BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

No regrets?
Marietta Peabody Tree

No Regrets. The (questionable) title of a 1997 biography of Marietta Peabody Tree, written by Caroline Seebohhm.

Back when the Democratic Party had an ‘Establishment’, it had its courtiers. They enjoyed playing at kingmakers: behind the scenes roles mainly, for the party itself increasingly identified with the ‘common man.’ Some broke with anonymity, for instance Averell Harriman who campaigned for the party’s presidential nomination and Adlai Stevenson who twice won the nomination (1952 and 1956). Most were men who’d grown up in a political world almost entirely male. But there were some ‘Establishment’ women, notably Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the sainted Franklin. After FDR’s death, Eleanor left her courtier career to become a leader as herself. But there were two other aristocratic females who remain fixed as ‘courtiers’ in American political history, not because they lacked talent (they did not) but because their routes to power ran through the bedrooms of several eminent men in the Democratic Party. One was Pamela Churchill Harriman (1920-1997), born a ‘real’ (English) aristocrat, and the other was Marietta Peabody Tree, who was born into the New England aristocracy on April 17, 1917. Marietta grew up a rebellious daughter of a straightlaced family, then escaped into two marriages, first (1939) to the Wall Street lawyer Desmond FitzGerald and then (1947) to the Anglo-American aristocrat Ronald Tree, Churchillian MP and the grandson of Marshall Field. Each of these marriages produced daughters of note, the historian Frances Fitzgerald and the fashion model Penelope Tree. But neither the bisexual Ronald Tree nor his elegant Oxfordshire estate were to Marietta’s taste. Soon after the family (including stepsisters Frances nd Penelope) moved to New York, Marietta involved herself in New York politics (city and state) and, amorously, with the egghead politician Adlai Stevenson. This affair, secret as far as the public knew, lasted on and off until Adlai’s death (1965) but was punctuated by other dalliances, notably with the Hollywood director John Huston. Along the way Marietta proved her political mettle well enough to win John Kennedy’s nomination as the US representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights. Her liaison with Stevenson lasted until 1965 when he died in London. Marietta remained behind to become a rather tragic figure. Unwilling to embrace the new feminism of the 1960s, stuck in her self-image as a mistress to others rather than as master of her fate, she died in 1991. That was only a little before Pamela Harriman graduated from courtier to stateswoman, US ambassador (to France), and—unofficially of course—the elder darling of the Clinton administration. ©

[Stanley]

A short bowler of great status.
Malcolm Marshall, fast bowler, 1958-1999

I believe in myself and in my game. Malcolm Marshall, cricketer, 1999.

My early encounters with cricket were puzzling, leaving me in agreement with Robert Benchley’s judgment that the English “take their pleasures sadly.” But when I was appointed a college principal I had to take it seriously for I was ex officio captain of the Faculty XI (each side fields eleven players) in its annual cricket match against the students’ JCR (Junior Common Room) XI. By then (1978) I’d become entranced by the game. That owed to several factors, for instance the sybaritic pleasures of watching (on TV, in our garden) international (“Test”) matches during the miraculously sunny summer of 1976. But I was more impressed by the West Indian Test side, then coming into its reign as the dominating colossus of world cricket. West Indian potencies were evident in their batting, bowling, and fielding, more so in their zest for the sport. It’s not possible to single out the best among them, but today I’ll focus on Malcolm Marshall, was born in Barbados on April 18, 1958. He played cricket throughout his school years and then for a brewery side. At first he thought he might be a batsman, following in the footsteps of his hero Garfield (‘Gary’) Sobers. As a professional, international cricketer, Marshall would be competent at bat, but he is remembered as one of the greatest-ever fast bowlers, a man of blistering pace—and dangerous, whether you count broken noses or wickets taken. And this despite his short stature. To be a fast bowler it helps to be tall (something to do with the physics of the thing), and Malcolm Marshall wasn’t. But he was compact, and out of his concentrated whirling motion the ball came like lightning, but well-aimed, forcing batsman into defensive action for the sake of their stumps, or their skulls, or some other part of their anatomies. In his prime, Marshall took wickets (made outs) at the average cost of fewer than twenty runs. Often he was cheaper still. A terror on the field, a sportsman off, and a lover of the game, Marshall turned down a $1 million offer to join a ‘rebel’ West Indian side on a South African tour designed to break the anti-apartheid boycott. In his prime, besides his Test matches, he played for Barbados in local West Indian cricket, for Hampshire in English County cricket, and after the end of apartheid for Natal in South Africa. He learned the game, too, and at the end of his career he coached in the West Indies, South Africa, and England. When he died of bowel cancer in 1999, aged only 41, heartfelt eulogies issued from all over—and they haven’t stopped coming, either. He was a great player at a great game, one who could not take his pleasures sadly. ©

[Stanley]

The Tuke family and the humane treatment of mental illness
Daniel Hack Tuke, 1827-1895

The success of the best plans, however, depends upon their execution. From Daniel Tuke’s biography (1856) of his great-grandfather William Tuke.

The Quaker doctrine of the ‘Inner Light’ has mystical elements not always easy to explain, but as a practical matter it fuelled Quakers’ commitments to equality, to social reform, and to faithful attendance on matters of business. So as the Tuke family of York, in northern England, waxed prosperous in the trades (tea, coffee, and woolens) it’s not surprising to find them engaged in humanitarian causes. The family patriarch was William Tuke (1732-1822). The best remembered among his many good works was his founding (1796) of ‘The Retreat,’ a center for the humane treatment of the insane. Several of his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren continued that work. They also married into other Quaker fortunes (notably in chocolates and banking), which helped The Retreat to stay in business (it still is, today). But each generation made its own contribution to the work of treating mental illness therapeutically rather than punitively. Among them was William’s great-grandson Daniel Hack Tuke, born in York on April 19, 1827. Appointed secretary (chief business officer) of The Retreat in 1847, Daniel continued its humanitarian policies and procedures, treating mental illness as a human affliction rather than a satanic possession, and opening to the afflicted The Retreat’s well-lit interiors (wide corridors, tall windows, fresh air) and its eleven acres of formal and informal gardens. There the ill could be secure (the rooms of the seriously ill were secured by concealed door-locks and hidden window bars) while they experienced therapies (e.g. craft work and kindnesses) to return them, inner light and all, to the world ‘outside.’ Daniel Tuke added to these practices a strong mix of medical science, studying first in London’s St. Bartholomew Hospital, then acquiring an MD at Heidelberg, before returning to The Retreat as its chief medical officer. Here Daniel continued the ‘moral management’ of the insane (he ended almost all ‘restraint’ therapies) but with the aid of the newest and best-tested medicines and close clinical observation of how each patient responded to this or that therapy. Tuke published his research and was rewarded for it (with important memberships in various scientific societies and a clutch of honorary degrees). As he moved into science he never did abandon his family’s traditions of humane treatment and clinical kindness. Daniel Tuke did all this while moving away from strict observance of Quakerism (worship and rules of conscience), but when his life of good works ended in 1895, just a year before The Retreat’s bicentennial, he was still buried out of a Quaker meeting and into a Quaker cemetery. ©

[Tripps]

The Retreat seems very similar to Whittingham in Goosnargh near Preston. Described here by Margaret Ashworth currently of Clitheroe.

