posted on 19 Dec 2019

Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales From A Year In Literature by John Sutherland & Stephen Fender

What do the following have in common: the official start of US involvement in Vietnam; the start of the Icelandic cod-war; the end of Ian Smith’s government in the Rhodesia; Ivana Trump’s divorce form the man who is now President of the USA; the birthday of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?  Answer: they share a common date in December. It’s a date that has added significance for me because that just happens to be my birthday too.

All this just goes to illustrate how some of us just love to assemble these sort of calendar coincidences and squirrel them away, pulling them out periodically to impress (bore) other people. But compared to John Sutherland and Stephen Fender who compiled this particular tome, I’m a rank amateur.

What we have here is an entry for every day of the calendar year on which the authors have ferreted out a literary event or fact or publication event that happened on that day. But, to give the whole thing body, they also spell out the cultural significance of these events too. So each day gets a page or two for itself and you end up with a pretty substantial gazetteer.

Inevitably I suppose, the entries have their highs and lows but I think it’s fair to say that the number of bum notes is pretty small given how much territory they have to cover. It’s also true that some of the entries stretch the rules a touch. A good example of that is that previously mentioned date in December, for which Sutherland and Fender identify something they headline as “Damon Runyon tells it as it is as he takes off for the poker game in the sky”. So, I thought, I share a birthday with the anniversary of Damon Runyon’s death but actually that turns out to not actually be the case:

“On ... December 1946, to the family’s distress…Runyan’s comrade in the newspaper world, Walter Winchell could not resist the scoop of releasing – the day after Runyan’s death – his final wishes as to the disposition of his body.”

So not the day Runyon died at all, just the day a squabble over his burial took place. Something a bit less interesting and significant I would suggest.

The title of the book is also just about as brassy a bit of marketing you’re likely to see. I would imagine that the publishers suggested to the authors that ‘A Book of Literary Anecdotes’ wouldn’t really cut it as a potential crowd-pleaser and so we end up with a title that allows the word ‘sex’ to be dominantly projected on the front cover but you’ll have pretty thin pickings if that’s what you’re looking for here. I can’t even give you an example that might begin to fulfil that promise.

But, when all is said and done, it’s a pleasant enough way to pass an afternoon or two – something that reviewer, Rick Gekoski writing in The Guardian was also keen to highlight and so I’ll leave the last word on this to him:

‘I've had tremendous fun reading them - arguing with some, substituting others, quoting them over lunch - and pleasure is at the heart of this project. It's irresistible, as compulsive as eating popcorn. Hawthorne and Melville meet for the first time, Petrarch catches first sight of Laura, Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky and Diaghilev and Proust dine together at the Majestic, Anthony Burgess (like Scott and Whitman before him) gives a glowing review to his own book, Defoe invents the novel, but doesn't know what to call it, Bertolt Brecht testifies before HUAC, Jeffrey Archer "goes down".’

 

Terry Potter

December 2019