BOB'S BITS

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"The Whip of Necessity," title of a Sarah Bagley essay in The Voice of Industry, circa 1846.

In the late 19th century, under the eye of the great robber barons and authors like Horatio Alger, the idea of the “self-made man” became a rags-to-riches cult. It began, however, as a cultural response to economic change. Rural overcrowding created a population surplus, and farm youngsters flocked to the cities to seek wage employment. What would they do absent the constraints of home, family, church, and neighborliness? They would keep diary accounts of their moral lives, nurture their minds, make themselves into better people. If they prospered too, so much the better. But there were also self-made women, and one of them was Sarah Bagley, born into a large cousinage in and around Scandia, NH, on April 19, 1805. Her parents rented land and owned some, but there was not enough to pass on to the children, and in 1835 Sarah Bagley found herself in Lowell, a cotton mill girl at 29. At first, employer paternalism and employee ambition allowed for some self-improvement, music rooms, perhaps a small lending library. Sarah herself wrote (if somewhat sardonically) of “The Pleasures of Factory Life” in a local Lowell newspaper, the Offering. But over the next decade bad times struck, employers cut wages and increased hours, especially for women mill workers, and in December 1844 six women, one of them Sarah Bagley, met in Lowell’s Anti-Slavery Hall (!!!) to form the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. They would become self-made women, restore wage cuts, work a ten-hour day, have room to breathe and grow, and Sarah now wrote for The Voice of Industry, an LFLRA paper, and not just about the LFLRA’s labor demands, but about anti-slavery, pacifism, prison reform, votes for women. In a long life that moved her to New York, Philadelphia, and Albany, marriage at 44, homeopathic medicine at 46, Sarah Bagley worked to improve herself, her sisters, and her society. She was the very essence of a self-made woman. ©

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"I cannot here avoid giving my most decided suffrage in favor of the moral qualities of maniacs." Philippe Pinel, 1801.

We call the era of the American Revolution the ‘age of democratic revolutions’ because these revolutions articulated expanded notions of human equality. Some (spectacularly in Haiti) even ended slavery, and all of them based self-government and the right of revolution on a “self-evident” truth of equality. There was no full fruition—nowhere were women “liberated”—but seeds were planted that others would cultivate and later harvest. One could even argue that the insane were freed, at least in Paris, during and as a result of the French Revolution, at both the men’s asylum, the Bicêtre, and at the infamous Salpétrière, a former gunpowder factory where all sorts of women were held prisoner: pickpockets, prostitutes, idiots, the insane, and the senile. The lead agent of these liberations was Philippe Pinel, born into a family of doctors in the south of France on April 20, 1745. He qualified there as a physician but moved to Paris where he hoped to find a more progressive scientific climate and more opportunity for personal advancement: right about the former but wrong about the latter. Pinel found new ideas in Paris salons and new frustrations in Paris snobbery, and by the time of the Revolution he was ready to give vent to both. He became director of the Salpétrière in 1795, and the chains came off (for the insane and the senile, anyway), and then in 1800 the same was accomplished at the Bicêtre. Pinel’s notions of treatment and cure are now dated, but he did think the mentally ill were equal, and just like us in our illnesses in need of medical treatment, loving care, wise counsel. Pinel himself credited his subordinates, Jean Baptiste and Mme. Pussin, with much of this reform, but subsequent historians have (until recently) preferred to find their heroes from further up the social scale or on the male side of it. “Equality” is, perhaps, not yet a fully-fledged principle of historical scholarship. ©

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'I hung myself with every available article of clothing, hugged a hot bottle, and drank cherry brandy.' Ella Christie to Alice Stewart, Sept. 1, 1904, on snow camping in the Himalayas.

Once one’s read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (or seen the film), the idea of the Scottish maiden lady is forever fixed, although truth be told Miss Brodie doesn’t finish a maiden. Whether in Spark’s novel, or as played by Maggie Smith, she’s indomitable in her values, yet ripped this way and that by a romantic nature and a stern mind. Her quasi-romantic attachment to Mussolini flaws a character that one is, despite oneself, drawn to admire. If Miss Jean Brodie had only had money, she’d surely have turned out better, or happier. Take Isabella (“Ella”) Robertson Christie, born in Edinburgh on April 21, 1861, and never married. But nor did Ella have to teach for a living, for her father was an irascible but very rich mine owner, and once Ella and her sister Alice (who did marry) had successfully challenged his will (he disinherited them), Ella and Alice never again wanted for porridge. In their dad’s palmier days, the girls had learned to travel, and to love it, and after the court case Ella’s first adventure was to Asia, starting with Bombay and taking in Kashmir, Tibet, Ceylon, Malaya, and Borneo. With Ella Christie travel was as she took it, and this journey mixed state dinners with maharajahs (and Lord Kitchener) with rough camps in the Himalayas and a spell with a load of pigs in a stinky ship bound for Sarawak. These travels (sometimes with Alice, sometimes not) continued apace for five decades, usually producing a cleverly-titled travel book, with “kodaking” photos, but there were also memorable works on cooking and gardening. In them one can learn to make “A Syllabub Under the Cow” or, if one would really “rather not,” a Japanese garden. And it is for her gardens at Cowden Castle, outside Edinburgh, that Ella is chiefly remembered. For me, I’m going to try to find her (and Alice’s) 1940 memoir, A Long Look at Life by Two Victorians, to see whether I can find a shade or wisp of Miss Jean Brodie. I think she must be there. ©

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"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity." Charles Mingus.

