BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Existence . . . has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. Hermann Rorschach.

When I directed the Des Moines YMCA Day Camp I had a surpassingly odd supervisor who informed me, with all due solemnity, that the boys we had especially to watch were the “oddballs” who lay on their backs watching the clouds (rather than, I guess, chasing each other with hand axes). I paid no attention to him because I knew why boys contemplated clouds. Every once in a while, a cloud looked like something, a horse’s head or President Washington or a bird in flight or a ship steaming towards the horizon. Whether there was anything deeper or even dangerous in it didn’t interest me, but it fascinated Hermann Rorschach, born in Zurich on November 8, 1884. I suppose he might have grown up to become a YMCA staffer, but instead he was fascinated by the explosion of consciousness, and of the subconscious, that came with the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. To understand what ailed us, or just made us tick, it became important to discover and then explore our deepest, most instinctive responses. Nighttime dreams or daytime fantasies, perhaps. For Rorschach, clouds might have done the trick, but he settled instead on inkblots. It might seem an odd choice but in the days of inkwells and primitive fountain pens, inkblots were as ubiquitous as clouds. And it’s possible that young Rorschach read an 1857 collection of poems, by a Dr. Kerner, each inspired by an inkblot. The story I best like is that in school Rorschach’s nickname was “klecks”, “inkblots” in English, because even then he liked to make pictures with little pools of ink. No doubt when outside the boy Rorschach also lay on his back and contemplated the clouds. And so we have the inkblot test, whereby the cleverer among us can discern our deepest thoughts, isolate our most troubling neuroses, and keep us away from those hand axes. ©

[Tizer]

I wonder what Uncle Bob will have for us next, after the result of the US election!

[Stanley]

Thou, O God, dost sell unto us all good things at the price of labour. quote from Leonardo da Vinci and the inscription on Florence Sabin's bookplates.

On such a morning, one looks for women who refused to give up, and in that spirit I found Florence Rena Sabin. She was born (on November 9, 1871) in a rip-roarin’ mining town in Colorado, and when (in 1877) her mother died in childbirth, her miner father sent Florence and her baby sister to live with her uncle in Chicago and then her grandparents in Vermont. Somewhere along the way she began to excel in math and science, and that took her first to Smith and then to Johns Hopkins Medical School where Sabin became, in 1900, the first woman graduate, in 1901 the first woman research intern, and in 1902 the author of An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain. On the strength of that she became the first woman to join the Hopkins faculty then in 1918 the first woman to hold a full professorship. However, she was not happy at Hopkins (in 1917 the school had declined to make her its first female department chair), and in 1925 she achieved a double first (first woman professor, first woman department chair) at the Rockefeller Institute. At this time she moved from anatomy to cellular immunology, but not before (in 1924) she was elected (first woman) president of the American Association of Anatomists. Several other “woman firsts” followed, most notably her election to the National Academy of Sciences. She retired from Rockefeller in 1938 and went “home” to Colorado, but in 1944 came storming out of mothballs to chair the Governor’s Committee on Health, to create “Sabin’s Health Laws” and (among other things) to revolutionize the treatment of tuberculosis. Florence came finally to rest at 81. Her ashes lie in Colorado; her bronze statue (she wears a lab coat) is Colorado’s gift to the National Statuary Hall, Washington, DC. ©

[Stanley]

To think of abstraction as an end in itself . . . can only lead to exhaustion and impotence. Sir Jacob Epstein.

