January 2011

I am writing to express thanks and admiration to Alfred Kazin for his perceptive article on Ernest Hemingway in your April/May issue. Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker said that it will be past the year 2000 before a definitive biography can be written. It seems to me that this article has moved the deadline up by a couple of years at least.

Last year some of us thought it high time that Oak Park begin an effort toward establishing a Hemingway Museum. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park was granted a state charter for that purpose.

Although a museum won’t be appearing soon, a celebration was held on July 21, the eighty-fifth anniversary of Hemingway’s birth, the thirtieth anniversary of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and of all things the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing at Duxbury, Massachusetts, of the family founder, Ralph Hemingway.

I would like to add a few comments to Oliver E. Alien’s article “A Tree Grows in America” (April/May).

In June 1980 the last and smallest of the ailanthus trees in the front of my parents’ home in Fairfax, Virginia, fell down. This tree had previously been topped, decades earlier, by a high wind.

My parents’ home is Hope Park. It was probably built by Edward Payne in the mid-1700s, and it later belonged to George Washington’s friend Dr. David Stuart. When our family took possession, there were three very large ailanthus trees growing in the front yard.

In the 1960s the tree that was in the center was approximately one hundred and fifty feet high and had a girth of at least twelve feet. The rings on which horses had been tied were grown over and were fifteen feet high on the tree.

1884 One Hundred Years Ago 1909 Seventy-five Years Ago 1964 Twenty Years Ago

On September 3 Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood accepted the nomination of the Woman’s National Equal Rights party, which had convened in San Francisco, and became the first woman to run for the office of President of the United States. She was also the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court.

Her concern for the rights of women began when, as a widow of twenty-four with a child to support, she taught school in Royalton, New York. Men doing the same work, she found, were getting paid twice as much. She complained to the trustees and to the wife of the Methodist minister and was told by that lady, “I can’t help you; you cannot help yourself, for it is the way of the world.”

Against this absurdity she fought until her death in 1917.

On August 27 of this year, the ship George Washington arrived in New York City. On board was Sigmund Freud, who had come to deliver five lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. He was to get his travel expenses and three thousand marks ($714.60). Jung and Ferenczi sailed with him, and on the voyage the three men analyzed each other’s dreams—the first example, according to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, of group analysis.

Freud had told friends that all he really wanted to see of America was Niagara Falls, but once he arrived he did the sights of New York: Central Park, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Columbia University, and Coney Island. Jones joined the party to dine at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden and to go to the first movie Freud had ever seen. Jones does not name it but calls it “primitive” with “plenty of wild chasing.” Freud was “quietly amused” by it.

President Lyndon Johnson appeared on television at 11:37 on the evening of August 4: “My fellow Americans: As President and Commander in Chief, it is my duty to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply. … That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam which have been used in these hostile operations.”

WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, serialized their life of the President in Century magazine in 1885, Lincoln’s old friend and law partner William H. Herndon did not like it. The articles were too reverential, he thought, too Republican, too everlastingly long. But worse than that, he added, the authors “handle things with silken gloves & a ‘cammel hair pencil’: they do not write with an iron pen.”

Back about 1922 I had a chance to climb on and into the first Navy sub in that Bronx park. My father took me (age seven) to see it. He made a big point of the designer being Irish, more perplexing to me than the submarine itself. Any boy could see how that worked, but an Irishman named Holland?

The two-page picture of the Holland undoubtedly was taken at Annapolis, as the Holland spent half of her service life there for the training of cadets, officers, and enlisted men. The Holland was struck from the Navy Register of Ships on November 21, 1910, and sold for scrap in June 1913.

The recovery of the British Holland is quite remarkable. With all the fine pictures of the hulk, it seems a shame not to have one taken in her prime. So I’m enclosing a picture of No. I (below) at her launching at Barrowin-Furness on November 2, 1901.

THE THEME OF the evil city versus the moral country is at least as old as Aesop, who in the sixth century B.C. told of the Country Mouse who visited the Town Mouse but soon turned tail: “Too many dangers to suit me”. As Alfred Kazin made clear in the February/March 1983 issue, this ancient fear of the city had enjoyed a long run in our own country, especially as applied in the last century to gaslit New York, the new metropolitan wonder of the industrial age. Farm journals implored the young to resist the lure of the city, and the Populists called it “the enemy’s country.” The National Police Gazette , closely read in every country barbershop, thrived on tales of urban vice and crime and ran regular features headed “Glimpses of Gotham” and “Noose Notes.”