Let the poem speak for itself:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
24 August
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live again
1966 The first performance of Tom Stoppard’s career-breakthrough play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, was on this day at the Edinburgh Festival ‘fringe’, in the dusty Cranston Street Hall off the Royal Mile.
The performance was poorly attended and even more poorly received.
The Scotsman, Edinburgh’s premier paper, dismissed the play as ‘a clever revue sketch which has got out of hand’. Other reviewers were similarly unimpressed. Cleverness was always in over-supply at the Edinburgh fringe and there was no reason to suppose a major theatrical career was being launched.
There was, however, one rave review – by Ronald Bryden, successor to Kenneth Tynan as the Observer theatre critic. Tynan, a king-maker in the stage world, was now commissioning for the National Theatre and he requested a copy of Stoppard’s play. Long runs in London’s West End and Broadway ensued.
The three-act text performed at Edinburgh and sent to Tynan was an expansion of a one-act jeu d’esprit, written by the 27-year-old Stoppard in 1964. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead draws on the then fashionable theatre of the absurd, specifically Samuel Beckett. Vladimir and Estragon – with Prince Hamlet as Godot – were clearly models in Stoppard’s mind.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are what Henry James termed ficelles – ‘strings’, whose only function is to make the plot move. They are brought from Wittenberg to Elsinore by Claudius (with malign step-paternal intent) and Gertrude (with benign maternal intent) to discover what ails their melancholic fellow student, the Prince of Denmark.
Hamlet soon perceives that they are spies and later callously arranges their death. When Horatio (another Wittenberg comrade) suggests it is rather hard that they should ‘go to it’, Hamlet shrugs off his homicide with the comment: ‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment. / They are not near my conscience.’
In Stoppard’s play the two courtiers quibble between themselves, ponder deep questions of free will and probability (there is much flipping of coins) and try, desperately and futilely, to work out what is going on in a machine in which they are mere incognisant cogs.
Playing with Shakespeare ‘metatheatrically’ was not new. Eliot had hinted at something like Stoppard’s play in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two.
One of Brecht’s exercises for his Berliner Ensemble in the 1950s was to replay the balcony scene (‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’) from the Nurse’s point of view, as if she too were eager that night to get away for a tryst with her lover. ‘Charles Marowitz’s Hamlet’, an absurdist 30-minute cut-up, had been performed at the Royal Shakespeare’s Theatre of Cruelty season in 1965.
Stoppard’s most likely inspiration (if there was one) was W.S. Gilbert’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a ‘tragic episode: in three tabloids, founded on an old Danish legend’. Gilbert’s fantasia was first published in 1874 in Fun Magazine. P.G. Wodehouse and George Bernard Shaw took part in subsequent amateur performances and Gilbert’s playlet may well have influenced their own comedies. Gilbert’s plot has Rosencrantz (very sensible, unlike the crazed prince) marrying Ophelia. She it is who comes up with the ideal solution to the Hamlet problem:
A thought!
There is a certain isle beyond the sea
Where dwell a cultured race compared with whom
We are but poor brain-blind barbarians;
’Tis known as Engle-land. Oh, send him there!
Exit Prince of Denmark.
25 August
Born in Belfast: the man who will overturn the American western film
1921 No wonder Brian (pronounced Bree-an) Moore was Graham Greene’s favourite living author. He wrote thrillers, and novels about Catholic doubt, and had got ‘a good grounding in shifting relativities and ambiguous loyalties’ (as Bernard McGinley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has put it) while working in Poland after the war for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
After UNRRA he emigrated first to Canada, where he worked as a journalist, then to the United States, finally settling in Malibu, California. He wrote nineteen novels and eight screenplays, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966) and the script for Black Robe (1991), an ambitious recreation of the Jesuit mission in what is now Quebec City and the territory to the north-east of it, based on his own novel of the same name, published six years before.
To write Black Robe, Moore had immersed himself in the letters and reports back home of the Jesuits trying to convert the natives, a perspective that radically altered the conventions of the usual cowboys-and-Indians epic out of Hollywood – reinforced in the film, made in Canada and directed by an Australian, the seasoned Bruce Beresford.
Not that Hollywood hadn’t already begun to undermine its own clichés. Little Big Man (1970; see 24 June) had reversed the old dichotomy between terrorised white families and predatory natives. Now the savages were the very US Cavalry that had so often ridden in at the last minute to save the beleaguered settlers, and their victims the Indian women and children camped on the Washita River. Dances With Wolves (1990) postulates one thoughtful man who takes the time and trouble to learn the ways of the Oglalla Sioux, only to have his good work cancelled out by unruly soldiers who come across his camp.
In Black Robe a party of Algonquins sets off with some Jesuits (‘Black Robes’ to the natives) to relieve a distant mission to the Hurons. It quickly becomes clear that the two cultures are entirely different, mutually incomprehensible, with no John Wayne out of The Searchers (1956) or Kevin Costner out of Dances With Wolves to read the natives’ behaviour. Yet they have a culture if not equal to, then at least capable of confronting that of the whites. Though marvelling at writing and trying to make music from a European recorder by blowing in at the wrong end, they can shoot a partridge on the wing with a bow and arrow.
