BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Two Spinsters and a Nature Trail: Lives Well-Lived/.
Helen Brotherton, 1914-2009
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If people get more pleasure out of wildlife, they will take more care in preserving it. Helen Brotherton, 2007, on the BBCs Naturewatch series.

Dorsetshire is one of southern England’s quieter counties, and that silence has been turned to advantage in the creation of a string of nature preserves along its coastline. They are not contiguous but neighborly enough that one could make a walking holiday of them, along a trail anchored at its western end by the “Jurassic Coast,” a fossil-hunter’s paradise that preserves saurian nature and was made famous by the spinster Mary Anning (1799-1847), who overcame Victorian strictures to clamber along the cliffs, to find fossil skeletons especially of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and, pre-Darwin, to accustom us to the ideas of vanished worlds and extinct species. At the trail’s eastern end, Brownsea Island preserves today’s natural world, a refuge for woodland and tidal species whether feathered, furry, or scaled—with the notable exclusion of gray squirrels for Brownsea is a redoubt of the beautiful, delicate red squirrels which once dominated southern Britain’s woodlands. Brownsea itself, and many other Dorset preserves, owe their existence to a modern spinster woman, Helen Brotherton, born into middle-class comfort on February 9, 1914. Though well-schooled, Helen resisted academics per se to excel at sports, notably cricket, and to develop a taste for bird watching. She carried both into her first teaching job. When World War II intervened, Helen learned much of leadership in Women’s Volunteer Services (first as Warwickshire’s “Evacuation Officer”). After the war she moved to Poole to care for her mother, to sail out of Poole Harbor, and to trespass on the private island of the eccentric Mary Bonham-Christie. When Bonham-Christie died (1961), her heir decided to make Brownsea into a housing estate for the idle rich, and might have succeeded but for the organizational skills and sheer energy of Helen Brotherton. Her campaign to save the island as a nature preserve enlisted the support of the UK Treasury (the tax authorities worked out a death-duties deal for the Bonham-Christies) and the National Trust (which now manages Brownsea). Better yet, Brotherton’s efforts led to the formation of the Dorset Wildlife Trust, donating membership 25,000+, which now manages 40 wildlife preserves. Helen lived long enough (95 years) to see all this to fruition, so perhaps someone will make a dramatic movie of her life, as was done for Mary Anning in Ammonite (2020, starring Kate Winslet). For now, Helen’s reputation will rest content with the David Attenborough BBC documentary (1988) and her own Naturewatch episode (2007). ©

[Stanley]

No more force than was necessary . . .
Emma Jackson, née Hall
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We acted with the greatest forbearance possible under the circumstances. Mr. Edmund Haughton Jackson in his defense, 1891.

Whether English husbands ruled their wives with a rod of iron or by ‘rule of thumb’ is a merely academic question. Male sovereignty was backed up by law, church, and custom, and it extended to rule over the female person as well as her property and labor. In seeking a new balance, the “Matrimonial Causes Act” (1884) ironically measured the existing disparity by stating that—after a marital breakdown—the husband’s conjugal rights could be restored only by renegotiation (in effect, a post-nuptial agreement involving payment in some form), or legal separation, or divorce—and NOT by force or “imprisonment.” This extraordinary law was not tested until the even more extraordinary case known at the time as the “Clitheroe Abduction” (1891) in which a Mr. Jackson kidnapped a Mrs. Jackson and held her captive to enforce his traditional rights. Mrs. Jackson was born Emily Emma Maude Hall, in Clitheroe (Lancs.) on February 10, 1845, the daughter of a lawyer successful enough to confer upo
n her an annual income of £600 and, presumably, some knowledge of legal rights and wrongs. Emily also experienced spinsterhood, finally marrying Mr. Edmund Haughton Jackson in 1887. He seems to have been not so much disreputable as weak, possibly attracted by her wealth. The marriage was not consummated, but broke down by degrees (including Mr. Jackson’s voyage to New Zealand, where he promised but failed to establish a home and an estate). Upon his return to Lancashire, the couple lived 11 miles apart until Mr. Jackson obtained a legal decree for restitution of his “rights” and then, when Emily refused to recognize it, hired two toughs and kidnapped her just after Sunday church services in March 1891. When the case came to court there were a lot of extraneous arguments (like whether or not “unnecessary” force had been used in the abduction) and rather too much male solidarity from the county court justices, so Emily (backed by her sisters and her brother-in-law) appealed to the law lords, whereat Lord Chief Justice Lord Halsbury laid it down that “no English subject has a right to imprison, of his own motion, another English subject—whether his wife or anyone else—who is sui juris, and of age.” In retrospect that would seem to be a very small victory, but it was amplified by outraged howls from conservatives to the point where we must allow Emily Emma Maude Jackson, née Hall, the title of heroine in the long campaign for female equality. No suffragist she, but only a female person with a mature sense of her own indivisible right to be “herself.” ©

[Stanley]

The Americanization of Aki Kurose
Aki Kurose, 1925-1998
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If you’re not at peace with yourself, with your neighbor, with your community, you can’t learn very much. Aki Kurose.

The works of Aki Kurose have been recognized in many ways. In Seattle, where she spent most of her life, there’s an affordable housing ‘village’ named after her. The local JACL (Japanese American Community League) and the AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) both have Aki Kurose university scholarship programs. Aki served on Jimmy Carter’s national committee on the education of disadvantaged children and then, in 2002, was awarded a presidential medal by George W. Bush. And there’s the Aki Kurose Middle School Academy, Seattle’s ongoing public experiment in childhood education. Especially notable is the Aki Kurose Memorial Peace Garden at Laurelhurst Primary School, in the upper-crust neighborhood where, in 1974, Ms. Kurose took her first teaching job. The garden was established in 1997, just as Kurose’s long cancer approached its sad end, by parents and children in a school that had not, at first, welcomed her. In 1974 Aki Kurose was an Asian-American woman loaded down with causes, someone that comfortable Laurelhurst folk did not need. By bringing discomfort into their school, she changed their minds. And that, in sum, is her life’s story. Aki Kurose was born Akiko Kato on February 11, 1925, to Japanese immigrant parents who had already made acculturation their goal, bending traditional Japanese gender roles, becoming active in local trades unions and self-help community groups, and making good lives in a city that in so many ways did not welcome them. Those efforts crashed down in WWII internment camps, but even there the family continued to build new lives, Aki aided by Quaker scholarships that got her a college degree (in Utah), marriage (to Junelow Kurose) and a return to Seattle where Aki returned to trouble by working for the trades union her dad had set up. 20 years later Aki was still at it, organizing marches for civil rights, against the Viet Nam war, for the YWCA, and for more support for early childhood education. Along the way, she picked up a teaching certificate and the Laurelhurst job, but Aki never rested on her laurels. She kept nibbling away at Seattle’s comfort zones and, before her death, had become one of the city’s most beloved troublemakers. Her life has recently been (re)celebrated by inclusion in a biography project (at the University of Washington-Bothel) called Badass Womxn [sic] in the Pacific Northwest. It’s the collaborative work of an undergraduate writing group calling themselves “gender free.” Aki Kurose would have felt pretty good about that. ©.

[Stanley]

Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time
Judy Blume, 84 today.
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Fear is often disguised as moral outrage. Judy Blume.

Banning books from school libraries seems to be in fashion these days, as politicians cater to parents who are scared to death that their kids might learn something that the parents don’t yet know. It reminds me of my 13th birthday, when our neighbor, Jean Lodwick, who taught middle school English, gave me Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, telling me I was now “old enough” to read it. I think Jean had it about right. I devoured it, and in retrospect I realize that at, say, 10 or 11, I wouldn’t have been at all interested. A child’s consciousness is the world’s best censor, and in the end the only effective one. One children’s writer who has traced that line between innocence (ignorance?) and knowingness (education?) is Judy Blume, today celebrating her 84th birthday. She was born Judith Sussman, a dentist’s daughter, on February 12, 1938, and didn’t begin to write seriously until she took up the profession of housewife. As wife and mother she recalled that her own childhood had involved some painful experiences, and as writer she remembered that some of them, at least, were liberating. In general, then, Blume wrote about growing up. It’s an adventure that most of us have only once. Whether as adults we would ever find the courage to do it again is doubtful, but reading about it, hearing about it, is probably a pretty good way to make it easier than it might otherwise be. Good parenting is part of the answer, but not sufficient, and if there are gaps, silences between parent and child they can be traversed through mindfulness, the child’s ability to imagine what it will be to grow up. Blume’s books nurtured that ability, perhaps particularly for girls, and at the same time—probably, for the same reason—outraged the book banners and the book burners who seem to be always amongst us. As with other banned books (Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a good example) the banning and the burning were good for business, and Judy Blume has now sold 30+ million books, bootlegged some of them (bought on the sly by the kids themselves), given as gifts by perceptive neighbors, or even picked off library shelves in more enlightened school districts. Blume has even written stories about God and about sex, both pervasive in our culture but, some argue, too controversial for a children’s book. Blume has won many prizes for her work, which is probably how she will be remembered. Along the way, she’s survived motherhood, marriage, breast cancer, and book burners. I hope she enjoys her birthday party, today. Perhaps (since she lives in Florida), Ron the Ranter will be among the guests. Or perhaps not. ©.

[Tizer]

Bob's mention of sex in that article reminds me of one of Richard Fortey's tales about life at the British Museum of Natural History. When he started there in the 1970s the museum had a new director who started a programme of change to make the institution more interesting and useful for the public. Fortey, as well as his Palaeontology day job, was put in charge of setting up one of the projects which had text, photos, videos etc on human biology. It seemed to go down well with the public but he was puzzled that it especially attracted teenage Spanish girls (in the 1970s there were a lot of them in London working as au pairs). So one day he followed a group into one of the enclosures (purely for academic interest, of course) and found them watching videos on sex, fertilisation, embryos, birth etc. Some of them were even taking notes. That's when he realised that they hadn't previously been given any sex education so they were getting it courtesy of the Natural History Museum. That made him even more pleased with his contribution to the projects and it also illustrates what the director was aiming for - making the museum not only entertaining but useful for the public.

[Stanley]

The Never-Nobelist
Georges Simenon and Jules Maigret.
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I write fast because I have not the brains to write slow. Georges Simenon.

It has been said (by many) that the best crime fiction is not about crime per se but about the context within which a crime is first committed and then becomes solvable—or, to put it another way, ordinary. It’s a formula. If that’s true, it may help to explain why many leading crime writers have been so terribly (or terrifyingly) prolific. Georges Simenon was one such, so expert at setting the scene that he didn’t have to worry overmuch about plot or character, and could (and did) produce whole novels in a week or two of furious, compulsive, formulistic writing. Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, on February 13, 1903. His parents, being more than ordinarily superstitious, had him entered officially as a February 12 baby, and too soon they proceeded to neglect him in favor of a younger sibling. That’s how Georges saw it, anyway, and it was a context that helped him to explain why he rebelled, left school early, and took to writing: first as an adolescent journalist, then as a pulp-paper storyteller, and finally (mainly) as a detective novelist. It was in this latter guise that he gave us Inspector Jules Maigret, his lead character in over 100 fictions (75 novels and 28 short stories). And Maigret is how we know Simenon. It’s a misleading identification, not least that Maigret is thoroughly French, not Belgian. Maigret also leads a life of routine and method. At his police office he habitually fends off his civilian superior and comfortably commands his stable of detectives. At home he falls in happily with Madame Maigret’s tidy domesticity (and enjoys her excellent cuisine). In all these ways Maigret is not Simenon, in his marital relations emphatically not. But both writer and character share their intimate knowledge of context, the lives (some pretty low) people lead and the motives that guide them. So for readers the murders that crop up become ordinary too, because we have come to know Maigret’s Paris as well as we know the gritty realities of Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles. But for someone who wrote so much and was so very au fait with his contemporary Paris, there was more to it than routine. Georges Simenon developed interesting friendships (e.g. with André Gide) and rivalries (e.g. with Albert Camus), and in the process thought himself a great writer, even a Nobelist. But the serious (“hard”) novels he produced never made that grade. Simenon had literary greatness within him, but he never allowed it the patience and parentage that it needed. Hugely entertaining, one Maigret is in its context and consequences much like the previous one, and there the matter rests. ©

[Stanley]

Winnetka, Illinois: Radical Hotbed.
Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, 1909-1983
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What Next? A Bad Word. A Good Deal. Freedom, Too. Title of a 1975 pamphlet on socialism by Jessie Loyd O’Connor.

