BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

“I’ve always thought that a big laugh is a really loud noise from the soul saying “Ain’t that the truth” Quincy Delight Jones, Jr.

The amazing life of Quincy Jones began with his birth on Chicago’s South Side on March 14, 1933, but one could say that his career began in the late 1940s, in the Seattle suburbs, when he heard a neighbor lady, a music teacher, playing the piano. It marked his start as a musician, but unlike many performers he early branched out into composition, recording, and marketing, and made himself a force to be reckoned with in American popular culture, particularly in music, TV, and the cinema, and in its industrial and financial institutions. The names of the people he’s worked with, starting with Ray Charles when both were teenagers, suggests something of Jones’s reach and the diversity of his talents: inter alia they include Count Basie, Richard Pryor, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis, Marlon Brando, Martin Luther King, Jr., Duke Ellington, Hillary Clinton, Will Smith, Stephen Spielberg, Lesley Gore, Neil Simon, Jack Lemon, Billy Eckstine, Gene Krupa, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Peggy Lee, Oprah Winfrey, and, as you might say, so on and so forth. Quincy Jones’s successes have made him pretty sure of himself, and he’s taken a line through his life to become interested in ancestry, astrology, politics, and medicine. His autobiography, brashly entitled Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, delights in pointing out his mixed ancestry and, not least, his relationships (distant cousinages) with Sidney Lanier, Tennessee Williams, and a raft of French Huguenots. I find the Lanier connection especially delightful, for it makes Jones eligible to join The Sons of Confederate Veterans. Among the honors that he has accepted, Jones has 28 Grammys and an honorary doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music, another nice mix. He was thought to be at death’s door in 1974 (a brain aneurism), but it didn’t work out; Jones survived and attended his own memorial service with his own neurologist in tow. He’s 87 today and, as far as I know, is still going strong. ©.

[Stanley]

"Pray, would you know the reason why I'm crying? The Comic Muse, long sick, is now a-dying!" From the prologue of She Stoops To Conquer, 1773.

One of the great survivals of the 18th-century theater is Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, a comedy, which opened in London on March 15, 1773. The play thrived well enough over the centuries to be chosen as a required text in the freshman year English course that, in 1961-62, was supposed to teach me how to read and to write as if I were a discerning person. It was chosen to demonstrate the important distinction between sentiment (in right hands a Good Thing) and sentimentality (a mere manipulation of emotion, and therefore a Bad Thing). There is some evidence that Goldsmith meant the play to do just that. After all, Goldsmith dedicated the play to his good friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, a man of consummate erudition who certainly knew the difference between deep and shallow waters. Moreover, the play’s prologue, spoken on opening night by none other than the great David Garrick (dressed in mourning black), is a lament for the disappearance from the English theater of real comedy: “morals won’t do for me; to make you laugh, I must play tragedy.” Also, just a year before the play appeared, Goldsmith himself (probably) wrote an essay (subtitled “A comparison between laughing and sentimental comedy”) lamenting the rise of the latter and the desuetude of the former. Alas!! I was not a good student in Freshman English. Not only did I miss Goldsmith’s whole point, an abject failure of discernment, but in another part of Freshman English one of my ‘review’ essays (on the film version of West Side Story, then just released) got the lowest grade I ever received for any piece of work in any course: 8%, assessed thusly by the course instructor, Mr. Osborne, on the ground that I had made no spelling errors. (The course’s grading rubric awarded 8% for perfect spelling). Now a good deal older and (I hope) wiser, I regard that grade and its rationale as an excellent example of “Laughing Comedy.” And the joke was on me. ©

[Stanley]

'I had no idea at all of what to do, only a desperate wish to do something.' Dorothy Warriner, explaining her decision to go to Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Doreen Warriner was born on March 16, 1904 at Weston Park near Stratford, where her father was land agent for the fifth Earl of Bradford’s 20,000-acre estate. Her childhood experience gave her a great deal of social self-confidence, of help in her career as one of Britain’s pioneer female academics. She finished as professor of Slavonic and Eastern European studies at the University of London and an internationally recognized expert on agricultural economics, notably in land reform and its beneficial impact on rural societies. Doreen figures also, then, as a social rebel, a left-wing reformer. That picture becomes clearer when one considers her reaction to the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938. Warriner, then writing her first book (Economic Problems of Peasant Farming, 1939), resigned a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship (awarded to finance her study of peasant farming in the Caribbean basin) to travel to Prague to “do something” to help the people whose lives were put at risk by the Munich deal, not only Czech Jews but Sudeten Germans whose politics (Social Democrats, Communists, trades unionists) put them on Hitler’s enemies list and, in the Sudeten, into concentration camps. From October 1938 through the next spring, Dorothy Warriner—using fair means and foul—helped these people and their families to obtain exit permits and escorted large groups (by train and sea) through Poland and Sweden to freedom in the west, primarily Britain. Meanwhile Warriner’s reports home strengthened the British campaign to raise funds (and visas) for the refugees. Hitler’s occupation of all Czechoslovakia (in March 1939) would end these efforts, but not before Dorothy Warriner herself escorted the last refugee group (300 women and children) out, by train, in early April, 1939. War work, then a UNRRA relief mission to Yugoslavia, occupied her full time until she resumed her academic career in 1947. We would know little of this ‘interval’ were it not for Dorothy’s nephew Henry Warriner, an industrial chemist turned Warwickshire farmer, whose Dorothy Warriner’s War came out just last year. ©

[Stanley]

"The only prejudice I've found anywhere on TV is in some advertising agencies. Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark." Nat King Cole.