The settlement house movement began in London and by the 1890s had spread to the US, notably Chicago’s Hull House, but before the decade finished there were 38 in New York. Enrolled at one of these was a Jewish immigrant kid, 13 years old, who’d missed three years of grade school because of tenement-borne illnesses. Quickly he began to gain health, to groove on Walt Whitman’s poetry, and to take an interest in art and socialism. He was Jacob Epstein, born in an east side slum on November 10, 1880. His drawings soon (1901) won him a commission to illustrate a pioneering reform book, The Spirit of the Ghetto, by the muckraking journalist Hutchins Hapgood. But already Epstein had turned to making bronze breathe and in 1902 he went to Paris to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts. His early figures impressed, and (carrying with him a letter of introduction from Auguste Rodin to George Bernard Shaw) he went to London. There he became a sensation and also a scandal, for he was always developing, changing, open to the new, not least non-European traditions, and notable especially for his human figures, unmistakable yet abstract. Among Epstein’s early commissions perhaps the most famous was Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise (1909-12), exotic, Assyrian, and defiant. The Paris police were outraged. By that time Epstein had married a Scotswoman (the astonishingly patient Margaret Dunlop), settled down and opened a studio in London, and become a British citizen. Despite the fact that his sculptures and reliefs soon littered the landscape, it took him some time to become “established” in every sense, but in his (very) active old age he became a knight, an Oxford honorary, and the grand old man of British sculpture. Sir Jacob Epstein died just short of his 80th birthday. ©

[Stanley]

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species. Gordon Allport, 1955.

In my youth, “personality” was quite an issue. One had to have one and, failing that, to construct one (the livelier the better). That widespread popular concern (it extended to school testing) may have been a construct of an advertising, consumerist culture (for you could also buy a personality), but it was at base a critical intellectual issue. In Europe, Freud had plumbed the origins of personality and found them lying deep in one’s past consciousness. What surfaced was determined by what lay beneath, layers down, in early childhood, in infancy, even in the womb. Among the dissenters, perhaps the most prominent was the Harvard psychologist Gordon William Allport. Born in rural Indiana on November 11, 1897, Allport grew up in an odd household, a compound of his father’s medical quackery (mail order cures for morphine addiction) and his mother’s deep Presbyterianism, but he won a scholarship to Harvard, where he majored in economics and philosophy. But he became interested in “personality” through volunteer work among Boston’s poor and because his elder brother was at Harvard working on a PhD in the psychology. Traveling to Europe, Allport met Freud, who immediately offered a kind of psychoanalysis of the young man, an odd explanation of an odd encounter on a train, that seemed to Allport too deep, too clever by half, and in utter violation of the Occam’s Razor principle that the best explanations are those that require the fewest assumptions. In his long and influential Harvard career, Gordon Allport went on to develop a theory of personality that was social, existential, and at base democratic. In the clinic, he urged his students to pursue a therapeutic strategy based on a patient’s conscious experience of life. Overall, Allport believed that individuals (and their societies) were fully capable of conscious improvement. Perhaps we could use him today, but he died at the tender age of 70 and the psychological brain has been taken over by chemicals. ©

[Tripps]

Broadens the mind doesn't it this site?

Epstein - I remember paying at Tussauds Blackpool branch in the 1950's (I think), to see amongst other curiosities a sculpture by him. I've tried to find it via google, but I've been unsuccessful. I still have mental picture of it, and I'm surprised I can't find it. I shall persist.

The poetry book 'Leaves of Grass' by Walt Whitman arrived today. It's a paperback, and over 700 pages! Looks eminently dipinable. Is that a word?

[Stanley]

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848.

Our Woman’s Movement had its formal beginning in 1848; yet its first great success—women’s suffrage—didn’t come until the 19th amendment in 1920. Besides opposition from him at home, another reason for the long wait was the sheer scope of female subordination. Women had to fight on so many fronts that their movement often fissured over issues of priority. Could women do business? Could they speak in public? Could they inherit property in their own name and right? Could they plan their pregnancies or, indeed, refuse pregnancy? Could they be educated and for what employments? Could they lead in their churches? One woman who took an especially broad-gauged view of ‘the woman problem’ was Elizabeth Cady, born on November 12, 1815. Accordingly, she fought the war on many fronts. Her first battle was to convince her father that having her was as good as having a son, and she emerged from that one with many victories including Greek, Latin, Law, and Mathematics; then she went on (as Elizabeth Cady Stanton) to educate her husband in, inter alia, birth control and a woman’s right to be known by her name, not as “Mrs. X”. Henry Stanton proved educable and the marriage lasted until his death in 1887. With or without Henry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s reforms included abolition, temperance, education, and editing maleness out of the Christian bible. The 1848 Declaration of Sentiments out of Seneca Falls was hers, too. The breadth of her causes won her a number of enemies in the movement (and out of it), and her position on African-American rights led her to utter racist-sounding rhetoric, but as her friends Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass understood, it was based on her fierce desire for the equality of all women, of any race, with all men, of all races. This indomitable person lived long enough to see the 20th century but not the 19th Amendment, dying just short of her 87th birthday in 1902. ©