But there’s nothing left of the noble savage. Indians fight their enemies just as bitterly as do the European and native white settlers. They are expert, exquisite torturers. The whites are unheroic, but they are not the murderous, rapacious cavalry out of Little Big Man. Though rough, they are courageous, hard-working and sincerely bent (for good or ill) on leading the Indians to Jesus.
Not that they succeed – on any level of grace. The Hurons resist the missionaries because their shamans have told them they will be destroyed if they convert. When they reluctantly accept the Gospel it’s because they believe it will save them from another white import, the smallpox. The film’s closing legend supplies the bleak dénouement:
Fifteen years later, the Hurons, having accepted Christianity, were routed and killed by their enemies, the Iroquois. The Jesuit mission was abandoned and the Jesuits returned to Quebec.
26 August
The last southern gentleman dies, aged 70
1744 Like Thomas Jefferson, William Byrd II of Westover was a Virginia country gentleman. Unlike Jefferson, he did not fret in the fetters of the mother countr
y. Byrd belonged to a generation content to be British. If they lamented their distance from the court, coffee houses and other locales of wit and good conversation found in the metropolis, it was not as inhabitants of an adversarial separate country, but as provincials on the edges of a great empire. Byrd had been born in Virginia, but was schooled in Essex, went to Rotterdam to study business, then back to London to study law, before returning to Virginia to inherit his father’s estate.
Back home he lived in a brick three-storey Georgian mansion on a plantation large enough to provide the land for present-day Richmond and Petersburg, as a government official (he was treasurer of Virginia), as an amateur naturalist (he was a Fellow of the Royal Society), and as the author of voluminous letters and diaries. He could read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian and French. His library of 4,000 volumes, one of the largest in the colonies, made up in books for what he lacked in good conversation.
Byrd’s coded secret diary gives the flavour of his daily routine. On the last day of 1711, ‘I rose about 7 o’clock and read a chapter in Hebrew and six leaves in Lucian. I said my prayers and ate boiled milk for breakfast.’ On New Year’s Day, 1712, ‘I lay abed till 9 o’clock this morning to bring my wife into temper again and rogered her by way of reconciliation.’ Later, ‘Mr Mumford and I went to shoot with our bows and arrows but shot nothing, and afterwards we played at billiards.’
Private pleasures were balanced by public projects. His best known work, The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (widely circulated but not published until 1841), followed an expedition to survey the disputed boundary. It is a mixture of science and satire: close observations of flora and fauna, of the natives’ habits and the history of European settlement, spiced with sketches of the North Carolinans’ gluttony, laziness and sexual excess: ‘The only business here is the raising of hogs, which is managed with the least trouble and affords the diet they are most fond of’ – so much so that they are beginning to look like hogs themselves.
Properly used for improving the mind and morals, leisure was a virtue, Byrd thought. This was very much a southern belief, not one shared by New England, for example. In his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), St John de Crèvecoeur tells the story of ‘Mr Bertram, the botanist’, who first cleared his land, then cultivated it, through which effort he earned the leisure to study nature in the abstract, and to take pleasure in his studies.
Susan Manning thinks that Byrd’s contempt for North Carolina is displaced anxiety about his own idleness. After the Revolution, which imposed (even for Jefferson) a strict dividing line ‘between virtuous industry and unpatriotic indolence’, the precarious balance could no longer be maintained. Then the southern gentleman turned into a ‘historical and literary myth’, she argues, ‘from the effete, enervated, but perfectly civilised Augustine St Clare in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the atavistic heirs of Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor’.1
1 Susan Manning, ‘Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia: A New Approach to William Byrd II’, Journal of American Studies, 28 (1994), pp. 190, 172.
27 August
Spain’s most popular and prolific playwright dies at 73. His state funeral will attract vast crowds and last nine days
1635 He was born before Shakespeare, outlived him by nearly two decades and wrote (at the most conservative estimate) some 800 more plays. Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio, to give him his full name, invented a new drama for his time and place. He tore into the conventions of classical drama, banishing the three Aristotelian unities of time, place and action and coming up with dialogue and metre adjusted to the social and political status of the characters – formal for toffs, vernacular for peasants. He was the first dramatist to make a living from his plays.
And they came so quickly, so apparently easily. He claimed to have written some 1,500 three-act comedias (a term that includes tragedies as well as comedies), more than a hundred of which, he boasted, took ‘only twenty-four hours to pass from the Muses to the boards of the theatre’. These totals may be exaggerated, but over 637 comedias are known by title, and the texts of 450 are still extant.
They ranged from explorations of conflicts between love and propriety that seem almost to presage English restoration drama – like El perro del hortelano, or The Dog in the Manger (1613), in which a countess falls in love with one of her servants – to plays of revenge, a popular Spanish genre that he began to deconstruct and ironise late in his career, as with El castigo sin venganza, or Punishment Without Vengeance (1631), in which a man kills his wife for an affair she starts in order to pay him back for his own infidelity, and winds up exposing himself, not only as a murderer but (worse) as a cuckold.
