Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  Salman Rushdie goes to ground

  1989 Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988. It received perplexed reviews in the London literary press – where it was widely seen as something of a disappointment from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children. No (London) reviewer found the novel offensive.

  Offence was taken in Saudi Arabia (whose moral guardians had had longstanding suspicions about Rushdie). The novel caught fire – literally – on 14 January, when a thousand Muslim protesters marched through Bradford with a copy of The Satanic Verses tied to a stake. The book was ritually burned. The media had been forewarned and cameras were present in force.1

  Book-burning is always telegenic and CNN picked up the event. There ensued riots in the Indian subcontinent. In Iran (which had current political resentments against the UK), on 14 February, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the British author Rushdie and his British publishers (Penguin) for The Satanic Verses. Any devout assassin was guaranteed entry to paradise and a multi-million-dollar reward for ridding the world of the literary apostate and blasphemer (as Rushdie was proscribed).

  In his later novel The Ground Beneath her Feet (2000), written in series of safe houses under the protection of Britain’s Special Branch, Rushdie labels the fatwa a ‘Valentine card’, echoing Jean Cocteau’s ironic comment that harsh criticisms of literature are the love letters of disappointed suitors. He would need to take refuge (initially under the government of ‘Mrs Torcher’ – satirised in The Satanic Verses) for a decade and a half.

  The principal ground of offence perceived by Islamists in The Satanic Verses is commonly misunderstood. It was not merely the use of the abusive occidental name ‘Mahound’ for the Prophet, nor his (alleged) lecherousness. It was the novel’s contention that the Koran was not the immutably received word of God, but – effectively – fiction (embellished by the Prophet’s secretary, ‘Salman the Persian’). That it is, effectively, a wonderful work of fiction, God’s Novel.

  Predictably, the furore made Rushdie’s novel (still as impenetrable to the majority of Western readers as Finnegans Wake) a bestseller. Nothing gets a book going so successfully as flames licking around its covers (in front of the cameras, of course).

  1 The incineration may be viewed on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2009/feb/11/satanic-verses-rushdie-fatwa-khomeini

  15 February

  Francis Parkman launches The Oregon Trail

  1849 The Oregon Trail grew out of a ‘summer’s journey out of bounds’ that Parkman made to the American West in 1846, of which he kept a journal. On this day the book was published, just in time for the Forty-Niner market of adventurers going to California in search of gold.

  Parkman was another of those well-bred, well-educated easterners – like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister (see 4 August and 29 June) – for whom the West was a rite of passage to American manhood. In the book this theme is heightened by three points of reference, none of which is important in the original journal.

  One is a group of English tourists whom Parkman and his party meet on the trail, who carry with them enough ammunition for a regiment, and a redundancy of ‘spare rifles and fowling pieces, ropes and harnesses’ – not to mention ‘telescopes and portable compasses’ and their personal baggage. Of course they ‘broke the axle-tree of their wagon’, bringing ‘the whole cumbrous machine lumbering into the bed of a brook!’ Oddly, in the journal it’s Parkman’s wagon that breaks its axle-tree, but here it has to happen to the English to show how encumbered the Old World is by precedent.

  Then there are the natives. Parkman couldn’t make up his mind whether they represented a complex traditional culture, or no culture at all. Of one Oglala Sioux ‘warrior’ he first describes him with a ‘statue-like form limbed like an Apollo of bronze’ and then lying ‘there in the sun before our tent, kicking his heels in the air and cracking jokes with his brother’.

  Finally the issue of the author’s health, barely mentioned in the journal, becomes a recurring concern in the book – until one morning when, feeling a renewed ‘strength and elasticity of limb’, he climbs a mountain and stepping ‘forth into the light’ sees the ‘pale blue prairie … stretching to the farthest horizon’. This prospect sets the West in perspective – not just visual but moral and intellectual too. It’s the real climax of The Oregon Trail, because it’s when the neophyte becomes the initiate.

  16 February

  The Thirties are over. Belatedly

  2009 ‘We were the 1930s’, boasted Stephen Spender. If so, the decade ended with the death of Edward Upward on this day, six decades later. Although he was not included in Roy Campbell’s satirical collective name ‘MacSpaunday’ (Louis Macneice, Spender, W.H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis) Upward was, through his connection and collaborative writing efforts with Christopher Isherwood, one of what Spender called ‘the gang’ (unironically – it was the era of Prohibition and Al Capone). As Spender wrote to one of the gang’s outriders, the publisher John Lehman, in 1931:

  There are four or five friends who work together, although they are not all known to each other. They are W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edward Upward and I … Whatever one of us does in writing, travelling or taking jobs is a kind of exploration which may be taken up by the others.

