Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Phileas lays a bet with his fellow Reform Club members that he can – using the latest transport systems (as advertised in the Daily Telegraph) – circumnavigate the globe ‘in eighty days or less; in nineteen hundred and twenty hours, or a hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred minutes’. He will leave England on 2 October, and return on – or before – ‘Saturday the 21st of December 1872’, at a quarter to nine. This narrative idea was supposedly inspired by Thomas Cook, catering for the first generation of world ‘tourists’.

  There follows Verne’s extravagant travelogue of Fogg’s worldwide peregrinations, assisted by his omnicompetent ‘man’, Passepartout (ancestor of Jeeves). Alas, despite heroic efforts, they miss the return deadline of Saturday, 21 December by minutes. Disconsolate, they do not go to the club but slink home.

  The following day (Sunday, as the two men think) – again with minutes only to spare – Passepartout rushes into his master’s mansion in Savile Row. It is, he breathlessly announces, a day earlier than they thought. They have forgotten, in all the excitement of their travels, crossing the date line. The two men scamper the 576 yards to the Reform Club, arriving breathless but just under the wire, as the club clock pendulum beats the 60th second.

  Verne tells his tale with such verve that the reader generously overlooks the unlikelihood of Fogg not looking at his Daily Telegraph, or not noticing the difference between lively Saturday and gloomy Sunday in foggy London Town.

  21 December

  Dostoyevsky’s last night on earth

  1849 Fyodor Dostoyevsky came to literary fame precociously, at the age of 24, with his first novel, Poor Folk (1845). As the title indicates, the work was what contemporary Britons called a ‘social problem novel’, or ‘political fiction’. It was politics that almost ended the young writer’s career before it had properly got going, four years later. The experience – arguably – made him the novelist he became.

  In early 1849, secret police in St Petersburg uncovered an underground socialist cell, ‘the Petrashevsky Group’. Tsar Nicholas I demanded exemplary punishment. The ringleaders, among them Dostoyevsky, were arrested on 23 April, and peremptorily sentenced to death.

  On 22 December 1849, twenty of the Petrashevsky Group were publicly executed, by firing squad, in St Petersburg’s Semenovsky Plaza. Dostoyevsky, stripped to his underclothes and freezing in the sub-zero morning temperature, heard his sentence read out. But before he was blindfolded and led to be bound to the execution post, the event was stopped. An arbitrary amnesty was announced for certain of the convicted. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to four years of penal servitude in Siberia and another four years of service as a soldier, also in Siberia.

  Later that day he wrote to his brother to say: ‘I did not whimper, complain and lose courage. Life, life is everywhere, life is inside us.’ The traumatic event is directly recalled in Notes from the Underground, where the narrator recalls:

  [A] man I met last year … was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offences. About twenty minutes later a reprieve was read out and a milder punishment substituted … he was dying at 27, healthy and strong … he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: ‘What if I didn’t have to die! … I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for.’

  The experience is also clearly evoked in the crisis of Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov finally confronts the consequences of his guilt (like the author, he escapes execution and undergoes exile to a Siberian camp). When the hero resolves to confess, he is described as having ‘a feeling akin to that of a dead man upon suddenly receiving his pardon’.

  It’s hard to think of a more personally painful but artistically rewarding apprenticeship for an author than Dostoyevsky’s trial by fire (and, of course, ‘hold your fire’).

  22 December

  Nathanael West dies

  1940 It has been argued that West (author of Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million) is one of the very greatest writers of his time. Few would dispute that he was one of the worst drivers.

  The Ancient Mariner of 20th-century literature, West’s career had been dogged by bad luck. His first published novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), was still-born when the publisher handling it went down in the post-1929 Crash. Mysteriously, although review copies of Miss Lonelyhearts went out in 1933, and the novel was glowingly reviewed, no copies were delivered to bookshops. A Cool Million (1936) was deemed too depressing by readers in the depths of the Depression. West, who wrote fiction with great difficulty, reckoned in the year before his death that he had made less than $1,000 from his three major novels.

