Wrestliana Page 13
Increasingly, over the years to come, the two ways of being a man that John Wilson hoped to unite moved further and further apart. Being a true all-rounder became almost impossible.‡‡‡‡
There are rare exceptions – Roger Robson, reading Ulysses and winning at Grasmere, is one. As I kept on researching William’s life, Roger’s dig at me for being clivver hurt more and more. And I couldn’t forget William’s satire of cits. I knew, if I were to stand any chance of gaining Roger’s respect, and understanding William properly, I’d have to step into the wrestling ring.
That was probably a good thing, wasn’t it?
Any man, as William would have said, needs a variety of occupations.
* Cumberland Pacquet, 12 January 1824.
† ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., p. xi.
‡ Being good at the waltz in Strictly Come Dancing is just about allowed, if you are shown wincing, falling on your arse and complaining to your dance partner that the training is really hard.
§ My Facebook friends, who helped with many of my askings, also suggested John Irving (novelist and wrestler), Arthur Cravan (poet and boxer), Morley Callaghan (poet and pugilist – k.o.’ed Hemingway), Ernest Hemingway (novelist and wannabe boxer and all-round nob), William Hope Hodgson (novelist and athlete), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (writer and goalie), Owen Lowery (Judo champ and poet), Andre Gide (literateur and golfer), Howard Jacobson (novelist and table tennis player).
¶ Cumberland Pacquet, 18 November 1812.
|| One of my father’s favourite words, usually coming in the form of ‘You great lunk!’ Quite often applied to men playing sport who have just done something immensely clumsy. A lunk stares at his palms, where the ball is no longer. The female equivalent is ‘lummox’.
** The lines, from Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6, lines 133–136 [137–139], one of the best bits, describing Aeneas’s round-trip to Hades, read in full:
‘Quod si tantus amor menti, si tanta cupido est,
bis Stygios innare lacus, bis nigra videre
Tartara, et insano iuvat indulgere labori, …’
†† Ibid., pp. 170–171.
‡‡ The full title is ‘NEW MORALITY; Or The promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the THEOPHILANTHROPES, with the Homage of Leviathan and his Suite’. In a typically crowded scene, against a background of classical pillars, Gillray shows – on the right – a leader of the French Revolution, preaching the Religion of Nature before an altar upon which stand female personifications of vengeful Justice, avaricious Philanthropy and washed-out Sensibility. Before him kneels a pack of propaganda-creating Jacobin sympathizers, the ‘Five-Wandering Bards’, who pour nonsense forth from a cornucopia of Ignorance. Behind them comes a chunky Leviathan with the face of the Duke of Bedford, ridden by politicians. In its wake, more fish-tailed sycophants surf along. A clear reproduction is here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/a/a7/GillrayNewMorality.jpg.
§§ That is ‘Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb’.
¶¶ Saeko Yoshikawa, author of William Wordsworth and the Invention of Tourism, 1820–1900, Ashgate, 2014, confirmed in an email that this poem ‘is one of the earliest references to the Lake Poets in the context of Lake District tourism’.
|||| I don’t really mean great great. William is not a great but forgotten poet, I am not going to claim that for him. It’s as a prose writer, of early sports non-fiction, that his name will continue to be remembered, and his muscular sentences read. His lyric verses are, at worst, competent and conventional. At best, as in ‘The Lakes’, they are pungent, lively and heartfelt – but in a style that, by 1812, was very old-fashioned. William’s influences were those of a couple of generations back. They are now considered in-betweeners, pre-Romantics, not major writers. His canon includes the poems he studied, and probably learned by heart, at St Bees: James Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ (1730); William Collins’ ‘Persian Ecologues’ (1742); The Works of Ossian (1765); Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770). And ‘The Lakes’ is influenced by an even earlier crowd. Heroic couplets, as a satiric tool, were perfected by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), although William’s have a roughness and almost manic energy that puts them closer to Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).