My undergraduate career coincided with the ‘miraculous years’ of improvisational jazz, and I heard a lot of it thanks to my roommate’s, Jim Kirsner’s, records. But Jim knew something about it, and I didn’t. I’m sure it was from Jim I first heard the name ‘Mingus,’ but today I couldn’t say certainly that I heard any Mingus music. It’s a bad memory gap, for Charles Mingus was one of the greats, and his albums Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) and Mingus Ah Um (1959) were foundational. They say jazz is a truly American musical genre; fittingly, Charles Mingus was an all-American boy, born in Nogales, AZ, on April 22, 1922, his dad an army sergeant in a border post, Charles was certainly German-American, African-American, Native-American, and Chinese-American. He claimed English and Swedish too, and why not? But Charles grew up in Watts and identified black, and this may have frustrated his first ambition, to become a classical cellist. Lack of formal musical education also told against this, and so Mingus learned his trade from LA session musicians and grew up with jazz as a bass player. In the 40s he toured with the likes of Armstrong and Gillespie and had the distinction of being fired by Ellington before striking out on his own, leading trios and quartets, playing with a larger ensemble, and composing. Mingus’s composition skills gave his music backbone and theme, and he distinguished himself from more purely improvisational talents like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane: “if the free-form guys could play the same tune twice, then I would say they were playing something.” Mingus’s religious and political sensibilities informed his music, for instance the rise and fall of humanity as portrayed in the Pithecanthropus album’s title piece. That also foretold his own fate. After rising to the top of his profession in the early 60s, Charles Mingus was brought down, with painful inevitability, by ALS. He died in Mexico in 1979. ©

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"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players . . ." Shakespeare, As You Like It.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is based (where else?) at Stratford-upon-Avon, whence its light shines out to the world, but under the direction of the (then) young Terry Hands its touring arm began to make a direct impact on the rest of us, taking the RSC even to Hollywood. Hands occasionally took with him a theatre designer whose sets—often simple enough to be ‘portable’—helped to define the drama on stage. This was Abd’Elkader Farrah, born in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains, Algeria, on April 23, 1926, and who was the RSC’s resident designer for 30 years. It seems an odd outcome for a Maghrebi Arab lad, and it was, but from his youth he was seized with a desire to paint. Islamic strictures against figurative painting led him into a different avenue, doing sets—by definition portable—for his brother’s touring company in Algeria. The colonial authorities suppressed the company amidst the tensions of civil war, and Farrah fled to Paris where he fell in with artistic sorts and designed several sets well enough to end up at the National Theatre School at Strasbourg as chief instructor of theatre design. There he married une française, Simone Pieret, but the Algerian war and his Algerian-ness made Stratford look like a haven, and (thanks to the director Peter Hall) it became their home in 1961. There Farrah’s impact was, pardon the pun, dramatic. And his genius drew other designers to Stratford, helping them to acquire fame and fortune. According to one of them, John Napier, “Abdel’s the wisest of us all.” Another called him “the most complete man of the theatre it has been my privilege to know.” Not surprisingly, Abdel Farrah was best known for his settings of Shakespeare, especially the history plays, but he’s credited with over 250 productions with around 30 directors, some in opera and ballet and many (especially after his retirement in 1991) away from Stratford. Simone died in 2005; Abd’Elkader Farrah followed her in 2006. ©

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"Professor" William Beard, the bone seller of North Somerset.

Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (1958) opened for me a lifetime’s reading hobby. Along the way I’ve discovered Eiseley’s limits: the “men” in the title, for instance, left out Mary Anning, (1799-1847), who mined the blue lias cliffs of the Somerset coast for its cornucopia of marine fossils. She sold them, but also studied them, and somewhat belatedly (in 2010) the Royal Society included Ms. Anning in a list of ten British women who should have been famed for their scientific discoveries. But there is another limitation in Eiseley’s title, which really should have read “the ‘Gentlemen’ who discovered it,” for ‘science’ was then still regarded not only as a manly thing but also as a genteel pursuit. Mary Anning’s father Richard, for instance, was no gentleman but a carpenter, and a religious dissenter (Congregationalist) to boot, but he’s the one who set Mary (when very young) on her quest. But even before Richard and Mary Anning, there was William Beard, born (also in Somerset) on April 24, 1772. Younger son of a smallholder, he was no gentleman. But at least he was a loyal son of the established church, and it was to aid the local parish and its school that William Beard began to harvest fossil bones from the Banwell Caves on the North Somerset coast. He sold them to casual tourists (at Weston-super-Mare) and to serious collectors already curious about origins and extinctions. William Beard’s pastor had rediscovered the caves, so the money went to the church. But it was clearly coming time to make a history of them, to build some explanatory frame within which to locate petrified bones and vanished species. William Beard would not manage that, but he studied his fossils closely enough to win the nickname of “Professor” from his fellow parishioners, and it was said that “he thought not a little of himself.” But until recently he, too, has been left out of the gentlemanly history of “Darwin’s century.” ©.

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Rhetorix the interpreter, Getafix the Druid, Cacofonix the bard, Geriatrix the elder, comic characters in the “Asterix the Gaul” series.

