So maybe it should be expected that his goodwill trip to Russia should have turned out to be less straightforward than anticipated. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a friend of Frost’s, was due to go to the Soviet Union on a diplomatic mission, and suggested that Frost go along to read his work and do some general cultural interacting. Frost was keen to go, though fearful of the effect on his 88-year-old constitution. Kennedy endorsed the idea.
But Frost really wanted to meet Nikita Khrushchev, to tell the Soviet premier how much he admired his forceful denunciation of Stalin and encouragement of young writers like Yevtushenko and Solzhenitsyn, and to suggest a new relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States – not ‘mutual co-existence’ (Khrushchev’s formulation, which Frost thought too negative) but, as Udall remembered the exchange, ‘a hundred years of grand rivalry based on an Aristotelian code of conduct he called “mutual magnanimity”’.
What neither man knew was that Khrushchev had already begun to install missiles in Cuba, and was using his meeting with Frost partly to gauge how Kennedy would react to the disclosure. According to Udall, ‘the only truculent outburst during our long talk’ was a coarse joke Khrushchev made about some American senators talking big about invading Cuba but being unable to ‘perform’.
Interviewed in New York after a long flight, unable to sleep for eighteen hours, Frost reported accurately on their hopeful exchange, but then, misremembering the joke (or misinterpreting its tone), claimed that ‘Khrushchev said he feared for us because of our lot of liberals. He thought that we’re too liberal to fight.’ The next day the Washington Post carried a banner headline: ‘Frost Says Khrushchev Sees U.S. as “Too Liberal” to Defend Itself”.2
Kennedy, who had already garnered intelligence of the missiles, was furious. Frost was sorry. If the president had been any less sure-footed, the provocation might have started the Third World War. Just under five months later the poet was dead.
1 Yvor Winters, The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 160.
2 Stewart Udall, ‘Robert Frost’s Last Adventure’, New York Times, 11 June 1972: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/specials/frost-last.html
30 August
The hotline between the leaders of the US and the Soviet Union goes operational
1963 It was the Cuban missile crisis that prompted the direct line between the two capitals. President Kennedy had demanded that the Russians remove their missiles from Cuba. The world waited, on the brink of the Third World War. Then at 6.00pm on 26 October 1962, the White House received a message from Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, offering to remove the missiles if the Americans would undertake not to attack Cuba.
It took the Americans twelve hours to decode this crucial communiqué. Thinking the US was stalling, Khrushchev sent another message at 11.00 the next morning. This time the conditions were more stringent: the US to remove all its Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy first. Then Kennedy’s advisors had a brilliant idea. Why not accept the conditions in Khrushchev’s first message and ignore his second? It worked, but it was a close run thing.
So on 20 July the two countries set up a hotline between the capitals. In just a month it went into action. Phase one was just a duplex telegraph line, on the assumption that voice transmission would require simultaneous translation both ways, and lead to confusion – not to mention comic possibilities of the sort exploited in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove a year later.
Here’s the scenario. Air Force General Jack D. Ripper, convinced that the Soviet Union has been polluting the ‘bodily fluids’ of the American people, has launched a nuclear strike on Russia. In the war room the American president, played by Peter Sellers to look and sound as much like Adlai Stevenson as possible, is calling Soviet premier Dmitri Kissov on the hotline:
Hello? … Uh … Hello D– uh, hello Dmitri? Listen uh uh I can’t hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? … Oh-ho, that’s much better … Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb … The Bomb, Dmitri … The hydrogen bomb! … Well now, what happened is … ahm … one of our base commanders, he had a sort of … well, he went a little funny in the head … you know … just a little … funny. And, ah … he went and did a silly thing … Well, I’ll tell you what he did. He ordered his planes … to attack your country … Ah … Well, let me finish, Dmitri … Let me finish, Dmitri … Well listen, how do you think I feel about it? … Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dmitri? … Why do you think I’m calling you? Just to say hello? … Yes! I mean i-i-i-if we’re unable to recall the planes, then … I’d say that, ah … well, ah … we’re just gonna have to help you destroy them, Dmitri … All right, well listen now. Who should we call? … Who should we call, Dmitri? The … wha-whe, the People … you, sorry, you faded away there … The People’s Central Air Defence Headquarters … Where is that, Dmitri? … In Omsk … Right … Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dmitri? … Whe-ah, what? I see, just ask for Omsk information.
