BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

In a great city, a small city, or a village, a great theatre is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture. Lawrence Olivier

In Lancaster we were for years associated with the the Duke’s Playhouse. Paulette worked in the box office, and (after Daniel went off to America) we rented bedroom and kitchen privileges to an actor or actress, some for months at a time, others for just one play’s run (three weeks’ rehearsal, two weeks’ performance). And whether our tenant was an aging artisan or a youngster on the way up, we were each time vividly reminded of how provincial theatres fed the pools of talent that are the real sources of Britain’s eminence in the dramatic arts. So it’s easy to imagine myself, back in the 1920s, attending a play at Birmingham’s provincial repertory, and watching a very young (he was 19) Lawrence Olivier just beginning to learn his stuff, with the occasional help of London actors just a bit further along in their careers, such as a fairly young (25) Ralph Richardson. Olivier was born in Surrey on May 22, 1909, the son of a peripatetic Anglican minister, himself very high church and very theatrical, who at length decided that he actually wanted his son to become an actor. And so it was that after a brief spell (one year!!) at Elsie Fogerty’s Central School of Dramatic Art Lawrence Olivier joined the Birmingham repertory for a five year run (off and on, like our Lancaster tenants). Maybe I would have seen his talent. Others did. The Guardian, reviewing one of his early roles, said “he deserves and will get better parts.” Indeed. Even before that Ellen Terry saw him act in a school play (aged 10) and wrote in her diary “The small boy who played Brutus is already a great actor.” Just so. And on Olivier went. One wonders whether that path to greatness, for individuals and for the British theatre as a whole, will be closed off by Cameron’s cuts. ©

Later Bob added this:
For accuracy’s sake: Paulette reminds me that we started renting to actors well before Daniel left for Grinnell, and how could I forget? Our first lodger was an elderly gal from Glasgow, very memorable indeed, who’d been acting (mainly in the provinces) for well over 40 years. We had a bit of trouble with her, not much you understand but she was likely to drink a bit after her performances. The better her performance, the more she drank, and she was a pretty good actor. Also she didn’t like little girls, so Greta’s first experience of our theatrical renting was not ideal. Later lodgers quite liked both kids and so we went on with it. Even that first one was an education . . . . Cheers, Bob.

[I can't resist adding my own Duke's Playhouse story....June 1982 was a strange time in my life. The closest parallel I can recall is the 'Phoney War' in 1939 when I was almost four years old and, though I didn't quite understand what was going on, I was certain that something important was about to take place and that, it wasn't necessarily going to be nice. I had just finished three years at Lancaster as a 'mature' student and we were in the limbo between exams and results. Post degree depression was the order of the day, With me it took the form of idleness, I had earned a rest and by God I was going to have it. Predictably, this induced a certain amount of boredom and a willingness to try new things. Not everyone reacted to it in the same way, my friend Jane had lapsed into depression, convinced she had failed miserably. Actually she had triumphantly seized a first class degree and was poised to sail majestically into a distinguished academic career but at the time this was far from clear. It was in an effort to divert her and give a treat another friend of mine that I finished up at the Lancaster Literary Festival with Jane and Joyce listening to readings by a then comparatively unknown Glasgow poetess, Liz Lochead.
It was a very good choice. Jane and Joyce took an instant liking to each other and loved the poetry, I was fascinated by Miss Lochead's verse and the fact that beneath her slacks she seemed to be wearing fish net tights. I should explain that in addition to the degree I was under other pressures like a divorce and unaccustomed celibacy and conjectures like these were pleasant, if not disturbing. After an hour in the theatre we adjourned to the café for a spot of lunch.
The food, like the furniture, was low budget and Joyce and I eventually settled down on one side of a large old-fashioned kitchen table with Jane on the adjacent side to Joyce’s right and we ate our baked potatoes with 'various fillings'. Shortly after we sat down, two other people joined our table. The first was a sharp looking elderly woman with a plastic carrier bag who sat opposite me and the second was a large and very striking man who sat next to Jane. His most striking feature was his face. If ever a person could be described as 'Neanderthal', this was he. He had an enormous craggy brow and my first impression was that I wouldn't like to meet him in a dark alley. Joyce and Jane were oblivious to all this as they had launched into a. deep conversation which it seemed superfluous to interrupt, so I observed our companions.
It wasn't long before a conversation started, initiated by a few polite comments and questions which indicated that this was a chance meeting of two strangers. At first, there was nothing striking about the conversation, the sharp-looking woman had an abrupt manner of speech which fitted my first impression well but the shock came when the man spoke. he had the most distressing stammer I have ever heard, I wouldn't attempt to reproduce it on the page but it was a severe handicap.
Normally, one would expect this to be a barrier to communication but my elderly lady was made of sterner stuff. Where most people would have tactfully ignored the problem and abandoned the attempt to converse, she took the direct approach and asked him how long he had had his stammer. Eventually, painfully, the reply came. "Ever since I had my frontal lobotomy".
At this point I had the sense to realise that one of life's little bonuses was presenting itself and concentrated totally on what they were saying. I ceased to be aware of the two J's conversation, the background chatter of the cafe faded out and I became totally absorbed in the drama unfolding on the other side of the table.
The questioning continued and my elderly lady displayed an impressive knack of getting to the heart of the matter. "Why did you have to have it done?". "Because I wasn't nice to people". "Where were you working at the time?” "In the men’s outfitting department at Lewis's store in Manchester." "Did you go back to work there afterwards?" "Yes, but they put me in the stockroom." My mind was racing, as I ran through the possible scenarios behind this economical and direct exchange. What was it that this man did in the men's outfitting department that was so terrible that he had to have a frontal lobotomy and then be banished to the stockroom? Vague thoughts of inside leg measurements and unspeakable mutilations milled round in my head but the interrogator was not to be diverted by what she evidently regarded as
paltry detail. "Are you better now?"--- “Oh yes, certainly, I haven't done anything like that since but I do think it has affected my poetry."
This revelation produced an entirely new line of questioning and any chance 1 might have had of learning more about mutilations in the fitting room vanished with the statement "Oh, you write. So do I, I've brought my poems with me, have you any of yours?" "No, I don't need to, I know them by heart." My elderly lady was evidently impressed. "That's very clever of you, I can never remember mine." "Not really, I've only written two poems." With this, unbidden, he started a recitation of two short poems which were absolutely terrible. I am no psychologist but they were so laden with thinly veiled, and to my ear, violently sexual metaphors that it seemed to me that whatever good the operation had done for him, he was still a very dangerous individual. My elderly lady seemed to have no such qualms, congratulated him on the verses and proceeded to read a. couple of her own which, though not as violent, were equally bad and sexually oriented.
The conversation continued and, after ascertaining that they were both attending the festival the following day they made an appointment to meet and go to the performances together. With this, the elderly lady took up her carrier bag and left. The Neanderthal man swivelled slowly round in his seat reminding me of a six inch gun and speaking directly to me said, “Are you interested in poetry?"
At this point I knew that the last thing I wanted in the world was a conversation with this man or a reading of his poetry. I gabbled some excuse about having a bus to catch and, breaking into their conversation, bustled Jane and Joyce out of the café. I didn't allow them to stop until we reached the relative safety of the pavement outside the hall. They both thought I had fallen victim to some sort of post-examination brainstorm even though I retailed the conversation to them and tried to convince them that the man was dangerous. To this day I doubt whether they fully believe me. Jane returned to her post-examination angst, Joyce went back to her cleaning job and I drifted out of the safe harbour of Further Education into the stormy waters of Life.]

[Stanley]

A new and effective style might, with new materials and improved principles of construction, grow out of a fusion of styles. Sir Charles Barry.

Postmodernism in architecture is obsessed with ‘quotations,’ embellishments often merely decorative and, in the view of some sour critics, merely foppish. As a style it’s been called ‘neo-eclectic,’ and I don’t think that was meant as a compliment. But as a culture we have declared a great affection for a previous and quite intensive bout of neo-eclecticism, the architectural “revivalism” (to coin a usage) that dominated building styles from (say) 1750 to 1900. Check out Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington or Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, or indeed the ghostly classical columns of Academic Hall on the University of Missouri campus at Columbia. But there was no greater architectural plagiarist than Sir Charles Barry, the magpie genius whose buildings include the Houses of Parliament, several remarkable churches, and a tour’s worth of stately homes including Cliveden, Kingston Lacy, and Harewood House. Barry (born on May 23, 1795) invested his modest inheritance in a good marriage, but even before that in a three-year grand tour of the Mediterranean lands, during which he improved on his drawing skills and aesthetic sense to bring back a lifetime of building ideas, but not only for “quotations,” but for structures and functions too. These he would apply to new buildings (e.g. the long and exhausting parliament project) but especially to more or less extensive remodellings of country houses, the most notable of which, these days, will have to be Highclere Castle in Hampshire, aka ‘Totleigh Towers’in the Jeeves and Wooster series and more recently ‘Downton Abbey’ in the eponymous ITV/PBS saga. Barry’s ability to combine magnificence, charm, and domesticity (the Parliament building has been likened to an overgrown gentleman’s club) make his renaissance eclecticism wholly pleasing. Postmodernism indeed!!! ©

[He designed some magnificent town halls as well. Notably at Halifax. SG]

[Stanley]

It is a forest full of innocent beasts. W. H. Auden, in the Britten opera 'Paul Bunyan.'

William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, among others, prove beyond doubt that it was not necessary to escape ‘The South’ in order to write about it, although Faulkner did put Quentin Compson in a cold Harvard College dormitory so he could tell the stories of Absalom! Absalom! (and tell them to a Canadian!!). But a southern writer of special brilliance who did find inspiration in a northern exile was Carson McCullers. In particular, three stories at least in her masterwork collection The Ballad of the Sad Café (published on May 24, 1951) were conceived and written during her stay 1940-42) in the oddest ménage in (northern) cultural history, the “February House” (so christened by Anaïs Nin) at 7 Middagh Street in the Borough of Brooklyn. Nin called it that because several of its inhabitants had February birthdays, but what a list of livers-in and callers-in!!! Nin herself was one of many visitors. More or less long-term residents (besides McCullers) included W. H. Auden (who served as ‘housemother’ during his tenancy), Richard Wright, Louis MacNiece, Janet Flanner, Paul and Jane Bowles, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Erika and Klaus Mann (sibling children of Thomas Mann) and, just for variety, Gypsy Rose Lee. The building’s lessee and presiding genius (and mine host when drinks were served, which was possibly too often) was George Davis, the editor of Harpers Bazaar and at one point Carson McCullers’ lover (a point reached and passed before McCullers moved in at 7 Middagh Street). It’s possible that the Britten opera Paul Bunyan (libretto by Auden, lead tenor Pears) was also written there, and Gypsy Rose Lee’s G-String Murders (1941) definitely was. The building should be a national historic site but, alas, it is now the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. ©

[Stanley]

Southern efficiencies and northern charms, or vice versa. Various attributions.

