In 1925 Robert Underwood Johnson was still incorrigibly at war with the new poets. The recoil from modernism he enshrined as a cause; and what was Johnson’s cause was bound to become the Academy’s cause, very nearly its raison d’être. (The first cracks in anti-modernism would not occur until late in the decade, and then—torrentially—in the 1930’s and 1940’s.) On November 23, 1925, in a letter to Who’s Who in America, presenting himself as an incarnation of the Temple’s eternality, Johnson requested that he be identified as “an antagonist of free verse and author of a criticism of it in an address before the Academy entitled ‘The Glory of Words.’ ” “The modernists,” he complained in that talk, “wish to exalt into poetic association words that heretofore have not been considered poetic.… Naturally such an attempt is conspicuously deficient in the glory of words.” The “metrical product of the revolutionists,” he went on, was “unimaginative,” “monotonously conventional,” and “objectionably sophisticated—individualism run to seed.” And: “They are determined to make silk purses out of sows’ ears.” “Because the Muses no longer rule there must be no allusion to Parnassus; the Muses are not ‘factual’ and must go by the board.” “The chief promise of poetry is to express the pervasive and permanent spiritual forces of all time.”
Although Johnson’s zeal on behalf of Miss Thomas had failed to win her an Academy honor, his fight against Robert Frost did not abate. To Booth Tarkington he wrote:
I am very strongly opposed to Frost’s nomination on principle (I have never met him and have no personal feeling)…. I think both he and Edwin Arlington Robinson who has been nominated are in the main mediocre in their work … they are not worthy of consideration for the Academy.… We have other men in the Institute who ought to be put forward for the quality of their poetry—Percy MacKaye, Clinton Scollard, Richard Burton, Brian Hooker, Don Marquis, Charles deKay and John Finley. Each one of these men has done beautiful work.
To our ears these are largely unrecognizable minor deities. Johnson’s own Parnassus has not gathered them to its bosom. And if Polyhymnia, having anointed (sparingly) Edward MacDowell and Victor Herbert, remains cool to Frederick Shepherd Converse and George Whitefield Chadwick, while smiling palely on Horatio Parker chiefly for his connection with Charles Ives, what of the painters’ Muse? Edith Thomas as poet and John Powell as composer may be confined to the category of antiquarian curios, but (for instance) Joseph Pennell and Childe Hassam are not. (Anyone examining the superbly evocative Pennell drawings that accompany Henry James’s Collected Travel Writings, reissued in 1993 by the Library of America, will be stirred by what we call permanence in art: that which cannot date.)
Repeatedly infuriated by the encroachments of new modes of literary expression and helpless before its tide—Robinson and Frost were both admitted to the Academy, in 1927 and 1930 respectively—Johnson was determined that the Temple should make an indelible statement at least in the graphic arts. One effort toward that end, the attempt to put a museum in every state, fizzled. A second idea both survived and prospered: this was to establish a collection by Academicians and other American painters. Johnson worked closely with the earliest Committee on Art, then known as the Committee on Art Censorship—a name that may suggest the prescriptive tastes of its three members: the painter and critic Kenyon Cox, the sculptor Herbert Adams, and the architect Cass Gilbert. Paintings were solicited from private collectors and through bequests. Since one of Johnson’s motives was to promote and augment the influence of the Academy, it is no wonder that portraits dominated, or that the collection was based, by and large, on the products of its own members. Johnson was relentless in going after contributions, especially from the freshly widowed wives of deceased Academicians. The collection expanded to cover etchings, lithographs, engravings, small sculptures, photographs, memorabilia, and manuscripts.
