1 Edward Winslow, ‘A Letter Sent From New England to a friend in these parts [i.e. England]’, Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, 1622, Part VI: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/users/deetz/Plymouth/mourt6.html
27 December
Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament
1895 The most prestigious prize in literature has its home not in one of the imperial capitals of the world, but in Stockholm. And, even more ironically, it is funded by the revenue from the world’s most popular explosive.
The story behind the setting up of the Nobel Prizes is legendary. Time magazine (16 October 2000) offers one chatty version. In 1888, Alfred’s brother Ludwig Nobel had died while visiting Cannes:
Alfred, a pacifist who liked to write poetry, had intended his explosive to be used mostly for peaceful purposes and was dismayed that it became so powerful an instrument of war. A French newspaper – thinking it was Alfred and not his brother who had passed on – ran his obituary in 1888 under the cutting headline ‘Le marchand de la mort est mort’ (the merchant of death is dead). With the family name obviously in need of some burnishing, Nobel hit on the idea of his golden prize.
Seven years later, on 27 December 1895, Nobel (who was childless) drew up his last will and testament. In it he decreed that the bulk of his wealth, derived from his deadly invention, should be invested to establish a foundation that should superintend the annual award of monetary prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace (economics came later).
The criterion for science was clear-cut. It should go to whomever was judged to have made ‘the most important discovery’. That for literature was fuzzier. It instructed that the Literature Prize be given ‘to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction’. The epithet ‘ideal’ – which is both moral and aesthetic, and extremely slippery – has been the cause of much controversy over the century the prize has been awarded.
Nobel died less than a year after drawing up his will, in December 1896. When the document was read out to the family it was violently objected to, and legally challenged by two nephews. The King of Sweden, Oskar II, declared the disposition of Nobel’s vast treasure ‘unpatriotic’. It took three years of difficult negotiation to get the literary prize running, under the auspices of the Swedish Academy, in 1901. The first laureate was the French author Sully Prudhomme. It was given, the judges declared, ‘in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect’. Whatever his lofty idealism, Prudhomme, alas, remains one of the less read Nobellists by posterity. In their wisdom, the judges had decided against Leo Tolstoy (as they did in 1902) because of his anarchism and eccentric religious views. The Russian claimed to be glad ‘because it saved me from the painful necessity of dealing in some way with money – generally regarded as very necessary and useful, but which I regard as the source of every kind of evil’.
28 December
The Tay Bridge collapses in a violent storm, dashing a trainload of passengers to their deaths
1879 Two estuaries form barriers to travel along the east coast of Scotland – the Firths of Forth and Tay. Trains from Edinburgh to Dundee and Aberdeen had to cross both, so the early railway companies were keen to bridge them. The Tay Bridge was the first to be built. Of lattice-grid design, resting on cast iron piers, it was – at two and a quarter miles – the longest bridge in the world on its opening in June 1878.
It lasted a year and a half, until one stormy night the combined stresses of load and winds brought the mid-section down with a train on it, killing 75 passengers and crew.
So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Tay Bridge disaster was celebrated or mourned (it’s hard to tell which) by the lines above, from what is commonly considered to be the worst poem in the English language, by William Topaz McGonagall. What makes the poem’s tone so unstable is partly those unruly metrics, with lines varying randomly from eight to thirteen syllables – or as long as it takes them to arrive at those obsessive rhymes. Even in his time and place McGonagall was a popular figure of fun, something of a town treasure, but since then his fame has spread, and he has never been out of print.
By contrast, the disaster was also marked by a much better poem, now almost forgotten. This was ‘Die Brück’ am Tay’, which the German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane managed to get into print just thirteen days after reading of the tragedy.
With scant regard to Scottish priorities, Fontane re-schedules the accident for Christmas Eve in order to underscore the human tragedy. On the north shore the bridge-keeper and his wife scan the south anxiously for a light, the sign that the Edinburgh train is crossing the bridge with their son Johnnie on board, bringing the Christmas tree for the family celebrations.
The point of view then shifts to Johnnie, who laughs to recall all those earlier Christmases when the old ferryboat failed to get him home in time. Granted, a storm is brewing up, but now they have the bridge, and the train, pulled by
Ein fester Kessel, ein doppelter Dampf,
Die bleiben Sieger in solchem Kampf.
Und wie’s auch rast und ringt und rennt,
Wir kriegen es unter, das Element.1
It was not to be. The elements, conjured up by those elemental forces, the three witches from Macbeth, who open and close the poem, bring the pride of Victorian engineering crashing down. ‘“Tand, Tand / Ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand”’, say the weird sisters. ‘“Trash, trash / Is everything built by man’s hand”.’
