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.” ©.

[Stanley]

WELSHNESS

Nor do I think that any other nation than this of Wales, nor any other language, whatever may hereafter come to pass, shall on the day of severe examination before the Supreme Judge, answer for this corner of the earth. Giraldus Cambrensis, 1126-1223.

We tend to think of “identity politics” as a contemporary phenomenon, and indeed the term itself came into use only in the 1960s and 1970s. And today we have a host of identities, each claiming the right to be itself, and to be itself right out there, in public. But identity politics is not new. Think of a very diverse bunch of human beings who over a long century (circa 1776-1876) came to think of themselves as “Americans,” and then consider how difficult it has been for some of them to welcome “others” into that particular club. So when a young man baptized as David Samuel moved to London in 1770 and called himself “Dafydd Samwell” and not only that but adopted the ‘bardic’ name of Dafydd Ddu Feddyg, we can say he was identifying himself as Welsh. For him it wasn’t a ‘new’ identity. David Samuel was born in Denbighshire, North Wales, on October 15, 1751, son and grandson of Church of England vicars. His vicar grandfather Edward Samuel was a noted translator of Welsh poetry and song and David himself was undoubtedly bilingual. He based himself in London because he apprenticed to a Royal Navy ship’s surgeon, but while ashore in London he became a leading light of 18th-century London’s vigorous Welsh culture (or, I should say, subcultures or identities). Indeed he cofounded the Gwyneddigion Society, participated in Eisteddfods, wrote and declaimed Welsh poems and songs, sometimes, apparently, while drunk. He became famous because he went on Captain Cook’s voyage ‘round the world, during which he succeeded to the rank of chief surgeon and became Cook’s faithful companion and recorder. Samwell’s witty journals still survive, including his racy observations of Pacific islanders’ sexual mores. Back in London he became a well-known surgeon but also, as Dafydd Ddu Feddyg (‘Black David the Doctor’) a ‘public Welshman.’ Poet and rake, a Dylan Thomas before his time, Black David died, probably of drink and opium, in 1798. ©.

[Stanley]

EQUALITY

Jack never did anything mean to me. Love just turned to pity. That is no way to be married. Marguerite Rawalt, 1927, explaining her divorce from Jack Tindale,

Evidence is that Marguerite spent most of that 9-year marriage trying to keep Jack Tindale afloat, even when he’d taken up a women’s lingerie franchise in El Paso, TX. When he lit out for the north and a new life, she divorced him. Marguerite would marry again, happily, in 1937. But her marriage history is not the point of her story, except that on the second time around she retained her maiden name. Marguerite Rawalt was born in Illinois on October 16, 1895. It was a depression time, and to find sustenance the family moved several times before finally settling in Corpus Christi, TX. There they prospered enough to ensure a good school education for her. Rawalt graduated valedictorian, entered the University of Texas, but soon dropped out for financial reasons and enrolled in the School of Life. There she did well enough that when a former employer, Texas Governor Pat Neff, moved to Washington DC, Neff asked her to resume work for him. Once there she rejected Neff’s advice that women should never become lawyers. Marguerite got her law degree in 1933 (having edited the George Washington University Law School’s Review), and went to work for the New Deal. She joined the DC’s ‘Women’s Bar Association’ and helped to draft the first version of the “Equal Rights Amendment” (ERA). Although Rawalt would hold a number of important jobs, the ERA became her life’s avocation. It was ‘only’ written to make explicit the idea that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution applied to American women. Female citizens of the republic should enjoy equal rights with male citizens. As a senior lawyer in government service for nearly 30 years, and in private practice, Marguerite Rawalt took on many cases involving women’s rights (as against government legislation or employer discrimination) and filed amicus briefs on women’s rights in several landmark court cases. Probably her most important ‘private’ job was her presidency of the National Association of Business and Professional Women. But the Equal Rights Amendment has persistently failed of passage. It’s a mystery to me, and I could only ascribe it to some deep-seated but very specialized misogyny. With Trump’s election, however, it seems more likely that it stems from opposition to the 14th Amendment itself. At her death in 1989, the Corpus Christi Times, in a lengthy obit, was proud to claim her as a native daughter, perhaps because Rawalt had retained Corpus Christi as her voting address. But the New York Times failed to publish any obituary for her. In answer to several protests, the NYT’s obituary editor claimed “we have no files on her.” To put it as mildly as possible, that was mistaken. The New York Times is, after all, a newspaper of record. ©

[Stanley]

CANALETTO

The fellow is whimsical and varys his prices every day; and he that has a mind to have any of his work must not seem to be too fond of it, for he’ll be the worse treated for it, both for the price and the painting too. Owen McSwiny to Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond, 1727.

