Fame & Folly (40 page)

In short, 1919 was the beginning of a deluge of new forms, new sounds, new ventures, new arrangements in the world. And in such an hour the Academy undertook to mark the centennial of James Russell Lowell, who had died twenty-eight years before. In itself, the choice was pleasant and not inappropriate. A leading American eminence of the nineteenth century, a man of affairs as well as a man of letters, a steady opponent of slavery, Lowell was poet, critic, literary historian. He was vigorous in promoting the study of modern languages, which he taught at Harvard. He was, besides,
The Atlantic Monthly
’s first editor and (with Charles Eliot Norton) a founder of
The North American Review
. He served as American ambassador to the Court of Spain, and afterward as emissary to Britain. His complete works—both verse and prose—occupy ten volumes. According to Lowell’s biographer, Horace E. Scudder—member of the Institute and author of a laudatory
Encyclopaedia Britannica
article on Lowell that is virtually contemporaneous with the Academy’s celebratory event—Lowell “impressed himself deeply on his generation in America, especially upon the
thoughtful and scholarly class who looked upon him as their representative.” Johnson unquestionably looked on Lowell as his representative; Lowell’s career—poet, editor, ambassador—was an ideal template for Johnson’s own.

The centennial program, subtitled “In Celebration of the Unity and Power of the Literature of the English-speaking People,” was intended to emphasize the ongoing link with the Mother Country. To further this connection, invitations went out to, among others, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Robert Bridges (the Poet Laureate), Rudyard Kipling, James Barrie, Conan Doyle, Gilbert Chesterton, Gilbert Murray, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Edmund Gosse, Alfred Noyes, and John Galsworthy. Ambitious though this roster was (it ran after nearly every living luminary of that scepter’d isle), only the last two accepted and actually arrived—Galsworthy with the proviso that he would attend the gala luncheon
“so long as this does not entail a speech.”
Stephen Leacock came with a troop of notables from Canada, and Australia was represented by one lone guest.

Still, a demonstration of the unity and power of literary Anglo-Saxonism was not, as it turned out, the whole purpose of the centennial. Nor was it precisely as an act of historic commemoration that Johnson sought to honor Lowell. On February 13, 1919, a New York newspaper,
The Evening Post
, explained: “James Russell Lowell, who was born a hundred years ago next week … would not have liked vers libre or modern verse in general, says Robert Underwood Johnson.… Mr. Johnson knew Lowell personally.” The
Post
went on to quote the Permanent Secretary’s reminiscences—“I remember hearing Lowell once say, when asked if he had read the latest novel, ‘No, I have not yet finished Shakespeare’ ”—and followed with a considerable excerpt from the rest of Johnson’s remarks:

Johnson concluded with a pledge that the Academy would take on the “agreeable duty to endeavor to accentuate the treasures of American literature which have fallen into neglect,” and hoped that the occasion would “incite our college faculties and their students to a study of the heritage which we have in the beautiful poetry and the acute and high-minded criticism of James Russell Lowell.”

To suppose that the times were ripe for a return to the prosody of Lowell was a little like a call to reinstate Ptolemy in the age of Einstein. The Lowell centennial was not so much a memorial retrospective—i.e., an unimpeachable review of a significant literary history—as it was that other thing: an instance of antiquarianism. Or—to do justice to Johnson’s credo—it was a battle-cry against the onrushing alien modernist hordes, the literary Bolsheviki.

The difficulty was that the Bolsheviki were rampant in all the arts. Young American composers—Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Marion Bauer, Roger Sessions, Herbert Elwell, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin—were streaming toward Nadia Boulanger’s studio outside Paris for instruction in harmony (much as young American writers were streaming toward Gertrude Stein’s Paris sitting room for lessons in logic), and coming back home with extraordinary new sounds. Boulanger introduced Copland to the conductor Walter Damrosch (later President of the Academy at a time when its laces were far less strait), who joked about Copland’s
Symphony for Organ and Orchestra:
“If
a gifted young man can write a symphony like that at twenty-three, within five years he will be ready to commit murder.” What Copland called the “jazz spirit,” with its irregular rhythms and sometimes exotic instruments, was received by the more conventional critics as a kind of symphonic deicide—the old gods of rational cadence struck down by xylophones, tam-tams, Chinese woodblocks. Copland was charged with releasing a “modernist fury” of “barnyard and stable noises.” “New York withholds its admiration,” Virgil Thomson wrote of the critical atmosphere, “till assured that you are modeling yourself on central Europe.”

But experiment was unstoppable: George Gershwin was blending concert music and jazz in works commissioned by Damrosch, and Serge Koussevitsky, conducting the Boston Symphony, was presiding over Copland’s barnyard noises. Edgard Varèse, who came to the United States from Paris in 1915, reversing the flow, declared his belief in “organized sound,” or “sound-masses,” and employed cymbals, bells, chimes, castanets, slapsticks, rattles, chains, anvils, and almost every other possible percussion device, “with their contribution,” as he put it, “of a blossoming of unsuspected timbres.” His scores were often marked with “hurlant,” indicating howling, roaring, wild and strident clamor: any sound, all sounds, were music.

In the prosperity and optimism of the Twenties, proponents of the “new” music were turning their backs (and not without contempt) on traditionalists like Frederick Shepherd Converse, Edward Burlingame Hill, George Whitefield Chadwick, Reginald De Koven, Arthur Foote, Victor Herbert, and John Powell, all members of the Academy, and all continuing to compose in nineteenth-century styles. The maverick among them was John Alden Carpenter, nearly the only Academician to venture into blues, ragtime, and jazz. But in the world beyond the Academy, the matchless Louis Armstrong and other eminent black musicians were revolutionizing the American—and European—ear, and by 1927 Duke Ellington’s band in Harlem’s Cotton Club was devising original voices for trumpet and trombone. The Twenties saw an interpenetration of foreign originality as well: Sergei Rachmaninoff arrived after the Russian Revolution, and in the
winter of 1925 Igor Stravinsky appeared with both the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony. Three years earlier, Darius Milhaud was lecturing at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Ernest Bloch, noted for chamber music and an enchantment with Hebrew melodies, became an American citizen in 1924. Arnold Schoenberg, inventor of twelve-tone technique and a refugee from Nazi Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1933, but his influence had long preceded him.

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”:

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.