January 8


1642


The list of poems (and other works, but let's stick to the poems for the moment - you can find many of the books on Dec 6) banned as heresies, whether religious, political, moral or social, is too long for this page; but I shall try. 

Noteworthy among them is Ovid's "Ars Amatoria", which upset the Roman Emperor Augustus so much that he both banned the work and banished the poet; the poem survived, until the monk Savonarola included it in his "Bonfire of the Vanities" in 1497 (not to be confused with, but the reason for the title of, Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel and the film that was made of it). Christopher Marlowe translated it into English around 1582, only to find his version banned and himself imprisoned; U.S. customs added it to their list in 1930. 

The 1881 edition of Walt Whitman's endlessly rewritten and reprinted canonical "Leaves of Grass" was banned in Boston, though that city now requires study of it as part of its Literature programme (I guess I should write that as "program", given that Boston is in the USA) in secondary schools; required reading, and banning, are of course both forms of coercion and control. 

The French government suppressed six of the poems in Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", and charged him with corrupting public morals; the work was republished the following year and has never been out-of-print since. The version I have linked to here provides an English translation alongside the French original - just trying to be helpful (as well as so enjoying putting these equivalents of the "Mohammed cartoons" out there on my own version of Charlie Hebdo pages!). 

The complete works of Osip Mandelstam disappeared on Stalin's orders, with the poet banished to death-by-exile (he died in Voronezh in 1938); read some of them in translation here; his Poem No 395 with my thoughts on the great man here; how Yevtushenko got his copy (and I mine) can be found on July 18

Alan Ginsberg's "Howl" fell victim to an obscenity trial in 1957. 

"Education for Leisure" by the current English Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy was banned in 2008 by the school’s examinations board AQA… plus ça change…


Why have I put all this under January 8th, and noted the year as 1642? Because this was the date on which Galileo Galilei died, in Arcetri in Italy, not a poet it is true, but a name that I cannot bring myself to wilfully exclude from a list of the banned geniuses of our moronically stupid world. I wrote this poem for him, many, many years ago:



Heresies
(for Galileo Galilei)


1642
at Arcetri
near Florence
under house arrest
working only under close policing
completely blind
censured by the ecclesiastical authorities
sentenced to death by Pope Urban VIII
(commuted at the personal behest of the Duke of Tuscany)
on the 65th birthday of the Danish astronomer Johannes Fabricius
(the man who actually discovered sunspots)
on the anniversary of the death of Marco Polo
at the age of 77
Galileo Galilei
died
broken on the rack of disappointment

Of his achievements we can list:

the inference
from the oscillations of a lamp
suspended in the cathedral at Pisa
of the usefulness of a pendulum
in measuring time exactly

the invention of a hydrostatic balance

a treatise on the law of specific gravity

the theory of falling bodies

the invention of the thermometer
and the proportional compass

the development of the refracting telescope
and its use in determining
the nature of the lunar landscape

the discernment of the structure of the Milky Way

the discovery of four satellites of Jupiter

the proof of solar rotation
based on the evidence of sunspots

the law of uniformly accelerated motion

the law of the parabolic path of projectiles

the law of virtual velocities

the law of inevitable weightedness

All these
science
or heresy
depending on your point of view

(published in "Welcome To My World"; to purchase your copy, click here)

*

Some time after writing that poem, I found myself drawn back to the theme (probably something of mine had just been banned, or me forced to resign from some position, or even imprisoned briefly, because somebody didn't like something I had written), and wrote a rather more prosaic piece which I called:
THE INDEX

The Argaman Press proudly presents its unique catalogue of writings which, according to the highest authorities of their days, constitute some of the greatest masterpieces of all time, the equals of Shakespeare, Dante, Molière...

“La Grande Bataille de Crecy”; author or authors unknown, probably written down in the late 13th century but originating much earlier, it is held to be the greatest of all works in the troubadour style of poetry, though unusual in that it departs from the customary themes of love and romance to speak of the massacre of the Celtic French (Armoricans) by the Angevins (Normans).

