BOB'S BITS

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In West Side Story, they made me use an accent, which I wasn't thrilled about because a lot of us, obviously, don't have them. Rita Moreno.

One faintly hears complaints, these days, from somewhere out in the underbrush, about the damage done to “our” moral fiber by people of Hispanic descent who seem, in this guise, to qualify as “them.” It’s a timely reminder to watch your pronouns. Perhaps the cavilers have in mind Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino. But really the only reason I am mentioning Rita today is that her uncle Paco (also a Hispanic) was a dancer in Spanish Harlem who trained up yet another Hispanic, Rosa Delores Alverio, starting when Rosa had only just arrived in this country, aged 11. Rosa, who was born in Puerto Rico on December 11, 1931, is better known these days as Rita Moreno, and Uncle Paco taught her to sing and dance and act quite nicely. Indeed, Rita Moreno is one of only a dozen Americans to win all four major entertainment awards, an Oscar (for West Side Story), a Grammy (for her children’s recording The Electric Company Album), a Tony (for her role in Terence McNally’s The Ritz), and two Emmys. She also won a Golden Globe for her performance in the original Broadway version of West Side Story. Along the way, Rita turned down Elvis Presley for Marlon Brando, with whom she lived for several years before marrying (1965) a quite respectable cardiologist named Leonard Gordon who became her manager (and the father of her daughter, Fernanda). More recently, Rita Moreno has been appearing pretty regularly in Law and Order and starred in the LA revival of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. I don’t know who Rita Moreno will vote for in 2016, but she has a choice. After all, George Walker Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and Barack Hussein Obama gave her the National Medal of Arts in 2010. ©

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California, Here I Come . . . Al Jolson, et al, 1921.

December 12 reminds us that just as we are the future of Europe so California is our future, and so we celebrate California “firsts” knowing that they would (or have) become ubiquitous. These have become common boons or common busts. Whether blessing or curse depends on one’s point of view, of course: they got Reagan as governor before we got him as president. But most of the iconic California innovations were mobility based, very appropriate for a state that is, tremor by tremor, slowly moving off into the Pacific Ocean. According to Daniel Boorstin, who was Librarian of Congress and knew about these things, California saw the first cafeteria (a disputed claim—one thinks the disputants must have taste bud trouble) and the first “motel,” the “Milestone Mo-Tel” in San Luis Obispo, which opened its doors on December 12, 1925. It was built in Spanish mission style, which itself spread as far as Duluth and Bangor where instead of looking like California it just looks odd. The Milestone Mo-Tel incorporated some astonishing features for the time, including a laundry, a grocery, an attached campground, and even a private toilet and bath in each unit. All this for $1.25 a night, pretty cheap really (under $20 at today’s prices). The proprietor thought he would make a killing by locating the Milestone Mo-Tel half-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco and by establishing copyright on the name “Mo-Tel.” He had plans for a franchise chain. Neither pipe dream worked out for him, although we got the whole package. A luckier California first, at least in the beginning, was the first ever Artichoke Queen of Castroville, California, who was Miss Norma Jean Baker. Queen of the Artichokes in 1947. Rumor has it that she never looked back.©

Bob Bliss

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We all lived rather excitedly and passionately, in those days. Marc Connelly on the Round Table.

The ‘Round Table’ met for long lunches in the Algonquin Hotel with manic frequency during New York’s gin-ridden Aspirin Age (1919-1929) and then ceased when the Great Hangover arrived with economic disaster and, not incidentally, the end of Prohibition. In its heyday, many RoundTablers were already famous or became so, mostly as writers in one or more genres but also actors (Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead spring incompatibly to mind), For most members, fame lingered on and we remember them still today: e.g. Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Noel Coward. But some faded away. One such was Marc Connelly, a charter member of the charmed circle, there from the beginning to the end and the originator of many of the Table’s best bon mots. Marc Connelly was born to peripatetic actors in McKeesport on December 13, 1890, and lived on for a very long time after the Round Table broke apart (he died in 1980). Marc Connelly was indifferently educated but managed to attain a stunning literacy and during the 1920s, singly or in collaboration with George Kauffman, wrote musicals, comedies, and avant garde dramas. Connelly plays (To the Ladies and Beggars on Horseback) were the breakthrough vehicles for Lynne Fontanne and Helen Hayes. Connelly himself was most famous for his Pulitzer Prize play, The Green Pastures (1930) with its all-black cast and biblical story line, and then The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934), but after that he faded into academic obscurity (he taught theater at Yale), resurfacing in the 1960s with a charming reminiscence (Voices Offstage, 1968) that guaranteed him a place in two modern films about the Round Table, the documentary The Ten-Year Lunch (1987) and the drama Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994). ©

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The creature (created thing) is always capable of a farther and perfecter degree of life. Lady Anne Conway.