Besides his theatrical works he composed a large body of lyric poetry, pastoral novels, epic poems, autobiographical reminiscences and much else. On top of all this he was a man of action in and out of bed, with two wives and many mistresses – all of whom he seems to have loved dearly – not to mention serving with the Spanish army against Portugal, and the navy in the Azores, even joining the Armada to sail against England. He was lucky to be in one of the few ships not blasted out of the water at Gravelines or dashed against the coast of Ireland in the later attempt to escape. But he improved the six-month voyage by writing the better part of La Hermosura de Angelica (1602), a long verse epic in the manner of Ariosto.
28 August
Sebastopol falls, a great novelist rises
1855 During the Crimean War, Sebastopol, a Russian stronghold, was besieged by the British and French for many months. One of the Russian defenders of the city was Leo Tolstoy, a volunteer and very junior artillery officer. He wrote, as his first serious fiction, a series of short stories and descriptive pieces based on his military experience. They were published in book form as The Sebastopol Sketches in 1856.
Sebastopol, with its blood-drenched and battered bastions, is defended because the generals can think of nothing better to do. The besieged citadel leaks good Russian blood like a severed jugular – but not generals’ or tsar’s blood, of course.
Finally the position is surrendered on 28 August 1855 – for no other reason than that the generals, and their tsarist commander-in-chief, have arbitrarily decided to turn tail and run. The description of the shameful retreat forms a savagely anticlimactic conclusion to the last story of the Sebastopol series:
The enemy saw that something incomprehensible was happening in awe-inspiring Sevastopol … they did not yet dare to believe that their unflinching foe had disappeared … The Sevastopol army, surging and spreading like the sea on a rough dark night, its whole mass anxiously palpitating … away from the place where it was leaving so many brave comrades, from the place saturated with its blood, the place it had held for eleven months against a far stronger foe, but which it was now ordered to abandon without a struggle. The first effect this command had on every Russian was one of oppressive bewilderment.
And, in the case of one young officer, a lifelong scepticism about military ‘strategy’. War is fog, blood and bad generalship. End of story.
During the weary months of the siege, when there was nothing to do but undergo bombardment and the occasional skirmish, Tolstoy read obsessively. His reading matter is interesting: the more so since this was largely the period in which his own authorial personality was being formed. Over 8–9 June 1855, for example, he records: ‘Laziness, laziness. Health bad. Reading [Thackeray’s] Vanity Fair all day.’ The same lazy week he read, for good measure, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and Pendennis (we should all be so idle – this is about a million words of fiction). Tolstoy, as he dodged English and French shrapnel, read the English novel in French translation.
It is demonstrable (from textual echoes) that Thackeray’s ‘Waterloo Novel’ (i.e. Vanity Fair) influenced Tolstoy powerfully, as did Thackeray’s ‘Showman of Vanity Fair’ technique. It was the arch-Jamesian critic, Percy Lubbock (in The Craft of Fiction, 1921), who linked Tolstoy and Thackeray as the two masters of the ‘pano
ramic’ novel (in opposition to the ‘dramatic’ and more artistic James). It would seem they had already made the connection themselves.
29 August
As the Cuban missile crisis looms, Robert Frost leaves on a goodwill tour of the USSR
1962 Robert Frost was America’s unofficial poet laureate. He was an icon, a national treasure, a bestseller compared to contemporary poets, widely consulted on cultural matters. In January 1961, he had been chosen to read a new composition at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration – the first poet to be so honoured. Entitled ‘Dedication’, the poem prophesied a new ‘Augustan age / Of a power leading from its strength and pride, / of young ambition eager to be tried’. But after a few lines the sun’s glare troubled his eyes so that he could read no further, and he had to fall back instead on one prepared earlier (as the television cooks say) that he could recite by heart.
There were gaps between the public and private Frost. He was the genial poet-philosopher drawing universal truths from nature, but accused of being an uncaring father and husband. He was born and brought up in cities – San Francisco and Lawrence, Massachusetts, a textile-manufacturing centre – before spending two years at Harvard, yet his popularity owed a lot to his persona as a plain-speaking New England farmer. As the poet and critic Yvor Winters has written, ‘the rural life is somehow regarded as the truly American life’; yet he adds, ‘it is the poet’s business to evaluate human experience, and the rural setting is no more valuable for this purpose than any other or no particular setting’. 1
Another surprise is that some of his best-known poems, thought to be most typical of felt life on his New Hampshire farm – ‘Mending Wall’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ – were written in England, where he lived from 1912 to 1915 before he moved to New Hampshire, and where he networked with other poets like Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and T.E. Hulme. Though now long regarded as the antithesis of modernism, his work piqued the interest of Ezra Pound, who reviewed it and got it published in Poetry.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 39