Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  As Sheila Rowbotham recounts (in her 2009 biography of Carpenter), Merrill’s touch triggered a creative release in the novelist. On 13 December 1913 he commemorated it in his diary, with the jubilant entry: ‘Forward rather than back, Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter! Edward Carpenter!’

  One result of this new forward-looking mood was his Bildungsroman about growing up gay in Edwardian England, Maurice. The novel transcribes much of Forster’s experiences growing up, and at Cambridge. As obviously, Maurice’s proletarian lover, Alec Scudder, is based on George Merrill.

  Maurice was completed at high speed and the manuscript sent to Carpenter in August 1914 (when, as history records, even more important things were happening). It could not, of course, be published. Forster tinkered with the manuscript over the subsequent years. He had particular problems with the conclusion (that published, in which Maurice and Scudder live together in a happy ever after, is extravagantly optimistic, a mere two decades after the martyrisation of Oscar Wilde).

  Maurice was not published until after Forster’s death in 1971, after the 1960 acquittal of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (in which Forster was a witness for the defence) had made its theme inoffensive and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act had made the love it describes between consenting males legal.

  In a 1960 postscript, inscribed on the cover of the manuscript, Forster noted that the novel was now ‘publishable’ but asked himself, quizzically, whether it was ‘worth it’? It had ‘dated’ sadly over the years. The world had moved on far beyond any relevance it might have. Maurice belonged, he thought, ‘to an England where it was still possible to get lost. It belongs to the last moment of the greenwood’ – the England, that is, destroyed in the First and Second World Wars.

  Maurice finally saw print in the authoritative ‘Abinger Edition’ of Forster’s work, and a successful film was made by Merchant and Ivory in 1987.

  14 December

  Two giants of modernism meet

  1956 The two great modernists, Stravinsky and Eliot, first met, face to face, on this day in the winter of 1956. The influence of the composer’s Le sacre du printemps (1911) on The Waste Land (1922) was frankly acknowledged by the poet, who hailed Stravinsky, in 1921, as ‘our lion’ – ‘our’ referring to their international artistic movement.

  The first personal encounter of these by now grizzled lions was arranged by their mutual friend, Stephen Spender – still something of a literary cub. A nervous Spender drove Eliot to the Savoy Hotel, where the composer was staying. Their subsequent conversation was conducted ‘mostly in English, though some of it was in French, which Eliot talks slowly and meticulously’.

  As Spender recorded, the opening topic was unlikely:

  Stravinsky complained that … he suffered from an excessive thickness of the blood. Moving his hands as though moulding an extremely rich substance, he said: ‘[The doctors] said my blood is so thick, so rich, so very rich, it might turn into crystals, like rubies, if I didn’t drink beer, plenty of beer, and occasionally whisky, all the time’ … Eliot said meditatively: ‘I remember in Heidelberg when I was in Heidelberg when I was young I went to a doctor and was examined and the doctor said: “Mr Eliot, you have the thinnest blood I’ve ever tested.”’

  This strangely allegorical conversation, although Spender does not mention it, was precipitated by an opening inquiry by Eliot about the composer’s health. Stravinsky had suffered a cerebral aneurism in Berlin, in October. He was still disabled and had to delegate the conducting of a new composition in St Martin-in-the-Fields church, on 11 December, to his long-time companion Robert Craft.

  Despite his illness, and although being the older man by six years, Stravinsky outlived Eliot by six years. Perhaps the beer and whisky (which, following medical advice, he consumed in heroic quantities) helped. Following their meeting he composed a brief a capella setting of lines from ‘Little Gidding’ (‘the dove descending breaks the air’) as a gift to the poet. On Eliot’s death, on 4 January 1965, he did a more substantial ‘Introitus: T.S. Eliot In Memoriam’. Ever sly, Eliot may have been making a self-depreciating joke about his thin blood. It was emphysema that killed him.

