by Phil Mason
They were all sentenced to death by firing squad. On 22 December, the execution was under way – the first three, not including Dostoevsky, had already been tied to pillars in readiness – when a royal reprieve arrived. They were instead despatched to Siberia for four years’ hard labour.
Accounts disagree whether in fact it was simply a mock execution laid on to scare the young minds. Whichever it was, the trauma of the episode had a lasting creative effect on Dostoevsky, which emerged later in his mature novels whose dark themes were commonly built around intense human suffering and despair.
We are left with the conclusion that either way, this narrowly avoided event was pivotal for Dostoevsky. If the execution was real, he was lucky to have escaped; if it was a set-up, it seems that it left on him a vital and lasting impression that guided the best of his writings.
Gravesend in Kent launched the career of one of Russia’s greatest composers and all because a cargo ship had an unplanned delay in the port.
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov was a young midshipman aboard the Russian clipper, the Almaz, which had left St Petersburg in November 1862 on a two-and-a-half year trading cruise across the Atlantic and around the Mediterranean.
The ship had had no plans to come to Britain. It intended to head straight for New York but a couple of days out from St Petersburg the captain decided that the Almaz, which had just had an extensive refit, had not been given large enough masts to make a sufficiently fast crossing of the Atlantic. Opting to have them replaced in England, he sent an order on ahead and put into Gravesend a few days later. The ship and its crew would spend the next four months in the port and for the young Rimsky-Korsakov it was a period which changed his life for ever.
Just 18 years old at the time, Rimsky-Korsakov had recently graduated from the St Petersburg Naval College, enthusiastically hoping to emulate his brother, 22 years his senior, who had fashioned out a brilliant naval career. Although a talented musician he had had no ambitions in that direction.
He had been an accomplished piano player since the age of six, and while at the Naval College revived his piano lessons and through them had come under the sway of one of the great contemporary composers, Balakirev, who encouraged the youngster to compose music of his own.
Under Balakirev’s guidance, Rimsky-Korsakov was attempting to write his first orchestral piece. It was hard going and by early 1862 he just had the slow movement to do. It was then that he graduated from the Naval College and the landmark decision had to be made – to carry on composing or go to sea.
He put to sea. And he might have remained a sailor for the rest of his life had the enforced stop at Gravesend not left him the unbroken four months at this crucial time in his life to devote to finishing his First Symphony.
He posted the last movement back to Balakirev and the great man pronounced it to be the best part of the entire work. Rimsky-Korsakov had composed the entire piece without the aid of a piano, as the ship did not have one. He recalled, however, in his memoirs that he played it once or twice in its entirety at a restaurant in Gravesend, the first audience to hear one of his works.
When the Almaz sailed from the Thames at the end of February 1863, the die was cast for Rimsky-Korsakov. On his return to Russia he took up music full time.
Evelyn Waugh attempted suicide as a 21-year-old, three years before he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was hugely successful and launched a career which lasted 40 years and produced gems such as the comic war novel Scoop and the grand Brideshead Revisited.
Waugh decided to drown himself off a deserted beach, but swam into a shoal of stinging jellyfish and, according to his biographer, ‘was stung back to reason’.
West Country novelist Thomas Hardy almost did not survive his birth in 1840 because everyone thought he was stillborn. He did not appear to be breathing and was put to one side for dead. The nurse attending the birth only by chance noticed a slight movement that showed the baby was in fact alive.
He lived to be 87 and gave the world 18 novels, including some of the most widely read in English literature.
When he did die, there was controversy over where he should be laid to rest. Public opinion felt him too famous to lie anywhere other than in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, the national shrine. He, however, had left clear instructions to be buried in Stinsford, near his birthplace and next to his parents, grandparents, first wife and sister. A compromise was brokered. His ashes were interred in the Abbey. His heart would be buried in his beloved home county.
The plan agreed, his heart was taken to his sister’s house ready for burial. Shortly before, as it lay ready on the kitchen table, the family cat grabbed it and disappeared with it into the woods. Although, simultaneously with the national funeral in Westminster Abbey, a burial ceremony took place on 16 January 1928, at Stinsford, there is uncertainty to this day as to what was in the casket: some say it was buried empty; others that it contained the captured cat which had consumed the heart.
Franz Kafka, now seen as one of the 20th century’s most insightful authors, hardly published any work before his death in 1924 aged only 40. He instructed in his will that all his manuscripts be destroyed after his death. He had published only a few short stories. Three major novels were unfinished.
His literary executor, Max Brod, ignored the request and oversaw the publication of the novels, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. He later rationalised his actions by saying that he had told Kafka he would ignore the instruction. Thus, he maintained, if Kafka really had wanted them destroyed, he would have chosen another executor.
A clinical depressive for most of his life, Kafka’s works deal with the fate of ordinary people trapped in tussles with forces outside their control or understanding. They have come to be seen as literary masterpieces evocatively foreshadowing the totalitarian trends of the 20th century.
