BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Abstraction and Introspection
Jackson Pollock, 1912-1956

Abstract painting is abstract. Jackson Pollock, 1950.

Jackson Pollock splashed into the American scene in 1949 via a four-page special in Life magazine. Being Life, the story was mainly pictorial. It focused on Jackson and his wife, painter Lee Krasner, meeting with their bucolic, rural neighbors in what was then bucolic, rural Long Island, but it did pose the question, “Is [Jackson Pollock] the greatest living painter in the US?” I can’t find Life’s answer to that, but six years later another Luce magazine for the middle-browed, Time, referred to Pollock as “Jack the Dripper.” If that witticism killed Pollock (he died a few months afterwards, in 1956), Time did not apologize. And the paintings of Pollock’s mature period were, indeed, difficult to take seriously. His “drip” (or splash, or spill) technique made him the most abstract of the abstract expressionist school of modern art. It was not long, however, until Pollock’s paintings sold for millions, and in 2021 his Number 17 sold at Sotheby’s for over $61 million. So there must have been something to him. Jackson Pollock’s parents were born and raised in rural Ringgold County, Iowa, some of the poorer Irish-American neighbors of my grandfather Bliss, who (I suppose) may have known them. Jackson Pollock himself, however, was born in Cody, Wyoming, on January 28, 1912, as his parents wandered westwards in search of better lives. Jackson and his mother, Stella May, finally fetched up in Los Angeles, where he had a troubled adolescence but became interested in doing art and in exploring various religio-philosophic notions, including Theosophy and Jungian psychology. He retained these interests through an apprenticeship with the rural regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and a period spent wielding brush and palette for the WPA’s Federal Art Project. His paintings from this period were mainly representational, but after a mental breakdown he turned to abstraction as a way to “see” his subconscious mind. So did Lee Krasner, who took him seriously enough to marry him, encourage him in his art, to make waves for him in the art world, and (as above) to move him into an old frame house (and studio) on the far eastern end of Long Island. There he executed most of the works for which, today, he is famous, revered, and yet still (for some) infamous and a figure of fun. As for me, I am still looking at his work and life. Since I am quite certain that Jackson Pollock would fail the DeSantis test, just as he failed to impress Henry Luce, I reckon he is worth the trouble it takes to understand him. That $61 million price tag, on the other hand, makes me think that capital gains taxes are far too low in an economy where wealth trickles, or drips, or splashes in an upwards direction. ©

[Tripps]

$61 million ? -

► Show Spoiler

Sounds like a load of Pollocks to me.

[Stanley]

I looked it up on thinternetwebthingy.....
Number 17, 1951 was also auctioned in November as part of the Macklowe Collection at Sotheby's. The work from Pollock's lesser-known group of works known as his Black Paintings achieved a new auction record for the master of action painting at $61.2 million.

[PanBiker]

I reckon most 4 year old's could do pretty good representations of his "style" certainly not my cup of tea and the worth if that term can be used is abhorrent when folk are starving.

[Stanley]

Banned in Boston
Premiere of The Beggars Opera, 1728.

Life’s a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, but now I know it.
John Gay (to Alexander Pope?), circa 1728.

Theater was banned in Boston, Massachusetts, from its first settlement until after the Revolution. This was a very long time, and it seems to me that Governor DeSantis, down south in present-day Florida, has taken note of it. The first Puritans, though, had more direct targets. Not only had Puritans and their ism been cruelly satirized by Jacobean playwrights (including Shakespeare and Marlowe), but they saw play-acting as inherently sinful, or at the very best an idler’s pursuit. And we all know what happens to idle hands. But in 1750, when a new “Act for preventing Stage-Plays” was passed by the colony’s General Court, it’s as likely that these sober Yankees had in mind the contemporary English theater. Looking around the old playbills, one can see their point. In London you could see re-runs of rakish Restoration Comedies, by definition unlikely to improve one’s morals, and the newer plays were no more edifying. Take for instance the most famous of them, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which opened on January 29, 1728, at John Rich’s Lincoln’s Inn Theatre. It was truly a slice of London’s seamier side of life, the “reality TV” of its day. It may originally have sprung from the fertile brain of Jonathan Swift, who in 1716 had suggested (to Alexander Pope) “a Newgate pastoral among the Thieves and Whores,” but by the time it hit John Rich’s stage it had acquired a new gloss, as a satire on the newly-popular Italian opera. So besides the thieves and whores on stage, Gay and Rich took aim at their prospective audience, more specifically at the toffee-nosed tastes of Georgian London’s rising, and apparently risible, middle classes. The meandering plot is full of loose women and looser men, and one fears that the male lead, Macheath, (by the play’s end the plausible defendant in four paternity claims cases) and his unblushing bride Polly Peachum would not have gone down well in Boston. Nor would some of the bit parts, notably Dolly Trull, Mrs. Coaxer, Betty Doxy, and Mrs. Slammekin. Their very surnames were London slang terms for “prostitute.” But though banned in Boston, The Beggar’s Opera was a smash hit in London. It was to become one of the most reproduced plays in Georgian London. But in the 20thcentury it came into its own with brilliant derivations by leading playwrights including Jonathan Miller and Alan Ayckbourn and, of course, the justly-famed Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. This Brecht-Weill version of John Gay’s comic masterpiece opened in Berlin in 1928. A socialist critique of capitalist society’s tendency towards (im)moral excess, the Threepenny Opera was still judged too hot for Boston, but it did play in New York in 1931, albeit not very successfully. In our own dissolute times, it has become a revival standard. Except, maybe, in Florida. ©

[Stanley]

The Guns of August
Barbara Tuchman, 1912-1989

The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962).

