OneGuyFromBarlick

Fortune doth both raise up the low and pluck down the high. Thomas More, Utopia.

On 7th February we note the 536th birthday of Sir Thomas More, or St. Thomas More to some, in London. More imbibed Renaissance humanism from his Oxford tutors, notably Thomas Linacre, and took his legal training at Lincoln’s Inn, whence he was called to the bar in 1502. He married first in 1505 and secondly (rather hastily) in 1511. As a family man he was unusual in advocating a classical education for women, and his daughter Margaret was known for her erudite and stylish Latin prose. We know More as a social theorist, author of the first and most famed Utopia (1516),and as a state servant, eventually Lord Chancellor (1529) to Henry VIII. His reputation as a writer led Henry to request that More write (1523) a response to Martin Luther’s attack on the king. More had earlier voiced some criticism of the Catholic Church, but now he became its stoutest defender and a willing persecutor of dissent. The Protestant tide that followed Henry’s divorce would cost More his life. Increasingly uncomfortable with Henry’s peculiarly English Reformation, More resigned his office in 1532, but his failure to attend Anne Boleyn’s coronation roused the attention of the authorities, and (upon examination) his refusal to utter the oaths required of Henry’s loyal Protestant subjects brought about More’s trial for treason and his execution on July 6, 1535. Exactly 400 years later More was canonized by Pius Pope XI and, in a spirit of ecumenicism, he was named a martyr by the Church of England in 1980. ©

Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in NIght: God said, Let Newton Be! and all was Light. Alexander Pope

Let’s give a cheer for science, for on February 8, 1672, Isaac Newton presented his paper on optics to the Royal Society of London, itself evidence that a new spirit of empirical and theoretical inquiry was abroad in the world, not yet called science. Newton, born in 1643, was an odd bird, reared by his grandmother and resentful of his mother and stepfather, whom he once threatened to incinerate. He graduated from Cambridge without distinction, in 1665, but was already known for his precocious work in mathematics, which included laying the theoretical groundwork for the calculus. He returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Trinity College where he would continue work on the calculus and turn his interests to optics and, of course, gravity. His unorthodox religious views meant that a special permission (from Charles II) was required before Isaac could assume the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics in 1669. His work on optics began before this appointment, and included the invention of a reflecting telescope, but the 1672 paper had almost entirely to do with the nature of light, its properties, and its manipulation by means of an optical prism. Specifically, he used prisms to demonstrate that white light consisted of a spectrum of colors, and that the spectrum could be returned to white light. Newton’s explanation for this phenomenon has not stood the test of time, but then science is a bit like that.

Free verse within its own law of cadence has no absolute rules. Amy Lawrence Lowell.

In the land of the bean-pot and the cod, when with only modest poetic license one could still say that Lowells spoke only to Cabots and Cabots spoke only to God, Amy Lowell was born (on February 9, 1874). Her father was a noted philanthropist and two brothers would become a famous astronomer (Percival) and a president of Harvard (Abbot), but Amy was brought up to become a Boston matron, intelligent and well-schooled (at, of course, the Cabot School for girls) and polite. She was not to attend university for “it was not necessary for girls to learn either Greek or Latin.” However, Amy turned out to be a terror, rich, willful, self-educated, brilliant, and single. She had the advantage of her father’s 7000-volume library, her name, and enough of an inheritance to buy the family home (in Brookline) and establish an artists’ colony at her summer place in Dublin, NH. From these redoubts she became a brilliant poet, critic, essayist and in due course propagandist for the imagist movement (which, according to Ezra Pound, who decided not to like her, she hijacked and turned into “Amygism.”) She was throughout conscious of her family connection to James Russell Lowell (her humorous poem Critical Fable, 1922, was modeled on his Fable for Critics, 1848) and she would have been delighted by the poetry of Robert Lowell (1917-1977) had she lived long enough to read it. However, Amy Lowell died of a stroke, at home in Brookline, in 1925. She was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer for What’s O’Clock (1925).

Willy Loman . . . is a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. Death of a Salesman. Arthur Miller.


Mid-winter can be a slow time in the theater world, but it was in mid-winter, February 10, 1949 that an undoubted American classic was first staged,Death of a Salesman, at the Morocco Theater in New York City. And from the first this one was a box office success. Directed by Elia Kazan and with Lee J. Cobb in the title role as Willie Loman. Death won everything going, including the Pulitzer for the play and Tonys and Critics’ Awards for everything but the plumbing. It went for 742 performances in its first run, most of them sold out. The playwright was Arthur Miller, born 1915. already well-known for All My Sons (1946), and a couple of prizewinning plays he wrote while a student at the University of Michigan where, oddly enough, he changed his major to English. Miller was also becoming well known for his espousal of various left-wing causes, and was “probably” a member of the Communist Party for a time in the 1940s. This caused Miller to break with Kazan in 1952 when the latter fingered eight theater colleagues as “communists” (including Clifford Odets but not Miller) before the House UnAmerican Actitivies Committee. Kazan’s film On the Waterfront and Miller’s play The Crucible offer some metaphorical guidance to their deep conflict over this issue. Arthur Miller died, full of years and honors, on February 10, 2005, the 56th anniversary of the opening night of Death of a Salesman. ©

Our world is terrifying in its insignificance. Bernard le Bovier Fontenelle, Treatise on the Plurality of Worlds.

Someone who lived 100 years may not thereby deserve our attention, but when he’s called “the most civilized man of his time” by Isaiah Berlin—no sloven himself—and in the course of his long life won the admiration of the Corneilles (his uncles), Voltaire, and Rousseau, we should notice him. Born in Rouen on February 11, 1657, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle nevertheless belonged to the 18th-century Enlightenment—and lived long enough to take up membership in it. He was trained to be a lawyer but became a writer of a rather speculative sort. His efforts at poetry, drama, and opera have been judged wanting, but his works on science, his gentle satires on society, and his philosophical speculations like Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) were reprinted several times in the 1700s and some still exist in modern editions. One is tempted to say that he was the Stephen Jay Gould of his day, a popularizer of science (“natural philosophy”) but also one who wrote knowledgeably about many other things and gathered quite a readership. But unlike Gould (and, e.g., Voltaire) Fontenelle shied away from controversy and tended rather to engage in learned fantasies, for instance dialogues between Montaigne and Socrates, Montezuma and Cortez, Paracelsus and Molière. Still interested in female beauty at 95 (when he told Anne Cathérine de Ligniville that he wished he was still 80) Bernard de Fontenelle finally gave up his ghosts [sic] in January 1757.

I can either run the country or attend to Alice. But I cannot possibly do both. Theodore Roosevelt.

The United States doesn’t “do” courtesans. Neither Monica Lewinsky nor Kay Summersby filled that bill, and (who knows?) we may be too je ne sais quoi for it. But in a long, eventful life, Alice Roosevelt Longworth came close, ’salon’ and all. Teddy Roosevelt’s oldest daughter was born on February 12, 1884. Her mother (also Alice) died on Valentine’s Day, two days later, and Alice was brought up by Teddy’s oldest sister, “Aunt Bamie,” and when pa married again Alice proved to be her own mistress, arm’s length from stepmother Edith, spoiled rotten (some said) and a force to be accommodated in the White House and afterwards (Alice buried a voodoo doll of Mrs. Taft in the garden before the Roosevelts moved out in 1909). Alice married a Taftite Ohio Republican, Nicholas Longworth, but didn’t much like him or his politics and veered towards the progressive wing of the party and into the bed of Senator William Borah of Idaho by whom she had a daughter, Paulina (known among family friends as Aurora Borah Alice). Longworth’s death in 1931 completed Alice’s move towards the Democracy and she supported the other Roosevelt with some aplomb (she referred to Thomas Dewey, FDR’s 1944 opponent, as the “little man on the wedding cake”). She did help Richard Nixon with his 1960s comeback, and since she had so few regrets we must assume she did not regret this. Alice finally succumbed to ill health in February 1980, thus avoiding the Reagan presidency. By then she was the only surviving child of Theodore Roosevelt. ©

The histories of mankind are histories only of the higher classes. Thomas Robert Malthus.

In a flash of Romantic Era intuition, Thomas Carlyle (1849) called economics “the dismal science.” While economists I have known have tended to jollity, Carlyle was surely thinking of one of the first whom we could call an economist,the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. Robert Malthus (the name he preferred) was born on February 13, 1766, into a gentry family. He attended a dissenter academy in Lancashire, then Cambridge, and took Anglican orders in 1789. He studied the problem of the poor and concluded that there were too many of them. Therein, wrote Malthus, lay the solution. Imbued with early stirrings of classical economics, Malthus believed that left alone this situation would balance. The too many poor would die, of starvation or disease, and at some point (the intersection between supply and demand) they would become just the right number and make just the right choices. Wages would then rise, and instead of lazing about on misbegotten charity and multiplying like rabbits the poor would thrive. Thus Malthus opposed most forms of charity and thought it best and most merciful to leave the system to its own self-righting devices. His classic Essay on the Principle of Population (1798 et seq) still inspires our latter-day conservatives and is available (for instance) from the “Library of Economics and Liberty.” In an ironic loop (given the views of many modern conservatives) Malthus also inspired Darwin to think of natural selection and evolution, but then history, and economics, are full of ironies. It almost makes one smile.

" He studied the problem of the poor and concluded that there were too many of them".

Hard to disagree with that. I was aware of this chap but in my ignorance always assumed he was foreign German perhaps. Never realised he was a Lancashire lad. Moved to Cambridge though - very sensible.

To be born . . . in a hand-bag . . . seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Lady Augusta Bracknell.

February 14, 2014 marks the 119th anniversary of the opening of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in London. Its subtitle (A Trivial Comedy for Serious People) signed it as a social satire, as indeed it was. It focused on late Victorian moralities concerning money and marriage but added devastatingly clever sideswipes at male friendships, religion, and more behavioral norms than you can shake a stick at. It’s also a farce, in which a left luggage handbag containing a (male) baby eventually ties off a plot involving two men (John Worthing and Algy Moncrieff, who assume characters that might be alter egos) who turn out to be brothers. Under assumed names (both as “Ernest”) they become embroiled with two lady loves, respectively one man’s cousin and the other’s ward, and the cousin brings to the fore a spectacular Victorian grande dame (Lady Bracknell), a woman of strongly held but (as it turns out) easily abandoned opinions. Important catalyst roles are played by a verbally hesitant country vicar (Dr. Chasuble), a primly passionate governness (the unforgettable Miss Prism), and a couple of bill collectors whose names escape me. Earnest is worth it for its wit and its words, and if you can’t find a theatre that is playing it yet again, the 2002 film version starring Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, and Judi Dench will handsomely repay your time. Reese Witherspoon shines surprisingly, too. And I didn’t even mention the Marquess of Queensberry and his rotten vegetables, waiting in the wings on that fateful February 14.©

Build to a standard, not to a price. Henry Steinway.

It’s good to know life stories that begin in violence and bloodshed but end differently. Such a one was that of Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, born in Brunswick, Germany on February 15, 1797. The brief peace of that year was soon shattered by the resumption of European war, and Heinrich, poorly educated and orphaned, at 15 joined the famous Black Legion of the Duke of Brunswick to fight against the forces of Napoleon. The legion’s reputation matched its death’s head badge. However, the wars soon ended and young Heinrich took up ways of peace. He apprenticed himself first to a carpenter and then to an organ builder, and pretty soon he was breaking the rules of his trade and making instruments in his kitchen, guitars, zithers, and in due course a piano. By the time of the Revolutions of 1848 he had set up for himself, but decided that the USA might be a better, more stable place to manufacture music and he migrated to New York City. There, in 1853, he became Henry Steinway & Sons. Perhaps because it was an upstart, Steinway & Sons was an innovative company, and before Henry died had amassed 60 patents related to piano design and manufacture and a host of prizes in America and Europe. Steinway himself died in 1871. His pianos play on in concert halls around the world, crescendo no doubt, but that first kitchen piano rests quietly in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Bodoni . . . the most illegible type that was ever cut . . . clumsy thickening and vulgar thinning. " William Morris.

We draw many benefits from the computer, but it’s eroded value, too. Digitalization brings so much knowledge within such easy grasp that it cheapens evidence and narrative, and their proper use becomes a lost skill. When anyone can find it out, who wants to know that Mark Twain’s father-in-law helped Frederick Douglass escape from slavery? Let alone what to make of it? Many craft and creative skills seem also to be in danger of obsolescence. My dad, wanting me to have more than one string for my bow, urged me (in my teens) to learn to be a printer, and took me around to several printshops which, today, are long-shuttered, to meet craftsmen at their work. Just so, when fonts and typefaces have become so many dots per square inch, defined by some tech oddity called a bubble-jet, what price is a famous font? Free, many of them, advertising come-ons for software companies, and no doubt Giambattista Bodoni is spinning in his grave even now. This designer of one of our most elegant type-faces, “Bodoni”, was born in Saluzzo, Italy, on February 16, 1740. Bodoni learned his art from famous British and French masters, notably John Baskerville, whose most characteristic type was similar to Bodoni’s but, as you should be able to see in this marvelous digital age, subtly different. In his lifetime, Bodoni designed and engraved 298 typefaces. He died in 1813. His characteristic font is not to everyone’s taste, but I like it, even digitally.

