text:
When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair

By Jonathan Goldman
February 6, 2020

Dorothy Parker’s reputation as one of the premier wits of the 20th century rests firmly on the brilliance of her writing, but the image of her as a plucky, fast-talking, independent woman of her times owes more than a little to her seat at the legendary Algonquin Round Table. Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the famed New York group and how Parker’s determination to speak her mind — even when it angered men in positions of power — gave her pride of place within it.

Dorothy Parker lost her job as Vanity Fair theater critic on January 11, 1920, in the tea room of the Plaza Hotel. Parker must have known there was trouble brewing as she sat down across from editor Frank Crowninshield. She had been in hot water for months. Her latest column had been a particularly biting one. Reviewing The Son-Daughter, Parker contended that David Belasco’s new play followed his old one, East Is West, “almost exactly”, which Belasco made known he considered grounds for a libel suit.1 A couple paragraphs later, writing about the new Somerset Maugham play Caesar’s Wife, Parker zinged actress Billie Burke for performing “as if she were giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay”.2 The comparison to a risqué vaudevillian enraged Florenz Ziegfeld, one of Vanity Fair’s most reliable advertisers, who happened to be Burke’s producer — and husband. Ziegfeld and Belasco both took their umbrage to publisher Condé Nast. It is in dispute which complaint held more weight, but either way, Nast passed the buck to Crowninshield, who met Parker at the Plaza and fired her from the job she had held for two years. Parker promptly ordered the most expensive dessert on the menu and left.
In the days that followed, Parker’s cronies who hung out in the Rose Room of the Algonquin Hotel made the firing and its fallout at Vanity Fair into a media scandal. Parker herself would never again hold a desk job or draw a regular salary, finding success instead as a freelance critic, author of brilliant and acclaimed verse, short fiction, essays, plays, and film scripts. The incident changed her career and stature, and its response helped forge the legend of what would eventually be called the Algonquin Round Table.
Parker may have learned from her parents the tendency to not quite accept the rules. She was born Dorothy Rothschild (a surname whose mention always caused her to protest any relation to the Rothschild lineage) in 1893, a child of once-forbidden love between Eliza Annie Marston, daughter of British burghers, and Jacob Henry Rothschild, child of Jewish immigrants, who married over the opposition of Marston’s parents. Dorothy grew up in New York City, in her family’s 214 West 72nd Street townhouse. It was a newly fashionable neighborhood; Broadway, a few steps away, was then called “the Boulevard” along this stretch, in homage to the Parisian boulevards designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann that it very slightly resembled. Dorothy’s was not an idyllic childhood. Her mother died when she was five. When she was eighteen, the Titanic sank, taking with it a favored uncle, Martin Rothschild; Parker may have accompanied her distraught father to the docks to greet the shipwreck’s survivors and learn that her uncle was not among them. Henry Rothschild, devastated, fell ill and died less than a year later.
Needing income beyond her father’s legacy, Parker found a job playing piano at one of many dance schools, which were faddish in the mid-1910s. But she wanted to earn money by writing. She went about it the old, hard way, sending in cold submissions of poetry until her number was called. In 1914 Vanity Fair accepted her poem “Any Porch”, which satirized chitchat of society women in meticulously metered and rhymed stanzas such as:
I don’t want the vote for myself,But women with property, dear ––I think the poor girl’s on the shelf,She’s talking about her “career.”3
The piece earned her $12, comparable to about $300 today. Parker used the poem as justification to force her way into Vanity Fair’s offices at 19–25 West 44th Street and ask for a steady job. The editor, Crowninshield, was sufficiently impressed. In 1915 he hired her for Vogue, another magazine owned by Nast, to do editorial work and write captions for illustrations of women’s garments. Soon her personal life also took a dramatic turn, and then another, when she met Edwin Parker II in 1916, married him in 1917, and a week later watched in surprise and dismay while “Eddie” enlisted in the US Army and went off to World War I.
During her two years at Vogue, Parker worked under Edna Woolman Chase, a legend. Chase, following a course normally reserved for men, had worked her way up from the mailroom to the top of the editorial ladder, becoming the managing editor in 1911 and editor-in-chief in 1914; she would stay in that position until 1952. Chase’s dedication was matched by her strictness. She insisted on formal workplace demeanor, and she and her young employee, demure in appearance but iconoclastic in attitude, grated on one another. Though thrilled when she landed the job, Parker could only follow the leader for so long, and was soon plaguing Chase with unprintable captions, meant to challenge the Vogue sensibility. One nightgown, she suggested, could be worn as a sexual enticement: “When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress . . .” Such insinuation was a no-no for Vogue readers of 1916. The caption made it through several editorial stages before its twist on the “girl with the curl” nursery rhyme was recognized.
Crowninshield relieved Chase of her problem employee in 1918, bringing Parker over to the editorial staff at Vanity Fair and offering her the theater critic job that would change her career. It was a wonderful time to have a front-row seat to New York’s theater scene. Over eighty venues were active in the Broadway district, opening over 150 shows a year; a reviewer could write about new shows every week. Parker’s monthly columns demonstrated early her propensity for dropping, and sometimes deflating, the big names — regardless of whether they belonged to someone on stage. In April 1918, while touting Wodehouse’s musical Oh, Lady! Lady!!, she digressed to say that “not even the presence in the first-night audience of Mr. William Randolph Hearst . . . could spoil my evening”.
Parker loved being a theater critic, but she loved less and less Nast and Crowninshield’s attitudes toward the staff. In this, as in many things, she was supported (and egged on) by her two new colleagues at Vanity Fair, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood. Benchley was hired as managing editor in the winter of 1919 and became Parker’s office mate in May. His straitlaced demeanor and traditional domestic life — wife, children, and house in the suburbs — belied an anarchic sense of humor that made him one of the US’s leading humorists for decades. Soon after Benchley’s arrival, Sherwood, recently returned from the war, came aboard as writer. Both Sherwood and Benchley had trained, so to speak, at Harvard, writing satire for the Harvard Lampoon; both, like Parker, would flourish as authors after Vanity Fair. It is clear that Crowninshield had a brilliant eye for literary talent.
In 1919, however, the three writers soured on the management and particularly on the ownership of the magazine they worked for. They disdained Nast’s combination of crass libertinism and schoolmarmish insistence on office conformity, and they resented their uncompetitive salaries. They were “treated like serfs”, said Sherwood, and “paid that way, too”.4 They acted out: decorating Nast’s office with streamers for a mock bon-voyage party, and at one point, when Crowninshield was on a trip and left them minding the store, publishing a satirical fashion article by Sherwood in which he predicted that men’s attire would soon include waistcoats trimmed with jewels.
Caesar’s Wife had its opening night in November 1919 and ran until the following February at the Liberty Theater at 236 West 42nd Street (whose facade is still there, now part of Ripley’s Museum, believe it or not). The play depicts the marriage between an English diplomat and a woman many years his junior. Parker’s review is not completely unkind until its conclusion: “Miss Burke, in her role of the young wife, looks charmingly youthful. She is at her best in her more serious moments; in her desire to convey the youthfulness of the character she plays her lighter scenes as if giving an impersonation of Eva Tanguay”.5 This was in fact a toned-down revision; in her first draft, Parker had written that Burke “threw herself around the stage as if giving an impersonation of exotic dancer Eva Tanguay”. After Crowninshield objected, Parker offered the slightly less inflammatory phrase.
