Quote from Vanderbilt

"It is said that I am always in opposition, and that the same spirit of resistance which has often hitherto governed my action has influenced it now ....I have only to say, that this is the same spirit which founded this great Republic, and which is now drawing the commerce of the world to our shores. It was the same spirit which unchained the fetters which legislation ... once fastened upon the Hudson. Repress it if you dare....The share of prosperity which has fallen to my lot is the direct result of unfettered trade and unrestrained competition."

NEW YORK TRIBUNE, March 8, 1855.

Vanderbilt, as a young man, had played a supporting role in the facts that led to the great Supreme Court decision as to steamboats on the Hudson, and the burdening of interstate commerce, GIBBONS v. OGDEN (1824), and that is one of his allusions above.

New York's Prominence

Years ago, some time in the 1990s, I began a ms on American history, aimed at the high school level, in the hope of selling it to a textbook publisher.

I fished about a bit for publishers, without any luck, then settled into some other project and forgot this one.

I mention this because I've just now rediscovered the long-forgotten partial ms. Leafing through it, my eyes fell upon my brief attempt to acknowledge, and to give some but not too much credence to, geographical explanations of NYC's rise to world prominence.

I observed that the Hudson River gave the holders of its southern extremity, from the era of Dutch dominance to the present, easy access to fertile lands along the long valley. Also, in English colonial times, this was "a highway to the lucrative fur trade and it could carry an intrepid traveller most of the distance to 'New France,' or Quebec. What is more: Hudson's tributary, the Mohawk, offered access to the western frontier."

I also noted, at a remove: "Also customary at this point is the observation that New York was positioned, in colonial times especially, to serve as the intermediary between Massachusetts and Virginia. As a geographical explanation for New York's rise to prominence this is unhelpful. First, it is also true of Baltimore and Philadelphia (which, likewise, possess fine natural harbors.) Second, it is true of virtually any point anywhere that it serves as an 'intermediary' between someone to its north and someone else to its south, so no site derives any especial benefit from that fact."

Okay, not a great piece of writing. But I have retained the ambivalent attitude toward geo-historical explanations that you can hear in my voice there.

Biography as an art

Biography is a complicated art form. There is, for example, the simple decision of where to start -- it is rare for a biography's first pages to describe the place and time of the protagonist's birth, for example -- and neither that nor any other starting point presents itself as an obvious choice. Separately, there are unique difficulties of point-of-view for any writer who wants to avoid presenting endless laundry lists, on the one hand, or hagiography on the other. Yet even before we get past the cover we face the question, especially pressing for the biography of someone of an distant time or place, of how much context will be required.

How common is our day is that word "context"! Some biographies make the issue of context more pressing for themselves than they have to, calling themselves not just the "life of X" but the "life and times of X." Suppose we pick up a book entitled "The Life and Times of Henry Hudson." Just looking at the cover, feeling the heft of the book, how much material will we expect to find on the politics of Queen Elizabeth's court? or the history of sailing vessels and methods of navigation up to that time? or on the growth of a European market for beaver pelts? We'll probably expect some asides on each of those subjects and on more, though in each case the aside should fall well short of being a chapter in itself, and the author must keep bringing us around the central story of Hudson's life.

But assume we let "the times" drop away from title and ambition: suppose this is just the "Life of Henry Hudson." What matters and what doesn't? If everything he does and says and puts on for clothing matters, then we'll have an endless and unreadable compendium. We'll expect that the author will have in mind some central purpose: why is Hudson important enough to justify a book? Because he has a river and a bay named after him? Because he represents curiosity, daring, entrepreneurship, or other qualities we value? Because we feel nostalgic for the bygone era of tall and wind-driven ships? These different motives will give rise to different books.

We're still left, still, with the beginning: we know very little about Hudson's childhood, and it would probably be silly to begin our book with that little, padded out with guesswork. Hudson first enters history as a sailor on John Davys' ship exploring the coast of Greenland in 1587. We might start there. Or we might do something more imaginative, and write about the Viking settlements on those coasts centuries before, and about how the Vikings died out, leaving scholars to speculate about why. Then we could flash forward and have our readers imagine ships much taller than the old Norse longboats appearing off that same shore. It is an aesthetic decision.

As Virginia Woolf wrote, "The novelist is free; the biographer is tied." Yet Woolf was writing those words largely to celebrate Lytton Strachey, and his sketches of eminent Victorians, which (Woolf tells us) made "Manning, Florence Nightingale, Gordon, and the rest live as they had not lived since they were actually in the flesh." The "ties" that bind the biographer are a challenge, and should be joyfully accepted as such -- every genre has set challenges and conditions. Biography has fidelity to fact.

Jesus Christ, Superstar

You have to admire the aging troupers who stick with their gig.

Well ... I do.

Here's some news both religious and theatrical from the Hudson Valley.

Make of it what you will.