Hillary Rodham grew up in the leafier suburbs of Chicago, so it’s not too surprising that she went to Wellesley College as a self-identified Young Republican. We expect that sort of environment to produce that sort of person. But not forever, as Hillary’s later career demonstrates, and not always either. Take for instance Jessie Lloyd, born on February 14, 1909 into real wealth—and a lakeside mansion—in Winnetka (a very byword for suburban leafiness and comfort in the Chicago metro). In Jessie’s case, though, blood trumped environment, for on both sides of her family a radical gene ran rampant. Her father, William Bross Lloyd, had already made himself (in)famous as a “socialist millionaire,” while her mother Lola Lloyd was in origin a down-home Texas populist (with the appropriate maiden name of ‘Maverick’) who spent her life as a campaigner (women’s suffrage, socialism, pacifism) and social worker (friend and patron of Jane Addams). Lola brought her three daughters (including
Jessie, then aged 6) up to the same standard by taking them all to Europe to observe, and take part in, the ill-fated 1915 peace conference. To all that parental influence we must add Jessie Lloyd’s grandpa, Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose crusading journalism exposed the seamy underside of American capitalism in the age of the Robber Barons. Like Hillary, Jessie Lloyd went off to college in the east, Smith in her case. There she found no reason to change her political spots nor her moral core. Magna cum Laude (in Economics, 1925), Jessie Lloyd first traveled to England to observe (and take sides with) the 1926 General Strike, spent two years reporting from Moscow on the progress of the Russian revolution, and then returned to the land of the free and the home of the brave to report on textile and coal strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina, and Harlan County, Kentucky. In Harlan, Jessie replaced two reporters who’d been shot by the bosses’ goons, which may be why she married Harvey
O’Connor, another radical journalist. Whether they came together for love or for protection I can’t say, but on Valentine’s Day let’s opt for love. Usually working together the O’Connors kept reporting on American conditions until they died (Jessie in 1983, Harvey in 1987). Along the way they also tried to improve things. Jessie even returned to Winnetka where she made a film to try to convince her neighbors to do something about Chicago’s slums and its residential red-lining. Could it be that young Hillary Rodham saw that film? Probably not, but it’s a poetic thought. ©

[Tripps]

Often wondered where Winnetka was. It's where the 'Big Noise' blew in from.

Now I know. Winnetka

[Stanley]

I thought exactly the same thing David as I read it.

[Stanley]

'Cartooning is a career for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write.' Matt Groening.
Matt Groening and Art Spiegelman
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Comics are a gateway drug to literacy. Art Spiegelman.

As a sophomore, a business school deserter, I signed up for a modern American literature survey. It was a popular lecture, taught by Provost E. Sculley Bradley in the law school’s largest theater. Bradley graded all his students’ work and was eccentric in other ways. So, when he assigned our term paper to be a ‘critical essay on a living writer,’ I did mine on the cartoonist Walt Kelly. After all, Kelly was a writer; and, thanks to my dad, I had most of Kelly’s prose in hand as well as his comics, daily strips and annuals, set in Okefenokee Swamp and featuring Pogo, a possum. Looking back, I am sure that Provost Bradley expected me to write about someone like John Barth, Katherine Anne Porter, or John Updike. But he gave me a B+ for the paper, some very nice comments, and I felt vindicated. Today my taste in “graphics” remains rooted in Kelly and Pogo and their brethren, the likes of Al Capp and his Dogpatch denizens. L’il Abner and Joe Btfsplk. I found in them—especially in Kelly—subversive perspectives, yet very funny, sometimes even descending to slapstick and vaudeville. To me, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was tame stuff, sentimental and superficial. Nor have I seriously engaged with later graphics satirists. I don’t think I have ever watched a complete episode of Matt Groening’sThe Simpsons, and though I quite liked Art Spiegelman’s Maus, when I read it, I didn’t think about it very much until recently when some good citizens in Tennessee tried to ban it (just as, during the McCarthy era, some newspaper editors banned Pogo from their comics pages). Now I think I should catch up, and February 15 would be a good day to start as it is the birthday of both Art Spiegelman (February 15, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden) and Matt Groening (February 15, 1954, in Portland, Oregon). Like Kelly before them, both were born on the wrong side of the tracks. Otherwise of very different origins they were both cultural outcasts and came to their art at least partly because they weren’t good students in any ordinary sense of that term. Neither much liked what he saw; both decided to draw it anyway, to comment by way of caricature. They walked into fame sideways, crabs that they were (and are); their humor travels that sharp edge between laughter and discomfort. Spiegelman’s first job was doing graphics for a chewing gum company; Groening did landscaping at a sewage plant. They’ve both claimed the attention of today’s leading Pecksniffs, and for that reason alone I should take them at least as seriously as Provost Bradley took my critical essay on Pogo, Howland Owl, Deacon Mushrat, and Albert the Alligator. ©.

[Stanley]

** John Cash, 1820-1880
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Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business! Jacob Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”, 1843.

I suppose it must be true that one cannot run one’s business as a charity. Everyone says so, Scrooge said so (before his nightmare, anyway), and today’s plutocrats tend to leave off charity until retirement—if then they ever take it up—or that task is left to their wives. But there have been other models, and the generations-long success of the Coventry firm of J. & J. Cash tells us that profitability and fairness (if not “charity”) can work (in the sense of ‘function’) hand in hand. The Cashes (John and Joseph) were Quakers, their family well-established in the English midlands as successful capitalists. John Cash, the elder brother, was born on February 16, 1820, and after serving an apprenticeship in the silk trade decided to set up, with Joseph, their own factory, which opened its gates in 1846. I once had a Quaker boss who, I joked, believed in high piety and low wages, but the Cash brothers were different. They sought highly qualified workers and paid them well in health and in sickness (J. & J. Cash pioneered in unemployment compensation). Workers and bosses prospered reasonably enough that the firm grew. By the 1860s J. & J. Cash had a shop floor workforce (mainly weavers) of 200+. The firm, and its workers, had by this time weathered the storms caused by cheap foreign imports (in this case from across the channel, in France), by finding new products, new markets, and altered work rules. Perhaps thinking that “success breeds success”) John and Joseph spread their wings a bit to move to a new, larger site, where they built not so much a new factory as a model village, where their sick pay idea might be expanded into good housing, an infirmary, and a school for workers’ children. When both brothers died (within months of each other, in 1880) they left behind them a bustling workplace and a profitable business. Charity as such had little to do with it; each brother also left a healthy estate to his heirs (circa £40,000 in each case, no trifling sum in Victorian Britain). The firm stayed under family management until 1976, and today you can still buy Cash ribbons, Cash woven silk pictures, and Cash name tapes. If you’re inclined to that sort of thing, make it a blue-ribbon tribute to a different business model than seems to prevail in these days of extremist capitalism. ©

[Stanley]

For there is no friend like a sister . . .
Maria Rossetti, 1827-1876
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For there is no friend like a sister// In calm or stormy weather// To cheer one on the tedious way// To fetch one if one goes astray. Christina Rossetti, “The Goblin Market.”