[Stanley]

How are we to distinguish between the exasperations of the chains and the symptoms of the illness?
Philippe Pinel, 1745-1826

I cannot avoid giving my most decided suffrage in favor of the moral qualities of maniacs. Philippe Pinel.

Humane care for the mentally ill came from several sources. Quakers had much to do with it in England, shedding their inner light, so to speak, on the less fortunate in so many ways. But in France, the reform issued in general terms from the spread of knowledge, the ‘Enlightenment,’ and more specifically from the French Revolution of 1789 and after. The chief mover was Philippe Pinel, born in St. André on April 20, 1745, and a physician like his father and uncle. In 1778 Pinel brought to Paris his enthusiasm for experiment and his belief that insanity was an illness with discoverable causes and discoverable cures. A provincial himself, he at first made no headway against metropolitan prejudices on this or other subjects, but the Revolution gave him his chance. Thrown to the top of the heap by the disorder, Pinel became chief physician at the Bicêtre, basically a hospital for criminals, where he adopted humane methods of treatment, and most dramatically removed the chains from the arms and legs of the insane. The act itself is immortalized in a great Romantic era painting by Robert-Fleury, as insane women, their chains cast aside, are suddenly bathed in light as if risen from the dead. Pinel was then appointed chief physician at the Salpêtrière, where he remained in charge until the great reaction of the 1820s when he was dismissed as too liberal for the Bourbons. But conservative ignorance and prejudice were not to triumph. Later in the century, devoted republicans raised a statue in Pinel’s honor. Thus Philippe Pinel still stands guard at the Salpêtrière, a monument to the humane treatment of the mentally ill. Since pictures are sometimes worth thousands of words, I conclude with this painting, one of several by Robert-Fleury, capturing in oils a great moment in medical history.

[Stanley]

Imperial India
The Battle of Panipat, April 21, 1526.

We conquered the world with bravery and might, but we did not take it with us to the grave. Bābur, first of the Moghuls.

Before British India there was Mughal India, an empire that lasted as long as the British one. Or almost as long: it depends on how one dates the transitions. Certainly the decline of Mughal rule was a longer drawn-out affair than the end of the Britsh ‘Raj.’ When in 1837 the last of the Mughals, Bahādur Shah II, gained the Delhi throne, that empire had already decayed, and when Bahādur had the bad judgment to become involved with the Sepoy Mutiny the British dismissed him easily (to exile in Rangoon) and assumed at Delhi all the trappings of empire. Notable among them was the practice of governing the subcontinent (which was a big place inhabited by many peoples) with and through local rulers, the princes and maharajas whose exotic lives and styles so excited (or disturbed) the Victorian imagination. It wasn’t exactly ‘divide and rule’; more like rule through division. The complications of such a strategy make it difficult to date the beginning of the Moghul Empire, but as good a date as any is April 21, 1526. That was the date of the Battle of Panipat, where the army of the invader Prince Bābur (1483-1530) routed the much larger force of the then Sultan of Delhi, Ibrāhim Lodī. Bābur had been a long time getting to Delhi. He was of Turkish origin (and his military weaponry and political tactics were both Ottoman), but as a prince, Bābur claimed direct descent (through 13 generations of the female line) from Genghis Khan himself. So Bābur had grown up in the tradition by which lineal descendants of the great conqueror dreamt of ruling them all. His was thus a warlike process as he moved east, conquering Samarkand, Kandahar, and Kabul, then south through the Punjab towards Delhi. But he’d also cultivated other princely characteristics, poetry, music, and art, and a religious presence, too. So he could be, and was, a violent and vengeful general, but he could also be, and was, a subtle, clever politician. His route was marked by bloody sieges and by strategic alliances, by retreats and advances (he had to reconquer Kabul, twice). Thus he must have known that he was tempting the fates when, in 1526, he proclaimed himself the founder of a Mughal dynasty. But thanks to his son Humāyūn (1508-1556) and other descendants, the dynasty continued through conquests and reconquests, advances and retreats, to establish its supremacy. Their alliances also lasted, with local rulers who, adept at sailing the winds of change, would one day obey both fate and the British. And the Moghuls left behind them the finer arts, not only a poetic tradition but the great monuments of Delhi and Agra. ©.

[Stanley]

From log cabin to Tudor mansion is not, after all, a great distance.
Sarah B. Cochran, 1857-1936

A log cabin woman becomes the coal queen of America. The life of Sarah B. Cochran.

My guess is that most American ‘log cabins’ are, nowadays, summer homes for the rich. It’s an odd fate for an art brought to the colonies by the humble Swedes and Finns who (at the behest of Dutch New Amsterdam) settled Delaware valley in the mid-17th century. Not very ‘American’ at all, really, but the log cabin became so as frontier folk recognized its virtues in a land full of forests and empty of sawmills. Indeed, seven US presidents were born in log cabins, two of them so significant (Jackson and Lincoln) that their lives became mythic fulfillments of Ben Franklin’s hopeful idea that America might be the world’s “best poor man’s country.” Our 19th-century robber barons were drawn to the notion, and (even when lacking a ‘real’ log-cabin infancy) made up rags-to-riches stories of their own lives. But who these days talks of a log-cabin woman? There were perforce plenty of them. New scholarship is unearthing them, and last year a new biography of one appeared, Kimberly Hess’s A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran. Cochran’s was a real rags-to-riches story, for she was born Sarah B. Moore, in a log cabin, in western Pennsylvania, on April 22, 1857. She was so poor that she lacked the clothing needed to go to school every day (the clothes were shared among siblings), but Sarah learned enough to become a maid of all work in the home of the coal and coke baron James Cochran. There she and Cochran’s son Philip fell in love and married. In 1880, a twelve-month after they wed, Sarah gave birth to their only child, another James. The marriage, unsuitable as it might have appeared, became one between equals. Husband Philip taught wife Sarah all about the coal and coke business, from mine to blast furnace. So, when death took first the grandpapa (1894), then the husband (1899), and finally the son (1901) Sarah Cochran became the coal and coke queen (as she was sometimes called) of American iron and steel royalty. Log-cabin born, she reigned as well as Andy Jackson and Abe Lincoln had, and ran her business smartly enough to be invited to sit on boards of directors in allied industries (and banking), to be an active and generous philanthropist (for colleges as institutions but also for individual college students), and to lead (and bankroll) the movement for women’s suffrage. Sarah also traveled in style and brought her styles home to a stately Tudor mansion (half-timbered, of course) she built not very far from that log cabin. Among Sarah Cochran’s many individual benefactions was a scholarship to the great-grandmother of Kimberly Hess. And thereby hangs her tale. ©.

[Stanley]

An earl loses his money and then loses his head
John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, 1408-1462

This Earle of Oxford, making his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart. John Aubrey, in Brief Lives.

