OneGuyFromBarlick

I am not an art collector. I am a museum. Peggy Guggenheim.

What does a fabulously rich young woman do with her “potato-shaped” nose? If you were Peggy Guggenheim, in 1920, and already into the arts, you paid a surgeon $1,000 to render it as a beautiful nose in Tennyson, “like the petal of a flower.” It didn’t work, and maybe Peggy spent the rest of her life compensating. If so, she spent spectacularly, collecting lovers as she found them, including Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp but not, apparently, Jackson Pollock (whom she had discovered and made famous). Peggy Guggenheim, born to a great fortune on August 26, 1898, was to be best known, in fact, not for her nose or for her lovers, but for her art collection, “a picture a day” at one point as Hitler’s tanks crashed across Europe and threatened her new museum in Paris—and her life. But Peggy wisely fled, holding on to life and art, to establish her “Art of This Century” gallery in Manhattan and then, when peace returned to Europe, a new Guggenheim in Venice, filling the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (on the Grand Canal, of course) with her collection of Miros, Picassos, Rothkos, Motherwells, Calders, Braques, Mondrians, Dalis and (as they say) et alii. But her generosity flowed widely. Wanting Pollock to do a big canvas, she commissioned his “Mural” (his largest splatter) and then gave it away to the University of Iowa, where it’s been since 1948. Where did her energy come from? It helps to have money, and it hurt to have the nose, but perhaps also she always remembered her father, Benjamin, who went down gallantly with the Titanic, in 1912, when little Peggy was only 14. “Tell my wife,” he said to someone in a lifeboat, “I played the game out straight, to the end.” So did Peggy. ©

It is not my design to render my sex any the less feminine, but to develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood, and furnish women with the means of usefulness, happiness and honor, now withheld from them. Sophia Smith.

Picture an old maiden lady in rural New England, daughter of a wealthy family notorious for its miserliness. Her brother, master of the family mansion, had charged her rent to stay there, even made her pay (by the trip) for using the family carriage. When he died, unmarried and childless, she was left sole heir to a fortune (about $7 million in today’s $$). Surely she would be parsimony personified. But this old lady had ideas. Deaf at 40, she had found solace and companionship in voracious reading, and—in consultation with her Congregationalist pastor—she decided the time was long past for the establishment of a proper college for women, not just an academy like nearby Mount Holyoke but an institution granting degrees in “English Language and Literature . . . Ancient and Modern Languages . . . Mathematical and Physical Sciences . . . the useful and Fine Arts . . . Moral and Aesthetic Philosophy [and all things] which pertain to Education, Society, and Government.” The maker of this magnificent menu was Miss Sophia Smith, born on August 27, 1796, and her recipe is still being followed at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and still for women only (undergraduates). Sophia died in 1870, and in a twist of fate not too strange her pastor, the Reverend Mr. Greene, spent the next three decades rewriting the record to make himself the hero of the story and rendering Sophia as just an eccentric old spinster. But Sophia was brought out of the kitchen in 1996 (her bicentennial) with the publication of Quentin Quesnell’s The Strange Disappearance of Sophia Smith. History is memory, and memory served is justice done. ©

They think I am going to be a schoolteacher but I am going to be a poet. Janet Frame.

Schizophrenia has proven difficult to explain and to treat, but over the years our favored treatments have become progressively less brutal. Perhaps the apparent violence of the disease, apparent in some sufferers—the suppression of one personality and the imposition of another—called forth extreme methods. Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, a young New Zealand teacher (born on August 27, 1924) first diagnosed as a schizophrenic in 1946, ran the gamut of treatments from isolation with severe physical restraint to heavy injections of insulin to electroconvulsive therapy, mostly at the forbidding Seacliff Lunatic Asylum near Dunedin. Finally, her doctors decided upon a lobotomy, a confession of medical impotence. Meanwhile, Janet wrote, rather well, and a local publisher had taken on her short fiction in the form of The Lagoon and Other Short Stories (1951). It made a mild sensation, won a prestigious prize, and (so to speak) canceled the lobotomy. There followed a series of therapeutic relationships, in New Zealand and London, with a hodge-podge of editors and analysts, and (writing as Janet Frame) an outpouring of fiction and an answering chorus of praise and wonder. Janet Frame’s travels (she spent many years in the US), her close relationships, her autobiographies (pronounced as “amongst the wonders of the world” by Patrick White), her prizes and awards (although never the Nobel), all suggest that the cancellation of that lobotomy was a pretty good idea. All in all it was not a bad outcome for a working class girl whose mother was housemaid to Katherine Mansfield and who just wanted to say something which, thanks to the care of others, she did.©

Vivien, this looks like something the Lord made. Dr. Alfred Blalock, 1948.

