BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The man who made a 70-gallon glass bottle and a 30-foot flute, and one or two other things.

One occasionally gets the impression that England’s industrial revolution was dominated by small knots of religious dissenters, gathered around this or that industry and tied together by marriages they made and the canals and roads that they built, and educated in their own dissenting academies. Their names run down the generations: e.g. four Abraham Darbys and six William Rathbones, each chain starting in iron and coal and ending in philanthropy. And that’s not counting the banking Quakers. William Reynolds, born at Ketley in Shropshire on April 14, 1758, was related to many of them. His mother was the daughter of Abraham Darby II and his sister became the wife of William Rathbone IV. William Reynolds’ immediate family was Quaker, so he went to a Quaker academy, but he was schooled in ironworking by his father and by another dissenter, James Watt, in the many uses of steam power. Reynolds married a first cousin, Hannah, of which Quakers disapproved, and they moved out of the Meeting but maintained Quaker habits, Quaker dress, and Quaker rectitude all their lives, into which they added an un-Quaker injection of levity and light ale. Reynolds’s interests engaged him mainly in ironmaking, then in constructing transportation networks to carry raw matter to his foundries and finished products to market. He also messed about, fruitfully, with steam engines, flour milling, glass making, iron bridges, several crack-pot inventions, navigation improvements on the River Severn, and early experiments in extracting coal gas and using it for lighting. Along the way, Reynolds became a more than passable geologist and (as such) contributed to the growing realization that the earth is unimaginably old. He has thus been seen as a precursor of Lyell and Darwin. This whirlwind expired in 1803, aged only 45, so he never got round to much philanthropy, but his great collections (fossils, minerals, engineering notebooks, etc.) now rest usefully in appropriate London museums and libraries. ©

[Stanley]

The world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. Henry James, 1884.

Of the thousands of college freshmen who, in 1961-62, were forced to read Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), I may have been the most callow. I had no notion of how much action could go on inside people’s heads or how interesting their mere conversation might be, and failed utterly to pick up the importance, to James himself, of the main character, Isabel Archer, a doppelganger for his dead cousin Minnie Temple (and thus a tragedy to begin with). As for James himself, I thought the less of him the better for me. But Henry James, born in New York to great wealth and greater eccentricity on April 15, 1843, turned out to be someone I did want to know. James’s father suffered from wanting to give his five children the perfect education he had missed, running them through most of the available private tutors in New York and then (1855-8) the art galleries, concert halls, and leading intellectuals of a half-dozen European cities. It seems to have worked, giving Henry a fascination for the multifarious distances between old Europe and young America, and producing into the bargain a brilliant philosopher (elder brother Will) and an equally brilliant diarist (younger sister Alice). Poor Garth (“Wilky”, b. 1845), took a detour through the Civil War, fought with Shaw’s black 54th at Fort Wagner, and suffered various wounds from which he never recovered. This was a rich tapestry to start with, and Henry James added to it his own experiences, his own sharp senses, his own indomitable curiosity about what it was that could possibly make people tick in just the ways that they ticked. Henry James is worth knowing about for his friends and siblings, and his fictions are made of a better, richer, and tougher cloth than the cotton on which the family fortunes were originally based. I recommend for a starter David Lodge’s biofiction, Author, Author (2004); then you could do worse than follow it up with Portrait of a Lady. ©

[Stanley]

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. Anatole France.

It may be a rule that you don’t get a Nobel for literature until you represent a passing era, the avante garde having moved off into its own safely distant future. There have been few Nobelists of whom that was truer than Anatole France, who won in 1921 for his “nobility of style . . . grace, and true Gallic temperament.” For a generation stunned by the carnage at Verdun and Passchendaele, Anatole France’s noble style was not only old hat but downright insulting. At his state funeral, three years later, a Dadaist breakaway (the ‘Surrealists’) asked permission to open France’s casket and slap his face. It was denied of course; as second best they issued a pamphlet urging the nation to bury (along with Anatole France) its “trickery, tradition, patriotism, opportunism, skepticism, and heartlessness.” Anatole France, born Jacques Anatole François Thibault on April 16, 1844, may have been a fair target for by 1921 he was an establishment figure. A conservative? Well, most famously he had bitterly attacked Émile Zola and his naturalist school as presaging the downfall of French literature and morals, and over a lifetime of writing copiously and in every genre France (who’d really named himself after his dad’s bookstore) certainly seemed to represent the nation in print. So the Surrealists’ anger is explicable, again in context of “The Great War” when “true Gallic temperament” and “Teutonic courage” had murdered a whole generation. But we should remember France’s early, courageous support of Zola in the Dreyfus Affair and his eloquent homily at Zola’s funeral (in 1902 and at least as contentious as France’s would be), wherein France praised his adversary’s “monumental life work and his great and glorious deed.” In “L’affaire Dreyfus” Zola had, France declared, become himself “a moment in the universal conscience of mankind.” So perhaps Anatole France’s Nobel was not, after all, such a bad idea. ©

[Stanley]

Be a vegetarian and never own a car. Stella Mary Newton on how to grow old gracefully.

