BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"They are the magi."
O. Henry, 1862-1910
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. . . of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest. Of all who receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi. From O. Henry, “The Gift of the Magi.”

Every profession produces its own language, or lingo, incomprehensible to lay people outside the profession), Among the odder expressions of ‘journalese’ (the lingo of journalists) is the term “bad news day,” which is not a day full of bad news. Rather it’s a day which produces no news at all, or more precisely no “newsworthy” events. One solution is to make bad news happen, which became a trademark of notorious journalists like Harry Tammen and Frederick Bonfils whose bad-news-day stunts are still remembered, I hope, in Kansas City and then—when they got run out of town—Denver. A less hazardous way of filling up a newspaper on a bad news day is the “human interest story,” true to life because it was about life, hum-drum enough to be familiar but also a life which takes odd turns, comic or tragic, funny or sad; and in the classic human interest story there’s something heart-warming (or heart-wrenching) about it. One journalist who made his reputation on human interest stories, is known today as O. Henry but began his life as William Sydney Porter, in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862. He became O. Henry in 1899 when, in prison for embezzling, he published a story in McClure’s magazine. He started in Greensboro as a pharmacist, moved to Texas for his health and on from pharmacy into a variety of professions, none of them lucrative. But he made friends easily, as a witty bon vivant whose singing and story-telling made him even more attractive. He married well, Athol Estes, seventeen at the time, and tried more lucrative work, including (fatefully) banking. Under a cloud, he left banking to become a reporter with the Houston Post (which published his human interest stories). But he couldn’t leave the embezzlement so easily, and fled to Honduras to avoid trial. When he heard Athol was dying he returned to face the music and care for his daughter. After his early release (good behavior) from prison, he and Margaret moved to New York where, as a writer, he did pretty well until 1910, when he died of drink. His life was a human-interest story, warts and all, and when he could not draw on his own life for stories, he drew on conversations he heard, in hotel lobbies, on trains, and in prisons, stories with an odd twist which could arouse readers’ interest and twang their heartstrings. After all, as well as being a skillful writer, he was a tiger on the mandolin and thus one who knew how to twang strings. ©

[Stanley]

"The longer I live . . . the more I am assured that all sectarianism is the offspring of hell." Alexander Campbell.
Reverend Alexander Campbell, 1788-1866.
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If a person says such is his private opinion, let him have it as his private opinion; but lay no stress upon it; and if it be a wrong private opinion, it will die a natural death much sooner than if you attempt to kill it. Alexander Campbell.

Alexander Campbell’s life took him from old world Presbyterianism to new world evangelicalism, made him a famous debater on theology and public morality, and took him from one denomination to another until he found truth (or stability) in the Disciples of Christ church, of which he was a founder. One could say that it was in his blood, for he was born the eldest son of Thomas Campbell (1763-1854) who’d himself gone through several splinters of Scots-Irish Presbyterianism to be—by the time of Alexander Campbell’s birth on September 12, 1788—a minister in the Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterian church in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It’s a denominational name that narrates its own story, but to understand Alexander’s life we must know, also, that the Rev. Thomas was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, and on Alexander’s tenth birthday gave him John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and Essay on Human Understanding. Once the family was in America (variously in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky), Alexander took as his guides both human reason and (as he saw them) the unalterable truths of the New Testament. So while Alexander roamed from his ordination as a Baptist through several other denominations (and independent congregations) he held fast to the idea that religious unity would arise when people of sound mind and good faith saw the truth. But American Protestantism continued to splinter, and eventually Alexander himself helped to found a single denomination, the Disciples of Christ (or, sometimes, just “Christian”) church. In the meanwhile, he was a cheerful warrior for his own version (whatever he called it), and entered into public debate (well-advertised and often very well-attended) with all comers, including even the atheist Robert Owen and, at the other end of the spectrum, the Roman Catholic bishop of Cincinnati. Alexander Campbell also believed that any church needed, nay required, a well-educated ministry, and so along the way he also founded Bethany College (1841) in far western Virginia, a liberal arts institution that still exists and still maintains its religious affiliation. True to its founder’s enlightenment views on the science of good sense, Bethany requires all of its students to be vaccinated against Covid-19, to mask, and to maintain social distancing. So, in that little sliver of West Virginia sandwiched between Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Scottish enlightenment survives. ©.

[Stanley]

Poor, discontented, mutinous, and armed.
Virginia's "Servants' Plot" and the Origins of Slavery.
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How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed. Governor Sir William Berkeley’s report to the Lords of Trade, ca. 1670

For many, perhaps most of those who came there, 17th-century Virginia was a hellish place marked by high death rates and low life expectancies. It was a demographic disaster zone made worse by a steady reduction in the price of Virginia tobacco, a luxury product in the 1620s which, by the 1660s, was selling as low as a penny a pound dockside in the colony. The solution was to produce yet more tobacco, which kept prices low and increased the misery of those who did the labor. In the Restoration era (post 1660) the burdens and the diseases of brutal work and abject poverty fell chiefly upon white “indentured servants” imported from England. Those who survived their indentures faced the virtually insurmountable challenge of surviving (let alone prospering) through planting tobacco. These poor whites, servants and freedmen, were a major source of the individual violence and collective resistance which culminated in Bacon’s Rebellion (1676). And at first they seemed all too eager to make common cause with African slaves, men and women whose life expectancies were even fewer, dimmer, and shorter. This was the nightmare of the planter class, most of them not “cavalier” aristocrats but self-made men who, through a combination of luck and ruthlessness, had clawed their way up the colony’s social and political ladders. Even before Bacon’s Rebellion this horror was made manifest by a plot, among Gloucester County servants and slaves, to escape their suffering through violence against their masters. This “servant’s plot” was discovered when, on September 13, 1664, servant John Berkenhead revealed it in the wrong company. This led to arrests, brutal interrogations, confessions and condign punishment. There were relatively few hangings, not least because dependent labor was so very valuable to Virginia’s new rich, but the episode revealed the connections between the rise of the planter class and that class’s power to control of the markets in land and labor. Following on Nathaniel Bacon’s larger (and more nearly successful) rebellion (1676), their preferred solution was to depend on slavery and thus to create a permanent (and visibly distinct) labor force. Soon, and certainly before 1720, Virginia became a slave society based on a slave economy, but that ‘solution’ had been forecast and fated by the rebellions of the Restoration period. ©

[Stanley]

Julius Jeffreys, virtuous Victorian.
Julius Jeffreys and the Public Health
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The British Army in India: its preservation by appropriate clothing, housing, locating, recreative employment, and hopeful encouragement of the troops. Title of an 1858 book by Julius Jeffreys.

In the current covid pandemic, seriously ill patients are often put on a respirator to assist them in breathing. The device benefits patients by helping to ensure that the air reaching their lungs is warmed and moistened, but also like a common face mask, protecting those nearby (notably ICU staff) by filtering pathogens out of the patient’s exhalations, There are several state governors who need to understand this, and we all should know that the basic device was the invention of an extraordinary 19th-century surgeon, Julius Jeffreys, born in London on September 14, 1800. His father Richard was a fine example of the bad clerical practice of absenteeism, holding a rectorship in Herefordshire (and its income) while serving as an East India Company chaplain; but he educated his children well, mainly at home, and Julius was licensed as a surgeon in 1822. He immediately returned to India, taking on his first residency in Calcutta during a cholera epidemic. That challenge survived, Julius Jeffreys became a public health reformer. Inter alia, he found new ways to keep people cool by designing a primitive air conditioner (he called it a ‘refrigerator,’ one of the earliest uses of the word) based on air flow and evaporation. He also researched the high country, and—pronouncing it healthful—was a major force in creating the ‘hill station’ system for the Raj and, for civilians, the posh holiday camp atmosphere that would characterize Simla. Along the way, Julius Jeffreys became a critic of empire, urging better treatment for the indigenous population and the reinvestment, in India and in Indians, of the East India Company’s profits. Perhaps the company tried to kick Jeffreys upstairs by offering him the superintendency of its main opium factory, but Jeffreys refused the offer on moral grounds. Quitting the company, he returned to England (1835) to find a sister with bad lungs, and invented for her a ‘volute humidifier’, which was put to use for a wider clientele by the pioneer medical reformer John Snow. Then, in 1836. Jeffreys invented the ‘respirator’, perhaps initially for his sister but soon of wider use, including Thomas Carlyle’s wife Jane, who praised the relief brought to her tender lungs by Julius Jeffreys’ “warm summer air.” At this point (late 1836) Julius Jeffreys decided that he and his family should also benefit materially from his inventiveness and patented his HME (heat and moisture exchanger). He sold thousands. His fellow medics condemned this as verging towards the commercialization of their profession. But Julius went on inventing, and he went on (until 1877, through his work and through his writing) crusading for better public health in a society that was slow to recognize that good public health is essential for good private health. We could use a few of his sort today. Meanwhile, do the right thing and mask up. You might save a life. ©

[Stanley]

"You know how to whistle, don't you? Just put your lips together and blow." Lauren Bacall, as 'Slim,' in "To Have and Have Not"
Lauren Bacall, 1924-2014.
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I wasn’t put on earth to be liked. I have my own reasons for being and my own sense of what is important and what isn’t, and I’m not going to change that. Lauren Bacall.

In 1981, Peter Stone and John Kander got together to write a musical comedy based on the 1942 film Woman of the Year, the comedy classic that made a couple out of its stars, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It seems almost inevitable that they would pick Lauren Bacall for the Hepburn role. Bacall became ‘best friends’ with Hepburn and Tracy during the filming of The African Queen (1951), a friendship that deepened when all four of them joined in a public protest against the depredations of the House Un-American Activities Committee. So in that 1981 musical comedy, on stage, Lauren Bacall knew what she was singing about. Everyone expected her to be the star of the show, and she came through perfectly, helped by her presence, her persona, and her gravelly yet soft voice to be a convincing woman of (her own) strong views and with (her own) strong ambitions. Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske, in the Bronx, New York, on September 16, 1924. Her later fame ensured that a lot of people would claim credit for “discovering” her as she worked her way through the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and a brief but promising modeling career (she was Miss Greenwich Village of 1942 and in the next year her picture appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar). That cover picture brought her a screen test for the lead role in To Have or Have Not. The producer Howard Hawks signed her up for $100 weekly, placed her as “Slim” opposite Humphrey Bogart’s ”Steve” where she made herself a star and found herself a lover, then a husband and (three more times) a co-star. When Bogart died (in 1957) Bacall rebounded into an unhappy marriage with Jason Robards (1961 to 1969) but as an actor she went on to many roles in film, on stage, and in guest appearances in various TV series. Wherever she went she was expected to be the star, and generally she did not disappoint. But her classic roles with Bogart remain the ones it is best to remember, and when they come up on stream you
should take them in. She was a woman of independent means, and that was how she was remembered in her obituaries in 2014. ©.

[Stanley]

"To build a fast car, a good car, the best in its class.”
Walter Owen Bentley, 1888-1971.
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I have always wanted to produce a dead silent 100 mph car, and now I think that we have done it. Walter Owen Bentley on rolling out his 8-liter “Bentley”, ca. 1929.

Growing up in Iowa, I had what our neighbors thought an unhealthy interest in motor cars. At 13, I could identify most cars back into the 1930s, but I had never even seen a Rolls-Royce. That opportunity came when, in early 1957, I met the parents of Robin McDonald, my dad’s WWII comrade. But he didn’t have a Rolls. His R-R was a ‘Bentley,’ because, he told me, it was more satisfying to own Iowa’s only Bentley rather than its 4th Rolls-Royce. The Bentley, he explained, was a Rolls-Royce “marque;” it (then) cost $300 less than the Rolls and differed mainly in its grille design and hood ornament. It was the most luxurious car I have ever ridden in. As the ad said, you couldn’t even hear its clock tick. Thus we come to W. O. (Walter Owen) Bentley, born into comfortable circumstances in Hampstead, London, on September 16, 1888. Walter didn’t take well to the kind of education a boy of his class might have had (although he did attend Clifton, a private boy’s school). But he loved to tinker, and in 1904 an internship was arranged with the Great Northern Railway, where Bentley learned what he needed to know to do what he wanted to do, which was to design and build motor cars, preferably of the racing sort. Bentley knew his metals and how to work them, and he was a brilliant designer, with a sideline in racing motorcycles. He found work with several firms as a designer, salesman, and/or a successful race driver. During WWI he took his talents to war and redesigned the Sopwith Camel (mainly the engine) to make it Britain’s best warplane. Returning to cars, he made the 20s his signature decade, forming a production, sales, and racing company with his brother and others (the “Bentley boys” they were called), winning the Le Mans race four years running (1927-1930). But Bentley had always been too little interested in sales and marketing, and the firm entered the Great Depression deeply in debt. In bankruptcy, its valuable assets, including the Bentley name, were bought up at bargain basement prices by Rolls-Royce, which quickly put out a “Bentley” car. Bentley sued R-R (he wanted his name back) but to no avail. He lived on as a designer in the industry, but never again in his own name or for his own company. W. O. Bentley died in 1971, mourned by many as a brilliant man, a faithful friend, and a good companion. ©

[Stanley]

A woman of strongly held opinions.
Katharine White, Editor.
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With a few exceptions, the critics of children's books are remarkably lenient souls.... Most of us assume there is something good in every child; the critics go from this to assume there is something good in every book written for a child. It is not a sound theory. Katharine Angell White.

About a decade ago there appeared in The Guardian newspaper an article entitled “The lost art of editing.” It included useful observations by several who were, or had been, editors themselves, and who did not think that the art had been lost. It’s true today that book publishing is big business, and publishers want the finished project here and now so they can meet the financial and production targets of (often) their “parent” company; and good editing can’t be done at speed. The other problem is that good editing is inherently invisible. And so one looks back, a little sadly, at legendary editors of the past, for instance Max Perkins (1884-1947), the Scribner’s editor who ‘made’ Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (and several others) into literary giants, and not always at the high end of the market, either. Another genius editor, Katharine Angell White, born Katharine Sergeant on September 17, 1892, may be said to have made a magazine, for it was she above all others who changed Harold Ross’s “comic magazine” into a showcase of serious short fiction and poetry, and made it possible to speak of a “New Yorker style.” Hired in 1925 as a part time reader when Ross’s magazine was only six months old, White quickly became “the lady with the pencil” who made the New Yorker’s literary reputation and helped Ross to shape the magazine as a whole product. She also married (in 1929) one of its best (and best-loved) writers, E. B. White, after divorcing her first husband, the lawyer Ernest Angell. It was typical of Katharine White the person that she told no one about her second marriage (not even her Angell children) until it happened. She was a small person, quiet and classy, who rejected most submissions but also dispensed pithy advice, and many writers became New Yorker regulars after multiple White rejections. The list is impressive. These relationships recall publishing as a collegial world wherein hard words were often meant well. Like many editors, Katharine was a writer herself, one who turned her best talents to writing about gardening; after she died, her pieces were collected and edited, appropriately, by E. B. White. When she retired her spirit lived on in her office, left empty first as a memorial and mark of respect, and then, latterly, occupied by her son, Roger Angell, New Yorker editor (and writer) in his turn, who has written lovingly about her (and about his step-father), and who will celebrate his 101stbirthday this coming Sunday. ©

[Stanley]

Equality later, or equality now.
Equality now or, if not, when?
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In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. Booker T. Washington.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. W. E. B. Dubois.

On 18th September 1895, Booker T. Washington delivered his famous (to some, infamous) "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Atlanta International Exhibition. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, was already a well-known leader of his community, and those (whites) who’d invited him to speak—leaders of the so-called ‘New South’ movement—wanted him to be heard and wanted the South to be thought of as a progressive place, where (for instance) investors’ money would be safe, secure, and profitable. That meant that southern ‘race relations’ had to be reformed and improved. Probably the most famous portion of the speech urged southern African Americans to be “patient”:
To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, I would say: "Cast down your bucket where you are--cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded."
Considered in broad, that is good, ‘down home’ advice. It’s often repeated, too, given by parents to their children for instance, and it has a variety of forms, as in ‘every journey starts with a single step.’ ‘In formulating your goals, you must first consider your assets.’ In what Mark Twain called (in 1901) “The United States of Lyncherdom” black people had too many liabilities. Washington’s public judgment was that the best way forward—or up—was to convince whites—southern whites in particular—that black people were safe, sure, certain, folk who would not claim equality until they deserved it.
Other black leaders dissented strongly, none more so than W. E. B. DuBois, who argued that it was wrong (both morally and tactically) to invite delay in securing the rights which should have come with freedom. DuBois would found the “Niagara Movement” which would become the NAACP, at its birth considered a radical movement because it claimed equality now, not in some distant (and rapidly receding) future. At the time, most whites who were sympathetic towards African-American aspirations favored Washington’s moderation over DuBois’s militancy. And then there were the whites who were not sympathetic at all. To judge the matter today, say by assessing Trumpist reactions to the Black Lives Matter campaign, we as a nation haven’t made much progress since 1895. ©

[Stanley]

"from that point we became mere numbers."
Witold Pilecki, 1901-1948
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Here our hair of head and body were cut off, and we were sprinkled by cold water. I got a blow in my jaw with a heavy rod. I spat out my two teeth. Bleeding began. From that moment we became mere numbers -- I wore the number 4859. Witold Pilecki on his entry into Auschwitz, September 19, 1940.

On September 19, 1940, Witold Pilecki (Pilestki) was arrested in a Nazi ‘security sweep’ and then interned at Auschwitz. He stayed there for over 2½ years before escaping, during which he had smuggled out reports on what was happening as Auschwitz was transformed from a POW camp into an extermination factory. In 1940, it was already a place of unspeakable brutality, and Pilecki suffered along with the rest. But he had volunteered to be there, to form a resistance network inside the camp and to send out messages to the ‘Home Army,’ an important force in the Polish Resistance. He was a Polish aristocrat, born in 1901 into a family that had long fought for Polish independence, and as a child he was instructed in that tradition. When a free Poland emerged out of the chaos of WWI, the Versailles Treaty, and the Russian Revolution, Pilecki’s family returned to their old estate and Witold joined the Polish army. He was a cavalry captain when the Germans invaded, on September 1, 1939,
and went underground to continue the struggle. In the ‘Home Army,’ he was noted for his insistence that all Poles should be welcome, including Jews, anyone willing to join. Once in Auschwitz he continued that policy in building his ‘resistance network,’ but in a hopeless situation his reports began to recommend that Auschwitz should be bombed, at first to aid an uprising but in the end simply to stop the slaughter. These reports did find their way to London, but no action was forthcoming. Nor were the sufferings he reported given wide circulation. In April 1943 he escaped but soon found himself facing a different enemy, this time the Russians, and he began again to send intelligence reports out. He was captured, found guilty in a ‘show trial’, and executed in Warsaw in May 1948. Still it took some time for his story to get out, perhaps because it proved that the Allies knew from very early on exactly what was happening at Auschwitz, yet did little about it. His own reckless bravery won him a chapter in M. R. D. Foot’s Six Faces of Courage (1978), and then after the fall of the communist government he was transformed into an icon of modern Polish nationalism. Whether that was appropriate is an interesting question. As Timothy Snyder points out in a 2012 review of The Auschwitz Volunteer (an edited collection of Pilecki’s Auschwitz reports) the brave are not often remembered as they would wish. ©.

[Stanley]

Not waving but drowning.
Stevie Smith, 1902-1971
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I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
--from Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning,” 1957.

It is said that poets (at least those who were not insurance executives) tend towards eccentricity. Maybe it’s the strain of looking for exactly the right word, the word that catches the rhyme or strikes the right beat and yet, at the same time, carries forward the statement that the poem wants to make. Or it could be the oddity of pursuing a profession that (usually) doesn’t pay even for the groceries let alone the roof over one’s head. But if you ran an Eccentricity Stakes among poets, you’d have to enter Stevie Smith. She (for ‘Stevie’ was a she) was born Florence Margaret Smith, at Hull, a North Sea fishing port, on September 20, 1902. Her father ran away to sea (in Hull, that’s where you run away to) in 1906, whence Peggy (as she was then known) moved with her mother and sister to her aunt’s house in a London suburb. It became her “house of female habitation” where she lived for the rest of her life. It was also where she wrote. Meanwhile she paid for the groceries and her aunt’s roof repairs by secretary-ing for a London publisher, Pearsons, which may have strengthened her desire to see her name (by now, Stevie Smith) in print. That happened first with a novel (Novel on Yellow Paper) in 1936. But she was also writing poetry, and (many of) her first poems were collected and published as A Good Time Was Had by All (1937). She had some success with fiction but was known as a poet and, of course, an eccentric. More poetry followed. We landed in England in 1969, and by then she was a celebrated poet (and eccentric) who appeared on the BBC, TV and radio. Her performances were memorable. Her poems (which she sometime sang) were catching but difficult for she did Some Things that Poets Should Not Do, especially changing voice mid-verse, often in very short poems. Thus you don’t quite know who is who, for instance in her most famous poem, the title poem of her 1957 collection, Not Waving but Drowning, where in only 12 lines she manages to obfuscate who it is that’s drowning, who’s waving, and even whether anyone’s drowned at all. Her poems are witty but often very dark, and death or suicide often lurk between the lines. Stevie’s most spectacular suicide attempt happened in that publisher’s office, whereupon she was retired and given a pension (for those groceries and that roof). She died of a brain tumor in 1971. Her eccentric poetry lives on, though, for instance in a collected edition in 2018, edited by Will May. One reviewer entitled her review “The Uneasy Verse of Stevie Smith.” And ‘Uneasy’ is exactly the right word. ©

[Stanley]

That's the inspiration . . .
Frances Albrier, 1898-1987.
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One of the greatest things is to inspire young people to the higher things of life . . . do something to help them, make it better for them. I think that’s the inspiration. Frances Albrier, 1898-1987.

You know the war-time poster of ‘Rosie the Riveter’? It’s the one that shows a woman war worker, blue collar and all, and carries the slogan “We can do it!” There’s been debate about it, who the model was and so on, but the more interesting discovery is that it was not a recruiting poster to bring women into the work force, but an internal PR job for Westinghouse Electric to improve the shop floor morale of its female workers. Over the years it was a sign that gained layers of meaning, and it is now the most-requested poster at the Smithsonian Museum and, indeed, from the government printing office. In my mind that makes a better story than the one I told students during the many years that a copy hung in my office or just outside my office door, including the fact that Westinghouse itself was known as a progressive employer since the days of George Westinghouse (1846-1915), the company’s founder. For a real-life Rosie let’s move west to the shipyards of San Francisco Bay, and the
interesting life of Frances M. Albrier, born on September 21, 1898. Her New York parents sent her south where she was raised by her grandparents in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her higher education began there, at Tuskegee Institute, but her BA came from Howard University. Then she trained as a nurse at California Berkeley. On graduating, she found that no one would hire a black nurse, so she turned instead to the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a group which, she found, needed a strong dose of feminism. In the mid-1930s she turned to California politics, where (in Alameda County) she was elected the first black woman on the Democratic Party’s Central Committee. She also became active in voter education and registration. When Pearl Harbor rolled around, she immediately trained to be a welder in the Bay’s shipyards. She was hired by Kaiser but then ran into the whites-only Boilermaker’s Union. Florence filed suit, riled up her friends, the Boilermakers caved, and she worked out her wartime as a black Rosie the Riveter in Kaiser’s Richmond shipyard (the one that turned out a ship per day), but also, after hours, as Rosie the volunteer nurse. As Florence grew older she widened her reform efforts to include the disadvantaged of all races, including poor children, the handicapped, and the elderly. She won a few enemies, but many friends, and what the national printing office might consider is a remade “We can do it” poster featuring a black Rosie. It is, after all, a poster that has acquired many layers of meanings beyond its original purpose. Why not one more? ©

[Stanley]

A Flanders mare?
Anne of Cleves, 1515-1557
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You have sent me a Flanders mare., Henry VIII, allegedly, on first seeing his bride to be, December 1539,
Once in England (1969-1970 to begin with), I took more interest than before in the monarchy and its history, stimulated by its oddities and by the then new BBC series, The Six Wives of Henry VIII. It starred Keith Michel as the eponymous, increasingly corpulent (and increasingly arbitrary) monarch. The six wives’ roles went to various actresses, all of them competent, and the booby prize (the Anne of Cleves role) went to Elvi Hale, born in 1931 and I think still alive. I say it was the booby prize because it was well known that Anne of Cleves was the least attractive and most forbidding of Henry’s consorts. On the other hand, Anne of Cleves survived the experience (she was the second “divorced” in the schoolboy mnemonic “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived”); so Ms. Hale played her part as not only unattractive but as a woman self-possessed and more than a little cunning. But there was probably more (and less) to the real Anne of Cleves, born on September 22.1515, in Cleves, a collection of valuable ducal properties which descended through the female line and were strategically located on both banks of the Rhine. She may not have looked as well as she did in the Holbein portrait of her, sent to Henry as a true likeness, but her downright ugliness (like a “Flanders mare”) probably resulted more from a late 17th-century history by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who thought it an easy way to explain the fact that her marriage (on January 6, 1540) to Henry, was unconsummated. Easier, anyway, than mentioning the fact that Henry was by then no Adonis; his several bad habits having by then got the better of him, he might not have been able to consummate. In the annulment proceedings (later in 1640) his lawyers argued a psychological cause, and on July 12, parliament dutifully proclaimed the marriage “illegal” as well as unconsummated. Anne, by then concerned with keeping her head attached to her body, consented readily enough, leaving Henry to pursue his infatuation with (and soon to wed and then behead) Katherine Howard. Anne stayed on in England, a senior female presence at court, and although she did return to Cleves briefly (it, not England, was “her country”) she returned to manage her estates and died at Chelsea Manor in July 1557. She was buried as a queen, with all due ceremony, at Westminster Abbey when, I believe, no one called her ugly. ©

[Stanley]

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.
Augustus Caesar, Emperor
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At the age of 19 . . . I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the republic. Augustus Caesar, reported by Suetonius.

It was Augustus Caesar, not Julius, who was the first Roman emperor; and it was he who completed Julius’s work of destroying the Republic by raising in its stead an empire so prosperous and so well knit together that it could survive the lethal shenanigans of Augustus’s ‘Julian’ descendants who, impatient to succeed him as god-emperor, often decided that the best way to do so was to murder their rivals. This art they learned from Augustus himself, for his route to imperial power was littered with the bodies of his rivals. The Emperor Augustus was born Gaius Octavius on September 23, 63 BCE. He was Julius Caesar’s nephew and then adopted son, and was only 18 when Caesar was assassinated by a cabal of restless Senators whose collective paranoias gave the 18-year-old the time and the opportunities he needed to rise to power. This he did, calling himself Octavian and claiming that he wished only to revive the Republic. He gave that claim some surface plausibility by retaining or renewing the republic’s window dressings, its old offices, its traditional religious observances, and Augustus’s own (sometimes) puritanical instincts. History judges him not a very good general, but he won a couple of civil wars, and his rival generals obliged nicely by then committing suicide (most famously, Mark Antony and Cleopatra). In the meanwhiles between these paroxysms of violence, Augustus built a following amongst the Roman poor, the ‘plebs,’ and the middle classes through various reforms (eg. the road system) and a few circuses. Thus he represented stability, virtue, and prosperity. Despite his ailments and his small stature, he won additions to his power and his supremacy (the name ‘Augustus’ itself reeks of authority), stamped his visage on imperial coinage, and began calling himself “imperator”. From there to emperor was but a small step. When he died, at the then great age of 77, it was but another small step to divinity, and the Senate duly obliged by calling him a god. About 1800 years on, the founders of the American republic found many lessons in the political lives of Julius Caesar the dictator and Augustus Caesar the emperor, and tried to build a system that would stifle such tendencies. We will soon see if they built well enough. ©

[Stanley]

"Better it is to have the worst, than none at all."
Gerolamo Cardano, gambler, 1501-1576.
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What is this complacency then but an ignoring of conditions, a pretense of not being aware of what we know exists, or a will to set aside a fact by force? And so it is with everything else foul, vain, confused and untrue in our lives. Gerolamo Cardano, The Book of My Life.

If ever you want a real-life example of a “renaissance man,” you might like to know about Gerolamo Cardano, born near Milan on September 24. 1501. His birth was probably premature and certainly illegitimate, and left him with a frail body and a short temper. At some point early in his life he was acknowledged by his father, Fazio, a mixed blessing because, although it gave Gerolamo some legal standing, Fazio was not a. loving parent. Gerolamo attended university and graduated in medicine in 1525, and practiced medicine amongst the poor for about 20 years. He also continued his studies in several fields, and indeed gained an international reputation as a polymath. His interest in mechanical gadgetry contributed (via a longish road) to your combination lock and your car’s driveshaft. His interests in medicine, chemistry, and biology qualify him as an early “scientist,” a safe definition if you remember that the word wasn’t yet invented and, in Gerolamo’s time, included astrology, Alchemy, and other ‘sciences’ that today we classify as divination (or superstition). His greatest fame came, however, from his talent for mathematics, In that field, he learned much from Arab scholars (which may be one reason that, eventually, he fell foul of the Inquisition), but he also made his own contributions to modern mathematics, for instance the use (and usefulness) of negative numbers and several important theorems. His writing made him known across Europe, and late in his life he traveled to Scotland to cure sudden speech disability of the archbishop of St. Andrews, which perhaps arose out of Gerolamo’s interest in educating and treating the deaf. His 1545 publication of Ars Magna (The Great Art) qualifies Gerolamo as one of the fathers of modern algebra. But he had a more practical reason for being mathematically inclined, for besides all his other talents he was fascinated by games of chance (notably “Hazard”, a kind of craps) especially those which involved betting and gambling (at which dark arts he was a success). He lost his university positions in Italy after his run-in with the Inquisition, and died in 1576 shortly after being pardoned by a new pope, which Gerolamo might have regarded as an unlikely throw of the dice. ©.
[So that's where the term 'cardan shaft' comes from.....]

[Stanley]

"We sold the farm. If they don't like us living on it, that is their prerogative." Olive Beech on her ouster from the Raytheon board, ca 1982.
Olive Ann Beech, 1903-1989.
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The kind of woman who can function in an executive job is one who can handle that job, and it’s just about that simple. Olive Ann Beech.

It may be true that companies tend as they age to fall into ruts and develop hardened arteries. If that’s so, then one might recommend that ‘under-represented’ groups, such as women and people of color, seek their fortunes in new businesses, new industries. Such was the route taken by Olive Ann Mellor when she went to work (as bookkeeper) for the new-minted Travel Air Manufacturing Company on 1924. She was then only 21, having been born on September 25, 1903, The business was new, and so was its product—the personal or business airplane—and Ms. Mellor knew how to keep the books. Personable, neat, and energetic, she learned how to find both investment money and customers. She also found a husband, Walter Beech, an executive with Travel Air, and when Travel Air merged with Curtiss-Wright, Olive Ann Beech went with him to New York. That was at the low point in the Great Depression, which was, Olive and Walter decided, a great time to start a new company, Beech Aircraft, get it back to Wichita, and concentrate on the personal and business market. It was Olive’s idea to gain publicity by going into racing, with the added wrinkle of using women as racing pilots, and their company got a good start when Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes won the Bendix race in 1936 with the Beech “Model 17 Staggerwing.” The company’s next plane was the Twin Beech, which soon gave way to the even longer-lived Beechcraft Bonanza, now entering its 75th year of production. Olive Ann, who never did learn how to fly, kept charge of the books, borrowing, and issuing stock, and after Walter died in 1950 she took the whole show into still newer markets, even producing drone planes which the US military used as target practice. Her one misstep was to keep Beech out of the jet plane market for too long, and that may be one reason that Olive sold the company (to Raytheon) in 1980. She stuck with the industry, the largest single stockholder in Raytheon and on its board, until Raytheon bounced her upstairs as "chair emeritus". Olive Ann Beech won many awards and was widely recognized as the “First Lady of American Aviation.” After her ouster, she turned to philanthropy. She died in 1993 and was buried next to Walter, in Wichita, of course. The Bonanza, model #G36, lives on. ©

[Stanley]

1066 and all that.
1066 and All That.
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A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England against the consent of the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, January 1776.

On September 28, 1066, Duke William of Normandy invaded England. His “Norman Invasion” turned out to be a success. King Harold was defeated and killed at Hastings, William assumed the throne (to which he did have a more or less legitimate claim), and in court circles and aristocratic castles England became Norman French, as William’s aristocrat-brigands fanned out across the land and established a feudal system. Ever since, this upper-class invasion raises the question. “How English are the English?” During the English civil wars (1640s), many came to resent the “Norman Yoke” and to praise the “ancient Anglo-Saxons” (previous invaders, ca. 500-800, C.E.) as the true progenitors of English liberties. This interpretation, or ideology, became popular again in the 19th century as imperialism encouraged ‘dominant’ peoples to find in themselves “better blood” than others possessed. In the USA, this idea of Anglo-Saxon “virtues” had a vogue for those who felt threatened by ‘new’ immigration from southern and eastern Europe or by the recently freed slaves in the southern states. It even found its way into history books, where we find the claim that American democracy evolved, racially as it were, from Teutonic folk-meets. This is one debate that has been deeply affected by modern genetics. It turns out that all these invasions of “England” (which began before there was an “England” or an “English” language) had little effect on the “English” gene pool. Today’s British-Asian-Muslim immigrants will probably have about as much genetic effect as previous waves of invader-immigrants like the Normans, the Vikings, the Danes, the Anglo-Saxons, the Jutes, the Friesians, or the Romans. The English gene pool, today, remains overwhelmingly Basque, presumably derived from the “Celtic” peoples who settled Great Britain even before it was an island, walking in, so to speak, not invading. A few years back, a pretty well-preserved stone age corpse was found in a cave in the Cheddar Gorge. Its closest match (in DNA terms) was found in a schoolteacher who lived only a few miles away from the burial site, his personal genetic map little changed by the many invasions that “made” England. It appears that those who claim racial purity as their chief political motivation really ought to think again. Or maybe they should just think. ©.

[Stanley]

All Greece reviles the wan face when she smiles . . . remembering past enchantments and past ills. H. D., in "Helen"
Hilda Doolittle, H. D., 1888-1961.
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If you do not know what words say, how can you expect to pass judgment on what words conceal? Hilda Doolittle, aka H. D.

The “imagists” were a loose-leafed group of poets that flourished in what seemed to many of them to be the wastelands of modern society, exhausted (morally, mentally, and physically) by the bloodlettings of the “great” war (1914-1918). My first encounters with them, in a first-year literature class, were not happy. It was difficult to read their poems because, on the page, they were constantly interrupted by footnotes explaining to unedified undergraduates like myself their allusions to the classics (Roman, Greek, Chinese . . .) of world literature. I found these pretentious and, in the end, boring. Who did they think they were, anyway??!! Worse, the man who qualified as one of the group’s founders, Ezra Pound, had played footsie with Fascism, had been tried for treachery, even then languished in a prison mental hospital, and was particularly guilty of poetry by footnote. Since then, I’ve grown more tolerant, have come to admire some of them (for their positive influence on
William Carlos Williams, a country doctor and one of my literary heroes). Among these was the feminist mystic Hilda Doolittle who (writing as “H. D.”) made herself the mistress of several languages (including Latin, Greek, and Japanese) and of several more poets and philosophers, male and female. Hilda, or H. D., was born in Bethlehem (Pennsylvania), on September 27, 1888. Her parents were a mystical mother (a Moravian) and a “clear as steel” father (an astronomer of Puritan roots), and she took some of each off to Bryn Mawr College where she became friends with Marianne Moore, and (at nearby Penn) with Pound and Williams. They encouraged her to think poetically, and she followed Pound to Europe where she became deeply involved with the troubling ferment that accompanied and followed the Great War. In the process, H. D. became a leading Imagist, prolific in poetry and prose, a scholar and translator who found her own ‘essences’ in classical figures like Helen of Troy and
modernists like Sigmund Freud and T. S. Eliot. Her poetry is very spare and doesn’t need many footnotes, although you may want to add some punctuation. She wrote for four decades and then stopped, leaving behind (for our consideration) some haunting poems and several interesting lovers. ©

[Tripps]

He's done it again - taken us to world of strange people that we've never heard of, who make us feel a bit inadequate. I usually google them for a bit more background. I try to be fair in my personal assessment , but being congenitally flippant, I find it hard.

Oread
Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

‘Oread’. This six-line poem, perhaps H. D.’s best-known poem, was published in the 1915 anthology Some Imagist Poets, which also featured poems by Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint – the main poets who published under the imagist banner. The Oread or mountain-nymph addresses the sea, asking for it to come up to the land and smother it – but the imagery H. D. uses enacts this very desire, by describing the sea using land-based imagery (seeing the green waves as pine trees, for instance). Is this also a poem about sexuality, and perhaps even same-sex desire? It might be read as such, as well as an innovative nature poem.

What to make of it all? I've decided that there are people who operate at an entirely different level to me. The guitar player with magic fingers, the pianist who can remember every note of long performance, the chess Grandmaster, and if she sees the sea as pine trees well - fair enough, though I never saw it that way in the slightest.

Like the character from Leonard Barrass' book 'Up the Tyne in a Flummox - I am "at peace with my inadeqacies"

If such they are - and I'm not sure.

[Stanley]

I totally agree David. Occasionally I have read books recommended by Uncle Bob and given them null point. Try Stegner's 'Angle of Repose'. according to Bob, a literary classic. I am with you David, wired up differently and I suspect no worse for it. I'm afraid HD's 'poetry' is not on my wavelength. Here's my wavelength!

Excelsior
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
Excelsior!

In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
Excelsior!

"Try not the Pass!" the old man said;
"Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!"
And loud that clarion voice replied,
Excelsior!

"Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast! "
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
Excelsior!

"Beware the pine-tree's withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!"
This was the peasant's last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
Excelsior!

At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
Excelsior!

A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell like a falling star,
Excelsior!

[Stanley]

"Idiots say idiocies... just as apple trees produce apples."
Pierre Ryckmans aka Simon Leys, 1935-2014.
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Whenever people wonder “What is the truth?” usually it is because the truth is just under their noses—but it would be very inconvenient to acknowledge it. Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (2011)

It is rare, in our time, for a leading academic to adopt a pen name, but this is what Pierre Ryckmans did when in the early 1970s he published, as “Simon Leys,” an exposé of China’s Cultural Revolution which he entitled (in French) “The New Clothes of Chairman Mao.” His main reason for adopting the alias was his fear that the Maoist government would deny entry visas to anyone connected with writing the polemic, and “Pierre Ryckmans” was then in the process of becoming a respected scholar in China studies, especially the arts and cultures of the imperial periods of Chinese history. But it didn’t work. Leys’ Habits neuf became a flash point of its very own cultural revolution, as he was named and attacked by western academics still enamored of Mao’s China. So, ironically, Leys-Ryckmans was barred from China and, moreover, decided to retain the pseudonym and to continue the fight (in, for instance, his Ombres chinoises (1974) against the ignorance, vandalism, and violence of the modern, mature dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party. Pierre Ryckmans was born into the Belgian haute bourgeoisie on September 28, 1935, his father a university professor, his grandfather the president of the Belgian senate, and his uncle (and namesake) then the governor-general of the Belgian Congo. Indeed his uncle’s imperial past may have contributed to Pierre’s decision to change his name. At any rate, Ryckmans-Leys’s attacks on the cultural revolution and the post-Mao Chinese government continued unabated, as did the academic civil war he had helped to provoke. His own academic career flourished (in Australia) as a respected student of traditional Chinese cultures and his reputation as a polemicist was further polished by his impassioned defense of Sister Theresa’s work in India. In Sinology, he remained in a minority, often rather an embattled one, until the horrors of Tiananman Square provoked a sea change in opinions about China, and Mao, and the so-called Cultural
Revolution. In the last 20 years of his life (he died in 2014) Ryckmans-Leys became more widely respected, and he began to publish regularly in the left-liberal press, notably the New York Review of Books and various European journals. His “real” political profile remains something of a puzzle, and it may be safest to say that it changed as he aged. ©

[Stanley]

"No glacier can baffle, no precipice balk her."
Lucy Walker, 1836-1916.
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No glacier can baffle, no precipice balk her,/ / No peak rise above her, however sublime, / / Give three times three cheers for intrepid Miss Walker, / / I say, my boys, doesn't she know how to climb! From “A Lady Has Clomb to the Matterhorn’s summit,” Punch magazine, August 26, 1871.

In her Victorians in the Mountains (2010), Ann Colley argues that as Victorian mountaineers scrambled atop Europe’s most splendid mountains—and reported on it—they made the pleasures of the view from the top almost commonplace. The book’s subtitle is Sinking the Sublime, and it’s about changing aesthetic values and vocabularies. Colley reprints a contemporary cartoon from Punch in which a young alpine adventurer tells his story, “There I stood, the terrible abyss yawning at my feet . . . “ and is interrupted by a listener who asks “Was it yawning when you got there or did it start after you arrived?” The scene is masculine (an after-dinner chat at a club), and so was the language of mountaineering, but how much more would the sublimity be sunk when mountains were conquered by ladies? The answer is, not at all. Victorian lady mountaineers became heroines for girls and women and at least objects of wonder for men, breaking gender boundaries as they climbed forbidding peaks and crossed yawning crevasses. There were several of these pioneers, but the most accomplished of them, Lucy Walker, was in herself something of an iconoclast, for she was born illegitimate on September 29, 1836 (and in Canada of all places), the first child of a Liverpool shipping magnate, Frank Walker, and his lover Jane McMurdo, then still legally wed to one Henry McMurdo. Once Henry divorced Jane, in 1841, Frank did the Right Thing and married Lucy’s mother, but still . . . Moreover, Lucy didn’t grow up ladylike but became a large, hearty woman who took up (in 1858) climbing mountains as therapy for her rheumatism. She climbed with men, always her father (until he died), their Swiss guide, Melchior Anderegg, and a selection of other men. She became a conquering heroine when, in August 1871, she stood atop the Matterhorn, the first woman to have done so. She made some “first” ascents too, man or woman, and after ill health got her (in 1879) she continued strenuous walking tours,
e.g. of the most famous Alpine passes. She climbed in a ‘trademark’ white print dress and subsisted, apparently, on sponge cake and champagne. Some conventions she obeyed, and at her posh Toxteth Park residence, in between her 98 Alpine expeditions, she became one of Liverpool’s favorite high society hostesses. She died in 1916, a founding member (and the second president) of the Ladies’ Alpine Club where, perhaps without interruption, she could tell her own stories about yawning abysses. ©

[Stanley]

Yeah, OK. But what about the Cubs?
William Wrigley, Jr.
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We are turning out nearly ten billion sticks a year. . . enough gum to reach from New York to Galveston and pretty nearly bridge the Gulf of Mexico if the sticks were laid end to end. William Wrigley, Jr., 1921.

No serious thinker, I suppose, should ever confuse justice with mere circumstance, far less with whimsy; even so, I find it somehow satisfying that William Wrigley, Jr. whose signature product now litters pavements (and the undersides of lunch counters) around the world, began his commercial life as a soap salesman. Wrigley, the future chewing-gum king, born in Philadelphia on September 30, 1861, started in business very young (aged 13) selling his father’s scouring soap. At a more appropriate age (30) he moved to Chicago to set up as a wholesale soap distributor. Thus, like most “captains of industry” in the heroic age of American capitalism, he was not a self-made man, but he did add a wrinkle to the soap trade by offering retailers bonuses for moving his stock. After all, soap is just soap. To add spice, Wrigley offered sales premiums, first, baking powder, but soon added others, not least chewing gum, which he bought, in sticks, from Zeno Manufacturing. Zeno itself was a marketing marvel, having made much of its gum as a penny a pop come-on at the 1893 World’s Fair. Soon, this “elegant” promotional product became Wrigley’s main line, and he bought Zeno out in 1911, keeping its patents (for making natural gum into a sugar- and flavor-enhanced chewing gum, an idea first trotted out, ironically, by a Cleveland dentist) but not its name. That became the William Wrigley Company and it went on to become a chewing gum empire. When our William retired, in 1925, Wrigley was an international enterprise, with factories in several countries and a signature HQ (completed in 1921), a ‘skyscraper’ overlooking the Chicago River and now anchoring Chicago’s ‘magnificent mile’, the posh shops and corporate addresses that line Michigan Avenue. As far as I know, the Wrigley Company produced no gum scrapers, which would have been whimsically satisfying; but William Wrigley did develop Catalina Island, just off Los Angeles, and made it (for a time) the spring training camp
for one of his other, less successful enterprises, the Chicago Cubs. Wrigley’s great-grandson, curiously named “William Wrigley, Jr., II,” sold the gum business in 2008 and has recently gone into the cannabis trade. Old habits, as they say, die hard. ©.

[Stanley]

For the multitudes
The Model T, 1908-1927
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I will build a car for the great multitude. Henry Ford,

Anniversary dates help us to calibrate change, but only when understood in the context of other evidence. A good example of this warning is provided by Henry Ford’s Model T. Officially, it came on the market on October 1, 1908, 113 years ago today. Ford’s driving ambition, as he put it, was to “build a car for the great multitude.” Since its list price was only $825, any color you wanted if it was black, and since Model Ts rolled off Ford’s assembly line so fast that his sales people could offer it “on order,” many people then and since have taken old Henry at his word. After all, he made 15 million Model Ts by 1927, when it was replaced by the Model A (at only $1200). So old Henry “put us on the road.” But who, then, were “us”? Add in inflation, and we find that at today’s prices the Model T would set ‘us’ back about $25,000. Or we could measure the $825 cost of the Model T against the average industrial wage (1908) of 22 cents an hour. In terms of range, industrial workers in 1908 took home from $200 to $400 per year, and remember too that in the 1910 census the largest single group of urban workers were domestic servants, who got paid less. So when the average life expectancy was 47 years, not many workers could buy the Tin Lizzie on time, and few owned property enough to pledge against a loan. If you could afford a doctor, who (at about $3300 p. a.) probably could buy a Model T, he could not have traveled more than 10mph to make a house call, for that was the prevailing speed limit. And he had to be quick, as the 3rd leading killer in the country was diarrhoea, almost all its victims young children who died fast. And childhood diarrhoea was rampant in a country where only 14% of households had a bathtub, and very few had clean running water. My grandfather Ralph, in 1908 a young college professor on his first job (in animal husbandry at Lincoln, Nebraska), walked to work and didn’t buy his first car until he could afford a wife. And my guess is that Ethel’s father paid for the car, anyway. ‘We’ were a different country in 1908, and not many of ‘us’ belonged to Mr. Ford’s ‘multitude.’ In thinking about ‘our’ history, pronouns matter. ©

[Stanley]

. . the first cloud so terrible and still, that bears the coming harvest in its breast. "The Zulu Girl" (1930).
Roy Campbell, South African poet.
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Now Spring, sweet laxative of Georgian trains,// Quickens the ink in literary veins,// The Stately Homes of England ope their doors// To piping nancy-boys and crashing Bores,// Where for week-ends the scavengers of letters// Convene to chew the fat about their betters.... Roy Campbell, The Georgiad (1931)

Roy Campbell was a South African poet whose odd, adventurous, often self-contradictory life rendered his literary output vulnerable to a wide range of ad hominem criticism, much of it political. Had he lived longer he might have been able to put it right, to find himself a stable place in the literary firmament, but he died at age 55 in a car crash, in Portugal, on April 22, 1957. Roy Campbell was born in Durban, South Africa, on October 2, 1901, into a prominent colonial family proud of its Scotch-Irish ancestry, as might be suggested by his baptismal names, Ignatius Royster Donnachie. Like many wild colonial boys he first sought his fortune in the metropolis, marrying a temperamental aristocrat, the biographer Mary Garman (against almost everyone’s wishes except maybe hers). While living with Mary in a converted stable in remotest Gwynedd, Wales, Campbell wrote a long poem (The Flaming Terrapin, 1924) which made his reputation and won admission, for both Roy and Mary, into London’s
Bloomsbury set. There, Mary’s passionate affair with Vita Sackville-West set off the first (of several) of Roy’s radical diversions from any settled life course. His satirical poem, The Georgiad (1931) announced his self-exile from Bloomsbury country, and he and Mary (she stuck with him throughout) were then heard from in Civil War Spain where they fought and reported first for the Republicans and then for the Nationalists. This latter transmigration brought him much condemnation from leftwing critics and entry into some conservative circles, notably the Oxford “Inkspots” (including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien) and a few more odoriferous acquaintances like Oswald Mosley and William Joyce. Disgusted by the latter two, and by their politics, Campbell trained for guerilla warfare with the British Army. That didn’t work out any too well, either, and after the war Campbell changed his spots yet again in a close friendship with Dylan Thomas and by beginning his serial English
translations of several poets, including the Spanish Republican Frederico Garcia Lorca. Since his death, which after all was almost 70 years ago, critics have begun to regard Campbell not as a chameleon but, more positively, as a poet sui generis. In his native South Africa, his early attacks on apartheid and, perhaps, his poetic genius, have led to his recognition as one of the new nation’s most prophetic voices. On that score, you will do well to read his haunting poem, “The Zulu Girl” (1930) ©

[Stanley]

'A majority of one.'
In which Tillie Edelstein becomes Gertrude Berg
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Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one. Henry David Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience” (1849).

Lexington Avenue is a New York street where people get lost, for its street address numbers don’t sync with those of parallel north-south streets. That’s a story of New York municipal muddling, but “Lex” was also famous as a street where immigrants moved out to when they moved upwards. That’s a really good “American” story which, in these Trumpish days, needs to be remembered, and it also formed the basis of one of the longest-running comedy series in US radio history, which began in 1929 as The Rise of the Goldbergs and finished (5000 episodes later, in the mid 1950s) as just The Goldbergs. The series was the brain-child of (and was written by) its lead actress, Gertrude Berg, who was born (on October 3, 1899) as Tillie Edelstein. Her parents were immigrants who, as they prospered, moved out of their East Harlem neighborhood and on to the Avenue. They’d also moved further out, to Fleischmanns, in the Catskills, where they’d begun in a small way and then become resort owners. There Tillie/Gertrude began to hone her entertainment skills by producing and acting in comic skits to amuse the guests, many of whom were also upwardly mobile Jews. But they didn’t have to be Jewish, because the skits (or, later, The Rise of the Goldbergs) told stories which resonated with the life experiences of a great number of Americans, immigrants and their first-generation children, who formed such a large portion of the nation’s population in 1929, when Gertrude Berg’s radio series began, and when she (and NBC) thought it meet that the first episode should feature the grandfather Goldberg at Shabbat. Berg (who’d married Lewis Berg, an engineer, in 1918) prospered mightily. NBC paid her very well ($2,000 weekly in the 1930s). She wrote another series for NBC and then switched to TV (on CBS) in 1949. But the story she knew best was her own. Similar themes surfaced in her prize-winning play (1951) called A Majority of One, but this time the dramatic tension focused on an immigrant widow’s daughter, who (ironically) disapproved of a courtship between her mother and a Japanese businessman. It all worked out in the end (and became a movie starring Rosalind Russell), because it had to. After all, the play’s title came from a Thoreau quote, and the story was, well, very American. Or at least it was until the House “Un-American” Activities Committee got its knickers in a twist over “foreign” involvement in the entertainment industry. After all, Gertrude’s male lead in The Goldbergs had once worked with the Marx brothers and was a leader in Equity, the actor’s union. As for Gertrude Berg, she died in 1955 and, unbothered by HUAC, is buried in the Catskills. ©