Many people my age will remember that “old King Cole was a merry old soul” whether he called for his pipe, his bowl, or his “fiddlers three.” But we likely didn’t know that the nursery rhyme character was modeled on one or more ancient British hero-kings (“Coel” in Celtic), and we were yet to learn about Nat King Cole who in the 1950s burst in upon the white consciousness as a singer, pianist, and the first black performer to host a national TV variety show. Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1919 as Nathaniel Adams Coles. His dad, Edward, was a grocer who wanted to be a church minister and moved his whole family to storied Bronzeville, in Chicago, where he did indeed take up the cloth, and successfully, but what stuck with Nathaniel (and his brothers three) was their mom’s love of music, for Perlina Coles was a church organist and music teacher. All four of her boys became successful musicians, none of them more successful than Nathaniel, who at about 15 dropped out of school, went on tour with that or this trio (he played piano and sang), and changed his name to Nat King Cole. And he was famous enough already that the ‘King’ part of it wasn’t just presumption, nor was it merely a play on words of the old nursery rhyme. At 15, Nat was “Chicago’s Young Maestro,” contesting in a “Battle of Rhythm”) with one of his heroes, Earl Hines, at Wrigley Field, no less, for jazz supremacy in Chicago. However that contest turned out, Nat and his trio did well enough to climb pretty near to the top of the mountain. Along the way he changed his style from black jazz to bronze balladeer, and indeed I remember him best for songs like “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Mona Lisa.” He also continued to perform in whites-only venues across the American South. This opened Nat to some telling criticism from within the black community, and before he died in 1965 (of lung cancer, aged 45) he’d learned to “Straighten Up and Fly Right” as a lifetime member of the NAACP and a crusader for civil rights. But it’s those love ballads that stick in my mind’s ear as Nat King Cole’s lasting signature. ©

[Stanley]

'To extend the understanding of play … promote the design of good toys, and encourage safe and adequate provision for children's play.' From Marjorie Abbatt's Trust Deed for the Children's Play Activities Trust.

If you grew up in Britain between (about) 1935 and 1975 and were blessed (or otherwise) with progressively-minded parents, the sort that drove sensible cars, read The Guardian, and ate pebble-dashed bread, the chances are that you played with Abbatt toys. Or played on them, for they came in all sizes from small toy trains and tracks (all wood and non-electric) to climbing frames (“jungle gyms”) more often found in suburban Montessori schoolyards. Abbatt toys were usually wooden, durable and in bright colors, and they lasted forever. They were the brainchildren of an otherwise childless couple, Paul and Marjorie Abbatt. Marjorie’s was perhaps the brain behind the operation, and her inheritance helped, too, for the Abbatts never paid themselves a salary. She was born Marjorie Cobb (of just the right sort of parents, wealthy and kind) on March 18, 1899, went to the Roedean School, then Oxford, and was starting on a London MA (in developmental psychology and speech therapy) when she met her Quaker husband Paul (at a woodcrafting folkmoot). They fell ”ecstatically” in love, married in 1930, and by 1932 decided to design, make, and sell a line of good wooden toys that would help good parents bring up good kids. They quickly fell in with a passel of progressive friends who cheered them on and bought their toys—and one of whom, the modernist architect Erno Goldfinger, actually designed their toyshop, in Wimpole Street, London, and several lines of Abbatt toys while he was at it. The shop itself, now sadly demolished, is seen as a landmark in modern commercial design, and the toys (indestructible and meant to be so) are all over the place, featured in illustrated histories of toy design and stored in grandparents’ basements where they await future generations of good kids. Paul Abbatt died in 1969. Marjorie sold the business in 1974 but remained active in child welfare and school reform until just before her death in 1991. ©

[Tripps]

I'm in the category, but never heard of them - though we didn't take the Manchester Guardian (as was). Just one example on ebay Abbatt toy. A good investment I'd say.

For the right age group - I approve.

[Stanley]

David, I had never heard of them either.
I still call it the Manchester Guardian.... Moving to London was a mistake.... Perhaps they should move back there and revert to the old name....

[Stanley]

"It's not about talent. It's about heart." Don Haskins, Texas Western basketball coach, circa 1966.

In the NCAA, sport and politics never mix—except when they do. One of those occasions came on March 19, 1966, when the lowly Miners from Texas Western College (now the U. of Texas at El Paso) beat the aristocrats of the college game, the University of Kentucky Wildcats, in the finals of the NCAA basketball championship. The score (72-65) wasn’t the point. It was, rather, that all seven players used by Texas Western in the final were black, including the starting five (Bobby Joe Hill, David Lattin, Orsten Artis, Willie Worsley, and Harry Flournoy). Coming in the decade of the Selma March, the Birmingham bombing, and the civil rights and voting rights acts, the racial nation noticed, disapprovingly. The Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp and the novelist James Michener dismissed the El Paso players as street thugs, “ragamuffins,” and “loose-jointed ramblers.” Already reeling from Wilt the Stilt (Kansas) and freshman phenom Lew Alcindor (UCLA), the NCAA banned the dunk shot for the next seven years and looked into Texas Western’s eligibility requirements. This latter maneuver got stuck in some mud, as 4 of the 5 Miners starters did graduate from college (more than can be said of 4 of 5 of Rupp’s all-white Wildcats) and all seven who played would enjoy successful business careers. Certainly time and talent have proven to be on the side of innovation and integration. Rupp himself, though vowing publicly to keep Kentucky basketball white, had already begun to recruit black players and would start his first player of color in 1968. In 2007, as if by way of apology, the NCAA inducted en masse the whole Texas Western team (7 blacks, 5 whites) into the Naismith Hall of Fame. On the other hand . . . In 2006, A film made of the Texas Western annus mirabilis (“Glory Road,” itself a prize winner) portrayed 1960s Texas as racist, which did provoke the Lone Star State’s legislature to pass a law denying state aid to any filmmaker who would portray Texas in a bad light. But with a legislature like that, chock-full of self-satirists, who needs a law? ©.

