Fame & Folly

by Cynthia Ozick

  Meanwhile, Henry Cowell, a native Californian, was not only trying out novel sounds on the piano—sometimes treating it like a violin—but was inventing a new instrument, the rhythmicon, “capable of producing very complex combinations of beat patterns.” The quarterly Cowell founded, suitably named New Music, was hospitable to the work of the most arcane innovators, including Charles Ives—whose composition teacher at Yale in 1894 had been the mild but uncomprehending Horatio Parker. It is one of the ironies of the Academy’s later history, and also one of its numerous triumphs over its older self, that grants and fellowships are now awarded to young composers in Charles Ives’s name, and out of the royalties of his estate—though Ives’s polytonality, quarter tones, and disjointed melody lines would surely have appalled the Academicians of the Twenties. In February of 1923, Richard Aldrich, a member of the Institute since 1908, and music critic for The New York Times, wrote in a bitter column called “Some Judgments on New Music”:

  It is nothing less than a crime for a composer to write in any of the idioms that have been handed down, or to hold any of the older ideas of beauty.… Any who do not throw overboard all the baggage inherited from the past, all transmitted ideas of melody and harmony, are reactionaries, pulling back and hindering the march of music.… Whatever is presented to [the receptive new audiences] as acrid ugliness or rambling incoherence is eagerly accepted as emanations of greatness and originality. It never occurs to them that it might be simple, commonplace ugliness.

  These are lines that might have emerged from Robert Underwood Johnson’s own inkpot. But it fell to John Powell, a Virginian elected to the Institute in 1924, to catch the Johnsonian idiom entire—the modernists, Powell said, were “nothing more or less than cheap replicas of the recent European Bolshevists.” Powell was a composer of moods, beguiled by the picturesque and the nostalgic, especially as associated with Southern antebellum plantation life. The introductory wail of his Rapsodie nègre is intended to capture a watermelon peddler’s cry—a telltale image that, apart from its melodic use, may possibly bear some relation to his distaste for racial mixing and new immigrants. His musical preference was for what he termed “the Anglo-Saxon Folk Music School,” and he shunned Cavalleria Rusticana and Tristan and Isolde not because he disliked opera, but because he disapproved of marital infidelity.

  The new music, with its “acrid ugliness” and “rambling incoherence,” may have been the extreme manifestation of what the Academy idealists were up against. Among the other arts, though, the idealists did have one strong ally, which steadfastly resisted—longer than music and longer than painting—the notions of freedom of form and idiosyncratic or experimental vision that modernism was opening up to the individual artist. Sculpture alone continued to profess public nobility and collective virtue in service to a national purpose. “Sculpture” meant statuary dedicated to historical uplift and moral seriousness. Even architecture, through its functional aspect, was more inclined to engage in individual expression—but virtually every statue was intended as a monument. The Armory Show of 1913, the catalyst that revolutionized American painting, barely touched the National Sculpture Society, which had settled on Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his successors, in their advance from marble to bronze, as “The Golden Age of American Sculpture.” (Saint-Gaudens died in 1907.) Colossal multifigured structures, exhibition palaces (often fashioned from temporary materials and afterward dismantled), fountains, celebratory arches, symbolic themes indistinguishable from spiritual credos—all these were in full consonance with Robert Underwood Johnson’s dream of an American Temple. Nearly fifty years before the Armory Show, the sculptor Erastus Dow Palmer had declared: “No work in sculpture, however wrought out physically, results in excellence, unless it rests upon, and is sustained by, the dignity of a moral or intellectual intention.”

  This dogma remained intact until the rise of the modernists, who repudiated not only its principles but its techniques. The Paris Beaux Arts tradition depended on studio assistants; a sculptor was a “thinker,” a philosopher who conceived the work and modeled it in clay, after which lower-level technicians were delegated to carry out its translation into finished form. Modernism, by contrast, brought on a rush of hand carving—the kinetic and aesthetic interaction of sculptor with tools and material. But it was not until the Twenties were almost out that individual style began to emerge as a recognizable, though clearly not yet dominant, movement. It was a movement that purposefully turned away from Old World models, and looked to the “primitive,” to African and pre-Columbian as well as Sumerian and Egyptian sources. While the Academy itself clung to the civically earnest, advanced taste was (once again) headed for unfamiliar territory. Thomas Hastings, a Beaux Arts adherent elected to the Academy in 1908, had designed a Victory Arch—adorned with abundant inspirational statuary—for the soldiers returning after the First World War to march through. In 1919 it was executed in temporary materials, and the soldiers did march through it. But public sentiment failed to support a permanent rendering in stone, and the Arch was taken down. Monuments to a civic consensus were slipping from popularity; work steeped in lofty aims met indifferent, or perhaps jaded, eyes.

