BOB'S BITS

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Horses always go up to each other and sniff each other's noses. Barbara Woodhouse, explaining her approach to a horse at its first training session.

A good way to compare cultures is to look for those places where they nearly intersect, and then tote up the differences. Take the dog, for instance, and the veneration shown for the animal in Britain and the USA. In this respect British and American dog owners often out-perform British and American parents. They give flesh, bone, and blood to the meaning of the word “dote.” And it is a well-observed fact that in both cultures many owners begin, somehow, to resemble their dogs. Or it may be the other way around. But when it comes to TV shows about dog training, we see contrasts, as in César Millan’s “The Dog Whisperer,” a weekly, dramatic, episode in which our man tames someone else’s anti-social canine and renders the slavering beast into a cuddly puppy, and on the other side there was the BBC’s “Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way” in which a mongrel crew of normal owners and their more or less normal dogs were gently whipped into shape over a period of weeks by a tallish, elderly woman of “shabby grandeur and imperious command,” the eponymous Barbara Woodhouse. She had been born on an Irish farm on May 9, 1910, and save for a few years of town life the smell of horses and dogs (and other rural odors) stuck with her all her life, making her—somewhat ungainly to begin with—the least popular girl in successive schools. But Barbara stuck with it, finishing up her formal education at an agricultural college and then steaming through one bad marriage and a second, happy one. Almost the whole time, her training business, her books and finally her TV appearances earned way more than pin money and demonstrated her preternatural ability to communicate with animals and with their owners. And it was the owners whom Barbara almost always arraigned as the guilty party when it came to (animal) misbehavior. In that, at least, Barbara Woodhouse and César Millan present themselves as near identities. So it may be a universal truth. ©

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In Hollywood, nothing is permanent. David O. Selznick.

It was 1937 and—still without a Scarlett O’Hara—David Selznick was already shooting scenes (the burning of Atlanta) for Gone with the Wind. He had purchased film rights for the novel before it became a best-seller, and now he was using old film sets to incinerate Atlanta (nothing lasts in Hollywood, he always said). Amid the ersatz smoke and fury, his brother Myron brought him a hazel-eyed, brown-haired beauty from Britain and said, “David, I want you to meet Scarlett O’Hara.” David Selznick signed her up on the spot, and Vivien Leigh started learning how to speak southron and to get along badly with Clark Gable. Selznick’s habit of acting on impulse was already legendary in tinsel town, and this brilliant stroke solidified it. But it had been long in the making. Born into a millionaire’s family on May 10, 1902, David Selznick and his brother Myron were encouraged by their indulgent father to see themselves as prodigies, and David certainly acted like one. When the family lost its fortune in a 1923 bankruptcy, David kick-started his career as an assistant story editor at MGM, married the boss’s daughter (Irene Mayer) and then with indecent haste jumped ship to become head of production at RKO (one of his RKO hits was Bill of Divorcement). He rejoined MGM to produce several hits, including a couple of Dickens pieces, and with this developed taste for making novels into films he moved into independent production just in time to snap up Margaret Mitchell’s epic for a measly $50,000 (actually, $900,000 in today’s $$$). On the Gone with the Wind set, as with all his films, Selznick worked himself, his writers, his actors, and his directors half to death, dictating orders at speed to two exhausted stenographers and giving ulcers to everyone, not least his assistant story editors. But he spent lavishly too, and Hollywood loved him for that. He peaked in the 1930s but he kept furiously at it until he died, with appropriate suddenness, in 1965. ©

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I stopped entirely at home like a limpet on a rock. Eleanor Ormerod, letter to a friend.

George Ormerod, historian, antiquary, and Gloucestershire JP, was born in the reign of George III but lived long enough to become the very model of a modern Victorian family autocrat. That only three of his ten children ever married was attributed to his iron rule over his household and his Gloucestershire estate. His daughter Eleanor Anne Ormerod (b. on May 11, 1828) rarely stirred from hearth and home until her father died (in 1873) and then off she went, with her sister Georgiana, to become a leading economic entomologist of her day. In truth, bugs had already been her liberation at home, an innocent pursuit of which her parents did not quite approve (it was not thought lady-like) and which began when, in 1852, she ran across a copy of James Stephens’s Manual of British Coleoptera. She quickly became fond enough of beatles and other insects to contribute to the Royal Horticultural Society (on beneficial and harmful insects), but she did not assume a public role until her father died. Indeed, her first (three) publications appeared in the year of his death. After that the only thing that held her back were the normal Victorian conventions of reluctance to grant public acknowledgement to a woman of genius. But she did operate in public, anyway, as a lecturer for the Royal Agricultural College, as a special assistant (for bugs, of course) at Kew Gardens, and as a prodigiously productive author of tracts on insects and their impact on farming. Once dad died, Eleanor and Georgiana moved from house to house, always in England, but Eleanor’s extensive correspondences enabled her to produce tracts on South African, Australian, Barbadian, and New Zealand entomologies. No feminist she, still her resolute pursuit of knowledge and her insistence on doing it herself (or with her sister) won her the admiration of Virginia Woolf as a “pioneer of purity.” Woolf’s short story, “Miss Ormerod,” appeared in 1924, 23 years after Eleanor’s death.©

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When I told my mother what had happened, I broke down and sobbed like a child. The future George VI. concerning his brother's abdication.

