BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A musical testament?

Familiarity need not always breed contempt. The case for Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”

A few decades ago, circa 1980, one couldn’t get away from Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.” Most familiarly, it was played at weddings, for its contrapuntal lines (piano on the one hand, cello on the other) made for beautiful harmonies. But it was chosen for funerals, too, for it could reflect both past happiness and present grief. Inevitably, James Galway fluted it. Whatever its guise, it seemed a perfect example of the baroque tradition. The “Canon” even found its way into pop music. Its basic theme propelled “Rain and Child” by the Greek band Aphrodite’s Child (!!!) to No. 1 in various European pop charts. It was backing for Carl Sagan’s science documentary, PBS’s “Cosmos,” and it provided theme music for Robert Redford’s debut in direction, Other People (1980). And in my opinion, the Canon’s utter simplicity inspired composer Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Farewell to Stromness.” That haunting piece, first performed in the ‘Yellowcake Revue’ as a protest against uranium mining in the Orkneys, is best heard on two guitars. Pachelbel’s Canon became so common that in 1981 the New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a prisoner being forced to listen to it yet again. And to give the “Canon” its due, it did always seem to me that I had heard it before, often, always. But in fact the “Canon in D” was a late 20th-century rediscovery. No one knows when it was composed (for three violins and a basso continuo): sometime in the 1680s, perhaps. In his own time, Johannes Pachelbel was a well-known composer, church organist (and organ repairer), and teacher. He wasn’t born to those trades. Pachelbel, whose father was a Nuremberg wine merchant, was baptized on September 1, 1653. His was a large and prosperous family whose boys got a good schooling. And his musical talents were early recognized. At only 18, he was appointed deputy organist at the Hapsburgs’ mother church, St. Stephen’s in Vienna, and by the 1680s he was established in Erfurt as chapel master, and well-known to at least some of the Bach clan. He tutored J. S. Bach’s brother, Johan Christoph, and later bought J. C.’s house. There’s a nice story that he composed the Canon in D for a Bach family wedding (1685), and I hope that it is true. But whatever his fame and influence in his lifetime, Johannes Pachelbel faded from sight (and hearing) after his death (1706) in Nuremberg. His main surviving publication was Musical Thoughts on Death (1683) which did not include the Canon in D and was composed after the death of Pachelbel’s first wife. I’ve never heard that one. Indeed, as far as I can remember the only Pachelbel I have ever heard is the Canon in D. Considered as a memorial, it will suffice. ©

[PanBiker]

Then there is the rock version, this is one of many renditions.

[Stanley]

the last monarch of Hawaii

‘Aloha’ is to learn what is not said, to see what cannot be seen, and to know the unknowable. Queen Lili’uokalani, nd.

Linguists tell us that ‘aloha’ and several other root words accompanied Polynesian settlers-explorers in their miraculous journeys across the great Pacific. As all these voyages, eastwards and northwards, happened during pre-history, we cannot know how many travelers were lost at sea, nor the proportion who made safe landfalls here and there. But the word survived, which may help to explain Lili’uokalani’s later mystical elaboration ‘aloha’ that, in her famous “Aloha ‘oe,” she translated simply as “farewell.” That song, “Aloha ‘oe,” first composed in 1878, has been used by many people in many ways. It’s been sung by Crosby and Presley. It’s been backing music in a host of cartoons (from Bugs the Bunny to Popeye the Sailor Man). And many tourist hear it even today, and when they arrive as well as when they leave the islands. So Hawaiian aloha functions like the Italian ciao; it can be hello and it can be good-bye. But especially among those concerned to preserve or revive native Hawaiian culture, Lili’uokalani’s fuller gloss, quoted above, holds sway. That’s partly because she became a cultural symbol, a reminder of things past. She was also the last Hawaiian monarch, deposed by rebellion (in 1893) and then permanently displaced when the USA took sovereignty over the islands in 1898. Additionally, Lili’uokalani was the first queen regnant in Hawaiian history. She was born in Honolulu on September 2, 1838, and christened (in a Protestant mission church) as Lydia Lili’u Walania Kamaka’eha. But she was of royal descent, and along with several siblings and cousins was declared (by King Kamahameha III) to be in the royal succession. Deaths, palace politics, and the constant pressure from Hawaii’s “yankee” merchants and shipowners, combined to make her (by 1877) the heir apparent to a younger brother who had succeeded to the throne. When her brother died (in San Francisco!!) she became queen of an island kingdom already in turmoil. It was not a case of native Hawaiians versus American immigrants. Her own husband was a New England ships’ captain, and she had many “American” allies in her campaign to restore native traditions and rights. But by 1893 it was too late, and in a bloodless coup Queen Lili-uokalani was deposed, a republic proclaimed, and the new régime quickly applied to Washington DC for annexation. For complex reasons (noble and base) Washington resisted annexation until 1898. Meanwhile, the Queen’s rear guard efforts at restoration came to naught. After some time in prison, she received a pardon from the pirate regime, and was left with her memories and hopes of what might have been. Aloha, indeed. ©.

[Stanley]

I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image . . . life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time. Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957).

Loren Eiseley’s life began in Lincoln, Nebraska, on September 3, 1907. His father was a hardware store clerk, his mother a landscape painter. They were not happy parents. Their misery impoverished his childhood, but he found saving graces in his mother’s beauty, his father’s delight in amateur theatrics, especially Shakespeare, and his own “escapes” into the eastern fringes of the high prairie. One could say that these became the themes of his whole life: nature, words, and beauty. But not immediately. Instead, diagnosed with tuberculosis, he left his studies at the University of Nebraska to become a hobo, riding the rails westwards to catch a breath of dry mountain air. Once he found he could survive, he returned to Lincoln to earn a BA in English and a BS in Geology and to develop an identity as a poet-scientist. He did well enough at both disciplines to earn a PhD at Penn, technically in Anthropology but with a (very) oddly entitled dissertation: “Three Indices of Quaternary Time and Their Bearing on Pre-History.” He would later return to Penn, where he moved up the hierarchy to become sometime director of the University Museum and to hold a distinguished endowed chair. That’s about when I didn’t meet him. I knew about him, for he was then (1961) University Provost. I read his Immense Journey, and was entranced by it. I knew he taught a science course for non-scientists, which I thought would be about my speed. But I took chemistry instead. I’ve read quite a bit of Eiseley since, and indeed credit his works for sharpening my lifelong interests in natural history and evolutionary biology. As the quotation from The Immense Journey might suggest, he was that very odd combination of Platonist-Scientist. In his research work, Eiseley the scientist chipped away at the edges of knowledge. He puzzled (for instance) over how it was that a Platte River catfish could survive frozen in ice or when it was that the human brain became capable of contemplating its own death. But lurking behind those little “how” problems was the big “why” question: unanswerable but not imponderable. Eiseley the Platonist filled this gap with prose to become one of the most read science writers of his era. He won praise from all sorts, poets like W. H. Auden, science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, scientists like the great Theodosius Dobzhansky. Eiseley’s belief, or hope, that there was behind it all some great “perfect image” could lead him into evidentiary error, but his prose (at its worst, purple; at its best, poetic) remains as his best monument. He’s still worth reading. ©.

[Stanley]

Mortimer, the cleverest of corvids.

It is not so easy as you might believe to give brandy to a large bird lying unconscious in the street. From the book Arabel’s Raven (1972) by Joan Aiken.

The Arabel’s Raven books came along just in time to benefit our first-born, Daniel (b. 1970), and were at the height of their popularity after Greta’s birth (1978). There would eventually be 13 of them, not counting special ‘compendium editions,’ the last (Mayhem in Rumbery) coming in 1995. Their main characters appeal to readers (and hearers) of all ages, but especially those who like a little anarchy in their lives but can see that too much anarchy could be, well, too much. As for instance when the Raven, Mortimer by name and omnivorous by nature, eats a whole staircase. Mortimer was brought home (in a nondescript London suburb) by Mr. Jones, a kindly cab driver, and immediately adopted by his daughter Arabel, a little girl. Mortimer is in bad shape at first, but is nursed back into vigor by Arabel. He, the Raven, becomes an agent of change and chaos and at the same time a constant symbol of what a daily dose of the freed spirit can do for ordinary human beings. So it’s interesting that his creator, Joan Aiken, was a little like Mortimer. She was born in Rye, Sussex, on September 4, 1924, to the American Conrad Aiken and his Canadian wife Jessie MacDonald. That marriage was already on the rocks, and soon rockier. Conrad, established poet and budding novelist, h met another woman and suggested a menage à trois. Jessie, a woman of fire and spirit, refused, and in 1930 married another writer. Joan Aiken retained her father’s name, and there’s something in me that wants to think she kept also some of his genius, for like her natural father’s, Joan’s literary output would be large and astonishingly diverse. But it seems unlikely. Nor could it be that Conrad Aiken was the archetype for Arabel’s kind and patient dad, Mr. Jones the cabbie. But the chaos of her early years, in a cold-water and coal-fired house in seaside Rye? Much more likely. But there’s a lot more to explain in Joan Aiken’s life, for instance her prize-winning a semi-scary children’s series set off by The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962 et seq). Aiken was also fascinated by the life of Jane Austen. No fewer than five Joan Aiken novels were fictional additions to (or extensions of) the Austen oeuvre. Perhaps Arabel Jones, freed from order and propriety by her ornery raven, was the little girl that Jane Austen might have been had she been born in some other time and place. After a long life and over 100 books of all sorts, Joan Aiken died in 2004. She was most eloquently remembered by Quentin Blake, whose brilliant illustrations enriched all the Mortimer books, as an American of “Jane-Austen-like Englishness.” For Joan Aiken, Blake wrote, Mortimer was the ego, while Arabel was the id. ©

