This headline simply grabbed me. "Queen Susan of the Albanians." It sounds like the title of a Marx Brothers film or maybe one of those Crosby and Hope road pictures. My faves. "The Road To Morocco" is the best. Catch the tunes. Johnny Burke was the personal lyricist to Bing Crosby. You know you are a star when you have a personal lyricist. I'm
counting on it. But I am afraid I will have to be it. I will have to serve until the end of my days. A court jester; an in-house smarster. In short. someone who might serve in the purview of Queen Susan of Albania.
Johnny Burke would have a lot of fun with, "Susan, Queen of the Albanians."
Perhaps we have to serve someone all the time. We had better pick right mistress.
Perhaps not. Maybe we should call the whole thing off.
How exotic or obscure is this? Albania must be the most arcane of European countries. You know that British intelligence would lose more agents there than anywhere else? I still wish I could have been there in" the Toledo roadhouse" that's what is mentioned below. Sinatra used to play roadhouses in New Jersey.My mother would tell me about this. That's when she dated my father. I don't think this roadhouse would have been all that similar. Sinatra also had a personal lyricist. That was Sammy Cahn, who was a lovely fellow.
We are off on the "The Road to Tirana."
A graziers daughter? It is so much fun to read between the lines. An inherent putdown. What the heck is a grazier? I am a city boy. A grazier is someone, I surmise, who grazes for his cattle feed. Of for fodder for a column. You don't see them around much anymore. I guess I am a grazier in an urban sense -- but we are off the topic. I am sure a
grazier's daughter is as wholesome and sweet as a farmer's daughter. Then again, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm after they've seen Albania?
Who could resist this obit? Back in Atlanta, Sherilyn Bottoms was berating me this afternoon. She said I did not include enough women in this column.
Now I include a woman who surpasses all women: Susan, the "Queen of Albania." It reminds me of the old Dorothy Parker joke, "And I am Marie of Romania." I did not know there were queens in Romania. What that the hell am I saying? We have plenty of them here in San Francisco, though perhaps they losty a little regality over the years.
In the old days, royalty was a living; a treasured artifact. Monarchy is specious, for sure --- but inexplicably attractive.
Above all, this piece is wonderfully written. What is a level-headed wife anyway. I never had one. I lis this is the second graph: "not unusual for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of the of dispossessed monarchs."
Ever have a bad day?
I really hate being a dispossessed monarch.
Or queen for a day.
Consort to a gun-toting giant? I've seen enough of those in the Tenderloin of San Francisco. And some of them were queens, as well.
Sherilyn is right: they might be dangerous. There are so many elements to this story that are so bizarre, it makes
me wonder. Friends of the CIA, Richard Nixon? Well, I guess that doesn't surprise me at all. But this "level-headed queen," I have to tax my imagination what it was all about. The chaos, the crime, the lunacy --- the state of simply trying to stay alive.
The writer describes her as "Young Sue." She must have been. She was only 63 when she died the other day. And she taught art. What kind, I haven't a clue. We would like to dismiss people who align themselves with the wrong persons. But perhaps we should not castigate them automatically.
I don't know. Judging people is always a bad premise. This is such a weirdly ornate story, I don't know what to make of it. Did she align herself with racist and creepy people? Yes. Do I condemn her? I don't know.
Sue's life is one well-lived because she made hard, determined choices. We may decide how we would like to live our own. That will give me pause. I am sure you will catch the stab from the London Telegraph reporter: "buried in a grave next to her mother-in-lay and bridge parter."
I don't know which is worse: having a mother-in-law or bridge partner.
Meanwhile, let's keep up our practicing to curtsey ...
Level-headed Bruce Bellingham, in San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Queen Susan of the Albanians
(Filed: 22/07/2004)
Queen Susan of the Albanians, who has died in Tirana aged 63, was the level-headed Australian wife of King Leka I, claimant to the Albanian throne.
It is unusual, though not unknown, for middle-class girls to marry into the fading respectability of dispossessed monarchs. But when in 1975 the petite Susan Cullen-Ward married Leka, son of King Zog I, she became consort to a 6ft 9in tall, six-gun-toting giant who has never shaken off the aura of his country's bandit culture.
Leka was born at Tirana just before the Second World War and left with his family two days later when Mussolini invaded Albania. After his father's death in 1961, he was crowned in Paris, from which he was expelled because of the ill-effects he was having on French relations with Albania's Communist regime; he was once arrested on suspicion of
arms smuggling in Thailand. In the course of his restless travels, he met Susan Cullen-Ward at a dinner party in Sydney.
