Category: Biography

The Whiz Kids and the 1950 Pennant (1996) by Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers, III.  

Good Reads meta-data is 390 pages, rated 4.27 by 33 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction.
DNA: baseball.
Verdict: Mr Rogers and Mr Roberts tell all.
Tagline: You can take the boy out of the ball game, but you can’t take the ball game out of the boy.

Forward by novelist James Michener published by Temple University Press perhaps in recognition of the social impact of sports, which seems more enduring than institutionalised religion these days. Hope, salvation, compensation, distraction from woes, identification with something larger and meaningful, sports gives these to a lot of people.

First half of the book is a history of the Philadelphia National League Franchise from 1915 when it went to the World Series to 1949 when, after long years in the wilderness, it made into the first division with a winning record. Robin Roberts (1926-2010) was one of the Clydesdales who pulled that wagon into the Winner’s Circle.

Based on extensive interviews with surviving members of the 1950 team and written largely from Roberts’s point of view, a modest and unassuming one. It recounts many games and the stresses and strains both on and off the field with a candor made possible only by Jim Bouton’s barrier breaker Ball Four of 1970, which might have been the first book about baseball to acknowledge that players were fallible and friable human beings. The Society for American Baseball Research has opined that Bouton’s is the most influential book ever written about baseball for that reason. Amen to that!

In these pages Roberts and Rogers give credit where it is due to the players who made the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies champions. A few tidbits follow in no particular order.

There was a new manager in 1949, replacing an aggressive and assertive fellow who did a lot of yelling while the losses mounted. In came Ed Sawyer, called the Professor by his players because he had an advanced degree in biology, a subject he had taught at Cornell where he coached the baseball team. Sawyer was, to say the least, mild-mannered. He seldom convened team meetings, never tried to motivate players by yelling at them, conceded the importance of family lives (births of children, illness of spouses, deaths of parents), did not tell pitchers what to do, and never, and this is much stressed in the book, second guessed after the fact what anyone did. So different from so many ex post facto coaches and so-called colour commentators who always know what should have been done.

Aside from creating an atmosphere of calm confidence, Sawyer also convinced the ownership to invest in new uniforms with a red pinstripe, perhaps to capture some of the reflected glory of the New York Yankees blue pin stripes.
Sawyer was the antithesis of the most well known and still remembered manager of that era, Leo Durocher, who always made himself the centre of attention, and over-managed enough to earn a McKinsey degree. He would certainly fit in the way the game is played these days: over-managed.
Sawyer believed in putting the players on the field and letting them do what they did best.

That was not always possible. To wit, All-Star first baseman Ed Waitkus missed most of the 1949 season and seemed unlikely for the 1950 season when a stan shot him. It’s a long story and none of it is good. A woman became obsessed with him, her apartment was plastered with all manner of his pictures and newspaper cuttings from the sports pages that mentioned his name. Then one day, perhaps, realising she would never possess him, she exercised her constitutional right to bear arms and in a hotel hallway shot him with a rifle. He did recover from the lung injury but was never quite the same again. This incident, by the way, is the seed of Bernard Malamud’s love letter to baseball, The Natural (1952). Justice being what it is, she was never tried but confined for psychological assessment and then released in 1952. Waitkus did not press charges but the team hired a body guard for him when she was released. Details can be found in John Theodore’s Baseball Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus (2002).

Fielding the best players in 1950 meant putting Mike Goliat at second base. Previously, he had played first and third, but the team had established players at the corners, and someone had to play second. He volunteered to try, and stuck to it. He made an adequate fielder and a modest hitter, at least above the Mendoza Line. (The cognoscenti know what that means.) But he made two other contributions to the team. According to Roberts, Goliat was a cheerleader of sorts who always tried to get the others to focus on the positive, even in defeat. And also, hidden in the aggregate statistics of his batting, is the fact that he absolutely owned Don Newcombe of the arch rival Brooklyn Dodgers and most of their other pitchers. HIs batting average against the Dodgers was well over .350. Because these Dodgers were locked in a race with the Phillies their ace Newcombe invariably pitched against them and Goliat feasted, typically going 4 for 5 with a couple of extra base hits, and even one of his few home runs. When the Phillies beat Newcombe, and they did, it was because Goliat was scoring. Of course, Roberts is too modest to say it, but it was also because he was shutting out the Dodgers’ many big bats.

