BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

PAGANISMS

The power of astrology broke down when . . . the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested: namely the geocentric system of the universe. Frnnz Cumont, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans(1912).

Thus, Cumont went on to say, “celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed [astrologists] of their mysterious prestige.” Well, it should have been so. But our bottomless credulity has insured that astrological predictions still abound, and not only in Chinese fortune cookies or the predictions of Indian marriage brokers. This in spite of the skepticism, and the massive scholarship, of Franz Valéry Marie Cumont, born in Aalst, Belgium, on January 3, 1868. After local schooling, his education took him to universities and museums in Ghent, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and Paris, and a good deal of fieldwork, too, in the western Balkans, Rome, and the Middle East. In the process, he became expert on early paganisms and cults in the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire. These included Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and several others. Cumont’s scholarship, combined with his careful conduct of archaeological digs, brought him prestigious appointments in Belgium. In his early 30s he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at the University of Ghent and as chief curator at the Musée du Cinquantenaire at Brussels. Like many scholars of his generation, Cumont was a man of considerable (inherited) wealth, and this (in addition to his scholarship) made him popular among his students and his academic colleagues. And then, in 1910, he was denied appointment to the chair of Roman history. This happened against the unanimous recommendation of the Ghent faculty, and was the work of minister of state the Baron Edouard Eugène François Descamps. Since Descamps was of the Catholic party, this was seen as religious interference in academic affairs. Amid protests, Cumont resigned his posts and embarked on a life of independent scholarship, mainly in Paris and Rome, and a raft of publications. All this likely had to do with Cumont’s work on the paganisms of the Roman Empire, and his emerging view that the early Christian church grew up in this conceptual world, that it borrowed much of its iconography and some of its ritual from those paganisms. In this, Cumont believed that the cult of Mithras (Mithraism) was particularly important, notably in its use of sacrificial meals and baptism and its belief in the immortality of the (converted) soul. Cumont even argued (incorrectly, as it finally turned out) that the God Mithras was born on December 25. Perhaps that was indeed the root of his troubles at Ghent, but when Cumont died, in 1947, he willed his extensive library to the Vatican. More likely Franz Cumont just wasn’t Catholic enough for Baron Descamps. Or perhaps the Baron was a secret devotee of astrology? ©.

[Stanley]

BRADLEY

[Walt Whitman] extolled the values of the common, the miracle of the mouse, the wholesome soundness of the calloused hand, the body’s sweat. He attempted “to make illustrious” the “procreative urge of the universe,” or of sex in man. E. Sculley Bradley.

I took Bradley’s sophomore survey on modern American literature in Fall semester 1962, having just transferred from Penn’s business school to “The College”. I was looking for inspiration, and Bradley seemed a good bet. He was Penn’s vice-provost for undergraduate education. He was reputed a great lecturer, and it was said that he graded, personally, all his students’ papers. I found all that to be true, and I prospered. My course grade was B+ (my highest semester grade so far), and on my final paper he’d given me an A (my first one!!) and made very complimentary remarks. The assignment was to offer a critique of “a contemporary writer.” I am sure that Professor Bradley had in mind someone like J. D. Salinger or Katherine Porter or Saul Bellow, but I chose Walt Kelly, creator of the comic strip “Pogo”. It was an odd choice, but I was a Pogo fanatic and had collected all of Kelly’s ‘annuals’ and his compendium Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-eyed Years with Pogo (1959), in which there was, really, a fair amount of prose. So I thought of Kelly as a writer. Goodness knows what Bradley thought when he saw my title, but he was a gentleman and a sportsman, accepted my definition of Kelly as “a contemporary writer”, and claimed to find great merit in my critique. As I learned more about literature and teaching, I became ever more grateful for, even amazed by, Bradley’s tutorial generosity. Edward Sculley Bradley was born into Philadelphia’s Quaker elite on January 4, 1897. He entered Penn as a freshman and then never left: BA 1919 (Phi Beta Kappa); MA 1921; PhD 1925; and then upwards through the ranks until he became a full professor in 1940. By then he’d made his mark as a pioneer in “American Studies” (an interdisciplinary approach to study of the USA) and, off campus, as a leading critic. As we learned in Bradley’s survey, he also knew everybody, writers like James Farrell, poets like William Carlos Williams, and the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins. We students could have accused Bradley of name-dropping, but his gossip was too entertaining for such carping. What I did not know, at the time, was that he had become a leading authority on Walt Whitman, and had just (in 1961) been appointed general editor of the Whitman Papers project. He was also the lead editor of the first great (and all-inclusive) teaching anthology, The American Tradition in Literature (2 vols, many editions). E. Sculley Bradley did not think that sophomores should be obliged to buy his books. I’m still grateful for that, but I owe Bradley even more for his generous decision to take seriously my ‘critical essay’ on a cartoonist. It was, perhaps, the miracle of the possum. ©.

