Category Archives: The Nottingham Essay

The Nottingham Essay : Margaret Cavendish (1623-73)

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Flamboyant, theatrical and a staunch fighter for women’s rights, 17th century writer, poet and general all round smart-arse (1623-73) Margaret Cavendish is yet another example of Nottingham’s rich literary history and why we were made a UNESCO City of Literature in 2015.

Ok. Yes, Margaret Cavendish was born into a wealthy Essex family, but we can claim her as one of our own as she married William Cavendish, the Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, and spent many years here helping to tart up Bolsover Castle and Welbeck Abbey.

Margaret was raised by her mother as her father passed away when she was two. This meant she avoided the strict parenting of the age and was instead encouraged to play and use her imagination, both of which would be pivotal in shaping her moral and mental outlook. In 1642, the family moved to the Royalist military stronghold of Oxford, where Margaret became a Maid of Honour to Queen Henrietta Maria. But when the Civil War started to properly hot up in 1644, Mary and the Royal entourage fled across the channel to the safety of Paris. Life as a courtier wasn’t quite as glamorous as you would imagine. It was full of back-stabbing bitches all eager to up their social status and was in stark contrast to the freedom and love of her childhood. It would shape in Margaret a lifelong distaste for fashionable society that she would satirise in her play The Presence, as well as other stories.

The following year she got hitched to the widowed William Cavendish, thirty years her senior. As the Marquis of Newcastle, William was one of the most powerful men in England, so Margaret quickly jacked in her job as a courtier. William, in addition to being a commander of Charles I, was a well-known patron of the arts and loved grand building projects, transforming traditional aristocratic households into centres of artistic patronage, with guests such as Thomas Hobbes and Descartes regularly invited over. Unfortunately, due to the Civil War, the couple would have to wait until the Restoration of 1660 before they could return back and develop their cribs.

During their enforced exile they travelled across Europe, living mainly off credit and reputation. Access to cosmopolitan culture and an educational elite would have a profound effect on Margaret. In Utrecht, she encountered Anna Maria van Schurmann, author of The Learned Maid (1639), which argued for the improvement of women’s education. In Paris, she discovered Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallerie des Femmes Fortes, a new movement that idealised strong women in possession of ‘male’ virtues (courage, moral strength) while retaining their femininity (beauty). Paris was also home to the emerging feminine salon culture, where women debated hot topics such as whether it’s better to be intelligent or beautiful, and what constitutes a good conversation. For maximum kudos, responses were given in allegories, similes or compact character sketches and was basically a testing ground for wit and wordplay, kind of like a seventeenth century version of Radio 4’s The News Quiz, but for aristocratic women.

Margaret could quite easily have moped around in relative luxury during her exile. Instead she embarked on a prolific writing career that constantly challenged accepted norms. Poems, and Fancies (1653) was the first book of English poetry deliberately published by a woman in her own name. To put this into context, historian Katie Whitaker found that in the first forty years of the seventeenth century there were eighty books published by women, equating to about 0.5% of all published work, and most of them were published posthumously or in pirated copies without the author’s consent. It was rare for even aristocratic women to be properly educated as their focus was normally housewifery. It was even suggested that education was dangerous for the inferior female brain which was deemed soft and incapable of absorbing information. Consequently, Margaret was educated at home in basic literacy. For her to dare to have an opinion was in itself an act of rebellion – to make this public was scandalous.

Poetry was the commonest genre of writing by women and was generally used to celebrate social occasions such as marriage. Yet exceptionally, for either a male or female, Margaret never once produced love poetry, deeming it too obvious and “a tree whereon all poets climb”. Instead she opted for philosophical verse that challenged the Christian-Judaism tradition of man’s superiority over nature. A Dialogue of Birds, for instance, critiqued man’s obsession with hunting and killing birds that dared eat the tiniest of fruits. She went on to argue that animals may have intelligence too. As she moved to other genres, she was keen to broach masculine subjects, debating the role of religion, law and philosophy. She advocated the celibacy of monks on the grounds that it helped keep the population down. Then she exposed the folly of religion, arguing that if men based their supremacy over women on the grounds that Jesus was a male, then men were by implication inferior to a dove, given that this is how the Holy Spirit is represented. The men didn’t like this smart arse, and negative rumours started to spread.

For a long time, people didn’t accept that Margaret had written her books herself because she was addressing male topics, and therefore they must have come from a male mind. Her poetry was slated for its poor rhyme and metre but she shrugged this off, arguing there was an obsession with form to the detriment of imagination. Other works were criticised for their poor grammar, punctuation and spelling. There’s been some fanciful claims that this was deliberate, that Margaret was simply appropriating language and creating her own unique style, a bit like txt spk. But it was more likely that she was dyslexic. The fact that she had no formal education or training in quill writing would have further exacerbated the problem.

A lot of these prejudices, particularly male expectations and social conventions, recur throughout her writing. In Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, the heroine Lady Travellia saves herself from a Prince by dressing as a male and fleeing aboard a ship. At her destination she encounters cannibals but she is able to save herself by learning their language and communicating on an equal level, something more achievable in the novel than in real life. In The Blazing World, a kind of Utopian political thriller which is seen by many as the first science fiction story, Margaret appears and strikes up an intimate friendship with an Empress, suggesting there is more to life than heterosexual relationships.

Margaret exuded as much individuality in her clothing as she did on the page. She wasn’t content to go along with the latest trends and instead designed her own costumes that strived to symbolise her revolutionary identity as a female intellectual. People would flock from miles around to see her, often attracting crowds usually reserved for Royalty. Diarist Samuel Pepys tracked her down in 1667 but was disappointed at seeing the myth in the flesh, dismissing her as “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman” but this criticism may tell us more about Pepys. He was authoritarian in his own marriage and came down hard on his wife when she dared to wear clothes he did not approve of. Unsurprisingly, Margaret wasn’t a fan of slap either, finding it oily on her skin and generally disgusting. Her only compromise was a bit of powder on her face and painting her nipples scarlet. The mindless following of fashion was just another form of oppression as far as she was concerned. This attitude didn’t bode well with other women, who saw her as betraying her gender. But she had come to expect snobbery, idle gossip and backstabbing from her class. She would take her revenge on the page.

2014 is the Year of Reading Women and it is hard to think of a more inspirational figure from Nottingham’s past for modern writers. Yes, she was a toff. But a toff who turned her back on an easy life and instead strived to change perceptions. She made many enemies and many friends during her fifty years of life and was essentially an Epicurean at heart, in search of personal pleasures. If society would not allow a woman equal rights then she would create her own through words, “Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First… I have made a world of my own: for which nobody, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone’s power to do the like.”

This article was based on two superb books: Mad Madge by Katie Whitaker and Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World and Other Writings, Ed. Kate Lilley. It was originally published in LeftLion magazine Jan 2015

The Nottingham Essay: Slavomir Rawicz (1 September 1915 – 5 April 2004)

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Slavomir Rawicz’s story of endurance across continents during WWII is detailed in the aptly named memoir The Long Walk. The best selling book is another example of Nottingham’s rich literary history and why we were made a UNESCO City of Literature in 2015.

To some of us, Slavomir Rawicz will be remembered as the technician on the architectural ceramics course at Nottingham Trent, back when it was a Poly. For readers, he is the voice of The Long Walk, an incredible adventure tale that saw him escape a Russian Gulag camp in 1941, and trek 4,000 miles to freedom. To others, his story is pure fabrication. But we’ll deal with the complexities of truth in a bit…

Rawicz’s ghost-written memoir has shifted half a million copies worldwide, making him a worthy topic for our UNESCO City of Literature feature, but today we’re celebrating him because he was Polish. With the threat of a UKIP/Conservative coalition on the horizon, it’s time we put immigration into context. So skip the next two paragraphs if you’re the kind of person for whom facts get in the way of a good story.

According to the 2011 Census, 12.7% of Nottingham’s population moved to the UK in the last ten years, compared to 7.0% nationally. In total, 19.5% of Nottingham’s population was born outside the UK, with Pakistan accounting for the highest proportion and Poland a close second. Half a million people in Britain speak Polish, making it the most commonly spoken non-native language. Polish migration has increased seven-fold since 2003 – hardly surprising given Poland joined the EU in 2004. But we need to pop back sixty years, to the end of World War II, to find the real reason these hardworking migrants were lured by our chip-littered shores.

After the fall of France in 1940, the exiled Polish Prime Minister and his government set up office in London, accompanied by 20,000 soldiers and airmen. They were a powerful Allied force who accounted for 150,000 troops under the command of the British Army and represented the largest non-British group in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Churchill was well impressed and vowed Britain would “never forget the debt they owe to the Polish” and pledged “citizenship and freedom of the British Empire” for all. Understandably, many didn’t want to return home to a Communist government and, after kicking up a stink, the Polish Resettlement Act 1947 was passed – the UK’s first mass immigration law. Now do the maths. As waves of immigration continued over the decades, a strong Polish community has developed, meaning our modern migrants aren’t just nipping over because we pay over double their minimum wage, but because the UK is where their family lives.

Slavomir Rawicz married Marjorie Gregory in the year the Polish Resettlement Act was passed and eventually settled down in Sandiacre, where he became the proud father of five children and lived a relatively quiet life before passing away on 5 April 2004. Prior to this, he was a young lieutenant in the Polish cavalry who was incarcerated in Siberian Labour Camp 303 in 1940 because he spoke Russian and was therefore deemed a spy. There were so many of these camps during the Stalinist period that writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, described them as a “Gulag Archipelago”. At their peak, they accounted for roughly 14 million captives.

After being unfairly imprisoned, forced to work gruelling shifts in inhumane conditions, and tortured by an interrogator who makes Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs look like Walter the Softy, Rawicz began planning his escape with six other prisoners. It would see them trek across the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas before finally finding salvation in British India during the winter of 1942.
City of Literature

While in Tibet, Rawicz claims to have seen a yeti (think Martin Keown crossed with Chewbacca) which led to his story being mocked. But let’s put this into context. Rawicz’s long walk to freedom would see two escapees perish in brutal conditions, ranging from snow blizzards to blistering heat. Throw starvation, dehydration, fatigue, high altitude and grief into the equation, and it’s a wonder the world didn’t contort itself into something far more sinister. Given that it only takes a few weeks in the Big Brother house before ‘celebs’ start ramming bottles of wine up their fadge, let’s not be too quick to judge what deprivation can do to a person.

A BBC documentary in 2006 questioned the validity of other aspects of Rawicz’s story. A report based on former Soviet records, including statements supposedly written by Rawicz himself, showed he’d been released as part of the 1942 general amnesty of Poles in the USSR, and had subsequently been transported to a refugee camp in Iran. Three years later, Witold Glinski came forward and claimed everything Rawicz’s had said was true except one crucial factor: it was Glinski’s story. Then, in 2011, Leszek Glinlecki accused Witold Glinski of being a fibber on the grounds they’d been classmates when the long walk happened.

While all of this was going on, Linda Willis spent a decade thoroughly examining the facts and published Looking for Mr. Smith, which ironed out a lot of creases, but couldn’t say for certain that Rawicz’s story was untrue. Irrespective of what the friggin’ truth is, the ghost-written book has been translated into 25 languages and is one of the greatest adventure stories ever told. The public like a good yarn.

It’s most likely that Rawicz’s story is a composite of other stories, and there’s quite a few to choose from. Stalin was responsible for more deaths than Hitler, and it’s been estimated by British historian Norman Davies that he’s accountable for fifty million deaths during his reign from 1924-53. That’s excluding wartime casualties. This makes any escape from Siberia an absolute miracle.

Whoevers version of truth we choose to believe, bear this statistic in mind from author Tadeusz Piotrowski: there were approximately 6 million Polish deaths during WWII, which equates to about one fifth of the pre-war Polish population. Therefore, Rawicz’s story needs to be understood in the context of survivor guilt – a mental condition that occurs when a person perceives themselves to have done wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not.

War is absolutely incomprehensible unless you’ve experienced it, so it’s pretty pointless trying to rationalise events through a modern lens. The validity of his story should be determined by those who were there, not those who weren’t. Clearly there is great sensitivity surrounding these stories and at least we can say Rawicz wasn’t attempting to monetise grief, as large chunks of profit were donated to charities. Writing acts as a form of therapy, a way of ordering experience into manageable chunks and exerting some level of control over our lives. The book may simply have enabled Rawicz to come to terms with events fortunately beyond our everyday comprehension. Nobody can deny him that.

His story has done others good too. Political cartoonist John ‘Brick’ Clark read Rawicz’s book as a nine-year-old who discovered The Long Walk in the library at his boarding school. It would inspire Brick to become a travel writer and satirise political injustices around the world through cartoons. All of which he recalled beautifully in an earlier issue of the Nottingham literary graphic novel, Dawn of the Unread.

Now, Rawicz is integral to a very different fight. Let us celebrate one of one of the many Polish immigrants to settle down in Nottingham over the past sixty years who contributed to the wealth of local culture. Remember that on 7 May…

My Long Walk with Slav by John ‘Brick’ Clark is available on the Dawn of the Unread website. This article was originally published in LeftLion magazine in April 2015