Grand Panjandrum

The only schoolbook that ever baffled him was Quackenbos' Principles of Rhetoric. No matter how he struggled, young Archibald Henderson of Salisbury, N.C. could not understand it. Finally one day his teacher blew up, slammed the Principles shut, threw the book at Henderson, and sent him from his classroom forever. "In Quackenbos," recalls Archibald Henderson, "I met my master."

He met few others. In time, Henderson became head of the mathematics department at the University of North Carolina, one of the top historians of the South, and a biographer of George Bernard Shaw. He mastered so many fields of learning that G.B.S. called him "the Grand Panjandrum." "He is the only man in the world," added Yale's late William Lyon Phelps, "who can talk professionally on equal terms with Einstein and . . . Shaw."

Sesquipedalian Words. Last week, U.S. readers could find out a good deal more about the panjandrum. A group of scholars, critics and historians had written sketches and tributes for a book about him (Archibald Henderson: The New Crichton, edited by Samuel Stevens Hood; Beechhurst Press; $5). Among the contributors were the late Historian Charles A. Beard, Novelist Betty Smith, and the university's ex-president (now U.S. Senator), Frank Porter Graham. Each took a different phase of the Henderson chronicle.

Graham remembered him as a young instructor at North Carolina, where he had been a rangy prodigy who played first base on the scrub baseball team a few years before. Others remembered him on his first trip abroad, a lanky six-footer who used "mouth-filling sesquipedalian words," wore high-necked collars, and was determined to become Shaw's Boswell. He had taken one mathematics Ph.D. at North Carolina, took another at the University of Chicago. In between, he studied under Einstein at the University of Berlin.

The world soon began to hear of him. Even Shaw admired the two authorized biographies George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Works and Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet ("I had only been uncollected odds and ends," said G.B.S. "Henderson collected me"). Henderson also wrote one of the first full-length biographies of Mark Twain, a 500,000-word history of his state, and a recondite mathematics treatise, "The Derivation of the Brianchon Configuration for Two Spatial Point-Triads." Once, two universities (Oklahoma and Tulsa) offered him presidencies in the course of a single evening. Moronic Camels. Despite such offers, Archibald Henderson seldom left Chapel Hill for long. Neighbors became accustomed to "The Genius," bounding down to the post office in the morning, or sitting on his porch sipping ginger ale. To them he was a scholarly squire, always ready with a merry bit of gossip, and a fresh flower in his buttonhole. To his mathematics students, he was not always so charming. He could tease or taunt them until some fled in terror. But those who stayed never forgot Professor Henderson, pacing back & forth before them, mixing Homer and Milton with his math.

Today, at 71, trim, jaunty Archibald Henderson no longer teaches. But he is still up at 6:30, still spends his days writing. The world as he sees it is not always a pleasant place with its "death-rattling traffic of mechanistic technologies . . . [its] moronic camels born with no thirst for knowledge." His own thirst never seems to have been quenched, nor his work ever finished. He is still the grand panjandrum, with a panjandrum's list of projects: a two-volume history of the Transylvania Co. and the founding of Kentucky, a new book on Shaw and a treatise "offering many of my own original proofs" of the converse of the Pythagorean theorem.*

-In a right triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.