*** I was able to buy a brand new copy from a print-on-demand service in India.
††† Lancaster Gazette, Saturday, 7 August 1824, reprinted from Kendal Chronicle; also reported in Calignani’s Messenger, Paris, Saturday, 14 August 1824.
‡‡‡ It is also possible that Wordsworth remembered ‘The Lakes’ from its appearance in Cumberland Pacquet twelve years earlier. Anything short of adoration didn’t do for Wordsworth; attacks like that were never forgotten.
§§§ Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, Penguin, 1980, p. 376.
¶¶¶ John Wilson wrote as Christopher North, and Christopher North was not merely a pseudonym – there was a division of personalities, too. The division, as by now you’ll expect, was about physical prowess. Christopher North was the superhero, John Wilson, the secret identity.
|||||| For a full unpicking, see ‘John Wilson and Sport,’ by John Strachan, pp. 215–225, in Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’, Robert Morrison and Daniel S. Roberts (eds), Palgrave, Macmillan, 2013.
**** There’s a whole huge argument here – because it’s always possible to go further back, and find antecedents. Someone looking for earlier examples of bodiless poets could mention Hamlet, wafting blackly and indecisively around Denmark. But it’s very clear from a close reading of the full play, and not the caricature image, that Hamlet is a renaissance man – and could both duel and wrestle to the highest standards.
†††† Ibid., pp. 135–136.
‡‡‡‡ It is very rare to find a man who can pass in changing room and bookshop. In the 1800s, William’s physical and mental prowess gave him remarkable social mobility. He was, it was said by the Memoirist, ‘Equally at home in the most polished and in the rudest society’. I imagine him exchanging knowledgeable wrestling talk with Lord Lonsdale and respectful banter with shepherds. By contrast, Graeme Le Saux is now remembered mainly for being ‘the footballer who read the Guardian’. In his memoir, Left Field: A Footballer Apart, he wrote, ‘Because I had different interests to the rest of my team-mates, because I didn’t feel comfortable in the pre-Loaded laddish drinking culture that was prevalent in English football in the late Eighties, it was generally assumed by my team-mates that there was something wrong with me. It followed that, naturally, I must be gay’. The fans in the terraces responded accordingly. Choruses of ‘Le Saux takes it up the arse’, to the tune of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’, boomed out from both home and away supporters whenever he played. To be an intellectual sportsman is, naturally, to take it up the arse. Imagine what they would have sung if Le Saux had been caught reading Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’.
11
SMUGGLER
Right from the start of my research, whenever I told people about William being a smuggler, they said something like ‘Wow’ or ‘Cool’. They never disapproved, as they would have done if I’d said he was a burglar or a mafioso.
They often wanted to know more. They asked how I could be certain he’d really done it, if it was something that happened so long ago, and was secret and illegal. I usually answered that William’s novel, Henry & Mary, was all about smuggling, and that William never wrote about anything he hadn’t done himself.
If they were really interested, I’d tell them about a novel called John Peel, published in 1932 by a Cumbrian writer called J.M. Denwood. As part of the plot, the huntsman John Peel (made famous by the song ‘D’ye ken John Peel’) goes to William Litt for help. In case the reader was tempted to disapprove of what they were about to do, J.M. Denwood inserted this aside:
At the time when Peel arrived at the man’s estate, smuggling was rife along the Solway coast, and he and many of his friends, i
ncluding William Litt, thought nothing of engaging in the traffic. It was extremely profitable, and a man lost no prestige by indulging in it. His self respect and dignity depended on his conduct towards his fellow-men, and not on his keeping of a law which, in the opinion of most of them, should never have been passed.
Our attitude today is still indulgent. I think there’s something in the word smuggler that makes them seem like cosy criminals, and that’s the ug-sound – as in ‘snug as a bug in a rug’, as in other comforting domestic objects, jugs, mugs, plugs.