[Stanley]

There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth.

Before we can build a stable civilization worthy of humanity as a whole, it is necessary that each historical civilization should become conscious of its unworthiness. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, in The Future of Civilization (1949).

My graduate school plan to pursue a minor concentration in Indian Studies crashed and burned in a reading course on ‘classical Hindu and Buddhist ethics.’ I did get an ‘A’ in the course, from an eccentric professor who had been a mathematician before he learned Sanskrit and who, in our discussion sessions, perched Buddha-like atop his filing cabinet. I read the classical texts (e.g. Bhagavad Gita and Dhammapada), but I concentrated on the vogue for India and things Indian shared by 19th-century ‘Romantics’ like Coleridge and Emerson. My main argument was that they didn’t get it, but my research paper should have been entitled “why I don’t understand classical Hindu and Buddhist ethics.” Looking back, I conclude that instead of the commentaries by Emerson & Co. I should have read Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the academic who became (in 1962) the second president of India. While for Western Romantics things “Eastern” were but passing vogues, Radhakrishnan’s study of world religions (mainly Hinduism and Christianity) was a life’s work that led to long tenures of prestigious chairs at Calcutta (1921-1932) and Oxford (1936-1952). In the end, he distilled from each tradition the moral imperative to see ourselves as if we were, actually, our neighbor. Other things mattered, to be sure, but never enough to die for, nor to kill for. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was born on September 5, 1888, in Madras. His family was of Brahmin status but poor. That was his first conundrum. Inner conflict continued when he studied at Christian mission schools (a necessary path for ambitious ‘native’ lads in British India). There, he felt his Hindu traditions disrespected, devalued. This continued at university level, where he revered his best teachers (all westerners) but found them willfully ignorant of the best that India had to offer. Radhakrishnan’s defense was to use their distortions to craft a brilliant essay, “The Ethics of the Vedanta,” which first appeared in 1914. It established his reputation in comparative religious studies, and further work led to his professorships, several nominations (in the 1930s) for the literature Nobel, and a knighthood from King George V. But with independence (1947) Radhakrishnan dropped the “Sir” and preferred to be known, instead, as “Dr.” Later, as President of the new Republic, when asked to make his birthdate a national holiday, he suggested instead that September 5 be celebrated as national Teacher’s Day. And so it still is. Dr. Radhakrishnan died, honored for his teaching in his own and other countries, in 1975. ©

[Stanley]

The wise fool.

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. Touchstone, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act V, Scene 1.

I can’t recall a “fool” character in Romeo and Juliet, unless it’s Romeo, the star-crossed lover who early proclaims himself to be “fortune’s fool.” But fools abound everywhere else in Will’s world. Among Shakespeare’s many fools, my favorites are Touchstone (As You Like It), Bottom (Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Dogberry (All’s Well That Ends Well). Each play is a comedy; thus each fool adds frothiness to froth. As an added bonus, each name can be regarded as a pun in itself, of several plausible meanings. But the tragedies have fools too, although the best known of them, “poor” Yorick is only a skull and, alas, can speak no lines except through Prince Hamlet’s memory. Even the fated Lear, in what must be the darkest of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, must needs have his fool—who has no name other than “Fool.” And Lear’s Fool puts aside all problems associated with modern political correctness, for the Fool is, arguably, the only sane person in the whole play. Additionally, the Fool and Cordelia are wise enough, and brave enough, to speak truth to power. So, whether frothy or fateful, the fool in Shakespeare is where you look first for useful commentary on plot and character. The fool wasn’t Shakespeare’s invention. Fools abounded on the Elizabethan stage, but also in royal and baronial courts. Elizabeth the Queen, like her forbears, ruled by inheritance and divine right. So who would dare tell the crowned head any unpalatable truth? That role could be safely played only by the jester. Dramatists could look to many examples in English history, but just before Shakespeare’s heyday there was a real person, in Elizabeth’s court, a jester/truth-teller whose success gave fools a real presence in the make-believe world of stage plays. His name was Richard Tarlton. We know quite a bit about him, but not when (or where) he was born, nor even exactly when he died. His last will and testament was proved in court on September 6, 1588. He was by then old enough to have acquired an illegitimate son, a daughter, a wife, and enough wealth to write a will. Tarlton served from time to time as court jester, actor in the “Queen’s Own” company, author, and in the streets and taverns of Elizabethan London and Westminster as general jackaknapes. Tarlton was also good at juggling, card tricks, and (probably) acrobatics. He may have begun life as a swineherd in Shropshire, or somewhere else, but he became a living legend in his own time: confirmation, in the flesh, that one could speak prophetically and yet keep one’s own head atop one’s own shoulders. As long, that is, as one wore funny clothes and dressed one’s wisdom in wit. ©.

