BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

For the stronger we our houses do build,/ The less chance we have of being killed. The Tay Bridge Disaster, by McGonagall, 1879.

William McGonagall’s humble origins mean that we do not know his birth date, but he died on September 29, 1902, already possessor of a reputation as a bad actor and a worse poet, and in his life and local reception proof positive that it’s not only the English who love irony. The Scots proved good at it too. So, too, do English folk who live in Scotland. When the poverty-stricken J. K. Rowling settled in Edinburgh to continue her work on the Potter saga, she encountered the McGonagall legend, was charmed by it, and named one of her central characters, the heroic Minerva, after him. Born in Edinburgh, McGonagall spent most of his working life in Dundee as a handloom weaver. There he married (at age 16), raised a large family, and it was there that in 1877 he received a vision of himself as a poet and, driven by that vision, commenced to write, and to act. He enjoyed enough fame to publish, to be the butt of mainly good natured jokes and pranks from his workmates, to retire and move himself and his unmarried children back to Edinburgh. There, sadly, people soon tired of McGonagall and his truly dreadful poetry (which he often declaimed on street corners). As the good joke turned into an embarrassment, McGonagall subsisted on occasional gifts from Dundee and pennies he begged in the streets. He died with too few pennies to afford a proper burial. His unmarked grave testified to his fall from grace. But his works, like Shakespeare’s, survived (some are still in print), and when the world recovered enough from WW II to need a joke, it rediscovered “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Grand Knight of the White Elephant, Burma.” There is light-hearted dispute about whom to credit for this, but it seems appropriate to honor Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and the rest of the zany crew that invented BBC radio’s immortal “Goon Show” in the early 1950s. McGonagall and his poetry then did sterling service for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for a fair number of comedy routines, for a film (starring Milligan and Sellers), a comic novel, for Minerva McGonagall of course, and from the 1950s the town councils of Dundee and Edinburgh have raised plaques to him and, justice finally done, marked his grave. ©

[Stanley]

No matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote

In the 1920s and early 1930s, a lonely child, oddly adult in some ways, came from sophisticated New Orleans to rural Monroeville, Alabama where he lived with his very elderly cousin and honorary aunt, Miss Sook Faulk. The boy was (by his own later recollection) “so different . . . so much more intelligent and sensitive and perceptive” than other children, but even so he struck up a fast friendship with a Monroeville child about his age, and together they enjoyed real adventures and some make-believe ones. That friendship would echo down the century in some of the most evocative writing about childhood, the little boy’s short stories “A Christmas Memory” and “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and the little girl’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. These precocious, imaginative kids were Truman Capote and (Nelle) Harper Lee, their fictional alter egos (in To Kill a Mockingbird) Dill Harris and Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch. In those childhood years, Capote was Truman Streckfus Parsons, born on September 30, 1924, to a mother who couldn’t handle motherhood and an affectionate if distant father, the scion of an old planter family. He would later take the surname of his stepfather, Joe Capote, and would throughout his life revel in the sense of his brilliance, his superiority to just about everyone he met. But his talents were undeniable, his prose crystalline, sometimes perfect, whether the subject were light, as in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his (rather sour) remembrance of James Thurber or forbiddingly dark as in his famous “faction” on gruesome killings in Kansas, In Cold Blood. That last title lives on as a masterwork, but in the end (which came early, in 1984) Truman Capote’s promise was dissipated by his life, a restless seeking after notoriety in which one of the few constants was that childhood friendship with Nelle Lee Harper. ©

[Stanley]

Lise and I walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot . . . and gradually the idea took shape. Otto Frisch, remembering his Copenhagen talks with Niels Bohr and Lise Meitner.

In the sciences, one occasionally hears of married couple partnerships, such as the Curies of Paris. More plentiful are father-son traditions such as that of the Braggs at Cambridge, and there are a very few brother-sister teams (e.g. Robert Boyle and Catherine, Viscountess Ranelagh), but aunt-nephew collaborations must be among the rarest of scientific “relations.” In the one case I know of, the aunt was Lise Meitner, already featured in these notes for her pioneer work in nuclear physics, and the nephew was Otto Robert Frisch, born on October 1, 1904, in Vienna. Otto’s parents urged him to take up painting, as per dad, or the piano, as per mom, and Frisch did try his hand at both, but Auntie Lise (his mother’s sister) tempted him into physics and a doctorate (1926, on the electrons of salts) at the University of Vienna. Together they also pursued the mysteries of the atom, at Vienna and then, when the rise of Nazism made life there unpleasant, wherever people would tolerate brilliant Jewish scientists, in Otto’s case at Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. Aunt Lise was near enough, in Stockholm, that the two often got together with Bohr (and maintained cordial and technical correspondences with some old colleagues in Berlin, Prague, and Vienna) and in experiments, in mind-games, and in conversations began to see how atoms might be split and thus realize the stupendous energy theorized by Einstein and others. The outbreak of war stranded Frisch in Birmingham, England, where he and yet another German exile (Rudolf Peierls) quickly produced a secret memorandum for the British government which became, in due course, the nucleus of the Manhattan Project. Thereby several tales hang, including how it was that the Nobel Prize for all this went to Otto Hahn, in 1944. But for today, let’s leave it with Otto Robert Frisch and his Auntie Lise which, many believe, is precisely where it should be. ©

[Stanley]

Innocence is a kind of insanity. Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955.

