BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Truly a medieval queen

The king would like to get our gold
The queen, our manors fair to hold.
--Contemporary verse on King Edward I and his Queen Consort, Eleanor of Castile.

Having featured Alfonso X of Castile only last week, it seems fair to look at his half-sister Eleanor, whom he married off to the (then) Prince Edward of England in November 1254. Eleanor brought with her (as dowry-in-kind) Alfonso’s rather dubious claim to Gascony, thus strengthening England’s lordship over that French duchy. But it was feared that she’d bring competing Castilian merchants with her, and perhaps Alfonso’s tolerant attitude towards Jews. As Princess and then (from 1274) as Queen Consort, Eleanor did both. Although she took no direct role in politics (then mainly carried on at court), she was an active royal and, in true medieval fashion, a grasping one. During the so-called Barons’ Rebellion (1263-65), led by Simon de Montfort, Princess Eleanor stayed loyal, and then in victory she managed to seize and keep executed rebels’ properties, particularly in the Midlands. It seems likely that she also did something to reverse Simon de Montfort’s ‘crusade’ against the Jews, for (later, as Queen) she used Jewish moneylenders to foreclose on other baronial properties. The profits, of course, were hers, although she did use some of her acquired wealth to endow several Dominican houses and a couple of convents. Eleanor was also among the bravest of England’s medieval queens. She went with Prince Edward on the crusade of 1270 (“Lord Edward’s Crusade”) and gained some popularity by it. Legend had it that, at Acre in 1272, Eleanor saved Edward’s life by sucking poison from his wounds. It was probably not so, but the legend was useful after Edward’s coronation. There were other Eleanors, of course, Eleanor of Aquitaine for instance, and more famous ones, but this Eleanor, Alfonso’s half-sister, seems to have been somewhat like her brother in her tolerance, her attention to her own power and wealth, and her scholarship. And, yes, she did bring those Castilian merchants with her, enough of them to rouse complaints from English merchants worried about their competitiveness in the wine and woolens trades. And she did that other thing that queen consorts were supposed to do. She successfully birthed sixteen children, and paid great attention to marrying off those few who survived to adulthood. Indeed from her arrival in 1256 she’d been a matchmaker for members of her own court’s circle, bringing quite a bit of Castilian blood into the English strain. Eleanor of England (or of Castile) died on November 28, 1290, having made her own distinctive mark on the long reign of her husband. ©

[Stanley]

Utopia and patriarchy

None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart. Bronson Alcott, on the failure of the Fruitlands experiment.

When I first visited Concord, Massachusetts, I expected to be inspired. Of course my great-great grandfather had not liked the place at all, thought its prospects so grim that, in 1819, he left. A victim of New England’s overcrowding, he moved to Madison County, Illinois, to establish a freehold farm. Family legend says that he was so poor that he walked all the way. But by fleeing Concord, John Estabrook missed the flowering of New England culture: Emerson, Thoreau, the Ripleys and their utopia at Brook Farm, even the dreamy Hawthorne moved there. In 1975 it was a well-kept place, and its heroes and heroines were well-presented. But I left almost as disillusioned as John Estabrook had been. During his radical, free-thinking sojourn at Walden, Henry Thoreau regularly sent out his laundry for his mother to wash. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s liberating individualism rested on the solider foundations of his wife’s inheritance. So he could write, the gentle Hawthorne retreated to the attic, drew the trap door shut, and dragged his desk over the door so his wife and kids couldn’t interrupt the flow. But the most disillusioning of all was the Alcott family’s pleasant manse, into which the family had moved after the failure of another utopian experiment, “Fruitlands.” Fruitlands was a ridiculously authoritarian place, an idealist utopia run like a boot camp. After its failure, the Alcott household was man-managed in much the same way, with precise duty rosters drawn up (by day, week, and even hour) for all and every one of its little women. The head of the household was Bronson Alcott who, although he may not have believed in patriarchy, meted it out daily. He was born in rural Connecticut on November 29, 1799, educated roughly in school and more finely by himself, then set out on his own as a peddler of dry goods and knick-knacks. These adventures failed, and next he set up as a teacher, where he met his wife (who married down), Abby May. Their methods were unusual, in hindsight progressive but then regarded as eccentric, and hinted at Alcott’s indwelling radicalism. In Transcendentalism’s warm embrace, the Alcotts and their daughters moved to Concord to be utopians and educators. Their growing brood, all daughters, furnished the plot lines of Little Women, written by their eldest surviving child, Louisa May. In it, he is affectionately portrayed. When he died, on March 4, 1888. Louisa May felt as if life itself had fled. Perhaps it had, for Louisa followed him in death four days later. Ever since my Concord visit, I’ve had a dimmer view. ©

[Stanley]

The girl that granny made
When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men. Shirley Chisholm, quoted in her New York Times obituary, 2005.

Shirley Chisholm was one of the most quotable of 20th-century American politicians, and it must be said that she always wore her education well. She always said that that education began in Barbados, and always identified herself as Barbadian-American. But Shirley Chisholm was born American, in Brooklyn, on November 30, 1924. Her parents, Ruby and Charles St. Hill, were both West Indian born but came to New York in the early 1920s. They met there, married there, and in fairly quick succession produced four daughters. Shirley was the eldest and thus led the St. Hill brood to Barbados in 1929. It must have been quite a trip, little black girls on an Italian liner, superintended by a five-year-old. But her parents were resourceful, though poor, and they wanted their girls to have the experience of living in a black majority society. For Shirley, it worked. On her granny’s farm she learned self-reliance and in a little one-room schoolhouse she learned the Barbadian English she would wield so well in New York politics, city and state, and then in the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives, Washington DC. In Barbados she also imbibed her granny’s Quaker egalitarianism. Thus, back in a Brooklyn high school, she not only excelled academically but was also active in the school’s Harriet Tubman Society. All that won her scholarship places at prestigious colleges, but her family couldn’t afford the board and room at Oberlin or Vassar, so Shirley opted for Brooklyn College, where she excelled in sociology and picked up another useful language, Spanish. After beginning her adult career (first as a teacher), she married a Jamaican immigrant who’d taken up the unusual career of private investigator, and so it was as Shirley Chisholm that she began her ascent in politics, working for local campaigns and in ward clubs that tended to be dominated by white folk, white men particularly. And it was that Shirley Chisholm that went first to Albany, as an assemblyman, and then to Washington, as a congressman. It was as a black she that she made her impact, cofounder of both the Black Congressional Caucus and the National Women’s Political Caucus, and in fast time (1972) the first serious female candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that.” Her husband Conrad acted as her bodyguard, but soon she was taken seriously enough to be given Secret Service protection. She was a lot more than either, in a long life, but that’s a good enough quote for the day. ©.

[Stanley]

What to do when the ballet doesn't work out.

There are good lobbyists as well as bad, and the good ones, I believe, have contributed in no small measure to the vitality and integrity of American political democracy. Dorothy Detzer, 1948.

