Can you imagine putting years of time, effort and money into a life-changing invention that you think will:
a) Make you tons of money
b) Make you famous
c) Change the world
d) All of the above
And instead, your amazing invention ends up being your kiss of death? It happens… maybe infrequently, but it does happen. Below, check out five examples of inventors who might have prolonged their lives if they had never dreamed up their creations.
Bad Blood
Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov was a Russian Renaissance Man – his interests included physics, philosophy, economics, science fiction, the universal systems theory and, his downfall – the possibilty of human rejuvenation through blood transfusion. Bogdanov was interested in the theory that a blood transfusion could possibly hold the secret to eternal youth, or at least slow the aging process. He actually performed a blood transfusion on Vladimir Lenin’s sister, Maria Ulianova. He tried 11 of these procedures on himself, with one of his friends remarking that Bogdanov appeared to be 10 years younger.
In 1928, he completed a blood transfusion on himself that ended up resulting in his death. The transfer was from a student who had malaria and tuberculosis. Some suspect that the death was, in fact, a suicide – Bogdanov wrote a very “nervous” political letter shortly before his death.
The Printing Press – Literally
William Bullock is the man responsible for the 1863 invention of the web rotary printing press. It completely changed the printing industry because of how quickly it could produce.
This was one of his many inventions – others included a roof shingle cutter, a cotton and hay press, a seed planter, a lathe cutting machine and a grain drill (which won him a prize from the Franklin Institute).
He perfected his web rotary press in 1860. Although a rotary press was already in operation, Bullock’s allowed continuous large rolls of paper to be used, eliminated the need to hand-feed paper through. The press could print up to 30,000 sheets an hour.
In 1867, though, the machine turned against Bullock. He was adjusting a new press that had been installed for the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper and tried to kick a driving belt onto a pulley. His leg got caught into the machine and was completely crushed. He died a little more than a week later during an operation to amputate his leg.
The First Aviation Accident (maybe)
Before the Wright Brothers, there was Otto Lilienthal. Known as the “Glider King”, he was the first person to make successful gliding flights more than once. Publications ran pictures of his successes, which helped to make the idea of inventing a “flying machine” more plausible to the public.
After many years of successes, failure finally caught up with him. On August 9, 1896, he fell from a height of 56 feet and broke his spine. He died the next day, but said “Kleine Opfer müssen gebracht werden!” (”Small sacrifices must be made!”).
The Wright Brothers credited him with as their inspiration for pursuing flight. “Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century,” Wilbur Wright said, “Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important.”
Toxic substances couldn’t kill him…
Thomas Midgley, Jr. held more 100 patents, had a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell and worked for a subsidiary of General Motors. He discovered that adding tetra-ethyl lead to gasoline prevented internal combustion engines from “knocking”. However, this also released huge amounts of lead into the atmosphere, causing health problems and massive pollution. After people at the GM plants started hallucinating and dying of lead poisoning, though, Midgley was assigned to develop a non-toxic refrigerant for household appliance. So, he discovered dichlorodifluoromethane (please don’t ask me to pronounce that), AKA Freon. Turns out that Freon is a chlorinated fluorocarbon, which is insanely bad for the ozone layer. This guy just couldn’t win!
Midgely wouldn’t live much longer to discover other toxic substances, though – in 1940, he developed polio. The disease left him extremely disabled, but, being the inventor that he was, he developed a system of pulleys and ropes to lift him out of bed. It was this invention – and not the hazardous exposure to lead and CFCs – that killed him. In 1944, he got tangled up in the ropes of his contraption and strangled to death.
The Brave Little Tailor
Franz Reichelt was a tailor who was convinced that the next big thing was a coat that doubled as a parachute. So he got busy sewing and developed just that. To test the coat/parachute (coatachute? Paracoat?), Reichelt climbed up to the first deck of the Eiffel Tower. He told authorities that he was going to use a dummy to test the invention, but at the last minute he strapped himself in and jumped to his death in front of a large crowd of spectators. If you YouTube his name, you’ll find video of the entire event. Since this is a family blog, I wasn’t sure that I should link to a man plummeting 60 meters to the cement below.
…And One Man Who Didn’t Die From his Invention
Apparently there’s a long-standing story that Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin died at the “hand” of his namesake invention, the Bowie Knife. I’m just kidding. He helped conceive of the guillotine, obviously. He suggested the beheading machine as a way to humanely execute criminals. Guillotine was actually against the death penalty and hoped that his invention would be a step toward more humanity, which would eventually abolish the death penalty altogether. At the time, people who couldn’t afford to pay for a quick death were decapitated, but it often took quite a few blows and the axe or sword was usually rather dull. Although Guillotin was arrested and imprisoned in the late 1700s, he was not executed. He was freed and died of natural causes in 1814.
Monday, April 28, 2008
The Man Who Invented Mars
Long before the space race and space shuttle, a brilliant, wealthy, charming Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell popularized the idea that we are not alone in the universe. As the next US spacecraft prepares to descend upon the Red Planet, it's an idea worth revisiting.
By Nancy Zaroulis
April 27, 2008
AT 7:36 P.M. ON May 25, if all goes well, a stranger from Earth will land near the north pole of Mars. It is called Phoenix. To the unscientific eye, it looks like a giant winged bug. It has three legs and a 5-foot-wide central science deck. With its two solar panels deployed, it measures about 18 feet long. It is 7 feet high. It weighs 772 pounds. Its landing parachute is 39 feet wide. When it touches down on the Martian landscape, it will have traveled 423 million miles - the equivalent of almost 18,000 trips around Earth.
Percival Lowell peers at Mars through his Clark telescope. Percival Lowell peers at Mars through his Clark telescope. (Photo from the Lowell Observatory Archives)
more stories like this
Approximately 17 minutes after it lands, its first signals will be received by its controllers. Then it will begin the task for which it was designed - a task that has never been performed before. It will extend its robotic arm and scoop up dirt and ice from beneath the Martian surface for analysis. It will be looking for evidence of life.
"Finding organic compounds on Mars will increase the probability that life may have or does exist there," says Tufts University professor Samuel Kounaves, the lead scientist for the wet chemistry investigation on NASA's Phoenix mission.
Somewhere, a 19th century Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell will be smiling.
Long before NASA was established in 1958, before JFK's impassioned speech about the space race, and before any of the Apollo missions or space shuttle successes and disasters, Percival Lowell devoted much of his career and considerable fortune to trying to prove that Mars hosted intelligent life. Viewed through his telescopes, the ancient, baleful Red Planet was about the size of a dime. Lowell believed he was seeing a network of canals on its surface. Therefore, he declared, Mars holds intelligent life. It is not necessarily like human life, he emphasized, but it is intelligent enough to build canals.
It is Lowell's vision of Mars that has enthralled and inspired earthlings ever since.
In 1895, Lowell published a book about what he believed he saw. He wrote articles about it for Popular Astronomy and The Atlantic Monthly. He lectured widely about it. He became famous and immensely popular. He was "of medium height, slim and handsome, with an athletic build and an intense expression," his biographer, David Strauss, professor emeritus of history at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, writes in an e-mail. "His erect bearing and fastidious dress contributed to a commanding presence."
Lowell enchanted the public with his charisma and the power and conviction of his beliefs. "He was a very effective popularizer of his ideas," says Robert Millis, director of the Lowell Observatory. "He was the Carl Sagan of his day."
The scientific community was less enthusiastic than the general public about the notion of intelligent life on Mars.
No matter. Wealthy, brilliant, charming when he wanted to be, Percival Lowell was confident in his heritage and convinced of his superiority to the "ruck and rubble" from Southern and Eastern Europe flooding onto America's shores. He was also seriously inner-directed. And with what he was certain was his discovery of the canals, he had found his life's work: to promulgate his sensational belief that Mars was the home of Martians.
LOWELL WAS BORN AT 131 TREMONT STREET in Boston on March 13, 1855, into a family at the pinnacle of what passed for American aristocracy. The first Percival Lowle, as it was then spelled, arrived in America in 1639 from Bristol, England ("the Venice of the West"), and settled in Newbury, north of Boston. His descendants flourished in the law, business, and the arts.
Percival Lowell's upbringing was entirely conventional for a boy of his time and class: early instruction at a "dame school," a couple of years' education in France, attendance at Mr. George W. C. Noble's school to prepare for Harvard. At college, he excelled in both history and mathematics. He won a Bowdoin Prize for his essay on England as a European power, and he gave a commencement address on "The Nebular Hypothesis." Some people thought him the most brilliant young man in Boston.
After graduation and the obligatory tour of Europe, he settled into the family business, much of which involved the textile mills in the city of Lowell. There were - and are - many canals in that city. Before the first brick of the first cotton factory was laid there in the 1820s, Irish canal-cutters - intelligent life - dug the canal beds and built the granite walls to channel the Merrimack River's water to power the mills.
Lowell chafed at life in cold, caste-ridden Boston. He was the most eligible bachelor in the city, but he was not happy. He served as best man at the wedding of Edith Jones and Teddy Wharton, but he himself did not want to be married. He became engaged to a Boston girl, but broke off the engagement - a more serious matter then than it is now.
A man of his time and class, Lowell was a patron of London tailors, a sometime presence on the American expatriate scene in Europe, a connoisseur of wine and spirits deeply opposed to the idea of Prohibition (which fortunately for him did not come in his lifetime). He was an avid reader of Greek and Latin classics in the original and of Chaucer in Middle English. He liked detective stories, too. An enthusiastic polo player, he was one of the founders of the Dedham Polo Club. Within his own household, he was something of a tyrant and was once witnessed kicking his butler down the front steps of his Beacon Hill home and throwing the unfortunate servant's trunk after him.
At a lecture in 1882, Lowell heard about this exotic, faraway land called Japan - at the time, a place as alien, as mysterious, as Mars is to us today, possibly more so. Having made a comfortable fortune in his own right, he decided to go there. For a few years, Japan was all he desired in the way of adventure and separation from Boston. He wrote three well-received books about Japan, and he published a book of photographs about Korea - the first ever seen by the American public of that land. For a time, he served as minister for the first Korean delegation to Washington.
The lure of the Far East faded, however, when he encountered the writings of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the French astronomer Camille Flammarion. There were, Schiaparelli said, "canali" on the planet Mars; Flammarion enlarged upon that idea. In Italian, canali means "channels"; a secondary meaning is "canals," and that was the meaning - the misinterpretation - that was given to Schiaparelli's assertion.
WHEN LOWELL WAS A BOY, he had been given a small telescope, and with it he gazed in fascination at the heavens from the roof of the family home at "Sevenels" in Brookline. Now, as an adult, he was about to embark on a new career: astronomy. It would bring him more fame - and more scorn - than he could have imagined.
Mars was to be in opposition to Earth in 1894 - closer than usual as it traveled its elliptical orbit, and thus in prime position for viewing. Lowell borrowed two telescopes and ordered another, with a 24-inch lens, from the best manufacturer in the country, Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport. He delegated a man to find a place with the clearest atmosphere for "good seeing." Flagstaff, in the Arizona Territory, was delighted to receive him; the townspeople understood that the Lowell Observatory would bring them worldwide fame. Lowell built his observatory there on "Mars Hill"; eventually he built a 25-room "Baronial Mansion" there, too.
In the clear desert and mountain air, far from the constraints of Boston and free to gaze at the stars with his cherished "Clark," Lowell was happy at Mars Hill. He spent much of the rest of his life there. From his garden and the surrounding desert and mountains, he sent exotic plants to professor Charles Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum. He hosted his many friends and, often, strangers; improbably, he dressed up as Santa Claus to help the local children celebrate Christmas.
The appearance of Lowell's book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. Let the stuffy academic scientists and astronomers carp and criticize, let them proclaim that there could not possibly be life on Mars because the Martian atmosphere was too thin, its gravity too weak. Lowell knew what he knew. He envisioned Mars society as a kind of utopia, with a place for every man and every man in his place. On Mars, there was no nonsense about workers' rights or labor unions or Progressivism or Socialism or any of the other discontents in the America of his time.
In 1897, Lowell had a nervous breakdown. At first his family tried to nurse him at home with the most up-to-date treatment: solitary confinement, no visitors, no reading material, no distraction or intellectual activity of any kind. Such a cure, Lowell said, was worse than the illness itself. After a month, he abandoned it. He went to Bermuda and then to the south of France to recuperate.
In 1901, Lowell returned to Flagstaff. Night after night, when the seeing was good, he would climb the ladder in his observatory to peer through the lens of his Clark telescope at the object of his obsession. He published his second book about the Red Planet, Mars and Its Canals, in 1906.
Because Lowell wanted a base in Boston separate from his family, he bought a house at 11 West Cedar Street on Beacon Hill. The seller was a neighbor, an interior decorator, a woman not of his exalted class. In 1908, he married her. While in London on their honeymoon, they ascended 5,500 feet over Hyde Park in a balloon because Lowell wanted to photograph the paths to see how they (or the canals on Mars) would look from the air. In that year, he published his third and final book on the planet, Mars as the Abode of Life.
Back at his observatory on Mars Hill, Lowell renewed his attention to another matter: the possibility of a ninth planet beyond Neptune, which he called "Planet X." The issue of intelligent life on Mars receded, but not much. By then, George du Maurier had published The Martian and H.G. Wells had produced a sensational fiction piece about Martians invading Earth, The War of the Worlds. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a pulp writer who later found immortality with his Tarzan stories, published the first of his Mars fantasies, A Princess of Mars, in 1912. It was an immediate hit. Burroughs wrote several sequels. Along with works by other writers, it was the beginning of the cottage industry that came to be called science fiction.
Despite having another breakdown in 1912, Lowell concentrated increasingly on Planet X. He never found it. He died at Mars Hill of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 12, 1916. A member of the Mars Hill community remembered that shortly before his fatal stroke, he had exploded in anger at a servant. He is buried there in a mausoleum shaped like an observatory with a blue glass dome.
Fourteen years later, in 1930, Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of a ninth planet: Lowell's Planet X. Pluto, as it was named, has since been downgraded to dwarf planet status because it is so small, so lacking in what might be called gravitas.
NINTH PLANET OR NO, Percival Lowell's greatest achievement was to popularize the idea of life on Mars. Astronomers had speculated about that possibility for centuries, but it was Lowell who implanted in the minds of earthlings, once and for all, the idea that we are not alone in the universe - an idea once as unthinkable, as heretical, as the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. Accordingly, in the decades after Lowell's death, the science-fiction genre flourished. Novels, pulp magazines, and the new media of radio, film, and TV kept Lowell's basic concept of Martian life alive, even if that fictional life was not quite the kind he would have approved of.
The public adored these speculative fictions - and sometimes believed them. On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre company appeared in a radio production of The War of the Worlds, updated to suburban New Jersey. At the beginning of the program, an announcer stated that it was a fictional presentation, but many people didn't hear that disclaimer. What they heard was a vivid, spine-chilling account of the invasion of New Jersey by Martians - not Percival Lowell's wise and rather hidebound creatures, but quite nasty super-intelligent beings intent on destroying earthlings. Panic ensued; Welles was thrilled at his success. The lesson was that two decades after Lowell's death, people were prepared to acknowledge that life existed beyond earth - and that it could come here with hostile intent.
During the first wave of Lowell's fame at the end of the 19th century, Robert Goddard of Worcester dreamed of a voyage to Mars. His subsequent development of the liquid-fuel rocket was known to German scientists who made the V-1 and V-2 rockets during World War II. After the war, many of those scientists came to the United States, while some went to the Soviet Union, and the space race was on.
The leading US space scientist was the former head of the German rocket manufactory (and slave camp) at Peenemunde, Wernher von Braun. Like many of his peers, von Braun was enchanted by the idea of man going to Mars. He was also, like Percival Lowell, a popularizer. He published articles and a book about a Martian expedition; he also wrote a novel about Mars.
The space program needed government financing, and the hundreds of science-fiction writers and filmmakers flourishing by the mid-20th century fostered the public's support for the program. People were eager to know about Mars, in particular. In 1976, Viking 1 and Viking 2 transmitted spectacular pictures of a ruddy landscape studded with giant volcanoes and riddled with deep canyons separated by stretches of vast desert. No sign of life was apparent. There has also been a continuing effort to receive a signal from space. This program, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), is of two kinds: active and passive. Those who favor passive listening warn that when we do encounter extraterrestrial life - or when it encounters us - it may not be friendly.
Finally, early in the 21st century, came life-altering news. The Mars Opportunity Rover had found evidence that Mars had been "soaking wet" in the past. Water meant life - or possible life, at any rate. Soon after that discovery, someone left a glass of champagne at the mausoleum of Percival Lowell with a note: "Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the sky" (Euripides, The Bacchae, circa 406 BC).
THE MARS WE SEEK, WITH OR WITHOUT canals and no matter what the Phoenix mission demonstrates, is Lowell's Mars. The Mars of our imagination is his fantasy, transmogrified a thousand times by writers and filmmakers. The questions that haunted him - questions to which he believed he had found the answers - are questions that haunt us still. Is there life on Mars now? Or was life there once, long ago? If so, what form did it take, and how and why did it die? Is the secret of life on Mars the secret of our own fate?
Now scientists anticipate the landing of the Phoenix next month.
"We are investigating if the soil has the ability to support life, past, present, or for future humans who may land there," says Tufts' Kounaves. The Phoenix will carry four wet chemistry labs to analyze the Martian ice and soil, as well as the first optical and atomic-force microscopes. The craft has been sterilized in accordance with NASA's planetary protection policy to ensure against contamination by earth organisms.
Some people wonder if the space program is worth all the money and effort.
Most definitely, says Maria T. Zuber, E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and head of the department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. "If you look at how our understanding of the universe, the solar system, and the earth itself have advanced from observations made since the dawn of the Space Age 50 years ago, it's clear that the results have been every bit worth the investment."
The Phoenix mission and its search for evidence of life on Mars is an important step forward in that understanding. Meanwhile, plans for "terraforming" Mars proceed. Terraforming means making the planet - any planet - fit for human life. This research is being conducted in Mars-like environments like Siberia, the Antarctic, and the Canadian Arctic. "The key challenge in making Mars habitable is warming it," says Christopher McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center, a lead researcher in planning for future Mars missions. "The way to warm Mars using technologies we have already demonstrated is to use super-greenhouse gases."
McKay estimates it will be at least 25 years before we can establish a long-term research base on Mars and that warming the planet might take 100 years. One problem will be water: how to melt it, possibly make it fit for human use, and then transport it from the planet's ice caps to the equatorial regions where the colonizers will want to be.
The late Carl Sagan had a solution. If we wanted to transport water across Mars, he said, "we would build canals."
By Nancy Zaroulis
April 27, 2008
AT 7:36 P.M. ON May 25, if all goes well, a stranger from Earth will land near the north pole of Mars. It is called Phoenix. To the unscientific eye, it looks like a giant winged bug. It has three legs and a 5-foot-wide central science deck. With its two solar panels deployed, it measures about 18 feet long. It is 7 feet high. It weighs 772 pounds. Its landing parachute is 39 feet wide. When it touches down on the Martian landscape, it will have traveled 423 million miles - the equivalent of almost 18,000 trips around Earth.
Percival Lowell peers at Mars through his Clark telescope. Percival Lowell peers at Mars through his Clark telescope. (Photo from the Lowell Observatory Archives)
more stories like this
Approximately 17 minutes after it lands, its first signals will be received by its controllers. Then it will begin the task for which it was designed - a task that has never been performed before. It will extend its robotic arm and scoop up dirt and ice from beneath the Martian surface for analysis. It will be looking for evidence of life.
"Finding organic compounds on Mars will increase the probability that life may have or does exist there," says Tufts University professor Samuel Kounaves, the lead scientist for the wet chemistry investigation on NASA's Phoenix mission.
Somewhere, a 19th century Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell will be smiling.
Long before NASA was established in 1958, before JFK's impassioned speech about the space race, and before any of the Apollo missions or space shuttle successes and disasters, Percival Lowell devoted much of his career and considerable fortune to trying to prove that Mars hosted intelligent life. Viewed through his telescopes, the ancient, baleful Red Planet was about the size of a dime. Lowell believed he was seeing a network of canals on its surface. Therefore, he declared, Mars holds intelligent life. It is not necessarily like human life, he emphasized, but it is intelligent enough to build canals.
It is Lowell's vision of Mars that has enthralled and inspired earthlings ever since.
In 1895, Lowell published a book about what he believed he saw. He wrote articles about it for Popular Astronomy and The Atlantic Monthly. He lectured widely about it. He became famous and immensely popular. He was "of medium height, slim and handsome, with an athletic build and an intense expression," his biographer, David Strauss, professor emeritus of history at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, writes in an e-mail. "His erect bearing and fastidious dress contributed to a commanding presence."
Lowell enchanted the public with his charisma and the power and conviction of his beliefs. "He was a very effective popularizer of his ideas," says Robert Millis, director of the Lowell Observatory. "He was the Carl Sagan of his day."
The scientific community was less enthusiastic than the general public about the notion of intelligent life on Mars.
No matter. Wealthy, brilliant, charming when he wanted to be, Percival Lowell was confident in his heritage and convinced of his superiority to the "ruck and rubble" from Southern and Eastern Europe flooding onto America's shores. He was also seriously inner-directed. And with what he was certain was his discovery of the canals, he had found his life's work: to promulgate his sensational belief that Mars was the home of Martians.
LOWELL WAS BORN AT 131 TREMONT STREET in Boston on March 13, 1855, into a family at the pinnacle of what passed for American aristocracy. The first Percival Lowle, as it was then spelled, arrived in America in 1639 from Bristol, England ("the Venice of the West"), and settled in Newbury, north of Boston. His descendants flourished in the law, business, and the arts.
Percival Lowell's upbringing was entirely conventional for a boy of his time and class: early instruction at a "dame school," a couple of years' education in France, attendance at Mr. George W. C. Noble's school to prepare for Harvard. At college, he excelled in both history and mathematics. He won a Bowdoin Prize for his essay on England as a European power, and he gave a commencement address on "The Nebular Hypothesis." Some people thought him the most brilliant young man in Boston.
After graduation and the obligatory tour of Europe, he settled into the family business, much of which involved the textile mills in the city of Lowell. There were - and are - many canals in that city. Before the first brick of the first cotton factory was laid there in the 1820s, Irish canal-cutters - intelligent life - dug the canal beds and built the granite walls to channel the Merrimack River's water to power the mills.
Lowell chafed at life in cold, caste-ridden Boston. He was the most eligible bachelor in the city, but he was not happy. He served as best man at the wedding of Edith Jones and Teddy Wharton, but he himself did not want to be married. He became engaged to a Boston girl, but broke off the engagement - a more serious matter then than it is now.
A man of his time and class, Lowell was a patron of London tailors, a sometime presence on the American expatriate scene in Europe, a connoisseur of wine and spirits deeply opposed to the idea of Prohibition (which fortunately for him did not come in his lifetime). He was an avid reader of Greek and Latin classics in the original and of Chaucer in Middle English. He liked detective stories, too. An enthusiastic polo player, he was one of the founders of the Dedham Polo Club. Within his own household, he was something of a tyrant and was once witnessed kicking his butler down the front steps of his Beacon Hill home and throwing the unfortunate servant's trunk after him.
At a lecture in 1882, Lowell heard about this exotic, faraway land called Japan - at the time, a place as alien, as mysterious, as Mars is to us today, possibly more so. Having made a comfortable fortune in his own right, he decided to go there. For a few years, Japan was all he desired in the way of adventure and separation from Boston. He wrote three well-received books about Japan, and he published a book of photographs about Korea - the first ever seen by the American public of that land. For a time, he served as minister for the first Korean delegation to Washington.
The lure of the Far East faded, however, when he encountered the writings of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and the French astronomer Camille Flammarion. There were, Schiaparelli said, "canali" on the planet Mars; Flammarion enlarged upon that idea. In Italian, canali means "channels"; a secondary meaning is "canals," and that was the meaning - the misinterpretation - that was given to Schiaparelli's assertion.
WHEN LOWELL WAS A BOY, he had been given a small telescope, and with it he gazed in fascination at the heavens from the roof of the family home at "Sevenels" in Brookline. Now, as an adult, he was about to embark on a new career: astronomy. It would bring him more fame - and more scorn - than he could have imagined.
Mars was to be in opposition to Earth in 1894 - closer than usual as it traveled its elliptical orbit, and thus in prime position for viewing. Lowell borrowed two telescopes and ordered another, with a 24-inch lens, from the best manufacturer in the country, Alvan Clark & Sons of Cambridgeport. He delegated a man to find a place with the clearest atmosphere for "good seeing." Flagstaff, in the Arizona Territory, was delighted to receive him; the townspeople understood that the Lowell Observatory would bring them worldwide fame. Lowell built his observatory there on "Mars Hill"; eventually he built a 25-room "Baronial Mansion" there, too.
In the clear desert and mountain air, far from the constraints of Boston and free to gaze at the stars with his cherished "Clark," Lowell was happy at Mars Hill. He spent much of the rest of his life there. From his garden and the surrounding desert and mountains, he sent exotic plants to professor Charles Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum. He hosted his many friends and, often, strangers; improbably, he dressed up as Santa Claus to help the local children celebrate Christmas.
The appearance of Lowell's book about Mars in 1895 came at a time of canal-building on earth. The Suez had recently been constructed; the Panama was in the works. For both Lowell and his adoring public, the prospect of canals on a neighboring planet was too captivating to dismiss. Let the stuffy academic scientists and astronomers carp and criticize, let them proclaim that there could not possibly be life on Mars because the Martian atmosphere was too thin, its gravity too weak. Lowell knew what he knew. He envisioned Mars society as a kind of utopia, with a place for every man and every man in his place. On Mars, there was no nonsense about workers' rights or labor unions or Progressivism or Socialism or any of the other discontents in the America of his time.
In 1897, Lowell had a nervous breakdown. At first his family tried to nurse him at home with the most up-to-date treatment: solitary confinement, no visitors, no reading material, no distraction or intellectual activity of any kind. Such a cure, Lowell said, was worse than the illness itself. After a month, he abandoned it. He went to Bermuda and then to the south of France to recuperate.
In 1901, Lowell returned to Flagstaff. Night after night, when the seeing was good, he would climb the ladder in his observatory to peer through the lens of his Clark telescope at the object of his obsession. He published his second book about the Red Planet, Mars and Its Canals, in 1906.
Because Lowell wanted a base in Boston separate from his family, he bought a house at 11 West Cedar Street on Beacon Hill. The seller was a neighbor, an interior decorator, a woman not of his exalted class. In 1908, he married her. While in London on their honeymoon, they ascended 5,500 feet over Hyde Park in a balloon because Lowell wanted to photograph the paths to see how they (or the canals on Mars) would look from the air. In that year, he published his third and final book on the planet, Mars as the Abode of Life.
Back at his observatory on Mars Hill, Lowell renewed his attention to another matter: the possibility of a ninth planet beyond Neptune, which he called "Planet X." The issue of intelligent life on Mars receded, but not much. By then, George du Maurier had published The Martian and H.G. Wells had produced a sensational fiction piece about Martians invading Earth, The War of the Worlds. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a pulp writer who later found immortality with his Tarzan stories, published the first of his Mars fantasies, A Princess of Mars, in 1912. It was an immediate hit. Burroughs wrote several sequels. Along with works by other writers, it was the beginning of the cottage industry that came to be called science fiction.
Despite having another breakdown in 1912, Lowell concentrated increasingly on Planet X. He never found it. He died at Mars Hill of a cerebral hemorrhage on November 12, 1916. A member of the Mars Hill community remembered that shortly before his fatal stroke, he had exploded in anger at a servant. He is buried there in a mausoleum shaped like an observatory with a blue glass dome.
