by John Kaag
The Hockings objected to what they called the “yielding morass of progressivism,” the idea that still holds sway in certain educational settings that children should be given free rein over their intellectual destinies. This freedom, often self-serving and self-centered, was, according to the Hockings, no freedom at all. Education was not about satisfying the interests that children already had, but about awakening them to the possibility of pursuing broader and more meaningful ones. In the words of Mary Williams, one of its former students, the lessons at Shady Hill were “over our heads at all times. But within our reach. We were always pulling ourselves up to exciting new levels.” It sounded to me a bit like purgatory—torturously inspiring. In Ernest’s words:
Poetry class is Mrs. Hocking standing on the front porch in spring with eight children at her feet with Doric columns. She swayed as she recited to us … Over our heads she would wave her hands, gloves flying … Her voice conveyed excitement. Presently we looked up, too. By then the world had become bright with images, rich in feeling. To us it was not necessarily coherent; it was rapturous. Like poetry, Mrs. Hocking aroused an exuberance that was supra-rational.
This was Plato’s divine madness and the definitive argument that it could, and should, be at the heart of education. As one of the original brochures for the school made clear, Agnes’s suprarational exuberance had a pointedly rational aim: to “provide life with all possible richness and fullness; to secure freedom with self-control.” This sounds grave and boring—with Kantian undertones Carol would have loved—but it wasn’t. Shady Hill was a place where children fell happily in love with both this educational aim and their headmistress.
* * *
May Sarton adored Agnes Hocking. In the 1970s Sarton would become one of the most popular women writers in America, an icon of feminist and lesbian literature, one of the first women ever to write a journal—Journal of a Solitude—that became a bestseller. But in 1917 Sarton was five years old and one of the youngest pupils at Shady Hill. I poked around the stacks of books in the attic until I found Sarton’s memoir, I Knew a Phoenix, and returned to my crate. “There is no doubt,” Sarton wrote, “that [my] creative mind stemmed in those early years from the genius of Agnes Hocking, the school’s founder and moving spirit.” It was such a relief to read those words. I was so tired of hearing about Agnes’s submissiveness, about how she’d been, in the words of one of Ernest’s biographers, “an excellent practitioner in the wifely art of ferreting out ambiguities and opaque passages in a husband’s work.” Sarton had a very different take on Agnes and her work: “The school was born of [the] marriage of poetry and philosophy, and though philosophy was worshipped, poetry ruled.” If there were even a sniff of misogyny at Shady Hill, Sarton would have been the first to let us know. She’d made her career articulating the subtle and not so subtle injustices of gender bias, so I couldn’t imagine that she would have given the Hockings a pass. Sarton went on about Shady Hill for many pages, and at the end of the chapter, I’d begun to think that Agnes was in fact the “phoenix” Sarton had known in her youth.
Being an Irish Catholic woman in the early twentieth century was not particularly easy on Agnes. The Protestant-Catholic union between Ernest and Agnes was at the time widely regarded as a “mixed-race” marriage; it was controversial in some social circles and downright blasphemous in others. They were, in Ernest’s affectionate words, “two odd sticks.” Odd sticks who decided to spend their honeymoon summer teaching at George Junior Republic School in Freeville, New York. This was not a posh summer camp, but a correctional facility for what Hocking termed “‘delinquent’ youth, male and female, at the point where education in the usual sense merges with correction.” Hocking would later remark, “I do not especially recommend this as the best way to spend a honeymoon; but for us it opened a new chapter, and an essential angle, of the whole educational undertaking.” Over the years, the Hockings managed to make something together—first Shady Hill, then West Wind, and all their other meaningful projects in between.
At Shady Hill they wanted to bring idealism up to date, “to give every child an experience of the inner glory of a physical task done with love and with a wish for perfection.” This is what they had done for Sarton. They’d also brought Sarton into connection with Robert Frost. Owing to his friendship with the Hockings, Frost came to Shady Hill on a regular basis and read his poetry to students, their parents, and faculty. Agnes, who I later found out was even closer to Frost than Ernest, took a special pleasure in introducing her friend to the next generation of American writers.
