On the stage set
of the Piazza della Rotunda
A couple of thousand citizens
(some still in togas)
strolling about or
sitting at café tables
And an old old flowerseller
passing among the tables
bending over young couples in jeans
as they whisper together
and offering them
her so dry flowers
And they not deigning
to notice the old crone
with her gnarled hands
and her fingers full of
the thin rings of
her former lives
each one of them enough
to enlighten them
as to what love or life might be
And her lips
almost at their ears
in which they hear only
the very distant roaring
of their own futures
"#64" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Far Rockaway of the Heart. © New Directions, 1997. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It was 150 years ago today, in 1865, that General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Union troops had driven Lee out of Richmond and blocked his route back to North Carolina. Lee’s Confederate troops had no more food or supplies, and Union forces hounded them wherever they went. Men were deserting in growing numbers, and those who stayed seemed certainly doomed. “It would be useless and therefore cruel, to provoke the further effusion of blood,” the Confederate general said, “and I have arranged to meet with General Grant with a view to surrender.”
The meeting took place in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and it lasted about two and a half hours. Lee was the first to arrive at one p.m., and was arrayed in full dress uniform, spotless. Grant came in half an hour later, straight from the road: rumpled and mud-speckled, with no ornamentation to give away his rank. Lee asked for the terms of the surrender in writing, which Grant did quickly. He agreed to release all Confederate soldiers currently held prisoner by the Union, with the condition that they never again take up arms against the United States. He also agreed that all the troops could keep their personal property — including their horses, which many of them would need for spring planting back home. Grant also agreed to supply Lee’s men with Union rations. The meeting concluded at about four o’clock and — for all intents and purposes — so did the war, which had cost some 630,000 American lives. There were further surrenders of other field armies over the next few months, but Lee’s surrender marked the death knell of the Confederate cause.
Grant, upon overhearing some Union soldiers celebrating, put a stop to the festivities, saying, “The war is over; the Rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”
It’s the birthday of poet Charles Baudelaire (books by this author), born in Paris (1821). His father died and his mother remarried a man he couldn’t stand, who sent him off to military school, but he got kicked out right before graduation. He inherited a small fortune, but he spent so much on clothes, entertainment, and drugs that soon he had squandered half of it. His family took away what was left and doled it out in small, regular increments. So he started writing to make money — essays, criticism, and translations. Although he is remembered as a poet, he only published one book of poems, Les fleurs du mal (1857, The Flowers of Evil).
It’s the birthday of Gregory Pincus, born in Woodbine, New Jersey (1903). He is one of the inventors of the birth control pill.
He had two uncles who were scientists, and he said, “As long as I can remember, I knew I was going to be a scientist.” He got a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Cornell, and was an instructor in zoology while studying at Harvard. By age 35, he was an international authority on the sex of mammals and sex hormones.
He first made headlines by achieving the in-vitro fertilization of rabbits. But he wasn’t celebrated for it. Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had just been published, and test-tube babies born without spirits were in the nation’s imagination. He was depicted as a “Dr. Frankenstein.”
When women’s rights advocates Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick approached him about an affordable birth control pill in 1953, Pincus was struggling financially. McCormick was heiress to the International Harvester fortune. She funded the trials, and in 1960 “the Pill” was approved for human contraception.
Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain (books by this author), received his steamboat pilot’s license on this date in 1859. Receiving the license was the fulfillment of a childhood dream for Clemens; in Life on the Mississippi (1883), he wrote: “When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. [...] These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”
He served as a “cub” pilot for two years, learning the ropes, before being granted a full license at the age of 23. He piloted steamboats for two years after receiving his license, and because he had a reputation as a safe helmsman, he found steady work. He made between $150 and $250 a month — which were pretty good wages at that time.
He later compared a new church building to a couple of boats he’d piloted, in an article for the New Orleans Crescent: “I took lodgings at Mrs. Marmadale’s, John, higher up in Locust street, towards the big church — I mean the one in the construction of which the least little bit in the world of Christian vanity sticks out — for, do you know, John, that that edifice reminds me of the steamers JOHN J. ROE and R.J. LACKLAND? Yes, she does. You admire the craft at a distance, but when you step aboard you are astonished to find that what you thought was all cabin, isn’t and what you thought was all church, isn’t, either, by considerably more than a good deal. No, John, it’s all sham. There’s a bulkhead amidships, and behind is a place devoted to bale-rope and buckets, in the one case, and prayer-meeting in the other.”
And it’s the birthday of Hugh Hefner, born in Chicago, Illinois (1926). He is the founder, editor-in-chief, and Chief Creative Officer of Playboy magazine.
He was brought up by strict Methodist parents. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he majored in psychology, where he reviewed Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male for a student publication. He wrote: “Dr. Kinsey’s book disturbs me [...] our hypocrisy on matters of sex have led to incalculable frustration, delinquency, and unhappiness.”
He was writing promotional copy for Esquire magazine when he got the idea for a new magazine that would be similar but more daring. He said: “What I was trying to create, quite simply, was a lifestyle magazine for single guys. There had never been anything like that before.”
He financed the project with $600 of his own money and several thousand dollars from friends, including $1,000 from his mother. He produced the first issue out of his kitchen in Hyde Park, Chicago. It featured a nude calendar photograph of Marilyn Monroe, which Hefner bought from a calendar company for $200. The magazine reached the newsstands in December of 1953 and quickly sold out all of its copies.
He said, “Playboy was part of trying to make the case for a more liberal attitude [...] suggesting that there was more than one moral purpose for human sexuality.”