BOB'S BITS

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"A power behind the SOE's operations in wartime France, she combined loyalty, brains and a seraphic smile." Headline over The Guardian's obituary on Vera Atkins, July 2000.

One woman’s career in British intelligence began in her native Romania, where in the 1930s, she was befriended by the German envoy, Count von der Schulenberg, and asked by him to hostess his social occasions. This she did well, for she had been trained to such tasks in French finishing schools and at the Sorbonne; but then she passed on the information she’d gained to intelligence officers in the British embassy in Bucharest. She was, you see, Vera Maria Rosenberg, born June 15, 1908 into a wealthy Jewish family of Ukrainian and German origins, and she was already aware of, and motivated by, the rising tide of anti-Semitism across central and eastern Europe, and not only in Hitler’s Germany. First part of an informal network that kept the dissident MP Winston Churchill informed of German actions and intentions, she was to help engineer (and execute) the escape, from Poland, of the Poles who had broken the German “Enigma” code, and brought them (and their code-breaking ‘machine’) to Britain in a hazardous trip (via Romania) that began just days before the German invasion of Poland. In Britain with her mother (her father died in 1932) she adopted her mother’s surname of Elkins, slightly anglicizing it to “Atkins,” and it would be as Vera May Atkins that she began (in 1941) her work with the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Soon Vera was the number 2 in “F”, the French section, training agents destined to work in France, drilling their speech, cosseting them, yet making them as fully aware as possible of the dangers they would face. She was deeply affected by her failures, and with liberation forces she traveled through France, Holland, and Germany to trace the fate of 118 ‘lost’ agents. She documented the deaths (some of them gruesome) of 117, with a particular interest in the 18 who were women, and it’s through Atkins’ work that we know how and when (for instance) agents Noor Inayat Khan and Violet Szabo met their grisly ends. In Vera Atkins’ old age, conspiracy theorists spread the ideas that she’d “really” been a double (or even a triple) agent, or that the ‘lost’ agents were her particular errors. She occasionally emerged from retirement to do battle on these matters, notably on the character and courage of Noor Inayat Khan, but otherwise Atkins lived quietly on until her own death in 2000. I believe that Atkins furnished a template for the character of the inscrutable, sometimes sinister, but always fearless Hilda Pierce in the British serial “Foyle’s War”: but I can’t prove it. ©

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"Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose." Joyce Carol Oates.

I read a Joyce Carol Oates novel when I was in graduate school, perhaps because I knew she’d been in the same graduate school before me, and was so turned off by it that I’ve never read another. Today, I think that is a perfect reflection on the absurdity (or mere silliness) of willfully closing one’s mind, for by general consent Oates is one of the finest writers of my time (and, somewhat oddly, one of the most prolific). Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1936, in Lockport, NY, a small city straddling the Erie Canal, and grew up in another, smaller, canal-straddling town in a small family (Oates, two siblings, two parents, and a grandma) which sat (insecurely) towards the top end of the local working class. Her parents and especially her grandma put a high value on education, and Joyce went along with that, fairly spectacularly, becoming Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian at Syracuse (1960) before entering grad school at Madison (MA, English, 1961). Soon she jumped those tracks in order to continue writing, which she evidently still does at the drop of the proverbial hat. She writes when she runs (she’s still, I think, a runner, having begun that hobby late in life, at 63), when she cooks, and until his death in 2008 when she talked with her husband Raymond Smith, whom she married in 1961 and for whom, today, she still grieves. Oates writes longhand, at least in her first drafts and early revisions, and she writes well. Her novels (about sixty of them), short fictions (a longer list), and some poems have won her just about every prize going (including the St. Louis Literary Award) but not yet the Pulitzer (five nominations, but no cigar). Nor has Oates won the Nobel (yet, although there are those who think she will if she lives long enough). Along the way she’s taught at Princeton, for many years, and at Berkeley, for a few. Oates is also a prolific and influential essayist, on political as well as cultural subjects, and I have read enough of her essays to think that I really must (not “should”) get around to a novel or two. But I think I will start with her “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, a 1966 short story dedicated to Bob Dylan and inspired (or precipitated” by her listening, perhaps with her husband, to “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” But for Oates it doesn’t seem to be all over, not yet; and we wish her a very happy, and prolific, 85th birthday. ©.

[Stanley]

"I always tell the producers, if I can't get the girl at the end of the picture, at least give me more money." Ralph Bellamy.

