Curiosities of Literature, page 3
And, if OPTIMA doesn’t give us the answer, other laboratories may. In 2005, newspapers reported that:
An art historian at the University of East Anglia has teamed up with a leading neuroscientist and created a new academic discipline: neuroarthistory. Prof. John Onians of UEA’s School of World Art Studies wants to use the new brain scanning techniques such as fMRI to answer questions such as:
What happens in the brain of the modern artist as he or she works?
What happened in the brain of an artistic genius like Leonardo da Vinci?
‘We are finally unlocking the door to this secret world,’ Professor Onians said. And, if neuroarthistory, why not neuroliterarycriticism? Something will have to be done about the rather unwieldy name, however.
ASTHMA AND GENIUS
In her biography of Edith Wharton (2007) Hermione Lee notes - in the context of Wharton’s chronic pulmonary ailments - that asthma often correlates, sometimes fatally, with high literary achievement.
The ‘fact’ that theirs is an ailment of the certifiably famous has always been a consolation to sufferers. It is affirmed by the ‘asthmatrack’ website which, among literary wheezers, lists: John Updike, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Addison, Pliny the Elder and, of course, the author of The Age of Innocence.
To the speculative mind, plausible reasons suggest themselves for the correlation between literary talent and asthma. An over-sanitary upbringing is one. Writers tend to originate in middle- or upper-class environments. The mop, duster, and flashwipe are never far away. Some parents of asthma sufferers I’ve spoken to are sceptical about the flashwipe arguement. Others believe there may be something in it; Wharton’s case certainly supports it. Young Edith, for example, after an infantile attack of typhoid was never exposed to the bacterial risks of the school playground, but was educated in her luxurious New York home: an environment as germ-free, by the standards of the time, as a hospital Intensive Care Unit.
Sanitary homes are not always healthy homes, or so modern science suggests. Sebastian Johnson, a professor of respiratory medicine, writing in The Times (10 Feb 2007) observes:
We know that those who have very low exposure to infections in childhood seem to be more likely to develop asthma. And it could be that because of this low exposure they never develop the immune responses they should.
This, the article continues, fits with the so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis. ’ This theory suggests that allergies happen because we do not expose our immune system to germs early in life, as the Spartans would lay weakly-looking babes naked on the mountain overnight to ensure they had what it took to be Spartans. Little asthma, one suspects, in Sparta. And lots of little coffins.
Children, the doctors now tell us, should not be ‘pompeyed’, as Dickens’s Mrs Jo puts it. Spare the germs and spoil the child. But the hygiene hypothesis would hardly work with Dickens himself, consigned as a child to labour in a blacking factor by the filthy Thames and resident, for most of his career, in a London where, as he graphically describes in the opening to Bleak House, the particles of soot were as large as snowflakes and the gutters running with animal and human excrement (‘mud’ as Dickens euphemistically calls it). He must surely have had a good inuring.
Dickens is, I believe, the first novelist to have introduced an identifiably diagnosed asthmatic into his fiction. In chapter 30 of David Copperfield, where the hero calls on the amiable Yarmouth shopkeeper, Mr Omer, he finds:
the shutters up, but the shop door standing open. As I could obtain a perspective view of Mr Omer inside, smoking his pipe by the parlour door, I entered, and asked him how he was.
‘Why, bless my life and soul!’ said Mr Omer, ‘how do you find yourself? Take a seat. - Smoke not disagreeable, I hope?’
‘By no means,’ said I. ‘I like it - in somebody else’s pipe.’
‘What, not in your own, eh?’ Mr Omer returned, laughing. ‘All the better, sir. Bad habit for a young man. Take a seat. I smoke, myself, for the asthma.’
Mr Omer had made room for me, and placed a chair. He now sat down again very much out of breath, gasping at his pipe as if it contained a supply of that necessary, without which he must perish.
Not much literary genius in Mr Omer’s establishment, we deduce.
