The Tumbrel Diaries

Portraiture again

2012-02-06T12:36:00.004-05:00

I have been thinking a little more lately about portraiture. One especially interesting sub-category of the genre is portraits of artists by their friends, indeed these have much to say about friendship itself—as does the exquisite double concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra in A minor by Johannes Brahms (opus 102), the composition of which was prompted by the reconciliation of two friends temporarily estranged due to taking sides in a messy divorce, but that is an entirely different story.

Here is a portrait of the eminent Dutch still-life painter Coenraet Roepel by his friend Richard van Bleeck; both artists were born and educated in The Hague. The picture was most probably painted to commemorate Roepel’s appointment in 1716 to be one of the painters attached to the court of the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in Düsseldorf, of which the big gold medal he wears suspended from a long chain was a handsome and very conspicuous token. (The recto of the medal is, of course, decorated with the Elector’s profile portrait.) The sitter is shown executing one of his own paintings, and in a delicious conceit, Roepel himself executed that skillfully foreshortened portion of the canvas, and signed it for good measure.

Still-life paintings of this kind were not merely pleasing aggregations of fruit and flowers, although they certainly could function as decorations on this straightforward level, and often with pleasing seasonal allusions—best contemplated in the depths of winter at the end of the little ice age. However, they could also be ruminations upon the cycle of life: budding, ripeness, over-ripeness, degeneration, and decay—such that the bursting fig, the wilting rose, and the bruised peach will soon be food for snails, and evidently spiders as well—there is a small but conspicuous web. So too men are food for worms. Such was the argument thundered from many Dutch Protestant pulpits.

The handling of Roepel’s palette, specifically the rather unconventional arrangement of his colors, meanwhile, is so specific that it raises the question whether Roepel supplied it also.

His smile combines a hint of mischief and much self-satisfaction, though his eyes are steady, even shrewd.

However—and this struck me as worth pointing out when on Saturday morning I spoke about the painting where it currently hangs at Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York—there is another ingeniously telling aspect of the artist’s disposition. His powdered wig is aspirational, and (along with the rest of his costume) socially ambitious, but Van Bleeck has shown the wig casually pushed back away from Roepel’s brow, perhaps with the clean end of his brush, to let in some air, to alleviate a certain scratchiness, or get it out of the road while he attends to some fine detail maybe up close. One sees very clearly the shaven part of Roepel’s scalp that would normally be covered. It is a delightful detail, and one which also reminds us of the bizarre circularity of habits of fashion.

The powdered wig or perruque, which developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, began as an approximation of real hair, but the wearing of increasingly elaborate wigs made it absolutely necessary for wig-wearing gentlemen to crop or even shave their hair because unless they did so the wig simply could not be worn. There were also problems of infestation—fleas mainly.

Also, a properly powdered wig, which helped with dubious smells, naturally through the course of the working day deposited a good deal of fine dust over the shoulder parts of a gentleman’s coat, and that phenomenon is very often represented in portraits, as it is here. This is no discoloration of the cloth, or a clumsy misreading of certain effects of light. It’s powder, suggesting that eighteenth-century servants all over Europe must have grappled with a more or less constant film of dust settling unhelpfully on virtually every surface. One wonders whether it also found its way into the paint film. I must ask Mark Aronson.

Finger-twirlers

2012-01-24T11:31:00.006-05:00

Lately an excellent colleague of mine, an enormously learned young man, has directed my attention to Mrs. Piozzi [Hester, previously Mrs. Thrale], specifically to her diary entry for March 29, 1794 (ii. 874f.), in which she coined the term “finger-twirler,” not one that I had previously come across. “[Ann,] Mrs. [Bertie] Greatheed & I call those Fellows Finger-twirlers,” wrote Mrs. Piozzi, “meaning a decent word for Sodomites: Old Sir Horace Mann [first baronet] & Mr. [George] James the Painter had such an odd way of twirling their Fingers in Discourse;―& I see Suetonius tells the same thing of one of the Roman Emperors ‘nec sine molli quadam digitorum gesticulatione.’ [Life of Tiberius, 68].” Finger-twirler does not yet appear in the O.E.D. among the many compounds listed in the article on finger, n., so at first I wondered if the nearest viable approximation was the citation for finger-work—“(a) work executed with the fingers; (b) the play of, or manipulation by, the fingers”—viz., 1849 D. Rock, Church of Our Fathers, III. x. 354: “A rich pall of silk, the finger-work of some queen,” but I am sure this is far too literal a reading. No doubt Mrs. Piozzi knew what she was doing, but I do wonder about the leap from digitorum gesticulatione to twirl. In any event, it seems that she was consistently preoccupied by matters of sexual orientation, perhaps to the point of obsession, though Mrs. Piozzi was certainly right about Sir Horace Mann and Mr. James, and I am sure she would have extended the same compliment to their friends Thomas Patch and Lord Tylney, who were also, by all accounts, fully paid-up, card-carrying finger-twirlers.

South 2

2012-01-21T12:05:00.004-05:00

The following day we approached the chalk cliffs between Seaford and Beachy Head. The most extraordinary aspect of this stretch of south coast is that cuddly old rural England just rolls picturesquely along, up hill and down, peacefully navigating soft rises and little gullies, until.... Straight down into the sea, a sheer and entirely unimpeded drop. It’s eroding steadily, of course, which means that sometimes important listed farmhouses of inconceivable antiquity that just happen to find themselves closest to the precipice—even a quarter of a mile or so from it, are absolutely uninsurable, so I imagine whoever is the unhappy person most recently left holding the deed has no choice but to abandon ship, and leave the place to its eventual fate. Contented livestock, meanwhile, graze contentedly in the teeth of southerly gales, almost perversely ignoring the dizzy spectacle of dwelling at the abrupt margin of England. If Dungeness is the sine qua non of horizontality, the Seven Sisters, here, are the epitome of vertical. During the First World War, incidentally, depending on the direction of the wind, the incessant bombardment of trench warfare in northern France was clearly audible in the locality.

South

2012-01-21T12:02:00.002-05:00

Last weekend we stayed in a little cottage on the South Downs, hard by the ancient smuggling village of Alfriston, East Sussex. Two places, barely fifty miles apart, attest to the extraordinary variety of the English landscape. Dungeness (above), where we went on Saturday, is a flat promontory composed entirely of shingle, one of the largest such aggregations in existence. Here all things are in a state of gradual reclamation: metal, driftwood, stone. The elemental powers simply grind them all to dust. Though barely twenty-seven miles away, just across the horizon, France might as well not exist; the place screams isolation and insularity, notwithstanding the twinkling lights of the nuclear power station that squats with a measure of contingency on the western edge. Fishing boats perch atop the vertiginous beach of loose, salt-encrusted stones, waiting stoically for their working life to expire; cottages cling to the ground as best they can. Dungeness makes David Copperfield’s Yarmouth feel positively cosy; it could easily be the farthest extremity of the world.

Callas

2012-01-07T14:55:00.005-05:00

Among the assortment of old gramophone records that lived in Dad’s study at number 18 Denham Place was “Callas à Paris,” a collection of French operatic arias sung by Maria Callas, and conducted by the youthful Georges Prêtre. Thank God I listened to that record a lot as a teenager, but it took me a long time to discover the early recordings made by Callas when she was at the height of her vocal powers, and in every respect in her prime. Among those the one I now listen to most is the 1953 Teatro alla Scala recording of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, conducted by Maestro Tullio Serafin. For what operatic confrontation is as painful or affecting as the scene in which Santuzza begs her lover (sung by Giuseppe di Stefano): “No, no, Turiddu, rimani rimani ancora” (“Turiddu, Stay with me, stay”)? And what fury when, at length, high-handedly he doesn’t, was ever better expressed in music than by Maria Callas here? No doubt Christoph Willibald von Gluck was a more soothing presence in the front room at Denham Place than Mascagni, whom I think probably Dad would have disliked, but there can be no doubt that Mascagni was the better fit for Callas. At the end of her career, when her voice was in shreds, Callas performed the same duet in concert with Giuseppe di Stefano in the Royal Festival Hall in London—the sparks flew there, too, but the pain of the drama itself was overshadowed by the greater anguish of a once matchless star who must have been aware that her own voice had abandoned her. You can see it in her eyes.

Princess Marie Louise again

2012-01-05T16:23:00.003-05:00

This rather beautiful drawing by Dame Laura Knight is coming up for sale late this month at Lawrences in Dorset, for next to no money. It shows Princess Marie Louise as a rather wistful old lady, having just completed her very engaging volume of memoirs, My Memories of Six Reigns. The lot contains two further drawings by Knight, showing the hands of the sitter and sheets of writing (“To all those whose friendship and affection have made my long life so full of interest and happiness―Marie Louise; I have told you that my religion and faith have been the anchor to which I have clung all through my life with its many joys and sorrows. There is no other anchor, and with that assurance I say ‘Farewell’―Marie Louise.” The drawings and manuscript were apparently acquired by the vendor’s mother from Princess Marie Louise’s last Lady-in-Waiting. According to the catalogue notes, the Princess died at her home off Berkeley Square on December 8, 1956, aged 84, only a matter of months after Dame Laura executed this portrait. The ones of her hands formed the frontispiece and endpapers of the Princess’s book, which was published earlier in the same year, so the group carries more than a hint of valedictory repose, or, as Lawrences rightly put it, “an unusual farewell to the nation” by one of Queen Victoria’s last surviving granddaughters.

Ronald Searle

2012-01-04T10:54:00.007-05:00

Ronald Searle has died at the great age of 91. By all accounts he felt oppressed by his enduring association with the Belles of St. Trinian’s, with Molesworth, and with all the other broadly revealing postwar English stereotypes which decades ago he skewered so exactly with his pen. His reportage and more serious later work he felt were consistently underappreciated at home; he settled in France. Yet those early, writhing symphonies of line were the works with which I grew up, and in early childhood obviously did my very best to imitate. This was my father’s taste, though interestingly in his own graphic work Dad leaned farther towards Daumier’s gens de justice. Anyway, a mere cartoonist or illustrator Searle was most definitely not, but rather, as his obituary in the Daily Telegraph rightly states, “one of the world’s greatest satirical artists.” Indeed, Ronald Searle belonged in the same category of genius as that of Saul Steinberg or Hilary Knight. His personal collection now goes to the Wilhelm Busch Museum (Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst) in Hanover.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T14:31:00.005-05:00

New Year’s Day? It’s incredible. The accelerating rate at which it arrives! I suppose the reason for that is that each passing year forms an incrementally smaller proportion of one’s entire lifespan, and no doubt that must make it feel as if they fly past faster. I’m not quite sure why New Year’s Day always puts me in mind of the Radetzky March and An der schönen blauen Donau because when I was growing up in Australia invariably we spent it at Metung, messing around on the shores of Bancroft Bay and Lake King, often in sweltering midsummer heat. In his heyday, Dad would join the sail-past in the old Jubilee, and we would give three hearty cheers to the commodore of the Metung Yacht Club—which event is just about as far from the New Year’s Concert in the Wiener Musikverein as it is possible to stray, yet now I am pottering around the house thinking of both: Metung and the Strausses (Elder and Younger), which evidently produce more than the hint of a spring in my step. And somehow this New Year’s Day, I have more of one—being filled with hope and energy and excitement about what this particular year will bring. I wish you, dear readers, as much of the same as anyone can reasonably expect, all the luck in the world, and I send you, wherever you may be, and for what they are worth, my warm greetings for a happy and prosperous 2012.

Vezdye, vezdye, on predo mnoyu!

2011-12-30T10:45:00.008-05:00

When I was a rather shy and extremely inexperienced undergraduate in the early 1980s, I indulged an immoderate enthusiasm for grand opera. That interest has never entirely gone away, but thirty years later I am struck by how inadequately I ever grasped the convergence of poetry and music and emotion in the great love scenes especially—which I was then singularly ill-equipped to appreciate. True, Giuseppe Verdi managed to fire up a certain amount of adolescent passion, never more so than in the love scene in Act I of Otello, but it has taken me half a life-time to learn to listen with the heart, and discover in music drama the expression of real emotions, and not some exciting approximation of something big that might be waiting around the corner, or not. Who has not looked back with a wry half-smile, and said to himself, “I was just too young”?

So it is that I have been listening lately to a crackly old recording of the remarkable Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch, a star who shone as brightly in the decade between 1942 and 1952 as indeed she shone briefly, and whose glorious voice, alas, faded much too soon. Here is her publicity photograph; talk about star power in living black-and-white! In May 1948, at the height of her powers, Miss Welitsch recorded in London the famous letter scene from Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugen Onegin, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted with exemplary finesse (and an admirably retrained tempo) by Walter Süsskind. Everyone knows, or ought to know the story: Tatiana Larina exchanges only a few words with the coolly detached Onegin when his friend Lensky, a neighbour, brings him to visit her sister Olga and their parents, but that encounter, in her own home, unleashes a torrent of emotion in Tatiana’s mind, and, in the privacy of her bedroom later that night, overwhelmed by a fever of passion, and of doubt, she sits down to write Onegin a letter—pouring out her very soul, with predictable consequences upon which the rest of the story hinge.

What is so remarkable about this particular recording (alas not yet propelled onto Youtube; though Renee Fleming is superb here), with all its technical limitations, and the further disadvantage that the piece was sung in a rather leaden German translation from which the richness of those marvelous Russian consonants was eliminated, is the apparent recklessness with which from the very opening Ljuba Welitsch hurls herself into the performance, as if from an exposed cliff-top: “Everywhere, everywhere I look, I see my fatal tempter! Wherever I look, I see him!” The quality of her voice, moreover—which is also what made her such a sensational Salome, and maybe also conspired at length to ruin it—combines bell-like clarity, urgency, unguarded girlishness, and a visceral unrestraint, which are all, of course, exactly right for Tatiana. You feel she gives it 250%, with all the breathtaking risk that that must have involved. Again, this is somehow right for Tatiana, though no voice teacher would ever these days responsibly recommend it. The internal shifts between torrential passion to doubt and fear and back again are written into the score, with its restive drive and accelerating heartbeat, but the job of making it all hang together is really the soprano’s. Hers is the startling vocal line, and Welitsch is never more believable or moving than in the moment of climax, when, about to sign and seal her letter to Onegin, Tatiana impores him: “I wait for you, I wait for you! Speak the word to revive my heart’s fondest hopes or shatter this oppressive dream with, alas, the scorn, alas, the scorn I have deserved!” I challenge anyone who has ever fallen deeply in love not to recognize at least something of the feeling—though for most of us it is couched in prosaic language: Will he or won’t he? Does he or doesn’t he? What are these feelings, whose sheer intensity I can barely understand? As usual, great artists hold up the mirror, and it is up to us—whether we are in the theatre with Tchaikovsky, in an art museum maybe with Tilman Riemenschneider (I wish), or just listening to the late, great Ljuba Welitsch on the radio—to peer into that mirror, and discover there an emotional experience, real and true. Then, with luck, we may shed tears of understanding. Vezdye, vezdye, on predo mnoyu! Everywhere, everywhere I look, I see him!

What did Thomas Woolner see?

2011-12-28T13:01:00.005-05:00

Just before Christmas I sent the following message to the editor of the Paris Review, hoping it might be included in the advice column in the online daily, then promptly forgot all about it:

Dear Lorin, May I once more avail myself of the generous hospitality of your advice column to help solve another of my small mysteries? I am currently editing the 1852–54 journal kept on the Australian goldfields by the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner. It is a fascinating document, from which most of the best bits were ruthlessly excised prior to publication in 1917 by his industrious daughter, à la Cassandra Austen, though fortunately they survive in the manuscript. On November 8, 1852, Woolner and his two traveling companions strayed from the main road north from Melbourne toward the diggings, became separated, and got lost in the bush: “I went on and saw—what produced this observation, ‘That [he] who wants to avoid strange sights must shun byways.’ A brutal, worse than brutal sight.” So far I have not been able to identify the quotation, if indeed it actually was one. It seems possible that the inverted commas were merely added for emphasis; it’s a rather clunky aperçu, yet I wonder if any of your readers recognize it? Elsewhere in the journal Woolner recorded without hesitation, and in detail, even a measure of cold detachment, scenes of drunkenness and violence, shady characters, the accidental drowning of a friend, and several murders in and around the goldfields. On this occasion, though, whatever Woolner saw so shocked him that he was obviously not prepared to note any particulars. Bodily, I presume, but what on earth was it? On that gothic note, may I also add my sincere compliments of the season? Angus Trumble.

This minor editorial problem has been rattling around in a quiet corner of my head for many months, and I thought it would be rather satisfactory if someone might come up with a plausible answer, or indeed an implausible one provided it was correct. Yesterday my attention was drawn to Lorin Stein’s extremely generous, flattering and, above all, helpful response:

Dear Angus, When you say jump, The Paris Review does not ask how high. We put our best people on this one. The results—while inconclusive—were revealing. Within minutes, our Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, wrote in from North Carolina with a passage from Tommaso Grossi’s Marco Visconti in an 1849 translation. This looked promising at first, only it had nothing to do with Woolner’s text, and was rejected. (Sullivan: “Could it have been this? My gut says no [and so does mine].”) Next our associate editor, Stephen Andrew Hiltner, proposed a line from the Tao Te Ching, but admitted that Woolner was unlikely to have known Chinese [correct]. Our deputy editor, Sadie Stein, claimed—impressively, and with some vehemence—to recognize the sententia from Horace [much warmer]. The poem has not been found. Our Latin consultant, Brian FitzGerald of Lincoln College, Oxford, doubted a classical provenance. He directed us to some chapters from Proverbs, in which, however, there is no mention of strange sights. Our managing and Web editors, Nicole Rudick and Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn, came out strong for Dante. So far we are unable to supply the relevant verse. One of Sadie’s contacts, a professor of Greek, suggested Oedipus Rex, either the messenger reporting Laius’s death or else a speech by Oedipus himself. Our close readings have not produced a match. On the other hand, we have now figured out what Woolner saw. (Private letter to follow.)