Graham Greene’s life is about as well-known as that of any author, modern or ancient. This is mainly thanks to Lancaster’s Norman Sherry, who knew Greene well, followed his footsteps through life, even contracted dysentery in the same Mexican village where Greene had fallen ill. Sherry’s three-volume biography stands as a monument to the belief that if we know enough about a writer’s life we can say something definitive about a writer’s intentions. It’s a noble idea and one eminently worth pursuing, but Greene’s life was particularly opaque, and there’s no doubt that the obfuscation was deliberate. Born into a headmaster’s family at Berkamsted School, October 2, 1904, Greene learned as a pupil there to hide himself from others, and he kept getting better at it until the day he died (in 1991). Along the way through “Greeneland” (as critics came to call his imagined world) he was a none-too-distinguished history major at Oxford, a spy (for a time he worked with that double-deceiver Kim Philby), a convert to, then an apostate from and then again a convert to Catholicism (or, at least, a “Catholic agnostic”), a spot-on libeler of the child star Shirley Temple (in 1937 MGM sued Greene successfully over his review of Wee Willie Winkie), a merciless observer of western neo-colonialism who himself played several games of cultural superiority, a patron of prostitutes and priests, a druggie, a distant husband and an intimate lover; one could go on. And through it all Graham Green wrote, at least 500 words a day, and he published fiction in several genres (including spy novels of great depth and deception) which, Norman Sherry exhaustively proved, were in some sense autobiographical and were peppered with very real characters from the Greeneland of Graham Greene’s ceaseless journeying. Paulette has a shelf full, has read them all, and insists that I start soon. ©

[SCG note: For English Literature I had Norman Sherry. Norman was a world authority on Conrad and when I knew him he was engaged in writing Graham Greene’s biography. Norman was a funny little bloke and I’m sure that in any other context I would have marked him down as suspect and avoided him like the plague. However, he was a wonderful and passionate teacher and I really enjoyed the seminars with him. We soon found out that there was a problem. Because of my age no doubt, I had no qualms about entering into debate with Norman and the result was that nobody else got a look in. Norman told me that I wasn’t to see this as a fault, I was using the seminar properly, the problem was with the younger students who didn’t have the confidence to speak. We came to an arrangement, I would only speak if spoken to for the first twenty minutes of the hour long seminar, after that the gloves were off. It was a good ploy because the others soon realised what was going on and fell over themselves to get a word in before Norman turned me loose. He said we made a good team and that the young ones had opened up much faster than would otherwise have been the case. Both at Lancaster and in the States I found that faculty at colleges and universities usually saw a leavening of mature students as a good thing. They were usually more committed and focused than the youngsters and set them a good example. Also, they weren’t afraid of speaking up in seminars and other discussions and could be a useful catalyst.
Norman’s secretary, and the person who did a lot of his research was a lady called Maureen Jex. Mo was brilliant, I think she enjoyed the fact that I was different and certainly understood many things about me far better than I did. She picked up on things that it took me fifteen years to sort out but had the sense to leave me to it. We are still talking to each other twenty years later so I think I did all right there!
Apropos of Norman, I have never forgotten an incident that happened in my second year. I had popped round to have a cup of coffee with him even though he was no longer one of my tutors and when I went in his room he was busy photo-copying documents on a large portable copier in the middle of the floor. He immediately put me in charge of the copying while he brewed the coffee. “Two copies of each dear boy!” and away I went. I couldn’t help noticing that the first document I copied was a letter from Edward Arddizone to Graham Greene illustrated with one of his famous line drawings! The next was from Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicholson’s wife and the one after that from Harold Macmillan! I realised I was copying Graham Greene’s personal correspondence! Just then Norman said something that was a complete non sequitur and I never replied. “Personally, I don’t know what you’re pissing about at dear boy, you’re quite obviously a writer.” That statement has haunted me for years, flawed man though he was, Norman was definitely a writer and an opinion like that from somebody like him must surely call for attention. I stored it away in the back of my mind and got on with my job.]

We met in NY in 1981 and Ethel and I poured him onto the Red Eye....

[Stanley]

Of course I shall be there. Every corpse must attend its own funeral. Annie Horniman, on the closure of the Gaiety, 1920.

