BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"They had both been sentenced to death, but one of them was to be released. He was amazed himself at their choice." Pär Lagerkvist, in Barabbas, 1950.


The literature Nobel is awarded, annually, by the Swedish Academy, but the fact that Pär Lagerkvist won the prize in 1951 had little to do with the fact that he was a Swede (born in southern Sweden on May 23, 1891). Even today there have been only seven Swedish literature Nobels, and if that’s more than Sweden’s “fair share,” it’s not a glaringly obvious maldistribution. More likely it had to do with Lagerkvist’s already long career as an author (poems, plays, fiction), and with the existentialist themes that explain most of his works and illustrate his lively awareness of the 20th-century world in which he lived and the moral standard by which Alfred Nobel wanted the Swedish Academy to work, to award the prize to writers whose works have provided “the greatest benefit to mankind.” Just as several of his earliest works had attacked World War I’s senseless bloodiness, so his most famous novel, Barabbas (1950) had shaken a literary world trying to come to terms with the worst savageries of WWII, its deliberate mass killings of “enemy” civilians (London, Dresden, Hiroshima) and its extermination factories (Auschwitz, Sobibor. Treblinka). The biblical character of Barabbas (intriguingly, “Jeshuah” or ”Jesus” Barabbas in some sources) seemed perfectly to reflect the 20th century’s strange love affair with death. In all four gospels, Barabbas was the man offered up to the Jerusalem “crowd” by an ineffective and cowardly Pontius Pilate to be crucified in Jesus’s stead. And when the “crowd” chose Jesus, it supplied Christianity with an enemy “other” (for the crowd was Jewish) on which to feast for centuries, culminating in Hitler’s “final solution.” There was never a more absurdist executive pardon, and indeed Lagerkvist’s Barabbas spent the rest of his life trying to answer the unanswerable question of why he was spared. It was a question in which the gospels were not terribly interested, but one posed by the various horrors of World War II. Lagerkvist’s attempt to address the issue was timely indeed, and it brought the Nobel prize home to Sweden. ©.

[Stanley]

"The Lord above gave man an arm of iron So he could do his job and never shirk . . . .But with a little bit of luck someone else will do the blinking work." Alfred Doolittle, in ;My Fair Lady' (1964)

Among the benefits Victorian Britain reaped from being the first nation to go through an ‘industrial revolution’ was a privileged position in the global economy. It bought cheap, sold dear, and made itself into ‘the workshop of the world.’ But one of its greatest products was neither a dry good (like, say, fine tweeds) nor a capital investment (steam engines and steel rails) but “tradition,” a product of the imagination and of a mindset that wanted to make the past even greater than the present seemed to be. This invention (sometimes a reinvention) of tradition was perhaps most successful at the very apex of British society, the monarchy, which Victoria’s long reign transformed from a failed institution of dubious relevance and doubtful character. But as a consumer good this royal tradition was gobbled up at home by the aristocracy and by a vigorous, large middle class. And it went down well, too, with colonial nabobs and self-made American millionaires seeking to join the club by marrying their children into it. But the Victorian poor proved almost equally adept at creating ‘traditions.’ Among the most bizarre of these were the “pearlie kings and queens” societies which began early in Victoria’s reign and within the sound of Bow Bells and can thus be seen as genuinely cockney in origin (and Victorian in spirit), but spread to the point where nearly every London borough had its own pearlie society which elected its own king and queen. The tradition, which includes the collection of funds for hospitals, has lately shown some signs of revival but was probably begun by a street sweeper (no, not named ‘Alfred Doolittle’), Henry Croft, who was born in the St. Pancras workhouse on May 24, 1861. That was not an auspicious beginning (for the London poor were very numerous and very poor), but Croft made the cockney into the stuff of legend and by the time the great queen (that’s Victoria) had died into an annual celebration of cockney life and cockney virtues. And he could not have done it without the industrial revolution, for the eponymous “pearlies” were the product of London’s growing button industry, and pearlie royalties depended (for their elevation to office) to an extent on the number and patterns of mother of pearl buttons that they could sew on to their suits and dresses. If you ever run into a pearlie king, you’ll know immediately what he is and, perhaps, where he comes from. And be ready with small change, too. ©

[Stanley]

"Everything is copasetic." 'Copasetic' is a new coinage, attributed by many to Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson.

When Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson died in 1949, aged 71, he was for all practical purposes (including the practical purpose of a funeral) penniless. So the city of New York stepped in and gave Robinson what was then New York’s biggest-ever funeral. It began with a lying-in-state in Harlem’s National Guard Armory and a religious service (conducted by Rev’d Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.) at the Abyssinian Baptist Church; and it finished with a parade from a Harlem church to a Brooklyn cemetery but looping south, too, so it could take in Broadway’s theatre district. It was organized (and largely paid for) by the journalist Ed Sullivan, just then becoming the star presenter of TV’s favorite variety show, and attended by mourners of all sorts (and all shades of skin color). The star of the show was not, of course, present, but odds are good that he would have enjoyed it. Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson began life as Luther Robinson, in Richmond, VA, on May 25, 1878. Orphaned at the age of 6, he was brought up by his grandma, Bedilia, but by 9 he was pretty much on his own, dancing for pennies on Richmond streets, where his talents won him a paid role as a “Pick” (‘pickaninny”) in a minstrel show. That success encouraged him to think bigger about himself, and in 1890 he ran away, first to Washington, DC and beyond that to a life that made him famous, first in “Black Vaudeville,” later on Broadway and then, in the 1930s, in Hollywood films, the most famous of them with Shirley Temple. Since he danced with her, and she was white (and in one film was in effect her guardian), these were controversial roles (indeed the copies meant for distribution in the South were severely cut). All along the way, besides being friend and tutor to such as Temple, Fred Astaire, and Lena Horne, Bill Robinson became famous in his own right as a dancer, tap especially, and famous too for his quiet success in breaking or at least bending a number of color barriers. I always thought that the wistful song “Bojangles,” popular when I was in grad school, memorialized Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, but it didn’t. The word came out of Black American English, a slang word of various meanings, but ‘contentious’ and ‘trouble-maker.’ I think it fits better that way.©

[Stanley]

"I've never seen a Lindy Hopper who wasn't smiling." Frankie Manning.