Had Kafka’s wishes been followed, his name and these seminal works would never have made their entry into the pantheon of modern literature.
One of the most successful novels in publishing history only came about because the author was laid up with an injury.
Gone with the Wind, according to one list the 49th best-selling book ever written with sales of 28 million copies, sold its first million within six months of publication in June 1936, a phenomenal achievement at the height of the Depression. Its author, Atlanta newspaper reporter Margaret Mitchell, only wrote it because she had broken her ankle. When it refused to heal properly, she had had to give up her job and stay at home.
It was the only book she ever published.
The 1939 film has been recognised as the highest-grossing movie of all time. An estimate in 1996 put its earnings, adjusted for inflation and relative costs of tickets, at £1.7 billion. By comparison, the next best was The Sound of Music with a relatively paltry £629 million. But the film nearly wasn’t made.
All the big three studios, MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Brothers, turned it down. It eventually found its way to David O. Selznick. Not even his director, Victor Fleming, had much confidence, warning Selznick that the film would be ’one of the biggest white elephants of all time.’
Literature’s most famous spy, James Bond, acquired his name because author Ian Fleming was an avid bird watcher. The real James Bond was a young academic explorer from Philadelphia who became the authority on bird species of the Caribbean. His 1936 treatise on Birds of the Caribbean was the first to catalogue the region’s birdlife. It was bedtime reading for Fleming, who lived for long stretches of the year in Jamaica.
When he began writing the first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, Fleming was searching for a name. He lighted upon Bond’s book. ‘It struck me that this name – brief, unromantic and yet very masculine – was just what I needed, and so James Bond II was born.’
Another curious origin in the Bond books was the naming of M, the Head of the British Secret Service from whom Bond took all his orders. His (or, as in recent films, her) identity is never reveale
d any further. Fleming derived the idea of the name from his childhood practice of always referring to his mother as ‘M’.
The only draft of Dylan Thomas’ masterpiece radio play, Under Milk Wood, had to be retrieved from a London pub after Thomas, a notorious alcoholic, lost it during a pub crawl. He had no idea which hostelry he had left it in and a BBC producer had to scour the city before closing time to avoid a cleaner unwittingly consigning it to the rubbish sack.
Author V. S. Naipaul was sacked early in his career as the Cement and Concrete Association’s press officer. They said he couldn’t write. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.
Rudyard Kipling might have pursued a relatively anonymous career as a journalist in the United States had it not been for the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, where he was briefly employed, sacking the future novelist, poet and epitomiser of late Victorian imperialism with the advice, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.’
Sir William Walton, one of England greatest composers, and who provided music for the 1937 and 1953 coronations, failed his final music exam.
After spending years fruitlessly trying to develop the plot of a novel to illustrate man’s essential double nature, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamt the storyline of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in one night in 1886. He completed the manuscript within six weeks, and when published later that year, it was an instant success.
The cartoonists who created Superman had their idea turned down by New York publishers for four years. Twenty-year-old Jerry Siegel from Cleveland, Ohio, came up with the character in 1934 during a sleepless night when he visualised the entire Superman legend. An old high school friend, Joe Shuster, drew the character.
Their first attempts to interest publishers received the response that Superman was ‘too fantastic for our readers.’ It was eventually accepted in 1938 when DC Comics were developing a new comic book. Siegel and Shuster were paid $130 between them for the rights, and they worked from then on strictly as freelance contributors.
They later spent over 30 years in litigation trying to secure a better deal as the popularity of Superman took off. Eventually Siegel had to take a job as a mail clerk and Shuster as a messenger to make ends meet. By the end of his life, Siegel said that just the sight of a Superman comic book made him almost physically sick. He died in 1996. Shuster predeceased him in 1992.
Among other literary works which might never have seen the light of publication had it not been for the extraordinary perseverance of their authors are:
Theodor Geisel, who as Dr Seuss was one of the most published children’s authors of the 20th century (he produced 47 books which sold over 100 million copies in 18 languages), had his first story, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, rejected by more than 20 publishers (he claimed 28, other sources say 23). After leaving the last one, he bumped into an old college friend on Madison Avenue in New York who happened to be children’s editor for Vanguard Publishers. He took a look and 20 minutes later Geisel had his first contract.
The original novel M*A*S*H took seven years to write and was rejected by 21 publishers before it came out in 1968. It later became one of the most successful television productions in history.
Lorna Doone, Richard Doddridge Blackmore’s dark tale of romance, had been rejected by 18 publishers and flopped in 1869 when it was released as a three-part edition. It succeeded when it was reproduced in a single volume two years later and has never been out of print since.
Beatrix Potter’s first story, The Tale of Peter the Rabbit, was self-produced after seven publishers had turned it down. It was the first of 22 such tales that eventually became some of the best-selling English children’s stories of all time.
Richard Adams’ Watership Down, the cult fable about the lives of rabbits, was one of the quickest books to sell a million copies when it was published in 1972 and has sold over 50 million worldwide. It was initially rejected by 13 publishers, including one who wrote Adams a three-page rejection letter complaining that the book was too long. He, however, refused all suggestions to shorten it.
Cited in his obituary as one of the most prolific novelists of all time, British crime writer John Creasey, who died in 1973 at the age of 64, was credited with 560 novels under more than 28 pseudonyms. He often wrote a full-length book in a week. It did not start out as auspiciously. By the age of 19 he had accumulated 743 publishers’ rejections, said to be a world record.
Hollywood originated as a centre for film production because of the toss of a coin. A New Jersey production company, Centaur, was looking for a better location for film making in 1911 instead of trying to recreate expensive background scenery in the American northeast.
Centaur’s two partners disagreed on where the best site was. Al Christie, chief director, wanted California as he aimed to make westerns. David Horsley, the owner, wanted Florida, which at that time was backward, undeveloped, remote but closer. He agreed to abide by the decision of a coin toss, which Christie won. Centaur set up on Sunset Boulevard, the first film studio to set up in southern California,
Within a year, 15 other small studios had opted for the area too, drawn mainly by the variety of natural landscapes of the area and the all-year sun essential for uninterrupted work.
The first words heard in the first talkie were accidental. Al Jolson’s ‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothing yet,’ in The Jazz Singer were not part of the script and not intended to be heard. They were accidentally recorded when Jolson called to a stagehand on the set, and the director decided to keep them in.
The origin of the celebrated catchphrase in the 1930s Tarzan movies, ‘Me, Tarzan’ is said to have come from the astonished reaction of former Olympic gold medal swimmer Johnny Weissmuller when asked by the MGM studios to take a screen test for the part. He exclaimed, ‘Me? Tarzan?’
He had gone to the studio to see Clark Gable. The only way he found to gain entry to the film lot was to join a queue for hopefuls auditioning for Tarzan. He was asked to test and got the part.
A scene in the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, voted by Empire magazine in 1999 as the ‘coolest’ in cinema history, was not originally in the script and came about only because Harrison Ford, the film’s lead, had diarrhoea.
Ford’s combat with an Arab swordsman who starts by extravagantly demonstrating his prowess with a display of swinging blades is brought to a sudden end when the archaeologist casually pulls out a gun and shoots him. Stephen Spielberg, the director, had planned a long fight sequence between the pair. Ford was suffering from a stomach bug and asked for the episode to be drastically shortened.
Steven Spielberg’s original design of the spacecraft for Close Encounters of the Third Kind was scrapped when it did not look right once filming began. No one could think of a right shape. Spielberg was inspired by driving past an oil refinery at night, with its hundreds of tiny lights sparking from the complex of pipes and towers. The spacecraft was suddenly born in front of him.
Twentieth Century-Fox initially wanted to change the title of Star Wars as, they maintained, no film with ‘star’ or ‘war’ in the title had ever been successful. The film won six Oscars, and has earned an estimated $800 million worldwide.
United Artists had to change the title of a Bond movie when market research showed that fewer than 20 per cent of the American audience understood what one of the words in the title meant.
The title of the 1989 edition of the Bond series was to have been Licence Revoked, as the storyline is about 007 having his licence to kill withdrawn on account of his personal obsession with hunting down the killer of a CIA friend’s wife. It is the only film of the series where he does not have the licence to kill. But researchers reported that so few Americans knew what ‘revoked’ meant, that they changed the title to the contradictory Licence to Kill.
The song sequence for which The Wizard of Oz is now chiefly remembered was initially cut
from the film when it was previewed before release. Over the Rainbow was judged to slow down the pace of the film. It was restored at the last minute. It went on to win the Oscar for the Best Song in that year’s Academy Awards.
Judy Garland starred in film only because of an inter-studio dispute that led to Fox refusing to loan to MGM Shirley Temple, then 11 years old and perfectly suited for the part. Garland, 17, ended up playing the supposedly nine-year-old Dorothy.
The most successful cartoon creations in the history of cinema, cat and mouse duo Tom and Jerry, were originally going to be a dog and a fox.
Mickey Mouse was invented only because Walt Disney had carelessly lost the rights to his first major cartoon success, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, created in 1927. The following year, Disney tried to negotiate with his agent an increased fee for future Oswald cartoons only to discover that Universal wanted a reduction instead and threatened to break the relationship if Disney and his team refused. Disney discovered that legally the studio, not he, owned the rights to Oswald. He refused the deal, lost most of his animation talent who went under contract to the studio and set out on his own. Mickey Mouse was dreamed up immediately afterwards to fill the gap.
Disney may never have emerged as a separate outfit had MGM supremo, Louis Mayer, accepted advice from his staff to hire Disney. Mayer refused after seeing a preview of Mickey Mouse on the grounds that he feared pregnant women would be frightened of a 10-foot high rodent appearing on the screen.