Director John Ford at 125

John Ford

I’ve loved movies from as far back as I can remember, and my favorites growing up were filled with action and adventure.  When as a young adult I finally began paying attention to directors, I discovered that many of the films I admired most were made by John Ford.  Today is his 125^th birthday.

Ford was a prolific director, even by the higher-output standards of his time, and he had astonishing breadth in subject matter.  He won four Academy Awards for Best Director, more than anyone else.  But although those four films were all non-westerns, Ford is best known today for his magnificent Westerns.  

Harry Carey Sr, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Henry Fonda (in his early days), and especially John Wayne, whom Ford made a star in his 1939 film Stagecoach, are just some of the actors particularly associated with Ford.  In fact, he cast in supporting roles a large group of regulars that became known as the Ford Stock Company.

Ford was admired for his genius, both in narrative and in technique.  But he was a gruff, often-unpleasant man, and at times mean and vindictive – especially when drunk.  Given his personality, Ford had a poor and unsatisfying family life, but in his films he seems almost obsessed with the rituals of community and domestic life.  Many of his best films center on family – some of his earlier ones, like Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, can seem overly-sentimental and mannered today, but some that came later are personal favorites – The Quiet Man and Donovan’s Reef.  Other non-Westerns that I particularly enjoy include What Price Glory, The Horse Soldiers, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Last Hurrah.

Ford's Westerns stand out, many of them filmed in Monument Valley (which he put on the map).  Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are particularly noteworthy favorites.  And then there’s his masterpiece, The Searchers, which many film buffs consider perhaps the greatest Western and one of the best films ever made. 

There are certainly other directors who have made many great films; for me Billy Wilder particularly stands out in this regard.  But Ford had an extra dimension, a thread, in his films that is hard to identify or describe, but it’s there.  Once, as the story goes, Orson Welles, certainly no slouch himself as a filmmaker, was asked to name the directors he most admired, and he replied: "I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."

R Balsamo  

Singer/Songwriter Steve Goodman at 70 – You Better Get It While You Can

Today would have been the 70th birthday of the late, great Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman.  For anyone who saw him perform, it was impossible to imagine that a man with such youthful energy and bounding joy could ever grow old.  Sadly, he did not, passing away in 1984 at age 36 from the leukemia that plagued him throughout his too-few years among us.

His performances were full of energy and sparkle and good humor.  Much of what he sang were his own compositions, and his style was certainly eclectic, ranging from folk to country & western to oldies, from soft ballads to comedy to satire to jazzed-up foot-stompers.  Anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing him live, especially in a small club on a warm summer night, can only wonder why he did not become a bigger star. 

I saw Steve Goodman perform many times in Chicago, in small folk-houses and in large halls (like the Park West on Armitage Avenue).  Most of the venues are long-gone.  I first saw him in the mid-1970s at the Earl of Old Town saloon with the great Chicago blues band Martin, Bogan & Armstrong, and I will never forget their exhilarating rendition of Mamma Don’t Allow It, which no one there, especially the musicians, seemingly wanted to ever end.  A couple years later I returned to the Earl to see Goodman once again, and smiled as, early in his act, he pulled an audience member up to play with him.  They played for hours, and seeing Steve Goodman and John Prine do an impromptu three-hour riff was a thrill I still remember.  In his middle career years he was joined in concerts, and on recordings, by county music legend Jethro Burns.  I once drove alone from Chicago to Rockford, almost a hundred miles from where I started on the South Side, in a light snow storm (I was very young then) to see the two of them play; consummate musicians they were, Goodman on his guitar and Burns on his mandolin.  (I had the pleasure of conversing with Jethro Burns for a couple of minutes during a break while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the small, two-man men’s room – a most pleasant fellow).  A few years before his death, Goodman moved, with his wife and children, to Southern California, hoping for more success from the connections he could make there.    

His breakout hit was City of New Orleans after it was recorded by Arlo Guthrie.  He had great range in his many compositions – from Would You Like To Learn To Dance, a soft, gentle invitation to take a chance at love, to Banana Republics, a ballad about disaffected American expatriates south of the border.  Some were intensely personal, filled with bittersweet emotion, notably My Old Man in which he mourns and reconciles with his long-passed father, and Old Smoothies, about the joy his loving grandparents experienced watching an old couple ice skating together.

Goodman had a great sense of humor, and what a treat it was to see as well as hear him do Talking Backwards, The Auctioneer, Vegematic, This Hotel Room, or of course The Broken String Song (which always seemed like he was making it up on the spot when he actually took time to repair a broken string in the middle of a set).  He could fill up half an evening, if he wanted to, with just these fun, and funny, songs.     

North-sider that he was, Goodman was a big, and long-suffering, fan of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and composed two tunes still often played today – Go Cubs Go and A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request (featuring the now inoperative lyric, funny then – “the doormat of the National League”).

Along with life-long friend John Prine (fellow Chicagoan and fellow former US postal worker), Goodman wrote Souvenirs, a favorite of mine, and the “perfect” country song You Never Even Call Me By My Name.  He also popularized songs of other composers, notably Michael Smith, who wrote The Dutchman, Roving Cowboy, Crazy Mary, and Spoon River – all soft ballads that became big Goodman fan favorites.  Goodman was a leading figure among the Chicago singer/songwriters and folksingers in a now-bygone era, along with others such as Prine, Bonnie Koloc, Ed and Fred Holstein, and Tom Dundee.  