To judge by her most often reproduced photo, Dorothy Detzer was a flapper girl: a rather elderly one, for she was born on December 1, 1893, in Fort Wayne, into the respectable middle class. Respectable perhaps: but her parents were also “wide-awakes,” she later recalled, and they encouraged her ambition to become a prima ballerina. But that wasn’t in the cards for a girl called Detzer from a town like Fort Wayne. All she got out of it was “a correct posture and over-muscular ankles.” So she took those assets to Chicago where she fell in with the Jane Addams mob at Hull House. There Dorothy established life-long ties with the likes of Charles Beard and Florence Kelley. She also cultivated sympathies with the underdogs of American society, working class people, colored folk, women in general, and she actively supported trade unionists. She never forgot all that, and returned to social activism at several points in her long life. But she discovered her main mission, world peace, when her brother returned from World War I debilitated from a mustard gas attack that blighted his existence and, too soon, killed him. She had already been in Europe working for the American Friends Service Committee, but her brother’s suffering strengthened her pacifism. and Dorothy became secretary of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Once in Washington, DC, she became one of the best, and one of the most energetic, of lobbyists. Idealist to the core, Detzer supported the Kellogg-Briand treaty of 1928 (for universal disarmament), gathering scores of thousands of signatures. When her hopes for the best were dashed, she turned to solider tasks and played a leading role in the establishment of the 1930s Senate Munitions Committee, which gathered evidence that US entry into WWI had been the bastard brainchild, all along, of Wall Street bankers and the munitions industry. Detzer also worked to improve the legal position of those who objected conscientiously to serving any war machine. Scholarly and fiercely articulate, she impressed her legislative friends and scared her enemies witless. Of course WWII was a big blow to her, but didn’t still her voice. Afterwards we find her working to defeat racial segregation in Washington, DC, sometimes in spectacular confrontations in the restaurants of the Capitol building (still, even in the 1940s and early 1950s, a racially segregated place). Wide awake to the end, she married (aged 67) an old campaigner friend, and finally rested from her labors in 1981. ©.

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How to make a vicar's son into an admiral.

A very domestic recipe for making a Royal Navy admiral out of a vicar’s son.

Jane Austen’s elder brother Francis (1774-1865) was, during her most fruitful years as a novelist, an officer in the Royal Navy who served with distinction throughout the Napoleonic wars. After Jane’s early death (1817) Francis continued to rise through the ranks to become rear admiral (1830) and, finally, Admiral of the Fleet (1863). It set me to wondering how, in a service run largely as a patronage machine, a mere vicar’s son could do so well. My curiosity was sharpened by espying, in Jane’s Mansfield Park (1814), the mirroring of the Austen siblings’ close relationship by that between the novel’s heroine, Fanny Price, and her midshipman brother William, a poor pair whose fortunes waxed on the patronage of their uncle-in-law Sir Thomas Bertram. That this sort of thing did actually happen had already been made evident in the naval career of Alexander Hood, born a mere vicar’s son (in rural Somerset) on December 2, 1726 and who, well before his death in 1814, rose to the rank of admiral. Like the fictional William Price and the real Francis Austen, Hood entered the service near its bottom, but not at its nadir, that of common seaman. Instead he began as a captain’s servant, in 1741, but by 1743 he ranked midshipman, then (1746) lieutenant. In the next war (1756-1763), Hood vaulted into a captaincy and served with distinction in engagements off Canada and in the Bay of Biscay. From that platform he married well, a woman 20 years older but connected to two important patronage machines and who, better yet, was able to retain her own fortune. Hood called her his “glorious girl,” and so she was; with their joint incomes they settled in a country estate and he continued with the navy, treading water while at peace (occasionally in command of the royal yacht) and full ahead in wartimes, including the war against American revolutionaries (1775-1783). Like Francis Austen, Hood developed a reputation as a good captain in what was a brutal service. It’s just possible that they were in the fleet together at the time of the famed Spithead Mutiny. In that crisis, Admiral Hood further secured his good reputation by taking the mutineers seriously, agreeing reforms in discipline and diet (Francis Austen took care to provide his sailors with lemon juice) and winning their praises. And the fleet did set sail to engage the French off Brest. So, on brief review of the lives of Alexander Hood and Francis Austen it looks as if a patronage system could still produce officers of competence and courage. And had Jane Austen lived long enough, she might have made a fictional admiral out of the very admirable William Price. ©.

[Stanley]

Politics and poetry don't always mix.

To the Isle of Peace I turn our prow;
No angry seas shall fright you now;
But calm lake waters lie smooth as glass
Where we shall pass from the place of slaughters.
---[trans] from “The Song of Ciabhan,” by Ethna Carbery.

In April 1900, Queen Victoria visited Dublin, an odd choice for an ailing 80-year-old constitutional monarch. Irish Home rule was a divisive issue in British politics; and (outside of Ulster) the only issue in Irish politics was whether ‘home rule’ would be enough. Nevertheless, Victoria was welcomed by an over-decorated Dublin, by 30,000 school children in Phoenix Park, and her colors paraded by British troops from the Curragh. That last was important, for one aim of her visit was to encourage Irishmen to enlist to fight for empire in South Africa. That struck at the heart of the strengthening nationalist movement in Ireland: Britain had for centuries played an imperial role in Ireland, and here was the Queen-Empress asking Irishmen to do her dirty work in Africa. So there were protests, one of them the formation of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in a meeting of 15 women in the tearoom of Dublin’s Celtic Literary Society, on Easter Sunday, 1900. With the queen already in Dublin, they could not take the initiative, but they planned a July response, a “Patriotic Children’s Treat” which, to judge by the numbers, was as successful as Victoria’s visit. Besides 30,000 kids enjoying candy and cake in Clonturk Park (Phoenix was then off limits for nationalist celebrations), there were anti-recruitment speeches and publicity for the Irish cause. But these founding ‘Daughters’ were divided on tactics and strategy. Maud Gonne, their leader, was on her way to embracing violence, as was Countess Markievicz. Also there was the literary faction, opposed to violence but devoted to traditional Irish culture as the better vehicle of republicanism. These included Sinéad O’Flanagan and Anna Johnston, both already involved in a Gaelic revival. O’Flanagan remained committed to her cause for the rest of her long life. Anna Johnston, born in Antrim on December 3, 1866, would never be put to that test. Born to a wealthy timber merchant and steadfast champion of republicanism, Anna (who published nationalist poetry of lasting merit, in Irish, as ‘Ethna Carbery’) died in 1902. Sinéad O’Flanagan, on the other hand, would marry Eamon de Valera and help him in his lifelong quest to make Ireland Irish as well as republican. She lived long enough to be the main speaker at Anna Johnston’s centenary celebrations in 1966, where she called Anna (aka Ethna Carbery) a poet “of idealism and devotion” who would “always hold the foremost place” among the heroines of Irish nationalism. But today’s IRA is more likely to honor Maud Gonne and the Countess Markievicz than it is to pay homage to a pacifist poet from Antrim. ©

[Stanley]

Music and medicine.

