Book One - Darling Fan and a Further Quintet of Essays
Chapter One – Luke the Drifter and the Secrets of Country
Luke the Drifter and the Birth of Country
It’s widely accepted that singer and songwriter Hank Williams is Country Music’s single most revered figure, and among the most influential popular musicians of the 20th Century.
And as such he incarnated many of the key elements of this most American of arts, having been born poor in the rural South of the United States, for notwithstanding its Canadian and Australian variants, Country is quintessentially the music of the working people of the American South.
These allegedly originally consisting of southern English emigrants from rural East Anglia, Kent and the West Country, who settled largely on the coastal regions, but had reached the Appalachian Mountains by the 18th Century. While Appalachia and the Piedmont were both significantly colonised by Northern English and Lowland Scottish peoples, as well as the Protestant Scots-Irish from Ireland’s Ulster province.
And the great majority of white Southerners continue to be of English and Scots-Irish origin, notwithstanding the sizable amounts of Southerners who don’t share these ancestries. Such as the French Americans of Louisiana for example; and the Irish Americans of South Georgia; as well as the German Americans of the Texas Hill Country and borderland areas of the upland South.
But Hank Williams was of English-American ancestry, like so many of those who bequeathed the South its distinctive culture, which includes its famous conservatism and patriotism, themselves the result of deep-rooted Christian foundations. And a culture of honour…born perhaps of the clannishness of herders from Western and Northern England, Lowland Scotland and Ireland’s Ulster province…and resultant fiery sense of protectiveness.
As well as the time-honoured mistrust existent between the rural poor and wealthy elite, such as those of the coastal areas, who were traditionally of English Episcopalian origin. While those of the hill country were mainly of mixed English and Scots-Irish ancestry.
And of course its music…and while it’s known as Country today, this has not always been the case.
For its roots lie in the Folk Music of emigrants from Britain and Ireland, as do the Square and Clog dancing that flourished alongside it; although while the fiddle came from the British Isles, the banjo was African-American in origin. While the Mountain Dulcimer was native to the Appalachians.
Known today as Old Time music, it was first commercially recorded in the early 1920s.
While among the earliest acts considered Country per se were Jimmie Rodgers from Mississippi; and the Carter Family from Virginia, whose music was marked by the Evangelical fervour that would go on to be one of the defining hallmarks of early Country.
And other early superstars included Uncle Dave Macon, son of a Confederate Captain, Country Gospel pioneer Roy Haxton Acuff, and harmonica master DeFord Bailey, self-styled purveyor of Black Hillbilly music. For at the time, Country was still described as such, with Acuff being known as the King of the Hillbillies (some time before he became the backwoods Sinatra).
All three were early performers at the Grand Ole Opry, a weekly stage event instituted in 1925 in Nashville, Tennessee, which has since become established as the spiritual capital of Country Music. But which was originally but a one-hour barn dance featured on local radio.
And if Acuff represented the family values that have always been part and parcel of Country, then Western Swing, a fusion of Country and Swing which took root in Texas and Oklahoma in the late 1920s, was infinitely less spiritual. Although by contemporary standards, it was the soul of romantic innocence.
And in time it mutated into Honky-Tonk, which was variously fuelled by Country fiddle and steel and electric guitars, as well as the Boogie Woogie piano style of artists such as Moon Mullican. While Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” is widely considered to have launched the genre in 1941, which at the hands of Floyd Tillman, produced songs of great beauty which inclined as much to Traditional Pop as Country.
While Mullican’s music was incredibly influential, providing much of the groundwork not just for Rockabilly, but Rock and Roll itself.
Although its dominance was seriously challenged by the birth of Bluegrass, which harked back to the classic Folk of yore, its founding father, Bill Monroe from the Bluegrass State itself. While other masterful acts within the tradition included the Stanley and Louvin Brothers.
If Honky-Tonk provided the essence of modern Country, then Bluegrass was the keeper of the classical tradition; and it could conceivably be said Hank Williams stood at the crossroads of both. That is, if his dual inclination to the spiritual fervour of Southern Gospel and the out and out hedonism of Honky-Tonk were anything to go by.
And perhaps it’s partly because he was such a divided spirit that he stands as Country’s single most revered figure, and not just in terms of his music - Country of course having served as one of the prime components of primordial Rock and Roll - but his wild and colourful lifestyle. For there are those who'd insist this was perfectly in keeping with the Rock and Roll ethos that came in the wake of his untimely death in 1953. Although such a theory is only partially true at best.
For far from being some kind of conscienceless libertine, there’s evidence he was conscious of the necessity of repentance all throughout his life. And in this respect, anticipated the tortured relationship with Christ enjoyed by several of his progeny within Rock and Roll, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis himself.
There’s also evidence he made his peace with His Saviour immediately prior to his terrible lonely demise, which while indisputably hastened by long-term alcohol abuse, was ultimately the result of a heart attack. While mention must be made of the morphine and chloral hydrate he’d been latterly taking as a means of controlling his chronic back pain.
And could it be said his longstanding pain was ultimately spiritual, as well as physical…born of a conviction on his part he’d neglected the kind of faith that inspired several of his early songs, such as “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul” from ’47, and “I Saw the Light” from a year later? And that he’d allowed himself to be blinded by worldly ambition?
Whatever the truth, it seems apparent this failed to provide him with any true long-lasting happiness. Or indeed the mainstream success for which he clearly so longed for a time. But if he died a saved man, in the final analysis, was this really such a great loss?
Luke the Drifter and the Life of Hank Williams
He was born Hiram King Williams in Mount Olive in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, on the 17th of September 1923, to Elonzo Williams, a World War One veteran of English ancestry known as Lon, and his wife Jessie Lillybelle Williams - née Skipper - known as Lillie.
