OneGuyFromBarlick

I read this a very long time ago in I think, Readers Digest.

There were two Archbishops of Cork - Cof I and RC. Both were gravely ill and the C of I succumbed first. The news was relayed to the RC Archbishop for words of comfort and condolence - his response was -

I've sent that to Bob......

The Dragon Lady of the Chicago Tribune
Sigrid Schultz, 1893-1980

You cannot understand the Nazi movement because you think with your head. Sigrid Schultz.

One of the best (and fastest-talking) film comedies of all time,His Girl Friday, turns on the joke of a woman being an investigative reporter. In the end, she (Rosalind Russell’s ‘Hildy Johnson’) gets her story, leaves several hard-bitten crime reporters in the dust, and into the bargain gets (or reclaims) a man good enough for her. Hildy’s reunion with Walter Burns (played by Cary Grant), can be seen as a way Hollywood could shuffle a tough female off the stage and into wedlock. After all, the film was made in 1940, and whoever had then heard of a woman running the show in journalism news? Not many: but in 1940 there was a woman journalist reporting on World War II from what was then the war’s cockpit, Hitler’s Berlin. She didn’t like Hitler or his henchmen, but reporting was her job. And she was tough enough to be known as the Dragon Lady. Tough but no fool. In power and at war, the Nazis expelled journalists they didn’t like, so the Dragon Lady filed her more critical reports from Oslo or Copenhagen and called herself “John Dickson.” But the dragon was indeed a lady, Sigrid Schultz, reporting from Berlin for the Chicago Tribune. She also did radio for the Mutual system, but could hardly adopt a male pseudonym for those. Sigrid Schultz was born to Norwegian-American parents in Chicago on January 5, 1893. Her father was a successful portraitist, well enough known to be commissioned to paint the royal family of Württemberg. In Europe, while dad exploited his princely connections to gain more commissions, Sigrid got a Paris education that would be hard to beat, and then landed a job teaching English and French in Berlin. She stayed there through most of WWI, filing occasional stories with the Tribune that were good enough to make her chef de bureau in 1925. From that eminence, Schultz watched, reported on, and did not like the rise of the Nazi party. She developed the argument that Hitler owed his success to an unholy alliance between German capitalism, the old aristocracy, and the hoodlum element. Later, expelled from Germany and recuperating from typhus, Schultz wrote a book on the subject, Germany Will Try It Again (1943), detailing her ideas. In it she noted the pro-Nazi connections of Americans like Senator Prescott Bush. Back in Europe via the Normandy landings, she was in plenty of time to be one of the first to visit Buchenwald, where she reported on the grisly fulfilment of her prophesies. Sigrid Schultz left all her papers (and her battle-worn suitcase) to the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. The papers have proven to be well worth examining. Her suitcase is beyond price. ©

Casa dei bambini
Maria Montessori, 1870-1952

Only when we are free is it possible to make choices. Maria Montessori.

The world’s first Montessori school opened on January 6, 1907, in the San Lorenzo quarter of Rome. It was not a “Montessori” school, of course, but rather the Casa dei bambini, the children’s house. It was a success for most of its pupils, and for its founder, Maria Artemisia Montessori (1870-1952). Within a few years, her casa became a movement, and before WWI there were Montessori schools (or school systems adopting Montessori methods) throughout most of Europe, in Asia, and in South America. In the USA too. Publicized in middlebrow magazines (and in academic journals) Montessori schools became almost a fad. The first US school opened at Tarrytown, NJ, in 1912, and many prominent folk became Montessori-mad. At the San Francisco World’s Fair, 1915, a glass-walled Montessori classroom invited all fairgoers to see a Montessori classroom (with real teachers and real pupils) in real-time action. But Maria and her methods were not universally admired. Progressive educators regarded her system as, well, too systematic, and unlikely to encourage each child’s individual genius. Among others, John Dewey was a leading critic, and the already popular kindergarten movement (a German import) took a few potshots, too. A look at Montessori, her career, and her earliest experiments suggests that the critics had a point. Montessori had throughout her life showed herself to be a female of iron will and great ambition. These were not traditionally admired female qualities. First we find her as the only girl in a boys’ technical school, pursuing scientific ambitions. Then she was one of the first women to take the medical course at the University of Rome (she did her dissections alone and behind closed doors). Upon becoming Italy’s first woman doctor, and a brilliant one at that, she found many areas closed off from her, and may have become a pediatrician by gender default. And a pediatrician to the poor, and an unwed mother. And in caring for poor and orphaned kids, she found her place, and her first pupils. At that time, the San Lorenzo was working class, and even kids in families had a tough time getting proper schooling, let alone children from the quarter’s orphanages. Maria Montessori thought that they should all have a chance to become well educated, and that they needed a structured environment within which it became safe, and secure, to be a kid. In view of the later identification of Montessori schools with middle class neighborhoods , leafy suburbs, and above-average children, there was an ironic contrast here, one that bears thinking about. Creativity springs from untended gardens, perhaps, but in such places already vigorous plants have the best chances. ©

"So I went back home, and began to be involved."
Nelle Morton journeys home

Maybe journey is not so much a journey ahead, or a journey into space, but a journey into presence. From Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home (1985)

In his famous address “Self-Reliance” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson advised that those who would travel to find wonders had best stay at home. Indeed finding one’s self can be a wondrous adventure, one with its own challenges. Nelle Morton’s journey began with her birth in rural Tennessee on January 7, 1905. She was then safely middle class, safely Presbyterian, safely white, safely southern, but in all those places she found a taste for travel. It didn’t come on her all at once, but perhaps began to stir at her Presbyterian women’s college, in rural North Carolina. It was named after Flora Macdonald, that Scottish Presbyterian lass who, after the Battle of Culloden, saved the decidedly Catholic bacon of Bonnie Prince Charley. It was, Flora later recalled, merely an expression of her humanity. For Nelle Morton another crucial step was her decision to enroll in a theological seminary in Richmond, VA. After that, she took an assistant’s position at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, NY, an historic place once the pulpit of Henry Ward Beecher (and a waystation on the Underground Railway). But late in life, Morton said it was her work back home, in the rural south, that really mapped her route. In Staunton, VA, she formed a group dedicated to interracial experiences for children (summer camps, no less!!!), and then in wartime she struggled with two serious illnesses, cancer surgery, and recuperation from a very low state. At the end of that, she worked for the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and, on the side, ran a rural bookmobile service for poor folk (of all skin shades) in North Carolina’s hill country. “Only” the corresponding secretary of the Fellowship (what else could a girl do?), her reputation spread, for instance through her work at the famed Tuskegee Institute, an historically black college, and with mentally and emotionally challenged children in several places. In 1956, having gained the requisite graduate degrees, Morton took a theological professorship at Drew seminary, in New Jersey, where she taught Christian Education for well over a decade. Almost unbeknownst to herself, she’d become a radical, not only on race but also on the function and place of women (of whatever skin color) in whatever communion, including even the Catholic church. She wrote prodigiously on such issues, making alliances across the religious spectrum. Her name is memorialized in courses of work and study at Drew and, across the continent, at the Claremont colleges in California. Nelle Morton’s long ‘journey home’ ended only with her death in 1987. ©.

