BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Poverty as the American dilemma.

I’m sick and tired of black and white people of good intent giving aspirin to a society that is dying of cancer. Ralph Abernathy.

One of the saddest, and truest, epitaphs you’ll find is on a brass plaque in Atlanta’s Lincoln Cemetery. It’s in caps and it reads “I TRIED,” and it’s a fair summary of the life and works of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, born in rural Alabama on March 11, 1926. He’s best known as Martin Luther King Jr.’s faithful lieutenant in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the leadership of which he took over when King was assassinated in Memphis, TN, in 1968. A rather pudgy figure, Abernathy lacked King’s charisma and eloquence, and perhaps should have stayed in a behind-the-scenes role. His nine years at the top of the SCLC were not notably successful, and afterwards he courted controversy by endorsing Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election (he repented this one) and then, in his autobiography (And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 1989) spilling the beans on MLK’s sexual strayings. Abernathy then became an object of satire (or perhaps pity) when he took on a role as paid spokesman for Sun Myun Moon’s controversial Unification Church. Some engaged in the struggle for equal civil rights may have breathed a sigh of relief when Abernathy died, aged only 64, of heart trouble. But ‘try’ Abernathy did, and his efforts deserve more than pity, for he saw political potential in a poor people’s alliance, one that spread across and could dissolve racial barriers by attacking the American market economy at its weakest point, its proven capacity to produce a substrata of the poverty stricken, handicapped by all that poverty brings in terms of educational attainment, life expectancy, childbirth mortality, et cetera ad infinitum. No doubt Abernathy knew of the rise and repression of the Black and White “Farmers’ Alliances” of the late 19th century and “The People’s Party” campaigns of the 1890s. More to the point, he’d been born rich himself, certainly well-off, the son of a prosperous farmer who owned, free and clear, 500 acres of good Black Belt land. At college, Ralph studied math and sociology, so he knew the numbers, too, and how they filtered down through the generations. Drawn to the ministry and the civil rights struggle, his interest in poverty as such helped to drive King and the SCLC towards the idea of a poor people’s campaign, thus (for instance) the decision to support Memphis sanitation workers in their struggles to rise out of their fully-employed poverty. After King’s murder (in Memphis) Abernathy would lead the “Poor People’s Campaign” of 1968 and its march on Washington. Afterwards, he continued to remind us all that poverty ravages people of all skin shades and calls for common political solutions. His memorial is that he tried. ©.

[Stanley]

Making good trouble in a democratic manner.

“Faith and Begorrah at an Indian Boarding School.” Article by Charles Ellis Trimble, March 2011.

Charles Ellis Trimble was born on March 12, 1935, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This was during the Great Depression, and Pine Ridge was (as it is today) one of the poorest communities in the USA. As the youngest of a large Oglala family (he had ten siblings), he felt poorer than most, and when his father died in 1937 the pain sharpened. Indeed the state threatened to take him away and put him in an orphanage or with an Anglo family. His mother fought this, but won only by promising to send her little boy to the Holy Rosary Mission School at Red Cloud. Nearly 80 years later, Trimble was asked by a group of Nebraska high school students to recall the abuses he suffered there. And why not? Trimble was by then an elder statesman of the indigenous people’s movement, founder of a news service for editors of tribal papers, and past president not only of the National Congress of American Indians but also of the Nebraska State Historical Society. His long answer (once a writer, always a writer!!) surprised the students. He did not say that there were no abuses. If there were he chose not to remember them. Instead, he asked the class to contextualize their own question, to consider Holy Rosary Mission School along with the experiences of other ‘minority’ children in the USA, indeed all children, for through most of US history children had no rights, nor much protection. Black children in the south fared worst of all, but in eastern cities poor children, most often from immigrant families, were rounded up and sent west on “orphan trains” to be housed by, and to work for, hardscrabble frontier farmers. No one asked their permission. As for Trimble, he remembered Holy Rosary for the privations of Lent and the lavish pleasures of St. Patrick’s Day, but never any punishments for ‘being’ an Oglala Sioux. It’s an interesting idea, contextualization. Throughout his life, Trimble used it to gain ground—and allies, and lively sympathies—for Native Americans. After his Holy Rosary years, Trimble gained a degree in (of all things) advertising, worked successfully in the ‘Anglo’ economy, mainly for General Dynamics, married an Anglo woman, but then took up journalism and advocacy for the causes of native peoples on various ‘reservations.’ His advocacy was entrepreneurial, alliance-building, and effective. He advocated strengthening cultures and preserving languages but eschewed identity politics. As his wife noted in an interview after Trimble’s death, he knew when to press hard and when to compromise. “That,” she said, “takes a real talent.” And, she added, “he was a good writer.” Indeed. ©

[Stanley]

March 13, 1927

That’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into. Oliver Hardy, often.

Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957) first acted together on film in 1921. How they got there at all is one of those minor miracles that would take chapters to recount, Stan from Ulverston in the English Lake District (who sailed over to America with Charlie Chaplin) and Ollie (whose Confederate father was wounded at Antietam) from Harlem, Georgia. But in 1921 they weren’t yet “Laurel and Hardy:” only bit players in a Hal Roach short. Exactly when they became trademarked is a matter of some dispute, but the best candidate was an 18-minute silent (Duck Soup, another Roach brain tempest) that opened in Los Angeles on March 13, 1927. You can watch it, these days, on YouTube, if you can spare the time and don’t live in Tennessee, for much of the inconsequential plot has Stan Laurel in drag, playing housemaid to an English Lord and his new Lady on their California honeymoon. Ollie Hardy stands in as the fat, unshaven, renter of the property (which actually belongs to someone else), safely and unambiguously male, always discounting his fluttering hands. How they got into this particular fine mess is prophetic (not to mention bizarrely unlikely), for when the film starts they are bums who escape from fighting forest fires through the usual comic chase (Laurel and Hardy on a bicycle pursued by soldiers in an open touring car) through what may have been downtown Hollywood, if Hollywood had a downtown in 1927. It was all such fun that Roach repeated Duck Soup in 1931, this time as a talkie and actually billed as a “Laurel and Hardy” vehicle. Two years later, the Marx brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo) made the title famous in a Duck Soup film (1933) that had nothing whatever to do with California forest fires or drag queen maids, for it was set in the mythical republic of Freedonia, and set up for Groucho’s unforgettable “Rufus T. Firefly.” The Marx version of Duck Soup also starred the long-suffering Margaret Dumont. She played high society widows in no fewer than seven Marx Brothers films (besides Duck Soup, there was Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, At the Circus, and The Big Store. Margaret’s statuesque figure and haughty manner made her a perfect foil for the Marx boys, and her role could have been played by a man in drag. After all, early 20th-century Hollywood was nothing like early 21st-century Tennessee, where dark thoughts about actors in drag run wild and unhinged. As for Laurel and Hardy, they went on almost forever, finally clocking up 107 films as one of the greatest comedy duos of their much more innocent time. ©

[Stanley]

A primer in Victorian domesticity. For women.