Dickens, rather more sensibly, took opium for his asthma. It may be that his own bronchial tubes were worrying him while writing Copperfield, this most autobiographical of his novels. Dora’s dog, Jip, is also described as ‘asthmatic’. It is a very stupid, but lovable, hound; like its mistress. She dies after childbirth. Jip, faithful to the end, dies with her. Whether of asthma is not indicated.
A Pack of Literary Hounds - faithful as Jip, but unasthmatic
Argos: the dog who wags his tail when his master, Ulysses, returns after twenty years away. Dogs live long in Ithaca and have memories like elephants.
Bull’s-eye: Bill Sikes’s bulldog; so loyal that it throws itself to its death, alongside its dying master. Neither is any loss to the world.
Rab: the first true canine hero, a highly sociable Edinburgh mastiff (‘big as a little highland bull’) in Dr John Brown’s novel, Rab and his Friends (1855). Edinburgh also boasts the most faithful dog in history, ‘Greyfriars Bobby’, who for fourteen years refused to leave his dead master’s graveside.
Boots: the first canine narrator, in Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘Thy Servant, a Dog’.
Flush: a Biography: Virginia Woolf ’s take on the world of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as seen through the eyes of the poet’s cocker spaniel.
Iris Murdoch liked introducing her friends’ dogs into her fiction. As her biographer Peter Conradi, records: Tadg, in The Unicorn, was based on John and Patsy Grigg’s golden labrador Crumpet; the papillon Zed in The Philosopher’s Pupil ‘was based on Diana Avebury’s three-legged shrill-barking Zelda’; Anax in The Green Knight was based on Conradi’s own blue merle collie, Cloudy. If there was a Booker Prize (let’s call it a ‘Barker Prize’) for naming canines Murdoch (herself dogless) would win hands down.
PROUST AND ASTHMA
More ingenious than the too-much-cleanliness hypothesis about asthma are those which draw on psychoanalytic explanation (a line with which Hermione Lee is sympathetic, in her account of Wharton). The root of the disease lies not in the bronches, but the psyche.
For advocates of this psychosomatic theory, the star asthmatic is Marcel Proust. An acute sufferer, after a life-threatening attack, aged nine, all outings ‘in the air’ were given up. Like Wharton, he was taught at home, by tutors, in a climate-controlled bubble.
In an article, ‘Asthma and the Fear of Death’, in Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1960) Karem J. Monsour digs deep into the aetiology of Proust’s condition:
Asthma is said to be precipitated by separation or threat of separation from the mother. French, Alexander, et al. have formulated the concept that in asthmatics ‘the nuclear psychodynamic factor is a conflict centring in an excessive unresolved dependence upon the mother’.
Mr Omer’s pipe, and the modern ventolin inhaler are clearly poor substitutes for the maternal nipple.
In a Q&A session, after a lecture at the National Portrait Gallery in 2001, the writer Edmund White (biographer of Proust and a brilliant autobiographer of himself) was asked ‘whether Proust’s asthma was code for his sexuality’. White was sceptical: ‘Proust really was asthmatic’, he asserted, adding ‘But it did turn him into a recluse and an observer.’
The author of À la recherche du temps perdu should, perhaps, have been even more reclusive than he actually was. Himself a prudent smoker of ‘Espic’ anti-asthmatic cigarettes, legend has it that the pneumonia that killed Proust was precipitated by an asthmatic attack brought on by the young Samuel Beckett’s cigar-smoking.
So much for Mr Omer’s thesis (‘I smoke, myself, for the asthma’). Smoking Kills, as the packets threaten us. Guns, however, are quicker (see p. 141), as is liquor (see p. 250).
JAMES’S IRRITABLY (FRIGID) BOWEL SYNDROME
Reviewing the newly published Complete Letters of Henry James, Volumes 1 and 2, 1855-1872, in July 2007, Peter Kemp observed that ‘Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James’s bowels.’ As the correspondence revealed, the young Henry suffered from chronic constipation. To alleviate it his parents dispatched him on a grand tour of Europe (doubtless hoping the foreign food would loosen his entrails). As Kemp notes:
Glum reports on the failure of water cures, laxative diets and vigorous hiking to dislodge his ‘hideous repletion’ went back across the Atlantic to his brother William (a fellow-sufferer who speculates - ‘Electricity sometimes has a wonderful effect’ - on the possible benefits of applying ‘a strong galvanic current’ to the seat of the problem).
