Love, Sex, Death and Words
Page 8
In the NYTBR’s temporary absence a group of like-minded literary friends saw their chance to start up another kind of review altogether. They included Barbara Epstein, a senior editor at Doubleday’s, her husband Jason, then a vice president at Random House and America’s version of Allen Lane (see 22 May), and Elizabeth Hardwick, author of a famous attack on the ‘sweet, bland commendations’ of contemporary book reviewing.
The New York Review of Books actually hit the streets some three weeks after its publication date, 1 February. It looked different. It felt different. Mimicking a mass-circulation paper, with its rough newsprint in tabloid format, yet with very special headline type fetched from Holland, it already looked, as the novelist Tom Wolfe was soon to put it, like ‘the chief theoretical organ of radical chic’.
But the real difference was in the editorial strategy. Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein set out from the start to review books in their contemporary political context, and to allow authors to take as long as they wanted to do so. So whereas the NYTBR might have reviewed around 1,250 books a year, and the Times Literary Supplement around 2,600, the NYRB, with its generous word limits and fortnightly timetable, would struggle to reach 400.
Besides, not all the essays were based on books. During the Vietnam War I.F. Stone, the veteran Washington investigative journalist, used the transcript of a hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (available from the Government Printing Office, price 30¢) as a peg on which to hang an eight-page attack on L.B. Johnson’s use of the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a pretext for widening the conflict. In Mary McCarthy’s case it wasn’t a book she reviewed but a situation; she travelled to Vietnam and used her experiences as her text on which to base a three-part critique of American policy there.
Since the sixties the paper’s adversarial stance has become even firmer, if anything. Reaganomics, the administration of George W. Bush and the role of the Supreme Court in hoisting him into the White House, the second Iraq war and its dreadful aftermath, even the inadequacy of the American press in letting all this go by with minimal scrutiny – all have come in for the paper’s well informed, analytically acute contempt.
Of course those on the American right, including some formerly liberal New York intellectuals who ought to know better, have repeatedly accused the NYRB of being un-American. They think it should review books, not spout politics. But in truth the paper has always worked to a venerable – if latterly forgotten – tradition: that of the 19th-century quarterly magazines on both sides of the Atlantic like the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the Westminster and the North American. These too invited gifted writers to hang long, opinionated essays on slender pegs, and were very partisan indeed.
In pursuit of such conditions, good writers have flocked to the NYRB like swallows to a barn. As a recent Guardian editorial put it: ‘It has published Auden, Updike, Sontag, Roth, Arendt, Mailer, Vidal, Bellow, Lowell, Capote and – oh well, everyone.’1 And besides, it has the most intriguing classified ads in the business – as accurate an insight into the socio-cultural environment as any Woody Allen film:
MWF [that’s Married White Female], attractive, intelligent, humorous, articulate, and sexy, seeks a local collaborator in the form of a tall man with similar qualities to hang out with. Married or single, 45–65. Hair (preferably on head), height, and brains preferred.
REFINED/LOVELY MANHATTANITE, 5'5" seeks well-educated, principled NYC male, 60–69, widowed or divorced only, Jewish (not religious), nonsmoker. Serious-minded only.
1 Editorial, Guardian, 25 October 2008.
2 February
Long Day’s Journey into Night’s long road to performance
1956 This was a notable year for theatre (see 12 May), the year in which British theatre broke the fetters of old-fogeydom with Look Back in Anger. John Osborne was, however, not the only playwright looking back that year. Improbably, Eugene O’Neill’s searingly retrospective play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, saw its first performance at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, on 2 February 1956. O’Neill was three years dead (which did not prevent a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Long Day’s Journey).
In the play O’Neill depicts the cauldron-like family situation in which he was brought up: notably a skinflint, former-matinee-idol father (James Tyrone), who is willing to let his tubercular son, Edmund, die rather than spend money he can easily afford. Completing the Tyrone family are an alcoholic elder son, Jamie (who may have deliberately killed a younger son of the family, Eugene, in the cradle), and a morphiniste mother. The action covers one typical tortured day in the Tyrone household in 1912 on the New England coast, fog-horns booming their melancholy obbligato, as the Tyrone family drench themselves in whisky, narcotics and mutual recrimination.
O’Neill completed the work in 1941 and dedicated the manuscript to his (third) wife, Carlotta, with the inscription:
For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play – write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light – into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
GENE
Tao House
July 22, 1941
The manuscript was then locked up in the vault of his publisher, Random House, with the instruction that it was not to be published or performed until 25 years after the playwright’s death. Carlotta, however, donated the copyright to Yale University, who authorised its performance and publication a mere three years after O’Neill’s death. His wish that the first performance should be in Sweden, the country which had given him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, was, unlike the date restriction, observed.