Darwinism and the divine spark
Alfred Russell Wallace

Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly. Alfred Russell Wallace.

One interesting thing about Alfred Russell Wallace, the great protagonist of Charles Darwin, is the extent to which the Christian press mourned his passing (in November 1913).    He could not accept that human consciousness, which we self-centeredly call “intelligence,” could have arisen from merely natural processes. Darwin could, and did, and therein lay their one major disagreement. So in the still uncertain play of evolutionary ideas of the period (late 19th and early 20th century) some religious folk found in Wallace a way to accept evolution by natural selection—almost. And many were grateful for it. The Christian Commonwealth, for instance, praised him as “the last of the Victorians,”  overlooking, for the moment at least, that Wallace himself was a spiritualist rather than, specifically, a Christian. Australians loved him, too, for in an evolutionary way he put the island continent on the map (today the “Wallace Line” refers to sharp species differentiations between the Antipodes—including New Guinea—and the rest of creation. Beyond that line, marsupials filled most of the conceptual gaps. Alfred Russell Wallace was born in Wales, of a Scots father and an English mother, on January 7, 1823.   The family suffered financial reverses and he apprenticed as a surveyor, but he was alive to many intellectual currents of his time and was quite taken with Tom Paine, Robert Owen, and other radicals (political and economic), but more especially he learned much from Darwin’s early jottings about species mutability and from Charles Lyell who taught him that the world might be unimaginably old.    Inspired, off Wallace went to the Amazon and then the East Indies, to collect and observe, and by 1858 he’d pretty well figured out “natural selection,” and sent his findings (ready for publication) to Darwin.   Darwin, who had but back from publication, decided that the hour had come, and together (1859) the two published their intellectual revolution and changed our world forever. ©

Born on January 9, 1941
Joan Baez, b. January 9, 1941

I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace. I was trying to disturb the war. Joan Baez, 1967.

As a dater, I was at once ardent and cautious. This is probably not an auspicious mix, and might even qualify as schizoid. One result, though, was that I almost never went on a ‘blind’ date. This caution was reinforced by one of my very first ‘blind’ dates, maybe even my first, in Philadelphia, in 1962. In order, I suppose, to make myself seem more attractive, I had suggested Manny Rubin’s legendary Sansom Street folk club, The Second Fret. That’s a neat name for a folk club, isn’t it? And besides the headliner that night was going to be Joan Baez, and even I had heard of her. I suspect my blind date had, too. So off we went. Joan Baez was then only 21, having been born in Staten Island, NYC, on January 9, 1941. Her parents were interesting people, to say the least, and they brought her up that way. After dad (once a Christian minister and soon with a Physics PhD) started with UNESCO, they moved around quite a bit, carrying their music with them, and also their concern for economic and social reform. That became deeper when the family converted to Quakerism, but the musicality continued, too. In that area, Joan’s talent soon eclipsed all of them, and her rising fame (in turn) made much more public (and more controversial) her political and pacifist commitments. Joan Baez’s career as a circuit performer and as a record artist really took off after her father, Albert, took a faculty appointment at MIT. That was 1958, so when I showed up at the Second Fret in 1962 she was well known but not yet at her zenith. She had already recorded some unforgettable songs, some her own but mostly her interpretations of others’ compositions and of traditional favorites. What carried it all was her voice, which could assume many moods but always come out clear and pure and pitch perfect. In 1962 she was just between two “gold” best sellers, containing traditional and new songs. I think it was the first time I heard “Barbara Allen” and “The Cherry Tree Carol,” both older than the hills, and the fairly new “Plaisir d’amour,” which tested my deplorable French and stirred my deplorable heart. Of course Baez went on to greater and better things, and to fame and controversy. The legendary Second Fret went into decline and like all good legends is now deader than the proverbial doornail. And my date was without doubt the worst one I have ever had. Indeed it’s surprising I ever again went on a blind date (although I did that, twice). In retrospect, I imagine the young woman who was my date that night didn’t enjoy it much, either. ©.

He also opposed the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
Paul Henreid, anti-fascist
.
We both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Rick Blaine says good-bye to Ilse Lund, in Casablanca (1942)

In my gloomier moments, I imagine that some improving half-wit has ‘colorized’ Casablanca. That hasn’t yet happened, at least as far as I know, and I retain my sunny, optimistic outlook on life. I first saw Casablanca when I was 20; the film itself was 21 and had acquired cult status. I was prepared to be bowled over, and since then have been bowled over many times, latterly on this or that ‘streaming’ service. But nothing will ever compare with my first viewing, in a dowdy and overwarm Philadelphia cinema, surrounded by equally rapt, equally young folk (all of us in glorious technicolor), mesmerized by the black and white romance that played itself out on the silver screen. The film’s real romance, unrequited, was between a hard-bitten, cynical softie called Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart, perfectly cast) and an idealistic, selfless, and courageous softie, Ilse Lund. She was played by Ingrid Bergman, and I swear that every time she came on screen Curtiz softened the focus. Rick and Ilse had a history, but now she was taken by Victor Lazlo. He got the girl, Ilse, in the end. Romantically, it was the wrong outcome, but Casablanca was about a war, a war then at its low point, and in the low place that was Vichy Casablanca Ilse had to choose Victor over Rick. Morally and politically there was no other possible choice. So Victor escapes, with Ilse, and goes on to fight for the right. In 1963, we all knew that right had triumphed, and so our romantic bruises were salved; it was OK that the gorgeous Ilse went with the rather priggish Victor, rather than the reluctantly heroic Rick. I might have thought differently had I known more about the actor who played the prig. That was Paul Henreid, who in his real life was really a war refugee, really an anti-Nazi, and (in the eyes of his Nazi persecutors) really a Jew. He was born in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on January 10, 1908. His father was a Viennese banker who had converted from Judaism, perhaps for safety’s sake, changed his surname, and retained enough fortune to educate Paul in Vienna’s best schools. There, to the dismay of his father, he caught the acting bug. As a rising professional, Henreid also became an engaged anti-Nazi, which after 1933 blighted his career and forced his removal to London (his first role in London, in 1937, was as Prince Albert in Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina), thence to Hollywood, where (as things turned out) he was perfectly cast as a good man on the run from a monstrous evil. So maybe Victor Lazlo really should have gotten the girl, at a foggy airport, at night, and in black and white. In retrospect, I wouldn’t change a thing. ©

Actress--and much more.
Eva Le Gallienne, 1899-1991

I want the theater to be made accessible to the people. Eva Le Gallienne.