Fourteen years later, in 1930, Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of a ninth planet: Lowell's Planet X. Pluto, as it was named, has since been downgraded to dwarf planet status because it is so small, so lacking in what might be called gravitas.
NINTH PLANET OR NO, Percival Lowell's greatest achievement was to popularize the idea of life on Mars. Astronomers had speculated about that possibility for centuries, but it was Lowell who implanted in the minds of earthlings, once and for all, the idea that we are not alone in the universe - an idea once as unthinkable, as heretical, as the notion that the earth revolves around the sun. Accordingly, in the decades after Lowell's death, the science-fiction genre flourished. Novels, pulp magazines, and the new media of radio, film, and TV kept Lowell's basic concept of Martian life alive, even if that fictional life was not quite the kind he would have approved of.
The public adored these speculative fictions - and sometimes believed them. On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre company appeared in a radio production of The War of the Worlds, updated to suburban New Jersey. At the beginning of the program, an announcer stated that it was a fictional presentation, but many people didn't hear that disclaimer. What they heard was a vivid, spine-chilling account of the invasion of New Jersey by Martians - not Percival Lowell's wise and rather hidebound creatures, but quite nasty super-intelligent beings intent on destroying earthlings. Panic ensued; Welles was thrilled at his success. The lesson was that two decades after Lowell's death, people were prepared to acknowledge that life existed beyond earth - and that it could come here with hostile intent.
During the first wave of Lowell's fame at the end of the 19th century, Robert Goddard of Worcester dreamed of a voyage to Mars. His subsequent development of the liquid-fuel rocket was known to German scientists who made the V-1 and V-2 rockets during World War II. After the war, many of those scientists came to the United States, while some went to the Soviet Union, and the space race was on.
The leading US space scientist was the former head of the German rocket manufactory (and slave camp) at Peenemunde, Wernher von Braun. Like many of his peers, von Braun was enchanted by the idea of man going to Mars. He was also, like Percival Lowell, a popularizer. He published articles and a book about a Martian expedition; he also wrote a novel about Mars.
The space program needed government financing, and the hundreds of science-fiction writers and filmmakers flourishing by the mid-20th century fostered the public's support for the program. People were eager to know about Mars, in particular. In 1976, Viking 1 and Viking 2 transmitted spectacular pictures of a ruddy landscape studded with giant volcanoes and riddled with deep canyons separated by stretches of vast desert. No sign of life was apparent. There has also been a continuing effort to receive a signal from space. This program, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), is of two kinds: active and passive. Those who favor passive listening warn that when we do encounter extraterrestrial life - or when it encounters us - it may not be friendly.
Finally, early in the 21st century, came life-altering news. The Mars Opportunity Rover had found evidence that Mars had been "soaking wet" in the past. Water meant life - or possible life, at any rate. Soon after that discovery, someone left a glass of champagne at the mausoleum of Percival Lowell with a note: "Far away, hidden from the eyes of daylight, there are watchers in the sky" (Euripides, The Bacchae, circa 406 BC).
THE MARS WE SEEK, WITH OR WITHOUT canals and no matter what the Phoenix mission demonstrates, is Lowell's Mars. The Mars of our imagination is his fantasy, transmogrified a thousand times by writers and filmmakers. The questions that haunted him - questions to which he believed he had found the answers - are questions that haunt us still. Is there life on Mars now? Or was life there once, long ago? If so, what form did it take, and how and why did it die? Is the secret of life on Mars the secret of our own fate?
Now scientists anticipate the landing of the Phoenix next month.
"We are investigating if the soil has the ability to support life, past, present, or for future humans who may land there," says Tufts' Kounaves. The Phoenix will carry four wet chemistry labs to analyze the Martian ice and soil, as well as the first optical and atomic-force microscopes. The craft has been sterilized in accordance with NASA's planetary protection policy to ensure against contamination by earth organisms.
Some people wonder if the space program is worth all the money and effort.
Most definitely, says Maria T. Zuber, E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and head of the department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. "If you look at how our understanding of the universe, the solar system, and the earth itself have advanced from observations made since the dawn of the Space Age 50 years ago, it's clear that the results have been every bit worth the investment."
The Phoenix mission and its search for evidence of life on Mars is an important step forward in that understanding. Meanwhile, plans for "terraforming" Mars proceed. Terraforming means making the planet - any planet - fit for human life. This research is being conducted in Mars-like environments like Siberia, the Antarctic, and the Canadian Arctic. "The key challenge in making Mars habitable is warming it," says Christopher McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center, a lead researcher in planning for future Mars missions. "The way to warm Mars using technologies we have already demonstrated is to use super-greenhouse gases."
McKay estimates it will be at least 25 years before we can establish a long-term research base on Mars and that warming the planet might take 100 years. One problem will be water: how to melt it, possibly make it fit for human use, and then transport it from the planet's ice caps to the equatorial regions where the colonizers will want to be.
The late Carl Sagan had a solution. If we wanted to transport water across Mars, he said, "we would build canals."
Friday, April 25, 2008
Poor Dorothy Wordsworth
The shadow story of the Wordsworths and Wuthering Heights
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote much and published little, but despite her reticence much has been written about her. Frances Wilson gives us a new and at times startling reading of this enigmatic woman, and does not shy away from discussing what the editor of her letters, Alan G. Hill, described as the “peculiarly insensitive and maladroit” post-Freudian interpretations that have clustered round Dorothy’s relationship with her brother William. Wilson is neither insensitive nor maladroit. She is bold, witty, scholarly and speculative. She is not always respectful, but she is always interesting. She takes on incest, migraines, voyeurism and, at one point, what she describes as a note of “post-coital intensity” in Dorothy’s prose. This gripping narrative presents a character more subtle than the devoted, self-effacing amanuensis of tradition, or the later feminist stereotype. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth does not claim that Dorothy was a better writer than her brother, or that he repressed her talent by demanding sympathy and giblet pies. What really went on in Dove Cottage remains mysterious, and, as Wilson says, there are parts of the story which we will never know.
Wilson is intrigued by symbiotic literary relationships, by sexual subtexts, and by difficult women. In Literary Seductions (1999) she heroically engaged with the vast oeuvre of two of the most verbose and combative women writers of the twentieth century, Anaïs Nin and Laura Riding, both of whom were passionately involved with famous and prolific authors, the former, incestuously, with her father. Dorothy Wordsworth as a subject offers a different challenge, but demands some of the same literary and psychological skill. Wilson confines her analysis largely to the period leading up to the writing of the Grasmere Journals (1800–03) and to the journals themselves, and she brings her story to an end with an emotional climax and a textual crux. The climax is William’s marriage to his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson; the textual crux is one word in a deleted passage describing the morning of that marriage, and the manner in which William blessed his sister before leaving her on his way to the church – was it “fervently”, as one editor, Helen Darbishire, transcribed, or “softly”, as another, Pamela Woof, proposes? William’s family life and his sister’s decline into what Wilson suggests might now be diagnosed as “depressive pseudodementia” are sketched in briefly, in a closing chapter. The Grasmere Journals are the key text.
The word “text” is inadequate here, for one of Wilson’s achievements is to convey a sense of the journals not simply as texts but as physical objects – four surviving notebooks, bound in different colours, blotted, doodled and with some passages (including that word “fervently/softly”) heavily inked out. We are given the history of their creation and survival, accompanied by illustrations which are both touching and illuminating. The last notebook, which begins on May 4, 1802, is described as small and substantial and “bound in brown leather with a metal clasp”: when Dorothy began to write in it, it already contained drafts of “Michael” and some pages have been cut out from the beginning and end. It is this volume that contains Dorothy’s strangely unsettling account of William’s marriage, which Wilson sees as crucial to an understanding of the intensity of her feelings for her brother.
Wilson is good, throughout, on the physical, and expands on the hints that she is given and some that she is not. She makes us feel the constraints of the living conditions at Dove Cottage: she counts the number of bedrooms and works out who slept where, with whom, and why. She describes the immense walks that Dorothy took, “with mud-encrusted skirts banging against her sturdy legs, her flimsy shoes, her neck and face often wet and cold, her eyes and ears alert to the beauty of every sight” and the disapproving reactions of family and landladies to this bohemian mode of travel. She invokes Miss Bingley’s scorn of Elizabeth Bennet’s three-mile walk to see her sick sister at Netherfield, as well as Thoreau and Bruce Chatwin’s endorsement of revolutionary walking.
Three miles were nothing to the Romantics, as we know, but it is nevertheless startling to be reminded of one long December journey on foot from Keswick to the Clarksons at Eusemere in 1801, past “Saddleback half-covered with snow”, and through “a sharp hail-shower” at the head of Matterdale. The threesome of Mary, Dorothy and William lost its way on the slippery darkening road several times, and Dorothy writes laconically “I was often obliged to crawl upon all fours, and Mary fell many a time”. The Wordsworth wanderings were a strange mixture of defiance, poetry, foolhardiness and bathos: although they spent so much time rambling and sometimes in extreme conditions, both Mary and Dorothy were frightened of cows, and even William preferred to avoid them. It is also surprising to note that, for all their midnight wanderings, they were not very good at astronomy: one of the most endearing of Dorothy’s comments refers to “Jupiter”, seen on a clear night among the many stars in the soft purple sky over Rydale, which she amends – “Jupiter at least we call him, but William says we always call the largest star Jupiter”. The Wordsworth walks were more Brontë than Austen, and Wilson uses Emily Brontë as a key to her understanding of brother and sister:
"When I read Dorothy’s accounts of her love for William in the Grasmere Journals I am moved in the same way as I am by Catherine Earnshaw’s description of her love for Heathcliff . . . and it is through Wuthering Heights that the peculiarity of [their] relationship can best be understood. Powerful in both cases is the elusive, visionary nature of what each woman is straining to define, her hunger for twinship with the one she loves . . . her confusion about where she ends and he begins. "
This comparison makes sense, and it connects with the idea of incest which F. W. Bateson so memorably introduced in 1954 when he suggested that William and Dorothy fell in love in the intimacy of their cold winter in Germany. Bateson, according to Wilson, only pointed out “what was obvious to all”, which is that something odd went on in Goslar. (Wordsworth’s comment that he wrote in Goslar “in self-defence” is intriguing.) The Heathcliff–Catherine relationship has an incestuous element, as they were brought up together as children, and their sexuality is obviously abnormal (though not very unusual in the context of Gothic fiction and Byronic poetry). Emily Brontë could not have read Dorothy’s journals but, Wilson argues, she is more than likely to have read De Quincey’s portraits of the Wordsworths in Tait’s in 1839, which describe her “gipsy tan”, outdoor spirit and impulsive nature. It is intriguing to think that descriptions of the high-minded homely life of Dove Cottage could have prompted the melodramatic tragedy of Wuthering Heights – a shadow story spun from what lay concealed and repressed.
Influence or no, Dorothy and Emily were indisputably and for obvious reasons affected by the same imagery – by solitary flowers and lone birds. I would add to Dorothy’s description of the columbine, “a graceful slender creature, a female seeking retirement”, young Cathy Linton’s response to the last bluebell of summer, which Nelly Dean urges her to pluck for her father: “Cathy stared a long time at the lonely blossom trembling in its earthly shelter, and replied, at length – ‘No, I’ll not touch it: but it looks melancholy, does it not, Ellen?’”. I hadn’t noticed this before, but it now seems pure Dorothy. Emily’s greatest intimacy, like Dorothy’s, was with her siblings, but for Dorothy the sibling relationship with her famous brother was unequal, and became more unequal. Wilson explores the shifting balance between William and Dorothy, and her demotion from the role of the chosen one, the partner swan of the “solitary pair” who inspired “Home at Grasmere”, to that of the “surplus relation” or “perpetual third party”, subsumed by unspoken jealousies. She marks the point at which (with “The Leech Gatherer”) he began to move away from his sister’s way of looking. He ceased to need her insights, her butterflies, her mosses and little birds, though he needed her devotion, her childcare, her cooking. But maybe he needed them only because they were there. Maybe, after the trauma of his marriage to her “dearest sister” Mary, some separation should have taken place, instead of the endlessly loving reassurance that kept her imprisoned in a secondary role and finally, Wilson assumes, drove her into depression and dementia.
Dorothy clearly knew, as the entry for October 4, 1802, indicates, that life would change irrevocably once her brother began to share his bed with Mary. The business of the wedding ring, which she wore on her finger for the night before he was married, and the trance into which she fell, “neither seeing nor hearing anything”, while the ceremony was performed at the church down the road, betray her abnormal state. Wilson disagrees with Dorothy’s biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, who said that her words here are of “transparent truthfulness”: I half suspect that by “transparent” they may have meant “unwittingly revealing”, but were too kind to say so. Wilson is, rightly, more overtly suspicious of double motives and meanings, but I find it impossible to tell whether Dorothy knew how strange her emotion might appear to others, or whether she found it strange herself. Neither Wilson nor Gittings and Manton comment on the fact that Dorothy, in her letters, usually referred to the latest Wordsworth child as “our baby”. One wonders what Mary made of that.
Wilson is excellent on migraines, but I’m sorry that she does not say more about teeth. The most poignant entry in the whole journal is for May 31, 1802, where Dorothy writes “My tooth broke today. They will soon be gone. Let that pass, I shall be beloved – I want no more”. One has to consult Gittings and Manton for an account of the horrors of dentistry at this period: her few painful remaining teeth were removed in 1820, for a fee of fifty guineas, and were replaced by artificial teeth which in those days “consisted of two rigid half-hoops, with carved bone, tusk, or sometimes sheep’s teeth, held in place by a hinged steel spring”. These sound even worse than and, for their day, almost as expensive as implants. Were the bad teeth connected with her migraines? Or with her stammer? Did she grind her teeth in her sleep? We shall never know, but we may guess. Implants are anachronistic, but Wilson does not fear anachronism. She tells us that Mary Hutchinson, the eldest daughter of a large orphaned family, was “a Wendy to a party of Peter Pans”, and that Coleridge’s “Christabel” “takes us through the wardrobe door into a Narnia full of wonders”. These analogies may strike some as curious, but they display an imagination that has liberated itself from critical orthodoxy. Frances Wilson’s book is an excellent and stimulating combination of sensitive attention to text and soaring hypothesis.
Frances Wilson
THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
Dorothy Wordsworth wrote much and published little, but despite her reticence much has been written about her. Frances Wilson gives us a new and at times startling reading of this enigmatic woman, and does not shy away from discussing what the editor of her letters, Alan G. Hill, described as the “peculiarly insensitive and maladroit” post-Freudian interpretations that have clustered round Dorothy’s relationship with her brother William. Wilson is neither insensitive nor maladroit. She is bold, witty, scholarly and speculative. She is not always respectful, but she is always interesting. She takes on incest, migraines, voyeurism and, at one point, what she describes as a note of “post-coital intensity” in Dorothy’s prose. This gripping narrative presents a character more subtle than the devoted, self-effacing amanuensis of tradition, or the later feminist stereotype. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth does not claim that Dorothy was a better writer than her brother, or that he repressed her talent by demanding sympathy and giblet pies. What really went on in Dove Cottage remains mysterious, and, as Wilson says, there are parts of the story which we will never know.
Wilson is intrigued by symbiotic literary relationships, by sexual subtexts, and by difficult women. In Literary Seductions (1999) she heroically engaged with the vast oeuvre of two of the most verbose and combative women writers of the twentieth century, Anaïs Nin and Laura Riding, both of whom were passionately involved with famous and prolific authors, the former, incestuously, with her father. Dorothy Wordsworth as a subject offers a different challenge, but demands some of the same literary and psychological skill. Wilson confines her analysis largely to the period leading up to the writing of the Grasmere Journals (1800–03) and to the journals themselves, and she brings her story to an end with an emotional climax and a textual crux. The climax is William’s marriage to his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson; the textual crux is one word in a deleted passage describing the morning of that marriage, and the manner in which William blessed his sister before leaving her on his way to the church – was it “fervently”, as one editor, Helen Darbishire, transcribed, or “softly”, as another, Pamela Woof, proposes? William’s family life and his sister’s decline into what Wilson suggests might now be diagnosed as “depressive pseudodementia” are sketched in briefly, in a closing chapter. The Grasmere Journals are the key text.
The word “text” is inadequate here, for one of Wilson’s achievements is to convey a sense of the journals not simply as texts but as physical objects – four surviving notebooks, bound in different colours, blotted, doodled and with some passages (including that word “fervently/softly”) heavily inked out. We are given the history of their creation and survival, accompanied by illustrations which are both touching and illuminating. The last notebook, which begins on May 4, 1802, is described as small and substantial and “bound in brown leather with a metal clasp”: when Dorothy began to write in it, it already contained drafts of “Michael” and some pages have been cut out from the beginning and end. It is this volume that contains Dorothy’s strangely unsettling account of William’s marriage, which Wilson sees as crucial to an understanding of the intensity of her feelings for her brother.
Wilson is good, throughout, on the physical, and expands on the hints that she is given and some that she is not. She makes us feel the constraints of the living conditions at Dove Cottage: she counts the number of bedrooms and works out who slept where, with whom, and why. She describes the immense walks that Dorothy took, “with mud-encrusted skirts banging against her sturdy legs, her flimsy shoes, her neck and face often wet and cold, her eyes and ears alert to the beauty of every sight” and the disapproving reactions of family and landladies to this bohemian mode of travel. She invokes Miss Bingley’s scorn of Elizabeth Bennet’s three-mile walk to see her sick sister at Netherfield, as well as Thoreau and Bruce Chatwin’s endorsement of revolutionary walking.
Three miles were nothing to the Romantics, as we know, but it is nevertheless startling to be reminded of one long December journey on foot from Keswick to the Clarksons at Eusemere in 1801, past “Saddleback half-covered with snow”, and through “a sharp hail-shower” at the head of Matterdale. The threesome of Mary, Dorothy and William lost its way on the slippery darkening road several times, and Dorothy writes laconically “I was often obliged to crawl upon all fours, and Mary fell many a time”. The Wordsworth wanderings were a strange mixture of defiance, poetry, foolhardiness and bathos: although they spent so much time rambling and sometimes in extreme conditions, both Mary and Dorothy were frightened of cows, and even William preferred to avoid them. It is also surprising to note that, for all their midnight wanderings, they were not very good at astronomy: one of the most endearing of Dorothy’s comments refers to “Jupiter”, seen on a clear night among the many stars in the soft purple sky over Rydale, which she amends – “Jupiter at least we call him, but William says we always call the largest star Jupiter”. The Wordsworth walks were more Brontë than Austen, and Wilson uses Emily Brontë as a key to her understanding of brother and sister:
"When I read Dorothy’s accounts of her love for William in the Grasmere Journals I am moved in the same way as I am by Catherine Earnshaw’s description of her love for Heathcliff . . . and it is through Wuthering Heights that the peculiarity of [their] relationship can best be understood. Powerful in both cases is the elusive, visionary nature of what each woman is straining to define, her hunger for twinship with the one she loves . . . her confusion about where she ends and he begins. "
This comparison makes sense, and it connects with the idea of incest which F. W. Bateson so memorably introduced in 1954 when he suggested that William and Dorothy fell in love in the intimacy of their cold winter in Germany. Bateson, according to Wilson, only pointed out “what was obvious to all”, which is that something odd went on in Goslar. (Wordsworth’s comment that he wrote in Goslar “in self-defence” is intriguing.) The Heathcliff–Catherine relationship has an incestuous element, as they were brought up together as children, and their sexuality is obviously abnormal (though not very unusual in the context of Gothic fiction and Byronic poetry). Emily Brontë could not have read Dorothy’s journals but, Wilson argues, she is more than likely to have read De Quincey’s portraits of the Wordsworths in Tait’s in 1839, which describe her “gipsy tan”, outdoor spirit and impulsive nature. It is intriguing to think that descriptions of the high-minded homely life of Dove Cottage could have prompted the melodramatic tragedy of Wuthering Heights – a shadow story spun from what lay concealed and repressed.
Influence or no, Dorothy and Emily were indisputably and for obvious reasons affected by the same imagery – by solitary flowers and lone birds. I would add to Dorothy’s description of the columbine, “a graceful slender creature, a female seeking retirement”, young Cathy Linton’s response to the last bluebell of summer, which Nelly Dean urges her to pluck for her father: “Cathy stared a long time at the lonely blossom trembling in its earthly shelter, and replied, at length – ‘No, I’ll not touch it: but it looks melancholy, does it not, Ellen?’”. I hadn’t noticed this before, but it now seems pure Dorothy. Emily’s greatest intimacy, like Dorothy’s, was with her siblings, but for Dorothy the sibling relationship with her famous brother was unequal, and became more unequal. Wilson explores the shifting balance between William and Dorothy, and her demotion from the role of the chosen one, the partner swan of the “solitary pair” who inspired “Home at Grasmere”, to that of the “surplus relation” or “perpetual third party”, subsumed by unspoken jealousies. She marks the point at which (with “The Leech Gatherer”) he began to move away from his sister’s way of looking. He ceased to need her insights, her butterflies, her mosses and little birds, though he needed her devotion, her childcare, her cooking. But maybe he needed them only because they were there. Maybe, after the trauma of his marriage to her “dearest sister” Mary, some separation should have taken place, instead of the endlessly loving reassurance that kept her imprisoned in a secondary role and finally, Wilson assumes, drove her into depression and dementia.
Dorothy clearly knew, as the entry for October 4, 1802, indicates, that life would change irrevocably once her brother began to share his bed with Mary. The business of the wedding ring, which she wore on her finger for the night before he was married, and the trance into which she fell, “neither seeing nor hearing anything”, while the ceremony was performed at the church down the road, betray her abnormal state. Wilson disagrees with Dorothy’s biographers Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, who said that her words here are of “transparent truthfulness”: I half suspect that by “transparent” they may have meant “unwittingly revealing”, but were too kind to say so. Wilson is, rightly, more overtly suspicious of double motives and meanings, but I find it impossible to tell whether Dorothy knew how strange her emotion might appear to others, or whether she found it strange herself. Neither Wilson nor Gittings and Manton comment on the fact that Dorothy, in her letters, usually referred to the latest Wordsworth child as “our baby”. One wonders what Mary made of that.
Wilson is excellent on migraines, but I’m sorry that she does not say more about teeth. The most poignant entry in the whole journal is for May 31, 1802, where Dorothy writes “My tooth broke today. They will soon be gone. Let that pass, I shall be beloved – I want no more”. One has to consult Gittings and Manton for an account of the horrors of dentistry at this period: her few painful remaining teeth were removed in 1820, for a fee of fifty guineas, and were replaced by artificial teeth which in those days “consisted of two rigid half-hoops, with carved bone, tusk, or sometimes sheep’s teeth, held in place by a hinged steel spring”. These sound even worse than and, for their day, almost as expensive as implants. Were the bad teeth connected with her migraines? Or with her stammer? Did she grind her teeth in her sleep? We shall never know, but we may guess. Implants are anachronistic, but Wilson does not fear anachronism. She tells us that Mary Hutchinson, the eldest daughter of a large orphaned family, was “a Wendy to a party of Peter Pans”, and that Coleridge’s “Christabel” “takes us through the wardrobe door into a Narnia full of wonders”. These analogies may strike some as curious, but they display an imagination that has liberated itself from critical orthodoxy. Frances Wilson’s book is an excellent and stimulating combination of sensitive attention to text and soaring hypothesis.
Frances Wilson
THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Six Rulers Who Didn’t Spend Much Time in Office
Louis XIX
This one’s disputed, but since the time frame is so ridiculously small I had to include it. Louis was married to the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Louis XIX was actually Louis XVI’s nephew, making Louis XIX and his wife, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, cousins. His father, Louis XVI’s brother, was Charles X. Got all of that? In the July Revolution of 1830, the people of France demanded that Charles give up the throne because they hated his policies and felt they were too repressive. He reluctantly granted the wish of the people and abdicated, making Louis XIX the new king. However, the people didn’t want Charles’ descendants in power either, and, perhaps remembering how her parents’ reign ended, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte pleaded with her husband to abdicate as well. And he did, 20 minutes after becoming King of France. It’s disputed because some historians think it’s too short of a time frame to recognize.
Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia
Michael had a long way to go to the throne at the time of his birth – he was fourth-in-line after his father and two older brothers. When his grandpa was assassinated in 1881, his father took over as Emperor. When he died in 1894, eldest brother Nicholas became Nicholas II. The next-eldest brother, George, died in 1899 of tuberculosis, leaving just Emperor Nicholas II and Michael left. Nicholas II had no sons to pass the crown to, so it was starting to look like Michael would someday be Emperor. Then, on August 12, 1904, Nicholas II and Alexandra had a son, placing Michael second-in-line again.
However, under pressure from generals and others, Nicholas II abdicated the throne and also named his brother as the new Emperor. He bypassed his son because Alexei had hemophilia, which was not curable at the time.
Michael was proclaimed Emperor Michael II… for about 16 hours. He signed a document the next day stating that he would only reign if the Russian people wished to uphold the monarchy. The monarchy was overthrown and so was Michael’s stint as Emperor. In July 1918, he was murdered less than a week before his brother. Nicholas II was also murdered along with his wife and children (including the famous Anastasia, who was rumored to have made it out alive).
Pope Urban VII or Pope-elect Stephen
Depending on how you number the Popes, one of these guys had the shortest reign in the history of Popes. Pope Stephen hasn’t been recognized as a Pope since 1961, though, so I thought I’d give you both stories.
Stephen was elected to succeed Pope Zachary in 752. However, before he could be ordained, he died of apoplexy. So, his “reign” was only three days, if you can consider it a reign.
Urban VII (that’s him in the picture) was Pope for just shy of two weeks in September 1590. He died of malaria just 13 days into his term, but while he was in office he managed to enact the first known public smoking ban: he threatened to excommunicate anyone who smoked, chewed or sniffed tobacco in the porchway or inside of a chuch.
Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev
Dipendra was kind of King of Nepal by default for three days in 2001. On June 1, he murdered his family at a royal dinner, including his father who was the King of Nepal at the time. The story is that Dipendra was angry that his mother would not let him marry the bride of his choice due to ages-long feuding between the two families. After killing his parents, brother and sister, he turned the gun on himself. He lingered in a coma for three days and was officially proclaimed King of Nepal in his hospital bed. He died three days later and his uncle, Prince Gyanendra, became King. Some people believe that Gyanendra actually slaughtered the whole family so he could become King. His wife and son were in the same room as the royal family during the massacre, but managed to escape without mortal wounds.
John I (aka John the Posthumous)
John I was King of France for the five days that he was alive. His father, Louis X, died in June 1316. The reason is disputed – could have been dehydration, could have been poisoning. When he died, his wife Clémence was pregnant. John I was born November 15, 1316, and died on the 20th, succeeded by his Uncle Philip. As with the royal family of Nepal, many people suspect that King Louis X’s brother first poisoned Louis and then had his infant son killed so he could become King. In the 1350s, a man popped up in Provence claiming to be John I, but he was quickly put in prison and died there. Hmmmm.
Lê Trung Tông
Lê Trung Tông became King of Vietnam after his dad, Lêi Dai Hành, died in 1005. He was one of 10 brothers, so there was some heated “discussion” over who should become King. In fact, for eight months, the princes fought amongst themselves. The war was mainly between two of the brothers, but one of them was finally defeated and killed, leaving Lê Trung Tông as the victor. At least, for three days. His half brother, Lê Long Dinh, sent an assassin to climb over the wall of the palace and kill the King. He did, and Lê Long Dinh reigned from 1005-1009.
Lady Jane Grey
Finally, we’d better address the Lady who started my research. When Edward VI, Henry VIII’s only son, died on July 6, 1553, at the age of 15, things were thrown into an uproar. On his deathbed, Edward had named the descendants of his aunt as the heirs to the throne. Essentially, this meant that Henry VIII’s sister’s grandchildren would be the next to rule so - try to keep this straight – Lady Jane Grey was King Henry VIII’s grand-niece and King Edward VI’s second cousin. I think. Someone correct me if I have figured that out wrong. Anyway, Edward, who was Protestant, did this because letting his half-sister Mary take the throne would have meant a Catholic England. However, by bypassing his half-sister, Edward was going against the Third Act of Succession passed by Parliament. That Act restored his half-sisters to the line of Succession, which would have made his oldest half-sister Mary the new Queen upon Edward’s death.
Initially, Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England to respect Edward’s wishes. Mary was enraged by this and gathered enough backing to ride into London with a large group of supporters. Parliament had no choice but to declare Mary the rightful Queen. As Queen, Mary had Jane Grey, her cousin, beheaded. Jane Grey was only 16 (or 17, according to some reports).
This one’s disputed, but since the time frame is so ridiculously small I had to include it. Louis was married to the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. Louis XIX was actually Louis XVI’s nephew, making Louis XIX and his wife, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, cousins. His father, Louis XVI’s brother, was Charles X. Got all of that? In the July Revolution of 1830, the people of France demanded that Charles give up the throne because they hated his policies and felt they were too repressive. He reluctantly granted the wish of the people and abdicated, making Louis XIX the new king. However, the people didn’t want Charles’ descendants in power either, and, perhaps remembering how her parents’ reign ended, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte pleaded with her husband to abdicate as well. And he did, 20 minutes after becoming King of France. It’s disputed because some historians think it’s too short of a time frame to recognize.
Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia
Michael had a long way to go to the throne at the time of his birth – he was fourth-in-line after his father and two older brothers. When his grandpa was assassinated in 1881, his father took over as Emperor. When he died in 1894, eldest brother Nicholas became Nicholas II. The next-eldest brother, George, died in 1899 of tuberculosis, leaving just Emperor Nicholas II and Michael left. Nicholas II had no sons to pass the crown to, so it was starting to look like Michael would someday be Emperor. Then, on August 12, 1904, Nicholas II and Alexandra had a son, placing Michael second-in-line again.
However, under pressure from generals and others, Nicholas II abdicated the throne and also named his brother as the new Emperor. He bypassed his son because Alexei had hemophilia, which was not curable at the time.
Michael was proclaimed Emperor Michael II… for about 16 hours. He signed a document the next day stating that he would only reign if the Russian people wished to uphold the monarchy. The monarchy was overthrown and so was Michael’s stint as Emperor. In July 1918, he was murdered less than a week before his brother. Nicholas II was also murdered along with his wife and children (including the famous Anastasia, who was rumored to have made it out alive).
Pope Urban VII or Pope-elect Stephen
Depending on how you number the Popes, one of these guys had the shortest reign in the history of Popes. Pope Stephen hasn’t been recognized as a Pope since 1961, though, so I thought I’d give you both stories.
Stephen was elected to succeed Pope Zachary in 752. However, before he could be ordained, he died of apoplexy. So, his “reign” was only three days, if you can consider it a reign.
Urban VII (that’s him in the picture) was Pope for just shy of two weeks in September 1590. He died of malaria just 13 days into his term, but while he was in office he managed to enact the first known public smoking ban: he threatened to excommunicate anyone who smoked, chewed or sniffed tobacco in the porchway or inside of a chuch.
Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev
Dipendra was kind of King of Nepal by default for three days in 2001. On June 1, he murdered his family at a royal dinner, including his father who was the King of Nepal at the time. The story is that Dipendra was angry that his mother would not let him marry the bride of his choice due to ages-long feuding between the two families. After killing his parents, brother and sister, he turned the gun on himself. He lingered in a coma for three days and was officially proclaimed King of Nepal in his hospital bed. He died three days later and his uncle, Prince Gyanendra, became King. Some people believe that Gyanendra actually slaughtered the whole family so he could become King. His wife and son were in the same room as the royal family during the massacre, but managed to escape without mortal wounds.
John I (aka John the Posthumous)
John I was King of France for the five days that he was alive. His father, Louis X, died in June 1316. The reason is disputed – could have been dehydration, could have been poisoning. When he died, his wife Clémence was pregnant. John I was born November 15, 1316, and died on the 20th, succeeded by his Uncle Philip. As with the royal family of Nepal, many people suspect that King Louis X’s brother first poisoned Louis and then had his infant son killed so he could become King. In the 1350s, a man popped up in Provence claiming to be John I, but he was quickly put in prison and died there. Hmmmm.
Lê Trung Tông
Lê Trung Tông became King of Vietnam after his dad, Lêi Dai Hành, died in 1005. He was one of 10 brothers, so there was some heated “discussion” over who should become King. In fact, for eight months, the princes fought amongst themselves. The war was mainly between two of the brothers, but one of them was finally defeated and killed, leaving Lê Trung Tông as the victor. At least, for three days. His half brother, Lê Long Dinh, sent an assassin to climb over the wall of the palace and kill the King. He did, and Lê Long Dinh reigned from 1005-1009.
Lady Jane Grey
Finally, we’d better address the Lady who started my research. When Edward VI, Henry VIII’s only son, died on July 6, 1553, at the age of 15, things were thrown into an uproar. On his deathbed, Edward had named the descendants of his aunt as the heirs to the throne. Essentially, this meant that Henry VIII’s sister’s grandchildren would be the next to rule so - try to keep this straight – Lady Jane Grey was King Henry VIII’s grand-niece and King Edward VI’s second cousin. I think. Someone correct me if I have figured that out wrong. Anyway, Edward, who was Protestant, did this because letting his half-sister Mary take the throne would have meant a Catholic England. However, by bypassing his half-sister, Edward was going against the Third Act of Succession passed by Parliament. That Act restored his half-sisters to the line of Succession, which would have made his oldest half-sister Mary the new Queen upon Edward’s death.
Initially, Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England to respect Edward’s wishes. Mary was enraged by this and gathered enough backing to ride into London with a large group of supporters. Parliament had no choice but to declare Mary the rightful Queen. As Queen, Mary had Jane Grey, her cousin, beheaded. Jane Grey was only 16 (or 17, according to some reports).
Rutherford B. Hayes: The National Hero of … Paraguay?
n Rutherford B. Hayes’ hometown of Delaware, Ohio, there’s a memorial to the late U.S. president; it’s a plaque that marks his birthplace, which is now a gas station. In Paraguay, people would find this fact horribly offensive. Perhaps that’s because the country is littered with Hayes memorials—from statues to schools to streets named in his honor. There’s even a city in Paraguay called Villa Hayes, which lies in the middle of a province called Presidente Hayes, which is roughly the size of South Carolina.
What did Rutherford do to deserve all this? From 1864 to 1870, Paraguay was engaged in one of the bloodiest wars in the history of the Americas—the War of the Triple Alliance. Facing the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, the people of Paraguay were mercilessly defeated. Two-thirds of the country’s population died.
But even after the war ended, Argentina and Paraguay continued to scuffle over the Chaco, a huge tract of land in the southwest region of Paraguay. Unable to come to a resolution, diplomats from both countries traveled to Washington, D.C., so that President Hayes could arbitrate the debate. As you’ve probably guessed, Hayes decided in favor of Paraguay—and he’s been a national hero ever since. Once every 50 years, Villa Hayes hosts a huge festival in his honor. The next one is in 2028, so mark your calendars.
Andrew Johnson: Of Mice and Men
The award for Most Humble Origins goes to Andrew Johnson, hands down. He was born to a sharecropper in North Carolina, but his father died when he was just 3 years old. Never having the money to attend school, Andrew became an indentured servant when he was 14, but eventually ran away to reunite with his mother. Struggling to eke out a living, they hauled all of their belongings over the mountains into Tennessee. It was a budget move; they lugged everything in a two-wheeled cart pulled by a blind pony. Despite the fresh start, the family’s prospects never truly improved.
Growing up poor and uneducated in the South likely helped to foster Johnson’s verdant racism. Yet, because he was against secession, he was considered loyal to the North. Lincoln spotted him as a Southerner with Northern sympathies and picked him to be his running mate in 1864. Aside from sharing the ticket, the two men didn’t have much in common politically.
Following Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson was happy to leave the Southern states to themselves to hash out the details of Reconstruction while Congress was conveniently out of session. As a result, “freed” slaves were basically turned into a permanent underclass. Furious, Congress turned against the sitting president, and in 1868, Johnson was impeached. Although it was purely a political maneuver, the move effectively neutered Johnson for the last year of his presidency.
What did Johnson do with his remaining time in the White House? Mainly, he tended to a family of mice living in his bedroom. Seriously. He’d place fresh water next to the fireplace and keep a constant basket of flour for them on the floor. Referring to the mice as his “little fellows,” a lonely Johnson appreciated the fact that they didn’t care where he came from—or whether or not he’d just been impeached.
Thomas Jefferson: The Sensitive Writer Type
Let’s get a few things straight about writing the Declaration of Independence. First of all, it wasn’t the founding fathers’ top priority. By early 1776, America had pretty much broken up with King George, but since it was a long-distance relationship, the nation felt the need to make it official on paper. Second, getting to write it wasn’t really an honor. Thomas Jefferson was the newbie and, at 33, the second-youngest guy in Congress. And because the elder statesmen had more important things to do, like forging alliances with France and Spain, Jefferson got the job because no one else wanted it.
Regardless, Jefferson poured his heart and soul into the document. He spent days holed up in a second-story Philadelphia apartment, scratching away with his quill. And in that time, the sensitive, fiery redhead grew deeply attached to every sentence. After the manuscript hit the floor of Congress for debate, Jefferson slumped in his chair and sulked as his colleagues argued over it. They only cut about one-quarter of his words, but Jefferson felt they’d “mangled” his baby.
Among the edits were some of the more serious passages, like a section that dealt with the evils of slavery. But Congress jefferson-grave.jpgalso cut out much of the melodrama. Jefferson wrote of the British, “Manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren. We must endeavor to forget our former love for them.” Harsh, no? Typical break-up letter material, but harsh.
Jefferson remained bitter about Congress’ edits for years, but his ego eventually healed. By the end of his life, he was taking measures to ensure that “Author of the Declaration of American Independence” would be engraved on his tombstone.
Thomas Jefferson’s (Somewhat Unorthodox) Pursuit of Happiness
For Jefferson, the pursuit of happiness often meant breaking the rules.
His Five-Finger Discount: While serving as ambassador to France, Jefferson discovered that Italian rice was tastier than American rice. Always looking for ways to improve U.S. agriculture, Jefferson figured he’d just cross the Alps to pick some up. Easier said than done. The Italians wanted to protect their crop from foreign competition, so taking rice out of the country was punishable by death. Instead of heeding the law, a cavalier Jefferson stuffed his pockets with the grains and then hired a mule-driver to smuggle two sacks of the stuff into France. He then brought the rice back to the United States, where it’s still grown today.
His Slacker Style: When Jefferson became president, he never wanted to be confused as a king. He wouldn’t let visitors bow to him, and thereby inadvertently began the custom of presidential handshakes. Further, dinner at the White House was always an informal affair, and Jefferson often showed up sweating in his riding clothes. Stranger still, when a British minister once paid him a visit at the White House, the casual president simply answered the door in his pajamas.
Top Biographical Movies Based on Musicians Lives
La Bamba (1987)
This movie is based on the story of young Ritchie Valens, the rock & roll pioneer who had a string of hits in his 8 month professional career as a recording artist. Valens career was cut short when he died in a plane crash at the age of 17. Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” were also on board this plane as it was traveling to North Dakota on February 3rd 1959, this has become known as the day the music died.
Lou Diamond Philips, was 25 years old when he played the 17 year old Valens. This film is generally regarded as his breakthrough role. The movie was nominated for a 1988 Golden Globe Award for best Motion Picture Drama.
Selena (1997)
Based on the story of Selena Quintanilla-Perez, the Grammy Award winning Mexican American singer, who was killed at the age of 23 by the president of her fan club; Selena was released by her family only 2 years after the tragic murder. I personally first heard of Selena after she had passed away when her English speaking album was released. Selena was extremely popular in the Hispanic community and over 60,000 mourners attended her funeral.
This movie made Jennifer Lopez a star. She beat out over 12,000 actresses to play Selena and was nominated for a Golden Globe for this role.
The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
Based on the life of Buddy Holly the famous rock musician in the 1950’s who died in the same plane crash as Ritchie Valens. Buddy Holly is also known as one of the first Caucasian bands to play at the famous Apollo Theatre.
Although he is known more for his unusual behaviour now than anything else, Gary Busey was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Holly. He was 10 years older than Holly at the time of his death, lost 32 pounds to play the role and along with the other actors did all of his own singing and played his own instruments for the musical numbers in the film.
This clip chronicles the famous Apollo Theatre incident.
What’s Love Got To Do With It (1993)
This is the movie adaptation of Tina Turner’s biography. It is extremely graphic in it’s vivid description of the domestic abuse that Tina endured from her husband Ike Turner during their tumultuous working and personal relationship. Both Laurence Fishburn and Angela Bassett were nominated for Academy Awards for their portrayals of the Turner’s.
Angela Bassett is praised for her role, as well she should be. Ms. Bassett went on a rigorous training schedule to gain Turner’s notoriously well tone figure, not to mention the song lyrics and dance routines she memorized for the musical numbers. Bassett won a Golden Globe for best actress for her portrayal, the first African American female to do so.
This clip shows off exactly why Bassett deserved the win, and although there is not a lot of violence in this clip I would strongly recommend that you be aware that the rest of the movie is extremely graphic.
Ray (2004)
Known as the movie that proved Jamie Foxx was more than just a background comedian, Ray is the story of Ray Charles, legendary pianist who at the age of 7 was blinded in an accident but through perseverance shaped the sound of Rhythm and Blues music as we know it.
This movie was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and won two including a Best Actor nod for Jamie Foxx. Foxx wore prosthetics so that he was unable to see and played all the piano scenes in the film himself.
Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)
This is one of my favourite films and I think the performances are brilliant. Sissy Spacek was hand picked by Loretta Lynn to star in this movie based on the biography that she co-wrote. Both Spacek and Beverly D’Angelo, who portrayed Patsy Cline in the film, performed all of their own material. The movie follows Lynn’s life from the backwoods of Kentucky to Country Superstardom.
Enclosed is a clip that showcases Spacek and D’Angelo’s friendship but it unfortunately has many of the performances cut out for some reason.
The Pianist (2002)
This movie is based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, an accomplished pianist in 1930’s Poland. When Poland is invaded by the Nazi’s in 1939 Szpilman becomes a prisoner and slave labourer before ultimately being freed after the occupation.
This movie was nominated for and won several awards most notable of which include winning the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes. As well the film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards and won 3 including Best Director for Roman Polanski and Best Actor for Adrien Brody in the lead role making him, at age 29, the youngest actor to win the award.
In preparation for this role Brody became a shut in and gave up many of his possessions so that he may understand what it might have been like in the situation. In addition he lost 30 pounds and learned to play Chopin on the piano.
Amadeus (1984)
This movie is based upon the lives of Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the competitive atmosphere surrounding them in 18th Century Austria.
I have not seen the entire movie but I have seen enough to know that the performances were brilliant. This movie is funny, dramatic and sad sometimes within 5 minutes. But We can let the numbers speak for themselves. Amadeus was nominated for 53 separate awards including 11 Oscar nominations. It went on to win 40 of those nominations, 8 of which were Academy Awards. Included in those 8 were Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director. In a rare occurrence it should be noted that both actors who portrayed Salieri and Mozart were nominated for Best Actor.
Walk The Line (2005)
This movie is based on Johnny Cash’s life, going from his childhood through his drug addiction and exploring his hidden romance and eventual marriage to June Carter Cash. Johnny and June are played by Joaquin Phoenix and June Carter respectively and are brilliant in their performances. They both learned to play all their own instruments and performed all of the songs themselves.
Both Phoenix and Witherspoon were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances with Witherspoon winning the Best Actress award. It was rumoured that Phoenix’s subsequent admission to rehab for alcoholism was due in part to the fact that he became addicted while preparing for the part.
This movie is based on the story of young Ritchie Valens, the rock & roll pioneer who had a string of hits in his 8 month professional career as a recording artist. Valens career was cut short when he died in a plane crash at the age of 17. Buddy Holly and “The Big Bopper” were also on board this plane as it was traveling to North Dakota on February 3rd 1959, this has become known as the day the music died.
Lou Diamond Philips, was 25 years old when he played the 17 year old Valens. This film is generally regarded as his breakthrough role. The movie was nominated for a 1988 Golden Globe Award for best Motion Picture Drama.
Selena (1997)
Based on the story of Selena Quintanilla-Perez, the Grammy Award winning Mexican American singer, who was killed at the age of 23 by the president of her fan club; Selena was released by her family only 2 years after the tragic murder. I personally first heard of Selena after she had passed away when her English speaking album was released. Selena was extremely popular in the Hispanic community and over 60,000 mourners attended her funeral.
This movie made Jennifer Lopez a star. She beat out over 12,000 actresses to play Selena and was nominated for a Golden Globe for this role.
The Buddy Holly Story (1978)
Based on the life of Buddy Holly the famous rock musician in the 1950’s who died in the same plane crash as Ritchie Valens. Buddy Holly is also known as one of the first Caucasian bands to play at the famous Apollo Theatre.
Although he is known more for his unusual behaviour now than anything else, Gary Busey was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Holly. He was 10 years older than Holly at the time of his death, lost 32 pounds to play the role and along with the other actors did all of his own singing and played his own instruments for the musical numbers in the film.
This clip chronicles the famous Apollo Theatre incident.
What’s Love Got To Do With It (1993)
This is the movie adaptation of Tina Turner’s biography. It is extremely graphic in it’s vivid description of the domestic abuse that Tina endured from her husband Ike Turner during their tumultuous working and personal relationship. Both Laurence Fishburn and Angela Bassett were nominated for Academy Awards for their portrayals of the Turner’s.
Angela Bassett is praised for her role, as well she should be. Ms. Bassett went on a rigorous training schedule to gain Turner’s notoriously well tone figure, not to mention the song lyrics and dance routines she memorized for the musical numbers. Bassett won a Golden Globe for best actress for her portrayal, the first African American female to do so.
This clip shows off exactly why Bassett deserved the win, and although there is not a lot of violence in this clip I would strongly recommend that you be aware that the rest of the movie is extremely graphic.
Ray (2004)
Known as the movie that proved Jamie Foxx was more than just a background comedian, Ray is the story of Ray Charles, legendary pianist who at the age of 7 was blinded in an accident but through perseverance shaped the sound of Rhythm and Blues music as we know it.
This movie was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and won two including a Best Actor nod for Jamie Foxx. Foxx wore prosthetics so that he was unable to see and played all the piano scenes in the film himself.
Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)
This is one of my favourite films and I think the performances are brilliant. Sissy Spacek was hand picked by Loretta Lynn to star in this movie based on the biography that she co-wrote. Both Spacek and Beverly D’Angelo, who portrayed Patsy Cline in the film, performed all of their own material. The movie follows Lynn’s life from the backwoods of Kentucky to Country Superstardom.
Enclosed is a clip that showcases Spacek and D’Angelo’s friendship but it unfortunately has many of the performances cut out for some reason.
The Pianist (2002)
This movie is based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, an accomplished pianist in 1930’s Poland. When Poland is invaded by the Nazi’s in 1939 Szpilman becomes a prisoner and slave labourer before ultimately being freed after the occupation.
This movie was nominated for and won several awards most notable of which include winning the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes. As well the film was nominated for 7 Academy Awards and won 3 including Best Director for Roman Polanski and Best Actor for Adrien Brody in the lead role making him, at age 29, the youngest actor to win the award.
In preparation for this role Brody became a shut in and gave up many of his possessions so that he may understand what it might have been like in the situation. In addition he lost 30 pounds and learned to play Chopin on the piano.
Amadeus (1984)
This movie is based upon the lives of Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the competitive atmosphere surrounding them in 18th Century Austria.
I have not seen the entire movie but I have seen enough to know that the performances were brilliant. This movie is funny, dramatic and sad sometimes within 5 minutes. But We can let the numbers speak for themselves. Amadeus was nominated for 53 separate awards including 11 Oscar nominations. It went on to win 40 of those nominations, 8 of which were Academy Awards. Included in those 8 were Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director. In a rare occurrence it should be noted that both actors who portrayed Salieri and Mozart were nominated for Best Actor.
Walk The Line (2005)
This movie is based on Johnny Cash’s life, going from his childhood through his drug addiction and exploring his hidden romance and eventual marriage to June Carter Cash. Johnny and June are played by Joaquin Phoenix and June Carter respectively and are brilliant in their performances. They both learned to play all their own instruments and performed all of the songs themselves.
Both Phoenix and Witherspoon were nominated for Academy Awards for their performances with Witherspoon winning the Best Actress award. It was rumoured that Phoenix’s subsequent admission to rehab for alcoholism was due in part to the fact that he became addicted while preparing for the part.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
How Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca
How Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 19/04/2008
Page 1 of 3
Suspicion within Daphne du Maurier's own marriage fuelled the tense, macabre plot of Rebecca, says Matthew Dennison
In 1937, Daphne du Maurier signed a three-book deal with Victor Gollancz. She was 30 years old, the author of four previous novels, including, most recently, Jamaica Inn. She knew already the title of the first of the books she would write for Gollancz: Rebecca. Beyond that point, she had scarcely thought. On and off for the past five years she had been toying with an idea. Its theme was jealousy.
It came to Daphne the year she married Frederick "Boy" Browning, whom she called Tommy. Tommy had been engaged before - to glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne.
She accepted from Gollancz an advance of £1,000 - the equivalent of 18 months of Tommy's pay as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards - and prepared to set to work.
Nothing came. The paper in her typewriter remained blank. Sluggishly, she wrote 50 pages, all consigned to the waste-paper basket. To Gollancz she wrote a desperate apology: "The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather..."
Daphne was in Alexandria with Tommy, the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards and a crowd of English expats she loftily dismissed as "horrible Manchester folk". Waking from a dream into the bright light of a foreign hotel, the narrator of the novel with which she struggled so hopelessly would find herself "bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky".
In Egypt that summer Daphne, too, was bewildered: unnerved by the climate, the landscape and the prescriptive regimental social life. Gollancz expected her manuscript on her return to Britain in December. "I'm ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel," she wrote to him. "There is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished manuscript in December."
Without Daphne's failure of maternal instinct, Rebecca would never have been written.
"I am not one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time," she wrote later. She and Tommy had departed for Alexandria on 30 July, leaving behind them four-year-old Tessa and the three-month-old Flavia.
On their return, Daphne straight away formulated a plan to spend Christmas apart from her daughters. Child-free quiet was the only hope for Rebecca. She was not, she assured her own mother, "a brute".Daphne du Maurier was hesitant about Rebecca
In her daughters' absence she worked quickly. Eighty years ago this month, no more than four months after she started work, Daphne delivered her manuscript.
If she was characteristically hesitant about Rebecca's qualities, her hesitation was not shared by anyone in Victor Gollancz's office. Her editor, Norman Collins, reported simply: "The new Daphne du Maurier contains everything that the public could want."
Gollancz did not hang around. He ordered a first print run of 20,000 copies and within a month Rebecca had sold more than twice that number. It remains Daphne du Maurier's best-loved novel, continuously in print through eight decades.
In 1993, when Susan Hill published her sequel to Rebecca, Mrs De Winter, du Maurier's US publishers Avon estimated ongoing monthly paperback sales of Rebecca at more than 4,000 copies. No mean feat for a novel whose writer haltingly described it as "a bit on the gloomy side", and which V S Pritchett, in the Christian Science Monitor of 14 September 1938, predicted would be here today, gone tomorrow.
Coyly and with a degree of considered obfuscation, Daphne du Maurier "remembered" Rebecca's gestation in The Rebecca Notebook of 1981. "Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..."She categorised Rebecca as a study in jealousy, although she admitted its origins in her own life to few. She feigned surprise at the novel's enduring popularity, but was vocal in her disappointment when Gollancz failed to honour subsequent novels with print runs reflecting Rebecca's commercial success.
Agatha Christie earned her ire by echoing the question so many readers had asked her: why does the narrator have no name?
Perhaps du Maurier looked with greater amusement on reports that Field Marshal Rommel kept a copy of Rebecca at his headquarters: though ultimately it would not be used, the Nazis mined Rebecca as the source for a code for German agents infiltrating Cairo.Rebecca is, as Daphne intended it, "about a young wife and her slightly older husband, living in a beautiful house that had been in his family for generations".
Its nameless narrator is traditionally identified with Daphne herself - she has "a very lovely and unusual name" which people frequently misspell; she is shy and socially ill at ease. In Monte Carlo she falls in love with a handsome, inscrutable man old enough to be her father.
Maximilian de Winter, like the narrator, is staying at the Hôtel Côte d'Azur. He encounters the narrator in her role as paid companion to an exacting American matron, Mrs Van Hopper.
An air of mystery clings to de Winter. He is a man on the run, desperate to escape the shadows of the past, the memories and associations of his beautiful Cornish house, Manderley. He proposes marriage, the narrator accepts. They return to Manderley and the ghosts of de Winter's past.
The house hides dark secrets. All concern de Winter's first wife, Rebecca, a triumphantly lovely creature - like Jan Ricardo. Norman Collins reported to Victor Gollancz that Rebecca "brilliantly creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense" and Manderley is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar.
Both house and novel acquire a dream-like quality. Into this steps the nightmarish figure of Mrs Danvers, gothic housekeeper and devoted Rebecca acolyte. Mrs Danvers unsettles the second Mrs de Winter, who finds herself overmastered by Manderley - its grandeur, its memories, its personnel and, most of all, its master, whose behaviour here seems so remote, so changed.
Du Maurier's storytelling instinct was better developed than her prose style and the plot crackles. The pages fly. Tension and suspense mount. As she wrote in her notes prior to beginning work, "I want to built up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens."
That something involves hatred, adultery, shipwreck and deceit. To bring about the novel's happy ending demands no less than the reader's collusion in a husband's murder of his wife.
Rebecca contains elements of romance, murder mystery and the gothic novel: it defies easy categorisation, but parallels with Jane Eyre are unavoidable. Its plot - like Rebecca's boat at the centre of its mystery - is less than wholly watertight. Yet it worked in 1938, when Victor Gollancz was able to market is as "an exquisite love story", and it works today.
Readers unmoved by the second Mrs de Winter's surrender to Maxim respond to Rebecca's darker face - as Daphne described it, "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower... Psychological and rather macabre".
Daphne du Maurier found Egypt no place for romance or suspense. In bright rented rooms in Alexandria, inspiration failed her. The sun of North Africa seared into her imagination an image of unconventional exoticism, a "sleeping" Cornish mansion with which she had already fallen in love and which later would become her home for quarter of a century - Menabilly, the novel's Manderley.
Rebecca is a love letter to a lost homeland; it is a story about the balance of power between men and women. Like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, written the previous decade, it is a hymn to a vanished race of men who were somehow larger and better than mere mortals.Rebecca is, of course, a study in jealousy. But it is also about holding on to happiness: "I wanted to go on sitting here, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time". Repeatedly it lures the reader towards that dreamer's goal, at the same time acknowledging its impossibility: "We can never go back again, that much is certain."
Daphne and Tommy Browning, like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, were not faithful to one another. Jan Ricardo, tragically, died during the Second World War. She threw herself under a train.
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 19/04/2008
Page 1 of 3
Suspicion within Daphne du Maurier's own marriage fuelled the tense, macabre plot of Rebecca, says Matthew Dennison
In 1937, Daphne du Maurier signed a three-book deal with Victor Gollancz. She was 30 years old, the author of four previous novels, including, most recently, Jamaica Inn. She knew already the title of the first of the books she would write for Gollancz: Rebecca. Beyond that point, she had scarcely thought. On and off for the past five years she had been toying with an idea. Its theme was jealousy.
It came to Daphne the year she married Frederick "Boy" Browning, whom she called Tommy. Tommy had been engaged before - to glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne.
She accepted from Gollancz an advance of £1,000 - the equivalent of 18 months of Tommy's pay as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Grenadier Guards - and prepared to set to work.
Nothing came. The paper in her typewriter remained blank. Sluggishly, she wrote 50 pages, all consigned to the waste-paper basket. To Gollancz she wrote a desperate apology: "The first 15,000 words I tore up in disgust and this literary miscarriage has cast me down rather..."
Daphne was in Alexandria with Tommy, the Second Battalion of the Grenadier Guards and a crowd of English expats she loftily dismissed as "horrible Manchester folk". Waking from a dream into the bright light of a foreign hotel, the narrator of the novel with which she struggled so hopelessly would find herself "bewildered at that glittering sun, that hard, clean sky".
In Egypt that summer Daphne, too, was bewildered: unnerved by the climate, the landscape and the prescriptive regimental social life. Gollancz expected her manuscript on her return to Britain in December. "I'm ashamed to tell you that progress is slow on the new novel," she wrote to him. "There is little likelihood of my bringing back a finished manuscript in December."
Without Daphne's failure of maternal instinct, Rebecca would never have been written.
"I am not one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time," she wrote later. She and Tommy had departed for Alexandria on 30 July, leaving behind them four-year-old Tessa and the three-month-old Flavia.
On their return, Daphne straight away formulated a plan to spend Christmas apart from her daughters. Child-free quiet was the only hope for Rebecca. She was not, she assured her own mother, "a brute".Daphne du Maurier was hesitant about Rebecca
In her daughters' absence she worked quickly. Eighty years ago this month, no more than four months after she started work, Daphne delivered her manuscript.
If she was characteristically hesitant about Rebecca's qualities, her hesitation was not shared by anyone in Victor Gollancz's office. Her editor, Norman Collins, reported simply: "The new Daphne du Maurier contains everything that the public could want."
Gollancz did not hang around. He ordered a first print run of 20,000 copies and within a month Rebecca had sold more than twice that number. It remains Daphne du Maurier's best-loved novel, continuously in print through eight decades.
In 1993, when Susan Hill published her sequel to Rebecca, Mrs De Winter, du Maurier's US publishers Avon estimated ongoing monthly paperback sales of Rebecca at more than 4,000 copies. No mean feat for a novel whose writer haltingly described it as "a bit on the gloomy side", and which V S Pritchett, in the Christian Science Monitor of 14 September 1938, predicted would be here today, gone tomorrow.
Coyly and with a degree of considered obfuscation, Daphne du Maurier "remembered" Rebecca's gestation in The Rebecca Notebook of 1981. "Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..."She categorised Rebecca as a study in jealousy, although she admitted its origins in her own life to few. She feigned surprise at the novel's enduring popularity, but was vocal in her disappointment when Gollancz failed to honour subsequent novels with print runs reflecting Rebecca's commercial success.
Agatha Christie earned her ire by echoing the question so many readers had asked her: why does the narrator have no name?
Perhaps du Maurier looked with greater amusement on reports that Field Marshal Rommel kept a copy of Rebecca at his headquarters: though ultimately it would not be used, the Nazis mined Rebecca as the source for a code for German agents infiltrating Cairo.Rebecca is, as Daphne intended it, "about a young wife and her slightly older husband, living in a beautiful house that had been in his family for generations".
Its nameless narrator is traditionally identified with Daphne herself - she has "a very lovely and unusual name" which people frequently misspell; she is shy and socially ill at ease. In Monte Carlo she falls in love with a handsome, inscrutable man old enough to be her father.
Maximilian de Winter, like the narrator, is staying at the Hôtel Côte d'Azur. He encounters the narrator in her role as paid companion to an exacting American matron, Mrs Van Hopper.
An air of mystery clings to de Winter. He is a man on the run, desperate to escape the shadows of the past, the memories and associations of his beautiful Cornish house, Manderley. He proposes marriage, the narrator accepts. They return to Manderley and the ghosts of de Winter's past.
The house hides dark secrets. All concern de Winter's first wife, Rebecca, a triumphantly lovely creature - like Jan Ricardo. Norman Collins reported to Victor Gollancz that Rebecca "brilliantly creates a sense of atmosphere and suspense" and Manderley is as much an atmosphere as a tangible erection of stones and mortar.
Both house and novel acquire a dream-like quality. Into this steps the nightmarish figure of Mrs Danvers, gothic housekeeper and devoted Rebecca acolyte. Mrs Danvers unsettles the second Mrs de Winter, who finds herself overmastered by Manderley - its grandeur, its memories, its personnel and, most of all, its master, whose behaviour here seems so remote, so changed.
Du Maurier's storytelling instinct was better developed than her prose style and the plot crackles. The pages fly. Tension and suspense mount. As she wrote in her notes prior to beginning work, "I want to built up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG! something happens."
That something involves hatred, adultery, shipwreck and deceit. To bring about the novel's happy ending demands no less than the reader's collusion in a husband's murder of his wife.
Rebecca contains elements of romance, murder mystery and the gothic novel: it defies easy categorisation, but parallels with Jane Eyre are unavoidable. Its plot - like Rebecca's boat at the centre of its mystery - is less than wholly watertight. Yet it worked in 1938, when Victor Gollancz was able to market is as "an exquisite love story", and it works today.
Readers unmoved by the second Mrs de Winter's surrender to Maxim respond to Rebecca's darker face - as Daphne described it, "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower... Psychological and rather macabre".
Daphne du Maurier found Egypt no place for romance or suspense. In bright rented rooms in Alexandria, inspiration failed her. The sun of North Africa seared into her imagination an image of unconventional exoticism, a "sleeping" Cornish mansion with which she had already fallen in love and which later would become her home for quarter of a century - Menabilly, the novel's Manderley.
Rebecca is a love letter to a lost homeland; it is a story about the balance of power between men and women. Like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, written the previous decade, it is a hymn to a vanished race of men who were somehow larger and better than mere mortals.Rebecca is, of course, a study in jealousy. But it is also about holding on to happiness: "I wanted to go on sitting here, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time". Repeatedly it lures the reader towards that dreamer's goal, at the same time acknowledging its impossibility: "We can never go back again, that much is certain."
Daphne and Tommy Browning, like Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter, were not faithful to one another. Jan Ricardo, tragically, died during the Second World War. She threw herself under a train.
Monday, April 21, 2008
2001 profile of "Bill Ayers, unrepentant former Weather Underground revolutionary"
2001 profile of "Bill Ayers, unrepentant former Weather Underground revolutionary"
By Mark Frauenfelder
Now that former Weather Undergrounder Bill Ayers is back in the news, this 2001 Slate profile of him is worth reading. He comes off as an extremely unsavory character.
Much of what Ayers self-interestedly leaves out of his book is more personally embarrassing than illegal. Ayers takes care not to dwell on his own Establishment credentials. (His father was chairman of the energy company Commonwealth Edison, a fact Ayers conveys only by writing, "My dad worked for Edison.") Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn's famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she'd been trying to convey that "Americans love to read about violence.")
Calvin Coolidge: The Quiet Riot
h, the Roaring Twenties—an era defined by flappers, jazz, gangsters, speakeasies, and … the most boring president ever!
Calvin Coolidge, a buttoned-up Puritan from New England, wasn’t much for hobnobbing, even when it could have helped him politically. His wife, Grace, liked to tell people about the time a woman approached her husband and said, “I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” Coolidge’s reply? “You lose.”
But what most people don’t know about Silent Cal is that he could be quite the prankster. Sometimes, he’d ring the buzzer at the White House, wait for all the maids and ushers to snap to attention, and then run away.
When he wasn’t pestering his servants or being the mute of the party, Calvin Coolidge slept—eight hours a night, plus two or three hours in the afternoon. In fact, his very first act as president of the United States was to go to sleep. At the time, in 1923, Vice President Coolidge was visiting his parents’ farm in Vermont. After a hard day in the fields, a tuckered-out Coolidge went to sleep at 9 pm. Then, in the middle of the night, a messenger arrived to announce that President Warren G. Harding was dead. Coolidge needed to be sworn in immediately, so it was particularly convenient that his father happened to be a notary public. They conducted an impromptu inauguration ceremony in the living room, lit by kerosene lamps, after which Calvin promptly went back to bed.
Of course, all of this would be simply quaint and amusing had Harding’s sleepy, hands-off style not laid the groundwork for the Great Depression. Coolidge disdained welfare and put all of his faith in the free market. He passed pro-business tax cuts and let industry go unregulated. And when it came to the plight of the American farmer, he was aloof to the point of being cold. He vetoed two bills designed to protect farmers from the boom-and-bust cycle of the economy, mostly because he thought farming was a lost cause. He once told the chairman of the Federal Farm Loan Board, “Well, farmers never have made money. I don’t believe we can do much about it.” Coolidge quietly left office on March 4, 1929, and Black Tuesday struck on October 29.
My Young Years': Rubinstein's Enchanting Prelude
My Young Years': Rubinstein's Enchanting Prelude
The classical pianist wrote the memoir of his early life when he was in his 80s.
The classical pianist wrote the memoir of his early life when he was in his 80s. (1967 Photo By Eddie Adams)
Enlarge Photo
TOOLBOX
Resize Text
Save/Share +
Digg
Newsvine
del.icio.us
Stumble It!
myspace
Yahoo! Buzz
Print This
E-mail This
COMMENT
No comments have been posted yet about this item. Be the first!
POST A COMMENT
You must be logged in to leave a comment. Log in | Register
Why Do I Have to Log In Again?
Log In Again?
CLOSE
We've made some updates to washingtonpost.com's Groups, MyPost and comment pages. We need you to verify your MyPost ID by logging in before you can post to the new pages. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Discussion Policy
Discussion Policy
CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging
» Links to this article
By JONATHAN YARDLEY
Saturday, April 19, 2008; Page C01
An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.
Midway through "My Young Years," his memoir of the first three decades of what turned out to be an exceptionally long life, the incomparable classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein recalls an anecdote about two cousins, one of them "the greatest Don Juan of his time," who became involved with the same beautiful woman but whose friendship managed to survive this rather extreme complication. Rubinstein tells the tale and then shrugs: "Even if it were only half-true, it was a good story."
That is exactly how I feel about "My Young Years." How much of it is true and how much mere invention no one now can say -- Rubinstein died a quarter-century ago at the age of 95, and all his contemporaries are long since gone -- but veracity in this case really matters less than the unflagging zest with which Rubinstein recalls those years between 1887, when he was born in Poland, and 1917, when his career as a concert pianist finally began to achieve the success that had been predicted for him since he was a boy. Published in 1973, and followed seven years later by the rather less interesting "My Many Years," "My Young Years" was an international bestseller. It now is out of print, a puzzling development when one considers that Rubinstein's recordings, especially of Chopin, continue to be played and admired.
Whatever the explanation for its disappearance from the bookstores, "My Young Years" remains a classic autobiography in the grand manner. Unlike the memoirs that now crowd the bookshelves, exercises in self-administered therapy in which narcissistic narrators of no apparent accomplishment whine ad nauseam about real or imagined angst, this is an exuberant account of what Rubinstein calls, in his brief foreword, "the struggles, the mistakes, the adventures, and . . . the miraculous beauty and happiness of my young years." His was a life lived to the full, with triumphs and disappointments galore, and by the time he reached his 80s and began to write this book, Rubinstein had such great stature that his story virtually commanded readers' attention.
It was written in English, one of several languages in which Rubinstein was fluent, and it is written remarkably well, with scarcely a trace of the diction of his native Polish or the other languages (Russian, German, French) he spoke during his youth. I first read it about 30 years ago -- my copy is the third printing of the 1973 paperback -- when I was in the midst of a Rubinstein binge, gobbling up his recordings of Chopin, his fellow Pole, one after the other. I make no claim to particular knowledge of classical music, but I was drawn then (as I am now) to the lyricism and abundant feeling of Rubinstein's Chopin, and I simply wanted to know more about the man who made the music. I was enchanted by the book then, and I remain enchanted by it today.
Rubinstein says, in the same foreword, "I have never kept a diary, and even if I had, it would have been lost with all the rest of my belongings in the two world wars. But, it is my good fortune to be endowed with an uncanny memory which allows me to trace my whole long life almost day by day." This is why the reader does well to approach the book with a certain amount of friendly skepticism, especially with regard to the author's accounts of his numerous youthful amours, but the overall impression it conveys is that veracity wins out over invention. No doubt the many conversations Rubinstein recalls fall considerably short of total accuracy, but they have the clear ring of truth, a sense that is heightened by Rubinstein's willingness to portray himself in an unflattering light when circumstances call for it and by the mixture of pride and self-deprecation with which he describes his formative years.
He was born in Lodz into a relatively prosperous family. His musical gifts became apparent when he was very young, and he was taken to Berlin to undergo the scrutiny of the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim, who "took it upon himself to direct my musical and cultural education," not as his teacher but as his mentor. At the outset, "one important stipulation that Professor Joachim made was that my mother had to promise not to exploit me as a child prodigy" and he "insisted that I should get a full education until I was artistically mature." Rubinstein seems to have been less a supervised student than an autodidact whose learning was scattershot, but he became a deeply cultured man with passionate opinions across a broad range of subjects.
He had more than a little bit of a lazy streak -- he had a "capacity to work well only if there was something special to work for, like a concert, or, later, my recordings" -- and it became a problem as his musical education proceeded. By the time he was well into his 20s he had begun to accumulate a reputation in Europe and had made his first tour of the United States, but his "repertoire needed expansion." He writes:
"Two major Beethoven sonatas, short pieces by Brahms and Schumann, and the great B minor Sonata of Chopin were added to it in less than two weeks. As before, and as would prove true for many years after, the processes of my means of approach to the music at hand were made up of a peculiar combination: a clear conception of the structure of a composition and complete empathy with the composer's intentions were always within my reach, but because of my lazy habits, I would neglect to pay attention to detail and to a finished and articulate performance of difficult passages that I hated to practice. I used to put the whole weight on the inner message of the music."
Doubtless his laziness was aided and abetted by his sheer precocity. The piano came so naturally and easily to him that he could get by with half an effort where lesser performers would have had to practice endlessly and still would have come up short. He also, notwithstanding all the depth of his love for music, had a somewhat cynical attitude toward audiences: "I learned . . . that a loud, smashing performance, even the worst from a musical standpoint, will always get an enthusiastic reception by the uninitiated, unmusical part of the audience, and I exploited this knowledge, I admit it with shame, in many concerts to come." Beyond that, he was as much a born playboy as a born pianist. He began having affairs, mostly with older women, when he was barely out of short pants, and he was always good for a party, a game of pool or poker, a boisterous conversation into the smallest hours of the morning.
Not to mince words, he could be childish and irresponsible. He was "totally devoid of a sense of economy -- a failure that has proved fatal for most of my life" -- and seems to have felt a deep sense of entitlement where other people's money was concerned. Sometime early in the 20th century (he is not great about supplying dates), while still a teenager, he found himself down and out in Paris, living "the excruciating life of someone constantly short of money, constantly in debt," a period that "was typical of my life for many years, consisting as it did of the discrepancy between the daily struggle for survival and the frequent escapes into [the] most refined luxuries," escapes that were made possible by friends, of whom he had many, and by music lovers eager to be in his company.
He could be totally shameless. Once he persuaded a friend to tide him over with a large amount of money. When the friend agreed, Rubinstein immediately proposed that they blow it all on a trip to Paris, London and other stops on the glitterati trail, which is exactly what they did. He doesn't really seem to have been spoiled -- by the time he was in his teens, he was pretty much estranged from his family -- but was merely willful and self-indulgent. There are moments when one wants to wring his neck, but the candor with which he confesses his youthful misadventures is so free and unaffected that these moments soon pass. Obviously he was immensely likable. He had many friends who were, or would become, famous in musical and artistic circles -- Pablo Casals, Fyodor Chaliapin, Karol Szymanowski, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev -- but his accounts of these friendships never sound like mere name-dropping. These simply were the circles in which he traveled.
Much of his time in those early years was spent in the salons of the wealthy, the titled and the privileged. Hanging around with these sublimely boring people doesn't seem to have bothered him -- after all, they brought a fair amount of money his way -- but one of his best stories is at their expense. The great Polish pianist and patriot Ignace Jan Paderewski was asked to perform privately for an English duchess. He "demanded a very large sum of money which was readily granted." Then "he received a letter from the Duchess: 'Dear Maestro, accept my regrets for not inviting you to the dinner. As a professional artist, you will be more at ease in a nice room where you can rest before the concert. Yours, etc.' " Paderewski replied: "Dear Duchess: thanks for your letter. As you so kindly inform me that I am not obliged to be present at your dinner, I shall be satisfied with half of my fee. Yours, etc."
There are many other delicious stories in this book's nearly 500 pages. There is also a pervasive sense of the lost world of pre-World War I Europe, "the long era of the easy, peaceful intercourse between nations, of gracious living, of good taste, of good manners, of prosperity," a world that, with the war's onset, "was gone forever." Thus for all the happiness with which this book is imbued -- his "secret of happiness," Rubinstein writes, is, "Love life for better or for worse, without conditions" -- there is also an undercurrent of sadness, of grief not merely for the author's youth but for the world in which he lived it. All in all "My Young Years" is a lovely book, and it's a real pity that prospective readers must go hunting for it in used bookstores and libraries or buy it online.
Friday, April 18, 2008
LBJ: The President Who Marked His Territory
Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to be remembered as the greatest president who ever lived. With that grand ambition in mind (and an ego to match), he launched such sweeping social programs as Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, public radio, public television, and food stamps. Regardless, Johnson will probably be best remembered for his blinding arrogance, and what many would point to as the result of it—the Vietnam War.
But here, we’re choosing to remember Johnson not by the many political wheels he set into motion, but by the stuff he kept by his side—and close to his heart.
LBJ-Richard-Russell.jpg
His Toilet
Johnson lived to dominate, and he used crass behavior to bend people to his will. At 6-ft., 3-in. tall and 210 lbs., he liked to lean over people, spitting, swearing, belching, or laughing in their faces. Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.” His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him—forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet. [Image: LBJ and Senator Richard Russell, courtesy of the National Archives.]
His Car
When President Johnson was visiting his ranch in Texas, he’d invite friends down and take them for a joyride in his car. He’d drive down a steep incline toward the lake, pretend to lose control, and then yell, “The brakes don’t work! We’re going in! We’re going under!” The car would splash into the lake, and as everyone else was screaming, Johnson would be doubled over laughing. Turns out, Johnson was the proud owner of an Amphicar, the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.
His Presidential Buzzer
When people told stories about John F. Kennedy’s great female conquests (and they often did), it made Johnson furious. He’d pound his fists on the desk and scream, “Why, I had more women on accident than he ever had on purpose!” And that may very well have been true. Johnson brought a lot of pretty young things back from Texas to work in the White House, even if they couldn’t type. He even had a buzzer installed in the Oval Office so that the Secret Service could warn him when his wife was on her way.
His Helicopter Chair
LBJ loved riding in helicopters. He loved it so much, in fact, that his desk chair in the Oval Office was actually a vinyl helicopter seat—green with a built-in ashtray. In the event of a flood or an emergency water landing, the cushion could have doubled as a flotation device. No joke.
His Wife’s Pecan Pie Recipe
Lady-Bird.jpgClaudia “Lady Bird” Johnson was her husband’s most vital political ally. In the early days of their marriage, he could boss her into picking up his socks or shining his shoes, but by the time they moved into the White House, he couldn’t give a speech without consulting her first. During the 1960 election, she traveled 30,000 miles campaigning for the Kennedy/Johnson ticket; and after they won, Bobby Kennedy said they couldn’t have gotten Texas without her.
She played an even bigger role in the 1964 election. That July, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which barred racial and religious discrimination in public places and the workforce. In doing so, Johnson betrayed many good ol’ boys in the South, where he desperately needed votes. Enter Lady Bird. Armed with big hair and big makeup, the Texas native spewed Southern charm from Louisiana to South Carolina. And everywhere she went, she handed out her recipe for pecan pie. The hospitality worked. In 1965, Mrs. Johnson held the Bible as her husband was sworn into office.
His Monogrammed Towels
Everyone in the Johnson family had the same initials—Lyndon Baines, Lady Bird, and their daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. Don’t think for a moment that it was a coincidence, either. They named the family dog Little Beagle Johnson.
Jenny Drapkin is the Senior Editor of mental_floss magazine. We’re currently serializing “All The Presidents’ Secrets,” her fantastic feature from the September-October 2007 issue. Yesterday: Richard Nixon. Wednesday: Andrew Jackson. Tuesday: Teddy Roosevelt. Monday: Silent Cal.
But here, we’re choosing to remember Johnson not by the many political wheels he set into motion, but by the stuff he kept by his side—and close to his heart.
LBJ-Richard-Russell.jpg
His Toilet
Johnson lived to dominate, and he used crass behavior to bend people to his will. At 6-ft., 3-in. tall and 210 lbs., he liked to lean over people, spitting, swearing, belching, or laughing in their faces. Once, he even relieved himself on a Secret Serviceman who was shielding him from public view. When the man looked horrified, Johnson simply said, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.” His favorite power ploy, however, seemed to be dragging people into the bathroom with him—forcing them to continue their conversations with the president as he used the toilet. [Image: LBJ and Senator Richard Russell, courtesy of the National Archives.]
His Car
When President Johnson was visiting his ranch in Texas, he’d invite friends down and take them for a joyride in his car. He’d drive down a steep incline toward the lake, pretend to lose control, and then yell, “The brakes don’t work! We’re going in! We’re going under!” The car would splash into the lake, and as everyone else was screaming, Johnson would be doubled over laughing. Turns out, Johnson was the proud owner of an Amphicar, the only amphibious passenger automobile ever mass-produced for civilians.
His Presidential Buzzer
When people told stories about John F. Kennedy’s great female conquests (and they often did), it made Johnson furious. He’d pound his fists on the desk and scream, “Why, I had more women on accident than he ever had on purpose!” And that may very well have been true. Johnson brought a lot of pretty young things back from Texas to work in the White House, even if they couldn’t type. He even had a buzzer installed in the Oval Office so that the Secret Service could warn him when his wife was on her way.
His Helicopter Chair
LBJ loved riding in helicopters. He loved it so much, in fact, that his desk chair in the Oval Office was actually a vinyl helicopter seat—green with a built-in ashtray. In the event of a flood or an emergency water landing, the cushion could have doubled as a flotation device. No joke.
His Wife’s Pecan Pie Recipe
Lady-Bird.jpgClaudia “Lady Bird” Johnson was her husband’s most vital political ally. In the early days of their marriage, he could boss her into picking up his socks or shining his shoes, but by the time they moved into the White House, he couldn’t give a speech without consulting her first. During the 1960 election, she traveled 30,000 miles campaigning for the Kennedy/Johnson ticket; and after they won, Bobby Kennedy said they couldn’t have gotten Texas without her.
She played an even bigger role in the 1964 election. That July, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which barred racial and religious discrimination in public places and the workforce. In doing so, Johnson betrayed many good ol’ boys in the South, where he desperately needed votes. Enter Lady Bird. Armed with big hair and big makeup, the Texas native spewed Southern charm from Louisiana to South Carolina. And everywhere she went, she handed out her recipe for pecan pie. The hospitality worked. In 1965, Mrs. Johnson held the Bible as her husband was sworn into office.
His Monogrammed Towels
Everyone in the Johnson family had the same initials—Lyndon Baines, Lady Bird, and their daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. Don’t think for a moment that it was a coincidence, either. They named the family dog Little Beagle Johnson.
Jenny Drapkin is the Senior Editor of mental_floss magazine. We’re currently serializing “All The Presidents’ Secrets,” her fantastic feature from the September-October 2007 issue. Yesterday: Richard Nixon. Wednesday: Andrew Jackson. Tuesday: Teddy Roosevelt. Monday: Silent Cal.
RIP: "father of chaos theory," Edward Lorenz
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz, credited for having founded the field of chaos theory, died Wednesday of cancer in Massachusetts. He was 90 years old.
He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the "butterfly effect." He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.
His discovery of "deterministic chaos" brought about "one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton," said the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. It was one of many scientific awards that Lorenz won. There is no Nobel Prize for his specific field of expertise, meteorology.
Jerry Mahlman, a longtime friend, noted that the man who pioneered chaos theory was "the most organized person I ever knew."MIT prof Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory, dies at 90
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
Buy AP Photo Reprints
Your Questions Answered
Ask AP: Forced takeovers, borrowing from Social Security
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday. He was 90.
He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the "butterfly effect." He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.
His discovery of "deterministic chaos" brought about "one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton," said the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. It was one of many scientific awards that Lorenz won. There is no Nobel Prize for his specific field of expertise, meteorology.
Jerry Mahlman, a longtime friend, noted that the man who pioneered chaos theory was "the most organized person I ever knew."
Lorenz came up with the chaos theory concept in the 1960s through his own meticulous work habits, said Kevin Trenberth, a student of Lorenz's. Trenberth is now climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
He inadvertently ran what seemed like the same calculations through a creaky computer twice and came up with vastly different answers. When he tried to figure out what happened, he noticed a slight decimal point change - less than 0.0001 - wound up leading to significant error. That error became a seminal scientific paper, presented in 1972, about the butterfly effect.
Lorenz was "the quiet geek" who turned the old concept of "wiggle room" into hard numbers and scientific theory, said Mahlman, a retired federal climate scientist. Meteorologists today base their forecasts on his techniques. Lorenz's 1967 book "The Nature and Theory of the General Circulation of the Atmosphere" is considered a classic textbook in meteorology.
The concept of small changes turning into big effects also influenced many basic sciences. Other fields probably benefited more than meteorology, said MIT meteorology professor Alan Plumb.
Lorenz also was incredibly quiet. Getting him to talk was painfully difficult, his colleagues said, except around his late wife, Jane. He rarely wrote papers with others.
"Of all the geniuses of that era, he was the quietest and most humble and the most kind," said Mahlman.
Lorenz was born in West Hartford, Conn., in 1917 and later wrote in a biographical sketch: "As a boy I was always interested in doing things with numbers and was also fascinated by changes in the weather."
He had degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard University as well as MIT where he joined the meteorology staff in 1948. He later became department head and retired in 1987.
In 1983, with a colleague, he won the $50,000 Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which recognizes leaders in scientific fields not eligible for a Nobel.
Lorenz was an avid hiker and climber, who well into his 80s would "put many younger people to shame in terms of his fitness and love of going into the mountains," Trenberth said.
Lorenz is survived by three children.Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.
A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.
These observations ultimately led him to formulate what became known as the butterfly effect--a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled: "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Lorenz's early insights marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted not just the field of mathematics but virtually every branch of science--biological, physical and social. In meteorology, it led to the conclusion that it may be fundamentally impossible to predict weather beyond two or three weeks with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
Some scientists have since asserted that the 20th century will be remembered for three scientific revolutions--relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos.
"By showing that certain deterministic systems have formal predictability limits, Ed put the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian universe and fomented what some have called the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, following on the heels of relativity and quantum physics," said Kerry Emanuel professor of atmospheric science at MIT. "He was also a perfect gentleman, and through his intelligence, integrity and humility set a very high standard for his and succeeding generations."
Born in 1917 in West Hartford, Conn., Lorenz received an AB in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 1938, an AM in mathematics from Harvard University in 1940, an SM in meteorology from MIT in 1943 and an ScD in meteorology from MIT in 1948. It was while serving as a weather forecaster for the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II that he decided to do graduate work in meteorology at MIT.
"As a boy I was always interested in doing things with numbers, and was also fascinated by changes in the weather," Lorenz wrote in an autobiographical sketch.
Lorenz was a member of the staff of what was then MIT's Department of Meteorology from 1948 to 1955, when he was appointed to the faculty as an assistant professor. He was promoted to professor in 1962 and was head of the department from 1977 to 1981. He became an emeritus professor in 1987.
Lorenz, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, won numerous awards, honors and honorary degrees. In 1983, he and former MIT Professor Henry M. Stommel were jointly awarded the $50,000 Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a prize established to recognize fields not eligible for Nobel Prizes.
In 1991, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for basic sciences in the field of earth and planetary sciences. Lorenz was cited by the Kyoto Prize committee for establishing "the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology." The committee added that Lorenz "made his boldest scientific achievement in discovering 'deterministic chaos,' a principle which has profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton."
During leaves of absence from MIT, he held research or teaching positions at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.; the Department of Meteorology at the University of California at Los Angeles; the Det Norske Meteorologiske Insitutt in Oslo, Norway; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
An avid hiker and cross-country skier, Lorenz was active up until about two weeks before his death, his family said.
Lorenz is survived by three children, Nancy, Edward and Cheryl, and four grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 20, at the Swedenborg Chapel, 50 Quincy St., Cambridge.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Here's to Tom Lehrer, elemental geek
We live in a world focused on celebrity, but there are also luminaries -- those guiding lights who actually inspire celebrities along with the rest of us. Today there's a luminary we'd like to call out: Tom Lehrer. It hasn't escaped our attention that Mr. Lehrer turned 80 last week. (We have it on good authority that his view of numbers is such that 80 is not so different than 79, so he probably won't mind this belated note.) We think he's great. We're fans.
Mr. Lehrer is the Harvard mathematician turned parodist songwriter-performer whose sense of humor, intelligence and rhythm created a cult following that, weirdly enough, anticipated a lot of what Google's culture tries to be about. His work is clever, playful and fun and connects things in ways that surprises, delights and inspires. (Consider "The Element Song", his ode to the periodic table, or his lesson on "New Math".) How could we not be inspired by someone who can craft a good laugh, a great tune, and an elegant equation?
From "The Masochism Tango" to "Who's Next" to "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (trust us, you have to hear it), Mr. Lehrer's unique music carved out a distinctive place in popular music in the 1950s and '60s. He made his fans feel smart. An entrepreneur -- and we like entrepreneurs -- he self-produced and sold his songs via mail order. And for all the edginess in his humor, he ended up writing some ten clever songs for the '70s public television children's program The Electric Company, including a tune about the letter 'e.'
Although Wikipedia notes that he performed only 109 shows and wrote just 37 songs over 20 years, we think his impact and influence goes well beyond those numbers. He was the best kind of "geek" before the word made its way into pop culture. He's the kind of character as comfortable teaching a university course on the history of the musical -- which he did -- as running a seminar on the nature of mathematics -- which he did.
We hope that in retirement Mr. Lehrer is enjoying himself even a fraction as much as we've enjoyed his work. We're grateful that he's such a great example of how science, humor, music and mathematics can be combined to create such wonderful things.
Mr. Lehrer is the Harvard mathematician turned parodist songwriter-performer whose sense of humor, intelligence and rhythm created a cult following that, weirdly enough, anticipated a lot of what Google's culture tries to be about. His work is clever, playful and fun and connects things in ways that surprises, delights and inspires. (Consider "The Element Song", his ode to the periodic table, or his lesson on "New Math".) How could we not be inspired by someone who can craft a good laugh, a great tune, and an elegant equation?
From "The Masochism Tango" to "Who's Next" to "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" (trust us, you have to hear it), Mr. Lehrer's unique music carved out a distinctive place in popular music in the 1950s and '60s. He made his fans feel smart. An entrepreneur -- and we like entrepreneurs -- he self-produced and sold his songs via mail order. And for all the edginess in his humor, he ended up writing some ten clever songs for the '70s public television children's program The Electric Company, including a tune about the letter 'e.'
Although Wikipedia notes that he performed only 109 shows and wrote just 37 songs over 20 years, we think his impact and influence goes well beyond those numbers. He was the best kind of "geek" before the word made its way into pop culture. He's the kind of character as comfortable teaching a university course on the history of the musical -- which he did -- as running a seminar on the nature of mathematics -- which he did.
We hope that in retirement Mr. Lehrer is enjoying himself even a fraction as much as we've enjoyed his work. We're grateful that he's such a great example of how science, humor, music and mathematics can be combined to create such wonderful things.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Songs Inspired By Real Women
Songwriters have found inspiration in all sorts of places, from transvestites to team tennis titans. Maggie Koerth-Baker has read between the liner notes to find out for whom 8 famous songs were written.
1. “Philadelphia Freedom”
Written by: Elton John & Bernie Taupin
Written for: Billie Jean King, as a thank-you for a tracksuit she gave Elton. And what a tracksuit it must have been! The 1975 song remains one of the most popular disco hits ever, leaving thousands of Hustle enthusiasts wondering just what Billie Jean King had to do with Philadelphia, anyway.
Turns out, the song was a reference to King’s pro tennis team, The Philadelphia Freedoms. Prior to 1968, tennis players were all considered “amateurs” and weren’t eligible to receive prize money. So, if you didn’t have the wealth to support yourself, you couldn’t play. Billie Jean King fought against those constraints, ultimately founding Professional World Team Tennis in 1974 and turning tennis into a paid league sport.
2. “Lola”
Written by: The Kinks’ Ray Davies
Written for: A transvestite. But the question is, which one? According to Rolling Stone, “Lola” was inspired by Candy Darling, a member of Andy Warhol’s entourage, whom Ray Davies briefly (and cluelessly) dated. If that’s the case, then “Lola” is just another notch on Darling’s song belt—she’s also referred to in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” (”Candy came from out on the Island/ In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’.”)
But, in the Kinks’ official biography, Davies tells a different story. He says “Lola” was written after the band’s manager spent a very drunken night dancing with a woman whose five o’clock shadow was apparently obvious to everyone but him.
3. “867-5309/Jenny”
Written by: Jim Keller (of Tommy Tutone) and Alex Call
Written for: Unknown, as the songwriters apparently make up a different story about its inspiration every time they’re asked. While the woman continues to remain a mystery, however, the phone number is all too real. In fact, it’s been wreaking havoc ever since 1982the passage of time hasn’t quelled of the number of crank calls. In 1999, Brown University freshman roommates Nina Clemente and Jahanaz Mirza found that out the hard way, when the school adopted an 867 exchange number for its on-campus phone system. Immediately, the girls’ innocuous Room No. 5309 became a magnet for every drunk college kid with a 1980s fetish.
Other unfortunate phone customers have fought back with creative and profitable solutions, like the holder of 212-867-5309, who put his phone number up for auction on eBay in 2004. Bids approached $100,000 before eBay pulled the item at the request of Verizon, the number’s actual owner.
4. “Für Elise”
Written by: Ludwig van Beethoven
Written for: Some girl probably not named Elise. In fact, as far as most historians can tell, Beethoven didn’t even know an Elise. Instead, the song was originally titled “Bagatelle in A minor” based on some handwritten notation a Beethoven researcher claimed to have seen on a now-lost copy of the sheet music.
Further complicating things, Beethoven had hideous handwriting—to the point that some scholars speculate the song was actually written “for Therese,” as in Therese Malfatti, one of several women who turned down a marriage proposal from the notoriously lovesick maestro.
5. “Oh, Carol”
Written by: Neil Sedaka
Written for: Carole King, naturally. Sedaka and King actually dated briefly in high school — a romance Sedaka was able to successfully milk with “Oh, Carol,” a then top-10 (if now somewhat forgettable) 1959 pop song.
However, the real success of “Oh, Carol” came a few months later, when it inspired King to write a rebuttal entitled “Oh, Neil.” At the time, King and her husband, Gerry Goffin, were fledgling songwriters in need of a hit tune. “Oh, Neil” wasn’t that, but it did pay off. After Sedaka gave a tape of the song to his boss, King and Goffin landed jobs at the legendary Brill Building pop music factory, where the duo went on to write chart-toppers like “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Loco-Motion.”
6. “It Ain’t Me, Babe”
Written by: Bob Dylan
Written for: Joan Baez, though it clearly wasn’t the nicest gift Dylan could have given her. The two met in 1961, when Baez was an up-and-coming folk singer and Dylan was a nobody from Minnesota. Desperate to make his break in the music biz, Dylan worked like crazy to get Baez’s attention. He eventually ended up going on tour with her, which is how he first became famous, and also how the two began dating. For a while, they seemed like the golden couple, but things soon went downhill.
During a European concert tour together in early 1965, they had a huge fight and parted ways. That May, Dylan was holed up in a hotel after being hospitalized with a virus, and Baez, hoping to remain friends, decided to bring him flowers. Sadly, that’s how she found out that her ex was already dating someone else. That someone else was Sara Lownds, whom Dylan married a mere six months later.
7. “Our House”
Written by: Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Written for: Joni Mitchell. In December 1968, Nash and Mitchell moved into a cozy little house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Though commonly left out of the hippy pantheon, Laurel Canyon was sort of a commune-home away from commune-home for San Francisco society — not just CSN&Y, but also Jim Morrison, the Eagles, Frank Zappa, and more.
“Our House” was directly inspired by a lazy Sunday in the Nash/Mitchell household. The couple went out to brunch, hit an antiques store, and then returned to find the house just a bit chilly, at which point Nash literally “lit a fire,” while Mitchell “placed the flowers in the vase that she bought that day.” No, really. The whole tableau seemed so ridiculously domestic to Nash that he immediately sat down and spent the rest of the day writing about it.
8. “Dear Mama”
Written by: Tupac Shakur
Written for: Afeni Shakur, who is, obviously, Tupac’s mama. A fascinating character in her own right, Afeni Shakur was born Alice Fay Williams, but changed her name while working with the Black Panthers in the 1960s. In fact, Tupac (named after the Peruvian revolutionary leader Tupac Amaru II) was born in 1971—just a month after Afeni was acquitted of bombing conspiracy charges. (She had spent most of her pregnancy behind bars.) As the song implies, she and Tupac didn’t always get along, particularly during his adolescence, when Afeni was addicted to crack. But, by the time of Tupac’s death in 1996, she was clean and the two had patched things up long enough for Tupac to write that she “was appreciated.” Today, Afeni runs a charity in her son’s name and is (somewhat controversially) responsible for Tupac’s multiple posthumous CD releases.
1. “Philadelphia Freedom”
Written by: Elton John & Bernie Taupin
Written for: Billie Jean King, as a thank-you for a tracksuit she gave Elton. And what a tracksuit it must have been! The 1975 song remains one of the most popular disco hits ever, leaving thousands of Hustle enthusiasts wondering just what Billie Jean King had to do with Philadelphia, anyway.
Turns out, the song was a reference to King’s pro tennis team, The Philadelphia Freedoms. Prior to 1968, tennis players were all considered “amateurs” and weren’t eligible to receive prize money. So, if you didn’t have the wealth to support yourself, you couldn’t play. Billie Jean King fought against those constraints, ultimately founding Professional World Team Tennis in 1974 and turning tennis into a paid league sport.
2. “Lola”
Written by: The Kinks’ Ray Davies
Written for: A transvestite. But the question is, which one? According to Rolling Stone, “Lola” was inspired by Candy Darling, a member of Andy Warhol’s entourage, whom Ray Davies briefly (and cluelessly) dated. If that’s the case, then “Lola” is just another notch on Darling’s song belt—she’s also referred to in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” (”Candy came from out on the Island/ In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’.”)
But, in the Kinks’ official biography, Davies tells a different story. He says “Lola” was written after the band’s manager spent a very drunken night dancing with a woman whose five o’clock shadow was apparently obvious to everyone but him.
3. “867-5309/Jenny”
Written by: Jim Keller (of Tommy Tutone) and Alex Call
Written for: Unknown, as the songwriters apparently make up a different story about its inspiration every time they’re asked. While the woman continues to remain a mystery, however, the phone number is all too real. In fact, it’s been wreaking havoc ever since 1982the passage of time hasn’t quelled of the number of crank calls. In 1999, Brown University freshman roommates Nina Clemente and Jahanaz Mirza found that out the hard way, when the school adopted an 867 exchange number for its on-campus phone system. Immediately, the girls’ innocuous Room No. 5309 became a magnet for every drunk college kid with a 1980s fetish.
Other unfortunate phone customers have fought back with creative and profitable solutions, like the holder of 212-867-5309, who put his phone number up for auction on eBay in 2004. Bids approached $100,000 before eBay pulled the item at the request of Verizon, the number’s actual owner.
4. “Für Elise”
Written by: Ludwig van Beethoven
Written for: Some girl probably not named Elise. In fact, as far as most historians can tell, Beethoven didn’t even know an Elise. Instead, the song was originally titled “Bagatelle in A minor” based on some handwritten notation a Beethoven researcher claimed to have seen on a now-lost copy of the sheet music.
Further complicating things, Beethoven had hideous handwriting—to the point that some scholars speculate the song was actually written “for Therese,” as in Therese Malfatti, one of several women who turned down a marriage proposal from the notoriously lovesick maestro.
5. “Oh, Carol”
Written by: Neil Sedaka
Written for: Carole King, naturally. Sedaka and King actually dated briefly in high school — a romance Sedaka was able to successfully milk with “Oh, Carol,” a then top-10 (if now somewhat forgettable) 1959 pop song.
However, the real success of “Oh, Carol” came a few months later, when it inspired King to write a rebuttal entitled “Oh, Neil.” At the time, King and her husband, Gerry Goffin, were fledgling songwriters in need of a hit tune. “Oh, Neil” wasn’t that, but it did pay off. After Sedaka gave a tape of the song to his boss, King and Goffin landed jobs at the legendary Brill Building pop music factory, where the duo went on to write chart-toppers like “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Loco-Motion.”
6. “It Ain’t Me, Babe”
Written by: Bob Dylan
Written for: Joan Baez, though it clearly wasn’t the nicest gift Dylan could have given her. The two met in 1961, when Baez was an up-and-coming folk singer and Dylan was a nobody from Minnesota. Desperate to make his break in the music biz, Dylan worked like crazy to get Baez’s attention. He eventually ended up going on tour with her, which is how he first became famous, and also how the two began dating. For a while, they seemed like the golden couple, but things soon went downhill.
During a European concert tour together in early 1965, they had a huge fight and parted ways. That May, Dylan was holed up in a hotel after being hospitalized with a virus, and Baez, hoping to remain friends, decided to bring him flowers. Sadly, that’s how she found out that her ex was already dating someone else. That someone else was Sara Lownds, whom Dylan married a mere six months later.
7. “Our House”
Written by: Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Written for: Joni Mitchell. In December 1968, Nash and Mitchell moved into a cozy little house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Though commonly left out of the hippy pantheon, Laurel Canyon was sort of a commune-home away from commune-home for San Francisco society — not just CSN&Y, but also Jim Morrison, the Eagles, Frank Zappa, and more.
“Our House” was directly inspired by a lazy Sunday in the Nash/Mitchell household. The couple went out to brunch, hit an antiques store, and then returned to find the house just a bit chilly, at which point Nash literally “lit a fire,” while Mitchell “placed the flowers in the vase that she bought that day.” No, really. The whole tableau seemed so ridiculously domestic to Nash that he immediately sat down and spent the rest of the day writing about it.
8. “Dear Mama”
Written by: Tupac Shakur
Written for: Afeni Shakur, who is, obviously, Tupac’s mama. A fascinating character in her own right, Afeni Shakur was born Alice Fay Williams, but changed her name while working with the Black Panthers in the 1960s. In fact, Tupac (named after the Peruvian revolutionary leader Tupac Amaru II) was born in 1971—just a month after Afeni was acquitted of bombing conspiracy charges. (She had spent most of her pregnancy behind bars.) As the song implies, she and Tupac didn’t always get along, particularly during his adolescence, when Afeni was addicted to crack. But, by the time of Tupac’s death in 1996, she was clean and the two had patched things up long enough for Tupac to write that she “was appreciated.” Today, Afeni runs a charity in her son’s name and is (somewhat controversially) responsible for Tupac’s multiple posthumous CD releases.
Theodore Roosevelt: Mojo in the Dojo
President Theodore Roosevelt not only practiced judo in the White House, he also became America’s first brown belt. It was an accomplishment in the combined history of world leaders and martial arts not surpassed until a century later, when Russian president Vladimir Putin advanced to the level of sixth-degree black belt. (Putin’s known for his vicious sweeping hip throw, by the way.) Of course, Roosevelt wasn’t exactly shy about his hobby. He lined the White House basement with training mats, and he practiced with anyone who was willing to tussle—including his wife and sister-in-law. Once, he even brightened a boring state luncheon by throwing the Swiss minister to the floor and demonstrating a judo hold, to the delight of his guests.
Was this typical behavior from the 26th president? Absolutely. Teddy loved a good fight, both literally and metaphorically. Just as he wasn’t afraid to spar with boxing champion John L. Sullivan in the White House gym, he wasn’t scared to take on big business in America, either. Though a capitalist at heart, Roosevelt believed the trusts being formed by a few powerful banks (notably J.P. Morgan’s First National City Bank) were hurting American competition. To fight back, he enforced the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, thereby sticking it to giant corporations like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and DuPont.
Although he didn’t intend to become “the Trustbuster,” Roosevelt did see the need to protect business from its own excesses. He passed the first workers’ compensation bill to cover federal employees and pushed for more stringent child labor laws. Those measures made him enormously popular with the American public, and that image was only bolstered after he went hunting in Mississippi and refused to shoot a black bear cub.
The story became so beloved that stuffed bears were soon named after him.
Roosevelt’s presidency wasn’t all fluff, though. When it came to foreign policy, Teddy followed the proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” After the United States won the Spanish-American War in 1898, former Spanish colonies Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were up for grabs. The United States had a choice: gobble them up, or promote independence and self-determination. Roosevelt opted for the former, feeling that it was the white man’s burden to bring order to these lands.
The new “colonies” felt betrayed, having fought with the United States against Spain only to be annexed by their former ally. The Philippines fired back, launching a guerrilla war for independence. In one of the uglier episodes in American history, Roosevelt authorized U.S. troops to pacify the rebellion. Soldiers burned down villages and herded natives into detainment camps. In the United States, opposition to the conflict quickly sprang up in the form of the Anti-Imperialist League, led in part by Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. Then, in 1902, Roosevelt declared the war over, but the issue wasn’t really resolved until the Philippine Islands gained independence in 1946.
Teddy definitely could’ve spoken softer in that situation, but he still accomplished a great many things by daring to carry a big stick. He led the construction of the Panama Canal, thus forming a strategic shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and he even won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
Was this typical behavior from the 26th president? Absolutely. Teddy loved a good fight, both literally and metaphorically. Just as he wasn’t afraid to spar with boxing champion John L. Sullivan in the White House gym, he wasn’t scared to take on big business in America, either. Though a capitalist at heart, Roosevelt believed the trusts being formed by a few powerful banks (notably J.P. Morgan’s First National City Bank) were hurting American competition. To fight back, he enforced the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, thereby sticking it to giant corporations like Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and DuPont.
Although he didn’t intend to become “the Trustbuster,” Roosevelt did see the need to protect business from its own excesses. He passed the first workers’ compensation bill to cover federal employees and pushed for more stringent child labor laws. Those measures made him enormously popular with the American public, and that image was only bolstered after he went hunting in Mississippi and refused to shoot a black bear cub.
The story became so beloved that stuffed bears were soon named after him.
Roosevelt’s presidency wasn’t all fluff, though. When it came to foreign policy, Teddy followed the proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” After the United States won the Spanish-American War in 1898, former Spanish colonies Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were up for grabs. The United States had a choice: gobble them up, or promote independence and self-determination. Roosevelt opted for the former, feeling that it was the white man’s burden to bring order to these lands.
The new “colonies” felt betrayed, having fought with the United States against Spain only to be annexed by their former ally. The Philippines fired back, launching a guerrilla war for independence. In one of the uglier episodes in American history, Roosevelt authorized U.S. troops to pacify the rebellion. Soldiers burned down villages and herded natives into detainment camps. In the United States, opposition to the conflict quickly sprang up in the form of the Anti-Imperialist League, led in part by Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. Then, in 1902, Roosevelt declared the war over, but the issue wasn’t really resolved until the Philippine Islands gained independence in 1946.
Teddy definitely could’ve spoken softer in that situation, but he still accomplished a great many things by daring to carry a big stick. He led the construction of the Panama Canal, thus forming a strategic shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and he even won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.
The Nine Lives of Andrew Jackson
It’s a wonder Andrew Jackson was able to defeat the British during the War of 1812. And found the modern Democratic Party. And become President of the United States. After all, Jackson should’ve died many, many times before he had the opportunity to do any of those things.
Little Orphan Andrew
The sun rarely shined on Andrew Jackson’s childhood. At 14, Andrew and his brother, Robert, were captured, starved, and abused by the British during the Revolutionary War. After finally being released, they were forced to trek 45 miles to a POW camp in the rain. Robert was so sick that he was slung over the back of a horse. Andrew, meanwhile, was left to trudge through the mud—barefoot, without a jacket, and delirious with smallpox. Their mother eventually negotiated for the boys’ release, but Robert died only two days after reaching the family home. Bedridden for months, Andrew pulled through miraculously.
Once Andrew had been nursed back to health, his mother left to tend sick prisoners of war in Charleston Harbor, 160 miles away. There, she succumbed to cholera and died. Since his father had passed away before he was born, Andrew suddenly found himself a penniless orphan. He moved to the town of Salisbury, N.C., where he scrubbed the floors of a law office by day and roamed the streets by night, stealing signposts and moving outhouses where no one could find them.
The Hot-headed Gunslinger
The next 100 times Andrew Jackson should have died were in duels of honor—the old-fashioned variety, where sometimes men fired their pistols into the air and sometimes they didn’t. Often, these run-ins were instigated by talk of Jackson’s wife, Rachel, who’d previously been with an abusive husband. Jackson valiantly rescued her from the nasty situation, yet the finality of her divorce at the time of their wedding was questionable at best. Needless to say, this was a sore spot for Jackson, and he wasn’t afraid to draw his pistol at any mention of it. In fact, things only got worse when he decided to run for president, as it became the topic of a massive smear campaign. Rachel was called a bigamist more times than she could handle, and she died of a heart attack before she could even make it to the White House.
Although not all of Jackson’s duels were near-death experiences, at least two of them were. Once, for instance, he was shot squarely in the chest. Normally, that sort of thing would signal the end of a duel, but Jackson simply staunched the wound with a handkerchief, and then shot and killed his opponent. The bullet, however, was lodged so close to Jackson’s heart that it couldn’t be removed, and he suffered from chest pains and excessive phlegm for the rest of his life. In another fight, two bullets shattered Jackson’s arm and left shoulder. Doctors wanted to amputate, but Jackson refused for fear it would ruin his military career.
The War Hero
Jackson also should’ve died at some point during his glory days on the battlefield. He became a national hero for “clearing out” the American Indians from the South and for defeating the British at the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815, but General Jackson also fought less glorious battles against malaria, diarrhea, and starvation. In one campaign against the Creek Indians in 1813, he survived on nothing but acorns.
The Enormously Popular President
The combination of Jackson’s humble roots and military success made him wildly popular in the rough-and-tumble early days of the United States. Winning the Oval Office by a landslide in 1828, he was proclaimed “The People’s President” in much the same way the British proclaimed Diana “The People’s Princess.” America’s six previous presidents were born rich and had been well-educated, whereas Jackson had once cleaned floors for a living. But the citizens who loved Jackson nearly killed him, too. On Jackson’s inauguration day, a mob of well-wishers rushed the White House lawn to shake hands with him. The crowd became so thick that the president would have been crushed to death if his friends hadn’t formed a protective ring around him to shield him from the mob.
Of course, no matter how popular a president is, there are always those eager to take him down. In 1835, Jackson was leaving the Capitol building when a demented misanthrope named Richard Lawrence approached him with a raised pistol. Too shocked to move, the president watched as Lawrence fired a shot. Nothing happened. Then the assailant produced a second gun and fired. Again, nothing happened. Horrified, onlookers wrestled Lawrence to the ground and held him until he could be taken into custody. Only later would the strange truth become known that both pistols had been properly loaded. Odds of two misfires in a row: 1 in 125,000. The expression on Lawrence’s face: Priceless.
Little Orphan Andrew
The sun rarely shined on Andrew Jackson’s childhood. At 14, Andrew and his brother, Robert, were captured, starved, and abused by the British during the Revolutionary War. After finally being released, they were forced to trek 45 miles to a POW camp in the rain. Robert was so sick that he was slung over the back of a horse. Andrew, meanwhile, was left to trudge through the mud—barefoot, without a jacket, and delirious with smallpox. Their mother eventually negotiated for the boys’ release, but Robert died only two days after reaching the family home. Bedridden for months, Andrew pulled through miraculously.
Once Andrew had been nursed back to health, his mother left to tend sick prisoners of war in Charleston Harbor, 160 miles away. There, she succumbed to cholera and died. Since his father had passed away before he was born, Andrew suddenly found himself a penniless orphan. He moved to the town of Salisbury, N.C., where he scrubbed the floors of a law office by day and roamed the streets by night, stealing signposts and moving outhouses where no one could find them.
The Hot-headed Gunslinger
The next 100 times Andrew Jackson should have died were in duels of honor—the old-fashioned variety, where sometimes men fired their pistols into the air and sometimes they didn’t. Often, these run-ins were instigated by talk of Jackson’s wife, Rachel, who’d previously been with an abusive husband. Jackson valiantly rescued her from the nasty situation, yet the finality of her divorce at the time of their wedding was questionable at best. Needless to say, this was a sore spot for Jackson, and he wasn’t afraid to draw his pistol at any mention of it. In fact, things only got worse when he decided to run for president, as it became the topic of a massive smear campaign. Rachel was called a bigamist more times than she could handle, and she died of a heart attack before she could even make it to the White House.
Although not all of Jackson’s duels were near-death experiences, at least two of them were. Once, for instance, he was shot squarely in the chest. Normally, that sort of thing would signal the end of a duel, but Jackson simply staunched the wound with a handkerchief, and then shot and killed his opponent. The bullet, however, was lodged so close to Jackson’s heart that it couldn’t be removed, and he suffered from chest pains and excessive phlegm for the rest of his life. In another fight, two bullets shattered Jackson’s arm and left shoulder. Doctors wanted to amputate, but Jackson refused for fear it would ruin his military career.
The War Hero
Jackson also should’ve died at some point during his glory days on the battlefield. He became a national hero for “clearing out” the American Indians from the South and for defeating the British at the Battle of New Orleans in early 1815, but General Jackson also fought less glorious battles against malaria, diarrhea, and starvation. In one campaign against the Creek Indians in 1813, he survived on nothing but acorns.
