The Pursuit of Laughter (61 page)

Cincinnati was a frontier town, divided from Kentucky, a slave-owning state, by the broad Ohio. Stowe heard many lurid tales from escaping slaves, who were free once they managed to get across the river. In 1850 a new law was enacted making it a crime to
harbour
a runaway slave, who must be handed back to the owner. This outraged not only the growing number of abolitionists, but all right-thinking people like Stowe. In furious protest she wrote
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, became a world celebrity and made a large fortune. The book was translated into every language, and if it has now dwindled from a long Victorian novel to a short book for children, nevertheless everyone knows the story of dear old Uncle Tom, angelic Eva and cruel McGree. She followed it up with
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, giving authentic accounts of slavery so that no one could say she had made it all up. Stowe had, in fact, never been to the Deep South when she wrote
Uncle Tom.

Stowe and her family went to Europe and she was lionized by prominent liberals like Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Carlisle. Back in America she built herself two houses and gave her girls silk dresses. She had to keep on writing—her family was big and
demanding
.

Harrowed by the Civil War, in which half a million died, Stowe was received at the White House by Abraham Lincoln, who called her the little woman who had made the great war. Undoubtedly her book affected people deeply, though perhaps according to
modern ideas she was not quite sound on class, gender, or even race.

Joan Hedrick has made the very most of Stowe and her entourage, their sufferings and their triumphs. If anyone wishes to know about them, this is the book to read.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
, Hedrick, J.
Evening Standard
(1994)

When Ibsen’s father lost all his money he sent Henrik away from home to work as a chemist’s assistant. Henrik earned a tiny wage and shared a bedroom. Only in the shop, between customers, was he alone for a few moments. Yet he studied, borrowing books.

He fathered an illegitimate son and had to pay maintenance to the mother from his minute salary. Ibsen knew real poverty, even hunger, and was threatened with prison if he fell behind with the payments. He dreaded the scandal. He took Latin lessons given in the shop at odd times. He, who so loved solitude, could never be alone except for long walks on Sundays.

His ambition was boundless; he knew he was a genius. His miserable, thwarted
adolescence
made him into a bitter, angry man.

The Latin lessons bore fruit: his first play,
Catiline
. Rejected by the Christiania theatre, it was published and admired, enabling him to escape from the pharmacy.

Ibsen was well-treated by his native Norway, he was the recipient for the rest of his life of a small income from the state. He had friends to back him up, young poets and
journalists
, and in his twenties was made director of the Bergen theatre, which sent him abroad to learn stagecraft in Copenhagen and Dresden.

For Ibsen this was a miniature Grand Tour. In Dresden’s picture gallery he became aware of European art: Italian, Spanish, French and German masterpieces opened his eyes to Europe’s culture. In Norway he had to pretend to a Norwegian nationalism he never felt. Despite early plays about Vikings, he knew he belonged to the world and to what he called the great Germanic tribe.

In 1858, at the age of 30, he married a perfect wife, Suzannah Thoresen, who had but one ambition, to see Ibsen’s genius recognised and rewarded. Ibsen went to Rome, where Suzannah and their son joined him, and where they lived for four years.

He wrote
Brand
and
Peer Gynt
in Rome, a paradise in those days, ruled by the pope, before it became the capital of united Italy. Robert Ferguson considers these Ibsen’s
greatest
plays… there were to be no more poetic dramas.

Ibsen’s breakthrough came when his plays were translated into German and acted to enthusiastic audiences. The Ibsens lived in Dresden and Munich for many years where he wrote dramas and tragedies which had enormous success in Germany and England. They have never dated; the themes were love, jealousy, hypocrisy, incest, corruption, murder and
suicide.

Ibsen furiously denied being a socialist, or a feminist. He was simply an artist,
reflecting
the world in a pessimistic way.

All the great actresses of the time wanted to play his heroines, Eleanora Duse, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Janet Achurch. Shaw said Duse ‘knew Nora [
A Doll’s House
] more
intimately
than Nora herself did.’

A solitary figure, fuelled by anger and mistrust, Ibsen sought honours and decorations. He loved to pin stars and ribbons and medals on the formal black coat he always wore. He liked kings and princes because they could bestow baubles, the outward and visible sign of success.

Apart from his wife and son he never saw members of his family, or even answered their letters, and he only went back to Norway at the end of his life, to be fêted as its greatest son. With his bushy whiskers, formal attire and regular walks each day, he became a tourist attraction. If a fan was bold enough to accost him a furious snub was the reward.

Like Hilda in
The Master Builder
, the younger generation came knocking at his door. He wrote love letters to several young women, who were flattered by the attentions of such a famous man. Suzannah loved Norway and stayed there while he flirted during
holidays
in Tyrol. His last mysterious play,
When We Dead Awaken
, was a tribute to her.

Hedda Gabler, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck, Ghosts
, enthral audiences as they did Shaw a century ago. This excellent biography perhaps fails to emphasise what wonderful ‘theatre’ they all are. Robert Ferguson, fluent in Norwegian, compares
Peer Gynt
with
Faust II
;
language
is the barrier to appreciating poetry.