If anyone qualifies as the grand old lady of American acting, it was Eva Le Gallienne, whose career outshone any of the Barrymore women, even Ethel and Drew. Drew Barrymore was born only in 1975. That was the 60th year of Eva Le Gallienne’s career, and Eva had, as yet, 17 years to go. Eva Le Gallienne was born in London on January 11, 1899, and into no acting dynasty. Her parents (English father and Danish mother) were both journalists, but divorced early whereupon Eva and her mother moved to Paris. There Eva was subjected to some of the best available schooling, but discovered her life’s work when her mother took her to see Sarah Bernhardt act, and then backstage to talk with Bernhardt. Back in London, Eva had her first big role in 1915. In the midst of war she and her mother sailed to New York where she was a sensation because of her talent, because of her beauty (though she felt herself a plain Jane in that department), and arguably because of her small stature. She was light enough to be the first Peter Pan to soar out over the audience and on to the balcony. But by that time (the mid 1930s) Le Gallienne was famous for many other things. For one, she was publicly (but not flamboyantly) lesbian, and indeed had been named co-respondent in a divorce case in New York City. More predictively of her future, she was a woman of wit and learning who became a treasured member of New York’s famed Algonquin Circle, that Arthurian round table presided over by the likes of Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and George Kaufman. In 1926 she also had become the guiding spirit (or leading light, or energy source) of the Civic Repertory Theater Company, whose home base (the 1100-seat 14th Street Theater) she programmed with a mix of old classics, avant-garde plays (several of which she translated into English), and less formal productions (her “Peter Pan” was one of them) aimed at kids (or, anyway, at the young of heart). Tickets were cheap, as Le Gallienne had intended, and audiences large enough to limp along well into the Great Depression, finally closing in 1936. She rarely acted in films but when TV came along she put on (or acted in) several landmark productions, winning awards all the time. Successful as translator, actress, director, impresario, and publicist, Eva Le Gallienne stands alone. Looking back on her life, and in conversation with a young actress, Eva reflected that she could not possibly regret being old. Instead, she regretted what her companion had missed. Perhaps the young woman was Drew Barrymore? Probably not, but Drew herself is spreading her wings to become something much more than a child phenomenon. ©.

In my profession there is no chance of unemployment.
Marie Colvin, 1956-2012

My job is to bear witness. Marie Colvin.

In 1991, at the start of the ‘first’ Iraqi war, western embassies urged their civilians to evacuate Baghdad. Quite apart from anything else, there were rumors that at last resort, Saddam Hussein would use poison gas to defend (or destroy) his capital city. Almost all complied, including journalists. One exception was the correspondent for London’s Sunday Times, Marie Colvin. While her colleagues waited anxiously for transport, she collected dried foodstuffs, bottled water, and other necessities for a long stay, perhaps in the hotel’s basement, from which she planned to file her reports. The decision to stay was courageous. Gathering supplies and finding a place of safety was prudent. But there was humor, too. Among all her emergency supplies, Colvin had somehow found a caged canary. Just as in a coal mine of old, it might (she said) warn her of the approach of poison gas. Just where Colvin found that odd and ultimately appealing combination of bravery, caution, and wit is an interesting question. Marie Colvin was born (on January 12, 1956, amongst the material comforts of Oyster Bay, New York. Speaking of courage, her dad had been a Marine in WWII and then a schoolteacher in New York City. As for prudence, her mother was a school advisor in Oyster Bay. Doubtless profiting from both, Marie went up to Yale (after, of course, that redoubt of privileged manhood had gone weakly coeducational) where she majored in Anthropology and then switched to English. More importantly she took an elective from John Hersey, whose reporting on the Hiroshima bambing had made journalistic history. By a circuitous route, Marie then turned up in London, became a journalistic ‘stringer,’ and then by chance a foreign correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times who, again by chance, found herself assigned to cover the air raids on Libya ordered in retaliation for the Lockerbie outrage. Thus began the war correspondent career of a most remarkable journalist. She covered the most brutal of ‘civil’ wars (Syria, East Timor, Chechnya, etc.), clear-eyed and often at personal risk. I thought “too often,” but she thought differently, and when she lost her left eye (in Sri Lanka’s civil war) and then her life (reporting on Syria’s civil war) I had to reevaluate her. She wanted all of us (even those in leafy, prosperous Oyster Bay) to know what war really was like for the civilians who had to endure it. And as a woman of remarkable courage, cool judgment, and spare prose she made journalistic history. Marie Colvin, aged only 56, was killed in a Syrian government attack on Syrian refugees, mainly women and children, cowering in cellars in the city of Homs, February 22, 2012. ©.

A girl in a man's world.
Melba Liston, 1926-1999

I’m sure happy I had those early years. Melba Liston, in interview, circa 1998.

When Melba Liston uttered those words she couldn’t remember much about “those early years” (she was in her 70s and had suffered two strokes), but she did recall that when she and her mom had moved out to Los Angeles (to be with a passel of aunties) the LA schools didn’t know what to do with her. She was just 10 then, but she tested into the 10th grade. As a compromise, they bunged her into the 7th grade, a year or two ahead of her age but three behind her abilities. So, one way and another, she’d been pretty well taught in her three Rs, in Kansas City’s segregated schools and at home. But besides readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic Melba also knew how to play the trombone, an odd skill for a girl, and difficult, too, for a person so small that to reach her instrument’s full range she had to bend her neck to avoid getting hit by the horn’s tuning slide. In that interview, Melba didn’t recall who’d taught her in academics (her mother had gone to college, so she’s a good candidate), but it was grandpa who’d taught her to blow her horn, sitting on the back porch, accompanying her with his guitar. Melba Liston was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on January 13, 1926. Out in Los Angeles, too young for her grade but not for her horn, she fell in with (among others) Dexter Gordon, a fellow pupil, and very soon she was out at night, aged 13 or 14, playing trombone in various LA clubs and venues. She got very good at it, and accustomed to the strains and pains of being an attractive young woman in a man’s world. Along the way (“rapes and everything” she later said), she played in some famous bands (Basie, Gillespie, Ellington) and with some famous people (Dexter Gordon, of course, and then Billie Holliday, Art Blakey, and John Coltrane). As a concert artist, Melba became (a critic wrote) the sort of performer who could light up the first ten rows in a concert hall with her sunny personality while whipping the horn sections into shape with her dominating musicality. Early on she’d also formed a partnership with pianist and composer Randy Weston, and now (two decades after her death in 1999) she’s remembered also, and perhaps primarily, as a composer and arranger. As such, she produced music in a daunting variety of genres and for many artists. There was a brain behind those ‘bones, and from about 1960 Liston worked for Motown (e.g. The Supremes), Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra (not to mention the music department of the University of the West Indies) to provide us with lasting evidence of the quality of learning that a little girl first absorbed, on a back porch in Kansas City, from her grandpa, her mom, and her dancing aunties. ©.

