BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Here's what Bob replied to your comment David.
You’d better write to the DNB. They had Archer as a yank, unless I read the article too quickly. Thanks for the quote. Bob I looked it up and according to my reading you are right. Better email him!

The Georgians are such as have evidently in them the making of much better things, had they only a chance. William Palgrave, Georgia Through Foreign Eyes, 1871.

19th-century imperialism has taken its knocks from scholars, moralists of all stripes, and from its erstwhile victims, those lesser breeds who later took the law into their own hands. But the long imperial encounter produced extraordinary men and women from the ‘West’ who did their damnedest to find value in subject peoples and cultures. Some (like Emerson or Coleridge) never traveled there. Others spent their lives in hazardous quests for the truths they found in ‘otherness.’ Such was William Gifford Palgrave, born in London on January 24, 1826. His father Francis was already an ‘other,’ having been a Cohen before converting to Anglicanism, lawyering, and marrying a banker’s daughter. William’s brothers all had great successes, mostly scholarly, and William excelled at Trinity Oxford (in languages and mathematics) before going off to the Indian army. There his excellent prospects were diverted by India itself. He converted to Catholicism, reverted to the surname Cohen, and joined the mission to the ‘natives;’ but he learned more from them than they did from him. In his missionary travels in India and then the Arab and Ottoman worlds he became an expert linguist, explorer, soldier, an agent-spy for the pope and then Napoleon III, but he was always a scholar. Palgrave-Cohen became immoderately famous and from time to time a trusted agent of the British empire. By that time he’d left the Church, reverted to “Palgrave,” and married prosperously. After marriage, his diplomatic career (in the West Indies, the Philippines, Bulgaria, Asian Russia, Cairo, Uruguay, Japan, and Bangkok) tended to founder on his sympathies towards the locals. As Palgrave aged he went back to Catholicism, though with significant admixtures of Shintoism and Buddhism, and continued to study the cultures he’d encountered in the course of empire—and to write about Dante, whose works he’d encountered in his quick study of Italian while he was the pope’s man in Damascus. ©

[Stanley]

It is as natural for Miss Sharp to be witty as for a brook trout to have spots. The Saturday Review, reviewing Sharp's Britannia Mews, 1946.

I’ve been writing these notes since 1999 (daily since 2012), and (necessarily) many have been about people previously unknown to me. When these unknowns turn out to have been fine writers, they inspire in me something like nostalgia, except that it’s for things missed, not things remembered. One such is the prolific Margery Sharp, none of whose books (26 novels for adults, 14 for children) I have read or even held. But I recently ran across an appreciation of her in the NY Times (by an eminent pediatrician, of all things), and clearly there has been a modest Sharp revival. Justly so, apparently. She was born Clara Margery Melita Sharp in rural Wiltshire on January 25, 1905. She was well educated (in French, at Bedford College, London) but began publishing in Punch, funny bits of course, before she got her BA. In 1938 she married (happily, it turned out) an RAF major, and they both survived the war. The Blitz figured in her Britannia Mews (1946), but that was her 12th. By then she’d attracted American readers, including in Hollywood, where Britannia Mews became The Forbidden Street (starring Maureen O’Hara). Her Cluny Brown (1944) as a movie (1946) starred Jennifer Jones, and indeed Ms. Sharp excelled in her strong, unconventional female characters, who were played also (in Hollywood and, in The Nutmeg Tree, on Broadway) by the likes of Greer Garson and Kim Novak. In the US, however, Margery Sharp is best known for her children’s books, which began by mistake with an adult novel (about a mouse!!) that became popular with young readers, The Rescuers (1959). That was so successful that it became a series, with 8 further ‘episodes’ and an apparently bowdlerized Disney cartoon feature, same title (1976). They were once all out of print, but now, good readers, you can pick up 14 of Margery Sharp’s books on Kindle and not a few others on the second-hand market. Margery Sharp, who died in 1991, has again become an item. ©

[Stanley]

Every single book must count. Kaye Webb.

In the Wodehouse oeuvre, kids play an ambiguous role. But three of the ‘young men in spats,’ grown wastrels that Wodehouse loved to write about did from time to time edit a kids’ magazine called Tiny Tots, and they did not do it well. Meanwhile, there was a real-life woman who excelled at the job, so much so that she transformed children’s literature, notably as the head of Puffin Books, Penguin’s kids’ division. Central to her success? Like Wodehouse’s Wooster, she had a horror of schools. Kids did best, she thought, when they were left alone to read. She was Kathleen (Kaye) Webb, and she was born in London on January 26, 1914. Both parents were successful journalists, and during a very unhappy schooling (aged 15) that’s where Kaye Webb started, penning replied to children’s letters (at tuppence each) for the Mickey Mouse Weekly. There followed a period when Kaye worked for motoring publications, but during the war she moved over to edit her own “Tiny Tots”, a magazine called Lilliput. When she wasn’t driving an ambulance, enforcing the blackout, and heading up the Fleet Street women’s rifle brigade, she was asking eminent writers (e.g. Dylan Thomas and H. G. Wells) to turn their talents towards young readers, and they responded. After the war she moved to another young readers’ magazine, Young Elizabethan, and then from 1961 she ran Puffin Books. In each job, Kaye Webb’s trademark was respect for young readers. They deserved (and she delivered) the best writers and illustrators, good information and exciting fiction. Webb talked to kids to find out what they wanted (the ‘Puffin Club’ was her invention, and she was the ‘Fat Puffin’), ratcheted the quality up a notch or two, and made Puffin Books into a world-wide marketing phenomenon. Ill health forced her into ‘retirement’ in 1981 but for 15 more years Kaye Webb freelanced for Puffin from her wheelchair, in a mansion flat made accessible, making books that were good to read. ©

[Stanley]

Let me be like Bach, creating fugues . . . of ancient light//of origins and change and human worth. From a poem by Beatrice Tinsley.

Back in the bad old days, on most campuses, the most visible female ‘faculty’ presence was, collectively, as the wives of male faculty members. At my father’s university, they were called the “Faculty Dames,” and they did fundraising and teas and good works. My mom even served a term as ‘den mother’ to a campus sorority. Meanwhile, in 1964, down at Texas’s Center for Advanced Studies (a research institute that later became UT-Dallas) a faculty wife called Beatrice Tinsley raised eyebrows by refusing—it was her ‘turn’—to hostess a faculty tea. She’d made something of a name for herself already by being, rather publicly, an agnostic in religion. And then to cap it all, she went off, got a PhD in Astronomy, and while still a student began her life’s work of upsetting the cosmology applecart. She was Beatrice Tinsley, born Beatrice Hill, in England, on January 27, 1941. Right after the war her clergyman father moved the family to New Zealand where he became a politician. Beatrice went to university at Canterbury, where she broke female ranks by majoring in physics and confounded predictions by doing so brilliantly, got her masters, married a physics professor (a good one) and moved with him to Dallas, where she in 1968 got her PhD. Then, despite her achievements (she won the Annie Jump Cannon award for being a brilliant female astronomer), she found it impossible to land a faculty appointment. So she divorced, surrendered custody of her adopted children (she loved kids but had decided not to contribute directly to population growth), and was snapped up by Yale, the first woman on its Physics and Astronomy faculty. There she continued her pioneering work on the expanding universe, and there she discovered the melanoma that would kill her. Beatrice Tinsley brought her daughter Teresa to New Haven, shepherded her through school, helped her with her homework, and brought forgiveness into both their lives. “I am proud,” Teresa later wrote, “that my mother stood her ground and followed her career.” Others have followed, improving university lives immeasurably. ©

[Stanley]

A crystal is like a class of children arranged for drill, but standing at ease, so that while the class as a whole has regularity both in time and space, each individual child is a little fidgety! Kathleen Lonsdale.

The DNA molecule, the ‘genetic material’ whose exact structure had for so long eluded scientists, was parsed in 1953 at Cambridge’s Cavendish labs by Francis Crick and James Watson, but with a little help from their University of London rivals, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. Nine years later, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel prize for work that unlocked ‘the secret of life.’ Rosalind Franklin had died in the interim and so was not rewarded, but there has been ever since an undercurrent of suspicion that, as a woman, she would not have been honored. Leaving that dispute to others, I’ll note yet another woman whose pioneering experiments in x-ray crystallography made possible Dr. Franklin’s discovery. She was Kathleen Lonsdale, born Kathleen Yardley in County Kildare, Ireland, on January 28, 1903. The family soon moved to England, where Kathleen broke her first barriers. She wanted to study chemistry and physics, subjects not even taught at her girls’ high school, so she was allowed to enroll (for those subjects only) at a boys’ school nearby. She then majored in chemistry at London’s women’s college, Bedford, and did so brilliantly there as to come to the attention of Nobelist Henry Bragg at the Cavendish. There she married, birthed and raised three children, and (with Bragg) virtually invented modern crystallography, demonstrating (in 1929) the exact molecular structure of the benzene ring, a discovery of huge economic importance. Kathleen Lonsdale went on to become (1949) the first tenured woman chemistry professor at London, (1945) the first woman to be elected to the Royal Society, and (1967) the first female president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As the first female chair of her London department (1951), she helped to bring Rosalind Franklin back from Paris to engage in the same work, and thus to take her “photo #51” of the DNA molecule. But Lonsdale had laid the scientific groundwork for that photo two decades previously. ©

[Stanley]

The nature of heaven is to provide a place for all who lead good lives, no matter what their religion may be. Emanuel Swedenborg.