Now that my undergraduate instructor in French, Vicki Creed, has retired, you’d have to learn French with Babbel™ or Rosetta Stone™. But in Vicki’s spirit it would be cheaper and much more enjoyable to read both French and English editions of Asterix©, a justly-famed and funny serial comic of which (I hope) all annual editions are still in print. Asterix the Gaul (as he was christened in 1959) was a pint-sized savage who decided that civilization Roman-style was not his slice of roast wild boar, and most of his cartoon adventures follow his efforts to prick, subvert, mock, and/or destabilize the Pax Romana and send Caesar (or his legionary underlings) back across the Rubicon. Asterix was the brain-child of a couple of Parisian immigrants, a Polish-Argentinian Jew named René Goscinny and an older Italian named Albert Uderzo. Uderzo, born in the Marne on April 25, 1927, had a tough time growing up in working-class east Paris, where politically aware workers did not approve of Mussolini’s intervention in Spain’s civil war, but then Uderzo didn’t approve either and his humor often got him out of what might have been unpleasant scrapes. It seems likely to me that some of these youthful adventures found their way into the Asterix strips, but Uderzo’s career in comics was quite a while in coming (although like many others he was early charmed by Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck). He met Goscinni, who would be the prose man in Asterix, in 1952, and the two created several memorable characters before finally hitting on that ornery little Gaul, Asterix, his village chief Vitalstatistix, the village headwoman Impedimenta, Asterix’s thundering great sidekick Obelix (a menhir maker), his dog Idéfix (“Dogmatix” in the English translations), and bumbling, slow, stupid Romans like Gluteus Maximus. I think you are beginning to get the picture (they’re drawn always by Uderzo), but it’s Goscinny’s puns that will teach you French almost before you know it. ©

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"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." The Red Queen to Alice, shall we say in July 1862?

Without stretching our imaginations as far as it takes to read it, we can say that a literary classic was born on this date, for it was on April 26, 1856, that Charles Dodgson (mathematician, aged 24) first met Alice Liddell, (little girl, aged 4). Perhaps they met in Christ Church meadows, Oxford, for Alice’s father was Dean of Christ Church College, Dodgson was a graduate of the college and had just been appointed to its ‘Mathematical Lectureship.’ It was certainly in the meadows where, on July 4, 1862, Dodgson sat with the Liddell family (Alice, her father the dean, her mother Lorina, and her sisters) to tell a story about a little girl who fell down a rabbit hole and into a most marvelous adventure. It wasn’t the first story Dodgson had told the girls or their friends, nor the last, but it’s the one we all know, first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, which purged of its fantastical critical reputation(s) is quite fantastical enough on its own, a story told to small children in a pleasant place on a sunny Friday afternoon. Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, went on to publish other stories, but I’ve already done him in these Notes. Alice became a beauty, intelligent and adept, and possibly a romantic friend of Victoria’s son Prince Leopold. At any rate, she married a wealthy gentleman cricketer, Reginald Hargreaves, at Westminster Abbey in the Fall of 1880. They might have lived happily ever after but that two of their three sons were killed in WWI. Alice tended her wonderful gardens near Emery Down, Hampshire and powered the local Women’s Institute, but later had to sell her inscribed copy of Alice (for £15,400, then a stupendous sum). She attended Columbia University’s celebration of the book purchase in 1930, aged 80, where she met Peter Llewelyn Davies, aged 33, who had as a child been the inspiration for J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. But that’s another story. ©.

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"There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground." Mary Wollstonecraft.

On April 27, 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was born, the eldest child in a family of domineering men, particularly her father, and submissive women, particularly her mother. Nor did her father improve his temper as he sank the family fortune in farming; his violent temper and drunkenness provided her with a model to avoid. But it may have been her mother, Elizabeth, whom she most disliked. Not only did Elizabeth submit to her husband’s rages, but she idolized her eldest son, Edward (‘Ned’), and thought her daughter ill-fitted for a woman’s life. “What was called spirit and wit in [Ned],” Mary later wrote, “was cruelly repressed as forwardness in me.” It was not a time for feminism or liberation; even the French Revolution—for which she had great hopes—was a disappointment to Mary. But it was a time in which middle- and upper-class women were finding their voices, or more accurately their pens, and Mary Wollstonecraft wielded hers like a sword. And she found a publisher, the radical Joseph Johnson, who was not only willing to put her writings forward but also offered her the support and counsel she might have had from her parents. Mary did write fictions, but hers was not the literature of sentiment chosen by most (not all) of her sister writers, and her most lasting works were her critical essays on the state of the world and the status of women. Among these latter the most notable were Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and, of course, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Although Wollstonecraft was not a “modern” feminist (how could she be?), I can testify that the Vindication is a book that still influences student readers, and not just women, either, for its power lies partly in Wollstonecraft’s insistence that the oppression of women is a mark of a society that will perpetuate, and profit from, other oppressions, too. It also helps that she was, and remains, a writer of passion and power. ©

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"An error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat." Hertha Ayrton.