I read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August 61 years ago. It was my roommate’s copy, and although I bought my own when it came out in paper, I have no recollection of reading it again and, indeed, no very clear idea of her interpretation. But I do remember the book as a literary triumph. It excited me, and had some effect on my decision to change my major from business studies to history. And on its face The Guns of August is a ‘history,’ a history of the first month of World War I, August 1914, when the political murder of a single individual (Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent of the Hapsburg empire), tumbled the world into a four-year war. It was an apocalypse, killing millions, and its four horsemen were battle, disease, famine, and revolution. Barbara Tuchman was born (as Barbara Wertheim) before the war began, on January 30, 1912, in New York City. She took the war personally, partly because, as a very young child, she witnessed one of its remoter engagements (a sea pursuit in the eastern Mediterranean), but more so because she saw it as a colossal blunder, a wrong turn which set the world on course for even worse disasters. She was herself the privileged child of an American Jewish aristocracy. Besides the Wertheims there were the Morgenthaus, her mother’s folk, not only bankers but publishers: and important public servants through several administrations, and from them Barbara acquired knowledge of how things were and a belief—disappointed—that things should be better. When she turned from her family life to history, she saw World War I in this light, as a colossal blunder. It was not just its senseless resolution at Versailles; it was fated so from its very origins: impossibly conflicting imperial ambitions and the rise of military castes (and military casts of mind) in London and Berlin, Paris and St. Petersburg. Tuchman saw it whole, and quite the best part of the book is its mis en scène, the elaborately ceremonial 1910 funeral in London of the fat, self-satisfied philanderer-king, Edward VII, attended by every crowned head of Europe, most of them soon to fall foul of themselves and of their illusions. Self-satisfaction and (in retrospect) an insane confidence also characterized the military planners, notably in Berlin, London, and Paris, almost all of whom were sure that war would come and, when it came, it would be a short and glorious one that “we” (whoever “we” were) would easily win. Barbara Tuchman’s story is about how grand dreams got mired in blood, mud, and something worse than nightmare. It remains worth reading today, but as tragedy rather than history. ©

[Stanley]

a master of puzzles
Sam Loyd, puzzle master

Life is a puzzle. Popular saying, but reasonably accurate.

Many elder folk take up puzzles. The likelihood is that they will solve fewer and fewer of them as time goes on, but in the meanwhile making a game effort passes the time and may function as a sort of existential defense. In ‘my’ period (early modern history) mathematical games had a special mystique. Not only were numbers suddenly seen to be the way to solve various scientific problems (witness the invention of calculus, whether by Newton or Leibniz), but some also hoped that numbers would unlock the alchemical mysteries and lay bare the secrets of life: Newton again, in his spare time, and for all I know Leibniz too. But puzzles persisted, and with the industrial revolution they evolved from being folk pursuits (taught one generation to another) to being big business. One of the great puzzle masters of the American industrial age was Sam Loyd (one ‘L’ only), born in Philadelphia on January 31, 1841. His was a reasonably prosperous family (dad was in real estate), and it was hoped that Sam (even though the youngest of 9 children) would make something of himself. He did, but it wasn’t in the way of John D. Rockefeller (in oil) or J. P. Morgan (in banking). Instead, early in his teens, Sam Loyd got bit, badly, by the chess bug. He got pretty good at it, too, and eventually competed internationally in normal chess matches, playing across the board from opening moves to checks mate. He liked to win, but he liked even more to create and solve set-piece chess “problems” or “puzzles.” You know the type: chess pieces scattered lightly across the board with instructions like “white to move. Checkmate in four.” Sam began to make money out of it, and fame too, and turned to other puzzles, more democratic, so to speak, or more demotic. He was creative enough to enjoy a measure of fame and measures of wealth, and today some call him (still) America’s puzzlemaster. Along the way, ambition got the better of him, and besides publishing best seller puzzle book he laid claim to other puzzles then becoming popular, for instance Pachisi. Sam did make money selling Pachisi boards, pieces, and dice, but it was a very old fraud, for that particular game evolved out of ancient India where the very powerful cast small shells, moved gold pieces, and conquered empires. Sam also falsely claimed credit for a new game, the 15-tile one, a one-dimensional Rubik cube. But when we compare Sam’s to the grander crimes associated with Rockefeller and his ilk, he appears in a kinder light. And, along with Standard Oil and Morgan-Chase, a Sam Loyd company still makes puzzles. For solvers of all ages. As for Paulette and me, we stick to crosswords. ©

[PanBiker]

Many elder folk take up puzzles. The likelihood is that they will solve fewer and fewer of them as time goes on, but in the meanwhile making a game effort passes the time and may function as a sort of existential defense.

I am up to puzzle number 32 in My GCHQ puzzle book. All based on different cryptography techniques.

[Stanley]

I often think I must be wired up differently. The only puzzles that interest me are the ones I encounter in the shed!

[Stanley]

Wilbur the Pig, Charlotte the Spider, and Fern their Friend
Ursula Nordstrom, 1910-1988

I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. Ursula Nordstrom.

When very little, and illiterate, I was read to by a tribe of well-meaning adults. Then I took up reading for myself, still incessantly. I don’t recall all that reading, but clouds of memory tell me that it was mostly about good little children and their just rewards. Their adventures, if any, left them sometimes scared but usually unscarred, and they were like me—unless they were girls. They had their own bedrooms, lived in detached houses on leafy streets, and their families were nuclear to a fault. That now seems a lost world. That’s partly because it is lost, but also because of Ursula Nordstrom, born in New York City on February 1, 1910, and from 1940 to 1973 the chief editor (for Harper & Row) of children’s books. It’s not clear to me when Nordstrom hit her stride, for I wasn’t conscious of book editors or what they might do, but I do remember reading to my little sister one of Nordstrom’s first big successes, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952). That masterpiece struck reviewers as something new. Some liked it as much as I did (like Eudora Welty, down there in Mississippi, who generally wrote for adults). Others didn’t. One of these was the head children’s librarian for the city of New York, who thought the books fanciful, talking animals unrealistic and likely to disturb or mislead young readers (or, I suppose, young hearers). Much later, in 2006, Charlotte’s Web was banned in a Kansas school district because talking animals were “blasphemous and unnatural.” The same school board thought Charlotte’s (very natural) death was too distressing for children to contemplate. This suggests a fundamental stupidity about kids, about life, and about literature, a confusion that did not afflict Ursula Nordstrom. For a start, she grew up with humor, both her parents being vaudeville comedians in the “Pat and Mike” tradition. These slapstick parents then managed to educate Ursula very well, at a progressive school. And Ursula herself was thoughtful enough to seek a job in publishing, first as a mere secretary and then, not quite by chance, vaulted into the editor’s chair when her predecessor adopted a baby. Nordstrom was determined to engage children’s imaginations, their thoughtfulness, even to help them confront their terrors (for instance that their pet pig might end up as bacon). Besides Charlotte’s Web, we can thank her for Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1962) and other books that tell us it’s OK to be scared, to be unusual, maybe even to live in an exploded family or beyond Where the Sidewalk Ends (Shel Silverstein, 1974). They are useful for parents, too, or indeed for anyone who appreciates the uncertainties of childhood. ©

[Stanley]

Immigrants.
Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler

There is no such thing as perfection. There are only standards, and after you have set a standard you know that it is not high enough. Jascha Heifetz.

Jascha Heifetz was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, on February 2, 1901, the 26th birthday of Fritz Kreisler (Vienna, February 2, 1875). That, of course, was a mere coincidence, but in broad terms their careers did fall into parallel courses as they became the most famous violinists of their time. Kreisler’s head start was dissipated by a period during which he first dropped his fiddle to try his hand at medicine (his father was a doctor) and then, in a burst of patriotism, joined the Austrian army at the start of World War I. Heifetz was quicker off the mark, his precocious talents recognized and improved upon by his father, a violin teacher, but both were child prodigies, called upon at very tender ages to perform challenging pieces in ‘pinnacle’ venues. And both ended up in the United States. Kreisler got there first, with a début (aged 13, in 1888) in New York City, but did not become permanently resident until the 1930s. Young Jascha emigrated to America by force majeure, the Russian Revolution of 1917, fleeing across the Pacific to make landfall (in San Francisco) then making his New York début in the same year. As with Kreisler, Heifetz’s fame had gone before him, so there was no chance of an empty house, but his public reputation may have been enhanced by several encounters with the Marx brothers (especially, appropriately enough, Harpo). Kreisler, too, had his brush with Hollywood, writing the music for a film directed by another Austrian exile, Josef von Sternberg, in 1936. Their career paths, generally parallel, did occasionally intersect. Each, for instance, would make the cover of Time magazine. And they actually met, in Berlin, in 1912, when the 11-year-old Heifetz performed Mendelssohn, and the 37-year-old Kreisler is alleged to have said that he might as well break his fiddle across his knee and take up some different line of work. That never happened, for either of them, and both became revered for their performances (remastered recordings are widely available) and known, too, for their personal collections of famous fiddles, Stradiverii included. Both also became music scholars, transcribing and possibly improving upon old manuscript scores by the likes of Bach and Vivaldi. Kreisler became famous for his own compositions, often light pieces that have become favorites for short concert encores. Heifetz finished out his career as professor of music at the University of Southern California, where he also became a pioneer agitator for environmentalist causes and drove his own electric car. I think their playing styles were rather similar, too, “delicate” being the right word, but that may be one parallel too far. ©.

[Stanley]

Go west, young man. Or go to the city?
Horace Greeley, 1811-1872

The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages. Horace Greeley, 1864.

From the first Euro-American settlements, farming northern New England was always chancy. Thin soils, granite outcrops, and short summers made it hard. Then came the “summer of 18 and froze-to-death” (1816) and the rapid settlement of richer lands in the Ohio Valley. When the Erie Canal (1821) made it possible to ship Indiana wheat to Liverpool, the strains of being poor, isolated, and hopeless became unbearable in Vermont and New Hampshire. Many turned to evangelical religion. Discontented with poverty and religious fragmentation, Vermont-born Joseph Smith dug up golden tablets in New York, found a basis for a whole new religion, and began a very long trek westward. But many more moved citywards. One of these was Horace Greeley, born into poverty in Amherst, New Hampshire on February 3, 1811, who would become one of our first press barons, but of a different sort than the Murdochs of our own time. Horace was an odd child, one who didn’t even breathe at first. He may have suffered some brain damage from that, but he certainly suffered poverty as his family fled from its debts to settle first in Vermont and then in upstate New York. But along the way Horace’s more appealing oddities were discovered, and encouraged, by his parents and by a shifting coalition of neighbors. Horace read everything he could find, exhausting a series of country libraries (and a succession of schoolteachers), and enjoyed local fame as a walking, talking encyclopedia. He was always eager, overeager perhaps, to recite existing facts and to take up new enthusiasms. Through a couple of apprenticeships he discovered a profession, journalism, and, eventually, prosperity. His irrepressible energy took him to New York City and then upwards through the city’s oversupply of newspapers (some of them mere newssheets) to become a pioneer journalist and editor, and a crusader, not for a new religion but for a new way of life. He tried many nostrums himself (vegetarianism, temperance, universalism, abolitionism, even socialism), but eventually (in the 1850s) settled on economic nationalism and the new, nascent, Republican Party. Having seen the transformations wrought by the Erie Canal, he advocated activist government, state and national interventions in the economy, free public education, and also (by the way) moving west and growing up with the country. As editor and publisher of the New York Tribune, a local paper with a national circulation, Horace Greeley became a Republican kingmaker, important in the rise of William Seward and then Abe Lincoln, but those are different stories, for a different day. ©

[Stanley]

racism and reform in the American south.
Lila Meade Valentine, 1865-1921

You cannot swim to new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. William Faulkner.