  Yet the new sculptors were not recognized by the Academy, and the strikingly fresh shapes and experiments of the Twenties streamed past the Temple only to attract its vilifying scorn. Saul Baizerman, whose innovative studies of contemporary life, The City and the People, were hammered out between 1920 and 1925, was never invited into the Institute, while even more notable sculptors of the period had to wait for a later generation’s approbation. Bruce Moore was not admitted until 1949; William Zorach became a member only in 1953, and Robert Laurent only in 1970, the year of his death. Within the Academy of the third decade, it was Daniel Chester French (admitted in 1908) who was preëminent: the prized sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the creator of a female Republic (with staff, globe, and dove) and of Columbia University’s Alma Mater, himself a grand symbol of the grand symbolic statuary that preceded the modernist flood and was finally—if belatedly in the Academy—overwhelmed by it.

  In a tribute delivered on French’s death in 1931, Royal Cortissoz, an Academician who was art critic for The New York Herald Tribune from 1891 on, observed with just precision that French “was thoroughly in harmony with [the Academy’s] spirit” in a life “dedicated from beginning to end to the production of noble work.… A beautiful seriousness of purpose animated him.” As an example he offered French’s figure of Memory, “a seated nude reminiscent of antique ideas.” Cortissoz was reflecting exactly what William Milligan Sloane had prescribed in his address at the opening of the Temple in 1923:

  We are a company seeking the ideal … we do not forget that our business is conservation first and foremost, conservation of the best and but incidentally, if at all, promotion of the untried. We are to guard tradition, not to seek out and reward innovation … we are sternly bound as an organization to examine carefully any intellectual movement striving to break with tradition.… Our effort in word and work must be to discover and cherish the true American spirit and keep it pure, in order to prevent inferior literature and art from getting the upper hand.

  What, then, was Cortissoz about when he labeled modern art “a gospel of stupid license and self-assertion,” if not preventing the inferior from getting the upper hand? Still another Academician, the painter and critic Kenyon Cox, wrote: “There is only one word for this denial of all law, this insurrection of individual license without discipline and without restraint; and that word is anarchy.” The Armory Show, Cox announced, was a “pathological museum” where “individualism has reached the pitch of sheer insanity or triumphant charlatanism.” Gauguin was “a decorator tainted with insanity.” Rodin displayed “symptoms of mental decay.” If Cortissoz thought Matisse produced “gauche puerilities,” Cox went further, and condemned “grotesque and indecent postures” drawn “in the manner of a savage or depraved child.”

  Eleven years after
the Armory shock, the Academy, still unforgiving in 1924, published three papers attacking “Modernist Art,” one each by Cortissoz and Cox, and the third by Edwin Howland Blashfield. All three blasts had appeared in periodicals in 1913 and 1914, in direct response to the Armory Show, but the Academy—while asserting that modernism’s influence was “on the wane”—saw fit to reprint them in the interests of dislodging “eccentricities” from “the tolerance of critics.” Here again was Kenyon Cox: “The real meaning of the Cubist movement is nothing else than the total destruction of the art of painting”; Cézanne “seems to me absolutely without talent”; “this kind of art [may] corrupt public taste and stimulate an appetite for excitement that is as dangerous as the appetite for any other poisonous drug”; “do not allow yourselves to be blinded by the sophistries of the foolish dupes or the self-interested exploiters of all this charlatanry.” And Cortissoz on the Post-Impressionists: “work not only incompetent, but grotesque. It has led them from complacency to what I can only describe as insolence”; their “oracular assertion that the statues and pictures are beautiful and great is merely so much impudence.” Blashfield, finally, after deploring “a license to omit painstaking care, coherent thinking, an incitement to violence as compelling attention,” simply ended with a cry of self-defense: “there is no dead art.”

  Thus the Temple on the coming of the New. And thus the Academy’s collective impulse toward vituperation—delivered repeatedly, resentfully, remorselessly, relentlessly; and aimed at the New in music, painting, sculpture, literature. And not only here. Whatever was new in the evolving aspirations of women toward inclusion and equality was repudiated. New immigrants (no longer of familial Ango-Saxon stock, many of whom were to enrich American literature, art, and music) were repudiated. Any alteration of nineteenth-century standards of piety or learning was repudiated. In a 1922 address, Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, ostensibly lauding “the permanent hoard of human knowledge,” offered a list of “certain menaces to our chance for great literature”:

  We are developing ragtime religion. Homer and Virgil were founded on a serious faith.… The classics are in eclipse. To that star all intellect has hitched its wagon. Literature has become a feminine subject in our seats of learning. What female Shakespeare has ever lived? Recent arrivals pollute the original spring.… It would be well for us if many recent arrivals would become departures.

  Across the water Virginia Woolf, too, was speculating on the absence of a female Shakespeare, though from another viewpoint. And in the very bowels of the Academy, in a letter to President Sloane on October 22, 1921, loyal Mrs. Vanamee herself—in the name of the logic of precedent—was protesting the exclusion of women:

  You will be astonished to learn that I found a volume of Institute Minutes which was once loaned to Mr. Johnson and in looking through it this morning we found a record of [Julia Ward] Howe’s election to the Institute. It seems she was regularly [i.e., routinely] nominated and regularly elected for at that time [1907] there was no ruling against women’s being elected to the Institute. Mrs. Howe’s name has always been included among the names of “Deceased Members of the Institute.” Of course this makes the ruling of yesterday entirely out of order.

