Unable to get off the island except at low tide via a narrow causeway bordered by mud, the Vikings realised that only a few of their fighters at a time would be able to confront the English. Their numerical advantage would be cancelled out. So they asked leave to be allowed off the island before the battle began. In a gesture still debated by historians, Byrhtnoth granted this condition. In the battle that followed he was killed, along with many of his household thanes, and the militia raised locally was defeated.
The Battle of Maldon, written that same year, focuses on English values still discussed today as part of the national identity. First, there was Byrhtnoth’s concession to the Viking raiders, explained in the poem as fair play prompted by his ofermode (literally ‘over-mind’), which can mean courage as well as pride.
Then came loyalty to the liege lord even in defeat. The poem invokes the virtue of sacrificial courage, in full knowledge of the hopelessness of the cause. After Byrhtnoth is hacked down, the old retainer Byrhtwold speaks to the remaining English soldiers:
‘Hige sceal the headra, heorte the cenre,
mod sceal the mare, the ure mægen lytlath,
Her lith ure ealdor eall forheawen,
god on greote; a mæg gnornian
se the nu fram this wigplegan wendan thenceth.’1
The Battle of Maldon provides early proof that the English see moral lessons in defeat, relish and remember it far more keenly than victory.
1 ‘Thought shall be harder, heart the keener, / Courage shall be greater, as our might lessens. / Here lies our elder all hewn down, / The good [man] in the dust; may he mourn [forever] / Who from this warplay thinks to turn [away].’
11 August
Enid Blyton is born in a flat above a shop in Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London
1897 The phenomenally successful author of children’s fiction was nothing if not prolific, regularly producing between 10,000 and 14,000 words of finished copy a day. In 1948 alone she brought out 28 titles under fifteen imprints. By 2007, nearly 40 years after her death, over 3,400 translations had been made of her books, almost as many as of Shakespeare’s work.
She is best known now for the Famous Five and Secret Seven stories (Noddy, for very young children, was a relatively late arrival). The ‘Five’ tales involve four boarding-school pals home on holiday, plus their dog, going on adventures like camping, or exploring the seaside. In the ‘Seven’ series the companions are amateur sleuths solving mysteries that baffle the police. The bad guys are invariably working-class, sometimes foreign as well.
As the country’s social climate lurched from rationing and austerity to sexual liberation in the swinging sixties, Blyton’s fiction was criticised for its increasingly eccentric construction of normality. Families had mummies and daddies who sent their children away to school; everyone had access to the countryside; boys were leaders while girls played with dolls (unless, like Georgina in the Five books, they called themselves George and wanted to out-Tom the boys).
No doubt these comforting family structures compensated for the lack of them in Blyton’s own life. Just before her thirteenth birthday her father left the family to live with another woman. Blyton herself married a divorced man, then divorced him in turn to marry another, making sure that the children would never see their father again.
And what is less often remembered is that before Blyton’s work was assailed for classism, sexism and racism, librarians in the late forties and fifties worried that it was linguistically and stylistically too undemanding to stretch their young readers’ minds – the sentences too short, the vocabulary limited, the implied authorial attitude moralising and condescending.
Of course Ernest Hemingway worked very hard to achieve short sentences and a basic vocabulary, but this was middle-class England. Anyway, as Enid Blyton said, librarians probably disliked her books because ‘the hordes of children swarming into the library on Saturday morning became a nuisance’.1 Or so she would have found them, anyway.
1 Quoted in Robert Druce, This Day our Daily Fictions: An Enquiry into the Multi-Million Bestseller Status of Enid Blyton and Ian Fleming, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992, p. 38.
12 August
Who or what killed J.G. Farrell?
1979 It was on this day that the death of the Booker Prize-winning novelist J.G. Farrell was announced to the world. The exact nature of his death, however, remains mysterious – despite rigorous biographical investigation – to this day.
Had he been born a year later, posterity would probably never have had Farrell’s fiction. When he went up to Oxford in October 1956, ‘Jim’ Farrell was anything but literary. Head boy at his Irish public school, ‘rugger was pretty well my life’, he later recalled.
On 28 November 1956 – the height of the season – Jim Farrell had a bad game. He didn’t feel right in the changing room afterwards, ‘cut the usual drinking session’, took a bus back to college and crawled fully-clothed into bed.
He had polio. Six days later he was in an ‘iron lung – that life-saving apparatus which was half Edgar Allan Poe’s “Buried Alive” and half medieval torture rack’. Jonas Salk’s vaccine became widely available six months later, leading to the eradication of the disease, and the iron lung would join the hook-hand in the medical museum.
When he was recovered sufficiently for ‘physio’ he was three stones lighter, and had shoulders that, to his mortification, he heard one girl call ‘flabby’. It was like the Charles Atlas story in reverse: the husky young athlete had become a 90-pound weakling. Jim Farrell became J.G. Farrell; an ‘outsider’, in the term popularised by Colin Wilson that same year. No longer a player, he became a spectator. The novelist was born.
