BOB'S BITS

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Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;// The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;// When other helpers fail and comforts flee, //Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me. Henry Fancis Lyte, 1847.

Impecunious young clergymen who marry well are not unfamiliar figures in English literature, and proved irresistibly tempting to the comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse, but they did exist and so, possibly, were drawn from life. One such was Henry Francis Lyte, whose unpromising beginnings (on June 1, 1793) were made less promising by having unwed parents, one of whom was an army captain father who cared more for fishin’ and huntin’ and ridin’ than raisin’ kids and so left the boy a small stipend and went off somewhere. Henry was a bright boy who first attracted the attention of his headmaster and then (after a brilliant BA at Trinity Dublin) of Anne Maxwell, an Anglo-Irish heiress who married Henry, cared for him in his several illnesses, bore him a passel of children (whom he did not abandon), financed his extensive travels in France and Italy, and enabled him to build one of the most remarkable private libraries in the West of England, where he vicared for most of his short life. Lyte was not only a faithful husband but (despite his frailties) an assiduous cleric, a conservative reformer (education of the poor, anti-slavery), a staunch opponent of Catholic emancipation, and theologically a bit of an oddball combining high church aesthetics with a commitment to evangelical theology and affective preaching. And he wrote poetry, mostly religious, often very personal, which is why he is remembered today. Not only do a number of his lyrics appear in hymnals, but one in particular is sung loudly, and I must say tunefully, at many English football (soccer) matches, most famously at the FA Cup Final in May. It is “Abide with Me;” and though that’s probably not the venue that the Rev’d Mr. Lyte might have chosen for his sacred hymn, he would be pleased by the evangelical fervor of the massed Wembley Stadium choirs that, each Spring, imbue his verse with such power and invest it with so much hope. ©

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We two kept house, the Past and I,// The Past and I;// I tended while it hovered nigh,// Leaving me never alone. From Hardy's "The Ghost of the Past," 1914.

Once I shepherded C. Vann Woodward around Lancaster for the day, and finally at dinner asked the question that had been on my mind for several years. “Was your vision of the South inspired by William Faulkner’s fictional world?” The great historian pondered, and then said, “yes, it might have been.” Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County was a historical construction of compelling genius. It has few parallels in fiction, but one precursor was Thomas Hardy’s ‘collection’ of “Wessex Novels,” set deliberately enough in England’s West Country to have inspired critics to draw maps of the place, from Berkshire west to Devon. The third Wessex novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), made Hardy’s reputation, while the 10th and 11th (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891, and Jude the Obscure, 1895) almost sank it, both of them critical of marriage and frank (though not explicit) about sex. Negative reaction to both books stung Hardy, and he never wrote another novel although he lived until 1928. Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset, the geographic heart of Wessex, on June 2, 1840, and it could be argued that he never left it even though he began his working life (and won prizes) as an apprentice architect in London. His father was a stonemason and builder, which may explain that early career, but dad wielded a mean country fiddle, too (at least according to one of Hardy’s Wessex poems), and that may have drawn Thomas back to Wessex and to an artist’s portrayal of the place and its people, realistic, sometimes romantic, and certainly ordinary folk, as Hardy felt himself to be. Hardy’s yen for construction showed not only in his fiction but also in his house, “Max Gate,” designed by him and built by his father in 1885. When he died, in 1928, the nation insisted on burying his ashes at Westminster Abbey, in Poet’s Corner, but his heart is buried in Dorset, next to the grave of his first, unhappy wife, Emma. ©

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La Belle Hamilton.

My research world, 17th-century Anglo-America, to which I am now returning, included, at its pinnacle, the Stuart court, and during the reign of Charles II, that court was a good place for a beautiful, vivacious, and intelligent woman to lose her virtue. Elizabeth Hamilton,”La Belle Hamilton,” certainly passed the first three tests, and into the bargain was related to the dukes of Ormonde (she was of the family’s Catholic branch), but she retained not only her looks and her wit but also her virtue. Elizabeth Hamilton was born in Ireland sometime in 1640-41 and died in France on June 3, 1708. With her family she spent the Interregnum in France, and with the Restoration of 1660 she and her two brothers joined the Stuart court in London, where she fit right in, a favorite of the king and his brother James, a beauty who loved a good joke, was certainly not a prude, and joined in most of the court’s fun and games. But not all of them. Indeed she spurned the advances of two dukes and no doubt others. But when the Count de Gramont, temporarily exiled from the French court due to his improprieties, arrived in London she seems to have set her cap for him, and with the help of her brothers made him (on the eve of his return to France) a virtuous man. He was 20 years her senior and in some ways a nonentity, but she remained devoted to him through a long second life at the center of Louis XIV’s court (the French king Louis appointed her Dame du Palais to Queen Marie Therese) and then at the center of James II’s court in exile at St. Germaine-en-Laye. Along with all that, she birthed two daughters, one of whom married the Catholic Earl of Stafford, and the other of whom became an Abbess of a Lorraine convent. Elizabeth Hamilton, Countess of Gramont, died—apparently of a broken heart—less than a year after her husband. ©

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They call for dates and quinces in the pastry kitchen. Nurse to Lady Capulet, Romeo and Juliet, Act 4, scene 4.

