BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

It was a shock to me to find my writings amongst juveniles. It does not bother me any more, but I still feel there should be a category of seniles to offset the epithet. Hugh Lofting.

World War I, the “Great War,’ was according to participants’ memoirs, boredom and trenchfoot punctuated by unimaginable terror and carnage. Nevertheless it has produced some strikingly humane literature, for instance Birdsong (1993) by Sebastian Faulks. But surely the most unlikely product was the prize-winning children’s book, The Story of Doctor Doolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed (1920). The author, Hugh Lofting, was born in Maidenhead, Berks., on January 14, 1886, and after studying civil engineering (at MIT), he volunteered for battle as an officer in the Irish Guards. Having left children behind, and unwilling to tell them about the horrors and ennui of the trenches, he sent story-book letters home, illustrated, which would become, eventually, Dr. Doolittle’s story, or, rather, stories, for there would be sequels, and movies, and then radio and TV adaptations. More recently there have been allegations of racist content, and some editing to erase it. Whether Doolittle has been improved by all that is an open question. The books themselves, as written, won every prize going for kids’ stuff, including the Newberry, and they continue to entrance those that way inclined, most of whom might well be children, with the occasional senile thrown in. Lofting, who moved to the USA in the 1920s (where he wrote for The Nation), got the real war out of his system with an epic pacifist poem, Victory for the Slain, published in book form (only in Britain) during the second world bloodbath, in 1942. It was not written for children, though for their sakes. ©

[Stanley]

The Abyss is time with its sadness . . . The birds are the opposite . . . they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs. Messiaen's notes on the clarinet solo.

Facts are facts, nothing more, but now and again a mere fact cries out for public airing. Among my recent favourites: Livy Clemens’s role in teaching Mark Twain what he needed to know about race and the brave German immigrants, armed with American pitchforks and Prussian memories, who kept Missouri in the union in 1861. So here’s another, the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, on January 15, 1941: composer at the piano, Henri Akoka clarinet, Étienne Pasquier (not the Renaissance philosopher, but a different Étienne) cellist, and Jean le Beaulaire violin. As with many of Messiaen’s compositions, the quartet has a deeply religious theme, based on Revelations 10: 1-2, 5-7: “And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was on his face . . ..” I do not know whether the four ever played again, but you can find out by reading Rebecca Rischin’s For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Cornell, 2006). But why a whole book (well reviewed) about a single classical quartet? Part of it, doubtless, is the quality of Messiaen’s music. The other bit, that “fact” I mentioned , is that its premier took place in the dead of winter, in Stalag VIII-A, in German Silesia. The quartet members were POWs, one (Akoka) was a Jew, and according to Messiaen they all wanted to say something. So they did. All survived the war (the story of Akoka’s dramatic escapes might justify another book), and some lived a very long time. So I offer a hopeful fact for January 15. ©

[Stanley]

Our best advertising stroke has been the publication of our maps and guides. On these we make no profits whatever. Edouard Michelin.

It is a general truth of commerce that if you are selling some one thing, you are usually also selling something else. Universities sell education but also the future: jobs, careers, fulfillment. The folks who sell the Dodge Ram hawk a weird version of masculinity alongside the truck. Just listen. Geiko sells geckoes. But usually you are known for the first thing, the main product. One who became famous for the second thing, the pitch as well as the product, was André Michelin. Born in Clermont-Ferrand on January 16, 1853, André (and his younger brother Édouard, b. 1859) inherited their grandfather’s rubber business in 1886, without knowing very much about rubber. But they did know that the business (making rubber into valves and pipes) languished, and they soon figured out (thanks to an English inventor, John Dunlop) that rubber, properly treated, shaped, and filled with air, could cushion wheels and help them move swiftly. So they started making tires, first for bicycles (1891) and then (1895) for autos and trucks. The brothers were salespersons, and saw that they were not just selling tires but movement and travel, and so the company began to push travel, first road signs and then, for the bourgeoisie, the pleasures of touring. Stay at a good inn. Eat at a better restaurant. Replete with sleep and food, learn from the place you’ve arrived at, its history, its culture, its architecture. And Presto! the Guide Michelin was born, first the red book in 1900, but then, red and green, becoming an institution in its own right, although still, today, also helping to sell tires. ©

[Tripps]

I do hope no Scots are reading this.

