Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many – they are few.
17 August
Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide
1935 Charlotte Perkins was born in Hartford, Connecticut. The Perkinses were a cultivated family rooted in a cultivated community (Harriet Beecher Stowe was a distant relative – see 20 March).
Charlotte was physically vital as an adolescent: visiting a gymnasium twice a week and running a mile every day. She disdained corsets. On leaving school she studied at the Rhode School of Design, leaving without any formal qualification but with the working skills to design greeting cards and tutor young people in art. She intended to pay her way through the world.
In 1884 Charlotte married the artist Charles Walter Stetson. After the birth of their first child, a daughter, she was plunged into postnatal depression.
In 1887 the advice of S. Weir Mitchell, a specialist in ‘women’s disorders’, was called on. A believer in the ‘rest cure’ (i.e. solitary confinement and sensory deprivation), Mitchell prescribed the regime described, horrifically, in Gilman’s most famous story, ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, in which the ‘cure’ is portrayed as therapeutic, patriarchal sadism.
Charlotte escaped by fleeing to Pasadena, California, from where she divorced her husband. They remained on amicable terms. He married her best friend (for whom, it is speculated, Charlotte’s feelings had been overtly erotic) and took over the care of their child. In California Charlotte (still Stetson and now genuinely ‘cured’) began to write and lecture on feminist subjects.
She was, by nature and intellectual conviction, utopian: believing in the possibility not merely of equality, but gynocracy; a theme pursued in her novel, Herland: A Feminist Utopian Novel (1915), which foresees a woman-dominated world. Androcracy, she firmly believed, could be overset. In 1900 she married a cousin, George Houghton Gilman, an attorney of passive character and seven years younger (Gilman’s sexual interests, in her early Pasadena years, seem to have been principally lesbian). The Gilmans lived contentedly, by all accounts, in southern California, until his death in 1934. Gilman, afflicted with breast cancer and a believer in euthanasia, killed herself (with chloroform that she had methodically stored) a year later, leaving an autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), and a suicide note of Roman stoicism, stating: ‘When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.’
18 August
Lolita is published in the US
1958 Five years after it was written, three after its first appearance in Paris under the imprint of the Olympia Press and the subsequent seizure by British customs of all copies entering the UK, Lolita finally emerged in the United States, to become an almost instant bestseller. Usually we chronicle such past repressions implying that we are all much more enlightened and liberal now, but would the 21st century greet any more warmly a novel about a middle-aged man falling in love with, then kidnapping, a twelve-year-old girl? Not likely.
Of the two films made of the book – Stanley Kubrick’s in 1962 and Adrian Lyne’s in 1997 – the former was the better, thanks to the script (to which Nabokov contributed) and the outstanding acting of James Mason and Shelley Winters as Humbert and Charlotte, and the ingenious improvisations of Peter Sellers as Quilty. But good as it was, the movie could only reproduce surface dialogue, whereas the heart of the prose narrative is the complex working of Humbert Humbert’s consciousness as he advances then retreats, rhapsodises most subjectively over his nymphet then stands apart in objective blame of his behaviour, only to exonerate himself by appeal to irresistible passion.
The dialectics of Humbert’s inner monologue open thematic debates too. Who does the seducing – the innocent American or the wily European (perhaps representing America and Europe generally)? ‘Frigid gentlewomen of the Jury! … I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me’, claims Humbert. Tactically, maybe, but only within Humbert’s elaborate, long-planned strategy.
Again, who is the more trapped – Lolita as she is moved around from Kumfy Kabins to Sunset Motels to U-Beam Cottages (‘Children welcome, pets allowed’), always watched over by Humbert until sprung by Quilty? Or Humbert by his obsession? It is Humbert who winds up in prison, literally; but Lolita, who escapes, is betrayed by Quilty, only to be trapped again as the heavily pregnant ‘Mrs Richard F. Schiller’, stuck in a ramshackle cabin, unable to pay her debts or get to Alaska, where her husband has the promise of a good job. But this time it’s Humbert who springs her, with the gift of four thousand dollars, out of hopeless love.
Then he sets off for his vengeful rendezvous with Clare Quilty.
19 August
The New York Herald breaks the news of the California Gold Rush
1848 ‘The gold mine discovered in December last’, reported the paper’s anonymous correspondent, ‘is only three feet below the surface in a strata [sic] of soft sand rock.’ The same vein, between twelve and eighteen feet deep, runs at least twelve miles to the south and five to the north, he continued, so that ‘I would predict for California a Peruvian harvest of the precious metals, as soon as a sufficiency of miners, &c., can be obtained’.
Nearly right. On 24 January 1848 (not the preceding December), James Marshall was building a lumber mill for a Swiss settler called John Sutter, in the foothills of the Sierra, east of what is now Sacramento, when he came across some gold flakes in the tailrace. The two men tried to keep the discovery quiet, but the rumour spread, and by March a newspaper editor was broadcasting it in San Francisco.
