A Date With... Philip Larkin and the Marquis de Sade
This fortnight in literary sayings, births and deathsNovember 30th
Now, obviously, I could remind you once again that Oscar Wilde, that man of a million witty comments, died on 30th November 1900. I could but there is more than enough of Wilde and his ways scattered liberally in Well Red magazine this month. So let us just start off with one of his sayings and park ourselves by someone else's grave. Wilde once said that, "One charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary to both parties".
December 1st
Philip Larkin, who died on this day in 1985, probably would have agreed on the general principle of Wilde's comment. One of his finest poems, "Talking in Bed" (from The Whitsun Weddings) puts it like this, in his characteristic mode that lies somewhere between humour and profound sadness:
"At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind."
Larkin had something of a melancholy nature as these lines illustrate, but like his friend Kingsley Amis could be relied on for some moments of delightful wit. As a judge at the Booker Prize awards in 1977, Larkin said of the various entries and of modern fiction in general that, "Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end". But usually he was capable of the grouchiness one might well associate with a man who worked in a library in Hull for the greater part of his life. Which, of course, he did. John Carey once, brilliantly and accurately, wrote that Larkin's, "attitude to most accredited sources of pleasure would make Scrooge seem unduly frolicsome". His views on death (best seen in "An Arundel Tomb" and "Aubade") were typical in their negativity: in the year before his death he wrote that "I am getting progressively less fond of poems about old age as I near the Pearly Gates". Woody Allen, born today and whose Collected Prose is essential reading for anyone for whom free association is more palatable than free love, put it best when it came to the matter of death and art. He exclaimed, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying".
December 2nd
Well, a solution to the unquestioned inconvience of an early death did not make itself known but was at least hinted at on December 2nd 1982 when the first permanent artificial heart – Jarvic-7 to its friends - was implanted. It couldn't help the Marquis de Sade, though, since he had died somewhat unhelpfully today in 1814, in a lunatic asylum. He can't have been entirely insane, though, since he insisted that after death he should be laid in an open casket for 48 hours which seems fairly sane to me. De Sade was the source of the word "sadism" (his much maligned 120 Days of Sodom is his best known book). He was not, in fact, the origin of Sade, singer of "Smooth Operator", "Your Love is King" and other big M.O.R. hits of the eighties and nineties whose new album was released recently. Sade's listeners are more commonly associated with masochism (only kidding, I too have a copy of "Diamond Life" somewhere).
December 3rd
The first disposable razor was patented by Gillette yesterday in 1901, but John Lennon wouldn't have noticed for most of his "sleeping is political" years. It must have had some effect though, since today in 1969 he was offered the role of Jesus in "Jesus Christ Superstar". Funny choice of person to give it to, though, given this notorious statement by the Beatle only three years earlier: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now". What I like about that is the eloquence, the humility, the sheer logic. Martyred by Chapman he may have been, but not proved right. He died on December 8th, 1980.
Another man with prominent facial hair (there had to be some kind of link) was Joseph Conrad, born today in 1857. He wrote Heart of Darkness, a bleak but brilliant and very short novella about a powerful colonial lunatic officer in the Belgian Congo, that was later turned into the film "Apocalypse Now" with Marlon Brando. Francis Ford Coppola, the director, is currently putting together an even longer version of the film to be screened soon, which presumably means that viewing will now have to include several intervals and beds for the audience. Marlon Brando was also in the first version of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire that opened today in 1947.
Also today is the anniversary of Charles Lamb (Tales from Shakespeare) who was born in 1764 and Robert Louis Stevenson - author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped - died suddenly of apoplexy in Samoa in 1894. Agatha Christie appeared to have been kidnapped today in 1926. Making like a character out of one of her mystery novels, she vanished apparently after hearing of her husband's continued love affair with another woman and was found only after a 10 day search with the help of 15,000 volunteers that led the investigators to a health spa where she was pretending to be a South African for reasons still unknown. Apparently, under her pseudonym, she had openly followed the story of her own disappearance with great interest.
December 4th
On December 4th 1835, Samuel Butler was born. The man best known for creating Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh once spoke to what appeared to be the corpse of a lady friend of his and begged
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