Gaining academic credit through “life experience” is still, to my mind, a problematic idea. It remains safer, more dependable, literally more testable, to do it the right way. And yet . . . Some of the best students I have ever taught learned more extramurally before admission than inside the institution after admission. And there are many famous exceptions to the institutional route, for instance that of Vivien Theodore Thomas, born in New Iberia, LA on August 29, 1910, whose ambition to become a doctor stalled after he finished high school. So Vivien became a carpenter instead. Clever with his hands, he secured a job in the Vanderbilt University lab of a surgeon, Alfred Blalock, and then moved with Blalock to the medical school at Johns Hopkins. Soon Thomas played a critical role in Blalock’s perfection of a daring surgical process to cure “blue baby syndrome.” At the time, Thomas received no credit, and as a black man was paid only at janitor grade, but eventually his manual and mental dexterity brought him recognition, first from Blalock’s students, who learned laboratory and surgical techniques from their quite exemplary janitor (“Vivien made it look so simple . . . not a false move, not a wasted motion,” one of them said). Then from Johns Hopkins, in 1964 when the university promoted Thomas to Director of Surgical Research Laboratories and in 1978 when it (finally) granted him an honorary doctorate. And then at long last from the media, when between 1989 and 2004 the Washington Post, the Public Broadcasting System, and HBO honored Dr. Vivien Thomas (posthumously, for their hero had died in 1985) by tracing his extramural path from apprentice carpenter to master surgeon. ©

A little powder and a little drink, and I would pass the German posts and wink and say Do you want to search me? What a flirtatious little bastard I was. Nancy Wake.

Her service pictures make her look pretty glamorous, and when she was a Reuters correspondent in 1930s France she swept a Marseilles industrialist (Henri Fiocca) off his feet and for a couple of years they enjoyed an idyllic life (“Champagne in the morning and love in the afternoon,” she later said). Then came the Fall of France, the Vichy régime, and a couple of British airmen knocking on her door asking for help to get back home. She (and her husband) helped, and they went on from there, becoming braver every step of the way. She was Nancy Wake, born in New Zealand on August 30, 1912, and by the time of the allied invasions of 1944 (in Normandy and the South) she was known to the occupying Germans as “The White Mouse” because of her own escapes. They put a huge price on her head, dead or alive. Incredibly, she made her own way back to Britain, was commissioned into the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (!!!), and then parachuted into the Auvergne in 1944 to lead an army of 7,000 maquisards in guerilla attacks behind the retreating German lines. Come the peace, she learned that her husband had been captured, tortured, and executed by the Gestapo, for which she never forgave herself. “Never” was a long time, too, for Nancy lived on to 2011, latterly as a guest of honor at the Stafford Hotel, London. Nancy Wake was, almost certainly, the most decorated woman soldier of the war, and her New York Times obituary (“The Socialite Who Killed a Nazi with Her Bare Hands”) inspired what is, almost certainly, not the last book about her. The first one, published in 1957, was entitled simply The White Mouse. ©

Falling short of perfection is a process that just never stops. William Shawn.

August 31 marks an anniversary for serious writers, for it is (or could have been) the 108th birthday of William Shawn, who for 35 years (but it seemed like forever) was the managing editor of The New Yorker magazine. Taken together with his predecessor, the magazine's founder Harold Ross, that gave The New Yorker over 60 years of editorial stability, an astonishing record in modern American journalism. Born in Chicago of immigrant parents (family name Chon), Shawn joined the magazine as a fact checker in 1933. "Quiet, considerate, infinitely courteous" (according to his obituary in the New York Times), Shawn did change things when he took over in 1952, moving away from the often flippant style Ross and writers like James Thurber and E. B. White had fixed on the magazine, but in truth things had begun to change as the Depression and then the World War rendered flippancy flippant rather than funny. Shawn's more serious tone had already been signaled by John Hershey's amazing Hiroshima, which took over the whole magazine on August 31, 1946 (and won the Pulitzer Prize). But Shawn continued in that vein, and intensified it, making the magazine a cultural icon and widening its focus to include poverty, race, war, and the environment, featuring writers like Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, and (memorably) Truman Capote. Not so much old age as corporate pressures for bigger profits did Shawn in, and he was removed from his post in 1987. He died in 1992. ©

The here and now is all we have, and if we play it right it is all we will need. Ann Richards.

