A Writing Life

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A Writing Life

i Stanley Weintraub 2019 Age 90

ii A Writing Life: Revisiting the Past

Stanley Weintraub

David A. Weintraub & Michel W. Pharand Coeditors

| ELT Press | www.eltpress.org

NUMBER THIRTY-THREE 1880–1920 BRITISH AUTHORS SERIES

iii ISBN 978–0–944318–79–9

E-Book Edition ISBN 978–0–944318–80–5 At Johns Hopkins University Press Project MUSE Open Access

Library of Congress Control Number 2020936795

TYPOGRAPHY & DESIGN Cover Display Type: Gill Sans Ultra Bold Text Type: Berkeley Oldstyle Black & Plantin

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iv DEDICATED TO

my family, friends, neighbors,

students, colleagues

and fellow soldiers,

both known and unknown to me,

with gratitude

for allowing the threads of their lives

to weave the tapestry of mine;

and to Rodelle, my Charlotte,

who as my wife and

partner of seven decades edited and coauthored my writing life

v Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better

than that a man should rejoice in his own works;

for that is his portion; for who shall bring him

to see what shall be after him?

Ecclesiastes 3:22

vi Contents

PHOTOS & ILLUSTRATIONS x–xiii

BOOKS BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB xiv–xvii

OED CITATIONS BY STANLEY WEINTRAUB xviii–xxi

PREFACE I Making the Most of Possibilites xxii–xxv

PREFACE II Acquiring a Name xxvi–xxx

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1 A Kid’s War I: Beginnings, 1929–1941 1–31

CHAPTER 2 A Kid’s War II: The Real Thing, 1941–1945 32–55

vii CHAPTER 3 Kid to Khaki, 1946–1951 56–80

CHAPTER 4 Korea, 1951–1953 81–103

CHAPTER 5 War in the Wards, 1952–1953 104–134

CHAPTER 6 Golden Gates, 1953–1956 135–157

CHAPTER 7 Beginning Again, 1956–1965 158–188

CHAPTER 8 Beardsley and Beyond, 1966–1968 189–213

CHAPTER 9 The Whistler Decade, 1969–1977 214–243

INTERLUDE 244–245

viii BOOK II

CHAPTER 10 Victoria and Its Successors 246–263

CHAPTER 11 Victorian Sunset 264–279

CHAPTER 12 Pearl Harbor and After 280–300

CHAPTER 13 Victorian Aftermath 301–321

CHAPTER 14 Farewell, Victoria! 322–333

CHAPTER 15 Wartime Christmases 334–352

CHAPTER 16 American Wars 353–360

EPILOGUE 361–363

AFTERWORD Tributes to Stanley Weintraub by Fellow Bernard Shaw Scholars 364–374

ix Photos & Illustrations

Frontispiece Stanley Weintraub 2019 Age 90 Fig. 1 Preface I The “Stanley Tree”: a pine branch, decorated with illustrated matchbook covers, made by his children and grandchildren to look like miniature copies of Stan’s published books Fig. 2 Chapter 1 Stanley Weintraub at age 3, in 1932 Fig. 3 Chapter 1 War cards, printed by Gum, Inc., of Philadelphia in 1942 Fig. 4 Chapter 1 Stan’s first book,The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which he reread in its entirety every year, for nearly 80 years, for his birthday. Fig. 5 Chapter 2 Admission ticket to Army War Show to raise funds for the Army Emergency Relief Fund Fig. 6 Chapter 2 Family portrait, 1942: front: father Ben, mother Ray; back: brother Herb, sister Gladys, Stan (age 13) Fig. 7 Chapter 2 Stanley at the Bat Fig. 8 Chapter 3 Family portrait, 1947. Left to right: Stan (age 18), Ray, Gladys, Ben, Herb Fig. 9 Chapter 3 Stan, late 1940s, prepared to run laps in Shakespeare class Fig. 10 Chapter 4 Stan in Korea, in uniform, with a short-lived mustache