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman was born on October 3, 1860, into the forbidding upper reaches of Victorian Protestant dissent, her father a Quaker who lapsed only into the Congregationalism of her mother. Annie retained the Quaker spirit, and she also found the family money useful. The capital came from tea, her first infusion a bequest that came directly to her from her grandpa, then more came from her parents (she was co-heir with her brother Elmslie). Well before that, the family’s German governess began her liberation by taking her (secretly for plays were sinful) to see a performance of The Merchant of Venice. Her exploding interests in art led her father to permit her to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882, where she discovered she couldn’t paint but found new friends, new life and the art of rebellion. She traveled alone to Europe, learned to bicycle, to ski and to smoke in public, was bowled over by Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and found her lifelong romantic interest in Minnie Bergson. And from 1892 Annie had the money to back, and the talent to help, those who could create art, and after a rather long flirtation with crackpot religion (the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn) she settled down to being an art impresario of the first order, amanuensis to W. B. Yeats (and co-founder, with him, of Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre), secret sponsor of the outrageous George Bernard Shaw, and then (1908) the woman who transformed Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre into a pioneer repertory, actors and directors on year-long contracts, no stars, and a veritable curriculum of classic and new plays. Showered with honors, including from King George V, famed for her humor, her suffragist politics, her wardrobe, and her protégés (e.g. Flora Robson), Annie closed the Gaiety in 1920 but kept gaily going until 1937. When he heard of her death, Yeats couldn’t stop talking about her. ©

[Stanley]

ere many yeares I wyl cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture, than doust the pope. William Tyndale.

That Thomas More was of saintly quality is not to be doubted. But the author of Utopia had another side to his character, dark enough that his elevation to the Catholic sainthood (1935) and his ‘promotion’ (2000) to be the patron saint of politicians has the complex, subtle flavor of irony. (Although given today’s politics ‘irony’ may not be quite the right word). More’s power was at its height at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and he used it ruthlessly to hound the heresy (and its heretics) out of existence, or keep it on the continent, using spies and deception, torture and the stake. So when, on October 4, 1535, Miles Coverdale saw the first whole (both testaments) edition of the Tyndale Bible into print, probably in Antwerp, he understood that he might be signing his own death warrant. But the politics of making the Bible accessible to the meanest cowherd (in plain English) was itself very complex. William Tyndale, the chief translator, was already in prison, near Brussels and perhaps at More’s and Henry VIII’s request. He would be strangled and burned (in that order) in 1536. Miles Coverdale was not without Tyndale’s courage, to be sure, but he also knew when to be scarce, and his career of brave acts and prudent exiles (that would include a brief spell as a bishop in the Reformed Church of England) ended naturally when in 1569, aged 81, he expired in a (by then) safely Protestant London. Before the complete Tyndale translation was published, in 1535, Thomas More had already run fatally foul of his mercurial king’s marriage plans and after a deadly game of cat and mouse was beheaded. The king accorded More that mercy in lieu of hanging, drawing and quartering. But William Tyndale’s brave, adept translation survived them all and would form about 80% of the King James Bible, finally published in 1611 and (by definition) with the approval of the crown. ©

[Stanley]

The Power of the Powerless. Samizdat essay by Vaclav Havel, circulating in manuscript from 1978, published in New York in 1985.

Some of my father’s most memorable moments came in his defenses of freedom of the press and free speech (at Drake University where he directed the journalism program and advised the student newspaper). In several small ways, on several occasions, he proved the truth of one of his favorite aphorisms, “the censor is always an ass.” That’s especially true when censorship is codified, embodied in bureaucratic rules, for language itself, when properly weaponized, can be razor sharp and surgically precise. A good writer can waltz right down the rules’ edges, never or only very rarely falling off, but always enraging the censor. This risky art has over the centuries had many master practitioners, but may have reached its high point in Communist Czechoslovakia, where from the 1960s a generation of writers and playwrights jabbed and poked at the censor’s rules, served occasional prison terms for their revolutionary insouciance, upon their release resumed their mockery, and thus by stages improved their art. Among the best of them was the playwright Vaclav Havel, born 80 years ago today, on October 5, 1936. After messing about with chemistry, Havel became entrapped in the theatre, first as stagehand and student, then (from the 1960s) as a writer. His writing (vaudevillian sketches, comedies, dramas, essays) got him in trouble in the Prague Spring (1968) and then kept him there, in and out of prison, banned from writing but writing anyway, probing the grim landscape of repression and nailing its comedic qualities, infuriating the authorities until, at length, in the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989, Vaclav Havel became himself the “authority”: by unanimous vote of the new Federal Assembly president of the Czechoslovak republic. His presidency, open and flexible and liberating, proved to be the very best and most pointed of all his jokes. ©

[Stanley]

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you. Jane Eyre.