  He had been obliged, like other writers of the time, to indenture himself to Hollywood. He hated the work, but could do it easily. And in the two years leading up to his death he was, at last, on Easy Street, earning up to $500 a week writing scripts for RKO. He married and bought himself a handsome Ford station wagon.

  On the way back from a hunting trip in Mexicali with his wife, Eileen, his liver-coloured pointer bitch, Julie, and a trunk full of dead duck, West was driving along the highway to El Centro. Normally his wife refused to drive with him, regarding him as ‘murderous’ behind the wheel. Many of his friends were similarly disinclined to be Nate’s passenger. He had a bad habit of turning his head to whomever he was talking to – and he talked animatedly.

  Blithely shooting a boulevard turn (at which he should have stopped) onto Route 80, West ploughed into an oncoming Pontiac truck driven (entirely legally) by a farmer. The Wests were killed (the fate of Julie is unrecorded). West was 37 years old.

  It was a season of literary death. Over the winter months of 1940–41 Sherwood Anderson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce died. It is sometimes surmised that West was preoccupied on the fateful afternoon of 22 December by news that his friend, and idol, Scott Fitzgerald had died on the evening of the 21st – news that he had received by telephone.

  23 December

  Scientists at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories first demonstrate the transistor

  1947 Before transistors, the sort of electric currents used in audio systems, radio and television receivers and the like were managed by thermionic valves (or vacuum tubes in American usage). They looked a bit like old-fashioned light bulbs. Depending on the wiring and where the signal was put in, tubes/valves could act as amplifiers or switches or detectors, enlarging the signal or shutting it off, or separating it out from the high-frequency carrier wave needed to send it from broadcaster to receiver. But they used a lot of power, generated a lot of heat, and often blew out – just like light bulbs.

  At the Bell labs, William Shockley and his team found that crystals of silicon or germanium ‘doped’ (grown) with impurities like boron or phosphorus would become semiconductors – that is, materials that neither conducted electrical currents nor insulated against them, but performed something in between these functions. When they sandwiched the semiconductor in between two conducting plates, they found that small variations of current applied to the sandwich ‘filling’ would control large flows across the device as a whole. So the transistor could act as a valve, amplifying current or switching it on and off.

  That’s the simplest model. Transistors soon grew into a bewildering variety of design and function. But their ability either to amplify or switch meant that they could be used in binary computer processors and memory, in place of those banks of valves that used to occupy floor after floor of old mainframe computers – back in the days when ‘mainframe’ was a literal description.

  The final stage was the integrated circuit. Transistors and other components could be assembled, not by soldering but by being layered on to circuit boards, then assembled as microchips so tiny that it takes a microscope to see the connections.

  So what has this got to do with literature? Simply that the microchips underpin the way modern books, newspapers and magazines are written
and produced – and increasingly read. In its impact on literacy, the invention of the transistor may not yet rank alongside that of the printing press, but it’s catching up fast.

  24 December

  Booth Tarkington makes the cover of Time

  1925 Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) is a famous novelist whose actual name is everywhere forgotten. Echoes of his grandiloquent prose (in Orson Welles’s fruity baritone) have – via a classic film adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons – kept his work, if not its author, fresh and alive while contemporaries like Winston Churchill (the other one, the American who wrote novels) – judged greater in their time – have faded utterly.

  Booth Tarkington was Indiana-born (a ‘Hoosier’) and a lifelong booster of the region, particularly his native Indianapolis. It changed during Tarkington’s lifetime from quiet rural town to an industrial powerhouse (this is the background to George Minafer’s ‘comeuppance’, and his family’s decay, in the last scenes of The Magnificent Ambersons). Tarkington’s first novel – not his best, but his most characteristic – was The Gentleman from Indiana (1919). His pedigree was locally ‘magnificent’ – like the Ambersons, the Tarkingtons were among Indianapolis’s ‘top 500’. Booth’s middle name (Newton) honoured an uncle, then governor of California. His father was a lawyer (later a judge).