Blackadder Hall offers over 500 en suite bedrooms, within 5 minutes walking distance of the Old Course, and in to the town of St Andrews. From the St. Andrews University website.

One of the odder offices of the ‘ancient’ universities of Scotland is that of rector, elected by the students (at Edinburgh, by students and faculty) for three-year terms. ‘Rector’ derives from the Latin for ruler, but the modern rector represents the student body. The rectorship was originally an honorific post held by people who might be called honorable, sometimes honorable mavericks (for instance, Winston Churchill during his years in the political wilderness). But later in the 20th century, Scottish students grew whimsical in their choices. The comic actor Alastair Sim ‘rectored’ at Edinburgh from 1948 to 1951, one hopes comically. Then St. Andrews took the lead with the long rectorial run (1970-1982) of John Cleese, Alan Coren, Frank Muir, and Tim Brooke-Taylor, each whimsical to a fault. So when in 2019 I read that St. Andrews students had insisted on renaming one of their residences as Blackadder Hall, I assumed that they wished to memorialize the classic comedy series “Blackadder”, where (in four seasons, each set in a different era of British history) Rowan Atkinson (as “Edmund Blackadder”) and Tony Robinson (as Blackadder’s addled dogsbody “Baldrick”) mocked several sacred cows, most memorably in Blackadder Goes Forth, set in the trenches of World War I. But Blackadder Hall at St. Andrews is named after a very serious (even seriously heroic) medical doctor, Agnes Forbes Blackadder, born on December 4, 1875, and destined to become (in 1896) the university’s very first female graduate. “Blackadder” is an ancient Scottish clan name, derived from a water course (“Blackwater”) in Berwickshire. But this Blackadder was born in Dundee, and when the time came for her to break gender barriers St. Andrews was conveniently close. She went on to a medical degree at Glasgow, where she performed brilliantly in several fields. She then practiced in London, where she studied the effects of force feeding on imprisoned suffragettes. But she won her fame as a pioneering medic in Captain Edmund Blackadder’s war, in the field and at the Scottish Women’s Hospital at Royaumont. There she was most famous for developing early treatment of gas gangrene (using an x-ray ‘cart’ for both diagnosis and therapy). Not only that: at Royaumont she installed a pianola for her patients’ relief. She soon saw that it provided therapy, too, and later (1923) wrote Music, Health, and Character to prove her point. So Blackadder Hall, at St. Andrews, represents more than undergraduate whimsy. Perhaps St. Andrews students had been as serious when, 50 years ago, they elected John Cleese as Rector. His Minister of Silly Walks might be seen, today, as a therapeutic sort of politician. ©

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Of beans, Codfish, and God.

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.

My dad often recited a version of this doggerel, which I thought a jibe at Boston’s Unitarian aristocrats (“corpse cold,” Transcendental rebels called them) of the ante-bellum period. In fact it was first delivered in 1910 at a Holy Cross alumni dinner. It went down a treat with a largely Catholic audience, upwardly-mobile descendants of the ‘no Irish need apply’ generation. Then, with the rise of Boston’s new Irish aristocracy, it became a popular ditty. But there was at least one Cabot who had spoken to immigrants. She was born Elizabeth Cabot Cary, in the hub of the universe (that’s Boston), on December 5, 1822. “Lizzie” was thought (wrongly, it turned out) to be fragile, and so was educated at home. Since Lizzie’s succession of private tutors included Elizabeth Peabody, we might assume that her parents were progressively-minded. So perhaps they were not upset when Lizzie became friendly with a Swiss immigrant, Louis Agassiz. Agassiz was then married, having left his family behind him, with two adult children, but at least he had descended from a long line of Protestant ministers and was also, already, a celebrated natural scientist whom Elizabeth met at Harvard College. When Louis’s first wife died, he married Elizabeth who took on the care of his (three) children. Her social connections helped them to marry well, to integrate into Boston society, indeed to shape it through their charitable work. Now frail Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz threw herself into her husband’s work, accompanied him on difficult (even dangerous) expeditions, not only to the Amazon but to the ‘sea island’ plantations of coastal Carolina. Elizabeth made her own mark (using the pen name Actaea) as a writer, but also helped to compile and publish Agassiz’s scientific works. One of these, a study of the enslaved people of South Carolina’s coastal islands, would later tarnish the reputations of both Louis and Elizabeth. Its racialist assumptions and its intimate, exploitative daguerreotypes of enslaved individuals led (in the 2010s) to lawsuits by the slaves’ descendants. True to their acquired Boston Brahmin values, the Agassiz step-progeny of Elizabeth Cabot Cary supported the suits. Among other positive results of Elizabeth’s talking to someone other than God was Radcliffe College, which (with several others) she helped to found in 1879. Frail Elizabeth went on to a productive old age as writer and educator. She died, aged 84, in 1907, and was buried beside her husband’s body at Mount Auburn, where so many Cabots now speak only to God. ©

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Courage, scholarship, and honesty. Really?

He was of very good courage. From John Aubrey’s ‘Brief Life” of Judge David Jenkins.

Historians of Stuart England will sometimes admit that they first cut their teeth on John Aubrey’s (1625-1685) short biographies of the era’s leading (and some of its obscure) figures. Often personal and pithy, they are now considered classic forerunners of the biographical sketch genre. Aubrey himself sometimes showed them around, and then generations of scholars used them until finally, in 1898, they were collected and published as Aubrey’s Brief Lives. I used them, and found them very quotable if too kind to royalists and Tories, too hard on parliamentarians and Whigs. But then Aubrey was a royalist, a frequent sponger at courtiers’ country seats, and (though west country English by birth) distantly related to the baronets Aubrey of Glamorgan in Wales. Perhaps that is why Aubrey gave such good press to the Welsh lawyer and judge David Jenkins. Aubrey didn’t know Jenkins’ birthdate, and got his death date wrong (Jenkins was born in 1582 and died on December 6, 1663), but he did know that Jenkins had married a Glamorgan Aubrey and that Sir Thomas Aubrey intended to raise a memorial to Jenkins at Cowbridge, where nearly all of them, it seems, had attended grammar school. Kinship aside, Aubrey particularly admired Jenkins’s scholarship, his courage, and his incorruptibility. Incorruptibility was not always the best way to get ahead in 17th-century England, and when it was paired with courage it could be downright dangerous. Once David Jenkins had got through Oxford and established himself as a lawyer he began his often Quixotic career by siding with Parliament over the efforts of King Charles I to establish his “personal rule.” That got Jenkins a judgeship, oddly, and it was as a judge that he became a royalist, honoring his oath to the king and articulating his view that the crown was, by hereditary and God-given right, the essential element in government. As the Civil Wars went, this became a dead-end cause. As a judge and a sometime soldier, he fought for the king and against legislative presumption, and in 1648 he was in the Tower and ready to be hanged “with the Bible under one arm and Magna Charta under the other” (as Aubrey put it). Then, at the Restoration of monarchy (1660) incorruptibility trumped courage, and Jenkins refused to pay Lord Chancellor Clarendon the bribe that might have put him, Jenkins, on the high court. This odd, Welsh-like defiance won Aubrey’s admiration but also that of the regicide Henry Marten who, after interviewing Jenkins in the Tower, decided that Jenkins would do more damage to parliament as a dead martyr than as a living pain in the neck. So David Jenkins went free. ©

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Head nurse at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

A singularly meritorious act of extraordinary fidelity. From the pre-1942 requirements for the Purple Heart ribbon.