On March 29, 1772. Emanuel Swedenborg died in London and was buried there, in the Swedish Church. His death caused a stir, for Swedenborg was a famed mystic and a great religious leader. He had also predicted the day of his death (that February, he wrote to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, that on March 29 he would be traveling to heaven). In 1912, the Swedish Church announced a move, and it was thought best to ship Swedenborg to Uppsala Cathedral, where his remains were reinterred next to those of the great biologist Carl Linnaeus. That, too, was appropriate, for Uppsala was Emanuel Swedenborg’s birthplace (on January 29, 1688), and in his time he had also been a pioneering scientist. Science was indeed Swedenborg’s first choice, a relief to his father who, though Bishop at Uppsala, had been periodically in trouble for suspected heresy. As a young man, Swedenborg studied at Uppsala, in the Netherlands, and in London, and became an accomplished engineer and natural scientist. He also developed a couple of odd ideas, a flying machine for instance, and the notion that ideas had their own physical being, as ‘vibrations.’ This, along with his announced ambition to capture and publish a new scientific idea every day, may help to explain his shift to spiritualism, which began in earnest in the 1730s. His was a complex dance of science and the spirit that brought forth precocious ideas about brain functions, speculations about the physical location of the soul, dreams and visions, and Bible translations. He was unusual among religious leaders as he rarely spoke in public, but he conversed with many and published prolifically, and “Swedenborgian” became the name of a worldwide religious denomination. Never a large movement, it has had many influential converts and friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought of Swedenborg as a “colossal soul,” and Helen Keller, for whom Swedenborg “brought light into my darkness.” ©

[plaques]

Not many years ago there was a Swedenborgian church in Burnley. Since then it has closed down (I think).

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[Stanley]

Enslaved from across the sea [she] ransomed many slaves, especially those from among her own people. From a late 7th-century biography of Queen Bathilda of Neustria

I am by no stretch a medievalist, and another reason that medieval (and ancient) persons rarely figure in these notes is that we rarely know their birthdates. In the case of St. Bathilda of Chelles, legend has it that she died on January 30, but even legend is silent on the year of her death. “C. 680” is often given. Much of what is known is also legendary, a devotional biography written by a nun at Chelles about a decade after Bathilda’s death, by which time her life was already being celebrated as a saintly one (including as foundress of Chelles). However, Bathilda’s relics were kept intact, including her bones and hair (at death, she was a greying blonde, 5 feet tall), and other archeological discoveries have verified other elements of her story. She was born c. 630, in what is today England, possibly of noble Saxon lineage. Continental raiders captured her when she was still a child (aged about 10) and sold her as a slave in the palace of the Merovingian kings. There she made herself so useful—starting out as cup-bearer—that an aged aristocrat tried to marry her. Legend has it that she (a precociously wise virgin) held herself aloof, but it is certain that before she was 20 she had married King Clovis II of the successor kingdom, Neustria (a Frankish land comprising a wide central swath of present-day France from the channel to the Mediterranean). As queen she did her job, bearing at least three sons who became kings themselves, and serving as regent for one of them. She also founded a monastery or two and the convent at Chelles (now a distant eastern suburb of Paris). Her saintliness is attested by many stories, now difficult to corroborate. However, one of these (that she divested herself of all her riches) seems to have been true, based partly on the oddity that her burial garb included no precious metals or jewels. Rather, they were painted on her silken shroud. Bathilda remains, officially, a saint, and it seems that she might have been. ©.

[Stanley]

“I have no reason to go, except that I have never been." Freya Madeline Stark.

Freya Stark lived 100 years. This in itself is a sort of accomplishment, but when she died (in 1993) and was written up in The Guardian, I had never heard of her, nor of the explorations and writings that had made her famous to many, including my wife. Since as a boy I devoured exploration narratives this may reflect the gendered reading habits I grew up with and which, ironically, narrowed my horizons. Freya Madeline Stark was born in Paris on January 31, 1893, and grew up in an Italian artist colony, certainly the biological child of her Polish-Italian mother but possibly not of her English-painter father. At any rate her parents were unhappily married. Freya took refuge in books, among them One Thousand and One Nights. Later she learned Arabic and Persian, but at nine she read it in English. This and other works (e.g. by Dumas, which she read in French) gave her a yen to travel and a taste for adventure, and after a college education and war service (as an ambulance driver on the Italian front: her biographer liked to think she may have met Hemingway) travel is what she did, at least when she wasn’t writing about her travels. Stark’s travels took her mainly to the Middle East and Arabia, although also further afield (in the late 1960s to Afghanistan). These locales were ones in which other British women had found much to write about, but Freya was ‘first western woman’ in many places, including the wilder reaches of southern Arabia. Her books (several of which are still in print) have long been favorites, and not only of female readers. Freya Stark married at 54, but didn’t settle down until she reached her 80s. When diplomacy and warfare allowed it, Freya would return home to write and reflect not to England but to Italy, where her friend ‘Pen’ Browning (the son of the poets) had, long ago, introduced her to the pleasures of Asolo. She died there, widely mourned, in one of Browning’s old villas, in May 1993. ©.

[Stanley]

If I knew how to say disagreeable things in an agreeable fashion I would not be spending most of my time siting alone in a room, reading the dictionary. Ammon Shea, Reading the OED, 2009.