x Fig. 11 Chapter 4 As First Lieutenant, Medical Service Corps, in Korea, 1952 Fig. 12 Chapter 5 In front of POW camp walls, Christmas Day, 1952, in Korea Fig. 13 Chapter 5 Bronze star medal certificate Fig. 14 Chapter 5 Bronze star medal Fig. 15 Chapter 6 Rodelle, Age 20 in 1953, shortly after leaving her pony-tail days behind Fig. 16 Chapter 6 Wedding portrait of Stanley and Rodelle, June 6, 1954 Fig. 17 Chapter 7 Stan and Rodelle with Mark, age 1, 1957 Fig. 18 Chapter 7 Young Professor Weintraub, late 1950s Fig. 19 Chapter 7 Party sketch of Stan and Rodelle, drawn by an Esquire house artist at Christmas, 1959 Fig. 20 Chapter 7 Dust Jacket of Private Shaw and Public Shaw, 1963 Fig. 21 Chapter 7 Stan and Rodelle with (left to right) Mark, David, and Erica, 1962 Fig. 22 Chapter 7 Dust Jacket of War in the Wards with inscription to Rodelle Fig. 23 Chapter 8 Stan with editor and wife Rodelle, 1968 Fig. 24 Chapter 8 Dust Jacket of Beardsley, 1967 Fig. 25 Chapter 8 Sitting in front of retaining wall at home xi Fig. 26 Chapter 9 On the set of Book Beat with Robert Cromie, 1974 Fig. 27 Chapter 9 Sculpture of a brain, commissioned by the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies and awarded to scholars honored as Fellows of the Institute Fig. 28 Chapter 9 Stan, posing in 1995, with a war-torn Japanese “meatball” flag Fig. 29 Chapter 9 Dust Jacket of Whistler, 1974 Fig. 30 Chapter 9 Plaster cast of bronze bust of Stan, cast by friend and Penn State artist Samuel Sabean. Original bronze in the West Chester University Library. Fig. 31 Chapter 10 Dust Jacket of Victoria, 1987 Fig. 32 Chapter 10 Posing with a pair of Queen Victoria’s underpants Fig. 33 Chapter 11 Presenting “Shaw Lecture” in English Reading Room at Cal State University Northridge, 1979, with copy of London Yankees on the coffee table Fig. 34 Chapter 12 With statue of Victoria while on Victoria tour in Australia, 1988 Fig. 35 Chapter 13 Dust Jacket of Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story and Stan’s dedication: “For Rodelle—My Charlotte” Fig. 36 Chapter 14 Stan, still authoring books, in his early 80s Fig. 37 Chapter 15 Dust jackets for Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001) and six other wartime Christmas books: General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (2003), 11 Days

xii in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2006), General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009), Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941 (2011), Christmas Far From Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival During the Korean War (2014), and The Recovery of Palestine, 1917: Jerusalem for Christmas (2017) Fig. 38 Chapter 15 Stan, in his Washington State University “Grandad” t-shirt, assisted by “Granna” Rodelle, telling the first graders at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School in Pullman Washington, about George Washington. His youngest grandson, Noah, is in the front row directly in front of Stan. Fig. 39 Chapter 16 Stan, age 74, in 2003, in his home office, while writingIron Tears. Brass sculpture for Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies is on the shelf at the bottom right Fig. 40 Chapter 16 Stan, age 77, in 2006, while writing 15 Stars Fig. 41 Chapter 16 Dust Jacket of Iron Tears Fig. 42 Epilogue Stan in his home office in 1976 Fig. 43 Epilogue Portrait of the author

xiii Books by Stanley Weintraub April 19, 1929–July 28, 2019

Bernard Shaw The Shaw Review, ed. (1956–1980) SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, vols. 1–10, ed. (1981–1990) An Unfinished Novel by Bernard Shaw, ed. (1958) Private Shaw and Public Shaw: A Dual Portrait of Lawrence of Arabia and G.B.S. (1963) Desmond MacCarthy’s The Court Theatre 1904–1907, ed. (1966) Cashel Byron’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw, ed. (with Harry T. Moore) (1968) Shaw: An Autobiography 1856–1898, ed. (1969) Shaw: An Autobiography 1898–1950. The Playwright Years, ed. (1970) Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw 1914–1918 (1971) Bernard Shaw’s Nondramatic Literary Criticism, ed. (1972) Saint Joan: Fifty Years After—1923/4–1973/4, ed. (1973) Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw, ed. (1975) The Portable Bernard Shaw, ed. (1977) Heartbreak House: A Facsimile of the Original Typescript, ed. (with Anne Wright) (1981) The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G.B.S. and His Work (1982) The Playwright and the Pirate: Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris, A Correspondence, ed. (1982) Bernard Shaw, The Diaries 1885–1897, ed., 2 vols. (1986) Bernard Shaw on the London Art Scene, 1885–1950, ed. (1989) Bernard Shaw: A Guide to Research (1992) Arms and the Man and John Bull’s Other Island by Bernard Shaw (with Rodelle Weintraub) (1993)

xiv Books by Stanley Weintraub

Heartbreak House and Misalliance by Bernard Shaw (with Rodelle Weintraub) (1995) Shaw’s People: Victoria to Churchill (1996) Who’s Afraid of Bernard Shaw?: Some Personalities in Shaw’s Plays (2011) Bernard Shaw Before His First Play: The Embryo Playwright (2015)