If we do not do the impossible, we shall be faced by the unthinkable.
Murray Bookchin, 1921-2006

Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Murray Bookchin, 1980

Throughout his long life, Murray Bookchin engaged in many crusades, partly because he saw so much wrong in the world about him and was motivate by a strong desire to put them right. ‘Tilting at so many windmills,’ critics might say, and indeed he discovered too many ills, social, economic, political, racial; but he seems never to have given up the struggle (or more accurately the struggles) against them, and for that he deserves recognition. Murray Bookchin was born of Russian emigré parents in the Bronx on January 14, 1921. His dad was a farmer turned feltmaker. In Russia he had agitated against the Tsar, and in the USA he found enough substitute Tsars to continue in that vein. Murray’s mother was cut from similar cloth; as an American radical she helped to organize workers in New York’s clothing trades. Both had been on the left of the Russian left, and Murray seemed to have absorbed their ideological stance. Certainly he followed it, through several political crises that saw him (among other things) joining and then seceding from the American Communist Party, organizing foundry workers in New Jersey, and then playing a leading role in the auto workers’ strikes early in the Truman administration. Along the way he volunteered for the American army in World War II. One would have to call it an irony that, instead of doing battle against Adolf Hitler, Private Murray Bookchin spent the war on guard duty, protecting American gold at Fort Knox, Kentucky. One hopes he had, by then, cultivated a sense of humor. Like many leftist radicals, he certainly did have a sense of personal peril, and so he wrote (profusely) under a string of pseudonyms, inducing headaches in those who would now bibliograph his writings. Along the way (as he transitioned into using his own name) he also learned to distrust the whole idea of power, corporate or political or even as exercised by ‘establishment’ labor unions. An outsider among outsiders, Bookchin increasingly found his political ideal in smallness, citizen power in places where ordinary citizens could realistically make policy and then live with or cure (if they so decided) the consequences. Some call this anarchy. At the same time, Bookchin became more and more convinced that in the long-term the central problem with capitalism was its worship of production and profit, to Bookchin a moral pathology more than a political ideology. Not only did this waste human beings, but it inevitably laid waste to the environment. So it was that Murray Bookchin, now using his own name, became a leading philosopher of environmental activism. And that is how he was principally remembered in the many obituaries written about him, in the US and Europe, following his death in 2006. ©

"I am very strong & robust & not of the delicate sex." Marjory Fleming, in her Journal.
Marjory Fleming, 1803-1811

To [sic] days ago was the King’s birthday
And to his health we sung a lay
Poor man his health is very bad
And he is often very mad.
--On King George III: from the Journal of Marjory Fleming, circa 1808)

Whether he exercised it on “the damned human race” or on the nobility of Huck Finn’s enslaved savior Jim, Mark Twain took great pride in his realism. Indeed, for his time he was (relatively) immune from adjectival diarrhoea. But perhaps he stored these adjectives up, for when it came to Marjory Fleming, they all spewed out. Marjory was vivid, sudden, tempestuous, tender, loving, sweet, loyal, rebellious, repentant, wise, unwise, frank and free. Twain ran through all those adjectives (and a dozen more) before he finished the introductory paragraph of his essay on Marjory, whom he called “the wonder child.“ Indeed she was, but Twain came closer to the truth when he called her “the world’s child,” for by the time Twain came across her (circa 1900) she’d been bowdlerized, sentimentalized, immortalized (or, in a word, Victorianized) by a crowd of British writers who found in Marjory’s journals the sort of girl-child they would have liked to be, or at least to know (for all of them were, I think, men). Marjory Fleming was born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, on January 15, 1803. She died there on December 19, 1811, not quite 9 years old. During that short time, Marjory (a rambunctious child) had spent about 3 years’ “seasoning” with Edinburgh relations, the Keiths, including her beloved elder cousin Isabella (“Isa” to Marjory). Perhaps at Isa’s urging, or on her own, Marjory had (over about a year, April 1808 to April 1809) compiled three volumes of jottings, in which she articulated her child’s view of her child’s world. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘small boys sure of their dinner,’ she wrote guilelessly and fearlessly, and when her journal came to light (about a half century after her death) it was seized upon by those who wanted to find in her what she could be made to reveal. So they improved upon it, albeit in various ways. They retained her cuter misspellings (‘misteris’ for ‘mysteries’) and corrected others. They even made Marjory into a constant companion (or muse?) for her very distant cousin Walter Scott, when in fact she never saw the man. She was a mirror for those who wanted to see the childhood they’d missed. In about 1900 Twain ran across a recent ‘improvement’ of Marjory’s journals and found in them a miracle, perhaps shades of his own dead daughter Suzie, certainly an intended comfort for his dying wife Livy. A ‘real’ (accurately transcribed) edition appeared in 1934, too late for Twain; but for us it exposes Marjory Fleming as an extraordinarily childlike child, one sure enough of her dinner to say what she thought and to repent later, if at all. So she is still worth a read. ©.

The loyal brother
Prince Edmund, earl of Lancaster

Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent. Thomas Paine, 1776

In Common Sense (1776), Tom Paine demolished the myth that heredity should be working political principle. One is reminded of that (and of Paine’s exuberant humor) by the current ‘spat’ between princes William and Harry, the one the heir apparent and the other rendered apparently hairless by the personal slights he’s suffered. Likely this tiff will wear away, leaving few flesh wounds, but the history of the English crown offers many more, and very much more serious, squabbles between the adult children of dead or ageing monarchs. Few “legitimate” heirs slept easily in their beds if they had overly ambitious brothers, or cousins, or even rank outsiders who could piece together a passably ‘royal’ DNA. One lucky exception was Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272. Edward I (known as “Longshanks”) reined as well as any predecessor until his death in 1307. No doubt this owed to his personal qualities (his long shanks, perhaps, for he towered over most of his subjects), partly to the solid inheritance left him by his parents, Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. It owed also to the steady loyalty of Edward’s younger brother Prince Edmund, who was born on January 16, 1245. Prince Edmund hardly put a foot wrong. Adventurous and ambitious abroad, on crusades or in respect of his own claims in Sicily, at home he was a model of princely brotherhood. Edmund had no press baron available, but he doesn’t appear to have been tempted, either, by England’s jealous landed barons (who did make war on his father and his elder brother). This prince’s nickname was Edmund Crouchback but this was no comment on his courage (rather, as “cross back”, testimony to his faith). While Edward I became the “Hammer of the Scots” Edmund Crouchback spent much of his time subduing the wild Welsh and slaughtering infidels around Jerusalem, going on a ‘Crusade’ as his brother’s representative or, perhaps, alter ego. One secret of this brotherly love (or live and let live) was that their parents, Henry III and Eleanor of Provence, took care to ensure that both Edward and Edmund were well looked after in those crucial matters of honor and wealth. At home, Edmund was made earl of Lancaster, a title that brought with it many estates and at least five castles across the north and west of England. And abroad (not only in Provence but in Sicily) Henry and Eleanor pushed their personal and dynastic claims on Edmund’s behalf. He almost became king of Sicily. He never did try, anyway, to become king of England, and thereby hangs his unusual tale. He were a better prince than most: not a great challenge, perhaps, but stiffer than any faced by our current prince Harry the Unhappy. ©.

