BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Her life and her vision and her invincible spirit . . . From the NY Times obituary of Jeanette Thurber, January 1946.

Local pride can sometimes get in the way of the facts or, at best, obscure significant context. So, growing up in Iowa, we were told that Antonin Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” was inspired by his time in Spillville, an immigrant town in a picturesque area of the state. Not quite so. He arrived at Spillville with the completed manuscript in hand. And what is even more interesting is how he got there, for Dvorak had been brought to the USA by Jeanette Meyer Thurber, herself the daughter of immigrants (from Denmark). Born in America on January 29, 1850, her violinist father saw to it that she was properly educated (finishing at the Paris Conservatoire), and it may have been her music that broke the heart of a respectable grocer named Thurber, who married her when she was but 19. While she was bearing him children (3), Thurber became a millionaire wholesaler, and encouraged his wife to further her interest and the country’s assets in music. So in 1882 Jeanette founded The National Conservatory of Music in America and the American Opera Company and, understanding her family’s new country pretty well, opened its doors to all, including women and African-Americans. Ten years on, she offered Dvorak the staggering sum of $15K ($500K today) to direct the conservatory, and threw into the bargain an amanuensis-assistant, the African-American composer and baritone Henry Burleigh (then a student at the Conservatory). Burleigh taking notes, Dvorak ground out the New World Symphony, both of them then decamping to Spillville, for the summer of 1893, where they must have made quite a pair. Jeanette Thurber herself lived on to 1946, a noted philanthropist of music. So I think Iowa has to take a back seat on this one. ©

[Stanley]

Citations from Homer or Sophocles or Confucius are brief and serve to remind the ready reader that we were not born yesterday, Ezra Pound to the Prison Censor, 1945.

Politics and art inevitably mix. In democratic cultures art is to some a matter of taste (everybody’s got it). And art cuts people close to the quick, the core of their being. The National Endowment for the Arts has been a lightning rod recently, attracting thunderbolts from conservative politicians who believe that whatever art may be, it shouldn’t outrage common decency or be “anti-American.” In the 1990s, Robert Mapplethorpe’s work fell foul on both counts. And indeed, recently fire has come from the right and has been directed at art (and artists) thought to be left wing. But in 1948 both shoes were on different feet when the Bollingen Prize (a kind of precursor of the NEA, funded by the government and administered by the Library of Congress) was awarded to the fascist poet Ezra Pound for his brilliant Pisan Cantos, poetry written while Pound was in prison awaiting his treason trial. Pound had, you see, met Benito Mussolini on January 30, 1924, and (already discontent with western democracy and abubble with elitist, conservative, corporatist notions) decided that social salvation lay with fascism, in Italy with “The Boss” (as Pound admiringly translated “Il Duce”). Worse, he had stayed in Italy during WWII and issued broadcasts in fascism’s favor. Outrage over the 1948 Bollingen came from all over the spectrum, not least from the left and from Jewish cultural leaders (for Pound was undoubtedly an anti-Semite). But the Bollingen committee was unapologetic, the Truman administration stood firm, and the Supreme Court would have, had the matter come to trial. Great art was great art, for one thing, and for another its creation (and its critical reception) in the democratic USA comes under First Amendment protections. And so it has been held, down the decades. ©

[Stanley]

Feeling love within ourselves, it is very easy to give it to others. Sri Daya Mata.

The appeal of “Eastern” religions (mainly Buddhism and Hinduism) has been fairly constant in the USA since the days of the Transcendentalist movement, when its leading lights (notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge) discovered western translations of sacred Asian texts, especially the Bhagavad Gita. The appeal has had its ups and downs since, one “up” being the 70s when it sometimes seemed that every tenth male one met was attired in a saffron robe and (usually) shaved nearly bald. But the involvement of American women in eastern spirituality is not a major theme (John Updike’s 1988 epistolary novel S. provides a wonderful, if comic, exception). But here’s Rachel Faye Wright, who became a world-wide spiritual leader of a Hindu sect. She was born into a prominent Mormon family (her grandfather was architect of the Tabernacle) in Salt Lake City on January 31, 1914. As an adolescent, she began a religious quest for “love unconditional . . . a perfect love” and could not find it in the faith of her fathers. She read the Gita at 15 and then, aged 17, she found what she wanted from an Indian spiritual leader then touring the US. After attending his lectures in Salt Lake City, she joined his Ashram on Mt. Washington, outside of Los Angeles, taking the new name of Daya Mata (“Compassionate Mother”). In 1955, she became the movement’s leader as Sri Daya Mata. Like her guru, she preached love and forgiveness and urged her followers to respect every religion as a spiritual quest for love, and for truths beyond our material frame. Sri Daya Mata was a successful guru (her sect has 600 American temples) and led her movement until her death in 2010. You can read admiring obits even in the Salt Lake Tribune. ©

[Stanley]

To put it squarely . . . the eternal triangle has come full circle. Muriel Spark.

