BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Hollywood had a double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle. Ben Hecht.

All lives are unusual, but among the most unusual lives of 20th-century Americans we’d have to include Ben Hecht’s. He was born in New York, February 28, 1894, into a family of immigrants from Minsk, who then almost immediately emigrated again, to Racine, where Ben learned to feel provincial, isolated, and frustrated. He worked it out by practicing the violin and acrobatics, but soon found better solace in Chicago, where he lived with relatives, knocked about a while, and became a journalist. He read voraciously, books and people, and turned what he found into a pioneering daily column, “One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago,” writing “just under the edge of the news as commonly understood,” several plays, and a best-selling novel. One of those plays was The Front Page, which vaulted Hecht to New York and then Hollywood and a career as (arguably) the most successful screenwriter of the century. He was prolific, brilliant, and above all quick, and the latter made him a hot property. He worked with Selznick, Hawks, Lubitsch, Capra, Huston, and Hitchcock. His credits included Scarface, His Girl Friday, The Sun Also Rises, The Front Page (of course), and A Farewell to Arms. His uncredited list is far longer, and includes, intriguingly, his role in ghost-writing Marilyn Monroe’s autobiography, My Story. Hecht’s opinion, late in life, was that he could have been a better writer had he done less of it, and there is truth in that. His autobiography, A Child of the Century (1954), won widespread critical acclaim. But he made too much money too quickly in Hollywood, and that defined his life and his fame. ©

[Stanley]

I yam what I yam. The invisible man, Chapter 13.

So it’s 1914 and you name your first-born after Ralph Waldo Emerson and you tell people you want him to be a poet. It’s not unique. Emerson, a representative spokesman for American culture, only died 30 years before and he’d written some inspiring things about childhood genius. On the other hand, if you are Lewis Ellison, a black construction worker, and you and your wife Ida live in Oklahoma City, maybe you’re getting a bit above yourselves in the naming game. But Ralph Waldo Ellison the boy was, born on March 1, 1914, and 100 years later his centenary would be celebrated in Oklahoma City and other places when too many speakers said he was “no longer the invisible man.” In line with Lewis’s and Ida’s hopes, Ralph Waldo almost became a poet, with some accomplishments in sculpture and music, but we know him as, indeed, the author of Invisible Man (1952), a brilliant novel (National Book Award, 1953) that made his reputation and secured a career as teacher, critic, and essayist, but never another novel (a second novel Ms. perished in a house fire in 1967). Invisible Man is often seen as a ‘tamer’ novel than Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright, for although they tell similar tales (why not?) and Ellison sought Wright’s advice in crafting the fiction, his unnamed protagonist has valuable possessions, not only a furnace room “warm and full of light” but a personal past and a culture he wants other people to see and to acknowledge and to accept. This ‘invisible man’ has a center of gravity that Wright denied to Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Maybe a bit of Emerson there, too, when you think about it. ©

[Stanley]

Wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space, and indefinite in duration. DeWitt Clinton.

During the 2012 campaign, President Obama’s comment that “you didn’t get there on your own” created a wave of self-induced apoplexy at Flox News and in the Romney camp. In our country, Obama said, “there are some things we do better together.” Somehow (according to O’Reilly et al) this denigrated private enterprise. They should read a book or two about how cleverly Americans used public assets and government enterprise to spur growth. This notion was fundamental to the Republican Party at its creation, and before that to a Transportation Revolution that made our very big country into a marketplace. A leading hero of this revolution was DeWitt Clinton, born on March 2, 1769, graduate of Columbia, who would become a distinguished naturalist, an enthusiastic historian, a patron of the arts, an unsuccessful presidential candidate (in 1812), and (oh, by the way) the builder of the Erie Canal. Well, actually, he didn’t do it “on his own.” Indeed, Clinton understood that it wouldn’t be built at all unless it was “done better together,” and so as governor of New York he mobilized the resources of the state to dig the great ditch that would transform the northern economy, make New York City the nation’s entrepot, impel the development of commercial banking, waken thousands to the virtues of enterprise (public or private), and do much to explain why, in 1860, the old northwest (tied to the northeast by a ribbon of water) would produce yet another public enterpriser (Abraham Lincoln) and make the Republican Party the strong center of Union sentiment in the Civil War. Not to mention the Transcontinental Railway. ©

[Stanley]

The love between these two odious characters was little suited to inspire a composer as poetic as M. Bizet. From an early review of Carmen.

