Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  The search eluded both men – Smith because the Chickahominy soon became too shallow to explore further, and Rut and his crew because they kept running into icebergs:

  We ran in our coarse to the Northward, till we came to 53 degrees; there we found many great Islands of ice and deepe water; we found no sounding, and then we durst not go no further to the Northward for feare of more ice.

  But they did find St John’s Harbour in Newfoundland, which provided both a welcome shelter and also (to the modern reader) a surprise, since ‘there we found Eleuen Saile of Normans and one Brittaine and two Portugal barks all a fishing’. In fact, though we popularly date the discovery of America with Columbus landing in 1492, mariners from Portugal, France and even the west of England had been fishing the Grand Banks of Newfoundland since at least the second half of the 15th century, and had certainly gone ashore for supplies and provisions.

  Rut and his men had gone ashore too, where they found

  … wilderness and mountains and woodes and no naturall ground but all mosse and no inhabitation nor no people in those parts; and in the woods we found footing of divers great beasts but we saw none not in ten leagues.

  Failing the north-west passage they could at least fill their ship with salt cod, and sail southwards. And so to home, via the east coast of Florida, the first English ship to follow that route.

  4 August

  Out West for the first time, Owen Wister is underwhelmed by cowboys

  1885 Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) invented the western, signalling the cowboy as an American hero and establishing patterns of plot and character that would last through the 20th century in film and fiction. Yet for all its mythical dimensions, Wister would always claim that the book was based on first-hand experience, gleaned over a decade of travel in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Texas – above all (and repeatedly) Wyoming.

  Wister’s journal kept on the first of these excursions, to Wyoming in July and August of 1885, suggests boys camping out and doing a lot of shooting – of grouse, elk, bear, even sheep (wild, presumably). His first account of ranch life, on 4 August 1855, was a one-liner: ‘At a roundup – it’s very interesting, but beastly hot.’ Later he expanded on his reaction. After describing their skill in cutting and bunching the cattle, he had this to say about the cowboys:

  They’re a queer episode in the history of this country. Purely nomadic, and leaving no posterity, for they don’t marry. I’m told they’re without any moral sense whatever. Perhaps they are – but I wonder how much less they have than the poor classes in New York.

  Perhaps there’s just a hint of the noble savagery to come in that last sentence, but how different this first impression from Wister’s preface to The Virginian, where the typical cowpuncher is courageous, honest, polite and well-spoken to women, ‘the last romantic figure upon our soil’. As for what he portends for the country’s history: ‘He and his brief epoch make a complete picture, for in themselves they were as complete as the pioneers of the land or the explorers of the sea.’

  Why the change? Wister was one of those well-born and well-educated easterners for whom vacations in the West were a way of discovering timeless values from which eastern civilisation had slipped. Another was his classmate at Harvard (and dedicatee of The Virginian), Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had his own ranch in North Dakota, authored a series about ranch life in the Century magazine in 1888, in which he promoted the West as a test of American manhood, a rite of passage to full citizenship.

  If Wister gave us the fiction of the West, Roosevelt provided its ideology.

  5 August

  Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville meet for the first time

  1850 At mid-century, in mid-summer, the two classical authors of the American renaissance were in mid-career. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter had come out five months earlier. Melville had written five books on seafaring themes, starting with Typee (1846), the bestselling account of his adventures in the South Pacific – favourably reviewed by Hawthorne, as it happens – and was now at work on a sixth, about a whaling vessel hunting an albino whale.

  Melville had just bought a house in Pittsfield, in north-western Massachusetts, where other literary notables lived, like the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell, poet and later editor of the Atlantic. Just six miles away, in Lenox, lived Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  A perfect setting for a literary coterie, you might think. You’d be wrong. Nineteenth-century America didn’t do literary coteries, except in New York City. Melville and Hawthorne had never met, nor even knew they were neighbours, and it’s not clear that Melville had yet met Holmes and Lowell either. Café society it wasn’t.

  So it took a New Yorker, Melville’s friend, Evert Duyckinck – editor, publisher and leading light of the Young America Group, which promoted American literature and worked for copyright reform to keep cheap British books from flooding the local market – to bring them together. At his suggestion a picnic was arranged for 5 August, to include Melville, Hawthorne and Holmes. They would climb nearby Monument Mountain, drink champagne and talk about the necessity of a distinctly American literature.

  As it turned out, the excursion was surprised by a thunderstorm. While sheltering from the rain, the two novelists got to talking, and Melville’s usually chilly manner thawed into a torrent. In a later letter to Hawthorne he wrote: ‘I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.’

  Something else happened too. Either in preparation for the meeting, or in response to it, Melville belatedly read Hawthorne’s collection of stories, Mosses From an Old Manse (1846). His essay on the experience, published in two parts by Duyckinck in The Literary World for 17 and 24 August, remains one of the most perceptive assessments of Hawthorne’s deep allegories ever written. Commenting on the ‘darkness’ lurking in Hawthorne’s tales, Melville wrote that ‘this great power of blackness derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations … no deeply thinking mind is wholly free’.

  That association between darkness and depth would, in turn, deepen the white whale tale, then in process, and turn it into Moby-Dick.

  6 August

  The poet Robert Lowell receives his letter drafting him for service in the US armed forces. He declines the invitation

  1943 ‘Dear Mr President’, Lowell wrote in answer to his draft notice, ‘I very much regret that I must refuse the opportunity you offer me in your communication of August 6, 1943, for service in the Armed Forces.’ Once willing to serve, he had now become a conscientious objector in protest at the Allies’ policy of saturation bombing of German cities. ‘I was a Roman Catholic at the time’, he recalled in a 1969 BBC interview, ‘and we had a very complicated idea of what was called “the unjust war”. … So I refused to go into the army and was sent to jail. I spent about five months in jail and mopped floors.’1

  Before being sent to the Federal Correctional Center in Danbury, Connecticut, which specialised in COs, along with first-offence bootleggers and black marketeers, he was held a few days in New York’s tough West Street jail, in a cell next door to Murder Incorporated’s Louis (Lepke) Buchalter. ‘I’m in for killing’, said Lepke. ‘What are you in for?’ ‘I’m in for refusing to kill.’ Lepke laughed. Five months later he was electrocuted at Sing Sing.2

  ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, in Life Studies (1959), would tell the story more succinctly:

  I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.,

  and made my manic statement,

  telling off the state and president …

  That was written looking back from ‘the tranquillized Fifties’, as Lowell put it. But an earlier poem, one that mentions nothing of these particulars, had much more to say about the poet’s mood and thought at the time. This was ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ (1946), a strenuously ambitious med
itation drawing on Thoreau’s description of a shipwreck in Cape Cod (1865), Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit of the white whale and the sinking of his ship in Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and other allusions to the self-destructive will.

  ‘The Quaker Graveyard’ is dedicated to ‘Warren Winslow, Dead at Sea’. Winslow was Lowell’s cousin, a sort-of alter ego to the poet. Both hailed from the high-minded New England Protestant establishment; both attended Harvard. But while Lowell left to study poetry with John Crowe Ransom, converted to Catholicism and got jailed for resisting the draft, Winslow joined the Navy on graduating in 1940, serving as an officer on three destroyers.

  On 3 January 1944, while Lowell was ‘serving’ in quite another sense, the last of Winslow’s postings blew up while at anchor at the entrance to New York harbour, killing 123 sailors and fifteen officers, Winslow among them. No enemy was involved; the damage was entirely self-inflicted. To the poet the accident must have seemed a perfect emblem for what he felt had changed Allied strategy. The real theatre of operations was in home waters, the real violence self-generated, the real struggle within the American soul.

  1 Robert Lowell, ‘Et in America ego – The American Poet Robert Lowell Talks to Novelist V.S. Naipaul about Art, Power, and the Dramatisation of the Self’, The Listener, 4 September 1969, pp. 302–04.

  2 Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell, London: Faber & Faber, 1983, p. 91.

  7 August

  Rumour has it the Scottish play is first performed – though not in the usual place

  1606 Shakespeare probably wrote Macbeth early in 1606. There are allusions in the play to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the trial of the conspirators early the following year – particularly in the play made by the porter in Act II, scene iii on the word ‘equivocation’, not just a facetious comment on the double-dealing and double-speaking going on in the play, but also the theological concept posed by one of the conspirators, the English Jesuit Henry Garnett, as a justified tactic against injustice.

  But when and where was it first performed? The earliest documentary account places the play in the Globe Theatre on the South Bank in 1611, with legendary tragedian Henry Burbage in the leading role. But it’s more likely that the play saw first light at Hampton Court on this day, when a number of works were presented by the King’s Men before King James and his brother-in-law, King Christian IV, then visiting from Denmark.

  Shakespeare seems to have been keen to flatter both parties, leaving the Danes out of the Scandinavian attack on Scotland at the beginning of the play, playing up to James’s interest in witchcraft, and celebrating the long lineage of Banquo, as shown in the masque presented by the witches in Act IV, scene i, down through eight happy generations, culminating in James himself – the sixth of Scotland, and first of England. Macbeth is horrified:

  Another yet! A seventh! I’ll see no more.

