Moore supported Vizetelly and continued to emulate Zola. He crusaded, with some success, against the moral hegemony of the lending libraries and what Henry James called ‘the tyranny of the young reader’. Literature, Moore believed, should have the right to bring the occasional blush to a maiden’s cheek. He lived long enough, dying on 21 January 1933, to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
22 January
Anthony Powell’s great dance begins
1951 The first paragraph of A Question of Upbringing (published on this day), the opening volume of Powell’s twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time sequence, begins with a London road-mending, in winter. Nothing is happening:
The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with hurricane lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes.
The description meanders on for another 200 words, ending: ‘The grey, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.’
Where, the reader wonders, is all this going? Nowhere very quickly, it’s safe to assume, like the hole in the road. But the effect is instantly hypnotic. No writer in English is more the master of the slow tempos of life than Powell.
Anthony Powell was born the only child of a distinguished soldier and a mother some fifteen years older than her husband. He was officer class; she had her roots in the land-owning classes of England. Somewhat perversely, he grew up prouder of his Welshness than his Englishness (his surname, he ordained, should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘Noel’ and not ‘towel’).
At Eton he fell in with Henry Green and Cyril Connolly and at Oxford (Balliol) with Evelyn Waugh, as one of what would later be called the Brideshead Generation. One of Powell’s critics wittily retitled his great work ‘A dance to the Eton Boating Song’.
Powell left Oxford (although in one sense he never did) with the de rigueur ‘gentleman’s third in history and drifted to London, as if drawn by a magnet’. ‘I am a metropolitan man’, he once said of himself. He joined the publisher Duckworth (his father had ‘friends’ who arranged it). One of his early signings was Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall would influence his own work. Afternoon Men came out under the Duckworth imprint in 1931, to be followed in quick succession by From a View to a Death (1933) and Venusberg (1932).
In late December 1934 (always his favourite month – he liked the gloom) Powell married Lady Violet Georgiana Pakenham, a scion of the English Catholic aristocracy. The couple would have two sons.
On the outbreak of war, he gave up writing for the duration. After a false start in the infantry Powell found his niche in ‘intelligence’, working as a liaison officer with expatriate allies from occupied countries in Europe. He was demobilised in 1945 with the rank of major, a chestful of decorations and a sense of vague remorse that he had had such a cushy war. And, as he said, a very ‘boring’ one.
In 1948 Powell fell, as he always did, into a comfortable berth as the Times Literary Supplement’s fiction review editor. In 1950, he inherited a fortune from an uncle he barely knew. Money, too, always seemed to fall his way. It enabled him to move into a fine country house, The Chantry, in Somerset. Another bequest, when his father died in 1959, insulated him against the inconveniences of post-war austerity. Financial security also enabled him to embark on his grand project, A Dance to the Music of Time, and to take his time doing it.
The sequence was launched in 1951 – the year of the Festival of Britain which, in his prelude to his own grand project, The Sword of Honour trilogy, Waugh portrayed as the end of English civilisation. Under his series-hero’s less jaundiced, but equally gloomy, eye Powell surveys 50 years of England. The viewpoint is conservative, like Waugh’s, but less angrily so. Powell rarely put people’s backs up. ‘Tony is the only Tory I have ever liked’, said George Orwell – someone who elsewhere repudiated everything Powell’s class stood for.
Alongside Dance, which was completed in 1975, Powell kept private journals which, when published in 1982, revealed an increasingly bilious temperament. His last novel was The Fisher King (1985). He turned down a knighthood – even though it was offered by a Conservative administration. It would, probably, have looked paltry alongside his wife’s lineage. Or perhaps too Widmerpoolian. He left over £1.5 million on his death and a fictional sequence to rival Balzac’s.
23 January
After the failure of his stage play, Guy Domville, Henry James resolves to ‘take up my own old pen again’
1895 The episode has become legendary: James, shamed as a dramatist, returns to his proper profession as a prose stylist to produce his late, great novels. In 2004 the story dominated two (good) novelised biographies of Henry James. Colm Tóibín’s The Master leads with it, and it forms the climax of David Lodge’s Author, Author.
Daringly for such a complex prose stylist famous for his competing points of view, Henry James had tried his hand at a play, Guy Domville, about a man caught in a love triangle while trying to renounce the active life for the priesthood.
James stayed away from the opening, preferring a neighbouring premiere instead, that of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. He thought it dreadful – clumsy, feeble and vulgar – but the audience adored it. What would such a crowd make of Guy Domville? He set off to find out, just as his play was finishing. Greeting him backstage at the Victorian Theatre, actor-manager George Alexander dragged him onstage to take the author’s plaudits.
At first James took the audience’s tumult for approval. He was rudely disabused. They were jeering, not cheering – louder and more abusively as the author’s face rose from his bow of appreciation. ‘The worst part was now’ – Tóibin has imagined it – ‘when he could not conceal the expression on his own face, the look of panic he could not prevent.’