Although not well-known by his fans during his lifetime, illness and mortality were always on Goodman’s near horizon, perhaps explaining in part the energized emotion and bittersweet tenderness of so many of the songs he sang.  His You Better Get It While You Can was more poignant than many of us realized at the time (“from the cradle to the crypt is a might short trip, so you better get it while you can”).  Steve Goodman passed away in late September 1984, just days before his beloved Cubs finally entered post-season play for the first time since before he was born.

Although I enjoy a great deal of popular music I don’t go to concerts much, preferring mostly to listen to music in a comfortable arm chair with a subtle pinot at hand.  But Steve Goodman had to be seen in person, to share in his warmth and energy, and so I have seen Steve Goodman far more than any other performer, and he is still sorely missed, after all these years.

R Balsamo

Related Posts:
John Prine at 65
Folkie Tom Paxton at 75
Laura Nyro in My Head

Hemingway’s Collected Letters

Ernest Hemingway wrote a great many letters in his lifetime.  They were usually very informal, often full of strong enthusiasms, coarse language, and unbridled emotion.  They were not written as works of literature, or anything close to that.  They were spontaneous and of the moment.  They reveal a great deal about the man, less about the writer.

Hemingway’s letters are scattered all over the world, some in libraries and some in private hands.  After Hemingway’s death, Carlos Baker sifted through what was then available to him and in 1969 published a collection of letters he thought were the best.  But they were just a small fraction of the entire corpus.  Now, a group of scholars is in the process of publishing a multi-volume collection of every known Hemingway letter in existence, fulsomely annotated and carefully documented – The Letters of Ernest Hemingway.  The first volume was published in 2011 and three volumes of an anticipated twelve have been published so far, in beautifully-bound editions by Cambridge University Press.  The letters are being published in chronological order, and the editors supplement them with copious introductions, notes, chronologies, glossaries, maps, and indexes.      

Bruce Bawer reviewed (link) the first three volumes in the February, 2016, issue of The New Criterion, a terrific journal of criticism and commentary to which I subscribe.  He is not very enamored with the letters he has read thus far.  Bawer finds them for the most part uninteresting, often casually written, and not indicative of the great writer’s literary talent.  Bawer sees in the letters a very human, flawed man  – he sees the man behind the curtain and doesn’t like what he finds.

Having now read many Hemingway biographies, most of the letters in the Baker collection, and all the letters in the first two volumes in this new collection, my view is different from Bawer’s.  Although Bawer’s points are well taken, and valid to a point, I find Hemingway the man fascinating, and his letters flesh out that man more than any other source.     

In his letters we see how Hemingway approached his life and his writing.  He may have been economical with words in his serious writing, but he was garrulous in his letters.  We see how his relationships with family and friends (such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Archibald MacLeish) grew, blossomed, and deteriorated.   We see his need to be surrounded by friends, with himself as the center of attention, in his frequent urgings to friends to come and stay with him to fish and hunt and travel.  The letters are often emotional, frequently gossipy, and occasionally petty.  There’s bluster, and passion, and anger.  He was very numeric – we see a man continually aware of his finances and his productivity (page counts of works in progress are frequently conveyed to friends and editors), a man who kept detailed logs of fish caught and animals shot, of miles driven and expenses incurred.  He could be very kind and considerate, or a total jerk, and he was definitely not a family man, mostly neglecting his three sons, four wives, and others in his orbit.  We see a man whose friends and family and women are cast off one-by-one along the way, and wonder why.  Hemingway was funny and inquisitive, and very competitive, always exploring, thinking, pushing limits.  He was a man full of vim and enthusiasm, who could not stay in one place (or with the same people) for very long.   

The plan for the series is to publish only letters from Hemingway himself, and not those of his correspondents, providing explanatory notes to help with context.  About 85% of the letters have never been published before, and a great deal of effort seems to have gone into tracking them down all over the world.  At the time of the first volume, letters had been collected from almost 250 sources, not only libraries and similar institutions but from over 175 dealers, private collectors, and individual Hemingway correspondents.  Hemingway himself had saved some material – early drafts and some copies, whole or in part.  He seems never to have thrown out even a scrap of paper with writing on it, perhaps learning the value of saving material from his mother, who meticulously kept detailed scrapbooks on each of her children, filling six large volumes on her son Earnest’s activities through his involvement in the First World War.  Hemingway, by the way, saved a great many lists, from shopping items to camping trip needs, and, like his father, organized himself through them.

Hemingway’s letters in a very real sense constitute his autobiography, however unintended.  He took life his way with passion and vigor, and though the picture is not always pretty, there’s much to be taken away in his letters by those of us more inclined to quiet reading and quiet times.

R Balsamo

Remembering Edward Everett Horton

Has there ever been anyone funnier in film than Edward Everett Horton?   I first met him, or met his voice that is, early on – he was the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales series that was a regular part of the animated Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.  Growing older I’ve come to enjoy his every film appearance.  He excelled in playing cheerful though slightly befuddled and often exasperated characters and was a master of the delayed double-take.  Three favorites:  Holiday, Springtime in the Rockies, and Arsenic and Old Lace.

Then there are his Astaire/Rogers pictures, three of the best, in which he practically steals every scene he’s in:  The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, and Shall We Dance.  His scenes with the daffy, screwball Alice Brady in The Gay Divorcee are alone worth the price of admission, and as a bonus he has the Let's K-nock K-nees dance number with Betty Grable no less.  The Gay Divorcee, incidentally, features the then new song The Continental in a 20-minute song and dance extravaganza (here's a part); it later won the very first Academy Award for best original song, back in the good old days when such awards were merit-based.  His scenes (link; link) with Eric Blore are priceless.

Per Wikipedia, the New York Times, and other sources, Horton was born one hundred thirty years ago today in Brooklyn to parents of Scottish extraction.  Horton’s grandfather was writer Edward Everett Hale, who was a nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, and a grandnephew of Nathan Hale, the martyred spy of the American Revolution.  He attended college for a while at Oberlin, until, showing an early theatrical bent, he was “asked to leave” after climbing to the top of a building, and after gathering a crowd below, threw off a dummy the audience mistook for him.  He moved back to New York City, attended Columbia University for a time, and began his performing career in acting and singing.

He started in silent pictures in 1918, and from then on was based on the West Coast.  His first talkie was the 1931 version of The Front Page.  He was an entrepreneur as well – he would lease a theater and produce a play in which he would star; in 1932 he leased the Hollywood Playhouse for a year and put on Springtime for Henry, in which over his lifetime he would appear more than 3,000 times.  From all this he earned enough to spring for a summer home on Lake George in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

After finding success in Hollywood, he bought 23 acres of land in the Encino section of Los Angeles and established a compound of houses where he, his mother, his sister, and his brother lived with their families.  He was an avid antique collector, acquiring a valuable collection over the years.  Horton died in Encino in 1970 at the age of 84 and is buried in Forest Lawn, the cemetery of the stars.  His work, fortunately for us, lives on.

R Balsamo

Remembering Omar Sharif

He was given one of the most dramatic entrances for an actor in film, cast as a then-unknown by director David Lean in his masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia.  Starting as a shimmering dot in the distant desert, his figure grew slowly larger until he burst into the scene by suddenly shooting Lawrence’s companion and guide. 

According to Wikipedia, Omar Sharif was born Michel Demitri Chalhoub in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Lebanese Christian family.  The city in his youth was a "chaotically cosmopolitan" place (link) in a country ruled by the Westernized King Farouk, who was a friend of his mother and played bridge at their house.  He graduated from Cairo University with a degree in mathematics and physics, but eventually gravitated to acting.  In his early 20s he converted to Islam and scrapped his Christian name in order to marry an Egyptian actress, back when Muslim countries had actresses.  In 1962 Lean cast the 32 year old actor in his first English-speaking role in Lawrence.     

Smart and educated, a noted bridge player and a speaker of many languages, Omar Sharif died a few days ago in Cairo at the age of 83.     

To a generation of middle-aged American women, he came to epitomize the somewhat exotic, always mysterious, ever debonair foreign sex symbol.  His film roles included The Night of the Generals, a favorite of mine in which he plays a German army officer conducting a murder investigation during WWII; the picture also features his co-star from Lawrence, Peter O’Toole.  Perhaps his greatest part was that of a sensitive and altruistic physician and poet consumed by the barbarity of the Russian Revolution in another David Lean epic masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago.

I imagine it would be hard for someone young today to appreciate the breath of his appeal.  But there is this.  In the rolling hills of southwest Wisconsin, far from the plains of the Nile delta or the forests of Lebanon, nestled along the high, picturesque dalles of the Wisconsin River is a little town called Wisconsin Dells.  It has become a resort area hosting the thousands of tourists attracted to the cool water and beautiful north woods countryside.  In the heart of the sprawl is a supper club called Wally’s House of Embers, there since the late 1950s.  For that special occasion it has a cozy, overly-decorated, very private booth for two.  Anyone wanting to reserve it for a romantic dinner by candlelight needs just to ask for the Omar Sharif Room.

R Balsamo

Reflections on Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway at age 24

A trip late last summer into Northern Michigan’s Hemingway country rekindled an old interest of mine in his life story.  I grew up not far from his hometown of Oak Park in suburban Chicago, and his boyhood there was of course well-known in the area.  As a boy, Hemingway fished and hunted in the “prairie” west of the Des Plaines River near his home; years later houses were built on that land and I grew up in one of them.  My interest has been not so much in his fiction but rather in his person, why he wrote and how he wrote about his life's adventures.  It has always struck me that his public persona of the great adventurer, full of vim and at times reckless vigor, was at odds with the themes of death and violence that he so often employed.  I wanted to know more about him, to see whether this was true.  And that terse writing style – perhaps I might find some insight as to why I have trouble stopping a sentence while he strained to keep one going.  Since his fiction was semi-autobiographical anyway, why not read the real stuff. 

Hemingway’s life is remarkably well documented.  He was a prodigious letter writer and many memoirs have been written by family, friends, and associates.  He saved a wealth of papers, some involving the most mundane aspects of his life.  His literary importance and the amount of personal material have led to numerous biographies.  I have been reading a bunch of material: memoirs, biographies, letters, stories.  I’ve moved through many of them simultaneously, taking each phase of his life in turn, and it has been a valuable comparative exercise.  It’s been quite interesting to see what each biographer feels is important, what he covers, and the things omitted by one that another dwells on. 

Some observations:

·       He had a most remarkable, oversized personality.  Men and women were drawn to him like flies around a bright night light.  I’ve jotted down lots of adjectives as I moved through the story of his life:  passionate, adventuresome, narcissistic, mean, kind, energetic, envious, competitive, thoughtful, bombastic, self-absorbed.  He had a commanding personality, who, as his friend the poet Archibald MacLeish once said, would suck all the oxygen out of the room when he walked in.  Friends would flock to be around him – to Northern Michigan, Chicago, Paris, Spain, Key West, Bimini, Wyoming/Idaho, Cuba – wherever he was, wherever he was going, they wanted to be there with him.  It is truly remarkable how many people, over so many years, traveled long distances to spend time with him, once there often in the company of other friends of his they had never met, forming a sort of gang in orbit around him, and typically doing something they may never have done by themselves and didn’t always particularly like – fishing and hunting.         