On 6th October 1847 the novel Jane Eyre was published by the firm of Smith, Elder, and Co. The author was Currer Bell, a person (presumably male) who had previously published, with his brothers Ellis and Acton, a volume of poetry. We know today that Currer Bell was Charlotte Brontë and that Ellis and Acton Bell were Emily and Anne Brontë. And thereby hang several significant tales. The Brontë sisters, all inclined to self-expression, had been writing poetry secretly, not just secretly from the world but secretly from each other. Discovering this was such a joy to them all that they published the poetry, albeit under male pseudonyms. As for Jane Eyre, it did not sell well, though it’s recognized today as a pioneer fiction, a first person narrative that delved deeply into the narrator’s character and revealed her as a free person, stunning herself and others with her choices. And the experience gave the sisters a taste for further writing, and publishing, so before their untimely deaths the world saw not only Jane Eyre, by Charlotte, but also Wuthering Heights, by Emily, and Agnes Grey, by Anne. Their brother Branwen, who figures in their writing and characterizations, expressed himself through addiction to opium and alcohol. All four children, raised by repressive (and over-protective) parents, told stories to one another to pass the days, and years, in their father’s vicarage at Haworth, near Keighley (“Keithlee”), in the north of England. In summer daylight, visitors today discover it as a pleasant place, perched high near the boundary between woodland and moor. Thanks to Jane Eyre (and even more to Wuthering Heights) one easily imagines it otherwise, on its dark and stormy winter nights, as a prison for those precocious children. And yet one can see it too as a beacon of hope (in Jane Eyre) for Mr. Rochester, which is how it all turns out. ©

[Stanley]

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair. R. D. Laing.

Severe mental illness in a loved one is difficult to understand, and explanations that depend on brain chemistry and genetic inheritance seem hollow when one knows that the “insane” person experienced an unfair share of trauma and unhappiness and when chemical treatments seem only to deaden both the pain and the patient. In such trying circumstances, the early works of Ronald David Laing offer plausible narratives of and hopeful responses to mental illness. R. D. Laing was born in Glasgow on October 7, 1927. He read medicine at Glasgow, but said his interest in psychiatry was spurred by his service in an army psychiatric unit. Given the tenor of his first books on “madness” and his focus on the patient’s family history his “decidedly odd” parents may have been the true source of his interest. At his clinic at Kingsley Hall, east London, and in his The Divided Self (1960) and Sanity, Madness, and the Family (1964), Laing rejected “brain chemistry” explanations for madness (and excoriated the practices of drugging or shocking patients into comatose states) and urged that we begin helping and healing madmen and madwomen with a humane acceptance of their mad state as an alternate reality which arose in the first place as a way of coping with their (alternate) experiences. Only then could the mad find their way to new (and yet workable) relationships with others and with themselves. Lionized by the trendy, embracing with far too much enthusiasm LSD and alcohol, Laing himself began in the 1970s to develop “decidedly odd” behaviors and even odder notions. He would eventually be barred from medical practice, but his early ideas retain force (and, indeed, devoted disciples in and outside of the shrink business). His was a hopeful thesis, and may be worth our attention on that ground alone. ©

[Stanley]

So follow, follow, by hill and hollow,/ And swiftly homeward glide, /What midnight splendor, how warm and tender, / The maiden at your side. Sleighing in New England, Edmund Stedman.

Poetry is such an exacting profession that we have come to think of the poet as other-worldly, careless of money even when she has it, unstylish in dress or kaftan-wrapped. If male, the poet’s conventional role is played out as raffish at best, unkempt, and if from an earlier era consumptive into the bargain. One could almost conclude that the best poets die young, victims of the collision between their own imprudence and the world’s harsh realities. But then we come to Longfellow, who made so much money from his poetry (and from his second, tragic marriage to Fanny Appleton) that he could live in haut bourgeois splendor at Craigie House, in Cambridge, despite resigning his Harvard chair. And in these notes I have already mentioned the ironic connections between verse and comfort in the life of Wallace Stevens, insurance executive and poet par excellence. But today brings up another, Edmund Clarence Stedman, born into wealth on October 8, 1833, and destined (after the deaths of Lowell and Longfellow) to become Victorian America’s most popular poet, founding member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (in 1904), literary scholar and anthologist, and, yes, an eminent banker and member (1865-1900) of the New York Stock Exchange. If you are looking for Bohemian anguish, you won’t find it in his poetry, although he did have a tough time of it when he and his mother spent a miserable period with her millionaire father, who apparently took some pleasure from beating bad boys, but he was liberated from that by Yale and journalism, after which he took his rightful place at the Stock Exchange and wrote poetry (not at all like Wallace Stevens’s) that was florid, sentimental (Prince Albert was his tragic hero), and forgotten. Still, the next time you meet a financier, don’t make any casual assumptions about his, or her, aesthetic life. ©

[Stanley]

Why not sell hot food in cold weather? Mrs. Myrtle Walgreen, circa 1911.

