Evadne Price

Evadne Price (28 August 1888 – 17 April 1985), probably born Eva Grace Price, was an Australian-British writer, actress, astrologer and media personality. She also wrote under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith.
She is now best remembered for her World War I novel "" (published in America as "Stepdaughters of War") which adapts the style of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" to depict the experiences of British female ambulance drivers. During her lifetime she was known for her many romance novels, some of which were serialised in national newspapers, as well as for her children's books starring the popular character Jane Turpin. In the nineteen-fifties, she became a regular performer on television, as a storyteller and as an astrologer. For twenty-five years she published a monthly astrology column in "SHE" magazine.
Biography.
Early years and first marriage.
Evadne Price's own account of her early life is full of contradictions. There is considerable evidence that she was born Eva Grace Price on 28 August 1888 in Merewether, New South Wales, Australia (NSW Registry of BDM cert. no. 1888/032162). In "SHE Stargazes" Evadne gives her birth date as 28 August (p. 82). Evadne's claim to have British parents is also unreliable, as BDM records show that they were both born in NSW, Australia. Her father, Jonathan Dixon Price, was a miner. He died in 1921, not, as Evadne claimed, during her teens.
"The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" follows the "Times" obituarist in accepting her own claim that she was born at sea in 1896 but there is no birth certificate to support this, and she can not be found in the 1901 or 1911 British census listings.
The article "Newcastle Girl is Film Writer" ("Newcastle Morning Herald", 20 June 1939, p. 6) reports that Evadne Price/Helen Zenna Smith was born in Merewether and attended the Junction School in Merewether.
In July 1902 Eva Price obtained a bursary at the Maitland High School and in 1903 she attended the Largs Public School near Maitland. She performed in the end-of-year school concerts at these establishments, giving recitations (as reported in the "Maitland Daily Mercury").
In her late teens Eva Price was familiar to Newcastle audiences as an elocutionist.
In 1908 Eva Price played the First Twin in Australia's first production of "Peter Pan".
On her 21st birthday, 28 August 1909, Eva Grace Price, actress, daughter of Jonathan Dixon Price, married a German-born actor Henry A. Dabelstein in Sydney (NSW Registry of BDM cert. no. 1909/007059). Henry used the stage name Harry Preston.
Moving to England and second marriage.
In 1910 Price left Australia for London. Unable to find work there she went on to New York where she found a job in a burlesque variety show. She returned to the UK in 1912 and began to secure parts in provincial tours of dramatic productions: "The Girl Who Knew A Bit" (1912), "Mr Wu" (1914), "Oh I Say" (1915), "Within The Law" (1916). In 1915 she changed "Eva" to the more evocative "Evadne" ("Dumfries & Galloway Standard", 25 August 1915 p. 3) and invented a new persona for herself, claiming to have been born at sea of British parents and considerably understating her age.
In 1920, Price married Charles A. Fletcher, a soldier. There was no mention of any previous marriage on the GRO entry form. Her second husband was a Captain in the 3rd Devonshire Regiment; he died in the Sudan in 1924.
When her stage career ended in 1923 Price turned to journalism.
Third marriage and World War II.
In 1939 Evadne Fletcher married the Australian writer, Kenneth Andrew Attiwill alias Ken Attiwill (1906-1992) in Kent, England. The couple co-wrote a number of books and plays. They also later wrote scripts for the British television soap-opera "Crossroads".
She was the war correspondent for "The People" from 1943, covering the Allied invasion of Europe and many major war stories, including the Nuremberg Trials. She was the first woman journalist to enter the Belsen concentration camp. Her husband was a prisoner of war in Japan, and was presumed dead for two years.
Writing career.