[the original showed the typeface but I lost it in posting. See this LINK]

I don¹t have a director. The audience directs me. Hal Holbrook.

Hal Holbrook, one of our more durable actors, is 89 today, born on February 17, 1925. His childhood was interrupted by abandonment (at age 2), but he managed nevertheless a college education—where he wrote his senior honors project on Mark Twain—and a stint in the army at the tag end of WWII. The Twain thing was important, for it would become Holbrook’s big break. Out of work, he’d researched and written a stage routine impersonating Twain (a memorable lecturer-raconteur) and was performing at a small Pennsylvania college (Lock Haven) when impresario Ed Sullivan was in the audience. In 1956 Sullivan invited Holbrook on to his national, Sunday evening variety hour, and (like the Beatles, eight years later) Holbrook rose to the occasion. Holbrook played “Twain” in New England the next year and then, in 1959, in New York City. I got a recording of this one for my 17th birthday. Holbrook-Twain was on Broadway in 1966, and won the Tony, and then national television in 1967, and won the Emmy, and he’s toured with it as a quality act ever since, over 2000 live performances. He’s played Twain longer than Clemens did. Add to that a reasonably successful film career (including a role as Deep Throat in All the President’s Men), daytime soaps and made for TV movies and drama, and you have a full career. Mark Twain Tonight played to a packed house at the Touhill, at UMSL, with Holbrook finely fettled at 87, and if the old guy turns up again you should carpe diem before it’s too late.

I have always striven to fix beauty in wood, stone, glass, or pottery, in oil or watercolor. Louis Comfort Tiffany.


18th February is a good day to think about the importance of design to our daily lives, because it was on this day in 1848 that Louis Comfort Tiffany was born, in New York City. His father, a well-established jeweler, supported Tiffany’s artistic ambitions, and Louis studied with leading American artists and with Léon Bailly in Paris. Tiffany himself thought he was a painter, and indeed he did paint, all his life, in oils and watercolors, but we know him as a designer of jewelry, furniture, fabrics, and above all of glass, whether in lamps, vases, windows, ewers, you name it, Tiffany did it. “Tiffany Favrile Glass” was his invention, and it is how we think of Louis Tiffany today.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, 18th February 1848-18th January 1933

Dance music . . . serves a function. It becomes a utility . . . But when you¹re playing for listening, you¹re free. Stan Kenton.

In its 1979 obituary the New York Times called band leader Stan Kenton “controversial,” and that seems about right, but only partly because his bands were so loud. Kenton took a long time to make it big, and then there weren’t too many who were glad to see him there, except his fans. There were plenty of fans, too, mainly white, who according to Kenton would drive “ a hundred miles through the snow to see the band . . . to stand in front of the bandstand in an ecstasy all their own.” Born in Wichita “out of wedlock” on February 19, 1911, Kenton learned to play the piano there and moved to Los Angeles to go to high school and then make a living in music. He played with a variety of bands, live and broadcast, but he studied music, wrote some, arranged a lot, and inevitably formed his own band in 1941. He did not play “white” music. Influenced by Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie, and his own studies, his “progressive jazz,” owed as much to Afro-Cuban music as to anything he’d run across in the LA club scene (or, I suppose, Wichita). He had his admirers in the classical world, too. Or near-classical: Arthur Fiedler called him an important link with classical music, and in LA, in the 50s, Kenton did organize a “Neophonic Orchestra” which was to have formed a permanent part of the city’s music scene. It did not, and in his later years Kenton was surrounded by controversy of a non-musical sort, for instance sending (or having his son send) a rattlesnake to one of his critics. It bit.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture . . .it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul. Louis Kahn.


Once I was indifferent to architecture but I had passed that point when, as a freshman, I was knocked out by Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Tower standing in splendid contrast against the low mass of the men’s residences at the University of Pennsylvania. The dorms had been built in the 1870s to recall Trinity College, Cambridge. They did not carry that off very well but they made Kahn’s towers, really only 8 or 9 storeys, seem to soar skywards. I walked past those towers daily for two years and felt that they symbolized what my life as a student might be about, that something important was going on behind the plate glass and bricks, that this was a good place for me to be. Kahn was born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky in rural Estonia on February 20, 1901. When he was 6, the family emigrated to Philadelphia, changing its name to Kahn in 1915. Kahn’s compulsion to draw was hampered by poverty, but by 1924 he was an architecture student in excellent standing at the University of Pennsylvania. Once in practice, he began with houses and moved on to factories and churches, but his best buildings were at universities, schools, and research institutes. His unflinching modernism manifested in brick, concrete, and glass their aim to make our world new through learning. Louis Kahn taught at Yale, then returned to Penn. He died in 1974, just after submitting his superb design—now finally completed—for the Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York Harbor. ©

I will love you, dear . . . till the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street. W. H. Auden.

Europeans usually think of the brain drain to North America as involving technocrats of various hues. It’s probably a historical hangover, as quite a few industrial and technical secrets have come across the Atlantic on two legs, from mill workings to V2 rockets and beyond. But occasionally the Atlantic exchange has got us an artist. Such was Wystan Hugh Auden, poet extraordinaire, who came over to see what made us tick and stayed. Auden was born into middle class comfort on February 21, 1907. His dad was a doctor and his pedigree included engineers, clergymen, farmers and geologists, and Auden himself—privately schooled—was on his way to a career as a mining engineer when he was quite bowled over by words. Any words would do but poetry won out, although he did go to Oxford to study biology. That lasted a year. He switched to English, made friends with a slew of precocious writers (his friendships were indeed legion), forsook religion, discovered his homoerotic side, and wrote and wrote, and wrote. He went to the US in ’39, embraced it with enthusiasm, wrote (with Ben Britten) an opera that is truly American (Paul Bunyan), became a citizen, and settled down. Somewhat to his and others’ surprise he took up religion again, and wrote and wrote, and wrote. W. H. Auden is one of the finest poets of his time, approachable, readable, and immediate. Pick up an Auden vol. today. It won’t wear out. ©

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective and not like a model to scale. Frank Plumpton Ramsey,

“Fascinating” lives are usually long ones, to allow for maturing, for roads tried but not taken, for life-changing choices and chances. But here’s a short, fascinating life, that of Frank Ramsey, who died just short of his 27th birthday. Born in Cambridge on February 22, 1903, Ramsey’s tutors, students,and friends formed a who’s who of mathematics, logic, philosophy, and economics. Religion too, despite his atheism: his “friends list” included his brother Michael, who would become Archbishop of Canterbury.John Maynard Keynes was Frank’s undergraduate tutor; aged 19 he translated Ludwig Wittgenstein’sTractatus Logico Philosophicus into English; at 23 he talked G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell into examining Wittgenstein’s work as a PhD thesis (Ramsey was third examiner); Lewis Namier and James Strachey were members of his psychoanalysis group; and Theodore Reik was his psychoanalyst. And I forgot his wife, Lettice Baker, an accomplished photographer and mother of his two children. Frank Ramsey’s life defined the word “precocious.” What Ramsey is most famous for is his argument (he was a mathematician) that save perhaps in Physics statistics and logic are both shaped by various subjectivities (today we call Ramsey’s ideas “games theory” but they also influenced some of the higher reaches of economics). If Ramsey had stuck around a bit he would have seen the same thing happen in Physics, but he died of a liver ailment, aged 26, before Schrodinger and Heisenberg got their Nobels for showing how God diced with atoms.

Here I staid all the afternoon talking of the King's being married, which is now the town talk, but I believe false. Pepys' Diary, February 22, 1661.