One of my most interesting historical conversations was at Plymouth Plantations with the woman ‘playing’ the part of Mary Brewster, wife of Elder William Brewster. She knew her role and responded to my questions perfectly. It was a cold day, a nor’easter blowing, and she was cooking a “winter stew,” wild onions and other forest gatherings in a thin broth. She gave me the “receipt” for it and some interesting, deferential comments on her husband’s few theological tracts, all in good 17th-century form and even in an East Anglian accent. And she was a gentlewoman, literate and polite, and she was cooking. Back home in England, a gentlewoman might not be cooking at all, and particularly if she such a gentlewoman as Lady Anne Blencowe, mistress of the manor at Marston St. Lawrence near Northampton. Born Anne Wallis (on June 4, 1656), and well tutored by her father (the Professor of Geometry at Oxford and a noted cryptographer), Anne married barrister John Blencowe in 1675, shortly after he inherited the Marston estate, and she spent her whole life there, bearing seven children (raising five to adulthood), and running the house’s domestic offices. Unusually, she did her own cooking. We infer that interesting detail from her ‘receipt’ book, which she kept in manuscript form and probably completed in 1694. It was a bit heavy on fruit puddings and savory pies (she grew her own peaches and apricots and collected, or sent servants out to collect, barberries, wild herbs, and mushrooms) and on dishes she thought medicinal, but it also explains how she preserved meat (by cooking it into a heavy paste) and it has some main dishes. Lady Anne died in 1718. Her receipt book stayed in her house until the early 1920s, when the then lady of the manor, Georgia Sitwell, had it privately published. It was published again in 2004, its cover page a copy of Lady Anne Blencowe’s fine wedding portrait. She is holding an orange blossom. ©

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Liberty is the one thing no man can have unless he grants it to others. Ruth Benedict.

Among the books that convinced me that scholarship might offer an interesting life was Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. It was assigned reading in Prof. William Fontaine’s “Philosophy of the Social Sciences” course (along with Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, Stevenson’s Ethics and Language, and way too many other books). But I was inspired by Benedict’s slim volume. Whatever its defects, its demonstration that behaviors familiar to me and upon which I had acquired clear moral views (I was 20, and I knew what I liked) had, in other cultural settings, quite different functions, upon which clear judgments became cloudy, nuanced, difficult and interesting. Among her most memorable examples was acquisitiveness in Kwakiutl culture, an obsession with strangely more virtuous outcomes than in the lives of the American and European plutocrats I studied in my history major. Ruth Benedict was born Ruth Fulton, in New York City on June 5, 1887. Her parents were progressive sorts who gave her more ambition than direction. She was also profoundly affected by her father’s death and her mother’s obsessive grief (these became central functions in her studies of other cultures). After several odd jobs, Ruth fell in love, and then out of it, with Stanley Benedict, and only then began her anthropological studies with “Papa Franz” Boas at Columbia, earning her PhD very quickly (in 1923) and beginning her teaching career, at Barnard (then Columbia’s women’s college) where she taught, among others, Margaret Mead. Patterns of Culture came along in 1934, so it was already long in the tooth when Bill Fontaine told me to read it, offering proof positive that even old books can bring forth new matter in a new reader. Benedict later helped to create the USA’s extraordinarily successful occupation policy in Japan. She died in 1948, leaving her name on the academic landscape in Benedict College at Stony Brook. ©

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An eccentric king, an adventurous actress, and a pioneer mathematician.

King Ludwig I of Bavaria was not the crazy one (that was his grandson, Ludwig II), but he had his eccentricities, among them his mistress Lola Montez, an Irish actress who got him in trouble with his fractious family because of her support for liberal reforms (and because Ludwig made her a countess). In the political reaction to the 1848 Revolution, Lola had to flee and poor Ludwig had to abdicate, but he left his mark on the Bavarian landscape with the fanciful “Walhalla,” his Parthenon-like temple of the heroes of German history. He’d begun it 40 years before, his opening bid to be the leader of German unification, and among its original collection of 127 memorial busts you can find not only monarchs and emperors but also many cultural heroes, including the Renaissance astronomer John Müller, born at Königsberg on June 6, 1436. He was a child prodigy, and after whizzing through Leipzig University in his mid-teens but before his tenure as a Greek scholar at Padua he adopted the name Regiomontanus. Among his various talents, Regiomontanus is known for restoring trigonometry to the European arsenal of intellectual weapons (metaphor intended for indeed trig was very helpful in the new European science of gunnery). But Regiomontanus is in Walhalla because of the use he made of trigonometry (and triangulation) in astronomy. An assiduous observer of the heavens, he made new calculations of the distance between the earth and the sun, the moon, the other known planets, and even a few stars. Those of the sun were surprisingly accurate given that he thought the earth the fixed center of the universe (he thought the sun about 60 million miles away). In 1472 he also made such accurate observations of a comet that, two centuries later, Edmund Halley knew that Regiomontanus had seen “his” comet, but of course by then Halley knew that comets traveled, like the earth and planets, around our local star. But Halley still used trig to figure out its elliptical orbit. ©

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Art is either plagiarism or revolution. Paul Gauguin.

