Humanities, January/February 2016

J AJ A NN UU AA RY AA RY R /Y F/ EF BE R BU RU R Y2 012 2 016

HUMANITIES I NE EOOF FT THHE E NNAA I ONNAAL L E ENNDDOOWWMME ENNTT F FOORR TTHHEE HHUUMMAANNI T I TI IEESS TT HH E EMMA A GG A AZ ZI N T TI O

J AJ A NN UU AA RY AA RY R /Y F/ EF BE R BU RU R Y2 012 2 016

HUMANITIES

EDITOR’S NOTE

I NE EOOF FT THHE E NNAA I ONNAAL L E ENNDDOOWWMME ENNTT F FOORR TTHHEE HHUUMMAANNI T I TI IEESS TT HH E EMMA A GG A AZ ZI N T TI O

—Alfred Eisenstaedt, The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

Choreographer. The familiar word for one who conceives and directs a piece

Ballerinas adorn the window of the School of American Ballet, started by the Russian-turnedAmerican choreographer, George Balanchine.

See page 24.

of dance was little used before the 1930s, a surprising fact that surfaces in Peter Tonguette’s essay on George Balanchine. Fortunately, the term arrived on the scene just in time for the Russian émigré to personify it.

An NEH-supported exhibition at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore casts a searchlight across the connections among artists and patrons in the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman empires. Visitors to the museum report being stunned by the artistry of the show’s paintings and the extravagance of its objects, especially the jewel-encrusted firearm on page 16. David Soud reports on this and other wonders from Baltimore.

Another exhibition on our minds is the tour, beginning this month, of First Folios from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., to all 50 states and Puerto Rico. David Scott Kastan of Yale University, the author of several books on Shakespeare, reviews the unlikely history behind one

HUMANITIES

of the most celebrated volumes in the English language. It turns out that

A bimonthly review published by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

one person who did not dwell much on the idea of collecting and preserv-

Chairman: William D. Adams Editor: David Skinner Managing Editor: Anna Maria Gillis Assistant Editor: Amy Lifson Senior Writer: Meredith Hindley Associate Editor: Steve Moyer Editorial Board: Jane Aikin, Brett Bobley, Nadina Gardner, Scott Krawczyk, Karen S. Mittelman, William Craig Rice, Katja Zelljadt Director of Communications: Theola DeBose

So often when we confront art we overlook the milieu from which it

Art Director: Maria Biernik Graphic Designer: Andrea Heiss The opinions expressed in HUMANITIES are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect Endowment policy. Material appearing in this publication, except for that already copyrighted, may be reproduced. Please notify the editor in advance so that appropriate credit can be given. HUMANITIES (ISSN 00187526) is pub­lished bimonthly by the National Endowment for the Humanities, 400 7th Street, S.W., Washington, D.C. 20506. Telephone: 202/606-8435; fax: 202/208-0774; e-mail: publications@neh.gov­; url: www.neh.gov Periodicals postage (USPS #531-230) paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to United States Government Printing Office, Super­intendent of Documents, Washington, D.C. 20402. New subscriptions and renewals: U.S. Government Printing Office, P.O. Box 979050, St. Louis, MO 63197-9000. Annual subscrip­tion rate: $24.00 domestic, $33.60 foreign. Two years: $48.00, $67.20. For new orders, 202/512-1800; for current subscriber questions, 202/512-1806.

www.neh.gov 2 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

ing these plays was Shakespeare himself. arose. All the more reason to appreciate someone like James Laughlin, the founder of New Directions Publishing, who accepted a background role for himself in exchange for a chance to help bring modernism to American letters. NEH research fellow Greg Barnhisel tells how a rich kid from Pittsburgh became a big-time literary operator.

From the creation of culture we shift to its reception in Andrew Reiner’s essay on Colonial Williamsburg, the grandfather of American preservation projects. Our enthusiastic, well-researched essay by Reiner is a reminder that writers, whatever else they may be, are also individuals uniquely compelled to follow wherever their curiosity leads.

One more thing. In the last eight years, our readership has grown mightily, especially on the Internet as aggregators and social media have extended the reach of our little government magazine. In recognition of this, we are shifting some of our magazine features online to neh.gov/ humanities and beginning a broader effort at developing the same classic content using digital media formats. For starters, the beloved Curio section will become the foundation of a regular blog, as we look to take note of more of what is new and happening in the humanities. Impertinent Questions as well is moving to the web, sure to become the basis of a more dynamic interview format.

We look forward to seeing you there. And here.

—David Skinner

T h e M agaz i ne

of th e

N at io nal E ndowm en t

f or th e

H um ani tie s J anuary /F eb r uary 2016 V ol . 37 N o . 1

8 Did He Even Know He Was Shakespeare? What the First Folio’s history tells us about our greatest playwright. By David Scott Kastan

12 Courting Beauty How artists, patrons, and intellectuals fused traditions and created distinctive works across the Islamic world. By David Soud

Page 12

18 My Own Private Williamsburg A writer goes in search of W.A.R. Goodwin.

By Andrew Reiner

24 An Artist in Love with His Country George Balanchine adored the United States, especially all those dancers from Texas or wherever. By Peter Tonguette

30 The Man Who Made American Modernism, or Modernism American James Laughlin, champion of literature. By Greg Barnhisel

Page 18

4 Statements

Tennessee remembers Sam Phillips and the roots of rock ’n’ roll, Minnesota explores the legacy of its black writers, and California looks at the career of former L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley.

36 Calendar 38 Noteworthy 39 In Focus

New Jersey’s Briann Greenfield has a public historian’s view of the world.

By Mary Jo Patterson

40 Around the Nation

An exhibition on water shows in Oklahoma, art of the American West displays in Nebraska, and discussions about risks to coastal heritage take place in Florida.

More from these and other states. Compiled

by Laura Wolff Scanlan

47 Deadlines

Page 24

Antique calipers hang on a wall in the home of Christopher Williams, a self-professed tool guy who, in the early years of NEH, traveled with his wife and toddler across Europe and Africa, researching pre-modern building techniques. Read about his work in the new Curio, along with other online-only HUMANITIES stories, at neh.gov/humanities. (Photo by Susan Williams)

neh.gov/humanities HUMANITIES 3

statements

4 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

on not having heard what I had heard as a child. . . . I said, ‘I’ve just got to open me a little recording studio, where I can at least experiment with [some of] this overlooked humanity.’”

After Phillips’s first few unsuccessful attempts to get black music heard by the world, B. B. King urged him to call nineteen-year-old Ike Turner, a bandleader in nearby Clarksdale, Mississippi. As the group made its way to Memphis, someone dropped the guitar amplifier cracking the speaker cone. At the studio, Phillips put wadded paper in the speaker, creating a distorted sound he found appealing. The sound helped Phillips in 1951 produce “Rocket 88,” considered the first rock ‘n’ roll single, which hit number 1 on Billboard’s rhythm and blues chart and stayed there for weeks. Phillips would later say, “‘Rocket 88’ was the record that really kicked it off for me, as far as broadening the base of the music and opening up wider markets to our local music.”

From 1950 to 1954, Phillips recorded black rhythm and blues artists such as King, Howlin’ Wolf (whom he considered his greatest discovery), Rosco Gordon, James Cotton, and others. Although Sun became a respite for black artists in heavily segregated Memphis, Guralnick says Phillips realized that no matter how big an R&B hit he had, it was never going to sell to a wider audience. “It seemed that for all of the fervor of his belief, for all of the success he had enjoyed, with the Wolf, with “Rocket 88,” and with Little Junior’s Blue Flames, he just couldn’t get himself situated on a solid foundation.”

Then walked in Elvis Presley. After a few informal auditions and a session where he sang virtually every pop and country song he knew, Presley spontaneously broke into “That’s All Right” by bluesman Arthur Crudup. Phillips recorded it. That night he told Becky that their lives were about to change. The next day, Phillips gave the record to his friend disc jockey Dewey Phillips (no relation), who played it over and over again and had Presley on his radio show as a guest. A cultural revolution was in the making.

—© Michael Ochs/Corbis

y of —Courtes

un and the Co s Family the Phillip

try Music

m Hall of Fa

e and Mus

eum

TENNESSEE SAM PHILLIPS opened Sun Records in a tiny rented storefront on Union Avenue in Memphis in 1952 with the slogan, “We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime.”

For a few dollars, anyone could walk in and make an acetate dub of their choice, usually a song or a special message for a loved one.

The following year, a freshfaced teenager just out of high school named Elvis Presley came in to record a ballad for his mother.

Before Presley’s arrival, according to Peter Guralnick, the musical stage was set for something big to happen. “[Phillips] didn’t believe in luck necessarily, but the moon had to be in the right place, the wind had to be blowing in the right direction. . . . He just hoped he would still be in business when that day finally arrived.” Guralnick is the author of Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘N’ Roll and cocurator of “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll: The Cosmic Genius of Sam Phillips” on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.

Phillips opened his Memphis Recording Studio in 1950 with the goal of recording blues music made by black artists. With no record company, no deals lined up, and no outlets once records were made, it was slow going. To make ends meet, Phillips used portable equipment to record whatever a paying customer wanted as a keepsake. “I didn’t open the studio to record funerals and weddings and school day revues,” said Phillips. “I was looking for a higher ground, for what I knew existed in the soul of mankind. And especially, at that time, the black man’s spirit and his soul.”

Phillips grew up near the Muscle Shoals region of north Alabama, where, as a small child, he farmed fields with his family. He was surrounded by all kinds of music. His mother played folk songs on guitar. He listened to radio broadcasts from the Grand Ole Opry. White and black sharecroppers sang a cappella alongside him. Soulful gospel music reverberated from the local black church.

In 1939, when Phillips was sixteen, he stopped in Memphis on a road trip with his brother. He was immediately enamored by Beale Street, home to an energetic and diverse music scene where yet-to-be blues and jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and B. B. King could be heard.

Visiting Memphis had a profound effect on Phillips.

Guralnick writes, “For a boy who had never even been as far as Birmingham, Beale Street and the Mississippi River were nothing less than the spelling-out of his dreams and his destiny.”

A couple years later, Phillips began his radio career spinning gospel records. After marrying radio personality Becky Burns, the couple moved a few times until Phillips could no longer resist the pull of Memphis. Phillips said, “My conviction was that the world was missing out

Phillips released five Presley singles over the next year. But, needing capital, he sold Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000 in November 1955 (which he said he never regretted). At the time, it was the highest price ever paid for a pop artist.

After Presley’s departure, Phillips moved Sun Records forward at breakneck speed. Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all released big hits in 1956 and 1957. Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” had the rare distinction of climbing the national charts in three genres: pop, country, and R&B. Presley stayed friends with Phillips. In late 1956, fresh off his performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he stopped by the Sun studio where an impromptu jam session with Perkins, Cash, and Lewis took place. Dubbed the “Million Dollar Quartet,” the recordings remained unreleased until 1981.

Visitors to the exhibition, funded in part by Humanities Tennessee, can hear early recordings by Presley (including “My Happiness” he recorded for his mother), Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire,” King’s “She’s Dynamite,” and many more. A video loop shows Howlin’ Wolf growling out “How Many More Years,” with a young Mick Jagger in the audience, Lewis’s manic “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” and an angeliclooking Johnny Cash donning a bedazzled white suit.

Phillips regretted bailing on black music. Sun artist Rufus Thomas recalled, “Me and Sam Phillips, we were tighter than the nuts on the Brooklyn Bridge, but when Elvis and Carl

ideal. Thus, on his Sun label, he introduced the world to some of the most primal gut-bucket blues, some of the most frenzied rockabilly, some of the most propulsive rhythm & blues, some of the hardest of hardcore honky-tonk, and some of the most hummable pop music ever committed to tape. The Sun label has come to stand for excellence because Sam Phillips, in his cosmic genius, encouraged nothing less than pure, unmediated originality.”

—LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

Laura Wolff Scanlan is a writer in Illinois, Tennessee, and Arizona.

Sun Rises on Memphis Perkins and Johnny Cash came along, no more blacks did he pick up at all.” An exhibition label says, “Phillips’s view was that this was the only way to broaden the base for the acceptance of black music, and, ultimately, he felt that it succeeded in doing so.”

Phillips sold the Sun label and all of its master recordings to Nashville’s Shelby Singleton in 1969. For his contributions to American music, Phillips was in the first class of inductees elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2001, he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. Phillips died in 2003 in Memphis.

At the end of the exhibition, Phillips’s cultural contributions are noted: “Phillips looked for ‘perfect imperfection’—he encouraged his artists not to smooth out their sound, not to bend their identities to fit a show-business

OPPOSITE PAGE TOP LEFT: SAM PHILLIPS IN THE 1950s.

LEFT: THE MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET— AN IMPROMPTU JAM SESSION AT PHILLIPS’S SUN RECORDS WITH JERRY LEE LEWIS, CARL PERKINS, ELVIS PRESLEY, AND JOHNNY CASH ON DECEMBER 4, 1956. THE RECORDING WAS RELEASED IN1981, AND BECAME THE SUBJECT OF A BROADWAY MUSICAL IN 2010.

—Photo by Delevante Creative, courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum

RIGHT: PHILLIPS’S TRADEMARK PATENT LEATHER BOOTS.

HUMANITIES 5

Black in the Upper Midwest

6 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Pate and his team intend for Blues Vision to be used in high school and college classrooms. He believes it is crucial “to get African-American writers into public schools, particularly in Minnesota, particularly talking about Minnesota.” The Minnesota Humanities Center is currently holding workshops to train educators on how to use Blues Vision as a classroom text.

Blues Vision creates a conversation between history and the present day, and between the rural and the urban, keeping readers from considering only one story. Pate says of the temporally spliced experience, “You’re thinking about what it meant to be a limousine driver in the 1970s, and at the same time you’re reading a poet like Tisch Jones, who’s talking about what it means to be a performance poet, right now.”

Pate prefers not to characterize the writings, simply saying, “These are the folks who were here.” We are given hints that race, climate, geography, and demographics are critical. But ultimately the power of Blues Vision is in the aggregate: There is not and has never been a single African-American experience in Minnesota. Pate says, “If you are paying attention, you can understand the patchwork quilt of all these truths together.”

—JAEL GOLDFINE

Jael Goldfine is a writer in Ithaca, New York.

—Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society

MINNESOTA HOW DOES GEOGRAPHY CARVE OUT literary expression in America? And what might that regional expression have to do with race?

These are questions author and editor Alexs Pate was occupied with when he set out to excavate the African-American experience in Minnesota. Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota is the product of his digging. Published by the Minnesota Humanities Center, and coedited with Pamela Fletcher and J. Otis Powell, Blues Vision spans 75 years, the breadth of the state, and every genre of written creative expression.