A word’s history is often one of invasion or migration, but the word ‘earl’ (designating a noble rank just below that of a ‘marquess’) is a case of borrowing after conquest. When the Normans invaded Anglo-Saxon England they brought brigands of varied ranks, but left behind the term ‘count’ and borrowed the Saxon word ‘eorl’ as a new order of nobility. Since the Normans were Norse in origin, they already knew of the word (‘jarl’ in Old Norse), but their ‘count’ uncomfortably echoed an old Anglo-Saxon word, one of those four-letter ones, and ‘earl’ sounded better. So William the Conqueror and then his progeny sprinkled England with earldoms. One of the oldest was the earldom of Oxford, created 1141 and descended through the male line of the de Veres until the last (20th!!) earl died in 1703. That’s a long history, with its ups and downs. One of the ups was Edward de Vere, the 17th earl, a good enough poet to be mistaken for Will Shakespeare of Stratford. Perhaps the severest ‘down’ was that of John de Vere, the 12th earl, who was born to a much-diminished inheritance on April 23, 1408. By then, confusingly, most of the earldom’s properties were nowhere near Oxford, but rather in East Anglia, so he was born at Castle Hedingham, in Essex. John made several mistakes, including marriage without the king’s consent, and before he was 30 his annual rents had declined to less than £500 yearly, a princely sum for many but for the second oldest earldom in England a mere pittance. After performing some military duties (in France) with modest success, his second big mistake was to become involved in the Wars of the Roses. Inveigled (perhaps by his second wife and the property interests she brought with her) to join the Lancastrian side, John de Vere was captured by the Yorkists in 1462, given a trial, and was beheaded at the Tower on February 26. Maybe the trial was unfair (they had beheaded Oxford’s eldest son, Aubrey, on February 20th), but the Yorkists showed a nice hereditary propriety by making Earl John’s younger son, another John de Vere, the 13th earl, and when the Lancastrians eventually won (in the shape of Henry Tudor) the family’s fortunes did improve somewhat. But Shakespeare’s treatment of the de Vere Oxfords, in his historical plays, was cavalier enough to sink any claim that they were ‘really’ written by Edward de Vere, the 17th earl, who was notoriously proud of his ancestry. It is past time to admit that Will Shakespeare far outshone his contemporary; in this game, the commoner trumped the earl. ©

[Stanley]

The ascent of women.
Katy Richardson, mountain climber, 1854-1927.

The Ascent of Women. Title of a 2015 London PhD dissertation (history) by Clare Roche, about female mountaineers.

When I think about pioneer women mountaineers (and I’ve featured many in these notes) I often think first of Dorothy Wordsworth, no ‘mountaineer’ she but a Lake District hill walker who, in the Spring of 1802 and with her brother William, hiked from Grasmere up and across the Helvellyn ridge to visit friends who lived on Ullswater’s shore. And then back. That’s a long haul, but I have done half of it (twice) and can testify that its ascents and descents require only endurance. Luckily the Wordsworths also packed their poetic sensibilities, which would give us, first, Dorothy’s journal entry about Ullswater daffodils and then (in 1806) William’s wondrous poem about them. Female mountaineers came later, like Katharine ‘Katy’ Richardson, also a northern lass, born in a Yorkshire vicarage on April 24, 1854. Katy didn’t take to climbing until she was in her 20s. Once started, she proved a natural—and a sensation although there were by then numerous female climbers. Her fame rested partly on her individual ascents, many of them ‘first by a woman’ but quite a few the first by anyone of any gender. Among them, in the Swiss and French Alps, were several “aiguilles.” That’s French for ‘needles’, and you need only see pictures of Katy Richardson’s aiguilles to get the point. See for instance the Aiguille de Bionnassy or the Aiguille de Charmoz; Richardson climbed them in the late 1880s. People viewing from below knew it was she because she was slight and wore distinctively short skirts; the men she climbed with testified to her daring, her strength, and the speed with which she negotiated even the most forbidding peaks. Richardson also ‘did’ alpine marathons, several peaks in one or a few days. Her fame rested sufficiently on her accomplishments, but was enhanced by her writing, and then by the writing of a French climber, Katy’s constant companion from about 1889, Mary Paillon (1848-1946). Paillon had the advantage of a faster start, for she came from a mountaineering family (including her mother!). She was also a publicist, a veteran writer about alpine exploits for French and English journals. Paillon and Richardson climbed together until Mary’s failing eyesight restricted them to challenging mountain walks (a little like Dorothy Wordsworth’s across the Helvellyn ridge?). After Katy’s death in 1927, Mary Paillon continued to write, including biographies of pioneer women climbers (Katy of course but others, too). Katy and Mary argued about alpine wear (Mary advocated stylish trousers) but they had been, Mary recalled, “almost like sisters.” And, now and then, sisters have been known to argue. ©

[Stanley]

By writing poetry, even those poems that fail, we honor and affirm life, We say, "We loved the earth but could not stay." Ted Kooser, 2005.

Ted Kooser, grass-country poet.
The Poetry Home-Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets, by Ted Kooser: a Christmas present from my mother in 2005.

Even before this country’s birth (in 1776) people worried that it would never produce a poet. Most of them were well-intentioned (e.g. Jefferson and Franklin), but they thought that we were too rough-hewn, too enamored of our commonness, and, dammit, too busy. We’ve proved them wrong by democratizing poetry. Whitman proclaimed, with a loud “yawp” (as he put it), that poetry was an everyman’s business, while Longfellow did much the same for the aspiring middle classes with politer words and proper rhymes, the safer verse that generations of American kids had to learn and then recite, ‘by the shining Big-Sea-Water’ et cetera ad infinitum. But there remained pockets of the USA where poetry seemed an unlikely growth. One of them was Ames, the seat of Iowa’s ‘cow college’ where my grandpa professed animal husbandry, where most of my uncles and aunts lived, and where my future father-in-law studied bridge-building. That’s where I would have been born had dad not been out west training to drop howitzers on Hitler (my mom followed him there, and I was born in Portland). But by one of those common democratic miracles it was in Ames where, on April 25, 1939, Ted Kooser was born to become (in 2004) one of America’s most popular (and long-lived) poets laureate. It wasn’t easy for Ted. After all, it was Ames, and anyone who did as well as he did at Ames High School took their talents to Iowa State to learn some art as long as it was Agricultural or Mechanical. Ted followed, but hinted at his inner calling by making architecture his major. That came to little, and legend says that one day Ted Kooser threw his muse (a slide rule!!) into a shining big-sea-water (Lake Laverne, a campus pond where A & M students watched the swans and fell in love), and followed his truer calling. Since poetry was for him a side-line, he needed a day job, so like Wallace Stevens before him Ted went into insurance. He did well at a lot of other things, too: a good marriage to Kathleen Rutledge, just a bit of school teaching (English, of course), and, as I say, poetry. He doesn’t call himself a regional poet, but the title of his first collection (Grass Country, in 1969), says otherwise. Indeed Ted Kooser has never left grass country (Nebraska), where Kathleen enjoyed exceptional (for her generation) success as a female journalist. Since Grass Country there have been 24 Ted Kooser poetry books, one of which (Delights & Shadows) won the 2005 Pulitzer. I think more are to come out of Ted and Kathleen’s smallholding in grass country, near Lincoln, NB, where Ted (as a past county librarian, after he retired from insurance) bans no books, not even his own. ©

(Bob doesn't mention that his dad volunteered for army service in 1939 because 'he knew Hitler had to be stopped'. He was most upset because the first things the cavalry taught him were sabre drill and how to charge on a horse. But they got round to howitzers afterwards!)