“Every artist was once an amateur,” Emerson wrote in 1876, recycling a thought he’d expressed much more vigorously in “Self Reliance” (1841). By 1876, in Paris, the most famous of all amateur artists, Paul Gauguin, had begun to paint. He was then a stockbroker on the Bourse, only 28 but successful enough to begin to collect art, brash enough to write about art, and gregarious enough to collect artist friends and learn the rudiments of their trade. Gauguin was never a likely stockbroker, and he didn’t stay one for long. He’d been born into chaos, on June 7, 1848, in the middle of the failed Revolutions of that year, and his whole family were implicated in them. So they fled France for the Peruvian lowlands, where his mother’s family enjoyed wealth, privilege and power and where young Paul imbibed lasting impressions of a “tropical paradise.” Another revolution forced them to flee back to Paris, where (after a navy stint) Paul became a stockbroker. And then with the crash of 1876-77 he took up a rambling, peripatetic life, including stabs at marriage, an unsuccessful adventure in retail business in Copenhagen, and finally (circa 1885) the life of an artist, painting first but also sculpture and prolific art criticism. In the latter he uttered many Emersonian thoughts, that were reflected in his art and in his life, self-consciously following no style (“Why should one follow the masters? The only reason they are masters is that they didn’t follow anybody!) and thus becoming master of his own style, rejecting impressionism and, famously, rejecting Europe. in his last, furious assault on life, he sojourned, painted, sculpted, and wrote in the French Pacific, first Tahiti and then, when that became too civilized and constraining for him, the Marquesas. His life, which also reflected the destructiveness (of self and others) inherent to his extreme individualism, ended in syphilitic agony in 1903. ©

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My baptism gave me the moral power to receive what seemed to me to be truth. Mary Bonney, on her 1847 baptism by Rev'd Thomas Rambaut. She would marry Rambaut 41 years later.

In “my” period Baptists were an unruly lot, persecuted everywhere except in Rhode Island and, later, Pennsylvania. Their congregationalism made them hostile to any government involvement in religion but also to any effective denominational structure. This changed as slavery divided northern and southern Baptists, and in 1845 the ‘Northern Baptists’ (today the American Baptist Churches USA) declared themselves a church confederation. Besides slavery, they continued to agitate on other matters, including Indian rights and advocacy of a female clergy. An important woman leader among Northern Baptists who took up the cause of Native Americans was Mary Lucinda Bonney, born in upstate New York on June 8, 1816, but not baptized (of course) until she felt right about it, which came in 1847. By then she was already a leading woman educator, a graduate of Emma Willard’s Female Academy at Troy, NY, and an activist for women’s education, missionary outreach, and anti-slavery at Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church. After abolition, the church’s Home Mission Circle, of which Bonney was president, became increasingly concerned with Indian rights, especially land and treaty rights. In 1879, a Missouri senator’s proposal to open ‘Indian Territory’ (mainly but not only in Oklahoma) to (white) settlement and investment vaulted Mary Bonney into national leadership, including three rapid-fire petitioning campaigns (1879, 1880, and 1882) that gained huge support and enjoyed some political success. To be sure, Ms. Bonney (who married in 1888, when she felt right about it), wanted Native Americans to be, so to speak, less Indian and more Baptist, and she devoted much energy and money to the tasks of “civilization,” but she is still remembered, and memorialized, by Indian rights advocates today. Her Women’s National Indian Association, which she founded in 1880, continued its work well beyond Bonney’s death, from a fall, in 1900. ©

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Am sorry to note that abuse of a common acquaintance often constitutes very strong bond of union between otherwise uncongenial spirits. The Diary of a Provincial Lady, 1933.

One might draw from yesterday’s British election that the still-largest party, the Conservative one, is having an identity crisis. Given its advanced age, that’s an oddity, but by the same token some backwards-looking is in order. Its remaining strength in the ‘shires’ (in England’s green and pleasant lands) owes much to women, not only as voters but leading spirits of coffee mornings, charity drives, parish councils, real ‘country ladies’ like Edie Fitzherbert-Brockholes of Lancashire or aspiring ones like the fictional Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced ‘bouquet’) of BBC comedy. That brings up Edmée Dashwood, not Jane Austen’s bereft widow but a modern Mrs. D., born on June 9, 1890 as Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture, descended from French nobility on her father’s side and English gentry on her mother’s (who was also a well-regarded writer of “women’s novels”). Edmée was thus fated to be a 1909 débutante, to marry a younger son of the peerage, and then to take up her pen as E. M. Delafield (a sort of pun) to produce The Diary of a Provincial Lady (1933) and its three sequels. Immensely popular at the time, and (in 2008) brilliantly resurrected by Jilly Cooper in her column in The Guardian, The Diary now deserves another look. Luckily it’s already had one, produced by E. M. Delafield herself in 1938 for a cartoon special in Punch, her dissection of the convictions of ‘the provincial lady.’ Among them: that God is an Englishman (probably educated at Eton), that any change in the British Constitution (whatever that is) would be for the worse, that England is going to rack and ruin, that England is the finest country in the world, and that all foreigners are slightly mad. Yesterday’s results suggest that, while you can sweep the shires on that platform, you can’t win a British election. Not incidentally, I must add, E. M. Delafield (aka Mrs. Dashwood) was in 1921 elected president of her local Women’s Institute, and remained in that position until she died, in 1943. ©

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I'd rather make $700 a week playing a maid than $7 a day being a maid. Hattie McDaniel.

