Monday, October 31, 2011

All Hallow's Eve - RIP Jack Kerouac (Died Oct 21,1969)

After my last post's events in Worcester on Dead Poets Remembrance Day I intended to go on to Author's Ridge in Concord (grave of Louisa May Alcott among others), and then come straight home.  But the thought of it being the weekend of "Lowell Celebrates Kerouac" drew me back to that city on the Merrimac; I found a motel room in Westford, some ten miles south of Lowell.  A sweet "associate" at a Hampton Inn gave me a small toothbrush, a razor, and sample sizes of toothpaste and shaving cream.

Jack Kerouac's photo upon enlistment in US Navy.  He lasted about 80 days, being discharged "by reason of Unsuitability for the Naval Service".  

On Saturday morning I drove into Lowell, parked at Lowell National Park, and walked to the Kerouac Memorial.






Lots of people were there.  Blue skies and warm sun.


Steve Dalachinsky, described as a New York "downtown" poet, read some of  his own poems.  I'd not heard of him.  He was excellent.
This is David Amram; he plays music every year at the festival.  I think it was an oboe he used but I wasn't sure.  I asked if I could take his picture but would have felt foolish to ask what kind of instrument he'd used.



We then got on a city bus, chartered, that took us to various Kerouac sites in town.  Above is the house he was born in on March 12, 1922.
A plaque adorns the house's front.


Falls on the Merrimac River.  From Dr. Sax:  "The thunderous husher of our sleep at night ... I could hear it rise from the rocks in a groaning wush ululating with the water, sprawish, sprawish, oom, oom, zoooo, all night long the river says zooo, zooo, the stars are fixed in rooftops like ink.  Merrimac, dark name ... Merrimac comes swooping from a north of eternities, falls pissing over locks, cracks and froths on rocks, bloth, and rolls frawing to the kale, calmed in dewpile stone holes slaty sharp ... by moonlight I see the mighty Merrimac foaming in a thousand white horses upon the tragic plains below."
I guess this is thanking Mme. Archambault, who probably was of the family which owned the Archambault Funeral Home across Pawtucket Street,  for a skating rink for the orphans (housed nearby at the time).

This is an outdoors Stations of the Cross which leads to a crucifix above a grotto (both pictured below).  There's a wonderful passage somewhere in Kerouac about a time he came here as a boy with his mother at night; it was ghostly and frightening, especially as a prominent funeral home was just across the street.
Close-up of one of the stations.
After the Stations of the Cross you could, if truly penitent,  ascend to the Crucifix on your knees, pausing on each of some twenty shallow steps to recite three prayers: The Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.   Catholics in the old days did not have football-damaged knees, but kneeling-damaged knees.  
Descending then from the crucifix down the left side you entered the grotto and prayed to The Blessed Virgin Mary. There were votive candles.  One could, for a price, light a candle as a signal of prayer.  In November of 1975 the famous Bob Dylan-led Rolling Thunder Revue performed in Lowell; many in the group, including Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, visited this grotto as well as Kerouac's grave and Memorial.
The Archimbault Funeral Home, which is situated across the street from the foot of the Stations of the Cross.  Jack Kerouac, dead from an alcohol-drenched liver at the age of forty-seven, was waked here in October of 1969.


Wednesday, October 19, 2011

RIP: Divine (Glenn Milstead) - Oct 19 1945/March 7, 1988

I loved his acting, and, from what I saw of him off-camera, he was a sweet guy. He knew how to be a star when that was appropriate and then be just a regular guy sitting across the room or across the table telling funny stories when that was appropriate.  In one interview he said "My favorite part of drag is getting out of it. Drag is my work clothes. I only put it on when someone pays me to."

Heart attack. Forty-two. Missed by many friends and and many fans. 

High School Graduation

At World Premier of "Female Trouble" in NYC; February 1975
Prospect Hill Cemetery; Towson, Maryland


Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part III (Stanley Kunitz)

Mount Hope Cemetery; Worcester, Massachusetts


And so, after the round-robin recitations of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems at her grave in Worcester's Hope Cemetery, and then going to a far corner of that cemetery to see the gravestone of the mother and stepfather of the great poet Stanley Kunitz, as well as the grave of his father, we got into our cars and made our amazingly many-turns way to what was the boyhood home of Kunitz during his formative years.

The house has a beautiful story. In 1979 a couple named Carol and Greg were looking for a home to buy. They found a stucco house which, despite its run-down condition, appealed to them. They bought it. They planned and began the necessary repairs and updates. Then, on an autumn day in 1985, returning home from a day of apple-picking, they saw a few people standing out front staring up at the house. They recognized one of them to the the city's favorite-poet son ... Carol or Greg had attended a couple readings Kunitz had given in Worcester ... not that they were "poetry lovers" but more, rather, out of a general support of culture.