Almost immediately, people in California downed tools and headed for the mountains to try their luck. But the Herald announcement spread the word to the rest of the country – and the world. Prospectors came by sea – around the Horn or across the isthmus of Panama – while as many again, with less to spend, crossed the country in wagon trains starting from Missouri. For these transcontinental voyagers (more like tourists than pioneers, let alone explorers), it was the journey of a lifetime, producing an explosion of vernacular writing in diaries and journals as they struggled to account for the strange physical and social landscapes on the way (see 18 June).
But the Gold Rush also attracted professional writers. If the Forty- Niners were writing for their families, journalists like Leonard Kip, J.D. Borthwick and Bayard Taylor had metropolitan readerships in their sights. For them California was just so much local colour, its details to be described and consumed de haut en bas.
Nothing was what it seemed. Kip in California Sketches (1850) told how he ‘peeked into’ many gambling houses ‘and was surprised to see how easily French paper, fine matting, and a small chandelier, can convert the rough ribs of an old barn into an elegant hall’. They were fascinated by California’s lack of scale. San Francisco had grown in under a decade from a small Mexican outpost and mission town to an American city of 50,000 inhabitants, supported by restaurants, hotels, banks and even an opera house. Yet whole tracts of it could burn down in a single night. The city’s earthquake and fire of 1906 is what people remember now, but that was just the largest of a series of natural disasters to be made good in record time.
Social codes were scrambled too. On landing in San Francisco, Bayard Taylor had tried to find a porter to carry his trunk, only to be told that ‘every man is his own porter here’. ‘Dress was no gauge of respectability’, he wrote in Eldorado (1850). ‘Lawyers, physicians, and ex-professors dug cellars, drove ox-teams, sawed wood, and carried luggage’, wrote Taylor in a sketch later collected in his book, while ‘men who had been Army priv
ates, sailors, cooks or day laborers were at the head of profitable establishments’. Comic or just democratic? Depends on your point of view.
20 August
England’s finest naturalist–novelist is buried
1887 Richard Jefferies was born near Swindon in Wiltshire. His father was a farmer in a small way, with 40 acres. He was unlucky, being bankrupted in 1877, and ending up a jobbing gardener. James Luckett Jefferies (1816–96, he outlived his son by several years) is immortalised as Iden, in Amaryllis at the Fair (1887).
Richard was educated locally and at Sydenham, in Kent, among aunts and uncles. Aged sixteen he demonstrated his independence of spirit by running away to France with a friend. They intended to make their way to Moscow, or failing that, America.
Jefferies finally settled on Swindon, where he began to write for Wiltshire newspapers, journals and magazines – mainly on local historical and natural history topics. His views were strongly Conservative, and conservationist.
In 1867 he suffered severe illness and was never again to be in good health. Tuberculosis had, in fact, been diagnosed in his early childhood. He married Jessie Baden, a farmer’s daughter, in 1874 and began writing.
It was some time before Jefferies could find a publisher for his more sensitive and introspective work, The Dewy Morn (eventually published in 1884). In it he found his distinctive mix of ruminative countryman essay and fictional plot. His essays on rural distress in The Times, in the early 1870s, were influential, and publicised his name.
In 1876 he moved to London, where his reprinted papers The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) and Wild Life in a Southern County (1879) were well received. The two strands of Jefferies’ prose – descriptive essay and fiction – merged, triumphantly, in Wood Magic (1881). It was followed by the childhood autobiographical novel, Bevis (1882), and the spiritual autobiography of adolescence, The Story of My Heart – his masterpiece and a work that Jefferies had been meditating for seventeen years.
In 1881 Jefferies’ health collapsed. Tuberculosis and a painful fistula (and numerous operations on it) made writing an agony. The remainder of his life was passed as an invalid in various health resorts, impecuniously. He nonetheless refused aid from the Royal Literary Fund, on moral principle. His last works were dictated to his wife from his death bed. He died of tuberculosis, at Goring on Sea, aged only 38, leaving his wife and three children virtually penniless. His remains were buried on 20 August 1887 at Broadwater cemetery, Worthing. Despite the wretched pauperism of his last years, Jefferies’ reputation has risen steadily over the century following.
21 August
The first of two English sisters arrives in Montreal to kick-start Canadian literature
1832 She was Catharine Parr Traill, and since she would be followed in under a month by Susanna Moodie, 1832 can really be counted an annus mirabilis of Canadian literature. Their maiden name was Strickland, and back home other sisters were also adding to the freight on library shelves. Elizabeth Strickland was author of Disobedience: or, Mind what Mamma Says (1819), while Agnes, who (like Susanna) also wrote children’s books, is best remembered as a historian and biographer, author of (among many other studies) the twelve-volume Lives of the Queens of England (1840–48). None of them had formal schooling.
Susanna and Catharine married friends from the Orkneys, both army officers. Lots of Scots were emigrating to Canada. Thomas Traill already had relatives there, while the older John Moodie, who had spent ten years in South Africa (and of course, in this literary environment, had written a book about it), was also disposed to join the flow. After landing at Montreal, where a plague of cholera was raging, Thomas and Catharine took the stage westwards for Cobourg, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, then headed north to Lakeland, in what Susanna would call ‘the bush’. John and Susanna first tried working an already cleared farm near Cobourg, but soon ran out of money, sold up and joined the Traills at Lakeland.