[Stanley]

He sought to dignify the brick;

Actively ugly. Nikolaus Pevsner on the architecture of Keble College, Oxford.

The “gothic revival” in architecture began so early that some have called its first appearances as “gothic survivals.” The most famous ‘survivals’, in England, came in 1682 with Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, and then, in the early 18th century, the west towers at Westminster Abbey. These additions to older buildings were severe enough to look pretty much like originals. Later ‘gothicisms’ became more elaborate, but tourists can still mistake the Palace of Westminster (1834-1860) for the real thing. But while architect Charles Barry was remaking Westminster, the “gothic revival” was entering a much more distinctive stage, sometimes called “high gothic,” during which elaboration became the name of the game and the sublime simplicity of (say) Kings College Chapel was quite forgot. Instead, we got the studied excesses of bands of red brick, non-functioning stone curlicues dripping from fan arches, spires added wherever they could be stuck, and turrets from which dozens of Rapunzels could, if the need arose, let down their long hair. One of the leading lights was of this brick and stone vandalism (as I still see it) was the architect William Butterfield, born in London on September 7, 1814. Since, in England, much high-gothic architecture was associated with the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England, Butterfield was an unlikely candidate. His parents were non-conformists, evangelical Protestants, and hailed from the more prosperous end of London’s mercantile community. His father, a pharmacist, also kept a wharf on the Thames. One of nine children, William was at age 16 apprenticed out to a builder and might have stayed one himself, but he was soon sketching building plans and developed a yearning towards planned architecture. Along the way, he studied old buildings, the older the better, and in 1840 set up for himself as an architect not too far downstream from where Barry was remaking the halls of parliament. But Butterfield had already indicated that his interests lay in remaking English churches. As editor of Instrumenta Ecclesiastica , he came to believe that in the past a mystical unity had enveloped all Christendom, and he hoped to recreate a church environment in which that spirit might flourish. His masterworks were several, most notably All Saints, just off Oxford Street in London, its high sanctuary dizzy with decorations (carved and colored). But his best known work is Keble College, Oxford, where he was founding architect and, it must be said, chief interior decorator, too, deciding on which art works should be displayed and where. The effect is overwhelming. Further saith not. ©.

[Stanley]

Music to murder by.

O woeful fate!//The one who can give me life, alas,//gives me death. Carlo Gesualdo.

We’re not sure when Carlo Gesualdo was born, and it’s more appropriate to remember his death date, September 8, 1613. For Carlo Gesualdo de Venosa, besides being known for his lute playing, his dark madrigals, and his sacred music (he was a composer ahead of his time) was also a murderer. Gesualdo was born, in 1566, in Venosa, a minor princely state in Italy’s far south. A younger son’s exact birthdate didn’t matter much, for he would not inherit and was intended for a military or a churchly career. But when his elder brother died Carlo, now heir apparent, left Rome, and in 1586 prepared for his adult estate by marrying Donna Maria ’Avalos, niece of a pope and sister of a cardinal. There is no evidence that they were happily wed, and soon she began an affair with the Duke of Andrea which lasted until (in 1588 and in flagrante) both were murdered by Gesualdo and his ruffians. In Renaissance Italy, murdering your wife and her lover did not over-excite lawyers, so Prince Gesualdo was left to his lute. But the murders were gruesome (Gesualdo mutilated the bodies and left them outside for all to see), and Gesualdo and his delitto passionale became famous. Shakespeare might have used it! In 1976, Gesualdo and his crime were remembered in a play by David Pownall: Music to Murder By. Pownall’s play is rarely performed as it requires the principal actors to be musicians (lute, classical guitar, harp) and demands an off-stage chorale of three (a tenor and two sopranos: the music is by Gesualdo). The plot is a fantasy invoked by an aggressively obtuse American musicologist—Helen Euterpe—who is writing a book on Gesualdo. Her questions and perhaps her names (‘Helen’ calls forth Helen of Troy, a woman of fatal beauty, and ‘Euterpe’ was the mythological muse of music and a demon on the lute) stir forth ghosts, those of Gesualdo, Donna Maria, and her lover, but also Peter Warlock, an eccentric English composer (and suicide) who found Gesualdo’s music inspiring. There is a replication of the original murders, and then Euterpe herself falls victim to Gesualdo (or his ghost). Paulette and I saw its World Premiere, and it is a brilliant piece of theatre, a reminder that historians do indeed disturb the sleep of the dead. If Music to Murder By ever comes to your town, see it twice. As for ‘justice,’ don’t hold your breath. Carlo Gesualdo was a Prince of the Italian Renaissance, and a prince who had been cuckolded had, thus, a license to kill. He may even have been something of a hero. If so, it was a role he proved unable to play. True to his ilk and governed by his demons, Carlo Gesualdo married again, abused his second wife, and may have been killed by her. ©

[Stanley]

Some mothers do have 'em.

MY DEAR FLORENCE. Salutation of Gertrude Bell’s first known letter to her stepmother, September 25, 1874. Gertrude was then six years old.

Florence Eveleen Eleanore Olliffe entered the London marriage market late. She was born to it, if in Paris, on September 9, 1851. Her father was physician to the British embassy, but Florence was as ‘at home’ in London where her maternal grandpapa, Sir William Cubitt, was sometime Lord Mayor, Liberal MP, and always the inheritor of the Cubitt building fortune. Florence loved Paris, was privately educated there, and might have stayed on but for the Franco-Prussian War. The Olliffe family then fled to London. I don’t know whether Florence (then almost 20) was ever properly presented as a debutante, but she did find a man, a young widower, quite a rich one, Hugh Bell, whose first wife had recently died in childbirth. They married in 1876. Within five years, Florence birthed three new children, along with transitioning as good stepmother to Hugh’s first two. Those five, three girls and two boys, would grow into accomplished adults, including stepdaughter Gertrude Bell who would win a First (in History) at Oxford before Oxford consented to give girls degrees. Gertrude would go on to become an accomplished equestrienne and mountaineer before settling in to her adult life as a pioneer Arabist. Gertrude Bell explored the deserts, became fluent in several desert languages, dug up ruins, and in her spare time became a leading architect of Britain’s middle eastern nation-building. Throughout she enjoyed Florence’s support, and when Gertrude died in 1926 Florence celebrated her stepdaughter’s life by publishing her letters home. All that might have been enough, but one must add that Florence Bell, née Olliffe, had also distinguished herself as author, playwright, social reformer, and Liberal hostess. Florence began by writing children’s books (including a three-part primer French Without Tears) and then launched into fiction with an autobiographical novel about a young woman growing up in Paris and London. She also struck up productive friendships with two gifted American expats, the actress-playwright Elizabeth Robins and the novelist Henry James. All this was centered on her London base in fashionable Knightsbridge, where her parents had settled in 1870. More notably, Florence became a social reformer in her husband’s back yard, his massive steelworks in the far northeast of England. Sir Hugh paid his workers well, but Florence went beyond wages to study their real lives in the social world of Tees-side tenements. Her pioneering study, At the Works (1907), remains one of the more important social documents of Edwardian England. It’s interesting that Gertrude was one of her researchers. The moral of this story may be that some extraordinary daughters had extraordinary mothers. ©.

[Stanley]

A music master and his friends.

As poetry is a rise above prose, so is music the exaltation of poetry. Henry Purcell.

In planning our wedding (for September 3, 1966), the presiding minister (Paulette’s uncle Clayton) said that he would have only sacred music—at least until he pronounced us married. So, for the recessional, we chose Henry Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary.” It was secular enough, uplifting, happy, triumphant—except that, as the church organist (Bob Speed) informed us, it wasn’t by Purcell. It was, he said, Jeremiah Clarke’s “Prince of Denmark March.” Who composed the music was still at issue in 1966, but we took Speed’s word for it. He was a Professor of Music. Anyway, Paulette’s family liked the ‘new’ title: seven of her eight great-grandparents were Danes, and Uncle Clayton was a minister in what the family still called the Danish Lutheran Church. The confusion about composer and title was understandable. Clarke and Purcell were colleagues, even friends. Both composed for Stuart courts; each held royal appointments at Westminster and/or Windsor; the original manuscripts were all over the place; each had annotated the other’s work. As if to cap the confusion, Clarke wrote a musical memorial for his friend, Come, come along, for a dance and a song. Henry Purcell, a prolific composer, had died young, aged only 46, and still full of promise. He was buried in Westminster Abbey to music composed by him and his friends and performed by fellow professionals (Clarke’s Come Along came later, in a special memorial edition). Such connections comprised Purcell’s life. Henry Purcell was born on September 10, 1659, probably in Westminster. His father held an Abbey post under the Commonwealth and survived, after the Restoration, as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and choirmaster. Henry sang in the choir until his voice broke. By then he’d already begun to compose, and his biography is written in his music, manuscripts and printed editions, as he moved through various royal appointments in the reigns of Charles II and James II. After yet another Revolution, the “Glorious” one of 1688-9, a wider music market opened up. Purcell and others—including Jeremiah Clarke—began to compose for the theater as well as for royalty. Purcell was at the height of his powers (and his popularity) when he fell ill. The titles given to two of his latest (last?) published pieces testify to the suddenness of his death, and on November 28, 1695 his funeral and burial (at the Abbey) were accompanied by the best music of his age, his own and others’, and performed by his colleagues and choristers. It must have been quite an occasion. He left an estate much larger than his father’s, including an organ and a house in the Abbey Yard where his widow, Frances, lived for another decade. ©.

[Stanley]

Barbarity and civilization.

I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God against these barbarous wretches . . . Oliver Cromwell, Drogheda, Ireland, 1649.

The siege of Drogheda ended on September 11, 1649 with total victory for the English parliamentary army commanded by General (later ‘Lord Protector’) Oliver Cromwell. As the victors poured into the Irish city, the vanquished were killed, more than 3,000. Most were soldiers and officers of the royalist garrison, many “put to the sword” after they had surrendered. But the toll included many civilians, including women and a few children. These facts are plain, but explaining them has been difficult. The day before, September 10, Cromwell had demanded surrender and implied that ‘no quarter’ would be the result of a refusal. But what if the conquered people are (also) barbarous wretches? Cromwell said they were and clearly thought it an additional justification to the settled ‘no quarter’ rule of siege warfare. What was barbarousabout the dead wretches of Drogheda? Questions such as this should give us pause when we seek to understand what went on the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 and what is going on in the Israeli response since, in Gaza and in the “occupied territories.” In 1649 Cromwell attributed ‘barbarity’ to the defenders of Drogheda. His words were freighted with memories of previous massacres, Irish Catholic killings of English and Scottish Protestants in the uprisings of 1637-1641. Underlying that was an English folk memory, a mythic truth, that to be Irish and Catholic was also to be savage, strange, and noisy. Early in my research on “the language of colonization” I found the word “hubbub” used to describe what went on in Native American powwows. English pamphleteers found ‘hubbubs’ wherever they looked, first Virginia, then New England. Hubbub was cacophony, gobbledygook, noise. Ahah! A new word, born of new contact between the known and the unknowable, between the civil and the savage. But “hubbub” wasn’t new. Shakespeare used the word. And Edmund Spenser (in The Faerie Queene) used it way before Shakespeare. But then where did Spenser pick it up? It’s a long story, but the irony is that the original root word was Old Irish (or maybe Old Welsh). And it was used to describe a war cry (Irish) or a hue and cry (in Old Welsh, a calling up of ‘the people.’) So in conquering the lands and peoples of the Celtic Fringe, the English also expropriated elements of the natives’ language, then turned it against the natives as evidence of their savagery. More a concept than a word, “hubbub” then came in handy as a built-in descriptor for other subject peoples, for instance in North America and Africa. Barbarous wretches, indeed! The irony is that even barbarous wretches have long memories. ©

[Stanley]

Just tried email again and no luck. here's hoping we get on better tomorrow!

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Sorry, still cut off from the world.

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Sorry, no change, still isolated!

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Still blocked.....

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Sorry, no change.

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Still locked out!

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Sorry no change despite my efforts.....

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Still trying!

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Sorry, no improvement but trying!

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An odd hero, an imagined life.

The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, disheveled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty. Robertson Davies, from What’s Bred In the Bone (1985).

That little boy was Francis Cornish, born on the edge of the Canadian wilderness on September 12, 1909. He was born to wealth and in odd circumstances. He would live through even odder ones, and would die on his 63rd birthday in a Toronto apartment full of artwork, some his and much of the rest of museum quality. And Francis Cornish was a fiction. Francis Cornish’s life is the common thread on which Robertson Davies strung his Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels (1981); What’s Bred In the Bone (1985); and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). As with all the better trilogies, each novel can be read on its own, profitably. But I luckily read them in quick order, for I knew nothing of Davies until early July 1989 when my old PhD mentor, David Lovejoy, lent me his The Rebel Angels. Before July was out I’d read the whole trilogy. It was a marvelous experience, and I’ve returned to it several times since, each time reading them one-two-three and with advancing pleasure. It comprises two comedies (volume I about the academy, volume III about the arts), and both touching on the question of whether a young country (Canada) can have a culture. They sandwich volume II, What’s Bred In the Bone. This middle piece is a biography of Francis Cornish, an odd but thoroughly likable bird. And he’s a hero, so his life echoes the medieval sagas, a grail quest. Its mythic quality is enhanced because the saga is being written by two archetypal spirits, the Lesser Zadkiel, an angel-scribe, and the daemon Maimas who in some odd way oversees Francis’s life, maybe makes it tick. The life itself, from the pretty boy’s first encounter with the disorderly peony, turns out to have been worth living. Francis gets the best education money can buy. His oddly-nurtured artistic talents are filled out by his apprenticeship with an eminent restorer who’s not above a bit of forgery. Francis spies on Hitler for British intelligence and participates in an art fraud on Hitler’s minister of “culture.” He searches for a feminine ideal (perhaps mirroring his own feminine side), and may find it in an affair with a fellow (or sister?) spy. He returns to Canada, falls in with a couple of Rebel Angels, and spends the rest of his life hiding his greatest forgery and musing on how to bring real culture to Canada. Mystical (and Jungian) elements aside, Francis Cornish is an alter ego for Robertson Davies himself, an heir of Canada’s Anglo-Protestant aristocracy, newspaper publisher, and (latterly) Master of Massey College, University of Toronto. It’s all a tremendous entertainment, and a reminder that mere erudition can, in the right hands, be a cardinal virtue. ©

[Stanley]

Experimental medicine.

The prayer . . . that I might be permitted in some way or sometime to do something to alleviate human suffering has been answered. Walter Reed to his wife Emily, December 31, 1899.

For some years, at Christmas, I could expect a gift book drawn from Random House’s “Landmark Series.” It was in one of these that I first learned about Walter Reed, a pioneering medic widely credited with finding the cause of yellow fever. I also learned that Reed was memorialized by the Walter Reed Hospital, now the Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, MD. Within a couple of years of writing that letter to his wife, Walter Reed was dead of a botched appendectomy. For a man who’d spent most of his adult life cobbling together ad hoc solutions to emergent medical problems, it was an ironic, almost tragicomic, end. As the only doctor available, at various army posts in the far west, he’d cared for captured Apaches (including the notorious Geronimo) and agitated for their better treatment. By laboriously treating each early stage of gangrene, he’d saved the life (not to mention the foot) of Jules Sandoz, a crusty old Swiss immigrant who’d refused Reed’s advice to let the bad foot go first. Walter and Emily Reed had two kids of their own (delivered by Reed himself), then added to their brood a little Native American child they named Susie. One would have to say that Reed’s approach to life was experimental. This may have been a matter of temperament, but it was also clearly a matter of training, for after his first MD (at the age of 18!!!) Walter Reed had credentialed himself as an epidemiologist, through a second MD and then a spell as a professor of bacteriology at George Washington University. He got round to yellow fever while doctoring soldiers at a DC army base, where he noted that officers didn’t get the disease. Instead of assuming that the officers must have been of a superior breed, he made notes on the life habits of enlisted men, who drank river water and hiked woodland trails. So when Reed went to Cuba he was ready to isolate the mosquito as the vector villain of yellow fever. His research method has been open to ethical scrutiny, for his research subjects were healthy human beings (soldiers, lab assistants, etc.), some of whom (inevitably?) died to prove his point. But the history of 19th-century science is littered with such corpses, including scientists, and Reed must have exposed himself. And Reed credited others for the ‘discovery,’ not least the Cuban medic, Carlos Finlay, who had first pointed his finger at Aedes cinereus, the tiger mosquito. This honest modesty came naturally to Walter Reed, born on September 13, 1850, to an itinerant Methodist preacher in a clapboarded cabin in the swampy lowlands of eastern Virginia. Reed’s birthplace (two tiny rooms and a lean-to kitchen) is dwarfed by his memorial. ©.

[Stanley]

Gendered language and the French Revolution

The only limit to the exercise of the natural rights of woman is the perpetual tyranny that man opposes to it. From Article IV of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, by Olympe de Gouges.