"(thanks to an English inventor, John Dunlop)

Dunlop

[Stanley]

I missed that.... I'll mail Bob immediately!

[Stanley]

You WILL promise to forget this fellow, to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory. Mrs. Malaprop to Lydia Languish.

“What’s in a name?,” cried Juliet Capulet, mildly disappointed to fall for a Montague, even one called Romeo, but the answer to her question for many writers is "quite a bit." Probably no one more enjoyed naming his characters than Charles Dickens, with kind and jolly Polly Toodle, cruel Wackford Squeers, chaotic Sweedlepipe, grasping Gradgrind, conniving Uriah Heep, and above all miserable, miserly Scrooge. Dickens might have taken his lead on poetically appropriate names from the dramatic characters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose plays were still popular in Dickens’s youth. And the most famous of all Sheridan characters gave her name to our language by taking such a commanding and comedic role in The Rivals, young (aged 23) Sheridan’s very first drama. The Rivals premiered at Covent Garden on January 17, 1775, and even for a first drama it wasn’t too well received, verging just a bit over the line between the comic and the bawdy. But quick edit brought it back on the 28th to the considerable enjoyment of audience and critics alike. Among Sheridan’s names that stuck were Sir Anthony Absolute, his son Jack Absolute, Jack’s servant Fag, and the slightly flighty Lydia Languish, the heroine if the play has one. And then there is Lady Slattern Lounger, surely a name for all seasons. But towering above them all (in the naming stakes) was Mrs. Malaprop who, of course, issues “malapropisms,” starting (on her very first appearance, in Act I, scene 2) with “illiterate” as a transitive verb. This was a dickens of a touch, fully worthy of the brilliant young grandson of Jonathan Swift’s best friend. ©


Re: Our best advertising stroke has been the publication of our maps and guides. On these we make no profits whatever. Edouard Michelin.
My kindest editor, an Englishman with a suspiciously Scots-like surname, begs me to note that John Dunlop was a Scot. Half a Scot myself, I cannot but carry out his wishes. John Boyd Dunlop was indeed born in Ayrshire, in 1840, not quite 20 miles from the birthplace (1836) of my great-grandfather, who will doubtless be spinning in his grave. Bob Bliss

[Tripps]

How gracious - Mr Dunlop can stop spinning now.

[Stanley]

I think it was Bob's grand dad who was spinning.... Bob is a nice bloke. Here is today's offering.


The American Medical Association today apologizes for its past history of racial inequality .. . . AMA Official Statement, July 10, 2008.

American racial segregation was not Apartheid, but close enough, with racially pure cemeteries and segregated schools for the blind among the evidences of our very own tribal delusion. In 1896, the Supreme Court established “Separate but Equal” as a post facto justification. A cruel joke, to be sure: still, segregation sometimes brought access previously denied. In our fair city, black citizens could not depend on receiving hospital treatment until 1937 (!!!), when the Homer G. Phillips Hospital was opened. Chicago, as usual more “progressive” than St. Louis, had established its own segregated hospital in 1891, called Provident Hospital. It was the brain-child of Daniel Hale Williams, born free (in Pennsylvania) on January 18, 1856, who would become not only a campaigner for racial justice but also a pioneer medic. After a spell at barbering, Williams moved with his mother to Janesville, Wisconsin, where he apprenticed with a sympathetic white surgeon and qualified for admission to the Northwestern Medical School. After graduating, Dr. Williams campaigned (successfully) for a black hospital on the city’s south side, and (not quite content with that) became a pioneer surgeon, performing (in 1896) what was only the second successful pericardial surgery in medical history. Williams then became chief surgeon at Washington’s Freedman’s Hospital and then (back in Chicago) a charter member of the (unsegregated) American College of Surgeons and a surgeon much in demand among wealthy white Chicagoans who, perhaps, thought their own health more important than segregated surgeries. ©

[Stanley]

His huff arrived and he departed in it. Alexander Woollcott.

