Category Archives: history

Lost Perth

10 Monday Jun 2013

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Lost Perth linked to a panorama photograph from the Perth Observatory in 1920, a wide shot of the city as it was on a particular day. To look over it, panning along as if it was something more than a photograph, is to step into a ghost city in black and white. The town of a century ago lives on, details trapped. I zoomed in as far as it would go and looked for people. For a long while, it seemed there were none, just long deserted stretches. And then I came to a huddle of people near the edge. It looks to me like a nun with some students – praying, talking, learning? They have no idea the moment is recorded from up on the hill. Perhaps one of the girls could still be alive, but probably not; she would have to be 110. Not far from that huddle are two figures in motion, blurs in the corner of the photo.

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[Thursday 3pm #28] The Hoarding Recluses: A Review of E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer and Langley”

08 Thursday Oct 2009

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CollyerHomer and Langley Collyer were two hoarding recluses who suffered notorious celebrity, at least in New York City, in the 1940s as they fought against the power company, the bank, and the city council. They lived in a large house inherited from their parents and filled it with everything they could get their hands on. Homer was blind; Langley saved years of newspapers in massive piles (‘like cotton bales’ Doctorow imagines) in case Homer ever got his sight back and wanted to catch up on the news. By the end, the paranoid brothers had set traps around the house and could barely move through the narrow passageways between junk. They died within days of each other in 1947 and compulsive hoarding is named after them – Collyer Syndrome. According to Wikipedia, 103 tonnes of rubbish was removed from their house:

Items removed from the house included baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a child’s chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old.

From such promising source material in the hands of a masterful novelist, Homer & Langley disappointed me. It feels like a novel which never takes off. Narrated by Homer, it is an episodic account of his life from childhood to the late 1970s (Doctorow has the brothers live on several decades longer than they did in real life). A gangster and a group of hippies stay with the brothers at different times, and many others come into their lives for a little time only to leave again. Doctorow doesn’t stay with any of these characters long enough for their interactions with the Collyers to take on enough significance.

The other problem is the first person narration. It doesn’t suit the story Doctorow is telling. We need a narrator who can see the significance and full eccentricity of the Collyers, rather than one to whom their life is insignificant. We need fresh eyes – and Homer has no sight at all – to describe the wonders of the hoarded house.

Perhaps the conflict with the power company and banks would have been more compelling if there was a character representing one of them, an antagonist in ongoing conflict with the Collyers, instead of a couple of faceless stand-offs at the front door.

The charms of this novel are in Homer’s philosophy of the world and his mad projects.

He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need. For five cents, Langley said, the reader will have a portrait in newsprint of our life on earth. The stories will not have overly particular details as you find in ordinary daily rags, because the real news here is of the Universal Forms of which any particular detail would be only an example. The reader will always be up to date, and au courant with what is going on. He will be assured that he reads the indispensable truths of the day including that of his own impending death, which will be dutifully recorded as a number in the blank box on the last page under the heading Obituaries. (p.49)

At moments like these, the novel brings to mind Paul Auster and the fascinating life projects of his characters.

I could find only one non-fiction book written about the Collyers; it’s called Ghosty men : the strange but true story of the Collyer brothers by Franz Lidz.

[Thursday 3pm #21] Belle Costa Da Greene : ‘Girl Librarian’

20 Thursday Aug 2009

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bellegreeneAn Illuminated Life : Belle Costa Da Greene’s Journey From Prejudice to Privilege / Heidi Ardizzone (Norton, 2007)

Pierpont Morgan’s librarian, Belle Costa Da Greene (1879-1950) is a fascinating woman. Her parents were of mixed ancestry – black and white. Her father, Richard Greener, was the first black graduate of Harvard. After early success, he was involved in scandal while ambassador to Russia and returned to the US to live out his life in obscurity. He had become estranged from the rest of his family, who wanted to ‘pass’ as white, while he wanted to stand up for black rights.

