Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Disney’s Bambi (1942) burnished even more hard edges. The original, Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods (1926), traces the life of a deer from childhood to old age as he escapes the threat of hunters and finally learns, when he comes across a dead human body, that his persecutors can turn against themselves, and are not omnipotent. The Nazis burned the book in 1936 as an allegory of anti-Semitism. Salten, whose real name was Siegmund Salzmann, fled to Hollywood, where Disney bought the rights for the knock-down price (measly even in the late 1930s) of $5,000, then set about changing both tone and content.

  Though in the film the hunters still threaten, out goes the grim lesson in man’s fallibility. Bambi gets a chum in the woods, a rabbit called Thumper. The movie ends happily ever after, with Bambi and his sweetheart Faline starting a family, whereas in the book he leaves Faline to manage her fawns, just as his father did his mother. It all comes down to audience. Target just the adults, and you exclude the children. But adjust the approach to the young, and you get both.

  19 November

  After a sound night’s sleep at the Willard Hotel, Washington, DC, Julia Ward Howe wakes early in the dawn with the words of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ in her head

  1861 ‘I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper’, the fervent abolitionist remembered, fearing to use a light ‘lest I should wake the baby’. Then she returned to bed and fell asleep, ‘saying to myself, “I like this better than most things I have written”’.1

  Though she was already a published poet, Howe was right to guess that ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ would eclipse her other work. It came just in the nick of time to galvanise the Union’s moral fervour. Since April of that year America had been embroiled in a civil war, and since July the first Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas, as the victorious South had the right to call it) had made it clear that the war was going to be bloody and prolonged.

  On her way back from visiting an army camp, Howe heard soldiers along the road singing the ballad ‘John Brown’s Body’. Brown was the militant abolitionist who tried to start a slave revolution at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in 1859, and was hanged for his troubles. ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave’, the song went, ‘but his soul goes marching on’. It’s not recorded whether she also heard the soldiers’ favourite pastiche of the ditty, ‘John Brown’s bollocks are a-dangling in the air’, but in any case Howe was persuaded she could find more seemly and patriotic words to the same tune.

  Her version contains six verses, each followed by the chorus ‘Glory, Glory, Halleluja’ thrice, followed by a variant of ‘His truth is marching on’. The God invoked is one of vengeance, not mercy. He is ‘trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored’ and has already ‘loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword’. Here even Jesus, though born ‘in the beauty of the lilies’, is not forgiving, but an incitement to violent sacrifice: ‘As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.’

  Howe’s lyrics really do sound as though they were ‘got twixt sleeping and waking’. It’s grapes that are trampled, not their vintage; Christ was born in a stable in winter, not ‘in the beauty of the lilies’. Maybe their oddity is why they have been such a rich source of American titles, like The Grapes of Wrath (1939; the first edition had the whole anthem printed on its end-papers) and John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), and Martin Luther King, Jr., used ‘Mine eyes have seen the coming’ in numerous speeches.

  1 Quoted in Elaine Showalter, A Jury of her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, London: Virago Press, 2009, p. 134.

  20 November

  Melville and Hawthorne meet for (nearly) the last time, and take a walk in the sand dunes of Southport, Lancashire

  1856 It was only just over six years after they first met on that picnic in the Berkshire Mountains (see 5 August). In return for his campaign biography of President Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne had been awarded the American consulship at Liverpool, then the chief port through which American goods and travellers entered the UK. Seeking a break from his work and family, Melville was on his way to the Holy Land.

  Since their first meeting their literary fortunes had diverged. Contemporary critics actually preferred Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to The Scarlet Letter (1850), and much admired The Blithedale Romance (1852), his satire on an idealistic farming commune. Melville’s monumental Moby-Dick (dedicated to Hawthorne) had appeared in 1851 to mixed reviews, while Pierre (1852), his next novel – and his last conventional one – was a disaster, both critically and financially.

  On first seeing Melville at the Consulate, Hawthorne noted in his journal of 20 November that his old friend looked ‘a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder’, perhaps because he had ‘suffered from constant literary occupation, pursued without much success latterly’. So he invited him to stay for a few days in the family residence at Southport, to get a breath of sea air.

  On a long walk, sitting down ‘in a hollow among the sand hills’, Melville announced ‘that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”’. He seems to have meant this in the metaphysical sense, not referring to his critical reputation, for Hawthorne reports that he had always lacked a ‘definite belief’ and seemed doomed to wander over these deserts of doubt ‘as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting’.

  They did meet just once again, when Melville returned from his voyage and passed through Liverpool on 4 May 1857. But this time Hawthorne’s journal is silent on the occasion. As for Melville’s critical standing, that would have to wait nearly a century to be justly valued.