  15 December

  Fanny Hill seized – still banned

  1964 John Cleland – the first recorded author of a work indicted as ‘obscene’ – described his pioneer work as: ‘A Book I disdain to defend, and wish, from my Soul, buried and forgot.’ No novel has been less so than Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

  Cleland (1709–89) was well born. His father, a former army officer of distinguished Scottish lineage, later a civil servant, was a friend of Alexander Pope’s. His mother’s family were wealthy anglicised Dutch Jewish merchants, and well in with high literary and political circles.

  Young John spent two years at Westminster School before being expelled. Offence unknown; delinquency suspected. There may well have been some disgrace. Aged 21 he was packed off to India to serve for twelve years as a soldier, and later an administrator, in the East India Company. He returned to London in 1741, as his father was dying. In 1748 he was arrested for debts of almost £1,000, and spent a year in the Fleet Prison.

  Debt drives the pen. In jail he wrote Fanny Hill. The first volume was published in November 1748, the second in February 1749. The author was paid £20 for the copyright. Legend has it that the publisher, Fenton, gained as much as £10,000 by the bargain. Who enabled Cleland’s release from prison is not known.

  The composition of Fanny Hill behind bars, as a kind of extended masturbation fantasy by a man denied his doxies, is a pretty anecdote. It may be prettier than true. Twenty years later, Cleland boasted to James Boswell that he had actually written the work in Bombay, in his twenties, as a wager to prove that one could write erotica without ever using a single item of foul language.

  In late 1749 Cleland was arrested along with his publisher and charged with ‘corrupting the King’s subjects’ with his novel. In court, Cleland, ‘from my soul’ wished the work ‘buried and forgot’. He got off.

  According to his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Cleland was awarded a pension of £100 a year from the public purse, on condition that he write no more corrupting works. This is unlikely – although he may well have received financial assistance from his friends in high places.

  Cleland was, for the remainder of his life, a productive, unpornographic, and consistently unsuccessful Grub Street author. Cleland grew quarrelsome in later life, falling out with friends. He lived by himself, never married, and had the reputation of being a ‘Sodomite’.

  Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, as published in 1748–9, takes the form of a confessional letter describing the heroine’s ‘progress’, and was clearly designed to contradict the joyless moralism of Hogarth’s ‘The Harlot’s Progress’ (1732) and to show up the timidly parsimonious reference to sex in Defoe’s ‘whore’s autobiography’ Moll Flanders (1722), both of which aims Fanny Hill achieves triumphantly. The name is a somewhat laboured pun on ‘Veneris mons’ – Venus’s hill. It is not clear whether ‘fanny’ was, then as now, street slang for ‘quim’.

  Following the acquittal of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, the paperback publisher, Mayflower, announced an above-ground edition of Fanny Hill in November 1963. Copies were seized from a London retailer (a joke shop in Tottenham Court Road) on 15 December. It went on trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in February 1964. Cannily, it was the West End retailer – not the publisher (as in the Lady Chatterley case) – who was hauled into the dock. The book was deemed (locally) offensive and the seized stock ordered destroyed.

  Oddly, no successful defence of Fanny Hill has ever been mounted. It crept back into print, and now has a learnedly annotated existence as one of the Oxford World’s Classics. A BBC TV version, adapted by Andrew Davies in 2007, attracted an audience of seven million. It remains, technically, a banned book: at least, in Tottenham Court Road and environs.

  16 December

/>   A literal hatchet job

  1943 One of the stranger coincidences of the First World War is Erich Maria Remark (as he then was) and Adolf Hitler serving alongside each other in the trenches at the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in July 1917. Some have fantasised that the two men may have rubbed shoulders, unconscious of each other’s identities.

  Remark was badly wounded by a British shell and invalided out. The injuries ended his hoped-for career in music. A week before the end of hostilities, in November 1918, he was returned to the trenches in Belgium where, again, he was serving close to Corporal Adolf Hitler (who, in the intervening months, had won an Iron Cross First Class).

