Love, Sex, Death and Words

by John Sutherland

  So much for the preamble – the movement’s birth and baptism, so to speak. As for the manifesto itself, it contained eleven paragraphs hymning ‘the beauty of speed’ imaged in ‘a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes’ and whose driver ‘hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit’. Paragraphs five and six promised a violent, radical and intentionally misogynist programme:

  5. We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

  6. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

  It was absurd, extreme – deliberately so (the Futurists could be self-mocking as well as self-advertising). What did it all mean in practice? In painting, urban scenes in which nature and artifice – trees, sky, houses, buses – blended into each other, through a ‘divisionist’ medium of dots, stripes and planes of colour. In poetry, forced analogies between nature and the machine (not unlike metaphysical conceits), that perennial modernist chimera, the ‘abolition of syntax’ so as to ‘free’ the word (parole in libertà was both the theme and the method of Marinetti’s own concrete poem Zang Tumb Tumb, which appeared in instalments between 1912 and 1914).

  Did Futurism leave a legacy? Fragments of its mood and method could be found in Surrealism, Dada and the vorticism of Blast (see 2 July). But none would survive the First World War, which it no longer seemed so witty to ‘glorify’ as ‘the world’s only hygiene’.

  21 February

  Dead, but not yet buried

  2005 Guillermo Cabrera Infante was born in Cuba in 1929. He was the eldest son of parents who founded the Cuban Communist party. Their politics led, inevitably, to friction with the authorities (Cuba was, effectively, a US possession – following its liberation from Spain – and a Yankee playground). Guillermo’s parents were imprisoned in 1936. On their release the family went to live in Havana: the location that meant most to their son for the rest of his life.

  Cabrera Infante enrolled as a medical student at the University of Havana in 1949, but promptly switched to journalism. Films were always a passion for him and he published on them enthusiastically and perceptively in the 1950s. He had proclaimed dissident views and, like his parents, spent some time in prison for pieces the authorities found offensive. Prohibited from writing under his own name, he adopted a pseudonym (‘G. Cain’ – after the Biblical outcast) and continued annoying the Batista regime.

  When Fidel Castro took over the country in 1959 Cabrera Infante was, initially, a staunch supporter of the socialist revolution. The new authorities liked him as well. He was awarded a position of authority in the newly established state film institute, and an editorial position on the cultural supplement of the party’s newspaper, Revolución. He divorced his first wife and remarried during this period and in 1960 published his first volume of fiction, Así en la paz como en la guerra (As in Times of Peace, So in Times of War).

  He was, however, already chafing at the party’s censorship of artistic expression. In 1962, he accepted a diplomatic position in Belgium where he could express himself unfettered. Here it was that he wrote Tres tristes tigres (1967; Three Trapped Tigers) – an exercise in Joycean verbal wit, set in Havana (his Dublin) before the revolution. It won an array of international prizes.

  In 1965 Cabrera Infante finally resolved on exile from a country he loved, but could no longer – under Castro – live in (although, until his death, he would write about it obsessively, particularly Havana). After Franco’s Spain denied him residency he moved to England, becoming a citizen in 1979, the country’s first Cuban novelist.

  In England he published novels and wrote screenplays and film reviews (his English was as proficient as that of any native speaker), and published a celebration of the cigar, Holy Smoke (1985). Cuba had, by now, long disowned him as a traitor to the country and his books were banned on the island. However, some Cubans saw him as the country’s greatest living novelist. His last years in England were depressed and unhappy. Castro, it seemed, would live for ever.

  Cabrera died on 21 February 2005 of MRSA, while being treated in a London hospital for a fractured hip. He had requested, in the event of his death, that his ashes be kept unburied until – after Castro and his regime were gone – they could be interred in Cuba. They remain unburied.

  22 February

  Coetzee’s Gulliverism

  2007 Literature is in its essence national property – ‘English Literature’, ‘American Literature’, ‘French Literature’. In Pictures of an Institution, Randall Jarrell imagines a small South American country whose ‘great author’ is called Gomez. The inhabitants think of Shakespeare as ‘the English Gomez’. When Saul Bellow asked (there is some doubt that he ever did), ‘Who is the Zulu Tolstoy?’, he was making a chauvinistic point about nationalism as much as any point about literature. In other words, that great nations (alone) have great authors.

  J.M. Coetzee is indisputably a great author. Who owns him? It is a tricky question. He was born into an Afrikaans family, but one which spoke principally English (there was also a dash of Polish in his background). He was brought up and educated in South Africa (a phase of his life chronicled in his fictionalised memoir, Boyhood). Arguably the Zulus, after Mandela, could mount a claim on the basis of country of residence.

  In his early twenties, unwilling to live under apartheid, Coetzee moved to London where, having studied maths and English as a university student, he was one of the first generation of IBM computer programmers (this phase of his life is chronicled in Youth).

  Coetzee moved on to America in 1965, where he studied and later taught English at university level. He applied to be naturalised in the US, but was rejected by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for having taken part in violent anti-Vietnam protests. Coetzee returned to South Africa in 1971, to take up a university post in Cape Town. On his retirement in 2002, he migrated to Australia. In 2006, he became an Australian citizen.