There is an assumption that, when confiding to a diary or journal, people are more honest (or less guarded) than when they record themselves in other ways (letters, speeches, novels, e-mails, etc.). The assumption may be unwarranted, but it was profoundly shaped by the most famous of diaries, that of Samuel Pepys (“peeps”), which he kept faithfully for ten critical years, starting on January 1, 1660 and continuing through the Restoration of monarchy, the foundation of the Royal Society, war with Holland and diplomatic intrigue, the Plague Year of 1665, and the Great Fire of London. The Diary covers these great events, Pepys’ part in them of course, his wedded life and his extracurricular amours, the books he bought, and his personal and political contacts with the great and powerful. In its pages we can also discern the stirrings of modernity, secularism and the origins of the modern state (besides being a gossip he was inter alia an effective bureaucrat as a commissioner of the Royal Navy). Born on February 23, 1633, Pepys lived in momentous times as an active participant, which makes him significant. The diary renders him fascinating. The whole thing is in the University Library and St. Louis Public. Or you can sign on to receive daily entries at www.pepysdiary.com. It’s free, and it’s annotated. You’ll find it chatty and personal, sometimes inconsequential, often insightful, and always informative about the life of a man who kept a diary because he thought he was worthy of it. ©

Try to put down exactly what you see. Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway. Winslow Homer.

It is no wonder that the artist Winslow Homer (born in Boston on February 24, 1836) acquired a reputation for being set in his ways, impervious to fashion, a school to himself. Even a trip to Paris at the very dawn of impressionism failed to jar him loose from his own “phlegmatic” style. When in the 1880s he began to sell paintings, he joined an artists’ group (the Tile Club) whose members christened him “the obtuse bard.” People who serve very long apprenticeships, or who are self-taught before they find success (or success finds them) are often set in their ways, and Winslow Homer did both. He served a very long apprenticeship (nearly 20 years as an wood-cut illustrator for Harpers) during which he taught himself to paint in oil and watercolor. By the time he was “noticed” (his civil war sketches went down well, as did his paintings from them), he may have felt that he’d learned quite enough about life and art, knew what he liked, and was happy to go on liking it. His paintings, of seascapes, landscapes, and people, now seem very striking. Their light or darkness (and sometimes action or weather) sets the mood, but the strongest impression is of a story well told, of a scene where the viewer looks over the artist’s shoulder at the canvas and then at what is being painted and says “yes, now I see just what you mean.” Of no school, Winslow Homer inspired many, not least the Wyeths (he taught Pa Wyeth), to find art and meaning in our common vision.

That rings a bell - there was a work by this guy on one of the TV antique programmes. Either Antiques Roadshow, or more likely, David Dickenson? I've a great memory for rubbish.

I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history. Perry Miller

Every great once in a while it should be OK to remember an historian, and there is no better one to remember than Perry Miller, who was born on February 25, 1905, in Chicago and died in post at Harvard in 1963. He began—and in crucial ways remained—a literary scholar, but he turned towards history while unloading American oil drums on the Congo, although how he got from there to be the supreme interpreter of American Puritanism (in particular) and pre-Civil War American culture (in general) is beyond me. His genius is best shown in extended form in his two-volume study of The New England Mind. Volume I, The Seventeenth Century, appeared in 1939, and volume II, From Puritan to Yankee, in 1951. My first copies of these books became so battered I had to buy new ones, and the new ones are not looking any too well these days. But Miller’s brilliance shines best, incomparably, in shorter pieces, notably “From the Covenant to the Revival,” (in Nature’s Nation) where he manages to summarize (and overturn) two hundred years of American cultural history. Miller had his blind spots, of course; in particular he could not see how social history (“wash pan and boiler pot,” he called it) could and indeed would make his vision whole. If you haven’t time to read him all, and you don’t, try the chapter “The Judgment of the Witches” in From Colony to Province. You will then want to read more and, luckily, there is plenty. ©

Come live with me and be my love/and we will all the pleasures prove. Marlowe.


It amused my great-grandfather to have small busts of Shakespeare and Bacon in his bookcase because of the debate over which one of them really wrote all those plays. Nowadays, it seems, the anti-Will brigade plumps for Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford. Another Elizabethan playwright about whom little is known was Christopher Marlowe, born on February 26, 1564 in Canterbury, fourteen years after Oxford, three years after Bacon, and just two months before Shakespeare. None, it seems, was his father. Marlowe’s few plays influenced Shakespeare (or Bacon or Oxford), because they were hugely successful and because they were dramatic, with leading characters larger than life and fit for an heroic age. Marlowe is famous for three plays in particular, Tamburlaine the Great (1587),The Jew of Malta (1592), and Doctor Faustus (1594). Great controversy surrounds the authorship of that play and, as with WS, it’s because Elizabethan theatre was a hand-to-mouth operation where it was more important to keep ahead of the censors and the creditors than to establish a play’s provenance. Poor Marlowe wasn’t quite quick enough, and was stabbed to death in 1593 shortly after his interrogation by the Privy Council. (He was not stabbed by Shakespeare, or Oxford, or Bacon.) In view of his tragic end, let’s settle the matter, give Shakespeare and Marlowe a standing ovation, leave Bacon and Oxford out of it, and enjoy our night at the theatre.©

A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion. Hugo Black.