They discovered that they both had claims of royal lineage; she was descended from King Edward I and he was a ninth cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II. When later she was on holiday in London, a courtier suggested that she visit the King in Madrid.
Leka's mother, Queen Geraldine, realised that the couple's friendship was turning into love, and proceeded to groom the Australian girl as her royal successor. This involved teaching her to speak Albanian and steeping her in the history and customs of the country.
Leka and Susan were married in a civil ceremony at Biarritz, then held a reception at a five-star Toledo roadhouse, which was attended by members of other exiled royal families, loyal Albanians and Spanish friends. An Anglican clergyman flew from Australia to give the couple a blessing. Queen Elizabeth II sent a telegram of congratulations. Queen Susan looked suitably regal in a 200-year-old gold embroidered Royal Albanian shawl and the guests cried "Long live the King".
A grazier's daughter, Susan Cullen-Ward was born at Waverly, a suburb of Sydney, on January 28 1941 (Australia Day). She was brought up on a New South Wales sheep station, where she remembered practising to curtsey to Her Majesty The Queen before a royal visit, but also being taken with the achievements of Colonel Harry Llewellyn and his
showjumper Foxhunter, which won a gold medal at the 1952 Olympics.
Young Sue went to the Presbyterian Ladies' College at Orange, then Sydney Technical College, before teaching art at a private studio and contracting a brief marriage.
After returning with her husband to Spain, she told the press at the reception, "I don't feel like a queen. I feel a happy bride. Nothing has changed except I have the responsibility of helping His Majesty back on to the throne of his country."
The couple returned to Madrid, where they were befriended by King Juan Carlos and continued to enjoy the attentions of Albanians while awaiting what they knew must be the fall of Communism. But when it was discovered that Leka not only retained some Thai bodyguards but had what was described as an arms cache in their home, the Spanish government asked him to leave.
That Leka had some reason for his fears was proved when he arrived at Gabon to find his plane surrounded by local troops, who were said to have been hired to capture him by the Albanian government; he saw them off by appearing at the plane's door with a bazooka in his hand. The couple went on to Rhodesia. But after Mugabe took power they settled in a large compound at Johannesburg, where they were given diplomatic status by the apartheid regime.
There were always questions about how Leka lived. Such good friends as the Shah of Persia, President Richard Nixon (a distant cousin) and the CIA are thought to have helped.
The royal couple enjoyed a close personal relationship. They both had a keen liking for smoking. He affectionately called her "Roo", and showed some signs of allowing her to check some of his more outlandish instincts. For more than a decade she tried to lead as ordinary a life as her roles of housewife, mother and queen permitted.
Out shopping, she often called herself Mrs Smith or Mrs Jones because shop assistants were so bamboozled by her title that they would ask "Queen? That's a funny name, Mrs Susan." When her son, also called Leka, was born, her hospital room was declared part of Albania for an hour. The boy used another name at school, though she once heard him tell a friend: "You can't say that to me, because I'm a prince." Entering the room, she said: "Well, I am queen, so I outrank you. Bend over."
But as Communism looked increasingly shaky in Eastern Europe, she felt lonely with Leka so frequently away; and she was always delighted to receive visits from old Australian friends, replete with gossip. Her relationship with the dominion's government proved a problem when she wanted a passport.
The Australian authorities declined to recognise her as a queen, and eventually, after a friend had a word with the Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock, the document described her as "Susan Cullen-Ward, known as Queen Susan". There was also trouble when her son, aged four, had wanted to visit a dying grandfather whom he had never met. He was asked to sign an undertaking not to address any dissident groups.
By the time it was clear that Leka's dream of returning to his country was to be fulfilled, she showed signs of preferring the simple life, saying she had no desire to live in a castle and was sometimes tempted to laugh when grown men, in their confusion, had curtseyed to her.
But she duly went to Albania where a referendum was held on his offer to become king in 1997; it was lost. But he was invited to return by 74 members of parliament in 2002; and it is thought that the royalist party could join a government after next year's general election, thanks to proportional representation.
After her death in July of this year, Queen Sue lay in state at the royal palace outside Tirana. Hundreds paid their last respects before she was buried in a grave next to her mother-in-law and bridge partner Queen Geraldine.