On American ranches, the “wrangler” saddled and settled the horses for the day’s work. Today it’s more commonly a line of blue jeans. It’s an older word, though, first applied to those who would rather argue than agree, and then (from 1748!!) at Cambridge University to those who graduate in honours mathematics. There “wranglers” are ranked by degree class and the topmost is “Senior Wrangler.” Cambridge’s first Jewish senior wrangler was Numa Edward Hartog (1869), and when (as a non-Anglican) he was denied a college fellowship, outrage and embarrassment led to the passage of the Universities Test Act (1871). But this is not about Hartog, rather about his pupil Sarah Marks, born to Jewish immigrant parents on April 28, 1854. Possibly because of her family’s poverty, she was sent to her Hartog aunts’ pioneering school in north London, where her cousin Numa taught her mathematics. There Sarah, a star pupil, gained the attention and affection of the novelist George Eliot, and is said to have been the model for Mirah Lapidoth, the Jewish heroine of Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. While at school Sarah also came to the notice of Barbara Bodichon, the cofounder of Girton College, and it was there Sarah went to study math. She did very well, though women were not recognized in wrangler ranks (her friend Charlotte Scott came first in the exams but as a woman could not be “Senior Wrangler”), and after graduation Sarah became the second wife of the noted electrical engineer William Edward Ayrton. Ayrton died in 1908, by which time Hertha Ayrton (as Sarah Marks became known) was the better engineer, famed to this day for her practical and theoretical work with electric arcs and wave theory. Hertha [Sarah Marks] Ayrton became also a leading suffragist, friend and colleague of an arc of accomplished women, including Marie Curie and the Pankhursts, and thus (in two contexts) a “wrangler” in fact if not in name. ©

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"Perhaps I do not speak King's English but it's Kisch English anyhow." Egon Kisch, speaking to a crowd of 18,000 in Sydney, Australia, 1934.

‘Reportage’ is a fancy word for journalism, but its better meaning refers to reporting in literary style and with literary imagination. It also describes fiction that uses the news story as a vehicle, as in the ‘newsreel’ episodes of John Dos Passos’ masterful USA trilogy. As journalism, another practitioner was Norman Mailer (see his prescient treatment of the 1968 presidential campaign, Miami and the Siege of Chicago). Both Dos Passos and Mailer might have learned their art from Egon Erwin Kisch, born in Prague on April 29, 1885. Kisch wrote first in German, but some of his works were translated into English (and several other languages), and he took his persona, Mailer-like, from the title of his first major piece, Der Rasende Reporter (“The Raging Reporter”), 1924. He’d taken his politics from his (bad) WWI experience in the Austrian imperial army, and was a participant in the 1918 revolution in Vienna. He then hurried to Moscow to participate in the latter stages of that revolution, then based himself (or immersed himself) in Weimar Berlin. His stay there was punctuated by long trips that produced more reportage, including books on the Soviet Union (1926), the USA (1929) and China (1933) but was ended in the Nazi sweep of socialists and communists occasioned by the Reichstag fire. There followed a dramatic visit to Australia where the authorities tried, ham-fistedly, to keep him out with a literacy test in Gaelic (which, of course, he failed). This produced a curious decision, by an Australian judge, that Gaelic was not a European language. So Kisch stayed for a bit, and what might have been a failed tour turned into a tour de force as this “vivacious little man” charmed thousands of Aussies, even leading a torchlight procession in Melbourne to commemorate the Reichstag blaze. And he wrote a book about it. After spending WWII in a Mexican exile, Egon Erwin Kisch returned to Prague where he died in 1948. ©

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“After debauches and orgies there always follows the moral hangover.” Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Schweik.

At Penn, in my second year, a student political party promised (if elected) to resign en masse to demonstrate that student government was a sham. It won, resigned, and provoked a reconstruction of Penn’s student government. The party’s name was “the United Christian Front-Student Anarchist League,” which I still think brilliant. Its name and promise echo those of a party founded, in Hapsburg Czechoslovakia, by Jaroslav Hašek: “The Party of Slight Progress.” A serious drunk and perhaps playful anarchist, Hašek had threatened suicide but instead announced a political crusade and began collecting money for his Slight Progress Party. He collected enough to go back into the bar and drink some more, and thus was saved for our future enjoyment Hašek’s great satire, The Good Soldier Schweik (3 vols., 1921-1922). Hašek himself was a good model for the bumbling, awkward, insolent, and often drunk Schweik except for one thing. Schweik was stupid. Jaroslav Hašek was not. Born in Prague on April 30, 1883, the son of a high school teacher who drank himself to death in 1896. Young Jaroslav bummed around, drank a lot, fell in with the Czech literati (including Franz Kafka), and wrote furiously and speedily for a succession of short-lived radical, anarchist publications, including Svet zvírat (“The World of Animals”) . Unlike Kafka, who wrote in German, Hašek wrote in the vernacular Czech and developed quite a following, in print and (when sober enough and not in mental hospitals) in cabaret performances. It was not a great background for a military career, but Hašek was drafted into the imperial army, rose to the exalted rank of corporal, and spent World War I on the brutal eastern front, distilling out of it the immortal Schweik. Spared by the war (unlike 150,000 of his fellow Czechs), Jaroslav Hašek died of his vices in 1923, leaving unfinished a fourth volume of the Schweik saga. ©

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"May be you find out I could be useful in getting people out of prisons and camps in Germany. I should love to do it." Krystyna Skarbek-Granville, ca. 1940.

