Fame & Folly (38 page)

In the extraordinary literary decade that followed the Great War, the Academy neither recognized nor praised nor put forth nor took in T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, H.D., Louise Bogan, John Crowe Ransom, or E. E. Cummings—revolutionaries, in their varying degrees, of voice, theme, and line. Not since Whitman had there been such a conflagration of fresh sound in American verse; it engulfed the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer among them, and burned brilliantly, though in another language, among the American Yiddish Imagists of the
In Zikh
movement farther downtown. Beauty, it seemed, was turning out to be neither changeless nor divine: it could take the form of the Brooklyn Bridge, and manifest itself in idioms and accents that an unreceptive Temple, immaculately devoted to the difference between “can” and “may” (the Academy’s task, Johnson said, was to preserve this distinction), might be oblivious to at best, or at worst recoil from.

Established in 1898 as an outgrowth of the American Social Science
Association, the National Institute of Arts and Letters flourished alone until 1904, when it gave birth to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, its hierarchical superior. The Academy was incorporated by an Act of Congress on April 17, 1916; its first president, who served from 1908 to 1920, was William Dean Howells, one of the few early Academicians whose names are recognizable to later generations.
The Rise of Silas Lapham
may not be much read today—not, say, as
The Great Gatsby
is read, zealously and regularly—but Howells (who was long ago dropped from routine high school curricula) is nevertheless permanently lodged in American literary history. He was succeeded as president (from his death in 1920 to Sloane’s death in 1928) by William Milligan Sloane, a professor of history at Columbia University, the author of a mammoth four-volume
Life of Napoleon Bonaparte
and of seven other equally ambitious works. A public presence—an eminence—in his time, Sloane must now be researched in the
Dictionary of American Biography
.

And so it is with numerous others. The cycle of generations dims if not eclipses even the most illustrious, and if an examination of the Academy-Institute’s membership reveals nothing else, it surely affirms the melancholy wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Yet one need not go to the Preacher to learn how there is “no remembrance of former things”; sometimes biblical perspective comes without waiting so much as a day. In 1923—the very year the Academy moved into its just-completed Renaissance palace—Burton Rascoe, a journalist with the
New York Tribune
, targeted the Temple’s newest anointed: “[W]hen Mr. Johnson handed me a list of the fledglings upon whom the organization had just conferred harps and wings and other eternal impediments, I was even more startled to observe that scarcely one of the twenty outstanding literary personages of America was included, but a whole roster of nobodies whose careers were so limited and obscure that I had to spend an hour or so in the morgue after I got back to the office to find out what they had done or written.” Rascoe’s literary nobodies of 1923 included John Spencer Bassett, James Bucklin Bishop, Owen David, Burton J. Hendrick, Rollo Ogden—names that, if they meant nothing to Rascoe, are merest dust to us. But Eugene
O’Neill was on that same list, and Don Marquis (the celebrated progenitor of Archie the Cockroach); and if Rascoe—himself reduced now to one of the nobodies—had looked back a few years, from 1918 on (i.e., from the end of the war), he would have encountered literary somebodies we still remember, and sometimes even read: James Gibbon Huneker, Edgar Lee Masters, Irving Babbitt, John Erskine, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Bernard Berenson.

Still, the forgotten Burton Rascoe is not mistaken about the forgettable among his own contemporaries, or about the deadly absence of “outstanding literary personages.” During the Academy’s third decade of life—the vital cultural period between 1918 and 1927—the single major American writer to attain membership was Edith Wharton. (A belated elevation that took place in 1926, after an effort toward securing the admission of women finally prevailed over an acrimonious opposition.) Whereas in the world beyond the Temple—to confine our inquiry at this moment to literature only—there was an innovative ferment so astounding (and exhilarating) that no other segment of the twentieth century can match it. Consider: 1918 saw the publication of Willa Cather’s
My Ántonia
, Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
, the first installments of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, volumes by Rebecca West and H. L. Mencken;
The Education of Henry Adams
won the Pulitzer Prize; the Theater Guild was founded in New York; in Germany, the Dada movement began; in Russia, Aleksandr Blok was writing poetry in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution (without suspecting that its dissolution eight decades later would draw equal praise).

