Pinter’s linguistic plea made less impact than his furious j’accuse against the warmongering leaders of the so-called ‘Free World’.
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.
They weren’t.
8 December
The Saturday Evening Post publishes Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘A Negro Voter Sizes up Taft’
1951 The disconnect between the talent and politics of one of the best African-American writers of the 20th century has posed a puzzle, if not a problem, for her admirers. Senator Robert A. Taft was a principled conservative. He had opposed the New Deal and America’s involvement in the Second World War (at least until Pearl Harbor), and – over Harry Truman’s veto – written and steered through Congress the Taft–Hartley Act banning closed shops and enforcing an 80-day ‘cooling off’ period when an impending strike threatened the national interest. Now he was seeking the Republican nomination for president, which in seven months’ time he would lose narrowly to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Hurston, who had also opposed the New Deal and Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy, and would go on to argue against the de-segregation of southern schools in 1954, saw Taft as the reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson. Liberals may not see it that way, she wrote, but that was because ‘the word “liberal” is now an unstable and devious thing in connotation’ and has come to be associated with ‘a person who desires greater Government control and Federal handouts’.
Was this another case, like John Steinbeck, of the early radical’s political arteries hardening in middle age? After all, Hurston was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, energetically promoting the work of black writers, and in 1938 even went to work for the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project (see 27 July), editing the state guidebook for Florida.
Not necessarily. Things in her youth and training contributed to her conservatism. She grew up in the first all-black town to be incorporated in America, where she could live free of the constraints of white society. Her later education at Barnard College, New York (where she was on a scholarship, the only black in the student body) pointed her increasingly towards anthropology and ethnography. In 1937 she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct ethnographic research in Haiti and Jamaica.
Hurston wrote her greatest work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), while doing that field work, and it shows. It’s not that the characters in the novel talk like Haitians or Jamaicans – they don’t, of course – but that the author’s ear was so trained to register accents and speech rhythms that she could do the sound of southern black dialogue with complete assurance:
‘Wid you heah [says Jody to Janie in Their Eyes], Ah oughtn’t ta hafta do all dat lookin’ and searchin’. Ah done told you time and time agin tuh stick all dem papers on dat nail! All you got tuh do is mind me. How come you can’t do lak Ah tell yuh?’
Apparently confusing this for something out of Uncle Remus, Richard Wright thought it amounted to a ‘quaint’ exhibit put on for a condescending white audience. Other old Harlem Renaissance associates deplored her lack of political subject matter, her apparent indifference to the struggle for black advancement. But Hurston felt secure in her blackness, didn’t feel it needed to be ‘advanced’, and suspected – as Wright himself would come to realise (see 7 May) – that her left-wing friends had been slotting ‘the Negro’, as an undifferentiated bloc, into that gap left by the missing American proletariat so necessary to European communist theory.
Her work forgotten, Hurston died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960. By the mid-1970s a new generation of black novelists began to notice her work – women like Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, who were proving that the African- American experience was not confined to issues of racial and political struggle. Walker’s ‘In Search of Zora Neale Hurston’, published in the March 1975 issue of Ms magazine, brought her work to life again.
9 December
Peanuts gets its first of many outings on television
1965 With A Charlie Brown Christmas, America’s most popular cartoon strip took to the air. Over half of the country’s television sets were tuned to the half-hour cartoon produced and directed by the former Warner Brothers animator Bill Menéndez. The theme was the discovery of the true meaning of Christmas beneath the tinsel, the buying and selling, and the highly organised secular festivities.
Though Snoopy the Beagle enters wholeheartedly into festooning his doghouse as part of a competition for best Christmas decorations, the girls in the story – always the iconoclasts – have already faced down the hypocrisy behind the season’s gift-giving. Lucy van Pelt doesn’t want a ‘lot of stupid toys’ for Christmas; she wants real estate. Sally Brown dictates a letter to Santa asking him to ‘just send money’, preferably in tens and twenties.
It’s left to Sally’s older brother Charlie, always the worrier, to puzzle over the meaning of Christmas, to roll back both the cynicism and the commercialised sentiment. After he buys a tiny tree, the only living thing in a lot featuring plastic and aluminium imitations, the other kids join in the search for authenticity, borrowing from Snoopy’s prize-winning decorations to adorn the vulnerable plant, after Lucy’s brother Linus recites the gospel account of Christ’s birth.
The fact that A Charlie Brown Christmas was itself a species of commercialised sentiment didn’t prevent its winning an Emmy and a Peabody Award for excellence in radio and television – and probably ensured that it would go on being shown and seen as a perennial Christmas favourite. But the real story behind the programme’s success was the enduring popularity of the strip itself, Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, which appeared over half a century in (at its peak) over 2,600 newspapers, read by 3.5 million people in 75 countries.
Peanuts started back in 1950, when American Sunday papers all had their cartoon strips set apart in brightly coloured comic sections. Popular strips included the very different humour of The Captain and the Kids and Li’l Abner, but not all were funny. Some, like Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon, followed detective or adventure plots. The Captain was a comedy of situation, while Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner told a serial story, to be continued the next week.
