Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Marx, equally hopefully, foresaw less happy endings.

  17 September

  Maggie Joy Blunt follows a woman hoarding salt

  1946 If the Mass Observation archive is a famous resource for British social history, its value as a repository of vernacular literature is less celebrated than it ought to be. From 1937 Mass Observation surveyed ordinary people’s feelings about what was going on around them. Its founders were not sociologists, but an eclectic mix of the poet Charles Madge, the documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings, and the polymath Tom Harrisson, newly returned from studying cannibals in the New Hebrides, who decided it was time for ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. Others involved included the literary critic William Empson, poet and critic Kathleen Raine, and the Picture Post photographer Humphrey Spender, brother of the poet.

  The survey’s managers started out a bit like the American Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July), paying journalists, civil servants and the like to note down conversations overheard in pubs and workplaces. Later they realised they could get a broader response for less money by recruiting volunteers to answer questionnaires or just keep diaries to note down their feelings and opinions about day-by-day occurrences.

  The returns were especially illuminating for the immediate postwar period, which was supposed to bring peace and prosperity, instead of austerity, the fear of nuclear war, a balance of payments crisis, the continuation of domestic rationing, and a shortage of coal during the coldest winter on record, 1946–47. Where were those sunny uplands promised by Winston Churchill? Who won the bloody war, anyway? The vernacular voices of Mass Observation offered a sobering counter-balance to the official optimism about a great technological future in a new Elizabethan age.

  Maggie Joy Blunt was a freelance writer and publicity officer in a metal factory living near Slough. On this day she noticed:

  … a woman [going] from shop to shop in the village today. She was buying cooking salt. One block from the greengrocer which she concealed in her basket and then another from the grocer. Expect she is salting beans.

  Not that salt was rationed. The woman wasn’t on the fiddle; she was just hoarding. But with shortages still a public issue, Maggie couldn’t help noticing – and yet a kind of communal feeling for a fellow victim prevented her judging:

  I wonder how many of us do this sort of scrounging for a quantity of something, with and without feelings of guilt? I do it for cigarettes and do have a twinge of conscience.1

  1 Simon Garfield, ed., Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain, London: Ebury Press, 2005, p. 275.

  18 September

  Edie Rutherford supports the communist squatters

  1946 The day after Maggie Joy Blunt noticed the salt hoarder (see 17 September), a much more serious post-war shortage caught the attention of the Mass Observation diarists. This time it was housing. With so many of the country’s houses destroyed by bombing, and over three million servicemen being demobbed in the middle of a baby boom, there just weren’t enough houses to go round – at any price.

  The great 1946 summer squat began in empty Nissen huts on abandoned army camps, a movement that quickly spread across the country. The government responded leniently, even offering to reconnect gas and electricity, providing the squatters would register as council tenants. Then in September some communist councillors led an occupation of five blocks of luxury apartments in Kensington, originally requisitioned for the war effort and not yet re-let. To this invasion of private property the government reacted furiously, blockading the buildings, arresting the five (elected) councillors and charging them with ‘conspiracy to trespass’. These events were widely reported, picked up by papers even in Australia and the US.

  But the public backed the squatters. On this day Edie Rutherford, a South African-born housewife living in Sheffield, noted in her diary kept for Mass Observation:

  How cautiously Bow Street [Magistrates’ Court] has dealt with the Communist squatters today. I should jolly well think so. Public opinion does count for something, and not all the populace are against the squatters. It is mostly the haves who are. The disclosure at court by the woman who had to take her child to hospital fifty times for rat bite was more than enough for everyone I should think.

  Maggie Joy Blunt, while sceptical of their motives, could still approve of the communists’ campaign:

  I think the Communists were right, whatever their ulterior motives may have been, to draw attention to the shocking housing conditions that many of the flat-squatters have had to put up with. Rat bites! Just think of it. It seems to me scandalous that a Labour Government couldn’t have done better for their own people in this last year.1

  Housing minister Nye Bevan was also busy getting the NHS up and running – and this was just over a year after Labour won its landslide general election – so maybe it was a bit early to blame the government for letting down its supporters. Still, these diaries testify to a humane common judgement that can rise above prejudices of class or politics.

  1 Simon Garfield, ed., Our Hidden Lives: The Remarkable Diaries of Post-War Britain, London: Ebury Press, 2005, pp. 275–6.

  19 September

  Amiri Baraka is de-laureated

  2001 Eight days after 9/11, Amiri Baraka (the African-American writer formerly known as Leroi Jones) appeared at a poetry festival in Stanhope, New Jersey. Baraka had been appointed the poet laureate of his native New Jersey a couple of years before and had penned, in some haste, a poem to read aloud at Stanhope on the recent outrage in Manhattan. It was entitled, quizzically, ‘Somebody Blew Up America?’ His outrage, it was clear, was not directed at Al Qaida, or any other US-hating terrorists. It was equally clear, from a central stanza, who the ‘somebody’ in the title was:

  Who knew the World Trade Center

  was gonna get bombed

  Who told 4,000 Israeli workers

  at the Twin Towers

  To stay home that day

  Why did Sharon stay away?