Kunitz had made a few earlier efforts to find his boyhood home but had not been successful; what with whole neighborhoods having been razed to make room for all those Interstate-Somethings now criss-crossing Worcester, he, already nearing eighty, was unable to get his bearings; further, he had to consider that perhaps his old home simply did not exist anymore, had been in one of those neighborhoods bulldozed and hauled to a landfill.

Greg and Carol invited Stanley, his wife, and their companions into their home. Stanley immediately confirmed that it was indeed the house he, along with his mother, his stepfather, and his two older sisters, had moved into in 1919, when the house was newly built. The visit must have flooded his mind with memories but none seems to have been more poignant than that which came when he stepped out back and saw a thriving pear tree. He and his mother -- she directing, he digging and lifting -- had, some sixty-five-or-so years earlier, planted that very tree.

When that fall's pears were harvested Greg and Carol sent a package to Stanley at his winter home in Greenwich Village; they were to do so every autumn for the remainder of Stanley's life.

My Mother's Pears

Plump, green-gold, Worcester's pride,
     transported through autumn skies
           in a box marked HANDLE WITH CARE

sleep eighteen Bartlett pears,
     hand-picked and polished and packed
          for deposit at my door,

each in its crinkled nest
     with a stub of stem attached
          and a single bright leaf like a flag.

A smaller than usual crop,
     but still enough to share with me,
          as always at harvest time.

These strangers are my friends
     whose kindness blesses the house
          my mother built at the edge of town

beyond the last trolley-stop
     when the century was young, and she
         proposed, for her children's sake,

to marry again, not knowing how soon
     the windows would grow dark
          and the velvet drapes come down.

Rubble accumulates in the yard,
     workmen are hammering on the roof,
          I am standing knee-deep in dirt

with a shovel in my hand.
     Mother has wrapped a kerchief round her head,
          her glasses glint in the sun.

When my sisters appear on the scene,
     gangly and softly tittering,
          she waves them back into the house

to fetch us pails of water,
     and they slip out of our sight
          in their matching middy blouses.

I summon up all my strength
     to set the pear tree in the ground,
          unwinding its burlap shroud.

It is taller than I.  "Make room
     for the roots!" my mother cries,
          "Dig the hole deeper."


***

When Walter Skold (founder and head of Dead Poets Society) and I, along with three wonderfully knowledgeable members of the Worcester Poetry Society, step into the living room of Stanley Kunitz's boyhood home I feel immediately awash in a particular spirituality which I am not accustomed to; I am by no means certain that I can enclose it within the usual mundanity of my existence, don't know if I can come up with a comfortable fit. "I lack the art to decipher it," as Kunitz wrote (about a different subject) in a line in his poem "The Layers". 


When introduced to Carol, our hostess, I see in her eyes a soulful dance of warmth and welcome; it is clear that she is pleased to share with us poetry-lovers the part of Stanley Kunitz which resides in her history and which resides in her heart.  Through her, I can feel the presence of Stanley Kunitz, and I recognize that it is that which is the particular spirituality I am feeling; and now, recognizing it for what it is, I am comfortable with it. It is extremely moving. We pilgrims, en route, had just passed the very ballpark of "The Testing-Tree" where I could never hope to play. (Small for his age -- and, indeed, a tiny man -- he's implying that he'd never be chosen for a team.) Further, we were just blocks from the park where, some six weeks before the poet's birth, his father had committed suicide (there's no certainty of why he ended his life, though "a business setback" is sometimes mentioned, but, really, no one today knows.)


I never met Stanley Kunitz -- I saw him here and there in Provincetown when I lived there for twelve years, and where he had a summer home with its famous terraced garden, but I did not then know his poems and his biography. Later, enchanted with his poems, I imagined that I could see in his eyes a terrible far away look that had the tint of sadness; it was as if he were pondering the sort of question that will never be answered: How could you not have wished to stick around for another six weeks or so in order that you could meet me, your first-born son? I've also imagined that this is the very sort of question that could impel one to become a poet.


Stanley Kunitz


(This isn't an exactly fair sentiment on my part; there are a thousand pictures of Kunitz with eyes expressful of joy and other appealing connotations.)


Stanley's mother, Yetta, married again; her new husband, Mark Dine (related, I forget just how, to the pop-artist Jim Dine) was a good and kind-hearted stepfather to Stanley. Shortly after the family had moved into the house we are visiting, Mark Dine died of a massive heart attack while hanging drapes at the front window .. velvet drapes one can imagine from the image in "My Mother's Pears".