  After the war the two ex-soldiers’ careers went in opposite directions. On his return home, Remark (who was a non-commissioned conscript) was arrested for impersonating a lieutenant, decorated with two Iron Crosses (he was already displaying a talent for fiction – or perhaps, as sympathisers have suggested, he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: ‘shell-shock’).

  Remarque (as he renamed himself) went on to publish in 1929 Im Westen Nichts Neues – All Quiet on the Western Front, routinely voted the best anti-war novel ever. It became an international bestseller after its blockbusting 1933 film tie-in. The story tracks the fortunes of six classmates swept up in the Great War, as narrated by Paul Bäumer. The soldiers reserve their hatred not for the ‘enemy’ but the armchair warriors on the home front. On the day that the Armistice is signed, Paul, realising that he can never readjust to civilian life, walks into no man’s land, and is shot.

  In the same year, 1929, Hitler published his own bestseller, Mein Kampf. His hatred was reserved for the Jews who, he believed, were responsible for Germany’s defeat in 1918. His book was pro-war: fanatically so.

  The Nazis banned Remarque’s detestably ‘pacifist’ novel and, on coming to power in 1933, stripped him of his German citizenship. Remarque, now rich (thanks to his book sales and film adaptation), fled to America where he continued his career as a novelist. He had a passionate affair with a fellow exile, Marlene Dietrich, and later married another Hollywood star, Paulette Goddard. German propaganda suppressed his works, alleging that he was actually a French Jew named ‘Kramer’ (‘Remark’ backwards).

  Unable to lay hands on him, the Nazi party arrested Remarque’s sister, Elfriede Scholz, in 1943, on a trumped-up charge of ‘undermining the war effort’. The judge at the ‘Peoples’ Court’ frankly admitted: ‘Your brother is beyond our reach, but you will not escape us!’ She was sentenced to beheading on 16 December 1943.

  Erich Maria Remarque was sent a bill by the party for the 90 marks executioner’s fee.

  17 December

  Dr Martin Luther King attends the world premiere of Gone with the Wind (in a sense)

  1939 The world premiere of the MGM adaptation of Gone with the Wind was held at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta (the town so memorably burned in Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the David O. Selznick film) on 17 December 1939. ‘The South’ – it was said – would be mortally offended if it were held anywhere else. The New York and Los Angeles opening showings were duly postponed to 19 December.

  The stars and their spouses (Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier), together with the author and a host of film dignitaries, attended a grand reception at the Georgian Terrace Hotel; while, opposite on Peachtree Street, spotlights played over the cinema and the crowds massed to catch a glimpse of their screen idols.

  Guests at the celebration in the hotel were entertained by the allnegro Ebenezer Church Choir, under choir-mistress Alberta Williams King. They were dressed in slave costume and sang negro spirituals. Among the choir was the leader’s son, ten-year-old Martin Luther King, dressed as a handsome little pickaninny.

  Loew’s was a white-only theatre and the choir would not have been able to join the ecstatic audience that night – or any night until 1940, when GWTW (as enthusiasts called it) was shown to segregated audiences.

  Although MGM tempered the unreconstructed elements in Mitchell’s text (Rhett, for example, does not ride with the Klan), it is unlikely that the future leader of the civil rights movement would have found much to entertain him in the film, other than the spirited performance of Butterfly McQueen as Scarlett’s maid, Prissy.

  18 December

  Dryden mugged

  1679 Poet laureateship was a riskier office in the 18th century. The first writer formally to be appointed to the position in 1670, John Dryden, was thought to have had a hand in The Essay on Satire, nominally the sole work of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave (later Duke of Buckingham) – one of Dryden’s principal patrons, and not renowned as a poet of the first class.

  The work, circulated in manuscript (and anonymously), contained smart sarcasms against the Earl of Rochester – the most wicked poet of his age – not for the earl’s wickedness (which would have amused the author of Sodom) but his ‘want of wit’. In the Restoration period such an accusation, between versifiers, was blood libel.

