Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science VI

I finally finished the book. Darwin died in 1882 at the age of 73 and Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of 55. I think that Bergland succeeds in evoking the period, which, as she points out, was quite different from the present. I was often reminded of A.S. Byatt's novella Morpho Eugenia and her novel Possession, though this book doesn't take such liberties with history.

While I enjoy Bergland's style of writing, her focus seems to be mainly on literary history, so she doesn't devote much space to the psychological makeups of the people discussed. Dickinson's sister, Lavinia, also never married, though, apparently, she was more sociable than Emily. Did their mother tell them that sex was awful and childbirth even worse? Bergland is also a complete blank on economic history, which, in my experience, played a significant role the evolution of the arts in England. In Darwin's case, his family married into the Wedgwood family, which had become wealthy from the manufacture and sale of china and other products. If Darwin had been from a poor family, you would never have heard of him. I think that Janet Browne makes that clear in her biography. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's family on both sides became wealthy from slave labor in Jamaica. William Morris's father was a wealthy English financier. I was also surprised to learn recently that Percy Bysshe Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was born in Newark, New Jersey and became rich partly from marrying wealthy women. As I've written, money and the arts often go hand in hand.

Dickinson had a portrait of George Eliot by her desk, which almost automatically makes me a member of the Emily Dickinson fan club. I'm not as enthusiastic about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose portrait was also there. I am still feeling sorry for Dickinson, because she didn't get the kind of recognition that she deserved during her life. She was self-conscious about her appearance and had only one know daguerreotype made (from school?). She actually had red hair. For many years it seemed that she was seeking a "Master" who would help guide her through her work and publication. Apparently, the best that she could come up with was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who may have aided her in some ways, but does not seem to have had any sophistication in poetry. To me, he sounds like an active person with many interests, including abolitionism and women's rights. Somehow he took an interest in Darwin and visited him at his house, though I'm not clear what the purpose of that was. Higginson may have been significant to Dickinson, because they began corresponding in the same year that she wrote "I died for beauty." Bergland parses that poem, which is one of my favorites. I think that Dickinson identifies with Beauty, and her fellow corpse, possibly Higginson, identifies with Truth. Truth says that Truth and Beauty are "Brethren," but Beauty neither agrees nor disagrees. My impression is that Dickinson was less interested in science than Bergland suggests. The enjoyment of flowers seems to be intoxicating to women, and I think that those feelings underly her reaction to nature. Darwin may have had similar feelings, but, if he did, he was more interested in figuring out how organisms work. That pragmatic quality seems to be absent in Dickinson.

On the whole, my take on Dickinson and Darwin is slightly different from Bergland's. She seems to make Dickinson out to be interested in magic, but I don't see any clear evidence of that. To me, Dickinson is interested in the harmony of nature and the relatedness of organisms, which, for me, can evoke a sense of awe and mystery that does not normally intrude on ordinary life. It is possibly that Dickinson did think in terms of "magic," but that isn't exactly how I interpret her poems. I am in closer agreement with Bergland on Darwin, though in that case I find her a little tendentious. Possibly she's been reading too much A.S. Byatt. My impression of Darwin is that he wasn't very literary at all but, from years of living with his wife, Emma, decided that he ought to be more literary. While, at times, he must have felt in awe of nature, it would be inaccurate to describe him as remotely interested in magic. As Bergland herself points out, Darwin was a total skeptic regarding the séance that he attended. He probably felt socially obliged to attend, and that was the only reason why he went.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science V

I am gradually approaching the end of this book and should finish it by my next post. It is literally putting me to sleep on some days. Though I think that the main thesis is flawed, it is still an academic exercise that can be amusing and informative at times. Dickinson seems to me to have been quite lonely and in search of literary friends. In 1862, when she was 31, she began a correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who published articles in Atlantic Monthly. He didn't consider her poems publishable initially. The Civil War was under way then, and, later that year, Higginson enlisted. Her brother, Austin, paid someone else to serve for him. In any case, the war disrupted many people's lives.

When I finish the book, I'll make some final comments. For now, I'll just make some general criticisms. My greatest annoyance is probably that Bergland assumes, without providing any evidence, that Dickinson read On the Origin of Species, absorbed its content, and incorporated those ideas into her poems. I read her poems more psychologically: as a lonely person who spent a lot of time outdoors, she tended to anthropomorphize animals. Frogs are courting her like men. A snake is a "fellow." I like to compare her to my other favorite poet, Denise Levertov. In her poem, "Living," Levertov uses a description of a red salamander to evoke a rather mystical feeling about life: Charles Darwin is nowhere in sight. 

More broadly, I think that, to some extent, Dickinson can be viewed in terms of religious history. In England, Henry VIII kicked out the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Calvinists fled the Roman Catholic Church in France and moved to England and America (my ancestors and Henry David Thoreau's were Huguenots). As I've said, much of New England resembled a Congregational theocracy up until the late nineteenth century. Emily Dickinson herself rebelled against that church. Though I don't think that Bergland is wrong about the intellectual climate in Massachusetts during Dickinson's life, she seems to be placing more weight on Darwin's influence than seems appropriate. She is probably more accurate with respect to how a scientific education may generally have supported Dickinson's theological rebellion.