Roberts was not an overpowering fastball pitcher like Sandy Koufax nor did he have a table drop curve ball like Bob Gibson, but he did have preternatural control of all his pitches. This mastery was born of practice, but then everyone practices. But a hint at what set him apart is to be found in his comment that he seldom noticed the weather, the crowd, the catcalls, the cheers, the jeers, the wind, the noise or anything else. When he stood on the rubber atop the 15-inch mound there was just him and catcher’s glove. He sometimes had to be told the game was called off because of rain. He hadn’t noticed when pitching in it. More than once he asked his wife if there had been a big crowd at a game. He hadn’t noticed.

The Phillies beat the Dodgers for the National League Pennant in the last game on the last day of the season in the 11th inning at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn against that man Newcombe with Roberts holding the formidable Brooklyn bats to one run, and Mike Goliat getting four hits. Two days later they met the dynamic New York Yankees and were roundly trounced in four games, three by one run. Yes, the Yankees had a superb team and the Phillies were doomed before the umpire said the sacred words of ‘Play ball.’

Ace left-handed pitcher Curt Simmons was called to active duty for the Korean War and left the team in September. The third starting pitcher Bubba Church was hit in the face by a line drive that same month and went on the injury list. Then the fourth man in the rotation was carrying a suitcase on a stairway in a train station when he fell and twisted his back in what became a lifelong disability. When the Series started the Phillies were very long shots with only one of their four starters available, that is, Roberts who had, two days before, pitched an eleven inning game, well over the magic pitch count of today.
But wait there is more! The starting catcher, Andy Seminick, broke his ankle in that last game with the Dodgers. He played on, including the World Series, shot full of novocain and taped toe to knee. This, by the way, was not the last disaster for this team. When Simmons returned the following year, he tested his new electric law mower with his foot. Since it was silent, he could not tell if it was running so he struck his toe under it to see. He saw…a lot of blood and a career-ending injury. (Though in fact with a prothesis and agonising physiotherapy he did make a comeback.)

As quickly as they had arrived at the top they fell to the bottom of the heap for years to come.

The sobriquet ‘Whiz’ was created by the pressmen in spring training in 1950 (p215) to reflect on the fast finish the Phillies had made in 1949 and the very successful spring training they had. (Wherein Roberts struck out Ted Williams in an exhibition game with a slow curve. For the record, Williams had his revenge in the next at bat, hitting a home run off Roberts). The nickname might also have been inspired by the popular radio program of the day, ‘The Quiz Kids,’ who answered all manner of trivia questions. However, the Phillies’ roster was not appreciably younger or smarter (see the reference to a lawn mower above) than those of other teams. Subsequently, it had another application to refer to how fast the Phillies faded from NL pennant contention in the following years.

Partly thanks to the efforts of James Michener and others, Robin Roberts was inducted into baseball’s Vahalla at Cooperstown with a career record of W 286-L 245 with 305 complete games. At one point he pitched 28 straight complete games, five of them had extra innings. Because the Phillies barely averaged 2 runs a game in his tenure, Roberts, one member of the nerd kingdom estimates, lost more than 50 games by one run. In that World Series he pitched 11 earned runs scoreless innings in two games, and yet lost one because of an error. Like many others, he found it hard to quit and hung on MLB for 18 years.

David Halberstam, The Teammates: a Portrait of a Friendship (2003).

Good Reads meta-data is 218 pages, rated 4.04 by 5789 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

DNA: Red Sox Nation.

Verdict: ‘Good at life.’

Tagline: Life goes on.  

The Brotherhood of the Bat was Dominic DiMaggio,  Bob Doerr, John Pesky, and Ted Williams. No pitchers allowed. (Grizzle: while pitchers have to bat, batters never have to pitch. Can that be right?) Baseball brought these four together where they had fused into a lifetime camaraderie.  A couple had become acquainted as teenagers, others later.  One was marital matchmaker to another, and so on. Their children played together and, sometimes, more than that into the next generation. 

The common currency in this unlikely union of such differing personalities was baseball, and specifically hitting a baseball.  Even in their eighties they could and would argue over technique with the bat. By social norms these four had little in common but baseball, and it was enough.  Even when they were no longer teammates, they remained fast friends, though I did wonder how that worked with the draconian fraternisation rules of baseball applied when the teammates were split up, but our author does not comment.   