·       When Hemingway was in his late teens and early twenties, beginning to make his place in the world, it is remarkable how many of his close friends and associates were much older than he.  His two most important Michigan friends, the siblings Bill and Kate Smith, were four and seven years older.  As an aside, there’s reasonably suggestive evidence that he had a romantic relationship of some kind with Kate, who years later would marry the author John Dos Passos, another friend of Hemingway’s whom she met when they were both visiting him in Key West.  His first great love, the Red Cross nurse Agnes in Italy, was seven years his senior.  His first wife Hadley was eight years older, and his second wife Pauline four.  His best friend from his Red Cross ambulance experience in Italy, and with whom he roomed for a while in Chicago, was Bill Horne, a Princeton graduate eight years older.  In Paris, he socialized and corresponded with writers and artists sometimes decades older.  He was mature for his age, exciting, interesting, and interested.        

·       So how was it then that this man so full of boundless energy and adventure could be so focused on death?  When Hemingway was a teenager, his mother told him “everything you write is morbid.”  He had that strange fascination with death, suicide, and killing animals (particularly big ones) for sport.  It’s there in his writing from the beginning.  In Indian Camp, one of his earliest published stories, his alter-ego Nick Adams as a boy witnesses the terrible suffering of a woman undergoing an emergency cesarean section without anesthesia and the suicide of her nearby husband who, unable to bear her screams, slits his own throat.  The personality of the man seems so inconsistent with the themes of his writing.  Being around him in person, I imagine one would think that he was the writer of grand adventure stories. 

·       The startling number of suicides in his immediate family is well known:  besides himself, his father, his one brother, and one and possibly a second of his four sisters; and, many years later, a granddaughter.  But the number of suicides among his extended circle is also remarkable:  his third wife the writer Martha Gelhorn; his young Venetian love Adriana Ivancich; the father of his first wife Hadley; and his long-time Havana housekeeper.    

·       As an adult, Hemingway became progressively estranged from most of his family, save his sister Ursula.  When his mother died, he hadn’t seen her in 20 years, and he didn’t attend her funeral.  He had few real life-long friends.  And as with people, when he was done with a place, he moved on.  The Northern Michigan about which he wrote so passionately in his early years, which was so formative of his character, he visited just once after leaving at age 22.  From about that age as well until his death he returned to his hometown of Oak Park/Chicago only a handful of times.  When he left Key West after living there for about 10 years, he rarely returned.  His youngest son once said that Hemingway would swallow and use up places, then be done with them.  He was like that with a lot of people as well.

·        Yet he could be remarkable kind and thoughtful, sometimes to people he hardly knew.  One poignant example stands out to me:  the two touching, well-crafted letters he wrote to old Paris friends Gerald and Sara Murphy on the deaths of their two teenaged sons, one from meningitis and one from tuberculosis just a few years apart, reveal an extraordinary kindness.  The boy with TB was sick for some years, and Hemingway went out of his way to visit him, and he wrote the boy letters as well.  For recondite reasons that will be grist for generations of psychologists to come, by the tender age of 32 Hemingway was calling women not much younger than himself  “daughter,” and not long after that chose for himself the nickname “Papa.”  Imagine, say, being 40 years old and calling your 35 year-old friend Ernest Hemingway “Papa.”

·       He was a disciplined writer (and a voracious reader).  Hemingway could write anywhere; in hotel rooms, on trains, on boats.  He had to, for he was often away from his home base for many months at a time.  In 1929-1930 at one stretch he was away from Key West for 10 months, staying from days to months at a variety of locations in Europe and the States.  He was very focused on word counts – he continually mentions them in letters, often also noting how many pages he threw away.  His well-documented writing experience reveals that for him as for many great writers it was as much perspiration as inspiration. 

·       To say Hemingway was accident-prone would be an understatement.  Throughout his life, a progression of serious injuries caused by alcohol, recklessness, and just plain bad luck (such as the two airplane crashes in Africa in the early 1950s), including a staggering number of concussions, left him physically and mentally compromised by his mid-50s.  That he was a prodigious drinker and amateur boxer surely didn’t help his health any.  The courses of experimental electroshock treatments he received at the Mayo Clinic seem especially misguided and likely contributed to his mental deterioration in the months before his suicide.

Hemingway was an exciting man, a magnetic man, with great virtues and great faults.  Even if he had never written a word, it would not have been surprising if stories were written about him, he was that kind of man. 

R Balsamo

Patrick O’Brian at 100 – Remembering His Remarkable Aubrey-Maturin Series of Historical Fiction

Today would have been the 100^th birthday of Patrick O'Brian, author of a remarkable feat of historical fiction – a story spanning 20 and one-half books of the particular friendship and adventures of English naval captain, expert navigator, and amateur mathematician Jack Aubrey and Irish/Catalan noted physician, spy, and naturalist Stephen Maturin.  At first drawn together by their love of music, they become fast and somewhat improbable friends and serve together in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, through battles and intrigue, loves and losses, sickness and injury, and wealth and impoverishment, all while fighting the French, their allies, and their spies across the globe on both land and sea.   

O’Brian was not only a great storyteller but was as well a meticulous researcher.  The series is a treasure for its complexity of plot, depth of characterizations, and fascinating period detail about flora, fauna, food, drink, and sailing ships.  His use of authentic language and nautical terms is impressive, though it takes some getting used to (but I now know quite a bit about the weather gauge, slipping one’s anchor, and the danger of a lee shore).  And there’s plenty of history and geography, music and mores, and of course battle strategy and tactics. 

Patrick O'Brian

Humor abounds, usually subtle and dry but sometimes broad (the dog watches being curtailed and choosing the lesser of two weevils come quickly to mind).  The writing style, the depth of slowly-drawn detail, takes no small measure of perseverance at first.  In that regard the story is like a fine tawny port – strong and an acquired taste, but once hooked, exquisite and sublime. 

Fame and fortune came late to O’Brian, when he was more than half-way through the series whose first volume, Master and Commander, was published in 1969.  Living modestly and reclusively with his beloved wife, he wrote for decades in a small house in a French Catalan village on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border.  When he passed away in January of 2000 he was partway through the 21^st book, which has been published as-is up to the point he left off the last time at his desk, with alternating pages of a photocopy of a single hand-written page paired with a typed transcription. 

In 2003, director Peter Weir premiered a beautiful, richly-layered film which drew on a number of story elements from different parts of the series – “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.”  And of note, the handwritten manuscripts for eighteen of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, as well some first editions and other pieces from O’Brian’s body of work, were acquired by the special collections Lilly Library at Indiana University, where I was fortunate to see them all displayed at the 2008 exhibition “Blue at the Mizzen” (which is the title of the last full volume in the series).

For well over 15 years I have been enjoying this long tale; whenever I get through the last volume I just start all over at the beginning.  I always have a book going, and I find I read it sporadically in fits and starts, daily for stretches, and then maybe not at all for a few weeks while consumed by other books; but I am never very long away from the story.  If the joy has not yet been yours, by all means get the helpful lexicon and the geography guide, start at the beginning, and stick with it in the first three volumes and let O'Brian hit his stride.  As Lucky Jack Aubrey is wont to say, there is not a moment to lose.

R Balsamo

Remembering Churchill, at 140

Today is the 140^th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill.  I don’t remember when my particular interest in him began.  No doubt I was aware early on, through all those WWII movies and books I voraciously consumed.  But there was certainly much more to his life than his war days, and over time that came into focus for me.  I now own over 40 books by or about the man, and I have read most of them.  My first perhaps was the one-volume biography by Martin Gilbert, a condensation of his much longer treatment.  My favorite is the two-volume The Last Lion by William Manchester, and for an emphasis on his personal life and habits I like The Private Lives of Winston Churchill by John Pearson.  Of Churchill’s own work I have especially enjoyed My Early Life, The River War, and The History of the English Speaking Peoples.  There was much to find and much to learn in studying the life of this most remarkable of men.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, into a life of privilege and wealth.  He was the grandson of a duke and the son a rich American heiress.  He was born premature, so it was said, in the coat room of his grandfather the Duke of Marlborough’s majestic Blenheim Palace.  He had a very confident, perhaps overconfident, independent nature; and surprisingly, for a great speaker, he also had a lisp, which he worked hard all his life to mask and overcome.  After a much neglected childhood, with indifferent and self-absorbed parents, he attended Sandhurst, the British military academy analogous to the American West Point, from which he graduated a cavalry officer.  His mother, quite the socialite, often pulled strings with her many friends and lovers to secure advantages for her son. 

As a young man he had a remarkable career as an army officer, war correspondent, and writer, often all simultaneously.  He sought out military action wherever then it was, and often at the same wrote dispatches to newspapers back home for pay.  Then shortly thereafter he would write a book about it all.  He always had a lifestyle that required plenty of cash, more than he was earning as an officer even when supplemented by an allowance from his mother.  So he wrote, and wrote well.

He was an observer and correspondent during the Cuban revolution of 1895 while on a leave from the army.  He was posted to India, where he was a skilled polo player.  While there in 1897 he joined a unit in northwest India fighting a local tribe and served with distinction, and also was well paid for his reporting from the front.  The following year, through his mother’s influence he secured a choice position in Kitchener’s punitive expedition up the Nile to confront an army of frenzied Islamic militants.  The march to the Sudan was in part to avenge the murder there of the popular British official Charles "Chinese" Gordon, of whom Churchill wrote "a man careless alike of the frown of men or the smiles of women, of life or comfort, wealth or fame."  In that campaign at the Battle of Omdurman he was part of the last cavalry charge of the British Army. 

In 1899 Churchill left the Army, lost an election for Parliament, and headed off to South Africa to cover the Boer War as a newspaper correspondent.  While an observer on a British scouting mission in an armored train car, he bravely, though illegally, took charge while under fire at a critical moment during a Boer attack and saved many, though he was captured.  He famously escaped from a prison camp in Pretoria and found his way to safety in British territory, where he was hailed as a hero.  Though he continued as a war correspondent, he then rejoined the Army for its ultimately victorious campaign.  He eventually returned to Britain, left the Army once again, and won the first of many elections to Parliament. 

Churchill was an influential political leader right from the start, joining a group of young reform-minded Conservatives. In 1904, he left the party in a fight over free trade, which he supported, and joined the Liberals.  With them he held many important leadership positions, culminating in being appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, the head of the British navy, a post he held for over three years extending into the start of WWI.  While there he upgraded, modernized, and developed new technologies (such as the tank, despite his being in charge of the navy, not the army).  After the disaster of the Gallipoli campaign which he had helped formulate, he took much of the blame, unfairly in my opinion, and resigned.  He then reactivated in the Army and served as a front line senior officer on the brutal Western Front.  