Opera is a minority taste, and most will join me in admitting to having seen very few. But it’s an important genre, and some of the world’s most sublime music was composed for opera. Today we remember one of the most famous of them all, Carmen, by Georges Bizet, first performed in Paris on March 3, 1875. It was revolutionary in its subject matter, with a whole host of characters not one of whom would have been granted an audience with Napoléon III: there is a Gypsy girl (Carmen, a mezzo-soprano) who demands to experience life in a very large sense; the virtue-hero is a mere corporal, tenor Don José; the villain-hero a lowlife toréador, the baritone Escamillo; another corporal or two; a couple of smugglers; and some cigarette factory girls who, like Carmen, are on the prowl for something better. The proletarian character of the opera might be explained by the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune uprising, the abdication of the Bonapartes, and the equally limping debut of the Third Republic, but even so audiences were not thrilled. Nor were critics. We are reminded of NPR’s warning that once all music was new. Carmen’s sublime songs and pulsing dances waited for another time to become (e.g. last year) the second most-performed opera in the world, a favorite even of philistines. Back in 1875, though, the run would have ended in early June but Georges Bizet’s untimely death (June 3, at the age of 37) provoked a ghoulish interest among the bourgeosie, with no fewer than 4000 coming out for his funeral, and so the first-ever Carmen limped along for another dozen performances.© (Carmen will be broadcast from the Met this Saturday nationally on NPR. You can hear it for yourself. I am pretty sure UK residents can get it online.)

[Stanley]

Grab a pair of binos, go outside, and learn your way around the sky. Sir Patrick Moore.

As knowledge becomes professionalized, the self-taught person who rises to the top becomes rarer. In that sense we can all celebrate Patrick Alfred Caldwell Moore, born near London on March 4, 1923. Dad was a war hero and was perhaps disappointed in Patrick’s frailties (congenital heart issues); indeed Patrick was much closer to his mother. The family had the resources to educate Patrick privately, and as many home-schooled people do, he developed a consuming interest in one subject, astronomy. This interest was suspended by World War II, during which his fiancée was killed by a Luftwaffe bomb, which helped give Patrick another enthusiasm, a strong anti-German bias which he later extended to the whole continent. By 1950, he was a well known amateur astronomer, and from 1957 to 2012—a world record run—he presented the BBC’s The Sky at Night, a monthly program made compulsive by his enthusiasm for the subject. His astronomical discoveries and his membership in astronomical societies, made him a fitting candidate for an honorary Doctor of Science degree (Lancaster University, 1974) despite some feeling that his political loyalties ranged from harmless to the distasteful. These enthusiasms continued to convulse Patrick Moore the end of his life (2012) and included the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (harmless) and various stripes of ultra-nationalism (distasteful). Just so, he opposed blood sports, homosexuality, capital punishment, nuclear power, women in high positions (Thatcher excepted) and the European Union, all with a vehemence that (perhaps) characterizes many auto-didacts. ©

[Stanley]

The greatest advance in the knowledge of our planet since the celebrated discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries John Murray on the Challenger Expedition.

Historians are trained to think of ‘the age of exploration’ as being of the early modern era, Henry the Navigator, Columbus, Cabot and all that, but the 19th century has a good claim, and in the 19th century a new kind of exploring became important, even dominant, the scientific expedition. The US had a few of its own. Thanks to President Jefferson, Lewis & Clark did quite a bit of science on their way to and from Fort Clatsop, but Clarence King’s Fortieth Parallel survey (1867-72) was a better American example. HMS Beagle’s second voyage (1831-36) had several other objectives than science, but Charles Darwin made us forget them all. A more single-mindedly scientific expedition (one that also left its name on the seascape) was that of HMS Challenger, another sailing ship that set off round the world just before Christmas 1872, fully equipped with chemistry and biology labs, astronomical gear and ( not least) sounding equipment, and with a real scientist (Darwin was just an amateur) running the show. He was Charles Wyville Thomson, born in West Lothian on March 5, 1830, and only recently appointed to the chair of Natural History at Edinburgh. The Challenger Expedition (1872-76) was a huge success, discovering or confirming many things in and about the deep ocean (including of course the Challenger Deep), It won Thomson fame and a knighthood, but collating and reporting all the Challenger findings did Thomson in. Indeed, he may have died of depression, but in any case he expired just after his 52nd birthday. His great work was finished by his friend Sir John Murray, an oceanographer. ©

[Stanley]

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

One should, no doubt, always heed the reading advice of one’s friends. But in one case I haven’t, and it weighs heavily. Our friend Don Rice, a professor of French, used to visit us in summertime, in England, and one summer (circa 1978) he learned, to his horror, that I had never read anything by Gabriel García Márquez. Don had a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) with him, left it with me, and I have yet to read it. Meanwhile, García Márquez has won the Nobel Prize (1982), many other rewards, has published other novels (notably Love in the Time of Cholera) and short fiction, has died and has been lauded as “the greatest Colombian who ever lived” and, practically, as the founding father of a literary school, “magical realism.” Not only that, but this semester the Honors College offers a seminar on magical realism. And still Don’s book is on my shelves, unopened. García Márquez was born on March 6, 1927, in Aracataca, Colombia. His mother was a child of Colombia’s Liberal aristocracy, and indeed the boy was brought up by her parents, her father especially, whom García Márquez later called his “umbilical cord with history and reality.” Grandpa, a colonel in the Colombian army, gave to his grandson’s magical realism an undercurrent of democracy, socialism and anti-imperialism that have made Gabriel García Márquez a household name (“Gabo”) in South America and his imagined ‘home town’ of Macondo a place of literary pilgrimage for readers across the globe. Except for this one, of course; but I plan to travel to Macondo next year. ©

[Stanley]

The new plastic idea should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color. Piet Mondrian.

Many modern art genres are often abstract and apparently casual. In the museum or at a poetry reading, one hears “my eight year old could do better,” or “looks like the work of the average monkey.” But usually the artist first learned to submit to the discipline of rhyme and meter before breaking into free verse or to paint a basket of fruit before putting a canvas on the floor and throwing gobs of paint at it. It was thus with the most recognizable of all modernists, Piet Mondrian. His mature work is black lines, right angles, and primary colors. You can see a typical piece in the St. Louis Art Museum, Gallery 211, “Composition in Red and White: Nom 1/Composition No. 4 with red and blue” (1938-42). The canvas is almost perfectly a metre square and the title says it all. “Give me a ruler and some masking tape and I could do it myself.” Except I couldn’t. Mondrian’s learning curve began almost at birth (March 7, 1872) with his father, a drawing instructor, teaching him pencil sketches and then proceeded through impressionism, then post-impressionism, until in the hothouse of Paris-between-the-wars Piet hit on plane geometry and rationed spaces filled with pure, simple colors. Some of his finest work, including the St. Louis canvas, was done in old age, after he fled fascism and settled in New York in a big studio that he made his own by taping large paper sheets, gaily but plainly colored, in varied geometric shapes, on its flat white walls. These collages, as Mondrian’s “Wall Works,” have drawn crowds of art lovers—and the inevitable skeptics—around the world. ©

[Stanley]

I consider a typeface good when it can't be any gooder. Frederic Goudy.