[Stanley]

Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature. Title of a 2009 BBC Radio 4 documentary.

If it proves too taxing for Mr. Trump to distinguish between the dangerous “Other” (Mexican Rapist? Syrian Terrorist?) and the safe ones, the Hitler solution might prove tempting. Just brand them all. In 1930s Germany, as a Jew, Ludwig Karl Koch was quickly defined as “Other,” but his talents caused hesitation. Hermann Göring thought Ludwig an exceptional Other, for Göring was a bird lover, and so on a 1936 lecture tour of Switzerland, Koch’s air tickets (out and return) were the personal gift of Air Minister Göring. For you see, Ludwig Koch, Jew, was also a famous birder. Born in Frankfurt on November 13, 1881, he was first identified as a precocious violinist, as a boy part of Clara Schumann’s circle. He then became a concert singer. In 1914 his fluency in French put him into military intelligence. He served with distinction and, after the defeat, was appointed by the Weimar government as chief of German repatriation in Alsace. He soon returned to music, where his interests in recording techniques and in birds gave him a new career (identifying, recording, and publishing books and records on birdsong) and, as noted, attracted the admiration of Air Minister Göring. Koch found this scary rather than satisfying, and so instead of flying back he flew out to Britain. There his deep technical and fieldwork knowledge soon made him a BBC Radio favorite. Over the airwaves Koch’s bird lore and bird love comforted and informed a devoted public. His light German accent—which he never lost—might have made him an “Other” during Göring’s aero-Blitzkrieg, but British eccentricities (in radio entertainment as well as in bird watching) would make Koch an MBE and the Grand Old Man of BBC nature expeditions long before David Attenborough took up the torch. Ludwig Koch’s flight from Zurich allowed him and his love of birds to outlive Hitler, Göring, and the 3rd Reich. He died at home, in Harrow, aged 92, in the late spring of 1974. ©

[Tizer]

Perhaps Koch became a friend of R.A. Saville-Sneath who wrote the book on aircraft recognition used by the Observer Corps in WW2. Saville-Sneath worked on aircraft design, was Head Observer at a local post of the Observer Corps and gave lectures on aircraft recognition. But what made his book and lectures so effective is that he was a very keen birdwatcher and therefore knew how to select the important characteristics in recognition and filter out the rest of the information.

[Stanley]

I've always understood that a painting of a bird by an artist is a better aid to recognition than the best photograph.

[Stanley]

No one is more tiresome than the person who can understand only realism in art. Aaron Copland.