A visitor to St. Louis could be excused for thinking there is a Walgreens on every corner. They are indeed plentiful, made even more so by a series of Walgreens takeovers of rival companies, most recently Rite-Aid (for $9.4 billion). Thus the life and times of the company’s founder, Charles Rudolph Walgreen, takes on local color in many places. Charles Walgreen, born in Knoxville, Illinois on October 9, 1873, was the son of two of those immigrants we lately hear so much about, from Sweden, immigrants who in their desire to assimilate had changed their name from Olofsson. Charles grew up in Ronald Reagan’s home town, Dixon, but took a different path in life, first volunteering for the cavalry in the Spanish-American War. From that he contracted malaria, a lifelong companion, but he had already qualified in pharmacy, and upon his discharge bought the Chicago pharmacy he worked for (in 1901). By 1916 he was incorporated as the Walgreen Company, with nine stores and a reputation for selling more than pharmaceuticals. This prepared him for selling “prescription” whiskey during Prohibition (and maybe some non-prescription whiskey, too), and he may also be credited with popularizing (but not inventing) the chocolate malt at his lunch counters (another innovation) where he also served Walgreen’s Ice Cream by the cone, dish, and gallon. The Walgreens were good employers (Charles Walgreen is in the Labor Hall of Fame) and they became very considerable philanthropists. Charles made big donations to the universities of Chicago and Michigan both before and at his death, and his daughter Ruth (after she and her husband broke away to form Rexalls) endowed the University of Arizona’s poetry center. For me, the chocolate malted milk shake was more than enough. ©

[Stanley]

If there warn't no Crown, Bess, if there was only just you and Porgy, what then? Porgy, in Porgy and Bess.

One of the more dramatic performances of Porgy and Bess occurred in 1943, in Copenhagen, at the Royal Danish Theatre. Given the venue and the Nazi occupation, it was performed by Danish singers, in blackface. It was a protest, and it was cheered to the rafters by 22 audiences on 22 nights until the Nazis closed it down. And indeed Porgy and Bess has had a political history, which may be said to have begun on October 10, 1935, at the Alvin Theatre, with its première performance. By then George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward had tried it out severally, beginning with Heyward’s 1925 novel, Porgy, read by George Gershwin in 1926, and then continuing with the play of the same name (1927). By then the Gershwins had already decided it had to be translated into music, and they began work on it (with Heyward) in 1927. By 1935 it was ready, and after a concert performance in Carnegie Hall and a short run in Boston it hit Manhattan with an all black cast (no blackface!!), did well for 124 nights, and then took to the road. It is now part of the modern opera repertoire, a measure of how far we’ve come since that first road trip (when, for instance, the company successfully demanded the integration of DC’s “National” Theatre!!). Along the way, one would have liked to see the 1952 production, with Leontyne Price as Bess, William Warfield as Porgy, Cab Calloway as Sportin’ Life, and (who would have thought?) Maya Angelou as Clara. Then the propagandists in the State Department got hold of it and, eager to show the world how un-racist some Americans would like to be, sent it off on tour to Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America in 1953-1956. Its journey to full opera status climaxed in Houston, in 1976, and then at the Met itself in 1985. It was a long journey, both political and artistic, and it is still in progress. ©

[Stanley]

Of all the crying evils in the depraved earth ... the greatest, judged by all the laws of God and humanity, is the miserable selfishness of men that keeps women from work. Alice Meynell, Diary, 1865.

Here’s a story involving religion, race, poetry, music, several passionate though platonic loves, and Charles Dickens. All this was bound up in the life of Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell, born in Barnes, London, on October 11, 1847. Alice would become a noted poet and critic, a feminist, a friend of Tennyson and Ruskin, a regular contributor to leading intellectual publications, essayist, and devoted mother of seven children. With all that, Alice was long-time editor (or co-editor, with her husband) of three important journals, including the Catholic Weekly Register. She was a woman of color, her father (Thomas James Thompson) being born of an Afro-Jamaican mother, the (free) mistress of a wealthy sugar planter. Thomas Thompson inherited all of his father’s wealth and moved to England, where his charm, intelligence, and fortune brought him a wide circle of friends that included Charles Dickens. Dickens in turn brought Thompson a wife, with whom he (Dickens) was passionately in love, the concert pianist Christiana Weller. It is thought that Dickens brought Christiana to Thompson so that he could, so to speak, have her without having her, but in the issue the marriage soured the relationship. But that marriage also brought forth Alice Christiana Gertrude Meynell, the writer and critic, who herself would have several intimate though not physical loves, first with the Catholic priest who brought her into the Church but then left England altogether to avoid any carnal sin, and then with the poets Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, the latter of whom lived (platonically) with Alice and her husband and co-worker, Wilfred Meynell, and their six surviving children, for over two decades. Alice died in 1922, mourned as one of England’s most remarkable women. Indeed. ©

[Tizer]

"She was a woman of color, her father (Thomas James Thompson) being born of an Afro-Jamaican mother, the (free) mistress of a wealthy sugar planter."

I've listened to several of those 15-minute programmes currently on Radio 4 at lunchtime relating stories about black people in Britain in the 1800s. The stories were full of surprise and it's a pity they aren't being heard by a wider audience.

[Stanley]

I've heard them too Tiz and I agree with you.... Nightingale and Seacole says it all......

[Stanley]

[thus] out of the diploid state, the haploid is once again germinated. Theodor Boveri, The Birth of the Cell, 1909.