The USA is not known for producing typeface designers, at least not before the digitization of everything. Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Gill, all were Europeans. Our most famous designer came to the craft late and almost by accident. Born on March 8, 1865, in Bloomington, Illinois, Frederic Goudy lived a very ordinary life and had ascended to the exalted position of bookkeeper for a Chicago real estate brokerage. And he thought himself a failure. Unbeknownst to his fellow Bartlebys, however, Goudy had become entranced, inspired, by the American version of the arts and crafts movement, and in 1895, moonlighting from accountancy, he and an English teacher (C. Lauren Hooper) set up the Camelot Press in Chicago, first using other typefaces to produce “craft printings” but then designing his first font, “Camelot,” a design he sold for just $10. A paltry take, but it inspired Goudy to set up a new printshop, the Village Press, and then move it east, finally (1923) settling in Marlboro, NY. Along the way, Bartleby-Goudy found his voice and fame, designing new type, putting an American twist on classics like Garamond, lecturing on design at New York University and the New York City Art Students’ League, and writing (and printing!) several works on typeface design (including The Alphabet, 1918, and Typologia, 1940). If like most of the world you use Microsoft Word you can find two of his creations in your fonts list, Copperplate Gothic and Goudy Old Style. You can download his Kennerly fonts for free, microdots from the internet. One suspects, though, that Frederic Goudy himself would rather see it in hot lead than in pixels. ©

[Stanley]

Mother. . . my worrying secret . . . is neither yours nor my fault . . . i was not meant to be an athlete, I was meant to be a composer. Samuel Barber, age 9, to his mother.

Samuel Osmond Barber II was born (March 9, 1910) in West Chester, PA, where his doctor father and musical mother fashioned for him a secure childhood and his aunt, Louise Homer, a singer at the Met, further encouraged him to think musically. One of his few early terrors was that he might be forced to play football. He was, he wrote at age 9, “meant to be a composer” and, indeed, that is what he did. He began formal musical studies at the Curtis Institute in 1924, where he met his life-long partner Gian Carlo Menotti, and continued in music at Columbia University. Barber had begun composing at seven, and at Curtis and Columbia he was recognized as a prodigy. At 25, he won a Pulitzer traveling scholarship and introduced his talents to Europeans and at 28 he had a work premiered by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. From then on, he was assured of musical work, well established in love, feted wherever he went, but clearly there were demons. He suffered from depression and alcoholism and developed a reputation for turning against his own work (he suppressed several and even went to the trouble of destroying all known copies of his Second Symphony). In spite of all that his music is generally known as reflective, melodic, and open, even happy. Almost un-modern, one might say. A 1947 piece that one would like to hear is Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a vocal composition written about writer James Agee’s idyllic childhood. The words were indeed by Agee; Barber meant the music as a “lyric rhapsody” to celebrate the good memories of a happy, dreamy adolescent savant. ©

[Stanley]

One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you? Bix Beiderbecke.

Sometimes an immortal gains a second immortality, as for Bix Beiderbecke in Britain’s (ITV) dramas by Alan Plater, now called The Beiderbecke Trilogy (1984-88). Bix, long dead (1931) played no direct role, but he gave the series its sound track and figured also in the temperament of the lead character, Trevor Chaplin, a woodwork instructor whose obsessions with classic jazz and with fellow teacher Jill Swinburne connected him with trouble, whether political corruption or nuclear waste pollution. Among other awards, the series won prizes for its sound track. Bix Beiderbecke himself had a short, unlikely life, born in Davenport, Iowa on March 10, 1903, as Leon Bismark. He later took his mother’s name, Beiderbecke, but what really stuck was his childhood nickname, Bix. Bix taught himself how to blow the trumpet, and some critics think his unique sound owed to his unorthodox fingering, others to a stormy childhood. Whatever the matter, it’s agreed that he turned on to jazz when he heard records brought home in 1919 by his soldier brother Burnie [sic]. By 1920, he was performing professionally (one of his bands was called “The Black Jazz Babies”) but failed to get his union card because he couldn’t sight read music. He also managed to become fairly well educated, but what sticks in memory is his meteoric rise to performing and recording fame, his long gigs in St. Louis, New Orleans, and New York with jazz greats, and his early death brought on by drink and exhaustion. It’s clearly not true that only the good die young, but in Bix Beiderbecke’s case the death of a gifted youth birthed a legend. ©

[Tripps]

I've got the book, the VHS tape, and the DVD's of the trilogy. I think it's one of the best things ever on TV. For what it's worth - I once heard the footballer Jimmy Greaves say the same thing.
I thought it was a bit far fetched when I first saw it, but it now looks more likely. In the family, I still use the word 'Beiderbecke' meaning stumbling across something unexpected, and wonderful. Like finding out that an American Professor knows all about it. Well done Mr Bob.

[Stanley]

There will always be plenty of things to compute. Vannevar Bush, 'As We May Think', July 1945.

In one of the great statistical oddities, it takes only 23 randomly selected people to have a 50/50 chance of finding two with the same birthday. So it’s hardly surprising that there are some other birthday coincidences, as for instance with March 11, the birthday of two prophets of the internet. They were Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890, in Everett, MA) and J C. R. (“Lick”) Licklider (March 11, 1915, in St. Louis, MO). Oddly enough, both were the sons of ministers, but before we judge that a meaningful coincidence please note that one (papa Bush) was a Universalist and the other a Baptist. And they came to their interests in what we would call computing by quite different routes. Bush, an engineer, would be most famous for directing American scientific research during WW II, Licklider for evolving a very scientific view of his main discipline, psychology. But their paths converged (they knew each other) in their fascination with binary numbers, electrical circuits, and the collation and transmission of information. Bush saw the possibilities mainly as ‘information technology.’ Indeed, Bush’s brain-child vision was rather like a universal library with no lending limits. Licklider incorporated this idea to be sure, but it was perhaps his original interest in psychology that led him to envision “his” internet as (in addition) embodying a new way of thinking, partly artificial intelligence but mainly bringing many human brains together, quickly and efficiently, to address common problems in uncommon ways. Neither lived to see either vision realized, although Lick Licklider came very close, dying in June 1990.©

I told Bob about your post David, he sent this message....
Please give my warmest regards to Tripps. and thanks. But tell him I cheated by living in England. Cheers, Bob

[Stanley]

Verses On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, George Berkeley, 1728.

My great-great grandfather was a “Yale Band” Congregationalist missionary in central Illinois in the 1840s. Other Yale Band zealots got to San Francisco Bay, where they would convert few sinners but lead the Union cause in 1860-61, help to found the University of California and then to name its city, Berkeley. Thereby hangs a tale, a poem, and a couple of paintings, for Berkeley CA was named for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, born in Ireland on March 12, 1685. Besides bishoping in the (Protestant) Church of Ireland, Berkeley would become an important philosopher, a westward-bound missionary himself (an Anglican in Puritan New England), and a prophet of empire. He was quite outside the Anglophone philosophical tradition (where empiricism and ‘common sense’ have ruled), but came into his own as modern physics tussled with the reality of relativism and literary criticism waxed post-modern. In New England, Berkeley converted few souls to Anglicanism but impressed all with his kindness and left his books behind for Yale’s library. He also pondered history and in 1728 wrote a famous poem (on “Arts and Learning in America”) whose last stanza begins with the line “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” By a long chain of highly unlikely links (which the idealist Berkeley would have enjoyed) his books and his poem would inspire the Yale Band, make him the obvious namesake of a western university town, hang his portrait in the UC library, and place the magnificent Leutze mural, “Westward . . .”, in the western staircase of the American House of Representatives. Westward Ho, indeed.©

[Tripps]

" But tell him I cheated by living in England."

I knew that, just for 27 years- I cheated too and found him with google.

[Stanley]

Dr Robert Bliss teaching at Lancaster in 1982. He doesn't look a lot different now.... A good man!

[Stanley]

When he was a boy he exercised his father's trade (butcher), but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech. Aubrey on Shakespeare.

