Reviews and News:
Music was a significant part of life for medieval Scots, and no songs were more important than those found in Thomas Wode’s Scottish Metrical Psalter: “These books preserve one of the most important contributions ever made to Scottish music. As well as his commissioning of new psalm settings in simplified and more homophonic styles suitable for the impending Calvinist age, Wode also included a lot of other music from the time, and crucially from before the great conflagration, and from Scots, English and continental composers. Therefore we are given a glimpse into the musical life of this country at one of its most dangerous hours.”
In an essay on the Bloomsbury Group, Elizabeth Hardwick remarked that “Certain peripheral names vex the spirits.” Hardwick was not exactly a peripheral figure in 20th-century American letters, but her prose could both vex and charm.
“Schubert’s penwork was so clean and clear that a musician would be able to play from it directly, without the need for a fair copy, much less a printed version,” and 100 other historical tidbits from Christie’s.
Why does the Southern Poverty Law Center have offshore accounts in the Caymans? “‘I’ve never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts,’ said Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of Pacific Human Capital, a California-based nonprofit consulting firm. ‘My impression based on prior interactions is that they have a small, modestly paid staff, and were regarded by most in the industry as frugal and reliable. I am stunned to learn of transfers of millions to offshore bank accounts.’”
Sargent’s women: “Elsie Palmer…sat for Sargent when she was 17. It was a difficult commission and she was 18 by the time it was finished. Although Sargent’s early sketches show her as innocent, childlike and charming, Lucey tells us that the finished portrait ‘dispenses with charm.’ In the final painting, Elsie looks like a grim little ghost, with her blunt bangs, pop eyes and pale little face. She’s clad in a pleated linen dress that resembles a shroud.”
Kids: Memorize a poem!
Essay of the Day:
The poet and boxer Arthur Cravan and avant-garde writer Mina Loy seemed happily married. Then Cravan disappeared somewhere between Mexico and Argentina:
“In January 1918 Loy arrived in Mexico City, and the couple got married at the mayor’s office. Their newlywed existence was devoid of luxury: they occupied an insalubrious ground-floor tenement room with a charcoal stove, water drawn from a well in the courtyard and ‘old sorceresses’ squatting outside. Still, they were blissfully happy. ‘It never made any difference what we were doing,’ wrote Loy. ‘Somehow we had tapped the source of enchantment, and it suffused the world.’ Yet one cannot live on enchantment alone, and by the summer they were virtually indigent. For a while Cravan had taught boxing at a gym, but a recent bout of illness left him unable either to teach or compete. And a legacy from Loy’s late father all but ran out. When they didn’t even have enough to eat, Cravan suggested joint suicide as a preferable alternative to starving to death. Loy wouldn’t hear of it. She was weak and malnourished, but their life together was precious to her.
“Once she realized a baby was on the way, they decided to leave Mexico for Buenos Aires, where food and drink were said to be cheap. They could then make their way to Europe, in particular Florence to see Loy’s other children, from whom she’d been separated for two years. Since Cravan lacked proper papers, a plan was hatched: Loy would board a passenger ship at the small seaport town of Salina Cruz, while he sailed separately with some friends and reconvened with her in Argentina. Loy, by then several months pregnant, duly departed on a Japanese hospital ship, sometime after which Cravan—at least according to the patchy testimony that exists—went out alone in a small fishing boat he had fixed up, possibly just to test it. There is no unequivocal evidence he was ever seen again.
“He certainly may have drowned. The month he sailed, October, is known locally as the época mala, the dangerous time, due to strong north winds. Or perhaps he ran afoul of the pirates then prevalent along that coastline or even was murdered by someone he knew. The FBI in New York and the U.S. Secret Service in Mexico were sufficiently concerned about the company Cravan kept (he had, for instance, befriended Leon Trotsky aboard a steamship in 1917) to place him under surveillance. The absence of a body, or of any physical traces at all, leaves open all possibilities, including—most painfully for Loy, who hadn’t doubted his love—that he chose to begin a new life, unencumbered by a wife and child. Had his proposal of a suicide pact betrayed a yearning to escape from his marriage and from commitments of an unfamiliar magnitude? After all, he had long made a habit of slipping continually between different identities and nations—different selves—as whim dictated. ‘I have twenty countries in my memory,” he once wrote, “and I drag the colors of a hundred cities in my soul.’
“Of Cravan’s resurrection in a new guise, competing legends arose. Was he in fact the elusive novelist B. Traven, who is known to have lived in Mexico but whose true identity has never been established? Mike Richardson and Rick Geary’s 2005 graphic novel, Cravan: Mystery Man of the Twentieth Century, makes such a case. The Death Ship, Traven’s breakout novel about a stateless merchant seaman, explores themes—exile, identity, transience—that resonate with Cravan’s life. Nevertheless, the more pleasingly novelistic idea is that within a couple of years of going missing, the boxer-poet had reinvented himself as a prolific counterfeiter of Oscar Wilde manuscripts. In the early 1920s, a Parisian con artist who went by various aliases, including Dorian Hope, sold forged papers he claimed were of legitimate provenance—among them the alleged originals of Salomé and The Importance of Being Earnest—to rare book dealers in London and Dublin. The documents were clever enough to be verified by the Wilde scholar and bibliographer Christopher S. Millard, and some landed stateside. One of the first people to raise the alarm was a New York book dealer who, in 1921, saw on the Salomé manuscript pages a Strathmore brand watermark, designating a line of paper only produced long after Wilde’s death. Various buyers compared notes, and Millard soon realized he’d been fooled. By then, a significant number of forgeries were in circulation. Hope, however, was nowhere to be found.”
Photo: Logan Pass on the Continental Divide
Poem: David Ferry, “Marriage” (Hat tip: A. M. Juster)
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