Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  The newly introduced law in Britain and the French prosecutions defined two quite distinct ideas about the means by which dangerous books (worse than cyanide or prussic acid, according to Lord Campbell) should be controlled by the well-meaning state.

  The Anglo-Saxon approach, soon adopted in the US, took as its defining criterion that obscenity was to be defined by its inherent tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’ (this test was officially clarified as a handy slogan in the judge Sir Alexander Cockburn’s definition of obscenity in 1868).

  Especially, that is, works with the tendency to deprave and corrupt the vulnerable ‘young’. Would it, in Dickens’ sarcastic formulation, bring a blush to a maiden’s cheek? If so, it was offensive and could be proceeded against. In fact the vagueness of the definition (how did one measure ‘depravity’?) induced a spirit of excessive caution and self-censorship in the book trade. British publishing became institutionally timid for a hundred years.

  In France, as established in the courts in the same year, 1857, the criterion was outrage aux bonnes moeurs – public indecency. The question asked in France had nothing to do with mademoiselle’s cheeks. Did a work, by its encouragement to moral disorder, threaten the stability of the state?

  After its serialisation in La Revue de Paris between October 1856 and December 1856, Madame Bovary was prosecuted as a threat to public order and religion and duly cleared on that score on 7 February 1857. Refined descriptions of adultery, it was determined, offered no risk to the republic. Inevitably the novel went on to be a best-seller.

  The difference between the French and Anglo-Saxon regulations led to markedly different literary cultures. Zola, for example, was a heroic author in France and a purveyor of filth in Britain. The publisher of his translated works, Henry Vizetelly (see 21 January), was imprisoned for depraving the English public with Zolaism – he had, The Times said, thrown a vial of acid in the face of the great British public.

  This dualism attained its absurd height in the 20th century when a whole succession of English literary ‘classics’ (e.g. Ulysses, Henry Miller’s ‘Tropics’, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, Naked Lunch) could be published only in Paris.

  The anomaly was belatedly cleared up by reform of the obscenity law in the US in 1959 and in the UK a year later.

  8 February

  The Pickwick Papers are launched and almost sink

  1836 On this date the up-and-coming London publishers (with a long way still to come in the book trade) Chapman and Hall invited Charles Dickens to write the text (‘letterpress’), under the pseudonym ‘Boz’, for a random series of sporting papers (called in the trade ‘Nimrod’ publications, after the great hunter in the Bible).

  The project was centred, initially, on the illustrations of the well known Robert Seymour, who had a line in ‘Sporting Sketches’. Dickens was a wholly unknown journalist in his early twenties. The only original aspect about the ‘Pickwick Papers’, as they were to be called, was that Chapman and Hall decided they should be published monthly, in one ‘gathering’ (32 pages), with an ‘advertiser’ (paper wrappers, with two or three pages of ads), costing 1 shilling (a considerable amount of money in 1836), with two engravings on steel by Seymour (these, it was expected, could be extracted and framed).

  There was nothing new about the part-issue of books in ‘fascicles’ like this. The practice goes back to the 17th century and was a handy way of spreading costs for impecunious readers. What was new was that Chapman and Hall’s monthly issue of their papers on ‘magazine day’ (the last Friday of the month) was designed to sell the ‘parts’ like a journal – taking advantage of the new railway distribution system emerging across the country.

  The first instalment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club began to appear in April. It was not a success. Sales sank as low as 400 – well below break-even point. From the start there was friction – effectively a power struggle – between Dickens (who wanted more ‘story’) and his senior partner (who felt it was ‘his’ venture). There was a particularly fierce quarrel on the night of 19 April. The following day, Seymour shot himself. Dickens promptly took charge and was responsible, in a month or so, for appointing the congenial illustrator who would work with (effectively ‘for’) him through much of his later career – Hablot K. Browne, who took on the matching nom de plume, ‘Phiz’, in witness of his subordinate role. As Dickens went on to pull in thousands of pounds over the next few years, Browne slaved away at £5 for a full-page illustration.

  Now effectively a novel – not a loose gathering of sporting papers – organised around the magnificent comic creation of Samuel Pickwick, the series went on to enjoy huge success, selling up to 40,000 copies a month. Dickens went on to become the Shakespeare of Victorian fiction and very rich. Behind every great fortune, says Balzac, lies a crime. So friends of Robert Seymour felt about ‘the Great Inimitable’. Friends of Dickens answer that great careers in literature require some steel: something with which the young Boz (and the older Dickens) was amply supplied.

  9 February

  Frank O’Hara sees a headline that Lana Turner has ‘collapsed’ and immediately writes a poem

  1962 The whole poem reads:

  Lana Turner has collapsed!