The first of my few encounters with a Free Pole was with Wacek Koc, an ebullient, impish man whose pleasure it was to irritate conservative academics at Lancaster University. Wacek called his friends ‘darlings;’ he and his English wife lived in a mansion up Cannon Hill with their 11 (or so) kids. Wacek got there by fleeing Poland and trekking across Nazi-occupied Europe to freedom. Had Countess Krystyna Skarbek been in Poland she might have done the same, but she was in Ethiopia where her husband-at-the-time, Jerzy Gisycka, was Polish consul. Krystyna, born of a Polish count and a Jewish mother on May 1, 1915, had no obvious reason to return to Poland, and so they went to London where Krystyna was taken on as a British agent and assumed the identity of Christine Granville. And then she did go back home where she failed to talk her mother into escaping (the elderly Countess Skarbek was later murdered by the Nazis) but did recruit several Polish soldiers for service with the Free Poles (was one of them Wacek??) and brought them out. She herself lingered in Budapest where she took up with another Free Pole, Andrzeij Kowerski, recruited him as a British agent (aka Andrew Kennedy), married him, and escaped via Istanbul and Cairo. After D-Day she served, with spectacular courage and hair-raising bravado, as a behind-the-lines agent in southern France, where among other things she talked a Polish unit into deserting the Wehrmacht and rescued three other agents from a Gestapo jail in Digne In peacetime, “Countess” Christine Granville served as stewardess on Union Castle ships, and was brutally murdered by a sailor whose advances she dared to resist. He was hanged. She’s buried in consecrated ground at St. Mary’s, Kensal Green, London. Her headstone calls her Krystyna Skarbek-Granville and notes only that she held the George Medal and the Croix de Guerre. Perhaps that is ‘enough said.’ “Andrew Kennedy” lies beside her. ©

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"The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number." D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 1917.

The eminent Scots scientist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson had a name to conjure with, but his fame owes to his book On Growth and Form (1917), where he mixed biology with mathematics and philosophy to argue the seeming tautology that “everything is the way it is because it got that way.” Thompson was born in Edinburgh on May 2, 1860. His mother died shortly thereafter, and the infant was transferred to the care of her father, Joseph Gamgee, veterinary surgeon and patriarch of a talented family. One of the Gamgees, D’Arcy Thompson’s uncle Sampson, an eminent human surgeon, was immortalized by J. R. R. Tolkien in Frodo’s sidekick Samwise Gamgee, but that’s an entirely coincidental story. D’Arcy Thompson was educated in ancient and modern languages (his biological father’s trades), but at university (Edinburgh and then Cambridge) studied medicine and zoology, which owed more to the Gamgee connection. At Cambridge he became known to Charles Darwin, with whose theories he would have a lover’s quarrel, but for whom he translated (in 1863) a German work on the fertilization of flowers. But it was as Professor of Natural History at Dundee and then St. Andrews that Thompson developed the ideas that would blossom forth in On Growth and Form. This heavy book (its weightiness owes more to its complicated, interdisciplinary arguments than to its great length) expressed Thompson’s dissatisfaction (not his disagreement) with Darwin’s theories, but it’s more positively devoted to his own view that by close study of an organism’s physical shape and structure one can better explain its origins. Its form is determined by its function, and it’s that connection which explains its survival (“evolution”) in natural history. Thompson’s ideas have influenced a wide variety of pioneers in his field (e.g. the biology Nobelist Peter Medawar) and in others (e.g. the ‘form and function’ architects le Corbusier and van der Rohe). ©.

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"In Singin' in the Rain, there isn't a wasted second. The important points are made in every scene and then it moves right along to the next scene." Betty Comden, 2002, in conversation with Adolph Green.

It’s not widely known that “Singin’ in the Rain” began its life as a single song routine written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Brown for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Freed kept the song in the back of his mind, and after he became director of a (hugely successful) production unit at MGM, he gave the song to a couple of his writers and told them, “kids, your next movie is going to be called Singin’ in the Rain, and it’s going to have all my songs in it.” Since the songs were pretty much unrelated, the ‘kids’ had an “almost impossible” problem, but they were a talented pair and (with a little help from Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds) their success became legendary. The writers were Betty Comden (born in New York as Basya Cohen on May 3, 1917) and Adolph Green. In 1938, just out of college, Basya met up with a fairly disreputable group that included Green, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, and Judy Holliday. Later they would all profit greatly from that brief encounter, but in 1938, to keep bodies and souls together, they formed a (very) modestly successful cabaret group, “The Revuers.” Comden and Green really hit it off an formed a musical and writing partnership that lasted for nearly six decades and chalked up many immortals, starting with On the Town (1944, with Bernstein and Jerome Robbins) and including The Barkleys of Broadway (1949, an Astaire-Rogers vehicle), Singin’ in the Rain (1952, with Kelly) Wonderful Town (1953, Bernstein again), Bells Are Ringing (1956, with Holliday), and Do Re Mi (1960). Along the way they wrote some of the music for Mary Martin’s Peter Pan and translated and edited (!!!) Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera. Betty Comden married just once, to Siegfried Schutzman, in 1942, and after he died in 1979 she never remarried. Showered throughout her working life with just about every writer’s reward in the gift of Hollywood and Broadway, Betty Comden died of heart failure in 2006. ©.

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“I HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF” Sergeant Croft, in The Naked and the Dead, published on May 4, 1948.