The Book of Household Management, comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady's-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort. Isabella Mary Beeton, 1861.

It's passing strange that a book with such a title should be known, today, as a cookbook, but that has been its fate. In truth, it was mostly recipes (‘receipts’ in the language of the day), some of which (delicate pastries and some of its finest entrées) were to be the sole responsibility of the lady of the house. But she, queen of the family and director of the household, should know how everything was done, which accounts for the overly-detailed title and the overall length (1,112 pages) of the first edition—and especially its innovative “analytical index” (26 pages). The index, wisely used, was there to help the neophyte wife to become an ersatz expert in Victorian domesticity. The book became an overnight sensation, selling tens of thousands of copies in its first printing and going on to become a veritable franchise operation, a copyright gold mine. Today, despite many misgivings about its cookery per se, The Book of Household Management has become an essential sourcebook for any young scholar wishing to know more about the details of Victorian family life: at least middle class life. The book’s author, Isabella Mary Beeton, was born Isabella Mary Mayson, in London, on March 14, 1836. Her father, a successful linen merchant, died when Isabella was still a toddler, so she watched and learned as her mother kept the business afloat, married again, and birthed a further thirteen children. That made sixteen in all, to which we must add the four brought in by the second husband, Isabella’s stepfather Henry Dorling, the clerk of the racecourse at Epson Downs. Isabella’s education, then, included oversight of this “living cargo of children,” and the domestic demands of a busy house in a busy place. To this core curriculum Isabella added boarding schools in London and Heidelberg, thus entering adulthood with an impressive skill set. At 20, she married Samuel Beeton, an innovative publisher already selling to a female market (not to mention his famous Boy’s Own Magazine which would survive well into the 20th century). A “discreet” believer in women’ rights, Samuel put Isabella right to work, writing up receipts and domestic hints and almost constantly pregnant until her death (from puerperal fever and, possibly, from Sam’s very own syphilis) in 1865. So hers was a short life, but a useful one, and those who purchased the Isabella Beeton copyright (in 1866, from Sam, by then ill and down on his luck) made her into a profitable institution. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management has never, since, been out of print. ©.

[Stanley]

Wokeness and the history of the Republican Party.

As a matter of fact, it is the fascist-minded of America who are the real enemies of our institutions. Harold L. Ickes.

Governor Ron DeSantis, despite his education at elite schools (Yale and then Harvard Law), appears innocent of knowledge about his own party’s history. His campaign against what he calls ‘wokeness’ is a prime example. The politically ‘awakened’ have been prominent in the Republican party’s greatest triumphs, for instance in the so-called ‘Progressive’ Era. Of course Teddy Roosevelt was the most progressive of them all. In New York City, New York state, and then in the White House he fought for the great middle class (and occasionally for the working class) against the “great malefactors of wealth” (his words), men who owned the country and thought that they should, therefore, run it. But way before TR’s progressives, there were Abe Lincoln and his “wide awakes” who wrested control of the new party from its kingmakers and then successfully fought to keep the nation whole and—among other things—to extirpate slavery. These “Wide Awakes” first rose up in Connecticut, roused to action by Lincoln’s defense of workers’ rights to join unions and strike for better conditions, and quickly spread across the north and west. These “woke” of their day paraded to the polls under “Wide-Awake” banners. In Missouri they organized a mob which kept the secessionist legislature from moving the state into the Confederacy. For most of its history, Republicans held their awakened element close and gained their greatest political successes. But some “awakened” were unable to remain Republicans. One such was Harold Ickes, born in Hollidaysburg, PA, on March 15, 1874. He was educated in Chicago, first at Englewood School and then at the University of Chicago (BA 1897, JD 1907). That was a John D. Rockefeller foundation that had attracted a knot of progressive scholars, and Harold Ickes absorbed their political ethics and their regard for fact-based thinking about politics and economics. Ickes burst upon the Chicago scene as a radical young lawyer, a “progressive Republican” who would stick with the party if it stuck with him. As it turned out, that was not very long. He rebelled first with Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moosers, returned briefly to the fold in the early 1920s, and then left forever to join Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. A woke politician to his core, Ickes the Illinois Republican served as president of the Chicago NAACP, a defender of workers’ rights, a burr under Charles McCormick’s girdle, and therefore the favorite enemy of McCormick’s Chicago Tribune. Come the Depression, Ickes the Republican was ready to serve FDR’s New Deal, which he did from 1933 to 1945 as an extremely “woke” Secretary of the Interior. His is a moral tale which could stand retelling. ©

[Stanley]

Rumpole forever!!

[Leo McKern] not only played the character Rumpole—he added to it, brightened it and brought it fully to life. John Mortimer, author of the ‘Rumpole’ stories and ITV scripts.

There are three film versions of T. S. Eliot’s 1935 verse drama Murder in the Cathedral, the most recent in 2020. It’s dramatic material, climaxing when four armed knights do the king’s business by murdering Archbishop Thomas Becket, rendering him a sacrifice in blood at the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral. The 1951 film version starred an Anglican priest, Father John Groser, a Christian Socialist whose presence sheds unexpected light on the play’s politics. The drama’s moral is made clearest in its denouement, where the four bloodied knights seek to justify the murder. They speak in plain prose and not poetry, and make the usual, flawed claims, that their end justified their means, that they had done their duty. Such threadbare hypocrisy!! But in trial takes, the 1951 film’s director feared that audiences would find these speeches amusing rather than terrifying, and asked Eliot for a rewrite. I like to think that comedy was perceived because in 1951 one of the four knights was played by a man who had comedy (of a particular sort) in his bones. This was a young and then almost unknown Australian actor named Leo McKern, born Reginald McKern in Sydney on March 16, 1920. He shed the name Reginald as soon as he could, becoming the more demotic “Leo,” and then at 15 (he’d left school early) lost his left eye in a factory accident. Besides war service he tried a couple of skilled trades before becoming an actor, an odd choice for a man with a glass eye and a short, slightly dumpy, stature, but he’d fallen in love with an actress, Jane Holland, and followed her to England where, in 1946, they married, and he embarked on a career wherein he would play many roles in many genres, including comedy, and play them well. One of his favorites was the treacherous Iago, in Othello, but he was not so much typecast as he was condemned (that glass eye and 5’7” frame again) to play in support, never in the lead. His gravelly basso made him a good villain, and led also to a number of voice only engagements. But now we all typecast Leo McKern as Horace Rumpole, Rumpole of the Bailey, an also-ran barrister who could never equal his early success in the Penge murder case, never fully make the grade expected of him by his wife Hilda (“she who must be obeyed”), and never quite escape the amused contempt of his law partners (even when ambushing them in court), always finding comic refuge in wearied cynicism, cheap wine, and undiluted faith in the jury system. Rumpole was John Mortimer’s creation, and ran first in 1978 as a BBC “Play for Today,” but Mortimer himself often (and gladly) admitted that Horace was made, “brought fully to life,” by Leo. Leo stayed obedient to his own wife until his death at 82. Jane Holland would die in 1921, aged 98. ©.