  I was trotting along and suddenly

  it started raining and snowing

  and you said it was hailing

  but hailing hits you on the head

  hard so it was really snowing and

  raining and I was in such a hurry

  to meet you but the traffic

  was acting exactly like the sky

  and suddenly I see a headline

  LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

  there is no snow in Hollywood

  there is no rain in California

  I have been to lots of parties

  and acted perfectly disgraceful

  but I never actually collapsed

  oh Lana Turner we love you get up

  This is one of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, so called because they evoke chance encounters while the poet is on his lunch break from his job at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. To add to the sense of casualness, the poem does away with punctuation marks (apart from the exclamation points after ‘collapsed’), to good comic effect in the last line, especially. The lines often run on (as in ‘hits you on the head / hard’) and lack the usual capital letters at their start.

  Characters appear without the formality of an introduction (who is ‘you’?), and the poem’s plot seems to be governed by the quotidian – the weather, newspaper headlines and random thoughts – to all of which the aimless act of ‘trotting along’ keeps the narrative consciousness open.

  Unkind critics have referred to the Lunch Poems as O’Hara’s ‘I-do-this-I-do-that’ poems, but not everything is what it seems. This one was actually written on the Staten Island ferry, which means that although the poem may have been composed in a hurry (the ferry takes less than half an hour to cross between Manhattan and Richmond), its apparently immediate elements, like the traffic, meeting ‘you’, arguing about the weather, or even seeing a headline about Lana Turner, aren’t really as ‘there’ as they seem.

  In other words, there’s nothing self-revelatory about the poem. O’Hara hated the confessional style, as exemplified in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and in the work of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Referring to Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, he told Edward Lucie-Smith: ‘I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s admirable to feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty.’1

  By contrast to ‘Skunk Hour’, ‘Lana Turner’ is a poem of surfaces. The words don’t refer to deep psychological states so much as play against or interrogate each other, so that, for example, the word ‘collapsed’ registers not anything that happened to Lana Turner (fainted? fell into a drunken stupor? died of a heart attack?) but the clichéd use of the word in newspaper headlines.


  1 ‘Edward Lucie-Smith: An Interview with Frank O’Hara’, in Frank O’Hara (ed. Donald Allen), Standing Still and Walking in New York, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1983, p. 13.

  10 February

  The king of the cuckolds dies

  1837 No poet of the Romantic movement can claim to have died as romantically as Alexander Pushkin. In 1829, aged 30, he fell in love with a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl, Natalya Nikolayevna Goncharova. They married two years later. The glamorous couple moved in Moscow’s high society and were seen at every grand ball.

  Pushkin was famous as the author of Eugene Onegin (completing its serial publication in 1832, with a clear depiction of Natalya as ‘Tatyana’) but – like other poets – not rich. Natalya was, gossip informed him and the world, conducting an affair with Baron Georges d’Anthès, whom the Pushkins had met in 1834. D’Anthès was a dashing Frenchman who had come to Russia and joined the tsar’s army. He began taking an interest in Natalya in 1835.

  In 1836 Pushkin received a poison pen letter informing him that he had been elected to the ‘The Serene Order of Cuckolds’. It may have been baseless. D’Anthès had, by now, married Natalya’s sister. But Pushkin was determined to follow the script laid down in Eugene Onegin, where Lensky provokes the hero to a duel over Tatyana.

  Pushkin would prove unluckier than Onegin. Despite furious efforts to prevent it, the duel, with pistols, took place on 27 January 1837. D’Anthès fired first and wounded Pushkin. Pushkin then fired, and winged his opponent. Pushkin was, it transpired, fatally hurt. He died, lingeringly, on 10 February.

  His death was the occasion of extraordinary public mourning which – since he was a proclaimed critic of the government – caused alarm. By the tsar’s order (the potentate had also, at one point, eyed the beautiful Natalya), Pushkin was buried out of the way, and discreetly, at a monastery. D’Anthès was expelled from Russia and lived a long life, dying in 1895. According to the New York Times, reporting the event in 1837, ‘every patriotic Russian will spit on the ground on hearing the name of d’Anthès’.

  11 February

  Sylvia Plath commits suicide, in the coldest winter in England for fifteen years

  1963 Only those (like the present authors) who lived through the winters of 1947 and 1963 can know not how cold they were (much less so, in terms of degrees, than winters in Plath’s native Boston) but how wretchedly ill-equipped British heating, plumbing and transport was for the unseasonably freezing weather. It was a bad time.

  The weather doubtless exacerbated Plath’s suicidal depression; but there were other factors. She had long suffered self-destructive impulses. She attempted suicide at least twice in college and her first (and only) published novel, The Bell Jar (by ‘Victoria Lucas’, published a month before her death), replays that period of her life. In the months leading up to her death when she wrote her most famous poems, a number of them revolved around the theme of suicide. Notably ‘Lady Lazarus’, with its laconically morbid opening lines: ‘Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.’ Her physician had been trying to find her a place in a psychiatric unit for weeks. But the NHS was no more efficient that winter than British central heating.

  Her tempestuous marriage to the poet Ted Hughes was the trigger for her suicide. He had abandoned her, and their two children, for Assia Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill. Plath had moved to a flat in 23 Fitzroy Road, a house where W.B. Yeats had once lived.