In Fall semester 1966 I took a graduate seminar on modern US social history, in which one of the main required texts was The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s first novel. It was an exciting semester, for I got married at the beginning of it and it was also my first as David Lovejoy’s research assistant, but I can still remember the novel as a high point. It was not that it was a literary masterpiece (although at the time I thought it was); rather I was impressed—and still am—by its prescient forecast of the American political and social climate. That was the reason it was a required text in a social history seminar. Published on May 4, 1948, The Naked and the Dead was a fiction about the immediate past that foretold the future. This was not because of its use of interjected, authorial obiter dicta like the ‘time machine’ episodes (as Gore Vidal later wrote, those made the novel look like “smudged carbons” of Dos Passos’s USA trilogy). Instead, Mailer’s own experience, first of Harvard and then (in training and in battle) of the WWII army gave him a biographical survey of a USA he hardly knew, for he was just a brash Jewish kid from Brooklyn. So his characters, in The Naked and the Dead, were social types, representative Americans from different regions, races, religions, and classes, and all of them thrown into modernity by the war, rather like a cruel behaviorist might throw rats into a huge water tank with slippery sides and just a few safe islands. Which rats would drown? Which would survive? And how? Among those, who would be King Rat? And why? You’ll have to read the novel to find out, but I have to tell you that the deaths of some (notably Lt. Robert Hearn and Private Woodrow Wilson) and the survival of others (notably General Edward Cummings and Sergeant Sam Croft) presaged grim times ahead for the land of the free and the home of the brave and make a war novel into a masterpiece of social commentary. ©

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"Warmth, charm, and wry humor." From an appreciation of Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod at the dedication of the Garrod Building at Newnham College, Cambridge, 2018.

One’s understanding of the devastation wrought in Britain by ‘The Great War’ is deepened by seeing the quite long lists of names on quite small villages’ war memorials. Or one could consider families, for instance that of Archibald and Laura Garrod, who lost all three of their sons (the youngest, still on active service, in the 1919 flu pandemic). Their remaining child, Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod (whose fiancé was killed in the war) pledged herself to fill the vacuum left by those deaths. She did so by becoming the leading prehistorian and archaeologist of her era. Born on May 5, 1892, Dorothy read history at Newnham College, Cambridge. After war service as a nurse, she moved to Oxford (where her father had been named to the Regius chair in medicine) where in 1921 she took an Anthropology diploma “with distinction.” Her first book (in 1926, The Upper Paleolithic in Britain) won her an Oxford BSc by publication and an appointment as research fellow at Newnham. After making discoveries (both homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens) in Gibraltar, Garrod moved to the Middle East where (1928-37) she directed excavations at Mount Carmel and elsewhere. In her first (of six!) seasons at Carmel, her team of five archaeologists was all female, and in all her work she involved women, both western and locals, in scientific excavation and classification. Garrod’s final report on Carmel (1937), pioneering in its discoveries and in its methodologies, won her an Oxford doctorate (D.Sc.). At Cambridge, women could still not take degrees, but Dorothy Garrod’s appointment as Cambridge’s Disney Professor of Archaeology (1939) highlighted the absurdities of that situation, and from 1948 women became full members at Cambridge. In retirement (from 1952), Garrod continued her digs, her discoveries, and her publications. A stroke felled her in 1968. Her ashes were deposited in her parents’ graves, a final filling of the great gap left by World War I. ©

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"I must admit, that I have not hopes in this country—no confidence in the American people—with a few excellent exceptions." Martin Delany, 1852.

Martin Robison Delany was born in Charles Town, now West Virginia, on May 6, 1812. He was probably of African royal blood on both sides of his family (Mandika and Gola), and as the offspring of a free black woman he was born free in a slave state. That his mother, Pati, had one day to travel to the county courthouse to prove her little boy was free presaged a life that made Martin Delany one of the more unusual characters of our history. Pati taught her children to read, and when warned that that was illegal took them all to Pittsburgh, where Martin was apprenticed to a doctor who taught him medicine; at nearby Jefferson College he learned Latin and Greek into the bargain. During the savage cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1833, Martin was among the few medical men who stayed in town to treat the sick and the dying. Later, he became part of a cause célèbre at Harvard, where his enrollment with another black man caused a student uprising. Harvard backed down, which played a role in Martin’s move towards black nationalism. Already an abolitionist (and a colleague of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison), Delany bravely toured the slave south to see for himself, and concluded that Africans could find no home in the USA. His new militancy showed forth in his actions and in his writings, notably in an 1852 political manifesto and an 1859 novel. But Delany stayed on and in the Civil War became Major Delany, the first black field officer in our army, and symbolically recruited Denmark Vesey’s grandson to begin what would have been—but for the peace—the first all-black (men and officers) regiment. His post-war career was just as unusual, in politics, medicine, and business. In 1885 he died in Wilberforce, Ohio, where two of his children were students. His grave now supports a large memorial. Quarried in Africa, it is a granite stone as black as coal, and on it is carved Martin Delany’s likeness, in his major’s uniform. ©.

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"Truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest." Rabindranath Tagore.

Once the main seat of the East India Company, Calcutta (now Kolkata) first lost its political primacy to New Delhi, then its lead economic role to Mumbai, but has never surrendered its claim to be India’s cultural capital. Rabindranath Tagore, one of the architects of that cultural reputation, was born in Calcutta on May 7, 1861. His large birth family (he was the 14th child) was but an element in the great Tagore clan, the most powerful in Bengal. The Tagores were also “not quite” Brahmins, members of the Pirali subcaste, which contributed to Rabindranath’s hostility to the caste system. In his youth, he (like his siblings) profited from the family’s connections with the Raj, and his first visit to Britain (1878) was undertaken to celebrate his brother Satyendranath’s success in being the first Indian to qualify for the Indian Civil Service. But from a very early age—an ‘awakening, he called it—he took as his mission to write about, to imagine, and to further the idea an independent India, ‘modern’ (or modernizing) and yet a distinctive place that treasured its heritage. As a pioneer nationalist he was most influential in India as a writer and an educationalist. This vision and his brilliance as a writer and poet made him one of the best-known Indians in the West, a guru of sorts and a personage that one must see should one travel to Calcutta. By the time of his third visit to Britain (1912-1913) Tagore was famous, famous enough that when he lost his literary notebook, it was quickly found and returned by the Underground’s Lost Property Office. Translations of his poems were read—in public and in private meetings—by none other than W. B. Yeats, and it was no great surprise that in 1913 Tagore was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature. Back in India he generally supported Gandhian nationalism, but did not live to see independence. Rabindranath Tagore remained to the end of his days (1941) the Indian best known to western readers, a reputation he cultivated assiduously, and several of his works are still in print in the USA. ©.

