Regimes rise and fall, but departmental admins are forever.
Special shout-out in this blog to my Columbia peeps. Keep reading past the jump for a few Columbia-specific jokes.
I don't want my reaction to the stupid planes to overshadow what was really the coolest part of my day today, namely my visit to the Residencia de Señoritas, where I was very kindly received, in spite of the archive and library being officially closed for restoration. (Sadly, the gardens of the Residencia are also closed, which my host today informed me was a shame because especially in the spring they are "una preciosidad" and I can well believe it.) The Residencia de Señoritas is right down the street from the Museo Sorolla, and shares some of that buildings consciously gracious charm, though in a more modernist (if equally aristocratic) way. The staircases reminded me tremendously of the sets for the Hercule Poirot series. | |
| Staircase in the BBC Poirot series |
 |
| Staircase in the Residencia de Señoritas (currently the Fundación Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón) |
You see what I mean? Allowing for different light and angle, it's that same smooth, creamy white spiral that's trying to be super-modern and also nodding gracefully toward the classic.
Anyway, after going up two flights of smooth, curving staircase, and down a hallway, I found the little office where there is a computer "rehabilitado para investigadores" while the library is closed. The lovely woman who worked there explained that she has been in charge of digitizing their holdings, and while there are still several boxes that are undigitized, they have a very extensive searchable database, with links to PDFs of what she's scanned already. It's not online yet, so one has to go to one of the special computers, but it has a very good search function, which she showed me, and you can search by author, institutional author, location of sending or receiving (for correspondence), type of material, keyword, and so on. She showed me how to use the search function and click the link to get to the PDFs (it looks to me like it's organized a bit the way Zotero or EndNote store linked PDFs), and then I sat down and happily got to work.
Alas, I drew a blank on Peterson, although there were lots of "Dorothys" and one Ellen "Randolph" (from Virginia, of course). I also had no hits on Petersen or Petersan just to be sure, since I discovered via casual searching that Barnard College also appears as Bernard and (for some reason) Bosnard. Nella Larsen was also alas a blank, as was Anna Julia Cooper. (I know Cooper was more focused on France than Spain, and she would have been older than the profile of students at the Residencia by the time it opened in 1917, but you never know.) On the other hand, combing carefully through Peterson's article "Summer in Spain" (there were no hits on her co-authors either, drat it), I did find a reference to actual place where Peterson took lessons, the "Centro de Estudios Históricos" and its secretary, one "Don Antonio García Solalinde" who does indeed show up in a bunch of correspondence (frequently from the Centro de Estudios Históricos, where according to the letterhead he was secretary when Ramón Menéndez Pidal was president...so medievalists are popping up all over). Don Antonio (whose letters to the Residencia's director María de Maeztu are addressed to "mi querida amiga") was apparently in charge of finding housing for foreign students for the summer programs, and there are several brief letters saying that he is remitting "a bill for one pound sterling" for Miss So-and-So from various cities in the UK (mostly northern, Manchester and Edinburgh feature more than London), or a given number of pesetas for an Italian young lady as a deposit for her room for the summer session. I haven't found any wandering Americans so far.
There are also a number of more personal letters to and from Don Antonio and María de Maeztu during his stay at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor right after the first world war, and her similar stay at Columbia, where she was hired by the college for one summer session at the rate of $500! In 1919! The idea of a visiting adjunct being paid that much for a short term! All I can say is that Columbia's stipends have not kept pace with inflation over the past century. Maeztu also lectured at Barnard, and there are several letters to her from Virginia Gildersleeve, whose name rings a faint bell, who was a Barnard administrator. (One of them is an apologetic notification that she owes New York State $15.00 in income taxes, asking whether perhaps the immigration officials didn't bring that up when she left the country? I take back anything I said about my adventures in banking recently, and am instead profoundly grateful that I can move money between continents via the internet, because finding a bank in Madrid willing to issue a check in dollars, and sending it to New York must have been a first class pain in the neck.)
There's also a note to Maeztu when she was at Columbia from someone at Teachers College saying that of course she should visit their "lectures and laboratories" (as a model for the Residencia and given her interest in educational policy in Spain) and saying that he will be delighted to introduce her to "Professors Thorndike and Strayer" although Professor Dewey is away for the term. Since I know Thorndike only as a building at TC (and a very nice non-descript building it is too, the former home of AIS, and the site where I wrote most of Death of a Nationalist), I was amused to hear him referred to in the present tense. The letter from the TC person is dated from the "Psychology Department" of Columbia on letterhead that says its from 504 Philosophy Hall! If I'm not mistaken that's the French department now, but it was funny to encounter something only one floor away from my normal haunts in Madrid.
All in all, the correspondence between Maria de Maeztu and the various faculty and administrators at Columbia and Barnard is a scream. In some ways it's so very dated and in others so very contemporary. The confidential letters of recommendation requested by the "appointments office" of Columbia for various lecturers in Spanish who had put Maeztu as a reference are printed on forms that say "dear sir" which no one bothered to cross out and correct when addressing her, and refer to the candidate for appointment as "he" even when the name specified is clearly female. The Barnard department administrator writes to Maeztu in Madrid and asks her to publicize a full scholarship since the students have raised money for a year of full room and board and tuition at Barnard for "a foreign student" and "this year have expressed a preference for one from Spain." The idea of Barnard undergraduates funding foreign students - or rather a foreign student, singular - each year seems incredibly quaint. And yet except for the amounts of money, the letters of appointment and tax notifications (and also the friendly letters between professors about academic gossip) could have been written yesterday.
None of this had much to do with my research, but it all made me laugh a good deal, and it occurs to me (as I'm returning tomorrow) that given the strong Barnard connection it might be worth nosing around to see if Maeztu crossed paths with Zora Neale Hurston. They couldn't have been more different, in background or attitude (I suspect Maeztu would have thought Hurston was frivolous, and Hurston would have thought Maeztu lacking in sense of humor and interest in men), but they were both strong personalities linked to the same place at the same time. So there are search terms for tomorrow.
There were also some things that had nothing to do with my research but which were moving, including a few letters which made their way to the Residencia de Señoritas from kids in the US. One is from a fourteen year old ninth grader (she specifies) from Skimballton, Iowa, who writes asking to correspond with a Spaniard, and offers an awkwardly charming picture of her school day, explaining what hours are devoted to penmanship, science, geography, etc. Another is from the second year Spanish class of a school in rural Wyoming (with seven boys and ten girls, as they explain), who say that they have studied Spanish for two years, but have never had the opportunity to speak it, and would like to compare the translations they have made of short stories with the language "como ustedes la hablan." Their letter is written with two copies, one in English and one in rather uncertain Spanish, on notebook paper, and comes enclosed with postcards of the Rocky Mountains. There is something moving almost to the point of tears in reading these wholly naive letters addressed to "dear friend" from children buried in the depths of the Great Plains or the Rockies, who had literally never met someone who spoke Spanish, and had in fact little hope of ever even traveling to a place where they might (though I suppose California was always a possibility), and who cried into the void in the many decades before the internet (or even widespread radio or TV) made it possible to meet people beyond the four hundred or so in their little towns. When did Americans become so inward-facing, and incurious about the rest of the world? Now, when we have the opportunity to communicate with anyone from anywhere, people stick their heads in the sand and mutter about "English only." And a century ago, when the physical and technological obstacles were insurmountable, kids on farms and ranches in the depths of the places that most fear diversity now desperately and eagerly sought out human contact halfway across the globe. I hope some of these adventurous kids got a nice response from some similarly shy and curious young person in Spain.
So such are the joys of research...a bunch of trivia that has nothing immediately to do with my thesis, but a few clues toward things that might be helpful, and the thrills of PDFs of old notebook paper torn from its rings, color postcards, and prim letterhead and carbon copies of things where putting the year must have seemed like a foolishness (except for the New Year's greetings like the one from Barnard wishing that "1928 be a year of prosperity and happiness for you") because these were such quotidian concerns, and so obviously current to both the sender and receiver. Hopefully I find more stuff that's relevant tomorrow. But in the meantime, this was a happy several hours until I started squinting at the handwriting in the PDFs on the screen. (It does get tiring.)
More soon....
 |
| Photo of students at the Residencia in the early 1930s, currently on the wall by the curving staircase |
No comments:
Post a Comment