Peanuts was both comic and serial, which meant that, in the words of Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, it grew into ‘arguably the longest story ever told by one human being’. It also carried the plot into four-panel monochrome strips in the daily papers, which widened its social and economic readership beyond the usual ‘funny pages’ audience.
What made it so popular? Partly the way it reversed expectations. The characters were drawn as children, but their dialogue was adult. Or rather, they interacted as kids but moved into adult concerns. Girls were mean to boys rather than the other way round. They didn’t always succeed – the strip was very un-American in that way, and quite unlike the usual English children’s story too. Charlie Brown managed a Little League baseball team that never won a game – except when for some reason he couldn’t play.
Why did Peanuts endure? Its longevity must have had a lot to do with its running gags: Lucy’s sidewalk booth selling not lemonade – the usual kids’ venture – but psychiatric advice, for 5¢ a throw; Linus’s security blanket; Schroeder playing Beethoven on his toy piano; Snoopy on top of his doghouse, forever fantasising about being a First World War flying ace; Lucy holding a football for Charlie Brown to kick, then pulling it away at the last minute, causing him to cartwheel backwards and land on his head – and Charlie Brown falling for the trick again and again.
10 December
Mi
khail Sholokhov collects his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: how an apparatchik became an unperson
1965 The Nobel for Literature has frequently proved controversial, for which read curious, at best. So many criteria, whether diplomatic, political or whatever, have to be considered along with literary quality that the judges’ choice often diverges from that of posterity.
Among those never awarded the prize were Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, Emile Zola, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges and Norman Mailer. Meanwhile, the winners included Henryk Sienkiewicz, Romain Rolland, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Harry Martinson and Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf.
Is Sholokhov another of those now forgotten literary laureates? Yes, but not because of literary quality. His And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), an epic sweep across Russian life during a time of fundamental change, has often been compared to War and Peace – with some claim to justice.
The book has also been cited repeatedly as a masterpiece of Soviet realism, which isn’t the same kind of praise, of course, but at least meant that he wouldn’t lack for home-grown accolades. As well as the Nobel, Sholokhov won the Stalin Prize in 1941, and was much rewarded by the Stalinist state in other ways. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet, to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party, made an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a Hero of Socialist Labour (twice), and elected Vice President of the Association of Soviet Writers.
As an establishment figure, Sholokhov also seems to have played a dubious role in the country’s cultural struggles. For example, he supported the sentences of seven and five years respectively handed down to dissident writers Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel for ‘anti-Soviet activity’, and approved the persecution of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn himself (Nobel, 1970) in turn accused Sholokhov of plagiarising most of And Quiet Flows the Don. His evidence was circumstantial, but Sholokhov had lost his notes and early drafts, so couldn’t prove his authorship conclusively. In 1984 two Norwegian scholars demonstrated through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely author of the book, and in 1987 the lost notes and drafts – several thousand pages of them – were discovered and authenticated.
But the world didn’t relent: And Quiet Flows the Don has long been out of print. Orlando Figes, in his monumental cultural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance (2002), devotes not one word to Sholokhov.
11 December
Damon Runyon tells it as it is as he takes off for the poker game in the sky
1946 If Damon Runyon is remembered at all, it is primarily as the author of the short story (in fact two of them) later adapted as the movie and stage musical Guys and Dolls.
Runyon (1880–1946), the laureate of Manhattan, was, ironically, born in Manhattan: the difference being that it was Manhattan, Kansas. The Runyons were a newspaper family and, after some service in the Spanish–American War, Damon moved to New York, where he became a sports journalist, specialising in boxing and baseball. His chosen friends – outside the newsroom and the sports arena – were mobsters, bootleggers and what were euphemistically called ‘colourful’ metropolitan types.
In addition to his reportage, Runyon wrote short stories for the papers, centred around characters such as Harry the Horse, Liverlips Louie, the Lemon Drop Kid and Nick the Greek (Runyon was masterfully creative with nicknames – it was he who gave heavyweight champion James J. Braddock the label ‘Cinderella Man’). Runyon’s narratives, invariably comic in tone, were rich in slang and comically romanticised criminality.
Runyon died of throat cancer. The obituaries were instructed to say so. As his son, Damon Runyon Jr., records: ‘As far as I know my father was the first person of note whose death was attributed publicly and bluntly to cancer.’ Runyon Sr. hated the common euphemism ‘lingering illness’.
On 11 December 1946, to the family’s distress (‘a shocking breach of trust’), Runyon’s comrade in the newspaper world, Walter Winchell, could not resist the scoop of releasing – the day after Runyon’s death – his final wishes as to the disposition of his body. He wanted to be cremated, and his ashes thrown from an aeroplane over Manhattan.
It involved the family in vexing disputes with the authorities, who had strict sanitary rules against the dumping of dirt (however distinguished). On 18 December the First World War ace, Eddie Rickenbacker (about whom Runyon had written a book in 1942), arranged for Eastern Airlines, of which he was CEO, to do as Runyon had wished. Rickenbacker himself tipped the ashes from the urn as the plane wheeled around the Statue of Liberty.