[Stanley]

Sybil's Midnight Ride.
Sybil Ludington, Founding Mother

The story of the lone, teenage girl riding for freedom, it seems, is simply too good not to be believed. Paula Hunt, writing in the New England Quarterly, 2015, pp. 187-222.

The phrase “founding fathers” was coined only in 1916, and then by Warren G. Harding. Modern scholarship has rendered the idea more embarrassing for its patriarchalism and elitism, but these ‘founders’ were men, all of them. As a group, they were well off. Some were indeed quite wealthy, and most of the rest were gentlemen of good prospects. They were, most of them, young, and many lived long enough to become venerated elders if not yet “founding fathers.” As the last of them died (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, symbolically, on July 4, 1826, Charles Carroll five years later), unease grew about whether the USA could survive their loss. So began a search for new heroes. Some of these were really new, like the rough, rude, ungrammatical Andy Jackson, a mere stripling in 1776 but elected president in 1828. “Commonness’ was in the air, even thought a virtue, and Boston found a new founder in a very common man, George Robert Twelves Hughes (1742-1840), a cobbler who in his late 20s had joined rebel mobs and who in his late 80s remembered it all. He was made much of by orators, featured in newspapers, and responded well to his newfound fame. At about the same time, an old lady in upstate New York told her family some stories about her role in the great events of the Revolution. She was Sybil Ludington, born in New York in 1761, and she remembered that on the dark and stormy night of April 26, 1777, aged only 16, she mounted her horse and rode many miles to warn local militiamen that the British were on the march. The militia, forewarned, gathered in numbers at their elected colonel’s house (he was Sybil’s father) and began a guerilla action that hurried the British back to their home base. Sybil died in poverty in 1839, probably poorer than George Robert Twelves Hughes, and certainly denied even a widow’s revolutionary pension. Nor did her story surface, but it percolated around Putnam County to be brought up by those who wanted some heroes to be female as well as poor. Sybil’s story first appeared in print in 1880, in a local history by Martha Lamb, and since then has been constantly debunked and defended. Even the DAR have disowned her. But she and her ride have got a US postage stamp, she and her horse have got a noble statue, and every year since 1979, in Putnam County, on the weekend closest to April 26, there’s been a “Sybil Ludington 50k Run,” a celebration for those who like their heroes to be fit as well as female. There’s even an opera. By now, whether or not it is a true story is the least interesting thing about it. There were, after all, at least some “founding mothers,” and Sybil Ludington is now, bless her, one of them. ©

[Stanley]

Tested by fire, I came to understand that I was not a breakable crystal figurine. Coretta Scott King.
Coretta Scott King, 1927-2006

By and large, men have formed the leadership, but... women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement. Coretta Scott King, 1966.

After Martin Luther King’s assassination (April, 1968), the FBI switched focus to put his widow under surveillance. In its efforts to discredit her, the bureau argued that her public persona as “selfless, magnanimous [and] decorous” was “belied by [her] actual shrewd, calculating [and] businesslike activities.” Thus the FBI conceded, unwittingly, the essence of Coretta Scott King’s steely strength. Throughout her life she’d been well-tempered (in the steelmaker’s sense). Her birth on April 27, 1927, was midwifed by her grandmother, who’d been born enslaved. Her rural Alabama childhood was superintended by her ambitious parents, Obadiah and Bernice Scott, who pooled their resourcefulness to give their kids the best education their money could buy. Coretta repaid their investment by studying hard. She followed her elder sister Edythe north to Antioch College, where they pioneered Antioch’s program in real racial integration. There Coretta excelled sufficiently to gain admission to Boston University’s conservatory of music. At Antioch, she earned pin money by babysitting a faculty brat, John Lithgow, but it was at BU where she met Martin Luther King, Jr., and set her future course by his star. Before that, she had to survive the searching scrutiny of King’s parents, who didn’t want their boy marrying some dubious female with a beguiling soprano. Already well tempered, Coretta passed with colors flying, marrying Martin at her parents’ house in late June, 1953. Their marriage lasted just short of 15 years, stormy ones during which she birthed four children and stood by her man while he risked his life, and hers, by leading the civil rights movement, percolating to the top of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, spending long periods away from home, always in danger and often in jail, and adding high politics to her repertoire. So when in 1968 Martin was killed while leading urban garbage collectors on strike for decent wages and better conditions (a humble task), Coretta Scott King was already magnanimous enough, and shrewd enough, to be (and to act as) the grieving widow, young, beautiful, and restrained; but beyond that to become (and to act as) a leader of the civil rights movement, and to extend its remit well beyond Martin’s original goals to include peace, women’s rights, gay and lesbian freedoms, and enough economic equality to make opportunity a universal possession. Or to put it another way, Coretta King wanted the country to do for all its citizens what Obadiah and Bernice had done for her. Magnanimous and decorous, shrewd and steely, Coretta Scott King reminds us of our better natures. ©

[Stanley]

A man of many firsts.
George Boyer Vashon, 1824-1878

When Freedom bids unbare the blade
And calls from every mountain-glen . . .
Her chosen ones to stand like men,
And cleanse their souls from every stain
Which wretches, steeped in crime and blood,
Have cast upon the form of God. George Boyer Vashon, “Vincent Ogé” (1854).

Google ‘Millionaires’ Row’ to find that many cities have them, sometimes under aliases (e.g. ‘Alpha Street’!!). They all began as housing projects for the rich, and some remain so, full of the Victorian flamboyance against which architects like Frank Lloyd Wright would rebel. Others are ghosts of their former selves, casualties left on the battlefields of urban decline. Among the latter is St. Louis’s “Millionaire’s Row,” on St. Louis Avenue just west of the rejuvenating “Old North” neighborhood (with its monument to decayed teeth and hardened arteries, the Crown Candy Kitchen). This millionaires’ row took shape in the 1850s, matured during the “Gilded Age,” then fell into disrepair as the wealthy trekked west to whiter pastures. Today there are some signs of renewal, not least the George B. Vashon mansion, 2223 St. Louis Avenue, which, rehabbed, now houses a black heritage museum and serves as a focus for civic action. George Boyer Vashon was born in western Pennsylvania in 1824 and on April 28, 1847, gained admission to the Bar in the state of New York. Not long after that, he was granted leave to argue cases at the US Supreme Court, not bad going for a young man barely out of Oberlin College (BA in Classics and Valedictorian for the class of 1844). But George Vashon the first African-American to do any of these things. Of course, Vashon’s intellectual prowess made passing the bar in his native state a piece of cake, but he was denied a license to practice because, as a black person, he was not a citizen. This sinister presage of the Dred Scott decision turned George to neighboring New York, where the judiciary thought differently, and where George became (incidentally) the first black professor at any American college (in classics, of course). After a time spent in Haiti (where he became a poet-advocate of Haitian revolutionary nationalism), Vashon returned to his native land and, through Civil War and Reconstruction, labored hard to make the USA a real motherland for himself and all others of African descent. Those labors ended in 1878 when George Vashon died, of yellow fever, at Mississippi’s Alcorn University, where he was professor of classics and mathematics. He’s buried there, and never lived in St. Louis. But his son John B. Vashon moved here, prospered, and as Millionaires’ Row declined, was able to buy a St. Louis Avenue mansion and make it suitable to his waxing wealth. Our Vashon High School, St. Louis’s second “black” high school in the bad old days of legal apartheid is named after both Vashons, father and son, and appropriately too, but that’s another story for another day.