The Finches were an aristocratic family that reappears throughout England’s ‘century of revolution.’ Besides allying with several other eminent “connections” (including the Thynnes and the Grimstons) they generally served the Stuart kings and, confusingly, several were named “Heneage.” When historians write about Finches, they write about men, but the family also spawned interesting women, none more so than Lady Anne Finch, philosopher and Quaker convert, born on December 14, 1631, at Kensington House, London (now Kensington Palace, belonging to the Windsors). Her father was one of the Heneages, Speaker of the Commons, and he having died her mother (a Cradock and possibly of Puritan bent) had her tutored in the classics (including Hebrew). Lady Anne also horned in on her brother’s Cambridge education, becoming an unofficial student of the philosopher Henry More. She married well and, as Lady Anne Conway, continued her philosophical studies with Viscount Conway’s blessing. Henry More wrote later that he had “scarce ever met with any Person, Man or Woman, of better Natural parts than Lady Conway.” We might have to rest content with that epitaph, but an Ms. by Lady Anne was found after her death and first published in 1692 (a modern edition also exists) as The Principles of the most ancient and modern philosophy. Her aim, theological and philosophic, was to rescue God from the “pantheism” of Hobbes and Spinoza but also from the vengeful temper accorded him by Puritans. Anne’s God, one of Quaker hue, aims to restore all parts of His creation (both men and women) to moral perfection. Today, Anne Conway’s work earns her a large entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she is viewed as a precursor to Leibniz. ©

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There is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply. Gustave Eiffel.

What would Paris be like without the Eiffel Tower? When it was being planned, a self-appointed “Committee of Three Hundred,” comprising virtually the whole of the French cultural establishment, answered emphatically that the “ridiculous tower” would crush under its “barbaric bulk” and deface by its “hateful shadow” all the capital’s beloved, majestic monuments. The vandal who perpetrated these dégradations was Gustave Eiffel, even before his eponymous tower the most famous engineer in all of France and now, of course, immortalized by his “hateful column of boiled sheet metal.” Gustave Eiffel was born of German immigrant stock in the Bourgogne region on December 15, 1832. His chemistry degree notwithstanding, Eiffel’s first big job was to design a railway bridge over the Garonne at Bourdeaux, and this landed him at the pinnacle of French engineering at the age of 30. It was, after all, the railway age, and Eiffel profited immensely from it, not only bridges but also stations (e.g. at Budapest and Toulouse) and even railway engines. Some of his bridges were quite beautiful (e.g. the viaduct at Garabit) but he was as famous for efficiency (his prefabricated bridges would knit together the French Empire’s rail systems from Algeria to Indochina) as for aesthetics. This may help to explain the art establishment’s horror at his 1889 Tour d’Eiffel but Gustave had already designed rather pleasing iron and steel ‘industrial sculptures’ for the Paris Exhibition of 1867 and the iron and steel skeleton for Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. His work was not to everyone’s taste, but it was long lasting. So we can at our leisure consider Paris without its tower, even New York without its Lady, and look also at the attached picture of Eiffel’s fine bridge at Garabit. ©

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A king is a thing that men have made for their own sakes. . . . just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat. John Selden.

Upwards social mobility may not have been conspicuous in early modern England, but there were many individual examples. Among them one of the most singular is that of John Selden. This son of a yeoman farmer (born on December 16, 1584) ended up as lover, possibly husband, and certainly sole heir of the Countess of Kent. But besides her possessions, Selden left a considerable estate of his own. Doubtless his rise owed in part to his “humanity, courtesy, and affability,” but nice guys do occasionally finish last, and Selden’s fortune owed more to his stupendous scholarship than to his good nature. Educated at Oxford and the Inner Temple, young lawyer Selden became interested in history wherein he hoped to find the deep essence of the law. In his pursuit of history, Selden mastered a dozen modern and ancient tongues including Samaritan and Aramaic. This arsenal, in turn, enabled him to move from legal to religious history, both of which, during his lifetime, became sharply controversial subjects. Although Selden was not above publishing books that would sell (e.g. his histories of dueling and of divorce) his work focused on issues that increasingly divided the king from his parliament, the people from their bishops, and led to revolution and regicide. Inevitably, Master Selden’s meticulous scholarship could not please everyone. He was imprisoned by Charles I in 1629-33, defended the king’s servants in the 1640s, irritated the Presbyterians beyond measure, and was purged from parliament by Colonel Pride in the climacteric of the Civil Wars. Along the way, he amassed a huge library and a long list of friends. He bequeathed the former to the Bodleian and left the latter to safeguard John Selden’s reputation as a very pleasant sort of fellow. ©

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Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there. John Greenleaf Whittier, 1848.

Most Huguenot refugees in early New England migrated easily to Calvinist communions (Anglican or Congregational), but some—reacting against their persecutions—became Quakers. Among them were the Feuilleverts, ancestors of John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier was born to Quakerism on December 17, 1807. His frail health worried his family, but he outlived them all. Whittier died in 1892, a beloved poet who wrote just the sort of stuff a college student, Margaretta Kerr, might give to her 11-year old sister, Lillian, for a Christmas present in 1886. Lillian was my grandmother, and I still have the book, beautifully printed and illustrated with appropriate line drawings. It reflects Whittier’s life and includes his abolitionist poetry, quite radical, (he saw slaves as “our countrymen” and agitated for immediate abolition), and his war poetry. Quaker or no, Whittier joyously celebrated the early emancipations that came with military conquest and deeply mourned the Union dead. So the book was an appropriate gift for daughters of a Union army veteran and radical Republican politician to give, to receive, and to read. But by 1886, and probably in the eyes of these two young sisters, Whittier was better known as a best-selling “Fireside Poet,” one who strictly adhered to conventional rules of meter and rhyme and wrote about simple things and conventional moral truths. And doubtless both Margaretta and Lillian knew by heart Whittier’s ‘O Brother Man’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’ which became classic Protestant hymns. Today the poet lives on in our memory as the namesake of Whittier College and, somewhat incongruously, of the John Greenleaf Whittier Memorial Bridge which carries the roaring traffic of I-95 across the Merrimack River. ©

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I can see no escape from the conclusion that they are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter. J J Thompson, Philosophical Magazine, 1897.

Among the many whose careers turned in wrong or at least unexpected directions was Joseph John Thompson, born in Manchester on December 18, 1856. He wanted to be an engineer, but his family (though not poor) couldn’t afford the apprenticeship fees, so Thompson was shunted off into education, at the new Owens College (now Manchester University) and then to Cambridge. In both places he had trouble deciding between chemistry and mathematics, but ultimately (1883) he graduated in mathematics, brilliantly enough to become a fellow of Trinity College and then, oddly, Cavendish Professor of Physics (1884). This surprised several people, including perhaps Thompson himself, but his genius was widely recognized whatever his métier. In the same year he was elected a member of the Royal Society and then, in 1890, married Rose Paget, daughter of the Regius Professor of Medicine. Now socially as well as academically secure, Thompson pioneered in several fields, for instance carrying on James Clerk Maxwell’s work in electromagnetism and always dabbling in chemistry, but Thompson is best known for his work in proving (in 1897) that the atom was not indivisible but constituted of very tiny negatively charged particles. He called them “corpuscles,” we call them “electrons,” but the Nobel committee was untroubled by terminological confusions (or disciplinary uncertainty) and in 1906 awarded Thompson the Nobel Prize in Physics. Thompson went on to make other discoveries in both chemistry and physics, to be remembered as a brilliant teacher (e.g. of other Nobelists like Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr), to become Master of Trinity College, to be knighted, and finally (1940) to be buried close by Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. ©

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When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. He will find his place and stay in it. Carter G. Woodson.

Berea College was founded in 1855, in the slave state of Kentucky, by a brave band of Baptist abolitionists. From the first it admitted both black and white students. It carried on as an integrated institution until 1904, when the Kentucky legislature decided that the danger this represented to (white) race solidarity could no longer be tolerated. So Carter G. Woodson just made it, getting his Bachelor of Literature degree from Berea in 1903. Woodson was a good student but it was in the nature of things at that time that the University of Chicago turned up its nose at a Berea sheepskin, so at Chicago Woodson earned both a BA and an MA in 1908. Born to ex-slave parents on December 19, 1875, Woodson went on to Harvard for his PhD (in history) in 1912, writing up research he had done while teaching at an all-black school in Washington DC. Woodson went on to join the faculty at Howard, where his research and scholarship made him “the father of black history.” But always he was the engaged scholar, pushing his local chapter of the NAACP into more radical action, resigning when it failed to follow his lead in a proposed boycott of segregated stores in our nation’s capital, and always insisting that true freedom for African-Americans required deep learning of their own history. Several of his publications have themselves become important historical documents, notably The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933). Woodson’s pursuit of deep learning led him to elect a monastic existence, “married to my work” he always said, and lived for decades in the Washington YMCA. Woodson died in 1950. In the same year, out in Kentucky, the law changed, and Berea College immediately resumed its historic role as a southern beacon of interracial education. ©

{I still find it shocking that it took that long...... SCG

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I believe that Christians in particular should read this book. The Bishop of Woolwich testifying in the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1960.

Philip Larkin is just about my favorite poet, I hope despite rather than because of his sometimes misanthropic verse. Larkin was born in 1922, and it’s just possible that he had his first heterosexual experience at the age of 41:

(which was rather late for me) . . .
Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Larkin referred to the British ban on D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, imposed immediately on its publication in 1928. The novel is famous for its physical descriptions of physical love (which in our surfeited age now seem naively poetic), but it wasn’t much liked even by the cognoscenti. The American bookseller and printer of Paris, Sylvia Beach, who had dared to publish Ulysses, refused to touch Chatterley even with a barge-pole, and Lawrence (deeply disappointed, deathly ill with TB and desperately in need of money) had it published in Florence. A British edition was published privately (and clandestinely) in 1929 by the dubious “Inky” Stephenson, but Lawrence now placed great hope on an American publication. Alas, the pleasures of buying and even of reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover were denied to the American public by an executive decision of the US Customs Service on December 20, 1929, just in time (so to speak) for Christmas. Lawrence wasted away soon after, dying in bed on March 2, 1930, reading a book about Columbus’s discovery of America (I like to think it was the one by Samuel Eliot Morison). In two quite famous obscenity trials (1959 in the USA and 1960 in the UK) Chatterley came off the banned list, possibly and perhaps just in time for the deflowering of Philip Larkin. ©

[Sorry to follow up so quickly but I just remembered that Lawrence could not possibly have been reading Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a book not published until 1942. Good morning. Bob]

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There was a solid streak of business sense in this woman, and she meant to get hers while the getting was good from a P G Wodehouse serial in WHC, 1921.

Innovations in printing and the growth of the literate market led in the late 19th century to an explosion in magazine circulation. Many publications were purely commercial, but some shaped values, politics, behavior. For instance the magazines’ ‘muckrakers’ scored hits on the robber barons and monopolies and helped make progressive reform politically possible. The Women’s Home Companion (WHC) was one such mag, and its heyday came with the 30-year editorship of Gertrude Battles Lane. In its 1941 obituary of Lane,Time magazine called her “the best man in the business.” This was as much a comment on Timese (a strange tongue) as on Lane, for indeed she was the best woman in the business, and she ran the show at WHC with panache and always with an eye to improving and enhancing women’s lives: household hints to be sure, but editorial features that focused also on the workplace, education, empowerment. Gertrude Battles Lane herself came up the woman’s way. Born in Maine on December 21, 1874, this piano tuner’s daughter got about as much education as a Maine girl could then get, her finishing school a year (1895-96) at a Boston business college learning to take dictation and keep books. In 1903 she took a lowly editorial position at WHC but was managing editor from 1911. WHC’s editorial offices were in New York, where Lane gathered an influential group of intellectual friends, including Edna Ferber, acquired interesting writers and columnists (e.g. P. G. Wodehouse, Eleanor Roosevelt and Anita Loos), and tripled WHC’s circulation, surpassing even The Ladies Home Journal. By then Lane was vice-president of WHC’s publishing company and, Time thought, the highest-paid woman in the country, at $900,000 (in today’s $$$$). ©

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Art is a kind of illness. Giacomo Puccini.

If ever a baby boy was fated to be a musician, it was Giacomo Puccini, born in Lucca, Tuscany, on December 22, 1858. His string of first names would take up most of this note, so suffice it to say that besides a couple of saints it included the names of his ancestors who had been, since 1740, maestro di cappella at St. Martin’s Cathedral. Giacomo broke the string, partly because his dad died when he was only six, partly no doubt because he was bound for higher achievement as the greatest genius, or second-greatest after Verdi, of 19th-century Italian opera. After studying music at a local academy (partly under the guidance of his uncle Fortunato), Puccini distinguished himself at the Milan Conservatory and launched his career with an opera first performed in 1884. The major landmarks that followed are titles known even to those who dislike opera: Manon Lescaut (premiered in 1893); La bohème (1896, conducted by Toscanini); Tosca (1900); and Madama Butterfly (1904). A serious automobile accident intervened between the composition and premiere of Butterfly, and this slowed the maestro down a bit. Puccini may also have been increasingly distracted by his complicated love life, including the suicide of a housemaid who had been accused (unfairly, it would turn out) by Madame Puccini of being Giacomo’s latest conquest. He was certainly distracted by his love of motor cars and hunting. So of his later operas, only Turandot (unfinished at his death, completed by Franco Alfano) has stood the test of time. Puccini died in 1924, and Turandot was first performed at La Scala in 1926. With that opera, Puccini gave us the now excessively famous and yet surpassingly beautiful tenor aria Nessun dorma (“none shall sleep”). ©

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I am going to give a good part of what I make to the Lord, but I can make better interest for Him by keeping it while I live. James Buchanan Duke.

The Library of Congress’s (LOC’s) online photo archive documents the advent of our industrial revolution, including film footage (prepared for the St. Louis World’s Fair) of George Westinghouse’s dynamo factory and, less salubriously, photos and drawings of James Buchanan Duke’s cigarette mills. Duke, born on December 23, 1856, at the start of James Buchanan’s appalling presidency, presents us with a ‘riches to riches’ story typical of the age of the robber barons. He inherited his tobacco holdings from his father, but improved on the processes first by importing to North Carolina sweated labor from New York (mainly Jewish tenement dwellers already inured to the piece-work discipline of cigarette rolling), breaking their union and then throwing most of them out of work with James Bonsack’s rolling machine, a weird-looking invention that enabled Duke to monopolize the American and then the British market. What’s really astonishing about the LOC collection, though, is its documentation of how hand rolling continued well into the 20th century, and not only in cigar making (in Indiana, Florida, Maine, and elsewhere) but also with “luxury” cigarettes, still in 1900-1920 typically made by immigrant families (men, women, and children) doing piecework in their dark urban tenements. It offers us a visual reminder that the history of American poverty is largely a history of the working poor. As for James Buchanan Duke, he followed Andrew Carnegie’s program of giving away most of his millions (e.g. to Duke University), but in 1925 he still managed to leave $100 million ($1.3 billion in 2015 $$) to 12-year old Doris Duke, who thus became “the richest little girl in the world.” Little Doris soon proved she was a chip off the old block by suing her mother for more of the estate. ©


luxury cigarettes, cigars

These photos from the LOC’s ‘American Memory’ collection (both are from the National Child Labor Archive) show luxury cigarette production in a New York tenement house, 1908, and workers in an Indiana cigar “factory”, 1910. Probably not luxury cigars. These photos and hundreds more were collected by Progressive Republicans intent on passing legislation to limit or prohibit child labor. Legislation, more or less appropriate to the problem, eventually passed in the 1910s and 1930s, at both federal and state level.

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You'll be thought cool// If you call it the joule.// But there'll be a howl// If you call it the jowl. Anonymous.

We approach the end of the hottest year since measures of average temperature have been available, and this has been the warmest December of my anecdotal memory. So we have a renewed interest in assessing energy costs and in agreeing wider definitions of those “costs,” to go beyond their dollars and cents. We can seek inspiration from the career of James Prescott Joule, born on December 24, 1818, who first arrived at an acceptable universal measure of the energy it took to produce heat (or “lift” or any change from one stable position to another). Birth situated him well for this challenge, for his father was a brewer (where better to learn science than in a brewhouse?) and he grew up in Manchester, increasingly a place of coal, fire, and steam but also the home of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, a passel of practical scientists that included John Dalton. Brewing gave Joules an interest in the pounds and pence costs of energy, a money measure; his tutelage under Dalton opened to him some better, more universal, more transferable measurements. There had been previous efforts, but Joules’s measure (that he first proposed in 1843, subsequently amended by argument and experiment) supplanted them. Arguing from science (and from a religious first principle that only God could destroy), James Joule gave us the “joule”, the mathematically measured amount of energy it takes to perform a certainly mathematically measured task—in his case raising the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. In 1878, Joule measured this at 772.55 “foot-pounds” of work. That number is inscribed on Joules’s gravestone, along with John 9:4: “I must work the works of Him that sent me, while it is day; the night cometh, when no man can work.” ©

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When we were . . . beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the waterside . . . some rested . . . and the rest tossed and reeled and danced , , , Dorothy Wordsworth, Journal, 15 April 1802.

William Wordsworth’s “dear, dear friend” in whose “voice I catch the language of my former heart” was his sister (and, possibly, alter ego) Dorothy, born on Christmas Day, 1771, when William was but a year old. Eleven years later they were separated by parental death, and for a time brother and sister lived far apart, with relatives. They were reunited in 1796 and lived together until William’s death in 1850. Although her last years were clouded by dementia, Dorothy in her long prime was a strong character, fast friends with (among others) William’s wife Mary and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who lodged with the Wordsworth ménage for extended periods in Somerset and then at Grasmere in the Lake District). She was by no means a dependent, tromping around the lakes by herself, or with a woman friend (Mary Barker), or with William. Dorothy journaled her walks, including an ascent of Scafell Pike in 1818(!!), and some her entries were later incorporated (without citation) in publications by William himself and then by Harriet Martineau. Not a great poet, Mary could nevertheless make words laugh, dance and reel, and her “Grasmere Journal” was finally published under her own name in 1897. Was she more than that? Perhaps so. Certainly her journal entry of a long walk in 1802, found later expression in William’s famous, characteristic “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, better known simply as “The Daffodils” (1804). In her journal (of a very long walk, from Grasmere to Ullswater) Dorothy wrote of how she and William chanced upon beautiful daffodils, some pillowing their heads on stones, others laughing and reeling and dancing in the wind, “ever glancing ever changing.” Anyone familiar with William’s wonderful poem will think that Dorothy Wordsworth deserves at least a footnote. ©

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Being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured father . . . I could not satisfy myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters. Rev'd Collins, in Pride and Prejudice.

Readers of Jane Austen know that many English estates were entailed to “heirs male,” so that if a landowner like Mr. Bennet and his lady failed to produce a boy, Bennet’s estate would pass on his death to some creepy cousin like the Rev’d Mr. Collins, leaving his five daughters (two of whom deserved better fates) high and dry. However, not all estates were entailed, including that of the Pulteney family, so when a couple of Pulteney brothers died childless, their kinswoman Frances Pulteney Johnson inherited the whole shooting match. On Frances’s death in 1782 the estate passed on to her 16-year old daughter Laura Pulteney (born on December 26, 1766), who would become one of the more interesting characters in Georgian high society, the more so as she was as rich as Croesus. By her father’s direction, Laura was educated in Paris “after the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” did a sort of female Grand Tour, and then returned to England to play (with her father) an active role in the management of her vast estates in Somerset, several other English counties, London, Scotland, and Britain’s American colonies. She used her wealth wisely, married well, became a noted philanthropist, and among other notions developed rather progressive ideas about marriage and divorce. She also acquired a noble title (Countess of Bath suo jure) which might have confused people down the ages (for there were also Marquesses of Bath—all male—at nearby Longleat) but Laura, Countess of Bath, died childless in 1806 and her title with her. Laura Pulteney, Countess of Bath, did not seek to entail her estate to a male succession. It is unfortunate, though, that she died before Pride and Prejudice could have instructed her in the matter, and at least as clearly as Rousseau. ©

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I beseech you to take interest in these sacred domains so expressively called laboratories. Louis Pasteur, 1878.

Education in 19th-century France was a political football, a contest played out between a monarchical and religious right and a republican and secular left. Louis Pasteur, born in the Jura on December 27, 1822, got a bit of both, his early schooling in his home parish and at a provincial Collège Royale, but he then moved on to the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. And in the process he moved from art (painting), his first love, to science, the love of his life. It was an uneasy courtship at first. He’d dabbled unsuccessfully in Chemistry at the Collège Royale, but at Paris he impressed his professors, themselves at the cutting edge of things, and by 1849 he had his doctorate (in two sciences), a professorship at Strasbourg, and had married the daughter of the university’s rector. Brilliant to a fault Pasteur moved onwards and upwards to Lille and then Paris, ultimately at the Institut Pasteur. At Lille and Paris he began his researches that led to the virtual discovery not of microbes per se but of their ecologies, first in processes of fermentation and decay and then in causing, or precipitating, or accompanying diseases in macro-organisms (big living things like us). In turn Pasteur invented pasteurization, discovered new vaccines (notably for cholera and rabies), and perhaps even more importantly made crystallography an important adjunct of molecular science (lacking X-rays, cyclotrons, and electron guns, he did this with fiendishly clever deployment of light beams). Pasteur was also known for his devotion to scientific method not only in his lab but in his classrooms. His reforms in science education clearly declared his allegiance to the republican and secular sides of his education, but did not dent his religiosity, either. ©

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I like the ephemeral thing about the theatre; every performance is a ghost—it’s there and then it is gone. Maggie Smith.

In 1969, aged only 35, Maggie Smith faced the considerable challenge of playing an older woman fiercely determined to be seen to be, believed to be, and indeed to be, still in her prime. She was Miss Jean Brodie, proto-fascist schoolmistress, and Smith played her faultlessly right down to the posh Edinburgh accent. And though clearly Maggie Smith did not learn how to be a fascist, she seems to have picked up something about long primes, for she is still at it. Born on December 28, 1934, Smith went to school but not university in Oxford, and learned her craft at the Oxford Playhouse doing the Bard. She often returns to Shakespeare, not of course a bad idea, but she has enjoyed the most amazingly varied career: stage, screen, and TV; tragedy, comedy, drama; winning the big prizes in every medium and every genre. Besides her Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Maggie Smith has won awards for her leading roles in Macbeth, Othello, Private Lives, A Room with a View, Private Function, and Lettice and Loveage, among others. Her most recent role, one that has her acting her age, is to play Miss Shepherd in Alan Bennett’s comedy-drama (just out this year), The Lady in the Van, about the female indigent who lived for years in a panel truck parked in Bennett’s driveway. Bennett himself is amazed. He says he cannot now visualize Miss Shepherd without seeing Maggie Smith. But readers may be more familiar with Maggie Smith as Harry Potter’s form mistress, aging and vital, stern and heroic, at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter saga. Or you may prefer her as the Dowager Countess, Lady Violet, in the long-running TV series, Downton Abbey. She shines at everything. So a very happy birthday, returns included, to Dame Maggie Smith. ©

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Justice delayed is justice denied. William Ewart Gladstone.

The March of Progress has claimed many victims, among them the old Green Dragon Public House in the village of Galgate, Lancashire. There until the 1970s you could get only a pint of mild (a distinctively northern brew), a shot of whiskey, or a glass of port (the venerable landlady famously claimed she never had call for other drinks). As you sipped you could enjoy the original decorations, spare though they were. On one wall, William Ewart Gladstone glowered across at an imperviously serene Queen Victoria, hanging on the other wall. Gladstone was in his age indeed a sternly moral figure, a Scotsman born (December 29, 1809) and bred in Liverpool, a favored child (though not the eldest son) of a wealthy father, a brilliant student (Classics and Mathematics) at Cambridge, a rescuer of prostitutes, and from 1832 a member of parliament (for over 60 years). Like Churchill after him, Gladstone slipped out of the Conservative Party but unlike Churchill he stayed out to become a founder of the Liberal Party and its most famous Prime Minister, advising the Queen through four premierships. Victoria never warmed to Gladstone, as was clear in the Green Dragon lounge bar. This may have been because the Audience Room was too small for two persons of such fabulous rectitude and unimpeachable morality but more likely because the queen preferred Gladstone’s great rival, Benjamin Disraeli, who in the 1840s stayed with the Tories over the same issue (to pun, opposing the rePeel of the Corn Laws) that drove Gladstone out. My old Penn professor, Holden Furber, used to assure me there was no need to memorize anything about parliamentary politics in the late 19th century, All one had to know was that when Gladstone was in, Disraeli was out. And, to be sure, vice-versa. ©

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More Dragon dreams

Three faithful readers, each of whom has probably and one certainly forgotten more about Gladstone than I ever learned, despite Prof Furber’s best efforts, have kindly filled out my memory of the Green Dragon and/or more clearly traced its downfall. Some tidbits to share. First, the venerable landlady was, by name, Hilda Biles. That name sounds so like something out of Coronation Street that even had I remembered it I would have been sure my memory was playing tricks on me. I do remember, though, that she had some connection, family perhaps, with one of the old owners of Yates & Jackson, which was occasionally given as a reason for her long tenure despite her defiance of market demands. The Dragon also apparently had more customers than I remembered, largely elderly folk (as they then seemed, anyway) identified by the click of dominos. There were also some bottled beers available, which I certainly had forgotten, and Ms. Hilda also insisted on using the old, larger measures for her “whisky," which—one of my former students gently reminded me—is how it’s spelled in Galgate. Another former student remembered that Hilda allowed you to move tables and chairs only if your party were four or more, otherwise you had to stand. But my memoirist was then a student, and it strikes me that Hilda might have been letting students know who was boss in the Dragon. She never got after me for moving a chair, doubtless stunned by my age and respectability.
I do remember the remodeling that occurred on Hilda’s death or retirement, and indeed at least once had a rather passable pub meal there under the new management. Alas, even good steak pie could not conquer the lack of adequate parking, and the Dragon (that spent some years as a Gifte Shoppe) is now listed as a "business opportunity, " No doubt it is one soon to be taken up by a courageous acolyte of Mr. Cameron’s intent on speeding Britain’s transition to a new economic reality.
Thanks, all, and yes, let us hope for better outcomes and better politicians in 2016. "Gladstone come back, all is forgiven.” (or even, perhaps, Disraeli)
Happy New Year. Bob

In ancient times they had no statistics, so they had to fall back on lies. Stephen Leacock.

A younger friend has just announced her intention of spending the whole of 2016 getting up to scratch on women writers. Paulette and I offered her some suggestions from our lists of favorites, and it struck us how idiosyncratic the category of “favorite writers” can be. But in the spirit of diffidence and humility, let me offer up Stephen Leacock, born in sunny Hampshire, England, on December 30, 1869, into a family with a strong impulse to move to a better life in the colonies. First they went to South Africa, but when that fizzled they decamped to an equally unsuccessful (but much colder) Ontario farm. These ruined dreams impelled Stephen, a clever lad, to learn political economy, which he did at the feet of Thorsten Veblen, at Chicago. He also imbibed some of the ironies and pathos of provincial life. So Stephen P. H. B. Leacock, to give him his full name, became a distinguished economist (at McGill in Montreal) and also for a time (circa 1910-1925) the most widely read humorist in the English-speaking world. Not only did Leacock prove beyond any cavil that Canadians could laugh, but he showed a host of others (to name a few, Groucho Marx, Robert Benchley, Jack Benny, and James Thurber) that quite ordinary lives and places can be quite extraordinarily funny. His memoir style of humor found an echo especially in the short “stories” of Benchley and Thurber, and indeed Leacock directly tutored Benchley in the art. Leacock wrote quite a bit of funny stuff, and you might not be able to get through it all in 2016. But start with Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich (1914), for they are very funny and, better yet, still in print, the former in a collectors’ edition that is a steal at US$27.50. ©

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To be beautiful is the birthright of every woman. Elizabeth Arden.

By choosing her name, the parents of Florence Nightingale Graham (born in Ontario on December 31, 1884) indicated some ambition for their baby girl, and indeed young Florence went to nursing school in Toronto. But that didn’t work out, and in 1909 Florence joined Elizabeth Hubbard in New York City to set up a beauty culturist business, “treating” women with various cosmetics. The partnership quickly dissolved, and Florence set out on her own, traveling to France to learn more about cosmetics, facial massage, and spa entrepreneurship. Back in the USA, she adapted her old shop front sign (“Elizabeth”) to name her new venture and set out to bring European sophistication to the American beauty business. She added “Arden” to the company name after the California racing estate of the Harriman family, and indeed when “Elizabeth Arden” hit the big time with her cosmetics business, she set herself up as a race horse owner. It was said that “Elizabeth Arden” treated her horses like her models and her models like her horses. Either way, she revolutionized the American beauty industry and became the most successful woman racing entrepreneur in the USA. Arden sold cosmetics to be sure, but her main insight was to add “treatment,” in more than 50 luxury shops and spas. These beauty treatment centers attracted rich and famous women (besides actresses Arden’s custom included Mamie Eisenhower, Peggy Goldwater, and Clare Booth Luce). Women who could not afford spa treatment bought Arden cosmetics, self-applied them, and hoped for the best. Arden herself was stylish, rich, and flamboyantly ageless, and this also helped the business which, by the time of her death in 1966, was number 1 in the USA and not doing any too badly in France, either. ©

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I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. Holden Caulfield

Readers’ Digest no longer appears in my waiting rooms, but it may still run a feature called "the most unforgettable character," about someone the writer has known who seems, well, ‘unforgettable.’ It would be as interesting to ask people about the most unforgettable characters they have met in a work of fiction. After all, most fiction is about (inter alia) ‘character.’ My list certainly includes Holden Caulfield, the ‘Catcher’ who captured imaginations with his poetic combination of infinite impressionability and rock-hard integrity. Although so very young, Holden had already ‘seen enough.’ Holden was the creature of Jerome David Salinger, J. D. as we know him, and may have been something of an authorial alter ego. J. D. Salinger was born (in Manhattan, January 1, 1919) to a Jewish cheese merchant from Louisville, KY, and a gentile girl from Atlantic, IA. His prosperous childhood (Park Avenue address, private education) was not a happy one. He had trouble fitting in, not least at the Valley Forge Military Academy. Then came World War II, combat at Utah Beach and the Bulge, a tour of a Dachau tributary, and a short time working with deNazification, before which time, Salinger—luckily for us—had already started to write about it. He impressed editors and Ernest Hemingway, who thought him “a helluva talent.” Holden himself came out of a 1945 short story (“Slight Rebellion off Madison”), had a brief tour through an apparently unpublished play, and then came gloriously to full life in The Catcher in the Rye (1951) to join Jake Barnes, Quentin Compson, Elizabeth Bennet, Billy Pilgrim, and Huckleberry Finn in my longish list of unforgettable characters. Salinger himself “disappeared” in the 1960s, having, perhaps, “seen enough.” He died a hermit in 2010. ©

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Madeleine de la Resistance. Fusilee a Dachau. Croix de Guerre. George Cross. From a memorial plaque at Dachau.