What's in a name?
Muhammad Ali, 1942-2016

Cassius Clay is a slave name. I didn’t choose it and I don’t want it. I am Muhammad Ali, a free name — it means beloved of God, and I insist people use it when people speak to me. Muhammad Ali, 1964.

When I heard (or more likely read) that, I didn’t think much of it or, indeed, of its utterer. In retrospect, I think Muhammad Ali had as much to do with transforming American culture as did another name-changer, one of Ali’s near contemporaries, Robert Alan Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. OK, so Ali never won the Nobel for literature, but he spun off doggerel, some of it sparkling like a catherine wheel, some of it just trash talk, and he could be said to have made rap possible. And in 1997 Muhammad Ali was nominated for a Nobel, the peace prize one, and that was a ‘real’ might have been. He was made to pay for his peace, too, stripped of his boxing titles and barred from the ring. But it was also a victory. At the very least, Muhammad Ali democratized draft dodging, which in the 1960s was at first a prerogative of middle-class white boys like me. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong” is what he really said. That was later dressed up, ‘improved’ you might put it, to bring it into line with the rising rhetoric of the Black Power movement, but by itself it was pithy enough. And it was true. Muhammad Ali’s real quarrel began with his birth, as Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., on January 17, 1942, in Louisville, KY. And it was a quarrel forced on him by his brown skin which, however light, had limited the success of his father, Cassius, Sr., whose gifted sign painting made the Clays a respectable, hard-working folk proud of their family connection with the original Cassius Marcellus Clay, “Cash” Clay, a slave-owner converted to abolitionism (and brash militancy) by yet another trash talker, old William Lloyd Garrison (he who called the Constitution “a covenant with death”). At first young Ali’s ambitions were constrained. A new bike might do, or then (1960) an Olympic Gold Medal (as a very light heavyweight), and he enjoyed the credulous admiration showered on him by (most of) the sporting press. But Ali was far too smart to be satisfied by such gewgaws. He’d learned about life in Louisville, segregated off black as a light brown boy. He took some of that out on Sonny Liston, a darker heavyweight, but at about the same time he converted to Islam. From that emancipation to the end (in 2016), Ali wore it all pretty well and with some style. A great-great grandchild of slavery (and, maybe, of a slaver) Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., took possession of himself, took a new name, and lived out his life as a free man. I miss him. ©

Don't smoke!!
Captain Matthew Webb, 1848-1883

Nothing great is easy. Captain Matthew Webb, ~1875.

My smoking years were spent mainly in England, and though I coughed through several cigarette brands, I remained faithful to one kind of match, the wooden “Captain Webbs”. They were sold in small boxes which made it clear that Webb was a swimmer, and something of a Victorian hero, whose image (on each box) reminded one a little of the American “Marlboro Man.” But while the Marlboro man was real enough—he was an advertising actor who, I think, eventually succumbed to cancer—Captain Webb was even realer, a swimmer who eventually succumbed to swimming. Matthew Webb was born on January 18, 1848, in rural Shropshire into the large (12 kids) family of a country doctor. He learned to swim in a hard school (the River Severn at its freshest), and gained a measure of local fame when he saved a younger brother from drowning in it. He was probably drawn to the sea for other reasons, and did very briefly rise to the rank of captain. But along the way, first as a midshipman and then on merchant marine crews, he continued to make waves as a swimmer: not a quick one but steady. He could swim submerged (for instance effecting difficult repairs below the Plimsoll line while his ship was moored in the Suez Canal). But he was most famous for his ability to stay in the water for a very long time. Once, on a bet, he outlasted a Newfoundland dog, swimming around in choppy seas until the dog, exhausted, was hauled out and into his master’s skiff. Then, in 1875, Webb swam across the English channel. He’d trained for it and taken some care to publicize it. After a gallant failure on August 12 (fully reported in the press) he tried again on August 24. This time Webb made it, overnight, in a swim that lasted 22 hours and covered an estimated 40+ miles because of adverse tidal currents on the French coast. Victorians loved their heroes, and Webb played the part. His red silk swimming costume became iconic, he paraded here and there, was asked to speak at banquets, and engaged in various derring-do swimming stunts in tidal estuaries, rushing rivers, and placid lakes. All for money, but Webb was not a provident man and as his physique began to fail his needs increased. He also now had a family to provide for, and to do that he proposed to swim the Niagara River below the Falls, apparently for $10,000 (a huge fee in 1883, amounting to ~$500,000 today). Alas, the Niagara whirlpool proved as dangerous as smoking. Captain Webb was drawn under, crushed, and (despite his red silk swimming costume) drowned. He’s buried on the American side, in a cemetery section known as the Stranger’s Rest. The moral of Webb’s story is, if you are a swimmer, stick to quiet waters. If you are a smoker, just stop. ©

Nothing risqué, nothing gained.
Alexander Woollcott, 1887-1943

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t go. Alexander Woollcott.

During the 19th century, Americans learned to live with exponential economic growth. For some it was addictive, engendering cultish worship of the “self-made man” and the naïve hope that expansion would bring economic justice. But some did not buy into these new ideologies. Alongside economic revolution we got doses of reform, religious and secular. These generally operated within the consensus that capitalism and competition were Good Things That Must Be Made Better. There were some radical dissents, though, including utopias, whole communities within which individuals hoped to find something better in cooperation and some degree of selflessness. Nearly 30 actual utopias took shape before the Civil War, more if we count religious groups like the Shakers and the Mormons. Among the more secular examples was the “North American Phalanx” of Monmouth County, New Jersey. As an organized utopia it didn’t last long, but one of its rambling houses lingered on to serve, on January 19, 1887, as the birthplace of one Alexander Humphreys Woollcott. He didn’t stay long, for his family was peripatetic by nature, but I like to think he imbibed from his birthing place enough eccentricity, intelligence, energy and bile to become one of our leading litterateurs: author, critic, reviewer, and free-floating man about town (the town being New York City). First, though, he had to go to Kansas City for formal schooling, successful enough to get him into a good liberal arts college (Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York). There he was none too successful socially (his classmates nicknamed him “Putrid”), but he did learn to write: no small thing.   From Clinton he moved to the big city, where after a spell at the bottom of the journalistic pile and a tour as a wartime writer for Stars and Stripes,Woollcott became a renowned critic (so renowned he was banned from several theatres), the discoverer of the Marx brothers (Harpo named both his sons after Woollcott), and along with Harold Ross a founder of the famed Algonquin Circle, an oddly utopian bunch of misfits, writers, at least one yeast maker, and endless hangers-on.   Woollcott’s friends were legion but most expressed some ambivalence about him, which helps to explain how he became the inspiration for the magnetically unlikeable Sheldon Whiteside, the anti-hero of George Kaufman's (another Algonquinist) The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939).   Odd to the end (1943), Woollcott hoped to be buried at Hamilton but they sent his ashes to Colgate instead (possibly in jest) and when the urn finally arrived in Clinton, postage was due. “Putrid” might have enjoyed that, but he was dead. ©

Financing, or finagling, the American Revolution

Robert Morris, 1735-1806

Let me know the sum you desire. Robert Morris to George Washington, Valley Forge, 1778
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Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is now mistaken to have been a manifesto for unrestrained and unregulated capitalism. This error is encouraged by the coincidence between its first publication and the American Declaration of Independence (both in 1776). However that may be, it’s interesting that Smith begins not with broad principles but with a precise example, a pin workshop. Of all things!! A pin is a frail peg on which to hang a revolution in economic thought. But in Smith’s time (and still today in some skilled trades) “pin” and “nail” (as nouns or as verbs) were synonymous. So it’s appropriate that one mastermind of the American Revolution was the son of a Liverpool nail maker. This was Robert Morris, born in Liverpool on January 20, 1735. Morris’s father soon sold out of nail-making to apply his entrepreneurial skills to the shipping trades, and that is how young Robert, not yet 20, landed in Philadelphia as apprentice to an established colonial merchant. Almost immediately he was a partner, and in a suspiciously short time after that he was, or claimed to be, the owner of more shipping tonnage than any other colonial merchant. So perhaps Smith was right to start with nail- (or pin-) making. In 1769 Morris used his wealth and power to effect a useful marriage with Mary White, daughter of a rich tobacco planter and slaver. Affectionate too, apparently, for eventually (in 1801) it was Mary’s marriage annuity that got Robert out of debtors’ prison. But in 1769 he was riding high as a leading revolutionary, organizer of colonial protests against the Stamp Act, a strong believer in the potential wealth of the American nation, and soon he became the genius financier who kept the infant republic alive through the strains of a war and into a tenuous peace. Objectively speaking, the infant nation could not afford either one. It was kept alive by paper money, backed not by gold but by hope, hype, and Morris’s ersatz “Bank of North America.” A nail maker’s son, Morris was not a theorist of the Revolution. We do not find him articulating ideals of human equality. He was an inventive tinkerer, issuing “Morris Notes” and then redeeming them with loans wangled from France and the Netherlands. His was a Ponzi scheme, a pin factory perhaps, but it worked well enough to keep Washington’s army in the field. It also made Marris suspect (of graft, of course), and it roused opposition to his advocacy of a more powerful national government. But like Adam Smith, Morris knew that prosperity (‘the wealth of nations’) depended as much on public policy and political sovereignty as it did on the division of labor.

Storming the bastions of patriarchy
Sophia Jex-Blake, 1840-1912

Until lately there has been no demand for women doctors, because it does not occur to most people to demand what does not exist. Sophia Jex-Blake, 1869.

The medical profession was an enduring bastion of ‘maleness.’ As a boy, I was unusual in having two women doctors (the first was my mother’s best friend); but it was thought ‘natural’ for me to change to a male physician as I reached puberty. This peculiar hangover of patriarchy was a long one. The common route for the very first female doctors was to treat women, in women’s clinics. So it was with Sophia Jex-Blake, born in Brighton, England, on January 21, 1840. Showing precocious aptitude in mathematics, Jex-Blake early decided to become a medic. Her difficulties included her parents’ opposition, which she finally overcame, but even before that Jex-Blake ran into gender barriers at medical schools in Britain (London) and the USA (Harvard). Along the way she picked up useful knowledge (including of pharmacology), but her medical studies did not start until she and six other women literally forcedtheir way into Edinburgh’s prestigious program. Even then women were barred from ‘promiscuous’ lectures, and of course anatomies were out of bounds. Jex-Blake finally won her MD in Switzerland and then had it confirmed at the London School of Medicine for Women (which she had helped Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to found). Still, she was restricted in her professional practice to the treatment of women (her Swiss medical thesis had been on puerperal fever). She may have been happy about this restriction, and pioneered not only with paying patients but also in establishing public (free) clinics for working class women. As a crusader she had few equals. She successfully lobbied Parliament to pass “enabling” legislation (it allowed but did not require British medical schools to admit women students), and also (in 1886) had a hand in the foundation of the Edinburgh women’s medical school. Meanwhile, she convinced her parents that hers was the right course and that she had a right to pursue it (her father had opposed women of his class undertaking any paid professional work). After her mother’s death, Sophia Jex-Blake resumed medical practice. She also inspired other women to break down gender barriers. These included Sophia’s nieces, Katharine and Henrietta Jex-Blake, who become leaders in their chosen fields (classics and music performance, respectively) and then pioneer educators of other women: Katharine (1860-1951) as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, and Henrietta (1862-1953) as Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Both of them lived to see their universities allow women not only to study but to take degrees in their chosen fields, including medicine. Good trouble seems to have run in the Jex-Blake family, well beyond Sophia’s death in 1912. ©

I grew up in a small town--American folk saying.
Grover's Corners and Salem Village

Home may be where the heart is, but it’s no place to spend a Wednesday afternoon. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos (1983).

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) was neither the first nor the last youngster to escape the confines of a small town for the heady liberty of the metropolis, nor was she the first, or the last, to regret it. Such transitions are by no means universal American experiences, especially now that we’ve almost all settled for halfway, in “suburbia” or, more recently, “exurbia,” but Carrie Meeber’s abrupt transformation remains one of our favorite bipolarisms, along with innocence versus knowingness, nature versus artifice, identity versus anonymity. Indeed, some today see it as marking the fundamental divide between ‘MAGA’ Republicans and the rest. But, Reagan films and pastoral pipe dreams to the contrary notwithstanding, the American small town itself was no picnic. Please remember that the small town is the chosen scene of some of our best horror movies. And if you don’t fancy village ghouls of rural zombies, try a dose of rural realities with the archive photos in Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). That ambivalence about the small place, where everyone knows everyone (because knowing all there is to know about one’s neighbors is everyone’s business) is nicely symbolized by the an important theatrical coincidence. January 22 is the anniversary of the premieres of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Princeton, NJ, January 22, 1938) and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (New York, January 22, 1953). Now, Wilder’s Grover’s Corners is not a simple paradise, and Miller’s Salem is not a pure hell. Both are prize-winning dramas written by intelligent playwrights who understand that good and evil can inhabit the same soul—or, for that matter, the same small town. Miller’s Salem Village and Wilder’s Grover’s Corner are imagined places that have a real world resonance in American social and cultural history. Thus it is that both plays have become favorites of amateur and high school theaters across the land. They are often revived, too, by professional theatrical companies, so (at least if you live in a metropolis) there’s a measurable chance you might be able to see them played on successive nights in two different theaters. If you like bipolar experiences. ©

Wolf Hall rediscovered.
Edward Seymour and Wolf Hall

Beneath every history, another history. Hilary Mantel, in Wolf Hall (2009).

There was a real Wolf Hall, in Wiltshire, England. Or, rather, Wolf Halls, plural: for the building had several incarnations, beginning as a 15th-century manor house. It has reappeared as the mis en scène in Hilary Mantel’s epic trilogy beginning with Wolf Hall (2009) and continuing with Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020). Mantel’s work centered on the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief fixer for King Henry VIII, and on the Latin epigram Homo homini lupus, or ‘man is wolf to man.’ That’s a fair comment on Henry VIII’s court, and in 1540 Cromwell’s wolf fell prey to other wolves who, many of them and in their turn, met similar fates. Among these other wolves was the real master of Wolf Hall, Edward Seymour, eventually the Duke of Somerset and “Lord Protector” during the short reign of the boy king, Edward VI. Seymour did not survive Edward’s reign, tried and executed (on January 23, 1552) by a cabal of his fellow wolves. Unlike Thomas Cromwell, Seymour was himself no johnny-come-lately. His family could claim descent from King Edward III (reigned 1327-1377). That was on the distaff side, and a safer line could be traced from the Percys and the Cliffords. Edward Seymour’s birthdate is not known. He was not a firstborn son, so some imprecision is to be expected, but he was probably born about 1500, probably at Wolf Hall. His family was on the way up, for his grandfather had bet right on King Henry VII, and in turn his father had served Henry VIII. Both were liberally rewarded with lands and offices, and as eldest surviving male heir Sir Edward Seymour continued their progress. His rate of ascent speeded when, at Wolf Hall, King Henry spotted Edward’s sister Jane Seymour, and then married her in June 1536. Jane died after birthing a son. Her death slowed Edward Seymour’s rise, but did not halt it. Throughout the next decade, his military talents and his ruthlessness served him well, and served many others fatally. When Jane Seymour’s 9-year-old son became King Edward VI, his uncle became Lord Protector and Duke of Somerset. During his rise he sat on courts which condemned his rivals to death, and in 1552 he suffered the same fate, though (oddly) only a felony and not “treason.” Using his royal preferments of lands and incomes, Somerset began rebuilding Wolf Hall, a vast project which ceased on his death. Wolf Hall disappeared. It was “rediscovered” in 2018, first by uncovering its elaborate sewage system. The current owners of the property are direct descendants of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. They hope to make Wolf Hall’s remains into a tourist attraction. In England, some things change only very slowly. ©.

Or, possibly, E. T. W.
E T A Hoffmann

Believe that nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic, than real life, and that all a writer can do is to present it as ‘in a glass, darkly.’ E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Sandman.”

I never let the opportunity pass to praise the fiction of the Canadian writer Robertson Davies (1913-1995), and today offers just such an opportunity. January 24, 1776, was the birthdate (in Königsberg, then part of Prussia) of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hoffmann played an important role (or roles) in the concluding novel of Davies’s finest work, the Cornish Trilogy. At his birth, Hoffman was E. T. W., for “Ernst Theodor Wilhelm”, but later in life, and in apparent homage to Mozart, he substituted “Amadeus” for “Wilhelm” in his authorial name. Hoffmann was, truth be told, not much of a musician, not much of a composer, not much of an artist, and not much of a jurist, either, but he tried his hand at all these things. He’s remembered instead for his Gothic tales, short stories mixing horror and fantasy, tales which inspired later musicians to compose better music, notably Jacques Offenbach (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1880) and Pyotr Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker, 1892). I think all this struck Robertson Davies’s funny bone, and inspired him to make Hoffmann himself (or, rather, Hoffmann’s ghost or spirit) a minor character in Davies’s last Cornish novel, The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). Minor character perhaps, but the whole novel is about the (re)discovery of a Hoffmann manuscript, a never-before-performed opera. “The Lyre of Orpheus,” and about the storms and stresses of completing the opera’s score and then producing it as a public statement of Canada’s cultural coming of age. The whole thing (the novel, that is) is a hoot from beginning to end, involving a couple of affairs (‘off-stage’, mainly, one heterosexual and the other not), a painfully uncouth child prodigy named Hulda Schnakenburg (“Schnak” is her nickname), and an egomaniacal Canadian producer of Welsh origins (perhaps a stand-in for Robertson Davies, originally of Welsh nonconformist stock). Fittingly, given Hoffmann’s actual tales and central elements of Davies’s previous Cornish novels, it’s spiced with gothic fantasies (Hoffmann’s ghost and two other spirits) and a mystic, mythical echo of Celtic England’s (or Wales’s) Arthurian legends. Whether or not the ‘real’ Hoffmann (E. T. A. or E. T. W.) deserved all this is a question; he lived a dissolute life, was often in trouble with authority, may have seen himself as a kind of Goethe figure (Goethe manqué, I guess), and died of his vices in 1822. But Hoffmann (or, possibly, Hoffmann’s ghost) gave Robertson Davies another chance to write a comic masterpiece in praise of imagination and erudition. It makes the whole Cornish saga, just like Hoffmann’s lost manuscript, into a real entertainment. Incidentally, it suggests too that ‘Canadian culture’ is not an oxymoron, but contains many tales worth their tellings. ©

The other Miss Potter
Beatrice Webb

Nature still obstinately refuses to cooperate by making rich people innately superior to poor people. Beatrice Potter Webb, Baroness Passfield.