The published version was insulting enough. Caesar’s Wife, by the acclaimed Maugham, was meant to burnish the credentials of Burke, returning to the stage after three years in cinema, and her husband Ziegfeld, best known for his annual variety shows. Parker’s reference to Tanguay undermined these aspirations. Eva Tanguay’s name was a byword for indecorum, eroticism, and unbridled physicality. She was, by all accounts, not particularly skilled as a singer, dancer, or actress, yet she became an international star, famous partly for her salary, which eventually climbed to an astonishing $2,500 per week when she headlined at the Metropolitan Theater in Brooklyn in 1921. As Printer’s Ink had hailed her ten years earlier: “She can neither sing, nor dance, nor recite . . . . Just the same, Eva commands the money. The audience wants her”.6 Tanguay was also known for transgressions against traditional female comportment on stage and off, and for acting as her own business manager, hiring male business agents but insisting on controlling her own career.
Parker’s allusion to Tanguay conjured up associations that show her remark to be more than a dig at an imperfect performance. It also subtly invoked the dynamics of the Burke-Ziegfeld marriage and served as a swipe at patriarchal control. When Parker refers to the “young wife”, and twice reiterates the “youthful” qualities of the role, she loops in the public history of Ziegfeld’s relationships with younger women, and of those women getting replaced by even younger women. Burke, for example, seventeen years Ziegfeld’s junior, had married him in 1914 following his divorce from Lillian Held and endured his unrepentant philandering ever since. Parker’s review implies that Burke is overacting because she is too old for the part of the “young wife” — and that her status as Ziegfeld’s “young wife” was expiring as well. Parker had thought Burke both inept and (her opinion unsympathetic to the plight of women actors in an inegalitarian theater industry) miscast, and had turned the critique personal. Less overtly, the reference to Tanguay, a woman who resisted having her career guided by men, sets in relief the professional arrangement between Burke and Ziegfeld.
Nine years earlier, Ziegfeld had employed Tanguay in his Follies of 1911 and knew well what Tanguay represented: excess, vulgarity, spectacle — all the associations he was trying to avoid. He had already complained about Parker’s writing to his friend Nast, but this time he was either more persuasive or had the weight of Belasco’s threats to add to his own. Nast was not in a position to lose a prominent source of ad revenue and weather Belasco’s libel suit, so he called Crowninshield, his trusted chief editor at Vanity Fair since 1912.
Crowninshield rose to the occasion. The Plaza Hotel was, in 1920, already a symbol of luxury, excess, and pretension. (It has since been owned by, among others, Conrad Hilton and Donald Trump.) In this setting, Crowninshield, after commanding the staff to bring a huge bouquet of roses for the table, explained to Parker that her predecessor, P. G. Wodehouse, wished to resume the job of theater critic. He complimented Parker’s writing and invited her to freelance for the magazine. She left.
Returning to her West 71st Street apartment, Parker may have been greeted by her husband. Eddie had returned to New York the previous summer, struggling with drug use as did many GIs returning from the Great War. For commiseration, Parker telephoned her friend and confederate Benchley, who immediately caught a seven p.m. train to Manhattan from his home in Crestwood, arrived at the Parker apartment, and offered support. The next morning he walked into Crowninshield’s office and, in protest against Parker’s dismissal, tendered his letter of resignation. That afternoon, Parker and Benchley went to the Algonquin to tell their stories, staying for hours of gossip and rounds of drinks. After repeated recountings, the Round Table wits, who had long heard the complaints about Nast and Crowninshield, sprang into action. Alexander Woollcott persuaded his editors at the New York Times that the paper should cover the story. His article, “Vanity Fair Editors Out: Robert Benchley Follows Mrs. Parker–Criticisms Under Fire”, appeared the next day — good publicity for the trio, tantamount to a free “for hire” listing.7 A few days later, another writer from the table, Frank Adams, publicly shamed Vanity Fair: he described the kerfuffle in his column “The Conning Tower” running in the New-York Tribune. The incident helped make the Algonquin Round Table a thing.
This informal group of colleagues, friends, adversaries and contestants had started taking shape over the previous summer, starting at a roast for theater columnist and Broadway personality Woollcott upon his return to New York from military duty. The group met at 59 West 44th Street, in the dining room of a hotel that had opened in 1902 under the name The Puritan. It was Frank Case, who managed the establishment for over two decades and then bought it in 1927, who, perhaps hoping to entice a less puritan clientele, rechristened it The Algonquin, giving it the name used for a group of indigenous tribes. One can assume that Case did not intend the irony of using a name for people who had been forcibly exiled from New York City three centuries earlier.
From 1920 on, the Algonquin became a regular meeting place for a group eventually to include a host of literary and cultural figures, including New Yorker founder Harold Ross, fiction writer Edna Ferber, sportswriter Heywood Broun, and Harpo Marx. It was Case, again, who made the decision to arrange a large round table for this garrulous group, set right in the middle of the Algonquin’s “Rose Room” where they could be on display for other customers, especially the tourists. “The Gonk”, as its regulars took to calling it, was where Parker was to encounter Will Rogers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre, Ernest Hemingway, and the artist Neysa McMein, who would become her close friend.
But she had other business to attend to first. On January 13 — the morning Woollcott’s article appeared — Benchley, Parker and Sherwood arrived at the Vanity Fair offices, apparently out of contractual obligation. Freed of any need for decorum, they pinned chevrons, insignias of military discharge, on themselves, and created a mock contribution box labeled “for Billie Burke”. Parker kept up these embittered jokes even after January 25th, when she cleaned out her Vanity Fair desk for good. That September, she sent Benchley a series of postcards signed “Flo and Billie”, and “Conde and Clarisse” (Nast’s wife, by this point estranged).8
In February, she and Benchley rented an office together in the Metropolitan Opera House Studios at 39th Street and Broadway, a quick trip on the IRT or 9th Avenue elevated train from Parker’s home. The space was so tiny, she later quipped, that “an inch smaller and it would have been adultery”.9 Parker’s first gig of her new life was writing intertitles for Remodeling Her Husband, a film Lillian Gish was directing, produced by D. W. Griffiths. The work dissatisfied her, and she soon resumed work as theater critic, this time for Ainslee’s, whose circulation was larger than that of Vanity Fair; it was a position allowing Parker to schedule her own work hours and write for other publications. She proceeded to have a productive winter, publishing in Ladies Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post. Her finances survived, and that spring she had enough to lend Benchley $200. She surely appreciated being liberated from daily editorial responsibilities, and especially being free of Nast. Indeed, she would never again work a nine-to-five job, maintaining as much control as possible over how to pursue her profession and calling as writer.
Ziegfeld and his women stayed in her sights. In her June 1920 column for Ainslee’s, Parker wrote warmly of Ziegfeld’s Frolics — variety shows distinct from the Follies. She complimented the comedic performances of W. C. Fields, Mary Hay, and Fanny Brice, but skewered the singing of Lillian Lorraine — the longtime Ziegfeld paramour who had been instrumental to Ziegfeld’s divorce from Held. Commenting sardonically on the show’s female chorus, she wrote: “Where the Ziegfeld girls come from will always be one of the world’s great mysteries”.10 Her next column reviewed the Follies, giving the thumbs down to even the music of Irving Berlin and Eddie Cantor while pointing out that “the real point of the production, as it is of every Follies, is the girls”.11
When Parker likened Billie Burke to Eva Tanguay, she was gesturing past the actor to the patriarchal structures, personal and professional, represented by Ziegfeld and Nast. She surely knew that she was risking her position, and just as surely decided that to defer to those structures would be worse than the consequences of defying them.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 6, 2020

