Evolution and other events

I somehow failed to notice that yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, an event I didn't forget to include in A Book of Ages. What people forget is how scrupulously cautious Darwin was as a revolutionary. He checked and double checked before leaping to a dangerous conclusion. He also remained firmly in the fold of believers. Would this make him a Creationist? Not ideologically, not to fly in the face of science, no. Darwin appears three times in A Book of Ages.

November 24th is also the day Agatha Christie's play "The Mouse Trap" opened in the West End of London. It's still running. I note this event on page 229. Christie was 62.

Shaw, Icarus and Keith Richards

I am reminded by today's Writer's Almanac that George Bernard Shaw died on this day in 1950. He was 94, too old to be climbing trees, but that's what he was doing. Not whimsically or playfully. He died of injuries after falling out of the tree he was pruning.

Which makes me think of Keith Richards who fell out of a palm tree while vacationing in Fiji in 2006. Richards survived, and he continues to defy the actuaries' predictions about his lifespan. Based upon his smoking and drinking and carrying on they had arrived at a life expectancy of 52. He is now pushing 66. I doubt he will rival George Bernard Shaw, though, who was a teetotaler, vegetarian and a bit obsessive about physical fitness. I am sure pruning a tree seemed a sensible thing to do at the time. Mr. Richards and Mr. Shaw appear several times each in A Book of Ages.

Very Early Television

In July 1932, 29 year-old Clare Boothe was having an affair with married Wall Street moneybags Bernard Baruch and was invited over to his place to watch something his friend David Sarnoff called television. Not yet a playwright or married to Henry Luce of Time magazine, Boothe was an editor at Vanity Fair. She appears three times in A Book of Ages. Understudying Mary Pickford on Broadway, letting boyfriend Henry Luce "go all the way", and being nervous as her play "The Women" opens on Broadway in 1936. (Henry Luce appears twice.)

Wilde, Stravinsky, Stein

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested in room 118 at the Cadogan Hotel for the crime of being homosexual. Up until that moment he was a famous playwright, one of the greatest wits and celebrities of the age. (His play the Importance of Being Earnest had recently opened in the West End.) Five years later he would die in a far cheaper hotel in Paris at age 46. Wilde appears on pages 101, 125, 152, 160, 179 and 256 in A Book of Ages.

Igor Stravinsky, whose compositions provoked famous riots by people wearing expensive evening clothes in expensive concert halls in Paris and elsewhere, died on this day in 1971. In 1913, Gertrude Stein attended the second night performance of Stravinsky's Le sacre de printemps, thereby missing all the commotion. In any case it is hard to visualize the phlegmatic Ms. Stein throwing a chair. Stein appears at ages 4, 19, 29, 32, 33, 39, 59 and 72 in A Book of Ages. Oddly, Stravinsky only appears in other people's anecdotes.