Not all novelists lead interesting yet difficult lives, but Muriel Spark did. She’s most famous for her fifth novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), an experimental fiction that, straightened out for the theatre and then film, won her substantial royalties and even greater fame. Luckily, she was tough enough to stand it. Spark was born Muriel Camberg to a working class Edinburgh family on February 1, 1918. Muriel was a mixed-up kid ethnically, best described as Anglo-Scots-Lithuanian-Jewish. Her grandmother Adelaide self-identified as a “Gentile Jewess”, a description Muriel adopted for herself before she migrated to Anglicanism and then to the Roman communion, a journey that was mirrored in her fiction’s religious or semi-religious themes. Before that, Muriel Camberg finished her schooling (at a school not unlike Miss Brodie’s), decided she couldn’t afford university, emigrated to Rhodesia, entered an unhappy marriage there with Solly Spark, a Jewish schoolteacher, and bore a child from whom she was to be alienated (she paid for his education, then regretted it). Muriel Spark began to write in Rhodesia, escaped to London during the war (where she wrote ‘black legend’ counter-propaganda), and finally came to public notice with her short fiction and poetry. She converted to Catholicism and Dexedrine at about the same time (she stayed with Catholicism and shed the speed), and produced her first novel (The Comforters, 1957) with help from, among others, Graham Greene. Throughout she has woven her fascination with the Book of Job and her unconventional but “absolute” Catholicism into an unusual private life and a body of experimental fiction (some of it on ‘current affairs’) that seems likely to survive her. She died, wracked with diseases of aging, in 2006. ©

[Stanley]

You may not be Tolstoy, but then Tolstoy wasn't Sendak, either. Ursula Nordstrom to Maurice Sendak, 1961.

One of the great mysteries of publishing is how to pick good children’s books. For as anyone who has read a good book to a child knows, it is one of the very finest arts. We therefore treasure its adepts, and none deserve our veneration more than Ursula Nordstrom, who ran the children’s show at Harper & Row for decades, in the process discovering such authors and illustrators as Maurice Sendak and Garth Williams. Ursula was born (February 2, 1910), schooled, and lived her whole life in Manhattan, but never became insular. After school, she took a business college course in typing and filing, and (in 1936) snagged a clerk’s position at Harper’s. Within four years she and her employer had figured things out and she was the “Editor in Chief of the Department of Books for Boys and Girls,” a title rather prosier than some of the books she would put out. Ten years after she died, a collection of her letters was published (Dear Genius, 1998) which revealed how she did it. I was not, she wrote in the 1950s to one of her Newbery winners about her refusal to be “promoted” to adult books, interested in “dead dull finished adults.” Rather she looked for, and loved, “good books for bad children.” Retaining something of a child’s outlook, she leaned towards English traditions (e.g. Edward Lear) of nonsense, wonder, anarchic silliness, and occasional terror. And so when she read a manuscript that began with Fern Arable’s horror at her farmer father’s routine decision to execute a runt piglet, Ursula knew she had a winner, and she cajoled its author into finishing the thing. If Ursula Nordstrom had brought us nothing more than Charlotte’s Web (1952, by E. B. White, illustrations by Garth Williams) we would recognize her powers, and stand aside as she passed. ©

[Stanley]

Bad news on the doorstep. Don McLean, American Pie, 1971.