[Stanley]

"The Emancipation of Miss Menten." Title of a 'historical note' by Albert Gjedde, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, 1989.

“Enzyme” is a word that appears frequently in dietary supplement catalogs, not to mention in food labeling. Enzymes play vital roles in the biochemistry lab we call the human body, where (acting as catalysts) they govern the speed of several thousand biochemical processes which themselves govern our capacity to live . The rates at which they work these miracles are governed, or explained, by what is called the Michaelis-Menten equation, discovered jointly in Berlin, circa 1913, by Professor Leonor Michaelis and his student-colleague Maud Menten, a Canadian who’d been looking for a berth somewhere in medical science. That was not to be found in Canada, where she’d been born (in Port Lambton, Ontario, on March 20, 1879) and where scientific research was generally regarded as men’s work. So, after successfully completing her BA (1904) and MA (1907) at Toronto, she left, fetching up first at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, then in Berlin with Michaelis, then at Chicago for her PhD (1916). Along the way, Menten had returned to Toronto for her MD (in 1912 she was one of the first Canadian women to do that) and spent several years on the faculty of a Japanese university. For her whole employment career, including about 30 years at the University of Pittsburgh, she mixed clinical medicine with laboratory biochemistry in many fruitful ways, but that work she’d done with Michaelis on “enzyme kinetics” has proved the most important, in terms of medical treatments and medical research generally and in her own later discoveries, including that many enzymatic processes varied according to barometric pressure. She also did important work in the diagnosis and treatment of renal and blood disorders. At Pittsburgh, where she was finally promoted to a full professorship (at the age of 69; she retired at 71), Menten became known also for her eccentricities, which included driving to work in her faithful Model T, dressing in severely Victorian style, mountain climbing, landscape painting, and learning several languages (including two Native Canadian tongues). But then her professional accomplishments as a woman scientist were by definition “eccentric” for much of her lifetime, and certainly in her youth. ©

[Stanley]

"You can try more ephemeral, more fleeting things in a story – you can work more by suggestion – than in a novel. [in a short story] less is resolved, more is suggested.” Eudora Welty.

With a few exceptions, e.g. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s historical stories, I have not been able to appreciate (or really to enjoy) short fiction. One day I hope to find an honorable explanation for this, but so far I have had to regard it as a debilitating weakness, an intellectual frailty which should be overcome but which (failing that) must be confessed. Luckily, Martha Foley did not share my weakness. Born in Boston on March 21, 1897, Foley started writing short stories as a schoolgirl (at Boston Latin’s girls’ school), and never gave it up. She had several other enthusiasms, too, for instance for women’s suffrage and socialism; after dropping out of Boston University she devoted her life to writing, short stories for love and journalism for money. While reporting for the San Francisco Record she met a fellow reporter, Whit Burnett, who shared her passion for short fiction. Together, they moved to Paris in the late 1920s, fell in with the ‘lost generation’ writers and artists, married in Vienna, and in the same city started the annual publication Story. It was done on the proverbial shoestring. The first number (1932) sold only about 130 copies, all mimeographed (!!!), but it seemed to meet a need. Soon it was taken over by commercial publishers, notably Random House, and by the end of the decade boasted annual sales of 25,000. Foley and Burnett shared a good eye. Story published the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, and Carson McCullers (for some it was their first publication). And then, after she and Burnett divorced in 1942, Martha Foley took over the editorship of the annual Best American Short Stories from Edward O’Brien (who had, by the way, saluted Story as “the most important publication since Lyrical Ballads”), and moved it over to Houghton Mifflin. Foley edited BASS, latterly with the help of her son David Burnett, until her death in 1977, at which point Houghton Mifflin changed it to an annual “guest editor.” That appointment has become quite an honor (guest editors have included Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Louise Erdrich, and John Edgar Wideman). The whole story (Whit Burnett kept Story going until his death in the 1950s) testifies to the importance of the short fiction genre—and is a standing reproach to my inabilities as a reader of fiction. Until I overcome them, however, I’ll stick with the novel.

[Stanley]

"There is something more to 'a fine piece of writing' than the words that constitute it, something more lurking behind its 'mere surface'." Edith Grossman.

Edith Grossman, translator extraordinaire (of Spanish into English), was born in Philadelphia on March 22. 1936, and in 1957 became the first member of her family to graduate from college: Penn’s College for Women, where she majored in Spanish. She stayed at Penn for her MA and then bounced between Berkeley and New York to achieve her doctorate (from NYU). Predictably, she settled down to a professorial life, but a chance encounter followed by an offer led her down a different path, as a translator, and her growing success at this poetic challenge (as she sees the ‘art’ of translation) enabled her to quit teaching and start doing. Since then, Grossman has translated over 40 works, mostly narrative fictions and (as far as I know) she’s still going strong, including (now) publishing her own poetry and a personal reflection (Why Translation Matters, Yale U. Press, 2010). In several interviews, Grossman tells us that her greatest challenges were presented by Gabriel García Márquez (seven works, including—of course—Love in the Time of Cholera, 1998) and none other than Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (2003) and Exemplary Novels (2016). I find it interesting that she found her key to translating García Márquez was to “enter his mind” through her readings of William Faulkner’s most complex fictions. Her greatest success, though, came with her translation of Don Quixote. None other than Harold Bloom praised it as the best of many, a translation which catches (along with the greatness of the novel itself) Cervantes’ ambiguous position as a narrator of daydream heroism for a culture no longer capable of producing (or recognizing or rewarding) heroism: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago . . . and his man-of-all-work who did everything from saddling the horse to pruning the trees,” a knight errant poor enough that he had to sell off portions of his estate to be able to buy books on chivalry. ©

[Stanley]

"Whether great or small ugly or handsom sweet or stinking . . . every thing in the universe in their own nature appears beautiful to me." John Bartram.

