It was, as Gore Vidal cattily pronounced on the death of Truman, ‘a good career move’. Better, in point of fact, than a Nobel would have been.
One response in the West was amusement at the strange ways of the Japanese. Private Eye had a spoof headline, ‘Famous British Novelist Commits Public Suicide By Drinking Himself To Death’, over a picture of Kingsley Amis (who did indeed drink himself to death in 1995).
More significantly, Mishima’s headline-reported suicide provoked a wave of interest in his fiction. Particularly successful in its translated form was his 1963 novel, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, the story of a widow with a son who schemes hideous violence against his prospective stepfather (the sailor of the title). The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea was adapted in 1976 as a film, its setting moved to England, starring Kris Kristofferson.
More successfully, the distinguished director Paul Schrader did a biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, in 1985. It is, Schrader claims, the best film he ever made (judges at the Cannes Festival agreed with him, audiences less so). Mishima remains the only Japanese novelist with high name recognition outside his country – less, alas, for his works than his spectacular death.
26 November
The great(est) storm
1703 ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ begins Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘best-worst’ novel, Paul Clifford (1830). It has inspired (along with the Literary Review’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ award) the most famous spoof prize in Anglo-American fiction for the worst opening paragraph of the year in new fiction.
Few actual dark and stormy nights have, however, been commemorated in fiction. An exception is the ‘Great Storm’ of 1703 – often judged to be the worst ever to hit mainland England. ‘No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it’, wrote Defoe, its most famous chronicler, in The Storm.
Gales had battered Britain from 19 November. Barometer readings had sunk below 870, and were continuing to fall. Trees, even oaks that had stood centuries, were blown over and Defoe himself nearly killed by a falling chimney in London.
The gales reached hurricane force a week later, most devastatingly on the night of the 26th. On that night not just chimneys, but whole houses were destroyed. The newly constructed wooden Eddystone lighthouse was blown away, with not a timber remaining where it had once stood. Westminster Abbey lost its lead roof, lesser churches their spires. Queen Anne and her family were obliged to cower in the cellars of St James’s Palace as the roofs above her royal head collapsed.
Bristol was flooded to a depth of three feet by water driven by the storm from the sea into the city. Some 1,500 sheep, 800 houses and many human lives were lost in the inundation. There was terrible destruction in the country’s shipyards. Defoe claimed to have seen with his own eyes 700 ships wrecked in the upper Thames estuary. Some 1,500 sailors were estimated to have perished. It was a serious loss of men and matériel – Britain was currently engaged abroad in the War of the Spanish Succession.
The queen proclaimed a national ‘day of fast’ on 19 January 1704 to commemorate the loss of life and property sustained by her realm. The Great Storm itself became folkloric and was remembered long after those, like Defoe, who had witnessed it were dead. It figures centrally in W.M. Thackeray’s ‘Queen Anne’ novel, Henry Esmond (1852). It is also the backdrop to the first ten chapters of W.H. Ainsworth’s historical bestseller, Jack Sheppard (1840). Drawing heavily on Defoe, Ainsworth paints a gothic picture of that dreadful night of Friday, 26 November 1703, from the ominous stillness of the eye of the storm to the terrible assault of its full force on London:
During the foregoing occurrences a dead calm prevailed. But as Rowland sprang to the helm … a roar like a volley of ordnance was heard aloft, and the wind again burst its bondage. A moment before, the surface of the stream was black as ink. It was now whitening, hissing, and seething like an enormous cauldron. The blast once more swept over the agitated river: whirled off the sheets of foam, scattered them far and wide in rain-drops, and left the raging torrent blacker than before. The gale had become a hurricane: that hurricane was the most terrible that ever laid waste our city. Destruction everywhere marked its course. Steeples toppled, and towers reeled beneath its fury. Trees were torn up by the roots; many houses were levelled to the ground; others were unroofed; the leads on the churches were ripped off, and ‘shrivelled up like scrolls of parchment.’ Nothing on land or water was spared by the remorseless gale. Most of the vessels lying in the river were driven from their moorings, dashed tumultuously against each other, or blown ashore. All was darkness, horror, confusion, ruin. Men fled from their tottering habitations, and returned to them scared by greater dangers. The end of the world seemed at hand.
27 November
Heine’s credo
1823 Most literary people expire as unmemorably as unliterary people. The death of the poet Heinrich Heine is an exception on two counts.
The first is his last words – the wittiest on record and among the most authentically attested-to. Heine was born in Düsseldorf (then under French occupation) in 1797, a German-speaking Jew. He converted to Lutheranism in 1825, taking on the ultra-German forename ‘Heinrich’ – largely to avoid impediments put in the way of ambitious young intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany. For the same reason he emigrated to France in 1831, spending the next 25 years in Paris. In 1835 his works were banned in Germany, on the grounds of his association with the radical ‘Young Germany’ movement (the forerunner of Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ movement).
Heine died in Paris in 1856. He is buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre, among predominantly Catholic graves. His famous last words similarly allude to the Last Rites: ‘Dieu me pardonnera. C’est son métier.’ (‘God will forgive me, it’s his line of business.’)