“The Gospel According to St James”; written in Greek and originally published in Egypt, James’ account of the life of his master is characteristically different from the better known synoptic gospels, particularly in its insistence on what may be termed gnostic conceptions. The book first appeared in Europe in about 1400 CE; many scholars hold it to be a fake.

“La Saga di Gabrielle” by Roberto di Guislano; a 14th century Italian romance which sought to merge the Commedia Dell’Arte and Condottiere traditions of Italian theatre and prose. It tells the story of the archangel Gabriel, sent by God to announce the birth of Jesus to Mary, and of how he fell deeply, and carnally, in love with her, ultimately fathering the child himself.

“Tempus Fugit” by Guiseppe di Scarlatto; an early 15th century Italian tractate which promulgated the notion, gleaned as so much Renaissance culture was from the Arabic, that time is less important than action, and that the person who carries out the action is the least important of all.

“The Virgin Mary Magdalene”, a poem by the 15th century Flemish poet Richard van der Elk, in which it is imagined that the two Marys of Christian tradition were in fact one and the same.

“Antonio” by Mordechai Levy; written in 1634 but never performed in England, it presented a riposte to Shakespeare’s story of “The Merchant of Venice” from a Jewish perspective.

“Against Slavery: A Polemic” by Brahame Swift. Unlike his elder brother, Jonathan, Brahame wrote but one book. A marginal note in the journals of William Wilberforce suggests that copies of the book were circulated privately over several decades. Wilberforce himself was powerfully influenced by its coherent and lyrical attack on all forms of human slavery, including, interestingly, marriage.

“Gott Ohne Ich, Ich Ohne Gott” by Hermann Dietrich Fassbinder. A 19th century German essay in novel form which arguably was the first modern work to establish atheism as a defensible intellectual posture.

“The Princess Clementine Rose”; an otherwise run-of-the-mill romance by one of the 19th century’s lesser known women novelists, Mary Graveney; it enjoyed a brief succes de scandale for its unusually graphic descriptions of lesbian love.

“The Complete Poems of Osip Mandelstam.” Only about a tenth of Mandelstam’s oeuvre has survived his persecution at the hands of Stalin. This volume brings the remainder together for the first time.*

All of these works - and many, many more - are offered by us as titles only, as the manuscripts are alas no more. What all these works have in common is their unavailability, and the reason for their unavailability. They share a common fate. What might otherwise have been handed down to us as some of the greatest masterworks of European culture may now only be savoured, relished, deified, as titles. Each of these works was banned, burned or prescribed by the particular authorities of their day, because they were perceived as challenging those authorities, or the status quo, or as being inflammatory and therefore dangerous to the common reader. What remains is an index, utterly mouth-watering, though alas not mouth-watering enough to quench the fires in which they burned. 

(published in "Welcome To My World"; to purchase your copy, click here)

Oh, and I should also note, fifteen years after publishing that story in that book: at least a half of them are fictions, but fictions by me, not by them. I leave you to work out which for yourself.






The illustration immediately above is from an exhibition that I was fortunate enough to see in Toronto, and even bought the catalogue, which I still have. You would be amazed at how much of what are regarded as the world's greatest works of literature have, at some time, including right now, been banned, in one country or another, and sometimes all of them. "Nihil obstat", or in full "nihil obstat quominus imprimatur", is the nearest the Pope will ever commit himself to approving a book for publication; "it contains nothing contrary to faith or morals" is not actually a green light, but it allows the process to move forward. Once it is approved by the full Synod, it is given the stamp "imprimatur" - "let it be printed". There is no equivalent for the refusal of a book; like the thousands that sit there unread because unsolicited in the dumping-rooms of commercial publishing houses, books that you don't want to publish can simply and safely be ignored.

Some of this blog-entry is taken from my collected poems "Welcome To My World", with the additional piece "The Index" from my minimalist-story collection "The Captive Bride", both published by The Argaman Press in 2013.