Nowadays, the word “nice” is generally used in some positive sense, as in the ‘nice’ weather we haven’t been having lately, or that ‘nice’ person who not only found but returned my wallet—intact!! But ‘nice’ has an ambiguous profile. Even today, ‘nice’ can be used pejoratively, to express tastes too dainty by half or a grammatical rigidity which can’t under any circumstance abide a split infinitive. In the past a ‘nice’ person might be one of those you wouldn’t want to be seen with, at least not in daylight: a wanton woman or a dissolute man. Shakespeare used the word thus, fairly often, and before him so did Chaucer. And one could go on and on, through about a dozen main meanings and 40 ‘senses’ of the word ‘nice’ (some of them “obsolete”), and with illustrative quotations, historical synonyms, and even an etymology (and that’s only for ‘nice’ as an adjective). All this you can get from the Oxford English Dictionary, which first saw the light of day on February 1, 1884. At least that was when its first “fascicle” (look it up!!) was issued. It was a project first dreamed up (in 1857) in the London Philological Society, and the last “fascicle” was not published until 1925. That first full edition of the OED came to 10 vols. and 400,000 words. The current edition is twice as long but has added only 100,000 words, and so definitions and usages have, as you might put it, multiplied, grown, burgeoned, swelled, proliferated, and been augmented. There’s some dispute over which word cops the longest OED definition, but the very short word “set” is the ironic winner; its entry comprises over 400 distinctive usages and is 60,000 words long. (“Short,” by the way, has a 33,000-word entry). The OED is the subject of two entrancing books by Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (2003) and The Professor and the Madman (2005), and if you’re lucky your local public library offers access to the OED’s on-line edition. Next time you “look it up”, use the OED. You’ll be glad you did. ©

[Stanley]

"The divine part of Bloom is simply his humanity - his assumption of a bond between himself and other created beings." Richard Ellmann,

“Modern” is a slippery adjective and its child-noun “modernism” slipperier, but if you had to choose a coming-of-age year for modernism as literary expression 1922 would be a good pick. It saw the publications of T. S. Eliot’s longish poem “The Waste Land” and of James Joyce’s much longer novel Ulysses, both classics of literary modernism. Today we give the nod to Ulysses, for it was published (in Paris, by Sylvia Beach) on February 2, 1922, which was also Joyce’s 40th birthday. Each work “streams” its author’s conscious and unconscious mind, and each is full of allusions to its contemporary culture, and the allusiveness in each is both high- and low-brow. All of these characteristics qualify as ‘modernist,’ and indeed Eliot was inspired by his reading Ulysses during his construction of “The Waste Land.” But in the end they leave different tastes in one’s mouth. Eliot’s pessimism overwhelms us, and not just in the title or in the first line where April (sweet April, surely, spring promising summer) is, instead, “the cruellest month.” Nowhere in Eliot’s ‘waste’ are we relieved. Ulysses is different. No one mistakes it for a cheerful tale but it is a saga, a day-long odyssey as social outsiders (Leopold Bloom for sure, but Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom and several minor characters also qualify) run up against the repressiveness of their society and find various ways to outrage it, to endure it, to mock it, and/or to knuckle under to it. If James Joyce was Leopold Bloom, and he was in part, then it’s no wonder that he and his Nora Barnacle (Molly?) lit out for the territories, never to return to Ireland except to write about it. In 1922, Joyce told Sylvia Beach that Bloom was modeled after a well-known bibliophile, but that was his way of complimenting Beach, love-sick for books. But Bloom was Joyce, and Bloom was a Jew, and thus he marks another sharp contrast with much of Eliot’s poetry. Modernism was a large and commodious tent. ©

[Tripps]

They're big into James Joyce around here.

James Joyce

I've had several tries to read his 'Dubliners' , but have yet to succeed.

[Stanley]

I read Ulysses many years ago when I automatically went for books that had been banned..... I didn't get the literary nuances. That applies to many classics. I tried Stegner after Bob sang his praises with the same result and 'The Great Gatsby' went down like a lead balloon. I think my brain is wired differently to his.
That reminds me of the shock of reading 'The Blue Lagoon' during the sermon when I was on the choir. I thought God might strike me dead when I got to the sex scene, the first I had ever read in a book!

[Stanley]

"To feel, when one is playing his beautiful music, that he is no more, seems incomprehensible!" Queen Victoria, journal entry, November 13, 1847.

I’ve watched several episodes of Victoria, but don’t recall one that depicted any of the encounters Victoria and Albert had, or arranged, with Felix Mendelssohn. There should be one, for V & A were both accomplished musicians, and in these several meetings the three of them played (or sang) for each other. Moreover, these get-togethers were fully reported in their journals and letters, meat for a scriptwriter. The three were close enough in age (Mendelssohn was born on February 3, 1809, V & A both in 1819) to enjoy each other’s company for other reasons. They met several times in the 1840s, by which time Mendelssohn had become almost as English as Handel. Their meetings were in conjunction with Mendelssohn’s tours of Britain, playing, conducting, and composing. At first, in June 1842, the young queen found Mendelssohn slightly exotic, “dark & jewish-looking, delicate,” and entirely “pleasing and modest.” He played for them (improvising on “Rule, Britannia”!!!) and then they returned the favor. He cemented the relationship by sending Victoria a special manuscript of his Scottish Symphony (still presumably in the royal collection), and then enjoyed a longer and much less formal evening or two with them in the next month, with Victoria looking unsuccessfully for her own music (which had been packed for a journey). She then played and sang (rather well, Mendelssohn thought) from memory. Victoria thought she was playing one of his pieces and praised him for it, but when he confessed that it was one of his sister Fanny’s compositions Victoria liked it even more. They met several more times, the last in May 1847, just days before Mendelssohn was devastated to hear of Fanny’s sudden death. He hurried home only to die himself in November. In her journal, Victoria penned a fine tribute, and a few days later she and Albert mourned by playing a duet (“Song without Words”) that Felix Mendelssohn had, in 1844, written out for them. ©

[Stanley]

When the idea of human freedom moves the minds of men, it also moves the minds of women. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 1963.

Even today we wonder what those 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence meant when they endorsed Thomas Jefferson’s view that it was a “self-evident” truth that all men were created equal. Clearly all of them—wealthy, white, male—thought that they belonged to the ‘equality club.’ The rest of US history has been a struggle over who else might join that club, when, and under what (if any) restrictions. On one side have been men and women who took the Declaration’s self-evident truth as a marker, a target, and sought to widen membership for themselves or for others. They have been a mixed bag, starting with Jefferson, as it were despite himself: whatever the particular cause, the club-crashers have always been an amorphous and shifting coalition of the eager and the reluctant. Among the most eager was Betty Friedan, born Bettye Naomi Goldstein on February 4, 1921, shortly after women won the vote. But as she grew up, married, moved through left-wing politics and union journalism, Betty Friedan discovered the that simply to vote was a half-membership, an auxiliary’s privilege. Exactly when she made that discovery is disputed, partly because it now seems so obvious. Perhaps it was when, in 1952, she was dismissed from her editorial position (with the electricians’ union newspaper) for being pregnant. At any rate it was in 1957 that Betty Friedan conducted a survey, historical and current, of women, their hopes and their realities, and through it discovered “the problem that has no name.” Friedan first analyzed the problem in magazine pieces. Then, in 1963, in a book, she gave it a name. It was The Feminine Mystique. It would be a mistake to give her, and her book, sole credit for the gender revolution that has opened the club’s doors and changed the face of the country, but once we finish celebrating the suffrage centenary, we should plan to remember Betty Friedan on hers, in 2021. ©

[Stanley]

"[Karen Blixen] was always there in her stillness, her serenity, and her great wisdom to comfort me." Carson McCullers.

In these notes, I stress birthdays of interesting people but I am also on the prowl for anniversaries. Here’s one I was alerted to years ago, but haven’t yet read the main source, Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends (another book bought but not yet fully read). On February 5, 1959, novelist Carson McCullers hosted a private luncheon party for Countess Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), Norma Jean Baker (aka Marilyn Monroe), and Arthur Miller. McCullers had long been fascinated by Blixen’s Out of Africa, indeed reading it at least once a year, as therapy. So McCullers arranged to meet Blixen at an American Academy of Arts and Letters dinner, held in Blixen’s honor. The two women, sitting at the same table, hit it off, and then Blixen confessed to McCullers that she’d always wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe. Since Monroe and Miller were at the same Academy function, McCullers called Miller over and the luncheon was arranged. The Millers were late (of course: Marilyn always was a bit tardy), but not too late. The menu was oysters, grapes, and champagne (Blixen’s request) and a soufflé in case the Millers wanted something more substantial. Each of the principals was in character, Blixen in her “Sober Truth” garb (”like a candle in an old church,” McCullers said), Monroe in furs and a revealing black sheath dress, and McCullers intensely observant. Blixen found Monroe as fascinating as she’d hoped (“unbelievable innocence” and “unbounded vitality”). They talked a lot, danced together (but not, Miller later said, on top of the table), and as a party trick each told a story about her life. Monroe’s won: a comic tale, well-told, about how (late yet again) she’d finished cooking for guests (a pasta dish) with her hair dryer. The three together is a nice thought, though sad in retrospect. Monroe (36) and Blixen (77) both died in 1962. McCullers followed in 1967, aged only 50. One might say that each was killed by her life. ©.

[Stanley]

A duel . . . as a ceremony in the cult of honour . . . demands a perfect singleness of intention, a homicidal austerity of mood. Joseph Conrad.

Almost every academic year, I’ve pondered what King George III, the unfortunate royal princes, and Britain’s leading politicians (court and country) did with their spare time while they lost the American colonies: fiddling, so to speak, while the empire burned. They, their hangers-on, and in due course their sons, were at one of London’s great mansions, Carlisle House, learning swordsmanship and horsemanship and comparing the latest in court manners and manly fashions. The operation was run by Domenico Angelo, a Tuscan immigrant born in Leghorn (Livorno) on February 6, 1717. He’d come to London by a strange route (as maître d’ and lover of an eminent Irish actress), whose heart he’d won (in Leghorn) with his swordsmanship and general gallantry. After their break-up Domenico used the same talents to build up a reputation, and a kind of gentleman’s college, in London. He also wooed a young gentlewoman, Elizabeth Johnson, and wed her at fashionable St. George’s, Hanover Square. As business grew he bought Carlisle House and grounds in 1761 and was said to be pulling down over £4,000 annually just from fees, never mind gifts, his royal sinecure, and sales of his book, L’école des armes. Among his clients were numbered not only the royal brute (as Tom Paine called George III) and the princes, but leading politicos, aristocrats, and men from the arts scene: the duke of Devonshire, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John Wilkes, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Charles James Fox, and several of the ministers that Americans were learning to hate. One guesses that these patrons left their politics at Carlisle House’s door, lest their fencing drills actually draw blood. Domenico Angelo retired to Eton (where until 1802 he taught boys to be gentlemen), leaving the fencing business to his eldest son. It continued in the family for another century, before being taken over by an Irishman with the unlikely name of McTurk. ©

[Stanley]

"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse." Richard III. "And my large kingdom for a little grave." Richard II. Both by Shakespeare.

In 2012, King Richard III’s remains were found under a parking lot in Leicester. His reputation had long been buried by Shakespeare’s eponymous play (1593) and has not recovered (historians have found several other reasons to dislike him). But Shakespeare’s King Richard II could very possibly have been the end of the playwright himself. It’s not only that it was a touchy thing to write ill of kings, After all, Will had done down several past monarchs, and he knew how to do it without offending Queen Elizabeth. But when Richard II was re-staged (at The Globe, on February 7, 1601), it was a very touchy thing. It was a revival (the play was first performed in 1596); it was about Richard II’s deposition; and the rumor was that the re-staging had been subsidized by those who thought that the aging Elizabeth should also be deposed, or worse. The Queen (then 67) knew about the rumors (“I am Richard II!! Know ye not that?” she is reported to have said). She also knew about the strange coincidence of timing. The play was staged on a Saturday afternoon, and on Sunday the Earl of Essex and his band of brothers staged their rebellion, with Essex acting, so to speak, as Bolingbroke (in the play and in history Bolingbroke became Henry IV after Richard’s deposition). The revival fizzled; Essex fizzled worse. Perhaps because the rebellion itself was played so poorly (‘bad plot, worse plotters,’ a theatre review might have said), there were relatively few executions. The Earl of Essex and four others were beheaded. But William Shakespeare survived, to write and produce what many say are his very best plays, including Othello, Lear, and Macbeth, coming in majestic, frightening succession in 1604, 1605, and 1606. Unkindest cut of all, Shakespeare and his merry men performed yet another revival—for the queen herself—on February 24, the night before Essex’s execution. Once again, art triumphed. ©



CAVEAT EMPTOR!!
I have never before issued a warning about error or possible error in my anniversary notes, at least not before having those errors pointed out.
But today’s note, about Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Earl of Essex’s rebellion, completely ignores an entertaining historical debate, about which play it was that Essex subsidized, or even whether it happened at all. But I couldn’t get all that into a 300-word essay. And the story as it is has some charm to it.
The main argument is that the play in question was in fact Henry IV, the sequel (so to speak) to Richard II. A recent rehearsal of the argument took place in the Times Literary Supplement in, I think, 2001. Among the participants were Frank Kermode and Blair Worden, and in such company I would have little to say. So I stuck with my story, humbly, and put it before you. If you want authority, I seem to recall that Stephen Greenblatt thinks that it was, indeed, Richard II. See his magnificent Will in the World.
I don’t thus “rest my case” but did want to let you know that my note might not be gospel.
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

This present afternoon was brought before us Thomas Everard, a Jesuit of continuance thirty years as he himself confesseth . . . . From a 1623 indictment of Thomas Everard, at Dover.

Some of the old “whiggish” historians credited the Reformation with modernizing England: the rise of parliamentary government, the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th century, a free market economy, the world’s first industrial revolution, and even the advent of religious toleration. These claims have mostly been scaled back or abandoned. In the case of the connections between Protestantism and toleration, however, it’s now a mix of subtleties, ironies, and outright cruelties. In its origins, English Protestantism was willing and eager to fine, imprison, mutilate, burn or hang dissenters from the ‘national’ faith. In the 16th and 17th centuries, and beyond, the sufferers included radical Protestants of many ilks, but the main victims were of the Old Faith, their danger made worse when the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth I and announced that killing her would offer the perpetrator(s) a quicker and easier road to heaven. But even then persecution was uneven. Local justices were reluctant to punish their Catholic neighbors (often related by blood or marriage). Even some priests, though captured, escaped the ultimate penalty, among them Thomas Everard, born to a Suffolk Catholic family on February 8, 1550. Everard entered the priesthood (at the “English College” in Rheims) in 1592 and after long training entered the Jesuit order in 1604. He spent the next 29 years in England, conducting mass, catechizing, running to hide from the authorities, and three times caught, imprisoned, and confessed, but then released. In all this he also translated many devotional works from Latin into English (ironies abound on both sides of this story). How he escaped death is a bit of a puzzle, but it’s laid partly to his scholarly and saintly nature, his pacific yet courageous temperament, and perhaps not least to the eminence of his Catholic friends. Thomas Everard, S.J., died in London, in his own bed, “piously” the record says, on May 16, 1633. ©.

[Stanley]

"What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary, 1963.

In England I came to love the game of cricket, and even to captain (ex officio) the Principal’s Eleven in Grizedale College’s annual faculty-student match. Once to everyone’s consternation (including mine) I bowled out (for a “duck”!!) a recognized youth international batsman from Ian Smith’s breakaway Rhodesia. Despite the intense political pleasure that afforded me, it was as cricketing a stroke of luck rather than a flash of expertise. But it did give me a taste for bowling, and it was during an era when fast bowlers from the West Indies and Australia dominated international “test” cricket. Rhapsodizing (to an English friend) about the West Indies’ Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall, I stirred up cricket patriotism, and my friend told me about Jim Laker, legendary slow bowler (“off-break,” technically) for Surrey and England. Born in Yorkshire on February 9, 1922, Laker’s ‘test’ cricketing career was delayed by war service and then by unaccountable difficulties in international competitions. But he hit his stride, majestically, in the 1950s. To rehash Laker’s bowling statistics would bore English readers and mystify everyone else, but just to take one instance, the Old Trafford (Manchester) test match against Australia in 1956, Laker took 19 wickets for the cost of only 90 runs. Only a fool would say that a record will never be beaten, but so far that miraculous tally has not been bested in any Test match, anywhere. It would be like the Yankees’ Whitey Ford striking out 26 (all the Dodgers’ batsmen but one) in a World Series no-hitter. And to fill out the picture, Jim Laker was a laconic, plain-spoken man who, after a brilliant playing career, became a brilliant (if sometimes controversial) commentator. My friend’s story concluded sadly, however, for he was at that test match in 1956 when his father had said, ‘not much is going to happen today, let’s go home.’ And home they went, while on the pitch Jim Laker made history. ©

[Stanley]

"A common unlettered weaver." An inaccurate description of George Mealmaker at his first indictment in 1793.

Among the most fervent supporters of the American Revolution were recent Scots and Scotch-Irish immigrants, people who had little reason to love George III. Back home in Scotland, a new revolutionary spirit arose, partaking little of the highland fervor that in 1746 had been so bloodily put down by the “Butcher” (the king’s younger brother, the duke of Cumberland) at the Battle of Culloden. As the industrial revolution gathered steam it generated discontent amongst new and old working classes. Meanwhile Scottish Presbyterianism was riven by conflict between an established Old Guard and ‘New Lights’ who wanted more lay power, livelier sermons, and less patronage in church affairs. Young George Mealmaker’s radicalism was sustained by both forces. Born on February 10, 1768, a linen weaver who was son and grandson of linen weavers, Mealmaker became a leading light in Dundee’s “Relief” church, writing and delivering lay sermons about sin and grace but also about man’s inhumanity to man. Had he been born earlier, he would likely have been an active sympathizer with the American Revolution. Instead, history gave George Mealmaker the French Revolution, and with it a belief that Scotland should have its own democratic uprising, to displace or overthrow corrupt aristocracies in church and state. Already eminent in the “Relief” church, Mealmaker became a leader of clandestine groups supporting the French Revolution, e.g. the Friends of Liberty and the Society of United Scotsmen. He was arrested at least twice, on the run more often, his home raided, his papers seized. The authorities finally pinned him down in 1797. Convicted of sedition, he was sentenced to 14 years’ transportation, but he didn’t quite make it. George Mealmaker—who might have been a Tom Paine to a Scottish revolution—died in poverty, in New South Wales, in 1808. His wife, left back in Dundee (as part of the punishment?), did not learn of his death until 1811. ©.

[Stanley]

'He was in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man". Thomas Jefferson on George Washington, 1814.

One of our durable national myths is that of “the self-made man,” now amended to “self-made person.” Today it tends to be a rags-to-riches metaphor, for late in the 19th century it was hijacked by the era’s “captains of industry” (or “robber barons”) who wished people to think that they’d risen to wealth by their own heroic efforts when, in fact, few of them had. The myth itself was originally not about rags to riches; rather it was about the moral imperative of making yourself into a real, and good, person, despite the temptations of life in a competitive economy. Several scholars, notably Thomas Augst and Daniel Howe, have shown how any man who aimed to become ‘self-made’ could follow the myth’s straight and narrow road to moral success. And the culture provided two model lives, Ben Franklin’s and George Washington’s. Franklin became popular partly because his story of moral improvement (told, of course, by himself) was also one of rags to riches. That couldn’t be said of George Washington, born to wealth on February 11, 1732. As a second son, he might not have inherited the wealth, but an older brother’s death, a clever marriage, and a sharp eye for the main chance made Washington still richer, one of the greatest landowners in the new nation. But, very much like Franklin, Washington examined his own character, found it wanting in several serious respects, and set about the task of making himself over. Like Franklin, he kept precise accounts of his progress, not only financial but moral. As a big man (at 6’3”) and a rich one, rage and temper were, he thought, among his worst traits, and his legendary reserve was his chosen cure. Self-improvement was, he thought, a lifelong task, and its success was not to be measured in his wealth or power but in the respect and affection of his fellow citizens. Warts and all, Washington remains a model which some modern presidents have emulated with some success. Others, not so much. ©

[Stanley]

To reveal the past, we assume that the forces in the world are essentially the same through all time; for these forces are based on the very nature of matter. James Dwight Dana.