  And yet the eighth appears, who bears a glass

  Which shows me many more; and some I see

  That twofold balls and treble sceptres carry:

  Horrible sight! Now I see ’tis true;

  In this most psychological of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth’s soliloquies have struggled between his conscience and ambition. Now that he realises he has been shut out of history, that gap between desire and act closes down. ‘From this moment’, he says just after the witches depart with their dumb show, ‘The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand’. Everything contracts, shuts down; in this shortest of the tragedies time seems to accelerate almost to an apocalyptic crisis.

  8 August

  Elizabeth rallies her mariners

  1588 British monarchs, with the noble exception of Alfred and James I, do not figure high in the literary annals of their country. Highest is Elizabeth I, who wrote very creditable poetry (notably ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’) and – assuming it is all her own work – a patriotic speech unmatched in its oratorical eloquence by any except those of Winston Churchill in the Second World War.

  The occasion for her great speech was the imminent invasion by the Spanish empire. One hundred and fifty ships and 26,000 men of the Spanish Armada had set sail from Lisbon on 28 May 1588, with the aim of making England a Spanish colony and returning it to the Catholic faith. It was planned that 30,000 extra troops would join the invasion force from the Spanish Netherlands.

  The Spanish were sighted off the coast of England in late July and the news communicated by beacons to London. The logistic task of mustering the combined Spanish army from the Low Countries gave the English time to organise their own forces, to harass and successfully engage the Spanish fleet – taking full advantage of the British navy’s superior seamanship and more manoeuvrable vessels.

  On 8 August, with the final encounter in the Channel imminent, Elizabeth came to Tilbury, as near the front line as a monarch could come, and delivered her speech to her sailors, and to her people:

  My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that we are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery; but, I do assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and, therefore, I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all – to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king – and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field. I know already, for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and, we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you.

  Famously, the Armada was defeated principally by a series of late summer storms that scattered their fleet and made them easy prey for the English privateers (commanded by such heroes as Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins). As the medal cast for the event recorded, Afflavit Deus et dissipantur – ‘God sent forth His breath and they were scattered’. The speech, doubtless, helped.

  9 August

  Edgar Allan Poe invents the detective story, then disparages his achievement

  1846 Alright, maybe Poe didn’t actually invent the novel of detection – that distinction is claimed by E.T.A. Hoffman, whose Das Fräulein von Scuderi came out in 1819 – but he set the conventions for the genre as we know it, from Conan Doyle to Raymond Chandler. Detectives are not policemen – far from it. They may be anything from seedy private dicks to scholars of a retiring disposition, but they will work outside the police investigation, often incurring the suspicion of the flat-footed regulars. The detective will often have a sidekick who doubles as narrator of the tale. Most important – and this gives the genre its name – the process of catching the culprit depends on detection, or reasoning from evidence.

  In Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, first published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841, Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin and his friend read in the papers about the horrific murder of two women, one with her throat cut and the other strangled, then stuffed half-way up a chimney. Normally retiring and asocial, Dupin is intrigued and visits the scene of the crime, and – through a series of deductions – works out that the ‘murderer’ was a pet orang-utan that had escaped its owner, after grabbing his straight-edge razor while he was shaving.

  But in a letter to the lawyer and minor poet Philip P. Cooke written on this day, Poe played down the significance of his invention. ‘These tales of ratiocination [as he called his detective stories] owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key’, he wrote. ‘People think them
more ingenious than they are.’ To take ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for example, ‘where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the suppositious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.’

  Important as this passage seems now, it wasn’t Poe’s main concern in the letter. He was anxious to sign Cooke up for his planned compendium of ‘Literary America’ (a grand project, never completed), as the author of the essay on himself. To that end, he wanted to pass on Elizabeth Barrett’s good opinion of his poem ‘The Raven’ – ‘This vivid writing! – this power which is felt!’ – as conveyed in a recent letter. ‘Would it be bad taste to quote these words of Miss B. in your notice?’ Opportunistic? Maybe, but don’t forget that Poe was the first American to make his living solely through creative writing. It was never too late in one’s career for a touch of log-rolling.

  10 August

  The Vikings defeat the Anglo-Saxons in the Battle of Maldon, early testimony to the English cult of defeat

  AD 991 Now known for its sea salt, Maldon on the Blackwater estuary in Essex was once the site of a skirmish that led to one of the great works of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

  Three thousand Viking raiders led by Olaf Tryggvasson were camped on Northey Island in the estuary. Against them, Byrhtnoth, a local ealdorman (or earl) loyal to King Aethelred, led a much smaller English force, drawn up on the bank opposite the island. The Vikings offered a truce for gold, which Byrhtnoth scornfully refused.