  Unlike the others Spender mentions (and John Lehman), Upward was not gay. He married, very happily, in 1936. Unlike his fellow gangsters, Upward took up a career as a public school teacher, sticking at it for the whole length of his career (Spender and Auden dabbled, but found the classroom uncongenial). And Upward, a card-carrying member of the Communist party after 1932, brought a Marxist stringency to the ‘gang’. A contemporary of Isherwood’s at Cambridge, Upward wrote with him a series of squibs and satires set in the imaginary village of Mortmere.

  Despite loyal attempts by his fellow gangsters to promote his fiction, Upward’s novels (half of which came out in the last fifteen years of his life) were all politely received but made no great impact. He resigned from the Communist party (which he regarded as having become soft in its ideology) in 1948. Widowed, and having outlived all his fellow gangsters, he lived out the last decades of his life on the Isle of Wight, a living monument to the Thirties which – like MacSpaunday – he never really left.

  17 February

  John Sadleir, the greatest financial swindler (to that date) in British commercial history, commits suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath

  1856 No financial crook has inspired better literature than John Sadleir (1813–56). The Irish-born (distantly related through his father to Shakespeare), Catholic and Clongowes College-educated Sadleir began life as a lawyer with his brother William in Dublin. In 1839 – a period of wild railway speculation – he and another brother, James, founded the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank. It expanded rapidly. In 1846, Sadleir moved to London. He was now wealthy, and set up house, magnificently, in Gloucester Square. He joined the best clubs, the Reform and White’s. He rode to hounds and kept a stable of hunters. He did not marry – although he had liaisons of a fashionable kind.

  It was the railway boom which buoyed him up. He took shares in many speculative ventures, and sat on boards of the innumerable companies spawned by the mania. He also became chairman of the London and County Joint Stock Bank, which had 60 branches and 20,000 accounts.

  By 1847, he was grand enough to be elected to Parliament, for Carlow. Five years later, his brother James and three cousins joined him in the House. They were active in the prosecution of Catholic emancipation, as part of the ‘papal brigade’. It was the period of the so-called ‘papal aggression’ – the setting-up of a Catholic hierarchy in Britain.

  Sadleir over-extended himself, and neglected his primary business. By February 1856 his bank was insolvent, largely owing to Sadleir’s personal overdraft of £288,000. He was driven to fraud and wild financial gambles, in a desperate attempt to keep afloat. He ran up debts of £1.5 million for the banks over w
hich he had power – an unimaginably large figure at the time.

  In the face of inevitable disgrace and criminal prosecution he disposed of himself with prussic acid on the night of 17 February 1856, on Hampstead Heath, near Jack Straw’s Castle, the tavern. He is buried in an unmarked grave in Highgate cemetery.

  There had never been a financier as spectacularly criminal as Sadleir. He inspired a string of wicked fictional ‘Napoleons of the City’: Merdle in Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857); Davenport Dunn in Charles Lever’s 1858 novel of that name; Jabez Morth in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Trail of the Serpent (1861); and Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875).

  One can almost forgive Sadleir the thousands of ruined widows and children for passages, such as the following, which his malefactions inspired:

  Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other. The weightiest of men had said to projectors, ‘Now, what name have you got? Have you got Merdle?’ And, the reply being in the negative, had said, ‘Then I won’t look at you.’

  18 February

  Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is published in the US, delayed by an obscene engraving

  1885 The American edition came out over two months after appearing in England and Canada, because an unknown engraver in the American publishers, Charles L. Webster Company, had added an erect penis to the picture of Silas Phelps on the penultimate page of Chapter XXXII. The pictures in all copies had to be cut out by hand and replaced by a new printing of the original plate.

  The joke would prove prophetic of the book’s reception; along with great approbation, it has attracted 100 years of objections to its language. Libraries, including the otherwise liberal Free Public Library in progressive Concord, Massachusetts, would ban the book as ‘obscene’ – not in the sense of sexually explicit, but in the older sense of not fit for public performance. More recently the book has been criticised for its racial discourse, in particular Huck’s frequent use of the word ‘nigger’.

  The reason why the Concord library called the characters’ dialogue ‘rough, coarse and inelegant’ is that they were the first in American fiction to talk as real people actually spoke. Before Huckleberry Finn characters said things like: ‘Faith, Sir, I have much inclination to indulge the man, if it should only be to let him behold the firm countenance we maintain.’

  That comes from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826). As Mark Twain himself commented of Cooper’s dialogue, ‘To believe that such talk really ever came out of people’s mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man’s mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation.’

  19 February

  Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos wins the first-ever Bollingen Prize for poetry

  1949 The award caused a critical storm that spread to the popular press, raising once again (as had the trial of Oscar Wilde – see 25 May) that old question of whether aesthetics is a kind of morality. In other words, does art have a system of morality that can be kept separate from life?

