BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

All the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms.

Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food.

Opening couplet of “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,” 1996.

Sherman Alexie’s poem proceeds through 20 couplets, each bursting with tragedy, each delivering bitter humor. The final couplet is an epitaph. Or, if you prefer, an ironic postscript.

In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written,

all the white people will be Indians and all the Indians will be ghosts.

The poem appeared in Alexie’s collection The Summer of Black Widow (1996), itself part of an extraordinary literary explosion. Starting with The Business of Fancydancing (poems, 1992) and ending with You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (memoir, 2017), Alexie published nineteen books: poetry, novels, and short stories. And then he disappeared. Almost. He still produces an occasional ‘literary newsletter’ for the online publication Substack, uses YouTube to conduct writing workshops, has ‘social media’ accounts, still participates in local (Seattle, WA) charitable activities. But my guess is that today he will celebrate his 59th birthday quietly, at home, with his wife Diane Tomhave and their two sons. As that 20-couplet poem suggests, theirs was a marriage of half breeds. Between them runs a cocktail of bloods, a half-dozen northwestern clans, a hint of Choctaw and Ho-Chunk, and a spice of European tribes including Sherman Alexie’s Russian great-great-great grandfather. Sherman Alexie was born on the Spokane Reservation on October 7, 1966. Trouble began almost instantly, for he was hydrocephalic. He survived that, but it left an enlarged head that became the butt of jokes and taunts at his reservation school and then at an all-white high school. He wasn’t too happy there, but at least he’d escaped from the “tortures” inflicted on him by the nuns who ran the reservation school. He went on to college, finally at Washington State where a couple of creative writing professors helped Alexie discover he’d rather be a writer than a doctor. Then came the books, several prestigious prizes and fellowships, and the 2017 memoir. While it was still in press, Alexie was informed he was to be awarded the Carnegie Medal. At about the same time, multiple allegations of sexual misconduct surfaced. Sherman Alexie acknowledged his guilt in a full public apology, withdrew his name from the Carnegie Prize list, retired ‘home’ to Seattle with his wife and family, and as far as publishing goes has remained silent ever since. It’s a story full of pain: pains endured and pains inflicted. To understand it, I suggest you read “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” It deals in real pain as well as imagined tragedy. It’s at the Poetry Foundation website. ©

[Stanley]

GEORGINA

Darling, if you saw how [my mother] writes, you would not wonder that I turn to you for love and claim a mother’s love, because I need it so desperately. Constance Wilde to Georgina, Lady Mount-Temple, January 2, 1891.

Constance Wilde (1858-1898), cut emotionally adrift by her own mother, was soon to be cut further adrift by her husband Oscar. It’s no surprise that Constance sought solace, nor that she would find it with Georginia Cowper-Temple, Lady Mount-Temple. There would be irony, though, for it was at Lady Mount-Temple’s country place, “Broadlands,” that Oscar Wilde fell in love with his “Bosie,” Lord Alfred Douglas, a same-sex affair that would bring Oscar’s world crashing down. The many letters from Constance Wilde also throw much light on the extraordinary life of Georgina Mount-Temple. Georgina, Baroness Mount-Temple was 70 in 1891. She was born Georgina Tollemarche on October 8, 1821, the daughter of a Royal Navy admiral. She absorbed her parents’ evangelical enthusiasms, then multiplied them to become the doyenne, patron, or high priestess, of a clutch of religious and reform movements. From 1874 to 1888 she and her husband (himself an unusual character) hosted annual religious conferences at their country estate, Broadlands. Although Lady Mount-Temple remained an Anglican, her enthusiasms were broadly based. Attendees at Broadlands included Quakers, Spiritualists, the occasional American revivalist, a smattering of Anglican bishops, deans, and canons, and not a few secular enthusiasts, for Lady Cowper-Temple was also a vegetarian and an animal rights campaigner. Politically, she and her husband aligned themselves with the more radical wing of the Liberal Party, as evidence by guest lists at the Broadlands Conferences. So why not take on Constance Wilde? Constance was a distant cousin and, besides, was on familiar terms with another galaxy of Lady Cowper-Temple’s friends, from the arts world. Georgina’s London home was a jumbled museum of pre-Raphaelite paintings, Arts & Crafts furniture, and William Morris wallpapers. How avant-garde she was may be doubted. Oscar Wilde himself may have satirized her in Lady Windermere’s Fan. But Constance’s letters kept her up to date even on the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Georgina was a woman of boundless energy and diverse enthusiasms. In a different era she might have become a leading businesswoman or parliamentarian. But it was the Victorian age, and she played the hands she was dealt. As she aged, she even dressed the part, looking more and more like an Anglican nun. Given the circumstances, her motherly love and care for Constance Wilde was no surprise. And although she disapproved of Oscar’s sexual preferences, she did offer him (and Constance) a refuge during the trials that brought him down. ©.