As kids, I and my friends became aware of an acting and plot cliché, especially in war and western movies, the male supporting actor who was (for sure) fated to die and, in doing so, teaching the hero an important moral lesson, for instance about courage and selflessness. Meanwhile the hero got the girl and rode off into a glorious sunset. Another supporting actor cliché was the story of a naïve, well-meaning man, a mensch, whose appealing qualities make him lose the girl to the cooler and cleverer lead actor. Ralph Bellamy made almost a specialty of this cliché, for instance by losing first Irene Dunne and then Rosalind Russell to Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (1937) and His Girl Friday (1940). In fact Bellamy was a lead character in his own right who, left to his own devices rather than to a script, would have got the girl every time. Born in Chicago on June 17, 1904, Ralph Bellamy grew up in prosperous Winnetka, acquiring enough self-confidence to run away from home at 15 and join a touring Shakespearian troupe. Fetching up in New York City, he formed his own acting company, the Ralph Bellamy Players. There he caught the eyes of a couple of film folk and landed his first (starring) role in 1931. That began what was perhaps his best period, certainly a fast and furious one (by 1940 he’d been in 69 films). Besides being Cary Grant’s fall guy. Bellamy played the lead in many films, including noir crime and even horror. In the late 40s he moved into TV, serials and specials, then copped his biggest success, as Franklin Roosevelt (on stage 1954. and in film, 1960) in Sunrise at Campobello, about FDR’s polio and how he coped with it. Bellamy drilled himself for this role with passion and care while, behind the scenes, or publicly as long-time president of the Actors’ Guild, he saved several from the depredations of McCarthyism. I thought his last role was in Trading Places (1984, wherein he and his even more dastardly brother were outclassed and outfoxed by Eddie Murphy) but in fact he played in three more (including a reprise of his Trading Places role). Bellamy’s last film was Pretty Woman (1990). His very full life (which included a starring role in developing Palm Springs as Hollywood’s home from home) ended in late 1991. ©.

[Stanley]

"I would in fact tend to have more confidence in the outcome of a democratic decision if there was a minority that voted against it, than if it was unanimous." Jürgen Habermas, 1993.

The question “what makes us ‘human’?” has concerned those who study human evolution, whether they be fossil hunters or gene theorists. Several plausible answers have been offered up, including upright posture, tool-making, and (intriguingly) cooking, but a favored answer is “speech.” We humans can, amongst ourselves, actualize our thoughts (from abstract concepts like ‘progress’ to real things like how to tie our shoes). And then we communicate these thoughts to others with a reasonable expectation that we will be understood, including even when our speech provokes disagreement. Jürgen Habermas has lumped all this together in the idea of “communicative competence”, and by working on this idea has made himself into one of the most important philosophers of our time, one whose influence is felt in many fields, among them theology, physics, history, and literature. The trick, as Habermas sees it, is ‘competence,’ not only the skill of communicating our thoughts to someone (or to many), but to Habermas the idea that the speaker and hearer (or the writer and the reader) can find agreement or, failing that, can make their discussions mutually rational and reasonable (based on agreed evidence). Born in Germany on June 18, 1929. Habermas has found in his own life story reasons aplenty to hope that he is right, from his regretted youth as the son of a Nazi organizer and then as a 15-year old Hitler Youth ordered to hold the Western Front, to his adulthood as an academic philosopher engaged in communicative battle with those who (as Habermas saw it) had no interest in coming to an agreement with him, even if only an agreement to disagree. For Habermas, our communicative competence was itself an evolving skill, one which had moved from a top-down “command” process (you tell me to jump and my only alternative is to ask “how high?”) to a ‘discussion’ process, a self-consciously modern way of communicating, one that acknowledges (or positively embraces) the possibility of disagreement and explores the varied ways in which disagreement can be voluntarily resolved or at least lived with. It’s an attractive idea, this “deliberative democracy,” not least because it is so many miles away from a boy being sent into battle by a leader (or, in German, a “Fuhrer”) who communicated only by command. ©

[Stanley]

"A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat." Mayor Jimmy Walker.

One of the best political novels, The Last Hurrah (1956), is Edwin O’Connor’s affectionate, sharp portrait of the fictional Frank Skeffington, Irish-American mayor of an unnamed eastern US city. Through it we learn much of Frank’s alliances with the city’s ethnic enclaves, unholy alliances which performed welfare and ‘Americanization’ functions, handouts to the poor and protection from overzealous policing. Much more saintly were the crusaders who sought to free the city from the mayor’s greasy grip, not only the city’s WASP establishment but Frank’s own Mother Church whose local Cardinal knew Frank from birth and who loathes Frank’s soul with a holy passion. Skeffington is thought to be a stand-in for a real machine politico, the famous mayor James J. Curley of Boston. Almost as easily, Skeffington could be a fictional Jimmy Walker, New York’s mayor (from 1926 to 1932) and the wishbone wedged in Franklin Roosevelt’s throat. James Walker was born on June 19, 1881; he wasn’t born poor (his dad William owned a lumberyard), but he was certainly born on the wrong side of FDR’s tracks, and for good measure on the wrong side of Teddy Roosevelt’s tracks, too, for William Walker was a self-made Irishman who’d mastered the middle ranks of New York City’s Tammany Hall machine and who wanted Jimmy to become a politician. After sampling the joys of Tin Pan Alley and the rewards of friendships with chorus girls, Jimmy followed along, and after several lucrative terms in the state legislature became New York’s mayor. Mayor Walker had some positive accomplishments, including cleaning up the city in the literal sense, but proved unable to restrain his pursuits of pleasure which usually ended up in his favorite speakeasies and/or in the arms of his best girls. He was a man of both bad and good habits, and in neither guise did he (or anyone connected to him) appeal to the national electorate. And so the Governor of New York, the aristocratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President Teddy’s cousin, had to sink Mayor Walker to realize his own presidential ambitions. This he did. And so, to escape justice and evade civil actions, Jimmy and his latest chorus girl sailed to Europe while Franklin sailed into the White House. They left from the transatlantic terminal that Mayor Jimmy had built. As if to complete the comparison to Skeffington, another of Walker’s inveterate opponents was Patrick Joseph Hayes, yet another Irishman who was the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. ©.