  There was some angry response and protest. But so distracted were the months after 9/11 that no great publicity was given to the laureate’s allegation that Zionists had been privy to the imminent destruction of the Twin Towers. Finally, in July 2002, the Jewish Anti Defamation League complained. They would, they threatened, launch a law suit against Amiri Baraka for inciting ‘global anti-Semitism’.

  Pressure was put on Baraka to resign and save the NJ authorities public embarrassment. He posted on his website a defiant refusal:

  I WILL NOT ‘APOLOGIZE’, I WILL NOT ‘RESIGN!’

  The recent dishonest, consciously distorted and insulting non-interpretation of my poem, ‘Somebody Blew up America’ [sic] by the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League, is fundamentally an attempt to defame me. And with that, an attempt to repress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere. This trashy propaganda is characteristic of right-wing zealots who are interested only in slander and character assassination of those whose views or philosophies differ from or are in contradiction to theirs. First, the poem’s underlying theme focuses on how Black Americans have suffered from domestic terrorism since being kidnapped into US chattel slavery, e.g., by Slave Owners, US & State Laws, Klan, Skin Heads, Domestic Nazis, Lynching, denial of rights, national oppression, racism, character assassination, historically, and at this very minute throughout the US.

  The governor of New Jersey was not inclined to support his state’s appointed poet. But legal advice suggested that First Amendment Rights might cover Baraka’s poem, and he could have grounds, if dismissed, for a lawsuit of his own. Hemlock was not available.

  Finally a way through was found. The New Jersey State Assembly voted 69 to 2 on 7 July 2002 to abolish the post of poet laureate. In the language of the business world, Baraka was ‘let go’. In the annals of literature he is the only poet laureate to have been de-laureated.

  20 September

  Born: the midwife of the modern American novel

  1884 Maxwell Perkins
– or Max to everyone who knew him – who worked at the august publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons from 1910 until his death in 1947, was one of those editors who exist today only in the dreams of aspiring authors. He actually went out looking for unknown writers, and when he found them, he made up his own mind about their work, brought it on and nurtured it. When he joined the firm, Scribner’s was a distinguished, if somewhat staid publishing house. Its authors included Edith Wharton, then in mid-career, and Henry James, his major fiction behind him, now into his autobiography.

  On the lookout for younger writers, Perkins came across the 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been trying, and failing, to interest publishers in a blushful Bildungsroman about doomed youth that he called The Romantic Egoist. Perkins took it on, suggested radical revisions and a new title (never Fitzgerald’s strong point – see 7 November), and forced it through his colleagues’ resistance. This Side of Paradise came out in March 1920, selling out its first print run of 3,000 copies in three days. The next day Scott felt enough confidence in his future to marry his sweetheart Zelda Sayre. By the end of 1921 the novel had gone through twelve printings, selling nearly 50,000 copies.

  In other words, Perkins could pick them. Through Fitzgerald he met Ernest Hemingway, snaffling up his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and publishing it in 1926. Together with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) it set the themes and (more important) the tone of a literary decade. Among other authors Perkins discovered or got into print were Erskine Caldwell, James Jones, J.P. Marquand and Alan Paton.

  But he wasn’t just an astute talent scout. Once he got them on board, Perkins would cosset his authors like a broody hen, coping with their drunkenness and self-doubt, forever encouraging them, even lending them money from time to time. When they panicked about their prose, he would say: ‘Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it.’

  In the editorial process itself he wasn’t very hot on the details, but he was a genius when it came to the larger structure. After a long struggle he persuaded Thomas Wolfe to cut 66,000 words (not 90,000, as is commonly reported) from O Lost, another disastrously titled first novel that no one else wanted to publish, to turn it into Look Homeward Angel (1929), still a healthy first-born weighing in at 233,000 words on 626 pages.

  21 September

  Publius Vergilius Maro dies, his Aeneid not quite finished

  19 BC If its homeland is a tribe’s identity, how devastating it must be to lose one, and how like rebirth to find (found) another. That’s the plot of Vergil’s epic. In twelve books, each of around 800 hexameter lines, the Aeneid tells the story of how a party of Trojans escapes the Greeks’ destruction of their city and wanders the Mediterranean for six years until fetching up, first in Carthage, then on the coast of Latium to establish a new home. Some of those lines are curtailed, as though awaiting their endings, and the whole comes to an abrupt end – suggesting that Vergil didn’t quite finish his masterpiece.

  Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey on which it draws, the Aeneid is written to a nationalist agenda, explicitly to provide a myth for the founding of Rome – and specifically the empire under the Julio- Claudian dynasty. Buttressing the myth is the theme of continuity and rebirth: the religious beliefs and moral virtues of the archaic age refreshed in the vigour of the Latin peoples.