Her portraits tell us that Lila Meade Valentine was ‘unconventional,’ for from well before the roaring 20s they show her looking out on the world from beneath a bobbed and shingled hairdo. Indeed she was a little odd: a member of Richmond’s elite but not drawn from the traditional Virginia aristocracy, planters and slavers. Her father made his fortune in pharmacy, built himself a mansion, supplied it with an extensive library, and then ensured that his daughters learned how to use it. Lila Meade was born there on February 4, 1865, during the death agonies of the Confederacy, and for want of a Virginia higher education gave herself a home schooling. Then, in 1886, she married into another patent medicine fortune, that of the Valentine family. The Valentines had been made wealthy by Valentine’s Meat Juice. Modern chemists call it a foul concoction, implicated in a famous Richmond murder case as foul enough to conceal the taste of arsenic, but it provided Lila and her new husband, B. B. Valentine, with enough money and leisure to pursue progressive causes and to try to build, in Richmond, the foundations of a “New South.” Denied from childhood any full participation in schools or colleges (she was, after all, a “she”), Lila Valentine first led a crusade to extend public education down the social scale and across gender barriers. Her vehicle was the Richmond Education Association [REA], through which she sought not only to strengthen (in practice, to create) a public school system, improve teachers’ salaries and social standing, and embrace new educational ideas (e.g. the ‘kindergarten’ movement). Her successes, she thought, would be all the more transforming if only women could vote. She was after all founder and president of the REA, and many of its leading members were women like her. So after an energetic attempt at improving health care for Richmond’s poor, Lila turned to women’s suffrage. If only women could vote, they could lead the Old South into a truly “new” era. Here she enjoyed less success, locally. Virginia did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1956!! Her activism (and the Virginia Assembly’s reactionism) raise the question of race, for an emergent and smothering apartheid was the most enduring legacy of the Old, slave, South. At every stage of her reform career, in health care as well as in education and politics, Lila Valentine did attempt to break through racial barriers, but at every stage she found it impolitic to continue. Despite Lila Valentine, the Old South would hold on to white supremacy for a very long time. As long as it did, so long would the South continue to lag behind in education, in health care, in public welfare, and indeed in life expectancy. ©.

[Stanley]

The country newspaper.
Hazel Brannon Smith, 1914-1994

I am just a little editor in a little spot. A lot of other little editors in a lot of little spots is what helps make this country. It’s either going to help protect that freedom that we have, or else it’s going to let that freedom slip away by default. Hazel Freeman Smith.

Little country weeklies in little country towns keep neighbors up to date on who visited the Smith family, what went wrong last Friday with the girls’ basketball team, and on the trichinosis epidemic that erupted after the Presbyterian women hostessed a ham sandwich lunch. They do a lot more, too. My dad believed in them, and every spring took his journalism majors out to some little rural spot (in Iowa) where they could put out next week’s edition (collect the news, devise the headlines, sell the ads, compose the editorials). He also subscribed to a few exemplary ones, which were displayed in the department’s reading room along with his pick of the “five best” national dailies. I remember the Hungry Horse (Montana) News, which he selected for its photography. I don’t remember, though, the Durant News, the Lexington Advertiser, or the Banner County Lookout, all rural Mississippi weeklies owned and edited by Hazel Brannon Smith. She was born in rural Alabama on February 4, 1914, and 50 years later would win the Pulitzer Prize for her editorial columns (“Through Hazel’s Eyes”, they were disarmingly called), notably those about big problems in little spots like Durant and Lexington. Hazel had begun her career quietly enough, buying up dead or dying papers in rural Mississippi and reviving them sufficiently to make a living out of it. Enough money that she took a world cruise in 1950 and came back home with a husband, Walter Smith, a cruise ship purser who became a country hospital manager. Along the way Hazel had showed signs of rebelliousness, printing reports on community-building activities among her black neighbors and examining local police brutality, but at first she editorially deplored national intervention in Mississippi’s “race problem.” Then, as the white South’s resistance to integration deepened and became more violent, Hazel shifted course, and her little newspapers (by 1954 she owned five rural weeklies) became beacons of light for local integrationists. Local white supremacists took their revenge. Walter got fired from his hospital. Hazel’s papers lost advertising dollars. Two of her papers’ offices were bombed. But not only did Hazel keep at it; she founded a new paper, the Mississippi Free Press, to publicize and further strengthen the cause. National contributions helped slow the decline of Hazel Smith’s little empire of press freedom, but in 1985 Hazel, the little editor in little spots who (nevertheless) won a Pulitzer, declared bankruptcy and moved back home to Alabama, where she died in 1994. As far as I can remember, her papers never reached my dad’s reading room. ©

[Stanley]

A heroine in marble.
Beatrice Cenci, 1577-1598

For my part, I gave her full leave to wear what may suit her best, and to behave as her inner woman prompts. Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing of Harriet Hosmer, 1858, Rome, Italy.

Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) was a frail child who became an unusually strong woman. No stranger to Boston’s polite society, she had been toughened up by her doctor father who thought strength the best cure for weakness, even for a girl, and she repaid his attention through her athleticism and her adventurous life. On a trip west to spend time amongst the Sioux, she won a footrace up a Mississippi bluff near Lansing, Iowa, now called Mount Hosmer. As a leader of the American art colony in Rome, she mesmerized Nathaniel Hawthorne who not only pardoned but celebrated her “habit” (occasionally to dress in masculine clothing). She’s remembered today as a pioneer woman sculptor, and it’s notable that among her favorite subjects (sculpted in life-size or larger marble) were women who suffered for their gender. But also there was Hosmer’s Medusa (1853), the goddess who could turn men into stone. Among the female sufferers sculpted by Harriet were Zenobia (1857), the barbarian queen brought back to Rome to be exhibited as a captive in chains, and Beatrice Cenci (1857). The last is one of three Hosmer works one can see in St. Louis, and the more one knows about the flesh and blood Beatrice, the more beautiful the marble. Beatrice Cenci was born in Rome on February 6, 1577. Of noble birth, she was abused by her father, Francesco. He imprisoned Beatrice and his second wife Lucrezia (Beatrice’s stepmother) in his castle and subjected them to his perversions. She and Lucrezia escaped, and then plotted with others (including her lover Olimpio and her brother Giacomo) to take revenge. Her father was spectacularly murdered in 1598, staged to look like an accident. For some, the staging made it seem more like a crime. So, by the Pope’s order, Beatrice and several of the plotters were arrested and tortured. Under torture she refused at first to confess, but then did, and she (and others) were executed for their crime. Even in 1598, some thought her “crime” pardonable or even commendable, but in more romantic (or egalitarian) times she became a heroine, for instance in a verse drama by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819, but not performed until 1922) and a novel by Alberto Moravia (1958), both eponymously titled. But to really understand Beatrice Cenci, begin with the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer. You can find it in the Mercantile Library, on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Since our Harriet was a commercially successful artist, there is also a copy in the main art museum of Sydney, Australia, if fate takes you there. Viewing either will be worth your while. From her original tragedy to her artistic memorials, Beatrice Cenci is a person to ponder. ©

[Stanley]

Ideals and impossibilities.
Julia Stephen, 1848-1895

We think back through our mothers if we are women. Virginia Woolf.

Biographers and literary critics don’t agree on much, but there is consensus on how deeply Virginia Woolf—in her life and writings, and possibly in her death—was influenced by her mother Julia Stephen. Woolf idealized her mother, writing often of Julia’s other-worldly beauty, her selflessness, her nurturing powers, her benign reign in the Stephen household. Yet Virginia needed also to escape from all that, to fashion a room of her own, to find a “modern” identity as her own self, and not as some unachievable ideal. Given Virginia’s literary genius, Julia Stephen becomes a character of interest. She was born Julia Prinsep Jackson, in Calcutta, on February 7, 1846. Her mother and father were both Anglo-Indian, financially secure and well connected in both Bengal and England. So when Julia and her mother ‘returned’ to England in 1848 they were socially at home, but in strata that gave Julia an elusive identity. One aunt was married to a progressive peer, the third Earl Somers, while another was a central figure in a cultural grouping then giving birth to the idealists of the pre-Raphaelite movement, on the one hand, and on the other a coterie of critical social thinkers. Julia prospered in both connections, her ethereal beauty making her a favored model for Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt. Julia’s mind, meanwhile, moved towards alienation and agnosticism, which became more marked after the death (1870) of her first husband, the barrister Herbert Duckworth. Grieving, she found outlet for her empathies in the recently widowered Leslie Stephen, already a well-known essayist and biographer. Empathy became love, and after a longish courtship they married in 1878 and (despite using the best available birth control) quickly produced five children, including the remarkable daughters Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell, 1879-1961) and Adeline Virginia (later Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941). Childbirth and motherhood only deepened Leslie’s adoration of his wife. Julia, meanwhile, continued to model, and to mother, and to create a life of her own as a carer (e.g. as a nurse and public health campaigner), essayist (on public affairs and religion), and guiding spirit of a remarkable household, a gathering place for artists, writers, and intellectuals of varied sorts. And yet . . . as one of her sons-in-law wrote, she was a saint in whom “one cannot quite believe.” Julia’s early death (suddenly, of influenza, aged 48) left teen-aged Virginia grief-stricken and with an unresolvable puzzle: an ideal to which a modern woman might aspire, but could never fully embrace. We are left to puzzle over Julia’s portraits, on canvas by Hunt and Burne-Jones, and in words by her troubled daughter, Virginia Woolf. ©.

[Stanley]

Melancholia as an art form.
Robert Burton, 1577-1640

He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, various editions.

It’s just possible that the Puritans suffered more from melancholy than other 17th-century English folk. For them, salvation was the thing, the one crux of life’s great drama. The distance between damnation and salvation was unimaginably great. One could not, must not, hope to traverse it by one’s own efforts, but Puritans’ unforgiving Calvinism required them to try, fail, try, fail, and yet keep on trying. If you tried but failed, you could take comfort in the justice of your damnation, for as Reverend John Cotton (of Boston in Lincolnshire and then Boston in Massachusetts) put it, you thus became a “beautiful abomination.” Not surprisingly, this proved cold comfort. Anxiety marked many Puritan brows, and quite a few Puritan clergy wrote much more empathetically about it, notably Thomas Hooker (1586-1647) and his son-in-law Thomas Shepard (1605-1649). But Puritans were not the only Calvinists in early modern England (or America); nor did they have a monopoly on melancholy. Shakespeare, not much of a Puritan, had a lot to say on the subject, drawing his Hamlet from melancholy to madness, never mind poor Ophelia. But above all stood Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy became a classic text in his own time and then, periodically, in later eras. Born of gentry stock on February 8, 1577, Burton was no Puritan but, as an Oxford fellow, was a clergyman and must have subscribed to the Anglican Church’s Calvinistic 39 articles. But it took him a long time to get there, BA’d at the relatively ancient age of 26. The degree may have been delayed by his own melancholy. He hated grammar school (as the worst kind of “slavery”), and there’s some evidence that he didn’t like Oxford much more. If melancholy he was, Burton first tried wit and satire as cures, writing a couple of plays (the one performed for James I and his court went down very badly) which showed a certain proclivity to humor. But failing to find advancement in the church he stuck around Oxford, collected a couple of aristocratic patrons and hundreds of books, and produced the Anatomy in 1621. It proved a big hit, melancholy being a big problem. The book went through three more editions before he died (another was published posthumously with his notes and addenda). And although it may have made him a rich academic, it seems not to have made him a happy one. Its early editions, massively long and overloaded with Latin quotations and classical allusions (if sad, he was an indefatigable bibliophile), may depress the modern reader, but there are now footnoted editions to help one through. It’s got no plot, partly because Burton’s melancholy has no end. He dealt with it as he recommends readers to do, page by page, thought by thought, sadness by sadness. ©

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Choice and necessity.
Jacques Monod, 1910-1976

[Man’s] destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, 1970.

Among the revolutionary notions that arose from the discovery of the DNA molecule is that, besides passing on the parent cell’s biological and chemical identity, cell division passes on “information.” This does not include the fact that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in April, 1865. But it does mean, for instance, that every new e coli cell “knows” that, when encountering a new source of energy, it must reorganize itself to absorb (and to use) that energy. Furthermore, each new e coli “knows” exactly how to do this. It “senses” its new environment and then adjusts to it. So the verbs “to know” and “to sense” become metaphors, and for this verbal legerdemain three French scientists shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. One of the three was Jacques Lucien Monod, born in Paris on February 9, 1910. Monod himself was someone out of the ordinary, with a Milwaukee mother of Scots descent and a paternal line descending through his artist father from a clutch of Huguenot leaders and intellectuals. Monod then absorbed from his French schoolmasters breadths of information and a serious ambition to learn more. At university he studied biology, and did well enough at it to land a place (in the USA) in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s lab where he researched the inheritance patterns of fruit flies without, yet, understanding the inheritance mechanisms. Monod returned to France in time for the German invasion. Quickly he rose to the rank of commander in la Résistance, at first in the Gaullist wing. But by war’s end he was a committed communist. He left the party because of its absurdist rejection of Darwinism (evolution by natural selection had been an enthusiasm of his artist father). Monod returned to laboratory work in Paris and, with his Nobelist colleagues André Lwoff and François Jacob, began to develop a new branch of biology. As well as becoming (in effect) a cofounder of molecular biology, itself an interdisciplinary exercise, he remained a seeker after knowledge in many fields. Something of his spirit can be gleaned from his self-deprecating Nobel (auto)biography (1965) and from his philosophical writings, notably Le hasard et la nécessité (1970). That e coli cell, Monod argued, carried information that enabled it to switch its diet from one sugar to another, but its biochemical inheritance required it to do so. It was truly a child of fate. We humans learn about those things, and more. Thus we acquire much information. But we know, too, that we are subject to “chance” (Le hasard), and we use information to choose our courses of action. It’s vital that we use good information, but as recent events have reiterated, too often we choose to act on falsehoods. ©

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The microphone man
James West, b. 1931.

My father introduced me to three black men who had doctorates in physics or chemistry. The best jobs they could find were in the Post Office. My father said I was taking the long road towards working at the Post Office. James Edward Maceo West, 2003.

Polytetrafluoroethylene, aka Teflon®, was an accidental discovery (a 1938 experiment gone wrong) by Roy Plunkett, technician at a Dupont subsidiary. Its peculiar properties have given it an astonishing variety of uses, starting in 1942 as a joint sealant in the Manhattan Project’s uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, TN. It’s best-known as a liner for “non-stick” cookware, but it stain-proofs your slacks, lubricates your trumpet valves, and insulates your outdoor wear. Spread very thinly, it covers stadium domes (e.g. in Minneapolis, USA, and Madrid, Spain). What you may not know is that it enhances the voice transmission capabilities of your cell phone and—if you wear them—your hearing aids. Arranged as a super-thin membrane, Teflon flutters beautifully. It’s also cheap, and those two qualities have made it or one of its many derivatives an essential element in roughly 90% of today’s zillions of mini-microphones. That was the decidedly un-accidental outcome of experiments conducted by Gerhard Sessler and James West at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. These patentees were an odd couple. Sessler was an academic who would soon return to an electrical engineering chair in his German university. ‘Jim’ West was an African-American who’d been unable to complete his Master of Science program at Temple University, possibly because he spent too much time reading Leon Trotsky and attending Black Panther Party meetings. James Edward Maceo West was born in Farmville, Virginia, on February 10, 1931, his father a jack of several trades and his mother a teacher at Langley Air Force Base. During the McCarthy hysteria, she would lose her job there, apparently because of her civil rights activism, but was later judged safe enough to work as a secretary-recorder at NASA. As a teen, James became a semi-pro installer of electricity in rural homes, then majored in physics at Hampton Institute. After a spell fighting for freedom in Korea, he returned to study physics at Temple and radical politics on the street. He also interned at Bell. Bell liked his work and hired him, perhaps despite his political activism (which continued), but certainly for his talents, and (with Sessler) West was put to work on what became known as the electret microphone. They took out their first patent in 1962. Forty years (and 250+ patents) later, James West retired. His lack of academic degrees has since been remedied with several honorary ones, not to mention a professorship at Johns Hopkins University. As far as I know, James West is celebrating his 92nd birthday today, and I wish him well. I use his work every waking hour. ©

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A Tambourine Man
Josh White, 1914-1969

Uncle Sam Says [we've got to end Jim Crow]. First line of a 1941 recording by Joshua White.

It may well be that “Mr. Tambourine Man” (1964) has been the most revised and re-recorded of all Bob Dylan’s songs. Of the versions I have heard, the one that jangles through my memory is the Byrds’ shortened (2½ minutes) rendition, top of the charts in Des Moines for much of the summer of 1965. The group’s lead singer, Jim McGuinn, subsequently said that he felt like Mr. Tambourine Man was God, that in singing the lyric he was singing to God. Jim soon became “Roger” McGuinn, and after much religious experimentation became an evangelical Christian and a devoted right-wing Republican, so who can doubt him on Tambourine Man’s divinity? Another and possibly better case for the original Tambourine Man might be made for Josh White, who as a little boy (aged 8 to 14) actually played ‘tambourine man’ to several itinerant performers, most trading as “Blind” this or that. “Blind” they may have been; exploitative they certainly were; but a stroke of luck (in Chicago, in 1928) opened up new possibilities for little Josh, whose subsequent career took him to the top of the “race records” business and into the Roosevelt White House. Joshua Daniel White, born in Greenville, South Carolina, on February 11, 1914, was named after the prophets, and when his lay preacher father was beaten into premature senility by Greenville sheriff’s deputies, Josh’s mother only let the boy go (with “Blind Man” Arnold) on the promise that he would not sing the devil’s music (the blues) and that Arnold would send money home every week. When Josh did start recording blues songs in 1928, he did so as “Pinewood Tom”, and still sending money home. He was also recording as “the singing Christian” and in 1940 was rediscovered by Broadway producers for a role in the musical John Henry, singing onstage (as Josh White) with the likes of Paul Robeson. There’s quite a bit of evidence that he enjoyed his new fame, but also that he never forgot his prophetic names. He became friendly with the Roosevelts, Eleanor and Franklin, and performed at the White House (and later with Eleanor on European stages), but on the American circuit he sang devil’s music and added political content to his repertoire. Josh White (and his music) served as a political and musical bridge between country blues and modern folk. White’s progressive politics established connections with the likes of Alan Lomax and Burl Ives, but by the same token made him a target for the McCarthyites of the later 1940s and early 1950s. White’s influence on a new generation of singers, including Bob Dylan, and his first performing persona, make him a plausible Mr. Tambourine Man: at least as possible as Roger McGuinn’s God. ©.

