Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Never mind, In Dubious Battle made Steinbeck look as though he knew something about conditions down on the farm, so when the San Francisco News, a liberal evening daily, wanted to cover the residential camps set up by Roosevelt’s New Deal to keep the migrant ‘Okies’ and their families out of the drainage ditches where they were washing and going to the toilet, they asked the novelist to investigate.

  This was journalism, not fiction, so it was going to require some real fact-finding about local people and conditions, rather than half-baked biologistic theories. So Steinbeck travelled down the Central Valley, finally winding up at Weedpatch, the leading government camp near Arvin, where he found out about the systems for welcoming migrant families, keeping them dry, clean and happily occupied between jobs, and fending off the landowners’ vigilantes. Meeting the migrants face to face, hearing them speak, sitting in on their meetings, Steinbeck quickly came to recognise them as something more than cells in a larger organism.

  ‘The Harvest Gypsies’, as his articles were called, appeared as seven full-page pieces in the News, from 5 to 12 October 1936, illustrated by the government documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (see 26 May). A survey of the migrants’ living conditions outside the government camps began with the material facts as experienced on the ground:

  The dirt floor is swept clean, and along the irrigation ditch or in the muddy river, the wife of the family scrubs clothes without soap and tries to rinse out the mud in muddy water. The spirit of this family is not quite broken, for the children, three of them, still have clothes, and the family possesses three old quilts and a soggy, lumpy mattress.

  THEN COME THE RAINS

  With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush; in a few months the clothes will fray off the children’s bodies while the lack of nourishing food will subject the whole family to pneumonia when the first cold comes.

  Families barely subsist; they are terrified of starvation, the children too weak to go to school. Medical attention hardly exists.

  Shock details were reinforced by analysis. Steinbeck went back into history, explaining how California farms had evolved, not through thousands of individual settlements, but through a few large landholdings subdivided again and again. Then he explained how many of the big farms were owned by absentee landlords, banks and corporations, and managed by supervisors, before showing how the new government camps were working.

  Besides being one of the best pieces of investigative journalism to come out of the Depression, ‘The Harvest Gypsies’ opened the door to The Grapes of Wrath, awakening in Steinbeck a genuine sympathy for the Okies and their political struggle, and teaching him the value of minutely-observed particulars as a way of setting a scene and piquing the reader’s participation in bringing the picture to life.

  6 October

  William Golding’s sour-tasting Nobel Prize

  1983 As his biographer, John Carey, records, William Golding (a Grand Old Man of English fiction, at 72) received the first intimation that he was to be 1983 Nobel laureate by phone, at ten o’clock on the morning of 6 October. He was so informed by a Swedish journalist who said, tantalisingly, that he had a ‘50–50 chance’. The award was confirmed by lunchtime.

  The 50 per cent adverse possibility was, despite the notorious secretiveness of the Stockholm literary committee, made public in the days thereafter. One of the judges, 77-year-old poet Artur Lindkvist, had single-handedly tried to blackball Golding’s nomination in favour of a Senegalese poet, Léopold Senghor (he was also the first president of his country after its independence). Senghor (five years older than Golding) was well known in the francophone literary world. He had been elected a member of l’Académie française on 2 June 1983, the first African writer to be so honoured.

  Lindkvist explained: ‘I simply didn’t consider Golding to possess the international weight needed to win the prize … I admire Anthony Burgess very much. He is of far greater worth than Golding and is much more controversial.’ The author of Lord of the Flies was, he concluded, ‘too nice’.

  Golding was chronically self-doubting. Lindkvist’s spiteful criticisms soured what should have been the crowning moment of his literary career.

  7 October

  As Allen Ginsberg first reads Howl aloud at the Six Gallery, San Francisco, the Beat Generation comes of age

  1955 ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked’, he intoned,

  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz …

  These are just the first four verse paragraphs in a total of 88 in Part I alone. Most reiterate that parallel construction beginning with ‘who …’, so are about those ‘best minds’ ‘who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa’ and ‘let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy’.

  Howl took over from where Ginsberg’s fellow New Jerseyian Walt Whitman left off – not just in that conversational rhythm and versification based on breath, but also in those frank vignettes of urban lowlife, and of the gay scene generally.

  Howl came out in 1956 in a now legendary ‘Pocket Poets’ edition published by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti under the imprint of the City Lights Bookshop, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. The book’s format was nearly square – 6½ inches high by just under 5 wide – and it cost 75¢.

  As a result of its sexual explicitness, the San Francisco police prosecuted Ferlinghetti for publishing obscene material after the local district attorney declined to act. In the trial that followed in 1957, the book was defended by the American Civil Liberties Union, calling on artists and academics as expert witnesses. Ferlinghetti won when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the work was of ‘redeeming social importance’. The trial was as widely publicised in the US as was the Lady Chatterley case in Britain (see 10 November).