President Kennedy’s memorable comment that “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and northern charm” was itself remembered, for there were (so to speak) earlier “sightings.” For instance there was a strikingly similar and widely cited comment made in 1945 by Senator Warren Magnuson on his first arrival there. The noted author and historian Walter Lord (1917-2002) used the same idea to comment on the services of the “Old Bay Line” whose steamships plied the waters of Chesapeake Bay, delivering people and “packets” from Baltimore, MD, to Norfolk, VA. Old Bay ships called also at points between, including Washington itself, Point Comfort, and Richmond. Its varied excellencies, Lord wrote, owed to “some magical blending of the best in the North and the South . . . the North its . . . mechanical proficiency . . . while the South contributed its gracious ease.” Its real name was the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, chartered in 1840 and still running its routes while John F. Kennedy made his way in Washington from House to Senate to Presidency. By then overnight packet ships were already museum pieces, but the Old Bay Line kept faithfully at its appointed rounds, and indeed became a fashionable curiosity, maintaining for instance its superb dining rooms (specializing in Chesapeake Bay delicacies) and its well-appointed private cabins (that were praised by travel writers as providers of romantic nights “almost” at sea). Walter Lord’s family wealth derived to some extent from the company (his grandfather had been president), and he bemoaned its demise. For, alas, the very long-lived Old Bay Line gave up its ghosts on May 25, 1962, its efficiencies and charms (and its last two packet ships) tied up forever at the Pratt Street Pier in Baltimore. ©

[Stanley]

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it. Isadora Duncan.

There was something odd about the Duncan siblings of San Francisco, and it wasn’t only that one of them was named Isadora. She was the youngest, born on May 26, 1877, and became the most famous, but all four became dancers. Of the child Isadora, it can be said that she taught dancing before she learned it. At about the time Isadora was born their banker father lost his fortune and his wife, the very much younger Mary Isadora, and after the divorce Mary moved across the Bay and to a hard life as a seamstress and piano teacher. The four kids went with her, and when our Isadora was only six they set up a dancing school, at home, where they taught other youngsters how they danced. “I followed my fantasy and improvised,” she remembered later, “teaching any pretty thing that came into my head.” Many would say that that also sums up her professional career, although she would put it differently, as a noble quest to rediscover dancing as a “sacred art,” shatter the conventions of classical ballet, and make dancing “natural.” Isadora is, indeed, regarded by her admirers as one of the founders of modern dance. Her revolution, for such it was, took place mainly in Europe where she established dancing schools, mainly for young women, in Germany, Britain, France and, when the Revolution came along, Soviet Russia. Her pupils, some calling themselves the “isadorables,” would continue her mission. Isadora Duncan also established a well-deserved reputation for eccentricity and tragedy in almost every department of life, not least her own death, in bizarre motoring accident in Nice, in September 1927. Her siblings, Elizabeth, Augustin, and Raymond, lived on to complete similar but not quite such notorious lives. ©

[Stanley]

It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be used. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, an already well-known science writer was under attack from the chemical industry and sectors of the farm lobby. The senior chemist at American Cyanamid called her “a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.” Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, found it oddly sinister that she wasn’t married, and decided she was “probably a Communist.” DuPont and Velsicol (between them manufacturers of DDT, 2 4-D, chlordane, and heptachlor) threatened lawsuits against her publishers. That failing, they launched an expensive PR campaign to denigrate her research and attack her person and to threaten the rest of us with a “return to the dark ages” if we dared to take her seriously. Even today you can find well-funded websites that accuse her of mass murder or bad science or both. This alleged savior of mosquitos and purveyor of malaria was Rachel Carson, born in rural Pennsylvania on May 27, 1909, and she was trying to explain to us why so many species were failing to birth their next generations. And not just in the USA, and not just the raptors. Those responsible for maintaining the royal estate at Sandringham noted, in 1961, the virtual disappearance of thrushes, skylarks, goldfinches, chaffinches, pheasants (the wild ones, anyway), herons, and wood pigeons, and wondered whether this might have something to do with their recent heavy use of pesticides. Carson’s publishers bit the bullet, academics like Loren Eiseley rushed to her defense, and Carson, ill from her cancer, locked herself away in her seaside cottage to ready her research for publication. Serialized in The New Yorker in early 1962, it was published in book form (by Houghton Mifflin) in September of that year. And so we had our Silent Spring to explain our silent springs. ©

[plaques]

Just reading a book..."The Great Disruption" (Paul Gilding) where she is heavily referenced. The problem of the big capitalist industries of denigrating her work still goes on. They are the real 'deniers' of climate change and resource users.

[Stanley]

I come from Old Massachusetts, where we have declared that all, not only men but women too, are created free and equal. Eliza Ann Gardner, 1884.