Glancing around, I think, too, that I have never seen such a beautifully appointed and beautifully furnished home; it turns out that once Greg and Carol learned that this had once been Kunitz's boyhood home they decided to furbish and furnish it to accord with that era. There are the hardwood floors and the woodwork, glistening -- when the light hits them just so -- with high varnish; there are leaded and patterned window panes; there are arches; there is a set of sumptuously upholstered throne-like chairs; there is a baby grand piano which Greg and Carol found in Newport once they'd learned (perhaps from Kunitz's poem "Three Floors" in which 'a sister ... played Warum on the baby grand') that Yetta Dine had a piano -- and, Carol says, when they were castoring theirs about the room, wondering what would be the best place for it to be put, Stanley happened to telephone and told them exactly where his mother had placed her baby grand; and in the kitchen, where we were served coffee and cookies, an exquisite collection of antique baskets hangs here, there, and everywhere; and over there in that corner is Stanley Kunitz's very own white-painted high chair, discovered in the basement, and gleefully confirmed by Kunitz himself to have been his very own; throughout the house the walls are adorned with handsomely framed photos of Kunitz and other family members, as well as certain of his poems, including an early typewritten draft, slightly different from the final version, of "My Mother's Pears"; there's even a framed letter or two written to Carol and Greg in the poet's hand.

But it was out back that, for the third time since entering the house, my eyes welled with tears. I asked to be permitted to touch the famous tree. I reached out and cradled some low leafs within my palm; I meant this as a gesture of sympathy to a tree that had loved Stanley as much as he had treasured it. And now here comes a fact: in 2006, the year of Stanley Kunitz's May death, this tree wept. One by one it dropped, like tears, its immature fruits, to the ground. Trees know.

There would be no autumn harvest that year.
***
So, yes, Carol and Greg, in a labor of love -- often excruciating labor, stripping layers and layers of paint from an eternity of surfaces -- yes, they turned the house into a museum dedicated to Stanley Kunitz. It is said that once the two had met Stanley, they adopted him, and he adopted them. Kunitz was eighty when they met; who would have imagined that twenty years of friendship would ensue .. who would suppose that there would be twenty parcels of pears transported through autumn skies .. and, who could possibly have imagined, even with tears and joy being, as they are, the yin and yang of life, who could possibly have imagined that Greg, who loved performing as the docent of this museum, and who, according to a magazine article I read, was "blessed with the gift of gab and a unique sense of humor" .. yes, who could have imagined that he would die from a massive heart attack himself, at the age of just fifty-eight, two and a half years after the death of Kunitz at one hundred and one, and a hundred and two years after the massive heart attack which killed, in the same house, Stanley's kind and good stepfather?


How can such tragedy and heartache be borne? We are merely humans. Carol, a young widow, merely a human .. yes, how does one go on?





"I can't go on. I must go on," says a Samuel Beckett character. When Carol had seen through the shock and the grief and the tears and learned to bear the pall woven of terrible heartache, she said, in essence, that the house felt sad and that she couldn't allow that it remain so. With assistance from the Worcester County Poetry Association, a docent program was developed; there now are close to ten docents, any one of whom may lead small groups through the house at certain advertised times of the year.
***
Provincetown Cemetery; Provincetown, Mass.
***
So it was an immensely rich series of events to celebrate Dead Poets Remembrance Day. Thanks Walter Skold. Thanks Raffael de Gruttola for addressing the crowd and reciting Kerouac haiku at his grave in Lowell. Thanks to those members of the Worcester County Poets Association who were so informative at Mount Hope Cemetery and also were such excellent co-docents at the boyhood home of Stanley Kunitz. And last, but in no way least, thanks Carol -- your soul, and that of Greg, have enriched my own beyond measure.


May all be richly blessed!
***
Ephemera #1: At birth, Stanley was given the name of his father, Solomon; it was changed to Stanley when he was five or six; inasmuch as Yetta seems to have had only bitter memories of Stanley's father, it is easy to imagine why the name was changed, but not easy to know why.


***
Ephemera #2: The Worcester County Poetry Association keeps a wonderful website, a page of which has many pictures of Stanley Kunitz, his boyhood home, and associated information.  Check it out at: http://wcpa.homestead.com/2011_KUNITZ_STOCKMAL_HOUSE.html


Monday, October 10, 2011

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part II (Elizabeth Bishop)

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester; her father died when she was eight months old; her mother shortly thereafter was institutionalized (some reasons for institutionalization in those days can provoke horror; the slightest of aberrations could be looked upon harshly; even what we call depression could be deemed ‘crazy’).


Essentially orphaned, the adult Bishop, in a bit of autobiography, wrote:  “My relatives all felt so sorry for this child that they tried to do their very best.  And I think they did.  I lived with my grandparents in Nova Scotia, then with the ones in Worcester, in Massachusetts, very briefly and got terrible sick [with asthma].  This was when I was six or seven .... Then I lived with my mother’s older sister in Boston, she was devoted to me -- she had no children.  My relationship with my relatives -- I was always sort of a guest, and I think I’ve always felt like that.”


Her poetry seems to be universally esteemed; almost any of her poems has been described by one or another respectable critic as ‘perfect’.  Despite a scant output -- biographers have insinuated that it was difficult for her to force herself to sit down and write (but to write ‘perfectly’ has to have been grueling) -- yes, with but a scant output she won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award, a Pulitzer prize, the National Books Crtics Circle Award, and was the first woman (and the first American) to win the Books Abroad/Neustadt Prize for Literature.  She was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, and was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 1949-50 term (the position is now, thanks to a rise of common sense, called Poet Laureate of the United States).


At Hope Cemetery in Worcester we were met at Elizabeth Bishop’s grave by three representatives of The Worcester County Poetry Association, an organization “dedicated to keeping poetry in all its forms alive for the people of Worcester” and which publishes the nationally recognized and respected literary journal with the matching capital “W’s” in its name: The Worcester RevieW.  These three were warm, charming, and full of interesting details and trivia.


Three of Bishop’s poems were recited by the six of us in an out-of-the-ordinary way-- one person read a sentence, then the person to his/her right read the next sentence, and so on, round-robin style, until the poem was finished; in the case of “Letter from N.Y.” we each read one stanza.

Poetry lovers at grave of Elizabeth Bishop


(I was told that while we were driving from Lowell to Worcester, had I been tuned in to NPR, I would have heard Terry Gross interviewing humorist David Rakoff (winner of the 2011 Thurber Award) and that, in the course of the interview Rakoff recited “Letter from N.Y.” calling it one of his favorite poems.  I have since “streamed” that interview.  Of the poem, Rakoff says, “In my life I will never achieve anything that beautiful.”)



In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.


I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.


Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?


The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.


Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.





The Bight


 At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.



 Letter To N.Y.

             For Louise Crane




In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:


taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,


and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,


and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,


and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.


--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.






And then we moved to the far corner of the cemetery, to a cluster of Hebrew-inscribed stones, among which we found the stone of the mother and the stepfather of the great poet Stanley Kunitz, as well as the stone of his father.  To be continued in Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part III.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part I (Jack Kerouac)

I didn’t expect that last year’s Dead Poets Remembrance Day -- a stroll in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery with stops and recitations (and a few songs) at the graves of a number of poets along the way -- each stop a dollop of spiritual richness and vast  pleasure -- in a beautiful setting, and  with Mother Nature blessing us congregants with that true blue sky  mentioned by e e cummings, and with a warm sun, and with a perfect October crispness -- so, no, I didn’t expect -- for that would be asking for too much -- I didn’t expect, two years in a row, an equal measure of richness.


It was achieved nevertheless. This year’s Day of Remembrance took place day before yesterday, a Friday, and, as it turned out, was another perfect day.

Not a stroll this year, but an ambitious drive, starting at nine in the morning at John Whittier’s grave in Amesbury, followed by a visit to his homestead; then on to the North Andover Burying Ground to see the Anne Bradstreet Memorial; this followed with a stop at Edson Cemetery in Lowell to celebrate the haiku of Jack Kerouac, that city’s great son; then some fifty miles down I-190 to Worcester’s Hope Cemetery to visit the grave of Elizabeth Bishop as well as the graves of Stanley Kunitz’s father, mother, and stepfather, followed by a visit to the boyhood home of Kunitz. Finally, Dead Poets Day was to end at sunset on Author’s Ridge in Concord at the grave of Louisa May Alcott. 


Dedgar the Poemobile


Living about 130 miles from the first stops I didn’t want to rise god-awful early so I slept in a bit and met up with Walter Skold (the founder of Dead Poets Society) when he pulled Dedgar, his white van (the Poemobile) along the grass in Lowell’s Edson Cemetery near ‘Ti Jean’ Kerouac’s grave; we were among a crowd of close to fifty.


Raffael de Gruttola, of the Boston Haiku Society, addressed the crowd, speaking about haiku in general, citing especially admiringly the haiku of Nick Virgilio, a Camden, New Jersey poet fairly considered one of our country’s most accomplished composers of haiku.(When one of your haiku is admired by an Emporor of Japan -- as one of Virgilio’s was -- then you may automatically be considered one of this country’s most accomplished haiku artists.) 