  21 November

  Jane Welsh Carlyle confronts the taxman on behalf of her husband

  1855 Jane Baillie Welsh wrote her first novel at thirteen. At 25 she married the then unknown essayist, Thomas Carlyle. Her letters have long been admired for their vivacity, warmth and wit, their prose often compared favourably with that of her husband. Their London house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea was the hub of a lively social and intellectual scene – at a rare period in English life when ‘intellectual’ wasn’t used ironically, or as a term of abuse.

  But this anecdote comes not from her letters, but from a journal she kept between October 1855 and the following July. The Tax Commissioners had summoned Carlyle to explain why he had paid no income tax for the past few years. ‘Mr C. said “the voice of honour seemed to call on him to go himself”’, she wrote, ‘but either it did not call loud enough, or he would not listen to that charmer’. In any case he would probably ‘run his head against some post in his impatience’.

  Arriving at ‘a dirty, private-like house only with Tax Office painted on the door’, she was shown into ‘a dim room where three men sat round a large table spread with papers’. The chairman of the panel seemed to be impersonating Rhadamanthus, the judge and prosecutor of the dead in the underworld:

  ‘Ha!’ cried Rhadamanthus … ‘What is this? Why is Mr Carlyle not come himself?’ … ‘I was told … that Mr Carlyle’s personal appearance was not indispensable.’ ‘Huffgh! Huffgh! What does Mr Carlyle mean by saying he has no income from his writings …?’ ‘It means, sir, that in ceasing to write, one ceases to be paid for writing, and Mr Carlyle has published nothing for several years.’ ‘Huffgh! Huffgh! I understand nothing about that.’

  The spirited, articulate Jane finally faced Rhadamanthus down, who, with a good deal of further huffing and puffing, split the difference on the disputed sum. On leaving, her ‘first thought was, what a mercy Carlyle didn’t come himself!’

  22 November

  Norman Mailer, uxoricide

  1960 New Yorkers awoke on Monday morning, 22 November, to read in the New York Times that the city’s most famous novelist might be writing his future works from Sing Sing. He had been arrested a few hours earlier, charged with stabbing his 37-year-old wife Adele in the abdomen, chest and back. She was in critical condition at U
niversity Hospital, having been driven there in a private car.

  It was fascinating stuff, but there was much confusion about what had happened. As the Times reported:

  According to the police of the West 100th Street station, where the 37-year-old writer was being held, Mrs Mailer told physicians at the hospital that she had fallen on glass in her apartment at 250 West 94th Street. The physicians were suspicious and notified the police.

  It had not been a good week for Mailer, as regards the law. He had been arrested a few days before on a disorderly conduct charge after an argument over a $7.60 bill at the Birdland jazz nightclub (he attempted to pay by credit card, illegal where liquor was purchased, and became violent with the waiter).

  When detectives went to question Mrs Mailer, she was reluctant to talk to them, claiming to be too ill. She finally conceded that Norman had stabbed her at a party on Sunday around 5.00am, for ‘no reason that she could offer’.

  He had ‘suddenly walked up to her, looked at her, stabbed her with what she thought was a penknife or clasp knife, and left the apartment’. He returned and drove her to the hospital, some ten hours later. He was arrested when he came to visit her, late on Sunday night. He denied everything and was paroled on Monday morning.

  It all blew over, thanks to Adele’s refusing to press charges (had she done so, the novelist would certainly have served time in prison). Mailer, six times married, kept none of his wives long (although in the other cases his divorce procedures were more orthodox).

  Adele, after separation, went on to pursue a successful career as an alternative healer. She wrote a late-life memoir, in which she recalled her version of the stabbing episode. The weapon in question had been ‘a dirty three-inch penknife’. In those hours in the apartment before she went to hospital he had gone down tearfully on his knees, she recalled, begging her not to prosecute. It would ruin him. Mailer (in imagination, at least) went through with the uxoricide more manfully, in his novel published later in the year, An American Dream. The narrative opens with the hero, Rojack, strangling his wife before proceeding to anally rape her German maid. All in the Mailerian day, one apprehends.

  23 November

  Berger spurns Booker

  1972 For writers other than the austerely Marxist John Berger this would have been an annus mirabilis. His TV series – Ways of Seeing – had revolutionised art history, and how it was taught, doing for the discipline what ‘Theory’ was currently doing for literary criticism (see 21 October). Later in the year, his novel G. won the country’s premier literary prize, the Booker (Booker-McConnell, to give it its full title).

  There were three judges for the prize (now in its third year). The most influential was Dr George Steiner, a very advanced thinker and literary critic. The chair was the sadly decrepit lion of London’s (1940s) literary world, Cyril Connolly: no longer an advanced thinker, constitutionally lazy, and chronically ill. It was Steiner’s authority, everyone assumed, that tilted the choice towards Berger’s extravagantly literary work (submitted by his publisher, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, not himself, as it later became clear). The publisher’s blurb played down the elliptical, enigmatic, epistolary nature of the narrative.