To display the Academy’s riches, the year 1927 saw four public events: separate exhibits honoring Academicians Childe Hassam, Timothy Cole, and Joseph Pennell, and an “Exhibition of Manuscripts Representing the First Century of American Independence”—which included the notebooks of John Burroughs and letters by Academy members Henry Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Julia Ward Howe, William Dean Howells, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (the very Higginson who had chided Emily Dickinson for “spasmodic” and “uncontrolled” verse), Henry James, Henry Charles Lea, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Richard Henry Stoddard. Manuscripts by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman were also on exhibit. As a mendicant on behalf of the Academy, Johnson was astoundingly tireless, and his solicitations ended only with his death in 1937. With Johnson gone, the Academy’s policy for both artists and writers (and for musicians and composers as well) moved from mainly self-reflecting acquisition to outward-looking prodigality: awards to the young at the start of their careers.
A few days after the Timothy Cole event, Huntington presented the Academy with a gift of $100,000 as an endowment for future exhibits. The permanent collection, and the new plan for ongoing showings by painters, were designed to set a standard for American cultural aspiration. So were the concerts and recitals sponsored by the Academy during the decade of the Twenties: what was to be emphasized, George Whitefield Chadwick urged, was “the development of American Music (not by foreign musicians, no matter how accomplished),” But the pressure for indigenous American achievement—a sign of the early Academy’s sense of its own inferiority before the age and weight of Europe’s cultural cargo—was nowhere more pronounced than in the preoccupation with American speech. President Sloane warned of “a stream of linguistic tendency, prone to dangerous flood and devastating inundation,” alluding no doubt to the postwar immigration. Yet native-born journalists were almost as perilous a threat as foreigners spilling into the country: “How are we to justify the diction of the press,” William Roscoe Thayer inquired, “through which pours an incessant stream of slang, vulgarism, grammatical blunders, and rhetorical crudity?” Responding, the press—in the shape of the Boston Herald of December 15, 1926—pretended to take up the case of an instance of ambiguity in the use of “is” and “are,” which was being placed before the Temple for adjudication: “After having brought half the dilettantes and intellectuals of the nation in futile disagreement, one of the worst sentences ever written will soon arrive at the Academy of Arts and Letters in search of further trouble.”
Further trouble? Such playfulness—or mockery—could hardly sit well with the Permanent Secretary. The function of the Academy, Johnson grandly noted, was to reject “invasions from the ribbon counter” and to “stand against the slovenly, and for the dignified and effective use of words.” This meant also the sound of words. In a radio talk invoking the Academy’s various causes, Mrs. Vanamee testified to the excitements of clear enunciation:
There is a medal for good diction on the Stage which was awarded to Walter Hampden in 1924 and last spring to Miss Edith Wynne Matthison whose perfect diction was never more perfectly in evidence than in her superbly simple and touching acceptance of the medal from the hands of Robert Underwood Johnson, the Secretary of the Academy, and after he and its Chancellor, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler had paid high tribute to Miss Matthison’s work.
Mrs. Vanamee was plainly not in line for a medal honoring Style.
THE RIBBON COUNTER, along with the Academy’s defunct ribbon badge, has vanished; it is a different Academy today. For one thing, though born of the Institute, the Academy has swallowed up its progenitor. What was once two bodies, joined like Siamese twins in any case, is now a single organization—diverse, welcoming, lavishly encouraging to beginners in the arts. Yet what Hamlin Garland remarked on long ago remains: a quantity of seasoned gray heads—few of whom, however, are polemically inclined to retrogressive views. Crusty elitism is out. The presence of women goes unquestioned. Ethnic parochialism is condemned. No one regards experiment as a revolutionary danger. And by now modernism, which seventy years ago seemed so disruptive to the history-minded, is itself an entrench
ed tradition with a lengthening history of its own—even fading off into the kind of old-fashionedness that derives from repetitiveness, imitation, overfamiliarity. Modernism has grown as tranquil as Robert Underwood Johnson’s Parnassus; and what postmodernism is, or will become, we hardly know.