The following year brought
Winesburg, Ohio
, by Sherwood Anderson;
Jurgen
, by James Branch Cabell;
The Arrow of Gold
, by Joseph Conrad;
La Symphonie pastorale
, by André Gide;
Demian
, by Hermann Hesse;
The Moon and Sixpence
, by Somerset Maugham—and Carl Sandburg won the Pulitzer. Finally, the next eight years—1920 to 1927—introduced a torrent of works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Galsworthy, Katherine Mansfield, Max Beerbohm, H. G. Wells, Sigrid Undset, John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, T. S. Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, François Mauriac, Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, Rainer Maria Rilke, Italo Svevo, Robert
Frost, Colette, S. Ansky, E. M. Forster, Edna Ferber, Thomas Mann, Maxwell Anderson, Michael Arlen, Theodore Dreiser, Maxim Gorky, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ernest Hemingway, W. E. B. Du Bois, T. E. Lawrence, Sean O’Casey, William Faulkner, Jean Cocteau, William Butler Yeats, Thornton Wilder, Henri Bergson. Mixed though these writers are in theme, genre, nationality, and degree of achievement, they represent, on the literary side, what we mean when we speak of the Twenties—an era staggering in its deliverance from outworn voices and overly familiar modes and moods. Not all were “experimental”; indeed, most were not; but all claimed an idiosyncratic distinction between their own expectations of language and art and the expectations of the author of “The Temple.”

Some of the Americans among them did finally gain admission to the Academy-Institute, but not without opposition. To combat the new streams of expression, Harrison Smith Morris—a writer elected to the Institute in 1908—proposed a Resolution:

Though the archives of the Academy do not yield information on how the members voted (or at least I have been unable to uncover the results), the Resolution itself was in profound consonance with the views held by the Permanent Secretary, Robert
Underwood Johnson himself. And Johnson in effect ran things, despite the status of the men at the top—Howells, then Sloane, later Nicholas Murray Butler; Johnson was the Academy’s primary engine. A first-rate organizer and administrator, he single-handedly acquired an endowment for the Academy—or, rather, he acquired the friendship and loyalty of Archer Milton Huntington, an extraordinarily wealthy donor with a generous temperament and a serious interest in Spanish culture. Huntington, a railway magnate’s son, owned the empty plot of land on West 155th Street (across the street from a cemetery), and offered it free; he also pledged $100,000 in endowment funds if enough money could be raised by 1919 to build on the land.

Spurred on by this promise, Johnson went in zealous pursuit of the extra money, but came back with empty pockets. Huntington extended the deadline; still no other large-scale benefactor appeared. Huntington withdrew his terms and supplied the building funds himself; in addition, he showered the Academy with periodic gifts ($475,000 in 1923, $100,000 in 1927, $600,000 in 1929), so that within a very short span a membership that was only recently being dunned for dues found itself cushioned and cosseted by prosperity.

At the annual meeting of 1925, Johnson spoke of Huntington as “a permanent friend of the Academy who desires to remain permanently anonymous.” This was certainly true; yet Huntington—who quickly became a member of the Academy, and whose second wife, a sculptor, was herself eventually elected—was not without intimations of immortality. In an autographed poem dedicated to the Academy and entitled “Genius,” and in a style reminiscent of Johnson’s own, he wrote in praise of “this oriflamme of glory”:

(There was a follow-up stanza as well.)

