BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A case for woked-ness.

Buzzing with Questions: The Inquisitive Mind of Charles Henry Turner. Title of a recently-published (2019) book for children.

‘Colonel’ John O’Fallon (1791-1865), a transplanted Kentuckian and nephew of William Clark, became a power in early St. Louis, an explorer who settled down to become a banker, merchant, and railway enthusiast. His name still litters the landscape (O’Fallon, MO, and O’Fallon, IL, confusingly) and some of his benefactions linger on, too, for instance in Washington University’s medical school. He’s not much remembered now, partly because he was a slaver and a trader in enslaved persons. It is one of my favorite local ironies, because another of the colonel’s gifts to the city, O’Fallon Park (at the city’s far northern tip), became the main research site for one of St. Louis’s leading scientists, the African-American entomologist Charles Henry Turner, born in Cincinnati on February 3, 1867. Turner’s educational achievements started when he was valedictorian at his (segregated) high school. He then won graduation honors at the University of Cincinnati (BS and MS, both in biology). After about a decade at Clark College, in Atlanta, he earned a University of Chicago PhD (magna cum laude, zoology, in 1907) but again found it difficult to land a good research post. So in 1908 Charles Henry Turner was hired to teach biology at (the all-black, segregated) Charles Sumner High School in St. Louis. And it was in 1908 that the city of St. Louis decided to make what remained of the O’Fallon estate into a 125-acre municipal park. Undeveloped where it was not underdeveloped, O’Fallon Park became an outdoor lab where Charles Henry Turner could continue his research into the behaviors of social insects. And it was pioneering stuff. Something in Turner’s background, his victories over America’s prevailing racism, made him doubt the then-orthodox view that bees and ants ran their complicated lives purely on instinct. Using sophisticated devices of his own design, Turner had already shown that bees could recognize (and learn from) patterns, that ants could communicate to other ants how to negotiate Turner’s mini-mazes. His O’Fallon Park work confirmed these observations and (as it were) conveyed the gift of cognitive development even to cockroaches and, much better, to Turner’s Sumner High School biology classes (from which he recruited his research assistants). Over the years, Dr. Charles Henry Turner of Sumner High School published over 70 papers in leading journals (three in Science) and, in 1910, was elected a member of the St. Louis Academy of Science. Recently, the redevelopment of O’Fallon Park has been an important (and expensive) issue in a still-segregated city. I would not be disappointed to see it renamed as Turner Park. Fair’s fair, and woke’s woke. ©

[Tripps]

Why "mushers" though? Is it connected with the Romany word - as in "from a mush in Shepherds Bush" as used in Steptoe and Son? I doubt it. More research needed.

I looked in my - "English Gipsies and Their Language" by Charles G Leland (Second Edition_ 1874.
Which of course is never far from hand, and found this

The Story of the Gypsy and the Bull which starts as below.
Yeckora there was Rommany chal who was a boro koorin' mush, a sorrelo mush, a boro-wasteni mush, werry toonery an hunnalo.
Translated
Once there was a gypsy who was a great fighting man, a strong man, a great boxer, very bold and fierce.

I rest my case. . . .

[Stanley]

An essential skill......

[Stanley]

Yeah, I get it, 'ya always sorta hope 'ya can get out, it keeps 'ya going--Ida Lupino as Marie in THE HIGH SIERRA.

People . . . pay out good money for their theatre tickets and they want something in return. They want realism. And you can't be realistic with the same glamorous mugs on the screen all the time. Ida Lupino, 1949.

When Ida Lupino died in August 1995, the New York Times obituary got a couple of things wrong, notably by offering only three brief comments on her career as a director. An apology of sorts came in December 1995, when the Times’ Sunday Magazine carried the short essay “Behind the Camera, a Feminist,” by Martin Scorsese. “I never met Ida Lupino, but I always wanted to,” Scorsese begins, and then writes of her creative powers as a director and producer. Ida Lupino was born into an English music hall family, albeit with an Irish mother (stage name ‘Emerald O’Shea’), on February 4, 1918. Her parents wanted her to aspire to higher things than comedy, song, and dance, and had her on stage (in their back garden) where she learned (by heart) several leading female roles in Shakespeare. Ida’s first roles (from age 13) were not so high-falutin’. But she performed memorably enough in British films to be ‘(re)discovered’ by a visiting Hollywooder. She was whisked to Tinseltown where Jack Warner told her that she’d be the next Bette Davis. That never happened, but Lupino played very well in several roles, notably opposite Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941). But she’d long wanted to write, to create, and this may have deepened the tensions between her and Jack Warner. Though on contract, Lupino refused to play opposite Ronald Reagan in Kings Row (1942), and finally she left Warner Bros. and struck out with her then husband Collier Young, to set up her own company, aiming to produce low budget ‘B’ films that addressed ‘serious’ issues. Serious they were, focusing generally on women’s vulnerabilities: unwanted pregnancies (Not Wanted, 1949), exploitative men (The Bigamist, 1953), even rape (Outrage, 1950). They called themselves “The Filmakers” [sic] and their work was remarkable enough to win the support of (and money from) Howard Hughes. Acting as producer and sometimes as director, Lupino was always aware of the deficits she began with as a female in the men’s worlds of camera work, production schedules, and casting, and got her way through discussion rather than dictation. Her Director’s Chair carried the legend “Mother of Us All.” After 1953 she did return to acting, but according to Scorsese her talents were best displayed in direction, often as visitor, in Hollywood features, TV specials, and the workaday world of television serials (e.g. Have Gun, Will Travel; Alfred Hitchcock Presents; even Gilligan’s Island). Vulnerable herself, Lupino (as actor or as director) portrayed vulnerable people in their extraordinary struggles through ordinary lives. ©

[Stanley]

It's an ersatz world.

I just want to say one word to you . . . just one word . . . are you listening? Plastics. Mr. McGuire to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967).

