90. The Bald Prima Donna by Eugene Ionesco

Apologies for the intermission - now for some more titles.

Ionesco said that The Bald Prima Donna, his first play, and a keystone of absurdist theatre, was inspired by a teach-yourself-English manual. He wrote in his autobiographical work on the theatre, Notes and Counter-Notes:

I bought an English-French conversational manual for beginners. I set to work. Conscientiously I copied out phrases from my manual in order to learn them by heart. Then I found out, read­ing them over attentively, that I was learning not English but some very surprising truths: that there are seven days in the week, for example, which I happened to know before; or that the floor is below us, the ceiling above us, another thing that I may well have known before but had never thought seriously about or had forgotten, and suddenly it seemed to me as stupefying as it was indisputably true.

The play drew on these banalities, spiced up with a few well-known English proverbs (‘He who sells an ox today, will have an egg tomorrow’), and was originally called English Without Pain ­— but when a director commented that this might lead people to believe it was a satire on the English, this was changed to The Bald Prima Donna.

This title actually emerged during rehearsals. In the episode called 'The Headcold', the script refers to an ‘institutrice blonde’ (blonde schoolmistress); instead, the actor, Henri-Jacques Huet, made a slip – or began improvising – and said ‘cantatrice chauve’ (bald prima donna). Ionesco was present at the rehearsal and realized this was a much better phrase, and indeed a better title. It was adopted, and for form’s sake, a brief reference to a bald prima donna was later inserted in Scene 10.

Consulted:
Lamont, Rosette C.: Ionesco's Imperatives (1993)
Esslin, Martin: The Theatre of the Absurd (1980)

Brief hiatus

I'm off on holiday for a few days but will be returning at the weekend with more titles. And by the way, Robinson's barley water + lemonade = Robinsonade. See you later,
Gary

89. The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss

Der Schweizerische Robinson was published in 1812 and tells the story of a pious Swiss family, a mother, father and four young sons, marooned on an island in the East Indies following a shipwreck. It is 600 pages long. The father, who narrates the book, uses the shipwreck as a pedagogical opportunity:

‘I believe,’ said Ernest [aged 12], ‘that mangoes grow on the sea-shore in marshy soil.’
‘You are partly right, my boy,’ I said, ‘but what you say applies to the black mango, not to the grey or red species, which bear small berries and do not grow so high.’

During their stay on the island the family undertake a holocaust of its creatures. Among the species butchered are kangaroos, penguins, bears, giant land crabs, capybaras, apes, jackals, ostriches and turtles (the island contains the fauna of six continents). To keep themselves in comfort the family build a luxurious treehouse, plant and harvest corn, milk cows (rescued from the ship), boil up a whale, manufacture isinglass and cochineal, breed doves, gather honey, tap rubber and salt herrings. There is no difficulty of island life that their ingenuity and perseverance cannot resolve. By the end of the book they have created a Calvinist paradise in which nature has been subdued and largely exterminated, and where disease, sex and conflict (between humans) have been banished. In a final act of dour appropriation they christen their island ‘New Switzerland’.

The family is not, of course, called Robinson. They are never named. The title refers instead to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of 1719 (see post 73). In an odd twist of literary fate the word ‘Robinson’ had taken on a life of its own in eighteenth-century European publishing, appearing in the titles of hundreds of adventure stories, mainly German and Dutch, but also French, Danish, Swiss, Swedish and Italian, known collectively as ‘Robinsonades’: Teutsche Robinson (1722), Americanische Robinson (1724), Nordische Robinson (1741), Hollandsche Robinson (1743), Dänische Robinson (1750), Walchersche Robinson (1752), Maldivschen Philosophen Robine (1753), Oude en Jongen Robinson (1753), Isländische Robinson (1755), Hartz-Robinson (1755), Robinson vom Berge Libonon (1755), Haagsche Robinson (1758), Robertson (sic) aux terres australes (1766), Steyerische Robinson (1791) and Böhmische Robinson (1796), among many others, all by different authors. ‘Robinson’ simply denoted an adventure tale. They didn't even have to take place on desert islands: there were Robinsonades set on mountain-tops, in jungles, among corsairs or in Turkish prisons. Many of the tales dispensed with the idea of the isolated adventurer altogether. There were even Robinsonades without ‘Robinson’ in the title.

Scholars first began to examine the Robinsonade phenomenon as early as the mid 1700s. Among the Robinsonade sub-groups identified by a French scholar were the robinsonnade gullivérienne, the robinsonnade en famille (such as the Swiss Family) and the robinsonnade de l’enfant. There were satirical Robinsonades, fantastical Robinsonades, Utopian Robinsonades and interplanetary Robinsonades. Life was a Robinsonade. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Robinsonade had mutated still further: Tarzan of the Apes, looked at in a certain way, is a Robinsonade (a robinsonnade de l’enfant?), and so is The Island of Doctor Moreau and Lord of the Flies (dystopian Robinsonades). In film and television, Lost in Space was obviously a Robinsonade (being based on the Swiss Family), and there were TV dramas such as Mountain Family Robinson and Swiss Family Robinson Lost in the Jungle.

But strangely, of the eighteenth and nineteenth century continental Robinsonades, only The Swiss Family Robinson took root when transplanted back onto English-speaking soil. Why, it is difficult to say. Perhaps the title had something to do with it. Originally, of course, it had been Der Schweizerische Robinson, and as such was indistinguishable from all the other Hollandsche Robinsons, Dänische Robinsons and Haagsche Robinsons. But the insertion of the word ‘Family’ in translation put it in a class of its own. ‘Family’ acted as a sort of pivot. Substitute anything for the ‘Swiss’ or the ‘Robinson’ and you get an infinite number of delightfully silly variations: Space Family Robinson, Beverly Hills Family Robinson, Swiss Family Treehouse, Swiss Family Orbison, Swiss Family Guy Robinson, Mouse Family Robinson, Swiss Family Mouse House, Stick Family Robinson, Swiss Bank Family Robinson, Swiss Cheese Family Robinson, and on and on (all real examples). The words ‘Swiss Family Robinson’ are close to nonsense in any case: tinkering with them reduces them to gibberish. Perhaps the reason only one Robinson made it back home was because it could be endlessly parodied.

Consulted:
Gove, Philip Babcock: The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction (Holland Press, 1961)

88. Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, by Charles Perrault

The salient detail here is the glass slipper, and perhaps my French-speaking readers will correct me if I make any blunders!

The version of Cinderella that most readers will be familiar with first appeared as ‘Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre’, one of the stories in Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Tales) in 1697. His immediate written source was ‘La Gatta Cenerentola’ from Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone of 1634. ‘Cenerentola’ comes ultimately from cinis, ash, and tollere, to carry: thus the heroine is an ash-carrier, or ash-girl. In Perrault the sisters refer to her unkindly as ‘Cucendron’ — ash-bottom, or ash-arse: this found its way into the first English translation as ‘Cinder-breech’. Perrault has all the paraphernalia we recognize from Disney: the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, the glass slippers, the rat coachman, and so on.

It is the detail of the little glass slipper that brings Perrault’s title into an area of controversy. The glass slipper was his own addition (it does not appear in Basile, where the shoe is merely ‘the richest and prettiest patten you could imagine’), and he gives it star billing — ‘Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper’. Before modern industrial toughening, glass would have been an entirely impractical, not to say lethal, material for slippers, and appears in very few other Cinderella stories (which go back at least to dynastic Egypt). It has been suggested that Perrault drew on oral sources in which the slipper was made of vair, an archaic French word for an ermine-like fur, and changed it to verre, or glass, either because he liked the sound of it or out of a genuine error, and thus the tale was altered forever. One of the earliest champions of this theory was Balzac, in his Etudes Philosophiques sur Catherine de Medicis (1836), but its spread was guaranteed when it was taken up by encyclopedias such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Among the most recent encyclopedias to cite the theory uncritically is the fourth edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of 1996, in front of me as I write. Folklorists still occasionally cite the vair/verre hypothesis as fact. But it is almost certainly false.

The reasons were pointed out by the folklorist Paul Delarue in a short essay in Le Monde in 1951. Essentially, the vair/verre hypothesis depends on the idea that glass is very uncommon as a slipper-material in other tales of the Cinderella cycle. Perrault invented it through this tiny slip or misunderstanding, the hypothesis runs. Any other Cinderella tales with glass slippers must therefore derive from Perrault. Certainly there are none published which pre-date Perrault. But Delarue pointed out that in other Cinderella tales with glass slippers, motif-analysis does not bear out the assertion that they are necessarily derivative of, and post-date, Perrault. A Scottish version of Cinderella, for example, which includes glass shoes, also includes the ‘helpful animal motif’, which, for folklorists, sets heads nodding. Animals helping the heroine in Cinderella stories — frogs (Africa), fish (China) and giant crabs (Java) — indicate antiquity, and in the Scottish tale it is a little black lamb, not a fairy, who dispenses the rich raiment that enables Cinderella to attract the prince.