It was Maria Francesca Rossetti’s fate to be born (on February 17, 1827) the plainest of the Rossetti children. We can call it an ironic fate because her three siblings (all younger) became famous for their beauties and for cultivating a distinctive aesthetic of beauty, known at the time and since as the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ school. Her siblings saw her plainness and, as children will, teased her as “Moonie” because of her oddly rounded face. Partly in compensation, her father (professor of Italian at London University) called her ingegnosa, “ingenious”, and indeed Maria was that, still known today for her scholarship on the medieval poet Dante Alighieri. As her siblings (the painter Dante Gabriel, the critic William Michael, and the poet Christina Georgina) rose to fame, they also came to appreciate Maria’s genius—and not merely in compensation for Maria’s plainness. One could say that Maria began her teaching career by teaching them, and a particularly close relationship developed between Maria and Christina. Christina’s poem, “The Goblin Factory,” has been taken to celebrate that sisterly tuition and sisterly love—in ways that might today get it banned in Tennessee even though Christina also wrote religious poetry, notably the beloved carols “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “Love Came Down at Christmas.” Interpretations differ, but “The Goblin Factory” may commemorate a day when Maria took Christine to see the Egyptian mummies at the British Museum and expressed some odd, scary views of what could happen should the mummies come to life. Maria honed her literary scholarship first by learning Italian (from her mother), then teaching it (as a live-in governess), and then moving on to Dante Alighieri’s masterworks as translator and critic. Maria wrote about it all, too, ingeniously enough that her Dante criticism was republished (4 vols.) in 2010. But Maria Rossetti found most meaning for her life in religion, a very ‘high church’ Anglicanism, and moved towards a life vocation as a nun. She did take part in (certainly attended) the activities of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but failed to convince her brothers to renounce their agnosticism. The Rossetti siblings remained close, however, and when Maria finally succumbed (to ovarian cancer) in 1876, all attended what was quite an unusual funeral. Just as Maria had imagined those mummies coming to life, she looked forward to death as marking a new stage in her story. So her burial (in a nuns’ cemetery) was attended with all due jollification, as she had ordered. ©.

[Stanley]

"Mumper". Dialect noun, obsolete, means "a begging imposter."
Thomas Bell, mumper extraordinaire.
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A mumper among the gentle. Title of a 1998 article on the fraudster Thomas Bell, who did not graduate from Harvard.

Having been long involved in ‘higher’ education, I’ve noticed that the class of people who have attended college is larger than the class of people who have graduated. Subtracting the graduated from the attended leaves one with the “dropouts,” an unfair pejorative that comprises an interesting variety of human individuals. Some of them are among the best people I have ever known who, whatever their failures as students, found success (status, fulfillment, serenity) in life. One or two of those gifted individuals will be receiving this note. Others I was glad to see off the premises and haven’t looked for since. Of these, an interesting sort were outright fraudsters, people who’d fooled the world to get into college, but proved unable to maintain the pretense, were found out, and asked to leave. As a type, they’ve been around forever. One early American fraudster was Thomas Bell, expelled from Harvard in 1733 for, inter alia, “the most notorious complicated lying” and (more prosaically) for stealing chocolates. Thomas Bell was born in Boston on February 18, 1713, a sea captain’s son in what was by then the British colonies’ busiest port. Busy it was, but the number of Massachusetts laws against forestalling, engrossing, false weights and wrong measures (never mind the port’s long association with pirates and piracy) suggest that Tom Bell may have picked up some of his bad habits on the quayside. Whatever, his three years at Harvard were pockmarked with trouble. Nor did his expulsion bring a reformation. If he often changed his name, his spots proved indelible. Jailed in Virginia, wanted for forgery in New York, his first famous fraud occurred in Barbados where he turned up in 1739 as grandson and namesake of the Anglican bishop Gilbert Burnet. It was a name and status than enabled Bell to borrow more money and goods than he could (or intended to) repay, and it won him a custodial sentence and the punishment of branding. He escaped the latter and returned, wiser but unscarred, to the mainland where he continued his chosen profession, and with just the kind of persistence that might, in the first place, have won him a Harvard AB. But the Harvard faculty got it right in 1733. Tom Bell eventually married, and may have reformed, but if so it was under another name. By the time Bell faded from the records (circa 1782) he’d used 19 names. If he’d learned anything in school, Boston Latin or Harvard, it was how to fool people, an art he used liberally and with some success. ©

[Stanley]

An American Renaissance
F. O. Matthiessen, 1902-1950.
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It is well to remember that although literature reflects an age, it also illustrates it. F. O. Mattheisen, 1941

If the academic discipline of ‘American Studies’ has a founding father, it was Francis Otto (‘F. O.’) Matthiessen, born in Pasadena, CA, on February 19, 1902. With his three older siblings, he was heir to an American industrial fortune (based on zinc refining, ‘Big Ben’ clocks, and machine tools) but from an early age defined himself as an outsider, a perspective that undoubtedly helped him to shake up scholarly work on the USA by insisting on an interdisciplinary approach and to advocate studying the subject in full, its history, its politics, its philosophy, its low and high arts. F. O.’s outsider state, or stance, may have been based on his homosexuality, but he kept that closeted and first declared his independence politically. As a senior at Yale he was chosen to deliver the annual Deforest oration, which he entitled “Servants of the Devil” and delivered as a full-blown attack on the university’s ties with big business and its (consequent) inability to support true scholarship . Nevertheless F. O. was a high-flier, academically and socially (at Yale, he was in Skull & Bones), and he next turned up as a Rhodes Scholar, at Oxford, a conservative place itself which was then (in the 1920s) just beginning to concede that the USA might have a history and a national literature that were worth studying. Acquiring some resentments from this parochialism, Matthiessen returned to the land of his birth, secured a Harvard PhD, and set about his life’s work, which has recently been called “the rediscovery of American literature.” And, one might add, the discovery that understanding the country’s literature was essential to understanding its history, its politics, and its culture. Matthiessen flourished at Harvard, published widely, and formed foundational friendships with (among others) Kenneth Murdock and Perry Miller (who, if not founding fathers, were midwives to the American Studies approach). F. O.’s most famous study was American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). It’s still available electronically, and used book stores probably have overstocks. It’s still worth reading. Meanwhile, Matthiessen’s left-wing politics and his homosexuality won him the unwelcome attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI (their dogged persecution of Matthiessen has now been fully documented) and the obloquy of patriots like Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon. For these and many other causes, Francis Matthiessen suicided on April Fools Day, 1950, an unhappy ending to a brilliant scholarly life. ©

[Stanley]

In the summer, the rain is warmer.
Queen Margaret's Dowry, February 20, 1472
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You have to remember, Shetland time is slower. Avalina Kreska, The AdderStane.