Paul Robeson to the contrary notwithstanding, most blacks who—before the civil rights era—achieved success in the world of ‘white’ arts and entertainment did so at the cost of accepting roles that that, in one way or another, reinforced prevailing racist stereotypes. The classic case was Lincoln Perry, who as “Stepin Fetchit” (!!!) portrayed lazy, childlike figures of low human intelligence (if sometimes animal cunning). A more complicated case is presented by Hattie McDaniel, the first black actor to win an Oscar, in 1939, for best supporting actress. It was a notable achievement, but forever compromised (some would say) because of the movie, Gone with the Wind and its ahistoric, racist portrayal of slavery and slaves, and because of her role, as Scarlett O’Hara’s ever-faithful “Mammy” (she is never called anything else in the movie). Hattie McDaniel understood this as well as anyone, more than once saying she understood her role so well because her mother had been a house slave at a plantation “not unlike Tara.” Hattie was indeed born to ex-slaves, in Wichita, KS, on June 10, 1895, but her father, Henry, had escaped slavery to fight for freedom in the 122nd US Colored Troops, so there may have been a bit of steel in her character, along with whatever servility she had to acquire to make her way in the world. She came up the hard way, touring and recording as a singer, bit parts on radio, and her first two film roles (and many others) were as maids. She appeared (with Robeson) in Show Boat and was pretty well known by the time David Selznick chose her for “Mammy.” Something of the difficulties and ironies of her situation may be sensed from two facts. Hattie McDaniel accepted her Oscar in a segregated hotel (no black maids, no black guests), and when she died (a young 57), she asked for, and was refused, burial in “the” Hollywood Cemetery, Perhaps we should see Hattie McDaniel’s successes, in life, as extraordinary for their time and quite beyond our reproaches. ©

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I unhappily fell into the displeasure of the State. George Wither, The Schollers Purgatory, 1621.

Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, in Bartholomew Fair, present a dim view of Puritans. Most Puritans didn’t approve of the theatre, so Shakespeare and Jonson returned the compliment with Puritan characters that were figures of fun, but unable even to crack a smile. But here’s a Puritan who who loved a joke well enough to spend jail time for it, a friend of some princes (like the good Puritan Elizabeth of Bohemia) but not of Charles I (against whom he took up arms) nor of parliamentary authority (against which he spoke, probably as a Leveler). George Wither was born in Armada year, 1588, on June 11, the son and eventually the heir of a Hampshire gentleman. He went up to Oxford in 1604 but soon fetched up in London, perhaps as a trainee lawyer but certainly as a mean pen wielder. He wrote on many subjects, but is remembered for his satires, notably Abuses Stript, and Whipt (1613) which, though it did not attack King James, roused the king’s judges sufficiently to whip Wither into prison. Still he sought royal favor, and seriousness, with a volume on the Psalms dedicated to Prince Charles but then got into prison again with Wither’s Motto (1621), a best-seller that paraded as a self-satire but offended some in high places. So this Puritan developed into an advocate of press freedom (at least for Wither) and an increasingly effective opponent of kingly power whether expressed through the courts or by the “Personal Rule” (1629-40). By the outbreak of the Civil Wars, Wither (now a substantial landowner) joined up with the parliamentary army (as an officer, of course), grew disillusioned with Cromwell, and then at the Restoration of monarchy (1660), veered back towards satire and, aged 75, back towards prison, first Newgate and then, an improvement of status, the Tower itself. Still undeterred, and still laughing, George Wither didn’t lay down his pen until he died, leaving only his ‘last works’ whose mere title (Nil Ultra, 1668) shows him too witty to have been anyone’s Malvolio. ©

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When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? Attr. John Ball, June 12, 1381.

Recently, scholars who write general histories of England have been at pains to remind us that “England” itself is an imposed idea, a spot of land that one day might “be” England but before was a conglomeration of peoples and languages, and for a few centuries after the Norman invasion (1066) more a part of France than an island realm. When England became England is a teaser question, though. Some (looking at the language) cite Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) as midwife, his Canterbury Tales evidence of an English culture. But for an event suggesting a degree of national political identity, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is a good candidate. Of course dramatic uprisings like this don’t “begin” on a given day or in a given place. Its causes were complex, many (the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death) of long standing, and the political and physical realities of medieval “England” make it difficult to tie risings in Kent to troubles in Lancashire. Even so, a good day to remember is June 12, 1381, for on that day, at Blackheath (then southeast of London), John Ball preached to a crowd of rebels—in English, although you’d be hard pressed to understand him—one of the more famous sermons in English history. It was enough to get Ball hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head placed on a pike at London Bridge, but he drew together the grievances that had provoked the Kentish rebels to kill a few tax collectors, attack courts, empty prisons (thus freeing Ball himself, a rebellious priest often in trouble), and march on London to demand justice from the king (at that point, a youngish Richard II, on June 12 cowering in the Tower). Be of good heart, John Ball urged his hearers at Blackheath (a motley crowd of serfs, smallholders, craftsmen, and laborers), for after all,

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the Gentleman?

For a time, the rebels made good progress and on June 14 wrested some gains from the king, but by November two rebel armies had been routed, Ball and about 1500 others had been executed, and his dangerous question was once again ruled out of court. ©

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Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force. Dorothy L. Sayers.

20th-century England produced several successful female writers of detective fiction, but for my money the best of them is Dorothy L. Sayers, although I confess I have read only five of her 11 ‘Lord Peter Wimsey’ novels. But I will get to the other six in due course, partly because her novels reflect her interesting, eccentric life. Sayers was born in Oxford, on June 13, 1893, to an Anglo-Irish clergyman (at that time choirmaster at Christ Church) father and a landowning mother, and she would return to Oxford first in the flesh (a student at Somerville College) and then in fiction, in Gaudy Night (1935), as Harriet Vane the almost-wife-and-possibly-lover of Lord Peter Wimsey. But between ages 4 and 18, Dorothy lived with her parents, in isolated, rather Spartan splendor, in two different rectories in the Fen country of eastern England, a brooding landscape captured perfectly in The Nine Tailors (1934), to my mind the best Wimsey novel (begging the question of the six unread ones). An only child whose father thought her brilliant (she was that), Dorothy was educated at home, became adept in Latin and two (at least) modern languages, a background which helps to explain her scholarly bent and her lasting pride in her translations (1929-1962) of Dante, The Song of Roland, and other medieval classics. Her Peter Wimsey novels, in their wit, often sparkling conversation, and social commentary (not least on marriage) reveal an authorial intelligence that is worth knowing, and if her great detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, can seem a bit much at times (especially in his upper class twit phases), please remember than in those village rectories (one of them with no running water) in the windswept fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, little Dorothy, her mother Helen Mary, her Reverend father Henry, and her succession of governesses almost always dressed for dinner. One would have liked to be at that table, at least once. ©

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The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen// Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing// A local habitation and a name. Theseus, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene 1.

If you’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades in the performing arts (stage, screen, TV, opera, actor, director, and impresario) you start in Chicago, on June 14, 1919, with the birth (to first-generation Americans) of Samuel Watenmaker and you end up in London (more precisely, Southwark) with Sam Wanamaker. You specify Southwark because it was there that Sam Wanamaker created a new Globe Theatre, as near as dammit (and in poetry that’s near enough) to the old Globe of Will Shakespeare, an earlier jack-of-all-trades in the performing arts, but in Will’s case very definitely a master of one. Of course Shakespeare had a couple of so-so plays (and we know nothing about his acting performances), but Sam Wanamaker’s stage history is a little more mixed. He began acting as a child in a Chicago vacant lot and then did a turn in a papier maché replica of The Globe at Chicago’s 1934 World Fair. He did some distinguished turns in New York, on and off Broadway, in the ‘40s. Then, in the early ‘50s, his left wing activities got him in trouble with the House “Un-American” Activities Committee, and he decamped to London where he had better luck (although MI5 at first thought him dangerous) and fell in love with the idea of recreating Shakespeare’s theatre, really, and on the spot. For the next 30 years his career waxed and waned. His TV stuff is especially forgettable (Hawaii 5-0 anybody?) but in 1959 he plotted brilliantly as Iago to do in Paul Robeson’s Othello, and, better yet, did it in Stratford. And it should be mentioned that Sam fathered Zoe Wanamaker, herself turning out to be a rather good performer. But all the time, Wanamaker worked on the Globe project, gaining support from various quarters, e.g. the duke of Edinburgh, Anthony Hopkins, and Judi Dench, overcoming local opposition, and finally, in 1993, as the site was cleared and his Shakespeare dream taking shape, Sam died of cancer at his home near Primrose Hill, London. ©

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Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take, // No matter where it's going. Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Travel," from Second April, 1921.

On June 15,1902, “the most famous train in the world,” New York Central’s 20th Century Limited, began its first New York to Chicago run at 6:00PM sharp from Grand Central Station and on a trip that was “perfectly routine and ordinary” and “thoroughly practical” it arrived on time (a record 60mph) at LaSalle Street Station, Chicago, at 9:00AM sharp. In its 65 years it wouldn’t always be on time, but it always offered luxury service, carnations for men, scent for ladies, a barbershop (sorry, ladies, not a hairdresser), elegant dining, an iconic bar/observation car at the end of the train, and two classes of sleeper accommodation, both “First”. You paid for the privilege. In the 1920s, a lower class berth cost you well over $800 in 2017 dollars. In 1938, also on June 15, “The Limited” received its best-known treatment, with all new rolling stock in Art Deco inside and out and that famous streamlined steam locomotive, the Hudson. Since it was a daily train, both ways, this represented a considerable investment, and it was one that could not be sustained when the airplane came into its own. But like the Santa Fe’s Super Chief that took movie stars on from Chicago to Hollywood this train gave us an idea of luxury that sticks. The phrase “red carpet treatment” was a 20th Century Limited trademark, and it has entered our language because passengers walked to and from “The Limited” on a red carpet. Throughout this whole period, the 20th Century Limited carried out an expensive and (for first-class passengers, anyway) beneficial competition with the Pennsylvania Railroad’s crack NYC to CHI train, the Broadway Limited. The Broadway (not named after Broadway in New York, but after the Pennsy’s 4-track ‘highway’) was a shade faster and just as luxurious, but never quite captured the cachet of “the most famous train in the world.” Its advantage was that, in Chicago, you didn’t have to change stations to board the Super Chief. ©

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When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Back in the days when real presidents made real announcements about real accomplishments (remember when?), on June 16, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed several pieces of foundational legislation, including the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Glass-Steagall (or “Banking”) Act, and the Farm Credit Act. As they say, it had been inter alia, for President Roosevelt had been very busy jerking the country out of its devastatingly real depression. For instance, he had already, on June 13, signed the Home Owners Refinancing Act, and almost immediately when he took office he declared a Bank Holiday and abandoned the Gold Standard, and on June 16 he would also sign the Railroad Act. These laws and others, by any measure, made FDR’s first Hundred Days so clearly epochal that they needed no additional tweets, no embarrassing claims or ludicrous overstatements. Of course, back then, tweeting was impossible, but FDR’s remarks, and his manner, his “body language,” were directed towards the American people, praising the nation for its courage and perseverance, thanking congress and its leaders, his cabinet officers, his “brains trust,” for their heroic activity, and through his own body language reminding his fellow citizens that severe setbacks (such as, say, bank failures or stock market crashes or sinking commodity markets or, for that matter, polio) were there only to be overcome by our common efforts. The many contrasts between “Dr. New Deal” and today’s busy tweeter could not conceivably be more marked. But then imagine what our current acting president might have made of a handicapped person like Franklin Roosevelt, who was wheelchair-bound, had often to be carried to the podium to speak to the nation, and could walk only very awkwardly and with teeth-gritting effort, lurching from foot to foot in ways that Donald Trump (demonstrably) finds easy to mock but very, very, very difficult to emulate. ©

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My music is best understood by children and animals. Igor Stravinsky, 1961.