I’ve long thought the term “twilight years” patronizing, and now that I am in them somewhere between infuriating and amusing. For those of us who are there, and those who might one day get there, let’s consider the twilight years of Stella Mary Newton, who didn’t “retire” until she was 75 and then kept industriously at it for another 25, in some ways her most productive period. Newton was born on April 17, 1901 in London and reared in Manchester, where her socialist parents moved to take up work in politics (her father) and music (her mother). There Stella became interested in theatre, in religion, and particularly in dress and design. She joined a touring Shakespeare company at 16, and during her “resting” periods found work designing and making stage costumes, notably for T, S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. This blossomed into a consuming life’s work, or works, as a theatrical designer, a grande dame of English haute couture, and more particularly as a brilliant historian of fashion. She was already that when (in 1934) she married Eric Newton, art critic of the Guardian, but working with him on his articles and books allowed her to focus on fashion history, an avocation at which she became famous. During this period her greatest coup was to re-date seven Tinteretto paintings using as principle evidence the dress of the figures, but before Eric’s death in 1965 she radiated on her own in lecture series at Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute, as consultant at the National Gallery, and as the guiding spirit of a pioneering course in museum studies at the Courtauld which focused on dress, fabrics, and material restoration. Before her retirement she wrote three important works on fashion history; afterwards she wrote four more, including Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince. Stella Newton died, at rest, aged 100, on May 24, 2001, her life a standing rebuke to the twilight. ©

[Stanley]

I enjoyed pursuing questions that could be answered by experiment. Maurice Goldhaber

It sometimes seems that nuclear physicists have just two routes to their puzzling truths. Here and there they use immense installations (like CERN’s vast collection of six accelerators—and one decelerator!!—in Switzerland) and then elsewhere they play mind games on blackboards or in their heads to come up with impenetrable explanations. Of these my favorite is the sealed box in which Ernst Schrodinger’s metaphysical cat demonstrates quantum mechanics by languishing forever dead and/or alive, depending only on how (or perhaps when) you look at the box. Somewhere in the elegant middle, though, we find Maurice Goldhaber and the simple, small and cheap table top device he used to prove (in 1957) that neutrinos (one of the smaller but more omnipresent bits of our universe) behave very oddly indeed. Goldhaber was born in what is now the Ukraine (then it was part of the Hapsburg empire) on April 18, 1911. His brilliance was early recognized and took him first to Berlin and then, for asylum and his PhD, to Cambridge, then to Illinois, and at last to head the lab at Brookhaven in New York (where his wife Gertrude, also a nuclear physicist, could be employed, the University of Illinois—unlike our White House—enforcing its rules against nepotism**). There Goldhaber never quite won the Nobel (although his Brookhaven lab produced three during his 12-year tenure there) but did cop just about every other physics prize. He’s best remembered, though, for that table-top demonstration that neutrinos (zillions of which zip through you every minute) only rotate in one way (counter-clockwise), an odd finding for an unusual man. Maurice Goldhaber died in 2011, when colleagues praised him, fondly, for living 100 years, for telling great stories, for retaining to the end a cheerful, clarifying sanity, and (with ‘Trude, who died in 1998) as a co-progenitor of two further generations of distinguished physicists. ©

** and against illegal parking. It was a parking ticket, affixed to their car’s windshield when they were working in Maurice’s lab on a quiet Sunday, that finally convinced Maurice and ‘Trude to leave Illinois for Brookhaven. A demonstration, perhaps, of the importance of small forces in physics.

[Stanley]

Don't Row! Use the Evinrude Detachable Row-Boat Motor. Display ad, Chicago Tribune, circa 1910.

Surnames came into general use rather late in Scandinavia, and were not common among the peasantry in the remoter parts of Norway as late as April 19, 1877, when Ole Evinrude was born in a mountain farm in the northwest of Oppland province. He was simply “Ole son of . . .” until the family emigrated to America in 1882 and found they needed a surname. So they chose “Evenrud”, the name of the farm where his mother had been born. An immigration officer misspelled it, of course. Once settled in southern Wisconsin and educated in a country school, Ole Evinrude took work where he could find it, and by apprenticeship stages (in Madison, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Chicago) Ole Evinrude became a skilled machinist with an abiding interest in the internal combustion engine. Family legend has it that Ole didn’t think at all of putting such a contraption on the water until, on a hot holiday, he had to row a boat all the way across a lake to buy some ice cream for his lady friend, Bess. By then (about 1905) he had his own machine tool firm, and inspired by the agony of the ice cream mission he reformed it into Clemick & Evinrude, married Bess, and by 1907 had devised a production model outboard engine. It sold like ice cream on a hot day. By 1912 Evinrude was a major player, and although there were some setbacks (Ole ‘retired’ in 1913 to care for Bess and only returned to production when she recovered in 1919). Never in great health, Bess and Ole both died young (1933 and 1934), but they’d built well enough their son Ralph—who of course had a surname—could take over the company (by then “Evinrude Outboard Motors”) in the midst of the Great Depression and steer it to prosperity. Evinrude is still there, put-putting across a thousand lakes, although it has since been purchased by a Canadian firm, Bombardier of Quebec. ©

[Stanley]

Up at 4am from our resting place under a ledge of rock. Had a little wine and bread and then ascended to the Narcissi quarters. Peter Barr, diary entry, 1888, hunting bulbs in the Pyrennees Mountains