Black leadership in the abolition movement went largely unrecognized by historians until the pioneer efforts of historians like Carter Woodson and John Hope Franklin began to turn the tide. But our late start means that many will likely remain unknown or, like Eliza Ann Gardner, little known. Miss Gardner, as she liked to be called, was born into a free black family in New York City on May 28, 1831. The Gardners soon moved to Boston’s West End where her father became a successful ships supplier and a pillar of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her parents saw to it that Eliza was educated, and she was a very successful student at the only public school in Boston open to blacks. There, too, she came into contact with white abolitionists, some of whom were her teachers, others eminent leaders like Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. As a young woman she shared in her family’s hazardous responsibilities as conductors and stationmasters for the Underground Railway, and family legend has it that during these years Eliza spoke in public against slavery, and once shared a platform with the great Frederick Douglass. She certainly spoke in public after the Civil War, when she became a crusader for women’s rights in the AME Church and in the wider civil society, encountering and surmounting considerable opposition in both spheres. She served as the first female Superintendent of the church’s Boston Sunday Schools and, in the national AME church was founder of the Ladies’ Home and Foreign Missionary Society and several other ‘reform’ organizations. Meanwhile she served as advisor and placement agent for young black women seeking work in Boston. This indomitable old lady never married and kept at her appointed tasks until the day she died, aged 89, in 1922. ©

[Stanley]

It must be true that I’m a feminist, for all my friends say so. Jane Grant, 1943.

One of the members of a YMCA entertainment troupe bound for Europe and the battlefields of WWI was a 25-year old woman who had gone to New York (aged 16!!) to be an opera singer but instead became the first female correspondent at the city desk of the New York Times. She was already known for her view that women should do their bit—and be free to do it—on par with men. So here was Jane Grant, doing her bit. She was born in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29, 1892, and at the Times she was already thought of as someone to know if you enjoyed thinking, writing, and good conversation. Once in Europe, her friend from the paper, Alexander Woollcott, introduced her to several other like minds, one of whom was another 25-year old from the provinces, Harold Ross, then reporting for Stars and Stripes. And thus was born the nucleus of The New Yorker and the ‘Vicious Circle’ that would do so much to give Manhattan its sparkle during the 1920s and into the darker 1930s. Grant and Ross (who married in 1920 and divorced in 1929) co-founded the magazine and Grant was especially important in finding (and grubstaking) promising young writers, including women of course for Jane Grant—who kept her name through two marriages—was also a founding sister of the modern feminist movement, and in 1921 (with Ruth Hale) founded the Lucy Stone League (“My name is my identity and should not be lost”) bringing into it such future Vicious Circlers as Anita Loos and Heywood Broun (men were allowed). Grant later (by then married to Fortune editor William Harris) revived the League and widened its objectives. Jane Grant’s name, indeed, lives on in the well-endowed Jane Grant Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon where, among other things, you will find her letters and papers. ©

[Stanley]

Sometime the hating has to stop. Epitaph on Eric Lomax's headstone.

For old codgers who think that American national holidays should not be moved around the calendar to make long, fun-filled weekends, Memorial Day is May 30, a day of remembrance, to ponder the braveries, cruelties, and above all the losses that accompany warfare. Those made prisoners of Imperial Japan suffered especially, with a death rate of nearly 30%. The death rate was higher for those British and Dominion POWs deployed to work on the Burma railway. Over 12,000 of them died, and they are memorialized by (inter alia) The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952), a existentialist novel by Pierre Boulle and, latterly, by a 1995 autobiography by Eric Lomax, a British postal engineer who survived but could not forget his imprisonment. Born in Edinburgh on May 30, 1919, Lomax worked in telegraphy and telephony both before and after his enlistment, in 1939. Taken prisoner at Singapore, Lomax worked on the “death railway” for over three years, malnourished, beaten, frequently tortured. After liberation, he worked on various imperial projects, returned to Scotland to lecture at Strathclyde University on (of all things) industrial relations, and wrecked his family by brooding privately on his losses, his 12,000 tragedies, and on the apparent incomprehension of others. All this changed when Lomax met his second wife, an Anglo-Canadian nurse, Patti Wallace. From 1987 he underwent therapy at the London Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. In 1995, encouraged by Patti, he met one of his torturers, Takashi Nagase, who expressed regret, contrition, and guilt, “and the pain just went away.” Thus Eric Lomax decided to publish a memoir he had first written in 1945. Entitled The Railway Man, its last words are “sometime the hating has to stop.” A good thought for May 30th. ©

[Stanley]

I would as soon place my children in the midst of smallpox, as rear them under the influence of slavery. Jessie Benton Fremont to Lydia Maria Child, 1856.

When (aged 50) Thomas Hart Benton the painter fathered his second child he was an established artist known for his regionalism and historicism. It was no accident that he named her Jessie Benton. Benton the painter was the great grand-nephew of Thomas Hart Benton the politician, whose daughter, born on May 31, 1824, was Jessie Benton. Benton, Senator from the new state of Missouri, had hoped for a boy, to be named Jesse after his father. So he called this girl baby Jessie and integrated her into his life and work, the development of the American West, teaching her his passions, insuring she was an adept in American history, and making her a son-in-substitute. Willful she was, at 15 falling for and (against her parents’ wishes) becoming engaged to Lt. John C. Fremont. They married in 1841, and soon were reconciled to the old man, who finagled important military assignments for his son-in-law exploring the American West. Jessie Benton Fremont not only followed along, birthing five children in often difficult circumstances, but became her husband’s publicist and defender, writing about his adventures and, on way more than one occasion, turning a blind eye to his philandering. Jessie was also a remarkable politician in her own right, stoutly anti-slavery, and in 1861 the effective leader of a group that successfully plotted and maneuvered to keep California in the Union. Congress recognized her heroism (and her talents) after General Fremont’s death, granting her a generous annual pension (over $50,000 in 2016 $$). Old Bullion’s daughter lived on, continuing her political and historical tasks, until 1902. Her ashes rest quietly in Rosedale Cemetery, Los Angeles. All in all, “Jessie” was a good cognomen for a later Benton’s daughter, herself a remarkable person not least as model for, and defender of, her own old man. ©

[Stanley]

When other helpers fail and comforts flee/ Help of the helpless, O abide with me. Henry Francis Lyte, 1847.

A minor and unsurprising lesson in religious history is that hymnbooks tend to be denominationally specific, but the popularity of some hymns (e.g. “Silent Night), the sheer brilliance of some hymn writers (e.g. Charles Wesley), and modern ecumenicism have produced significant cross breeding (no pun intended). So if today you should check out your local hymnbook supplies you would likely run across several by Henry Francis Lyte. He was well-born in Roxburghshire, Scotland, on June 1, 1793, descended from notable scholars. His own father was a naval captain and probably was not married to his mother. After a very peripatetic eight years (the family moved often) his parents separated, and Henry was in effect brought up by the headmaster of his Enniskillen boarding school. He went on to Trinity College Dublin where he excelled in literature, wrote much poetry, and soon abandoned his first ambition, medicine, for a second, religion. He took holy orders in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. By this time Henry suffered severely from asthma, which interfered with his preaching, and he, his wife Anne, and their growing brood moved from place to place in Ireland and England. An intense “second conversion” (in Cornwall, in 1819) made him, he believed, into a better preacher and a better poet, and he finally achieved a permanent curacy in Devonshire, where he became a leading citizen, especially in the schools, and a notable tutor for gentry children. He also published several books of poetry, including many poems that became (as he hoped) enduring hymns. Easily the most famous of Lyte’s efforts was the popular (in and out of churches) “Abide with me,” which may have been written during his final illness and was sung for the first time at Lyte’s own funeral in 1847. ©

[Stanley]

Fortunately we are a family that laughs. Nellie Taft, reflecting on the election of 1912.

As we could have a “First Gent” in the White House, we should review think accurately about the role of our “First Ladies.” Certainly the 20th century started out with a bang. First Edith Roosevelt spent a small fortune making the place comfortable for her small children and tolerable for her willful stepdaughter. And then came Helen Louise Taft, better known as Nellie, who had a more lasting impact on the city than most presidential spouses. Born into a political Ohio family on June 2, 1861, Nellie Herron knew two presidents well and, at 17, was a White House guest during the Hayes’s 25th anniversary celebrations). Ambitious to a fault, Nellie thought “Will” Taft “adorable, while he regarded her as “a treasure . . . self-contained, independent, and of unusual application.” She would, he thought, make a good Treasury Secretary. Once wed she played important roles in Taft’s career, always preferring politics to the judiciary and never fully winning that particular battle. She showed acute political sensibilities as “first lady” of the Phillippines during William’s Governor-Generalship (1900-1903). As First Lady of the USA (1909-13), Nellie regularly attended Cabinet meetings and, in 1912, took a ringside seat at the Democratic national convention to discourage critical comments about her husband. Her official White House portrait reveals a woman of strong opinions, as do her icy comments about Teddy Roosevelt’s behavior in 1912. We also owe to Nellie (and to the wife of the then Japanese ambassador) Washington’s cherry trees. She helped to plan this pleasant addition and, in March 1912, planted the first two (of over 3,000) saplings. Will Taft’s term as Chief Justice (1921-30) brought Nellie Taft back to Washington, a town that was really rather glad to see her again. She’s still there, just across the river at Arlington, right next to her Will. ©

[Stanley]

Aletheia: a name chosen by Queen Elizabeth I for her god-daughter, signifying verity or truth.

When the Tudor monarchs went Protestant, not all of England followed. Among eminent Catholic “recusants” was Gilbert Talbot, 7th earl of Shrewsbury. He maintained good relations with Queen Elizabeth, and indeed the queen served as godmother to Aletheia Talbot, his youngest child. Aletheia was born in about 1582 and died, still devoutly Catholic, on June 3, 1654. The deaths without issue of her brothers made her (and her sisters) the inheritors of several of the Talbot titles and most of its wealth. So Lady Aletheia carried a generous dowry into her marriage with Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel. It was an estate that she maintained in her own right (suo jure) through an often exciting life. Under King James Aletheia Howard continued to enjoy royal favor, including important dynastic duties. Along the way, she became a very cultured woman, adept in several languages and with a deep interest in art and architecture that she improved upon with long stays in Italy (at Florence, Padua, and Venice), sometimes (remarkably) without her husband. During these Italian interludes she also acquired a great collection of paintings, books, and statuary. The Howards made a special friend of the architect Inigo Jones, who remodeled their London mansion before having a go at the king’s Banqueting House. The Howards were less eminent at court after King James’s death, and upon Thomas Howard’s death (at Padua, in 1644) his widow set up her dowager household in tolerant Amsterdam with her “vast treasure of rarities” and an even rarer circle of artistic and intellectual acquaintances including the hot Protestant Samuel Hartlib. Aletheia Howard’s death embroiled her descendants in a century of litigation over her acres, her art, and her books, but not over her reputation. ©

[Stanley]

Back in St. Louis I hadn't even known that Negroes were allowed to go to concerts. Oliver Nelson, on hearing Ravel and Hindemith compositions performed in Tokyo.

One of St. Louis’s lesser-known but more accomplished musicians was the jazz-classicist Oliver Nelson, who was born here June 4, 1932. That he died only 43 years later is the main reason we rarely hear of him, but another is his split musical personalities. He was all over the place. His roots were clearly in St. Louis’s jazz and blues scene. He learned to play and sing at home, and his brother and sister were both notable local performers. Even so, while in his teens this gifted saxophonist was already known for his abilities to compose and arrange. Nelson enlisted in the Marines during the Korean War, and on leave in Tokyo heard a modern (Ravel and Hindemith) orchestral performance, and decided to merge the music. He returned to Missouri, studied music composition at Lincoln University and then Washington University, and took his master’s degree and his saxophone to New York City and then to Hollywood. Everywhere he proved his massive talent as a performer, band leader (usually in small combos), arranger, and composer, working for or with Basie, Ellington, Quincy Jones, and arranging scores at the Apollo Theater. His big breakthrough came in a series of releases on the Prestige label, culminating with his own The Blues and the Abstract Truth, recorded early in 1961, in which he composed or arranged all the numbers and played alto sax. In 1967 it was off to Hollywood where he amassed TV and film credits including Ironsides, Columbo, Death of a Gunfighter, Alfie, and Last Tango in Paris and arranged and produced albums with the likes of James Brown, The Temptations, and Diana Ross. And I haven’t even mentioned his classical compositions. The pace was too much, too fast, too often, and Oliver Brown succumbed to it all with a heart attack in October 1975.

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I long to speak of the intense inspiration that comes to me from the lives of strong women. Ruth Benedict.

At Penn, history majors were required to take philosophy of history, and I had the good luck to be taught by William Fontaine, an elderly gent of aristocratic bearing and avuncular manner, 3-piece suits, a gold watch chain, white hair, and then the only tenured African-American in the Ivy League. His first assignment was for us to read Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, even then an old book (1934) because (among other reasons) he wanted us to see that human nature arguments in history were suspect at best. Human nature was too protean a beast, one given to fundamentally different expressions in different cultures. Even such a simple concept as ‘generosity’ became, in Kwakiutl culture, something quite other. I was bowled over, the normal impact, I suppose, of a 20-year old’s contact with a great teacher and a great book. Ruth Benedict was born in New York City on June 5, 1887, into a middle-class family, her father a homeopathic doctor and her mother a school teacher. Her father’s early death (from a disease contracted while performing surgery) and her mother’s extreme grief were, to Ruth, traumatic experiences, and moved her first towards poetry but ultimately became a major concern of her anthropological work. After college she married Stanley Benedict, a biologist, but drifted away from him and, at the New School, into Anthropology and the intellectual orbit of “Papa Franz” Boas. Among other things, Benedict’s academic reputation as a scientist of culture brought her into a critically influential role in shaping American policy towards defeated Japan, an episode suggesting that good social science can indeed help to create enlightened, successful public policies. In our present political culture, where mere bombast and brass can win a presidential nomination, that would be a huuuuge legacy. ©

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It is wonderful how little the English are known or understood on the Continent. Leone Levi, The Story of My Life, 1888.

Paris has Père Lachaise, but London has Highgate, where one may interrupt the final rest of a galaxy of stars, in literature from Christina Rossetti to Douglas Adams. One might say you’d find there many of those who might have made it into Westminster Abbey, but didn’t. One who couldn’t but should have made Westminster was Karl Marx. His rather forbidding monument is at Highgate. There you will find also the grave of another Jewish immigrant who wrote persuasively on the condition of the working classes. This was Leone Levi, born in Ancona, Italy, on June 6, 1821. There his family ran a modest mercantile house, and in 1844 Leone went to Liverpool to establish a branch operation. The economic crises of the late 1840s claimed his firm, but (already a naturalized British subject and soon to become a Presbyterian with an Edinburgh Presbyterian wife), Leone joined a Liverpool firm. He was successful there but his international and cross cultural experience, together with pain of his early commercial failure, led him into practical and theoretical scholarship on economics and commercial law. His first book, a massive tome on comparative commercial law (in 59 countries and the Roman Empire), won him great fame, a chair at the University of London, membership of all the right royal societies, and even an honorary degree. Levi is little known today because his radical proposals in commercial law (that most disputes should be arbitrated by merchants’ councils rather than decided in law courts) fell before the majesty of the industrial state. But he was a pioneer statistician in both economic and legal studies, and his career provides supporting testimony about the depth and content of an immigrant’s assimilation into British commerce and culture. Truly Leone Levi belongs in Highgate. ©

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All pain is per se and especially in excess, destructive and ultimately fatal in its nature and effects. James Young Simpson.

“Unto the woman he said . . . in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” So Genesis has it (3:16, KJV) and so biblical traditionalists opposed the innovation of offering anaesthetics at childbirth. To do so was to defy God’s decree, that just penalty (so to speak) for Eve’s apple-sin. There were other problems, too, not least the safety of mother and child. Both issues were overcome by James Young Simpson, born poor in rural Scotland on June 7, 1811 and, something of a prodigy, appointed chair of obstetrics and midwifery at the University of Edinburgh at the tender age of 28. He lived long enough to have pictures taken, and they show him a fat, jolly sort, an impish Uncle Jim, and indeed pregnant women found him a helpful counselor. From the start of his career he was also tinkering with ways to make childbirth work better for women, including midwives attending and better forceps, so why not anaesthetic (its surgical use already discovered in 1799)? A devout Christian by his own lights, he’d already rejected the Westminster Confession (for its biblical literalism), and was utterly impatient with the notion that childbirth pain was a divine decree, so he set about experimenting (first on himself and then on his niece) with chloroform. Luckily he never dosed too heavily, for it could have killed him (or his niece) and he used it successfully on a delivering mother in 1847. The young Queen Victoria was more than amused, and soon named James Young Simpson her physician in Scotland. Simpson’s immense popularity was attested by the 30,000 mourners who lined the streets of Edinburgh in May 1870 to witness the passing of his funeral cortege. His memorial plaque in St. Giles, Edinburgh, reads “Thank God for James Young Simpson’s discovery of chloroform anaesthesia in 1847.” Let’s vote on it, shall we? ©

[Stanley]

All life is nucleic acid. The rest is commentary. Isaac Asimov.

In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, idle young men acquire punning nicknames, so that Reginald Herring was known as “Kipper.” Just so a boy named Crick became to his schoolmates “Crackers.” Indeed Francis Crick (born on June 8, 1916) was an odd child, reading whole encyclopedias and already nursing an ambition to make a big discovery in science. But his London research degree was interrupted in September 1939, and he joined the Royal Navy where he helped to make British mines better than German ones. Come the peace, physics having moved on and his experimental apparatus at London destroyed in the Blitz, Crick brilliantly or eccentrically applied for a grant in a field that didn’t yet exist institutionally, and called it (in his 1947 grant application) “the chemical physics of biology.” Cambridge proved interested, and took him on but he continued to be interested in the scientific borderlands. Gregarious to a fault, talking to and arguing with other scientists all the time and still reading all over the place including Erwin Schrodinger’s “little book” What Is Life?, Crick became interested in the molecular structure of “the genetic material,” and thereby hangs his particular tale. It’s a long one, full of drama and difficult characters (including Crick himself whose great virtues were also his vices), and worth learning about, but to cut it very short Francis Crick, working with the American James Watson and seeing what others missed in the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, discovered the “secret of life,” the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (alias DNA, the genetic material) and transformed all our lives. Francis Crick continued to pioneer in science to the end of his life, and his writings about it, accessible to the laity, display a man and a mind that are worthy of your acquaintance. ©

[Stanley]

Historians are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens wish to forget. Eric Hobsbawm.

Because we live in exciting times politically it may be easier to imagine the excitement and peril felt by a Jewish teenager attending a Communist party street rally in Berlin on January 25, 1933. On January 30, Adolph Hitler was appointed chancellor, and the dangers became palpable. So in April Eric Hobsbawm and his sister Nancy were taken into England by their Uncle Sidney and Aunt Gretl, who settled their ersatz family in London, sent Eric to Marylebone Grammar School, and got on with life in a new land. But for Eric it wasn’t absolutely brand new. His grandfather had settled in London 60 years before, and although Eric was born in Egypt on June 9, 1917 he did possess a British passport and an OK command of English. This was improved upon in school and then at Cambridge, and in due course Eric Hobsbawm became a brilliant historian, an incisive editorial commentator, and a provocative political gadfly. Although British intelligence had him down as a dyed-in-the-wool communist (and may have been instrumental in keeping him from the Cambridge appointment he wanted), Hobsbawm’s deep political passions cannot be easily classified. Meanwhile, his scholarship and bonhomie kept him in good odor at Birkbeck College, London, and the New School in New York, while his book royalties and speaking fees kept him in considerable splendor in Hampstead. Taxed with the latter, he replied “if you’re in a ship that’s going down, you might as well travel first class.” Among his sinking ships was the British Labour Party, which he likened (in an address to a Labour meeting in 1983) to a man who had lost his pipe in the park but preferred to search for it in his living room where the light was better. Eric Hobsbawm died of multiple ailments in 2012, five years short of his very own century. ©

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I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain . . . there was not a crime I did not commit. Tolstoy, A Confession.

Renouncing all comforts for a life of austere holiness is, apparently, “a fairly common phenomenon among Russian writers” (A. N. Wilson), but the only one I knew about was Leo Tolstoy. Already a Russian icon, albeit of a secular sort, for War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), and apparently comfortably settled on his family’s ancestral estates, Tolstoy was in fact deeply troubled. We might want today to concentrate on his personal agonies, and indeed his A Confession reads a lot like St. Augustine in one of his more murderously self-reflective moods. Tolstoy was an aristocrat, after all, and it’s abundantly clear that as a young man he was more inclined to droit du seigneur than to noblesse oblige. And why not? The temptations were powerful and the restraints merely irksome. And these sins were among the most important reasons that, on June 10, 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy laid down his previous life, donned peasant clothes, took up his staff, and walked off to seek admission to the Optina Pustyn monastery. But it might be as accurate to say that Tolstoy’s agonies were about history: the history of his class, of his nation, of the nation-state, of humanity itself. He began his reflections on these things when in his 30s, especially during long trips through western Europe (a public execution in Paris was a particularly devastating experience) in the late 1850s and early 1860s. At first political-reformist-anarchic, later and especially during the 1870s his musings and actions became more tied to things of the spirit, notably the ethics laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. Leo Tolstoy would return home from the monastery but he (and his family) suffered greatly from his spiritual agonies for three decades. According to legend, he died expressing his grief in preaching, in 1910, in a rural railway station. ©

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My heart determines my choice . . . wherever you go, I shall willingly accompany you, and hope to be happy. Margaret Montgomerie, accepting James Boswell's proposal of marriage, 1769.