The Enormously Popular President
The combination of Jackson’s humble roots and military success made him wildly popular in the rough-and-tumble early days of the United States. Winning the Oval Office by a landslide in 1828, he was proclaimed “The People’s President” in much the same way the British proclaimed Diana “The People’s Princess.” America’s six previous presidents were born rich and had been well-educated, whereas Jackson had once cleaned floors for a living. But the citizens who loved Jackson nearly killed him, too. On Jackson’s inauguration day, a mob of well-wishers rushed the White House lawn to shake hands with him. The crowd became so thick that the president would have been crushed to death if his friends hadn’t formed a protective ring around him to shield him from the mob.
Of course, no matter how popular a president is, there are always those eager to take him down. In 1835, Jackson was leaving the Capitol building when a demented misanthrope named Richard Lawrence approached him with a raised pistol. Too shocked to move, the president watched as Lawrence fired a shot. Nothing happened. Then the assailant produced a second gun and fired. Again, nothing happened. Horrified, onlookers wrestled Lawrence to the ground and held him until he could be taken into custody. Only later would the strange truth become known that both pistols had been properly loaded. Odds of two misfires in a row: 1 in 125,000. The expression on Lawrence’s face: Priceless.
Whiskey Business: The Many Myths of Jack Daniel
In Lynchburg, Tennessee, tales of Jack Daniel are taller than Paul Bunyan on a step stool. The question is, are any of them true?
The legend of Jack Daniel reaches all the way back to the moment he was born. Unfortunately, nobody knows exactly when that was. Some records show that Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel came into the world on September 5, 1846. His tombstone, however, says 1850. Strange, because his mother died in 1847.
All of this might not normally matter, but Jack’s birth date is important to his overall legend, which proudly proclaims him “the boy distiller.” So perhaps it’s best we begin when Jack was first introduced to whiskey, which we know was early in life. Leaving home at a young age, Jack struck out on his own with nothing more than a handful of items valued at $9. He ended up at the home of Dan Call, a preacher at a nearby Lutheran church and the owner of a general store. There, Reverend Call also happened to sell whiskey that he distilled himself.
Jack quickly became determined to learn the craft. In fact, many storytellers claim the boy wonder bought the still from Call and began pursuing the business full-time at the ripe age of 16. If that legend is true, then Jack began selling his own Tennessee whiskey only three years later; the famous black labels on the company bottles proudly pronounce, “Established and Registered in 1866.”
In reality, no documents support that myth. Jack may have been a teenage moonshiner, but he didn’t register his business with the federal government until 1875. And by then, Jack would have been the more booze-appropriate age of 29.
The Maker Makes His Mark
Whatever legends exist, one thing is certain: Jack Daniel had a brilliant mind for marketing. Even as a youngster, Jack understood that if people remembered him, they would remember his whiskey. To that end, he decked himself out in a formal knee-length coat, a vest, a tie, and a wide-brim planter’s hat, and was never caught out of “uniform” again.
Jack also established the Jack Daniel’s Silver Cornet Band—a 10-member outfit solely devoted to promoting his whiskey across the countryside. With uniforms and instruments from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and a specially designed wagon for traveling, Jack made sure the band played every saloon opening, Fourth of July celebration, and political rally around.
But perhaps Jack’s most brilliant decision concerned how to present his whiskey. From the beginning, Jack had been one of the first sellers to stencil his distillery name on his whiskey jugs. Next, he upgraded to round, custom-embossed bottles. But when a glass salesman showed him a prototype square bottle in 1895, Jack realized he’d stumbled upon something unique. The new bottles not only stood out from the crowd, but also had a shape that would prevent them from rolling around and breaking during transport. In addition, the square look reinforced the idea that Jack was a square dealer who put honest work and high standards first.
Whatever effort Jack Daniel put into his marketing, he never let quality slip. In 1904, the distiller decided on a whim to enter his whiskey in the taste competition at the St. Louis World’s Fair. It came as little surprise when he won.
Perhaps Jack’s greatest coup was the name he gave his high-quality product—Old No. 7. Naturally, nobody seems to know why. The official historian at the Jack Daniel Distillery today says it’s the most oft-asked question on factory tours. As you might imagine, many theories have been advanced. Jack had seven girlfriends. Jack believed the number seven was lucky. Jack was honoring a merchant friend who owned seven stores that distributed Jack’s liquor. Jack misplaced a batch of whiskey for seven years and, upon finding it, labeled it “Old No. 7.”
None of these stories, however, makes as much sense as the less-than-sexy explanation from Jack Daniel biographer Peter Krass. Simply put, Jack was originally assigned a district tax assessment number of 7. But when the IRS consolidated districts within Tennessee, they arbitrarily reassigned him the number 16. Jack didn’t want to confuse his loyal consumers, and he certainly didn’t want to bend to the government, so he began labeling his bottles “Old No. 7.” More than 125 years later, this act of defiance still makes his labels stand out.
Jack Without Jill
Jack Daniel never married. Some say it’s because he was married to his work; others say it’s because he never found a girl who measured up to his high standards. Or perhaps it’s just that he was too busy catering to the greater Lynchburg population—throwing elaborate Christmas feasts, hosting exquisite costume parties in his second-story ballroom, and donating money to every church in Moore County.
But by all accounts, Jack was quite a ladies’ man. He was a perfect dance partner, a polite conversationalist, and a fantastic gift-giver. Unfortunately, he also gravitated toward girls young enough to be his daughter (or even granddaughter). Once, Jack even asked for a woman’s hand in marriage, but her father denied him—partly because Jack enjoyed keeping his own legend alive and always hesitated to reveal his true birth date. When Jack proposed, her father made it clear that any man unwilling to disclose his age was “a little too old for such a young girl.”
The Early Bird Gets the Gangrene
Hard as it might be to believe, in the end, the great distiller actually died from getting to work too early. As the story goes, one morning in 1906, Jack arrived at his office before anybody else. He tried to access the company safe, but had a terrible time remembering the code. After a few frustrating minutes, he kicked the safe as hard as he could. He badly bruised his left foot and immediately began to walk with a limp. The limp only grew worse with time, and he later discovered the injury had led to blood poisoning. Then came gangrene, then amputation, and then, five years later, death.
It’s not the happiest ending for the story, or the clearest cut, but it is the best, because it adds to the mystery and mystique of Jack Daniel. As they say, where facts cannot be found, legends fill the empty space—and that’s perfectly fine for the keepers of the company flame. After all, as Jack himself believed, the more memorable his image, the more memorable his whiskey.
The legend of Jack Daniel reaches all the way back to the moment he was born. Unfortunately, nobody knows exactly when that was. Some records show that Jasper Newton “Jack” Daniel came into the world on September 5, 1846. His tombstone, however, says 1850. Strange, because his mother died in 1847.
All of this might not normally matter, but Jack’s birth date is important to his overall legend, which proudly proclaims him “the boy distiller.” So perhaps it’s best we begin when Jack was first introduced to whiskey, which we know was early in life. Leaving home at a young age, Jack struck out on his own with nothing more than a handful of items valued at $9. He ended up at the home of Dan Call, a preacher at a nearby Lutheran church and the owner of a general store. There, Reverend Call also happened to sell whiskey that he distilled himself.
Jack quickly became determined to learn the craft. In fact, many storytellers claim the boy wonder bought the still from Call and began pursuing the business full-time at the ripe age of 16. If that legend is true, then Jack began selling his own Tennessee whiskey only three years later; the famous black labels on the company bottles proudly pronounce, “Established and Registered in 1866.”
In reality, no documents support that myth. Jack may have been a teenage moonshiner, but he didn’t register his business with the federal government until 1875. And by then, Jack would have been the more booze-appropriate age of 29.
The Maker Makes His Mark
Whatever legends exist, one thing is certain: Jack Daniel had a brilliant mind for marketing. Even as a youngster, Jack understood that if people remembered him, they would remember his whiskey. To that end, he decked himself out in a formal knee-length coat, a vest, a tie, and a wide-brim planter’s hat, and was never caught out of “uniform” again.
Jack also established the Jack Daniel’s Silver Cornet Band—a 10-member outfit solely devoted to promoting his whiskey across the countryside. With uniforms and instruments from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and a specially designed wagon for traveling, Jack made sure the band played every saloon opening, Fourth of July celebration, and political rally around.
But perhaps Jack’s most brilliant decision concerned how to present his whiskey. From the beginning, Jack had been one of the first sellers to stencil his distillery name on his whiskey jugs. Next, he upgraded to round, custom-embossed bottles. But when a glass salesman showed him a prototype square bottle in 1895, Jack realized he’d stumbled upon something unique. The new bottles not only stood out from the crowd, but also had a shape that would prevent them from rolling around and breaking during transport. In addition, the square look reinforced the idea that Jack was a square dealer who put honest work and high standards first.
Whatever effort Jack Daniel put into his marketing, he never let quality slip. In 1904, the distiller decided on a whim to enter his whiskey in the taste competition at the St. Louis World’s Fair. It came as little surprise when he won.
Perhaps Jack’s greatest coup was the name he gave his high-quality product—Old No. 7. Naturally, nobody seems to know why. The official historian at the Jack Daniel Distillery today says it’s the most oft-asked question on factory tours. As you might imagine, many theories have been advanced. Jack had seven girlfriends. Jack believed the number seven was lucky. Jack was honoring a merchant friend who owned seven stores that distributed Jack’s liquor. Jack misplaced a batch of whiskey for seven years and, upon finding it, labeled it “Old No. 7.”
None of these stories, however, makes as much sense as the less-than-sexy explanation from Jack Daniel biographer Peter Krass. Simply put, Jack was originally assigned a district tax assessment number of 7. But when the IRS consolidated districts within Tennessee, they arbitrarily reassigned him the number 16. Jack didn’t want to confuse his loyal consumers, and he certainly didn’t want to bend to the government, so he began labeling his bottles “Old No. 7.” More than 125 years later, this act of defiance still makes his labels stand out.
Jack Without Jill
Jack Daniel never married. Some say it’s because he was married to his work; others say it’s because he never found a girl who measured up to his high standards. Or perhaps it’s just that he was too busy catering to the greater Lynchburg population—throwing elaborate Christmas feasts, hosting exquisite costume parties in his second-story ballroom, and donating money to every church in Moore County.
But by all accounts, Jack was quite a ladies’ man. He was a perfect dance partner, a polite conversationalist, and a fantastic gift-giver. Unfortunately, he also gravitated toward girls young enough to be his daughter (or even granddaughter). Once, Jack even asked for a woman’s hand in marriage, but her father denied him—partly because Jack enjoyed keeping his own legend alive and always hesitated to reveal his true birth date. When Jack proposed, her father made it clear that any man unwilling to disclose his age was “a little too old for such a young girl.”
The Early Bird Gets the Gangrene
Hard as it might be to believe, in the end, the great distiller actually died from getting to work too early. As the story goes, one morning in 1906, Jack arrived at his office before anybody else. He tried to access the company safe, but had a terrible time remembering the code. After a few frustrating minutes, he kicked the safe as hard as he could. He badly bruised his left foot and immediately began to walk with a limp. The limp only grew worse with time, and he later discovered the injury had led to blood poisoning. Then came gangrene, then amputation, and then, five years later, death.
It’s not the happiest ending for the story, or the clearest cut, but it is the best, because it adds to the mystery and mystique of Jack Daniel. As they say, where facts cannot be found, legends fill the empty space—and that’s perfectly fine for the keepers of the company flame. After all, as Jack himself believed, the more memorable his image, the more memorable his whiskey.
Monday, April 14, 2008
‘This Is How We Lost to the White Man’
Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!”
He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”
Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’
“I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”
Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.
It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.
Black America does not entirely share the euphoria, though. The civil-rights generation is exiting the American stage—not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America’s fate. In that climate, Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-reliance offers a way out—a promise that one need not cure America of its original sin in order to succeed. Racism may not be extinguished, but it can be beaten.
Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?
From the moment he registered in the American popular consciousness, as the Oxford-educated Alexander Scott in the NBC adventure series I Spy, Cosby proffered the idea of an America that transcended race. The series, which started in 1965, was the first weekly show to feature an African American in a lead role, but it rarely factored race into dialogue or plots. Race was also mostly inconspicuous in Cosby’s performances as a hugely popular stand-up comedian. “I don’t spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act,” Cosby told Playboy in 1969. He also said that he didn’t “have time to sit around and worry whether all the black people of the world make it because of me. I have my own gig to worry about.” His crowning artistic and commercial achievement—The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992—was seemingly a monument to that understated sensibility.
In fact, blackness was never absent from the show or from Bill Cosby. Plots involved black artists like Stevie Wonder or Dizzy Gillespie. The Huxtables’ home was decorated with the works of black artists like Annie Lee, and the show featured black theater veterans such as Roscoe Lee Brown and Moses Gunn. Behind the scenes, Cosby hired the Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint to make sure that the show never trafficked in stereotypes and that it depicted blacks in a dignified light. Picking up Cosby’s fixation on education, Poussaint had writers insert references to black schools. “If the script mentioned Oberlin, Texas Tech, or Yale, we’d circle it and tell them to mention a black college,” Poussaint told me in a phone interview last year. “I remember going to work the next day and white people saying, ‘What’s the school called Morehouse?’” In 1985, Cosby riled NBC by placing an anti-apartheid sign in his Huxtable son’s bedroom. The network wanted no part of the debate. “There may be two sides to apartheid in Archie Bunker’s house,” the Toronto Star quoted Cosby as saying. “But it’s impossible that the Huxtables would be on any side but one. That sign will stay on that door. And I’ve told NBC that if they still want it down, or if they try to edit it out, there will be no show.” The sign stayed.
Offstage, Cosby’s philanthropy won him support among the civil-rights crowd. He made his biggest splash in 1988, when he and his wife gave $20 million to Spelman College, the largest individual donation ever given to a black college. “Two million would have been fantastic; 20 million, to use the language of the hip-hop generation, was off the chain,” says Johnnetta Cole, who was then president of Spelman. Race again came to the fore in 1997, when Cosby’s son was randomly shot and killed while fixing a flat on a Los Angeles freeway. His wife wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that white racism lay behind her son’s death. “All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors,” she wrote. “Most people know that facing the truth brings about healing and growth. When is America going to face its historical and current racial realities so it can be what it says it is?”
The column caused a minor row, but most of white America took little notice. To them, Cosby was still America’s Dad. But those close to Cosby were not surprised. Cosby was an avowed race man, who, like much of his generation, had come to feel that black America had lost its way. The crisis of absentee fathers, the rise of black-on-black crime, and the spread of hip-hop all led Cosby to believe that, after the achievements of the 1960s, the black community was committing cultural suicide.
His anger and frustration erupted into public view during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. At that moment, the shades of mortality and irrelevance seemed to be drawing over the civil-rights generation. Its matriarchs, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, would be dead within two years. The NAACP’s membership rolls had been shrinking; within months, its president, Kweisi Mfume, would resign (it was later revealed that he was under investigation by the NAACP for sexual harassment and nepotism—allegations that he denied). Other movement leaders were drifting into self-parody: Al Sharpton would soon be hosting a reality show and, a year later, would be doing ads for a predatory loan company; Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had recently asked MGM to issue an apology for the hit movie Barbershop.
That night, Cosby was one of the last honorees to take the podium. He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.”
There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience.
Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”
Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa— with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock.
After what has come to be known as “the Pound Cake speech”—it has its own Wikipedia entry—Cosby came under attack from various quarters of the black establishment. The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”
But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. Outsiders may have heard haranguing in Cosby’s language and tone. But much of black America heard instead the possibility of changing their communities without having to wait on the consciences and attention spans of policy makers who might not have their interests at heart. Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment. Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream for just that reason.
From Atlantic Unbound:
"The Awakening of the Negro"
(September 1896)
"Friction between the races will pass away in proportion as the black man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, can produce something that the white man wants or respects in the commercial world." By Booker T. Washington
The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.
From Atlantic Unbound:
"Strivings of the Negro People"
(August 1897)
"The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world... This is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, and to husband and use his best powers." By W.E.B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. History ultimately rendered half of Washington’s argument moot. His famous Atlanta Compromise—in which he endorsed segregation as a temporary means of making peace with southerners—was answered by lynchings, land theft, and general racial terrorism. But Washington’s appeal to black self-sufficiency endured.
After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them.
Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. “The greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself,” wrote Garvey. “The monkey wrench of destruction as thrown into the cog of Negro Progress, is not thrown so much by the outsider as by the very fellow who is in our fold, and who should be the first to grease the wheel of progress rather than seeking to impede.” Decades later, Malcolm X echoed that sentiment, faulting blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”
Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.
Those beliefs also animate Come On People, the manifesto that Cosby and Poussaint published last fall. Although it does not totally dismiss government programs, the book mostly advocates solutions from within as a cure for black America’s dismal vital statistics. “Once we find our bearings,” they write, “we can move forward, as we have always done, on the path from victims to victors.” Come On People is heavy on black pride (“no group of people has had the impact on the culture of the whole world that African Americans have had, and much of that impact has been for the good”), and heavier on the idea of the Great Fall—the theory, in this case, that post–Jim Crow blacks have lost touch with the cultural traditions that enabled them to persevere through centuries of oppression.
“For all the woes of segregation, there were some good things to come out of it,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “One was that it forced us to take care of ourselves. When restaurants, laundries, hotels, theaters, groceries, and clothing stores were segregated, black people opened and ran their own. Black life insurance companies and banks thrived, as well as black funeral homes … Such successes provided jobs and strength to black economic well-being. They also gave black people that gratifying sense of an interdependent community.” Although the authors take pains to put some distance between themselves and the Nation of Islam, they approvingly quote one of its ministers who spoke at a call-out in Compton, California: “I went to Koreatown today and I met with the Korean merchants,” the minister told the crowd. “I love them. You know why? They got a place called what? Koreatown. When I left them, I went to Chinatown. They got a place called what? Chinatown. Where is your town?”
The notion of the Great Fall, and the attendant theory that segregation gave rise to some “good things,” are the stock-in-trade of what Christopher Alan Bracey, a law professor at Washington University, calls (in his book, Saviors or Sellouts) the “organic” black conservative tradition: conservatives who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention, but whose black-nationalist leanings make them anathema to the Heritage Foundation and Rush Limbaugh. When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.
“There are things that we did not see coming,” Cosby told me over lunch in Manhattan last year. “Like, you could see the Klan, but because these things were not on a horse, because there was no white sheet, and the people doing the deed were not white, we saw things in the light of family and forgiveness … We didn’t pay attention to the dropout rate. We didn’t pay attention to the fathers, to the self-esteem of our boys.”
Given the state of black America, it is hard to quarrel with that analysis. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.
Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”
The rise of the organic black conservative tradition is also a response to America’s retreat from its second attempt at Reconstruction. Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love-child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress.
In May 2004, just one day before Cosby’s Pound Cake speech, TheNew York Times visited Louisville, Kentucky, once ground zero in the fight to integrate schools. But TheTimes found that sides had switched, and that black parents were more interested in educational progress than in racial parity. “Integration? What was it good for?” one parent asked. “They were just setting up our babies to fail.”
In response to these perceived failures, many black activists have turned their efforts inward. Geoffrey Canada’s ambitious Harlem Children’s Zone project pushes black students to change their study habits and improve their home life. In cities like Baltimore and New York, community groups are focusing on turning black men into active fathers. In Philadelphia last October, thousands of black men packed the Liacouras Center, pledging to patrol their neighborhoods and help combat the rising murder rate. When Cosby came to St. Paul Church in Detroit, one local judge got up and urged Cosby and other black celebrities to donate more money to advance the cause. “I didn’t fly out here to write a check,” Cosby retorted. “I’m not writing a check in Houston, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Leave these athletes alone. All you know is Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. Forget about a check … This is how we lost to the white man. ‘Judge said Bill Cosby is gonna write a check, but until then … ’”
Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. “What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?,” Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. “Do they think that black male youth won’t act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?” Cosby’s rhetoric on culture echoes—and amplifies—a swelling strain of black opinion: last November’s Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence.
The strain of black conservatism that Cosby evokes has also surfaced in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Early on, some commentators speculated that Obama’s Cosby-esque appeals to personal responsibility would cost him black votes. But if his admonishments for black kids to turn off the PlayStation and for black fathers to do their jobs did him any damage, it was not reflected at the polls. In fact, this sort of rhetoric amounts to something of a racial double play, allowing Obama and Cosby to cater both to culturally conservative blacks and to whites who are convinced that black America is a bastion of decadence. (Curiously, Cosby is noncommittal verging on prickly when it comes to Obama. When Larry King asked him whether he supported Obama, he bristled: “Do you ask white people this question? … I want to know why this fellow especially is brought up in such a special way. How many Americans in the media really take him seriously, or do they look at him like some prize brown baby?” The exchange ended with Cosby professing admiration for Dennis Kucinich. Months later, he rebuffed my requests for his views on Obama’s candidacy.)
The shift in focus from white racism to black culture is not as new as some social commentators make it out to be. Standing in St. Paul Church on that July evening listening to Cosby, I remembered the last time The Street felt like this: in the summer of 1994, after Louis Farrakhan announced the Million Man March. Farrakhan barnstormed the country holding “men only” meetings (but much larger). I saw him in my native Baltimore, while home from Howard University on vacation. The march itself was cathartic. I walked with four or five other black men, and all along the way black women stood on porches or out on the street, shouting, clapping, cheering. For us, Farrakhan’s opinions on the Jews mostly seemed beside the point; what stuck was the chance to assert our humanity and our manhood by marching on the Mall, and not acting like we were all fresh out of San Quentin. We lived in the shadow of the ’80s crack era. So many of us had been jailed or were on our way. So many of us were fathers in biology only. We believed ourselves disgraced and clung to the march as a public statement: the time had come to grow up.
Black conservatives have been dipping into this well of lost black honor since the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, vintage black nationalists have harked back to a golden age of black Africa, where mighty empires sprawled and everyone was a king. Meanwhile, populist black conservatives like Cosby point to pre-1968 black America as an era when blacks were united in the struggle: men were men, and a girl who got pregnant without getting married would find herself bundled off to Grandpa’s farm.
What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.
Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments. “The early effort of middle-class blacks to respond to segregation was, aside from a political agenda, focused on a social-reform agenda,” says Khalil G. Muhammad, a professor of American history at Indiana University. “The National Association of Colored Women, Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, all shared a sense of anxiety that African Americans were not presenting their best selves to the world. There was the sense that they were committing crimes and needed to keep their sexuality in check.” Adds William Jelani Cobb, a professor of American history at Spelman College: “The same kind of people who were advocating for social reform were denigrating people because they didn’t play piano. They often saw themselves as reluctant caretakers of the less enlightened.”
In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.
At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”
Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?
“I don’t know how to measure culture. I don’t know how to test its effects, and I’m not sure anyone else does,” says the Georgetown economist Harry Holzer. “There’s a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there’s another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can’t prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.” Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn’t preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more-rigorous conditions.
The accepted wisdom is that such studies are a comfort to black people, allowing them to wallow in their misery. In fact, the opposite is true—the liberal notion that blacks are still, after a century of struggle, victims of pervasive discrimination is the ultimate collective buzz-kill. It effectively means that African Americans must, on some level, accept that their children will be “less than” until some point in the future when white racism miraculously abates. That’s not the sort of future that any black person eagerly awaits, nor does it make for particularly motivating talking points.
Last summer, I watched Cosby give a moving commencement speech to a group of Connecticut inmates who’d just received their GEDs. Before the speech, at eight in the morning, Cosby quizzed correctional officials on the conditions and characteristics of their inmate population. I wished, then, that my 7-year-old son could have seen Cosby there, to take in the same basic message that I endeavor to serve him every day—that manhood means more than virility and strut, that it calls for discipline and dutiful stewardship. That the ultimate fate of black people lies in their own hands, not in the hands of their antagonists. That as an African American, he has a duty to his family, his community, and his ancestors.
If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists for pushing to reform the criminal-justice system, despite solid evidence that the criminal-justice system needs reform. His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations. After the Million Man March, black men embraced a sense of hope and promise. We were supposed to return to our communities and families inspired by a new feeling of responsibility. Yet here we are again, almost 15 years later, with seemingly little tangible change. I’d take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.
On the day last summer when Cosby met me for lunch in the West Village, it was raining, as it had been all week, and New York was experiencing a record-cold August. Cosby had just come from Max Roach’s funeral and was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. Despite the weather, the occasion, and the oddly empty dining room, Cosby was energized. He had spent the previous day in Philadelphia, where he spoke to a group in a housing project, met with state health officials, and participated in a community march against crime. Grassroots black activists in his hometown were embracing his call. He planned, over the coming year, to continue his call-outs and release a hip-hop album. (He has also noted, however, that there won’t be any profanity on it.)
Cosby was feeling warm and nostalgic. He asked why I had not brought my son, and I instantly regretted dropping him off at my partner’s workplace for a couple of hours. He talked about breaking his shoulder playing school football, after his grandfather had tried to get him to quit. “Granddad Cosby got on the trolley and came over to the apartment,” he recalled. “I was so embarrassed. I was laid out on the sofa. He was talking to my parents, and I was waiting for the moment when he would say, ‘See, I told you, Junior.’ He came back and reached in his pocket and gave me a quarter. He said, ‘Go to the corner and get some ice cream. It has calcium in it.’”
Much pop psychology has been devoted to Cosby’s transformation into such a high-octane, high-profile activist. His nemesis Dyson says that Cosby, in his later years, is following in the dishonorable tradition of upper-class African Americans who denounce their less fortunate brethren. Others have suggested more-sinister motivations—that Cosby is covering for his own alleged transgressions. (In 2006, Cosby settled a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that he had sexually assaulted her; other women have come forward with similar allegations that have not gone to court.) But the depth of his commitment would seem to belie such suspicions, and in any case, they do not seem to have affected his hold on his audience: in the November Pew survey, 85 percent of all African American respondents considered him a “good influence” on the black community, above Obama (76 percent) and second only to Oprah Winfrey (87 percent).
Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” (Rock stopped performing the routine when he noticed that his white fans were laughing a little too hard.) Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head.
This disquiet spans generations, but it is most acute among those of the civil-rights era. “I don’t know a better term than angst,” says Johnnetta Cole. “I refuse to categorize every young African American with the same language, but there are some ‘young’uns’—and some of us who are not ‘young’uns’—who must turn around and look at where we are, because where we’re headed isn’t pretty.” Like many of the stars of the civil-rights movement, Cole has gifts that go beyond social activism. She rose out of the segregated South and went to college at age 15, eventually earning a bachelor’s from Oberlin and a doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern. That same sort of dynamism exists today among many younger blacks, but what troubles the older generation is that their energy seems directed at other pursuits besides social uplift.
Cosby is fond of saying that sacrifices of the ’60s weren’t made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made. After all, chief among all individual rights awarded Americans is the right to be mediocre, crass, and juvenile—in other words, the right to be human. But Cosby is aiming for something superhuman—twice as good, as the elders used to say—and his homily to a hazy black past seems like an effort to redeem something more than the present.
When people hear Bill Cosby’s message, many assume that he is the product of the sort of family he’s promoting—two caring parents, a stable home life, a working father. In fact, like many of the men he admonishes, Cosby was born into a troubled home. He was raised by his mother because his father, who joined the Navy, abandoned the family when Cosby was a child. Speaking to me of his youth, Cosby said, “People told me I was bright, but nobody stayed on me. My mother was too busy trying to feed and clothe us.” He was smart enough to be admitted to Central High School, a magnet school in Philadelphia, but transferred and then dropped out in 10th grade and followed his father into the service.
But the twists and turns of that reality seem secondary to the tidier, more appealing world that Cosby is trying to create. Toward the end of our lunch, in a long, rambling monologue, Cosby told me, “If you looked at me and said, ‘Why is he doing this? Why right now?,’ you could probably say, ‘He’s having a resurgence of his childhood.’ What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that’s a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories—why can’t we have our own?”
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Our Most Underrated President?
If I had to name the most underrated president in American history,
Warren Harding would be at or near the top of my list. Harding is
[1]routinely ranked at or near the bottom in presidential ratings by
historians and other experts.
In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has [2]an
interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first
"black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a
remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and
race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a
well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks
in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois [3]pointed out at
the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks
than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the
Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even
worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating
equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter.
Harding also [4]lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb
the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the
first post-Reconstruction president to do so. As DuBois pointed out in
the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism shared
by most white political elites at the time. But he was a lot better
than the vast majority of his contemporaries.
Nor were these Harding's only achievements. As Gene Healy discusses in
his interesting recent book, [5]The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is
also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic
liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson.
It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to
Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the
imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious
[6]"Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the
reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property. As
David Bernstein and I briefly discuss in [7]this article, Wilson's
administration was also highly racist and segregationist even by the
standards of the day; here too, Harding was a sharp contrast.
I'm not arguing that Harding was a great president. His administration
included some serious corruption (such as the famous Tea Pot Dome
Scandal), and his intellectual and political skills were not
especially impressive. However, Harding's achievements in ending
Wilson's harmful policies and his laudable efforts on behalf of civil
rights greatly outweigh the relatively limited harm caused by his
corrupt underlings. Indeed, the harm caused by corrupt embezzlement of
federal funds had very limited impact in part because federal spending
itself was only a small part of the economy at the time - thanks in
part to Harding's own efforts at reversing the growth of government
that had exploded (by contemporary standards) under Wilson. And, by
all, accounts, Harding himself was clean (though many of his
appointees definitely weren't).
Harding will never be ranked among the top few presidents. But he
deserves much greater respect than he gets.
References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_United_States_Presidents
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/magazine/06wwln-essay-t.html?ex=1365048000&en=25ce824c700104e5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
3. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1129
4. http://www.kipnotes.com/Warren%20G.%20Harding.htm
5. http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Presidency-Americas-Dangerous-Presidential/dp/1933995157
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
7. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=620781
Warren Harding would be at or near the top of my list. Harding is
[1]routinely ranked at or near the bottom in presidential ratings by
historians and other experts.
In Sunday's New York Times, Yale historian Beverly Gage has [2]an
interesting article suggesting that Harding may have been the first
"black" president in the sense that it is possible that he had a
remote black ancestor. Unfortunately, Gage's article about Harding and
race relations completely ignores the fact that Harding made a
well-known speech advocating full legal equality for southern blacks
in 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama. As W.E.B. DuBois [3]pointed out at
the time, Harding went farther in advocating equal rights for blacks
than any other post-Reconstruction Republican president (the
Democrats, at that time the party of southern whites, were even
worse). Indeed, no president went as far as Harding in advocating
equal rights for southern blacks for several decades thereafter.
Harding also [4]lobbied hard for a federal anti-lynching bill to curb
the rampant lynching of blacks by whites in the South - again, the
first post-Reconstruction president to do so. As DuBois pointed out in
the linked article, Harding was not wholly free of the racism shared
by most white political elites at the time. But he was a lot better
than the vast majority of his contemporaries.
Nor were these Harding's only achievements. As Gene Healy discusses in
his interesting recent book, [5]The Cult of the Presidency, Harding is
also notable for reversing the severe violations of civil and economic
liberties that had proliferated under his predecessor Woodrow Wilson.
It's easy to belittle Harding's campaign slogan - "Return to
Normalcy." But Harding's notion of "normalcy" included an end to the
imprisonment of political dissenters (such as Wilson's notorious
[6]"Palmer Raids"), abolition of wage and price controls, and the
reversal of Wilson's numerous illegal seizures of private property. As
David Bernstein and I briefly discuss in [7]this article, Wilson's
administration was also highly racist and segregationist even by the
standards of the day; here too, Harding was a sharp contrast.
I'm not arguing that Harding was a great president. His administration
included some serious corruption (such as the famous Tea Pot Dome
Scandal), and his intellectual and political skills were not
especially impressive. However, Harding's achievements in ending
Wilson's harmful policies and his laudable efforts on behalf of civil
rights greatly outweigh the relatively limited harm caused by his
corrupt underlings. Indeed, the harm caused by corrupt embezzlement of
federal funds had very limited impact in part because federal spending
itself was only a small part of the economy at the time - thanks in
part to Harding's own efforts at reversing the growth of government
that had exploded (by contemporary standards) under Wilson. And, by
all, accounts, Harding himself was clean (though many of his
appointees definitely weren't).
Harding will never be ranked among the top few presidents. But he
deserves much greater respect than he gets.
References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_United_States_Presidents
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/magazine/06wwln-essay-t.html?ex=1365048000&en=25ce824c700104e5&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
3. http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1129
4. http://www.kipnotes.com/Warren%20G.%20Harding.htm
5. http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Presidency-Americas-Dangerous-Presidential/dp/1933995157
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
7. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=620781
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Captain James Cook
The Extraordinary Voyages
of Captain James Cook.
By Nicholas Thomas.
Illustrated. 468 pp. New York:
Walker & Company. $28.
Perhaps no explorer has inspired such a voluminous bibliography as James Cook, and it is not hard to understand why. In his three great expeditions to the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 he surpassed all previous European voyagers to that ocean in the accuracy of his maps, finally pinning down the locations of fabled islands as well as encountering many unknown to European geography. His second and third voyages effectively disposed of two chimeras that had obsessed European cartographers for centuries -- the Great Southern Continent and a temperate-latitude Northwest Passage. And in the generous latitudes between, he became the central figure in a series of encounters between the strange cross-section of European society that his ships embodied and the peoples of some 10 major Pacific island groups, more than 40 individual islands, probably initiating more cross-cultural ''first contacts'' than any other person in history.
Although J. C. Beaglehole's ''Life of Captain James Cook'' (1974) is still indispensable for its scholarship and thoroughness, Nicholas Thomas's ''Cook'' will surely become established as one of the finest of the recent books that have a more anthropological focus. Deep in its research, broad in its sympathies, imaginative in its reconstruction of events and thought processes and graceful in its prose style, ''Cook'' presents a winning combination of qualities. In essence, it is a series of informative and sometimes inspired meditations on the various meanings an event might have had to its different participants. In this Thomas seems consistently more thorough and successful than Anne Salmond in her recent book, ''The Trial of the Cannibal Dog,'' which covers the same ground with an ostensibly similar approach. In describing the initial meeting between Cook's first expedition and the Maori of New Zealand in 1769, for instance, Salmond spends one page relating the event with little comment, while Thomas gives a psychologically and culturally penetrating account of how gift-giving and nose-rubbing turned into jostling and shooting as the initiative ebbed and flowed between the two groups.
Although the European side of each encounter is obviously better recorded, the view from ''the other side of the beach'' is reconstructed as far as possible from later recovery of oral tradition, as well as from research that has documented the wider worldviews through which Pacific peoples would have understood these meetings. Unlike many writers on Cook, however, Thomas, a professor of anthropology at the University of London, has also done his homework on, and writes illuminatingly about, the less fashionable and usually overlooked meetings with the peoples of Tierra del Fuego and Nootka Sound.
An anthropological approach also brings to the fore the social relationships among different elements of the ships' crews, underscoring the ambivalence of Cook's own position. He was the son of agricultural laborers, with limited formal education or social polish -- a background closer to that of the common seamen than to his officers, let alone the gentlemen scientists like Joseph Banks. The Polynesian leadership caste, knowing nothing of this, took Cook's position at face value and treated him as an aristocrat like themselves, forging personal alliances through the custom of exchanging names. These friendships often put Cook under obligations to individual chiefs that were at odds with those to his crew: a gentleman might complain that his gun had been stolen, but sometimes Cook felt he had to let the matter drop so as not to create a difficult situation with a chief who, he believed, considered him a friend.
At the same time, he was often inflexible in pursuing stolen goods if they were expedition property rather than personal property -- a distinction lost on Polynesians and sailors alike, who were amused by his ruthless pursuit of a stolen goat across one island. The introduction of European livestock, brought with infinite pains halfway round the world, was one of the prime objectives of the third voyage, and Cook's sense of obligation to ensure that breeding pairs reached their intended destinations brooked no opposition. Single goats cannot breed. It was the theft of such a piece of expedition property, one of the ships' boats, that led to the series of chaotic confrontations in which Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii. Most commentators have regarded this as an almost inevitable climax to what they see as a deterioration in Cook's conduct during the third voyage, especially an increase in the severity of punishments. This is presented either (as Beaglehole does) as a symptom of mental fatigue, after a decade spent mostly in the Pacific with the sole responsibility of command, or (as the more hostile Gananath Obeyesekere does in ''The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,'' 1992) as a descent into irrationality and savagery. Thomas dissents from the assumptions underlying both interpretations, pointing out that Cook's growing distance from his crew (which he links to the pressures arising from Cook's ambiguous social position) can be dated to the middle of the admired second voyage, not the third, while fewer indigenous people were killed on the third voyage before Cook's death than in either of the two earlier ones.
There is something poignant in Cook's consistent attempts to do the right thing, whether it was his refusal to partake of the frequently offered sexual hospitality, his efforts to prevent his men from spreading venereal disease, his scrupulous sharing of fresh food among the whole crew or his refusal to punish the leader of a group of Maori that not only attacked and killed a party of his men but ate them (Cook thought it likely his men had provoked the incident). Even when the outcome was not as beneficent as he hoped, he always followed his own lights -- a mixture of his Quaker-influenced upbringing, Enlightenment rationality and the autodidact's passion for acquiring knowledge. One of the most oddly moving passages shows Cook not only observing but becoming caught up in an island ceremony. Desperate to know what was going on, he put aside his dignity as captain, stripping to the waist and untying his hair to comply with ritual requirements and becoming part of a large crowd that had to run, leap or sit with downcast eyes before the high chief, the Yorkshire laborer's son mixing it with the Polynesians, losing himself in the quest to understand.
of Captain James Cook.
By Nicholas Thomas.
Illustrated. 468 pp. New York:
Walker & Company. $28.
Perhaps no explorer has inspired such a voluminous bibliography as James Cook, and it is not hard to understand why. In his three great expeditions to the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 he surpassed all previous European voyagers to that ocean in the accuracy of his maps, finally pinning down the locations of fabled islands as well as encountering many unknown to European geography. His second and third voyages effectively disposed of two chimeras that had obsessed European cartographers for centuries -- the Great Southern Continent and a temperate-latitude Northwest Passage. And in the generous latitudes between, he became the central figure in a series of encounters between the strange cross-section of European society that his ships embodied and the peoples of some 10 major Pacific island groups, more than 40 individual islands, probably initiating more cross-cultural ''first contacts'' than any other person in history.
Although J. C. Beaglehole's ''Life of Captain James Cook'' (1974) is still indispensable for its scholarship and thoroughness, Nicholas Thomas's ''Cook'' will surely become established as one of the finest of the recent books that have a more anthropological focus. Deep in its research, broad in its sympathies, imaginative in its reconstruction of events and thought processes and graceful in its prose style, ''Cook'' presents a winning combination of qualities. In essence, it is a series of informative and sometimes inspired meditations on the various meanings an event might have had to its different participants. In this Thomas seems consistently more thorough and successful than Anne Salmond in her recent book, ''The Trial of the Cannibal Dog,'' which covers the same ground with an ostensibly similar approach. In describing the initial meeting between Cook's first expedition and the Maori of New Zealand in 1769, for instance, Salmond spends one page relating the event with little comment, while Thomas gives a psychologically and culturally penetrating account of how gift-giving and nose-rubbing turned into jostling and shooting as the initiative ebbed and flowed between the two groups.
Although the European side of each encounter is obviously better recorded, the view from ''the other side of the beach'' is reconstructed as far as possible from later recovery of oral tradition, as well as from research that has documented the wider worldviews through which Pacific peoples would have understood these meetings. Unlike many writers on Cook, however, Thomas, a professor of anthropology at the University of London, has also done his homework on, and writes illuminatingly about, the less fashionable and usually overlooked meetings with the peoples of Tierra del Fuego and Nootka Sound.
An anthropological approach also brings to the fore the social relationships among different elements of the ships' crews, underscoring the ambivalence of Cook's own position. He was the son of agricultural laborers, with limited formal education or social polish -- a background closer to that of the common seamen than to his officers, let alone the gentlemen scientists like Joseph Banks. The Polynesian leadership caste, knowing nothing of this, took Cook's position at face value and treated him as an aristocrat like themselves, forging personal alliances through the custom of exchanging names. These friendships often put Cook under obligations to individual chiefs that were at odds with those to his crew: a gentleman might complain that his gun had been stolen, but sometimes Cook felt he had to let the matter drop so as not to create a difficult situation with a chief who, he believed, considered him a friend.
At the same time, he was often inflexible in pursuing stolen goods if they were expedition property rather than personal property -- a distinction lost on Polynesians and sailors alike, who were amused by his ruthless pursuit of a stolen goat across one island. The introduction of European livestock, brought with infinite pains halfway round the world, was one of the prime objectives of the third voyage, and Cook's sense of obligation to ensure that breeding pairs reached their intended destinations brooked no opposition. Single goats cannot breed. It was the theft of such a piece of expedition property, one of the ships' boats, that led to the series of chaotic confrontations in which Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii. Most commentators have regarded this as an almost inevitable climax to what they see as a deterioration in Cook's conduct during the third voyage, especially an increase in the severity of punishments. This is presented either (as Beaglehole does) as a symptom of mental fatigue, after a decade spent mostly in the Pacific with the sole responsibility of command, or (as the more hostile Gananath Obeyesekere does in ''The Apotheosis of Captain Cook,'' 1992) as a descent into irrationality and savagery. Thomas dissents from the assumptions underlying both interpretations, pointing out that Cook's growing distance from his crew (which he links to the pressures arising from Cook's ambiguous social position) can be dated to the middle of the admired second voyage, not the third, while fewer indigenous people were killed on the third voyage before Cook's death than in either of the two earlier ones.
There is something poignant in Cook's consistent attempts to do the right thing, whether it was his refusal to partake of the frequently offered sexual hospitality, his efforts to prevent his men from spreading venereal disease, his scrupulous sharing of fresh food among the whole crew or his refusal to punish the leader of a group of Maori that not only attacked and killed a party of his men but ate them (Cook thought it likely his men had provoked the incident). Even when the outcome was not as beneficent as he hoped, he always followed his own lights -- a mixture of his Quaker-influenced upbringing, Enlightenment rationality and the autodidact's passion for acquiring knowledge. One of the most oddly moving passages shows Cook not only observing but becoming caught up in an island ceremony. Desperate to know what was going on, he put aside his dignity as captain, stripping to the waist and untying his hair to comply with ritual requirements and becoming part of a large crowd that had to run, leap or sit with downcast eyes before the high chief, the Yorkshire laborer's son mixing it with the Polynesians, losing himself in the quest to understand.
JUNG
JUNG
A Biography.
By Deirdre Bair.
Illustrated. 881 pp. Boston:
Little, Brown & Company. $35.
CARL JUNG'S relationship with Sigmund Freud was probably doomed from the start. They met in Vienna on March 3, 1907, after having corresponded for a year. Freud sought a gentile to champion his ''Jewish science.'' Jung yearned for an influential father figure; Freud anointed Jung ''his scientific 'son and heir.' '' In 1910, according to Jung's ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections,'' Freud made a request: ''Promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . We must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.'' Against what, asked Jung. ''Against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism.''
What did Jung's face look like at that moment? After all, not only did Jung have growing misgivings about Freud's theories of sexual repression, his past was a veritable cornucopia of occultism: as a child, he participated in family séances run by his cousin; his mother, a delusional hysteric with a split personality, believed their house was haunted by ghosts; and Jung's dissertation (''On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena'') was sympathetic to the paranormal. By 1913, the Freud-Jung friendship was over. ''The rest is silence,'' Jung wrote.
Freud and Jung represent the twin therapeutic impulses of the modern age: neurotic self-scrutiny versus New Age spiritual redemption. Freud, the essential Enlightenment figure, meant for psychoanalysis to free man from the elements (the unconscious, superstition) that deprived him of autonomy. Jung, the German Romantic, for whom individuation meant returning to the archaic and the mystical, complained that Freud's biological theories excluded the very Dionysian, polygamous spirituality essential to the fully realized life. Freud wrote about sex; Jung had it.
While writing her comprehensive biography, ''Jung,'' Deirdre Bair discovered that the battles between Freudians and Jungians are as nothing compared with the internecine war raging in the Jung world: ''In a field whose history is inflamed by the quasi-religious status of its pioneers, partisans have been vocal. . . . Anyone who undertakes to write about him is confronted by the many charges against him.'' Much ink has been spilled over Jung since his death in 1961; in ''The Jung Cult'' and ''The Aryan Christ,'' for instance, Richard Noll characterized Jung as an ambitious charlatan who lifted his central insights from other scholars. For its part, the Jung family has maintained an iron grip on his archives, refusing access to many of his writings, and even those by long-deceased colleagues. Bair, the author of biographies of Samuel Beckett, Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, circumnavigated most of the family's restrictions, noting only that she couldn't use any document ''unless a member of the family has read it first,'' and that she had to know in advance which files she wanted to see, ''because even the card catalog was tightly restricted.''
What is the Jung family so determined to hide? Jung's parents, Paul Jung, a minister, and Emilie Preiswerk, were poor and unhappily married. Both were the 13th child in their families, which was regarded as a good sign. Jung's father eventually became the pastor in a mental hospital. Carl, the first of their children to live past infancy, born on July 26, 1875, in the small town of Kesswil, Switzerland, was an introverted, solitary boy who, in keeping with family tradition, had dual personalities (''a clumsy, awkward, mathematical dunce of a boy living in real time at the end of the 19th century'' and ''an old man living in the 18th century who dressed in high-buckled shoes, wore a powdered wig and drove a fine carriage'') and mystical visions, including one of God dropping excrement on a cathedral.
Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel, incorporating a multitude of other fields -- mythology, anthropology, comparative religion -- into his work. He became a psychiatrist and worked at the prestigious Burgholzli Mental Hospital, where he developed a series of language association experiments that brought him fame throughout Europe and America. When nearly 28, he married Emma Rauschenbach, the second-richest heiress in Switzerland. Economic independence liberated Jung intellectually, encouraging him to test the boundaries of early-20th-century European psychiatry and to expound on the consciousness not only of individuals but of civilization itself. Jung came to believe that the key to decoding the conditions of neurosis lay within the history of civilization and mythology. Sexual repression and family issues were of secondary importance to him; ''Don't waste your time,'' Jung tells a patient who has the gall to mention her mother. With his eye on history, he developed the concepts -- archetypes, New Age, collective unconscious, synchronicity, anima, the two dimensions of personality (extroverted, introverted), man's four basic functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) - that made him famous.
Bair is less interested in the content of Jung's ideas than in his life, which is just as well. Many of Jung's intellectual passions -- alchemy, phrenology, astrology, U.F.O.'s -- are as woolly and suspect as his life story is vivid and dramatic. From 1914 on, he maintained a public ''unorthodox emotional triangle'' with his wife and a former patient, Toni Wolff, whom he called his ''other wife.'' He treated writers like Thornton Wilder and Hermann Hesse, and was acquainted with James Joyce, whose schizophrenic daughter he saw. Bair has unearthed fascinating new material about Jung's role as ''Agent 488,'' briefing the Office of Strategic Services' spy-recruiter Allen W. Dulles on the psychology of Nazi leaders. Back in Washington, Jung's comments ''figured importantly in the agency's operational policies.'' In 1945, Jung's ideas for persuading the German public to accept defeat were read by the supreme allied commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Bair's stated goal is to rise above the fray and answer the questions most often posed about Jung: Was he an anti-Semite? Was he a womanizer? Was his psychological theory a form of religion? She largely succeeds. Painstakingly fair, she digs up and scrutinizes sources with an admirable, if sometimes exhausting, thoroughness.
In a particularly perceptive chapter, ''Falling Afoul of History,'' Bair explores Jung's conduct during World War II, which he spent in neutral Switzerland. Even as Jewish psychoanalysts were being purged in 1933, Jung accepted the presidency of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which meant working with Matthias Heinrich Göring, Hermann's cousin. Jung vowed to resign on three occasions, and was finally kicked upstairs to a figurehead position of ''honorary president,'' which he held until 1940. Bair makes a convincing case that Jung was neither personally anti-Semitic nor politically astute. Rather, he played all sides: letting himself be used by the Nazis to legitimate their racial theories, belittling Freud (''insofar as his theory is based in certain respects on Jewish premises, it is not valid for non-Jews''), even as he tried to help other Jewish analysts.
Bair argues that Jung's overriding goal was to rescue psychotherapy, to ''see to it that it maintains its position inside the German Reich,'' as he claimed. The sentiment shrinks in importance when one realizes just whose school of psychotherapy he was protecting. Pluralism was never Jung's (or Freud's) strong suit. Bair occasionally goes too far, as when she insists that the man -- so canny and manipulative in every other dimension of his life -- was naïve in his dealings with the Nazis. In this respect, Jung's case resembles that of another charismatic intellectual, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was much more of a collaborator than Jung. These ambitious men were not naïve; they were overconfident about their ability to manipulate the Nazis and were hopelessly outplayed.
Perhaps in reaction to the violence of the Jung partisans -- pro and con - Bair is relentlessly judicious, often preferring to draw the reader's attention to contradictory evidence rather than to draw conclusions. The result is a more academic book than she perhaps intended: some of these disputes, after all -- Jung's falling-outs with minor figures, the authorship of insignificant memos - could well have been relegated to end matter. As a result, the book sometimes reads more like an effort to assemble a puzzle than to offer a cohesive narrative. Still, Bair has presented a balanced, full-blooded portrait of a tremendously flawed and divisive figure. It will be praised by scholars, read by the general public and loathed by the partisans -- just as a good biography should be.
A Biography.
By Deirdre Bair.
Illustrated. 881 pp. Boston:
Little, Brown & Company. $35.
CARL JUNG'S relationship with Sigmund Freud was probably doomed from the start. They met in Vienna on March 3, 1907, after having corresponded for a year. Freud sought a gentile to champion his ''Jewish science.'' Jung yearned for an influential father figure; Freud anointed Jung ''his scientific 'son and heir.' '' In 1910, according to Jung's ''Memories, Dreams, Reflections,'' Freud made a request: ''Promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. . . . We must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.'' Against what, asked Jung. ''Against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism.''
What did Jung's face look like at that moment? After all, not only did Jung have growing misgivings about Freud's theories of sexual repression, his past was a veritable cornucopia of occultism: as a child, he participated in family séances run by his cousin; his mother, a delusional hysteric with a split personality, believed their house was haunted by ghosts; and Jung's dissertation (''On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena'') was sympathetic to the paranormal. By 1913, the Freud-Jung friendship was over. ''The rest is silence,'' Jung wrote.
Freud and Jung represent the twin therapeutic impulses of the modern age: neurotic self-scrutiny versus New Age spiritual redemption. Freud, the essential Enlightenment figure, meant for psychoanalysis to free man from the elements (the unconscious, superstition) that deprived him of autonomy. Jung, the German Romantic, for whom individuation meant returning to the archaic and the mystical, complained that Freud's biological theories excluded the very Dionysian, polygamous spirituality essential to the fully realized life. Freud wrote about sex; Jung had it.
While writing her comprehensive biography, ''Jung,'' Deirdre Bair discovered that the battles between Freudians and Jungians are as nothing compared with the internecine war raging in the Jung world: ''In a field whose history is inflamed by the quasi-religious status of its pioneers, partisans have been vocal. . . . Anyone who undertakes to write about him is confronted by the many charges against him.'' Much ink has been spilled over Jung since his death in 1961; in ''The Jung Cult'' and ''The Aryan Christ,'' for instance, Richard Noll characterized Jung as an ambitious charlatan who lifted his central insights from other scholars. For its part, the Jung family has maintained an iron grip on his archives, refusing access to many of his writings, and even those by long-deceased colleagues. Bair, the author of biographies of Samuel Beckett, Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, circumnavigated most of the family's restrictions, noting only that she couldn't use any document ''unless a member of the family has read it first,'' and that she had to know in advance which files she wanted to see, ''because even the card catalog was tightly restricted.''
What is the Jung family so determined to hide? Jung's parents, Paul Jung, a minister, and Emilie Preiswerk, were poor and unhappily married. Both were the 13th child in their families, which was regarded as a good sign. Jung's father eventually became the pastor in a mental hospital. Carl, the first of their children to live past infancy, born on July 26, 1875, in the small town of Kesswil, Switzerland, was an introverted, solitary boy who, in keeping with family tradition, had dual personalities (''a clumsy, awkward, mathematical dunce of a boy living in real time at the end of the 19th century'' and ''an old man living in the 18th century who dressed in high-buckled shoes, wore a powdered wig and drove a fine carriage'') and mystical visions, including one of God dropping excrement on a cathedral.
Jung studied medicine at the University of Basel, incorporating a multitude of other fields -- mythology, anthropology, comparative religion -- into his work. He became a psychiatrist and worked at the prestigious Burgholzli Mental Hospital, where he developed a series of language association experiments that brought him fame throughout Europe and America. When nearly 28, he married Emma Rauschenbach, the second-richest heiress in Switzerland. Economic independence liberated Jung intellectually, encouraging him to test the boundaries of early-20th-century European psychiatry and to expound on the consciousness not only of individuals but of civilization itself. Jung came to believe that the key to decoding the conditions of neurosis lay within the history of civilization and mythology. Sexual repression and family issues were of secondary importance to him; ''Don't waste your time,'' Jung tells a patient who has the gall to mention her mother. With his eye on history, he developed the concepts -- archetypes, New Age, collective unconscious, synchronicity, anima, the two dimensions of personality (extroverted, introverted), man's four basic functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) - that made him famous.
Bair is less interested in the content of Jung's ideas than in his life, which is just as well. Many of Jung's intellectual passions -- alchemy, phrenology, astrology, U.F.O.'s -- are as woolly and suspect as his life story is vivid and dramatic. From 1914 on, he maintained a public ''unorthodox emotional triangle'' with his wife and a former patient, Toni Wolff, whom he called his ''other wife.'' He treated writers like Thornton Wilder and Hermann Hesse, and was acquainted with James Joyce, whose schizophrenic daughter he saw. Bair has unearthed fascinating new material about Jung's role as ''Agent 488,'' briefing the Office of Strategic Services' spy-recruiter Allen W. Dulles on the psychology of Nazi leaders. Back in Washington, Jung's comments ''figured importantly in the agency's operational policies.'' In 1945, Jung's ideas for persuading the German public to accept defeat were read by the supreme allied commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Bair's stated goal is to rise above the fray and answer the questions most often posed about Jung: Was he an anti-Semite? Was he a womanizer? Was his psychological theory a form of religion? She largely succeeds. Painstakingly fair, she digs up and scrutinizes sources with an admirable, if sometimes exhausting, thoroughness.
In a particularly perceptive chapter, ''Falling Afoul of History,'' Bair explores Jung's conduct during World War II, which he spent in neutral Switzerland. Even as Jewish psychoanalysts were being purged in 1933, Jung accepted the presidency of the International General Medical Society for Psychotherapy, which meant working with Matthias Heinrich Göring, Hermann's cousin. Jung vowed to resign on three occasions, and was finally kicked upstairs to a figurehead position of ''honorary president,'' which he held until 1940. Bair makes a convincing case that Jung was neither personally anti-Semitic nor politically astute. Rather, he played all sides: letting himself be used by the Nazis to legitimate their racial theories, belittling Freud (''insofar as his theory is based in certain respects on Jewish premises, it is not valid for non-Jews''), even as he tried to help other Jewish analysts.
Bair argues that Jung's overriding goal was to rescue psychotherapy, to ''see to it that it maintains its position inside the German Reich,'' as he claimed. The sentiment shrinks in importance when one realizes just whose school of psychotherapy he was protecting. Pluralism was never Jung's (or Freud's) strong suit. Bair occasionally goes too far, as when she insists that the man -- so canny and manipulative in every other dimension of his life -- was naïve in his dealings with the Nazis. In this respect, Jung's case resembles that of another charismatic intellectual, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was much more of a collaborator than Jung. These ambitious men were not naïve; they were overconfident about their ability to manipulate the Nazis and were hopelessly outplayed.
Perhaps in reaction to the violence of the Jung partisans -- pro and con - Bair is relentlessly judicious, often preferring to draw the reader's attention to contradictory evidence rather than to draw conclusions. The result is a more academic book than she perhaps intended: some of these disputes, after all -- Jung's falling-outs with minor figures, the authorship of insignificant memos - could well have been relegated to end matter. As a result, the book sometimes reads more like an effort to assemble a puzzle than to offer a cohesive narrative. Still, Bair has presented a balanced, full-blooded portrait of a tremendously flawed and divisive figure. It will be praised by scholars, read by the general public and loathed by the partisans -- just as a good biography should be.
Rudyard Kipling unburdened
Rudyard Kipling unburdened
by Roger Kimball
It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person.
—George Orwell, 1942
My childhood home did not boast many literary accoutrements. Apart from an imposing set of "World's Classics," what I chiefly remember is a framed copy of (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling's poem "If—." It was printed with impressive gilt filigree on a sheet of foolscap and, together with a portrait of my Guardian Angel, it presided in quiet admonition on my bedroom wall.
I never memorized the poem, though I internalized its cadence while nervously savoring the impossible combination of virtues it pleaded:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Etc. Tough for an impatient eight- or ten- (or fifty-) year-old. There were thirteen such conditionals to be fulfilled before arriving at the consummating apodosis: "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,/ And—which is more—you'll be a Man my son!"
"All well and good," I remember musing, "but what 'if not'?"
"If—" is probably Kipling's most famous poem. As recently as 1995, a BBC poll named it Britain's favorite. Written in 1895, when Kipling was thirty and crossing the threshold to international celebrity, it was published as part of Rewards and Fairies, a set of historical stories, in 1910, when his reputation was already on the wane. In a celebrated essay on Kipling from 1942, George Orwell dismissed the poem as the sort of thing (about the only sort of thing) Colonel Blimp would like.
Today, I suspect, Kipling is regarded chiefly as that most anodyne of literary practitioners: a children's author, creator of the boy Mowgli, Kaa the python, and Shere Khan the Tiger, the genial-looking, pipe-puffing genius who wrote Kim and populated the imaginations of boys and girls with the sultry weather of the Raj, explained how the elephant got its trunk, and decorated it all with fastidious (little) poems that rhymed and scanned. Kipling was picturesque. He was born in romantic-sounding Bombay, and he got his precocious literary start in India after a decade of schooling in England. (His parents chose "Rudyard," by the way, after a lake in Staffordshire where they courted.) If his stories are exotic, even scary at times, they are nonetheless wholesome or at least susceptible to Disneyfication.
How different it once was. Around the turn of the last century, at the apogee of Kipling's fame, Mark Twain wrote that he was "the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable." In Kipling, the zeitgeist briefly found its impresario. For a time, his authority was as much political as literary. Kipling gave speeches advocating British supremacy in India and South Africa. He opposed the suffragettes and home rule for Ireland. He could be downright strident. It was Kipling, one of his biographers speculates, who popularized the metonymy "Huns" (actually, he insisted on "huns" with a small "h") for "Germans," a subject on which he grew increasingly ferocious. By 1915, Kipling was insisting that there were "only two divisions in the world … human beings and Germans." Kipling consistently refused state honors (a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the post of poet laureate) but by the late 1890s he was the undisputed if unofficial laureate—but also, which is sometimes forgotten, the Jeremiah—of Imperial Britain.
True, Kipling's celebrity was never universally applauded. Most literary folk instinctively disliked him. Henry James gave away the bride at Kipling's wedding, but he could be magisterially tart about Kipling the writer: "great talent," he wrote in a letter of 1897, but "almost nothing civilized save steam and patriotism." Oscar Wilde described Kipling as "our first authority on the second-rate," "a genius who drops his aspirates." And for Wilde's disciple Max Beerbohm, Kipling always exercised "the fascination of abomination": he was the man in whom "the schoolboy, the bounder, and the brute" found "brilliant expression."
This was, I've always felt, a bit stingy of Max, who ought to have harbored some gratitude to Kipling for providing him such valuable fodder for his own caricatures and parodies. Particularly choice is P.C. , X, 36, in which a Kiplingesque constable collars Santa Claus emerging from a chimney on Christmas Eve:
"Wot wos yer doin' hup there?" asked Judlip, tightening the grip.
"I'm Santa Claus, Sir, p-please, Sir, let me g-go."
"Hold him," I shouted, "He's a German."
For his part, Kipling cordially returned the animus, writing about the "brittle intellectuals,/ Who crack beneath the strain" ("The Holy War") and "the flanneled fools at the wicket"("The Islanders"). In 1889, shortly after returning to London from his apprenticeship in India, Kipling published "In Partibus" in (note the venue) the Civil and Military Gazette:
But I consort with long-haired-things,
In velvet collar-rolls,
Who talk about the Aims of Art,
And "theories" and "goals,"
And moo and coo with womenfolk
About their blessed souls.
Kipling was pals with H. Rider Haggard. Arthur Conan Doyle came to visit and give Kipling a golf lesson when he was ensconced with his American wife in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the early 1890s. But by and large, he consorted with politicians, generals, and magnates. George V was a close friend, so were Cecil Rhodes and Viscount Milner. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1907—the first English-language laureate, and still the youngest—the citation mentioned not only his "power of observation" and "originality of imagination" but also his "virility of ideas." By then, in the aftermath of the Boer War, the "virility" of Kipling's ideas was already a stumbling block; by the time the First World War was over—a war that Kipling had foretold with uncanny accuracy and in which he lost his only son, John—the nation was in wholesale retreat from Kiplingesque virility. (Today, of course, it is unimaginable that a Nobel citation—or most any other, for that matter—would commend someone for his "virility of ideas.") When Kipling died, in January 1936, age 71, his pallbearers included the Prime Minister, an Admiral, a General, various other friends, but no literary figures.
It would be instructive to trace the process that de-clawed and domesticated Rudyard Kipling, that gradually diminished that brusque and imposing giant to an entertaining homunculus. When the zeitgeist shifted, Kipling's politics suddenly became a popular as well as an elite embarrassment. ("Poetry," T. S. Eliot, noted, "is condemned as 'political' when we disagree with the politics.") Typical was Orwell's savage outburst: "Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting." It got to the point where people who had absorbed Kipling unwittingly suppressed his authorship. Orwell notes that Middleton Murry, quoting Kipling's famous lines "There are nine and sixty ways/ Of constructing tribal lays," mistakenly attributed them to Thackeray. Kipling might have written good poetry, but it wasn't good for poetry to have been written by Kipling. Sanitizing Kipling, segregating his political and social opinions from his literary accomplishment, has had the unfortunate effect of diminishing the appreciation or even the knowledge of that accomplishment. A slim but representative selection of his poems in the attractive Everyman series offers a welcome occasion to return to that unfairly diminished master.[1]
In 1941, T. S. Eliot edited and wrote an introduction for a plump collection of Kipling's poems. It was partly, but only partly, an effort at rehabilitation. Eliot noted Kipling's uncanny "second sight," his seeming ability to lift and peer beneath the curtain of history, also his habit of writing "transparently, so that our attention is directed to the object and not the medium." He spoke warmly of Kipling's "consummate gift of word, phrase, and rhythm" and praised his technical mastery: "no writer has ever cared for the craft of words more than Kipling." Kipling's prosody was generally so regular that it is easy to miss the subtlety of his music and rhythmical variation. Eliot singles out "Danny Deever," a typical Kipling "soldier's poem" from Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), that tells the story of the hanging of the eponymous Danny who "shot a comrade sleepin'." The poem begins in matutinal confusion—the bugles are blowing, but why? Eliot points out how Kipling insinuates a dread sense of acceleration and tautening step-step-step focus:
"What's that so black agin' the sun?"
said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life,"
the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What's that that whimpers over'ead?"
said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny's soul that's passin' now,"
the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they're done with Danny Deever,
you can 'ear the quickstep play,
The regiment's in column,
an' they're marchin' us away …
Eliot is all admiration for the seemingly effortless prosodic mastery Kipling displays. But (and it is a large "but") his essay turns on a distinction between "verse"—at which Kipling is said to excel—and "poetry," which, says Eliot, he approaches but rarely and then only by accident. In other words, Kipling, though good at what he does, isn't really playing in the big league. Eliot doesn't put it like that, not quite. He even notes that Kipling "is so different from other poets that the lazy critic is tempted merely to assert that he is not a poet at all and leave it at that."
Eliot forbears to make that assertion. He nonetheless manages to leave it echoing in the reader's mind. His essay is sensitive, intelligent, and a subtle masterpiece of deflation. The deflation operates primarily by apophasis. Eliot notes that one is usually called upon to defend modern poetry from the charge of excessive obscurity: with Kipling the culprit is "excessive lucidity." Similarly, where one hears of complaints about the metrical chaos of modern poetry, Kipling is so regular he can be accused of writing "jingles." Much modern poetry seems caught up in a sort of cosmic privateness: Kipling, who starts with "the motive of the ballad-maker," seems all too involved with the events of the day. In short, Eliot wants to preserve a place for Kipling, but he also wants to put him in his place—not, we are meant to understand, the same (and higher) place occupied by Eliot himself.
A good deal of intelligent commentary on Kipling operates like this. Irving Howe, for example, in his introduction to the Viking Portable Kipling, begins with the obligatory condemnation of Kipling the "tub-thumper" for imperialism, etc., but then proceeds to find numerous things to praise. His denouement is the conclusion that Kipling was "a brilliant if unacknowledged fellow traveller of literary modernism."
This strikes me as completely wrong. Kipling was in a different game altogether. Yes, he was sui generis, but only in the way—or rather, to the extent—that Eliot himself or other "strong voice" poets (Wallace Stevens, for example) are sui generis. You can't imagine Kipling beginning a long poem with the observation that "April is the cruellest month" (to say nothing of "Complacencies of the peignoir"). But then you can't imagine Eliot or Stevens writing "Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;/ And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die." Which is better, more important, more serious?
I am not sure those are answerable questions. But if Auden is correct in defining poetry as "memorable speech," what Kipling wrote is surely poetry. Orwell lists several phrases that have entered the language:
"East is East, West is West."
"The white man's burden."
"Paying the Dane-geld."
"The female of the species
is more deadly than the male"
"He travels the fastest who travels alone."
To which we might add (to show that Kipling had a sense of humor) "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
Writing about Auden, Edward Mendelson distinguished between the "vatic" and "civil" traditions in poetry. The former aspires to the splendid isolation of aesthetic autonomy, the latter to a more public vocation: "poets," says Mendelson, "who write as citizens, whose purpose is to entertain and instruct, and who choose subjects that would interest an audience even if a poet were not there to transform them into art." That, I believe, brings us to the neighborhood where Kipling flourished. Although possessed of prodigious gifts of verbal and rhythmic invention, Kipling sought not the lyric moment but a more didactic end. I know that "didactic" is not what Stephen Potter would call an "O.K. word" these days. We resist the presumption that art should aspire to teach almost as much as we resist the idea that we might be in need of tutelage. It is worth noting, then, that Kipling's didactic designs were, at least in part, capacious. As has often been pointed out, in much of his work, he sought to give memorable voice to segments of society (even of animal society) hitherto lost in inarticulacy: the Indian beggar, the uneducated solider, the hard-bitten colonial administrator. Kipling was especially good at capturing the sweaty rage of pride affronted, as here, in "Tommy":
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll …
I have always greatly admired "Tommy," not least for is psychological acuity. The good citizens of Berkeley, California, would profit from taking its message to heart. They might also get outside "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," a poem that is full of sage but perpetually forgotten advice:
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
But Kipling was not all barracks-room bluster or overt moralizing. Far from it. As Robert Conquest notes in his excellent "Note on Kipling's Verse," if Kipling's was a "poetry of clarification rather than of subtlety and suggestion," you could also easily make a selection of his poems that would show him to be "a poet of sensitivity and sorrow." "The Way Through the Woods," a haunting, Hardyesque lyric, reveals another, less declamatory side of Kipling:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
In fact, Kipling was a poet of considerable emotional range and conspicuous majesty. "Recessional," the poem that catapulted Kipling from mere fame to nationwide celebrity, was written in 1897 for Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. It is an ever-pertinent masterpiece about hubris and the evanescence of power. Instinct with Biblical echoes, it issues a lofty call to humility and awe; it also contains one of the two most politically incorrect lines in all of Kipling:
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
As Orwell noted, the line about "lesser breeds" "is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles." But it doesn't refer, as Orwell also noted, to "coolies" being kicked about "by pukka sahib in a pith helmet" but rather to the awe-less multitudes "without the Law," Germans, first of all, but also anyone who glorified power without restraint or obeisance. (The other gem of political incorrectitude, for the record, is "the white man's burden," title and recurrent phrase of another famous poem: "Take up the White Man's burden—/ And reap his old reward:/ The blame of those ye better,/ The hate of those ye guard—." How we squirm at that today! But as David Gilmour points out in The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, the word "white" "plainly refers to civilization and character more than to the colour of men's skins. The 'white men' are those who conduct themselves within the Law for the good of others: Gunga Din may have a 'dirty' hide, but he is 'white, clear white, inside.'"
The key word is "civilization." Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of "the civilized man." It's a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds. Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, "believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms." Kipling endeavored to man those defenses partly through his political oratory, but more importantly through a literary corpus that taught the explicit lessons and the implicit rhythms of emotional continence and restraint.
by Roger Kimball
It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person.
—George Orwell, 1942
My childhood home did not boast many literary accoutrements. Apart from an imposing set of "World's Classics," what I chiefly remember is a framed copy of (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling's poem "If—." It was printed with impressive gilt filigree on a sheet of foolscap and, together with a portrait of my Guardian Angel, it presided in quiet admonition on my bedroom wall.
I never memorized the poem, though I internalized its cadence while nervously savoring the impossible combination of virtues it pleaded:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Etc. Tough for an impatient eight- or ten- (or fifty-) year-old. There were thirteen such conditionals to be fulfilled before arriving at the consummating apodosis: "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,/ And—which is more—you'll be a Man my son!"
"All well and good," I remember musing, "but what 'if not'?"
"If—" is probably Kipling's most famous poem. As recently as 1995, a BBC poll named it Britain's favorite. Written in 1895, when Kipling was thirty and crossing the threshold to international celebrity, it was published as part of Rewards and Fairies, a set of historical stories, in 1910, when his reputation was already on the wane. In a celebrated essay on Kipling from 1942, George Orwell dismissed the poem as the sort of thing (about the only sort of thing) Colonel Blimp would like.
Today, I suspect, Kipling is regarded chiefly as that most anodyne of literary practitioners: a children's author, creator of the boy Mowgli, Kaa the python, and Shere Khan the Tiger, the genial-looking, pipe-puffing genius who wrote Kim and populated the imaginations of boys and girls with the sultry weather of the Raj, explained how the elephant got its trunk, and decorated it all with fastidious (little) poems that rhymed and scanned. Kipling was picturesque. He was born in romantic-sounding Bombay, and he got his precocious literary start in India after a decade of schooling in England. (His parents chose "Rudyard," by the way, after a lake in Staffordshire where they courted.) If his stories are exotic, even scary at times, they are nonetheless wholesome or at least susceptible to Disneyfication.
How different it once was. Around the turn of the last century, at the apogee of Kipling's fame, Mark Twain wrote that he was "the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable." In Kipling, the zeitgeist briefly found its impresario. For a time, his authority was as much political as literary. Kipling gave speeches advocating British supremacy in India and South Africa. He opposed the suffragettes and home rule for Ireland. He could be downright strident. It was Kipling, one of his biographers speculates, who popularized the metonymy "Huns" (actually, he insisted on "huns" with a small "h") for "Germans," a subject on which he grew increasingly ferocious. By 1915, Kipling was insisting that there were "only two divisions in the world … human beings and Germans." Kipling consistently refused state honors (a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the post of poet laureate) but by the late 1890s he was the undisputed if unofficial laureate—but also, which is sometimes forgotten, the Jeremiah—of Imperial Britain.
True, Kipling's celebrity was never universally applauded. Most literary folk instinctively disliked him. Henry James gave away the bride at Kipling's wedding, but he could be magisterially tart about Kipling the writer: "great talent," he wrote in a letter of 1897, but "almost nothing civilized save steam and patriotism." Oscar Wilde described Kipling as "our first authority on the second-rate," "a genius who drops his aspirates." And for Wilde's disciple Max Beerbohm, Kipling always exercised "the fascination of abomination": he was the man in whom "the schoolboy, the bounder, and the brute" found "brilliant expression."
This was, I've always felt, a bit stingy of Max, who ought to have harbored some gratitude to Kipling for providing him such valuable fodder for his own caricatures and parodies. Particularly choice is P.C. , X, 36, in which a Kiplingesque constable collars Santa Claus emerging from a chimney on Christmas Eve:
"Wot wos yer doin' hup there?" asked Judlip, tightening the grip.
"I'm Santa Claus, Sir, p-please, Sir, let me g-go."
"Hold him," I shouted, "He's a German."
For his part, Kipling cordially returned the animus, writing about the "brittle intellectuals,/ Who crack beneath the strain" ("The Holy War") and "the flanneled fools at the wicket"("The Islanders"). In 1889, shortly after returning to London from his apprenticeship in India, Kipling published "In Partibus" in (note the venue) the Civil and Military Gazette:
But I consort with long-haired-things,
In velvet collar-rolls,
Who talk about the Aims of Art,
And "theories" and "goals,"
And moo and coo with womenfolk
About their blessed souls.
Kipling was pals with H. Rider Haggard. Arthur Conan Doyle came to visit and give Kipling a golf lesson when he was ensconced with his American wife in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the early 1890s. But by and large, he consorted with politicians, generals, and magnates. George V was a close friend, so were Cecil Rhodes and Viscount Milner. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1907—the first English-language laureate, and still the youngest—the citation mentioned not only his "power of observation" and "originality of imagination" but also his "virility of ideas." By then, in the aftermath of the Boer War, the "virility" of Kipling's ideas was already a stumbling block; by the time the First World War was over—a war that Kipling had foretold with uncanny accuracy and in which he lost his only son, John—the nation was in wholesale retreat from Kiplingesque virility. (Today, of course, it is unimaginable that a Nobel citation—or most any other, for that matter—would commend someone for his "virility of ideas.") When Kipling died, in January 1936, age 71, his pallbearers included the Prime Minister, an Admiral, a General, various other friends, but no literary figures.
It would be instructive to trace the process that de-clawed and domesticated Rudyard Kipling, that gradually diminished that brusque and imposing giant to an entertaining homunculus. When the zeitgeist shifted, Kipling's politics suddenly became a popular as well as an elite embarrassment. ("Poetry," T. S. Eliot, noted, "is condemned as 'political' when we disagree with the politics.") Typical was Orwell's savage outburst: "Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting." It got to the point where people who had absorbed Kipling unwittingly suppressed his authorship. Orwell notes that Middleton Murry, quoting Kipling's famous lines "There are nine and sixty ways/ Of constructing tribal lays," mistakenly attributed them to Thackeray. Kipling might have written good poetry, but it wasn't good for poetry to have been written by Kipling. Sanitizing Kipling, segregating his political and social opinions from his literary accomplishment, has had the unfortunate effect of diminishing the appreciation or even the knowledge of that accomplishment. A slim but representative selection of his poems in the attractive Everyman series offers a welcome occasion to return to that unfairly diminished master.[1]
In 1941, T. S. Eliot edited and wrote an introduction for a plump collection of Kipling's poems. It was partly, but only partly, an effort at rehabilitation. Eliot noted Kipling's uncanny "second sight," his seeming ability to lift and peer beneath the curtain of history, also his habit of writing "transparently, so that our attention is directed to the object and not the medium." He spoke warmly of Kipling's "consummate gift of word, phrase, and rhythm" and praised his technical mastery: "no writer has ever cared for the craft of words more than Kipling." Kipling's prosody was generally so regular that it is easy to miss the subtlety of his music and rhythmical variation. Eliot singles out "Danny Deever," a typical Kipling "soldier's poem" from Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), that tells the story of the hanging of the eponymous Danny who "shot a comrade sleepin'." The poem begins in matutinal confusion—the bugles are blowing, but why? Eliot points out how Kipling insinuates a dread sense of acceleration and tautening step-step-step focus:
"What's that so black agin' the sun?"
said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny fightin' 'ard for life,"
the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What's that that whimpers over'ead?"
said Files-on-Parade.
"It's Danny's soul that's passin' now,"
the Colour-Sergeant said.
For they're done with Danny Deever,
you can 'ear the quickstep play,
The regiment's in column,
an' they're marchin' us away …
Eliot is all admiration for the seemingly effortless prosodic mastery Kipling displays. But (and it is a large "but") his essay turns on a distinction between "verse"—at which Kipling is said to excel—and "poetry," which, says Eliot, he approaches but rarely and then only by accident. In other words, Kipling, though good at what he does, isn't really playing in the big league. Eliot doesn't put it like that, not quite. He even notes that Kipling "is so different from other poets that the lazy critic is tempted merely to assert that he is not a poet at all and leave it at that."
Eliot forbears to make that assertion. He nonetheless manages to leave it echoing in the reader's mind. His essay is sensitive, intelligent, and a subtle masterpiece of deflation. The deflation operates primarily by apophasis. Eliot notes that one is usually called upon to defend modern poetry from the charge of excessive obscurity: with Kipling the culprit is "excessive lucidity." Similarly, where one hears of complaints about the metrical chaos of modern poetry, Kipling is so regular he can be accused of writing "jingles." Much modern poetry seems caught up in a sort of cosmic privateness: Kipling, who starts with "the motive of the ballad-maker," seems all too involved with the events of the day. In short, Eliot wants to preserve a place for Kipling, but he also wants to put him in his place—not, we are meant to understand, the same (and higher) place occupied by Eliot himself.
A good deal of intelligent commentary on Kipling operates like this. Irving Howe, for example, in his introduction to the Viking Portable Kipling, begins with the obligatory condemnation of Kipling the "tub-thumper" for imperialism, etc., but then proceeds to find numerous things to praise. His denouement is the conclusion that Kipling was "a brilliant if unacknowledged fellow traveller of literary modernism."
This strikes me as completely wrong. Kipling was in a different game altogether. Yes, he was sui generis, but only in the way—or rather, to the extent—that Eliot himself or other "strong voice" poets (Wallace Stevens, for example) are sui generis. You can't imagine Kipling beginning a long poem with the observation that "April is the cruellest month" (to say nothing of "Complacencies of the peignoir"). But then you can't imagine Eliot or Stevens writing "Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;/ And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die." Which is better, more important, more serious?
I am not sure those are answerable questions. But if Auden is correct in defining poetry as "memorable speech," what Kipling wrote is surely poetry. Orwell lists several phrases that have entered the language:
"East is East, West is West."
"The white man's burden."
"Paying the Dane-geld."
"The female of the species
is more deadly than the male"
"He travels the fastest who travels alone."
To which we might add (to show that Kipling had a sense of humor) "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
Writing about Auden, Edward Mendelson distinguished between the "vatic" and "civil" traditions in poetry. The former aspires to the splendid isolation of aesthetic autonomy, the latter to a more public vocation: "poets," says Mendelson, "who write as citizens, whose purpose is to entertain and instruct, and who choose subjects that would interest an audience even if a poet were not there to transform them into art." That, I believe, brings us to the neighborhood where Kipling flourished. Although possessed of prodigious gifts of verbal and rhythmic invention, Kipling sought not the lyric moment but a more didactic end. I know that "didactic" is not what Stephen Potter would call an "O.K. word" these days. We resist the presumption that art should aspire to teach almost as much as we resist the idea that we might be in need of tutelage. It is worth noting, then, that Kipling's didactic designs were, at least in part, capacious. As has often been pointed out, in much of his work, he sought to give memorable voice to segments of society (even of animal society) hitherto lost in inarticulacy: the Indian beggar, the uneducated solider, the hard-bitten colonial administrator. Kipling was especially good at capturing the sweaty rage of pride affronted, as here, in "Tommy":
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll …
I have always greatly admired "Tommy," not least for is psychological acuity. The good citizens of Berkeley, California, would profit from taking its message to heart. They might also get outside "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," a poem that is full of sage but perpetually forgotten advice:
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
But Kipling was not all barracks-room bluster or overt moralizing. Far from it. As Robert Conquest notes in his excellent "Note on Kipling's Verse," if Kipling's was a "poetry of clarification rather than of subtlety and suggestion," you could also easily make a selection of his poems that would show him to be "a poet of sensitivity and sorrow." "The Way Through the Woods," a haunting, Hardyesque lyric, reveals another, less declamatory side of Kipling:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
In fact, Kipling was a poet of considerable emotional range and conspicuous majesty. "Recessional," the poem that catapulted Kipling from mere fame to nationwide celebrity, was written in 1897 for Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. It is an ever-pertinent masterpiece about hubris and the evanescence of power. Instinct with Biblical echoes, it issues a lofty call to humility and awe; it also contains one of the two most politically incorrect lines in all of Kipling:
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
As Orwell noted, the line about "lesser breeds" "is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles." But it doesn't refer, as Orwell also noted, to "coolies" being kicked about "by pukka sahib in a pith helmet" but rather to the awe-less multitudes "without the Law," Germans, first of all, but also anyone who glorified power without restraint or obeisance. (The other gem of political incorrectitude, for the record, is "the white man's burden," title and recurrent phrase of another famous poem: "Take up the White Man's burden—/ And reap his old reward:/ The blame of those ye better,/ The hate of those ye guard—." How we squirm at that today! But as David Gilmour points out in The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, the word "white" "plainly refers to civilization and character more than to the colour of men's skins. The 'white men' are those who conduct themselves within the Law for the good of others: Gunga Din may have a 'dirty' hide, but he is 'white, clear white, inside.'"
The key word is "civilization." Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of "the civilized man." It's a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds. Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, "believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms." Kipling endeavored to man those defenses partly through his political oratory, but more importantly through a literary corpus that taught the explicit lessons and the implicit rhythms of emotional continence and restraint.
Red Skelton's Pledge of Allegiance
This is so unbelievable. In 1969, how did he know?
[]
Some of you may remember him but he passed away before many of you were born. Red Skelton was a good & funny man. He also ended every show by saying, 'GOOD NIGHT AND GOD BLESS.' Listen to the end of this. It is something he said 39 years ago.
Very important that you listen to the very end! Eerie! Take a moment and listen to it (from 1969). How would he have known that this is what is happening?
FOR THE FEW WHO DON'T KNOW: Red Skelton was a movie star and comedian on television back in the 1950s. He created a number of characters, and his show was watched by millions..
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