Who wants to live in a castle anyway? Right.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Thursday, July 15, 2004
A Life Well-Lived
Hollywood has decided to remake the classic 1962 film, "The Manchurian Candidate." It is a painful reminder that we no longer have Lawrence Harvey around anymore. Through his twitchy performance and the film, we learn solitaire is the only game in town. Nor do we have Sinatra, who, like the rest of the cast, was amazingly good in the film. It includes John McGiver, James Gregory and yes ... Whit Bissell. Let's thank God for Janet Leigh and Angela Lansbury. There are moments in cinema that allow such talented elements tumble together and create a truly wonderful movie. Not to mention that, I, as a horror film fan, found this to be one of the scariest of all. Why? Because it is plausible.
In the original "Manchurian Candidate", the presidential candidate is secretly undermined by the man running on the second spot through the most nefarious techniques -- one is manipulating the media. The other might be described as the intelligence community on steroids. Sound familiar?
How about this line from Sinatra's character, Major Marco: "Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it."
Perhaps the real genius beyond the first "Manchurian Candidate" is John Frankenheimer, who learned his craft by making training films for the Air Force and then became a television director during the 1950s. He used both experiences to give the film more starkness and credibility. No wonder Frankenheimer understood how manipulative sound bites would eventually replace critical analysis. The original story comes from novelist Richard Condon, who also wrote "Prizzi's Honor."
I watched the original "Manchurian Candidate" the other night. I was riveted by David Amram's sophisticated score. Not the soupy stuff they tend to inflict on us in movie houses today. (David is a former San Francisco jazzer who performed a show last year at the Caffe Trieste in North Beach.) His strident soundtrack makes the story all the more terrifying.
Amazing to think Angela Lansbury was only a year older than Lawrence Harvey when they made the film. She played his incestuous, conniving mother in the film. Therein lies the lovely and sordid Greek tragedy theme. Lansbury's youthful beauty makes their relationship in the movie all the more lurid. Inexplicably, she still does not look all that different today.
Most of us know that in the 1960s Sinatra obtained the rights to the movie and pulled it from circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It came a little too close to home. In 1988 it was rereleased on video where Frankenheimer, Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod reminisce a little. Sinatra said he had
never been so excited about a project in his movie career as he was about "Manchurian..."
The difference between then and now is the soldiers were brainwashed. Now the American public is. The soldiers, then and now, will tell the story.
But this column is about John Frankenhiemer, who died in July two years ago. I pull it from this archive (and from the Associated Press). Rosemary Clooney -- one of my favorite singers in the whole, wide world
-- used to talk about how the death of Robert Kennedy pushed her over the edge to addiction. That night in Los Angeles in 1968 also changed Frankenheimer. Years later he would openly admit he had trouble with addiction. Such a euphemism: an addiction is nothing but trouble. But he came to grips with it, acknowledging that it had cost him plenty. That is, he had stopped working -- the worst thing that could happen to an artist. I like the way he dealt with his subsequent depression: he went to France to become a chef. But, of course, he came back home to movies --- and to television -- crepe pans in hand, no doubt.
Frankenheimer represents to me what an artist is all about: someone who has the courage to be honest with himself and then share it with the world. His was a life well-lived.
So, meanwhile, why don't we pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
LOS ANGELES, July 6, 2002 -- John Frankenheimer, one of the foremost directors of the 1960's with classic films like "The Manchurian Candidate," "Seven Days in May," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Train,"
died of a massive stroke from complications after spinal surgery. He was 72.
Mr. Frankenheimer, whose career stumbled badly in the late 1970's and 1980's because of personal problems and alcoholism, came back in the 1990's with significant television work that was flourishing at the time of his death. "It's a town with a short memory: it grinds people up and throws them away," Mr. Frankenheimer told a reporter in 1998, shortly before the release of an action film, "Ronin," with Robert De Niro.
More recently, Mr. Frankenheimer won four consecutive Emmys for best director for the television movies "Against the Wall," "The Burning Season," "Andersonville," and "George Wallace." His last film, "Path to
War," an ambitious HBO drama about the Johnson administration's decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, was shown in May to strong reviews.
On the set of the film, veteran actors like Donald Sutherland, who played Clark Clifford, and Michael Gambon, who played President Lyndon B. Johnson, said that Mr. Frankenheimer's enthusiasm and energy amazed
them. "He has more energy than someone half his age," Mr. Gambon remarked.
The director Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a longtime friend of Mr. Frankenheimer, said: "John revolutionized everybody's way of looking at films. He had such a highly charged visual style, so full of energy; he brought us close up to things. Movies began to look different after John came along."
The actor Gary Sinise, who played the title role in "George Wallace" and worked with Mr. Frankenheimer on two other films, called him "a giant."