‘Rippling through these letters,’ Kemp detects, ‘are the first imaginative stirrings of one of the greatest fiction and travel writers in the language.’ Costiveness inspired the famously contorted style - sentences which labour, often interminably, to deliver their meaning.
If true, Henry James’s IBS takes its place with other happy (for literature) afflictions: the polio that lamed Walter Scott, and prevented him from being the soldier that he always wanted to be; or the short-sightedness that made it impossible for Tom Clancy to pursue a military career, obliging him to write about it instead; or the TB, that gave Alan Sillitoe an invalid discharge from the RAF, a convalescent couple of years, and a sufficient disability pension wherewith to write Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Without that happy (for literature) bacillus, the Arctic Monkeys would not have had their allusive, career-making album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and Gordon Brown, who claimed to like their music above all others, would have had to pretend to like another pop group in order to certify his street credibility with the younger British electorate. Curious.
There is no need, however, to be over-grateful to the tubercular bacillus. It robbed us not merely of the conclusion to Keats’s Hyperion, but of any successor to Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell died when forty-seven years old (if that’s the right word). Among the most poignant lines in literature is that in a letter to David Astor, in February 1948 that the doctors have told him about something ‘called streptomycin’. This was a first-generation antibiotic that would, soon after, make TB as much a thing of the past as leprosy.
The rich and well-disposed Astor procured some of the new drug from America for his friend, but it was too late and disastrously mis-prescribed. Had the disease given him another couple of years, while the antibiotic cure was refined, Orwell might well have lived to see the year about which he was so gloomy - 1984, that is.
As Mrs Thatcher laid into those miners, about whom Orwell had sentimentalised in The Road to Wigan Pier, in 1984 itself Orwell might well have been inspired to even greater gloom than he experienced in 1948. To paraphrase O’Brien as he tortures Winston Smith: ‘The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake . . . If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Thatcherite handbag swinging against a human face - for ever.’
IRRITABLE BOWELS (II)
A vivid last poem - also, legend has it, his famous last words - is recorded as issuing from the tremulous lips of the Scottish Chaucerian, Robert Henryson (author of The Testament of Cresseid). Henryson died, probably around 1505 (no one is sure), of dysentery - or ‘flux’. An eye-witness account of his last hours was put on paper by his friend, Sir Francis Kinaston.
Sixteenth-century medicine could do nothing for the venerable Dunfermline ‘makar’ - whom an off-the-shelf course of Imodium would doubtless have saved. None the less, they did what they could. In extremis, a white witch was called in. After due inspection, the old crone quaveringly told her patient:
There is a whikey tree in the lower end of your orchard, if you go and walk but thrice about it, and thrice repeat these words ‘whikey tree, whikey tree, take away this fluxe from me’, you shall be presently cured.
Too feeble to move, but not too feeble to explode with terminal indignation against bad verse, Henryson, with his last reserves of bodily strength, pointed to the table in his room and enquired, sarcastically, whether it might not serve as well ‘if I repeated thrice these words: “Oken burd oken burd Garre me shit an hard turde” ’.
He died shortly afterwards, ‘within half a quarter of an hour’, as Kinaston pedantically records. He did not, one suspects, go gentle in the night; but still raging against the foolishness of witches.
Whether the whikey tree might have helped bring on hard turds, posterity will never know and medical science has not yet investigated. ‘I hae me doots,’ as the Scots say.
ILL WIND
On 5 August 2007, following the recently introduced total ban on smoking in pubs, the Sunday Times reported that, far from making the serious drinker’s atmosphere more salubrious, the opposite had happened. Oliver Devine, senior marketing manager of the Sizzling Pub Company (wonderful name) was quoted as saying:
Appetising food smells have increased but others are less attractive, such as stale food and beer, damp, sweat and body odour, drains and - how do you put this nicely? - flatulence.