The Victorians Whistler: A Biography (1974) Four Rossettis: A Victorian Biography (1977) Victoria: An Intimate Biography (1987) Disraeli: A Biography (1993) Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert (1997) Edward the Caresser: The Playboy Prince Who Became Edward VII (2001) Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story (2003) Victorian Yankees at Queen Victoria’s Court: American Encounters with Victoria and Albert (2011) Farewell, Victoria! English Literature 1880–1900 (2012)

The 1890s The Yellow Book: Quintessence of the Nineties, ed. (1964) Reggie: A Portrait of Reginald Turner (1965) The Savoy: Nineties Experiment, ed. (1966) Beardsley: A Biography (1967) The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. (1968) The Green Carnation by Robert Hichens, ed. (1970) The Portable Oscar Wilde: Revised Edition, ed. (with Richard Aldington) (1974) Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse (1976) The London Yankees: Portraits of American Writers & Artists in England 1894–1914 (1979)

American Military & Political History The War in the Wards: Korea’s Unknown Battle in a Prisoner-of-War Hospital Camp (1964)

xv A Writing Life

The Last Great Cause: The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War (1968) A Stillness Heard Round the World: The End of the Great War: November 1918 (1985) Long Day’s Journey Into War: Pearl Harbor and a World at War (1991) The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, July/August 1945 (1995) MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (2000) Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire (2005) 15 Stars. Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who Saved the American Century (2007) Final Victory: FDR’s Extraordinary World War II Presidential Campaign (2012) Young Mr. Roosevelt: FDR’s Introduction to War, Politics, and Life (2013)

Wartime Christmases Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001) General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming 1783 (2003) Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, December 1944 (2006) General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009) Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941 (2011) A Christmas Far From Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival During the Korean Wa r (2014) The Recovery of Palestine, 1917: Jerusalem for Christmas (2017)

Other C.P. Snow: A Spectrum Science–Criticism–Fiction, ed. (1963) The Art of William Golding: A Comprehensive Account of the Novelist’s Work (with Ber- nard S. Oldsey) (1965) Biography and Truth, ed. (1967) Directions in Literary Criticism: Contemporary Approaches to Literature (with Philip Young) (1973) Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 10: Modern British Dramatists 1900–1945, Part 1: A-L, ed. (1982)

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 10: Modern British Dramatists 1900–1945, Part 2: M-Z, ed. (1982)

xvi Books by Stanley Weintraub

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 13: British Dramatists Since World War II, Part 1: A-L, ed. (1982) Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 13: British Dramatists Since World War II, Part 2: M-Z, ed. (1982) Benjamin West Drawings from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (with Randy Ploog) (1987) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, ed. (1998)

With Rodelle Weintraub Evolution of a Revolt: Early Postwar Writings of T. E. Lawrence, ed. (1968) Laurence of Arabia: The Literary Impulse (1975) Shaw Abroad, vol. 5 of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies (1985) Arms and the Man and John Bull’s Other Island by George Bernard Shaw (1993) Heartbreak House and Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw (1995) Dear Young Friend: The Letters of American Presidents to Children (2000)

Unpublished Deadlock: Roosevelt and de Gaulle, 1940–1945 (completed 2018)

xvii A Writing Life

OED Citations by Stanley Weintraub

amuel Johnson in the first English dictionary (1755) recognized as the standard for understanding and practice, credited earlier Sauthors and those of his time for examples of usage. A curious as- pect of a lifetime of publication has been the often inadvertent coinage of new words, or new usages of familiar words. The results insert one into the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary, the gold standard for language, for creating new words, new nuances for existing words, and further usages for words. The OED staff includes readers who survey new publications—obviously a hit-and-miss opportunity among mil- lions of new pages—for examples newly enriching language. The OED cites thirty-odd (some truly odd) examples under “Stanley Weintraub,” and their published sources. For example, “concretize,” to make something substantial. Or “Whistlerian,” evoking his fog-shrouded night- scapes. Wartime involvement can result in citations from medals to campaign ribbons. His Korean War experience resulted in a Bronze Star and four campaign ribbons. OED citations are the word equivalent of campaign ribbons. Some of his books have earned twenty-eight citations, in the company of earlier writers. Victoria, which received much attention in the media, apparently caught the eye of the OED editors. Here, then, in alphabetical order, are OED citations from his writing life: communize: to bring under communist control. Here he joins such examples as Bernard Shaw and the journals Blackwood’s and New York Review of Books. The citation is from 15 Stars (2007): “Ernest Bevin, for Britain, agreed that the abandonment of Berlin could lead to the communizing of Western Europe.” concretize: to render concrete, firm. Rarely used before, notably in the Eng- lish journal Athenaeum (1884) and in a book in 1952 by publisher Victor Gollancz. The citation is from Private Shaw and Public Shaw (1963): “The surviving manuscript shows stylistic changes in G.B.S.’s hand—mainly in his concretizing T. E. [Lawrence]’s diction.” country seat: a country estate belonging to gentry or nobility; here in the company of Addison (1711) and Trollope (1866); the citation is from Vic-