This is the time of year to think about daffodils, most (not all!!!) varieties of which have passed their flowering prime and are now busily at work building bulb strength for their appointed task of announcing to us the glories of spring, next year. We have two daff patches at our woodland cabin, one flowering early and the other very late, prolonging all of our springtimes. But the flower was not always so well loved, nor in so many varieties, as today. I like to think that its popularity owed much to Wordsworth’s immortal “crowd,/ A host, of golden Daffodils;/ Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” But we owe more to a man of humbler birth whose search for new daffs and newer narcissi led to him being called the Daffodil King. Peter Barr was born on April 20, 1826, in Govan, Glasgow, before it became the British Empire’s shipyard. Then it was a weaver’s settlement, and Peter might have followed his father’s trade, but instead he skipped out into nature and became a daffodil hunter. True, he had a day job; in 1861 he founded the successful Covent Garden firm of Barr and Sugden, supplying flowers (cut, potted, and seeds) to the urban gentry. From that financial base he traveled the world to find new (to him and us) varieties of the brilliant bulb, new narcissi in the Spanish mountains, new daffs in China (we find Barr there, aged 83, trundling around in a horse cart searching for yet one more strain). Charles Darwin took a scientific interest in Barr’s discoveries (for bulbs also evolve), but in Spring 2018 most of us will, like Wordsworth, find some other satisfaction. ©

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

[Stanley]

I honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what ain't so. Josh Billings, in Sollum Thoughts (1874)

Ask any educated, Anglophone adult the real name of Mark Twain, and you’ll probably get the right answer, but you’d get a spottier return with Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby (David Locke) or Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw). But in about 1870, with young Twain-Clemens reeling from success with his “Jumping Frog” story and his faux travel journal Innocents Abroad, we find him on a souvenir picture-postcard (“The American Humorists”) standing between the seated figures of Nasby and Billings, both of them a bit older and (at that point) a lot richer than Twain. Today let’s consider Josh Billings, purveyor of rural or frontier humor in many books and stories, most profitably in his Farmers’ Almanax although he was probably best known, in his time, as a popular fixture on the lecture circuit and as a newspaper columnist. He was in one sense a fraud. Not only was he “really” Henry Wheeler Shaw, but he had been born into a wealthy, eminent New England family (on April 21, 1818, so he is one year short of his bicentenary) and very well educated, at least until he was expelled from Hamilton College for the lèse majesté sin of removing the clapper from the chapel bell. After that, he did sample the varieties of American life (farming, mining, laboring, general vagabondage) before “settling down” to write for a newspaper in Poughkeepsie. But his successes there with rude, rural humor moved him right downriver and into the big city, where he held court in the beer vault at Pfaff’s, a famous German restaurant, and established a comfortable base for his nationwide lecture tours (presaging Twain?) which really secured his fame. Indeed he died on one of them, his last we might say (parodying his humor), in Monterey, CA, in 1885, and in odd circumstances (including a botched embalming) that would later furnish a funny aside (funnier, perhaps, than anything Billings ever wrote) in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). ©

[Stanley]

We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, and that the only way to detect it is to be free to enquire . . . the wages of secrecy are corruption. J. Robert Oppenheimer.

One common feature of American immigration is that every definable group (including the very first English colonists) has experienced conflict between those eager to integrate into their new world and those wishing to retain their “Old World” heritage. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s immigrant parents were such enthusiastic assimilationists that they radically outdistanced their new world culture. So their sons grew up in a household that was by American standards more avant garde than alien. Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 into a household already full of modern art and enthusiastic for the secular faith of the Ethical Culture Society. Both boys went on to become physicists, but Robert’s career was extraordinary. Never quite mastering experimental techniques (he got in trouble for this at both Harvard and Cambridge), he found his niche in Europe (aged 22) studying theory with the likes of Born, Pauli, Dirac, Fermi, and Heisenberg. He returned to the US to a Caltech fellowship, then Berkeley, then finally Princeton, and to theoretical work across a stunning range of problems, but along the way his intuitive grasp, his delight in collegial work, and his easy, casual manner led to his appointment at the head of the weapons section of the Manhattan Project and to his being known, rightly, as the father of the nuclear bomb. His well-known left-wing sympathies were regarded as irrelevant in wartime but became critical during and indeed after the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War. Dismissed from government service, Oppenheimer continued to serve scholarship (in the sciences and the humanities) at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. His political persecution (which later extended to his daughter, Toni) ranks among the more disgraceful sagas of America’s obsessive anti-communism. ©

[Stanley]

Indistinctness is my forte. J. M. W. Turner.

Joseph Mallord William Turner always claimed he was born on April 23, 1775, and at this stage it seems sensible to accept it (there is proof of his baptism, later, in May). Turner’s parents were of London tradesman stock (butchers and barbers), and that’s how he might have ended up, but his mother’s insanity drove him a few miles west, to Brentford, where he was raised by his namesake maternal uncle, J. M. W. Marshall, and further indulged in his desire to draw and paint. By the time he was 14, Turner’s talent had been recognized, even by his father, and in short order he was apprenticed to Thomas Malton and then admitted (by none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds) to the Royal Academy of Art. He exhibited in the Academy’s annual show in the very next year and quickly moved on to better markets than selling his sketches in his father’s butcher shop window. He was a prolific painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes, but (almost) always above them loomed the Turner sky, which when I first saw one (in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) seemed unreal, impossible, an abstraction in light (and, sometimes, darkness) which seemed to make the sky, and not the subject, the whole point of the painting. Then, in Oxfordshire, I saw a Turner sky, or one that, given sufficient genius and talent, I might have made into a Turner sky. The location fit, I later found out, for Turner had done some of his early work at Sunningwell after his uncle retired there. In his brushes with cloud, sunlight, moonlight, and shadow, Turner was helped for some years by the eruption of distant Mt. Tambora, giving his sunsets especially an occasionally otherworldly look. But it is Turner’s light that lasts. In this special sense he is now known as a precursor of the Impressionists. Fittingly, J. M. W. Turner died muttering his artistic mantra, “the Sun is God.” ©

[Stanley]

If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. Robert Noyce.

