I can’t resist passing on this AP story from the Santa Cruz [Cal.] Evening News (Mar. 29, 1930):
Joan London Malamuth, daughter of the late Jack London, was sued for divorce here today by Charles Malamuth, Assistant Professor in Slavic Languages at the University of California.
Malamuth’s principal complaint was his wife preferred to follow in her father’s footsteps, writing, to cooking meals.
There’s something odd about the structure of that last sentence (and I don’t mean the omission of “that” after “was,” which is perfectly normal colloquial English). Thanks, Mike!
I think it’s the punctuation… I’d go for separating ‘writing’ off with a dash on either side, or failing that, putting it in brackets. It’s the commas that make it look/feel odd to me.
Are you upset with the incomplete parallelism,
preferred to follow
preferred writing to cooking meals?
So emend to
(1) preferred to follow in her fathers footsteps–she preferred to write rather than to cook meals
Actually I think
(2) preferred to follow in her fathers footsteps–she preferred writing to cooking meals
is better than (1).
But I think the repetition of preferred before writing improves the sentence.
I think it’s the punctuation… I’d go for separating ‘writing’ off with a dash on either side
Yes, that works for me. Good call.
(The incomplete parallelism is a bit annoying, true, but in a newspaper story it doesn’t bother me as much.)
I had to read the comments to even understand the last sentence. Absolutely, the commas should be dashes.
The phrase “in her father’s footsteps as a writer” sounds perfectly idiomatic to me. I think maybe the gerund is what makes it weird? It might be equally odd-sounding to say “She’s writing like her father did before her” rather than “She’s a writer like her father was before her.” At a minimum, the first might mean something different and narrower?
ETA: if you swapped in “footsteps as a writer” you might need to slightly alter the rest of the sentence (maybe to “than to cook meals”, but so be it.
By the way, here’s a follow-up from the May 4, 1931 issue of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Takes Back Mate
OAKLAND, Cal. May 3. –(AP)– A new dispatch from Moscow has disclosed that Joan London Malamuth, daughter of the late Jack London, author, had become reconcile [sic] with her husband, Charles Malamuth, correspondent in Moscow for a news agency. Mrs. Malamuth obtained an interlocutory decree of divorce last May.
On the other hand, the wiki article on Charles Malamuth sez: “They divorced in 1930, moved to Moscow remarried, separated in 1934, and divorced finally in 1935.[3][7] By 1950, he had married again to Renee Malamuth.[4]” It also says “While Stalinist communist parties called Malamuth a Trotskyist, Trotskyists considered him an Anti-Communist–and still do to this day.” Can’t please everyone.
Thanks for that followup — there’s a movie in it, as my wife says!
The erstwhile Mrs. Malamuth, who apparently resumed use of her maiden name, subsequently among other things co-wrote* under a pseudonym a thriller titled “The Corpse with Knee Action,” which sounds like it might have film noir potential. Plot summary taken from elsewhere on the internet:
“What was such a good-looking girl doing in the dead of night along the waterfront? What about the two men who jumped out of a black sedan and overpowered her, until Bill King of the San Francisco Times came to the rescue? Was the lady’s name really Stella Holmes, and was she engaged to the shipping magnate Harold Landesbury as she claimed? Bill accompanied her to Landesbury’s boat to find out. Instead he was confronted with the gruesome spectacle of the tycoon weltering in his own blood in a cabin. Curiously, an artery behind his knee had been severed. It was a strange method of murder, but Bill King recalled that someone had used it before.”
*Her co-author was a dude who sounds like he was a leader of the Trotskyite faction rather than Stalinist faction of the Bay Area longshoreman’s union, although the dame herself continued to have CPUSA (and thus Stalinist) associations through at least the ’40’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_London_(American_writer)
Malamuth doesn’t seem to have pleased anyone …
Stalinists would no doubt describe pretty much anybody they disagreed with as a Trotskyist unless it was more convenient to call them a Fascist. (And their invoking the Doctors’ Plot tells you we’re not in the realm of actual fact at all here.)
On the other hand, the Trots may just have meant that he wasn’t a communist of sufficient Pure Pureness (i.e. a Trotskyist.)
The WP article reads very oddly; and apart from the few biographical details, it seems simply to retail the views expressed by Rob Sewell in the video.
He’s the editor of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Appeal_(UK%2C_1992)
(and, to be fair, probably does know a lot more about Trotsky than I do.)
The group Socialist Appeal is one of those recently banned by the Starmerites (i.e. you get to be expelled from the Labour Party for expressing support for it.)
I agree with PlasticPaddy. Either (a) “preferred to follow than to cook” or (b) “preferred following to cooking” would work, but (c) “preferred to follow to cooking” does not work for me.