To young, just-married graduate students, this seemed the very best line in that prize-laden movie. It would have been even better, or at least more poetic, had the advice been given to young Ben by Mr. Robinson, he who was soon to be cuckolded by Ben. Not only did Ben bed Mrs. Robinson, but he then stole away the Robinsons’ only daughter, Elaine. When the movie ends Ben and Elaine are (we knew) running off into a world free of plastics and therefore real, genuine, honest, and natural. But wherever Mr. McGuire had got his insider knowledge, ‘plastics’ had by 1967 been around for quite some time. The first hot tip about plastics was delivered on February 5, 1907, in the form of a public lecture at an American Chemical Society conference. The speaker was Leo Baekeland (1863-1944), and he had just invented Bakelite®, the world’s first commercially viable plastic. He took out his US Patent on the stuff later that year, and waxed prosperous on it, but then inventing things and making money on them was already Baekeland’s modus vivendi. Born in Flemish-speaking Belgium, he was something of a prodigy as a youth, always messing about with chemicals. He gained his PhD (in chemistry) at age 21, and soon (1889) moved with his Flemish wife (maiden name ‘Swarts’) to the USA, where people knew how to make money out of things. Baekeland fit right in, first with a new process for developing photographs, which he sold to Eastman Kodak for a small fortune. He used the money to set up his own laboratory, in a Dutch revival mansion at Yonkers, NY, which was large enough to serve, also, as the family’s home. There he dabbled enough in electrochemistry to play important roles in inventing a new battery and setting up what was then the world’s largest electrochemistry plant (at Niagara Falls). Baekeland soon interested himself in the profitable potential of artificial resins. His first one resulted in a synthetic shellac, none too successful, but then came “Bakelite.” That sounds a bit like his surname and is surely easier on the tongue than polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, its proper name. Keenly aware of what he’d wrought, he didn’t sell off Bakelite but formed his own companies (three of them, apparently) and became genuinely rich and a cultural icon in his own right, American citizen in 1919 and making the cover of Time magazine in 1922. I doubt that ‘Mr. McGuire’ knew anything at all about Baekeland, but in 1972, when plastics manufacturers finally got together to create the Plastics Hall of Fame (!!) they quite rightly inducted Leo Baekeland into it, albeit posthumously. I suspect that ‘Ben Braddock’ has yet to be inducted. He found other fish to fry. ©.

[Stanley]

On the keeping of rabbits

For a dozen weary years the invalid daily faced her office work. She did not leave affairs to her favourites or even wholly to her Ministers . . . . she slaved at many details of government. And the ideas that inspired her were those of moderation, good sense and humanity, for which the Stuart line had not always been conspicuous. G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne, 1930.

The nearly universal success of The Favourite (2018) was measured by the film’s award nominations, by critics’ responses (initial and retrospective), and by the production’s profit margins. But the debate over its historical accuracy was pointless. The film’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos, regarded history as make-believe, and he let his lead actors know that they need not brush up on the troubled politics of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-1714). The plot’s real-history origins lay in a screenplay submitted for a creative writing MA (1998) at the University of East Anglia by a (then) underemployed TV journalist, Deborah Davis. She was fascinated by the “fun and fury” of feminine relationships, and she found both in the court intrigues of Queen Anne, Sarah Churchill (Duchess of Marlborough), and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Masham. Since The Favourite, Davis and Lanthimos extended their search for female “fun and fury” to Louis XVI’s guillotined queen. Their streaming series Marie Antoinette discovered in Marie a “modern and progressive woman who gave today’s women the opportunity to be who they are.” That is very new news, and the Disney-Canal series ran for only four episodes. As for the ‘real’ Queen Anne, the historical one born in St, James’s Palace, Westminster, on February 6, 1665, her short life (she died at 49) was also short on fun, though not without fury. Her royal parentage (her father was the Duke of York, brother to and successor of King Charles II), put her in the Stuart line of succession, but for a girl child accession to a ruling throne could only happen by circumstance, in her case a revolution that overthrew her Catholic father, then the childless marriage of her elder sister Mary, and the accidental death (thanks to a mole-hole) of her brother-in-law William. Anne was all too aware of this problem, and sought to solve it through (at least) 18 pregnancies. Almost all resulted in stillbirths, and so she came into queenship unable to offer an heir. Her very real politics (in court, in parliament, and in country) were dominated by that fact, by the still-unsettled issues that had ended her father’s reign, and by European wars. In all this Sarah Churchill was a very big player. Anne would enrich and empower Sarah. Sarah would be, late in Anne’s reign, displaced by her cousin Abigail. And all three of them would be the subjects of clever, sometimes vicious satire. But the plots were political, not single-sexual. Queen Anne aimed to preserve a Protestant succession, and if she failed to do that through her pregnancies, she was a success at politics. And rabbits had nothing to do with it. ©.

[Stanley]

The problems of perfection.

For we think back through our mothers if we are women. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).

Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical reflection had its immediate origin in papers she delivered in 1928 at Newnham and Girton, Cambridge’s oldest women’s colleges. Woolf was then 36, old enough and famous enough to be invited. Married to Leonard Woolf and herself a leading spirit of the spirited ‘Bloomsbury Group,’ Virginia Woolf had published several books (novels and introspections), and had a better claim than most to inhabit a ‘new’ womanhood. She may have hoped to advise the Girton and Newnham ladies on acquiring the power to find and keep a room of their own, but whether she ever liberated herself remains a disputed question. Among the obstacles in her path was her own mother, Julia Stephen, the nearly perfect wife of Leslie Stephen. Julia birthed and mothered four Stephen children, brought in three of her own from her previous marriage to Herbert Duckworth, and step-mothered Leslie’s handicapped daughter Laura. So Julia was also a nearly perfect mother, shepherding a tribe of siblings and half-siblings into adulthood. Her perfections proved a big part of Virginia’s liberation problem. Julia Stephen was born Julia Prinsep Jackson in Calcutta, India, on February 7, 1846. Her mother and aunts were famed for their beauties, and Julia followed them in this respect. Back in England (from 1848) the family celebrated beauty with the help of pioneer photographers and pre-Raphaelite painters, and Julia as a girl and then as a young woman modeled for them. Her charms and her family connections made her a desirable marriage prospect, and she wed Herbert Duckworth in 1867. It was, Julia thought, a perfect union, and Duckworth’s early death (in 1870) consecrated it. So she went into her second marriage (in 1878) to Leslie Stephen with a burden to prove, and became again a paragon of domestic perfection, beautiful to see and to contemplate. But neither she nor her second husband believed that a female could (or should) wish for any other pedestal, and so her daughters (Vanessa and Virginia) were to be brought up in that mold, very well educated, but at home (while their brothers went off to Cambridge); sophisticated, but domestic; spirited but trained to find their true being in marriage and motherhood. They were in their minds as free as butterflies but as human persons free to do only that which was good, just, honest—and ‘Victorian.’ Julia Stephen died when her Virginia was only 13, but that proved time enough for the girl-child to create an impossible paradox for the grown woman. With the ideal Julia in mind, could Virginia ever inhabit a room of her own? ©

[Stanley]

"A HANDBAG!!!???" Edith Evans as Lady Augusta Bracknell.

God was very good to me. He never let me go on tour. Dame Edith Evans.

I first became aware of the honorific rank of “dame” (“Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire”) in conjunction with Dame Edith Evans, who received the honor from King George VI in 1946. A little later than that, I would see her in several films, but her whole career centered on the stage, specifically the theatres of London’s West End, and she had indeed avoided the hard labor of the touring company, facing thinnish houses in dampish afternoon matinées in Southport. After a brief run in an amateur company, she so impressed her audiences that she vaulted into the West End, and before she’d hit her 30s she was having roles written for her by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and was credited with having made definitive performances of several Shakespearean roles, notably Beatrice (in Much Ado About Nothing) and Katherina (The Taming of the Shrew). In 1918, aged 30, she did go on tour, but it was by invitation, not necessity, and the company was led by none other than Ellen Terry. Edith Mary Evans was born on February 8, 1888, in London, the only surviving child of a minor civil servant. Edith went to a local Church of England school, left it to take up an apprenticeship as a milliner. And that might have been that, except that Edith found herself making too many mistakes with hats. So she took evening classes in drama, did well enough to join an amateur company. It was not one of strolling players, but it did tour as far as Cambridge, where Edith’s performances won her a year’s contract (£2 14s weekly) in a West End theatre. Better yet, her Cambridge roles won her the patronage of the novelist-playwright George Moore. George Bernard Shaw was not far behind, and by the 1920s Edith Evans was a headliner. She stayed there until her death, aged 88, in 1976, only a few months after her last public performance. Late in life, she’d begun to ‘tour’ as a one-woman show, offering poetry readings in her distinctive voice. In early 1976, on BBC Radio’s With Great Pleasure, a program where the star of the evening reads from their favorite literary works, Edith Evans finished with a poem by her friend Ronald Church, CBE, a reflection upon mortality and time. Church’s poem ends:
Perhaps it is not much
After life’s labour,
That summoning touch
Of Death, our neighbour.
Edith Evans died a few months later, at her home, ‘The Gatehouse.’ She left the bulk of her considerable estate to the Actors’ Charitable Trust, and so continued her many gifts to English theatre. ©

[Stanley]

A chip off the old block?

Nothing is so laborsaving as a vote, properly applied. Laura Clay.

Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903) is well-known to historians as a Kentucky planter who (while a student at Yale) was converted to abolitionism by none other than William Lloyd Garrison. Cassius’s Kentucky cousinage included Senator Henry Clay and many other prominent politician-planters. So Cassius’s anti-slavery activities made him newsworthy and, in 1863, brought him an appointment as ambassador to Russia. There he was instrumental in keeping Russia neutral in the US Civil War, perhaps by cultivating Tsar Alexander II’s anti-feudal sympathies. Meanwhile, Clay married and fathered a passel of children, including four daughters who, grown to adulthood, proved just as ornery as Cassius. Each expressed her reforming zeal in her own way, but all shared in common a revulsion at Cassius’s womanizing, his extra-marital liaisons, and his abandonment of their mother, his wife, the redoubtable Mary Jane Warfield Clay (1815-1900). The youngest of the daughters, Laura Clay, was born at the Clay plantation, “White Hall,” on February 9, 1849. An avid reader, she early noticed that she was as smart as most boys she knew, including her brothers, data that became conviction through her own education at local girls’ schools and the (coed) University of Michigan. Meanwhile, Laura also noticed how her father treated her mother, sharply aware after their divorce in 1878. Lucy Warfield, who’d managed Clay’s business affairs while he was off cultivating Abe Lincoln and the Republican party, was left destitute by the divorce. Proud of her own accomplishments and mad as hell, Lucy led her daughters, especially Laura, into the ranks of Kentucky suffragists, aiming not only at the right to vote, but the right to be free citizens, to buy and sell and profit in their own name, to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Just as there had been few abolitionists in Kentucky there weren’t many feminist crusaders. But Laura made up for the thinness of her ranks through ceaseless energy in Kentucky and beyond, chairing the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) and then holding several different offices in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In NAWSA, Laura Clay used her ‘southern’ identity to support the racist idea that (white) woman suffrage would help to keep blacks (both men and women) in segregated subjection, and this helped make her, in turn, a maverick who opposed a national constitutional amendment which, necessarily, would include black females gaining a right to vote. It’s tempting to speculate that this racially-charged “states’ rights” position was yet another form of rebellion against her philandering father. ©

[Stanley]

Flying the flag.

Der er et yndigt land. (‘There is a lovely country’): first line of the Danish national anthem.

My wife Paulette is 100%+ Danish, her parents third-generation Danish-Americans who grew up in a small Iowa town that has, in its municipal park, a copy of Copenhagen’s “Little Mermaid” bronze, memorializing Danish story-teller and cultural hero Hans Christian Andersen. But Paulette’s Danish ancestors did not come from Copenhagen, nor from Andersen’s home island of Funen, but further west still. They were Jutlanders, continentally speaking Europeans as well as Danes. Paulette’s mother’s folks hailed from South Jutland, and in 1977 and 1979 we visited several of them (including a still-living first cousin of Paulette’s grandmother) on their farms near the town of Tønder, with a side trip to the port of Sønderborg, whence Paulette’s great-grandfather had sailed as a seaman in the China trade and then, latterly, packed into an emigrant ship to the USA. The younger generations spoke English, and so we had many interesting conversations. One of my questions was about Danish patriotism, because the further south one traveled on the Jutland peninsula, the more one saw the Danish flag, often in urban front yards but fluttering above nearly every farmstead in the region. I naively asked whether this came from the German invasion of 1940, but it dated from the plebiscites of 1920 when the people of the whole region were asked whether they wished to be German or Danish. In a sense they had already answered that question, in the language each family spoke at home. And prior to the plebiscites enthusiasts (of both sides) had traveled the region (many on bicycles) seeking to heighten ‘national’ consciousness of one sort—or the other. But there were confusions, and before the plebiscites, people flew flags to identify themselves. And the Danes among them never lost the habit (although one suspects it flagged a bit in 1940). Plebiscite I took place on February 10, 1920, and resulted in a 75% Danish landslide. Tønder town went narrowly German, as did Sønderborg, but the electoral rules (votes were counted by ‘county’) meant that both towns became Danish. But Paulette’s ancestors had already voted with their feet, fleeing Schleswig after the Prusso-Danish War (1864) to become “Danish-Americans” in Iowa. There, in Kimballton and Elk Horn, they still fly that red flag with its Nordic cross. In Kimballton, elders worshipped in Danish until 1966. And in 1979, just outside of Tønder, at one of the farms we visited, we met a girl from German Flensburg, just across the border. Flensburg had voted German in Plebiscite II, and she’d been sent north by her Danish-speaking family to learn how to ‘be’ Danish. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as they say in Alsace-Lorraine.©

[Stanley]

On the unity of the human species,

The term ‘race’ should be used without any involved meaning that such a progeny or stock has always possessed a particular character. James Cowles Prichard, 1843.

Whether colonists or imperialists, early modern Europeans saw the ‘new’ peoples of the wider world as different. History had trained them to make this distinction. In the British isles the Anglo-Saxons warred against the Celts. Pushing the indigenes out to a “Celtic fringe,” the invaders called the natives “uncivilized”: lesser beings. And the Spanish ‘reconquest’ of Iberia was seen as a ‘civilizing’ conflict: Europeans vs. Moors, Christians vs. infidels. It was also a matter of superior vs. inferior, but we should not see it as “racism.” Rather those who first pondered the matter were more likely to see human differences as circumstantial: historical or environmental, not essential. Modern racism, in all its ugliness, was indubitably ‘modern,’ and the 19th century was its heyday, reinforced by the persistence of racial slavery in the Americas and by economic imperialism almost everywhere else. Theologians read into their Bibles that Africans were the sons of Ham and thus under the Noachian curse of servitude. Many scientists were becoming religious skeptics, but in pondering the origin of species they traduced Darwin’s evolutionary theory to find humankind a plural category. Among its different species (or even social ‘classes’) only the fittest could conquer, for they had conquered: quod erat demonstrandum. Not too many stood against this QED orthodoxy. Charles Darwin was one, although even he had his doubts. One much more certain than Darwin in his view that all humans were sui generis was the physician and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard, born on February 11, 1786 in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, the product of an Anglo-Welsh marriage. So it was 'mixed'; but a unifying factor was that both parents were devout Quakers. So James, who wanted to be a doctor, had to take his MD at Edinburgh (the English universities barred non-Anglicans), where his thesis (1808) was all about human ‘races’. He accepted variations as obvious, but argued for an essential unity in mind and spirit. In part his reasoning was ‘scientific,’ observational and experimental (what else could it be at Edinburgh?), but in large part it was moral and religious. Perhaps it originated with the Quaker belief in a universal “Inner Light,” which Prichard carried with him into the evangelical “Low Church” wing of the Church of England (and into the Aborigines’ Protection Society). Perhaps it followed his studies in the evolution of human languages, in which he found common genealogies and common origins. Or maybe in his lucky guess that all humanity shared an African origin. He also pioneered in taking a humane view of insanity, its causes, and its consequences.. Wherever it originated, his Natural History of Man (1843) stands out as a beacon of light in a gloomy landscape. ©

[Stanley]

Shakespeare and salted fish.

We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself. Harold Bloom, in Falstaff: Give me Life. (2017).

The Battle of Rouvray took place on February 12, 1429. It was a late gasp of the Hundred Years War between “England” and “France.” I put them in quotation marks because, in 1429, it was not yet entirely clear that there was an England, or for that matter a France. The “English” kings (the ones who held court at Windsor or Westminster or, sometimes, Winchester) still claimed much of “France”, and for its part “France” was still a congeries of kingdoms and principalities. For that matter, it’s not clear where, exactly, the battle was fought, for there are two Rouvrays, Rouvray-St. Denis and Rouvray-Ste. Croix, about 30 kilometers apart. So the engagement is sometimes called The Battle of the Herrings, because the “English” force was a supply train sent to Orléans, whose “French” garrison was being besieged by the “English.” And among the supplies were great barrels of salted herrings as well other foodstuffs and, of course, weaponry. Whatever we call the battle, it was of some importance. Tactically, it’s of some interest that the English ‘circled the wagons’ as their initial defensive maneuver, thus creating an ersatz castle. The battle also saw the early use of cannons (by the French). It included a Scottish force (about 400 infantrymen), supporting the French, of course. It was won by the English archers (or, possibly, lost through French cowardice). It helped to prolong the siege of Orléans, one of the classic sieges of medieval military history. Thus it allowed the Hundred Years War to limp on for another couple of decades. But what strikes me about the battle is its cast of leading characters, not the fish. The small Scots force (cut to pieces when the French cavalry abandoned its charge) was led by a Stewart of Darnley, and in the next century Stewart (or ‘Stuart’) and Darnley would be names to conjure with in both Scotland and England. More dramatically, the defeat at whichever Rouvray it was roused a young woman to take up arms and armor, to berate the cowardice of men, and (soon) to enter history as the martyred Ste. Jeanne d’Arc. What I most like about the cast is the appearance, in command of the English wagon train, of a different ‘hero,’ none other than Sir John Falstoff (1380-1459). The real Sir John Folstoff was an significant character in himself, an improving landlord with extensive estates in England and in France (and thus a knight with fish to fry in the Hundred Years’ War). Over a century later, he would achieve literary immortality as Will Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the blowhard who cried in his beer and lived in his dreams. And, never mind Folstoff’s salted fish; Falstaff is the one to remember. ©.

[Stanley]

Suffragist and scientist.

It must be possible to command a team of skilled labor . . . There must be expertise in many languages. There must be someone in charge. Isabella Leitch, 1959.

Dr. Leitch made this observation in a paper on the importance of ‘critical reviews’ in the development of the biological sciences. At 79, she knew whereof she spoke, and because of her expertise she had been invited to speak on the subject at a conference of the US National Academy of Sciences. Being “in charge” had long been part of her problem. Isabella Leitch was born on February 13, 1890, in a village on the Moray Firth in far northeastern Scotland. Her father would very soon resign his job as postmaster rather than deliver telegrams on the Sabbath, but he also felt that his six daughters needed to be well-educated in order to stand on their own two feet. So Isabella was well-prepared when she went to Aberdeen University. There she graduated, with honors, in math and natural sciences (1911), and then in zoology (1914). Along the way she kept up in several other disciplines, including Latin, economics, philosophy, and embryology. Hers was a very fine academic record, but Scottish universities had only begun to admit women in 1892, and the jobs market hadn’t yet caught up. The Carnegie Trust thought better of her, and got her an assistant’s post in the Copenhagen lab of August Krogh, where she soon became a Fellow and contributed to the work that won Krogh a Nobel prize (physiology) in 1920. It was partly in recognition of her work for Krogh that Aberdeen awarded her a DSc in 1919. But she was still a she, and a single parent, and could only find work as a librarian at the Rowett Research Institute. There Isabella’s other talents attracted notice, and won her several lab jobs and then an appointment as the personal assistant of John Boyd Orr, the director of the Rowett. Orr would in 1949 win the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his long crusades, scientific and political, to spread better nutrition to the whole human family. Isabella Leitch’s work as a scientific reviewer is now seen as vital to Orr’s work, and to the Rowett Institute. Helped by her literacies (eventually in 11 languages—and in statistics), her ability to synthesize research findings in different fields and suggest new departures would make her Director of the Rowett’s Bureau of Animal Nutrition. In her spare time, she did do her own research, but it was as a reviewer that she became that “someone in charge.” She retired from her directorship in 1949, the year of Orr’s Peace Prize and of her own OBE. Her last book came when she was 86. She then moved to Australia and into the care of her daughter. When her grandson went to medical school (obstetrics) in Australia one of his textbooks was Isabella Leitch’s The Physiology of Pregnancy (1964). ©.

[Stanley]

Valentine's Day heroine.

Then half of Tragedy is dead. David Garrick, 1766, on hearing of the death of Susannah Cibber.

