BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

As sung at Rick's Cafe, Casablanca

Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive!
         First lines of “La Marseillaise, by Rouget de Lisle.  
 
I can’t remember when I first heard the French national anthem, but it was when I heard it sung at Rick’s Café Américain (in the movie Casablanca) that I first wanted to learn what the words meant.   Rouget de Lisle composed ‘La Marseillaise’ in a rush, in the afternoon and evening of April 25, 1792, and at the request of the Mayor of Strasbourg.   Both the mayor and de Lisle were freemasons, which may explain God’s absence in the lyrics (THE deity appears only as an oath, and thus in vain).   But why isn’t it called “La Strasbourgeoise”?   Possibly because most of the city’s inhabitants spoke German?   De Lisle himself entitled it “Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin,” which doesn’t trip off the tongue very easily.   The more immediate reason is that it caught on when the members of the Marseilles National Guard entered Paris in July 1792 to defend the embattled Revolution, flags flying and voices raised in song.   The National Convention made “La Marseillaise” official in 1795, by which time, ironically, the Strasbourg mayor had fallen victim to the Terror.   De Lisle (1750-1836) lived on long enough to see the anthem disowned by the restored monarchy, but not long enough to see it sung again in the failed revolution of 1848, then suppressed again by Napoléon III.   By the outbreak of World War II (1939), “La Marseillaise” was well entrenched, its bloodthirstiness (and anti-German biases) a reflection of national feeling.   And then came the fall of France, the German occupation of most of the country, the puppet Vichy regime holding uncertain sway over the rest and over French North Africa, including Casablanca.   So it was that at Rick’s place, in Casablanca the movie, when some German officers started singing “Die wacht am Rhein” the rest of the café crowd struck up “La Marseillaise.”   It’s a romantic, defining moment in a film that overflows with romantic, defining moments.   Only the first verse (and the refrain) is sung, but it’s enough to silence the Germans and, better, to transfigure Rick’s place (and its habitués).    Even Rick, defeated in love, embittered, cynical—even Rick (aka Humphrey Bogart, in his perfect role as an imperfect human being) is moved to a defiance we might dare to call patriotism.  It is Rick, after all, who gives the nod to the café band (another dissolute lot) to join in and give the hymn its proper instrumental setting.   Of course Rick doesn’t get the girl (the radiant Ingrid Bergman, as Ilse) in the end.   She flies off with her knight in shining armor (Paul Heinreid as Laszlo of the Czech Resistance), leaving Rick Blaine to his own ways of dealing with a real world at war.   ©.  

[Stanley]

A real vicar of Bray?

And this be law, that I'll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
         --lyric from “The Vicar of Bray,” circa 1720.  
This song dates from the golden age of English satire, Pope, Swift, and their fellow scribblers.  It tells of the religious turncoatery of a country parson who glues to his living (in Bray, of course) whatever the weather.  He’s a vengeful Anglican in Charles II’s reign, then (almost) a Catholic under James II.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 finds him safely Protestant.   Under Queen Anne, he dances the high Tory fling, but when Hanover George comes to the throne our vicar turns Whiggish.   Scholarly searches for a ‘real’ Vicar of Bray have been unsuccessful.   None of these regimes were powerful enough to force strict orthodoxy (or hypocrisy?) way down at the parish level; and, let’s face it, England had wearied (somewhat) of killing people for their peculiar prayers.   It was not so during the hot times of the Tudors.   Henry VIII and his three royal children (Edward, Mary, Elizabeth) produced a whole galaxy of real martyrs, people who refused to conform to whatever creed was the flavor of the day and who were hanged, beheaded, and/or burnt at the stake for their panged consciences.   And surely, with the stakes so high, there was an abundance of hypocrites.   Perhaps the most successful of that lot was Andrew Perne, who managed to die peacefully, abed, on April 26, 1589 after a long life (he was probably born in 1519) of turning his coat as the weather required.  His greatest successes were at Cambridge, where in very troubled times he moved steadily up the hierarchy at Queens’ College, served several terms as Vice-Chancellor of the university, then became Master at Peterhouse in 1584.   Along the way he took livings here and there, including one as dean at Ely’s cathedral, viewing them all, apparently, as sources of income rather than as duties.   Such consistent success in such turbulent times might in theory signal courage (of a very rare sort), but Andrew was made of clay, not tempered steel.   He had declared against Rome by 1549, but when bloody Mary came to the throne in 1553 he was back in the Mother Church.   When Mary’s sister Elizabeth took over the family firm in 1558 he went quiet for a while, but not too quiet to win further preferment (ecclesiastical and academic) as a safely Protestant man of God.    Had he no conscience?  Nor any courage?   These are harsh judgments.   In dangerous times, most of us do what we must.   But Perne felt badly about it.   At least we know that he burned a passage about his turncoat hypocrisies from his own, private copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.   Perhaps Andrew Perne was a martyr unto himself.  It’s a common human trait.   We rarely celebrate it, but there’s a lot of it about.  ©    
 

[Stanley]

Cartographer of Pittsburgh, PA.

When the sins of our fathers visit us, we do not have to play host.   From Fences (1983), by August Wilson.
   
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was where Great Lakes iron ore and eastern coal met to make steel, and where steel made money.   So we find some of the great names of the US’s industrial and financial revolutions: notably Carnegie and Mellon, but important supporting roles played by Frick, Morgan, Gary, and Rockefeller.   But you’ll also find one of the nation’s most diverse populations, for these captains of industry (or ‘robber barons’) needed to enlist armies of workers.  The city’s most spectacular growth drew heavily on the “new” immigration flooding in from southern and eastern Europe, 1870-1920: Italians, Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Russians.   Employers (notably Carnegie and then Gary) deliberately used this diversity to smother unionization.   So I think of Pittsburgh as a fractious stew of languages and cultures, a boiling pot, not a melting one.   And there were migrants as well as immigrants, including black folk coming up from the Jim Crow south, seeking paid work and wanting freer lives.   There was no Harlem (New York), nor any South Side (Chicago).   Pittsburgh’s African-American population grew to, and then hovered around, 20% of the total.   Pittsburgh’s blacks concentrated in few neighborhoods, mostly around the Hill district, not formally but functionally segregated.   Out of this fragility emerged one of the 20th century’s best playwrights, August Wilson.   He was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945.  His parents had themselves crossed color lines to marry, but he took his black mother’s name, Wilson, when his white father deserted the family.   August’s was, in any case, a tough childhood, marred first by poverty and then, when his mother moved her family to Hazelwood (a white district), by racism.   Wilson would write his way out of both, first in school essays, then in poetry.   Wilson’s most productive years as a playwright came well after he moved away from Pittsburgh (to St. Paul and then Seattle), but the city of his birth and youth remained the stage for which he wrote his best plays, now known as the “Pittsburgh Cycle.”   These ten dramas are mostly set in Pittsburgh, and were mostly successes (among them two Pulitzers and two Tonys).   Although the first, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), is set in Chicago, the whole corpus creates an urban world similar to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.   Characters and the plots of their lives move from play to play, sometimes in fragments.   They, and the author who created them, ask audiences ‘only’ to accept their humanity.  In St. Louis (which has its own Hill district, but full of Italians) we’ve seen three of Wilson’s Pittsburgh plays, and we would like to see more.  ©.  

[Stanley]

Mothering Sundays

As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you, and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.   Book of Isaiah, 66:13. 

It is well known that our ‘Mothers’ Day’ is a modern invention, the brainchild of Anna Maria Jarvis (1864-1948), midwifed by President Woodrow Wilson’s Mothers’ Day proclamation of May 9, 1914.   For years Ms. Jarvis had been celebrating the day in memory of her own mother, a volunteer social worker of progressive values who herself had founded ‘Mothers’ Day Work Clubs’ in Grafton, West Virginia.   It’s less well known that Jarvis was soon appalled by the commercialization of Mother’s Day, truckloads of white carnations, mountains of greeting cards, and avalanches of chocolates.   Florists even invented the red carnation, for people to wear if their mothers were still alive.   That may have been the last straw for Jarvis, who in her last years organized a petition to rescind Mothers’ Day.  However, her mind wandering, she was placed in a sanitorium where her bills were paid by florists and card manufacturers, who knew a good thing when they saw it.   Meanwhile, in England, inspired by Anna Jarvis’s early successes, yet another devoted (and unmarried) daughter, Constance Adelaide Smith, had founded “Mothering Sunday.”   Smith, born on April 28, 1878,wanted Mothering Sunday to be a day of religious observance, centered on the rituals of the Church of England.  This was natural for a clergyman’s daughter, but Smith came to it after years’ experience as a caregiver and dispenser of medicines at a Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) lodge in Nottingham.   There she entered lifelong relationship with the head nurse, Ellen Porter, and became used to working behind the scenes.   She used a pen name (her father’s name, C. Penswick Smith!!) to author her pamphlets.  Nor had she any desire to claim it as an invention of her own.   Her first pamphlet, The Revival of Mothering Sunday (1920), presented the idea as a long-standing Christian tradition, celebrating not only earthly mothers (like her own mother, Mary Caroline Smith) but also mothering as a metaphor.   Like her vicar father and all her vicar brothers, she was of a High Church mentality, and so the Mother Church was a focus, as was Mother Earth, and then Christ’s ‘mothering care’ for all faithful persons.   Smith’s writings emphasized ancient precedents for the churches’ modern celebration of mothering, including precedents set by the mother of all churches, the Roman communion, and she included various dissenting churches too.   So the English “Mothering Sunday,” was a low key affair.   In our years there (1969-1997, during which Paulette became a mother) it remained so: no carnations (red or white), cards were hard to find, and I recall no Mothering Sunday chocolates.   Fathers’ Day was almost non-existent.   ©. 

[Tripps]

It is well known that our ‘Mothers’ Day’ is a modern invention,

Indeed - and even more so Fathers' day. Thanks America. . . .

Mothering Sunday however is quite a different matter.