  But for all the book’s notoriety, who were the Beats, after all? Was their ‘generation’ anything more than one of those convenient clichés of literary classification, like the so-called ‘lost generation’ between the wars, an epithet actually based on a disparaging remark made by Gertrude Stein to her French garage mechanic? Were they a literary movement, or just a public relations gesture, a bunch of guys, their women seldom mentioned, famous for making themselves famous?

  Take Neal Cassady. Did anyone ever read anything by him, or just about him in Jack Kerouac’s defining narrative of the Beat moment, On the Road (1957)? The (rather more conventional) poet Gary Snyder, who also read that night at the Six, denies that the movement had much coherence, other than as a ‘circle of friends’.

  Yet the reading at the Six Gallery remains a monument in American poetry. By its 50th anniversary, Howl had reached its 53rd printing, and nearly a million copies remained in print.

  8 October

  Herta Müller wins the Nobel. Handkerchiefs flutter in celebration

  2009 One of the things that hobbles the Nobel Literature Prize is its founder’s instruction that it should be awarded to the author of ‘the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. There is argument about how idealisk (in the old dynamitard’s original Swedish) should be translated. But the basic instruction is clear – the laureate should be on the side of the angels.

  The ‘idealisk’ criterion probably also explains why Philip Roth (many things – but no angel) has never been honoured. It also explains why, lest some bombshell is dropped later, the committee usually aim to get in just ahead of the undertaker (the two of them practically got jammed in the door with poor Harold Pinter, the 2005 honoree).

  ‘I am very near the end’, said V.S. Naipaul in his winner’s lecture. He was
n’t. But had his nomination come up after, rather than before, Patrick French’s 2008 warts-and-all biography the odd black ball might have been cast.

  It must have been painful when, with the laurel leaves still fresh on his brow, Günter Grass disclosed that he had a Waffen-SS uniform in his skeleton’s closet (Grass may, perhaps, have slyly forecast that Stockholm would regret it by giving his lecture on the subject of rats).

  Herta Müller, the 2009 laureate (announced to the world on this day), was, by Nobel standards, young – in her mid-fifties. She was also the daughter of a Waffen-SS soldier. Not that it should be held against her any more than the paternity of Nicholas Mosley (son of Oswald, and one of Britain’s most underrated novelists) should affect critical judgement. But it must have been mulled over in Stockholm.

  Brought up in a German-ethnic-minority family in Ceauşescu’s horrid Romania, Müller falls into a favourite category with the committee – writers who express human freedoms while suffering under totalitarian regimes (Pinter under Blair, for example). Müller chose to give her winner’s lecture not on the subject of liberty but of snot (beats rats). This is how it opens:

  ‘Do you have a handkerchief?’ was the question my mother asked me every morning, standing by the gate to our house, before I went out onto the street.

  The same maternal query came up the day the Securitate came to haul Herta’s mother off to a Gulag. The whole of Müller’s lecture revolves around the big things that little things mean. It’s very touching, and like no other Nobel lecture on record. Even a hankie can be idealistic.

  9 October

  Dario Fo wins the Nobel for Literature

  1997 Aged 71 when he received the honour and still going strong, Dario Fo, the Italian dramatist, screenwriter, composer, librettist, theatre manager, television game show author and political activist, has used his art and wit to ridicule political corruption, the Catholic Church, fascism, the Communist party, the Mafia, Israel, Lyndon B. Johnson and the US in general, the Carabinieri (Italian state police) – and many other persons and institutions not at all good at taking jokes. The wonder is not that he got the Nobel Prize, but that he lived long enough to take delivery of it.

  Against the limits of frequent censorship and worse, Fo’s greatest achievement in strictly literary terms has been to make theatre popular. While in most other countries it’s a small segment of the middle classes who patronise the live theatre (where they can find it), Fo and his wife Franca Rame have brought theatre to the people – touring the country first with the company bearing their names, then with the Associazione Nuova Scena with its portable stages, and finally their Collettivo Teatrale La Commune.

  Among their most popular productions were Mistero Buffo (Slapstick Mystery) (1969), seen by up to three million Italians, in which Fo drew on the tradition of medieval travelling performances often held in town squares, and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), his most often performed work outside Italy – staged in over 40 countries.

  Based on a real-life case in which an anarchist, suspected of having bombed a bank in Milan, mysteriously fell or was thrown from a fourth-floor window in a police station (at first the police said he jumped in remorse for his part in the atrocity), the play draws on the popular tradition of the commedia dell’arte, posing a Harlequin-like trickster, ‘the Maniac’, to infiltrate the judicial system and get the police to deconstruct the official account in their own words.

  Dario Fo ‘emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages’, his Nobel citation read, ‘in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden’. On receiving his award, Fo paid tribute to Ruzzante Beolco – ‘the true father of the commedia dell’arte’, he called him – who, along with Molière, ‘was despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys and desperation of the common people; the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the high and mighty; and the incessant injustice. And their major, unforgivable fault was this: in telling these things, they made people laugh. Laughter does not please the mighty.’