Isaac Newton was not a modest man, but his famous statement that he but stood on the shoulders of giants offers a reminder that science is, so to speak, a collaborative construction project. Great discoveries by their greatness conceal the fact that they were made possible by lesser ones. Francis Crick and James Watson’s mapping of the DNA molecule is a case in point. It not only camouflages the crucial supporting work, at the time, by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, but obscures a whole string of vital findings stretching back into the 19th century. Among the most critical were those of the German cytologist Theodor Boveri, born on October 12, 1862, in Bamberg, Bavaria, who first trained to follow his father or his mother into art or music, but at the University of Munich got sidetracked into anatomy and biology. This brought him an appointment at Wurzberg and an American wife, a biology professor at Vassar, Marcella O’Grady, who collaborated with him on much of his work. (She was, by the way, the first woman on the Wurzberg faculty). That work began on nematode worms and graduated to sea urchins, simple enough organisms to perform careful and controlled experiments on inheritance. Boveri learned much about the structure and location of chromosomes in worms, urchins, and birds’ eggs, meticulously followed the embryonic development of several species, argued (from empirical tests) that cancers could be heritable, made exciting discoveries about the mechanisms of cell division, and clearly predicted just the sort of work that, decades later, would be carried out by Crick, Watson, Wilkins, and Franklin. A great pioneer in science, Boveri died at only 53, leaving his wife to carry on at the Boveri Institute and a daughter who became a leading science writer. ©

[Stanley]

If you know before you look, you can't see for knowing. Sir Terry Frost.

Although Terence Ernest Manitou Frost would claim that, as a youth, he felt “artistic impulses” and that, as a young man, he painted the red, white and blue RAF roundels on production fighter planes, his life supports the notion that artists are made, not born (although like most of us he was indeed born, on October 13, 1915). The English educational system destined him for the workshop, and from 14 (when he left school) he followed orders, first in a bicycle repair shop, then in a bakery, and as the war came in an aircraft factory. He had joined the territorial army during a period of unemployment, and he volunteered as a commando and saw service in North Africa and then in a failed operation on the island of Crete. Captured on Crete in 1941, by 1943 Frost was in Stalag 383 in Bavaria, where he really learned to paint, using scrounged materials to produce striking portraits (some still survive!!) of his fellow POWs. Liberated and demobbed, Terry married Kath Clarke (a machine operator) and they settled down to work and raise a brood (among six there are two artists). But the art bug had bitten, and very soon Terry and Kath were living in a trailer on the fringes of the St. Ives (Cornwall) artist community, both doing odd jobs and Terry painting when he could afford brushes and oils. Through the patronage of (inter alia) Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, this rather sociable machinist commando then attended art school, learned the finer points of his chosen craft, and became one of England’s best abstract painters. Abstract his works certainly are, but most of the 103 of them online at “ARTUK” seem to me, and to many critics, somehow grounded, real, “things” first seen by the artist and then translated for us. Knighted in 1998, Sir Terry Frost finally laid down his brushes in 2003, mourned by Kath, their five surviving kids, and many colleagues. ©

[Stanley]

Every instinct of mine would indicate that I was meant to be a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, or even a bishop, rather than the leader of a revolution. Eamon De Valera.

The racially-tinged “birther” campaign against my country’s first black president offers a reminder that one’s natal place can, from time to time, matter. So Eamon De Valera’s mother, Catherine Coll, when he had been sentenced to death for his part in Ireland’s Easter Rising (in 1916) thought she could save him by presenting evidence that he was not Irish at all, but American. And indeed De Valera was a Yank (by his birth in New York City, October 14, 1882, and the 14th amendment). But he was “George” at birth and “Edward” at his christening, and he did not become “Eamon” until he was sentenced to death in 1916. Thus we have tangential proof that the man really wanted to be thought an Irishman. So how did Eamon became Irish? His mother having married a different man (in Rochester, NY), De Valera was taken back to rural Ireland in 1885 by his uncle Ned, and was known as Eddie Coll. It was not a happy time for the orphan, but his cleverness brought an escape into college, a mathematics degree, and a wife (one of his teachers, a real Irishwoman, Sinead Flanagan). A year after his marriage, the dramatic failure of the Irish Home Rule Bill (under the threat of violence from Protestant Ulster) forced de Valera and many others into the militant nationalist movement. De Valera went on from 1916 to become prime minister (“Taoiseach”) of the Free State, then the Republic, and finally its President (1959-1973). In some ways more Irish than the Irish, he married nationalism to the Catholic Church, sought to revive a truly Irish national culture (rural, Gaelic, spiritual, patriarchal) and, however George-Eddie he began, he ended truly an Eamon. As for his birth certificate saving his life, that is unlikely. In 1916, the British decided they had shot quite enough rebels, and left Eamon de Valera to raise a family and a nation. ©

Later....

The Nobel Prize for Literature

A special anniversary note to you all, direct from the Nobel Prize Committee. There are a couple of people on this mailing list who will remember Dan Tynan singing this song on the shores of Lake Monona, in 1969, as Paulette and I got ready to take a train going east, all the way to England. Would that there were more, but it was 45 years ago and time and people do pass on. Anyway, it is really rather pleasant to have a good sweet rain fall into this very dry season.



