Taking part in the battle was Aeschylus, the Athenians’ greatest dramatist. It’s as though Shakespeare had fought in the Battle of Agincourt. Naturally the playwright wanted to use his experience, but there were two problems. First, he was a tragedian and this victory was anything but a tragedy for the Athenians. Second, the plots of tragedies were conventionally based on myths or legends, and this was near-contemporary history.
As for the second difficulty, he may have thought the sea battle so important – deciding as it did the fate of Greek, and especially Athenian, civilisation – as almost to have reached mythic significance. The solution to the first was to set the play in Persia, at the court of King Xerxes, where Salamis really was felt as a tragedy – though more in the modern newspaper-headline sense than the Aristotelian. As a result, The Persians (472 BC) was not packed with action; the climax (from the vantage point of its vast Greek audiences) was a long speech by a messenger reporting the battle to a shocked Queen Atossa, mother of Xerxes. It is one of the most powerful descriptive passages in all Greek drama, full of details like blood-bespattered shipwrecks and corpses rolled by the waves onto rocky shores. You could tell that Aeschylus had seen it for himself.
30 September
The first part of Little Women comes out – to instant and lasting acclaim
1868 Loved by every generation of women since its first appearance, Little Women has inspired – or spawned, according to your point of view – no fewer than fourteen movies from 1917 to 2001. The book spans exactly a year in the lives of the poor but genteel March girls, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as they make do with their mother in a large but ramshackle house in Massachusetts. Short of money ever since their father ‘lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend’, and now left behind while he’s away serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, the girls do their best to support their ‘Marmee’, while all engage in various charitable and caring works at home and in the neighbourhood.
Though based loosely on the author’s own childhood, it’s not the sort of book that Louisa May Alcott might have been expected to write. Her father and mother were part of that Concord, Massachusetts circle of Transcendentalists that included Emerson and Thoreau (see 23 July). They were feminists and anti-slavery activists who had welcomed the widow and daughters of the violent abolitionist John Brown into their home, and sheltered an escaped slave on his way to Canada.
Louisa was no less adventurous. At 30 she signed up as an army nurse in a chaotic Washington hospital. Some of her earliest writings were gritty sketches of her work among the Civil War wounded, offering vivid details of the men’s wounds, their words and their callous treatment by the surgeons (they can be seen at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/alcott/sketches/sketches.html). After that she wrote a series of sensationalist stories for Frank Leslie’s Magazine under the pseudonym of ‘A.M. Barnard’. ‘Dealing with masquerade, mesmerism, rebellion, desire, anger, revenge, and incest’, Elaine Showalter writes, ‘these thrillers allowed her to express the volcanic side of her personality.’1
In moving to write Little Women, did Alcott abandon frankness for sweetness and light? After all, this is a novel about adolescent girls in which there are no – not even coded – references to sexual maturation, and where love between the sexes is represented mainly by good fellowship. In exploiting the enormous popularity of Jane Eyre (first American edition, 1848) and America’s first bestseller, Susan Warner’s The Wide Wild World (1850), did Alcott sell her birthright to the market? Not necessarily. Showalter points out the thematic links between these popular works, with their isolated heroines who ultimately triumph through patience, and the rebellious Jo in Little Women, and her ambition – a clear reflection of her creator’s – to become an author. With the father erased and the military hospital (of which the author had first-hand experience) marginalised, ‘Alcott suppresses her own anger and ambition’ even as Jo masters her quick temper. But in volume two, Good Wives (1869), Jo achieves her ambition. She becomes the author of sensational stories for the Weekly Volcano. Maybe that’s why Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir so admired her example of aspiring womanhood.
1 Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, London: Virago Press, 2009, pp. 140, 142.
1 October
Wuthering Heights and the long journey of the four-letter word
1848 The least successful governess of the three novel-writing Brontë sisters (but arguably the greatest novelist), Emily was the most attached to the Yorkshire moors where she was brought up, and largely educated, in her father Patrick Brontë’s Haworth parsonage. It was, ironically, the bitter weather of her beloved moors that killed her. On 1 October she left Haworth to attend her wayward brother Branwell’s funeral service. Drink, drugs (laudanum), and moral dissipation had doomed him, the only son and the great hope of the family.
Branwell’s self-destruction is pictured in the downfall of Hindley, Heathcliff’s predecessor as master of Wuthering Heights. None of the owners of that ominous property, in the three generations covered by the novel, comes to a happy end. The curious inscription over the door, which no one can read, may plausibly be a curse.
Branwell died, as did all of his siblings, of pulmonary weakness, principally. He was buried on 28 September 1848 in Haworth churchyard. His father (who would outlive all his children) was too upset to officiate. Three days later, at the funeral service, Emily developed the chill that exacerbated her consumption and killed her, on 19 December. Six months later, her sister Anne joined her in the Haworth vault.