During the 19th century, Americans learned to live with competition and capitalism but not everyone enjoyed the lesson. So alongside our economic revolutions we also got doses of utopianism, some merely theoretical, others quite practical, and nearly 30 actual utopias took shape before the Civil War, more if we count the Shakers and the Mormons. Some of them lasted a while, including the “North American Phalanx” in New Jersey. Although it fell on hard times, it lasted long enough to give us Alexander Woollcott, born at what was left of the Phalanx on January 19, 1887, and imbibing from it enough eccentricity, intelligence and bile to become one of our leading critics. First he had to go to college, at Hamilton, where he was none too successful socially (his nickname was “Putrid”) but he learned to write. From there to the big city, where after a spell at the bottom of the journalistic pile and a tour as a wartime writer for Stars and Stripes, Woollcott became a renowned critic, so renowned he was banned from several theatres (he sued), the discoverer of the Marx brothers (Harpo named both his sons after Woollcott), and along with Harold Ross a founder of the famed Algonquin Circle, an oddly utopian bunch of misfits and writers. His friends were legion but seemed to feel ambivalent about him, which helps to explain how he became the inspiration for the magnetically unlikeable Sheldon Whiteside, the anti-hero of Kaufman's The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). Odd to the end, he hoped to be buried at Hamilton but they sent his ashes to Colgate and when the urn finally arrived in Clinton, postage was due. He would have enjoyed that. ©

[Stanley]

Say good night, Gracie. George Burns, once each week, in the 1950s.

In the late 50s, at Roosevelt High in Des Moines, it was an article of faith that two ditzy women in popular sitcoms, Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen, were the real brains behind (respectively) “I Love Lucy” and “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.” Perhaps our generation really was ready for feminism, but as it happens we were only about half right. Gracie Allen was certainly no airhead, although she played that role brilliantly, but the chap who figured out the act, wrote most of its early scripts, was the straight guy with the cigar, George Burns. Away from the mike or off stage, Gracie called him “Nattie,” as in “Nattie, you’re such a schmuck,” and indeed he was a Nattie, born Nathan Birnbaum, on January 20, 1896. Nattie was the ninth in a dirt poor immigrant family of 12 kids, and he went to work in a candy shop at the tender age of 7. From there it’s a pretty long story, as he didn’t shuffle off stage until 1996, but he sang on street corners before he met vaudeville (four little kids in “The Pee Wee Quartet”), before he changed his name to George Burns, a song and dance man, before he developed the habit of playing comedy routines with a woman (one of the early ones was Hannah Siegel) before he met a pretty Irish Catholic convent girl called Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen (for economy’s sake he called her “Google”) and, as he later gracefully put it, “the world discovered I had talent.” They played the boards for three years before they married in January 1926, then became famous, then moved to radio, adopted two kids, then on to TV, and then George visited Gracie’s grave once a month after she died in 1964. ©

[Stanley]

Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment. Konrad Bloch, quoting Jacques Barzun, Stockholm, 1964.