In the mysterious genealogies of European royal houses, Queen Victoria was a Hanover, but as a woman she could not pass that line on, and so her children, perforce, were of Prince Albert’s house (another German line): Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Then the trials of the Great War (1914-18) encouraged a wholesale name change (to the House of Windsor), while a cadet family, the Battenbergs, simply translated themselves into English as the Mountbattens. By their several names, they are the champion line of English royalty, certainly in terms of length (the Plantagenets ruled for 245 years), and something of their sense of permanence, of business-as-usual, of keeping the shop, and even of duty can be gathered from the decision of Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George, Duke of York, despite the uproar and (for him) unpleasantness surrounding his brother’s abdication, elected to keep Edward VIII’s coronation day, which thus went ahead more or less as planned, on May 12, 1937. The theme of continuity must have been uppermost in his choice of his fourth name (royals usually came with a pack) as his moniker regnant, and so he became George VI, though not at all his father’s son. George VI was not the sharpest of needles. He was last in his class for most of his years at the Naval College, and his childhood stutter became a noticeable public handicap as he began, in the 1920s, to fulfill some of his royal duties. His struggles with that presaged his successes and his limitations as king, and are masterfully recounted in the movie The King’s Speech (2010). Albert Frederick Arthur George knew duty, and he knew family (whatever its name), and so while still Duke of York he made one of his better choices by marrying Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons, who was not a royal but learned how to become one. George VI of Windsor, a family man who became a king, died of one of his few really bad habits—smoking—in 1952. ©

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Bob made an addition to yesterday's post.....

Dear all. I thought Ed Rataj’s contribution far too good to keep it to myself!!!
Here Ed retails Kaiser Bill’s one joke for your pleasure.
Bob Bliss

Kaiser Wilhelm is reported to have told only one joke in his entire life. When he heard that the English royal family had changed its name he said that he looked forward to seeing the play The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. Ed Rataj

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Had I not seen several China merchants shampooed before me, I should have been apprehensive of danger. A Voyage to the East Indies, 1762.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘shampoo’ first appeared in English in a 1762 travel narrative. But the practice became popularized by an intrepid Indian explorer (of England) named Deen Mahomet, born in Bihar, India, sometime in May 1759, so let’s call it May 13. He served with distinction in the Bengal Army (indeed rescuing Governor-General Hastings in a 1781 battle). He then fell under a cloud (accused of extortion) and emigrated to Ireland with his sponsor, a Godfrey Baker, where Mahomed changed the spelling of his name, perfected his English, married an Anglo-Irish gentlewoman, Jane Daly, and published an epistolary memoir, The Travels of Deen Mahomed (1794). It sold well (the first book written in English by an Indian), but his fame really took off when in 1807 he moved to London and established, in the Portland Square mansion of an India Company official, a steam bath and shampoo salon. He also founded the Hindostanee Coffee House (next door), but it was the shampoos that made him famous and, in an up-and-down career, wealthy at times. These were, in the Indian way, full-body, massaging shampoos, sometimes modestly done in a body-bag, and after Mahomet moved to Brighton (to take advantage of the Prince Regent’s fashion for exotica) he added various retail lines of ointments, medicines, cosmetics and, of course, what we now call shampoos. And he published two books about his treatments, attributing to himself a long period of medical training in India (and a longer life to accommodate it). He was astonishingly successful, and in 1820 (with a new English partner, Thomas Brown) he built the magnificent Mahomed’s Baths overlooking the sea on King’s Road. The Baths no longer survive, but the Mahomeds brooded a passel of children, some of whom became prominent Brightonians. Deen and Jane died within a year of each other (Mahomed aged 92) and are buried side by side at St. Nicholas Church. ©

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I didn't want to be in the movies. I knew I was going to be. Billie Dove.

