Susan Dickinson on EMILY DICKINSON 1830-1886
Remembered here by her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson gained recognition only after her death.
(Duke Ellington, 1935 -- Duke Ellington Collection)
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A Damascus blade gleaming and glancing in the sun was her wit. Her swift poetic rapture was like the long glistening note of a bird one hears in the June woods at high noon, but can never see. Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startling picturesqueness to her friends, who, charmed with their simplicity and homeliness as well as profundity, fretted that she had so easily made palpable the tantalizing fancies forever eluding their bungling, fettered grasp. So intimate and passionate was her love of Nature, she seemed herself a part of the high March sky, the summer day and bird-call. Keen and eclectic in her literary tastes, she sifted libraries from Shakespeare to Browning; quick as the electric spark in her intuitions and analyses, she seized the kernel instantly, almost impatient of the fewest words by which she must make her revelation. To her, life was rich and all aglow with God and immortality. With no creed, no formulated faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer.
Christopher Isherwood on VIRGINIA WOOLF 1882-1941
After Virginia Woolf drowned herself, her friend and fellow writer Christopher Isherwood recalled her enigmatic presence.
One remembers, first of all, those wonderfully forlorn eyes; the slim, erect high-shouldered figure, strangely tense, as if always on the alert for some distant sound; the hair folded back from the eggshell fragility of the temples; the small, beautifully cut face, like a Tennysonian cameo -- Mariana, or the Lady of Shalott. Yes, that is the impression one would like to convey -- an unhappy, high-born lady in a ballad, a fairy-story princess under a spell, slightly remote from the rest of us, a profile seen against the dying light, hands dropped helplessly in her lap, a shocking, momentary glimpse of intense grief.
What rubbish! We are at the tea table. Virginia is sparkling with gaiety, delicate malice, and gossip -- the gossip that is the style of her books and that made her the best hostess in London; listening to her, we missed appointments, forgot love affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours, when we had to be hinted gently but firmly, out of the house. . . .
Was she the bewitched princess, or the wicked little girl at the tea party -- or both, or neither? I can't tell. In any case she was, as the Spaniards say, "very rare," and this world was no place for her.
Ernst Straus on ALBERT EINSTEIN 1879-1953
As an assistant to Albert Einstein, Ernst Straus was well acquainted with the physicist's personal foibles.
Often on our way to work, someone would waylay him, tell him how much he had looked forward to meeting the great Einstein. Einstein would pose with the waylayer's wife, children, or grandchildren as desired and exchange a few good-natured words. Then he would go on, shaking his head, saying, "Well, the old elephant has gone through his tricks again."
He was very fond of small children and animals. With children he would go through various tricks, making funny noises with his hands and wiggling his ears. In fact, his ability to wiggle his ears was the only accomplishment of which he would boast shamelessly and which he was quite eager to show off. . . .
I might mention here a good anecdote he told about himself. We were looking for a paper clip for a manuscript and finally found one too badly bent to be usable, so we looked for a tool to straighten it. In doing so we found a drawer full of perfectly good paper clips, and Einstein was just about to bend one out of shape when I asked him what he was doing. "If you hadn't been here, I should certainly have ruined this clip in order to straighten the bent one. This always happens to me when I get stuck on a problem."
John F. Kennedy on ROBERT FROST 1874-1963