  ‘G.’ is a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet culmination in each of his sexual experiences of all those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1889, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments.

  The award ceremony at the Café Royal (not, as it proved, the ideal location) did not go to anyone’s plan, except Berger’s. His winner’s speech opened with a critique of cash prizes for art and the pernicious (capitalistic) competition they represented:

  Since you have awarded me this prize, you may like to know, briefly, what it means to me. The competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful. And in the case of the prize, the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.

  Nevertheless prizes act as a stimulus – not to writers themselves but to publishers, readers and booksellers. And so the basic cultural value of a prize depends upon what it is a stimulus to. To the conformity of the market and the consensus of the average opinion; or to imaginative independence on the part of both reader and writer.

  This was bad, but worse was to come. Berger turned on the sponsors, Booker-McConnell, whose commercial wealth, he contemptuously noted, had largely come from 130 years of cultivating sugar, with indentured black labour, in the West Indies. He would no more accept their laurels than a handout from Simon Legree (the vicious slave-owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Half the £5,000 award he would donate to the Black Panthers (alas, their British chapter no longer existed: but, as they say about gifts, it’s the thought that counts).

  The evening was a disaster. Not least because G. went on to be a flop in the bookshops. The reading public did not share Steiner’s enthusiasm for fiction they found baffling. The events of 23 November led to material changes in the way the prize was subsequently run. The panels were expanded to five – with a majority of lay (and, occasionally, ‘celebrity’) judges. The apparatus, paradoxically, increasingly conformed to Berger’s stinging remark about ‘stimuli’ to book sales and the welfare of the British book trade.

  Berger himself left Britain for good eighteen months later, to live in a village in the French Alps, and write a novel on the plight of foreign migrant workers.

  24 November

  James Boswell conquers in armour

  1762 Boswell records in his London Journal for 24 November a lusty adventure of the previous evening:

  I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeal. I gave her a shilling, and had command enough of myself to go without touching her. I afterwards trembled at the danger I escaped.

  By ‘danger’, of course, Boswell means venereal disease. No member, whatever its size, could hold out against the clap in those pre-antibiotic times. What, however, was the ‘armour’ that the whore neglected to carry with her? Rubber condoms would not be available for a century and galvanised rubber condoms for two centuries. The condoms that Boswell would have used were made of washable sheep-gut. One, long retired from battle, is on display at the Johnson House in London. It was fastened at the top by tape, to prevent mid-coitus slippage.

  These contraceptive sacks dried out between use and needed to be moistened. Boswell elsewhere in his journal recalls dipping his ‘machine’ (as they were called) in the (filthy) water of the lake in St James’s Park before dipping his wick with another lady of the London night.

  25 November

  Yukio Mishima’s good career move

  1970 Mishima (birth name ‘Kimitake Hiraoka’) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He suffered, while under the custody of a relative, childhood disciplines that verged on the sadistic and that are plausibly credited with the morbid obsessions of his later life.

  He had the education and military indoctrination typical of a young Japanese male of his upper class in the nationalist-imperialistic 1930s. But, while absorbing samurai codes he was also fascinated by the writings of European ‘decadents’, such as Wilde and Rilke. His sexuality was ambiguous and his narcissism pronounced from his earliest years. He published his first book in 1944, and adopted the pen name by
which he was later famous (it was initially a nickname given him by schoolmates). He was obliged to write in secret – being forbidden by his father to follow such an effeminate career.

  Mishima was called up for military service in the final desperate years of the war, when boys were being recruited. He dodged the draft by faking TB (he had a bad cold at the time of the medical). He went on to graduate from university in 1947 and entered the civil service. After a year he resigned and devoted himself thereafter to literature.

  Fame, in Japan, came with Confessions of a Mask (1948), in which Mishima explored the delicate subterfuges required to be homosexual in a homophobic society such as Japan’s. He was, as his career progressed, regarded as the country’s strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize (in fact it went in 1968 to his mentor, the novelist Yasunari Kawabata).

  A flamboyant figure, dedicated to body-building, Mishima appeared in films and modelled. In the last decade of his life he became increasingly obsessed with bushido codes and ultra-nationalism (at a period of general westernisation in his country). He formed a martial cult around himself, the Tatenokai (Shield Society), fanatically dedicated to the imperial traditions of ancient Japan.

  On 25 November 1970, Mishima and four of his followers invaded a military camp in Tokyo, taking its commander hostage. He apparently aimed to trigger a coup d’état, although he may also have intended self-immolation on the world stage.

  After an address to the soldiers below from the camp balcony (who jeered), Mishima retired to commit the act of seppuku – self-disembowelling – curtailed by beheading by one of his followers (the designated attendant botched the job, horribly).