This last communication I am most eager and anxious to read. Beyond this small army of enthusiastic in-house helpers, a generous reader, who self-identifies as “J. A. Zugot,” submitted the following comment…twice!:

Reading Woolner’s quotation, “That [he] who wants to avoid strange sights must shun byways,” I too was reminded of bad translations from the Chinese or Japanese, or of some clunky re-doings of Sophocles and Horace. Dante, Milton—who not? Your staff isn’t—literarily—alone for the holidays…But that mention of Proverbs, by your guy from Oxford (surely he was thinking of those strange warnings against “strange women”), set me down another, um, “byway.” The Talmud, specifically its section called Avot, is often read separately under the title Pirke Avot, “Ethics of the Fathers.” These fathers are called the tannaim, or “repeaters,” and they, repeating mostly in Jerusalem, essentially committed the Oral Law—the Jewish oral tradition—to parchment, roundabout the first two centuries of the previous millennium. This could go on and on. Better you should search the internet. Anyway, from Avot: “He [their teacher, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai] said to them, Go and see which is the good way that a man should cleave to. Rabbi Eliezer said, A good eye: R. Yehoshua said, A good friend: and R. Yose said, A good neighbor: and R. Shimon said, He that foresees what is to be: R. Eleazar said, A good heart. He said to them, I approve the words of Eleazar ben Arak rather than your words, for his words include your words. He said to them, Go and see which is the evil way that a man should shun. R. Eliezer said, An evil eye: and R. Yehoshua said, An evil companion: and R. Yose said, An evil neighbor: and R. Shimon said, He that borroweth and repayeth not—he that borrows from man is the same as if he borrowed from God (blessed is He)—for it is said, The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again, but the righteous is merciful and giveth: R. Eleazar said, An evil heart. He said to them, I approve the words of Eleazar ben Arak rather than your words, for your words are included in his words.” Now here’s where I’m going to lose you: Freemasonry. “The Constitutions of Free Masons,” ca. 17something and so among the oldest surviving documents of the Brotherhood, states that God Himself, the Great Architect, is the primeval Grand Master. Fellow lodge members include Adam, the three Patriarchs, Moses, the various Israelite kings and high priests, Jesus and his dozen apostles. And obviously the entire Masonic temple model, symbology to rituals, was based solidly on the two Temples of Jerusalem. Now, after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., Judaism lost its geographic center and became wholly bookish. The rabbis of the Talmud kept the secret, at least selective, traditions alive. It was natural that they, and their two local lodges—those of Grand Master Rabbis Hillel and Shammai—would be Masonically adapted/adopted. Freemasonry from the Talmud, a very stupid, stupidly fascinating book from 1905, written by A. (no further clarification) Posman, makes this explicit. Here, R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus’ responses have been altered to: “A good eye is the right path for man to adhere to.” “An evil eye is to shun the path.” Again, here’s Woolner’s: “[He] who wants to avoid strange sights must shun byways.” Of course, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was itself a type of lodge, and indeed its original members, including Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt, and Thomas Woolner, were all Masons. As Albert Boime, in the final volume of his magisterial A Social History of Modern Art, notes: “‘Brotherhood’ carried unmistakable allusions to a Freemason-like fraternity. Significantly, when the group agreed to use the monogram P.R.B., each member had to swear an oath to keep its meaning secret.” So, another year over, another hour wasted. From the Oral Tradition to the Written Tradition (the Talmud), to an English Masonic traducing, to oral Masonic lore—that’s my guess. Strange.

I never knew that Rossetti & Co. were Freemasons, and will—with all due respect, and many thanks to J. A. Zugot for his efforts on my behalf—check in with Barringer and Prettejohn for confirmation. If so, it seems a rather plausible explanation, which nevertheless leaves unanswered the larger and definitely more baffling question as to what on earth was the “brutal, worse than brutal sight” Thomas Woolner glimpsed in the Australian bush that shook him so.

Brownie

2011-12-18T12:13:00.006-05:00

We go the whole way back, my bear and I.

His name is “Brownie,” though I’m not sure why:

The threads are dappled grey, not brown, with which

Aunt Anne contrived and made him, stitch by stitch,

Before my birth, love’s labour unremitting:

She never shone more brightly than when knitting.

I miss her still, my thrilling, clever aunt,

Her many skills she never wished to vaunt:

The semaphore she learned and trained to guide

Our ships past Rottnest Island, served with pride

In wartime—Russia was our ally then;

Her letters, and the sharpness of her pen,

But funny too; she taught me how to swim.

Her work was therapy, not mind but limb,

A physio, and “farmer’s wife” as well,

Admittedly far better in that shell

Than Uncle Henry handled sheep or cattle,

Through flood and drought with courage she did battle;

Like Mum, she built in winter massive fires,

Dispatched whole trees, killed snakes with fencing wires.

In town from time to time Aunt Anne would see

A play or concert, kindly taking me:

That’s how aged six or seven at the Palais

I saw Nureyev leap in my first ballet!

To Paris and l’Étoile she took me straight,

And climbed the arc, then let me stay up late.

Though shy, dear Brownie knows these things by heart,

Reminds me, too, how well she learned the art

Of complex origami from Japan.

How lucky that our smashing lives began,

My bear and me, not part of any plan,

But soon enough to know and love Aunt Anne!

Merry Christmas

2011-12-18T06:30:00.004-05:00

At Christmas many people draft a letter,

A twelve-month circular of news and stuff.

I think on balance verses can be better,

Two modest sonnets probably enough.

Last winter stank, with record falls of snow;

The summer brought a hurricane, “Irene”!

And staged a local earthquake (impact: low);

Another storm cut power on Hallowe’en

(Because the trees had not yet lost their leaves

Much snow built up, and snapped off mighty branches;

The power lines were cut, then hateful thieves

Nicked farmers’ generators from their ranches.)

Throughout my house stood solid as a rock,

Ein feste Berg, the finest on the block.

But in between I traveled far and wide,

To Cape Town, Perth, Chicago, Stockholm, Leeds,

And London several times, although I tried

To match each trip to really pressing needs.

In Melbourne, to St. George’s we transferred

Our parents’ ashes, laying them athwart

Two pretty cherries, such that Mum preferred,

And long ago convinced them to import

Before that very garden was implanted.

With every end there comes a new beginning:

To Sophie, Simon’s second child, is granted

A brand new baby boy whose name, so winning,

Is Jack—late-breaking news of recent days,

A Christmas gift: To him your glass please raise!

Sir Zelman Cowen

2011-12-12T13:54:00.003-05:00

Sir Zelman Cowen, A.K., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O., Q.C., died in Melbourne last Thursday, thirty-four years to the day since he was sworn in as the nineteenth Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia. In a formal statement, the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has rightly said: “Sir Zelman was a proud member of the Australian community, a proud member of the Jewish community, and a leader of both. He was a humanitarian whose dedication to justice and public welfare will remain one of his great legacies. We will remember him for his warmth, his humility, his integrity, his compassion, and the great dignity he brought to public life.” His appointment was one of the most inspired acts (and not the only one) of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who, as time passes, just keeps on looking better and better. Certainly his approach to the problem of who to nominate to the Queen (and who not to) has been praised, perhaps above all, by Gough Whitlam! Not too long ago I was talking with a former official of the attorney-general’s department in Canberra who told me that, of all the prime ministers for whom it was his duty to supply formal legal advice, he thought Malcolm Fraser was the one who most conscientiously exercised the power of the executive specifically to right wrongs, despite the immediate or short-term political disadvantages such actions might well, and usually did generate. Sir Zelman’s death has reminded me of that conversation. I met Sir Zelman on a number of occasions between 1987 and 1991, when I worked at Government House, Melbourne, during the McCaughey era, and well remember the fondness, respect, esteem, and enjoyment of each other’s company exhibited by both statesmen, and indeed by Jean McCaughey and Lady Cowen. Sir Zelman had left office some years earlier, just as Davis had relinquished the Mastership of Ormond College, but their prodigious intellects and interests intersected in many ways, never more so than in the affairs of the University of Melbourne, and of universities in general during the period of the Dawkins reforms, of which it would be fair to say that neither Sir Zelman nor Davis approved. If heaven is a university, then surely both men hold personal chairs.

Passport photographs

2011-12-11T14:37:00.002-05:00

Just back from a busy week in London, with many more thoughts about portraiture. I suppose the vast majority of people today experience portraiture at first hand—the production of an image meant in some way to stand in for themselves—only in various banal forms of photography, increasingly biometric for the convenience of computers. And as everybody knows, in the cafe, canteen, public bar, or by the water cooler, when comparing sometimes scarifying, often comical images embedded in our not particular recent drivers’ licenses and other documents with photo ID, we are not often pleased with the likeness, or even convinced by it—even though it evidently performs more or less the function now required by a society in which an ever greater premium is placed upon security and surveillance. By contrast, I suppose it is also true that the merest glance at Facebook demonstrates what very unusual ideas many people entertain about how they would like to be identified, and by what sort of image. It is, after all, not so long since formal black-and-white passport photographs were routinely taken by professional photographers, and many of the lingering conventions of pose, of artful lighting, and of pleasing composition were then still pluckily harnessed in a studio setting to produce a better and more putatively flattering likeness. Such is my memory of going with Mum to have my first passport photograph taken in the old shop-front studio belonging to a Mr. Humphries (no relation) in Glenferrie Road, Malvern, near the corner of High Street. I cannot remember what I wore, but I do remember that Mum prudently brought along my hairbrush, a scratchy one, and that the sitting, which was surprisingly long, involved adopting a most counter-intuitive, cantilevered pose, with an upward turn of the head, and a subtle fall of light across the backdrop. Certainly the finished result was deemed acceptable by the authorities, and perhaps more importantly by Mum, and that passport served me well in the following years. This must have been towards the end of 1971, because I needed it to go to Fiji during the next May school holidays. I was seven years old. The last time I went through a similar process was a few years ago, when the consulate-general in New York sent me out to get a more satisfactory biometric passport photograph taken in a cut-price establishment with which they seemed to have wrought some commercial arrangement, which, because of the assembly-line technique and extraordinarily high cost, seemed dubious then and even more dubious now.

Anniversaries

2011-12-02T10:02:00.003-05:00

Anniversaries are peculiar, because aside from a mere accident of the calendar there is no particular reason why Mum should seem any more absent today than she was this day last week, the week before that, or through recent months. Yet one feels it keenly: It is two whole years almost to the day since she died, and not quite two years since we buried her. Memories cluster in, all of them happy—above all of Mum’s elaborately rationed sense of the ridiculous, and her infectious laughter—especially the galloping timbre of an unrestrained chuckle, followed by the swooping, follow-up sigh that said: “How silly,” whatever it was. I think, I hope that my brothers and I have inherited this quality, though I also like to think that we ration it rather less than she did—perhaps that is due to the part of us that devolves from Dad. Self-discipline was probably her most admirable quality, that and thrift. She would never think of replacing something if it could be repaired, or of indulging in any luxurious extravagance for herself, more’s the pity because she could easily have afforded it. She took pleasure in The Times crossword puzzle, a cup of tea, her pretty garden, a game of patience, and a good book. She had had a serious respiratory illness in the late 1950s, which left her lungs severely scarred, and therefore vulnerable to respiratory trouble in old age. This combined with serious anti-inflammatory medications for rheumatoid arthritis seem to have destroyed her health in the last few years of her life. After she died, her doctor remarked to me that she had simply exhausted all her reserves of strength. Quite so, but I often wonder whether those reserves might have been better preserved by us, by him, and by her, because she was a stubborn and stoical old lady, and clearly lived with a greater measure of discomfort than anyone really understood. But she soldiered on to the very end, and mercifully the end was as swift as can be. She was spared the distress of leaving her house, losing her garden, the indignities and ugliness of aged care, and the misery of dependence, decrepitude, and senility. Perhaps this is enviable, however I cannot but wish that she was still en poste in Melbourne, for a newsy phone call every Sunday night (Monday morning her time), and regular doses of stern but shrewd advice. In melancholy moments I am reminded of what my old friend Kelly Read remarked just after Mum died: Your parents don’t really vanish so much as move in with you. It is as if they are quietly pottering about in the next room, or in your head. On the whole, I think this is true.

Dad and documentation

2011-11-28T07:52:00.004-05:00

Lately I have commenced the awesome task of sorting through and identifying the Trumble family papers that are ultimately destined for the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Dad’s run of scrapbooks is fascinating because he kept everything—pretty much in chronological order—a confetti of mementoes of professional and domestic life from 1949 to the 1980s. Nothing he regarded as too trivial to escape notice and preservation. Beyond the scrapbooks, however, there are hundreds of other documents and photographs that came from previous generations—a group of long letters, for example, from the novelist Mary Grant Bruce to her lifelong friend our great-grandmother Borthwick and to her daughters, Aunt Jean and Aunt Kath, which seem to imply that various aspects of the Billabong stories, and of the Linton family of Gippsland, were based at least in part on the Borthwick family of Bald Hills near Sale. As well there is a sheaf of more official papers. This one is typical. Evidently inspired by the glorious Trumble heritage of test cricket, Dad put each of his sons up for junior membership of the Melbourne Cricket Club—at birth. Here is Hamish’s docket, lodged when he was a fraction more than two months old, on March 14, 1956. The annotation down below “Hamish David Campbell Trumble / plse Edgar” is a courteous instruction to Edgar Parker, who for years served as a law clerk (I think, I hope I am right about that) at Mallesons, and as the designated custodian of valuable and/or important documents that Dad preferred to keep under lock and key in the office: documents such as deeds, titles, share certificates, passports, and the completed nomination forms for his four sons’ junior membership of the Melbourne Cricket Club. As I recall, Mr. Parker began his lifelong career of devoted service to the partners of Mallesons as a junior deputy to the ancient Mr. Ted Russell, ultimately rising in the mid-1970s to be in charge of the files, which in those days were still folded in half down the middle and tied with red tape. Files pertaining to dormant matters were customarily retained for a period of about fifteen years, after which time they were put in large canvas bags and consigned to an industrial incinerator, to make way for the next year’s accumulation of files. The task of doing this was allotted to the teenaged sons of partners during the first few weeks of the Christmas holidays, and so it was that in the summer of 1979 Mr. Parker became my very first boss, and an exceedingly kind and benevolent one he was too. I was fifteen, but looked closer to nine.

Thumb-nails

2011-11-20T10:37:00.006-05:00

A generous colleague from the Ohio State University has lately written to ask me whether, when writing The Finger: A Handbook, I had ever come across any references to marginalia having been inscribed with the reader’s thumb-nail. In The Rivals (1:2) Richard Brinsley Sheridan has Lydia Languish refer to Lady Slattern, who “has a most observing thumb; and…cherishes her nails for the convenience of making marginal notes.” He goes on to say, quite correctly, that there is a similar observation made in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and asks me whether I know if the practice in fact ever existed. Alas, I had never come across either of these intriguing references. Presumably the idea was that Lady Slattern’s thumbnail was maintained in such a way—even pared down to a sharp point—so as not merely to mark the passage more effectively with an indentation, à la manicule (above) but to annotate busily also, which might conceivably require doing to it what one does with a sharp knife to the tip of a quill. Tatiana learns much about Onegin in his library, specifically from the marks of his pencil and thumbnail in the margins of various books, which implies a distinction there between pencilled notes and indented marks and/or underlinings done with his thumb-nail. I very much doubt if the quill-sharpening step was ever undertaken, so the joke in Sheridan must be about officiousness, or maybe inquisitiveness, or even interference, in other words making of Lady Slattern some sort of equivalent of P. G. Wodehouse’s glorious creation “the efficient Baxter.” I am guessing. I daresay the phenomenon may relate, however approximately, to the concept of “thumb-nail sketch,” although the O.E.D. (“thumb-nail…2. transf. A drawing or sketch of the size of the thumb-nail; hence fig. a brief word-picture. Chiefly attrib., as thumb-nail sketch”) admits no possibility that such a sketch might actually have been produced with the aid of the thumbnail. This would not be the first time that the O.E.D. ever overlooked some forgotten shred of social usage. We know, for example, that eighteenth-century French gentlemen grew the nail of their little finger for the specific purpose of scratching discreetly at doors, to distinguish that refined gesture from the crude knocking of factors, salespeople, or servants. We also know that J. M. W. Turner cultivated a long fingernail as a convenient tool for scraping, chiefly on paper through watercolour, but that is quite a different matter and I am not aware that he ever wrote with it.

The Agony Column Codes and Ciphers

2011-11-19T14:45:00.002-05:00

One of my favourite anthologies contains mostly brief items of correspondence, many of them in code or cipher, that were printed in various London newspapers through the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond: The Agony Column Codes and Ciphers, Wndr, wpng, nd wrshp fllw., by Jean Palmer (Gamlingay, Bedfordshire: Authors Online Limited, 2005). The practice seems to have come into being with the pillar box, and became so widespread that it is mentioned several times in passing by Sherlock Holmes, who boasted of being able to decipher even the most complicated ones quite easily, and “that such crude devices amuse the intelligence without fatiguing it.” Many of the messages are barely encoded at all. Some merely spell words backwards or deploy obvious letter substitutions, or even demotic French, so the question arises as to whether their composers were genuinely concerned about keeping the contents secret. Others, however, are deeply impenetrable, and were certainly meant to protect the identity of the correspondent and recipient. Naturally, most of the messages relate to clandestine assignations, some commercial, possibly even political, but far more often romantic, at a time when evidently no other avenues of written communication were regarded as secure—from suspicious husbands, tyrannical mothers, watchful servants, even unscrupulous telegraph boys eager to do almost anything in return for a modest pourbois. Consider, for example, this slightly tactless appeal that was printed in The Times on Thursday, June 12, 1856: “I have the most beautiful horse in the country, but not the most beautiful lady. Your silence pains me deeply. I cannot forget you.—M.” Or this, from a person who self-identified as “Coach and Horses”: “Will you fulfill your promise this week to your distressed but ever loving Pussy?” (Tuesday, April 5, 1881.) Many others, however, are far less straightforward. In February 1886, readers of the Evening Standard might well have puzzled over the true meaning of this: “The steamer will leave as advertised on Wednesday. The two experiments answered very well. Your request shall be complied with. The box, I hope, is safe. Your own always, most lovingly. Fair and Mild.” Or this: “Yes. Reward would depend on value of information and amount recovered—Q. V. (Daily Telegraph, Saturday, August 8, 1903). And especially this, from the mysteriously restive “Velsa”: “Do you believe in the word platonic?” (Morning Post, Friday, November 6, 1896). Like all such conspicuous genres, this one inevitably attracted eccentric correspondents determined not merely to avail themselves of the platform, but to use it either to air non-problems—“Gentleman in good social position finds that wherever he goes friends ply him with whiskies and soda, which he does not like, and which disagree with him; they resent it if he refuses them. He would like introduction to society in which whisky and soda does not form so important an element. Address R., 01826, “Morning Post” office, Strand, W.C.” (Ibid., Thursday, April 9, 1908)—or to confront real and pressing crises but in so obscure a manner as to be almost entirely ineffectual: “A lady, whose parentage and connections entitle her to respect, if not veneration, has reason to believe that anonymous aspersions and improper letters (purporting to be written by her) are circulating to her discredit. She earnestly hopes that the recipients of any such document will be cautious of the credence they attach to it.” (The Times, Friday, April 2, 1852.) Which last example begs the question whether a lady believing herself entitled to veneration therefore might well be capable of drafting improper letters, and concocting a cover story with which to distance herself from the mischief. Or perhaps this simply proves that I have been reading far too many. In any case, I love the Victorians.