Paulette and I attended an STL Symphony concert last night, guest composer Leonard Slatkin and featuring Billy the Kid by Aaron Copland. It was a nice coincidence, for today is the 116th anniversary of Copland’s birth (November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn). You don’t have to scratch me too deeply to elicit my admiration for Copland. I like his music because I like to listen to it, but also because he worked so deliberately in American idioms. Copland is the perfect “American Studies” classical composer, melding elements of modernism and melody to create compositions that you know you have heard before because, well, you’ve heard them before. Copland gives you horses galloping down Billy Bonney’s main street (1938), the buckaroo swagger of Rodeo (1942), Latin rhythms belted out in Mexico or LA (1936), a reflective Quaker hymn echoing softly down a mountain valley in springtime (1944), a piano blues filtering out of a nightclub door in Harlem (1949), or Benny Goodman’s jazz clarinet in concerto on national radio (1950). If those don’t stir you up, then try Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, which he wrote (in 1942) to give voice to a worldwide struggle against a would-be master race and a very real dictator. Of course the execrable Joe McCarthy and the miserable Roy Cohn ignored all this, investigating Copland for his communism (or perhaps his homosexuality, or his atheism) in the 1950s, but Copland went on composing, his opera The Tender Land (1952) expressing his deeper, gentler patriotisms. Later Copland turned to conducting and recording and became the acknowledged dean of American classical music. Enduringly popular in one way or another, Aaron Copland, the child of immigrants, left behind him (he died in 1990) a heritage worth $600,000 per year to fund young composers and new performing groups. ©

[Tripps]

That comes across to me a a post from an angry person. I feel recent political events in USA have coloured it. (or colored if you prefer it.). The uncharacteristic mistake in the second sentence hints at it. The first sentence would put me into the 'mildly tiresome' category.

I quite like Appalachian Spring by Mr Copland, but I prefer real Appalachian music which I've listened to most of my life, and it's a lot easier now than when I first started. Try this WDVX

Interesting to see that I'm as old as the Fanfare for the Common Man.

[Tizer]

We have a CD of Copland's music so next time I play Fanfare for the Common Man I'll think of you, Tripps. Because you're the same age of course; I'd never think of you as a common man!

[Stanley]

Bob thinks the election result is terrible. So you are right.... it's showing through.

[Stanley]

The virtue which has never been attacked by temptation deserves no monument. Madeleine de Scudery.

Fiction gives us the chance to imagine other worlds, other persons, other ‘plots’ than our own. Thus it carries both an educating and a liberating potential, both celebrated in Martha Nussbaum’s brilliantly titled 1996 study, Poetic Justice. One woman who found liberation through letters was Madeleine de Scudéry, born in Le Havre on November 15, 1607. Orphaned at six, Madeleine and her brother were brought up by an uncle, who did a bang-up job. Madeleine learned to draw, dance, cook, paint, and tat, to be sure, but along with her brother she also learned languages ancient and modern, medicine, math, and agriculture. When uncle died, Madeleine and her brother Georges decamped to Paris where both became leading writers, Georges as a playwright, Madeleine as novelist and belle-lettrist. Although there had been women writers before her, she first prudently published under Georges’ name, but soon she established her own name and indeed her own salon, the Société de samedi. Writing sometimes as “Sapho” but more often as Madeleine de Scudéry, she produced novels of stupendous length (one, Artemène, at 2.1 million words) that became immensely popular. Her fictions elevated women to moral agency and freedom, and her essays (e.g. Les femmes illustres, 1642) did the same, often by resurrecting historical figures of note, for instance Cleopatra, whom men had feared or honored. A constant theme of hers was that female empowerment came with education, and her published ‘conversations’ show empowered women using their sharpened wits to drive home that point. Molière satirized her in Les précieuses ridicules and Les femmes savantes (interesting titles) but Madeleine outlived Molière by three decades, finally laying down her chosen weapon—the pen—just a breath of time before the birth of Voltaire’s “divine mistress,” Émilie du Châtelet, and at the dawn of the century of enlightenment. ©

[Stanley]

High office is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit — reptiles and eagles. Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert.

