Bunyan was let out of jail in 1672, when Charles II, preparing the ground for toleration of Roman Catholics, issued his Declaration of Religious Indulgence. Under the new law Bunyan was granted one of the first licences allowing non-conformist pastors to preach wherever they could gather a congregation. He built a new meeting-house in Bedford and even set up new congregations.
In March 1675, after Parliament had forced Charles to withdraw the Declaration of Indulgence, Bunyan’s fortunes changed once again for the worse, and the devout preacher found himself back in jail. ‘Maybe this is not so much a prison as an office from which I can reach the world with Christ’s message’, he wrote.
13 November
Kenneth Tynan ejaculates the word ‘fuck’ (‘fuff-fuff-fuff-uck’) on BBC TV: a first – for TV, not Tynan
1965 Asked during the course of a live debate whether he would allow sex to be represented on stage, the theatre critic and producer replied: ‘Well, I think so, certainly. I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word “fuck” would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden. I think that anything which can be printed or said can also be seen.’ Hard to imagine a time when ‘fuck’ could cause such a furore, now that it’s become a commonplace in every ‘reality’ TV show from Big Brother to Come Dine With Me, and a celebrity chef even has a programme named after it. But this was the first time the word had been spoken on British television, and for a time Tynan became the most infamous man in public life – exactly his intention.
The satirical magazine Private Eye’s hilarity was unbounded. Pointing out that Tynan’s stammer had created the first thirteen-syllable four-letter word in history, they lampooned the original debate in their 26 November issue:
Millions of viewers were surprised last night … when in the course of a discussion of the nature of charity between the Lord Chamberlain, the Bishop of Hampstead and dramaturg Kenneth Tynan, Mr Tynan was seen to make a certain gesture involving in no small measure the glans penis.
He then said, ‘In this day and age a quick flash is in no way shocking or offensive. If it has been done in a book, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be brought to life on the screen’.
The dramaturg was as good as his word – as soon as the law allowed. Four and a half years later, after the Theatres Act had abolished the Lord Chamberlain’s power of stage censorship (see 26 September), he produced Oh! Calcutta! This was not (as some bemused subcontinental tourists supposed) about the problems of India’s most overcrowded city. The title punned on the French for ‘Oh what a lovely arse!’ (‘O quel cul t’as!’) ‘Mr Tynan’s Nude Review’ (The Times’s frosty description) gathered together sketches from different hands – some crude, some subtle – mixed up with song and dance. John Lennon, Joe Orton, and Samuel Beckett were among Tynan’s best-known contributors. Lennon’s piece featured a masturbation rite, each member (members dangling) calling out women’s names to stimulate fantasy. Suddenly one interjects ‘Frank Sinatra’. Members droop catastrophically.
Oh! Calcutta! opened at London’s Roundhouse Theatre, a converted railway shed, on 20 July 1970. Since the theatre was Arts Council-supported, feathers were predictably ruffled by ‘state handouts for filth’. Tynan revelled in such controversy and did his utmost to whip up pre-event publicity by having a series of packed ‘previews’ in advance of opening night. The (anonymous) Times staff reporter who attended one such event was typically disapproving:
It will prove of interest to those excited by the prospect of unclothed ladies and gentlemen cavorting in a stuffy former engine shed … it will bore most adults … If it was for this that the battle against the censor was fought and won, then the struggle was barely worth it.
There ensued a fevered correspondence in the paper. Tynan’s contribution to it was sublimely insolent.
Sir,
Lord Drogheda joins several of your other correspondents in ascribing to me the phrase ‘tasteful pornography’. What ever his lordship may have read, I have never used this expression to describe Oh! Calcutta! or anything else. I have a horror of the word ‘tasteful’.
Yours etc.
Kenneth Tynan
14 November
Lawrence’s Rainbow goes up in flames
1915 Wartime, with the emergency powers assumed by the state, invariably brings in censorship. On 30 September 1915, D.H. Lawrence’s fourth novel The Rainbow (the work that posterity generally applauds as his masterpiece) was published. It drew a chorus of disparagement from the London reviewers, as ‘worse than Zola’ and a filthy exhortation to unbridled sexual licence. Obscurely, it was also felt to be unpatriotic (the oblique criticism of the Boer War, in the narrative’s later section, was found fault with on this score). Two reviewers roundly called on the authorities to take action against the publisher, Methuen.
A search warrant was duly procured on 3 November and a thousand warehoused copies were seized. The publishers were prosecuted that same month. None of Lawrence’s literary friends were prepared – such was the vindictive mood of the time – to offer themselves as witnesses for the defence. The pusillanimous publisher offered no defence, merely stating (to avoid a punitive fine) that they ‘regretted having published it’. They piously testified to the court that they ‘wished they had scrutinised the manuscript more carefully’. They did not trouble to inform Lawrence about the prosecution, possibly to protect his feelings – more likely to get the embarrassing affair out of the way with as little publicity as possible. Methuen escaped with a mere ten guineas costs.
On 13 November 1915 the Bow Street magistrate, Sir John Dickinson (under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act), solemnly determined The Rainbow to be ‘a mass of obscenity’ and ordered all copies, in shops, warehouses, and libraries to be seized and burned to protect the British population. Lawrence’s patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell, attempted vainly to have the matter raised in Parliament. The home secretary had more important things to worry about.
The bonfires were stocked on 14 November for incineration the next day. The shameful conflagration was completed, by legal order, within the week. Lawrence and his wife Frieda (née von Richthofen) attempted, unsuccessfully, to get passports and exit visas for America. Lawrence, chronically unhealthy, was called up for medical examination by the War Office in December; a horrific experience vividly recalled in the ‘Nightmare’ section of Kangaroo (see 28 June).
The Lawrences, denied emigration, found refuge in a cottage in Cornwall for the duration of the war, where they were suspected of being spies and ostracised. The Rainbow did not see unexpurgated publication until 1926.
In later life, invoking the suffering of Christ, Lawrence declared: ‘The War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes.’ His battles with the ‘censor morons’ would continue until his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That too was banned.
By a nice coincidence, Kenneth Tynan took the battle to the censor morons of his own day with his epochal ejaculation of ‘fuck’ on the BBC on 13 November 1965. Fifty years to the day of The Rainbow’s prosecution.
15 November
The Scrooby Separatists set off to explore the New World
1620 Once ashore, they ‘espied five or six people with a dog … who were savages’, but they ran away, ‘whistl[ing] the dog after them’. That night they camped out. ‘Some kindled a fire, and others fetched wood, and there held our rendezvous.’ The next morning they ‘saw a deer, and found springs of fresh water … and sat us down and drank our first New England water with as much delight as ever we drunk drink in all our lives’.
These were the Scrooby Separatists, so called because they had come from that village in Nottinghamshire, though by way of a twelve-year sojourn in the Netherlands, and had formed a Puritan church entirely separate from the Church of England. In this they differed from the Congregationalist Puritans who would settle around Boston ten years later, and who kept communion with the C of E, while dissenting from some aspects of its cere
mony and governance.
The settlers’ first encounter with New England is told in Mourt’s Relation, a short account of their first year, published in London in 1622 – less than a year after the last events (including the first Thanksgiving) covered in the narrative. It was a booster’s tract, an attempt to attract further settlement and financial backing for the settlement.
No doubt that’s one reason why, despite the season and their exposure to the wilderness, they manage to make their first steps sound like a delightful adventure, in a land where ‘grew … many fine vines, and [where] fowl and deer haunted’, and where the natives, far from threatening them, had run away, leaving behind curious artefacts, like a ‘basket … round, and narrow at the top … very handsomely and cunningly made’.