Back in the days of the “Solid South,” when white supremacy ruled the culture and the Democratic Party ruled in politics, there were still serious social and economic tensions, and in most southern states the “Democracy” contained a liberal wing. Some southern Democrats were really quite liberal, e.g. Lister Hill of Alabama and Claude Pepper of Florida, although almost always they toed the prevailing color line. This was particularly true where Farmers’ Alliances or the Peoples’ Party had been strong in the late 19th century, and nowhere was it more evident than in Texas. So Dorothy Ann Willis, born in Lakeview on September 1, 1933, could grow up politically active “on the left,” win debate prizes in high school and college (Baylor University), marry her high school sweetheart Dave Richards, and hit the ground running as a social studies teacher in an Austin middle school and, on the side, as a tireless campaigner for whatever Democratic progressives she could find, notably Senator Ralph Yarborough and Representative Henry Gonzalez, but also Judge Sarah Hughes, a former civil rights attorney who would, one November day, swear in Lyndon Johnson (yet another Texas liberal) as President. But we know Dorothy better as Ann Richards, established in her own right as crusading politician, feminist, riveting speaker at the Democratic convention in 1988 (where she nominated Walter Mondale), and governor of Texas in the early 1990s. Once out of office, Ann Richards couldn’t be cowed by a conservative climate. Her verbal barbs continued to find their mark as she upheld the southern populist tradition, feminism and all, until her death in 2006. ©

Has the God who made the white man and the black, left any record declaring us a different species? James Forten, 1813.

The first Quakers were an unruly lot, and were not (in the beginning) pacifists. Their peace testimony, though, came much sooner than their anti-slavery testimony. But in Quaker Pennsylvania the logic of Quakerism led to emancipation, first individually and then, in 1774, as a matter of Yearly Meeting policy. One of the earliest freed slave families in Pennsylvania were the Fortens, and by the time their third generation came around they were well acclimated to freedom. James Forten, born free on September 2, 1766, became one of the most successful of the whole clan, educated at Anthony Benezet’s African School, a young privateer during the Revolution, and then an apprentice to master sailmaker Robert Bridges. When Bridges retired in 1802, James bought the business, married, named his eldest son Robert Bridges Forten, and became one of Philadelphia’s wealthiest citizens, white or black. The Fortens (James, his wife Charlotte, and their seven children) used their wealth to push for integration (the Forten sailyard was an integrated workplace), abolition, and full civil rights. After a brief period where he sponsored emigration to Africa, James turned his voice and his resources against the American Colonization Society. When William Lloyd Garrison came along with The Liberator, James was ready for him, wrote for him, and supported him with cash. James’s children married well, and as we have already seen in these notes (vide Charlotte Forten Grimké) so did at least one of his grandchildren. Perhaps James Forten’s greatest tribute came at his death. His funeral (March 4, 1842) was attended by thousands of Philadelphians, white and black. ©

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world. Sarah Orne Jewett.

Ever so often, graduate school extends one’s education (as opposed to filling it up), and this happened to me when, in a frontier literature seminar, I was led to the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. I was at first immunized against her by the idea that the boreal forests and rocky points of Maine could not birth a fine writer (so I chose Henry Adams from civilized Boston for my seminar paper), but when we got to Jewett I acknowledged my mistake. Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett, a sickly girl, was born in Maine on September 3, 1849, drank in her health from walks in those pine forests, learning from her family’s library, and her formal ‘filling up’ from Miss Rayne’s School for Girls in Berwick. She also acquired some spiritual notions, since regarded as odd, from Emanuel Swedenborg, which may have made her a Transcendentalist and certainly made her want to write. Her first published story came in at the top (The Atlantic Monthly) whose editor, William Dean Howells, was on the lookout for writing that rendered ordinary life as odd and wonderful as it really is. Realism indeed is what Jewett is known for now, especially her fine-tuned grasp of women’s lives and minds. In Dr. Feltskog’s seminar, I read only her Country of the Pointed Firs, and must read more (she wrote a lot) and the more so now that I know that her birth anniversary is also my wedding anniversary. Sarah herself never married but had a fulfilling end-of-life relationship, a “Boston marriage,” with Annie Fields, the widow of her publisher James Fields. She suffered greatly from injuries in a carriage accident and died prematurely, in 1909, in her family home (now a National Historic Landmark) in Berwick, Maine.©

A man without money is like a body without a soul. Frederic Tudor.