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Essays to do good.
Cotton Mather, 1663-1728

Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother. Cotton Mather, 1702.

Cotton Mather was born on February 12, 1663, in Boston, and he died there one day after his 65th birthday. A good age: but it was a short time in which to establish himself as the very symbol of colonial Puritanism. However, that was not so much his accomplishment. His bad reputation was constructed by his critics, during his life and in later centuries. Thanks to Mather, they had copious evidence. Most of his letters were printed in the 19thcentury. His exhaustive diary came out in a heavy two-volume edition in 1911-1912. And if they were not enough, he published, during his lifetime, 450+ books on every subject under his sun, in sermon form and other genres. One (Manuductio ad Ministerium, 1726) was a handbook about how to be like Cotton Mather. But if you did not want to be like Cotton Mather, his prodigious output made it easy to avoid that outcome. Young Ben Franklin (1706-1790) was by no means the first to jump ship. Writing anonymously in his brother’s newspaper, Ben satirized Mather as “Silence Dogood.” It was a brilliant stroke, Mather being anything but quiet, and made famous by his Bonifacious: An Essay to Do Good (1710), in which he presumed to tell everyone (soldiers, sailors, tinkers, women, etc.) how to be good. Mather backed this up with separate sermon-pamphlets aimed at particular sorts of people, in their families, in their trades, on the streets, or sitting on a judge’s bench. It was just the sort of thing that make even a perfect person seem a nosey parker, a moral policeman, a pecksniff. And Cotton Mather was not perfect. His greatest self-disgrace came during the Salem Witchcraft trials and executions of 1692-93. This is not just because we “moderns” now see witchcraft as non-existent (or as harmless eccentricity), but because Mather himself knew the evidence against the accused was (by his own standards) bad. He must therefore have known that the judges had shed “the innocentest blood imaginable” (to quote one of the victims). Mather defended the executions for political reasons. That’s still happening today. And, much like us, Cotton Mather was complicated, a stutterer who learned to preach; a witch hunter whose therapeutic treatment of the afflicted was surprisingly ‘modern;’ a self-proclaimed man of God who kept in touch with the very latest in science. The abject apologist for the crimes of Salem was also the man who, in the epidemic year 1720-1721, courageously urged his neighbors to use inoculation as the best defense against smallpox. Someone then threw a bomb at him. We need, at least, to offer him the benefit of our modern tendency to doubt. ©.

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Imposing a price ceiling on apples
Gertie F. Marx, 1912-2004

I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. Genesis 3:16, NIV.

A still-dominant evolutionary theory (from about 1960 it has been called the ‘obstetric dilemma’) holds that painful childbirth is the price we humans pay for the inestimable benefits of an upright posture and a big brain. Recently it has come under fire, and for many good reasons: not least the evolutionary poser of why a species-wide benefit should be billed only to its better half. These are fascinating debates, but for Dr. Gertie F. Marx, the pain was the thing, and she devoted her whole professional life to doing something about it. Called by some the “mother of OB anesthesiology”, Gertie Florentine Marx was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on February 13, 1912. She’d already begun her medical studies at the local university when Hitler came to power. Gertie convinced her whole family to emigrate to the Swiss Republic, and in 1937 she got her MD at Bern. Then came an internship at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. There were 23 male interns and Gertie, so perhaps it wasn’t too surprising that she became interested in female medicine, but there was a physical reason, too. She found handling surgical tools taxing, and became interested in something she could do, and think about: anesthesia and anesthetic procedures. Soon she was director of obstetric anesthesia at Beth Israel, and then in 1955 was hired to form the obstetric unit at the new Albert Einstein School of Medicine. Free to offer pain relief, and to think about it, Gertie Marx devised epidural anesthesiology. It was a vast improvement over previous methods (most of which anesthetized too much, sometimes including the infant). But her directorial position made her chief researcher as well as practitioner, and she refined epidurals by making them more precise and by devising better means of support for “parturients” (an odd name, I think, for birthing mothers), notably using “super hydration” to assist in delivery and recovery. In her 40 years at Albert Einstein, Marx authored many research papers (and textbooks), and graduated many OBs. She also contributed new anesthetic and operative techniques for open heart surgeries. As far as I know Gertie Marx made no comments on the “obstetric dilemma” of evolutionary theory, although early on her ideas on managing childbirth pain did face opposition from MDs and administrators (most of them men?) who believed that Gertie Marx was tampering with the divine edicts of Genesis 3:16. She responded effectively to those. Of her many awards, the one Gertie prized most came from Queen Elizabeth II, a woman who knew a thing or two (or four) about childbirth. ©

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a chip off several old blocks
Jessie Lloyd O'Connor, 1904-1988
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We did everything for Jesus save to follow his behest,
And war goes marching on. From Jessie O’Connor’s “Hymn for the Atomic Age”, to be sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