  Mrs. Vanamee recommended that “any record of what occurred” (meaning the entire set of minutes of the meeting ruling against admission of women) be expunged in a little act of hanky-panky. Accordingly, the culpable minutes were somehow spirited away, never again to emerge—but the issue continued to fester, and it would be another five years before enough ballots could be counted in favor of admission. Julia Ward Howe’s membership—for the three feeble years before her death at age ninety-one—was argued against as “an error of procedure.” Besides, as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” she was less a woman than a national monument, one of those ideal female symbol-figures specialized in by Daniel Chester French.

  In the ballots of 1923—asking directly, “Do you favor the admission of women to the National Institute of Arts and Letters?”—sometimes a simple “no” was not enough to satisfy the spleen of an elderly gentleman born before or during the Civil War. “NO I DO NOT,” roared the painter Whitney Warren. “A categorical NO,” announced the composer Arthur Bird, and followed up with a tirade:

  To express my decided antipathy against this proposed innovation you will notice that I have added categorical. I have lately in the Chicago Musical Leader ventilated my opinion on this subject in a short exposé. The occasion of a woman attempting to conduct the Philharmonic orchestra here at a symphony concert gave me a long awaited opportunity to mouth a short but vigorous sally … against the attempts of a certain clan of womanhood to try to do things the feminine gender is by nature utterly incapable of doing and hooting at those things for which it is by nature predestined. What on earth have or ever will have women to do with science, art and letters (in the highest sense of the words) or are they satisfied to play a very mediocre second fiddle? It is needless to hide the naked fact, conceal the plain truth, that the moment the fair sex drops its skirts, throws aside guiltiness, modesty, refinement, all that gentility that we know and love so much, don the leather breeches, beat the drum, then lackaday to all the poetry of this life, away with the sentiments so expressive in Heine’s poem so prettily and cleverly translated by our Longfellow, “The sea hath its pearls,” etc. Then we shall say “For women must work and fight, men weep and spin.” Id est—the world turned upside down.

  Tirades on the one hand, gloatings on the other. “I rejoice exceedingly,” the writer James Ford Rhodes wrote in 1918 to Robert Underwood Johnson (who, surprisingly, favored women’s admission), “that you were beaten on the women question. What would you do with the ‘wimmin’ at the dinners at the University Club?… A hysteria is going over the country, showing itself in women’s suffrage and Prohibition.” (The Temple may have been able to do without women at dinner, but it rarely permitted itself to do without booze, and regularly circumvented the Eighteenth Amendment—viz., “My dear Cass, Please send the bottle of Gin for the Institute dinner, carefully wrapped up so as to conceal its identity.” “My dear Thorndike, Will you please send the bottle of Gin, carefully wrapped up so that it will not look suspicious.”)

  In the midst of all these fulminations and refusals and repudiations (always excepting the gin), there was, nevertheless, one moment early in the Academy’s third decade that hinted at a glimmer of doubt, perhaps even of self-criticism. It was, in fact, a kind of bloodless insurrection or palace coup, and took place behind Robert Underwood Johnson’s formidable back. The rebel in the case was Hamlin Garland, author of A Son of the Middle Border, a school classic of the last generation. Wisconsin-born, Garland grew up in the drudging privations of farm life, at home in the unpolished—and impoverished—regions of Iowa, California, and the Dakotas. Unlike Johnson (out of whom the last traces of Indiana had long since been squeezed), Garland could never have been mistaken for a formal Easterner. His perspectives were wider and more sympathetic than many of his colleagues’; he was a liberal who wrote seriously on social reform. His name was irrefutably linked with narrative realism, but he was a realist in the more everyday sense as well: he looked around and saw an Academy of fatigued and retrograde gentlemen stuck fast in a narrow mold. “We must avoid the appearance of a club of old fogies,” he warned, and kept an eye out for a chance to invigorate the membership.

  The chance came in 1920, when President Wilson (an Academy member since 1908) appointed Johnson to be Ambassador to Italy, and Garland stepped in as the Academy’s Acting Secretary. In Johnson’s absence, Garland’s first target was Johnson himself: “We cannot become a ‘one man organization,’ no matter how fine that man may be.” To Brander Matthews he wrote, “Now is the time to make the Academy known. If we let this chance pass we shall be a Johnson Institution for the rest of our lives.… We can’t be run by a volunteer member seventy years of age.… We are called … that Johnson thing.” He noted “the age and growing infirm
ity of many of our members who are losing interest in the organization” and “the fact that our membership is scattered as well as aged and preoccupied.… We should draw closer,” he advised, “and take the future of the Academy much more seriously than we have heretofore done.… We must not lose touch with youth. We should not be known as ‘a senile institution.’ We must assume to lead in the progress of the Nation.”

  Yet Garland’s ideas for Academy programs turned out to be less than revolutionary: “The Academy by a Lecture Foundation should offer to the Nation a series of addresses on American Arts and Letters in which the most vigorous propaganda for the good as against the bad should be carried forward. We should stand against all literary pandering, all corrupting influences”—an exhortation that might easily have been uttered by any of the old fogies had it not concluded with a call to “make it plain that we are for progress, that it is our plan to hasten and direct the advance. That we intend to recognize the man of genius whether in the Academy or not.”