My best friends will admit that I am no dancer, and Paulette has the wounds to prove it, but today is an important anniversary for swing dancers good enough to have mastered the Lindy Hop, described in dictionaries as a particularly energetic or enthusiastic development of swing. It was possibly invented and certainly made popular around the world by Frank (aka ‘Frankie’) Manning, born on May 26, 1914, in Jacksonville, Florida. When his father moved out in 1917, young Frankie’s mom, a dancer, moved to Harlem and took Frankie with her, although in summers Frankie went back South to his grandparents’ place in rural South Carolina. While mom danced all sorts of styles, including ballroom (waltz, fox trot, etc.) Frankie learned to prefer a wilder way down on the farm and (sometimes dancing with a broom or mop) at his mom’s place in Harlem, and it was this wilder way that got him noticed (and employed) at leading Harlem nightspots (on YouTube watch him and a troupe do the Lindy with Duke Ellington’s band, a very young Duke at the piano). At some point in the late 20s, the ‘Lindy Hop’ became popular, and Frank Manning took it to the American west coast, Europe (including Sweden where, recently, a small town renamed itself in honor of Manning) and the antipodes. But as many black Americans found, worldwide fame did not translate well into American English, and it was not until Frankie Manning was in his 70s that he became an American icon, dance instructor, choreographer, and winner of a Tony award in 1989 for his choreography in Black and Blue. He wore his fame well, even becoming a star attraction on luxury cruises, and returning to Melbourne (which he and the Lindy had first taken by storm in 1939) for a nostalgic celebration in 2003. He was fit enough to establish the custom, on cruises, of dancing with as many women as he was years old, a tradition he kept up until his 94th year. He died later in that year, 2009, and he’s still with us in the form of the Frankie Manning Foundation, which spreads the Lindy gospel, and his dancing shoes which rest right next to Fred Astaire’s at the Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan. If you’ve retained enough strength and elasticity, you (and your partner) might take a stab tonight at the Lindy Hop. As for me, I’ll hold your coat. ©.

[Stanley]

"The costume of women should be suited to her wants and needs." Amelia Bloomer.

As almost everyone knows, Amelia Bloomer invented the ‘bloomers,’ puffy trousers worn under a shorter skirt that enabled women to move about more freely and, eventually I suppose, could be viewed as the innovation that made “limbs’ into “legs.” Except that she didn’t. They (the bloomers} originated in Muslim lands, and were being used by (among others) actress Fanny Kemble before Amelia put the idea forward in her reforming newspaper, The Lily, which, with her husband’s encouragement, she started publishing (out of their home) in 1849. Amelia Bloomer was born Amelia Jenks, in Homer, NY, on May 27, 1818. Her family couldn’t afford to get her properly educated (as that might have been understood by progressive people in the 1820s) but she picked up enough knowledge and skills to teach school and to serve as children’s governess to a prosperous Seneca Falls, NY, family. Clearly she’d picked up some feminist ideas, and that probably led her to pick Dexter Bloomer as husband, for he also had been influenced by the reform spirit of the age. But while Amelia’s (and probably Dexter’s) focus was on drink and the damage it was doing to the ‘alcoholic republic’, she gave time, money, and labor to a range of reform notions, and was doubtless happy to attend the Seneca Falls women’s right Convention. But she was not an active participant and indeed shrunk back from signing its Declaration of Sentiments. But as she and Dexter moved west her sympathies broadened to include many feminist reforms (including the bloomers) and made her eminent enough to engineer a first meeting between Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, now commemorated in bronze at Seneca Falls. On balance, we must conclude that Amelia Bloomer’s being identified with her odd trousers owed mainly to her opponents’ desires to trivialize everything that she really stood for. Amelia Bloomer continued to agitate for a better world until she died, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, late in 1894. ©

[Tripps]

Makes me immediately think of the Oldham Tinkers record Oldham's Burning Sands

In the 'arem where they wear 'em pretty low - ow - ow
And sometimes where they wear 'em none at all. . .

[Stanley]

Well! You learn something new every day. Thanks for that David..... My education has been advanced.

[Stanley]

"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success." Ian Fleming

My youthful admiration of John F. Kennedy, inspired mainly by his wit and his knowledge of American history, soon faded; but it never extended to his preferences in literature. So I readily confess that I have never read (or purchased) a James Bond novel, even though it’s pretty clear that Kennedy’s endorsement of ‘secret agent 007’ transformed Ian Fleming’s Bond series from so-so to best sellers in the American market and, soon enough, made Bond films into one of Hollywood’s great franchises. In 1960, when the two first met, Fleming had published seven Bond novels, the first one, (Casino Royale) in 1953, so they were certainly written at speed, and were clearly intended as entertainments, stressing Bond’s fascination with gadgetry, his stylish life, and his unnatural success in attracting the femme fatale type of woman. All of those might have caught Kennedy’s eye, but Fleming’s life story as similar enough to Kennedy’s that there may have been some fellow feeling involved. Ian Fleming was born (on May 28, 1908) into a family suddenly made wealthy by his self-made grandfather and grew up in the shadow of a more successful (at school and university) elder brother, Peter, who also became, one gathers, a better writer. Ian Fleming’s taste in women was also, possibly, part of the reason for Kennedy’s interest in him. But what strikes me now is that their first conversation, at a Washington, DC, social gathering in Kennedy’s campaign year, was all about how to get rid of Fidel Castro. Fleming’s proposed solution involved creating a (false) legend about how beards attracted radiation, at which point cowardly, credulous Fidel would shave his beard off and thus lose his mystique and, along with it, the support of the Cuban people. Kennedy is said to have laughed merrily at Fleming’s outrageous suggestion, but his endorsement of Fleming’s Bond books soon bubbled to the surface and sent Fleming’s American sales through the roof. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion was not too far in the future, and although an invasion was a more dramatic intervention than a shave, it still relied on the idea that political power was merely sensational, a matter of style rather than substance. Kennedy’s arrogant expectation that Cubans would rise up to greet their liberators was about as realistic as Fleming’s idea that marring Castro’s “image” would evaporate his power. John le Carré’s Smiley, a perfectly ordinary man, is a better bet for spy immortality than Ian Fleming’s Bond. ©

[Stanley]

"Intelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old cultures." Oswald Spengler.

To many in the West, World War I (‘The Great War’) signaled only decay. Millions died in battle and from war-induced disease, but for what? The war itself seemed to have no actual ‘cause’ (other than a set of top-heavy and inflexible alliances which shook out as the ‘Central Powers’ versus ‘the ‘Allies’) and its only obvious consequence was the Versailles peace of 1919 wherein the winners named the losers as villains and then plundered them through war reparations and demilitarization. Surveying the rubble, western youth asked ‘what the hell?’, found no answers, and joined the ‘lost generation.’ This alienation and anomie produced some excellent art (including fiction) of which my favorite continues to be Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and it produced much speculation about the decline and fall of cultures. Among several such philosophical-historical works, I remember best Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West which, translated into English in the 1920s and highlighted by Time magazine in 1928, found its way onto my father’s bookshelves and stayed there at least until I read it as a high school student. It was a gloomy read. Born in Brunswick on May 19, 1880, Oswald Spengler found in Europe’s disintegration the idea that cultures, like organisms, have a life cycle, and that the West’s life cycle had entered its final stages, evidenced by flailing, feeble democracies intent on reaching their lowest common denominators and by reactionary forces that dreamed only of revenge. Though profoundly conservative, Spengler took little comfort from the rise of Mussolini and Hitler (his subsequent volumes were banned by the Nazis) and hoped for a more explicitly German and very conservative (one might almost say ‘Bismarckian’) socialism to fight the rising power of communism. Even this, for Spengler, was not a pleasing prospect. The West was dying, and deserved to die. Of course he roused some opponents (for instance Arnold Toynbee), but as a prophet Spengler was not honored in his own country (in 1936 he predicted that the Third Reich could not last more than a decade). Income from The Decline of the West and its subsequent volumes eased him out of his own life with a huge personal library and a lot of recorded 18th-century German music. I never did learn what dad thought of Spengler’s book, but it may have deepened his often-expressed puzzlement about how a culture that produced Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven could also bring forth a Hitler or a Goebbels. ©.

[Stanley]

"Never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians” – Miles Davis

No, ladies and gentlemen, “British Jazz” is not an oxymoron, certainly not as good a one as “military intelligence”. On the other hand, it’s not as old as Shakespeare’s “lascivious grace,” which dates from circa 1609 (Sonnet XL). Nor is British jazz very old, nor (as American jazz can claim to be) is it home grown. It was an import, perhaps first introduced by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s British tour of 1921, an event that (in causing the elderly and established to wrinkle their noses) gave the young a rhythmic way to rebel. Indeed it seemed to me that many British jazzmen (and women) took to jazz through what was almost a conversion experience, a road to freedom and free expression, a liberation made much of, too, by the likes of George Melly and John Dankworth. But it was “auntie” herself, the BBC, who took jazz up in 1929. Soon jazz was a BBC broadcast staple, not only at home but abroad, in the commonwealth and colonies. In Barbados, Harold Winston Beckett first heard BBC-broadcast jazz and translated it into his own with the trumpet, his instrument of choice (he played it for the Salvation Army). Beckett, born in St. Michael’s, Barbados, on May 30, 1923, moved to Britain in 1954 as part of the post-World War colonial migration. He took his trumpet along, intending to play it on a wider stage, was almost immediately taken in by leading British bands, e.g. Ronnie Scott’s, and soon became a jazz figure in his own right and (often) with his own band or combo. He also played with touring bands and combos, notably Dave Brubeck’s and Duke Ellington’s, and thus kept up with new developments in jazz culture. In the 1980s the British Council picked Beckett up and made of him a British cultural ambassador, for instance to Scandinavia and the Middle East. It was Winston’s wish to be “with it”; it was his technical skill with the horn that enabled him to do so, whether on his own albums or with the Orchestre Nationale de France. His last full album (2008) was reggae and fusion in style. An ‘import’ himself, Harry Beckett was one of those players who made jazz “British”. ©

[Stanley]

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whitman, "Song of Myself," 1892 version.

