Behind the Scenes Minis: The Apostrophe and the Rich Guy

0:01 Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This week on the show, we talked about Fila Roseboro. Oh yeah, I it was really that apostrophe that caught my attention at the end of her name, that made me go, why is that spelled that way? Fila? What are you doing? I had one specific difficulty with research for this, which is that, as we alluded to, there is one book length biography that I know of of her. Oh yeah one. It is by Jane Kirkland Graham, someone I could find no information about other than the fact that she wrote this biography of rosebro It was published in nineteen fifty five. It is more than six hundred pages long. WHOA, that's a

1:09 minutia biography. That's a lot and it is two volumes published under one cover. So sometimes I can find when there are obscure books like this. I do have access to a lot of different libraries, and sometimes when there's something pretty obscure, I can find it in one of those libraries. That was not the case this time. There are maybe nine copies of this book in any library anywhere in the United States. It's possible that some of them can be sent through inner library loan. But like an extremely rare book that was published in nineteen fifty five, maybe not. Also, six hundred pages is like really long for our show, Like that's that's not really an amount of time that we can devote one subject. Yeah, unless

2:03 you're just like doing nothing else with your week, and I mean right, nothing else, absolutely nothing, or if it's gonna become a two part episode, that could potentially work. So I guess I lied a little bit. I could. Also in addition to Jane Kirklin Graham having written this book, I also did find out that she lived in Bamberg, South Carolina and was a school teacher. That was it.

2:25 So what I wound up doing was I read every review that I could find of this book, and there are a number of reviews of it that were published in like literary journals, okay, and the reviewers the same kinds of words showed up in a lot of the reviews, the words like unusual and unorthodox because, apparently, as Holly guests, from the fact that it was more than six hundred pages long, it does get into the minutia of things.

3:01 Apparently there's a lot of discussion of where individual facts came from. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, who said what? Some of the chapters of the book apparently have extensive citations basically throughout the text, but there's no index and there's no formal bibliography, which the reviewers all found made it very hard to like rEFInd information right, Like there was no index to refer back to if they were like, where was the part that she was talking about that time she was in Rhode Island? Who could say? It's some there? So she needed Viola Roseboro to edit that biz Maybe so it's possible that Jane Kirkland Graham was really Jeane Kirkland, who was one of Rosebrow's correspondents, friends with Roseboro, friends with some frosper As friends, and decided

4:02 to write a biography of her after her death, but it's not totally clear. One of the reviewers, named Scott c Osborne, pointed out the many flaws in this biography, but also called it quote prodigious research obviously performed with love. So all of that, I was like, I could see if I can get this through Inner Library a loan which would mean delaying when I could work on this episode.

4:29 I would have to wait for the book to arrive. But after having read the same consistent criticisms of the biography, I was like, I feel like this biography is just going to make it harder, right, It's gonna drag down the research process. Yeah. I would have filled in some of the gaps that I do have about her, but it would have added so much to the research process just to get through it. I did really love one particular thing that was said by Isabelle Howell in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly in their review of this book, which was quote, her cordial and generous acknowledgments of indebtedness to the Vanderbilt and Tennessee State Library staffs ought to be an encouragement to all librarians. So I guess Jane Kirkland

5:20 Graham was full of thanks and praise for the librarians who helped her with the prodigious research obviously performed with love. Villa Roseboro was also featured in that Southern Women in New York article that we talked about in the Elizabeth Bisland episode. Oh yeah, yeah, she did have a similar trajectory.

5:40 That was one of the reasons why I did not immediately jump into figuring out more about her. After Elizabeth Bisland, I was like, this does seem like it's going to have some of the same right moments of you know, person who grew up elsewhere moving to New York trying to make a living as a writer. So let's wait just a couple months before we get into it. I feel like if I had known her, I would have loved and hated her. I think I would have just hated her. Is that terrible to say? No, there's a specific personality that she seems to fit the bill of that I have encountered many times in my life, and people go, you will love this person because I am a chatty person and I like to chitter chatter. But

6:24 I don't like people. I mean. When I was younger, yes, but as I have gotten older, more mature, I do not like people who are mean for sport. Okay, I don't care how witty you are. If you're being a jerk, I think you're a pretentious jerk. That's the nice way I can use. There are much much more salty words bubbling in my esophagus right now. I just I don't I don't care that you're you're a hoot. I think you're a jerk at the end of the day, like her whole like, ah, I hate that I can't just insult people. I'm like, I'm out, I'm out like a trout.