Delarue deals his knock-out blow by finding this dangerous item of footwear in other antique tales. In a Gaelic story a heroine who desires to climb a glass mountain in order to find her husband must wear glass shoes. In an Irish tale it is the hero who wears glass shoes when rescuing a princess from a sea-serpent. The point here is that glass is a magical material, on a par with diamond and gold (all of which are materials for objects, including shoes, in fairy-tales). Thus in various stories we have a glass mountain, a boat of glass, a castle of glass, a tree with leaves of glass; there is even a story of a giant with a beard of glass (as well as a giant with a beard of copper and a giant with a beard of gold). Impossible things are permissible in the magical world, and a beard of glass is as impractical as shoes of glass. The fact that glass is likely to shatter, and that fur would be more sensible, is an absurd attempt to judge the fairytale world by the standards of our own mundane one.

Perhaps the debate will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, but the fact remains that the original story with the fur has never been located, and that Perrault wrote verre, and meant verre.

Rather a shame, because the verre/vair hypothesis is useful as a story to tell at dinner-parties, and Balzac is on your side if anyone disagrees.

Consulted:
Perrault, Charles: Histories or Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose with Morals (Fortune Press, 1928)
Barchilon, Jacques and Flinders, Peter: Charles Perrault (Twayne, 1981)
Dundes, Alan, ed., Cinderella: A Casebook (University of Winconsin Press, 1982)

87. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

In his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, Asimov recounted how I, Robot, his short-story collection of 1950, got its title.

On June 8 I visited Fred, got my advance for The Stars, like Dust —, and handed over additional chapters. I also gave him the manuscript of the robot story collection. Martin Greenberg had rejected my notion of calling it Mind and Iron and suggested it be called I, Robot.
“Impossible, Marty,” I said. “Eando Binder wrote a short story called ‘I, Robot’ back in 1938.”
To which Marty answered, with unassailable logic, “F— Eando Binder.”
So I, Robot it was. There is no question that Marty’s title was far better than mine and probably helped sell the book.

(Eando Binder was in fact two people, the brothers, E. and O. Binder – E and O = Eando – early US sci-fi writers.)

It’s a good story, but it begs a further question — where did Eando Binder get it from? There is one other famous book with the same title formula: Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, which was a huge international hit in 1934, four years before the Binders’ I, Robot. Coincidence? You decide.

Consulted:
Asimov, Isaac: In Memory Yet Green (1979) (Back cover blurb: ‘THE AMAZING ASIMOV TACKLES HIS MOST FASCINATING SUBJECT - HIMSELF!’)

86. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

The Tale of Genji (c.1010), by the Japanese noblewoman known as Lady Murasaki Shikibu, is sometimes designated the world’s first novel; perhaps it could be called the world’s first bonkbuster, dealing as it does with the irresistibly attractive Prince Genji and his many love affairs.

The name ‘Genji’ is something of a smokescreen, though. This is not his actual surname, which is never revealed. He is the son of the emperor by a low-ranking concubine, and Genji is a rendering of the Chinese characters for ‘Minamoto’, a clan name conferred on princes of the blood who were not in direct line to the imperial throne. The fact that Genji was given this name signalled that he was no longer a member of the imperial family and could never aspire to supreme power. The title The Tale of Genji thus means, in a sense, ‘the story of an outcast’.

But that doesn’t stop him having a lot of fun.

Consulted:
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji, trs and notes Royall Tyler (2001)

85. The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud

Freud had something of a genius for titles. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is startling and witty; Beyond the Pleasure Principle is intriguing and titillating. The Ego and the Id demonstrates the same mastery. With all the confidence of his forty clinical years, Freud introduced in his title a completely new term, the ‘Id’.

Although it wasn’t quite new. A couple of weeks previously, another book had appeared: The Book of the It. The author was the analyst George Groddeck. Both Freud and Groddeck used the same German term for their ‘Id’ and ‘It’ respectively: das Es. Freud was quite open about his debt: rather shockingly, he announced that The Ego and the Id was ‘under the sponsorship of Groddeck.’ It was shocking because Groddeck was regarded in some quarters as little better than a lunatic.

In the early years of psychoanalysis, practitioners were very anxious to establish their respectability as legitimate medical men. This was still an age of sexual puritanism, in which the sexual organs and sexual functions were not generally mentioned in polite conversation, and in which sexual categories as we now know them, or think we know them — homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, transsexualism — were still at an early and controversial stage of development. In this atmosphere, George Groddeck delivered a notorious speech to the congress of psychoanalysts at The Hague in 1920, opening his address with the words: ‘I am a wild analyst.’ This was somewhat crass. Analysts were regarded by the public as ‘wild’ already: it was exactly the image the profession wished to avoid. In his speech Groddeck went on to develop the idea that unconscious forces were the rulers of the human organism: even bodily diseases were caused by unconscious conflicts and neuroses. Groddeck moreover insisted on bringing his mistress to conferences and was the author of a risqué novel, The Seeker of Souls.

Nevertheless Freud liked Groddeck personally. He wrote to Max Eitingon that Groddeck was ‘a bit of a fantasist, but an original fellow who has the rare gift of good humour. I should not like to do without him.’ And Freud and Groddeck were in regular correspondence about their projects in 1923. Groddeck wrote to Freud, explaining his concept of the It, an idea partially derived from Nietzsche:

I am of the opinion that man is animated by the unknown. There is an It in him, something marvellous that regulates everything that he does and that happens to him. The sentence ‘I live’ is only partially correct; it expresses a little partial phenomenon of the fundamental truth: ‘Man is lived by the It.’

Groddeck sent Freud the chapters as he completed them, and Freud sent back letters of encouragement, also revealing the direction of his own thinking on the composition of the psyche. Taking Groddeck’s idea of the ‘It’, along with previous notions of the unconscious, as well as other speculations on the nature of personality, Freud was crafting the model that came to dominate psychiatry in the twentieth century. This was the tripartite model of Ego, Id and Superego, which he set out for the first time in the book The Ego and the Id.

It is important to look at the actual terms Freud used. In German the title of his book was Das Ich und das Es — ‘The I and the It’. It was only in the Standard Edition of Freud’s works in English that the latinate ‘Ego’, ‘Id’ and ‘Superego’ were used. Freud’s Id was therefore, as already mentioned, terminologically identical with Groddeck’s It in The Book of the It (in German Das Buch vom Es). But in analytical practice there were some important differences between It and Id. Groddeck saw the It as the dominant, though entirely unconscious, fount of personality: Freud’s Id was the ultimately subordinate repository of sex and death drives. For Freud, the Ego, although largely controlled by the Id, was in some senses an agency: it had limited powers of will, despite its unhappy position at the centre of pressures from the Id, the Superego, and the external world. For Groddeck, the psyche had no conscious agency at all. The unconscious It regulated everything.

Some time after the publication of both books, on the occasion of Groddeck’s sixtieth birthday, Freud sent him a letter with his best wishes, in a form which neatly encapsulated his debt. It was as if the elements of Freud’s psyche were wishing happy birthday to the single hidden force of Groddeck’s: ‘My Ego and my Id congratulate your It.’

Consulted:
Gay, Peter: Freud: A Life for our Time (Little, 2006)
Groddeck, Georg: The Book of the It (introduction by Lawrence Durrell, Vision Press, 1949)

84. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Anyone who has read The Secret Garden will feel that the walled, abandoned and secretly-visited garden is a symbol of great richness and power. TS Eliot obviously felt so: as Ann Thwaite points out in her study of Burnett, he must have been remembering it in Burnt Norton, right down to the roses, the children and the bird who guides the way:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. [...]
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Frances Hodgson Burnett was a keen gardener with a wide knowledge of horticulture, and she took the idea for The Secret Garden in large part from the walled Rose Garden at her home at Maytham Hall, Kent, where she wrote, sitting outside with tuffet, rug and Japanese parasol. ‘It was entered by a low, arched gateway in the wall,’ Burnett wrote of the Maytham garden, ‘closed by a wooden door...and then at every available place, roses were planted to climb up the ancient trunks and over the walls.’

Consulted:
Thwaite, Ann: Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1974)

83. The Escaped Cock by DH Lawrence

In early 1925, in Mexico, DH Lawrence contracted malaria. In his weakened state, tuberculosis took a hold, and for a few weeks he hovered between life and death. But in the spring of that year, on his ranch in New Mexico, he began to recover. Frieda wrote:

How he loved every minute of life at the ranch. The morning, the squirrels, every flower that came in its turn, the big trees, chopping wood, the chickens, making bread, all our hard work, and the people all assumed the radiance of new life.

This personal resurrection was reflected in his writing. The period from 1925 to his death in 1930 was the period of Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the period too of The Escaped Cock, his last major work of fiction. One might say that in this last phase of his writing he was preoccupied by cocks. During these five years he also wrote the essays 'Women are so Cocksure', 'Cocksure Women and Hensure Men' and 'Aristocracy', the latter immediately after his illness in July 1925, in which he described his white cock Moses:

And as the white cock calls in the doorway, who calls? Merely a barnyard rooster, worth a dollar-and-a-half. But listen! Under the old dawns of creation the Holy Ghost, the Mediator, shouts aloud in the twilight. And every time I hear him, a fountain of vitality gushes up in my body. It is life.

The cock is, with perfect Lawrentian seriousness, nature's phallus. And the bird is not some symbol from Frazer but the living embodiment of thrusting male energy, ready to fight and copulate at a moment's notice.

The novella The Escaped Cock was published in two parts, the first in 1928 and the second in 1929. It tells the story of Jesus’ life immediately following his resurrection. In later years it was published as The Man Who Died, chiefly for reasons of prudery, but this was not the title preferred by Lawrence.

The plot, as Lawrence described it in a letter to a friend, is as follows:

Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can't stand the old crowd any more — so cuts out — and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the phenomenal world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven — and thanks his stars he needn't have a 'mission' any more.

Jesus’ first intimation that the phenomenal world is a marvellous place comes in the form of a barnyard cock escaping from a Galilean peasant:

Advancing in a kind of half-consciousness under the drystone wall of the olive orchard, he was roused by the shrill, wild crowing of a cock just near him, a sound which made him shiver as if a snake had touched him [...] leaping out of the greenness, came the black-and-orange cock with the red comb, his tail-feathers streaming lustrous.

Jesus buys the cock from the peasant and goes on his way carrying it under his arm.

In the second part of the story we are introduced to a priestess of Isis. This woman has known both Caesar and Anthony, but has given herself to neither. She is a virgin, and waits for the man who can awaken her body. (‘Rare women wait for the re-born man,’ Lawrence comments — a good advertising slogan, if only one could think of the right product.) One morning she comes across Jesus lying asleep. ‘For the first time, she was touched on the quick at the sight of a man [...] Men had aroused all sorts of feelings in her, but never had touched her on the yearning quick of her womb, with the flame tip of life.’ The priestess and Jesus initiate one another into the life of the senses, a life which, until that moment, neither has known. Jesus sees the essential wrongness of his past ministry: he sees, suddenly, that saving souls has been, at bottom, a dry exercise:

A vivid shame went through him. — After all, he thought, — I wanted them to love with dead bodies. If I had kissed Judas with live love, perhaps he would never have kissed me with death...There dawned on him the reality of the soft warm love which is in touch, and which is full of delight.

In the throes of this revelation, Jesus echoes the Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? of the biblical Christ on the cross:

He untied the string of the linen tunic, and slipped the garment down, till he saw the white glow of her white-gold breasts. And he touched them, and he felt his life go molten. — Father! He said — Why did you hide this from me? [...] Lo! He said. — This is beyond prayer.

At the odd, evocative end of The Escaped Cock, a story that Lawrence might have continued had he lived, Jesus escapes by water, with the Romans in pursuit, presumably to re-crucify him. Now, suddenly and differently fulfilled, he carries the priestess's perfume in his flesh 'like essence of roses'. The novella ends with the words: 'Tomorrow is another day.'

The title The Escaped Cock was suggested by something Lawrence noticed in Italy in 1927. At around this time he had developed a love of the culture of ancient Etruria (an interest that was later to have a flowering in the posthumous book Etruscan Places). After visiting the Etruscan tombs with his friend Earl Brewster, examining the frescoes with a battery torch, he wrote:

The tombs seem so easy and friendly, cut out of rock underground. One does not feel oppressed, descending into them. It must be partly owing to the peculiar charm of natural proportion which is in all Etruscan things of the unspoilt, unromanticised centuries. There is a simplicity, combined with a most peculiar, free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity, in the shapes and movements of the underworld walls and spaces, that at once reassures the spirit. [...] And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction.

After inspecting the tombs, Lawrence and Brewster were passing through the town of Volterra, and stopped for provisions. Brewster recalled what they saw:

We passed a little shop, in the window of which was a toy rooster escaping from an egg. I remarked that it suggested the title — ‘The Escaped Cock — a story of the Resurrection.’ Lawrence replied that he had been thinking about writing a story of the Resurrection.

Lawrence said in a letter to Harry Crosby that the model was of ‘a cock escaping from a man’, but he may have been confusing the model with the use he made of it in his story, in which the bird, tied by a string to a post, breaks free and runs off with the man pursuing it. But in both cases the cock was escaping. As Lawrence later wrote to Brewster about the title: ‘It’s called The Escaped Cock, from that toy in Volterra.’

It is all rather astonishing. If Lawrence and Brewster had not seen the toy, they would have had to have invented it. It brought together all of Lawrence’s thinking: his fascination with the phallic cock-bird as representative of Christ and the Holy Ghost, his own sense of escape into a new life after his illness, and the story ‘of the Resurrection’ he had been considering, very probably one in which Jesus was imagined as a free-and-easy Etruscan, at home in his body, ‘free-breasted’ and spontaneous. At the centre of it all was a cosmic pun — Jesus as phallus, as the escaped cock himself. In this last fiction, here is the solemn, impressive, puritanically-erotic Lawrence, with a double entendre that defies parody:

The deep-folded, penetrable rock of the living woman! The woman, hiding her face. Himself bending over, powerful and new like dawn. He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.
‘I am risen!’

Consulted:
Sagar, Keith: D.H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Viking, 1985)
Sagar, Keith: The Art of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge University Press, 1966)

82. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The title of the original hand-lettered book was Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. As is well known, it had its origin in stories told by Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) to Alice Liddell and her two sisters in the early 1860s; particularly in a set of stories told on the afternoon of 4 July 1862, when they went on a boating trip on the Isis at Oxford.

Dodgson illustrated the hand-lettered book himself, and presented it to Alice in 1864. But by this time he was barely on speaking terms with Alice and her family: relations with the Liddells had suffered a mysterious rupture. One guess is that Dodgson offered Alice his hand in marriage, and the offer was not well received by the Liddells. Alice was only 11, of course. Possibly of greater importance was that she was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church College (where Dodgson was a Fellow). Alice’s mother was a social climber, and Dodgson was not a very good prospect.

Still, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was the fruit of those golden days on the Isis: and it was so well liked by the friends Dodgson showed it to that he determined to have it properly published, with proper illustrations. He decided on John Tenniel as the illustrator – thus bringing to being the most famous marriage of author and illustrator in the history of literature – any other candidates?

However, he worried that the title Alice’s Adventures Under Ground might be a little too prosaic for the published version (he even joked that readers might guess it had something to do with mining). Accordingly he wrote on 10 June 1864 to a friend, Tom Taylor, for advice. He enclosed several titular possibilities in his letter, including Alice Among the Elves, Alice Among the Goblins, Alice’s Hour in Elfland, Alice’s Hour in Wonderland, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Taylor picked the latter, and Dodgson concurred. Of the possibilities, it stands out as the superior choice, but in rather a poor field. The original title – Alice’s Adventures Under Ground – is easily better, with its mythic connotations and its modern sense of a parallel social reality.

Taylor went on to be editor of Punch and a minor member of the Victorian literati. He had one other claim to fame: he was the author of a play called Our American Cousin. This was the play being performed when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Consulted:
Brown, Sally: The Original Alice (1997)
Gardner, Martin: The Annotated Alice (1970)

81. Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney is now known chiefly for the manner of his death. On the morning of September 22, 1586, following an assault on Spanish forces outside the Dutch town of Zutphen, he was badly wounded in the thigh. His friend and biographer Fulke Greville described how, returning with the English wounded

...he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor Souldier carryed along, who had eaten his last at the same Feast, gastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, Thy necessity is greater than mine. And when he had pledged this poor souldier, he was presently carried to Arnheim.

He died in agony nearly a month later, of complications to the wound.

But Sir Philip was also a literary man. In fact, for at least a century after his death, his contribution was ranked above Shakespeare’s (who flourished a decade later). Sidney’s Defence of Poesie was the first major sustained work of literary theory in English, and his prose work Arcadia presented a new and influential form of pastoral romance (Charles I is said to have quoted from it as he mounted the scaffold). His crowning literary achievement was Astrophil and Stella, which pioneered the English sonnet sequence. Sonnet-making had become popular in the early 1500s with the work of writers such as Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, but Astrophil and Stella was the first attempt to create a sonnet sequence in English after the manner of Petrarch or Dante, a unified collection with a semi-dramatic progression of thought. It was the precursor of the sonnet sequences of Spenser and Shakespeare.

