35 Years Ago Today

My family and I moved from California to North Carolina

By Moristotle

June 16, 1983, was a Monday, I’m pretty sure, because I had worked my last day at IBM in San Jose, California the preceding Friday and I seem to recollect that we flew the day after that weekend. [Wrong! The calendar for June that year puts the 16th on a Thursday.] Raleigh-Durham Airport wasn’t international then, and my memory of it is similar to the image shown above, which was apparently made in the 1950s. I even think they rolled a stairway up to the airplane for us to disembark. Little of the fields of grass around it were covered with runways then.

How you know you chose the right spouse

In Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, I learned this morning how E. B. White (1899-1985) knew he had chosen the right woman to marry:

White married Katharine Angell in 1929 after what he later described as a "stormy" romance (when they first met, she was in a failing marriage and had two children). White later wrote, "I soon realized I had made no mistake in my choice of a wife. I was helping her pack an overnight bag one afternoon when she said, 'Put in some tooth twine.' I knew then that a girl who called dental floss tooth twine was the girl for me." [p. 32]

How did I choose?

Well, it wasn't hard. My wife of almost forty-four years was good-looking and intellectual. How could I resist someone who appeared in our very first conversation to be enthusiastically interested in what I was telling her about a book I was then reading [Gestalt Psychology, by Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967)]? We were wed six weeks later.
    My wife is the only person I know who has read the whole of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and while I may be the one of us interested in modernism and the modern Irish writers (I have read most of literary critic Hugh Kenner's books and Ellmann's biography of James Joyce), she's the one of us who has actually finished reading Ulysses.
    Mention of my wife reminds me of one of her memorable observations. It was a speculation about why someone we know had chosen his wife. "It couldn't have been her face, but it might have been her fetching rear end."

How did you choose?

Please tell us in a comment how you know you chose the right one....

Wilde the movie

Last evening I watched again the 1997 film, "Wilde," directed by Brian Gilbert and starring Stephen Fry as Oscar, Jude Law as Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") (1870-1945), and Tom Wilkinson as the latter's father, the Marquis of Queensberry. I found it even harder to watch or enjoy than the first time, likely because I know more now about Wilde's submissive participation with Bosie in his own undoing—and also, perhaps, because there were more scenes of homosexual sodomy than I recalled the film's having. Bosie was no more forgivable for being portrayed prettily by Law, although Wilde may have been even more pitiful for Fry's pathetic portrayal.
    Most interesting, actually, was this time recognizing the Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd, whose portrayal of William Wilberforce (1759-1833) in the 2006 film, "Amazing Grace," I'd watched the night before (and whose portrayal of Horatio Hornblower we enjoyed months ago in the TV series). In "Wilde," he plays John Gray, whom Frank Harris described as having "not only great personal distinction, but charming manners and a marked poetic gift, a much greater gift than Oscar possessed." Harris identified Gray as the likely source for the last name of the title character in Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Remember, Harris knew the people involved; he was Wilde's junior by only sixteen months.
    From the blurb at the bottom of the front cover of Frank Harris's life of Wilde ("Now a major motion picture starring Stephen Fry"—see the cover photo on Thursday's post), I was expecting to see that the film was based on the book. Not so, alas; it was said to be based on Richard Ellmann's biography (which I've had for years but not read yet).
    Ellmann (1918-1987) is said in the introduction to Harris's book (by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, copyright 1997) to have distanced himself from Harris's account:

Such, though, is Harris's reputation that even modern biographers are often reluctant to quote him. Harris in Chapter 4 tells the story of the famous Wilde/Whistler exchange culminating in Whistler's "You will, Oscar, you will." Hesketh Pearson's 1946 biography repeats the incident word for word and Richard Ellmann quotes it in his 1987 biography of Wilde, but gives Pearson as the source rather than the generally discredited Harris....[p. ix, Oscar Wilde]

I note, however, that Ellmann gave Harris almost half a column in his index, with over thirty references.