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's mother was from Czechoslovakia and another's 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 "ethnicity" and "community" 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 because I grew 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 was already dead, 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 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 exploration and know my English background fairly well, as far back as 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 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 variety, we probably have greater affinities to people who are closer 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 far 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.