Astrophil and Stella was also a coded text reflecting a love affair. Stella (‘star’) was Lady Penelope Devereaux, the 14-year-old to whom Philip had been promised in marriage. Astrophil, or ‘star-lover’, was Philip himself. The stellar theme was perfect for Philip, whose last name contained the first three letters of ‘sidus’, star, and whose first name was also present in truncated form as the ‘phil’ of ‘Astrophil’, a name that thus neatly united lover and beloved. That Philip intended a pun can be seen in another invented name, this time from the Arcadia, that of ‘Philisides’, ‘lover of a star’, a character also thought to represent Philip.

The marriage never happened, though. In 1581 Penelope was married off to a better prospect, Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. In that year Philip appeared at tilt with the word ‘Speravi’ ­— ‘I hoped’, written on his shield, but crossed out with a thick line.

Astrophil and Stella is presented as a drama, in which 108 sonnets are interspersed with 11 songs. Astrophil loves Stella, although she does not explicitly return his love. The poet begins by appealing to the moon, praising his loved-one’s beauty, bemoaning his fate and her indifference, toying with ideas to do with the nature of true virtue, true love and true wisdom. Then the wedding to Rich is announced and in sonnet 37 the poet is in despair:

My mouth doth water, and my breast doth swell,
My tongue doth itch, my thoughts in labor be;
Listen then, lordings, with good ear to me,
For of my life I must a riddle tell.
Toward Aurora's court a nymph doth dwell,
Rich in all beauties which man's eye can see;
Beauties so far from reach of words that we
Abase her praise saying she doth excel;
Rich in the treasure of deserved renown,
Rich in the riches of a royal heart,
Rich in those gifts which give th' eternal crown;
Who, though most rich in these and every part
Which make the patents of true worldly bliss,
Hath no misfortune but that Rich she is.

The heavy playing on ‘Rich’ reveals Stella’s identity as the newly-married Lady Rich. It was, significantly, one of the very few sonnets suppressed in the first printing of 1591. Other clues to the lovers’ identities can be gleaned from sonnet 65, where Astrophil asserts ‘Thou bear’st the arrow, I the arrow head.’ An arrow head was part of the Sidney coat of arms. There is also a reference to ‘Penelope’ in the fact that there are 108 sonnets, and 108 stanzas in the 11 songs that intersperse the sonnets. 108 was the number of Penelope’s suitors in the Odyssey. Each sonnet, and each stanza, is a suitor standing in for the ever-importuning Astrophil.

There is another way of looking at all this. Perhaps Philip never loved Penelope. In the twentieth century we all ‘grew up’ about Astrophil and Stella. Despite all the coded references to the lovers’ identities, the sonnets were a self-conscious game with language and imagery, the fashionable discourse of a courtier-poet. The poet says and does all the things that are expected of the Petrarchan sonneteer. If it had not been Stella it would have been some other maiden. Critics have even speculated that Astrophil and Stella was a witty present to Stella on her bridal-day, intended to point out the importance of virtue by presenting her with a fictitious, unvirtuous lover. Others have surmised that Philip may not have been interested in Penelope until her marriage, at which point he was stimulated to produce the sonnets, since a married, and therefore inaccessible, woman was required by the genre.

But if all Philip wanted was to praise some - any - young woman in Petrarchan fashion, would he have gone to the lengths of inaugurating a new literary genre? It is tempting to feel that something more than a courtly game must have been fuelling this dazzling experiment. Stella was, as a matter of historical record, promised to Philip, and then given to someone else. We don’t tend to dismiss Donne’s or Shakespeare’s love-sonnets as mere fantasies. Shouldn’t we accord Sir Philip Sidney the same courtesy?

Consulted:
Sidney, Sir Philip: Astrophel and Stella (introduction by Alfred Pollard, David Stott, 1888)
Brother Anthony of Taizé: Literature in English Society Before 1660: A Historical Survey (Sogang University Press, 1998)
Stewart, Alan: Philip Sidney: A Double Life (Pimlico, 2001)

80. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett

Beckett was gripped by a love of the letter M. Several of his works begin with it (Murphy, Molloy, Mercier and Camier, Malone Dies) as do many of his characters (Moran, Mahood, Madeleine, Moll, Macmann, etc). In the novella Company the narrator calls his hearer ‘M’; ‘MMM’ is the ‘Magdalen Mental Mercyseat’ in Murphy; in How It Is the characters have been reduced to Pim, Bom, Bem and Pam, ‘one syllable m at end all that matters’ (as Beckett put it). In early drafts of Malone Dies the protagonist was simply called ‘M’, and it is easily seen that ‘Malone’, broken apart, reads ‘M Alone’.

Why all these Ms? Shall we wax psychoanalytical? There was only one significant ‘M’ in Beckett’s life: his mother, May, with whom he had a fraught, guilt-ridden relationship. As John Banville put it recently: ‘Beckett's mother, May, was a loving though stern woman, brooding and given to unpredictable fits of anger followed by lengthy bouts of depression [...] Like so many Irishmen, Beckett was deeply attached to his mother – "I am what her savage loving has made me" – in a classic love-hate relationship that was to endure long after her death; his later decision to settle permanently in France, and to write in French, seemed as much a flight from the mother as from the motherland.'

Beckett called ‘M’ the ‘fundamental sound’. Perhaps it was the sound, recapitulated in self-torture, of ‘Mama’.

Consulted:
Ackerley, Chris, Gontarski, S. E.: The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (2004)
Banville, John: review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, The New Republic, May 20, 2009, http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=30f007e1-9a95-4dea-98dc-af9ad009aaaf

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79. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Why Gulliver exactly? It’s now such a familiar name that we no longer ask. But it seems to have been carefully chosen. A ‘gull’ is slang for a fool or dupe, a trustful person, an ‘innocent abroad’; and to ‘gull’ someone is to trick or fleece them. The term was common in Swift’s day; the OED gives the earliest citation as 1594, from the work of Thomas Nashe: 'Liues there anie such slowe yce-braind beefe-witted gull.’ From 1748, closer to the publication-date of Gulliver’s Travels (in 1726), we have a citation in Smollett: ‘If I had been such a gull...I would without more ado tuck myself up.’ By the late nineteenth century the term was dying out. The OED’s last citation is from 1885 in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘He perceived by what...unmanly fear of ridicule he had been brought down to be the gull of this intriguer.’ Gulliver is not a fool, nor a dupe, but he is certainly trusting. And he is met everywhere with freaks and impossibilities which he is expected to take seriously - as are we, the readers. Gulliver may not be a fool but there is no shortage of fools in Gulliver.

The syllable ‘ver’ seems also to have been significant. It suggests truth (as in ‘veracity’), a point echoed in Swift’s foreword to Gulliver’s Travels, written under the pseudonym of Richard Sympson and itself an exercise in pseudo-deception: ‘There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, “it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it.”’ Gulliver, then, as a name, opposes deception with truth. What better nomenclature for the hero of a work of satire, in which the satirist peddles monsters and exaggerations in the service of righteous and truth-telling anger?

On a final note of pedantry: Gulliver’s Travels is not the title of the book at all. It was originally Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships.

Consulted:
Seronsy, Cecil C: ‘Some Proper Names in Gulliver’s Travels’, Notes and Queries 202 (1957), 471

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78. Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833) are perhaps the best-known works of Charles Lamb, aside from his Tales from Shakespeare for children. The essays were immensely popular in his day (and afterwards), combining sharp observation with great personal warmth and charm, and probably only equalled in their time by the essays of William Hazlitt.

They were not, however, the productions of a gentleman of leisure. Lamb worked his whole life as a lowly accounting clerk, at first for the London South Sea House and later the East India House in Leadenhall St. One of his colleagues was F. Augustus Elia, an Italian author of French tracts, from whom Lamb took his pen-name. Lamb wrote in a letter to John Taylor of 30 July 1821:

Poor ELIA, the real, (for I am but a counterfeit,) is dead. The fact is, a person of that name, an Italian, was a fellow clerk of mine at the South Sea House, thirty (not forty) years ago, when the characters I described there existed, but had left it like myself many years; and I having a brother now there, and doubting how he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapt down the name of Elia to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added the function of an author to that of a scrivener, like myself.

I went there the other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it.

So the name has fairly devolved to me, I think; and ‘tis all he has left me.

Lamb may have been drawn to the name because, as he himself remarked, the name forms an anagram of 'a lie'.

Perhaps surprisingly, his workmates formed an extraordinary galaxy of literary talent. Among them were John Stuart Mill, Thomas Love Peacock, the playwright James Cobb, and a swarm of other poets, essayists, translators and pamphleteers, all of whom had inexplicably gravitated towards accounting to make ends meet. Thomas De Quincey later said: ‘Such a labour of Sisyphus,— the rolling up a ponderous stone to the summit of a hill only that it might roll back again by the gravitation of its own dulness, — seems a bad employment for a man of genius in his meridian energies. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps the collective wisdom of Europe could not have devised for Lamb a more favourable condition of toil than this very India House clerkship.’

Consulted:
De Quincey, Thomas: De Quincey’s Works (1862)
Prance, Claude Annett: Companion to Charles Lamb (1983)
Lamb, Charles: The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb, Vol. III (2008)

Some Lamb footnotes:

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) on Lamb:

It is not by chance, or without a deep ground in his nature, common to all his qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb had an insensibility to music more absolute than can have been often shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before acknowledged so candidly. The sense of music — as a pleasurable sense, or as any sense at all other than of certain unmeaning and impertinent differences in respect to high and low, sharp or flat — was utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature herself from Lamb’s organization. It was a corollary, from the same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb’s nature at an early stage of our acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus,[1] with his eyelids torn away, and his uncurtained eye-balls exposed to the noon-tide glare of a Carthaginian sun, could have shrieked with more anguish of recoil from torture than we from certain sentences and periods in which Lamb perceived no fault at all.

‘Charles Lamb’ in the North British Review, 1848, in De Quincey as Critic, ed. JE Jordan (1973)

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) on Lamb:

Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation; not an opinion in it or a fact or even a phrase that you can thank him for: more like a convulsion fit than natural systole and diastole. — Besides he is now a confirmed shameless drunkard; asks vehemently for gin-and­water in strangers’ houses; tipples till he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking such trouble with him. Poor Lamb! Poor England where such a despicable abortion is named genius![2]

In JA Froude, Thomas Carlyle: A History of his Life in London 1834-1881 (1884)

Notes
[1] De Quincey adds as a footnote here: ‘Marcus Atilius Regulus, Roman general of the third century B.C., was by possibly apocryphal tradition, sent as a captive of the Carthaginians to Rome to arrange a peace, counseled against it, returned to Carthage according to his oath, and was fiendishly tortured.’
[2] Carlyle wrote this in his diary in 1831 after visiting Lamb at Enfield.

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77. No Thanks by EE Cummings

In the summer of 1934 the normally buoyant EE Cummings was in low water. His ballet Tom, based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, had been pronounced undanceable by George Balanchine, and had been dropped by the American Ballet. A Hollywood screenwriting offer worth around $10,000 had been made in August but then inexplicably withdrawn. He had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship worth $1500, but the money had run out. More brutally, the poems he had written with the Guggenheim money had proved unpublishable. Tentatively entitled 70 Poems, the volume had been turned down by fourteen publishers.

The Depression was taking a toll on American publishers and American readers. Poetry, never anything less than a luxury, was selling very badly, and Cummings’ brand of experimental verse was doing worse than most. In the 1920s he had found publishers for his poetry because of his one indisputable hit, the novel The Enormous Room. But his poetry had never sold well. In the first half of 1935 Cummings’ publishers Liveright sold 13 copies of Is 5 and just two copies of ViVa, and Covici-Friede managed to push exactly one copy of Eimi.

In spite of all this Cummings knew that in 70 poems he had achieved some of his best writing to date. It was a highly-wrought, precisely-structured collection, organized into a schema which alternated sonnets with free verse poems, representing the descent from heaven to earth and back to heaven. Thematically the volume focussed on the natural world, the doings within the miniature cosmoi of grasshoppers, ants and mice, the joy of spring awakenings, the sun’s and moon’s rises and settings, and love between man and woman.

No-one wanted it though.

After his fourteen failures Cummings gave up, and turned to his mother for the funds to self-publish the volume. She gave him $300, with which he was able to approach the printer Samuel Jacobs to bring out the volume in three different formats of nine, ninety and nine hundred copies (the attention to detail omnipresent) under his own imprint, the Golden Eagle Press. The title was changed from 70 Poems to No Thanks. The allusion was to the polite refusals of the publishers who had rejected it. To put the final nail in the coffin Cummings included on the dedication page of the book a witty concrete poem, arranging the fourteen publishers in the form of a funeral urn:

NO
THANKS
TO
Farrar & Rinehart
Simon & Schuster
Coward-McCann
Limited Editions
Harcourt, Brace
Random House
Equinox Press
Smith & Haas
Viking Press
Knopf
Dutton
Harper’s
Scribner’s
Covici-Friede

Consulted:
Cummings, EE: No Thanks (introduction by Richard S Kennedy, Liveright, 1978)
Friedman, Norman: ‘Not "e. e. cummings" Revisited’, Spring 5 (1996).
Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher: E.E. Cummings: A Biography (Methuen, 2005)

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76. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 is apparently the temperature at which paper spontaneously catches fire and burns. It was used by Bradbury as the title of his dystopian novel about a society in which reading is illegal.

The concept began life in a series of short stories on the theme of book-burning, including ‘Bright Phoenix’ and ‘Bonfire’, and developed into a 1951 novella ‘The Fireman’, about a municipal employee paid to burn books, before finding final form in Fahrenheit 451.

But Bradbury said that another short story, ‘The Pedestrian’ (1950), was also an important staging-post on the way to Fahrenheit 451. It was based on a real incident. Bradbury and a friend were taking an after-dinner walk when they were stopped and questioned by police. Indignant, Bradbury wrote a story about a future in which policemen arrest pedestrians instead of protecting them; this finds obvious parallels in a story about a future in which firemen start fires instead of stopping them. An evening stroll thus led to a critique of McCarthyist America. Bradbury later said: ‘When the wind is right, a faint odour of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.’

This still doesn’t quite explain the title, though. Perhaps Bradbury had been reading a precursor to the Handbook of Physical Testing of Paper By Jens Borch (2001). This states:

The ignition temperature of paper is about 450 degrees C, but it is somewhat dependent upon the paper quality. The ignition temperature is 450 degrees C for rayon fibers, 475 degrees C for cotton, and 550 degrees C for flame-resistant cotton (treated with N-methyl-dimethyl-phosphonopropionamide). From the data published the ignition temperature of paper treated with fire retardants seems to be about 100 degrees C higher than that of an untreated sample.

What seems to have happened is that Bradbury mixed up his Fahrenheit with his Celsius. 450 degrees C is correct for paper – only one off from 451 – but this is Celsius (or Centigrade), not Fahrenheit. The equivalent in Fahrenheit would be about 843 degrees. The famous formulation ‘Fahrenheit 451: The Temperature at which Book Paper Catches Fire, and Burns’, should perhaps be changed: I would suggest something such as: ‘Fahrenheit 843: The Approximate Temperature at which Rayon Fiber Untreated with N-methyl-dimethyl-phosphonopropionamide Catches Fire, and Burns’.


Consulted:
Bradbury, Ray: Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 (2006)
Borch, Jens: Handbook of Physical Testing of Paper (2001)

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75. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams explained while introducing the prog-rock band Procol Harum at the Barbican in February 1996:

'Anybody who knows me will know what a big thrill it is for me to be here to introduce this band tonight.

I've been a very, very great fan of Gary Brooker and Procol Harum ever since nearly thirty years ago when they suddenly surprised the world by leaping absolutely out of nowhere with one of the biggest hit records ever done by anybody at all ever under any circumstances. They then surprised the world even more by suddenly turning out to be from Southend and not from Detroit as everybody thought.

They then surprised the world even more by their complete failure to bring out an album within four months of the single, on the grounds that they hadn't written it yet. And then in a move of unparalleled marketing shrewdness and ingenuity they also actually left 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' off the album. They never did anything straightforwardly at all as anyone who's ever tried to follow the chords of 'A Rum Tale' will know.

Now they had one very very particular effect on my life. It was a song they did, which I expect some of you here will know, called 'Grand Hotel'. Whenever I'm writing I tend to have music on in the background, and on this particular occasion I had 'Grand Hotel' on the record player. This song always used to interest me because while Keith Reid's lyrics were all about this sort of beautiful hotel - the silver, the chandeliers, all those kind of things, but then suddenly in the middle of the song there was this huge orchestral climax that came out of nowhere and didn't seem to be about anything. I kept wondering what was this huge thing happening in the background? And I eventually thought ... it sounds as if there ought to be some sort of floorshow going on. Something huge and extraordinary, like, well, like the end of the universe. And so that was where the idea for The Restaurant at the End of the Universe came from - from 'Grand Hotel'.’

Consulted:
http://www.procolharum.com/dadams.htm

74. The Homecoming by Harold Pinter

In The Homecoming Teddy, a college professor, and Ruth, his wife, have returned unexpectedly from America to Teddy’s family home in the East End of London. The house is inhabited by Teddy’s father Max (a tyrant in cloth cap and plimsolls), his paternal uncle Sam (a chauffeur and dogsbody) and his brothers Lenny (a sharp-suited pimp) and Joey (a thick-headed boxer). They have not seen Teddy for nine years, and are unaware that he is married. As the action develops, a primordial struggle takes place in which Ruth, the only woman, is pitted against the other characters. She seduces Joey, coolly undermines Lenny, reduces Max to a stumbling, wounded old man begging for a kiss; Sam she merely ignores, aware of his status as a powerless bystander. The play ends, astoundingly, with her giving up her place as the wife of an American college lecturer for the life of a prostitute in a Soho flat (provided by Lenny). She also appears to give consideration to the idea that her duties will include the sexual servicing of Max, Lenny and Joey.

In his plays Pinter often drew on personal experience or on the experiences of those close to him. Some of the events of The Homecoming are paralleled in events that took place in the life of a childhood friend, Morris Wernick.

In the mid-1950s Wernick, a Jewish East Ender, left his home and went to Canada, where he became a Professor of English at Montreal University. Shortly before leaving, he married, but kept the marriage secret. His wife was not Jewish, and he feared that his father would be unable to accept her as part of the family. Much later Wernick wrote to Michael Billington, the drama critic and biographer of Pinter:

I married in 1956 and left immediately to start life in Canada. I never told my father that I was married and for the next ten years continued to keep up this ‘pretence’ even on my infrequent visits to England. Harold [Pinter] thought this action on my part unwise [...] I came, in time, to join the ranks of those who felt that it was ridiculous and in 1964 I brought my whole family to England where my father met his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. I do not need to tell you that it was one of the memorable moments in my life. Why did I take what I now regard as a mistaken course? For the simple reason that I believed it would spare him being hurt. Forty years ago marrying ‘out’ was still not regarded lightly. My father was in no sense a bigot and I certainly did not live in fear of his displeasure. Harold would get a laugh out of this idea, as would anyone who knew him.

Morris Wernick returned in 1964, the year before the play was completed. Pinter unquestionably based The Homecoming on the potentialities inherent in the Wernick ménage: he even sent Wernick a first draft of the play. The correspondences run even deeper. Pinter acknowledged that Max was drawn, in part, from Wernick’s father. Wernick also had two brothers — as in the play — as well as an uncle who was a cabbie. These are of course starting-points: there is no suggestion that Wernick’s brother was a pimp, or that the family all ended up giving Wernick’s wife ‘a walk round the park’. These were Pinter’s additions. But the homecoming of The Homecoming nevertheless drew heavily on real events.

Consulted:
Billington, Michael: The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (Faber, 1996)
Lahr, John, ed.: A Casebook on Harold Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’ (Davis-Poynter, 1974)

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73. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe was inspired, as is well known, by the travails of Alexander Selkirk, marooned on the island of Más Atierra in the Pacific Juan Fernandez group in 1704. Selkirk got into an argument with the captain of his ship and it was decided, it seems by mutual agreement, that it might be best just to stop and let him off. He survived on the island for four years, and on his return to civilization his story became famous. Defoe took what was already a very well known story and raised it from the plane of the famous to the plane of the immortal.

But this doesn’t explain the title. The actual name ‘Crusoe’ very probably came from Timothy Cruso, a schoolfellow of Defoe’s and a friend in later life. Cruso, like Defoe, was a Dissenter: in fact he was a dissenting minister in the church of the Crutched Friars, London, and the author of God the Guide of Youth (1695). Members of the Dissenting or Nonconforming churches (ie Christian believers without the Anglican faith) were denied a university education or a civil or military career. The History of Dissenters gives a short character-sketch of Cruso:

While his popular talents were crowned with great success, his amiable disposition and conduct endeared him not only to his own family but also to a very large circle of valuable friends. But the heavenly treasure was deposited in an earthen vessel, and his soul, like that of Watts, perhaps also of Paul, and some other distinguished men, was not well lodged; for his body was contemptible in its appearance, and frail in its texture. Exhausted therefore by the constant studies and hard labour which his indefatigable mind, ever eager to increase both his knowledge and his usefulness, imposed upon the feeble frame, he sunk under his work in the prime of life, and died on the twenty-sixth day of November, in the year one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven, when only forty-one years of age.

Robinson Crusoe is of course a highly theological work, representing one man’s dialogue with the Almighty shorn of any institutional trappings, a tale of survival through personal resourcefulness and faith. There a strong dissenting theme, therefore, in Robinson Crusoe. It seems very likely that Defoe’s use of his friend’s name was intended not only as a personal tribute but as a codified sign of support for Nonconformism.

Consulted:
Bogue, David, and Bennett, James: History of Dissenters, from the Revolution in 1688, to the Year 1808‎ (1809)
Backscheider, Paula R: Daniel Defoe: His Life‎ (1992)

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72. Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry

Père Ubu — Papa Ubu, or just plain Ubu — is one of the most alluringly disgusting characters in the history of theatre. Enormously fat and ugly, wearing a strange costume with a spiral painted on his paunch, continually shouting orders, he is a living marionette, a sort of cross between Mr Punch and the Emperor Bokassa. As Ubu Roi opens we witness him plotting to depose the King of Poland. Beside him are his henchmen and his wife, the slatternly Mère Ubu. Also at his right hand is a torturing engine called the machine à decerveler, or ‘de-braining machine’ (‘See the brains spurt out!’ ‘Soon my wife and I are going to be white with splattered brains!’). His speech is a torrent of schoolboy obscenity, literary-philosophico-scientific nonsense, oaths (‘by my green candle!’) and baby-talk, much of it all but incomprehensible, even in French. The first word of the play is ‘Merdre!’ Not merde, but merdre, with an extra ‘r’, the addition of which seems designed to heighten its obscenity. Among Ubu’s tricks is to throw a soiled toilet brush into the pot of food from which his soldiers are eating.

At the first performance of Ubu Roi at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre on December 10 1896 there was pandemonium. Amid the jeering, stamping and shouting, the actor playing Ubu tried to establish order by blowing into a horn, and it was at least fifteen minutes before the play could continue. The press reaction was universally hostile. Ubu Roi appeared to reject everything: any recognizable conception of theatre, any notion of satire, even a conventional idea of the unconventional — its bawdy, for example, was not the knowing innuendo of adults but the silly jokes of schoolboy-virgins. It was in places deliberately lame and unfunny. It must have been utterly baffling. Reviewers condemned it for its pointless vulgarity, lack of wit, irresponsibility and artistic vacuousness. One reviewer appeared to wish to de-louse himself after the performance, writing: ‘Despite the late hour, I have just taken a shower. An absolutely essential preventative measure when one has been subjected to such a spectacle.’ It all seemed to have been conceived by a naughty child to hoax the grown-ups. And in a sense, it was.

The phenomenon of Ubu began as a schoolboy burlesque, the creation of Alfred Jarry and his friends at the Lycée de Rennes in the late 1880s. The prototype for Ubu was his school physics master, M. Hébert. This unfortunate pedagogue, incompetent, fat, unable to keep order, was routinely mocked by the children as ‘Père Heb’, ‘Éb’, ‘Ébouille’, ‘Ébé’, ‘P.H.’ and so on. His tormentors, year after year, had constructed a mythology around him: he had been born on the banks of the Oxus River, the son of a Tartar witch and a member of a race known as the Hommes-Zénormes, emerging from the womb complete with bowler hat, check trousers and three teeth, one of stone, one of wood and one of iron. He had travelled to the Bering Straits, where he had become trapped in a glacier for a thousand years, but after his release had made his way to France, where he had taken a baccalauréat and become a brigand (naturally), dealing with his enemies by the use of a ‘de-braining spoon’. Jarry became the lead-archivist of this oral tradition, and M. Hébert’s lead-tormentor. A schoolfriend, Henri Hertz, wrote:

He entered the fray at the end, like a matador in a bull-ring, for the death-blow. Complete silence. Coldly, incisively, he put to Père Heb insidious, preposterous questions, which caused him to falter in mid-sentence and shattered his composure. He encircled him and made him giddy with his sophistry. He wore him out. Père Heb became disconcerted, batted his eyelids, stammered, pretended not to hear, lost ground. Finally, giving way, he collapsed onto the table...The class looked upon the victor Jarry with wonder.

With fear and a sense of recoil also. For there was the distinct feeling that his sarcasm went beyond the general unruliness, that something deep down inside him was taking part in this battle, something different, that his tactics arose from some powerful impulse.

‘Père Heb’ began to star in various marionette plays that Jarry performed with his friends. At some point in the early 1890s the name ‘Ubu’ emerged from ‘Ébé’ and ‘Ébouille’. By now his earlier collaborators were beginning to slip away into jobs or the army, and Jarry went to Paris, where he continued writing and polishing the Ubu-saga, which was eventually to comprise a cycle of plays beginning with Ubu Roi and including Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchainé. In the Symbolist Paris of the 1890s he found a place where eccentrics of all kinds were tolerated. Numerous tales were told about him. He would enter a restaurant and demand to be served the last course first, proceeding via the main course to the hors d’oeuvre. He was once asked for a light by a stranger in the street and discharged a pistol shot (un feu). When some children were endangered by his pistol practice, he told their mother: ‘Please do not worry Madame, if any unfortunate event should occur, we will soon engender others by you.’ Andre Gide wrote of his ‘bizarre, relentless manner of speaking, without inflexion or nuance, with an equal emphasis on every syllable, including the mute ‘e’s. Had a nutcracker spoken, it would have done so in exactly the same way.’ After the success of Ubu Roi in 1896 he became famous overnight, and began to adopt the language and demeanor of his creation.

For a long time after his death in 1907 (aged 34) Jarry was given only a token place in the history of the theatre. After the Second World War however, a strange organization was formed, the ‘Collège de ‘Pataphysique’, whose members included Jacques Prévert, Max Ernst, Eugène Ionesco, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and René Clair. ‘Pataphysics (the initial apostrophe is deliberate and silent) had been Jarry’s attempt to synthesize his philosophy: in its briefest formulation it is ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. The Collège championed all of Jarry’s works (which included many further novels and plays), and the 1950s and 60s saw the export of the Ubu plays to the USA, Britain and elsewhere. The Jarry phenomenon, 50 years late, was beginning to roll. It became clear that his work stood as an important precursor to movements such as Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. A certain strain of childish vulgarity, anti-sense and anti-wit in modernism could in fact be attributed directly to Jarry. Père Ubu, born of a malicious desire to destroy a hated teacher, was now venerated as the totem of those who wished to dismantle the world of grown-up rationality.

Consulted:
Beaumont, Keith: Alfred Jarry: A Critical and Biographical Study (Leicester University Press, 1984)
Jarry, Alfred: The Ubu Plays (introduction by Kenneth McLeish, Nick Hern Books, 1997)

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71. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë

One of the most abject failures in the history of publishing occurred in 1846. Three aspiring young authors, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, using their Aunt Elizabeth's legacy, paid for the publication of a slim volume of their poetry using the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It sold two copies. The hundreds of unsold books that remained — the original edition had been of a thousand — were left languishing in the storerooms of their publishers, Aylott and Jones.

As if anticipating the indifference of the public, the poems presented a world of almost unrelieved gloom. The concentration was on death (particularly young death), illness, betrayal, separation from loved ones by distance or time, the beauty of children and the brevity of childhood, the natural world and its pitilessness, remembrance of the dead, emotional anguish and its forbidden ecstasies, the rapture of death, the tomb, desire for death under the weight of misery, and faith and its fragility. It was a fantastically morbid collection — understandably so, since the Brontës had not only lost their mother at an early age but had witnessed the deaths of two sisters in childhood from tuberculosis, Maria and Elizabeth, in 1825.

The title of the sisters’ collection was a gem of cryptography. Each pseudonym was chosen so as to have the same initials as the real sister — CB, EB and AB respectively. Charlotte, writing in 1850 after the deaths of her two surviving sisters (Emily died in 1848 at the age of 30, and Anne in 1849 at the age of 29) gave a partial explanation of the names:

Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.

The sisters thus chose the ‘ambiguous’ Christian names of Currer, Ellis and Acton (though who would call a girl ‘Acton’?) because to take masculine Christian names — say, Christopher, Edward and Andrew Bell — would have been outright deceit, and they feared they would be either sneered at or patronized if they revealed themselves to be female. But why these hermaphroditic names in particular? And why Bell?

Biographers of the sisters agree that ‘Currer’ was almost certainly for Frances Mary Richardson Currer, one of the founders of the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge which Charlotte and Emily both attended. Frances Currer was a well-known bibliophile and scholar, and had one of the largest libraries in the north of England. In 1936 the clergyman Thomas Dibdin called her ‘the head of all female collectors in Europe’ and ‘a sort of modern Christina of the North’.

Acton Bell is likely to have come from Eliza Acton, a poetess who had found fame with her first book of poems in 1826. Many of her poems were moodily Brontëan in theme: ‘The Grave’; ‘On the Death of Ellen Sharp’; ‘Let Me Sit in the Twilight Hour Alone’; ‘A Shadow, Dark as Death’; ‘Go, Cold and Fickle Trifler’; and ‘Come to My Grave’. Her most enduring success, however, rested on her cookery book of 1845, the year before the Brontë sisters published their poems. Modern Cookery for Private Families went into three editions in the year of its publication, and was still in print by 1914. Elizabeth David called it ‘the greatest cookery book in our language’. The fusion, in the person of Eliza Acton, of the wild, the passionate, the morbid, and the handily domestic, may well have appealed to Anne Brontë.

What then of Ellis Bell? In a 1994 paper the critic Marianne Thormahlen pointed to an intriguing candidate: Sarah Ellis, the author of a number of conduct manuals for girls and women, including The Daughters of England, The Mothers of England, The Beautiful in Nature and Art and The Education of the Heart. This is perhaps the most controversial link of the three, given that Sarah Ellis placed much emphasis on woman’s worth as a mother and wife; but some of Ellis’s other ideas chimed with what we know of the Brontës’ views. She argued in The Mothers of England that girls should be given the freedom of the outdoors from an early age: ‘they should climb the craggy rock, penetrate the forest, and ramble over hill and dale.’ Such an idea would have appealed strongly to Emily Brontë. Ellis further urged women to acquire a general knowledge of politics and society, to be conversant with social issues such as slavery, temperance and cruelty to animals, and made frequent and admiring reference to Byron and Scott (the former a Brontë favourite). She reserved special praise for governesses (all the Brontës were trained as governesses):

And here I must beg to call the attention of the mothers of England to one particular class of women, whose rights and whose sufferings ought to occupy, more than they do, the attention of benevolent Christians. I allude to governesses, and I believe that in this class, taken as a whole, is to be found more refinement of mind, and consequently more susceptibility of feeling, than in any other.

And the pseudonymous surname ‘Bell’? The traditional explanation is that it derived from the middle name of Patrick Brontë’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who was a novelty in the household in 1845/6, and married Charlotte in 1849. But ‘Bell’ might also have had a feminine origin. The sisters’ immediate concern was to have a name beginning with ‘B’ to match ‘Brontë’, and the ‘B’ nearest at hand would have been their mother’s maiden name, Branwell, shared by their aunt Elizabeth, who had supplied the money for them to publish the poems. The name ‘Branwell’ itself could not be used, of course, being too immediately recognizable (it was also the name of their errant brother), but removing its middle letters would yield ‘Bell’. Might the sisters have chosen ‘Bell’ as a hidden tribute to their aunt and mother?

The sisters, pleasantly stimulated by their failure, then turned to novel-writing. In 1847, the following year, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey were all accepted for publication, all still under the pseudonyms of Currer Bell, Ellis Bell and Acton Bell. All were immediately successful. The Bell siblings — their sex was still not known, even to their publishers — became famous, and speculation mounted on their true identities. The remaining copies of the 1846 Poems were bought up from Aylott and Jones by a new publisher, Smith, Elder & Co., and re-issued with new bindings. Sales were brisk. The two copies that had been sold the previous year, with the couple of dozen review and gift copies sent out by Charlotte, were the only ones remaining with the original Aylott and Jones imprint. Fewer than ten are believed to be extant today. These copies of the despised little book are now among the most precious rarities of nineteenth-century literature.

Consulted:
Gérin, Winifred: The Brontës (Harlow, 1973)
Thormahlen, Marianne: ‘The Brontë Pseudonyms’, English Studies, Vol. 75, No. 3 (1994)

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70. Difficulties with Girls by Kingsley Amis

Difficulties with Girls (1988) is a sequel to Amis’s earlier novel Take a Girl Like You (1960). It has the same couple at its centre, Patrick and Jenny, both seven years older (real time has thus advanced four times as fast as novel time). Patrick has aged but not seen the error of his ways: he is a boozing philanderer. Jenny is struggling with her husband’s imperfections and contemplating a flingette of her own. As one might expect from a standard Amis novel, Patrick has the standard Amis ‘difficulties with girls’, largely arising from the fact that, as he sees it, ‘girls’ can’t think logically, they weep at a moment’s notice, they are selfish egomaniacs, etc.

But in early drafts the hero had difficulties of a completely different order. He was homosexual. Amis in fact spent a year creating a gay Jim Dixon. Later he abandoned the project: only the title survived, to be transferred to a totally new book. This is not (as I have pointed out before in these posts) a very uncommon strategy. Readers will remember that Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro was originally the title of an earlier uncompleted work, and that Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence was originally the title of a different book about seven middle-eastern cities.

So why did Kingsley Amis ditch the ‘gay hero’ idea? He was certainly seriously considering it – judging by the state of the manuscripts – and there are other homosexual themes in the final version of Difficulties with Girls, including a homosexual couple. It would have formed an interesting departure for a late Amis novel. But it seems that his nerve failed him. According to Kingsley’s son Martin, Kingsley was worried that his cronies at the Garrick Club would think he was gay. Martin Amis wrote: ‘I couldn’t believe it. That was supposed to be the point of Kingsley Amis: he didn’t care what people thought about him...’

Consulted:
Amis, Martin: Experience (2000)

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69. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was the blockbuster sensation of 1962. At first greeted with shocked incomprehension (‘a sick play for sick people’; ‘for dirty-minded females only’) it went on to win numerous major awards, transferred to Broadway, was made into a multi-Oscar-winning film and took Europe by storm (in Prague it was billed as Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka?). As a study in matrimonial attrition it went deeper, was more savage and uncompromising than anything yet seen in the American theatre. ‘Total war’ is the formula George and Martha agree on in Act Two; and in Act Three, George, humiliated and angry, avails himself of the atomic option.

The title was a major part of the play’s success. It originated from 1954. Albee was in the habit of drinking at an establishment in Greenwich Village called ‘The College of Complexes’, and behind the bar was a large mirror on which patrons were free to scrawl messages in soap. One night he saw the legend ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and it amused him. But it was not originally the title of anything: in the early stages of writing, the play was called Exorcism, and ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ was merely a line in the play. The line later moved to become the play’s subtitle, and then, at some point in the writing, with ‘Exorcism’ relegated to the third-act title (the first two acts are ‘Fun and Games’ and ‘Walpurgisnacht’) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became the main title. Albee said that its meaning was ‘who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf, which means who’s afraid of living life without delusions?’

Strangely enough for a title with such a concrete starting-point, there was at least one other possible influence on it, in the work of James Thurber, an author whom Albee admired (and admires) greatly. Thurber was, to many, the greatest twentieth-century observer of marital conflict, particularly in his short stories: much of the dialogue of these pieces, in which contests are played out between domineering wives and resentful husbands, finds an echo in the private-language bitching of Albee’s play. There is ‘The Curb in the Sky’ (‘He always gets that line wrong’), ‘Am I Not Your Rosalind?’ (‘Shut up, George, and give me some more ice’) or ‘Mr Pendly and the Poindexter’ (‘What’s the matter; are you in a trance, or what?’). There is even a Thurber short story called ‘The Interview’ in which the protagonists are a husband and wife called George and Martha, and in which George, a writer, gets drunk and taunts Martha, in front of a guest, over their failing marriage. More pertinently as regards the title, in 1939 Thurber co-wrote, with Elliott Nugent, the play The Male Animal. Its main character is Tommy Turner, a college professor (like George) with an emasculating wife (like Martha) who is attracted to a younger football-player (like Nick, the boxer and biology professor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Turner wants to read to his class a letter by the anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti, but is warned by his wife that if he does so he risks being fired. He must make a decision either to stand up for himself or back down, and if he backs down he will very probably be cuckolded too. ‘I won't,’ he says. ‘I'm scared of those Neanderthal men. I'll talk about football.’ But then he sings: ‘Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? The Big Bad Wolf? The Big Bad Wolf?’ Staking all on one throw, he reads the letter and is supported not only by his faculty but, surprisingly, by the football team.

A second possible influence came from the work of Virginia Woolf herself. In around 1962 Albee wrote to Leonard Woolf to ask him if it would be all right to use his wife’s name as part of the title. Leonard Woolf said it would. Later, when the play transferred to the West End of London, Woolf went to see it with Peggy Ashcroft, and wrote to Albee: ‘We both enjoyed it immensely. It is so amusing and at the same time moving and is really about the important things in life. Nothing is rarer, at any rate, on the English stage. I wonder if you have ever read a short story which my wife wrote and is printed in A Haunted House? It is called “Lappin and Lapinova.” The details are quite dif­ferent but the theme is the same as that of the imaginary child in your play.’ Leonard Woolf was perhaps being tactful. ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ is about a married couple who, in the absence of children of their own, invent a secret fantasy-world. In it the husband is a rabbit and the wife a hare:

Thus when they came back from their honeymoon they possessed a private world [...] No one guessed that there was such a place, and that of course made it all the more amusing. It made them feel, more even than most young married couples, in league together against the rest of the world [...] Without that world, how, Rosalind wondered, that winter could she have lived at all?

But the breakdown of the marriage leads to a breakdown of the shared fantasy, and it is dealt a cruel coup de grâce by the husband:

‘Oh, Ernest, Ernest!’ she cried, starting up in her chair.
‘Well, what’s up now?’ he asked briskly, warming his hands at the fire.
‘It’s Lapinova...’ she faltered, glancing wildly at him out of her great startled eyes. ‘She’s gone, Ernest. I’ve lost her!’ [...]
‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘Poor Lapinova...’ He straightened his tie at the looking-glass over the mantelpiece.
‘Caught in a trap,’ he said, ‘killed,’ and sat down and read the newspaper.
So that was the end of that marriage.

Albee claimed never to have read the short story.

Consulted:
Ardolino, Frank: ‘Nugent and Thurber's The Male Animal and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Explicator (Spring 2003)
Bigsby, Christopher: Albee (Oliver & Boyd, 1969)
Gussow, Mel: Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (Oberon Books, 1999)
Woolf, Virginia: ‘Lappin and Lapinova’, A Haunted House and Other Stories (Harvest, 2002)

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68. An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Another one by Ishiguro: this time his Whitbread-prize-winning novel of 1986, An Artist of the Floating World. The novel, set in the 1950s, tells the story of Masuji Ono, a Japanese painter. During the Second World War he has broken away from his traditional artistic training to become a propagandist for the Japanese war machine: now he finds that he and his art are increasingly met with hostility.

The ‘floating world’ of the title derives from the Japanese ukiyo. This was originally a Buddhist term signifying impermanence, but was later applied to the night-time subculture of courtesans, music and drink – the ‘floating world’ - that flourished during the Edo period (1600-1868). Ukiyo-e, or ‘floating-world-pictures’, was the art that depicted this subculture.

Ono, by repudiating the artistic ‘floating world’ and suffering the disastrous consequences of his involvement with militarism, ironically enters another ‘floating world’ which has resonances of the original Buddhist one: adrift, friendless, his once-solid reputation destroyed, the certainties he has lived by are now revealed to be as impermanent as smoke.

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67. The Republic by Plato

If Plato could be put into a time machine and brought to the twenty-first century, he would find many things to surprise him. Electricity, votes for women, competitive hot-dog eating — and the title of his most famous work, the Republic. For a start, he would not understand it: it's Latin, not Greek. And if someone translated it for him, he would probably be rather astonished to find it attached to his book.

The book was titled in Greek Politeia, which referred to the polis, or city-state, and can be rendered ‘the state’, ‘affairs of the state’ or, more broadly, ‘the life of the people’. Foreign translations give some idea of how far the title of the Republic has strayed from its origins: it is Der Staat in German, De Staat in Dutch, Stat in Slovak, Ustava (‘Constitution’) in Czech and Valsts (‘the State’) in Latvian. The book was intended as a manual on the good governance of a particular type of Greek political unit. It explored the political models on offer at the time, rejected all of them, and came to one, single, surprising conclusion.

Of the available models, timarchy was judged to be the best of a bad bunch. This was the system currently prevailing in Sparta, in which a small class of landed warriors lived amidst a slave-population, the helots, subduing them by means of military dictatorship and athletics. Oligarchy, the next most desirable, was government by a wealthy minority of unelected bureaucrat-politicians. The next was democracy, in which there was government by popular demagogues. The lowest of all, tyranny, was a state in which one terribly unhappy man, ‘surrounded by boyfriends and girlfriends’, enacted the destruction of the state through his own personal moral degradation.

Socrates/Plato, having demolished the opposition, then described his ideal state. This was an entirely theoretical polity, one ruled by ‘Guardians’, or specially-trained philosopher-rulers. The Guardians, unelected and set apart from the rest of the population (the Workers) from birth, would be bred eugenically by means of ‘marriage festivals’ (in fact state-sponsored orgies, since marriage was not their main purpose, but acts of intercourse by the fittest individuals). They would receive philosophical training for fifty years before being allowed to emerge and govern. A sub-set of the Guardians were the Auxiliaries, who would exist to keep order and prosecute wars. In order to keep the Workers loyal, a founding myth (sometimes translated as a ‘noble lie’) would be deliberately fabricated, ‘the Myth of Er’.

The title of the Republic, then, is rather strange: Plato’s ideal state is about as far away from representative republican democracy as it is possible to get. The reason lies essentially in the very great swathes of time that have elapsed since it was first translated. In its first Latin translation the title was Respublica, a word similar in meaning to Plato’s Politeia, and signifying ‘public matters’ or ‘matters of state’. Our modern word ’republic’, meaning democratic government shorn of unelected bodies, evolved from the term respublica, and its evolution in meaning twisted the meaning of Plato’s title. The Republic used to be a good translation, but evolved into a mistranslation.

Consulted:
Plato: The Republic (translation, introduction and notes by HDP Lee, Penguin, 1955)

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