'England Made Me'

Graham Greene, as much as any twentieth-century British writer, is a window onto the foreign land of the past. He writes so well about the first part of the century that immersion in any of his books is like a spot of time-travel.

In ‘England Made Me’, pre-Second-World-War Europe is preserved in his special aspic. He does this as well as Orwell, but somehow without the punch. Even though there is a suspected murder in this book, it remains a gentle read.

The story focusses on the relationship between Anthony, a globe-trotting con-man, and his faithful sister Kate. Greene paints a vivid picture of 1930s Stockholm, home of Kate and where she is the mistress of a powerful industrialist and swindler. On several occasions Greene dares to explore the least comfortable aspects of the brother-sister relationship, and the incestuousness of the relationship can at times be troubling.

The most carefully constructed character is Minty, a tired old gossip journalist who sells stories of the rich to scrape a living. At the time of writing Greene was ten years into a long relationship with Catholicism, and some of his own experience is included. Minty is a troubled, pious, jealous, asexual creature.

In this novel Greene also picks through the sexual habits of the pre-War generation, and he is quite frank. It is quite surprising to read a 1970s attitude professed by some of the characters, because it is easy to assume that everyone before the Second World War was straight-laced and well behaved. The opposite was obviously true for some, and Greene takes pleasure in describing it.

It is a modern novel. Europe was being shrunk by the advent of easy air access, and the novelty must have appealed to the author. After so many centuries of struggling along the ground, the modern wealthy Europeans of 1935 thought nothing of taking to the skies to travel quickly from city to city. There has been no significant change in the way we travel in the intervening eighty years, so it is interesting to read about flight at the dawn of a great step forward.

What is absent from ‘England Made Me’ is any reference to the gathering storm. Hitler had been in power for three years but there is no comment about the political situation in Europe. It is interesting to reflect that like so many other people, Greene was either unaware of the dangers in 1935 or unwilling to address them. Indeed, the author delights in a modern Europe that appears untroubled by the flexing of Nazi muscles. His only comments about nationhood hark back to the First World War. I was left wondering how Europe might have developed without Hitler’s attempt to drag everyone back into the dark ages. Greene captures the spirit of co-operative internationalism really well. He is different to Orwell in this respect, who I am sure saw the dark clouds on the horizon before many of his contemporaries.

There is much to learn from re-reading Graham Greene. The main realisation for me is how different the world used to be, and how previous generations would regard us as aliens, even though we occupy the same turf as them. There is nothing more clear about how much the world has changed than the fact that Greene spent many pages of this book writing about cigarettes. Everyone smoked, all of the time. But nobody wasted days gazing a computer screen. How advanced we have become.

'Off to the Side', a memoir by Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison has already lived a full and interesting life, however you decide to measure it. An early interest in hitch-hiking to strange American cities and a desire to make a success of life in New York City in the 1950s meant that by the time he had left his teens he had already racked up enough anecdotes to keep most people happy. Now approaching eighty, he does not seem to have any intention of stopping.

This book is subtitled ‘a memoir’, which is short-hand for a non-chronological effort, unbound by the usual rules of autobiography. It is apparent from the beginning that an autobiography was possible, but the author’s mind pings off in so many directions that he could not marshal his thoughts into a logical order. It is as if he really couldn’t be bothered with the effort of ordering things properly, because there is still so much fun to be had somewhere else. The book is fragmentary and lacks any purpose as a result.

It is a shame because the material that he has to work with is rich. He has been a poet, university teacher, novelist, short story writer, screen writer and Hollywood darling. He has mixed in illustrious circles, and his natural modesty is such that he spends most of the book apologising for his success. The most annoying thing is that a pearl of great insight is always just around the corner. He lived through the sixties on campuses around the USA – but no great conclusion is apparent. He spent time with a range of great and good writers, including Auden and Ginsberg, but the reader is left equally in the dark as to what they were like and what he learned. He has compartmentalised his life to allow for long periods of time in wilderness, but no great satori emerges from all the brooding. I kept turning the pages in the hope that his reflections on his later life would coalesce to form some wisdom, but was disappointed to find that all he had to share was a series of anecdotes about the Hollywood glitterati of the 1970s.

Harrison is a man’s man. He hunts, he shoots, he fishes, and he enjoys French red wine. He suffers from gout because of his love of eating game. He enjoys watching strippers. He has travelled extensively, and is proud of the connections that he has made in Europe, which is uncommon for American writers of his generation. He is unapologetic when describing his loves, which many would call vices. But he does describe and explain, and is honest when he admits that he knows the foolishness of some of his favourite pastimes, and how much like an overgrown schoolboy he must have appeared on many occasions.