The twists and turns of southern politics have produced quite a few surprises, and our national obsession with race has been the crux of most. Thus the great liberal senator from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, could be counted upon to filibuster against a civil rights bill. And a President’s southernness provided much of the drama when Lyndon Johnson announced his support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “We Shall Overcome,” he said, in his best Padernales twang. Before him, but a man Johnson considered a mentor, Alabama’s Senator Lister Hill was notorious for his support of a national health service and nearly the full range of New Deal legislation—and for segregation. But the biggest surprise of them all was Senator Hugo Black, also of Alabama, who was named to the Supreme Court in 1937. Born on February 27, 1886, this former Ku Kluxer quickly became and remained the bête noire (I use the term advisedly) of all right-thinking Americans. His 34 years on the court were marked by epochal decisions on segregation, free speech, the rights of accused citizens, and proportional representation. In nearly every case (no one can be perfectly consistent) Black took the view that the 14th amendment absolutely commanded every state to respect, protect, and further the rights of every person. He used it to “nationalize” the Bill of Rights. Today Black’s work underlines the conservative rationale for the repeal of our grand 14th. To which I say vivat justitia, vivat Black, and good health to the fourteenth amendment. ©

I am . . . sorry that . . . seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own. Montaigne, Of Cannibals.

Today we celebrate one of the more humane, and humorous, of that mainly humane group, the thinkers and writers of the European Renaissance, for it is the birthday of Michel de Montaigne, born on February 28, 1533, in Aquitaine (today, Périgord, near Bergerac). Like many but probably not most of his Renaissance fellows (and that list included a few women), he was of noble birth, and so he first drew breath in the Chateau de Montaigne, and unlike many nobles of the time he was filthy rich. Thus Montaigne helps us to understand that oodles of money can assist the processes of thought (and he was certainly aware of this himself). On the other hand, we also know from sad experience that great wealth doesn’t always help its possessors to think clearly, so we really should celebrate this most extraordinarily thoughtful person as one of us. He would have wanted that. Early on, Montaigne found that he wanted to think, and could afford to, so he locked himself away, more or less, to begin reading and contemplating, and in the process (it took over a decade) to write, rewrite, and then rewrite again the Essais (“Essays”) for which he is justly famed. In broad, his conclusion was that he did not, could not, know enough to be absolutely certain about anything, and that (therefore) the best course was to keep his mind sharp, his eyes and ears open, question everthing and be ready to rethink anything. Read his Essais in the classic translation (1603) by John Florio or the new one by Donald Frame. One a day will suffice, a vitamin pill for the brain. My favorite is “Of Cannibals,” maybe because Will Shakespeare plagiarized it in The Tempest.©

Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city¹s throat. Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead.

March 1 is the birth date (1848) of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish immigrant who became the most famous artist of his generation and whose sculptures grace public places in New York, Dublin, and London (and other cities, including Butte, Montana). Trained in New York, Paris, and Rome, Saint-Gaudens acquired a reputation for sculpting memorials to Union heroes of the Civil War, starting with Farragut and Sherman and continuing through his “Standing Lincoln” for Lincoln Park in Chicago (copies are in Springfield and across from the Houses of Parliament in London). Early on, Saint-Gaudens became friends with the historian Henry Adams. When Adams’s wife Clover committed suicide in 1885, Saint-Gaudens sculpted her memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, and it may be the most characteristic statue of the Beaux Arts period, embodying grief, mystery, and beauty in a single creation. Saint-Gaudens later accompanied Adams on his famous South Sea trip, sketching sunsets all the way (the purpler the better, according to Adams). Saint-Gaudens’ most famous work is the 1897 memorial to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his all-black 54th Regiment, slaughtered at Fort Wagner in July 1863. It took 13 years to complete and stands in bronze high-relief at the edge of Boston Common, framed by classic pediments. Seven decades on, the Shaw memorial inspired the finest of poems, by Robert Lowell (born on March 1, 1917, it happens), “For the Union Dead”. Before too much time passes, read one and see the other.©