[Stanley]

An American in London
Connie Smith, 1875-1970

Acting black in a white world. The life of Connie Smith, 1875-1970.

Nowadays if you look for an entertainer called Connie Smith you’re most likely to find her in the ranks at the Grand Ole Opry, also as a recording artist (country & western) in her own right. Either way she’s as white as Ivory soap. But before her there was another Connie Smith, born Cornelia Estelle Johnson on April 29, 1875. She was born in South Carolina of formerly enslaved parents who, in search of a better climate, moved to Brooklyn where Cornelia took up a music hall career. Cornelia became Connie Smith at St. Francis Xavier’s, Liverpool, in 1902, when she married another black émigré from the land of the free, the pianist and singer Gus Smith. By then they knew each other pretty well, for in 1894 they’d begun touring together (Britain, Denmark, and Germany) in a play called The South before the War. Back in Britain they invented a music hall routine and toured as “duettists and cake-walkers.” One can only imagine the implicitly (or explicitly) racist character of such appearances, but they became very popular and, looking back on it, Connie recalled that they “never had any sort of insult or suffered any indignity from the British.” No doubt that is why Connie and Gus elected to stay in England (despite being offered free passage “home” in 1914), and was certainly why after Gus’s death in 1927 Connie stayed on, never to return to the USA. The longer Connie stayed, the more accomplished she became. In 1928 she impressed Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern, in London casting for the English premiere of Show Boat, and (although for them she only made understudy) later she sang with Paul Robeson on stage. By the 1940s Connie Smith (now in her 60s) was the best known black actor in Britain. But in those days of racial casting there weren’t “starring” roles for blacks, so she’s remembered professionally as a character actor. In 1942 she was Addie in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. In 1946, as the first black actor to appear on BBC television, she portrayed Mrs. Harris in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chilluns Got Wings. When she was aged about 80, she was made a permanent member of the company at the Royal Court Theatre and was cast as Tituba in the English premiere of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Connie Smith never stopped growing. Her last stage role (in 1961, aged 86) was in a German-language production of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. She died in London, aged 95, in a Catholic nursing home and was buried at Streatham Park cemetery. This black Connie Smith provides us with a rough measure of what the USA lost through its persistent racism. ©.

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A practical measure for practical ends.
King Henry IV and the Edict of Nantes

Paris vaut bien une messe. "Paris is well worth a mass." Attributed, probably wrongly, to King Henry IV of France
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The idea that church and state should be separated, and kept so, became ‘constitutional’ in America at the time of the Revolution. It had many roots, for instance in the secularism of the Protestant Reformation, so it was not irreligious. Nor was it peculiarly ‘American’ or, for that matter, Anglo-American. The Dutch had created the western world’s most prosperous economy by leaving religion to the churches (and to the synagogues), meanwhile keeping it out of the marketplace and away from affairs of state. In New Amsterdam, in North America, they called it oogluiking, nicely translatable as ‘overlooking.’ Another example came in early modern France, where Henry of Navarre strengthened his hereditary claim to the throne by converting to Catholicism (from Calvinistic or ‘reformed’ Protestantism). For various reasons (not least that it was the second time he’d changed horses in midstream), he was disinclined to continue the slaughter, and so in the ninth year of his reign, on April 30, 1598, King Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes, which accorded certain rights (or liberties), and in certain places, to French Protestants. Henry probably promulgated it in Nantes, the center of his power and of “Huguenot” Protestantism, and although its provisions were limited it did end the French ‘Wars of Religion’ that had for decades convulsed the country and made it prey to its neighbors’ cynical (though very ‘religious’) diplomacy. Henry, who was part Medici as well as 100% Bourbon, probably thought of his action as merely practical, and in his own time it had some practical limitations. It did little to enhance his reputation amongst the Protestant English, for to them he remained a turncoat who’d gone popish for the basest of reasons. In France those Catholics who didn’t doubt his sincerity were convinced of his diabolism, and indeed he was assassinated by a Roman Catholic zealot in 1610. Some historians credit Henry’s other reforms (of state finances, for instance) to his residual Protestantism, but his Bourbon successors chipped away at the Edict of Nantes until Louis XIV revoked it completely in 1685. That revocation gave France’s neighbors (and Britain’s American colonies) a quick pulse of exceedingly valuable immigrants (including the families of Isaac Barré, Francis Marion, John Jay, James Monroe, and Henry Laurens), but sank Henry IV’s reputation in France. In a more enlightened age the French would rename him their “Good King Henry” and replace his statue on the bridge he had built to unite Paris, the Pont Neuf. There you can find his restored statue, and if you want you can call it an idealistic monument to practicality. ©.

[Stanley]

Almost but not quite.

May 1 is Cricket Day.
Cricket is baseball on Valium. Robin Williams.

Happy Cricket Day!! That’s not an easy salutation to offer in the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it does recognize the anniversary of the first (known) American cricket tournament, on May 1, 1751, in New York City. It was not exactly an ‘international’ match but might qualify as intra-empire, for it was played out between a local side and one daring to call itself a “London” eleven. Unlike tea drinking, cricket playing did not fall victim to the American Revolution. Cricket clubs sprang up almost everywhere, even in frontier Nashville, TN. I’ve heard claims that there the game was played, or at least watched, by none other than Andy Jackson. Abe Lincoln is known to have watched a match (between Chicago and Milwaukee) in 1849. But, notoriously, Abe and Andy lacked polish. It’s more certain that young college gentlemen played the game, even (from 1833) the good Quakers of Haverford College. If Haverford had a cricket club, it had to compete against someone, and indeed Philadelphia became the recognized center of American cricket. Doubtless at least some Haverfordians graduated into “The Philadelphians,” a local elite club, or team, that hosted touring sides from England (and Australia!!!) through the late 19th century. W. G. Grace played in Philadelphia, and then in 1884 The Philadelphians dared to tour England, where their matches were deemed ‘first class.’ Back home, however, cricket became identified as an elite pursuit. Games (“matches”) took too long, for one thing, and even worse the longer they dragged on the more likely they were to end in a draw. Now, this happened in baseball, too. A 1920 game (on May 1st!!!) between Boston’s Braves and Brooklyn’s Dodgers went for 26 innings only to be called a tie, perhaps on grounds of exhaustion (the two pitchers went the distance, Leon Cadore and Joe Oeschger). But the rules of baseball made such marathons mathematically unlikely, nearly impossible. Baseballers played it quick, and played it conclusively. Almost everywhere cricket clubs traded their pitches for ready cash; and, where they survived as clubs, they did so by becoming watering holes for local WASP elites. In St. Louis’s magnificent Forest Park, only a wisp of the game remains, at the little-used Cricket Drive entrance. The drive ends at a sward of green, where very occasionally cricket happens, but I haven’t seen a match played there for years. May 1 is a good day to hope for a revival, or a miracle. ©

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Am I not a man and a brother?
Zachary Macaulay, 1768-1838

Few men have devoted themselves so entirely and unselfishly to a noble cause. From Leslie Stephen’s essay on Zachary Macaulay in the original Dictionary of National Biography(1891). Stephen’s grandfather was among Macaulay’s early confederates in British anti-slavery.