This short book is a welcome reminder that great performers, in this case athletes, have lives off and on the stage, as well as before and after their careers.  It begins at the end with the death of the singular Ted Williams and works back with empathy and insight.  

The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1976) by Virginia Carr.

Good Reads meta-data is 600 pages, rated 4.23 by 667 litizens.

DNA: Dixie.

Verdict: Meets the standard.  

Tagline: A betazoid.  

Born Lula Carson Smith (1917-1967) this precocious and sickly girl-woman was a prodigy, an ill-fated infante incroyable. At fourteen she dropped the ‘Lula’ name and embraced the androgynous  ‘Carson,’ a family name. When later she married James Reeves McCullers she took his name and kept it, though she did not always keep him or he her.  When Mrs McCullers was 19 she began to write her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, hard though it is to believe that an adolescent, and one who was comfortably sheltered, could produce such empathy and insight into its cast of characters, but she did.

‘We are all homesick for a place we have never been called happiness.’ She didn’t say that but it fits. McCullers was a tormented and doomed genius, more often than not, silent and alone, like one of her characters.   

How did this inconsolable soul emanate from a happy home? This is one of the questions the author deals with in a masterful fashion.  It was precisely because she had a supportive and comfortable start in life that her senses extended, almost palpably, to those who were not so fortunate.  When the preteen McCullers visited a travelling carnival, she went to the freak show and stood for hours watching the bearded lady, the enormously fat man, the boy with a flat head, the armless man, the legless woman, the dwarf, the pinhead, Andre the giant, half man-half woman, and other deformities of nature, and she wondered so hard about being them that she became one of them in her mind, on paper: an outcast, a reject, inferior, useless, a freak.  She also wondered about a god that created such beings and then left them to their own devices. 

While McCullers had many writing teachers, a high school graduate, she did not go to college, but rather enrolled in a variety of adult education writing classes.  It was through these experiences that she found her way to publication. Even before The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, she had written much of what later become Reflections in a Golden Eye. 

This biography meets my principal test: it shows the adult in the child and the child in the adult. In the girl Carson are the liniments that form the woman McCullers, and in the mature McCullers, the author shows, the sources in the girl Carson. One example is the cocktail of silent introvert and loud extrovert.  Mostly, she was silent and brooding, or perhaps better, soaking up observations of the world and people around her, but she also liked, occasionally, to be the centre of attention, to be opinionated, noisey, and even ill-mannered.  There was no in-between of normal conversational interaction. 

She began telling stories as a child and never stopped.  She was encouraged by her mother who never doubted her genius, and educated in part by her father, the watchmaker who stressed persistence and precision.   

The biographer uses passages from McCullers’s novels and stories to describe and explain Carson’s life because she so closely identified with her deformed characters that she became, at least in her own mind, a grotesquerie herself. McCullers has been a posthumous recruit in the LGBTQAA1 alphabet world.  All part of her Indiana Jones exploration into the far reaches of the human psyche, looking for a bottom to touch and finding nothing fixed and firm. 

She published four novels, many short stories, and several plays.

Let this passage from her first published, though not her first written, work about tweenager Mick Kelly, who goes to bed hungry most nights, indicate the kind of fiction she wrote. Restless, Mick roams her small Georgia town on hot summer nights, and stops to listen to radios emanating from open windows because her family is too poor to own a radio or have the electricity to run it.   

“Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her hand went up to her throat. It was like God walking through the night. The outside of her suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what followed, she sat there waiting and frozen, with her fists tight. After a while, the music come again, harder and loud. It was her, this music, walking in the daytime, in the hot sun. The music boiled inside her. She wanted to hang onto it, to all of it. The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough to remember it all. Then the opening music again, but this time with different instruments. It was like a hard hand had punched her. And then it ended. This music did not take a long time or short time. It had no time; it was time.”

Music was McCullers’s even greater passion than prose and she was never without it, Beethoven (Eroica above), Brahms, Mozart, Vivaldi, the Liszt goes on. 