The 67-piece anthology contains poetry, memoirs, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and performance pieces—stories of delight, joy, and humor; of isolation, invisibility, and despair; of racism, the civil rights movement, hip-hop, jazz, blues, and gospel; and of beauty, love, and community. It is as political as Ralph Remington’s memories of Black Panthers walking through his neighborhood in “To Be Black in America”; as graceful as Roy McBride’s ode to spring in “Lilac Week”; as humorous as Evelyn Fairbanks’s anecdotes about her disciplinarian mother in “Mama”; and as haunting as Etheridge Knight’s visions of a lover departing in “As You Leave Me.” Or as surprising as how poet Philip Bryant compares the music of Miles Davis to the lakes of Minnesota: “But it’s the way the paper-thin / ice forms on the edge of the lake / in late October: / meeting at the cold dark water’s edge / —still open and free though not for long— / with the ripples of these short choppy / muted notes of yours / blown just out of reach / this cool windy autumn morning.”

Pate was born in Philadelphia in 1950 and moved to Minnesota in the 1980s. As a black writer in Minnesota, he was taken with the openness of the landscape, but felt “hypervisible” and “unknown.” Intrigued by the influence of Minnesota on his own writing, Pate wondered about the experiences of other black writers in the state. So, he and his colleagues began mining Minnesota’s black literary heritage.

Blues Vision includes the work of eminent writers like Gordon Parks, Etheridge Knight, Philip Bryant, and Roy McBride, as well as lesser known and never-before-published material by contemporary writers. In some sense, the volume is a work of modern literary history. Pate explains, “Not only were we saying we want to collect what has been here, but we were also asking folks who were maybe discouraged . . . to participate artistically in the expression of writing about Minnesota— who maybe would’ve never tried to publish here, to have an opportunity to add their voices to this mix.”

Pate felt that an anthology recognizing the work of black writers was particularly crucial in a state like Minnesota, given that the prevailing narrative of Midwestern America is so often a white one. He says, “If we go back to that question, What’s the story of art and creative writing, publishing and writers in Minnesota? [that story] almost always overlooks the contributions of black writers.” In an era of Fargo and A Prairie Home Companion, Blues Vision helps to balance out Minnesota’s literary and artistic legacy.

—Tom Bradley Legacy Foundation UCLA

CALIFORNIA “I MUST SAY, I NEVER EXPECTED IT TO STOOP this low,” says Tom Bradley. He’s sitting behind a desk, looking more composed than alarmed, in footage from 1969, the first year he campaigned to be Los Angeles’s mayor. He’s talking about his opponent, Mayor Sam Yorty, who was running a campaign of smear and fear-mongering.

In the new documentary supported by Cal Humanities, Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, we also see footage of Yorty in a cowboy hat, barbequing and spouting conspiratorial ideas with a grave expression. A reporter asks him, “Do you believe there’s a power combine of black militants, white radicals, and communists manipulating Bradley’s campaign?” Yorty replies, “I don’t believe it. I know it.”

Bradley ended up losing to Yorty, but then prevailed four years later in a rematch, supported by a multiracial coalition similar to the one that elected Barack Obama. He stayed at the city’s helm for the next two decades.

In retrospect, Yorty’s attitude seems bafflingly alarmist, especially as Bradley’s politics were always relatively moderate (he would describe himself as socially liberal, fiscally conservative). But L.A. had just weathered the Watts race riots, and no major American city had ever had an AfricanAmerican mayor.

When Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor, coproducers of Bridging the Divide, began working on research for the film in 2007, they found a surprising dearth of information. “We quickly realized there was not even a full biography,” says Goldfarb. UCLA had a collection of Bradley’s papers, and the public library had only a few books and documents, a disproportionately small number given Bradley’s long presence in city politics.

Sotomayor says, “The Bradley legacy—it was a story that had been distorted and forgotten.” People knew about the “Bradley effect,” a term that caught on after Bradley lost the gubernatorial race in 1982, in which a majority of voters told pollsters they would support the African-American candidate but then voted for the white candidate instead. Few, however, knew about Bradley’s actual career.

The son of sharecroppers, Bradley was seven when his family moved to Los Angeles. He enrolled at UCLA in 1937, but left to join the Los Angeles Police Department before he graduated (later, he would return to school for a law degree).

According to his peers, he was a good cop who rarely used force. He progressed to lieutenant, then captain, overseeing white colleagues. “The more blacks we got in the department, we could begin to bring change about,” says Felix Bell in Bridging the Divide. Bell worked with Bradley in the LAPD and saw a rise in black officers as the entire force grew after World War II. Goldfarb and Sotomayor sought out aging colleagues or acquaintances of the late mayor. Sometimes they weren’t fast enough. Former police chief Daryl Gates died before they could schedule an interview; so did Ethyl Bradley, Bradley’s wife. Still, they conducted 135 on-camera interviews.

No one scholar had done work focused solely on Bradley, so the filmmakers assembled a group of scholars that could speak to different aspects of his tenure and to issues such as police brutality or race in politics.

The story they tell in their documentary is largely about Bradley’s navigation of racial divisions. Archival footage shows him campaigning, surrounded by African-American, Asian-American, and white supporters. In 1973, he defeated Yorty in a landslide, commanding the majority of the white vote. Bradley called the win an “impossible dream.”

MAYOR-ELECT TOM BRADLEY AT A VICTORY CELEBRATION ON MAY 30, 1973.

TOM BRADLEY’S

WORLD

The fight didn’t end. The mayor championed public transportation, brought the Olympics to L.A. in 1984, contended with budget cuts, but also, always, grappled with race. In Bradley’s second term, Gates became police chief and Bradley’s adversary. His police force was notorious for targeting minority neighborhoods and, at one point, Gates said that anatomical differences in African-American men had led to a disproportionate number of them dying while in police chokeholds.

The documentary underscores that Bradley’s position at the helm of a segregated city was one step toward progress, but by no means a solution. The Rodney King incident happened near the end of Bradley’s long mayoral run, after the release of a video showing several policemen brutally beating King, an African-American man. “The chief has only one choice: he must step aside,” says Bradley on camera, after a review of Gates’s police force confirmed routine use of excessive force.

Gates did not resign. The police officers who beat King were acquitted. Buildings in South L.A. burned for days. People who knew the mayor remember the pain in his eyes. “I think it sucked a lot of his life out of him,” says Bobby Adams, Bradley’s chief of security during the 1992 riots. “A city that he loved so much, that he dedicated his time to serving. And here he is, watching it burn.”

Bradley pushed through one last reform, limiting the terms of police chiefs, and then, after twenty years in office, passed the torch. “Others should now have the opportunity and the responsibility to bring their visions to bear,” he says at a press conference shown in Bridging the Divide. Bradley died in 1998 at the age of 80, having helped reshape the national conversation on race and politics.

—CATHERINE WAGLEY

Catherine Wagley writes about visual culture and art in Los Angeles.

Bridging the Divide airs in February on PBS. HUMANITIES 7

DID HE

EVEN

KNOW HE WAS

?

SHAKESPEARE

8 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

--Folger Shakespeare Library

OPENING PAGES OF THE FIRST FOLIO, COMPLETED IN 1623, WITH AN ENGRAVING OF SHAKESPEARE.

WHAT THE HISTORY

OF THE

FIRST FOLIO TELLS US ABOUT OUR

GREATEST

PLAYWRIGHT

—© Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

By David Scott Kastan

LEFT: HENRY VIII PLAYED BY DONALD SINDEN IN 1969.

HIDDEN AWAY IN A STORAGE AREA OF THE KISLAK CENTER AT THE

University of Pennsylvania is an odd display case. It is a rectangular glass container—a small reliquary, one might call it—containing scorched fragments of a few pages of an early printed book. Bits of text are legible on some of the burned leaves, but mostly they are just blackened scraps of paper.

They are what survive of a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio that had belonged to the nineteenth-century American actor Edwin Forrest. One month after his death in December of 1872, a fire reduced what had been his most precious possession to these few charred remains.

Forrest’s house on Broad Street in Philadelphia was saved, and Forrest’s will provided for it to be established as the “Edwin Forrest Home for Decayed Actors.” The surviving books were maintained as a library for the use of the residents, and the remnants of his First Folio, carefully gathered up and entombed in their glass case, were conspicuously displayed until the home was closed in 1986. Soon after, the entire collection was acquired by the University of Pennsylvania.

Depending, then, on what you mean by the word “surviving,” Forrest’s folio is one of about 230 surviving copies of what is, to any book lover, among the most precious of early printed books. To mark the fourhundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is sending eighteen of its extraordinary collection of First Folios on tour, enabling all fifty states to put a First Folio on public display at some point in 2016. This is a wonderful testimony to the astonishing holdings (and generosity) of the Folger and to the remarkable interest there is in Shakespeare. But it was not always so easy to imagine the First Folio going on a grand tour—or its charred fragments lovingly preserved. Indeed, there might never have been a First Folio at all.

The First Folio was not, of course, the first book printed in a folio format. (“Folio” is the bibliographic term for a book made from gatherings of sheets of paper, each folded once along the longer side to make two leaves—or four pages.) The First Folio is merely the first appearance of Shakespeare’s plays in a folio format, and it is a mark of Shakespeare’s extraordinary prestige that the volume of his collected plays could claim the word “folio” as its own. Previously, 19 of his plays had appeared in small, individual volumes, almost all published in “quarto” formats. (For a “quarto,” each sheet of paper was folded twice, to produce eight smaller pages, and then gathered.)

HUMANITIES 9

But, in 1621, five years after Shakespeare’s death, a group Shakespeare, however, never asserted any such propriof publishers began the project of printing a collection of etary right to his play texts, though his own plays must have Shakespeare’s plays. Eventually, they would secure the rights similarly been subject to the inevitable cuts and rearrangeto publish the 19 plays that were published, many appeared ments of performance. Nor did he express any anxiety about in print (though Pericles, which had been published in 1609 the form in which they appeared in print. And, most signifiand whose rights they owned, was inexplicably left out), and cantly, he seems to have made no effort at all to ensure that they would establish their rights to publish the 18 plays that his plays were collected. had not yet been published and belonged to The King’s Men, “It is foolish to suppose,” insisted the great twentieththe acting company for which they were written. century scholar W. W. Greg, “that Shakespeare was indifferent to the fate of his own work.” But indifferent he seems In 1623, the volume finally appeared. It is undeniably an to have been. Perhaps he did care, though in truth nothimpressive book, with 36 plays printed on over 900 doubleing beyond the unactable columned pages, an engraved portrait of length of some of his play Shakespeare, a dedication to two influential texts suggests that he aristocrats, along with other prefatory materiever imagined their pubals, all attesting to the ambition of the publishlication. (And their length ers to create a living monument to Shakespeare. might well point merely The Shakespeare Folio is a cultural treasure. to writerly self-indulgence But it is not really a particularly rare book. There rather than a commitment are, relatively, a lot of them around. (There are to print.) Greg, however, 82 in the Folger Library alone.) Many early wondered if Shakespeare books survive in only one or two copies, and did not “dream in his garwe know of many others that were definitely den at Stratford of a great —Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene v published but of which no copies can be found. volume of his plays, such The Shakespeare Folio was published in an edias his friend Jonson was tion of probably no more than 800 copies. busy preparing.” But this seems to say less of Shakespeare’s More than a quarter of these survive, which probably means less that it was immediately recognized as being of extraordi- dreams than it does of his bibliographers. Only they dream nary value than that it was very well-bound but not energet- of authorized editions.

In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, a volume entitled ically read. And most of these have found their way to major The Works of Benjamin Jonson was published, with nine of institutional libraries, where they are proudly displayed Jonson’s plays along with various poems, masques, and and occasionally consulted by scholars. other entertainments. Shakespeare and Jonson knew each From our perspective, the publication and subsequent other well, and Shakespeare must have been aware of the importance of the First Folio seem the inevitable and approject for collecting Jonson’s Works. It could have sparked propriate tribute to Shakespeare’s genius. Certainly we are a desire for something similar for himself. But there is no fortunate that we have the book. After all, without it, we evidence that it did. Nothing Shakespeare ever did suggests would not have 18 of the plays—including The Tempest, Macanything other than that he thought as his contemporary beth, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. But the book was not as inevitable as it seems to us today. We easily might not have it. Thomas Heywood did. “It was never any great ambition in me,” wrote Heywood, “to be in this kind Voluminously Shakespeare himself seems to have had no interest in colread.” Shakespeare seems to have felt exactly the same way. lecting his plays, or even in publishing individual ones. In He just went home to Stratford once he stopped writing for his lifetime, almost half were not published, and of the ones that were many appeared without his name on the title page. the theater. There’s no sign of him ever having ambitiously dreamed of a volume of his collected works.

Legally, in any case, the scripts belonged to the acting comWhoever’s idea the Shakespeare Folio was, it wasn’t pany, of which, admittedly, Shakespeare was a part owner.

Shakespeare’s.

It was almost certainly the idea of two of his And, until 1710, a publisher, having come into possession of a longtime friends and fellow actors: John Heminge and Henmanuscript, could legally publish it without regard to the aury Condell. Several years after Shakespeare’s death, the two thor’s wishes. Only with the new law were authors granted men conceived of the project, as they say, “without ambition the rights to the “Property” of their “Books and Writings, as either of self-profit or fame,” but “only to keep the memory the Product of their Learning and Labour.” So, Shakespeare’s of so worthy a friend and fellow alive.” In his will, Shakeplays weren’t exactly his. speare had left each of them money for a memorial ring.

He seems to have thought a bit differently about his two With the Folio, they revealed how fully they did remember narrative poems. Shakespeare contributed dedications to him and provided for him to be remembered. But getting the Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, but wrote nothing similar for volume printed wasn’t easy. any of the published plays. Other playwrights seemed more Heminge and Condell arranged with a successful London interested in asserting their authorship—their moral authorprinter and publisher, William Jaggard, to produce the book. ity over the text if not their legal one. They often claimed They knew Jaggard, as he was the printer of the playbills the published play text as an opportunity to establish what that served as their acting company’s advertising. Jaggard, they had actually written rather than what was played in the however, had a vexed relationship with the publication of theater. Richard Brome, for example, writes in an epistle for Shakespeare’s work. In 1599, he had published a collection his Antipodes that the printed play contains “more than was presented upon the Stage,” where, “for superfluous length (as of poetry, The Passionate Pilgrim, with the title page proclaiming it was “By W. Shakespeare,” though only five of the 20 some of the Players pretended),” cuts were made. For Brome, poems are actually by Shakespeare: two sonnets and three as for other playwrights, print was important for restoring passages from Love’s Labor’s Lost. The volume attracted little and preserving the play he wrote.