Yet the biographer and critic Richard Ellmann has added a few nuances to the old tale of unmitigated disaster. The next evening James sat through a full performance, which the audience treated respectfully. Critics like William Archer, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw liked it, and it did run for five weeks. Despite the firm resolution entered in his notebook on this day, he wrote another play afterwards – Summersoft, at the instigation of the actress Ellen Terry, though she never produced it – in which Ellmann detects distinct echoes of Wildean dialogue.1
Meanwhile, Alexander was busy working on a new production for the Victorian. Its name? The Importance of Being Earnest.
1 Richard Ellmann, ‘James Amongst the Aesthetes’, in John R. Bradley (ed.), Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire, London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1999, pp. 25–44, 40–1.
24 January
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe are divorced in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
1961 ‘Egghead weds Hourglass’, ran the 1956 headline in Variety. The American papers couldn’t get over the unlikely marriage of sex and the intellect (in those days the playwright was commonly called an ‘intellectual’ in the popular prints). But Miller himself acknowledged the link between his feelings for Monroe and if not his mental powers, then at least his creativity. As he wrote in his autobiography, Timebends (1987):
Flying homeward, her scent still on my hands … I could, after all, lose myself in sensuality. This novel secret entered me like a radiating force, and I welcomed it as a sort of proof that I would write again.
They had met when Miller went to Hollywood to make a film about crooked labour leaders on the Brooklyn waterfront, only to drop out of the project when told by the studio chief of Columbia Pictures to change the villains from the mob to wicked communists. The project was later re-aligned as On the Waterfront (1954).
His resistance to the anti-communist film script, the production of The Crucible (1953 – see 1 March) and his enlarged public profile brought Miller to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). While the HUAC investigations were proceeding, studio executives urged
Monroe to dump Miller, but she refused. Subpoenaed in 1956, he was convicted of contempt when he refused to ‘name names’.
It was all about publicity. In Timebends Miller recalls the HUAC chairman, Francis E. Walter, offering to cancel Miller’s subpoena provided he could be photographed shaking hands with Miller’s new wife.
What went wrong? We’ll never have her side of the story now. His is set out in Timebends, which can be exciting about the power of their early love, honest and harrowing about their break-up, but keeps coming adrift in group-therapy phrases like ‘I knew I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing’.
Why or how it happened, most film people agree that the marriage was in a pretty rough state by the time they came to make The Misfits (John Huston, 1961), a script (ironically) that Miller had written as a Valentine gift to his wife. It was not only the marriage that perished. The Nevada sun and the stress of production combined to fray the nerves of actors and crew alike. Huston drank a lot and sometimes fell asleep on set. Monroe was drinking too, and taking sleeping pills. Two days after filming finished Clark Gable suffered a heart attack, dying ten days after that. A year and a half later Marilyn Monroe herself would die of an overdose; whether it was intentional or not has never been established.
For Miller one of the few good things to come out of the Misfits experience (apart from the film itself, which isn’t half bad) was Inge Morath, a Magnum photographer covering the movie. She and Miller married in 1962, remaining happily together until her death in 2002.
25 January
Rabbie Burns: whisky, literature and lassies
1759 Burns is the only author in the English language to have an annual revel – or booze-up – dedicated to him by name. Not that he is the only toper to be found in the annals of literature. One could, as plausibly, have a Ben Jonson Night (after a particularly heavy evening, one of the ‘Tribe of Ben’ would be assigned to take their chief home in a wheelbarrow); a Dylan Thomas Night (Thomas came up with the drinker’s favourite epigram: ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do’); or an Ernest Hemingway Night (Hemingway it was who uttered the drinker’s favourite maxim: ‘A man does not exist until he is drunk’).
Burns Night (commonly known as ‘Burns Supper’ by those who celebrate it) takes place only three weeks after that other massive Scottish drinking session, Hogmanay. 25 January is Burns’ birthday. The first celebratory events, in his native Ayrshire, took place on his death-day – 21 July. But so long are the Scottish summer days, and so demanding work in the briefly arable fields, that July pushed the nocturnal conviviality uncomfortably far into the night. It was switched to midwinter.
Hogmanay is an ‘open’ revel. In the cities of Scotland (as all over the world, where the Christian calendar rules) there are street parties. All shutters are lifted. In Scotland, every door is opened for the ‘first footing’ by some dark-haired stranger. One of the more comical cultural spectacles of the first minutes of the New Year is watching non- Scots (and, indeed, many natives) bellowing out Burns’ most famous anthem, with no more idea of what
And we’ll take a right guid willie-waught,
For auld lang syne.
means than if the poet had written in Sanskrit. Willie-waught?
Burns Supper, by contrast, is a closed or ‘club’ event – restricted to knowledgeable members (particularly Scots of the diaspora, who form nostalgic Caledonian societies), and highly ritualised. It is also, in Scotland, a Lowland, not a Highland event – and most enthusiastically commemorated in Burns’ western region.
A haggis soaked in whisky is piped in ceremonially and apostrophised, in mock reverence, as the company stands:
Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm.