In the west, women’s quest for real equality began in earnest in the 19th century, and as each milestone was reached—usually through struggle—women expressed their lives in new spheres and in their own right. Before (and of course with notable exceptions) women’s accomplishments and in several senses their identities were defined by their significant (male) others. For those pioneers, it is no insult to talk of “the woman behind the man” or to tell their story in terms of their impact on a man’s work. So we recognize Margaret Boswell for her role in constructing and maintaining the life and work of her husband and cousin James Boswell, who became the classic exemplar of the modern biographer (through his life of Samuel Johnson). Born Margaret Montgomerie in 1738, she was an adult friend of cousin James, and in 1769 actually accompanied him on his suit of Mary Boyd (another cousin). On the journey, instead, she snagged James. They were married in the same year. She was, he wrote (in some surprise) to a friend, sensible, agreeable, generous, and merry, “the most honest and undesigning creature that ever existed.” Having learned to put up with her own tuberculosis, she perhaps found it no great challenge to put up with James’s philandering. She stuck with him, bearing seven children but often withdrawing sex because of his infidelities and always insisting on his begging forgiveness. She advised him on his literary judgments and business affairs, she catalogued his library and papers, and, often lonely and tagged (admiringly) as “the Abbess of Auchinleck,” Margaret “longed” for an intimate female companion. At her final illness, Boswell was (typically?) six hours too late at her deathbed. On June 11, 1789, “stricken with grief”, he at least attended her funeral. ©

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Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles and see that the world is moving. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The World Anti-Slavery Convention held its first meeting, in London, beginning on June 12, 1840. Even though slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, the process still had to be brought to a full consummation. And there was still a lot of slavery about. So in 1839 the British Anti-Slavery Society sent out a circular announcing the meeting. The response in the USA highlighted two important things that would affect the Anglophone Atlantic world for decades. First, there was already an emergent “reform alliance” between like-minded Britons and Americans. It highlighted abolition but was a heady brew that took in a host of other concerns from prison to debt to diet. Secondly, there was in this coalition an ambiguity over women’s rights. It revealed itself in the American response to the invitation circular, a response that exposed deep divisions over whether women should even attend the convention. And then the British society further roiled the waters by saying they should not. What was at issue in 1839=40 was the fundamental issue of whether—or not—women possessed a public personality. Could they, should they, “be” public persons? And, invited or not, about 25 American and British women attended, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Isabella, Lady Byron, and Lucretia Mott. The ladies were barred from speaking but not from plotting, and thus was born another element of the Atlantic reform alliance, the women’s rights movement. Its birth was celebrated ten years later by the first National Women’s Rights Convention in the US (at Worcester, MA) and then commemorated in a 1940 centenary celebration in New York City, the Women’s Centennial Congress, a very public event at which women attended and women spoke, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to do. ©

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Think where man's glory most begins and ends,/ And say my glory was I had such friends. W. B. Yeats, "The Museum Gallery Revisited," circa 1937.

If you take together the probable truth that all great artists are complex personalities and the romantic nonsense that all Irishmen are poets, you will come up with William Butler Yeats. Irish he was, born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, though both his parents were of the Protestant ascendancy. He was certainly a great poet whose one-line zingers (“that is no country for old men,” “in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”) rattle through Anglophone culture and whose other writings also endure. And as for his complexities, they are legion and legendary and would take a volume to list. As a young genius beginning to be recognized in Dublin and London, he came to know nearly everyone: Wilde, Shaw, J. M. Synge, just about the complete pantheon of Irish nationalism, and to fall in love (physically and/or platonically) with a parade of sometimes exotic women like the debutante-heiress-nationalist Maude Gonne, then her daughter Iseult, or the aging but dramatic Lady Augusta Gregory who “so changed me that I live, labouring in ecstasy.” Yeats was also a mystic, albeit in appropriately mysterious ways. But beyond his poetry, Yeats is best known for his lifelong yet shifting loyalty to Irish Nationalism. He helps us to remember that in its origins the nationalist movement was heavily Protestant and (in the positions he took before and after the creation of the Irish Free State) to trace the tensions in the movement between ultra Catholics, military extremists, Gaelic romanticists, modernizers, proto-fascists, democrats, and socialists. It would be tempting to say that the enigmatic Willie Yeats was all of these things, and he was certainly some of them, but in his constant opposition to the Catholicizing of Ireland it might be best to remember that he was born a Protestant. ©

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I have an enormous respect for people who know exactly where they are going . . . and I wish I were one of them. Louise Dickinson Rich.

Everyone has a book they discovered, somewhere in the thorny thicket we call adolescence, that made them think the future might, after all, turn out OK. Mine was one my parents bought in the first year of their marriage, 1942, as my dad practiced for warfare. And so, luckily, I entered upon my own adolescence well clad in a thornproof jacket and with just the right sort of shoes. It was Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods. Louise Dickinson was born in Western Massachusetts, on June 14, 1903, and although her dad was a newspaper editor grew up in a pretty ordinary way. Late in adolescence she decided that she wanted some other form of existence and that it ought to include writing. After a few false starts, and a divorce, she went on a Maine canoe trip with a woman friend and found just the right place, a big (uninsulated) house meant for timber crew bosses smack dab in the middle of the Maine woods and right at the midpoint of one of the longest portages in North American canoeing. The man who lived in that house, and helped them portage, was an escaped advertising executive, also once divorced, Ralph Rich. More or less then and there, Louise decided to go back soon, marry Ralph, and in general take to the woods with him, and they did. In order to help make ends meet, she began to write for publication, and after a few really difficult years (they lived there all year round, winters in a nearby, snugger, cabin) she hit pay dirt with We Took to the Woods. Then fate stepped in. Ralph died of a coronary and Louise took her children with her out of the woods and into drink and depression. The story of her recovery, which I learned later, is nearly as inspiring (and produced nearly as good books), but if you’re in late adolescence (even very late) note that We Took to the Woods is still in print. ©