The main hole in this book is that he has been sustained through all his adventures by his wife, and she barely gets a mention. She comes across as a two dimensional figure, when in reality she must have had the patience of a saint to support him through all his wanderings. He was good friends with Jack Nicholson, if any proof was needed.

So Harrison paints his life with a broad brush – big wide strokes of colour, but not a lot of detail around the edges. The review quote on the front from the New York Times Book Review calls it ‘a sprawling, impressionistic memoir’. I think it was meant as a complement, but on reading it is a disappointment to discover that the description is entirely correct.

What's the point of Monday?

The Norman knights prepared their longswords and the English archers fletched their arrows on a Saturday morning, prior to the Battle of Hastings. It seems strange to think of a battle taking place on a particular day of the week, such was the weight of the occasion. On that particular Saturday – late in the afternoon, about the time when we now get the football scores – one English king was killed in battle and a foreign invader claimed the throne.

For how long have we measured time in days, weeks and months; and what was life like before? On which day of the week did the momentous events of our history take place, and on which day were the great and the good born?

Thenames for the days are a hot-potch, the majority of which come from the Romans. Sunday and Monday are the exception: in Northern European languages Sunday is the day of the sun, sune dai, whereas in the Latin countries it is the Lord’s Day, from dies Dominicus, dimanche. Monday is the day of the Moon, Luna, la lune, lundi.

The other days are named after gods: Tuesday (Tiw, the god of single combat and victory) is also Mars’ day (mardi in French). Wednesday belongs to Woden (the Norse god of all things) and Mercury (mercredi). Thursday is for Thor (Thunder god) and Jove or Jupiter (jeudi). Friday is for Frigg or Freja, the Roman equivalent being Venus (vendredi). Saturday is for Saturn. It is significant that the Southern European countries (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania) retained their Latin names, whereas in Northern Europe the names have been over-laid or replaced in part by Norse deities. Perhaps the Roman administrators found a name for each day useful so that taxes could be collected on particular dates, and the Vikings ran with the idea. Is it Tuesday? Let’s sack another monastery, or invade Ireland.

Common to all European cultures is the special significance of Sunday. Even the simplest agrarian economies downed tools once each week and rested, and gave the day to prayer. We have a strange mix of Saturday and Sunday in this, as the Jewish Shabbat has been mis-appropriated to mean Sunday’s Sabbath whereas in fact the Jewish holy day is Saturday. The confusion arises from the Council ofLaodicea (AD 336), which changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Constantine is to blame.

The idea of Saturday as a day of leisure is a modern invention: at the end of the Victorian Era in the UK, labour laws were changed and the 1847 and 1850 Factory Acts first gave people Saturday afternoon off. It is no surprise that the growth of sporting activity in the working class began to grow at this time. The English FA Cup, the oldest football competition in the world, began in 1872.

Sporting convention means that most great matches and competitions have happened on a Saturday (the FA Cup Final, most major Rugby internationals until the Twenty-First Century), a Wednesday (the European Cup Final and Champions’ League, until recently), and Sunday (The FIFA World Cup Final, the Wimbledon Men’s Final, The Superbowl, and so on).

There seems to be no particularly expedient day of the week to go to war, in case you are planning a land war in Asia. D-Day was a Tuesday. Rorke’s Drift was a Wednesday, and Waterloo was a Sunday. What is obvious is that most of the dates that are certain in Western History are those of battles, the start of wars, massacres or disasters. It is pretty certain that Hastings took place on 14^th October, which is unusually precise considering how long ago it was. Harold Godwineson (he of arrow fame) was born about 1020-22, and William the Conqueror about 1027/28. Nobody bothered to note down the exact day. The English Kings from 1066 onwards are well documented, especially if they were part of an established dynasty. There is uncertainty for those born who had no idea of their future greatness. For example, William the Conqueror’s children are well recorded, but the usurper Stephen of Blois was born ‘about 1092 or 96’.

Do you know on which day you were born? By far the loveliest tool online for all calendars and all things related to time is timeanddate.com

It can provide a calendar for any year, has details about time zones, and a very useful tool that tells the elapsed time between any two dates. You can even calculate the date in five hundred days, or a thousand days (useful for long-term diet targets) and when your life will be ten thousand days old. I have already wasted many of my allotted days on such things. For example, I will reach my twenty thousandth day in the summer of 2028.

A quick search for the calendar of your year of birth will tell you on which day you were born. With whom do you share your day?

