Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  It seems certain that Penlez was nothing more than an innocent bystander who lived and worked in the area, and happened to be drunk that night. But, the sailors having absconded, an example was required so that London houses – even houses of ill-repute – should not be at risk of violence. Fielding was attacked by newspapers as a paid protector of bawdy houses. He responded with a self-serving treatise, A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez.

  The Newgate Calendar is more sympathetic in its account of Penlez’s unhappy fate:

  When the day of execution arrived he prepared to meet his fate with the consciousness of an innocent man, and the courage of a Christian. The late Sir Stephen Theodore Janssen, Chamberlain of London, was at that time sheriff; and a number of soldiers being placed at Holborn Bars, to conduct Penlez to Tyburn (as a rescue was apprehended), the sheriff politely dismissed them, asserting that the civil power was sufficient to carry the edicts of the law into effectual execution.

  This unhappy youth was executed at Tyburn on the 18th of October, 1749.

  The worthy inhabitants of St Clement Danes, who had been among the foremost in soliciting a pardon for Penlez, finding all their efforts ineffectual, did all possible honour to his memory, by burying him in a distinguished manner in a churchyard of their parish, on the evening after his unfortunate exit, which happened in the twenty-third year of his age.

  19 October

  Dylan Thomas leaves on his fourth trip to the US – his second that year – a voyage from which he will never return

  1953 What British poet has ever claimed such celebrity in America as Dylan Thomas? Certainly not his contemporaries Stephen Spender or W.H. Auden, or any other would-be traveller or settler in the States. Celebrities are sought out for who they are as much as for what they do. So that lets out even Famous Seamus Heaney, whose outstanding work overshadows his amiable and self-depreciating personality.

  It was the poet and critic John Malcolm Brinnin who first brought Thomas to America. An admirer of Thomas’s poems, he raised $500 – the equivalent of around $4,500 today – plus his air fare, for him to read his work at a poetry centre he ran in New York, and with his good contacts he was able to arrange for the poet to read at over 40 schools and colleges across the country.

  Audiences loved his Byronic exuberance, his sonorous voice, his ‘Welsh lilt’, not knowing that between them Thomas and his schoolmaster father had managed to expunge all traces of his native Swansea from his plummy accent. Byron by day, maybe, more like Borat the Kazakh by night. Exhilarated by his reception, invited to endless drinks parties, he would get drunk and foul-mouthed, playing up to his persona of the troubled romantic, leering at the college girls and offering to suckle their breasts.

  Breasts also came into a well-reported incident in Hollywood. Introduced to Shelley Winters, Thomas told the actress that his two ambitions in Hollywood were to ‘touch the titties of a beautiful blonde starlet and to meet Charlie Chaplin’. Winters, then sharing a flat with Marilyn Monroe, invited the poet to dinner. They drank dry martinis out of milk bottles. Winters cooked and Monroe washed up (Marilyn’s idea of making a salad was first to brush each lettuce leaf with a Brillo pad, Winters recalled in her autobiography), then Thomas did indeed get to touch the starlet’s titties, but only with a single finger, one at a time.

  Afterwards they drove over to one of Chaplin’s weekly open house parties. With the drunken Thomas fatally at the wheel, they crashed onto Chaplin’s tennis court, into the net. When his hero deprecated his bad behaviour, Thomas strolled out into the solarium and urinated on a large specimen plant.

  The truth is, his offended hosts, so smitten by the notion that he was a great creative talent, colluded in the mischief and enjoyed the fun. In all, Thomas visited the US four times between 1950 and 1953 – for ‘flattery, idleness and infidelity’, according to the sour but accurate judgement of his long-suffering wife Caitlin. Besides, the money was good – not least for Brinnin, who, as Thomas’s agent, took a hefty 25 per cent of the poet’s earnings.

  Then, just as he was on the verge of signing a contract for future readings and lecture tours for $12,000 a week, the fun ran out. In October 1953, suffering from a chest complaint, he arrived at New York’s Idlewild airport, to be met by Brinnin’s assistant, Liz Reitell, with whom he had started an affair on his third visit. Fatigue and drink exacerbated his condition. Doctors injected him with steroids, then morphine. He fell into a coma. Reitell called an ambulance, which took him to St Vincent’s Hospital. There he died without regaining consciousness.

  20 October

  John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais is entered in the Stationer’s Register in London

  1595 John (or Giovanni) Florio is best remembered now as the man behind Gonzago’s vision of a reformed commonwealth in The Tempest (1610–11). He was born in London around 1553, the son of a fugitive Franciscan friar who had converted to Protestantism and, for his linguistic skills and Protestant sympathies, been taken up by Queen Elizabeth’s chief advisor, William Cecil, Lord Burghley. With John, the family would continue to enjoy royal and aristocratic patronage.

  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1553–1625) more or less invented the short prose exploration of a topic or event that he called the essai (French for ‘trial’ or ‘attempt’). In 1580 he published a collection of 107 of them, ranging from topics of general interest, such as the nature of sadness, virtue and vanity, to more specific political and social observations, like the Battle of Dreux (between Catholics and Huguenots in 1562) and suggestions for moderating the excess show and consumption of the French aristocracy. Montaigne’s tone was easy-going, often ironic; his beliefs were broadly humanistic, his angle of approach surprisingly modern in its moral relativism.

  Typical of the Essais is Montaigne’s take on what he had read (in Peter Martyr’s De Orbe Novo (1511)), about the ‘cannibals’ of the Caribbean. OK, so they take the occasional bit out of each other, but is that any worse than the vicious religious wars that were ravaging Europe? Besides, they live in a world in which food is abundant, illness unknown, social and political rank non-existent. The very words for lying, greed and envy are unknown to them.

  ‘Of the Caniballes’, Florio’s translation of this essay, puts it like this:

  It is a nation … that hath no kind of Trafficke, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politicke superiority, no contracts, successions, no partitions, no successions, … no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle.

  Though he may well have read Montaigne’s source, Peter Martyr, there’s little doubt that Shakespeare drew on his friend John Florio for the vision of the ideal commonwealth that Gonzago projects in Act 2, scene 1 of The Tempest:

  No kind of traffic

  Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

  Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

  And use of service, none; contract, succession,

  Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

  No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil …

  He is mocked for it in the play (by the bad guys), but Gonzago’s vision endures.

  21 October

  Poststructuralism comes to America

  1966 The academic ‘discipline’ of literary criticism, and the departments in which it finds its traditional home, are generational in their doctrines. That is to say critical orthodoxies tend to rule for the average length of a full academic career – 40 years.

  After its emergence as a respectable subject in American universities in the 1890s, the dominant orthodoxy was ‘Philology’ (i.e. applying to native literature the same kind of analysis that was applied to ancient Greek and Latin). This was replaced (after fierce quarrelling between old and new guards) by ‘New Criticism’ – strenuous analysis of ‘words on the page’. Leading figures were Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in the US and, with a slightly different accent, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis in the UK.

  By the 1960s
another generational turn was due. The New Criticism was Old Hat. It happened on 21 October 1966, when Jacques Derrida gave his lecture ‘La Structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ at the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

  Derrida had travelled from France with Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan, two other foundational figures in what would be called (misleadingly) ‘Theory’. Initially derided as ‘higher Froggy nonsense’, the new approach took off like wildfire among the younger American faculty. As they progressed upwards through the academic ranks, it became orthodoxy.

  ‘Theory’ redefined not just critical procedure but a new, expanded terrain. It was international and cross-disciplinary. Its branches – semiology, poststructuralism, deconstruction – drew on the work of Swiss linguists such as Saussure, Italians such as Umberto Eco (virtuoso in what Derrida called jeu, or ‘play’), German New-Marxists (such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger), social scientists such as the Bulgarian Tzvetan Todorov, and psychoanalysts such as Lacan. Barthes and Derrida were as engaged with philosophical problems as traditional explication de texte.