In 1469, Margaret of Denmark was wed to James III of Scotland. It was a dynastic marriage, completed when she was but 13. She was remembered as a good queen, unhappily married, but she did contribute her mite to the bloodline that became, in due course, the House of Windsor. And the union did have some effect on political geography, for instance settling taxation authority over the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. More importantly, as it would turn out, it established Scottish lordship of the Northern Isles because Margaret’s father, Christian I of Norway, Denmark and Sweden pledged the isles as security against Margaret’s promised dowry. When he defaulted on the dowry, the Northern Isles became Scottish on February 20, 1472. So today we have the archipelagos of Orkney and Shetland (not to mention the small rock that is Fair Isle) as part Elizabeth II’s United Kingdom. Today they are important because of their location near one of the North Sea’s most productive oil basins, but as reserves decline and the earth warms they are turning to hydrogen, wind, and tide for cleaner energy to export and to consume locally. And they remain important for their fisheries, their fine-wooled sheep, and their distinctive ‘corded’ sweaters. Once Covid becomes ordinarily endemic, they will also resume business as important tourist destinations. Some eccentrics visit for the weather, others for the islands’ picturesque isolation, but the islands’ long history is the main attraction. It stretches back to some of the most important Neolithic sites in all of Europe: burial mounds and chambers, fortifications, and stone circles that predate Stonehenge, far to the south. It’s all pretty mysterious. Recently some have argued that there’s a direct connection with Stonehenge. That theory aside, these artifacts testify to several thousand years of settlement and resettlement, conquest and reconquest, human cycles which made these places very old, historically, by the time that Queen Margaret brought them under Scottish lordship a mere 550 years ago. The most obvious evidence of these cycles rests in the islands’ placenames, artefacts of Old Norse language and Viking raids, and the distinctive Scots accents of the current inhabitants (which makes the BBC crime series Shetland a little hard to follow). Recent DNA testing shows, however, that these cycles of conquest (and for that matter Margaret’s dowry) were mere ‘surface’ events. Genetically, the islanders’ close kinship networks date back a very long time, perhaps beyond the first Pictish invasions, and are only (for instance) about 20% Old Norse. ©.

[Stanley]

"Of his course remain no cognizable vestiges."
A Country Curate
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Of his course remain
No cognizable vestiges, no more
Than of this breath, which shapes itself in words
To speak of him, and instantly dissolves.
--William Wordsworth, from “The Excursion: The Churchyard Among the Mountains,” 1814.

For all his political and poetic experiment, for instance his early sympathy with the French Revolution, William Wordsworth remained deeply committed to the Church of England. Or perhaps returned to it. And when he returned home, to the English Lake District, in about 1800, he found there a ready-made hero of that national communion. This was Robert Walker, the curate at Holy Trinity in the parish of Seathwaite. It is doubtful whether Wordsworth ever met Walker, who died in 1802, but the poet certainly heard of him for Walker, born on February 21, 1710, was already a local legend, spoken of as “Wonderful Walker.” Walker was born in Seathwaite, the youngest and frailest of a dozen children. His parents cherished him for his weaknesses, sending him to be schooled at Holy Trinity. There local patrons furthered his schooling sufficiently to make him a schoolmaster. Walker taught children for gifts rather than for fees, picking up paid work for his abilities with numbers and his
fine penmanship, but the curacy of Holy Trinity was his ambition, achieved in 1735. There followed 67 years of curing souls, satisfying work but not enriching. Walker and his wife Ann, a local girl, kept body and soul together (their own and those of their half-dozen children) by farming the church’s glebe and practicing country crafts. Robert became well known for his fine woolen thread, which he spun while listening to pupils’ recitations and then carried to market at Kendal, 30 miles distant. Walker was a ready-made Wordsworth hero, a “gospel teacher whose good works formed an endless retinue, a pastor such as Chaucer’s verse portrays, such as the heaven-sent skill of Herbert drew, and tender Goldsmith crowned with deathless praise.” Wonderful Walker’s improved human nature grew out of his closeness to the land and to the humble country folk who worked it. He was, in short, a perfect Romantic hero, and Wordsworth drew him just so. The ‘real’ Robert Walker doesn’t tarnish that
image, but fills it out. As a hard worker as well as a devoted curate, Walker marked the value of his work by buying land in small parcels and becoming, if not gentry himself, then the parent of gentle-folk, two sons well-placed in England’s burgeoning industrial revolution, another well-read at Trinity College, Dublin, and a daughter well-married locally (to a gentleman who was also a landscape painter!). Walker also made and sold a good local ale, but these mere humdrums did not serve Wordsworth’s poetic vision nor shape the Victorian legend of “Wonderful Walker.” ©

[Stanley]

If you came this way again . . .
Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding
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Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.
--T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” ca. 1942.

Nicholas Ferrar was born to wealth in London on February 22, 1592. 45 years later he died poor in the rural quiet of Little Gidding. Though his poverty was relative, not absolute, we might think of him as a failure. But he had influence in his lifetime. The ill-fated king, Charles I, visited at least four times at Little Gidding, looking for the inspiration he needed to become, eventually, England’s martyr-king. Centuries later, Nicholas Ferrar is celebrated on an Anglican feast day (December 1; King Charles has his own, on January 30). When I ran across Ferrar, researching the Virginia Company, I knew of him because he had inspired one of T. S. Eliot’s most beautiful poems, the “Little Giddings” section of Four Quartets, so I took more than usual notice of Ferrar’s role as a leading public critic of the Virginia Company. I passed it off then as special pleading (Ferrar and his father had lost most of their fortune by investing heavily in the Virginia adventure), but I was also interested because Ferrar based his critique partly on the company’s murderous exploitation of servile labor. And then Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes named their second child (b. 1962) Nicholas Farrar Hughes. That was partly because—despite the spelling variance—Ted Hughes was a Ferrar descendant, but had something to do, also, with Eliot’s poetry. Before her own suicide, Plath made the little boy her own poetic subject in “Nick and the Candlestick,” and one day (in 2009) Nick himself, an environmentalist, would suicide. Instead of suicide, Nicholas Ferrar retreated from the world to Little Giddings, to establish a monastic community based on the daily rituals of “high church” Anglicanism. The community also provided schooling for the children of the neighborhood, and withal set an example for later experiments in religious communalism. Of course Ferrar’s particular religious beliefs offended England’s triumphant Puritans, and the community was dispersed to the winds in 1645, so its life was short—if exemplary. In the early 1940s, T. S. Eliot contrasted Little Gidding’s springtime and its white flowering hedgerows with the red fires of Hitler’s bombing of London, where Eliot himself served night watches. In “Little Gidding,” defiantly, Eliot promised Ferrar that it would be
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness . . .
If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere, . . .
It would always be the same.
©

[Stanley]

We are all free to dine at the Ritz.
César Jean Ritz, 1850-1918.
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A hot dog at the game beats roast beef at the Ritz. Humphrey Bogart.

In 1920 the word ‘ritzy’ was so new that P. G. Wodehouse spelled it “ritz-y” (in his Jill the Reckless), referring to a person (not Jill but a duchess) whose snobbishness outweighed her other vices. But in 1919 the New York Times beat Wodehouse to it, using “ritzy” (and spelling it right) to describe in glowing terms a very posh hotel. Indeed “ritzy” was a new word, and the Times used it correctly, for it derived from the name and legend of a Swiss hotelier, César Jean Ritz, who was born on a peasant farm, near Niederwald, on February 23, 1850. Not all Swiss peasants were un-ritzy, and his parents sent César off to a Jesuit school and then found him an apprenticeship as a wine waiter. He did rather poorly at that, an odd start for a man whose name would become a synonym for elegant dining, good wines and all, at even more elegant hotels. After taking a shot at joining the Jesuits, where he also missed his mark, young Ritz took off for Paris to see the Universal Exhibition of 1867 and to find employment at the Restaurant Voisin where he learned how to serve the best viands in the worst times, the siege of Paris and the chaos of the Commune. It is said that during the Commune one of the dishes Ritz brought to table at the Voisin was elephant trunk stew (if you can find the French for that, do let me know). Despite all, Ritz prospered, moving up from garçon to maître de and then to manager at various exclusive hostelries, starting at Paris’s Splendide and on to various “Grand” hotels in Nice, San Remo, Lucerne, Monte Carlo, Vienna, and so on. It is said that Ritz followed the fashion of rich Americans on their grand tours, but he also catered to the Rothschilds and other blooded barons. His ambition to become a hotelier in his own right was furthered by his appointment as manager of the Savoy, in London, where he imported George Auguste Escoffier as his chef de cuisine and, after a dispute over money and missing liquors with the Savoy’s owner (Richard D’Oyley
Carte), Ritz set up for himself, backed up by European aristocrats. César Ritz did not so much “own” these hotels as franchise them. The first “Ritz Hotel” was in Paris, 1898, and Ritz owned and managed that one, but most Ritzes were franchises. Not all of them carried his name (London’s Carlton was a Ritz house) but all of them made “Ritz” a symbol of luxurious sleep and pampered palates. That world came to an end in the Great War, and Ritz himself died in 1918, but his name will outlast “Trump” as a byword for luxury and sophistication--and snobbery. As R. H. Tawney pointed out years ago, not everyone enjoys the freedom “to dine at the Ritz,” but we all know what it means. ©

[Stanley]

If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery.
Michael Harrington, 1924-1989
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That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. Michael Harrington.

It’s said that Michael Harrington “discovered” American poverty. That untruth pays homage to the extraordinary reach of Harrington’s most famous book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. I bought the book, and devoured it, when it came out in 1962. But I can’t say it was news to me. My dad had taken care of that before I left for college by taking me to see one of Des Moines’ most desolate neighborhoods, within sight of the gold-domed state capitol, where most homes (if you could call them that) were without running water and where the inhabitants (mainly poor whites) kept warm in winters by burning the add-on sun shelters they’d built the previous summer. Harrington’s book furnished for me confirmation of what I’d been shown, an explanation of it, and a plea for doing something about it (in Des Moines and everywhere else in America). In retrospect, that book must be seen as part of Harrington’s own life-long quest to find explanations and remedies for “poverty in the midst of plenty”, an American specialty. That quest began in St. Louis, where Michael Harrington was born on February 24, 1928, and where he attended St. Louis University High School with another future crusader, the ‘medicine man’ Dr. Tom Dooley (whose very comfortable family home we lived in for our first 15 years in St. Louis, 1997-2012). SLU High, as it’s locally called, is a Jesuit institution, which may be why (after studying at Holy Cross, Chicago and Yale) Harrington enlisted himself in the Catholic Worker battalions led by Dorothy Day. Just as she’s not yet a saint (she should be), Harrington soon left the church to try other experiments in social, economic, and political reform. At least Harrington saw them as “reforms.” J. Edgar Hoover thought them revolutionary and listed Harrington among the millions that Hoover thought should be ‘interned’ in case of domestic upheaval. Michael Harrington went on, in a too-short life, to play a leading role (sometimes as founder) in many such experiments, Trotskyite socialism, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the soon-to-be notorious Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Party of America. Throughout, Harrington’s litmus test for any variant of ‘socialism’ was that it should be small-d democratic and indeed should have democracy, true civic equality, written into its DNA, for to Harrington that was as important as economic equality. In that sense, he died a failure (he would secede from almost every movement he joined), but his was a noble failure and his home city should do more than it has to honor his gallant attempts. ©

[Stanley]

My wishes for my journal are, that I should not copy from anybody's journal. Priscilla Buxton, 1822, first entry in her journal.
Priscilla Buxton, 1808-1852
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For every evil under the sun
There is a cure, or there is none;
If there is a cure, seek and find it.
If there’s none, never mind it.
Priscilla Buxton’s journal, February 1, 1824 (aged 16).

Quakerism was born in the radical upheaval of the English Civil War, and the first Quakers were troublemakers, just the sort of people to be banned from (or hanged in) colonial Boston. As the Society of Friends grew it acquired arts of politeness; but Quakers retained the craft of making the world a better place than they found it. Honest to a fault, they succeeded at business, and commerce and social reform made them into the world’s best networkers well before the days of instant communications. Quakers’ English networks had several nodal points, and among them was Earlham Hall, outside of Norwich. Today it’s the home of the law school at the University of East Anglia (and the namesake of Earlham College, in Indiana), surprisingly modern in its rambling way; but for generations Earlham Hall was the seat of the Gurney family, some of them bankers (the progenitors of today’s Barclays Bank) and some persistent in witnessing for better ways of living. Many Gurneys returned to the hall to marry or give birth, so you can’t depend on surnames. Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, was a Gurney girl who married within the faith. Her niece Priscilla Buxton was the product of a marriage outside, for her father, MP and baronet, was Church of England. But he, too, was bit by the reform bug and of Quaker descent (else how could he have married an Earlham Gurney?), and became a founder and parliamentary leader of the Anti-Slavery Society. Priscilla Buxton, born at Earlham Hall on February 25, 1808, came into adulthood just in time to serve as Sir Francis Buxton’s corresponding secretary and general factotum, a young woman of substance who surprised people with her energies and abilities. A woman, she couldn’t join the Anti-Slavery Society, so she founded and led the London Female Anti-Slavery Society. Nor could Priscilla attend parliamentary sessions, but she arranged to hear her father’s speeches via a ventilation shaft, and together with the novelist Amelia Opie she organized the massive anti-slavery petition, signed by over 187,000 women and carried into both houses of parliament (by men, of course, and there had to be two of them for such a massive document, as big as “two great feather beds.”) Priscilla was also active in the conversion to Quakerism of the very unconventional Opie, and Priscilla herself chose to get married on the very day that the abolition of British slavery became official, on August 1, 1834. She was married at Earlham Hall, of course, though to a non-Quaker Scottish MP, Andrew Johnston, who besides being a reformer became a banker, just like the rest of the Gurneys. ©.

