Wordsworth’s most triumphant negative amounts to an admission, almost a rebuke to himself. He has gained from this scene an emotion to match his more usual landscapes:
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
But to gain the revelation he has, in a sense, to kill London off:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Still hearts don’t beat, don’t sustain life.
4 September
Dame Shirley, writing from the California gold mines, entertains the local blacksmith
1852
‘Who writ this ’ere?’ is his first remark, taking up one of my most precious books, and leaving the marks of his irreverent fingers upon the clean page. ‘Shakespeare’, I answer as politely as possible. ‘Did Spokeshave write it? He was an almighty smart fellow, that Spokeshave, I’ve hear’n tell’, replies my visitor. ‘I must write hum [home] and tell our folks that this ’ere is the first carpet I’ve seen sin I came to Californy, four year come next month.’
When Dr Fayette Clapp decided to practise in the mining camps of the California Gold Rush, his wife went along with him, rather than repine at home. Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (she added the terminal ‘e’ for style), a tolerably well-educated woman from Massachusetts, relished the adventure. Her letters, purporting to be written to her sister back home, were later published in San Francisco’s fledgling (and short-lived) literary monthly, The Pioneer, under the pseudonym ‘Dame Shirley’.
Dame Shirley was really one of those traveller-journalists like Leonard Kip, J.D. Borthwick and Bayard Taylor (see 19 August) who ‘wrote up’ the Gold Rush for readers further east. Like her, they thought the western vernacular was both demotic and inventive. In Three Years in California (1857) Borthwick recalled a man being described as ‘“strapped”, “dead broke” – Anglicé, without a cent in his pocket’. Quote marks and Latin serve to separate the observers writing for their cultural equals back home from the specimen under observation. There’s lots of defensive over-production of diction and rhetoric.
Dame Shirley begins her letter of 4 September with an elaborate inability topos: ‘If only I … could weave my stupid nothings into one of those airy fabrics, the value of which depends entirely upon the skill-ful work … which distinguishes it’ – and so on for over a page. Just under half-way through the letter she constructs an elaborate occupatio, or list of topics she won’t discuss while actually doing so:
I will not tell you, how sometimes we were stepping lightly over immense rocks, which a few months since, lay fathoms deep below the foaming Plumas … nor shall I say a single word about the dizziness we felt, as we crept by the deep excavations lying along the road …
But at least she conveys a sense of the mine workings and their environment. And she doesn’t shrink from the darker truths of the Forty- Niner experience. Forget any notions about the romance of crossing the plains:
The poor women, looking as haggard as so many Endorean witches, burnt to the color of a hazel-nut, with their hair cut short, and its gloss entirely destroyed by the alkali, whole plains of which they are compelled to cross on the way.
Details like these go well beyond local colour, and set Dame Shirley apart from the other Gold Rush journalists.
5 September
Born: father of the Edinburgh Festival
1903 Henry Harvey Wood’s remarkable career probably couldn’t happen today. It took easier access to university employment, a more relaxed approach to academic specialism, plus a world war, to bring his talents into full play. Born on this day in Edinburgh, Harvey Wood sailed through the Royal High School and the Edinburgh College of Art, where he won a prize for his draughtsmanship, before entering Edinburgh University to study English literature. Following more prizes and a first-class honours degree, he joined the faculty as a lecturer. In those more innocent times his promise was enough; no publications, not even a research degree were required.
At the outset of the Second World War he tried to enlist, but was turned down on medical grounds. Still wishing to serve, he joined the British Council, which was looking to set up an Edinburgh branch. In the national emergency, cultural diplomacy was needed at home more than abroad, as thousands of Allied servicemen – Americans, Poles, Czechs and Norwegians – not to mention refugees from the various theatres of war, fetched up in Scotland. Wood catered for them all, with activities ranging from basic English classes to readings and performances given by poets, musicians and artists brought to Edinburgh, and culminating in a series of exhibitions of ‘The Art of our Allies’ in the National Gallery of Scotland.
When he heard that the opera impresario Rudolph Bing, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was thinking of setting up a music festival in Britain, Harvey Wood persuaded him that Edinburgh had the resident audience and local backing to underpin the event. When politicians and bureaucrats dragged their feet, Wood’s tact, experience and persistent lobbying carried the scheme through, and in August 1947 the first Edinburgh International Festival was launched. From the start, Wood intended that it be a festival of the written and spoken word as well as music, and one of his first projects was to revive the mid-Scots morality play, Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1540), an earthy survey of Edinburgh society, politics and the law.
Also present from the beginning was what later came to be called the ‘Fringe’. While the official festival kept to formal theatre and opera, dance and concert music – whether classical or modern – the fringe went in for small, often experimental theatrical productions (including musicals), satire and stand-up comedy, dance and children’s shows. Then as now, performance in the official festival was by invitation only, whereas the Fringe is open to anyone who pays the exhibition fee.
From Harvey Wood’s modest start, the Edinburgh Festival has now grown into the largest arts festival in the world, with funding (in 2009) approaching £10 million. As an index of its range of support, half that sum is raised by ticket sales, sponsorship and donations, and half by grants from central government and other public-sector grants.
6 September
Thus perish all heretics
1536 What is the most read work of English literature over the fifteen centuries we’ve had such a thing as English literature? The answer will be found in the drawer alongside every hotel and motel bed in the US – the authorised, or King James version of the Holy Bible, published in the seventh year of his reign (1611).
It may have been authorised by the monarch, via some five committees and 50 scholars (most Oxbridge-based), but the authorship of central sections, as any modern copyright court would adjudicate, belongs to William Tyndale, 80 years earlier. Eighty per cent of the ‘King James’ New Testament, it is estimated, is verbally unaltered from Tyndale’s earlier translation. To stretch a point, we could entitle him the most read author in English literary history.
Who was he? His dates, as best we can determine his birth, are 1494–1536. His death, which was very painful and very public, we know about. Little is known of Tyndale’s early life: even his surname is not certain. He sometimes appears in documents as ‘Hichens’. But it is known that Tyndale/Hichens was a student at Oxford. On graduation in 1512, he enrolled to do what we would call research, or advanced study, into theology. He was evidently a brilliant linguist.
He went on to become a tutor in a noble household, but young Tyndale was soon in trouble for heresy. He was the most pugnacious of clerics. Early on, he developed two very dangerous aspirations: (1) to defy Rome, and (2) to translate the scriptures into English. His aim, as he put it, was that ‘even the ploughmen of England’ should know the scriptures: and know them as well as they knew their plough handles.
It was a perilous doctrine, and he decided to leave England for Germany in the 1520s, where he may have met Martin Luther. Tyndale was on the Continent w
hen Luther’s own vernacular Bible was published. Over the years, Tyndale himself worked on his great translation, abroad.
He fell out with Henry VIII on the issue of the king’s flagrantly multiple divorces. He was captured in Belgium, tried for heresy, strangled and burned at the stake in Brussels on the above date. His final words reportedly were: ‘O Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.’
7 September
French and Russian armies clash at the Battle of Borodino
1812 Nearly a century and a half later, the battle produced another, quieter clash when the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy declared the centrality of fact in fiction. ‘Dante can be wrong in The Divine Comedy’, she said. ‘It does not matter, with Shakespeare, that Bohemia has no seacoast, but if Tolstoy was all wrong about the Battle of Borodino or the character of Napoleon, War and Peace would suffer.’
‘We not only make believe we believe a novel, but we do substantially believe it, as being continuous [contiguous?] with real life, made of the same stuff, and the presence of fact in fiction, of dates and times and distances, is a kind of reassurance – a guarantee of credibility.’ She liked Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) because, along with its other strengths, it was ‘a compendium of everything that was to be known about whaling’.
The critic Frank Kermode, who (along with the present author) heard McCarthy’s lecture in Manchester in February 1960, remembered being told by an expert on whaling that Melville’s knowledge of the subject was inaccurate and unprofessional. ‘I mentioned this to McCarthy’, Kermode recalled, ‘asking whether … she would feel obliged to think ill of “Moby-Dick.” She replied that she certainly would. I called this attitude extreme.’1
It’s not clear where this leaves those readers of War and Peace who like to skip the war bits and cut straight to the love interest. In any case, Tolstoy’s treatment of the Battle of Borodino is more of an essay set out to refute the conventional wisdom of (especially Russian) historians than a historical event incorporated into fiction.
Was he right or wrong about it? Contrary to the official version, he writes in Book 10, Chapter 19 of War and Peace: ‘The battle of Borodino was not fought on a chosen and entrenched position with forces only slightly weaker than those of the enemy, but … on an open and almost unentrenched position, with forces only half as numerous as the French.’ Consequently, ‘its immediate result for the Russians was that we were brought nearer to the destruction of Moscow – which we feared more than anything in the world; and for the French its immediate result was … that they were brought nearer to the destruction of their whole army – which they feared more than anything in the world.’
So the French won the battle, but lost the war. That seems to get the balance about right.
1 Frank Kermode, ‘Bookend; Wilson and McCarthy: Still Entangled’, New York Times, 23 November 1997.
8 September
Edward Bellamy’s cousin reveres the flag
1892 For all Edward Bellamy’s success in making his name, fortune and a whole political movement out of his anti-capitalist utopian bestseller, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1886), the political impact of a 22-word affirmation penned by his cousin Francis was literally national in scope. The irony is that Francis Bellamy was a Christian socialist, a political designation that would be incomprehensible in America today.
He created the oath to the nation that all children in public (state) schools have to swear before lessons, all congressmen and other government officials at the start of their legislative sessions, all meetings of the Freemasons, the Boy Scouts, and many sporting events. It was on this day that he published his ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ in a popular children’s magazine, The Youth’s Companion.
In its first version the pledge said: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.’ ‘Republic’ because not kingdom or empire; ‘indivisible’ because we weren’t about to revisit the traumas of the Civil War. And that was it.
There were later additions and emendations, like ‘the flag of the United States of America’ in case immigrants thought they were still addressing their old national banners, and ‘under God’ inserted after ‘one nation’ – this last a tribute to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which promised ‘this nation, under God, shall have a new birth in freedom’.
In other words, Americans revere the flag – not just respect it, fly it and wear it in their lapels. The British have a head of state, to whom peers in the House of Lords bow even on the 364 days in which she is in absentia. The American head of state is ‘The People’, the first two words of the Constitution.
The British national anthem ‘Send[s] her victorious / Happy and glorious / Long to reign over us’. And the American national anthem? Well, that’s about the flag, of course, the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ that continued to wave over the ramparts of Fort McHenry after a day and long night’s bombardment by British ships in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812:
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
9 September
In Cologne, William Caxton completes his translation of The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye; three years later he will produce it as the first printed book in English
1471 ‘And for as moche as in the wrytyng of the same’, he wrote when he had finished, ‘my penne is worn, myn hande wery and not sted-fast, myn eyen dimmed with overmoche lokyng on the white paper.’ Caxton, a prosperous mercer (fine cloth merchant) and diplomat, had started the work in Bruges with the encouragement of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV of England, and when she approved the result, her courtiers wanted copies too. Clearly if Caxton was going to oblige them – not to mention sell further copies – he was going to have to make use of the new technology of printing (see 23 February).
The Recueil des histoires de Troye by Raoul le Fèvre was one of those medieval romance versions of ancient myth, like Le Roman de Thèbes (1150–55) or Le Roman de Troie (1155–60) by Benoît de Sainte-Maure. A ‘recueil’ is a compilation, and the Receuil scooped up Greek mythology along with the Fall of Troy, strictly speaking considered a part of the Roman story, in which the Duchy of Burgundy itself – like Britain – was supposed to have followed on that cataclysmic event.
To acquire a press, and hire the artisans who knew how to run it, Caxton went to Cologne in Germany, where he finished his translation. Back to Bruges, he set up the press, and by late 1473 or early the following year he had completed production of the Recuyell, the first book to be printed in English. But he was more a publisher than a printer; which meant that he was constantly on the lookout for new titles (some of which he translated himself ) and new markets to sell them in. As publishing claimed more and more of his time and interest, he realised that books in English would sell best in London; so there he moved in 1475 or early 1476, setting up his press in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.
Once in England, Caxton imported printed books from France and Flanders, but he also produced more chivalric and historical romances, as well as religious tracts and pamphlets. But for modern readers his masterpiece was the first edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1478, second edition, 1483).
Caxton’s Chaucer was as crucial to the development of English literature as Dante’s Divine Comedy was to Italian: it allowed literature to be in the language people actually spoke and heard around them, rather than in some official lingo. In a period when French was still the conventional language of literature in England, Caxton’s Chaucer proved that the full range of high and low styles – serious and comic, ironic and straight – could be achieved only in that glorious mixture of French, Latin and Anglo-Saxon that make up the English language.
And it’s important not to miss the connection betw
een the merchant adventurer, his sense of the demand (even Margaret of Burgundy preferred to read her stories in English) and the technology he mastered in order to bring the product to market. It was no accident that modern English literature was born along with the printing press.
10 September
The death of Amy Levy
1889 Few literary careers, or literary deaths, are more poignant than Amy Levy’s. She was born at Clapham in 1861, into a cultured and orthodox Jewish family, generally relaxed on matters of religion, who actively encouraged her literary talents. Her father was a stockbroker. She was educated at Brighton and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was the first Jewish woman to matriculate. At university her first volume of poems, Xantippe (1881), was named after Socrates’ fabled shrew of a wife – famously supposed to have been in the habit of emptying chamber pots over her luckless husband’s head.
The details of Levy’s subsequent life are tantalisingly mysterious. She may have taught, or worked (out of motives of socialist solidarity) in a factory. She published poetry and fiction including one novel, Reuben Sachs (1888), which caused a furore among Britain’s Jews for its satire on their community’s materialism. Levy was not devout and her poetry suggests she may have been lesbian.
A prey to melancholy, Levy committed suicide in her parents’ London home after correcting the proofs of her fifth volume of verse. She had foreseen this end for herself in a verse monologue, ‘A Minor Poet’, published a few years earlier. It opens with the speaker making preparations to end it all:
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 41