The “to” in (a) is not the same as the “to” in (b). The writer confused the two “to”s and in (c) switched horses in midstream.
Actual Trotskyites seem rather thin on the ground these days on this side of the Atlantic, but I was heartily amused a few months ago to see the International Committee of the Fourth International* come to the defense of the embattled then-governor of New York after all of his bourgeois-capitalist erstwhile supporters had abandoned him to the wolves. Their support, however, proved insufficient to keep him in office. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/05/pers-a05.html
*The two instances of the word “International” are doing different things syntactically and semantically so maybe it’s not actually redundant, but it’s still weird-sounding, innit? There are FWIW apparently two groups currently using that name, and the bourgeois-capitalist trademark lawyers have not yet been called in to resolve any resultant confusion.
“If the Trots are for me, who can stand against me?”
Ramon Mercador, in the study, with the ice axe.
…come to the defense of the embattled then-governor of New York after all of his bourgeois-capitalist erstwhile supporters had abandoned him to the wolves
Makes sense. They are frustraited that Cuomo was booted and they can no longer criticize him for bad pandemic response.
Punctuation is a bandaid on this broken sentence. Using anything in apposition to “my father’s footsteps” looks unintelligible to me. Maybe “by writing”, which would imply that Papa Jack also didn’t cook.
I am so glad to have heard of The Corpse With Knee Action which sounds like the turgidest manuscript evah!
Ramon Mercador, in the study, with the ice axe.
Would it be too literary to insist on “Ramón Mercader” ? Full disclosure: I had never heard of the dude. Were it not for the benevolent search algorithms of Lord Google, I might never have found out who he was.
Now that I have, I am casting about for some productive use to which this information could be put. So far nothing has come up. I may need to clear out that mnemonic shelf, to make room for new stuff that is dumped on my doorstep every day.
Edit: this knowledge enabled me to work a second paragraph into this comment, so it was good for something after all !
I suggest:
…preferred to follow in her father’s footsteps — he was a writer — rather than to cook meals.
No, because it would be ludicrous to explain in 1930 that Jack London was a writer. Newspaper style of a later date would be “in her writer father’s footsteps,” but that may not have been done in 1930.
The Corpse With Knee Action
What immediately came to my mind was some sort of training device for physical therapists or orthopedic surgeons – this one to be tackled, presumably, after you’ve mastered The Corpse with Hip Action.
The killer gets a diacritical mark in his name if you’re also willing to refer to the other fellow equally Spanishly as León Trotski.
Рамон Меркадер, please. The man was a Hero of the Soviet Union, with the Order of Lenin.
Ха́йме Рамо́н Меркаде́р дель Ри́о
The killer’s gravestone in Moscow lists him as both Рамон and Ramon, but without diacritical marks in both instances and with the Cyrillic in a larger point size. (In Cyrillic his surname is given as Лопес, i.e. Lopez. Don’t know the story there but maybe it was a cover name he used somewhere along the way? It also gives his patronymic as Ivanovich when a Russification based on the name of his actual father would yield Pavlovich.)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/d/d3/Friedhof_Kunzewo_Grab_Mercader_-_Grabstein.jpg
It was the final “-or” (instead of “-er”) that I was beefing about. Lord Google doesn’t give a damn about “diacritical marks”, at least not accents grave et aigu in French and Spanish.
The Larousse dictionary site, by contrast, refuses to accept an accented majuscule as first letter – telling me it can’t find “Épuration”, for example. The German keyboard software on my cellphone always starts things off with a majuscule, but Larousse programmers know nothing about this “Deutsch”. Talk about pedantic. It took me a while to figure this one out.
It finds épiphénomène, however, when I enter it without any accents.
Хайме Рамон Меркадер дель Рио
Замочит Бронштейна аллегро кон брио.
Pushkin, nothing.
my first instinct was, as Y suggests, to add “by”. then i noticed, as others already pointed out, that the parallelism of the “to”s doesn’t match up. anyway, how about “to follow in her father’s literary footsteps”? or….. hmmmm… “like her father, she neglected rustlin’ up grub in favor of hustlin’ on Grub Street”?
While Stalinist communist parties called Malamuth a Trotskyist, Trotskyists considered him an Anti-Communist–and still do to this day.
We are told that Major Major Major, before he joined the U.S. Army as a private and was promoted to major in one day, was “constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.” Later he attended a state university, where “he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of being a homosexual.”
Actual Trotskyites seem rather thin on the ground these days on this side of the Atlantic
The Socialist Worker’s Party has remained Trotskyist, and my father always voted their ticket in Presidential elections until at least 1988. WP lists the following living notables as SWP members: the labor union organizer and novelist Eric Flint, the historian Stephanie Coontz, the steelworker and journalist Martin Koppel, the oil-refining worker and coal miner Kathleen Mickels, the activist Olga Rodriguez, the journalist Mary-Alice Waters, and the VP candidate Myra Tenner Weiss.
Jaume Ramon Mercader del Río was a Catalan from Barcelona, thus no accent on Ramon.
Good to know!
Jaume Ramon Mercader del Río was a Catalan from Barcelona, thus no accent on Ramon.
The Spanish Wipe has Ramón Mercader, the Catalan Wipe has Jaume Ramon Mercader del Río. You can run it either way, especially considering that his mother was born in Cuba:
# Ramón Mercader fue el segundo hijo de un matrimonio de la burguesía barcelonesa formado por Pablo Mercader Medina y de Caridad del Río Hernández. Su padre pertenecía a una próspera familia del negocio textil. Caridad del Río había nacido en Santiago de Cuba en el seno de una familia acaudalada de origen peninsular. Tras asentarse en Barcelona antes de la independencia cubana, recibió una esmerada educación. Tras prometerse en 1908, Pablo y Caridad se casaron en Barcelona el 7 de enero de 1911. La joven esposa adoptó el apellido de su marido y sería conocida a partir de entonces como Caridad o Caritat Mercader. La pareja tuvo cinco hijos: Jorge (n. 1911), Ramón (n. 1913), Montserrat (n. 1914), Pablo (n. 1915) y Luis (n. 1923). #
As I mentioned above, it was only the “-or”/-“er” difference I wanted to point out. In English it’s not necessary to resprinkle the diacritical parsley that decorates furrin names, like München. When Spanish “Ramón” appears in English as “Ramon”, I daresay it is generally not due to sympathy with the Catalan cause.
We call that Munich anyway. Or Moo-nick if we’re feeling bovine.
Moo-nick ?! In line with that kind of pronunciation, some people must imagine that a colonoscopy is a sightseeing tour of Köln. But in fact there’s much more to see here, since it’s not so dark. Although recently we have indeed had pretty shitty weather.
I don’t actually think anybody says Moo-nick; it just sounded funny. And we’re having a sunny day here.
I bet a lot of people say Moo-nick. I had merely never thought to think and inquire about the matter.
When I read about the film Paris, Texas I wondered whether it was pronounced pareetexas there. I decided that was unlikely, since it would be too easily confused with parataxis. Not many people would want to see a film billed as Parataxis ! on posters.
I actually have a book 1001 Texas Place Names, but it doesn’t have Paris. Pretty sure it’s Pair-iss, though.
Not Parisian much, after all:
# Following a tradition of American cities named “Paris” (named after France’s capital), the city commissioned a 65-foot-tall (20 m) replica of the Eiffel Tower in 1993 and installed it on site of the Love Civic Center, southeast of the town square. In 1998, presumably as a response to the 1993 construction of a 60-foot-tall (18 m) tower in Paris, Tennessee, the city placed a giant red cowboy hat atop its tower. #
# In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, several lynchings were staged at the Paris Fairgrounds as public spectacles, with thousands of White spectators cheering as the African-American victims were tortured and then immolated, dismembered, or otherwise murdered.[16][14] A Black teenager named Henry Smith was lynched in 1893. His murder was the first lynching in US history that was captured in photographs sold as postcards and other trinkets commemorating the killing. #
Does your book list Swinney Switch ?
No, but it has Swindler Creek:
The very wikipedia article John Cowan links to explains that the SWP broke with what you might call the quote unquote mainstream of international Trotskyism in 1982 in order to cozy up to Castroism. In any event, in the most recent U.S. presidential election, the SWP ticket finished a very distant second among self-proclaimed Communist parties, getting less than 10% of the votes obtained by the ticket of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, which was founded as a splinter out of a group which had itself splintered out of the SWP some decades earlier.
As best as I can tell, the current U.S. successor to those who left or were purged from the SWP in the ’80’s when it broke with traditional Troskyism is the Socialist Equality Party, although there are other groups out there who self-identify as Trots.
Malamuth sounds perfectly English, slightly Anglo-Saxon even.
Maybe Malamouth would be even better.
…d’accord…
*backing away slowly*
Am I the only one who says moon-itch?
>her writer father’s footsteps
Perhaps that meets a style guide, but it sounds silly to me. Unless I were desperate to save column-inches, it’d be “the footsteps of her father, a writer.”
Again, that is superfluously pointing out that Jack London was a writer. It would be like saying “Joe Biden, a president.” We know that.
FWIW there’s a character in several Jack London stories set up in Alaska and/or the Yukon named “the Malemute Kid,”* perhaps oddly prefiguring the surname of his not-yet-on-the-scene son-in-law?
*The spelling of the Alaskan dog breed is now seemingly standardized as “Malamute,” but it was apparently more variable back then.
I don’t see that “her father writer’s footsteps” is less superfluous.
If you’d written her father’s writer footsteps, it could be said that you weren’t pointing out that he was a writer, but only that those were the particular footsteps she was following.
Picking a nit indeed. But if we’re going to nitpick, we should nitpick consistently.
Of course, father’s writer footsteps sounds even sillier.
I don’t see that “her father writer’s footsteps” is less superfluous.
It is, though. It’s not saying “by the way, her father was a writer,” it’s saying, in telegraphic newspaper style, “preferred to follow in the footsteps of her father, who (as you of course know) was a writer.” If you’re not familiar with that style, you won’t catch the nuance, but that’s how it works.
I would think “her writer father’s footsteps” would flow more idiomatically (in that telegraphic style), although perhaps not in 1930?
You’re right, of course, and that’s what I originally wrote; I mindlessly copied Ryan’s comment, which for some reason reversed the nouns.
“Malamuth’s principal complaint was that his wife preferred to follow in her father’s footsteps as a writer, rather than cooking meals.”
This version makes a statement about her as a writer, like her famous writer father. Or it can be construed, with equal felicity, as innocuously picking out from many available facts the known fact that her father was (famously) a writer, and it is in this capacity that he had footsteps for her to follow in.
The original again, for easy reference:
“Malamuth’s principal complaint was his wife preferred to follow in her father’s footsteps, writing, to cooking meals.”
The omission of that, while idiomatic enough, is insouciant and unhelpful. Using those two instances of to is a grotesque aberration, and grammatically borderline at best. The uncertainty of the role of writing in the sentence adds just one more swirl to the vertigo.
With Jack London, while it is certainly not necessary to point out that he was a writer, being a writer is not the only notable thing he did. He is famous because he was a writer, but he became a famous writer because of his travels (especially in the North), which informed his later writing. So it makes sense to specify that she was following in her father’s writerly footsteps, rather than in his snowshoes.
With Jack London, while it is certainly not necessary to point out that he was a writer, being a writer is not the only notable thing he did.
Quite so, Brett. That’s why in my version, just above, I speak of “innocuously picking out from many available facts the known fact that her father was (famously) a writer”.
Yes, your version is excellent.
not to be confused with the grubbier footsteps of her short-order cook father, in any case…
and the trotskyist tradition being a fissiparous one for ideological reasons (the axiom that the size of the group of cadre doesn’t matter if their Line is Pure, in particular), and its u.s. group(uscule)s being pretty ineffective at mass organizing for almost a century now, there are plenty of groups but few of any meaningful size. my experience has been that the relations among them are almost entirely composed of invective – unlike those among different maoist/”M-L” fragments, who are guided towards attempts to debate and persuade each other by the central places organizational coalescence and individual ideological rehabilitation hold in their ideology.
My guess is that Malamuth is more likely to be a version of Malamud than malamute, though I suppose these are derived from the same Russian word.
Malamud and Malamuth are from Hebrew word meaning “teacher” (and hence a relatively common Jewish surname) and Malamute is an Eskimo tribal name, I believe.
By the way, how on earth the Eskimo-Aleut languages got to have Mongolian plural ending?
preferred to follow in her father’s footsteps, writing instead of cooking
But that implies that her father wrote instead of cooking, which is not totally certain.
Jack London apparently enjoyed cooking and even contributed Roast Duck recipe to the Suffrage Cookbook:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26323/26323-h/26323-h.htm#Page_46
If Joan followed in her father’s footsteps and combined cooking with writing, perhaps her marriage would have fared better.
SF: If Joan followed in her father’s footsteps and combined cooking with writing, perhaps her marriage would have fared better.
She had a fairly typical marriage for a creative woman of her time: her husband liked her creativity but expected her to perform all the duties of a housewife. Did Joan expect her husband to be as good a cook as her father?
the axiom that the size of the group of cadre doesn’t matter if their Line is Pure, in particular
As in the well-known case of the Judean Popular Front, the ultimate Judaeo-Trotskyist faction.
Jack London was known for not wanting to cook: See Osa Johnsons autobiography “I married Adventure” about her husband’s experience as an unexperienced cook in London’s galley.
There are two kinds of people. Those who finish their sentences.
(I’ve met one guy who started laughing after “finish”. We got on very well after that. [Actually the most natural word order in Danish is different, but he still laughed before the clause was complete]).