April 24, 2017 is the 56th birthday of the semiconductor, patentee Robert Norton Noyce, which has changed our lives in ways we yet scarcely understand, probably for the better even though it has made possible the presidential tweet. Its inventor was certainly a remarkable sort. Robert Noyce was only 34 when he patented it, and by then he already held six big patents for very small-scale electronics. Noyce’s father, Ralph, was a graduate of Oberlin College where he had met Noyce’s mother, Harriet, who was the daughter of a Congregational minister. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the couple ended up in at Grinnell College, Iowa, where Ralph was pastor at the local Congregational church and college chaplain (both Oberlin and Grinnell were originally Congregational establishments). So, again not surprisingly, their son Robert also got a liberal education, and at Grinnell. He’d already shown so much talent in the sciences that, in his senior year in high school, he took the Grinnell College freshman physics course. At Grinnell Robert Noyce developed a strong taste for Ernest Hemingway and for pork, stealing the mayor’s pig and roasting it on campus. Thus he proved, perhaps, that ministers’ children are indeed likely to be full of the Old Nick. The college, embarrassed, negotiated with the mayor, the chaplain, and the miscreant, suspended the latter for just one semester, and paid the mayor something above market for his dead, eaten pig. Then in his senior year Noyce won the college’s award for getting the best grades with the least amount of work. Later, after an accelerated PhD at MIT and an accelerated career in Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce gave a ton of $$ to Grinnell, where the new, impressive science building is called Noyce Hall and where, for all I know, students still read Hemingway, roast mayoral pigs, and get by with as little work as possible, thanks in part, nowadays, to semiconductors. ©

[Stanley]

FW: Have I done the world good, or have I added a menace? Guglielmo Marconi.

It is just possible that Guglielmo Marconi might have become a dispenser of liquid comforts, for his mother was one of the Irish Jamesons (distillers extraordinaire) and as the second son of an Italian nobleman he would have had to find something to do with his life other than collect the rents (the estates were in Romagna and Tuscany). While his mother profoundly influenced him (he was raised an Anglican and schooled in England), Marconi became fascinated instead with radio waves, an insubstantial thing Heinrich Hertz had discovered in 1888. Hertz not only proved their existence but showed, too, that they could be generated. Born in Bologna on April 25, 1874, Guglielmo Marconi returned to Italy, and at age 18 started messing about in the physics lab at the University of Bologna. Soon he took radio waves (“electromagnetic radiation”) in a direction few expected: communications. In this he was inspired by the Bologna professor Augusto Righi and the British physicist Oliver Lodge, but for the most part the interest of scientists in radio waves had been restricted to the light they might shed on, well, light. Some thought they might also be useful in micro-measurements. The notion that they might transmit actual information we owe principally to this young Italian aristocrat, working away in his family attic (with the loyal help of the Marconi butler), and (to his father’s despair) tinkering ceaselessly with the strangest devices. Finally, in December 1894, aged 20, Marconi demonstrated to his parents that he could transmit something quite insubstantial across equally insubstantial space (wirelessly) and receive it somewhere else (in the next room). Legend has it that his father opened his wallet, gave Guglielmo all the money he had in it, and told him to go out into the world and develop the thing. Obedient at last, the son (and future Nobelist) did just that, and we are still coping with the effects. ©

[Stanley]

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters.

Paulette and I don’t “do” Mother’s Day, because for most of our childrearing years we lived in England, where ‘mothering Sunday’ is a Church of England day, when faithful parishioners gather to bless their own mothers, their ‘mother church,’ and mothers generally. The two celebrations lend further point to the Shavian aphorism that the US and England are different cultures divided by a common language. Indeed, the founder of England’s mothering Sunday (Constance Adelaide Smith, b. on April 28, 1878) made her day to stop England ‘becoming American,’ for she disliked the secular, commercial direction in which America’s Mother’s Day headed after its founding (by Anna Jarvis of West Virginia in 1908, ‘nationalized’ by Woodrow Wilson in 1914, and then ‘privatized’ by Hallmark Cards). And so Miss Smith, working from within a C of E children’s charity, rejuvenated a church holiday (the fourth Sunday in Lent) as Mothering Sunday. Not only that, but (writing as C. Penwick Smith), Constance Smith urged that parishes celebrating the day should also revive old English customs (e.g. baking and distributing Lenten cakes) to revive not only veneration for mothers but for mothers-in-family. In the 1920s, the Royal Family (itself chock full of mothers) came on board with an endorsement by Queen Mary, and in the national church (and its Methodist offshoot) the religious celebration went viral, spreading to the Anglican churches of the Commonwealth (and even to the Scottish Kirk just next door). The contrast between these mother’s days is strong, yet full of ironies. Neither Smith nor Jarvis ever married, or mothered. (Smith had a lifelong female companion, Ellen Porter). And for that matter poor Miss Jarvis came finally to agree with Smith and to despise “her” day’s gross commercialization, so strongly that she was institutionalized, her care (or incarceration??) paid for by card and floral delivery companies. ©

[Stanley]

I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of a theatre audience as a community of people who gather together to bear witness. August Wilson.

Among the tens of thousands of African-Americans who fled the Jim Crow south were the black ancestors of August Wilson, including a young woman (his maternal grandmother) who walked all the way from North Carolina to Pittsburgh. But before August entered the world he had to pick up a German father, an immigrant cook who gave his son a name and not a lot else, and so August Wilson was born as Frederick August Kittel, Jr., on April 27, 1945. Young Fred had a tough time of it, abandoned by his father (but not by his mother, Daisy Wilson), discontent with his schooling, and increasingly, burningly conscious of a yen to write. He practiced a lot and wrote too well, on one occasion suspected of plagiarism, and so at 16 he dropped out, bused tables and cleaned buildings at night, and during daytimes haunted the Carnegie Library so thoroughly that the library later accorded him an honorary diploma, his only formal educational distinction. Along the way he kept writing, and kept reading, and kept listening, cultivating his black heritage through works by Hughes, Wright, Ellison, street talk, and Bessie Smith’s blues. At 20 he changed his name to August Wilson, and at 23 he was cofounder of a black theatre and had begun his “Pittsburgh Cycle” of ten plays that would take him years to polish and complete and would, eventually, win him the Pulitzer Prize, indeed two of them (for Fences, in 1985, and for The Piano Lesson, in 1990) and many other honors including, in 1991, the St. Louis Literary Award. Wilson’s black heritage was always central (“all my plays are rewriting that same story”), but he also claimed inspiration from Borges and Faulkner and saw part of his job (so to speak) as offering playgoers (mostly white and notoriously middle class) intimate, personal experiences of being black and poor in America. Wilson died before his time in 2005 and left behind him a string of memorials, including the August Wilson Theatre in New York City. ©

[Stanley]

As I made my way home, I thought Jem and I would get grown but there wasn't much else left for us to learn, except possibly algebra. From To Kill a Mockingbird,

Taken together, the disappointments of Go Set a Watchman and the powerful (and continuing, for it pops up all the time) impact of the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird lead me to think that Harper Lee’s first-published—and incomparably best—novel was really about children and not about race. Whenever I think of it, those child actors keep popping into my head: Mary Badham’s “Scout,” Philip Alford’s “Jem,” and John Megna’s “Dill” and their wonder—amazement, astonishment—at the world of adults. Atticus, Miss Maudie, Calpurnia, all try to translate that world for them but their own solution, part realism, part make-believe, is totally convincing. The contrast of their child-world with the experience of Mayella Violet Ewell is complete, absolute. Mayella’s make-believe of her rape by Tom Robinson (another triumph of the movie version, acted by Collin Wilcox) is ugly, corrupted, false rather than true, and yet eerily childlike for, poignantly, she’s not much more than a child herself. Tom was right to feel sorry for her, even while she held his life hostage. Nelle Harper Lee was born into this world of race hate and child wonder (to give it a name, Monroeville, AL) on April 28, 1926. Her childhood makes both novels somewhat autobiographical; although her real father bore an Old Testament rather than an Athenian name, he (Amasa) was not unlike Atticus. Both novels circulated in manuscript for a while, and the one that first hit the jackpot (Pulitzer Prize, millions sold) was the one more in tune with the times and with the culture and, perhaps, the one that understood children better into the bargain. Or that may have been the movie’s gift to us, shepherded to the screen by director Robert Mulligan and made even more convincing by Gregory Peck’s decision to take little Mary Badham into his house and to be Atticus to her Scout before they ever went on set. ©

[Stanley]

“Ah, music," Dumbledore said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!” Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

It’s music-magic day on the 29th of April, for we note the birth anniversaries of Malcolm Sargent and Edward Kennedy Ellington. To be sure, they were born an ocean apart, but only four years (1895 and 1899, respectively) separated their birth days, and they were united, too, in being born into working class families of musical habits. Classical music was heard at the Ellington household, in Washington, D. C., where Edward’s father was a draftsman for the Navy (before Woodrow Wilson re-segregated the civil service). At the Sargents in Ashford, Kent, you were more likely to listen to church music, for Malcolm’s dad, when he wasn’t delivering coal, was parish organist. In both places and with both boys it was the music that stuck. In careers that would make Edward Ellington a Duke and Malcolm Sargent a knight, they led some of the world’s greatest orchestras. And although arguably Duke Ellington faced the greater challenge (of Jim Crow segregation), his chosen métier, jazz, welcomed him like a brother, and before he reached 30 he had his own orchestra and a four-year contract at New York’s Cotton Club. Sargent’s rise was just as fast, despite his working class origins winning his music doctorate in 1924 (from Durham) and by then already famous for conducting competence in several genres, mainly classical. Fame followed fame for both men: Sir Malcolm became known as THE conductor of the BBC Promenade Concerts (“the Proms’), from 1947 to 1967, turning the summer series into a world class musical event, and more than 30 of the Duke’s compositions have graced Promenade programs, many in a memorial concert honoring him in his centenary summer. Just so, the Proms had already honored Sir Malcolm in his centenary year by repeating the program he’d conducted in 1966 at his own 500th Promenade concert. ©

[Stanley]

TORPEDOED!! An officer's testimony to the sustaining qualities of Horlick's Malted Milk Tablets. Large print headline on a 1918 advert for Horlick's Malt.