A letter that Heine wrote on 27 November 1823 suggests that his religious views were never anything but extremely relaxed:
There is nothing new to tell you, my dear Robert, except that I am still alive and still love you. The last will endure as long as the first, for the duration of my life is very uncertain. Beyond life I promise nothing. With the last breath all is done: joy, love, sorrow, macaroni, the normal theatre, lime-trees, raspberry drops, the power of human relations, gossip, the barking of dogs, champagne.
Born a Jew, converted to Lutheranism, a death-bed flirt with Rome, and a constitutional disbeliever, Heine has been disowned by every one of the nations that might lay claim to him. His books were burned by the Nazis (unaware, presumably, of the fact that he was the author, in Almansor, of the proverb ‘Where Books are Burned, Men are Burned’). Düsseldorf has always been nervous about owning him with commemorative street or place names. In Israel his religious defections are often held against him.
The other aspect of Heine’s death that has provoked speculation is what actually brought him to his ‘last breath’ (breath he employed so wittily). He was a long time dying, and lay on his death-bed (‘the mattress coffin’) for eight years. It was traditionally suspected that the cause of death may have been syphilis, or multiple sclerosis (‘creeping paralysis’). Or it may have been precipitated by his abuse of opium. In 1997, analysis of one of his hairs (left as a souvenir) revealed that it was chronic lead poisoning. How he ingested the toxin is not clear. God only knows.
28 November
Edward Taylor loses his way en route to the town on the Massachusetts frontier where he will spend the rest of his life
1671 They had set out from Cambridge, Massachusetts the day before, ‘not without much apprehension of a tedious and hazardous journey’, as Taylor wrote in his diary, ‘the snow being about Mid-leg deepe, the way unbeaten … over rocks and mountains’. Now, on day two of the 100-mile trek, ‘we lost our way in the snow and woods, which hindered us some 3 or 4 miles: but finding it again by the markt trees, on we went’, until they ‘came in, through mercy, in health, to our Lodgen [lodging]’.
And s
o America’s most gifted and prolific poet until Emily Dickinson came along nearly 200 years later made his arduous winter way to Westfield, a small farming town in the Connecticut River Valley, where he would serve as the community’s pastor and physician until his retirement in 1725, four years before his death.
The decision to go can’t have been easy. Born the son of a Leicestershire yeoman farmer, and grammar school-educated, Taylor may even have matriculated at the English Cambridge before emigrating to New England following the Act of Uniformity of 1662. At Harvard College he entered with advanced status and graduated with distinction, after which he was offered a college fellowship. Yet when the call came from the beleaguered community on the frontier, he saw it as his Christian duty to answer it.
Every three months or so, Taylor’s congregation would celebrate Holy Communion – or what they called the Lord’s Supper. This called for a special sermon and – the night before – a meditation on the text to be preached on. Taylor’s ‘sacrificial meditations’ were in verse, following the model of George Herbert, whose work he had known and loved since his school days. So America’s only metaphysical poet was still writing in the 1720s, when England had moved on into the age of wit and elegance, of Dryden and Shadwell, and verse satire in decasyllabic couplets. There’s something very New England about Taylor’s story.
29 November
President Lyndon B. Johnson sets up the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy
1963 Established just a week after those terrible events in Dallas, headed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and including a former head of the CIA, the Warren Commission took evidence from 552 witnesses and reviewed over 3,100 exhibits. After ten months the report came out in 888 pages. As a character comments in Libra (1988), Don DeLillo’s masterpiece on the plot to kill Kennedy, the Warren report was the book James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.
The report’s findings, that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and without assistance when he shot the president from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, quickly came to be disbelieved. What about the persistent reports that shots had also come from the ‘grassy knoll’ to the right of the motorcade track? How could Oswald have got three shots spot on the target in the documented time, using an old bolt-action rifle? And how convenient that Jack Ruby, with his Mafia connections, should have been allowed into the Dallas police headquarters just two days later, only to draw a revolver and shoot Oswald dead.
To keep him from talking? Who was covering up what? That black underground river of paranoia, so abundant in America, soon boiled to the surface. A whole library of books following the assassination and its aftermath tried to implicate Cuban exiles (following the failure of the Bay of Pigs ‘invasion’), the CIA, the Mafia (in retaliation for the heat being put on the Mob by the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy), J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson, the Russians, even the Israelis.
As for creative writers, the problem was, as Philip Roth had argued only three years earlier, reality in mid-century America was outpacing the imagination of the most ambitious fictioneer. ‘The actuality is constantly outdoing our talents’, he wrote, ‘and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.’1
So Norman Mailer abandoned fiction altogether for his Oswald’s Tale (1995), as he had for The Executioner’s Song (1980), his massive treatment of the Gary Gilmore story (see 17 January). James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) mixes fictional characters and real-life-figures in an intricate plot involving the CIA, the FBI and the Mafia colluding over a six-year period leading up to the assassination.