  Essentially ‘Theory’ represented a turn back to what Aristotle called ‘Poetics’ – the question of how meaning is generated by permutations of small black marks on a white surface. Theory (particularly ‘deconstruction’) tended to lose itself in the problem of how fixed, or arbitrary, or limitlessly ‘decentred’ those meanings might be.

  The proceedings of the 1966 event were printed up as The Structuralist Controversy. Theory would certainly be controversial, but it soon became the main item on the academic literary agenda. J. Hillis Miller was teaching at Johns Hopkins in 1966 and recorded that his first encounter with Derrida at the conference was ‘a decisive moment in my life’. Paul de Man (Belgian by origin, and a comparatist by training) was also at the conference, where he too met Derrida for the first time. He and Miller (along with Geoffrey Hartman) set up their base at Yale, which became, after 1970, the HQ of American Theory.

  Forty years on, the Academy is due for its next critical revolution.

  22 October

  Sartre wins the Nobel Prize, rejects it, then thinks – ‘Well, why not? It’s a lot of money’

  1964 A hundred or so writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature; thousands plausibly think themselves robbed for not having won it. Only one writer, however, can be said to have won it, rejected it, then, some years later, decided he would, after all, accept.

  On this day in 1964 the Nobel committee resolved to give the prize to Jean Paul Sartre. He was not principally known as a novelist or playwright – although his works in that field are distinguished. It was more his record of wartime resistance and his current vanguard position in the radical movements of the 1960s that predisposed the Stockholm Academicians: that, and Sartre’s proclaimed anti-Americanism.

  His rejecting the prize was not seen as any kind of humiliation by the Nobel committee, but rather a validation of the rightness of their choice. Sartre had forewarned them, on 14 October, that he would not accept the award; nevertheless, academy members felt that ‘he was the only possible recipient this year’. They went ahead and gave it to him, knowing it would be turned down. The chairman of the eighteen-strong panel, Anders Oesterling, saluted Sartre as the ‘father of the existentialist doctrine, which became this generation’s intellectual self-defence’. Defence against what? (Something draped in stars and stripes, one deduced.) In the same year, Martin Luther King won the Peace Prize. He accepted.

  Sartre’s published explanation was expressed as a defence of inviolable individual freedom:

  It is not the same thing if I sign ‘Jean Paul Sartre’ or if I sign ‘Jean Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize Winner’. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form.

  In his autobiography, the distinguished Swedish novelist Lars Gyllensten (who was elected to the Academy in 1966) claimed that Sartre, in 1975, indicated privately that he would now accept the money for the prize that he had briefly, but legitimately, held (the 1964 prize money had been returned to the Foundation and reinvested). The application was, according to Gyllensten, turned down. The story has never been confirmed – although there must, if it is true, be correspondence in the Nobel archive.

  Gyllensten resigned from the committee in the late 1980s for what he saw as its weakness in not awarding the Prize to Salman Rushdie, after the fatwa brought down on him for The Satanic Verses. Gyllensten died in 2006.

  23 October

  Beowulf escapes incineration

  1731 There was an English literature before there was an England. Most of that literature, alas, is forever lost.

  Only fragments have survived – principally the first text on which the mighty structure of English literature rests.

  That we have Beowulf is the result of an almost miraculous series of accidents. It was composed – for recitation – probably in the 6th century, by pagan newcomers from north-eastern Europe. The epic was handed down, through generations of minstrels, or ‘scops’ – until, at the point when it would certainly have disappeared, a monk (or monks) transcribed it. We don’t know who, or where their monastery might have been. He/they evidently took the text down faithfully, but could not resist interpolating some pious Christian doctrine at various places. It’s easy to see where.

  The 3,000-line (incomplete) narrative is divided into two parts, the first twice as long as the second. Beowulf is a Geat, a tribe in what we call Sweden. He is a mighty warrior. Not yet a king, but destined to be one. He comes to Denmark, to help Hrothgar, King of the Scyldings, whose great hall has been terrorised by Grendel, a monster from the nearby marshes, for twelve years.