Among British agents in occupied France was a woman, code name “Madeleine.” Born in Moscow on January 2, 1914, “Madeleine” grew up in France, where she was an excellent if highly emotional student. She first came on the public scene as the writer of a children’s book, Twenty Jataka Tales (Paris, 1939). It was based on a series of legends about the Buddha, an interesting choice of subject for “Madeleine” was an Indian Muslim, a direct descendant of the last Mughal emperor, her father a Sufi religious teacher, her mother an American, from (of all places) Albuquerque. In her real life, the one she lived before the war, “Madeleine” was Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan. The Khan family fled to Britain in 1940 where Noor, as she was known, enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. In training as a radio operator, her cultural skills brought her to the attention of the Special Operations Executive, and she volunteered for the French section. Noor was flown into occupied France in June 1943, destined for work in “Prosper,” the largest Paris network. But as she arrived, “Prosper” collapsed, compromised by German counterintelligence. So “Madeleine” set up pretty much on her own and helped to reconstruct the network despite her superiors’ wish that she return immediately to Britain and safety. She performed her duties bravely until she, too, was captured (in late October 1943). Her recruiters had worried that her gentle nature might make her unsuitable for espionage, but under torture “Madeleine” revealed no secrets. Indeed, she made two escape attempts and was sent into Germany, in chains. “Madeleine” or, if you prefer, Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan, was executed by firing squad at Dachau in September 1944. ©

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The After Life in Roman Paganism. General title of a 10-lecture series delivered at the Yale Divinity School by Franz Cumont, 1923.

The idea that Christian doctrines as adumbrated by the apostles and the early Church Fathers might have had historical roots began to gather force with the explosion of German linguistic studies in the 18th and 19th centuries. While not necessarily hostile to Christian orthodoxies, this new, empirical approach raised doubts in some and was a factor in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s decision to leave the ministry. 80 years on, a Belgian scholar found it could still be objectionable to study the non-Christian roots of Christian beliefs when he was denied the chair of religious history at the University of Ghent. Despite the universal support of theological faculty and students, the Catholic minister of education in Belgium quashed his election and in 1910 appointed a more safely orthodox scholar. The man denied was Franz Valéry Marie Cumont, born to a wealthy Brussels family on January 3, 1868. A brilliant student, he devoted his life to studies of the archaeological artifacts and religious texts of classical antiquity, mainly Roman but also Greek and Persian. Cumont was particularly interested in Mithraic, Zoroastrian, Stoic, and Manichean traditions, and his work can be used to show that certain ‘Christian’ ideas were not unique to the preachings of Jesus or the apostles, or to the formal creeds and platforms of the early church. Syncretism, he argued from historical evidence, was endemic in the religious life of the classical eastern Mediterranean. Stung by his dismissal but a man of private means, Cumont continued to publish to the end of his days (1947). During his life and after, his ideas have been especially influential among Protestant theologians who, however, must study Cumont’s papers in Rome, where they are housed at the Academia Belgica. ©

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My grandfather wrote for vocal color, not skin color. Wieland Wagner, 1961, defending his decision to cast a “Black Venus” in Tannhauser.

The St. Louis Institute of Music (now defunct) offered music tuition to not quite all talented youths. In its heyday it sponsored a teenage talent contest, for which the first prize was a $1000 scholarship to the Institute. In 1954 the winner of this contest was Grace Melzia Bumbry, a junior at Sumner High School. Trouble was, Grace was black, and the Institute program (known with unintended irony as the Progressive Music Series) did not admit black people (save perhaps as cleaners). But winning the contest, if not the prize, moved Grace upwards from St. Louis, first to Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” (she moved Godfrey to tears), then Boston University’s music program, then Northwestern, then to the Music Academy of the West, and the next thing you knew Grace Bumbry was debuting at the Paris Opéra as Amneris in Verdi’s Aida (1960). She broke the the color line again at Bayreuth as Venus in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1961). She brought the house down in both places and thus provided yet another measure of the cost to this town of its racism. Grace Bumbry was born in St. Louis on January 4, 1937. Her father was a railway freight handler, her mother a housekeeper, and her music teacher at Sumner was the talented Kenneth Billups, who knew treasures when he heard them and encouraged Grace to develop hers slowly and aim high. High is where she got, only six years after Sumner, although her efforts to be seen as a true soprano were thought, by some, to be really too too high. Her best and most characteristic roles were in the mezzo range, but she sang both in all the world’s great houses. Now retired from the stage, Grace Bumbry lives in Salzburg and teaches in Berlin. There is on-line a nice picture of Grace receiving the Kennedy Center Award in 2009 from President Barack Obama.©