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"The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!” Jimmy Porter, in Look Back in Anger, 1956.

In Penn’s freshman English (a year-long course I belatedly recognize as a fine one) we read some new works, and the newest was John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, paired contrastingly with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. We were I think given the impression that Osborne’s play was written in answer to prime minister Harold Macmillan’s famous slogan, “our people have never had it so good,” and I’ve repeated that misinformation frequently over the course of an academic life, but in fact Look Back in Anger opened on May 8, 1956, well before Macmillan first used the phrase in 1957. So, better to see the play as a response to the time’s temper, something in the air that Macmillan would catch, articulate, and then win with in 1959. It was in any case a marvelous play for college freshmen to read in 1961. Its anti-hero is Jimmy Porter, a working class university graduate married to Alison, a colonel’s daughter. Alison is (secretly) pregnant, which becomes a precipitating factor in the drama, but what’s wrong with the marriage is that they run a sweet shop in a market stall, and it’s not enough for either of them. But what’s really wrong is outside of their scruffy flat and its domestic unhappinesses. It’s a sickness diagnosed by Jimmy in sarcastic, angry shouts against (for instance) Alison’s brother Nigel, an aspiring Macmillan-ite: “The Platitude from Outer Space.” “You’ve never heard so many well-bred commonplaces come from beneath the same bowler hat.” After much agony, verbal and otherwise (Alison has a miscarriage, off-stage), the audience realizes something hinted at, that this ill-matched couple may be well met; there is injury, and yet with it there is love. As Alison tells her father (and maybe herself), “you’re hurt because everything’s changed,” but “Jimmy’s hurt because everything’s stayed the same.” On that paradox, John Osborne made himself the first of his generation’s angry young men. ©

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''. . .Dost know this water-fly?'' Hamlet to Horatio, asking about Osric, a courtier.

For a few years, recently, quite a few honors college students were enthusiasts at fantasy gaming in the Dungeons and Dragons line. I never understood it, nor their enthusiasm for it, but they must have been familiar with OSRIC, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation, a computer tool created in 2006 and used to create D&D ‘clones.’ “Osric” is also a character, minor but memorably unpleasant, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (circa 1600). Osric a rich man but a servile courtier, apish in his imitations of his betters, who plays a role in bringing about and then refereeing the final, fatal duel between Hamlet and Laertes, both of them men whose tragic flaws do not hide their superiority to Osric. Shakespeare often drew his characters from historical sources, and Osric may have been one of them. He was not a courtier but an early 8th-century Northumbrian king of suitably small or poor reputation. He’s mentioned by the Venerable Bede and other medieval chroniclers who could not agree on whether or not Osric was of a legitimate line. Bede and others implied that Osric may have killed his brother to gain his throne, an unpleasant thought which gives some credence to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica as a Shakespearian source. But the mentions are fleeting, and the only certain information seems to be that Osric reigned in Northumbria for about eleven years and died, having named his successor, on May 9, 729. On the other hand, he may have been murdered, a fate which would certainly seem justified for William Shakespeare’s miserable Osric, and Osric’s death (by stabbing) has in fact been written in to some modern renditions of the play, virtue (as they say) being its own reward, and Osric having none of that. ©

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"With the Roman Catholics on one side and the Nonconformist Conscience on the other I just could not do it." Joyce Daniel, explaining her refusal to remove "married women only" from her birth control clinic's masthead.

Barbara Pierce Bush’s recent (2017) announcement that she was “proud to stand with Planned Parenthood” reminds us that once the Republican Party was shot through with advocates for free access to all forms of birth control, and that would include Barbara’s grandmother, also Barbara, the wife of the first president Bush. In its origins the birth control movement was a coalition of radicals and conservatives, snobs and democrats, and it included the religious and the secular. Such alliances were made natural by several factors, especially that ‘birth control’ was a woman’s movement. As in the USA, so in Britain: as the career of Joyce Daniel, born Joyce Mary Lee on May 10, 1890, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. She married a widower whose first wife died in childbirth, and joined him in Pontypridd, South Wales, where he had his law office. They rented a pew in the local United Church of Christ, and Joyce volunteered to deliver “maternity packages” to new mothers whose poverty called for material help and moral support. Very soon she decided that this situation called for women to take control of their own reproductive lives. Facing opposition from local (male) leaders, Joyce did the right thing, which was to call a meeting of their wives in her own living room, a meeting from which emerged local ‘chapters’ of women’s meetings and then an epidemic of local birth control offices, not only in Pontypridd but in a poetry of other mining towns: Caerphilly, Llanelli, Merthyr, Pontardawe, Rhondda and (by 1939) eight others. In this Joyce and her sisters found crucial support from national leaders, including Janet Chance of the Abortion Law Reform Association. But theirs remained a true coalition. Joyce never countenanced birth control help for unmarried women, remained opposed to abortion, and was a bit of a snob. But it was a women’s coalition, and it worked, and Joyce Daniel never jumped ship. ©

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"If a woman wants to fly, first of all, of course, she must abandon skirts." Harriet Quimby, 1912, in Good Housekeeping.