Also, the English think well of anything associated with the sea. Even pirates are, paradoxically, domesticated by the fact they operate on the watery part of the planet.
It takes a modifier to give the word back some power of terror: heroin smugglers, people smugglers. How horrifying. This fear immediately flips back to cosiness, though, if we hear whisky smugglers.
The historians I read, whilst I was trying to discover what William was up to, disagree about social attitudes toward smugglers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Were they seen as Robin Hoods, or just as hoods? Some thought the common folk loved them for getting one over on the tax-grabbing government. Others, that they were brutal ruffians who terrified the local population into silence and compliance.
Although the public don’t exactly see them as criminals, not on a level with smugglers, antique dealers still have the image of being a little bit dodgy. In lots of countries around Europe, old furniture is just that. When grandparents die, their houses are cleared, the contents sold, and the grandchildren get what cash they can in order to buy brand new chairs and tables to go in their new apartments. In Great Britain, we are much more likely to think something old is valuable, and that if a professional dealer is offering you £5, he’s probably ripping you off – because your tin snuffbox is actually worth £500, or your dauby painting of a depressed cow would fetch half a million at auction.
Now that he has retired from the trade, my father is quite happy to join the many viewers watching TV shows like Bargain Hunt and Flog It!. He prefers the more upmarket version of this, The Antiques Roadshow.
Roadshow used to be family viewing in 99 Dunstable Street – with my Dad saying he’d known this or that expert when they were working as a porter at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. But the bow-tied charmers giving valuations on country house lawns are essentially trustworthy. The common view of dealers is a lot closer to the roguish wheeler-dealer that was Lovejoy, played with sexy charm by Ian McShane.
My father’s business was legit. He never sold reproduction furniture as original. Most of David Litt Antiques’ profits came from one of two things – buying furniture up North and selling it to London dealers, or buying furniture that the public wouldn’t want, because it was in a bit of a state, and having it restored by cabinetmakers before selling it on, to the public.
Restoration might involve stripping paint off a dresser, sanding it down, and polishing it up to a lovely mahogany shine.
But what use to anyone is a set of six dining chairs where one has only three and a half legs?
If my father’s cabinetmakers turned something you couldn’t actually sit on without falling over into something useful and beautiful – and he didn’t point out that this particular leg was not quite as old as the others…
Was that dodgy?
Pieces of furniture were brought back to life; because customers were allowed to believe they dated entirely from 1815, that they were ‘lovely, original’. The job of my father’s cabinetmakers was to make their work invisible, so that even another dealer wouldn’t know exactly what restoration had been done.
A set of eleven dining chairs is worth no more than a set of ten. But a set of twelve are worth quite a bit more. One way of solving this problem is to take the whole set apart, and to distribute one new joint there, one new leg there. That’s an old antique dealer’s trick – and who is harmed?
No one could point to any particular chair and say, ‘That one’s fake.’ Instead, a number of them have had some undetectable restoration work – and when the customer sells them on, they can go in the catalogue as ‘original condition’.
In a sense, I suppose, my father was involved in a kind of smuggling – smuggling new bits of wood in amongst old bits.
My own associations with the idea of smuggling are all positive. One of my favourite books when I was about fourteen was called Atlantic City Proof.* American prohibition was the background, and the plot consisted almost entirely of the coast guard almost apprehending the heroic smuggler one night, and the heroic smuggler outrunning them the following night with a bigger, faster boat. I loved the escalation; I’d never tasted rum. I must have read Atlantic City Proof about two or three times, and at that age I hardly ever got to the end of novels.
Back when I was thinking I might write William’s life as a novel, the smuggling scenes were the ones I was really looking forward to. I knew my father wanted to read them. These would be the action sequences, just as they are in Henry & Mary. But if I’d been fictionalizing, I’d have been free to put William in peril he most probably avoided.
I was writing the chapters of William’s life in chronological order. Earlier on, when there were fewer records, I’d found this a struggle. But after watching William write ‘The Lakes’, I felt I’d had some kind of breakthrough. I was a lot closer to him. I could feel what it was like to be in the room with him. The writing he’d left behind seemed designed to help me. The smuggling part of his life was the one for which he’d left the largest amount of material, but all of it oblique.
In Henry & Mary, as you’ll remember, the whole plot depends on Henry falling in love with Mary, the niece of a notorious smuggler, and falling in with his dodgy family, the Fosters.
In 1815, at a birthday dinner held in Lord Lonsdale’s honour (I was soon going to be visiting quite a few of those), William met the very young and presumably very attractive Elizabeth Mossop, better known as Betty.†
Sixteen-year-old Betty was a barmaid, and the Mossop family were notorious smugglers.‡
Not long afterwards, William married Betty.
If Henry & Mary is disguised autobiography, as I’m convinced it is, then William didn’t take much persuading to join the family business.
In the novel, Henry meets and falls in love with and wants to marry Mary, but is worried his small fortune isn’t enough to support them. One day, Mary’s brother Walter – already a smuggler and the son of a smuggler – slyly tells Henry:
In the course of a few nights a certain vessel will be off this coast on her annual visit to this channel. Her owner sells for ready money only; but for ready money he will sell so low, that, if fortune be favourable, it is easy to double your cash after every expense is paid. Our gang at this time is bold, trusty, and numerous, while the [customs] officers and their fellows are comparatively few and timid; and therefore the risk and difficulty is a mere bugbear.§
Although he knows it is the wrong thing to do, Henry decides to invest in Walter’s plan, and assist in carrying it out – with fatal consequences…
William was never caught smuggling. He was never shot and wounded by a customs man. Instead, he ended up making a mysteriously large sum of money – around £3,000 (money that certainly didn’t come from farming or wrestling) – and then losing it by trying to start a legitimate brewing business.
But that is for later.
This is how I picture his first night.
The moon is muffled by clouds; no tinkle of silver scatters across the waves hitting the beach. Out upon the black sands, the men speak in whispers as they listen for the dip and creak of oars in rowlocks. These are stout men, in all senses of the word – hefty, undaunted. William Litt is among them. Why? Because it’s useful to have some real muscle along? Because he’d heard all his life about the trade, and was curious to witness it himself? Because a friend asked, and he had nothing better to do that night? Because he needs the money to get married? Whatever the reas
on, he is among smugglers, doing what they direct him to do. He is young. This is his first step away from the path of rectitude.
Off shore, a lugger has dropped anchor. She has just come in from the Isle of Man, a West-East downwind run of thirty miles.
If you were to design a bay for smuggling, you could not do better than Fleswick Bay. On a map of the coast, it looks as if a giant spade has made a deep nick into the green whaleback of the land. It’s to be found, or not found, one mile north of St Bees School, one mile south of Whitehaven. Well out of sight of town but close enough for quick access.
Those of her crew that row the first load towards the beach are armed with weapons that will in later years come to seem comic – cutlasses and blunderbusses. We’ve seen too many plastic cutlasses at children’s pirate-themed parties to take them seriously. The very word ‘blunderbuss’ seems to suggest an affable uncle of a weapon, who’d pat you on the back with a sweaty palm. But a good shot from one of those beauties could take your arm off at the shoulder.
A few words of identification are exchanged, over the last few feet of water. Recent nights have been successful, but caution is profitable. The rowboat grinds into the sand, and the unloading begins. This is why William is here. He has invested his own money in this venture. He wants to ensure it is returned.
There are glugging wooden casks, of course – massy hogsheads, barrels requiring two lifters, hefty kilderkins, firkins you could cradle and pocketable pins. Making these is skilled work: a cooper, like Bill Hartley’s great-grandfather will one day be, is seven years an apprentice. But if the joints are loose, the drink soon becomes brackish.