Putting it nicely is, if one takes a long historical perspective, a recent anxiety. The Emperor Claudius gave a medal to anyone who broke wind in his presence and tried to get some ‘let it rip’ reforms through the Senate. Robert Graves has some fun with it in his Roman novels, although I don’t recall the detail featuring in the popular TV versions.
The fart is found in the very fundament of the father of English verse, Chaucer. An eructation, fit to split the sky, climaxes ‘The Miller’s Tale’, when Absolon, a lusty young lad, knocks on the window of his beloved Alisoun, the cuckolded carpenter’s wife, beseeching a night-time kiss. The wily Nicholas, however, has got into her sheets before him and juts his ‘ers’ out of the window and, ‘anon’:
. . . leet fle a fart,
As greet as it had been a thonder-dent
The luckless Absolon is almost ‘blinded’ with the unexpected gust. Once recovered, his revenge is prompt, fiery, buttock-directed, and hilarious.
Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy is similarly redolent with fart jokes and allusion. The second line of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist has rogue Subtle snarling at his fellow-rogue Face, ‘I fart at thee’. In some modern productions, he does just that. Later in the play, the preposterous Sir Epicure Mammon, fantasising what he will do with his wealth after Face and Subtle have given him the philosopher’s stone, prophesies:
. . . My flatterers
Shall be the pure and gravest of divines,
That I can get for money. My mere fools,
Eloquent burgesses, and then my poets
The same that writ so subtly of the fart,
Whom I will entertain still for that subject ...
There is owlish scholarly dispute as to who the subtle poet might be. A popular candidate is John Suckling, presumed author of ‘Down Came Grave Ancient Sir John Crooke’, otherwise, and more descriptively known by the title: ‘On a Fart in the Parliament-House’.
Impropriety did not come into it. Even the most divine were unembarrassed (although they could be highly amused) by references to this particular bodily function.
Martin Luther, for example, is supposed to have asked one of his companions at table ‘Warum rülpset und furzet ihr nicht, hat es euch denn nicht geschmecket?’ (‘Why don’t you belch and fart, did you not enjoy the meal?’). John Osborne elaborates this broadness of talk in his 1961 play, Luther, whose hero describes himself as ‘a ripe stool in the world’s straining anus’. One can’t be sure the German divine would have gone quite that far after dinner. A fart and a belch would have sufficed.
One of Walter Scott’s favourite after-dinner stories was of Queen Elizabeth, getting into a barge on the Thames and, as she stepped across, breaking wind. The bargeman promptly apologised on her behalf. He was knighted by a grateful monarch on the spot: Sir Bargeman of the Gracious Wind, perhaps. The story outdoes Sir Walter Raleigh and the velvet cloak, and is surely just as apocryphal. Scott, of course, would never have thought of intruding the impropriety into his Elizabethan novel, Kenilworth The bargeman story was for the smoking room.
King James, Elizabeth’s successor, in his counterblast against tobacco, hints broadly that smoking means voiding sooty wind: filthy fumes fore and aft. ‘Smoking Smells’, as might have been written, by royal (dis)command, on the Jacobean fag packet.
ILL WIND (II)
In the civilising process, pioneered by Addison and Steele in the eighteenth century, this broad freedom of reference to wind (‘gas’ as the Americans call it) is sanitised out of English literature for a century or more. Civilisation, as Freud notes, is measured anatomically by the distance the human species raises its nose away from the brown towards the toffee. Not one character in Victorian fiction, as I recall, breaks wind. Even in pornography of the period, it is rare. Chaucer was strenuously bowdlerised, particularly for the classroom.
The pressure of universal decency on the topic was occasionally resented and resisted. Never more wittily than by Mark Twain, in his Rabelaisian fantasia, 1601. The squib was composed around 1876, the same period that he was writing Tom Sawyer, and there is a congenial juvenile naughtiness about the piece. This, one is tempted to speculate, is the portion of the novel Twain could write, but not publish. At least, not under his own name, or through the normal channels.