Readers will be glad to know, I am sure, that the University of Missouri’s new health maintenance plan includes a highly recommended (you actually get paid for it) biometric screening. At my advanced age, I found it distressingly simple. It seems to be concerned only with lipids, mainly manufactured by my very own body, including good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, triglycerides, and so on. My results are confidential between me and my insurer, but I can attribute our joint cholesterol obsession to yet another US immigrant, Konrad Emil Bloch, born on January 21, 1912, in Prussian Silesia. He was a very bright young man, so his parents sent him off to Munich to study under Hans Fischer and Adolph Windaus, both Chemistry Nobellists. Konrad Bloch would win a Chemistry Nobel, too, in 1964, but first he had to flee Germany, for although in some ways he fit the Nazi ideal stereotype (blondish hair, for instance, and quite athletic) he was a Jew. First a Swiss institute took him in, but by 1938 he was finishing his Chemistry PhD at Columbia in New York, and by 1942 he was synthesizing cholesterol. Most of his basic research was done at Columbia and then Chicago, but by the time the Nobel Committee got round to recognizing it, he was a Professor at Harvard University. So Cambridge gladly celebrated yet another Nobel Prize, the trumpet fanfare doubtless accompanied by the rhythmic gnashing of teeth in Morningside Heights and Hyde Park. I don’t know what Professor Bloch’s lipid levels were, by the way, but he survived Hitler and Goebbels to see us into the new century. ©

[Stanley]

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago . . . she was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Sister Carrie.

Sister Carrie (1900) was neither the first nor the last youngster to escape the confines of a small town for the heady liberty of the metropolis, nor was she the first, or last, to regret it. It’s by no means a universal American experience, especially now that we’re almost all defined as suburban, but it’s still one of our favorite bipolarisms, along with innocence versus knowingness, nature versus artifice, identity versus anonymity. But, Reagan films (and speeches) to the contrary notwithstanding, the small town itself was no picnic. It’s also the scene of some of our best horror movies. And if you don’t like village ghouls, try a dose of Victorian reality with the archive photos of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). That ambivalence about the small place, where everyone knows everyone (and it is everyone’s business to know) is nicely symbolized by the lovely theatrical coincidence that January 22 is the anniversary of the premieres of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (Princeton, NJ, 1938) and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (New York, 1953). Now, Wilder’s Grover’s Corner’s ain’t a simple paradise, and Miller’s Salem ain’t a pure hell, for these are prize-winning dramas written by intelligent playwrights, and in my mind Sister Carrie might have fled Grover’s Corners even faster than she might have left Salem. Still, these two imagined places have a real world resonance with an important theme of American social and cultural history. They are favorite repeats of theatrical companies, so (at least if you live in a large city) there’s a measurable chance you could, sometime, see them both on successive nights. ©

[Stanley]

There are no lines in nature. Edouard Manet.

Those who sense uncertainty, embarrassment, or downright panic when the after-dinner conversation turns to Manet and Monet should gain some comfort from knowing that their confusion is understandable. Not only are the names distressingly similar, but they were contemporaries, both pioneers of impressionism and modernism in art, and both managed to épater les bourgeois with paintings first seen as decadent and even rather sloppy. In their youth, they even looked a bit similar, with great heads of hair and great bushy beards, sharp eyes looking out at the viewer with a hint of rebellion. But Claude Monet, the younger, went on and on and on, developing impressionism to its theoretical limits, possibly even (and ironically) helped by his failing eyesight. Édouard Manet, born on January 23, 1832, was certainly born richer, died sooner (1883), and although it was his paintings that first outraged Paris (le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863, and Olympia, (1863), and are seen as proto-impressionist, he remained convinced that the best strategy for the impressionist movement was to stay within the artistic establishment, submit paintings to the annual Salon, work in studios rather than in plein air. He had good relations with some members of the movement, and indeed learned from them, notably from Monet (which adds to the confusion), but Manet was too haute bourgeois, and maybe too literary, in his origins, tastes, and friendships. So if you want to talk about a “real” impressionist, talk about Claude Monet and leave Édouard Manet unspoken. ©

[Stanley]

Crack Open a Cold One in Honor of the Beer Can's 80th Birthday. Time Magazine headline, Jan 23, 2015.

