BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

‘I still do not feel a day over fifty’. Sir Henry Wood, interviewed on his 69th birthday.
Sir Henry Wood, 1869-1944
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A happy disposition is largely a disposition to make others happy. Sir Henry Wood, 1938.

Every summer, at the Royal Albert Hall, London, the bronze bust of Sir Henry Wood presides over a late summer season of promenade concerts. They are called ‘The Proms’ for short, but formally copyrighted as the ‘Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Presented by the BBC.’ It’s a fitting tribute, for although Wood did not invent promenade concerts, he gave these Proms their particular, even peculiar air. The Proms began in August 1895, Wood at the podium where he presided most years until his death in 1944 (a couple of years had been suspended ‘in honor’ of the Blitz). The Proms’ first financial backer was Robert Newman, who hired Wood to “train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.” Henry Wood, born in London on March 3, 1869,proved perfect for that task. Though only 25, he’d established a reputation as the first British-born professional conductor, and he made a great asset out of his popularity—and his rapport—with audiences and players. Wood continued to schedule ‘pops’ music, especially after the interval (including his own ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs,’ now a traditional ‘last night’ piece) but ‘serious’ stuff as well beginning with Beethoven and Wagner nights (Mondays and Fridays, respectively), the former being ‘classical’ and the latter still ‘modern.’ Wood made the Proms into a venue for new music. They remain so today, but during his time Wood premiered (British and/or world premieres) over 700 works by over 350 composers, mostly at the Proms. Wood’s new composers included Hindemith, Mahler, and Bartok, and he also introduced to London audiences guest conductors like Walter and Toscanini. Other notable features of his career included his insistence on continuing to present German music during both world wars (his very last concert, in 1944, highlighted Beethoven’s 7th), his decision—early on—to open all sections of his orchestra to female players, and retaining the tradition of cheap tickets for the musical mobocracy, the standing-room crowd that still sings and sways, banners absurdly afloat, during ‘last-night’ festivities. Henry Wood won many garlands, honorary doctorates and visiting appointments on the continent and in the USA, and of course he acquired a knighthood. Many thought he should have had a peerage, but in the end Wood rested satisfied with having his ashes interred at St. Sepulchre’s, Holborn, where he had first learned to play the organ. ©

[Stanley]

Curry and chips in the British imperium
Toru Dutt of Calcutta and Cambridge.
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We have taught Isabella to cook some Indian dishes, and on our table with mutton cutlets and roly-poly comes up hot Kucharee or cabbage Churchuree . . . Isn’t this nice? Toru Dutt to her cousin in Calcutta, from Cambridge, England, November 1870.

Debate rages on about the historical effects of European imperialisms, often focusing on the most ‘successful’ of them, the British empire (you know, the one on which the sun never set). I put ‘successful’ in quotes because it needs to be there; for if empires teach us anything it is that one culture’s success can be another’s Armageddon (or Gomorrah), so the debate becomes one that’s more about ‘values’ than about ‘facts.’ Even quantifiable problems, for instance about profit and loss, have proven resistant to solutions—at least agreed ones. That may be one reason that the most influential works have been biographical (or autobiographical) in nature, like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in the year of his death (1961) or literary, like V. S. Naipaul’s tragicomic A House for Mr. Biswas (also 1961). One real life that is worth a look is the short and extraordinary one of Toru Dutt, born in Calcutta, British India, on March 4, 1856. Her family’s wealth and status (on both her father’s and mother’s side) came from its service to the conquering power. As if in recognition of this, her father converted to Christianity when Toru was six. At first Toru’s mother resisted, making sure the children (Toru and her two siblings) heard the classical stories of Hindu and Moghul India. So Toru Dutt was brought up bilingual in several senses, learning French, English, even the ancient Sanskrit, and conversant with both Paradise Lost and the Bhagavad Gita. If hers was a cultural personality ‘divided’ by imperialism, the split deepened during the family’s four-year residence in Europe, in France and then Cambridge in England, where Toru continued to exhibit her precocity (in language and literature) and develop a personal style at odds with both her Indian background and her new European experience. This was eloquently visible in her hairstyle (long, flowing, curly locks cascading down to her elbows) and evident also in her writing (letters, fiction, poetry, much of it published after her death). Tragedy struck in Europe in the deaths (from consumption) of both her siblings, and she and her parents returned to Calcutta in 1874. There she wrote like a madwoman, four books published during her lifetime, others discovered later, novels with western settings, glosses on Indian myths and traditions, poetry. It is reasonable to suggest that this bright young woman tried to mesh and merge her colonial and imperial selfs. Sadly these efforts ended in her own death, from consumption, in 1877. Hers is a poignant tale of profit and loss, but a short one without any clear conclusion. ©

[Stanley]

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Lord Kelvin 1883
John Collins FRS, 1626-1683
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A man of good arts, and yet great simplicity; able, but no ways forward. From a contemporary comment on John Collins, FRS.

One of the first ‘real’ documents (an actual manuscript) I encountered when I began my PhD research was a 1660 petition from one John Collins to King Charles II. Even then I could see it was unusual, written in a fine, clear hand, and rather in the style of friendly advice than in supplication, an unusual tone to adopt for one who was then (as I quickly found) a mere clerk in the Excise Office. But what struck me was its modernity, for in it Collins urged the king to take over the whole administration of trade and taxation by using the simplest of tools, the ability to count. Trade, Collins wrote, was no longer a mystery open only to merchants and their chartered companies. Just go down to the docks and count: count up the barrels (‘hogsheads’) and ships’ masts and use your numbers to formulate and impose a policy designed to serve the state. “Policy” was not a word Collins used (it then had other senses) but his basic proposal would later bear much fruit. John Collins was born in rural Oxfordshire on March 5, 1626. He was of dissenting, non-conformist stock, but the accidents of life had made him into a royal civil servant (a minor officeholder) in Restoration England. Early orphaned, Collins first apprenticed to an Oxford bookseller, then (in London) served briefly in the household—the kitchen—of the Prince of Wales (later, King Charles II), learned to calculate and construct sundials, and served in the Venetian navy and the English merchant marine. Yet he continued to dabble in books and learning, mastered Latin and bookkeeping (and penmanship), and had become a dab hand at mathematics. He was not, perhaps, as good a mathematician as he thought, but good enough to think that math could serve as a way to understand the world. And although his 1660 petition won him no great favors his abilities and his industriousness found him some openings, not least (in 1667) as a Fellow of the Royal Society, wherein he was surely one of the humblest members. But since mathematics was a mystery to many, even to great amateurs of science, Collins soon found himself handling (or editing) much of the Royal Society’s correspondence on mathematical matters, a man known to the likes of Huygens and Oldenburg, Newton and Leibniz. Collins also gained preferment in the crown’s taxation offices and (1672) in its councils of trade and plantations where, in small steps, England was beginning to make itself into a modern state. John Collins, FRS, helped to make it so. Much later, he helped me understand what it was that I was writing about. ©

[Tripps]

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Lord Kelvin 1883

Updated by McKinsey & Co. -"if you can't measure it you can't manage it"

[Stanley]

That occurred to me as well David. God! How I hate that firm and its associates!

[Stanley]

She had a million different ways to do one thing and was never satisfied until she had tried them all. Beverly Sills, commenting on Sarah Caldwell.
Sarah Caldwell, 1928-2006
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If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera. Sarah Caldwell.

Regular attendance at St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) performances leads one to forget that in classical music there has been a revolution, not only in musical style but in personnel. On stage, women abound, and in every section (saving perhaps percussion) as well as, often, at the podium. It has been so for long enough that it looks like business as usual, and it sounds fine. In a year when the SLSO celebrates the long career of Amy Kaiser, its choral director for 27 years, it’s good to remember that it has not always been so. Time was, not so long ago, that musical proficiency was thought a useful attribute of a woman’s domesticity, an earnest of her family’s appreciation of life’s finer things. In itself, that strengthened the traditional barriers that kept women at home. Of course singers were as exception (male sopranos were a rare breed), but female instrumentalists appeared late and, when they did, as second fiddles. Among pioneers who broke through these glass
walls we must count a Missouri native, Sarah Caldwell, born in the small college town of Maryville, MO, on March 6, 1928. Her mother did some of the pioneering, furthering her own musical ambitions through divorce and remarriage, and Sarah picked up the melody by becoming a child prodigy (violin) and then defying her stepfather by majoring in music at college (in Arkansas) and then winning a scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music. There Sarah developed a flair for direction and production wherein she was encouraged by male mentors (like Boris Goldovsky and Serge Koussevitsky) putting on her first production (Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea) in 1948. Since she was only 20, that was at least an eccentricity, and she took it with her into music instruction at Boston University, where Sarah created the Boston Opera Workshop and BU’s Department of Music Theatre. In those arenas she introduced new works and found friends enough to create the Opera Company of Boston and then direct it for three decades, not only its musical productions but also its business side. She was a one-woman whirlwind and probably took on too much, but was always a pioneer, ahead of the curve, out on her own. Some of the company’s problems, indeed, arose from Caldwell’s insistence on doing everything, but she did everything well enough to be called (by a British critic) “the best thing about opera in America,” and (by her New York Times obituarist, in 2006) “indomitable.” By the time Sarah Caldwell died, we knew that the good old days were, indeed, old. ©

[Stanley]

'Idle hands are the devil's playground.' Traditional saying.
Joseph Lee, 1862-1937
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Give the constructive power of your children scope and elbow-room—the temple that it builds is invisible to any eyes but theirs. Joseph Lee.

The notion that ‘play’ is a vital part of a child’s development has now been extended to almost all vertebrate species, not to mention certain mollusks, notably octopi, and even adult humans. Having watched various species at play (cats, racoons, my own children, and college students), I’m not about to challenge the idea, but would point out that it’s relatively new. 17th-century Puritans thought ‘play’ a type of idleness, thus dangerous. When an early Harvard undergrad skated through the ice and drowned in the Charles’s cold, dark waters, one of his tutors thought it served him right. He should have been studying his Bible, reciting his Latin, and working on his sins. There’s evidence that upper-class parents were already, even in New England, more indulgent to their children’s whims, and that attitude became more common in the 19th century, witness Emerson’s eloquence on the genius and honesty of the untutored child. And it would be a Boston Brahmin who made of children’s play an index of their quality of life and a factor in their success as adults. This was Joseph Lee, born to the Puritan Purple on March 7, 1862. Related to the Cabots and Adamses, Lee went to Harvard (and Harvard law) but besides marrying well and becoming a prosperous lawyer, he’s best known today as an advocate of the playground. Lee picked up the impedimenta (jungle gyms, swings, slides, and see-saws) in Germany, but his inspiration came from new cultural norms about the child and its best path to adulthood. He sought to correct the ‘ancient sin’ (as he saw it) of “not letting the child live, as well as learn.” One is reminded of Emerson’s lament on the death of his three-year old son: “he were a better man than I.” But Emerson fried other fish, and Charles Lee had the time, the money, and the ambition to lead the American “Playground Movement” and to create actual playgrounds (in and around Boston) where children could, well, play. But not just play. Lee believed that his philanthropy was “constructive and preventative”, and his playgrounds were structured spaces within which children might play in certain ways towards certain ends. Nothing wrong with this, of course, but it sounds a bit like school, and it’s clear, too, that not all children were welcome in Lee’s structured playspaces. Among Lee’s other philanthropies were his contributions to eugenics and to immigration restriction (to use his own words) “by race.” Not all children were fit to play under Joseph Lee’s gentle supervision. Today we recognize the value of his contributions, but we also see their limitations. At least I hope so. ©

[Stanley]

Typography is the art of endowing human language with physical form.
Frederic Goudy, 1865-1947
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When a type design is good . . . there is a feeling of harmony and unbroken rhythm that runs through the whole design, each letter kin to every other and to all. Frederic W. Goudy.

One of the subtler ironies of the computer age is that it’s made us much more aware of the art and variety of typeface design or, if you prefer, ‘fonts.’ My word processor offers me over 700 of them, and if that’s not enough I can go on line to download more, some free, many cheap. Despite this, font designers still (defiantly?) think of theirs as a fine art, but it’s certainly been a craft since before Gutenberg (as it’s necessary to consider medieval manuscripts and Icelandic runes, too). My impression (pun intended) is that there have been relatively few American typeface designers. If so, one among these stands out as world class, and he was Frederic W. Goudy (pronounced ‘gowdy’ and sometimes spelled that way, too). Our Goudy was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 8, 1865. A few things, but not many, about his early life suggest his future fame in fonts, for he bounced from job to job until he fetched up in Chicago (1890) to be entranced by his future wife and collaborator, Bertha Spinks, and by the craftier side of the industrial revolution, most notably by the printed work of William Morris’ (English) Kelmscott Press. Goudy acquired his first Kelmscott book in 1891, was inspired by printing displays at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, and began himself to design fonts. One of his early designs was pirated by a St. Louis printer and renamed “Hearst.” Goudy called this renaming “adding insult to injury,” hinting at his leftish political sympathies and his devotion to the arts and crafts movement. As a printer-publisher, indeed, Goudy was most famed for special ‘craft’ editions of fine literature, in small format and in limited runs, items which were valued as much for their physical design and feel as for their content. As his fame grew he acquired his own printshops (notably, the Marchbanks Press and the Marlboro Press) but continued to work for other firms, too, in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. His first successful font, “Kennerly Old Style,” was produced for Mitchell Kennerly in 1911 but then came his very own “Goudy Oldstyle.” Some 120 fonts would follow, the most famous (and most often used) probably “Garamond,” now standard (though not ‘default’) with MS Word. Along the way Goudy produced books about typeface design and developed new ways of producing the metal types themselves. These technological miracles have been superseded in our digital age, but the subtle beauties of Goudy’s types remain for us to enjoy. ©.

[Stanley]

"What this country needs is a good 5-watt amplifier." Paul W. Klipsch
Paul W. Klipsch, 1904-2002
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My theories on audio and audio reproduction will be proven wrong only when the laws of physics change. Paul Klipsch.

When he was in his 80s and I just breaking 20. I asked my grandpa to name the biggest changes in his life. I supposed he would name airplanes or motor cars or broadcast media, but his answer was ‘running hot water.’ Since then he had hearing aids which ran on a large battery pack (strapped to his chest) and which didn’t work very well, and since I (now approaching 80) depend on tiny hearing aids, in-ear, rechargeable, and programmable, I might answer ‘sound reproduction.’ Indeed progress in that general area has been remarkable, for instance in speakers. But it’s been uneven, and the marketplace is so charged with jargon and hype (and my ears have grown so dull) that I sympathize with one of our great sound pioneers, who called it “bullshit” and indeed used that word as his company’s unofficial motto. He was Paul Klipsch, born in Elkhart, Indiana, on March 9, 1904. He was a man of many talents and enthusiasms, airplanes and oil prospecting for instance, and did not make his
breakthrough in speaker design until he was working for the US army at the Hope, Arkansas Proving Station during WWII. There he worked in a rackety, temporary shed which is now the core of the Klipsch Museum of Audio History. His designs were new but what was interesting is that his designs included the acoustics of the shed’s walls, specifying that the speaker should best be placed in a right-angled corner. Already leery of BS, he didn’t call it “surround sound” but instead ‘corner speaker,’ because that’s what the Klipschhorn ® was. His company prospered partly because it continued to produce good speakers according to that original design (patented in 1943, 1945, and 1946) for another 60 years at least, under his direction (he died at 98) and then his son’s. First educated in mechanical engineering and then trained on the job in oil prospecting and the routing of train lines, he got to speakers by stages, and his many, diverse patents (before and after 1946) testify to a roving mind willing to try anything once. But when he found that really good design (I don’t fully understand it but, like the later Bose ® speakers, it’s ‘folded in’ on itself) he stuck to it. So in an industry (and a culture) that believes “progress is our most important project” as holy writ, Paul Klipsch began to be viewed as a maverick, oddball, undependable and strange. And he liked the image and played to it as if it were a role. I have a couple of Klipsch speakers, bought when we moved into our apartment in 2012, and they’re still music to my ears. ©.

[Stanley]

An Iroquoian double life.
Pauline Johnson, 1853-1913
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Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men's hands,
By right, by birth we Indians own these lands . . .
>From “A Cry of an Indian Wife,” by Pauline Johnson.

Emily Pauline Johnson was born in what is now rural Ontario on March 10, 1853. She was already a child of a mixed cultural inheritance that would define her future career as Pauline Johnson, the ‘Mohawk Poet’, a public performer, orator, and an author whose works sold reasonably well in Canada, the US, and Britain. Pauline’s Mohawk name, Tekahionwake, may have meant “double life;” if so, it reflected her parents’ past experiences and future fears, for they themselves resided on a shifting cultural boundary, or boundaries. Her father, a Mohawk chief, bore his surname Johnson because his father, born in 1758, had been baptized a Christian and was the godson of the then British governor of colonial New York. Her mother was of English Quaker parentage and had fully embraced her family’s active sympathies for the oppressed of North America whether native-born or imported as slaves. Once the Mohawks had been the “keepers of the eastern gate” for the Iroquois confederation, but by 1853 war and diplomacy had moved them north to an all-Iroquois “reserve” in Upper Canada, where Pauline’s father’s chiefly status (traditionally inherited through the matrilineal line), Anglican faith, and family history made him an important go-between for the peoples of the reserve and British (Canadian) colonial authorities. So Pauline’s childhood was at once precarious and privileged. She was taught by her parents to respect both cultures, and in some sense to embody them, but in both ‘places’ she was always a “half-breed.” Perhaps in defense, Pauline developed an aristocratic persona and bearing. Living in a fine mansion house, she was educated in the finer arts and was particularly drawn to Anglophone poetry (from Shakespeare and Milton to Longfellow and Whittier) but also well versed in Iroquois traditional tales. Intelligent, sensitive, and rather striking in appearance, she drew the attention of a succession of Euro-Canadian suitors, and seems to have enjoyed that, but remained womanly, spinsterish, and Mohawkish. Her literary career began with amateur theatre but blossomed into public readings (of her own works and others’), soon dramatized by ‘second-act’ costumery and stage settings which emphasized her Mohawk heritage. Genuine or not, these fripperies increasingly defined her and undergirded her popularity in an era when educated people were beginning to feel a sympathy for the displaced “Indians” of the Americas. Pauline Johnson died in 1913, in British Columbia, very far away from the Eastern Gate of her Iroquois ancestors. ©.

[Stanley]

Press freedom is a property.
Dorothy Schiff, 1903-1989
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Influence, not power, is what interests me. Dorothy Schiff, in her “Dear Reader” column in the New York Post.

My dad, professor of journalism, believed strongly in the freedom of the press, as successive student editors of his campus’s newspaper will testify. But he was clear-eyed about it. It was a freedom that belonged especially to those who owned the press. For him, that meant newspapers. Dad liked some ‘press barons,’ others not so much, and thought that our freedoms were safer when there were plenty of owners, competing with each other for circulation. One person who purchased a press was Dorothy Schiff who in 1938 bought the New York Post. She made the Post into a liberal newspaper, some would say downright leftist, partly because there was market room for it. It was certainly a marketing decision to make the Post into a tabloid and to encourage its sensationalist tendencies, but as to liberalism Dorothy Schiff was born into it (on March 11, 1903). At least her grandfather, Jacob Schiff, was a supporter of several liberal causes despite the position he won in railroads and Wall Street as one of America’s richest men. Her father also appreciated wherefrom the family’s wealth came, having started his career at the empire’s bottom, as a lineman on the Great Northern. The Schiff family’s anti-establishment bias arose also from its anger at the ways the city’s German-Jewish ‘establishment’ cold-shouldered the post 1880s flood of eastern European Jews with their shtetl cultures and their rude, country ways, an invasion embraced by the Schiffs and embodied in old Jacob’s financial support for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and for welfare agencies on Manhattan’s lower east side. Dorothy’s mother, a Neustadt, felt this especially strongly. But as a young woman Dorothy Schiff reveled in wealth rather than in reform, acting as a Jewish debutante eager for acceptance—and baptism—into the WASP tribe. Most of that frippery faded with her second marriage, to a liberal Polish-Jewish journalist and when Dorothy was swept off her feet (figuratively, certainly) by FDR’s New Deal. So while her Post might feature severed heads on its front page, its opinion sections and some would say its news reporting were solidly in the liberal camp. Dorothy Schiff’s press freedom was usually Democratic, always liberal (even when she backed Dewey in ’48); the Post was one of the first papers to attack Joe McCarthy (and to carry the comic strip Pogo). But in 1976 Dorothy sold her slice of free speech to Rupert Murdoch, and the New York Post became a laboratory demonstration of my dad’s cautions about the ‘freedom’ of the press. ©.

[Stanley]

"There are so many possibilities."
Andrew Carnegie, the DesMarias sisters, and your local public library.
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There are so many possibilities, Robin Westphal, 2013. Ms. Westphal, then director of libraries for Livingston County, MO, commenting on the DesMarias bequest. The library board decided to put the $8+ million in trust and to use the income to explore the possibilities.

The DesMarias sisters (Varina, the younger, was my first doctor and, in 1948, saved my life; Lillian was a career librarian who worked at my dad’s university for several years) had an interesting agreement. Their wills set up a trust, the beneficiaries to be determined by which sister survived the other. It was a sort of ‘reverse’ tontine, and few knew about it other than Lillian, Varina, and their lawyer. Born poor on a rented acreage, both lived frugal lives, and healthy ones too, but Lillian in her 90s grew quite frail, and ill, and everyone thought she would go first. So Varina brought Lillian back home (to Grundy Center, IA) and put her in care. But Varina died first, rather suddenly, in late 2009. Lillian followed in 2012, aged 99. So Lillian won the ‘tontine’, and in 2013 the headline news read, “$8 Million bequest goes to the Chillicothe Public Library.” Actually it was a tidy bit more than $8million, and it all went to the Livingston County (MO) library system. Lillian’s last professional job (1970-1980) had been as that county’s library director. The news came as a pleasant shock to the library’s director and staff, who rushed to remember Lillian fondly and to underline her lifetime devotion to spreading knowledge and literacy. I thought of the DesMarias sisters today because it was on March 12, 1901, that Andrew Carnegie (also born poor and a remarkably thrifty chap) made his biggest single library endowment, $5.2 million to the New York Public Library on condition that it became a library system for the whole city, all five county boroughs, and all its citizens. Of course back then a dollar went a long way (Carnegie’s gift would total over $180 million today), but then being an iron and steel magnate is more profitable than being a country doctor or a county librarian. But the point Andrew and Lillian wanted to make (and probably Varina) was the same. Enabling ordinary citizens to understand and use the tools of literacy is a Good Cause. And March 11 seems like a good day to honor it. So read a book, and let your mind run free. If you don’t have a book to hand, or none that you want to re-read, and you live in the USA or Britain, there’s a reasonable chance that a Carnegie library (or a Carnegie-endowed library) is within driving distance (unless your local taxpayers closed it down). St. Louis has a marvelous Carnegie Library, recently and imaginatively renovated. Even the Grundy Center Library got a Carnegie gift, but for some reason Andrew Carnegie overlooked Chillicothe. In 2012 the DesMarias sisters put that right, so before you open that book, bless their eccentricities. ©

[Stanley]

"The first expression of religion was the dance, and the first motive of the dance was religion." La Mer.
La Meri, 1898-1988

The reason for mastering technique is to make sure the body does not prevent the soul from expressing itself. La Meri (Russell Meriwether Hughes).

Russell Meriwether Hughes was born in Louisville, KY, on March 13. 1898. The family soon moved to San Antonio, where her extraordinary career began in the unlikely setting of a silent movie palace; in intermissions and between reels she would dance. At college (first Texas Women’s College and then Columbia University), she studied English (and indeed would make her mark as a published poet), but dance became her profession, arguably her obsession, with a particular emphasis on the technical details of what she called ‘ethnological’ dance, the folk dances of diverse cultural traditions. New York in the 1920s was a great place and time to find such an interest, and she pursued it as scholar, performer, and teacher. Indeed her performances were also seminars as, while changing costume behind a screen, she would explain to the audience the history and cultural aesthetic of her next dance. Perhaps to lessen confusion about her name and gender (she was named after her father), she adopted the stage and professional name of ‘La Meri,’ and it was under that name that she would tour the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Her husband, impresario Guido Carreras, handled performance bookings, and the performances financed their travels, but her real business was to widen and deepen her knowledge of ethnological dance, not only its histories and cultural functions but also its techniques, right down to the ways in which the dance movements of different body parts could be seen as cultural memes and grammars. La Meri performed and studied almost everywhere, in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and South America. Her performances were, apparently, stunning. A London reviewer gushed that she “was not one woman, but twenty.” World War II sent La Meri back home—to New York City—where with her husband and others, notably Ruth St. Denis, she founded a school of ethnological dance (the “School of Natya”) where, in a more institutional setting, she continued to perform, research, and teach. La Meri retired twice, you might say, first to Hyannis on Cape Cod, where in 1958 she turned to writing (not only dance scholarship but also several volumes of poetry) and then back to San Antonio where she collected various rewards for her extraordinary contributions to the study of the language(s) of dance. That included a 1973 citation for artistic achievement from the Governor of Texas (not, then, Greg Abbott). She continued to write (including a 1975 autobiography), teach, and consult until her death in 1988. Her dust lies in the Hughes family plot in a San Antonio cemetery. ©

[Stanley]

From Horse Thief to Heroine
Margaret Catchpole, down-under founding mother.

I am well beloved by all that know me and that is a Comfort . . . a monkest free peopell whear they mak as much of me as if I was a Laday. Margaret Catchpole, circa 1802, letter home to her maternal uncle.

Every nation, I suppose, must have its founding myths and founding heroes. For Australia, one of the latter is Margaret Catchpole, transported to the island-continent under sentence of death but who became a respected member of her new community, first as cook for an early governor, then in other pursuits. Better yet, she left behind her many letters testifying to her newfound self and self-respect, and then after her death came a fictionalized biography (by Richard Cobbold, 3 vols., 1845). Much like Parson Weems’ fiction on George Washington, it added a shiny gloss to a story that, in retrospect, needed none. Margaret Catchpole’s life began inauspiciously, for she was the illegitimate child of a rural serving-woman, born in Suffolk, England, on March 14, 1762. Her laborer father having absconded, Margaret took her mother’s surname, and grew up a serving-girl in the household of her mother’s master. Margaret may already have been marked out for greatness of heart, for once she saved the lives of her master’s children, but that was not enough, so in 1797 to find something better she stole her master’s fine horse and rode off to London, where, instead of better, she was caught and sentenced to hang. There followed her escape, recapture, resentencing, but again she could earn a reprieve (NOT a pardon) by being transported to the prison colony of Australia. Margaret chose life and made her Australian life into a new one. She arrived on the Nile, doubtless named after the sea battle, in late 1801 and by some chance became the camp commissary’s cook, a good one apparently, and for long enough to become well-known in the colony. There followed a series of similar servitudes, most of them fortunate ones, and at the end of these indentures Margaret was well enough known, and thought well enough of herself (we know this from her letters home) to set up for herself in varied women’s works, shopkeeper, innkeeper, midwife. Semi-literate, she kept a record of her ascending esteem (from herself and others), and this record would turn her into a legend. Her legendary status was helped along by the 1845 biography (written by her English master’s son), and so it’s been a bit of a problem sorting out myths and realities, but the real Margaret Catchpole shines out from her letters, along with her growing awareness that she was—or was becoming—a real person who is worth remembering. And she’s even got an opera, Stephen Dodgson’s Margaret Catchpole: Two World’s Apart (1979). Some of the lyrics are hers. ©

[Stanley]

"I had no idea of what to do."
Doreen Warriner, 1904-1972

I had no idea at all of what to do, only a desperate wish to do something. Doreen Agnes Rosemary Julia Warriner, “Winter in Prague,” published posthumously in 1982.

In case you needed reminding (as I did), today is the 83rd anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s march into Prague, where he finished the easy work the western powers had invited him to begin, the destruction of a sovereign state. March 15, 1939 was also the 35th birthday of Doreen Warriner, by then already there, risking her own life to save others—social democrats, communists, Jews, and children of all stripes—from whatever unpleasant fate the Nazis had in mind for them. Doreen Warriner, born on March 15, 1904, already had a brilliant academic career marked out, but in October 1938, burning with rage at the ‘Munich Agreement,’ she had canceled her flight to New York (where she was to take up a Rockefeller Fellowship) to fly to Prague and to plunge into a sea of troubles. It was an odd thing for a realtor’s daughter to do, but perhaps she’d been trained to it by her maternal grandfather, a Church of England clergyman who’d been asked to leave his Irish parish because of his sympathy with the nationalist cause. In her studies (at St. Hugh’s, Oxford, and then graduate work at the LSE) she’d become expert about the plight of peasant farmers in rural central Europe, which may also have contributed to her feelings of desperation in the face of German aggression. So she flew to Prague on October 13, 1938, where she engineered the escape of “hundreds, possibly thousands” (about 15,000, actually) of those prejudged as dreck (“garbage”) by Hitler and his minions. Doreen learned her business by doing it, securing passports and visas, finding receptive contacts in a ‘west’ that was uneager to welcome such misfits as Jews and leftwingers, bribing border guards, eventually commandeering two whole trains. Warriner’s escapes, by individuals, by 10s and 20s, or en masse, were first from the Sudetenland and then, after March ’39, from Prague itself. Early in April ’39 she surmounted her last challenge, a trainload of 300 women and children who, shepherded by Warriner, left Prague for Poland. Behind them the borders of the 1000-year Reich slammed shut. Back home, Warriner’s war work continued, first for various British ministries and then, appropriately, for UNRRA. She also worked for the International Labor Office in Geneva, then returned to a distinguished academic career on the causes of rural poverty, and the ways in which these problems, endemic in a free market, could be addressed by public action. One wonders whether Warriner taught us anything at all, but today is a good time to celebrate her efforts. ©

[Stanley]

The first book of photographs
Anna Atkins, 1799-1871.

“Ghostly beauty.” From a review of a recent Los Angeles exhibition of the works of Anna Atkins.

‘Photograph’ is a new word, a thrown-together compound of the Greek for “light” and “drawing,” and photography a relatively new art. One of its first practitioners was the physicist Sir John Herschel, whose aunt (the noted astronomer Caroline Herschel) was born on March 16, 1750, but this note is about one of John Herschel’s scientific collaborators (and a co-inventor of photographic processes), Anna Atkins, who was born Anna Children on March 16, 1799. Anna’s mother died of puerperal fever soon after the birth, so Anna was brought up a treasured only child by her father. Thus she was brought up to science, for her father, John Children, was a scientific jack-of-all-trades who worked with the British Museum and the Royal Society. Anna began in graphics rather than photo-graphics, producing line drawings for her father’s translation of a work by Lamarck on shells (clams, oysters, etc.). After her marriage (1825) to John Atkins, a West India merchant of progressive mind, she turned more to botany, both collecting specimens and drawing them. Anna Atkins probably learned of photography, such as it then was, by social acquaintance with her husband’s friend William Henry Fox Talbot. At the time it was literally “light drawing,” or more accurately shadow drawing, placing the subject on light-sensitive glass plates and then preserving (“fixing”) the image, which struck Anna as an almost-perfect way of making accurate botanical images of plants. By 1841 she was already working on that, sometimes in collaboration with John Herschel. She either coinvented with him, or refined, his “cyanotype” process, and she’s thus also to be credited as a pioneer (if not the pioneer) of the blueprint, which was to become the stock in trade of the architectural profession. Anna Atkins’ most famed work was her own, though, privately published, in installments, from 1843, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. It was a labor-intensive process, partly because the 450+ impressions were accompanied by her handwritten scientific notes (all in ‘blueprint’, of course). It took her more than a decade to finish all the installments, but it is the first-ever book of ‘photographs.’ You can see some of the plates on-line, things of ghostly beauty, as are her later plates of British ferns and flowers. Before her death in 1871 she also published five novels, including an early mystery, Murder Will Out: A Story of Real Life. Only a very few copies of her cyanotypes exist today. Those not in museums occasionally change hands at auction. The going price seems to be about $300,000. Anna Atkins gave most of them away, including to the British Museum. ©

[Stanley]

The monumental patience of Sue and Sara
Sir Robin Knox-Johnson, 1939- .

My proudest achievement is producing my daughter. Then sailing round the world. Robin Knox-Johnson, 2011.

Humans have been unique, among all species, for pursuing eccentric adventures. Since many of these are death-defying—or death-inviting—they seem to be inconsistent with Darwinian principles, and indeed they have been minority pursuits. I lived in England for 28 years and formed the impression that the English produced more than their share of eccentric daredevils. This is a misimpression, but the English have made much of their adventurers, witness the ecstatic, mass welcome-home given Francis Chichester when in 1967 he sailed his Gipsy Moth IV into Plymouth harbor after piloting her, single handed, around the globe. The resonance with English national mythology of Francis’s adventure was underlined when Queen Elizabeth II knighted him using the same sword that Elizabeth I had used to knight Francis Drake 4 centuries before, and for much the same accomplishment (although Drake did it with a three-master, the Golden Hind, and a crew (and I think Chichester took no Spanish prizes). Then, two years later, another nutty Englishman, William Robert Patrick Knox-Johnson, aka “Robin,” sailed into Falmouth aboard his 32-foot ketch Suhaili after a non-stop single-handed circumnavigation (Chichester had put up into port once), and again the English went into paroxysms of pride. Robin Knox-Johnson was born on March 17, 1939, in humbler circumstances than Chichester’s, and went to sea as merchant crew at the age of 18. But he had sipped at the cup of eccentricity, for only 8 years later he had acquired the Suhaili and sailed her home from Mumbai. He had left his wife. Sue, and newborn daughter, Sara, in Mumbai (a divorce followed) and so sailed single-handed. Having gone that far in 1967, it was only a smallish step to do the whole shebang two years later, alone and non-stop. Once you’ve done that sort of thing it’s hard to stop, and Knox-Johnson has adventured ever since. Besides several sailing exploits, including a speed-record circumnavigation in 1994—75 days but not solo—at the age of 55, Knox-Johnson has spread himself about a bit, including adventurous reporting in war-torn Afghanistan, with another English eccentric, Ranulph Fiennes. On the quieter side of his life, he remarried Sue in 1972 and is now (thanks to Sara) a grandpapa several times over. He’s acted throughout with generosity, heading up charities and seafaring museums, and so Queen Elizabeth finally got round to knighting him in 1995, but not with that old Francis Drake—Francis Chichester sword. Sir Robin today celebrates his 83rd birthday, one hopes ashore and quietly, and I wish him well. ©

[Stanley]

Coffee Capitalism
Jacob Bunn, 1814-1897

Generations of quality. A contemporary slogan of the Bunn Corporation

The aristocratic principle has a lot to answer for, but in its better moments it produced an ethic we know as noblesse oblige which, in modern capitalism, survives in the form of the charitable foundation. Contemporary examples include Gates and Bezos (and their estranged wives), but the classic type was embodied by the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations, great capital funds whose good works rested originally on the free-market depredations of their founders. Make your money first, by fair means or foul, and then exercise noblesse oblige. But there is another capitalist ideal, in which the growth of the private fortune is tied to the public good: res publica twinned with privatum bonum in mutual interdependency. This was the dream of Abraham Lincoln and his new Republican Party, witness their famous slogan, “free soil, free labor, free men.” And it was shared by one of Lincoln’s Springfield friends, Jacob Bunn. Jacob Bunn was born in New Jersey on March 18, 1814. He and his much younger brother Joseph (born 1831) went west to grow up with the country. Jacob landed first, in Springfield, in 1840, where he set up a retail grocery and soon added to it a wholesale business in foodstuffs. In the 1850s they formed a family partnership which expanded into banking, railroading, real estate, and iron making. Along the way, the Bunns developed the notion that their success depended upon the success(es) of the wider community. This was expressed in the ease with which they formed successful partnerships with other ‘new’ men in other new enterprises, and also on their roles as community entrepreneurs. One brother or the other did not wait to die to endow a foundation, but rather threw their money and energies into the pot while, in their own firms, acting as progressive employers. Inter alia, Jacob and/or John worked to establish pension systems, waterways improvements, and played foundational roles at the University of Illinois, and state and local historical societies—including Springfield’s Lincoln Library, and the charitable mansion, The Springfield Home for the Friendless. They played leading roles, too, in Philadelphia’s famous centennial Exposition, 1876, and then Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. John died childless in 1920, but Jacob’s progeny have gone on in family enterprises. Back to basics, you might call it, for the Bunns own, and run, a successful business in coffee and luxury chocolates and, I imagine, still have their fingers stuck in other pies. Their company’s website today touts this image. I don’t know enough to say whether they deserve it, but the original Bunn brothers made a game attempt. ©.

[Stanley]

Surgery as a science.
Everts Ambrose Graham, 1883-1957.

To do major surgery, to engage in research . . . and to have a clinic of younger men . . . interested in . . . developing ideas. Evarts Ambrose Graham outlining his life ambitions when he was a sophomore at Princeton, circa 1902.

The pioneering St. Louis surgeon Evarts Ambrose Graham was born (in Chicago!!) on March 19, 1883. After a BA (1904) at Princeton Evarts returned to Chicago (Rush Medical College) where he took his MD in 1907. Graham from the first intended a career in surgery (his father, David, was a surgeon), but surgeons had long been regarded as mere mechanics in medicine, and Evarts’ aim to bring science into surgery was furthered by his entry (circa 1912) into the University of Chicago’s PhD program in chemistry. In that program he did find a wife, Helen Tredway, a pioneer female scientist who completed her biochemistry PhD, but his own plans were disrupted by WWI and his service in the US Army’s medical corps. There, because of the great flu epidemic of 1918, Graham made important progress in the surgical treatment of empyema (not ‘emphysema,’ but a similar lung condition caused by infection), and it was that thoracic expertise that brought Dr. Graham to St. Louis’s Washington University and an appointment as the Bixby Professor of Surgery. There he developed new techniques in what was then “radical” surgery, for instance having to do with the gall bladder. Perhaps because he often worked at the boundaries of patients’ safety, he also became a pioneer in medical ethics, always weighing the costs and potential benefits of progress and probing the limitations of the traditional medical warning, to ‘do no harm.’ These problems led to Graham’s active involvement in policy discussions, in the accreditation of hospitals, and the creation of the American Board of Surgery. But timidity was not his style, as witnessed by his most spectacular surgical success, in 1933, the nearly complete removal of a cancerous lung. His patient, perhaps a volunteer, was also a doctor dying of lung cancer, and a heavy smoker. Graham had become interested in the rapid upswing of lung cancer deaths, especially in men, and set about researching the phenomenon. A smoker himself, Graham first doubted any connection between smoking and lung cancer (a correlation is not necessarily a cause), but by the late 1940s surgical experience and statistics had changed his mind. His major paper on the subject (the “Wynder and Graham” study of 1950) coincided with his own decision to quit smoking “cold turkey.” But for Dr. Evarts Graham, it was too late, for he died of lung cancer in 1957. Graham was survived by his biochemist wife and, ironically, by his surgical patient of 1933. He left behind him also a string of honorary doctorates, a clutch of memorial lectures, and a son (Evarts A. Graham) who became the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. ©

[Stanley]

'The second time as farce.' Karl Marx, March 18, 1848.
The Abdication of Ludwig I of Bavaria, March 20, 1848.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce Karl Marx, 1852 (on the revolutions of 1848 in France and the rise of Louis Napoleon).

The ‘romantic revolutions’ of 1848-1850 convulsed much of Europe, notably in the German states and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. March 1848 may qualify as the revolutions’ critical—most hopeful—month, and one of its highlights was the abdication of Bavaria’s king, Ludwig I, on March 20, 1848. Politically, Ludwig was a mixed-up fellow. Born in 1786, he was the godson and namesake of France’s Louis XVI, beheaded (1793) in the French Revolution. Ludwig (German for ‘Louis’) could never forget that tie, but his Bavarian monarchy was itself a creation of the French revolution, and Ludwig’s military reputation owed to his service as a very young general in Napoleon’s army and as Bavaria’s Crown Prince. He succeeded to the kingship in 1826 with a reputation as a romantic-era reformer, something of a liberal, a patron of modern cultural currents in art and even of the Greek revolution against the Ottomans. His son Otto was to become King of the Greeks. He was also informal in his habits, even a little common (his marriage in 1810 occasioned the first Oktoberfest), but his liberal tendencies faded as the Bavarian middle classes and Protestant minorities began to feel their oats, agitate for political reforms, and show a marked lack of gratitude for the reforms Ludwig was prepared to tolerate. From about 1832 Ludwig began to look and act like a true reactionary, and what may have been worse and was certainly irritating to his liberal opponents, began to be rather expensive in his architectural and artistic enthusiasms. His neoclassical palaces and actress-mistresses were particularly galling to an opposition steeped in middle-class morality. So Ludwig became unpopular, a figure of fun and fear, and a likely victim of the revolutionary fervors of 1848. Or, as Karl Marx pointed out in the same year, revolutionary fevers, symptoms of the aches and pains of a bourgeois culture. Ludwig was not to lose his head, only his throne (he refused to accept the status of constitutional monarch), and he would live long enough to witness his grandson (King Ludwig II), develop his more insane enthusiasms for fairy-tale architecture and myth-laden operas. Looking at the two Ludwigs, retrospectively, one might prefer Ludwig I’s classical palaces and the most famous of his mistresses, the Irishwoman Eliza Gilbert, who (thanks to Ludwig I’s infatuation), became Countess of Landsfield in the Bavarian aristocracy. The 1848 revolutions didn’t accomplish much, but in Bavaria they forced Eliza to flee and to revert to her stage role as “Lola Montez.” ©

[Stanley]

A housewifely poet.
Phyllis McGinley, 1905-1978

Housewives more than any other race deserve well-furnished minds. They have to live in them such a lot of the time. Phyllis McGinley, Sixpence in Her Shoe, 1964.

I read poetry fairly often, but never anything by W. D. Snodgrass, who won the poetry Pulitzer in 1960. In 1961 that Pulitzer went to Phyllis McGinley. I don’t know much about her, either, but Snodgrass was offended that ‘his’ prize should have gone to a woman who wrote “silly little verses for The Saturday Evening Post.” Nor was Sylvia Plath favorably impressed. McGinley, Plath wrote, a little sourly, had “sold out.” But McGinley’s story is not simple. She was a writer of comic verse, light indeed but not rollicking, and her humor could be as sharp as the best paring knife and (yet) as domestic as a calico apron. And she did walk away with the 1961 Pulitzer. Her “silly little verses” appeared (also) in The New Yorker, she did enjoy the plaudits of (inter alia) W. H. Auden, her many volumes of poetry did sell well, and she was rewarded with a string of honorary doctorates, even from Ivy League universities. And yet today who is she? Two major online poetry sites, the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, each grant her a thumbnail biography but include not one of her poems. So who was she? Phyliss McGinley was born in rural Oregon on March 21, 1908, and, in tow behind her family, lived a peripatetic childhood. As a teen she fetched up in Utah, took a literature degree at the state university, and went to New York to try her arm. In New York, in the late 20s and the 30s, a common fate of literary young women was to become an editor, and she did that briefly, but she fell in love with and married Charles Hayden, by day a sound engineer, by night a jazz pianist, and in 1937 he whisked Phyllis off to suburban Larchmont, domesticity, two kids (both daughters), lawns and picnics, barbecues, dinner guests, church on Sunday, and weekdays meeting Charles on the 5:20 out of Grand Central. Phyllis loved it all and began to write about it, not only light verse but also children’s books. Her liberal politics, her verses’ satirical tone, and some of her titles (e.g. Stones from Glass Houses, 1946) make it clear that her love for suburbia was neither unconditional nor abject, but it was love and it put her in an unreceptive mood for the new feminism. So McGinley wrote an autobiographical riposte to Betty Frieden’s The Feminine Mystique, but with the lightly self-deprecating title Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964). Light self-deprecation was not yet in the new feminist playbook, and it’s fair to say that Phyllis McGinley’s poetry—and her literary reputation—have suffered the consequences. Her birthday might be an occasion for reconsidering that judgment. ©

[Stanley]

From the summits of love a curse is driven,As lightning is from the tops of heaven. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1856.
"Pinkie" Moulton, 1783-1795

As I cannot gratify my self with the Original, I must beg the favor of You to have her picture drawn at full Length by one of the best Masters, in an easy Careless attitude. Judith Barrett, 1793, requesting a portrait of her granddaughter “Pinkey” Moulton.

In my grandma’s house there hung, side by side small, painterly portraits of a boy in blue and a girl in white. She was the more arresting of the two, standing on a promontory, pink-ribboned, rosy-cheeked and wind-swept, and he seemed not as lively, more stand-offish. But both are fixed firmly in my memory. I would later find that both portraits were famous renditions of childhood, ‘Pinkie’ in 1795 by Thomas Lawrence and ‘The Blue Boy’ in 1770 by Thomas Gainsborough. Singly or paired they rattled down the years as symbols of youthful innocence or (latterly) as meat for satirists who thought of innocence or youth as mere naivete. Whoever in my family bought those reproductions, perhaps grandma herself, saw them as pleasing pictures worthy of warm sentiment. Exactly who Gainsborough’s blue boy was remains disputed, but ‘Pinkie’ was Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton, born on March 22, 1783, on her father’s sugar plantation in Jamaica. Along with her brothers, Sarah was sent back to England in 1792 to be properly educated, she at “Mrs. Fenwick’s School” in Greenwich. Already known as ‘Pinkey’, Sarah was sorely missed back in Jamaica, and it was at her grandma Barrett’s insistence that the portrait was commissioned. Exhibited in 1795 at the Royal Academy, it became famous as an early evidence of the Romantic Era’s warm, optimistic view of childhood. The original portrait stayed in the Barrett family, for several decades in the house of Edward Barrett, brother of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Their family’s fortunes were based on slavery, and perhaps Elizabeth used “Pinkie” as a muse for her anti-slavery poems “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1849) and “A Curse for a Nation” (1856). If so, it had become for Elizabeth a guilt-charged inheritance. But it was certainly an inheritance, and when a later Barrett sold it at auction, in 1926, it fetched a then-record £78,000 (about $380,000). That also established its value as a commercial property, exploited by (among others) Cadbury’s Chocolate and Shirley Temple, and would later (with the Blue Boy) appear in the TV serial Leave It to Beaver. It now hangs in the Huntington, in California, estranged by many miles from The Blue Boy, still in London at the National Portrait Gallery. As for my grandma’s copies, they went up in flames when the house burned down in 1967. Sarah Moulton herself died of a childhood ailment at the tender age of 12, in the same year that her portrait began her march towards fame. ©.

[Stanley]

"Sewing, Bottomley?" "No, reaping." Reported exchange in Wormwood Scrubs prison, circa 1926.
Horatio Bottomley, 1860-1933.

The ‘Artful Dodger’ made flesh. Horatio Bottomley, journalist, stockbroker, MP, and mailbag maker.

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist: or, The Parish Boy’s Progress is a hopeful tale, rescuing the eponymous Oliver from a life of petty crime and placing him in an environment better than the grim orphanage from which he’d sprung. Oliver’s adoption, by Mr. Brownlow, is a good twist of fate, and we leave the novel thinking that that the good in him will win out. But the long-term success of Oliver Twist (the novel) owes as much to Dickens’ rich cast of supporting characters, most of whom are not supportive at all but constantly threaten Oliver’s progress ‘from this world to that which is to come.’ Among these ne’er do wells, the most memorable is Jack Dawkins, the “Artful Dodger.” Because there is art in him, Jack is not wholly evil but is incorrigible, and he ends up being transported to Australia for a pitifully petty theft. Dickens’ novel was published serially in 1837-39, and only two decades later appeared a truly Artful Dodger, Horatio William Bottomley, born in London on March 23, 1860. Bottomley was born poor, orphaned early, and learned enough from his five-year orphanage life to become the most famous of all the Artful Dodgers in English (or, for that matter, literary) history. He could, Oliver-like, have turned out better, for he was a hard worker and a quick learner in several apprenticeships (wherein he learned legal procedures, short-hand notetaking and, probably, speed reading), but before he was 30 it was clear that it was the Jack Dawkins in him that had won out. For three decades Bottomley exceeded Jack’s arts of petty crime, picking enough pockets to become rich, all the while nurturing a consuming love for the world, the flesh and the devil (for instance, a succession of mistresses and racehorses). Thus he acquired a permanent cash flow problem, assuaged only by yet further pickpocketing. Bottomley never went to Australia, but sold overvalued Australian stocks. As journalist-proprietor-editor, he set the Sun newspaper on its infamous 20th-century path as a titillating, red-baiting scandal sheet. But Bottomley’s most infamous success was to become a member of parliament, three terms indeed, in which he played the role of a vagabond Liberal MP, always laying rotten eggs and hatching doomed schemes for coalition governments. In the end, he was jailed for fraud and made mailbags at Wormwood Scrubs. When asked (by a prison visitor) whether he was sewing, he answered no, that he was reaping. This was a very Dickensian end for a very Artful Dodger. ©

[Stanley]

"When neither sex, race, color, or previous condition [ the exercise of human faculties, the world will hold the promise of a millennium." Gage.
Matilda Gage, 1826-1898.

‘Karonienhawi’ or ‘she who holds the sky’: the name given Matilda Gage by her Iroquois (and matriarchal) neighbors of the Wolf Clan, Fayetteville, New York.

Recently Republican senators have labored furiously (and ‘manfully’?) to pin Critical Race Theory (“CRT”) on Judge Ketanji Jackson. Her hide has proved tougher than they thought, and they’ve displayed their ignorance of CRT, which as a mode of thought has been around for a long while. Since, one might say, the days of the Prophets. It’s also found in the ‘liberation theology’ of Latin America and, closer to home, in the ways in which colonial North Americans rewrote the history of the British Empire as a catalog of crimes against liberty—made clear by the longer bits of the Declaration of Independence (1776). Another harbinger of CRT can be found in the women’s movement of 19th-century America. Its more radical wing even retranslated and reedited the Bible. In doing so, the editorial ‘committee’ was not aiming at sacrilege but at showing how men had used their dominance to corrupt theology, make of priestcraft a male monopoly, and reduce women to the status of silent, passive vessels of godliness. These women translators and editors produced The Woman’s Bible, a runaway best seller when it first appeared in two volumes in 1895 and 1898. One guesses that most of the buyers were women eager to open their purses to buy and their minds to absorb a new ‘critical’ way of thinking about history. The editor-in-chief was Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), about whom plenty is known. One of her 26 coeditors was Matilda Joslyn Gage, born near Cicero, NY, on March 24, 1826. Matilda later (1888) wrote that she was “born with a hatred of oppression.” Since her father made her home an Underground Railway station, she may have inherited some of that hatred from him; the rest came from her stern, Presbyterian mother, who insisted that Matilda arm herself with knowledge. Thus equipped, Matilda married (at 18) another Underground Railway conductor, Henry Gage, but was already sharpening the weapons she needed to liberate women. Despite her youth Matilda played a leading role in drafting the 1848 Declaration of the Rights of Women. She would go on to lead the more radical faction of the suffrage movement, all the while eager to join in agitation on other issues, notably family law reform and the separation of church and state. She also nurtured the radicalism of her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. His Wizard of Oz looks suspiciously like the monsters that had opposed her own crusades for democracies of sex and gender. Through her actions and her many writings, Matilda Gage was a practitioner of Critical Gender Theory, not half as strange to US history as are the silly yet sinister men today confronting Judge Ketanji Jackson. ©

[Stanley]

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd. Flannery O'Connor.
Flannery O'Connor, 1925-1964.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. Flannery O’Connor.

The greatest challenge of creative writing is to establish a critical distance from one’s self. Great artists invite us to enter new worlds quite different from our own and yet convincingly familiar. And, in fiction especially, they must make it easy, an insensible suspension of disbelief. But it is never easy for the writer. The task proved impossible for one of my oldest friends, whose “first novel” (written in his late 20s) has never been published. He suppressed it, fearful of the offense it would cause or, as he once joked, of a long string of lawsuits and a longer one of cold shoulders. Once the successful writer is safely buried, critical biographers turn to the task of evaluating how successfully the writer effected this escape (from ‘reality’?) into an imaginative life. Usually the biographers turn up some skeletons, in the closets or under the floorboards. It has been so with many writers, not least the magician of the short story, Flannery O’Connor. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, and lived most of her life not very far away in Milledgeville, where she died (early, but after a long and painful encounter with lupus) in 1964. So she was, emphatically, a southern writer, or more precisely southern gothic. She did much to distance herself from Milledgeville, toying with the notion of a northern education and, later, enjoying a precocious success at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She also dropped her christened first name, Mary, favoring her middle name, Flannery, which sounded less “like an Irish washerwoman.” She also translated her childhood Catholicism into something different, but still indubitably Catholic. In a similar way it proved impossible for Flannery O’Connor to escape the inherently racist world into which she’d been born. At least not completely. Racism is not usually obvious in her fiction, but the posthumous release of her private papers exposed a racist vein which critical biographers have traced right into her short stories. This may bury her as deeply as, say, Joel Chandler Harris has been, but I hope not. O’Connor’s letters show that she understood this as a flaw, even that she was amused by it, almost as if it belonged to someone else. She might, she once wrote a friend, quite like James Baldwin in New York but couldn’t abide him in Milledgeville. And we should understand, also, that in her published fiction poor whites suffer more from her gothic whimsy than any black characters do. So Mary Flannery O’Connor never completely escaped her middle class, southern, white self. But then, who has? ©