Who remembers ‘The Medal of John Bayes’ today? About all we have left of Shadwell’s is that old chestnut of girl-guide outings, ‘Nymphs and shepherds, come away. / In the groves let’s sport and play, / For this is Flora’s holy day’. But who now understands those callow classical references? Who was Flora, anyway, and why was she on holiday?
But royal favour and poetic achievement don’t always coincide. In 1688, when the Protestant monarchs William and Mary were invited to succeed the deposed Catholic James II, Dryden lost his job. And who took his place? Step forward, Thomas Shadwell, who would hold the post until his death in 1692. Or as Dryden himself would put it in another context (his attack on the Earl of Shaftesbury in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’), ‘He had his jest, and they had his Estate’.
6 November
The first (but by no means the last) death of Count Dracula
1897 Bram Stoker’s novel, which along with Frankenstein has inspired more movies than any other work of 19th-century fiction, is narrated as a series of breathless, as-it-happens, journal entries from Jonathan Harker’s first arrival in Transylvania (3 May) to the vampire-count’s decapitation, six months later, on 6 November.
Using Mina Harker’s partially-vampirised, radar-like ability to track the ‘King Vampire’, Dr Van Helsing leads the hunt. Dracula is finally cornered trying to escape, at nightfall, his coffin being carried away in a cart by his faithful band of gypsies, guarded by a pack of wolves, subservient to his will. He must be destroyed before night falls and he regains his awful powers. The last act is described in Mina’s journal entry:
I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well.
As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.
It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.
The American, Quincey Morris, is killed in the fray. Jonathan and Mina (purified from her vampire taint) live happily ever after. Dracula (never was the term ‘undead’ more appropriate) would rise again to suck blood in innumerable sequels. Oddly, Bram Stoker never wrote one.
7 November
F. Scott Fitzgerald writes to his publisher with the definitive title of his new novel. It is to be called Trimalchio in West Egg
1924 You can see a sort of logic behind the title. The new story concerned a wealthy man who loved to give parties. In the Satyricon, the 1st-century Latin work of poetry and prose fiction by Petronius, Trimalchio was a man of self-made riches who loved to show off by throwing lavish feasts featuring such exotic dishes as live birds sewn up in the bellies of roast pigs.
In Fitzgerald’s novel West Egg is the fictional stand-in for Great Neck, a peninsula on Long Island where the new money built their mansions in the 1920s. Its counterpart, East Egg (Manhasset Neck), had already been colonised by old money. The two small communities faced each other across a narrow body of water.
Max Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s (see 20 September), was uneasy with the author’s choice of title. How many potential readers would understand the allusion to the Latin classic? What did ‘West Egg’ mean to someone who hadn’t already read the novel?
Other ideas Fitzgerald came up with at various times included Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires, On the Road to West Egg, The High- Bouncing Lover and – even after he had read the proofs – Under the Red White and Blue. ‘Fatal’ was the editor’s reaction to the last offering. Finally, Fitzgerald would settle for a title he never grew to like, The Great Gatsby.
Like other American novels (Look Homeward, Angel being the most famous), The Great Gatsby benefited from Perkins’s surgery. That evocative last chapter (‘So we beat on, boats against the current …’) came at the beginning in the original manuscript. Fitzgerald had concentrated Gatsby’s biography into a solid, indigestible block. Perkins persuaded him to break it up into segments, to be revealed piece by piece, to make the protagonist more mysterious. He was right about that title too.
8 November
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is published but not publicised
1900 Wisconsin farm girl Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago to find work. On the train she meets Charles Druet, a slick travelling salesman, with whom she eventually moves in after a debilitating bout of factory work. Druet introduces Carrie to George Hurstwood, manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s bar, ‘the finest resort in town’ and a ‘way-up, swell place’, according to Druet.
Before long, impressed by his savoir faire and elegant clothes, Carrie has started an affair with Hurstwood. One night while closing the bar, the manager is tempted by the cash in the safe. He picks it up, but when he tries to return it, finds that the safe door has closed.
He and Carrie have to flee, first to Montreal, then to New York, where Hurstwood takes up various unsatisfactory jobs and Carrie gets increasingly bored and restless. As a successful actress she meets wealthy patrons of the arts, including Robert Ames, a handsome young scholar who lectures her on the futility of material possessions, while having plenty himself. Hurstwood, meanwhile, loses his job, can’t pay his rent, lives on the streets, and finally commits suicide in a flophouse.
As the men in her life fall away, are ruined or worse, Carrie ascends the ranks of fortune, sophistication and success. She isn’t happy, but unlike other fictional fallen heroines – Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dickens’s Lady Deadlock – she at least comes out alive.
Submitted to the prestigious New York publishers Doubleday and Page, the manuscript of Sister Carrie was strongly backed by the firm’s reader, the California naturalist Frank Norris. Walter Page agreed to publish, but when Frank Doubleday got back from a trip to Europe he was much less keen on the project. Rumour has it, though it has never been documented, that it was his wife who found the book especially repugnant.
