Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  ‘Linda Brent’ was really Harriet Jacobs, and her story – of repeated sexual harassment by her master, her liaison with another white man, her hiding for seven years above her grandmother’s store-room, and her eventual flight to the North – is the fullest and frankest of all the women’s slave narratives. Her styles range from that of the sentimental novel, to the camera obscura effect of her outlook from her hiding place, to cool irony out of Dickens via Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see 20 March):

  Mrs Flint [her mistress] … was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs, but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash.

  These literary powers made the book’s provenance suspect. How could an unlettered slave write like this? Had it been ghost-written by abolitionists? Or maybe it was an anonymous novel written to mimic a slave story? It wasn’t until 1981 that Jean Fagan Yellin, Jacobs’ biographer with access to all her papers, proved by acute literary detective work that Incidents was indeed the work of Harriet Jacobs.

  31 October

  Brecht, having baffled HUAC, leaves the USA

  1947 Bertolt Brecht gave evidence to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on the morning of 30 October 1947. He was, by definition, un-American. Although he had passed the first stage of the naturalisation process, and had expressed his intention to move to America as early as 1941, he was still a foreigner. He testified as one of the so-called ‘Hollywood 19’ – voluntary witnesses who aimed to oppose the witch-hunt against supposed ‘Reds’ in the American movie industry. They had agreed they would not give a direct answer to the key question: ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’

  Brecht’s connection with Hollywood was slight and he was, as he informed the Committee, a ‘guest’ in the country. He is said to have rehearsed for his appearance with his friend Hermann Budzislawski, in order to give the most evasive and slippery answers. He had been, of course, deeply involved with the communist movement.

  As the Los Angeles Times reported, ‘Brecht spoke with a heavy accent and puffed at a long cigar with easy poise’ (his responses can be sampled at: http://www.archive.org/details/BrechtAndTheHuac).

  The chaotic nature of the proceedings is evident from the following excerpt (‘Stripling’ is the HUAC Chief Investigator Robert E. Stripling):

  Stripling: Uh, Mr Brecht … is it true that you have written a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings?

  Brecht: I am uh written a number of poems, songs, and plays, in the fight against Hitler, and, of course, they can be considered, therefore, as revolutionary, cause, I, of course, was for the overthrow, of that government.

  Unidentified voice: Mr Stripling, we’re not interested in …

  Stripling: Yeah …

  Unidentified voice: … any works that he might have written, uh, going for the overthrow of Germany.

  Stripling: Yes, I …

  Unidentified voice: The government there …

  Stripling: Uh well, from the examination of the works which Mr Brecht has written, particularly in collaboration with Mr Hanns Eisler, uh, he seems to be a person of international importance to the, Communist revolutionary movement. Now Mr Brecht, uh, is it true, do you know whether or not you have written articles, for …

  [Gavel bangs three times]

  Thomas: There’s gonna be another fall here pretty soon so will you boys just, sit down quietly please, while we’re … [murmur from audience] … Go ahead.

  HUAC was totally baffled by their German witness and made no request that he hang around to make them look even more clumsy. Brecht left the country for Europe on an Air France flight on 31 October 1947. He would never return.

  1 November

  W.H. Smith open their first bookstall at Euston station

  1848 The leading British wholesaler and retailer of printed materials, the Smith (‘first with the news’) dynasty began in 1792, when Henry Walton Smith set up as a newsvendor in Grosvenor Street, London. By 1817 the firm was also a leading bookseller and purveyor of news materials (by horse-drawn coach) to the provinces.

  Smith’s grandson W.H. Smith II (nicknamed ‘Old Morality’) originally hoped for a career in the church. It was under him that the firm gained its dominating position as a railway newsvendor and (linked, via station-stall) bookshop chain, selling and lending volumes. Between 1840 and 1870 nearly 15,000 miles of rail track were laid, effectively connecting the nation in a communication network for the first time.

