Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

4 July: Two American founding fathers die on the 50th anniversary of the United States they did so much to establish

  5 July: Rebecca Butterworth writes to her father from ‘The Back Woods of America’ asking him to pay her way back to England

  6 July: The first Nobel laureate blogs his principles

  7 July: Ida L. Moore interviews the Haithcocks of West Durham, North Carolina

  8 July: Ralph Waldo Emerson prepares to deny the miracles of Christ – sort of

  9 July: Mrs Gothic is born

  10 July: Poet shoots poet

  11 July: To Kill a Mockingbird is published

  12 July: The end of blasphemy

  13 July: William Carlos Williams writes to James Laughlin at New Directions: ‘Working like hell on Paterson. It’s coming too. … You’ll see, it’ll be a book’

  14 July: La Marseillaise – to sing, or not to sing?

  15 July: The fictional origins of Scott’s great work of fiction

  16 July: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is published. It will go on to sell 60 million copies and be translated into almost all the world’s languages

  17 July: Alexander Pope and his doctor

  18 July: Led by white officers, including Henry James’s brother, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of black soldiers attack Fort Wagner with courage and terrible loss of life

  19 July: Jeffrey Archer goes down

  20 July: The Modern Library proclaims the 20th century’s 100 best novels in English

  21 July: Pottermania is good for you – or is it?

  22 July: Robert Graves: the War Office regrets, then doesn’t

  23 July: Henry David Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax

  24 July: Sailing the Atlantic, Francis Higginson shows why there will be no room for blasphemers and sodomites in the ‘new paradise of New England’

  25 July: At the height of the Potsdam Conference, Tyrone Slothrop, disguised as Rocketman and cradling a twelve-pound bag of hashish, sees Mickey Rooney leaning over the balcony of no. 2 Kaiserstrasse

  26 July: John Muir spends ‘a day that will never end’ among the trees and crystals at the top of Mount Hoffman

  27 July: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Federal Writers’ Project into law

  28 July: Last Exit to Brooklyn, the censor’s last throw

  29 July: The USS Indianapolis is sunk by a Japanese torpedo

  30 July: Better late than never?

  31 July: Daniel Defoe is pilloried – literally – for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters

  1 August: Shakespeare’s little helper is laid to rest in St George’s church, Southwark

  2 August: Murdoch’s brain

  3 August: John Rut writes the first letter home from the New World

  4 August: Out West for the first time, Owen Wister is underwhelmed by cowboys

  5 August: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville meet for the first time

  6 August: The poet Robert Lowell receives his letter drafting him for service in the US armed forces. He declines the invitation

  7 August: Rumour has it the Scottish play is first performed – though not in the usual place

  8 August: Elizabeth rallies her mariners

  9 August: Edgar Allan Poe invents the detective story, then disparages his achievement

  10 August: The Vikings defeat the Anglo-Saxons in the Battle of Maldon, early testimony to the English cult of defeat

  11 August: Enid Blyton is born in a flat above a shop in Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London

  12 August: Who or what killed J.G. Farrell?

  13 August: The Duke of Marlborough leads an army of northern European forces against the French at Blindheim, to win a famous victory

  14 August: John Updike publishes his first contribution to the New Yorker. It is a comic poem entitled ‘Duet with Muffled Brake Drums’

  15 August: Disguised as a snake, the Devil invades a meeting of the Synod in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Mr Thomson, an elder of Braintree and a man of much faith, treads it under foot

  16 August: Massacre of Peterloo

  17 August: Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide

  18 August: Lolita is published in the US

  19 August: The New York Herald breaks the news of the California Gold Rush

  20 August: England’s finest naturalist–novelist is buried

  21 August: The first of two English sisters arrives in Montreal to kick-start Canadian literature

  22 August: Jack London’s Wolf House burns down

  23 August: Unconquerable

  24 August: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live again

  25 August: Born in Belfast: the man who will overturn the American western film

  26 August: The last southern gentleman dies, aged 70

  27 August: Spain’s most popular and prolific playwright dies at 73. His state funeral will attract vast crowds and last nine days

  28 August: Sebastopol falls, a great novelist rises

  29 August: As the Cuban missile crisis looms, Robert Frost leaves on a goodwill tour of the USSR

  30 August: The hotline between the leaders of the US and the Soviet Union goes operational

  31 August: Richard III is killed as the Tudors defeat the Plantagenets at Bosworth Field, bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end

  1 September: Somerset Maugham, literary travel agent

  2 September: Pepys – eye-witness to the Great Fire of London

  3 September: William Wordsworth has to kill London in order to love it

  4 September: Dame Shirley, writing from the California gold mines, entertains the local blacksmith

  5 September: Born: father of the Edinburgh Festival

  6 September: Thus perish all heretics

  7 September: French and Russian armies clash at the Battle of Borodino

  8 September: Edward Bellamy’s cousin reveres the flag

  9 September: In Cologne, William Caxton completes his translation of The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye; three years later he will produce it as the first printed book in English