Sanjūsangendō

2011-11-18T11:32:00.003-05:00

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of aesthetic experiences that one would willingly call life-changing—and I have a full set of fingers. One of these occurred a few years ago, on a visit to the great thirteenth-century temple in Kyoto called the Rengeōin or, more popularly, the Sanjūsangendō, which means the temple of the thirty-three bays. This enormous, plain, shoebox-shaped wooden building houses a colossal statue of Kannon, the feminine manifestation of Avalokiteśvara, the seated bodhisattva of infinite compassion. She sprouts forty-two arms, and a forest of hands. An eleven-foot high masterpiece of Japanese sculpture of the Kamakura period (1185–1333 C.E.), Kannon is gloriously flanked by her heavenly cosmic guardians or attendants, the twenty-eight so-called bushū, and 1,000 life-sized, eleven-headed, “thousand-armed” standing statues, representing different versions of herself, carved in cypress-wood, then gilded. Each statue is carefully differentiated from the next, and like its larger prototype, has dozens of pairs of hands, the fingers painstakingly crafted into a bewildering range of delicate gestures. These statues fill the temple, and are carefully accommodated on a gigantic altar consisting of ten ascending steps which accommodate these seemingly numberless ranks of statues. It is said that all Japanese pilgrims should be able to discover their own face peering back from this host of silent bodhisattvas, who, like them, await a higher incarnation. Their fingers are exquisite.

"A masterly portrait, and very like"

2011-11-18T09:40:00.004-05:00

I have been thinking quite a lot about portraiture lately, specifically an oddly widespread trope that crops up regularly in many British sources roughly stretching from the 1760s until the late Regency. I have a strong feeling, though it is only a hunch, that the watercolourist, printmaker, and author William Henry Pyne (1770–1843) (who published under the bizarre pseudonym of Ephraim Hardcastle) was well aware of it too when, sketching a semi-historical vignette in a very long and rambling article for Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country (“The Greater and Lesser Stars of Old Pall Mall,” Vol. 23, No. 138, June 1841, p. 686) Pyne imagined the Prince of Wales dining with a group of gentlemen at Carlton House, including the Duke of Norfolk, and commenting on a caricature of the Duke by James Gillray. “It really is,” says the Prince, “a masterly portrait, and very like.” Portrait and likeness are two separate things, and the quality of the portrait appears to relate only partly to the accuracy of its likeness to the sitter. This sounds a good deal more familiar to us than it might otherwise where we sit at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, yet writing from Poundisford Park in Somerset to his son and namesake, a young grand tourist temporarily residing in Rome, Ralph William Grey could remark of his son’s portrait by Pompeo Batoni that it is “a very good portrait, and very like you” (Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 37–38). I seem to recall a similar formulation crossing the lips of an especially garrulous character somewhere in Jane Austen, so it is safe to say that this figure of speech was widespread, but was it taken seriously, and should we also? There are grounds for caution. Pyne has the Prince of Wales utter it, at a time when the Prince’s posthumous reputation could not have sunk lower, and in relation to an object that was demonstrably not a portrait, or not at least a portrait as the term was ranked among the genres in the Academy of the forties, or indeed at any time immediately prior to, during, or after the Regency. In other words, you could argue that Pyne is actually mocking the formulation of “a masterly portrait, and very like,” regarding it in something of the same light as those silly eyes that follow you around the room. Likewise Jane Austen, and, in the many other places in which it recurs, and in Mr. Grey’s letter to son, there would appear to be grounds for consigning the phrase to the dense thicket of mere conventions. Yet even if that is true, the phrase tells us a lot about the accepted conventions of portraiture in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain, and the assumption that the parent concept of portrait was not by any means the same thing as likeness. Useful, I think.

Hallelujah

2011-11-17T12:45:00.008-05:00

The Yup’ik are aboriginal people of the Russian Far East and of western Alaska. The village of Quinhagak, Alaska—population 680—is primarily Yup’ik. The local fifth grade schoolchildren decided they wanted to send a message to the other Yup’ik communities in the area. So they made this little video, and then posted it on Youtube. Naturally, inevitably, it went viral. Evidently nearly a million people have watched it, all over the world. I especially like the postmistress: http://youtu.be/LyviyF-N23A

The firescreens

2011-11-17T08:57:00.002-05:00

Lately I received a courteous message from a gentleman who recalled having been shown over the state rooms of Government House, Melbourne, by me when I worked as an aide to Governor McCaughey nearly twenty-five years ago. Clearly that tour must have been memorable, and I can only hope that it was memorable for the right reasons. He went on to explain that I had shown him on that occasion an object near one of the fireplaces which he thought I said was for the lady of the house to busy herself behind with tapestry or needlework, while not revealing too much of her face in wider company. Did I recall the object and its name? He explained that the reason he sought clarification was that he is writing an historical novel that is set in 1910.

I well remember the pair of objects to which he refers. They stand at either side of the fireplace in the State Drawing Room, and my correspondent was right in thinking that adjustable firescreens of this kind had to do with the fire in the grate. However, the function of the object was not provide something discreetly to hide behind, but rather to shield a lady’s face from the radiant heat of the fire, so as to avoid unsightly flushing, blushing, or worse. The practice of creating adjustable, embroidered panels with which to decorate such firescreens—here is a rather ugly mid-Victorian one, ornate in a rather cheap way— was a semi-logical convergence of function and pastime. In other words, the embroidery that ladies so positioned (and protected) industriously practiced while sitting by the fire, “flush-free,” was eventually coralled into decorating the screen itself, a depressing example, I suppose, of the pointlessness and circularity of much that went on in the day-to-day life of a Victorian lady, or, as it were, didn’t. Unless, of course, you were George Eliot, Lady Burdett-Coutts, or Mrs. Russell Barrington.

Eyes that follow you around the room

2011-11-16T16:20:00.005-05:00

One of the strangest art clichés that still circulates endlessly—and I heard it again yesterday uttered by somebody who really ought to know better— is the one about the eyes in a portrait “following you around the room.” This non-illusion arises from somewhat muddled expectations about how a two-dimensional image might behave when seen from different angles in three-dimensional space. Provided the image is not a hologram, we can hardly expect it to take account of our position in the room. If the eyes engage us when we stand directly in front of the picture, they will also engage us from any other viewpoint, despite the distorting effects of foreshortening. I doubt if eyes “following you around the room” have anything at all to do with gothic fiction or those old movies in which real eyes spy through peep-holes cut into the face of a portrait. Of course, they actually do follow you around. I suspect by its slightly supernatural, spiritualist note that we can safely blame the concept of eyes that seem mobile and, worse, intently watching you, on nineteenth-century French art critics, who got a kick out of that sort of thing.

Donna Orietta

2011-11-15T12:14:00.004-05:00

I have only ever known one continental noblewoman, and even then only slightly. Somehow it seems absolutely right that I should have been introduced to her and to her family in Rome in 1986 by those shrewd but kindly Ladies of Bethany. Donna Orietta Doria Pamphilj, Princess of Torriglia, Princess of Melfi and of Valmontone, Duchess of Avigliano, etc. etc., was far more than their landlady. To a very large extent Princess Doria was a vital and practical patron of their work, and the principal reason why Miss Koet and Miss Galema managed to live for so long in their sunny apartment on the roof of the Collegio Innocenziano at Via dell’Anima, 30, overlooking Bernini’s exceptionally theatrical fontana dei quattro fiumi right in the middle of the Piazza Navona. Donna Orietta spoke English, French, and Italian with complete fluency, and was no doubt therefore entitled to make what at the time seemed the rather suprising observation that I spoke Italian with a Japanese accent. She was rightly proud of the staunch, anti-fascist stance, adopted by her father, Prince Filippo Andrea VI Doria Pamphilj, long before and right the way through World War II, and at considerable personal cost. Having refused to fly a fascist flag, a mob ransacked the Palazzo Doria, and Orietta and her mother hid in an old elevator that they stopped between floors. After the fall of Mussolini and the end of World War II, Don Filippo, who had been imprisoned, first, in a concentration camp, and later hid with his wife and daughter in different safe-houses in Trastevere, plotting with the partisans to dynamite the headquarters of the Waffen SS, which happened to be in the Villa Doria Pamphilj on the Gianicolo, whose cellars Don Filippo explored in early childhood and therefore knew like the back of his hand. He became in 1944 the first postwar sindaco of Rome, a vital role in the transition from allied occupation to the plebiscite in 1946 which abolished the Italian monarchy and established the Italian Republic. Before his death in 1958 the family estates were vast, and, I seem to recall, extended over such extensive southern territories in what was previously the Kingdom of Naples that there existed a family train in which to travel through them, at times escorted by cowboys mounted on horseback, ebulliently firing their rifles into the air by way of tribute. Upon the prince’s death, Donna Orietta had to sort out estate taxes and death duties of colossal size, and resolved to do everything in her power to save the enormous Palazzo Doria, one of the largest in Rome, together with her astonishing collections of art, among them the famous portrait of Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez. This she did with the assistance of her English husband Frank Pogson, who took much pleasure in sustaining over many years a cricket club which played socially in the grounds of the Villa Doria Pamphilj. That beautiful property eventually had to be made over to the Italian state, but was restored some time during the 1980s, at enormous cost to the Italian taxpayer, in order to provide a suitable venue for entertaining Diana, Princess of Wales.

The Ladies of Bethany

2011-11-13T12:47:00.011-05:00

The Ladies of Bethany, an order of Dutch nuns, were infinitely kind to me. I first met them when I stayed briefly in their guesthouse in Rome called Foyer Unitas Casa, in the snowy winter of 1984–85. I was initially referred to them by the redoubtable Thea Waddell, whose son Richard I knew at Trinity. Originally there were four sisters, Miss Luff, Miss Klompé—a sister of Marga Klompé who in 1956 became the first female minister of state in the Netherlands—Miss Josefa Koet (pronounced like shoot, seated here on the right), and Miss Leideke Galema (on the left). The order was one of the first to eschew the habit of the religious, and to adopt as well as civilian clothes the slightly confusing practice of referring to themselves by the secular “Miss.”

The four women converged upon Rome from various different places in, I think, the mid- to late 1950s, with an essentially outward-looking and ecumenical mission, much supported by Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, who was at that time Pope Pius XII’s sostituto for ordinary affairs in the Vatican secretariat of state. With Monsignor Montini’s assistance they found accommodation in the Palazzo Salviati in Trastevere, a sinister, ramshackle building that was used by the Germans during the war as a point of deportation of Roman jews from the Ghetto. Possibly the ladies moved from there once or twice before Princess Orietta Doria Pamphilj was persuaded by Monsignor Montini, with whom she was on friendly terms, to restore and make available to them and other religious bodies an essentially derelict, six-storey palazzo she owned that adjoined the great family church of S. Agnese in Agone, which dominates the Piazza Navona. (She had previously sold the huge Palazzo Pamphilj to the Republic of Brazil, whose embassy to Italy continues to occupy it.)

With the coming of the Second Vatican Council the work of the Ladies of Bethany suddenly assumed far greater prominence in Rome than it had previously, and the guesthouse they maintained, and the hospitality and programs they offered their guests, were geared towards accredited non-Catholic observers at the Council, both Orthodox and Protestant—Davis McCaughey was a guest at around this time—and continued thereafter to support far greater efforts in inter-church and inter-faith dialogue.

On one occasion, Miss Galema once told me, a young theologian then staying at Foyer Unitas, who was peritus to Josef Cardinal Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, received word that his mother had died in Germany, and therefore needed to be driven straight away to the old airport at Ciampino. This Miss Galema did, thus earning the sincere gratitude of the future Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

At around the same time, Monsignor Montini, who had in the meantime gone to be Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, was elected to succeed Pope John XXIII. For the rest of his life, Pope Paul VI took a lively interest in Foyer Unitas, and presented to the ladies the gold chalice which a kindly Dutch Jesuit priest used every afternoon for the masses he said in their beautiful little chapel, a calm, whitewashed slice of Holland right in the heart of the Baroque city.

I only ever knew Miss Koet and Miss Galema. Miss Luff and Miss Klompé died long before I arrived in Rome. Miss Koet, alas, died some years ago, but Miss Galema is still going strong, and, when last I received news of her, was busily drawing up plans to travel to the Holy Land. She is now well over ninety. I recall many good stories that each of them told me a different times, Miss Koet with wry good humour, wit and wisdom, and Miss Galema with considerable flamboyance. One of those has remained especially important to me.

Immediately after the end of World War II, Josefa Koet was attached to a convent in Vienna. When I learned this, I asked her with the boldness of the very young and inexperienced whether she had ever seen Carol Reed’s The Third Man—convinced when I did so that her reply would be no, and that I would be introducing a comparative simpleton to something potentially interesting and novel and informative. As usual, with infinite indulgence, she surprised me. Yes, she had not only seen that marvelous film, but had seen it many times, because it so perfectly captured what she recalled of the sinister postwar mood and rubble of occupied Vienna. And evidently she knew it far better even than Carol Reed, because clandestinely, Josefa and her fellow religious undertook the hazardous task of ferrying messages—letters, memoranda, deeds, money, etc.—between families for the time being divided between the three allied sectors and the locked-down Soviet, from which even temporary departure was for several years forbidden. Such communications were naturally also prohibited by the Russian military authorities, and there were numerous instances of people being deported to the east, or even worse simply disappearing for presumed political and other offenses far less serious than this essentially humanitarian work, about which, incidentally, certain officers of British military intelligence were glad to learn as many trivial details as Miss Koet could remember. Josefa told me she was not aware at the time that she was ever being debriefed, but she eventually reached that inevitable conclusion with considerable alarm. Alarm, because on one occasion in an especially cruel midwinter she was detained by Russian soldiers for four interminable hours on an exposed railway platform, as she was about to cross back into the British sector, and was questioned there in some detail about the purpose of her visit to the Soviet. They never learned that she was carrying an infinitely compromising brace of letters in both outside pockets of her overcoat—compromising not only to Josefa herself, but obviously to each and every correspondent who had entrusted them to her care through an intermediary—because when at length the Russian military police conducted a careful body search, they made the simple, life-saving mistake of asking Josefa with considerable gruffness to unbutton and open wide her overcoat for ease of frisking, and evidently assumed that nobody would be so stupid as to carry secret messages anywhere other than below many layers. They mocked her vocation, shocked her by the intrusiveness of the search, but eventually let her go.

Years later, I am still struck, indeed ever more so, by the extraordinary bravery exhibited by Miss Josefa Koet, then and on numerous subsequent occasions—bravery to which she would never have laid claim, but almost certainly would have dismissed with a chuckle instead. She simply did what she had to do, and it would never have occurred to her not to do it. Goodness of heart, strength of spirit, gentleness and wisdom. How rare are those qualities, and how lucky we are when, with luck, it is given to us to encounter them at an early age? Josefa died peacefully some years ago in a pretty retirement home, formerly a boarding school for the children of Rhine barge captains, at Arnhem in the western-most corner of the Netherlands, not too far from the house in which she was born.

SS. Quattro Coronati

2011-11-11T15:03:00.005-05:00

The year I lived in Rome was one of the happiest and most adventurous of my life. I was not yet twenty-two when I arrived in the fall of 1986, armed with a trio of scholarships and a letter of introduction to the ancient Professor Richard Krautheimer who graciously allowed me to get a reader’s ticket at the Bibliotheca Hertziana over which he still presided in the Palazzo Zuccari at the top of the Spanish Steps. There I spent many sunny mornings reading my way into an impenetrable thicket, trying with minimal resources but much ambition to make sense of the Tavolette di San Bernardino at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia. That group of panels I first knew in the somewhat unpromising form of several dusty old Arundel Society prints that hung in the corridor outside the office of the Warden of Trinity, the late and much lamented Evan Laurie Burge. The problem I set for myself was to come up with a hypothesis about the sequence in which the panels were originally installed in the Augustinian oratory for which they were intended; figure out what they meant; and who painted them. Essentially I failed in all three endeavors, but it was heaven. I had a job answering the telephone for the Ladies of Bethany, an order of Dutch nuns of whom only two elderly members remained en poste, living in considerable splendor in a very large apartment on the top floor of the Collegio Innocenziano in the Via di Sta. Maria dell’Anima, overlooking the Piazza Navona. And I enrolled as a part-time student of Latin at the Pontifica Universitas Gregoriana. It sounds busier than it actually was, because as far as I can remember I spent most of my time exploring the churches of Rome, of which there is a limitless supply, and in every one of which there is an abundance of treasure.

One of my favourite places, because of its scarcely conceivable antiquity, was the fortified monastery of SS. Quattro Coronati, which is tucked along an almost bucolic uphill lane just behind the Colosseum. In that complex, then and still now occupied by an enclosed order of especially ferocious nuns, the small chapel of S. Silvestro contains a cycle of early thirteenth-century frescoes depicting scenes from the lives of Pope Sylvester and the Emperor Constantine the Great. What is so fascinating about this monument is that, not surprisingly because of earthquakes, the frescoes were at intervals heavily restored (most recently towards the end of the nineteenth century), but evidently restored in the certain belief that the original paintings were far, far cruder in execution than was actually the case, and in conformity to the view that before Pietro Cavallino Roman painting of the dugento amounted to nothing. If there is one monument that should teach caution to those of us who concern ourselves with the repair and restoration of damaged works of art, it is the fresco cycle of S. Silvestro at SS. Quattro Coronati. However, we did not know this when I first knew S. Silvestro, because the art historian Andreina Draghi had not yet re-discovered an astounding further fresco program elsewhere in the same complex, in the aula gotica upstairs, that also dates from the early thirteenth century. This happened in 2002. That lost cycle was entirely covered with plaster probably at around the time of the Black Death around 1348 or 1349, presumably in a desperately prophylactic but useless gesture of penitence—which nevertheless and, at length, fortunately insured that many of the frescos have been preserved in almost pristine condition. The monument is a revelation, and shines entirely new light upon the artistic milieux of medieval Rome, far, far less like something out of the Flintstones than we previously assumed. These airy frescoes let us see as never before what early thirteenth-century Roman painters were capable of. They are amazing: subtle, intensely colored, brimming with life, energy, even choreography. And, equally remarkable, they are secular, a scheme of Twelve Months (May is illustrated here), representations of the Liberal Arts, the Four Seasons, and of the Zodiac—a kind of temporal pendant or counterpoint to the ecclesiological cycle that lurks underneath the crude reconstructions in the chapel of S. Silvestro downstairs. Thank goodness Professor Draghi was allowed to reveal and conserve these lost paintings in the Gothic hall, and to photograph and publish them in sumptuous detail, because those wretched sisters will not allow them to be seen by any visitors at all because of the strictly enclosed state of their order. Nevertheless the work that Professor Draghi has done now lets us see beyond the gluggy restorations, and hazard a guess at what S. Silvestro might once have looked like.

The Finger again

2011-11-11T10:33:00.003-05:00

My last book has now appeared in paperback, though only in the United Kingdom. It has this glamorous new cover, but everything else in it is the same. It’s a strange feeling, because it has been so very long since I wrote it, but upon revisiting certain parts I remain satisfied, and occasionally have the satisfactory and somewhat surprising feeling that, you know, this is quite good. The Guardian seems to like it, though they also used the word creepy. The wider critical reception has been mixed, which doesn’t really bother me as it might once have done—because you get better at putting those things in perspective as you get older, and as you write more books. And now, I think, a novel.

The Debt Crisis

2011-11-10T10:42:00.014-05:00

The events unfolding in Europe in recent days, indeed the lack of geopolitical focus exhibited by the entire community of nations in the midst of the current economic crisis, brings into focus a horrible truth: As far as creativity and boldness of leadership are concerned, we are adrift in a sea of ordinariness.

Where is the vision? Where is the grit and determination to put the shamefully expedient western financial system in order; to deal forthrightly with excessive, squalid wealth that treads with contempt and utter selfishness upon grinding poverty; to forge a more adequately representative international settlement which accommodates the great states such as Russia, China, India, and Indonesia? Where is the gravity that looks far beyond opinion polls and even election results; and, perhaps above all, where is the proper disregard for the shallow cult of celebrity that practically everywhere now so deeply undermines public life, discourse, and deeds?

When the democratically-elected representatives of the American people find themselves in a crisis simply unable even modestly to raise the level of taxation on the incomes of the wealthiest few in order to confront and alleviate the enormous problems faced by the entire polity, you have to ask: How did this happen, and where has our common sense gone, to say nothing of our basic senses of justice, of goodness, and of truth?

All this puts me in mind, first, of Kenneth Clark’s famous rhetorical flourish: “What is civilization? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it, and I’m looking at it now,” and, following his prompt, and that of Jacob Bronowski here, a single speech delivered in the House of Commons on November 12, 1940. Only 71 years separate us from that moment, but from where I sit it might almost be centuries. Here is what Winston Churchill said then about Neville Chamberlain:

“Since we last met, the House has suffered a very grievous loss in the death of one of its most distinguished Members, and of a statesman and public servant who, during the best part of three memorable years, was first Minister of the Crown. 

“The fierce and bitter controversies which hung around him in recent times were hushed by the news of his illness, and are silenced by his death. In paying a tribute of respect and of regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no-one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.

“But it is also a help to our country and to our whole Empire, and to our decent faithful way of living that, however long the struggle may last, or however dark may be the clouds which overhang our path, no future generation of English-speaking folks—for that is the tribunal to which we appeal—will doubt that, even at a great cost to ourselves in technical preparation, we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands and peoples, and yet seek new victims still. Herr Hitler protests with frantic words and gestures that he has only desired peace. What do these ravings and outpourings count before the silence of Neville Chamberlain’s tomb? Long, hard, and hazardous years lie before us, but at least we entered upon them united and with clean hearts.

“I do not propose to give an appreciation of Neville Chamberlain’s life and character, but there were certain qualities always admired in these Islands which he possessed in an altogether exceptional degree. He had a physical and moral toughness of fibre which enabled him all through his varied career to endure misfortune and disappointment without being unduly discouraged or wearied. He had a precision of mind and an aptitude for business which raised him far above the ordinary levels of our generation. He had a firmness of spirit which was not often elated by success, seldom downcast by failure, and never swayed by panic. When, contrary to all his hopes, beliefs and exertions, the war came upon him, and when, as he himself said, all that he had worked for was shattered, there was no man more resolved to pursue the unsought quarrel to the death. The same qualities which made him one of the last to enter the war, made him one of the last who would quit it before the full victory of a righteous cause was won.  

“I had the singular experience of passing in a day from being one of his most prominent opponents and critics to being one of his principal lieutenants, and on another day of passing from serving under him to become the head of a Government of which, with perfect loyalty, he was content to be a member. Such relationships are unusual in our public life. I have before told the House how on the morrow of the Debate which in the early days of May challenged his position, he declared to me and a few other friends that only a National Government could face the storm about to break upon us, and that if he were an obstacle to the formation of such a Government, he would instantly retire. Thereafter, he acted with that singleness of purpose and simplicity of conduct which at all times, and especially in great times, ought to be the ideal of us all.  

“When he returned to duty a few weeks after a most severe operation, the bombardment of London and of the seat of Government had begun. I was a witness during that fortnight of his fortitude under the most grievous and painful bodily afflictions, and I can testify that, although physically only the wreck of a man, his nerve was unshaken and his remarkable mental faculties unimpaired.

“After he left the Government he refused all honours. He would die like his father, plain Mr. Chamberlain. I sought permission of the King, however, to have him supplied with the Cabinet papers, and until a few days of his death he followed our affairs with keenness, interest and tenacity. He met the approach of death with a steady eye. If he grieved at all, it was that he could not be a spectator of our victory; but I think he died with the comfort of knowing that his country had, at least, turned the corner.

“At this time our thoughts must pass to the gracious and charming lady who shared his days of triumph and adversity with a courage and quality the equal of his own. He was, like his father and his brother Austen before him, a famous Member of the House of Commons, and we here assembled this morning, Members of all parties, without a single exception, feel that we do ourselves and our country honour in saluting the memory of one whom Disraeli would have called an ‘English worthy.’”

So, there we are. We will not, and evidently we cannot, produce another Churchill any more than we will discover in our midst a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, more’s the pity, but surely there has never been a time between then and now when the need for that calibre of brave and decisive leadership; wisdom and strength; goodness of heart, and passion was ever greater, or more urgent.

Bobby

2011-11-01T16:22:00.006-04:00

I saw this snippet of Dame Margot Fonteyn on Youtube the other day, dancing the exquisite Salut d’amour which Sir Frederick Ashton choreographed for her sixtieth birthday gala at Covent Garden. Set to Elgar, the piece evokes several of the most famous roles Ashton created for that great, great artist. At the end of the snippet, Dame Margot pays tribute to the Australian dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. About Helpmann there are many good stories, but one of the best was told by Kenneth Williams, and is worth re-telling. Helpmann danced the role of Oberon in a production of Ashton’s The Dream that toured through the United States. Somewhere along the way the ballet was performed in a huge sports arena, and Bobby Helpmann was assigned to the umpires’ room, which was considered the most commodious, or, at any rate, the least uncomfortable dressing-room accommodation. Before that evening’s performance the stage manager did the rounds, calling “the half” (hour), and, getting no answer from Helpmann, knocked again, then cautiously opened the door. He was genuinely taken aback by what he saw: A large table had been dragged into the middle of the room. On the table was a chair, and Helpmann was standing on that: craning towards the one naked, low-wattage light bulb that dangled forlornly from the ceiling. With the aid of a hand mirror held at an angle in one hand, and a pencil clasped with several more in the other, Helpmann was busily applying his spectacular green and silver eye make-up. “Are you all right, Sir Robert?” asked the stage manager, slightly concerned. “I’m fine,” answered Bobby, in his trademark drawl, “but God knows how those umpires manage.”

John Hoyland, R.A.

2011-10-31T08:43:00.003-04:00

On behalf of the director, Amy Meyers, and the whole staff of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, I come this morning as an emissary to pay our tribute to John Hoyland. We mourn the loss of such a distinguished Royal Academician, and, of course, we pay our respects to Beverley, to Jeremy, and to their family and many friends and colleagues. Last autumn John’s work was seen in abundance at Yale thanks to the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Lurie, who have for decades supported John, and acquired a great deal of his work. We were delighted not only that John and Beverley were with us then, and gave so generously of their time, above all for our students—he really was a trooper—but also that John was able to know and derive satisfaction from the decision reached by Mr. and Mrs. Lurie to present to Yale their entire collection of his work. John has been a presence in the United States since the mid-1960s when in New York he attained the recognition of the powerful critic Clement Greenberg—not, I think, an easy feat because with that recognition Greenberg was famously parsimonious—but thanks to this remarkable gift henceforth John will remain powerfully present with us for as long as earthly things endure. And for that we give hearty thanks.

As the Rector pointed out in the beginning, light is at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and there can be no color without light. If poetry is music set to words, as a colleague of mine suggested lately, then great paintings may be, can be, poems wrought by color. No doubt they are many other things too, but John’s work surely brings us in that direction. The death of a major painter, and a colorist as dazzling as he was, inevitably makes us wonder where that light came from, and what it means for talented individuals to harness and share it for the benefit of all who care to look. Though John has gone, the colors remain, reflecting the light—the sunlight of the Mediterranean and of tropical places: Jamaica and the waters of the Caribbean; the lush green hills of Bali; even the ocean beaches of southeastern Australia. But in a larger sense John’s work, his legacy, surely hints at what in this great parish church we call light perpetual. May it shine upon him.

St. James’s Church, Piccadilly
Thursday, October 27, 2011

Zoffany

2011-10-19T15:07:00.005-04:00

Martin Postle’s exhibition Johan Zoffany, R.A.: Society Observed is taking shape here just now, and will open to the public next Wednesday evening. The process of unpacking and hanging the many loans is always exciting, and brings to mind what Brian Porter assures me Lady Woods once remarked to Miss Mountain at the conclusion of Speech Day at Merton Hall: “What a wonderful series of treats!”

Britannia

2011-10-18T16:10:00.008-04:00

This week The Queen is visiting Australia for the sixteenth time since 1954. I have a vivid memory of the third of those official visits in 1970, to mark the bicentenary of the arrival of James Cook aboard H.M.S. Endeavour. I was five, and in the first grade at Grimwade House. Every schoolchild received a little medal to commemorate the event, and mine is somewhere. I must find it. Dad and Mum took me down to Port Melbourne to witness the arrival in Hobson’s Bay of the Royal Yacht Britannia. Not too far from Station Pier I waved my small Union flag with tremendous vigor, and was in every other respect beside myself with excitement. I have no recollection of seeing anything or anyone larger than a couple of brightly colored specks, descending the gangplank, and transferring to the snappy little tender that brought the sovereign, the Duke, Prince Charles (aged 21) and Princess Anne (19) all the way up the River Yarra, not I suspect an experience in those days that was ever likely to become etched upon their collective memory. Nevertheless, the drama created by the gradual approach of an ocean-going vessel as big, as sleek, and as glamorous as Britannia, and the certain knowledge that The Queen was definitely on board, these outshone anything that is now ever remotely feasible in the conveyor-belt desolation of a modern airport, even the patch of cement that is from time to time with pluck designated as the V.I.P. Apron. So to some extent when I think of The Queen, as I quite often do, I think also of that childhood vision of Britannia steaming up Port Phillip Bay. I think of the immense crowds, too, Maie Casey, Mr. Gorton, Jumbo Delacombe, Miss Mountain, Mrs. Woods, and the huge black Rolls Royce Phantom VI that I gather still lives in Canberra, and by no means in semi-retirement.

Lost

2011-10-11T16:10:00.003-04:00

I have just now had a childhood recollection of almost stupefying vividness. What do these mean, and where do they reside for so long in some backwater of the brain before they jump out and scare us silly? One afternoon more than thirty-five years ago I took the tram home from Grimwade House as usual, but became so absorbed in reading a book that I failed to notice that instead of turning left from Balaclava Road into Hawthorn Road, my tram continued straight ahead into the completely unknown territory of deepest Caulfield, where I had never before ventured. I had evidently taken the number 3 tram without realizing it, instead of the number 69 (as it was then known). It would be useful to know what book induced in me such complete absorption, possibly Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson? (I recall having a soft spot for the Hemulen.) I cannot remember what I did, other than to scramble off at the next tram stop, which was a considerable, panic-inducing distance farther ahead, and to run with my schoolbag slung over my little shoulder all the way back to the junction of Hawthorn and Balaclava Roads to wait patiently for the next 69. However, what I do remember with a shudder and much clamminess in the palms of my hands is the fright, the awful terror of looking up and out at a Melbourne streetscape that was completely alien to me—and the feeling, not entirely momentary either, of being horribly lost and alone. The afternoon was hot, dry, and dusty. There were no pedestrians, few cars on the road, and a couple of drunks lounging at the Balaclava junction. In a way, it now seems extraordinary that our parents entrusted us to the care of Melbourne public transportation when we were barely nine or ten, but nothing too dreadful ever seems to have happened to me whilst traveling on it other than this.

Stockholm

2011-10-06T09:01:00.011-04:00

Before an all-male crowd impassively positioned in the granite loggia above, a white-bearded archpriest prepares to administer the solemn pagan midwinter rite of human sacrifice. Flanked by gold lions, weird, semi-hypnotized attendants, and a sacred tree, the facade of his temple sanctuary is sumptuously decorated with interlacing bas-relief traceries, and a polychrome sculpture depicting some terrifying Norse god with ruttish goat-headed supporters. Gloved trumpeters, horn-blowers, and frenzied blond dancing girls greet the victim, who, ecstatically discarding his wolf-skin cloak (though not his ceremonial gold diadem, armlets, and ring), enters, otherwise naked, on a massive gilded sacrificial sled. A detachment of four slaves drags this under heavily armed escort, attended by more temple prostitutes muttering over precious idols, while in the foreground, a flamen priest wearing a blood-red cloak reverently prepares to carry out the gruesome ritual with a single stroke of the gold-handled dagger he clasps in his right hand. Welcome to Sweden. This enormous mural by Carl Larsson is right at the top of the main staircase of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and contains much that is informative and useful for the first-time visitor, at least I found it so. Beautiful, arctic, nautical, Sweden carries her immensely long history with pride, certainly, but also with an air of burden, wearisome solemnity, almost resignation. There are more than seventy museums in Stockholm alone, and most if not all of them refer to the terrible things that routinely happened here before there was a Sweden—the dense pine forests that enclosed; gloomy seas that swallowed whole; ice floes that encased and engorged; bottomless lakes; sprites, trolls, wolves, and wicked magic; darkness that descends for months on end, and (as Fiona rightly points out) the sermons thundered by Pastor Bergman from his pulpit in the Hedvig Eleanora Kyrka, literally putting the fear of God into little Ingmar. In purely museological terms, lately in Stockholm I was again and again put in mind of P. G. Wodehouse, and observed by way of paraphrase that obviously there are few people in the world less elfin than a late nineteenth-century Swedish art collector.

North

2011-10-05T09:10:00.007-04:00

I cannot understand the disinclination of most air travelers to gaze down at remarkable sights. Once I flew right over Niagara Falls, having been alerted by the captain to the prospect of this awe-inspiring view out to starboard. Afterwards I looked around and every single portly window-seat traveler was impassively glued instead to the television mounted on the back of the seat in front. Yesterday’s transatlantic journey was far more amazing. The flight to New York from Stockholm took an especially northern route—I’m not sure why. At first we headed north-west and out over the Norwegian Sea, across the Arctic Circle, eventually leaving Iceland far to the south. After some hours we then hugged the coast of Greenland for quite a long time, then crossed the southern end of it, heading in due course right across the Labrador Sea, onwards over the vastnesses of mainland Newfoundland and Labrador, not all that far south of Nunavut, into darkest Québec, then more or less due south over the mighty St. Lawrence and essentially down the Hudson Valley into Newark, N.J.: only seven and a half hours. The view of Greenland was wholly unimpeded, and there is something mind-boggling about flying for an hour or so over seemingly endless glaciers of incomparable scale and power, enormous territories without the merest hint of human habitation. Having just spent some days sampling the material culture of the Vikings, I was struck by the contrast between what they managed to do with longboats and broadswords and hemp and runes and the effortlessness of modern travel by jet. It could not be starker. The least one can do is to be amazed and humbled by it, to harness imagination to the eye, be in thrall, and not watch television. Unfortunately at length an elderly Swedish flight attendant with glossy scarlet fingernails ordered me to close my blind, so that was that. In a way I suppose the Vikings are still with us—certainly I was not inclined to resist, for fear of being brained with a Champagne-bottle (business) as with a cudgel at, say, the Battle of Hjörungavágr.

Imperious tone

2011-09-24T10:19:00.020-04:00

The other day a thoughtful senior colleague gave me this photograph. I fancy it was presented to him in turn by a person who spotted the sign somewhere in Jamaica. In both cases one is tempted to wonder what exactly inspired such a charming gift, however I am sure my colleague merely thought that I would be tickled by it, and not necessarily endorse the sentiment. The wacky orthography—the work, perhaps, of some mad but self-disciplined child—made me wonder if this could be a real quotation, or else some sort of subversive Wodehousean fake or pastiche, genuine though it certainly sounds. However, thanks to the awesome power of the Internet it has taken me no time at all to track down what appears to be the original, or a slightly longer version of it. According to Alan Wykes, who used the text as an epigraph to the second chapter of his Abroad: A Miscellany of English Travel Writing, 1700–1914 (London: Macdonald, 1973, p. 54), this snippet comes from the unattributed preface to Experiences of a Missionary on the Dark Continent (1908), and reads: “As a general rule it should be observed that English is always understood if it is spoken clearly and accompanied by appropriate gestures or mime. His Majesty the King Emperor is personified in every Englishman abroad and orders must be given in a suitably imperious manner. Shout if necessary, but never dissemble. God is your authority.” This was presumably the source for an almost identical but likewise sadly un-ascribed quotation that found its way into a humorous article about Englishmen abroad in Punch (vol. 269, 1975, p. 362) where but never dissemble was omitted, presumably to amplify the sound of imperial jingo (if that were possible). Maybe the sign was copied from Punch, and the substitution of tone for manner a simple truncation for space, though admittedly Punch made no mention of the highly suggestive year of 1908. One problem is that there is no record of the publication in 1908 or at any other time of a book entitled Experiences of a Missionary on the Dark Continent—neither in the catalogue of the British Library, nor in that of the Library of Congress, nor anywhere else, as far as I can see, so the identity of its author is therefore maddeningly occluded, and indeed his very existence questionable. According to Clark Worswick (An Edwardian Observer: The Photographs of Leslie Hamilton Wilson, New York: Pennwick Publishing, Inc., 1978, p. 13), the text originally appeared in “a leading travel book of the time,” though naturally this is not cited, nor even in the boiled-down version of Worswick’s impressionistic essay that somewhat expediently appeared at around the same date in American Photographer (“Leslie Hamilton Wilson,” Vol. 1, No. 5, October 1978, p. 59). In both places, Worswick sharpened the emphasis along lines presumably similar to the excision in Punch, by giving always and God is your authority in distinctly un-Edwardian italics. However, an even more tangential and recent source quotes this text exactly as it appears in the sign (in other words tone not manner and nothing at all about not dissembling), and offers quite a different explanation for its origin, or possibly an intermediate step. In his The Lichen Factor: The Quest for Community Development in Canada (Sydney, Nova Scotia: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1998, p. 32), Jim Lotz suggests with much disapproval that the text was originally inscribed on a sign and attached to the exterior of a plantation house in Jamaica. The relevant footnote refers to Destinations magazine (November 1993, p. 9). Alas we do not appear to have that organ here at Yale. I suppose it is just conceivable that, inspired by a close reading of Experiences of a Missionary on the Dark Continent, that “leading travel book,” or something similar, a sugar planter in Jamaica took matters into his own hands; amended the wording; produced his own sign, from which in due course this version was copied. We shall almost certainly never know, but I live in hope.

Copyright infringement sonnet

2011-09-01T14:06:00.004-04:00

When writing verse I’m not a heavy hitter,

Yet lately my adventures in haiku
Without acknowledgement turned up on Twitter,
And now I wonder what on earth to do.
My estimable agent tweeted first,
Remembering to name me when she did—
In vibrant social networks she’s immersed.
Re-tweeted thence, and spreading through the grid,
An editor it reached at The New Yorker,
Who, clearly tickled, thought it worth quotation,
Became effectively my umpteenth hawker.
That missing verse’s latest infiltration—
It’s mine, some terrible mistakes despite—
Is through the editor-in-chief, Die Zeit!

To unsung literary agents

2011-08-31T12:31:00.009-04:00

Their labors rarely earn a lot of money
Except for publishers, and lazy hacks.
Some editors reject fine works and funny,
When profits plunge then shrivel prior to tax.
“Technology: a boon!” shriek twelve year-olds,
“Forget the book, just give me sexy apps;
Ten thousand zines my 4–G iPad holds,
I only want what goes on top of laps.”
That’s Penguin, HarperCollins, and the rest,
But crafty authors, watching titles vanish,
Besiege their agents, venture to suggest:
“I heard a fortune can be made in Spanish.
Translate me, please, for nothing would be finer
Than now to sell my book as well in China.”

Message in a bottle

2011-08-30T09:53:00.008-04:00

If in New Haven, Conn., you live on the corner of two streets, one of which is technically a state route and the other a city street, as I do, and something happens, such as a tropical storm, and the power goes out through the entire neighborhood, and police road blocks go up over both city streets and the state route alike, encircling you like a snug and impenetrable noose, naturally you seek information, and, seeking it, you encounter the following problem: The City of New Haven transportation department refers you to the state of Connecticut department of transportation, and the state of Connecticut department of transportation refers you back to the City of New Haven transportation department. That’s if you can find the right telephone number in either case. It is understandable that under present conditions, in which everyone is working as hard as possible and doing all that they can to bring things back to normal in the aftermath of tropical storm Irene, there will be tiresome delays. However my neighbors and I can neither drive into nor out of our properties, in which there is no power, and all we are asking is for a rough estimate of how long this state of affairs is likely to continue, and, incidentally, since the barriers all around us read “CAUTION ENERGIZED AREA,” a wonderfully ambiguous phrase, what risks there are in our immediate vicinity of which we should obviously be made aware. I see no wires down, nor any risky trees. As usual, the United Illuminating Company (UI) are not easily reachable, and their online storm information impossible to decypher. The person I just spoke to did not even know what “CAUTION ENERGIZED AREA” means. No idea. So I am putting this message in a virtual bottle in the hope that someone else may come to our rescue. Until then the experience of returning home after dark at the end of the working day will continue to have a Cathy-and-Heathcliff dimension, with more prosaic stubbed toes thrown in. Thank you.

Recovery haiku

2011-08-29T14:18:00.002-04:00

My house is clearly

Eine feste Burg, thank God.
Shame about the fence.

These days anything
At all that approaches Wall
Street gets downgraded.

Watch TV, they said.
Hard when the cables are snapped,
But far more restful.

After the maelstrom,
Busy blokes in pick-ups thirst
For chainsaw action.

My New York Times came
Despite the storm. Pity I
Couldn’t retrieve it.

That driver stopped and
Took pictures of the damage
To my yard. Moron.

CNN wanted
Our photos—“but don’t take risks.”
Couldn’t they take them?

Fill up your bathtub,
They said, mysteriously.
Today I know why.

The grid is like a
Tree. They fix the trunk first, then
Limbs. I am a leaf.

After Irene, a
Hundred ways with dry biscuits
And canned goods. Who knew?

Irene wrought still less
Than collateralized debt
Obligations did.

Motorist! You toss
Your empty bottle as if
Irene said you could.

Dominatrix! You
Say my call is important
To you. What rubbish.

The rich banker’s house:
Gone, but for shards of onyx
Tub. That is my dream.

The name of Hurricane Irene

2011-08-27T15:47:00.005-04:00

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations agency responsible for studying the state and behavior of the Earth’s atmosphere, its interaction with the oceans, the climate these produce, and the resulting distribution of fresh water, “there is a strict procedure to determine a list of tropical cyclone names in an ocean basin by the responsible Tropical Cyclone Regional Body at its annual or biennial meeting.” There are five such tropical cyclone regional bodies, of which the fourth, that of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean concerns us here. From 1953 to 1979 Atlantic tropical storms were named consecutively from lists of twenty-one women’s Christian or first names arranged alphabetically (except for the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z) on a six-year rotation. In 1979, it was decided to add men’s names to these lists, alternating with women’s, and, should the number of tropical storms ever exceed twenty-one, to continue thereafter with the names for letters of the Greek alphabet, that is, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. From these lists certain names are occasionally removed for reasons of sensitivity when they stand post hoc for a storm that caused much loss of life or destruction. “It is important to note,” they say, “that tropical cyclones or hurricanes are named neither after any particular person, nor with any preference in alphabetical sequence,” whatever that means. Such names are said to be familiar to whole populations in each region, for the purposes of comprehensibility, clarity, memorability, and, in turn, better preparedness, and improved public safety. So where I sit just now, in New Haven, Conn., Hurricane Irene—Irene of the Horai, she of order, loveliness, spring flowers, cornucopias, predictability and, above all, peace—is instead charging up the eastern seaboard of the United States like a mad, bile-spitting harpy, causing immense upheaval, chaos, disruption, fear, and destruction. Moreover, and most curiously, she is to be found in the following bizarre sequence of names that were apparently selected on purpose, but according to no identifiable principle of taste, by invisible meteorologists who claim to know which names are most memorable to a majority of people in our multilingual, multicultural, multinational region. It is simply mystifying, but I suppose it could just as easily have been Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Jose, Katia, Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Philippe, Rina, Sean, Tammy, Vince, Whitney, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. So let us be gay.

Irene haiku

2011-08-27T05:19:00.005-04:00

Pine needles rustling,

Harbingers of fall, but no:

The tree squashed my car.

No power, no gas.

Water’s off. With my flashlight,

Though, I read Miss Pym.

Mudslide trauma, then

More checks for the contractors.

What was I thinking?

A gallon per day

Of bottled water, they said.

I’d sooner have gin.

Looters rummaging

Through the wreckage of my house.

Bring me Nick’s chainsaw.

Evacuation?

Not if it means going to

A gymnasium.

Above the clamor,

Amy Chua’s kids must do

Violin practice.

“Storm strike with fury,”

Confucius say, “like dragon,

Or Mrs. Murdoch.”

After the tempest

Irksome Yalies ask: “What are

You working on now?”

“Hurricane Irene”:

Whoever named it needs a

Good Greek dictionary.

Connecticut code

Warns against use of candles.

But don’t they eat out?

If hurricanes were

Like Trumbles, their wrath would melt

Harmlessly away.

“Chipmunk!” I chortle,

“Have you some inkling of what’s

Coming down the pike?”

The book of crisis

Cuisine has no recipe

For blanquette de veau.

If the mighty oak

Blows down, why can’t it land

On a few squirrels?

A man’s house is his

Castle, except when high winds

Bugger up the roof.

Chipmunk! Your nest near

My grease trap suits you just fine,

So why jump ship now?

Could that be the sound

Of my chimney teetering

On the brink of coll…?

The penny

2011-08-19T10:27:00.020-04:00

Today I noticed in an irritatingly large handful of small change a penny that is clearly dated 1929. This means it is real bronze (95% copper, 5% tin and a dash of zinc), in other words actually worth rather more than a penny, but that is neither here nor there. I wondered for a few moments where on earth my penny has been for all this time, and, wondering, the following bright visions wafted into partial focus. From the United States Mint in Philadelphia, gleaming and new, together with tens of thousands of others my penny was delivered under armed guard to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. According to standard contractual arrangements, they consigned it to the Lower Manhattan branch of the Lincoln-Alliance Bank and Trust Co. Soon afterwards my penny found its way into the pocketbook of a clerk in charge of the wire room at the bonding house of the New York Stock Exchange firm of Sutro Brothers. Ruined in the crash, she threw herself out of a fortieth-floor window onto Wall Street, and of course died instantly. My penny therefore spent some days in the custody of the New York Police Department, before being handed over to her heirs with a few other relatively undamaged personal belongings. After a period of mourning as brief as that of Clytemnestra, these rather distant relations in Brooklyn released it back into circulation at Coney Island. Thanks to organized crime, my penny migrated thence to the tray of a cigarette vendor in a Chicago cinema. Afterwards it was brought to Kansas City, Mo., and then carried by an anthropologist all the way to San Francisco, Calif., by rail, before commencing a long period of hibernation in a cookie jar. The cookie jar was disposed of in accordance with the instructions of a testator, who before he died of a stroke in 1956 relocated several times, ultimately to Fresno. Thus returning to the banking system, my penny was soon propelled by air back to the east coast. There a freight forwarder and shipping agent used it to play a conjuring trick in a cocktail lounge not far from Ildewild Airport, part of a determined effort to seduce an off-duty stewardess (Braniff). Failing, the next morning he took my penny in his van to Rochester, N.Y., and left it in a dish at the front counter of a small diner. My penny went with his share of tips to the short order cook, who presently took it with him on vacation to Cape Cod. This was in the summer of 1968. My penny was then handled briefly and in rapid succession by a recently ordained Unitarian minister, an out-of-work soul singer, and two or three volunteer collectors for charity, curiously the same charity, before landing in an amusement arcade in Atlantic City, N.J. Already too insignificant for most slot machines, it found its shamefaced way back to a small and undercapitalized local bank, and presently reappeared on the dashboard of a lorry in Trenton. Soon afterwards my penny crossed back over the Hudson in the hip pocket of a senior Port Authority official who lost it down the back of a sofa in a prosperous Lower East Side brothel. A further period of slumber ensued, before my penny was retrieved by a frugal re-upholsterer in Long Island City. Incredible as this may seem, he banked it. Six months later, my penny went to an unscrupulous arms dealer changing numerous crisp Turkish 500,000 lira banknotes at the foreign desk in a Midtown branch of Citibank. My penny annoyed him, so a few days later, upon relinquishing his eleventh-floor suite at the Carlyle, he tossed it on the vanity. Later that morning, a hard-working chambermaid took up my penny. It lurked in her battered purse for seventeen months, two weeks, three days, ten hours, and some minutes when, just by the Astoria Boulevard subway stop, she was robbed at gunpoint and her purse emptied. This was in February 1983. There followed a brief period for which I cannot account, though numerous court appearances and at least one confiscation by officers of the law definitely occurred. Fortunately through this my penny sustained no significant damage. Nor was it ever thrown in the trash; nor placed on the railway by truant schoolchildren eager to see it squashed under a bogie; nor dropped into a sewer or storm drain where so many others apparently do end up. Reverting to the control of a front-line cashier or teller thanks to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (White Plains)—when acquitted of several counts of aggravated assault, a felon with three prior convictions overlooked it when reclaiming his personal belongings, so lost property were called in—my penny became indirectly involved with the Savings and Loan catastrophe because it was carried several times back and forth to California by Charles Keating himself, before dropping—ping!—onto a sidewalk in Beverly Hills. There a bag lady picked it up. For several weeks she shook it in her little paper cup, together with other coins of small denomination, but ultimately shook it onto the floor of a bus. The bus driver, unusually fastidious, picked it up at the end of her shift, and, perishing not long afterwards as a consequence of chronic diabetes, yielded the penny to a grieving grandson. He put it in his piggy bank. The piggy bank was emptied during the recession of the early 1990s, and this time my penny transited through the U.S. postal service. It was given as change when a graduate student on vacation from Amherst bought a prepaid envelope and ten domestic postage stamps. Back in Massachusetts, this young man misplaced my penny in his grubby backpack, right down at the bottom with a few crumpled gum wrappers and some dusty old marijuana leavings. Appointed to a junior position at Lehman Brothers, he peremptorily and, as it turns out, unwisely consigned his back-pack to the Salvation Army, and my penny was discovered in the workroom adjoining their Thrift Store at 271 Appleton Street, Holyoke, Mass. It was tossed into the cash register. It passed on yet again, this time to an itinerant but shrewd collector of old vinyl LPs, who I gather back home in Boston habitually empties his pockets of all coins and puts them into a large canvas bag that lives on the dresser, and once a year around Thanksgiving indulges in the giddy pleasure of depositing the lot into his bank account. By this mechanism my penny made its way onward to the petty cash box in the front office of a minor religious order. It was stolen by a middle-ranking nun and spent by her, clandestinely, on a pair of naughty undies ($29.99, using the exact money for speed, she thought mistakenly). The lingerie people routinely deposited my penny into their number 2 account at TD Bank in New Haven, Conn., whence it was lobbed to the cash register at Starbucks, which is where I received it this morning with other coins and a cup of coffee in exchange for four one-dollar bills. The beauty of these schemata is that nobody can possibly show that any of them are not true.

Nuits St. Georges

2011-08-18T07:08:00.012-04:00

Curious, isn’t it, how little threads join wildly different moments? A few weeks ago I was in the dining car of the Blue Train, somewhere not far from Beaufort West in South Africa, jotting down with deep skepticism the brief but extravagant description of Klein Constantia printed in the wine list. Back in New Haven, this led me to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Napoleon and creepy old Baudelaire, who in the Fleurs du mal reckoned he preferred the elixir of his lover’s mouth over opium, or the fine vintages of Nuits St. Georges, and Constantia. I bet he was fibbing about the opium. Anyway, I now know that the vin de Constance that flourished before phylloxera was everything it was cracked up to be, but how delightful, only a few days later, to bump into Nuits St. Georges again, this time in London, and as a prop exquisitely chosen by Barbara Pym in Excellent Women:

I sat patiently while William and the waiter consulted in angry whispers. A bottle of wine was brought. William took it up and studied the label suspiciously. I watched apprehensively as he tasted it, for he was one of those men to whom the formality really meant something and he was quite likely to send the bottle back and demand another. But as he tasted, he relaxed. It was all right, or perhaps not that, but it would do.

“A tolerable wine, Mildred,” he said. “unpretentious, but I think you will like it.”

“Unpretentious, just like me,” I said stupidly, touching the feather in my brown hat.

“We really should have a tolerable wine today. Spring seems to be almost with us,” he observed in a dry tone.
“Nuits St. Georges,” I read from the label. “How exciting that sounds! Does it mean the Nights of St. George? It conjures up the most wonderful pictures, armour and white horses and dragons, flames too, perhaps a great procession by torchlight.”
He looked at me doubtfully for a moment and then, seeing that I had not yet tasted my wine, began to explain that Nuits St. Georges was a place where there were vineyards, but that not every bottle bearing the name on the label was to be taken as being of the first quality. “It might,” he said seriously, “be an ordinaire. Always remember that. A little learning is a dangerous thing, Mildred.”
“Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,” I went on, pleased at being able to finish the quotation. “But I’m afraid I shall never have the chance to drink deep so I must remain ignorant.”
“Ah, Pope at Twickenham,” sighed William. “And now Popesgrove is a telephone exchange. It makes one feel very sad.” He paused for a moment and then began to eat with great enjoyment.

