Fame & Folly (39 page)

Mrs. Vanamee, the Colonel, and, of course, the Permanent Secretary all moved on together to West 155th Street. Huntington carried out his plan to sell the West Eighty-first Street building (he intended to use the profits as endowment funds) despite pressure from Witter Bynner of the Poetry Society of America, who hoped to rent it as a meeting place for “all the Poetry Societies of America.” The idea was discussed by the Academy Board early in 1922 and quickly rejected. Brander Matthews dismissed such a convention of poets as “a large body of very small people,” and Robert Underwood Johnson declined to place “the Academy’s stamp of approval on the lack of standards of the Poetry Society.” (Its membership at the time included Stephen Vincent Benét, Carl Sandburg, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, all of whom Johnson scorned.)

It was in this same year that Sinclair Lewis, elected to Institute membership, angrily rejected it, unwilling to place
his
stamp of approval on the Academy or any part of it. Seven years later, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature before the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, he excoriated its American counterpart: “It does not represent literary America of today. It represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.” (And in 1979 Witter Bynner had
his
revenge, albeit posthumously, with the establishment of the Academy’s Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry.) The Academy was offended by Lewis but unruffled. The Board went on to review a roster of quotations that might be appropriate to stand as a frieze across the brow of the new building. Aperçus by Cicero, Lucian, Pericles, Plato, Aristotle, and Emerson were proposed, none of which satisfied—whereupon Johnson remarked that a member might be moved (he may have been thinking of himself) to write something original. The wording for the frieze was not determined until 1924, a year after the opening of the building. Brander Matthews made the selection:
HOLD HIGH THE FLAMING TORCH FROM AGE TO AGE
. When the architects asked for a second quotation, Matthews supplied them with
ALL ARTS ARE ONE ALL BRANCHES ON ONE TREE
. (The sources for both lines are unknown.)

The estimated cost of the finished Temple as presented to the Academy by the architects—McKim, Mead, and White, all three of whom were members—was $380,223.04, though the final bill probably exceeded half a million. The doors were heavy bronze. An early sketch of the façade before completion shows a pair of neoclassical sculptures in embrasures, and while these draped female figures, goddesses or Muses, at length vanished from the plans and were never executed, their spirit stuck fast. Stanford White was the designer of New York University’s neoclassical campus on University Heights, and Charles F. McKim presided over Columbia’s Beaux Arts buildings on Morningside Heights; both were visionaries of an ideal acropolis conceived as an echo (or rebirth) of older cities grown legendary through literature and art.

It was the same echo that had sounded in Robert Underwood Johnson’s ear since his days at Earlham College, a small Quaker institution in Indiana that emphasized Latin and “the human element of Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, Cicero.” Even the college-boy jokes were in Latin: a classroom was dubbed
Nugipolyloquidium
, “a place of talkers of nonsense.” Out of all this came the lingering faith that the classical is the eternal, and that the past, because it Ls the past, holds a sacred and permanent power—a view that differs from the historical sense, with its awareness (in contradistinction to Truth and Beauty) of evolution, displacement, violence and oppression, migration of populations, competing intellectual movements, the decline and fall of even contemporary societies and cultures. The achievement of such a serene outlook will depend on one’s distance from strikes, riots, destitution, foreign eruptions, the effects of prejudice, immigrants pressing in at Ellis Island, and all the rest.

Inland Earlham in 1867, when Johnson was a freshman there, is deservedly called “tranquil”—“Tranquil Days at Earlham” is a chapter in Johnson’s autobiographical
Remembered Yesterdays
, self-published in 1923 (just when Marshal Foch was pocketing the silver trowel); and tranquility was the goal and soul of Johnson’s artistic understanding. “We were charmed by the mountain scenery of the Gulf of Corinth, every peak and vale of which is haunted by
mythological associations,” he writes in a chapter entitled “Delight and Humor of Foreign Travel.” “The Bay of Salamis gave us a thrill and at Eleusis we seemed to come in close touch with classic days, for here was the scene of the still unexplained Eleusinian mysteries.” Living Greeks—at their rustic best, since “the urban Greek is undersized and unimpressive”—are admired solely as an ornamental allusion: “Some of them resembled fine Italian types, one or two reminding me of the elder Salvini,” an Italian tragedian. More gratifying than these Greeks in the flesh are the crucial landmarks: “I stayed up until one o’clock at night to catch sight of the beacon on the ‘Leucadian steep’ which marks the spot from which Sappho is reputed to have thrown herself.” “One may well imagine that three fourths of the time we spent in Athens was passed on the Acropolis.”