Henrik Ibsen
, Ferguson, R.
Evening Standard
(1996)

Dr Wertham, an American psychiatrist who specialises in the treatment of children, became aware during the course of his work that horror comics have a bad influence on his patients’ minds and behaviour. In his efforts to get these comics suppressed he collided with an enormous vested interest.
Crime does not pay
, perhaps, but horror comics do. Sales are astronomical; the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers estimates them at 80 millions a month, and ‘… the names of the firms publishing crime comic books are almost as elusive as the titles. They change, and quite a number of concerns function under different names for different comic books’—a difficult adversary to pin down,
obviously
.

Dr Wertham gives endless examples of the torture, sex and brutality which fill the
comic
pages, and a number of disgusting pictures of people having their eyes gouged or their tongues cut out, being shot, bashed, hanged or bound, balloons coming out of their
mouths with ‘Lousy!!! Filthy!!! I’ll tear ya…’ all chosen from these so-called comic
magazines
. They certainly make his case for him. After reading his book I asked a boy who was formerly an avid comic reader what effect they had had on him, and he replied, ‘Well, I think they make you feel inclined to sock somebody’.

But Dr Wertham exaggerates; he cannot be taken seriously when he objects to Superman flying through the air, stopping aeroplanes, lifting houses, on the grounds that children will get a wrong idea of basic physical laws. Even Peter Pan could fly. And when Super Duck terrorises a family of rabbits and we are invited to be scandalised, the shade of Mr MacGregor rises before us.

It is not only children who read comics, as the figure of 80 millions a month shows, and as anyone who has ever seen an American soldier knows. But lately ‘The Pacific Fleet Command has banned the sale of most war comic books in ships’ stores on the grounds that they are too gory for the American sailor’. Military authorities consider that they go ‘beyond the line of decency’. So a beginning has been made; though, as Dr Wertham points out, it is odd to forbid soldiers and sailors what is permitted to children of six and seven.

Seduction of the Innocent,
Wertham, F. (1954)

When Harold Nicolson wrote his biography of George V he was disappointed by the King’s diary, concerned entirely with weather. Nicholas II, first cousin and double of George V, kept a diary hardly more interesting, at last available, one of the sources used in this rather tiresomely-written translation.

The well-known cast takes the stage once more: Nicky and Alix, the Grand Duchesses and Baby, Anya, ‘Our Friend’, all except Anya to meet violent death. The murderers were themselves murdered late on by Stalin; only Lenin died in his bed.

The tragedy that the heir, Alexei, was haemophiliac led to other tragedies. Rasputin became ‘Our Friend’, and powerful, because of some magic healing power for the
suffering
boy; he was indispensable to the Tsaritsa. Yet with his orgies and disgraceful behaviour he was loathed and his power resented; he was murdered by aristocrats in 1916.

The war gave a respite from politics for a while, uniting the country behind the Tsar. But with the defeat at Tannenberg and the millions of casualties discontent grew, and the demand for a Constitution and an end to autocracy was louder than ever.

When Alexei was well enough the Tsar took him to Headquarters, and the Tsaritsa showered letters of advice. Baby must not be allowed to throw bread rolls in the Mess, she wrote, and urged the Tsar to make himself feared by his critics, to show his iron fist and will of steel. Though unsuccessful, since it was not in his nature, she nevertheless made
everything harder for him with her unwise advice. He always gave in to commonsense too late, though ever since 1905 the country had seethed with discontent. Disregarding
compromise
, in 1917 he was forced to abdicate, and kept prisoner with his family, first at the palace, then Tobolsk, and finally Ekaterinburg in the Urals, ferociously red.

The Grand Duchesses remained at Tobolsk for a time, and their mother wrote they must be sure to bring the medicines with them. The ‘medicines,’ diamonds and other gems they sewed into their bodices. They still hoped for England, where their cousin reigned, or rescue. But no thousands of swords leapt from their scabbards. Nobody lifted a finger.

Civil war raged, and as the fight approached Ekaterinburg in July 1918 it was decided to kill the family without delay. Their circumstances were miserable, the house
overcrowded
, the windows painted over. At dead of night they were wakened and ordered downstairs. Baby, now nearly 14, had bruised himself and was too ill to walk. The Tsar
carried
him in his arms. Seven in the Royal Family, Dr Botkine and three other faithful
retainers
were herded into the cellar room, and shot by Bolsheviks with pistols and rifles. After ghastly minutes the Grand Duchesses died of bayonet wounds, the bullets repelled by the jewels concealed in their underclothes. The bleeding bodies were loaded into a lorry and driven to a partly flooded mine. The men had petrol and sulphuric acid, but to get rid of eleven bodies is difficult. The remains were thrown in the mine, and found by the white army, soon to be overcome by the reds. Only nine skeletons were found, mysteries remain. Radzinsky interviewed many old people, still half afraid to speak, and the story is told over and over again. Perhaps the strange thing is we already know it so well.