[Stanley]

"Those that set in motion the forces of evil cannot always control them afterwards." Charles Chesnutt.

Charles W. Chessnut was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20. 1858. His parents were “free persons of color” who had moved there from the slave state of North Carolina. When Chesnutt was 9 years old, his family returned to North Carolina in hopes that emancipation (and northern victory in the Civil War) had made it possible to be really free. Over the years, these hopes would be disappointed (if not dashed to smithereens), and Chesnutt would make this disappointment a major theme of his life and of nearly all his short stories and novels. He began to write early, as a student and then teacher in a freedmans’ school in Fayetteville, NC, and then, back in Cleveland, as a young lawyer. At 29 Chesnutt’s short story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” was published in The Atlantic magazine, and from then he was a writer, both by his own definition and that of William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic and the gatekeeper of America literary culture. I agree, and I’ve used Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as a required text in several of my American Studies seminars. It’s a good novel, not only a gripping narrative in itself but also a significant document on the North Carolina coup d’état of 1898 by which a racially integrated coalition government was overthrown in a violent and bloody insurrection (which makes Trump’s attempted coup d’état, January 2006, look like a tea party, mad hatter and all). Chesnutt is a fascinating character himself, too, for he could (and as a young adult occasionally did) “pass” as a white man. His father’s father was a white slave owner, and his mother, too, was of mixed racial descent, and in appearance Chesnutt was white. But through most of his life and at its end Charles Chessnut made the existential choice to “be” a black man in a ‘white’ society that was becoming increasingly self-conscious about its ‘whiteness’ and absurdly zealous in enforcing whiteness per se as a thing of value. Its cruelest expression was the “one drop” rule enforced by the Virginia “Racial Integrity” Act of 1924, a law that led the state into a racial crime wave that resulted (among other enormities) in the forced sterilization of thousands of “defective” individuals. Charles Chessnut’s decision to “be” a black person was thus an act of defiance as well as one of self-definition, and it makes his fictions especially memorable. ©

[Stanley]

"I want a part where I can use my own hair, my own voice, and maybe even be literate." Judy Holliday·

Barely controlled hysteria about vast conspiracies is an American political style that is once again with us in the shape of the ‘stolen’ election of 2020. In my youth, it took various shapes now known collectively (pun intended) as McCarthyism. One of its leading expressions was a “report” on communist influence in US radio and television imaginatively entitled “Red Channels”. This June 1950 “document,” as conservative commentators called it, listed 151 individuals who were supposed to be commies (outright or clandestine), primarily because of their known proclivities to support liberal causes such as civil rights, peace in Korea, labor unions. Every care was taken. “Red Channels” insisted, to exclude “genuine” liberals from the list, but one who sneaked in was the comic actress Judy Holliday, who was duly called before the senate’s McCarren committee to testify, under oath, about her commie connections. True to her art, she didn’t defy the committee but nor did she surrender to it. Instead, she played the dumb blonde, a role she played to Oscar perfection (Best Actress) in “Born Yesterday” (also 1950). As she explained in a letter to her friend Haywood Broun, “I played Billie Dawn . . . but I am not ashamed of myself because I didn’t name names. That much I preserved. Judy Holliday was born on June 21, 1921, as Judith Tuvim, the only child of a couple of genuinely liberal Jewish parents, Abe and Helen (Abe was director of the National Jewish Fund and Helen a music teacher) who encouraged Judith in her move from secretarial work to play-acting. That move seemed to require a name change, and Judith translated hers to Holliday. After acting bit parts on Broadway she joined a revue group and (rather against her will) did comedy, well enough to come to the attention of those about to stage “Born Yesterday.” She was a hit, and when the play went to Hollywood to become a movie, she went with it (thanks to some behind-the-scenes maneuvering by some of her “genuine liberal” friends e.g. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn). These (and Heywood Broun and Leonard Bernstein) were precisely the sort of people a good Jewish girl should steer clear of, but Judith Tovim-Judy Holliday didn’t. She went on to some other good things but succumbed to cancer at only 43. Her “Red Channel” tormenters went on to form the nucleus of the John Birch Society, and I think they may still be around. I heard someone say so, once. ©.