His reputation quickly recovered and he returned to a series of government leadership positions.  He led the British support for military action in the Russian Civil War and the Irish War of Independence.  Then in 1924 he left the Liberals and rejoined the Conservative Party, saying at the time that "anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."  He became Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to Treasury Secretary in the US) and led the country’s return to the gold standard, which turned out to be an economic disaster.

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 general election.  Churchill remained a Member of Parliament, but fought with others in his party over free trade, which he still supported, and home rule for India, which he did not.  With no leadership position and his party out of office, Churchill became a backbencher in Parliament in what he described as his “wilderness years.”  He spent that time writing books and articles, painting, traveling on speaking tours (including a long one through the United States), enjoying his country estate Chartwell, and, most importantly, increasingly warning the near-heedless free world of the growing danger of Nazi Germany. 

Melding wisdom with wit, Churchill is said to be the third most quoted source in the English language, after the Bible and Shakespeare.  Once when asked about a fancy London dinner he had just attended, he said "it would have been splendid, if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess."  He was a truly prodigious drinker all of his adult life, yet he lived past 90, explaining that “I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.”  He described Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  Although an excellent writer, Churchill once remarked that the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition is "the sort of English up with which I will not put."  He described the socialist Labour politician Clement Attlee as "a modest man with much to be modest about."  He said that "the vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings, whereas the virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."  He averred that "communism was a religion – Jesuits without Jesus."  Finally, in a story perhaps apocryphal, Churchill's perennial political sparring partner Lady Astor once said to him that if he were her husband she would poison his coffee, to which he replied that if she were his wife he would drink it.   
 

When war broke out again in 1939, at two months shy of his 65th birthday Churchill was returned to power and the rest, as they say, is better known history of this most remarkable man.

In the last volume of the Pax Britannica trilogy, his near-poetic, masterly, pointillist history of the events and ethos of the British Empire, James Morris wrote of Churchill at the time of his death on January 24, 1965:

He had become the living exemplar of British glory.... and the most universally honoured man on earth.... [N]ot only his own nation, but half the world paused wondering and reverent to mourn him.  It was like that moment of antiquity when, the wild god Pan having died, strange music sounded and spirits moved from one end to the other of the classical world.  Churchill had gone, and a sigh, part regret, part wry, part sentimental, went round the nations.

R Balsamo

Cruising Up North in Michigan – Part Three: Hemingway Country

On our recent trip Up North in Michigan, we spent a few days in Petoskey, a fine little town on Lake Michigan's Little Traverse Bay which, among other things, sits in Hemmingway country.

I grew up near Hemingway’s boyhood home in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, and I went to high school there as well (though at a different school than Hemingway's).  Because of his particular local fame I have had a passing interest in his life and writing, although I am not especially partial to his style which I find excessively sparse and metaphorical.  I have though enjoyed his semi-autobiographical (which of his work is not, for that matter) Nick Adams short stories, about a sometimes barely-fictionalized boy and young man growing up in northern Michigan. 

On this trip we did not make it over to the Walloon Lake – Horton Bay area, a short distance outside Petoskey.  Hemingway spent twenty summers there starting when he was practically a newborn.  Early on he stayed with his family at their summer cottage on Walloon Lake.  Later his parents bought additional property on the opposite shore and developed a truck farm there that Hemingway worked for a few years as a teenager.  He would rough it in a tent on that side of Walloon Lake, and gravitated for meals and company to nearby Horton Bay, a small settlement a few miles west down the road on neighboring Lake Charlevoix.  Later on at 20 years old, after his return from his WWI experience in Italy, he spent one autumn and early winter in a Petoskey boarding house, as the cottage was too cold and he chose not to return to Oak Park to stay with his parents.    

At Horton Bay Hemingway met two siblings named Smith who would figure large in his life.  They were from St Louis but spent some summers in the area with a rich aunt.   He would have an affair with Kate Smith, a beautiful girl who would go on to introduce him to two of her girlfriends who would become his first two wives and the mothers of his three sons.  Bill Smith became a close friend.  Later, Hemingway would live for a while on Chicago’s near north side in the apartment of the oldest Smith sibling, Kenley, who would introduce him to some literary figures who would set him off on his career.  One of these was Sherwood Anderson, who entranced Hemingway with stories of his recent time in Paris among the “Lost Generation” and encouraged the young man to move there (which of course he soon did).  As an aside, some years later, after Hemingway was married to his second wife and living in Key West, Kate Smith came to visit both her friends and there met Hemingway’s pal and fellow writer John Dos Passos, whom she soon married.

Hemingway married his first wife in a small church on the shore of Lake Charlevoix in Horton Bay.  After their honeymoon at his family's cottage on Walloon Lake, the couple left to live in Chicago near Kenley Smith.  Less than three months later they moved to Paris.  Although his experiences in northern Michigan with family, friends, lovers, and the outdoors would loom large in his writings, Hemingway returned to the area only once more in his life, for a short time when he was about 50 years old.    

I have particularly enjoyed the biography of Hemingway’s early life – "Along With Youth" by Peter Griffin.  I have also read parts of, and relied upon, "Hemingway: A Biography" by Jeffrey Meyers.

R Balsamo

Part One here; Part Two here.