Belle lied constantly about her life story; she told people she had Portugese ancestry, and this is what gave her such ‘exotic’ features. Her biographer Heidi Ardizzone writes:

The tactic she would take, whether regarding her ancestry or her affair with Bernard, would be one of misleading openness. Consciously or not, Belle dealt with suspicious about first her ethnicity and now her sexual behaviour by acknowledging, even drawing attention to the rumours and the questions…. This tactic of hiding in the light flirted with true exposure, but it also allowed her the appearance of frankness, which veiled her growing collection of secrets. (207)

Belle was working with Pierpont Morgan’s nephew Junius when he recommended her in 1905 for the post of librarian for Morgan’s library. Morgan had devoted himself to building up a collection of rare books and manuscripts for several years now and his basement was overflowing; he was building a library next to his house to hold his collection.

Perhaps it was Belle’s charisma that persuaded Pierpont to take her on, even though she was a woman in a very masculine world and had no formal qualifications. She proved to be the best librarian one could imagine, building the library into an incredible collection. She was, we are told, brilliant at negotiating prices on rare items, a formidable and lively personality in society both in New York and Europe. She is marked by caprice and unpredictability; at time sounding feminist and yet joining the anti-suffragette movement; shifting from pacifist to vehemently pro-war over the course of the Great War.

It would seem she didn’t want her story told. Ardizzone writes- “But in her generation Belle was not alone in scorning personal history as irrelevant, in destroying personal papers, and in maintaining very different public and private personas.” (9) In her final illness in 1950, she burned all her papers, an act that means many of her secrets will never be revealed. Indeed, it was not until 2007 that a full length biography – this one – was finally published. The biography is built on the letters Belle wrote to her lover and friend of over forty years, Bernard Berenson. He lamented that in burning the letters he sent her, she had destroyed his autobiography; he could not bring himself to do the same to hers, in spite of her request.

Bernard, then, plays a massive role in the biography. It made me think about the difficult task of reconstructing a life, and the way sources skew any portrait. Was Bernard as significant in her life as the biography suggests? We’ll never know, but I would say he probably wasn’t, that he becomes significant as the source behind the biography. He is almost like the narrator of a novel.. and yet not; the letters Ardizzone is working from them are Belle addressing herself to him. Belle is the narrator, but Bernard is the audience.

Her love affair with Bernard has its tragedy. At first, it was a chaste exchange of passionate letters; he was in Europe, she in New York. She was constrained by the shadow of the other man in her life: Pierpont Morgan himself. Morgan was jealous and possessive of her as a twisted sort of father figure in her life; he didn’t want her having affairs with any man and especially not Bernard. Indeed, he didn’t even want her marrying.

But the affair was finally consumated on a trip to Venice in 1910. Ardizzone’s narration of this is unimaginative and anticlimatic after chapters leading up to it. Belle fell pregnant and was sent to London for an abortion. ‘In 1921 she remembered the “really innocent… utter and world-excluding worship I once gave you.” She commented that her ability to have that kind of feeling for anyone ceased to exist “when I left you to go to London,” although she did not realise it at the time.’ (199)

When she returned to New York from London, she was a different woman. While once chastely flirting, she had no inhibitions any longer and, Ardizzone documents, affairs with many men.

One thing I have loved in reading this biography is the strange intersections with famous and unlikely lives. Belle’s lover Bernard Berenson was married to the daughter of the still popular evangelical devotional writer, Hannah Whitall Smith. Hannah’s daughter, Mary, did not share her mother’s morality; she instituted an open marriage with Bernard, only to regret it later when he began his long love affair with Belle. Then there was Belle’s good friend Cardinal Ratti – former head of Vatican library – who became Pope Pius XI in the 1920s. She had friends in high places.

Biographies are a strange narrative. Without the simpler narrative arc of a conventional novel, they draw toward the only ending they can : the deathbed, the funeral, the legacy. The middle of this biography feels as boring as life itself can be: the seemingly endless twists and turns of a love affair between Bernard and Belle, none of them decisive. But then things do change; her endless youth and energy desert her. She grows old, the death of her nephew in World War Two – an unacknowledged suicide – breaks her; she dies.

It was, finally, for me a fascinating story, impressively researched, a remarkable feat, to bring this woman to life in a book. Albeit truncated, distorted, with gaps we would like to fill.

[Thursday 3pm #20] The Book Collector With the Big Nose: Pierpont Morgan

13 Thursday Aug 2009

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JohnPierpontMorganPierpont Morgan (1837-1913) is a fascinating figure. My interest in him stems from his library of treasures, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. But the library, his legacy, is only the last phase in the life of a preposterous man, the king of his milieu.