[Stanley]

"I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world; yet I know that it will." Gwen John.

If this summer you choose to celebrate the easing of travel restrictions by visiting London, you might want to take in a special exhibition at the Tate Britain. The exhibition, called “Women and Power,” celebrates women artists (British women, of course), not in a ‘room of their own’ but scattered in several existing rooms and organized by time period. Thus scattered, the eight artists featured operate (each in their appropriate gallery) as a gendered minority, possibly a more realistic way of organizing this exhibit, since, historically, actually being a woman artist has been, in itself, a daunting challenge. This was particularly so for Gwen John, whose work you will find in the 1900 Gallery and who held stubbornly to her particular vision despite being the elder (and overshadowed) sister of Augustus John. Gwendolyn John was born in Pembrokeshire, Wales, on June 22, 1876. Her own unconventional artistic style and life (not to mention Augustus’s flamboyances) might be seen as a rebellion against her father, a cold, cheerless lawyer, or her ‘Salvationist’ sisters, but in fact her artistic talents were encouraged by the family. Until she was 19, she was educated at home, by governesses and by her painterly mother. Her first surviving painting came in that year when she moved to London to take up a place (next to Augustus, so to speak) at the Slade School of Art. She won a drawing prize at the Slade and (in terms of the practical business of living) began to follow some of her brother’s eccentricities, in terms of both diet and lovers. We can see from her several self-portraits that she never ate heartily (her “Nude Girl” is alarmingly spare), but on the lover side of life she had several affairs, notably with Auguste Rodin (for whom she also modeled), but also (probably) with two of Augustus John’s wives. After her Rodin period ended, she renounced the flesh for a life of the spirit (in the Roman communion) but her available (on-line) paintings retain the restrained, wan and drawn style of her earlier works. Her paintings continued to sell, enough at least to keep her in cats and food, until the early 1930s, when she began her retirement from this life. Gwen John died in September 1939, possibly of starvation. Her loneliness survives in her paintings and in a rich collection of drawings. She would, doubtless, have been pleased to see her artistic reputation grow and begin to overshadow that of her brother, Augustus, but that process did not begin until the rise of the new feminism. ©.

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In case you're wondering, nothing received from Bob since Tuesday....

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Still nothing from Bob and I have no information despite enquiring. Very worrying...

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I've mailed Paulette, Bob's wife, to see if I can get any news. I spoke to my mate Steve and he has heard nothing. I'm getting worried.....

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Update. I've had word from Paulette. Bob is fine. They had to drive to Iowa for a funeral and have only just got back. There is some sort of a problem with hosting his blog at the University but P says it will be sorted out. I've told him he could always use us...... P says he will be back soon.

[Stanley]

“the dignity of women’s place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.” Letter to Brooks from the Barnard College dean.
** Harriet Brooks

I am old enough to remember that in Iowa schools there once was a surplus of older, unmarried women among the faculty at all levels from kindergarten to grade 12. There were several reasons for this, but one was that for a long time it was illegal for a married woman to teach. My grandmother had to quit her teaching job (a one-room rural primary in Grundy County) when she married, in 1908, as did my mother-in-law in 1942. And the prohibition went up the educational ladder and across the country. Harriet Brooks, born in Ontario on July 2, 1876, studied physics at McGill under Nobelist Ernest Rutherford and in Paris with Nobelist Marie Curie. There she made some landmark discoveries, for instance various properties of Radon and Thorium, and was probably the first scientist to observe the quantum physics phenomenon of the recoil of the atomic nucleus. From McGill, Harriet Brooks took up an appointment in the Physics faculty at Barnard College, the women’s division of Columbia
University in New York. After a few years at Barnard, she met and married Frank Pitcher despite the known rule that Barnard’s women faculty were not allowed to wed. She refused to resign voluntarily and was fired by the Barnard dean, Laura Gill, who explained “the dignity of women’s place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.” Harriet Brooks Pitcher moved back to Canada and moved away from physics. But not far enough. She died in 1933 of cancer induced by her early exposure to radioactive materials. ©

[plaques]

....was fired by the Barnard dean, Laura Gill, who explained “the dignity of women’s place in the home demands that your marriage shall be a resignation.”

Part of the evangelical right-wing thinking that helped Trump get into the Whitehouse. Make America Great (white) Again. nonsense.

[Stanley]

"Ruth Crawford Seeger set out to revolutionize music, then moved into politics. But the world wasn't ready for her." Charlotte Higgins.

