Fame & Folly (42 page)

Like Lowell, the membership, reluctant to be more activist than they had been under Johnson, resisted Garland’s pressure for broader concern and greater participation. “The lack of interest and cohesion is pitiful,” he wrote to President Sloane. And to Matthews he complained, “I am just downright discouraged.… The truth is we are a lot of ‘elderly old parties’ who don’t care very much whether school keeps or not—we’d rather not if it involves any janitor work on our part.… I cannot be a party to a passive
policy.” The Academy, it seemed, liked it well enough that Johnson ran a one-man establishment, and Garland himself was feeling more and more the imposition on his own literary productivity. “I am carrying so much of the detail work of the Academy at this time,” he moaned one year into his service as Acting Secretary, “that I have no leisure for my own writing.” Two years later he was in a state of full surrender, and could hardly wait for the finish of Johnson’s ambassadorial stint. “As I see it now there will be no one but Johnson to carry on the work and I withdraw all opposition to him.” And: “I’ve been a nuisance to little effect and shall turn the Office of Secretary over to Johnson the moment he reaches the building. It is a thankless task for any man.”

Thankless for any but Robert Underwood Johnson. Though his beard may have grown whiter, he resumed his position at the helm as energetically as before: it was as if Italy had never intervened. Despite Garland’s efforts to introduce notions of “progress,” everything Johnson had left behind was still in place, every prejudice intact, the familiar projects ongoing: the preoccupation with standards of English diction; public addresses entitled “The Literature of Early American Statesmanship,” “Kinship and Detachment from Europe in American Literature,” “The Emotional Discovery of America,” “The Relations of American Literature and American Scholarship in Retrospect and Prospect” (all these in 1924, to mark the Academy’s twentieth anniversary); the annual Evangeline Wilbour Blashfield Lecture, in honor of the wife of Edwin Howland Blashfield, sculptor of
The Evolution of Civilization
. At her death she was eulogized not merely for “nobility of character” but more particularly for faith “in the furtherance of sane and useful movements in literature and the Arts.”

Perhaps the most Johnsonian display of taste burst out in 1924, the year Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the Academy voted not to award its Gold Medal to anyone at all. According to the minutes of October 10, Johnson protested this decision, “favoring as the recipient Miss Edith M. Thomas, whose seventieth birthday has just occurred. Mr. Johnson spoke in high appreciation of the substance and style of Miss Thomas’s work, which he regarded as the summit of contemporary American poetry.”
Not that this was Johnson’s first salvo on behalf of the summit. He had begun to urge Miss Thomas’s cause six years earlier; apparently he regarded her as his most incendiary weapon in the war on free verse. “Aside from her professional merits and the nobility of her character,” he pressed, “the spiritual tone of her work … would be all the more timely because of the widespread misconceptions in the public mind concerning the art of poetry, due to the vogue of formless, whimsical and eccentric productions, which by reason of their typographical form are generally classified as poetry by publishers, librarians, critics and readers. That the Academy should honor a poetic artist of so fine a strain as Miss Thomas would be to throw the force of its influence against the lawlessness of the time that has invaded all the Arts.” And even by 1926—it was now four years since the landmark appearance of
The Waste Land
—Johnson was still not giving up on Edith Thomas: “I believe that in some respects she has seen more deeply and reported more melodiously the evanescent phases of the borderland of the soul than any other American poet except Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

In 1925 the vote for the newly established William Dean Howells Medal, given “in recognition of the most distinguished work of fiction published during the preceding five years,” went to Mary E. Wilkins Freeman for her depiction of “Old New England, New England before the coming of the French Canadian and the Italian peasant.… The body of her work remains of the Anglo-Saxon order.” (Other American fiction published in that annus mirabilis of 1925 included
The Professor’s House
, by Willa Cather, who was elected to the Institute in 1929;
In Our Time
, short stories by Ernest Hemingway, never admitted to membership;
The Great Gatsby
, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, also never admitted;
An American Tragedy
, by Theodore Dreiser, another non-member;
Manhattan Transfer
, by John Dos Passos, admitted in 1937; and
The Making of Americans
, by Gertrude Stein, who of all American writers was least likely to be nominated.) At the same time the vote in the Institute for the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres landed on William Crary Brownell, an Academy member who had the distinction of serving as Edith Wharton’s editor at Scribner’s. Wharton herself
was still unadmitted. In 1926, the Gold Medal for Sculpture was presented to Herbert Adams, the Academician who had designed the Academy’s bronze doors, with their inscription:
GREAT MEN ARE THEY WHO SEE THAT THOUGHTS RULE THE WORLD
. In 1927, William Milligan Sloane won the Gold Medal for Biography and History; Johnson had successfully nominated the Academy’s President for the Academy’s own award.

The Academy was also engaged in other forms of self-recognition. There was the question of a bookplate, insignia, regalia—all the grave emblems of institutional Importance. The bookplate—an airy Pegasus rearing among clouds, framed by a wreath resting on a book, below which appears the Academy’s motto:
OPPORTUNITY, INSPIRATION, ACHIEVEMENT
—was devised by the architect Henry Bacon and engraved by Timothy Cole. The airiness was Cole’s contribution—“a delicate light style,” he said, “that I have been at great pains to secure”—but Bacon rejected it, preferring the “heavy strong manner” of Piranesi, the eighteenth-century Italian neoclassicist. Bacon died in the middle of the dispute, so Pegasus continued to fly lightly, as Cole rendered him.