The best so far has been Libra – like American Tabloid a fact-fiction, but one that deepens in seriousness because it explores paranoia within the context of plots both conspiratorial and fictional. DeLillo’s imaginative hypothesis is that the CIA made the plot to kill Kennedy look as though it came from Cuba – not to succeed but only to push him into declaring all-out war on that country. Coincidence and intention interact to turn the plan lethal, but then it is the nature of plots to run their course, and all plots lead to death.
If that were all it had to say, Libra would be a poor abstraction. Its real strength lies in old-fashioned novelistic attention to detail: what people eat and wear, the contents of their refrigerators and car boots – above all, how they speak. Marguerite, Oswald’s mother, drifts through the novel in fragments of an unstoppable address to an imagined judge (‘I am the mother in the case, your honor’). She’s strong on her dignity:
I was sitting pretty in our American slang, managing Princess Hosiery, when Mr Ekdahl proposed in the car. I made him wait a year and he was a Harvard man.
And on Lee’s care for his mother:
I have a story to tell. He came home with a birdcage that had a stand with a planter. It had ivy in the planter, it had the cage, it had the parakeet, it had a complete set of food for the parakeet. This boy bought gifts for his mother.
DeLillo used the transcripts of the Warren hearings as a contemporary reinvention of the Federal Writers’ Project life histories (see 7 July and 27 July). What he shows is that the true dialogue of the underdog is monologue, because no one cares enough to listen – let alone reply.
1 Philip Roth, ‘Writing American fiction’, in Reading Myself and Others, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.
30 November
A comet blazes, Mark Twain is born. It blazes again at his death
1835 Two days after Samuel L. Clemens’s (i.e. Mark Twain’s) death, a reader wrote to the New York Times to draw the editor’s attention ‘to a peculiar coincidence’.
Mark Twain, born Nov. 30, 1835.
Last perihelion of Halley’s comet, Nov. 10, 1835.
Mark Twain died, April 21, 1910.
Perihelion of Halley’s comet, April 20, 1910.
‘It so appears’, the paper’s correspondent pointed out, ‘that the lifetime of the great humorist was nearly identical (the difference being exactly fifteen days) with the last long “year” of the great comet’.
In fact the coincidence was noted, and actually predicted, by the writer himself, recollecting, doubtless, with some justified self-importance the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘When beggars die, then are no comets seen / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.’
Thirty years before he died, an 1881 interview with Twain was published under the title ‘Mark Twain’s Preparations for a Possible Encounter With the Comet’. In 1909, as his angina worsened, he made the much quoted remark:
I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year [1910], and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together’. Oh, I am looking forward to that.
That Twain came into this world and left it along with Halley’s comet is universally noted as one of the pleasing symmetries of literature. Astrology and literary history rarely concur so neatly.
But is it neat? A spoilsport article by Louis J. Budd, ‘Overbooking Halley’s Comet’ (in the Mark Twain Circular, January 2000), modifies and – arguably – overturns the coincidence of birth, death, and comet. According to Budd, Twain’s Halleyan entrance and exit works ‘only if we arrange the facts loosely’. He goes on:
Astronomers use perihelion as one of the pivotal (no pun) dates of its schedule. That’s when its orbit comes closest to the sun. However, rubberneck fans of the comet date its fly-bys by its visibility without a telescope … In 1835 such visibility began in very late September, peaked on 9 October in England, and faded out before the end of that month (track ‘Comet’ through the precisely indexed London Times). An astronomer in New England calculated that visibility would peak there on 16 October … Perihelion occurred on 15 November, a
nd the next Clemens baby [i.e. Twain] arrived on the 30th.
In 1910 the earliest, dim sighting without telescope was claimed for 29 April. Visibility in New York City – at a commuting distance from Redding, Connecticut [where Twain died] – peaked on 18 May. Twain had died on 21 April, the day after perihelion.
Budd’s observations about observation seem irrefutable. But literary history will always prefer to ‘arrange the facts loosely’.
1 December
American Declaration of Independence (e-text version) proclaimed
1971 Johannes Gutenberg, pioneer of the Western printing press, chose the Bible as his first major text in c. 1455. Some 180 copies were run off and the history of the world changed by an apparatus that, to the untutored eye, looked like a cider press. Copies of the first Gutenberg Bibles sold at 30 florins in Gutenberg’s native Mainz – which restricted circulation to wealthy or institutional purchasers. The Latin text was no more universally readable than the earlier manuscript codex versions, whose layout and script Gutenberg simulated exactly. But the technology was infinitely liberating.
Five hundred and sixteen years after Gutenberg’s Bible, Michael S. Hart launched ‘Project Gutenberg’. At the time, Hart was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. The mainframe computer he had access to was stone-age, technologically, but he managed to wangle virtually unlimited time and space on it.
Hart mobilised a team of volunteers to archive, digitally, the great books of the English language. Until 1990 they were manually keyboarded and mostly transliterated into basic 256-character ASCII computer script (some HTML versions were also available). Optical recognition apparatus made later transcription more efficient.
Love, Sex, Death and Words Page 54