Most of P. G. Wodehouse’s young men, for instance Bertie Wooster and Archibald Mulliner, are inheritors of large fortunes and pea-sized brains. Occasionally, however, in Wodehouse, there springs up a self-made millionaire whose wealth almost always depends on a cure-all pill or a pick-me-up tonic. And he needs it to deal with the dyspepsia brought on by one of those young men, generally (in the Wodehouse oeuvre) an imbecilic nephew. I don’t know whether Sir James Horlick had such a nephew, but in most ways he fit the bill, an impresario of a malt powder that, when mixed with water or milk, induced in the imbiber a sense that nothing, nothing at all, could be amiss in the best of all possible worlds. James Horlick was indeed self-made, a saddler’s son, born in Gloucestershire on April 30, 1844. He looked elsewhere than hostelry for apprenticeships and found one with a homeopathic apothecary, which gave him a lifelong interest in concocting cures for those who needed them. Meanwhile brother William had emigrated to America and (though working as an accountant for a baby food firm) had formulated a malt powder he thought might sell. James joined him, used his apothecary skills to improve the mix in the direction of health and happiness, and by 1876 they had a factory up and running (in Wisconsin) and an expanding market. James moved back to England, established a Horlick’s factory at Slough and a country estate near his Gloucester birthplace to supply the product with best milk (the malt came from his Norfolk estates), and cleverly marketed the stuff to polar explorers and alpine adventurers. It was great publicity for a sweet but healthy drink and it made Horlick’s fortune, secured his knighthood, and insulated him against most of the trials and tribulations of life, including any Wodehousean nephews he might have picked up along the way. And today we have the chocolate malt, a cure-all indeed, as our part of the bargain. ©

[Stanley]

If a writer is sensitive about his work . . . then he would do well to avoid screenwriting. Terry Southern, interview notes, circa 1980.

Among writers who never quite made the grade of ‘great American novelist’ Terry Southern ranks high. He had the right background, broke free of it at the right time, knew the right sorts of people and patrons, but despite many flashes in the proverbial pan never produced the sustained brilliance of the true artist. Southern was born in Alvarado, TX, on May 1, 1924. His university education was interrupted by war service but then continued at Northwestern (Philosophy BA, 1948). His writer’s education began in Paris, on the GI Bill, at the Faculté des Lettres. There he fell into elite literary circles (French and American expatriate), became a jazz freak (Gillespie, Monk, Davis), and began to write for George Plimpton’s Paris Review. Back in the US he visited and paid homage to his heroes William Faulkner and Nelson Algren, gaining the latter’s patronage, and then settled in Greenwich Village and into new literary circles (mainly the “beats”). Stories appeared, and a novel, and a couple of contracts, but he was diverted by co-writing Candy, an erotic burlesque that (once published) managed to offend even Paris. His distinctive talents appeared in some “New Journalism” pieces (a genre he is credited with founding with a memorable 1963 piece on baton twirling in Mississippi) and in a brief, hyper-intensive, and for the film transforming period co-writing Dr. Strangelove (he was brought to help Kubrick remake the film as black comedy). This frenetically creative six weeks (in 1962) may have been transformative for Southern, too, for during it he developed (or deepened) his dependence on amphetamines and alcohol. There would be further flashes in further pans (many screenplays, some journalism), but it is likely that Southern’s greatest gift to posterity will be his extensive correspondences with other writers, including many better ones than he turned out to be. The whole corpus is in the New York Public Library, Archives division. ©

[Stanley]

'to restore Britain to Antiquity, and Antiquity to Britain'. From the Preface to Camden's Britannia.

Elizabethan Englishmen worked hard at restoring the antiquity of Britain. After all, the island was a far outpost of Europe, civilized only by conquest (and then but partly). And latterly it had further distanced itself by becoming Protestant. That in itself strengthened the impulse to find, or invent, an ancient history, for even to schismatics the apostolic succession of the church universal was a vital matter. And so we have, today, the romances of Sidney, Spenser’s apotheosizing of Elizabeth, and towering above them all the magnificent pasts invented by Shakespeare (and the not-at-all-bad ones of Jonson and Marlowe). But we also have the ‘real’ histories of William Camden, born in the hyper-Protestant reign of Edward VI on May 2, 1551. Born also of the London craft guilds, Camden was educated at Protestant schools, notably St. Paul’s, and went on to Oxford to acquire great proficiency in the classics and a burning curiosity about antiquity. In London from 1574 as a schoolmaster (at Westminster School) and client of the powerful Cecils, he taught generations of scholars to revere the Elizabethan church settlement (no Puritan he), meanwhile collecting his antiquities. The ancient past was a general Renaissance passion, and Camden himself became a tourist stop for both Catholic and Protestant scholars even before he published his magnum opus, to give it its English title, Britain, or a Chorographical Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, Ireland, and the ilands adjoyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie. For short, and in Latin, it’s “the Britannia.” In Latin, it went through five editions in Camden’s lifetime, each one revised and improved (for instance with Saxton’s maps), and is as much a monument to the Elizabethan Age as Shakespeare’s histories. Camden lives on in his endowment to Oxford, his other histories, and in the Camden Series, original texts now published by the Royal Historical Society. ©

[Stanley]

Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing? Pete Seeger.