Owen McSwiny (1676-1754) is a story in himself, an Irishman of obscure origin who became one of England’s most successful impresarios in theatre, music, and finally art. But this quotation is of special interest. It’s good advice whatever one might be buying, mousetraps or horsewhips. In this case, though, McSwiny introduced the painter Canaletto to one of England’s great patrons, the 2nd Duke of Richmond, grandson of Charles II (one of the merry monarch’s illegitimate lines). The Duke bought some Canaletto miniatures and would go on to bring the painter to London and establish him for a time in Richmond House, the duke’s Whitehall mansion, from which Canaletto would paint two of the most famous “views” of 18th-century London. Canaletto was born Giovanni Antonio Canal on October 17, 1697, in Venice. He was the eldest child of the painter Bernardo Canal, and he would become known as Canaletto (a diminutive) because his first brush with art was as his father’s apprentice. In 1719, this trainee Canaletto sketched 23 drawings of Rome. Twenty-two of them now reside in the British Museum, London, and that is the hook on which this story hangs. There are so many Canalettos in British collections, not least in the royal collections, that it’s easy to think of him as an English painter. But he began by selling views of Venice and Rome to rich young men on the Grand Tour. He called them capriccios, or “whims”, an odd moniker for such realistic cityscapes. Canaletto was a genius at distance and perspective. Indeed he used a camera obscura for many of his paintings. But scholars have pointed out that he did play around with his views, bringing this or that building or tomb more sharply into focus. 18th-century England was bursting with wealth, and in 1746 Canaletto followed the money to England where he painted his capricci of London, but also of his patrons’ country houses, their city mansions, and (oddly) their ancestors’ tombs. Clearly the English, though already masters of literature and (with help from the Scots) finding their feet in philosophy, still felt the need to import artists. Not until Gainsborough and Turner can we espy a truly ‘great’ English painter. It’s fitting that one of them, J. M. W. Turner, is best known for his “views”. But Turner’s landscapes are truly “whims,” capricci. Representational accuracy is not Turner’s central concern. If you don’t believe me, just look at his clouds. Or his rivers. Turner’s buildings, when they appear, don’t matter. As for Canaletto, he returned to Venice in 1755 and resumed selling his capricci to grand tourists. He died in his family’s house in 1768. ©.

[Stanley]

ULFCYTEL

There’ll always be an England

And England shall be free

If England means as much to you

As England means to me.

--Popular song recorded by Vera Lynn, 1939.

This is a dubious assertion. Even in 1939 Ms. Lynn’s lyrics confused matters by calling on “Britons” and “the Empire too” to “shout it loud.” In Welsh, perhaps, or even Hindi? “England” as a concept or a country becomes foggier still in the more distant past. The current monarchy dates itself from Aethelstan who, in the 930s became by conquest the king of all the Angle-lands. (there were about seven of them), but if you could see or hear his proclamation you would be hard pressed to understand it. His language, such as it then was (a Germanic import), went into eclipse with the Norman Conquest, when a band of “French brigands” (as Tom Paine later called them) made a bastard rançais the official tongue. Three centuries later, English began to claw its way back, officially by the Statute of Pleading (1362), which required legal proceedings to be conducted in English. But the statute itself was written in French. It wasn’t until 1399 that “England” got itself an English-speaking king when Henry the Fourth (not ‘Henri Quatre’) gave his coronation address in our mother tongue. It was about the same time that Chaucer gave English per se a new lease on life with “Canterbury Tales.” But if you read it in the original you’ll need footnotes. These confusions were made manifest by the life of one of the first great “English” heroes, Ulfcytel Snillingr, who died in battle against a ‘foreign’ invader on October 18, 1016. It was the battle of Assandon, fought somewhere in Essex, perhaps at Ashdon or Ashford in today’s English. But you can already tell by his name that Ulfcytel was not very ‘English.’ He was most likely a recent immigrant who merged with the locals, or ‘natives,’ to become an official of some sort for King Aethelred the Unready. But he was never ‘promoted’ to become an earl (ealdorman). There is documentary evidence for Ulfcytel acting as a minister (thegn) for King Aethelred. Ulfcytel collected rents, witnessed or issued some charters, and there is a legend that he even married the king’s daughter, Wulfhild. Like most of the evidence concerning Ulfcytel, this latter tidbit comes from the sagas, both Danish and English (old Danish and old English), ‘skaldic’ verse, poetry rather than documentary evidence. Whoever he was, Ulfcytel was slain by the Danes, one of whom added insult to injury by marrying, as a trophy of war, the Princess Wulfhild. It was just the sort of thing that Vera Lynn would not sing about in 1939, when her green and pleasant land faced the possibility of yet another ‘foreign’ invasion. ©.

[Stanley]

DEVELOPMENTAL EPISODE

What are the effects of war on the developing personalities of children, with special consideration of the development of anxiety and aggression? Lois Meek Stolz, 1950.