Another area where I think that Bergland could have done a better job would be in showing how marginalized Dickinson was by her family and how the scope of her life experience was limited from cradle to grave. She had so little to do for much of her life that she went outdoors and identified with blades of grass. If you compare her to Denise Levertov, she barely lived. Levertov was a nurse during World War II, had an abortion, moved to America, established a career as a poet, had a son, protested the Vietnam War, supported her family, and even supported her ex-husband and his second wife after their divorce. I don't think that poor Emily ever even went on a date! It is possible that Dickinson had some psychological conditions that inhibited the progress of her life, but I don't know of any other than shyness, and Bergland has nothing to say on that front.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science IV

When Dickinson returned to Amherst in 1848 at the age of seventeen, she gradually settled into what was to become her adult life. In 1851, there was a spectacular display of the aurora borealis that awed the entire town. At the time, Emily and her friends speculated on mysterious natural forces. They thought that telepathy, as described in Jane Eyre, could be some sort of electrical phenomenon. By 1855, the fortunes of her father, Edward, had improved. He was able to buy back the Dickinson Homestead, and the family returned to it. At that time, her older brother, Austin, was away from home. He eventually became a lawyer and worked at his father's law firm in Amherst. Thereafter, Emily, her mother, father and younger sister, Lavinia, lived at the Homestead. Austin later moved to a house next door. Her mother became ill after the move, and Emily disliked doing the housework.

One of Dickinson's poetic inspirations was Elizabeth Barrett Browning, particularly Aurora Leigh. She also subscribed to Atlantic Monthly, where in 1860 she would have read Asa Gray's review of On the Origin of Species, which was the first in the U.S. So far in the book, Bergland is emphasizing the theory of evolution as a confirmation of the relatedness of organisms, which accords with Dickinson's view in her poems. However, Bergland seems to be downplaying the actual process of natural selection, which can be quite grim. On the other hand, Bergland does a good job explaining how neither Darwin nor Dickinson were anthropocentric in their views of nature. Neither of them seem to have adopted the rigid, ideological tree that I mentioned before, which presents a developmental hierarchy with Homo sapiens at the top.

Even so, I think that Bergland is stretching things a little by emphasizing the similarities between Dickinson and Darwin. Dickinson's poems tend to interweave elements of the personal with elements of the natural world and the mystical. Darwin's work is specifically scientific and attempts to develop biological theories from the observations that he made. Bergland dutifully reports that it was Darwin who first discovered carnivorous plants, and that he spent years studying them. For all of her enjoyment of plants and natural phenomena, Dickinson's projects had little to do with scientific knowledge. Darwin's projects involved more than scientific discovery in the sense that he carefully calculated how to present his ideas in an environment in which he knew that some of his colleagues would be hostile because of their religious implications – he did in fact lose several friends. However, Darwin had a soft side, and at times he seems to have been almost paralyzed by the enormity of his findings. To this day, I don't think that many people can face them straight on.

It may not be Bergland's fault, because there doesn't seem to be much information available, but so far in the book I haven't developed much of a sense of how people who knew Dickinson perceived her. Her family life seems to have been satisfactory, though it was clearly patriarchal. Obviously, Emily was extremely introverted, and her mother and Lavinia may also have been. Emily developed a close friendship with Susan Gilbert, who read some of her poems and offered advice. But, after, Susan married her brother and lived next door, the relationship seemed to decline. Austin and Susan had large parties, which Emily avoided. There is also speculation in this book and elsewhere about Emily's sexuality. There don't seem to be clear answers, though several of her poems seem to be of a sexual nature.

I should finish this book within two more posts. Although it is entertaining to see Dickinson within the context of scientific progress during the nineteenth century, I prefer to see her as a talented artist who developed her craft in privacy and to very high standards. To some extent, this makes her immediate social environment, which seems a little insipid, of somewhat lesser importance than Bergland suggests. Dickinson seems to me a lot more like Vivian Maier, who developed very high proficiency as a street photographer completely in private, than Charles Darwin, who had few discernible artistic tendencies.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science III

I've reached the halfway point in the book and am enjoying it, but am mainly reading it in bed at night for a few minutes at a time. Not much space is devoted to Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle, which was a major transformative experience in his life. Through the captain, Robert FitzRoy, and his reading of Charles Lyell on the voyage, he changed his focus from biology to geology. When he returned to England, Darwin became a close friend of Lyell, who helped him launch his career – as a geologist. Bergland does describe Charles's brother, Erasmus, a little and suggests that he may have been gay. Erasmus was a close friend of Harriet Martineau, the most prominent female intellectual in England at the time, and notes that Charles also knew her and spoke to her. Darwin himself hardly ever mentioned Martineau, and I think the same occurred with George Eliot. It is a little difficult to sort out Darwin's attitude toward women: on the one hand, one might say that he was a complete sexist who thought that the ideas of women had no scientific importance, but, on the other hand, especially for an introvert, he was extremely socially aware and didn't want to make public statements that linked him to specific women who were not members of his family.

Following the voyage, Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, after a completely lackluster courtship, during which she didn't think that he was interested in her. Bergland doesn't mention that he had a potential love interest before the voyage that had evaporated. While Janet Browne isn't particularly sanguine about the marriage, Bergland thinks that it worked very well. As a couple, they had identical social backgrounds, so they were operating on the same model. They each knew their predefined roles and stuck to them. I found this interesting, because it may be an example of a pre-feminism marriage that worked well for both the husband and the wife. Their personality differences seemed to complement each other. While he was highly introverted and disliked most social events and public speaking, she was highly extroverted and socialized a lot. With frequent visits from family members and several children of her own, Emma's social needs seem to have been satisfied. Of course, it helped that they were rich and had several servants. I should also note that, in those days, before radio, films, TV, computers, smartphones and social media, married couples often read books out loud together for entertainment, and this probably added a stability to their relationships. Darwin may have been slightly dismissive of women as thinkers, and Emma thought that he was a hypochondriac – though he may have picked up some very unhealthy microbes on his voyage. They both enjoyed their children a lot, and Darwin liked to compare them to orangutans. I doubt that Emma would ever have wanted to be a business executive or a professional athlete. Bergland makes a strained attempt to show a connection between Darwin and Amherst by saying that Harriet Martineau met the geologist, Edward Hitchcock, in Amherst, and Charles Lyell and Darwin corresponded with him.