For people “of a certain age” (a phrase about which it is best not to inquire), February 3, 1959 was, indeed, “the day the music died.” Somewhere near Clear Lake, IA, a Beechcraft Bonanza crashed, taking with it its pilot, which was sad enough, but also Buddy Holly (22), Ritchie Valens (17), and ‘The Big Bopper’ (J. P. Richardson, 28). Ironically, Holly and his backup, The Crickets, had just recorded yet another Number 1, “That’ll Be the Day,” but Valens (“La Bamba”) and The Bopper (“Chantilly Lace”) were no slouches either. It was indeed a sad day for what was then NOT called “rock” music but “rock ‘n roll.” But the reason we now say it was “the day the music died,” that precise expression, was not Holly’s recent hit but because the whole business (rock ‘n roll, the high spirits and hormonal promise of youth, and tragedy) was immortalized in 1971 by singer-songwriter Don McLean, whose “American Pie” topped the charts throughout the Anglophone world (including New Zealand) and did very well, thank you, in such places as Norway and the Netherlands. The song seems to go on forever (because one would like it to?), but in fact is “only” 8:33 by the clock. Its clever, evocative lyrics spawned a growth industry in explications de texte, which McLean encouraged for a while by keeping mum about it himself. It was, simply, iconic. In 1973, we gave a party at our house for students in my first Special Subject (senior seminar). Paulette and I played “our” music, of course, mostly late 50s and mid 60s stuff, and late in the evening one of the students (Mark Shields) asked us “what was it really like, back then?” If I had had my wits about me, I would have gone to the phonograph (remember those?) and played “American Pie,” over and over and over again. Instead, I made some lame joke, and the party went on. ©

[plaques]

but in fact is “only” 4:33 by the clock

The full length was actually 8 min 32 sec. It was split into two parts side A 4.11 and side B 4.31. American Pie
It was said that Fred Goodwin of RBS fame could sing the complete version. (not many people know that)

[Stanley]

You're right P and Bob issued a correction yesterday but when I came to the site to edit the post I couldn't get in, it was reporting an SQL error. OK now and I've changed it.

[Stanley]

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity. Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman, 1977.

Annually since the days of Michael Faraday (1825) Britain’s Royal Institution has presented “Christmas Lectures.” In them, a science person speaks on his or her subject as if to an educated lay public and specifically to a young audience. Enthusiasm and humor are thrown in as bonuses. I saw only a few (I could catch up, for there are many recorded on the Royal Institution’s website) but one of the first ones I did see was by Christopher Zeeman, a mathematician, who was very clearly having fun. Bearded and a bit hairy, he explained various things in terms I could almost understand, and I thought then that he would be a great person to teach math to kids. As it turns out, he has done a lot of that, too. Indeed, his Christmas Lectures (of 1978) became the basis of the “Mathematics and Engineering Masterclasses” that annually involve bright British children in learning how to be brighter, and Zeeman was knighted in 1991 for his services to mathematics education. Born in Japan on February 4, 1925, Christopher Zeeman was brought back to Britain by his Danish father and English mother. He flew for the RAF towards the end of WWII, survived, and then took his math degrees from Cambridge; his PhD (1955) was in topology. He’s most famous, though, for working with “singularity” and catastrophe theory, for his reforms in math education (in schools and at Warwick and Oxford universities), and for his good humor and wide-ranging intellect. Zeeman has collared just about every award going in mathematics, and as far as I know he’s still going strong. Appropriately, the Christopher Zeeman Medal, established in his honor, is given annually to a mathematician for excellence in communicating mathematics to the general public. That is a difficult art. Zeeman mastered it. ©

[PanBiker]

One of my enduring memories of the annual Christmas Lectures in the late 50's or very early 60's was from Professor Eric Laithwaite demonstrating electrical engineering, magnetism and in particular his development of the linear motor. Ably demonstrated by levitated tea trays traveling the length of the lecture theatre to the awe of the assembled young audience. His design was turned down for investment by successive British Governments, a track record we as a nation seem to be particularly good at with numerous other British inventions being passed over. The most famous of the incarnations of this technology is the Japanese Bullet or Mag Lev Train. Meanwhile we are still pontificating over 60 years later over HS2 and rather conventional electrification technology.

[Stanley]

Her resignation was forced by a brutal and lawless element . . . and was obtained under terror. President Theodore Roosevelt, 1903.

Time was, the job of postmaster was a political appointment. The president in power might appoint a local supporter, or appoint a nominee of the local senator, even to appease a foe. So in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Minnie Cox to be postmistress of Indianola, MS. Cox, born into freedom on February 5, 1869, was active in the local Republican party, a college graduate, and recently married to Indianola’s sole black alderman (and principal of the local black school). Her appointment caused little trouble. Minnie was then replaced in 1893 by a white man, for Grover Cleveland, now president, was rewarding his party stalwarts. It was just politics. But over the 90s decade, racial politics throughout the south became much more violent (murderously so) as southern Democrats disenfranchised blacks (they also disenfranchised poor whites but that’s another story) and, in general, moved blacks out of jobs and places that “should” be white preserves. So when William McKinley, elected president in 1900, reappointed Minnie Cox and, worse, raised her salary, he also raised a racial firestorm. Minnie did a great job, including installing a phone at her own expense to improve the service, but the race-baiting senator James K. Vardaman whipped himself and others into a fury, and (given “lynch law”) Ms. Cox, fearing for her safety, submitted her resignation. Teddy Roosevelt, now president after McKinley’s assassination, refused to accept it, then when it appeared quite impossible to reinstate Cox, Roosevelt simply closed the Indianola Post Office. “President Punishes Southern Town”, the headlines read, and (for once) they were correct. But things do change. Indianola’s PO and its city park are today named after Minnie Cox—by Act of Congress. ©

[Stanley]

The art of compromise is an art . . . any compromise should represent an advance. Rashi Fein, advice to President Obama, January 2009.

Democracy, Winston Churchill famously concluded, is clearly the world’s worst form of government until one considers all the alternatives. Among its frustrations is that victories (when won) tend to be small, incremental, fragile: compromises rather than triumphs. So when we run into someone who was on board for a long time, winning some victories, losing occasionally, but keeping at it with “good-humored inflexibility,” we have to concede that we’ve encountered a true democrat (that’s a small “d”). Such a one was Rashi Fein, born in the Bronx on February 6, 1926, a distinguished economist who devoted his life to health care reform. His dad taught history, but also taught Rashi some present lessons including that “freedom” properly understood was a social concept as well as an individual one. After service in WWII, Rashi took this notion into his studies at Johns Hopkins and kept the faith in a career that took him from North Carolina to the Brookings Institution, into government service, and finally to a joint appointment (in government and medicine) at Harvard. Fein began work on “socialized medicine” while on secondment to the Truman administration and kept at it (free of charge) through the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (!), Carter, Clinton, and Obama, winning some ground, suffering some setbacks. His greatest triumph came with Medicare (he is widely recognized as the “father” of that reform) but, his son Alan said, it was also his greatest disappointment, for it did not cover all our citizens fully, nor for all of their lives. A truly just society, Rashi Fein thought, would not rest content until it had insured that all could afford (and access) the same level of medical care in a single-payer system. And so Fein soldiered on, democratically, until his death in 2014. ©

[Stanley]

It would be good for religion if . . . there were not so many books. Girolamo Savonarola.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the striking title of a striking 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. It’s also out of the ordinary in its characters (you could say that the author didn’t like anybody), and its mode of production had historic echoes to the 19th century serialized “social comment” novels of Dickens and Thackeray. But there was a longer echo, too, stretching way back to late medieval Italy’s “bonfires of the vanities,” an irregular custom where lay penitents consigned to the flames their passing fancies, perfumes, mirrors, fine fabrics, in general possessions that might be thought to tickle pride or flatter egos. Its origins are obscure but perhaps stemmed from the laity’s general sense of guilt or their unwillingness to go whole hog and take the vows of poverty required of most monks and nuns. It could have been stirrings of discontent with the church’s lack of spirituality, an early tremor signaling the earthquake of the Reformation. Whatever, in Florence a Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola, would give the custom a particularly reactionary flavor, make of it a populist revolt against a particular set of sins, ‘the sins of our times’ so to speak. After a couple of trial bonfires, he brought things to a head in Florence with a spectacular conflagration on February 7, 1497, Mardi Gras. Targeting more than the usual vanities he added such things as “bad” books (e.g. Ovid, Dante and Boccaccio) and other artistic items beloved of elite families, using intimidation if any showed reluctance to part with their sinful treasures. In Florence, of all places. It was too much. Ironically, Savonarola himself provided the fuel for the next bonfire of the vanities, being burned on the cross in May 1498. He might have done better in today’s American politics, In Italy, he erred spectacularly by crossing both the Medicis and the Borgias. ©

[Stanley]

No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides. Baruch de Spinoza.

Having spent my working life at two young universities (both founded when I was 20) I see merit in the old saw that there is nothing as conservative as a new institution. Teething problems abound, and the easiest solutions are often traditional ones. But perhaps it’s always been so. Take the University of Leiden, for instance. Today it’s one of the top universities in the world (28th, according to a British ranking agency, 29th say the Chinese), hoary with age and, one hopes, full of the institutional confidence that can encourage innovation. But Leiden was young once, chartered on this day, February 8, in 1575, by Prince William of Orange, and (full of beans) announced its motto to be Libertatis praesidium (‘defend liberty’). But that would be difficult, for Leiden was founded to provide the Protestant Netherlands with its first university, and its very foundation was part of the decades-long Dutch War for Independence against Catholic Spain. So at first the liberties of Catholic scholars (if any) were not defended. But as the wars went on, and as Holland became (despite its lack of resources) the richest country in Europe per capita, liberty became not only more affordable but also an integral element of the Dutch economic miracle. Their unofficial word for it, far too modest for a motto, was oogluiking, best translated as “connivance” though “overlooking” will do. Not a bad idea for a university, or for a nation; to secure our own liberty we need to connive at it with others. Within 100 years, Leiden “connived” at the liberty of Baruch de Spinoza (who was neither Catholic nor Protestant), and today the Leiden faculty holds more than its fair share of the Dutch national academic awards, very appropriately called the Spinozapremies.©

[Stanley]

It is too late to do anything but accept you and love you, but when you were quite a little boy somebody ought to have said hush just once. Mrs. Campbell to GBS, November 1912.

Before the talkies and television, the British stage produced a legion of legendary actresses, starting with the passionate Nell Gwyn. But legendary status did not require an affair with a monarch. A good thing for Mrs. Patrick Campbell, whose amorous tastes ran definitely to men, for she became famous during Victoria’s reign. Instead of the Queen’s ever-randy son, Mrs. Campbell chose the monumental ego of George Bernard Shaw on which to shower her affection, in a long affair that was never consummated. Mrs. Patrick Campbell on the stage, she was born Beatrice Tanner in London (her mother the daughter of a count) on February 9, 1865. She came late to the stage (1888), but stayed long enough to play opposite Gielgud (in 1928) and to star in movies. Before all that, she married Patrick Campbell at a tender age (she was 19) and birthed two children. Her stage debut was in Liverpool, but she hit her stride in London in the 1890s. playing as Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a name she kept after her husband was killed in the Boer War and after she married again (a society marriage to George Cornwallis-West). In the next decade Mrs. Campbell knocked them dead in New York, too (one performance as Melisande opposite Sarah Bernhardt’s Pelleas). And then, at an advanced age (49) for a young role, and moreover at the special request of the playwright, she did Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion in 1914. Indeed, Shaw wrote the role for her (she played it again in 1928!!!). Shaw had been her friendly critic in the 90s, but they did not become close until the writing of Pygmalion. Their letters would not be published in full until after Shaw’s death, in 1952. In them, Mrs. Campbell outshone Shaw and perhaps played one of her finest roles. ©

[Stanley]

I prefer to leave standing up. Leontyne Price at her last Met performance, 1985.

If you are old enough to recall when black men couldn’t be quarterbacks you can appreciate the challenges that faced a talented black singer born in Laurel, MS, on February 10, 1927. But Leontyne Price made it, triumphantly singing her final opera encore at the Met in January 1985. Appropriately, for Verdi was her meat, it was “O Patria Mia” from Aida. In Price’s own homeland her family encouraged her talent, but it helped to have white friends, and she found them in Alexander and Elizabeth Chisholm, for whom Leontyne’s aunt cooked and cleaned. The Chisholms turned their piano and parlor over to this brilliant child so she could practice unimpeded, and indeed Ms. Chisholm herself would provide piano accompaniment for Leontyne in her earliest public concerts. The Chisholms’ help extended through Leontyne’s college years (at Wilberforce) and then they joined forces with Paul Robeson to get the maturing artist into New York’s Julliard School, where she sang her first lead role (in Verdi’s Falstaff). But out of Julliard it was the black quarterback problem (which had kept Price’s heroine Marian Anderson to the concert stage), and Price’s first big hits were in all-black casts in all-black operas (one of them, inevitably, as Bess in Porgy and Bess). It was as Bess that Price first graced the Met, in concert, but her operatic début was in San Francisco in 1957. And suddenly the world was hers: Vienna, London, Verona, Salzburg, and then in 1960 Leontyne Price became the first black quarterback to play at La Scala, Aida in Aida. Ms. Price lives in retirement, in New York. Her last last public performance (as far as I know) was in a memorial concert for 9/11 victims, in October 2001, where she sang “This Little Heart of Mine” and “God Bless America.” Indeed. ©

[Stanley]

In an age of great collectors, she rivaled the greatest. Horace Walpole, of Lady Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland.

Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford (1661-1724), was an odd bird in politics, sympathetic to religious dissent while a high Tory in parliament, but he was conventional in seeking good marriages for his children. He outdid himself in securing an alliance with the Cavendishes and Holleses through the marriage of his son Edward to Lady Margaret Cavendish. This union of wealth and power produced only one surviving child, a girl, born on February 11, 1715, but she would prove worth all the effort. She would become Lady Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, and she brought her duke not only a huge dowry but a lively mind and an ever-expanding circle of intellectual and artistic friends who made the Portland estate (at Bulstrode, Buckinghamshire) an important cultural center. Lady Margaret is best remembered as a patron of natural science, but she was also a practitioner in an age of collection and classification. Plants especially. Her gardens and its specimens would ultimately form some of the best bits of the royal gardens at Kew, including her entire herbarium. She also collected, classified, and arranged for the recording (drawing) of seashells, in the process establishing a relationship with the colonial naturalist William Bartram. Her collections were vast (perhaps surpassing those of Sir Hans Sloane) and yet discerning, including the “Portland Vase,” which is still ‘on loan’ to Sloane’s British Museum (after being loaned to Josiah Wedgwood, who found in it an inspiration!!). If that were not enough, she pioneered in the education of her five children, exposing both boys and girls to science, math, and contemporary literature, and adding Anglo-Saxon to their ancient languages. Lady Margaret ran out of steam in 1785. Her estate sale lasted 38 days. ©

[Stanley]

There is a grandeur in this view of life . . . from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Charles Darwin

In my lifetime, discoveries in the life sciences have transformed society, sometimes by extending our lives, sometimes by enriching them. The discovery of DNA—the “genetic material”—remains an inspiring tale of industry (Franklin and Wilkins) and insight (Crick and Watson), while the discovery itself has demonstrated almost infinite promise in the field of genetic engineering: new crops for farmers and eaters, new cures for old scourges (from birth defects to cancers), and the gift of understanding. Hazards too, of course, for we fully retain our human capabilities of misusing power. For good or for ill is our choice, but whichever way we go it is not an intolerable stretch to argue that this whole structure of modern biological science depended initially on the discoveries of Charles Darwin, born on February 12, 1809, into a maze of family alliances that gave him the time, freedom, and wealth to make the very best of his own genetic inheritances. At the center of these alliances, the Darwins and the Wedgwoods provided (and tolerated) a broad spectrum of belief, a history of reform activity (not least, anti-slavery) in politics and society, a set of successful industrial entrepreneurs, and more than a passing interest in science (including a grandpapa who had speculated brilliantly on how species came to be). With such a genetic inheritance and in such an environment, what could Charles do but revolutionize our whole understanding of our physical existence? But it has to be pointed out that it also required of Charles Darwin a lifetime of the most painstaking labor, collecting and sifting the scientific evidence and (not incidentally) perfecting his skills as a writer. Inheritance plus environment plus industry: a potent combination. ©

[Stanley]

O how glorious it would be to set my heel upon the Pole and turn myself 360 degrees in a second. Sir Joseph Banks.

By no means all English gentlemen of the 18th century studied at university, but most of those who did concentrated on the classics and/or theology. Joseph Banks had broken that mold at Eton (1756-60) and then at Christ Church, Oxford, he continued to study science, notably botany. Oxford’s professorial botanist didn’t care to teach, but Joseph did what he could. Born into wealth on February 13, 1743, Banks paid Israel Lyons to come over from Cambridge to offer a course of lectures on botany. Banks was indeed something of a rich young thing. He left Oxford without a degree to join in the entertainments of London society with some fervor and, occasionally, too little discretion. But at the same time his interest in science was well enough known for him to join HMS Endeavour as a gentleman naturalist for Captain James Cook’s first (1768-1771) voyage of exploration. Banks’ collecting on this voyage and his journal of it showed him to be a scientist of note, one who was in many ways (e.g. his refusal to assume racial superiority over the indigenes he met) ahead of his time. Returning to England, he gained the patronage and friendship of King George III, a knighthood, and in 1778 the presidency of the Royal Society. His long presidency was marked both by cooperation with the powers that be, reflecting Banks’ conviction that science was the handmaid of empire, but at the same time by his expanding international network of scientists. His correspondence thus offers to us a history of the science of his time. It also shows him to have been both a natural and a cultivated gentleman. Banks chose a lizard for his personal seal, for it was “an animal said to be Endowed by nature with an instinctive love of mankind.” ©

[Stanley]

Woman, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee. A prominent clergyman, on hearing Susannah Cibber sing “He Was Despised” from The Messiah.

Love conquered almost all in the life of Susannah Cibber, born Susannah Arne on Valentine’s Day in 1714, and destined to be the greatest actress (and singer) of her time. As children, Susannah and her siblings were exposed to, rather than formally trained in, music and acting. It worked out well for her brother Thomas, who became a more than passable composer, and for Susannah too for whom Handel would write the contralto parts of The Messiah (1741). First, though, she had to suffer the hell of an arranged marriage with the “nasty, ugly, squat little man,” Theophilus Cibber, actor of little talent and theater manager, who Susannah’s father hoped might serve her career. Although Cibber took her wages (and most of her gifts from patrons), she did do quite well, with another major part for Handel (in Samson Agonistes), but she developed a real talent for tragedy, channeling her private agonies (including the loss of a child) to the public stage. Then, Cibber sold her (literally) for the sexual pleasures of a wealthy gentleman, William Sloper, and they established a bizarre ménage à trois in Kensington. But fortunately sex blossomed into mutual love and parenthood for Susannah and William. There followed a dramatic escape from “Theophilus” (never was a man less well named), a new career acting opposite David Garrick and in London and Dublin, a retainer salary growing to over £700 per annum, and the most famous part in the London stage, as Polly Peacham in a revival of The Beggar’s Opera. Off stage, Susannah and William moved between her fine town house (in Scotland Yard!!) and his estates in Berkshire. When Susannah Cibber died in 1766 Garrick is said to have exclaimed, “then half of tragedy is dead.” And a love story too. ©

[Stanley]

With the exception of Rupert Brooke, no English-speaking man of more unquestionable genius has been lost to the world in this world-frenzy. Critic William Archer, writing of Harold Chapin in 1917.

The long list of writers who served in WWI ambulance corps includes some of the most famous names in modern literature: Hemingway of course but also Dos Passos, cummings, Masefield, and, one might say, et cetera. But there were those who didn’t make it, who died at the front, and whose talents are now hidden from us. One such was the American Harold Chapin, born in New York on February 15, 1888, and in 1891 spirited away to England by his divorced mother Alice Chapin, an heiress and actress. In England, Harold was brought up Alice’s political and artistic radicalism, appeared in plays as a child actor and then turned to production, directing, and writing. Married to the actress Calypso Valleta, Harold wrote several short plays (comedies and social comment) between 1910 and 1914 that were well received by critics. Come the war Harold, still an American citizen, immediately volunteered for ambulance duty and after hospital duty served at the front as a stretcher bearer from March 1915. At the Battle of Loos, in September, badly wounded, he continued to rescue men from the battle lines. He was killed by enemy fire on September 26. Back in London, in December, his mother and Gerald du Maurier played the leads in four of Harold’s one-act plays put on as a memorial to him and to raise funds for a YMCA hut at the front. The titles may tell us something of their author: The Philosopher of Butterbiggins; It’s the Poor that ‘elps the Poor; The Dumb and the Blind; and The Innocent and Annabel. His death in battle silenced Harold, but not Alice. She returned to the USA in 1916 where she continued her artistic career and her political battles until her death, in 1934, in the small New England town where she had been born on the eve of the Civil War. ©

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Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 1751.

Abraham Lincoln was nominated as president by the party of progress, for Republicans were then committed to use government as an instrumentality to open up avenues of opportunity for the citizenry. Yet when he was asked to provide a thumbnail autobiography, he quoted one of his favorite poems. My story, Abe said, is nothing more than “the short and simple annals of the poor.” The poem was Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” first published on February 16, 1751. It was to become the most often reprinted English poem of the century (and translated into Latin and Greek for the torture of generations of schoolboys). Its great vogue owed primarily to a nostalgic or perhaps romantic view of country life, leading (at one extreme) to Lord Harcourt’s decision to raze his manorial village (Nuneham Courtenay, near Oxford) and rebuild it a mile away in what he thought an image of Gray’s vision, an irony not missed by Oliver Goldsmith in “The Deserted Village” (1770). Abraham Lincoln undoubtedly liked Gray’s poem, and knew it by heart, but like Goldsmith he was more alive than Lord Harcourt to its ambiguities. So was Thomas Hardy, who borrowed a line to entitle his novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). Lincoln escaped from grinding rural poverty to become a successful corporation lawyer and a great president. His biographers stress his intellect and his ambition (that “tiny engine”), but he understood his luck. Lincoln, following his hero Henry Clay, would use government (laws, taxes and expenditures) to promote the general welfare and provide warmth and life to those for whom “Chill Penury repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul.” Happy Birthday, then, to a truly complex poem, one of continuing relevance. ©

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THINK. The motto of Thomas J. Watson.