Victorian England produced two Miss Potters, both going by the same middle name (almost: one Helen Beatrix, the other Martha Beatrice), and both were born into wealth and brought up as Unitarians. But like most coincidences it didn’t go further than that: other than, perhaps, in happy childhoods. Once Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) passed into adolescence, she entered the bonds of womanhood, her ambitions repressed into painful gender conformities by her utterly conventional parents. Her secret lives would later explode into world-wide fame as a conservationist, an expert on mushrooms, and as a writer and illustrator of stories about rabbits (Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter). Later, Beatrix was portrayed (wonderfully) by Renée Zellweger in the 2006 film Miss Potter. The other, Martha Beatrice Potter, was born on January 22, 1859, into an unrelated but equally wealthy ‘Potter’ family, one with nine surviving children, all of them girls (the one boy died young). Luckily for all those girls their father Matthew “genuinely believed that women were superior to men.” He brought them all up to learn much, think for themselves, but failed to ensure that they knew “how to cook and clean.” Beatrice remembered that oversight, and smiled at it, in 1942 when war had robbed her of domestic staff, and domestic tasks were made difficult by her advancing age. She was then 83, and famous both as herself and as the wife and working partner of Sidney Webb, by then Baron Passfield. Indeed, the second (posthumous) volume of Beatrice’s autobiography was entitled Our Partnership (1948), as a complement to the first (My Apprenticeship). But it’s by no means clear that Sidney was, so to speak, her master. They came to their task together as idealistic reformers, and stayed that way in spite of drearily realistic nature of modern politics. Of the two, Beatrice was the more scholarly, but both were of an intellectual caste (or cast?), leaders of the Fabian Society and then servants of the Labour Party, believers always in research and study as foundations for action and policy. Beatrice’s wealth and wit always helped sustain Sidney, but at the same time their elitism undermined their influence. It’s hard not to see Sidney’s elevation to the peerage (as Baron Passfield, in 1929) as a classic case of being kicked upstairs. And there they stayed: waning influences, graying eminences. But time passes, old wounds heal, and eventually their ashes were transferred from the privacy of their garden at Passfield to the public splendor of Westminster Abbey. Beatrix Potter’s ashes, in contrast, were scattered at her Lake District farm where, I suppose, they continue to nourish the rabbits. ©

(and Joanne Woodward)
Paul Newman, 1925-2008

The embarrassing thing is that my salad dressing is outgrossing my films. Paul Newman.

That’s probably not true, although by the time he said it Paul Newman’s line of (mainly) condiments was a big earner, and still (when out of reach of my wife’s, son’s, or daughter’s homemade dressings) I reach for “Newman’s Own” Italian. It’s pretty good on lettuce, and all the after-tax profits go to charity (which adds to its piquancy), but it’s also a remembrance ritual, a vinegar and oil communion. When I did go to see films (from the late 1950s and into the 1970s), Newman was my favorite actor. He was magnificent in his best roles, believable always. Even better, he was my anti-Wayne (John Wayne, that is) both on screen and in real life. Best of all, he was married to Joanne Woodward and directed her finest film, Rachel, Rachel (1968). Newman later said that he picked up all these skills (and Ms. Woodward) in his early years in New York (not least at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio), but it all began in Ohio with the marriage of his parents, Arthur Newman and Terézia Fecková, he of Polish-Jewish stock and she a Slovakian Catholic who ended up a Christian Scientist. They were an odd couple rendered ‘normal’ by dad’s ownership of a sporting goods shop. Paul Newman was born in Cleveland Heights on January 16, 1925, then (thanks to the shop’s success?) grew up in the somewhat leafier Shaker Heights. There he early (aged 7 and after) appeared in school productions, but any artistic leanings were interrupted by WWII, wherein he’d hoped to be a Navy pilot but because of color blindness ended as turret gunner, a very hazardous but not a heroic role. Once at peace he entered the notoriously liberal Kenyon College (drama and economics, an optimistic combination), tried his hand at summer stock, and drifted into New York, married (not yet to Woodward) and ambitious. His breakthroughs came with characteristic roles. I heard of him in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, but I was judged too young for the steam. I hardly noticed him in Exodus (1960) but first ‘really’ saw him in The Hustler (1961), opposite Jackie Gleason (thus began his love interest in pool). Even more characteristic parts came in Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). In all he was put-upon, resentful, and anti-heroic, which suited him, and then came a peculiarly appealing, defiant humor in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). More films came, of course, plus (in 1982) the salad dressing. There was some good stuff in all that, condiments really, but the Paul Newman I remember is encapsulated in those 1961-1973 films. Newman remains, for me, the best ‘not-quite-noir’ of all time, or, to put it another way, he was a blond and believable Bogart. And there was Joanne Woodward, too. ©

The novel as confessional.
Moll Flanders goes on sale, January 27, 1722.

To give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be made as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give a beauty to the penitent part . . . Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722).

Puritans have been blamed for many things, perhaps deservedly, but their desire for a purer church led some of them, particularly in the New England colonies, to require of would-be communicants a narrative of their spiritual growth. Men gave these “relations” in public, before the congregation; women told theirs to the minister in private but with an older woman present. Challenges were made, questions asked, but most stories passed muster. Increasingly, they took on a particular form, a common plot. They might be titled “my struggles with myself and against God,” and almost all ended with recognition of one’s own impotence and God’s omnipotence. Much later, a more secular age would see these stories as progenitors of, or templates for, the modern novel. This is not to say that these confessions were fictions, but that their central themes carried over into a new form of expression. If so, then the midwife (or obstetrician?) was Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). Appropriately enough, he was born of Puritan stock, but instead of following his parents’ model, he became a Grub Street hack, a writer for money, a gossip-monger. This got him in trouble (and debt, and prison, and even into the stocks), but late in life he hit on a safer vein, long fictions posing as autobiographies. His most famous effort was (and remains)Robinson Crusoe (1719). It was Puritan enough in its basic structure, for Crusoe’s “life and surprising adventures” constantly provoke pious self-evaluations and, finally, a salvation. But Defoe’sThe Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, was much more in the Puritan mode. It was published 301 years ago, on January 27, 1722, and surviving copies now sell for pearls. And make no mistake this Moll was a sinner. Her very name (or, more accurately, nickname) tells us so, for “Moll” had become synonymous with women of low morals and high adventures, as in the Jacobean drama Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut-Purse (1611). Defoe’s Moll told her own story, though: her times spent in prison and in the stocks, once under a death sentence; her transportation to the colonies; her return (and then back again), her lovers (five of them husbands, serially, most of them no-goods), her abandoned (or dead) children, and finally her salvation (in America, of course, and with the help of a kindly Quaker) and her happy reunion with her one decent lover (a Lancashire lad named Jemy) who’d been ground fine by similar millstones. It’s all about salvations, essays in “soteriology”, most of them temporary and thus false, but Moll’s final salvation comes in the telling of her true story. She’s still with us today. ©.