In the event, the publishers honoured their verbal agreement, came to contract and brought the book out after the author had made a few adjustments to assuage middle-class respectability – but he kept to his chief innovation, that Carrie was the first fallen heroine in the history of the novel whom the author didn’t feel compelled to kill off by having her die of consumption in a graveyard or jump in front of a train.
The first-edition print run of 1,000 copies sold only about half. Doubleday and Page didn’t push the marketing.
9 November
Hitler’s beer hall putsch
1923 Adolf Hitler has rarely been glorified in British or American literature. There is, however, one notable exception – the ‘underground bestseller’, The Turner Diaries.
The novel was written by Dr William Luther Pierce. Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia (KKK territory) in 1933. He was educated at a Texas military academy, and graduated BA from Rice University in 1955. He spent a year at Caltech as a graduate studying physics. At this point he fell in with, and then fell out with, the radical right-wing John Birch Society, whose HQ was just down the road from his lab. He evidently read, with attention, the Birchites’ favourite novel-cum-tract, The Franklin Papers.
Caltech was too demanding – or his political activities too distracting – and Pierce moved on to Colorado, where he acquired a PhD in physics. Now a ‘rocket scientist’ (a breed few and far between among neo-Nazis), he taught at college level for a while, before sacrificing his academic career ‘to devote himself to the service of his people’.
More specifically he entered the service of the ‘American Führer’, George Lincoln Rockwell. When Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce went independent with his ‘National Alliance’, later
‘National Vanguard’ movement, based in Virginia. In his neo-Nazi fastness he ran a publishing business, a radio station, and a clearing house for co-ideologues – spreading his word.
He spread it most effectively as ‘Andrew MacDonald’, under which pen-name Pierce wrote The Turner Diaries (1976). The plot derives, transparently, from Jack London’s ‘Revolutionary Memoir’, The Iron Heel (Pierce impudently claimed that London was ‘a National Socialist before his time’).
The Turner Diaries became what the FBI called the ‘Bible of the Racist Right’. Pierce used the FBI warning as a shoutline on self-published reprints. The diaries are those of Earl Turner, the martyr who crowns a career of race vigilantism with a suicide bombing assault on the ‘Jewish capital’, Washington DC (Tom Clancy wasn’t the first to anticipate 9/11 in fiction, as Pierce indignantly claimed after the outrage). He does so ‘on November 9 – our traditional Day of the Martyrs … in the year 1999, according to the chronology of the Old Era – just 110 years after the birth of the Great One’ (i.e. Hitler).
9 November 1923 was, of course, the day of the ‘Beer Hall Revolution’ when Hitler and his band of stormtroopers marched on the Bavarian War Ministry with the ultimate aim of starting a Nazi revolution in Berlin. They failed ignominiously – but success was to follow.
In The Turner Diaries the heroic American Nazis nuke Tel Aviv as well, and clean up the west coast, their HQ, with ‘the Day of the Rope’. At every intersection in Los Angeles, there dangles a corpse bearing one of two placards: ‘I betrayed my race’ (for traitors) or ‘I defiled my race’ (for women ‘who were married to or living with blacks, with Jews, or other non-white males’). National Vanguard actually created a ‘Day of the Rope’ musical that outdoes ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in surrealist excess.
There were many reprints of The Turner Diaries. Skinheads pored laboriously over its pages, their lips moving as they struggled with the occasional polysyllable such as ‘Hebrew’ or ‘miscegenation’. It sold, over the years, over half a million copies: mainly through non-bookstore outlets.
Famously, Timothy McVeigh (who sold the Diaries, cut-price, at gun shows) had seven strategically highlighted pages of the novel in his getaway car from the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995. The novel was plausibly linked to many other acts of domestic terrorism. Pierce blandly disowned them. It was ‘only a novel’, as Jane Austen would have said.
10 November
Lady Chat goes on sale
1960 The term ‘sea change’ is frequently used but seldom justified. A genuine change of the literary weather (to vary metaphors) occurred in Britain and America in November 1960.
D.H. Lawrence wrote three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the last of which was the freest with the awkwardly-termed ‘four-letter words’. The final draft could not, in 1928, be published in Britain (nor easily printed: printers are notoriously strait-laced and nervous, as the easiest targets for prosecution). Lady Chatterley’s Lover was printed – like other subversively obscene works of literature (notably Ulysses) – offshore, principally in France, where it sold massively over the years.
Various expurgated versions of the novel were published in the English-speaking world. Lawrence, who died in 1930, would have disapproved. His novels ‘bled’, he complained, if they were cut.
Times changed in the late 1950s in the US, with the liberating Roth changes to the law of obscenity and the decline of censorious lobbies such as The Society for the Suppression of Vice. In 1959, after a series of trials, Lawrence’s novel was deemed mailable and publishable. It was not, at that point, covered in the US by copyright protection and there was a flood of pirated versions. At one point, in 1960, the novel was being sold, as a newspaper supplement, on street corners in Boston for 25¢.
In the UK, the home secretary, Roy Jenkins – who complacently declared that ‘the permissive society is the civilised society’ – got into UK law an amended obscenity statute that allowed publication of an ‘offensive’ work if it could be shown to be of literary or social ‘merit’. Bad books could, in the right circumstances, be good books.
Penguin, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Lawrence’s death, brought out a collective seven-volume set of his work – including Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They prudently kept the stock in a warehouse, sending a dozen copies to the director of public prosecutions, daring him to act: which he duly did.
In November 1960 the publishers were tried at the Old Bailey. They mustered an impressive corps of witnesses to testify to the novel’s merit (tactfully, they did not draw the prosecution’s attention to the act of anal rape, late in the narrative, nor had the prosecution read the novel carefully enough themselves to notice it). Among other fatuities on the witness stand, the Bishop of Woolwich averred that the adultery of the gamekeeper and the aristocrat was equivalent to an ‘act of communion’.
By general agreement, the case for censorship was lost by the prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith Jones, instructing the jury, in his opening address
to ask yourselves the question, when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?
He had forgotten it was the 1960s. Or perhaps he never knew. Lady Chat (as she was fondly named) was acquitted in court on 2 November. The novel went on sale on the 10th. By the 11th, as The Times reported, there was not a copy to be found in any bookshop in London.
11 November
The Pilgrim Fathers land in America. Ten years later, William Bradford will turn the event into New England’s founding myth
1620 On this day the Scrooby Separatists, a group of Puritans who had separated from the Church of England, dropped anchor just inside the hook of Cape Cod, offshore of present-day Providence, Massachusetts. Three days later they would begin to explore the New World (see 15 November) before finally settling at Plymouth, and to write up their adventures almost as soon as they lived them.
But though William Bradford may well have written some or all of that earlier account, ten years after the event he was engaged in something much more serious. Up the coast, the Massachusetts Bay colony was beginning to settle the area around Boston. This was a much bigger enterprise than Plymouth’s, better-funded, better-educated, and – being Congregationalist rather than Separatist – better-connected with the London establishment. Would Plymouth’s population and business begin to leak away to the prosperous new colony?
Bradford’s book Of Plymouth Plantation, begun in 1630, was an attempt to establish Plymouth’s primacy – at least in the settlement of Massachusetts, and hence in the history of New England. Whereas in Mourt’s Relation, their contemporary account of exploration, he and his colleagues had been writing for potential backers in England, now he was writing for posterity.
So everything changes. Instead of running away, as they had in the earlier account, the natives are ‘savage barbarians … [who were] readier to fill their [i.e. our] sides with arrows than otherwise’. The weather was ‘sharp and violent, and subject to fierce storms’. Gone are the deer, the vines and the springs of fresh water that so delighted the early explorers; now all is ‘a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men’.
Not only that, but the settlers’ coming was a portent. Though Puritans were not supposed to draw connections between the Bible and their everyday life, Bradford begs an exception. ‘May not and ought not’ their posterity boast that ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity’? This is Deuteronomy 26:7, almost word for word. In other words, the Scrooby Separatists had now become Pilgrim Fathers, the chosen people brought out of captivity in Europe to found the Promised Land.
12 November
John Bunyan is ar
rested for preaching outside the established church. ‘Not so much a prison as an office’
1660 When the monarchy was restored that year, it became illegal once again for a preacher to conduct a divine service outside the ritual of the Anglican Church. Those not in Episcopal orders were forbidden even from preaching.
John Bunyan was an itinerant tinker by trade, and a lay preacher by calling. This meant that he would gather congregations to pray and hear him preach the word of God – by the side of a road, under a tree, or wherever else people wanted to convene.
Just six months after Charles II returned to England, Bunyan was arrested in a village near Bedford as he was about to conduct a service in a private house. He was imprisoned for twelve years. Though he could preach in prison, his quarters were very uncomfortable. He had to sleep on straw; he was held in a room without a chimney. Worst of all, he was separated from his wife and children, for whom he was always anxious. Occasionally the authorities would offer to release him, provided he undertook not to preach. Despite his privations, he always refused these offers.
While in prison Bunyan wrote the most complete spiritual autobiography in English, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and – scholars now think – most of his masterpiece, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Pilgrim’s Progress blends the language of the King James Bible with evangelical theology and English 17th-century vernacular speech and geography to form the greatest Christian allegory of salvation in the language. The book was and remains a bestseller. In Bunyan’s lifetime the first, most substantial part went through eleven editions, and it has never been out of print since.
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