  Beowulf defeats Grendel in single combat. Then, when Grendel’s mother comes to take revenge, he drives her back to her watery lair and dives in to kill her underwater. There follows feasting, drinking, and treasure-giving before Beowulf sails back to his own people. In the second part of the epic, many years later, Beowulf is now King of the Geats, and his kingdom is terrorised by a great dragon. Beowulf slays the dragon, but is himself mortally wounded. The poem ends with his ceremonial burial.

  The history of the sole Beowulf manuscript is, in its early career, mysterious. By the 16th century, however, it is known to have been in the possession of the antiquarian Laurence Nowell. As the British Library (the manuscript’s current custodian) records:

  It was acquired in the 17th century by Sir Robert Cotton, a keen collector of old manuscripts whose library was presented to the nation by his grandson in 1700. However, the dilapidated state of Cotton’s house gave cause for concern over the collection’s safety. The library was moved first to Essex House in the Strand, then to Ashburnham House in Westminster … on 23 October, 1731, Ashburnham House was ravaged by a fire that destroyed or damaged a quarter of Cotton’s library. Beowulf was saved with other priceless manuscripts, but not before its edges were badly scorched.

  In 1753 it came into the care of the more fire-proof British Museum. The hand that saved Beowulf is unknown.

  Had English Literature, as a university-based discipline, not had an ‘epic’ on which to base itself, and an Anglo-Saxon literature to study, its academic respectability and evolution would have been very different. To speculate further, English literature itself would have been very different. J.R.R. Tolkien, to take an obvious example, was the greatest Beowulf scholar of the 20th century. And Tolkien’s view on the poem was uncompromising. It was the fantasy – the monsters, dragons, and epic battles – that made Beowulf great. And that, of course, inspired The Lord of the Rings. Had the manuscript burned in 1731, Tolkien’s saga would have burned with it.

  The British Library has put the manuscript beyond the reach of any flames in its 1993 electronic/DVD facsimile version.

  24 October

  Martin Amis joins the ranks of the literary breast-men

  2
009 One of the phenomena bemoaned by the literary establishment in this generally gloomy year was the vast popularity, among the British Reading Public, of the ‘celebrity’ novel. Typically this was a ‘ghosted’ product – the nominal author blithely admitting the fact that the only pen they had put to paper was on the contract. ‘They’ wrote her novels, Katie Price (famous as the glamour model Jordan) said in one of her innumerable interviews (most of which concentrated on her F-cup, surgically enhanced, frontal features).

  One novel of Price’s (or at least, a novel with her name on the title page and her full-on picture on the dust flap), Crystal, sold more – the literary commentator David Sexton wryly noted – than all the Booker shortlist for that year (2007) combined. These, as Richard Hoggart would have said, were the ‘uses of literacy’, 2009-style. Tabloid newspapers had always known: ‘tits sell’. ‘Lit’, notoriously, doesn’t sell.

  Jordan, wrote the author Lynda La Plante, was ‘killing publishing’ – which seemed a little perverse, at least for Price’s publisher who was in the best of financial health. Jordan’s success had also irritated Martin Amis mightily. At a lecture on this evening, 24 October 2009, for the ‘Hay in London’ literary festival, he informed his audience that Price/Jordan ‘has no waist, no arse … an interesting face … but all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone’. Her (so to call it) fiction he regarded as beneath notice. Nonetheless, he had introduced a character (‘Threnody’) obliquely based on her in his forthcoming work of fiction, State of England.

  The giveaway word ‘worship’ aligns Amis with male authors similarly attracted. It’s an impressive crew. Fielding’s overdone jokes about Lady Booby betray a fascination with what he elsewhere more reverently calls ‘beauteous orbs’. Hardy makes similarly revealing references to Tess Durbeyfield’s frontal development. The ‘luxuriance of her figure’ is what first catches seducer Alec’s eye. The sage of Wessex, we deduce, also had an eye for them.