Lon Williams’ working career had included time spent as a waterboy on logging camps, while he was ultimately destined to ascend to the lofty status of engineer for a prestigious logging company. But he’d more recently opened a small store with his wife adjacent to their cabin in Mount Olive. And their first child, Irene, had been born on the 8th of August 1922.
Young Hiram was a frail and slender boy seemingly bound for a lifetime of suffering, and most of all from a mild undiagnosed case of the spinal disorder, spina bifida occulta.
Then, in 1930, when he was only seven years old, his father was diagnosed with a brain aneurism related to a fall he'd suffered during his wartime service, and he was hospitalised for eight years. Which resulted in a lengthy peripatetic period for the Williams family, with Lillie finding work wherever she could.
And it was during a brief sojourn in Georgiana that Williams' musical career is believed to have come about, when Blues musician Rufus Payne, known as Tee Tot, provided the young Hank with guitar lessons in exchange for meals prepared by his mother. The upshot being he came to develop a unique musical style consisting of elements of Country, Folk and Blues which presaged the eventual birth of Rock and Roll.
And while still only a teenager he was already hosting his own show on a local radio station in Montgomery, Alabama, as “The Singing Kid”, while touring beer joints and other venues with his band, which he dubbed the Drifting Cowboys.
So that by the early ‘40s he was a regional star attraction, coming to the attention as such of various influential members of the music business, even while seeking the alcoholic self-medication that took a serious toll on his reputation for reliability.
And then, with America's entry into World War II in 1941, the band was virtually decimated, although Williams himself was exempted from active service by dint of his medical condition.
Two years later, he met Audrey Mae Sheppard, a beautiful divorcee from a farming family from Banks, Alabama, and they wasted little time in getting married, with Audrey becoming his manager a short time before their wedding. And in 1946, he and Audrey visited Nashville with a view to meeting music publisher Fred Rose, one of the heads of Acuff-Rose Publishing with one of Hank’s idols, Roy Acuff.
He promptly went on to record two successful singles, which resulted in his signing a contract with MGM Records with Rose as his manager and producer.
“Move it On Over”, released in 1947 was Williams’ first single for MGM, and while it went to number four on the Billboard Country Singles chart, it failed to make a dent on the Pop mainstream. Although its uncanny resemblance to “Rock Around the Clock” makes it one of the most influential records of the 20th Century.
However, by this time, his problems with alcohol were in constant danger of sabotaging his ascent to national celebrity. And far from contributing to these, it’s believed Audrey was indefatigable in her efforts to keep him from the booze and encourage his rise to the top, notwithstanding the turbulence of their relationship.
But these were such that Fred Rose, who evidently loved him as his own son, gave up on his in despair, while in April 1948, Audrey filed for divorce.
However, after having reconciled with both his manager and the love of his life, his career was once more on track. And in August, he appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show, which would play host to one Elvis Presley just a little over a half dozen years down the line.
Then in 1949, his son Randall Hank Williams - who would go on to great success in his own right as Hank Williams Jr. - was born on the 26th of May. While his cover of “Lovesick Blues”, a Tin Pan Alley song written by Cliff Friends and Irving Mills in 1922, became his first number one on the Country chart, while crossing over into the Top 25 at number 24.
And when he performed it at the Grand Ole Opry in June, he received no less than six encores, which was unprecedented at the time, and had the effect of turning him into a true star at long last.
With success came the creative freedom to create an enigmatic alter ego, which he did in 1950. And under the name of Luke the Drifter, he recorded a series of recitation-based recordings with a powerful Christian theme.
But 1951 was a year of terrible trial for Hiram King, and his final separation from Audrey came in May when they were divorced for a second time. While in August, his uncontrolled alcoholism saw him fired from the Grand Ole Opry.
Although his career proceeded apace, and he placed no less than five singles in the Country top ten in that year, including two number ones in the shape of “Hey Good Looking”; and “Cold Cold Heart”, which the great vocal stylist Tony Bennett took to number one on the national chart.
But in the fall, he suffered an accident during a hunting trip on his Tennessee
farm which exacerbated his already chronic back problems, while allegedly causing him to resort to a variety of painkillers including morphine.
While in ‘52, he scored as many successes as the previous year, including “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”, which reached number 20 on the national chart, making it his greatest ever hit.
His personal life received a shot of good fortune in October when he married another Southern beauty Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar in Minden, Louisiana. And it’s she who has publicly testified to his reconciliation with Jesus shortly before his death on New Year’s Day 1953, while it behoves all Christian men and women to maintain its sincerity. For when all’s said and done, a person’s salvation is in the hands of the Creator, and the Creator alone.
What is certain is that his death came some time after midnight on the 1st of January 1953, in the back of a Cadillac convertible in which he was being driven to a series of concerts by a college student called Charles Carr, and was in consequence of a heart attack. And it’s been called the first great tragedy of Rock and Roll.
But were it still up to Williams, would he truly care to be identified with such an ecstatically sensual music form?
That is, in the light of the Luke the Drifter recordings; and his professed belief in the vital importance of repentance, as expressed through several of his earliest songs. To say nothing of the high poetic quality of his lyrics, which have caused him to be dubbed “The Hillbilly Shakespeare”.
Although to be fair, Rock wasted little time in becoming a bona fide art form, with Bob Dylan injecting voluminous quantities of high culture into the music once he’d crossed over from Folk in 1965. While the Beatles were among the first of the initial wave of sixties Rock groups to be powerfully influenced by the fledgling art form’s first true intellectual.
And would it be too fanciful to suggest that Williams’ considerable poetic gifts partially anticipated this development? For Dylan has included him among his foremost artistic mentors. While his musical progeny have also included the greatest Rock star of them all, Elvis Presley…the man who effectively birthed an entire era. Albeit unwittingly.
For Elvis was initially seen as a Country artist, performing on the Grand Ole Opry for the first and only time on 2 October 1954, and on the Louisiana Haywire a fortnight after that; and then all throughout the following year. Although in truth, his music subsumed the rougher elements of both Country and Rhythm and Blues to create an entirely new music genre, Rock and Roll.
And seminal Rock and Roll inclined more to Country or R&B depending on the artist creating it at any given time.
But whatever it was known as, it took the Pop world by storm around 1955, while fomenting a cultural and moral revolution whose repercussions continue to be felt in the West and beyond to this day.
Luke the Drifter and the Future of Country
It could conceivably be said the means by which Country survived the Rock and Roll revolution was to distance itself from the very earthiness that had inspired it. And which was pre-eminently associated with Country music’s single most revered figure, Hank Williams, who is also among the most influential popular musicians of the 20th Century.
So while the smooth musical genres of Soul and Tamla-Motown emerged from the far rougher sound of primal R&B, the Nashville Sound was born from a co-mingling of Country and Tin Pan Alley style Pop in the city that tendered it its name.
While its earliest proponents included Jim Reeves, who sang with the finesse of a great song stylist…a Sinatra or a Como…and Patsy Cline, who had something of the Jazz chanteuse about her. But while the Nashville Sound saved Country Music in commercial terms in around 1958, a major creative backlash came courtesy of the Southern Diaspora city of Bakersfield, whose Bakersfield Sound, forged in the mid 1950s, started infiltrating the mainstream a few years later.
For during the Dust Bowl period of the early 1930s, this small conservative town in California’s San Joaquin Valley had been subject to a massive influx of migrants from several southern states including Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas. And when they came, they brought their music and culture with them, with the result that Bakersfield became a Southern city in all but name.
And if the Nashville Sound was born of a harmonious merger between Country and Tin Pan Alley, that of Bakersfield harked back to the pre-Rock age, while ultimately co-opting several key ingredients of this upstart art, its first major figure the Texan Buck Owens, who settled in the town in 1951.
While his first number one, “Act Naturally”, from 1963, was later covered by the most successful Pop act of all time, the Beatles…who were allegedly influenced by the Bakersfield Sound; and certainly the distinctive twang of many of their earliest recordings has a powerful Country feel about it.
Although unlike the superstars of the Nashville Sound, Owens never had a top ten record on the Billboard Hot 100.
While Country Pop thrived throughout the ‘60s in the shape of such massive crossover hits as Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go” from 1960; “I’m Sorry” by Brenda Lee, also from ’60, “Make the World Go Away” by Eddie Arnold from 1965; and the poignant “Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell from the year of non-stop protest, 1968.
But it was also in the ‘60s, or rather the late 1960s at a time when Rock was in the midst of its Golden Age, that new earthier forms of Country could be said to have set about the task of challenging the Nashville mainstream. Such as the first major Bluegrass Revival; as well as the increasing popularity of Progressive Bluegrass.
While Country Rock became an international sensation thanks to such albums as the Byrds’ “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”, spearheaded in ’68 by tragic wunderkind Gram Parsons, who more than anyone was responsible for introducing the Rolling Stones to his beloved music.
While it had been Bob Dylan who’d been its foremost pioneer by dint of incorporating elements of Country into his ground-breaking 1966 double album “Blonde on Blonde”; with “John Wesley Hardin” from ’67, and “Nashville Skyline” from ’69 serving as full-blown Country Rock artefacts.
But it wasn’t until the ‘70s that the genre truly came into its own, when the Eagles emerged as the most successful Country Rock act of all time. Although their powerfully melodic sound was indebted to a classic Pop sensibility. And specifically that of the Beatles, whose “Beatles for Sale” from 1964 showed a marked Country influence.
Among the other artists successfully operating within the Country Rock genre in the ‘70s were Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and John Fogerty, whose Creedence Clearwater Revival had been instrumental in bringing about the birth of Southern Rock in the late 1960s. This a form of music forged from elements of Rock and Roll, Country and Blues, whose most beloved exponents remain Southern legends the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynrd.
While concurrently with the coming of Country and Southern Rock, Outlaw Country, inspired by the spirit of Hank Williams, started making modest inroads into the mainstream. And it was Willie Nelson, ironically responsible for one of the most beautiful crossover ballads in Country Music history in the shape of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” who stood at its centre.
But he was aided and abetted in this respect by other veterans from the ‘50s, such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. While younger more troubled outlaws came in the shape of Townes Van Sandt, very much part of the pantheon of tortured prodigies that reached an apogee with Hank Williams, as well as Williams’ own son, Hank Jr.
Although Country Pop with its roots in the Nashville Sound continued to dominate the Pop charts in the ‘70s, providing such diverse figures as Anne Murray, Olivia Newton John, John Denver, Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, and Dolly Parton with massive crossover hits. Even if by the mid 1980s, it had begun to be challenged by the New Traditional and Alternative schools, with Lyle Lovett widely considered to be the supreme pioneer of what has become known variously as Alt-Country and Americana.
While in the ‘90s and ‘00s, mainstream Country music experienced an explosion of popularity which propelled certain figures to levels of international pre-eminence previously unprecedented for Country artists.
And these included Billy Ray Cyrus, Shania Twain, Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks, but most of all, Garth Brooks, who stands as the third most successful act in the history of recorded music in America. Even if in terms of international record sales, he is nowhere near as prolific as his closest rivals in the US, the Beatles and Elvis Presley.
And if mainstream Country in the new millennium is closer to teeny bop Pop than ever before, then there are those who’d insist that much contemporary alternative Country is Rock in all but name, with little of pure Country remaining. But if this is so, then at its most progressive, it’s produced some truly exalted art.
Such as from native New Yorker Gillian Welch, who more than anyone since the end of the last millennium has forged fresh territory for Country Music, by fusing Old-Time music not just to the sombre mysteries of Alternative Rock, but the beautiful melodies of Classical Pop.
While Hiram King Williams’ own grandson, Hank Williams III, serves to disprove the notion that the spirit of traditional Country has been entirely lost to the upstart art of Rock. Even if his lyrics are informed by such quintessential Rock and Roll subspecies as Heavy Metal and Punk.
And what would his granddaddy, Country Music’s single most revered figure, and among the most influential popular musicians of the 20th Century, have to say about the state of Country Music were he in a position to say anything at all?
One can’t help thinking he’d be urging those with the requisite talent to return to songs of repentance pure and simple. And that wherever he may be now…he’d be devoutly wishing he devoted more of his life and career to songs bespeaking the seeing of the light and the subsequent preparedness for a time about which he once so fervidly sang…“When God Comes and Gathers His Jewels”.
Chapter Two – Werther and the Rise of Romantic Melancholia
Most students of world literature would surely agree that Goethe’s famous epistolary novel, “The Sorrows of the Young Werther” has exerted a quite incalculable influence on the evolution of the Western mind from the date of its publication in 1774. And that it did so principally through Romanticism, that great movement in the arts of which it was a prime antecedent, would be disputed by few.
And while the notion that melancholy is a feature of sensitive and creative youth was not new at the height of Romanticism, it attained a credence within it that was possibly unprecedented, at least in its intensity. The name mal du siècle becoming attached to it, although some may refer to it as weltschmerz, which literally means world pain.
Such a development can be at least partly attributed to “Werther”, whose forlorn hero has served as the forefather of succeeding generations of melancholy youth.
And then there are the countless scions of Romanticism within the Decadent and Symbolist Movements, Expressionism and Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism and the Beat and Rock Generations, who by pursuing tragic, tormented existences and dying while yet young and preferably beautiful, have become the favoured artists of the Modern Age.
Surely, all who remain unconvinced by the romantic and avant-garde persuasions will view this development as not just tragic but horrifying. For while old age is all too often a source of deep regret for follies past, youth, precious youth, provides a person with almost unlimited opportunities for the eradication of this outcome.
Which is not to mitigate genuine depression, of which there are sufferers in all age brackets, and to which youth can be singularly susceptible. For to do so would be not just cruel but dangerous.
But most people in the privileged West, no matter how exorbitantly romantic in youth, yet survive into late middle age. And all that remains for them to do is find a place for themselves in the world, but without the advantages of youth and beauty and endless reserves of time.
So, what precisely was it that possessed Goethe to write a novel that at least partially caused an entire movement in the arts to be birthed in its wake. And what was it about the work that was so inflammatory?
In order to answer this question, it’s necessary to examine certain events from Goethe’s own young manhood.
For in 1770, at the tender age of 20, Goethe found himself in Strasbourg in order to complete a law degree he’d previously abandoned while at Leipzig. And while there, became a close friend of future fellow polymath Johann Gottfried von Herder, who introduced him to Shakespeare, then allegedly barely known in the German speaking world.
And by the following year, he was working as a licensee in Frankfurt, although he soon lost his position, at which point he set about attempting to make his living as a writer for the first time, publishing the drama, “Goetz von Berlichingen” in 1773.
By so doing, he’d provided the first classic of the Storm and Stress movement
which also included his one-time mentor Herder, as well as an example of what is known in German as “das Dämonische” in the shape of the drama’s hero. This being a type of genius of overpowering will and energy who could to some degree be said to be a precursor of the Byronic Hero.
And in this, he was powerfully influenced by Shakespeare, whose age he evidently saw as being in marked contrast to late 18th Century Germany in all its sedate respectability.
In 1772, he resumed his legal career in Wetzlar on the river Lahn, and it was in that city state that he met the woman who would inspire him to write what remains his most famous work apart from “Faust”.
The woman in question was Charlotte Buff, who by rejecting Goethe in favour of the civil servant Johan Christian Kestner provided the model for Lotte, heroine of “Werther”. Yet while he suffered from her repeated rejections of his love, his friendship with Charlotte was far less intense than the novel suggested. While the titular hero himself was based not just on the youthful Goethe, but the German-Jewish philosopher Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who committed suicide following an unhappy love affair.
“Werther” perfectly captured a nascent restlessness and passionate extremism among the youth of Europe in the later years of the Enlightenment that would ultimately culminate in the Romantic revolution. In fact so much so that in some quarters its depiction of suicidal despair was condemned for flouting the traditionally Christian view of the sanctity of human life.
Although to be fair, it was hardly new, having played its part in tragic literature since time immemorial. And there is no hard and fast evidence for the existence of the so-called Werther Effect of copy cat suicides.
But the fact remains that “Werther” helped to develop the notion of the hero as rebel against all constraints.
And Werther’s rebellion even extends to his dress, which is to say the famous blue coat and yellow breeches, which were inappropriately proletarian for the bourgeois society of the day. And which serve to make him a remarkably contemporary figure, for in the days leading up to the sartorial revolution of the ‘60s, male clothing had been of a near-universal drabness for several decades.
While at the height of the Swinging Sixties, hordes of young middle class men on both sides of the Atlantic elected to grow their hair; and sport dandified outfits like the Rock acts and artists who were seen as vulgar and low class by many from among their parents’ generation.
Other facets of Werther’s rebellious uniqueness include his emotionalism, seen at the time as ill-befitting an educated male, but which went on to become an important part of the artistic armoury in a brave new aeon in which the Artist served as High Priest. Or to paraphrase Shelley, the unacknowledged legislator of the world.
And a certain wandering quality which results in his accepting a mission to go in search of a family legacy, and then feel no overwhelming desire to either return home or seek a job in the rural region to which he has been sent. An idleness in other words…possibly born of a rebellious distaste for the puritan work ethic that has long been one of the key foundations of European bourgeois society.
A distaste which has persisted since among Bohemian artists, but which is usually transcended beyond a certain age, as in the case of Goethe, who mutated into the most industrious of men. But Werther never matures beyond a state of infantile dependence, and for a time is content to do little other than socialise with the local peasant folk, or read Homer beneath the linden trees.
And when he does finally find himself in work, his employer’s fastidiousness drive him to distraction, and he quits in disgust, only to drift to the nearby town of Wahlheim in search of a local girl by the name of Charlotte, with whom he’d earlier become infatuated.
This despite the fact that Lotte is as good as engaged to be married to an older man called Albert, who befriends the lad, so that a kind of love triangle comes into being. And it could be said that Lotte is tempted by Werther, as the essence of proto-Romantic Bohemianism.
However, Werther ultimately leaves Walheim to find work, only to return after quitting his job; while Albert and Lotte have since married and settled into domestic contentment. Yet Werther is warmly welcomed by the couple in his new capacity as a family friend.
But he becomes increasingly de trop until Lotte is forced to become firm with him and tell him to stay away until Christmas Eve at which point, he reveals his true feelings to her. Not that she’d ever been in doubt about these. But of course, she rejects him, and the following day Werther kills himself by shooting himself through the head.
And so…après lui, le déluge…which is to say of the Romantic Revolution, although it would be unjust to suggest that Goethe was its only forefather. For Goethe himself was responding to revolutionary ideas that were already very much in existence, such as those of Rousseau for example. And it would be equally unjust to over-emphasize the movement’s negative aspects.
For it could be said that Romanticism was a reaction to the stultifying rationalism of the Enlightenment, and thence in some respects a step in the right direction in terms of renewing interest in the spiritual side of life.
But at the same time, it ushered in this notion of the artist as set apart from the common run, and inclined to all manner of excess in terms of intuition and sensibility, of seditiousness and eccentricity, of mental and emotional instability, which is surely absurd. Or rather should be seen as such by anyone of a responsible cast of mind.
For in its wake there arose a series of artistic movements or avant-gardes which fostered the most aberrant behaviour on the part of some of its participants. And presumably they acted as they did because they felt they had the right to as artists.
And yet it could be said they were more inclined to do so than previous generations by virtue of the tenor of the times. Which is to say an age in which the Judaeo-Christian values on which the West had ever relied on for its foundations had already begun to decline following the Enlightnment, and so given birth to a spirit which has come to be known as Modernism.
But it would be altogether wrong to suggest that Werther is responsible not just for Romanticism but its protracted decadence…which could with some justification be said to still be in operation.
For there were many Romantic precursors, and in comparison to some of these, Goethe’s breakthrough novel was the soul of innocence. And what’s more, in the wake of its phenomenal success, its author distanced himself from the nascent Romantic movement which caught fire first in Germany and then in Britain.
And he did so for the sake of a form of Neoclassicism which has become known as Weimar Classicism, whose minute number of participants included, in addition to Goethe himself, his close friends Schiller and Herder, as well as the poet and novelist Christoph Martin Wieland.
Yet, some half century after the publication of the book that made him world famous, Germany's greatest poet, and the equal as such of his one-time idol Shakespeare looked back on the time of Werther’s sensational impact on a restless, passionate generation of youth. And he described it as “a spring, when everything was budding and shooting, when more than one tree was yet bare, while others were already full of leaves. All that in the year 1775!”
One can't help thinking there are many of the so-called Baby Boomer generation who view such totemic years as 1965, or '67, or perhaps even '77, in much the same way as Goethe when he was inspired to write these lines about his own wild youth. But then is that not the way for all generations of youth now grown old?
Of course...but then perhaps it's especially true for the generation who didn't so much invent the madness of youth, as incarnate it as never before within living memory.
And for my part, without sacrificing a tithe of what I've learned and achieved up to this point, I'd dearly love to make a return to a time when life seemed like some kind of eternal spring when everything was possible, nothing too much trouble. And this time around, youth would not be wasted on me, no not one delicious drop of it.
Chapter Three - Beyond the Borderlands of Scotia
It’s estimated that some 27 million Americans are of Scots-Irish descent, making it one of the largest ethnic groups in the country, although the vast majority of these would consider themselves simply to be ethnically American.
And among those sons and daughter of the US who’ve been able to boast of Scots-Irish origins have been many of the nation’s most legendary figures. Such as Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Kit Carson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Andrew W. Mellon, George S. Patton, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Jackson Pollock, Ava Gardner, Audie Murphy, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, Robert Redford, Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain.
In addition to the US, people of Scots-Irish descent are to be found in all other parts of the Anglosphere, including Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, and of course Britain.
Indeed, the people whence they directly emerged are still to be found in Northern Ireland and other parts of the United Kingdom. While living Britons of Scots Irish lineage include composer and former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, much-praised Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh and Hollywood movie star Daniel Radcliffe. As well as all those Northern Irish men and women who identify as British, of which there are allegedly 37%.
To say nothing of your humble author who, while proud of his Scots Irishness, nonetheless maintains that there is no justification for claims of superiority on the part of any ethnic group, given we are each of us subject to sin from birth.
This is a concept which will hold great appeal to many of those of Scots-Irish origin, given their longstanding affiliation to that form of Christianity which is predicated on a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, and which has become known as Fundamentalism. All of which begs the question… just exactly who are the Scots-Irish?
Well, contrary to what might be believed, the Scots Irish are neither strictly Scottish nor Irish. In fact, their origins as a distinct group lie in what are known as the Ulster Plantations, which came into existence in 1609, in the wake of the Nine Years War, a bloody conflict fought largely in the province of Ulster, Ireland, between its chieftains and their Catholic allies, on one hand, and the forces of Elizabethan England on the other. The latter’s decisive victory led to the end of the Gaelic Clan system, and the colonization of Ulster by English and Scottish Protestants; hence, the Ulster Plantations.
Many of these planters had been inhabitants of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands, and so, hailing from northern English counties such as Cumberland, Westmoreland, Northumberland, Yorkshire and Lancashire, and counties of the Scottish Lowlands, such as Ayrshire, Dumfriesshire, Roxburghshire, Berwickshire and Wigtownshire.
According to many sources, Lowlanders are distinct from their Highland counterparts by being of Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic ancestry, although how true this is it’s impossible to say. Certainly, the region straddling the Scottish Lowlands and Anglo-Scottish Borderlands is one traditionally perceived by Highlanders as Sassenach, which is the Gaelic term for a person of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Whatever the truth, the sensible view is that their bloodline contains a variety of kindred strains including - as well as Anglo-Saxon - Gaelic, Pictish, Norman and so on, depending on the exact region. Moreover, all Caucasian inhabitants of the British Isles partake of a fairly homogenous ancestry, which certain contemporary experts are claiming to be more Iberian than anything else. Again, this is open to conjecture.
These Ulster Scots emigrated to the US in the 1600s, and their descendants are to be found all throughout the country, but most famously perhaps in those regions which are culturally Southern, which is to say those states situated beneath the Mason-Dixon Line. Indeed most of the original European settlers of the Deep and Upland South are widely believed to have been of British, and especially English and Ulster-Scots, origin. Today, many of them describe themselves as merely “American”, while others continue to claim either English or Ulster-Scots ancestry.
In America, they are known as the Scots-Irish, although a far better name for them would be the British Irish, or Ulster British, given that they are mostly of Anglo-Scottish stock, with alleged soupcons of Irish, Flemish, French and German . However, Scots-Irish is the name by which they are most famous, so from this point on, they will be referred to exclusively as such.
In the early 1700s, some 50,000 Scots-Irish men and women left the ports of Belfast, Larne and Londonderry for the New World. They came as a fiercely independent people, complete with Bible and musket, and mostly as skilled workers, filled to the brim with the Protestant work ethic, and desperate for religious freedom.
Having had a negative experience of gentry-dominated societies in both Britain and Ireland, the freshly arrived Scots-Irish were understandably keen to steer clear of similar regimes in the US. So at first, they avoided Virginia, which had been settled during the English Civil War and its aftermath by Royalist Cavaliers of gentle birth, as well as the Carolinas, as all were under the sway of the plantation system and the Church of England; while Maryland had been established for the Catholic nobility.
Their first part of call was the Pennsylvanian backcountry, and from there, they moved further down into the Southern hinterland, to Virginia and the Carolinas; and following the war of independence, and together with fresh immigrants, they set about the population of Kentucky, Georgia and Tennessee, and so the rest of the South. At the same time, many remained in Pennsylvania and surrounding areas, while others moved further west, so that parts of Missouri, Texas and Oklahoma went on to become culturally British, and specifically Scots-Irish. The same could be said of the southernmost parts of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.
They formed the dominant culture of the Appalachian mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and featured strongly among those who tamed the West in the wake of the American War of Independence.
In time, they largely forsook their Calvinist roots to adopt the fervid Evangelicalism for which they are renowned throughout the world, as they are for their unyielding allegiance to God, nation and family.
In time, their influence grew to the extent that they became part of America’s ruling elite, with no less than a third of all American presidents having ancestral links to Ulster, these reputedly including FDR, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, both Bushes and Obama.
Thence, this remarkable little race made the voyage all the way from the borderlands of Scotland, where they existed as the lowliest and most oppressed of peoples to the highest political office in the world…an incredible testament of the resilience of the fighting Scots-Irish.
Chapter Four - Alfred de Musset and the Myth of Young France
It was in the glittering Paris of the 1830s that a certain French Romantic poet, playwright and novelist of noble birth by the name of Alfred Charles de Musset-Pathay came close to having the exorbitant ambition of one who didn’t want to write unless to aspire to the greatness of a Shakespeare or a Schiller.
But then he’d been a brilliant student, the son and grandson of writers who’d published his first poem at just 16 in 1828, and a translation of de Quincey’s “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater” in the same year.
While his early works, which included the “Contes d’Espagne et d’Italie” were published at the dawn of that decade which he entered blessed with every great gift a gilded young genius might hope to possess. Being tender as well as elegant, beautiful as well as brilliant, and an irresistible enthusiast...brimful with passion and sensibility. But he’d have to wait a few years before real artistic success came his way.
And his was the era in which the Romantic movement came into full flower in France. And he revelled in it as the so-called Phosphorescent Prince, his sphere, the dandified café society of the Parisian Right Bank, his closest friend, fellow dandy Alfred Tattet.
For the Paris of the 1830s was the very cradle of the nascent Modern impulse, the leading world incubator of the most charismatic originality of thought and behaviour, in which such distinctly Modern phenomena as Bohemianism and the avant-garde came into being more or less for the first time. And the Gothic tendency flourished as never before in the hands of such proto-Bohemian bands as the Bouzingots and the Jeunes-France.
It was a uniqueness, moreover, that has tended ever since to verge on the downright aberrant when manifested by some of her most gifted citizens, such as her celebrated poètes maudits…long the apostles of the avant-garde par excellence.
And it could be said the first generation of these were numbered among the young men who in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 congregated about such wild and brilliant youth as Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier, two writers of the so-called frenetic school of late Romantics. And these seminal avant-gardists have become known as the Bouzingos, although little distinguished them from the earlier Jeunes-France.
Originally members of a Romantic clique known as le Petit Cénacle, their role in the infamous Battle of Hernani at the Comédie Francaise theatre in February 1830 was paramount.
And this took place on the opening night of Hugo’s play, “Hernani”, and was marked by violent scenes involving defenders of the Classical tradition, and Hugo’s supporters, who flaunted long hair and flamboyant costumes in defiance of everything the bourgeois held dear.
In addition to Gautier, they included Pétrus Borel, Gérard de Nerval, Philothée O’Neddy and Augustus MacKeat, all of whom went on to be numbered among the Jeunes-France.
According to one theory, the first Bouzingos were a band of political agitators who took part in the July Revolution in wide-brimmed leather hats. While their artistic equivalents were so named by the press following a night of riotous boozing which saw some of them end up in prison for the night.
However, they too embraced radical political views; for the artistic avant-garde has mostly inclined to the left, while containing an ultra-conservative element.
Needless to say, they owed an enormous debt to the earlier English and German Romantics, who did so much to promote the myth of the artist as tormented genius ever-existent on the fringes of respectable society. A Bohemian in others words.
And akin to the Bohemian was the Dandy; and of the poètes maudits of mid 19th Century Paris, several were both Bohemians and Dandies, depending on their circumstances at the time.
They included Charles Baudelaire, whose essay “Le Dandy” (1863) is one of the defining works on the subject.
And the same could be said of his forefather Musset, whose tormented relationship with fellow Romantic George Sand had much of the Bohemian about it. That is, in terms of its turbulence and debauchery, which left the former golden boy of French letters a prematurely broken man at just 24, spurring him to pen his hyper-emotional “Confession”. And this was as much about his failed love affair with Sand as the disenchantment of the generation that had come to maturity in the wake of the Revolutionary Age.
Sand, born Amantine Lucile Dupin in Paris in 1810, was clearly a woman of quite extraordinary magnetic power…and by the time of her affair with Musset, she was a divorcee with two young children, and a baroness to boot, even though her own roots were only partly aristocratic. For her effect on Musset was little short of cataclysmic, inspiring much of his finest work; and not just the “Confession”.
For the famous series of poems known as “Les Nuits”, composed between 1835 and ’37, also spring from his unhappy relationship with Sand, and they are rightly considered to be among the unimpeachable masterpieces of French Romanticism. Indeed of French literature as a whole.
Yet it could be argued that Musset is best known for his theatrical writings, which began as early as 1830 with “La Nuit Venitienne”. And of which “Lorenzaccio” from 1833, and “On Ne Badine Pas Avec L’Amour” from ’34 are among the most celebrated.
Having said that, it’s the true life romance at the heart of the “Confession” that most inspires contemporary creators.
And the motion picture “Les Enfants du Siècle”, which was directed by Diane Kurys in 1999 with Benoît Magimel as Musset and Juliette Binoche as Sand, was directly inspired by these. While a version of the “Confession” itself is purportedly in the pipeline.
And certainly it’s a glamorous tale, while Musset’s life itself is the stuff of legend.
Yet despite the fact that like Gautier, he became a deeply respectable figure in late middle age, receiving the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1845, before being elected to the French Academy in ’52, his was an ultimately tragic life, blighted by alcoholism. Which together with the condition known as aortic insufficiency, brought about his demise from heart failure at just 46 years old.
An age which appears to be a common one for the deaths of great poets whose flaming, beautiful youths were garlanded with the most magnificent promise imaginable. For as well as Musset…Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde died at 46, and together they might serve as a testimony to the awful truth of the brevity of even the most glorious of youths.
As well as the ruinous nature of youthful self-indulgence which so often leads ultimately to what is described in 2 Corinthians 7:10 as “the sorrow of the world”, and of which Musset’s own heartbreaking poem “Tristesse” is a pre-eminent expression. As opposed, that is to “godly sorrow”, which “worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of.”
Chapter Five – Thomas Stearnes’ Pilgrimage to East Coker
The great Anglo-American Modernist poet TS Eliot (1888-1965) had strong links to the East Coast, and specifically New England, that most spiritually English of American regions, a distinction it shares with the South, with which Eliot was linked through his mother the poet Charlotte Champe Stearns, originally from Baltimore in Maryland. Although he was actually born in St Louis, a Midwestern city in which it could be said that the wildly divergent cultures of the North and South, Midwest and East Coast are somehow mysteriously fused.
He was a scion of the famous Eliots, a family of Brahmins, or top families of largely Anglo-Saxon extraction, based in Boston, but originally from the little Somerset village of East Coker, subject of one of Eliot’s most famous poems, and who came to dominate the American education system. And after graduating from the exclusive Milton Academy, Eliot himself attended Harvard between 1906 and 1909, earning his B.A. in what may have been Comparative Literature by his third year and his M.A., in English, by his fourth.
He also discovered Arthur Symons’ “The Symbolist Movement in Literature”, which introduced him to the French Symbolists and Decadents, such as Verlaine, Rimbaud and Laforgue, all of whom went on to exert a profound impact on his work, as did Symbolist founding father Charles Baudelaire, more of whom later.
After Harvard, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he attended lectures by Henri Bergson, to whose philosophical ideas he was drawn, as he was to those of the ultra-conservative writer Charles Maurras. And he came to know Alain-Fournier, ill-fated author of a single much loved novel, “Le Grand Meaulnes”, and Jean Verdenel, a brilliant medical student with whom he forged an exceptionally close friendship, cut short by the latter’s death in the First World War.
But it was when he was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914 that his artistic life could be said to have truly begun, almost as if, by arriving in England, he came home in a spiritual sense. Yet he quit Oxford after only a year, and this academic restlessness persisted into 1916, when after having completed a PhD dissertation for Harvard, he failed to return to the college to defend it; and so never received his doctorate.