On 24th January we can (if we are over 21) thus celebrate the 80th anniversary of the first successful manufacture, distribution, and sale of canned beer. And it wasn’t Anheuser-Busch, either, far less In-Bev. For it was on this day in 1935 that the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company, working in partnership with American Can Company, delivered a test run of 2000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale to its customers in Richmond, Virginia. Polled as to their views, loyal Krueger drinkers gave the cans a 91% approval rating, and Kruegers went into serious production. It was an invention whose time had come, or perhaps passed. Canned foods were used by the Union Army during the Civil War (some say that’s why the North won), and by the late 19th century “tinned cans” were common containers for food. Beer was first canned by the American Can Company in 1909, but not successfully (beer interacted badly with tin), and the idea was suspended because of the war and then that noble experiment of Prohibition. In 1935, Kruegers’ success was phenomenal, and overnight 80% of American distributors were featuring that small firm’s canned beer and ale. But for Krueger’s it was just a flash in the can. The big brewers noticed, and Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst, et al, had by the end of that very year produced and sold 200,000,000 cans of beer. Thus was proven that even in the midst of a Great Depression American capitalism could still shoot fish in a barrel. It also gave rise to a sub-section of popular and indeed academic archeology, collecting and dating old beer cans, and if you doubt that please read the journal Historical Archeology, vol. 27, January 1993, pp. 95-113, wherein you will find much of this information. Cheers!! ©

[Stanley]

I mean by elements . . . certain primitive or simple or perfectly unmingled bodies . . . not being made of any other bodies. Robert Boyle.

It was a very complicated coincidence that the ‘Age of Discovery’ (as it was once called) also the period of the first ‘Scientific Revolution,’ when men—and the occasional woman—unearthed new truths about nature. We call them “scientists” but it’s a distortion. Not only was the word unknown but most of these characters engaged in all sorts of thinking not usually associated with our modern conception of ‘the scientist.’ Newton spent much time calculating the end of time, for instance, while the other inventor of the calculus, Gottfried Leibniz, had a brief fling with I Ching and a longer one with theology. But perhaps no one better illustrates the stunning diversity of interests of these pioneers than Robert Boyle, born into the Anglo-Irish nobility on January 25, 1627, at Lismore Castle. At Eton and then on his ‘grand tour’, young Boyle discovered (and developed) interests in alchemy, theology, astrology, magic, astronomy, and linguistics. Back in Oxford, he fell in with the ‘Hartlib Circle,” and thus qualifies as a founding father of the Royal Society. Meanwhile he continued to puzzle over the “real” identity of matter and to hope that base metal could be transmuted (alchemically) into gold. And, oh yes, he was the “father of modern chemistry,” a reasonable title if we follow just one or two lines of his thought, not least “Boyle’s Law.” An interesting sidelight is that his closest research partner was his sister Catherine, Viscountess Ranelagh, one of those “occasional women” who also contributed to the scientific revolution. ©

[Stanley]

Their monument sticks like a fishbone/ in the city's throat. Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead," 1964.

The 54th Massachusetts was by no means the first unit mustered for national service in our Civil War, nor even the first black troop (that honor went to the 1st South Carolina Volunteers), but it has become the most famous of Union Army regiments. On January 26, 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton authorized Massachusetts Governor John Andrew to recruit black troops. The call soon went out, and within two weeks the 54th had more volunteers than it could deal with, freedmen from all over the north but also recently escaped slaves from the south. There were so many that the regimental officers (save for chaplain William Jackson all were whites) instituted rigorous selection procedures, and after training the 54th took the colors as possibly the fittest of all Union regiments, not to mention one of the best provisioned, thanks to volunteer fundraising by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Wendell Phillips. So the 54th marched off into the teeth of southern fury that black men could be enabled to take up arms against white. It had already been announced by the rebels that any black soldier (or white officer of a black unit) would be executed if captured, and the 54th felt the meaning of this threat in its bloody assault on Fort Wagner in July 1863. Their bodies, officers and men, whites and blacks, were dumped in a common grave, an expression of southern contempt that insured immortality for the 54th, thanks partly to a good movie (Glory, 1989) and a great poem (“For the Union Dead”, 1964). ©

[Stanley]

Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. Dorothy Parker, reviewing Oh, Lady! Lady! for Vanity Fair in 1918.

It was not too long ago that New York City ran on horses, and one of the city’s stable owners was a German immigrant named Henry Kern. Henry was prosperous enough to marry into a previous immigrant family, marrying Fannie Kakeles, and soon enough (January 27, 1885) their union produced Jerome David Kern. It’s not clear whether the family knew that January 27th was also Mozart’s birthday, but Fannie—a piano teacher—nurtured his love of music, taught him piano and organ, and by his high school years he was composing for student musicals at Newark High School. Henry had moved to Newark to take up trade and wanted Jerome to follow in his footsteps, but as the world well knows Jerome Kern wasn’t cut out for commerce. By 1902 Jerome was a music student in New York, by 1903 he had his first published composition, and by 1904 he was pushing sheet music by playing it in storefront windows and rehearsing musical companies on and off Broadway. His talents were noticed in New York, then London (where he married Eva Leale and met Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse). Jerome and Eva missed a sailing on the Lusitania, and as a result we have Jerome Kern’s most famous songs, sung first on stage or in films, but since interpreted and reinterpreted by popular and jazz singers. Name your favorites, for they are still all around us, for instance Ol’ Man River, A Fine Romance, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, They Didn’t Believe Me, Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man, Long Ago and Far Away, The Last Time I Saw Paris, and my favorite of all time, The Way You Look Tonight. ©

[Stanley]

The Edison of Our Time. Obituary of Luther Simjian, Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel, 1997.

Even though it was carried out by the Ottomans, admitting the Armenian Genocide (‘Medz Yeghern,’ the Great Crime) has proven difficult for modern Turkey. But it happened. And it did give us a very inventive orphan, whose American name was rendered as Luther George Simjian, born in Armenian Turkey on January 28, 1905. He lost both parents in the genocide and somehow found his way to New Haven, CT, where, aged 15, he lodged with cousins. Within eight years he was chief photographer at the Yale Medical School, inventing away, and then in the midst of the Great Depression he moved to New York City where he invented the camera portrait box we used to see in train stations (and still do in the occasional French movie). In 1939 he patented the Automated Teller Machine but back then no one (not even the banks) wanted cheap, anonymous cash transactions. Simjian never made a nickel from that one, although his name for it stuck, but come the war he invented, and sold, 2000+ flight simulators to the US military. His greatest contribution, though, was to loosen our tongue-tied culture with the teleprompter. This has given us the nearly fatal illusion that our politicians know how to speak, but you can cure yourself by watching a late-night session of the House of Representatives. Luther Simjian couldn’t stop inventing. His elder years saw a medical ultrasound reader, a golf simulator, and a postage meter. He took out his last patent at the age of 92, in 1997. It was a way to treat the wood used in musical instruments. Let’s call it, and him, a resonator. ©

[Stanley]

It hath made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich. Early review of The Beggar's Opera.

Theater was banned in Boston until after the Revolution, a very long time. Perhaps the first Puritans thought of Shakespeare and Marlowe, but in 1750, when a new “Act for preventing Stage-Plays” was passed, their progeny had in mind the contemporary English theater, and one can see their point. In London you could see re-runs of rakish Restoration Comedies, hardly likely to improve your morals, and the new plays were no more edifying. Take for instance the most famous of them, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which opened on January 29, 1728, at John Rich’s Lincoln’s Inn Theatre. It may have sprung from the fertile brain of Jonathan Swift, who in 1716 had suggested (to Alexander Pope) “a Newgate pastoral among the Thieves and Whores,” but by the time it hit the stage it had acquired a new gloss, a satire on the newly-popular Italian opera. So besides thieves and whores Gay and Rich took aim at the toffee-nosed tastes of Georgian London’s rising, and apparently risible, bourgeoisie. It’s full of loose women and philandering men, and one fears that Macheath (subject to four paternity claims) and his unblushing bride Polly Peachum would not have gone down well in Boston. Be that as it may, The Beggar’s Opera was a smash hit, became one of the most reproduced plays in 18th-century London, and in the 20th came into its own with brilliant derivations by leading playwrights including Jonathan Miller and Alan Ayckbourn and, of course, the justly-famed Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Which, for all I know, played well in Boston, where theater had become legal. ©

[Stanley]

It takes earnestness to be a man and diligence to make a genius. Nikolaus Pevsner, Diary.