In 1938, at a concert featuring her earlier compositions, Ruth Crawford Seeger was asked about her ‘current’ compositional work. She replied that she was now “composing babies. Indeed. In a fairly short period, about a decade, she married Charles Seeger, her music teacher (piano and composition). Thus Ruth took on three step-children (by Charles’s previous and unhappy marriage) and then, in quick succession, ‘composed’ four of her own. These seven sprouts included Pete Seeger (stepson) and her own Seegers, Mike, Penny, and Peggy, who all four would become eminent ‘folk’ musicians in their own right. What seems saddest about this whole story is that, until after Ruth’s death in 1951, these kids knew little (or perhaps nothing) of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s life as a single woman who was a pioneer composer of modern American classical music. Ruth Crawford (Seeger) was born on July 3, 1901, in Chicago, the daughter of a Methodist minister, Clark Crawford, and his wife Sarah. By 1914, when Clark died, Ruth had already developed a precocious talent at the piano, which was refined by formal instruction in Chicago (1921-29) and New York. Along the way, she added composition to performance and widened her career ambitions. This dual-track development continued when she became a student, then a lover, of Charles Seeger, despite Charles’ view that women could “never write symphonies.” As far as I know Ruth never did that, but she composed several shorter pieces (for piano and for a string quartet) which are now acknowledged classics, both in their own right and as foundational to the works of modernist American composers, notably Henry Cowell and Elliott Carter. We might take all this as conclusive comment on how marriage could squash a woman’s career, except that their marriage (in 1932) also radically altered Charles Seeger’s life, from eminent teacher of the classics to eminent collector of American ‘folk’ music. Ruth Crawford Seeger joined him in this
new work, and became, herself, eminent in the new field, as collector and transcriber (in this, as partner to Charles and also to John and Alan Lomax) but perhaps most remarkably as story-teller, e.g. Our Singing Country (1941) and American Folk Songs for Children (1950). In 1951, Ruth Seeger began a return to classical composition, an ambition cut short by cancer in 1953. It was then that her children learned that, once, she had been a different person. ©.

[Stanley]

Irish Independence and the American and French Revolutions
** Arthur Condorcet-O'Connor, 1763-1852.
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Arthur O’Connor was one of the many members of the ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ who birthed, or at least midwifed, Irish nationalism. It was thus, for him, a happy coincidence that he was born on July 4, 1763, just 13 years before the USA’s birthing date. Indeed, even as an adolescent he welcomed the announcement (from Philadelphia) that since all were created equal, all also possessed the right to national self-determination. Arthur was the eighth (of nine) children of the Irish MP Roger Conner, and (at 20, along with his elder brother Roger) he proclaimed his conversion to Irish nationalism by discovering (or inventing) his family’s descent from the Clan O’Connor. As if in celebration, he and Roger changed their surname from Conner to O’Connor. Both brothers, and several of their children, would remain true to that new political identification (with the amorphous group known as United Irishmen), Roger as a figure in Irish politics but Arthur, much more dangerously, in his
enthusiastic support for the French Revolution. This led to his participation in French military schemes to invade Ireland and sever its British connections, his trial for treason, and his eventual exile to France where in 1804 he was appointed a general in Napoleon’s army and then, in 1814-15 supported Napoleon’s effort to return to power. While Napoleon was exiled to distant St. Helena, O’Connor remained in France where, with his wife Sophie, he edited and published the letters and publications of his philosopher father-in-law the marquis de Condorcet. That relationship seemed to inspire another name change, and so in 1852 he died as Arthur Condorcet-O’Connor, citoyen français and (informally) lord of the manor of Le Bignon Mirabeau, just south of Paris. To the end, he remained true to the ideals of equality and freedom as articulated in 1776, not only by Thomas Jefferson but also by the Scottish philosopher-economist Adam Smith.

[Stanley]

"Life is simply the reification of the process of living." Ernst Mayr

Ernst Mayr, Ornithologist, 1904-2005
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The discovery of DNA, and the development of DNA dating, have had a profound, sometimes startling effect on our understanding of evolutionary processes. But the basic theory of evolution remains pretty much intact, thanks not only to Charles Darwin (of course) but also to Ernst Mayr, born on July 5, 1904 in Wurzburg, Germany. In the course of his long, active life (Mayr died in 2005) he brilliantly defended Darwin while adding fundamentally to the strength of the theory, and indeed was the principal author of the “modern synthesis” of what we probably shouldn’t still call Darwinism. But Mayr was first and possibly foremost a birdwatcher. It was this that distracted him from his medical studies, earning his doctorate, instead, in ornithology (when he was only 21); and it was this that brought him to the attention of New York’s Museum of Natural History. His first task for them, aged but 23, was to undertake a now-famous expedition to New Guinea to collect, and map, that island’s spectacular diversity of birdlife. Mayr survived that expedition (by the skin of his teeth) and then went on to become a curator at the Museum, then a museum director and professor at Harvard, and always working on difficult problems in evolutionary theory. “Everyone should have a problem,” he once told a group of teen-aged birdwatchers in the Bronx. Ernst Mayr discovered quite a few problems, and lived long enough, and lively enough, to solve most of them. Appropriately, several species have been named after Mayr (species name = mayri or ernstmayri). They are mainly birds, but sprinkled too with orchids, nematode worms, arachnids, and bird lice. Taken together, they reflect his intellectual breadth, his astonishing industry, and his fruitful retirement (of more than 30 years). ©