7:00 You're done, You're done. Swimming away from this one. Yeah, I was reminded of Steel Magnolia's and if you don't have anything nice to say, come sit by me, which is also attributed, as we've discussed on the show before, to Alice Roosevelt. I forgot that, which is an interesting yeah connection point. Yeah, yeah, I mean, listen, I love a little gossip. I love calling it like it is.

7:23 But I also just think if you are going into conversations because you want to be mean. There's also that thing where she's like, I take control of it, and I'm like, I'm out. That's a boss person. I don't mind if you are a person that dominates conversations as long as you're a delight. But if you're just kind of being bossy because you think you're better than everybody else, then you're done. I'm sorry, Viola, I don't think we can hang. The things I loved about her are how much she loved reading, how much she really seems to have found joy in finding interesting new work in the mail bag at the magazine, how much she really seems to have never lost sight of the fact that that's an incredibly cool job to have, if that's something that

8:24 you find joy in, right, I think it's easy for everybody in every job, no matter how cool it is, to eventually kind of fall into a mundane rut with it. And it doesn't seem like she ever did that. It seems like she always was like, all right, I get to go to work, and I get to find some amazing new story in this mail bag full of stories, and then I get to help that writer get more well known in the world. And I think she really loved that and put her heart into it for as long as she was doing it. The fact that somehow she was at least briefly able to afford apartment in New York and multiple cottages, that's the thing I'm curious about.

9:04 Did she actually have enough money to do that or was she really financially overextending herself? And that is what contributed to the nineteen twenties being so much harder for her. I had Initially, before I quite realized the timeline, I had attributed that more to the Great Depression, right, but a lot like the height of the Great Depression was after she was having a lot of those struggles that struck me while we were trying you through this, and like ooh, she hit the downramp before the depression even hit that. Yeah, been a rough rough time. Yeah, so uh, I like that she liked to make her own way that I similarly to you don't necessarily like that she enjoyed being mean or insulting. I just you know, that's

9:54 how it is, that thing where it's like, okay, what is that person getting out of it? Like uh huh, why do you want? Why is that a thing you prize? Right? And it usually doesn't take you to a good place. Yeah yeah, yeah. That seems to have I think been one of the contradictions about her, because people also talked about how she was really generous with her friends, and even when she didn't have any money, she was always scraping something together to try to buy little treats for people, and especially books, Like if somebody came to visit her and they always left with a book. But then sometimes she could be very blunt in her criticisms of people, sometimes beyond what's really necessary. The other thing, too, is

10:39 that she wanted to make her own way in the world, which I love, but not to put any of that effort towards ensuring other women could do the same. Sure, Sure, and I'm like girl, yeah, yeah, yeah. The contradictions and how she was living her life she thought politically. I wonder if that six hundred and something page biography sheds any light on that, like where that was coming from.

11:11 Was it like I got mine and I don't need to worry about anybody else, or was there something else going on there? Don't know, Yeah, I don't It's really hard to Is that her form of rebellion because she grew up with hippie parents? Is it? You know what I mean? Like? Sure, trying to parse that file is a little tricky. Yeah, yeah, maybe someday, Because I think there are various services is not even the right word, sort of prints on demand situations that will print rare out of print books on demand, right, And I think one of those does have this biography, So I also could have spent money and waited a long time to get it. Uh So maybe I also have a question for you, okay, because I'm curious what your take is

12:09 on Willa Cather's will, okay, and it being disregarded after Okay, So here is my understanding of this situation. And I'm gonna say I did not I got to a point where I felt like I had a satisfactory answer, but I do not know. I cannot promise this is like the whole story. So Willa Cather's will said none of my correspondence published in whole or in part right. And then also there was an executor who all of that was tied to, and that executor eventually died, and at that point everything that the will had specified to go through the executor, all of that expired, and the setup that had been established to maintain her literary legacy dissolved with the expiration of all of that. So then a new basically executor, like the will is over, but like

13:11 a new organization had to be sort of developed to maintain the Willicather legacy, right, and that organization ultimately decided that it was importance to history and literature and study of Willa Caather to be able to publish that correspondence. And also I think she had specified in her will not to have any adaptations of her work, huh, and so I think they may have revisited that also. So my understanding is that all of this was within the bounds of what was legal, within the terms of her will. Yeah, it just made me feel icky. I get it. Like she she literally said she did not want this. She said forever, and you where I for Okay, but later now legally we can so well. And I don't know if the details of the will were do not ever

14:09 publish this until after the death of this person Gosch executor, or if it was do not ever publish this ever ever? I mean, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't either, And I don't really feel like doing an episode on Willa Cather to figure it out more. As we said during recording, I'm not that not really a fan of her work. Yeah, And I'm also like, I'm not a lawyer, and that what I Everything I just said was sort of my understanding based on having to try to figure out, like, wait a minute, this thing that here says that she said for her letters never to be published. But I read some of her letters while researching this episode. What's going on. So yeah, I don't for sure not either.

14:59 I mean I'm going through the like logic flow right of, Like, well, she did try to get her letters back from people, so she didn't want them out there, but maybe that's because she wanted to control it with a weird clause in her will. I don't know, yeah, read her will. Yeah, and it's possibly it's possible that we will get an email either from a lawyer or someone who knows a lot more about Willa Cather who can give a fuller explanation than my layperson, not a lawyer who looked just enough to figure out if she said, no, why is this on the internet? Yeah, yeah, fascinating. Yeah, I kind of like not necessarily with Willa Cather, because again, no plans to do a Willicather episode. But there's definitely been

15:47 times that we have worked on episodes on the show where like there's a question of would this person want these details right out there? And sometimes there's sort of a question of like the history storical interest about something, what is the importance of understanding this versus like what is the harm to this person or their legacy or what they would have wanted, And sometimes those things are complicated, Yes, because often too they involve other people. Yeah, which makes it layers and layers are trying to figure out what path feels the the right feels like the right one, right anyway, history you complicated thing. Yeah, okay, I have several things I want to discuss about Robert Boyle. Great.

16:43 The first is now a personal bucket list item sort of. Lismore Castle, Yeah, where he was born, is available for booking. Oh, you can book out the whole property. I don't know how much it is. They won't say so on their web site, so you know it's a lot. A lot. That's that means a lot. Come on, lattery whin. We're all going to this wreastle like if it happened, If it were to happen, if I just stumbled into a Redonka doodle sum of money, I'd be on that website getting quotes. Yeah, it's beautiful and it's obviously been renovated and kept up and it's now like an event space.

17:21 They'll rent it out for special events, but you can also just rent out the property to stay for a weekend with your friends or whatever. Imagine the cool party you could have there. Yeah, it's gorgeous. I think it is. Also I don't have their website up in front of me, but I think it is also like a property you can just go visit for the day, like a park area and green spaces that you can look at, and also architecture that's obviously interesting but so pretty. And I like that it's been there since the twelfth century. Said, yeah, that's cool. It's cool. The next thing I want to talk about is that third person autobiograph. Yeah, A lot of discussion of it calls it a fictionalized autobiography, and

18:07 it might be. It doesn't seem super embellished to me. I didn't live his life, obviously, I don't know, but like the details of his birth, his family, upbringing, where they were all very very identical to his actual life. And then I came across a portion of it where he was introducing a letter he had written to his sister, I believe, and I was like, this is why you wrote this in the third person, my dude, because in not saying it about himself, he can praise himself because he's introducing this letter and he's like, you know, essentially like you'll see what a good writer this person is.

18:48 They're amazing, and I'm just like, I see what you did here, I see I'm onto you, Robert Boyle. It made me laugh so hard. Also because when you read his letters, they're so clunky. Yeah, I'm sure in the time he was giving himself points for verbosity, but like in terms of clarity. Yeah, no, yeah, when I was reading through the outline, all the things I had to read that were quotations of his work were read through repeatedly by me to try to make sure I understood what he was saying. They're clunky. But again that also, I mean that becomes an interesting discussion point of the ways that different things have been valued in writing and intellectual communication and correspondence over the centuries. Right to him,

19:41 it was I know a lot of big words, and I can string him together, whereas I think today we'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. Clarity in scientific writing in particular, clarity in all things. Well, and we read clunky stuff in the Heart Lib episode two, didn't we, Yeah, remembering that right, Yeah, it's a clunky time.

20:00 They were all clunky writing each other. So you know, it's if you believe that adage that you're the average of the five people you're closest to. Yeah, they're all just writing that same style. It just is a feedback loop, a self replicating feedback loop. Yeah, but that third person did crack me up. But then when he did the Skeptical Chemist and he chose to do that as a fictional dialogue, there was also part of me that's like, maybe he just likes to mix it up, like he doesn't like the directness of an actual scientific essay or a scientific writing style. Well, and there are other things that were written as dialogues. Yeah, so it's like he didn't, he didn't make that all up. But no, no, no, no, no,

20:44 it's interesting that he chose it for that particular thing. It did make me chuckle. Yeah, Okay, the big thing I want to talk about, yes, is wealth and wealth inequality. Okay, because listen, Robert Boyle was a man born to incredible privilege, right, and if you really look at his whole life, everything he was able to achieve was a direct result of that privilege. Right. He inherited a big, empty castle that he could go stay at, right set of castle, or in any case, a big where he could go stay and do experiments. Because he didn't have to work and he didn't have anything else going on. Not many people have that ever. And then you know, even when he was like at Oxford, he you know, he fell in

21:40 with a lot of great thinkers in part because that the work he did in his big, empty home opened the door for him to have, you know, intellectual discourse with other people that did experiments, which then brought him into their circle at Oxford and then at London, and even in his later years when he's living with his sister Catherine, they are living in a very fancy part of town. They were on Pall Mall, which you know was where all of the wealthy people lived, and he was able to afford to set up a whole lab of his own that was not part of his Oxford setup. So, like, it is one of those things that especially kept jumping out to me. And I don't know if I'm just being hypercritical of poor Robert Boyle, but like he gets

22:24 held up as the first modern chemist, but he didn't really invent or discover a whole lot, right, He just spent a lot of money in his lab doing things, which is cool, and it does again fostered that idea of exploration and experimentation among his peers. But I'm also like, the one thing that you're really well known for was kind of an accident, And I mean, I shouldn't boil it down to that. He was doing a very clearly laid out experiment and observing the results. But I feel like a lot of his place in the history of science is because he was a wealthy dude who got to do wealthy dude stuff and then met other wealthy dudes and they wealthy duded together. Yeah. Well, we had the whole era of like the gentleman's science scientists gentlemen like.

23:18 Some of that was a bit later than Robert Boyle, like more into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prior to as much formalization and professionalization of like the educational system and the idea of what a chemist is. Yeah, but yeah, I think about that too, And I also think about how many of them also had a sister or a daughter or a wife who was doing a lot of record keeping or note taking or whatever. Well, and Catherine is actually on my list because she had her hands in a lot of pies in the best way of like supporting financially just supporting, like through encouragement a lot of people that were doing a lot of science and other things. She is a pretty interesting figure and really

24:10 pretty pivotal in that surge of discovery at the time. But yeah, it makes sure you start to look at like all of the people that I shouldn't say all, many of the people that are lauded as you know, great pioneers in their field were able to be that because in many cases there was general wealth in the mix.

24:33 Now there is an interesting flip on this though, because then I think about less than one hundred years earlier, Thomas Harriet and Galileo were both looking at the moon through a telescope at the same time. Oh sure, but because Thomas Harriot had tons of money, he didn't publish anything because he didn't need to, whereas Galilea was like, I look at the thing I looked at. I know what the moon looks like. You guys, somebody pay me.

24:58 So there's a flip on that one. But and so yeah, it's just I'm fascinated by the way that wealth plays into the stories that we tell about discovery, pioneering in scientific fields, et cetera. When there are so many other people who were probably working as hard or harder, possibly even in the same fields, but maybe even not in you know, some other job that don't ever get recognized anyway.

25:26 That's I gotta be in my bonnet today about this. I don't know what's up with that. It's a voting day, so maybe it's just maybe that's anyway. Robert Boyle, I find him fascinating. I didn't know anything about the like religious elements of his work at all. Oh, yeah, it is weird because he was he was so hell bent on the idea that everyone that was not Christian was doing it wrong, which is such a weird mindset for someone who is kind of trying to bumble their way through understanding the world more deeply. Mm hmm, Like you know, you don't know everything because you're trying to learn things, but also you think you know everything. Yeah, what's going on?

26:19 Rob anyway, Robert Boyle fascinating person, very important in history, but also got you gotta look at the context. Yeah. May may we all have the good fortune to get a ton of money and do experiments and putter in the way we desire. If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you have whatever financing you would need in place to do something cool, maybe experimental, but in a safe way. But also I just hope, like you have peace, you have some rest and relaxation and time to just think about whatever you would like and putter or if you want. I love a good putter, Oh, I love it so much. If you don't have time off this weekend, I hope that you still get some puttering in. I'm gonna putter around in my sewing room after we're done recording.

27:10 Will I do anything about you, I don't know, but I'm gonna putter. I hope though, that if you are working, that you have as smooth as time as possible in those endeavors. And I hope that everyone is kind to one another and we all take care of each other. We will be back here on Monday with a brand new episode. We will also have a classic episode for you tomorrow. 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.