The idea that human persons—their labors, their minds, and their progeny—can be owned by other human persons is devilishly hard to comprehend, and it’s no easier to teach. That is why slave autobiographies are essential teaching aids. It’s also why abolitionists found the formerly enslaved to be vital witnesses to slavery’s enormities. There was nothing like hearing it from the horse’s mouth (unless it was seeing it etched in scars on the horse’s back), especially when the ‘horse’ was a fellow human being. Almost as useful were those who’d seen slavery from the perspective of the owner-masters. Some had been owners themselves, like the Grimké sisters of South Carolina. Others had been mere functionaries, clerks like Zachary Macaulay who found himself unequal to the horrors of people-trafficking. His monument stands today in Westminster Abbey, Poet’s Corner, over a medallion which shows an enslaved person in chains and the legend “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” Born a minister’s son in Inveraray. Scotland, on May 2, 1768, might never have asked that question. But, except for steeping himself in the literatures of other slave societies, ancient Greece and Horace’s Rome, he'd proved an undutiful son, so steeped in drink and unwise friendships that he found himself, aged only 17, clerking on a Jamaica sugar plantation. There, unwittingly, he found himself doing what he could to befriend and benefit the enslaved. These small humanities began Zachary’s personal reform, and when he returned to Britain he fell in, this time, with better company, evangelicals like his brother-in-law Thomas Babington. Another new friend was William Wilberforce. Pioneers of the British abolition movement, they helped Zachary give shape and substance to his discomfort with British colonial slavery. In return, his own skills (a capacious memory and a clerk’s respect for facts and figures) strengthened Wilberforce’s campaigns to end British participation in the transatlantic slave trade and, ultimately, to abolish slavery in the empire. The evidence Macauley provided was notable for its accuracy and its moral force. He played an important role in awakening the British public (and parliament) to the almost incomprehensible realities of a modern slave system. The evidence amassed by clerks like Macaulay and former slaves like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth will likely outlast the efforts of some among us to promote the lie that slavery was just another labor system. ©

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White rose, red rose, white rose in red rose.
Cecily, Duchess of York, 1415-1485.

Politics makes strange bedfellows. Saying, dated from the mid 1800s.

Shakespeare may be credited (in The Tempest) with originating the proverb ‘adversity makes strange bedfellows,’ but the more familiar (and more plausible?) ‘politics makes strange bedfellows’ didn’t become common usage until the mid-19th century. It’s passingly odd that old Will didn’t coin the latter proverb when he, partly in collaboration with a couple of drinking companions, wrote his four ‘history’ plays on the Wars of the Roses. For this period of civil war (ca. 1450-1485) had very much to do with the strange politics of dynastic ‘bedfellowing.’ The bedfellowing ended only when Henry Tudor, a cadet twig of a cadet branch of the house of Lancaster, announced that he would bring it all to a peaceful end by marrying Elizabeth of York—and if that didn’t work out, Henry added, he’d marry another of Elizabeth’s kinswomen). Elizabeth became Queen, of course, and birthed the Tudor dynasty, but behind the scenes there was a more important Yorkist woman, Cecily, Duchess of York, whose long and eventful life began on May 3, 1415. It didn’t end until 1495, well into Henry Tudor’s reign. By that time, Cecily had become the honored grandmother-in-law of Henry Tudor’s bedfellow-wife (and thus great-grandmother of four Tudor monarchs, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I). Cecily underwent long imprisonments when her life was at the mercy of others. She’d very nearly missed becoming queen herself (in 1460 when her husband the Duke of York lost his life at Wakeville, one of the climacteric battles of the Wars of the Roses). She nevertheless became Queen Mother of two Yorkist monarchs, Edward V (1461-1483) and Richard III (1483-1485), and then survived Richard’s grisly end at Bosworth Field. As Shakespeare would have it, Richard lost his crown for the want of a horse (and a moral sense?), but Cecily lived on at the Tudor court, important in her mere presence, in her ceremonial roles (e.g. at the wedding of Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon), and not least in her personal wealth. Besides all that, in her old age Duchess Cecily became famous for exemplary piety, a seeker after visions who adopted a monastic life of silence and study. In 1485 she was buried beside her husband the Duke, and with all due ceremony and with a papal indulgence. No doubt she felt that she needed the indulgence, given all that she’d seen, and done, in her long life as a Yorkist matriarch. It’s surprising that Shakespeare didn’t make more of her, but in Henry VI, part I,where in the garden scene the playwright gave us the white (Yorkist) and red (Lancastrian) roses, she doesn’t appear at all. Duchess Cecily did, however, have much to do with the Tudor rose, for it was both red and white but never pink. ©

[Stanley]

"I am tired of being Alice."
Alice Liddell Becomes Alice Hargreaves

I am tired of being Alice. Alice Liddell Hargreaves, circa 1932

My grandmothers were old college chums, each expecting an adult spinsterhood. Instead they married late in life, at about the time that Kenneth Grahame’sThe Wind in the Willows, was published. It’s to both of them that I owe my early immersion in the ‘classics’ of English children’s literature, not only Grahame’s wondrous excursions with Ratty, Mole, and Messrs. Toad and Badger but also Lewis Carroll’s peculiar underworlds in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872). Luckily my Grandfather Bliss added in a large dose of Mark Twain, notably Twain’s early stories about bluejays and bull frogs, then (in Roughing It) about a tree-climbing buffalo and the desperado Slade. I say luckily because Twain’s tall tales and shaggy dog stories prepared me for learning discomfiting details about Grahame and Carroll: Grahame’s own unhappy, destructive parenthood and then the ‘real’ Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, and his odd relationship with the ‘real’ Alice. Alice Pleasance Liddell was born May 4, 1852, in the posh precincts of Westminster Abbey and then grew up in the even posher deanery at Christ Church, Oxford’s ‘cathedral-college.’ Dodgson, in holy orders as were all Oxford dons, was also a mathematics tutor of a moody sort; he thought Alice and her sisters personifications of beauty and innocence. Dodgson’s pictures of them and his diary entries prove the point, which is not much different from W. M. Thackeray’s characterization of their mother,Lorina Liddell, as both dull (an adult shade of innocence) and gorgeous. And besides Charles Dodgson’s photos we have Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Today we are both more tolerant and more prurient than they were in the era of Thackeray and Dodgson (also the age of John Ruskin, the Liddell girls’ even odder tutor in art and music), and that has led to some alarming speculations on the ‘real’ nature of these relationships. As for Alice herself, she grew up to become as beautiful as her mother. There’s a hint that she may have been courted by Victoria’s son Leopold, Duke of Albany, an undergraduate at Christ Church, but Alice fell outside of the queen’s dynastic criteria and into the arms of a shootin’ and huntin’ gentleman, Reginald (‘Regi’) Hargreaves. They married in 1880. Alice spent her adult life less happily (and less innocently?). Regi died in 1926, his estate in ruins. Alice Hargreaves was rediscovered, feted as the ‘real’ Alice, and went to New York for an honorary degree (of letters?) in 1932. She said that she was “tired of being Alice,” but by then that was merely a Victorian irony. ©

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From Bletchley Park to Nuneham Park.
Mavis Lever Batey

These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these,
With sweet succession, taught even toil to please;
These round thy bowers their chearful influence shed,
These were thy charms—But all these charms are fled.
--Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village,” 1770.