As a journalist, Evadne wrote a column for the "Sunday Chronicle" and contributed to other newspapers. She also began contributing short stories to the fiction magazines of the period. Many of these are comic, and her most notable successes were the Jane Turpin stories, about a female equivalent of Richmal Crompton's William. These were published in the "Novel" magazine from 1928, and then in books, beginning with "Just Jane" (1928). There were ten collections of Jane stories, finishing with "Jane at War" (1947). Price, however, did not take kindly to Jane stories being referred to as a copy of the William series. She went on record saying she "had never heard of William", even though William stories were regularly advertised on Jane book dust jackets.
The famous illustrator Thomas Henry illustrated both Jane and William books, but signed the illustrations for the Jane books as "Marriott", to distinguish the two series.
Helen Zenna Smith.
In 1930, Albert E. Marriott, who had recently started a publishing company, asked Evadne Price, who was known for her skill at pastiche, to write a parodic version of Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", featuring women at war; his suggested title was "All Quaint on the Western Front". By her own account she took Remarque's book home to read and decided: 'Anyone who wants a skit on this book wants their brains dusted.'. She told him that he should publish an authentic account of women at war, and he asked her to write it, despite her protests that she was too young to know anything about the war. He offered her £50 if she could bring him 20,000 words by Monday morning. Through an acquaintance she met Winifred Constance Young, who had been a wartime ambulance driver. Young lent Price her wartime diary, and the 20,000 words were written in less than forty-eight hours. Price recounts that Marriott was so delighted with her work that he immediately took the carbon copy to the "News of the World", who paid him £5000. It is likely that in making this deal he represented the writing as a first-hand account rather than a piece of historical fiction. If there was dishonesty or misrepresentation, there is no direct proof that Evadne Price was actively complicit in it; late in life, in an interview, she presented herself as a complete innocent manipulated by Marriott.
The book "" was published as by Helen Zenna Smith, which was also the name of its central character. The book's jacket presents it as: 'An honest, unsentimental, savage record of a girl ambulance driver in France.' and claims: 'This is not a story.' These claims for authenticity persuaded reviewers to treat the book as a record of the author's own experience. The "Manchester Guardian" critic wrote: 'The author was attached to a convoy under the command of a domineering and heartless commandant, where the drivers suffered every discomfort of bad food, lack of sleep, dirt and petty tyranny.'
The book was an immediate success, and Marriott employed young women to drive around London in ambulances to publicise it. It was translated into French as "Pas Si Calme" and published by Gallimard, Paris in 1931. It was translated into Spanish as "Hay novedad en el frente...: (Hijastras de Guerra)", in 1935. In the Netherlands it and two sequels were translated as a trilogy: "Gij vrouwen...!", "Vrouwen in nood" and "Vrouwenroeping". In Germany she was compared to Adrienne Thomas, whose book, "Katrin becomes a soldier" was published in 1930.
Shortly after the publication of "Not So Quiet...", according to Evadne Price's later account, the publisher Albert E. Marriott committed fraud by forging a letter on Buckingham Palace notepaper claiming to have the rights to Queen Mary's memoirs. He sold these to the "Daily Mail" for a considerable advance, and then absconded. According to her own account, it was only at this time that she discovered that 'Albert E. Marriott' was a pseudonym of Netley Lucas, a career criminal.
Marriott/Lucas became bankrupt, but because he had paid her nothing, Price's copyrights did not go to his creditors. They remained her property, and "Not So Quiet..." was republished by Newnes, in a format that presented it as more obviously fictional. Four sequels to "Not So Quiet" were also published by Newnes. These were: "Women of the Aftermath" (1931); "Shadow Women" (1932); "Luxury Ladies" (1933); and "They Lived With Me" (1934). These books are written in the same dramatic style as "Not So Quiet...", and take the same heroine into the challenges of the 1920s. They touch on such social issues as the care of the war-wounded; post-war decadence; eugenics; and the fate of destitute women in London.
Romance novel author.
Under her own name, Evadne Price was a successful romance novelist. She wrote over 150 paperback novelettes for cheaply produced series such as "The Lucky Star Library", "The Glamour Library" and "The Silver Star Library", as well as longer romance novels that were published in hardback. She was a vice-president of the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Playwright and screenwriter.