Bob Dylan’s Dream



While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words were told, our songs were sung
Where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied
Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

[Stanley]

Has anyone seen my regiment? Trevor Howard as Lord Cardigan in the 1968 movie, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

On this day (October 16) was born, in 1797, James Thomas Brudenell, who would become famous for at least three reasons. First, he was the General who led the glorious (if you like that sort of thing) and disastrous “Charge of the Light Brigade,” immortally limned by Lord Tennyson:

Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Most likely, the blunderer was Lord Lucan, otherwise known as “Lord Looked On,” who gave the fatal order to charge. Brudenell merely obeyed. He was one of the few survivors of this particular piece of military folly and became a hero in Britain (until his actual conduct became known). So Brudenell himself was, secondly, a famous blunderer, comically aristocratic in his language, his bearing, and his ideas, impatient of restraint, immune to caution, hyper-sensitive about his place and his dignity, and after his fall from grace a figure of fun in London society. Later, Brudenell became the butt of the joke (at once comic and tyrannical) in two of George MacDonald Fraser’s famous “Flashman” fictions, notably Flashman at the Charge. Somewhat more happily, James Thomas Brudenell is best known to us today as the Earl of Cardigan, a title he assumed upon his father’s death. So he was, thirdly, the seventh Earl of Cardigan, and the one after whom the sweater was named. ©

[plaques]

The Charge of the Light Brigade was followed by an afternoon matinee by the Charge of the Heavy Brigade. This was led by our local hero General the Hon. Sir James Yorke Scarlett. The Russians having trounced the light brigade set of down hill in the belief that nobody would be stupid enough to charge uphill against them. They had even re-ranged their guns to avoid hitting their own cavalry. General Scarlett, brave but rather stupidly, led his men through the Russian cavalry and even through the Russian guns but having got there realized it was all a bit pointless and came back down again. At least Burnley got a hero and subsequently two Russian cannon that were put on display outside the old Grammar School.

[Stanley]

I think I have a right to feel aggrieved. Lucy Stanton, circa 1864.

Lucy Stanton, the first black woman to graduate from any American college (Oberlin, in 1851) was born free in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 16, 1831. Her biological father died when Lucy was a baby, and her mother then married John Brown, who adopted Lucy as his own although she retained the Stanton surname. This was not the John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame, but a freed black man of considerable wealth who founded the Cleveland Free School for African-American children and maintained in Cleveland a very active station on the Underground Railroad. Lucy was then admitted (in 1846) to Oberlin’s “Ladies’ Literary Course” (so-called because it did not require math or the classics). At Oberlin, Lucy was elected president of the ladies’ literary society and invited to speak at graduation. Her topic was “A Plea for the Oppressed,” and it proved to be a rule she lived by. She married an Oberlin alumnus, William Day, and the couple worked for abolition, editing abolitionist newspapers in in Ohio, New England, and Canada, but after Day abandoned Lucy (and her daughter) she worked as a seamstress in Cleveland. Her status as a single mother made it difficult for her to win an appointment as a missionary teacher in the post-war south, but she won through, taught in Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, found another husband (Levi Sessions), and enjoyed some local acceptance, particularly in Tennessee where she was elected president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Repelled by the rise of Jim Crow in the South and freed from local obligations by the death of Lucy’s mother, the couple moved to Los Angeles in 1900, where Lucy founded and ran a welfare agency for black women, the Sojourner Truth Industrial Club. Lucy Stanton died in 1910; she was buried in a rare place but a fitting one, for from its founding in 1884 Rosedale Cemetery was open to the dead of all races and religions. ©

[Stanley]

When I see the ways of others and thinks on you, I cannot but acknowledg myself most happie in so verteus a person. William Douglas to his wife, Lady Anne Hamilton, circa 1660.

Since these notes function as birthday cards, I don’t usually do death dates, but in the case of Anne, Duchess of Hamilton, it makes sense. When she was born, in London, on January 16, 1632, she was only a good marriage prospect. She had three brothers, one of whom might expect, surely, to inherit her father’s immense Scottish estates (centered on the Isle of Arran and in mainland Lanarkshire) and his dukedom. But the boys all died by 1640, and since Hamilton’s estates and titles were not entailed to the male line, Lady Anne became Duchess Anne. By the time the duchess herself died, on October 17, 1716, she had (twice) reclaimed the Hamilton estates from crushing debts, once reclaimed them from the accidents of the Civil Wars (her father was a royalist soldier, and his properties had been confiscated and passed to Cromwellians), restored or founded her estates’ several schools and churches, gone into Lanarkshire coal and salt mining in a big way, and made a couple of “her” villages into thriving port towns. She’d also birthed a baker’s dozen of children, watched her eldest son deteriorate into a typical London roué, preserved the estates (and the liquid capital) from his wasteful hand, and before his death (in a duel, in 1712) had taken his children under her care and raised them (particularly her eldest grandson) to be proper Presbyterians, good managers, and reasonably excellent aristocrats. Thus Lady Anne, suo jure Duchess of Hamilton, should have put paid to the notion that a woman could not manage even her own affairs. But then, her grandmother had already done so, and at age 10 Lady Anne had been sent north from London to learn from her namesake Anne Cunningham, Marchioness of Hamilton, how, indeed, to be mistress of Hamilton Palace and of all she surveyed. ©

[Stanley]

She had all the graces of a mid-Victorian in the midst of an active, modern, American existence. New York Times obit for Ellen Browning Scripps, August 1932.