No lightness attached to the issue of regalia, however—odd-looking caps and shroudlike gowns were supplied to the Academicians (a photograph attests to their discomfort) and then discarded. From 1923 on, there were various experiments with insignia; at one point the current small rosette was in disfavor for grand occasions, and a great floppy badge was introduced—a giant purple satin ribbon trimmed with gold scallops and tiny bows. (A box of these relics, accompanied by cards of unused ribbon, matching thread, and even needles and pins, is still being thriftily stored in the Academy’s archives.) And there were Roman-style busts of the Academicians themselves: F. Wellington Ruckstull, an Academy sculptor, was commissioned to immortalize both Nicholas Murray Butler and Wilbur Cross, a governor of Connecticut whose name, familiar as a highway leading to New England, may prove that asphalt is more lasting than bronze.

But it would be misleading to infer that the Academy was fixed only on itself in these years. One ambitious plan for the general enlightenment was to establish an art museum in every state lacking
one. “The commanding motive,” Johnson explained in 1925, was to bring “knowledge of the best painting and sculpture to populations that are not able to visit the great centers.” Doggedly optimistic, Johnson traveled from city to city searching for donors and making speeches—“I am well, but a bit tired of my own voice,” he reported to Mrs. Vanamee. The idea fell through, possibly because, as Johnson noted, “there is an impasse between the artistic and the commercial temperament.” A second attempt to widen the Academy’s purview—its affiliation with the American Academy in Rome—was more efficacious, and endured.

And the course of public lectures the Academy launched in Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other venues frequently aspired to a global embrace: “The Literature of Japan”; “The Spirit of Italy”; talks on Scandinavia, France, Russia; and, following the war, an entire series on “The Failure of German Kultur” (though these were rather more punitive than embracing). Relations were kept up with the Belgian and French Academies. Letters of invitation—and homage—went often to British men of letters. In 1919, Maurice Maeterlinck, the 1911 Nobel Laureate, visited the Academy as an honored literary guest from Belgium. The novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez came from Spain.

Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, Canada, and Britain all sent laudatory messages to the Academy’s William Dean Howells memorial meeting in March of 1921; Rudyard Kipling’s contribution, representing England, brought a vigorous insight into the American literary past—with more conviction, possibly, than some of the narrowly Anglophile Academicians themselves (always conscious of what they saw as American marginality with regard to European models) could wholeheartedly summon. Despite the international tributes solicited from overseas, and despite the number of speakers and subjects (“Howells the Novelist,” “Howells the Dramatist.” “Howells the Humorist,” etc.), some indeterminate trace of the intramural nevertheless clung to the Howells commemoration—a touch of the gentleman’s club; Howells, after all, had been the Academy’s first president. The event rises out of the record less as a national literary celebration than as an Academy period piece. The speakers, Academy members all, were
once again identifiable by their common idiom—the idiom of backward-looking gentility, hence of diminishment. Press attention was meager.

Three years later, H. L. Mencken, in an article headlined “No Head for Howells’ Hat” in the Detroit
News
of March 23, 1924, took up a different approach to Howells. “Suppose,” he wrote, “Henrik Ibsen and Anatole France were still alive and on their way to the United States on a lecture tour, or to study prohibition and sex hygiene, or to pay their respects to Dr. Coolidge … who would go down the bay in a revenue cutter to meet them … who to represent American literature?” Represent it, he explained, “in a tasteful and resounding manner.” “So long as Howells kept his legs,” Mencken went on, “he was chosen almost automatically for all such jobs, for he was dean of the national letters and acknowledged to be such by everyone. Moreover, he had experience at the work and a natural gift for it. He looked well in funeral garments. He had a noble and ancient head. He made a neat and caressing speech. He understood etiquette.”

But the price of Mencken’s esteem for Howells, however soaked in the Mencken satire, was disesteem for the Academy:

On the heels of the Howells commemoration came the Academy’s 1922 memorial to John Burroughs, the naturalist, a member since 1905. This was marked by a lengthy address entitled “The Racial Soul of John Burroughs,” by Henry Fairfield Osborn (who was
not
an Academy member)—a talk of a certain brightness and charm until it discloses its dubious thesis: the existence of “racial aptitudes.” “The
racial
creative spirit of man always reacts to its own historic racial environment, into the remote past.” “Have we not reason to believe that there is a
racial soul
as well as a racial mind, a racial system of morals, a racial anatomy?” In short, it was his “northern heredity” that drew Burroughs to become “the poet of our robins, of our apple trees, of the beauties of our forests and farms,” and “the ardent and sometimes violent prophet of conservation.” There is no evidence that any of Osborn’s listeners demurred from a theory linking conservation of forests to northern European genes. And a decade later similar ideas of race, applied less innocently than to an interest in robins, would inflame Europe and destroy whole populations.

In the spring of that same year—1922—the Academy turned once again to Europe, anticipating Mencken’s nasty vision of distinguished “literary foreigners” being welcomed at the docks by a Temple nonentity. The nonentity in this instance was not an Academician but rather a Mr. Haskell, unknown to history and apparently a Columbia University factotum sent to the pier by Nicholas Murray Butler to meet the S.S.
Paris
. Aboard were Maurice Donnay and André Chevrillon, Director and Chancellor respectively of the Académie Française. The pair had been imported to attend the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Molière—“In Celebration of the Power and Beauty of the Literature of France and Its Influence upon That of the English-speaking Peoples”—and were fêted at luncheons and dinners in New York, Princeton, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. The official Academy dinner included oxtail soup, appropriately dubbed “Parisienne”;
the appetizer was a quatrain by Richard Watson Gilder: