By Stuart Mitchner
The town of Griffin was completely destroyed, and the large town of Princeton ravaged….
—Wikipedia
Because these columns are about connecting likely and sometimes deceptively unlikely numbers and names, the first thing I do every week is check Wikipedia for the date in question. On this date, March 18, 101 years ago, the “1925 Tri-State Tornado, the “deadliest in U.S. history” (695 dead, 2,027 injured) ended its reign of terror in southern Indiana, three hours and 45 minutes after it had touched down in southern Missouri.
Given the reference to Princeton, I read ahead in the Wikipedia account and found our Indiana namesake described as “a large factory town,” where “much of the southern side was destroyed.” The tornado killed 45 and injured 150. “Large sections of neighborhoods were leveled, and a Heinz factory was badly damaged.”
Looking for more information, I consulted the volume on Indiana in the American Guide Series (Oxford Univ. Press 1945), which I found decades ago at a book sale similar to the Bryn Mawr-Wellesley event that ended last Sunday. Although the Princeton entry makes no mention of the tornado, it notes that the town was founded in 1814 and named for Captain William Prince, “later a representative in Congress.” Princeton’s main claim to fame circa 1945 was a visit made in 1827 by Abraham Lincoln, which is the subject of an anecdote in my February 2009 “Lincoln at 200” book review.
March 18, 1571
It’s rare that I find anything to write about in Wikipedia’s Pre-1600 Notable Events list, which is why I was excited to learn that on March 18, 1571, Valletta was “made the capital city of Malta.” Why the excitement? Because Valletta looms large in Volume 2 of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton University Press), as well as in Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel V (1963).
My interest in the Maltese capital had been roused during an ongoing reading of Mason and Dixon, Pynchon’s 1997 novel wherein Philadelphia plays as significant a part as Valletta does in V, which I have to admit giving up on decades ago. Not to worry, the notion of giving up and going back is just one more example of this author’s magnitude. What you left unfinished in 1966 you’ll rediscover in 2026. Now, thanks to the March 18 Valletta connection, I plan to return to V after I finish Mason & Dixon (300 pages to go). While I enjoyed the chapters set in Benny Profane’s underground New York, I found the novel’s other key locale, Herbert Stencil’s Valletta, relatively impenetrable. The city is introduced in the opening chapter, with reference to “the Metro Bar, on Strait Street, and the Gut.” In the Epilogue, a character says that whenever he returns to Valletta, it was “as if I’d come back to something my own heart needs … But it is a deception. She’s an inconstant city. Be wary of her.”
According to a recent mention in maltaprivateguide.com, “Strait Street Valletta had a reputation for sexual fantasies that boiled over during its fiery existence and continue to simmer in its current revival. Until the mid-sixties ‘The Gut,’ as British sailors had christened the street, … heaved with bars, music halls, restaurants and lodging houses” and had seen “so many servicemen … that you would have thought they were heading to a shrine.”
Strait Street was also frequented by American sailors, Pynchon among them in the fictional guise of Benny Profane, who was in Valletta in the autumn of 1956, where “As an indication of the military buildup in Malta since the beginning of the Suez crisis, there overflowed into the street a choppy sea of green Commando berets, laced with the white and blue of naval uniforms.”
Public Secretary S.T.C.
The author of Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner served as public secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta from January to September of 1805. On May 12 of that year, Coleridge experienced an ocular hallucination of the man he’d been conversing with a few minutes before: “The appearance was very nearly that of a person seen through thin smoke distinct indeed, but yet a sort of distinct shape and colour, …. — like a face in a clear stream … I have noted this down, not three minutes having intervened since the illusion took place. Often and often I have had similar experiences and, therefore, resolved to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur, as a weapon against superstition, and an explanation of ghosts — Banquo in Macbeth the very same thing. I once told a lady the reason why I did not believe in the existence of ghosts, etc., was that I had seen too many of them myself.”
While examinations of heightened sensory experience like these can be found throughout the notebooks, there was clearly something special about Valletta. Two years later in September 1807, Coleridge remembers “The Sky, or rather say, the Æther, at Malta, with the Sun apparently suspended in it, the Eye seeming to pierce beyond, & as it were, behind it.”
A March 18 Death
Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, four years after the March 18, 1768 death of Laurence Sterne, the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the “undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century,” according to 20th-century novelist Italo Calvino. Readers of Mason & Dixon, with its selective 18th century peculiarities of style and capitalization, will agree with Calvino. Although Pynchon’s novel begins around a decade after Sterne’s death and the 1767 publication of the last installment of Tristram Shandy, the sheer bizarre fun of the narrative had me thinking of Sterne’s absurd comic derangements and half-hoping the Rev. Sterne would occasionally change places with Pynchon’s narrator, the Rev. Cherrycoke.
In the context of deceptively unlikely names and connections, including subsequent March 18 deaths ranging from Ivan the Terrible to Johnny Appleseed, the loss I instantly connected with Sterne was the master of the duck walk Chuck Berry (March 18, 2017), who composed “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Johnny B. Goode,” the only rock ’n’ roll song included on the Voyager Golden Record.
Two Actresses
I’ve got an impressive group of March 18 birthmates to choose from, including Grover Cleveland (1837), Rimsky-Korsakov (1844), and John Updike (1932), but since I’m writing the day after the 2026 Academy Awards, I’m narrowing my list down to actors, actresses, and movie people, including a living actress who was not born on March 18.
A particularly satisfying connection is embodied in the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, born March 18, 1800. When Hector Berlioz attended stagings of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet presented in Paris in 1827 by John Kemble’s English company, Smithson’s portrayals of Ophelia and Juliet were so intoxicating that Berlioz fell in love with and eventually married her.
On Sunday night, the Irish actress Jessie Buckley captured a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Shakespeare’s wife in Hamnet, where “her most praised sequence,” according to The New York Times, “arrives in the movie’s final beats” when she watches a performance of her husband’s play Hamlet at the Globe. Although Buckley was born in December 1989, I couldn’t resist making a connection between the Irish actress who won the heart of a great composer and the Irish actress who won an Academy Award.
Never An Oscar
Born on Long Island March 18, 1886, Edward Everett Horton played François Filibae in Trouble in Paradise, Max Plunkett in Design for Living, The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, Ambassador Popoff in The Merry Widow, Horace Hardwick in Top Hat, and professor Nick Potter in Holiday, among numerous classics of the 1930s brightened by his cheerful presence. I’d seen none of those films when Horton introduced himself to me at New York’s Players Club. I was a callow 20, my first novel had just been published, and I didn’t know who he was or what to say. Ten years later, I’d have been no less tongue-tied in the presence of one of Hollywood’s greatest character actors, who appeared in more than 120 movies without ever winning an Oscar.
A Career Shortened
Born in Manchester, England, on March 18, 1905, Robert Donat won a Best Actor Oscar for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), one of only 19 movies in an illustrious career shortened by chronic asthma. David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film mentions some of the roles he had to turn down, among them Lawrence of Arabia, Romeo, Mr. Darcy, and the chorus in Olivier’s Henry V. In addition to the asthma, he was troubled by “a profound tentativeness, itself at the root of his stammer and nervous breathlessness.” Otherwise, “he might have become a major international star.” Even so, “he acted with a sense of contained riches that is rare in English stage-trained actors.” His “great quality” was that “he could draw us further into himself by his very modesty.”
Another Tornado?
I was looking for a last paragraph Monday afternoon when my wife told me Mercer County was under a tornado watch. So it goes. I begin with the tornado devastating Princeton, Indiana, while keeping an eye on the Weather Underground alert for Princeton, New Jersey.