Brontë’s one complete novel had been published, the year before, by the most dubious publisher in London, Thomas Cautley Newby. Newby (who the same year did his best to ruin the early career of Anthony Trollope by his shoddy and dishonest practices) printed Wuthering Heights as a three-decker (by ‘Ellis Bell’) along with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (by ‘Acton Bell’). The reviews were few and indifferent. The general opinion was that Wuthering Heights was ‘coarse’. There was too much damning and blasting in Yorkshire for genteel metropolitan ears.
Charlotte Brontë, in a posthumous reissue of Wuthering Heights (which began that novel’s progress to its huge fame) was apologetic, but made a prophetic plea for frankness:
A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only – a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does – what feeling it spares – what horror it conceals.
It would, however, be a long time until the four-letter word – with Kenneth Tynan’s primal fuff-fuff-fuff-uck (see 13 November) and Lady Chatterley’s legalised ‘effing’ – would be reached.
2 October
Sarah Kemble Knight begins her epic journey from Boston to New York
1704 In those days you weren’t spoilt for choice when it came to ways of moving about the American colonies. There were no roads to speak of, so no stage coaches. East-coast cities were best served by ship. That’s how Benjamin Franklin made his career-building move from Boston to Philadelphia 1725.
But 21 years before that, Sarah Kemble Knight, a Boston businesswoman, legal scrivener and schoolteacher who may have taught the young Ben, decided to risk the trip on horseback, possibly because her legal business required that she go by way of New Haven, Connecticut. She was gone for five months, arriving home on 3 March 1705.
She made her way along barely marked tracks, usually assisted by a local guide. Where rivers were shallow enough to ford, they rode across them. Where not, t
hey might cross by canoe, the water almost up to the gunwales. Details like these she recorded in her journal, along with acute observations of the manners and mores of tobacco-chewing country ‘bumpkins’ (her word), native Americans little more than animals, and frontier settlers living in huts with bare dirt floors, with no
furniture but a Bedd wth a glass Bottle hanging at ye head on’t; an earthan cupp, a small pewter Bason, A Bord wth sticks to stand on, instead of a table, and a block or two in ye corner instead of chairs.
It was ‘the picture of poverty’, yet ‘both the Hutt and its Inhabitance were very clean and tydee: to the crossing the Old Proverb, that bare walls make giddy hows-wifes’.
In places this reads like Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), but Madame Knight wasn’t just Frances Trollope avant la lettre. What really distinguishes the journal from the travel book is the former’s sense of irony, its grip on reality. One night as they made their way along a dark, narrow track, ‘Going I knew not whither, and encompassed wth Terrifying darkness’, they breasted the top of a hill to suddenly see the full moon. Or as she put it, ‘the Kind Conductress of the night’.
My tho’ts on the sight of the moon were to this purpose:
Fair Cynthia, all the Homage that I may
Unto a Creature, unto thee I pay;
In Lonesome woods to meet so kind a guide,
To Mee’s more worth than all the world beside …
And the Tall and thick Trees at a distance, expecially wn the moon glar’d light through the branches, fill’d my Imagination wth the pleasant delusion of a Sumpteous citty, fill’d wth famous Buildings and churches, wth their spiring steeples, Balconies, Galleries and I know not what: Grandeurs wch I had heard of, and wch the stories of foreign countries had given me the Idea of.
Here stood a Lofty church – there a steeple,
And there the Grand Parade – O see the people!
That Famous Castle there, were I but nigh,
To see the mote and Bridg and walls so high –
They’re very fine! Sais my deluded eye.
What is it about the occasion that causes her to burst into poetry, the most formal manner of discourse? What prompts her rhetorically heightened references to the moon, like the elegant periphrasis ‘Kind conductress of the night’ and the classical allusion to the goddess Cynthia? Why do her most ‘pleasant delusions’ consist of famous buildings and churches got from stories of foreign countries’?
The obvious answer is that these elaborate forms were the author’s compensation, the fantasies of civilisation that came to her in the wilderness. True, but the point is, she knows it; she realises her ‘eye’ is ‘deluded’. And in case we miss that point, here is how she concludes the episode:
Being thus greatly entertain’d without a thou’t of any thing but thoughts themselves, I on a suden was Rous’d from these pleasing Imaginations, by the Post’s sounding his horn, which assured mee hee was arrived at the Stage, where we were to Lodg.
‘Without a thou’t of anything but thoughts themselves’? Can it be that an American first theorised deconstruction some two and a half centuries before the French?
