July 2024
The Last Arcadia. An oddity of this election season is that nobody — well,
nobody in my admittedly partial reading and viewing — has mentioned the Presidential election of nineteen twenty-four, one hundred
years ago.
Garland S. Tucker III wrote a rather good book about that election. He pointed out how peculiar it looks in retrospect: both major-party candidates, Republican and Democrat, were conservatives!
I reviewed Tucker's book in October 2010. Here's the opening paragraph from my review:
The 1924 presidential election was, on the face of it, a snoozer. The major-party candidates were Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democrat). Both were conservative — sensationally so by today's standards. As Garland Tucker notes in this enjoyable and informative book: "There were … very few philosophical differences between Davis and Coolidge." Both men thought that federal power should intrude as little as possible into the life of the nation. Both favored minimal taxation, wanted the states left to conduct their own affairs where the Constitution did not forbid their doing so, saw America's international role in terms of diplomatic sweet nothings, and believed that "to tax one person, class or section to provide revenue for another is … robbery" (Davis) and that "the chief business of the American people is business" (Coolidge).
Not for nothing did British historian Paul Johnson, in his book Modern Times, title the chapter on 1920s America "The Last Arcadia."
Having given you the opening of my review, I should end this segment with the closing:
Here is a well-researched, well-structured narrative of classic conservative principles in action at the highest levels of politics. Along the way we get thoughtful pen-portraits of two great American gentlemen, men of the highest honor and integrity, both of whom believed, in the words of Coolidge, that "unless there abides in [the people] the spirit of industry and thrift, of sacrifice and self-denial, of courage and enterprise, and a belief in the reality of truth and justice, all the efforts of the Government will be in vain."
What a falling off was there!
Biden's choice, and Coolidge's. Calvin Coolidge won the 1924 election of course, and
served his first full term. (He'd advanced from Vice
President to President in August 1923 following the sudden death of Warren Harding.)
He could, under the Constitution, have run in 1928 for a second full term, but like Joe Biden he chose not to.
In Biden's case the word "chose" there belongs in inverted commas. Biden's decision was made with either Barack or Michelle Obama — possibly both — holding a gun, or guns, to his head.
Coolidge's withdrawal was genuinely voluntary. The way he made it known was very Coolidgean. Here's the story, slightly edited, as told in Claude Fuess' biography Calvin Coolidge, The Man from Vermont.
It's the summer of 1927. The Coolidges were vacationing at a game lodge in the Black Hills of South Dakota, 32 miles from Rapid City.
In late July, 1927, the President summoned Sanders [i.e. his Secretary, Everett Sanders] to his improvised office in the southeast corner of the high-school building in Rapid City, invited him to sit down, and then said in a perfectly natural voice, "Now — I am not going to run for President." Sanders was too much astonished to reply, and Coolidge continued, "If I should serve as President again, I should serve almost ten years, which is too long for a President in this country." Sanders answered, "I think the people will be disappointed." Coolidge then handed Sanders a slip of paper on which was written, in blue pencil, the sentence, "I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight," — twelve words …
A full complement of White House correspondents from the newspapers were of course in Rapid City, reporting on the President. A few days after the above, on August 2nd:
Coolidge … at the end of his regular nine o'clock conference with the newspapermen, remarked casually, "If you will return at twelve o'clock, there will be an additional statement."
About eleven-thirty, after attending to his routine mail, Coolidge called Sanders into his office, picked up his pencil, and wrote in a neat hand on a small sheet from a memorandum pad the same words that Sanders had already seen, "I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight." "Take this," he said, "and about ten minutes before twelve call in Mr. Geisser, have him run off a number of these lines on legal-sized paper, five or six on a sheet, with carbons enough to supply the newspapermen, and some to spare. Then bring the sheets to me uncut." Sanders retired to his own quarters and summoned Erwin C. Geisser, the President's personal stenographer, who, although visibly much affected, followed implicitly the instructions. Sanders took the sheets to the President, who picked a pair of shears out of the desk drawer and cut painstakingly through the paper, making neat little slips, perhaps two inches in width. He then said, "I am going to hand these out myself; I am going to give them to the newspapermen, without comment, from this side of the desk. I want you to stand at the door and not permit anyone to leave until each of them has a slip, so that they may have an even chance."
So it went. At the appointed time:
The President told the newspapermen that the line would form on the left, and then handed to each in turn a slip of paper. When Sanders opened the outer door, there was a wild scramble for the nearest telegraph office and long-distance telephone. The excitement which ensued did not die out for many months.
That was our Presidential politics and its coverage ninety-seven years ago. What a … Oh wait, I already did that.
The Cycle of Life. Excuse me; I'm still a bit death-haunted after
last month's funeral.
As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.
Too damn true, James. The least I could do, but mostly don't, is record the passings.
Of Carol Iannone, for example, an editor at Academic Questions, house organ of the National Association of Scholars. I knew Carol for many years. She occasionally reached out to me for a contribution to the journal.
We were both attendees at Mike Berman's "R-R Ranch" monthly Monday-night dinner club in Manhattan for the two or three years it lasted. The "R-R" stood for "Race Realism," but Mike told inquiring outsiders and the restaurant that hosted us it was a tribute to Roy Rogers … until the restaurant got wise and banned us.
Carol was fun to be with, always bright and cheerful. Steve Balch wrote a moving obituary of her at nas.org:
Yesterday [Jan. 3, 2024] the National Association of Scholars (NAS) learned that Carol Iannone had passed away in her Manhattan apartment sometime during the holiday season. It's heartbreaking news. She was that rare chimera, the hardened idealist, coupling an innocence ever shocked by the world as it is, to a tough-minded tenacity that never relented in fighting back.
I should have published a tribute of my own at VDARE.com (which once cross-posted a short article of Carol's), but … something else got in the way. Sorry, Carol.
And then Ray Wolters, who died in December 2020. I knew Ray and his wife Mary well; we met several times at dissident-right gatherings. Jared Taylor posted an eloquent obituary of Ray at VDARE.com, and James Fulford posted a good memorial summary of VDARE's engagement with Ray.
Again, though, I wish I had added something more personal, the more so since learning the other day that Mary Wolters has passed away. Another bright, cheerful American lady gone; "still sharp of mind and independent, at one of her favorite places," I am told, doing sudoku and keenly following the news of the previous day's attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Rest in peace, Mary.
But then, just as my mood is threatening to transition from gloomy to morbid, I get a reminder of the full Cycle of Life.
So it was this month. That funeral last month was of the neighbor who lived next-door to our East. On the other side, immediately to our West, is another family, somewhat younger: Dad, Mom, two daughters. On July 24th they welcomed a new arrival, a baby boy. Congratulations!
It's irrational, I know, but I can't help thinking some kind of balance has been restored.
Chiang Kai-shek's marriage. Sortly after
Jonathan Fenby's
biography of Chiang Kai-shek came out in December 2003 I published
an appreciative review of it. Chiang was a person it's
hard to like, but he had an eventful life of great importance in the development of 20th-century China.
Chiang was a diarist, although a far more diligent one than me. From 1917 to 1972 — that is, from ages 29 to 85 — he kept a full account of his thoughts and activities. The diaries still exist, but they have had a checkered career since Chiang's death in 1975.
In 2004 most of them were deposited at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University by the widow of Eddie, Chiang's grandson. The Chiang family retained ownership and imposed some conditions on access and quotation rights but the diaries were a banquet for China scholars, although unfortunately too late for Fenby.
Last year, after a decade of legal wrangling between Stanford, the Chiang family, and the Taiwan government, Stanford returned the diaries to be deposited in Taiwan's national archives.
The diaries were at Stanford all those years, though, and the Taiwan archivists will make copies available on request; so more recent biographies of Chiang have better claims to accuracy than Fenby's.
Here's the latest one: originally written in Russian but now out in an English translation by Steven I. Levine: Victorious in Defeat: The Life and Times of Chiang Kai-shek, China, 1887-1974 by Alexander V. Pantsov.
I haven't purchased it, and probably won't; one biography of the Generalissimo is enough for a non-scholar. I'm working here from a review — a review of Levine's translation of Pantsov's book: pay attention! — by Parks M. Coble in the July 2024 edition of The China Journal.
I mention all this by way of offering a correction — more precisely, a revised opinion.
In my 2004 review of Jonathan Fenby's book I ventured some unkind remarks about Chiang's third wife Soong Mei-ling, and about their marriage, which I had always assumed was a loveless diplomatic move to enhance Chiang's access to the U.S.A. (Mei-ling was educated here. She spoke English with a Georgia accent.)