This was the sensibility that dreamed and labored over and built the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Johnson came to this task—this passion—after forty years at
The Century
, the magazine that succeeded
Scribner’s Monthly
. Its editor-in-chief was Richard Watson Gilder, a poet hugely overpraised by his contemporaries (“An echo of Dantean mysticism … He wanders in the highest realms of spiritual poetry”) and wholly dismissed by their descendants. As editor-cum-poet, he was uniquely qualified to be mentor and model for Johnson, whom Gilder appointed associate editor in 1881. Gilder’s own mentor and model was Edmund Clarence Stedman, himself a mediocre poet of the idealist school; both Stedman and Gilder were Academy members. Although Alfred Kazin (a present-day Academician) describes Gilder as “a very amiable man whom some malicious fortune set up as a perfect symbol of all that the new writers [of the Twenties] were to detest,” he was, for Johnson and his generation, the perfect symbol of all that belles-lettres and an elevated civilization required.

Nor were Johnson and his generation misled.
The Century
was the most powerful literary periodical of its time, a genuine influence in the formation of American letters. In 1885, for example, the February issue alone carried—remarkably—excerpts from Mark Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
, Howells’s
The Rise of Silas Lapham
, and James’s
The Bostonians
. Gilder was a believer in purity of
theme, which drew him away from certain subjects; Johnson was Gilder’s even more cautious copy. In 1904, when, despite the editorial risk, Gilder wanted to publish Edith Wharton—he was shrewd enough to see that she was “on the eve of a great popular success”—Johnson demurred: Wharton had written stories about divorce. At Gilder’s death in 1909 Johnson took over as editor-in-chief. The decline of
The Century
is usually attributed, at least in part, to his inability to respond to changing public taste and expectation. The trustees, at any rate, found him inflexible; he resigned in 1913.

He was then sixty years old, in full and effective vigor, with a strong activist bent and an affinity for citizenly service. He was an advocate, a man of causes. At
The Century
he had promoted the conservation of forests and was instrumental in getting Congressional sanction for the creation of Yosemite National Park. It was he who persuaded a coolly reticent General Ulysses S. Grant to set down an emotional memoir of the battle of Shiloh. As secretary of a committee of authors and publishers, Johnson lobbied for international copyright and fought against the pirating of foreign books. His ardor spilled over into nine volumes of verse, all self-published, on subjects both sublime and civic, often interwoven: “The Vision of Gettysburg,” “The Price of Honor: The Colombian Indemnity,” “The New Slavery (On the Expatriation by Germany of Civil Populations of Belgium),” “Armenia,” “Henrik Ibsen, The Tribute of an Idealist,” “To the Spirit of Luther: On Learning of the Reported Appeal of Germany to Matrons and Maidens to Give Themselves ‘Officially’ to the Propagation of the Race, Under Immunity from the Law.” There are poems on the Dreyfus Affair: “The Keeper of the Sword (Apropos of the Dreyfus Trial at Rennes)” and “To Dreyfus Vindicated.” The talent may have been middling, but the good will, and the prophetic vigilance, were mammoth.

If, as Emerson insists, the shipbuilder is the ship, then Robert Underwood Johnson was, long before its founding, the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There can be no useful history of the Academy that fails to contemplate Johnson’s mind. Whatever ignited his enthusiasm, whatever struck him as repugnant—these
formed the mind of the Academy. It was not that Johnson was dictatorial—on the contrary, he was elaborately courtly, and punctilious as to protocol. (As Permanent Secretary, he sent himself a deferential letter announcing his election to the Academy, and, with equal deference, wrote back to accept the honor.) He did no violence to the opinion of others; rather, his opinion was generally the opinion of the membership, and vice versa. It may have been the Muses themselves who nurtured such unanimity; or else it was the similarity of background of these cultivated gentlemen, similarly educated, similarly situated in society, each with his triplet of rhythmically interchangeable names, all of them patriots, yet all looking toward an older Europe for continuity of purpose—with one urgent European exception.