The British are a punning people, even in extremis, and one of the best to come out of WWII came from the head of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park. “Give me a lever and a rock and I can move the universe.” Concealed in an apparent homage to Archimedes, Dilly Knox thus coded praise for two members of his team, Margaret Rock and Mavis Lever, for their roles in breaking the “Enigma” codes of the Axis powers, first Lever on the Italians and then Lever and Rock together on the Germans. Mavis Lilian Lever was born on May 5, 1921, in working-class London. Her convent-school teachers spotted her extraordinary talents, and Lever entered London University in 1938 to major in French and German. As a schoolgirl she’d already demonstrated deep hostility to international fascism, so when it came to finding an international placement for her second-year studies in German she chose Zurich. In November ’39, Europe at war, she returned to London. Instead of following her classmates to safety in mid-Wales she applied for war work. Given her talents, the Civil Service did the right thing and transferred her to Bletchley Park where, besides breaking into “Enigma” she fell in love with another code-breaker, the mathematician Keith Batey. That might have been enough, and when the Bletchley Park work surfaced in the popular imagination, Mavis Lever Batey surfaced to advise Kate Winslet how to play her role as a woman war worker in the film Enigma (2001). But by then Mavis was famous in another field, broadly landscape history but more precisely garden history. Her moves as wife and mother in the Batey ménage had fetched her up at Nuneham Courtenay near Oxford where a large garden had fallen into a nearly impenetrable tangle. She broke its code to see design below the mess. It was once, she concluded in 1968, the pride of Nuneham Park, a stately home in SE Oxfordshire, and it had been the inspiration for Oliver Goldsmith’s elegiac “The Deserted Village.” There “honest rustics” had worked, played, prospered, and died in the warm embraces of nature and community. An enclosed garden had stilled that life. In her own new life, Mavis Batey became famed in her own right as a restorer of gardens and a scholarly interpreter of gardens’ roles in shaping both landscapes and our evolving views of nature. Among many of her re-creations I list two, at Levens Hall which we visited often while we lived in Lancaster and the deanery garden at Christ Church College, where once Lewis Carroll envisaged yet another world for little Alice Liddell. Having lived three or perhaps four lives, and lived them to the full, Mavis Batey died, aged 92, in 2013. ©

[Stanley]

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her. Agatha Christie.
Sir Max Mallowan, 1904-1978

Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are. Agatha Christie’s heroine Anne Beddingfield, an archaeologist’s daughter. in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). She ends up married (happily ever after?) in British Africa.

A high proportion of Agatha Christie’s novels are centered in or connected to the Middle East. Even her famed Murder on the Orient Express begins there, in Syria, as Hercule Poirot boards the Taurus Express to connect with the ‘Orient’ at Istanbul. These novels are drawn from life, not least because one of them,They Came to Baghdad (her 50th, published in 1951), features an intrepid, attractive young woman who came there thinking to find adventure or romance, and instead found both, and not in the shape of a fussy, round, elaborately-mustached Belgian detective. After all, Christie herself came to Baghdad in 1929, after the collapse of her first marriage (to an army gentleman-officer called ‘Archie,’ for heaven’s sake). Well-connected and already an established author, Agatha dabbled in a dig financed by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Thus this whodunit writer participated in excavating the mysteries of Ur and Nineveh, and she found romance, too, in the shape of a young British archaeologist, Max Mallowan. Not yet ‘established,’ but certainly well-connected, Max had been born Edgar Max Lucien Mallowan on May 6, 1904. Of mixed Austrian and French heritage, but middle class enough to attend school with Evelyn Waugh, Max finished off his education at New College, Oxford (in classics) and then joined Leonard Wooley’s BM-Penn team where (thanks to Wooley’s wife, a formidable dame whose shade would figure in a couple of Christie novels) he met Agatha Christie at dinner. They didn’t fall in love immediately (that may have followed a train journey they took back to London, in separate compartments of course, via the Taurus and then the Orient Express), but they married soon enough, in 1930. Thereafter, Agatha kept on writing (60+ novels, in the end). As for Max Mallowan, he kept on digging down to become eminent in his field, first at the British School of Archaeology, then London University, and finally at All Souls, Oxford. Along the way, he learned how to fly and played that role during WWII, as an RAF wing commander in the Middle Eastern theatre. Max Mallowan, scholar and hero, did well enough to achieve his knighthood (1968) before Agatha became a Dame (1971). After Dame Agatha died in 1976, Sir Max quickly and quietly married his long-time archaeological colleague, Barbara Parker. His autobiography (Mallowan’s Memoirs, 1977) is also drawn from life and should be read by any Agatha Christie fan. ©

[Stanley]

Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
The premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

There were handkerchiefs in the air, hats, and raised hands, so that Beethoven, whom they knew could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovations. From a critic’s review of the premiere performance of Beethoven’s Ninth

Out of all premieres, one would most like to have been present at the first airing of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Vienna, on May 7, 1824. Beethoven was by then the grand old man of European music, one identified with the hopes and disappointments of a revolutionary age. He’d begun in this mode with his 3rd Symphony, which he’d intended to dedicate to Napoléon Bonaparte. But when Napoléon fell prey to his own power, Beethoven changed that “to the memory of a great man,” and we know the Third as everyone’s Eroica. Beethoven went on composing majestic works for big orchestras, and for his Ninth the publicity mill brought in a big crowd. The crowd at the Theater am Kämtnertor expected the dramatic. Despite his serious illnesses, the composer would conduct, a chorus would fashion the finale (and there would be a smashing, stately overture and some of the best passages from his recent Missa Solemnis). Beethoven threw himself into the drama of the occasion, conducting like a madman despite his deafness. Never mind that he could hear nothing above his tinnitus (imagine watching but not hearing the Ninth). Never mind that the orchestra had been told not to follow Beethoven but heed the ‘real’ conductor, Michael Umlauf. Never mind that when the players and singers were finished, Beethoven kept on conducting (two measures or more behind by then). And never mind that the contralto soloist, Caroline Unger, had to step over and turn Beethoven around so that he could see the applause, the waving crowd. Even the musicians and critics in the audience knew they’d witnessed something special. Whether they recognized that they’d also witnessed the creation of a musical monument is another question, but that’s what the Ninth has become. But it has survived and is a necessary feature of most orchestras’ regular (not annual but regular) repertoire. The Ninth was a perfect mirror of its own time. The majestic music worked towards then framed Schiller’s Ode to Joy and, in doing so, stated widespread relief that peace had come to Europe and yet voiced regret that it had not been a nobler peace. By the 1820s, Hapsburg Vienna was the focal point of Europe’s political reaction, at peace but . . . . The music, and its spirit, would surface again politically in the shape of the 1848 revolutions. Artistically, the Ninth speaks to us of the Romantic era, not one of reaction but of hopes for a better peace than we’ve yet found. And so we still buy our tickets, we attend, and we see in our minds’ eyes the deaf maestro, behind the beat but alive with hope. ©.