My unkind remarks:
Though plainly a very intelligent woman, and possessed of an icy kind of prettiness, Mei-ling was also calculating, manipulative, vindictive, a hypochondriac, and a crashing snob.
On the much-debated question of whether the Missimo and the Generalissimo ever performed the conjugal act together, Fenby's account of the marriage reinforced my impression that they probably did not, though it is unlikely we shall ever know for sure.
In the China Journal review I just read, Parks Coble's review of Alexander Pantsov's book, the reviewer writes this:
Pantsov concludes that the two had a loving relationship but not one without conflict. Their marriage was shadowed by a failure — it did not produce children. Pantsov's approach is to recount virtually all of the speculation that has appeared over the years. Was Chiang impotent because of a childhood accident? Or sterile because of a sexually transmitted disease? He finally accepts a report that Meiling suffered miscarriages.
With all that access to the diaries, Pantsov's narrative is more likely to be accurate than Fenby's. I shall therefore revise my opinion. Most likely the Chiangs' was not a sexless marriage.
(It's infantile, I know, to make fun of people's names, but with conjugal relations thus in mind, I can't help wondering: Does Alexander Pantsov's wife have the maiden name Nikersov? Sorry! Sorry!)
Death in the driveway. Two years ago the Derbyshires acquired
a cat, name of Mimi. She is now well settled in. There is only
a very occasionsl hissing-growling contest with Basil, Hound
of the Derbyshires.
Mimi is exceptionally pretty. She is of the type called "calico," softly colored fur above and lovely super-soft white fur below. She is something of a princess, though; she knows her own beauty, and can be seductive when she wants to get her way.
Recently we have discovered another side of Mimi. With our neighbors' agreement, we let her out to roam around the gardens at night and (we presume) socialize with other cats.
Then one morning I walked up my driveway to fetch something from the garage when I saw what looked like two dead rats lying there. On closer inspection they turned out to be baby rabbits.
Could our pretty, delicate, haughty Mimi be a child-killer? Basil, who's been with us five years now, has never displayed any homicidal or cuniculicidal tendencies. We refused to believe it. A neighbor tried to reassure us: "Probably a raccoon got into your yard …"
It happened a couple more times. We consoled ourselves with the raccoon theory. Then one day there was a baby-rabbit corpse in the basement. That had to be Mimi.
I guess it's good to be reminded that these cute, loving, furry little companions are still beasts who, like all beasts — including our own species — kill for food and, sometimes, just for sport.
An odd pairing. The May 2006 issue of The New Criterion has
an excellent and very illuminating article by Jeffrey Meyers on one of
the oddest ever pairings of literary gents: that between Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Johnson.
"Pairing" is not really the right word. For one thing, the two gents were born 190 years apart, so they had no personal relationship, and Nabokov's keen appreciation of Johnson was perforce unrequited. Even if they had been coevals, though, there would have been nothing symmetrical about the relationship. Nabokov was not the kind of writer Johnson admired, nor even approved of.
Jeffrey Meyers states the paradox in his opening words.
Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov seem diametrically opposed. The quintessential Englishman, the epitome of the eighteenth-century "Age of Johnson," favored lofty abstractions, moralistic content and elaborate Latinate style. Modern readers often assume that his works are impenetrable: his criticism misguided, his poetry prosaic, his essays didactic. Nabokov, by contrast, is the embodiment of the witty, urbane, and cosmopolitan modern writer. An uprooted victim of violent revolution, a scientist and scholar, he wandered across two continents and wrote, in two languages, subtly sophisticated, exquisitely stylish, and teasingly elusive books. Yet Nabokov perceived the greatness of and was strangely drawn to Johnson, whose appearance, character, and writings profoundly influenced the creation of his tragi-comic masterpiece, Pale Fire (1962).
Do modern readers really assume that Johnson's works are "impenetrable"? Have our literary tastes really regressed so far? I'll take Jeffrey Meyers' word for it; he's better acquainted with the state of affairs than I am. (He wrote a rather good biography of Johnson; I reviewed it in 2008.)
Johnson's criticism "misguided"? This month sees the 350th anniversary of Paradise Lost (in its final form). It was the case well into the twenty-first century — again, I'm out of touch — that you didn't get very far into a conversation about Milton's epic with a decently well-read counterparty before one or other of you quoted Johnson's observation that, "None ever wished it longer."
Johnson is surely correct to a high order of approximation. I mean, there might, in these three and a half centuries, have been a handful of readers who did wish Paradise Lost longer, but they are massively outnumbered by Johnson's faction (to which I belong).
And Johnson's poetry "prosaic"? At its best, as in the lines On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet, it was, er, poetic to a high degree. The Vanity of Human Wishes is a towering masterpiece of pessimism in verse:
How rarely Reason guides the stubborn Choice,
Rules the bold Hand, or prompts the suppliant Voice,
How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppress'd,
When Vengeance listens to the Fool's Request.
All right, I'm a Johnson fan. In my late-adolescent and young-adult years — before I discovered Johnson — I was somewhat of a Nabokov fan. Much later, following the fiftieth anniversary of Lolita being published, I wrote a long appreciation of it for National Review.
I read Nabokov's Pale Fire around age twenty, again before any real acquaintance with Samuel Johnson. I found it a difficult book. "Teasingly elusive"? Oh yeah. (And the only novel I know that comes with an index.)
I kept trying with Nabokov, though. Checking with the bibliography at Nabokov's Wikipedia page, I have read around a third of the man's books, although I retain only scattered vague memories of most. (An exception is his luminous memoir Speak, Memory.)
Most recently I acquired, free of charge (it was a book give-away at my local railroad station) the complete short stories, 1995 hardback edition. I've picked it up and read a story or two in idle moments. There are 65 in the book altogether; my bookmark tells me I have read the first 43.
The stories are in chronological order, from 1921 to 1958. (Nabokov was born in 1899.) Practically all those I've read are from Nabokov's years as an emigré in Berlin, 1922-1937. The early ones are pretty dire, impressionistic blurs; around number 30 or so there starts to be some narrative zest. If I make it through all 65 I'll file a report.
So I know Johnson and Nabokov sufficiently well to share Jeffrey Meyers' fascination with Nabokov's fascination with Johnson. Perhaps I'll give Pale Fire another try. I really should, having cribbed the same line from Shakespeare for a novel title.
In short. Is there still a market for short stories? When someone mentions one
in conversation — most recently, in my conversations, Heinlein's
All You Zombies — it's always
something written decades ago (in that case, 1959). The last one I can recall mentioning in my online postings was Irwin Shaw's
The Mannichon Solution (1967).
Short stories used to be much more a thing. In the 1950s my mother subscribed to a British short-story magazine called Argosy. Sometimes she would read the stories to me. The sci-fi magazines I wallowed in through my adolescence generally had one long story or serial and half a dozen short stories (like All You Zombies).
I have short-story collections on my shelves: Poe, Kipling, Saki, James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Irwin Shaw, Noël Coward (yes, he wrote stories as well as songs), … I have a nodding acquaintance with short-story writers of other languages, mainly of course in translation: Maupassant, Gogol, Pú Sōnglíng, …
Who's writing short stories now? Anybody?
Math Corner. The International Mathematical Olympiad is still a redoubt of
pure meritocracy. I don't know how they keep it that way against the massed legions of race'n'sex denialism, but I'm grateful to them for doing
so.
This year's IMO was held from July 11th to 22nd in the lovely old English city of Bath. In competition with 107 other countries, the six-member U.S.A. team placed first! My hearty congratulations to them.
You have of course been waiting for the team members' names. Here they are:
Jordan Lefkowitz, 17 (Connecticut)
Krishna Pothapragada, 18 (Illinois)
Jessica Wan, 18 (Florida)
Alexander Wang, 16 (New Jersey)
Qiao (Tiger) Zhang, 16 (California)
Linus Tang, 18 (California)
Another thing that happened this month was my son Danny's 29th birthday. Danny is not a math nerd; but he is bright and curious in a general way so I thought I'd go looking for something mathematical to catch his interest, however briefly.
Caldwell & Honaker's book Prime Curios! supplied this, which was new to me and is, I think, pretty nifty.
TWENTY NINE can be written out with exactly 29 toothpicks.
So it can. Are there any other numbers for which this is true? Numbers which, I mean, can be spelled out in capital letters using a number of toothpicks equal to the number being spelled out?
No, that's not this month's brainteaser, just a bonus. Here's the brainteaser.
Brainteaser: I have borrowed this one from Catriona Shearer, who has a million of 'em. (Click on "PuzzlePages" here.)
The line segments here connect corners of the square to midpoints of the sides. What proportion of the square is yellow?