People are sometimes known best for their lesser accomplishments, and this was John Aubrey’s fate. He is famed for his Brief Lives (deposited in 1693 as private manuscripts and not published until the 19th century) and scarcely known at all for his pioneering work in archeology and natural science, nor for his preservation of documents and artifacts, even of folk songs and old wives’ tales. Born on March 13 1626 to a wealthy gentry family, John Aubrey was educated privately and then at Oxford. Along the way, this affable, intelligent man made many friends, which was fortunate for us all because his father’s debts made Aubrey (from age 40) pretty much dependent on his friends’ generosity. By then, however, his character was well known, his interests judged entertaining or worthy, and his company sought. He was, at base, an antiquary, a collector. While a student, he’d become fascinated with the stone circle at Avebury. He would in due course show the stones to King Charles II but more importantly begin the long project of mapping the site. He would do the same for Stonehenge, Celtic hill forts, Roman encampments, burial sites, ancient roads, urns, coins, armor, costume, castles. Of course he entertained friends with his finds, and the Royal Society (he was an early member), but again most of this was in manuscript (notably Monumenta Britannica) and was not fully known until our time. But his lesser accomplishment, Brief Lives, is indeed a treasure. It lives on for its fact-based sketches, spiced with lively anecdote, written with charm and insight, often of people he knew or sought out, sometimes of the dead, mostly the well-known (Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes) but sometimes just people who had interested this odd scholar, this man who could not stop collecting. As a literary model, it is well worth a read. For those of us who study Aubrey’s century, it is a constant companion. ©

[Stanley]

People were amazed that a young girl had so far forgotten her womanhood as to want to study dentistry. Lucy Hobbs Taylor.

What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank asked in 2004, and thought he had the answer because he’d grown up there and started his political life as a conservative Republican. Among other puzzles, Frank noted that Kansas had a progressive past, born in conflict, from bloody John Brown to Mary Ellen Lease, the firebrand who promised to raise “less corn and more hell” in the 1890s. And in women’s rights Kansas was indeed a pioneer, becoming (in 1912) only the eighth state to grant women the vote. One Kansas fighter for equal rights was Lucy Hobbs, born on March 14, 1833 (in New York) and early (aged 17) showing her independence by setting up a dame school in frontier Michigan. Lucy then conceived the ambition of becoming a dentist, and with some difficulty obtained an apprenticeship (in Ohio), then moved to Iowa where she practiced without a license in the river town of McGregor. Soon the fledgling Iowa Dental Society took up her cause, licensed her, and demanded that she receive academic training. The Ohio College of Dental Surgery answered the call, and in 1866 Lucy Hobbs became the first woman to graduate from dental school. She then married James Taylor, taught him to be a dentist, and the couple moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where Lucy took up her dentist drills and her women’s rights cudgels, electing women to local offices (before they could vote!!) and at length winning support from progressive Republicans, including Governor Walter Stubbs. Lucy Hobbs Taylor died in 1910, victory in sight but not yet won. But then, she’d gained some ground herself. ©

[Stanley]

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. Dame Rebecca West.

Rebecca West lived long enough—she died aged 90 on March 15, 1983—to seem an artifact of a bygone age. But intellectually she remained fresh as a daisy, fresh as when (at only 19) she burst on the scene with a hilarious, cutting review of the great H. G. Wells’ novel, Marriage, a review which ended with her sharing Wells’ bed, bearing him a son, and then dunning him for child support. Yet they remained friends. “The greatest use of marriage,” she concluded, “is for riveting the fact of paternity on the male mind.” Born as Cicely Fairfield, a name Dickens might have conjured up for a wilting yet pretty heroine, West was anything but wilting. Among others, George Bernard Shaw felt the sting of her pen (being embraced by him was like “being the toast under a poached egg”) and yet admired her for it. Indeed she had many and varied friends, from the rather louche comedian Frankie Howard to Wells to cold warrior Allen Dulles to Doris Lessing and Martha Gellhorn. She was most like the last two, feminist, socialist, sometimes a pacifist, and a prolific writer in several genres. Unhappily, her tendency towards lacing her works with autobiographical references (including the novel The Fountain Overflows, 1957) was shared by her (and Wells’) son, Anthony West, himself a well-regarded writer who skewered his mother in his own autobiographical fiction, Heritage (1955) and then, mercilessly, in The New York Review of Books shortly after her death. If Rebecca deserved it (and of course she could not answer it) it was a sad postscript to a remarkably creative life.©

[Stanley]

They are all my members. What¹s the difference between Heifetz and a fiddler in a tavern? James Caesar Petrillo.