He was born knowing that he would be ‘great’. His hero was Napoleon and his father was a wealthy industrialist, anticipating his own career.

In her 1999 biography, Morgan, Jean Strouse writes:

He began to keep diaries in 1850 – small “Line-a-day” books. Like most masculine journal writers of his time and social class, he was far more interested in registering what happened than in exploring subjective responses or ideas. “Sleighing, skating; beat father in backgammon,” he wrote in early January 1850. The next day, “wound 7 skeins of cotton for mother A man fell off one of the towers of the new depot & killed.” He rarely mentions his siblings. Over the following months he recorded: “Dancing school. Ladies to tea.” “Father did not come home.” “Mother ill.”… “Finished 3rd Book of Virgil. Picked some cherries.” Not even death evoked a comment: “Mr S.B. Paddock [with whom he was living] died at 10 o’clock aged 56. In evening staid home and read.”

What the diaries chiefly portray is a young mind intent on order and control. Next to the day and date printed on each page, Pierpont entered the number of days gone by and remaining for the year – on October first, for instance: ‘Days past, 274.” “To come, 91.” At the end of 1851 he tabulated “Places resided” between January and July – there were seventeen – and the diary pages convering each place. He kept lists of his income, expenses, the initials of girls he liked, and all the letters he sent and received, including postage paid. (38)

I am amazed by the detail of Morgan’s life that Strouse can give us. Most lives do not leave this many traces – childhood diaries, folders and folders of correspondence. There is barely a week of his life that Strouse cannot tell us something about. I compare it to my own family. I know almost nothing of Joseph Hobby, my great-grandfather born in the 1870s, let alone his father, a contemporary of Morgan’s. Not one letter, let alone the detail of a life, the happenings of the days, weeks and months which make it up.

Morgan was involved in some suspicious arms deals during the Civil War, financing the refurbishing of old guns bought cheaply off the army and selling them back at a large profit.

He built up an empire; he had so much money it attracted more money. He came to singlehandedly influence the stockmarket and control investment confidence.

Rhinophyma disfigured his face, a condition in which the nose spreads out red and bulbous. He didn’t want it fixed, superstitiously thinking it would lead to other conditions. He dared people not to stare at it; but he also avoided the public gaze and photographs.

He also lived in the shadow of his father, and it was only when his father died that he embarked with vigour acquiring valuable manuscripts from around the world. He treated with the spirit of competition and acquisitiveness with which he had amassed his empire and soon the basement of his mansion was overflowing with Gutenberg Bibles and rare manuscripts.

In 1906, a library was built next to his house to keep all his treasures. A tunnel connected it to his house. He hired a feisty young librarian who lied about her age and racial background, Belle Costa da Greene, who set about expanding his collection even further.

Hearings into his undue influence over the economy hastened his demise in 1913. He went travelling in Egypt afterwards and slipped into a delusional depression, convinced of conspiracies against him: ‘On the Nile in early February he slid into a delusional depression. He could not eat, had ‘horrid’ dreams, asked constantly about conspiracies, subpoenas, and citations for contempt of court, and felt, reported Louisa, that ‘the country was going to ruin, that his race was run, and his whole life work was for naught!’ (Strouse: 14) His death made headlines around the world. But who has heard of him today?

In his brilliant novel of this milleiu, Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow depicts a fascinating fictional J.P. Morgan. In Doctorow’s account, Pierpont believes himself to be the reincarnation of a special higher class of human, and tries to convince Henry Ford that he is one too. When Ford only partly joins this exclusive club of elites, Pierpont travels to Egypt alone to spend a night in a pyramid. In his absence, the finale of the novel occurs in his library.

[Thursday 3pm #15] J.S. Battye : state librarian for life

09 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by in history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009), Western Australia

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JSBattyeI’m researching James Sykes Battye (1871-1954) for my novel. He was the first state librarian in Western Australia, establishing what was then called the Victoria Public Libary, now the State Library of Western Australia.

He was only 23 when he was appointed state librarian in 1894, and incredibly he was appointed for life. He stayed on in this role – also in control of the museum and art gallery – for more than half a century, dying on the job in 1954 at age 82.