  The first W.H. Smith’s bookstall was opened on the Northwestern Line terminus at Euston, on 1 November 1848. The station was, with its famous Doric Arch, a temple to British world supremacy. Smith’s were given the monopolistic concession (for which they paid rent) on the understanding that they clean up the quality of reading material (‘purify the sources of instruction and entertainment’) for the travelling public. This they did.

  By the 1860s the firm had bookstalls on all the main lines and main stations in the country. Smith’s not only sold fiction from their outlets (notably Routledge’s ‘Railway Library’) but they also went into production of so-called ‘yellowbacks’ (cheap volumes of fiction with illustrated board covers). In 1860 they set up a ‘circulating library’ that enabled subscribers to borrow a book at one station and return it at another.

  Their library activities enlarged when they moved, in the late 19th and early 20th century, into High Street outlets. With the similarly censorious Mudie’s ‘Leviathan’ circulating library in London, W.H. Smith became what the novelist Wilkie Collins called one of the ‘twin tyrants of literature’. Smith’s continued their moralistic line to the late 20th century – banning, for example, the satirical magazine Private Eye (who returned the compliment by labelling their boycotter ‘W.H. Smut’). W.H. Smith’s lending libraries flourished until 1961 when they were finally killed off by the newly energised post-war public libraries.

  2 November

  Spenser’s tomb is dug up

  1938 When Edmund Spenser died on 13 January 1599 he was laid to rest, as the author of the greatest epic in the English language, The Faerie Queene, in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, alongside Geoffrey Chaucer (the first to be so honoured).

  Spenser might well – given the extraordinary amount of achievement he crammed into his 47 years of life – have been entered in the annals of his country as a statesman, colonial governor, and soldier.

  In Ireland, under the leadership of his patron, the Earl of Essex, Spenser proved one of the most efficient (and occasionally brutal) administrators of Elizabeth’s dominion over the restless Celtic colony.

  Insoluble mystery surrounds the circumstances of Spenser’s final days. There had been an outbreak of rebellion in Ireland. Spenser had, since September 1598, occupied the post of Sheriff of Cork. His castle at Kilcolman was sacked the following month, obliging him and his family to take refuge in Cork. In December he left for London, with messages for the Privy Council.

  Arriving in London at the turn of the year, he took up residence in King’s Street and, according to Ben Jonson, died there alone, ‘for lake of bread’, early on a Saturday. It seems strange that a nobleman, on state business – a man with many friends in high places – should have starved to death a few hundred yards from the seat of government.

  Three days later, on 16 January 1599, he was interred in the abbey, the expenses (lead coffins were expensive) being supplied by the Earl of Essex.

  Many poets die poor. But as pauper’s burials go, Spenser’s was glorious. According to the normally reliable historian, Camden (writing in Latin), Spenser had:

  scarcely secured the means of retirement and leisure to write when he was ejected by the rebels (in Ireland), spoiled of his goods, and returned to England in poverty, where he died immediately afterwards, and was interred at Westminster near to Chaucer; his hearse being attended by poets, and mo
urnful elegies, and the pens they wrote them with, being thrown into the grave.

  Legend has identified the poets assembled round his coffin as it was lowered to its resting place; they were the leading playwrights of the time: Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Shakespeare.

  Camden’s account (which did not identify the exact location of the coffin) was tantalising. On 2 November 1938 the Dean of the abbey was persuaded to allow the earth under Spenser’s (notionally) located memorial tablet to be dug up, in the hope of finding, inter alia, that unicorn among literary relics, the holograph manuscript of a Shakespeare work.

  Alas, ‘all that was discovered was a collapsed lead coffin surrounded by dry soil’. In the coffin were some loose, disarranged bones and a skull. The coffin (which had been plundered by grave robbers – presumably immediately after inhumation) was dated by funerary experts at least a hundred years later than 1599. The identification was, plausibly, that of Matthew Prior (who died in 1721).

