In Memory of Arthur Cash

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

He was already a distinguished professor, both in title and in fact, when I was his student for the first time, in the early 1990s. Dr. Arthur H. Cash had earned the rare title of “Distinguished Professor” from the State University of New York system in 1989, and I do not know if that title is what gave him the clout to hold classes in his dining room and kitchen rather than in whichever campus building the pesky registrar had located the class, or if I am getting it all backwards and his clout, with or without a title, brought us to his kitchen.

I learned this morning that Dr. Cash died Thursday, December 29, at the age of 94. His obituary appeared in he New York Times on December 30 but only today did it start to make the rounds of social media among his students. He retired in 1997 (a memorable party that I actually remember) but his retirement was an active one: his most recent book, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
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January 9 in History

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Clifford Irving left a clue to his hoax in plain sight: in the introduction to The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, which was neither an autobiography nor by Hughes, “Hughes” tells Irving that he, Hughes, admired Irving’s (real) book about Elmyr de Hory, the famous art forger. Hughes tells Irving that this is one of the reasons he is giving him the manuscript of his autobiography.

Irving never met Hughes and he forged the manuscript. He later confessed to the crime and went to prison. But on this date 45 years ago, Howard Hughes felt forced by the rumor that his autobiography was about to be published to come out of hiding—a recluse, Hughes had not been seen in public nor spoken with a reporter in fifteen years, which is partly why Irving’s hoax was plausible—but he came out of hiding in the most bizarre, Hughes-ian, way possible: seven reporters were assembled in a hotel conference room in the center of which was placed a table covered with a cloth and a speakerphone atop that. (Photo at top.) A voice spoke from the phone, claimed to be Howard Hughes, and he took questions and denied ever meeting Irving.

Whatever Hughes had desired from the event, it only added to the circus atmosphere around his life and the “autobiography.”
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Infinite Love

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.”—G.K. Chesterton, “The Flag of the World,” Orthodoxy

The suicide is committing, from his or her terrible and terrifying and terrified point of view, genocide. Humanity-cide.
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