  10 September: The death of Amy Levy

  11 September: Fateful date in fiction – fatal in real life

  12 September: Death of a literary louse

  13 September: On reaching its 1,998th performance, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap becomes Britain’s longest-running straight play

  14 September: After speculating on ring-ousel migration, Gilbert White comes down on the side of local natural history

  15 September: Stephen King is honoured, but not respected

  16 September: The Great Preston Lockout

  17 September: Maggie Joy Blunt follows a woman hoarding salt

  18 September: Edie Rutherford supports the communist squatters

  19 September: Amiri Baraka is de-laureated

  20 September: Born: the midwife of the modern American novel

  21 September: Publius Vergilius Maro dies, his Aeneid not quite finished

  22 September: Death of the worthiest knight that ever lived

  23 September: ‘An important Jew dies in exile’

  24 September: 60 Minutes gets its first showing on CBS television

  25 September: Queen Victoria delays her diamond jubilee. Rudyard Kipling delays publication of his celebratory poem

  26 September: Stage censorship finally ends in Britain

  27 September: Midwich survives

  28 September: Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo lands near what is now San Diego, to become the first European to set foot in California

  29 September: The Greek fleet swamps the Persians in the Battle of Salamis; Aeschylus writes it up

  30 September: The first part of Little Women comes out – to instant and lasting acclaim

  1 October: Wuthering Heights and the long journey of the four-letter word

  2 October: Sarah Kemble Knight begins her epic journey from Boston to New York

  3 October: Poet meets leech-gatherer; poem ensue
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  4 October: Printing of the Coverdale Bible is finished, the first complete Bible to be published in English

  5 October: Steinbeck begins a series of articles in a San Francisco paper; they will change his life

  6 October: William Golding’s sour-tasting Nobel Prize

  7 October: As Allen Ginsberg first reads Howl aloud at the Six Gallery, San Francisco, the Beat Generation comes of age

  8 October: Herta Müller wins the Nobel. Handkerchiefs flutter in celebration

  9 October: Dario Fo wins the Nobel for Literature

  10 October: A True Leveller is baptised somewhere in the parish of Wigan

  11 October: Where’s Charley? opens a long run on Broadway

  12 October: Tennyson crosses the bar

  13 October: Sonia Brownell marries George Orwell in his room in University College Hospital, London, the hospital chaplain officiating

  14 October: The Normans defeat the English at the Battle of Hastings, changing the English language for ever

  15 October: Winston Churchill, novelist

  16 October: Abraham Lincoln deconstructs ‘the sacred right of self-government’

  17 October: A St Louis newspaper interviews Walt Whitman on the future of American literature

  18 October: Bosavern Penlez hangs, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time

  19 October: Dylan Thomas leaves on his fourth trip to the US – his second that year – a voyage from which he will never return

  20 October: John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais is entered in the Stationer’s Register in London

  21 October: Poststructuralism comes to America

  22 October: Sartre wins the Nobel Prize, rejects it, then thinks – ‘Well, why not? It’s a lot of money’

  23 October: Beowulf escapes incineration

  24 October: Martin Amis joins the ranks of the literary breast-men

  25 October: St Crispin’s Day: two kinds of glory in British military history

  26 October: A gunfight breaks out at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, when Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday try to disarm Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury

  27 October: Maxine Ting Ting Hong is born in Stockton, California

  28 October: Henry David Thoreau reclaims from his publisher 703 unsold copies of his first book, out of 1,000 printed

  29 October: Sir Walter Raleigh’s sharp medicine

  30 October: The abolitionist and suffragette Amy Post authenticates Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and vouches for its author, Linda Brent

  31 October: Brecht, having baffled HUAC, leaves the USA

  1 November: W.H. Smith open their first bookstall at Euston station

  2 November: Spenser’s tomb is dug up

  3 November: Boris Pasternak is offered the chance to leave the Soviet Union and refuses

  4 November: Anthony Trollope’s mother emigrates to America – temporarily

  5 November: William of Orange arrives in England to take up the offer of the throne, and Dryden loses his job

  6 November: The first (but by no means the last) death of Count Dracula

  7 November: F. Scott Fitzgerald writes to his publisher with the definitive title of his new novel. It is to be called Trimalchio in West Egg

  8 November: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is published but not publicised

  9 November: Hitler’s beer hall putsch

  10 November: Lady Chat goes on sale

  11 November: The Pilgrim Fathers land in America. Ten years later, William Bradford will turn the event into New England’s founding myth