Susannah Cibber, née Arne, was born in London on February 14, 1714. She would become one of the city’s most famed, best loved, presences: “the daughter of Nature in Perfection” according to one admirer. Her career had two perfect peaks, partnering on stage with David Garrick and before that a favorite singer of George Frederick Handel. It’s not recorded whether she attached significance to her birth date, St. Valentine’s Day. Perhaps. She and her Arne siblings (including the composer Thomas Arne) were raised Catholics, so they probably knew of the early Roman martyr Valentinus, but it is more certain that their religion brought them into close contact with London’s artistic community. And soon all of London knew that Susannah was a woman unlucky in love. In 1734, already a talented, beautiful singer, she married into a famous theatrical family. Although she learned much stagecraft from her father-in-law Colley Cibber, her husband Theophilus Cibber proved to be a skunk of the smelliest sort, an abuser who was (nevertheless) happy to live off her growing fame and to use her earnings for his own benefit. Once, Theophilus went so far as to sell Susannah’s sexual favors. This proved his undoing and her salvation, for the buyer, William Soper (1707-1789), became Susannah’s true Valentine, and into the bargain rich enough (his landowner father was an MP, and William would become one in the 1750s) to set her up in her own household. When Theophilus Cibber sued Soper (for Theophilus’s loss of earnings!!) the jury agreed that he had a point (what else could it do?) but awarded him only a derisory £10. London must have laughed, and London made a heroine of Susannah Cibber as she moved from singing roles created for her by Handel to playing opposite David Garrick. Once she almost joined Garrick as business partner (at the Drury Lane theatre). She played many parts. One of her first with Garrick was as Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera. But her talents and her life story were better deployed in classic tragedies: as Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia. Real tragedy intervened when her son Charles Sloper died, aged 8. Susannah was then playing Constance, in King John. Her on-stage scream, on discovering the body of Constance’s son Prince Arthur would “never be forgotten by those who heard it.” Susannah Cibber died a year too soon to celebrate her daughter Molly Sloper’s real wedding to an actual gentleman. Molly’s father, William Sloper, faithful lover to the end, gave Molly away, in the parish church on his Berkshire estate. It was not on Valentine’s Day. ©.

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Memory and identity.

Q: Why is the USA better than Canada? A: Because it has nicer neighbors.

Today is “National Flag of Canada Day.” It commemorates the official ceremony, on February 15, 1965, when the Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson (Ontario), and the Speaker of the Canadian Senate, Maurice Bourget (Quebec) and many other dignitaries proclaimed the “Maple Leaf Flag” as Canada’s (new) national flag. Bourget said that, “beyond any doubt,” the flag represented “all the citizens of Canada without distinction of race, language, belief, or opinion.” To which generations of jokesters would respond, ‘well, of course.’ Canadians’ incapacity to offend (or to take offense) has become a staple of North American humor. “How do you get a Canadian to apologize?” “Step on their foot.” Just so, the maple leaf flag became joke fodder, so inoffensive as to be almost anonymous. And inoffensive enough not to be commemorated. It was not until 1996 that ‘Flag Day’ became an official national holiday, and even then (and, I think, still today) several other flags remain “official”, in the sense that they can be flown by this or that official or government body to represent the Canadian nation. The “Royal Union Flag,” stuffed as it is with symbolic reminders of Canada’s allegiance to the British Crown, is still displayed on several official holidays, and when King Charles III visits he will be greeted, everywhere, with the Royal Standard of Canada, yet another “official flag.” And even though each Canadian province is represented in the eleven points of the leaf on the Maple Leaf Flag, each province retains its own flag. Ontario’s does carry three small maple leaves (in gold!!) but they are outflanked and outsized by the Union Jack canton (the upper left corner). And the Québec flag shows no maples, nor any red either. Its four white fleur-de-lis rest on a defiantly blue (or should I say bleu?) field. And in those areas of the Maritime provinces where folk memories are long, Acadians fly the Acadian flag to remind themselves of their ancestors’ cruel exile. So it’s no surprise that Canadians themselves made deprecating (self-deprecating?) jokes about their new flag. I’ve just been rereading the great Welsh Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who couldn’t resist taking pot shots at the banner or the idea that it might represent a national culture. Even so, it has become steadily more evident that Canadians have reconciled themselves to the extremely inoffensive, and yet rather pleasing, Maple Leaf Flag. To which one can only say, ‘well, of course.’ They are Canadians; conciliation is what they do. QED. South of the border, we envy them for that, not to mention envying them their lovely public gardens, which still flourish in their too short summers. ©.

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Librarian, scholar, diarist.

Sir Walter Scott came at two o'clock and stayed about an hour with me. I had the pleasure of looking over with him a set of very curious and ancient chessmen brought to the museum this morning for sale by a dealer from Edinburgh. Frederic Madden’s diary entry for October 17, 1831.

So Frederic Madden described his first sight of the “Lewis Chessmen”, so-called because they had been unearthed on the Isle of Lewis. Madden immediately began his campaign to buy the set whole, badgered the dealer down from 100 to 80 guineas (£84), and browbeat the British Museum trustees into purchasing the set whole. The trustees did not resist for long, and by March 1832 the Lewis pieces had become a national property; and Madden was already at work on a scholarly study of the set and its origins, a study still regarded as standard. You have my permission to leave the study unread, but when you next visit the BM, you will find that resin copies Lewis chessmen are among the hottest sellers in the Museum’s gift shop. And if your touring budget is limited you can buy just one. I bought three, 50 years ago, and still enjoy looking at them. The originals were carved from walrus tusks, and remain priceless. But it turns out that Madden is almost as interesting a figure. Frederic Madden, eventually Sir Frederic, was born on February 16, 1801, the 11th child (of 13) of a captain in the Royal Marines. This was not a particularly promising start. His mother’s connections with Church of England clergy and his own precocity got him into Oxford, but not through it. Forced to work to make ends meet, he never graduated. But his marvelous work with old books and manuscripts made him employable, first in sorting out private collections (notably the Coke Mss. at Holkham Hall) and then undertaking the same tasks at the British Museum. There he worked feverishly and brilliantly at calendaring and collating, all the while hoping that his virtues would be rewarded with appointment as principal librarian. His hopes were always dashed, and he always took it personally. So we have not only mountains of his scholarship (linguistic and historic) but also an aromatic pile of his personal observations about the donkeys in charge of the BM. They survive in an extensive and intensive diary which (besides many wonderful examples of Victorian invective) offers insights into Madden’s private life. There he found pleasures of all sorts, some conventional and some not. Probably because of its unconventional bits, Madden directed the Bodleian to keep his diary sealed until 1920. Taking him in the altogether, his bibliographies, his translations, his scholarship, his disappointments, and his pleasures, Sir Frederic Madden reminds us that librarians are very often the most interesting people one can find. Look for them amongst the books. ©.

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A revolutionary recipe.

When the pot boils, the scum will rise. Popular saying sometimes attributed to James Otis, Jr. but perhaps of biblical origin (see Ezekiel 24: 1-12.)

In 1777, gentleman James Madison, future president and architect of the surprisingly conservative US constitution, lost his seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses to a tavern keeper. This gave Madison a bit of a shock and may have set him on to the problem of how to preserve elite rule in a democratic republic. And there’s no doubt that a general tendency to upwards social mobility can bring ‘scum’ to the top. Many cookbooks say as much. And even before Madison’s untoward loss, in Boston, in 1776, James Otis, Jr., a hero of the early resistance, began to have doubts about independence and revolution: “When the pot boils, the scum will rise,” he is reported to have said. It was already a widely used cliché, and was descriptive of a real phenomenon in early America, witness the rough edges of one or two (or more) members of the colonial elites. As long as we remember that some scum made themselves into interesting people (Ben Franklin was a little scummy in his origins), it's useful for understanding some aspects of the American Revolution. For instance, James Otis might have been talking about John Sullivan, born in neighboring New Hampshire on February 17, 1740, and even as Otis issued his warning already risen to the rank of general in the rag-tag and bobtail army besieging the British in Boston. Before that, this son of Irish Catholic immigrants (who had prudently converted to Protestantism) had risen rapidly in New Hampshire. He apprenticed to a prominent lawyer, then became the only lawyer in town in a frontier region where his high fees and arrogance caused complaint but his effectiveness drew clients. First, Sullivan attached himself to the royalist Wentworth clan, wangling an appointment in the colony militia, but as the imperial crisis heated up, he switched sides. His revolutionary career as general and politician saw some successes, some failures, and more controversy. His bad manners and short temper wore thin on many revolutionary gentlemen, not least on George Washington, but like a bad penny or pot scum (his biographer has called him “ethically obtuse”) Sullivan kept turning up—and rising up. An early supporter of a stronger national government and still a local hero, he was appointed by President Washington (in 1789) as federal judge in New Hampshire, doubtless with misgivings. But Washington needn’t have worried. Sullivan’s alcoholic benders kept him from doing much work (or for that matter much damage) as a judge. He rarely presided in court, and his life-time appointment was made safe by his early death in January 1795. ©

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Poet Laureate of the State of New York, 1991-1997.

I am defined as other in every group I'm part of . . . Yet without community there is no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression. Audre Lorde, in The Cancer Journals (1997).

Audre Lorde collected her othernesses (plural) almost fanatically, reminding me of people I’ve known who clog their houses with horse brasses or carriage clocks or owl statuettes. It can be a killing eccentricity. Yet in each case, in every one of her othernesses, Lorde always found community. Where there wasn’t one already, she made one up. So during her years (1984-1992) as visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, she found enough people who were enough like her to identify with them as a new community of “Afro-Germans,” a term she is said to have coined. Audre Lorde was born (as ‘Audrey’ Lorde) in New York City on February 18, 1934, and began almost immediately to discover things that made her an ‘other.’ Not least, she was the blackest child in a mixed race Afro-Caribbean family, living in African-American Harlem, a poor, racially-defined community in which her parents carved prosperity out of their real estate business. Her mother, perhaps the “whitest” member of the family, disapproved of darker skins, including little Audrey’s. Her sense of otherness was strengthened by her acute nearsightedness and her shyness, both of which (aged 12) she began to negotiate through poetry. Even at this age her poetry was odd enough to make her an outsider, an even more so when, during her year abroad study (in Mexico City, 1954) she came to grips with her lesbian self. She returned to Hunter College as a student, where she performed well enough to become a leading academic and published enough to be recognized, nationally, as a poet of promise. But it was not until 1976 that she found a publishing home (W. W. Norton) and a distinctive way to communicate her “other” selves as (in her own words) “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Norton published Coal in 1976. In the same year, a smaller press put out Between Our Selves, an even more revelatory title. Then, only two years later, in 1978, Audre Lorde discovered yet another “other self”, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Typically, she wrote about her cancer and its individuality, but also about how, through it, she found another community, the community of cancer survivors. She lived with that special identity for another 19 years, writing poetry, making films, holding important professorial chairs. Audre Lorde died of her cancer identity in 1997. But if ever you are experiencing trouble understanding how human communities gain strength and unity through their diversities, I recommend that you consider the several lives and the many works of the very singular Audre Lorde. ©.

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"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence." Justice Potter Stewart.

I know it when I see it. US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition (1964) of “obscenity.”

American law, as an aging former president is now finding out, tends to reflect majority opinion on ‘moral’ issues, for instance sexual harassment and business fraud. But when you analyze any ‘majority opinion’ you begin to realize that its criteria are neither clear nor universal. This is evident in recent censorship cases involving school libraries in such outposts of the higher civilization as Iowa and Florida. “I know it when I see it” is still the standard. It all reminds me of E. B. White’s comic comment, “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Or as Lucretius put it, in the first century BCE, “quod ali cibus est aliis fuat acre venenum.” (‘what is food to one man may be bitter poison to others’). So our obscenity laws (and there have been quite a few of them) have had short shelf lives. And, should any of the Iowa or Florida cases ever reach the US Supreme Court, I predict entertaining arguments, fascinating evidence, fuzzy judgments, and very few (if any) book burnings. This can be illustrated by the short and inglorious history of the Georgia Literature Commission, a small body called into being by state legislative enactment on February 19, 1953. It was to examine books (and, later, magazines) to find matter (words, plots, pictures) “offensive to chastity or modesty . . . presenting to the mind or view something that purity and decency forbids to be exposed.” Not at all clear to me, and made less clear because the Literature Commission had only the power to read this stuff and then work with publishers and retailers to impede its circulation in the sovereign state of Georgia. So it should not surprise us that the Commission had a spotty record. Among the few books it tried to ban were Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Alan Marshall’s Sin Whisper. In order these were a comic exposé of rural life, a modern classic about adolescent truth and adult hypocrisy, and a trashy effort to titillate teenagers. The Literature Commission failed (even in Georgia) to keep Caldwell and Salinger at bay, and its more successful effort to remove Sin Whisper ended in failure at the US Supreme Court, which overturned the Georgia ban. The SCOTUS opinion was so brief as to be called a dismissal. In 1973 the crusading Georgia governor James Earl Carter used his zero-sum budgeting to determine that the Literature Commission, however worthy its morals, was a total waste of public money. And as is well known, Jimmy Carter had his own definitions of obscenity. You can read his views on this very private matter in the November 1976 issue of Playboy magazine. Ironically, Playboy had been one of the Commission’s early targets. ©.

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Artistic midwifery.

We want to create an atmosphere in which creation is possible. Dame Marie Rambert.