3 October
Poet meets leech-gatherer; poem ensues
1800 In her journal for 3 October, Dorothy Wordsworth records an encounter, while out walking with her brother William, in the Lake District around Grasmere:
We met an old man almost double. He had on a coat, thrown over his shoulders, above his waistcoat and coat. Under this he carried a bundle, and had an apron on and a night-cap. His face was interesting. He had dark eyes and a long nose … He was of Scotch parents, but had been born in the army. He had had a wife, and ‘a good woman, and it pleased God to bless us with ten children’. All these were dead but one, of whom he had not heard for many years, a sailor. His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce, and he had not the strength for it. He lived by begging, and was making his way to Carlisle, where he should buy a few goodly books to sell. He said leeches were very scarce, partly owing to this dry season, but many years they had been scarce – he supposed it owing to their being much sought after, that they did not breed fast, and were of slow growth. Leeches were formerly 2s 6d. [per] 100; they are now 30s.
It was a striking enough experience for Dorothy to inscribe it at length in her journal. In William it inspired one of his finest poems, and his noblest reflection on the rigours of the poetic career, ‘Resolution and Independence’. In the poem (in which, rather unkindly, he pictures himself walking around Grasmere by himself ) Wordsworth first experiences ‘joy’ at a gorgeous morning, then a sudden decline into melancholy – thinking, specifically, of poets who have died young or wretched or both (principally Burns and ‘the marvellous boy’, Chatterton).
Suddenly, he encounters an old man. How is it you live, and what do you do? Wordsworth asks:
[He] said, that, gathering leeches, far and wide
He travelled; stirring thus about his feet
The waters of the pools where they abide.
‘Once I could meet with them on every side;
But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.’
The leech-gatherer’s courtesy, courage, and stoicism correct his own self-indulgence, and he concludes that when in the future melancholy strikes: ‘I’ll think of the leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’
The poem has some ecological and medical interest. Leeches were in great demand in the 18th and 19th centuries for ‘bleeding’ or phlebotomy – a treatment for a whole range of conditions. The species, due to over-harvesting, was exhausted in Britain by the 1830s and the bulk of leeches (which travel well) were imported from France and Germany. By the beginning of the 20th century the medicinal leech was virtually extinct across the whole of Europe.
4 October
Printing of the Coverdale Bible is finished, the first complete Bible to be published in English
1535 At the heart of the Protestant Reformation was the devout worshippers’ desire for direct access to God through Jesus Christ. People wanted to work out their own salvation, not have it decided by a parish priest working the gates of confession and absolution. So they needed to know God’s word directly, not filtered through someone’s loose paraphrase of the Latin scriptures.
Needless to say, the established Roman Catholic Church was strenuously opposed to translations. The Bible was so complexly figurative; ordinary people would just get confused if they tried to read it for themselves. Besides, they might discover that there was no scriptural authority for purgatory, let alone the profitable indulgences sold to curtail the loved one’s time there.
Only ten years earlier, the reformist English priest William Tyndale had published his English version of the New Testament, only to have it denounced by the Catholic Church and himself be charged with heresy, for which he was strangled at the stake in Vilvoorde castle near Brussels, after which his body was burned (see 6 September).
Thanks to a certain Ms Boleyn, Yorkshireman Myles Coverdale was luckier. Although he too had to have his Bible printed abroad, that’s because the funding and printing expertise were there, rather than for fear of persecution. Newly divorced and remarried, split from Rome, and in 1534 officially designated head of the Church of England, Henry VIII had plenty of use for English translations of the Bible.
He ordered a Coverdale Bible to be supplied to every church in England, chained to a lectern so that parishioners could read it for themselves. If they couldn’t read, here was an added incentive to learn. Over time, the Bible’s effect on literacy in English – not to mention its influence on the imaginative use of the language – has been incalculable.
Coverdale wasn’t a great Bible scholar. He had little Greek and less Hebrew, using (among others) Tyndale’s work and Martin Luther’s great German translation for cribs. But his translations of the Psalms lived on in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which means that to churchgoers o
f a certain age it’s they that are the Psalms, not those in the Authorised Version.
For Handel too, Coverdale was the proper psalmist. In The Messiah (1742), Psalm 22 is exploited for its prophetic bearing on Christ’s crucifixion:
All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out their
lips, and shake their heads, saying,
He trusted in God, that he would deliver him: let him deliver
him, if he will have him.
And a whole chorus is built around the lead line of Psalm 2: ‘Why do the heathen so furiously rage together: and why do the people imagine a vain thing?’
5 October
Steinbeck begins a series of articles in a San Francisco paper; they will change his life
1936 It’s often forgotten that The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was not John Steinbeck’s first novel about migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley. That was called In Dubious Battle (1936), and it wasn’t very good. It was about a strike. To gather information on it, Steinbeck had relied on a few second-hand accounts. He wanted his plot to prove a theory he had heard from his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, that men in a group behave like cells in the body, not thinking or acting for themselves but for the greater organism.
As a result, In Dubious Battle didn’t work, either as fiction or documentary – hazy on concrete detail, its characters mouthing set philosophical and political positions. Though the migrant workers had won the actual strike on which the story was based, they had to lose it in the novel, in order to conform to the pre-existent theory.
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