xviii OED Citations by Stanley Weintraub toria (1987): “Old, red-brick Kensington Palace, once the country seat of William and Mary, proved unready for occupancy.” crack-up: a crash, a collapse. Charles Lindbergh as flyer wrote of his first crack-up; F. Scott Fitzgerald of his personal crack-up. In Private Shaw and Public Shaw, he wrote of T. E. Lawrence in an R.A.F. rescue boat speeding “to the scene of a crack-up on the water.” lining: to mark with a line or lines. Shelley wrote of “cares” that “had lined his narrow brow”; and Dickens in Pickwick Papers (1837) of an “entry … afterwards lined through.” In Private Shaw and Public Shaw, “G.B.S. … both edited and altered the language of the contract … boldly lining out large passages and inserting new ones.” marquis or marquess: as a title prefixed to a place or surname. The use of “marquess” seems to date in Britain in various and curious spellings (even “markys”) from 1399, but in the usage which he employed in Victo- ria, only from 1910: “Lord Grosvenor had been made Marquess of West- minster.” memorandum: a note or record for future use, with a contractual implica- tion. In 1591 Shakespeare’s contemporary referred to “a memorandum drawen in some legall forme.” In Victoria, he wrote that “The Duchess permitted Conroy to draw up a memorandum defining her new powers over the Princess.” misappropriation: to appropriate for a wrong use. Edmund Burke in the House of Commons in 1794 used the term in a speech. Rarely used thereafter, it was employed by Anthony Trollope in 1874 and by James Joyce in 1922. In Victoria he wrote that turning to the Princess’s mother, the Duchess, William IV warned her that “He had seen her misappropriation of space in Kensington Palace.” mistaken: as “wrongly conceived.” First used in a letter by Thomas Wyatt in 1540 in “a mistaken certainty.” In Victoria: “The tough constitution of the Duke [of Kent] began to give way under the mistaken medical prac- tices of the day.” naming: when giving a name to a thing. Rarely employed as a participle, as in chemistry in 1964: “The simplest method of naming the compounds is to call them alkyl cyanides.” In Victoria: “The Princess was given the honors of naming the new bridge over the Dee.” new-laid: especially of a freshly laid egg. As early as 1528 in “newe layde egges.” In Victoria: “The simplest gift reported was two new-laid eggs sent for the Queen’s breakfast by an Irish farm woman.” occupancy: the fact of occupying something. In Blackstone’s Commentar- ies on the law (1767), taking possession “is the true ground and foundation of all property.” Cited earlier in Victoria for another usage: “Old, red-brick Kensington Palace, once the country seat of William and Mary, proved unready for occupancy.”

xix A Writing Life patron saint: when used ironically for protector, as when Ralph Waldo Emerson called Sir Philip Sydney “one of the patron saints of England.” In Victoria: “Saint George, the dragon-slaying patron saint of England.” police court: referring to a subordinate criminal court, as in D. H. Law- rence’s “faces of police-court officials” (1930). InThe London Yankees (1979): “English readers discovered [Harold] Frederic in the newspaper transcripts from Croydon Police Court in 1898.” porphyria: shortened form of haematoporphyria, a metabolic disorder described in Lancet (22 July 1961) and the New England Journal of Medicine (18 April 1968). In Victoria: “Possibly suffering from porphyria, the same malady that had enfeebled his father, he [George IV] was losing his sight.” postscript: a passage written following the signature in a letter; an af- terthought. As early as 1551, spelled as “post script.” In Francis Bacon (1625) “Post-script” and in Richard Steele (1711) “Postscript.” In 1925 in The Professor’s House, Willa Cather conflated the noun to “postscript.” In Victoria: “The Duke’s equerry, the letter added in a “postscript, would be sent ahead to handle all details.” precedence: priority; going before. Earliest usage is as “presidence” (1484). In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) it is “presedence” but in Ant- ony and Cleopatra (published 1623) it is “precedence.” In Victoria: “She complained about proper precedence being ignored in her seating.” princess: often capitalized even when not used in a title; however, in Chau- cer’s Knight’s Tale (c. 1385): “To speke of roial lynage and richesse / Thogh that she were a queene or a princesse.” In Victoria: “An old gentleman who had been a political radical when Victoria was still a princess….” proxy: as a verb, substitute for. A rare usage for a noun, as in The London Yankees, where “when [Harold] Frederic was unable to go to a premiere on which he was to report for The Times, Ruth would wear her hair up, put on evening clothes, and proxy for her father, who would compile a dispatch from her notes.” quarrelsomely: first used as an adjective in 1582 but rarely thereafter. In Victoria: “Queen Caroline, from whom George IV had been quarrelsomely separated for twenty-five years, unexpectedly died.” rabble: a noun usage as a quantification, first employed in c. 1400 but rarely thereafter. In Victoria: “Viscount Melbourne … blamed all discon- tent upon a rabble of agitators, most of them Irish.” rare: as adjective and adverb since c. 1400. In Victoria: “She was an elderly lady and wore the traditional black of her generation, giving way to display only on rare, great occasions.” regrets: as plural noun, in use since c. 1500. In Victoria: “Reluctantly, the Duke’s brother gave in … but noted his regrets that such an inexpedient journey was to be undertaken by the Duchess.” road race: first used in 1835, the term pre-dates the automobile. InThe London Yankees it appears in a letter in 1904 from Joseph Pennell to