Sellers ad-libbed much of this himself (it was later retro-scripted to become part of the film’s official transcript). Four takes were spoiled because the actors around the war room table couldn’t stop laughing.
31 August
Richard III is killed as the Tudors defeat the Plantagenets at Bosworth Field, bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end
1485 The scene is familiar from Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard the Third (written 1591, published 1597). The wicked king starts the day badly, having spent a sleepless night haunted by the ghosts of his victims, who have ‘struck more terror to the soul of Richard / Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers’. During the battle, key allies like Lord Thomas Stanley and his brother Sir William Stanley change sides. Richard is unhorsed (‘My kingdom for a horse!’) and killed. Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, is crowned Henry VII on the spot.
Did Shakespeare get it right? How would Mary McCarthy (see 7 September) assess the facts in this fiction? Richmond’s claim to the throne he seized from Richard was shaky. His lineage descended through his mother, the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt and his mistress. If he was going to be presented to the world as the founder of a great dynasty, he would need to hire some good spin doctors.
Step forward, Polydore Vergil, an Italian cleric on the make. Henry VII hired him to write the ‘official’ history of England up to his reign. The best way to promote the Tudors was to denigrate the man they replaced. So in Vergil’s Anglica Historia (first edition, 1534) Richard becomes ‘deformyd of body, th[e] one showlder being higher than th[e] other, a short and sowre cowntenance, which semyd to savor of mischief’.
Not only that, but he ‘was woont to be ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the myddest, and putting in agane, the dagger which he did alway were’. And Vergil’s Richard conspires against Lord Hastings and (ultimately) the Duke of Buckingham, and has the two princes murdered in the Tower of London.
Shakespeare goes one further than Vergil by having Richard order that the Duke of Clarence be drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine, and by turning Richard into an old-fashioned villain of a medieval morality play – taking the audience into his confidence, hence co-opting them in his wicked plans, manipulating events, finally getting his just deserts.
Even the battle itself still arouses controversy. Did it really happen at Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, or eight miles away on the Warwickshire border? New archaeological finds, including part of a sword and a silver-gilt badge showing a boar (Richard’s personal symbol, worn only by his closest retainers), places the climax of the battle, and probably the king’s death, in a field four miles south-west of Market Bosworth, with the village of Shenton to the north and Stoke Golding to the east.
1 September
Somerset Maugham, literary travel agent
1947 No writer of modern times has be
en more peripatetic than Somerset Maugham. Born in Paris, he was bi-cultural. Bi-sexual as well, it was usually more convenient for him not to stay for long periods in Britain or America but in places more tolerant of diversity – famously the French Riviera.
He was, however, obliged to stay in the UK or – at a pinch – America during the Second World War. The alternative was to suffer the indignities visited on that other pre-war south of France resident, P.G. Wodehouse. The Nazis were not tolerant.
After the war, an economically devastated Britain imposed strict exchange controls. The limits on currency that the country’s citizens were allowed to ‘export’ were minimal – £10 per annum in the late 1940s. Enforced insularity had a cramping effect, Maugham believed, on the author’s mind: particularly the young author. Could he have written as he did, had he remained (as he began professional life) a doctor in Lambeth?
A world-wide bestselling author who had made other fortunes from his plays and film adaptations, the 70-year-old Maugham was well placed to set up a prize, named after himself. ‘Millionaires and such like’, he once sourly observed, ‘are always ready to give money to universities and hospitals … but will never do anything for the arts.’
The Somerset Maugham prize was endowed to be administered by the Society of Authors. There were strict conditions attached to it. Eligible authors had to be under 35 years old and the £500 cash stipend was to be spent on at least three months’ travel abroad, in places felt to be useful to the writer’s future work.
The winner of the first award was announced on 1 September 1947: A.L. Barker for her collection of short stories, Innocents. There was universal praise for Maugham’s enlightened philanthropy. There was, however, one dissenting voice – that of Evelyn Waugh, who thought it wrong to encourage the young, and tantalise the elderly, in this way. He wrote in protest to the Daily Telegraph:
Does Mr Maugham realize what a huge temptation he is putting before elderly writers? To have £500 of our own – let alone of Mr Maugham’s – to spend abroad is beyond our dreams … What will we not do to qualify for Mr Maugham’s munificence? What forging of birth certificates, dyeing of whiskers and lifting of faces? To what parodies of experimental styles will we not push our experienced pens?