Remembering Banjo Patterson and Waltzing Matilda

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Andrew Barton "Banjo" Patterson (link), the man who in 1895 wrote the lyrics to Waltzing Matilda, a song often regarded as the unofficial national anthem of Australia.  I first heard it as a boy in the early 1960s at the Boy Scout Camp Shin-Go-Beek in central Wisconsin.  There were a few hundred of us at a time at those annual summer camps, and I think we sang this song, and a few others, every day at lunch and dinner; interestingly though, Waltzing Matilda is the only one I can specifically remember.  Of course, I had no idea then what any of the nouns meant – swagman, billabong, coolibah tree, billy, jumbuck, tucker-bag – they seemed borrowed from a foreign language.  As it turns out, they were – Australian!

Patterson was quite a fellow.  He grew up in the Australian outback and, although becoming a lawyer, is best known as a writer – he wrote lyrics, penning the words to Waltzing Matilda; poetry, including The Man from Snowy River (which was later twice made into a movie); novels; sports reports; and finally dispatches from the front, serving as a war correspondent during the Second Boer War in southern Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China.  He also served in WWI first as an ambulance driver and later as an officer in the Australian Army, with which he was wounded in France.  He eventually settled down as a farmer in later years and died in 1941, during WWII, at age 76. 

I’ve heard many versions of Waltzing Matilda over the years, but perhaps the best (despite omitting the third verse), slowly paced with a wistful, melancholy air, is one by the late Tom Dundee, from a town far from Down Under – Chicago.  I’ll almost certainly never learn if he first heard the song deep in the Wisconsin woods, but his version is available on iTunes, where I discovered it and bought it some years ago.

R Balsamo

Remembering Sidney Reilly, the Ace of Spies

The Name's Reilly, Sidney Reilly

On this day in 1925, 88 years ago, Sidney Reilly, adventurer, con-man, and British agent, the model for Fleming’s James Bond, was supposedly executed by the Soviets after being lured to Russia in a trap.  I say supposedly because much of Reilly’s story is shrouded in uncertainty, as he fabricated stories and identities as a matter of course.  

Perhaps the first true international man of mystery, it seems most likely that he was born in Czarist Russia to Jewish parents and found his way to Britain where he married a wealthy woman, freshly widowed perhaps during an affair with Reilly, and became a valued operative for the young British Secret Service.  His undercover exploits were all over the globe, including his foiling the Russians in Manchuria just before the Russo-Japanese war, stealing weapon plans from Germany before WWI, and causing much mischief in Russia for the Bolsheviks.    

Sam Neill as Sidney Reilly

I first learned of Reilly from the excellent 1983 TV mini-series Reilly: Ace of Spies, which was based the book of the same name, which I later read, by Robert Bruce Lockhart.  The music theme was a haunting melody I enjoyed so much that I recorded it from the TV speaker onto a cassette tape; I only knew it was "The Romance" movement from a Dmitri Shostakovich score for a movie called The Gadfly.  What I didn’t know until today, knocking about on Wikipedia as I am wont to do, is that this film was an adaptation of the novel of the same name, written by an Irish woman named Ethel Voynich, allegedly once a lover of Reilly’s, whose theme is revolution and romance and whose central character is allegedly based on none other than Reilly himself.    

Lockhart was a friend and colleague of Sidney Reilly.  He later worked closely in British intelligence with Ian Fleming, and Reilly undoubtedly came up in conversation.  According to the Wikipedia entry (link), “Reilly was multi-lingual, fascinated by the Far East, fond of fine living, and a compulsive gambler” – just like some other secret agent we know.

R Balsamo

Remembering Burt Lancaster, at 100

Today would have been the 100^th birthday of actor Burt Lancaster, one of the greats of Hollywood and a particular favorite of mine.  As a boy I especially liked adventure stories, and Lancaster’s The Crimson Pirate is one of the first I can remember seeing; I was particularly enthralled by the daring and ingenious escape in which he and two others, while chained together in a small dinghy, capsize their boat to trap air in its hull, sink to the bottom, and walk the whole way back to shore on the sea floor breathing the trapped air.  That movie was in the repertory of the weekly Family Classics movie series on WGN TV in Chicago along with another film of his – Jim Thorpe – All-American.  

Although born and raised in East Harlem in New York City, Lancaster started out as a circus performer, and his gracefulness of motion is evident in his work.  He had a warm, confident persona accompanied by an easy, almost trademarked, wide, toothy smile and an expressive physicality.  In his long career drama was his strength.  He won an Academy Award for his role in Elmer Gantry, a film which showcases his charm and talent as well as any other and which won an Oscar for co-star Shirley Jones as well.  Some of his other well-known performances were in The Bird Man of Alcatraz and Atlantic City.  He starred alongside some remarkable leading ladies, such as Katherine Hepburn in The Rainmaker, Audrey Hepburn in The Unforgiven, and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.  He also started a production company that, among other things, produced the award-winning movie Marty as well as Sweet Smell of Success, in which he starred as the heavy.

Particular favorites of mine include war pictures The Train, Go Tell the Spartans, Castle Keep, and Run Silent, Run Deep, and Westerns Ulzana’s Raid, The Professionals, and Lawman.  He had notable performances all the way to the end of his career, and his late roles in Rocket Gibraltar and Field of Dreams constitute a memorable finish to a remarkable body of work.  Lancaster died in 1994 at the age of 80.

Laura Nyro In My Head

Laura Nyro

There’s music for every mood, and this week Laura Nyro has been the soundtrack of my days with her beautiful, clear voice wafting through in her unique bluesy, jazzy style.    

Born Laura Nigro in 1947 in the Bronx to an Italian musician father and a Jewish social progressive mother, she was still a teenager when she sold her first song And When I Die, which later was a big hit for Blood Sweat & Tears.  Stone Soul Picnic and Eli’s Comin’ are other well-known works of hers.  Personally, I enjoy rather many of her slower-tempo, less-well-known compositions like Emmie and Billie’s Blues.

I hold a special place for her sparkling, soulful covers of 50-60s era pop songs such as Spanish Harlem, Up on the Roof, It’s Gonna Take a Miracle, Dedicated To the One I Love, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Let It Be Me, La La Means I Love You, and Desiree, many of which were recorded with Patti Labelle and her vocal group.  It doesn’t get any better than their lilting harmonizing on The Bells.

Sadly, Laura Nyro died all too young, as did her mother, both at age 49 from ovarian cancer.  Tomorrow would have been her 66^th birthday.  She left behind a treasure trove of material, to be discovered and enjoyed all over again by those yet to come. 

R Balsamo

American Egyptologist – Breasted & The Oriental Institute

Jeffrey Abt has written a fascinating and detailed account of the life of James Henry Breasted, the much celebrated University of Chicago ground-breaking epigrapher and founder, at UChicago, of the Oriental Institute.  Abt thoroughly covers Breasted’s work in epigraphy and archaeology, and also many interesting aspects of UChicago’s early history.  The book is exhaustingly researched, and is handsomely bound in rich, dark blue cloth by the University of Chicago Press (at one time, and maybe still, the largest university press in the world).

Breasted was foremost an epigrapher, studying ancient inscriptions and language, and though not trained as an archaeologist he became one by necessity, given the need to find, excavate, and explore ancient sites.  Working from the 1890s into the 1930s, his primary focus was ancient Egypt, and as a young man, struck by the deterioration of the known sites, he began a lifelong project to record and interpret the inscriptions.  In time, Breasted became famous; he was, for example, at the opening of the chamber containing the sarcophagus and mummy of King Tutankhamum.  He emphasized studying not just past events but past conditions and institutions, which seemed novel for the time. 

Breasted also became, through books and lectures, a very well-known popular educator about ancient Egypt and early Eurasian civilizations.  In his teaching and writing, he was a pioneer in the use of visual, diagrammatic displays of information, and coined the now well-known term “fertile crescent”.  He was one of the first to appreciate the important influence of Egypt’s ancient civilization on that of Greece.  The Oriental Institute’s projects eventually encompassed all the civilizations of the Near East and the field work spread out accordingly; its museum displays one of the finest collections of ancient Near East artifacts in the world, and I have enjoyed many a desultory stroll through the exhibits.      

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago

Breasted was born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1865, and grew up in Chicago’s western suburbs.  He started out in pharmacy, of all things, and graduated from what is now North Central College in suburban Naperville.  He eventually turned to theology (at the Chicago Theological Seminary), then to languages (studying Hebrew at Yale), and then finally to epigraphy which became his life’s work.  As his career moved on, he became as much an administrator and fundraiser (Rockefeller money) as researcher and educator, and at that point in the story the book gets dry with detail I imagine not of particular interest to the casual reader, who I suspect might be inclined to tread lightly over those sections.  An abridged version for the general reader would not be misplaced.

Breasted was the first archaeologist to be elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and became so well-known that he made the cover of Time magazine in 1931.  When he died at 70 in 1935, his memorial service at Rockefeller Chapel on the UChicago campus featured the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and was broadcast nation-wide on CBS radio.  He was buried in Rockford, with a large granite cube from ancient Egypt placed as his tombstone.  Years later, when a film maker was creating the fictional story of a young, dynamic epigrapher, he placed his character at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, no doubt because he figured where else would you find someone like Indiana Jones. 
 

American Egyptologist:  The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute
By Jeffrey Abt (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Richard R Balsamo

Related Posts at this blog:
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
Ancient Assyria & the Transience of Economic Strength
The Oriental Institute's "Striding Lion" of Babylon

Folkie Tom Paxton at 75

Some of the warmest memories I have of the early days with my firstborn is singing with him, mostly singing to him, softly, on our glider late in evenings after a long day at work.  We had a small repertory of songs he liked, some standards like Old McDonald and many tunes familiar from Raffi.  But there was one old personal favorite of mine that I sang a lot.  No doubt the appeal was the father-to-son-to son theme, spiced up by bursts of onomatopoeia amusing to both son and father.

 

That song is The Marvelous Toy, profound I think in its deceivingly superficially simple and silly way.  It was composed by a young man – in the Army, somewhat incongruously, at the time.  He went on to a memorable career as a singer-songwriter in the “folk” genre, starting off as part of the Greenwich Village scene.  I saw him perform once in the mid-80s or so in Chicago – at The Quiet Night on the north side, I think.  His songs are many – my particular favorite is The Last Thing on My Mind, and a version of his powerful Jimmy Newman by the late Chicago folkie Fred Holstein deserves special mention.   

He’s done a lot of satirical, topical political stuff from the usual simplistic, child-like leftist point of view, and I wonder how his antipathy to warmongering and allegedly corporatist presidents is holding up against such disorienting developments as Obama’s personally directing ongoing drone murders (no due process!) of scores of people all over the Middle East and Obama’s sinking billions of taxpayer money into Solyndra and other failing companies controlled by his political pals and sponsors.  Mature, three-dimensional intellectual thought has never been a strong suit of tres chic lefties, and I suppose we cannot expect any more of this man.  We take him and his music for what they are as they come.   

 

Born in Chicago 75 years ago today – Tom Paxton.   

 

Richard Balsamo