  All these national locations, and affiliations, find reflection in Coetzee’s fiction – both geographically and thematically. But ‘nation’, one suspects, means less to Coetzee – one of the most enigmatic writers of his time – than ‘species’. He seems, like Gulliver at the end of his travels, to have decided that his true kinship is with animal-, not human-kind.

  In a series of books, articles and speeches from the mid-1990s onwards Coetzee proclaimed his zoophilia. In his 2003 novel Esther Costello he put into the lead character the belief that humans’ factory-style husbandry of animals was not merely the equivalent of the Jewish Holocaust but – in terms of numbers and the fact that it is ongoing – much worse. In a novel this opinion could be attributed to the fanaticism of a fictional character: no more the author’s personal views than are Savonarola’s extremities in George Eliot’s novel, Romola.

  But on 22 February 2007, in a lecture to the ‘Voiceless’ animal protection society in Sydney, Coetzee proclaimed as his personal belief ‘the Holocaust on your breakfast plate’ (as satirical journalists called it):

  The transformation of animals into production units dates back to the late 19th century, and since that time we have already had one warning on the grandest scale that there is something deeply, cosmically wrong with regarding and treating fellow beings as mere units of any kind. This warning came so loud and clear that one would have thought it impossible to ignore. It came when in the mid-20th century a group of powerful and bloody-minded men in Germany hit on the idea of adapting the methods of the industrial stockyard, as pioneered and perfected in Chicago, to the slaughter – or what they preferred to call the processing – of human beings.

  Of course we cried out in horror when we found out what they had been up to. We cried: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like cattle! If we had only known beforehand! But our cry should more accurately have bee
n: What a terrible crime, to treat human beings like units in an industrial process! And that cry should have had a postscript: What a terrible crime, come to think of it – a crime against nature – to treat any living being like a unit in an industrial process!

  In the 1960s (the period in which the novelist entered adulthood) the cry had been ‘one race – the human race’. For Coetzee, in the years of his maturity it is ‘one species, the animal species’.

  23 February

  The print run begins of the Gutenberg Bible, in Mainz, Germany

  1455 Recently we have all been through a step change in the sharing of information like that experienced by Europeans of the 15th and 16th centuries. Ours is the internet; theirs was the invention of printing with movable alphabetical type.

  First came writing, though at first that didn’t advance literature so much as state bureaucracy. Early papyri and clay tablets were inventories, receipts, lists of payment in beer to manual workers, at a time when imaginative literature like epics and lyric poems were sung or spoken from memory.

  Another great leap forward was the codex – the book as we know it, with lots of pages bound together along one edge. This had two advantages over the scroll: you could write on both sides of the page, and (much more important) the reader could flick to different parts of the text much more quickly – like moving from videotapes to DVDs.

  But books had to be either written by hand or printed from elaborately carved woodblocks, which limited their distribution to the elites of church and state. Printing using type that could be set up, used for multiple copies, then distributed and ultimately used again for another text introduced mass production to the mix.

  What Gutenberg did was to take a wine press, add a padded flat surface to the bottom of the screw, and below that a ‘chase’ or frame in which to clamp the type and its spacers. The type was inked with a roller, paper or vellum placed over it, and the upper surface screwed down. Trained as a goldsmith, Gutenberg knew what alloy would make the type able to withstand repeated use. He also worked out that ink based on oil rather than water would stick better to the type.

  Gutenberg’s idea to print the whole of St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Old and New Testaments was itself a radical step, since most worshippers in a Catholic service would know the Bible only through the missal – a sort of anthology of scripture with certain selected texts to be read out on a particular day. Though his massive Bible remained expensive, within a little over half a century printing had spread to over 2,000 cities in Europe, and had got much cheaper. When Bibles became affordable, people could gain direct access to God’s word without the mediation of the parish priest – the fundamental principle of the Reformation.

  To speed the process reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin could now publish their sermons and religious tracts more cheaply. Before long came political pamphlets, newspapers, street ballads – even (eventually) imaginative literature. As print capitalism spread, so more and more people wanted to learn how to read. The process of enlightenment was reciprocal. ‘We change our tools’, as Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, has said of the internet, ‘and then our tools change us.’

  24 February

  The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, burns down, prompting a laconic quip from its newly ruined owner

  1809 It wasn’t the first Drury Lane theatre, nor the first to burn. A theatre has stood on Bridges Street (now Catherine Street) in Covent Garden, backing onto Drury Lane, since 1663, three years after the Restoration cancelled the Puritan ban on public performance. The first escaped the Great Fire of 1666, but burned to the ground six years later. Its successor, designed by Christopher Wren, was home to the great actor-manager David Garrick and his famous 24 Shakespeare performances. On leaving the stage in 1776, Garrick sold his shares in the theatre to the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who used it to premiere both his enormous success (and perennial favourite) The School for Scandal (1777) and The Critic (1779).