Shall we study the arts or commerce? Shall we be pragmatic or aesthetic? I don’t think it’s an either/or question, but those who do might point to the Tudor brothers of Boston. William Tudor, born in 1779, was the Boston Brahmins’ quintessential man of letters. Educated (brilliantly) at Phillips and Harvard, he went on the Grand Tour and (from Paris) sent mom 100 manuscripts of Hayden, Mozart, etc.. Then he settled in Boston to mind the family capital and improve Boston’s brain, which latter he did by being a founding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and a co-founder of the North American Review. In his spare time he dined and chatted with Emerson, Ticknor, and Everett, and wrote several good biographies. William’s brother Frederic Tudor, born on September 4, 1783, refused to go to Phillips and spurned Harvard. He ran away to sea at 13, had bankrupted himself twice before he was 40, and bounced back each time because he had an idée fixe (so to speak) to become the Ice King of the Atlantic trade. He cut, packed, shipped, and sold ice, not to Eskimos (of course) but to Cubans, Barbadians, Colombians, proper Englishmen and, eventually (come the clipper ship) Frederic sent ice to India where it cooled the increasingly fevered brow of the British Raj. Indeed, Calcutta became the most profitable market for Tudor’s ice, which (ironically) he cut from Walden Pond right under the observant—and disapproving—nose of Henry David Thoreau, prophet of the wilderness. William and Frederic Tudor, in short, embodied the horns of our dilemma. Which bro would you be, smooth or hairy? ©

You are not obliged to believe the reasons of those who contradict you. . . . Campanella to Galileo, September 1632.

The first stirrings of science in Renaissance and early modern Europe have given us a pantheon of heroes: Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Bacon, and many others. What made these geniuses heroic is that they often worked in defiance of the received wisdom of their cultures. So they took great risks. What made them human is that most made compromises, sometimes substantial and often to save their necks from this or that inquisitorial power. But many continued to pay homage to (or energetically pursue) elements of the old ways of thinking. Astrology and alchemy showed remarkable strengths, and very few of these thinkers abjured religion even as they developed heterodox theologies. In short, they are difficult to fit into a story of “progress." One of the most ambiguous of these thinkers was Tommasino Campanella, born in rural Calabria on September 5, 1568. Discovered and trained by the Dominicans, Campanella demonstrated a combination of skepticism and utopianism that won him the attention of the Inquisition. Once—under torture—he escaped death by feigning insanity, but he spent no fewer than 27 years in various prisons which, despite appalling conditions, gave him time to write his greatest works, defend Galileo (twice), and yet also develop ideas that eventually won him the patronage of a Pope, Urban VIII, and two of the Church’s most important cardinals, Barberini and Richelieu. Campanella took refuge with Richelieu, in Paris, and continued to speculate in rationalism, empiricism, astrology, and (yes) theology. One of Campanella’s last acts was to construct the horoscope of the boy who would be Louis XIV, the Sun King. It wasn’t too far off the mark. ©

There is only one point about this almost entirely French republic to which I cannot resign myself: that is Slavery, and the anti-Black prejudices. Lafayette to his daughters, New Orleans, April 1825,

On July 4, 1865, my great-grandfather was his regiment’s “designated orator” for the victorious Union Army’s patriotic celebrations at Montgomery, Alabama. He spoke well, but not as memorably as another “designated orator,” Colonel C. E. Stanton, in Paris, 1917, at Lafayette’s tomb, whose oration ended with the excellent “Lafayette, nous voilà!” The crowd cheered, and the tomb’s sleeper, Marie-Joseph Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, might have been pleased too. Born on September 6, 1757, the Marquis de Lafayette gained from philosophes and from military academies thirsts for liberty and glory, and to slake both he joined the American revolutionary army, where he was given the rank of major-general aged only 19. Thus a republican army recognized social rank. He served with some distinction early in the war and with great distinction at its end, and became the symbol of Enlightenment France’s sympathy for the new American nation. Come France’s own Revolution, in 1789, Lafayette was a member of the Estates General, co-author of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and Commander of the National Guard. He fell out with the Revolution in 1792, fled, and returned to political life only with the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. He remained unsullied in American eyes, and in 1824 he sailed to the USA to help in the nation’s 50th birthday celebrations. His tour (of all 24 states!!) was a triumph. His most treasured gift was soil from Bunker Hill, which he was given after dedicating the Monument there. In 1834, the Marquis de Lafayette chose to be buried under that American dirt. It was sprinkled on his grave by his son Georges Washington de Lafayette.©

When Uncle Sam calls, by God we go. R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.

On 7th September 1813 we can say (with journalistic accuracy), a newspaper in Troy, New York, The Post, first used the term “Uncle Sam” to refer to the USA. After that the story gets murkier, but the term probably had its origins as a nickname for one of two brothers, Ebenezer and Samuel Wilson, who were the local government agents (in Troy) charged with buying provisions and supplies for the proposed US attack on Canada (this was, after all, during the War of 1812). “Uncle Sam” Wilson he was, and the term caught on locally. But it didn’t catch on elsewhere, as the favored image in the early 19th century was the warlike Columbia, her female figure only partially draped. It was probably this nudity that drove Columbia out of fashion in the 1920s (rather than the flappers’ decade it belonged to George Babbitt). Meanwhile, English sophisticates liked to think of the USA as “Brother Jonathan”, a kind of homespun Babbitt-ish character invented by a cartoonist at the humor magazine Punch. Uncle Sam soldiered bravely on, though, and by the 1850s was a stock character in the newish genre of political cartoons. No doubt Uncle Sam reached his apotheosis in the famous army recruiting theme of 1917, “Uncle Sam Wants You,” but Sam remains iconic and has now reached the tender age of 202.©

There used to be a real me, but I had it surgically removed. Peter Sellers, on The Muppet Show, 1979.

Peter Sellers was born above a pub in Portsmouth, England, on September 8, 1925. His parents christened him Richard but called him Peter after an earlier stillborn child. This may have given him an odd outlook on life and death, but his parents’ profession, traveling variety show actors, had more impact. In a life notable for its unhappinesses and its brevity, Sellers is best known for his comedic roles as the hapless Inspector Clouseau in “The Pink Panther” and as three characters (ranging from slightly mad to completely bonkers) in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. These parts showcased Sellers’ ability to assume quite different (comedic) personae, an ability already evident in childhood and honed to a fine point in the BBC radio series The Goon Show. Collaborating with three other WWII veterans, Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine, and Harry Secombe, Sellers played several plastic parts, most memorably as Bluebottle, Hercules Grytpipe-Thynne, and Major Denis Bloodnok. Building on the madcap hysteria of the Marx brothers, The Goon Show influenced a whole generation of British performers, including John Cleese and Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame), Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (of Beyond the Fringe), four Liverpool lads who, one day, would become The Beatles, and Charles Windsor who might, one day, be king. The Goon Show (draft title: “Crazy People”) ran for nine years on BBC and was reproduced worldwide (in the US by NBC Radio). Written largely by Spike Milligan, it derived its singular character from the many characters of Peter Sellers. ©

It's still available on the web. The Goon Show

To assert the kinship of all people and provide interracial education with a particular emphasis on understanding and equality among blacks and whites Mission statement, Berea College.

In the era of the American Revolution, and coincident with it, southern Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists each declared slavery to be unchristian. But by 1830 each denomination had, so to speak, changed its mind and was well on the way to adopting the “positive good” pro-slavery argument. In each denomination, that transition from anti- to pro-slavery would provoke a breach with their northern brethren. Indeed the Protestant schisms (1836-1848) over slavery were harbingers of the American Civil War. But there were antislavery stirrings within the South, too, and one of the chief stirrers was John Gregg Fee, born in Kentucky on September 9, 1816 into a Presbyterian family just becoming prosperous enough to own slaves. John Fee had his doubts, however, and these were strengthened by a religious conversion (at 14) and then by his education at Lane Seminary and Oberlin, antislavery centers in Ohio. Ordained a Presbyterian minister in Kentucky, Fee was forced out when his church refused communion with slaveowners. He then formed a non-denominational “Free Church of Christ”, and finally, in 1853 and with the help of another white abolitionist, the planter Cassius Marcellus Clay, Gregg founded a new town and church at Berea, in Madison County. By 1855 the congregation had grown enough in numbers and confidence to found Berea College as a coeducational, interracial institution of higher learning. But in ante-bellum Kentucky, this was a perilous task, and in 1859 armed gangs of slaveowners forced the Bereans to flee. They would return with the Union Army, and still today Berea College adheres to the interracial principles laid down by John Gregg Fee. ©

We desire, and must have, an equal chance in the race of life. John Roy Lynch, campaign speech, 1872.

