The Bankhead Gleaner, 3

Hello, friends. Thanks for reading. Pinned immediately above is a facsimile of one of many day-after accounts of the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; it’s from The Daily News (London), October 7, 1892. When last we met, I noted how the story that’s come down about Tennyson breathing his last while reading Shakespeare (Cymbeline) is an inflated truth. I don’t suppose this news would have been on an emotional par with, say, learning the truth about Santa Claus — have you heard? he’s Anglican! Also a smoker! — but no one wants to get a reputation as a killjoy. It pleased me to note that the moon had, in fact, waxed full on the night of October 6, 1892, so that charming and pre-Raphaelite kind of detail, at least, could rest unchallenged.

AI-generated image of Tennyson in bed in the moonlight in the style of Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

I also wrote about my fondness for the sidebar — my life has been a sidebar, really — and if you want to see a great example of the elevation of these vaunted footnotes, I recommend The Annotated Alice, from 1960, with its comprehensive and scholarly (but always readable) notes by Martin Gardner crowding pretty much every margin. Mr. Gardner wasn’t as lucky as I when it came to perpetuating the integrity of a meteorological myth. The poem with which Lewis Carroll launches his vessel — the Alice origin story, if you like — described a rowboat ride in dreamy weather on a golden afternoon. July 4, 1862 was the date that the Rev. Dodgson and the three Liddell girls — Alice was the middle child — went on their excursion. Garner writes:

It is with sadness I add that when a check was made in 1950 with the London meteorological office (as reported in Helmut Gernsheim’s Lewis Carroll: Photographer) records indicated that the weather near Oxford on July 4, 1862, was “cool and rather wet.”

Here is Martin Gardner’s marginal note about a possible origin for the Mad Hatter:

Now, add to the mix this clipping from the Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, May 22, 1967.

Benjamin Snow — a hatter not so much neurodivergent as impecunious — was tended to by Mr. Henry Liddon. Henry Liddon was a theologian — he would become Dean of St. Paul’s, in which capacity he was a hugely popular preacher — and he was also a good friend of the Reverend Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll. In fact, a few months after Benjamin Snow slipped the surly bonds of earth, Henry and Charles (who by then would have been answering easily to Lewis; he published Alice in Wonderland in 1865 and it was already a classic) went on an epic voyage together, which Dodgson / Carroll documented in his Journal of a Tour of Russia in 1867. (I’d never read, or even heard, of this diary, but found it in a second book store in Tokyo, of all places, a couple of weeks ago.) Liddon’s purpose was to meet members of the Russian Orthodox church — he seems to have been one of those clergymen interested in rapprochement between various faith factions — and Carroll went along for the ride: an amusing plus one.

Probably Carroll wasn’t giving much thought to the forging of Canada that was underway round about then, not paying much mind to the to-ings and fro-ings in the colony that would inspire Alexander Muir to write the lyrics to “The Maple Leaf Forever,” which we still sang (with the same imperialist lust and fervour we brought to “Onward Christian Soldiers) when I was an elementary school student in the 60’s. That name, though, would have meant something to him, because another Alexander Muir was on the train from Konigsberg to St. Petersburg that Liddon and Carroll boarded on July 26. About him I’ve learned not much. He was an Englishman — or Scot, more likely — who’d been living in Russia for ten years — as Carroll tell us — doing some kind of business there. By a lucky chance — as it turned out — he happened to be in the same car as our two travellers. Carroll writes of how there wasn’t room for everyone to stretch out to sleep, so he, Carroll, bedded down on the floor with a carpet bag for a pillow. He writes that he and Muir played three games of chess, all of which Muir won. They became friends; or, at least, there was enough of a connection that on July 31, Muir called on them, Liddon and Carroll, at their hotel and invited them travel the next day to what sounds to have been his dacha in Peterhof, “a distance of about 20 miles.” Muir sent an associate, a Mr. Merrilies, to act as their chaperone. Here’s an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s diary for August 1, 1867, describing what, in the Canadian north, is known as an ice-road.

“We went by steamer down the tideless, saltless Gulf of Finland … The piece we crossed some 15 miles from shore to shore is very shallow, in many parts only 6 or 8 feet deep, & every winter it is entirely frozen over with ice 2 feet thick, & when this is covered with snow it forms a secure plain, which is regularly used for travelling on — though the immense distance, without means of food or shelter, is dangerous for poorly-clad foot-passenger. Mr. Merrilies told us of a friend of his who, in crossing last winter, passed the bodies of 8 people who had been frozen…”

Carroll was impressed, once they arrived in Peterhof and began to make their way by carriage to the home of their host, by the fine homes — recreational property, as now we’d say — and their beautifully landscaped and appointed gardens: much fine statuary was observed, and water features, and so on. They spent an agreeable time with Mr. Muir, and his wife and their “charming little children,” who were always an asset as far as Lewis Carroll was concerned. All told, it was an agreeable day, the more so for having been unsought after: one of those out-of-the-blue adventures that make travel worthwhile.

Lewis Carroll doesn’t write much in the Russian diary about luggage, beyond noting the carpet bag that was his pillow and remarking that he and Liddon had just a couple of portmanteaus between them. By Victorian standards, they were traveling light.

(And here I introduce a sidebar to remark that surprisingly little has been made in the Canadian press about the death last week of Pat Carney, who was a journalist before she became an MP before she became a Senator before she became a best-selling writer of fiction. I knew her just a little, and liked her very much. She knew her mind and spoke it and if it rubbed people the wrong way — I was one of those people — she didn’t much care. I half recall a story, a two-day teapot rattling with a tempest, of how someone was bumped from their business class seat in order to accommodate her — I may have the details wrong, it’s such a trivial matter I’m not going to take the time to check, feel free to do so and let me know — but that was nothing compared to the time an entire flight was cancelled and the passengers told they would have to wait because Elizabeth Taylor required it for her luggage. End of sidebar.)

Here’s a clipping from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, February 15, 1937, that describes Tallulah Bankhead — for whom this commonplace book is named — and her (relatively) modest baggage.

Two years later, Tallulah would score her greatest stage triumph as Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. This was the play, along with Private Lives, to which she could always return when other cupboards were bare. They kept her working. They kept her — despite her protestations of poverty — rich. In Tallulah (1972), Brendan Gill writes:

[Little Foxes] moved in triumph to Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago. After the show one evening in Toronto, on the April day when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, Tallulah’s dressing room was full of young kilted officers of the Princess Pat Regiment. Tallulah ordered supper for all, Rose Riley opened the trunk that accompanied Tallulah everywhere as a portable bar and started handing round drinks, and the officers and the cast sat on the floor and sang “The Road to the Isles,” and “Sixpence,” and “Bless Them All.”

I love everything about that story, especially the business about a trunk devoted to the transport of liquor that accompanied Tallulah everywhere. She was a sensualist of the highest order, she loved the press of flesh, loved to smoke (150 Kents a day), loved to drink. But she loved company, too. That, more than anything — so I would guess — would be the purpose of the trunk bar. Any one person’s needs can be accommodated with a monogrammed flask. The trunk was not for Tallulah. The trunk was for company.

Oh, mercy. Look at the time. It’s just past 5, and I’m due elsewhere in an hour. To wrap this up, by way of envoi, here’s a found poem I put together when I was doing a stint as an engineer on The Little Search Engine That Could. The term I was investigating was “never travelled without.” They were organized according to line length, as should be clear. I haven’t included the names of the people — some known, some not, all dead — to whom these necessities can be ascribed. Sometimes, identity just gets in the way, n’est-ce pas? Again, thanks for reading. Till next time, xo, BR