Legend has it that, during WWI, Igor Stravinsky and his family were traveling to Paris (from their home in Switzerland), he was asked by a French border guard to state his profession. “Inventor of music,” was his reply. He was then only in his mid 30s. But had he dropped dead at that moment, we probably would still accept his self-definition, for he had already composed the ballet music upon which his fame is lastingly based: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Rite of Spring (1913). Each of these premiered in Paris, and each provoked outrage (from critics and from audiences), but also they were recognized as beginning a new era (modernism) in classical music. In a long lifetime, Stravinsky would adopt other styles, notably neo-classicism. Indeed, just before his death in April 1971, he had been composing alternative orchestrations to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” Igor Stravinsky’s life began in a St. Petersburg suburb on June 17, 1882 when he was born to Ukrainian parents. His father, principal bass at the Imperial Opera, wanted the boy to join the established middle class and study the law, and Stravinsky obeyed. At least, he went to law school, but he did not attend classes, instead whiling away his hours with music, playing and composing, and cultivating a friendship with a fellow student whose father, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, gave Stravinsky his only formal music training. After Rimsky-Korsakov’s death (1908) Stravinsky retired to a rural retreat, in the Ukraine, from which soon issued the three masterpieces named above, each of them commissioned by Serge Diaghliev for the Ballets Russes, two of them choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and all three first performed in Paris. In music, the modern age had begun, and because other things than music were afoot in the modern age, Igor Stravinsky would not see Russia, or the Ukraine, again until 1962. ©

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Collecting these songs was a man's job . . . but no man appeared. Fannie Eckstorm, foreword to The Minstelsry of Maine, 1927.

In the U. of Maine’s Folklife Center, there’s an 1892 picture of Fannie Hardy (she was born on June 18, 1865), after a camping-hunting trip with her father, a fur trader and trapper. She’s holding a brace of grouse, but what’s interesting about the picture is that she’s in full Victorian woman’s garb, long dress and all, which she found to be only a slight handicap. It might have been her last camping trip, for she soon married Rev’d Jacob Eckstorm, an episcopal priest, and settled down in his Providence, RI, parish where she had two kids (a boy and a girl) before Jacob died, leaving Fanny a widow at 37. So what does a young widow do in 1899? In this case, it was back to Brewer, Maine, where she parlayed her Smith College BA and her outings with her father into a career as a schoolteacher, scholar, naturalist, and writer. She was the founder of Brewer High School and of the Brewer Public Library, but in the summers she tramped the woods and canoed with her own children, and improved the time by gathering information about nature. Her bird books and nature essays gave her enough money to support her father, too, and she began to study his hobby, the folklore—especially the folksongs—of Maine fishermen, timbermen, and fur trappers. By 1910 she had a couple of bird books, a collection of folk songs, and a biography of a Maine man (David Libby, an ‘ordinary’ river-driver who floated logs down the Penobscot) to her credit, and a growing academic reputation, which after 1910 she parlayed into more books and essays, often co-authored with an Elmira College professor, Mary Smyth. Before she laid down her pen and stored her canoe (she died in 1946), Fannie Pearson Hardy Eckstorm had also written on Henry Thoreau and the languages and cultures of Maine Indians and had lived an ordinary life of extraordinary accomplishments. ©

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Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Lou Gehrig, Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939.

Baseball and cricket clearly have a common genetic ancestry, which shows in various ways in their modern phenotypes. One of the less obvious is the devotion to statistics of afficianados of both sports. Through the numbers the sports’ histories can be traced and, more particularly, their current heroes compared to the giants of the past. This peculiarity has been noted by sports writers, including the oldest living writer on baseball, Roger Angell, and the paleontologist (and Yankee fanatic) Stephen Jay Gould, whose science essays frequently turned on baseball stats. As Gould knew, this obsession with the numbers of the game at least once had eloquent expression, when in June 1941 the New York Times pondered how to present Lou Gehrig’s obituary, after the great Yankee hero died, at only 38, of what is now called Lou Gehrig’s Disease. For once at a loss for words, The Times eloquently, simply, and (almost) silently listed Gehrig’s stats. All of them were (at that time) records, eclipsing even The Bambino. They were Lou Gehrig’s “mosts,” and in 1941 there were 25 of them, from “most” consecutive games to “most” home runs in a World Series and including most “grand slams.” Perhaps the “most” impressive of them all is that back then, when the major league season was only 154 games long, Lou Gehrig played in more than 150 games in 12 seasons. But the Times let his numbers speak for themselves. No mention that he was known as the “Iron Man,” no mention that he was born in New York City (on June 19, 1903) to German immigrants, that he was “Heinrich” Gehrig whose first language was, indeed, German, that he adopted the nickname “Lou” to distinguish himself from his alcoholic father, or that Lou Gehrig’s short, eloquent farewell speech (after his diagnosis with ALS), at Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939, is considered to be, by a very long shot, the finest oration in baseball history. But then, you can’t measure that sort of thing by the numbers. ©

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It is an old saying, abundantly justified, that where sciences meet, growth occurs. Sir Frederick Hopkins, 1938.