Price's career as a romance novelist took her into playwriting, radio scriptwriting and screenwriting. Her play "Big Ben", written for the Malvern Festival in 1939, was a successful one ("The Times" called it "a large, comfortable play with a soul to call its own"). "The Phantom Light" (1937) was a stage version of her novel, "The Haunted Light". The play was also made into a film starring Gordon Harker. "Once a Crook" (1939) - a play which was co-written by Price and her husband Ken Attiwill, was filmed in 1941. She also acted in the movie "Trouble with Junia" (1967) in the minor part of Miss Hallyday, beside her husband Ken Attiwill.
In 1965, she and Ken Attiwill joined the scriptwriting team of the ATV soap opera "Crossroads"
Astrology.
Evadne Price had a parallel career as a broadcaster during the early years of British television. Her afternoon horoscope show called "Fun with the Stars" led to regular appearances on the lunchtime chat and music show "Lunchbox", with Noele Gordon. Price was dubbed the "new astrologer extraordinaire" for twenty-five years for the "SHE" magazine and published a successful collection of these columns as "SHE Stargazes". When she and her husband retired to their native Australia in 1976, Evadne Price wrote the monthly horoscope column for Australian "Vogue".
She also appeared weekly on the ITV Central evening news magazine show with a 5-minute astrological reading, and she would always close with the catchphrase "think lucky and you'll be lucky".
Final years.
Evadne Price died on 17 April 1985 in Sydney, Australia, aged 96. Evadne Price has an unfinished autobiography which was to have been named "Mother Painted Nude".
Posthumous reputation.
In the year of Price's death, a selection of the Jane Turpin stories was published as "Jane and Co", with an introduction by Mary Cadogan (London: Macmillan, 1985).
In 1989, "Not So Quiet..." was republished to acclaim by The Feminist Press, New York, and later by Virago in the UK.
The Feminist Press edition included a discursive afterword by Jane Marcus, which explained much of the story of the book's origins, but the back cover describes it as 'a scathing firsthand account of war from the point of view of women actively engaged in it', which may have allowed some readers to overestimate its authenticity.
Since then there have been notable critical accounts of the novel by Angela K. Smith in "The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War", and by Alison Hennegan in 'Fighting the peace: Two women's accounts of the post-war years', an essay included in "The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory After the Armistice", a collection edited by Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy.
Bibliography.
As Helen Zenna Smith.
Stepdaughters of War series
References and sources.
"Who's Who in the Theatre", 11th Edition, 1952 p. 1175
Afterword by Jane Marcus, Not So Quiet...Stepdaughters of War, Evadne Price, The Feminist Press, 1989.
Adrienne Thomas: DIE KATRIN WIRD SOLDAT und Anderes aus Lothringen, Röhrig Universitätsverlag, St. Ingbert 2008, 510 S., 37 Abb.,


Heinrich E. K. Henel

Heinrich Edmund Karl Henel (18 April 1905 – 7 March 1981) was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of German at Yale University.
Early life and education.
Henel was born on 18 April 1905 in Saigon, Vietnam. He was born to German parents.
His daughter Bettina Charlotte Henel married Owen P. Stearns in 1954, a fellow academic.
Career.
Upon earning his PhD in 1927 from Goethe University Frankfurt, he began teaching at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He left the institute in 1929 and accepted a position at Cambridge University. He eventually emigrated to Canada where he served as Head of Queen's University German Department until 1947. He transferred to the United States after accepting a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951 and awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship grant in 1954. Henel joined the faculty at Yale University as a Full Professor in German in 1957.
He was the recipient of the 1962 Goethe Medal for "furthering cultural relations between the United States and Germany." In 1963, he was appointed to Sterling Professor of German at Yale.
In 1973, he was the recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He died from illness on 7 March 1981.
One of his PhD students was Thomas P. Saine.
Selected publications.
The following is a list of selected publications:


Heterotopagnosia

Heterotopagnosia is a neuro-psychological syndrome caused by brain damage in the left parietal lobe and corresponding to an acquired inability in pointing at and locating another person's body parts. Its name comes from the Greek: "hetero" which means the other from a pair, "a" combined with "gnosis" means without knowledge, and "topos" means location. This clinical syndrome is distinct from autotopagnosia, another group of cognitive deficits associated with difficulties in locating body parts on own's one body. Allotopagnosia is another related disorder in which the patient cannot point at any external targets except his/her own body parts.
Causes.
Heterotopagnosia is a type of brain damage that affects the left parietal lobe, at the parieto-occipital junction, or in the inferior parietal lobe. The brain damage could be an ischemic or an hemorrhagic stroke, or a neurogenerative disorder affecting this region.
Symptoms.
Heterotopagnosia is an inability in pointing at another person's body parts associated with a spared ability in pointing one's own body parts. When the patient is asked by the examiner to point at his/her own body parts, he/she shows normal performance. However, when asked to point at the examiner's body parts, the patient erroneously points at his/her own corresponding body parts. For example, when the patient is asked "Point at the examiner's nose", the patient points at his/her own nose (so-called "self-referencing" behavior). In typical cases, the patient can point at objects, even those located on the body of other persons. In three reported observations of patients with heterotopagnosia, the ability in touching or grasping other person's body parts was spared.
Diagnosis.
Clinical examination.
Heterotopagnosia can be detected by asking several questions: “Point to your nose”: the patient shows no error. “Point to my nose”: the patient erroneously points to his/her own nose. “Point to the door, to the ceiling, to my glasses…”: typically, the patient shows no errors for objects. “What is it called?” (the examiner points to his/her own nose”: the patient can name the nose of the examiner or any object.
Core syndrome.
Based on the different cases reported in the literature, the core syndrome of heterotopagnosia appears to imply: 1) an impaired capacity in pointing at another person's body parts; 2) a spared capacity in pointing at the patient's body parts; 3) a self-referencing behavior is observed when the patient fails to point at another person's body parts (except in the case).
Brain imaging.
Brain imaging (CT-scan or MRI or functional imaging) demonstrates a damage to the left posterior parietal, the left parieto-occipital or the inferior parietal region. According to Cleret de Langavant et al., an additional lesion in the insular region makes the syndrome of heterotopagnosia long-lasting.
Clinical cases.
Sixteen patients with heterotopagnosia have been reported so far in the literature. Those patients all share the striking inability in pointing at another person's body parts, despite normal performance for pointing at their own body. All patients but one show the self-referencing behavior. Despite similarities between the clinical assessments in those sixteen patients, the same tests were not proposed in all patients, yielding discrepancies in the descriptions of impairments. For example, grasping capacities were only tested in four patients and touching in one patient.
Degos et al. (1997) / Degos and Bachoud-Lévi (1998).
JD Degos and AC Bachoud-Lévi described for the first time the syndrome of heterotopagnosia in nine patients after a left hemisphere stroke. In 5 of these patients, the deficit was restricted to the body of other persons (pure heterotopagnosia), while for the 4 other patients, the inability to point at external targets included both other persons' body and objects (allotopagnosia). Three patients with heterotopagnosia could perfectly point at body parts of pictures of human body and another patient with heterotopagnosia could point at body parts of a doll. The authors described for the first time the self-referencing behavior typical in heterotopagnosia and allotopagnosia, by which patients point at their own body instead of pointing at another person's one. One patient with heterotopagnosia had better performance for grasping other person's body parts than for pointing at them. Another patient with heterotopagnosia recovered from this disorder after eight days and offered a narrative of his experience: he could see the body parts of other persons but could not locate them, and acknowledged confusing between the body of other persons and his own. The authors interpreted this disorder as an impairment in the process of pointing itself.
Felician et al. (2003).
O Felician and collaborators described two patients showing a typical double dissociation. The first patient suffered from autotopagnosia, with a selective deficit in pointing to own body parts and a spared ability to point to the body parts of others. The second patient demonstrated symptoms of pure heterotopagnosia, with a selective inability to point to another person's body parts, a self-referencing behavior, and a spared capacity to point to own body. The patient with heterotopagnosia could point at objects whether at a reaching distance, in the room or on the examiner's body. The patients could point at parts of animals or of complex objects. This patient could point at body parts of a picture of a human body, at parts of a mask, whether held by the examiner or onto the examiner's face, or at parts of a face visible onto a TV screen, whether still or moving. The patient with heterotopagnosia had decreased brain perfusion in the left inferior parietal lobe, while the patient with autotopagnosia had decreased perfusion in the left superior parietal lobe.
Auclair et al. (2008).
L Auclair and collaborators described the case of a patient with heterotopagnosia, with impaired pointing performance for other persons’ body parts but also for other human body representations. A qualitative analysis of pointing errors showed that the patient did not exhibit a self-referencing behavior. Brain imaging identified a left parieto-occipital hemorrhagic stroke.
Cleret de Langavant et al. (2009).
L Cleret de Langavant and collaborators described three patients with long-lasting heterotopagnosia, in contrast with most patients with this syndrome that rapidly recover after few hours or days. The three patients had typical heterotopagnosia, with severe impairment for pointing at other person's body parts, especially the body of the examiner (“point to my nose”), but also for a third person (“point to his nose”). Patients showed better performance when pointing at non-living representations of humans (dolls, pictures, drawings) or at objects. In one patient, pointing performance improved when he was instructed to consider the target person as a doll. In the three patients, grasping other person's body (or touching for one patient) was by far easier than pointing at another person's body parts. All three patients had a left posterior parietal lesion and a lesion in the insula, either left or right. The authors suggested that the left posterior parietal lesion was necessary to occur to observe heterotopagnosia, but that the associated insular lesion was the reason for the long-lasting effect of the parietal lesion.
Cleret de Langavant et al. (2016).
L Cleret de Langavant and collaborators reported the unusual case of a female patient with primary progressive aphasia of the logopenic type and with heterotopagnosia who was more accurate in pointing to men's body parts than to women's body parts. She exhibited the self-referencing behavior and better pointed at objects than at other person's body parts. She also better grasped women's body parts than she could point at them. Brain MRI showed atrophy of the left parietal region and of the left frontal cortex.
Bassolino et al. (2019).
M Basolino and collaborators studied the case of a patient with heterotopagnosia and self-referencing behavior after a left parieto-occipital hemorrhagic stroke due to a cerebral arterioveinous malformation which was surgically treated. This patient showed deficits in pointing at another person's body parts, but also at body parts on a drawing of human body, on a doll and on a picture of a human body. The patient could locate the body parts of three different animals without errors. The authors used a virtual reality setting in order to test the respective influence of somatosensory and visual inputs in the disorder of this patient.
Interpretations.
Considering the clinical description of their cases, the different authors attempted to provide an interpretation of the complex behavior of patients with heterotopagnosia, which remains debated.
An objectivization disorder?
According to Degos and collaborators, accurate pointing requires two complementary representations at cognitive levels: 1) an egocentric visuo-proprioceptive representation which extends somato-sensori inputs from the subject's body to the visual inputs from the extrapersonal space; 2) an objective representation by which the target of pointing is singled out from the first visuo-proprioceptive continuum. The body of other persons would be easily matched to the subject's body through brain mechanisms such as mirror neurons and thus more difficult to single out in the objective representation, yielding heterotopagnosia.
A category-specific disorder affecting human body-specific visuospatial representations?
Felician and collaborators argue that pointing to body parts is a category-specific behavior that relies on both somatosensory representations and body-specific visual representations. In case of damage of somatosensory representations, autotopagnosia could be observed, while in case of body-specific visual representations, it would be heterotopagnosia.
An impairment of self-other distinction and spatial coding of human body parts?
Auclair and collaborators acknowledge the role of the left parietal region for human body parts representations, and suggest that this region could participate in the distinction between self and other's body.
A difficulty in viewing another person’s body as an object?
Cleret de Langavant and collaborators recalled that pointing is a communicative gesture that necessarily involves a first person who points, a second person to whom the pointing gesture is addressed, and an object, the target of the pointing gesture. Within this triadic setting, only the first two are truly persons while the object or third person is essentially a non-person. According to these authors, two spatial reference frames (or representations) should exist for any pointing gesture: an egocentric representation that accounts for the first person's perspective and a heterocentric representation that accounts for the second person's perspective (the egocentric space from the addressee's perspective). Heterotopagnosia would arise from the inabily to conceive at the same time another humain as an addresse, with a heterocentric perspective, and as an object, deprived from this heterocentric perspective. They summarize heterotopagnosia as an inability to view another person's body as an object.
An inability to integrate self-related somatosensory information with others’ body visual information?
Bassolino and collaborators used virtual reality to test the respective role of identity of the human body (self versus other) and of the perspective onto that body (first person perspective versus third person perspective) in heterotopagnosia. They proposed that heterotopagnosia could stem from a difficulty in the integration of self-related somatosensory signals with other-body-related visual information.


Muzzy Marcellino

Maurice "Muzzy" Marcellino (November 27, 1912 – June 11, 1997) was an American singer and musician, known primarily for his clear, melodious style of whistling.
Marcellino was born in San Francisco. He began playing with the Lofner-Harris Orchestra in 1932 and then moved to the Ted Fio Rito band in 1935. He formed the Marcellino Orchestra in 1938, with Gloria De Haven as his singer.
Marcellino's whistling was featured in many television and film soundtracks, such as "The Mickey Mouse Club" and "Lassie". His contributions can also be heard on the soundtrack to the 1954 film "The High and the Mighty" and on Hugo Montenegro's 1968 hit version of the main theme to the film "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".
He was also the musical director of the CBS daytime show, Art Linkletter's House Party.
The Reader's Digest set of six records called Gaslight Musc Hall (1969) featured Marcellino whistling in the tune Whistling Rufus, performed by the Gaslight Novelty Orchestra and conducted by Heinie Beau. Whistling Rufus was composed by Kerry Mills and, as stated on the record collection, the jaunty Whistling Rufus came at a transitional point in his career.
Marcellino was the maternal uncle of jazz musician Vince Guaraldi.


Charles Beaumont

Charles Beaumont (January 2, 1929 – February 21, 1967) was an American author of speculative fiction, including short stories in the horror and science fiction subgenres. He is remembered as a writer of classic "Twilight Zone" episodes, such as "The Howling Man", "Static", "Miniature", "Printer's Devil", and "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You", but also penned the screenplays for several films, such as "7 Faces of Dr. Lao", "The Intruder", and "The Masque of the Red Death".
Novelist Dean Koontz said "Charles Beaumont was one of the seminal influences on writers of the fantastic and macabre." Beaumont is also the subject of the documentary "Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man" by Jason V Brock.
Life and work.
Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago, the only child of Charles Hiram Nutt (an auditor of freight accounts for the Chicago & Alton Railroad) and Violet "Letty" (Phillips) Nutt, a homemaker who had been a scenarist at Essanay Studios. His father was 56 when Charles was born; Letty, his mother, was 22 years her husband's junior. Letty is known to have dressed young Charles in girls' clothes, and once threatened to kill his dog to punish him. These early experiences inspired the celebrated short story "Miss Gentilbelle", but according to Beaumont, "Football, baseball, and dimestore cookie thefts filled my early world".