In the early morning of December 7, 1941, 1st Lieutenant Annie G. Fox had just begun her day duty as chief nurse at the small (30-bed) military hospital at Hickam Field, Pearl Harbor—no doubt getting her small staff of day nurses (the whole 24/7/365 roster was six trained nurses, including Fox) to their duties when the surprise attack began. The Japanese Navy aimed at the ships in the harbor and the planes at Hickam, but the hospital was nearly hit, shrapnel everywhere and planes roaring too close overhead for comfort. They should have been overwhelmed. The hospital had only been established in November, and it was not set up for a disaster. 1,178 servicemen were wounded that day (2400 were killed), and although they didn’t all go to the Hickam Field hospital, a great many did. It was a bloody mess. Except, as the Nurse Corps citation put it, for Lt. Fox.
Lieutenant Fox in an exemplary manner performed her duty as head nurse . . . Lieutenant Fox worked ceaselessly with coolness and efficiency, and her fine example of calmness, courage, and leadership was of great benefit of all with whom she came in contact . . .
That “all” included not only the wounded and the tiny hospital staff, but volunteers (navy wives, off duty servicemen) who showed up to help. What could such a crowd do? Fox triaged them as she triaged the wounded, setting those with some skills to emergency-room work and organizing the amateurs into bandage makers, water boilers, cleaners—all those “little” jobs without which no hospital can run. This motley crew worked throughout, saving whom they could and treating all. Fox became a local legend and soon enough a service-wide one. Since the Nurse Corps could hardly ignore her, it cited her with a Purple Heart and her small nursing staff with legion of honor medals. She was at the time the first female to be awarded the Purple Heart. Later in the war, when the Purple Heart was repurposed to be awarded only to those wounded in battle, her citation was repurposed (but not reworded) to award her the Bronze Star for valor. Having been born in Nova Scotia in 1893, Lieutenant Fox was yet another immigrant, but it was beginning to be accepted that that was who we actually were, and so nobody complained. Fox had joined the Nurse Corps shortly after she arrived, in 1918. She continued in the service for years after Pearl Harbor and years after her heroic service on the day which, as President Franklin Roosevelt said in his war message, would live in infamy. After her retirement, Annie Fox moved to San Mateo, CA, where she died in January 1987. ©.

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Problem-solver extraordinaire.

I decided that as a woman and a mathematician I had no alternative but to accept [to continue to] do everything I could to encourage talented women to become research mathematicians. Julia Robinson, upon deciding to accept her election as president of the American Mathematical Society.

The best mathematics teachers in my Des Moines high school were three elderly spinsters, each eccentric in her own way, and memorable for that, for their enthusiasm for algebra, and for their first names: Beulah, Ethel, and Geraldine. Then, at college and in my first university job, I learned that higher-level female mathematicians were, to put it in a mathematical way, singularities. I never thought much about it, and still don’t, not least because the higher math is to me a complete mystery, but it’s become more and more clear that women are breaking into the field. The universe of female mathematicians, once lit by very few bright stars (like Emilie du Châtelet, who tutored Voltaire in the calculus), is now an expanding one. One of the American pioneers of this sea change was Julia Robinson, born in St. Louis as Julia Hall Bowman on December 8, 1919. Possibly her genius was nurtured by her long absence from regular school. Diagnosed with rheumatic fever in 1928, the spent two years being privately tutored at home: well-tutored, for when she returned she passed out of 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. Having moved to San Diego, she then tore through high school and entered San Diego State at 16. There she found math too pedestrian, so transferred to Berkeley, where she found her husband (who taught her Freshman calculus) and her metier. Julia Robinson earned her PhD in 1948, but was barred from a faculty appointment in math by a rule that forbade spouses in the same department. So instead she taught statistics, while on the side becoming moderately famous as a mathematical theorist. Only when Raphael Robinson retired (in 1973) could she take up a formal appointment in mathematics, which came at the same time she was nominated for membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Her success in solving a couple of math’s classic problems led quickly to a MacArthur ‘genius’ award while, on the side, she became active in the California Democratic Party and, not least, a crusader for equal opportunity for girls in school and college mathematics. I think it is safe to say that she would have warmed the hearts of Beulah Newton, Ethel Cain, and Geraldine Rendelman. She warmed the hearts of her fellow mathematicians, too, and in 1983 was elected the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society. Painfully aware that she was, indeed, a token female, she was also diagnosed with leukemia. Debating the matter with herself and her family, Julia Robinson decided that taking that token roll was her only honorable course. She lived out her term, served well, and died in 1985. ©

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What one can do with a banking fortune.

My bankers are Hoares. Captain Jack Aubrey, Royal Navy, in the ‘Master and Commander’ novels of Patrick O’Brien.

Hoare’s Bank, not just a clever pun, was founded in 1672 at the Golden Bottle tavern in London. It no longer operates there, but its current HQ, in Fleet Street, still sports the bank’s icon, the Golden Bottle. It is Britain’s oldest bank, and (astonishingly) is still an unlimited liability partnership. Almost from its start, Hoare’s has had an exclusive clientele. One of its first customers was Sir Samuel Pepys. Since then it has gone down-market occasionally, louche characters like the poet Dryden and humble investors like the novelist Austen, but most of its current clients are simply rich folk who like to do their banking business in quiet lounges of baronial style. And for 12 generations, up to 2017, it was run by direct descendants of its founder, Sir Richard Hoare. But that line was almost broken by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, great-grandson of the founder, born on December 9, 1758. This particular Hoare was groomed to take over the bank. He and his six half-siblings were close, the products of a childhood idyll at the family’s Wiltshire seat, Stourhead (now one of the National Trust’s premier properties). Of course he was privately educated and of course he apprenticed at the bank. When he reached his majority, his grandfather made him a rich man independently of the bank’s operation. This explains how Richard Colt Hoare could spend his adult life as an amateur scholar: antiquary, art collector, local historian, and author of erudite travel journals. As to why, he left banking with a broken heart, for only a few days after their second anniversary, his wife Hester died. leaving ‘Colt’ (the name used by himself and his closest friends) an 11-month old son, Henry. Already the inheritor of landed estates, and with an annual income rivalling that of Jane Austen’s prideful Fitzwilliam Darcy, Colt Hoare set himself to learn what he could of Europe’s cultural history. For six years he traveled, studied, translated, sketched, and wrote about Rome (from its first origins). He collected ancient manuscripts and artifacts—and current art—and sent them back to Stourhead where he had to build two new wings to house it all. When the French Revolution made travel impossible, he returned home to study British history, Wiltshire of course but also Wales (having first learned Welsh). None of this did his son Henry any good (he died, dissolute, in 1836), but the family bank carried on under the leadership of Sir Richard’s half-brother, another Henry. Today the bank is still owned by Hoare descendants, but its chair is a former senior civil servant (in the UK Treasury), and its CEO is a veteran of a Swiss bank and believes that “private” accounts are a very natural thing. ©.