author: Jonathan Goldman


text:
Comic Gold
The Easterner Goes West in Three Early American Comics
By Alex Andriesse
March 12, 2020

The California Gold Rush transformed the landscape and population of the United States. It also introduced a new figure into American life and the American imagination — the effete Eastern urbanite who travels to the Wild West in quest of his fortune. Alex Andriesse examines how this figure fares in three mid-nineteenth-century comic books.

There is something funny about the California Gold Rush. The sequence of events, real though they are, have all the makings of a tall tale — or a grim joke.
On January 24, 1848, James Marshall, who was overseeing the construction of a sawmill on the American River in Coloma, California, accidentally discovered gold. News spread fast. By the end of 1849, an estimated 80,000 people — predominantly men, about half of whom hailed from the urbanized northeastern United States1 — had traveled to the West Coast in one of three ways: overland, through Indian Territory; by ship, sailing around Cape Horn; or by steamer to Panama, where they crossed the Isthmus and caught a second steamer to San Francisco.
According to the tall-tale version of events, the forty-niners arrived and, as long as they worked hard, endured the wilderness, and survived the rough-and-tumble culture of New California, they were in a pretty good position to strike it rich. According to the grim-joke angle, these same forty-niners arrived with dreams of “picking up gold by the bushel”2 only to find that mining work was arduous, Californian inflation outrageous, and the likelihood of making money almost nil.3
The truth seems to be somewhere in between these two extremes. Approximately half of the forty-niners turned a profit either as miners or merchants — although these profits seldom approached the life-changing jackpots they’d imagined back home. For every Levi Strauss (whose denim empire was founded in San Francisco in 1853), there were countless others whose fortunes remained unaltered or who were ruined by the costly voyage and the frequently bloodthirsty hunt for gold. This is not even to mention the damage done to African American, Chinese, and Mexican forty-niners by the violent racism rampant among disappointed whites. “Any mysterious outrage was attributed to ‘Mexicans’”, Josiah Royce wrote in his 1886 history of California; “any American wretch who chanced to find it useful could in moments of excitement divert suspicion from himself, by mentioning the Mexicans in general, or any particular Mexicans, as the authors of his crimes.”4
This is only one of many aspects of the Gold Rush that continue to cast a shadow on American culture. Whatever the consequences for individual forty-niners — one in twelve of whom were killed by disease, accident, or human violence — the discovery of gold in Coloma produced tremendous changes in the nation.5 It relocated hundreds of thousands of settlers, transformed the village of Yerba Buena into the city of San Francisco, polluted western waters, destroyed the soil, and led to the dispossession and genocide of more than ten thousand Native Californians.
The Gold Rush also introduced new figures into the American imagination. The Chinese worker with his wide palm-fiber field hat, the frontiersman with his sugar loaf or panama, the Mexican with his sombrero, and (most out of place of all) the effete urban Easterner struck with gold fever who’s gone west on a wing and a prayer. This Easterner was not solely a figure of the imagination, either. While no small number of forty-niners were desperate or destitute, many others were thoroughly middle-class city-dwellers who, as Brian Roberts writes, “joined the rush for a variety of reasons: for gold, to be sure, but also to escape . . . the stultifying walls of moral codes and lawyers’ offices”.6 These men did not conform to their contemporaries’ idea of who belonged in California any better than they conform to the popular image of the Wild West today. The Independent Gold Hunter on His Way to California, printed by Currier & Ives, is emblematic of the satirical view many Easterners took of their “Argonaut” brethren. Laden with pots and pans, a string of sausages and a shovel, the would-be prospector is shown in his town clothes, striding along, still 1700 miles from his destination — the very picture of foolhardiness.
Narratives quickly attached themselves to this laughable figure, emphasizing both the real and the imagined dangers that could be encountered on a journey to the West. For those going overland, these included immense unmapped distances, hostile Native Americans (whose territory was being violated), starvation, dehydration, and disease. For those going by way of Panama, there were the added possibilities of being shipwrecked, eaten by an alligator, or stranded in a foreign land. For those going around Cape Horn, there were all the usual perils of a long ocean journey conducted entirely by wind and sail. Over all these narratives hung the question why? Why leave home and hearth? Why forsake civilization? Why risk life and limb for an improbable promise of wealth?
Questions like these were implicit not only in the lithographs and cartoons of these years, but also in a form recently introduced to North America: the comic book.7 In The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump (ca. 1850), Journey to the Gold Diggins (1849), and Outline History of an Expedition to California (1849), the figure of the Eastern Argonaut was set into motion and put to the test.
The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, a children’s book, is by far the least sophisticated of the bunch. Its drawings are stiff, its captions brief, and its story is demented. An unlikely-looking schoolboy called Mr. Tom Plump, who is — you guessed it — plump, runs away from his Eastern home and sets sail for California. Once there, Mr. Plump “gets poor” (meaning he loses weight) and finds some gold, which disappears when his mule is frightened by a bear. On arriving back home, he in turn frightens his parents, who don’t recognize him now that he’s thin. Soon enough, however, “good living makes him fat again” and, having married a woman who can dance the polka, Mr. Tom Plump drowns in a river after falling through a bridge. This is a shaggy dog story if ever there was one. Besides getting seasick and losing his gold, Mr. Tom Plump’s adventures don’t have much to do with the adventures experienced by actual forty-niners.
Journey to the Gold Diggins, illustrated and probably written by J. A. and D. F. Read, is a masterpiece by comparison. Its seascapes and grotesque human figures look forward to the elaborate comics art of Tony Millionaire, and its story — about a skeletal “urban dandy” called Jeremiah Saddlebags — has a dreamlike coherence.
Saddlebags, learning that his aunt has died and left him five hundred dollars, decides to invest the money in a trip to California. The prospect of prospecting excites him. In fact, it excites him so much he does a jig, alarming the neighbors, who’ve never known him to be so noisy before. Mortified at being caught while jigging, Saddlebags “considers he has made a fool of himself” (a sign of self-conscious “Eastern” oversensitivity that, we are supposed to understand, doesn’t bode well for his chances in the insensitive, hyper-masculine West).
The subsequent action of Journey to the Gold Diggins is so relentless, it really demands to be recounted in a single breath. So, here goes: Saying goodbye to his fiancée, Saddlebags boards a ship to Panama, confronts an alligator, avoids being scalped (thanks to a well-placed wig), is captured by pirates, made to join their number, is captured by the military, saved from being hanged by an old friend, travels to “the diggins”, squabbles with fellow miners, finds a huge lump of gold, is divested of it, gambles for a smaller lump, sets off overland back east, eats bones with bears, is captured by Native Americans, made to join their number, escapes, returns to his hometown, is pursued by a racist mob who mistake him for a Native American, learns his gold is worthless, and entertains his fiancée by “recounting his adventures”.
Like The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, Journey to the Gold Diggins is about a man who has no business going west and, economically speaking, gains nothing by doing so. Yet Saddlebags at least comes out of it with a tale to tell — a tale that perhaps makes him more satisfied with his settled life back East. By extension, Journey to the Gold Diggins seems designed to regale its Eastern readers with a sensational story that reassures them about their decision to stay home, looking down their noses at dupes like Saddlebags who squander their lives in a greedy search for gold.
Greed is explicitly the theme of Outline History of an Expedition to California (1849), which is less focused on a single character than either Journey to the Gold Diggins or Mr. Tom Plump. Instead, it offers a sort of panoramic view of the Gold Rush, following parties bound for California by all three major routes. At the center of this narrative swirl is, naturally, an Easterner, Jonathan Swapwell of Swapville (a not-so-subtle indication he is a New England merchant), who travels from his hometown to New York City and from New York City to California, going by all three routes at once! This mind-bending approach allows the author (the decidedly anonymous XOX) to depict multiple perilous journeys simultaneously. While the overland party trudges across the muddy Great Plains, the “Cape Horners” are shipwrecked and the “Panamains” wait perpetually for the San Francisco steamer to come.
Somehow, one of the Jonathan Swapwells arrives at the California mines, where he and his partner, Pat, become successful merchants, swapping and dealing with the miners. As it turns out, they will be the only two figures in the book who escape the place unscathed. Jonathan, overhearing some miners planning to rob him, decamps at night with just enough gold to make a decent life for himself back in Swapville. (Pat, suffering the fate of minor characters since time immemorial, travels with him as far as the ship before vanishing.) But what might be merely dreary middle-class moralism is livened up by a frame story involving Death and the Devil, who start off this History by lacing a hole in California with golden “bait” and end it by filling up the “cavity made by the extraction of gold, with the bones of those who perished in its pursuit”.
None of these early comics would have existed had the Gold Rush not occurred, but they were not, of course, pure products of events. Their creators were inspired by newspaper stories, lithographs, and word-of-mouth legends — as well as by the world’s first comic strip, Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (Geneva, 1837), translated into English as The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck and illegally published in America as early as 1842. This Swiss volume follows the melancholy yet feverish exertions of its title character in pursuit of his “lady love”, including several suicide attempts, a couple of prison breaks, and one escape from premature burial.
Töpffer’s ridiculous lovesick European served as a model for American artists depicting ridiculous gold-sick Easterners. The author of The Adventures of Mr. Tom Plump, for example, took something from Töpffer’s obsession with human forms that alternate between fat and thin, while the authors of Journey to the Gold Diggins imitated not only Oldbuck’s oblong format but also specific postures and scenes.
The urban Easterner out of his element in the West proved to be an abiding figure in the American imagination.8 Even after the Gold Rush, the young man who decides to light out for the territories would appear time and again. In John Williams’ novel Butcher’s Crossing (1960), he is Will Andrews, a preacher’s son from Boston who wants to commune with the natural world but, going on a buffalo hunt in 1870s Colorado, finds himself merely participating in mindless slaughter. In Jim Jarmusch’s movie Dead Man (1995), he is William Blake, an accountant from Cleveland who intends to take a job at the metal works in the Western town of Machine but ends up wounded and wanted, transformed into an outlaw in the wilderness.
Such characters personify, just as surely as Jeremiah Saddlebags, the anxieties that surrounded the voluntary mass migration to the West. The upheaval that followed the discovery of gold in California in 1848 made clear how willing even “civilized” Easterners were to leave their homes at the drop of a hat. The greedy, the desperate, the aimless, the ambitious, the curious, the romantic — all found reasons to go. Civilization, with its wage work and promise of relative security, was no match for their dreams of a better, freer life out in the great unknown. This part of the Gold Rush story, at least, still holds us in its sway.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Alex Andriesse

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Propagating Propaganda
Franklin Barrett’s Red, White, and Blue Liberty Bond Carp
By Laurel Waycott
March 17, 2021

Toward the end of World War I, as the US peddled hard its Liberty Bonds for the war effort, goldfish dealer Franklin Barrett bred a stars-and-stripes-colored carp: a living, swimming embodiment of patriotism. Laurel Waycott uncovers the story of this “Liberty Bond Fish” and the wider use of animals in propaganda of the time.

In April 1918, subscribers to Aquatic Life opened the latest issue to find a large illustration of “The Liberty Bond Fish”, the “famous red, white, and blue carp” owned by Philadelphia goldfish breeder Franklin Barrett.1 While the illustration is regrettably in black and white, it shows a handsome specimen of carp with delicately outlined scales and variegated fins.
Barrett’s creation and its name were products of his time and place: April 1918 marked both the one-year anniversary of the US entry into World War I and the start of the third Liberty Loan drive, a massive effort to encourage US citizens to fund the government’s war expenses by purchasing bonds. But if Liberty Bonds were primarily a vehicle for financially backing the war, why create a Liberty Bond fish? Of what use was a star-spangled carp to the war effort?
Propagation and propaganda share the same root: the latter term has its origins in the name of the congregatio de propaganda fide, a committee of the Roman Catholic Church responsible for “propagating the faith” in foreign missions. Barrett made this propagation literal by enrolling living organisms into politics. The nationalistic fish was an overt attempt to take national symbolism and impose it onto the genetics of the animal. By breeding Liberty Bond carp, Barrett turned the reproductive power of fish into a technology to reproduce the notion of “America” itself.2 To understand how the red, white, and blue creature came to be, we must look at the role of propaganda in the effort to get Americans emotionally invested in World War I.
Franklin Barrett would have been familiar to the readers of Aquatic Life, a magazine catering to aquarium hobbyists and professionals. He had been a major figure in the Philadelphia aquarium industry since the first decade of the twentieth century. He started breeding goldfish in the backyard of his Philadelphia row house as a sideline to factory work, and by 1916, was selling twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of fish every year.3 Barrett was among a group of breeders in the first decades of the twentieth century who propagated “fancy” goldfish, like those with pop-eyes or fantails, from varieties developed in Japan and China.
Humans have long interfered with the reproduction of plants and animals, but breeders in the early twentieth century, emboldened by the emerging science of heredity, vastly expanded the scope of these traditional practices in an effort to “improve” a wide variety of organisms. Like horticulturist Luther Burbank, who developed numerous novel varieties of fruits, vegetables, and ornamental plants by systematically crossing existing cultivars, Barrett and his fellow goldfish breeders combined selective breeding with a eugenically-inflected zeal for developing new, better, and stronger traits.4
One of the traits that Barrett and his fellow fish breeders were particularly interested in cultivating was the color blue. While red and white were familiar colors for goldfish, blue was much more unusual. The “blue” that Barrett sought manifested as a subtle pale lavender tint underlying the flecks of color on “calico” goldfish, or as a deep, all-over navy. Barrett had spent considerable effort breeding fish whose bodies were entirely blue, claiming to have bred the only blue lion-headed goldfish in the United States.5 The interest in blue fish preceded the American entry into the war, but once the United States was engaged in the conflict, Barrett saw an opportunity to use his expertise for a patriotic, and potentially lucrative, new purpose.
It is unclear how, exactly, Barrett was able to breed the Liberty Bond Fish. It was not a goldfish, but an unspecified variety of carp — though Barrett was likely able to transfer his expertise, as goldfish and carp are both part of the Cyprinidae family. It is possible that the patriotic fish was derived from the Asagi breed of Japanese koi, which have navy-blue scales and fins patterned with cream and orangey-red blotches. If that was the case, then Barrett’s creation was not so much a new breed as a new brand — a tactic that Barrett had relied upon before.
Franklin Barrett set himself apart from his fellow Philadelphia fish breeders with his canny marketing skills. His eye-catching advertisements, often featuring the drawing of a pop-eyed goldfish staring entreatingly at the viewer, appeared in most issues of Aquatic Life and other aquarium periodicals. Unlike his peers, he gave his prize-winning fish catchy names, such as the rotund lion-headed goldfish called “Bill Taft”, in reference to the portly twenty-seventh American president, and another named “Queen Lil”, possibly in homage to Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawai’i.6 Barrett often publicized extraordinary asking prices for his best fish, such as the one thousand dollar price tag (approximately seventeen thousand in today’s dollars) that he attached to a goldfish named “King Bul-bul”. Whether or not he ever received this amount did not deter public fascination with the high valuation. The Liberty Bond carp, which Barrett priced at three hundred dollars apiece (about five thousand dollars today), was one in a long line of smartly branded fish designed to generate publicity for Barrett’s business.7
It was clever marketing to tie in the fish to Liberty Bonds, which were garnering huge public attention in April 1918. Designed to bridge the billions-wide gap between tax revenue and the immense costs of the war, the bonds allowed the government to borrow money from its citizens, with a fixed rate and date for repayment. The third Liberty Loan Campaign was launched on April 6, 1918, when movie stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charlie Chaplin held an astoundingly successful rally near the White House lawn, exhorting the public to buy bonds. (By fall of 1918, during the fourth and penultimate Liberty Bond Drive, such massive rallies became deadly super-spreading events of the influenza pandemic. A loan drive parade in Philadelphia was responsible for forty-five thousand new influenza cases — a confluence of patriotism, coercion, and public health that sounds eerily familiar.)
While Liberty Bonds were a financial investment, the Liberty Loan drives did not rely solely on an appeal to prudent money management. Rather, the government’s plea was bluntly emotional. The massive propaganda campaign, consisting of posters, newsreels, and radio advertisements, prompted Americans to take action by evoking sympathy, generosity, and fear. Like the fish in Barrett’s advertisements, many addressed viewers with a direct gaze. Uncle Sam, the Statue of Liberty, soldiers, children, and the sun itself entreated poster viewers to act immediately.
The coercion of patriotism was not subtle: one poster asked “Are you 100% American? Prove it! Buy U.S. Government Bonds”. Bullying and intimidation buoyed the Liberty Bond drives, where participation was grounded in an imperative to demonstrate one’s unquestionable support for the war effort. The Boy Scouts of America enrolled children in the campaign by turning scouts into bond salesmen, while adults who could or would not buy bonds were publicly shamed and humiliated.8 The Liberty Bond drives were therefore an extremely effective mechanism for manipulating emotions and turning feelings into cash for the US government.
One way that propaganda campaigns in Europe and the United States activated public sentiment was by using animals. By depicting the nations at war as animals, propaganda artists bred sympathy for allies and fear of foes. A series of French postcards, for example, show the Allied Powers as elegant butterflies with the faces of beautiful young women. Dressed in national costume and sporting wings tinted in the colors of their national flags, the graceful creatures are gentle and fragile. The Central Powers, on the other hand, were depicted as stinging wasps and scaly beetles, with the faces of stern-faced old men, each symbolically slain with a sword and pinned to paper as if it were a dead specimen in an entomology collection.
Dogs, alternatively sweet and threatening, were a favorite of propaganda artists. They were particularly useful for naturalizing the differences between political powers. Identifying different breeds of dogs with geographical (and therefore political and racial) regions was a relatively new phenomenon. Many of the dog breeds we recognize today have their origins in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, when a burgeoning interest in dog breeding prompted the formation of kennel clubs in Britain and the United States. The creation of breeding standards essentialized the physical form of different regional types, prioritizing aesthetics over health or utility. These phenotypic characteristics lent themselves to caricature, making dogs excellent propaganda motifs. A British postcard from World War I depicts the Allies as an army of puppy figurines, with a solid and stubborn English bulldog at the center, accompanied by a bright-eyed Irish setter, and what we can only assume is a French poodle dressed like Marianne, the allegorical embodiment of France, complete with a red Phrygian cap and blue sash. The assembled army of puppies glossed over the devastation of war, turning the conflict into something undeniably sympathetic and cuddly.
Just as sympathetic animals activated feelings of affinity toward allies, unfamiliar and aggressive animals worked to dehumanize enemies. A widely printed American enlistment poster depicted Germany as a raving gorilla, setting foot on American soil after leaving Europe in shambles. His prisoner, a half-naked white woman representing American liberty, covers her eyes in shame. The gorilla too makes eye contact, beholding the viewer with deranged pinhole eyes, suggesting that it is coming for us next. Prefiguring the 1933 movie monster King Kong, which historians have largely interpreted as a metaphor for white racist fears about the violence and sexuality of Black masculinity, the monster draws on stereotypes about apes that were also used to dehumanize Black Americans.9 Unlike puppies or butterflies, which would never be confused with humans, apes are human-like, but lesser-than. It is the ape’s proximity to humanness that shows just how unhuman it is.
Depicting nations as different species or breeds built on the ideas of race emerging from the eugenics movement, implying that there were fundamental and natural differences between allies and foes. The nationalized animal avatars had the power to make the warring nations seem inherently innocent or intrinsically aggressive. It obfuscated the war for what it actually was: a mess of Homo sapiens divided along political lines.
Fish also had a role to play in propaganda efforts, despite their generally less charismatic affect. After the American entry into the conflict, postcard producer S. E. Clark published the “Patriotic Fantasy Animal Series”, depicting animals embodying the stars and stripes. The National Aquarium shows a tank full of robust and vibrant finny patriots, joyfully sporting the American flag.
Franklin Barrett made this idea flesh through the Liberty Bond Fish. Unlike the animals populating propaganda postcards, this was a tangible, living thing. The red, white, and blue color scheme was bred into the fish as a hereditary trait of the animal. While dog breeds had come to be associated with the nations that created them, Barrett’s breeding practice worked in the opposite direction: by injecting national symbolism into the genetics of the animal itself.
We do not know what Franklin Barrett did with the proceeds from the sale of the Liberty Bond Fish: whether he invested them in actual Liberty Bonds or kept the profits. Other plant and animal breeders created “Liberty Bond” varieties after the conclusion of the final loan drive in 1919, suggesting that the name was a strategic branding choice rather than a fundraising effort. In 1919, the Lou S. Darling Seed Company held a contest to rename their 1912 seedling potato, selecting “Liberty Bond” as the winner, since potato and bond were seen to share key characteristics: reliable producers easily convertible to cash.10 Southern California floriculturist J. J. Broomall introduced a “Liberty Bond Dahlia” in 1922. Unlike Barrett’s red, white, and blue creation, the flower was “a blending of buff, bronze, and salmon shades”.11 The appeal of these varieties, whether animal or vegetable, traded on the positive associations that had been insistently linked to Liberty Bonds during the war years; use of the name allowed these breeders to cash in on the emotional manipulation already forged by the propaganda campaigns.
Despite the profits that he might have made, Barrett’s patriotic creation was not an entirely cynical cash-grab. The survival of his own lineage was invested in the outcome of the war: in July 1918, his only son, Royden, registered for the draft. Fortunately, Royden came home after the conclusion of the war and joined the family business. When industrial breeding operations in the American Midwest came to dominate the goldfish trade of the 1930s, Franklin Barrett shifted course yet again and opened an art studio, teaching classes until his death in 1958 at the age of eighty-seven.12
And the Liberty Bond Fish itself? The fate of the actual creatures of this breed is unknown, and its name disappeared from Barrett’s advertisements after the war’s conclusion. But while it lived, this star-spangled carp did nothing less than propagate the notion of a national American identity in living, swimming form. The emotional pleas of propaganda coupled with the affective immediacy of animals had instructed Americans how to feel about the war. By buying Liberty Bond flowers, potatoes, and fish, they could also feel patriotic about reaching for their wallets.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Laurel Waycott


text:
“I Am My Own Heroine”
How Marie Bashkirtseff Rewrote the Route to Fame
By Sonia Wilson
September 2, 2020

The diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, published after her death from tuberculosis aged just 25, won the aspiring painter the fame she so longed for but failed to achieve while alive. Sonia Wilson explores the importance of the journal — one of the earliest bids by a woman to secure celebrity through curation of “personal brand” — and the shape it gave to female ambition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In May 1884, long before the likes of Kim Kardashian achieved celebrity through the careful curation and promotion of self, a young unknown named Marie Bashkirtseff staked her desire for fame on the publication of her personal diary. She knew she was consumptive and that she had little time left. Her right lung was irrevocably damaged. The left had steadily deteriorated. Bones were now visible where they had not been before. Taking up her pen and a fresh notebook, she composed what would become the definitive version of the preface to her diary. Adopting the manner of one who is neither inclined toward, nor has the time to strike what Leo Braudy in his study of the history of fame calls “posture[s] of reticence”,1 she cut straight to the chase: she desired immortality, by any means possible. Should sufficient time remain before her death, she hoped to secure posthumous renown through her painting. In the event of an early death, her diary was to be published.
This was some wager. By May 1884, she had secured only one medal at the Salon and this — to her disappointment — for a pastel. Nor were the odds to improve. When she died five months later, she left behind a large number of paintings and a small sculpture (all of which had failed to garner any resounding interest), a handful of articles published anonymously in the feminist press, and her diary. Despite her best efforts, she was not part of the literary or artistic coteries of the day; nor did she issue from an illustrious line of poets or painters. Of minor Russian aristocracy, her maternal family had left what is now called Ukraine in 1858, trailing through Europe with the family doctor and a retinue of servants, and settling first in Nice. Here at the age of fourteen Bashkirtseff began her diary, filling early entries with details of the dresses she wore, the number of admiring glances she received on the Promenade, the ins and outs of family squabbles, the progress of her lessons, and the books she read.
She also strenuously and repeatedly articulated her desire for glory, elaborating at length on the means by which she intended to procure it. She first entertained hopes of achieving celebrity through her voice, consulting singing masters in Nice, Paris, and Rome and imagining herself fêted on the stages of Europe. Ever alert to what one might call the apparatus of fame, she had herself photographed often and in a number of guises, although she was later to repudiate these early images as pretentious and contrived. In her diary, she engaged in lengthy and glowing descriptions of her face and naked figure, passing off such undue attention to self as a magnanimous gesture in the direction of posterity, who would thus, she archly observed, be spared the trouble of speculating on her physical appearance. From October 1875 on, she placed every notebook of her diary under the sign of the motto that she had adopted as her own: Gloriae cupiditate.2
Her present was less glorious. Early undiagnosed symptoms of her illness reduced the range and power of her singing voice. Scandal dogged her family. Bashkirtseff’s mother and aunt had been implicated in a trial in Russia in which they stood accused of colluding in the death of a certain M. Romanoff who had been married to Marie’s aunt. Their names were cleared, but the process was prolonged and the damage was done: in Nice, the family was the subject of much conjecture. A scurrilous uncle with a penchant for drunken brawls had added further grist to the rumour mill; the fact that Madame Bashkirtseff was separated from her husband, who had remained in Russia, did not help matters. Excluded from the social arenas in which she had hoped to make her mark and aware that the stories in circulation about her family had compromised her chances of making a suitable match, Bashkirtseff vented her fury in her diary entries, chafing irritably at her mother’s and aunt’s conduct.
However this was not the only purpose to which she turned her diary. Professing a fondness for writing before the mirror, she would describe herself in the act of admiring her “incomparable arms”, the whiteness and fineness of her hand, or the form of her bosom, thereby effectively turning the diary’s pages into sites of display for those aspects of her physical self that propriety forbade her from exhibiting in public.3 Elsewhere, she drew upon it to project forward and outward, beyond the confines of its pages and the restrictions of her present, to imagine — and leave detailed instructions concerning — the arenas of display to be constructed in her posthumous future. On September 6, 1875, she entered into a good deal of detail concerning a marble statue of her person that, she stipulated, was to be sculpted at thirty times natural size and erected atop a six-metre elevation at the bottom of the family garden in Nice after her death. Throughout however, Bashkirtseff not only worked exceedingly hard at cultivating herself — her wit, her singing, her artistic skills, her knowledge of history and of literary and artistic debates — but also consistently positioned herself within her diary as her own playfully mocking second. Hardly unaware of gender protocols when it came to singing one’s own praises and her own most vigilant reader and surveyor of self, Bashkirtseff did not engage in such self-promotion without keeping up a running commentary on it, shifting from plaintive lamentation or enraptured enumeration of her multiple talents to self-ridicule in less than a line.
By the age of nineteen, her ambitions had become more focussed. In 1877, she entered the Académie Julian in Paris, the atelier of choice for young European women with serious artistic ambitions whose gender precluded them from entry into the École des beaux arts. She worked doggedly, spending long hours at the atelier by day, and by night calculating in her diary how many months it would take for her to reach and best the most accomplished students in the atelier. She discovered belatedly a passion for sculpture and briefly entertained the notion that this might be the medium of her success. She did her utmost to develop the artistic and literary relations that her family lacked: she ensured her art instructors, painters Rodolphe Julien and Tony Robert-Fleury, were invited for dinner; she developed a friendship with the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage and his architect brother Émile.
She wrote anonymously first to Dumas fils, and — in the year leading up to her death — to Zola, Goncourt, and Maupassant. Dumas fils responded to the rendezvous she gave him at the bal de l’opéra scathingly, prosaically advising early nights as a cure to what he clearly saw as overwrought and misplaced female enthusiasm. Bashkirtseff took a different tack with Goncourt in 1884. Chérie had just been published. This was the novel Goncourt had first announced in his preface to La Faustin in 1882. Describing it as “a psychological and physiological study” of a little girl’s first steps toward womanhood, he had requested what he termed “female collaboration”, directing his female readers to jot down their memories of their earliest adolescence and send them anonymously to his editor.4 With characteristic directness, Bashkirtseff informed him in the opening line of her letter that Chérie was riddled with inadequacies. She spoke, she continued, as one who knew; she herself had been writing her own impressions from an early age and now proposed to send them to him. Whether Goncourt ever received this letter is uncertain; if he did, he did not reply.
With Maupassant, Bashkirtseff fared slightly better. Clearly intrigued by her first letter, signed “Miss Hastings”, Maupassant bit. A short epistolary exchange ensued, in which Bashkirtseff responded to Maupassant’s desire to know if she was “a charming young woman”, “an old concierge with a predilection for Eugène Sue novels”, or a “mature and thin well-read lady’s companion” by floating the idea that she might be a man.5 Maupassant promptly declared her a crusty old Latin master and asked if she had a daughter. Now signing Joseph Savantin, Bashkirtseff imparted pithy advice in the tone of older man to younger: loftily quoting from Sallust in order to deflate Maupassant’s boast of superlative performance in sports. Faced with Maupassant’s clearly expressed irritation, Bashkirtseff revealed her gender but became vexed in turn when Maupassant persisted in his attempts to engineer a rendezvous.6 Both clearly managed to rub the other up the wrong way and the correspondence ended badly with the two never meeting.
Undeterred by her lack of success in writing herself into the lives of the literary greats, Bashkirtseff promptly wrote their names into her preface instead. The diary’s value as reading matter lay, she asserted, in its status as document humain: the public had only to consult Messieurs Zola, Goncourt, and Maupassant. It was a stretch, as she well knew. When she died on October 31, 1884, just a few weeks before her twenty-sixth birthday and three months after her last letter to Maupassant, she was under little illusion concerning the likelihood of publication. She had written in her diary almost every day from the age of fourteen until six days before her death. It numbered no less than 106 notebooks, many of which consisted of over two hundred pages. As she herself put it in 1882, wading through thousands of pages of an unknown was hardly an enticing prospect for any editor.
Three years after her death, a two-volume, highly truncated edition appeared. It became almost overnight one of the greatest publishing sensations of the day.
It was Madame Bashkirtseff who first took charge of the publication of the diary. Grief-stricken, intent on honouring her daughter’s wishes, she enlisted the services of André Theuriet, a popular poet and novelist. He deleted, condensed, and sequenced entries to produce an overarching narrative arc, in which a young and ambitious girl morphed into a serious artist only to die on the cusp of success and love. All references to the trial in Russia and Uncle George’s behaviour were removed, as were Bashkirtseff’s descriptions of her body; two years were shorn off her age, placing her on the “right” side of twenty-five.
The reaction was immediate. No one, it was generally agreed, had seen anything quite like it. In France, apart from the pious fragments of spiritual diaries cobbled together by curés, only one young woman’s diary had previously been published. The gentle modesty exuded by the well-written pages of Eugénie de Guérin’s diary had made it quasi-obligatory reading for young girls, promoted assiduously by mothers as a model of style and conduct. Moreover, it had come with bona fide literary connections. The older sister of the romantic poet Maurice de Guérin, Eugénie had addressed her entries to her beloved brother, only able to write on after his death when Barbey d’Aurevilly proposed that she write for him instead. When her journal was published in 1862, a respectable fourteen years after her own death, the terrain had already been prepared by the publication of fragments of her brother’s journal. In short, her journal did not simply enter neatly into the existing apparatus of authorship, but reinforced both the protocols of gender and the hierarchy of genres that underpinned it. Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal did not.
Ferdinand de Brunetière thundered: what right, he demanded to know, did this “petite peintresse de Marie Baskircheff” have to impose herself upon the public?7 Anatole France devoted a chapter to the Journal in La Vie littéraire, thereby acknowledging the extent to which the journal had already become a discussion piece in literary circles and further consecrating it as such, even as his measured tones gave his own readers the impression that he himself had emerged from the journal somewhat exhausted by what he termed the constant agitation of “a troubled soul”.8 Maurice Barrès immediately threw his not inconsiderable literary and critical weight behind it, sanctifying Bashkirtseff as Notre Dame du Sleeping Car, extolling the tirelessness with which she constantly pushed herself on to new challenges and urging France’s youth to rouse itself from its torpor and do the same.9 In England, W. E. Gladstone himself took up the journal’s cause in a six-page review in the Nineteenth Century (1889). Pronouncing the journal “a book without parallel” on the basis of the insights it provided into “human nature”, he located its value as reading matter in the sustained and in-depth nature of Bashkirtseff’s “self-record”.10
Within a year of Gladstone’s review, the first English translation had appeared in the US; the second, by Mathilde Blind, followed a year later. Blind had in fact been the first to introduce the English reading public to the journal in a two-part article in the Woman’s World (1888), then under Oscar Wilde’s editorship. In it, she recounted her visit to a sorrow-stricken Madame Bashkirtseff in the villa at Nice, who, with “furrowed face” and shabby gown, spoke gladly of her deceased daughter.11 Such visits rapidly became an integral part of what came to be known as “the Bashkirtseff cult”, as did pilgrimages to the imposing neo-Byzantine tomb sculpted by the architect Émile Bastien-Lepage in the Passy cemetery in Paris. Madame Bashkirtseff corresponded happily with readers of the diary and equally willingly conducted tours of Marie’s studio and rooms. Maurice Barrès was not a little irked to discover that the volumes of Fichte and Kant that he had boasted of having seen lying open on Marie’s desk, as if death had surprised her in the midst of deep philosophical speculation, owed more to the rather curious shape Madame Bashkirtseff’s grief was taking than it did to any activity of Marie’s in the days leading up to her death.
By 1890, Bashkirtseff’s name was, as one English reviewer put it, “a household word”.12 Public opinion was polarised from the start. Reviewers attempted to outdo themselves in superlatives: Bashkirtseff herself was deemed “overstrung and overbalanced”.13 Stereotypes of the Slav character were peddled furiously on both sides of the Channel, dosed liberally in England with references to Parisian coquetries and refinement.14 Others seized on Bashkirtseff’s “absence of reserve” as “an abdication of womanhood”.15 The already controversial William T. Stead weighed in, allowing Bashkirtseff genius, but not womanliness.16 In turn, George Bernard Shaw took Stead roundly to task in 1913, ridiculing the persistence with which he clung to his ideal of womanhood even when faced with firm evidence to the contrary in the shape of Bashkirtseff’s diary.17
But what saved the journal from becoming just another passing literary sensation and ensured instead that it morphed into a full-blown cultural phenomenon was the very particular way in which young women — and some young men — took it up. They saw it not as a document humain to be analysed, but as an example of a writing practice in which they were either already engaged, or into which they immediately plunged. Anaïs Nin and Katherine Mansfield wrote, entranced, in their own diaries of their reading of Bashkirtseff’s; Nin was eighteen years old; Mansfield had just turned nineteen.18 The young German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who studied briefly at the Académie Julian herself, sighed in her entries at the tenacity with which Bashkirtseff stuck to her own work schedule.19 In 1887, sixteen-year-old Pierre Louÿs conceded in his own fledgling diary that the idea of writing it had come to him upon reading Bashkirtseff’s.20 In 1895, on English stages, Oscar Wilde’s Gwendolyn assured Cecily with Bashkirtseff-like aplomb that she never travelled without her diary given that “one should always have something sensational to read in the train.”21 Not to be outdone, Cecily copies Algernon’s remarks into her own diary in front of him and when he begs to see, refuses, covering the entry and archly asserting that her diary is merely “a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication”.22
Outside fiction too, a detailed and daily record of self began to be perceived as an accomplishment in its own right, one that — if written with even a modicum of flair — was as sure a route to fame as any other. Imitating Bashkirtseff but going one better, diarists bundled up their notebooks and sent them off to publishers. Two were particularly successful. Bruce Frederick Cummings, a naturalist employed by the British museum, was already a practised diary keeper when he stumbled across Bashkirtseff’s journal in 1914; astounded, he declared Bashkirtseff “the very spit of [him]” and within months began considering the publication of his own journal.23 Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of twenty-six, he, like Bashkirtseff, knew he had not long to live. Unlike Bashkirtseff, he revised his journal for publication himself and lived for a further two years after it appeared in 1919. Entitled The Journal of a Disappointed Man, it too was read as an exercise in candid and precise self-observation and as a narrative of foiled ambition.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a certain Marie MacLane had already taken matters one step further. Aged nineteen, she embarked in 1901 on three months’ worth of dated writing with the specific intention of having it published. Naming Lord Byron and Marie Bashkirtseff as the two minds in the world of letters most resembling her own, she opened her first entry with a point-by-point comparison of her own qualities and those of Bashkirtseff, in which predictably she emerged the superior, thus soundly substantiating her claim that in conceit too she bettered Bashkirtseff. Conceived from the outset less as diary and more as “portrayal”, largely unleavened by the kind of mundane detail which is part and parcel of diarising and of which Bashkirtseff at times despaired, MacLane focussed predominantly on her loneliness, the cultural and intellectual barrenness of the mining town in which she lived, her personal philosophies, and her genius.24 The book was a huge commercial success, launching Mary MacLane as “the American Bashkirtseff” and enabling her to embark upon a somewhat sensational, if short-lived, career as writer and autobiographical filmmaker.
Clearly, Bashkirtseff’s diary did not only change the ways in which young women and men perceived their own diaries — and indeed themselves — but also shifted something in the mechanics of literary celebrity itself. Her keen awareness of what Leo Braudy calls styles of self-serving25 and how these had shifted between the previous century and her own, her deftness at manipulating the conventions of the diary to produce herself as “[her] own heroine”,26 her astuteness in capitalising on the burgeoning interest in “human documents” — all successfully ensured that posterity did indeed sit up and take notice. Blind’s English translation of the journal was carried forward into the twentieth century by a Virago reprint in 1985. The early decades of the twenty-first have seen Bashkirtseff’s journal finally emerging in full from the archives both in the original French and in English translation: Le Cercle des amis de Marie Bashkirtseff published the last of its sixteen-volume transcription of the manuscripts in 2005. The second and final volume of the first complete English edition of the manuscripts, translated by Katherine Kernberger, was published in 2013. Its title propels Bashkirtseff into the twenty-first century as an icon of female ambition: Lust for Glory: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff Volume II.
As for the would-be Bashkirtseffs that sprang up in the wake of the diary’s publication, Bashkirtseff had not lacked foresight. In her entry for July 22, 1883, in which she outlined yet another painting project and dreams of “un succès brutal”, she noted the following:
If I succeed my biography will be the undoing of masses of people. Every proud and vain incompetent will become aware of his genius. But if I fail what a lesson!!27
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 2, 2020

author: Sonia Wilson


text:
The Uncertain Heavens
Christiaan Huygens’ Ideas of Extraterrestrial Life
By Hugh Aldersey-Williams
October 21, 2020

During the 17th century, as knowledge of the Universe and its contents increased, so did speculation about life on other planets. One such source, as Hugh Aldersey-Williams explores, was Dutch astronomer, mathematician, and inventor Christiaan Huygens, whose earlier work on probability paved the way for his very modern evaluation of what alien life might look like.

When things look bleak in this world, it is perhaps natural to turn one’s mind to conditions on other worlds. This is what the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens did in the late 1680s. He had been ejected from his influential post as a government scientist of Louis XIV in Paris and found himself isolated back home in the provincial town of The Hague, frequently ill with depression and fevers, and missing the companionship of his brother Constantijn, who was away serving as secretary to the Dutch King William III in England.
It was then that Huygens began to write Cosmotheoros, a book-length speculation on the possibility of life on other planets, and the first such work to be based on recent scientific knowledge rather than philosophical conjecture or religious argument. Fearful of censure by “those whose Ignorance or Zeal is too great”,1 Huygens instructed his brother to publish the work only after his death, which he did in 1698. Originally written in Latin, Cosmotheoros was quickly translated into Dutch and other languages. A lively English translation appeared that same year under the audacious title, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d.
Philosophers had of course always thought about the existence of life beyond the Earth. Aristotle ruled it out, believing that the Earth was unique and that other celestial bodies were pure geometrical entities. But the atomists, among them Democritus and Epicurus, accepted the notion of a plurality of worlds, somewhat on the analogy of particulate matter of various kinds existing with space in between. Medieval thinkers picked up on this debate, but could only add to it their own concerns about the implications of one view or another for church doctrine, which did nothing to advance it.
The revelation that there were yet more bodies in the solar system than the ones that had been known since antiquity, which came with Galileo’s discovery of four moons of Jupiter in 1610, added an unexpected new dimension to the discussion. And when Huygens discovered the first satellite of another planet, Saturn, in 1655, the balance of the argument seemed to change again.
Huygens achieved fame in the 1650s for that discovery of Saturn’s first satellite (later named Titan) and the planet’s ring (later seen to be rings) and as the creator of the first accurate pendulum clock. He also invented numerous other devices, including a “magic lantern”, a kind of primitive slide projector, and made important contributions to mathematics, especially the fields of geometry and probability, and introduced mathematical formulas as a means of expressing the relationship between quantities such as speed and mass in physics problems. All of these achievements make him the greatest scientist in the period between Galileo and Newton.
Christiaan Huygens was precocious in his fascination with the physical world. As a child, he made little machines and delighted in solving mathematical puzzles, such that people began to refer to him as the “Dutch Archimedes”.2 He rejected the life of a courtier and diplomat pursued by his father and brothers, and soon distinguished himself in physics, mathematics, and astronomy. After his breakthroughs with Saturn and clocks, his experiments with moving objects led him to the conclusion that all motion is only relative (which later earned the admiration of Einstein). In the 1670s, he devised a wave-based theory of light, which was substantially correct but was neglected for nearly 150 years until it could be confirmed by experiment.
Unlike some illustrious contemporaries, he maintained a systematic focus on his chosen problems and recognised the joint importance of their practical and theoretical aspects, rejoicing when these were shown to reinforce one another, as they did in his improvements to the pendulum. Although, like any natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, he worked on a range of problems that would seem hopelessly broad to a modern specialist, he did not — as Newton did — become sidetracked into alchemy, occultism, or religion.
Huygens was a true internationalist. He sought to adapt his improved pendulum clocks with the aim of being able to calculate longitude at sea in collaboration with Scottish inventors. He swapped ideas about the air pump used to investigate the properties of the vacuum with the Irish Robert Boyle. He found himself caught in an ugly dispute with the English Robert Hooke over the invention of the balance spring to regulate the timekeeping of portable watches. He compared telescope designs and planetary observations with the Polish Johannes Hevelius and the Italian Giovanni Domenico Cassini, among others. He tutored the young German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in mathematics (before the student surpassed the master and invented calculus).
In 1663, Huygens became the first foreigner to be elected to the Royal Society. More significantly, he was instrumental in establishing the French Academy of Sciences around the same time, making him “the recognised leader of European science”,3 according to a biographer.
Huygens’ discovery of Saturn’s ring in 1656 demanded years of patient observation of the planet using a telescope of his own design (for which Christiaan and his brother Constantijn even ground the lenses themselves). During this time, the apparent shape of the planet changed, leading to many interpretations of its form. It was Huygens’ powerful optics together with his mathematically informed sense of what was physically most likely that led him to the correct interpretation.
His first speculations about life on the planets date from this time. Writing about the ring in his treatise on Saturn, he nonchalantly added a line of wonder about “the effects that the ring that surrounds them must have on those who inhabit it”.4 From later letters of reminiscence to his brother, it appears that Christiaan freely discussed such matters with Constantijn while they were at the telescope together, even though it took another forty years for his thoughts to appear in print.
By that time, Cassini had discovered four moons of Saturn in addition to Huygens’s Titan and the four “Medicean stars” that Galileo had detected in orbit around Jupiter in 1610. The solar system was beginning to look very different from that understood by the ancient Greeks, or even by astronomers of a generation or two before, such as Galileo or Johannes Kepler.
Although the atomists anticipated that there was a plurality of worlds both within the solar system and perhaps also beyond it, they were divided on the question of what these worlds were like. They accepted that some might be inhabited by living creatures of various kinds, while others might be devoid of any life and water. Pythagoras, for instance, believed that the moon was inhabited by animals larger and plants more beautiful than those on Earth, while others insisted it was barren.
Medieval scholars felt duty-bound to consider these matters in the context of God’s creation. In 1318–9, William of Ockham gave lectures at Oxford stating his belief that “God could make another world better than this one and distinct in species from it”.5 But his ideas aroused such opposition that he was not granted his degree. A century later, Nicholas of Cusa went further in supposing that at least some species elsewhere would be superior to humans, but that nevertheless all owed their origin to “God, who is the centre and circumference of all stellar regions”.6
Two great revelations, both so vast in their implications that it took them more than a century to sink in, gave a new stimulus to these speculations in the sixteenth century. The first was Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system, which demoted the Earth to a status equal with that of the other planets. The second was the European discovery of the Americas, which broadened ideas of the diversity of species that might be expected to be found on new worlds. These conceptual upheavals unleashed a popular new wave of imaginative literature about life on other worlds that depended neither on scholastic orthodoxies nor on up-to-the-minute astronomical observations.
The advent of the telescope brought a sharper focus to these conjectures. The discovery that the Moon was not a pure sphere, but marked by mountain ranges like the Earth, encouraged the cleric John Wilkins, for example, to infer that there would also be inhabitants there in The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638).
Kepler, too, believed that all manner of celestial bodies — planets, moons, and even suns — might have inhabitants, based on similar astronomical observations. He went further than previous authors by using his knowledge of physical laws (presumed to operate universally) to consider the form that these beings might take. On the Moon, they would have “by far a larger body and hardness of temperament than ours”,7 he wrote, because of the length of days and extremes of temperature.
In Somnium, a prototype science fiction novella (the title means “The Dream”) in which the protagonist is kidnapped by daemons and taken to the Moon, Kepler enlarged on the nature of the Moon’s inhabitants, dividing them into two groups according to whether they lived on the dark side or the illuminated side. The latter naturally regard the Earth as their Moon, and Kepler gave a scientifically informed impression of how the Earth would look from its satellite. However, Somnium is not great reading, concerned as it is mainly with the comparison of orbital periods and other astronomical variables on the two celestial bodies.
Huygens’ main stimulus to action was probably another work, by the writer Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, published in 1686. His wildly successful Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes took the form of a dialogue between a naive marquise and a wise philosopher. Written in plain French so that it might appeal to those without any scientific knowledge, and specifically to women readers, it offered a primer to current astronomical theories, as well as an entertaining vision of life on the moon, planets, and stars beyond our solar system.
While not so artfully conceived as Fontenelle’s work, Cosmotheoros is its match in literary terms, while also being, according to the science writer Philip Ball, the “first attempt to mount a rigorous scientific case for life on other worlds, without doing harm to Scripture”.8 Huygens’ seriousness of intent is evident from the fact that he considered the work as just one volume in a never realised “book of the planets”. He wrote in Latin in order to appeal to an educated readership. (The fact that it was quickly translated into spoken languages shows that it reached well beyond this target audience.)
Part of Huygens’ purpose was to refute the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who had published his own mystical dialogue of space travel, Itinerarium exstaticum, in 1656, which Huygens had read and found to omit all that he considered probable about other planets, while including “a company of idle unreasonable stuff”.9 Huygens had more time for other writers. He cited  Nicholas of Cusa, Tycho Brahe, Giordano Bruno, and Johannes Kepler, although they, he felt, had ventured too little detail as to the forms that extraterrestrial life might take.
Huygens made his argument by reasoning from probability. He began: “A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of the Planets, cannot but sometimes think, that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, and perhaps their Inhabitants too.”10 The key phrase here is “not improbable”, harking back to Huygens’ youthful investigations of statistical likelihoods. For, as he warned his readers: “I can”t pretend to assert any thing as positively true (for how is it possible) but only to advance a probable Guess, the truth of which every one is at his own liberty to examine.”11
He thought it most unlikely there was an atmosphere on the Moon, for instance, and so he ruled out the kind of life there imagined by Kepler and Wilkins. But he happily endorsed the idea of life on planets within our solar system and in the solar systems surrounding other stars. The discovery during his lifetime that the speed of light is finite encouraged him to go further and suggest that there may be stars so distant that their light has not yet reached us.
His thoughts about the likely nature of each planet were informed by what could be learned about them through a telescope. He argued that if one planet could be shown to be Earth-like, then it greatly increased the chances that others would be too — a logic that still guides the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). By using what evidence he had of one planet’s distinctiveness from another — in size, distance from the sun, length of days, and appearance — he was able to enrich the vision of extraterrestrial life he laid before his readers.
Huygens’ ideas about plants and animals were based on reasonable projections of what was then known to exist on the Earth, recently expanded by news of exotic species brought back to Europe by explorers’ ships. Marvelling at the richness and fitness of species “so exactly adapted”12 to life on Earth, he argued that if we were to deny this abundance to other planets, then “we should sink them below the Earth in Beauty and Dignity; a Thing very unreasonable.”13
What form might this life take? Based on new information that American species are different, but enough like those of the Old World, Huygens presumed a general similarity with terrestrial species. But he did give some consideration to the different physical conditions that may prevail on other planets. The atmosphere might be thicker, for example, which would suit a greater variety of flying creatures. Gravity might be different, too, although he did not provide estimates of the comparative gravitational force on each of the planets, and in any case he rejected the notion of a simple correlation between the size of a planet and the scale of its flora and fauna. “We may have a Race of Pygmies about the bigness of Frogs and Mice, possess’d of the Planets,”14 he wrote, although he thought it unlikely.
For Huygens, though, “the main and most diverting Point of the Enquiry is . . . placing some Spectators in these new discoveries, to enjoy these Creatures we have planted them with, and to admire their Beauty and Variety”. Remarkably, he suggested that these intelligent observers might not be men, but other kinds of “Creatures endued with Reason”.15 Some planets, indeed, might be capable of accommodating several species of “rational Creatures possess’d of different degrees of Reason and Sense”.16
The nature of reason and morality would be the same as on Earth. These creatures would be social, and they would have houses to shelter them from the weather. Huygens struggled with their appearance, though. He wanted to indicate that they might not be humanoid, and yet, he said, surely they must have hands, and feet, and stand upright. But perhaps they would have exoskeletons, like lobsters, for example. After all, “”tis a very ridiculous opinion, that the common people have got among them, that it is impossible a rational Soul should dwell in any other shape than ours”.17 Such conjectures echoed those of Kepler in his Somnium, but were more soundly guided by Huygens’ expert knowledge of the likely physical constraints.
Huygens then turned his attention to intelligence and technology. His planetary beings would surely have science, and especially astronomy, as this study was said to have arisen as a consequence of the fear of eclipses, which would also occur on other planets. They would doubtless have some of our inventions, “yet that they should have all of them is not credible”.18 In particular, Huygens could not credit that they would possess telescopes, since he considered those which he had used himself as being so fine that other intelligences would not be able to equal them. Instead, he invested the denizens of the planets with far superior natural eyesight.
In 1600, Giordano Bruno had been burnt at the stake in the Campo de” Fiori in Rome by the Inquisition for many heresies, including his insistence on the plurality of potentially inhabited worlds. A century later, Huygens was safe from such a fate. Nevertheless, he attempted to forestall any criticism from the church by making the semantic point that the heaven and earth referred to in scripture must apply to the totality of the universe and not to the planet Earth exclusively. He refused to grant man a special place in Creation. Unlike some rival works, especially those with a utopian or a satirical agenda, Cosmotheoros did not propose a hierarchy among the creatures in which humans would be either superior or inferior.
Cosmotheoros enjoyed a long period of popularity through the eighteenth century, and Huygens’ ideas about life on the planets and in other solar systems became important for Immanuel Kant in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens of 1755. The discovery of Uranus by William Herschel in 1781 saw a further surge of interest, but thereafter astronomers began to shun the topic, and subsequent opinion has been less kind to this most speculative of Huygens’ works.
Recently, though, Cosmotheoros has been reappraised by historians of science, who acknowledge that it was Huygens’ embrace of uncertainty that gave him the licence to explore the topic in the first place. This was by no means a tendency shared by all in Huygens’ time. Many thinkers, such as the English clergyman Joseph Glanvill, saw the acceptance of things not known for sure as the thin end of a wedge that would prise open a world of atheism. The Scottish poet William Drummond (in A Cypress Grove) explicitly singled out both Copernicanism and the idea of extraterrestrial life in this regard, as cases where “Sciences have become opinions, nay errors, and leave the imagination in a thousand labyrinths”.19
Nevertheless, it can now be seen that Huygens’ greatest gift to later generations of scientists may have been his willingness to work with uncertainty. Having set out the mathematical foundations of probability, nobody was in a better position to extend its precepts into thinking about questions of science. Doing so was not a surrender to unreason, but a way of opening new doors to creative thought. As Huygens wrote in Cosmotheoros: “tis a Glory to arrive at Probability, and the search itself rewards the pains.  But there are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgment.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 21, 2020

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams