Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  28 July

  Last Exit to Brooklyn, the censor’s last throw

  1966 Segments of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn had been printed in the US as early as 1957. One extract – recounting the gang rape of the whore Tralala – had been prosecuted, and cleared, around the period of the first Lady Chatterley trials, in 1959. The whole work was published in America in 1964. Selby’s novel was palpably rawer than Lawrence’s, and there was a nervous interval in the UK before the firm of Calder and Boyars (who specialised in avant-garde literature) took the risk of publishing Last Exit, on 24 January 1966. The British publishers took the precaution of sending a pre-publication copy to the director of public prosecutions (DPP), who said he could not instruct them on the legal situation, and to various professors, who were all for going ahead. The publishers took the further precaution of pricing the novel sky-high, at 30 shillings, a ruse that often mollified the censorious. Nonetheless, the book proved a bestseller, selling 11,000 copies in its first few weeks.

  There were, from the first, stirrings of anger among establishment figures. A Conservative MP, Sir Charles Taylor, on 28 June, brought this ‘filthy and disgusting book’ to the notice of the attorney general, who declined to take action. Another Tory MP, Sir Cyril Black, using a provision in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, moved at Bow Street on 28 July to have Last Exit banned. The magistrate issued a search warrant of Calder and Boyars’ premises and seized three sample copies. The publishers vowed to continue publishing. By this stage, however, booksellers were distinctly anxious about handling it.

  The case was heard at a magistrates’ court in mid-November. Unlike the Lady Chatterley case (a fiasco, moral conservatives thought), the prosecution mustered persuasive witnesses – including the then respectable mogul Robert Maxwell (who declared the novel ‘muck’). The magistrate, Leo Gradwell, found the book obscene and ordered the three seized copies destroyed.

  Calder and Boyars appealed. On 6 February 1967 the DPP indicated that he would, after all, prosecute. A second trial was heard at the Old Bailey, 13–22 November 1967. The jury was, by direction of the judge, all male, to spare ladies possible embarrassment. Among the array of prosecution and defence expert witnesses, particular impact was made by David Sheppard, former opening batsman for England, who had given up his sporting career to work among the poor and take religious orders (he would later be appointed Bishop of Liverpool). Sheppard had been, he testified, ‘not unscathed’ by reading the raping-to-death of Tralala, and the violation of her corpse with a broomstick. Despite a barrage of expert defence from leading academics, cultural commentators, writers and clergymen, the jury found the book to be obscene. The publishers, somewhat bad-temperedly, accused the jury of being ignorant and suggested that in such trials in the future at least an A-level in literature should be a necessary qualification. It did not go down well.

  On July 1968, an appeal was heard. Acting for Calder and Boyars was John Mortimer. The appeal judges, while not actually clearing Last Exit to Brooklyn, could see no reason, under the terms of the existing law, for suppressing its sale and circulation.

  Effectively the exoneration of Selby’s book completed the process begun with the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. Henceforth censorship on grounds of sexual obscenity was a dead letter.

  29 July

  The USS Indianapolis is sunk by a Japanese torpedo

  1945 The Portland-class cruiser USS Indianapolis was on a return voyage, having delivered critical parts for the atomic raid on Japan, 6 August. She was torpedoed and sunk in minutes by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea.

  For security reasons, there was strict radio silence. Three hundred men went down with the ship. Some 900 were left in the water, with no lifeboats – exposed to shark attacks – for three days. Only 316 were eventually rescued. It was the largest loss of life from a single vessel in the US Navy during the whole of the Second World War.

  The disaster is memorialised in the 1975 film Jaws, in which Quint, in an edgy drinking scene on board the Orca, with Chief Brody and the marine biologist Hooper, recounts his experiences as an Indianapolis survivor.

  Quint’s monologue is, with Orson Welles’ ‘cuckoo clock’ monologue in The Third Man, one of the most famous such moments in film. Both were the invention not of scriptwriters, nor the novelists (Peter Benchley, Graham Greene) from whom the film narratives were adapted, but composed by the actors themselves.

  Robert Shaw’s Quint monologue can be heard and seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nrvMNf-HEg (It will be noted he gets the date wrong – June, not July.)

  Shaw was born in Lancashire, the son of an alcoholic doctor who had married one of his nurses and killed himself with an overdose of opium when his son was twelve. Shaw taught for a while, after himself leaving school in Cornwall (whose regional accent is detectable, even under his assumed American accent), before studying at RADA. At school he excelled at sport and might – had his career gone differently – have been a professional rugby player. He would gravitate towards physical roles. He was also a novelist of great talent.

  Like Richard Burton, Shaw could not afford to waste his considerable acting talent on the stage, where he made an early reputation in Shakespeare. His most commendable film role was as Aston, in the 1963 adaptation of Pinter’s The Caretaker. Notably memorable is the character’s extended monologue about the abusive effect of electro-convulsive therapy on his brain. Shaw’s name was made, and his career likewise, by his performance as the psychopathic SPECTRE assassin, Grant, in the James Bond film, From Russia with Love, which also came out in 1963.

  Like Burton, Shaw enjoyed (if that’s the word) riotous sessions with fellow-drunk and screenwriter, Alistair MacLean. He died, on the set of a wholly undistinguished film, aged only 51, leaving a clutch of distinguished novels. ‘I would rather’, he once said, ‘go down as having written one good novel than be acclaimed as a great actor.’

  It is as Quint, alas, that he is destined to be remembered on the innumerable TV re-runs of Steven Spielberg’s most popular film.

  30 July

  Better late than never?

  1919 In the last year of the First World War a shell-shocked Wilfred Owen was treated at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland (see also 22 July). Here he met Siegfried Sassoon – something that was influential on the poetry Owen was writing. It shows a remarkable development over these months, notably his masterpiece, ‘Strange Meeting’. It opens:

  It seemed that out of battle I escaped

  Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

  Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

  Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

  Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

  With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

  Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.

  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,—

  By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

  Unfortunately for Owen, the treatment at Craiglockhart, under the brilliant psychotherapist A.J. Brock (Sassoon was treated by the equally brilliant William Rivers), was the best to be had anywhere. Craiglockhart did not cure Owen, but it rehabilitated him sufficiently to be returned to the Front in September 1918. Following the ever-bloodier battles of 1917–18, there was an urgent need for men, particularly trained officers, for the ‘last push’. He was, he informed Sassoon, ‘in hasty retreat to the Front’. The shells, he said, ‘scream at me every time: “Haven’t you got the wits to keep out of this?”.’

  In October 1918 Owen won the Military Cross by capturing a German machine gun. He claimed, in a letter, to have killed only one of the enemy, with his revolver. The official (and witness-verified) commendation for his Military Cross reports differently:

  He personally manipulated a captured machine gun in an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallan
tly.

  Oddly enough, it was in the same battleground, at the Sambre-Oise Canal, that Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby is recorded as doing heroic things with a machine gun, and winning his Montenegran medal for gallantry.

  Owen was killed on 4 November, by rifle fire. His family were informed by telegram, a week later, as bells rang across England to celebrate the long-awaited Armistice, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. He was 25 years old. If he had lived, as did his comrades Robert Graves (who rather despised Owen, and hinted at cowardice) and his fellow homosexual, Siegfried Sassoon, would he have developed as a poet (as, arguably, Graves did and Sassoon didn’t)?

  Almost a year after his death, on 30 July 1919, his family received his Military Cross.

  31 July

  Daniel Defoe is pilloried – literally – for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters

  1703 To a high Tory like Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe was just one of those innumerable hacks of Grub Street, part of that ‘involuntary throng’ buzzing around the throne of Dulness. In Book II of The Dunciad (1743) the goddess presents a tapestry picturing her most illustrious acolytes, among whom, ‘Earless on high, stood unabash’d De Foe’ (line 147) – that is, Defoe punished as though a 17th-century Puritan under Archbishop Laud.

  Defoe irked Pope for three reasons: he was a radical dissenter, he was a political pamphleteer, and he wrote for money, rather than being supported by patrons. These very qualities might prompt a later age – imbued with Adam Smith’s respect for the market and (Defoe’s own) Robinson Crusoe’s genius for practical solutions – to admire him the more.

  As it happens, there’s some substance to Pope’s portrait of Defoe standing ‘unabash’d’ on the podium of punishment. In 1702 he published The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an ironic proposal that religious dissenters should be done away with – banished from the realm if not something worse. The Church of England had been too lenient up to now, the pamphlet argued. In the reign of King James I, ‘the worst they suffered was, at their own request, to let them go to New England, and erect a new colony’. Even now, the worst they suffer is to be fined ‘Five Shillings a month for not coming to the Sacrament, and One Shilling per week, for not coming to Church: this is such a way of converting people as was never known! This is selling them a liberty to transgress, for so much money!’

  If any think the remedy cruel, consider that ‘It is cruelty to kill a snake or a toad in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our neighbours, to destroy those creatures! … Serpents, toads, vipers, &c., are noxious to the body, and poison the sensitive life: these poison the soul! corrupt our posterity! ensnare our children! destroy the vitals of our happiness, our future felicity! and contaminate the whole mass!’

  It was a satirical trick that Jonathan Swift would repeat 29 years later with A Modest Proposal, in which he urged that children of starving Irish beggars be cooked and eaten. The trouble with The Shortest Way was that many in authority took it seriously and even began to borrow its imagery. When they discovered who had written the pamphlet, the high-church establishment, tricked into making fools of themselves and thereby proving his satirical point, took their revenge. Defoe was punished on this day for seditious libel – not by having his ears cut off but by being put in the stocks for three days, fined heavily and thrown into Newgate prison.

  Legend has it that instead of throwing rotten vegetables and dead rats at him, the populace bestrewed his scaffold with flowers.

  1 August

  Shakespeare’s little helper is laid to rest in St George’s church, Southwark

  1715 Although an accomplished translator, satirist and dramatist (he helped Dryden with the second part of Absalom and Achitophel and wrote the libretto for Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas), Nahum Tate is best remembered for his weird adaptations of Shakespeare. His version of Richard II, rewritten as The Sicilian Usurper (1681), made all references to both the person and institution of majesty respectful, even though the king was being deposed. In the same year he reworked Coriolanus as The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth so as to ‘Recommend Submission and Adherence to Establisht Lawful Power’. With all such submission gone, the unruly Roman plebs (meant to parallel Tate’s contemporary Whigs) ensure that the play ends in a melodramatic explosion of violence, with Aufidius, Young Martius and Virgilia dead by the end, and Volumnia gone mad.

  But it was on King Lear that Tate really went to town – in that same annus mirabilis of 1681. The mouthy Fool is cut out altogether, no doubt because he would simply confuse the new simplicities. The wicked are punished. Gloucester survives. Cordelia is spared the makeshift hanging and lives to marry Edgar. Lear is restored to his throne, and all live happily ever after. Edgar speaks the postscript:

  Our drooping Country now erects her Head,

  Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and Plenty Blooms.

  Divine Cordelia, all the Gods can witness

  How much thy Love to Empire I prefer!

  Thy bright Example shall convince the World

  (Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed)

  That Truth and Vertue shall at last succeed.

  Coming after even what horrors are left in Tate’s version, these rhyming decasyllabics sound neat to the point of absurdity, but it’s worth recalling what one of the greatest English critics, Samuel Johnson, wrote about King Lear in the notes to his great 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. What he called ‘the extrusion of Gloucester’s eyes’ he found ‘an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition’. Moreover, Shakespeare ‘suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause,contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles’.