There they lived in log cabins, learned to manage everything from a horse and plough to a birch-bark canoe, and shared hopes, fears and practical tasks with their neighbours, like clearing land, building houses, pulling teeth and assisting at childbirth. But they didn’t go native. Susanna sent frequent sketches of her life in the bush to the Montreal Literary Garland, and Catharine wrote regular letters home to her literary family. In time these dispatches coalesced into their best-known books, Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852).
In these accounts and others, the sisters established a Canadian voice quite distinct from that of their contemporaries south of the border. Whereas American immigrants (especially on what they called the frontier, rather than the bush) tended to develop an ideology of initiation, in which they imagined themselves to have experienced a rite of passage into a freer, more independent way of life, the Canadians, having retained their connections with the British empire, were happy to foster a community, unashamed to ask for help, or even to admit that they were bored as often as exhilarated by the wilderness – that at times the New World felt (as Moodie would put it) like a ‘green prison’.
Maybe this is why Margaret Atwood, the doyenne of Canadian writing, gave the sixth (and best) volume of her poetry the title The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), and why her imagination was so captured by the determination of those early immigrants, who:
pretend this dirt is the future.
And they are right. If they let go
of that illusion solid to them as a shovel,
open their eyes even for a moment
to these trees, to this particular sun
they would be surrounded, stormed, broken
in upon by branches, roots, tendrils, the dark
side of light
as I am.
22 August
Jack London’s Wolf House burns down
1913 Since selling his first story (‘To the Man on Trail’) in January 1899, Jack London had written for his living. His work ranged from socialist dystopias such as The Iron Heel to the perennially popular dog-and-wolf story, The Call of the Wild – a work that gave London his nickname, ‘Wolf’. No writer in American literature wrote more profitably. In his last years (he died – by suicide, probably – in 1916, aged just 40) he was earning around $75,000 annually by his pen: in modern currency values about $2 million (and virtually tax-free).
London had taken to himself a handsome new wife (or ‘mate-woman’, as he called her) in 1905. He had high hopes of a Jack London Jr. by her (he had two daughters by his previous marriage). London had also in 1905 bought a property in northern California’s Sonoma County – the beginnings of what he named his ‘Beauty Ranch’.
London developed his ranch with an enthusiasm bordering on obsession. He was infected with the eucalyptus-planting mania that swept California in 1909 in the (false) belief that the eastern US was running out of timber and that ‘Circassian walnut’ (as eucalyptus wood was grotesquely called) would be commercially viable. The following year, London tore up 700 acres of vines and planted 16,000 seedlings on his ranch. Before the mania subsided some years later, London had planted around a quarter of a million trees and spent some $50,000. It was a wholly unprofitable speculation. Glen Ellen wine from London’s ranch sells strongly to this day.
By 1912 Beauty Ranch had expanded to some 1,000 acres. At its centre, London began erecting a mansion to be called ‘Wolf House’. The Spanish tile roof alone cost $3,500, and when finished the house would be a fit habitation for one who had shown himself so indisputably a leader of the human pack.
August 1912 was a month of disaster. On the 12th, London’s wife, Charmian, had a miscarriage. There would be no son to carry on his name. On the very day that the couple intended to move into Wolf House, 22 August, it burned down. The cause – act of God or arson? – was unknown (most plausibly a disaffected workman was responsible).
The event, accompanied by chronic ill health, plunged London into the gloom that intensified over the last four years of his
brief, but extraordinarily productive, life.
23 August
Unconquerable
1849 W.E. Henley was born on this day. When he died just under 54 years later, so would most of what little reputation he had built up during his lifetime. But every so often a poem, buried in the oblivion of the anthologies, takes off thanks to a wholly unpredictable celebrity boost. W.H. Auden became Beatle-famous when his lament, ‘Funeral Blues’, was featured in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
In January 2010, chance swung a similar spotlight on W.E. Henley and his poem ‘Invictus’. It was mentioned by British prime minister Gordon Brown (‘a battler’, as he informed TV interviewer Andrew Marr) as his inspiration in fighting back the latest of the intra-party plots to unseat him.
On another front, Henley’s poem inspired the title to the 2010 film recording Nelson Mandela’s welding of the new Republic of South Africa on the rugby fields of Johannesburg. Henley’s lines resound through the heart-warming film. (‘Is Invictus based on a book?’ is one of the FAQs on the IMDB website. ‘Yes’, is the astounding answer.)
For posterity Henley was known, if at all, as one of the more memorable of Robert Louis Stevenson’s close acquaintances (they met in a hospital ward), and as the one-legged man who was a principal source for Long John Silver.
Unkindly, one commentator said that Brown’s choosing Henley’s poem ‘is equivalent to choosing “My Way” as a Desert Island Disc … “Invictus” is the sort of poetic anthem that Hitler would have savoured in the bunker as Magda Goebbels poisoned her children and Eva bit into the capsule.’
This is too hard – although one might note that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, chose the poem as his final statement to the world before his lethal injection for the murder of 168 fellow Americans in 2001.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 38