NEWS
Marilyn Monroe and the Alexander Technique
This is not an association that comes readily to mind. I am grateful to Bryan Niblett, that deeply knowledgeable and staunch supporter of the AT, for pointing it out to me.
Marilyn Monroe’s exploitation by Hollywood and the media left little room for any other impression of her than as a sex symbol. But her private library reveals her as an intelligent and inquiring woman. She was, after all, married to Arthur Miller, that most intellectual of American playwrights. The Marilyn Monroe Collection website does a lot to round out her character and reveal her as a person with a broad range of interests.
This link shows that she had made a big effort to come to grips with F.M. Alexander. Her well-worn copy of Man’s Supreme Inheritance is annotated up to her personal bookmark on page 157. The link to the page is:
http://www.marilynmonroecollection.com/TheBook2.htm
I should also mention that Bryan’s biography of the Victorian radical Charles Bradlaugh DARE TO STAND ALONE: the story of Charles Bradlaugh, atheist and republican has just been published and is next on my reading list.
DILYS CARRINGTON (1915-2009)
Dily’s long life came to an end on 22 September. It was celebrated at the Constructive Teaching Centre on 8 October.
Advanced for her time, she studied mathematics and psychology in Bedford College in the mid-1930s. She had her first lessons with Alexander in 1939 and joined her husband Walter in setting up the Constructive Teaching Centre in 1960.
Over more than forty years at the school she showed herself to be one of the great teacher-trainers. Most of those who trained with her remember her with a kind of awe-stricken affection. There is something about going back to school which makes us all regress and Dilys could be quite terrifying, in a twinkling-eyed way.
It was in her winding down years, after she had her stroke, that I got to know her best. As her physical powers waned she substituted pure intellect. She liked Alexander’s quote from Sir Charles Sherrington: “…to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is co-equally with excitation a nervous activity.” For Dilys, doing less was a way of achieving more, never more so than in those last years.
Although she was somewhat in the shadow of her illustrious husband, those who knew her were aware of her steely toughness and integrity. She was always her own person and confident in her work. Towards the end, to feel her frail hands upon you, infused with little beyond the strength of her thought, was as deep a lesson in the Technique as anyone has ever given me. It was a privilege to know her and I am just one of a large number of grateful teachers and pupils who miss her deeply.
Another tribute
Kri Ackers was trained by Dilys in the 1980s and has gone on to set up the Alexander teachers' organisation, Alexander Technique Education, in Australia. She pays Dilys a warmly affectionate tribute at www.ate.org.auMemorial donations
As Dilys’ eyesight failed and she was deprived of her life-long pleasure in reading, she was greatly consoled by the talking-books provided by the RNIB. Her family have suggested that a donation to this service is an apt way of remembering her. The internet link for such donations is http://www.justgiving.com/Victoria-Carrington/
BOOK REVIEW
Forward and Away: memoirs
Elisabeth Walker
Published by Gavin R Walker 2008
Elizabeth Walker was born in 1914 and is still an active Alexander Teacher. As she says: “ It is more difficult to be balanced and co-ordinated in one’s nineties; aged bones, muscles, the whole functioning system slows down, one takes less exercise so it is even more essential to give thoughts to applying Alexander’s principles.” This book is a charming and copiously illustrated memoir of a dauntingly active life.
Growing up as a girl in the 1920s and 1930s was very different from today; she was apprenticed as a Court dressmaker and had a horrible but mercifully short period as an unpaid seamstress to a Madame Calista in Wigmore Street. But she also became an excellent golfer. In 1937 she met Dick Walker who introduced her to mountaineering and rock-climbing – as well as to FM Alexander with whom he had been having lessons. They decided they wanted to train as teachers with Alexander and got married in 1938 as the war loomed closer.
After the war the boundlessly busy pattern of their lives was established. Interested in art, they met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in Cornwall and never willingly passed an art gallery without a visit. They later became friendly with Lee Miller the war photographer and Roland Penrose the surrealist. In 1947, they both qualified as Alexander teachers and Dick became one of Alexander’s assistants while Elisabeth looked after their two young children. Tragedy came with the death of one of their boys at the age of five following a tonsillectomy – a doctor callously remarked to her “I see you have another on the way.” She went on to have another four children.
The following decades were filled with travel – they went everywhere, including South Africa, in trucks or camper vans; climbing whenever they were near a mountain; teaching and promoting the Alexander Technique. They lived in South Africa from 1949 till 1960 becoming increasingly disturbed by the development of apartheid and active in opposing it. Helen Suzman was among their friends and they met Nelson Mandela and found him “a very special man.” They returned to England in 1960 after the Sharpeville massacre.
This is an unpretentiously written memoir by a truly remarkable woman. There are references to Alexander himself and to the big figures of the Alexander Technique, Walter and Dilys Carrington, Bill and Marjory Barlow, Margaret Goldie and others. Her final chapter, “Reflections” repays careful reading by anyone seriously interested in the Technique. But above all this is a celebration of travel, friendship, family, art, and the joy of living life to the full.
It also cleared up a particular point for me. Nikolaas Tinbergen received the 1973 Nobel Prize for his role in developing ethology, the science of animal behaviour. Somewhat to the scandal of the assembled scientific dignitaries, he devoted half his acceptance speech to praising the Alexander Technique which he had recently discovered. His biographer, Hans Kruuk, a scientist and former student of Tinbergen’s, was keen to denigrate this, claiming it was an interest that quickly faded.
His Alexander teacher was, in fact, Elizabeth. She mentions that Tinbergen continued to have lessons from her for a further nine years, that they shared a continuing interest in photography, and that she and her family spent a particularly happy holiday with him in his holiday cottage in Westmoreland in 1980.