I apologise to all those many authors, poets, painters, scientists philosophers, journalists, and more, who I have not managed to include on this page, and dedicate this day to all of you. Damn the censors!

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July 12

1906


I have a highly personal vested interest in what happens after you hit the newspapers as a subject of scandal or controversy. As a general rule, the media gets much of the information wrong, rarely asks their "victim" to share their side of the story, doesn't care about fact-checking because the whole thing is forgotten (from the point of view of making copy and therefore sales, ratings and advertising revenue out of it) after a few days, and almost never ever comes back a week, a month, a year, a decade later, to apologise for the bits they got wrong (but which in the meanwhile damaged or even destroyed somebody's life), let alone to inform their audience of what has actually happened in the meanwhile (that man whose arrest for a horrible crime that he didn't actually commit was splashed across our front pages, ruining his career; well, he finally made it to court fifty days later, and was immediately released).

Few media controversies have ever occupied a nation to quite the scale of that surrounding Captain Alfred Dreyfus (he actually gets four other mentions in this blog, unavoidable on each occasion). The full details of the scandal can be read here, so I see little point my offering more than a resumé - if you already know the story, you don't need it; and if you don't already know it, then you need to click that "here" button and read the whole thing, because it's one of those seminal stories, like Rosa Parks and the Soweto schoolchildren's march, which changed the course of human behaviour, which is far more important surely than any impact they may have had on passing history. But it won't tell you what happened afterwards, which is actually far more important; and so you will need to read on here, because I shall, after a brief resumé of the incident, fill precisely that gap.

In brief then, the Jew Dreyfus was a French military attaché at the German Embassy in Paris, when, in 1894, he was framed as a spy and sent to Devil's Island as a traitor. In the meanwhile, the discovery of papers which proved that the real spy was one Major Esterhazy were suppressed; Colonel Picquart, who led the enquiry that found the evidence, was transferred to an out-of-the-way posting in north Africa; the writer Emile Zola was given a one year prison sentence (which he avoided by fleeing the country) for libellously daring to accuse the government in a front-page newspaper article of both anti-Semitism and a cover-up; and Marcel Proust retreated to a cork-lined room to write "A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu" in disgust at the racism of a society he had patronised for so long. 

 There were appeals at the Supreme Court, the interventions of Prime Ministers, anti-Semitic riots, the whole shabang, until eventually Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island, to face a second court-martial in Rennes in 1899... at which he was again found guilty, albeit with "life" reduced to a further ten years, due to "extenuating circumstances", whatever that might mean in such a case. Some months later, in September 1899, the President of the Republic issued a formal pardon, and Dreyfus was persuaded - probably because the alternative, a return to Devil's Island, was a worse option than suicide - to accept it; like "extenuating circumstances", the acceptance of a pardon first requires, even implicitly, even tacitly, an admission of guilt. 
Upon his release, Dreyfus spoke to the media. His statement included these words: "Liberty to me is nothing without honour. From this day forward I shall continue to seek amends for the shocking judicial wrong of which I am still the victim."

He got nowhere for many years, while those responsible continued their illustrious careers. Then, out of the blue, on April 7th 1903, the newly elected Prime Minister Jean Jaurès announced a new enquiry, headed by General André, the Minister of War, though most of the real work was done by his aide, one Captain Targe. So many were the fabricated documents that Targe uncovered, most of them archived in the Ministry's own files, he was able to present a full report to the Minister of Justice by November of that same year. This led to a second formal enquiry, which was placed in the hands of one Ludovic Trarieux, later the founder of the League of Human Rights. It took two more years, but in April 1905 an eight hundred page report was presented, which demanded not just the quashing of Dreyfus' conviction, but also the dismantling of the entire system of military justice - something that would take another seventy-seven years to complete.

On July 12th 1906, the French Supreme Court brought the matter to an end at last, by annulling the judgement in Dreyfus' first trial, and ignoring completely the 1899 retrial because it had no status or validity in the light of that annulment. 