3 February
The Reverend George Crabbe dies in Trowbridge, far from his family and roots in East Anglia, leaving many volumes of unpublished poems behind him
1832 Samuel Johnson, who helped Crabbe by suggesting a few emendations to his poetic sequence The Village (1783), got it about right. According to Boswell, he admired the work ‘for its sentiments as to the false notions of rustic happiness and virtue’. Or to put it another way, because it wasn’t Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770), of which the following gives a flavour:
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain
That word ‘swain’ gives it away; this is a pastoral vision of the countryside, written by a city boy. (The word would recur ironically in The Village, where the ‘swains’, denied a livelihood on the land, have become smugglers.) By contrast to Goldsmith, George Crabbe was born poor in Suffolk and though no labourer, his training as a doctor and clergyman taught him to pay close attention to the realities of life around him.
He could see for himself that although the countryside abounded in ‘fruitful fields’ and ‘numerous flocks’, the country poor got little of it for themselves, let alone enjoyed ‘health and plenty’. In addition, he picked up a sharp sense of class difference from his three years as chaplain at Belvoir Castle, where the Duke of Rutland treated him kindly, encouraging his poetry, but the servants made fun of him as a rude provincial trying to rise above his station.
But Crabbe’s most astute perception was that sentimentality goes along with – in fact, is usually diagnostic of – cruelty. ‘Peter Grimes’ in The Borough (1810) traces the decline of a violent fisherman into homicide and madness through an almost documentarily objective point of view. Rather than attempt any suppositions about Grimes’ motives and other thought processes, the narrative works through his social and physical environment.
Grimes buys a series of boys from London w
orkhouses to help out on his boat. He beats them, half starves them – in effect kills them through neglect and brutality. To all this the villagers pay scant attention until the third boy appears, ‘of manners soft and mild’, who the seamen’s wives fancy to be:
Of gentle blood, some noble sinner’s son,
Who had, belike, deceived some humble maid,
Whom he had first seduced, and then betray’d—
When this one goes missing, the town pays proper attention, and ‘the mayor himself with tone severe replied,— / “Henceforth with thee shall never boy abide”’. Losing his livelihood pushes Grimes over the edge. When he appears raving mad in the village, the people treat him as a Bedlam exhibit:
‘Look! Look!’ they cried; ‘his limbs with horror shake,
And as he grinds his teeth, what noise they make!’
Then Benjamin Britten re-imported the sentimentality in bucketloads, when his opera of the same name (1945) turned the protagonist into a misunderstood pederast.
4 February
Rupert Brooke goes off to his corner of a foreign field
1915 ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ say the monuments to the fallen of the First World War. None more so than the name of Rupert Brooke. When war broke out in August 1914, Brooke, at 27, had some reputation as a literary critic (principally for his work on Jacobean drama) and as a poet associated with the Bloomsbury Group – whose liberal-humanist values he shared.
His tepid pre-war Georgian literary style is exemplified in his second-best-known poem, ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (the current owner, Jeffrey Archer, is doubtless forever asked if there is ‘honey still for tea’).
Brooke was strikingly good-looking, bisexual and well-connected: a particular friend was Edward Marsh, one of the principal patrons of early 20th-century verse. It was through Marsh, via Winston Churchill (then first lord of the admiralty) that Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve on this day.
Brooke’s war sonnets, later published in the volume 1914: and Other Poems (and dashed off in December of that year) are most famous for the gallantly death-anticipating ‘The Soldier’:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Brooke was, of course, a sailor. But the notion of corpses rotting at sea was not poetic. His vessel left port on 28 February 1915 for what would be a battle at Gallipoli (one of Churchill’s less happy strategic initiatives). En route, on a hospital ship on 23 April, Brooke died of a mosquito bite turned septic. His corpse was landed and summarily buried in a foreign field, at Kyros in Greece.
Brooke’s patriotic poems were too useful as propaganda not to be exploited on the home front. On Easter Sunday 1915 (22 March), Dean Inge read ‘The Soldier’ from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘The enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism has never found a nobler expression’, Inge added, by way of comment.
The poet was then still living but would shortly be dead.
Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times, hailing him as ‘one of England’s noblest sons’.
1914: and Other Poems was published in May 1915, and reprinted, it is estimated, every two months during the course of the war as foreign fields overflowed with the rich dust of British troops.
5 February
Longmans digs in for a very long stay
1797 British publishing has always been dynastic in its character. This has been its strength, and the means by which its strongest elements have survived in a business little better than gambling on the public’s notoriously fickle taste in reading matter.
The most venerable ‘houses’ in the history of the book in Britain, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, can both of them claim half a millennium’s existence – and dispute among themselves which was actually, by a few years, the first in the field.
The longest-surviving commercial house is Longmans. In the 17th century the family were successful Bristol soap-makers. Thomas Longman (1699–1755), the patriarch of the publishing firm, was born in Bristol, and was sent by his family, aged seventeen, to be an articled apprentice in the London book trade. He exchanged soap for ink.