Do these white-bearded, high-collared gentlemen of the old Academy—who live out the nineteenth century’s aesthetic and intellectual passions right up to the lip of the Great Depression—strike us as “quaint”? Condescending and unholy word! Unholy, because it forgets that death and distance beckon us, too: our turn lies just ahead. Possibly we are already quaintly clothed, as unaware that we are retrograde as Kenyon Cox and Royal Cortissoz before Matisse, or Robert Underwood Johnson in the face of T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. Despite our ingrained modernist heritage, we may, after all, discover ourselves to be more closely linked to the print-loyal denizens of the Twenties Temple than we are to the cybernetic future. If a brittle and browning 1924 Mencken clipping testifies to the cultural irrelevance of the official humanists of two generations ago, the loss of a fixed and bound text, if it occurs—bringing a similar disorientation to fixed expectations—may be as cataclysmic for us as Cubism was to the votaries of Beaux Arts.
And if time has reduced Robert Underwood Johnson and his solemnly spiritualized colleagues to toys for our irony, what does that signify? Probably that (given our modernist habits) we value irony more than dignity, and what does that signify? The “mystic nobles,” as Mencken called them, of the Academy’s third decade lacked irony; but they also lacked cynicism. When they sermonized on “nobility of character,” they believed in its likelihood, and even in its actual presence. When Johnson honored “Beauty changeless and divine,” he took it for granted that the continuity of a civilization is a sacred covenant. A review of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, a pair of Library of America volumes published in 1993 and edited by John Hollander, a contemporary Academician, adds this perspective: “Just as the spare acerbity of early modernism must have looked bracingly astringent to writers and readers grown weary of nineteenth-century rotundities, so today … these relics of another age are deeply refreshing.”
We who are postmodern inheritors of the violent whole of the twentieth century no longer dare to parade—even if we privately hold them—convictions of virtue, harmony, nobility, wisdom, beauty; or of their sources. But (setting aside irony, satire, condescension, and the always arrogant power of the present to diminish the past), the ideals of the Temple, exactly as Johnson conceived them, are refreshing to an era tormented by unimaginable atrocity and justifiable cynicism. Nor are those ideals precisely “relics.” Suppose Johnson had chosen Frank Lloyd Wright as architect for the new building; what might the Academy have looked like then? If it is good to have the Guggenheim Museum’s inventiveness, it is also good to have the Academy’s Venetian palace, just as Stanford White and Charles McKim dreamed it.
Or what if the Academy’s art committee had allied itself with, say, Alfred Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, the heart and muscle of the modernist cause? What if Robert Frost and Charles Ives had been admitted to membership in 1918? Or H. L. Mencken?
Such speculations instantly annihilate the history of the Temple’s credo between the Great War and the Great Depression. Worse, they wipe out the name and (noble) character of the redoubtable Robert Underwood Johnson, and who would want that?
“IT TAKES A GREAT DEAL OF HISTORY TO PRODUCE A LITTLE LITERATURE”
H. G. WELLS once accused Henry James of knowing practically nothing. In the Jamesian novel, Wells charged, “you will find no people with defined political opinions, no people with religious opinions, none with clear partisanships or with lusts or whims, none definitely up to any specific impersonal thing.” Wells concluded: “It is leviathan retrieving pebbles.”
James was desperately wounded. He was at the close of his great span of illumination—it was less than a year before his death—and he was being set aside as useless, “a church lit but without a congregation.” Replying to Wells, he defended himself on the question of the utility of art. Literature, he asserted, is “for use”: “I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything behind.” There followed the famously characteristic Jamesian credo, by now long familiar to us. “It is art,” he wrote, “that makes life, makes interest, makes importance … I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” And though he was speaking explicitly of the novel’s purpose as “the extension of life, which is the novel’s great gift,” there is evidence enough that he would not have excluded the literary essay, of which he was equal master, from art’s force and beauty. Thus, what Henry James knew.
To which Wells retorted: “I had rather be a journalist, that is the essence of it.”