[Stanley]

MURDERESS AND MARTYR

Each woman is a briefe of womankind,

And doth in little even as much containe,

As, on one day and night, all life we finde,

Of either, more is but the same againe:

God fram’d her so, that to her husband she,

As Eve, should all the world of woman be/

First stanza of Sir Thomas Overbury’s poem “A Wife” (written in 1613).

There is no better—or, depending on how you look at it, worse—summary of early modern English views of the ideal woman than Overbury’s poem, (fewer than 300 lines). Overbury’s aim was to dissuade his friend, Robert Carr, from marrying Lady Frances Howard. Not only was she already married (in 1604, at the age of 14) to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, but she had acquired a bad reputation at court and was already involved in a scandalous divorce case against Devereux. Her claim that he was impotent and the marriage thus unconsummated had already inspired much smutty gossip. To see it through, King James I had to pack the court. James, he of Bible fame, had his own reasons, for in 1607 he had taken on Robert Carr as a lover, showered Carr with many favors, and wanted to grant Carr one more (marriage to Lady Frances). Overbury thought Carr was going too far, and too fast, and so wrote the poem. And Overbury paid for it. For, having been sent to the Tower for disobeying King James (on another matter), he was poisoned, and died painfully (on September 14, 1613). The case was, still is, impossibly complicated, but probably the chief agent in the poisoning was Lady Frances herself (via an enema laced with sulfuric acid!). However, justice being what it was in Jacobean England, she never paid for her crime. She was found guilty, but she (and her new husband, Robert Carr) received King James’s royal pardon in 1622. But five of her underlings were hanged, at Tyburn, on November 14, 1615. One of them was Anne Turner who, according to documents and depositions, was a perfect fall guy, or fall girl. She was a female of lowly birth (January 5, 1576) who had somehow become a physician’s wife (thus knowledgeable about poisons), then widow, who had somehow wormed her way into Lady Frances’s household (and not as a servant). There she befriended an astrologer (who was also hanged for his part in Overbury’s murder). Better yet, Anne was a Roman Catholic, of which much was made in post-trial propaganda and gossip. In short, Anne Turner was the exact opposite of the ideal woman of Thomas Overbury’s famous poem (which was published in December 1615, as if to drive the point home.). Anne Turner then confessed, in detail, to her role in the crime and how it was managed. She even begged forgiveness for wearing fancy ruffs. And, best of all, she converted to Protestantism and conducted herself perfectly and penitently at the gallows. My guess is that the truth will never be known, but Anne Turner, confessed murderess and converted Protestant, was accorded a Church of England burial. ©

[Stanley]

ADELINE

Leicester Square . . . where music halls at night belch out crowds of stout imperialists. From The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Noonan, writing as ‘Robert Tressel’.

It’s a book I must read some day,. But for the moment let’s look at those music halls. In Noonan’s time (1870-1911) Leicester Square was dominated by two music halls, The Empire and The Alhambra, glowering at each other catty corner. On the square’s north side The Empire presented a Greco-Roman façade to The Alhambra’s Ottoman dream-style (complete with minarets), but inside both all was music hall jollity. Popular songs (some of them jingoistic celebrations of the British empire) jostled for attention with cross-talk acts, trapeze artists, Amazonian women, and even ballet dancers. Yes, in Victorian London the ballet became a music-hall standby! After the Alhambra’s experiment with the risqué ‘can-can,’ which resulted in the temporary loss of its music license, it turned to ballet. It was partly to add some higher-brow stuff to the music hall repertoire, but ads urged west-end gentlemen to consider the attractions of squiring ballerinas to tea or stronger drink, even between performances (for then they might still be “scantily dressed”). And there were plenty of ballerinas. The music halls’ corps de ballets grew large, and at The Empire and The Alhambra ballet became spectacle, a distinctively English translation of a continental art form. But there were among them serious dancers, primas one might say, who danced solo on stage and, when off-stage, served as instructors for the new recruits to the corps de ballet. At The Empire, from 1897, that crucial place belonged to Adeline Genée, who came to London from a promising career in Berlin and Munich. Adeline was born near Arhus, Denmark, as Anina Margerite Kirsten Jensen, on January 6, 1878. From the tender age of 10, she was trained to the dance by her adoptive father, her uncle Alexander and his wife, a Hungarian ballerina. As a teen-aged prodigy, Anina took a new name and, as Adeline, danced through Scandinavia before, at 18, fetching up in Berlin as understudy to an established prima. Ambitious for more, she accepted a telegraphed offer from The Empire, Leicester Square, where her special talents in miming gave her dancing roles special character. ‘just the ticket’ for music hall success. As one critic put it, “her feet twinkled, but so did her mind.” Another noted “the infusion of her own gracious personality” into the techniques of classical ballet. Thus Adeline Genée was well-suited to undertake the challenge to English music-hall ballet which came when Diaghilev revolutionized the art, in Paris, with his Ballets Russes. Adeline Genée turned instructor and impresario, and in 1920 we find her as one of the five cofounders (and the first president) of what became The Royal Academy of Dancing. Partly under her guidance, English ballet left the music hall for more refined company, higher-browed audiences, and royal patronage. ©