[Stanley]

Middletown and Zenith?

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well? Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, 1920.

In the 1920 presidential election, the US allegedly returned to something the winning candidate, Warren G. Harding, called “normalcy.” It was not a word at all until Harding got hold of it, and its shallowness was exposed when his administration collapsed under the weight of scandal (financial, political, and sexual) and his own skyrocketing blood pressure. Normalcy as revenge!! But “normalcy” was to be even more pitilessly dissected in fiction and in social science. During the election year, Sinclair Lewis put the finishing touches on his novel Main Street. Its phenomenal success suggests that the reading public had had enough of normalcy or, at least, enjoyed finding out what was wrong with it. It also made Lewis a millionaire and encouraged him to continue to rip the lid off, which he did with Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927), each of which took deadly aim at small-town pretentions to embody the norms of American life, love, and religion. Lewis’s books gave us “babbittry,” a much better word than “normalcy,” and gave him the Pulitzer (1925) and then the Nobel (1931) prizes for literature. Then, in 1924, two young scholars, Helen and Robert Lynd, moved themselves from New York City to “Main Street,” in their case Muncie, Indiana, to commence a careful study of real-life Babbitts. Of course they couldn’t call a spade a spade, so they rechristened Muncie as “Middletown,” just as Lewis had made his native small town, Sauk Centre, into “Gopher Prairie” (cruelly, he would call George Babbitt’s and Martin Arrowsmith’s little place “Zenith.”) The Lynds’ Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, appeared in 1929, and soon became as much a classic as Main Street. And, like Main Street, Middletown inspired follow-ups, the first by the Lynds themselves, but later by other social scientists. Of course it can’t be proven that the Lynds followed Sinclair Lewis’s lead, but it’s interesting (at least) that Helen Lynd was (like Lewis) a product of the small town Midwest, for she was born Helen Merrell in LaGrange, Illinois, on March 17, 1896, into a safely prosperous WASP family, and like Lewis she left. She studied at Wellesley College (BA 1919), then Columbia (MA 1922, PhD 1944). At Columbia, she met and married Robert Lynd (another small-town Midwesterner who started out to be a Protestant missionary). On the face of it, their Middletown study was financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and there’s no doubt of their strong academic motivation. But I like to think that they had had their fill of normalcy and found their inspiration in Sinclair Lewis’s satires on babbittry. ©.

[Stanley]

A pioneer in energy efficiency.

Switch off the plug, It will make you feel smug. Old advertising slogan for diesel power.

As many would be glad to tell you, I am no physicist: thus disabled from understanding a central problem of our time, how to achieve true energy efficiency. An early theoretical statement of this problem came from a French physicist, Sadi Carnot, in 1824. His “Carnot Cycle” provided a mathematical formula showing what perfect efficiency might look like and, apparently, also showing why it’s impossible. But it provided a theoretical framework for those who sought to find better ways of producing energy. That there should be better ways was obvious, for Carnot and others calculated steam engine efficiency at about 10%. Carnot’s formula works whether one aims to produce refrigeration or heat, so it’s no accident that some of the best work in the production of heat energy was begun by a young engineer in Franco-Swiss refrigeration plants. This was Rudolf Karl Diesel. We’re all familiar with the distinctive odor produced by his diesel engine and his diesel fuel, but not with the fact that he was born in Paris (on March 18, 1858) and didn’t become really proficient in German until his teens. His parents were Bavarian exiles, so anxious that their son would Frenchify that they farmed him out to a Vincennes household, then saw to his formal education in a French Protestant lycée. All that came to naught with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, when the family was exiled again, this time to England. From there, Rudolf Diesel went to Bavaria, to study engineering at the Munich Polytechnic, then back to Paris to apprentice-employment with an ice-machine company. Along the way, Diesel (perhaps reflecting on his father’s life as a skilled artisan) chose to work towards a more efficient way to produce usable energy. He chose the internal combustion engine as his ‘vehicle,’ but not one built for mobility, rather to bring cheap energy to the workshop floor. He did explore the possibility of solar power, but worked mostly with petroleum’s explosive potentials. His first patents were taken out in Berlin (where his French employer had a plant) and then in Switzerland and the USA (US Patent #608845). By 1896 he'd developed an engine that, on Carnot’s scale, scored at 75% efficiency, which is why we call it a diesel engine. Diesel’s profits made him into a noted patron of the arts, but he also overextended in investments (for instance in the use of vegetable oils for diesel fuel). So his death in 1913 (he disappeared off the rear deck of a cross-channel ferry) became an instant mystery (‘murder or suicide?’), still unsolved. Nor have we yet achieved Carnot’s perfect energy production. ©

[Stanley]

The thumbnail sketch as an art form.

So: I ha’ done you right, on my thumbe naile. From Thomas Middleton’s The Honest Whore, 1604.