[Stanley]

SEWARD OF LANCASTER

I was thinking over the moral significance of Old School ties and the British social fabric. Rudyard Kipling, “The Tie,” 1934.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase ‘Old School Tie’ only appeared in 1920. But it seems ageless. And Kipling himself wrote the story “The Tie” in 1915, did not publish it, and then unearthed it for inclusion in a 1932 collection, Limits and Renewals. Kipling’s ‘Old School Tie’ is a pun, a double-entendre. It’s a physical thing, a neck tie, and it’s also a tie that binds. Elsewhere, and well before 1920, that ‘old school tie’ helps to explain how Albert Charles Seward became his generation’s leading paleobotanist, a knight, a fellow of the Royal Society, and the recipient of more honorary doctorates than I’d care to count. Seward was born in Lancaster, England, on October 9, 1863. His circumstances were modest but not humble. His father, an ironmonger, was of the city’s elite, and Albert attended the Lancaster Royal Grammar School (LRGS), an ancient foundation that took day boys from the city and boarders from rural gentry. Albert did well at chemistry, and as LRGS had old school ties with St. John’s, Cambridge, Albert went there to study chemistry in the same year that, back home, his father was elected mayor. But a provincial lad needed friends at Cambridge, and Seward fell under the tutorial influence of an LRGS ‘old boy’ at Cambridge, J. E. Marr, a geologist with a particular interest in fossil plants. The rest was history. A triple First in the natural sciences brought the reward of a Cambridge appointment, first at St. John’s, then (1886) a year’s study at Manchester University with Professor W. C. Williamson that solidified Seward’s desire to effect a union between geology and botany. He realized that ambition through his own monographic publications and capped it with his mammoth (4 volume) study Fossil Plants for Students of Botany and Geology (1898-1919). It’s not recorded whether Seward continued with the ‘old school tie’ by taking in students from LRGS. At Cambridge and in scientific research he was famed for his roles as colleague, friend, and patron. Elected Master of Downing College in 1915, he rescued the college’s tattered finances. extended its physical plant, and with the assistance of his wife, Marion Brewis, drew both faculty and students into its social and cultural life. (Marion, an artist, also illustrated his books). It’s said that Seward knew personally every Downing student. His botany laboratory spawned a host of leading scholars and teachers, several of whom wrote (in 1941) admiring obituaries of him in leading scientific journals. One of his more rewarding ties was with Francis Darwin, Charles’s son. They worked together on editing and publishing Charles Darwin’s letters, still a standard source for historians of science. ©.

[Stanley]

MODERATION?

The life of Tamerlane the Great . . . wherein are rare examples of heathenish piety, prudence, magnanimity, mercy, liberality, humility, justice, temperance, and valour. Samuel Clarke, 1653.

Tamerlane (1336-1405) was an odd subject for the Reverend Samuel Clarke to choose for an exemplary biography. Clarke was a Christian minister who found his chief delight in the community of a well-ordered church. He was born into just such a community on October 10, 1599, in Warwickshire where, at Wolston, his father Hugh Clarke, held the Christian ministry for over forty years. Educated by his father and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Samuel (after a willful and obstinate youth) had accepted the same calling, at a larger church (but not the cathedral) in Coventry. There he helped to shape Christian community and establish his own identity as a leader in the ‘Puritan’ movement within the established Church of England. That got him into plenty of trouble, but he was a moderate Puritan, enjoying his clerical office under the patronage of the moderate Puritan peer Lord Brooke, and soon Clarke identified as a Presbyterian. He wanted to rid the church of its popish tendencies but not to rid the nation of its king. During the Civil Wars he remained a moderate, urging negotiation, and in January 1649 was one of only 57 ministers to present a petition to the high court of Parliament not to take the king’s life. After the regicide, Clarke busied himself with whatever ministry he could find, although he had to accept ordination by the laity. But he feared that the radicals (Independents, Quakers, Anabaptists) would get out of hand, which seemed the more likely when Oliver Cromwell rose to power espousing toleration. Where, now, could a Presbyterian find comfort? It’s fascinating that Clarke found his ‘redemptive’ model in Tamerlane the Conqueror, creator of the vast Timurid Empire, the ‘Sword of Islam’ who ruled southwest Asia from the Himalayas to the Mediterranean and was at one time thought to threaten Christian Europe. But in 1653 Samuel Clarke espied in Tamerlane a faithful steward. The central idea blazed forth on the title page, from Romans 2:14-15. “When the Gentiles which have not the Law, do by nature the things contained in the Law, these having not the Law are a Law unto themselves, which shew the work of the Law written in their hearts.” Though an infidel, Tamerlane cared for his people, for their interests, and for lawful rule. So to Clarke it seemed that the 1660 Restoration of kingship, in the person of the ‘merry monarch’ Charles II, was cause for hope. But after a flurry of activity in aid of a “moderate” church settlement, Clarke proved as unbending as only a moderate can be. He would spend the rest of his long life writing still more thumbnail sketches of people whose chief virtue was to live by the rule of Law. ©