  Ezra Pound, the archetypal Anglo-American modernist, was the author of works ranging in size from the early imagist ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (a poem not much longer than its title), through the cultural critique of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920) to the monumental The Cantos (1922 onwards, unfinished at his death in 1972, at which point he had reached number 120). He was also a generous patron to many artistic contemporaries and midwife to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

  From 1924 he lived in Italy. When the Fascists took power, he became an ardent admirer of Mussolini, writing to him from time to time, and even meeting him once in 1933 when he presented the Duce with a copy of his first 30 Cantos. Hugely delighted with the encounter, Pound would recall it in Canto 41:

  ‘Ma questo,’

  Said the Boss, ‘è divertente.’1

  Catching the point before the aesthetes had got there;

  With so much goodwill about, it was natural that Pound would want to support the Italian side in the war against the Allies. Pound hated the war anyway, so he wrote articles for the Italian papers denouncing it as a Jewish bankers’ conspiracy. Between 1941 and 1943 he also made well over 100 broadcasts on Rome Radio attacking the war. They were in English, colloquial in tone, spoken in a kind of folksy accent and clearly aimed at Americans (including soldiers on active service) in an attempt to get them to question their nation’s war effort against the Axis.2

  As the Allies completed their dangerous conquest of Italy, Pound was arrested by Italian partisans and handed over to the US authorities. On 24 May 1945 he was incarcerated in a US Army ‘Detention Training Camp’ (DTC) on the Via Aurelia just north of Pisa, where he was kept in an open cage for almost a month, before being allowed a tent.

  It was here that Pound wrote most of Cantos 74 to 84, the so-called Pisan Cantos. They are indeed different from the other Cantos – more reflective, less declamatory; quoting from conversations in his personal past more than from the writings of philosophers and politicians; immensely attentive to nature near and far, from a green baby grasshopper swinging on a blade of grass to the snow on the marble of the Carrara mountains to the north-east of the DTC.

  On his return to the States Pound was charged with treason, but was judged unfit to plead because of his mental condition, and committed to St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC. There he was the centre of something of a salon, visited by poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and William Carlos Williams, and a cadre of younger men keen to learn more about his ideas about economic history. Meanwhile, publication of The Pisan Cantos in 1948 aroused a great deal of interest – so much so that the Fellows of American Letters at the Library of Congress decided to award the volume the first-ever Bollingen Foundation poetry award on this day in 1949.

  Then all hell broke loose. ‘Pound, in Mental Clinic, Wins Prize for Poetry Penned in Treason Cell’, thundered the Sunday New York Times. Scarcely less alarming was Robert Hillyer in The Saturday Review of Literature (‘Treason’s Strange Fruit’), for whom The Pisan Cantos were a vehicle for ‘Fascism, anti-Semitism’ and ‘contempt for America’. It was all down to a conspiracy made up of T.S. Eliot and other friends of Pound, together with the ‘New Critics’ whose doctrine disallowed the truth value of a work of art, focusing instead on its inherent worth as an aesthetic object – a ‘Well-Wrought Urn’, to borrow New Critic Cleanth Brooks’ title of 1947.

  Eighty-four writers and critics, including e.e. cummings and Lionel Trilling, wrote to The Saturday Review to counter Hillyer’s attack. The magazine declined to print their letter.

  Congressmen like Jacob K. Javits of New York and James T. Patterson of Connecticut addressed the House, and read Hillyer’s essay into the Congressional record. The Congressional Joint Committee on the Library of Congress resolved that no more literary prizes should be granted under the Library’s auspices.

  There was some truth in Hillyer’s analysis, daft as it may sound at this distance. If not a conspiracy, then the Bollingen award was certainly the result of a remarkable likeness of critical orientation among the Fellows – most of whom, like T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Mark Van Doren and Conrad Aiken, were friends of Alan Tate, the Library’s consultant in poetry, who had appointed them.

  It was left to a later historian to point out the irony that during the Cold War, ‘most Americans would have felt more at home with Soviet “Realist” premises, which demanded a subordination of art to politically defined mass needs, than with a seemingly incomprehensible aesthetic theory originating in T.S. Eliot�
��s obscure complaints about a “dissociation of sensibility”’.3

  The British had a more direct approach to problems like these. When they finally got their hands on another expatriate American broadcasting treason from an enemy country, William Joyce (aka ‘Lord Haw-Haw’), they strung him up without delay or ceremony. As Private Eye would put it, ‘it’s the only language they understand’.

  1 ‘But this … is amusing.’

  2The full text of the broadcasts can be found in Leonard W. Doob (ed.), Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.

  3Frank A. Ninko, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1951, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

  20 February

  F.T. Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro, Paris

  1909 ‘We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.’ Then, a call to action: ‘“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!”’

  No sooner were the words out of Marinetti’s mouth than they raced on in their car, ‘hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron’ until made to swerve by two cyclists ‘shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments’ until the car winds up in a ditch, its wheels in the air:

  O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse … When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!