Thus the idea of a ‘thumbnail sketch’ makes its earliest appearance in English, as a brief bit of gossip. The line came in a Jacobean comedy involving (inter alia) mistaken identities. But the thumbnail was soon to become its own art form, thanks to John Aubrey. Aubrey (1626-1697) began his Brief Lives to help a friend but soon it became a habit, if not an addiction. He sketched his contemporaries, of course, but also the notable dead. Most are gossipy but many contain sharp, often razor sharp, insights. They have been used by many historians over several centuries. Brief Lives survives in many modern editions but also in the idea itself, for instance used as a title by writers as diverse as Noel Coward and Anita Bruckner. Aubrey’s idea became an art form through the Dictionary of National Biography, a British production now owned by Oxford University Press and available in print, on line, and kept up to date by a stable of scholarly writers and careful editors. It is the model for other “national” biographies, for instance an American one, and it became so partly thanks to Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), the DNB’s first editor-in-chief (1885-1891). Today, Stephen is famous for fathering Virginia Woolf. In his lifetime he was better-known as a jack of many intellectual trades, not to mention his mountaineering and his trenchant political journalism. Leslie Stephen was hired by the founder and guiding spirit of the DNB, George Murray Smith, born in London on March 19, 1824, and born into the publishing trade, for his father was a stationer and publisher. Smith was, in business, as adventurous and entrepreneurial as Stephen was in intellectual life. In this he took after his dad, and between father and son their firms published a pantheon of great authors, some of them mainstream, but not all. The Smith publishing list is a mega-sketch of the Victorian intellect (if such a thing existed), running through Dickens, Tennyson and Thackeray to Eliot, Darwin and Ruskin. It’s a great story, including such business oddities as high pay (including ‘retainers’), technological innovation, and daring gambles, but in his 50s George Smith decided he wanted to do something more lasting—more worthy—than all he had done before. So along with launching novelist Thomas Hardy, Smith’s desire to escape the toils of morbidity led to his launching (1882) of the Dictionary of National Biography, and his hiring of Leslie Stephen as its first editor. It’s a measure of Smith’s energy that, before he died in 1901, the DNB had produced 15 volumes. It has since become an institution. I read a bit of it every morning. Many entries are thumbnails, but others are much longer. Smith’s own entry now runs to over 7000 words! ©

[Stanley]

Snow is just unnecessarily frozen water.

The absolute truth is the thing that makes people laugh. Carl Reiner.

Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx on March 20, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrant parents from Austria (father) and Romania (mother). 90 years later, when asked to explain his funniness, he thought it might have been in his genes, perhaps his bones, but finally remembered that his family liked to laugh. However it happened, Reiner became our most versatile comic: actor, monologuist, writer, director, producer, and (besides all that) Rob Reiner’s father. All that took time, and Reiner was given enough of that. He wanted to live long enough to see Donald Trump voted out of office, but as a final joke he was denied that pleasure, dying in June 2020, aged 98. Even so, Carl was able to see something funny about Donald, constructing an elaborate fantasy in which his favorite grandson woke to the horrible joke of the Trump presidency and went through a whole day of ordinary life (breakfast, lunch, school rooms, dance lessons) screaming every time he thought about it. Reiner’s own life started to get funny when, as an apprentice sewing-machine repairman, his elder brother suggested that Carl get involved with a New Deal theater project. The next big joke came during WWII, when the American army trained Carl in French (so that he could help with the liberation), but then sent him to Hawaii as a teleprinter technician. During that time he got involved in dramatics, directing a Molière play (all in French, of course), then in comedy as a Special Services performer in such bloody places as Guam and Iwo Jima. In peacetime, his big break came as a bit-parter in Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, where he graduated from playing in skits to writing them, working in a wrecking crew that included Neil Simon, Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart. If Carl Reiner had to learn comedy, it was then. There were important later collaborations. I first heard Reiner on my college roommate’s album, The 2000 Year Old Man, comic turns involving Steve Allen and then Mel Brooks. Then Reiner moved into directing and producing as well as writing, most notably as the originator of the Dick Van Dyke Show and then director of the George Burns vehicle Oh, God! (1977), both of them huge successes. He continued to act, direct, and write, but increasingly was seen in public as American comedy’s elder statesman, a role he played well for about three decades. I was among the many who hoped Carl Reiner would live forever, the more so when he began to rile Trump on Twitter, but as Reiner might have put it, we all have our little disappointments. If it’s possible for a self-proclaimed “Jewish atheist” (his coinage) to rest in peace, then Carl Reiner RIPs. ©.

[Stanley]

Blurring the gender line.

[Amy Height] is the cleverest coloured lady we have seen. She is a born comedienne, can sing, and introduce patter and gag, and makes herself a general favourite on her first entrance. From an 1899 review of Height’s performance, in London, as Princess Lulu in “The Gay Grisette.”

These days, ambitious politicians and cultural yahoos have joined forces to make it illegal to play with the ‘sacred’ concept of gender identity. Take for instance Tennessee’s effort to make drag shows illegal, on the ground that such gaieties tempt little boys to become little girls. While “drag shows” per se are the target, one wonders what Tennessee’s First Defenders will do with the whole theater repertoire. Many dramas (and more comedies) turn on sex changes or impersonations, and in Shakespeare the confusions were downright cosmic. In his Twelfth Night, Countess Olivia falls for Viola, the hero/heroine, thinking that Viola is ‘really’ a man. But Viola is ‘really’ a female, and (worse!!) when Twelfth Nightwas first staged both roles were played by male actors. Putting on an original Twelfth Night in Nashville could, one imagines, bring on the collapse of western civilization, especially if staged at the Grand Ol’ Opry. Speaking of which, it was not very long ago a custom in the Tennessee hill country for men to play female roles in ersatz ‘local’ comedies. Back in even happier times, the good old days, an American-born actress became a popular performer in England, and she did so playing it straight (in female parts) or queer (as a boy or man). She was Amy Height, born in the New England Boston around 1866, and first appearing in the English Barnsley in 1883, aged only 17. We know very little about Amy, except that by the time of her death (on March 21, 1913, in London) she was a popular phenomenon. Our ignorance arises in part from Amy’s discretion. In British censuses, she reported herself as born at various times and in various places (she was 29 in 1911 and born in “America”; but in the 1891 count she was 30 and from New York City). On stage she played some straight roles (usually in comedies) and some drag ones (in pantomimes), but wherever Amy went, whatever gender she played, she was much loved by audiences and much praised by critics. One identity she could not shake—and never tried—was racial, for she was a black American. Indeed she broke into the English theater circuit as a soprano singing for a black banjo duo, the American Bohee brothers. And much of her daily bread and butter was won playing various “black” parts in the stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, latterly (as she aged) that of Aunt Chloe. She became so well known that, in 1911, she was “done” by a leading female impersonator—with Amy’s explicit permission. Such a performance would be quite impossible in 21st-century Tennessee. There’s a moral in this story, but I don’t know exactly where it lies. We live in strange times. ©

[Stanley]

Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.