[Stanley]

PETRY

I wish I could say it was the result of a lot of thought. Actually . . . it was pure accident. Most of what I write is the result of what I can only say is accident. Ann Petry, 1976.

Ann Petry said so, and meant it. The quote comes from a Philadelphia Free Library series. and Petry was responding to a question from a 6th-grader. “Why did you write a book about Harriet Tubman?” Good question. Petry’s bio of Tubman was produced for middle school readers, part of the ‘Crowell Biographies’ series that Thomas Y. Crowell (1836-1915) started in 1876 as a game effort to convince children that history could be interesting. Its subjects were heroes. But there were few heroines, and still fewer persons of color. Crowell Publishing started to make amends in the 1940s. In addition to Petry’s pioneering Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railway (1956) the series now includes Mary Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Wilt Chamberlain, César Chavez, and even Malcolm X. So while Ann Petry’s response was truthful (her Tubman book started with a chance meeting in a New York department store), the fact that Crowell wanted a Tubman biography in 1956 was no accident. American history as read to and by children had been about white people, mostly white men. Nor was it ‘accident’ that she proved willing, even eager, to write about Tubman. Ann Petry was born black in Old Saybrook, CT, on October 11, 1908, the youngest of three daughters of Peter and Bertha Lane. Bertha owned a millinery and was a hairdresser. Peter was a pharmacist, having taken over the business from Bertha’s mother Anna James, Connecticut’s first black pharmacist. This family of five made up fully one-third of Old Saybrook’s total black population, but their prosperity was no accident. Their families were long established in New England, where slavery had been abolished in the revolutionary era. But then Ann married George Petry and moved with him to Harlem. Now racism (not unknown in Old Saybrook) became part of the web and woof of Ann’s life, an American structure, and she wrote angrily about it, first in black newspapers. After a few short stories came her novel The Street (1946). This put Ann Petry on the map, sold over a million copies, won her a prestigious fellowship, and brought her to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and a tribe of congressional McCarthyites, primitive whites already equipped with chips on their shoulders. After all, besides a novel about a black single mother and her inevitable privations, Ann Petry consorted with suspected Communists. Ann fought it for a while, for instance in her defense of Paul Robeson, but she had always meant to be a private person and retired back to Old Saybrook. And a story about a brave black woman seemed an attractive idea. She continued to write, in Old Saybrook but with occasional forays out into the world as a visiting professor of creative writing where, no doubt, she spoke often of how accidents can lead to good writing. But if local vigilantes should remove some Crowell volumes from school libraries to avoid causing emotional injury to white children, that will be no accident. ©

[Stanley]

CHILDRESS

A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich (1973). ‘Young adult’ novel by Alice Childress.

This book title is also a cross-cultural pun. In the novel, Benjie Johnson, a 13-year-old, has fallen on bad times and taken up heroin. He’s urged to make himself a better person, a ‘hero.’ Being Benjie, he responds cynically. And even if we didn’t already know it, his acid comment placed him firmly in New York City, where in the 1930s people started to use the word ‘hero’ to describe a sandwich so large that one had to be a hero to eat it. Elsewhere in the eastern US, Benjie might have said “hoagie” (in Philadelphia), “grinder” (in Boston), or “submarine” (in and around the naval shipyards of New London, CT). But everywhere the sandwich was a culinary expression of the Italian immigrant working class. So Benjie is a New Yorker, but more than that he is black, he lives in Harlem, and life has become so tough that ‘heroism’ seems out of the question. So he makes a joke of it. But Benjie turns out all right, which (given his problems) is heroic. In this he mirrors something of the life of the author, Alice Childress. She was born Alice Hendron in Charleston, South Carolina, on October 12, 1916. Effectively orphaned by her parents’ separation, she was sent to Harlem, where her doughty grandma, Eliza White, had carved out a good life at the very north end of 5th Avenue. Grandma may not have made a hero out of Alice, but she saw to a good schooling, finally in Harlem’s famed Wadleigh High School. Upon Eliza’s death, the Harlem Renaissance took over the task of making Alice (now married) into a writer of stature. With no college degree, Alice’s route ran first through stage acting in all-black productions, mostly on Harlem, but in 1949 she took a new life in hand with a one-act play, Florence, which oddly enough was about a southern black girl who makes her way in New York City. Further writing triumphs followed, but the way was hard. A convinced leftist, Alice worked with all-union actors and stagehands, and besides being dubious about black writers and actors Broadway was dead set against unions. Her successes were noted elsewhere, for instance by the BBC in Britain and Radcliffe College, in Massachusetts. So writing a young adult novel about a rebellious, unhappy teenager who finally redeems himself (and, while he was at that task, his stepfather too) was a natural thing to do. After Alice’s death, in 1993, several of her early plays have been resurrected on Broadway, and to great acclaim. As for the ‘hero,’ ‘hoagie,’ or ‘grinder’ sandwich, it marches on. Now, thanks to a successful national chain, it’s generally known as a “sub,” but although it may look like a New London shipyard submarine, the chain models its décor after the New York underground system, and the ‘sub’ has become a ‘Subway’ ®.

[Stanley]

ROCKS OF AGES

The science of the earth . . . invites us to be present at the origin of things, and to enter into the very worship of the Creator. John William Dawson, in The Story of Earth and Men (1887).

Since its birth, modern science has moved towards a collection of truths about the way the universe works. Or maybe not. A chemistry colleague taught a successful honors college seminar entitled “Bad Science,” a course that examined the proposition that modern science is an accumulation of errors. For an amateur like me, perhaps the best conclusion is that science is a messy progress. So Albert Einstein found, when his own revolutionary theories were almost immediately challenged by other physicists—many of them his friends!!—who advanced the unsettling ideas (and bizarre vocabulary) of ‘quantum’ physics. It was just so in geology. There pioneers like Robert Jameson and Charles Lyell proved that the earth was of great age and had hosted a succession of plant and animal species, many of them extinct. Charles Darwin took this idea to produce his On the Origin of Species (1859), proof positive that life forms had evolved, had not been ‘created.’ This is a neat, progressive story. But there were within the scientific community strong dissents. One of the strongest came from the geologist John William Dawson. He was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, on October 13, 1820, where he first learned geology by making pencil leads out of local shales, wherein he found many differing fossils. Dawson then went to Edinburgh, where (like Darwin before him) he studied geology under the tutelage of Robert Jameson. He then accompanied Charles Lyell back to Canada, on one of Lyell’s great geological surveys. After a time in school teaching, Dawson himself became a great geologist with many discoveries to his name. Given the technology available, he didn’t accurately date these fossils. But he sequenced them, and he could not but conclude that the earth itself was unimaginably ancient, that new species appeared and then went extinct. But Dawson could not abandon the ideas of God as the creator of all things and of man (humankind) as God’s most special creation. Besides being a Nova Scotian, Sir John William Dawson (Victoria knighted him in 1886) was a Presbyterian of Scottish heritage. For him, the proof was in two puddings: the rocks and the Bible. This required a poetic interpretation of the latter, especially Genesis 1, but Scottish Presbyterians had long been doing that, and the one Dawson favored was that the ‘days’ of creation were in fact ‘eras.’ Not only did Dawson produce a mountain of good science (he became one of the world’s leading geologists); he spent much time, money, and effort to prove that science and religion, specifically science and the Bible, were complementary. In some parts of the world that messy process is still underway. And given the odd science coming out of Washington these days, I’m still not ready to call it “progress.” ©

[Stanley]

ROCKS OF AGES

The science of the earth . . . invites us to be present at the origin of things, and to enter into the very worship of the Creator. John William Dawson, in The Story of Earth and Men (1887).