Walt Whitman, perhaps one of our gayest men and certainly our most exuberantly American poet, was born May 31, 1819, on Long Island. Among his brothers were George Washington Whitman and Thomas Jefferson Whitman, so we may guess that, as well as being Quakers, his parents were patriots. So was Walt. Genteel poverty and many moves made his childhood unhappy, but he did remember being kissed by Lafayette on July 4, 1825, during the marquis’s farewell tour of the republic that he had midwifed. More prosaically, in his Ben Franklin mode, Walt apprenticed as a printer, and in that raffish crowd he began to write, attend the theatre, write, teach, write, work as a reporter, and write. In about 1850 he began Leaves of Grass, that immortal outpouring of (to quote from the poem) “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He would return to Leaves again and again, revising, modifying, even retrieving previously trashed lines, truly a life’s work and the work of his life. Early on, Leaves of Grass impressed all the right people (Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, et al), but many (possibly most) reviewers thought it obscene and awful. So when next you read something that is offensive to you, remember it might become something quite else, in our culture’s own good time, just like Leaves of Grass has become “our cultural Declaration of Independence.” It’s just possible, then, that the “decision” on whether something is in good taste, or a work of genius, will not be yours alone. After service as a medic in the Civil War (if you haven’t yet, you must read his Civil War journal!!!) Walt Whitman suffered a stroke in 1873 and lived the rest of his long life in some discomfort, cared for by his neighbors, his tenants, his family, and his friends, but always writing, revising his life and re-editing his work. He died in 1892. Leaves of Grass is still with us, triumphantly. ©

[Stanley]

" I don't carry a gun because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they respect me." Sheriff Andy Taylor in the Andy GriffithShow.

When in 2010 actor Andy Griffith came out with a short film in which he praised President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, it rubbed some people up the wrong way. Conservatives were outraged and took to the airwaves to express their anger—only to find themselves mercilessly lampooned by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” As for me, I was so pleasantly surprised by Griffith’s ‘political’ persona that I thought that maybe, just maybe, Andy Griffith had not been “playing himself,” whether as Andy Taylor, the down-home sheriff of Mayberry (in “The Andy Griffith Show”) or as the mountain yokel Will Stockdale in No Time for Sergeants. In a sense, we were both wrong. In supporting Obamacare, Andy Griffith voiced those down-home values that made his TV Mayberry so loved (in the 60s it was never out of the top ten and in its last year it was #1 in viewing figures); and he was indeed still playing himself. He was a North Carolinian country boy, born in Mount Airy (rhymes with Mayberry, doesn’t it?) on June 1, 1926, the only child of a working-class couple, shy enough to retire hurt when he heard himself referred to as “poor white trash.” He found solace and self-expression first in music (he taught music in school for three years), then comedy monologues (featuring himself as country bumpkin) and finally in acting, and as success started to pile in (in acting, in the 1950s and 1960s) he built himself a home in the North Carolina hills (where else would a mountain yokel hide out?) where, locally, he played a role in “liberal” politics. It was a small role, and an occasional one, but in it he was effective enough that he was urged (in 1989) to run for the US Senate against the arch-conservative Jesse Helms. That role was one that Andy Griffith turned down, but he did successfully back the campaign (for governor, in 2000) of Mike Easely, another home-grown (Rocky Mount) North Carolina yokel of liberal instincts. The more one discovers about Andy Griffith, the more evident it becomes that he was, actually, very like Sheriff Andy Taylor and Private Will Stockdale, and it was no surprise, either, that Griffith turned up in 2010 as an enthusiastic supporter of a public health system. ©

[Stanley]

"We saw her plunge, bow first and intact . . . then the screams began and seemed to last eternally." Elizabeth Allen, April 1912.

‘Tis an ill wind that blows no good’ is an ancient proverb that testifies to our common reaction to disasters, which is to find heroes (or martyrs) in the wake of even the worst cock-ups. So, in the case of the sinking of RMS Titanic (April 14-15. 1912), the press made much of the courage (and phlegm) of the ship’s band, eight musicians who stayed and played while the waters rose around them. Their leader, Wallace Henry Hartley was born in Colne, Lancashire on June 2, 1878. Hartley’s body, Number 224 in a grisly list, was recovered, and by the time it came home to Lancashire (May 17. 1912) he was object of popular veneration. His funeral was attended by thousands (30,000, it is reckoned), and it presented important parts of his life story, notably his respectable dissenting background and his singing. He was buried out of his family’s Methodist church, and music was provided by Hartley’s old choir at the Bethel chapel. Among their tunes was “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” for everyone believed the story (first printed in the Boston papers) that “Nearer” was among the band’s last tunes, perhaps the very last, as the ship filled and plunged. The origin of that story was a Canadian, Mrs. Vera Dick, who also remembered the band still playing as the water rose waist high. Given Mrs. Dick’s baptismal name, she may have wanted to tell the truth, but it’s thought that she didn’t quite manage. Indeed some saved passengers remembered no music at all, notably a Miss Elizabeth Allen, a first-class passenger from St. Louis. As another proverb has it, the truth lies somewhere between. The band did play (although the rising waters did move them away from their pianos), and they played at least one hymn (from the White Star Line’s music book), but in general they stuck to popular tunes such as “Alexander’s Rag Time Band.” Doubtless they helped passengers and crew retain order and maintain sanity, and we remember Hartley and his band for that. As for Miss Allen, she was returning home preparatory to her London wedding. Rather phlegmatically, if not heroically, she immediately sailed back to England (on board the Baltic, another White Star Line ship!!) to be married to an up-and-coming English doctor, James Mennel. It was a double wedding (her sister Clare was the other bride) and quite a “society” occasion, attended by (among others) the American ambassador. I expect that nothing was said about Wallace Henry Hartley and his bandsmen. Weddings must needs be happy occasions, not heroic ones. ©

[Stanley]

"He who accepts the unaltered philosophy of another is as ludicrous as he who dons his neighbor's hat, and infinitely more ridiculous." Paulette Goddard.