Yet in the midst of this intellectual high-mindedness, something bothered me. I went back to the Atlantic article. Ernest and Agnes had coauthored it, but the voice wasn’t Agnes’s. I flipped to the end of the article: “There was just one person who had the heart and will to hold the threads [of Shady Hill] together … How Agnes Hocking, who always disclaimed ‘executive capacity,’ carried all this, God only knows.” Agnes was supposed to be an author of this article, yet she was just a character described in the third person. Ernest had written her into the story, idealized her like Beatrice. Like so many men, Ernest hadn’t let his beloved speak for herself. Disgusted, I grabbed the Atlantic and trundled downstairs to meet Carol. We ate dinner in the library—two gas-station sandwiches and a bag of stale chips—and, discussing Agnes, reaffirmed our refusal to repeat the past.
* * *
Early the next morning I slipped out of bed without waking Carol and shuffled through my cramped book bag, which was stuffed to the brim with articles I’d resolved to at least skim before the appraiser arrived. If I couldn’t sleep, at least I could read. From Ernest Hocking’s presidential address given to the American Philosophical Association in 1927: “There is some analogy between philosophy and biography … A good biography must be something better than faithful to fact: it must be a work of art and imagination. It must be so, in part, because without imagination it cannot be true.”
This was my permission to interpret West Wind as I saw fit, and it was my warning not to abuse its history. Philosophy, according to Hocking, could err in two ways: “If it falls into bare chronicle, or if it substitutes the writer’s vision for that of the subject, it is so far false biography.”
I eased myself into the armchair across from our bed. Carol and I were to meet the appraiser in a few days at the library, and he would try to tell us what it was worth. I was dreading it. For the past few years I’d been able to live with the idea that these books were priceless. Putting a value on them somehow seemed to diminish their import, and I imagined that this might be even more difficult for Hocking’s granddaughters. Despite their grandfather’s heavy-handed rule of West Wind, it remained a place of gracious memory. Agnes and Ernest had gotten married in 1905 and remained married for fifty years. Their children, children’s children, and children’s children’s children regarded West Wind as the center of family life. On Agnes’s headstone, nestled on a discreet plot of West Wind, she’d requested the following words: “Agnes O’Reilly Hocking, who loved life, her family, and this farm.” No fanfare or philosophical system. Just a straightforward account of a life I’d always regarded as particularly beautiful.
I was still mildly annoyed at Ernest for his apparent slight in the Atlantic, so I went to take another look. Why hadn’t he let Agnes write it? It was 1955, not 1655—by that time, on the brink of genuine civil rights, there was already a raft of women authors, and she was a very good one. Then it clicked: Agnes died in May of that year, and when the article had been penned, she was likely on her deathbed. I’d imagined the set of Atlantics being wrapped up by Agnes, carefully preserving one of her few pieces of professional writing. But perhaps the Atlantic article had been a eulogy, the best kind. The kind that might still be read by the soon-to-be-departed. In subsequent months I discovered that Ernest had in fact planned to write an entire book about his wife’s impact on modern education. The project was never completed, but its beginnings are still to be fo
und in the archives at Shady Hill. Among those papers is also a copy of a letter Ernest Hocking had written about Agnes’s last days:
Her death was like the definite flickering out of a candle, not in pain, but in growing limitation. She had long been without words; but these silent weeks are to me among the most precious of my memories. For her utterly simplified self, with nothing but a sign language—perhaps a faint smile, perhaps a pressure of the hand—was still so entirely herself: it was she and no other, and she knew that I was there. And now, while there is no “there” where I can find her, she is still un-losable.
I crawled back into bed and inched my way closer to Carol, where I would remain as long as possible.