The “Philanthropy Hall of Fame” states that Ellen Browning Scripps’ personal fortune “derived” from her brother’s publishing empire. Her New York Times obituary similarly credits E. W. Scripps with founding the empire in the first place. But Miss Ellen, born in London on October 18, 1836, lived a life that, read between the lines, had quite a bit to do with her family’s good fortunes. Her father’s three marriages produced ten children, seven of them long-lived, and three of those became gifted newspaper people. The family moved to Illinois when Ellen was seven, and after she’d graduated from Knox College (1858) she went off to Michigan to help elder brother James set up The Detroit Evening News, for which she wrote regular, and pioneering, “op-ed” columns. Ellen soon welcomed her younger half-brother, E. W., into the business, and in 1880 sided with him in a failed effort to wrest control from James. The two then traveled together, in Europe and South America, probably plotted, and returned to the USA to take over from James, buy or establish many more newspapers, and become a real social force in southern California. Working from her modest home in La Jolla and E. W.’s Miramar Ranch Ellen mobilized her millions not only to expand Scripps & Co. but also to found a famed liberal arts college, several science research institutions including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, two San Diego museums, a huge nature reserve (which she gave to the state), and endow the San Diego Zoo. She was a noted campaigner for women’s rights and free speech, and still she wrote her daily news and views column. However, her effort to give it all away failed, and at her death (aged 95) she left a still hefty fortune to her favorite good causes and to her favored nieces and nephews. ©

[Stanley]

When students study all worlds except their own, they are miseducated. Johnnetta Betsch Cole.

In my lifetime, African Americans faced not only formal segregation but a host of quiet prejudices. So as legal race bars were breached, glass ceilings were installed. The one I remember best—as blacks began to populate football teams—was that “they” could never produce a quarterback. Similarly, when I was at Penn, my philosophy prof, William Fontaine, was the only tenured African-American in the Ivy League. It was a distinction he soon lost, brilliant though he was. But could a person of African descent be a college president? That—like the quarterback question—now seems an absurdity, but even Spelman College, perhaps the most prestigious of all historically black colleges, found it unanswerable until, in 1987, at the tender age of 106, Spelman installed its first black president. Johnneta Betsch Cole was born in Jacksonville, Florida, on October 19, 1936. She had an unusual background and a couple of odd advantages, including an exceptionally rich grandfather, and she made the most of them: BA Oberlin (1957) and PhD Northwestern (1967). Cole made her academic mark in anthropology and soon began to be known as a skillful administrator, rising to the rank of provost at the University of Massachusetts before being tapped to be Spelman’s very first black president. There she presided over significant increases in enrollment and in endowment, leaving in 1997 to do the same at Bennett College. At 79, she is still gainfully employed as Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American Art. Her Cuban connections and sympathies denied her a place in Bill Clinton’s cabinet, but Coca-Cola and Merck were less politically correct and she’s been on their executive boards since the 1990s. I suspect Johnnetta Cole could also have been a quarterback, but some glass ceilings remain intact. ©

[Stanley]

Either this is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians. Thomas Linacre on encountering the original Greek text of the New Testament.

When in the early 1960s Oxford University decided to establish a graduate college to cater especially to the needs of students who were from non-Oxbridge universities, they needed money but also a name. They chose Thomas Linacre, a man of affecting modesty whose range and depth of learning attracted many friends and inspired many students. And so Linacre College got its name. When I arrived there in 1969, I had no idea who Linacre was and still do not know his birthdate (it was sometime in 1460); but the anniversary of his death (on October 20, 1524) is well known, for by then he had become a famed scholar, tutor to Henry VII’s children (and then to Henry VIII’s daughter Mary), the king’s own physician, tutor and close friend of Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, John Colet, and other leaders of the northern European Renaissance, and (speaking of money) a generous benefactor. Indeed in 1520 Linacre retired from public life, joined the priesthood, and left his entire fortune to Oxford and Cambridge (for professorial chairs in medicine) and to the Royal College of Physicians, which he had helped to found and of which he was the first president. For all that, and his medical degree from Padua, Thomas Linacre was known best for his scholarship in classical Greek. It was a passion he had acquired as a student in Italy and brought back to England, where (at Oxford) he effected a revolution in accurate translation and critical exegesis, raised serious questions about the pedigree of the approved Latin Vulgate, and inspired Colet and, very possibly, William Tyndale to continue the work of making the Bible accurate and accessible. Thomas Linacre is, then, an appropriate namesake for a college that welcomes students from all the world and nurtures them in all the disciplines. ©