In the quarrel between Wells and James, James’s view has been overtaken by times and habits far less elevated in their literary motives (and motifs) than his own, and by radical changes in the aims of education and in the impulses that drive the common culture. What James knew was the nobility of art—if, for him, the novel and the literary essay were not splendors just short of divine, then they were, anyhow, divining rods, with the capacity to quiver over the springs of discovered life. What Wells knew was something else—the future; us; what we are now. He welcomed the germinating hour of technology’s fecundity, and flourished in it. James, we recall, switched from pen and ink to the typewriter, not because he was attracted to machines—he was not—but because he suffered from writer’s cramp. He never learned to type himself; instead, he dictated to a typist—a technological regression, in a way, to the preliterate oral; or else an ascendance to the dominant priestly single voice. Wells, by contrast, was magnetized by the machine-world. Imagine him our contemporary: his study is mobbed by computer, printer, modem, e-mail, voice-mail, photocopier, fax, cable—the congeries and confluence of gadgets and conveniences that feed what the most up-to-date colleges advertise as “communications skills.”
The truth of our little age is this: nowadays no one gives a damn about what Henry James knew. I dare to say our “little” age not to denigrate (or not only to denigrate), but because we squat now over the remnant embers of the last diminishing decade of the dying twentieth century, possibly the rottenest of all centuries, and good riddance to it (despite modernism at the start and moonwalking near the middle). The victories over mass murder and mass delusion, West and East, are hardly permanent. “Never again” is a pointless slogan: old atrocities are models (they give permission) for new ones. The worst reproduces itself; the best is singular. Tyrants, it seems, can be spewed out by the dozens, and their atrocities by the thousands, as by a copy machine; but Kafka, tyranny’s symbolist, is like a fingerprint, or like handwriting, not duplicatable. This is what Henry James knew: that civilization is not bred out of machines, whether the machines are tanks or missiles, or whether they are laser copiers. Civilization, like art its handmaid (read: hand-made), is custom-built.
Let this not be mistaken for any sort of languorous pre-Raphaelite detachment from science or technology, or, heaven for-fend, as a complaint against progress and its reliefs. Gratitude for anaesthesia and angioplasty and air travel, and for faxes and computers and frozen food and the flush toilet and all the rest! Gratitude, in truth, for Mr. Gradgrind and the Facts, and for those who devise the Facts—especially when those facts ease the purely utilitarian side of life. What distinguishes the data of medicine and science is precisely that they can be duplicated: an experiment that cannot be repeated will be discarded as an unreliable fluke, or, worse, as a likely forgery. In the realm of science, what is collective has authority. It is the same with journalism: if two reporters witness an incident, and the two accounts differ, one must be wrong, or must at least promote distrust. A unique view, uncorroborated, is without value. Wells, in discrediting James, was in pursuit of public and collective discriminations, as opposed to the purely idiosyncratic; he was after consensus-witnessing, both in science and societ
y, and a more recognizable record, perhaps, even of lust and whim. Defined political and religious opinions, clear partisanships, persons definitely up to some specific impersonal thing.
Defined, definite, specific—how, what, when, where: the journalist’s catalogue and catechism. Naming generates categories and headings, and categories and headings offer shortcuts—like looking something up in the encyclopedia, where knowledge, abbreviated, has already been codified and collected. James’s way, longer and slower, is for knowledge to be detected, inferred, individually, laboriously, scrupulously, mazily—knowledge that might not be found in any encyclopedia.
“I had rather be a journalist, that is the essence of it”—hark, the cry of the common culture. Inference and detection (accretion heading toward revelation) be damned. What this has meant, for literature, is the eclipse of the essay in favor of the “article”—that shabby, team-driven, ugly, truncated, undeveloped, speedy, breezy, cheap, impatient thing. A while ago, coming once again on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque”—an essay not short, wholly odd, no other like it, custom-made, soliciting the brightness of full attention in order to release its mocking charms—I tried to think of a single periodical today that might be willing to grant print to this sort of construction. Not even “judicious cutting,” as editors like to say, would save Stevenson now. Of course there may be an instantly appropriate objection to so mildewed an observation. Stevenson is decidedly uncontemporary—the tone is all wrong, and surely we are entitled to our own sounds? Yes, the nineteenth century deserves to be read—but remember, while reading, that it is dead.
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