  On the night of 18 December 1679, in Rose Alley (a dank corner off Covent Garden, still to this day used as a convenient public toilet), Dryden was set on by three bullies (one of whom was later identified as ‘Black Will’) and brutally beaten up. It was never decisively proved, although widely suspected, that Rochester organised the assault. It ranks as one of his lesser outrages.

  The ‘Rose Alley Ambuscade’ (uncommemorated to London’s metropolitan shame by any blood-red plaque) has become allegorical of the woes of authorship. The event is annually re-enacted. In 1995 David D. Horowitz founded the ‘Rose Alley Press’ in Seattle, whose list specialises in ‘rhymed and metered poetry, cultural commentary, and an annually updated booklet about writing and publication’.

  19 December

  The first Poor Richard’s Almanack is printed

  1732 Almanacs were popular in colonial America. They offered a calendar, long-term weather predictions and astrological tables for the coming year, along with jokes, puzzles and practical household hints. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he wrote and published for sixteen years, also included aphorisms and proverbs, like ‘He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals’, ‘Wise men learn by others’ harms, fools by their own’, and (inevitably) ‘God helps them that help themselves’.

  In his autobiography, written from 1771 to 1790, over the period straddling the country’s fight for independence, Franklin tried so hard to present himself as a representative American that it’s hard not to read Poor Richard’s Almanack as a uniquely American production. After all, it seems to have suited a democratic readership so well, being practical, written in a demotic style and immensely popular, selling 10,000 copies a year at a time when the literate population of the British colonies in America probably numbered under 625,000.

  But in all respects of literary and publishing history, Poor Richard’s was less original than it has since been seen to be. For one thing, not all the aphorisms were freshly minted; many, by Franklin’s own admission, were gathered from the ‘wisdom of the ages and nations’. As he has often been quoted as saying: ‘Originality is the art of concealing your sources.’

  Poor Richard’s is a parodic almanac; it pokes fun at conventional almanacs, often for satiric purposes. The parodic form goes back almost as far as its ‘straight’ counterpart, to François Rabelais’s Pantagrueline Prognostications (1532), which Franklin knew. Popular English predecessors included Jonathan Swift’s Isaac Bickerstaff’s Predictions (from 1708), and before that, two almanacs from which Franklin took the name of his own: Poor Robin’s (from 1663) and Richard Saunders’ Apollo Anglicanus, or English Apollo (from 1694).

  Frank Palmieri shows that Poor Robin’s, though conservative in its politics (upholding the values of the Restoration, for example), also debunked ‘the pieties generally accepted by the serious almanacs’, and so ‘had an implicitly irreverent and deflating effect on the form and the culture that was at odds with its overt
allegiance’.

  Facing each other across the Atlantic, the satiric almanacs began to diverge in their politics as the 18th century advanced, the British remaining ‘staunchly royalist’ while Poor Richard’s became ‘more radical, Whiggish, and contrarian’. For all that, though, ‘both address the reader as a member of the nation, defining him as an Englishman in one case and an American in the other’.1 Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, two Englishmen of differing political persuasions. For the lesson implicit in Poor Richard’s lack of originality is that Franklin and his readers were not yet thinking of themselves as part of an exceptional, distinct nationality, but as part of a wider British community allowing diverse political viewpoints. This is a perspective often obscured by the ‘American Studies’ industry.

  1 Frank Palmieri, ‘History, nation, and the satirical almanac, 1660–1760’, Criticism, Summer 1998: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n3_v40/ai_21182130/pg_2/?tag=content;col1, passim.

  20 December

  Phileas Fogg arrives on the right day, but does not know it

  1872 Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a novel with a calendar at its narrative heart. The novel’s hero is Phileas Fogg, the incarnation of Anglo-Saxon sang-froid (his surname, however, indicates a lingering Gallic anglophobia – we may admire the rosbifs, but who would want to live there?).