Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (7 page)

If I had to live my life over again I would not devote it to develop new industrial processes: I would try to add my humble efforts to use Science to the betterment of the human race.

I despair of the helter-skelter methods of our vaunted homo sapiens, misguided by his ignorance and his politicians. If we continue our ways, there is every possibility that the human race may follow the road of former living races of animals whose fossils proclaim that they were not fit to continue. Religion, laws and morals is not enough. We need more. Science can help us.

Broadmoor

Dear Miwa—

I am sending you these dreams which I have had during the past few days at Broadmoor:

I will continue to send you my dreams. There is so little to tell you
except
my dreams. I write them out in the middle of the night—there is no light so sometimes in the morning I have trouble deciphering them.

Love,
Tony

Youth has many advantages, such as daring, speed of action, and quickness of perception. Intelligence is inborn, and develops by practice and opportunity, knowledge comes quickly to the intelligent; but experience lingers, and is only acquired slowly through life and mistakes.

Bakelite in the museum.
Everyday objects such as radios and amplifiers, cigarette boxes and soap dishes all look as if they are made in precious tortoise shell, amber, marble, leather and sometimes even in gold. Yet they are all made of Bakelite, that forerunner of plastic which from the twenties to the fifties was all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the Boymans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam an industrial product is once again the centre of attention…. Three main trends in its use can be identified: the Art Deco style (where it is usually made use of as imitation) in radios and clocks after the Great Paris Exhibition in 1925; in functionalism in objects coming from Germany and the Lowlands and in the “aerodynamic” style of America in the forties and in postwar Europe. In short, a fashion and the symbol of an era.

Apart from the plastic tie-press that spits out your creased cravat as if it were a serpent on heat, the nicest thing about Patrick Cook’s Bakelite Museum in London is that he does not take it terribly seriously.

“There is a humorous quality about so much of the Bakelite,” he says, fingering a 1950s radio that opens up to reveal a portable vanity case with lights and mirror. “So much of it is a parody. The market in it is very strange. Sometimes I take stalls in the markets and sell things at rock-bottom prices to undercut those dealers who are trying to force the prices up.

“Some of the early Phillips radios go for thousands of pounds, if you can get them. They have almost all been collected out of England into Holland,” he shook his head in disbelief. “The prices are very strange. When the Victoria and Albert Museum was setting up their Bakelite show, I let them have some of my early radios for about £30 each—a bargain….”

He began hiring out some of his prize pieces to film and TV period shows like
Pennies from Heaven,
and his Bakelite Museum Society has a TV game called “Spot the Bakelite.” They have a Bakelite picnic every other year, lectures, and evenings to swap items and marvel at the invention of Dr. Leo Baekeland.

Bakelite. The name summons up a whole mystique of early plastics for Art Deco collectors, producing images of Cubist-styled 1930’s jewelry, mock tortoise-shell compacts, ersatz ivory combs, butter-scotch-toned desk accessories and what may well be the most glamorous plastics creations of the period—streamlined-styled radios.

There was then, and there is once again, magic in what we call Bakelite radios. When they were new almost a half-century ago, these radios brought into the homes of millions the adventures of Jack Armstrong, the problems of Helen Trent, the jokes of Jack Benny and the nightly news. Now, with nostalgia running high for such vintage wares, the public will have an opportunity to view the most comprehensive display ever mounted of these passports to the past in “The American Radio Show—Bakelite Radios of the 1930’s and 1940’s,” an exhibition opening Wednesday….

How few people will realize how much detail had to be gone into before Bakelite was a commercial success!

Leo Hendrik Baekeland apprenticed in a shoe repair shop, with his father, who was illiterate. His mother also was from a poor family, but she had been a maid and had seen life of families on the other side of the poverty line. She had no interest in having her son grow into a world as impoverished and closed as her own (there was one other child in the family, Rachel, who remained in Belgium all her life) and she looked upon education as his passport.

My most important discovery at the university was that my senior professor of chemistry had a very attractive daughter. Hence, the usual succession of events.

His personal life had been far from happy since his arrival in the U.S. Céline had returned to Belgium, at his insistence, for the birth of their first child. (Jenny, born in 1890, died at the age of five.) Leo assumed that, because of his modest circumstances, his wife would be better situated if with her family. However, after the baby was born, he made no move to bring his wife and child to America.

Céline begged him to send money for her passage, writing that her funds were also exhausted, and adding the bitter note that her own father refused to come to her aid. Leo’s letters of response are not extant, but it is clear from Céline’s letters that he delayed repeatedly, arguing that he could not support a wife and daughter even if he could raise their passage to New York. Eventually they were reunited—family records do not specify when but it appears to have been about 1892—but not before Céline had been deeply hurt by what she regarded as Leo’s lack of affection. The separation left a wound that never quite closed. Though Céline remained a dutiful wife, and assisted her husband in keeping laboratory notes and financial accounts, she built much of her life around interests of her own, and was frequently separated from her husband for periods of several months.

Dearie—

Every time I am alone, I go back to my own self. It always takes some time and always takes much sorrow the first week. I miss you, I miss you dreadfully, then comes the power to crush that feeling, and unhappily I call forth every reason why I am a fool, why I should not feel badly, how hard and unkind you are, etc.—how this is wrong, and I know it, it brings me in a worse agony yet, and by and by the old Céline pops out, and I long again for you, not for the heartless you, but for everything which is good in you—that is why when we meet we both are good and kind and loving. Now this time I have been more alone than ever, and you might not believe me, but I would not give up my Summer for yours—I have been alone and at perfect peace most of the time.

I have called in you all the good element there is—and I know that when you come back you will be a better man—I certainly am a better woman—and we both ought to have the thought to live the next years in peace and for the best of our children—think of people of our standard and intellect making each other unhappy for no reason whatever! Think of the beautiful life we could have if we both made up our minds to be happy and good to each other—if our lives had for an aim to be as kind to each other as possible. Our unhappiness is in
one
thought, let us tear that thought off and replace it by one of love and of peace.

Yours, Céline

In the beginning when Twashtri came to the creation of woman, he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man and that no solid elements were left. In this dilemma, after profound meditation, he did as follows: He took the rotundity of the moon and the curves of the creepers, and the clinging of tendrils and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves and the tapering of the elephant’s trunk, and the glances of deer and the blustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gayety of sunbeams and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock and the softness of the parrot’s bosom and the hardness of adamant and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger and the warm glow of the fire, and the coldness of snow and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakrawska, and compounding all these together he made a woman and gave her to man.

But after one week, man came to him and said: “Lord, this creature that You have given me makes my life miserable. She chatters incessantly and teases me beyond endurance, never leaving me alone; and she requires incessant attention, and takes all my time up, and cries about nothing and is always idle, and so I have come to give her back as I cannot live with her.” So Twashtri said: “Very well,” and He took her back. Then after another week man came to Him and said: “Lord, I find that my life is very lonely since I gave You back that creature. I remember how she used to dance and sing to me and look at me out of the corner of her eye, and play with me and cling to me, and her laughter was music and she was beautiful to look at and soft to touch, so give her back to me.”

So Twashtri said, “Very well,” and gave her back. Then after only three days man came back to Him again and said: “Lord, I know not how it is, but after all I have come to the conclusion that she is more of a trouble than a pleasure to me so please take her back again.” But Twashtri said: “Out on you! Be off! I will have no more of this; you must manage how you can.” The man said: “I cannot live with her.” And Twashtri said: “Neither can you live without her.” And He turned His back on man and went on with His work. Then man said: “What is to be done? For I cannot live either with her or without her.”