Toasts are drunk – loyally to the monarch (the Lowlands, contrary to what is vulgarly believed by non-Scots, did not join those bare-arsed Celts in their mad 1715 and 1745 rebellions against the Crown) and lasciviously to the ‘Lassies’. Burns was as famous a wencher as he was a carouser. Wheelbarrows are normally called around one o’clock on the 26th.
As a British writer (in addition to his dialect poetry he wrote verse in the King’s English – without much applause) Burns is the most famous ‘peasant poet’ in the language. But what is his language? ‘Lallans’ [lowland Scots dialect]. Poets of a radical persuasion (notably Hugh MacDiarmid) – who have co-opted Burns as a fellow Anglophobic republican – have made attempts to restore Scottish poetry to the pure, Burnsian fount of the native tongue and have failed. As devolution, and possible independence, reshapes the country’s destiny Lallans may yet assert itself as the lingua Caledonia.
26 January
James Frey confesses his fact is fiction, and wins twice over
2006 The most spectacular mea culpa in literature took place on this date, before an audience of some 50 million.
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club (OBC) had been launched ten years earlier, in September 1996. It was spun off from the hugely popular TV talk show hosted by the African-American (former film star) ‘personality’. ‘I want to get the country reading again’, Oprah declared by way of explanation.
There was predictable scorn from those who believed the country (or at least their part of it) had never stopped reading and needed no encouragement from a mere celebrity. As Jonathan Yardley, in the Washington Post, sneered: ‘I watched it once and nearly gagged on all the treacle and psychobabble.’ (5 November 2001)
The book trade did not sneer. Oprah’s inaugural selection, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Deep End of the Ocean (a novel that had not set the Potomac on fire), sold close on a million copies overnight and shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The ‘Oprah Effect’, as it was labelled, proved to be the most potent advertising agent in the history of books. Every selection on OBC picked up between half a million and a million sales – irrespective of genre or quality.
Why? Not because Oprah claimed to be a literary critic but because the reading public trusted her (as they rarely do literary critics). Her most loyal audience were women of middle age, watching in their homes – traditionally a core book readership. Where Oprah led they would follow.
There was a clear tendency to Oprah’s selections (in which she had a guiding hand). She, and her advisers, manifested high-mindedness, a liking for ‘self-help’ books, and a strong ‘home-team’ rooting for African-American writers. Toni Morrison, for example, got no fewer than four picks in ten years (Oprah also bought the film rights to Beloved).
Ted Striphas, in his 2009 monograph The Late Age of Print, sees OBC as symptomatic of the changing cultural landscape in the 21st century, specifically that most fraught of marriages – TV and the Printed Page.
In 1951, at a time when there were around 12 million television sets in the US, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 pictured the spread of TV as the death of the book – which, henceforth, would be preserved only by a fanatically literate underground sect. OBC proved just the opposite. TV could actually expand the readership for books.
The most sensational of the OBC shows took place following Oprah’s endorsement of James Frey’s ‘drunkalogue’, A Million Little Pieces, in September 2005. The Oprah Effect boosted Frey’s (alleged) memoir of his descent into alcoholic hell and back into the number 1 slot on the New York Times bestseller list. It was, to date, OBC’s biggest-selling title. Oprah made Frey rich.
On 8 January 2006 the exposé website thesmokinggun.com publicised, in facsimile, Frey’s criminal record sheet and revealed that the book was, at best, a tissue of gross exaggeration and, at worst, fabrication.
Frey was hauled back on to the Oprah talk show, in front of a now-hostile live audience, on 26 January. Why, the ‘Empress of Empathy’ (Maureen Dowd’s description) asked, did Frey lie? ‘I feel duped
’, she said (as the audience cheered), ‘but more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers’ (louder cheers, mixed with boos).
Frey, stumblingly, claimed that the ‘essence’ of the book was true. It was the Blanche Dubois defence: ‘In my heart I never lied.’ This would be his line in the months that followed. His publisher, Random House, took a more cautious line. They offered full refunds to anyone who honestly felt they had been misled as to the authenticity of A Million Little Pieces.
The event prompted a debate about ‘memoirist’s licence’, in which Frey continued to argue that ‘truth’ should not be hampered by what actually happened. Most of the contributors to the debate were unaware of the fact that they were waltzing around issues dealt with as the Mimesis paradox in Aristotle’s Poetics, a couple of thousand years before.
Some US libraries nervously reclassified A Million Little Pieces as fiction. The New York Times, after some dithering, continued to enter it in the ‘Fiction Bestsellers’ list. It had a new lease of life there. The Oprah Effect, even when accompanied by a damning critical verdict, worked yet again. There is, as book people like to say, no such thing as bad publicity.
27 January
The US Congress sets up an Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma
1825 It was the territory for which Huck Finn would ‘light out’ when he got tired of being ‘sivilized’. Freedom for him, maybe, but not for the Native Americans living in the south and south-east of the continent whom the government planned to dump there. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill would force the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes to leave their homelands for the Indian Territory, in order to make room for white settlers in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and the Carolinas. This brutal policy, pursued over the next eight years, displaced some 46,000 natives from their homes. Along the forced migration that came to be called the ‘Trail of Tears’ many died of cold, hunger and illness.
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