Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  What should such fellows as I do,

  Crawling between earth and heaven?

  Here is the phial; here I turn the key

  Sharp in the lock. Click! – there’s no doubt it turned.

  This is the third time; there is luck in threes—

  Queen Luck, that rules the world, befriend me now

  And freely I’ll forgive you many wrongs!

  Just as the draught began to work, first time,

  Tom Leigh, my friend (as friends go in the world),

  Burst in, and drew the phial from my hand,

  (Ah, Tom! ah, Tom! that was a sorry turn!)

  There was no Tom for Miss Levy. She was 28 years old when she died. She is recorded as the first Jewish woman to be legally cremated in England.

  11 September

  Fateful date in fiction – fatal in real life

  2077 On this date the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke imagined an asteroid striking Italy, causing huge devastation – arrivederci Padua, Verona, Venice – leading to the launch of Spaceguard, a NASA early-warning programme to watch for threats from space. In June 2130 Spaceguard detects a strange space vehicle in the shape of a sausage 20 kilometres round by 54 long. This is the scenario for Rendezvous with Rama (1972), which scooped all the sci-fi prizes for that year.

  Told of the ‘real’ 9/11, Tom Clancy commented: ‘Four planes? That many people willing to die for the same cause at the same time? If any writer turned in a story like this, the publisher would have just handed it back and said, “No way. Not believable.”’ His own final scene in Debt of Honor (1994) has an embittered Japanese pilot of the ‘lone nut’ persuasion, following a not awfully believable war with the United States in which his son and brother have been killed, crash his 747 into the US Capitol building in Washington, killing the president, most of the Congress and cabinet, the joint chiefs of staff and all nine justices of the Supreme Court – all convened for a celebratory joint session of Congress.

  Clancy claims he foretold the attack on the Twin Towers, and that NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, should have been in the air over New York to shoot the hijacked planes out of the sky on that sunny September morning. More up-market authors thought fiction might never rise to the occasion, now that it had actually happened. Within a fortnight the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ department had got together a symposium of first (non-fictional) impressions, including John Updike’s on the abstract fury of the perpetrators, Amitrav Ghosh’s on how hard it was for a victim’s children to take in the enormity of his sudden death, and Susan Sontag’s that this was not another Pearl Harbor, but revenge for America throwing its weight around in the Middle East.

  But the end of fiction? Not a bit of it. By mid-decade the fictions were positively gushing out: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006). Martin Amis’s short story ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ (2006) imagined the interior mental framework of a fanatical personality. So did Updike’s Terrorist (2006), only now the fanatic was an American-born Muslim high school senior in New Jersey, both attracted to and repulsed by the girls who ‘sway and sneer and expose their soft bodies and alluring hair’. Then Don DeLillo explored modes of union and isolation in Falling Man (2007). Reviews were mixed.

  No one departed from Clancy’s paranoid vision of an embattled America. Clarke’s very different projection remained unshared. When the Americans finally gain entrance to the spaceship Rama, the aliens are too busy preparing their ship for a crucial manoeuvre to pay them any attention. They have no interest in earth, let alone the United States. They are just passing through the solar system – not visiting it (let alone assaulting it) – in order to use the sun’s gravity to sling-shot them into a faster trajectory for another destination altogether.

  12 September

  Death of a literary louse

  1908 On this day John Churton Collins died, aged 60. His was the lot of the worthy scholar, outshone by what F.R. Leavis and his stern disciples liked to call ‘facile journalists’. They usually win.

  A career swot, Collins made it with difficulty to Balliol College, Oxford (a benevolent uncle paid his way, under the misapprehension – encouraged by his nephew – that a career in the church was in prospect). At university (Oxford was currently going through the period that Gladstone called its ‘agony’ of religious doubt) Collins read deeply and widely.

  He aimed already to be a man of letters based in Oxford, the only thing he is recorded in his life as ever having passionately loved. Alas, he was awarded a second-class degree: a handicap that hung, for the rest of his career, like an albatross round his neck. It precluded any academic post and his kind uncle, on learning of the fraud perpetrated on him, was kind no more.

  Collins took up hack work in Fleet Street and, when his fortunes ran low, menial clerical work. It is recorded that he was superhumanly fast at addressing envelopes, for which he received a pound every thousand he did. Eventually he found a steady post as a ‘crammer’ for students entering the universities or the Civil Service (the Northcote Trevelyan Report of 1854 had recommended entry examinations – much to the disgust of old hands like Anthony Trollope).

  What he really wanted to do was to write about literature, and by the end of the 1870s he had made a small reputation for himself as a higher journalist and could marry the lawyer’s daughter who had already borne the first of his seven children.

  In 1880 Collins was taken up by Henry Morley, the indefatigable founder of adult education in England, and head of the English department at the University College of London. Collins followed Morley’s example as an industrious university extension lecturer. He is estimated to have given some 10,000 lectures. It was not, however, Oxford where, in the few days allowed him, he took his annual vacation.

  Collins’ enduring quality was that of making himself royally unloved by the literary great. An uncomplimentary, but solidly researched, article on Tennyson’s poetic derivativeness earned him the description from the laureate that has immortalised him. Collins, Tennyson declared, was ‘the louse on the locks of literature’.

  Collins buried his vengeful hatchet into the work of other literary grandees – always with sound scholarly warrant, which made him even less loved. His attempt to get himself elected professor of literature at Merton College, Oxford in 1885 provoked a powerful critique of the feeble way the subject was taught in the universities. He was right, but it won him no friends in high places.

  His greatest offence, in the eyes of the London literary world, was his devastating satire on the (admittedly lax) scholarship of Edmund Gosse’s Clark lectures at Cambridge in 1886. A ‘mass of error and inaccuracy’, he called it. Collins’ hatchet was razor-edged, delicately aimed and transparently a shriek of (egotistic) scholarly pain:

  That such a book as this should have been permitted to go forth into the world with the imprimatur of the University of Cambridge, affords matter for very grave reflection. But it is a confirmation of what we have long suspected. It is one more proof that those rapid and reckless innovations, which have during the last few years completely changed the faces of our Universities, have not been made with impunity.

  Gosse’s reputation never recovered. On 12 September 1908, Collins’ body was found in a dyke at Oulton Broad in Suffolk, with a bottle of sedatives nearby. Despite the court’s verdict of accidental death, suicide seems more likely.

  13 September

  On reaching its 1,998th performance, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap becomes Britain’s longest-running straight play

  1957 It’s amazing to think that the record set way back in 1957 should have been surpassed by another 58 years and still counting; that both the Queen and the play should have celebrated their silver jubilees together, and that the production is still running in 2010 – well into the 21st century. By now, of course, it has set many more records: it is now the longest-runn
ing show of any kind in the universe, having gone through many changes of cast, a shift of venue (from The Ambassadors to St Martin’s, where it has played since 1974), and of course props and stage furniture – though not design. Only an old armchair and a clock on the wall date from the first production.

  Not that the critics were all that excited about the play when it opened. Quoting Tallulah Bankhead that ‘there is less to it than meets the eye’, the Guardian objected that: ‘Coincidence is stretched unreasonably to assemble in one place a group of characters, each of whom may reasonably be suspected of murder in series.’ Still, the critic liked Richard Attenborough’s performance as Detective Sergeant Trotter, ‘an unconventional police sergeant on skis’, and thought ‘the whole thing whizzes along as though driven by some real dramatic force’.

  It all started out as a 30-minute radio play broadcast in 1947. The scene is a country hotel in which a number of people are stranded by a snow storm. Christie’s adaptation for the stage allowed her more time to develop character and prolong suspense. All the characters have a secret, though only one of them a murderous one. There’s a twist in the ending – two, actually – which the audience are asked to swear they won’t divulge. Since the play has now been seen by well over ten million people in more than 40 countries, it’s not clear how much of the world’s population still doesn’t know the secret.

  So how to account for the play’s evergreenery? Clever plotting, certainly, along with deft portrayal of character. A scenario, the country house murder mystery, so timeless that it’s still being used, or – in the case of Robert Altman’s superb film, Gosford Park (2001) – deconstructed. But by now it’s probably simply the fact that its longevity has turned the play into a phenomenon, a station on the tourist itinerary. In other words, The Mousetrap is famous for being famous.

  14 September

  After speculating on ring-ousel migration, Gilbert White comes down on the side of local natural history

  1770 ‘From whence, then, do our ring-ousels migrate so regularly every September, and make their appearance again, as if in their return, every April?’ he wrote to his friend Thomas Pennant, Fellow of the Royal Society. ‘They are more early this year than common, for some were seen at the usual hill on the fourth of this month.’

  This combination of curiosity and close observation typifies Gilbert White’s method. While Captain James Cook was off collecting exotic specimens in the South Seas, this country clergyman in the Hampshire village of Selborne studied what went on around him through the seasons, making careful notes on plants, birds, bees – even earthworms, which he properly valued for their effect on the soil.

  His letters to Pennant, and another Academician, Daines Barrington, were published as The Natural History of Selborne in 1788. Admired by writers as distant as Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, the book has gone through 200 editions and translations, and has never been out of print.

  In the same letter he informs Pennant that he had just got hold of a copy of Giovanni Scopoli’s recent work on natural history, in which ‘he advances some false facts’, such as that ‘the hirundo urbica … pullos extra nidum non nutrit’ (‘the house martin doesn’t feed its chicks outside the nest’). This White ‘knew to be wrong’ because he had seen them feeding their young on the wing, but ‘the feat is done in so quick a manner as not to be perceptible to indifferent observers’.

  To prevent this sort of careless scrutiny, White urged what he called ‘parochial history’, in which observers stick to what they know and can verify, for (as he went on to say in this letter):

  [A]s no man can alone investigate all the works of nature, these partial writers may, each in their department, be more accurate in their discoveries, and freer from errors, than more general writers; and so by degrees may pave the way to an universal correct natural history.

  The local is all very well, but it would be hard to sustain if it weren’t for that often overlooked infrastructure of Romantic nature writing, the Systema Naturae (1735) of Carl Linnaeus. White, who had tried and failed to find a permanent position at Oxford, knew that Linnaeus’ universal system of binary classification into family and species (like ‘hirundo urbica’) would still connect his ‘parochial’ observations to the rest of the world. Like his admirer Henry David Thoreau over half a century after him, who also felt himself to be on the cultural margins, Gilbert White had found in Linnaeus a language for the universal oversoul.

  15 September

  Stephen King is honoured, but not respected

  2003 The clash between low- and highbrow is one of the never-ending, and more entertaining, literary wars. One side, typically, has the money; the other side the prestige.

  Few authors have had more money than Stephen King. In 2003 the author of Carrie, The Shining, and It made #14 on the Forbes wealthiest celebrity list, with an estimated income of $50 million-plus. Only novelist Michael Crichton ranked higher among writers. And Crichton was, by contrast with King, a child of privilege. He had written best-selling novels while a Dean’s List medical student at Harvard.

  Stevie King had had no such advantages and always believed that he was denied the respect he deserved. Unlike Crichton, he had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, from mobile home to mansion.

  It rankled. Even in the years of his triumph. On 15 September 2003 the National Book Foundation announced that King would be the recipient of ‘lifetime award’. In his acceptance speech at the public ceremony on 19 November that year, King recalled how he and his wife Tabitha lived in a trailer …

  … and she made a writing space for me in the tiny laundry room with a desk and her Olivetti portable between the washer and dryer … When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single-spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on.

  The main thrust of his November speech was Carrie-style payback. They hadn’t emptied a bucket of pig’s blood over his head, but the literary establishment was guilty of ‘tokenism’ – treating him like a house negro with their lifetime award. It was an awkward occasion.

  Nonetheless, the literary establishment declined to be cowed by some hack who had struck it rich with a reading public even less cultivated than himself. Harold Bloom, who is to literary criticism what Einstein was to physics, declared that the NBA’s decision to give an award to King was:

  … another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.

  The war goes on.

  16 September

  The Great Preston Lockout

  1853 There are few topics on which one can find Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, and Mrs Gaskell engaged in discussing the same event. The Great Preston Lockout was one.

  For years, workers in the (immensely profitable) cotton mills of Lancashire had agitated and unionised for higher wages: ‘ten percent’ was the slogan. The masters resisted and, on 16 September 1853 – in the face of a threatened walkout by the labour force, or ‘operatives’ as Victorians called them – closed the factory doors. The intention was to starve their workforce into docile submission. As many as 20,000 workers were involved. Karl Marx was quick to perceive the episode as potentially revolutionary, following a street riot in late October. In the York Daily Tribune, 1 November 1853, he declared:

  While the first cannon bullets have been exchanged in the war of the Russians against Europe, the first blood has been spilt in the war now raging in the manufacturing districts, of capital against labor.

  The days of the ‘millocrats’ were, Marx believed, numbered (ironically his own income came, substantially, in the form of handouts from the millocrat Engels). ‘Our St Petersburg is at Preston!’ was the communists’ rallying cry.

  Dickens was less sure. Now the proprietor of a w
eekly newspaper, Household Words, he made a personal trip to Preston in early February 1854 and wrote an article, ‘On Strike’, based on what he saw there. Declaring himself a friend to both employers and employees, Dickens reserved his criticism for the trade union organisers – particularly the rabble-rouser, ‘Gruffshaw’, from London (in historical fact the relatively unradical George Cowell, further satirised as ‘Slackbridge’ in Hard Times). Dickens’ conclusion was that:

  This strike and lock-out is a deplorable calamity. In its waste of time, in its waste of a great people’s energy, in its waste of wages, in its waste of wealth that seeks to be employed, in its encroachment on the means of many thousands who are labouring from day to day it is a great national affliction.

  The first-hand experience, and the long continuation of the dispute, inspired Dickens to write his only novel set outside London, Hard Times, serialised in Household Words from April to August 1854. In the novel, Dickens moved round to a more direct attack on the masters – in the form of the odious hypocrite Bounderby. But his conclusion is that of the saintly mill-worker, Stephen Blackpool: ‘A muddle! Aw a muddle!’

  The union funds were less ample than those of the masters, who recruited ‘knobsticks’ (i.e. scabs) from Ireland to break the Lancashire workers’ resolve. ‘Hands’ began to trickle back in spring 1854 and on May Day, at a rally of 10,000 men, it was decided to sanction a return to work.

  Dickens was still exercised by the upheaval, and he commissioned an after-the-event serial from the Lancashire novelist Mrs Gaskell, North and South, serialised in Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855. In her novel, Gaskell is at pains to be scrupulously fair to the mill-owners (whom she had earlier criticised in Mary Barton). Margaret Hale is transplanted from a comfortable life in Hampshire to ‘Milton-Northern’ (i.e. Manchester) when her clergyman father’s ‘doubts’ force him to leave the Anglican Church. Initially appalled, Margaret is gradually won over by the rough northern community and its tough (but moral) textile workers. Her southern softness tempers the hardness of the factory-owner Thornton and helps bring about an acceptable end to a savage strike.