"He had directing in his blood," Mr. Sinise said. "He loved filmmaking. It gave him a great source of energy and passion. I met him later in his career, but never did I feel that I was working with someone whose best years were over. He just had this great passion and great vision and great love for making movies."
A tall, rangy figure with a craggy face and a surprisingly open and blunt style, Mr. Frankenheimer sometimes looked back on his career without bitterness or rancor.
He attributed his bleak years in part to a drinking problem that sometimes led to disastrous decisions in the 1970's. He said he stopped drinking in 1980.
"I had a drinking problem — it took a toll on me," he told The New York Times in 1998. "And the state of mind you're in when you have a problem like that, even when you're not drunk, is the most dangerous time.
Because you make decisions that are not totally in your best interest about your life, about your career choices and everything."
Of his decision to stop drinking, he recalled, "I said, `I can't go on like this — I figured I'd better do something about it, because otherwise I was going to die.' "
Compounding his personal difficulties was the assassination in 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy. Mr. Frankenheimer and Senator Kennedy had developed a close friendship, and the filmmaker spent that year traveling with
him during his presidential campaign. In fact, on the last day of his life, Senator Kennedy was staying at Mr. Frankenheimer's home in Malibu. Mr. Frankenheimer drove him to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown
Los Angeles to celebrate his triumph in the California primary. It was there that Senator Kennedy was killed.
Decades after the assassination, Mr. Frankenheimer spoke of it in halting terms. "If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night," Mr. Frankenheimer said. "I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of
deep depression. It took a long time to get it back." Mr. Frankenheimer spent five years in France, taking cooking classes and directing sporadically.
Movie offers dwindled in the 1980's after several failures and a decline in his work. But his career revived in 1994, when he won an Emmy for HBO's searing prison drama "Against the Wall," about the bloody 1971 riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
Mr. Frankenheimer was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1930, the son of a stockbroker. "I came from a half-Irish, half-German-Jewish background, a very volatile mix," he once said with a laugh. He was active in theater at Williams College. During the Korean War, while he was in the Air Force making training films, he decided he wanted to direct movies. Soon afterward he was hired as an assistant director at CBS in New York, where he worked on weather and news broadcasts as well as shows like "Person to Person" and "You Are There."
Yes, we are there.
In the original "Manchurian Candidate", the presidential candidate is secretly undermined by the man running on the second spot through the most nefarious techniques -- one is manipulating the media. The other might be described as the intelligence community on steroids. Sound familiar?
How about this line from Sinatra's character, Major Marco: "Intelligence officer. Stupidity officer is more like it. Pentagon wants to open a Stupidity Division, they know who they can get to lead it."
Perhaps the real genius beyond the first "Manchurian Candidate" is John Frankenheimer, who learned his craft by making training films for the Air Force and then became a television director during the 1950s. He used both experiences to give the film more starkness and credibility. No wonder Frankenheimer understood how manipulative sound bites would eventually replace critical analysis. The original story comes from novelist Richard Condon, who also wrote "Prizzi's Honor."
I watched the original "Manchurian Candidate" the other night. I was riveted by David Amram's sophisticated score. Not the soupy stuff they tend to inflict on us in movie houses today. (David is a former San Francisco jazzer who performed a show last year at the Caffe Trieste in North Beach.) His strident soundtrack makes the story all the more terrifying.
Amazing to think Angela Lansbury was only a year older than Lawrence Harvey when they made the film. She played his incestuous, conniving mother in the film. Therein lies the lovely and sordid Greek tragedy theme. Lansbury's youthful beauty makes their relationship in the movie all the more lurid. Inexplicably, she still does not look all that different today.
Most of us know that in the 1960s Sinatra obtained the rights to the movie and pulled it from circulation after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. It came a little too close to home. In 1988 it was rereleased on video where Frankenheimer, Sinatra and screenwriter George Axelrod reminisce a little. Sinatra said he had
never been so excited about a project in his movie career as he was about "Manchurian..."
The difference between then and now is the soldiers were brainwashed. Now the American public is. The soldiers, then and now, will tell the story.
But this column is about John Frankenhiemer, who died in July two years ago. I pull it from this archive (and from the Associated Press). Rosemary Clooney -- one of my favorite singers in the whole, wide world
-- used to talk about how the death of Robert Kennedy pushed her over the edge to addiction. That night in Los Angeles in 1968 also changed Frankenheimer. Years later he would openly admit he had trouble with addiction. Such a euphemism: an addiction is nothing but trouble. But he came to grips with it, acknowledging that it had cost him plenty. That is, he had stopped working -- the worst thing that could happen to an artist. I like the way he dealt with his subsequent depression: he went to France to become a chef. But, of course, he came back home to movies --- and to television -- crepe pans in hand, no doubt.
