J.G. Ballard adored Elizabeth Taylor, and wrote a great novel about her – Crash. But Ballard had to concede that Marlon Brando was the better actor and, in his later years, had the bigger breasts.
Lawrence complains bitterly, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, about the flat-chested flapper. He despised what he called ‘little iron breasts’ and women who wanted the vote. Connie, like Frieda, was, we apprehend, generously endowed. Lawrence lyricised on the ample breast in his poem, ‘Look, we Have Come Through’:
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me space and fear, but the fourth side rests,
Warm in a city of strength, between her breasts.
He loved, Lawrence said in another poem (‘Song of the Man who is Loved’), to get his ‘hands full of breasts’. Groping some call it.
Leading the mammalian crew among the moderns is Philip Roth, who published a novel in 1972 in which the hero, David Kapesh, in a pathological recycling of Kafka, is metamorphosed into a 155-lb breast. No prizes for guessing the title.
Norman Mailer is hot on Roth’s heels as a breast-worshipper. In Marilyn: A Biography he ponders, at immense length, the power of Marilyn’s ‘popped buds and burgeons of flesh’. She was, Mailer enthused, ‘a cornucopia. She excited dreams of honey for the horn’. Mailer’s encomium, in Esquire, on the 40DD breast picture (nothing else, just the breasts) that took (male) America by storm in 1999 is rather slangier:
These breasts really hit home for a nation eager to stare at a huge honkin’ set of big ol’ whoppers. The reassuring presence of this enormous pair of mamajamas is something all Americans, from every walk of life, can relate to.
Why is it, Susan Seligson (the author of Stacked) recently enquired, that ‘big breasts never fail to render men instantly stupid?’
25 October
St Crispin’s Day: two kinds of glory in British military history
1415, 1854 The battles of Agincourt and Balaclava appealed mightily to William Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson – but in very different ways. At Agincourt Henry V really did lead his outnumbered forces into battle, unlike Charles VI of France, who had been kept at home because he was mad. Thanks to their highly trained longbow archers, the English won overwhelmingly, killing an average of between six and ten French soldiers each. After the battle Henry wooed and won the hand of the French king’s daughter. How romantic is that?
Balaclava, the second major engagement of the Crimean War, produced romance of another sort. A scramble of badly articulated orders from Lord Raglan through Lord Lucan down to Lord Cardigan resulted in the last of these temperamental toffs first refusing to send the Light Brigade cavalry to attack the left flank of the Russian cavalry, then leading it down a valley bristling with Russian cannon on both sides and at the far end. The outcome was inevitable.
Shakespeare’s Henry starts off with ambiguous motives for going to war, but grows into the responsibility of leading his compatriots into and through the conflict. In Shakespeare the war makes the man, but it also makes the nation. During the Second World War, Laurence Olivier was released from the navy to make the movie of Henry V that came out in 1944, just in time – not so much to stiffen backbones as already to celebrate the impending Allied victory.
So when Henry speaks to his troops before the battle, he lays down rhetorical tracks for the later conflict too. The first line alone provided Churchill’s epithet for heroic Battle of Britain pilots and the title of a TV mini-series of 2001 following a company of parachutists from the Normandy landings to the end of the war in Europe. But more important is Henry’s conceit of social levelling through the shared danger of combat. That may well have fed into the tremendous Labour victory in the ‘Khaki Election’ of 1945.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
The Crimean War was remembered more for its victims than its victors. Florence Nightingale famously looked after the wounded, while Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, written in that same year, dramatised the quandary of those troopers sacrificed in the fatal charge:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d & thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
‘Do & die’, so often misremembered as ‘do or die’, is the key: here the dying is in the doing, and the romance is not in the battle won through the fellowship of leaders and led, but in the courageous pursuit of the impossible. As the French Marshal Pierre Bosquet put it, while witnessing the massacre: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’ Or to quote a less friendly comment by a contemporary Russian general: ‘Lions led by asses.’
26 October
A gunfight breaks out at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, when Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday try to disarm Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury
1881 It took place in nowheresville between two buildings (not in the O.K. Corral), yet it went down in the popular memory as the most famous gunfight in the Old West. On one side were the ‘cowboys’ who came into town to raise hell from time to time. On the other were the federal marshal, Virgil Earp, his brothers Morgan and Wyatt, and a gambler called Doc Holliday. After 30 seconds it was all over. Three of the cowboys lay dead in the dust, Frank and Tom McLaury and the hot-headed Billy Clanton. Morgan, Virgil and Doc Holliday were wounded, Wyatt unscathed. From that his reputation as a gunslinger took its start.