Runyon, shortly before he died, said that he when he ‘woke up dead’ he hoped to find himself with a good hand in an infernal poker game.
12 December
Edgar Wallace sees Hollywood and dies
1931 Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born in 1874 on April Fools’ Day, spectacularly illegitimate. He was the child of a touring actress: a second-line performer in a third-rate troupe, Mary Jane ‘Polly’ Richards. A young widow at the time of her son’s conception, she surrendered her virtue at a drunken party to the company’s romantic lead, Richard Horatio Edgar.
Edgar claimed not to remember the encounter. Polly sneaked away to bear her shameful offspring in secret in Greenwich. Barely hours after birth, the boy-child was farmed out to the family of an amenable Billingsgate fishmonger who brought him up as ‘Richard Freeman’.
Smart as paint, young Dick earned an honest penny as a printer’s devil, a newspaper vendor, and – as an early photograph indicates – a villainous-looking milk van boy. He was dismissed from the last position for lifting a few dishonest pennies from the coin bag. Cash was always his great weakness.
Aged eighteen, Edgar enrolled in the army under the name Wallace. Trained in the infantry, he was shipped to South Africa, in 1896, and wangled a transfer into the Medical Corps. It was a cushy berth. In 1899, as the war with the Boers broke out, Wallace (no fool) married a local girl and bought himself out.
By this point Wallace had cultivated contacts in the press. On his return to Britain he took up work with the Daily Mail. In 1905 he produced his first novel, The Four Just Men. The idea was ingenious. Four cosmopolitan vigilantes, of impeccable breeding, set out to overthrow Britain’s xenophobic ‘Aliens Act’ (Wallace was always a champion of the underdog). The narrative pivots on a locked room mystery. The home secretary is warned that unless he liberalises the legislation, he will die. The minister ensconces himself in his Portland Place office, surrounded by guards. He is assassinated. But how?
Wallace, still slaving as a hack and a racing tipster (his preferred occupation), picked a winner in 1911 with his next serious foray into fiction: ‘Sanders of the River’. Before being sacked by Daily Mail owner Lord Northcliffe (furious at the never-ending libel suits his star reporter incited) he had been dispatched to the Belgian Congo – the heart of darkness. He span out of this experience a series of adventure tales, chronicling Mr Commissioner Sanders’ mission to bring ‘civilisation’ to ‘half a million cannibal folk’ with his Maxim machine gun and Houssa storm-troopers.
Wallace came into his own as a mass producer of fiction in 1920. His agent, A.P. Watt, negotiated a sweet deal with the publisher Hodder and Stoughton for what was, effectively, a fiction assembly line. H&S would pay him £250 advance (around the national annual wage at the time for people born in Wallace’s station of life) for any and every title. Wallace rose to the challenge, with 150 novels over the next 25 years. All he needed was his Dictaphone (he hated the labour of actually writing), pyjamas, a freshly brewed pot of tea every half hour (heavily sugared), and his cigarette holder, nearly a foot long, to keep the smoke from his 80-odd cigarettes a day out of his eyes.
He boasted he never walked more than four miles a year (and then only between bookies at the track). He feared draughts and went to extreme measures to protect himself against them. He travelled habitually in a closed Rolls Royce; his windows were kept shut in all but the warmest weather, and he wore two sets o
f underwear.
In financial difficulty, despite his vast income, Wallace accepted Hollywood’s lucre in 1931 and arrived there on 12 December. RKO loved him. A new career, even more splendid, was in prospect. He set to work on a story about a giant ape he had devised, King Kong.
He was never to finish. On 10 February as he waited, impatiently, for the Hollywood starlet who would warm his bed that night, Wallace fell into a terminal diabetic coma (sweet tea did for him – he was teetotal). He left huge debts, and some grieving turf accountants. The bells tolled and flags in Fleet Street were lowered when his body returned. His personal verdict on his life’s achievement was blunt: ‘The good stuff may be all right for posterity. But I’m not writing for posterity.’ King Kong, nonetheless, has found considerable favour with later generations – miniscule as Edgar Wallace’s credits are on the various film versions.
13 December
E.M. Forster finds salvation
1913 The most important event in the personal life of E.M. Forster was his meeting with Edward Carpenter – the early evangelist for gay (or, as he called it, ‘Uranian’) emancipation – in 1913. The 35-year-old Forster discovered Carpenter to be his ‘saviour’. It was, however, another of the ‘Carpenterians’, as Forster later recalled, George Merrill (Carpenter’s lover), who worked the saving miracle on him:
Carpenter … was a socialist who ignored industrialism and a simple-lifer with an independent income and a … believer in the love of comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians. It was this last aspect of him that attracted me in my loneliness. … I approached him … as one approaches a saviour. It must have been on my second or third visit to the shrine that the spark was kindled as he and his comrade George Merrill combined to make a profound impression on me and to touch a creative spring. George Merrill also touched my backside – gently and just above the buttocks. … The sensation was unusual and I still remember it as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts.
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