I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happens,
Then Baxter and Calabro . . .
. . . names falling into place
As droplets fell in the dark.
From “The Names”, Billy Collins, 2001

To be a rich poet you need to inherit a fortune or, failing that, have a good-paying day job. So T. S. Eliot lived well, or well enough, on his father’s brick fortune; Wallace Stevens was an insurance company executive; and William Carlos Williams, MD, delivered babies in Rutherford, NJ:
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.
But it had not always been that way. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow waxed wealthy on verse, and his works are now being reassessed partly because they were, after all, runaway best sellers. And then in our own time Billy Collins set the literary world alight when (1999) he signed a six-figure contract with Random House for his next three books—all poems!! His then publisher, a university press, actually sued, claiming loss of expected income (their Collins books were still selling well, and they feared that the Random House deal would cut into their established market). The whole thing delighted Collins, whose father had worked in Wall Street but only as an electrician. Billy Collins also liked to point out that he was born (on March 22, 1941) in a hospital where William Carlos Williams was a consulting obstetrician. That’s fitting not because a poet delivered a poet, or might have done, but because Collins’s own verse floated on his appreciation for little, everyday ironies, the unexpected things that intrude into ordinary lives. He is a conversational poet, so it’s easy to imagine ourselves into his lines, just as he images a loved one reading a letter sent from a faraway place, the heaven of a hot shower, or the loneliness of the dead—and of the living they left behind. Impressed by his six-figure sales and by the commonness of his verse, Congress made him Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. It’s an unpaid honor, without too many obligations, but then Billy Collins, Poet Laureate. was asked to commemorate the victims of 9/11. He refused to publish the poem, reluctant to profit, even collaterally, from the carnage. But “The Names” is a celebration of our diversities, from Ackerman and Baxter to Ishikawa, Medina, Young, and Ziminsky. And it finally saw the light of day a decade later. Collins himself is 82 today and just retired from teaching poetry at SUNY Stony Brook. He now lives in Florida, where I imagine him conversing daily with Governor DeSantis about the ordinary things in life. It would be a learning experience for one of them, I’m sure. ©

[Stanley]

Stand up but don't sing!!

Learn all there is to learn, and then follow your own path. George Frideric Handel.

The early modern (ca. 1600-1800) German principalities produced some of the western world’s greatest musicians. But precious few of them, even the best, rose in social status higher than liveried servants in this duke’s or that prince’s household. That may be why Georg Handel, an eminent surgeon in Halle, Saxony, discouraged the musical ambitions of his son (also Georg). A career in law was, the elder Handel thought, a better prospect. He may have been right. But talent trumped ambition, and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) would wax fat on it. But real prosperity came not in Germany; rather it was London, its booming suburbs, and their blossoming consumer classes that would add many inches to Handel’s waistline and provide him many ways to add to his bank balances. He moved to London in 1710 as a prodigy and died there in 1759 as possibly the fattest and certainly one of the richest residents in Brook Street. Oddly, his most famed composition, The Messiah, premiered in Dublin in April 1742, where contralto Susannah Cibber brought all her private troubles into the line “he was despised and rejected of men” and brought the house down. Indeed The Messiah’s Dublin premiere was a huge success, and when Handel & Co. brought the thing to London for its imperial first night, on March 23, 1743, the whole town turned out, at least its more prosperous elements, including King George II, himself a native of Lower Saxony who was, like Handel, translated to London by its lure of wealth and (for George II) real power. Probably the king expected to be moved by The Messiah; in any case, he was so moved by its “Hallelujah Chorus” that he rose from his seat. Out of respect for the royal person, the whole audience rose. Hence the custom, in modern concert houses around the globe, for audiences to rise during that passage. Now, one hopes, concert-goers honor the triumphant music and not the monarchical principle. As for George Frideric Handel, he kept adding to his wealth through more great compositions and shrewd investments, mainly in London real estate, a booming market. On his profits he lived comfortably at 25, Brook Street and (as I have noted) dined richly, he also established a reputation for princely generosity well beyond what might have been possible for him as a lawyer in Halle. Handel’s charities took particular care of musicians in their declining years or down on their luck. So today it might be appropriate (in more ways than one) that his old mansion houses (besides his own) a museum to the memory of Jimi Hendrix, who died there, down on his luck, in 1970. ©.

[Stanley]

In case you're wondering, we never got an anniversary note from Uncle Bob yesterday so I have dropped a query in his inbox. As soon as I get any response I will let you all know.....

[Stanley]

Everybody was so young.

If that's painting, that's the kind of painting that I would like to do. Gerald Murphy after seeing an exhibition of works by Picasso and Braque.

The expatriates of the 1920s--“a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein famously said of them—are to me a continuing fascination. Their lives—work and carousing in Paris punctuated by bullfights in Spain and carousing in Riviera sunshine—were best recounted by Malcolm Cowley (a minor poet who became a major editor) in Exile’s Return (1934) but there have been many other attempts. Cowley had a hand in another, fictional attempt to recapture those “best times,” Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last and darkest novel. It’s obvious to modern readers that Tender is ‘really’ about Scott himself and his troubled wife Zelda. What’s now less obvious is that Fitzgerald’s fiction starts (more happily) with different characters, drawn from Gerald and Sara Murphy, before they implode into the lives of Scott and Zelda. At the time it was obvious to everyone, including Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, who both slammed Fitzgerald privatelyfor dragging the Murphys into his tragedy. Gerald Murphy (born March 25, 1888) and Sara Wiborg Murphy (b. 1883) were of NY’s economic elite who married against their parents’ advices. Not only was Sara too old for Gerald, but his was ‘new money,’ drawn from the leather and haberdashery trades. Unhappy with their in-laws’ infighting, the Murphys moved to Paris to get away from it all. There (and on the Riviera) they and their children lived lives of great pleasure with great friends, today heroes of literary and artistic modernism, who were drawn to Gerald and Sara by their money (to be sure) but also by their heady mix of kindness and style. Gerald dabbled in the arts, notably painting, and Sara was Sara, beautiful, charming, obliging to a fault. They, too, were unhappy with Fitzgerald’s caricatures (as they thought) in the form of Nicole and Dick Diver, but made unhappy already by the deaths of two of their children. Gerald died in 1964. Sara lived on until 1975. One hopes they rest in peace. Their response to Fitzgerald is best summed up in the title of Calvin Tomkins’s 1971 biography, Living Well is the Best Revenge. For a more complete picture of their lives together (and apart), their happinesses and their tragedies, you might better refer to Amanda Vail’s 1998 best-seller, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story. ©

[Stanley]

modern or modernist?

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost, 1916.