I gather that vintages of Nuits St. Georges are produced in the part of Burgundy called, not surprisingly, Côte de Nuits. I’m not sure I have ever tasted one, not even an ordinaire. Also, I had to go and look up the couplet from Pope. It comes from Part II of An Essay on Criticism (1711), which goes to show you how very safe I am, rather like Mildred. Notice, though, the brilliance of Barbara Pym’s comic prose: those angry whispers, the feather, the endearing recklessness of Mildred’s effort to generate conversational momentum and the banality of William’s effortless and entirely unwarranted condescension, above all the telephone exchange. Most satisfactorily near the end of the novel Mildred seizes the chance to lob Nuits St. Georges right back into William’s court, after the manner of Dorothy Round Little. Lovely, and now I must take out the rubbish.

Excellent Women

2011-08-17T06:56:00.005-04:00

In London over the weekend I picked up a copy of Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952), and devoured it. Notwithstanding Alexander McCall Smith’s remark in the new introduction—“One does not laugh out loud while reading Barbara Pym; that would be too much. One smiles.”—I think it’s one of the funniest novels I have ever read. Perhaps this is because there is so much of Mum contained in the voice of the narrator Mildred Lathbury, everything from a profound distaste for being addressed as “dear,” through all forms of sharp observation, treating seriously what others too distracted by self-importance regard as trivia, to an extremely well-developed and healthy sense of the ridiculous. Mrs. Gray, William Caldicote, Mrs. Bone, Sister Blatt, and the mysterious Miss Jessop are delightful exempla of the middle-class urban grotesque then flourishing in postwar London. Following last week’s deeply shocking riots, I suspect the metropolis is beginning to re-acquire something of the same bleak atmosphere, though admittedly free of shared bathrooms and smoke from dismal coal fires. Certainly Mum had a complete run of the novels of Barbara Pym neatly arranged on the shelf above the phone at Denham Place, and I have a vivid recollection of her quietly chuckling to herself whilst reading one, propped up in bed with a cup of tea. Why did I not follow the prompt while she was still alive? No doubt part of the answer is contained in the question, but I am sure it is better late than never. I hope she would be pleased; I am simply grateful:

Rockingham! I snatched at the name as if it had been a precious jewel in the dustbin.

The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one.

There can be no exchange of glances over the telephone, no breaking into laughter.

Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

Men love messing about with paint and distemper.

I felt it was not a very suitable remark for a clergyman’s widow to have made, though it was certainly amusing in a rather cheap way.

I supposed that Dora and I, who had both been fat as schoolgirls, could now stand side by side singing “Frail children of dust, And feeble as frail,” without a tremor or the ghost of a smile. It was rather sad, really.

“Hullo! You look like a wet week at Blackpool,” Sister Blatt’s jolly voice boomed out of the dusk.

“Do you think they have jumble sales in Belgravia?” asked Mrs. Gray; “that hadn’t occurred to me.”

The room seemed suddenly very hot and I saw Mrs. Gray’s face rather too close to mine, her eyes wide open and penetrating, her teeth small and pointed, her skin a smooth apricot colour.

“Do you think Mrs. Gray will marry again?” I asked craftily…/ “I don’t know…widows nearly always do marry again.” / “Oh, they have the knack of catching a man. Having done it once I suppose they can do it again. I suppose there’s nothing in it if you know how.” / “Like mending a fuse,” I suggested, though I had not previously taken this simple view of seeking and finding a life partner.

“I wonder if they have any picture postcards of this garden?” / “Oh to send to William, you mean?” / “Yes, perhaps to William, but I’ve already sent him one.” / “Oh, you mustn’t overdo it, or he’ll think you’re running after him.” / I agreed that I mustn’t and imagined William’s beady eyes, round and alarmed.

She did not look like the kind of person who could possibly do anything for which an apology might be demanded.

Miss Jessop made a quavering sound which might have been “Yes” or “No” but it was not allowed to develop into speech, for Mrs. Bone broke in by telling Everard that Miss Jessop wouldn’t want any sherry.

Everard Bone was at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society. It sounded like a joke.

“Miss Jessop and I are very much interested in the suppression of woodworm in furniture.”

Birds, worms, and Jesuits…it might almost have been a poem, but I could not remember that anybody had ever written it...

The engagement ring

2011-08-07T13:55:00.004-04:00

Dad kept everything. Tucked inside the back cover of the earliest of his many scrapbooks is the receipt for Mum’s engagement ring. He bought it on March 2, 1948, from W. M. Catanach of Catanach’s (est. 1880), who then occupied premises on the corner of the Royal Arcade and Little Collins Street. Incredibly they are still going strong. The item is a “W[hite] G[old] & platinum 3 st[one] Diamond and Sapphire Ring,” and the price was high: £68 10s. When in 1949 Dad began work as a lowly law clerk at Mallesons his salary was £10 a week.

Forever Mum

2011-08-06T12:26:00.007-04:00

On Ash Wednesday, February 16, 1983, fanned by hot winds of up to nearly 70 miles per hour, about 180 wildfires burned over more than a million acres of land stretching right across Victoria and South Australia, many of them merging to produce conditions of frightening savagery. Seventy-five people were killed, seventeen of them volunteer firefighters, and over 340,000 sheep, 18,000 cattle, and innumerable native birds and animals. 3,700 buildings were destroyed in the firestorm, including Mum and Dad’s weekend place at Upper Beaconsfield. The process of cleaning up and rebuilding took years, but by the time Dad took this photograph in November 1985, a few months shy of Mum’s sixtieth birthday, they had managed to deal with the worst of it. Local contractors felled this enormous gum tree; I presume it was beyond salvation because she loved her trees, but Mum took over from there. Methodically, patiently, indomitably she built a succession of carefully controlled bonfires that eventually consumed the whole damned thing, just as Aunt Anne did some years earlier (come to think of it) at their pretty place on the right bank of the Tambo, upstream from Swan Reach. In each case those tough sisters were as proud as punch, as well they might be, but Mum’s Farmer-Giles pose is characteristically good-humored, even self-deprecating, but quite obviously real also. She was simply amazing.

No solicitors

2011-08-06T11:33:00.009-04:00

I’ve been looking through the albums. How very lucky we are to have them.

Whenever they traveled to the United States of America, which was not often, Dad rarely lost an opportunity to have himself and/or Mum (as in this instance) photographed inspecting those little signs on the front door of Upper East Side apartment and other buildings that say “NO SOLICITORS.”

Dad was a solicitor, but not the kind that bother us here. In the British legal system from which the Australian was derived, solicitors were attorneys who dealt with any legal matter, including certain minor court proceedings. However, by universal convention solicitors engaged learned barristers to argue their clients’ cases in the higher courts, and until recently defendants or litigants had no choice but to consult a solicitor in the first instance. It was very much a two-tiered system: suave barristers above, and humble city solicitors below. Indeed before the First World War it was not unusual for Australian solicitors not to have a law degree; barristers invariably did. When our grandfather was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of Victoria, the law in Australia was in the process of rapidly professionalizing. Thenceforth solicitors invariably took law degrees before being articled to a senior solicitor. They then had the option of reading for the bar (to become a barrister), or not. Judges were almost invariably chosen from the pool of senior barristers. Dad graduated from the University of Melbourne on December 18, 1948, was shortly afterwards admitted to practice as a solicitor, and did so for the rest of his professional life.

In America, the sign “NO SOLICITORS” is meant to ward off door-to-door salesmen, hawkers, canvassers, etc., but Dad and Mum were always tickled by the notion that this could be read as an outrageous rebuke aimed at respectable partners of the old Melbourne firm of Mallesons. God, how I miss them both!

Our new website

2011-08-06T09:21:00.010-04:00

All my working life authors wishing to publish photographic reproductions of works of art that are (a) owned by public institutions, and (b) out of copyright, have labored under a punishing regime of fees for permission, fees for reproduction, fees, fees, fees. It is a burden that has cost many of us more than our published work will ever earn back in royalties, and has therefore put an almighty brake on scholarship in every branch of the history of art, and much else besides. For many impecunious art museums, the system has been regarded as a valuable income stream, and as a way of controlling the quality of such reproductions of the works in their care as find their way into print. However, the cost of gathering those fees is often greater than the annual income so generated, and in the era of the internet no museum, however great, can ever possibly hope to maintain that control. People will simply go ahead and scan a magazine illustration then manufacture Mona Lisa bathmats any way they can, usually in Guangzhou.

So we are leading by example. Henceforth we at the Yale Center for British Art will gladly make available through our website easily downloadable high-resolution print-quality photographic reproductions of anything in our collection that is out of copyright—free, gratis, and for nothing. Nor does it concern us in any way whatsoever how you wish to use these reproductions, in print or online. We are sufficiently confident that people everywhere will grasp the difference between a photo and the real thing, and if the dissemination of accurate reproductions of our works of art achieve wide distribution, so much the better. We do not and will not make judgments of taste in respect of the suitability or otherwise of George Stubbs’s Zebra, say, wandering onto a muu-muu or shower curtain any more than we interfere with law-abiding visitors to our galleries during normal opening hours. And we are certainly not so paranoid that we regard such unconventional forms of reproduction as an affront to the artist, or so pompous as to see ourselves as the sole custodian of his posthumous reputation—indeed we are confident that Stubbs will be taken no less seriously should his zebra ever put in an appearance on a G-string at the carnival in Rio. Ideally we would prefer non-commercial use, but these days what is non-commercial? You will see that we have put in place a simple mechanism that ought to prevent a robot from vacuuming up everything. All that we are asking our users is that in due course they let us know where they elect to publish reproductions of works in this collection so that our records can be kept as up-to-date as possible.

It’s about time, isn’t it? And the cultural and philosophical bases are entirely logical. We are a public institution, and thanks to the munificence of our founder the late Paul Mellon access to the objects entrusted to our care is free, clear, unrestricted, and open to any and everyone in perpetuity, subject of course to the law of copyright, and to routine logistical or conservation constraints. But even there we do our best to show people whatever they want to see that may happen to be in storage just now. So the new website and our new policy about reproductions are merely an extension of that.

So, authors, come ye, shout it from the rooftops, tell your colleagues and friends, alert your publishers to this valuable new resource, and feel free to rake through our website, search high and low, right across the collections, and download to your heart’s content. Be fruitful, and multiply!

Table Mountain

2011-08-05T10:34:00.006-04:00

At the summit of Table Mountain, 3,563 precipitious feet above sea level, there is a small plaque affixed to a stone wall that carries the inscription “Great are the works of the Lord,” Psalm 111:2a (RSV). I daresay a suitable response might be “O God, thou knowest my foolishness,” Psalm 69:5a (KJV). True, from here you grasp the full splendor of the Western Cape—the rampart-like formation of the Tafelberg itself, as narrow as it is preposterously high, and the scale of Duiwels Kop (Devil’s Peak) adjacent; the puniness of Signal Hill, and the stunning spectacle of the Twelve Apostles, which Jan van Riebeeck first named the Gevelbergen, invoking the supremely Dutch analogy of gables. This spectacular chain of mountains tumbles southwards to the Cape of Good Hope. However, Table Mountain is fearfully exposed, and long stretches of extremely low parapet beckon playful toddlers to opt for the fast way down. On the whole, for me it was not so much a Caspar David Friedrich moment as an Edvard Munch. Perhaps this is evidence of the strengthening grip of middle age. There is also the tafelkloot or “tablecloth.” This remarkable cloud from time to time forms over the length of Table Mountain and spills over the edge before dissipating, the product of moisture thrown upwards by a brisk southeaster. The French called it la perruque, the wig, which is better because it takes account of the billows, swirls, and curls. According to legend, the tablecloth was the product of a long pipe-smoking contest between the Devil and a Dutch pirate called Jan van Hunks. The cloud, it is said, serves to remind the Devil of Van Hunks’s victory—but innumerable later events suggest that it was the other way around.

Groot Constantia again

2011-08-02T14:33:00.010-04:00

A bright but unflattering sidelight is shed by Captain Robert Percival upon the production, sale, and distribution of the fabled vin de Constance in the neighborhood of Groot Constantia. Captain Percival’s An Account of the Cape of Good Hope (London: C. and R. Baldwin, 1804) was reviewed by “Muir”—paraphrased really—in the Monthly Review in February the following year (pp. 130–143). According to Muir,

“The inferiority of most Cape wines to those of Europe proceeds from no inherent defect in the grapes, but from the slovenly practices of keeping them too near the surface of the ground, mixing both leaves and foot-stalks in the wine-press to increase the quantity of juice, pulling the fruit in an unripe state, checking the fermentation, and employing sulphur and sugar of lead for the purpose of fining. The remarks, however, apply not to the celebrated Constantia wine, concerning which our author has favoured us with some interesting information. The beautiful little village of Constantia and its vine plantations, with the Table Mountain, are considered as the principal objects of curiosity at the Cape:

‘Round the vineyards, dwelling houses, and offices, are pleasant groves of silver-tree, besides oak, elms, and other smaller plants, which completely shelter it in every direction, and hide it from the view till you wind round the hill, and come quite close to it. There are two distinct and separate plantations of vines here, each of a different colour and quality, though both are called Constantia wines. The first farm, called Great Constantia, produces the red wine of that name; and at Lesser Constantia, in its vicinity, the white is made. The farm, which alone produces this richly flavoured wine, belongs to a Dutchman, Mynheer Pluter [sic, his name was Hendrik Cloete] and has been long in his family [sic, the property changed hands twice in 1778, when Mr. Cloete’s father bought it, barely twenty-five years earlier]…

‘The quantity of wine made on the farms of Constantia, on an average, is about seventy-five leagers a year, each leager containing upwards of one hundred and fifty gallons of our measure. It is a sweet, heavy, and luscious wine, not fit to be drunk in any quantity, but chiefly suited to a dessert, as a couple of glasses are quite as much as one would desire to drink at a time. It is even here excessively dear and difficult to be procured, and must be often bespoke a considerable time. The captains of vessels touching here, who have wished to procure a quantity of it, have been frequently obliged to contract for it a year or two before the wine was made.

‘Under the Dutch government [to 1795] the farmer divided the produce into three parts; one-third he was obliged to furnish, at a certain price, to the Dutch East-India Company, who sent it to the government in Holland. Another proportion was furnished to certain of the inhabitants of Cape Town, chiefly the people in high office and power, at the same rate; and the remaining quantity he was at liberty to dispose of at what price he could to the passengers, and captains of ships of all nations. The price to strangers varied according to circumstances; when there was any deficiency in the produce of his farm, the price was always raised in proportion. The Dutch inhabitants in Cape Town, at whose houses and tables the passengers are accommodated, rarely ever produce a drop of this wine, except upon very extraordinary occasions. The Dutch indeed are sufficiently careful never to open a bottle of this valuable liquor at their tables, unless they perceive it may serve their own purposes. A rich Englishman who has made his fortune in India, and from whom they expect a handsome present of tea, sugar candy, or muslin, is honoured now and then with a bottle of Constantia at the dessert; but a British officer who is not supposed to be flush of money or valuable articles, except where he is a favourite with the lady of the house [!], may go without it all the time he remains here.

‘When a bottle of Constantia is to be bought at the Cape Town, which is but seldom the case, and even then it requires some management to procure it, it is never sold under a couple of dollars. But it generally happens that strangers, although they procure this prize, are still as far as ever from tasting real Constantia, as there is another kind of sweet, rich wine, which the Dutch frequently pass off for it.

‘One may fortunately, by dint of persuasion, get at the village of Constantia, from Mynheer Pluter [Cloete], a small cask containing about twenty gallons for ten or twelve pounds sterling; a stranger can seldom procure a larger quantity at the same time; indeed he must always be particularly recommended to take any quantity he can obtain, and also to prevent having the other heavy, sweet wine imposed upon him for Constantia. Mr. Pluter has a great number of visitors to his farm, who are equally attracted by the beauty of the place, and the desire of seeing the vine plantations, with the manner of making the wine. He is in every respect a complete Dutchman. For though used to such a variety of the first company, and gentlemen of high civil, and military situations, who always pay liberally, and whom it is strongly his interest to encourage to his farm by civility, and a suavity of manners, he is generally morose, uncouth, and churlish in his manners; and it is rare to see him in a good humor, though he gains a great profit by entertaining his occasional guests with his nectar. Money is the idol of the Dutch; yet they receive it without thanking those who bring it, or encouraging them to come again by civility and attention; and when they have once received their extravagant demand, they laugh at the folly of our countrymen for their indifference in parting with that money which is their own idol.

‘I was so unfortunate as not to find this gentleman in a good humor during the two or three visits I made to his farm, and could scarcely get a bottle of wine, or leave to look at his wine vaults and presses, not having brought any particular recommendation from his friends at the Cape, which from pride he regularly exacts. I relied however on what I knew of a Dutchman’s partiality for English customers; but on my requesting leave to see the place, he himself came out and informed me the gentleman was not at home. The other officers who were along with me, however, and who understood his disposition better, and the requisite management, got some of the slaves for a present to get us wine, and shew us the plantations and manner of manufacturing the grapes into wine; nor did we take the smallest notice of the owner’s surliness and boorish manners when we afterwards met him, but went on to satisfy our curiosity, and obtain the wine and information we wanted. If company arrives before he is dressed, and has got over his usual quantity of pipes and tobacco, he denies himself, and does not wish to admit them unless he is pretty sure of getting hard dollars; those perfectly acquainted with this, take care to let the slaves see the cash, on which he sends any quantity into an arbor in the garden, and when the bill is called, he charges two Spanish dollars a bottle, equal to 11s. 6d. British. Some allowances must certainly be made for Mynheer Pluter’s [Cloete’s] moroseness, as it is impossible for him at all times to attend to the reception of his visitors; some of whom by their teizing and forward loquacity, might render themselves extremely troublesome and disagreeable to his grave and solemn habits. His slaves are exceedingly attentive and communicative, when allowed to wait on and conduct strangers, finding it highly to their advantage, as they always get something for themselves.

‘Mr. Pluter’s wine vaults are very extensive and neatly laid out, and every thing is in much better order than at any other wine farm I have seen. In the vaults and wine cellars of the merchants at Cape Town, the wine is kept in very large butts or vessels somewhat shaped like a hogshead, but the rotundity is vastly greater in proportion. Those vessels are made of mahogany, or a wood very much resembling it, very thick, highly polished, and kept clean as our dining tables; they are bound round with great brass hoops, and the edges are secured by the same metal, so that no accident or time can damage them. Each of those butts or reservoirs, which they call leagers, though an inapplicable term, as a leager is a measure of one hundred and fifty gallons, will contain from six to seven hundred gallons. The bung-holes are covered with plates of brass hasped down and locked; the cocks are also strong and large, with locks and keys to them, so that the slaves are prevented from embezzling any of the wine, as they are never opened but in presence of one of the proprietors. Some of these leagers are elegantly carved and ornamented with various figures.’”

Captain Percival’s low opinion of Mr. Cloete, and Mr. Cloete’s presumably of each and every officer of the Royal Navy who wished to buy a few bottles of fine Constantia, and to bribe his slaves, were no doubt thrown into high relief by the outcome of the Battle of Muizenberg of 1795, the subsequent demise of the Dutch administration of the Cape, and its replacement by the British—with a brief hiatus between 1803 and 1806, when, under the Treaty of Amiens, the British handed it back to the Batavian Republic. More generally the Dutch colonists could hardly have been expected to entertain uninvited representatives of the new regime with reckless extravagance, or to forfeit a ready supply of their precious Constantia at the obviously unprofitable navy discount. On the other hand, there can be no excuse for serving, and far less selling, counterfeit Constantia—klein or groot.

Bo-Kaap

2011-08-02T13:16:00.009-04:00

Bo-Kaap is the largely Muslim district of inner Cape Town, built against the slopes of Signal Hill, which is still today largely populated by the descendants of former slaves of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie. It is often called the “Malay” quarter, but this is really a misnomer because the local community is far more ethnically diverse than that—and in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Dutch brought slaves from all over the Indian Ocean rim, and far beyond. It is a fascinating neighborhood.

There are still numerous small mosques, each with a particular ethnic or sectarian or local, even family or community affiliation: the shafee or “Indonesian” Auwal Mosque (1798); the Palm Tree or Jan Van Boughies Mosque in Long Street (1820); the Nurul Islam Mosque at 134 Buitengracht Street (1844); the Jamia or Queen Victoria Mosque in Lower Chiappini Street (1850); The Mosque of Imam Hadjie or Mosque Shafee in Upper Chiappini Street (1859); the Hanafee Mosque on the corner of Dorp and Long Streets (1881); the Boorhaanol Mosque in Longmarket Street (1884); the Quawatul Islam Mosque in Loop Street (1892); the Nurul Mohamadia Mosque in Vos Street (1899), and the Nurul Huda Mosque in Leeuwen Street (1958), among others.

It is often extremely difficult for the non-Muslim visitor fully to grasp the subtle differences between these various mosques, but the concept of the parish as distinct from the denomination certainly seems to help. Most are very small. The little row houses in surrounding streets are almost invariably painted bright, sometimes dazzling colours, wholly delightful. I was warned to be very careful walking around Cape Town, but I never once felt remotely threatened or uneasy in Bo-Kaap. The atmosphere was friendly, relaxed, even at times genuinely sleepy.

It is slightly unclear to me why Bo-Kaap escaped the shocking fate of District 6, but I suspect that even in the dark 1960s, the area was regarded as perhaps too difficult and expensive to demolish and reorganize, or even just possibly worthy of preservation as a kind of picturesque, certainly unthreatening remnant. In a way it is tempting to use Bo-Kaap as an imaginary framework with which to imagine what the messier, rowdier, more commercial, less candy-coloured streetscape of District 6 must have been like in its heyday.

Lately a different fear has arisen, namely that processes of gentrification will eventually drive out the locals who have lived here in many cases since the mid-eighteenth century, in other words achieving by ordinary market forces (and neglect) what Apartheid entrusted to the Group Areas Act. What is especially intriguing is the persistence through the otherwise plain built environment of flourishes, arabesques, curly-cues, and hints toward gabling that you associate primarily with Cape Dutch and therefore VOC “style,” a sort of aesthetic Stockholm Syndrome, but maybe also a plucky sign of conquest also. It is impossible not to like Bo-Kaap.

The Cape of Good Hope again

2011-08-02T12:01:00.008-04:00

Australians are everywhere, even at the lighthouse high above the Cape of Good Hope. Among the forest of signposts pointing through 270 degrees, the one that points due east says “SYDNEY 11,642 KM,” i.e. 7,234 miles. Here it is. Some wit has hastily added in thick black felt-tipped pen “LITHGOW 11,485.” The calculation is based on subtracting the distance of about 93 miles that separates Lithgow, New South Wales, from Sydney, and is therefore pretty accurate. The old coal-mining town of Lithgow (pop. 11,298) was named after William Lithgow, the first auditor-general of New South Wales, and is on the western edge of the Blue Mountains. Lithgow is notable for various other reasons, not least as place where Marjorie Jackson grew up, “the Lithgow flash,” who at the Olympic Games in Helsinki in 1952 won gold medals for Australia in the women’s 100m and 200m athletic events, and was from 2001 to 2007 Governor of South Australia.

The Cape of Good Hope

2011-08-02T10:51:00.013-04:00

The Cape of Good Hope is so laden with historical associations, so mythic, so much a part of the saga of Europe’s discovery of the rest of the world, that arriving there in person is almost absurd. One thinks of Bartholomew Diaz, reaching it for the first time in 1488 aboard the tiny caravel São Cristóvão, and naming it Cabo das Tormentas, the Cape of Storms—only to be corrected later by King João II of Portugal, in view of the infinite commercial potential of a new and viable sea route to India and back again: Cabo da Boa Esperança, Cap de bonne-espérance, Kap der guten Hoffnung, Kaap die Goeie Hoop, the Cape of Good Hope! One thinks of Vasco da Gama sailing by aboard the São Gabriel and pushing on past what is now the Eastern Cape and further up the coast, arriving on Christmas Day, 1497, and therefore calling the place Natal. One recalls the Flying Dutchman, forever doomed to tack and beat and tack again without ever passing beyond the Cape, its ghostly crew in perpetual torment. One also thinks of Admiral Elphinstone, General Craig, Commanders Hardy and Spranger, and their two fine battalions of Royal Marines, ordinary sailors, and men of the 78th Highlanders, who at the Battle of Muizenberg in August 1795 wrested control of the Cape from the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, and promptly dismantled Dutch instruments of torture, then destroyed the pieces. One thinks of resourceful Lady Anne Barnard, and her dim view of the Acting Governor, General Francis Dundas, and “the little politicks of our Lilliput court.” One thinks of Cecil Rhodes, financed by N. M. Rothschild and Sons, the diamond monopoly, and his fevered vision of a red stripe extending all the way from the Cape to Cairo. One thinks of passengers alighting at the Cape, repairing to the Mount Nelson Hotel for tea, then boarding a Union Limited and Union Express sleeper bound for Witwatersrand and Pretoria... On it goes. A couple of baboons, a few bad-tempered ostriches, a herd of eland, abundant zebra droppings, and a wealth of hazy schoolroom memories—after the Cape, to paraphrase Yeats, what more is possible?

Tom Trumble

2011-07-31T08:34:00.005-04:00

Following upon the success of his Unholy Pilgrims, my nephew and godson Tom Trumble has lately been on assignment in West Timor, where he was received by H.R.H. the Raja of Kupang, a tennis fanatic. I gather that all this is in some way connected with his next book, but you will have to wait and see. In the meantime, Tom’s growing readership may now feast upon his blog. Judging from this intriguing view of the bustling market in downtown Kupang, it might be prudent to ask chef not to tackle fish. However, I am rather taken by those paving stones. They look old to me, and quite possibly Dutch.

The spoons

2011-07-28T12:56:00.010-04:00

Before Groot Constantia I collided with Cape silver at the slave lodge, one of the oldest buildings in Cape Town, a difficult place.

The British dealt with it by rolling their government offices over the top, and later the Supreme Court. However, the record-keeping of the Dutch was so meticulous that the ghosts are chillingly present. Hundreds, thousands of names survive: Titus, Hannibal, Scipio, Moses, Solomon—choices closely allied to the naming of horses and other livestock. Fortune, Aap, Pattat, Pickle Herring, Dikbeen van de Kaap (literally thick-leg): gestures of contempt. A more systematic method gradually evolved, which at least provided Abram Solena van Java, Ticia van Mosambique, Jabinoe van Zanzibar, Nasfoe van Batavia, Claas van Malabar, Matombar van de Rio de la Goa, Cupido van Bengalen, Paria van Bali, Walale Jerrirano, and Maas van Nias the benefit of some vestigial memory of place, which leaves Angala, Thaviemma, Kafisie, Marimoreo, Schkanaljar, Onbelatie, Lubbert, Bappa Saeya, Sidie, Sabienpoin, Nareloe, Ontong, Fortamij, Tauhite, Oemar, Ringe, Baakka, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... How do you make sense of the grim legacy of this building, and the evidence it furnishes of global displacement, misery, and death?

I suppose it is redemptive, in a way, to scramble upstairs and discover something wholly beautiful, but upon much reflection afterwards, of course there is in this a ghastly paradox. The same colonial society that was capable of inflicting such unthinkable suffering upon innocent people, upon entire communities, purely for the benefit of the shareholders of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, could at the very same time produce a species of object that attests to the remarkable aesthetic judgment of its silversmiths, their sensitivity, their instinct for volume, shape, balance, and perfect proportion—spoons!

Until then I had been wondering where in the Cape I would find any really substantial evidence of the earliest colonists’ aesthetic engagement with their remarkable surroundings—taking into account the ferocious Protestantism they brought from Holland, and their nose for business. Upstairs at the slave lodge, of all places, the penny dropped.

Here are glorious basting spoons (“druplepels”), serving spoons (“opskeplepels”), and teaspoons (“teelepels”) by Johannes Combrink (ca. 1781–1853), Willem Godfried Lotter (fl. 1770–1810), and Marthinus Keet (fl. 1819–1860); sauce ladels (“souslepels”); soup ladels (“soplepels”), and mustard spoons (“mosterdlepels”) by Frederik David Waldek (b. 1808), Cadier Abdol (fl. 1847–1854), Dominique Baudouin du Moulin (fl. 1822–1833), Johan Voigt (fl. 1783–1791), Lawrence Twentyman (fl. 1818–1832), and Jacobus Johannes Vos (fl. 1800), all brought from the collection of the South African National Gallery.

I suspect the plainness and the general schemata were imported from Georgian and Regency Liverpool, but the sensuousness of the bowls, their sculptural flair, their generosity without “fatness,” to say nothing of the harmony of each transition from bowl to stem, the shapeliness of the whole article, its simplicity and refinement, the avoidance of embellishment, and the mastery over form—these set the Cape silversmiths apart. By any measure these men were major artists, but—really, seriously—who were they?

Hugh Trumble in Matjiesfontein

2011-07-27T16:53:00.008-04:00

The week before last I went from Cape Town to Pretoria aboard the Blue Train. The journey takes about 30 hours, and the train stops only once, after about six hours, for passengers to stretch their legs for about an hour in a tiny hamlet on the edge of the Grand Karoo plateau, which looks to me an awful lot like the Wimmera, or, at a pinch, the Mallee.

The halt is called Matjiesfontein and there are a few old houses, some dusty-looking sheep, a defunct post office, a cricket pitch of sorts, some stables abandoned by the British army after the end of the Boer War, and a dear old “spa hotel,” the Lord Milner, with a public bar where the Blue Train people had arranged for us to have refreshments.

Bear in mind that these were the first premises in which I had set foot outside Cape Town, only four days after I arrived from London. I have never before set foot upon the continent of Africa.

In the bar there were a clapped out but functioning upright piano, a huge Edwardian cash register, a large clock that had stopped at half past six, and an assortment of ancient sporting and other team photographs hanging on the walls at either side of the front door, and on the short sides of the room, flanking the counter.

Those sporting team photographs included the Blair Lodge School first cricket XI for 1895 (in Polmont, near Falkirk in Stirlingshire, Scotland, about 20 miles from Edinburgh); the same school’s officer corps of cadets; the Nottinghamshire county XI for 1897; Major Barton’s Cape XI (date unknown); Lord Hawke’s South African XI (1898–99), and “the Australians (Seventh Team) 1890,” in which, on the left, wearing his trademark bowler hat, a very youthful but nevertheless unmistakable Hugh Trumble stands, our great-grandfather J. W. Trumble’s famous younger brother. Of course he does!

I couldn’t believe it, but yes: the relevant portion of the caption read: “H. Trumble.” There must be some algorithm relating to colonial populations, relatively high birth rates, patterns of descent, and the intercolonial and international Edwardian cricket enthusiasm that would go a little way towards accounting for this amazing coincidence. Even so, I was and am still completely astonished by it.

I have no idea how this rather fine group photograph found its way to Matjiesfontein in the Grand Karoo. Great Uncle Hugh certainly played with the Australian tourists in the Cape and Natal in 1902, but this was taken twelve years earlier. It’s a possible explanation, and at this stage the only one that is in any way viable. At any rate, it is in fine shape and so am I.

District 6

2011-07-27T16:49:00.004-04:00

Distrik Ses, the sixth municipal district, was a busy, relatively cosmopolitan neighborhood of inner Cape Town, roughly bounded by the docks, the city, and the slopes of Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak. Generations of former slaves, “coloured” migrants, Malay and other Southeast Asian and indeed non-Asian Muslims, a fair number of Xhosa, a smattering of Afrikaners and other whites lived there in relative degrees of harmony, a fairly representative cross-section of the whole of South African society. In February 1966, under the notorious Group Areas Act (No. 41 of 1950), District 6 was declared whites-only, and forced removals were announced. Commencing two years later, and proceeding in well thought-out stages, by 1982 upwards of 60,000 people were removed to the desolate Cape flats, some fifteen miles away, and the entire locality bulldozed. Only places of worship were spared. Richmond, Arundel, Frere, Clifton, Ashley, Hanover, Tennant, Godfrey, Sidney, Ayre, Cannon, Clyde, Caledon, Queen, Phillip, Gray, Combrinck, and Pedersen Streets are no more. It is as if the whole of Carlton or Darlinghurst or Fortitude Valley had simply been obliterated. Today you may still make out quite clearly what was done, because there is a sizeable portion of absolutely vacant hillside right there in the middle of Cape Town, but a little ad hoc museum nearer the centre of the city has been salvaging the collective memory of those who once lived in District 6. A large map on the floor is gradually accumulating the marks and surprisingly detailed notes of hundreds of former residents. It is an immensely moving monument, because you may walk across it, gradually absorbing the many human dimensions of each and every pulverized street corner. Which alleys were one-way? Where did Mrs. Adams live, or Mr. and Mrs. Wessels, or Mrs. De la Cruz, or Dollie and Joe Buckingham, or E. Mosoet, or L. J. Williams, or Y. Abrahams, or Sarah Louw (Anderson), the Carrs, the Schroeders, or “Walker,” or “Patsy Harry (nee van Schoor, now living in Australia, born 11/11/54)”? Where were the fish and chip shop, the Cheltenham Hotel, or Globe Soft Furnishings, or the Sheik Jossai Primary School, or the Moravian Chapel? Exactly how many steps led up to the steep corner of Hanover Square? (Seven.) What was A. J. Parker’s five-digit telephone number at 48 Stone Street? Perhaps there is no better spot than this in which to begin to grasp the hopeless desolation of Apartheid.

Groot Constantia

2011-07-27T16:47:00.013-04:00

The menu called it “the wine that seduced the crowned heads of Europe, consoled Napoleon in exile, and was featured in the novels of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Baudelaire [sic]. Produced from Muscat de Frontignan grapes, this is a bold, rich, honeyed wine without the botrytis usually found in this style...Former President Nelson Mandela has been known to enjoy this wine.” I copied it down in the dining car somewhere near Beaufort West, ordered a second glass, and made a mental note to go to Groot Constantia when at length I returned to Cape Town—and upon my return to New Haven, Connecticut, to check up on those wonderful but slightly improbable claims.

How delightful to discover that it is all quite true. Frederick the Great definitely drank it. So did King Louis-Philippe, the Prince Regent, King William IV, and Queen Victoria also. The order books have survived. Such was its fame, Constantia made it into successive editions of The Child’s Book of Knowledge (1828). On St. Helena Count de Las Cases supplied Bonaparte with “vin de Constance,” something that so irritated the Governor that the count was eventually ordered off the island. This cannot have led Jane Austen (in Sense and Sensibility, 1811) to make Mrs. Jennings recommend to the lovelorn Marianne Dashwood a glass of the finest old Constantia wine for “its healing powers on a disappointed heart.” (“My poor husband! how fond he was of it! Whenever he had a touch of his old cholicky gout, he said it did him more good than anything else in the world.” Elinor Dashwood drinks it instead.) I do wonder, though, if just conceivably De Las Cases actually got his bright idea from Mrs. Jennings, a suitably romantic twist in the otherwise hard-nosed commercial environment of the Cape.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), “whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it to be an infallible sign that he ‘wanted support,’ the blooming old lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit,” definitely not a marie. In Les fleurs du mal, meanwhile (XXVI “Sed non satiata,” 1857), Baudelaire says he prefers the mouth of his lover over the fine vintages of Constantia, Nuits St. Georges, and opium: “Je prefere au constance, a l’opium, aux nuits, / L’elixir de ta bouche ou l’amour se pavane.” Too creepy.

The whole question is academic. The Klein Constantia that Frederick, Napoleon, Prinny, Louis-Philippe, Austen, Queen Victoria, Baudelaire, and Dickens knew, or thought they knew, was obliterated at the end of the nineteenth century by the scourges of, first, oïdium, swiftly followed by phylloxera. The wine we drink today is a reconstruction, though certainly a delicious one.

Alas, this great house of neighboring Groot Constantia burned to the ground in the 1920s, so it too is a reconstruction, but very effective and moving nonetheless. But for a grumpy alpha male baboon, I was quite alone there.

The well-proportioned rooms are kitted out with mostly Cape Dutch furnishings in yellowwood, beefwood, satinwood, Burmese teak, amboina, ebony, elmwood, mahogany, and stinkwood (I am not kidding), as well as various early colonial pictures that come from elsewhere, above all from the collection of Alfred de Pass.