Doubtless most, but certainly not all sexual intercourse between slave women and their masters was forced. Take Patrick Lynch, an immigrant from Dublin who in 1840 took work as overseer on the Tacony plantation near Vidalia, LA. There he fell in love with Catherine White, a Virginia-born slave. The two lived together on the plantation as man and wife. Marriage was illegal, so Lynch began to buy Catherine, and their children, as it were on the installment plan. This came unstuck when Lynch died and the friend he had entrusted with continuing the purchase instead turned a quick buck by selling Catherine and her kids to a Mississippi plantation. One of those children was John Roy Lynch, born on September 10, 1847 into an interesting life. He was appointed a JP during the military occupation, became a successful photographer, and was elected as a Republican congressman twice during Reconstruction but then again in 1882, an event that helps to explain the deliberate disenfranchisement of blacks (and poor whites) in Mississippi. Lynch then joined the American army (where he rose to the rank of major). He retired in 1911 to a prosperous real estate business in Chicago. There he also lawyered and wrote books, including an autobiography which now, in a nice irony, is published by the University of Mississippi Press (2008). His scholarship on Reconstruction was used later by DuBois (1935) and Foner (1988) in their revisions of Reconstruction history. Free and prosperous, John Roy Lynch died in 1939 and was buried with full military honors on the plantation of Robert E. Lee (or, if you prefer, Arlington National Cemetery). ©

Ours is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, for Wall Street, and by Wall Street. Mary E. Lease, 1890.

It was not only in the prairie and mountain states that American women were first allowed to vote (Wyoming Territory, 1869), but also where they first became “public persons” and gave shape to aerated conservative fears about letting ladies out of the parlor. Worse, women actually won elections and served in office. One of the more colorful ones, though, never held office. She was Mary Elizabeth Lease, lioness of Kansas, but born in New York as Mary Clyens, on September 11, 1850. It was the same day that Jenny Lind began her triumphal concert tour of the USA, but apparently Mary Clyens did not have such a sweet voice. Also known as Mary Ellen Lease, by the 1890s she was called “Mary Yellin” by her many detractors. She had moved to Kansas aged 20 to teach school, married a pharmacist-farmer, moved with him to Texas (they’d lost the farm), studied law, did some writing, and moved back to Kansas just in time for the first stirrings of the Great Depression of the 1890s. In that climate of discontent and dissent, Mary Ellen Lease became an organizer and speaker for the Peoples’ Party, the Populists, and she spoke loudly enough and often enough to come to the attention of men who didn’t like her or her cause. It’s difficult, reading their comments, to decide whether they more disliked her ideas or her gender, so I won’t bother quoting them. The quotation that Lease herself is most famous for (“raise less corn and more Hell”) is one she first disavowed, and then adopted as “a right good bit of advice.” She fell out with the Populists at the height of their Kansas power, divorced Mr. Lease, and later moved back to New York where her daughters had settled. ©

The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn; God's in his heaven--All's right with the world. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes, 1841.

When I was very small, my uncle Ed and aunt Dorothy had on their Iowa farm an Airedale bitch named Pippa. I later learned that she was named after the lead character in a Robert Browning verse drama, Pippa Passes (1841, revised in 1848), which helped to establish Browning as a leading poet, a man of daring and mystery, perhaps a secret republican, and certainly one who toyed with the prevailing moralities of his time. Whether Ed and Dorothy knew all this I can’t tell you, but my guess is that for Dorothy it all added up to “Romance,” and that was enough for her. It was enough for Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett, too. A child prodigy poet, born to a wealthy family (English estates and Jamaican slave plantations), Elizabeth Barrett was encouraged in her writing by both her parents, who saw to it that her work was published and that she met the leading writers of her age (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, etc.) Among the “etc.” was Robert Browning, then a lesser and younger figure, who was not on the approved list. So the two thirty-somethings, who took a strong fancy to each other, had to carry on their courtship in secret. Their elopement and marriage, on September 12, 1846, scandalized Elizabeth’s family. She was forthwith disinherited, and the two lovers left England for Italy, where they lived (and loved, and wrote) near Pisa until Elizabeth, sickly and possibly a laudanum addict, died (in Robert’s arms, of course) in 1861. It was in almost every respect a great story, freighted with Romance, capital “R”, and one guesses that it helped to inspire Ed Simms and Dorothy Loring, students at Grinnell College, to get married themselves (and, later, name their Airedale).©

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead; it means that the dead are living. Harold Macmillan.

When Captain Harold Macmillan was grievously wounded at the Battle of the Somme (September 1916) and left in a shallow trench in no man’s land, he pulled a book out of his kit bag and spent the day reading Aeschylus, in Greek. Of course it helped him to pass the time, but that’s hardly the point. There’s something “improving” about the act itself that recalls his grandfather’s stern upbringing in the Presbyterian Kirk of the Isles. For young Daniel Macmillan, born to a crofter’s family on Arran September 13, 1813, just passing the time was among the anathema of his life. Moments were indeed to be improved, as the moment when (aged 10) his father died and Daniel was bound out to service in the book trade, first in Irvine, then in Glasgow. By 1833, he was a waged worker in a Paternoster Row (London) bookseller’s, and distressed to find that in London people did not observe the Sabbath. But he kept his nose to the proverbial grindstone, learned what he could about every book in the shop, saved shillings when possible, and so impressed his customers that in 10 years he had his own shop and was on the threshold of launching into publishing. The rest, as they say, is the Macmillan publishing house. But given his grandson’s sang froid at the Somme, note please that Daniel remained a Presbyterian at heart (even as he migrated to a more congenial church and married a very congenial woman, a chemist’s daughter). Daniel Macmillan lived long enough to found an empire and father two sons (one was Maurice, Harold’s father) and as we might expect he settled his affairs carefully enough that when he died (in 1867) both boys were bound out to the book trade. Only this time, the book trade was theirs. ©

Jan Masaryk was a very tidy man. He even closed his bathroom window after he jumped. Czech street talk, circa 1948.

In the 1930s my aunt Angeline (not yet my aunt!!) hosted a visitor from Czechoslovakia, then on a tour of American college campuses. The visitor left a gift, a brightly spangled fabric that we use at Christmas and call our Masaryk blanket. The visitor was Alice Masaryková, sister of Jan Masaryk whose birth anniversary, as it happens, is today. Jan Garrigue Masaryk was born on September 14, 1886. His father, Tomas, was a Philosophy professor at Prague University, and his mother, Charlotte Garrigue, was an American musician who trained at Vienna (where she met Tomas). In Prague, both parents became active in Social Democratic and nationalist politics, and when Czechoslovakia assumed nationhood, in 1919, Tomas was its first president. He retired in 1935 and died in 1937. Jan Masaryk, meanwhile, moved up the ranks, representing the young republic first as chargé d’affaires in the USA (where his mother’s connections proved useful) and then as ambassador at the Court of St. James. Come Munich (1938) and WWII, Jan became Foreign Minister of the Czech Government-in-Exile, living in London or Buckinghamshire (wherever the president, Edouard Benes, laid his head). After the war, Jan worked to establish a multi-party, democratic state in Czechoslovakia, and served as Foreign Secretary, but in suspicious circumstances was found dead in his garden, two stories beneath his bathroom window, on March 10, 1948. The Czech government called it suicide. Alice Masaryková and his American wife agreed, calling the murder story put out by the US a “cold war cliché”. The matter of fact remains unresolved. ©

A free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. Robert Benchley.

Getting over the fact that the writer of Jaws is the grandson of Robert Benchley has been a fruitless task and may well prove endless. Best lay it to the deterioration of the gene pool, and get on with celebrating the funniest American ever to draw breath. Drawing breath was done first on September 15, 1889, in Worcester, Massachusetts. After which Benchley entered a not very prosperous childhood, but in a bizarre turn his dead brother’s fiancée financed his studies at private school and then Harvard. Some of his biographers have commented on the oddity of that relationship, but it’s more significant that, while at Harvard, Benchley edited the Lampoon and acquired the reputation of having an odder way with words. Too odd for some publishers, and so his early career path in (mainly) New York journalism was strewn with brilliant flashes and unhappy partings. But his talents were noted by, inter alia, P. G. Wodehouse and (from far Toronto) Stephen Leacock, then by the editors of Vanity Fair, and at long last by Harold Ross, the doyen of the Algonquin Circle and founding editor of The New Yorker. It was there that Benchley hit his stride, about one article a week, and it was then that he started to branch out into film (making them and acting in them). There was also a longish relationship with Dorothy Parker. Benchley’s forte was writing about the “little man,” that ubiquitous figure, in quite ordinary but (as it would always turn out) overwhelming situations. Benchley’s humor drew out the terror, pity, and pathos of the ordinary tasks of our daily lives (e.g. making a bank withdrawal), but as far as I can remember he never saw anything funny in the dining habits of the great white shark. ©

Most men who have really lived have had, in some share, their great adventure. This railway is mine. James Jerome Hill.