Monday'schild is fair of face:

Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria, Walt Whitman, Cary Grant, Mark Twain, John McEnroe, Mikhail Gorbachev

Tuesday's child is full of grace:

Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Henry VIII, Neil Armstrong, Margaret Thatcher, Marilyn Monroe, Pablo Picasso, Napoleon, Justin Bieber, Dave Grohl, Elvis Presley

Wednesday's child is full of woe:

Stalin, Babe Ruth, Pele, John Lennon, Queen Elizabeth II, Vincent Van Gogh, Desmond Tutu

Thursday's child has far to go:

Paul McCartney, Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Edison

Friday's child is loving and giving:

Charles Dickens, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Marlene Dietrich, Barack Obama, Beyoncé Knowles, Bill Gates, Albert Einstein

Saturday's child works hard for a living:

Adolf Hitler, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Austen, Madonna, George Clooney, Claude Monet, Dalai Lama, Muhammad Ali

But the child who is born on the Sabbath day

Is fair and wise and good in every way:

Henry Kissinger, David Cameron, Abraham Lincoln

The seven day week is a strange construction, but one that is dear to us. The last people to try to change it were the French Republicans. Their revolution of thecalendar lasted a mere twelve years, because nobody else wanted to join in. I think part of the distaste might have been the fact that a ten day week meant a long, long wait for the weekend…

Naming the royal princess

The safe arrival of Charlotte, the royal princess, has provided miles of column inches for the media. Chief among the points of interest was the name that the new great-granddaughter of the Queen. It is a rich source of income for the bookmakers, a source of delight for royal watchers, and of significant interest for genealogists.

As with most royal activity, the long shadow of Victoria falls over the royal princess and many of the traditions were established by her. She was the mother of nine, all of whom lived to adulthood – itself a remarkable fact in a time of high infant mortality – and had specific ideas about how they were to be named. She chose names that honoured her predecessors, and also secured her place in history as the founder of a dynasty.

The Hanoverian influence was strong, and as result the names of all the royal family of the Twentieth Century have had a significant Germanic flavour. Victoria (with questionable input from her consort Albert) named her children Victoria, Edward, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice. At first glance it might appear that Albert lost out a little by having none of his children named after him. However, they all had several names and the couple decided from the outset that every child would carry either the name Albert, or Victoria, or the variation according to gender. Only Alice (Maud Mary) escaped without this nineteenth-century hash-tagging. Victoria’s influence extended to her grandchildren as well, as she commanded that all of them either had Victoria or Albert as one of their names. Whilst some children rebelled, the practice stuck and the name Albert persists to the present as The Duke of York is named Andrew Albert Christian Edward.

In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, deference played a large part in the naming of royal children, and few escaped without carrying the names of their grandparents. Whilst this was less ridiculous than the Georgian royal children (six Christian names were the norm, and the more the merrier*), children were still named by formula, especially if they were in the direct line of succession. This naming formula reached its zenith with King Edward VIII, who was doubly unlucky to be born as the direct heir to Victoria whilst she was still alive to bully his parents and carry Albert’s name, and to receive the names of all the patron saints of the British Isles for good measure. As a result he was christened Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David. He received Edward from his grandfather Edward VII, Albert from his great-grandfather the late Prince Consort, and Christian from his other great-grandfather, the King of Denmark. His family called him David. The Queen Was Not Amused.

The younger royal family are less burdened by such considerations. As dynastic marriage has become less of a pre-requisite for survival, the children and grandchildren of the Queen have married commoners. We are closer to Queen Savannah than you might think – the great-granddaughter of the Queen is fourteenth in line to the throne.

There has been a significant slimming down of names for the heir. Charles is named Charles Philip (his father) Arthur George (his grandfather). William is William Arthur Philip Louis (Louis after Mountbatten), and George is George Alexander Louis. The girls have got away with significantly less, with our present queen herself only bearing three names. She was christened Elizabeth Alexandra Mary. Had she been regarded as a stronger contender for the throne on her birth (when it still seemed likely that her uncle would produce an heir) she might have been more elaborately named. Certainly Victoria would have been on the cards.

So what of the new princess, who is fourth in line to the throne? The the history of her father’s family is well represented, as she is named Elizabeth after the present queen and the Queen Mother. The choice of Diana has been a popular one, especially in the United States where the love for Charlotte’s late grandmother runs deep. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have displayed their unity by choosing Charlotte as her first name. The most recent family member to bear the name is her aunt Pippa. However, names are interpreted according to our own perceptions because the princess may also claim connection with her seven times great-grandmother, Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, or her grandfather Charles. Names are just another way for us all to feel good about our past.

*King George III had a great-grandson named George William Christian Albert Edward Alexander Frederick Waldemar Ernest Adolphus…