The exception was Germany in the Great War. The Academy, most notably in the person of Robert Underwood Johnson, threw itself indefatigably into the war effort against Germany, contributing $100,000 to Italy and over one hundred ambulances presented in the name of the poets of America. Though the hostilities had come to an end with the November armistice of 1918, the Academy’s hostility remained white-hot into the following year, with the publication of its
World War Utterances
. Here patriotism overreached itself into unrestrained fury. In an essay called “The Incredible Cruelty of the Teutons,” William Dean Howells—the most benignly moderate of novelists—asked: “Can anyone say what the worst wickedness of the Germans has been? If you choose one there are always other crimes which contest your choice. We used at first to fix the guilt of them upon the Kaiser, but event by event we have come to realize that no man or order of men can pervert a whole people without their complicity.”

Luminary after luminary joined the cry, under titles such as “Can Peace Make Us Forget? A Plea for the Ostracism of All Things German”; “The Shipwreck of Kultur”; “The Crime of the
Lusitania”;
“Germany’s Shame.” “The nation which had invited our admiration for its
Gemütlichkeit
instantly aroused our abhorrence for its
Schrecklichkeit
,” wrote Brander Matthews. And Nicholas Murray Butler, condemning Germany’s “principle of world domination,” compared German conquest and subjection of peoples
to Alexander the Great, the legions of Rome, Charlemagne, Bonaparte, and, finally, “the Hebrews of old.” (As the author of Columbia University’s notorious and long-lasting Jewish quota, Butler—quite apart from his Academy activities, where such views were never expressed—apparently also feared conquest by later Hebrews.) Woodrow Wilson, who had campaigned for the Presidency with the slogan “He kept us out of war”—to the disgust of his more belligerent colleagues at the Academy—now spoke of Germany as “throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity” while engaged in “a warfare against mankind.” In his “Note on German Music and German Ideas,” Horatio Parker, one of the period’s nearly forgotten composers, could not resist making a plea for German music, especially Bach, Richard Strauss, and Mendelssohn (“It is as useless to deny the beauty and greatness of classical masterpieces by Germans as it is to deny the same qualities in their mountains”); nevertheless he concluded that “prejudice of the public and of officials in this country against
modern
German music is perhaps justifiable.”

In these exhortations to hatred and ostracism, the Academy’s impulse was no different from the anti-German clamor that was everywhere in the American street. From our distance, the bitter words may seem overreactive and hyperchauvinist. Still, reading these papers now three-quarters of a century old, one feels a curious displacement of rage—a vertiginous sense of the premature, as of an hourglass set mistakenly on its head. The sinking of the
Lusitania
, merciless act of war though it was, was not yet Auschwitz. If Howells, say, had written as he did, not in 1918 but in 1945, after the exposure of the crematoria, how would we judge his judgment? It is sometimes an oddity of history that the right thing is said at the wrong time.

And it may be that, in the third decade of its life, many right things were spoken at the Academy at the wrong time. When the war was over, Johnson turned his energies once again to the celebration of a type of high culture. And again there looked to be a displacement of timing. In 1919, race riots broke out in Chicago and a dock workers’ strike hit New York; the eight-hour workday was instituted nationally; President Woodrow Wilson won the
Nobel Peace Prize and presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations in Paris; the Red Army took Omsk, Kharkov, and the Crimea; Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement; Paderewski became Premier of Poland. Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres. Short-wave radio made its earliest appearance, there was progress in sound for movies, and Einstein’s theory of relativity was borne out by astrophysical experiments. Walter Gropius developed the Bauhaus in Germany and revolutionized painting, architecture, sculpture, and the industrial arts. Kandinsky, Klee, and Modigliani were at work, and Picasso designed the set of Diaghilev’s
The Three Cornered Hat
. Jazz headed for Europe; the Los Angeles Symphony gave its initial concert; the Juilliard School of Music opened in New York, and the New Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edgard Varèse, inaugurated a hearing for modern music. A nonstop flight across the Atlantic was finally accomplished. Babe Ruth hit a 587-foot home run. The Nobel Prize for Literature went to Knut Hamsun.