This was one of the questions that started Dr. Stolz on her pioneering study of Father-Relations of War-Born Children. It was published in 1954 by Stanford University Press (where Stolz was professor of psychology), and was recommended reading for my course, at Penn (Spring, 1963), in developmental psychology. I took particular interest in that reading, for I was one of those war-born kids. My dad, a progressive Republican of strong convictions, had before I was born joined the ‘antifa’ movement known then as the US Army. He left the bosom of the family before my first birthday and didn’t come back until after my third. I’d had recurrent dreams about his return, striding across the front porch in full military dress—but it didn’t happen that way. Instead, dad came home in civvies. Mother and I met him at the railroad station (the C&NW) at Marshalltown, Iowa, then had pie at Stone’s restaurant, ‘under the viaduct.’ So I had questions about my little divorce from reality. Dr. Stolz’s book didn’t answer them directly, but I found her interviews reassuringly personal. She did her research in person, interviewing war-born kids and their fathers, of course, but also their mothers. I still have that dream, very occasionally, but it no longer troubles me. As for Dr. Lois Stolz, she was born Lois Meeks, in Washington D.C., on October 19, 1891. She went to a ‘normal’ school in DC, and might have gone straight into school teaching. Instead she went on to get her BA (from George Washington) and then her doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College. Always a ‘model teacher,’ she’d become also a model researcher in psychology, and was from 1947 on the Stanford faculty. She interviewed and observed her subjects and, being a ‘model teacher’, gained their confidence and drew them out. Over her whole career, she was particularly interested in children, whom she refused to regard as little robots or ‘blank slates’ on which the world would, willy-nilly, write its message. It’s thought that she learned this in practice, for during the war, already married and with a child of her own, she got involved (as an expert) with child care, day nurseries and day schools for children whose parents were involved in war rather than parenting, fathers abroad fighting fascists and mothers working in industries to produce the necessary weaponry. From this post-doctoral schooling, Lois Meek Stolz came to exercise a great and beneficial influence on the whole field of early education (pre-school through the grades) and, of course, on developmental psychology. I got an ‘A’, by the way. But I never fully understood the course and queried my grade. My psych professor told me it was a new experience for him. That’s OK, for ‘new experiences’ are, by definition, developmental. Anyway, he did not change the ‘A’. ©.

[Stanley]

DEMOCRACY IN EDUCATION

If I were asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education, I should say: ‘cease conceiving of education as a mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.’ John Dewey, Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal (1893).

When I was in college and graduate school, John Dewey was the progressive educator that conservatives most loved to hate. And, although he was by all reports a mild-mannered man, he returned the compliment. In his two main academic appointments, first at Chicago and then at Columbia, he did battle against conservative campus presidents: notably Robert Hutchins at Chicago and Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia. Neither could do much about the radical in their ranks because Dewey was such a prolific researcher, an acknowledged expert in philosophy, psychology, and education. But they didn’t have to like Dewey. Among Dewey’s many failings, from a campus president’s point of view, was that he involved himself too often (some would say continuously) in political controversy, and almost always on the side of the underside. At Chicago, Dewey liked the Pullman strikers and Eugene Debs and thought the university itself too much in the pay of plutocrats—understandably, for the university itself was a Rockefeller philanthropy. Later, Dewey consorted with communists and helped shape the progressive presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. But the main issue throughout was Dewey’s view of education itself. Education wasn’t ‘preparation.’ It couldn’t be menu-driven. Education, properly conceived, was life itself, an ongoing process in which the child (or parent), pupil (or teacher), and student (or professor) absorbed new knowledge and then, crucially, decided what to think about it, how (or whether?) to use it. Dewey’s was a democratic view of education. Indeed, to Dewey, education was democratic, had to be. It was not an elite pursuit best undertaken at elite colleges. It did not consist of worshipful absorption of ‘great works.’ And at any level education was centered on the neophyte, not the professional appointee or this or that corpus of received wisdom or perfected knowledge. John Dewey was born in Vermont on October 20, 1859, exactly 40 weeks after the death of the first “John Dewey”, who’d died in infancy. So we could say that our John Dewey, the progressive educator, was the direct result of his parents’ pragmatic decision to have another kid. Pragmatically, for his parents were of modest means, Dewey first attended the local land-grant, the University of Vermont, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1879, and then taught school. Needing more tools to be good at that, Dewey got a PhD in Psychology, or maybe one should call it Philosophy, and continued this experimental or experiential approach to education for the rest of his long life. John Dewey died, much mourned by some, in New York City in 1952. ©.

[Stanley]

ALICE CHAUCER

I shal seye sooth; tho housbondes that I hadde,

As thre of hem were goode, and two were badde.

The Wife of Bath, Prologue, from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.”

Five times married, and five times widowed, the Wife of Bath was ready to try a sixth. Unless she chose virginity (she conceded that that train had already left the station), her identity depended on it. And this was not to mention the pleasure, profit, and power which, if her luck held, would come with marriage. Geoffrey Chaucer blew hot and cold on women in his poetry, The Wife of Bath gets both, but there’s little doubt that the poet liked her. It’s a pity, then, that Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) didn’t live to observe the career of his granddaughter Alice Chaucer. Scholars aren’t sure of Alice’s birthdate. She first appears in the records on October 21, 1414 as a widow, made so by the death (on October 2) of her husband Sir John Phelip. By the death settlement, Alice kept title to her dowry lands in Ewelme, Oxfordshire. Her grief was further assuaged by gifts from her dead husband’s family, a gold cup and some furniture. Even better, Alice retained title to Sir John’s Bedfordshire lands. And, since Alice was at this time only about ten years old, we should assume that she also kept her virginity. So little Alice entered again on the marriage market as a hot property, and we are reminded, too, that the Chaucers, besides being descended from a poet, were an important courtier family. So Alice’s father Geoffrey and her mother Maud were able to arrange another good marriage, sometime after 1421, to Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury. That marriage turned out to be childless and lasted not more than seven years, Montagu (much older than Alice) dying in 1428. Alice did pretty well out of that one, too, in gold coinage and Montagu family plate, as well at his lands in Normandy. Now a noted court beauty, Alice then married William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk. This time she left little to chance. By 1435 Countess Alice was in effect co-owner of the Suffolk estates. As if to nail that deal down, she bore him a male heir (her only child) in 1442 and almost immediately was named as the boy’s guardian should Suffolk predecease her. Suffolk himself ended badly, dismissed from the court of Henry VI and then beheaded by a mob, but Alice sailed through almost without injury. Three marriages and three widowhoods left her a wealthy woman, holding in her own name lands in twenty-two counties and enough income to became a leading lender to Henry VI and then Richard III. Fittingly, given that she was after all still a Chaucer, Alice was also a leading patron of the poet John Lydgate (1370-1451). His religious poetry, especially his many “Ave Marias”, paints a rather different picture of the ideal in womanhood. Alice herself went back home to Ewelme where she died in 1475. ©.

[Stanley]

FOUNDING MOTHER

Our ambition is kindled by the same of those heroines of antiquity, who have rendered their sex illustrious, and have proved to the universe, that , , , if opinion and manners did not forbid us to march to glory by the same paths as the Men, we should at least equal, and sometimes surpass them in our love for the public good. Esther Reed, “Sentiments of an American Woman,” Broadside, 1780.

In these latter days of the Republic, with those paragons of maleness Steve. Josh, and Pete agonizing about female aggressiveness and the “replacement” of male by female virtues, let us remember a woman hero of the American Revolution, one who knew that she was effecting (at least imagining) the replacement of convention (“opinion and manners”) with a new model of deportment and behavior. She had plenty of examples to cite. In 1780, who better to cite than those Old Testament heroes Deborah, Judith, and Esther? If those ‘ladies’ were not enough, Esther Reed cited the countless heroines of sieges and battles, women who not only raised walls to defend their cities, dug trenches, even ‘darted’ “missile weapons on the enemy.” Listen up, Pete!! Women don’t have to be “Amazons” to do battle, no more than men need to emulate Hercules. But though there were at least two female artillerists in the American Revolutionary army, Ms. Reed is famed for her urban activism, organizing city women to resist the tyrant king and join in the “deliverance” of the res publica (deliverance was a significant word choice, given that Denise Reed also birthed six children, the last of whom she named George Washington Reed. He was born in 1780, so perhaps Reed was pregnant when she penned that broadside). As for Esther Reed herself, she was born Esther de Berdt, in London, on October 22, 1746. Her father was a successful merchant of French Huguenot extraction, so the family knew in its bones the dangers of tyranny and had fled Louis XIV’s France to escape it. Perhaps that made ‘Papa’ de Berdt less hostile than he might have been to Joseph Reed’s courting Esther. But Dennys de Berdt didn’t think much, at first, of the young American lawyer’s prospects. So the couple courted for five years before marrying, in London, in May 1770. But then History stepped in, in person so to speak, and the newlyweds hurried off to America where Joseph became the leader of Pennsylvania’s very radical, very democratic revolution (and adjutant general to Washington himself), while Esther (like so many other American women) managed the home front. And in a war like the American one, the home front was also the battlefront. As First Lady of the republican state of Pennsylvania, Esther led women in their battles, making uniforms and bandages, melting down their metals (precious for money, coarse for musket balls), and occasionally playing hell with the tyrant king’s paid soldiery. The one thing Esther de Berdt didn’t revolutionize was the third person male pronoun. But she was a true Daughter of Liberty. And, be it said, a founding mother into the bargain. Look around you, Petey. They’re everywhere. ©.

[Stanley]

BORING ISN'T

Scientific truth, like juristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. Edwin G. Boring, 1928.

Thus Edwin Boring began his argument that psychology was, properly speaking, a science. It was the major part of his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, and most of his auditors were glad to hear it. Their discipline was something of an orphan, unsure of its home. At Harvard, where Boring was soon to take up an appointment, psychology was still tied to the apron strings of the department of philosophy, as it had been since the days of the great philosopher (and psychologist) William James. Another great American thinker, John Dewey, thought of psychology as an adjunct to philosophy. Others thought that when it grew up it might become a ‘social science’—if that were not a contradiction in terms. For Boring, though, psychology was a science. After all, he’d come to it by that route. Edwin Boring was born in Philadelphia on October 23, 1886. The family had interests in science, his father being a pharmacist, and soon his elder sister, Alice, started out on the path that would make her a leading taxonomist. As for Edwin, who like Alice attended the Friends’ Central School, engineering seemed the preferred path. While Alice went on to Bryn Mawr (BA and PhD in Biology), Edwin went to Cornell, a Masters in Engineering, and then a job with Bethlehem Steel while teaching part-time in a local Moravian school. The school teaching ended badly, or comically, and he went back to Cornell, probably for a PhD in Engineering. He ended up with a doctorate in psychology, instead, having been captivated by a short course on animal behavior. His PhD was on his own behavior, observing the return of feeling to his forearm after he had cut, surgically, his ulnar nerve. This might be called scientific-aggressive behavior, and Boring’s science of psychology was indeed experimental and observational. He devised fiendishly clever experiments on visual perception (of colors and shapes), in humans and other species. He was no stranger to controversy, even though in his 1928 presidential address he claimed to “hate” it. Once at Harvard he led the campaign to divorce the discipline from philosophy. The decree came in 1934, after which Harvard became a center of experimental, observational psychology. Whether the divorce was amicable I cannot say. Boring’s argumentativeness became legendary. Perhaps, psychologically, it was compensatory for his short and slight frame. Just so, he became quite rotund, packing over 200 pounds onto his 5’7” frame. But Boring proved adept at settling arguments, too, and this trait helped him to finish the work for which he is now best remembered, his pioneering History of Experimental Psychology, published just one year after his presidential address. It’s all about arguments, and how they were settled. ©

[Stanley]

CHARTRES

If you are to get the full enjoyment of Chartres, you must for the time believe in Mary . . . and feel her presence as the architects did, in every stone they placed, and every touch they chiseled. Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres, 1913.

St. Louis is my ‘home city.’ I’ve lived here for 28 years, longer than anywhere else, and I like the city. (My dad once told me that I should “love” only people and pets). There is much to like: its symphony orchestra, now in its brand new facilities clustered around a remodeled Powell Hall. And there is the St. Louis Art Museum, best known by its acronym, SLAM. It stands in grand Beaux Arts style atop a hill in Forest Park, now nicely complemented (and complimented) by a modern addition. The city’s crowning glory is Forest Park itself, a grand expanse of greenery whose north entrance is only a long block from my door. The park is a tribute to the joint power of public taxation and private philanthropy, and even now work continues to transform its main watercourse into a series of natural environments (prairie, savanna, wetland) and man-made ones—in one of which, it can be said, water now flows uphill. Despite my father’s warning, I love the Park. Like the city, Forest Park has its blemishes, the most recent imposed by a tornado. One historical blemish was removed several years ago, when Mayor Lyda Krewson organized a raiding party to remove the park’s Confederate Memorial. The deed was done in the dead of night, offering no opportunity for public displays of racist nostalgia. But if that was ‘politically correct,’ then why not remove the statue of Saint Louis himself? Brazenly, so to speak, it stands right in front of SLAM, atop Art Hill and commanding the Forest Park’s Grand Basin. Before he was made a saint, he was Louis IX of France, a medieval king militant who wanted France unified, and who spilled a lot of blood towards that end. In battle Louis began the erosion of English claims to French territories. Less creditably he persecuted French Jewry and slaughtered its Albigensian heretics who disagreed with him on certain points of theology and church history. And then, of course, Louis IX was the Crusader King, laying waste to the Holy Land in order to save it from its inhabitants. No doubt about it, our ‘Saint’ Louis had blood on his hands. But we in modern “St. Louis” can’t really wash our hands of him, even though “we” include large numbers of Jews and Muslims, not to mention Protestants and non-believers. Diverse as we are, we all can admire our medieval namesake as a patron, for it was King Louis IX, not yet a saint, who dedicated the new Cathedral Church of St. Mary (en Français, Notre-Dame) at Chartres, in northern France, on October 24, 1260. It was one of the best things he ever did. And despite a fire or two, it still stands. It’s a monument we should be proud to associate with our city. Or, perhaps, vice-versa. ©.

[Stanley]

COBBLERS!

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember’d:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile.

ˆKing Henry V at Agincourt, in Shakespeare’s Henry V

King Henry’s speech may be the best known passage in all Shakespeare’s plays. It’s fairly long (49 lines) but tightly constructed. Henry replies to Westmoreland’s lament that they are so few by wrapping them all up as a band of brothers, not only his ‘real’ (royal) brothers and noble cousin (Westmoreland) but the meanest among them. It’s a victory speech, for although on that actual morning Henry’s army was badly outnumbered, those who first witnessed the play were comfortable in the knowledge that it was, would be, one of the greatest victories in the English crown’s long struggle to retain its French claims. And one of the last, too, for when Will wrote it (1599) Elizabeth I held no French real estate (although she had occasionally schemed to get Calais back, and her title still proclaimed her to be Queen of France). Anyway, Agincourt was a great victory, though stained by someone’s decision, post-battle, to kill all the French prisoners. Victory belonged to Henry V’s archers, whose longbows loosed death and panic on the French. Many of those bowmen were Welsh, which Shakespeare might have made more of (the great queen was, after all, a Tudor), but his speech seems to be all about England. Another interesting thing about the speech is the frequent mention of St. Crispin. Now of course the Battle of Agincourt was fought, as it happened, on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, 1415. So what other day would Shakespeare have put in the king’s mouth? St. Crispin (and his twin St. Crispinian) were amongst the most humble of all the early Christian martyrs, beheaded during Diocletian’s terrifying persecution on October 25, 285. Proper humility was of course a virtue, but they were made humble by their faith. Born into a noble family, their conversion made them outcasts, scum, and they kept their bodies and souls together (and fed their followers) by working leather. And how better for Shakespeare’s King Henry V to bind together his rag tag and bobtail army than to call on them (seven times, no less) to remember that it was a cobblers’ day. By the middle ages, St. Crispin’s Day festivals were marked (in England and France) by the presence of shoemakers’ guilds. And “Crispin Crispian” were their patron saints. So on that day, any man, ‘be he ne’er so vile” was by his presence and blood one of the band, the king’s brother in battle. The Roman Church has removed Crispin from its calendar. But, fittingly, Anglicans still celebrate St. Crispin’s Day. It’s a good day to remember humility and courage. They often go together. ©.

[Stanley]

BREAKFAST?

You can’t always believe what you read. C. W. Post.

That’s good advice, and, as it comes from one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs, C. W. Post, we might take it seriously. Trouble is, it might better be read as “you can’t always believe what you read, especially if it was written by C. W. Post.” He was born in Springfield, Illinois, on October 26, 1854. Post was prone to remind people that Springfield was also Abe Lincoln’s (adopted) home town, but for reasons that remain unclear Post didn’t want folks to know that he’d been christened Charles William Post and insisted on being addressed as “C. W.” Charles William or C. W., he didn’t do well at what was then called Illinois Industrial University and returned home to take sales work for an agricultural implements company. Ambitious to a fault, he worked hard. Besides sales, he turned inventor, and he patented several of his devices, just in case they turned out well. They did not. Post suffered a breakdown in 1885, and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he got involved in real estate schemes. One was his own, for which he made great promises (parks, trolleys, and cheap municipal electricity), but none of it panned out. Nor did his cheap, fancy writing paper (made of rotten cotton) nor his pulley-operated suspenders. So along came another breakdown, at which his long-suffering wife, Ella, loaded him on a stretcher and took him to the Kellogg brothers’ health spa at Battle Creek, Michigan. The Kelloggs may have cured him, but what they fed him there gave him another bright idea, and he pirated it to “invent” various health foods, centered around the idea of having a good breakfast. Several were clearly derived from Kellogg’s: ‘Corn Flakes’ became ‘Post Toasties’; ‘Caramel Coffee’ became ‘Post’s Postum.’ This may have inspired Post’s rather heterodox religious belief in the transmigration of souls, but where Kellogg’s promised only a better and more Christian life, Post claimed that one of his cereals (‘Grape-Nuts’) would actually cure appendicitis. And he tried to market his Toasties flakes as ‘Elijah’s Manna,’ That got him in trouble with the UK government, who thought it sacrilege. It was in defense that Post issued his disingenuous advice that one should not, necessarily, “believe” everything one read. It was about this time that Post began playing footsie with his secretary, Leila Young, leaving Ella in Springfield and making Leila a salaried “companion” to his daughter Marjorie Post. Marjorie would later build Mar-a-Lago, a place where, today, no one should believe what they read. As for Post, he died of something resembling appendicitis. C. W. Post’s mausoleum at Battle Creek is almost as big as Honest Abe’s at Springfield. As to Marjorie’s Mar-a- Lago, that is another story. ©.

[Stanley]

CREDULITY

True it is ‘faith that saves,’ but the faith that is without understanding is not faith, but credulity. Edward Maitland.