John Bartram was born in Darby, a small settlement just to the southwest of Philadelphia, on March 23, 1699. He was buried there, too, in 1777, in what is now the oldest cemetery in Pennsylvania still in use, Darby’s Quaker burying ground. He always considered himself a plain farmer, but he also founded a three-generation gardening dynasty, co-founded (with Ben Franklin and other plain craftsmen) the American Philosophical Society, and designed and planted out the first American botanical garden. Bartram’s scientific ambition took root early and, he having bought a 100-acre farm, first bore fruit in 1728 in the shape of an 8-acre ‘kitchen garden’ located hard by his farmhouse, where of course he planted cabbages and things, but also rarer plants which he collected personally or solicited by letter and purchase. Most came from the eastern seaboard of North America, but as Bartram’s contacts and business associations grew so did the geography of his small garden. As it happens, that kitchen garden lies on an important geological borderline, the ‘fall line’, but also at a junction point between several surface soil types. This was probably a happy accident but it made Bartram’s garden the perfect place to root all sorts of plants; and as befit an early Linnaean (Bartram was among Linnaeus’s most faithful correspondents) he catalogued them all, descriptions, properties (especially medicinal), and classifications, through which we know that some of them (among the garden’s trees) were planted by Bartram or his sons William and John, Jr. As a botanical collector and traveler, William became more famous than his father, but together the Bartrams (through their annual shipments of “Bartram’s Boxes”—seeds, dried specimens, and descriptions) ensured that North American plants were well represented in Europe’s best gardens. In America efforts to preserve Bartram’s Garden began in earnest in 1888, when the kitchen garden was deeded to the city. If you visit John Bartram’s garden today (admission is free), you can hug a few very old trees, stand on the riverside boulder that marked the southeastern corner of John Bartram’s original deed, and consider the marvelous diversity of our native plant life. ©

[Stanley]

"He had no concept of humor; he simply wasn't a funny guy." Chuck Jones, speaking of Ub Iwerks.

Buried amongst P. G. Wodehouse’s Mr. Mulliner stories is “Buried Treasure,” the saga of one of Mulliner’s innumerable nephews, Brancepeth, and his quests for love and lucre, both of which (as it happens) turn on Brancepeth’s discovery of a marketable cartoon character, a frog as I remember the story. In some ways, the tale (which Wodehouse wrote in 1936) parallels the adventures of Walt Disney and his sometime partner, Ub Iwerks. Disney and Iwerks, who’d met in Kansas City, then sought their grail in Hollywood, struck it rich with Mickey Mouse in the late 1920s (in a short titled “Steamboat Willie”) but then went their separate ways, Walt waxing rich on the Mickey Mouse line while Iwerks sought wealth and recognition elsewhere several other cartoon characters, notably “Flip the Frog.” Their estrangement led to competing legends (which of them had ‘really’ invented Mickey Mouse?), a publicity battle which enlivened 1930s Hollywood gossip and (perhaps) struck Wodehouse’s funny bone. In the end, 1940 to be exact, Iwerks lost out and returned to the Disney studios where he continued to work, probably for low wages, until his death in 1971. Ub Iwerks, originally Ubbe Irt Iwwerks, was born in Kansas City on March 24, 1901, his father an immigrant German barber with a history of abandoned marriages. More or less on cue, he abandoned Ubbe who, to support his mother, turned his drawing skills into an advertising partnership with Disney in and after 1919. In 1923 they succumbed to the lure of Hollywood and to the notion that animation, cartoons, would being them fame and wealth. They were immediately successful with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and several dogs, cats, and horses, but then, more lastingly, with the mouse Mickey. Iwerks’ belief that the firm’s genius was his and not Walt’s had something to do with their breakup, but although Iwerks was perhaps the better draughtsman and certainly the better animator, success owed more to Walt Disney’s abilities to tell funny stories, win friends, and influence people. In Iwerks’ absence, Disney hired other animators, and eventually Iwerks returned to the Disney studio, where he continued to innovate with production processes but never regained his partnership position. ©.

[Stanley]

Ethel and Bessie, sisters and architects

It has often been the case that women who pioneered in exclusively male professions did so with the help of progressive males. This was certainly the case of the architect Ethel Mary Charles, the first female elected to membership in RIBA, the Royal Instituted of British Architects. And where Ethel had breached the gender wall, her elder sister Bessie soon followed. Ethel Mary Charles was born in British India on March 25, 1871, two years after Bessie. The sisters were the eldest two of the family, followed by four brothers, and were privately educated by their father, a medical doctor, their mother Ada, and by a succession of governesses and teachers hired in for the purpose. The family returned to England in 1877 so much of this education occurred there (and in Switzerland and France). In the process both sisters became interested in architecture and took academic courses in that field at Somerville College, Oxford, and then London University, but no professional courses were then available to women, nor any apprenticeships, until 1892 when Ethel found a berth with the fashionable (and progressive) firm of Ernest George & Peto, then heavily involved in making Kensington and South Kensington into London’s most fashionable neighborhoods. George’s and the Peto brothers’ distinctive houses, inspired by the best in contemporary German and Dutch domestic architecture, may still be admired, including the Harrington Gardens property the firm designed and built for W. S. Gilbert. Then, after George & Peto, Ethel moved over to Walter W. Crane’s tutelage, and found in him a fellow spirit. Crane is now known mainly for his book designs but at the time (1896-1903) he was also an architect, a socialist, and actively involved in the arts & crafts movement—and sympathetic to contemporary feminism. The Charles sisters specialized in domestic and church architecture, and you can still, today, follow some of their best designs (and indeed those of Ernest George & Peto and Walter Crane) through the internet. But for the most part the sisters’ pioneering professional careers were over before the outbreak of World War I. Both then retired to quieter lives as spinsters and as favorite (and indulgent) aunts to their brothers’ children. When Ethel died in 1962, she chose for her ashes to be interred next to Bessie’s (who had passed in 1932) at Golders Green, London. ©.

