BOB'S BITS

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She did not say anything that she did not mean; she did not indulge in hyperbole or special pleading; she never submitted a manuscript that was flawed. Dan Franklin, Random House, on Patricia Kavanagh, 2008.

Even historians have occasionally to concede that post-modernism has a few useful things to say. Among them is the significant fact that every book is produced, a thing of industry and commerce. In that context it’s good to remember editors such as the legendary Maxwell Perkins, the Scribners man who birthed (or at least midwifed) Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe (the last quite a labor). So on the other side of the water let’s give a nod to Pat Kavanagh, best described as an agent-editor, who managed (some would say trained) an even larger stable and whose death in 2008 caused a genuine outpouring of grief and love among men and women normally too hard-bitten for such public display, which is to say authors and publishers. Patricia Olive Kavanagh was born on January 31, 1940, in the depths of a South African summer. She acquired an interest in literature from her older step-sister and took that to Capetown University where she didn’t stay long. After brief spells of acting, radio work, and copy-writing, she moved to England (in 1964) and an advertising job. Soon she went to a literary agency (A. D. Peters) and almost at once this beautiful, charming, funny and sharp {“my little shark,” wrote Arthur Koestler) woman became her agency’s leading spirit. Her list is like a who’s who (no, “the” who’s who) of English publishing, including her husband, Julian Barnes (who came in the middle, with his first novel), and including all sorts, Koestler I’ve mentioned, John Mortimer, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Drabble, the brilliant Brian Moore, Joanna Trollope, Andrew Motion, very early on Kingsley Amis and S. J. Perelman, and towards the end the actor-turned-author Emma Thompson and the scholarly Hermione Lee. And she kept almost all of them (including Barnes), managing to alienate only Martin Amis, a small enough task for one of Ms. Pat Kavanagh’s great stature and discerning eye. ©

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When I first read the OED, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything. David Bowie.

Today I am preparing a lecture on Robert Boyle’s pioneering scientific experiments on the “spring” (as he called it) of air. They are fascinating essays in science, possibly the most important experiments of the 17th century, and among their fascinations are the words Boyle chose. “Science” itself was rarely used, and then not usually in the sense we know. “Scientific” was unknown, as was “scientist” (Boyle thought of himself as a natural philosopher). And “experiment”? A main usage of that word at that time was as “experience,” usually in a religious context. Boyle was doing something really new, and he really needed new words, or new meanings for old words. Those words and meanings (“usages”) would come as science itself evolved, and we can trace their development in The Oxford English Dictionary, a massive collection that in 20 volumes gives us over 500,000 words, their pronunciations (e.g. English or American), their etymology, and their changing uses through time. What, for instance, did Shakespeare mean by “wonderful” or by “set?” The OED’s entry for “set” runs to 60,000 words and gives us over 400 usages: a fact that should ‘set’ you back on your heels. The Oxford English Dictionary, a project long in the making, first saw the light of day on February 1, 1884, when its first “fascicle” was printed. (What is a ‘fascicle’?Look it up!!) The OED continues to grow, and change, in time with our astonishingly flexible language (Despite Brexit and Trump, English welcomes immigrants and foreigners especially when it cannot reinvent itself). You will find the OED in most good libraries and, nowadays, on line. If you live or work in St. Louis, a county library card will do the trick. And if you get really interested in it, Simon Winchester has written two vastly entertaining books about the Oxford English Dictionary: The Professor and the Madman (2005) and The Meaning of Everything (2003). ©

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Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of preserving it. Havelock Ellis.

There are so many jokes about “the sexual revolution” (most of them, it seems, about missing it) that it must have happened. Now, sex and talk about sex is on the street or, failing that, on afternoon television. Before, it was whispered, concealed, to quote our current president “locker-room talk.” P. G. Wodehouse thought it was, and should be, confined to ladies’ clubs. In any case sex was certainly not a matter for public discussion between the sexes. But there were pioneers who thought sex so important, or so interesting, or even so exciting that it should be, so to speak, subjectified. Among the most famous of these was Havelock Ellis, born in London on February 2, 1859. His was a seafaring family, and Ellis the boy accompanied his father on several long voyages, in 1875 fetching up in Australia where, precociously, he taught school for four years before he returned to London, aged only 20, to study medicine and sex. It was perhaps a curious choice, for as it were despite his seafaring experience and his curiosity, he claimed to be a virgin when he wed, in 1891, a lesbian woman, Edith Lees, only to live apart from her in an early example of “open marriage.” After a spell of editing and publishing forgotten Elizabethan playwrights, Ellis wrote the first of many books on sex, Sexual Inversion (1897), largely on sexual relations between males (Ellis did not like the term “homosexual,” which he called “barbarously hybrid”). The book got him and others in a certain amount of trouble, but he kept at it. Before he’d finished (he died in 1939), Ellis himself became material for humorists (most famously, in 1929, James Thurber and E. B. White, Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why Do You Feel the Way You Do?), but he was by no means obsessed, and his mind was certainly not dirty. After all, Havelock Ellis’s whole (massive) literary production included many titles on hygiene, as also on war and peace, poetry and drama, and (of all things) Australia. ©

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If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled. Elizabeth Blackwell.

Cleanliness now seems so much a part of medicine that we notice it in its absence, but it was not always so. The idea that hospitals and even doctors’ hands should be quite clean came into medicine in the 19th century and by various routes. Most famous was the scientific route, pioneered by (inter alia) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Listerine. But there was also a moral and gender dimension to it, as can be seen in Florence Nightingale’s nursing stations in the Crimea, in the 1850s, and in the career of Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneering Anglo-American doctor who saw herself as a Nightingale apostle and who throughout her career insisted that medicine had a moral purpose, and a moral character, and that among its moralities was cleanliness. Elizabeth Blackwell was born rich, in Bristol, England, on February 3, 1821, but by the accidents of history fetched up poor in Cincinnati, where she and her sisters established an “English and French” girls’ school in 1837. At or near this point, Elizabeth developed a passion to be a medical doctor, and much to her surprise (and everyone else’s) became the first woman in the US to graduate (in 1849) with a medical degree. There followed a long and distinguished medical career in Paris, London, the USA (notably during the Civil War, in battle stations). Her convictions concerning the feminine and moral characteristics of medical care often put her at odds with reformers, scientific and otherwise (for instance opposing both contraception and inoculation), and her insistence on cleanliness in medical practice never wavered from her view that it was a moral good and a feminine principle more than it was a scientific one. Along her way she also helped to found the London School of Medicine for Women, and she surprised both her friends and her critics by insisting that human sexual passions (and the moral responsibility to control them) belonged equally to both sexes.©

{Uncle Bob is pulling our leg here..... Joseph Lister for antisepsis. Joseph Lawrence named Listerine after him.....]

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The older is condemned to death/ Pardoned, drags out lonely years/ Conspiring among the ignorant. W. B. Yeats, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, 1927.

These anniversary notes have several times remarked on the Protestant leadership of early Irish nationalism. It might be said also that it’s in this group you will find many of the more eccentric and romantic nationalists. An example of this fissiparous element was Constance Georgina, Countess Markievicz, born Constance Gore-Booth in London on February 4, 1868. Her interest in Ireland descended from her father, Sir Henry, whose wealth (and considerable philanthropies) came from his Irish estates, concentrated around Lissadell House, County Sligo. Constance and her four siblings, notably her militant suffragette sister Eva, were brought up to be class-conscious aristocrats, and Constance added to that pedigree by marrying a Polish count she met at art school in Paris. The couple had a daughter, whom Constance immediately turned over to her mother, Lady Gore-Booth, to concentrate on her own artistic, literary, military, and political commitments to Irish independence. These commitments were constant, sometimes courageous (she was sentenced to death, commuted to life, and soon amnestied, for her very military part in the 1916 Easter Rising), and often theatrical. Accomplished in the military arts of horse-riding and shooting, Constance appeared in uniform when it wasn’t appropriate (e.g. at clandestine Sinn Fein gatherings) and when it was (she was an officer in the Irish Citizen Army). And she was, predictably, an enthusiast for Gaelic country culture, a patron of those activities especially around Lissadell House. Her fiery intensity frightened W. B. Yeats, himself a guest at Lissadell, and perhaps also scared her husband, who separated (amicably) from her in 1909 to pursue his interests as a journalist and (later) war correspondent. Constance converted to Catholicism in prison in 1917 and in 1927 joined other Republican heroes at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin. ©

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Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, circa 1870.

It has been said that America’s industrial revolution came later, was briefer, and had a more transformative effect precisely because it was begged, borrowed, and stolen. Inventive men and their ideas moved across the Atlantic, often in defiance of European laws, and made the USA the industrial powerhouse of the world by 1900. True or not, this commerce in human genius was not all westwards. Hiram Stevens Maxim, born in Maine on February 5, 1840 and trained as a coachmaker, reversed the flow, became a British citizen, and indeed was knighted by King Edward VII for his service to British industry and commerce. That came in 1901, but Maxim had first sailed to Britain in 1881 as an accomplished engineer and the owner of many patents for a weird variety of things (e.g. mousetraps, hair curling irons, and a mechanical device for curing or at least alleviating asthma.) Among his patent claims was one for the carbon fiber used in some early electric lighting. He lost a dispute over that (with Edison), but it was as an electrical engineer that Maxim first arrived in London. Once there his frenetic energy and feverish mind led to yet more inventions, some of them successful. Maxim worked on what we know as the airplane, but his “flying machine” came to nothing more than a circus ride (the basic design is still in use). He gave a much energy, too, to spreading his ideas about poetry and religion (on the latter, Maxim’s views were much like those of Mark Twain), wherein he earned the enmity of G. K. Chesterton, who used Maxim to warn us that engineers, so rational in their daily work, were (therefore) subject to a peculiarly dangerous form of romanticism in their leisure thoughts and should certainly not be listened to when it came to religion. And of course Hiram Maxim invented the first truly functional machine gun, later used by both sides to rake with killing fire the no-man’s mud of Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun. ©

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O hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea. From “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” by William Whiting, 1860.

Of all those that “go down to the sea in ships, that do business on the great waters,” perhaps the bravest are lifeboat men and women. In many countries they are volunteers. Perhaps they should be, for what sane person would do this for pay? In Britain, these volunteers are, collectively, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and its stories are legend. Possibly the most famous is the crew at Cromer, a small town that looks onto the stormy, shallow North Sea from the far shoulder of the Norfolk coast. Just last month, the Cromer crew laid century wreaths on calm waters for two Swedish seamen who drowned in the breakers on the stormy night of January 17, 1917. Two did drown; but on that night, the old men of Cromer (the youngsters were at the Great War) rescued 27 men from two ships, first a Greek coaster and then the Swedish steamer Fernebo, having twice themselves capsized and still put out to sea. Their coxswain then, and for decades, was Henry George Blogg, born in Cromer on February 6, 1876, and an active lifeboatman with the Cromer boat for 53 (!!!) of his 78 years. Blogg’s exploits won him many medals (including the Empire Gallantry Medal and the George Cross), but rightly his crewmen were not far behind. The Fernebo rescue was thought so extraordinary an example of courage and seamanship that the RNLI created a new medal class so all his crew could be honored. When Blogg retired (in 1946) a new lifeboat given in his honor was named after him. It was motor-driven. Through most of his time as coxswain, the Cromer crew had put to sea, often in the most appalling conditions, by dragging the boat through the surf, then moving her to the rescue with oars and sail. Since then, RNLI charities have supplied Cromer with more motor-driven boats and a modern jetty with a slipway. The old boathouse has been moved up the beach and redeployed as the Henry George Blogg Lifeboat Museum. ©

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I shall never be persuaded that marriage has a charm to raise love out of nothing, much less out of dislike. Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, 1653, towards the end of their long courtship.

February 7 (as a birth-date) offers up great bounty, not least Charles Dickens (1812, Portsmouth, UK) and Sinclair Lewis (1885, Sauk Centre, MN). I hope to get to them one day, but today introduce a gifted writer of my period (the 17th century) who was published only long after her death. Even then, her incisive, sparkling wit found print only as an adjunct curiosity to an 1832 biography of her husband, Sir William Temple. The few letters then used allowed Temple’s biographer to write of her as a devoted and loyal helpmeet, and that she was, but as Emerson might have said, she were more than that. Lady Temple was born Dorothy Osborne on February 7, 1627, into a web of family connections that virtually guaranteed her an interesting life assuming she evaded the perils of early modern womanhood. She did, and an interesting life she had, too, with close relatives and friends on opposing sides of the English Civil Wars and then of Restoration politics. Her maternal uncle was a regicide; two of her brothers perished in battle, dying for a king who wasn’t worth their blood. Her marriage to Temple was not to her royalist parents’ liking. They thought she might have done better (in politics and in property), but as Temple became one of the richest office-holders of Restoration England she seems to have done well enough. And she liked him, too. Her diary and letters tell also of a woman of wide interests and considerable presence, one who helped arrange the important marriage of the Princess Mary with Prince William of Orange (and remained close to Mary when she became queen) and who took an intelligent, independent view of the political and religious strife (and of the politicians and preachers) of her troubled times. Might Dorothy Temple have been an author? The answer to that question must be that she was. Anyway, she’s buried, like Charles Dickens, in Westminster Abbey. ©

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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/ I took the one less traveled by./ And that has made all the difference. From "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost, 1920. Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher's favorite poem.

It is too often forgotten that the movement to restrict the voting rights (the old movement, that is, the one that took place in 1880-1920) of black people was aimed also at the voting power of poor whites. Of course the main intended victims were black, and in their task southern state governments were aided by the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine laid down by the Supreme Court in 1896 and abetted by the complicity or silence of northern white politicians. The fact that ‘separate’ facilities were plainly unequal offered an attack route to the clever, nay brilliant lawyers of the NAACP, but they needed plaintiffs. Then came Ada Lois Sipuel, born on February 8, 1924, in Chickasha, Oklahoma, a clever, bright, and courageous minister’s daughter who graduated from a black high school as valedictorian and from a black college magna cum laude, decided she wanted to go to law school but opined that the black version laid on for her by the state of Oklahoma was not up to snuff and sued. Her lawyer was Thurgood Marshall who made such mincemeat of the alleged equality of Oklahoma’s separate law school that (in 1948) the Supreme Court found unanimously in Sipuel’s favor. By the time she walked through the white law school’s doors at Norman she was Mrs. Fisher and pregnant, but still black, and to their lasting shame the authorities troubled to make her feel unwelcome. They provided her a lecture desk marked “Colored” and a chained-off area in the cafeteria, to make sure she would cause no race pollution while eating, but some of her white classmates proved “equal” to the occasion and learned to crawl under that chain and to sit in that chair. In 1992 Lois Fisher was appointed a Regent of the University of Oklahoma. She died in ’95, but near the law school you can remember her by sitting in the Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Memorial Garden. And then you can go out and work against voter suppression, which is with us again. ©

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I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best. Dusklands, 1974. J. M. Coetzee.

Some (I think most) of the world’s best literature is marked by themes of alienation. It’s as if the compulsion to tell the truth (even if in fiction) inevitably makes outsiders, not only of protagonists but of authors. Throughout a pretty long life (he’s 77 today), J. M. Coetzee has acted out his alienation, leaving his native land (he was born in the Western Cape, South Africa, on February 9, 1940) to try life in Britain, then the USA, and now finally (maybe) in Australia, where, he has said, he finds “Australian-ness” less uncongenial than any ‘ness’ he has yet tried. Coetzee’s sense of being an “other” may have begun with his name, the “James Maxwell” denoting an Englishness about him, the surname rooting him in Afrikanerdom, but it was deepened by his detestation of apartheid, then (on his travels) by his dislike of business culture and language (he spent several years as a computer programmer) and by his vehement and public denunciation of US involvement in Viet Nam. This probably cost him his American green card, a criminal trespass charge (incurred during an anti-war demonstration) sending him back to the Cape in 1971 with a PhD from Texas and his first novel (Dusklands, 1974) in process. There followed a tremendous literary explosion that brought Coetzee (among many other awards) the Tait prize (for Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980) two Man Bookers (for The Life & Times of Michael K, 1983, and Disgrace, 1999) and in 2003 the literature Nobel. That Nobel (the fourth to an African writer) was given to a writer “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.” That citation expresses the wondrous paradox of the finest fiction, an explosive mix of engagement and alienation. How does it work? Just ask Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, or Shakespeare’s Danish Prince, or Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, or Camus’ eponymous “stranger” of Algiers. ©

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I do not care how dark the night is. I believe in the coming of the morning. Joseph Charles Price.

It is well known that during our Civil War the Union Army quickly became home to many southern blacks, who were not fleeing the war as much as they were escaping slavery. Indeed, many would join the war effort, first as laborers and then as soldiers. Joseph Charles Price, born in Elizabeth City, NC, on February 10, 1854, was too young to fight. Nor was he fleeing slavery for he had been born of a free woman (Emily Paulin). Nevertheless, Emily thought she and her boy would do better in freedom land than in slavery territory. Indeed both did. Behind the Union lines in New Bern, NC, Emily found a husband, David Price, and Joseph found a surname and an education. He was taught by Bostoners, volunteers at an Episcopalian school for freedmen financed by (among others) the Lowell family, and there his teachers found him to be an extraordinarily bright child. Come the peace and legal equality, Joseph was sent to Lincoln University in PA where he graduated in 1879 with a BA in theology. Fame came when in 1881 Joseph Price was chosen as one of a dozen African Methodist Episcopal delegates to that year’s World Ecumenical Conference, in London. There his eloquence won him (from the London press) the sobriquet of “The World Orator,” and he took advantage of this to raise over $10,000 to take home (to North Carolina) to begin a college (Livingstone College, in Salisbury NC) and to continue his mission to raise freedmen up to full equality and full citizenship. As should be better known, North Carolina saw some signal successes in this quest, in the late 1890s raising up a “fusion” government of poor whites and blacks. But by then Joseph Price had laid his burden down, dying tragically young, in 1893. He did not, thus, live to witness the violent (indeed murderous) overthrow of the fusion government in 1899, the only coup d’état in United States history. Evidently, racism dies hard in the Tarheel state. ©

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Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it. Newman, circa 1852.

In an honors college seminar, yesterday, we discussed Bishop Newman’s “Idea of a University,” and his fear that technology might supplant the “university” as a locus in space and time where those having knowledge and those wanting it could meet in civil discourse to gift one another with their riches: age and experience meeting youth and curiosity in a common endeavor. And no, this was the 1850s, so Newman wasn’t writing about digitization, the internet, or Wikipedia. His Luddite instincts were catalyzed by the flood of cheap knowledge suddenly in print, and thus open to any untutored fool who could read and afford a ‘penny dreadful.’ I had to explain to the seminar about the new printing presses of the time, that could roll out printed pages faster than Ben Franklin had ever dreamed, but what I left out was the paper. Enter Henry Fourdrinier, born in London almost a century earlier (February 11, 1766) of Huguenot stock, whose stationer grand-père, Paul, had set up Bloxham & Fourdrinier in 1719. In 1799 or thereabouts Henry got wind of a new French invention that could make paper in rolls and set about getting hold of it, improving it, and securing English patents on the improvements. It was a draining business for the Fourdiniers who had thought to profit by licensing out their improved paper-making machinery to other manufacturers (and even to the Tsar of all the Russias). But licensees didn’t pay their fees and pirates set up their copies of Fourdrinier’s miracles without acknowledging his patent rights. Henry sued frequently and won the suits almost as often, but it was bankruptcy rather than prosperity that rewarded him and his family for their risk, their ingenuity, and their entrepreneurship. He died poor, despite an 1840 parliamentary grant of £7,000 in recognition of his troubles. But his inventions lingered on to disturb the academical dreams of Bishop John Henry Newman, just as the internet disturbs mine. When I think about it, anyway. ©

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Try as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm . . . He felt drawn to it. From The Education of Henry Adams (1918), Chapter 1.

Trump sometimes thinks of himself as another Andrew Jackson. This is mostly a delusion, an odd one even by his standards, but it did cast my mind back to another “first lady” who, like Ms. Obama, thought she’d left the White House to a barbarian. Louisa Catherine Johnson was born (in London) on February 12, 1775, and would live in Washington as Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, our sixth president. Louisa’s father, Joshua Johnson, was a wealthy Maryland planter-merchant then factoring in London for his family. He needed the wealth for he had seven daughters to marry off, and he did well by Louisa, who married John Quincy when his father was President, in 1797. The marriage took place in All-Hallows-by-the-Tower (an ancient church, survivor of the Great Fire of 1666), London, and it’s said that Louisa never lost her European ways and outlook. So to her Andrew Jackson was indeed a man without manners or sensibility, and in that strict sense she might have seen some Trumpish qualities in him. But Louisa had her doubts about the New England aristocracy into which she’d married. She might even have agreed with Margaret Fuller, who called them all “corpse-cold Unitarians,” and perhaps this lady of London and the Chesapeake (“the Madam,” her grandson Henry called her, in affection and awe) saw something warm, human, and passionate in her husband’s rough nemesis, that genuinely self-made man from Tennessee. Secretly glad to leave Washington, she came back often as John Quincy’s escort while he served 17 years as “Old Incorruptible,” a congressman from Massachusetts. She survived Adams by four years, and at her death (in 1852) the US Congress adjourned in mourning, the first time it did so for a woman, for Louisa Adams was indeed a grand old lady of the republic. ©

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Why do you weave a garment so gay? . . . / Blue as the wing of a halcyon wild,/ We weave the robes of a new-born child. Indian Weavers, by Sarojini Naidu.

The rainbow diversity of the Indian subcontinent was truly embodied in the life and work of Sarojini Naidu, poet laureate of the independence movement, who was born in Hyderabad on February 13, 1879 and died as the Governor of India’s largest state in 1949, the second year of independence. She died broken hearted by the communal violence that had marred independence and (in her view) sundered the nation, not least because she (although a high-caste Hindu) had always believed that Indian Islam held within it the democratic seed of a non-sectarian nationalism. Sarojini may have acquired this view from her father, an eminent Sanskrit scholar, university administrator, advocate of independence, and admirer of Islam. Her artistic side reflected her mother’s love of music and dance, and her wide connections with early nationalism began in a home noted for its openness, its sociability, and its liveliness. She began her studies at Madras University and continued them at Cambridge (Girton College). She didn’t much admire institutional education, but used her studies—in English literature—to gain the patronage of Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons, and took to heart Gosse’s advice to be “a genuinely Indian” poet (and stop imitating Wordsworth). Back home she married a prominent medical doctor (of a different caste and culture, in a civil ceremony), and soon poetry took second place to a passionate involvement with the independence movement. Naidu traveled India and the world (including the USA) to speak and agitate for nationhood. She became a trusted friend of Mohandas Gandhi, accompanied him on the legendary Salt March, and (like him) spent much jail time. Throughout her life Sarojini Naidu campaigned also for the rights of women—with signal successes—and for religious toleration and religion’s separation from the politics of state. Her failures in the latter were truly India’s tragedy. ©

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If they hang you, I'll always remember you. Sam Spade to Brigid O'Shaughnessy, The Maltese Falcon.

Hollywood may be notorious for wrecking really good novels, but now and then “a movie of the book” eclipses its light source. We forget the author and the characters, and remember the stars and maybe the director. Such was the fate of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, first published in book form on Valentine’s Day, 1930. It had already appeared, in part, as a magazine serial, and its anti-hero, Sam Spade, private dick (and the original hard-boiled egg), had also already excited Hammett’s imagination, threatening to wean him away from his previous stock detective, the “Continental Op.” It’s one of the best novels of its century, say the critics, and Hollywood thought so, too. The film that killed the book was in fact tinsel town’s third adaptation. On the second run some genius decided to make it into a comedy (roughly analogous to making Pride and Prejudice into a tragedy) starring Bette Davis (1936), but Davis herself later called Satan Met a Lady “junk” and so it was. No, the film version everyone knows (and knows it better than the novel) came out in 1941, as The Maltese Falcon, and starred Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The secondary roles were almost as brilliant, with Mary Astor as the cold beauty Brigid O’Shaughnessy (aka ‘Miss Wonderly’) and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet doing more than their bits as the very strange Joel Cairo and “the Fat Man,” the jolly and sinister Kasper Gutman. There’s also Elisha Cook, Jr., unforgettably in the background, as Wilmer, a pitiably petty villain. The film’s brilliance owes much to its writer-director, the immortal John Huston, for whom it was (to say the very least) a promising debut. Still, you do need to ask yourself, was the movie better than the novel? And since you will (almost certainly) have seen the film, you had better start reading the book. ©

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My parents taught me that if a man is drowning it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality. One must help him. Irena Sendlerowa to her Kansas friends, 2001.

Irena Sendlerowa was born on February 15, 1910, in a small town near Warsaw. The town’s large Jewish community was grateful for her doctor-father’s medical care and when he died in 1917 Jewish community leaders offered to pay for Irena’s education. Her mother refused the offer, but at Warsaw University Irena created waves through her passionate dedication to socialism and her refusal to follow campus rules designed to segregate Jewish students from the rest. At the time of the German occupation Irena was 29, married with three small children, and a social worker. So of course this young woman joined the Underground and was made head of the “Children’s Department.” She smuggled children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, provided them with new identities, and placed them with Polish Catholic families. She kept a kind of Schindler’s List, too, recording two copies of each child’s Jewish identity and hiding them in glass jars. One list would have been dangerous enough, but Irena’s idea was to return the children to their families once the horror was over, and so the copies were, to her, insurance. By the time she was finished she and her 25 co-workers in the Children’s Department had taken over 2500 children to high ground, safety, and life. In October 1943 she was arrested, brutally tortured, and sentenced to death, but somehow survived. After the war, Irena was recognized for her courage in Israel and eventually in Poland, but lived pretty obscurely until, in 2001, some high school girls in Uniontown, KS, brought her wartime work to life with their ten-minute play, Life in a Jar (a great title, it must be said). The play won a National History Day prize and won the girls a trip to Poland where they met their hero, a cheerful little old lady who did her best to explain to them why, so many years before, she had done the decent thing over 2,500 times. ©

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I think this ship will do us very well. She'll carry a good load. She isn't much to look at, though, is she? A real ugly duckling. Franklin Roosevelt, on the design of the Liberty Ship.

To repair massive losses from torpedo attacks, the ‘Liberty Ship’ was born. Designed in Britain and built there and (mainly) in the USA, their welded bottoms had a tendency to crack open, usually on the high seas and in rough weather, but when one fell apart in harbor it was decided that something was wrong in the welds (before the Liberties, ships’ bottoms were riveted). Enter the British metallurgist Constance Fligg Tipper, a recognized expert in the structure and mixing capabilities of crystals and metals, who surprised the engineering world by demonstrating that the problem was not in the welds per se, but in the metal plates themselves. So production methods were changed, and Liberty Ships and crews went on to complete their gallant tasks. Four still survive, in maritime museums. Constance Tipper was born in Hertfordshire on February 16, 1894. Her parents (and in his turn her husband) urged her to follow her scientific interests, in which she performed none too well at Newnham College, Cambridge. She would much later become a Newnham fellow and a Cambridge reader in engineering, but in 1915 what does a young woman do with a mediocre degree in a generalist field (“natural science”)? Constance became a tech in the Royal School of Mines, in London, and began teaching herself about metals and other solids. Fifteen years later, having proved her mettle and found herself a husband, she was back in Cambridge with an earned doctorate and a research fellowship, doing pioneer work in crystallography and metal stress. After retiring from Cambridge in 1960, she worked for a while at the Barrow shipyards and then repaired to her brother’s house in Penrith, Cumbria, where her trout fishing, gardening, and water-colors kept her going strong until 1995. Today in Newnham College gardens, a sweet chestnut “Tipper Tree” reminds students of what you can do with a third-class degree. It was planted in honor of Constance Tipper’s 100th birthday. ©

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Money is just a way of keeping score. H. L. Hunt.

I suspect that one of the reasons (there were, to be sure, many) that we didn’t like Muammar Gaddafi is that he nationalized the Libyan oil fields that were owned, or claimed, by Bunker Hunt, an American oilman, poker player, and speculator also famous for trying (and nearly succeeding) to corner the world silver market. How Hunt got hold of those Libyan fields might be a good story, but today I’m more interested in his father, H. L. Hunt, who got his start in oil (after his Arkansas cotton fields were flooded) by playing poker very well. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt was born on February 17, 1889, in Illinois, His dad speculated in agricultural land, farmed some of it, and taught his son to go after the main chance. Home-schooled, H. L. went off and did just that. He took his poker winnings (reputed to be very large) into oil field speculation, was exceptionally successful in oil, and then (in the late 1930s) purchased the rights to the East Texas oil field for a measly million. It was a ridiculous bargain price even then, but the titles (or the means by which they’d been acquired) were a bit dodgy, and the wildcatter who sold them to Hunt, the colorful “Dad” Joiner, was happy enough that Hunt agreed to defend him against all legal claims arising from his land dealings. Dad Joiner died poor. H. L. Hunt died probably the richest man in the USA. J. Paul Getty thought so (at least in terms of liquid capital privately held), and Warren Buffet was not yet a household name. Never entirely secure in his wealth, Hunt founded the American Football League and fathered (at least) fifteen kids, several of them bigamously or illegitimately. A few of those fifteen (both “wrong-siders” and legal issue) followed their dad into conservative Republican politics, generous support for the Southern Baptist Church, oil wheeling and dealing, and gambling. But we haven’t (yet) made any of them president. ©

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Her majesty desires greatly that her subjects may come to embrace the same faith quietly and with charity, whereby she shall receive great happiness. Queen Mary I, Proclamation, August 18. 1553.

In 1563, only five years into Elizabeth I’s Protestant monarchy, John Foxe published his Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, an immediate best-seller that became better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Foxe detailed the sufferings of early English Protestants, forever fixed Elizabeth’s elder sister, Queen Mary I, as “Bloody Mary” (at least in the Protestant mind), and provided dramatic examples of brave and selfless Protestant martyrdom that would (centuries later) flower in particular strains of Victorian poetry and statuary. But perhaps the more important thing to remember about Bloody Mary, in these days when “court politics” seem to rule the Washington roost of President Trump, is that she’d had a very hard schooling that did not fit her for government. The eldest daughter of Henry VIII, born on February 18, 1516, Princess Mary suffered the all the consequences of her parents’ divorce and her mother’s cruel disgrace. In a world dominated by an irascible, paranoid king, Mary’s resolute Catholicism made her the living symbol of Henry’s sin (to those inclined to view it as such) despite his attempts to de-legitimize her through proclamation and legislation. Whether at court or exiled from it, Mary’s fortunes ebbed and flowed according partly to her relations with her father’s current consort, partly to the shifting fortunes of her own patrons and protectors. At the center of Mary’s world, her king-father raged and ruled, marking out men and women for power and favor and then sending them to the block. One of the few people who dared to defy Henry VIII was his eldest daughter, who held fast to her faith, her rank and her rights despite her own fears and panics and her father’s terrible frowns. Mary’s “bloodiness” was not so much invented by John Foxe as it was made at the court of King Henry. ©

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His profession made him rich and he made his profession respectable. Dr. Johnson on David Garrick.

The Edict of Nantes (1598) brought religious peace to France and recognized the rights of French Protestants, the Huguenots. Its revocation (in October 1685) by Louis XIV, was—my dad always said—the Sun King’s biggest mistake. In settling questions of sovereignty, it robbed France of a productive, progressive population: those thousands of Huguenots who could afford to leave, or who could not stomach the requirements of uniformity. Leaving France they enriched much of Europe, but in particular Britain and its colonies. Faneuil Hall in Boston is one of their monuments. The many Garrick Theatres that exist today in the Anglophone world are monuments also, all named after the grandson of a Huguenot refugee, David de la Garrique, a merchant rich enough to buy his son Peter a commission in the British army and canny enough to anglicize his surname to Garrick. David Garrick the actor was born on February 19, 1717 (that’s 300 years ago today) at the Angel Inn, Hereford, where his father Peter was garrisoned. Peter Garrick had made a good marriage, and his commission and his wife’s connections enabled David to make his way in provincial society and to acquire a good education, but Peter was not best pleased when the young gentleman went to London, kicked over his traces, and became the most famous actor in the history of English theatre. David Garrick’s breakthrough came in 1741 when he starred in Richard III, on which he immediately capitalized with his own play, oddly enough a French farce, The Lying Valet. And that was the way Garrick went: actor, then playwright, then impresario. His massive talents in each field made him famous, made him rich, and made of his name a theatrical byword. David Garrick even played Paris, but he’s buried in the Protestant Abbey at Westminster. ©

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Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival. Rene Dubos, 1968.

The 1960s decade has been blamed for so many problems for so many years that we’re in danger of forgetting how much fun it was. That may indeed be the critics’ aim, for what they really fear is the decade’s moral energy, an energy that in so many ways threatened to upend our complacencies. The richest nation in the world, we focused our attention on poverty; if we’d actually done something about it we might still be the richest nation in the world. The civil rights and black power movements wakened the nation to the many ways in which racism blighted and blinded all citizens. Today, we see it for what it is. Another productive tension introduced by the “60s awakening” was the recognition that our very prosperity (as ill-distributed as it was) endangered us all with environmental degradation. We borrowed our progress at high rates, and many scientists and economists turned to the task of explaining how it would, one day, make us bankrupts. Among them was René Dubos, a butcher’s son, born in rural France on February 20, 1901. He emigrated to the US to continue his education in Ag Science (at Rutgers), shifted gears to concentrate on pathogens and their strategic frailties, and made some signal discoveries in antibiotics. Dubos was one of the first to see that the better we got at killing them, the better pathogens became at fighting back. His The Bacterial Cell in its Relation to Problems of Virulence, Immunity, and Chemotherapy (1945) was an early essay in micro-environmentalism, and in the 1960s Dubos became a powerful macro-environmentalist. He turned his patents into the Dubos Center for Human Environments and his scientific energy into his Pulitzer prizewinner, So Human an Animal (1968). Both works eloquently embody his contribution to the positive, educative force of the 1960s decade and to its lessons still to learn. ©

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No one need be afraid. Barbara Jordan, House Judiciary Committee speech, 1974, quoting a 1789 North Carolina resolution on impeachment.

Donald Trump, the “made in China” retailer who has become our immigration control president, might like to cite Barbara Jordan’s strong support for tighter immigration policies. And indeed Jordan did, when (1994-96) she chaired President Clinton’s Commission on Immigration Reform. But the restrictions this liberal activist proposed were not religious, racial, or ethnic, for she understood our Constitution very well. Indeed, what today’s White House might not like to remember, Jordan (as a new-minted congresswoman, in 1974) made an influential speech on Congress’s duty, when a president’s actions presented evidence prima facie of behavior subversive of the Constitution, to examine and vote upon articles of impeachment. That was an eloquent address indeed, still thought to be one of the 100 best speeches by an American politician in the 20th century, but perhaps not surprising from a woman who had been a champion debater as an undergraduate, a magna cum laude graduate in history and political science, a star law student, and a pioneer leader of the civil rights movement in Texas. Born into a Baptist minister’s family on February 21, 1936, Barbara Charline Jordan began to make waves as a high school kid (in segregated Houston), and continued to do so as Texas’s first African-American state senator since Reconstruction. That was in 1966, and with Lyndon Johnson’s patronage Jordan made her way—with all deliberate speed—to the House of Representatives in Washington. There Johnson helped her to secure a seat on the House’s Judiciary Committee where, in 1974, Barbara Jordan made history with an eloquent, erudite, non-partisan speech which, many believe, cooked Richard Nixon’s goose before he was even in the oven. Barbara Jordan simply stated the facts, like the good lawyer she was, and summarized their constitutional significance like the good historian she was. It would be so good to have her back. ©

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The Museum will be illuminated every evening until the public curiosity be gratified. Rembrandt Peale, advertisement for his gas-lit museum, Baltimore.

Charles Wilson Peale was a famous early American painter, and his works, especially his portraits, are today important documents of our past. He was also commercially minded, and it could even be said that Peale trademarked his children, among whom we number his daughter Raphaelle and his sons Rubens, Titian, and Rembrandt. All of them were (inevitably?) instructed in drawing and painting, but it was only Rembrandt Peale who enjoyed anything like his father’s success. Born in Bucks County, PA, on February 22, 1778, during the British occupation of Philadelphia and the continentals’ winter encampment at nearby Valley Forge, Rembrandt made the most of his father’s connections, and talents. He married well, into a Philadelphia Catholic family (and named only one of his children, Michael Angelo, after artists), studied in Europe under Jacques-Louis David, the great artist of the French Revolution, and returned to his native land only to find that his potential clients and subjects wanted their paintings done in a less “sensational” style. Romanticism had not yet hit our shores. Rembrandt kept on painting, nevertheless, and his Washington (which he took from life but did not finish until many years after Washington’s death) is justly famous. He also ‘did’ John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson, and other heroes and heroines of his age, but he developed a sideline in showmanship which is what kept his (and his family’s) body and soul together. Notably, he developed a museum in Baltimore, where he showed off his own works, other paintings, many artifacts (including Mastodon skeletons he had unearthed nearby), in attractive atmospheres that he hoped would attract paying custom. He even pioneered gas lighting for his galleries, in which he invested heavily and unwisely. The building has gone through many uses (including as city hall and a school for African-Americans) but it survives today as the (restored) Peale Museum. Rightly so. ©

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I should be sorry if I only entertained them. George Frederic Handel.