The chorus girl Billie Dore was a likeable character in an early Wodehouse novel (A Damsel in Distress, 1919), a minor love interest who ran off with Lord Marshmoreton while Lord M’s daughter Maude (the distressed damsel) married George Bevan, a romantically inclined American playwright-songwriter. I long identified the Bevan character as Guy Bolton (a Wodehouse collaborator at the time) and Billie Dore as Billie Dove, a great star of the silent screen. Neither guess stands up to scrutiny. The real Billie Dove led an extraordinary life, but had more connection with Billie Holliday (who admired her and borrowed her name) than with P. G. Wodehouse. Billie was born Lillian Bohny, of Swiss immigrant parents, in New York, on May 14, 1903. She acquired the “Billie” as a nickname in school, and the “Dove” from an admiring artist. As Billie Dove she became a Ziegfield chorus girl, and then a screen star whose popularity rivaled that of Clara Bow and Mary Pickford. Like Wodehouse’s Billie Dore, she was quite an innocent, and her first marriage (with director Irvin Willat) had an odd whiff about it (“it was not the sort of love you have in marriage,” she later wrote), but even more oddly she was bought out of the marriage by Howard Hughes, who in 1930 paid Willat $325,000 to let Billie go. Billie stayed with Hughes for three years, had a totally bizarre filming experience (Blondie of the Follies, 1932) with Marion Davies (the film was changed in Davies’s favor by her lover William Randolph Hearst), and Billie Dove then literally flew off into the sunset with her very own Lord Marshmoreton, a Texas oilman called Robert Kenaston. And she was desperately afraid of airplanes, having refused to take to the air with Hughes. Robert and his beautiful, innocent wife raised two kids and stayed wed for the rest of his life, which ended in 1970. Billie then took a creative writing course at UCLA and, as Lillian Kenaston, wrote her memoirs. She lived on to 1997. ©

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I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Walt Whitman.

I am not qualified to name our greatest poets, but the two who would most assuredly be in the running are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. They were contemporaries and breathed the same air (as they both might have put it). Their genius with words led them inevitably to share some visions, and their culture regarded both as eccentrics. Those similarities (better called commonalities) fade away, however, when we compare Dickinson’s tight, elegant, crystalline (and indeed private) poems with Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” that he blazoned out “over the rooftops of the world.” The blazoning broke out with the publication of the first (of many) editions of Leaves of Grass. We can celebrate its birthing-day as May 15, 1855, for it was on that day that the 36-year-old printer’s mate registered the title with the US District Court, New York City. Seven weeks later the actual book appeared in print, but hardly “in public,” for all 795 copies were placed on sale in one place only, a book and curio shop called the Phrenological Cabinet. Whitman was at this hour one of those who believed that the general profile and the particular bumps and furrows of his skull were, so to speak, his karma: odd to us, perhaps, but not to many of his contemporaries. The Leaves of Grass would go through eight American editions, each one revised by its guiding genius, the ever-aging but ever-young poet. You can find the very first one at the University of Iowa libraries. However, the page proofs and manuscript are long gone, used (Whitman thought) to light the print-shop stove. But the wondrously (and aggressively) public poetry survives in each edition.

Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,


My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.


Emily Dickinson managed such universality too, but in a far quieter key. ©

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Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, 1939.

In 1965, Professor Laurence Veysey assigned to his graduate course (on 20th-century US social history) Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, first published on May 16, 1939. The novel was not then highly thought of, and I was surprised to find it on the “required for purchase” list, but critical opinion today echoes Veysey’s view that its plot and imagery expose some of the emerging excesses of American culture and their corrosive effect on ordinary folk. The Day of the Locust is a great novel, even if it’s only about Hollywood culture, and the Modern Library now ranks it among the 100 best novels of the century. Its chaotic, apocalyptically absurd ending, themed by the hero-painter’s grand canvas “The Burning of Los Angeles,” is a bit hard to believe, but it’s a double picture-in-words that has stayed vividly with me for over 50 years and now seems real enough in our apocalyptically absurd world with its casino queen presidency. It’s also worth reading for its unforgettable portrait of the pathologically repressed Iowan, Homer Simpson, who’s come to LA to find peace and health only to find utter disillusionment. Just as other disappointed tinsel-town “seekers” join in the final, destructive, revengeful riot (a real-life embodiment of “The Burning of Los Angeles”) Homer stomps to death a particularly objectionable child actor, the apparently angelic but really quite devilish Adore Loomis. From time to time, Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, has confessed that Nathanael West’s “Homer” (rather than the Greek one) was the inspiration for his own cartoonish invention. And in our current politics, W. H. Auden’s reaction to West’s novel seems eerily prescient. The Day of the Locust was, Auden wrote, a moral parable “about a Kingdom of Hell whose ruler is not so much the Father of Lies as the Father of Wishes.” ©

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The oboe's a horn made of wood/ I'd play you a tune if I could./ but the reeds are a pain./ the fingering's insane,/ it's an ill wind that blows no one good. Ogden Nash.

