Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Inevitably in that long run there have been pratfalls. One very embarrassing one also says a lot about what’s been happening to the American media recently. On 6 September 2004, Dan Rather, the seasoned anchor man for the CBS Evening News, did a 60 Minutes piece alleging that President George W. Bush had gone absent without leave from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War of the 1970s. This was a serious charge, right in the middle of a presidential election, and the liberals loved it. Bush was already under fire for using family influence to get himself posted to the National Guard as a safe alternative to combat in Vietnam. But Rather seemed to seal the accusation by showing a series of letters and memos from Bush’s National Guard commander ‘grounding’ him – that is, withdrawing his flight status (and extra pay) – for failure to report for a physical examination, and for other absences from duty.

  Within hours, bloggers began to post doubts about the documents shown on 60 Minutes. The letterheads and signature blocks were wrong. Above all, the body type of the letters and memos themselves could never have been produced in the early 1970s, when hard-type typewriters printed letters all of the same width, and could not ‘kern’, or fold letters like ‘f’ and ‘l’ into one another. The documents shown on 60 Minutes all had letter spaces of variable widths, with those kerned where appropriate. They had been produced on a word-processor, using Microsoft Word with default settings, some 30 years after their purported dates.

  After some huffing and puffing, CBS admitted its mistake. Rather apologised too, then lost his job. 60 Minutes soldiered on, and ultimately recovered. But the wider lesson was that a new force had entered the world of news broadcasting. Following the tsunami disaster later that year, a significant number of Americans turned to blogs for breaking news. Increasingly, the internet began to look like the news medium of choice for the new millennium.

  25 September

  Queen Victoria delays her diamond jubilee. Rudyard Kipling delays publication of his celebratory poem

  1896 On this day Victoria outlasted George III as the longest-reigning monarch in English history. A diamond jubilee was in prospect. It was held on 22 September 1897, to commemorate the queen’s coronation some 60 years earlier (the precise date of that event was 28 June 1837). The whole British empire, then at its furthest reach across the globe, was instructed to rejoice, and given a public holiday for the occasion. There was a Naval Review and a regal procession through London, to cheering crowds, the queen escorted by soldiers from all her many domains. Royalty flooded in from those quarters of the globe not already under Victoria’s dominion.

  Shortly after ten o’clock, with a loyal Indian servant in close attendance, the queen and empress descended the stairs at Buckingham Palace and pressed an electric button that (courtesy of Associated Press) flashed across the world the message: ‘From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them.’

  The poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, composed a celebratory verse. His first idea was an early version of the poem later known as ‘The White Man’s Burden’. This, however, was held back for two years and dedicated to America, then (in 1899) embroiled in its bloody campaign of suppression in the Philippine Islands. Its theme (that the US must now assume the weary burden of racial superiority and the bloodletting that goes with it) would not have been entirely suitable for the earlier event:

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Send forth the best ye breed—

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

  To wait in heavy harness,

  On fluttered folk and wild—

  Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half-devil and half-child

  Kipling offered as his jubilee tribute instead the poem ‘Recessional’ (dated 22 June 1897). It too expresses a sombre conviction that the high-point of imperial greatness, like all the greatnesses before it, has passed.

  Far-called our navies melt away—

  On dune and headland sinks the fire—

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget – lest we forget!

  Kipling’s gloom rings truer than the cheers in Pall Mall that June, with the Boer War looming. The inexorable shrinkage of the British empire would continue for the next 60 years until the last winds of change, in the 1950s, blew it away for ever.

  26 September

  Stage censorship finally ends in Britain

  1968 Oppression of the stage in Britain has almost as long a history as Britain itself. The church has traditionally conceived theatrical performance as more dangerous than literature. Audiences (unlike solitary readers) are ‘crowds’ and crowds easily become rebellious mobs.

  The Puritans, after their victory in the Civil War, put down all public drama as work of the devil. Even after the Restoration, Charles II (an inveterate lover of the theatre and its orange girls) extended ‘Patents’ (i.e. licences) to only two theatres: Sir Thomas Killigrew’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and Sir William Davenant’s Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Unroyal theatres did not qualify.

  In the 18th century, licensing of the national theatre came officially into the domain of the Lord Chamberlain, a dignitary in the royal household charged with matters of protocol, civil order and state occasions. The Chamberlain delegated theatrical matters to his deputy – ‘the examiner of plays’. That such an office existed chilled creativity. Early plays to be banned were Gustavus Vasa (1739) by Henry Brooke, and Edward and Eleonora (1739) by James Thomson – both on grounds of their political content – innocuous though it was. For theatre managers and proprietors it was enough, as with the Inquisition, to ‘show the instruments’. Self-censorship did the Lord Chamberlain’s work for him.

  Censorship was refined by the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843. As ‘licenser’ of plays, and theatres, the Lord Chamberlain now required every script to be physically deposited with him, scrutinised, corrected (if necessary) and cleared before performance.

  As the 19th century progressed – particularly with the arrival of ‘Ibsenism’ – friction rose. It reached a head in 1894 when the Lord Chamberlain declined to license (even with modifications) George Bernard Shaw’s third play, Mrs Warren’s Profession.