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Fame is a fickle food . . .

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —-
--Emily Elizabeth Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson was born into New England’s middle class on December 10, 1830. In one sense it was a promising time and place to be born female. Some women were becoming public persons, active in reform movements, notably abolitionism, their presence barely tolerated by many but celebrated by some, notably the cadre of Transcendentalist intellectuals. That’s where Margaret Fuller would find her place, editor of The Dial and sparring partner of Emerson. Emily’s father, a lawyer and a leading light at Amherst College, was aware of these things, and saw to it that Emily and her sister Lavinia were as well educated as girls of their class could be. But on the other hand this was also the era of the “cult of true womanhood,” the view that woman’s glory was to be found in marriage, the home, the family, and in encouraging their sons and husbands to be the best that men could possibly be. Faced with those two roads, Emily Dickinson took neither. After briefly attending Mount Holyoke Female Academy, she went home and became an Amherst recluse. Eccentric to a fault, she dressed in white, watched the town and its grim burying ground through her curtains, and was rarely seen abroad. The neighborhood children knew her as the odd lady who made nice cakes. Emily kept some private correspondences and kept abreast of her siblings’ lives. But her own life was an elaborate silence. Except . . . . Except that Emily Dickinson became a great poet, possibly the best ever American poet. But to settle in that rank required her liberation. I was introduced to her in high school English, odd poems from which, I later discovered, her true genius had been edited out by people whose wider experience had altered Emily’s verse to conform with the best rules of grammar, punctuation, rhyme, and even reason. Luckily, but long after her death in 1886, Thomas Johnson and Perry Miller went to the source, Emily’s own unedited (except of course and exhaustively by her) poems. This made her verses even odder than the ones I read in high school, but far more memorable, and often unsettling. She invented new punctuations, mostly dashes which, I think, were meant to be silences, adopted mysterious rules—or new anarchies—of capitalization. More importantly, she had found new subject matters: herself, for she was a reclusive, but also nature writ large (the wind rustling its fingers through a field of grain is one of my favorites) and even politics and war (often as distractions which disrupted her private fields of vision). I discovered this new Emily, or the old, genuine Emily, in graduate school, and have yet to leave her behind. ©

[Stanley]

And his brother, Theodore.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
--“For the Union Dead,” by Robert Lowell.

At 15 Grove Street, Fitchburg, Massachusetts, once stood a substantial brick built house. It has since given way to a parking garage. This odd fact calls to mind Robert Lowell’s poem, where (on Boston Common) a parking garage is gouged out of land facing Augustus St. John’s ‘Shaw Memorial,’ honoring Colonel Robert Shaw and the famed (and doomed) volunteers of the Massachusetts 54thinfantry. They were cut to pieces in the Union assault on Fort Wagner, in South Carolina. To show their contempt for a black soldiery, the Confederate officers commanding ordered that the union dead should be buried en masse, in a ditch, and threw Shaw’s body in with them. They intended insult; Shaw’s father took it, instead, as an honor. There were few survivors from the 54th, but one of them was Theodore Becker, a black medical orderly who went on to become a medical doctor. As a youth, he’d lived in that Grove Street house, taken in by its owner, his brother Martin Becker. It’s a good, fascinating story. I haven’t been able to find much about Theodore, but Martin Becker was probably born, in Dutch Guiana, on December 11, 1820. He was of mixed African and East Indian parentage, but was born free. As a free person, Martin took to the sea as a common sailor, but jumped ship at Portsmouth, NH, where he established himself as an unusual character. He went to school, did well, apprenticed as a printer but became a barber instead, well enough established to marry a local girl, Caroline Walker. Along the way he became an abolitionist, too. Active in abolitionist circles, he met a prominent Fitchburg merchant, Benjamin Snow (1813-1892), and established himself in Fitchburg as a printer. Becker did well enough at that to buy Snow’s Grove Street house, and to maintain it (as Snow had) as a station on the Underground Railway, and to serve as a local justice. There Becker may also have met Frederick Douglass, the Grimké sisters, and other eminent visitors on the abolitionist circuit. They are all honored today in Fitchburg’s “Abolitionist Park.” So it’s not surprising to find Martin Becker volunteering for Union service, first in the navy and then (following in his brother’s footsteps) in the Massachusetts 55th. The war’s end found Martin in South Carolina, where for a time he played an active role in Reconstruction as a state representative and agent of the Republican Party. After all, Becker had the skills needed, and the courage, but with the end of Reconstruction he moved back to Fitchburg, where he died in 1880. ©.

[Stanley]

Le mot juste.

The difference between the right word and the wrong word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain.

Over years of teaching, I’ve found that one of the more difficult tasks is to explain what is meant by ‘literary realism.’ Mark Twain and his friends, notably William Dean Howells, certainly dabbled in it, and it’s found, for instance, in Twain’s concern with getting the accents right in the many dialogues between Huck Finn and the runaway slave Jim. More to the point, Jim instructs young Huck in the ‘real’ absurdities and hypocrisies of a social order based on racial slavery. Howells, influential as a critic, was entranced by this quality in Twain’ work and did much to make Twain respectable. And in his own novels Howells saw to it that virtue was not always rewarded—his endings are truthful, but only occasionally happy. But most critics look abroad to find the ‘real’ prophets of literary realism. One such was certainly Gustave Flaubert, born into an upper middle class family in Rouen, Normandy, on December 12, 1821. Flaubert was schooled locally, then sent to Paris to study for the law. He liked neither the city nor his intended career. Instead he took to a writer, the poet Loise Colet (the first of what would be many and varied sexual liaisons), and to writing. His first two fictions were not great successes, but his third was the perpetual blockbuster Madame Bovary. Serialized in 1856, it won Flaubert a prosecution (for obscenity) and a reputation as a founder, perhaps the founder, of literary realism. Once he was acquitted, the serial was republished as a two-volume novel, warmly praised by many critics, and Flaubert became an established figure. His heroine, Emma, was a farmer’s daughter, her head turned by romantic novels and her heart won by Charles Bovary, a youngish widower and medic who, she dreams, will take her into a life of urban sophistication. When it doesn’t work out that way, she flings herself into affairs and reckless spending on fancy clothes and pretty things. Everything turns out badly for everyone. Emma suicides. Charles sinks into grief and death, and their daughter Berthe, illegitimate in every respect except legally, ends up working in a cotton mill. Flaubert’s own life wasn’t, in the end, much happier. He had only one more literary success, L’Education Sentimentale (1869), but is remembered for his realism, which was based, in part, on his questings for “le mot juste.” That was indeed a Twain obsession, and Twain would refer to Flaubert as a French forbear, but only occasionally. He was more likely to pay homage to Balzac as a realist. However, on the web here is a confusing reference to an old, “illustrated” (!!!) Madame Bovary, which apparently had something to do with Twain, but I have been unable to track that fascinating reference down. ©

[Tripps]

That reminds me (again) of one of my favourite quotes.

Richard Bacon

Some folk however will never change - despite however much "conference".

[Stanley]

"A well regulated militia . . . "

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Second Amendment, US Constitution, ratified December 15, 1791.

Today’s National Guard, or in the plural the American states’ National Guards, have made December 13, 1636 (not December 15, 1791) their birth date, for it was on that day that the Massachusetts colony ordered the formation of militia companies to defend the colony in the so-called Pequot War. ‘Defend’ is not quite the right word, for the war now appears to have been manufactured by the colonists, and it would end with the massacre of Pequot men, women, and children at the ‘Battle’ of Mystic Fort. But the line between civilization and savagery has always been blurred, and it’s often the victors who determine the facts. But not always. As to the colonial militias being the historical basis for the USA’s gun mania, Glocks under every pillow and AR-15s in every closet, that’s another question. The Second Amendment, in context and in its entirety, was not license for citizens to arm themselves to the teeth, nor to fire the weapon whenever they felt threatened. Introduced as a sop to people who had opposed the Constitution (and to widespread fears about a standing army), the amendment also spoke to a general view (and to General George Washington’s settled opinion) that the militias had been undependable forces in the war for independence. Militias rose up when the British were nearby, but tended to sink back into the woodwork when the Brits moved on. That left Washington’s Continentals to carry the can and to nurse grudges against the militias’ short enlistments, irregular disciplines, and disappearing tendencies. So the key is “A well regulated militia,” a phrase that Justice Scalia edited out of the amendment (inconsistently, given his claims to originalism in constitutional interpretation). In colonial militia laws, regulations had been imposed, so frequently that one must suspect they were being regularly flouted. New England militia laws typically required militia men (fit, sane, aged 16 to 60) to bring their own arms (and, at first, armor) to muster days. But taxes were set aside to buy guns and powder for poorer townsmen, and at “muster days” (generally, four annually) everyone was required to drill, demonstrate their competence with firearms, and present each gun for inspection. If the local militia officers found incompetence (for instance, unsafe handling or misfiring), the militiaman could be fined. If a gun was unclean, unkempt, or faulty a fine could be imposed or the gun confiscated. So the gun was not, strictly speaking, the militiaman’s private property. And certainly the gun was not beyond the state’s authority. Nor was the militiaman. Both needed to be well regulated. Antonin Scalia’s editing missed the point. ©.

[Stanley]

The Dutch and their dikes.

. . . Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world.
---From John Donne, “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.”

Yesterday, December 13, was St. Lucia’s Day, a feast day in Catholic Italy and Protestant Scandinavia. Italy is easily explained, for Lucia was an Italian saint. In Scandinavia it’s complicated, until you remember that the medieval calendar (for reasons tedious to explain) was askew enough to make December 13 the winter solstice, the darkest, shortest day of the year, and a saint whose name means ‘light’ was easily translated into what had been ‘pagan’ celebrations of the solstice. In Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and parts of Finland children parade holding candles against the dark and thus prophesying the lightening of the world as it turns towards the sun. St. Lucia was popular elsewhere northern Europe, which may explain why John Donne’s “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day” is a widower’s lament about how his wife’s death had brought him a dreadful darkness. In Holland, St. Lucia is remembered because of a greater disaster, for it was on her day that a storm blew up and threatened the sea wall marking off the Zuiderzee from the tidal waters. Sometime in the night, the wall broke, and with the dawn of December 14, 1287, a terrible flood came upon the lowlands surrounding an ancient lake. It was among the worst floods of recorded history, Noachian in its horrors. Of course the exact toll is unknowable, but 50,000 is a safe estimate. Whole villages were destroyed, thirty in East-Frisia, some never to be resettled. What had been a freshwater lowlands became salty sea, and indeed the “Zuiderzee” (“southern sea”) gets its name from the disaster. Of course it was not a disaster for everyone. For instance Amsterdam began its rise as a major trading port, profiting from the vast change in lowland geography. And St. Lucia’s Flood drove home a different lesson. The sea wall broken by the storm was in the main a natural barrier island wall. But in West- Frisia seaside villages and farms survived (and thus prospered) because they were protected by man-made ring dikes. And so, eight centuries ago, the Dutch (not yet a nation) became an engineering people, investing their time and, eventually, public money in the endless task of holding back the sea. The Zuiderzee still exists, but two great dikes have held back enough water to create new land, mainly at its southern end, surrounded by lesser dikes and kept safe by pumping stations. All this, by the 17th century, made the Dutch the richest of Europeans (per capita), and they are still close to the top. In an era of global warming, we should see a moral to this story. ©

[Tizer]

And so, eight centuries ago, the Dutch (not yet a nation) became an engineering people, investing their time and, eventually, public money in the endless task of holding back the sea.

Our Environment Agency (EA) called in the Dutch engineers to design and install the new major flood defences for where we lived in the Somerset Levels about 10 years ago. It stopped the flooding of residential areas but doesn't prevent the main trunk road route being flooded and closed. They put gates on some hundreds of yards of the road to be closed during floods, which means lots of traffic going a very long way around the outside of the Levels. It's ironic because when the EA bods came to our village to discuss the proposals I recommended raising the road above flood level and putting arches underneath to let the flood waters drain away to the River. The EA said it would be too expensive and the road would have to be closed to do the work. Sadly, many of the villagers said they didn't want that because they wouldn't be able to get to work quickly when the building was being done. Doh! Now they get blocked from using the road every time it floods.

Incidentally, what I proposed was the same as the main road through Langport on the edge of the Levels. Centuries ago Bow Street was raised up and culverts incorporated underneath to let water escape from the higher to the lower fields. It never floods. As for time and expense I did point out that in the 1890s Brunel had all the GWR broad gauge rail track lifted and replaced with standard gauge on one Sunday!

[Stanley]

Student, servant, and critic of the Chinese Revolution.

The current was so strong that we were carried miles downstream. Isabel Cook, recalling her first research trip—and perhaps also explaining her life.