Following the financial securities brought in by the Queen Anne copyright act of 1710, print products enjoyed a boom during this period. Having served his time and learned his business, Thomas borrowed money (over £2,000 – a huge sum at the time) from the family’s Bristol coffers to set up his own house at the ‘Sign of The Ship’ (which would be the firm’s emblem), near Paternoster Row, the home of the British book trade (see also 29 December).
Thomas was not a publisher in the modern sense, but a ‘bookseller’. He traded in books – both their production and their retailing. But, since he was childless, there was no expectation that the name Longman would survive four centuries as an imprint.
On his death, the firm passed into the proprietorship of his nephew, another Thomas Longman (1730–97). He had twelve children, and the family interest was continued. But not with any great flair or trade prominence. It was with this Thomas Longman’s death, on 5 February 1797, that the company’s root was finally planted.
Thomas’s eldest son – inevitably another Thomas Longman (1771–1842) – made the firm a publishing powerhouse. The age, with industrialisation, urbanisation, increased literacy and modern transport systems, was propitious for the book trade. Longman III (so to call him) imaginatively expanded into papermaking and printing. But, as the historian Asa Briggs records in his history of the firm: ‘The basis of the house’s strength was capital. Thomas Norton Longman had left nearly £200,000 in 1842, when he died accidentally after falling from his horse on his way back from Paternoster Row to his house in Hampstead.’
This Thomas Longman was the first of the family to enter Parliament. Among other things, publishing was now clearly a ‘profession for gentlemen’.
Longman would continue as a family dynasty – and as the most eminent imprint in the London publishing community – until the early 1970s, when it was swallowed into the maw of the Viking- Penguin-Pearson multinational combine. The age of family publishing had passed.
6 February
Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel-length detective fiction, The Big Sleep, at the advanced age of 51
1939 Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and the ‘Philip Marlowe PI’ series it initiated, are high points in the ‘hard-boiled’ crime fiction genre. More significantly, they served to raise that genre from the pulpy soup in which it was spawned to ‘Literature’. Chandler was plausibly considered for a Nobel Prize and – given the 1938 winner (Pearl S. Buck) – might well have graced that award. Certainly, Chandler’s Marlowe series have lasted longer in reader popularity than Buck’s trilogy about 20th-century China, which kicked off with The Good Earth in 1931. It was filmed – Oscar-winningly – in the same year as The Big Sleep.
Chandler came to writing fiction late in life, with career failures dragging behind him. The child of a broken family, he was educated (as he was proud to advertise) at an English public school – Dulwich. He was knocked about in the First World War fighting with the Canadian army, and – before taking to literature – had failed in the California oil industry. Not easy to do at that period, when you could start a gusher in the Long Beach fields with a pickaxe. Given his problems with alcohol in the 1930s, it would have been very wise to steer clear of Ray with a pickaxe in his hand.
Always dominated by his mother, and sexually timid, he married the day after his mother died. His wife, Cissie, was decades older than he. As an acquaintance tartly noted, the new Mrs Chandler
was 50 years old, looked 40 and dressed twenty. But she helped Ray dry out, and start a redemptive late career in crime fiction.
He was assisted by the market for high-class, hard-boiled detective fiction created by Black Mask magazine. The journal had been founded in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and his partner, George Jean Nathan, who sold it after a year to be run by various editors until the dominating Captain Joseph T. ‘Cap’ Shaw took over. Shaw was a former bayonet instructor and a theorist on the subject of the detective story. He demanded from his contributors a clear, uncluttered style and storyline, and he ‘Hammettised’ the magazine. Dashiell Hammett published the first of his ‘Continental Op’ stories in Black Mask in October 1922. Erle Stanley Gardner published his first story in the magazine in 1923 and Raymond Chandler published his first short story in Black Mask in 1933. Thereafter he served an apprenticeship with a string of short pieces revolving around various precursors of Philip Marlowe.
The Big Sleep introduces the 38-year-old PI as ‘a shop soiled Sir Galahad’ taking on the corruption of the southern Californian ‘old money’ elite (a caste Chandler knew well from his oilman days). The Big Sleep – which does not have an easily followed plot – was filmed by Howard Hawks, starring Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe, in 1946. Famously, the director wired the novelist asking him to explain the significance of the murdered chauffeur, only to be told that Chandler himself did not know the answer.
7 February
Madame Bovary in the dock
1857 1857 is the annus mirabilis for students of obscenity. In Britain the first formal legislation on the offence (the Obscene Publications Act, known as ‘Lord Campbell’s Act’) was enacted in that year. In France, there were three high-profile trials in 1857: against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, against Baudelaire’s poems Les Fleurs du Mal, and (more forgettably, despite its runaway popularity at the time) Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères du Peuple.