  The manuscripts, if they are indeed beneath the flags of the abbey, still await a luckier dip – or a more adventurously exhuming Dean.

  3 November

  Boris Pasternak is offered the chance to leave the Soviet Union and refuses

  1958 Russia has a long history of censorship and the persecution of writers – never more so than under the USSR regime. This was the harsh environment in which Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) prosecuted his literary career. By a mixture of cunning, silence (on public matters) and inner exile, Pasternak contrived to produce an enduring masterpiece of Russian literature chronicling the Revolution – this despite the Stalinist purges and the coercion of the Writers’ Union propaganda machine. He was not permitted to collect the Nobel Prize awarded him in 1958 for Dr Zhivago (whose publication in the West had been financed by the CIA). And there was a strong sentiment among diehards in Moscow that he should be expelled for a work so clearly dissident from the party line. In the mild warmth of the so-called ‘thaw’, on this day in 1958, Khrushchev actually offered him the opportunity to leave – without dishonour. Pasternak refused. ‘I am linked to Russia by my birth, my life, and my work … To leave my country would be for me the equivalent of death’, he wrote in a letter to the premier. He died barely a year later. His passing was hardly noticed by the Soviet-controlled press, but thousands attended his funeral at Peredelkino. Over his grave the poet Andrey Voznesensky defiantly recited Pasternak’s banned poem, ‘Hamlet’:

  But the order of the acts is planned,

  The end of the road already revealed.

  Alone among the Pharisees I stand.

  Life is not a stroll across a field.

  4 November

  Anthony Trollope’s mother emigrates to America – temporarily

  1827 Frances Trollope arrived in the United States on this day, not through the usual portals of Boston, New York or Philadelphia but via the Mississippi Delta. She could tell they were approaching their landfall, as she was later to write in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), when ‘the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf’ began to be sullied by the Mississippi’s ‘muddy mass of waters’.

  As they made their way upstream, she ‘never beheld a scene so utterly desolate’, relieved only by huge crocodiles ‘luxuriating in the slime’ and a tree that had been dislodged by a hurricane, ‘with its roots mocking the heavens while the dishonoured branches lash[ed] the tide in idle vengeance’, like ‘the fragment of a world in ruins’. In short, it was the world turned upside down, as the old radical anthem had it, nature’s emblem for the ‘I’m-as-good-as-you’ politics of the young republic.

  But this was written after her disappointing return from her American venture. The New World hadn’t always presented such a vision of chaos. It was to be the way of mending the family’s hopes and fortunes after her husband failed at the bar because of his bad temper. Taking her three youngest children (Anthony, now at school, stayed behind with his father), she made her way to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she decided to open an ‘emporium’ offering the latest European fashions.

  Twenty years on, after canal and railroad connections had brought increasing trade, the investment might have paid off. As it was, the settlement was only eleven years old as a ‘city’ when the Trollopes moved in, and the residents were mostly preoccupied with more practical matters. Disappointed and more or less destitute, Mrs Trollope had one last card to play.

  Returning home by way of the more established cities of the east coast, she turned herself into a tourist, just as other disappointed and failed English emigrants had before her – William Clark, Richard Weston, Francis Wyse, and many others – their sights fixed on the avid home market for books that satirised or otherwise deprecated the upstart offspring that had dared to break away from its maternal roots. Titles like Clark’s The Mania of Emigrating to the United States (1820) set both scene and tone. Domestic Manners of the Americans was Frances Trollope’s own variant of the sub-genre. It sold like hot cakes.

  5 November

  William of Orange arrives in England to take up the offer of the throne, and Dryden loses his job

  1688 Appointed by Charles II, John Dryden was the first official Poet Laureate, and the only one – so far – to be sacked. His pay was a pension of £300 (£34,322 or $55,603 in today’s money), plus one butt of Canary wine per year. A butt is a barrel big enough to drown a man in, as is clear from Richard III. It holds 476 litres, or 210 imperial (252 US) gallons. This was a lot more than later emoluments. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (laureate from 1843–50) got £72 a year in cash and another £27 ‘in lieu of the butt of sack’. Andrew Motion (1999–2009) started on £5,000, but claimed the fortified wine, now refined as 600 bottles of sherry.