And it is through the pictures that one question above all swims into vivid focus: How was it possible that a setting as physically spectacular as that of the Cape of Good Hope, and the incomparable profiles of Devil’s Peak, Table Mountain, Lion’s Head, Signal Hill, and the Twelve Apostles, consistently failed to lift the local landscape painters to more and better results? It seems almost perverse, but more often than not eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century views across Table Bay reduce these sublime features to the character of a lumpy hillock, or a small gravel quarry in Derbyshire. Even William Hodges seems to have had considerable trouble capturing the effect. Maybe that is the answer: Some places simply defy representation, unless you are Albert Bierstadt.

On the other hand, look at the glorious proportions and sculptural vigor of Groot Constantia. Not bad for a colonial farmhouse at the farthest edge of the globe. It is in places such as this that you discover what is surprisingly scarce in the Cape, namely an adequate receptacle of any sort of aesthetic excitement among the earliest colonists. Held in check by such austere forms of Protestantism as they brought with them from Holland, those industrious East India Company people seem to have channeled everything into built forms, mostly gables, perfectly-proportioned windows and shutters; Cape silver, and successive vintages of sweet Klein Constantia, thank goodness.

Egyptian geese

2011-07-27T16:45:00.004-04:00

There is no need for an alarm clock in Cape Town. Egyptian geese do the job. Alopochen aegyptiacus is a noisy creature, and busy. A pair alighted in the Aleppo pine right outside my hotel window well before dawn on the first day, honking for South Africa. Later, in the Company Gardens, I watched with real admiration as a mother Egyptian goose herded her brood of fluffy goslings into the rose garden to demolish the iceberg patch, undeterred by baboons. But for me the Egyptian goose also rang a loud and persistent aesthetic bell. It is so obviously the same creature that found its way into the Old-Kingdom, fourth-dynasty mastaba of Nefer-maat (2613–2494 B.C.), who was a brother of the man responsible for building the great pyramid at Giza. After at least 45 centuries descendants of those famous “geese of Meidum” in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo are alive and well, and merrily shitting all over Cape Town.

The marie biscuit

2011-07-27T13:38:00.009-04:00

Last week when I went to meet our extraordinarily hospitable colleagues at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, they gave me morning tea—proper tea out of a pot, sitting down at a table, with cups and saucers, and a generous plate of marie biscuits (rhymes with starry). I don’t think I’ve seen a marie biscuit since early childhood, and I immediately thought of Gran in Myamyn Street. It was quite eerie: the canonical key pattern around the edge; the lettering in the middle, “MARIE”; the pale colour; the dense composition, not too hard but definitely not crumbly; the comforting, non-assertive ur-biscuit flavor—all these seemed so familiar, so vividly the same. My own little madeleine moment. There are many remarkable things about the South African National Gallery, but my delightful reunion with the marie biscuit was a special bonus.

According to various sources, the marie biscuit was invented in London in 1874 by the firm of Peek Frean & Co. to commemorate the marriage of Queen Victoria’s second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to H.I.&R.H. the Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia—and by that neat set of circumstances gained traction throughout the Empire. Peek Freans had earlier achieved success with their garibaldi biscuit (1861), but as far as I can recall only the marie was ever a middle-class morning-tea staple in the suburbs of Melbourne. Prior to my visit to Cape Town I was not aware that it enjoyed the same degree of prominence in South Africa—so I imagine the marie found its way onto the bridge tables of Hong Kong, the verandahs of Candy, Peshawar, and Nairobi, and I daresay into the better tea rooms of Halifax and Christchurch also. Splendid.

According to the South Australian Register (Saturday, November 22, 1919), “The Prices Regulation Commission on Friday approved tentatively of an increase of ½d. per lb. in the price of bush, coffee, and marie biscuits. The new prices are 7d., 9d., and 9½d. per lb. respectively, with transport added for the country districts. A further investigation will be made by the commission at a later date.” How sensible, and what better indication than this of the lasting importance of the marie biscuit (the costliest of the three) as a binding agent, both gastric and imperial.

The leopardess

2011-07-27T13:36:00.012-04:00

If you have never ventured into the South African bush, or visited what is still soberingly referred to as a “game reserve,” it is difficult to grasp just how rich an experience it can be, even how transformative.

Sabi Sand in the Limpopo Province comprises 44,000 acres of high bushveld savannah, gently rolling country at either side of the Sand River, which rises in the Drakensberg Mountains, a distant but beautiful presence. The property is contiguous with the western boundary of the Kruger National Park, not so far from the border with Mozambique, and scores of wild animals move freely back and forth. At this time of year, the southern winter, the land is dry, brown, and crackly, very much like Australia Felix—the days are warm and sunny, the nights cold.

In the absence of lush foliage, you can often see across long distances, which is handy for encounters with especially reticent creatures, but animals big and small are so numerous, and so familiar with the careful movement of land rovers, that all you really have to do is sit there with your binoculars and before long pretty much everything ambles, trots, stomps, skitters, flaps, or slinks casually by. It is simply amazing—a place teeming with every conceivable form of life. The best analogy is Eden. Indeed whoever drafted Genesis must surely have known a landscape like Sabi Sand, all set about with fever trees.

During my visit of four days, comprising three-hour dawn and dusk expeditions led by Shelley, our expert guide, a young New Zealand expatriate equipped with a loaded rifle, and Emmanuel, our dependable tracker, we met with a dazzle of well-fed zebra and a journey of giraffes, the latter with incomparable eyelashes; a crash of dogged white rhinoceros, who evidently double as a taxi service for meticulous side-stepping red-billed oxpeckers; herds of sensitive nyala, graceful impala, swaggering kudu, and big shaggy blue wildebeest; cheerful waterbuck, bushbuck, nimble grey duiker, and watchful rock-dwelling klipspringer. There were four busy warthog piglets, trotting along behind big-bosomed mother warthog, their tails pointing straight up. She reminded me of late-career Melba.

There were lissome tree squirrels, cheeky vervet monkeys, and a troop of unscrupulous chacma baboons. A herd of massive Cape buffalo ambled by, restively—the only creatures at length I found truly frightening. Unstoppable elephants patiently carried forward their project of deforestation, in particular a large bull without tusks who with the tip of his trunk gingerly sampled a waterhole with absolutely disarming fastidiousness, while at the same time producing an enormous erection.

There were crested barbets, forked-tailed drongos, helmeted guinea-fowl, grey go-away birds, a stately goliath heron, a black-winged stilt, sacred ibis (scooping and sifting through the mucky reed-beds), primevil red- and yellow-billed and trumpeter hornbills, Cape turtle-doves, sumptuous lilac-breasted rollers, a little exhibitionist bee-eater, and a clan of spotted hyenas with two suckling pups. We had seen the mother a day earlier, standing motionless upon a rise, the epitome of statuesque, her broad forequarters the equal of any carved in alabaster with wings on the gates to the citadel of Sargon II.

For two nights fleet-footed hippopotamus, including the baby hippo with a very hairy nose, munched determinedly right beneath my window, tossing confident grunts to relations up and down the river.

I saw a scrub hare, a woodland dormouse (enchanting), an African civet, a hefty marsh terrapin, a pair of hyperactive dwarf mongooses, a coy side-striped jackal, several single-striped mice, bats, ostriches, rainbow skinks, and the distinctive tracks of an especially reclusive aardvark.

After some considerable searching, we caught up with two young male lions, yet to grow their manes, one comforting the other, who had lately been badly hurt in a scuffle maybe with a hyena. However, I suppose it is the leopardess who will stay with me long after the whole spectacle recedes.

She was stalking something, and stole out from behind a termite mound—just like that. Silent as the grave, and as smooth as plush silk velvet, she proceeded without the slightest hint of urgency, actually hugging the three sides of our vehicle that stood between her and some intriguing fragrance farther distant. Her paws were as big as my head, her shoulder-blades undulating with metronomic precision. Her coat was paler than I had imagined it might be, and her gait was indescribably beautiful. The rear pads trod exactly into the rustle-free spots carefully discerned by the fore. She then reclined for a few minutes with the effortless authority of a queen-empress, and that was when I took this photograph. She has a seven or eight-month-old cub back near the lodge. Evidently leopards live with constant hunger, but you would never know. It is especially odd, therefore, that she can maintain such superb disdain for the assortment of human amuses gueules perching fussily in our (open) truck, but maybe we hoist too many olfactory question marks over the subtle mind of Panthera pardus.

As if to amplify an already intense experience up to the point of dizzying sensuality, a full moon rose on the second night and shed its cold light over the Drakensberg Mountains, the river flats, the gentle slopes, creek beds, copses of leadwood and marula and thickets of spiky acacia.

The Italians talk about mal d’Africa, literally Africa-sickness, and now I know exactly what they mean. I’m going back.

The skunk

2011-06-25T06:53:00.007-04:00

For some weeks past there has been an occasional pre-dawn visitor to my garden—an especially large and elegant skunk. She sashays slowly across the back lawn, shimmies even. She is industrious but nonchalant, assertive but discreet, imposing but delicate, and above all glamorous. Her tail is long, white and glossy, almost luminous in the half-light. The tapering stripes on her back are the height of fashion. In every respect she outshines the specimen shown above. Browsing for tasty morsels, she gives not the slightest hint of indiscriminate snuffling. There is the occasional tremulous upward flicker of the tail. That is her only sign of quiet satisfaction. I feel she has that rare quality we used to call “poise.” Where on earth did that go, and how can we get it back? Anyhow, I had no idea how glorious mature skunks are, though of course I am aware that you should keep your distance. Alas, yesterday my neighbor Nan Ross alerted me to evidence of a major skunk fatality a little way along Forest Road, state route 122, which Connecticut motorists use with a degree of recklessness that is equal to the worst you may expect to encounter in suburban Cairo or downtown Guangzhou—be warned! Upon further investigation, I fear my beautiful visitor has become road-kill, I daresay not even a statistic, and how very sad I am and sorry about that.

Pompon bobbery

2011-06-18T11:31:00.004-04:00

I have lately been pondering some matters connected with Anglo-Indian language, prompted in that direction not merely by current events (Abbottabad), but by my quest for William—and a spot in which to publish his remarkable story, the product of years of patient searching. So this morning I came across part of an article in Blackwood’s Magazine for May 1877 (Vol. 121, No. 739), “The Anglo-Indian Tongue,” that is cited in the preface to the first edition of his A Glossary of Reference on Subjects Connected with the Far East, by Herbert A. Giles, sometime H.B.M. consul at Ningpo, an indispensable work of reference:

“Now it is partly as a key to the shibboleth of Anglo-Chinese society that this Glossary has been designed, though to judge by the opening lines of the same article, which the [anonymous] writer tells us would be perfectly intelligible in a Calcutta drawing-room, there is no comparison between the phraseological difficulties in the way of new arrivals in the Far East and those to be encountered by the ‘griffin’ who wishes to be appreciated in Anglo-Indian society. These lines run thus:

“‘I’m dikk’ed to death! The khansamah has got chhutti, and the whole bangla is ulta-pulta. The khidmatghars loot everything, and the masalchi is breaking all the surwa-basans; and when I give a hukhm to cut their tallabs, they get magra and ask their jawabs. And then the maistries are putting up jill-mills, and making such a gol-mol (“pompon bobbery” in Japanese Pidgin-English,) that I say darwaza band to everybody. But when all is tik, I hope you will tiff with us.’

“The translation of this is:—I’m bothered to death! The butler has got leave, and the whole house is turned upside down. The table-servants steal everything, and the scullion is breaking all the soup-plates; and when I order their wages to be cut, they all grow sulky and give warning. And then the carpenters are putting up venetians, and making such an uproar, that I am obliged to say ‘not at home’ to everybody. But when all is put to rights, I hope you will lunch with us.”

Setting aside the ample evidence of poor domestic economy, not to say terrible industrial relations, it is intriguing to see that the same passage is exceedingly difficult to translate using Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell’s classic Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases (1886), another of my favourite works of reference. “Dikk, s., worry, trouble, botheration” is there, as is khansama, though listed under consumah, s., “master of the household gear.” So are bassan, s., dinner-plate; huck, hakk, huq, s., a just right or lawful claim; jawaub, s., meaning (curiously) dismissal; maistry, s., foreman or master-workman; jillmill, s., venetian blinds or shutters (external); and tiffin, s., lunch. The nearest thing to chhutti is chutt, s., or chhat, which essentially means a sort of awning or ceiling, and nothing at all like leave of absence. Bangla, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found, and nor are ulta-pulta, khidmatghars, masalchi, tallab, magra, gol-mol (though bobbery is there, but nowhere in Giles, who, after all, specifically cited it as a variant in Japanese pidgin, whatever that means), darwaza band, and tik. Presumably the problem for Yule and Burnell was whether such terms fell outside even their generously porous boundaries of colloquial usage, and, lacking any Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, or other etymological foundation, instead occurred merely as a kind of ad hoc pidgin. Or perhaps it was a consequence of the political and social changes that took place in the decade after the proclamation of the Indian Empire that, having made it into Blackwood’s Magazine, numerous semi-viable nabob terms simply evaporated.

"Blackfellow"

2011-06-12T13:42:00.007-04:00

Indigenous Australians have traditionally avoided naming the dead, as much a mark of respect for those who survive them. The taboo is inseparable from spirituality, social usage, and attitudes about kinship widespread among descendants of its original inhabitants in many parts of the continent and offshore, and has today broadened to include a prohibition of the publication, dissemination or display of photographs and other images of the dead. These conventions are not often strictly observed, but are now far more likely to be acknowledged, at least, by means of a warning to aboriginal viewers or readers that they are likely to encounter such references or images—even though they (the conventions) are therefore honoured only in the breach, and almost always by those who are most likely to urge non-indigenous Australians to treat them with the respect they deserve. This is something of a paradox. Meanwhile, as far as I can see there is considerable unclarity about whether these prohibitions were ever meant to be permanent. Certainly the issue of not naming individuals who have died has come to be something of a flashpoint in dialogue between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, and points to a fundamental difference between our respective attitudes toward the distant past, and about history. Nor is it easily separated from disagreements about collective naming. The Latin-derived terms “aboriginal, adj.” and “aborigines, n.” have now fallen out of favour.

We are for these reasons not likely to see the study of indigenous Australian prosopography flourish any time soon, though nineteenth-century European sources are full of references to named individuals now long dead. I mean no disrespect to anyone by pointing to one of these—as I shall presently—because it brings us back to the issue of collective naming, specifically an old term, “blackfellow,” that is now for obvious reasons pretty much universally regarded with distaste. The matter cropped up in conversation lately with a colleague—we were wondering if that English hybrid could actually have been coined in colonial Australia. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that black-fellow certainly predated first contact and was in common use by 1738, in relation to sub-Saharan Africans. Moreover, the mid-century Australian variants “black-feller,” “black-fellah” and “black-fella” were merely vulgarisms, and had nothing to do with the Arabic fellah (peasant, laborer, bearer), nor any other putative Anglo-Indian origin, which had occurred to us as at least a possibility. However, what surprised me most when at length I double-checked my copy of Austral-English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages, by Edward E. Morris (London and New York: Macmillan, 1898, p. 33) was that his earliest reference to “blackfellow” occurs in Discoveries in Australia by J[ohn]. Lort Stokes (London: T. and W. Boone, 1846, vol. 1, p. 74): “The native Miago, who had accompanied us [aboard H.M.S. Beagle] from Swan River [Perth, Western Australia], was most earnest in his inquiries about the savages, as soon as he understood that some of them had been seen [on January 18, 1842]. He appeared delighted that these ‘black fellows,’ as he calls them, have no throwing sticks;…” The italics are mine. Obviously this comes much later than the earliest current reference in the OED to “black-fellow,” meaning specifically an Australian Aborigine (Collins, 1798), and, despite Commander Stokes’s implicit suggestion that this man actually coined it, the term was evidently by then well enough established in Perth to be learned and used by indigenous English-speakers. It seems strange that Stokes was apparently neither aware of this, nor at all familiar with the term.

All things are queer and opposite again

2011-06-10T12:16:00.007-04:00

Thanks once more to my colleague David Hansen, and through him also to John McPhee, I am put in mind of all things queer and opposite by this charming portrait reproduced from a glass-plate negative in the collection of the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. According to information published on their website, the photograph was taken by the pioneering radiologist Dr. Thomas Beckett in November 1891, during an extended visit with his family to London. This is the doctor’s maternal grandmother, old Mrs. Hoyt.

Thomas George Beckett was born in London in 1859 and was one of the seven children of Mr. Beckett, a pharmacist, and his wife Julia, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hoyt. Thomas studied medicine in Edinburgh, graduating in 1880, and spent several years as a ship’s surgeon before going to Victoria in 1885, accompanied by his young wife Kate (née Lawrence).

The Becketts went at first to the town of Charlton, which is half way between Wedderburn and Wycheproof on the road from Bendigo to Mildura. In 1892 they moved permanently to Melbourne. Beckett was one of a small number of colonial doctors who specialized in radiology soon after the discovery of x-rays in November 1895 by W. C. Röntgen. Another was Beckett’s friend Frederick (Fred) Clendinnen (1860–1913), whose collection of x-ray tubes is in the collection of the Museum of Victoria. Clendinnen purchased his first X-ray apparatus from W. Watson for £5 13s. 9d., but Beckett built his own equipment, including tubes, batteries, and the ad hoc cabinetry for housing them—not only for taking fairly primitive x-radiographs, but actually for treating cancer patients with admittedly mixed results, and certainly not much concern for the harmful effect upon himself of more or less continual exposure to radiation, which, of course, soon killed him. Beckett was head of the x-ray department the Alfred Hospital from 1901 to 1908, “electrician in charge of equipment,” a keen cyclist, and a captain then major in the militia.

However, what concerns me here is the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus, formerly O. paradoxus) that you see hanging prominently among the little framed photographs on the wall of old Mrs. Hoyt’s London parlour—evidently a mature animal, if slightly over-stuffed, I suspect, by a taxidermist with grandiloquent, possibly even histrionic tendencies. At her left elbow one glimpses also a preserved lizard, possibly a baby goanna, a large sea shell, and other curios. Neatly stacked on the dresser behind, one makes out albums, books, and maybe boxes—in other words hints toward Mrs. Hoyt’s serious contemplation of natural history and the South Seas, where so many things were without question queer, and determinedly opposite.