[Stanley]

"Justice should be seen to be done."
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 1938-1965
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Wounded Negro Dies in Alabama. Story headline, New York Times, February 27, 1965.

I don’t usually remember death dates in my ‘anniversary notes,’ but earlier this week President Biden nominated a black woman, Ketanji Jackson, as an associate justice in the US Supreme Court. Her color and gender fulfill a campaign promise he made, and a chorus has already risen from Republican choir lofts, saying that being black and female is not ‘qualification.’ Those questions will be fully aired in coming weeks by people who have short memories. Indeed, Judge Jackson, who is 51, is too young to remember that on February 26, 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson (no relation), then aged 26, died in Alabama. He died of gunshot wounds to his stomach, wounds marked with powder burns, and of injuries to his head and back consistent with being beaten with blunt instruments. Mr. Jackson and other witnesses before and since confirmed that he was beaten before and after being shot. Jimmie Lee Jackson was a Viet Nam vet who farmed his own land. He’d inherited the land from his father, and he was a deacon (the youngest deacon) in his Baptist congregation. And he was black. The New York Times story (front page, February 27 issue, continued at length on inner pages) is entitled “Wounded Negro Dies in Alabama.” As he lay dying in hospital Mr. Jackson was served with an arrest warrant, by the head of the Alabama State Patrol, Colonel Al Lingo. This was nothing new for well over 3000 black citizens of the county had, in recent months, been arrested for the same crime, publicly protesting that all citizens of Perry County should be able to vote. On the night of February 18, a large crowd again gathered to march. Then the streetlights went out, and a mixed force of state and local police attacked the marchers, beating some and arresting many. Among the beaten were Jimmie Jackson’s maternal grandparents and his mother, and he was shot when he went to protect his mother. The shooter was a state trooper, white, who said that he felt “threatened.” So nothing was done to
investigate further, let alone to charge the trooper or even to release his name. 40 years on, the retired trooper recalled (in an interview) that he was indeed the shooter. By then, things in Marion had changed enough that he was charged, sentenced to 6 months (for manslaughter), and then released (on compassionate grounds) after serving 4 months. For these reasons, and many others, I think that Judge Jackson is qualified to be nominated to the US Supreme Court and confirmed by the Senate. It’s way past time that the court (and the whole legal system) should look more like “us.” ©

[SG Note. What a good one! Bob's heart is in the right place I think..... ]

[Stanley]

'Not believe that I love you? . . . If you do not believe my tongue, consult my eyes." William Congreve to Arabella Hunt, ca, 1690.
Arabella Hunt, 1662-1705
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Come all ye Love-sick Maids and wounded Swains,
And listen to her Healing Strains.
A wond'rous Balm, between her Lips she wears,
Of Sov'reign Force to soften Cares;
Ode on Mrs. Hunt Singing, by William Congreve

If you research 17th-century history, you’ll run across the women’s name ‘Arbella’ or ‘Arabella’. In English the name was taken to mean ‘beautiful one’ or, in a providential sense, ‘an answer to prayer.’ In Germany it meant ‘Eagle,’ and perhaps in England, too: when the Massachusetts Bay Company purchased the ship ‘Eagle’ to transport their first settlers to New England, they renamed her ‘Arbella.’ But then among the Arbella’s passengers was Lady Arbella Johnson, daughter of the Puritan Earl of Lincoln. Maybe the ship was named for its most eminent female passenger. For other Puritans, the name referred to one of the might-have-beens of English royal history, for the Lady Arbella Stuart had a good claim to succeed Elizabeth I, but Elizabeth chose instead Arbella’s cousin James Stuart who, just to make sure, placed this Arbella under house arrest, then imprisoned her in the Tower, where she died. These Puritan associations were not what Richard and Elizabeth Hunt had in mind when they christened their first child Arabella Hunt. She was born just after the Restoration, on February 27, 1662, and the Hunts were members of the court circle of King Charles II, no Puritan he. Arabella Hunt may have been an answer to prayer, but she also grew into a beauty, with a beautiful voice, and highly skilled at the lute. All these were useful at court, and Arabella Hunt became music tutor to court children, notably the Princesses Mary and Anne, daughters of James, Duke of York. She also sang to small groups of very important people and appeared on stage, generally in singing roles. Her first known appearance was at the age of 13 in a singing role, at a royal masque which today we might call a musical, John Crowne’s “Calisto: or, The Chaste Nymph.” (In Greek myth, Calisto was the chastest of nymphs until seduced by Zeus. She was changed into a bear by Zeus’s furious wife Hera who placed Calisto as a star in ‘the Bear’ constellation.). Chaste or not, Arabella Hunt gained notoriety by marrying (1680) a young man who turned out to be a woman, Amy Poulter. At Arabella’s suit, the marriage was declared null, leaving both to marry again if they wished to marry a man. No one knows what happened to Amy, but beautiful Arabella lived on to play, and sing, for Mary and then Anne, when they in their turns became queens regnant. Purcell composed for Arabella; Kneller painted her; and Arabella Hunt died, in 1705, a chaste lady of independent means, beauty, and skill. ©.

[Stanley]

"Every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country." Montaigne, Of Cannibals.
Michel de Montaigne, essayist.
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Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know. Michel de Montagne, ca. 1580.