Ten years later, when William Bradford re-told the story (see 11 November), the discourse would be aimed not at potential backers in London, but at posterity. The Scrooby Settlers would be promoted to Pilgrim Fathers, and their story nothing less than the founding myth of America.
16 November
Britain’s pioneer lesbian novel is judged obscene
1928 (Marguerite) Radclyffe Hall (1883–1943), author of the first English novel to deal explicitly with lesbianism, was already notorious when The Well of Loneliness came to trial in November 1928. She dressed in an ostentatiously male style, insisted on being addressed as ‘John’, wore a monocle, smoked in public, and made no secret of her sexual preferences.
Hall – who started fiction late, in 1924 – had written four novels before The Well of Loneliness. That immediately previous, Adam’s Breed (1926), was intermittently autobiographical. So too (with a lot of wish-fulfilling romanticism) was The Well of Loneliness – with the difference that Hall took the plunge and made the heroine, ‘Stephen’ Gordon, female.
Stephen is the only child of Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon, who desperately wanted a son. The novel implies that their excessive desire for a male heir has tainted the foetus. Stephen is born with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and the invert’s tendency to neurasthenia.
The Gordons have a magnificent estate, Morton Hall in Worcestershire. Stephen has an idyllic childhood (Hall’s was actually rather pinched, and passed in unlovely places like Bournemouth). She grows up loving horses, cultivating her biceps with dumb-bells, and falling in love with the female servants.
Sir Philip is killed by a falling cedar tree, his last words a desperate attempt to warn his wife about Stephen, who subsequently falls in love with the wife of a local businessman, Angela Crossby. Angela, to save herself, betrays Stephen, who is denounced by the infuriated husband as ‘a sin against creation’. She is cast out by her mother with only a faithful housekeeper, ‘Puddle’, and the fortune her father has thoughtfully left her for just such an emergency.
Stephen becomes a novelist, and resides in Paris with her ‘kind’. On the outbreak of war, Stephen serves in an all-woman ambulance unit. Here she meets the great love of her life, Mary Llewellyn, a sweet, simple girl from the Welsh valleys. In Italy, after the war, they consummate their love (‘that night they were not divided’). Stephen eventually realises that the degenerate life of the lesbian will corrupt her lover, and forces her to leave. The novel ends with the hero(ine) Stephen and her lament: ‘Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence.’
The Well of Loneliness promulgates Havelock Ellis’s (since discredited) view, expressed in Sexual Inversion (1897), that lesbians are males trapped in female bodies. The first edition of the novel was published by Jonathan Cape, with an afterword by Ellis, on 27 July 1928.
On 19 August, the Sunday Express’s editor, James Douglas, attacked the novel (‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid’) and demanded that it be prosecuted. A moral panic ensued, with virtually all the British press joining in. The novel’s publishers, Jonathan Cape, lost their nerve and dispatched stereo plates to Paris, so that The Well of Loneliness could be published there, under the imprint of their subsidiary Pegasus Press.
The home secretary was reassured that no further copies were printed in England. In America, Knopf also withdrew the novel – Alfred Knopf’s wife, Blanche, was influential in the suppression. Despite Cape’s craven unwillingness to offend, imported copies from Paris were seized by HM Customs, and a magistrate’s prosecution ensued in November 1928.
Radclyffe Hall was a Conservative, a Catholic, and at best a mawkishly middlebrow author. Nonetheless, sections of the literary establishment (including Bloomsbury) supported her. Inevitably the book was found to be obscene under the terms of the 1857 (‘tends to deprave and corrupt’) legal criterion, and the distributors fined. The Well of Loneliness remained unpublishable in Britain or America until after the liberating 1959–60 Lady Chatterley trials (see 10 November).