An enduring of American myths is that of the “self-made man.” Once it conveyed the obligation to all young folk (women included) to attend to the ‘duty’ of building one’s character, if necessary from scratch, but during our capitalistic revolutions (ca. 1865-1929) it was appropriated by “captains of industry” who liked to claim that they had risen to riches solely by their own efforts. Well, some did (e.g. Carnegie), but most didn’t. One of the truly self-made was Thomas J. Watson, in the sense that his origins were humble (made more so by his father’s alcoholism). So Watson (born on February 17, 1874) went to work early in life, beginning with several unsuccessful sales jobs. Then failure as a retail butcher led to a job with NCR. Watson was returning his cash register and arranging to pay off that debt when, instead, the local NCR manager took him on and (according to Watson) taught him everything he needed to know. There followed a meteoric rise to head an NCR subsidiary, which in 1924 Watson transformed into “International Business Machines,” better known as IBM. The rest is history. By the time Watson retired, in 1956, IBM was an empire with 75,000 employees, and he was a multimillionaire. But Watson never forgot his roots, or his luck. Like Carnegie he devoted a great deal of time and money to philanthropy, especially to education and health care but also to the United Nations. A loyal Democrat, Watson was especially close to FDR and Truman (perhaps despite always sailing too close to the anti-trust wind), and in 1942, as his company’s war profits soared, Watson made news by giving up his salary, perhaps moved by the fact that his sons were bomber pilots and understood risk better than he ever had. ©

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I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. Inscription on Nikos Kazantzakis’s gravestone, in Heraklion, Crete.

If ever Hollywood produced a male icon especially for males, it was Anthony Quinn, and when as Zorba the Greek (1964) he taught timid Basil (Alan Bates) to howl with laughter, to weep, to hug (even men), to pity, and above all madly to dance, multitudes of young males (timid and otherwise) sighed with relief. It was all OK. Maleness, as a quality, suddenly had new parameters. And for once, in this at least, a movie got a novel right. Nikos Kazantzakis, born in Heraklion on February 18, 1883, wrote the novel Zorba in his 60s, when his beloved Crete was under German occupation. Starving, Kazantzakis and his wife would lie abed to save calories, while in the streets the Nazi model of manhood held sway. And so Kazantzakis invented Zorba, the Zorba who taught “the Boss” (a half-Greek English academic) how to be some other man, to look “over the awe-inspiring abyss” of life and then to avoid delirium, terror, religion, and/or bravado, but to “look over the precipice calmly and bravely and say, ‘I like it.’” This was Kazantzakis’s consistent view. His final novel, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955), is also about the renunciation of fear (even when it seemed the only sensible response). Kazantzakis may have been too left wing for the Nobel (he is said to have missed it narrowly in 1957, the year he died), but he did win the Lenin Peace Prize, translated both Goethe and Dante into Greek, and wrote a huge, poetic, sequel to the Odyssey (over 30,000 lines), also of course in Greek. Always he wanted us to share Zorba’s pleasure when the Boss learns to be “a man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets tears run down his cheeks . . . and does not spoil the freshness of his joy” by thinking too hard about it. But in 1964, Rex Harrison stole Anthony Quinn’s Oscar. ©

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I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven. Emily Dickinson.

These notes have featured several authors who began writing late in life, after careers as CEO’s or housewives, but usually they wrote a bit before mothballing their computers or dustmops. So it was with Eugene Eisenmann, a moderately successful New York lawyer (he became president of the Legal Society of New York) who quit at age 50 (he was born in Panama on February 19, 1906) to become an ornithologist. Within two years he edited the American Ornithological Union’s journal (entitled The Auk) and a member of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. Of course he cheated. You can’t make that kind of a switch overnight, and indeed he’d been a bird nut since his youth in Panama. Fluent in English and Spanish, Eisenmann kept up that interest through his years at Harvard and, as a practicing lawyer, took time off to observe, record, and write about birds in and near Panama. This didn’t much impede his rise to senior partner, but he did find trial lawyering getting in the way of his passion for ornithology. So in 1956 he quit torts and frauds and took up birds, full time. In the 25 years left to him, besides The Auk, he became a research fellow of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote 150 scientific papers, and produced two important compendium studies on the birds of Central and South America. On his death in 1981, the AMNH immediately established the Eisenmann Medal (awarding distinguished work in ornithology), and it was also entirely fitting that a group of Panamanian scientists would, in 2000, name their ‘Discovery Center’ in Soberania National Park the Fundación Avilauna Eugene Eisenmann. The moral of this story may be that if you want to change careers, start yesterday. ©