The actress Paulette Goddard was born on Long Island on June 3, 1910. As her parents’ marriage dissolved, she left school at 14 to become a model. Her success may be measured by her ‘discovery’ (by Florenz Ziegfield) and her brief time as a ‘follies’ chorus girl. Her breakthrough in Hollywood films, though, may be attributed to her marriage (her second) to Charles Chaplin, and her important roles in Chaplin’s silent classic Modern Times (as the Little Tramp’s “Gamine”, in 1936) and in his first talkie, The Great Dictator (1940). These vaulted her, for a time, into the front rank of American film actresses, and she was seriously considered for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in David Selznick’s Gone with the Wind (1939). I’ve been more than a little interested in Goddard’s roles (in movies and in real life) about this time, for in December 1942 my wife was born, and her parents named her for Paulette Goddard. Theirs was an interesting choice. Selznick always thought Goddard would have made a better Scarlett (than Vivien Leigh, who got the part), but turned her down on his studio’s advice that Goddard’s private life was a bit too public, and might damage the film’s reputation especially in the American South. Among other things, there were those who doubted that Goddard was ever “really” married to Chaplin, whose womanizing was well-known. In any case, Goddard soon obtained an uncontested Mexican divorce from Chaplin and landed plum parts in several Cecil B. DeMille films (including Northwest Mounted Police, 1940, and Reap the Wild Wind, 1942). My betting, though, is that my future parents-in’-law saw Goddard in a couple of Bob Hope comedies (1940 and 1942) and liked the thought of a beautiful, fun-loving daughter. As for the other Paulette, the Goddard one, she went through another marriage and divorce before marrying (in 1958) the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. They moved to Switzerland where Goddard became known as a discerning art collector and a successful woman of business. Remarque died in 1970. At her own death (aged 79) Goddard lived in New York, where she identified herself with several good causes, including New York University, to which institution she willed several millions from her estate. Goddard Hall, a student residence, is among the fruits of that generosity. ©.

[Stanley]

"Small wonder then my children glean in fields they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit." From "A Black man talks of reaping" by Arna Bontemps.

The recent CNN documentary “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street,” has raised a number of questions, not least this one, voiced by a friend. “Why have we never been told this story?” It’s a complicated question, with an even more complex answer, but it does suggest the necessity of including in standard school curricula what’s been called “critical race theory.” This modest idea, now inflaming the passions of the brightest lights at Fox news, is the suggestion that when we teach “American” subjects (literature, history, politics) we should take greater care to include black Americans in the story as subjects, as living, breathing, thinking human beings who did, after all, participate in writing it—and who suffered through some of its worst chapters. One 20th-century American who did try to write “black” into the American story was Arna Wendell Bontemps, born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on June 4, 1902. His parents were “creoles”, a recognizable demographic in Louisiana’s tangled racial history, who were ‘white enough’ to think that they could escape being “Negroes” by moving west, to Los Angeles to ply their skilled trades (dad was a bricklayer and stone mason). Arna’s fight to tell the black part of our story caused conflict with his father, who sent Arna to private school and ordered him “not to go there acting colored.” It didn’t work. Instead, Arna self-identified as black, and spent his life writing “black” into the American story. He did so first by playing an important role in the Harlem Renaissance as a friend of (and co-worker with) writers of the caliber of Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston. Bontemps’ closest friend and mentor was Langston Hughes. When Bontemps’ fiction and poems fell on stony ground they produced (as one of his poems would have it) “bitter fruit,” causing him to lose hope in his present generation and turn to writing children’s literature (daringly, about black children, their hopes, and their dreams) and to caring for, classifying, and archiving the black record for a future time. For adults, he wrote about rebels like Gabriel Prosser and Toussaint Louverture (Bontemps’ Dreams at Dusk was published in 1939). After Harlem he moved south to teach school (in Alabama), to curate black archives (at Fisk University), to develop a fruitful working relationship with the white working-class writer Jack Conroy, and always to hope for better times. If we manage to apply ‘critical race theory’ to these tasks, we may indeed find those better times—and perhaps put a little bit of Bontemps—and Conroy—into our curricula. ©

[Stanley]

"Say good-bye to all the boys at the Bar-20// The black and white days are over// So long Hopalong Cassidy." Don McLean, 1971.

The greatest American pop ‘nostalgia’ song was, without doubt, Don McLean’s “American Pie” (1971), notable for, among other things, making 1959 seem “A long, long time ago.” In the original LP album, it was originally packaged as Parts 1 and 2, almost equal in length, but it became so popular that it was soon released as an 8:42 single which rampaged to the top of the charts in several Anglophone countries, including even New Zealand. Another McLean piece was packaged with the album (printed on the record sleeve), which was McLean’s ‘poetic’ tribute to William Boyd, “So Long Hopalong.” It’s a dreadful poem, nothing poetic about it, no rhyme or rhythm, and it doesn’t even qualify as free verse. But William Boyd was an important figure in the post WWII revival of the “western” as popular entertainment, even as an art form. Boyd was born poor in Ohio on June 5, 1895. By then Ohio was not a very wild state, nor very western, but in his teens he did spend four years living in Tulsa, OK. There he may have punched a cow, but his pickup jobs after he moved to Los Angeles in 1913 hardly prepared him for his celluloid life as a western hero. Nor, for that matter, did his early films, first silents then talkies, but his good looks and easy manner were noticed and he had some leading (non-western) roles before disaster struck in the form of mistaken identity (another William Boyd, also an actor, was arrested in a fairly spectacular bootlegging case) which led to our Bill’s being dismissed as one too hot to handle in an industry struggling to gain at least a surface respectability. At this low point, about 1935, William Boyd trans appeared as Hopalong Cassidy, drinker of sarsaparilla and, despite the fact that he always wore black, including a black hat, a self-effacing hero sans pareil. It was Boyd as Hopalong that McLean memorialized in 1971, and it was Boyd’s many potboiler films (ca. 1935-1942) that in 1948 he bought, revised for television, and made him as rich as Croesus. It was a nice change for Boyd, and for Don McLean (and Bob Bliss) it provided a recognizable hero, one easily called up on late afternoon and Saturday TV, and always in black and white. ©

[Stanley]

Jane Haining: a Life of Love and Courage" title of a recent biography of Ms. Haining.