  Tarkington attended Princeton, where he enjoyed king-of-the-campus success. He was voted most popular man in his 1893 class. A fellow student recalled him as ‘the only Princeton man who had ever been known to play poker (with his left hand), write a story for the Nassau Lit (with his right hand), and lead the singing in a crowded room, performing these three acts simultaneously’. Such ambidexterity rarely makes for academic magnificence. Tarkington did not graduate (although in the years of his fame Princeton would award him two honorary degrees).

  Tarkington tried public life, unsuccessfully. He was, for one term in 1902, an Indiana State Representative in the Indiana government. He married twice. The only child from his marriages died early – nonetheless, the vicissitudes of childhood would be a principal theme in his best-known and bestselling fiction.

  Tarkington had his first bestseller with Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), a ‘no man is a hero to his valet’ spoof on the current American rage for historical fiction. Tarkington had even greater success with his comic epics about the trials of youth. Adolescence was a psycho-genetic category invented in America at this period by G. Stanley Hall. Tarkington popularised it in Penrod (1914). Penrod Schofield – invariably accompanied by his dog Duke; and latterly by his gang, Sam Williams, Maurice Levy, Georgie Bassett, and Herman (the second Jewish and the last black) – is an eleven-year-old rebel against the middle-class values of his Midwest family and community. His little battles are narrated in arch-ironic style by Tarkington.

  Penrod clearly draws on Tom Sawyer and just as clearly inspired Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1922). Addressed principally to adult readers, both depictions of juvenile machismo exude tolerant adult amusement at the barbarism of the young male child in Western civilisation. Penrod inspired the sequels Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929).

  Tarkington continued this bestselling vein with Seventeen (1916). With eighteen-year-olds (and, after 1917, American boys) dying by the hundred thousand in France in 1914–18, Tarkington’s idylls offered escape to a safer, if imaginary, world. Adolescence agonistes of a more tragic kind is portrayed in Georgie Minafer of The Magnificent Ambersons (1923). This novel made up a trilogy with The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923). These socially troubled novels earned Tarkington two Pulitzers and a front page on Time magazine on this day in 1925. Like everyone else, the young Orson Welles read them admiringly.

  Around this period Tarkington was losing his sight, and his later novels – none of which enjoyed the success of the earlier – were dictated. Royalties and film rights (his work adapted smoothly onto the screen) enriched him and allowed him to indulge a taste for English 18th-century painting and fine furniture for his mansion in Indianapolis.

  Tarkington was increasingly right-wing in later years, conceiving a violent distaste for President Roosevelt, the New Deal, and virtually everything that happened after 1929 (not least to his beloved Indianapolis).

  25 December

  Bing Crosby first sings ‘White Christmas’ on his NBC radio show, ‘The Kraft Music Hall’

  1941 With words and music by Irving Berlin, Crosby’s recording of ‘White Christmas’ would go on to be the best-selling single of all time. Originally penned in Beverley Hills, California, in a fit of nostalgia for the old-fashioned winters of the American east coast (‘Where the treetops glisten, / And children listen / To hear sleigh bells in the snow’), the song was soon standing in for home – with nearly unbearable poignancy – for thousands of GIs in Guadalcanal, North Africa and other hot, dangerous places where they didn’t want to be.

  There are at least three stories here. The first is about Berlin himself, who lived to be 101, his career running from the ragtime to the Kennedy eras (he wrote ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and the score for the musical Mr President, which premiered in 1962 with the young president in the audience). He was the Jew who wrote the classic Christmas song; the immigrant who composed the country’s unofficial national anthem, ‘God Bless America’. So the second story is about America.

  The third is about musical comedies, the usual vehicle for Berlin’s songs (even ‘White Christmas’ found its setting a year later in Holiday Inn). Possibly out of a lingering Puritanism, American intellectuals don’t treat musical comedy as seriously as they do the ‘straight’ theatre. And while literature courses will spend hours analysing Donne’s

  Sweetest love, I do not goe,

  For weariness of thee,

  Nor in hope the world can show A fitter Love for me …

  … they will pay scant attention to the lyrics of musical comedies, like Berlin’s own comic context between male and female sharpshooters in Annie Get Your Gun (1944):

  Anything you can be

  I can be greater.

  Sooner or later,

  I’m greater than you.

  No, you’re not. Yes, I am.

  No, you’re not. Yes, I am.

  No, you’re NOT! Yes, I am.

  Yes, I am!

  I can shoot a partridge

  With a single cartridge.

  I can get a sparrow

  With a bow and arrow.

  I can live on bread and cheese.

  And only on that?

  Yes.

  So can a rat!

  The joke lies in how the war of the sexes infantilises the combatants. Or what about Cole Porter’s words to ‘You’re the Top’ in Anything Goes (1934)?

  You’re the top!

  You’re Mahatma Gandhi.

  You’re the top!

  You’re Napoleon Brandy.

  You’re the purple light

  Of a summer night in Spain,

  You’re the National Gallery

  You’re Garbo’s salary,

  You’re cellophane.

  And so on, through 53 other supposed superlatives. It’s inventive (because it could go on for ever); it’s witty (because the references are comically scrambled between high and low commodities of travel and the market). Above all, like hundreds of show-tune lyrics, it’s in the plain style: accessible and memorable. Not as easy as it looks.

  26 December

  Just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt sets the day for Thanksgiving

  1941 Newly plunged into the Second World War, the President of the United States could still take time off to decide when the nation should celebrate its annual day of thanksgiving. This wasn’t the first time that war had turned the thoughts of the country’s leaders in that direction. In the middle of America’s War of Independence the Continental Congress proclaimed Thursday, 18 December to be a day of ‘SOLEMN THANKSGIVING and PRAISE’, and Abraham Lincoln took time off from the Civil War in 1863 to set the day on
the last Thursday in November.

  Roosevelt settled on the penultimate Thursday of November, a month that sometimes stretches to five. His reason, he said, was to add an extra week to the pre-Christmas shopping spree, thus increasing spending and profits in the most serious depression in the country’s history.

  But even that motive tells a story. Whereas in Britain adverts mentioning Christmas begin to dribble out around the middle of September, America keeps its Christmas spending strictly post-Thanksgiving. And Thanksgiving itself is non-commercial: no presents, no decorations (apart from a few paper table favours shaped like pumpkins or Puritans), no hoopla. More even than Christmas, Thanksgiving is the one day in the year when American families, however far apart, try their best to get back together – think Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). More even than the 4th of July, it is America’s national holiday.

  Why? There was nothing very auspiciously national in its beginnings. ‘Our harvest being gotten in’, wrote Plymouth settler Edward Winslow to ‘A loving and old friend’ in the autumn of 1621, ‘our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might … rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.’

  The ‘fowl’ were probably wild turkeys. There is no mention of pumpkins. The ‘fruit of their labors’ amounted to maize or Indian corn and an ‘indifferent’ crop of barley. They invited the natives, too, who after all had shown them how to plant corn by putting a small fish in with each kernel. ‘Many of the Indians [came] amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted.’1

  Ever since then, even as immigrants arrived from southern and central Europe, the Far East, and the country’s Spanish-speaking neighbours to the south, the United States has continued to picture its origins in those steeple-hatted, white English men and women sitting down to celebrate their first harvest. How did so much glamour and prestige come to be attached to this tiny movement of peoples to Massachusetts? Because William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Plantation, told the story of the colony’s settlement so as to re-enact the Israelites’ trek to the Promised Land, the very paradigm of the immigrant experience shared by all (see 11 November).