BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

From French to English.

And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetishly//After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe.//For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe. Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales, ca. 1390.

Thus Chaucer introduces his Prioress. It’s a classic of gentle irony—or of praising with faint damn. The Prioress eats neatly, but not too nicely. She claims humility, but pridefully, and dresses stylishly. She speaks French, but not in the Parisian style then in favor at the court of King Richard II, aka Richard of Bordeaux. Chaucer spoke court French, and wrote in it, too, but in The Canterbury Tales, he chose English. We call it Middle English, but it’s clear enough for modern Anglophones to see that the Prioress’s French was (like her manners) not quite right. Richard II, a Plantagenet dynast who became king at age 10, had his troubles with those who “spak” Anglo-Saxon English, as witness the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. So one’s language could be a political identifier, and Chaucer nails the Prioress by giving her French, if not its best version. But we can place Alice Bryan among those who used the best French. Her father’s family, the de Bures, came in with the Norman conquest, and her husband, Sir Guy Bryan, sprang from a long line of aristocratic servants of the Plantagenets and may have been of Bréton ancestry. The Bryans owned a lot of East Anglia, 15 parishes including the family’s seat in Acton. Alice, an only child and an heiress in her own right, was quite a catch, and brought with her into the marriage (in 1375) extensive estates in the western shires, which is perhaps why Sir Guy became admiral of King Richard’s western fleet even though he was not, himself, a seafarer. And when Sir Guy died, in 1386, Alice became a 25 year old widow, the legal guardian of her two daughters and the femme sole owner of extensive estates. So the rich widow Bryan was courted. But she stayed emphatically single and managed her estates (she owned 6,000 acres and rented more) through four stewards, kept about 30 retainers and servants (with their winter and summer liveries). She sponsored feast days at several of ‘her’ parishes, gave to charities, endowed a grammar school, and invited 300 guests for a New Year’s feast at her family seat in Acton. Intriguingly, she once gathered a group of twelve women pilgrims to honor a newly canonized saint, John of Bridlington. And if she told a tale during that meeting, it would have been in the best Parisian French. We know all this because Alice Bryan kept meticulous books, in French, recording all her business and much of her social life. These documents survive because they were brought into court as evidence surrounding a 1457 lawsuit involving the femme sole properties inherited by Avice, Countess of Wiltshire, great granddaughter of Alice Bryan. Alice Bryan had died on January 11, 1435, aged about 75. Clearly Alice’s properties had lingered on. But my guess is that Countess Avice spoke English. ©.

[Stanley]

"Enthoven Unboxed"

I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost. It’s there and then it’s gone. Dame Maggie Smith.

And in her Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, another grande dame of the British theatre, Judi Dench, recalls how she played the same role, with the same company, on successive nights, and how each time she had to play it differently. ‘Ephemeral’ indeed: and yet from ancient times theatre has been a performance art which allows us to see, hear, and feel what it’s like to be someone else in some other circumstance. And, of course, performances leave artifacts. And one of the best places to see these artifacts, these physical realities, is London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the ‘V&A.’ There you can see (for instance) a bust of the great actress Sarah Siddons sculpted by Siddons herself. Or an 1848 oil painting of the black American actor Ira Aldredge playing (as you probably guessed) Shakespeare’s black Othello. The V&A has been collecting performance ephemera for over 100 years, now, and in September 2024—to celebrate that centenary—it mounted a special exhibition of the collection, called “Enthoven Unboxed.” That’s because the core of the collection was the work of Gabrielle Enthoven, born Augusta Gabrielle Eden Romaine in Westminster, London on January 12, 1868. Her father was very well connected, and Gabrielle would remember playing with Princess Mary of Teck just down the street at Buckingham Palace. He also encouraged family performances of selected plays, or scenes, in which Gabrielle participated, but her first memory of a professional performance came when she was 12, seeing a first night performance of The Forty Thieves at the Gaiety. And Gabrielle was hooked. She would become (in London and for a time in New York) a dedicated First Nighter, and a collector of all sorts of memorabilia. Before and after her marriage (1893-1912) to a Major Enthoven, she would also write plays, and act, too. An active citizen, Gabrielle also crusaded for women’s rights, and (in both world wars) for the welfare of refugees and civilians. She was a public friend of gay folk, from Oscar Wilde to Noel Coward, and after the major’s death came out, herself, as a lesbian. Having amassed a huge theatrical collection, she campaigned around London for a place to house it, finally settling (in 1924) on the V&A. And there Gabrielle Enthoven also settled, commandeering an office and workshop, hiring staff, whipping the whole operation into shape, and continuing to add to the collection. Thus she exhausted her fortune and many of the V&A’s professional staff. At her death in 1950 she willed whatever she had left to the museum, and there it stays—and has continued to grow—as a memorial to her and to one of our most powerful art forms. ©.

[Stanley]

Conflict and continuity.

Beneath lieth the body of the right hon'ble Henry Booth, earl of Warrington, and baron Delamer of Dunham Massey, a person of unblemished honour, impartial justice, strict integrity, an illustrious example of steady and unalterable adherence to the liberties and properties of his country in the worst of times, rejecting all offers to allure, and despising all dangers to deter him therefrom, for which he was thrice committed close prisoner to the Tower of London, and at length tried for his life upon a false accusation of high treason, from which he was unanimously acquitted by his peers, on 14 January, MDCLXXX V/VI [1686] which day he afterwards annually commemorated by acts of devotion and charity: in the year MDCLXXXVIII [1688] he greatly signalised himself at the Revolution, on behalf of the protestant religion and the rights of the nation, without mixture of self-interest, preferring the good of his country to the favour of the prince who then ascended the throne; and having served his generation according to the will of God was gathered to his fathers in peace, on the 2d of January, 169¾, in the XLIId [42nd] year of his age, whose mortal part was here entombed on the same memorable day on which eight years before his trial had been. Tomb inscription, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Bowdon.

Bowdon now lies just within greater Manchester, but St. Mary’s is still in Chester diocese, and in 1694 Bowdon was in Cheshire. The church is of a respectable age, but Bowdon’s main attraction is Dunham Massey Hall, now a National Trust property attracting over 300,000 visitors annually. It includes not only the Hall, a mainly Georgian pile, but a magnificent stable and one of England’s oldest deer parks (it is said to date from the 1200s). Few of the 300,000 will visit the church, fewer still read the inscription over Henry Booth’s tomb. That’s a pity. On the other half of the tablet, his wife Mary’s equally long inscription offers a summary of feminine virtues. The contrasts are instructive in themselves. But it’s Henry’s inscription that offers us a lesson in 17th-century English politics. While errant (or stupid?) Stuart kings brought chaos, a rising gentry and a largely Protestant aristocracy acted as a balance wheel. The immediate result was not stability, nor safety, but regicide and revolution. So Henry’s father had gone forth from Dunham Massey to fight for parliament against King Charles I, and then plotted to “restore” Charles II. Just so, Henry Booth himself (born on January 13, 1652, in Dunham Massey Hall) dared a traitor’s death to exclude James II from the succession. Meanwhile the Booths served their “country.” But read county, for it was for Cheshire that Henry, his father, and then his son were Lords Lieutenant, MPs, quorum justices, members of the House of Lords. In these roles they defended their liberties and their powers. The three of them, each in their own succession, also began the rebuilding of Dunham Massey Hall, a task they paid for by improving their estate. They planted timber for future harvests; they improved their rents from present harvests; they encouraged good land management. And they patronized the church parishes on their lands. So it was that Henry Booth, Baron Delamer, rose to an earldom, risked his life, and in death still wielded enough influence to have his own history written in stone in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. ©

[Stanley]

Cricket and not cricket.

We . . . cannot but see with the deepest regret & disappointment that in the recent treaty with France no provision has been made for the immediate abolition of the African Slave Trade-a Trade avowedly repugnant to every moral and religious principle . . . Petition to the House of Lords from Lee Parish, county of Kent, 1814.

This treaty was rendered irrelevant by Napoleon’s return from Elba and then otiose by the emperor’s crushing defeat at Waterloo. But two centuries later it became an issue in the Black Lives Matter protests, a movement that began in Minneapolis and invaded even the sacred quiet of the Members’ Pavilion at Lord’s cricket ground in London. Not the petition itself: by 2020 few could be found to defend the slave trade. Rather, at Lord’s, attention focused on who did NOT sign the Lee Petition. Everyone who counted in Lee Parish signed: 50 including the rector, a knight and his lady, several gentlemen, and (intriguingly) a “Miss Potter.” But one Lee gentleman who did not sign was Benjamin Aislabie. That’s odd, because Aslabie, his wife Mary, and their household of servants and children), were at the very center of parish life. Aislabie oversaw the Poor Laws, and in that same winter (a harsh one) was noted for his private kindnesses to Lee’s less fortunate inhabitants. But his charity was based on his West Indian plantations, two owned outright and one in partnership. These were not small operations. In 1833, when slavery itself was abolished in the empire, Aislabie received compensation of £2,342 for the ‘loss’ of his human property. That’s about £400,000 in today’s money. Benjamin Aislabie, born on January 14, 1774, had inherited most of that property from his father, and then invested heavily in more. One cannot say that Aislabie approved of the slave trade (abolished in 1808 and execrated by many), but it’s likely that he refused to sign the 1814 petition. And then, shortly afterwards, Aislabie moved his family and domestic retinue to Marylebone parish, London. That’s the home of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), the governing body of English cricket, where Aislabie played the game and, as MCC secretary, administered it. In 2020, that rendered the MCC open to attack as a bastion of racialism (and imperialism) in international sport. That’s not because Aislabie was a good cricketer. He was perhaps the worst (certainly one of the fattest) ever to play the first class game. But he had much to do with shaping the sport in its adolescence, and Aislabie’s portraits (one in oil, the other in marble) were prominently displayed in the Members’ Pavilion at Lord’s. In 2020 they were removed, and the MCC issued an apology for its former (formative?) connections with slavery, an institution “avowedly repugnant to every moral and religious principle.” After two centuries, it was a small, symbolic victory for the Lee petitioners of 1814. ©.

[Stanley]

Freudian slip.

Freud is a man given to absolute and exclusive formulations: this is a psychical need which, in my opinion, leads to excessive generalization. Josef Breuer, 1907.

Josef Breuer was born in Vienna on January 15, 1842. He is credited as a pioneer of Freudian psychoanalysis because of his experience in treating a patient, recorded in his notes as “Anna O.” for a variety of physical and mental symptoms. Sigmund Freud himself thought the case a classic of the “cathartic method.” But Freud and Breuer—colleagues at the time of Anna O’s treatment—would become known to history as adversaries. And Anna O herself would, much later, issue the judgment that
. . . psychoanalysis is in the hands of a doctor, what confession is in the hands of a Catholic priest; whether it becomes a good instrument or a double edged sword depends on who is administering it, and on the treatment.
It’s a complicated matter partly because Breuer himself was complicated. His father, Leopold, was not a rabbi but taught religion in Vienna’s Jewish quarter, but as fate and Josef’s maternal aunt would have it, Josef was educated at the liberal Jesuit Akadedmisches Gymnasium and then qualified in medicine at the University of Vienna. His early work marked him out as a scientist, not a clinician. His first posting was as an assistant to the Vienna pathologist Johann von Oppolzer. Breuer then worked with Ewald Hering on the anatomical structures and reflexive functions of the nervous system. This scientific approach led on to a partnership with the mathematician Ernst Mach, in which Mach and Breuer examined how, exactly, the fluids and nerves of the inner ear affected our sense of balance (or, as it might be, imbalance). But at the same time, Josef Breuer maintained a private medical practice in Vienna where he treated human patients. He needed an income, after all. And there were other needs. “Science has no color. I need passion. I need magic.” Some magic came to him in the person of ‘Anna O’. Her serious symptoms, physical and psychological, had been conveniently diagnosed as “hysteria”, then almost by definition a woman’s disease. She was, after all, a woman from the upper reaches of Vienna’s Jewish society. But in his efforts to diagnose and treat, Breuer became Anna O’s analyst, talking her through her problems, listening to her stories, encouraging her through mild hypnosis. It’s a famous case because it so intrigued Breuer’s colleague Sigmund Freud, because Freud and Breuer fell out over its significance, and because ‘Anna O’, in real life Berthe Pappenheim (1859-1936), would transcend her traumas to become a courageous and outspoken pioneer for women’s and children’s rights within the Jewish community and in German civic society. How much Josef Breuer’s “talking treatment” helped, and why, are still at issue. It’s a fascinating story. ©

[Stanley]

Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus.

This is the title the Roman Senate conferred on Octavian on January 16, 27 BCE: or these are the titles. They translate as “Emperor Caesar Augustus Son of God.” So they pack multiple punches and are generally taken to signal the death of the Roman Republic and the birth of the Roman Empire. It was a momentous change. But those senators and maybe even Octavian himself could claim that ‘the republic’ still existed and remained a political entity in which all cooperated to serve the common good, the res publica. For the next four centuries plus, until Rome itself was overrun and occupied by barbarians, emperors replaced emperors. It proved a messy succession, often (even usually) accomplished by murders, executions, palace coups, or civil wars, and validated ex post facto by an increasingly supine senate in order to maintain the mythic meaning of the “republic.” But it was all show. The ‘emperor’ held power by inheritance. The ‘caesar’ was military commander-in-chief. And he (always ‘he’) was ‘augustus,’ the highest in the land, a spiritual leader (“pontifex maximus”) whose flesh was made divine by his succession to the imperial purple. What all those words meant, exactly, remained at issue. For its entire existence the Roman Empire experienced coups and countercoups. There were civil wars. The empire waxed and waned, then waxed again, as trade boomed or busted and as territories were won from (or lost to) barbarian hordes. And then circa 300 CE, the empire split into western and eastern divisions with two capitals (Rome and Constantinople). And from time to time there could be multiple ‘Caesars’ and, to confuse matters, plural ‘Augusti.’ But through it all there was no disguising the fact that the change in title of 27 BCE was a Big Deal. As if to underline the point, Octavian executed roughly half the Senate, including those who had supported his opponents (lean Cassius and stout Brutus) and at least a few who had not supported Octavian warmly enough. Centuries later, during the European Enlightenment the issue assumed great symbolic significance as scholars like Montesquieu and Gibbon argued over how and why Rome had degenerated from republic to empire and then fell. In Britain’s North American colonies, in 1776, these theoretical and historical arguments became real politics. The founding fathers of the Amerian Revolution wanted their republic to last, to grow in strength. They used the lesson of Rome to separate military from civil, to divorce church from state, to make legislation representative, and to find in elections a safe, stable way to transfer power from one “president” to the next. Today one wonders how long their solutions will survive. ©.

[Stanley]

Machismo or machista?

Within our society, there are hierarchies of need because there have been hierarchies of oppression. Martha Cotera, The Chicana Feminist (1977).

Martha Cotera was born Marta Piña on January 17, 1938, in the state of Chihuahua, Republic of Mexico. At 7, she moved across the Rio Grande to El Paso, Texas, where her facility in Spanish and English so impressed local schools that they ‘graduated’ her into the 3rd grade. She went on to Texas Western (now Texas-El Paso) where she majored in English, found job as a librarian (in El Paso’s public library system), married Juan Cotera, and moved with him to Austin. There Juan continued his own education (in architecture, at the University of Texas). Meanwhile, Martha, aged only 26, was appointed director of the documents division at the Texas State Library. They were, in short, a professional couple on their way up. Along that way, however, they encountered barriers. Austin, Martha later wrote, was a great place for liberals, but especially if you were white and Anglo. It was otherwise if you were not members of those clubs. So the Coteras got involved in community action, focusing especially on providing equal education for Mexican-Americans, first in Crystal City and then in Mercedes. Education was opportunity, and for Hispanic children in Texas education must be bilingual and bicultural. As nearly as I can tell, Martha Cotera has never stopped running. According to her Facebook page, she is this month, aged 97, involved in raising funds for the Emma Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, a municipally-funded foundation housed in a strikingly modern building near downtown Austin. She’s still an active speaker (for instance recently at a three-woman symposium at Texas A&M), too. As the saying goes, you can’t keep a good woman down. But there’s no doubt that Martha Cotera has changed her focus, or sharpened it. Involved in community action in Texas, she found that Mexican-American civil rights groups were too much dominated by machismo, most notably in a Hispanic group calling itself the Brown Berets. They were not, by any means, all male. But it was the young men who had the most fun and served as the public face of the movement, while the young women did all the work. So in Martha Cotera’s Texas the hierarchies of oppression went beyond (ran more deeply than) color, language, and culture. They included pervasive hierarchies of gender. It was more than a word (although she did toy with the idea of redefining machismo as machista), but since we’re dealing with words we should name Martha Piña Cotera as one of the founding mothers (mujeres) of the Chicanas movement. For five decades she has been reminding us that equality begins at home. I wish her a happy 97th birthday. ©.

[Stanley]

The civilizing functions of barbed wire.

Barbed wire used properly can be a beautiful sight. Donald J. Trump, 2018.

Trump spoke in Montana about US soldiers installing barbed wire at our dangerous northern border. But barbed wire carries uglier connotations. Bodies hung for days on barbed wire in the “no man’s land” of World War I’s trench warfare. Barbed wire enclosed World War II concentration camps, and not only in Nazi-occupied Poland. It surrounded “internment” camps for Americans of Japanese descent. And when you look at it, barbed wire is not pleasant, let alone “beautiful.” It’s meant to deter, and if that fails it’s meant to injure. According to the patent for barbed wire (#157,194, November 1874) this “improvement in wire fences” was meant to deter cattle from getting into the wrong field or onto the wrong property. A single strand, posted at the right height, should do the trick. And that is how barbed wire was first used. This was certainly the intention of its inventor, Joseph F. Glidden. Born in rural New Hampshire on January 18, 1813, Glidden moved west to grow up with the country. He taught school for a few years in upstate New York, then in 1843 he moved to Illinois to take up farming. His first efforts ended badly, but not because of cattle. His wife died in childbirth in 1846 and in 1847 his three children perished in an epidemic. Chastened, he married again and resumed farming, at DeKalb. Glidden seems to have been a tinkerer, and his first effort (to control his own cattle) was constructed of two wires, twisted, with ‘barbs’ inserted every few inches. He bought the wire locally and made the barbs himself, using a coffee mill. So the first barbs were not sharp, but having obtained his patent (at age 61) he went into partnership with a DeKalb ironmonger, and the barbs became sharper, the wire purchased in bulk from a Massachusetts company. And it sold. It became part of American mythology. See especially the movie Shane, 1953, wherein barbed wire protects virtuous homesteaders from vicious cattle ranchers (with a little help from a gunslinger called Shane). Indeed barbed wire is said to have sounded the death knell for free-range cattle ranching in the American west. As for Glidden, his wire made him DeKalb’s first millionaire. He was also founder of DeKalb’s Normal School (now Northern Illinois University), the owner of DeKalb’s daily newspaper, a major stockholder in the C&NW Railroad and the owner of a Texas Ranch, the Frying Pan Ranch. He fenced in the Frying Pan with 120 miles of barbed wire. When Shane came out, I and my farming cousins liked the film’s realism (in fist fights people bloodied their knuckles!!). But we did not know that Shane (Alan Ladd) stood on a box to be taller than his leading lady, the really beautiful Jean Arthur. And I didn’t notice the barbed wire at all. ©

[Stanley]

An unfinished education.

No, I finished nothing. Even to this day I have no degree. Faubion Bowers, 1960, from the Columbia University Oral History Project.

Thus Bowers answered to ‘Did you finish Julliard?’ Well, no. Nor did he ‘finish’ at the University of Oklahoma. He barely got through his freshman year. Nor at Columbia, where he studied “for a couple of years.” Nor at the Université de Poitiers, where he was an ‘occasional’ student for an academic year. Then came that graduate fellowship at Julliard, and yet another unfinishing. All of this in the 1930s: an unusual academic biography. Faubion Bowers was born in Miami, Oklahoma, on January 19, 1917. He was of mixed heritage, Anglo and Cherokee, and went to college to study English. Once there, he got up a petition to force the university to offer a course in Russian (he wanted to study Alexander Scriabin, an interest that would eventually win him the Julliard scholarship). And then, in 1940, Bowers went to Japan. Well, no. He actually sailed for Indonesia, in late 1939, to learn more about the gamelan tradition in music. But he got off the boat in Yokohama and, entranced by a place where he couldn’t even read the road signs, settled down to study Japanese. So we might better call his a roulette-wheel education. “Unfinished” doesn’t suffice. Of course Bowers left Japan, in 1941, and returned to the USA where he was drafted into the artillery, for it was wartime. Four years later, on August 28, 1945, Faubion Bowers deplaned at Atsugi Airport, Japan, a member of a small advance party (100+ including about 20 intrepid journalists) for the coming Allied occupation. It was 3 weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and five days before the Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri. So it was a dodgy situation. The Japanese at Atsugi were very formal and very frightened. The Americans feared that the drinks they were being offered might be poisoned. And then Faubion Bowers asked the hosts, in Japanese, “Is Uzaemon still alive?” and the ice was broken. Uzaemon was the greatest actor in the Kabuki theatre, a traditional form of drama, and to be asked this question by a foreigner was, to the Japanese at Atsugi, a completely pleasant surprise. In due course, Captain Bowers was promoted to Major Bowers and became Douglas Macarthur’s private secretary and counselor, the point man for many delicate conversations about the occupation’s aims and processes. One result was the revival (preservation) of Kabuki, but much else was accomplished. After the occupation, Faubion Bowers went on to publish standard works on Kabuki, on Haiku poetry (and write quite a few Haikus himself). And that’s not to mention his works on Gamelan and on Alexander Scriabin. Not a bad tally for a lad from rural Oklahoma: he made of himself an American hero in the Emersonian tradition. ©

[Stanley]

Methodical mothering.

You and I must part: for if we have two kings, we must have two beds. Attributed quotation, circa 1700.

Thus did the Reverend Samuel and his wife Susanna agree to live apart. It was doubtless a scandal in the rural parish (Epworth, in north Lincolnshire) where Samuel preached, the more so because it was he who left Susanna in charge of the rectory and their growing brood. It was a political, not a sexual scandal, and a matter of conscience. Susanna could not regard King William II as her legitimate sovereign. That difficulty was resolved when William died and Queen Anne succeeded to the throne. The Rev’d Samuel returned to the Rectory, and Susanna resumed her pregnancies, giving birth (in June, 1703) to a son they named John. He was the 15th of Susanna’s 19 births, and one of the 10 who survived to adulthood. And he was John Wesley. Later (#18, in 1709) came Charles Wesley, and so we know Susanna as the ‘mother of Methodism.’ And given her 19 full-term pregnancies in 21 years, that would be enough. But Susanna Wesley was more than a mother. As she wrote to her husband (during one of his later absences):
I am a woman, but I am also the mistress of a large family . . . [and] I cannot but look upon every soul you leave under my charge as a talent committed to me under a trust.
And so Susanna reared her children as well as birthed them. It was no surprise. Susanna Wesley was born Susanna Annesley on January 20, 1669, one of the 25 children of a dissenting minister. In that family she learned how to read before she was taught to sew, and that was part of the ‘method’ she imposed on her own children, boys and girls. The method began very early, doubtless, but it was on the day after their fifth birthdays that Susanna’s kids began their education, learning to read and write in English and Latin, and even Greek. They also learned, as she would have put it, to govern their souls. After all, she had, at the tender age of 13, left her father’s dissenting congregation to join the Anglican communion. She made that decision in conscience and without rancor (she would became her father’s literary executor). And through her own marriage she continued to act as teacher and mentor—and manager. In addition to Samuel’s debt problems and their temporary political estrangement, the Epworth rectory burned down twice. Each time Susanna regathered her family and continued their methodical tutelage. She also wrote, compellingly, about her own journey, and continued to advise her children into their adulthoods. So, when John and then Charles experienced their own spiritual conversions they were ready to become the founding fathers of Methodism. Susanna Wesley died in July 1742, and was buried (appropriately) in a nonconformist cemetery. ©

[Stanley]

Civil liberties and the law.

Never yield your courage - your courage to live, your courage to fight, to resist, to develop your own lives, to be free. Roger Nash Baldwin, 1981.

Roger Baldwin issued this still timely advice during the first year of the Reagan presidency. Earlier, in January 1981, the outgoing president, Jimmy Carter, had awarded Baldwin the US Medal of Freedom. This was a political gesture that recognized Baldwin for his lifetime of resistance. And Roger Baldwin was no stranger to political gestures. During the Paterson, NJ, silk strike of 1924, he’d organized a strikers’ march on City Hall. He armed them with US flags and copies of the Constitution. But then the police had arrested only local strike leaders and known union organizers, marked men and women. Baldwin thought about it overnight and the next morning marched to Paterson police HQ and insisted on being arrested, booked, and jailed for “rout, riot, and unlawful assembly.” His sentence (and the sentences of the other marchers) was unanimously reversed by the New Jersey Supreme Court. Although the decision itself was narrowly based it was a major victory for the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers represented the marchers and defended their constitutional right to assemble, to act and speak freely on public issues (even on public property). And, oddly enough, Roger Nash Baldwin was the ACLU’s Executive Director. He was born in Wellesley, MA, on January 21, 1884. His father was a leading shoe manufacturer, and on both sides of his family Nash descended from New England’s Puritan aristocracy. He graduated from Harvard (AB 1904, AM 1905) determined to right ancient wrongs and took the advice of one of his professors, Louis Brandeis, to start doing so in St. Louis. There Baldwin taught sociology at Washington University, served as executive secretary of the St. Louis Civic League, and became a leading figure in the city’s juvenile court system, and coauthor (with Bernard Flexner) of Juvenile Courts and Probation (1914), then thought radical but soon to become a standard text. With the coming of World War, Baldwin added pacifism to his legal radicalism. He was a cofounder of the American Union Against Militarism and, when the US entered the war in 1917 he headed its Civil Liberties Bureau (which, among other things, defended the rights of conscientious objectors). So the ACLU (1920) was an obvious next step, and Baldwin led the organization through a number of landmark trials, including the Scopes and the Sacco-Vanzetti cases. These were not always victories, but thanks to Baldwin and others (e.g. Clarence Darrow) they have become American civil liberties landmarks. Roger Baldwin’s Medal of Freedom—awarded to him just before his 97th birthday—reminds us all that in the struggle for freedom a defeat need not be fatal. ©

[Stanley]

Agony advisor.

How Did I Get Here from There?

It’s a good question for all of us, but it’s also the title that Claire Rayner chose for her 2003 autobiography, and for her it’s a real poser. She was born on January 22, 1931, in London, as Claire Berenice Berkovitch. Then she lived not so much a life as a saga. Hers was a childhood of misadventures, mostly having to do with her father’s unfortunate habit of getting into debt and then fleeing from it. Thanks to her dad and to the Luftwaffe, she found her teenaged self in Canada (with her mother and siblings), where (underage, aged 14) she played for a time at being a nurse, then fell so ill herself that she had to be shipped back to the UK (in a locked cabin) where, under the National Health Service, she could afford the surgery needed to save her life. Now named Chetwynd (after a small town, not a husband) and newly healthy, she aimed at a career as a doctor. She settled for a job in nurse-midwifery and, in 1957, for a husband, Des Rayner, an actor who soon went into advertising. About this time, Claire discovered a talent for writing and the ambition to “get inside people’s heads with my words.” She began modestly, with articles in nursing journals and a few short stories for a pulp publisher. Meanwhile, her life experiences so far (the saga up to now plus several miscarriages and three successful pregnancies) inclined her to undertake a career in advising, first in books on pregnancy and childbirth, then on sex education. Claire Rayner became, in the 1970s and 1980s, one of Britain’s most successful agony aunts, in BBC broadcasts and then, more lucratively, for national newspapers (The Sun, then The Mirror, then Today) and for the mass circulation mag Women’s Own. Along with all this newsprint came yet more books, fiction and fact, advice and real life, and although some books were penned anonymously she also developed a national persona. She was Claire Rayner, a real woman who’d learned a lot from life and who had become an adept in knowledgeable advice. Much of it was personal, but increasingly it was also political. Rayner left Rupert Murdoch’s papers to write for the Labour-leaning Mirror, and saw herself as an advocate for reproductive freedom for women, for men too, and for the National Health Service and its ‘creeping privatization’ threatened by Margaret Thatcher (of course) but then also by “New Labour” in its varied iterations. The NHS had saved her life in the late 1940s. It set about the task again, in 2001, when for Claire was diagnosed with breast cancer. Typically, she wrote about her experiences (and about her medical decisions) plainly and intelligently, for that was her style, just as it had become her life. Claire Rayner was, after all, a very well informed agony aunt. ©

[Tripps]

Her son the writer, food critic, jazz pianist and 'blagger at large' is Jay Rayner

[Stanley]

Islands.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
From “The Sea Is History,” Derek Walcott, 1979.

Derek Walcott was born on the island of Saint Lucia on January 23, 1930,a small place with a fractured history, full of stories about sugar and slavery, of piracy, of imperial warfare, most recently stolen by the British from the French. He was himself fragmented, a boy of Dutch, French, English and African ancestry, and for all I know some trace of Carib. Put it all together and he was a small piece of the island’s light-skinned minority: a singularity underlined by his parents’ religion (they were devoutly Methodist in a overwhelmingly Catholic population) and their professional status (a school teacher and a painter-playwright). And it was English, not the pidgin mix of the island’s majority, that was his first language. At home it was spoken, sung, read and written, and it was Walcott’s English that helped him put all these fragments together in a flood of poetry. Much of his early life was spent in Trinidad, another multi-cultural wonder of the imperial world, where, earlier, C. L. R. James had found liberation in cricket, the sport of the colonizer remade—reimagined, really—by the colonized. For Walcott it was English, modernist poetry, much of it inspired by Eliot and Pound. He borrowed money from his mother to publish his first collection, and repaid her by selling the volume door to door to neighbors who were perhaps too polite to turn him down. But it won him wider notice, especially in the US, where a later Walcott volume (1962), and then (in 1971) a prizewinning play made him a spokesman for a whole culture, that fragmented collection of volcanic islands and coral reefs we call the West Indies or (unless our current president thinks up a newer and greater name for it) the Caribbean. The themes of breaking apart (the shattering of a vase, the wind-driven ruin of a coral reef) run through his poetry, and chart the cultural impact of western, white, imperialism on captured peoples, their languages, and the places they inhabit. But there’s also a putting together, a recreationing, a discovered unity. At times, Walcott’s vision of a holistic Caribbean culture could bring him political trouble, and he has experienced exile in his life. But in 1992 his mastery of English verse brought him the ultimate literary award of the Nobel Prize. At that point, insular Anglo-American that I am, I had never even heard of Derek Walcott. So I went immediately to the university library where I found, in his poem “Islands”
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,
Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
As a tumbler of island water.
Indeed. ©.

[Stanley]

The soap opera as a genre.

There is a destiny that makes us brothers.
None goes his way alone.
All that we send into the lives of others,
Comes back into our own.
--Tagline for The Guiding Light, 1935-2009.

The Guiding Light first aired on NBC Radio on January 25, 1937. It transferred to CBS in 1947, then CBS television in 1952. The show title dropped its definite article in 1975, and (as Guiding Light) gave up the ghost in September 2009. That’s 72 years, not bad going, and indeed it is (or “was”) the longest-running serial in American broadcasting history. In its origin the actual ‘guiding light’ was a lamp in the window of the Reverend John Ruthledge. He shepherded the troubled sheep of his Chicago neighborhood, but when the show moved to CBS its venue changed to an anonymous (and mythical) Los Angeles suburb, and the focus shifted to the lives of a German immigrant family, the Bauers, their neighbors, and (inevitably?) a couple of reverend ministers. Just like real life, I guess. And that was the formula of a whole genre, the “soap opera,” so-called because so many “soaps” were sponsored by, well, soap. And except for a brief interlude (in the mid 1940s) during which The Guiding Light serial was sponsored by cereals (I’m not making this up), Proctor & Gamble and its soaps footed the bill. And just like the laundry and the dishes, which keep coming and going, the soap opera had a universal, inevitable cycle to it. The genre has never appealed to me, although I do confess that when we lived in an English village (1970-1981) we did find the even longer-running BBC Radio serial, or soap, The Archers, to be reassuringly familiar. The Archers began its life in 1951 and is still running today, 74 years young. June Spencer, the actress who “was” Peggy Archer in 1951, was still Peggy in 2022 when she (Spencer, that is) was 103 years old. Of course Peggy had married Jack Wooley, and of course they’d had kids, happinesses, sadnesses, tragedies, laughs and tears, all those things (or, you might say, all those episodes) that make us brothers and sisters under our skins. Other than my brief contact with The Archers, I’ve never really succumbed to the soap. I do remember my parents listening to a radio serial, The Great Gildersleeve, when I was in grade school. But it was a comedy; Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve was a manufacturer of ladies’ girdles, so obviously it was made up, not true to life. But Guiding Light was a real soap, and I find it somehow ‘realistic’ that when Guiding Light was finally brought to an end, in 2009, CBS moved The Price Is Right into the soap’s old time slot. Perhaps we do, after all, live in a transactional universe. ©.

[Stanley]

I've mailed Bob about the missing note on the 23rd but I haven't heard from him yet.....

[Stanley]

Geo-anthropology?

There was a shaking and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters. From a Hoh tribal legend.

The Hoh, or Chalá-at, still live on the seaward side of what we now call the Olympia Peninsula. Their tribal legend, quoted above, tells the story of the ‘Cascadia’ earthquake and tsunami which struck their homeland on January 26, 1700. Similar stories have been recorded from tribal groups from the Kwakiutl of British Columbia to the Yurok of northern California. They are plain spoken tales, yet poetic, and have doubtless been improved upon, in that poetic sense, with each telling. Thus they echo the flood myths of other cultures and call to mind similar passages in Genesis and in the Epic of Gilgamesh. These other stories were also originally told, spoken or sung, by preliterate peoples, and only later committed to paper. So heaven only knows (literally) about when (or whether) they happened. But we can date the Hoh story pretty exactly, even to the hour. At about 9PM, January 26, 1700, there was first a great earthquake, or a series of violent ‘shakings.’ Some land fell immediately beneath the sea, but then came a great rolling in of the waters. Whole villages were destroyed, many people perished, and some survivors were swept miles away. We can date the Cascadia events, even time them, because there are written records, far away in Japan, manuscripts that report a great tidal wave (“tsunami”) which the Japanese thought especially noteworthy because it was not accompanied, or announced, by a shaking of the earth. The tribal legends from the Pacific Northwest have been known about for generations, but have been recently collected, or re-collected, not just by anthropologists but by geologists like Ruth Ludwin of the University of Washington. Geologists have also carefully studied the modern landscapes (and such things as tree rings) of Vancouver Island, the Inside Passage, Puget Sound, and the coastline southwards to present-day California, to put together an astonishingly exact narrative of a great natural disaster. Or several, for it now appears that a ‘Cascadia’ has happened about every five centuries. The quakes have measured about 9.0 on the Richter scale. Some tidal waves have run in at over 200 feet high, not walls of water but skyscraper-surf. Tribal peoples in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon have taken it all to heart and asked that their tribal headquarters, even whole villages, be moved inland and upwards. They plead as reason enough not only science but also their legends. But what is to be done with the great modern cities that line the coasts? Since the last “Cascadia” happened in 1700, we have about 200 years to answer that question. And 500 years is only the average interval. ©.

[Stanley]

The public health is a public problem.

I loved clinical practice, but in public health . . . the whole society is your patient. Tom Frieden, 2009.

In Broad Street, London, a black water pump is mounted on a stone plinth, just outside the John Snow public house. Annually in September, the John Snow Society meets there, ceremonially replaces and removes the pump’s handle, and then retires to the London School of Tropical Medicine to hear that year’s “Pump Handle Lecture.” This commemorates the role of Dr. John Snow (1813-1858), a man who used his best medical instrument (his brain) to demonstrate that cholera was a public health problem that required public solutions. During a ‘cholera year,’ he mapped the sociology of death to find that cholera killed discriminately and that, in London, its greatest successes clustered around the Broad Street water pump. These notes have already celebrated John Snow for his common sense and his moral acuity. Now here’s another public health hero, William Henry Duncan, born into middle-class comfort in Seel Street, Liverpool, on January 27, 1805. He was of Scottish stock, had an uncle who was a physician, and qualified MD at the University of Edinburgh in 1829. He then returned to Liverpool to set up in private practice in Rodney Street, Liverpool’s provincial copy of London’s Wimpole and Harley streets. Rodney Street housed the city’s best doctors and was the birthplace of such luminaries as William Ewert Gladstone and Arthur Hugh Clough (and, much later, Brian Epstein of Beatles’ fame), but our Dr. Duncan soon became more interested in the health of Liverpool’s poor. He examined the sociology of death in rural Rutland and downtown Liverpool, and found that the life expectancy of Rutlanders was twice that (38 years versus 19) of poor Liverpudlians. Presbyterian though he was (Rodney Street also housed a Scottish Presbyterian Church), Dr. Duncan did not think that this was fated, nor that it reflected differences between urban sin and rural virtue. It was a secular problem, something to be fought against and conquered. His 1840 report to the city’s Common Council so shocked the aldermen (they found it “novel and appalling”) that they appointed Duncan to be Medical Officer of Health. The city’s action also led to Parliament’s “Liverpool Sanitary Act” (1846) and then its more general “Public Health Act” (1848) both admissions that the people’s health was a public issue. As Liverpool’s (and England’s) first Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Duncan set about improving water supply, public sewage disposal, and basic health care (and health education). Like John Snow, he’s remembered not only by a pub name but also an annual lecture at the University of Liverpool’s medical faculty. Many historians argue that Britain’s National Health Service is another memorial to these pioneers of ‘socialized’ medicine. ©

[Stanley]

Here's the missing link!

It’s going to be really weird when I’m 80 years old, in a walker, and people are still calling me America’s sweetheart. We need a new one. Mary Lou Retton.

Americans have short memories when it comes to sports icons. It’s a flavor-of-the-month game, despite our plethora of sport “Halls of Fame.” I don’t think there is one, yet, for tiddly-winks, but you could visit one for darts, another for water polo, or (in Canada, of course) another for curling. Of course there’s one for gymnastics, in Oklahoma City. In it are memorabilia associated with many international gym whizzes, including Mary Lou Retton (inducted in 1997). She’s not 80 yet, having been born (in West Virginia) on January 24, 1968, and not yet using a walking frame (although she does suffer from an unusual form of pneumonia). Retton discovered her ambition for gymnastics in 1976 while watching Nadia Comǎneci sweep the boards at the Montreal Olympics. Mary Lou was then only 8, but then Comaneci was just 15, so why not? And Mary Lou’s family had enough money to encourage her. She moved to Houston to train with Comǎneci’s coaches and by the time Mary Lou was 15 she was top of the class among American female gymnasts. In the next year, 1984 at the Los Angeles Olympics, Mary Lou became the first American woman to win Gold in the “all around” gymnastics. Named “Sportswoman of the Year” by Sports Illustrated, and only 16, she was indeed America’s sweetheart. Mary Lou Retton retired from the sport in 1986 and started doing endorsements. Her endorsement (and her picture) appeared on Wheaties® boxes and helped Wheaties® to increase sales despite the rising flood of ‘natural’ cereals. There were other endorsements; Retton did very well at the endorsement game. But the pneumonia hit her uninsured. So she went into the crowdfunding game. To date she has pulled in almost $500,000 to pay for her treatments. But America has another sports sweetheart now, also in gymnastics, Simone Biles. Biles was also bit by the ambition bug at age 8, and also enjoyed her greatest Olympics success in her teens (at the 2016 Games). There are differences between the two. Biles is black, for instance, and (oddly) she has yet to be inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. It’s NOT a racial thing. For Biles, personal health and wholeness, mental and physical, has always been an issue, not least in the Nassar scandal, concerning the sexual abuse of female gymnasts by the US coach Larry Nassar. Biles testified on behalf of the “Empowering” act of 2019, designed to prevent such enormities. Mary Lou Retton, long a public endorser of conservative causes and conservative politicians, testified against the act. She thought the publicity would be bad for the sport—and (possibly) for the Gymnastics Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. But who knows? Our memories for sports heroes are, after all short and faulty and selective. ©.