Farrell scraped a third. It did not faze him. He had already resolved to write. That was what outsiders did best. Over the next few years, he got by on various teaching jobs and travelling fellowships. He compensated for his disability by sexual athleticism, running three or four girlfriends at the same time.
Farrell’s first three ventures in fiction did nothing to separate him from the 1,500 or so novelists every year who try their luck and get nowhere. He was, however, mining his own family background – the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, the Anglo-Indian professional classes, the army-officer caste.
Novelists, like generals, need luck. Troubles, Farrell’s story of the Irish uprising and the battles between the IRA and the Black and Tans, came out in 1970, a few months after Ulster exploded into flames. Few novels have been more timely. Troubles hit the jackpot. And Farrell made it to the top with his Indian Mutiny novel, The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker in 1973.
Farrell, only 38, was rich and famous. He fired his agent and went into tax exile in Kilcrahone, south-west Ireland. Here, living close to the land and the sea, he found, as he said for the first time, douceur de vivre.
There then happened the strange episode of Farrell’s death, aged only 44, on 11 August 1979. He was fishing in high seas near his home and was knocked off the rock on which he was standing by a wave, falling into the water. It was the same storm that would later drown eighteen contestants in the Fastnet yacht race. What was odd, according to witnesses, was that Farrell made no effort to save himself. He did not shout for help and his body was recovered only much later.
Was it suicide? An IRA hit? Is J.G. Farrell, like Elvis, still alive? It remained a mystery for 30 years until the last person to see Farrell alive, Pauline Foley, went on record in The Times (7 February 2010) to recall what actually happened. Foley was walking alongside the rocks with her children:
When Foley … saw him, he was standing on a ledge, wearing wellington boots and holding a fishing rod. Fishing was the first sport Farrell had been able to enjoy since contracting polio. The illness had left him unable to cast the rod overhead with one hand, so instead he tucked the rod under his arm and cast by twisting his body. It made balancing tricky. ‘It was very rough, splashing up on the rocks, but there weren’t killer waves,’ recalled Foley. ‘He turned and waved to the
boys. The boys waved back. He turned back, started to cast and slipped. I think it was more of a slip than the waves.’ Farrell made no attempt to save himself. Foley said: ‘I called to him, “I’m coming” … I started to go down there. It was just his head in the water. There was no waving, no call to me. He was just looking at me. All the time he looked at me. I don’t even want to think what he felt.’
What killed him was the long-term debility of his polio. He was too weak to save himself. What made him a writer killed him.
13 August
The Duke of Marlborough leads an army of northern European forces against the French at Blindheim, to win a famous victory
1704 The bloody Battle of Blenheim (as the English spelled it) was fought on the banks of the Danube near the small Bavarian town. It was part of the long-running War of the Spanish Succession to prevent Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV of France, from becoming King of Spain and thus threatening a grand alliance between those two countries. The duke’s army included Austrians, Prussians, Hessians, Dutch and Danes, alongside the 12,000 English. After a long day’s fighting 20,000 French troops lay dead and another 14,000 had been captured, including their commander-in-chief, Marshal Tallard.
It was a famous victory. When Marlborough returned to England a grateful Queen Anne granted him extensive parkland at Woodstock, north-west of Oxford, along with £240,000 to build a country house there. That’s well over 30 million in today’s pounds. The result was the monumental and gargantuan Blenheim Palace, designed by Vanburgh in the mercifully short-lived style of the English baroque. It is still the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, and the only building not connected with monarchs or bishops to be called a palace. Winston Churchill was born there in 1874.
Poetic tributes were more modest in scale, though at first no less adulatory. Joseph Addison’s ‘The Campaign’ (1705) tells the story in 47 stanzas of decasyllabic couplets prefaced by a Latin epigram. Though not glossing over the scenes of razed villages and murderous conflict, the poem draws the national moral:
Such are th’ effects of Anna’s royal cares:
By her, Britannia, great in foreign wars, […]
By her th’unfetter’d Ister’s states are free,
And taste the sweets of English liberty:
Getting on for a hundred years later, when people had forgotten why the war had been fought in the first place, the literary establishment wasn’t so sure – not even the Poet Laureate Robert Southey. His ‘After Blenheim’ (1796) imagines little Peterkin coming across a smooth, round, hard object while playing in a field, and bringing it to his grandfather to be identified. ‘’Tis some poor fellow’s skull’, says his grandfather, adding that he often ploughs them up. Prompted by Peterkin, he tells the saga of the battle, his father’s house burnt to the ground, the women and children put to the sword, the bodies rotting in the sun after the battle.
‘And everybody praised the Duke
Who this great fight did win’—
‘But what good came of it at last?’
Quoth little Peterkin.
‘Why that I cannot tell,’ said he,
‘But ’twas a famous victory.’
14 August
John Updike publishes his first contribution to the New Yorker. It is a comic poem entitled ‘Duet with Muffled Brake Drums’
1954 It fantasised the moment when Rolls met Royce ‘where grey walks sloped through shadows shaped like lace / Down to dimpleproof ponds, a precious place’, and Rolls asked:
‘Ah—is there anything you’d care to make?
