Behind the Scenes Minis: I Keep No Monkey

0:01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. We talked about Montague Summers this week. We sure did. I think it might have been last October that I finally went, I think I need to do a podcast about this guy. And at that point, it was too late in October to have him be part of the October season. But he seemed like such a good fit for the October season that I wanted to save him. I did not know any of the stuff about the Order of Carinia or the Society for Sex Psychology Research, whatever the order of that was. I knew none of that when I put him on the list.

0:52 It was a surprise to me as I did my research. Something I didn't put in the outline. is that he apparently loved dogs. I mean, who doesn't? Yeah. One account said that he was buried with a coat belonging to one of his dogs. He also at one point had a dog named Cornelius Agrippa, who was named for Cornelius Agrippa von Nettenheim, who I should have just put a little biographical sketch of right there before I came into the studio, but I did not. I... There were a number of very fun descriptions of him in the research that I just, there was not really space to put all of them into the episode, so I have them now.

1:41 One is by Frederick S. Frank, who wrote an introduction to Montague Summers' A Bibliographical Portrait, which who described Montague Summers as eliciting strong opinions for his, quote, bizarre scholarship and still more bizarre biography, which I found amusing. The other, I have access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography through a library that I have a library card to.

2:14 At any time that we're talking about anybody from Britain or places connected to Britain, I go look there to see if there's an entry and often there is. And sometimes I get the sense that the entry was written a long time ago and I'm getting a lot of like carryover of kind of archaic language. And then sometimes there's ones like this one, which this I feel like is a newer edition. But There's also this sort of random aside where whoever wrote the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Montague Summers compared him to the Widow Twankie.

2:55 And that is a character from the pantomime of Aladdin. The Widow Twankie is Aladdin's mother, who is a laundress and is usually played by a man in women's clothes. And I was just like, this choice of description... Seems like it is conveying a lot of meaning, but also meaning I had to go look up because I don't know who the widow twanky is. I just want to name a pet that now. It's such a good phrase.

3:22 It is a good phrase. But then I was like, I felt like it was intended to sort of add some layers to him in a way that wasn't really necessary in what's usually a pretty straightforward biography. Yeah. Anyway, it was both amusing and a little like, what an odd thing to include. I love it. Yeah, me too, honestly.

3:50 I had an interesting moment. Okay. Where I realized a very silly connection between Montague Summers and another episode that we've done that I bet you would never guess in a million years. Oh, I'm excited. I'm excited. That Sewell description of him talks about him being in the reading room of the British Museum in 1927, which means that he overlaps with Mike the Cat. I figured it out during your pause there that this was going to be about Mike the Cat. Everything's always about Mike the Cat.

4:30 I don't know how he felt about cats, although I do know that he liked cats. Well, since Mike the Cat apparently didn't like very many people, probably he didn't feel great about it. Maybe Montague Summers was the one cat whisperer who Mike the Cat was okay with. Well, he had... Several, as you may or may not recall.

4:51 He had an Egyptologist that he loved that was like clearly his caretaker. And at least two of the guards at the exterior gate who would make him dinner every night. Yeah. And he liked those people. He did not like women at all. And most, I don't think he liked much of anybody outside of those three people. Yeah. So Mike the Cat, if folks are like, what are you two talking about? Is it an episode? It was about historical cats and dogs. Am I remembering correctly? I think just cats.

5:18 Just cats? Historical cats? Was that three upbeat cats? Was that that one? Maybe. Yeah. Mike the Cat was a stray cat that got taken in and guarded the British Museum from 1908 to 1929. He lived to a ripe old age. Yeah. I have a tattoo of Mike the Cat. I knew you said you were gonna, but I did not remember that you had done it. Oh, yeah. I got it. It's one of my favorite tattoos of all of mine that I have, as well as my tattoo artist, because he just turned out beautiful. And there are only two photographs of Mike the Cat, and they're both pretty spectacular.

5:53 And it's the one where he looks like he's yelling. And I just love it. And then I feel like in getting that tattoo... I accidentally manifested our cat, Jezzy, because she looks a lot like Mike the Cat. Oh, fun. Has a bit of a personality about her and is very loud. Like, she likes to talk and yell a lot, even when she's very happy. Yeah, yeah. So my tattoo is Mike the Cat, but there have been people who are like, is that Jezzy? And I'm like, kind of.

6:19 Now it is. Now it is. Now it's always Mike. But I just love that. I also, I will say, you know, I understand... Somebody like Montague Summers, who clearly seems to be very bright, definitely with an artistic bent. I get why he would have an affinity for the Catholic Church, right? Like, it's so associated with incredible art and really, really beautiful symbolism and ritualism. You know, I mean, all you have to do is like walk into St.

6:53 Peter's Cathedral or Sagrada Familia and like, you're instantly blown away by the sort of art and aesthetics of that religion. So I 100% get why he was into it. Him wearing purple socks to go with the calendar, like chef's kiss, Montague Summers. I get it and I see you. I, very late in the research when I was trying to just confirm a few details, I found some things that were sort of about More of his theology, which was stuff that I was like, I don't have the cultural framework or the religious framework to even be able to understand the terminology that you're using. And it seems like it would have been a whole other layer to the podcast that was probably also not going to make sense to a lot of people in the audience. So I

7:52 did not go try to learn all of it because I felt like it was a whole different world from the Protestant, specifically United Methodist Church that I was raised in. I was like, I don't even know what these terms mean. It's terms about very specific worldviews within Catholicism. And I was like, I don't even know what this is. I also feel like when we got to the end and how he died and how basically everything that he had went to somebody who was described as his like companion and personal secretary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like body servant or whatever. It reminded me of the meme that I hate so much that's about how historians be like, these are just gal pals. And I'm like, what do you mean by historians here? I think what you might actually

8:42 mean is your high school history teacher from 1984. Because there's a whole field of like queer history that's older than I am. That is all about exploring these kinds of lives and how these questions of identity and relationships have evolved over history and what that has meant. And, like, in terms of this, we just... I don't have any other details other than, like, these two or three descriptions that are all very bland. And it's like, maybe they were partners. Maybe... Montague Summers was incredibly grateful for this person that spent the last years of his life living with him, doing all of this work for him, and was like, I want that to be rewarded. And it's hard to know that for sure. I feel like we've

9:32 had some sort of similar, especially people who toward the end of their lives were living in a way that was pretty isolated. Maybe they had become disabled and had someone who was caring for them, and then they left all of their possessions to that person. But we don't really know beyond what was written down there, which is that this person, his biggest bequest was to this one person. Yeah.

10:01 Although I will say, not to be argumentative, but there have been a lot of historians throughout time who have been like, no, no, clearly not that. There have also been historians studying sexuality, sexual identity, you know, all of that. I just, like you said, I think... Well, we got to talk about like when that historian was writing because I have for sure read 19th century historians writing about somebody from the 18th century who a 21st century historian would have a totally different read on their relationships and their sexuality. I think the problem is that historians never, you know, just the word historians can be diced up in many ways. A lot of ways. I think a lot of people that throw that meme around, like, there's

10:50 not real historians that are the root of it. It's really, like... It's, again, like... I think there are, though, some real historians, though, that their own bias has led them to be like, no way, they were just pals. Yeah, I find the meme to be incredibly disrespectful to the incredibly many queer historians that there are, and it frustrates me every time I see it.

11:14 I don't think I take memes seriously enough to find, unless they're just blatantly cruel or spreading a falsehood. I'm like, meh, it's some kid on the internet, I'm fine. Yeah. We talked about Beelink's bells and Edward Moore this week. Yes. The silliest Halloween topic of all time, perhaps. It was so silly. I loved it so much. We don't get to talk about things that are that silly that often.

11:50 They're just goofy. Yeah. Delightfully goofy. One thing that is very funny to me that came up really in the Montague Summers episode... is how bickery the Society for Psychical Research is. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've always known, but it just came up in both of these episodes that people are like writing letters back and forth arguing.

12:14 What amazes me about it every time I look at one of those is that it's not, the camps don't divide evenly. Do you know what I mean? It's not like the people who believe are over here and the people that don't believe are over here. Within those two groups, there's a lot of arguing, and there's nobody that, like, is always on one side of the equation or the other, which is fascinating to me. Yeah, there were definitely people who were wanting to use science to disprove claims of the paranormal, but there were also people who wanted to use science to prove that they were real. And, yeah, that's fundamentally incompatible. There's also, like, the Podmore thing that we quoted in this episode... His take, and I haven't

12:56 done enough research on him to say if this is definitive or if this is how he habitually operated, was kind of like, we have to identify the fake stuff because that is the only way we can make any of the genuinely unexplainable things worthy of talking about or examining. Because otherwise, like, we're lumping a bunch of garbage in together with things that might really merit our intellectual time, which is just interesting. Mm-hmm. The other thing that just fascinated me about Edward Moore, on the one hand, I said it in the episode, like to be retired at 35 with all of your, you know, financial needs essentially met sounds terrific. But I also later as we were recording, it occurred to me like, yeah, but he traded his

13:40 childhood for that. Sure. Yeah. Because he was really young when he joined. Eleven. Yeah. Eleven. And then 12 when he shipped off. to India like no kid at that age no matter what era you have lived in is really going to be prepared for that kind of thing although he apparently flourished and was great at languages so I also would like to make a motion that when you tell someone something and they don't believe it we should all just adopt the phrase I keep no monkey as a way to defend yourself yeah I keep no monkey I'm never going to not find that funny. Like, just that that was a question that had to be answered. Yeah, yeah.

14:27 The bells. Yeah. The bells. I will say, if this is, as more modern scholars, skeptics, etc., have said, kind of a satirical hoax perpetrated by Moore. Mm-hmm. It worked in that it did point out how many people were so ready to come forward and be like, the same thing happened to me. Which I kind of love. He just collected all of these wacky stories. And it kind of seems like he's trying to make a case in the book because he connects them all. The way he weaves narrative is interesting to me. Like he gives them instead of chapter numbers, like they're almost like numbered like pieces of evidence. It sounds like he's trying to make the case.

15:12 if you believe he's not being satirical, that clearly there is some entity that's just bell crazy in England at the time. But he never quite walks you right to that explanation. He just shows you a lot of bell happenings, which is interesting to me. I don't know. Oh, Edward Moore. Yeah. I can easily see how if he did mean it as a satire, people were just... eating it up as a legitimate thing. Yeah. In part because we're living in an era where ridiculous things happen that seem like they should be satire, but they are real things that are happening. Yeah, and I mean, also, some of that, I find myself questioning, like, okay, if you want to do satire... That's cool, but part of the problem is that you are trading on a

16:07 reputation and a name of reliability that you've built. Oh, sure. Right? Like, he was so respected as a member of the Royal Society. He was believed to be an expert on, you know, the culture of India. Like, he was... I'm trying to think of, like, somebody at that level... In our modern culture that's known as a, you know, it would be like if a scientific Nobel laureate was suddenly like, did I tell y'all I have ghosts? Like, maybe like, wait a minute. You know, I, I, that's part of it is that if he's trying to do this as a satire, he may have miscalculated his ability to land a satire based on his reputation. Right. Sure. Sure. Or for people to perceive it as a satire based on his reputation. Yeah. Yeah.

16:55 Not about the bells. While I totally understand that this was filtered through his own perceptions and his own experience, I really like the idea that he was like, I don't understand some of the conversations that I'm having because I don't know this religious symbolism or I don't have this cultural context. And so he started writing it out for himself. Yeah. To understand it better. I thought that was really cool. Yeah. Yeah. There have definitely been times, even simple times of moving from North Carolina and Georgia to Massachusetts where I've been like, wow, I don't understand what's happening right now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it does offer up, it gives you an insight into the way his mind worked. And why he probably was better than

17:43 a lot of other people within the East India Company at like, I don't know that integrating is the right word, but just interacting with locals and understanding them and being able to communicate with them, making the effort to learn their language. Yeah, he was like, he was recognizing that he didn't have the cultural context. And so he tried to get it to make it better. Yeah, which is interesting.

18:04 Like I said, there are examinations still of his Hindu pantheon work and like how much of it is still worthwhile information to communicate to people that may not understand it versus the parts that are maybe not as well understood and might be communicated incorrectly. But it's very interesting and you can find the images from it online. He basically like he had collected all of this imagery while he lived there. And then when he was preparing the book, I think he had engravers do. replicas of them to go to print for the book. So there's a lot of imagery in it that people in Europe had never seen before that book came out, which is kind of interesting. Again, that gets into the problem of like a person not

18:48 from a culture explaining that culture to somebody else. But it is just a fascinating work. And it does, as you said, like the idea of like, I don't understand this. How can I learn this instead of making assumptions? That's respectable for sure. Mm-hmm. It's Halloween. I realized after we recorded last week's behind the scenes that at some point I think I thought that was our last Halloween episode, which it obviously wasn't, where I'm like, everybody go trick-or-treat.

19:17 Now everybody go trick-or-treat. If you're gonna. I'll say that we've had a lot of stuff going on and a lot of travel and more disorienting travel than normal, I feel like. And so I... Do not fault you in any way for being confused about when the episode is going to come out. I mean, to be fair, like once we're in the Halloween court or every day is trick or treat day in my book. But now it really is Halloween time. I hope this season has been good to everybody. I hope that you have if you are a Halloween person. like me, I feel like I've been a little soft on my Halloween celebrating this year.

19:53 I don't know if I can kick it up here in the last couple of days or not, but just because we've been super busy, sometimes life happens, life be lifin'. If you have been celebrating at whatever level is your jam or not celebrating, maybe you just don't want to mess with it. That's fine too. I hope that everything that you have been putting your mind and energies to has been enjoyable, fruitful, if that's what you desire. And that you're also giving yourself time to rest and that you're also giving grace to other people because we all needed a whole bunch right now. And honestly, like that, I have just realized in recent life that that can solve more problems than trying to barrel through them. a

20:31 little bit of grace goes a very long way but we are very grateful for you and hope that you are taking time to rest and recharge celebrate whatever you wish in whatever way makes you feel happy and is kind to others we will be right back here on monday with a brand new episode and if you'd like to trick or treat old-fashioned style we'll have a classic for you on halloween Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.