Her horribilis annus was 1944.  Her father died. Her mother collapsed as a result. Carson had three strokes over the year that left her partly paralysed. In between the strokes her recurrent pulmonary affliction knocked her down. During one of the many visits a doctor told her that she could not have children. Then a cancer was discovered. She was accused of anti-Semitism and that wounded her.  Her husband was an Army Ranger and his unit went up the bluff face on Normandy Beach with 50% casualties.  She knew he was a Ranger and she knew his Ranger regiment took the bluff, per the news reporting, and from that source she also knew the casualty rate, but it was weeks before she learned he had survived, though twice wounded. 

Through much of life she was a stick figure with a withered arm.  Several surgeries on a leg to restore circulation did not succeed and it atrophied.  Recurrent stokes. Near constant pain treated with alcohol and drugs. The press photographs required all too often by publishers were agony for her.  She had to psych and pretty herself up, mask her deformed arm in long sleeves and forgo the sling she often wore to keep it out of the way.  She would greet an interviewing journalist or photographer seated so as not to reveal how hard it was for her to move.  The photographs of her standing were choreographed. Yet through this all those voices of the neglected and rejected that had gestated within her leaked out onto the page, sometimes dictated, sometimes typed with the good hand or written.  She was an oracle through whom the speechless spoke.  

Reeves McCullers, that husband, survived Normandy with wounds and later when he was herding German prisoners onto trucks, he waited for the next truck, a German naval officer who was at the head of line read the name stencilled on his shirt – ‘McCullers,’ and in English said, pointing, ‘An unusual name.  Did you write The Heart is a Lonely Hunter?  A very moving book.’  It seems this German had read it in captured booty earlier.  Reeves told the German it was his wife who wrote it, and then he, the German, dug into his kit bag and handed over a piece of Belgian lace, saying, ‘Give it to her from a grateful reader.’  After the war, the textile hung as silent testament on the walls of their digs. Throughout her life, when her health permitted she read and replied to letters from readers.  

Aside: It rivals the story I read elsewhere of the Luftwaffe pilot who on being shot down west of Bradford in Yorkshire, asked his capturers if he might see the Brontë’s cottage before being taken away.  

The book is almost a diary of her day to day life, and I got bogged down in detail that did not, to this reader, add any more understanding of either the author or her works.  In such a forrest few trees were visible.  No doubt those whose accolades adorn the book cover had greater persistence than did I.  

The movies I have seen derived from her books are pale watermarks of the intensity of the original. I expect most of her novels are now banned in Florida. 

Last Stop, the Twilight Zone: The Biography of Rod Serling (2014) by Joel Engel. 

Good Reads meta-data is 322 pages, rated 3.81 by 59 litizens. 

Genre: Biography.

DNA: USA.  

Verdict: The one and only. 

Tagline:  Next stop.  

Born (1924-1975) the second son to a comfortable, well-off family in Binghamton New York, which was a small company town based on a shoe factory whose owners practiced Quaker philanthropy with its work force.  Idllic images of towns and villages were born from that experience to return in scripts years later.   

Even as a five-year-old he craved the limelight and was forever thereafter trying to be the centre of attention.  A school teacher guided that incessant demand into plays and debate, and later into journalism.  He edited his high school newspaper and was class president, having campaigned hard for the honour.  At 5’ 4” both the high school football and basketball coaches rejected him as too small. That put a chip on his shoulder. 

The day he graduated from high school in 1943 he enlisted in the US Army and volunteered for the most rigorous training as a paratrooper.  Only 1 in 8 of volunteers succeeded, and he was one of them.  He made 37 jumps, including two in combat conditions in the Philippines with the 511th PIR where 400 men of this unit were killed or wounded. There are some remarkable scenes in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead of such combat. The fragility of life was another recurrent theme in Twilight Zone born of this experience. He also took part in the house-to-house fighting to liberate Manila from the suicidal Japanese defence.  He had two wounds, one a knee that forever gave him pain and which occasionally even as he recorded the prologue to the Twilight Zone would seep. In addition to the two Purple Hearts, he had earned a Bronze Star. 

He went to Antioch College on the G.I Bill and set himself to write for radio, starting with the campus radio.  Again guided there by a teacher.  At the time cheapskate sponsors came up with the idea of having listeners submit scripts to anthology programs, and Serling did so, winning more than once a cash prize, and more important, the glory of having his words broadcast into the ether. He loved both the money and the glory. There was no looking back from that.  The anthology format went into Twilight Zone.  

While at college he met and married Carolyn Kramer, she a Christian and he a Jew. They compromised on religion and became Unitarians (who have no religion, people used to say).  She brought a summer home on a lake to the union, but while in college to generate the income of a married man, Serling took a job test jumping parachutes at a nearby army base and then ejector seats.  He succeeded 3 others, all of whom had been killed in tests.   

First as an unpaid intern and then as a staff writer he worked for radio stations writing everything from advertising jingles, to reports of garden parties, the weather, drama, news bulletins, commercials, and comedy.  Then came television with an even more voracious demand from words, and he supplied them. He now submitted scripts to television programs, amassing a volume of rejections, but enough acceptances to eke out a living.  

He wrote 71 scripts for Kraft Television Theatre, and then came the 72nd, called Patterns (1955), a kind of Caine Mutiny set in the corporate world.  It was triumph in the pages of the New York Times and he was a made-man.  There followed another triumph with Requiem for a Heavy Weight (1956).  His name now sold and he sold off 50 or more of his earlier rejected scripts as fast as possible to capitalise on his newfound fame.  Many of these were mediocre at best and reduced his market value. This desire to spread his seed, despite devaluing it, is a recurrent tide in his life.  

He wrote scripts about negro lynchings, hated of Jews, corporate corruption, government incompetence, quick-thinking women, incompetent bullies, and the like but found commercial sponsors insisted on watering the themes down to nearly nothing.  To skirt this barrier he adopted the fantasy, science fiction cloak, encouraged by Desilu Productions, and produced the pilot of Twilight Zone in 1959.  It lasted five seasons when a season was 39 episodes.  By the end he was dried up, and accepted the termination, though he did not write them all he did read and edit those written by others whom he hired and directed, but he wrote the bulk.  During its run in proved to be both a commercial and critical success.  

Twilight Zone made him famous and wealthy.  It is unlikely that any other writer ever has been so well known around the world. That celebrity also carried expectations, none of which he could fulfil in later years, and he knew it, but could not change his ways. The sirens’ song had done its worst to him.   

Those successes enabled him to convince the producers to record the episodes to be screened again, the rerun. This was not the common practice at the time when one live airing was the norm. When taping started it allowed better productions, but once aired the programs were taped over for the next episode.  Serling, and others, argued that saving taped programs for summer reruns recouped the cost of taping and, he argued, and also allowed the broadcast rights to be sold, which they were and syndicated to local stations.  

Leaving aside the many details, what emerges is a man who was driven by an insatiable craving for external validation, and, in fact, could not live without it.  Was this entrenched need a result of his height (he wore elevator shoes from high school on) or being a lifelong younger brother, or what?  

When Twilight Zone ended he sold himself to the highest bidder, not because he wanted or needed the money, he was rich beyond Croesus, but for the affirmation.  He did TV commercials, became a regular on daytime television game shows, hit on every woman that crossed his path from stewardesses to college students asking for an autograph to waitresses to secretaries and more, instructed his agent to say yes to every commercial offer, composed and tried to sell film scripts, teleplays, theatrical dramas, short stories, novels, and mostly failed. 

He prostituted himself in every imaginable way to find approval, affirmation, and adulation, becoming just the kind of hollow man he had decried in his Kraft Theatre dramas years ago. What is worse is that he knew it but the compulsion was too strong. He was an unhappy man. An example of human bondage.

Even those projects that were completed and credited (and paid) to him succeeded, despite, not because his contribution, e.g., Seven Days in May. His name is there but he contributed little to it.

It is another example of a poor little rich boy’s search for happiness, and the failure of that quest.  It is hard to sympathises with his emptiness, the more so, because it was all so repetitive.  He learned nothing, and forgot almost everything.  

What killed him in the end was one of the products that he advertised, cigarettes.  He smoked 60-80 a day himself.  That might almost be a Twilight Zone episode, killed by the golden goose.  

Anka Mühlstein, Balzac’s Omelette (2010).

Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages, rated 3.38 by 184 litizens. 

Genre:  Non-fiction; Species: Gourmet.  

DNA: Gallic.

Verdict: Erudite, witty, and insightful. 

Tagline:  What, where, and when you eat reveals your identify.

Across the panorama of La Comédie humaine, Balzac uses food to evoke character, to establish atmosphere, to reveal social class, to suggest conventions, and more.  He is credited in these pages with being the first author to bring food and eating into fiction.  

The timing was right for this excavator of humanity to do so.  Prior to the French Revolution there were no restaurants (in our sense of the word). Dining was done at home, but the Revolution rendered unemployed ranks of chefs, pastry cooks, soup specialists, providores, butchers, gardeners, and the like who had ladened the tables of aristocracy, nobility, and royalty. From these ranks a couple of enterprising souls opened an eatery.  Prior to that coffee houses, which occasionally offered bread or biscuits, table d’hôte, inns, or street vendors were the only meals available to someone away from home.* 

The talkfest that the aftermath of the Revolution unleashed in Paris brought thousands of men to the capital, and they had to eat. There was the demand to be supplied by all those unemployed caterers. 

The word ‘restaurant’ comes from restore, and originally the nascent restaurants offered restoratives, that is, light meals to tide one over until the evening meal. But unlike the establishments mentioned above in a restaurant, one could eat at a time of choice and select what to order and only pay for what was consumed (not a fixed price), while sitting down inside. It was a culinary revolution that quickly developed.  

Balzac often describes meals but he seldom includes the menu, but rather concentrates on the manners and mores, the spectacle, the tableware, the candles, the ostentation or humility, the occasions, the aftermath, the subtexts, the verbal sparring, that is, he treats the meal as a mis-en-scene.  He himself had a vexed relation with food (like everything else), while in the throes of composition to generate income to defray creditors and buy food and wine, and, oh, pay some of the arrears in rent, he did but drink coffee.  He said it was fifty (50) cups a day, and ate very little, or nothing.  

Then when the cheque came in he would bust loose with a gigantic feast, inviting all and sundry, and a barrel of the best Bordeaux to mark his achievement. The result of this manner of living was the corpulent character we know from cartoons, though he despised his own fat he made no systemic effort to reduce his weight except for that coffee. There is a strain of self-hatred in him that shows in his novels.   

 No sooner would he recover from such an excess than the knock of the bailiff would drive him into another composition.  

*A table d’hôte at the time referred to to a boarding house meal, where a stranger might enter, and if a place was free, take a meal plonked down.  In such a case this stranger ate what was put on the table. Paid for it whether he ate it all or not and left.  The term today means a menu fixé for a fixed price. In an inn one ate at a fixed time, for a fixed price, and took what was offered. No choice. Inevitably stew of some kind.  

P.S. Street food — the crèpe — was more varied and available at all hours, but of course there was nowhere to sit, and one was exposed to the elements.  

Deborah Logan, The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau’s “Somewhat Remarkable” Life (2002)

Good Reads Meta-data is 332 pages rated 0 by 0 litizens.

Genre: Biography

DNA: PhD

Verdict: Indeed, remarkable.

Tagline: Too much is not enough.  

First to the woman, then to the hour.  Martineau (1802-1876) was an influential writer in the Victorian Era.  In that age of reform, she was a REFORMER with the pen. The causes she took up often fell hardest on women, but not all of them.  She was a social analyst, social critic, and social advocate of a high order.  Later in life her admiring readers included Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria, John Stuart Mill, and others of their like.  

Her Unitarian father owned a factory in Norwich and he encouraged his daughters as well as his sons to get educated.  When his factory later fell on hard times, to make money Martineau made and sold needlework, something she continued to do throughout life, donating the proceeds when she could to the causes, and also took up the pen. Her first foray was Illustrations in Political Economy, where she illustrated economic concepts with stories, combing fiction and non-fiction.  Efforts to secure publication of the first of these by correspondence failed, and she did not even think of using a masculine pseudonym, but rather she did what a man would do.  She went to London to argue her case with publishers face to face. It was difficult but it worked.  She found a publisher desperate enough to take a punt on an unknown writer, an unconventional mixed genre, a provincial, and a woman on a new subject.

The first exemplar was published, and….it sold every well. It was reprinted and distributed further.  That led to eleven more.  The result was more cash money than the family had ever seen, and set her on the a road she never left.  It also gave her a notoriety that was mixed, for publishing was men’s business, and the reviewers let fly with a barrage of ad hominem (or is that ad feminem) attacks that would please an internet troll today. These continued the rest of her life: personal, malicious, threatening, incoherent, ranting, and stupid fulminations.

She continued apace with other social questions, and when money and time allowed she travelled to the United States in the same year that Tocqueville did, 1835.  While he carried letters of introduction from the French government, he went as an ingenue looking for a key to the kingdom of democracy, she went as a social critic to observe the life of both women in this New Jerusalem and of slaves.  She found that women’s world was no different in the US than in the UK.  She also added abolitionist stripes to her colours.  (In the effort to emphasise Martineau, our author rather undersells Tocqueville. See his prophetic chapter The Three Races.)

While she promoted female emancipation, she did not advocate the franchise for women.  She thought that education and autonomy came first, then the vote.  If the vote came prior to social, intellectual, and moral emancipation, it would be manipulated by men who dominated women.  The arguments are clear and logical, but, well, impractical.  It is a variation on that recurrent nostrum: first utopia, then national health.  

She spend years battling the Contagious Disease Act which permitted the seizure of women on the grounds of public health (venereal disease) and imprisoning them.  That the government owned the bodies of women whereas it would never even consider a like possession of men, drove her pen into open warfare.  Not only was the Act wrong in itself, it was misused and abused to subjugate women. The cannibals had at her but she did not flinch.  Yes, there are contemporary resonances here, too.  (Strangely neither Martineau nor our author consider military conscription as a relevant comparison to this point.)  

If all this were not remarkable enough, she did it while enduring a debilitating handicap.  She became deaf at an early age, and thereafter brandished an ear trumpet, and later a walking stick, and suffered extended periods confined to a bed. Yet she soldiered on. (I wondered if this loss of hearing was related to her penchant for writing to communicate?  And how that related to learning French? But no answers did I find.)

This is a book about her life but it is not a chronological biography and rather assumes the reader knows the facts of her life – which I found on Wikipedia.  What it offers is a thoroughgoing analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of Martineau’s intellectual achievements and heritage piled high and deep enough for a PhD.  That means it is hard sledding to a casual reader like this correspondent.  I chose it because I knew her name as a forerunner of Sociology, and while that is here, it is not emphasised.  Did she compile data and present it, as Florence Nightingale did, or not remains unknown to this reader.  Or did she rely on polemic? She translated some of Auguste Comte’s doorstop books but how and why she learned enough French to do this, and whether it was cause or effect of her social interests remains befogged to me.  

The book is divided into 50-page chapters that wearied me, weak reed that I am, and the level of argument at times is as mystical as a priest reading entrails.  Finally, nothing is good enough for Martineau.  Previous writers who have praised her are arraigned for failing to praise her in the right way, for failing to praise her enough, for failing to praise her on time, and so on.  The compound of these features and their kin is overkill.   

She would certainly was a good subject for a ‘Great Lives’ program on BBC4 rather that some of the stand-up comedians that are so common on that once very informative program. That is where I was reminded of her, and that led me to getting this book. 

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A Meeting in Oea, or Concerning Plato (1970) by Aleksander Krawczuk 

Good Reads meta-data is 243 pages rated 3.38 by 21 litizens

Genre: fiction.

DNA: Ancient Greek.  

Tagline: It’s a long (winded) way to Alexandria.

Verdict: All trip, no arrival 

It is 150 A.D. when a near-sighted, round-shouldered, shuffling scholar leaves Carthage (Tunis) to go to the distant and fabled library at Alexandria, where he hopes to complete a biography of the divine Plato.  The trip does not go smoothly and Scholar becomes stuck in Oea (near Tripoli).  Travelling by the inland road he misses the shores of Tripoli.  

In his trials and tribulations Scholar finds solace in passages from Plato’s works.  He also describes some of Plato’s life, like the name of his mother, father, and sister, as well the brothers.  We learn the back stories of some of the characters whom he chose to name in his dialogues like Cephalus and Polemarchus.  Plato never married and sired no children it seems, though why is neither alleged nor suggested.   Indeed, there as much basic biography in this book as in Robin Waterfield’s book on Plato subtitled ‘A Life.’

I needed a map and Wikipedia to follow his path.  

Originally published in Poland in 1970 it might well have seemed to be social criticism then and there, though that is not immediately apparent to this reader.  

It is largely expository with little dialogue and no action to speak of.  The result is slow moving, but it does move, and at times is moving.  Those with short-attention spans need not bother.  

The resident Mechanical Turk at Amazon struck again because I had earlier searched for a biography of Plato, as in the Waterfield reference above. 

The author Polish was professor of Philosophy with other like titles.

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