Second Marriage, or Lemon Chicken by Laura Foley It begins at the Chinese place on Spring Street, our first date. Though the dish looks good, I cannot eat. He scrapes my leftovers to the sidewalk for his patient old Lab, waiting by the restaurant door. I have that queasy, excited feeling, when you know something is about to happen. “Second Marriage, or Lemon Chicken” by Laura Foley from Night Ringing. © Headmistress Press, 2016. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) It's the birthday of English biochemist Frederick Gowland Hopkins, born in Eastbourne, Sussex, in 1861. His father's cousin was the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and young Frederick was more interested in reading books and writing poetry than he was in science. But when he was eight, his mother gave him his father's old microscope, and he spent many happy hours studying things he found at the seashore. He later said that, left to his own devices, he might have become a naturalist. Hopkins was a capable and bright student in many subjects, especially English and chemistry. At 17, he took a job in an insurance office at his uncle's urging, but was soon bored. He went to college to pursue a degree in chemistry, and later studied medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. He conducted research in toxicology, physiology, and chemistry, and in 1901 he discovered the amino acid tryptophan. For the next several years, he continued to study diet and its effect on the body's metabolism. After further research, he concluded that essential amino acids, which the body needs to produce its own proteins, are not made by the body but must be consumed as part of the diet. He further noticed that rats fed an artificial diet — even though it contained the proper balance of protein, fat, carbohydrates, minerals, and water — became sickly and failed to grow. But when he added a little cows' milk to the rats' diet, they grew and thrived. This led to his discovery that there are elements in food that animals need to survive and thrive. He called these "accessory nutrient factors," but we know them today as vitamins. He published papers on the subject in 1906 and 1912, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his discovery, a prize he shared with fellow researcher Christiaan Eijkman. Today is the birthday of poet Paul Muldoon (books by this author), born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland (1951). His father was a laborer and farmer who, Muldoon recounts, "could just about write his own name.” He attended Queen's University Belfast and after he graduated, he took a job with the BBC as a radio producer; he's convinced that he got the job because he poured tea for everyone at the interview. He later said, "[W]hen you get right down to it [that] is really what a radio producer is: a tea pourer." Muldoon published his first book, New Weather (1973), when he was 21 years old, still a student in Belfast. It's the birthday of Vikram Seth (books by this author), born in Calcutta, India (1952). He's the author of A Suitable Boy (1993), the longest single-volume work of fiction in English since 1747. The first draft was 5,000 pages long. His editor helped him trim it down to about 1,500 pages. Seth wrote on the dedication page, "Buy me before good sense insists / You'll strain your purse and sprain your wrists." It's the birthday of guitarist Chet Atkins (Chester Burton Atkins), born outside Luttrell, Tennessee (1924), to a family of fiddlers and singers. He built his own crystal radio set and listened to Merle Travis, with his fingerpicking style, and learned how to play it for himself. He said: "I didn't have any idea we were poor. Back then, nobody had any money. We were so poor, and everybody around us was so poor, that it was the '40s before any of us knew there had been a Depression." It's the birthday of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (books by this author), born on this day in Cleveland (1858). His parents were free mixed-race Southerners who left Fayetteville, North Carolina, for Ohio. One of his grandfathers had been a slaveholder, and Chesnutt looked white, but he always identified as black. His family moved back to Fayetteville when Charles was eight, and the boy went to a Freedmen's Bureau school for the children of freed slaves. He became a teacher, and then principal of the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville, which trained black teachers. In 1880, when he was 22 years old, he wrote in his journal: "I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been a cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task." It took Chesnutt a few years to get there. He was an established and respected citizen in Fayetteville, but in 1883 he decided that he didn't have much of a future as a black writer in the hostile post-Civil War South. So he moved back to Cleveland with his wife and children. He passed the state bar exams and set up a stenography business, and in his spare time he wrote stories. In 1887, he published his first short story, "The Goophered Grapevine," in The Atlantic Monthly. He was the first black fiction writer to be published in The Atlantic — although the magazine assumed that he was white until he informed them several years, and many stories, later. In 1891, Chesnutt sent a manuscript to Houghton Mifflin, who wrote back: "A writer must have acquired a good deal of vogue through magazine publication before the issue of a collection of his stories in book form is advisable." Apparently he had not acquired enough vogue, because his manuscript was rejected. He continued to publish stories, and in 1899 Houghton Mifflin finally released his first book, The Conjure Woman. Most of theConjure Woman stories described clever slaves outwitting their cruel masters, and they were written in dialect, filled with supernatural events. The Conjure Woman was incredibly successful, and Chesnutt was welcomed as a major new voice in American fiction. Chesnutt was trying to write a critique of racism, but it was easy to lose sight of that in the stories. William Dean Howells, one of his champions, wrote about The Conjure Woman: "As far as his race is concerned, or his sixteenth part of a race, it does not greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the Southern cabins. In either case, the wonder of their beauty is the same; and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader's heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these enchanting tales." Chesnutt switched gears for his next book, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line (1899), realistic stories of life in Ohio and North Carolina, featuring middle-class, light-skinned, mixed-race characters. The Wife of His Youth was also a big seller, and Chesnutt decided to quit his stenography business and become a full-time writer. Chesnutt followed up these collections with three novels: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel's Dream (1905). They sold poorly — readers considered them too angry and radical. So just six years after publishing his first book, Chesnutt's literary career was finished. He went back to his stenography business, worked as an activist, and published an occasional essay or short story. It's the birthday of Lillian Hellman (books by this author), born in New Orleans (1905). When she was 20, she married a writer and moved with him to Hollywood. She published a few stories in the magazine her husband edited. Then she read a Scottish book called Bad Companions (1930) by William Roughead. It contained a chapter about a court case in Edinburgh where a young girl accused her female teachers of having an affair, on no basis whatsoever. Hellman decided that the premise would make a good play. She said: "Anyone young ordinarily writes autobiographically. Yet I picked on a story that I could treat with complete impersonality. I hadn't even been to boarding school." She had a new lover, the detective writer Dashiell Hammett, whom she had met at a Hollywood restaurant, and he encouraged her to try her hand at writing drama. So at the age of 26 she wrote her first play, The Children's Hour, which debuted when she was 29. It is the story of two teachers, Karen and Martha, who teach at an elite all-girls New England boarding school. A malicious student spreads a rumor that Karen and Martha are lesbian lovers, and their lives fall apart. Parents pull their students out of school, Karen breaks up with her fiancé out of fear that she has damaged his reputation, and Martha commits suicide. The Children's Hour was a sensation. It was so controversial that it was banned in several cities, including Chicago, London, and Boston. But it opened to rave reviews on Broadway, and when it failed to win the Pulitzer Prize because of its content, critics objected so strongly that they formed the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as a way to honor it. That was the beginning of Lillian Hellman's celebrity. |