At the time of his death, the state cabinet was trying to negotiate his retirement; he apparently wanted to stay on. In her thesis on him, Celia Chesney mentions intriguingly that the cabinet was prepared to let him live on in the house attached to the library after his retirement. I am fascinated by this image of an octogenarian librarian clinging to his position, living in the library itself, having ruled the library and the cultural life of the state for the first half of the century, through two world wars and a depression.

Born into a working class Victorian family, he worked his way up the ladder of society. He was heavily involved in the freemasons, an intriguing and disturbing – though commonplace – link for men in high places in Australian society in the early twentieth century. He is best remembered today because the collection of Westraliana in the state library is named after him and because of the cyclopedia of Western Australia he compiled. (I am fascinated by the polymathic nature of prominent people in the early twentieth century; this man having his finger in so many pies is something that’s going to inform one of my characters.)

The picture I’ve got of him from my reading is an ambitious man who started the library well, building an impressive collection and engaging the interest of the public. But a long decay set in as funding dropped during the Depression and the library atrophied. He came to obstinately cling to his position, unable to relinquish the role, unable to admit to himself that his time had passed.

There are two significant sources of information on him. Firstly, the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, written by historian Fred Alexander. Alexander and Battye were not, apparently, always on good terms and one can see evidence of conflict in Alexander’s assessment of Battye’s contribution to UWA:

he rarely revealed constructive imagination and, despite a certain skill and finesse in negotiation, was no match for the subtler academic minds. Partly because of his relatively low public service standing, his achievements as ambassador for the university were limited.

Secondly, an unpublished thesis of 15000 words written for a diploma of history at UWA by Celia Chesney. Called “A man of progress : Dr James Sykes Battye”, it includes a helpful annotated bibliography and is available, of course, in the Battye Library.

[Thursday 3pm #13] A weekend of assassination texts : Libra, JFK and Death of a President

25 Thursday Jun 2009

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On Saturday, I finished DeLillo’s Libra and the Kennedy assassination was going through my mind so much, I was desperate to finally watch JFK. But Nicole had already seen it, so I also got out Death of a President as well, a mock documentary made in 2006 about the assassination of George W. Bush. Death of a President was so weak, Nicole went to bed after half an hour and I turned it off to start watching JFK. I stayed up late, but still only got halfway through. I woke up early and put it on at 7am to watch the second half, the earliest I’ve ever seen a film. I think I was dreaming about it all.

Libra and JFK make for interesting comparison. DeLillo uses the contradictions and paradoxes of the assassination and of what we know of Lee Oswald to create a complex situation and a paradoxical character, represented by the scales of Libra – a man weighing contradictory things at the same time, ready to tip one way or the other. The paradoxes make for a postmodern novel, a postmodern character, a postmodern world like DeLillo always evokes.

In JFK, Stone takes the same contradictions and paradoxes and irons them out with a much more elaborate conspiracy theory. A surface reading makes it much more convincing than DeLillo’s vision, but that is exactly because it is so neat, so unwilling to accept that the truth of JFK’s assassination might be impossible to get to.

So, for example, what are we to make of Oswald setting up a pro-Castro organisation in the same building as Guy Bannister, a far-right private detective working against Castro? For DeLillo, it is about Oswald’s own contradictions, wanting attention and taking it wherever he can get it, giving some information to FBI agents, applying for work with a  man like Guy Bannister – anything to get noticed. For DeLillo, pro- and anti- Castro forces in this context are not opposing forces, but two sides of the scales, the same type of men, disenchanted, extreme men. In Libra, Oswald doesn’t know what he actually wants, beyond being listened to, glory, vindication of his genius, of his confused view of the world. And this, in its own way, is utterly convincing.

Stone’s interpretation of the same event? Jim Garrison, the DA heading the New Orleans investigation, sees it as clear proof that Oswald is not a communist at all, but an undercover agent for a nefarious coalition of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, all three with offices within a block of the building. Which, in the context of a conspiracy thriller is, in its own way, utterly convincing.

While Libra is a brilliant novel and JFK is an excellent film, Death of a President is a competent waste of time. It has the exact feel of what a decent, uninspired documentary might be like if George W. Bush had been assassinated in 2007. As I watched, I imagined how fooled a class of sixteen year olds would be in a few years if I was an English teacher showing it to them. It has all the tedious overnarration and overexplanation of certain documentaries, intercutting each action scene with interviews with key players. Utterly convincing; but because we know none of it happened, rather boring.

It needed an edge to it. Think Woody Allen’s Zelig, the fake documentary of a man with chameleon abilities who manages to make it into every significant event of the early twentieth century. It was worthwhile because it was funny, the fake documentary had a purpose.

But they didn’t have to make this one funny. They could have made it hallucinatory and surreal, using the plausibility of the documentary style to lead the viewer not just over a tedious fake assassination but one with outrageous elements. Or it could have been political, with some interesting point about either Bush or the anti-Bush protestors, about what it meant for a country to live under his rule for eight years. But it studiously avoided doing this. It did exactly what it was trying to do and gets marks for that, but what it was trying to do was so unremarkable.

[Thursday 3pm #7] Youth and age : a review of Tolstoy’s War and Peace

14 Thursday May 2009

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War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy (1865-8; translated by Rosemary Edmonds 1958)

It’s common to hear that War and Peace contains all of life, depicting the full range of human experiences. As a reader, it also evoked the full range of reading experiences for me, from the exhiliration of acute insight that resonated with my experience of life, to boring pages I wanted to flick over; from thrilling narrative drive to moments of narrative listlessness.

I have spent so long reading it – five weeks – that I have begun to feel that I was never going to read another novel, that this was the novel which would last me the rest of my life.

My dad asked me to sum up the plot. I couldn’t do that. How about this: it’s about three Russian families in the time of the wars against Napoleon’s army between 1804 and 1812, with an epilogue set several years later?

Percy Lubbock thinks ‘War and Peace’ is a bad title and I agree. (Even though it captures the epic nature of the work and has become a cliche in itself.) Or it’s not a bad title, but it focuses attention on one half of the novel, and the less interesting part to my mind – war and peace are the backdrop for an exploration of ‘Youth and Age’. Has a ring to it, I think. Better than its insights into war are the insights into the impetuousness of youth, the mad zeal which would drive young men to throw their lives away for the sake of glory; or the dive into marriages ranging at first from the unsatisfying to the miserable; and the insights into the quiet wisdom of age, or the fastidious fussiness of it; or just the depiction of characters – particularly Pierre and Natasha – moving from youth and into age.

In the first half, as possible ideas for this review ran through my head, I was going to write how remarkable it is that Tolstoy avoids the intrusiveness of so much nineteenth century writing; he doesn’t intervene with pages of boring exposition about history or culture but lets the story tell itself. And yet in the second half, Tolstoy becomes very interventionist, hammering home several key points that are worthy in themselves but are belaboured and out of place.

A lot of the problem seems to come about because Tolstoy spends so much time debating the historians of his age. He wants to rehibiliate the reputation of the commander of the Russian army, Kutuzov, who Tolstoy saw as a hero and not a fool for abandoning Moscow and refusing to directly engage the retreating French army.

He wants to prove that Napoleon was no genius.

He wants to elucidate his own theory of history and of war, that it is not made by Great Men but by inscrutable forces, the sum of millions of individual decisions which no one person can particularly influence one way or the other. A theory that sits well with contemporary views of history, but that he shows so well in his novel he doesn’t even need to explain.

In short, Tolstoy addresses the concerns of his day, the debates around the Napoleonic Wars that were going on fifty years after the event but which matter very little to most readers of War and Peace today. If only he knew that he would one day be as famous as Napolean and that readers would be more interested in the brilliance of his psychological depictions of his characters than in his contribution to historical debates.

My favourite character is Pierre. He has an ineffectual idealism; he stumbles into life. The illegitimate son of a rich prince, he receives a massive inheritance thanks to an older woman’s political acumen. He goes from being treated as a shabby, uncouth zealot to a desirable bachelor. He marries the wrong woman because she charms him; he lets himself be robbed and mistreated over and over. Stuck in a carriage with a freemason, he joins that movement with high ideals, only to find that the other members don’t share them, that the movement can’t live up to its own claims.

Perhaps the most fascinating, almost Dostoeveskian passage, involves him staying behind in Moscow as the French army invades and getting in his head the idea that he is the chosen one destined to assasinate Napoleon. Being Pierre, it doesn’t turn out right and he is captured as a prisoner of war while rescuing a baby from a fire. Perhaps I should have known that there had to be a happy ending for him; after being set free, he finally marries the woman who was meant for him all along.

Tolstoy finishes with two epilogues; the second is regrettable, a long meditation on war and history not at home in a novel at all. But the first is fascinating, a glimpse into the lives of the characters years later, as the surviving ones come together, now with children, another generation arising, and yet so many of the old quirks and problems remaining. It gives the novel an even bigger sense of expanse, a glimpse that this could keep on going on forever if only Tolstoy had more pages.

[Thursday 3pm #4] The tragedy of Robert Wadlow, world’s tallest man?

23 Thursday Apr 2009

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robertwadlow1For my eighth birthday, my uncle gave me a discarded library copy of the 1983 Guinness Book of Records. It became one of my favourite books. To my child mind, conditioned by test scores and sports statistics, it told the whole story of the world, of everything important.

One of the few records I remember vividly was that of the world’s tallest man, Robert Wadlow. The book featured a photograph of a plastic model of him, with Britian’s tallest living man and a man of average height standing next to it. At 8 foot 11 inches or 282 cm (and of course I memorised this measurement) he stood over a metre taller than a typical man.

He seemed a figure from the distant past, with nothing more to be known of him than his height, his date of birth in 1918 and his death at age 22. Twenty-two sounded quite old to me at eight. I wished I was the world’s tallest man and found my way into the Guinness Book of Records. Now, 22 sounds so young and I realise that he was born the year after my grandfather. And I would hate to be the world’s tallest man.

Last week I saw Robert Wadlow mentioned in passing and I went looking for him on the internet. I discovered there was so much to his story.

He was born in small town America – Alton, Illinois – and it seems the town has never got over its only claim on world attention. Today a bronze statue, life-size, of Robert is found at a local university, as well an exhibition at the museum.

Robert was normal height when he was born, but started growing rapidly in the first few months of his life because of an over-active pituitary gland. He attracted attention in newsreels as the world’s tallest boy scout; but he tried to be a normal American boy, collecting stamps and joining the Freemason youth club (presumably this what one did in small town America).

One source says he was happy at high-school and lived semi-normally, but when he got to college, people were not so understanding, and he returned home after one semester.

Accounts of his life on the internet and contemporaneous media have the glow of one-dimensional quirky human interest stories. He was called the ‘gentle giant’ and the photos show him smiling. Yet the suggestion of tragedy lies beneath the facts of his life. On imdb.com, a user-contributed biography (offering no sources and complete with many spelling errors, but having a certain passionate appeal) insists he lived a miserable life:

A tragic figure who hated his size and his life. He was forced into the role of a first-class freak by his father, who paraded him around the country in a specialized Ford Model T (it had the front passenger seat removed, and Robert sat in the back.) His father quit his job as worker at an oil company to devote himself to Robert and his career. In all, Robert made 747 personal appearances around the country, appearing at everything from store grand openings to Ringling Brothers/Barnum&Bailey Circus. He was born of normal size, but early in his life he developed a problem with his pituitary gland, and by age 9, he was 6 feet tall. He lived in a racist time in America, growing up in lilly white Alton, IL. He listened to the radio a lot and followed the rise of Hitler. He was fascinated by Germany enough to switch his foreign language class in high school from Latin to German. He was experimented on for many years at Washington University in St. Louis by a doctor who was from Germany. Robert would always insist on the doctor sharing stories of his homeland. His intelligence was limited. He graduated from high school, but dropped out of college after one semester. That is when he began his career. In his first job he promoted a shoe company, which supplied him with his size 37 shoe. For most of his life he was the center of attention. He made the newsreels anually on his birthday. The Alton Telegraph, the local newspaper, often followed his life. In July 1940, in Manistee, Michagan, Robert was being paid to appear in a 4th of July parade. The tempature was sweltering and the humidity unbearable. His father wrote a book along with a ghost writer in 1945 about Robert. It was a PR puff piece which glowed with anecdotes about what a great father Robert had. But, great father, or not, Robert had an infection on his left ankle which was left untreated, and on that hot summer day, the tallest man who ever lived finished his 4 hour appearance in the parade (he rode in the back of a truck,) and when he got back to the hotel room, he collapsed, and a doctor was summoned. He lingered in the hotel room for 3 days before he died. Two beds had to be placed end to end to accomodate him. In Alton, it was reported that 30,000 people attended his funeral. Remarkable only for his size, Robert Pershing Wadlow died an unfulfilled soul.

If nothing else, the imdb.com account is a fascinating embellishment of Wadlow’s life. I can’t find any other reference to the Nazi flirtations or the experiments. The official account agrees that he did spend the last years of his life promoting shoes. The circumstances of his death are also relatively uncontested. But most accounts stress how his parents did everything they could to prevent him becoming a freak. They sued a newspaper that described him as a ‘freak’; they destroyed all his belongings upon his death (the museum claims ‘We want to continue to honor their wishes, and are displaying what items we have in our museum with pride and dignity’) and they filled his grave with concrete to prevent his body being excavated for medical experiments. I keep thinking of his body lying under all that concrete.

The only book that seems to have been published about him besides the ‘PR puff-piece’ is an Alton published one from 2003 called ‘Boy Giant’. I think his story is worth exploring in a novel. And a film.

An interesting post on Robert can be found here. A short documentary can be found here.

Strange memories of 1978

14 Sunday Sep 2008

Posted by in history, media, reading

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I just spent a delightful hour looking through a copy of The Bulletin dated 4 July 1978. More than any book or film can, it gave me a snapshot of the world three years before I was born. I find the familiarity and unfamiliarity of the bearded, big haired strangely coloured photographs and articles and advertisements fascinating.

Cassettes are a running theme. Siemens offers a free cassette explaining the benefits of their PABX telephone system – ‘Get your secretary to mail the coupon now’. Send off for the Len Evans Home Wine Tasting Pack and you receive a FREE How-To Wine Guide Cassette. At a sales conference Zig Ziglar (whose signed book I weeded from a library once) proclaims that if you don’t feed your mind with a cassette player, you’re losing $25 000 a year. (I think of The Assassination of Richard Nixon, set in the same decade, the main character obsessively listening to positive thinking cassettes.)

At the same conference, an aging Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking spoke. He’s dead now, of course. ‘There’s no problems in cemeteries,’ he told the conference. ‘Problems are a sign of life.’

There are ads for Asbestos Cement Pipelines at Port Waratah – ‘helping keep coal dust firmly in its place’. Dunhill on the inside cover – ‘Internationally acknowledged to be the finest cigarette in the world’. Craven Mild on the back cover, a golfer swinging – ‘mild as can be… yet they satisfy’.

There’s an article on the demise of the Democratic Labor Party, a strange footnote to the Cold War years, their existence finally sputtering out with Nixon’s detente with the Soviets and the rise of an exciting new party, the Democrats. I say a footnote, and yet they kept Labor out of power for a couple of decades, terrified as they were of the Communist menace. And now no Democrats either.

An article about Alan Bond selling his share in the Yanchep Sun City project to Japanese investors. I didn’t even know this story from my own city, of Bond (that ubiquitous presence in the news bulletins of my childhood in the late eighties) buying up hectares of land and creating the Yanchep suburb sixty kilometres north of Perth. Back then, WA feared being taken over by the Japanese (if not the Communists); both fears have passed away now, only to be replaced.

The gossip page is instructive, the names now a little faded – the release of ‘aging film star’ Joan Collins’ embarrassingly naked memories; a revisiting of Frank Sinatra’s visit to Australia a few years’ previously when he got on the wrong side of union boss Bob Hawke; actor Hayley Mills’ divorce (was she in Parent Trap or something? I think my mum used to talk about her) and also that of Sylvester Stallone, the one celebrity on the page who has kept his place. In another thirty years?

And then there’s an interview by distinguished British novelist V.S. Pritchett of his colleague Graham Greene, both of them reflecting on life in their seventies. I get so sad about people getting old and dying. Greene was just publishing his twentieth novel, one of his best to my eyes, The Human Factor. He published at least one more novel before dying thirteen years later in 1991. Pritchett was to live on another nineteen years, to the glorious age of ninety-seven, well into the period of my own consciousness. But I was an ignorant sixteen year old. I don’t remember him dying. He didn’t publish any books in those nearly two decades, though.

And as of this year, of course, The Bulletin, that given fact of Australian media, is no longer published.