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Super omnia vincit veritas
Jan Hus, 1372-1415
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We know very little about the first half of Jan Hus’s life, not even his birth date, but we do know about his spectacular end, condemned as a heretic by the Council of Konstanz and burned at the stake on July 6, 1415. Hus was born poor, and as he moved up through the priesthood he took his birthplace, Husinec (in Bohemia) as his surname. He was born sometime in the early 1370s, a time of considerable conflict within the Roman Catholic church and between the church and several of the states of western and central Europe. The positions that Hus would take in these ongoing struggles marked him out as an early reformer and, in several senses, a predecessor of leaders of the Protestant Reformation, especially Martin Luther (1483-1546). He was first drawn into battle as a scholar at the University of Prague, where a Bohemian majority sought to wrest power from a German minority, so in addition to Hus’s undoubted importance as a reformer we need to reckon with his contributions to
modernizing the language, written and spoken, of his native Bohemia. Certainly he campaigned to make the vernacular, in his case Bohemian, the language of the church both in worship and in scholarship. Given the unsettled politics of the Holy Roman Empire, this in itself was enough to guarantee for Hus a lifetime of troubles. Hus was also an heir to and follower of John Wycliffe (~1328-1384), and much of his writing was in effect a plagiarism of Wycliffe, notably Hus’s chief work on the abuses of the medieval church (De ecclesia). By 1410 Hus was in trouble for all these reasons. Forced into internal exile in Bohemia, he could not be silenced, and at length he was brought to trial before a church council in German-speaking Konstanz. He confessed the charges against him if they could be proven contrary to scripture, a ‘confession’ which only infuriated his enemies, who turned him over for punishment to the civil authorities. Hus remained a hero in Bohemia where, for over two
centuries, heresy and schism were, and were seen to be, “Hussite.” The Hussites were driven out during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648); many of them would eventually emigrate to the British American colonies (notably Pennsylvania, where liberty of conscience was the law). Jan Hus remains today a Czech national hero.

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"Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. " Margaret Walker, 1942.

Margaret Walker’s story-telling life was birthed in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915. Her father, a Methodist minister from Jamaica, began by making his daughters familiar with the best of western (and American) literature. Her pianist mother played everything from the classics to improvised honky-tonk. But her maternal grandmother told her real stories, if second-hand ones, from the slavery days of her great-grandmother Vyry. All this would simmer and season for three decades, then issued forth in Margaret Walker’s first (and only) novel, Jubilee (1966), in which a fictional Vyry is the main character and narrator. That publication coincided with Walker’s second stay at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she won her Ph.D. in 1967) but well before that she had learned to put her stories into poetry. After some years in Birmingham and New Orleans, the Walkers moved north, to Chicago, along with tens of thousands more in the Great Migration, bringing their stories with them. Young Margaret graduated from Northwestern in 1935: black, female, highly educated, and unemployed. But she was bursting with stories, and took them just a little ways south, to Bronzeville and the Chicago Black Renaissance, first as a staffer in the Federal Writers Project (where she headed the team charged with writing the Illinois guidebook), but secondly and more importantly as a coworker and friend of writers of the caliber of Richard Wright, Arna Bontemps, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Encouraged to write poetry (Langston Hughes played a role here), Margaret Walker won the Yale Younger Poets competition with her collection For My People (1942), in which the title poem is an eloquent plea for Black people to take pride in telling all of their collective story. If you want to know more about her, a worthy aim, I recommend her poetry (still in print or on various poetry websites), and Amiri Baraka’s eloquently poetic obituary. “Margaret Walker Alexander,” in The Nation magazine for 1998: LINK

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“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” ― Jean de La Fontaine, Fables

** Jean de la Fontaine. 1621
Literature flourished in and around the court of Louis XIV, where it was almost a requirement, for those noble ladies who held a salon, to have on call at least one writer of note. One writer who enjoyed the patronage (and perhaps protection) of several of these ladies was Jean de la Fontaine, born on July 8, 1621, in Chateau-Thierry where his haut bourgeois father held a minor but profitable post in the vast bureaucracy of the Sun King’s France. De la Fontaine inherited this position in 1647 and made a good marriage (financially speaking) in the same year, and these served as an entré to court life. As his marriage foundered, he began to mature as a writer and from 1659 to his death in 1695 he was fairly steadily in receipt of pensions (and residences) with this or that courtier or salon. De la Fontaine’s skills at negotiating the intricacies of this social life helped to make him into a poet of wit and subtlety, and his works are still, today, much favored for these qualities in French school curricula. The most famous are his Fables choisies: “chosen”, that is, from the Greek and Latin classics of the genre, and published in three batches from 1668 to 1693. These were not mere translations, but were naturalized into French culture by a writer of great skill and further enriched by his humanist leanings. Endorsed as such by one of his salon patronesses, Marie, marquise de Sévigné (no mean writer herself), they entered the list of French classics, and along with various of de la Fontaine’s contes, they remain there today. Perhaps because of their subtleties, they’ve never translated well into English, and that subtlety, with its hints of gentle skepticism, may be one reason that de la Fontaine never fully enjoyed the light of the Sun King’s approval. When the king finally did assent to the poet’s election to the French Academy, he endorsed him only as someone who had the ‘promise’ to become wise. Today de la Fontaine’s wisdom and wit are memorialized in statues at his birthplace and other cities, often showing the poet in tandem with characters (e.g. a tortoise and a hare) from his fables. Some say that it was his quest for favor that brought him, finally, to reconvert to Catholicism. Perhaps it was, instead, de la Fontaine’s personal version of Pascal’s wager.

[Stanley]

"Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances." Samuel Eliot Morison.

The debate over history—whether it is a humanity or a social science—has yet to arrive at a definitive conclusion, perhaps because it is a little bit of both. That dual nature is evident not only in the finished product, the organization and style of published histories, but in individual historians’ choices of subject matter and in their research methods. In my experience, most historians are themselves a little unsure about the matter, but there are exceptions on both sides. One of the most eminent practitioners of history as a humanity was Samuel Eliot Morison, whose choice of subjects, research methods, and style and structure of discourse were made crystal clear in his characteristic contribution to the Harvard Guide to American History (both editions, 1951 and 1974), an essay about how history should be written, and his History as a Literary Art: An Appeal to Young Historians (1946). That he felt such a book had to be written suggests a certain defensiveness, as does his (nearly) lifetime habit of arriving on horseback to teach at Harvard. Samuel Eliot Morison was born to the New England purple on July 9, 1887. He attended Harvard for his BA and PhD degrees, and stayed there most of his professional life, with brief interruptions for military service in both World Wars. He came to believe that an historian should immerse himself in the lives of those he studied. This is clearly shown in his research for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), where he sailed a 45-foot ketch along Christopher Columbus’s transatlantic and interisland routes, but also reflected in the biographical nature of most of his works and their focus on social elites. Morison won many awards (including Pulitzers for his biographies of Columbus and John Paul Jones), but his immersions, so to speak, inclined him to histories of elites and, perhaps, an unconscious sympathy for elites. It was this tendency that led to his eclipse; as history and historians became more concerned with depicting and explaining whole social orders, it became easier to see Morison as out of touch with, or opposed to, the new scholarship of diversity and democracy that looked beyond and behind lines of gender and ethnicity. But Morison’s books are still a treat to read, both for their literary qualities and for their focus on the life of the mind. ©

[Stanley]

"We shall exclude from our pages the semibarbarous phraseology of the Schools, and adopt as its substitute, plain English diction."

** Thomas Wakley, 1795-1862
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Most people will know something of the British medical journal The Lancet, including that its name, “lancet”, is an older term for a scalpel. But the founder of The Lancet, Thomas Wakley, meant also to refer to the medieval “lancet,” an arched window letting light into old places. And indeed it was from its first issue a crusading journal, modeling itself in that regard after The New England Journal of Medicine; indeed Dr. Walter Channing, one of the founders of the New England journal, visited London in 1823, when The Lancet first appeared, met Wakley, and may have helped to fund the first issue. There is no doubt, however, that Thomas Wakley ‘made’ The Lancet let in light. In 1823, the crusading doctor became a crusading medical journalist. Thomas Wakley was born on July 11, 1795, in Devonshire, the youngest son of a prosperous farmer, Henry Wakley, and his wife Mary Minifie. Youngest sons of this era needed find a new trade, and Thomas’s search began at good grammar
schools, continued with apprenticeships with a series of local doctors and dentists, and culminated in his years as a medical student at London’s main teaching hospitals. He qualified in medicine in 1817, made a good marriage in 1820, and set out his shingle in front of a comfortable town house in Piccadilly (supplied by his father-in-law), and seemed destined for a prosperous medical career. However, events sent him in another direction. In what became a famous legal case, he was nearly killed by assailants who burned down his house, and in the very public process of recovering his father-in-law’s investments was befriended by radicals like William Cobbett. By now no stranger to public controversy, Wakley founded The Lancet to let light into what had become hide-bound and in some senses monopolistic professions, medicine and surgery. Almost immediately, Wakley and his weekly journal were embroiled in controversies over medical practice and medical education, and he made them very
public by aiming his journal at a wide audience and being named as a defendant in various libel actions. Wakley can hardly have expected to be liked—and he wasn’t—but he gathered the right sort of admirers (including Dickens and Thackeray) and a wide audience, widened his crusades to include parliamentary reform, among others, and before he died (in 1862) ensured that The Lancet would survive and that the people’s health was, indeed, the proper concern of the public and of its government. For that, we all owe him a great deal. ©.

[Stanley]

What's a 'scrum half,' daddy?

** Gareth Owen Edwards, Scrum Half and CBE
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—death, famine, war, and conquest—rode out of Revelation to provide a perfect metaphor for the backfield of Knute Rockne’s 1924 Notre Dame football team—Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller, and Layden. It might have done as nicely for the most famous back line in Wales’s national rugby side that dominated European Rugby from the late 60s through the 70s, winning 11 championships in 16 years. Except that there were five of them: Barry John and then Phil Bennett at fly half, Gerald Davies the winger, JPR Williams the fullback, and—perhaps best of the lot—Gareth Edwards at scrum half. The scrum half was guy who took the ball from the ruck, lineout, or scrum and then distributed it to someone on the back line, but when he was on the field Edwards was everywhere, and he was often there at the end, too, making the ‘try’ (touchdown), both at club and international level. In Wales, Gareth Owen Edwards embodied the sport in another way, for he was a coal
miner’s son, born in Gwuan-Cae-Curwen, in Glamorgan, on July 12, 1947. In Welsh, that’s ‘white hemlock heath,’ and he is remembered there as a schoolboy who did well in all sorts of sport. He did learn some of his rugby at an English school, an oversight that’s been forgiven several times over as he led the Welsh national side to stunning victories over England on several occasions. Not only that, but Edwards captained the British Lions (a composite team representing the ‘Four Nations’ (Wales, England, Scotland, and Ireland) in its heyday, making the baa-lambs into real Lions in touring victories over New Zealand (“All Blacks”) and South Africa (”Springboks) He’s also known for the ‘greatest try ever,’ for the Barbarians (a composite club side) against the touring All-Blacks in 1973. No fewer than seven Barbarians carried and passed the ball during that try, finishing with Edwards, but among them, justly, were Phil Bennett and JPR Williams. Those were the days, my friend!! Edwards (now Sir Gareth) says that Sid Going, of New Zealand, was the better scrum half, but the world has disagreed, emphatically. ©

[Stanley]

"Why, sometimes I have believed in at least six impossible things before breakfast." the Queen, in Alice in Wonderland.


** Alvero Ladrón de Guevara, 1894-1951.
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Research for these ‘anniversary notes’ is usually done on-line. I favor subjects about which I know at least something, but even then following someone’s life through internet sources is a bit like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole, producing bizarre connections and contexts of doubtful significance. Today, for instance, I started with the artist and boxer Alvaro Ladrón de Guevara, born on July 13, 1894, in Valparaiso, Chile. He is an interesting enough subject in his own right who did most of his painting in London, Paris, and Aix-en-Provence and most of his boxing in Chile (he was South American champion “of all weights” in 1924). He was also a demon lover, bisexual, whose affairs roped in a whole range of people, including Edith Sitwell (and possibly Osbert), Nancy Cunard, and Meraud Guinness (she of the Guinness family whom he married in 1929 and from whom he parted in 1932, having produced a daughter, Bridget, but also a few full-face portraits of Meraud, in charcoal or oils,
which now sell in the region of $2,500-$4,000). Besides lovers, Guevara knew many interesting sorts, having been taught (at the Slade school, in London) by Augustus John and befriended by Walter Sickert, and then (in Paris) joining the ‘lost generation’ set that surrounded the ménage of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In the 1940-44 occupation the Nazis didn’t like him much, threw him into one of their more brutal prisons, then diagnosed him as paranoid and repatriated him to Chile. The internet also taught me, whimsically, that Guevara, during his first prolonged Chile stay, painted portraits of his mother, one of which is featured in the IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) current exhibition of “artists’ portraits of their mothers.” But that single oil is by no means the main attraction. The show is based on Lucien Freud’s many (and perhaps obsessive?) maternal portraits. A final internet irrelevancy is that that theme, artists’ portraits of their mothers, was used as a
marketing gimmick by the artists’ supply house Jacksons of London for ‘Mothering Sunday’ (the Church of England’s version of mother’s day) in 2016, a show which included not only Alvaro Guevara’s mom, but also Whistler’s, Rembrandt’s, and Picasso’s. About all of which one can only say, ‘not bad, for a boxer.’ ©

[Tripps]

Fascinating as always - how do you choose them in the first place?

I might humbly suggest that you've missed the Yorkshire connection -

"In 1910, at the suggestion of his elder brother Lucho, who was running the family's business interests in Yorkshire, Guevara and his two youngest sisters were sent to England; their parents followed shortly afterwards and moved into the Majestic Hotel at Harrogate. Guevara entered Bradford Technical College, where he was miserable and homesick: he had no inclination to train for the wool trade and left without any qualifications. However, encouraged by his brother's friends William and Albert Rothenstein, he secretly attended evening classes at the local art school; and in 1912 he applied to, and was awarded a scholarship at, the Slade School of Fine Art in London"

How do you 'secretly' attend evening classes? Did he wear a mask?