Some called them “captains of industry.” Teddy Roosevelt occasionally called them as “malefactors of great wealth.” Whatever we name them, one of our cherished cultural delusions is that the members of America’s 19th-century industrial elite were “self-made men.” Among the few who did rise from rags to riches (most took the shorter road from riches to riches) was James Jerome Hill, born in Canada on September 16, 1838 of Irish immigrant stock. Orphaned at 14, he left school and migrated to the USA where he factored a native mathematical ability into a bookkeeping career, first in Kentucky and from 1855 in Minnesota. Within 20 years the bookkeeper had fashioned partnerships that made St. Paul the axis of a nascent transportation empire. The partners also took care to control a few banks; and Hill used the money as an industrial weapon during the depression that followed the Panic of 1873 to take over the biggest railway in town, in the next decade to transform it into the Great Northern and, in the Panic of 1893, to pick up the Northern Pacific for a song. He then joined forces with J. P. Morgan and others who agreed that competition was bad for business, and set about buying E. H. Harriman’s western roads, notably the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy. Harriman fought back, and the fight grew so costly that these “captains” created the Northern Securities Trust, which owned all three railroads. Thus they became “malefactors”, and Teddy Roosevelt busted their Trust in 1904. But we are more permissive, these days, and court-approved mergers in 1970 and 1995 have recreated (and added to) the transportation giant that James J. Hill masterminded in 1901. ©

The lights burned late, our bed was lumpy with page proofs, and our home was alive with laughter and the pervasive spirit of her dedication and her industry. E B White on Katharine White., 1979.

In the glory days of its youth,The New Yorker had its detractors, but most criticized it for not being what it had not meant to be, a serious magazine. For what it was, a knowing, amusing, detached yet perceptive commentator on our arts and cultures, our foibles and fables, it was soon brilliant, and one who gets too little credit for making it so—and then transforming it—joined the staff in the magazine’s first year, 1925. She was then Katharine Sergeant Angell, born on September 17, 1892, so no spring chick she, but she had been a brilliant undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, was fed up to the back teeth with her philandering husband, and was looking for a useful occupation of a literary tenor. At The New Yorker she found that occupation, and she would nurture and correct and polish a legion of brilliant writers, in several genres, from Nabokov to McCarthy to Moore to Updike—and many more. Not least she nurtured Elwyn Brooks White, an excessively timid Cornell graduate, 7 years her junior, who sent her love poems only to find that she put them in the magazine. Perhaps he married her to stop that, but marry her he did, and their life together, in Manhattan and a series of rural retreats (fetching up finally in Maine), is one of the love stories of the century. Even in distant Maine, she kept editing and writing. Her vitality was acknowledged, at her death (1979) eloquently by William Shawn, but she didn’t get her just deserts until 1996, when Nancy Lincoln, then a staff writer for the magazine (who had scarcely known Katharine) wrote a brilliantly-titled and brilliantly-nuanced piece, “Lady With a Pencil.” Katharine White herself might have accepted it without change. ©

I've got too much material . . . sometimes I wonder what in the name of God I am going to do with it all. George Webber, in Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again.

Back in the day when legendary editors like Katharine White, Malcolm Cowley, and Maxwell Perkins had a major, and measurable, impact on published fiction and poetry, a self-proclaimed literary genius (Thomas Wolfe of Asheville, NC) appeared on the horizon whose work desperately needed editing. Today is the anniversary of Wolfe’s last novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, published on September 18, 1940, very possibly the most-edited novel in American literary history. Wolfe had died of tuberculosis almost exactly two years before (9/15/38), leaving editor Edward Aswell, at Harper’s, a manuscript of 1.5 million words (enough for ten longish novels). Aswell set to work, perhaps out of a sense of duty to the dead but also because Maxwell Perkins had already shown that editing Thomas Wolfe (“the lone Wolfe,” Perkins had called him) was an eminently worthwhile, if Herculean, task. At Scribners, Perkins had nursed into life and clarity (and some degree of concision) Wolfe’s first two novels (including his best, Look Homeward, Angel). Although relentlessly autobiographical and thus self-centered (in a variety of senses), they had sold well and attracted critics’ respectful attention. Ironically, Wolfe left Scribners in anger because, he felt, Perkins had over-edited his material, which begins to suggest the delicacy, as well as the immensity, of Aswell’s editorial challenge. But the author’s early death (Wolfe was only 37) removed the complicating problems of authorial and editorial egos, and Wolfe, with Aswell’s help (or, if you prefer, Aswell, with Wolfe’s help) produced another masterwork (in my humble opinion) of modern American fiction. ©