To be born (in Paris, on November 16, 1717) the “natural son” of a female scribbler and a mere artillery officer was to be a child of fate, and at first it seemed likely that fate would be unkind to the boy who, later, would be known as Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert. His mother left him, in the proverbial bundle, at the door of a Paris church, Saint-Jean-le-Rond, and after naming him (“Jean le Rond”) the church placed the enfant trouvé in an orphanage. And there it could have ended, but his father—who never did openly acknowledge him—returned to Paris, put him in care of a glazier’s wife, began to pay for his education, and in 1726, dying, left the boy an income to continue that education. The glazier’s wife (a Mme. Rousseau) proved a faithful carer (for 50 years!!) and her clever boy starred in school, adopted the surname d’Alembert (ironically, after a non-existent moon of Venus), went into the law, then the classics, and finally became an enthusiastic yet critical disciple of Isaac Newton (whose physics and calculus D’Alembert extended in important ways). It was in these latter guises, physicist and mathematician, that D’Alembert took up his great work as science and math editor of Denis Diderot’s signature Enlightenment project, the Encyclopédie. D’Alembert himself contributed no fewer than 1200 articles to the Encyclopedia, which brought him further fame and yet a life-long spat with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (no relation to d’Alembert’s guardian) over, of all things, music theory. Along the way, D’Alembert became a fellow of almost every scientific society going, including (in 1781) the infant American Academy of Arts and Sciences (for he was an enthusiast for the new republic and its revolution), and to be often embroiled in religious controversy, par for the course for a Diderot philosophe. As an atheist, D’Alembert would be buried in an unmarked grave, orphaned again one might say, in October 1783. ©

[Stanley]

A motley rabble of saucy boys, negros and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish Jack Tarrs. John Adams, defending the British soldiers for their role in the Boston Massacre.

As John Demos showed in The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994), the American frontier was not a line of demarcation between Euro- and Native-American. If it existed at all, it was a highly permeable borderland across and within which we human beings fought, feasted, lived cheek by jowl and loved even more closely. And not just Europeans and Americans but Africans too. Framingham MA, just west of Boston, was just such a place, and it was there, at a date now set as November 17, 1723, that Crispus Attucks was born, the son of a native woman and an African-born man. Not much more is known about him except that he stayed on in Framingham, probably as a slave, and was probably the “Crispas” who escaped from his master in 1750 and provoked a “runaway” ad promising a reward of £10 for his capture. It was his very own American Revolution, and it led to a life on the open ocean as a merchant seaman and in polyglot Boston as a wage laborer. On both counts, Crispus would have resented the British soldiers moved to Boston in 1768 to repress dissent for (quite apart from the repression) the soldiers took off-duty employment from local workers, at lower wages. And so this mixed-race son of our mixed-race frontier, in short one of us, picked up his cudgel and stood at the head of an angry mob that hurled insults, stones, and snowballs lumber at a British infantry company. Whether panicked or not, the soldiers fired, and on March 5, 1770 Crispus Attucks became the first casualty of the American Revolution, and indeed one of its martyr-heroes. Afterwards, his body (and four others) lay in state at Faneuil Hall, all humble men who would have included fair wages among their inalienable rights. They lie together in integrated soil, the Old Granary Burying Ground, in modern Boston. ©

[Stanley]

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly. Margaret Atwood.

Margaret Atwood dedicated her novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) to the historian Perry Miller and to her own ancestress, Mary Webster, hanged for witchcraft. To my mind this makes Atwood a person of interest, as indeed she is. Still alive and kicking at 77 (she was born on November 18, 1939), Atwood could yet be Canada’s first literary Nobelist, Robertson Davies having missed it by his ample whiskers. Like Davies she was descended from American loyalists, and like him she has done much speculating on Canadian identity, not only here and there in her writing (18 novels and 15 volumes of poetry so far) but in her public persona, especially her devotion to the environment, its preservation, and its reclamation. She is also, by the way, dead set against the use of artificial turf on playing fields. But Atwood is a writer, a profession she discovered in her peripatetic childhood. Her father’s work (he was an entomologist) took young Margaret here and there, chasing bugs, and so she didn’t get much formal education. During these travels she found in reading (just about anything) both comfort and inspiration. She took this love into her undergraduate studies at Toronto (English, Philosophy, and French) and her graduate work at Harvard (there she met Perry Miller but did not finish her PhD). By then she was already a published poet (1961), and her first novel, The Edible Woman, came in 1969. Since then Atwood has won many awards, invented a robotic writing system (she got tired of signing her novels), more than dabbled in politics, and like Mary Webster Ms. Atwood just keeps bobbing up wherever one looks. For Mary Webster, “hanged by the neck until dead,” did not die. God having thus declared Mary innocent, her Puritan persecutors let her live. And so it is that in 2016 we can wish Margaret Atwood many happy returns of the day. ©