Although in 1952 Walt Kelly had yet to create the bobcat Simple J. Malarkey (his devastating Joe McCarthy caricature), his new daily strip, “Pogo,” captured the imagination of college students, and Life magazine decided to do a cover on him. This was a big deal for a cartoonist, and Kelly and his wife met with the Life editor on February 6 for a final interview. Kelly expressed concern that the story might not run, and was assured that it would, “barring the flood.” On the train home, Kelly espied a newspaper headline, “George VI Is Dead,” leaped up, grabbed the paper, and shouted “The Flood!!” Harriet Quimby had experienced like disappointment in April 1912, when her death-defying feat (she was the first woman to fly a plane across the English Channel) was pushed off page 1 by the HMS Titanic. Given the scale of the disaster, her reaction (if uttered) was not recorded, but she didn’t have to live with disappointment for very long. On July 1, 1912, at an air show near Boston, Quimby and her passenger were pitched out of her biplane to their deaths. The plane (the same model she’d piloted across the Channel) landed by itself. This bizarre accident did make headlines, for Ms. Quimby was the first (and only) American woman to qualify for a pilot’s license. And she was much else. Born in Michigan on May 11, 1875, Harriet Quimby moved to San Francisco with her wealthy parents and soon made a name for herself as a ‘new woman,’ not only as an accomplished journalist (in San Francisco and New York) but as scriptwriter for “silents” and thus a female pioneer in the nascent film industry. Quimby saw flying as a promising career and earned her license (license #37!!!) just a year before her death. Her last article, published posthumously (September 1912) in Good Housekeeping, praised flying not so much as a sport as it was a promising career for new women in a new age. Sadly, that would take longer than she envisaged, but her exploits did earn her a place in aviation history. ©

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"We changed some attitudes." Maida Springer Kemp, in interview, circa 2004.

Maida Springer Kemp was born Maida Stewart, in Panama, on May 12, 1910. Her father was a Barbadian worker on the canal project, her mother a Spanish-speaking Panamanian. The family moved to Harlem in 1917, divorced, and Maida would take after her mother, a local leader in Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. In accord with the self-improvement mantras of the UNIA, Maida was well-schooled, first in Harlem and later when she got the chance, e.g. in the 1930s in Wellesley College’s Institute for Social Progress, then in the early 1950s at Ruskin College, Oxford. But before then Maida worked in the garment industry, where she became an activist in the ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union). She was a leader in a successful 1933 strike, and in 1938 was elected to the ILGWU’s board. In 1940, chair of ILGWU’s education committee, she worked with A. Philip Randolph on the first of several projects, but mostly her life was tied up with international activities of the AFL-CIO, including as its wartime delegate to Britain (partly financed by the USIA). From 1955, Maida took a lead role in organizing labor unions in emerging African nations, first in Accra, Ghana, as the only woman (of any nationality) at the initial meeting of the International Federation of Free Trade Unions, and then, known as “Mwalimu” (Swahili for “teacher”), helping to organize workers in East Africa. She also set up educational exchanges for African union activists, for instance with Harvard and CUNY. In retirement, Maida Springer Kemp was showered with many honors, perhaps most fittingly an honorary doctorate (Humane Letters) from Brooklyn College, CUNY. In 2010, she willed her papers to the Amistad Center and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. An engaging, humorous, wide-ranging interview with her was published in book form by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2004, but as yet there is no biography. ©

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“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character." Ben Franklin to Sarah Bache, 1784.

Legend has it that for our national bird Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, and the legend has often been improved upon, for instance in the musical 1776, wherein Franklin, Adams (eagle), and Jefferson (dove) contend the issue. Like many legends it has some warrant, a musing and amusing letter from Franklin to his daughter Sarah, wherein he considers the eagle and the turkey—and endorses the latter’s better qualities. But there may be more to it. Why else would the wealthy merchant (and Franklin’s friend) Samuel Vaughan commission a large oil painting of not one, but two wild turkeys? And the painter is not without interest, John Hazlitt, born in Gloucestershire on May 13, 1767, and when he executed his turkeys very young and establishing himself in Boston as a painter. Hazlitt’s reverend father was a leader of the Unitarian movement and a British sympathizer with the American cause, and when things got too hot in Britain he took his family to America at the new nation’s birth, the Spring of 1783. They settled near Boston (then birthing American Unitarianism), where young John continued to teach himself how to paint and his even younger brother William Hazlitt began his career as a scribbler. While in America John did portraits (generally not of turkeys but of leading Bostonians), landscapes, and some interior design. But his father failed to find an American pulpit and the family returned to England where (in London) John Hazlitt became a leading miniaturist of his era and, true to his father’s political sympathies, a member in good standing of London’s radical circles. The 1790s were not the best years to be a radical in London, but he established a studio, continued to win commissions, was offered a court position (as a miniaturist) by the Russian Tsar, and exhibited yearly at the Royal Academy until liquor got the better of him and he moved north, to Manchester, a quieter market, where he continued to paint until his death in 1837. ©.