Today we think of the sciences (aka “STEM” disciplines) as full constituents of a proper education, but it was not always so. In Britain and the USA, they began in-migration in the 19th century (more or less as the word “scientist” came into common usage). Various factors were at work, not least the example of German institutional science, but at Bowdoin College science entered the curriculum because the hero of Gettysburg, Joshua Chamberlain, thought his students needed a dose of realism. But it was still possible for scientists to be born, so to speak, out of wedlock, and such was the experience of Frederick Gowland Hopkins (born on June 20, 1861) who followed an exceedingly circuitous route to a Cambridge professorship, election to the Royal Society, a Nobel prize, a knighthood, and finally (he died in 1947) a clutch of doctoral degrees, honoris causa, in (of all things!!) “science.” He was not working class in origin (his wife, Jessie Ann, was), but his father, a bookseller, died shortly after Frederick’s birth, and he was saved from grim penury by an uncle who took him in and put Frederick (a rebellious schoolchild) to an apprenticeship in insurance. That didn’t suit, although liked the math, and so Frederick entered one of the ersatz institutions of Britain’s scientific revolution, the Royal School of Mines, itself an inspiration of The Great Exhibition (of 1851) and of the scientific enthusiasms of Victoria’s German consort, Prince Albert. As Hopkins grew into an eminent Cambridge chemist, so the Royal School of Mines matured into Imperial College, London University’s chief science institution. But Hopkins had a ways to go, via several technical appointments at Cambridge (today we might call him a lab assistant) before his work (in chemical physiology) brought him the kind of professional status that today’s scientists ‘naturally’ deserve, a college fellowship in 1910 (he was then 49!!) and a professorship in 1912. ©

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I will preach with my brush. Henry Ossawa Tanner.

On June 21, 1900, Henry Ossawa Tanner received the Medal of Honor from the annual Paris Salon, a rare accolade for an American artist and made rarer as it was his 42nd birthday. His art had recently entered a religious phase, a reflection of his struggle for recognition and of the influence of his father, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who had made struggle a part of Henry’s name, for “Ossawa” was a mute memorial to the free soil martyrs of Ossawatomie in “Bloody Kansas” (1856). Henry’s mother Sarah had traveled to freedom on the Underground Railway, so the boy grew up conscious of the struggle for freedom and equality. He was able to express his talents at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which not only admitted him but found him an encouraging tutor in Thomas Eakins whose life classes (and anatomy lessons) gave Tanner’s work—including his biblical scenes—their air of realism, so that it’s a very concrete Mary who, fearful and wondering, hears The Annunciation (1898) from a glowing Angel of the Lord. Finding life and work difficult in the USA, Tanner decamped to Paris in 1891, accepted soon as an artist in his own right (his first Salon piece, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, came in 1896). In 1899, he married an operatic soprano, Jessie Olsson, which provoked racist comment at home but left Paris unruffled, and they settled down to family life, and the arts, in the village of Les Charmes, a rural idyll interrupted first by the destructive savagery of WWI (metaphorically depicted in Tanner’s Sodom and Gomorrha, 1920) and then by Jessie’s death in 1926. Tanner lived on, a full citoyen (of the Legion of Honor from 1923) until 1937. He and Jessie lie together in lasting reproach to racist slurs in the cemetery at Sceaux, just south of Paris. Tanner’s work lives today in many museum collections, including in St. Louis, and in the White House, too, assuming Trump has kept it there. Perhaps he has: it’s Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (1885). ©

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He knew more about the moon than anybody in history. A fellow astronomer, on Ewen Whitaker, 2016.

Career planning is a big business on college campuses. Almost everyone does it (faculty and advisors vicariously), despite considerable evidence that lives rarely work out ‘as planned’. For several years the Honors College at UMSL has been inviting alumni back to talk to current students about careers, and their nearly universal message is “prepare to be surprised.” They are referring to their own surprises, but here’s another one, who became a leading astronomer more or less by accident. Ewen Adair Whitaker was born in London on June 22, 1922, the son of a typesetter. Perhaps predictably, his first job was that of technical apprentice, at Siemens Engineering. Come the war, he worked on a scientific project that required him to learn spectroscopy (he used it to determine the suitability of various metals for underwater deployment), which in its turn interested him in the mapping of the universe, which landed him a job (in 1949) at the Royal Greenwich Observatory where they were soon calling him an astronomer (although he’d left school at 16). There he developed (among other expertises) an encyclopedic knowledge (much of it brand new) of the geography of the solar system, for instance even working out the dates on which Galileo must have made his most famous observations of the moon (in early December 1609, if you want to know). This took him (in 1958) to the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, where Whitaker completely revised our understanding of the surface geography and underlying geology of the moon. And this in turn brought him to the University of Arizona, where he worked out the best landing places for the Ranger and Surveyor probes and then for the critical Apollo expeditions (he put Apollo 12 within a few hundred feet of Surveyor 3). Whitaker retired in 1987 to devote the rest of his long and surprising life to writings on the history of lunar astronomy and exploration. ©

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Nail your new season look. Advertising slogan from the 2017 Jaeger catalog.