Huntington was Johnson’s organizational masterstroke—a funding triumph with recognizably lofty verbal credentials, capable of gilding new pantheons with cash. But Johnson’s executive instincts pulled off a second administrative coup—in the shape of Mrs. Grace Vanamee, who was enlisted as the Permanent Secretary’s permanent deputy in the fall of 1915. A widow in her forties, Mrs. Vanamee was a kind of robust Johnsonian reverberation: if he was exuberantly efficient, so was she; if he was determined that no concern, however minuscule, should go unresolved, so was she. Mrs. Vanamee was, in brief, an unflagging enthusiast. She is reputed to have been a woman of large dimensions (though there is no one alive who can claim to have set eyes on her), and even larger energies. Like Johnson, she could successfully concentrate on several activities at once. On the side, so to speak, Johnson oversaw New York University’s Hall of Fame; Mrs. Vanamee directed the Organization of Soldiers’ Families of America. A public lecturer herself, she was also chair of the Republican Women’s State Speakers’ Bureau and founder of the Women’s National Republican Club; during the war she served as secretary of the Italian War Relief Committee, for which she earned a medal from the Italian Red Cross.

Her career as celebrated Academy factotum (a combination of executive director and chief housekeeper) began in a “sordid little office” at 70 Fifth Avenue, equipped with an ancient second-hand typewriter bought for twenty dollars. Huntington soon provided a more suitable venue, a building he owned on West Eighty-first Street, which was rapidly refurbished with offices, an auditorium, and living quarters for Mrs. Vanamee. There was, in addition, a President’s Room decorated with a mahogany desk and green leather chairs and fine carpeting, at a cost of fifteen hundred dollars. Only two years later, when the West 155th Street edifice was ready to be occupied, all this would be dismantled.

But in the meantime, Mrs. Vanamee was in charge of caring for the now lavishly outfitted interim building—though not alone. A certain Frank P. Crasto emerges here as her indispensable assistant and sidekick; it is possible that he may represent our history’s love-interest.
(The archives, it goes without saying, are silent on this point; but in Crasto’s obituary, intimacy is given a delicate license; he is described as Mrs. Vanamee’s “foster-brother.”) Mrs. Vanamee’s early widowhood was enlivened by an open and famously zippy character, and her correspondence with this or that member of the Academy occasionally bordered on the flirtatious. In the middle of so much dense Victorian formality, she was even capable of an indiscreet anecdote: if not for Mrs. Vanamee, posterity would still be in the dark about the Pinching of the Trowel. In her account of Marshal Foch and the West 155th Street building’s cornerstone ceremony—“President Sloane almost white with excitement, Mr. Johnson radiant because his dreams had come true”—she describes how “the little Maréchal was tired and had to hurry away and as he did so to our great amusement and consternation we saw that he had absent-mindedly thrust the lovely little silver trowel into his hip pocket, but we never saw it again.”

This cheery neglect of reverence for the great French military leader did not extend to Frank P. Crasto, himself a military man. Mrs. Vanamee identified him as “a Captain in the Reserves [who] knows what it is to inspect buildings and equipment and to maintain discipline as well as order and cleanliness,” and added, with the esteem due such things, that “he understands all about printing, and is an expert proofreader.” He was also found to be useful in handling the heavy work. Captain Crasto became Major Crasto, and Major Crasto was promoted to Colonel Crasto—ascending titles that Mrs. Vanamee noted with veneration. His maintenance responsibilities were perhaps less lofty than his officer status would suggest—at the Academy Board meeting of May 11, 1921, for instance, he reported that one hundred and thirty-eight of the three hundred and ten light bulbs at West Eighty-first Street were out. Eventually he was raised to the post of Librarian; but his rise in Mrs. Vanamee’s affections had evidently occurred long before. In times of sickness they spelled each other. In 1923, when she was seriously ill in a Brooklyn hospital (but she lived until 1946), all inquiries concerning her condition were directed to the Colonel, and it was she who in 1925 packed him off on a recuperative steamer trip to New Orleans after a heart episode: “there is nothing
pressing at the Academy,” she urged. One gets the inescapable impression of a pair of turtle doves under the Temple’s eaves.