Occasionally one reads of a person of such extraordinary talent and so many virtues that one wants to learn more. Such a one was Janet Craxton, born in London on May 17, 1929, the youngest child (of six) and only daughter in the remarkable brood of the pianist Harold Hunt Craxton and his wife, the “saintly” Essie May Faulkner. Like her immediate family, Janet’s Hampstead street seems to have been bursting with talent; she went through the Royal Academy of music with her Brain-y neighbors Dennis, the horn player, and his brother Leonard who, like Janet, took on the daunting challenges of the oboe. But as for talent and persona, there was no oboist like Janet Craxton. Taught by a galaxy of players and composers in London and Paris (including Nadia Boulanger), she became principal oboist with the Hallé aged only 20, moving in her too short lifetime as principal to the London Mozart Players, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the Royal Opera House orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic. She was also an oboe patriot, founder of the London Oboe Quartet and a performer for whom, in ensemble or as soloist, modern composers rushed to produce oboe pieces, including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Elisabeth Lutyens. Craxton also taught oboe at the Royal Academy, fondly remembered by her pupils as an exacting and yet warmly supportive master with “a wicked sense of humor.” Other Craxton talents included gardening, organic cookery, golf, the keeping of cats, and (especially) photography—and she made her own reeds, too. After nursing her much older husband (the composer and pianist Alan Richardson) through his final illness, Janet Craxton died suddenly (and inexplicably) in 1981. Her memorial service was a Wigmore Hall concert put on in 1982 by a galaxy of talented musicians including—with an empty chair—the London Oboe Quartet. She left her body to science and most of her estate to musical trusts. ©

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Quite one of the outstanding institutions of London. Arthur Conan Doyle, commenting on Lady Mary St. Helier's dinner parties.

When I speak of indomitable Tory ladies I speak warmly. I don’t mean Mrs. Thatcher but, for instance, Lady “Edie” Fitzherbert-Brockholes, who half a lifetime ago and in one of her public service roles (as a lay member of a university council), played a critical part in my first appointment as college principal. Now here’s another, at the end of her long life Lady St. Helier, but at the start of it Mary Stewart-Mackenzie, born in Bavaria on May 18, 1845. Her father was in military service with King Ludwig (not the mad one), but Mary was brought up in Easter Ross by her grandmother, then chief of the Clan Mackenzie and a leading light in the Free Church of Scotland. Two marriages and three children later, in the 1880s, Mary had broken with the “Wee Frees” and become a personage at the very center (or pinnacle) of London society. All her political and some of her social friends were Tories, the Randolph Churchills for instance, and later (1908) she introduced young Winston to her grand-niece Clementine Hozier, choosing one of her famous dinner parties as the theater of engagement. But her social circle was wide, catholic indeed, and as Lady Mary Jeune (and then after her 2nd husband’s elevation to the peerage Lady St. Helier) her social friends included not only Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Conan Doyle but the Americans Edith Wharton and Ida B. Wells, two women about as different as one can imagine. Lady St. Helier was a social magpie, in the language of the day a “lion-hunter,” but her sponsorship of Wells’s anti-lynching campaign highlights her commitment to philanthropy and social reform. For her these were “top-down,” noblesse oblige things, but from 1910 to 1927 the London County Council knew her as the alderman enthusiastically in charge of public housing, and it’s appropriate that today her largest memorial is the St. Helier Estate, a council house development in Morden. But I like to think of her as an indomitable Tory lady. ©

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The ability to read awoke inside of me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. Malcolm X, Autobiography.

At some point in my life, I stopped thinking about “the Negro problem” and began to ponder American racism. Among other things, I credit James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” for that awakening. His title came from an old spiritual:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time.

At the same time, as if on cue, the Nation of Islam entered my field of vision, with its charismatic young leader, Malcolm X. And although Baldwin had explicitly rejected black separatism, Malcolm embodied his prophetic voice. It was not only Malcolm’s message, but his bearing and his background. He was born Malcolm Little, in Omaha, on May 19, 1925. His mother Louise was West Indian and his father Earl a local leader of the Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; together they gave Malcolm that world perspective that Baldwin urged on “White” America, a constant reminder that black history had worked out differently in other places than the USA, and that most people in the world were “of color.” Such views won the family a good deal of persecution from people “without color” (“blue-eyed devils,” Malcolm would later call them) and after a long journey into and out of trouble and prison Little converted to Islam, renamed himself “Malcolm X”, declared himself a communist (which got him on the FBI’s subversives lists), and began to hone those rhetorical skills and personal qualities that would make him, in 1963 when I read Baldwin’s essay, the most visible and most influential black nationalist in the USA. Malcolm’s potential (for good or ill) would not, however, be fully tested. He was assassinated in early 1965, probably because of his leaving the Nation of Islam and certainly the cause of continuing recriminations within the black nationalist movement. ©

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There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. Margaret Fuller.

May 23, 2017, is the 207th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Fuller, who had an extraordinary childhood and an even more remarkable adult life, and became one of the 19th century’s leading advocates of reform, not least in the area of women’s rights. More than that, her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in Boston in 1845, gives some insight into important differences between women’s rights and feminism. Born to a family that did not believe in female subordination, Margaret was rigorously educated at home (mainly by her father Timothy) and at school, and wrote (at the age of 16) that she “felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot.” She came of age at the height of the American Romantic movement, dominated by the New England Transcendentalists, and whether they recruited her or vice versa she quickly became a recognized intellectual force, cooperating with Frederick Henry Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, and George Ripley, and in 1839 forming one of the most famous literary partnerships in American history by becoming the editor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s periodical, The Dial. Famously, she made the great man laugh more than he liked. She broke another barrier by becoming the first female correspondent of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, covering the 1848 revolutions in Europe. There she met, and probably married, the radical Count Giovanni Ossoli, and bore a child (her mother was delighted). Tragically, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, her child and her count were lost at sea on her return voyage. Her tombstone inscription (1901!!), probably by Julia Ward Howe, reads:

By birth a child of New England

By adoption a citizen of Rome

By genius belonging to the world.

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When Lumpy Rutherford had his tonsils out, he brought 'em to school in this little jar. Wally Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver ('Beaver's Tonsils' episode), 1961.

Back in Greenwood Grade School, Des Moines (1949-1955), a common question amongst the cognoscenti was “have you had your tonsils out yet?” Quite a few young heroes and heroines went under the knife and came back, in about a week’s time, acting like the walking wounded, but I remained cravenly tonsilled. I think I was in a minority. My immediate excuse was my Uncle Bill, a surgeon, who contradicted my pediatrician’s advice to yank ‘em out (I was prone to sore throats and he blamed the tonsils). Uncle Bill credited the tonsils, my first experience of a paradigm shift, and he turned out to be right. Final proof of the tonsils’ important role was delivered by Dr. Robert A. Good, then a University of Minnesota professor of medicine known primarily as a pediatrician. Good, born in Crosby, MN, on May 21, 1922, was the first at Minnesota to earn both an MD and a PhD, and his real field was immunology. Good delivered the final, scientific death blow to the tonsil-yanker school with a paper published in 1965. The tonsils, he said, played a particularly important role in children’s health (and indeed in the health of many young mammals). He had already, in 1962, proven the same general point with the thymus gland, previously a physiological puzzle. Meanwhile, Good (himself a victim of partial paralysis from a childhood illness) had become interested in immune deficiency and the “glandular” role played by bone marrow. After fully researching the matter, he performed (in 1968) the world’s first successful bone marrow transplant on a 5-month old baby boy, using marrow from the boy’s 8-year old sister. One can only imagine his pre-op conversation with the parents. When Good died, in 2003, the New York Times reported that the baby boy was still with us and, indeed, was himself a parent. Thus we modify Shakespeare: The good that men do can live after them. ©

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The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, Richard Strauss, Diary entry, Spring 1945.

A small but interesting part of the post-war rehabilitation of Germany came on May 22, 1950 with the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.” The soloist was the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, to whom Strauss had written (just before his death) to put the songs “at your disposal for a world premiere with a first-class conductor and orchestra.” London responded by inviting Flagstad to perform with the Royal Philharmonic, at the Royal Albert Hall (itself London’s tribute to Queen Victoria’s German Prince Consort), with Strauss’s countryman Wilhelm Furtwängler at the podium. The songs, “Spring,” “September,” “When Falling Asleep,” and “At Sunset” are hauntingly beautiful meditations on life and death, the soprano parts often backed (echoed or led) by a solo horn, and they are set to words from a German literature far removed from Nazism, including three poems by Herman Hesse. The London concert was an odd mixture of public pardon and public honor, for both Strauss and Furtwängler had been attacked as Nazi collaborators, and both had been subjected to “denazification.” During that process, much evidence had come to light that both men had (while accepting musical appointments under the regime) believed themselves to be preserving German music from “barbarians” and had also courageously sheltered and saved Jewish friends (musicians and, indeed, in Strauss’s case, his daughter-in-law and grandchildren) from arrest and deportation. Today, Strauss’s last works, not only “Four Last Songs” but also “Metamorphosen”, his Horn Concerto #2, and his Oboe Concerto, are regarded as late-life masterpieces and as philosophical reflections, memorial memoranda on the Nazi destruction of German culture. “Four Last Songs” is also a memorial to Strauss’s father, a horn player, and a tribute to his wife, a soprano. You can hear the songs today on the NPR music channel. ©

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Nature does not make leaps. All plants show an affinity with those around them, according to their geographical location. Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica (1751)

The ordering—by visible or functional relationship(s)—of living things can seem little more than memorization (for freshmen scientists) and as ye olde curiositye shoppe by some molecular biologists. But the still-modern science of taxonomy (there were ancient efforts, for we humans like to classify things) got off to a running start with the work of Carl Linnaeus, born in southern Sweden on May 23, 1707. He spent almost all his adult life at Uppsala University, although the first edition of his life’s work, the Systema Natura, was published during his short stay (1735-38) in the Netherlands. It was a young age for such a revolutionary masterwork, but it was then only 10 pages long and Linnaeus had begun early. His genius and his driving curiosity was recognized by almost everyone who knew him, starting with his father, a Lutheran minister, who put him on to Latin when he was just 7. The other “Linnaean” quality was his humanity; truly a child of the Enlightenment, Linnaeus enjoyed learning enough to shower kindnesses on students, colleagues, neighbors, even on scientific rivals, and he urged anyone who would listen never to trust authority (not even his own) but rather to figure it out for themselves. His founding role in biology is widely recognized. I like it that he also invented the note card (an essential tool of his trade, and mine) and that in a 1752 publication (Nutrix Nuverca) he urged on European upper class mothers that for the health and happiness of all concerned they should breast feed their own children. It was, he thought, nature’s way, and should no longer be regarded as a shameful scrape of the poor. His favorite plant, the northern honeysuckle or “twinflower”, figures prominently in the coat of arms granted to him in 1761 by the Swedish crown, and it is today called Linnaea borealis, a delicate memorial to a great scientist. ©

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A very faithful correspondent, a member (like myself) of St. Louis’s oddest and cheapest club, wrote yesterday to tell me of a rather remarkable article, in last Sunday’s New York Times travel section, which traces Linnaeus’s expedition to Lappland. Linnaeus undertook this task of exploration and, of course, classification (which lasted several months) at the tender age of 20, taking leave from his studies and operating under the auspices of Sweden’s Royal Society. The article, beautifully illustrated (including a print of the twinflower and an explanation of Linnaeus’ rather odd scientific name for the arctic grayling), can be found at LINK
If the URL doesn’t work the NYT site has a very good search engine.
Bob Bliss

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'a fine fellow ... in all the glory of pearlies and bell bottoms' (Pall Mall Gazette, 1888)

A history for everyone is The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, and concentrating (by my imperfect memory) on the traditions invented by or in the service of the British monarchy and empire. Invented traditions, when successful, become imagined histories and thus help to produce distorted presents. We have too many of them. But they can be harmless, take the pearly king and queen traditions of London’s East End. It’s a cockney ‘tradition,’ the East End having once been a cockney kingdom (now it’s a stockbroker’s paradise), and although “pearlies” now claim more ancient roots their odd walks and far odder costumes originated with a streetsweeper named Henry Croft, born on May 24, 1861 in the St. Pancras Workhouse. This was not, as far as I can tell, within earshot of Bow Bells, so Croft might not qualify as a true cockney, and nor did he sweep East End streets. But at some point (probably 1879), Henry Croft started decorating his clothes with mother-of-pearl buttons, and before the century was out the ‘tradition’ had been born and the ever more elaborately buttoned costumes and those who wore them were the subject of paternalistic humor. This came from upper class Londoners, and calls to mind the similar function, in American culture, of the “cakewalk,” a black street performance often the subject of racist jokes. So we hear no more of cakewalks. But the pearly tradition continues, born in Henry Croft’s very public commitment to charity drives, especially those in which working class London scraped together pennies to build their own hospitals. As for Henry, he died in the workhouse where he was born, in 1930, and his funeral parade was a wonder to behold, the cortège a half-mile long and populated, inter alia, by at least 400 pearly kings and queens, dressed, as they say, to the nines. Today, Henry’s great-great granddaughter is Pearly Queen of Somers Town. Long may she reign. ©

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Here, unadorned, are the facts. Richard Dimbleby, beginning his report from Belsen, Spring, 1945.

The BBC’s reputation for objective journalism, occasionally tattered, is still intact, but once it was an object of satire for its formalism and passivity. Its first radio news announcers donned formal wear, black tie I believe, and in the 1960s the “Beyond the Fringe” boys lampooned the Beeb’s wartime announcer: “Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. This is Alvar Liddell bringing you news of fresh disasters.” But by the 1960s things had changed at “Auntie,” and a leading agent of change was Richard Dimbleby. Dimbleby was born on May 25, 1914, born to journalism we might say, for his dad owned, edited, and reported for a local Richmond (Surrey) newspaper. But the amiable, idle child wasn’t going to excel at anything (except “messing about in boats”). He seemed, however, gentlemanly enough to be taken on by the BBC, then upset applecarts by suggesting that it hire its own reporters rather than redact press agency stuff (e.g. Reuters). He even added sound effects to an early radio report, on a record speed run by a British train, by dangling his microphone out the lavatory window. He also pioneered “royal reporting,” accompanying King George and Co. on a Canadian tour in early 1939. The war interrupted all that and made Dimbleby into a real journalist, irritating Churchill with his reports from the middle eastern theater. Called home for that lèse majesté, he was soon reporting from the east bank of the Rhine, from the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber over Berlin, and, memorably, from the gates of Belsen. Back home in peacetime, he became the voice of BBC television news, the pioneer of investigative TV journalism on Panorama, the go-to guy for crisis reporting, and in a sense the nation’s chief presence at its ceremonies, including Churchill’s funeral, a broadcast he made in 1965 very near the end of his long and unsuccessful bout with cancer. Dimbleby was, a colleague said in memoriam, “a simple man, a good man, and a very brave man.” And he still messed about in boats. ©

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A face is too slight a foundation for happiness. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

