Aunt Selma and Sir Max

I have sometimes where my Aunt Selma got inspiration for her stories about her cavortings with the motorcycle gang.  Aunt Selma was no dummy, of course: as cultured and accomplished a lady as ever crossed the commencement platform at the the Straw School.  But all great artists work on a pallet of the past.  Now, I think I may have found a clue.  Here is Zuleika Dobson, the loveliest woman ever to venture a winsome toe into the  secretive purlieus of an  Oxford college,  as introduced by her creator,Sir Max Beeerbohm:

Already, indeed, she was rich. She was living at the most exorbitant hotel in all Mayfair. She had innumerable gowns and no necessity to buy jewels; and she also had, which pleased her most, the fine cheval-glass I have described. At the close of the Season, Paris claimed her for a month's engagement. Paris saw her and was prostrate. Boldini did a portrait of her. Jules Bloch wrote a song about her; and this, for a whole month, was howled up and down the cobbled alleys of Montmartre. And all the little dandies were mad for "la Zuleika." The jewellers of the Rue de la Paix soon had nothing left to put in their windows—everything had been bought for "la Zuleika." For a whole month, baccarat was not played at the Jockey Club— every member had succumbed to a nobler passion. For a whole month, the whole demi-monde was forgotten for one English virgin. Never, even in Paris, had a woman triumphed so. When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to its Elysee. Zuleika, quite untouched, would not linger in the conquered city. Agents had come to her from every capital in Europe, and, for a year, she ranged, in triumphal nomady, from one capital to another. In Berlin, every night, the students escorted her home with torches. Prince Vierfiinfsechs-Siebenachtneun offered her his hand, and was condemned by the Kaiser to six months' confinement in his little castle. In Yildiz Kiosk, the tyrant who still throve there conferred on her the Order of Chastity, and offered her the central couch in his seraglio. She gave her performance in the Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope launched against her a Bull which fell utterly flat. In Petersburg, the Grand Duke Salamander Salamandrovitch fell enamoured of her. Of every article in the apparatus of her conjuringtricks he caused a replica to be made in finest gold. These treasures he presented to her in that great malachite casket which now stood on the little table in her room; and thenceforth it was with these that she performed her wonders. They did not mark the limit of the Grand Duke's generosity. He was for bestowing on Zuleika the half of his immensurable estates. The Grand Duchess appealed to the Tzar. Zuleika was conducted across the frontier, by an escort of lovesick Cossacks. On the Sunday before she left Madrid, a great bull-fight was held in her honour. Fifteen bulls received the coup-de-grdce, and Alvarez, the matador of matadors, died in the arena with her name on his lips. He had tried to kill the last bull without taking his eyes off la divina sehorita. A prettier compliment had never been paid her, and she was immensely pleased with it. For that matter, she was immensely pleased with everything. She moved proudly to the incessant music of a psan, aye! of a plan that was always crescendo.

Surely the funniest novel ever written about a mass suicide. 

Aunt Selma and the Motorcycle Gang

Here's a bit that just surfaced in some old household debris.  It's a letter from my late Aunt Selma, sent to several of her nieces in 1952.  She was a highly respected and respectable (if not entirely proper) manager of the office of a law firm.  She liked to tell people that she was a virgin.

Afterthought: "If I live to be 40"--cute.  As was no secret, in 1952 Selma was 48.

And an update: My sister Sally, one of the original recipients, adds--"Oh my, remember well the motorcycle letters ... They made us laugh then.  Now I see them a little differently as sort of a longing for some excitement that never quite came her way and that seems sort of sad now don't you think?"

Anybody Recognize This Crowd?

Here’s a picture that has been circulating among my relatives. Second from the right is my aunt, Louise Nordstrom Smith, born I believe in 1896. Fourth from the right is another aunt, Louise’s sister, Selma Nordstrom, born in 1904. Despite the uniform outfits, these two stand out because they are wearing some sort of photo-medallion—the medallions appear to be identical, the picture of a woman.

The picture must have been taken in Manchester, New Hampshire—the girls grew to womanhood there, and never strayed very far. There were eight in all—three boys and five girls, but one of the boys died in infancy, and two of the girls/women in young adulthood. Selma in the picture bears an eerie resemblance to a grandchild of mine, aged nine, a boy.

Beyond that, we know zip. The family was Swedish by background, and Manchester had a well-articulated Swedish community (if small). My first thought was—St. Lucia’s Day (look at the decorative headbands)—but St. Lucia’s Day is December 13, and those costumes do not look seasonal: New Hampshire is no Garden of Eden in December.

Another thought: one of the sisters—Evelyn Nordstrom—died on February 26, 1926. The medallions might be memorial pictures of her. But this would make Louise 30 and Selma 22—and they don’t look that old, do they?

And if this is a family picture, where is my mother, Esther Nordstrom, born in 1902?

All suggestions welcome.

One more Dactyl (and Remembering the Nordstrom Girls)

It just struck me that this dactyl-hymnal thing might be more prevalent than I had realized (link). Now I am remembering what was, for me, the funniest amateur vaudeville act I ever enjoyed. That would be:

Soft as the voice of an angel,
Breathing a lesson unheard,
Hope with a gentle persuasion
Whispers her comforting word:

Yep, that would be "Whispering Hope, (link), the work of one Septimus Winner who gave us also such winners as “Listen to the Mockingbird,” and “Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Dog Gone?” But you just don’t know what comedy is unless you heard "Whispering Hope" as rendered on home theatricals night in the 1940s by my mother, Esther Nordstrom, and her sister, Louise Nordstrom.

I guess you had to have been there and sadly, this was the day before tape recorders, but I can still picture them—both short, Esther roundish and Louise a bit spidery, arm and arm they’d enter; they’d bow in unison. Then totally deapan, in close harmony:

SOFT

As the voice of an a-a-ngel,

BREATH

Ing a lesson unheard

And so forth through –well, I don’t know how many verses, I was laughing too hard and so, I assume was everybody else in reach. They’d bow again, still unsmiling and exit as they entered. Like I say you had to have been there. But I also say: Esther’s been dead for over 20 years now—Louise, longer. There are many reasons to wish them with us again, but I can think of none more compelling than the desire once again to hear them do their rendition of “Whispering Hope.”

Church Music Footnote: Only remotely relevant, Mrs. Buce asks: is “Ave Maria” really the most god-awful piece of music Schubert ever wrote, or is it just that it is so consistently sung god-awfully by god-awful singers? Or maybe they are joking and we don’t get it.

Update: My sister Sally and my cousin David independently remind me that there was a third Nordstrom sister in the act: our aunt Selma. I never saw that version, but I can believe it: Selma, the youngest of the three (and the only one who never married), shared her sister's comic sensibility, although she was perhaps a bit gentler. Sally also points out that they all three had absolutely knockdown perfect pitch which, in this case, was part of the comedy.

Ecclesiastes 12:12

Packing up to leave my office at last: the library downstairs keeps a “giveaway cart” where people can dump their unwanted books as strays seeking adoption on their last stop before the pound. Lately I’ve been culling my office to see what I keep and what goes to the cart. It’s a draining exercise. Don’t listen to what Mrs. B tells you, I am really not a pack rat—I’m sure in my life time I have thrown away 2-3 times as many books as I now own. But this kind of exercise is like ripping off the husks of former selves.

Some of these show their age. Perhaps the one I've owned longest is an old Bantam Paperback of The Count of Monte Cristo. The inside cover indicates I bought it in Washington Courthouse, Ohio, in 1957. I remember reading it while tending a coal furnace when my kids were babies in the 1960s (I don’t think I realized it was abridged). And here’s an ancient copy of of Bertram D. Wolfe’s Three Who Made a Revolution, just about the first serious grownup book I ever read I (hey, I was a late starter, okay?) with a printing date of 1959.

Moving forward in time, here’s a paperback of Perry Miller’s collection, The Legal Mind in America (1962). I see that I bought it in February, 1963, which would have been just months before I began law school: I wonder, did I think it would help? From law school itself, I keep my old copy of Casner and Leach on Real Property, the most instructive casebook I ever went to school to. From law school also, here’s the two volume mimeo (sic) of Hart and Sachs, The Legal Process, which circulated in Samizdat for a generation before somebody got around to publishing it. Oh, and here is the three-volume set of Corpus Juris Secundum on Corporations: my first law school prize (we used it as a booster chair to get my daughter up to the dinner table).

And at last, a milestone: a four-volume set of Kent’s Commentaries, (9^th ed., 1858), given me by my Aunt Selma when I passed the bar in 1968 (she was a legal secretary back before smart girls went to law school). I suspect I have never opened it, but it sure does look pretty.

From the beginning of my own teaching career, here’s Kessler & Gilmore Contracts (1970), one of the classics of law-teaching, together with Gilmore’s inimitable teaching notes, which passed hand to hand among professors in the old days like some underground Henry Miller. More recently, here’s a lot of stuff that (aside from its value as compost) is entirely worthless: bankruptcy statutes of 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, etc., previous editions of lawyer desk books, some written (gasp!) by me.

There are other items not so neatly dateable. Here’s a whole run of books that had certain cachet in their time, now mostly forgotten: Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic; Ed Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society; Leon Festinger et al., When Prophecy Fails; J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors--but just where should I rank Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques? (together with Lévi-Strauss, I do find a Fontana Modern Masters paperback, purporting to explain just what in hell he was talking about).

And there are any number of books I won’t throw away but I suspect I may never read, starting with Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

There are scattered fragments of various languages I have never learned very well. Ignoring the audio tapes, here’s a student edition of Pinocchio, which helped me idle away a day when I got stuck in a snowstorm in South Carolina (long story)—complete with student questions: “chi viene in aiuto di Pinocchio?” Here’s a nice antique edition of Balzac’s Le Lys Dans La Vallée, given me a thousand years by a student for my presiding over her wedding; the marriage did not last, but the book is still here (indeed, there seems to be a lot of Balzac; I did not realize I was such a fan). And looky looky: an Oxford classical edition of Plato’s Republic, in Greek (but why do they insist on putting the titles in Latin?)—I guess was full of optimism about my retirement agenda.

And there’s more, folks: there seems to be an array of poets I had quite forgotten I still owned (which probably tells you something): Edwin Muir (once a great favorite); Robert Lowell, James Merrill. And here’s a tattered old edition of Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels (but I bought it second hand just last year); and here’s Iona and Peter Opie’s Lore and Language of School Children, which I discovered many years ago(but this is a new copy, also purchased just last year).

I learn that I must be a sucker for dictionaries. Here is a Dictionary of Espionage. Here is Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words (knibber: a male deer when the antlers first appear). Oh, and here is the three volume set of the Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance which I bought for $100 from a colleague when, I suspect, he needed the money. As a pendant, here is Hawkshop:The Fabulous Story of the “Emperor of Pawnbroking.”

Finance and Pawnbroking come from a more recent phase in my life, when I got interested in learning (and teaching) the basics of finance to law students. Here are some of the MBA textbooks I cribbed from so shamelessly, before writing my own. Here’s Forgotten Calculus and Forgotten Algebra, which saved my bacon more than once. Here’s a (once) pretty good one about accounting fiddles, made obsolete by the exponential growth of financial fraud in the decade of Enron.

There are tough judgment calls in this game. I suppose I do need my two-volume Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, and Dicey on the Constitution, but do I really need volumes of political criticism written by a couple of Yale professors 15 or 20 years ago, perhaps long forgotten already even by the authors? And here is de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution; I have a French edition at home; do I trust my French enough to dispense with the English? And do I keep my edition of the script of Repo Man—for use, of course, in the teaching of commercial law?

And so it goes. I have 15 boxes of the stuff so far, with maybe another ten still to go (but I swear, I am not a pack rat). And this says nothing about the stuff I discarded. Which reminds me,—that library remainder cart: a month ago, I found my old copy of Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America. I remember the day when everybody in the library seemed to have his (sic) own copy. Last month I put mine on the remainder cart. Tonight, it's still there.