The Writer's Almanac for September 14, 2018 - Garrison Keillor

The Writer’s Almanac for September 14, 2018

Remember by Christina Rossetti. Public domain.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

It’s the birthday of the theater critic and translator Eric Bentley, (books by this author)born in Bolton, England (1916). In 1942, the young Bentley was fresh out of his Ph.D. program at Yale, and he went to UCLA to teach freshman English for a year. And there he met the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who had recently immigrated to the United States after fleeing Nazi Germany and was unknown in this country. The two of them became close, and it was Bentley who translated a lot of Brecht’s work into English and helped establish his career in America.

Bentley also wrote Bentley on Brecht (1998), a combination of literary criticism and personal reflections and anecdotes about his colleague and friend, which has been published in several editions throughout the years. In it, he wrote: “Brecht would always shout and scream when things went wrong in the theater. His paranoia was as outrageous as that of anyone I’ve ever met […] Brecht found hostility and sabotage everywhere […]

It was on this day in 1814 that Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that became “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The British had invaded and captured Washington on August 24th. After successfully destroying the White House, the Capitol building, and a lot of Washington, the British moved on to Baltimore, and had no interest in occupying it — they just hoped to destroy as much as possible, as a symbolic victory.

The British made their headquarters in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, and took over the plantation of the town doctor, Dr. William Beanes, who was elderly and well-liked. A young lawyer, Francis Scott Key, was incensed when he heard that Beanes had been captured and was being held on a ship, so he set off to rescue him.

Key was accompanied by John S. Skinner, an agent for prisoner release whom President Madison had sent along. The British commander, General Robert Ross, finally agreed to release Beanes after the Americans showed them some letters written by wounded British prisoners saying that Dr. Beanes was taking good care of them. But he wouldn’t let the three men leave until after the attack on Baltimore. They had to get on a sloop behind the British fleet and wait to see what would happen.

At Fort McHenry in Baltimore, there was a huge flag, 30 feet by 42 feet, easily visible from the British ships. Each of the 15 stars measured two feet between the points, and the stripes were two feet wide. A Baltimore seamstress and her 13-year-old daughter had sewn the flag by spreading it all out on the malthouse floor of a local brewery.

The British attacked Baltimore throughout the day on September 13th, and that night they sent more than 1,500 bombs, rockets, and cannon balls across the water at Fort McHenry. But Baltimore had been preparing for war for the past year, and it was well defended. Suddenly, the British stopped firing. From their boat, Francis Scott Key and the other men had no idea whether the British had succeeded or given up and retreated, and they could no longer see the harbor now that the sky was dark. So they had to wait all night, until the sky was light enough to see which flag was flying over the fort. And of course, the next morning the American flag was there.

Francis Scott Key scribbled down some ideas for a poem on the back of a letter that he was carrying. He was released later that day, and the next day, September 14th, he finished writing “Defense of Fort M’Henry,” which would later become the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in a room at the Indian Queen Hotel.

Within five days, the poem was printed and circulated all over Baltimore with the directions that it should be sung to the tune of an English song, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” No one is sure exactly who figured out that the lyrics fit the tune of this popular drinking song. A well-known actor, Ferdinand Durang, stood on a chair and belted it out to an appreciative crowd at Captain McCauley’s tavern and became the first person to publicly sing what is now the national anthem of the United States.

George Frideric Handel completed the Messiah oratorio on this date in 1741. Librettist Charles Jennens had finished the text in July, and he handed it off to Handel with great expectations. He wrote to a friend, “I hope [Handel] will lay out his whole Genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excel all his former Compositions, as the Subject excels every other Subject.” Handel worked at a furious pace, doing nothing else but composing from morning to night, and completed the oratorio in only 24 days.

Messiah tells the story of Jesus’ birth, death, and resurrection. It was originally written for the Easter season, and it debuted in Dublin at a charity concert the following April. The event attracted 700 people; to accommodate such a crowd, gentlemen were asked to leave their swords at home, and ladies were requested to remove the hoops from their skirts. The Dublin News-Letter reported that Messiah “far surpass[ed] anything of that Nature which has been performed in this or any other Kingdom.”

It remained one of Handel’s favorite works for the rest of his life, and grew to become a beloved holiday favorite — but at Christmastime, rather than Easter. Even Mozart was reluctant to change anything about the oratorio when he supervised a new arrangement in 1789. “Handel knows better than any of us what will make an effect,” Mozart said. “When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt.”

It’s the birthday of Margaret Sanger (books by this author), born in Corning, New York (1879). She coined the term “birth control,” she was its most famous advocate in the United States, and she was the founder of Planned Parenthood. H.G. Wells said of her, “The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time.”

Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died at 50, after 18 pregnancies. Margaret went to New York City, became a nurse, got married, and had three children. As a nurse, she worked in the maternity ward on the Lower East Side. Many of her patients were poor, and many ended up in the hospital from self-induced abortions, which often killed them. At the time, contraceptives were illegal in the United States — it was illegal even to send information about contraception through the U.S. Postal Service. Products were out there, but only the wealthy had the means to access them.

Margaret Sanger quit nursing and wrote a series of articles called “What Every Girl Should Know.” She also published a radical newspaper, Woman Rebel, with information about contraception. In 1914, she was indicted for sending information about birth control through the mail. She fled to Europe, where she observed birth control clinics, and eventually came back to face charges. The charges were dropped, and in 1916, she and her sister, who was also a nurse, opened a birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, to serve the mostly immigrant population. Nine days later, the police closed it down and arrested Sanger, her sister, and the clinic’s interpreter. Sanger spent a month in jail, and her sister went on a hunger strike.

In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She also funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She said, “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” She died in 1966, at age 87, a year after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples.

Today is the birthday of Australian journalist and novelist Geraldine Brooks (books by this author), born in Sydney (1955). She’s the author of five novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning March (2005). March is a companion novel to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), a book that Brooks’ mother gave her when she was a girl; March tells the story of the March girls’ father, who was away fighting in the Civil War for most of the Alcott book.

Her first dream, from the time she was eight years old, was to become a journalist. She would visit her father at the office, where he was working as a proofreader for a newspaper, and one day he pulled a freshly printed paper off the press, and handed it to her. “It was warm — hot off the presses — the link of the reality of this warm newspaper right off the press, knowing I was one of the first to read what was going on in my city, just thrilled the pants off me,” she recalled.

She came to America for graduate school, and was hired by The Wall Street Journal for their Cleveland bureau and then, later, as a foreign correspondent. She wrote her first book — a work of nonfiction — in 1994. That was Nine Parts of Desire, and it was about Muslim women in the Middle East. Three years later, she published a memoir, Foreign Correspondence (1997). Brooks’ latest novel is The Secret Chord (2015), about the life of the biblical King David.