Well, he said it. But Maitland himself would gain fame (and some fortune) through ‘credulity,’ for he spent the last decades of his life as one of England’s leading spiritualists. Such an end might have surprised even him. Edward Maitland was born into a reasonably eminent family on October 27, 1824. His father was a clergyman of modest attainment, and Edward went to Cambridge with the intention of following in his father’s tread. Instead, after graduation, Edward embarked on a wandering life. First there was the California Gold Rush, no doubt a vivid experience for a young English gentleman. He then went on to Australia, where he may have exploited his family connections (there was an extensive Maitland cousinage) to become Commissioner of Crown Lands in New South Wales. There he married and fathered a son, but his wife soon died and left Edward a boy child, Charles. The boy turned out well: no thanks to Edward, who found the role of widower easier to play than that of single parent. And it was in that guise that he sailed back to England. Oddly, he’d given a “farewell lecture” in Sydney entitled “The meaning of the age.” This may have hinted at his future in spiritualism, maybe not, but it did suggest some grand ambition. At any rate, after a decade or so as an essayist and novelist (one novel, frankly autobiographical), he took up seancing: talking to the dead and helping others to do so. Modestly admitting to being unusually “sensitive”, he proved adept at lifting others into the same receptive state. Already a prolific writer, he found higher meaning in it. He had experienced previous lives, including as Marcus Aurelius and even a tree or two. Anna Kingsford (1846-1888) a clergyman’s wife of advanced views, had similar insights, and before and after her death (when Edward was still, of course, in communication with her), they made great stir in a society now prepared to be very sentimental indeed about death and the dead. Queen Victoria herself had shown some of the way with her long (40-year) period of mourning her beloved Prince Albert, which began with Albert’s death in 1861—about the time that Edward Maitland returned home. In some ways, for instance laying out Albert’s clothes, Victoria acted as if Albert were still present. But as far as we know, the great queen was never credulous enough to have a chat with the prince consort. Edward Maitland wrote his last great work (2 volumes, 1896). It was all about his communications with Anna Kingsford, both before and after Anna’s death. Shortly thereafter, Edward Maitland lost the power of speech. Dumfounded, he died in 1897. Victoria outlived him. She still mourned Albert, but the Queen Empress had her feet firmly planted on solid ground. ©.

[Stanley]

WROBLEWSKI

Homeland is not a blot on a map but the living essence of man. Czeslaw Milosz.

Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, knew a thing or two about the difficulty of being Polish. He was born in 1911 when there was no Poland. Milosz lived through several iterations of national dependency, fighting German invaders in 1939 and then standing against Russian domination after 1945. He went into exile in the USA. Poland, famously the “sick man of Europe,” had died by stages in the 18th century, at least as a “blot on a map.” But the idea of Poland was kept alive, not least by Polish aristocrats who retained their titles and properties and dreamed—in Polish—of better days to come. Milosz himself came from just such stock, a minor noble family in Lithuania that traced its Polish ancestry back to the 13th century. He lived long enough to become a great poet (in Polish), win the Nobel, die (2004) in the Polish city of Krakóv and be accorded the dignity of a Polish state funeral. The Polish physicist Zygmunt Wróblewski also came from the minor Polish aristocracy, born in what is now Belarus on October 28, 1845. He would become an important scientist, and had he lived long enough might have won the Nobel in Physics, but he died in in 1888, well before Alfred Nobel established the prizes that bear his name. Instead, the first Polish Nobelist was Madame Marie Curie (née Maria Sklodowska). Just like Curie, Zygmunt Wróblewski was a Polish nationalist, and got in trouble for it. He’d done well enough in school to get into university (at Kiev), but he’d already been bitten by the nationalist bug. At 18, he took part in an anti-Tsarist rising. He escaped the death penalty because of his youth, but suffered six years of “internal exile,” not in the dependent “kingdom” of Poland but in the Tsar’s Siberia. Once out, he went into real exile (in Prussia first, Paris later). He found internal freedom in physics, kept mainly quiet about politics, and returned “home” (in 1880) to the University of Krakóv. In Berlin, Paris, and Krakóv, often in partnership with another Polish physicist, Karol Olszewski, Zygmunt Wróblewski worked mainly in low temperature physics. In particular, he devised ways to produce (in commercially viable amounts) liquid oxygen and liquid nitrogen (both in 1883). Along the way, an inveterate tinkerer, he made a startling discovery, the potential of which we are still struggling with today: that is, at these very low temperatures, electrical superconductivity becomes possible. Given this and the sophisticated processes he used to condense gases, it is ironic that he died in a rather primitive accident. Wróblewski was tinkering with a kerosene lantern, spilled the liquid, and his clothes caught fire. His students did their best, but he died of his burns sixteen days later. He was only 43, and Poland was not yet a blot on the map. ©.