xx OED Citations by Stanley Weintraub

newspaper editor W. J. Fisher: “I am anxious to do nothing to discourage motoring, and I do not at all object to this road race.” royalist: as noun and adjective the term dates back to 1605. It was much employed during the English civil strife, 1640–1660, continuing after- ward. In General Washington’s Christmas Farewell (2003): “New York and Long Island [were] the last major enclaves of enemy troops in the former colonies and home to resident and refugee royalists from Maine.” thesis: normally a noun but here used as an adjective, drawing on “thesis- novel” from the French roman à thèse in The London Yankees, where [ac- tress Elizabeth Robins] “continued writing thesis-novels on euthanasia, prostitution, women’s rights, and other subjects.” urtext: first employed in 1932, capitalized and italicized, to refer to the earliest version of a text. In Private Shaw and Public Shaw (1963), it is lower-cased and Romanized, as “The earlier version still retains advo- cates, because of its more complete, ur-text quality, and the comfortable feeling that no Procrustean games were played with its vocabulary and sentence structure.” Whistlerian: adjective, referring particularly to the impressionistic quality of the artist’s waterscapes and cityscapes. Although OED cites the 1979 The London Yankees, as “His [sc. Sargent’s] icily elegant and Whis- tlerian portrait … of Madame Judith Gautreau,” the words “Whistlerian nocturnes” appears earlier in Whistler. A Biography (1974), in which, also, James A. McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) is quoted as using the term himself, satirically, in a letter to his wife, Trixie, in 1895: “There! I can’t go on—it was like a sort of hideous Whistlerian chaos.” Someday he might gain one more accidental OED ribbon for jeeped, which is cited in the OED only four times, and never in this past tense form, and appears in this manuscript (in Korea) as “I jeeped out again in April.” His first use of jeeped, though, was in11 Days in December (2006), where he used this verb five times, including writing that Gen- eral “James Gavin … had jeeped south to ‘issue General McAuliffe his orders in person’” (p. 45).“ All but four of the OED attributions to “S. Weintraub” are to “Stanley Weintraub.” The others (unrecorded above) are to a “Sidney”—who, as Professor Weintraub would no doubt say, is welcome to them.

xxi A Writing Life

Preface I Making the Most of Possibilities

ur father liked to talk about his family history. His maternal grandfather was a farmer, and he was proud, in particular, of Othe wood carvers and coppersmiths, the artists, who populated the generations before him. Certainly, he admired great artists. But we find it interesting, and predictive, that those who preceded him in- cluded “writers.” In the last decades of the 1800s, his paternal grandfather Mendel earned his living as a scribe, writing letters and legal documents in Romanian and Russian for his less-literate neighbors. Dad’s maternal grandmother Ziva was also a writer. She lived in Narveh, a bend-in- the-river village near Bialystok in the borderlands between Russia, Romania and Poland. There and then, Jewish women and girls were mostly illiterate. She taught her own daughters, and other girls, reading and writing while the boys went off to school. The next generation was born in the old country and came to Amer- ica, like many in our country’s history, in search of a better life. Dad’s mother Rintel (we knew her as Grandmom Ray) was born in 1904 in Bialystok, the youngest of eight children. When she was two, she escaped the violence directed towards Jews in the borderlands of central Europe during the first years of the twentieth century. After hiding out for her last ten days there, in the family’s brick-lined root cellar, she was smuggled out of Czarist Russia in our great-grandmother’s arms, the last of her family to escape from a Europe in which they had no viable future. Dad was well aware of his origins as the first member of his immi- grant family to have been born in America, to have become a United States citizen by birth. Though his family lived in relative poverty at the beginning of the Great Depression, opportunities existed for a poor

xxii Preface I: Making the Most of Possibilities

Jewish boy in Philadelphia that would not have existed for him in the Pale of Settlement. He was in a hurry to take advantage of the opportunities he had been given and that had been denied to his forefathers and foremothers. He was not the first in his immediate family to graduate from high school; his mother was. But he was the first to graduate from college, doing so in only three years while working forty hours a week and commuting twenty-five miles each way, every day. He was also the first to serve in the U.S. Army, to earn a Ph.D., to become a university professor and to publish a book—and then approximately sixty more books. In looking back at his life, he suggests near the end of this memoir that what defines one’s life is “what you have done with the possibilities available to you.” The arc of his life took him from his birthplace in Philadelphia, to West Chester, to Korea and wartime service, to Penn State University, and finally all over the world as a scholar, researcher, speaker, educator, editor, author and consultant. From beginning to end, he did a great deal with the possibilities available to him. One of the most important possibilities he maximized, fortunately for us, was his brother’s introduction to him of Rodelle. She became his partner in writing as in life, developing into an accomplished scholar herself. She helped furrow out raw material for his books and provided expert—sometimes ruthless—editing expertise. Throughout this memoir, you likely will notice his obsession with Sherlock Holmes. They were both detectives, one solving crimes, the other unlocking secrets of the past. He absolutely adored these stories, re-reading the entire Holmes oeuvre every April as a birthday present to himself. He managed to see much of life, and the lives of those he wrote about, through a Sherlockian lens, and he spent much of his life investigating the lives of others on the same streets of London where his good friend Holmes had done the same. In this memoir, he also reveals the origin of his lifelong love of martinis: the Korean War. And while he loved them for himself, he advised us, circuitously, to avoid them. How so? He advised us to avoid olives. If we learned to enjoy olives, we would start drinking martinis and that, apparently, was something to be avoided for reasons he never ex- plained. The bottom line for him, then, was simple: olives lead to martinis, so for his children no olives. We ignored this advice.

xxiii A Writing Life

Amazingly, his only advice to us as new parents also involved martinis, but in this case, the advice was to drink rather than avoid them. We’re all allowed to be a little schizophrenic, right? His advice: if the baby is crying and can’t easily be calmed, put them in their crib. Have a martini. Take a long, hot shower. Have another martini. They’ll be fine. We all seemed to have turned out OK enough, so perhaps he was right. Our memories are of Dad always writing, reading or enlisting us to sort and mark on 3 x 5 cards and help create the index to one of his many books. As kids, we loved to delight him on birthdays and holi- days with writing-related gifts we always knew he’d appreciate: a jar of rubber cement, new typewriter ribbons, and typewriter erasers before computers made these gifts obsolete. In our young teenage years, we found another use for these items. Mom wanted a Christmas tree, and, since Dad year after year refused to embrace this radical idea, she appealed to his ego: she clipped a small, strong pine branch and stuck it in a jar. For decorations, we hung a jar of rubber cement, typewriter ribbons and erasers, pencils and boxes of paperclips; and as the pièce de résistance we kids crafted miniature reproduc- tions of the dust jackets of his books, which we affixed to matchboxes and hung on the tree. He Fig. 1 The “Stanley had no choice but to admit defeat. Mom got a Tree”: a pine branch, tree, of sorts, and a holiday tradition was born: decorated with the Stanley Tree. illustrated matchbook Though nearly always reading or writing some- covers, made by his thing, he often found time to take us out to the children and grandchil- yard to play catch. He’d gently toss a ball, under- dren to look like min- handed, to one of us at age four or five, and the iature copies of Stan’s ball would land at our feet, while we stood still, published books baseball glove carefully outstretched, waiting for the ball to land in the glove. “You need to go to the ball,” he’d say. “The ball won’t come to you.” He’d fetch the ball and toss it again. He, of course, NEVER tossed the ball into the maw of one of our wide-open, eagerly-awaiting, ball- hungry baseball gloves. Doink. The ball would land a few inches to the

xxiv Preface I: Making the Most of Possibilities left or a foot to the right. “You need to go to the ball; the ball won’t come to you” he’d repeat. Eventually, we learned. But what we learned wasn’t about catching a baseball. His advice was about life, about how he achieved all that he did. Rarely do the best and the most important things simply come to you. You pursue them, you go to the ball. In A Writing Life, he tells his own story of how he pursued knowledge and history around the globe for the better part of a century and how he sought each and every day to write one perfect sentence. Along his Forrest Gump-like journey, he introduces us to many of those he met during his travels through the twentieth century: Eddie Fisher, John Barth, C. P. Snow, Malcolm Cowley, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Dan- ny Kaye, Pierre Salinger, Ray Bradbury, Leonard Woolf, Studs Ter- kel, Jorge Amado, Alfred Knopf, Odetta, Isaac Bashevis Singer, J. M. Coetzee, W. H. Auden, Rex Harrison, Kitty Kelly, Joe Paterno, Bar- bara Walters, Larry King and Jacob Rothschild, among others. And in A Writing Life, you will discover that on many, many days, he achieved his goal of crafting a perfect sentence, and so as memorable as is his story, discovering and savoring these perfect sentences makes reading A Writing Life a marvelous adventure. —Mark B. Weintraub —David A. Weintraub —Erica Weintraub Austin June 2020

xxv A Writing Life

Preface II Acquiring a Name

ou, the reader, hold my life in your hands. Even my afterlife, which is what memoir becomes when life reaches a completed Ywhole. Memory is malleable. Revisiting one’s past can be like recording on an Etch A Sketch, on which events are drawn, then often altered or erased. Since distortions of memory can make us feel better about our- selves, recollections often color, conceal, or concoct the past. There is a little of that here, in my cautious handling of a few names. Invading the privacy of the living or dead may result in some awkwardness, even for the next generation. Aware of possible insensitivity, I have on occasion altered names, or dropped surnames. Survivors or their descendants may see through the thin veil. Otherwise I write about what I believe happened. I have revisited not only memory, but files going back to my curious birth certificate and my first-grade report card. I was a pack rat. Why I saved so much was not that I expected to be worth remembering but that concretizing my memory seemed, early on, important to me. I cultivated the process. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “concretize” is even credited to my writings.) I have saved boxes and files of stuff, and for better or worse trashed much more. Every move or change in life leads to lightening the load of the past. Some of the missing residue from the former century has escaped to recycling and the dustbins. Putting the past into pages inevitably foreshortens events and other people’s roles in them. Perhaps others, living or dead, would have told many things differently. The past belongs to them also, but here they have lived in my life. Yet no deliberate invention intrudes into these pages. Early on I lived with the recording of immediacy. Talking pic- tures were in their infancy in 1929 and media revolutions beyond any- one’s imagination still continue. My times encompass too many wars,

xxvi Preface II: Acquiring a Name in one of which I served, and an earlier one that foreshadowed my future. Nevertheless, I cannot pretend that the world would have been markedly different had I not intruded into it. My intimacy with the makers and shapers of my time and earlier has largely been indirect, as a biographer and a historian. On paper I have lived closely with Lawrence of Arabia, Queen Victoria, James McNeill Whistler, Benjamin Disraeli, Charlotte de Rothschild, George Wash- ington, Bernard Shaw, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, George Catlett Marshall, and other bold-face names. I have rejoiced at their achieve- ments, felt chagrin at their slips and often wept at their deaths as I described them. In imagination I attended their obsequies. The names in my life obviously begin with my own, which was par- tially a blank page. Memoirs often involve lucky breaks, or unlucky ones; chance encounters; self-made opportunities; grotesque mistakes and irresponsible mishaps. My name was one of the above. I entered life without one. Happily obsolescent as writing strategy is to open with “I was born …”—but my case may be one of the exceptions. My birth certificate had an empty space front and center, as my mother and father had failed to concur on a name for me. When a nurse arrived each morn- ing to my mother’s room at St. Agnes Hospital in Philadelphia—new mothers in 1929 remained a full week, or more—she held out a pad and pen and asked, “Do you have a name for Baby yet?” Luckily for me, my parents hadn’t compromised on one of the grim alternatives they had discussed: Seymour. I had no name. Finally, as discharge loomed, the nurse with the clipboard declared that since state law required fil- ing the birth certificate before I could depart for Percy Street, she was writing, as temporary expedient, “Male Baby.” In the Pennsylvania state archives for new births, as a lasting mis- hap, I am still “Male Baby Weintraub.” When I was escorted to Fell Elementary School in South Philadelphia in 1934, I had long been called “Stanley,” but the first public record of that was for kindergarten registration. No legal entity for years after required certified evidence as to who I was. As a working teenager in wartime I received a Social Security number as “Stanley.” I was employed at every level as “Stan- ley.” Only the Army found a minor problem: I had no middle name. That was rectified by the bureaucratic “NMI”—“no middle initial.”

xxvii A Writing Life

The crunch finally came when I was thirty-one in 1960. To fly to Dub- lin and London on research for a book, I needed a passport. To apply for one required legal documentation. Who was I? I asked my mother to search her papers for an appropriate document. My first grade report card would not do. She turned up a rabbinical certificate of circumcision with my name, and a portrait of themohel who wielded the scalpel and performed the ritual. The form proved unacceptable in Washington because it did not include the date and place of my birth. My Army DD-214 was also unacceptable. Reluctantly, she dug out her copy of my birth certificate. It read, in fading ink, “Male Baby.” Undeterred, she employed an eraser and scrubbed hard. Then with a ballpoint pen not yet in use in the year of my arrival, and differ- ing in all particulars from the rest of the words written in April 1929, she wrote boldly over the ghostly expurgation, “Stanley.” I might never go abroad, I worried. I might go to prison for forgery. At best I might have to go to court and request a lawful and time-con- suming name change. Still, I posted my application and several weeks later received a passport which entitled me to renewals without ever having to expose the altered document again. I am still “Male Baby” in the files of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but “Stanley” is my ballpoint-pen name. A writer should have a pen name, and I now had one. The “S”—whether “Seymour” or “Stanley”—harked back to a great- grandfather I never knew, Samson Schechter, the father of my father’s mother, whose life statistics are no longer on record—if they ever were. In 1898 my father, like his father, was born in the village of Hotin, on the outskirts of bustling Czernowitz in Bukovina, then the eastern- most “Crownlands” province of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Em- pire. Czernowitz (after 1918 in Romania as Cernauti and since 1944 in southwestern Ukraine as Chernivtsi) was one of the vibrant cul- tural centers for European Jewry in the nineteenth century. (The other two were in the Czarist Pale, in Poland and Lithuania.) Annexed to Joseph II’s Hapsburg domains in 1774, it was legally Viennese German in language. In the decade before the death of the reform-minded em- peror, Bukovina fell under his decree for Austria’s first census. For Jews and many others, traditional surnames, as in much of East- ern Europe, were suffixes of son or daughter added to the name of a

xxviii Preface II: Acquiring a Name parent in every new generation. Family names under the royal edict required the adoption of a continuing Germanic patronym. Often the choice recognized a father’s name, or the town of origin or residence, or an occupation. Apparently my parental forbear chose Weintraube: a cluster of grapes. The family may have had a vineyard, or produced wine. There is still a Weintraubenstrasse in Vienna and another in Dresden, but somehow, in time, the finale was sloughed off the patronym. The surname survived and proliferated. Perhaps all Weintraubs are family, however distant. At one point there were several (including me) in Who’s Who in America. Google searches turn up a great many; others live their lives under barely recognizable variations suggesting very different origins. Dad was four when his parents emigrated to the U.S. in 1902. He recalled nothing of his European years, nor his crossing. In 1918, war caused the dismemberment of the multi-lingual and multi-ethnic Aus- tro-Hungarian empire and the absorption of Bukovina into Romania to the south, which led to my father’s citizenship papers, as he became of age, that referred to him as Romanian, which he never was. His mother Eta always thought of herself as culturally Romanian but she knew few words in the language not involved in cookery. My mother’s parental family maintained a farm along the River Narew in Russian Poland that evokes to me scenes in the film ofFiddler on the Roof, actually shot in the early 1960s in a region of Croatia nearly forgotten by time. The family was dispossessed by Czarist edict, as were the tillers of the land in fictional Anatevka in the film, and forced into barely sustainable urban life in nearby Bialystok, north of the Narew. Her family in the overcrowded city descended from a long line of coppersmiths—miedziownik in Polish. (We still have centuries-old brass candlesticks.) Nevertheless, to seize opportunity, her brother Joseph was apprenticed to ecclesiastical woodcarvers, a craft he brought with him to America in the early 1900s, where his art adorns the River- side Church in New York, the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, and the DuPont Hotel in Wilmington, Delaware. Like young Mottel in Fiddler on the Roof, her eldest brother, Sol, somehow brought across the Atlantic his treadle sewing machine.

xxix A Writing Life

When her uncle Abram came to the Ellis Island immigration depot in New York harbor, the customs official, a German émigré, interrogat- ing him could neither spell nor pronounce the tongue-twisting Polish surname he offered. “Let me give you a good American name,” he in- sisted: “mine.” Thus, my great-uncle entered the New World as Abram Isaac Zimmerman. Her father’s surname was more easily spelled, but its origins are murky. Segal appears to be a medieval acronym for the He- brew phrase Se Gan Leviyyah, or Levite. Had Abraham Segal been in- terviewed by the kindly German-American official at Ellis Island who christened “Uncle Zimmerman,” my Zeyde might have been surnamed Brick—Ziegel in German. § § § Some of my papers for A Writing Life have been hoarded for eighty- odd years. Did I think as a schoolkid that I would be collecting otherwise fleeting memories for use decades later? If I did, I should have re- alized that some pages written (mostly hand-printed) with a red pencil would fade into unreadability, even with a strong magnifying glass. Yet they survive, along with others in less faded ordinary pencil. Ink was something one dipped into at school, with a penholder and scratchy nib. For some kids, inkwells were potential terrorist weapons, watched over, often unsuccessfully, by wary teachers from the front desk. I had never heard of, then, nor seen, a fountain pen. My early pages of cursive writing were, and are, rare. As I came to kindergarten and then first grade able to print at length, my teachers seldom asked me to write more than my signature, except at ex- ercises where, with pen and ink, we were ritually copying Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” That remained a requirement at least into third grade. Some stuff I hoarded over the years has not survived relocations. Happily—or unhappily—much did. The rest is fading memory, some of it perhaps only Fiction 101.

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