17 November
Sir Walter Raleigh goes on trial for treason
1603 Walter Raleigh probably never laid his cloak down over a muddy puddle so Queen Elizabeth I could walk over dry-shod. It probably wasn’t he who brought tobacco and the potato back from the New World to England. Even so, his actual life was crammed with near-legendary action. In turn soldier, explorer, member of parliament and (unsuccessful) settler of colonies, he was the queen’s favourite – contending with the Earls of Leicester and Essex – until he secretly married one of her ladies-in-waiting and got thrown in the Tower at her majesty’s displeasure. Incurring not wrath but cold revenge from Elizabeth’s successor, he went on trial for treason on this day, suspected of taking part in a plot against the life of James I, but the sentence was commuted.
Less often remembered, or even mentioned, is his writing: his narratives of exploration, his monumental A History of the World (1614) – above all, his verse. In the nearly 700 pages of his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, C.S. Lewis can spare just under two to Raleigh, whom he dismisses as ‘an amateur’ with ‘no style of his own’. He is usually classified as one of the ‘silver’ – or even ‘drab’ – poets. By this they mean that he eschewed the polysyllabic, Latinate diction of the high Renaissance (as in Daniel Drayton’s ‘the almes of thy superfluous prayse’) and also the strenuous ingenuity of Donne and the other metaphysicals.
Raleigh’s style (yes, he did have one) was anti-romantic, deploying an Anglo-Saxon vocabulary to challenge the more optimistic clichés of romantic love. He focused more on love lost than sought or enjoyed, more on the end of life than its prime, more on actual conditions in the countryside than on its pastoral idealisation. His response to Marlowe’s ‘The Shepherd’s Plea’ is typical. Here is Marlowe:
Come live with me, and be my love, …
And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks.
And here is Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’:
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move …
But time drives flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold.
If Raleigh had treated fantasies of New World riches as sceptically as he had literary conventions, he might have died in his bed. As it was, he made not one but two fruitless voyages to Venezuela in search of El Dorado, the golden city. On the second he laid waste to a Spanish settlement on the Orinoco. Buckling under Spanish pressure, James I reinstated the death sentence handed down in 1603.
The condemned man kept his sang froid to the end (see 29 October). The executioner’s axe was ‘a sharp Medicine’, he said, but ‘a Physician for all diseases and miseries’. As he lay ready for the blow, he cried out: ‘Strike, Man, strike!’ So Raleigh died as he lived: bravely, sardonically.
18 November
Walt Disney launches Steamboat Willie
1928 The third to feature Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie was the first Disney cartoon with a soundtrack synchronised to its action. Setting a long precedent for t
he animated cartoon to be shown before the newsreel and main feature, the sound linked to the action favoured music over words, since elaborate dialogue would detract from the slapstick humour.
Mickey is a junior officer on a river steamer, bullied by a bruising cat of a captain. Minnie Mouse comes aboard, with a guitar and the sheet music of ‘Turkey in the Straw’, both of which are swallowed by a goat. No problem. Minnie produces the tune by turning the goat’s tail like the crank of a hurdy-gurdy, while Mickey ‘plays’ (in turn) a row of suckling pigs, the sow’s teats and even a goose as a bagpipe. (Some of this was later cut out on a cruelty-to-animals basis; if you Google it, make sure to watch the eight-minute version.)
In less than a decade Disney had taken a step change in animation, producing ambitious feature-length literary adaptations in full colour. These started with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and by the 21st century had morphed into computer-generated films like Finding Nemo (2004) and WALL-E (2008). With Snow White they could hardly dispense with words, yet the intended audience forced certain simplicities on the originals.
The Brothers Grimm Snow White, with the heroine’s three ‘deaths’ and ‘rebirths’ and the wicked stepmother’s three symbolic gifts of girdle, comb and apple, is a tale of initiation. Central to Snow White’s dilemma is the contrast between her natural mother and stepmother, who is finally punished by being forced to walk in hot shoes to her death. Disney deletes the natural mother, gives the seven dwarfs childlike names and temperaments, invents forest creatures to minister to Snow White, and blunts the moral logic of the tale by having the wicked stepmother killed through a natural accident – a lightning strike – not through human agency.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 52