[Tizer]

"..invented a robotic writing system (she got tired of signing her novels).."
I've just been reading about a man in the 1800s who, as a railway station master, grew tired of writing out tickets on pieces of paper and instead made a lot of small rectangles of cardboard ready-stamped with arrival and departure stations, and prices, and thus invented the railway ticket. He went on to design a machine to do the job, patented it and died a wealthy man. Thomas Edmondson

[Stanley]

It's Good To Be Alive. Title of Roy Campanella's 1959 autobiography.

On his 32nd birthday, besides the usual cake and things, Brooklyn Dodger catcher Roy Campanella was named the National League’s most valuable player (MVP). It was his second MVP award, the first coming in 1951 (he would win it again in 1955), sweet success indeed for a man who had to begin his baseball career with the Washington Elite Giants in the Negro League (at the tender age of 16). Roy Campanella was born in Philadelphia on November 19, 1921, to a Sicilian father and an African-American mother. He quickly assumed a starring role with the Elite Giants, and then in the Mexican League where he caught the eye of several talent scouts. The idea of integrating major league baseball (MLB) was beginning to stir, and among the chief stirrers was Branch Rickey of the Dodgers. It’s very well known that Rickey signed Jackie Robinson; he also signed Campanella, and although Robinson was the first to break the color barrier in MLB, Campanella (and pitcher Don Newcombe) had moved with him and in some ways ahead of him through the Dodger’s farm system. Campanella played for Montreal and then, in the USA, for Nashua in the New England League. Thus it was that in 1946 Campanella and Newcombe became the first black players (since the 1880s) in American professional baseball. Indeed in one game Campanella actually managed the Nashua team. He moved up to the Dodgers in 1948, a season after Robinson, and was if anything a more spectacular success. He would have moved with them to Los Angeles, but a freak traffic accident in January 1958 left him paralyzed for life. His courage (and successes) in therapy kept him in the public eye and on the Dodger’s payroll until his death in 1983. In 1969 Roy Campanella was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame (again, following Robinson, this time by seven years). ©

[Stanley]

Bob has passed 110,000 page views. I shall inform him......

[PanBiker]

Just a general point Stanley. The thread is popular which will attract the bots and crawlers that we have installed, they also count to the page hits. Last look I think we have 17 active ones, this generally exceeds the number of registered members on the site at any one time, guests count too but the bots operate 24/7 hence the excessively high page hits on some threads.

[Stanley]

It's the only measure we have and the topic is popular. So I for one will not rain on Bob's parade.....

All presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find that they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency. Alastair Cooke.

One did not have to live in Britain for long to find that Britons’ views of the USA were shaped and in some senses limited by the reports of Alistair Cooke. He it was who set records for journalistic longevity as The Guardian’s man in America (27 years, 1945-72) and as the author and presenter of BBC Radio’s “Letter from America” (58 years, 2,869 editions, 1946-2004). Cooke was born near Manchester, then still The Guardian’s home, on November 20, 1908. His parents, enthusiastic Methodists, named him Alfred after their favorite preacher, but at Cambridge Alfred (by deed poll) became the more artistic Alistair, a change reflecting his theatrical ambitions. He traveled to the US on a scholarship, was smitten, and returned for good in 1937, taking US citizenship in 1941. Cooke’s reports (on air and in print) portray him as both insightful critic and naïve celebrant of his adopted land. His BBC broadcasts were often original, his carte blanche being “to explain in the most vivid terms the passions, manners, and flavor of another nation’s way of life.” He did that, brilliantly, until just before his death in 2004. Along the way, Cooke drove his Guardian and BBC editors distracted with his inattention to deadlines, but he almost always scraped in and it was usually worth the wait. But his long-time Guardian colleague and later editor Alastair Hetherington worried that Cooke had a “blind spot” about the civil rights movement. Indeed he did. With the release in 2012 of a trove of Cooke’s private letters, that “blind spot” turned into a kind of liberal racism. Given that we’ve just elected Donald Trump (and thus put Sessions at Justice and Bannon in the White House), we white liberals might learn something needful about ourselves from Alastair Cooke, our perceptive observer and, it now appears, reflective equally of our superior virtues and of our superior vices. ©