The details of Dickinson's development are sparse compared to those of Darwin. Like her mother, also named Emily, she was a very good student across all subjects. However, as an adult, her mother spent more time on housework than on reading. Her father, Edward, tried to control which novels his children read, and the household doesn't seem to have been particularly open to new ideas or perspectives. After finishing at Amherst Academy, Emily studied for a year at Mount Holyoke, which was then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, about ten miles from Amherst. Though the word "seminary" at the time did not imply any religious training, the students were ranked according to their religious standing. The highest rank consisted of members of the orthodox Congregationalist Church. The next rank consisted of those who aspired to become members, and the bottom rank consisted of those who had "no hope" of joining the church: they were called "impenitents." Dickinson became an "impenitent," it seems, based on whatever she said, after careful consideration of her religious views at the time. She stayed at Mount Holyoke for only a year. It isn't entirely clear to me why she left. Her academic performance had been good. Apparently, besides disliking the religious pressure, she felt herself to be on par with the faculty, which, in those days, consisted of people with no college training. She gradually stopped going to church, though the rest of her family continued to go. This is not to say that she wasn't religious: it is evident in many of her poems that she had strong religious sentiments, but that she didn't want to submit to religious orthodoxy simply to conform with those around her. You might say that she wanted to divine the divine on her own.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science II

Because I had such a hard time finding good reading material over the winter, I got out of the habit of reading regularly, and now, with spring, I am, as usual, distracted by new projects. Nevertheless, I do find this book useful and will continue reading it, but at a very slow pace. Since starting this blog, I have found that learning about the cultural and scientific developments of certain periods can be quite interesting. This period is especially interesting to me compared to others, because it includes both the U.S. and England from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, and I've already read a lot about it. Another period that I covered, less thoroughly, the French Enlightenment, was also interesting, but it seems to have ended by the late 18th century, before science really took off. This particular book is somewhat adventurous, because it links subjects that aren't usually associated with each other: poetry and science.

The chapters alternate between Darwin and Dickinson. So far, Bergland seems to be more neutral on Darwin than Janet Browne was in the earlier biography that I discussed. She draws a lot from Darwin's version of events, whereas Browne has a slightly more sociological take on Darwin. Overall, the impression I have is that Erasmus Darwin was thought of as somewhat of a crank by his son, Robert, and Robert attempted to raise his children a little more conservatively. Browne provides more of a sense that Robert considered his older son, Erasmus, smarter than Charles, because he breezed through school and became a doctor, like Robert and his father, whereas Charles wasn't very academic and liked to collect things in the outdoors. However, they were all quite shrewd about money. Robert married into the wealthy Wedgwood family and grew wealthier from his investments, and Charles married his first cousin from the Wedgwood side and never worried about money much. I haven't got very far in Bergland's book, but Browne portrays the younger Erasmus as somewhat of a dandy: though he did well academically, he did not practice medicine and socialized a lot in London, never marrying: there is some evidence that he was gay. I am watching to see how Bergland's account will play out later, but so far she hasn't conveyed the sense that Charles had a slight inferiority complex while he was growing up and psychologically was geared to be very careful about his work as an adult in order not to appear like a failure.

One area where Bergland does a good job is in conveying how the sciences were not widely part of the academic curriculum in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. The Darwin family traveled to Edinburgh and elsewhere for three generations for medical educations, because there was nothing available in England at the time. In this respect, though Dickinson's family wasn't at all scientific, the academic environment in Amherst was far more science-friendly at the time than it was at Cambridge and Oxford, or even Harvard and Yale. Amherst College was founded in 1821, and it may have had a better science faculty than the older colleges. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy for high school, and the curriculum there was atypical for females: it included math and science. While Dickinson's family wasn't poor, it wasn't rich: her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, went bankrupt and moved away to Ohio. The original Dickinson Homestead, where Emily lived initially, had to be sold, and she moved to a lesser property for the remainder of her life.

Although I've got a long way to go in this book, I am trying to piece together a history of British empiricism and how it intersected with American empiricism. Empiricism in Britain has an extremely solid footing dating from the eighteenth century, from David Hume to Thomas Malthus to Charles Darwin. Though various forms of spiritualism became popular periodically, affecting Robert Owen and Alfred Russel Wallace, and perhaps even George Eliot, Darwin was a complete skeptic and knew from the start that it was all nonsense. With the religious history in New England, Emily Dickinson was also predictably affected. That is something that will interest me in the remainder of the book. For me, it ties in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson reminds me a little of a cult leader: who, today, discusses Transcendentalism as a serious movement? Though Emerson came from a good family, he was poor while growing up. However, his first wife was quite wealthy, and when she died from tuberculosis after just two years, he inherited that wealth. He decided not to work and to form his own intellectual movement. I have never studied it in any detail, but it seems like a mishmash of Romanticism, the enjoyment of nature, and an undefined form of spiritualism. Emerson was not himself a true naturalist and didn't enjoy slogging through the wilderness in search of specimens. I think that he actively recruited people for his movement, and he specifically wanted to develop Thoreau as the naturalist spokesperson for Transcendentalism. It seems that he was often at odds with Thoreau, who was simply too independent and stubborn to follow Emerson's instructions. I suspect that, at heart, Emerson wanted to be seen as an informed evangelist. He actually favored literature and poetry over science, and, though he was twenty-seven years older than Dickinson, she may have made an excellent recruit for Transcendentalism – if he had ever heard of her.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science I