Since its birth, modern science has moved towards a collection of truths about the way the universe works. Or maybe not. A chemistry colleague taught a successful honors college seminar entitled “Bad Science,” a course that examined the proposition that modern science is an accumulation of errors. For an amateur like me, perhaps the best conclusion is that science is a messy progress. So Albert Einstein found, when his own revolutionary theories were almost immediately challenged by other physicists—many of them his friends!!—who advanced the unsettling ideas (and bizarre vocabulary) of ‘quantum’ physics. It was just so in geology. There pioneers like Robert Jameson and Charles Lyell proved that the earth was of great age and had hosted a succession of plant and animal species, many of them extinct. Charles Darwin took this idea to produce his On the Origin of Species (1859), proof positive that life forms had evolved, had not been ‘created.’ This is a neat, progressive story. But there were within the scientific community strong dissents. One of the strongest came from the geologist John William Dawson. He was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, on October 13, 1820, where he first learned geology by making pencil leads out of local shales, wherein he found many differing fossils. Dawson then went to Edinburgh, where (like Darwin before him) he studied geology under the tutelage of Robert Jameson. He then accompanied Charles Lyell back to Canada, on one of Lyell’s great geological surveys. After a time in school teaching, Dawson himself became a great geologist with many discoveries to his name. Given the technology available, he didn’t accurately date these fossils. But he sequenced them, and he could not but conclude that the earth itself was unimaginably ancient, that new species appeared and then went extinct. But Dawson could not abandon the ideas of God as the creator of all things and of man (humankind) as God’s most special creation. Besides being a Nova Scotian, Sir John William Dawson (Victoria knighted him in 1886) was a Presbyterian of Scottish heritage. For him, the proof was in two puddings: the rocks and the Bible. This required a poetic interpretation of the latter, especially Genesis 1, but Scottish Presbyterians had long been doing that, and the one Dawson favored was that the ‘days’ of creation were in fact ‘eras.’ Not only did Dawson produce a mountain of good science (he became one of the world’s leading geologists); he spent much time, money, and effort to prove that science and religion, specifically science and the Bible, were complementary. In some parts of the world that messy process is still underway. And given the odd science coming out of Washington these days, I’m still not ready to call it “progress.” ©

[Stanley]

PENN

For the love of God, me, and the poor country, be not so governmentish. William Penn, 1685.

Thus William Penn appealed to the Quaker-dominated Assembly of the infant colony of Pennsylvania. He was disappointed by its ingratitude. He had offered settlers a generous frame of government and individual rights, and here they were, asking for—no, demanding—a better deal and more specific guarantees. William Penn was disappointed, but he cannot have been surprised. Born on October 14, 1644, he was a Quaker himself, having converted to that radical faith in the late 1660s. That had surprised and disappointed his father, also named William. The elder Penn had been one of the Protectorate’s leading generals-at-sea, a very warlike occupation. His defection had been crucial to the 1660 Restoration of monarchy, and both King Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, were ever so grateful. They promised rewards to Admiral Penn, including a deathbed promise (the admiral died in 1670) to take care of his unruly Quaker son. The Stuarts were not known for keeping their promises, but in this case they had their own reasons. Charles II, and then in turn his brother, James II, believed that some measure of religious toleration would help preserve political stability, and were at times willing to extend that even to Quakers, a very radical sect founded by George Fox. Perhaps too radical, and the younger Penn after his conversion worked hard to bring order to the sect. After their founding (Fox had himself been a soldier in England’s revolutionary army), Quakers had embraced pacifism, and Penn hoped they could bring their peace testimony to England’s political life and develop a more coherent theological stance and governing structure. So when Charles II made good his debt by giving a huge American territory to William Penn, both the king and William Penn hoped that in America Quakers would create a peaceful and productive colony. Penn called it a ‘holy experiment,’ and in this experimental mode he guaranteed religious toleration, a generous set of rights, and a share in government. There is today little reason to doubt Penn’s sincerity. He was as ‘Quaker’ as it was possible for a gentleman to be, regarding men’s word as their bond (without oaths or swearing on the Bible) and addressing all comers with the intimate and egalitarian pronouns ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ But he also wanted to make money. That was one of the rubs. The other main rub was that Penn’s colonists, being Quaker and experienced in the ups and downs of Stuart promises about toleration, wanted it all in writing. They wanted no kings in America—a good idea even today—and a “True and Absolute Lord Proprietor” set up by Charles II looked too much like a king in waiting. So these Quaker colonists were, indeed, quite “governmentish.” ©.