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The Times Great Women's Lives

Page 36

by Sue Corbett


  Seven years later her long-awaited English Bread and Yeast Cookery finally appeared, a disappointment to many of her admirers. A heavy tome, over-filled with intricate variations on the same theme, this was a work of reference rather than a pleasure to read. The following years were spent researching a book on sorbets and ices which was never completed. But the academic period towards the end of her life was balanced by the publication of An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, a collection of pieces written mostly between 1955 and 1965. These provided a timely reminder of her powers to amuse and entertain, as well as to instruct. Her wit was devastating, often caustic, usually at someone’s expense.

  She was highly critical, but fair, giving praise rarely, for her standards were very high. She did not suffer incompetents and the dim-witted gladly, if at all, as customers in her Elizabeth Street shop often found, to their discomfiture. This may have been a family trait, for her sister Félicité could be equally crushing with foolish enquiries in Sandoe Books, just off the King’s Road, where she worked. Many people found Elizabeth David intimidating, yet she could be friendly and encouraging to younger writers. She had beautiful manners and was an accomplished letter writer. She was shy, unwilling to talk in public, or even to give interviews. In latter years she refused to be photographed, preferring to re-use earlier pictures by Cecil Beaton or the painter Derek Hill on her dust jackets. She became more and more reclusive and rarely went out except to see close friends. These had always been important to her, and included such figures as Norman Douglas, almost 50 years her senior, Derek Hill, and her publisher and editor, Jill Norman.

  But even friends were kept at a distance. One, returning from abroad, tried to get her telephone number from directory enquiries, only to be told they were under strict orders not to divulge it under any circumstances, even in case of death.

  For more than 34 years she shared a house in Chelsea with her younger unmarried sister Félicité, who died in 1986. Despite mutual regard and affection they lived quite separately. Elizabeth David was a solitary figure in old age, living alone with her books, and memories of a warmer, more enchanting past, as in 1939, when she “fell under the spell of the Levant, the warm flat bread, the freshly pressed tomato juice, the charcoal-grilled lamb, the oniony salads, the mint and yoghurt sauces, the sesame seed paste, the pistachios and the pomegranates and the apricots, the rosewater and the scented sweetmeats, and everywhere the warm spicy smell of cumin”.

  Elizabeth David, CBE, cookery writer and expert on the cuisine of the Mediterranean, was born on December 26, 1913. She died on May 22, 1992, aged 78

  BARBARA MCCLINTOCK

  * * *

  AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC VISIONARY AND NOBEL PRIZE-WINNER WHO DISCOVERED “JUMPING GENES”

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1992

  There was never a scientist quite like Barbara McClintock. She lived and worked alone, never gave lectures, delayed publication of her most revolutionary observations for many years, and did not even possess a telephone until 1986. Anyone who wanted to talk to her, said McClintock, could write a letter.

  For more than half a century, almost until her death, she followed her own course at Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where the director is Dr James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. In a tribute to McClintock, Watson described her as one of the three most important figures in the whole history of genetics, linking her name with those of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan.

  McClintock’s ruling passion was the genetic construction of maize; so much so that she spent her entire professional lifetime studying that one plant. She used the tell-tale patterns of the coloured kernels to disclose the breaking, joining and re-arranging of genes and chromosomes inside the cells. Because the pigments of the kernels are inherited, McClintock was able to use them to trace the genes. In this way, using her uncanny ability to understand the nature of genes and how they interact, McClintock made important discoveries about the role of chromosomes in heredity.

  In the 1930s she discovered the fact that chromosomes break and recombine to create genetic changes in a process known as “crossing over”, which explained puzzling patterns of inheritance. She also discovered a structure called the nucleolar organiser of the chromosome, which seemed to control the genetic material during cell division. It was to be three decades before molecular biologists could explain and confirm the finding.

  Much of McClintock’s early work was done at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, where she began to study as an undergraduate in 1919. Her bent towards science, which had begun in high school, had been strongly resisted by her mother who feared that her daughter was failing to develop “appropriate feminine behaviour”. But McClintock’s persistence won in the end, and by her junior year she was already taking graduate courses in biology.

  In her first year of graduate school, McClintock found that she could identify individual maize chromosomes under the microscope — a discovery that opened the door to the integration of plant-breeding experiments with chromosomal analysis. She gained her PhD from Cornell in 1927, published a series of radical research papers and soon became recognised as one of the leading scientists in her field.

  But despite a two-year fellowship from the National Research Council and the subsequent award of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1933, McClintock was soon to discover that the avenues of professional advancement available to women were severely limited. Cornell refused to give her a faculty position, and she became increasingly irritated by the favourable treatment given to male colleagues with inferior qualifications. Finally, in 1936, she left Cornell to take a teaching position at the University of Missouri, but there, too, her independence and maverick behaviour, coupled with the continuing prejudice against female academics, precluded any chance of promotion.