For reasons still unclear to me, travel writing by Victorian women was a growth industry and has since spawned a swarm of books about the writers themselves, women travelers like Mary Kingsley. Perhaps there was something about ‘the female gaze’ that made their observations peculiarly accessible. Often they proclaimed their debt to the pioneering Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born Lady Mary Pierrepont in a year of revolution and baptized in London on May 26, 1689. She was a precocious child of fabled beauty, and once returned to her father’s care in 1698 had the run of his family homes—and their libraries—in Nottingham and Wiltshire. She was self-educated (later writing that she had stolen her learning), and already in her teens was writing after the manner of Aphra Behn and of several male poets. Indeed she became more than a passable poet even before her 1712 elopement with Edward Wortley Montagu, a young aristocrat of whom her father strongly disapproved. She continued to compose poetry and political satire throughout her life. But her fame as a writer rests chiefly on her ‘Turkish letters,’ sourced from her journals of Montagu’s embassy to the Ottomans (1716-19). These were composed after her return to England and during her various romantic dalliances (including with Alexander Pope, an appropriately platonic one which somehow led to his attacks on her in the Dunciad) and long absences from her husband, but they were not published until after her death (1763: modern editions appeared in 1837 and again in 1967). Lady Mary is also famed for her support of inoculation for smallpox, an art (she called it ‘engrafting’) picked up from Ottoman harems and one which her own disfiguring bout with the disease (circa 1715) and her brother’s death from it (1713) gave her advocacy a personal touch. But then we could say that all of Lady Mary Montagu’s ideas were bravely acquired. strongly held, and clearly expressed. ©

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Courage, force, and charm. Homily at Jacqueline Nearne's funeral, 1982.

One thing learned from years of teaching undergraduates is that exam results should never be taken as fate. For instance, in her wartime tests for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, Section F, Jacqueline Francoise Mary Nearne was judged to be mentally slow, vacillating, and unsure of herself. But her CO overruled the examiners: “I think her one of the best we have found.” And so it was. Mlle. Nearne, born in Brighton on May 27, 1916, but from age 7 educated in France, had with her sister Eileen escaped to Britain in 1940 and volunteered for service. On the night of January 25, 1943, she parachuted into the Auvergne to begin her work as courier, posing as Josette Norville, a commercial traveler whose sales duties took her all over occupied France, usually by train. “Josette” took part in many successful sabotages, later turning to organizing the Maquis to move from resistance to liberation. She also survived several near misses, as when the Germans captured “Chantraine,” a Communist whose farm had been used as a base and landing site, and she dealt coolly with the usual challenges, as when her radio operator went blind, rendering him unable to deal with the codes. She was there long enough (15 months) to have a price put on her head and to recruit locals to the work, including (perhaps uniquely) her older brother Francis who had stayed behind (at Grenoble) in 1940. Jacqueline was ordered home to Britain a few weeks before D-Day. Eileen flew into France on the same night that Jacqueline flew out, and was less lucky (captured and then tortured at Ravensbruck, she did not break), but all three Nearne siblings survived the war. Jacqueline herself found work with the United Nations, mainly in New York, but retired to live in London with Eileen. At her death (1982) she was mourned by two nations as a woman of “extraordinary courage, force, and charm.” Rather a change from her first assessments. ©

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I told you I was ill. Inscription (in Gaelic) on Spike Milligan's tombstone, 2002.

Spike Milligan’s war experience (with the Royal Artillery) began surreally. Expecting a German invasion, and desperately short of munitions, his unit practiced firing routines (I believe on the Sussex Downs) by shouting “bang” at the appropriate moments. It continued in much the same vein. At one point, Milligan’s unit “allowed” a howitzer to roll off a cliff. It fell, with a bang, near enough a radio truck to demand an apology, or humor. Milligan chose the latter, asking the radio operator “Anybody see a gun?” The operator replied, “what color was it?” If you don’t believe me, read Milligan’s multivolume war memoirs, a vastly underrated chronicle beginning with Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. It’s important because the radio man’s name was Harry Secombe, and this Chance Disaster of the Falling Howitzer was, perhaps, the real origin of The Goon Show, which first aired on BBC radio on May 28, 1951 and ran weekly for a whole summer. Then entitled “Crazy People” (the famous title came in on Season 2), it starred also Peter Sellers (and for a short time Michael Bentine) and made a big enough bang to run for another decade on the Beeb. It ran also in the (then) Commonwealth (in edited versions) and even on NBC in the USA. Those who study these things, and if you’re crazy enough to study these things you’ve got to be believed, say that much modern comedy descends from and indeed was made possible by “The Goons.” And there is documentary evidence, sworn testimony so to speak, on this fact from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, from The Beatles, from “Beyond the Fringe,” even from Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and so on ad nauseam. You can see a bit of it still on Saturday Night Live. So have a good Memorial Day or Spring Holiday weekend, remember your loved ones, and think about me shouting “bang” at some appropriate moment, in memory of my father, another artilleryman. ©

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when the curtain opened … the storm broke…I was unprepared for the explosion…I left the hall in a rage…I have never again been that angry. Unknown attendee at the 1913 premiere of Rite of Spring.

Before ‘the guns of August’ crushed it, Europe’s cultural complacency was tested in ways that predicted the atonalities, anomies, and absurdities of interwar (1919-39) art, music, and literature. There are several wonderful books on the subject (you could start with Hughes’s Consciousness and Society). Or consider two ballets, the first premiered on May 29, 1912, the second on May 29, 1913, both in Paris, both productions of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and both choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky. In May, 1912, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Nijinsky himself danced in The Afternoon of a Faun, music by Debussy and inspired Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, “L’Après-midi d’un faun”. Exactly one year later, Diaghelev tried out the young Igor Stravinsky with his Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps). It is tempting to say that everyone was horrified (by the eroticism of the first, the atonalities of the second, and the revolutionary settings and costumes of both), but just as NPR reminds us daily that “all music was once modern” so too there were critics and theater-goers who were entranced, bowled over, convinced that they had seen and heard prophecies of a new artistic era. These seers included the elderly Auguste Rodin, who (it was noticed) stood and cheered at the premiere of The Afternoon of a Faun. And he was not alone. But many, possibly a majority, were outraged, horrified, disgusted, which helps to explain the boos and hisses heard at both performances. Le Figaro thought Nijinsky’s faun “lecherous . . . filthy . . . crude . . . indecent . . . mis-shapen [and] loathsome” and then, I guess, ran out of words. One year on, a London review concluded, of The Rite of Spring, that it was “hideous” and that it had “no relation to music at all as most of us understand the word.” In 1913, that was perhaps a true statement. Over a century later, it is safe to say that both pieces helped to make modern music and modern ballet. ©

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My subject is War, and the Pity of War. Wilfred Owen, inscribed by Benjamin Britten on the title page of the War Requiem, May 30, 1962.

May 30 is Memorial Day, “holiday weekends” be damned, and though the Brits don’t celebrate it (theirs is on Armistice Day, November 11) they did choose May 30, 1962 as the date to premiere Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. The occasion was memorially apt, for it marked the rededication of Coventry Cathedral, a magnificent new church that soared up out of the ashes of war and stands in moving juxtaposition to the surviving shell of the old St. Michael’s, “burned with its city” on November 14, 1940, in one of the Luftwaffe’s most devastating raids. Britten’s musical construction is staged as a dialogue. A full orchestra provides a soprano, a boys’ choir, and a full choir a modern setting of the traditional requiem mass. They are answered by a chamber ensemble performing a quieter setting to the war poetry of Lt. Wilfred Owen, killed in action on November 4, 1918 while he and his company gained “a few feet of land” one week before the Armistice. A tenor and a bass sing the poetry, in solo or duet, so we get the words right. Thus the opening of the mass, the requiem aeternam and the kyrie eleison, bracket Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” with its chilling last line, “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle.” Britten, a pacifist, meant his music as a commentary on war and a hymn to peace, and the solo parts were to be sung by a Russian soprano, a German bass, and an English tenor, but at the last moment the Soviet authorities refused to permit Galina Vishnevskaya to travel. Once they learned of the actual music and the overwhelming response to it they allowed her to travel to London to record the Requiem with Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. When you listen to it, remember that at the first performance, at Britten’s request, the music was heard in memorial silence, as befit the occasion and its setting. But applause has echoed down the years, for the Requiem is still considered Britten’s masterpiece. ©

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There is no such thing as modern art . . . Let us leave the labels to those who have little else to cover their nakedness. Walter Sickert, essays, 1912 and 1914.

It is my fond hope that the best artists lead the most interesting lives, and Walter Richard Sickert’s long, odd, and involved existence amply fulfills that hope. This is so in part because, besides being an original painter (and teacher) of no fixed style or school, he was a prolific writer about art (his own and others’), a demon lover who really liked women, and as confirmed an eccentric as you might care to meet. It all began in Munich on May 31, 1860, when Walter was born the eldest child of a Danish/English marriage. The family soon moved to London, where his artist father discouraged the boy’s artistic leanings, so instead of painting Walter Sickert took up acting (under the name Mr. Nemo), and never lost the taste for dressing up as someone else (or in a sense “being” someone else). Soon he returned to the canvas, learning his life’s trade not from his father but from the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler (it was Sickert the apprentice who took “Whistler’s Mother” to the 1883 Paris Salon). Along the way Sickert became friendly with modern French painters like Blanche and Degas, and (for a time) identified himself with impressionism. But Sickert was as interested in painters’ studio techniques as in their school or style and continued to pursue his “persistent effort to render the magic and the poetry” that he daily saw, whether in a rude London terrace or a gaudy music hall. Indeed the democracy or even anarchy of Sickert’s subject matter caused comment, and reminds me today of the poetry of Walt Whitman (also born on May 31). Sickert reveled in such comment, often replied to it, and even played to it by titling many of his works in odd, eccentric ways, perhaps encouraging the viewer to perceive something Sickert hadn’t noticed. Walter Sickert continued to paint in his own style, and to dispute, lecture, and tutor about it almost to the end of his long life, which came in January 1942. His influence continues. ©