[Stanley]

BOSWELL

[James Boswell:] "Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."
[Samuel Johnson:] "That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help”

This exchange took place on May 16, 1763. Boswell recounted it three decades later in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Dr. Johnson, the great lexicographer, had many other things to say about Scotland, mostly uncomplimentary, which helps us to think that the above exchange may have taken place as reported. More importantly, we now know that James Boswell was a meticulous diarist. His “recordings” were just that, reports of encounters and conversations, jotted down very soon after they happened, some maybe even as they happened. Such recollections add vitality to Boswell’s Life of Johnson and secure its reputation as a classic of modern biography. Samuel Johnson was famous in his own right, but Boswell’s pen made Johnson’s fame secure for the ages. As for Boswell’s personal journals, his descendants kept them stowed away in trunks at the Boswell family’s home estate, Auchinleck, in Ayrshire. They were unearthed (near Dublin) in the 1920s, and finally found their way to Yale University, where in the 1950s they began to issue out, volume by volume, under the general editorship of Frederick Pottle. The result has been that James Boswell is now almost as famous as Samuel Johnson. James Boswell was born in Edinburgh on October 29, 1740. His father was 8th Laird of Auchinleck, and a high court judge. So James became a lawyer, and took the high road to London (to hijack another Johnson quotation) to try his luck there. It was partly ambition, partly mere rebellion. But James took also took along something of his mother’s strict Calvinism. This did not mean he would live a blameless life, but he would certainly record (keep book on) those things for which he might be blamed when he came before the high court of heaven. My father had the Pottle edition (1950) of Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763 and then a couple of others. Oaf that I was, I concluded that my father loved the journals for their racy bits. There were certainly many of these, kept mistresses and casual sexual encounters, exciting reading for a teenager. But as I learned more about my father’s mental illnesses, I began to think that dad’s interest was in Boswell’s mood swings and in Boswell’s sometimes merciless self-examininations. Boswell never did amount to much as a lawyer, but in his own right he now has almost as many biographers as Samuel Johnson. He was indeed a fascinating character, possibly bipolar. His journals demonstrate a sharp awareness of his own life, warts and all, and help us to see how he could become Dr. Johnson’s best biographer. Anyway, I now know that my parents got that 1950 edition of Boswell’s London Journal as a “dividend” book for their faithful membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club. ©.

[Stanley]

DR. DIFFERENCE

What the next world may be, never troubled my pate;

If not better than this, I beseech thee, Oh Fate,

When the bodies of millions fly up in a riot

To let the old carcass of Monsey lie quiet.

Messenger Monsey’s epitaph was penned by the old man himself, as death approached him. It suggests religious skepticism, defiance, a rather heavy wit, and a tendency he break into doggerel. As it turns out, all these things were true. To take just the last, Monsey’s long correspondence with Elizabeth Montagu was, on his part, entirely in rhyming verse. Montagu, the guiding spirit of London’s “Blue Stocking Society,” amused her salon with it. And since Montagu’s circle took in such as David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, and Frances Burney we might guess that Messenger Monsey had become well-known. But “notorious” might be the better word. Johnson and Burney had their own reasons for thinking Monsey crude. As for David Garrick, there was a well-traveled anecdote about Monsey verbally abusing Mrs. Garrick for taking too much time getting dinner to the table (roast chicken, apparently). Still, people seemed to tolerate Monsey’s ‘wit,’ perhaps because he had become one of London’s more famous doctors. To begin at his beginning, Messenger Monsey was born in Hackford, Norfolk, on October 30, 1694. He may have picked up some of his skepticism because his father, the local vicar, was ejected from his living for refusing to swear loyalty to England’s new monarchs, William and Mary. But the family retained enough resource to send Messenger to Cambridge, after which he apprenticed to a leading Norwich doctor. Newly doctored himself, he had sense enough to marry a wealthy widow and set up a rural practice. But then he effected a miracle ‘cure’ on the earl of Godolphin, who encouraged Monsey to move to London. There his practice expanded greatly. Some, for instance the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, enjoyed Monsey’s repartee. He was one of the few n Walpole’s retinue who refused to flatter (even to agree with) the master politician. Others were drawn to Monsey’s pugnacious adherence to old-fashioned ‘country’ cures. And still others, it would seem, liked to trade stories about the old codger. As Monsey aged his medical practice fell off, but he retained clients enough to pass on a fortune (£16,000) to his surviving daughter. As to his body, since resurrection did not seem to be an issue, Messenger Monsey developed an obsession to have himself (or, rather, his earthly remains) dissected by a Chelsea College colleague, as if to see what was wrong with it. This was done for the instruction of medical students, and the remaining parts (as Monsey directed) were stuffed away in a convenient hole. Monsey’s fame died with him, to be resurrected, for some reason, in 1868 when a Monsey memorial was installed at Hackford’s parish church. ©