Who shot first? Who, apart from the marshal and his ‘deputies’, was armed? Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury had been seen flaunting revolver belts, but others of the cowboys had been disarmed in pursuance of a town ordinance requiring everyone entering the area to check their guns and bowie knives at the hotel or livery stable – wherever they first dismounted.
Despite these lingering doubts, the gunfight became the stuff of legend, revisited in over 25 books, movies, TV series and documentaries. The popular culture, while maintaining a hint of Wyatt’s moral ambivalence, posed it as the paradigm conflict between civilisation and barbarism, law ’n’ order as against unruly ‘thugs and cattle thieves’ (to quote one movie’s plot summary).
The pattern was set by the classic film Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Hal Wallis, 1957). ‘Here the outlaw band / Made their final stand’, as the tuneful soundtrack had it, and Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, as Wyatt and the Doc, were there to meet them. In Tombstone (1993), the costumes were period, the shooting balletic, and everyone nasty. A year later, Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp cast Kevin Costner as the romantic hero caught in the tragic dilemma of having to fight dirty to defeat evil.
It took a lot longer for the myth to get deconstructed, and it took the print medium – in the hands of probably the best novelist to come out of the West – to do it. Larry McMurtry’s Telegraph Days (2006) only brushes past the O.K. Corral as one of Nellie Courtright’s many picaresque adventures. She’s a sort of Jack Crabb (see 24 June) who doesn’t just meet and interact with all the legendary figures of the Old West, but goes to
bed with them too.
What all these versions of the story leave out – whether inflating or deflating – are the economics behind the fight. The cowboys weren’t just thugs raising hell in the town’s saloons; they were ranchers come in to sell their stock and get supplies. The Earps and their like were city people, easterners, Yankee capitalists, congenitally hostile (ever since the Civil War) to the ranchers’ values and way of living. In Tombstone the conflict wasn’t metaphysical; it was political.
27 October
Maxine Ting Ting Hong is born in Stockton, California
1940 She sold her first prose at the age of fifteen. It was called ‘I am an American’, and it appeared in The American Girl, the official Girl Scout magazine. She got $15 for it. ‘I worked out the idea that you don’t have to be white to be an American’, she told Michael Martin of National Public Radio 57 years later, after she had become the cynosure of gender and ethnic studies: Maxine Hong Kingston. ‘But all the time I was aware that both my parents were illegals and I had to be very careful to write in such a way that I can insist on our being American without giving away their illegal status.’1
Status is woven into better recognised themes of gender, migration and the succession of generations in Kingston’s first and best-known book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1977). The ‘ghosts’ are figures in Chinese folk tales, but also the white Americans around them, whose habits and manners the older Chinese find so difficult to fathom.
A challenging read, The Woman Warrior rewards close attention. Composed of five sections, written in styles ranging from ‘magical’ to conventional realism, it explores aspects of ethnicity, gender and the relationship between generations through the recurrent image of voice. ‘No Name Woman’ and ‘White Tigers’ are ‘talking stories’ – about a disgraced aunt of whom the family never speaks and the mythical woman warrior of the title. By taking on the personae of both characters, Kingston’s narrator restores the aunt’s voice and internalises the heroic role of the female avenger.
The last three parts develop the relationship between the narrator and her mother. ‘Shaman’ shows that her mother has had her own cultural struggles, fighting village convention in training as a midwife. From a limited-consciousness point of view (because she still knows very little of her mother’s past) the narrator in ‘At the Western Palace’ explores the stresses and dislocations of emigration. In ‘A song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’ the narrative breaks out into the American demotic, importing a modern scepticism along with the accent.
Now the issue of voice becomes explicit, even literal. Her mother tells her that she cut her fraenum (the little vertical membrane under the tongue) when she was a child.
‘Why did you do that to me, Mother?’
‘I told you.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language …’
‘But isn’t “a ready tongue an evil”?’
‘Things are different in this ghost country.’
Now the narrator is caught on the knife-edge between the two communities. ‘Sometimes I hated the ghosts [Americans] for not letting us talk’, she comments; ‘sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese’. As for Chinese ‘tradition’, ‘even the good things are unspeakable’. Keeping silent about their culture:
the adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask. You get no warning that you shouldn’t wear a white ribbon in your hair until they hit you … They hit you if you wave brooms around or drop chopsticks or drum them.
It’s a brilliant demystification, leaving both narrator and reader mystified. ‘I don’t see how they kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe everyone makes it up as they go along.’
1 ‘Maxine Hong Kingston Takes Pride in Mixed Heritage’, Tell me More, National Public Radio, 4 july 2007.
28 October
Henry David Thoreau reclaims from his publisher 703 unsold copies of his first book, out of 1,000 printed
1853 The book, printed at the author’s own expense by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s publisher in 1849 after failing to interest a commercial publisher, was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. ‘I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes’, Thoreau noted ruefully in his journal after taking the books home, ‘over seven hundred of which I wrote myself’.