  She left the university in 1941 and went to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where at last she achieved recognition. It was here, during the 1940s, that McClintock performed the experiments that led to her discovery of transposable genetic elements, or “jumping genes”.

  Observing successive generations of maize, she noticed colour changes in the leaves and kernels of some plants that failed to follow a predictable hereditary pattern. When she compared the variant specimens with their parent plants under the microscope, she found that parts of the chromosomes had changed position. She eventually concluded, after six years of painstaking research, that the genes were being manipulated by genetic “controlling elements,” whose locations on the chromosome were not fixed.

  The discovery of transposable elements had far-reaching implications for the understanding of cell differentiation in the growth and development of an organism, and was at total odds with scientific theory at the time. Most scientists then believed that genes were immovable beads on a string, and when McClintock presented her findings at a Cold Harbor symposium in the summer of 1951 virtually no one understood the significance and implications of her work.

  Although she had been elected president of the Genetics Society of America and was listed among the top 1,000 scientists in the United States, McClintock found herself laughed out of court. “They called me crazy, absolutely mad at times,” she recalled later. Disappointed by the reception of her peers, she stopped publishing the results of her experiments, though she continued her research.

  Vindication finally came in the 1970s, when a series of experiments by molecular biologists proved that pieces of bacterial DNA do indeed “jump around” on the chromosomes. Suddenly, McClintock found herself recognised as a scientific visionary and was showered with awards from every quarter. In 1981 she became the first recipient of the MacArthur Laureate Award, giving her a lifetime income of $60,000 a year, and in 1983 her Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine made her the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

  When asked by a reporter if she was bitter about the long years of neglect, Barbara McClintock replied: “If you know you’re right, you don’t care. You know that soo
ner or later it will come out in the wash.”

  Reviewing The Dynamic Genome: Barbara McClintock’s Ideas in the Century of Genetics, a book published to celebrate her 90th birthday, J. R. S. Fincham said in the August 20 edition of the science magazine Nature: “Her solitary style of work, total independence of thought, and extraordinary record of getting things right, have elevated her to the status of a prophet in the eyes of some.”

  She never married, and is survived by one sister and one brother.

  Barbara McClintock, geneticist who discovered the “jumping gene,” was born on June 16, 1902. She died on September 2, 1992, aged 90

  MARIAN ANDERSON

  * * *

  AMERICAN CONTRALTO WHO SURVIVED RACIAL PREJUDICE TO BECOME THE FIRST BLACK SINGER TO APPEAR AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA, NEW YORK

  APRIL 9, 1993

  The life of Marian Anderson is not merely the story of a successful concert and opera singer, eminent though she was in those fields, in her day. It is also the story of a struggle against poverty and racial prejudice to earn for her vocal gifts their due. For years in her own country this prejudice denied her the rewards of her artistry, long after she had been hailed in Europe as a great voice. When she was finally admitted to the Metropolitan Opera in 1955 it was, in reality, almost too late. She was by then in her late fifties and getting past her peak. Nevertheless by that time, through her conduct and her singing she had established a place for herself in the struggle for civil rights in America. Her concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Easter Sunday 1939 is a landmark in the history of the movement.

  Marian Anderson was the daughter of a Pennsylvania coal and ice dealer. While still of tender years she displayed astonishing precocity and versatility as a singer. She was singing before the age of three and at six was in the choir of the local Baptist chapel, where she went on to sing in the soprano, contralto and tenor ranges. At a religious concert when she was in her early teens, she was heard by the famous black tenor Roland Hayes, who was impressed by her singing and gave her name to concert promoters. As a result she was asked to appear in oratorio performances and began to specialise in Bach.

  She was refused entrance to a Philadelphia music academy on racial grounds: “We don’t take coloured,” she was told brusquely. But she received much encouragement and financial support from well-wishers and family friends, who dipped into their none too well stocked purses to raise money to help with her musical education. She went to New York where she studied with Giuseppe Boghetti. While still Boghetti’s pupil she began giving successful recitals in the New York area. She then participated in a competition to sing with the New York Philharmonic and won the prize against 300 other entrants. As a result she appeared with the orchestra at the Lewisohn Stadium in 1925.

  In any normal circumstances such an occurrence would have marked the lift-off point in a singer’s career. It was not to be so for Anderson. Though well received by the critics she found herself obstructed by racial prejudice at every level. In travelling about the country on a recital career she found doors shut against her and hotel accommodation difficult to obtain.

  In 1927, at thirty, she decided to try her luck in Europe and found a completely different reception awaiting her. She was lionised in Britain, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, Austria and Germany. In London she sang with Henry Wood at the Wigmore Hall. She gave royal command performances for the kings of Denmark and Sweden. In Helsinki she sang for Sibelius who was so moved that he dedicated his work “Solitude” to her. When she gave a recital in the ballroom of a Salzburg hotel Toscanini, who was among the audience, went backstage in the interval and told the nervous singer: “What I have heard today one is privileged to listen to once in a hundred years.”

  She had offers to appear in opera in Europe (one from Stanislavsky to sing the role of Carmen in the Soviet Union) but she refused them because she lacked confidence in her own acting ability. Although she often sang operatic arias at her concerts — “Softly awakes my Heart” from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila became one of her most popular records —Lieder and spirituals remained her favourites.

  Sol Hurok, the famous impresario, heard her in Paris in the early 1930s, put her under contract and went on to promote her in the US, where at last she seemed to be on the verge of becoming a big name. In 1935 she sang at New York Town Hall and her reputation thereafter began to burgeon. On the occasion of a visit to Washington by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1939 she was invited to sing at the White House, an event which helped project her public image. However, the Daughters of the American Revolution were not to be moved even by these marks of official approval.

  When she was engaged to sing a concert at Washington’s Constitution Hall, the organisation, which owned the building, refused to let her sing there because of her colour. It was a piece of racial discrimination which in fact rebounded on them and provided Marian Anderson with an opportunity to strike a blow for civil rights in America. Outraged at the behaviour of the Daughters, Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Day 1939, a date which has gone down in the annals of the struggle for equal rights for blacks in America. Before an audience of 75,000, the largest public tribute since the return home of Charles Lindbergh after his solo transatlantic flight in 1927, she sang a programme which included “America”, Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and the spirituals “Gospel Train”, “Trampin’ ” and “My Soul is Anchored in the Lord”. When the final notes of her programme died away this vast crowd gave her an ovation.

  After the war she continued her successful concert career. In 1953 she became the first black to perform at the Japanese imperial court in the 2,000 years of its history. Then, finally, on January 7, 1955, the Metropolitan, through Sir Rudolf Bing’s efforts, opened its doors to her, and she sang Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera. In truth, her rendering was not of her best. Not only was her voice not quite what it had been but, as she later admitted, she was so overcome emotionally by the reception she received when she stepped on stage that she could hardly focus some of the notes as she would have wished. Nevertheless this landmark in American opera history was received with rapturous acclaim by the Met audience.

  Marian Anderson gave her farewell concert at the Carnegie Hall, on April 18, 1965, symbolically another Easter Sunday. It was understandably a moving occasion, for here was the artist who more than any other broke down the barriers of racial prejudice in operatic and concert singing in the US, and thus enabled later generations of black singers: Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman and more recently Kathleen Battle and Cynthia Haymon to emerge and establish themselves of right in the opera field. Marian Anderson’s voice was a rich, true, vibrant contralto of great intrinsic beauty. She used it expressively in the wide variety of music she sang. At her recitals her warm personality won all hearts. In her autobiography My Lord, What a Morning (1956) she described her life thus: “My mission is to leave behind me a kind of impression that will make it easier for those who follow”. Indeed it was more by her example than through anything she said that she was able to make this aim effective.

  She married, in 1943, the architect Orpheus H. Fisher. He died in 1985. There were no children.

  Marian Anderson, American contralto, was born on February 17, 1897. She died on April 8, 1993, aged 96

  DAME FREYA STARK

  * * *

  WRITER AND ARABIST WHO “TRAVELLED THE HARD WAY IN MALE LANDS”

  MAY 11, 1993

  It is not unusual for travellers to write well about their travels. Doughty, Burton, Kinglake, to mention only a few from Freya Stark’s own territory, belong as much to literature as to geography. What was so rare about Freya Stark was that she was a woman who travelled the hard way in male lands, and that she would have been a writer if she had never got further than her front door. The movement and colour of words in many languages fascinated her; so did the nobility and absurdity of human beings; so did the world of ideas. Of course, travel provi
ded her with the material for most of her books, but when she grew older and travelled less she wrote more, finding memory an even more productive vein than novelty.

  For obvious reasons Freya Stark was often compared with that other intrepid female orientalist, Gertrude Bell; but the comparison is misleading. Gertrude Bell was a rich, masculine person, who “floored the pashas flat”. Freya Stark was extremely feminine, without money or any worldly advantages and with a constitution which, though fundamentally tough, was continually letting her down at critical moments, so that on more than one of her journeys she very nearly died. But a will of iron, infinite patience and powers of persuasion, an exact knowledge of her own aims and a sublime egoism, overcame all obstacles. Woe betide anyone — tribal sheikh, general officer, Italian greengrocer, Levantine merchant, guest sitting down at the Scrabble board — if they thought they were going to be let off with anything less than total surrender.

  With all this strength of character went a matching generosity. Freya Stark drew out the talents of others. She believed most men and some women capable of distinction, and they responded accordingly. Only the deliberately second-rate angered her. She regarded the world as a place thrown open for individual achievement, and she herself achieved much.

 

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