Plenty of books at “A Company of Authors” (Photo: Veronica Marian)

The Book Haven is in New York City, trying to make do with primitive internet connections and access.  Veronica Marian has come to our rescue with a short article on the recent Company of Authors event, at which Humble Moi was a panel chair for “The Power of Poetry.”

Nearly two dozen Stanford-affiliated writers gathered recently for the half-day event. Themed discussions covered everything from the history of romance and evolving perceptions of marriage to how Enlightenment principles are evident in Wikipedia practices and what President Obama could learn from the Kennedy administration.

Read the rest here.  Meanwhile, if you’re in the Big Apple, come to the Austrian Cultural Forum/Polish Cultural Institute forum discussion of Democracy Is Controversy Plus Solidarity: In the Absence of Krzysztof Michalski.

Kerry McCarthy has been fascinated by William Byrd, the foremost composer of the English Renaissance, ever since she was a freshman at Reed College.  As I wrote in 2005:

…she sat in a café and read through Byrd’s Corpus Christi mass, preparing for a choral performance. At the time, she was a history major with scant musical training, but going through that score was like entering another world. “I was absolutely knocked over by it,” says McCarthy. “This was some of the most beautiful stuff I ever heard—I didn’t yet realize this was one jewel in a whole structure. I remember that afternoon like it was yesterday.” Byrd has been her passion ever since.

She switched to a music major, and eventually got her PhD at Stanford.  Now she’s a professor at Duke University.

I’ve been thrilled that she’s has been working on a biography of the composer, and I have tried to be generally encouraging – as much as you can be from several thousand miles away – but her project wasn’t entirely real to me until she pressed the finished book into my hands a few weeks ago. Kerry’s Byrd has finally been published by Oxford University Press.  The writing is accessible, engaging, elegant, and Byrd’s story is compelling.  (I tell a shortened version of the composer’s backstory here.)

From Kerry’s preface:

“Byrd’s career lasted nearly six decades, and more than five hundred pieces by him have survived. He wrote in almost every genre of his day: Latin masses and motets, English sacred music, accompanied and unaccompanied secular songs, and a wide variety of music for keyboard and strings.  If every note of his vocal music had been lost, he would still be considered a first-rate composer on the strength of his instrumental works alone. His musical life reflected many of the cultural conflicts and paradoxes of the English Renaissance.  He was a Catholic dissident who thrived in a Protestant nation, acting as a revered court composer in public and producing clandestine Catholic services in private.  Although Byrd is often at his most attractive as a marginalized figure, it is also not important to lose sight of how deeply he was involved with the Elizabethan establishment.  He was as well known in his day as any court poet or playwright, and just as close to the centers of power.”

Not a fun guy, in 1540

Byrd was born in unpleasant times – but an era that nevertheless held unusual promise for a young musician, if you could cut it.  Kerry writes:

“Byrd’s life began at an unusually volatile moment in English history. 1540 was the year the workshop of Hans Holbein produced the iconic “Rome portrait” of the forty-nine-year-old Henry VIII, glowering at the viewer with fists clenched, the massive canvas barely able to contain his bulk. The ‘young, lusty, and courageous prince’ of his early reign had given way to the capricious tyrant. During this single year, King Henry met, married, and divorced his fourth wife, executed the man who had arranged the marriage, and, on the day of the execution, married for the fifth time. He continued to build up his own musical establishment, often at great expense. In 1540 he brought in the ‘King’s new viols,’ a full consort of virtuoso southern European string players who would change the character of English instrumental music within a generation.  This was also the year he finished dismantling the monasteries and convents – an act that, more than any other, marked the real end of medieval England. The very last to surrender, in March 1540, was Waltham Abbey, a large Augustinian foundation north of London.  The royal commission removed the monks and dispersed the lay staff, including a young organist named Thomas Tallis, who left with a pension of 20 and a fifteenth-century manuscript textbook of music theory.”

Byrd watcher

Byrd is a tight 282 pages, and should be of general interest.  I’m an avid reader of 16th century English history, however, and I have a motive of my own in thinking so: I think the great Elizabethan P.R. machine is breaking down after 500 years, and innovative scholars might have some new insights into a complex era – insights not just for music scholars, but for everyone.

According to music scholar John Milsom: “Kerry McCarthy’s terse and incisive biography of Byrd rightly places the music at center stage; Byrd was, after all, a true master musician who achieved excellence in all that he wrote, whether for consort, keyboard or choir. But her study also penetrates deep into Byrd’s mind, and in turn into Byrd’s world, a place filled with pressing issues of religion, politics and nationhood. The outcome is a vivid portrait of a complex Tudor genius who stares out at us with eyes nourished by intellect, competition, loyalty, stubbornness, faction, nostalgia, and above all faith.”

Kevin Starr at the Sunset book launch. (Photo: E. Spencer Toy)

“Bill waited a bit late to start a memoir – he was 88,” said historian Bert Patenaude at the annual “A Company of Authors” event last week at Stanford.  He was speaking about L.W. “Bill” Lane, Jr., and the book for which Bert served as a sort of midwife, The Sun Never Sets: Reflections on a Western Life.  The book traces the story of the late Bill Lane, who was not only longtime publisher of Sunset, but also a pioneering environmentalist and U.S. ambassador.  He died in 2010.

Lane’s late labor (Photo: E. Sunny Toy)

Bert began the project with a series of audiotaped interviews conducted at Lane’s home in Portola Valley and at his summer home at Lake Tahoe.  They were augmented with an oral history for Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in the 1990s. The book was just published Stanford General Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press.

Sunset, as the introduction notes, has played a significant historical role in Western life, especially for those of us transplanted from other climes.  Kevin Starr read from his introduction:

When Laurence W. Lane, Sr., stepped off the ferryboat at the foot of Market Street in mid-October 1928 after a long train ride from Iowa, a parade was in progress and the music of a great brass band filled the Ferry Terminal.  All this was for Columbus Day, of course, but it might have been for Larry Lane as well, since a process was being set in motion – for the new publisher of Sunset, his wife, Ruth Bell Lane, and the two Lane sons, Laurence W. “Bill” Junior and Melvin Bell Lane – that would eventually present the Far West with its most successful magazine publisher and its most successful book publisher, from whom millions would learn how best to live in this still-new region.

I never had the opportunity to build a house of my own, but if I had, it would have been a hacienda like the Sunset offices in Menlo Park.  And if I had ever had any kind of a green thumb, I would have created something like the heavenly garden that surrounds it.  These photos don’t quite do them justice – no fault of photographer Spencer Toy, but the massive Spanish doors and tiling aren’t in the shots of the event. And the gardens … well, nothing could do them justice.

I once knew Sunset well – I lived a stone’s throw away, on the Palo Alto side of San Francisquito Creek.  I hadn’t been back for 25 years, however.  So it was strange and familiar to attend the launch for the book a few weeks ago.

But it was the gardens, in particular, that caught my attention during the visit.  The last time I had visited them was (and this is a confession) when I trespassed onto the property in the early evening hours of March 3, 1988, very nervous and worried.  I knew the beauty of this place would be soothing and healing, for the next day, I knew, would be one of the hardest days of my life.  I didn’t yet know it would also be the best day of my life:  I gave birth to a perfect 9 lb., 9 oz. daughter, who remains perfect to this very day.

Landmark gardens of Sunset (Photo: E. Spencer Toy)

On Wednesday, we wrote about the Polish hero who tried to stop the Holocaust, Jan Karski.  No sooner posted than we got a letter from the former director of the Hoover Archives, Elena Danielson, who remembered one of his visits to Stanford (she’s pictured at right with Karski).  “Most of all, I was impressed by how gracious he was to us lowly archives staffers who brought him cardboard boxes full of the history he had saved half a century earlier,” she recalled. “He made us feel like keepers of the flame. His concern for human dignity was not just theoretical, it was part of his approach to life.”  The Jan Karski Papers collection was established at Hoover in 1946.

A story on Karski’s longstanding relationship with Hoover is here.  It begins: “A letter dated April 16, 1945, and signed by Stanford University president Donald Tresidder, formalized a relationship between Jan Karski and the Hoover Library (now known as the Hoover Institution) on War, Revolution and Peace that was to last until the end of Karski’s life. The letter confirmed a temporary appointment ‘to collect materials relating to political, economic, social, and other developments in Poland and other areas in Europe which have been attacked and occupied by Axis forces.'”

From Elena’s email:

Jan Karski was already a hero for those of us on the Hoover Archives staff when the East European curator Maciej Siekierski organized the visit by Jan Karski, seen in this photo from the mid-1990s [photo by Zbigniew Stanczyk]. Karski began working directly with Herbert Hoover back in 1945 to document the history of Poland in World War II. As a result, the Hoover Archives hold the largest collection of 20th century Polish archives outside of Poland, and the heart of the documentation is concern for human rights.

Hoover’s own interest in Poland went back to his humanitarian relief work there in World War I. Starting in 1945 Karski traveled to  London, Paris, and Rome, as well as Switzerland to coordinate the collection of documentation on the Nazi horrors in central Europe as well as the Soviet crimes. Those documents at Hoover preserved the truth about the Katyn massacre and the Gulag, information suppressed in Russia until 1992.  Karski used the same discretion, tact and diplomatic finesse to save the Polish embassy files abroad that he had used in his secret missions during the war.

Those skills were still evident in old age when I met him. He dressed meticulously, spoke in carefully chosen words, and conveyed the seriousness of his work to preserve the truth about the war. His sense of humor showed in ironic flashes. He told a story, now I’m retelling it from memory so I hope I have this about right, from 1942. He was in Switzerland conferring with OSS chiefs about his trip to the U.S. to see Roosevelt. He persuaded the OSS that they had to buy  him better shoes if they wanted him to be taken seriously by the president of the United States. Something like that. Most of all, I was impressed by how gracious he was to us lowly archives staffers who brought him cardboard boxes full of the history he had saved half a century earlier. He made us feel like keepers of the flame. His concern for human dignity was not just theoretical, it was part of his approach to life.

Straight-shooter

Never heard of him?  You should.  He got a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom last year.  Now you’ll get your chance to learn more about him tonight at the University of San Francisco.

In 1942-43, Jan Kozielewski, using the pseudonym Jan Karski, reported to the Polish government in exile and the Western allies about the Nazi-German extermination camps in occupied Poland.  Churchill and Roosevelt didn’t believe him.

So why haven’t you heard of him?  As I wrote here in a post about Captain Witold Pilecki (the man who had the distinction of being the only known person to smuggle into Auschwitz, so he could report back to the Allies about the conditions there):

The Communist government was anxious to bury the stories of Polish wartime heroes – it’s one reason, for example, the name of Irena Sendler, the woman who saved 2,500 children from the Warsaw ghetto, did not become known until after 1989.  (I’ve written about her, oh, here and here and here and here and here and here.)  Or the name of Jan Karski, who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom last month.

But there’s more to it than that: in 1978, French film-maker Claude Lanzmann recorded Karski’s testimony for the 1985 film Shoah, but Karski’s footage wound up on the cutting room floor.  After the 1994 biography Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust Lanzmann released a documentary, The Karski Report consisting of the previously unreleased second half of his interview with Karski.

Tom Wood, coauthor of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust, will discuss Karski’s life and legacy and sign books afterward at 6.30 p.m. tonight the University of San Francisco’s McLaren Conference Center 251.  (Wood coauthored the book with Stanisław Jankowski.)  The event is free and open to the public.

“Karski is a story of incredible valor, a story of personal courage and uncommon determination to bring to Allied leaders the awful truth about the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. It is the story of a man who understood the poisonous effects of bigotry and hatred. His fight against Nazi oppression came to an end in 1945. His fight against anti-Semitism has never stopped,” according to Miles Lerman, Chairman, United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Interviewed in 1995, five years before his death, Karski had this to say about the Holocaust:

It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn’t do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, “We tried to help the Jews”, because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn’t help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough.

A poet for troubled times…

It’s been a grim week with grim news every day – we can’t see the end of it too soon.  So let us finish off the week on a better note – here’s John Clare‘s “Autumn,” read by Richard Burton (with a hat tip to Morgan Meis of 3quarksdaily for bringing it to our attention).   It’s a dandy poem, one of the group written while Clare was confined in the Northampton County Asylum from 1842 until his death in 1864 … well, Clare had a few troubled times of his own. Biographer Jonathan Bate wrote that Clare was “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.”

As for Burton’s reading, this is the way a poem should be read – listen to the short clip, and see if you agree.  Patrick Stewart is also a wonderful performer – you can compare Stewart’s reading to Burton’s, and see some of the the working-class poet’s Northamptonshire home.  Only … it’s not the same poem.  “Autumn” and “To Autumn” are two different poems.  Both are splendid, and well worth a few minutes of your time.

I know what you’re thinking…  It’s May.  It’s springtime.  Yes, but not for the Book Haven’s southern hemisphere readers.  They’re deep into autumn on that side of the equator.

So to those of you in Christchurch, Buenos Aires, Cuzco, Johannesburg, Melbourne, and elsewhere today:

The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,
On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,
The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;
Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

The ground parched and cracked is like overbaked bread,
The greensward all wracked is, bents dried up and dead.
The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we’re eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.