A Week purported to be a travel journal of a trip that Henry made in 1839 with his brother John, in a sort of camping dinghy. From their home in Concord, Massachusetts, they sailed and paddled down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, thence up the Merrimack River to Concord, New Hampshire – and back.
Only three years later John died of lockjaw at the age of 27. Henry, devastated, decided to retire for a spell to a piece of land that Emerson owned on Walden Pond, just a mile and a half from Concord. There he built a hut out of surplus lumber and lived – on and off – for two years (see also 23 July).
While there, Thoreau set about completing his loving tribute to his brother. The problem with A Week is that it really had very little to say of John, or their relationship – and not even much about the particulars of the river trip. Or rather, a concrete observation, like ‘We passed a large and densely wooded island this forenoon’, would shift gears to a slightly whimsical abstraction – ‘An island always pleases my imagination, even the smallest, as a small continent and integral portion of the globe’ – after which he moves the reader on to Pindar’s account of the island of Thera, and how the sun god Helios felt when he first looked down on Rhodes – all embellished by eighteen lines of poetry. Learned? You bet. But no one could wish it longer.
As he wrote A Week at Walden, Thoreau continued to keep his journal. Over time, what emerged was his masterpiece, Walden or, Life in the Woods (1854) – equally meditative as A Week, equally allusive, and still quoting the ancients, but this time more within the gravity of the natural world around him. The sight of a striped snake, still in its ‘torpid state’ in the March cold, tempts him to a very New-England moralisation (see 15 August):
It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition, but if they could feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.
But that’s not the end of the snake, as it would be in a conventional sermon. Instead Thoreau returns to the concrete scene:
I had previously seen the snakes in frosty mornings in my path with portions of their bodies numb and inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the first of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.
That movement in and out between the specific and general, that apparently haphazard plotting by the motions of nature rather than the preacher’s agenda, is what sets Walden apart from A Week. At Walden Pond Thoreau wrote one bad book while learning how to write a much better one.
29 October
Sir Walter Raleigh’s sharp medicine
1618 No Renaissance man was more dazzling in his accomplishments than Sir Walter Raleigh (the name, incidentally, is spelled 70 different ways in documents of the time). Aged fifteen he was already a military hero, fighting for the French Huguenots. In his early thirties he was a renowned explorer of the New World. Now Sir Walter, when the Spanish Armada sailed, as commander of the Ark Royal he led the successful maritime defence of his country in 1588 and was rewarded with a huge slice of Irish real estate. Legends accumulated around him (most famously, and apocryphally, that of him throwing down his velvet cloak to spare the footwear of his monarch, Elizabeth I, from a spot or two of mud).
Less salubrious anecdotes also attached themselves to him, as that recorded by Aubrey in his Brief Lives:
He [Sir Walter Raleigh] loved a wench well; and one time getting one of the Maids
of Honour up against a tree in a wood (’twas his first lady) who seemed at first boarding to be something fearful of her honour, and modest, she cried, ‘Sweet Sir Walter, what do you me ask? Will you undo me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter!’
At last, as the danger and the pleasure at the same time grew higher, she cried in the ecstasy, ‘Swisser Swatter, Swisser Swatter!’ She proved with child, and I doubt not but this hero took care of them both, as also that the product was more than an ordinary mortal.
On the death of Elizabeth and with the accession of James I, Raleigh was accused of rebellion and sentenced to be executed as a traitor. It was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower, during which period (some twelve years) he wrote his History of the World, and some distinguished poetry. He was released in 1616, to undertake a voyage to discover the fabled Eldorado in South America. He failed, unsurprisingly, and on his return to England, under Spanish pressure (the country was indignant at his bloody incursion into their colonial territory) the death sentence was re-invoked. He was executed on 29 October 1618. As a courtesy, the former punishment of disembowelling was commuted. As a further courtesy, he was allowed to feel the axe that would remove his head. He commented, wryly: ‘This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all diseases and miseries.’ The removed head was embalmed and preserved by his wife for the 29 years of life that remained to her. It never, supposedly, left her presence.
30 October
The abolitionist and suffragette Amy Post authenticates Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and vouches for its author, Linda Brent
1859 Amy Post’s comments, so dated, appear as an appendix to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), by ‘Linda Brent’. In it, Post writes that ‘Brent’ had lived in her house, during which time ‘her deportment indicated remarkable delicacy of feeling and purity of thought’, even though the life events she had to relate were horrific. Though ‘she passed through a baptism of suffering, even in recounting her trials to me’, Post urged her to write about her life, and publish the result.
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