Occasionally a perfectly OK academic life gets diverted into something quite other, and one becomes a “popular” writer or commentator. That was among the several diversions of Nikolaus Pevsner’s life, which began in Leipzig on January 30, 1902. Pevsner earned his doctorate in art history at the tender age of 22, married well, and began a museum career in Dresden. Pevsner was an assimilationist Jew (he converted to Protestantism) and a German nationalist, and as a scholar he sang the praises of (“non-decadent”) German artists. As a citizen he welcomed the nationalism he saw in Hitler and the Nazis. This proved particularly naive, and by 1936 Pevsner decamped to England, where his career sputtered for a while (come the war, he was interned as an enemy alien), but he had developed a taste for English architecture, vernacular and formal, and a knack for explaining it to the many-headed, for instance on the BBC but also as a lecturer at London and Cambridge. Sometime during the war he proposed, to Allen Lane at Penguin, a comprehensive, county-by-county guide to English architecture. Oddly, it seems to me, Lane took him up on it, and come the peace Pevsner began work on the Buildings of England series, now known as Pevsner Architectural Guides. Of the 46 separate volumes (!!!) Pevsner himself wrote thirty-two and collaborated on ten. For the discerning type, tourist or native, the Pevsner series remains a marvelous guide to English travel. Pevsner himself became the grand old man of English preservationism, with perhaps a special interest in saving the lesser excesses of the Victorian Age. ©

[Stanley]

Mark Steele In Town was from Birkenhead this week and he said that the last act of the Civil War took place there when the Shenandoah surrendered to the Royal Navy in the Mersey Estuary. I checked with Bob and he says this could well be true though some in Missouri point to the James Brothers bank raids as continuing the war by other means.....

[Stanley]

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. A. A. Milne, Peace With Honour.

31st January 2015 is only the 59th anniversary of death of the author A. A. Milne, famous for Winnie the Pooh (1926), The House at Pooh Corner (1928), and When We Were Very Young (1924), but to his own way of thinking (and some others’, too, although assuredly not Dorothy Parker’s) a playwright and novelist who wrote for sophisticates. Alan Alexander Milne was educated in an English “public” school (Westminister) and at Cambridge. He wrote at both places, contributed to national magazines, and became an assistant editor at Punch. He also became father to Chistopher Robin Milne, and read stories to Christopher and his bear, “Edward”, which became the core of the Pooh saga. In the late 1930s he wrote an anti-war novel, Peace with Honour, which came from his experience of the Great War, but the rise of Hitler convinced Milne that his world was not yet ready for pacifism. After Milne’s death, a string of rights sales left Pooh, Eyore, Tigger, et al, to the Walt Disney Corporation. Sic transit gloria mundi. ©

[Stanley]

Robert Benchley . . . and Ring Lardner are gone, and so Mr. Perelman stands by himself. Lonely he may be--but there he is. Dorothy Parker, 1958.