When the anthropologist Isabel Crook died earlier this year (on August 20), England’s Guardian newspaper gave her quite a long obit. No doubt this owed partly to her grand old age, but more to her pioneering works on rural and ‘primitive’ cultures gripped by modernization, and yet more to the extraordinary fact that she’d spent 90 of her 107 years in China, survived her arrest during the Cultural Revolution (ca. 1964-1974), raised holy hell about the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and then in her eldest years (aged 103, in 2019) had received the Chinese Friendship Medal from none other than Xi Jinping. The Guardian called her a Canadian, I suppose because her parents were Canadian missionaries (Methodists, by the way: Muriel and Homer Brown). Isabel Crook was born at the Canadian mission school at Chengdu on December 15, 1915, the eldest of the Browns’ three daughters. Isabel Brown went to Canada for her BA degree, but returned to China in 1939 to study a tribal culture in the remote southwest. These were desperately poor people, subsistence farmers who eked out better incomes through the opium trade and loosely organized burglary. Still a missionary, she then joined a rural reconstruction project near Chongqing as an academic observer and researcher. Her work was eventually published (in 2013!!!) as Prosperity’s Predicament: Identity, Reform and Resistance in Wartime China. The gap has several explanations; most importantly, she soon joined Mao Zedong’s revolution. Why not? Already accustomed to dangerous work, Isabel was appalled by the brutal poverty of ‘traditional’ China and believed that Mao promised better. She also married a British Stalinist and former spy for the Soviet NKVD, David Crook, picked up an Anthropology PhD at the London School of Economics, and (with David Crook) returned to help build a new China and, on the side as it were, to study the process by which it became ‘new.’ This helps to explain the retitling of her 2013 book, for when she began it (under contract with Routledge) she had intended to call it “Prosperity Village.” Over the next decades, Isabel continued her researches, published in the West, and became a pioneer of foreign language education in the People’s Republic. Isabel and David retained their original loyalties to the revolution, and for that reason often found themselves at variance to the official line. Despite their public protest over the Tiananmen slaughter, they were kept on as ‘advisors.’ David died in 2000, aged 90. Isabel stayed on to receive the highest honor the Chinese give to foreigners, doubtless deserved but also, in its own way, a profound puzzle. ©

[Stanley]

The uses of history.

You must abide by contracts and forms of government agreed on by the citizens, and you must keep your word. John Selden, De jure naturali et gentium . . . (London, 1645).

There were many grounds for the execution of King Charles I, in 1649, but one was that he did not follow that advice. Rather, in 1648, Charles broke trust with his captors and launched England into a ‘second civil war.’ Given Charles’s view of his ‘divine right,’ lying was either impossible or irrelevant. Other, more pedestrian folk felt differently. Among them was John Selden, and to call him ‘pedestrian’ is only to accept that he was born of humbler stock, the respectable yeomanry, on December 16, 1584. Well before 1645 he had made himself into one of England’s greatest scholars, in law to be sure but also in history, biblical study, and languages. He was also, by 1645, almost certainly the live-in lover of the widowed Countess of Kent, possibly her secret husband. At various times Selden’s ever-widening circle of friends had included the eminent antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, the somewhat louche playwright and actor Ben Jonson, and the ever-ambitious Bishop of London, William Laud. Selden would later (1644-45) abandon Laud—by then Archbishop of Canterbury—to the chopping block. Just so, Selden had blown hot and cold on the king himself, identified in Charles’s first parliament as a loyalist, then a supporter of the Petition of Right (1628), for which Selden was imprisoned in the Tower. He made his peace with the king in a treatise (1634) magnifying royal power over the seas and seaborne commerce, and finally breaking with Charles when the king raised his battle standard against the citizens-in-parliament. Some of this in and out running was because Selden was, without doubt, an agreeable youth who matured into a man who would rather agree than not. But it owed also to Selden’s immersion in history, not just England’s past but as close as he could get to the beginning of time. Somehow the past had made the present, and the best way to deal with present conflicts was to lay open the record. Once that was done, men of good will and good reason could find a way forward. His best aid in that quest was his mastery of modern and ancient languages, including (among the latter) Anglo-Saxon and Hebrew. The full title (translated) of that 1645 tract was ‘of the law of nature and of nations according to the discipline of the Jews.’ Today, Selden’s mastery in Jewish history wins him a place in the Jewish Encyclopedia. In 1645, it made him an enemy of fabulists in high places who dealt in untruths. So the lessons John Selden derived from the past could prove useful today. ©.

[Stanley]

Farming with a Farmall.

We had to come up with an all-purpose tractor with rear wheels that could be adjusted to straddle two rows of crops, and a narrow front . . . which would fit into one crop row. Delbert Rufus Benjamin.

We moved to the city when I was 6, but still spent our summers at my mother’s house in Grundy Center, IA. There I ‘cultivated’ myself as a farm lad. I didn’t fool anybody (except myself) but learned things that set me apart from my Des Moines friends. Among them the most glamorous was that before I was 12 I had learned how to drive: specifically, my Uncle Ed’s Ford tractor. It was a simple beast: small and squat, light gray with a red engine block, and battery-started. But the tractor I lusted after was the Farmall F-12 owned by my mother’s cousin Margretta, and her husband Chris. I thought the F-12 ancient, for you had to crank it to get it running. In fact, it wasn’t much older than I. It came along in the 1930s, sold for $900 (about $20K today) and was the second iteration of the original “Farmall.” Trade name and tractor were invented by Bert Benjamin, a real Iowa farm boy born near Newton, IA, on December 17, 1870. He loved his dad’s farm machinery, such as it then was, and was also brilliant at school. So it was natural for Bert to go on to study mechanical engineering at the Iowa State College, the nation’s first “land grant” institution. Perhaps Bert always intended to go back to the farm, but ambition took him to a really big city, Chicago, to work for Cyrus McCormick’s International Harvester Co. There he made good enough progress to become chief inspector and, on that basis, to marry a home town girlfriend who had become Fred Maytag’s sister-in-law. So by 1903 Bert was well established and on his way up. But his dream was to bring efficiency to the family farm. McCormick’s machinery was big, bulky, and expensive, its tractors steam-driven, useful mainly at harvest time. He wanted a Farm-All, a machine that could plow, plant, cultivate, harvest and haul. And then he went one better by making it into a power-generator on its own, running a belt drive from its crankshaft which could, in turn, run all sorts of stationary machinery—even, come to that, a vacuum-driven milking machine. The first Farm-All moved off the assembly line in 1924, dark green in superstructure and with steel wheels. In 1932 came the F-12, now in bright red, ‘trademark’ livery. Available with tired wheels, and engineered to fit row crops. By 1940, Farmalls accounted for 90% of all working farm tractors and Bert Benjamin, that bright farm boy from Jasper County, had amassed over 100 patents for farm machinery (and Farmall ‘attachments’). But when he died, he was buried back home, in Newton, in the Benjamin family plot, and simply as “Bert R., 1870-1969.” ©

[Stanley]

P. I. Tchaikovsky and E. T. A. Hoffmann

Silly child, how can you imagine that this wooden doll from Nuremberg is really alive and capable of moving about? E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” 1816.

I did not run across Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) until I read The Lyre of Orpheus (1988), the last novel in Robertson Davies’s brilliant, entrancing Cornish Trilogy. In Orpheus, Hoffmann appears as the grumpy ghost ETAH, who is visiting from limbo (where he’s immured forever for his, Hoffmann’s, failure to consummate anything in his short life) to observe and comment upon an effort to resurrect his unfinished opera which gets retitled as King Arthur or the Magnanimous Cuckhold. If you know anything about Davies, the Arthurian legends, or indeed Hoffmann, you will see the tragicomic potential here, and indeed (among many other subplots) the ‘real’ Arthur (Arthur Cornish) does get cuckolded and does react magnanimously. Hoffmann is worthy of study for many other reasons, perhaps as a precursor of magical realism but certainly as a figure on the borderline between realism (the new sciences of his era) and magic (the legends, folktales, and alchemies of his forbears). For much of his short, unhappy life, Hoffmann (who adopted the middle name Amadeus for its publicity potential), tried to settle in a profession, then spent years on the run from Napoleon’s revolutionary army, and finally (1809) settled down to write in the gothic genre beloved by many early Romantics. He also sketched memorable caricatures, painted portraits, and composed music. His works are said to have inspired a host of interesting people, and in several arts: not only Robertson Davies but also Charles Dickens, Alexander Dumas père, Franz Kafka, Jacques Offenbach (The Tales of Hoffmann, of course), and even moderns like Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ingmar Bergman. One of Hoffmann’s works has even been used, foolhardily as it turned out, to satirize Vladimir Putin. It’s a fabulous list, and suggests that Hoffmann is someone to put on your reading list. But the reason for remembering Hoffmann in this holiday season is his “Nutcracker and the Mouse King” (1816) which would inspire Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s storybook ballet, The Nutcracker, which had its St. Peterburg premiere on December 18, 1892, where it was clearly intended to get Tsarist society into the spirit of Christmas. How well it succeeded at that only Lenin and Stalin could tell you, but in 1892 it didn’t go down well with St. Petersburg critics, or indeed the audience. Nevertheless, it has since become so popular that, in the unballetic USA, Christmas performances of The Nutcracker provide the basic cash flow for tens, maybe scores, of local dance companies. No doubt the ghostly ETAH would enjoy the irony. ©.

[Stanley]

A chip off the old blocks.

Humans become human through intense learning, not just of survival skills, but of customs, social mores, kinship, and culture. Richard Leakey.

I became interested in Kenya because my senior seminar professor, Martin Wolfe (not a believer in student choice), decided that my research paper would be on the land problem that resulted from the creation of the “white highlands” in the ancestral homelands of the Kikuyu and other indigenes. Native resentment fueled the Mau Mau rebellion; then imperial Britain’s savage response led to Kenyan independence. At the same time, I developed an interest in the equally absorbing story of human evolution and the role played there by the Leakey family and its discoveries. In the Leakeys, these two stories became intertwined, partly because the family patriarch, the paleontologist Louis Leakey, was himself a Kikuyu adoptee with a certain sympathy for nationalist aspirations. Louis’s second wife, Mary, and their three sons continued both stories, white folks determined to succeed by embracing black Kenya and majority rule while continuing their scientific quest to prove that Africa was indeed the ‘cradle of mankind.’ In some ways the most successful of them all was Richard Leakey, born in Nairobi to Louis and Mary on December 19, 1944. Like all the boys, he was taken on early expeditions and basked in his parents’ approval when, aged 6, wandering about a Leakey campsite, he found an important fossil. The whole Leakey saga is retold in a book, wonderfully entitled Ancestral Passions, about the family’s quest for human origins and, along with that, some peace for themselves as a family and as white inhabitants of an independent Kenya. The book, published in 1996, was given to me by a former student when Paulette and I left England to settle in St. Louis, and it still occupies a favored place among my books on natural history. Richard Leakey’s part in the story was by no means over in 1996 (he died in January 2022, in Nairobi), but Ancestral Passions makes clear his triple commitment to fossil study, post-colonial Kenyan politics, and making peace in his family—even to the extent of accepting a kidney transplant from his brother Philip in 1980. “Now,” Richard reflected, “I won’t be able to hate [Philip’s] guts.” That was a strange reprise of Richard’s role in saving the marriage of his parents when Louis was about to leave Mary and embark on yet another affair. Richard would survive similar marital difficulties, but his lasting fame lies in his roles as successful paleontologist (with no professional qualifications), Kenyan politician (once even a cabinet minister), eminent environmental crusader, and a very human man whose personal triumphs over illnesses and injuries are themselves inspiring stories. ©.

[Stanley]

Philip Larkin meets Constance Chatterley.

Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Mervyn Griffith Jones, for the prosecution, in the UK obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1960).

Philip Larkin is my favorite poet, despite his sometimes deeply felt misanthropy. Whether, within that general animus, he was especially misogynistic is often debated. On the whole, I think not. During his lifetime he enjoyed (sadly, as was his wont) several saving relationships with women. So we may conclude that he was not still a virgin when, in his early 40s, he wrote in his “Annus Mirabilis” that:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Tongue-in-cheek, surely: for Larkin, here, sex is a cultural phenomenon, a societal explosion, a metaphor. But the reference to the Chatterley ban is real enough. Larkin refers to the British ban on D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, imposed in the UK on its publication in 1928. The novel was banned because of its descriptions of sexual intercourse (which in our surfeited age now seem naively poetic), but in 1928 it wasn’t much liked even by those cognoscenti who actually read it (wrapped in brown paper?). The American bookseller-printer of Paris, Sylvia Beach, who had dared publish Ulysses, refused to touch Chatterley, and Lawrence (disappointed, deathly ill, and in debt) had it published in Florence. A British edition was published (clandestinely) in 1929 by the dubious “Inky” Stephenson, but Lawrence now placed great hope on an American publication. Alas, the pleasures of reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover were denied to the American public by an executive decision of the US Customs Service on December 20, 1929. Lawrence soon wasted away, dying in bed on March 2, 1930, while reading a book about Columbus’s discovery of America (which, on the whole, he regretted). In two quite famous obscenity trials (1959 in the USA and 1960 in the UK) Chatterley came off the banned list, just in time for the metaphorical deflowering of Philip Larkin. The UK trial (which, let us assume, probably made Larkin break at least a smile) became especially famous when the crown prosecutor infamously asked the jury, which for goodness sake included three women, “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” With rhetoric like that coming from the public prosecutor, why bother with Philip Larkin if you are looking for misogyny? ©