When Britain declared war against Germany, Jane Haining was vacationing in Cornwall on home leave from Budapest, where she taught domestic science at the Church of Scotland’s Jewish mission on Vörösmarty Street. With little hesitation, Haining announced that she was returning to her duty. That would have been heroism enough, but once she had got back to Budapest she stayed at her post even after the Church of Scotland ordered all British nationals on the school’s staff to flee. And she was still at post in March 1944, when Germany invaded, disregarding Hungarian neutrality and encouraged by Hungary’s rising tide of antisemitism. Immediately, severe restrictions were imposed on all Jews, including the girls at Haining’s school, and Haining wept when she had to sew yellow stars on their tunics. Even that, when reported to the Germans, was one of eight charges against her when she was arrested (on April 25, 1944). She cheerfully (“Ja, es ist wahr”) admitted to all the charges but one, that she had engaged in political activities. Charge #1 was that she had worked among the Jews, to which she responded “Ja” for it was the reason she had, in 1932, gone to work in the mission. Jane Haining was born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, a farmer’s daughter, on June 6, 1897. She was reared in the evangelical tradition in the United Free Church of Scotland, performed well (academically and as a student leader) at boarding school, and was a secretary in a Glagow textile factory when im 1927 she responded to the call to go a-missioning. “I have found my work,” Jane wrote to a friend, and went to learn domestic science in Edinburgh. Thus well prepared, she went on her mission. All surviving reports tell of a popular teacher, beloved by students and staff, and then of a courageous and cheerful prisoner who tried to comfort her fellow inmates. But then on May 15, 1944, she became one of the 12,000 prisoners sent each day to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the reports dwindled. We know she was still alive on July 15, a cheerful letter sent that day to a friend about ‘how to make do’ in a concentration camp, and it is believed that she died shortly thereafter. Some of her possessions were found at the mission in late 1945 and now occupy a place of honor in the National Library of Scotland. On the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Jane Haining was named in Jerusalem as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. And so she was. ©.

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"The lady on horseback", Celia Fiennes, traveller, 1662-1741.

Travel writing has long since become a genre of its own, indeed one with several sub-genres and many classics, best sellers in their own day and now become important historical documents, for instance Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, J. B. Priestley’s English Journey, and George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. Most, I think, have been written by men, not least because it was for a long time easier for men to travel, but the Victorian era produced several travel classics by women, who roamed very far and quite widely, and could thus add “intrepid” to their qualifications. For these brave ladies, indeed for all travel writers, Celia Fiennes was pioneer and predecessor. She was born into an aristocratic Puritan family on June 7, 1662. Her grandfather, Viscount Saye and Sele, was a hero of the Puritan cause in parliament, and her father was a parliamentary colonel in the English civil wars, and it may be that she inherited from them a desire to draw life lessons from things she saw and people she met. And since she was financially secure (Puritans generally believed in partible inheritance), she never married. Instead, she developed a nearly insatiable desire to travel. And not for her the security of travel by coach and four; Celia went sidesaddle, alone or with one or two servants or family members, and she went pretty much all over England. These travels began in the early 1680s and continued, off and on, until at least 1710. Her first motive was to “regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise,” but soon she began to take notes, to survey the landscape, buildings, and people, what they did with their time and how they made their living. She appreciated industry, criticized idleness, and was amused by her own and others’ hypochondria, especially when she visited “spaw” towns. Her journals, intended for family reading, were rediscovered in the 19th century and published in their entirety in 1888 as Through England on a Side Saddle. Only just recently out of print, and still available on-line, Celia Fiennes’ journals made travel worthwhile and thus are still well worth a reader’s time. ©

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From pirate to pioneer scientist: the life of Captain William Dampier, 1651-1715.

One can trace the beginnings of modern science in various ways, for instance following Isaac Newton’s transitions (never quite completed) from astrology to astronomy and from alchemy to physics. Another route, less frequently taken, would be to survey the early literatures of discovery and exploration. In early modern English writing that is to move from imagination to observation. The earliest narratives are full of impossible escapes, unlikely monsters (human and animal), and (of course) vast treasure troves of gold and silver. But by the time that young Thomas Jefferson sat down to write Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) a sort of studied sobriety was the norm. His “new” world was still a nice place with oodles of potential (after all, he had some land to sell or rent), but it had some problems, too. One transitional figure in this journey from romance to reality was William Dampier, sometime naval captain, born in Somerset, England, round about June 8, 1651, and destined to sail around the world (three times). He was, for his time, pretty well educated, but he was also early orphaned and was pressed by necessity to take to the sea as a merchant seaman. Then, following brief interludes with the Royal Navy during the Dutch wars of the 1670s, he took to privateering or, as seemed convenient, piracy. In the process he gained enough experience and reputation to be appointed (in 1699) to command the Roebuck on a voyage of discovery. He was judged well qualified partly because of his A New Voyage Around the World (1697) and its descriptive qualities, but also perhaps because of his accumulated prize money (upwards of £200,000, a very considerable sum). Dampier circumnavigated again, twice, first at the Admiralty’s request and then on his own account, but it was his New Voyage which secured his reputation, with its sobersided accounts of armadillos and breadfruit, Australia and typhoons. He became well known in his own time as a faithful reporter, leaving it to others to add romantic spin, not least Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe story is based on Dampier. Dampier’s writings, later, would inspire another explorer, Captain James Cook, and it’s worth noting that, later still, young Charles Darwin took Dampier’s books with him on his own momentous voyage of discovery aboard HMS Beagle. ©

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"To face life without hope can mean to live without despair." Terence Rattigan.

I may be one of the few foreigners who spent a long time in England (28 years) without ever seeing a play by Terence Rattigan. I learned plenty about him, though, and not just from his death notices (in 1977). He was a master—indeed a kind of missionary—of light, situational drama, often of a kind that allowed him to make his lead characters into objects of satire. This made Rattigan’s plays into dramas that were, critics charged, rendered obsolete (and almost offensively “detached”) by John Osborne’s legion of “angry young men.” Sir Terence Mervyn Rattigan (the ‘Sir’ was the gift of the queen and the ‘Mervyn’ was Rattigan’s own invention) was born on June 9, 1911, into the higher ranks of England’s middle class, his father a senior diplomat about to experience the zenith of his career and then to see it fall into ruins because of his sexual liaison with a Romanian princess. Rattigan negotiated his father’s tragicomedy with reasonable aplomb, doing well enough at Harrow and then Oxford to win some prizes (in sports and academics) and favorable notices of his theatrical talents. He left Oxford without a degree but already with a coterie of friends (including Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Rex Harrison, and Kay Kendall) who would make the 1930s, for him, a productive decade. It was highlighted especially by French Without Tears (1936) which marked Harrison’s arrival as a first-class actor. But perhaps Rattigan’s first decade was better measured by his Follow My Leader (1938), a thinly-disguised satire of Nazi Germany (“Moronia” in the play) and its leaders. Britain still had stage censorship, and the play was banned because it might (surely would have?) offended a foreign head of state and his moronic coterie. A recent (2009) biography of Rattigan heads up its chapter on the 1930s with a quotation from Francis Bacon: “men must know that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.” After wartime duty as an RAF tailgunner, Rattigan returned to write more plays which enabled us, too, to be ‘lookers on,’ e.g. The Winslow Boy (1948) and Separate Tables (1954). Several of these were reproduced as movies (and/or for television), but for effect I would pick Follow My Leader, a weaponized light satire that is potentially fatal to modern great dictators and thus still has its uses. ©

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"And he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are." Maurice Sendak, 1963.

Maurice Bernard Sendak was born in Brooklyn on June 10, 1928, to Jewish immigrant parents who made their ends barely meet through sweatshop work in the garment industry and then peppered their conversations with stories about relatives, back in Europe, who had fallen very foul of Hitler’s holocaust and were known to be disappeared and feared to be dead. Probably, for Maurice, this amplified all the normal horrors of infancy and childhood, and perhaps it found expression in Sendak’s adult work as an illustrator and author of children’s books. In itself, this makes a good story, and it’s one that Sendak loved to tell as he grew older, richer, and more famous. It strikes a chord with us, too, as we remember E. B. White’s depiction of Fern Arable’s desperation when she thinks of her pet pig’s fated future (as breakfast bacon) or Alice Liddell’s sudden descent “down the rabbit hole” into a grotesque wonderland of mad queens and madder hatters. But usually it all turns out OK. Charlotte the spider saves Wilbur the pig’s bacon by naming him “terrific” (and thus allows Fern to wander off into adulthood); Alice, for her part, is wakened by her sister and her disorienting nightmare becomes just a dream about a pack of cards. Most memorably, perhaps, Hans Andersen’s ‘ugly duckling’ becomes, and in his own eyes, a beautiful, graceful swan. taking flight with a better and prettier family. In Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak’s heroic Max faces his fears, made worse by being sent to bed on an empty stomach; and in his disturbed night-time sleep Max bravely becomes king of all the Wild Things before waking to the smells of a delicious breakfast and (only then) a truly restful morning nap. Sendak’s talents, brought into public view by the legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom, went way beyond illustrating and writing for children. But it was Max and his Wild Things who captured our children’s imaginations and made their bedtimes into manageable adventures. ©.

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"And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars." William Styron, translating Dante, in Darkness Visible (1990).

William Styron, one of the better American novelists of the 20th century, was born in Newport News, Virginia, on June 11, 1925. I should add to that evaluation that he proved to be one of our better essayists, too, through his last book, Darkness Visible (1990), a memoir based on his own extended bout with depression, madness, and the temptation to suicide. When he published it, he was not yet out of the woods, and his escape from a subsequent episode was facilitated by reading, again, some of the thousands of thankful letters he had received from readers of Darkness Visible. Acute depression is always personal, and Styron’s treatment of his own illness was, indeed, drawn from the uniqueness of his own life; but he saw depression, too, as a universal thing, an understandable consequence of the human condition. This seeming paradox characterized reactions to Styron’s most famous novels, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979). In both fictions, Styron the author had exploited quite “other” identities, a rebel black slave in the case of Nat Turner, and two survivor-victims of the Holocaust, Sophie Zawatowska and Nathan Landau—and what was worse, neither Sophie nor Nathan had a clear claim to be survivor-victims. Sophie was a Polish Catholic whose “choice” had been to give her daughter up to the extermination chambers at Auschwitz and Nathan was a delusional (indeed, schizoid) American Jew. When their own truths catch up to them, Sophie and Nathan commit suicide; but Styron was pilloried by some critics for looking in on, exploiting, “identities” that were not his own and that he (therefore) should not presume to share. The novels’ successes (both were prize-winners) further inflamed these critics’ anger, demonstrating to them not only Styron’s “exploitation” but the careless-ness of the ‘dominant’ culture. Well, as Donald Trump has demonstrated, “identity culture” is as dangerous a game as “identity politics.” Anybody can play the identity game, and in both cases, Styron had the last, best word. Slavery and the Holocaust, he said, were both expressions of the human condition, and if we are to retain our humanity, we must (and can) strive to understand both as human monstrosities.©

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"I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. " Djuna Barnes.