During the 19th century, American universities began to awaken to the idea that the sciences might provide teachable subjects, even for the young gentlemen who formed the great majority of the college-bound. Reluctance stemmed in part from disapproval of the “technical,” and laboratory instruction in particular was often hived off to adjunct (and inferior) science “institutes.” In 1802 Yale appointed Benjamin Silliman lecturer in chemistry—but young Silliman had to go off to Penn and then Edinburgh to learn enough to justify the hire. But once the inroad was made the fascinations of the subject brought students to New Haven. One of the most famous was James Dwight Dana, born (February 12, 1813) in upstate New York although with a New England pedigree as long as your arm and (as a Dwight) with deep Yale connections. But this young gentleman was already sold on science, and although he ‘did’ Yale’s classical curriculum the reason he was there was to use Silliman’s labs and lectures to absorb as much as he could about the way nature really worked. After graduation Dana made geology his main field, married Silliman’s daughter Henrietta, and eventually became Benjamin Silliman Professor of Natural History and Geology at his alma mater. It was a position he held for 40 years, and from which he exercised great influence on geological research and on science as a vital element in undergraduate education. Dana was especially interested in volcanism, making early (and hazardous) research trips to volcanic sites in the west (Mount Shasta and Mount Hood in 1849) and then Hawaii, where he made good use of Hawaiian legends to shape his approach to the volcanic fires of the big island. Dana’s eminence, at Yale and in the nation, was vital to generating American support for Charles Darwin’s theories, although Dana himself never abandoned the view that, however evolution had happened, and however long it had taken, God was still behind it all. ©

[Stanley]

I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa. Grant Wood.

My home state is best known for producing corn. pork, beans and the farmers and machinery that harvest them. Noble folk and noble products indeed: but something new popped up under the Iowa sun on February 13, 1891, in Anamosa, where Grant Wood first saw daylight. After his father died (1901) the family moved to Cedar Rapids where Grant apprenticed in a metal working shop and continued to show interest in things artistic. He enrolled at the Handicraft Guild, a women’s cooperative in Minneapolis, then toured Europe (more than once) to drink in contemporary trends and to discover a kindred sensibility in the much older paintings of Jan van Eyck. Back home, Wood tried his hand at silversmithing and glass-making, taught school, and then settled into a jack-of-all-the-arts studio in a Cedar Rapids back alley. He was homosexual, but closeted, and in an era when appearances mattered he tried marriage, unhappily. He found a more congenial image as a regionalist in art, won several commissions in that style and in a variety of art forms, and became pretty well known pretty fast. When during the Depression he helped to found the Stone City Art Colony (near Anamosa) a number of artists responded to the call, partly for the pleasure. As part of Wood’s very public advocacy of regionalism, he befriended Missouri’s own Thomas Hart Benton and found Benton a job in Kansas City to help him keep in touch with his subject matter. Meanwhile, Wood himself became famous as the artist who painted “American Gothic” which you’ve probably seen (if you think not, Google it) and as a professor at the University of Iowa school of art where he helped to organize the Iowa division of the New Deal’s Federal Art Project. Wood died of cancer in 1942. His sister Nan (the female figure in “Gothic”) long survived him, and in 1990 she willed Grant Wood’s unsold art and personal effects to the Figge Museum in Davenport (Iowa of course). ©

[Stanley]

when I on love do think// I know not well whether I float or sink. Chaucer, "The Parliament of Fowls," Feb 14, 1383. OR Whan I on him thinke, Nat woot I wel wher that I flete or sinke

Today is Valentine’s day, and you’re supposed to use it to state, or celebrate, your love for some one else (other, or others). Grade school kids were, in my day, pretty promiscuous about this, giving Valentines to all and sundry, but by the time you get to “elderly” it’s usually one significant other that gets the card, the flowers, and/or the chocolate. Or you could give a poem. That’s what Geoffrey Chaucer did, probably on Valentine’s Day (February 14, of course) in 1383. But the poem wasn’t written for Chaucer’s love, but rather for a pair not lovers yet. They were a teenage bride and groom, Prince Richard of England and Princess Anne of Bohemia, and their marriage had been arranged dynastically. So whether they were in love, or not, was not exactly to the point, and Chaucer, who had served for a couple of decades as the king’s ambassador in Europe and man about town in Westminster, knew this better than most. Still, in his “Parliament of Fowls” (“Parlement of Foules”) he provided the young couple with a way to see at least some humor in their situation and to hope that love would, as they say, find a way into their relationship. So the savior of the English language (as some call Chaucer, for without him we could have been speaking Norman French), may also be credited with the first Valentine’s card in English. Well, it’s in Middle English, but modern English translations exist, in both poetry and prose, so don’t despair. And in the poem’s odd plot, there is plenty of love advice from a “parliament of fowls” to the love birds in question. And Valentine’s Day? Well, Chaucer chose February 14 because he knew it was Valentine’s day, but the “Parlement of Foules” is the first evidence we have, in English, that it was celebrated in England, as well as on the continent of Europe. So if you haven’t yet a card or bloom to give, you can try a poem instead. Or maybe next year. Happy Valentine’s Day!! ©.