EAST WIND
The appraiser turned out to be as dry and dusty as the books he’d spent his life appraising. His hands—perfectly clean, slightly plump—made their way over the treasures of the Hocking collection. He worked at a glacial pace, which made me absolutely furious until I realized that he—unlike me, with my haphazard approach—was being appropriately careful. History was delicate and, if mishandled, could be irreparably damaged. It could also be incredibly valuable if it was kept in the proper condition. Unfortunately, most of the Hocking books hadn’t been kept in any condition whatsoever. The appraiser thumbed through the first edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan. “This,” he pronounced slowly, “is less than ideal.” He placed a tape recorder on the desk in front of him and gave the diagnosis: “First edition, first printing. With engraved title leaf laid down and the folded table (stained), but lacking the letterpress title; boards scuffed and spine worn; joints cracked; bookplate; edges shaved; pages 395–396 laid down: nearly good overall, but imperfect.” He was right, of course, but it was still a little hard to hear. He gently closed the book and pushed it off to the side of the desk. He stopped the machine and then pushed “play.” The recorder echoed his evaluation in a tinny, deadening voice. The machine rolled on, and he reached for the next volume: “Rudolf Carnap. Der Raum: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre. Berlin: 1922; original printed wrappers; near fine. First edition. Presentation copy, inscribed to W. E. Hocking on the front wrapper by the author. Carnap’s dissertation, published in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien. Current fair market value: twenty-five hundred dollars.” And then another: “The Year-Book of Spiritualism for 1871. Boston: 1871. First edition. Annotations by William James to text, especially at front, with marked list of texts at rear. Current fair market value: fifteen hundred dollars.” He kept going (for hours), but I couldn’t bear to watch. It was revolting: philosophy, that epic love affair with wisdom, summed up on a spreadsheet for the purposes of a tax write-off; Hocking’s lifework carefully tabulated by a complete stranger; William James’s explorations of the spirit world documented in the least spiritual way possible. I turned to Carol, excused myself, and made a beeline for the opposite corner of the library.
There was one place I’d avoided out of respect for the Hockings, one drawer of one file cabinet that I’d not checked out. When I first tried to open it, I’d been with Penny Hocking. She’d laughed softly and promptly closed the drawer. “Those are the Buck letters,” she explained. “Buck,” as in Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel laureate. The drawer had remained closed throughout the years I’d been coming to West Wind. As the months passed, I’d been sorely tempted; Buck was worldly and an international celebrity after she’d won the Pulitzer for The Good Earth and the Nobel in the late 1930s. I’d briefly imagined Hocking cheating on Agnes with the eminent author. I’d given Penny the impression, however, that I’d restrain myself, and I wanted to honor that unspoken promise. This hadn’t kept me from going to Houghton Library to look at the three hundred letters between Hocking and Buck stored in the archives. The Houghton letters had been redacted by Richard when he delivered them to Harvard, but they still gave me some sense of the mystery.
* * *
To this day, American philosophy is regarded as provincial and narrow in its focus, just another by-product of the nation’s political and cultural exceptionalism. And to some extent, that characterization is spot-on. Emerson and James wanted to escape the strictures of traditional philosophy, which occasionally meant downplaying or criticizing the intellectual resources of the rest of the world. But a quick walk through West Wind revealed a slightly different story: American thinkers were in constant contact with European and non-Western philosophy. There was Emerson’s Indian Superstition, an early commentary on the Vedas. And there were James’s copies of Buddhism in Translation. Hocking had carefully collected these books; they were pieces of evidence suggesting that American philosophy could be, and in some sense always had been, intercultural. As Western expansion exhausted itself at the beginning of the twentieth century, Americans—and the philosophers in their midst—began to more explicitly set their sights abroad. Such thinkers as Addams, Dewey, and Hocking, who lived through World War I, argued that American philosophy could not fulfill its potential if it remained narrowly American; its ideals of self-determination, pluralism, and loyalty should be employed in structuring the modern international community. Their recommendations often stood in marked contrast to long-standing norms of American diplomacy, which is to say that they were often ignored. But on rare occasions they had their say, dramatically affecting U.S. foreign policy.