[Stanley]

"When I want to buy up any politician, I always find the Anti-Monopolists the most purchasable. They don't come so high."
William Henry Vanderbilt, 1821-1885

The public be damned. William Henry Vanderbilt, responding to a reporter’s question on passenger services on the New York Central railroad.

The ‘robber barons’ of our Gilded Age were not self-effacing men. Instead, they made legends of themselves as the lords of creation, then acted that part. Pictured and painted as bluff and hearty, rather than just overfed, many filled out that image with stories of their hard-fought youth. They often claimed to have risen from rags to riches, and where that plainly wasn’t sustainable they would still have started at the bottom of their fathers’ empires, on the shop floor, in the print room, at the dry goods counter. Having risen to the top through their virtues, they preached their lives as golden rules for the rest of humanity, and of course for their own children. Their boys especially, one imagines: but while one can make stocks and shares heritable, legends are more difficult to pass on. Thus one of the oldest, bluffest, and heartiest of them all, Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), looked askance on his oldest son William Henry Vanderbilt. “Billy”, born on May 8, 1821, looked too frail to carry on the myth, and at first seemed too willful into the bargain. Cornelius, the self-style “Commodore” of the American merchant marine, was not pleased by this “blatherskite” timidity. Any hopes that a good marriage might make the man were dashed, seemingly, when Billy, barely 20, married a mere parson’s daughter, Maria Louisa Kissam. To put Billy away somewhere safe, Cornelius made him the steward of the old Vanderbilt farm on Staten Island. So while Billy and Maria raised a brood of grandchildren (duly naming the eldest Cornelius II) and grew foodstuffs, the Commodore saw to his commercial fleet and began to move into railways and stockbroking. At some point, however, Cornelius softened towards the boy, and aged about 40 Billy became William. His father found him a place in a bank, and began to heed William’s advice that railroads were indeed the coming thing. By the time the old Commodore passed (1877), William was his trusted lieutenant and his main heir, copping all but $10 million of the Vanderbilt fortune. William did so well in negotiating his way out of the great depression (the ‘creative destruction’ of 1873-1877) that by the time he died, only eight years later, he had more than doubled Cornelius’s fortune and nearly completed the Vanderbilts’ transition from shipping by sea to shipping by rail (plus banking, plus real estate). Not only does William figure as the main founder of the New York Central empire but also of New York City’s commuter lines. He also built the great Vanderbilt mansions in the city and ‘The Breakers’ too, their Newport “cottage.” Better yet, just like Cornelius, William did it all himself. ©

[Stanley]

The Mr. Man Man
Roger Hargreaves, 1935-1988

Mr. Nervous. Little Miss Late. Mr. Forgetful. Mr. Clumsy. Typical titles of Roger Hargreaves’ children’s books.

It’s past time for me to admit that my preferences for children’s literature are not appropriate to every child’s taste. My “classics” are longish stories marked by subtleties of plot, language and humor into which children can grow but which, perhaps, cannot strike every child’s fancy at first hearing. For children listen to rather than read their first books. Kids also see their books, not as jumbles of print and prose but through illustrations that narrate the stories. My “classics” came to be illustrated by artists who became as famous as the authors, like E. H. Shepard to A. A. Milne’s “Pooh” books. But it may be that very small children prefer simpler books, simpler prose, more accessible pictures. It was a happy coincidence, then, that our children were born and grew up in England in the 1970s and early 80s, at about the same time that Roger Hargreaves’ “Mr. Men” and “Little Miss” books hit the market. Hargreaves was born in Yorkshire, Cleckheaton, on May 9, 1935, and doesn’t seem to have had a single thought about writing, or drawing, for children until he had four of his own. When he did, he brought to those tasks all the simplicities that he’d learned as a commercial artist and advertiser. “Keep it short and keep it simple” was the rule he followed, first in his childhood ambition to become a cartoonist and, later, in handling ad copy accounts for cigarettes, beer, sweets, and other commodities bad for children’s health (athough Hargreaves did ‘do’ toothpaste commercials). Typical Hargreaves slogans were “Emigrate to Canada Dry (for the sake of your Scotch)” and “Glasgow’s miles better.” Hardly up to the standards of, say, E. B. White (Charlotte’s Web) or Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows) but adequate for adults thirsting for whiskey or travel. Just so, Hargreaves’ “Mr. Men” and “Little Miss” books proved exceedingly marketable, first in Britain and then in the world at large. They were cheap, straightforward, each could be read in minutes, and as for their illustrations, well, a child could draw them. Hargreaves’ publisher advertised the first six (in 1971) as “simple” and “normal,” and although “normative” might have served better, they sold like hotcakes. By the time Roger Hargreaves died, at only 53, his was a publishing and licensing empire that stretched into over 20 countries and had been translated (a simple enough job, one must say) into 15 languages. In 2004, Hargreaves’ widow and children, sold off the whole business for about £32 million. And, as they say in the Ad Biz, that ain’t hay. ©.

[Stanley]

Nothing here is permanent. Once photographed, its life is over.
David O. Selznick, 1902-1962

There are only two classes: first class and no class. David O. Selznick.

One of the greater gaps in my knowledge bank is almost anything having to do with Hollywood, its culture, its history. What I have are Wodehouse’s ‘Mulliner’ stories (those, anyway, that have to do with frosted malts in the studio commissary and temperamental blonde bombshells like Hortensia Burwash, the Empress of Molten Passion) and a ragbag of tidbits. Within even this well of ignorance, however, there remains enough matter to know that David O. Selznick is much more than a name, indeed much more than an ignoramus in search of a vocabulary (which characterizes most Wodehouse moguls). Selznick, born into the business (his dad was in silents, in a big way) on May 10, 1902, moved to Hollywood (from New York) in 1926. There he passed rapidly upwards through the ranks of assistant nodders and yes-men to assume control as director, or as producer (or both) of some of the greatest classics of American film, all of them talkies, some in black and white, and then of course in “living,” as they say, “color.” After a couple of early triumphs working for some other mogul-producer, as in Dinner at Eight (1933), Selznick moved into his own house, and then really churned them out, starting with Anna Karenina, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield (all in 1935). His facility in translating literary classics into enhanced celluloid dispel Wodehouse’s image of the Hollywood producer as an inarticulate, functional illiterate, and just in case Selznick left us with ample documentation of his productive processes. It is, however, possible that there was in Greta Garbo (whom Selznick cast as Anna) at least a whisper of Wodehouse’s Minna Nordstrom, that hard-bitten Hollywood housemaid who rose to stardom by ransoming her bosses’ bootleg booze. Other Selznick works of genius included A Star Is Born and, of course, the all-time blockbuster Gone with the Wind (1939). Selznick’s manic energy and insight also brought into Hollywood (or boosted the careers of) such as George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock. Then, in the late 1940s, his genius failed him or, as he claimed, had tired him out to the extent that he became, instead, Tinseltown’s presiding ghost. Since he died, in 1962, we’ve found out other things about him that suggest his magic carried a very high price tag. His manic energy was drug-enhanced, his talent for spotting stars seems to have depended in part on the casting-couch method, and then in the post-WWII ‘McCarthy’ era Selznick became one of Hollywood’s most enthusiastic red-baiters. Taken altogether, David O. Selznick’s life and work remind us that to be great is not always to be good. Or, to put it another way, that “O” initial stood for nothing. ©