[Stanley]

Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood. Beryl Bainbridge.

The list entitled “Writers I Have Never Read but Must” seems only to get longer, but one who has been at or near the top for a long time is Beryl Bainbridge, born in suburban Liverpool on November 21, 1932. She was nominated for the Booker Prize five times, never a winner. This was the perfect definition of an unenviable record, and to put things right in 2011 the Booker people ran a poll (of her readers!!) asking, basically, “which one of the five should we have picked?” Her public picked the 1998 historical fiction Master Georgie (by a whisker) and so Beryl, dead as the proverbial doornail since the Spring of 2010, finally won her Booker. A lot of people thought that Beryl would have been amused by that, but a more likely response might have been a scream of pain, anger, and pleasure. This was an ambitious novelist who began writing early (at about 10), began publishing a bit late (at 35), and worked exceptionally hard at distilling her (17) fictions down to their essential elements, more often than not short, gem-hard novels that turn on cruelty, deception, violence (physical and psychological) and death. Her real life (starting with fear of her father, then as “Bad Beryl” at school) was a constant rebellion against those things but her fiction makes them plotted elements of our human nature and of our historical or familial situations. “What repulsive little creatures you have made of the central characters,” a publisher wrote her of her first novel, Harriet Said (it was a rejection letter), but at the same time Beryl’s books could bring readers to laugh at her farcical situations, smile with her dark humor and sing along with “the music of her prose;” and only then be sobered by “the dark dynamic of her siren voice.” The woman could paint too, and paint rather well including striking self-portraits, but that is a new, if not entirely different, story.©

[Stanley]

There is no private life that has not been determined by a wider public life. George Eliot, 1866.

The number of novelists’ biographies that could be entitled “The Liberation of . . . “ is not quite equal to the total tally of great novelists, but among them would be George Eliot’s. She was born on the Arbury estate on November 22, 1819. Her liberation began with her very own self, Mary Anne Evans, a girl whose questing intellect won her the right to browse in the Arbury Hall library (her father was estate manager) and command of several modern languages. Outstandingly plain and outstandingly pious, Mary Anne acquired the pet name “Clematis” (for her mental beauty), and after her father’s retirement fell in with the manufacturer Charles Bray whose household (‘Rosehill,’ in Coventry) was a nest of radicalism. There Mary Anne impressed a who’s who of English and American reform, including Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, widened her already broad reading list, and got irreligious by translating (from the German) the new biblical scholarship of the day. There she also met her first lover, the publisher John Chapman, and in due course moved to London where, as Marian Evans, she upset the already highly unconventional Chapman ménage, turned to writing for the Westminster Review, and made her way (“in a society composed entirely of men”) into the arms of G. H. Lewes who would be her lover and in due course her husband. It was an affair that scandalized many but not, apparently, Queen Victoria. For as George Eliot, Marian Evans wrote several of the best novels ever written in English, including Adam Bede, Middlemarch, and Silas Marner. “Best,” that is, if you like deeply searching novels about character, and Victoria apparently did. George Eliot’s autograph resides in the royal library collection, for she was not too unconventional for the great queen. But Westminster Abbey wouldn’t have her, so her atheist bones rest at Highgate. ©