The German word Hanse derives from a word for ‘convoy,’ and the maritime towns of the Hanseatic League were known for their ships and sailors. But they had to carry goods out, and bring goods back, and the Hanse’s inland towns were also significant places. Halle, with its salt mines and craft guilds, was a prosperous place, quite far inland but the site of the upwards mobility of the Handel family, from farmers to copper workers to court surgeon to the most prolific composer of the 18th century, George Frederic Handel, born in Halle on February 23, 1685. Surgery was still a mere craft, and Handel’s move into music was hardly fated (most of his male siblings became barbers, surgeons, apothecaries). But somehow the boy became musical, found a good teacher, and began his lifelong habit of copying musical scores. Handel was orphaned at 12, but his talents took him on to school, then to university (where he did not study music), and finally to the position of deputy organist at the Calvinist church in Halle. By this time (1703) his prodigious talents were becoming well known. He studied in Italy under de Medici auspices, and there produced compositions that won him sufficient acclaim to be (in 1710) appointed kappelmeister to Prince George of Hanover, already singled out by British parliamentary enactment as the heir apparent to the Stuart throne. And so George Frederick Handel, by 1714, had settled himself in London, the city which became the scene of his fame (although his great Messiah was first performed in Dublin, in 1742) and the principal source of his fortune. His productivity was prodigious, his wealth legendary, his music the delight of thousands. (His Zadok the Priest, by the way, has been played at every British coronation since 1727.) But Handel remembered his hard times as an orphan in Halle, and assigned all profits and commissions for The Messiah to the London Foundling Hospital. ©


Without Vaucanson's duck, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France. Voltaire.

One of the Paris museums we have yet to visit is the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which is what it says it is, a museum of the mechanical arts. It was founded during the Revolution, an expression perhaps of the Revolution’s modernizing energy and certainly of its anticlericalism, for it was placed in the priory of St-Martin-des-Champs, where it still thrives. It houses many interesting objects, not least Foucault’s Pendulum and a complete reconstruction of Lavoisier’s laboratory (wherein, among many other discoveries, sulphur was first isolated). But the whole museum is an outgrowth of an earlier collection, and an amazing one, of the inventions of Jacques de Vaucanson, a compulsive tinkerer of the Enlightenment, who at his death made a bequest of all his “machines” to King Louis XVI. So when Louis was beheaded (by a devilishly clever machine that Vaucanson did not make), the collection descended to the French nation, which made the best of it, not only a museum but also a school (the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers) that, it was hoped, might train up future tinkerers. De Vaucanson (the ‘de’ was added when he became famous) was born poor, in Grenoble, on February 24, 1709, and apprenticed as a clockmaker. But by 18 he was famous as a maker of curiosities, and established (by noble patrons) in his own workshop. He invented robots of considerable sophistication (dining room servants and a flute player, for instance), and not just human ones. His “Digesting Duck” gained him further fame. Some thought his “android” inventions profane and irreligious (one can see their point), and in the 1740s de Vaucanson turned to more productive tinkering. He’s credited with early versions of automatic looms, computer punch cards (which ran his loom), and automated lathes. Several of de Vaucanson’s toys would shape France’s industrial revolution, but only when their time had come and after later tinkerers had improved his designs. ©

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To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters. Anthony Burgess, 1974.

Yesterday in the Honors College (at the launch party of the college’s annual literary magazine, Bellerive), we heard a provocative and yet charming speech (from a local poet) about starting up a writing career. She had some unusual advice for budding writers, but even odder advice was received (in 1949) by Anthony Burgess, in a publisher’s rejection letter of his first novel. “This is a second novel. Go away and write the first one.” Never one to take no for an answer, Burgess would go on to write (and publish) 30 more, compose a couple of symphonies and numerous jazz scores, script many films, and late in life build a formidable reputation as a careful, incisive, and remarkably prolific literary critic. Most (certainly not all) of his novels were written as Anthony Burgess, but that was itself a pseudonym, for he was born John Burgess Wilson, in Manchester, England, on February 25, 1917. Both parents were music-hall musical, and although they did not care much for the boy Burgess did grow up wanting to be a musician and composer. That was delayed, however, by an education (he majored in English), by the war (he served in the education corps), and by what may have been the century’s stormiest and most drink-sodden marriage (his first wife, Lynne Jones, died of cirrhosis). It was in the middle of that marriage, 1962, that Burgess published his most famous (and, some would say, least characteristic) novel, A Clockwork Orange. I’ve not read it but I am told it is nowhere near as disturbing as the 1971 movie that Stanley Kubrick made of it. Meanwhile Burgess climbed out of alcoholism, married another and even more unusual woman (Countess Liliana Macellari) and together they fashioned a new life (mainly in France and Morocco) of extraordinary intellectual and artistic productivity. Burgess died of his vices in 1993, universally mourned. ©