These notes have celebrated the reforms of Dr. John Kellogg and Sylvester Graham. Their common idea, pushed with religious fervor (Kellogg was a 7th-Day Adventists and Graham a Presbyterian minister), was that we might improve our soul’s (as well as physical) health by eating exactly right. So today some continue to eat Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers, perhaps unaware of their moral powers. Just so, some of us don Jaeger sportswear ignorant of the ways in which clothes make the inner (as well as the outer) person. This was an article of faith of Dr. Gustav Jaeger, born in Württemberg on June 23, 1832. This son and grandson of Lutheran ministers was expected to be one himself, but he left seminary to study medicine at Tubingen and then zoology and anatomy at Vienna. Nothing if not thorough, he qualified in all three, married a Lutheran minister’s daughter, and practiced medicine, lectured in anthropology, and (intellectually overwhelmed by Darwin’s new theory) studied beetles. His beetle book went through several editions and is still consulted. But the illnesses and sins of modern humans convinced Jaeger that we were troubled by our clothing, artificially concocted of “lust compounds,” and he urged a return to nature. Not nudity, heaven forbid, but “natural” animal fiber. “Normal clothes” (normalkleidung) was his trademark, woolens were his thing, and Jaeger convinced many European reformers and intellectuals to wear, next the skin and as outer layers, rough woolens, and to sleep only under rough Jaeger blankets. Among his unlikely converts was Oscar Wilde, not usually thought of in a normalkleidung way. More predictably, George Bernard Shaw bought a one-piece Jaeger suit, making him appear to one critic “a Jaeger Christ” and to another (less sympathetic perhaps) a “forked radish.” So, check out this summer’s Jaeger catalog, especially the woolens, and improve your morals. ©

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There’s a restlessness in me, a desire to walk in other people’s shoes. John R. Coleman, interview, 1987.

Herding cats must be pleasant work indeed, for today one rarely hears of a college president taking a sabbatical leave. Back in the day, John R. (“Jack”) Coleman took an unusual leave from his post at Haverford College. He used his sabbatical to see how the other half, or as Mencken used to say the nether nine-tenths, made its living. So he found work as a street sweeper, farm laborer, ditch digger, short-order cook, as jobs came up. One assumes he faked his resumé, and he did have an academic interest (he was a labor economist), but many of his findings were simple ones: not least that there isn’t much in the world of work you can honestly call “unskilled.” And that he may already have known. Jack Coleman was born on June 24, 1921, in Sudbury, Ontario, where his father managed the Copper Cliff nickel smelter. He studied economics, went off to war (as a ship’s commander in the Canadian navy), and returned to the academy with a Chicago PhD and a talent for administration which worked its way out at MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and then (just before Haverford) at the Ford Foundation. Taking the Haverford presidency at a difficult time (1967), he operated in unusual ways before he tried life as a garbage man. He led anti-war demonstrations, agitated successfully to end the college’s football program (and unsuccessfully to admit women), and actually became a Quaker (a ‘convinced Friend’). He retired in 1977 and pursued that with some originality, too, becoming (inter alia) a prison guard (a research project), a country newspaper editor, a bed and breakfast cook and owner, and in 2000, as justice of the peace in a small Vermont town, he officiated at one of the state’s first same-sex marriages. He also for a few years (as he had during his famous sabbatical) continued to advise the Federal Reserve Board and served for a time as president of a charitable foundation. He wanted, he said, to see how other people lived, so he did. ©

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In matters of life and death, you don’t stammer. It’s the yackety-yack of life where you stammer. Nicholas Mosley, 2011, reflecting on the Military Cross he won during the Italian campaign.

“Like father, like son” is a dicey game even in genetics. When it comes to an actual life it’s often dead wrong, as in the case of Nicholas Mosley, who died this year after a long life (he was born on June 25, 1923) during which he proved that (in politics, moralities, and manners) he was not his father’s son. For Nicholas’s father was the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, whose arm waving antics and “Black Shirt” followers so disfigured British politics of the 1930s and may have induced Nicholas’s stammer (he was treated by Lionel Logue). Sir Oswald and his second wife, Diana Mitford were interned during the war, during which Nicholas seized the chance to be “not Mosley’s son” by earning the Military Cross for battlefield gallantry and reveling in the existential meritocracy of an army at war. After the war, while his father farmed and re-dabbled in disagreeable politics, Nick Mosley tried to find salvation in philosophy but soon settled on experimental fiction as his lifeline. Several of his (20) novels won critical acclaim (Hopeful Monsters, 1990, won the Whitbread Prize) but not a wide readership (because of his surname or his dense prose or his ‘experimental’ fiction). I knew of him primarily through his fifth novel, Accident (1965), but not by reading it. Rather I was entranced, bowled over, by the brilliant film Joseph Losey made of it, which (also as Accident) came out in 1966. In that same year, as it happened, Nicholas Mosley became the third Baron Ravensdale, through a female-line inheritance from his maternal aunt (his mother was a Curzon). After his father’s death (1980), he also became the 7th baronet Mosley. More significantly, speaking of inheritances and family connections, Nicholas Mosley wrote a two-volume biography (1981, 1983) that is renowned for its clear-headedness, its humanity, and its moral vision, qualities so lacking in its subject, the author’s father. But Nick Mosley never did conquer that stammer. ©