TWA for Thursday, December 22, 2016

“Amaryllis” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Public Domain.

ORIGINAL TEXT AND AUDIO - 2016

It’s the birthday of Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, born in Lucca, Tuscany, in 1858. His full name was Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini. Music was the family business: the Puccinis had served as musical directors to the Cathedral of San Martino for 200 years by the time young Giacomo came along. His first job, when he came of age, was as the cathedral organist. When he was 18, he attended a performance of Verdi’s opera Aida, and he was captivated. He began his operatic studies in 1880. His friends helped him produce his first one-act opera, Le Villi, in Milan four years later.

Puccini’s most famous operas — Madama Butterfly (1904), Tosca (1900), and La Bohème (1896) — all feature a common theme, namely “He who has lived for love, has died for love.” He writes of women who are devoted to their lovers to the point of their own destruction. He never finished his last opera, Turandot; Puccini died of complications from the treatment of throat cancer in 1924. Another composer, Franco Alfano, later wrote the last two scenes based on Puccini’s sketches. When Arturo Toscanini conducted the premiere of Turandot in 1926, he stopped the orchestra at Puccini’s final notes, saying, “Here the opera finishes, because at this point the Maestro died.”

Today is the birthday of poet, essayist and translator Kenneth Rexroth, born in South Bend, Indiana (1905). He wrote more than 50 collections of poetry, essays, and translations. His books include The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1949), In Defense of the Earth (1956), With Eye and Ear (1970), and Saucy Limericks & Christmas Cheer (1980).

He was expelled from high school when he was 14, and he took his education into his own hands. He backpacked all over Europe and the western United States, doing odd jobs like soda jerk, wrestler, and reporter. He married his first wife, the artist Andrée Shafer, and moved to San Francisco in 1927. He described his new home: “It is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritan tradition, or by the Walter Scott, fake-cavalier tradition of the South. It had been settled, mostly ... by gamblers, prostitutes, rascals and fortune seekers who came across the Isthmus and around the Horn. They had their faults, but they were not influenced by Cotton Mather.” It was there that he first began to publish his poems, even though there wasn’t much of a San Francisco poetry scene yet. Rexroth wrote: “We decided to stay and grow up with the town.”

Rexroth grew to be a big part of the San Francisco literary community. He held weekly literary salons and invited poets to come and talk about poetry and philosophy. When he read his own work, he liked to be accompanied by jazz musicians. He became something of a mentor to the Beat poets in the mid-1950s; he organized and attended their readings and reviewed their books, and Time magazine dubbed him “the Father of the Beats.” He was the master of ceremonies at the Six Gallery when Allen Ginsberg first read his poem “Howl” in 1955. But Rexroth never considered himself one of the Beat poets, and he grew disillusioned with them after a while, when he felt they were turning into “hipsters.”

In 1966, Rexroth published An Autobiographical Novel, a book about his early years. He wrote: “The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.” He was at work on a second volume when he died in 1982.

It was on this day in 1894 that a Jewish officer in the French army named Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason in a trial that became one of the most divisive events in European history. Everybody involved in the case knew that Dreyfus had been convicted without any evidence, but nobody spoke out until Émile Zola, the most famous writer in France, published an open letter to the president on the front page of one of the major newspapers in France, detailing all the evidence upon which Dreyfus had been unjustly convicted. The headline for the article was “J’accuse,” which means, “I accuse.” It’s been called the most famous front page in the history of newspapers. A total of 300,000 copies were sold in one day. The article was reprinted in newspapers throughout France and around the world.

On this date in 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman presented Abraham Lincoln with a dramatic Christmas gift: the city of Savannah. Savannah was one of the last port cities still within Confederate control. Sherman had captured Atlanta the previous September. In November, he and his army — 60,000 strong — set fire to Atlanta and departed, leaving their supply lines behind. Nothing was heard from them for about six weeks as they marched toward the coast, and Lincoln was beginning to worry. Sherman’s army finally ended its 300-mile “march to the sea” outside Savannah on December 10. Three days later, they had captured Fort McAllister. Confederate troops escaped on December 21 and the city fell to Sherman. He sent a telegram back to Washington the next day with the following message: “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.” Lincoln thanked him via return telegram a few days later, saying that he had been anxious but “feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained,’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours.”

Sherman’s march to the sea wasn’t just an economic campaign, but also a psychological one; Sherman’s men only fought one battle during its six-week march, but they burned farms, ruined food stores, destroyed railroad tracks, and gave no quarter. It devastated Southern morale. After they left Savannah, Sherman and his men carried out the same tactics as they marched through South Carolina. Sherman explained his strategy by saying that the Union soldiers were “not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people.” He wanted to “make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.”

It’s the birthday of American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869). He was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine and who lived in poverty and alcoholism until President Theodore Roosevelt read his book Children of the Night (1897) and liked it so much he not only wrote a review of the book, he also found Robinson a job at the New York Customs Office, which saved Robinson’s life. The job was specifically designed to give him as little work as possible so he could write, and carried the stipend of $2,000 per year. Robinson dedicated his next book, The Town by the River (1910), to Roosevelt. “The strenuous man,” Robinson wrote, meaning Roosevelt, “has given me some of the most powerful loafing that has ever come my way.”

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