[Stanley]

Farm girl makes good.

We tell the stories. We tell the stories of the people. We told the stories of Colored people, we told the stories of Negroes, we told the stories of Black people and now we tell the stories of African-Americans. They are all our stories, and if we don’t tell them, who will? Hazel Garland.

Hazel Garland was born on her family’s farm outside Terre Haute Indiana, on January 28, 1913. The family soon moved to Pittsburgh, PA, in search of better opportunities, but especially for her brothers. Her father, George Hill, disapproved of higher education for girls, who just got married anyway, and so she had to quit high school. The eldest of 15 children, Hazel assisted her mother and, in the community, earned small wages as a maid of all work. It was, ironically, marriage (to Percy Garland, in 1935) that liberated her. Her mother-in-law was a force in the local black community, and Hazel jumped right in, in the church, in mutual aid societies. She also played in a band (trombone and drums). And she wrote about it, stories about her community life. She had been a good student, loved to read, and so writing about the people around her came pretty easily. And Pittsburgh had The Courier, a well-established black newspaper that soon was paying Hazel $2.00 each for her stories about church bazaars, sporting events, marriages, small tragedies and triumphs. It was human interest stuff, the sort of journalism you might see in the women’s pages of the ‘white’ press, and soon she was on The Courier’s regular staff and on its payroll. It was a good sounding-board. The paper had a wide readership in and around Pittsburgh, a national reputation (and some national subscriptions). It was a daily and, like other dailies, published several editions. Hazel fit right in, and expanded her journalistic roles. This included a daily “television column,” written and broadcasted, special reports on “race” issues in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, and not least reports (by a woman, no less) on the fortunes of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ NFL franchise. So the farm girl from Indiana became city editor, features editor, (inevitably) women’s editor, and when The Courier was taken over by John Sengstacke, editor-publisher of the famed Chicago Defender, in 1974 he made her his editor-in-chief at The Courier. So she was the first African-American woman to edit a national newspaper, for The Courier was that. At the same time, she’d become quite a force in the wider Pittsburgh community, a club woman of some note, and always and forever, a Steeler’s fan. Ill health forced retirement from the editor’s position in just three years (1977), but Hazel Garland continued her nationally-syndicated columns until just before her death in 1988. Back home, Indiana was the last northern state to desegregate its public school system, in 1949, barely beating the Supreme Court to the wire. So Hazel did well to escape and spend her great talents elsewhere. ©.

[Stanley]

Music man.

Just as a conductor must work to bring out the best in the members of his orchestra, a company president must draw on the talents of the people in his organization. Norio Ohga.

Our first home stereo system was based on an amplifier that I built from a kit. The whole process strained my brain and motor skills beyond their limits, but it worked and saved us a ton of money. When we could, we replaced it with a Sony, by then the ‘gold standard’ for audio electronics. Or the ‘black standard:’ Sony’s solid-state electronics were always housed in sleek, jet black cases. ‘Sony black’ has become an industry standard. But Sony itself has moved way beyond electronics wizardry. It’s now a multi-colored giant in almost all forms of entertainment, as much concerned with content as it once was with the technical delivery of content. Sony does music, of all sorts. It makes movies. It does streaming TV. Your games machine may well be a Sony ‘PlayStation,’ but the chances are even better that your computer game program comes from Sony Computer Entertainment. Much of this transition owes to Norio Ohga, born in Numazu on the southeastern shore of Japan’s main island on January 29, 1930. His success story rivals those of Ben Franklin and Andrew Carnegie, except that he was born rich. Or rich enough. When he was felled by childhood TB, or perhaps a chronic pleurisy, he undertook singing as a therapy. Controlled breathing was good exercise for the lungs, and whether from family tradition or the new cultural climate bought on by the post-war occupation, Ohga was drawn to opera. He had talent. He had ambition. And he studied music, first at Tokyo National University and then Berlin. In Germany he added conducting to his musical ambitions. Instead he tracked into the Sony Corporation, ironically because of a letter he sent to Sony (then the ‘Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation’) criticizing the quality of its tape recorders. So of course Sony hired him, first as a consultant. But in 1959 he went full time, and soon he was heading Sony’s tape recorder operation. Looking for better quality and greater portability, Ohga’s division created (and from 1982 marketed) the CD (Compact Disk), working at first to his demand that a single disk be capable of storing the whole of Beethoven’s Ninth (‘Choral’) symphony. It was a triumph and soon raised Ohga to Sony president, then (1989) CEO, and finally Chairman. He retired in 2003. Besides moving Sony into the entertainment business, however. Norio Ohgo continued to study music, opera and orchestral, and to perform, too, as a singer at first. Perhaps his greatest triumph was to conduct the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1993. The critics did not think Ohga “brought out the best” in his players; rather they reported that he kept up with them. Perhaps that was the real basis of his outstanding managerial career. ©.

[Stanley]

The Buildings of England


A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Outline of European Architecture (1942).

That sounds elitest, but a line must be drawn somewhere. Many of our structures are awful. Pete Seeger found his trash in the “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” that disfigured post-World War II suburbia in the USA. But Pete Seeger was trying to shake, or sing, college students free of the bourgeois routines of their ticky-tacky parents. Nikolaus Pevsner was a distinguished scholar and critic, the holder of Slade Professorship of Art—and at both Oxford and Cambridge. By the 1960s he was himself an institution. When in 1968 he came to Oxford to begin his course, the students applauded him before he’d said a word. They probably weren’t thinking of Pevsner’s scholarly work, rather of his monumental Buildings of England series. In 1968 he hadn’t yet ‘done’ Oxfordshire. The Oxford volumes (two of them!!) came out in 1974, full of sharp distinctions. L. H. Butterfield had meant well when he’d designed Oxford’s Keble College. But as it had turned out, Keble, Pevsner judged, was “actively ugly.” Well, tastes change. I still think Keble looks like a bad dream in Victorian brickwork, but some of my best friends think otherwise. And Pevsner himself had experienced important changes in taste. Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Germany (Leipzig) on January 30, 1902. He was a Jew of assimilationist tendencies who had converted to Lutheranism. He attended a church school in Leipzig, then studied art and art history at Berlin and Munich before returning to Leipzig for his PhD. His first dividing line in architecture was between Aryan and non-Aryan, for he’d become a German nationalist. So Gropius (German) was better than Le Corbusier (French) and the Bauhaus the supreme expression of modernism. But for a German Jew, even a convert, Naziism proved too much and in 1933 Pevsner settled in England. In 1939 he became an ‘enemy alien,’ already an inaccurate label, for he’d come to admire English buildings—not its bicycle sheds, of course, but its best architectural expressions of each age. He perhaps formed his intention to say (or write) more about that when he was clearing damage from the Luftwaffe’s raids on London, and in 1951 (with Alan Lane, the publisher of Penguin Books) he began his “Buildings of England” series with four books on London itself, picking through the ruins to find its architectural diamonds. By 1969, when we arrived in Oxford, he’d finished 40 volumes. The Oxfordshire volumes came too late for us, but when we moved north in 1970 we went armed with Pevsner’s three (!!!) books on Lancashire architecture. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner died in 1983, but the series goes on and has now been extended to the Celtic fringes. Next time you travel in Britain, take along a Pevsner. It will enrich your experience. ©.

[Stanley]

When Susi was driving me up the Camino Real in California on our way to San Francisco in 1980 she pointed out this hillside of little boxes as we passed and said that it was reputed to be the original hillside of 'Little boxes made of Ticky Tacky'.

[Stanley]

Peace campaigner.

Though it is fairly easy to describe what constitutes a bad home, there is no simple definition of a good one. Conformity with the traditional pattern is no guarantee of the happiest results. Alva Myrdal.

Every American knows—or should know—about Gunnar Myrdal. He was the Swedish economist who wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy. It came out in 1944, the crux year of World War II, just as ‘the arsenal of democracy’ was turning the tide against Nazi racism. But the world’s greatest democracy was a racialist state. The irony saddened Myrdal, unabashedly a pro-American, but for exactly the same reason he argued that the ‘dilemma’ could be resolved. The country’s commitments to equality, to democracy, to personal ambition, would commit it to the “affirmative action” needed to address, and solve, the race problem. In the year of Trump, 2025, this seems tragically overoptimistic. To recover that sense of the dynamic and positive possibilities of true “equality,” we might look at Gunnar’s wife Alva Myrdal, born Alva Reimer in Uppsala, Sweden, on January 31, 1902. Her modestly middle-class family abounded with talent, ambition, and socialism. She graduated in sociology and psychology in 1924, married Gunnar (an economist) and set about raising a family organized along ethical principles. And they worked together, too, on a study which aimed to reform Sweden. Their The Population Question (1934) proposed that a marriage between individual liberty and socioeconomic equality would remake Sweden from the ground up. And she published her own Urban Children (1935) to make it clear how this might work for every child, rich or poor of middling, highlighting state-funded preschool education as a way forward. Her work went on as she traveled with Gunnar, first to Geneva and then New York. Back home in Sweden she’d become a leading member of the Social Democratic Party. At the United Nations, she headed UNESCO’s social science operations. At home, wherever home happened to be, she became more and more concerned about establishing equality as the guiding ethic. Then, facing the MAD world of ‘Mutual Assured Destruction,’ she became a leader in the international disarmament movement. For Alva Myrdal it was always a package deal. Her children (Jan, b. 1927; Sissela, 1934; and Kaj, 1936) have followed similar paths. And so did the world. So Gunnar got the Nobel in economics in 1974. He shared the award, that year, with Friedrich Hayek, an odd pairing politically, although both were ‘monetarists’ in their economic thinking. And then, in 1982, Alva Myrdal received the Nobel Peace Prize. This was for her work on nuclear disarmament, but in the citation there was a nod towards her work for peace—and for equality—in the family. ©.

[Stanley]

Saga-man.

We are publishing now ‘Grettir’s Saga’ . . .a lengthy one, and in many places a pretty and peculiar saga. Morris is the greatest glutton of work I ever knew. Eiríkr Magnússon, January 21, 1869.

Thus Eiríkr Magnússon announced, in a letter to a friend, the beginning of his fruitful collaboration with William Morris. Morris (1834-1896) was indeed a “glutton of work,” the anima behind great flowerings of mid-Victorian art and culture. Morris was a Pre-Raphaelite, then a progenitor of the Arts and Crafts movement, arguably a step-father of art nouveau, and famous for all that. Among his lesser known enthusiasms, Morris fell in love with the Vikings. Not so much their bloodlettings, rapine, and pillage, but their legends, their sagas, the Homeric way in which they told their clan tales, first orally in their halls and then (in the 13th and 14th centuries) written down in a language we now call Old Icelandic. Already an aficionado of medieval European romances, Morris became an Old Icelandic enthusiast when he met Eiríkr Magnússon in 1867. Magnússon, born a minister’s son in Iceland on February 1, 1833, was the odder of the two. Born into the endemic poverty of 19th-century Iceland, he found relief in study, especially languages. A graduate of Reykjavik’s Theological College, he’d intended to take over his father’s parish, but his expertise in English brought him to the attention of British missionaries who (besides wanting to feed the Icelanders) aimed at a new Bible, in Icelandic of course but reflecting the best in modern biblical scholarship. So they took Magnússon and his wife Sigriður Einarsdóttir back to London. Eiríkr did publish that Bible (1866), but in London his knowledge of the old sagas found a readier market. Inevitably, that brought him into Morris’s circle, and after producing two translations with the poet Swinburne and the Welshman George Powell Magnússon and Morris began their translations in 1869. First published in periodicals, most were published (by Morris’s famous Kelmscott Press) in beautifully bound books and in striking fonts. This connection brought Eiríkr Magnússon to the attention of academics, and in 1871 he began his long association with Cambridge University as an under-librarian then (1893) as university lecturer, and in both employments a remarkable innovator, credited with modernizing the library and (meanwhile) in bringing Old Icelandic into Cambridge’s Anglo-Saxon curriculum. A ‘glutton of work’ in his own right, he, Sigriður, and their two adopted children made Cambridge home, Sigriður making waves in Cambridge society, while Eiríkur devoted much time to freeing Iceland from famine and from its awkward relationship with Denmark. Iceland’s full independence came in 1918, five years after Magnússon’s death, but his work in England had done much to establish the island’s cultural and literary identity. ©.