Djuna Barnes’ first name was by no means her only eccentricity, for she lived a good, long time and she spent most of it collecting eccentricities and being eccentric. But with all that, she could be very kind. In 1967, in the midst of her long spell (1940-1982) as Greenwich Village’s most eccentric recluse, Ms. Barnes received a letter from a young woman who’d named her baby “Djuna” and now wanted to know what the name might mean. Djuna responded with a pleasing and possibly true story of how her father constructed her name, and finished by writing “and there you are—and blessings on her.” Djuna Barnes was born on June 12, 1892, in an actual log cabin (overlooking the Hudson River) and into a family that prized its own eccentricities, perhaps using them as compensatory for their declining material fortunes. Djuna fell in with their oddities, enthusiastically, at 18 entering into an odd marriage (of which she quickly repented), and then in her 20s establishing a reputation as a gifted writer of feature stories for New York newspapers and national magazines. Perhaps needless to say, many of her stories were about odd folk. Djuna also became (in this period) a member of some of New York’s stranger social circles, and also became known as a writer in the decadent and aesthetic styles, as for instance in her Book of Repulsive Women (1915, first sold as a pamphlet at 15 cents). Djuna Barnes’ next eccentricity was modernism, as it was practiced by the expatriate writers of the Lost Generation. After these Paris years (1921-1930), during which she tended towards ‘dadaism,’ Djuna retired back to Greenwich Village, drank too much, alarmed her friends (including e. e. cummings, Anais Nin, and Carson McCullers), and dried out often enough to do some writing. That did sell, but did not bring in enough to keep together her body and soul, and so she supplemented her income with annual gifts from the Guggenheims and occasional generosities from her friends. Rarely seen in public but much loved, Djuna Barnes died in 1982 at 90, remembered in obituaries as the last survivor of her remarkable generation, and of her remarkable family. ©

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"People are always selling the idea that those who have mental illness are suffering. But it's really not so simple." John Nash.

The cinema being what it is, a visual art, the makers of A Beautiful Mind (2001) decided to render John Nash’s schizoid delusions as visual, seen things, but in fact Nash’s alternate realities were mainly auditory. He heard voices. We have that from John Nash himself, for he was still alive and well in 2001, and we should probably take his word for it. John Forbes Nash was born in West Virginia on June 13, 1928. He was educated in local schools (and by reading from his grandfather’s library), and then at the Carnegie Institute (now Carnegie-Mellon University) where he received both bachelor and masters degrees by age 20. Already recognized as a brilliant mathematician, he proceeded to Princeton for his PhD and then (in 1951) to MIT for his first academic appointment, in mathematics, where he was expected to research and teach in a field of advanced calculus. However, he’d also developed his interest in games theory, and had applied it to decision-making in a competitive, market economy. It’s all beyond my ken, but through mathematics Nash expressed the view that all players in a competitive game can reach (and in a sense ought to reach) a mutually advantageous outcome, now called the “Nash equilibrium.” It was for this (and not for his parallel work in advanced calculus) for which Nash, in 1994, won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Along the way, Nash won major prizes also for his discoveries and proofs in differential calculus, and he remains the only person to have received both the Abel and Nobel Prizes, the former in 2015. He’s undoubtedly better-known today as the central figure (played by Russell Crowe) in A Beautiful Mind, an Academy Award (four Oscars, in fact) film which makes a very game attempt to construct a unified narrative of Nash’s mathematical work, his courtship and married life with Alicia Lardé Lopez-Harrison (beautifully played in the film by Jennifer Connolly), and his schizophrenic episodes (themselves woven through with Cold-War imaginings and realities). Alicia and John Nash died together, in a car crash (neither was driving) on the New Jersey Turnpike in 2015. ©.

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"Though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.” Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 1889

When in 1888 Jerome K. Jerome married he was no longer a young man. True, he was in years only 29, having been born on June 14, 1859, but in experience he can be forgiven for thinking himself rather elderly. His family history was one of declining fortunes, which declined further when at 15 he was orphaned. He had then only barely started at grammar school, and he found it difficult to get (and retain) employment. His first job was collecting usable coal from the London & North-Western right of way, and after four years of that, still penniless, he joined up with a troupe of actors who spent more on their costumes than they took in ticket money. Then, in rapid succession, he tried several other professions before settling on writing for money. His only modest successes came with Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), a modest but accurate title, and with an affair of the heart with Georgina Elizabeth Henrietta (“Ettie”) Marris, whom he married only days after her divorce was finalized. Modestly, Jerome took Elsie out on the Thames for their honeymoon, in a small rowboat no less, camping on shore and enjoying the sights and sounds of the river. That led to a long marriage (they parted only Jerome’s death in 1928) and, more immediately, the book that made Jerome famous, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889). It sold wildly at first, worldwide, and is still in print, and if you run out and get a copy you won’t regret it. It’s not about Elsie at all (nor, of course, about the honeymoon, for this was Victorian England), but was a wholly imagined holiday (Jerome, two of his men friends, and the dog Montmorency), taken on the Thames, upstream from Kingston to Oxford, and it’s about their camping experiences, the sights they saw, their guesses about Montmorency’s thoughts, and the histories they contemplated. I don’t think you’ll stitch your sides laughing, but you will find it constantly, modestly tickling. And you’ll probably then go out and buy a boat just to mess about in it. In the year after the publication of Three Men, boat registrations on the Thames increased markedly, and my guess is that “Montmorency” became a favorite pet’s name, too. Jerome and Ettie (who died in 1937) went on to a modestly prosperous life, with a few successful publications. They are buried in an Oxfordshire village churchyard not too far from the river. Their chosen epitaph is from First Corinthians 3, St. Paul’s splendid hymn to modesty as the only fit mode of life for us humans. But there’s nothing in it of messing about in boats. ©