Just as winter abruptly ended, I came across this new book by Renée Bergland, and it suits me perfectly. I'm not sure how quickly I'll work through it, but it discusses topics that interest me and is very well-written. Enormous cultural changes occurred in the mid-to-late nineteenth century in England and the U.S., and this book delves into how Dickinson and Darwin were affected in complementary ways. As a matter of preference, I like the days when poetry was open to science and science was less specialized than it is now. Bergland differentiates natural magic from supernatural magic and discusses how participating in the exploration of natural magic can have a therapeutic effect on people – it definitely does on me – and how it became popular during the period discussed. I already knew a lot about Charles Darwin, but only a little about Emily Dickinson. Darwin's time period (1809-1882) doesn't exactly match Dickinson's (1830-1886) but overlaps for nearly all of Dickinson's life, and they also lived on different continents. Darwin never visited North America and Dickinson never traveled beyond the East Coast. This raises the question of how they could have similarities. The answer is probably that they both came from well-educated families, probably read some of the same things and were both upper-middle-class.

If anything, Darwin's family was considerably more intellectual and wealthier than Dickinson's. Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus (1731-1802) was a key figure in the English Enlightenment. Besides being a doctor, he wrote poetry, invented things, studied flowers and had discussions with members of the Lunar Society, where he befriended Benjamin Franklin, among others. He was also quite politically-minded, and I like this poem of his:

When Avarice, shrouded in Religion's robe,

Sail'd to the West, and slaughtered half the globe:

While Superstition, stalking by his side,

Mock'd the loud groan, and lap'd the bloody tide;

For sacred truths announced her frenzied dreams,

And turn'd to night the sun's meridian beams.

Later, when he met Wordsworth and Coleridge, they thought of him as a "meddling intellect." After Mary Shelley heard Byron and Shelley discussing Erasmus, he may have come to represent to her a type of callous rationalism, which she expressed in the character of Victor Frankenstein. Needless to say, Erasmus Darwin does not fit within the Romantic tradition.

I'm not in a hurry to finish this book, as spring has already arrived, and may linger on it for some time.

Genealogy

I've been reading Understanding Human Evolution, by Ian Tattersall, which is a recent summary of the research and is similar to his The Fossil Trail, which I read in 1995. This has been quite an active field, with new fossil discoveries, new archaeological techniques and new DNA analysis tools, and the still-fuzzy picture of hominin evolution seems to be advancing slowly, by the decade. Rather than summing up the contents of this book, I've decided to describe how and why I became interested in this topic.

In my case, I think that this has partly to do with the fact that my parents came from two different countries, and we moved from England to the U.S. in 1957, when I was seven. Growing up in a suburb of New York City, I had no sense of ethnicity, though I generally seemed to fit the description of a WASP, which was the dominant culture there. But the cultural environment was quite mixed at the time, with all of the job opportunities attracting people to the area. As I wrote earlier, there were already many Italian immigrants at the time, and, after World War II, others moved to the vicinity. I had friends whose parents had moved from the Midwest, and some of my friends' parents had met in Europe during the war: one mother was from Czechoslovakia and another was from Belgium. A girl in my class was from Norway. One family was Polish, and their son appeared in the 1963 film version of Lord of the Flies. Another family had moved from Australia after a divorce. At the time, I didn't think about this, and, much later, it came more into focus for me when "community" and "inclusion" became buzzwords in the media: these had never been meaningful concepts to me. Although I've now lived in various parts of the country, I don't particularly identify with any region, though I seem to have a slight preference for the Northeast, perhaps partly because I had grown up in New York.

After moving to the U.S., I never saw my English grandfather again and saw my English grandmother and Greek grandparents only once. I had very little contact with my cousins, aunts and uncles. By 1977, my father had died, but his mother was still alive, and I corresponded with her, inquiring about family history. Her health was declining then, and she had her brother, my great-uncle, help me. He sent me some very basic genealogical information, along with a MacArthur clan tie, since his grandmother was a MacArthur born in Edinburgh. Shortly after this, my grandmother had a stroke, and she died in 1980. Since then, I've done a lot of genealogical research and know my English background fairly well, going back to the eighteenth century.

The reason why I mention this is that much of what I discuss on this blog is related to human evolution, which, to me, is partly a continuation of my interest in genealogy. Evolution became an interest of mine when I read The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, and The Diversity of Life, by E.O. Wilson, in the early 1990's. I also studied Anglo-Saxon archaeology in Oxford in the summer of 1993. My overall conclusion is that you can only find out so much about your past, particularly your evolutionary past. It looks as if all of my ancestors were in Africa once, and later they left Africa, possibly returning, and probably mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans at some point. As research advances, it may be possible to know more about this through DNA analysis. As a practical matter, you can only speculate on what the daily lives of your ancestors were like just a few hundred years ago. I at least know what my great-great-great-great-great grandfather was doing in the eighteenth century: he was a farmer living in Aston Rowant, Oxfordshire. I've visited his grave and have a copy of his will. While, on the whole, I know very little about my ancestors, I seem to know more about them than most people know about theirs. Although, throughout my life I've never cared much about belonging to a group, everyone's true group consists primarily of their relatives and ancestors, whether they like it or not. As my father used to say, "Blood is thicker than water." Despite the fact that natural selection works through genetic variation, we probably have greater affinities to people who are close to us both culturally and genetically. I wouldn't waste my time socializing with a gorilla. As someone who is now old enough to say that I grew up in a different era, I am often reminded that many of the people around me are living in a conceptual world quite different from my own.

Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers

I've been reading a biography of Tennessee Williams, mainly to find out more about his relationship with Carson McCullers. Tennessee is one of the best-known American playwrights, and one of the first plays that I read in high school was The Glass Menagerie. At the time, it seemed all right to me, though I wasn't especially impressed. It mirrored some of the dysfunction in his family, and, because there was also dysfunction in my family then, I didn't find it particularly interesting. Later on, I came to prefer the film versions of two of his other plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. It helped that some of the best actors of the time appeared in these films: Elizabeth Taylor, Burl Ives, Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The biography I'm reading is a little too chatty for me, and plays have never been a central interest of mine, so I decided to read only the parts that pertain to Carson McCullers. This book repeats some of the same information found in Mary V. Dearborn's biography of McCullers, which I think is better-written, but it adds more context with respect to Tennessee.

Tennessee was six years older than McCullers, and he was impressed by her The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. This resulted in his sending her a fan letter in 1946 and subsequently inviting her to his summer house in Nantucket, as I mentioned earlier. When they met, they bonded, rather intensely it seems. It would appear that, because they were both Southerners, both gay, and had similar artistic sensibilities, they rejoiced as kindred spirits. Tennessee later told James Laughlin "The minute I met her she seemed like one of my oldest and best friends!" Also, "We are planning to collaborate on a dramatization of her last book soon as I get my present play finished." On the other hand, Gore Vidal said "She was a crashing bore, but Tennessee found her sort of tragic and interesting." At that time, Tennessee's live-in boyfriend, Mexican Pancho Rodriguez, had a rather volatile personality, and he came to resent Tennessee's affection for McCullers. Before long, McCullers thought of Pancho as a gold digger. He also was an inappropriate person to mingle within Tennessee's artistic circles: no one liked him, and their relationship eventually failed. I don't know what Tennessee saw in him.

Tennessee later described 1946 as "the last good year before her stroke" (though she probably had an earlier stroke). In 1970, after she had died, he said "To have known a person of Carson's spiritual purity and magnitude has been one of the great graces of my life." 

So, this isn't adding that much to my knowledge of McCullers. I have found it interesting that these two people were able develop such a close relationship. As a practical matter, it helped McCullers when Tennessee encouraged her to make stage adaptations of her fiction. It isn't clear that Tennessee got much benefit from the relationship, though, at the time, it may have enhanced his professional reputation to be associated with her. I was touched when reading the Dearborn biography that Tennessee encouraged McCullers to get psychiatric help and even recommended a therapist. 

I think that the fiction and stage scenes in New York City were a lot more dynamic in the '40s and '50s than they are today. It was all really quite messy for those who participated in it, but people like Tennessee and McCullers seem to have had more fun than the current participants, who are likely to be operating under the constraints of boring corporate overlords now.

Diary

I've been reading Shelley: The Pursuit, by Richard Holmes, and, though I thought I'd finish it, I've just decided to give up. The book was first published in 1974, when Holmes was young, and apparently a Shelley fanatic. While I do believe that Shelley was a good poet, his life was so nerve-racking that it's too painful for me to read about it in the slow-motion manner of this volume. You have to wade through his juvenile correspondences and put up with his ridiculously poor judgement in the first hundred pages – and there are still more than six-hundred pages to go! At the age of eighteen he entered his father's alma mater, University College, Oxford, but was expelled, along with his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, after writing and distributing the pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, before completing his first year. At the age of nineteen he persuaded a friend of one of his sisters, Harriet Westbrook, to marry him. She was sixteen at the time. They were married in Edinburgh and lived briefly in York – with Hogg. Looking ahead, after Harriet had a child with Shelley and another on the way, he abandoned her for Mary Godwin, whom he married. Harriet drowned herself when she was twenty-one – and so on. Even though Shelley himself only lived to the age of twenty-nine, I don't think that I can take any more of this. This isn't a criticism of Richard Holmes – I just seem to intensely dislike Shelley as a person.

So I'm still on the lookout for something to read. At the moment I'm fairly cabin-bound, because there has been a lot of snow. I've also been unenthusiastically following the Trump phenomenon. I think that he's so bad that even the conservative supreme court may be forced to act against him. The Democrats are gradually building up some gumption, and I think that we may be close to the nadir right now. Meanwhile, I've been able to find some old films that continue to entertain me.

Diary

Ordinarily I would have found an appropriate book and be commenting on it by now, but there is a hit-and-miss aspect to finding the right book, and it can be extremely time-consuming.  For example, I had no idea that I would like the biography of Carson McCullers as much as I did, and it turned out to be one of my favorites of 2024. My scientific interests are mainly focused on evolutionary biology, and new findings in that field emerge very slowly: one might die waiting for new revelations. I am currently reading a short book by Rosemary Ashton which analyses George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. I like Ashton a lot, and she understands George Eliot very well, but I don't consider that novel to be one of Eliot's best: it seems to appeal more to women than to men, and Simone de Beauvoir loved it. I'm also starting on an old biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I think has more substance, at least in terms of the number of pages. Shelley is not one of my favorite poets, though he is probably more interesting than Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden or Ted Hughes. I liked him in 1974 at the time of my wedding, and I had the best man read "Mutability." That turned out to be an appropriate poem for a marriage that lasted eleven years. As far as poets go, from a biographical standpoint, they can be more interesting than others if they write well, are hyperactive and die young. That sort of applies to Carson McCullers too. Though this is a cliché, there is a fine line between creative genius and craziness, and, for example, I don't think that Beethoven was someone whom I would want to know personally. I don't think that Shelley was crazy, and he is associated with a few others I've been reading about. His wife, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein and was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose biography I read some time ago. And the Shelleys were both influenced by Rousseau. They have many English literary connections, including Shelley's friendship with Leigh Hunt, who later became a friend of G.H. Lewes, making tenuous connections with George Eliot and Charles Darwin. These kinds of connections add an interesting density to the subject matter that rarely occurs in the U.S. There was an intense cultural density in London and Paris, and the only American city that comes close is New York.

My evening entertainment continues to be short snippets of good films. I'm currently watching "Babette's Feast," which I think is very good, though it is very slowly paced. Then I'll probably rewatch "It Happened One Night" and "Annie Hall," which I like a lot but haven't seen in years. I continue to watch the evening news, but, because of the Trump phenomenon, I frequently mute it and sometimes just turn it off. I can only take so much of Trump, who seems like a talking orangutan, especially with his friend, Elon Musk, the talking chimpanzee. I also find the interviews with Trump supporters in congress insufferable and just turn them off. I am reminded of Trump's complaint that modern toilets don't flush well, and think to myself that, with all of his Republican supporters in Washington, he must have the cleanest anus in the world and only needs a toilet for urination. Trump and Musk seem to be at the center of the largest disinformation campaign in American history, and I think that they should both be in jail now. As an investor, I find them both quite dangerous, and I'm now seriously considering investing in gold for the first time. Although I think that the political situation will eventually correct itself, this is probably the first time in American history with a simultaneously corrupt president, congress and supreme court. You have to be intellectually handicapped not to notice this – but, unfortunately, Americans have always been intellectually handicapped if you believe H.L. Mencken.

This winter is turning out to be more normal for Vermont, and there has been snow on the ground most of the time, with temperatures below zero occasionally. The bird feeder is very popular now, and I may have to buy some more sunflower kernels soon.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I just watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the first time in many years and thought I'd write about it today. The film seems to be a little different from the novel, perhaps because it may be based on a play that had been based on the novel. This makes the main characters sharply-focused, and the acting and directing skills necessary to make it were a little more demanding than in the case of most films. The popularity of films and plays can be social phenomena in themselves and in some cases bear little relation to the intentions of the author. When I was in college, the Samuel Beckett play, "Waiting for Godot," was wildly popular and had made Beckett famous; reading about it now, it seems that the play became popular primarily because viewers read their own meanings into it, and those meanings were not ones intended by Beckett, who, before that play, had been an obscure Irish writer. When I saw a college production of it, it didn't make much sense to me. A similar phenomenon can occur with films, and I don't think that Ken Kesey, the author of the novel, particularly approved of the film. Popular films and plays can take on a life of their own in relation to the intent of the original author, and, as I've said, I think that the best literary works shouldn't have film versions. However, I think that Kesey was a run-of-the-mill participant in the Beat movement, which, though it played an important role in American arts from the postwar years up until the 1960's, doesn't have much of a discernable legacy in the present. There may still be some surviving elements in jazz, in writers such as László Krasznahorkai, the Hungarian, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, who died in 2021, and perhaps even in the early music of Bob Dylan, but for the most part the Beats are ancient history already.

I think that this film may have an added dimension because, as I wrote earlier, the director was a Czech, Miloš Forman. Jack Nicholson may have been given the part of Randle McMurphy based on his participation in the film "Easy Rider," released in 1969. That film, I think, though a low-budget one, contains anti-establishment elements that could be said to carry over into "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Forman came from an anti-totalitarian arts environment in the Eastern Bloc, working roughly in the same tradition as Milan Kundera and perhaps some of the early Soviet dissident writers. Being a dissident in Eastern Europe is quite different from being a dissident in the U.S.: Alexei Navalny, an enemy of Vladimir Putin, recently died at the age of forty-seven, whereas Bob Dylan, who once wrote protest songs, is now eighty-three years old and a multimillionaire. 

The story line of this film is fairly simple. McMurphy is a prisoner in Oregon who had been found guilty of having sex with a minor, though he had denied knowing her age. Not liking prison, he was able to get himself transferred to a psychiatric hospital. His ward at the hospital is managed by Nurse Ratched, who has been maintaining an orderly environment with strict rules and a regular medication schedule for patients. The patients have a diverse range of psychiatric symptoms: some have severe symptoms and clearly could not function on their own in society, whereas a majority are relatively normal and are there as a matter of personal choice. Nurse Ratched administers a ludicrous group therapy session in which several of the patients don't have the slightest idea what is going on. McMurphy completely disrupts the environment by developing relationships with some of the patients and encouraging them to be more adventurous. One day, he and a group escape by stealing a bus and then stealing a boat to go fishing in the Pacific Ocean. He also arranges to bring along one of his girlfriends. Later, he sets up a large party after hours, with two of his girlfriends and a lot of booze smuggled in. One of his friends, Billy Bibbit, who has a terrible stutter, ends up sleeping with one of the girlfriends. When Nurse Ratched arrives in the morning, the ward is in shambles, and she finds Billy in bed with the woman. After she threatens to tell Billy's mother, he commits suicide by slitting his throat with a piece of broken glass. McMurphy becomes enraged and attempts to strangle Ratched, but he is pulled off her by the attendants.

In the course of his stay, McMurphy develops a close relationship with Chief, a tall Native American who has been pretending to be mute and deaf. When McMurphy realizes this, they begin to talk in private. He plans to escape with McMurphy at some point. After the strangulation incident, for which Ratched gets a neck brace, McMurphy is taken away. It isn't clear what happened to him until the end. He is returned to the ward at night. When Chief sees that he has been lobotomized, he suffocates him with a pillow and then breaks out by lifting up a large sink and throwing it through a window. In the final scene, he is shown running toward a forest.

Although I suppose that there are several ways that one might interpret this film, I prefer to see it as a critique of how American society employs thought control techniques in order to maintain a docile conformity in American life. While McMurphy does have some antisocial tendencies, in this film he engages his community in a way that they mostly appreciate and from which they benefit. This appeals to me because I have always been annoyed by the mindless conformity within the U.S. I think that this view of the film is supported by the fact that the hospital staff decides that McMurphy has to be permanently disabled by brain surgery when they could simply have returned him to prison. I think that some viewers make out Nurse Ratched to be a heartless villain, whereas I see her as an ordinary American who is just doing what she thinks is her job, which happens to encourage conformity and limited self-expression. If you ever wonder why political developments follow the direction that they do in this country, you can find clues in this film. So, overall, I still think that this to be one of the best American films, which includes the script, the acting and the filming.

The Current Situation

Since I'm still having a lot of trouble finding something to read, I thought that I'd write a bit about the world situation, particularly the return of the chaos-inducing Donald Trump, and what this means for all of us. There is a palpable sense of despair and panic at the moment, and I'm sure that millions of people would like assurances or guidance of some sort. 

First, let me specifically describe how I see Donald Trump. I see him as a stupid person who has been obsessed for most of his life with being perceived as important. From what I observe, he seems to have no particular talent, and he lacks the intelligence and creativity to come up with anything useful for others. In every public appearance of him that I've ever seen, he presents himself as a successful executive whom others flock to for advice. But this is all made-up, and no savvy people take him seriously. As a result, he became surrounded by sycophants who were generally also stupid, and, particularly after he was coached by Roy Cohn, he became extremely hard-nosed, is accustomed to using his underlings to do his dirty work for him, and he also became comfortable lying constantly. It seems that his primary business tactic was to work with small players for services and underpay them in order to maintain a profitable business. His main skill, to this day, is the avoidance of paying full prices for services that he has commissioned. Because of his enormous inheritance from his father, it was easy for him to win court cases against people who lacked his resources. As a matter of habit, he has continued the same technique right up to the present, and because no other person as unscrupulous as he is had ever reached his political level in the U.S. before, he was able to evade jail time for obvious crimes. In historical terms, one would expect that he would be in jail now.

The other aspect of Trump's ascent is the general political entropy that has occurred in the U.S. since about 1993. When business-friendliness became popular in both parties, the power of money gradually took over politics in the U.S. This is more conspicuous today than ever with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Rupert Murdoch, among others, attending the second inauguration of Trump. This isn't a real show of support and simply reflects a calculated attempt to benefit their businesses. In private, to them Trump fits the definition of a useful idiot. To be fair though, I also have to point out that the tech billionaires have their own set of psychological deficiencies. The point really is that the U.S. was not originally intended to be the world headquarters for pathological money-grubbers, and this is the spectacle that we're witnessing now.

I'm not about to predict world history for the next one-hundred years, but it isn't that hard to see how things will end for Trump. The rule of thumb is probably "Once an idiot, always an idiot." This means that Trump isn't about to successfully create a new world order for oligarchs. The more likely scenario is that Trump will completely screw things up, because that is what he usually does. He doesn't have a coherent ideology, and, for the billionaires, this is just a temporarily convenient arrangement for them. Because Trump doesn't understand or care about the needs of others, it isn't possible for him to intentionally make a positive contribution to society. This means that it is impossible for him to have a positive legacy when he leaves office. Only he and his friends will benefit, there will be no useful policies enacted, and the U.S. federal government may be left in shambles. The people who voted for him will generally be worse-off, and he and his advisors will probably continue to be charged with crimes. The powerful people who are supporting him now have already prepared their justifications and alibis, and the world will move on. No significant new world alliances will be formed, and within four years, Trump will have permanently departed. His health seems to be poor, and he could potentially die from natural causes while still in office. People like him are not usually assassinated, but that is also a possibility.

I won't belabor my points and will just say that Trump will eventually be remembered as the stupid fat guy who screwed things up for the world for a few years. If you can just sit tight and weather this, you should be fine. There are still real questions about where new technology is taking us, whether climate change will be addressed, etc., but that has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Diary

I've been reading Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen, which I think is good, but I haven't become excited enough to plow through it. It is probably a lot more interesting than the film, with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which I vaguely recall seeing long ago. The film is said to take many liberties with the book. Dinesen, who was Danish, writes well and is skilled at capturing the feel of the natives and the land. It is a memoir of her years, from 1913 to 1931, at a 4500-acre coffee farm near Nairobi. The farm was one hundred miles from the equator, but at an elevation of six thousand feet, making the climate quite unusual. It is not a particularly happy story, because she contracted syphilis from her husband, who managed the farm poorly and divorced her, and she never recovered fully from the illness. The farm eventually failed, and she left. She did have a romance with a neighbor, an English soldier, but he died in a plane crash in 1929. As I wrote earlier, she had lunch with Carson McCullers and Marilyn Monroe in 1959 while visiting the U.S. I think that this book may have been the inspiration for The Farm in the Green Mountains, by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, which I discussed earlier, because there are stylistic similarities. This would also explain why Alice and her husband, two Germans, suddenly became enthusiastic about becoming Vermont farmers. Obviously, rural Vermont during the 1940's was not as exotic as rural Kenya during this earlier period. Nevertheless, even though Out of Africa is well-written, I think it would appeal more to a cultural anthropologist or to a historian of colonialism in Africa than to me. For this reason, I am setting it aside and may or may not resume reading it at a later date. 

I am still a little burnt out on the biography/memoir genres and plan to stay on scientific/theoretical books for the time being. I continue to look for biographies but haven't found an appealing one recently. As far as my other activities are concerned, my investment survival instincts have been triggered by the looming commencement of the second Trump administration. He didn't do much damage during his first term, because the economy wasn't bad and the pandemic was the main issue. He mishandled the pandemic, and there would probably have been vaccines whether he was president or not. This time it looks as if there may be a larger window for him to cause economic and diplomatic chaos. For this reason, I sold all of my stocks last Friday and am waiting to see how things play out beginning next week. I managed to make large profits on Nvidia and the four main quantum computing stocks, which all plunged today. I would hate to see a significant economic downturn, but it would probably be worth it if it resulted in the removal of Donald Trump and ended the MAGA movement. Trump isn't even in office yet, and Steve Bannon is already attacking Elon Musk. I find it embarrassing to live in a country where Donald Trump and Elon Musk dominate the news media. As far as investments go, I think that Nvidia will pick up again, but that actual advances in quantum computing may be years away, and the recent run-up was primarily a meme-stock phenomenon.

The winter is turning out nice and white, with an almost continuous light snowfall for several days. The total accumulation hasn't been much, and I've only cleared the driveway twice so far. There is plenty of wildlife to watch. Deer come through the yard to eat dried fruit from one of the trees. Yesterday morning, a red fox chased a squirrel by the house. The squirrel successfully jumped onto the house and escaped.

Diary

With a fifty percent reduction in the number of household members, things get quite slow here during the holidays. However, I do have close relatives nearby, so there is always some activity. I haven't felt much like reading but will be starting again shortly; I recently gave up on another book. I've been watching a free MasterClass presentation by Jane Goodall. I like her and mostly agree with her, but I already know almost everything that she's saying. I was mainly interested in her early life, and found that an extremely fortuitous sequence of events led to her career success. If she hadn't made her way to Africa in 1957 and accidentally met Louis Leakey, you may never have heard of her. I was surprised that there was practically no research on chimpanzees at that time, and she was probably the first person to notice that chimpanzees are essentially the same as humans socially. This, along with genetic studies, eventually led to a vast improvement in our understanding of human evolution, though she is an ethologist and isn't particularly interested in that line of research. The origin of the divergence between chimpanzees and humans seems to have been that our ancestors were more environmentally stressed and began to occupy savannahs, whereas chimpanzees remained in forests. When this occurred, hominids developed bipedal gait. Because of their increased mobility and stresses, they became more cooperative and developed language. Although she is slightly New Agey, Goodall's views are very similar to those of other naturalists, such as E.O. Wilson. It is also quite clear that she despises much of contemporary life because of its environmental destruction and mass consumption. Though she doesn't quite say it, she doesn't approve of the American lifestyle at all. She grew up in England during World War II and became accustomed to rationing, and you can see in her a simmering hatred of corporate greed and consumer waste. We need many more people like her who dedicate their later lives to saving the planet. She doesn't put it this way, but if aliens were to visit Earth today, they would conclude that it has a toxic infestation of humans. I still have several more segments left to watch, which are mainly about environmental activism.

I have also been watching news coverage of the Jimmy Carter legacy, and he was quite different from subsequent presidents, mostly in a positive way. He didn't do well in office, but that was mainly due to bad luck. He inherited high inflation from the Republicans: when I bought my first house in 1980, the mortgage rate was thirteen percent! He also had geopolitical problems with Iran. However, he did a very good job negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel. Overall, it didn't help him that he was a complete outsider in Washington, and his staff was referred to as the "Georgia Mafia." Nevertheless, his Christian values, intelligence and work ethic, I think, made him a better person than any of his successors. It also helped that he had a supportive wife from his hometown. Who would want to be married to Nancy Reagan or Melania Trump? Although I'm an atheist, I've always noticed that people who adopt actual Christian values usually are better than other Americans. One of the greatest social problems of today is that self-identified Christians in the U.S. don't seem to see that Donald Trump is completely lacking in Christian values, and if it wasn't for Trump's glaring stupidity, it would be tempting to call him the leader of a satanic cult. As a thought experiment, try imagining him volunteering for Habitat for Humanity after he leaves office: picture Donald and Melania holding hammers and building houses for poor people. Dream on.

At the moment I don't have any house issues, which up to now occupied much of my time. Yesterday I added a clothesline to the back porch in case I need it. If everything keeps going smoothly, I may have to recruit some mice to start another mouse infestation just to keep busy. I have a little more to do on weekdays. I am following the stock market and am currently invested in AI and quantum computing. It would be nice if there were another meme stock rally, but that seems unlikely under the current conditions.