Pete Seeger spent most of his life in prophetic mode, and he was fond of blaming that prickliness on his Puritan forbears. Those ancestors had also amassed considerable wealth from fish, furs, farming and trade, and that might have let young Pete—born on May 3, 1919—in for a quiet, comfortable existence, but both his parents were political and artistic activists, musicians who turned their classical training into an abiding interest in the music of the people and their Puritan consciences towards peace and social reform. So Pete lived peripatetically both before and after mom (Constance) and dad (Charles) split up in the 1930s. Pete went with Charles, and soon welcomed into the family his half-siblings (Peggy, Penny, Mike, and Barbara), fellow songsters young enough to be his children. In 1943 Pete married the love of his life, Toshi Oto, and their kids also became arty types. In 1939-41 Pete abandoned his father’s pacifism in light of the threat from Hitler and the Nazis, and served his time in WWII (the army thought he’d have a better effect strummin’ for the troops than stormin’ in battle). But come the peace Pete returned to his left-wing politics, joined the Weavers in song, continued his father’s musicological researches, and pondered what it meant, spiritually, to be a Unitarian-Universalist (which is how his Puritanism worked itself out). His musical-political activism (civil rights, union rights, anti-war, social justice) is too well known to be recounted, except to say that it lasted almost forever. But not quite. Toshi Seeger died in the late summer of 2013, and after 70 years of living with her Pete couldn’t live without her. Aged 94, Seeger gave his last public performance in September (on stage with Willie Nelson and Neil Young), and died a few months later a stone’s throw from his Manhattan birthplace. Full circle, I think he might have said. ©

[Stanley]

I know what UNICEF means to children because I was one of those who received food and medical relief right after World War II. Audrey Hepburn.

Audrey Hepburn was always too young to die. Her style, her “innocent” encounters with the “real” world, for lack of a better word her persona set her out as a person forever young. But die she did, in 1993, of a cancer possibly brought on and certainly complicated by her indefatigable and often dangerous work for refugees, especially children, in such killing zones as El Salvador, Sudan, and Somalia. She’d had training for it, born in Brussels on May 4, 1929, of an Anglo-Dutch aristocratic family and then abandoned by her Nazi father; Hepburn’s first role was as an innocent-looking child courier for the Dutch resistance. It was deadly real stuff, but what German sentry could have thought that this sweet little thing, thin as a rail, wide-eyed and with such a ready smile, could be undermining the thousand-year Reich? She got away with it, anyway, and after the war got into modeling, and then pictures. Unknowns don’t do “cameos”, but what else can you call her role in her second film The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)? From there it wasn’t very far to Wyler’s Roman Holiday, perfectly cast (opposite Peck) as a princess pretending to be someone else, then to a couple of French films, then back to Hollywood for a while, uncharacteristically in War and Peace (1956) and then more her style in Love in the Afternoon (1957). Everyone of course remembers her cockney-cocky flower girl in My Fair Lady (1964), and indeed she’s excellent in a story line perfectly fit for her, but for my money Audrey Hepburn is always Holly Golightly, the innocent-sophisticate who (in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) saves, then almost loses, and finally dances off into a Brazilian sunset with George Peppard’s impecunious writer, Paul Varjak. Latterly, Hepburn moved back to Europe, more or less away from filmdom, and (from 1988) took up her final role as a roving ambassador for UNICEF. Her memorial is a simple wooden cross in a Swiss village churchyard. ©

[Stanley]

Miss Garrod is the first female professor ever to be elected in Oxford or Cambridge . . . It is not yet known whether she is to be a member of the University. Rosalind Franklin, letter home to parents, May 1939.

Dorothy Annie Elizabeth Garrod was a pioneering woman in quite a number of ways, but in the beginning she was a physician’s daughter living in Suffolk, England (born on May 5, 1892), and home-schooled. Finally, aged 21, she broke away from that to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in history. After war service (a stint she would repeat in WWII, albeit in a more exalted position), she joined her father in Malta where she dabbled in archaeological excavation. Garrod turned out to be very good at that, and moved on to Gibraltar to play a prominent role in exhuming a Neanderthal site. Along the way she also worked British sites, publishing a book on British prehistory in 1926 which won her a second degree (BSc by publication) from Oxford. Women’s chances at a distinguished academic career in Britain were still slim, and perhaps for this reason she spent much of the next decade in the field, with important work tracing Neanderthal bones into the Middle East and doing some North American work with the University of Pennsylvania Museum (Penn awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1937). Finally Cambridge saw the light, promoted her from her Newnham post to a university chair, and not just any chair but an endowed one, in Archaeology, in May 1939. She was the first woman to hold a professorship in Britain, and Newnham College celebrated with a memorable “feast day” in her honor. Cambridge itself had to rewrite its rules, for in 1939 women were still not judged capable of being full members of the University. The necessary transition for Garrod was effected quietly and with stiff upper lips. As one of her male colleagues put it, “the best man got the job.” After another stint of war service (she imported her pioneering work in aerial archaeology into RAF intelligence gathering), she resumed her digging career, but now as the Disney Professor of Archaeology. ©

[Stanley]

I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot. Matthew Henson, 1912.