When in 1885 two women—Louise Barbarousse and Marie Picot—demanded the right to vote in Paris’s municipal elections, their case went to court. Their lawyers argued that the standing election laws, which opened suffrage to tous les français, must needs include Louise and Marie. In denying them the right (in French, le droit, a masculine noun), the judge might have cited the masculinity of the noun français, and maybe he did, subconsciously. (The judge was a man; les français are frenchmen: quod erat demonstrandum.) Instead, the judge used “tradition, law, and custom” to deny the suit. Oddly enough, all three of those nouns are feminine (la tradition, la loi, and la coutome). But no matter. It was not until la libération of 1944-45 that la Françe freed herself from the tyranny of words and welcomed women into the ranks of tous les français. France was by no means the last nation to allow gender-equal suffrage, but it came pretty far down the list, even behind Muslim Albania and fascist Spain. That’s a puzzle for historians, in part because the way of thinking we call ‘feminism’ had its origins in 19th-century France, but mainly because the idea that women possessed (or should have) political and civil rights got its first full airing as part of the transforming political ideology of the French Revolution. This came early on in the revolution (in French, révolution is a noun feminine), in the form of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, issued by Olympe de Gouges on September 14, 1791. Her declaration can be read as a mere plagiarism on the earlier (1789) Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Each has the same number of articles, and in most of the articles de Gouge plays the linquistic trick of adding citoyenne to citoyen. But there’s more to it than that, not least de Gourges’ assumption that “the rights of man” already exist. Civil equality between men was a reality and not a mere figment of the Enlightenment mind. Hers was a revolutionary mentalité. There are also in de Gouges’ declaration clear expressions of anger, even fury, as the opening quotation, above, attests. Her enemy is the ‘ancient regime’ of men, not of monarchy. She even dedicated her Declaration to Marie Antoinette, not as queen but as “the most despised of women.” That in itself was a hint that Olympe de Gouges was, in the political context of the French Revolution, a constitutional monarchist. That contradiction in terms might have been her death warrant. For her words, and for her courage, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined by the men of the French Revolution in 1793, ©.

[Stanley]

The comedies of life.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. Robert Benchley.

Harvard College claims, fearlessly, that Robert Benchley graduated AB in 1912. That was his senior year, but Benchley hadn’t submitted his “scholarly essay,” then a graduation requirement. In idleness, he got round to it with a 1913 study on US-Canadian diplomacy. The two nations were negotiating for the Newfoundland fishery, which sounds serious enough. But Benchley wrote his piece from the point of view of the cod, or a cod. It must have been a howler. It’s not that the codfish is inherently risible. It is that Robert Benchley was one of the funniest writers in English who have ever put pen to paper, or in his case have ever attempted to change a typewriter ribbon—only to foul it up. In his prime, Benchley was a man of low expectations and was, therefore, never disappointed. This may have been because he came from such a noble lineage. His grandfather, a virulent abolitionist, actually traveled to the slave state of Texas to act as a ticket agent for the Underground Railway, and his father was brave enough to serve out the Civil War in a Massachusetts regiment (and in the Union navy). Benchley senior survived, married, and our Robert Benchley seems to have been a sort of afterthought, born very late in the marriage, on September 15, 1889, and always in the shadow of his brother, Edmund. Edmund, born in 1876, was an all-round all-American boy, an athlete and then a West Point cadet, and he would be killed on July 1, 1898, at the Battle of San Juan Hill. The news arrived home on July 4, and ever after Robert associated celebratory fireworks with his brother’s death. Gloomy indeed! But the memory was made worse because, o hearing the news, Ma Benchley had cried, “why couldn’t it have been Robert?” As if in revenge, certainly in retrospect, Robert would make failure the central core of his comedy. His everyman persona was the sort of fellow who quaked in terror before visiting his medical doctor, constantly avoided even thinking about his dentist, and couldn’t bring himself to negotiate with the teller at his local bank. It was typical of Benchley that he could make comedy out of the sex lives of polyps and then, 15 years later, of newts. But there was something grand about him, boy and man. His brother’s fiancée took him under her wing and saw to his education. Except for that late cod piece, he stormed through Harvard as its chief comic, writing for the Lampoon and famous for his skits. In New York, he was a founding father of the Algonquin Round Table (and, for a time, Dorothy Parker’s favorite lover). And, latterly, Benchley enjoyed great successes in Hollywood. But his low expectations finally got him down. Always a hearty drinker, he died of cirrhosis in 1946. ©