  In time the Wren building, even as refurbished by the Adam brothers (with Robert providing a handsome classical façade on the Bridges Street side) fell into such disrepair that it had to be knocked down. Sheridan put £80,000 of his personal fortune, including the earnings from his comedies of manners, into an ambitious new project capable of seating 3,600 on the ground floor and in six tiers of galleries supported by iron columns. The producers found it increasingly difficult to fill this cavern with ordinary, ‘legitimate’ theatre, so they staged plays that created their effect with spectacular display rather than well-turned verbal exchanges. One such spectacle featured a river flowing into a lake large enough to row a boat on.

  Despite an iron safety curtain that was supposed to prevent it, the third theatre caught fire on 24 February 1809, and by late afternoon was burning furiously. Sheridan, who was also the Member of Parliament for Sheffield, could see the glow from the House of Commons, then in session. ‘A motion was made to adjourn,’ according to the Annual Register for that year, ‘but Mr Sheridan said, with great calmness, “that whatever might be the extent of the private calamity, he hoped it would not interfere with the public business of the country”.’

  Finally he and ‘many of his friends’ left for the scene, only to confirm the bad news. The theatre was insured, but for far less than it would cost to rebuild it. Rumour has it that he went into a nearby tavern, ordered a drink and proceeded to sip it slowly (another version has him out on the street, glass in hand). When asked how he could remain so calm while his fortune was going up in flames, he replied: ‘A man may surely take a glass of wine by his own fireside.’

  25 February

  The other Naipaul dies. Prematurely

  1985 Shiva(dhar Srivinasa) Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was one of two sons of the distinguished Trinidadian journalist Seepersad Naipaul, who died when Shiva was seven. His brother V.S. [‘Vidia’] Naipaul was twelve years Shiva’s senior and more influenced by his father. The Naipauls were Indian by origin and their ancestors had come to the Caribbean in the 19th century as indentured labourers. Both the Naipaul sons were emotionally torn between Indian heritage and West Indian upbringing.

  Shiva Naipaul had the best school education (with a strong English flavour to it) the island could offer and like his brother before him won a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. He enrolled for a variety of subjects, none of them with any success. He graduated with a gentleman’s third (in Chinese) in 1968. He had married the year before. It was a year of social upheaval and a period of emotional confusion for Naipaul. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) records:

  He never truly felt at home anywhere; and so began a rootless and dislocated existence starting in Britain in 1964 where not ‘being straightforwardly Indian or straightforwardly West Indian’ was a confusion that the rest of the world could not deal with.

  It was additionally awkward having a novelist brother who had already won himself a distinguished name. Nonetheless, Shiva was determined to write fiction himself. He settled in London and, in 1970, published a novel set in the West Indies, Fireflies. Comparisons with Vidia’s A House for Mr Biswas were inevitable, and not always to Shiva’s advantage. Fireflies nonetheless won prizes and laid the way for another Trinidadian novel, The Chip-Chip Gatherers, which won the Whitbread Prize for that year, 1974.

  Naipaul then went silent as an author of fiction for ten years, restricting himself to some short stories and travel writing. The tone of his published work was increasingly bleak and sardonic. It was at its bleakest with his chronicle of the Jonestown massacre, Black and White (1980). A third novel, A Hot Country, was published in 1983 for a fiction readership which had largely forgotten him, if not his surname.

  Naipaul was poised on the brink of a major career when, wholly unexpectedly, he died of a thrombosis, shortly after his 40th birthday, on 25 February 1985. The Spectator, a magazine for which he had written over the years (and on which his wife worked), established a priz
e in his honour. It is, of course, routinely mistaken for an award honouring the achievements of the other, Nobel-winning, Naipaul.

  Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who wrote the above ODNB entry, has written elsewhere reflecting on Shiva’s alleged misanthropy:

  It’s impossible not to wonder how he would have developed … Vidia has been garlanded with the highest honours, knighthood to Nobel prize, but it would be an exaggeration to say that, while he has grown as a great writer, he has also mellowed into a great liberal philanthropist, and I doubt if Shiva would have done so either. V.S. Naipaul’s sharp critique of Islam is looking rather perceptive at present, but there is no use pretending that he is full of warm sympathy for the Third World, and nor was Shiva.1

  1 Spectator, 13 August 2005.

  26 February

  In Paris, Ernest Hemingway receives two cables from New York accepting his manuscript of In Our Time

  1925 In Paris during the twenties Hemingway taught Ezra Pound how to box, and Pound taught him to distrust adjectives. Or at least that’s how the novelist remembered it in A Moveable Feast (1964). Certainly Pound’s imagism – the concrete image standing alone, without modification or explanation, to evoke an emotional response in the reader – is a key into Hemingway’s famously plain style.

  That style made its debut in In Our Time (1925), a collection of short stories, each prefaced by a short inter-chapter seldom more than a page long. In some stories Nick Adams features as a sort of alter ego for Hemingway himself – whether in youth, as in ‘Indian Camp’, in which Nick watches his doctor father deliver a Native American baby, or as a war veteran in ‘Cross Country Snow’, in which Nick and George regret having to leave the Swiss Alps to return to the States.