There's a lot to it and it has become a mixrure of the religious and the commercial.

[Stanley]

Born on April 29.

You have to stop listening in categories.  The music is either good, or it’s bad.   Edward Kennedy Ellington.

Today is the birth anniversaries of two famed musicians, Malcolm Sargent (April 29, 1895) and Edward Kennedy Ellington (April 29, 1899).   Of course they were eminent in different genres.  Undeniably they were born an ocean apart.   And they started their musical careers very differently.   Sargent first established his genius as a talented organ apprentice at Peterborough Cathedral, and then, aged only 18, graduated Bachelor of Music from Durham University.  Edward Ellington learned his trade lounging around a DC dive where traveling pianists competed (or syncopated?) with the clicking of cues and balls.   One was English, and white, while the other was American, and black.   But it was music that made both men.   One became a knight, Sir Malcolm, and the other was soon known as ‘Duke’ Ellington, and that despite their humble origins.   Their fathers were both clerks, ‘respectable’ working class.   Sargent’s father kept the books in a coal merchant’s business (and his first wife was a coal merchant’s daughter), while Ellington’s copied blueprints for the US Navy (until Woodrow Wilson resegregated the civil service).    Both men’s parents were musical, in an amateur way, but proficient enough to recognize and ambitious enough to encourage their sons’  raw talent.   And there’s no doubt that both Malcolm Sargent and Duke Ellington learned ambition.   These famous conductors, mellowed enough in their old ages to be remembered fondly by some of their musicians—but not by all.   Others recalled a certain ruthlessness about Sargent and Ellington, who both could dismiss (and be dismissive about) even their most talented players.   A parallel similarity was that Sargent and Ellington were what used to be known as ‘womanizers.’    Sargent was particularly drawn to society women, including Edwina Mountbatten and the Princess Marina whose cousin, Prince Philip, married her niece, Elizabeth.   It is doubtful that either Sargent or Ellington regarded this behavior as sinful; but another similarity between the two is that they were both drawn to compose, and conduct, sacred music.  Perhaps not in expiation.  Close contemporaries, Sir Malcolm Sargent and Duke Ellington certainly knew of each other,  but I could find no evidence that they actuallyknew each other.   Sargent achieved his greatest popular fame as conductor of the BBC ‘Proms’ (1947-1967), but as far as I know never conducted an Ellington composition.   That came later.  After both men were dead, Ellington’s ‘classical jazz,’ including several of his sacred pieces, has been featured at the BBC Proms at least 30 times.  In the Duke’s centenary year, 1999, a whole Prom program was made of Ellington compositions, sacred and secular.   It is not recorded whether Sir Malcolm spun in his grave.   ©.   

[Tripps]

Sargent was particularly drawn to society women, including Edwina Mountbatten

He was by no means unique. . .

Lady Mountbatten's daughter Pamela Hicks wrote a memoir in which she describes her mother as a 'man eater' and her mother's many lovers as a succession of "uncles" throughout her childhood. In her memoir Pamela describes Edwina as a detached, rarely seen mother who preferred travelling the world with her current lover to mothering her children. Her affair with Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India, both during and after their post-war service has been widely documented.

[Stanley]

The Skating Minister.

True, heaven forbids pleasures; but one can generally negotiate a compromise.  Molière. 
  
Nearly fifty years ago, in Edinburgh, I took a break from research in the Hay manuscripts at the Scottish National Archives to visit the National Gallery.   There I saw a Henry Raeburn painting (circa 1785) which made the break worthwhile.   I even wrote home about it.  It’s a charmer called “The Skating Minister”.  There, on a frozen loch, and against a cloudy sky moderated here and there by reflected sunlight, I saw a top-hatted, soberly dressed man gliding across the ice.   His face catches the light and (I think) betrays modest pleasure.   He can be identified by his dress as a minister of the established national church of Scotland.   As an institution, the “kirk” is not known for its pleasures, except by several breakaway denominations (like the ‘Free Church’) who view the national kirk as besotted by modern materialisms.   Here, in ‘The Skating Minister,’ was proof that at least one man of the kirk knew how to enjoy life—soberly and serenely.   Over the years it has been impossible to prove the identity of this Presbyterian pleasure seeker, but circumstances make it certain that he was the Rev’d Robert Walker, born in Ayrshire (Monkton) on April 30, 1755.   Walker’s father, William, was minister at Monkton Kirk, and fairly early in life Robert felt the same calling.    Doubtless he learned more about Calvinism in its purer forms when his father was translated to the Scottish Church in Rotterdam, Holland, for Rotterdam was if not the birthplace then the proving ground of continental Calvinism.   But it was in Rotterdam that Robert learned to skate.   Perhaps it was on Dutch ice where he glided off the strait and narrow path.   Or maybe Robert became one of those establishment figures who saw some virtue in the poetry of Robert Burns, a fellow Ayrshire man born (in 1759) only 20 miles from Monkton.   But we don’t need Burns to nail Walker down as the ‘real’ Skating Minister.   For after he’d returned to Scotland (and been ordained minister at the tender age of 15!!), he it was who founded the Edinburgh Figure Skating Club.   Figure skating!!   A man of the kirk’s cloth!!   And he also became a member in good standing of the Scottish Enlightenment, that ‘common sense’ movement that gave us modern medicine, the agnostic philosopher David Hume, and the sunny welfarism of Adam Smith.   Added to all that, we know that Walker’s social circle (besides figure skaters and philosophers) included the artist Raeburn, and so we can be as certain as common sense needs us to be that “The Skating Minister” was indeed the Reverend Robert Walker.   Walker was also the official chaplain of one of Edinburgh’s elite social clubs, the Royal Company of Archers.   Clearly, he was a man who knew how to take his pleasures.   ©.    

[Stanley]

Wild Bill's Calamity Jane.

Seems a lot of men never saw one such as me.   Attributed to Martha Jane Canary, aka ‘Calamity Jane.’  
 
Among the reasons to devalue campus secret societies are the agonies they sometimes inflict during their ‘initiation’ rituals.   Indeed some ‘pledges’ (as neophytes are called) have died as a result of their efforts to prove worthy of “sisterhood” or “brotherhood.”   But back on the Iowa State College campus, in the 1930s, initiations tended more towards pranks: petty vandalisms, practical jokes, or bizarre quests for this or that unholy grail.  Later, at Bliss family gatherings in Ames, I heard memorable stories about the ‘frat’ pranks of my father and his younger brothers.   My uncle Dick, along with several other frat boys, picked up the snazzy little sports car of an unpopular professor and, turning it on its side, deposited it behind the Grecian columns of a campus building.   But the grail saga of my dad and his brother Bill was a classic, one in which (because of its noble failure) no harm was done.   In order to make themselves worthy of SAE (“Sleep And Eat”) membership, they were to drive to Deadwood, SD, to steal the gravestones of Wild Bill Hickock and Martha Jane Canary.  Back then this was no small feat, a round trip of nearly 1500 miles in their mother’s car (a roadster she’d won in a Depression raffle).   When they got there, in a bewitching hour, their manly courage failed them, and like good campers they took away only pictures.   I never did find out what they actually knew about Martha Jane Canary, a woman who might well have quelled the courage of any number of frat boys.   Ms. Canary, better known as ‘Calamity Jane,’ was born in Princeton (MO, not NJ!), on May 1, 1852.   Down on its luck (her dad was a gambler) the family migrated westwards in 1865, only to fall on even harder times.   Martha Jane, the eldest child, did what she could to keep the family together, and she did a lot.   She tended bars, waited tables, drove ox teams, punched cows, and may have served as an Army scout, working out of Fort Laramie.   She may also have sampled a couple of less salubrious jobs, which in 1876 landed her in Hickock’s company and in the rowdy Gold Rush town of Deadwood.   After Bill was murdered, Calamity never calmed.  She ranched for a bit, starred for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, drank too much, then died in poverty and was buried (according to her wishes) next to Hickock.   Her funeral, attended by thousands, made headlines in 1903.  Why she and Bill became the objects of a fraternity prank in 1936 is anyone’s guess, but it may have had some connection with the popular film The Plainsman, starring a somewhat sanitized Jean Arthur as Wild Bill’s favorite “calamity.”   That came out in 1936, and one can imagine frat boys in rapt attendance when it first showed in Ames, Iowa.  ©   

[Stanley]

A born outsider and an adult agitator.

Every time we choose the difficult right rather than the easy wrong we gain our lives.   From Joseph Johnson’s The Soul of the Black Preacher (1971). 
  
In these days of campus protest against the Gaza bloodbath, we hear much of “outside agitators.”  These mysterious figures have been a constant presence in US history, disturbers of the peace, pricklers of the collective conscience, and it’s no surprise, today, to find them in colleges, where students are by definition outsiders.   Most of them came into college to better themselves, and it’s easy to generalize that into a desire to make the world a better place.   I was twice identified as an outside agitator on campus, first at the University of Wisconsin where I, raised to be an Iowa Presbyterian, was accused of being a New York Jew come to pollute local purities (and to protest against the Vietnam war).   I took some pride in that, having roomed with Jewish friends throughout my undergraduate years, and so look enviously at today’s outside agitators (at Columbia, UCLA, and other institutions) who will, I hope, take similar satisfaction from the discovery that they are, indeed, ID’d as ‘outsiders.’   Joseph Andrew Johnson, Jr., was exactly that, an outsider, when on May 2, 1953 he entered the lily white ranks of divinity students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.   Johnson was outsided in several ways; he'd been born quite black and quite poor, in Shreveport, LA, in 1914.   By the time he entered Vanderbilt’s graduate program in divinity he was still black, still poor, but had proved himself bright enough to take on the mysteries of God as they were being elucidated by the Methodist Episcopal Church USA.  He was also about ten years older than most students in the program, not because he’d felt the clerical calling later, but because getting to Nashville had been for him a longer, harder slog: from the segregated schools of Shreveport to a black college in Texas and then to a very small seminary in Colorado.   But at 40 (1954) he became the very first African American to win a Vanderbilt degree, a Masters in Divinity.   In 1958 he added a Vanderbilt PhD (theology).   Having trained up for so long as an outsider, Johnson remained one for the rest of his life.   His day jobs varied.  He held professorships in theology and divinity in Atlanta and, latterly, at Fisk (ironically, a black university located only a mile away from Vanderbilt).   He also served as a Methodist bishop, albeit in a breakaway Methodist denomination.   Joseph Andrew Johnson, Jr., was a born outside agitator who, as a preacher and a theologian, taught that Christianity is (or should be) a ‘liberationist’ creed, not only freeing people from their own sin but also giving them special insights as to the sins of the world, and an urge to make all people whole.    It’s a natural calling for an outside agitator.  ©.   
 

[Stanley]

The good old days, when kings could do no wrong.

A vast empire where the sun never sets, and whose limits nature has not yet determined.    Sir George Macartney, 1773.   
 
George Macartney is sometimes credited with this imperial claptrap, but it’s as old as empire itself.  The idea, often in the same metaphor, has described universal sovereignties since at least the Akkadian empire of the third millennium BCE, then by the Persians (Xerxes I), the Egyptians (several pharaohs ruled “over everything the sun encircles”), the Romans, and by Pope Alexander VI, when in 1494 he divided the world between Spain and Portugal.  In 1773, Macartney hoped that the Treaty of Paris (1763) had cleared the way for a British edition.   Three years later, on July 4, 1776, unruly upstarts in Philadelphia excepted themselves from the trope, but Macartney went on to exemplify the vices American colonists espied in the rising empire of George III.    George Macartney was born into the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland (in County Antrim) on May 3, 1737.   By birth he was a landowner, though not much more.   But by 1773 he’d mastered the imperial fiddle.   He used a good education, good manners, and a disposition to please to win an important embassy (1764) to St. Petersburg, an advantageous marriage (1768), and a post as Chief Secretary to the Viceroy of Ireland (1769).   Macartney went on to a career that exemplified just what the Americans feared about monarchy.   Keeping his cards always close to his heart, he played them well to become, successively, a royal governor in the Caribbean, a Governor of Madras (for the East India Company), and then again the king’s man at Capetown in South Africa.   Punctuating these  appointments, Macartney embarked on important diplomatic missions, notably one to China (1792-93) and then another (1795) to the court-in-exile of the orphaned dauphin Louis XVIII.   One interesting thing about all these appointments is that none were successful.  Even more interestingly, they were all extremely profitable for George Macartney, pulling down large expense allowances (the huge sum of £6,000 for his first voyage to India) and even larger salaries (£10,000 annually at Capetown).    Along the way he graduated first into an Irish peerage and then an English earldom.   When in 1799 he retired from imperial duties, he had collected enough cash to buy a mansion in Mayfair and a country estate in Surrey; yet he still had enough, in 1806, to make his widow an extremely rich woman and to leave his real property to a niece.   Macartney was not a bad chap.   He left us some fine memoirs.  His scholarship made him an important patron of the (new) British Museum.   He showed admiration for his subject indigenes in Madras and in Africa.   But as the servant of a king who could do no wrong, he is a warning to all who might yearn for an imperial rule over which the sun never sets.   ©.    

[Stanley]

Education and Democracy.

Public education is the cornerstone of our community and our democracy.   Horace Mann.
   
In early 1778, citizens living in an outlying part of Wrentham, MA, were given permission to incorporate themselves as a new town.   “Exeter” was to be the town’s name, but the freemen demurred.   Instead, they chose “Franklin.”   Their aim was to honor Benjamin Franklin, who was at that moment in France preparing to introduce himself, at Versailles, as the emissary of the new American Republic.   Rumor was that the town hoped for a gift from Franklin, perhaps a steeple and bell for their meeting house.  Ben did come through, but there was no church bell.   Instead, Ben gave the town of Franklin 116 books, and to prove that they were in tune with the times the town made those volumes available for free loan to any town inhabitant.    Thus was born the new nation’s first truly public library.   Or so the town still claims.    One cannot doubt that old Ben was pleased.   He was himself a poor boy made good, a devotee of the American creed that self-improvement was a civic duty.   One Franklin resident who took up that challenge was Horace Mann, born in Franklin, MA, on May 4, 1790.   Mann was of good stock.   His great grandfather had been the church minister in neighboring Wrentham.   But he was born poor, and the town’s free public library offered him a route to self-improvement.   I don’t know which of Ben Franklin’s 116 books young Horace read.   Perhaps all of them: and they did include the complete works of John Locke, so perhaps Horace Mann cut his teeth on Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.   One likes to think so, for Mann devoted his whole life to the notion that understanding, education, was the vital element in the lives of individuals and nations.  Thus Mann qualified himself for entry to Brown, at the relatively advanced age of 20, then graduated valedictorian of his class.   His Valedictory was entitled “The Progressive Character of the Human Race,” and he went out into the world determined to prove the point.   Mann is best known for his educational reforms, starting with Massachusetts’ public school system, enacted by the state legislature and overseen by Horace Mann himself.  Mann’s schools would be free to pupils and their families and staffed by faculty educated—largely at public expense—in “normal” colleges.   Democracy, he felt, required a literate citizenry.    So, too, did prosperity and progress.    Mann was a pioneer, too, in the anti-slavery movement, and with his wife Mary (one of three formidable Peabody sisters) became a crusader for the rights of women.   However many (or few) children Ben Franklin fathered, metaphorically Horace Mann was one of them, and by no means the least.   ©    

[Stanley]

What is "race"?

Against the Tide.   The title of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.’s autobiography (1938).  

In my youth, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was the black politician that many white Americans loved to hate.   Secure in his Harlem constituency, he used his advancing seniority to publicize his causes (notably black civil rights) and, worse, to do so flamboyantly.  Singled out for corruption, he was censured and then voted out of the House, only to win both reelection and a landmark Supreme Court case (Powell v. McCormack) against the Speaker and the 307 representatives that had voted to remove Powell from the House.   But Powell wasn’t very black at all.   Indeed as a college freshman he’d “passed” as white.   His northern college, Colgate, had retained various racial restrictions; and why should a blue-eyed, blonde 18 year old suffer from them?   But as he matured, Powell embraced a ‘black’ racial identity, and for several reasons.   One was that it worked for him (and he did make money in politics).   Another was that he followed in his father’s footsteps.   Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., was born in the Virginia Piedmont on May 6, 1865.   The Piedmont was a borderland in several ways, but Powell, Sr., was born into a racial borderland.   His mother, Sally Dunning, was legally identified as a free black, although in point of fact her colors were blurred, several times over.  Virginia’s confused “racial” history had made Sally “red,” “black,” and “white”, but Virginia’s devotion to racial slavery made her a black woman free by her legal papers.   We don’t know who Powell Sr.’s father was, but most likely a “white” planter of the neighborhood.  Sally named Adam that way, and to make her child’s life a bit better moved her family to West Virginia, which had freed itself from slavery and from the Confederacy.   There they struggled, taking work where they could find it, at the bottom of the state’s infant coal mining industry.   From such beginnings, Adam Clayton Powell made himself into a human being of distinction.    He worked through Yale’s divinity program, then through ministries in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and in 1908, aged 43, began his tenure at one of New York’s oldest black churches.  His Abyssinian Baptist became the largest Protestant church in the USA, and one of the wealthiest.   But not per capita.   The poor were God’s people.  God made them so by making grace cheap and distributing it democratically.   Powell’s message inspired many, including a young German divinity student, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would carry it to his own martyrdom in Hitler’s Germany.    And Powell, Sr., seems also to have inspired his son to become black, to succeed him as pastor, and to confound our tangled racial past.  Today, “Ancestry®” is everyone’s business.   It used to be a monopoly.  ©  

[Stanley]

Born and died in the south, but not of 'The South.'

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Randall Jarrell. 
  
Randall Jarrell, poet and critic, was born in Nashville on May 6, 1914, and died while walking along a road near Chapel Hill on October 14, 1965.   One could say, then, that he never left ‘The South,’ that mystical geography where people can’t let go of anything.   Indeed some of Jarrell’s poems seem pretty gothic, and (also a little like southern history?) too many of them never really end.   They leave the reader mid-phrase, wondering what Jarrell might have wanted to say had he taken the time.   The picture of Jarrell as an unhappy, unfulfilled, southern intellectual is reinforced by his odd death, which several of his friends were sure was a suicide.   But the coroner thought otherwise.   His injuries were not likely the result of one stepping into the path of a speeding car.   And we might think otherwise too.   It’s true that Randall Jarrell stayed home for his schooling (at a Nashville high school of gothic elevations) and then for college, at Vanderbilt.   While at Vanderbilt he fell under the influence of the Southern Agrarians, high aesthetes like John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate who longed for the good old days even while they knew that those days had been neither good nor old.    But while Jarrell did emulate their way with words he did leave The South, along with another ex-patriot, Robert Penn Warren.   Literally left, first to Kenyon College, in Ohio.  And then figuratively, too.    Jarrell’s own poetry was forever changed by his experience of World War II.   He enlisted in the Army Air Corps, but was considered too old for combat missions and so spent much time as a flight instructor and then, in the south (of England!!) as a radio tower operator.   The ironies of being too old to die while sending young men out to perish in flak storms over Hamburg come through in the best of his war poetry, for instance in the savagely short “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” a five-liner that begins “From my mother’s sleep . . .” and ends “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”   That’s one Jarrell poem that ends with a bang, and in it one can’t find much nostalgia, either.   Unlike his friend Warren, Jarrell stuck to poetry, but he did write one novel, a satire (the man could laugh) about his short tenure teaching literature at a women’s liberal arts college.   He wrote for children, too, and  would become ‘consultant in poetry’ at the Library of Congress.   He’s remembered for his criticism (essays for Nation and The New Republic) where he promoted  Robert Lowell’s verse and repaired the reputations of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams.   These are my three favorite American poets, un-southern and ur-modern; Randall Jarrell might become a fourth.   ©.    

[Stanley]

A portrait of an artist.

B-but, Mr Jimson, I w-want to be an artist.' 'Of course you do,' I said, 'everybody does once. But they get over it, thank God, like the measles and the chickenpox.    Conversation from The Horse’s Mouth, by Joyce Cary. 
  
The Horse’s Mouth (1944) is still in print.  Its survival makes me think there is justice in the publishing world.   It’s one of my favorite novels.  I still have my Penguin’s “Classics” copy, but my wife Paulette is one of the few who admits to having read it.   It’s a tragic yet comic tale of a down-and-out about whom there’s almost nothing to admire.   Gulley Jimson is in and out of prison.   He steals.   He squats in hovels.  He drinks way too much, cadging money (or, failing that, stealing bottles) from a shrinking group of long-suffering friends.   He’s kept going (or kept laughing) by two things.   First, his early paintings have become fashionable and now sell well.   Jimson suspects that they are not worth the money, but they feed his conviction that he is a genius artist who has within him one last masterpiece.  The novel is about that inner belief and how it drives Jimson to drink and to cadge paints, brushes, and find a surface on which to spread them (a wall in a derelict building).   When he suffers a mortal coronary, Jimson reacts in character.   He laughs.  His death is fate’s joke, and it’s a good one.   One might almost say that Joyce Cary’s art, creating Gulley Jimson, called forth John Deakin’s life as if in imitation.   John Deakin, born to working class parents in Cheshire on May 8. 1912, is best known today for his photos: cityscapes and portraits.   But he began his artistic life as a painter, enjoying some success in the 1930s, but chance (and maybe a feeling that his paintings weren’t all that good) led him into photography.   Along the way, he gathered quite a few friends, many who stuck with him to the bitter end despite his bad habits, his coruscating wit, and what one called his “tyrannical eye.”  It was an accurate remark.   Deakin’s portraits, often more than life size, revealed his subjects warts and all.   His subjects included some of the greatest figures of 20th-century art, Pablo Picasso included, but mainly from the British art world.   Deakin’s life style matched Gulley Jimson’s, and when in his cups (often) he could be savage.   Deakin kept body and soul in contact as a fashion photographer for Vogue, but not for long, and his best work was done in seedy studios, where he took pictures for artists like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon—and photographed them, too.  John Deakin died of his vices in 1972, lamented by some.  His work has been rediscovered (much of it unearthed from litter piles in disorderly places), featured in leading expositions, and now sells like hot cakes.  Perhaps, like Gulley Jimson, John Deakin would have found that a good joke, and laughed—defiantly, one imagines.  ©  

[Stanley]

Play the game, change the rules.

Buy, sell, dream and scheme your way to riches.   Current marketing slogan for the Monopoly® board game. 
 
In my youth I played Monopoly® more than any other board game, then (cleverly) graduated to Clue®.   When education took hold of my imagination, I switched to Scrabble®.   What didn’t register was that at each stage what I was enriching Parker Bros., the Massachusetts company that held patents for all three games, and many others.   Since then, Parker Bros. has fallen victim to monopoly capitalism, bought out first by General Mills (think Cheerios®) and, latterly, by Hasbro (think Potato Head®).   It’s a kind of a moral tale, really, suggesting that there are better ways to get rich than to play board games.    Parker Bros. played the corporate monopoly game very well, not least stoutly defending its patent rights to the Monopoly® game, and telling and retelling the story about how Charles Darrow invented it (to pass the time pleasantly with his wife and friends), then how in the depths of the Great Depression Parker bought the patent, fiddled a bit with design and marketing, and then waxed rich on the proceeds.   It’s all very inspiring and makes me want to play again, roll those dice, establish monopolies (the red and green properties were my favorites), rack the rents, and drive my competitors into bankruptcy.   Trouble is, it’s not true.   The game was first invented by Lizzie Magie, born in Illinois on May 9, 1866: a girl who grew up in Radical Republican circles, became a radical feminist, then graduated into Henry George’s peculiar land-rent socialism (“Georgism”).   Along the way she invented things, wrote poetry, reported the news, whatever might turn her a dime or two.   Very well aware that women could too easily become slaves, she didn’t marry until 1910, by which time she’d already invented, and in 1904 patented, “The Landlord’s Game.”   It went through several iterations, including being used at Penn by economics professor Scott Nearing to teach his students what was wrong with monopoly capitalism, and you can follow its genealogy right through to Parker Bros. buying it from Mr. Darrow in 1934.   But Lizzie Magie’s game was different.   You could play it straight, buy up the best properties, drive your competitors off the board.   The other route, and according to Lizzie the better one, was to conspire together with the other players, work together to spread wealth around the board, build up the public treasury.    Statistically, it is beyond doubt that the best way to become rich in America is to be born rich.   Dreaming and scheming work occasionally to make this or that person (say a Gates or a Musk) richer than Croesus, but Lizzie Magie thought it best to scheme together to advance the common wealth.  Now that might be a really fun game.   ©     

[Stanley]

A life in music, lived well.

He has risen into estimation … by a combination of qualities not often to be found in the same individual.   >From a contemporary tribute to Sir George Thomas Smart, ca. 1867.  

Back in the days when Ludwig van Beethoven was modern, and considered by some to be too noisy and by others to be too radical, he nevertheless acquired a coterie of English admirers, notably those who would, in 1813, create the Philharmonic Society.   The Society would grow respectable with age, forming the Philharmonic Orchestra and earning the gratitude of millions by commissioning (then performing) Beethoven’s immortal Ninth.   Among them was George Smart, already an accomplished musician, one who had as a youthful chorister cut his teeth on Haydn and by 1813 was closely associated with London’s then annual Handel commemorations.   George Thomas Smart was born in London on May 10, 1776, just when American colonists were getting their Revolution together, so perhaps he was astrologically inclined towards the new in music.   More likely Smart was aware that Papa Haydn had seen young Beethoven’s genius and predicted great things for him.   In any case, Smart used his connections with the Philharmonic to begin a correspondence with Beethoven, at first about bringing him (or, failing that, some of his works) to London.   The 1814 premieres of Beethoven’s stirring “Battle Symphony” and his Christ on the Mount of Olives were the immediate results, but in retrospect they are better seen as episodes in the career of one of London’s most successful musicians.   George Smart played several instruments (pianoforte, organ, viola, cello).   He conducted (usually from a keyboard).   He sang, first as a boy chorister in the Chapel Royale and later, in opera, as a bass.   He was a successful teacher of music (the ‘Swedish Nightingale’, Jenny Lind, was tutored by him).   And Smart was an impresario, arranging concerts, advertising them, performing in them, and conducting of course.  As a patron, he spotted rare talents and then encouraged their development, not only Lind but also Felix Mendelsohn.    And his talents were rewarded.   He conducted, composed, and/or performed the music at royal funerals (William IV and George IV), and at coronations and weddings (both for the young Victoria).  Along the way he collected two knighthoods, the first in Ireland and the second in England.  But what is most notable is that Sir George Smart seems to have been a thoroughly pleasant person, beloved by contemporaries for much more than his musical good sense.    By Beethoven too.  Smart visited the ailing composer in 1825, a visit which led Ludwig to one of his last compositions, dedicated to “my friend Smart”: the very short canon was titled Ars longa, vita brevis.   But Smart’s life wasn’t short.  He died, much mourned, in 1867, his 91st year.   ©  

[Stanley]

Elkin the writer, not Elkins the historian.

I do not do schtick. What I do are organized routines and connected schtick— schtick upon schtick upon schtick until we have a piece of carpentry.   Stanley Elkin.  

Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) was regarded as a promising poet and Catholic social critic when he was killed at the Battle of the Marne only months before the end of the war to end all wars.   But today he’s remembered mainly for “Trees,” that odd collection of couplets that ends 
                           Poems are made by fools like me,
                               But only God can make a tree.
There was something about “Trees” that touched the hearts of Iowa educators, for it kept appearing in my school anthologies, and I may have had to memorize it in junior high English.   Even I, even then, thought it impossibly naïve and poetically pathetic, and it has indeed become the butt of literary jokes, often presented as parodies.    One writer who, as far as I know, resisted that temptation was Stanley Elkin.   This is surprising for Elkin, and not only because he loved satire and mocked naivete.   He also grew up in Kilmer country, summers especially, when his and other Jewish families liked to escape from Brooklyn’s heat and bustle to a quiet world, a shadier one too, utterly overwhelmed by trees.    Stanley Lawrence Elkin, the writer, was born in Brooklyn on May 11, 1930.   I’m not sure how many summers he spent ‘neath Joyce Kilmer’s trees, but the family moved to Chicago to follow his dad’s trade in selling jewelry.   Elkin began to divorce himself from that future by writing stories in school, then at the University of Illinois, in another town full of trees.   Here Elkin the scholar was drawn more to the gloomy world of Yoknapatawpha County, and wrote his PhD (English) on Faulknerian symbolism.   Hired to teach English at Washington University in St. Louis, Elkin turned decisively to creative literature, publishing novels and stories marked more by satire than sentiment.   It would be wrong to call his work vicious.    Indeed, Elkin’s appreciation of the literary potential of a good joke deepened when, in 1972, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.   Much of his work thereafter was concerned with the dilemmas presented to us by our mortality, tragic problems certainly but not without comic potential.   I must admit that I was totally unfamiliar with Stanley Elkin the novelist until we moved to St. Louis, in 1997, soon after Elkin’s death.    There I made the embarrassing error of confusing Stanley Elkin the writer with Stanley Elkins the historian, and, worse, made it in discussion with William Gass who (besides being our new neighbor) was also a novelist, a leading literary critic, and Stanley Elkin’s colleague and friend.   Gass enjoyed the joke, and I like to think that Elkin would have, too.   ©.