A day of it? A fourth at bridge? Some tea?’
Royce murmured, ‘If your afternoon is free,
I’d rather, much, make engineering history.’
John Updike (1932–2009), one of America’s most prolific and gifted fictional realists, wasn’t best noted for his poetry – even if he did publish ten volumes of it between 1958 and 2009 – nor for his stories, critical essays and other short pieces. What made him popular with such a wide and varied readership were his novels like Couples (1968), his exploration of suburban adultery, The Witches of Eastwick (1984), popular social satire with an edge, and above all, the near-epic span of the four volumes, running from the fifties through the eighties, that filter the anxieties and satieties of each decade through the limited perception and wide emotional range of Harold C. Angstrom, better known by his nickname ‘Rabbit’.
Alongside the novels, Updike wrote over 800 poems, stories and essays for the New Yorker alone. It made an ideal medium. Started in 1925, the (usually) weekly magazine, with over a million subscribers in the top quartile of the American incomes, has published fiction by John O’Hara, John Cheever, Philip Roth and many others, long non-fiction features like John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), biographical essays, book and film criticism, political commentary (fastidiously neutral until George W. Bush came along) – not to mention its classic cartoons by Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, Otto Soglow and William Steig.
Updike’s contributions to the New Yorker show the same closely observed detail and critical accuracy apparent in his longer work – whether in a patient’s fear of the dentist:
Burton’s heart beat like a wasp in a jar as the dentist moved across the room, did unseeable things by the sink, and returned with a full hypodermic. A drop of fluid, by some miracle of adhesion, hung trembling to the needle’s tip.’ (‘Dentistry and Doubt’, 1955)
Or in the legendary Ted Williams hitting his last home run for the Boston Red Sox:
From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. (‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’, 1960)
Or (just to show that he could also write about writing) on Herman Melville’s faith, which was also his own:
Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reason we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive. (‘Herman Melville’, 1982)
15 August
Disguised as a snake, the Devil invades a meeting of the Synod in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Mr Thomson, an elder of Braintree and a man of much faith, treads it under foot
1648 American Puritan settlers in Massachusetts saw the hand of God behind everything from droughts and tempests to a snake in the meeting house. Since devout Puritans were either saved or damned from before birth, no amount of good works could save their souls. Good and evil were abstractions to which the most momentous or trivial events could be key.
This one is recorded in the journal of John Winthrop, twelve times governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that settled the area around Boston in 1630. At first it looked like an ordinary snake that came in through an open door during the sermon and slithered onto one of the elders’ seats, causing ‘diverse of the elders’ to get up and move pretty smartish, until Mr Thomson stood on the intruder’s head and held its body ‘with a small pair of grains [barbed prongs], until it was killed’.
Only afterwards, ‘nothing falling out but by divine providence’, did they assign the true meaning of the occurrence: ‘The serpent is the devil; the synod, the representative of the churches of Christ in New England.’
Why should everything remind these worthies that the Devil was out to get them? Because the churches of New England, as Winthrop wrote in an earlier entry, were ‘such as come together into a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men, and there confederate together in civil and church estate’. To this exposed position the threats were not just the wild animals and savages of the New World, but the dissolution of the colony itself – discouraged people leaving for the West Indies, or to join the Dutch on Long Island, or even to return to England.
Throughout most of the 1640s it was this fear that the gr
eat Massachusetts experiment would fail through depopulation that fed the governor’s paranoia, which anxiety was displaced, in turn, onto fantasies of diabolical snakes.
16 August
Massacre of Peterloo
1819 What is hyperbolically called the Massacre (or the ‘Battle’) of Peterloo took place on St Peter’s Field, in Manchester, on 16 August 1819, in the wake of the profound industrial unrest that followed the Napoleonic wars. Such periods are invariably feared by authorities as potentially revolutionary.
Some 80,000 working-class Lancastrians (and ‘agitators’ from outside – notably the firebrand orator, Henry Hunt) massed to demand the reform of Parliament, so as to give greater representation to the unenfranchised non-householders in the country. Anger at the relaxation of the Corn Laws and widespread unemployment had further inflamed popular resentment.
The panicked magistrates mustered the local military, and instructed them to disperse the crowd and arrest Hunt. The crowd was not unruly, and the demonstration, despite radical speeches, was not violent. Organised by their chapels (i.e. trades unions) the workers in the crowd were, in point of fact, better disciplined than the nervous soldiers facing them.
Cavalry charged on the crowd, causing panic. Something under twenty people were killed (compared with 48,000 at Waterloo) and around 500 injured – more by horses’ hooves and trampling than by sabres. Hunt, along with eight others, was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for ‘sedition’.
The ‘Massacre’ tilted political agitation in Britain towards ‘physical’ rather than ‘moral force’ solutions. And the event entered the calendar of radicalism as a holy day in the workers’ struggle. It was helped there by the poet Shelley. In Italy, he got the news on 5 September and fired off his anthem to the oppressed classes of England:
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