Raffael de Gruttola
de Gruttola’s opinion is that Kerouac, with his love of words in general, and his spiritual penchant for mixing his Catholic mysticism with Oriental religions, was, when it came to haiku, a natural, and he admires Kerouac’s haiku tremendously. He recited several, saying each one twice, as if the first recitation was for our ears while the reiteration was for our hearts.


de Gruttola, perhaps out of an admirable modesty in the circumstances,  did not recite any of his own haiku, but I’ve dug one up which is marvelous: 




             bumper to bumper
    the monarch changes lanes
                  uncontested


After de Gruttola’s presentation Walter Skold fetched from Dedgar a cold six pack of some variety of Sierra Nevada beer and two 24-packs of plastic shot glasses. I helped pass out the Mini Party
Cups (each would hold about an ounce) and felt bohemian-beatnik-hippie rebellious when handing a few of them to youngsters who were probably no more than fifteen or sixteen.  “Salut!” exclaimed a man who’d once taught French at the Lowell High School, and we raised and downed a San Franciscan beer in a toast to Jean-Louis “Jack” Lebris de Kerouac. (So, doing the math, there were 72 ounces of beer, and containers enough to hold only 48 ounces; I was one of the lucky ones who ended up not with a plastic container but with a bottle containing perhaps four ounces of an excellent cool beer.) 






And then, a schedule to be kept, we Dead Poet Society followers separated ourselves from the many who happened to be at the gravesite as part of Lowell's annual autumn celebration of its beloved son. Ours was a tiny caravan of three vehicles, heading for Worcester, some fifty miles down Interstate 190.


Up tomorrow: "Dead Poets Remembrance Day - Part II".

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Fernando Sor - 1773 - 1839 - Cimetiere Montmartre; Paris

Photo by Steven Baldwin, from FindAGrave.com

Until I came upon Fernando Sor's grave in Cimetiere Montmartre in Paris I don't think I'd ever heard the name. Later I googled and wikipedia-ed and learned just who it was who'd earned this beautiful sculpture which marks his resting place.

Sor was born in Barcelona.  Though he excelled early in musical studies he was expected to become -- as a long line of his forefathers had become -- a soldier in the Spanish Army.  He became a captain soon after Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain in 1808.  When it seemed that Spain would be defeated Sor accepted a post in the occupying government, earning the label of afrancesado -- one of those who abandoned the defense of Spain and supported the ideas of the French Revolution.  When, however, the French were eventually driven out of Spain in 1813, Sor and the other afrancesados fled the homeland they had betrayed.  Sor initially went to Paris, but later became famous throughout Europe as a classical guitarist and composer.  A Belgian musicologist/critic of the period called Sor "le Beethoven de la guitare"

The brief biography on FindAGrave.com, written by Robert Edwards, reports that Sor's "last years were unhappy. His wife and daughter died suddenly within months of each other, his own health declined and he died after a long bout with tongue cancer. His grave at Montmartre Cemetery was unmarked until 1934."

Detail on Sor's Marker

----------------------------------------------------------------
I recently read Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir by Oscar Hijuelos, an excellent writer who earlier had won the 1990 Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The memoir was of growing up in Manhattan as the son of Cuban immigrants; his struggles with schools and illness and assimilation and ... lo! ... ending up at City University where he discovers a love for reading. He writes a sketch for a class, realizes he enjoys writing sketches, so writes a bunch of them over the years.  They are eventually shown to an editor.  "You have a book here!" Hijuelos is informed.

One incident recounted in the memoir was that his mother, who pretty much declined to learn English, was not immensely impressed to have a son with a published novel ... it wasn't in Spanish, so where was the value? He was invited to do a book signing appearance at a bookstore not far from the apartment where his (now-widowed) mother lived.  He went to it.  There was a multitude of copies of his novel displayed in pyramids in both large windows.  After the event he thought he'd fetch his mother to see the display; surely seeing her son's name and book displayed so prominently would impress her.  He went to get her and escorted her to the bookstore only to see that the double-windowed display of his book had been dismantled; featured now were copies of a book written by an author who would be coming for the next signing!

It was a passage in Thoughts Without Cigarettes that impelled me to dig out the pictures I'd taken of Fernando Sor's grave in Paris (and to then nab one from the Internet when one of mine turned out to be not a good one):  speaking of a neighbor in his apartment building, Hijuelos writes:

          I learned that he too played the guitar, but in
          the classical style, with sheet music for studies
          by Tarrega, Fernando Sor, and others lying in
          stacks on a table by a stand in his living room.