1 ‘A strong boiler and a double head of steam, / Bound to win such a battle, / And as it races and wrestles and runs, / We’ll beat it down, the element.’
29 December
The destruction of Paternoster Row
1940 Book-burning has huge significance – from the library of Alexandria, through Savonarola and Goebbels to the incineration of The Satanic Verses by enraged Muslims in Bradford.
The biggest book bonfire in England occurred in the early stages of the German Blitz in 1940. Since the introduction of the craft of printing in the 15th century, the heart of the British book trade had been located in the small area around St Paul’s in London – Paternoster Row.
Between the 20th-century wars it was still the centre point, dominated by Longman’s (the oldest surviving commercial firm in the country) and Simpkin and Marshall’s huge wholesale warehouse, which distributed books to all parts of the British isles.
St Paul’s Cathedral survived the Sunday raid (as its predecessor, in the Great Fire of London, had not).
But over a million books went up in flames on that awful night. Seventeen publishers’ premises were totally destroyed. As George Bernard Shaw noted drily: ‘The Germans have done what Constable’s [his publisher] have never succeeded in doing. They have disposed of 86,701 sheets of my work in less than twenty-four hours.’
One of Simpkin and Marshall’s warehousemen recalled his impressions next morning:
I went up on the Monday morning and all the Simpkin Marshall staff were standing in Ludgate Hill, surveying the ruins. We had heard there’d been a heavy raid, and set out not knowing what we would find. But what we saw was indescribable. I had never seen such desolation in my life. Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Land and bordering onto Ludgate Hill was a scene of smouldering ruins, and what had been Simpkin Marshall’s was just a heap of rubble.
Paternoster Row, and its adjoining streets, was now – as one observer put it – ‘the crematory of the City’s book world’.
But it wasn’t. The raid demonstrated the extraordinary resilience of the British book trade (which, amazingly, contrived to export more product in wartime 1941 than it had in peacetime 1939).
Organisationally, the 29 December raid had long-lasting and benign results. No ‘Leviathan’ wholesaler replaced Simpkin and Marshall (only very recently have the Amazon and Barnes & Noble electronic catalogues rivalled its stock range). Instead publishers came to rely on ‘sales reps’, who built up personal connections with bookshops, creating an immensely sensitive feedback mechanism (the British book trade, unlike its American counterpart, has never – until recently – believed in ‘sale or return’, itself a kind of Blitzkrieg technique). The ‘organic’ nature of the British book trade owes much to the sales-rep system.
The other benign effect of the Luftwaffe’s malignity was the diaspora of the book trade to more spacious areas (Harlow in Longman’s case) where it could expand to become a 20th-century industry.
30 December
Betwixt ‘Yol and Nwe Yer’ a green knight rides into King Arthur’s court
c. 1350 The guests at Camelot have just sat down to their dainty dishes served up in such abundance that there is scarcely room for them on the table, when in at the door of the feasting hall there bursts a frightening spectacle, a huge knight dressed all in green, with green skin and hair and riding a green horse. He is looking not for a fight, but for ‘a Christmas gomen [game], / For it is Yol and Nwe Yer [Yule and New Year]’, the season of games.
The game is an odd one. The Green Knight will allow one of the king’s young knights to strike off his head, providing he can return the blow in a year’s time in his own Green Chapel. Gawain, Arthur’s youngest knight, accepting the challenge, severs the head, which the Green Knight picks up again, departing with the reminder not to forget their rendezvous.
A year later, after an arduous journey through woods and wilderness, Gawain comes across the castle of Bertilak de Hautdesert, who tells him the Green Chapel is only two miles away, so he can stay for three days before his fateful encounter. Three times over the three days, as Bertilak goes out hunting, Gawain is tempted by Bertilak’s beautiful wife entering his bedroom and asking for the usual courtly favours. Three times Gawain resists, only a little less so on each occasion. Finally she gives the young knight a green girdle, which she promises will keep him from harm.
Come the meeting at the Green Chapel, and Bertilak reveals that he is none other than the Green Knight. His axe swings three times at Gawain’s neck; only the third blow causes a wound – a slight one. Gawain returns to Camelot, where his fellow knights take to wearing green girdles as light-hearted memorials of his peccadillo.
The 14th-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best-plotted of medieval romances, and one of the most intriguing works of English literature. It poses and doesn’t quite resolve so many tensions: sex and hunting (the word ‘venery’ means both); the exchange of gifts and blows; games and serious combat; chastity and courtly love; even the relative modernity of Middle English against the old alliterative Anglo-Saxon verse. The Knight of the title is a version of the old green man, the pagan god of rebirth at the year’s turning (he even carries a branch of holly – ‘That is greatest in green when greves [groves] are bare’), yet the stress on redemption is certainly Christian. It really does belong between Yule and New Year.
31 December
Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road is published, his classic novel of a doomed marriage in American 1950s suburbia
1961 The career of Richard Yates is one of the great mysteries of 20th-century American literature. His work was acclaimed by, among others, Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Tobias Woolf and Andre Dubus. Revolutionary Road, his first novel, was enthusiastically reviewed and entered as a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award for fiction, alongside Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and (the winner) Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. And Yates wasn’t a one-book wonder, either. In all, he produced seven novels and two collections of short stories. Yet none of them sold over 12,000 in hardback. By his death in 1992, they were out of print, and he was forgotten.
Then, at the turn of the millennium, the novel was reissued, fronted by an admiring and perceptive introduction by Richard Ford, by Vintage in the US (2000) and Methuen in the UK (2001), and the critics fell in love all over again – especially the British. ‘The literary discovery of the year’, enthused popular novelist Nick Hornby. The playwright David Hare handed out copies to anyone who would take them. ‘It is one of the most moving and exact portraits of suburbia in all of American literature’, he said.
The movie rights languished for four decades – then, when the AMC TV series Mad Men was making the world of 1950s commuters smart again, they were bought up by BBC Films. Justin Haythe wrote a meticulous screenplay, and in 2008 Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 1999; The Road to Perdition, 2002) directed his wife Kate Winslet and her old Titanic lover, Leonardo di Caprio, in the lead roles. Suddenly on TV and in the cinema everybody was smoking again – even pregnant women. The soundtracks were electric with the zing and snap of Zippo lighters.
Set in 1955, the novel follows Frank and April Wheeler through the dissolution of their marriage. They live on Revolutionary Road in a decidedly un-revolutionary west Connecticut exurb. He commutes to a dull job writing advertising copy for an adding machine firm, and she waits at home with his dinner ready when he gets back. Tragically, they know the limitations of their neighbours and of their own lifestyle but don’t have the courage or concentration – or frankly, the talent – to escape them. Her dream of getting away to an alternative life in Paris, where she will support them while he sort-of ‘finds himself’ in some vaguely defined career, falls apart when he gets promoted and begins to take his job seriously, and she gets pregnant for the third time.
Through closely observed details of speech and behaviour, much of it comic without being mocking, Yates sucks his readers into this downward vortex, leaving them without comfort – not even the deeper truth of more classical tragedy – just the stark confrontation of failure. ‘It’s his insistence on the blunt reality of failure that drew me to Yates’, Stewart O’Nan has written. ‘In the world I knew … Fortunes didn’t change, they just followed a track into a dead end and left you there. To find a writer who understood that and didn’t gussy it up with tough-guy irony or drown it in sentimental tears was a revelation.’1 But then maybe that very honesty is what limited the book’s appeal in its first incarnation.
1 Stewart O’Nan, ‘The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print’, Boston Review of Books, October/November 1999.
Text acknowledgements
Extract from A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell, published by William Heinemann/Arrow, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Extract from ‘For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration’ from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, published by Jonathan Cape, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Extract from ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’, from Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Extract from Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems, copyright 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.
Extract from The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (1942), edited by Mark Amory, reproduced by permission of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group, London.
Extract from Susan Howe, ‘Hope Atherton’s Wanderings’, from Singularities © 1990 by Susan Howe. Reprinted with permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Extract from Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: The New Biography (Vintage, 1995) reproduced by permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael Holroyd.
Extract from Adrian Mole, The Prost
rate Years by Sue Townsend (Penguin Books, 2009). Copyright Sue Townsend 2009. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd
Extract from Libra by Don Delillo (Viking, 1988). Copyright Don Delillo 1988). Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd
Extract from Selected Poems: Boris Pasternak translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (Allen Lane, 1983). Copyright Peter France, 1983. Forward copyright VAAP, 1983. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd
Extract from ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ by W.H. Auden copyright © 1976, 1991, The Estate of W.H. Auden. Reproduced by permission of The Wylie Agency on behalf of the estate of W.H. Auden
Extract from ‘For the Union Dead’ by Robert Lowell, first published 1965, reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Extract from ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, in Life Studies (1959) by Robert Lowell, reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Extract from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, in Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot, reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Extract from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Extract from ‘Annus Mirabilis’ by Philip Larkin, reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
Extracts from John Updike’s contributions to The New Yorker reproduced by permission of The Wylie Agency, on behalf of the Estate of John Updike
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