However, by this time, he was already a published poet, “The Love Song of J Arthur Prufrock” having been published in Chicago in 1915 at the behest of his soon-to-be mentor, fellow Modernist titan Ezra Pound, and dedicated to Verdenel.
“Prufrock” has been cited as the point where modern poetry begins, and its famous third line, in which the night sky is likened to “a patient etherised on a table”, remains a startling and even disturbing image to this day. However, the literature of shock was hardly new in 1914, possessing as it did multiple precedents among the French Symbolist and Decadents, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautréamont foremost among them.
Eliot had a special admiration for Baudelaire…Symbolist forefather and first great poet of the modern urban landscape…as he did for Rimbaud, the angel-faced enfant terrible whose ferociously beautiful free form verse contained in his last two volumes, “A Season in Hell” and “Illuminations”, exerted an influence on the evolution of 20th Century poetry that exceeds even that of Eliot. While their ecstatic, visionary quality is an obvious precursor of Eliot’s own poetic vision.
However, with its doleful emphasis on regret and frustration, failure, exhaustion and decay, “Prufrock” could be said to have to some degree anticipated Camus’ Theory of the Absurd, as well as the theatre that came in its wake, which attained its possible apotheosis in the shape of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” from 1955.
Although needless to say the Absurd was nothing new, having pre-existed for example in French literature in the shape of the vast array of Decadent sects that proliferated in the second half of the 20th Century.
He was also a married man, having wed the attractive and vivacious Vivienne Haigh Wood in June 1915, a move which evidently dismayed his family, who expected him to make an imminent return to the US in order that he might take up his rightful place as a Harvard professor.
Instead, after a brief period spent teaching at various academic institutions, he embarked upon a successful eight-year career as a banker for Lloyds of London, working on foreign accounts. And it was during his tenure at Lloyds that he wrote some of the most earth-shaking poems of the 20th Century, which have caused his name to become almost synonymous with Modernism, which begs the question, what precisely is Modernism?
One possible definition of Modernism is the avant-garde…but the avant garde translated into a worldwide artistic movement which lasted for some half a century from about 1880.
However, there are those cultural critics who’d insist that Modernism is far more than a mere artistic phenomenon…is in fact a spirit…with roots in the Enlightenment, the great 18th Century movement during which age-old conceptions specifically related to the Divine origins of Creation were being questioned as never before.
For them, the Modern embraces all aspects of human endeavour…the arts, religion, philosophy, science, politics; while others would assert that the Modern lives on, confounding the notion of a Post Modern age in which the pursuit of the absolutely modern has exhausted itself beyond recovery.
But whatever the truth, few would disagree that of all the masters of literary Modernism, Eliot remains the most famous and most quoted.
And all thanks to a mere handful of masterpieces…starting with “Prufrock”, which in 1917 became the title piece of “Prufrock and Other Observations”, and going on to include “Gerontion” at a time when our own era could truly be said to have begun.
Published in 1920 as part of a collection variously named “Poems” and “Ara Vos Prec”, it contains the first of the so-called Sweeney poems featuring a character called Apeneck Sweeney. And opinions vary as to the identity of this figure, with some critics insisting that he represents all that is coarse in modern Man, and others that he is in fact some kind of Rousseauian noble savage admired by his creator for his Boeotian simplicity.
And “Gerontion” contains one of Eliot’s most famous and desolate lines in the shape of “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” which has been sporadically referred to since by writers seeking to convey the utter enormity of Man’s inhumanity to Man.
While the third of these, “The Waste Land”, was published in 1922, a year which has been cited by at least one cultural critic as the very acme of the Modern, as it produced not just "The Waste Land", but James Joyce's equally seismic "Ulysses”.
It was received by the youth of the inter-war years as some kind of clarion call to arms…a cry to the young to rise; and as such, could be likened to Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which ignited the Beat Generation in 1955, that totemic year in which Rock started to make serious inroads into the mainstream for the first time. And James Dean took his place as the prototype of youth in revolt for the entire late 20th Century simply by dying while still young and beautiful at the flaming height of his fame.
While the following year of ’56 witnessed the onset of Britain’s Angry Young Men, led by playwright John Osborne, and among whose manifestos could be said to have been “The Outsider” by Colin Wilson, which included several quotations from Eliot’s poetry.
And Eliot himself was perceived as “wild” according to fellow poet Stephen Spender, which of course could not have been further from the truth, for all throughout the ‘20s, he faithfully worked from 9 to 5 as if he were the very epitome of middle class propriety.
Yet, he became an idol to a wild generation of gilded privileged youth…sonnenkinder such as Harold Acton, who famously declaimed “The Waste Land” from the balcony of his room at Christ Church, Oxford, an incident which Evelyn Waugh included in his much loved elegy to his own generation at Oxford, “Brideshead Revisited”.
However, according to Waugh, the novel’s chief aesthete, Anthony Blanche was based not on Acton, but another of Waugh’s contemporaries at Oxford, that Bright Young Thing par excellence, Brian Howard, whose single published volume of verse revealed exceptional poetic gifts. Although unlike Eliot, he remained in decorous obscurity.
As a poem, "The Waste Land" remains quite inscrutable, although rightly or wrongly, it conveys a powerful sense of disgust with the Established Order latterly responsible for sending millions of young men to their deaths in a pointless conflict, with its unforgettable opening lines starting with “April is the cruellest month…”
Eliot’s next major poetic work, “The Hollow Men” was from 1925, also the year of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, the quintessential Jazz Age novel which serves as an exquisitely wrought evocation of the despair that underlay its frenzied hedonism. Little wonder that Eliot admired it so much.
“Hollow Men” contains lines which are if anything even more mythically desolate than those of “The Waste Land”, such as, “We are the Hollow Men / We are the Stuffed Men”, which opens the poem, and “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”, which closes it.
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