In her long retirement, Jessie Lloyd O’Connor and her husband, Harvey, lived on the tip of Warren’s Point, Rhode Island, where she could look west to the mansions of Newport or in almost any other direction out to sea. She preferred the sea views. Their quiet life was interrupted by music and dance (Jessie played the violin, and in winter made a special hot cider). Neighbors remembered her perfect voice, her light feet, and that Pete Seeger was a frequent guest. All in all, an active woman, living well into her eighties. But then she always had been. Jessie Lloyd (O’Connor) was born on Valentine’s Day 1904, the granddaughter of the socialist muckraker Henry Demarest Lloyd and the daughter of his son, also a radical writer. Her mother, middle name Maverick, was a peace and suffrage campaigner. Jessie took after them all. The Lloyds had plenty of money, good lives, and thought those things should be more widely shared. After her degree at Smith College, Jesse traveled to Europe, where she practiced at being working class, joined the British General Strike of 1926 and helped to unionize a Paris factory. Along the way she decided to become a journalist. Her aim was to report fairly on working class struggles, a more objective picture than provided by the press of her day. In the late 1920s she returned to the US to report on labor disputes in southern mills and mines for the labor-affiliated Federated Press. Besides finding her husband there, and also picking up a few countrified tricks with her fiddle, she produced a book on the strikes at Gastonia, NC, and also stood witness to the struggles of coalminers in Harlan County, KY. It was at this point that she became an heiress in her own right, and since the bulk of her money came (ironically?) from Cyrus McCormick’s Chicago Tribune fortune, Jessie and Harvey moved to Chicago to cause still more good trouble, and report on it, using Jane Addams’s Hull House as their operational base. There they organized not only against employers but also in opposition to the rising tide of fascism and Naziism. In Chicago, Jesse served on at least 13 boards overseeing several reform efforts. Harvey was only slightly less busy, so rural Rhode Island, way out on Warren’s Point, must have seemed very quiet. It was enlivened when Jesse’s passport was taken from her and Harvey was called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Their protests against that came mainly through the ACLU but they also formed and led a committee to abolish the committee. And they held the occasional hootenanny, as above, with friends from near and far. ©

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Utility and happiness.
Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832

This word merit can only lead to passion and error. It is effects good or bad which we ought long to consider. Jeremy Bentham, undated manuscript.

The US Declaration of Independence introduced two explosive ideas into the theory and practice of politics: equality and the “pursuit of happiness.” The second was a “right” to which all “men” were equally entitled, and prima facie it’s a fuzzy notion, partly because it’s pursuit, not consummation, and partly because one person’s happiness is likely to be poison to another. But in the crisis years of 1775 and 1776, when royal governors had shut up shop and taken “government” away with them, leaving in abeyance governments’ legislative, executive, and judicial functions, colonists advised each other to set up new states that would “best” contribute to their “happiness.” For a still largely Calvinist culture, this was an extraordinary consensus. But it was attuned to the temper of the times. Another evidence of it comes in England, where a young lawyer, a brilliant one, struggled to find in the law an inner dynamic that would tend towards fairness, rational outcomes, better futures, shared benefits. For a profession obsessively concerned with conflicts between meum and teum, in which what is mine cannot be what is yours, this was an odd, quixotic quest. For Jeremy Bentham, this struggle unfitted him for the law (he killed cases instead of winning them), but it made him into one of his age’s great philosophers. Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher in question, was born in London on February 15, 1748,the son of a successful lawyer who wanted Jeremy to become an even more successful lawyer. So Jeremy got the best education, privately at home, then at public school (Westminster), Oxford (Queen’s College), then as a privileged apprentice at the Inns of Court. Jeremy read widely and thought deeply, but could not find in the law what he searched for: a system which would by its nature constantly improve itself. Inspired by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Bentham thought for a while that a laissez-faire economy might secure that end, but (disappointed) he kept on searching. Rather in the method of American revolutionaries, Bentham finally pitched on happiness as his summum bonum, but he would be more careful about defining it. The cardinal principle of legislation (or judicial decision, or executive action) should be its utility to produce “the greatest good for the greatest number.” And Bentham called it “utilitarianism.” As he tussled with the fuzziness of that notion, he came to believe that the best way to achieve “utility” would be to involve as many as possible in the process. So Bentham came to advocate a far greater political equality than, say, Thomas Jefferson (slaveowner, patriarch, aristocrat) could ever embrace. ©

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Making sense of the 14th amendment.
Leonora O'Reilly, 1870-1927

You men in politics are not leaders, you follow what you think is the next step on the ladder. We want you to understand that the next step in politics, the next step in democracy, is to give to the women of your nation a ballot. Leonora O’Reilly, in testimony before the Senate (all male, of course), March 13, 1912.

Leonora O’Reilly took her first step in US politics on February 16, 1870, when she was born to Irish immigrant parents in New York City. Her parents, John and Winifred, were refugees from the Irish Potato Famine and politically aware. So they may have known that, by virtue of her birth on American soil, their little girl was automatically a citizen, fully endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, she was a she, and dirt poor, and it took a while. Poverty forced Leonora out of school and into full-time work (as a seamstress) in 1881, aged 11, but she did not stop learning. Work itself was a hard school, but she learned much also from the Cooper Union lectures her mother took her to hear (John O’Reilly died in 1871). By the 1890s, Leonora was a prominent trades union leader in New York’s garment district, agitator, street corner speaker, firebrand, but one with a broad perspective and goals to match: she demanded not only shorter hours and better pay, but also the vote, and she advocated for a network of alliances that included other excluded groups. For instance Leonora joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) shortly after its foundation in 1909. Making her cause common was the name of Leonora’s game, and she found inspiration where she could, for instance from the French positivist August Comte, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, a radical priest (Fr. Edward MacGlynn), and the Socialist Party of America. She polished off some other of her rough edges by taking evening classes in art and adopting a daughter, Alice, in 1907. All this paid off. Leonora gained the friendship (and financial backing) of well-to-do radical feminists like Josephine Lowell and Louise Perkins, and when the US Senate bestirred itself to set up an investigative committee on female suffrage, her elitist liberal friends invited O’Reilly to testify. Typically, Leonora began by speaking and only then took questions. You can find that speech and much more about O’Reilly in the Carrie Chapman Catt archive (on-line) at Iowa State University and in an “Overlooked No More” obituary (in the New York Times for August 21, 2020.) Worn out by her labors, Leonora O’Reilly, native-born citizen of the USA and always in pursuit of her rights, succumbed to heart failure in New York City on April 3, 1927. She was only 57 years of age. ©.