A comedic writer who gets a full-length interview in The Paris Review, as S. J. Perelman did in 1963, needs to be taken seriously (even if the interviewer was George Plimpton), but when Perelman told Plimpton that his (Perelman’s) farmhouse in Bucks County, PA was shingled with “second-hand wattles” the spell is broken, the sheep’s bladder deflated, and one pratfalls back into the world of Perelmanisms. It was a world different from that inhabited by most of his humorist friends (he was pals with Benchley, Thurber, White, Wodehouse, Lobrano, almost each of whom thought Sidney his superior). That world was pretty accidental, wherein one had to enjoy a writer just having fun with words or making everyday situations into encounters with the surreal. Perelman typically defied the writing instructor’s advice to avoid non sequiturs; indeed he seems to have spent much precious energy inventing them, the non-er the better. Perhaps we can blame it all on a couple of Irishmen, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, whose wordplay and delight in the bizarre bowled Sidney James Perelman over when he was a callow youth at Brown University, or perhaps Providence (where S. J. was born on February 1, 1902) was just a funny place to grow up in. You should join the list of Perelmanistas, for it includes all the above plus Woody Allen, Frank Muir, Garrison Keillor, all of the Marxes, Ring Lardner, T. S. Eliot, Harold Ross, Katherine White, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Parker and (for all I know) Ezra Pound and Marilyn Monroe. Anyone who can put together a fan base like that deserves a fourth look. ©

[Stanley]

Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance. Luke 15:7, chosen for Nell Gwynn¹s funeral sermon, St. Martin-In-the-Fields, London, 1687.

The Puritans’ reputation for stern morality was not entirely deserved, Will Shakespeare to the contrary notwithstanding. Still, there is no doubt that when in 1660 Charles II restored royal rule, London loosened its corsets in anticipation and was not disappointed. Save for poetry, the arts profited, none more than theatre. Taste was not for tragedy, and indeed the period was dominated by “Restoration Comedy,” an art form in itself. Since manners and mistresses were prominent in story lines, it made sense to bring women on stage to play women’s roles, and among the most noticed of all Restoration actresses was the young, beautiful Nell Gwynn, born on February 2, 1650, and playing her first widely acclaimed role at the tender age of 17, almost in the teeth of the Great Fire, the Plague, and the Dutch invasion of the Medway. Samuel Pepys thought her marvelous in Dryden’s Maiden Queen, and Charles II saw the play 9 times in quick succession. But Nell was then the mistress of Lord Brockhurst, and it wasn’t until the next year that she bedded the king and appeared on the Civil List (as, so to speak, a pensioner). She was not the king’s official mistress (that was Louise de Kérouaille), but Nell had a ready wit to go with her beauty and he enjoyed her company. She gave him two sons (one of whom became Duke of St. Albans), he gave her two houses, and she gave us one of the great one-liners of political history, turning aside a threatening anti-Catholic mob during the Popish Plot crisis. “Nay, nay, good people,” she cried, “I am the Protestant Whore.” The crowd huzzaed and let her coach pass. ©

[Stanley]

Paris is well worth a mass. (Paris vaut bien une messe) Attr. to Henry of Navarre, 1593.

It was on 3 February 1576 that Henry of Navarre escaped from Paris. Henry, aka Henri de Bourbon, would also be (in due course) King Henry IV. One could call this a good day for La France, for as “Good King Henry” he authored the Edict of Nantes (1598) by which he hoped to bring an end to the wars of religion, guarantee peace to his Protestant subjects, and incorporate their wealth and trading savvy into the wealth of France. Henry was raised as a Protestant by his mother, Queen Jeanne of Navarre. In 1572, upon her death, he became King of Navarre and inherited her claim to the throne of all France. In the same summer, his marriage to Margaret of Valois (a Medici and a Catholic) took place, in Catholic Paris, and only five days later the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacres resulted in the deaths of thousands of Protestants (many of them wedding guests). Henry himself became a prisoner and was forced to convert ‘back’ to Catholicism (he had been baptized a Catholic at birth). But on 3 February 1576 he escaped and, at Tours, abjured Catholicism and took command of the Huguenot armies. The Wars of the Guise ensued. These confusing, blood-stained years also saw several assassinations, with the result that by 1590 Henry of Navarre was the only biologically legitimate King of all France. However, biology proved insufficient, and so on 25 July 1593 Henry of Navarre took the practical course and renounced Protestantism forever. He was crowned King of France at Chartres in February 1594. Vive le roi!!!!!! ©