The Red Shoes (1948) is reckoned to be among the best-ever British films, a Powell-Pressburger masterpiece based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story. Like the best fairytales, Andersen’s has its grisly bits. The film’s plot honors these with a dancer’s (the role played by Moira Shearer) tragic death and the possibly demonic power of her (red) shoes. You can see the film online, with ads or (on YouTube) without. If you do, keep your eye out for the ballerina Marie Rambert. She plays herself, in a scene set in a film studio replica of Rambert’s dance school at the old Mercury Theatre. By 1948, the Mercury had been repurposed, and Rambert herself had moved on to establish her ‘Ballet Rambert’ as an independent entity. Rambert was then at the height of her fame, and some doubtless attended the film just to see her brief cameo. Marie Rambert was then already 60 years old, having been born, in Warsaw, on February 20, 1888. Her birthname was Cyvia Ramberg, her father a bookseller of assimilationist aims. Soon her paternal family adopted different surnames, she’d been involved in revolutionary plotting (against Russia and the Tsar) and had distinguished herself as a brilliant school student with an appetite for literature (in several languages) and a taste for dance. By 1907 she’d moved to Paris and had been baptized a Christian. Her baptismal name was ‘Cyvia Myriam’ but her friends called her ‘Mim.’ Her friends included the American dancer Isadora Duncan, and “Mim” attended a dance school run by Isadora’s brother Raymond. From there her career took off, and her learning curve steepened. Increasingly committed to classical ballet, she also, and necessarily, learned other styles and rhythms, not only from Raymond Duncan. She danced and instructed with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (including in his controversial Le sacré du printemps), and danced part-time in silent film theatres, filling in the dead times between reels. She even did eurythmics (as teacher and performer), some circus dancing, and performed in something called a ‘cubist’ ballet. The mind boggles. It was this broad range that made her fame, once she’d moved to Britain, changed her name to Marie Rambert, and established her reputation as an innovative teacher. Whether she also established herself as the queen mother of British ballet is another question, for across town at Sadlers Wells there was Ninette de Valois (1898-2001: birthname Edris Stannus), who would move on from prima performer to founder of the Royal Ballet. Perhaps to sidestep the issue, Marie Rambert called herself the ‘midwife’ of British ballet. She kept at that task until she died in 1982. ©

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The power of 'we, the people.'

My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. Barbara Jordan, July 24, 1974.

So spoke Barbara Jordan, Democratic representative from Houston, Texas, at a pivotal moment in US political history. Her speech was delivered at the impeachment inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee. It was a good speech, pithy and well short of the time allotted to committee members for their opening statement. But of course it was a good speech, for when she’d studied at Texas Southern University, she’d starred on the debate team that (on its way to a national championship) had beaten Brown and Yale. And Jordan knew her stuff. She graduated magna cum laude (1956) in History and Political Science and then won her law degree (1959) at Boston University. By the time Nixon’s crimes came to light, she’d become one of “We, the People,” a fully-fledged citizen empowered (by her election and by the Constitution) to sit in judgment on the crimes and misdemeanors of a president. Jordan had risen to this point through her own efforts, but also (as she acknowledged) through the normal, constitutional processes we now call the civil rights revolution: freedom of speech, the right to assemble and petition, legislation, judicial decision, and executive implementation. It had not always been that way, for Barbara Jordan was born black, in Texas, on February 21, 1936. Racial apartheid was well-entrenched in state and local law, and she attended segregated schools. She did brilliantly in school, but could not attend the state university at Austin, so she tore up the track at Texas Southern, instead. Not surprisingly, she took her legal education elsewhere, returning to Texas to practice in Houston, and in the midst of an already vigorous campaign to win equal civil rights for all citizens. Jordan surfed this wave to become (in 1966) the first black legislator in Texas since Reconstruction and then (1972) the first woman (of any skin shade) to represent a Texas constituency in the House of Representatives. In both venues she was an active legislator. She knew her stuff. She had good friends in high places (notably former president Lyndon Johnson), and so it was that Barbara Jordan, a freshwoman congressperson, won her seat on Judiciary. She would make better speeches, she would be considered as a vice-presidential and even supreme court nominee. And this while she was under care for multiple sclerosis, first diagnosed in 1973. A strong woman, made stronger by the care of her life partner Nancy Earl, Jordan lived an influential public life up to her death in 1996. She then became the first African-American to take up a residency in the Texas State Cemetery. Her grave is not far from that of Stephen Austin, the man who had led the movement to make Texas safe for racial slavery. ©

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'To take my work seriously would be the height of folly.'

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment, the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring. Edward Gorey.

Edward St. John Gorey’s unusual life began, oddly enough, with his birth, in Chicago, on February 22, 1925. There was little in his background that would foretell his fate (which was to become one of the oddest and most gifted of illustrators). A Victorian great aunt had designed some calling cards, but it’s unlikely that he learned his art from her, or from her cards. Indeed it’s rather unlikely that he learned his art from any particular source, although he did confess to having taken a short course at the Chicago Art Institute in 1943. This was just before he enlisted in the US Army. His military career was short and involved no foreign adventures, even though there was a “World War” going on, and afterwards he entered Harvard. There Gorey roomed with Frank O’Hara, who was already busy at becoming a poet and intellectual gadfly. Probably through O’Hara, Gorey met several other Harvard-Radcliffe literary types, some of them, like Alison Lurie, of a comic turn of mind. They certainly had more influence on Gorey than had his old schoolmates in Wilmette, IL, who included Charlton Heston, unless you define ‘influence’ as repulsion, for Gorey qualifies as more un-Heston than most. After graduation, Gorey participated with Lurie, O’Hara, and others in forming Cambridge’s Poets Theater. It soon burned to the ground, but when 25 years later it rose from the ashes Edward Gorey was there to help celebrate the resurrection and, of course, to make a drawing of it. That was fitting for, however it had happened, he had become an illustrator of note and merit. Early on, he illustrated other people’s books: dead people like Dickens, but publishers soon asked him to do new books, covers at first but, increasingly, drawings to ‘illustrate’ the texts. His drawings are immediately recognizable but hard to define. ‘Minimalist Gothic’ is about as close as I can come, except that there can be no such thing as gothic minimalism. Some have made Gorey to be the American version of Edward Lear (1812-1888), the English founder of what we might call the nonsenseschool of illustration, which makes some (non)sense especially when we consider Gorey’s drawing “Scrap Irony”. He also enjoyed playing around with his name, so several of his books (he became a writer, too) are credited to anagram-Goreys: e.g. Ogdred Weary, Dogear Wryde, and (Mrs.) Regera Dowdy. The last might raise the ghost of that Victorian great aunt, but the anagrammatic possibilities are almost endless, and it’s said that Gorey did it dozens of times. I recommend him for your enjoyment. ©.

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A diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . So, wed with truth. I dwell above the Veil. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Soul of Black Folk (1903).

In January 2016, the New York Times ran a story, “Arthur Miller in Brooklyn.” Miller had been born in Harlem, but as a kid had visited his cousins in their (comparatively) green spaces across the river. Then, in his teens, Miller’s family moved to Brooklyn. He went to high school there, and after graduating from the University of Michigan returned to the borough of his dreams. By then he'd seen some of its cruelties, too. His first hit, All My Sons (1947), and his masterwork, Death of a Salesman (1949), are both set in Brooklyn. With the profits from the first and aboil with ideas for the second, Miller bought a large 4-story at 31 Grace Court, renting the bottom two floors out to a bank president. It was a posh neighborhood, not too far from the site of one of Washington’s greatest defeats, just down the street from Grace Church, and with literary connections (it had or would house Norman Mailer, W. H. Auden, and Truman Capote). But a different fame beckoned Miller (he had just met and would later marry Monroe), and (according to the Times) Miller had wearied of being a landlord. So in 1955 he sold Grace Court. By my measure it was one of the most important real estate transactions in American cultural history, for the buyer was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois,then 87, was born in Great Barrington, MA, on February 23, 1868, and in 1955 was better-known than Miller, but they had much in common. They’d both run afoul of the McCarthyite anti-communist crusade, and the US government had confiscated Du Bois’ passport, so Du Bois needed somewhere to live while he pursued his appeals, for he had already decided to leave a country whose vital statistics he had long probed with surgical accuracy and moral rage. Du Bois wouldn’t become a communist until 1961, by which time he’d moved to Ghana as a step-father of African independence (and friend of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president). But truth and fact were not important to our “unAmerican” congressional committees, and it was enough that Du Bois had written classic studies of American racism and its chief victims, those of African descent. His many masterpieces included The Souls of Black Folk (1903), The Negro (1915), and Black Reconstruction in America (1935), and to these scholarly sins Du Bois had added many political contributions, not least as founder of the NAACP (1910). So he and Miller had much in common, and one hopes that Miller offered Du Bois a good price for the house at 31 Grace Court. It would be fitting to visit it on Grace Church’s ‘feast day’ for W. E. B. Dubois, which according to the Episcopal Calendar is August 3. ©

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Hans Christian Andersen didn't like it.

"Peer Gynt" progresses slowly, and there is no possibility of having it finished by autumn. It is a terribly unmanageable subject. Edvard Grieg, 1874.

Edvard Grieg had been asked to compose the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and one can imagine Grieg’s problem. The play is episodic in the extreme, comprising no fewer than 40 scenes which follow its eponymous hero from Norway’s fjords to North Africa and then back. Besides its fast and loose geography, Peer Gynt moves from reality into fantasy, from Peer’s conscious to his unconscious mind, and from Gynt the blowhard and dreamer a Gynt who is (or can be) clear headed enough to be himself, How do you write music for that? Not easily, was Grieg’s answer, and his composition would contain 26 separate movements: some more separate than others. His two “Peer Gynt Suites” (which would become common concert fare) were drawn from only eight of the original pieces. But the play was the thing, for though Ibsen finished Peer Gynt in 1867 (and had then had it published in book form) it was not performed, anywhere, until its premiere in Christiana (now Oslo) on February 24, 1876. Reaction was mixed. Norwegian nationalism was just then astir (independence would not come until 1905), and some cultural patriots praised it: including, predictably, Edvard Grieg. Perhaps more damned it for this or that failure, including the “unmanageable” problems Grieg first encountered. Ibsen himself had made quite a splash with his first play, but Peer Gynt was only his second and he was not yet seen as a pioneer genius of modern theater. That would come with later plays, notably A Doll’s House (1879); An Enemy of the People (1882); The Wild Duck (1884); and Hedda Gabler (1890), each of which is still frequently performed. I’ve seen them all, two of them twice, but never a single Peer Gynt. As Ibsen became better known outside of Scandinavia, Peer Gynt would be translated (first into German, 1881, and then English, 1886) and, somewhat later, performed. But it remains difficult to perform on stage, pretty much for the same reasons that Edvard Grieg found so frustrating. And it is for these reasons that the play is now seen by many critics as “cinematic” and thus more suited to (and in that sense predictive of) the freedoms of film. Today, it remains easier to hear Grieg’s suites than to see Ibsen’s Peer Gynt play. That’s at least partly because it is easier. ©.

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Historian of the human mind.

It is obvious that man dwells in a splendid universe, a magnificent expanse of earth and sky and heaven, which manifestly is built on a majestic plan [and] maintains some mighty design, though man himself cannot grasp it. Yet for him it is not a pleasant or satisfying world. . . It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better. Perry Miller, in The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century (1939).

Thus Perry Miller framed his discussion of Puritan (Calvinist) theology. It’s typical of his prose, Faulknerian in its complexity or verbosity, and yet crystal clear when it comes to the nub, the odd nexus in Puritanism between predestination and free will. We must be what we are. And yet we must do something about it. When I went to graduate school to become an historian of colonial America, I knew next to nothing about the subject: I had taken no courses in it, not even close. So I was an innocent which, in graduate school, is to be guilty. Luckily, I found a mentor, David Lovejoy, who didn’t think this a handicap, luckier still that David’s first reading assignment was Perry Miller’s The New England Mind (2 vols., 1939 and 1951). It’s often said that Miller rescued the Puritans from their reputation as self-righteous bigots, hypocritical and intolerant. They were ‘puritanical,’ relegated to the lower divisions of humanity by their own descendants (not least Nathaniel Hawthorne) and then made the butt of jokes coined by the ‘new’ men and women of Miller’s own generation like H. L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker. Perry Miller, born in Chicago on February 25, 1905, was too young to be liberated by the war that freed another young Chicagoan, born in 1899, from his middle class comforts. But Miller caught some similar bug and traveled the world, vagabond-like, in the 1920s. Working as a deckhand on a Congo steamer, barely out of his teens, he had his own epiphany, one that set him on a mission to make modern sense of the origins of his own culture. Or so he claimed. Whether that oily, steamy Congo scene was true or cadged from Conrad, Miller returned to Chicago, took a BA and PhD, then went on to Harvard where—besides revolutionizing New England history—he became a founder of “American Studies” as an academic discipline. I was bowled over by The New England Mind and found in it a way to make the Puritans into thoughtful human beings: ‘Warts and All,’ it must be said. Miller’s chapter on the Salem panic, “The Judgment of the Witches,” is as merciless as it is dramatic. It’s a critical turning point in the second volume of The New England Mind, titled From Colony to Province. Miller’s works are literary histories in more ways than one. Loaded with complex sentences, challenging vocabularies, involved plot lines, telling allusions to modern times, and quite a bit of humor, the Miller opus makes the Puritans into a people a lot like us. When you think about that, it’s scary. So Miller remains worth reading. ©.