  Early in the morning of 11 February, Plath put milk and bread in the children’s room, broke their window (to let in air), went down to the kitchen, sealed the doors with wet towels, turned on the gas in the oven and waited to die. Her friend and active promoter of her poetry, Al Alvarez, who had seen her shortly before, speculates that it may have been initially at least a half-hearted suicide attempt – a cry for help. If so, it failed. Her dead body was found some hours later.

  She was buried five days later in the Hughes family cemetery at Heptonstall. The headstone, which identifies her as ‘Sylvia Hughes’, has been regularly vandalised. Plath’s death, it is not coincidental to note, occurred in the period that the National Organization of Women was formed, 28 June 1966. Her suicide has, for many women, taken on symbolic meaning.

  After Plath’s death, Hughes lived with Assia Wevill. She committed suicide – in exactly the same way as Plath – on 23 March 1969, killing their child as well. Hughes remarried in 1970, and died of cancer in 1998. On 16 March 2009, Hughes and Plath’s son, Nicholas, killed himself.

  12 February

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn is stripped of his Soviet citizenship

  1974 Few novelists’ lives in the 20th century have been as eventful as Solzhenitsyn’s. He was born into a prosperous and intellectual (but less than aristocratic) family a year after the 1917 revolution. He studied maths and philosophy at Moscow University and was, at this stage of his life, a communist patriot. In the Great Patriotic War against Germany he saw active service and rose to the rank of captain in the artillery.

  In February 1945, a few weeks before victory, he was arrested for injudiciously sarcastic comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend. After the usual brutal interrogation in the Lubyanka prison, he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. This provided the experience for his first published novel (unpublishable when written – but circulated in samizdat), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Having served his sentence he was sent into internal exile (routine for political prisoners) in Kazakhstan. There he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. This supplied the experience for Cancer Ward (published in 1967 in the USSR and banned the following year) – an allegory of totalitarian life in Stalinist Russia. By now Solzhenitsyn had renounced Marxism for his idiosyncratically forged brand of Christianity – although he remained throughout his life, even in exile, a staunch Russian patriot.

  In 1956, with the Khrushchevian ‘thaw’, he was permitted to return to Moscow. The Russian premier also authorised the belated publication of Ivan Denisovich in the journal Novy Mir in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s later works were less to the authorities’ taste, after Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964. He was not allowed to collect the Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1970. He was rendered an ‘unperson’, dismissed from the Writers’ Union, and his house raided for his work in progress, the massive denunciation of Stalinist terror that was The Gulag Archipelago.

  When portions of this work were published in Paris, Solzhenitsyn was arrested on 12 February 1974 and charged with treason. He was exiled the following day. He took up residence in the United States, where he was an inveterate critic of the Soviet regime – exiling him was a mistake of epic proportions. He made a triumphant return to his homeland in 1994 after the fall of the USSR and died in 2008, a survivor both of cancer and of communism.

  13 February

  Allied air forces firebomb Dresden

  1945 On the night of 13 February 1945, three months before the end of the Second World War, the author Kurt Vonnegut was a POW sheltering in an underground animal slaughterhouse during the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden. He survived. Thousands didn’t. Dresden was thought wrongly by its inhabitants, and by the large numbers of refugees fleeing the Russian advance, to be an ‘open city’ and the ‘safest air-raid shelter in Germany’. It wasn’t, Churchill decreed (arguably to show the USSR some Allied muscle).

  On the same night Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, is a POW in the same shelter as Vonnegut during the devastating fire-bombing of Dresden. He too survives. But he goes crazy.

  Vonnegut published many accounts of his Dresden experience. The following is from an interview in 1974:

  I was present in the greatest massacre in European history, which was the destruction of Dresden by fire-bombing … The American and British air forces together killed 135,000 people in two hours. This is a world’s record. It’s never been done faster, not in the Battle of Britain or Hiroshima. (In order to qualify as a massacre you have to
kill real fast.) But I was there, and there was no news about it in the American papers, it was so embarrassing.

  RAF estimates later downscaled the civilian casualties to 35,000. This figure has been disputed (notably by the right-wing historian David Irving, who goes for a number almost twice Vonnegut’s 135,000). Thirty-five thousand, of course, is not a figure to which one would attach the word ‘mere’. But it undercuts, if one wants to do a Bertram Rumfoord (the gung-ho military historian in Slaughterhouse-Five), Vonnegut’s allegation that Dresden was a worse massacre than Hiroshima – something that he was insisting up to a few months before his death in 2007.

  Fiction, like history, has been generally silent about Dresden. Vonnegut himself had almost insuperable difficulty writing his ‘Dresden novel’. He had to forge an entirely new ‘schizophrenic’ technique, weaving realism, science-fiction schlock (little green men from Tralfamadore) and slapstick social comedy into a startlingly innovative pattern. The novel’s composition accompanied a catastrophic crisis in the author’s family life (his marriage broke up and his son developed schizophrenia). Slaughterhouse-Five was finally published, to huge acclaim, in 1969. Nonetheless, for all the praise he received, Vonnegut went to his grave angry (in his ironic way) that posterity would not recognise the firebombing of Dresden for the war crime he always maintained it was.

  14 February