  12 November: John Bunyan is arrested for preaching outside the established church. ‘Not so much a prison as an office’

  13 November: Kenneth Tynan ejaculates the word ‘fuck’ (‘fuff-fuff-fuff-uck’) on BBC TV: a first – for TV, not Tynan

  14 November: Lawrence’s Rainbow goes up in flames

  15 November: The Scrooby Separatists set off to explore the New World

  16 November: Britain’s pioneer lesbian novel is judged obscene

  17 November: Sir Walter Raleigh goes on trial for treason

  18 November: Walt Disney launches Steamboat Willie

  19 November: After a sound night’s sleep at the Willard Hotel, Washington, DC, Julia Ward Howe wakes early in the dawn with the words of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ in her head

  20 November: Melville and Hawthorne meet for (nearly) the last time, and take a walk in the sand dunes of Southport, Lancashire

  21 November: Jane Welsh Carlyle confronts the taxman on behalf of her husband

  22 November: Norman Mailer, uxoricide

  23 November: Berger spurns Booker

  24 November: James Boswell conquers in armour

  25 November: Yukio Mishima’s good career move

  26 November: The great(est) storm

  27 November: Heine’s credo

  28 November: Edward Taylor loses his way en route to the town on the Massachusetts frontier where he will spend the rest of his life

  29 November: President Lyndon B. Johnson sets up the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy

  30 November: A comet blazes, Mark Twain is born. It blazes again at his death

  1 December: American Declaration of Independence (e-text version) proclaimed

  2 December: Would Jane Bigg-Wither have written better, or worse, or not at all?

  3 December: A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, launching the career of 23-year-old Marlon Brando

  4 December: Currer Bell meets Michaelangelo Titmarsh

  5 December: Burton concludes his great work (not for the only time)

  6 December: Hopkins’s ‘great dragon’

  7 December: Harold Pinter hurls his stick of Nobel dynamite at America and Britain

  8 December: The Saturday Evening Post publishes Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘A Negro Voter Sizes up Taft’

  9 December: Peanuts gets its first of many outings on television

  10 December: Mikhail Sholokhov collects his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: how an apparatchik became an unperson

  11 December: Damon Runyon tells it as it is as he takes off for the poker game in the sky

  12 December: Edgar Wallace sees Hollywood and dies

  13 December: E.M. Forster finds salvation

  14 December: Two giants of modernism meet

  15 December: Fanny Hill seized – still banned

  16 December: A literal hatchet job

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

  18 December: Dryden mugged

  19 December: The first Poor Richard’s Almanack is printed

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

  21 December: Dostoyevsky’s last night on earth

  22 December: Nathanael West dies

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

  24 December: Booth Tarkington makes the cover of Time

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

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

  27 December: Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament

  28 December: The Tay Bridge collapses in a violent storm, dashing a trainload of passengers to their deaths

  29 December: The destruction of Paternoster Row

  30 December: Betwixt ‘Yol and Nwe Yer’ a green knight rides into King Arthur’s court

  31 December: Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road is published, his classic novel of a doomed marriage in American 1950s suburbia

  Text acknowledgements

  Index

  About the authors

  John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College London.
He has taught at Edinburgh University, UCL, and the California Institute of Technology. He has two honorary doctorates (Surrey and Leicester Universities) for ‘services to literary criticism’. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is also President of the Society of Indexers, and was Chair of the Man-Booker Prize panel, 2005.

  Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and the Universities of Wales and Manchester. He has taught English and American literature at the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Sussex University, where he was Professor of American Studies from 1985 to 2001, and founding Director of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities. He has also taught in the USA at Santa Clara, Williams and Dartmouth Colleges, and while at UCL he designed and taught MA-level courses at the Institute for US Studies, London. At present he is an Honorary Professor of English at UCL.

  Acknowledgements

  Stephen Fender would like to thank Winifred Campbell, Brian Oatley, Peter Nicholls, Janet Pressley, Anna Ranson, and Jennifer Wall for their ideas and comments.

  Preface

  2 July

  2010 On this day, as the authors of this book put their heads together to write their preface (traditionally the last thing to be written), Beryl Bainbridge died. She was well on in years and was known to be frail. The obituaries were all in stock and up to date. They appeared, some of them, the same day – virtually before the novelist’s body had cooled.

  Bainbridge was much loved – one of the ‘national teddy-bear’ authors, along with her NW1 neighbour, Alan Bennett. The other image that attached to her was that of perpetual bridesmaid. She was forever being shortlisted, or touted, for the Booker Prize, the UK’s major award in fiction, but never quite won it. The British love a good loser, and none was a more gracious loser than Beryl.

  The anecdotes about her were, many of them, chestnuts, but still relished because she was so liked. She was expelled from school at fourteen as a ‘corrupting influence’, having lost her virginity to a German POW called Franz the year before. Her subsequent life, which included a walk-on part in Coronation Street, was rackety. As the Guardian obituarist, Janet Watts, records:

  One day her elderly former mother-in-law appeared at the front door, took a loaded gun from her handbag and fired. Beryl foiled that attack, and the episode appears in The Bottle Factory Outing, which won the Guardian fiction prize.