Among the interesting questions about the 1908-9 arctic expedition of Robert Peary are whether he was the first to reach the North Pole and then whether he reached it at all. But Peary and his black “first man” Matthew Henson were in the vicinity, tromped around quite a bit to try to agree on where the pole was, had themselves a small disagreement on who was “there” first, and came close enough. Today all that might have to be done in boats, but with satellites and GPS it would be done more certainly. It’s more interesting that, unlike many contemporary European expeditions (that gloried in the ‘man versus the elements’ idea and traveled light and fast), Peary and Henson believed in overkill. Naming their ship after Teddy Roosevelt, which doubtless helped raise funds, their expedition included 49 Inuit men, women, and children, 246 sled dogs, and literally tons of supplies (including 70 tons of whale meat). Not for them the heroic, fatal failure of Robert Falcon Scott’s dash to the South Pole. They established a line of reasonably comfortable and very well supplied base camps, meanwhile fathering two (at least) Inuit children (Peary with a 14-year-old “Inuit wife”), working their way up, so to speak, to that last leg of the journey. Peary (born on May 6, 1856) enjoyed quick and then lasting fame, and in 1920 he was buried a hero at Arlington. Henson was at first feted along with Peary, but fell into obscurity as Washington D.C,, under Woodrow Wilson, became officially racist. But he lived long enough (Matthew Henson died in 1955, aged 89) to reap some rewards (from congress, in 1944, and then from presidents Truman and Eisenhower), and in 1988 his body was moved from New York to Arlington where today it rests near that of his white companion-in-arms. There’s also a Peary-Henson postage stamp (1986), and their Inuit descendants, traced by DNA fingerprinting and confirmed by Inuit tradition, still live close by each other in Greenland. ©

[Stanley]

You see, my dear friend, I am made up of contradictions. Tchaikovsky.

From the time of the “great” tsars (Peter and then Catherine), the issue of Russian identity seemed to turn on whether the great empire was of the West or of the East. Both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great were ‘westernizers,’ and the list of western artists, philosophers, engineers, and musicians they brought to St. Petersburg is a long one. There was always resistance, though, and in the mid 19th century this took the form, in classical music, of a kind of Russianism, not only the use of Russian folk music to set melodic lines but mining Russian history to find operatic stories and musical themes. Glinka pioneered this, and he was followed by “The Five,” the most famous of whom today are Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky and Borodin. Even more famous today, however, is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born into a military family on May 7, 1840, a composer enamored enough of the West that he never fully embraced either Russianism or pan-Slavism (despite the stirring use of the Tsarist anthem in his “1812 Overture,” a hymn to Russian patriotism). Tchaikovsky’s musicianship was precociously evident, but awaited its full expression until the foundation of the Russian Musical Society in 1862. He enrolled immediately, and intensified his childhood habit of composing at speed. Soon he was a recognized composer, but one thought to be overly dependent on Western forms and themes. This would change somewhat, and in the 1880s (following the public endorsement of the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky) “Tchaikovsky the Russian” came into his own, patronized by none other than Tsar Alexander III and his works seen as sufficiently (and patriotically) Russian for truly national performances. Just so, at the end of his short life, Tchaikovsky found his burial ground at the Nevsky Monastery, where today you can visit his monument and, close by enough to suggest more than a chance propinquity, those of Mikhail Glinka and “The Five.” ©

[Stanley]

'The Rivals' is more droll, as a mere piece of drollery, but 'The School for Scandal' is a more delightful piece of comedy. Charles Dickens, letter, circa 1845, considering the prospects for producing a Sheridan play.

A trump card is one, ordinarily of no great value, that can turn a trick, and for that reason time may well tell us that Donald Trump’s name was truly “Dickensian.” And time would say so because Dickens characters often had names that, with not much of a twist (pun intended) could be turned into descriptions of their physique or evaluations of their moralities. Probably the most famous of Dickens’s names are Gradgrind (the literal-minded, miser-able schoolmaster of Hard Times), Pecksniff (the unctuous hypocrite of Martin Chuzzlewit), and of course the very scrooge-like Scrooge of A Christmas Carol. But in this “name-calling” Dickens worked a rich seam in English literary tradition. Consider the cast of characters of Richard Brinley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Indeed, if there is a character in the play whose name doesn’t ring a warning bell it’s Rowley (whose entry usually brings an argument), but as for the rest, we have Mrs. Candour and her opposite Sir Oliver Surface; we have Lady Sneerwell and Sir Benjamin Backbite, and we have as minor figures Careless, Snake, and Trip. Add Sir Peter and Lady Teazle and we almost have the plot, although Sheridan perhaps could have done with a “Trump.” However that may have been, the play opened to great acclaim at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London on May 8, 1777, 240 years ago today. With a prologue written and I think delivered by David Garrick that personifies “Scandal” as a proto-character of the comedy to come (“Cut Scandal’s head off, still the tongue is wagging”), and an epilogue (spoken by Lady Teazle) that dared to satirize Shakespeare, the play was considered Sheridan’s finest. Dickens certainly saw at least one revival of The School for Scandal, thought of producing a run himself, and just perhaps picked up one or two naming ideas for his own moral tales, however different their settings or loftier their purposes than Sheridan’s masterpiece. ©