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William Sydney Porter, a.k.a. O. Henry, US short story writer, born today in 1862
David Herbert Lawrence, author ("Lady Chatterley's Lover"), born today in 1885 - I am simply quoting a hundred different sources; because, sadly, this is the only one most people have even heard of, let alone read... a 2nd rate novel, written three times and he still wasn't happy with it, famous because it is full of embarrassingly badly-written sex scenes which got the publishers, Penguin, charged with obscenity; and that trial, thirty-two years after the book had first been published, became the key incident, the moment when freedom of literary speech was finally enshrined by precedent in English law... but what about his great works, "Sons & Lovers" and the two Brangwen novels, and "The Man Who Died", and his poetry, and the travel-essays from his "savage pilgrimage", and ... but like his paintings, also banished as obscenities, this was the work that got all the publicity, because there is nothing people like more than thinking about sex in all its infinite variety in the privacy of their mind or their porn-watching, but o my gosh it's obscene if ever it gets out in public...
And no, I shan't write more on DHL here. You can find a piece on his poem "Snake", in Private Collection, by clicking here; and a lengthy study of DHL will be published in my collection "Homage To Thomas Bowdler", sometime soon. And in the meanwhile, see my comment about him on Nov 22.
Military coup in Chile, today in 1973. Or was that a CIA coup? The overthrow of Allende anyway (Salvador, not his cousin Isabelle), a democratically elected, civilian government, but America only seems to support such things when they happen at home, or in favoured areas of Europe; in Central and South America they have to be removed a.s.a.p. So Allende was murdered (or may have committed suicide before they had the chance to do that), and Pablo Neruda, his number two, forced into exile - see February 8 for a small mention of Neruda, my piece on Chile in The World Hourglass for a more detailed account of the coup, and one of Neruda's great political poems.
The death of Sir Peter Hall, today in 2017, the man without whom there simply wouldn't have been serious theatre in the UK through the second half of the 20th century. The key to the man? His comment after watching the première of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot: "At last theatre is no longer simile, but once again metaphor". Read him explaining it in full by clicking here.
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