[Stanley]

"About the woodlands I will go// To see the cherry hung with snow." "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now", A. E. Housman, 1896.

Among the curious features of A. E. Housman’s first volume of poetry, A Shropshire Lad (1896) is that the poet’s connections with Shropshire were tenuous at best. He wrote most of the poems at his home in Highgate, London, and had by 1896 spent little (if any) time in Shropshire. Curiouser yet, Housman (a lifelong atheist) was buried in St. Lawrence churchyard in Ludlow, Shropshire, where an inscription celebrates him as the author of A Shropshire Lad, and (though it does not say so) leads the unwary tourist to think that A. E. Housman was, indeed, a Shropshire lad. In truth,
Alfred Edward Housman was born in Worcestershire (on March 26, 1859, and grew up in the Birmingham suburbs, where Shropshire’s “blue remembered hills” were little more than a low line on a distant horizon—and then only if the day were very clear and one looked in the right direction. But the poems in A Shropshire Lad are true ones, very true; even though, in 1896. Housman had to subsidize their publication, they have since rooted themselves in the national consciousness and have been set to music by a number of leading composers. George Orwell is not the only one who remembers them at his school (Eton, circa 1917, when Orwell was still Eric Arthur Blair) as his and his classmates’ poems of choice, read “over and over, in a kind of ecstasy.” In real life, Housman was not a poet anyway, but a (very) distinguished Latin scholar, in 1896 professor at London and soon (1911) to be translated to the chair at Cambridge, where he seems to have been an utterly intimidating teacher, nowhere near as accessible as was his poetry. When he died, those who admired him most saw to it that a cherry tree shaded his grave, and when that one died (as Housman remembered in one of his finest poems, cherry trees, like human lives, don’t last forever) it was replaced with a new planting. Just so, A Shropshire Lad has never, now for 125 years, been out of print. ©

[Stanley]

"The intellectual who accommodates the ruling class betrays the spirit." Heinrich Mann.

In the history of the modern German novel there is Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Nobelist and author of Buddenbrooks (1900), Death in Venice (1912), and The Magic Mountain (1929), and there is also the “other Mann,” Thomas’s elder brother, Heinrich Mann, also a novelist-critic of certain aspects of German culture and politics. Heinrich was born in Lübeck on March 27, 1871. Like Thomas, he enjoyed the advantages of wealth (their father was a leading grain merchant), not only as a child of prosperity but in his own right as a publisher. It was possibly this experience that made Heinrich’s novels of social criticism much more explicit than Thomas’s, literal minded one might say, and more historical too, most of them directly attacking what Heinrich saw as the fatal flaws in Germany’s culture. And if you didn’t get the point, Heinrich added to several of his novels polemic essays stressing the connections between power (state power and corporate power) and social and cultural decadence. His trilogy Kaiserreich (The Poor, 1917; The Patrioteer, 1918; and The Chief, 1925) may in this sense at least be likened to John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy (1930-36), and it set Heinrich up to becoming a leading defender of Weimar democracy and, by the same token, a critic of the rising right. But Heinrich’s most famous novel is Professor Unrat, 1905, and its fame rests on a film, The Blue Angel (1929-1930). The Blue Angel is the name of the sleazy night club which contextualized the rise and fall of the “tyrant,” aka “Professor Unrat.” “Unrat” means ‘unclean,’ which suits the small-town tyrant right to the ground and presaged some of the worst of the Nazis, not least Adolf the house painter. The Blue Angel also launched the international careers of actors Marlene Dietrich (as Lola Lola, temptress sans pareil) and Emil Jannings (as the professor who succumbs to temptation and ends his long fall from grace bound for an insane asylum). Not surprisingly, the rise of Hitler led to the exile of both Manns, Thomas and the other one, Heinrich, who went to California where he died in 1950. ©

[Stanley]

"I do long hours and I never complain. I want to do it right and prove people wrong once and for all about the myth of child stars." Daniel Ratcliffe.

Is it a worse sin to misquote or to misattribute a popular quotation? One of the more frequent misattributions is the immortal line “anyone who hates dogs and small children cannot be all bad.” It was a favorite of a bachelor friend of mine, who always attributed it (as many do) to W. C. Fields. Another frequent misattribution is to Groucho Marx. These are understandable errors on several counts, including the known prejudices (or personas) of Fields and Marx. But another reason is the date usually given, sometime in the 1930s, when the film industry was suddenly overrun by small children, each successive child star being impossibly cuter (or more saccharine) than his (or her) predecessor. The most famous of these impossible children was of course Shirley Temple (1928-2013), but there were many others, plentiful enough to make the quotation—and its misattribution—memorable and believable. Perhaps the most famous little boy in 1930s Hollywood was Freddie Bartholomew, born in London on March 28, 1924, whose signature role as Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936) made him the second highest paid child actor (after Temple) and made him (in my childhood) just the sort of boy that no one—at least no Iowa boy worth his salt—wanted to be: too angelic for words. The film was also an odd parallel of Freddie Bartholomew’s real life, for it involves a boy (Cedric) who becomes a victim of an emotional tug of war between adults, each of them having their own reasons for wanting to own “Ceddie.” Just so, Bartholomew’s guardianship—and his salaries—were fought over by his aunt, who’d brought him to Hollywood, and his parents, who had more or less abandoned him until he’d reached a profitable fame. As for the quotation, it was first uttered, Wikipedia thinks, in 1939 by Leo Rosten, as a sort of toast (or ‘roast’) to W. C. Fields at a Hollywood banquet. Asked suddenly to speak to the matter at hand (Fields’ life and character), Rosten blurted it out. Coming at the end of the decade’s flood of Bartholomews, Temples, and Rooneys, Rosten’s impulsive improvisation made an immediate hit and became genius. Freddie Bartholomew later, by the way, became a successful advertising executive. Shirley Temple became and ambassador. And Mickey Rooney stayed on as Mickey Rooney for almost 90 years. ©

[Stanley]

"I wear no labels. When a man has to put something around his neck to say 'I am,' he isn't. " Pearl Bailey.

Pearl Bailey, born on March 29, 1918, learned to sing in her father’s church in Newport News, Virginia. Singing (in several genres) was to be her career, and she made the most of it with a mid-range voice of extraordinary depth which got its first workouts in jazz clubs in Philadelphia (where her mother had moved after divorcing her father) and New York when she was still in her teens. But she could act, too, and together her musical and stage abilities won her starring roles in St. Louis Woman, Carmen Jones, and in the all-black cast version of Hello, Dolly! In a DC performance of Hello, Dolly! She made President Lyndon Johnson part of the show and invited him on stage for the encore. She made him part of the chorus. Pearl also picked up a husband, in 1952, in London, the multitalented and innovative jazz drummer Louie Bellson whose life story is almost as interesting as hers and who performed in all the leading big bands of the era, including Ellington’s and Basie’s. and included a spell in management (of Remo, a firm specializing in drum design and manufacture). The marriage (which included two adopted children) lasted until Pearl Bailey’s death in 1990. Together Bailey and Bellson were active in Republican party politics (Bailey was named Special Ambassador to the UN by Gerald Ford and would receive the Medal of Freedom from President Reagan in 1988.) Over the years Pearl Bailey got to know just about everybody in entertainment, white and black, among them Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Joan Crawford and Pearl Mesta. Articulate and unafraid, she was her own person (“I don’t work for anyone,” she once told Richard Nixon) Bailey made of herself a walking definition of equality. She took possession of her own life by writing three volumes of autobiography, including Talking To Myself, mainly about her higher education, which began with a diploma from what was then one of the few accredited black schools in the apartheid south. But it may be that her most prized academic possession was her BA in theology from Georgetown University, where she’d become a favorite student of the Catholic existentialist Wilfrid Desan. ©

[Stanley]

"With Goya we do not think of the studio or even of the artist at work. We think only of the event." Kenneth Clark.

Was Francisco Goya (born March 30, 1746) the last of the ‘Old Masters’ or was he the first of the moderns? One cannot answer that question without reference to his The 3rd of May, 1808 (also aka The Executions). I’ve yet to see the original, a large canvas (app. 9’ x 12’) that hangs today in the Museo del Prado, but I vividly remember my first sighting of it, projected onto a movie screen by Professor Lynn Case early in his Modern Europe course, Fall semester 1962. Case’s course turned me into a history major, and his treatment of the painting was particularly memorable. The 3rd of May is a oil on canvas treatment of Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain. It was one of the most miserable of modern wars, in its secret aims and its actual execution, and the closer one looks at Goya’s painting the better one can see the misery of it, a dark phalanx of armed troops in process of murdering an unarmed, disorganized civilian mass, geometry versus humanity. At least the civilians are in light but there is nothing heroic about their deaths. Even the ‘Christ’ figure at the painting’s focal center cannot compensate for the still-bleeding, crumpled corpses that lie around him. Goya’s massacre is ‘in process,’ unstoppable; proof of that lies within the painting, for a line of future victims stretches back into the infinite darkness. Just so, Goya’s contemporary (1808-1814) series of etchings, “The Disasters of War,” eloquently expressed the artist’s horror and also his utter disillusionment, for he had originally viewed the invasion as portending the triumph of the modern over the medieval corruptions of a declining Spain. To underline the point, one of the etchings is in design a mirror image of The 3rd of May but shows the indiscriminate slaughter of women. It is eloquent in its title, too: No se puede mirar (One cannot look at this). Considered as modern art, the line of descent from 3rd of May runs us towards Picasso’s Guernica, a painting that depicts another civilian slaughter in another foreign incursion. Less popular in the west but an even more faithful modern rendering of Goya was Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951). It was entirely fitting, then, that a bicentennial exhibition in 2008 brought together in the same room Guernica, Massacre in Korea, and The 3rd of May 1808. It must have been magnificent, yet silencing, to see them together. ©

[Stanley]

"We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all." Pericles of Athens;

