ANOTHER RHETT BUTLER (COMMENT).I posted here about possible answers to the question “Who was Rhett Butler?” My sister-in-law Margo e mailed me that wikipedia had another candidate. The article mentions only one candidate, George Alfred Trenholm, who was the South’s most successful blockade-runner and by the end of the Civil War had accumulated the equivalent of one billion dollars in gold and become the Treasurer of the Confederacy. The article also mentions that the Rhetts and the Butlers were among the great aristocratic families of Charleston.
Archive for May, 2009
ANOTHER RHETT BUTLER (COMMENT).
Sunday, May 31st, 2009LUCKY PUBLICATION—MARGARET MITCHELL.
Sunday, May 31st, 2009LUCKY PUBLICATION—MARGARET MITCHELL. I think that GONE WITH THE WIND is one of the great books of the last century. Here is how it came to be published. In 1934, Harold Latham of the Macmillan Publishing Company made a trip through the southern part of the United States and through Texas to California, looking for manuscripts, just as he had been doing annually in Great Britain. At a luncheon in Atlanta arranged by the local writers’ guild, he sat next to Margaret Mitchell, who had been a member of the guild since her days as a journalist. Latham had heard she had written a novel, and asked her several times whether she had a novel. Each time she denied that she had. At the end of the day, Mitchell was driving some young girls home when one of them said some dismissive things, including, as Mitchell recounted it, “Really, I wouldn’t take you for the type who would write a successful book.” Mitchell was so mad that she grabbed the parts of her manuscript that she could lay her hands on, “forgetting entirely that I hadn’t included the envelopes that were under the bed or the ones in the pot-and-pan closet” and gave them to Latham just as he was about to board his train. She told Latham, “Take the damn thing before I change my mind.” Latham put the piles of envelopes in a suitcase. (We saw the suitcase exhibited at the Margaret Mitchell Museum.) The next day, Mitchell sent Latham a telegram saying, “Send it back, I’ve changed my mind.” But by this time, Latham knew what he had in the suitcase.
A BIRD ON THE WING.
Saturday, May 30th, 2009A BIRD ON THE WING. Kirsch quotes the beginning of “The Windhover” as an example of the “thrilling effects” of which Hopkins was capable. Kids, think of trying to describe the thrill of seeing a bird in flight:
“I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!”
LUCKY PUBLICATION–HOPKINS.
Saturday, May 30th, 2009LUCKY PUBLICATION–HOPKINS. Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of the greatest English poets. Adam Kirsch has a good article in the New Yorker about Hopkins in which Kirsch says that “Bridges… pronounced Hopkins’s life a total failure.” Bridges was a friend of Hopkins and a future poet laureate. Certainly what Kirsch quotes from Bridges is one of the harshest judgments imaginable; “That dear Gerard was overworked, unhappy and would never have done anything great seems to give no solace. But how much worse it would have been had his promise or performance been mores splendid.” The reference to lucky publication in the caption of this post is because Bridges was responsible for the publication of Hopkins’s poetry—thirty years after Hopkins died.
SUBSTITUTING ALPHABETICALLY.
Friday, May 29th, 2009SUBSTITUTING ALPHABETICALLY. I spent some time coaching a “house soccer” team. There were no tryouts. Any kid in the age group who wanted to play could be on the team. I gave every player equal time by substituting alphabetically. If there were three players on the bench, the top three alphabetically would rotate out after a set time. (I did move one player to a different part of the alphabet so that I always had one of my two best defenders on the field).
EVERYBODY IN THE INFIELD.
Friday, May 29th, 2009EVERYBODY IN THE INFIELD. Malcolm Gladwell had an article about a girls basketball team (twelve and under) which had great success playing a full court press. The article turned out to be controversial (google new yorker gladwell basketball if you are curious). One of the criticisms of the article is that of course a press works well against young athletes who don’t have the skills of older players. The article reminded me of a time when my brother Elmer and I were in college and had a friend–Bill–who was coaching a team of young boys at a summer day camp. It must have been softball because the kids were young. It was the worst team in the league. They hadn’t come close to winning a game and they were very discouraged. This was long before THE BAD NEWS BEARS, but that is what it was like. Some had completely lost interest. We chatted and one of us had the thought that at that age the weak players were put in the outfield where they couldn’t do anything if a ball was hit near them. We wound up with a proposal that Bill would put all the players in the infield. The next time we saw Bill he reported success. The boys were tremendously excited by the new plan. There was lots of infield chatter. And a strange thing happened. The coach of the other team felt that he had to counter this new tactic. He did it by having his team bunt. And keep bunting. The way I remember it, Bill’s team won.
AN UMPIRE MAKES HIS RATING KNOWN.
Thursday, May 28th, 2009AN UMPIRE MAKE HIS RATING KNOWN. I have urged in several posts, including here, that the grading of the performance of sports officials should be made public. Now an umpire has made his rating for a game public. Umpire Bob Davidson was criticized by pitcher Ted Lilly for a game in which had been the plate umpire. Lilly told Davidson to “concentrate.” This article in the Chicago Tribune tells the story: “[Davidson said:] “I just found out I scored just about a 96 [out of 100] on my plate job, so my concentration was pretty [darn] good in my opinion.”
MLB umpiring supervisors grade umpires on a daily basis after reviewing videotapes.
Davidson said out of 215 pitches Monday, he was told he’d missed 10.
“Eight of them were pitches I called strikes that shouldn’t have been,” he said. “The other two, one went against Pittsburgh and one went against Chicago. My concentration was excellent.”
A grade can be a protection for an umpire. Hopefully, this kind of thing will happen more frequently.
REQUIRED SHARING OF NEGATIVE RESULTS.
Thursday, May 28th, 2009REQUIRED SHARING OF NEGATIVE RESULTS. I posted here about how my brother has been saying for thirty years that there should be a journal for negative results and that now there are in fact several in different fields. This article in the Economist reports that the European Commission has proposed changes in the regulation of scientific research which would have scientists who use animals in research share the results of unsuccessful experiments. One of the purposes of the regulation (which would not take effect for some years) is to avoid failure to publish which “condemns others who have the same idea to waste time, money and animals’ lives in duplicating the failed experiment.” (Of course, I think that a negative result should be thought of as a successful experiment. Knowing what isn’t true is useful).
THE END OF GONE WITH THE WIND (SPOILER ALERT).
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009THE END OF GONE WITH THE WIND (SPOILER ALERT). When we were at the Margaret Mitchell Museum, we were told that Margaret Mitchell began GONE WITH THE WIND by writing the last chapter and working backwards. Her biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, confirms that although Margaret Mitchell “circulated the most various tales about the chronologies and origins of [GWTW], she never varied her testimony of having begun her epic with the composition of the last chapter.” I know astute readers who are dissatisfied with the ending of GWTW, but I have always thought it was the right ending. It makes sense to me that Margaret Mitchell constructed the book to build toward that ending. The ending accomplishes several things. One message is that the course of events, the incidents that make up a plot–and a life– can divide people as well as unite them, that what happens in a book or a life matters. The break with the convention of the happy ending is very powerful. And, because, after all, there is always a chance that they will get together again, the ending is not final–again, like life.
WHO WAS RHETT BUTLER?
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009WHO WAS RHETT BUTLER? That Victor Fleming led a colorful life offscreen should have made him more famous, but it didn’t. According to Denby, “The director was considered by everyone to be a “man’s man”—shrewd, funny, but bluff and demanding—and he was close in temperament to the hard-nosed character of Rhett Butler.” Denby says that “[Fleming's biographer] Sragow calls the director ‘the real Rhett Butler.’” I take this with a grain of salt. After all, Margaret Mitchell got there first with the Rhett Butler of the novel. Where did Margaret Mitchell find her model for Rhett Butler? When we were in Atlanta this month for our son Nick’s graduation from Emory, we went to the Margaret Mitchell museum, located in the house where she wrote the book. Our guide offered some opinions as to where Margaret Mitchell drew inspiration for her characters. Interestingly, there had been a gunfighter and gambler in Margaret Mitchell’s family: Doc Holliday. This wikipedia article quotes Wyatt Earp as writing that Holliday was “the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a gun that I ever knew.” I could imagine that Rhett Butler was inspired by Doc Holliday, the gambler in the Mitchell family, but—remarkably—our guide told us that the prevailing view is that it was Ashley Wilkes that Margaret Mitchell based on Doc Holliday. I consulted Darden Asbury Pyron’s biography of Margaret Mitchell, SOUTHERN DAUGHTER. Pyron says that many critics think that Red Upshaw, Margaret Mitchell’s first husband, was the model for Rhett Butler. Pyron disagrees. She argues that Rhett Butler was a surrogate for Margaret Mitchell’s mother, May Belle Mitchell!