At its best, the essay is an art form, usually in prose but now more widely applied (in film, in music, and on canvas, for instance). It can be difficult to define ‘essay,’ but one can be guessed at by considering its history. The word came from Old French and first appeared, in medieval English, as a verb, to attempt or to try, as in ‘test’ (the goodness of a metal, the faithfulness of a spouse, the strength of an enemy). It became a noun describing a form of writing at the beginning of the 17^th century, almost certainly as a result of the translation (by John Florio) into English of the ‘Essaies’ of Michel de Montaigne. Florio was himself fascinating, a Protestant exile (from Italy), a man of words drawn to Montaigne’s essays by their content, character, and brevity. Michel de Montaigne was born into the new nobility of France on February 28, 1533, rich as Croesus but with a mongrel sort of background (Protestant, Portuguese, French, Jewish and Catholic, spiced with money from the herring trade) which may explain his mediating personality and his activities as a mediator and go-between in the French Wars of Religion. Eventually he took up Catholicism and indeed died (in 1592) while hearing the Mass, but he was open to many ideas and enjoyed investigating them as they swam into his wide field of vision. This owed partly to the way his father brought him up (in a rather modern way, as if the boy had a mind of his own) and partly to Michel’s friendship with the humanist poet Etienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) whom he met while both were soldiering and politicking in wartime France. Boétie’s early death (from the plague) was devastating, and it’s been argued that Montaigne’s Essaies (which originally came out in several volumes) were and were intended to be continuations of his conversations with his friend. And that’s a good way to think about the ‘essay’ as an art form. It’s a conversation, a discussion, between the author and an audience (one reader, or more) that is presumed to be open to thinking about the subject, willing to pick it up, examine it from any useful perspective, and join in. Its aim may be to find the ‘truth’ (whatever that is) but its essential purpose is to gain in understanding, to contextualize the subject (if it’s worth discussing, it has a context), and to appreciate its subtleties. To work out your own definition of ‘essay’, read Montaigne’s. The Florio translation is still available, but a more modern (some say better) edition is by Donald Frame. I suggest you start (as William Shakespeare may have done) with the essay “Of Cannibals.” ©

[Stanley]

"Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty." Howells.
William Dean Howells, 1837-1920
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I don't say we're any better off, for the money. I've got more of it now than I ever had; and there's no end to the luck; it pours in. But I feel like I was tied hand and foot. I don't know which way to move; I don't know what's best to do about anything. The money don't seem to buy anything. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1889.

Boston, Lincolnshire, was once hub of an important commerce with the continent, and it became prosperous enough to erect St. Botolph’s Church, finished circa 1530, still today one of England’s largest parish churches and dominated by its magnificent tower, 267 feet in height and quite dominating the flat countryside all around. A point of pride for the town, it was cut down to size when skeptical country folk christened it the Boston “Stump.” Boston’s American namesake, in Massachusetts, became in its time the hub of a ‘New’ England, in commerce and shipping but also in culture. In the 1770s, it became the ‘cockpit’ of the American Revolution and developed national ambitions. In terms of trade, these ambitions were eclipsed (first by Philadelphia and then by New York), but culturally the town’s ambitions remained high, higher perhaps than old Boston’s ‘stump.’ Boston was ‘the hub of the universe,’ and if the phrase was sometimes used derisively, as a cultural reality Boston the Hub retained great gravitational power. Among the many that were drawn to it came William Dean Howells, born (of all places) in Ohio, on March 1, 1837. Largely self-educated but also tutored by his ambitious father, a newspaper editor and printer, Howells early mastered several languages, ancient and modern, and experimented with writing (poetry first). He made good headway in Ohio, but his center of gravity was Boston, where he first visited aged 23, in 1860. There he took care to meet many cultural icons, including the coiner of the “hub” trope, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Hawthorne, Emerson, and Lowell. Howells returned to the hub after war service (in the diplomatic corps), married Elinor, a New England girl, and became assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly, itself one of Boston’s strongest claims to ‘hub’ status in the nation’s culture. Under the tutelage of James Fields, Howell became editor-in-chief in 1871 and began to develop the idea that a ‘realistic’ fiction was a more American way of exercising readers’ imaginations. His own works, e.g. A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) did much to shape our realist tradition, but his contributions as editor, critic, and friend were more important. Howells welcomed the work of many and diverse writers, ranging from Mark Twain (whom Howells called ‘the Lincoln of our literature) to Henry James, Emily Dickenson to Abraham Cahan, Sarah Orne Jewett to Charles Chesnutt. Howells was an Ohio boy who brought cosmopolitan standards and diverse voices into the hub of the universe. We are all enriched by the lights he shed. ©

[Stanley]

Give women the vote and the next thing you know your cue is broken.
Mayor Dora, of Argonia, Kansas
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There is reason to believe that billiards will soon become a lost art in all the smaller towns in Kansas, for the women have entered politics for the purposes of reforming the men . . . New York Herald, April 18. 1888.

Probably not much would be known about the third mayor of Argonia, Kansas, elected for a one-year term in 1887. Named for the ship Argo, in Greek myth, its ‘argonauts’ then numbered only about 300, mostly Ohioan emigrants who were not pursuing the golden fleece, and it hasn’t grown since. The mayor’s term wasn’t very exciting, either. Argonia’s billiards hall was denied permission to install an additional table, and the hall then expired (as the owner had warned), a business failure that did not unduly trouble Argonia’s mainly Quaker inhabitants. One thinks of the song “Trouble” (‘which starts with ‘t’ and rhymes with ‘p’ and stands for pool’) in the 1950s musical The Music Man. What the town did want was better enforcement of Kansas’s new temperance laws, not more billiard tables, and the mayor saw to that, but quietly and without fanfare (nor with, as far as I know, the smashing of taverns). The mayor and town council also dealt with some small boys who had been caught throwing stones at buildings and people (the kids and their parents got a ‘talking-to,’ a well-tried midwestern punishment). All pretty ordinary, except that this mayor was a woman, a wife and (though only 27 already a mother for four kids). She was Susan Madora (‘Dora’) Salter, born on March 2, 1860 (in Ohio) and she was the first woman elected to mayoral office in US history. So she made the news, not only in Kansas but wherever news editors were anxious for interesting stories. Indeed some New York papers sent reporters out to Argonia to report from the frontiers of female suffrage (Kansas had just allowed women to vote) about the displacement of men. There were, to be sure, some oddities about Mrs. Salter’s election. Her nomination was a prank engineered by some ‘wet’—anti-prohibition—men. More fool they, but otherwise her term of office was humdrum. She did draw her salary ($1.00 for the year), and she didn’t approve much of men with billiard cues or small boys with stones. But she was a good parliamentarian and chaired council meetings with tact and without fuss. After her year she didn’t run again, moved to Oklahoma with her newspaper editor husband, and became a locally loved senior citizen of Norman, OK, where she died in 1961. But her Argonia election was a sensation; it made her a heroine to suffragists and a portent of doom (domestic doom, mainly) to anti-suffragists. While in office Dora made headlines again by having a baby, but she calmed that fire down by saying it was all in a day’s work. She was accustomed to that. ©