Fame & Folly (41 page)

In a tribute delivered on French’s death in 1931, Royal Cortissoz, an Academician who was art critic for
The New York Herald Tribune
from 1891 on, observed with just precision that French “was thoroughly in harmony with [the Academy’s] spirit” in a life “dedicated from beginning to end to the production of noble work.… A beautiful seriousness of purpose animated him.” As an example he offered French’s figure of
Memory
, “a seated nude reminiscent of antique ideas.” Cortissoz was reflecting exactly what William Milligan Sloane had prescribed in his address at the opening of the Temple in 1923:

What, then, was Cortissoz about when he labeled modern art “a gospel of stupid license and self-assertion,” if not preventing the inferior from getting the upper hand? Still another Academician, the painter and critic Kenyon Cox, wrote: “There is only one word for this denial of all law, this insurrection of individual license without discipline and without restraint; and that word is anarchy.” The Armory Show, Cox announced, was a “pathological museum” where “individualism has reached the pitch of sheer insanity or triumphant charlatanism.” Gauguin was “a decorator tainted with insanity.” Rodin displayed “symptoms of mental decay.”
If Cortissoz thought Matisse produced “gauche puerilities,” Cox went further, and condemned “grotesque and indecent postures” drawn “in the manner of a savage or depraved child.”

Eleven years after the Armory shock, the Academy, still unforgiving in 1924, published three papers attacking “Modernist Art,” one each by Cortissoz and Cox, and the third by Edwin Howland Blashfield. All three blasts had appeared in periodicals in 1913 and 1914, in direct response to the Armory Show, but the Academy—while asserting that modernism’s influence was “on the wane”—saw fit to reprint them in the interests of dislodging “eccentricities” from “the tolerance of critics.” Here again was Kenyon Cox: “The real meaning of the Cubist movement is nothing else than the total destruction of the art of painting”; Cézanne “seems to me absolutely without talent”; “this kind of art [may] corrupt public taste and stimulate an appetite for excitement that is as dangerous as the appetite for any other poisonous drug”; “do not allow yourselves to be blinded by the sophistries of the foolish dupes or the self-interested exploiters of all this charlatanry.” And Cortissoz on the Post-Impressionists: “work not only incompetent, but grotesque. It has led them from complacency to what I can only describe as insolence”; their “oracular assertion that the statues and pictures are beautiful and great is merely so much impudence.” Blashfield, finally, after deploring “a license to omit painstaking care, coherent thinking, an incitement to violence as compelling attention,” simply ended with a cry of self-defense:
“there is no dead art.”

Thus the Temple on the coming of the New. And thus the Academy’s collective impulse toward vituperation—delivered repeatedly, resentfully, remorselessly, relentlessly; and aimed at the New in music, painting, sculpture, literature. And not only here. Whatever was new in the evolving aspirations of women toward inclusion and equality was repudiated. New immigrants (no longer of familial Ango-Saxon stock, many of whom were to enrich American literature, art, and music) were repudiated. Any alteration of nineteenth-century standards of piety or learning was repudiated. In a 1922 address, Owen Wister, author of
The Virginian
,
ostensibly lauding “the permanent hoard of human knowledge,” offered a list of “certain menaces to our chance for great literature”:

Across the water Virginia Woolf, too, was speculating on the absence of a female Shakespeare, though from another viewpoint. And in the very bowels of the Academy, in a letter to President Sloane on October 22, 1921, loyal Mrs. Vanamee herself—in the name of the logic of precedent—was protesting the exclusion of women:

Mrs. Vanamee recommended that “any record of what occurred” (meaning the entire set of minutes of the meeting ruling against admission of women) be expunged in a little act of hanky-panky. Accordingly, the culpable minutes were somehow spirited away, never again to emerge—but the issue continued to fester, and it would be another five years before enough ballots could be counted in favor of admission. Julia Ward Howe’s membership—for the three feeble years before her death at age ninety-one—was argued against as “an error of procedure.” Besides, as the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” she was less a woman than
a national monument, one of those ideal female symbol-figures specialized in by Daniel Chester French.

In the ballots of 1923—asking directly, “Do you favor the admission of women to the National Institute of Arts and Letters?”—sometimes a simple “no” was not enough to satisfy the spleen of an elderly gentleman born before or during the Civil War.
“NO I DO NOT,”
roared the painter Whitney Warren. “A categorical
NO
,” announced the composer Arthur Bird, and followed up with a tirade:

Tirades on the one hand, gloatings on the other. “I rejoice exceedingly,” the writer James Ford Rhodes wrote in 1918 to Robert Underwood Johnson (who, surprisingly, favored women’s admission), “that you were beaten on the women question. What would you do with the ‘wimmin’ at the dinners at the University Club?… A hysteria is going over the country, showing itself in women’s suffrage and Prohibition.” (The Temple may have been able to do without women at dinner, but it rarely permitted itself
to do without booze, and regularly circumvented the Eighteenth Amendment—
viz
., “My dear Cass, Please send the bottle of Gin for the Institute dinner, carefully wrapped up so as to conceal its identity.” “My dear Thorndike, Will you please send the bottle of Gin, carefully wrapped up so that it will not look suspicious.”)

In the midst of all these fulminations and refusals and repudiations (always excepting the gin), there was, nevertheless, one moment early in the Academy’s third decade that hinted at a glimmer of doubt, perhaps even of self-criticism. It was, in fact, a kind of bloodless insurrection or palace coup, and took place behind Robert Underwood Johnson’s formidable back. The rebel in the case was Hamlin Garland, author of
A Son of the Middle Border
, a school classic of the last generation. Wisconsin-born, Garland grew up in the drudging privations of farm life, at home in the unpolished—and impoverished—regions of Iowa, California, and the Dakotas. Unlike Johnson (out of whom the last traces of Indiana had long since been squeezed), Garland could never have been mistaken for a formal Easterner. His perspectives were wider and more sympathetic than many of his colleagues’; he was a liberal who wrote seriously on social reform. His name was irrefutably linked with narrative realism, but he was a realist in the more everyday sense as well: he looked around and saw an Academy of fatigued and retrograde gentlemen stuck fast in a narrow mold. “We must avoid the appearance of a club of old fogies,” he warned, and kept an eye out for a chance to invigorate the membership.

The chance came in 1920, when President Wilson (an Academy member since 1908) appointed Johnson to be Ambassador to Italy, and Garland stepped in as the Academy’s Acting Secretary. In Johnson’s absence, Garland’s first target was Johnson himself: “We cannot become a ‘one man organization,’ no matter how fine that man may be.” To Brander Matthews he wrote, “Now is the time to make the Academy known. If we let this chance pass we shall be a Johnson Institution for the rest of our lives.… We can’t be run by a volunteer member seventy years of age.… We are called … that Johnson thing.” He noted “the age and growing infirmity of many of our members who are losing interest in the organization” and “the fact that our membership is scattered as well as
aged and preoccupied.… We should draw closer,” he advised, “and take the future of the Academy much more seriously than we have heretofore done.… We must not lose touch with youth. We should not be known as ‘a senile institution.’ We must assume to lead in the progress of the Nation.”

Yet Garland’s ideas for Academy programs turned out to be less than revolutionary: “The Academy by a Lecture Foundation should offer to the Nation a series of addresses on American Arts and Letters in which the most vigorous propaganda for the good as against the bad should be carried forward. We should stand against all literary pandering, all corrupting influences”—an exhortation that might easily have been uttered by any of the old fogies had it not concluded with a call to “make it plain that we are for progress, that it is our plan to hasten and direct the advance. That we intend to recognize the man of genius whether in the Academy or not.”

He proposed the election of honorary foreign members, so that the Academy’s “penumbra can extend throughout the world.” As for the native membership, he warned against “the choice of a scholar who is known only to a few other scholars.” “There is always the danger of electing too many men who are merely college professors. The Academy,” he insisted, “cannot afford to elect a classicist in preference to the man of original genius.” And there was only one kind of genius he really wanted: “The Academy membership must be kept predominantly literary or the Academy will lose power. The moment the Academy is overbalanced on the art side it loses standing, a result which may be unjust but it is true.” He pushed for fame: “A man may be chosen who is recognized by the great public as a figure. Edwin Markham for example does not have to be explained. He is in Who’s Who. Some of the Academy elections have to be explained even to members.” He pushed for zeal: “men who will come to the meetings.… Every time the Academy takes in a man who has a sort of contempt for what it is trying to do it weakens the organization.” He pushed above all for the Academy as “an inspiration to young men,” and called for the establishment of annual awards to “young workers in the five arts.”

And as a final push, though Johnson was still safely in Italy, Garland considered how to suppress him on his return: “Johnson is ex-officio on all committees,” he conceded, but “should not be Chairman.” In the course of time Garland proposed an even more radical solution—the Academy should get rid of Johnson altogether: “The returning secretary is an old man, preoccupied (as the rest of us are) with personal work of his own. He cannot give his entire mind to the Academy and as he is a member, it is not desirable that he should. It is not a good thing to have any one member known as the manager of the organization. The managing Secretary should be an outside man on a salary.”

At the end of the day Garland was happy to have Johnson back. The truth was that Johnson
could
give his entire mind to the Academy, and had always been eager to do exactly that. The administrative minutiae that Johnson reveled in ultimately made Garland grumble—he was clearly sick of contending with old-fogey letters like the two that arrived a month apart in the fall of 1921, from Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the President of Harvard: