GPOYW: Instantiation Edition is my favorite; here are the previous four.

Above is the happy-looking Mills Thompson, an illustrator and periodic cross-dresser who worked regularly with the trail-blazing photographer Frances Benjamin Johnson (1864-1952). This is not the only collaboration of theirs that features gender-bending attire. Below, Johnson is dressed as a man, with a false mustache, and Thompson, reclining in front, wears what appears to be an uncomfortable quantity of womenswear.

Johnson was revolutionary, one of the earliest female photojournalists and an immensely successful artist in her time (more on her here). Below is a photographic self-portrait which -according to Wikipedia- is designed to show the “New Woman,” liberated, drinking, petticoats visible:

It’s not solely Mills Thompson’s smile which predisposes me to like him; I’m also inclined to assume the best about those who share my name, with an exception I’ll discuss perhaps later, perhaps never. I like to imagine that in donning dresses he hoped to support Johnson’s proto-feminism, help her lightly satirize the roles assigned to them both. In many photos, at any rate, they seem to be fast friends.

I came to this from an article on George Washington Carver, front and center below in Johnson’s excellent photograph of him and his peers at the Tuskegee Institute:

Frances Benjamin Johnson died in New Orleans. While she’s extremely well-known, I can’t find very much information on Mills Thompson beyond the single illustration for Johnson’s work and a few shots of him in various costumes. If you have any I’d love to know more.

The wonderful Enormous Air posted Soren Kierkegaard in the Coffee-House, a sketch in oils by Christian Olavious, 1843.

Raynor wants to know why all Bakers have the same hairstyle. Raynor likes to ask questions. Raynor ought to be careful what questions he asks about the Order of Bakers unless he wants to wind up “rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla.”

But this is scarcely a secret: we’ve modeled our haircuts on the style made famous by the dashing Søren Kierkegaard, whose contemporaries were as smitten with him as ours are with us; said one Hans Brøchner:

“My only definite impression was of [Kierkegaard’s] appearance, which I found almost comical. He was then twenty-three years old; he had something quite irregular in his entire form and had a strange coiffure. His hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look.”

Thus is this instantiation edition of GPOYW dedicated to Herr Ganan, who asks but never answers.

GPOYW: Instantiation Edition with Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. (First | Second)

I am always grateful to those who do more with this name than I do; I hope that, in decisive interactions, the cultural aura that surrounds it has been sufficiently enhanced by Haley Mills, C. Wright Mills, the Quasi-Honorable Semi-Judge Mills Lane, Sam Mills, military hero Gen. Mills, and others that otherwise suspicious interlocutors will give me the benefit of the doubt. A positive association with the original Parent Trap, for instance, could incline a policeman to overlook my poor driving.

I was pleased, then, to read about Wilbur Mills, a powerful Southern congressman, here photographed behind a plate that reads as I am addressed by a friend’s children: “Mr. Mills.”

Mills served in Congress from 1939 to 1977 and for eighteen years (1957-1975) was the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a post he held longer than any other person in U.S. history. Mills was often termed “the most powerful man in Washington” during his tenure… His accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role in the creation of the Medicare program. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, but eventually shepherded it through Congress and had a large hand in shaping its program. Mills was also acknowledged as the primary tax expert in the Congress and the leading architect of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. Mills favored a conservative fiscal approach, adequate tax revenue to fund government programs, a balanced budget, and also supported various social programs, especially Social Security Disability, adding farmers to Social Security, unemployment compensation, and national health insurance.

I hope there is something in there to satisfy readers of virtually all political inclinations. I felt proud to have an utterly incidental connection to this obvious hero of fiscal restraint, political compassion, and power-mongering ambition, until I came to this:

Mills was involved in a traffic incident in Washington, DC at 2 a.m. on October 9, 1974. His car was stopped by U.S. Park Police late at night because the driver had not turned on the lights. Mills was intoxicated, and his face was cut from a scuffle with Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanne Foxe, a stripper from Argentina. When police approached the car, Foxe leapt from the car and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin in an attempt to escape… On November 30, 1974, Mills, seemingly drunk, was accompanied by Fanne Foxe’s husband onstage at The Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house where Foxe was performing. He held a press conferencefrom Foxe’s dressing room. Soon after this second public incident, Mills stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged his alcoholism, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and checked himself into Palm Beach Institute at West Palm Beach.

This article is even better: black eyes, lies, obvious lunacy! I suppose that qualifies as additional context for the question of how much our names govern our lives, how much of an effect an idiosyncratic name can have on our development. I now consider myself, and Wilbur, mere victims of a name that wrought debauchery through us quite without our consent. Pity us!

Our appearances are accidental; as we are startled to learn in youth, staring into mirrors, we are not our faces. In posting photos of ourselves, we document coincidental elements of our identities: faces, bodies, expressions. Given that our names are no more or less arbitrary, I hope I can be forgiven for returning to a theme from months ago: the Instantiation Edition of GPOYW.

Whereas last time I attempted to associate myself with inanimate instances of my name, today I present two men who have done more with it than I will.

Above is Walter Mills, a British private who died at the age of 23 from exposure to shelled gas (probably phosgene) one year before the end of WWI. Mills was awarded the Victoria Cross for the incident described below:

On December 10/11, 1917 at Givenchy, France, after an intense gas attack a strong enemy patrol tried to rush British posts, the garrisons of which had been overcome. Private Mills, although badly gassed himself, met the attack single-handed and continued to throw bombs until the arrival of reinforcements and remained at his post until the enemy had been finally driven off. While being carried away he died of gas poisoning but it was entirely due to him that the enemy was defeated and the line remained intact.

He was five years younger than I am. I find his story -and his accidental appearance- heartbreaking; I cannot be alone in being barely able to look at his face without feeling an overwhelming simultaneity of admiration and sorrow. I also note that his Victoria Cross medal “was buried with his daughter Ellen, who died in the 1920s.” My mother’s name is Ellen; when I was a boy, she let me play with the Purple Heart and Silver Star her father earned in WWII. I don’t inflate the meaning of this additional coincidence, but it is touching in its way.

Below is John Atta-Mills, whose gleeful face you may have noticed on Wikipedia’s front page over the last few weeks. His election to the presidency of Ghana was an extremely welcome example of successful, stable democracy in Africa. Despite some concerns, his predecessor ceded power gracefully and the transition of the parties wasn’t marred by violence; this unfortunately remains rare.

I am happy for Ghana and John Atta-Mills, but not as happy as John Atta-Mills himself seems to be: in almost every picture you see of him, he has a smile that seems reflective of more than polish; it seems exuberant, genuine, warm, whole. I suppose I already contradict my opening assertion: after some decades, we begin to show through our faces, and by then one may regard appearance as less than totally accidental.

Into both of their faces, then, I have read more than should. I can only wonder what people see in mine, if anything, and whether it matters; I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ description of his own in Suprised by Joy:

“Worst of all, there was my face. I am the kind of person who gets told, “And take that look off of your face, too… [I did not intend to look] insolent or truculent… The moments at which I was told to “take that look off” were usually those when I intended to be most abject.”

Our faces are not of our making, but they attempt to make us. Lewis, pondering that which landed him in trouble, asks a question I’ve wondered about: “Can there have been [someone] among my ancestors whose expression, against my will, looked out?”