  To reinforce this theme, Vergil adapts a device used in the Odyssey. Exactly in the middle of both epics, the heroes visit the underworld for advice on how to get home. While Odysseus wants to get back to his literal home, Aeneas needs to find out where his tribal identity will finally be ‘at home’.

  The shade of his father, Anchises, answers his question with a prophecy detailing the Trojans’ founding of Rome, from Romulus through the age of kings, the Republic, the defeat of Carthage and Gaul, right down to the establishment of the empire under Caesar Augustus.

  Aeneas and his followers marvel at such news, but the prophecy device exerted a powerfully authenticating effect on Vergil’s contemporary readers, who experienced the poem’s fictional action as verifiable history. They were in the position of the gods, knowing as fact what the poem’s characters can only glimpse as improbable guesses about the future.

  In The Divine Comedy, Vergil takes Anchises’ place as Dante’s guide to the underworld. The Aeneid has been the same to European and American foundation stories as a whole.

  22 September

  Death of the worthiest knight that ever lived

  1586 Sir Philip Sidney lives in the annals of English literature as the author of what is often taken to be the first novel in the language (Arcadia), the author of the first serious literary-critical treatise in the language (An Apology for Poetry), and the author of the first notable sonnet sequence in the language (Astrophil and Stella).

  Sidney was also one of Queen Elizabeth’s favoured courtiers and a soldier. In 1586 she appointed him governor of Flushing in the Netherlands – a region where England was then in conflict with the other major imperial power of the age, Spain.

  In a skirmish with the Spanish near Zutphen on 22 September 1586, Sidney was wounded in the upper leg by a musket ball (he had, recklessly, left off his ‘cuisses’, or thigh protectors). Three weeks later he died of the wound (or, more precisely, the poor medical treatment he received), aged only 32.

  His body was brought back to London and transported in honour through the streets. Reportedly, citizens shouted: ‘Farewell, the worthiest knight that lived.’ Sidney’s worthiness is immortalised by the account given of the poet-warrior’s nobility by his friend (and fellow poet) Fulke Greville, as he was being carried away with his fatal wound from the field of battle at Zutphen:

  [P]assing along by the rest of the Army … and being thirstie with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor Souldier carryed along, who had eaten his last at the same Feast, gastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, Thy necessity is greater than mine.

  Greville’s anecdote is usually believed to be invented, although in character. It is less often recorded that the Spanish won at Zutphen and in the larger war in which it featured.

  23 September

  ‘An important Jew dies in exile’

  1939 Sigmund Freud died in exile in Hampstead, England, where he had lived after fleeing Vienna the previous year. War had been declared on his persecutor, Nazi Germany, a fortnight earlier. Freud did not wait to see the outcome. He doubtless feared the worst. Suffering from terminal cancer (brought on by his habitual cigar), he prevailed on a doctor friend, Max Schur, to overdose him with morphine. ‘It is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more’, he stoically explained.

  There were many obituaries, none finer than that from W.H. Auden, in his poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’. Over the 28 verses Auden does not over-praise Freud, but shrewdly sees him as less a psychotherapist than a prophet who has changed humanity’s vision of itself for, at least, a generation:

  for one who’d lived among enemies so long:

  if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

  to us he is no more a person

  now but a whole climate of opinion.

  Auden had been introduced to Freud early in life by his doctor father. At university, he spread the Freudian gospel to acolytes such as Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood – the poet, he insisted, must be ‘clinical’. In 2001 a collection of unpublished (and later deemed unpublishable by the poet) ‘case poems’ came to light. They were written in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Auden on Freudian themes.

  It was in his visits to his friends Isherwood and Spender in Weimar Berlin that Auden came into closest contact with Freudianism, via the teachings of Homer Lane, to whom he was introduced by John Layard. Auden was a convert – although a sceptical one. After Layard’s bungled suicide attempt, Auden referred to
him as ‘loony Layard’ (Freud gets away with a mere ‘absurd’). Less benevolent than Max Schur, when Layard – who had shot himself in the mouth – asked Wystan to ‘finish him off’, Auden refused, saying: ‘I’m terribly sorry, I know you want this, but I can’t do it, because I might be hanged if I did.’

  Ten years later, when he wrote his elegy for Freud, Auden was himself a refugee. He and Isherwood had sailed for the USA, fearing the outbreak of war in Europe, in January 1939. He died in 1973, after a peripatetic life, in Freud’s Vienna, alone in a hotel room.

  24 September

  60 Minutes gets its first showing on CBS television

  1968 Created by veteran CBS producer Don Hewitt, who had directed Edward R. Murrow’s See it Now show – not to mention the debates between presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon – 60 Minutes (actually 42 minutes without the adverts) has offered high-quality investigative reporting in the format of a television news magazine for 42 years. It’s the longest-running prime time programme still in production in the United States.

  Its popularity has been staggering for a news review in prime time. Always in the top twenty, it actually topped out the Neilson audience measurement ratings in 1976. It has won getting on for 80 Emmy awards, swung major policy decisions, even got into the movies, when the network’s struggle with the tobacco industry was dramatised in The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999).