  ‘A play in which the wicked prosper’, he continued, ‘and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be … a just representation of the common events of human life; but since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded, that the observation of justice makes a play worse.’

  Aristotle would agree. His Poetics (ca. 335 BC) argues that the crucial distinction between art and real life, mimesis or imitation, plays out in the audience response. If you witness a murder on the street corner, you are terrified, disgusted. In a play or an epic poem, set in the logic of moral cause and effect, the act becomes more true than horrifying.

  And it’s true that the sacrifice of Cordelia takes King Lear a step beyond the customary dénouement of tragedy. Albany starts the sort of usual winding-up speech used to conclude the earlier tragedies, saying to Kent and Edgar, ‘you twain / Rule in this realm and the gored state sustain’, but Kent knows he is about to die, while Edgar thinks that (for once at the end of a tragedy) we should: ‘Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.’

  2 August

  Murdoch’s brain

  1999 It was announced on this day that John Bayley had given the brain of his late wife, Iris Murdoch, to OPTIMA (the Oxford Project To Investigate Memory and Ageing). The team’s principal interest is Alzheimer’s disease.

  Murdoch, an Oxford philosopher and Booker Prize-winning novelist (for The Sea, The Sea in 1978) had requested that her body be donated to medical research.

  She was diagnosed, at the age of 77, with Alzheimer’s two years before her death.

  The pain that she, her husband, and friends suffered during her decline (and earlier, happier times) is recorded in John Bayley’s memoir, Iris, published in late 1998 (i.e. shortly before she died), and Elegy for Iris (1999). Bayley’s recollections were successfully filmed in 2001 with Kate Winslet as the younger Murdoch, and Judi Dench as the older, in Iris, directed by Richard Eyre.

  Since her death on 8 February 1999, Murdoch’s brain had been preserved at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. It was removed to the OPTIMA laboratory at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Murdoch’s funerary arrangements are described by her biographer, Peter Conradi:

  At her own request, no one attended her cremation; nor the scattering o
f her ashes ‘North of J8 flower-bed’, as the undertakers vouchsafed, at Oxford Crematorium; and no memorial service followed.

  The 19th century, as an aspect of their fascination with phrenology, were fascinated by novelists’ brains. When Thackeray was a little boy, his favourite aunt was alarmed to discover that his uncle’s hat exactly fitted William’s five-year-old head. He was rushed to the doctors – water on the brain (hydrocephaly) was suspected. Aunt Ritchie was reassured to be told ‘that the child indeed had a large head: but there was a great deal in it’.

  Thackeray’s head, as busts and portraits made during his life testify, does look unusually capacious. When he died prematurely, aged 52, Thackeray’s brain was extracted and declared to be extraordinarily heavy: ‘weighing no less than 58.5 oz’.

  In point of literary-anatomical fact, Thackeray’s brain was not, for a novelist, outstandingly big. The Russian novelist Turgenev, for example, weighed in at a jumbo 70 oz. To the disgrace of French literature, Anatole France’s cranium supplied only 36 oz of grey matter.

  The weight of Murdoch’s brain is unrecorded.

  3 August

  John Rut writes the first letter home from the New World

  1527 ‘Pleasing your Honourable Grace’, the letter to Henry VIII began, ‘to heare of your servant John Rut with all his company here in good health thanks be to God.’ Very little is known about John Rut, and nothing further was heard from him after he returned to England. But he emerges briefly on the world stage as author of the first known letter to be sent to Europe from North America.

  A seasoned mariner, Rut was recruited by Henry VIII to look for a north-west passage, a search that would motivate voyages of exploration and settlement for the next century. Even as far south as Virginia in 1608, Captain John Smith, shortly after landing with the first permanent English settlement in America, was ordered to sail up the Chickahominy River to find the fabled route over the top of what is now Canada through to the Pacific.