In all these “anniversary notes” (roughly 2000 survive) there is as yet not one leader of a labor union, a serious oversight. St. Louis was a union town, and at Lancaster there were always union leaders on the University Court. They were consulted by (Labour) Prime Ministers and (Democratic) Presidents, but they have gone out of fashion. At the same time, oddly enough, our income and wealth distribution structures have become ever more skewed, and we suffer supply-side paroxysms at any suggestion that the minimum wage should be a living wage. So let’s make amends with James Caesar Petrillo who was born on March 16, 1892, in Chicago, and would grow up to be a passable horn player (trumpet) and an indefatigable union leader. Petrillo led the American Federation of Musicians from 1940 to 1958 and after that advocated for radical causes (including full civil rights for African-Americans) from within the union leadership. He was—as union leaders must be—a terror on closed shop issues, so much that he became a national institution, the butt of unfriendly jokes on the Jack Benny Show, in Crosby & Hope films, even in Bugs Bunny cartoons (Bugs has a non-union monkey cranking his hurdy-gurdy and he “sure hopes” Petrillo doesn’t hear about it). I ran across him first in a Robertson Davies novel, on the issue of whether it was Abe Lincoln or James Petrillo who said, “we must save the union at all costs.” So play a memorial fanfare, trumpets please, for James Petrillo. A good place for it would be the Petrillo Bandshell at Chicago’s Grant Park. In the Windy City, they never forget. ©

[Stanley]

After all, in spite of opinion, prejudice or error, TIME will fix the real value upon this discovery. Withering, An Account of the Foxglove, 1785.

18th-century Americans thought Oxford and Cambridge morally suspect and intellectually moribund, and so modeled their new colleges after Edinburgh and Glasgow. This helps to explain our four-year baccalaureates and the early adoption of “useful” subjects like history and medicine (notably at Penn). Such attitudes were not confined to North America, and so it was that William Withering, a Shropshire lad born on March 17, 1741, went to Edinburgh. There he studied medicine and may have picked up on scientific method and the “common sense” philosophy. But he was also a friend of Erasmus Darwin so he might have absorbed those things at home. At any rate, he had an open mind about many things including folk remedies, and he noticed sharp improvements in seriously ill heart patients taking a traditional ‘old wives’ herbal dose. Much study convinced the young doctor that the critical ingredient came from the foxglove plant, a pretty weed (sometimes domesticated) with a flower that fits neatly over one’s little finger, hence known as digitalis. Withering was known widely for his scientific curiosity (besides botany he studied geology and astronomy), and was elected to the Royal Society in 1785. In the same year, he published An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses, its 158 case studies (101 of them judged successful as he adopted lighter doses) considered by some to mark the origin of modern therapeutics. Withering could not, however, find a remedy (or a curative climate) for his tuberculosis, and he succumbed to that illness in 1799. ©

[Stanley]

What art offers is space--a certain breathing room for the spirit. John Updike.

When he got together enough money, John Updike chose to live in Danvers, MA, which is what we call Salem Village today, but the ghastly goings-on of 1692-3 don’t seem to have colored his subsequent writing very much, save for the oddly comic The Witches of Eastwick (1984). What he saw wrong with America was very much in the present, notably the disappointing rewards that a life solidly rooted (or rather imprisoned) in the middle class can bring. That grisly-comic theme was thoroughly wrung out in the “Rabbit” novels, four of them (1960-1990), in which Rabbit is accurately measured by his surname, Angstrom. John Updike was born March 18, 1932 in Reading, PA, where his mother, Linda, encouraged a writerly streak, but at Harvard he conceived the odd ambition to take up cartoons for a living, and pursued that at the Ruskin in Oxford. Back in the US he started working for The New Yorker, and there found his métier and perhaps too his meter for he is a good writer in more than the tales he tells. In his fiction (such as I have read) his women fare better than his men, and of these my favorite is “S.”, an epistolary romp in which S, Sarah, a cheated wife, concludes that it is even worse to be neglected. Her letters “home” (to her husband, daughter, and friend “Midge”) are classics of satire, and it is satisfying too that S finishes up independently wealthy thanks to a fake fakir, the petty tyrant of an Arizona ashram. An English reviewer of S. asked, rhetorically, “Is it possible for a novelist to write too well?” John Updike tells us that this is perhaps so. ©

[Stanley]

Update on Updike

I mentioned the oddity of Updike’s ambition to be a cartoonist, but perhaps it was more than an oddity. When Updike was invited to St. Louis to receive the St. Louis Literary Award, in 1987, he was asked if there was anyone in town he would like the committee to invite. Yes, there was: Tom Engelhardt, the cartoonist for the Post-Dispatch, and his wife. Updike and Engelhardt studied together at the Ruskin.
Thanks to Ruth Bryant, active in this annual award for literature and one of our morning number, for this inside tip. (Among other awardees have been W H Auden, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Edward Albee, Chinua Achebe, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Drabble, and St. Louis’s own Bill Gass.)
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

Some day perhaps it will prove helpful that I spoke about these problems. Johann Peter Frank, The People's Misery-The Mother of Diseases. 1790.

The Affordable Care Act seems to many a radical innovation and a sinister infringement of liberty. Others might say it’s odd to protect the freedom to sicken and die, but the idea that the state has a public responsibility to maintain private persons’ health and treat their illnesses is of a respectable age. Not the first, but the most systematic pioneer of the idea was Johann Peter Frank, born in Bavaria on March 19, 1745. Frank studied medicine at Heidelberg and Strasbourg, and practiced medicine (and taught) in various places, mostly Vienna, but including a time as personal physician to Czar Alexander I. So one can presume he knew how to get paid for his services; but early on he was seized with the idea that medical health was a social good, not a private one, and in the early 1770s he embarked on what would become a life’s work (9 vols., 1779-1827) his System of a Complete Medical Policy. Using the best science of his time, he devised a life-cycle story of human health and illness, from before pregnancy to the grave; urged enactment of comprehensive hygiene laws (e.g. in water and food supplies); advocated international action on health issues; and argued at length that it was the duty (and the interest) of the state to maintain a citizen’s health and to treat a citizen’s illnesses. It has taken a while to get there, but of more immediate benefit was Frank’s meticulous keeping of statistical health records, which Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) would use, in Vienna, in 1847-53, to diagnose and then prevent the public health causes of childbirth fever.©

[Stanley]

That's right; put on the steam, fasten down the escape valve, and sit on it, and see where you'll land. Uncle Tom's Cabin.

There are several good stories about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s good story, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published on March 20, 1852. Possibly apocryphal is Abraham Lincoln’s greeting when she visited him in 1862: “the little woman who wrote the book that created this great war.” Better documented was her wartime visit to a training camp for black soldiers; they sang for her “a negro Marseillaise,” in call and response fashion. The little woman was “greatly moved” to hear “Go Down, Moses” sung this way. Her book, long seen as over-emotional, enfeebled by sentimentalism, is now accepted for what it was in its birth, a fiction of power and (on that ground alone, though there are others) of artfulness. Its enthusiastic reception in the free states helps to answer the great conundrum of why the North fought to keep the South in the union, just as the hysterically hostile southern response helps us to understand how Lincoln’s election could precipitate secession. What Ms. Stowe wasn’t prepared for was the book’s huge popularity in Britain, where she visited in 1853. Of course there was no copyright law, but the crowds that hailed her also donated (in dribs and drabs) $60,000 in compensation for lost royalties (perhaps $1 million in today’s dollars). More to the point as far as Stowe was concerned, the Duchess of Salisbury presented her with an abolitionist petition, “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters the Women of the United States of America.” Their signatures filled 26 specially-bound volumes. There was also a gold manacle, inscribed with the date of British Emancipation and with a space left blank for that great day in the United States, when it should come. Little book, little woman, great story, great war. ©