SURPRISING TALES FROM
A YEAR IN LITERATURE
JOHN SUTHERLAND & STEPHEN FENDER
Previously published in the UK in 2010
by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP
email: info@iconbooks.co.uk
www.iconbooks.co.uk
This electronic edition published in the UK in 2011 by Icon Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84831-269-2 (ePub format)
ISBN: 978-1-84831-270-8 (Adobe ebook format)
Printed edition (ISBN 978-184831-247-0)
sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia
by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,
74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents
Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia
by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,
Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW
Printed edition published in Australia in 2010 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,
PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,
Crows Nest, NSW 2065
Printed edition published in the USA in 2011 by Totem Books
Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,
39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP, UK
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Printed edition published in Canada by Penguin Books Canada,
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Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE
Text copyright © 2010 John Sutherland and Stephen Fender
The authors have asserted their moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Typeset by Marie Doherty
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Preface: 2 July
1 January: Peter Pan: eternal boy, eternal copyright
2 January: The SS Commodore sinks off the coast of Florida, leaving Stephen Crane adrift in an open boat
3 January: Construction begins on the Brooklyn Bridge, long-standing icon of American modernism
4 January: The death of T.S. Eliot
5 January: Dumas fights a duel
6 January: The Feast of Fools and the end of the world
7 January: John Berryman follows his paternal destiny
8 January: Villon escapes the rope, and is never heard of again
9 January: Deconstruction deconstructed?
10 January: In Philadelphia, Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet that will change the world
11 January: Lorna Sage dies as her memoir triumphs
12 January: Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery, and Dame of the British Empire, dies
13 January: Truth on the march
14 January: A.S. Byatt fights for her local
15 January: The youngest novelist in English literature dies, aged 89
17 January: Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, ending nearly a decade’s moratorium on the death penalty in the US
18 January: Imagists, ex-Rhymers and aesthetes dine on roast peacock at Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s stud farm
19 January: The Irish author Christopher Nolan wins the Whitbread Prize
20 January: The European Union enjoys itself
21 January: George Moore, the ‘English Zola’, dies
22 January: Anthony Powell’s great dance begins
23 January: After the failure of his stage play, Guy Domville, Henry James resolves to ‘take up my own old pen again’
24 January: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe are divorced in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
25 January: Rabbie Burns: whisky, literature and lassies
26 January: James Frey confesses his fact is fiction, and wins twice over
27 January: The US Congress sets up an Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma
28 January: Horace Walpole coins the word ‘serendipity’
29 January: The death of George III elegised and satirised
30 January: King Charles I of England is beheaded. A fortnight later John Milton will risk his life to defend the act in a pamphlet
31 January: Louis Asa-Asa tells how he was captured in Africa and sold there six times before a storm forced his landing in Cornwall
1 February: The New York Review of Books is first published
2 February: Long Day’s Journey into Night’s long road to performance
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
4 February: Rupert Brooke goes off to his corner of a foreign field
5 February: Longmans digs in for a very long stay
6 February: Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel-length detective fiction, The Big Sleep, at the advanced age of 51
7 February: Madame Bovary in the dock
8 February: The Pickwick Papers are launched and almost sink
9 February: Frank O’Hara sees a headline that Lana Turner has ‘collapsed’ and immediately writes a poem
10 February: The king of the cuckolds dies
11 February: Sylvia Plath commits suicide, in the coldest winter in England for fifteen years
12 February: Alexander Solzhenitsyn is stripped of his Soviet citizenship
13 February: Allied air forces firebomb Dresden
14 February: Salman Rushdie goes to ground
15 February: Francis Parkman launches The Oregon Trail
16 February: The Thirties are over. Belatedly
17 February: John Sadleir, the greatest financial swindler (to that date) in British commercial history, commits suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath
18 February: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is published in the US, delayed by an obscene engraving
19 February: Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos wins the first-ever Bollingen Prize for poetry
20 February: F.T. Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro, Paris
21 February: Dead, but not yet buried
22 February: Coetzee’s Gulliverism
23 February: The print run begins of the Gutenberg Bible, in Mainz, Germany
24 February: The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, burns down, prompting a laconic quip from its newly ruined owner
25 February: The other Naipaul dies. Prematurely
26 February: In Paris, Ernest Hemingway receives two cables from New York accepting his manuscript of In Our Time
27 February: Poet meets drummer
28 February: F.R. Leavis demolishes C.P. Snow
29 February: Gay’s ‘Newgate Pastoral’ will do
1 March: The witch trials open in Ingersoll’s Tavern, Salem Village, Massachusetts
2 March: Lucky Jim is conceived
3 March: The Birth of a Nation is released: literature meets film
4 March: Kidnapped by Native Americans, Mary Rowlandson is carried dry-shod over the Baquaug River, which proves an impassable barrier to the English army pursuing them
5 March: Shakespeare comes to America. Very slowly
6 March: Poe meets Dickens. Ravens fly
7 March: Alice B. Toklas dies at 89, 21 y
ears after the death of her companion, Gertrude Stein
8 March: The author of The Wind in the Willows is born
9 March: Rand’s religion: the almighty dollar
10 March: The first two Cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold are published; Walter Scott sensibly turns to writing novels
11 March: Following the defeat of the French in Egypt, the British army presents the Rosetta Stone to the Society of Antiquaries in London
12 March: The author of the nation’s anthems is born in Covent Garden, London
14 March: Mrs Beeton, arbiter of household management, is born
15 March: The Ides of March: Julius Caesar is assassinated
16 March: Lytton Strachey declines to do battle
17 March: Marx waxes literary over the Crimean War
18 March: Philip Massinger joins the eminent literary company in Southwark Cathedral
19 March: As Philip Roth turns 74, his alter ego begins to feel his age
20 March: After being serialised over 40 weeks in an abolitionist periodical, Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes out as a book
21 March: Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer, is burned at the stake for heresy in St Giles, Oxford
22 March: Goethe’s last words – and the other last words
23 March: Sexual intercourse has begun – or has it?
24 March: Nietzsche’s typewriting course ends
25 March: The Annunciation and Good Friday fall on the same day; John Donne doesn’t know whether to feast or fast
26 March: Modernist meets Anthroposophist
27 March: The Vicar of Wakefield is published, never to go out of print
28 March: Isaac Rosenberg sends his last poem to Edward Marsh
29 March: Brave New World is liberated in Australia
30 March: John Cheever (‘Chekhov of the Suburbs’) makes the front cover of Time magazine
31 March: Titanic poetry
1 April: Scientifiction blasts off
2 April: Alexis de Tocqueville sets sail from Le Havre to examine the American prison system
3 April: Mr Pooter decides to keep a diary
4 April: Winston Smith begins his diary
5 April: Pocahontas marries John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia
6 April: Francis Petrarch catches his first sight of Laura, and will go on to write 366 sonnets about his love for her
7 April: Edith Wharton entertains Morton Fullerton to dinner. Later that night she will write in her diary: ‘Non vi leggemmo avante’
8 April: Henry James writes of an idea for a novel that will ‘show that I can write an American story’
9 April: Dylan gets a Pulitzer
10 April: Revolution averted – without too much trouble
11 April: Frankenstein’s Volcano begins to subside
12 April: As forces of the Confederate States of America bombard Fort Sumter, the American Civil War begins
13 April: ‘Houston, we have a problem’
14 April: Roy Campbell punches Stephen Spender on the nose
15 April: The Dust Bowl gets its name and the Great Depression gets its dominant image
16 April: Britain’s first novelist (and first woman novelist) dies
17 April: ‘Holy Thursday’, William Blake’s ‘Song of Experience’
18 April: Paul Revere gallops through the night from Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn patriots that the British are coming
19 April: Samuel Johnson publishes Rasselas, his conte philosophique, written in one week to pay for his mother’s funeral
20 April: Amiel comes home in triumph
21 April: Jane Carlyle’s dubious post-mortem
22 April: In Household Words, the weekly periodical he ‘conducts’, Charles Dickens publishes ‘Ground in the Mill’ alongside the fourth number of Hard Times
23 April: Death of Poets Day
24 April: A terrible beauty is born
25 April: The novel is invented, but its inventor has no name for it
26 April: George Herbert is inducted as rector of the parish of Fugglestone-cum-Bemerton, near Salisbury
27 April: Encounter’s CIA connection revealed
28 April: The British bestseller list arrives (belatedly)
29 April: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is published: fact or fiction?
30 April: The United States buys the entire Middle West from the French for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the country. Fenimore Cooper has his doubts
1 May: The nine-year-old Dante Alighieri first meets the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari when his father takes him to their family home for a May Day party
2 May: An unnoticed revolution in books
3 May: Chekhov’s last visit to Moscow
4 May: Sherlock Holmes dies at the Reichenbach Falls
5 May: John Scopes is charged with teaching evolution in a Tennessee school
6 May: The Washington office of the Federal Writers’ Project writes to the south-eastern region to praise their life history of ex-slave Betty Cofer
7 May: Even though Richard Wright has broken with the Communist party, the FBI Director memoes the New York office to keep a Security Index Card on the African-American author
8 May: Nobbled
9 May: Everyman’s publisher dies; Everyman books live on
10 May: Bibliocaust
11 May: Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is published
12 May: As Kenneth Tynan lauds Look Back in Anger in the Sunday Observer, a ‘small miracle in British culture’ ensues
13 May: De Quincey writes to Wordsworth
14 May: John Smith lands in Virginia
15 May: Amazon’s stream strengthens to flood force
16 May: Burgess reviews Burgess (favourably)
17 May: Héloise is buried alongside Abelard in the cemetery at the nunnery that he had built for her
18 May: Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev sit down to the modernist dinner from hell
19 May: Mounted settlers from surrounding towns attack the natives at Peskeompskut; language poet Susan Howe scrambles the history
20 May: W.H. Auden becomes an American citizen
21 May: Henry Pye is appointed Poet Laureate
22 May: Allen Lane launches Penguin Books
23 May: John Banville throws a spanner in Ian McEwan’s works
24 May: Guy Burgess tries to telephone W.H. Auden just before defecting to Moscow
25 May: Oscar Wilde is convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour
26 May: Born: iconographer of the Great Depression
27 May: Cromwell returns, bloodily, from Ireland to be greeted, ironically, by Andrew Marvell
28 May: The first Hay Festival
29 May: H.G. Wells publishes his first (timeless) ‘scientific romance’
30 May: Dramatist Christopher Marlowe is murdered in Deptford, London: assassination or drunken brawl?
31 May: Evelyn Waugh looks on as No. 3 Commando blow up a tree for Lord Glasgow
1 June: Sydney Smith defends his style as the model English clergyman
2 June: Thomas Hardy is born, dies, and is reborn
3 June: Enoch’s melancholy return
4 June: Perón becomes president. Borges becomes an inspector of chickens
5 June: Daring novelist dies, no longer daring
6 June: Wallace Stevens writes to the editor of Poetry allowing her to change his most famous poem – for the worse
7 June: Washington Irving greets his native land after seventeen years living abroad
8 June: Mr Higginson gets a letter from Miss Dickinson
9 June: Dickens’s heroism at the Staplehurst rail accident
10 June: Registering a new word every 98 minutes, the vocabulary of English reaches one million words, more than the sum of Italian, French, Spanish and German combined
11 June: Owen Wis
ter sets the scene for the western movie – literally
12 June: Conrad enters the Heart of Darkness
13 June: Charles A. Lindbergh receives a ticker-tape reception as he parades down 5th Avenue, New York
14 June: William Brazel comes across a ‘large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks’ while working on the Foster homestead, near Roswell, New Mexico
15 June: The ball before the cannon balls flew
16 June: James Joyce goes out on his first date with his future wife, Norah Barnacle
17 June: The death of Joseph Addison. Bibles and brandy
18 June: Crossing the country on his way to the California Gold Rush, Edward Tomkins tries to describe the buttes and pinnacles in the Platte Valley
19 June: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York
20 June: After one of Anne Bradstreet’s many grandchildren dies at three years and seven months, her grandmother writes a poem on the brittleness of life
21 June: Isaac Asimov submits his first SF story, ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’, to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction
22 June: The Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives publishes its ‘Red Channels’ blacklist
23 June: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes a novelette of London gossip to her clinically depressed sister in Paris
24 June: The day before the Battle of Little Bighorn, Jack Crabb is appointed official jester to the commander of the 7th Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer
25 June: T.S. Eliot writes to his lawyer, patron and friend John Quinn that he has ‘written a long poem of about 450 lines’
26 June: The writers’ writer dies at Deauville
27 June: John Fowles despairs too early
28 June: Lawrence fails an examination, disgustedly
29 June: Theodore Roosevelt writes to Brander Matthews, professor of literature at Columbia: ‘What a miserable little snob Henry James is! His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories about the upper classes in England make one blush to think that he was once an American’
30 June: The United States passes the Pure Food and Drug Act
1 July: No smoking day
2 July: Blast deafens philistine opposition, until the blasts of war destroy it
3 July: To save face, Francis Bacon asks Robert Cecil for a knighthood