  Poets Laureate are a bit like Nobel Prize-winners in literature (see 10 December). With political and literary criteria always so intermixed, official approval has seldom coincided with critical opinion. The poetic standard has ranged from Tennyson and Wordsworth to forgotten nonentities like Henry James Pye (see 21 May) and others whose work even their contemporaries thought worthy only of parody.

  Some live on only in these jokes at their expense. ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them’ (1799), by Robert Southey (1790–1813), has long been displaced by Lewis Carroll’s ‘You are Old, Father William’; and the hapless Alfred Austin (1850–92) didn’t pen the following lines on the illness of Edward VII:

  Across the wires the electric message came,

  He is no better, he is much the same

  … but might as well have, judging from the quality of his other work.

  But the first Poet Laureate was also one of the best. Dryden was an immensely practised versifier, committed to his craft, and not afraid to use his invention and skill to tackle big, public issues, as well as the more private topics of the traditional lyric, as in these words set to Purcell’s music in The Indian Queen (1695), his own late echo of the Petrarchans and the Metaphysicals:

  I attempt from love’s sickness to fly – in vain,

  Since I am myself my own fever,

  Since I am myself my own fever and pain.

  Today Dryden is often remembered for his feud with another poet and playwright, Thomas Shadwell. They were divided by party as well as religion: Shadwell was a Whig and a Protestant, Dryden very much the other thing. The two poets had got along well enough, and even collaborated, but Dryden’s verse satires on populist Whig manoeuvres following the so-called Popish Plot of 1678, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (1681) and ‘The Medal’ (1682), brought Shadwell out in opposition. His ‘The Medal of John Bayes’ (1682) attacked Dryden, not for his politics, but for the quality of his satire:

  He quite defiles the Satyr’s dignity.

  For Libel and true Satyr different be;

  This must have Truth, and Salt, with Modesty.

  Sparing the Persons, this doth tax the Crimes,

  Galls not great Men, but Vices of the Times.

  Of course, all satirists high-mindedly aspired to attack the sin, not the sinner
, but sometimes it was hard to dissect out the two, as Shadwell himself found when he went on to reveal an idle joke Dryden shared with a few friends one lazy afternoon:

  Thou [Dryden] never mak’st, but art a standing Jest;

  Thy Mirth by foolish Bawdy is expresst;

  As —

  Let’s Bugger one another now by G-d.

  (When ask’d how they should spend the Afternoon This was the smart reply of the Heroick Clown.)

  Dryden was too clever to respond with a counter-libel. In fact, he side-stepped lampoon altogether, and went instead for a tone of comic seriousness that has since been styled the mock heroic. ‘MacFlecknoe’ (1682) imagines the Prince of Dullness trying to decide ‘which of his Sons was fit / To Reign, and wage immortal War with Wit’. Before long the obvious choice presents himself:

  S[hadwell] alone my perfect image bears,

  Mature in dullness from his tender years.

  S[hadwell] alone, of all my Sons, is he

  Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.

  The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

  But S[hadwell] never deviates into sense.

  Dryden’s sly inversions of expectation (‘Mature … dullness’ and ‘deviates … sense’) are part of that measured tone that severs the head from the body while leaving it in place. At first, you could mistake the attack for praise.

  Dullness isn’t just being boring; it is the absence of wit. It includes bad political and critical judgement, of course, but it’s also present in the snobbery that considers profanity to be the more serious because uttered ‘in the company of persons of Quality’. Alexander Pope was quick to see the possibilities of the trope. He would create an entire mock epic of dullness, in his monumental The Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1743).