Maugham’s prize survives and has an excellent record in picking winners (Doris Lessing, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, V.S. Naipaul, Julian Barnes, among others). The cash amount, £12,000 currently, has risen with inflation and can still, with a little scrimping, yield a valuable foreign experience.
2 September
Pepys – eye-witness to the Great Fire of London
1666 The most vivid evocation of the fire that transformed London is that of Samuel Pepys. A narrator of genius – true always to the impression of the moment – Pepys, like other Londoners, was initially somewhat blasé (fires were commonplace in a metropolis warmed by coal and constructed out of wood).
2nd. Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep. About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window, and saw the fire not so much as it was and further off. So to my closett to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.
So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding-lane, and that it hath burned St Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish-street already. So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steeleyard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.
The pigeons are a touch of genius. Pepys, a trusted functionary, hurried off to advise the authorities (the king and the Duke of York, no less) that houses must be pulled down to create firebreaks. When he hastened back to the fire, Pepys was told by the frantic Lord Mayor that the fire was moving faster than houses could be demolished (or owners prepared to let them be demolished), and the oil and tar warehouses alongside the river were in flames. ‘Firedrops’ were showering all over the city.
Pepys realised that his own house was in danger. His entry for 3 September notes: ‘About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bed[th]nall-greene.’ On the next day the authorities began blowing up houses. After supping on a cold shoulder of mutton (‘without napkins, or anything’), he and his wife went out into the garden ‘and saw how horridly the sky looks, all on a fire in the night, was enough to put us out of our wits; and, indeed, it was extremely dreadful, for it looks just as if it was at us; and the whole heaven on fire.’ Genuinely alarmed, Pepys now made arrangements about his £2,000-odd worth of gold. It was not until the 7th that the fire (‘thank God!’) finally burned out.
3 September
William Wordsworth has to kill London in order to love it
1802 This is the date the poet assigns to an inspired Petrarchan sonnet bearing what may be the least inspired title in English literature: ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’. The two quatrains go like this:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
What was Wordsworth, so famously associated with the wild landscapes of the Lake District, doing in London? Accompanied by his sister Dorothy, he was on his way to France, there to meet his former French mistress Annette Vallon, to try to agree an arrangement for her support and that of their illegitimate daughter Caroline. They crossed the Thames by Westminster Bridge because it offered the most direct route south, without their having to thread their way through the crowded City to reach London Bridge.
But they crossed on 31 July. It was on this date that the poem was at least begun. It was the date of their return crossing that Wordsworth chose to affix to the poem’s title.
Either way, what would they have seen? Obviously not the present Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry’s neo-gothic monstrosity not substantially complete until the 1860s, but Westminster Abbey and the lower-level buildings associated with it, like St Stephen’s Chapel, where the House of Commons sat. Dorothy’s diary mentions St Paul’s, which would have loomed over the City to the right of their view.
The poem itself refers to ‘Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples … /
Open unto the fields, and to the sky’, which brings two further points of difference between their time and ours: lots of shipping in the Thames, including smaller sailing ships and barges servicing the larger vessels, and a much lower density of building to the west of the City, allowing fields and gardens between the houses.
Was it this Canaletto-like vision that melted Wordsworth’s hardness of heart towards the great wen? Because he wasn’t above using the capital city as an emblem for all that had gone wrong with the country, as the title of another of his famous Petrarchan sonnets written that year makes clear:
‘London, 1802’
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, …
The answer, as so often, lies within the poem itself. In the first place, the first line of ‘Westminster Bridge’ is oddly phrased. Alright, so he needs ‘not anything’ (as opposed to nothing) to fill out the iambic line, but what lies behind that curiously negative construction, as though disputing many ‘fairer’ sights commonly claimed? And why ‘Earth’ and not ‘the earth’? Is the planet being personified? If so, to what purpose? And ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty’? Is the nature poet reproving himself for taking too little notice of the city’s beauty?
Maybe, but it’s worth noticing that he has to de-citify London in order to like it. First, there are no people here – no stinking crowds throwing their sweaty nightcaps in the air to greet the morning. Second, there is no smoke. It’s the early morning, you see, so for once ‘The Smoke’ isn’t smoky. Third (those negatives just go on and on), the usual noise and clutter of the big city is absent; the scene is ‘silent, bare’.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 40