Frankenheimer represents to me what an artist is all about: someone who has the courage to be honest with himself and then share it with the world. His was a life well-lived.
So, meanwhile, why don't we pass the time by playing a little solitaire?
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
LOS ANGELES, July 6, 2002 -- John Frankenheimer, one of the foremost directors of the 1960's with classic films like "The Manchurian Candidate," "Seven Days in May," "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "The Train,"
died of a massive stroke from complications after spinal surgery. He was 72.
Mr. Frankenheimer, whose career stumbled badly in the late 1970's and 1980's because of personal problems and alcoholism, came back in the 1990's with significant television work that was flourishing at the time of his death. "It's a town with a short memory: it grinds people up and throws them away," Mr. Frankenheimer told a reporter in 1998, shortly before the release of an action film, "Ronin," with Robert De Niro.
More recently, Mr. Frankenheimer won four consecutive Emmys for best director for the television movies "Against the Wall," "The Burning Season," "Andersonville," and "George Wallace." His last film, "Path to
War," an ambitious HBO drama about the Johnson administration's decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam, was shown in May to strong reviews.
On the set of the film, veteran actors like Donald Sutherland, who played Clark Clifford, and Michael Gambon, who played President Lyndon B. Johnson, said that Mr. Frankenheimer's enthusiasm and energy amazed
them. "He has more energy than someone half his age," Mr. Gambon remarked.
The director Frank Pierson, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a longtime friend of Mr. Frankenheimer, said: "John revolutionized everybody's way of looking at films. He had such a highly charged visual style, so full of energy; he brought us close up to things. Movies began to look different after John came along."
The actor Gary Sinise, who played the title role in "George Wallace" and worked with Mr. Frankenheimer on two other films, called him "a giant."
"He had directing in his blood," Mr. Sinise said. "He loved filmmaking. It gave him a great source of energy and passion. I met him later in his career, but never did I feel that I was working with someone whose best years were over. He just had this great passion and great vision and great love for making movies."
A tall, rangy figure with a craggy face and a surprisingly open and blunt style, Mr. Frankenheimer sometimes looked back on his career without bitterness or rancor.
He attributed his bleak years in part to a drinking problem that sometimes led to disastrous decisions in the 1970's. He said he stopped drinking in 1980.
"I had a drinking problem — it took a toll on me," he told The New York Times in 1998. "And the state of mind you're in when you have a problem like that, even when you're not drunk, is the most dangerous time.
Because you make decisions that are not totally in your best interest about your life, about your career choices and everything."
Of his decision to stop drinking, he recalled, "I said, `I can't go on like this — I figured I'd better do something about it, because otherwise I was going to die.' "
Compounding his personal difficulties was the assassination in 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy. Mr. Frankenheimer and Senator Kennedy had developed a close friendship, and the filmmaker spent that year traveling with
him during his presidential campaign. In fact, on the last day of his life, Senator Kennedy was staying at Mr. Frankenheimer's home in Malibu. Mr. Frankenheimer drove him to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown
Los Angeles to celebrate his triumph in the California primary. It was there that Senator Kennedy was killed.
Decades after the assassination, Mr. Frankenheimer spoke of it in halting terms. "If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night," Mr. Frankenheimer said. "I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of
deep depression. It took a long time to get it back." Mr. Frankenheimer spent five years in France, taking cooking classes and directing sporadically.
Movie offers dwindled in the 1980's after several failures and a decline in his work. But his career revived in 1994, when he won an Emmy for HBO's searing prison drama "Against the Wall," about the bloody 1971 riot at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
Mr. Frankenheimer was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1930, the son of a stockbroker. "I came from a half-Irish, half-German-Jewish background, a very volatile mix," he once said with a laugh. He was active in theater at Williams College. During the Korean War, while he was in the Air Force making training films, he decided he wanted to direct movies. Soon afterward he was hired as an assistant director at CBS in New York, where he worked on weather and news broadcasts as well as shows like "Person to Person" and "You Are There."
Yes, we are there.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
A Life Well-Lived for Rod McKuen's "Flight Plan"
Rod and I have a common and not-so-secret addiction.
That is, words. So it will not surprise you fellow travelers on Flight
Plan that this obit in the London Telegraph caught my attention. Not
just for Robert Burchfield's unrepentant and exquisite lust for
language -- but for his purity of conviction that would get him into
trouble. He battled political correctness before anyone had coined the
awful phrase. PC has damaged the freedom of language usage more than
anything --- even the California state school system. But I imagine
that is a dead heat.
Burchfield, the linguist, used language in a way that H.L. Mencken did
with journalism: fearlessly, directly and yes, compassionately. How
many reporters today recall Mencken's admonition, that the job of a
journalist is "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?
Burchfield was a kiwi, I word I think he had included in the Oxford
English Dictionary. It is slang for a New Zealander. He loved Tolkien.
Ironic that because a much younger fellow kiwi, Peter Jackson -- the
brilliant director of the "Lord Of The Rings" film trilogy -- now sits
at the top of the cinema world. Words and images have always been the
hallmark of imagination.
You will discover that Burchfield once hired the terrific writer Julian
Barnes at the OED to be an expert on "sports and dirty words." Wouldn't
you love to have a gig like that? Of course, I would likely never get
around to the sports stuff.
Burchfield described language as "a monster accordion." Probably the
greatest tribute to the accordion that's ever been uttered.
He wasn't beyond going to court over copyright matters -- even taking
on Weight Watchers for the right to use the term.
Let's face it: no one knew the weight of words than Robert Burchfield.
He watched them better than anyone. He was always paying attention.
This is a life truly well-lived.
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
That is, words. So it will not surprise you fellow travelers on Flight
Plan that this obit in the London Telegraph caught my attention. Not
just for Robert Burchfield's unrepentant and exquisite lust for
language -- but for his purity of conviction that would get him into
trouble. He battled political correctness before anyone had coined the
awful phrase. PC has damaged the freedom of language usage more than
anything --- even the California state school system. But I imagine
that is a dead heat.
Burchfield, the linguist, used language in a way that H.L. Mencken did
with journalism: fearlessly, directly and yes, compassionately. How
many reporters today recall Mencken's admonition, that the job of a
journalist is "to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted"?
Burchfield was a kiwi, I word I think he had included in the Oxford
English Dictionary. It is slang for a New Zealander. He loved Tolkien.
Ironic that because a much younger fellow kiwi, Peter Jackson -- the
brilliant director of the "Lord Of The Rings" film trilogy -- now sits
at the top of the cinema world. Words and images have always been the
hallmark of imagination.
You will discover that Burchfield once hired the terrific writer Julian
Barnes at the OED to be an expert on "sports and dirty words." Wouldn't
you love to have a gig like that? Of course, I would likely never get
around to the sports stuff.
Burchfield described language as "a monster accordion." Probably the
greatest tribute to the accordion that's ever been uttered.
He wasn't beyond going to court over copyright matters -- even taking
on Weight Watchers for the right to use the term.
Let's face it: no one knew the weight of words than Robert Burchfield.
He watched them better than anyone. He was always paying attention.
This is a life truly well-lived.
Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco
bellsf@mac.com
Monday, July 05, 2004
Robert Burchfield
Robert Burchfield, who has died aged 81, was the editor of the
four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972-86), and
chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984; he
played a crucial role in the study of the sources and development of
the English language, but his enthusiasm for the new sometimes enraged
traditionalists.
A New-Zealander by birth, Burchfield revelled in the flexibility of the
language, once describing it as "a monster accordion, stretchable at
the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib". He saw "standard English"
and "received pronunciation" as only a local, if once dominant, form of
a language which had become global and embraced many different strands,
each of which he regarded as democratically equal.
Burchfield broadened the scope of the OED to include words from many
Anglophone countries including North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. He also increased
coverage of demotic slang, colloquialisms and scientific and technical
terms.
The first fruits of his appointment as editor of the Oxford English
Dictionaries appeared during the 1970s when, to the dismay of lexical
purists, Maori terms (for example, kete and pakeha) began to appear in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
He soon discovered that nothing has the power to arouse people's
passions so much as words. He received anonymous death threats from
groups wishing to suppress racial vocabulary or to remove male
chauvinism from the language. One letter read: "You won't know where or
when, but you'll be dead."
He had to go to court to defend the OED's right to include pejorative
definitions of the word "Jew", on the ground that the function of a
dictionary is to describe language as it is, not as we may like it to
be. He had to fight legal battles over the right to include trademarks
and names, from Yale locks to WeightWatchers. He kept a file for what
he called the lunatic fringe: this included a letter from a man
imploring him to find a word for "a collector of fire helmets from all
over the world".
But the controversy over entries in the OED Supplement was as nothing
compared with the outcry over his revision of the grammatical bible
Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1996. Burchfield himself
admitted that he had "largely rewritten" Fowler, whom he described as
"a fossil". Yet even he must have been taken aback by the critical flak
which greeted his revision. One reviewer ventured that "Burchfield's
wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist
masterpiece have assured him a definite place in Hell".
Although Burchfield's Fowler contained much good advice (Richard
Ingrams and Jeanette Winterson were among a number of writers taken to
task for their dangling participles), and some reviewers applauded the
welcome he gave to non-standard constructions, others took exception to
what they saw as excessively permissive statements and lack of firm
guidance compared with earlier editions. Whereas the schoolmasterly
Fowler had defended standard English against invasion by the foreign
hordes, Burchfield saw it as merely the "language of the chattering
classes" and cited as many examples of American usage.
Robert William Burchfield was born on January 27 1923 at Wanganui on
the North Island of New Zealand, where his father ran the local power
station. There was only one book in the family home - a Socialist
tract. He was educated at Wanganui Technical College and at Victoria
University College, Wellington, where his studies were interrupted by
the outbreak of the Second World War.
It was the war, in which Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand
Artillery, that changed his life. While serving in Trieste, he
discovered a copy of Lancelot Hogben's Loom of Language, and was
captivated. After the war, he returned to complete his studies in
Wellington, then, in 1949, went on a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen
College, Oxford, to study English Language under J R R Tolkien and C S
Lewis.
Through their common interest in medieval literature he developed a
close friendship with Tolkien, whom he later described as "the
puckering fisherman who drew me into his philological net".
Immediately after graduation in 1952, Burchfield became a college
lecturer in English Language, first at Magdalen, then at Christ Church,
and later at St Peter's College, while studying for a doctorate on the
Ormulum, a 13th-century 20,000-line poem based on the Gospels.
While teaching at Oxford, he was encouraged by C T Onions, a former
editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to become involved in
lexicography, and he assisted Onions on his Dictionary of English
Etymology (1966). When, in 1957, he was appointed editor of the
Supplement to the OED, the University Press reckoned he would need
seven years and 1,275 pages to do the job. It took him 29 years, and
the four-volume supplement covered 6,000 pages.
Burchfield's team, in hallowed OED tradition, contained a fair number
of oddballs and eccentrics. One outside contributor worked from
Broadmoor and another from Parkhurst, where he had fetched up after
being arrested in the Bodleian Library. The novelist Julian Barnes was
employed for a time, as an "expert in sports and dirty words". He
recalled Burchfield's doubtful response to his efforts to include a
slang word for a supposedly popular form of sexual congress: "I'm
afraid, you know," Burchfield told him, "there isn't as much of this
about as you seem to think."
Burchfield's official retirement brought no slackening of pace, since
he was soon engrossed in Fowler. Among several other works, he wrote a
brief but informative history of The English Language (1985), published
a collection of essays, Unlocking the English Language (1991), and was
co-author of a report in 1979 on the quality of spoken English on BBC
radio.
Burchfield also wrote the preface for Caught in the Web of Words, a
biography of James A H Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, contributed to the Cambridge History of the English
Language, and published numerous scholarly essays. In the 1980s he
wrote a series on language, Sixth Sense, for The Daily Telegraph.
At Oxford, Burchfield became a tutorial fellow at Magdalen in 1963,
then a senior research fellow at St Peter's from 1979 to 1990. He was a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was appointed
CBE in 1975.
He married first, in 1949 (dissolved 1976), Ethel Yates; they had a son
and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1976, Elizabeth Austen
Knight.
four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary (1972-86), and
chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries from 1971 to 1984; he
played a crucial role in the study of the sources and development of
the English language, but his enthusiasm for the new sometimes enraged
traditionalists.
A New-Zealander by birth, Burchfield revelled in the flexibility of the
language, once describing it as "a monster accordion, stretchable at
the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib". He saw "standard English"
and "received pronunciation" as only a local, if once dominant, form of
a language which had become global and embraced many different strands,
each of which he regarded as democratically equal.
Burchfield broadened the scope of the OED to include words from many
Anglophone countries including North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. He also increased
coverage of demotic slang, colloquialisms and scientific and technical
terms.
The first fruits of his appointment as editor of the Oxford English
Dictionaries appeared during the 1970s when, to the dismay of lexical
purists, Maori terms (for example, kete and pakeha) began to appear in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
He soon discovered that nothing has the power to arouse people's
passions so much as words. He received anonymous death threats from
groups wishing to suppress racial vocabulary or to remove male
chauvinism from the language. One letter read: "You won't know where or
when, but you'll be dead."
He had to go to court to defend the OED's right to include pejorative
definitions of the word "Jew", on the ground that the function of a
dictionary is to describe language as it is, not as we may like it to
be. He had to fight legal battles over the right to include trademarks
and names, from Yale locks to WeightWatchers. He kept a file for what
he called the lunatic fringe: this included a letter from a man
imploring him to find a word for "a collector of fire helmets from all
over the world".
But the controversy over entries in the OED Supplement was as nothing
compared with the outcry over his revision of the grammatical bible
Fowler's Modern English Usage, published in 1996. Burchfield himself
admitted that he had "largely rewritten" Fowler, whom he described as
"a fossil". Yet even he must have been taken aback by the critical flak
which greeted his revision. One reviewer ventured that "Burchfield's
wildly descriptionist perversions of the classic prescriptionist
masterpiece have assured him a definite place in Hell".
Although Burchfield's Fowler contained much good advice (Richard
Ingrams and Jeanette Winterson were among a number of writers taken to
task for their dangling participles), and some reviewers applauded the
welcome he gave to non-standard constructions, others took exception to
what they saw as excessively permissive statements and lack of firm
guidance compared with earlier editions. Whereas the schoolmasterly
Fowler had defended standard English against invasion by the foreign
hordes, Burchfield saw it as merely the "language of the chattering
classes" and cited as many examples of American usage.
Robert William Burchfield was born on January 27 1923 at Wanganui on
the North Island of New Zealand, where his father ran the local power
station. There was only one book in the family home - a Socialist
tract. He was educated at Wanganui Technical College and at Victoria
University College, Wellington, where his studies were interrupted by
the outbreak of the Second World War.
It was the war, in which Burchfield served with the Royal New Zealand
Artillery, that changed his life. While serving in Trieste, he
discovered a copy of Lancelot Hogben's Loom of Language, and was
captivated. After the war, he returned to complete his studies in
Wellington, then, in 1949, went on a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen
College, Oxford, to study English Language under J R R Tolkien and C S
Lewis.
Through their common interest in medieval literature he developed a
close friendship with Tolkien, whom he later described as "the
puckering fisherman who drew me into his philological net".
Immediately after graduation in 1952, Burchfield became a college
lecturer in English Language, first at Magdalen, then at Christ Church,
and later at St Peter's College, while studying for a doctorate on the
Ormulum, a 13th-century 20,000-line poem based on the Gospels.
While teaching at Oxford, he was encouraged by C T Onions, a former
editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to become involved in
lexicography, and he assisted Onions on his Dictionary of English
Etymology (1966). When, in 1957, he was appointed editor of the
Supplement to the OED, the University Press reckoned he would need
seven years and 1,275 pages to do the job. It took him 29 years, and
the four-volume supplement covered 6,000 pages.
Burchfield's team, in hallowed OED tradition, contained a fair number
of oddballs and eccentrics. One outside contributor worked from
Broadmoor and another from Parkhurst, where he had fetched up after
being arrested in the Bodleian Library. The novelist Julian Barnes was
employed for a time, as an "expert in sports and dirty words". He
recalled Burchfield's doubtful response to his efforts to include a
slang word for a supposedly popular form of sexual congress: "I'm
afraid, you know," Burchfield told him, "there isn't as much of this
about as you seem to think."
Burchfield's official retirement brought no slackening of pace, since
he was soon engrossed in Fowler. Among several other works, he wrote a
brief but informative history of The English Language (1985), published
a collection of essays, Unlocking the English Language (1991), and was
co-author of a report in 1979 on the quality of spoken English on BBC
radio.
Burchfield also wrote the preface for Caught in the Web of Words, a
biography of James A H Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary, contributed to the Cambridge History of the English
Language, and published numerous scholarly essays. In the 1980s he
wrote a series on language, Sixth Sense, for The Daily Telegraph.
At Oxford, Burchfield became a tutorial fellow at Magdalen in 1963,
then a senior research fellow at St Peter's from 1979 to 1990. He was a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was appointed
CBE in 1975.
He married first, in 1949 (dissolved 1976), Ethel Yates; they had a son
and two daughters. He married secondly, in 1976, Elizabeth Austen
Knight.
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