St. Peter’s Church, in Perth Amboy, NJ, has several claims to fame. Although the current building dates only from the 1850s, it is locally regarded as an historical monument, and the parish itself is the oldest Episcopal community in New Jersey, having received its charter in 1718 (it was in fact a functioning church from 1685). The original building was an important landmark during the American Revolution, and changed hands several times (neither side respecting its function, it was used primarily as a stable and bunkhouse). Every communion, to this day, St. Peter’s uses its Queen Anne silver communion service, one of 14 sent out (in 1706) by the queen to Episcopal parishes in the colonies. And in St. Peter’s churchyard you will find the grave of Thomas Mundy Peterson, who served Perth Amboy as a school janitor and general handyman. This was the Thomas Peterson who, on March 31, 1870, became the first black person to vote in an American election. It was a local election on a local issue (the nature of the town’s charter), and it’s known that Peterson voted on the winning side, he and 229 other Perth Amboyans in favor of charter revision while 63 opposed. But the city recognized the special nature of Peterson’s vote (enabled by the 15th Amendment) and struck a gold medallion to memorialize it; the medallion was presented to Peterson on Decoration Day 1884. Two inches in diameter, the medal presents on its face a bas relief engraving of Abe Lincoln, which was doubtless much appreciated by Peterson, a loyal member of the Republican party. Economic necessity forced Peterson to put the medal in pawn several times, but it was in his possession when he died and it now occupies a place of honor in a museum on the campus of Xavier University, New Orleans. Thomas Peterson was buried in St. Peter’s churchyard in 1904, aged 80. Near his grave you will also find a memorial stone indicating that on August 10, 2011, the church held a Service of Repentance and Reconciliation to memorialize all those of African descent who were buried at St. Peter’s in unmarked and unremembered graves. ©

[Stanley]

"The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." Will Rogers.

On April 1, ‘April Fools Day,’ it is good to recall famous hoaxes and celebrate their perpetrators, but brief view (Wikipedia supplies a “list of hoaxes”) shows that they are (were) often far from being funny, frequently designed with malice aforethought. And then we’ve recently had stolen elections and Jewish lasers, and it may be that our thirst for hoaxes has been slaked—we live in serious times. On the other hand . . . There have been people whose whole reputation has rested on their genius for perpetrating successful hoaxes. One such was William Horace de Vere Cole, ‘Horace’ to his friends, whose claim to have been born in Blarney, Eire, should have served as a red flag to those who, over Cole’s lifetime (1881-1936) were taken in by his taste for making monkeys out of other people. Cole was the heir of an Anglo-Irish family with a long history, nearly devoid of laughs but full of Irish acres, and he was well-enough connected to get a good education and play a dashing role in the otherwise miserable Boer Wars. It was later, at Cambridge, that he fell in with a group of equally well-connected folk, now known as the Bloomsbury Group, and it was with them that (in 1911) he planned and executed his most famous hoax, a state visit for the Emperor of Abyssinia to HMS Dreadnought. De Vere did not play the Emperor—no burnt cork or tribal robes for him—but he did act as a senior Foreign Service official shepherding the group, which included Adrian Stephen (as translator) and in burnt-cork blackface his sister Virginia Woolf, and Duncan Grant, among others. And why not? They had the money, they had the time, and they’d already (in 1905) done the deed at Cambridge (miming a state visit to the university by the uncle of the Sultan of Zanzibar). The racial cruelties of these japes apparently bothered no one. But if the other members of the Emperor’s court went on in “real” life as writers, artists, leading civil servants, and senior army officers, Horace de Vere Cole could not escape his identity as a practical jokester. Some of his tricks were funny and harmless, some not, but his general course in life was downwards. Even his marriage failed—his wife Mavis (whose inheritance he tore through) became model for and mistress to the painter Augustus John, and it was John who was the biological father of Cole’s only child, Tristan. And when Tristan de Vere Cole wrote of his family, he chose his mother as his focus in Beautiful and Beloved: the Life of Mavis de Vere Cole (1974). ©

[Stanley]

'If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: "I am here to live out loud."' Emile Zola.

Émile Zola was born on April 2, 1840, in Paris, but spent most of his youth in Aix-en-Provençe where his Italian father was at work helping to design and build Aix’s sewerage system. Later, when Zola became the nation’s leading literary villain (in the eyes of the French radical right) much was made of this sewerage connection, for Zola became an advocate of naturalist fiction, but a more balanced judgment would make him a brilliant chronicler of French life (high, low, and middle) and the leading novelist of his time. He was much else, too, a theorist of literary and painterly art, a defender (and to an extent definer) of impressionism, and an active player in the politics of the Third Republic. In order to explain all this, we must move Zola back to Paris and away from Aix, and this happened on the death of his father in 1847 which forced his mother back on her own resources and a miserly pension. Her desires to see her bright boy become rich and famous got him a good education but not its fruits, at least not right away, and his failure in his law exams led to a period of real hardship and a more than passing acquaintance with Parisian lowlife and lowlivers. These (the early and mid 1860s) were at the height of Napoleon III’s “Second Empire,” and in his most famous fictions Zola would render (in language and plots) the contrasts and hypocrisies of a society awash in both luxury and poverty. “The incomparable Zola,” as Mark Twain once called him, is best known for his 20-volume Rougon-Macquart saga which followed two families and their vastly differing fortunes through the whole period of the Second Empire, ca. 1850-1871. Zola is more famed in Anglophone culture for his courageous defense of the Jewish army officer Albert Dreyfus in and after Dreyfus’s trial for treason (ca. 1898-9), which issued first in Zola’s flight (to London) and then his triumphant return after Dreyfus’s exoneration. But Zola’s role (and, it is thought, his fearless advocacy of naturalistic fiction) caused such deep bitterness that the French radical right was moved to claim credit for plotting Zola’s untimely and apparently accidental death (from carbon monoxide poisoning) in 1902. ©

[Stanley]

"To make a prairie, it takes one clover and one bee . . . and revery// The revery alone with do//. If bees are few." Emily Dickinson

Katharine Ordway was born on April 3. 1899, in St. Paul Minnesota, where her father Lucius, a Brown University graduate, had gone west to grow up with the country. He grew up well, married prosperously, and by the time Katherine was born (and named after her great-grandmother) the family (she was the only daughter and the second-youngest of five kids) lived in a Summit Avenue mansion designed by Cass Gilbert, Lucius’s personal friend who also designed (inter alia) the St. Louis Art Museum and the US Supreme Court building. So Katharine grew up smothered in good taste and comfort, attended local schools, and (1922) graduated cum laude from the University of Minnesota in botany and art. Meanwhile, her dad Lucius (who began as a wholesaler in tools and coal) was becoming an innovative investor who is credited with creating Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, a smallish investment that became very large, and thus enabled the adult Katharine to continue to pursue her interests in botany and art. Much of her art hangs today in her pleasing Connecticut mansion (now an endowed local history museum), but she’s more aptly memorialized today as a pioneering botanical amateur, in the classic sense of “amateur”: notably as a preserver of native prairie tracts (some of them very large and totaling over 31,000 acres) in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Kansas. These holdings also incorporate Ordway-funded research projects such as McAlester College’s Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area, on the Mississippi River just south of St. Paul. Most of the acreage was purchased with Katharine’s 3M inheritance, and a good deal of the legal work was done by her brother Richard and her first cousin Samuel Ordway, both of them lawyers and civil service reformers, and (like Katharine) impelled somehow (is there an Ordway gene?) to be do-gooders. For their doing good, Katharine, Richard, and Samuel are today celebrated as among the cofounders of the Nature Conservancy. Katharine, the quietest of the three and frail enough to be remembered “as a bird fallen from the nest” nevertheless lived long, dying in 1980. ©

[Stanley]

"Searching for solace." Title of a recent (1994) biography of Abdullah Yusuf Ali, 1872-1953.

Successful members of colonial elites who then, in the 20th century, faced rising tides of nationalism and liberation, found it a challenge to maintain their places and to salve their consciences. Such a one was Abdullah Yusuf Ali, born in Gujerat on April 4, 1872. As far as anyone could then have known, British India would last forever, and Ali’s father (from a merchant family) had chosen to grow with it, rising to a very senior position in the police force. Ali would follow like paths and go much further in them, but he lived long enough (81 years) to see not only the end of the Indian Empire but its partition into two states, one Islamic the other Hindu, and neither of them inclined to favor the accommodationist, civilian temper that Ali had cultivated as a leading Muslim scholar and an influential imperial civil servant. Ali showed great promise as a student, first in a Muslim school and then a Christian missionary college, and won a scholarship to St. John’s, Cambridge. There he did very well, then did even better in his law studies at Lincoln’s Inn, and passed (with flying colors) into the imperial civil service, holding senior positions in India from 1907. He had married an English wife, Theresa Shalders, in 1900, and in ways that now seem obsequious but then might have been called assimilationist made himself ever more “British,” more western. He did not abandon Islam—far from it, for he would remain a more faithful (certainly a more observant) Muslim than future leaders of separationist Pakistan like his contemporary, Muhammed Ali Jinnah. And Abdullah Ali’s English translation of the Qur’an is still well-regarded. But his English ways and his patriotic service to the British in both World Wars destroyed his chances to lead the subcontinent into nationhood. Abandoned by the British (who no longer had any use for him) and disregarded by Pakistani nationalists, Abdullah Yusuf Ali declined into senility and poverty. In 1953 he died in a London suburb, apparently an indigent whom the authorities had difficulty identifying. But they figured it out, for his will left nearly £600,000 in today’s values to the University of London for the support and welfare of Indian students. ©

[Stanley]

"The man who can speak acceptably is usually given credit for an ability out of all proportion to what he really possesses." Lowell Thomas.

“Later in the show” is the phrase today’s cable ‘newscasters’ use when they’re hoping that their audience (and thus their sponsors) stay with them for at least a few more minutes, and it’s also an admission that pessimists among us use to point out that the news, the daily beat, has turned into an entertainment, a show, its public ‘face’ (its newscasters) chosen—and paid—for other reasons than their ability to tell us, plainly, accurately and intelligently, what happened today. It’s not a new phenomenon, for sure; over a century ago Joe Pulitzer and Billy Hearst were newspaper publishers who became ever more adept at making “news” into headlines and special editions, sound and fury signifying only the arrival of new ammunition for their circulation wars. But there is something special about making the day’s ‘news’ into a 15-minute broadcast or a daily ‘show.’ One of the pioneers of this inherently deceptive art was Lowell Thomas, born on April 5, 1892, in Waddington, Ohio, just about the right time to grow up with new media and with just the right intelligence to make “news” into entertainment. In his two volumes of autobiography, each entitled with a tag line from his daily radio news show, he admitted as much, nay gloried in it. His show came on daily, at dinnertime, and he “never felt it was my responsibility to destroy the digestive system of the American people.” He could be the sauce or he could be the sweet, but he was, he said, “not a journalist, but an entertainer, just as Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are entertainers.” He first reached that eminence in “making” Lawrence of Arabia into an American hero, in radio reports which should, perhaps, have been focused on the imperialist connotations of World War I. Thomas’s oversell embarrassed even Lawrence, not a publicity-shy figure. In a long career (that began with newspaper reporting and ended with a nightly TV news “show”) Lowell Thomas reached millions of viewers and made millions of dollars, but the real value of his information needs to be assessed by some other measure. ©