  10 October

  A True Leveller is baptised somewhere in the parish of Wigan

  1609 His origins are obscure (where in the large parish was he born? Who was his mother?), but he was well enough known in his day, with over twenty books and pamphlets to his name – all but one of them reprinted. After that his fame was eclipsed again, until revived by left-wing historians like D.W. Petegorsky and Christopher Hill. What his published work proves is that Gerrard Winstanley was one of the most original political thinkers in English history. Why? He took Christianity seriously as a political programme. Hill put it well: ‘Winstanley’s relation to traditional theology is like Karl Marx’s relation to Hegelianism: he found it standing on its head and set it the right way up.’1

  Take the Apostles, for example – as Winstanley himself did. In the Book of Acts (2: 43–5) they and those they converted to Christianity ‘had all things in common; / And sold their possessions and parted them to all men, as every man had need’. So in The New Law of Righteousness, published in 1649 just four days before Charles I’s execution, Winstanley plotted England’s predicament against the grand narrative of the Bible itself, tracing unequal distribution of property back to the original Fall of mankind, and proposed a new socialist dispensation based on the New Testament.

  When that didn’t catch on, Winstanley and his followers acted out their ideals in real time and space. Occupying a piece of common land near Cobham, Surrey, on the first Sunday in April 1649, they proceeded to dig it over and sow beans, carrots and parsnips in it. Their enemies called them ‘Diggers’. They didn’t mind. Their own name for the movement was the ‘True Levellers’, as distinct from the ‘Levellers’, those agitators for political reform under John Lillbourne, who pressed for the right of all to own property. The True Levellers wanted to abolish the ownership of property altogether.

  But then, property is violence, as Proudhon might have said, but didn’t, and as the local landowners proved, when two yeomen led a group of men dressed as women to assault and beat four Diggers sowing a winter crop. Following this setback, Winstanley went silent for a while, before producing the book for which he is best known today.

  In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored (1652), to give it its full title, Winstanley continued to analyse the recent history of England in terms of the Bible, but now he was turning increasingly to the apocalyptic books, Daniel and Revelations, for his terminology. Thus ‘kingly government or monarchy’ is ‘the government of the Beast’ and ‘the very city of Babylon, full of confusion’; while ‘commonwealth’s government’, ‘whereby there is a provision for livelihood in the earth, both for elder and younger brother’, is ‘the ancient of days’ (an old man in Daniel, chapter 7, who prefigures Christ), ‘the true restorer of all long-lost freedoms’.

  We’re still waiting.

  1 Christopher Hill (ed.), Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and other Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, p. 53.

  11 October

  Where’s Charley? opens a long run on Broadway

  1948 Charley’s Aunt, by Brandon Thomas, was the prototype London West End farce – the inspiration for a hugely profitable and popular theatrical genre.

  The play ran for 1,466 performances from 21 December 1892, with Thomas (now in his mid-forties) playing one of the fathers in the action. On Broadway Charley’s Aunt ran for an even longer four years.

  The central element in the plot – as often in farce – is cross-dressing. Two young undergrads at Oxford, and lads around town, Charley Wykeham and Jack Chesney, are in dire need of a chaperone, so they can decently entertain the two young ladies they are sweet on. Charley’s aunt (whom he has never met, and who is coming from Brazil, ‘where the nuts grow’) will serve, they decide, perfectly. But she is delayed and a friend, Lord Fancourt Babberly, is prevailed on to impersonate her. Complications ensue.

  Charley’s Aunt became folkloric, thanks to repertory company performances over the years
and film adaptations. Astonishingly, there was enough life left in this Victorian fun-piece for a musical adaptation, Where’s Charley? (music by Frank Loesser, ‘book’ by George Abbott), to break box-office records half a century later.

  Where’s Charley? (which adheres more or less faithfully to the original 1892 plot) opened on 11 October 1948 and ran for an astonishing 792 performances. It greatly enhanced the stardom of Ray Bolger, as Charley. He went on to reprise the part in the 1952 film version.

  Bolger (born in 1904, famous as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz) would have seemed somewhat too old to play an Oxford undergraduate, and the part was changed to ‘graduate’, to make him more plausible.

  The London version (which ran for 404 performances) starred Norman Wisdom as Charley. He, like Bolger, is one of the less-likely actors one would (if plausibility were a factor) have cast as an Oxonian gilded youth. But in farce, anything goes.

  12 October

  Tennyson crosses the bar

  1892 As Samantha Matthews notes in her study of Victorian literary funerals, Tennyson’s was the biggest of them all in a century that revered its authors as never before or since.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate for almost half a century, died at dawn on 6 October 1892 in Haslemere, Surrey, aged 83. He was suffering from gout and influenza. The news that the queen’s favourite poet had died was telegraphed to the newspapers. They already had reporters in place outside the poet’s residence, Aldworth House.

  Victoria herself sent a telegram of condolence (how far the communication systems had advanced since 1837, when there was not even a penny post). It was, the nation agreed, an event of truly national – not merely literary – importance. Something important was passing away: a whole era.