  In this drama of ideas, Shaw wittily portrayed prostitution and brothel-keeping (neither word features in the text) as ‘rational’ alternatives to marriage that enabled women to make economic use of their sexuality. Women, Shaw wrote, were driven to the streets for the same reason that prize-fighters were driven to the ring. The playwright was an admirer of pugilism (he conducted, later in life, an interesting correspondence with the world heavyweight champion – and intellectual – Gene Tunney).

  In Shaw’s play the young heroine, Viv Warren, a Girton Girl, has grown up in ignorance of her mother’s ‘profession’. After the initial shock, she disowns the family, discards her lover, and becomes a wholly independent woman. The last image the audience has of her is methodically doing her accounts.

  The ‘King’s Reader’ (as Shaw called him) argued that the play offended by not depicting the ‘loathsomeness’ of prostitution. Shaw assumed that his more serious offence was failing to render the subject at all ‘aphrodisiac’. Perversely, if Mrs Warren’s Profession had been either more horrific or more erotic it would have been more presentable. It was the naked analysis (sex is as saleable a commodity as cabbage) that was objectionable.

  Shaw’s larger contention (as in his first play, Widowers’ Houses) was that the British middle classes all live on immoral earnings – the more immoral since they blind themselves to the fact.

  After the ban, Shaw promptly published Mrs Warren’s Profession (with a lengthy introduction and voluminous stage directions) as one of his ‘Plays Unpleasant’. The play was eventually staged on 5 January 1902, at London’s New Lyric Club. Such ‘closed’ events, with member-only audiences, were immune from the Lord Chamberlain’
s authority.

  It was a victory of sorts. But Shaw, the greatest British playwright of the 20th century, would be destined to work out his half-century career under the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship: duelling all the way.

  Mrs Warren’s Profession was finally permitted public performance on 27 July 1925, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Birmingham. Shaw surmised that the authorities had been shamed into letting it through by their own exploitation of women’s labour in factories during the First World War. He was not triumphant. The 1925 performance was, he felt, too late. Mrs Warren’s Profession was now historically irrelevant.

  The play had a similarly fraught passage to acceptability in the US. On 27 October 1905 its American premiere in New Haven, Connecticut (one of the routine preludes to Broadway production) was shut down by the local mayor after its first night. The same thing happened three days later when the play opened in New York. The whole cast, crew and management of the Garrick Theater were charged with ‘offences against public decency’. It was not until 9 March 1907 that Mrs Warren’s Profession was permitted unhindered public performance.

  The club loophole was increasingly used as the 20th century progressed, and British drama chafed under the nonsense of state control. The play that is credited with finally abolishing ‘royal’ censorship of the stage was Edward Bond’s Saved, featuring as it did the stoning to death of a baby on stage. The Lord Chamberlain banned public performance. The Royal Court (the theatre that had pioneered ‘new’ British drama) promptly reconfigured itself as a club and staged a performance on 3 November 1965. The play provoked furious discussion in the press and media. Following Roy Jenkins’ Obscene Publications Act five years earlier (and the ground-breaking Lady Chatterley acquittal), the interference on the creative arts of Britain by this ermined flunkey appeared absurd. The Lord Chamberlain’s power of censorship was abolished by the Theatres Act, which came into force on 26 September 1968.

  Interestingly, however, the act retained a clause requiring that every play, publicly performed in the UK, should have its pre-production script deposited at the British Library. This archive survives as the shadow of centuries-long censorship of the stage.

  27 September

  Midwich survives

  1957 It was Brian Aldiss who coined the term ‘cosy catastrophe’, specifically for the novels of his fellow science-fiction practitioner, John Wyndham (one of the pen names of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris). No catastrophe is cosier than that depicted in Wyndham’s novel, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

  The action is set in Miss Marples-land. The fictional Midwich is located in fictional Winshire – ‘an ordinary little village where nothing ever happened’. It has a Norman church, some 60 houses, a pub called the Scythe and Stone, and an aura of time-in, time-out unchangeability.

  Something, however, does happen. On 26 September (in an unspecified 1950s year) two Midwich residents, Richard Gayford and his wife, spend the night in London, celebrating his birthday. On their return on the 27th, they discover that for 24 hours, the village has been sealed off under an invisible and wholly impenetrable bubble. The authorities are impotent and have no explanation. The bubble mysteriously lifts and life returns to normal – as the village fondly but mistakenly thinks.

  Some months after the ‘Dayout’, as it is called, every one of the 65 or so fertile women in Midwich – including young maids and middle-aged spinsters – find themselves with child. It emerges that they have been impregnated by aliens – xenogenesis.

  Nine months to the day, a crop of clone-like, golden-eyed Wunderkinder are born. The children have extra-human powers, telepathic communication among themselves, and mature at a terrifyingly precocious rate. It becomes clear that they have no great love for their hosts – any more than does the nestling cuckoo for any young birds alongside it. Anyone who crosses the Midwich children dies.

  Other nests of these ominous children have implanted themselves in various parts of the world. The Russians ruthlessly nuke theirs. Midwich requires a more humanely English genocide. Gordon Zellaby, a man of great learning and a terminal cardiac condition, has befriended (insofar as it is possible) the Midwich cuckoos. He straps explosive to himself and, while discussing classical history, blows them, and himself, to smithereens. The world (more specifically rural England) is saved. For now.

  Zellaby leaves a bleak farewell note for his wife:

  [W]e have lived so long in a garden that we have all but forgotten the commonplaces of survival. It was said: Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more [‘If you are in Rome, live in the Roman way’], and quite sensibly, too. But it is a more fundamental expression of the same sentiment to say: If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

  Uncosiness (Zellaby’s bomb) is the only key to survival.

  It is tempting to tie Wyndham’s novel, and his other catastrophic scenarios (The Kraken Wakes, The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids), with the 1950s ‘Age of Anxiety’ when nuclear destruction was expected, with only four minutes’ warning, from the skies at any moment. The nervousness of the decade is similarly caught in Nigel Kneale’s 1953 TV series, The Quatermass Experiment – which may well have influenced Wyndham.

  The Midwich Cuckoos has itself been adapted for TV and has been twice filmed (in 1960 and 1995) under the fatuously gothic title, Village of the Damned.

  28 September

  Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo lands near what is now San Diego, to become the first European to set foot in California

  1542 As it would prove so often in the future – to the Forty-Niners looking for gold, the Okies for jobs, and electronics engineers for cutting-edge opportunities in Silicon Valley – people imagined California as their promised land before they experienced its actuality. In fact, California had existed in literature for some time before it was discovered – in Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián) by the 15th-century Spanish author of Amadís de Gaula, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo:

  [A] la diestra mano de las Indias existe una isla llamada California muy cerca de un costado del Paraíso Terrenal; y estaba poblada por mujeres negras … de bellos y robustos cuerpos, fogoso valor y gran fuerza.… Sus armas eran todas de oro … porque en toda la isla no había otro metal que el oro.1

  At almost the same time as Las Sergas appeared, Columbus was entering into the diary of his first voyage in 1492 another story – this one told by the natives – of an island inhabited by women. Just 32 years later, the conquistador Hernán Cortés reported to the king of Spain that one of his captains had heard yet another tale of a paradisal island ‘rich in gold and pearls’, inhabited only by women.

  Another of Cortés’ captains, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, fought as the head of a crossbow detachment in the conquest of Mexico, before settling in what is now Guatemala. Brought up as a shipwright, he was unusual among explorers in being able to build his own ships. He was also a canny adventurer and a hard employer, using the Indians virtually as slaves to carry supplies to his Guatemalan gold mine, and pitch from the mountains to waterproof his ships.

  In 1542 Cabrillo was charged by Pedro de Alvara, then Captain General of Guatemala, to explore the west coast of what is now the United States, not least to settle those old rumours of golden islands and dusky beauties. Arriving at Ensenada, Baja California on 17 September 1542, they sailed north until they entered San Diego Bay on the 28th, which Cabrillo named San Miguel and described as ‘a closed and very good harbour’, landing at Ballast Point and claiming the area for Spain. They then coasted what is now California as far north as the Russian River in present-day Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, before coming back south. Cabrillo died of infection following a leg wound sustained while scrambling ashore at Catalina Island, off Los Angeles.

  But no Amazons, alas – and no gold either; it would take a foreman working a watermill for a German-Swiss immigrant in 1848 to start up the California Gold Rush.

  1 ‘To the right of the Indies there is an island called
California, very close to the coast of the earthly paradise; and it was inhabited by black women … with strong, beautiful bodies, fiercely brave and very strong.… Their armaments were made completely of gold … because in all the island there was no metal other than gold.’

  29 September

  The Greek fleet swamps the Persians in the Battle of Salamis; Aeschylus writes it up

  480 BC The Greeks were up against it. The Athenians had evacuated their city for the island of Salamis off the coast of Attica, close enough to watch in agony and fury as the invading Persians sacked their city, setting fire to the sacred temples on the Acropolis. Offshore, the Persian fleet threatened with 700 or 800 triremes and support vessels. Within the straits between the island and the mainland some 360 allied Greek warships lay waiting.

  But only for a while. Some of the allies were growing edgy, thinking they had better get their ships back to defend their own city states. Themistocles, the senior tactician of the battle, hit upon a way of turning this hazard into an advantage. If he could tip off Xerxes, the Persian commander, that certain of the Greek triremes were about to escape, he could lure the Persians into the straits, where limited room to manoeuvre would cancel their superior numbers. Sure enough, the Persians swallowed the bait, rowing all night to reach and then patrol the southern exit to the straits, leaving them exhausted the next morning.

  As the Persians entered from the south, thinking to pursue some allied ships that appeared to be fleeing the scene, the main body of Greek triremes fell on their flank from the west, using their heavy rams to stove in the ships’ sides, then sending their marines to board and fight hand-to-hand. In the confusion more than 200 Persian ships ran aground, or into each other, or turned turtle and sank. The Greek allies lost fewer than 30. The Persians retreated, taking their occupying army with them. Historians still consider Salamis to have been the most important sea battle ever.