 There was also a declaration, in what might be considered slightly ambivalent language, of "the end of the rehabilitation of Captain Dreyfus". Anti-Dreyfusards, of whom there were still about half the nation, momentarily mis-read that as a sign that he was not to be rehabilitated any further, but the point was that he no longer needed to be rehabilitated at all, because he had never done anything wrong in the first place which required rehabilitation. He was reinstated in the army the following morning, with the rank of Artillery Major, which of course was a promotion, though he would have reached it by normal means had he not spent the intervening years in the gutter. He was also appointed as a Chevalier du Légion d'Honneur. He spent the next year as the Commander of the artillery base at Vincennes (the newly appointed Minister of War under whom he ultimately served was the "rehabilitated" Polonel Picquart! another nice little touch by the hand of chance and haphazard), before retiring in June 1907, still suffering from the various tropical and other afflictions residual to five years on Devil's Island.

When the First World War broke out, Dreyfus was called up as a reservist, serving as the head of an artillery depot in Paris before being sent first to Chemin des Dames, and later to Verdun. By yet one more wonderful irony, the artillery that had been developed in the meanwhile, and which was so crucial to the German retreat from Normandy in which Dreyfus participated, was precisely the artillery that he was supposed to have sold to the Germans in the first place. That war service was rewarded by his appointment as an officer of the Légion d'Honneur in 1919, and his promotion to the rank of Colonel, while his son Pierre received the Croix de Guerre for his endeavours. He died on July 12th 1935.

 One other side-note, when Dreyfus' great defender Emile Zola died in September 1902, the poet Anatole France demanded that Dreyfus be present at the funeral, but the Chief of Police refused, on the grounds that he wanted "to avoid problems", a rather prescient decision in fact - six years later, when Zola's ashes were being transferred to the Panthéon, and Dreyfus was present, a right-wing journalist named Louis Grégori attempted to assassinate Dreyfus, leaving him with a bullet wound in one arm. Anatole France compromised by writing a poem for the funeral, which honoured both Zola and Dreyfus:
   "Before recalling the struggle undertaken by Zola for justice and truth is it possible for me to keep silent about those men bent on the destruction of an innocent man, one who, after feeling lost, was saved even while he was being overwhelmed by the desperate audacity of fear?
   I cannot depart from your sight then, until I have fulfilled my duty to show who you truly were.
   Zola rose up weak and disarmed against them.
   Can I hide their lies?
   It would silence his heroic righteousness.
   Can I hide their crimes?
   That would conceal his virtue.
   Can I silence the insults and calumnies which they have pursued?
   It would silence his reward and honours.
   Can I hide their shame?
   It would silence his glory.
   No, I will speak.
   Envy him: he honoured his country and the world through a vast and noble act.
   Envy him, his destiny and his heart gave out the greatest.
   It was a moment of human conscience."

                                                                                                                (my translation) 





Amber pages


Henry David Thoreau, US writer, born today in 1817, in what really ought to be renamed Discord Massachusetts, given the scale of his rebelliousness and his absolute conviction that there is no government like no government - a man after my own mind, if not entirely after my own heart.


George Eastman, photography pioneer, born today in 1854 - why do we always remember his partner Kodak, but never Eastman himself; and why do we never remember whatever was Kodak's first name?

I do actually know the answer to both of those questions, and am being entirely disingenuous in asking them; but it makes for one of those interesting questions that history poses. Eastman was adamant that calling his camera, or his company, by his own name, would be disadvantageous, and that he needed what today would be called "branding", a recognisable trademark, or it would never be successful. Go tell that to Amelia Bloomer (May 26), or Erno Rubik (July 13), or Joseph Hansom (October 26), to name but three disproofs.


Amedeo Modigliani, Italian painter and sculptor, born today in 1884, and by a strange route of artistic and literary genealogy, see my piece on Osip Mandelstam in Private Collection.


Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet and diplomat, born today in 1904 - see February 8


Desiderius Erasmus, Dutch author and scholar, died today in 1536
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January 5

1463, 1856, 1922, 1979



A rather Rabelaisian figure, the one authentic portrait of François Villon that I have been able to find; the other, in the 1489 collection of his work, is most likely a piece of mediaeval clip-art, a template figure, and not him at all: cherub-cheeked, weak-lipped, with eyes that are both wry and awry: that fake-innocent look that high school students assume when sent to the Principal after being caught in flagrante with a reefer. 

I think it's the hat that makes me see Rabelais; a larger-than-usual Basque beret which, upon reflection, is also worn by Rembrandt in one of his self-portraits (actually in several, but they get worn flatter as he gets older; the one I was thinking of is called "Self Portrait With Shaded Eyes" - there, on the right, just below.

There are several versions of the Villon – sketch? painting? lithograph? woodcut? The one (above) which looks the most genuine has aged him, and fattened him, considerably, so that he looks less like a naughty poet or a penniless scholar than a complacent bourgeois (portraits of Gulielmus Shakspere do the same, middle-classing him as much as they think they can get away with, and renaming him, and respelling him, William Shakespeare; and when they can't, they give up altogether and simply attribute his works to genuine aristocrats like the Earl of Oxford and Sir Francis Bacon, neither of whom had the talent to write their own shopping lists, let alone those plays and poems; but this is England; we can't have our greatest creative genius be working class. God forbid! Why, in High Church Anglicanism, everyone knows that Jesus wasn't a carpenter like his dad, but studying to be a lawyer, even at the age of twelve. Phew. What a relief! Hope he passed those Jewish Bar exams)...

Precisely the kind of digression on which Villon was known to embark, though he tended to make his through half-open windows and poorly-locked back doors, rather than straight through the front door of the establishment as I have just done (and as Burglar Bill always did: "that's a nice commedia dell'arte play, I'll have that"). Villon detested the Establishment... but to return to the painting, which makes him look like someone who has gone to seed through serial venality. It is hard to imagine either the professional criminal or the amateur poet from this portrait; he seems too sallow, too plump, too softly fleshy, to have left a knife in a man's guts, let alone follow up with a stone; too portly to climb in and out that burglar's window; too bland to have written "The Testament", a work I can envisage from the pen of Lautréamont or Baudelaire, but not this man – though maybe this is also because the translations, which are all I have, are so unmonstrously bad (if they were monstrously bad, that would at least have the virtue of being apposite; but then maybe having any sort of virtue would itself be the opposite of apposite…)

A page from "The Testament"
in Villon's own hand
For some reason I have it in my head that he spelled his name Françoys, with a why, and that Villon was an adopted, or perhaps a stolen name (François de Montcorbier and François des Loges have both been suggested by historians as his birth-name); or was it he who was adopted? In English it would have to be Frankie Villain, though there is nothing of the poetry in that. He was banished from Paris, for the crime of murder, and later pardoned, because his victim allegedly forgave him (it is unclear from the histories whether he managed this before dying, and before witnesses, or in some ghostly manner through a medium after dying), before dying himself in a rather Marlovian brawl, aged only thirty-two, today in 1463.


Below is Richard Wilbur's translation of Villon's Epitaph, "The Ballade Of The Hanged Men":




                      O brother men who after us remain,
                       Do not look coldly on the scene you view,
                       For if you pity wretchedness and pain,
                       God will the more incline to pity you.
                       You see us hang here, half a dozen who
                       Indulged the flesh in every liberty
                       Till it was pecked and rotted, as you see,
                       And these our bones to dust and ashes fall.
                       Let no one mock our sorry company,
                       But pray to God that He forgive us all.

                       If we have called you brothers, don’t disdain
                       The appellation, though alas it’s true
                       That not all men are equal as to brain,
                       And that our crimes and blunders were not few.
                       Commend us, now that we are dead, unto
                       The Virgin Mary’s son, in hopes that He
                       Will not be sparing of His clemency,
                       But save our souls, which Satan would enthrall.
                       We’re dead now, brothers; show your charity
                       And pray to God that He forgive us all.

                       We have been rinsed and laundered by the rain,
                       And by the sunlight dried and blackened too.
                       Magpie and crow have plucked our eyeballs twain
                       And cropped our eyebrows and the beards we grew.
                       Nor have we any rest at all, for to
                       And fro we sway at the wind’s fantasy,
                       Which has no object, yet would have us be
                       (Pitted like thimbles) at its beck and call.
                       Do not aspire to our fraternity,
                       But pray to God that He forgive us all.
                       Prince Jesus, we implore Your Majesty
                       To spare us Hell’s distress and obloquy;
                       We want no part of what may there befall.
                       And, mortal men, let’s have no mockery,
                       But pray to God that He forgive us all.
1856


Pierre Jean David, Pierre Jean David (David d'Angers as they called him, intimate of Canova, warrior in the ranks of the people in the July revolution, sculptor magnificent, and finally a senator in the revolutionary Parliament of 1848. They exiled him, of course, the putschniks who couped the revolutionaries. They exiled him to Greece, which for a man like David, whose greatest works were the "Epaminondas" (illustration above right, from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris) and the pediment of the Pantheon, was a bit like exiling Dreyfus in Tel Aviv or Napoléon in St Petersburg. But at least they allowed him back to die, in Paris, today in 1856.




1922


Ernest Henry Shackleton (born 1874, died today in 1922) - his foundation's website here. 

I have vivid memories of watching a slow-moving but immensely powerful TV version of Shackleton’s failed expedition to Antarctica, Kenneth Branagh somehow inevitably in the lead role. It restored some faith in the power of the moving image to tell a good tale well, and to use its own language with relish. It also took me back to my childhood, to my prep school, where we had "Houses", and mine was named for one of Shackleton's late companions from his days with Captain Scott, the heroic suicide Captain Lawrence Oates (see March 17).

The entire Scott-Oates-Shackleton saga is one that somehow encapsulates the British ideal of heroism, or at least the Immaculate Failure in an exemple par excellence, Dunquerque on ice if I may call it that. Shackleton made four expeditions. The first was as a junior officer on the "Discovery", until Scott sent him back unfit. The second, in 1909, he led himself, reaching a point just ninety-seven miles from the South Pole, a southern record. He really enters the realm of the Titans through a later feat; in 1915, leading another expedition, his ship "Endeavour" was crushed between shifting icebergs. With sledges and makeshift boats, Shackleton got himself and his men to Elephant Island; then, leaving all but five behind, set out across eight hundred miles of the Antarctic to seek rescue on South Georgia, once again completing the expedition with not a single lost companion (Immaculate Failure is always failure, eventually -  upon their return home, all the men were conscripted to the trenches, and not a single one survived that expedition). The fourth expedition was his last; and his death, on the island of South Georgia, today, in 1922, by all accounts banal, like most of ours. But not his legacy there - South Georgia being now claimed for Britain, the next expedition to its shores took place on April 2nd 1982, a task force sent by Her Majesty Queen Margaret of Thatcher, to rescue it, with Las Malvinas, I mean the Falkland Islands, from those pirates the Argentines. 




1979


One last obituary on this date, Charles (Charlie) Mingus, not mentioned in any of the scholarly who’s whos, but the greatest jazz bass guitarist of them all, dead at only 56, in 1979. Joni Mitchell wrote an entire album in his honour (the picture's from her website), and Sue, his wife, let her intercut some tapes of him speaking in the gaps between the songs. He was into Vedanta, Hindu mysticism, so instead of a funeral in America, Sue took his cremated ashes out to India and released them at a point where the sources of the Ganges ran turquoise and flowed with golden carp. I like Joni’s verse on this: “Sue and the holy river will send you to the saints of jazz – to Duke and Bird and Fats, and any other saints you have.” She also tells how - mystical coincidence - the day after his death fifty-six sperm whales beached themselves on the Mexican coastline and had to be removed by fire. God must be a boogie man!
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