The word “modern” first appeared in English around 1500. As an immigrant (a borrowing from Latin via Middle French), it was at first a modest word of simple meanings: ‘contemporary’ or, in a comparative sense, ‘not ancient.’ Somewhere along the line, however, “modern” became a value-laden delusion, used by those with no feeling for its implicit ironies and its ever-receding relativities to distinguish themselves from others: for instance “we” the moderns versus “them” the primitives, a prejudicial distinction which caused anthropologists to spin their wheels for decades. Efforts to achieve clarity led to more confusion, especially in literature, with new categories such as “modernist,” which lumps together poets like Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and e. e. cummings. But if we return to a more unassuming definition of “modern,” then Robert Frost stands out as representative of a far broader set of poets. It's a set that excludes esoteric or elitist ‘modernists’, e.g. Eliot and Pound, but it brings in a veritable host of poets who took great pains to “poetize” the pains and pleasures that ordinary people found in their ordinary lives. Frost was one of many who responded to Thomas Gray’s clarion call (in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 1751) to versify about the rest of us. Robert Frost played the as a New Englander familiar with snow-choked lanes and those who traveled them, with stone walls and their menders. And he shed Gray’s regret that common folk were, well, so very common. But Robert Frost was an uncommon man. No rural New Englander, but born in San Francisco (on March 26, 1874), the son of an ambitious journalist (a Mark Twain manqué?) whose early death sent Frost back to his grandparents in Lawrence, MA. There he became a city boy, then attended Dartmouth, then Harvard. Along the way he began to write, dropped out of college, married his Lawrence sweetheart, then subjected his family to the hard diet of smallhold farming, spiced by the occasional check for published verse. Ironically, along the way, he was tutored by Ezra Pound, but his own style would be different, using plain words and real-life imagery, a “modern” right down to his fingertips. He prospered through writing about New England’s cold winters and gloomy autumns. He wrote beautifully about them, but spent much of his time on a Florida smallholding, basking in the sun (no snowy evenings there) with occasional outings to deposit his royalty checks. And his books did sell, and he would (in his common tongue) deliver a poetic message at President John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1960. ©.

[Stanley]

I've had a reply from Bob. Here's the gist of what he said.
I had picked my subject, the minor English novelist Ethel Florence Richardson (who wrote under a male pen-name and published (inter alia) the minor masterwork called ULTIMA THULE (1929), She was an odd bird, Aussie by birth and a rather good musician who finally settled on novel-writing. The first years of her marriage (to an English academic who taught in Leipzig) were happy ones, but when they moved to England she became very unhappy and poured it all into her fiction. Not, apparently, unhappy with her husband, but rather with England. That happens to the occasional Australian, I think. Something in the air?
But then he realised her birth date was January 3 not March 24 so he is saving her for next year and will not plug the gap.

[Stanley]

Why is there a Kosciuszko, Miississippi, and a Kosciuszko Park, Chicago?
(This should have been sent on March 24. My apologies. )

There is a time when you have to sacrifice everything to have everything saved. Tadeusz Kościuszko.

On March 24, 1794, in Kraków, a military engineer, Tadeusz Kościuszko, began what he hoped would be the Polish Revolution, and announced that he was to be its commander-in-chief as it did battle against the king of Prussia and the Tsar of Russia. For good measure, he aimed to overthrow Poland’s ersatz king, a joke monarch crowned by those who, for a century, had been filching Polish real estate. Kościuszko’s was a noble gesture that fizzled, and in 1795 Poland was divvied up between the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, and the Hapsburgs. It was only when those houses crumbled at the end of World War I that Poland reappeared, rising phoenix-like from the wreckage. It’s an anniversary that will be marked in Warsaw, should be remembered in Kyiv, and most likely will not be celebrated in Moscow. Beyond Putin’s grasp, Kościuszko’s name is today remembered across the world, from Australia’s tallest mountain to a chapel at Fontainebleau, even to several stirring lines in English Romantic poetry, as in Lord Byron’s “The Age of Bronze” (1823):
Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear,
That sound that crashes in the tyrant's ear:
Kościusko!
Outside of Poland, Tadeusz Kościuszko’s name is most often remembered in the USA. Before he became a hero of Poland’s failed uprising, he was a hero of the American Revolution, the chief strategist at the crucial Battle of Saratoga (1778), the scourge of the British in the southern campaigns, and (not least) the original designer of the fortifications at West Point. Back in the days when we thought we were a revolutionary republic, we liked to name American places after Kościuszko, counties and towns especially. You’ll find them in Mississippi and Missouri, Texas and Indiana. He pops up in the Jefferson Memorial, in DC, where Tom’s statue is draped in the fur coat given to him by Tadeusz (who thought Jefferson a good world citizen despite his ownership of human beings). Later, when mass immigration created something called ‘the Polish vote,’ urban mayors and aldermen hastened to add “Kosciuszko” parks, streets, schools and bridges to the list, notably in Chicago where there is still a Polish vote. Somehow, Iowa failed to get in on the act. Iowans gave the place-name honor, instead, to another Polish hero of our Revolution, Kasimir Pulaski, who took time off from an earlier Polish uprising to help General Washington develop a cavalry (and to save Washington’s skin at Brandywine). Since there wasn’t much of a Polish vote in Iowa, we might conclude that Iowans preferred the dash of cavalry to the drier work of military engineering. But along with everyone else, they liked revolutionaries. ©

[Stanley]

It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. Donald J. Trump. 2020.

It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess. Anthony Bourdain, in his book Typhoid Mary (2001).

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there really was a “Typhoid Mary.” I thought for many years that she was just one of my father’s expressions. He felt “like Typhoid Mary” when he was down with this or that viral infection, and sometimes used the phrase to describe some other ill person, away from whom, of course, I was to keep a safe distance. I don’t think dad’s use of the nickname was ever gender-specific. Indeed I was called “Typhoid Mary” myself during my childhood illnesses. But Typhoid Mary did exist, and she was a she, Mary Mallon, born in County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1869. Mary died at Riverside Hospital, a quarantine facility on an island in New York’s East River, in 1938, and she’d been there for 23 years, starting on March 27, 1915. It was her second quarantine, the first (also on North Brother’s Island) was from 1907 to 1910. Mary Mallon became a subject (or object) of dispute. Given our continuing difficulties with Covid 19, it would be well not to adopt a patronizing attitude towards Mary (nor, for that matter, towards those who prosecuted her and placed her, against her will, in quarantine.). Trouble is, some of the evidence concerning Mary Mallon was disputed, and still is. But the great weight of scientific evidence is that she was an asymptomatic carrier of the bacteria Salmonella typhi. Mary’s mother transmitted it to her, and Mary carried it to New York City. Given the anti-immigrant temper of her times, she thus had four counts against her (poor, immigrant, Irish, and female) even without the Salmonella, but she added to the problem by becoming a cook. It’s possible that, otherwise, she would never have been discovered, for the idea of asymptomatic carriers had then scarcely broken surface. But Mary was a good cook, articulate and personable, and after a few years infecting middle class families in rural Westchester, she found employment with New York’s social elite, for example on Park Avenue. Then, as now, epidemic disease found tougher going in the higher social altitudes, and when more than half of a banker’s family (in Oyster Bay, of all places!) fell ill with typhoid, the alarm bells began to ring. Various medical detectives had a hand in Mary’s capture and incarceration, and she resisted them all: the first one with a carving fork; later on with lawsuits and populist campaigns. Mary Mallon, perfectly healthy, did not believe she could be a carrier of a deadly disease. Hers was a problem that proved resistant to solution. It still is. Mary Mallon died at 69, still in quarantine. Her story should be of interest to all of us as we wrestle, in the dark, with masks, vaccines, and Chinese plots. ©

[Tripps]

There's one in Australia too.

Mount Kościuszko

[Stanley]

Anniversary notes tumble in thick and fast as Bob gets his pile straight. I think this might be the last one today.....
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The judgment of the witches.

Stately and slow, with thoughtful air,
His black cap hiding his whitened hair,
Walks the Judge of the great Assize,
Samuel Sewall the good and wise.
–John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall,’ ca. 1859.

Legend has it that when Oliver Cromwell sat for a portrait, he directed the painter to get him “warts and all.” We have Cromwell’s death mask, and the portrait, and can make judgments of our own. Oliver’s order is also taken poetically to show us a more attractive side of the Puritan character: phlegmatic, realistic, and if too judgmental of others still painfully aware of their own faults. The Puritan judge Samuel Sewall has left us with enough evidence to see him warts and all. Samuel Sewall was born in England on March 28, 1652, but his parents had married in colonial New England, and when the Restoration bought monarchy and episcopacy back to old England, they remigrated to breathe better air. Sam was only nine, and went with them. At Harvard College he did well enough to versify in Latin, a talent he used all his life, and to achieve eloquence in English, at least some of the time and in some of his copious writings. These include a massive journal, kept not quite daily but for decades: a record of his pleasures in his attainments (as merchant, councilor, judge, husband, and father) and of his readiness to judge others against this personal yardstick, and of his hurts when his world seemed intent on going some other way, for instance by singing tunefully in church or donning the latest fashions from London. He was especially down on powdered wigs, which he pompously judged as expressions of pomposity. As he aged, Sewall grew more and more conscious that he was a pillar of a crumbling old order. As such, he proved capable of whining, and he has been portrayed (in biographies and histories) as the quintessential “Yankee,” provincial, parochial, drearily judgmental. And when students realize that he was also one of the judges at the Salem witch trials, and by no means the least zealous of them, they see him as much worse than dreary. So much for “warts.” As for the “and all,” there was another Sewall, a rather attractive one. He lovingly husbanded his three wives, especially the first one, Hannah Hull, the daughter of Boston’s richest man, and eloquently mourned her passing in 1717. He wrote one of the finest prose pieces to come out of Puritan Boston, a biblical prophecy which includes his wondrous ‘paean to Plum Island’ and much more of note. As for Salem, Sewall was the first judge to see the terrible errors in it, and not only that but to stand in open church to hear read his condemnation of it, a confession written by him as a prayer to take upon himself “the blame and shame” of it. Sam Sewall saw racial slavery the very worst of sins, and authored (in 1700) the first American anti-slavery tract, The Selling of Joseph. The ability to see oneself ‘warts and all’ is a rare gift, indeed. ©.

[Stanley]

From war to anarchy.

The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I ‘ultimately’ do not take seriously. Ernst Jünger, 1977.

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) became a best-seller, not only in Remarque’s native land but across the western world. Beyond that, its several film versions (cinema and TV) have been well- received. It rejected war and turned war’s virtues into fatal (or deadening) vices, a popular notion after the carnage of the ”Great War.” The rise of Naziism, then another “World War,” did nothing to lessen the novel’s resonances, especially since Hitler and his minions had seen the book as degenerate and marked it for their bonfires. But the German title, Im Westen nichte Neues, more accurately translated as “nothing new in the West,” suggests a far broader (or deeper) disillusionment than with German militarism only. In the 1920s the leaders of the nascent Nazi party found another war book more hopeful, better suited, they thought, to a new Germany and its thousand-year rule. That was Storm of Steel (1920, in German In Stahlgewittern), by a veteran of the Kaiser’s imperial army, Ernst Jünger. Jünger was born in Baden-Württemberg on March 29, 1895, the son of a chemical engineer. In his teens, he developed a romance for war, fevered enough that at the age of 19 he ran away to enlist (at Verdun!!) in the French Foreign Legion. With great expense, his father got him out of that in time for him to enlist in the German army at the outbreak of World War I. There Jünger became a hero, seriously wounded seven times and, surviving them all, the most-decorated infantryman in all Germany. He found defeat, but also salvation. In Storm of Steel and other writings, including novels, Jünger established his militaristic credentials and made war and its heroisms the opposites of the uncertain degeneracies of Weimar democracy. Not surprisingly, the Nazis wanted to make him one of their standard bearers. But he turned them away, again and again, defied them, survived them and yet another war (he served again on the western front) and in his long life and varied publications made himself one of the most contradictory figures in modern German culture: philosopher, entomologist, novelist, he found his ideal in the discipline of the beehive, or possibly in the essence of ancient Sparta, where life was simpler and purer than in demotic, democratic Athens, lost in its own uncertainties. Yet always, in all his writings, there lurked the unconquerable hero, the sovereign individual. Full of years and festooned with praise (from all quarters, including Berthold Brecht and Francois Mitterand), Ernst Jünger died in 1998. For him, we might say, there was indeed ‘nothing new in the West.’ ©.

[Stanley]

Back to basics with a bang.

There is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. George Orwell, an ‘Old Boy’ of Eton College.

It’s said that in the 18th century England’s upper classes learned ‘proper’ speech (and ‘common’ spelling!) by their attendance at the great ‘spa’ towns, notably Bath. If so, then we might say that their boys learned their values and a certain national class loyalty by being educated in “public” at England’s elite “Public Schools.” The Clarendon Commission of 1861-64 named nine of them, including the boarding schools Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, and Winchester. Their role in English life was already fixed in a famous quotation from the first duke of Wellington, who said that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” Trouble was, the duke didn’t say it. He did attend Eton aged 12 to 15 (1781-1784), but he hated the place, and when he was there Eton had no playing fields. Then, 80 years on, the Clarendon Commission was charged to examine those schools’ governing boards, their classrooms. and their playing fields, to recommend what might be done to make them worthier still of their reputations. And there were concerns. Even loyal “Old Boys” had bad memories, of brawling among the boys and brutality among the masters. As for curriculum, the great Dr. Arnold (headmaster at Rugby from 1828 to 1842), had humanized it while (at the same time) bringing the boys themselves into many aspects of governance. He also had something to do (more than Wellington) with advancing organized sport as a vehicle of moral development. And against the Dr. Arnold model, there was that provided by his contemporary at Eton, John Keate, born a headmaster’s son at Wells, Somerset, on March 30, 1773. He went to Eton himself, then to King’s College, Cambridge, took holy orders, married, and was installed as Eton headmaster in 1809. The place was a mess, and Keate (like Arnold) was a reformer, but his motto (or mojo) was a better delivery of the traditional, classical curriculum and discipline, discipline, discipline. Sound familiar? Though short in stature and quite rotund, he could quell a mob of teenaged boys, and did so, often, and with ‘liberal’ use of the cane. To judge by the success of some of his Old Boys (those he taught himself), he was a more than competent educator. But the brawling went on, as boys in residence took their lead from their whipmaster Dr. Keate. Some remembered him fondly, more did not, and some (notably the young aristocrat Anthony Ashley Cooper, killed in a school brawl in Keate’s time) didn’t survive Eton at all. One does wonder whether any members of the Clarendon Commission were Old Boys of Dr. Keate’s Eton. Probably. But we can say that most of the men who have inherited Arthur Wellesley’s dukedom of Wellington followed him to Eton, and survived it. ©

[Stanley]

A cultured woman.

“Oklahoma”: a marriage of two Choctaw words meaning “red” (humma) and “people” (okla). Hence “red people.” First suggested by the Choctaw Principal Chief, the Rev'd Allen Wright

As with several Native American tribes, authority in Choctaw society flowed matrilineally. Women were caregivers and could possess medicinal powers. The ‘visible’ authority men held in warfare and games descended from their mothers, women participated in clan meetings, and they could gain exalted status as “beloved” persons. When in the 1840s, after the forced migration of the ‘Trail of Tears,’ Choctaw Nation reorganized in Oklahoma territory, it preserved some of this tradition by establishing female seminaries wherein girls could develop their own talents for the tribe’s benefit. Thus also the Choctaw mirrored developments in the dominant white society where, especially in Protestant evangelical circles, women were beginning to exercise moral and intellectual authority outside the home. Together, ancient tradition and modern adjustments help to explain the outsize life of Muriel Hazel Wright, born in Choctaw Nation, Oklahoma, on March 31, 1889. Muriel was herself a product of (at least two) biracial and evangelical unions. Her grandmother Harriet, a Mayflower descendant, came west in the 1850s as a Presbyterian missionary, whereupon she married the Choctaw Principal Chief, Allen Wright. Their son Eliphalet attended Union College in New York, qualified as an MD, and returned to Oklahoma to marry yet another Presbyterian missionary from Out East, Ida Richards. With such a pedigree, it’s not surprising that Muriel Wright became a well-educated person—although her only college degrees would be honorary ones—starting with schooling in one of those Choctaw female seminaries and finishing (as far as formal education is concerned) with a year’s study at Barnard College in New York City. Returning to Oklahoma, Muriel threw herself into Oklahoma history and geography, starting with a bang, a four-volume history of Oklahoma . . . and Its People (1929). That title should read “Peoples,” for she was a good scholar and yet knew her own story. She followed up with a distinguished career in local history, in Choctaw tribal councils, and in school education in the Choctaw Nation. Along with several books, including two for Oklahoma public schools (one hopes they haven’t been banned), Muriel Wright wrote scores of scholarly articles and, from 1943 to 1971, was editor of the state historical society’s Chronicles of Oklahoma. She also compiled guides to Oklahoma historical sites and, if that were not enough, led tours so that Oklahomans of all shades would know something of their state’s diversities. A “beloved” person who was also member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and a Colonial Dame, Muriel Wright’s life and work honored her own, and her state’s, histories. ©

[Stanley]

The unbearable lightness of life.

Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. Milan Kundera, in The Joke (1967)

One April Fools’ Day, aged 10, I put salt in our sugar bowl. My father, who only used sugar on his cereal, was not amused. He laughed about it later, to his credit, but on the whole authority does not like to be the butt of any joke. That makes April Fools a good day to celebrate Milan Kundera, who was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, on April 1, 1929, and is today a naturalized French citizen and, I hope, in good enough health to celebrate his 94th birthday by putting salt into somebody’s sugar. He’s proved that humor (of special sorts) can offer a stable point of reference to a very topsy-turvy life (his own), and that it’s one of the very best ways to unsettle others, particularly those too much in love with exercising authority or playing at profundity. Growing up amid the terrors of World War II, Kundera first found quiet in music, for his father was a leading performer and musicologist. But he turned to writing and, increasingly, to a humor of a special sort. In an earlier age, European humorists had done their best when outraging the middle classes, but in 1960s Czechoslovakia the new bourgeois were the apparatchiks of the communist state. Whatever cruelties they committed, they were (in both their private and public lives) perfect targets for the satirist, the lampoonist, the cynic, the teller of tall tales. And those dark arts, capable of flying just under the censors’ radar, provided perfect weapons. As Kundera learned to use them, he became suspect, was expelled from and then readmitted to the communist party, and yet still thought (in the famous “Prague Spring” of 1967-1968) it was safer to continue pissing in rather than outside the tent. So he fell out with his fellow writer (and lampoonist) Václav Havel. But when he witnessed the following reaction (including Havel’s internal exile and imprisonment), Kundera sharpened his pen and got to work. He’d earlier prodded power with his The Joke (1967). Then came The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). But Kundera had already exiled himself, and the novel was first published in French, then (in English, of course) in The New Yorker. It’s not really political, and not always funny, either. Rather it’s a kind of magical realism in which all the characters (including a pig and a dog) reflect life and its lightness and how awfully, terribly comic it is to spend that precious life under puritan, bourgeois restraints. The regime imposing those restraints was cruel and communist, but Kundera’s novel could easily have been set in the stultifying climate of Main Street, USA. His kind of humor has many enemies and needs more practitioners. ©.