Hocking met Pearl S. Buck in Nanking in 1931. He was touring China as chairman of the Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry, a group of laymen and scholars organized by John D. Rockefeller to conduct an extensive study of American Protestant missions in Asia. Today the task of evaluating missionary work might sound like a small-time operation, but in the early years of the twentieth century, Christian missionaries were the ties that bound a surprisingly large number of Americans to the lives of foreign nationals. Pearl’s father, Absalom Sydenstricker, was one of these missionaries; he’d transplanted his family—a small clan of fundamentalist Presbyterians from West Virginia—to the Chinese interior, where he and his wife had attempted to convert the members of its rural communities. Absalom, along with the rest of the American missionaries, was largely unsuccessful. He regarded the Chinese as a bunch of hopelessly backward heathens, and most of the Chinese he encountered thought he was the craziest white person they’d ever met. Pearl, originally filled with religious fervor, lost it when she hit her teenage years. Her father, in Buck’s words, was “a spirit made by that blind certainty, that pure intolerance, that zeal for mission, that contempt of man and earth, that high confidence in heaven, which our forefathers bequeathed to us.” He was a painfully misdirected idealist. It is not altogether surprising that Buck ended up falling in love with another type of idealist, one who might right her father’s wrongs.
When she met Hocking, he was in the midst of preparing the commission’s three-hundred-page report, Re-thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry After One Hundred Years, which provided a systematic and ultimately devastating critique of the Protestant missionary system. When it was published in October 1932, the book was hotly debated and immediately featured in Time. It was not Hocking’s magnum opus, but Re-thinking Missions was the book that made him famous. The report was grounded in empirical social science—teams of academics, led by Hocking, had conducted a year of field research in Japan, India, and China—but after all the data were collected, it was Hocking who interpreted and passed judgment on the findings. He concluded that most missionaries, so intent on saving the Asian horde from eternal damnation, were in fact dangerously out of touch with the local populations they hoped to rescue. Some attempts at salvation, according to Hocking, were not only counterproductive, but absurdly so. He observed that most missions were just a lot of talk: preaching, moralizing, proselytizing, more preaching. According to him, salvation turned on one’s willingness not to talk, but to do. Missionaries should assume a pointedly ecumenical posture, give up their self-righteous sermonizing, and emphasize the meaningful similarities between world religions. Instead of holding forth on Christian ideals of humility, charity, duty,
and love, missionaries should try to embody them. Rural Chinese didn’t need scriptural lessons or warnings about the tortures of hell. They were all too familiar with the tortures of earth. What they needed were basic social services.
Buck couldn’t have agreed more. “I am weary unto death of this incessant preaching,” she wrote in a glowing review of Hocking’s book in The Christian Century, “[it] deadens all thought, it confuses all issues, it is producing in our Chinese churches a horde of hypocrites.” For Buck, preparing The Good Earth for publication in 1931, the issues of mainland China were perfectly clear: People were dying of starvation and disease in unprecedented numbers, Western imperialism had undermined local political authority, and modern economic inequalities heightened the effects of traditional Chinese hierarchies. All the while, Christian missions attempted to do their “good works” in saving the godless millions. The Good Earth was arguably the first book to bring average Americans into close contact with rural Chinese, and its social realism was jarring to an American public and a Protestant clergy that had grown accustomed to either exoticizing or patronizing foreign populations. It also shocked Chinese officials, who in 1937 refused to release the original MGM production of the film owing to its depiction of crime, poverty, and the treatment of refugees by the Chinese Republican Army. Pearl was just sticking to the facts, but sometimes the facts get you in a passel of trouble. In a stern rebuke, Courtenay Fenn, executive secretary for China of the Overseas Missionary Board, wrote to Buck after the book was published: “[T]he fact that a thing is ‘true to life’ is not a sufficient reason for its publication.” When Buck gave the book to her father, he thanked her kindly and then told her he’d be too busy with his missionary work to read it. These were the first signs of what would become a large-scale dispute between Buck and the Presbyterian Church that eventually forced her to part company with its Overseas Missionary Board.