“Be not afraid of

greatness : some are born great,

some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

10 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

—Edwin Forrest Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts University of Pennsylvania

attention until 1612, when it was republished and significantly expanded, announcing on its title page that the new edition has “added two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen’s answere back again to Paris.” These were both by Thomas Heywood and had been published in his Troia Britannica in 1609, though Shakespeare’s name continued to appear alone on the title page of The Passionate Pilgrim.

Understandably, Heywood was upset, and, in an introduction to his Apology for Actors (1612), he complained about the inclusion of his work. It wasn’t a copyright violation; Jaggard owned the copyright. Heywood, however, protested “the manifest injury” done to him by publishing his poems under Shakespeare’s name, since it might now seem to readers that he had stolen them from Shakespeare in 1609 and that Shakespeare, in order to claim them as his own, now “published them in his own name.” He also said that Shakespeare “was much offended with” Jaggard for making “so bold with his name.” Other than Heywood’s comment, we know nothing of Shakespeare’s response to the episode. But Jaggard did cancel the title page of the unsold copies and reissued the volume without the claim of Shakespeare’s authorship.

And that is not the only time that Jaggard was involved with a publication that was less than straightforward about its publishing claims. In 1619, Jaggard and another publisher, Thomas Pavier, collaborated on what was intended to be an edition of ten plays by Shakespeare, though two of these—A Yorkshire Tragedy and 1 Sir John Oldcastle—were misattributed to Shakespeare, either in ignorance or as a deliberate fraud.

But what is unquestionable is that the internal title pages for individual plays were in a number of cases deliberately misTHE ASHES OF EDWIN FORREST’S MOST TREASURED POSSESSION, HIS FIRST FOLIO. dated, presenting newly printed texts as older publications, some dated as early as 1600 although all were printed in 1619.

What seems to have happened is that The King’s Men had learned of Pavier and Jaggard’s project, and were able to get Looking back through the centuries it must seem that the a governmental order issued (they were, after all, The King’s opportunity to be involved with Shakespeare’s First Folio Men) requiring that no plays belonging to the company be would have been a publishing coup. At the time, however, it printed without their more likely seemed an incredible risk. The permission. Pavier and large book demanded an extraordinary iniJaggard, having already tial investment. Unlike many forms of manubegun printing the plays, facture, with a printed book you can’t sell a had only two choices. single copy until all the copies are printed.

They could abandon the The publisher must front all of the costs, and project, though they had it could take years to turn a profit. already invested a lot of We assume that Shakespeare’s plays were money in paper and lavaluable. They weren’t. They were just play bor, or they could make scripts. We assume they must always have it look as if these plays been best-sellers. Some were; most weren’t. were merely old stock We assume there was a steady growth of and thus safely sold. And interest in the plays, justifying the collected this latter course is the edition. But, in fact, no play by Shakespeare one they chose. Having had appeared in print for four years prior to begun a collection (the Pavier and Jaggard’s project in 1619. Per—Macbeth, Act V, Scene v first three plays are clearhaps it was the experience with Pavier that ly printed to appear seconvinced Jaggard that there was a market quentially), they printed for these plays when Heminge and Condell the rest as if they were approached him several years later. He said each single volumes that had been published earlier, and yes when he was asked if he would publish them, and offered them all for sale—probably available both individuarguably the two actors knew no one else who would. ally and as a collection, though only a handful of collected volIn the 1622 catalog of English books that were available for umes have survived. Given Jaggard’s involvement both with sale at the biannual Frankfurt book fair, there is an advertisethis project and with The Passionate Pilgrim, one might well ask ment for “Playes, written by M. William Shakespeare, all in why Heminge and Condell would turn to him to print the Folio.

The answer seems to me simple. He was willing to do it.

—Continued on page 46

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by

an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

HUMANITIES 11

12 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

DURING HIS STORIED REIGN OVER Mughal India, Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605) held a weekly gathering to foster religious dialog and exchange. One attendee was Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s chief secretary. Abu’l Fazl was the architect of Akbar’s imperial narrative, not only through his vast administrative work but also through his writing. From 1590 until his death in 1602, he toiled obsessively over his Akbarnama, a chronicle of his patron’s reign, The Akbarnama, which took up three large volumes, was bound in lavishly illustrated editions during and after Akbar’s reign; the emperor himself served not only as patron but also as presiding art critic. The superb if incomplete codex held by Dublin’s Chester Beatty Library contains a fine

from Islamic poetry, suggests, the show emphasizes how discrete parts form a harmonious whole—in this case, how individual writers, artists, and patrons at the great courts of Mughal India, Safavid Persia, and Ottoman Turkey lived and worked within what curator Amy Landau calls “webs of personal relationships” among rulers and the “service elite” of court officials, artists, noblemen, harem women, and slaves of ranking households. Focusing on three men— a writer, a painter, and a patron—the exhibit manages to be at once panoramic and intimate.

The first of the show’s vignettes revolves around Abu’l Fazl, who served as Akbar’s top cultural administrator from shortly after his arrival at the Mughal court until his un-

How artists, patrons, and intellectuals fused traditions and created distinctive works across the Islamic world.

—Anonymous lender, Image courtesy of the Walters Art Museum

BY DAVID SOUD

painting of one of Akbar’s Thursday evening gatherings.

Akbar sits under a canopy, consulting with a courtier who may be Abu’l Fazl, as Muslims, Hindus, and even two Jesuits form a circle for discussion. A scroll probably containing a Hindu text—Muslim and Christian documents would more likely be in codices—lies unrolled at the center of the circle. The image captures the spirit behind Akbar’s campaign for religious pluralism, which he undertook even as Europe, divided between Catholic and Protestant powers, was approaching the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War. That painting, and the book from which it has been painstakingly detached, can both be found in “Pearls on a String,” an exhibit on view at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum until January 31, after which it will travel to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. With help from grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, among others, the two museums have collaborated in bringing together some of the greatest treasures of Islamic art. But rather than present an impersonal survey, “Pearls on a String” takes a decidedly humanistic view of its subject. As its title, a classic metaphor

timely death. Though Akbar was extraordinarily gifted, he was reportedly illiterate; scholars have speculated that he may have been severely dyslexic. As a result, he educated himself by discoursing with courtiers and scholars, and relied heavily on his chief secretary’s erudition. Abu’l Fazl returned his employer’s high regard. He vigorously promoted Akbar’s religious pluralism, overseeing the so-called “Akbari translations” of diverse texts into courtly Persian and promoting Akbar as a supremely enlightened and broad-minded ruler. In Abu’l Fazl’s narrative, the emperor appears as something like the “Perfect Man” of the Sufi traditions to which both men were attached: someone who has fully realized the divine qualities that were sharply diminished in humanity by the Fall. The first painting on view in “Pearls on a String” is, in fact, a portrait of Akbar as a kind of saint, endowed with a halo.

The exhibit goes on to showcase some of the exquisite works that emerged from Abu’l Fazl’s tireless efforts.

Beyond the Beatty Akbarnama, from which several superb pages are separately displayed, it presents paintings from translations of such Hindu texts as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Harivamsa. These codices reflect

THE LUSH CLOTHING WORN BY THE YOUNG WOMAN IN A GEORGIAN COSTUME IS TYPICAL SAFAVID DRESS FOR A PERSON OF WEALTH IN THE LATE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

HUMANITIES 13

—© The British Library Board, Or. 2265, fol.221v

meeting his teenage sons casts the Mughal emperor in the leading role. Another painting depicts the process of translating Hindu texts, showing both Muslim and Brahmin teams of scholars at work. Apparently, the translations were always indirect, Sanskrit texts being converted first into the Hindustani vernacular and then into the Persian of Akbar’s court.

Islamic literature had its own great narratives, one of the most famous being the Persian poet Nizami’s Khamsa, or Quintet, of five tales in verse. Nizami’s classic would be recast in India by the poet Amir Khusraw (1253–1325), and Khusraw’s Khamsa is enshrined in Mughal codices. One magnificent example from Abu’l Fazl’s industry, an illustration of The Story of the Wrongly Exiled Prince as Told by the Princess of the Sandalwood Pavilion, reflects the hybrid artistic sensibility that flourished under Akbar. The wandering prince, as instructed, meditates on an Egyptian god in order to summon a demon that will serve him faithfully—but though the demon looks suitably Persian, the Egyptian god is a four-armed, decidedly Hindu deity. The painter, Mukund, was clearly encouraged to feel at ease combining these and other pictorial traditions.

An even more impressive facility in fusing different pictorial languages features in the show’s next vignettes, which focuses on the famed Safavid painter Muhammad Zaman (active ca. 1670–1700). More than any other artist, it was he who put his stamp on the introduction of European-style painting, or farangi-sazi, into the Persian tradition. As Landau frames it, Zaman “came to embody innovation in late seventeenth-century Safavid painting.” Certainly he was highly esteemed, even being granted the most elite of privileges, access to the royal library of Shah Sulayman.

MUHAMMAD ZAMAN, WHO DREW ON PERSIAN AND EUROPEAN INFLUENCES, PAINTED TURKTAZI’S VISIT TO THE MAGICAL GARDEN OF TURKTAZ, QUEEN OF THE FAIRIES IN 1675/76.

The Safavid dynasty, which lasted from 1501 until 1736, was a cosmopolitan enterprise. It is perhaps no coincidence that its originators, like those of the Mughal Empire, were involved Akbar’s engagement with devotional traditions featuring with Sufism, which has often figured as an especially acthe god Vishnu’s avatars Rama and Krishna. One such commodating expression of Islam. The courtly version of painting, Krishna Dancing on the Head of Kaliya, depicts ‘adab, or Islamic etiquette, encompassed lofty character, Krishna playing a flute atop the five-headed serpent he has keen intellect, and refined manners: Nobles were expected, just subdued. The subject surely would have appealed to like Castiglione’s courtier, to be able to recite or even the Mughals’ Persian-inflected taste for the fantastical and compose appropriate verses on the spot. European culture miraculous, but there is also a political dimension to these had long been appreciated at the Safavid courts; “Pearls on texts. Akbar’s religious pluralism at times evolved into syncretism—the attempt to merge elements of different tra- a String” includes artifacts revealing how Dutch painters flourished alongside Persian, Armenian, and Georgian artditions into a composite whole. As a result, Akbar willingly ists in and around the capital of Isfahan. Zaman’s particular took on certain Hindu identifications: A painting of Rama 14 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

genius lay in his stylish integration of the two traditions, conjuring European techniques of atmospheric perspective and chiaroscuro while remaining faithful to the Persian aesthetic sensibility. This double fluency most obviously informs his treatment of biblical subjects; the first of his paintings on show is his 1689 The Return from the Flight into Egypt, which is modeled on a European print of Rubens’s The Return of the Holy Family from Egypt.

By 1675, Zaman had already gained sufficient prominence to be entrusted with a momentous commission: a series of new paintings to be inserted into two of the most treasured calligraphic codices in Persia. One was an edition of Nizami’s Khamsa commissioned by Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524–1576); the other was a superb rendering of the Persian national epic, the Shahnama or Book of Kings, commissioned by Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1588–1629). The commission was the ideal opportunity for Zaman to showcase his mastery, and he seized it. In the exhibition, two paintings from the Shah ‘Abbas Shahnama display the kind of dialog he established with past artists. A painting by Riza ‘Abbasi, Zaman’s famed predecessor, depicts the mythical king Faridun receiving an envoy. Its composition and coloring are exquisite, as is the accompanying calligraphy, but the image is essentially flat. By contrast, Zaman’s painting of the murder of Faridun’s youngest son Iraj is all about perspective: It centers on a receding corridor of columns and then trees.

The architecture framing the action quotes a Dutch engraving, and the entire scene recalls European depictions of the martyrdom of John the Baptist—but it lacks the fanciful delicacy of Riza ‘Abbasi’s work.

Elsewhere, however, Zaman’s artistry fuses the two traditions more seamlessly. In Simurgh Assisting at the Birth of Rustam, also from the ‘Abbas Shahnama, the magnificent bird seems to come alive from the border of the page and enter into the scene. Turktazi’s Visit to the Magical Garden of Turktaz, a delightful nocturne from the Tahmasp Khamsa, depicts musicians regaling the young hero and the fairy princess—here depicted as a fair-haired European beauty— while the romantic couple take tea on a moonlit terrace.

The night sky, deep perspective, and shadowy molding of the figures blend seamlessly with Persian imagery. One shy young woman playing a large tambourine hides behind her instrument, on the skin of which, in elegant script, Zaman has left his name.

The image conveys not only Zaman’s brilliance, but also the difficulty of locating the person behind the art. Zaman often left long inscriptions on his works, but while they assert his accomplishments, they tell us little about his life.

He gained wide admiration and taught illustrious students but left almost no biographical data—what in Arabic would be called ‘asar, or traces. We are left with the trajectory of his career, and must largely follow the directive of the great sixteenth-century calligrapher Dust Muhammad: “Verily, our works point to us, so gaze after us at our works.”

Such difficulties seldom apply to the patrons of artists, and this is certainly the case in the exhibition’s third vignette, which features Sultan Mahmud I of the Ottoman

THE BOOK ACCOMPANYING THE “PEARLS ON A STRING” EXHIBITION IS REPLETE WITH IMAGES OF BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS, INCLUDING THIS CAP FROM EGYPT, THAT ARE A REFLECTION OF WHERE THEY WERE MADE AND FOR WHOM THEY WERE MADE. —Cap with Narrow Bands, 1300s. Egypt, Mamluk period. Silk over bast fibers; lampas weave, quilted, layered; overall: 14.00 x 15.50 x 10.50 cm (5 ½ x 6 1/16 x 4 1/8 inches). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J.H. Wade Fund 1985.5. © The Cleveland Museum of Art

Empire (r. 1730–54). Until recently, historians tended to regard Mahmud as an undistinguished ruler inhabiting the inexorable decline of the Ottoman Empire. In 1718, the Treaty of Passarowitz had conceded large swaths of formerly Ottoman territory to the Habsburgs, and the empire’s economy had begun to contract. Nothing momentous seemed to distinguish Mahmud’s reign. More recently, however, the realization has dawned that a lack of historic drama does not equate to a dearth of accomplishment. Not only did Mahmud stabilize Ottoman politics and stimulate economic recovery; it was his military that maneuvered the Habsburgs into the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, forcing them to return most of the territory they had taken a mere twenty years before. And Mahmud was a lavish patron of the arts.

The conspirators who placed Mahmud on the throne after a successful coup against his uncle Ahmed III clearly expected him to be a compliant figurehead; he had been brought up under close control since the deposition of his father, Mustafa II, in 1703. Further, he suffered from a serious curvature of the spine. But he proved far more capable than anticipated, quickly overcoming his would-be handlers and taking confident control of Ottoman politics.

The new sultan wasted no time in issuing new gold coins HUMANITIES 15

EXQUISITE WORKMANSHIP CHARACTERIZED THE OBJECTS CREATED FOR THE ISLAMIC COURTS. THE SIXTEENTHCENTURY PIERCED STEEL PROCESSIONAL STANDARD IS FROM SAFAVID IRAN; THE JEWELED RIFLE WAS MADE FOR SULTAN MAHMUD I, WHO RULED THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE FROM 1730 TO 1754. —Image courtesy of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (Weaver/Boyko)

to signify both his own confidence and the empire’s prosperity, and throughout his reign he patronized artists while also commissioning a series of public works. His Tophane Fountain and Nuruosmaniye Mosque, the first Ottoman mosque designed by a non-Muslim architect, helped define the style now known as Ottoman Baroque.

Mahmud was resolved to demonstrate and drive forward a distinctly Ottoman form of modernity; he was also fascinated by elaborate gadgetry. Those two interests converge in the most spectacular object in the exhibit: a flintlock musket plated with gold and adorned with a breathtaking number of precious stones.

Fashioned shortly after Mahmud’s accession, it was passed down among his successors and reportedly taken to Paris by Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76), where it was fitted with additional accessories. By the turn of the century, it had entered into the possession of the antiques dealer R. S. Pardo, who sold it in 1903 to Henry Walters, benefactor of the museum that bears his name. Pardo passed on with the artifact a delight 16 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

ful tale of its commission. Mahmud reportedly requested a musket worthy of a sultan, and fashioned such that on a hunting trip he could kill an animal without the gun and use the gun to sign an edict. The result: this magnificent weapon, which contains within its stock two compartments, one holding a pen and penknife and the other an ornate dagger.

Given the sophistication of its design and decoration, the musket likely involved collaboration among gunsmiths, jewelers, and clockmakers, but it was signed only by its gunsmith, İsma ‘il. The octagonal barrel, made of Damascus steel and both gilded and inscribed, is striking enough, but the lock and stock blaze with gemstones. The butt end of the musket displays Mahmud’s tughra, or seal, arranged in diamonds; the seal opens on a hinge to reveal the compartments containing the pen set and dagger. The gun’s varied decorations include floral patterns reminiscent of Persian and Indic motifs—a reminder that Ottoman artists and craftsmen worked within a cosmopolitan sensibility tied to the empire’s extensive international trade.

In addition to the jeweled musket, many other opulent Ottoman artifacts on display attest to the often extravagant tastes of Mahmud’s era. But less spectacular objects perhaps reveal more about Mahmud and his predecessors. One is a qanun, or zither, an instrument the sultan played expertly; he is credited with at least 37 musical compositions. Another is a famed Hilya-i Nabi, a physical description of the Prophet composed by the great calligrapher Hafiz Osman. Osman instructed Mahmud’s father and uncle in calligraphy; Mustafa so revered his teacher that he was said to have held the inkwell as Osman wrote.

This sort of interpersonal bond—between student and teacher, patron and artist, ruler and courtier—emerges as the common denominator of “Pearls on a String.” The phrase “Islamic art” too often elicits notions of a static, undifferentiated, anti-figurative tradition. But both taste and production involved networks of personalities, and while the principle of lineage, or silsila, governs much of that art, its activity is complex and organic. “Pearls on a String” reveals how the art of three great Islamic courts emerged from conversations among individual people, unfolding both within cultural moments and across the centuries.

David Soud is a Maryland–based writer, who also teaches at the University of Delaware. His Divine Cartographies: God History, and Poiesis in W. B. Yeats, David Jones, and T. S. Eliot will be published

by Oxford University Press in 2016.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, received $300,000 in NEH funding to create the traveling exhibition “Pearls on a String: Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts.” The exhibition will run in Baltimore until January 31; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco hosts the show from February 26 until May 8, 2016. With a $307,500 NEH Preservation and Access grant, the Walters was able to digitize 236 Islamic manuscripts.

Following the digitization grant, the Walters held an exhibit of some of its Islamic manuscript collection.

NEH also has funded many other projects related to the art, history, and culture of Islam.

—Photo ©The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

—Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

THIS TENTH- OR ELEVENTH-CENTURY RENDITION OF SARASVATI, GODDESS OF SPEECH, LEARNING, AND THE ARTS, COMES FROM UTTAR PRADESH, INDIA, LATER THE CENTER OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRE.

HUMANITIES 17

BY ANDREW REINER

18 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

THIS HAPPENS A LOT IN NORWOOD, A TINY

crossroads 45 minutes southwest of Charlottesville, lolling between the Blue Ridge mountains and the James River.

It is like a lot of places in Nelson County and the deeper reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, hamlets where the temporal veil blurs and the distant past seems more vivid than the chronological present. As I jogged through the stillness at first sunlight, a rising mist revealed collapsing clapboard structures that have been clutching these hills since the 1830s. The steel-truss bridge spanning the Tye River looked singular and stalwart, as it must have in 1916 when the Virginia Blue Ridge Railway first steamed through.

The veil blurred even more inside the three-tiered antebellum home where I was staying, these days a writing retreat called The Porches. On my second morning, I was marveling at a throng of hummingbirds outside a window in the kitchen when I noticed an old bound volume lying on a table. It was the Norwood recollections of Wallace Ribble, who had lived in this home from 1875 to 1883. Among other things, Ribble described how he, his older siblings, and their cousins played on a large outcropping of rocks near a gate at the bottom of the front yard. Sitting on the front porch, I saw them through the mist in their knickers and pinafores, riding the bouldered back of the great “elephant,” while feasting on “black walnuts, salt and blackstrap molasses.” I could make out one child in particular, a dark-haired boy who slunk around with a feline ferocity in his eyes. Later that night, once everything grew quiet and still, I crept downstairs to the parlor, hoping to read before bed. But I didn’t want to interrupt Ribble’s Uncle Frank, who spent so many nights in this room by the hearth, regaling his family with Civil War stories while the “amber on his moustache” glistened from tobacco juice.

Was I really seeing ghosts? I’m still not sure. Ever since my first trip to Colonial Williamsburg at age nine—16 visits ago—I’ve dug breathlessly in the dirt near foundations of any Colonial-era ruin I could find, hoping to unearth some relic that would connect me to the long-dead person who last touched it.

This much I did know: The morning I left Porches I came face to face with a roadside marker in front of an old brick church that began “Boyhood Home of Rev. Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin (1869–1939) ‘Father of Colonial Williamsburg.’” For most people, including those who have been to Colonial Williamsburg, or CW, this knowledge wouldn’t count for much. The tourist experience at CW doesn’t devote a lot of time to Goodwin, and, really, no more than a few regional historians know who William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin was. But when I looked upon that granite-colored sign etched with letters in black relief, an inner shifting of archaeological proportions occurred.

Even though I was running behind schedule and had to get home to my wife, eight months pregnant with our first child, I turned my car around and rushed back to Porches. I asked Trudy Hale, Porches’ owner, if she knew where Goodwin had lived.

“Right here,” she said. “His family first lived here when they came by packet boat from Richmond. His earliest memory was of being carried to his home in a blanket during a snowstorm.”

Right here?, I wanted to say. Why isn’t there a banner draped across the house announcing this? Instead, I asked, “So, where was his real home?”

“Just up the hill a few feet,” said Trudy, a Memphis native who teaches writing at a nearby college and edits an online literary journal.

“You mean his home is still there?” I asked, while hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

“What’s left of it,” she said, shrugging.

From what I could see, Trudy was right—there wasn’t much of a house there anymore, and what was left was shrouded behind vines and shrubs.

IMAGES OF WILLIAMSBURG TODAY, PHOTOS BY JERRY SHELL

HUMANITIES 19

—The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

W.A.R. GOODWIN AND JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR., PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE RESTORATION PROJECT.

On the drive home a disturbing realization hit me. As much as I still loved making pilgrimages to CW, part of me didn’t want to go back. It remains a very special place, a wonderful monument to the American founding and the Colonial era. Built in what was once the capital city of Colonial Virginia, CW is the largest, most extensive interpretation of early American history (or living history, for that matter) in the world. Its living history programs, museums, archaeology, digitally interactive school curricula, and many other offerings make up perhaps the greatest concerted effort to enchant visitors with some of the earliest chapters of the American story. And yet, for a few years now, I have wished I could plumb beneath the scripts of the popular living history skits’ Revolutionary City to something more essential, more distillate to the meaning behind the most beloved living history destination in the world. That is how I came to realize that I had to exhume the dead Episcopal priest who pulled off perhaps the greatest, most unlikely historical preservationist feat in U.S. history. I had to find Goodwin.

LAST JULY, I WENT BACK TO PORCHES TO SEE IF

there were any answers in the red clay hills of Goodwin’s Nelson County home. During a walk, I ran into Trudy and her dog and asked her if Goodwin’s first school was still standing. “You mean the old shoe shop?” she asked. “That’s across the road from Porches behind a few vines.”

A few vines turned out to be an Amazonian-dense thicket of brush and scrub trees guarded by black snakes. When Goodwin and his Ribble cousins attended, it was a bare room in a log structure, but now it’s a weathered clapboard box, collapsing in on itself like a rotting jack-o-lantern.

Goodwin’s teacher Molly Roberts taught local children in part of the single-level building occupied by the Matthews family, while Mr. Matthews ran a shoe shop at the other end of a long room. Goodwin’s fondest school memory was “the ambition which came to me in my boyhood days to copy [Miss Roberts’s] well rounded and beautifully slanted let 20 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

ters,” he wrote in a 1924 self-published memoir excerpted in journalist Dennis Montgomery’s biography, A Link Among the Days: The Life and Times of the Reverend Doctor W.A.R. Goodwin, the Father of Colonial Williamsburg (1998).

Throughout his adult life, Goodwin’s rococo signature was a distinct calling card.

At a very young age, Will or Willie, as he was called, took from the Matthews home a consciousness of the power and beauty in language. This was someone who, as an adult, grabbed people by the lapels when he spoke, and, when delivering a sermon, leaned so far out from the pulpit that he’d nearly topple over as his words hurtled forth. He put all of his anxious passion into language, and bet everything on it.

He also took something else from the cobbler’s home.

As Wallace Ribble wrote in his recollections, Goodwin, his siblings, and their cousins weren’t allowed to play with the Matthews boys. Ribble and his siblings were “deprived of the delightful company of Harry and Alex because they were not F.F.V.’s [First Families of Virginia], and were not of otherwise gentle breeding.” As Ribble observed, “Who your parents were, often cut more ice than what you were.”

I walked back across the road (it’s really more of a long driveway), hoping to get a better glimpse of Goodwin’s home than I had the first time. The long-vacant house, which the family called Altavista, was in worse shape than the Matthews shoe shop.

Walls that held fireplaces and chimneys still stood, but much of the home looked as if Sheridan and his Union cavalry had trashed it during their Shenandoah rampage of 1864. Apparently, the present owners have little interest in doing anything to save it. Trudy told me that when she opened Porches in 2006, the house was still standing. Photographs from recent years reveal a multi-gabled roof with severe pitches, dormers, a wide front porch, and poplar clapboarding. A Works Progress Administration of Virginia Historical Inventory of 1937 lists three chimneys for the circa-1830s home, seven rooms, four-inch pine floorboards, and plain and carved cornices. It looked like the Hansel-and-Gretel-style cottages one sees splashed across the pages of Country Living magazine.

For all of its charm, the home belied a deeper, hidden truth: The Goodwins were poor. Like the Matthewses, the Goodwins knew about deprivation and suffering. Ribble quotes Goodwin’s father, Frank, from a letter he wrote to his mother during the 1880s: “We have nothing for breakfast, warm-over what is left for dinner, and go to bed before supper.” When Goodwin attended Roanoke College with cousin Frank, the two were booted from their dormitory for cooking their meals in a small tin stove they kept hidden beneath a bed. Homeless, they squatted in a vacated college office and tapped a fire hydrant at night for water.

Frank Goodwin had been a junior officer in the Confederacy and had coowned Richmond’s Vulcan Iron Works with an uncle, and his mother, Letitia, was daughter of a wealthy, land-owning merchant. She was so foreign to their new life-

—The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

style in Nelson County that she once asked her husband “which of their cows gave buttermilk.” Their financial woes were largely a result of Frank’s chronic ill health, brought on, apparently, by the war, and his indifference to farming. (He came to Norwood on the advice of doctors who recommended a bucolic environment and the close proximity of his physician brother-inlaw.) The Goodwins embodied the casteconscious, genteel poverty that afflicted so many Southern families after the Civil War. Before I left Norwood, Trudy asked if FRANCIS STREET, CIRCA 1890, NEAR THE CAPITOL SITE. I wanted to see Christ Episcopal Church at the bottom of the hill. and whether to continue his religious studies. It wasn’t She and a friend had bought the church to save it from the until he first arrived at Williamsburg in 1903 to become rector wrecking ball when it closed in the mid 1990s. As it turned of Bruton Parish Church that he developed a passion for out, this was where Goodwin received the training that Williamsburg history. changed his life. His mother served as church organist and At Bruton, Goodwin inherited a restoration project of the superintendent of the Sunday school, and his paternal venerated church—the building dated to 1715—that his grandfather as well as a fistful of uncles and cousins all purpredecessor, Reverend William T. Roberts, a combative, sued the Episcopal ministry. Perhaps no one exerted more divisive priest, had already started. Decades of fallen forinfluence on young Will’s ideals than his paternal grandtunes among parishioners had led to dramatic, severe father, an ex-pat New Englander who practiced a blend of changes to the church’s Colonial exterior and, especially, its Southern fervor with severe Yankee rectitude. Goodwin interior, moving Roberts to describe it as “sadly mutilated jokingly described it as a “combination of rheumatism and and defaced.” Goodwin found the project moving along St. Vitus dance.”

When I opened the church door, a rush of hot air escaped, sluggishly and embraced it with locomotive tenacity. He was guided by J. Stewart Barney, a prominent New York architect as if I had opened a long-sealed tomb. In a way, I had. The who agreed to undertake the restoration design gratis as original pews and pulpit furniture were still there from long as it was restored to its Colonial appearance. The combiwhen the church opened in 1845. An open Bible lay on the nation of Goodwin and Barney resulted in a Bruton that pulpit still draped with a pulpit fall from the mid 1990s. not only regained some of its lost Colonial mien but also In the foyer, names of such locals as “Boles,” “Tyler,” and became a showpiece of the 1907 Jamestown Tricentennial “O’Brien” were stickered to small mailboxes from the days celebration attended by Gilded Age barons and President when the church doubled as a post office. It was stifling hot.

Theodore Roosevelt.

As I left, I noticed two gravestones fitted into the outside In 1909, Goodwin was promoted to head a parish in brick wall. I kneeled down to read them—one memorialized Goodwin’s brother Frank, who died in infancy and the other Rochester, New York, but in three ways his experience in Williamsburg had left him a changed man. First: This his sister Mary Lacy, who died at age five.

Bruton restoration (there would be another in the 1930s) Given the struggles of his early life, perhaps it was no surprise that one of Goodwin’s favorite childhood memories required Goodwin to fundraise, and he traveled the East Coast, spreading awareness and interest in Williamsburg’s was of once prancing around, wearing a mask, taken from past, as well as honing what he quickly discovered were his the face of a skinned cat.

P. T. Barnum-like sales skills. Second: A fire kindled in his belly, fueled by what he would come to believe were crucial, THE MYTH SURROUNDING GOODWIN IS THAT HIS defining values that Americans needed to relearn but that passion for historic preservation germinated after a brief were buried in the rubble of the Capitol’s foundations. Third: stint working cornfields in Nelson County. With his earnGoodwin developed close ties with women in Bruton’s ings, he purchased his first book, subtitled Buried Cities congregation who, like the old Dutch dames in Washington Recovered or Explorations of Bible Lands. But journals from his Irving’s Catskills, were the curators and, most important, the college days talk more about girls, studying Latin and law, HUMANITIES 21

—The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

GOODWIN WITH HIS SONS HOWARD (LEFT) AND WILLIAM (RIGHT) BENEATH THE GREAT OAK AT BASSETT HALL, CIRCA. 1926.

conservators of the city’s spirits. This included Cynthia Coleman, who founded, along with her friends, what became the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, which repaired old gravestones, acquired the nearby eighteenth-century Powder Magazine (where gunpowder and munitions had once been stored), and took custody of the Colonial capitol building’s crumbling foundation.

In a letter to his son-in-law, Barclay Farr, Goodwin later recalled how “the older people of Williamsburg, many of whom lived in the Colonial houses, were largely responsible for the dream of the city restored. . . . They were constantly peopling the houses with fascinating ghosts. . . . The ghosts of the past haunted the houses and walked the streets at night. . . . They grew as they were told on moonlit verandahs or on winter nights by those gathered around a blazing fire whose flickering light illuminated the faces of ancestral portraits which still graced the Colonial walls. . . . Letters were found which had lain long hidden in secret drawers or in hide-covered trunks. . . . Palace ballroom was again peopled by the ‘lovely and the beautiful.’ . . . The music of the minuet and the fragrance of mint again filled the ‘Hall of Apollo’ in the Raleigh Tavern.”

This wasn’t just mawkish Southern storytelling. Goodwin grew to believe, as he once wrote to a ten-year-old girl, that you could “shut your eyes and see the gladsome ghosts who once made these places their home. You can learn to call them back.” Indeed, he said, “You can train yourself to hear what they have to say.” For Goodwin, these spirits also represented something else, something more pressing: They offered important lessons to modern-day America, a country derailed by the Great Depression and flooded with new immigrants who didn’t speak the language. Montgomery wrote that Goodwin wanted all Americans “to find inspiration not only in the faiths of their fathers but in the whole 22 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

legacy of the people he called the nation-builders.” For Goodwin, this meant, as his secretary Elizabeth Hayes Goddard recalled, the “principles of freedom and democracy as laid down by the early Virginia leaders.”

Hayes Goddard accompanied Goodwin on their first walks when he returned to Williamsburg from Rochester in 1923 to head the College of William & Mary’s endowment campaign and to teach there. In the 14 years since he had been away, Williamsburg had morphed from a sleepy bucolic backwater of old clapboard homes, where oyster mongers hoisted customers’ orders up to their windows in tin cans, into a bleak modern landscape. Corrugated iron buildings and neon signs lined the main thoroughfare, Duke of Gloucester Street. An automotive repair shop called “Tootan-Kum-In” squeezed in next to the old Powder Magazine, and many old buildings had become so dilapidated that it was common to see squatters inside holding umbrellas during rainstorms. As Hayes Goddard observed of her boss, he “sought to avoid the necessity of noticing the telegraph poles, the false-front shops, the abhorrent gasoline stations. . . . With half-closed eyes and pipe alight he had visions, I believe, of another day and he talked only of the colonial past.”

I RETURNED TO WILLIAMSBURG IN MARCH, HOPING

to find some of these ghosts, who, I assumed would not be around in summer, when all civilized beings leave town to escape the oppressive heat. I arrived at dinner time and headed for Chowning’s Tavern, one of my father’s favorite places to eat when he came to Williamsburg. In his honor, I was going to order a biscuit with Smithfield ham. It was my father who introduced me to Colonial Williamsburg. He took our family there on our first trip south of our Baltimore home when I was nine. Among many hazy memories, I clearly remember how at home my father seemed. This was a man who wore travel like a hair shirt, a chafing penance to endure. Yet in Williamsburg the fear fell from his eyes, and he strode through the old city with an abandon reserved for our kitchen, where he cooked in his stained undershirt and boxer shorts.

Years later, I learned that my father had first visited Colonial Williamsburg as a ten-year-old in 1938, only four years after the restored city first opened. His Uncle Izzy had read about the early restoration efforts in National Geographic magazine and persuaded his family to visit. This was no small thing during the Depression, especially for his parents, struggling Jewish immigrants who rarely ventured outside of gritty Elizabeth, New Jersey. Everything about Colonial Williamsburg seemed exotic, especially the stay at a guest house. “I remember coming down the stairs for breakfast to a table covered with biscuits, Smithfield ham, gravy. I had never tasted anything like it,” he told me.

Chowning’s was closed, sadly, so I headed over to the College Delly for a Greek salad. Back in 1974, my father took us to this restaurant when, if memory serves, it was a lowbudget Italian eatery, and I hoped that I could channel him, if only momentarily in this Greek-influenced diner. I should have known better. My father never set foot in a place that served baklava. Afterward, I headed over to Bruton Parish for one of its frequent, free concerts. A small high school ensemble from Tennessee was performing a series of solos by candlelight, and someone even attempted a few pieces on the large Bruton organ. Despite the frequent squawks and

—The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

squeaks, it was easy to close my eyes and imagine that it was Peter Pelham, Bruton’s beloved eighteenthcentury organist and keeper of the public gaol who often brought prisoners to church to pump the organ while he gave concerts.

After the concert, I killed some time at a local gastropub and then headed over to the William & Mary campus. When famed newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle visited CW in 1936, he took Goodwin up on the offer he made to all journalists: to experience the old city with him when it was at its most authentic, late at night. Pyle later wrote that it was when Goodwin “was alone, in EXTERIOR OF CAPITOL BUILDING AS IT APPEARS TODAY. the starlight, strolling in the night, talking with the ghosts, that he learned about Williamsburg.”

I began my divination in the college yard between the renowned Sir Christopher Wren and Brafferton buildings, facing Duke of Gloucester to find a rich man to buy the buildings, renovate them for Street. This seemingly unremarkable spot was where Goodstudent and faculty housing, endow them, and deed them to win stood with J. Stewart Barney in 1924, both of them feelthe college.” Colonial Williamsburg began as a way to shore ing their backs against a wall. Goodwin had just successfully up and expand a once-dignified college that had fallen on raised $100,000 for the construction of a new gymnasium for hard times. the financially foundering college and wanted its appearance From there I walked along Jamestown Road to the Phi Beta to jibe with the aesthetic of the two buildings facing them.

Kappa Memorial Hall. I thought about the myth perpetuated (The Wren Building, constructed between 1695 and 1700, is about Goodwin and John D. Rockefeller Jr., the philanthropist the oldest college building still standing in the United and Standard Oil scion who would eventually foot the bill States; Brafferton was constructed in 1723 to educate and for the entire restoration. The brief yarn is that Goodwin met Christianize local Native American boys.)

Rockefeller at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner in New York City in William & Mary’s president J.A.C. Chandler insisted that 1924 and persuaded him to invest in the unlikely project on the new gym have a modern appearance because it would be the spot. The reality is that it became a cat-and-mouse game cheaper, but, once again, Stewart held firm that he wouldn’t because Rockefeller, Goodwin learned after sending him a do the work unless the building mirrored its Georgian surlong, carefully crafted pitch letter, already had his hands full roundings. It was a quixotic stand for historical sovereignty in helping colleges, namely what is now Hampton Univeragainst an overwhelming tide of modernity. I could see sity, a historically black college two hours south of WilliamsGoodwin chewing on his briarwood pipe, gazing down Duke burg. Besides, what Goodwin was proposing, vague as it was, of Gloucester Street at the neon signs, telegraph poles, wires, clearly was no small undertaking. It was, to be exact, brazen and corrugated iron buildings that made communing with beyond reason. By the time of Rockefeller’s death in 1960, his beloved spirits so painful. he had spent $68 million on the restoration (a figure which Then Barney, too, looked down the street that once saw clearly would total in the hundreds of millions today). He the likes of George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Mardid persuade Rockefeller to say he would visit Williamsburg, shall, George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason which led Goodwin to needle him for years afterwards, until negotiating its ankle-high dust and yellow mud on their the whole courtship nearly dissolved. Dejected, Goodwin way to the Capitol or the college. Both men wondered: What turned uncharacteristically dark and blamed himself for this could possibly be done to preserve the dwindling number of dead end.

Colonial-era buildings?

Goodwin pulled himself out from his despair the only This was when Barney made a suggestion that would have way this boy raised in the hardscrabble Blue Ridge knew not just historical, but existential import for the college and, how. As he told Vernon Geddy, a local lawyer and confidant especially, the fading Colonial capitol. In his biography of who handled the legal paperwork for the restoration, “When Goodwin, Montgomery says that “Barney advised Goodwin —Continued on page 44 HUMANITIES 23

AN ARTIST

IN LOVE

BY PETER TONGUETTE

WITH HIS COUNTRY

BALANCHINE ADORED THE UNITED STATES, ESPECIALLY ALL THOSE DANCERS FROM TEXAS OR WHEREVER.

IT WAS THE WINTER OF 1958—A SEASON OF COLD AND SNOW—BUT CIVIC AND

cultural life in the United States was looking sunny.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was installed in the White House, where he would remain for another three years. The Korean War was a fading memory, and a new agency christened NASA was soon to come into existence. The year’s biggest movie would be Rodgers and Hammerstein’s rousing look back at World War II, South Pacific, and a successful run on the Great White Way was in store for Dore Schary’s commemorative play about FDR, Sunrise at Campobello.

On January 17, in the New York City Center, a new ballet was unveiled that reflected the country’s benevolent self-confidence.

Its music did not come courtesy of Pyotr Tchaikovsky or Sergei Prokofiev or even Igor Stravinsky.

No, this ballet was meant for the resolute rhythms of John Philip Sousa, the Washington, D.C.-born march-making composer whose tunes came to embody the institutions, like the U.S. Marine Corps, they celebrated. The ballet’s finale featured a veritable division of dancers—men donning cadetstyle uniforms and women wearing tutus of red and blue—who strutted and spun while a prodigiously sized American flag, running the width of the stage, emerged behind them. The title: Stars and Stripes, of course.

Amateurs in the audience would have been forgiven for supposing that Gen. Douglas MacArthur had temporarily commandeered control of the New York City Ballet, the company that was debuting the dance that day in 1958. But balletomanes would have known that its creator was an expat from St. Petersburg, Russia, who still spoke with an unmistakable accent that would never be mistaken for Boston Brahmin or Southern drawl.

His name was George Balanchine (1904–1983; pronounced “Balan-sheen”), and then—as ever— he frustrated expectations.

An artist’s home turf is frequently his biggest inspiration: Philip Roth situated much of his best fiction in Newark, New Jersey, while Andrew Wyeth often looked no further than Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, for potential paintings. And so attached was James Thurber to Columbus, Ohio, that he said “the clocks that strike in my dreams” were those of his hometown.

Not so with Balanchine. Of course, it is self-evident that his salad days in Russia—and, later, on the continent—were key to his later triumphs. As his dancing talent was developed at the Imperial Ballet School, his flair for music was honed at the Petrograd Conservatory of Music, where his instrument was the piano.

“Mr. B. frequently would say he had wonderful teachers when he was growing up in St. Petersburg,” says dancer Suzanne Farrell, who followed her famous collaboration with Balanchine at the New York City Ballet by forming her own company, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet at the Kennedy

George Balanchine rehearses Slaughter on Tenth Avenue with Suzanne Farrell, 1968.

—© New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division, photograph by Martha Swope

24 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

HUMANITIES 25

—Tanaquil LeClercq

Portrait of George Balanchine, 1950.

Center. But, she added of Balanchine’s roots in Russia, “he took much of it with him to America and re-weaved it onto American dancers, developing a completely different style.”

An appointment to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris was also career-changing.

“Diaghilev had named him ballet master at age 21,” says Violette Verdy, a French dancer recruited by Balanchine to become a member of the New York City Ballet in 1958, “because he could see the reflection, the depth, the silence, the thinking, and the creativity.” Indeed, the partnership resulted in Apollo (1928)—a Balanchine masterpiece—which marshaled modern music by Stravinsky to spin the saga of the Greek god Apollo contending with female muses.

But once the United States became Balanchine’s base of operations in 1933, he found creative nourishment not in his old backyard, but in his new stomping grounds.

“He loved the American spirit,” says dancer Patricia McBride, who was 16 when she joined the New York City Ballet, and remained with the company for six years after his death.

In the introduction to their book Balanchine’s Ballerinas: Conversations with the Muses, Robert Tracy and Sharon DeLano write: “Like many emigres from Soviet Russia, Balanchine was politically conservative and enamored of the American scene. He wore cowboy shirts with pearl snaps, Westerncut suits, string ties, and turquoise bracelets.” They went on to make note of a performance on Independence Day 1982 when Balanchine announced “that he had just received a new composition from Stravinsky, and the orchestra played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“I think he liked America for the entertainment of it,” says Wendy Whelan, a recently retired dancer with the New York 26 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

City Ballet who never worked with Balanchine but danced in many of his ballets. “I think he liked American movies and American shows and the American energy.”

So, it was in the U.S. of A., in 1934, that Balanchine shepherded into being the School of American Ballet, the organization that would, in 1948, beget the New York City Ballet.

Both came about due to cofounder Lincoln Kirstein, a son of Rochester, New York, whose sponsoring of the arts had already encompassed the formation of Hound & Horn, a literary magazine par excellence. Kirstein, Verdy says “had decided that this wonderful big country of the United States should have ballet,” adding, “but he wanted the real thing. . . . So he said, ‘We’re going to have to do ballet.’ The one person to go to was Balanchine.”

It was rough in the early going, though. In his biography of Balanchine, Bernard Taper describes the earliest photograph in existence of the choreographer at work stateside, as he toils on his magisterial ballet Serenade (1934) with students of the nascent School of American Ballet. “Looking at the snapshot, one can readily see why it was felt that ballet dancing was no activity for Americans,” Taper writes. “It just does not seem possible that anything remotely like a ballet troupe could ever emerge from this hodgepodge of chubby, self-conscious young women in homely, one-piece bathing suits.”

Nonetheless—as unsatisfactory as that class may have been—Balanchine seems to have recognized the resources in the country he had relocated to. “He took the Americans for what they were: tall, beautiful, long legs,” Verdy says. “He always told me . . . ‘You know, my best dancers come from the states that have a lot of sun, like Texas.’ Because it was sports and they have the belief of sports, which means they can have a body for ballet, too.”

For Balanchine, “like Texas” seems to have meant virtually anywhere in the continental United States: Over the years, dancers with the New York City Ballet have been found in New York and nearby states, of course, but also in Staunton, Virginia (Diana Adams), Cincinnati, Ohio (Suzanne Farrell), and even Southern California (Allegra Kent and Darci Kistler).

Maria Tallchief (who eventually became the third of his four wives) hailed from Fairfax, Oklahoma, and her father was an Osage Indian. Writes Taper: “It made him feel that in marrying her he was becoming really American—John Smith marrying Pocahontas.”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The School of American Ballet would endure, but, as the 1930s entered the ’40s, the failed “ancestors” of the New York City Ballet were legion, including such outfits as the American Ballet and the Ballet Caravan. Thus, Balanchine—needing employment—attached himself to lollapaloozas that ranged far afield of ballet in its most traditional guises. Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, Babes in Arms, and Cabin in the Sky were among his credits on Broadway, while in Hollywood he was responsible for choreography in The Goldwyn Follies and On Your Toes. The latter production— a tawdry tale that was also a stage show by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz “Larry” Hart—included a brooding number entitled Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, which matched a sultry score with the spastic, almost violent movements of highheels-wearing dancer Vera Zorina (who preceded Tallchief as Balanchine’s second wife).

Balanchine rehearses his Don Quixote with the company in 1965.

—© New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Division, photograph by Martha Swope

HUMANITIES 27

In a New York Times article by the critic Jennifer Dunning, an assistant of Balanchine named Barbara Horgan discussed the influence of Hart on Balanchine—a classic, touching example of an immigrant’s assimilation. “Larry Hart taught him English,” Horgan said. “He didn’t know any English when he came to America. Someone taught him to order ‘ham and eggs and bacon,’ but he didn’t like bacon so he changed it to ‘ham and eggs and no bacon.’”

“This man had to wait so much to be recognized,” Verdy says, adding, “He never thought that any job was too small for him. Hence, he did all of those films to survive. He did little things, little ballets for big, very wealthy people who had a little ballet in their soiree. He never refused any work that could come.”

But Balanchine took his contributions to stage and screen seriously.

“We owe (him) the word ‘choreographer,’ which of course exists,” Verdy says, referring to Balanchine’s insistence that he be credited as such on a particular production. “I mean, he didn’t invent it, but . . . he was the one, when he was doing one of the Broadway shows that he did in his early years . . . who demanded from the producer that they would stop to say, ‘Routine by such-and-such.’”

There were other, more momentous innovations.

Balanchine untethered ballet from the baggage that had been weighing down the form since time immemorial. “I think, for the most part, before Balanchine, it was very much spectacle and something outside of the dancer,” Whelan says.

“It was the costumes. It was the set. It was the story. It was the drama. It was the pantomime.”

In such ballets as The Four Temperaments (1946) and Agon (1957), Balanchine abolished scenery and turned rehearsal clothes into costumes. (“On the funny side,” Verdy recalls, “he said to me, ‘We just don’t have money to have costume!’”) But even ballets with less severe aesthetics—Western Symphony, with its dancers gussied up like cowboys and showgirls—usually skipped the over-the-top characterizations and fairy-tale plots of classic story ballets, like Swan Lake.

Indeed, it is instructive to contrast Western Symphony with a superficially similar work—Michael Kidd’s choreography in the musical film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The two works—remarkably, both debuted in 1954—seem to have so much in common: the application of ballet technique to tableaus suggesting the western half of the United States. But while Kidd’s choreography decisively advances the film’s storyline—as in “Goin’ Courtin’,” in which Jane Powell seeks to bring manners to the bush-country brothers—Balanchine’s has no aim but to make movement befitting music (in this case, Hershy Kay’s settings of such songs as “Red River Valley”). Western Symphony and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers are akin to poetry and prose: One form is about the kindling of a mood while the other is about the propulsion of a plot.

Not that Balanchine’s ballets don’t put forth definite ideas and attitudes. To the contrary, in Western Symphony there is no mistaking the rangy self-confidence of Herbert Bliss or the wily impudence of Diana Adams, both members of the original cast. (“When he did the last movement for Diana Adams, with her long legs and also her cool quality—she wasn’t involved,” Verdy says. “Her body was doing it—not Diana.”) To put it another way, the parts danced by Bliss and Adams call for the projection of qualities consistent with a cowboy and a showgirl, but neither dancer is asked to inhabit an actual character. “He made things without story, generally, and he never wanted dancers to act,” Whelan says. “He 28 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

wanted to see the dancer feeling the music or just dancing the dance with the music, and how that could be as emotional as any kind of put-on story.”

Music, for Balanchine, was the be all, end all.

“He always said, ‘If you don’t watch the ballet, just close your eyes, and listen to the music, and it will be great music,’” McBride remembers. Indeed, a multitude of musical masterpieces can be heard along with his ballets: Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in Theme and Variations (1947); four selections of Charles Ives in Ivesiana (1954); Louis Gottschalk’s Grande Tarantelle in Tarantella (1964); and a bevy of George Gershwin songs in Who Cares? (1970).

But those who keep their eyes and ears equally alert will discover a choreographer singularly attuned to finding correlatives to music. “Peter Boal, one of my colleagues, was working on Mozartiana with Suzanne Farrell, and she was helping him learn the part,” Whelan says. “And they were watching the pianist’s hand crisscross . . . and, interestingly, when you looked at the choreography in that moment, the bodies were crossing over as well.”

Few Balanchine ballets offer a better example of how bodies can adapt themselves to changing tones and tempos of music than Union Jack (1976), in which the choreographer sailed across the Atlantic—metaphorically speaking—to embrace Great Britain. In one ebullient passage, three spirited sailors— two men dressed in navy, one woman in white—kick, sway, and salute, but when Hershy Kay’s arrangement of “Rule, Britannia!” is cued up at the end, the corps momentarily pauses, makes itself ramrod straight, and then starts to march in sharply defined patterns.

On the basis of Western Symphony and Stars and Stripes, Balanchine is a celebrant of the United States on par with Aaron Copland (for Appalachian Spring and others) or John Ford (for Young Mr. Lincoln and others)—and, on the basis of Union Jack, he was a believer in Winston Churchill’s notion of a “special relationship,” too. But even his many ballets that do not partake in national iconography—like Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960) or Tarantella—exploit the zest and brio of the nation. Whelan says that Balanchine sought speed—that is, more moves in less time. “That was typically what he thought of as American in that sort of progressive boom of technology and post-World War, making things happen, and not wasting time and being in a New York state of mind,” she says, adding, “A lot of what we study in class is the speed, the timing, the directness of line.”

One day, Balanchine explained to Verdy one of the reasons that he was a fan of American dancers—the Russian choreographer confiding to the French ballerina. “He said, ‘You know, Americans don’t have style,’” Verdy recalls. “So, I jumped at him: ‘Mr. B.’! He said, ‘No, I mean they are not preconceiving style. They don’t have to do style. They do exactly what you ask them to do. They have a huge technique, and they have speed. They don’t even know that you can’t dance that fast.

They do it if I ask.’”

Yet, while crafting his ballets, Balanchine also made himself one with his dancers, according to McBride: “He could show so beautifully. Everything was there, and you’d just do it behind him. And he worked so fast that you had to keep up with him, because his mind worked so fast.” She says that it was the greatest of gifts to have a ballet created especially for her, and it was a joy to learn it from him in the studio: “There was an intimacy that you had working with him when he partnered you. You fell in love with him and his genius.”

Many ballerinas beguiled Balanchine, too; and Farrell,

—Paul Kolnik

succinctly: “He knew what a woman could do in pointe shoes, which was very rare.”

About three months after Balanchine’s death, Jennifer Dunning reported in the New York Times of the choreographer’s decadesin-the-making plans for a Morton Gould-scored work, “based on American themes and revolving around a hero based on both Johnny Appleseed . . . and a Tom Sawyerish John James Audubon, the naturalist whose book of drawings, The Birds of America, gave the ballet its name.”

Gould said that the ballet was to be “a glorification of this country and the joy of living, moving, the air, space and the body.” This, of course, calls to mind so Western Symphony danced by Megan Fairchild and Craig Hall of NYCB in 2010. many previous Balanchine ballets extolling America and its riches. But while The Birds of America is lost to the sands of time, it turns out its creator was, in his own fashion, a choreographic McBride, and Verdy were but a few of his muses. In 1965, cousin to Johnny Appleseed—sprinkling dances from sea in an article in Life magazine, Balanchine wrote: “The ballet to shining sea. is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful “His impact has touched . . . every major city of the flowers, and man is the gardener.” This attitude, so suggestive world,” says McBride, who—as associate artistic director of the Old World, was in fact in tune with American culture as of the Charlotte Ballet in North Carolina—regularly finds Balanchine found it: the idea of a woman being inherently worherself staging Balanchine’s ballets, a task she undertakes thier than a man is as old as Henry James’s Daisy Miller (1879). with a fresh perspective.

In Evan S. Connell’s Mr. Bridge (1969), the following “I always knew my roles well, and I could stage my thoughts are amusingly placed in the head of the Midwestern roles,” McBride says. “But, years ago, when I stopped businessman hero, upon going to a ballet for the first time: dancing in 1989, I started staging his works, and it was “For young girls to spend their lives dancing seemed permindboggling to see what he did for the corps that was fectly natural, they were charming. . . . But the male dancers behind me.”According to Whelan, Balanchine’s ballets puzzled him. No doubt they were necessary for the show, do well on the road. and he could not think of any specific reason the young men “Even a small company in Mississippi or Alabama or . . . should not be dancing; all the same he did not quite like it.”

Oklahoma could do a Balanchine work, and just practicing The question is: Would George Balanchine disagree? the choreography will make you a better dancer,” Whelan To be sure, Balanchine hardly shortchanged male dancers. says. “Just learning the steps that he created, in the way he The likes of Jacques d’Amboise, Edward Villella, and Mikhail created them, with the musicality and pushing yourself . . .

Baryshnikov were seen in such forceful, challenging dances you just automatically improve and become a better, stronas Apollo or Prodigal Son (1929). And, in a conversation with former New York City Ballet dancer Damian Woetzel in 2011, ger, more interesting dancer.”

Whelan adds: “One of my favorite things is energy the company’s present Ballet Master in Chief, Peter Martins, produces energy, and Balanchine’s work is so much about said: “Most of you who are familiar with ballet probably energy that it can’t help but bubble up like joy and excitehave heard the famous saying that Balanchine coined, ‘balment and just positivity.” let is woman.’ . . . It always bothered me—you know, this is the greatest choreographer who has ever choreographed so many great works for men, and he was never really acknowledged for that.”

Peter Tonguette has written about the arts for the New York Times, Even so, there is no denying that femininity reigns in Wall Street Journal, Columbus Dispatch, and other publications.

Balanchine’s ballets. In a 1982 interview in Balanchine’s Ballerinas, Farrell said that “so many dancers work on building up NEH has supported biographical research, oral histories, a critical strength to the point where they become unfeminine. Tough. study, and other projects relating to George Balanchine, along Yet ultimately our job is to entertain. To be beautiful to look with making two grants, in 1983 and 1984, to support the documenting of his choreography through Labanotation. at.” And Balanchine’s ballerinas always were. Says McBride, HUMANITIES 29

THE AMERICAN POET-CRITIC EZRA POUND

believed that present throughout history are nodes of energy, bundles of power and expression that meld together many diverse and even conflicting forces and ideas into a harmonious whole. These nodes of energy could be poetic images, Chinese ideograms, coins, buildings, presidential administrations. His name for them changed over time: Sometimes they were “luminous details,” later “images,” then around World War I they became “vortices.” But whatever he called them, they constituted the basic building blocks of his poetics and his criticism.

Even people could fit into this category—he called such individuals “factive personalities.” Confucius was one.

So was the Renaissance condottiere Sigismondo Malatesta.

So was another Italian, Benito Mussolini. (Pound had a fascism thing.)

Pound was astonishingly perceptive at times, but distressingly blind at others. (See Mussolini, above.) So, it’s not terribly surprising that he never recognized that one of the people closest to him for almost forty years was just such a node of energy. Although Pound never noticed, it’s not too much of a stretch to see James Laughlin—Pound’s admirer, disciple, student, PR agent, publisher, counselor, friend—as a kind of Poundian “factive personality” whose life amalgamated many seemingly dissonant strains in twentieth-century America into a coherent whole, and in doing so changed the direction of U.S. cultural history.

In Laughlin’s life story—which Ian MacNiven thoroughly and entertainingly recounts in his 2014 biography “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions—we see many of the key developments of the American century. Take, for example, large-scale industrialization and the labor movement: Laughlin came from the

eth-century United States. The city’s status as a punchline or a byword for pollution and philistinery is fading quickly, but the city in 1914, when Laughlin was born, deserved its reputation. Pollution dwarfing today’s Beijing, poisoned rivers running unspeakable colors, overcrowded row houses for the immigrants from Eastern Europe and, later, the American South: It was aptly called “Hell with the lid off.”

Laughlin knew his hometown hadn’t given him much in the way of refinement. He joked that society families passed around chewing gum on a silver salver after dinner, and once told Pound that “I ought to be writing about the ‘ineffable translucency’ of your metric, or something like that, but hell, I was born in PITTSBURGH.” Nor did his family prepare him for a literary life. His mother, Marjory, was a strict Presbyterian, and, in terms of books, his house had “nothing but sets and the Bible, and the sets were never read.”

He did know from an early age that he had no desire to go into the family business, and described his annual Thanksgiving trip to see the mill as “like the Inferno . . . terrifying.” His father, Henry, shared his feelings, and so the family spent a great deal of time at their farm in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands and at “Sidoney,” their estate in central Florida. (A private railcar shuttled them there.) In 1927, along with his older brother, Hugh, twelve-year-old James was shipped off to Institut Le Rosey, a swanky boarding school on Lake Geneva. The ostensible reason was to give the boys culture and French, but MacNiven points out that at this time Henry had started to exhibit the volatile bipolar disorder that afflicted Laughlin men, and Marjory didn’t want her boys to see it.

While he didn’t perfect his French at Le Rosey, Laughlin did kindle his lifelong love of skiing there. Laughlin’s passion, his wealth, and the burgeoning popularity of the sport

THE MAN WHO MADE AMERICAN MODERNISM Jones & Laughlin steel fortune, and Henry Clay Frick was a great uncle. Or the continuing cultural dominance of the New England and New York elite: Laughlin attended their schools (Choate, Harvard), but was snubbed, no matter how much money or cultural prestige he brought. But the greatest thing Laughlin did was energize the American literary scene through New Directions books and, perhaps more importantly, framed modernist literature as a worldwide phenomenon in which American artists were just as important as experimental French or British writers. At the same time, he published underappreciated authors from places like Burma, Japan, Argentina, and Brazil, ushering writers from outside the Euro-American world into the literary establishment.

Laughlin also proudly promoted American culture abroad and was deeply involved in Cold War cultural-diplomatic “public-private partnerships.” He even helped create the modern skiing industry.

All twentieth-century American roads may not have run through Laughlin, but many of them intersected there. Thus, it’s appropriate that he came from Pittsburgh, like Laughlin himself, an underappreciated Poundian “vortex” of twenti 30 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

were happy companions, catalyzing each other. In 1934, Laughlin competed on the first Harvard varsity ski squad at venues like Woodstock Hill, in Vermont, which had just installed the first rope tow in the United States. (The first chairlift didn’t come until 1936 when it was developed by the Union Pacific Railroad at Idaho’s Sun Valley resort.) With his graduation money, in 1940 Laughlin bought a mountain lodge in Alta, Utah, and installed a state-of-the-art lift there.

Alta soon became a training ground for U.S. Army alpine units and developed into one of the best ski resorts in the West. The lift, but not the resort itself, still belongs to the Laughlin family.

A tall man, close to six and a half feet, he often observed that he felt graceful only on skis. He was good, too. In the winter of 1936, he beat an Olympian and the Canadian national champion in a slalom race on Mt. Baker in Washington state. In 1937, he competed as part of the United States Expeditionary Alpine and Nordic Team in New Zealand and Australia—but had to cut that junket short after a bad crash on Mt. Hotham, near Melbourne.

The crash wasn’t the worst outcome of that trip. Although

—Collection of James Laughlin. Copyright 2006 by the Estate of James Laughlin and reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

AND MODERNISM AMERICAN

BY GREG BARNHISEL

A VERY YOUNG JAMES LAUGHLIN AND HIS MENTOR EZRA POUND IN RAPALLO IN 1934.

only 22, Laughlin had already embarked on his publishing career, and the first real book published by his brand-new imprint had come out just before he left for the Antipodes.

He wasn’t a typical young publisher, and the book wasn’t some parlor versifier’s chapbook, either. William Carlos Williams, one of the leading American experimental poets of the twentieth century, was optimistic that his first foray into short fiction, White Mule, would prove that he could write something beyond poetry, and might even make him some money. When he saw reviews of this book in The Nation, the New York Times, the New Republic, and even the ultra-middlebrow Saturday Review of Literature, prospects looked good.

But then the first printing of five hundred copies sold out, and the publisher’s father informed the enraged author that

only James, who was unreachable in Australia, could get the unbound sheets out of storage and to the bindery. It would be years before Laughlin’s relationship with Williams healed.

The drama with Williams, though, didn’t compare with Laughlin’s long, fraught, and crucial relationship with Ezra Pound, who was the key figure in Laughlin’s life and career.

Armed with an introduction from his Choate master Dudley Fitts, Laughlin had initially requested to “see” the notorious poet Pound while on a summer trip to Europe in 1933.

“Visibility high,” Pound gnomically responded. The stillteenaged Laughlin briefly stayed with Pound, then returned for an extended visit the following November (after a time lodging with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at their farmhouse in the Alps).

HUMANITIES 31

Stein had once referred to Ezra Pound as a “village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” Pound’s village in 1934 was Rapallo, Italy, where he maintained what he called the “Ezuversity.” Students and acolytes could spend their days with the poet, playing tennis and swimming in the Tigullian Gulf and, as a core curriculum, listening to Pound expound on everything: poetic meter, Chinese bureaucracy, late medieval banking. Laughlin loved it, and stayed for months.

He was less pleased with Pound’s opinion of his own writing. Since prep school, Laughlin had written poetry, influenced by people like T. S. Eliot and Williams and Pound, and asked for the master’s assessment. “You’re never going to be any good as a poet,” he offhandedly told the crushed Laughlin, who secretly yearned for a career as a writer. Do something useful with your money, Pound advised him—go into publishing, so that even if you can’t write good stuff, you can make sure that good stuff gets out there.

That’s just what he did. Returning to Harvard, Laughlin used a little family money and started a publishing venture that he called “New Directions” (or, in Pound’s formulation, “Nude Erections”) out of his Eliot House lodgings. Initially, New Directions was simply an annual anthology (New Directions in Prose and Poetry) with a list of contributors that a 22-year-old shouldn’t have been able to corral: Pound, Stein, Williams, Henry Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and a pseudonymous Laughlin. Within a couple of years, Laughlin was publishing books—Williams’s ill-fated White Mule, but also volumes of poetry by Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon and Dudley Fitts, and Pound’s idiosyncratic 1938 literary history Culture.

Also among these early New Directions titles was Delmore Schwartz’s story collection In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Schwartz, an instructor in Harvard’s writing program, worked as Laughlin’s “office assistant” and was just one of the constellation of future literary luminaries in whose orbit Laughlin hovered—or vice versa. Robert Lowell remembered that in stuffy late 1930s Harvard Square James Laughlin was the man to talk to if you had any interest in avant-garde literature. He’d been to Europe; he knew Pound and Stein and Williams. Since his freshman year he’d been attending a Thursday evening supper group with literary critic R. P. Blackmur and the still relatively obscure John Cheever. Laughlin took writing classes overseen by the archconservative Robert Hillyer, but then in the evenings employed Hillyer’s junior faculty Schwartz and John Berryman, themselves at the time aspiring experimental writers.

He was connected up and down the Ivy League, working with Lincoln Kirstein on Yale’s Hound and Horn as well as on Harvard’s own Advocate.

Laughlin went into literary publishing, driven by a strong sense of mission, and laid out his almost mystical vision of the power of experimental literature to transform consciousness and society in the manifesto-like preface to the first New Directions anthology in 1936. Of course, 1936 was a bad time all around, and Laughlin’s friendship with Pound only intensified his sense of impending doom. And when the feared, inevitable cataclysm came, in 1939, it did change both the course of his life and of his publishing house. Laughlin didn’t serve; he was declared 4-F for reasons that remain fuzzy (his powerful family might have pulled strings to get him out, or the family curse, which had claimed his father and uncle in the previous few years, might have been the 32 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

reason), and so he continued to run the press through the war, even though its output was limited by paper rationing.

He also had to quickly learn to follow his own instincts, and not the desires of his authors. In 1939, he obtained the contract for Pound’s ongoing Cantos project, a long and difficult poem being published in installments. Sunk deep in Pound’s Fascist and anti-Semitic period, the volume Laughlin was to publish first (Cantos LII–LXXI) included several passages that Laughlin feared were not only offensive, but libelous. He stood up to his mentor, demanded changes to the text and—without Pound’s knowledge and against his desires—included in this volume an explanatory pamphlet intended to draw readers’ attention away from Pound’s notorious pro-Fascist statements. During the war, of course, Pound would propagandize on Italian state radio. He was indicted for treason, captured, returned to the United States to face trial, and ultimately languished for thirteen years in a federal mental institution before the charges were dropped.

After 1945, Laughlin coordinated both his legal defense and the publicity campaign to rehabilitate the disgraced poet.

The Cantos LII–LXXI incident showed Laughlin at his most characteristic. He was a romancer, a flatterer; he collected mentors by making them feel important, and he never lost sight of how appealing he was—rich, erudite, cultured— as a disciple. But he never let this cultivation of mentors get in the way of his business. He told Pound no, even though he knew it would enrage the poet. He loved the erratic, shambling Schwartz, and employed him much longer than he really should have, but once Schwartz’s intoxicated antics threatened New Directions, Laughlin unsentimentally cut him loose. Kenneth Rexroth, the San Francisco poet and bohemian who was particularly close to Laughlin—the two went on long skiing and camping expeditions in the Sierras—blustered about the fact that rich Laughlin would never put him on a stipend, but Laughlin refused to consider it.

(Instead, he asked other people whether they would front Rexroth some money.)

Laughlin never intended to run a hothouse imprint, a Lost Generation-style futile stab at publishing evanescence.

Nor did he see New Directions as the vanity project of a rich dilettante. He always intended, as he told Pound in 1939, to run New Directions as an “efficient business.” (Laughlin was proud that New Directions turned its first profit in 1947 and was in the black more often than not after that.) To that end, he looked to the new generation of literary publishers, most of them Jewish and based in New York, that had supplanted the Boston publishing establishment in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Ben Huebsch, Horace Liveright, and especially Alfred A. Knopf became his models (and Bennett Cerf his putative adversary, although he cribbed more from Cerf than he cared to admit).

New Directions pioneered branding. To this day, its blackand-white trade paperback covers are immediately identifiable. Like Cerf ’s Modern Library, Laughlin licensed the copyrights to out-of-print modern works and produced discount versions of them for series like “The New Classics”; in 1945, for instance, he rescued Fitzgerald’s forgotten The Great Gatsby from obscurity. After the G.I. Bill filled campuses to bursting, Laughlin packed up a station wagon with studentpriced exam copies of New Directions books and gave them to friendly English professors like Hugh Kenner in the hopes that they’d be adopted for modern literature courses. And once Jason Epstein developed the trade paperback at Anchor

—Collection of James Laughlin. Copyright 2006 by the Estate of James Laughlin and reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

FROM LEFT: UNIDENTIFIED MAN, (STANDING BACK) MONROE WHEELER, ANN LAUGHLIN, GERTRUDE VANDERBILT WHITNEY, MARIANNE MOORE, AND JAMES LAUGHLIN STANDING OUTSIDE SHEA STADIUM IN QUEENS FOR A NEW YORK METS GAME.

Books in 1953, Laughlin pounced, persuading his authors that sales to the vast student market would offset the format’s lower royalty rates. Laughlin was never a hippie, not even close, but few 1960s crash pads lacked New Directions editions of Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, Thomas Merton’s books on Zen, Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, or at least Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.

Of course, Laughlin was right in the middle of every literary development in the U.S. between 1940 and the 1980s. He refused to take part in the corporatization and conglomeratization of American publishing, even as he saw his friend Alfred Knopf and his rival Roger Straus succumb. Laughlin always owned the company outright and its shares passed to an ownership trust on his death in 1997.

Between his involvement in publishing and his family’s wealth and profile, Laughlin’s life story can often seem like an endless Page Six of mid-century notables, panning from Drue Heinz (wife of his childhood pal Jack) to Andy Warhol (who designed book jackets for New Directions in the 1950s) to Henri Matisse (whose granddaughter was Laughlin’s secretary) to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (a Pittsburgh neighbor he knew as “Uncle Andy”) to Tennessee Williams, Laughlin’s great friend and rival for the affections of the Russian actress Maria Britneva, later Lady Maria St. Just. (Yes, that Tennessee Williams, the gay one. It was complicated.)

It helped that he was oddly gentle and sensuous for such a large man, thoughtful and attentive to whomever he was talking. He had a charisma that made people want to trust him—and then, of course, he had the money and the taste for living that made people want to hang around him.

Predictably, he was also a career philanderer, marrying three times and having countless lovers. (Even prostate surgery didn’t end it.) He radiated confidence, cultural sophistication, and a genuine enthusiasm for new experiences. I interviewed him near the end of his life, a poor graduate student making a pilgrimage to the country estate of a literary great, and his personal qualities cut through my fear and awe and nervousness. I could see why he would have been so often present at significant times and with memorable people.

But he wasn’t some sort of Zelig figure, merely there.

Always, he was fulfilling what he saw as his mission in life: renewing and energizing the world through good literature.

Laughlin had internalized the noblesse oblige best articulated in his fellow Pittsburgher Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” and added to that a dollop of guilt. As he told an interviewer, “I have a strong family concept of how we have to make up for being in the steel wars. . . . I wanted New Directions to go a little way to redeem the family in their dullness and sordidness, in their search for money.” By the time World War II ended and the Cold War began, Laughlin HUMANITIES 33

GERTRUDE STEIN, LAUGHLIN, AND STEIN’S DOG, BASKET. —Collection of James Laughlin. Copyright 2006 by the Estate of James Laughlin and reproduced with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

found himself eager to serve his country as well, in the best way he could: through literature.

During the war, Laughlin had declined an invitation to sign on with the Department of State, although New Directions did publish in 1942 an Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry that was secretly subsidized by the Office of Inter-American Affairs. The Iron Curtain, and in particular communism’s curtailment of artistic freedom, spurred Laughlin to get involved with American outreach in the early 1950s. He kept the government at arm’s length, though, instead doing his work through a private group: the massively wealthy Ford Foundation.

Ford had come into its money in the late 1940s and had already undertaken some extremely ambitious projects domestically. When former Marshall Plan administrators such as Milton Katz and Paul Hoffman came to the foundation, it began to look for ways to promote “cultural freedom” back in Europe. Wanting to give Europeans a taste of all of the innovative American art and literature they had missed because of the war, Laughlin proposed that Ford fund a magazine to do just that. Fortunately, his old friend Robert Hutchins—the former University of Chicago president and celebrity middlebrow intellectual—had also become a foundation director, and, in 1952, Laughlin brought out the first issue of Perspectives USA in English, French, Italian, and German.

Perspectives wasn’t exactly misbegotten, but nor was it 34 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

one of the successes of Laughlin’s life. His early plans for a cutting-edge magazine of culture, with rotating guest editors like Lionel Trilling, quickly fizzled. The contents were stale, consisting largely of reprinted material from magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic. And much of the literary material—thirty-year-old poems by Williams, for example—was dated. Then Laughlin’s managing editor, the poet Hayden Carruth, was institutionalized after an alcoholic breakdown; and Perspectives’ European translator turned out to be a grifter; and the brand-new Congress for Cultural Freedom brought out its own livelier version of this same idea (Encounter, edited by Irving Kristol and the English poet Stephen Spender); and Ford lost interest and pulled its funding. Perspectives limped through sixteen issues without publishing one notable original piece.

The only article with any impact, in fact, was Mary McCarthy’s “America, the Beautiful,” reprinted from a 1947 issue of Commentary. And it wasn’t readers who responded to it—it was William J. Casey, a member of Perspectives’ board of directors. (Casey had been an OSS spy during the war, and later became President Reagan’s director of central intelligence. Whether he still had his hand in the trade during this time is . . . unclear.) Laughlin’s board was stocked with corporate types like H. J. Heinz and Richard Weil Jr. of Macy’s and James Brownlee of J. H. Whitney, but only Casey reacted with anger to the prospect of printing McCarthy’s equivocal, ambivalent defense of American “plain and heroic accessibility.” Casey, a conservative Long Island Catholic, charged that it was typical New York Intellectual condescension, and demanded that Laughlin print something to balance it out—a piece by Peter Drucker, he suggested.

By then Laughlin himself was losing interest in Perspectives, and he’d used part of the Ford Foundation money to travel in Burma, Japan, and India. The plan was to create an offshoot of Perspectives that would focus on the contemporary art and literature of those nations, but Laughlin was also scouting for potential New Directions authors. He found them, too, and in subsequent years the firm put out titles translated from Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, and Burmese, and signed Yukio Mishima as a New Directions author. New Directions had long published books by Western authors influenced by Asian literature such as Thomas Merton and Pound and Hesse and Kenneth Rexroth, but in the late 1950s the firm’s books made Asian writing and ideas much more available to American readers. It’s hard not to conclude that Laughlin was at least partly responsible for fueling the counterculture’s interest in Asian philosophy and spirituality.

And even with all of his other work, he continued to write. He frequently published poetry in the New Directions annuals, often under humorous pseudonyms. One of New Directions’ first books was a collection of his own poetry. He published dozens of collections, most of them not with New Directions, and in the 1980s began dedicating himself almost full-time to his writing. His proudest moment, he said, was being inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995 as a poet. (In 2014, New Directions released a massive collected edition of Laughlin’s poetry.)

There was a tragic side to his burgeoning success as a poet, though. In 1968, Merton, the Trappist monk and writer who had become a close friend to Laughlin, died in Bangkok, electrocuted by a faulty fan. Laughlin was distraught.

Worse, this incident seems to have triggered the family curse in Laughlin. From the late 1960s on, he struggled with

JAMES LAUGHLIN AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS TALKING WITH THE POET-PHILANTHROPIST RUTH WALGREEN STEPHAN IN 1969. —Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images

we would now call bipolar disorder. As with so many other developments of the century, Laughlin found himself, against his desires, at the center of the revolutionary changes in mental health treatment and pharmacology. At first, he relied on lithium, which often dulled his ability to write, but the development of SSRIs like Prozac helped. The curse was brutal, relentless, and seemingly inevitable. In 1986, Laughlin’s son Robert slit his wrists in Laughlin’s Greenwich Village apartment, to be found by his father. And, just in August 2014, another of Laughlin’s sons, Henry, committed suicide.

When Laughlin himself died in 1997, most obituaries focused, naturally, on his work with New Directions and his relationships with luminaries such as Pound and Williams and Merton. New Directions was portrayed almost as a curiosity, a holdover from another era of publishing that would certainly fade when its guiding spirit passed. That hasn’t happened. The firm is healthy today and continues to find exciting new authors. And while in some ways the firm is a throwback, in another way its approach to publishing foreshadowed the “curated” aesthetic and long-tail strategy of digital-age publishing. New Directions finds a small number of very good authors, publishes most of what they write in small print runs, and keeps them in print for a long time, realizing that readers will eventually discover them.

In publishing and beyond it, Laughlin helped bury the once-widespread prejudice that “American culture” was an oxymoron. In the 1930s, he brought cutting-edge modernist

art and literature to the stuffy Ivy Leagues and then, through his student-aimed books, to a new generation of adventurous readers across the country. After the war, he turned his talents to the project of persuading influential European intellectuals, particularly in France and Great Britain, that American authors had indeed produced literature worth reading, “books of permanent literary value,” as New Directions’ first circular put it. Laughlin was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1953 for bringing French literature to America, but was even more important in nurturing the careers of American writers from Pound to Williams to H. D. to Mary Karr. And he did this because of his belief, perhaps anachronistic but widely shared among cultural notables of the 1950s, that American-style freedom and individualism weren’t anathema to sophisticated experimental art and literature but rather fostered them. At a time when the U.S. political establishment still saw modernist art as a stalkinghorse for subversion, Laughlin and others did what they could to obliterate that belief, showing skeptics in Europe and cultural conservatives in the United States that there was nothing more American than sophisticated, challenging, and truly multicultural art and literature.

Greg Barnhisel chairs the English department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Cold War Modernists: Arts, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, for which he received a research fellowship from NEH. HUMANITIES 35

Calendar

Endowment-Supported Events

“American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood” travels to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, opening February 6. The exhibit of Benton’s work is the first to delve into how the vernacular of his paintings and the language of film (he began his career working in the silent film industry) were combined to reinvent distinctly un-European narratives.

—Thomas Hart Benton (1889–­1975), Member of the Chorus, 1937, ink, ink wash, and graphite on paper / © T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Private collection, photo by Larry Ferguson Studio

In the early sixteenth century, Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés took note of the Aztecs’ use of a red, especially in textiles, that was more brilliant than the red then used in Europe. The source was a tiny insect living on prickly pear cacti and called the cochineal. Soon much of the world was draped in cochineal red.“The Red That Colored the World,” originated by the Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, travels to the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California, till February 21.

—Photo courtesy Museo de América, Batea (tray), Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico, ca. 1701–1750.

Wood, paint, 421/8 in. diameter. Museo de América, Madrid, 06921.

36 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

January/February

—Courtesy McClung Museum of Natural History, University of Tennessee

BY STEVE MOYER

“Maya: Lords of Time,” organized by the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, focuses on the kings and calendars of the Central American civilization that studied the skies and recorded planetary movements with precision. Based on archaeological work done at Copán, in Honduras, the exhibit opens January 23 at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City recently christened the permanent exhibit “City at Sea: USS Intrepid,” which explores the ship from stem to stern, including the combat information center, officer berthing, enlisted mess, and anchor chain room. Interactive stations feature video interviews with those who sailed aboard Intrepid from World War II to the 1970s. The exhibit focuses on how an aircraft carrier operated in times of war and peace.

trepid Sea,

on of the In

—Collecti

e Museum

Air & Spac

HUMANITIES 37

NOTEWORTHY NEXT GENERATION

February 17 is the deadline for a new NEH grant program to help transform humanities doctoral education to include broader career preparation.

The new program, called Next Generation Humanities PhD, responds to the changes in professional options for humanities scholars who increasingly do not pursue a career in academia.

“Through the Next Generation Humanities PhD grant program, NEH expects to play a leading role in helping humanities doctoral programs prepare students for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century,” said NEH Chairman William D. Adams. “The knowledge and skills that students acquire through humanities PhD programs can make an important contribution to society in ways that go beyond the customary career track for doctoral students.”

Planning and implementation grants are available as a one-to-one cost-sharing award. Planning grants up to $25,000 will help graduate programs in the humanities explore how to increase exposure to other careers through interdisciplinary and non-academic collaboration. Implementation grants are available for up to $350,000 to make structural changes to PhD program requirements, activities, and formats. Application guidelines for Next Generation PhD grants are available at neh.gov.

WHITE HOUSE HONORS

In November, the White House presented the National Arts and Humanities

38 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Youth Program Awards to 12 programs that promote creative and academic achievement for young people. They range from theater and music programs to docent training and urban studies.

The winners are selected from 285 nominations across the country, and receive the award from First Lady Michelle Obama in Washington, D.C. The program is an initiative of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

“As I’ve said many times before, arts education is not a luxury, it is a necessity,” said Mrs. Obama. “It’s really the air many of these kids breathe. It’s how we get kids excited about getting up and going to school in the morning. It’s how we get them to take ownership of their future.”

Among the 2015 awardees are CityDance DREAM Program, free afterschool and summer dance programs for students at six elementary schools in lower-income D.C. neighborhoods; Spy Hop Productions, classes in film, music, audio-production, and game-design reaching more than 600 young people each year in the Salt Lake City area; Urban Investigations, a program run by the Brooklyn-based Center for Urban Pedagogy engaging students from under-resourced public high schools to tackle philosophical and pragmatic questions about their communities; and Young Writers and Leaders, a weekly program for immigrant and refugee youth in Portland, Maine.

—All photos © Scavone Photography

NEA CHAIRMAN JANE CHU AND JOSEPH D. DUFFEY, WHO WAS THE NEH CHAIRMAN FROM 1977 TO 1981.

BELOW LEFT: GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT STEVEN KNAPP WITH ALBERT SMALL AND NEH CHAIRMAN WILLIAM D. ADAMS; BELOW RIGHT: ALBERT SMALL, JOURNALIST COKIE ROBERTS, AND ALBERT H. SMALL JR.

NEH CELEBRATES 50

A reunion of sorts occurred when former colleagues, supporters, and friends came together to mark NEH’s 50th anniversary. Held at George Washington University, the event was supported by collector Albert Small, who spoke about his lifelong love for artifacts of American history. On hand were also NEH’s former chairmen Joseph Duffey and Carole Watson, NEA Chairman Jane Chu, and GWU President Steven Knapp.

—Amy Lifson

In Focus

BY MARY JO PATTERSON

Briann Greenfield of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities

—James Kirkland

BRIANN GREENFIELD HAD JUST COME TO NEW JERSEY TO head the state’s Council for the Humanities when she decided to attend a daylong program at Rutgers exploring black history and culture. It was a snowy February day in 2014, and New Jersey was still new territory for her.

Greenfield grew up in a small New Hampshire town near Lake Winnipesaukee. Filled with old houses, the town inspired the fictional Peyton Place, a setting Greenfield often joked about when introducing herself. Peyton Place, a juicy 1950s novel and a prime-time television soap opera, was replete with gossip, secrets, and double crosses. Greenfield’s childhood home, however, was anything but. Her mother worked as a secretary for the state, and her father worked for Pitney Bowes, going from office to office repairing copy machines. She had one brother.

From childhood, Greenfield was smitten with history, and as she grew older her interest in the past grew. A high school teacher, Perry Onion, encouraged this passion and inspired her to study Latin. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in history and earned her Master’s in American Civilization/Museum Studies at Brown. Her doctorate, also from Brown, was in American Civilization.

By the time Greenfield arrived in New Jersey, she had taught history for close to 13 years at Central Connecticut State University. She developed and taught a cornucopia of courses ranging from museum studies to food culture to the history of consumer culture to the history of technology. Now, being a tenured full professor is not a job many people would walk away from, but Greenfield itched to get out of the classroom and into the real world. “I was tired of talking about what other people did. I really wanted to be on the front lines,” says Greenfield, 45, the slight, extroverted director of the New Jersey Council since February 2014.

When Greenfield arrived at the annual Marian Thompson Wright lecture series at Rutgers/Newark she took a seat in the crowded auditorium and took in the speakers’ words like a starving man served a lavish meal. The topic was “Tending the Light: Community Organizing & the Modern Civil Rights Movement” and covered Freedom Summer, a campaign launched in 1964 to register black voters in Mississippi.

Speakers included participants in the campaign as well as scholars who had chronicled them. As a former professor, Greenfield was used to doing the talking. But she was a good listener, too. “I was blown away by the event,” she recalls. “The audience consisted of locals from the African-American community, other communities, academics, and others you wouldn’t consider consumers of scholarly programming.”

Greenfield has quickly burnished her reputation as a workaholic. She sat in on focus groups with nearly one hundred people representing various local cultural organizations, brainstorming ways to create social bridges among them.

Having people connect over ideas matters to Greenfield. She’s particularly proud of the council’s ongoing work on Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care. By the end of 2015, health-care workers in eight hospitals, veterans’ centers, and long-term care facilities across the state had participated in the reading and discussion program. The program promotes discussions for health-care workers of every rank. “The people range from folks who change bed pans to medical directors. They often don’t get any support, yet they’re dealing with death and dying,” says Greenfield.

The council has begun experimenting with the “unconference.” This is “a conference without an agenda. Participants come and make the agenda during the first hour. Then everyone votes on which proposal they find most engaging,” says Greenfield. The first one, called Telling Untold Histories, held last spring, covered LGBT history, making community supported archives, and preserving and interpreting the history of disability.

“Many organizations came together to build the event, including the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey State Museum, and the Alice Paul Institute,” says Greenfield. “Our original goal was fifty participants. By the end, we had to cap registration at one hundred.”

Ever the scholar, she continues to study New Jersey. She has explored the cities, agricultural plains, and boardwalk shore culture. When she finds time, she tours gardens. She walks the streets of shabby neighborhoods and areas with gleaming grounds and houses. Along the way, she found a place to call home in the historic Mill Hill section of Trenton, not far from her office.

Greenfield’s favorite places: Paterson’s Great Falls on the Passaic River—the waterfall fueled the industrial revolution; the Methodist camp meeting sites in Ocean Grove; the Batsto River in the Pine Barrens; Newark’s 1935 art deco Penn Station by McKim, Mead & White. “I’m a public historian, so these places interest me,” she says.

Mary Jo Patterson is a New Jersey-based writer.

HUMANITIES 39 HUMANITIES 39

Around Nation

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

the

ALABAMA Pulitzer Prize winners who have connections to Alabama will take part in a panel discussion at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Tuscaloosa on Feb. 19 at the Alabama Press Association’s Winter Convention.

ALASKA The 2016 Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities will be presented by Governor Bill Walker at the state capitol in Juneau on Jan. 28.

ARIZONA Warren H. Stewart Sr. gives the talk “Victory Together for Martin Luther King Jr.” for Authors Night at Arizona Humanities in Phoenix on Jan. 21.

Hugh Grinnell discusses “The Explorations and Discoveries of George Bird Grinnell, the Father of Glacier National Park” at Arizona Humanities in Phoenix on Feb. 24. Grinnell uses field journals, memoirs, and personal correspondence to talk about his distant cousin who founded the Audubon Society, cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club with Teddy Roosevelt, and led the effort to establish Glacier National Park.

FLORIDA As part of the series “Heritage at Risk: Climate Change, Coastal Communities, and Cultural Resources” at the Lewis Auditorium of Flagler College in St. Augustine, Brenda Ekwurzel presents “Our Coastal Heritage: Communities Tackling Rising Seas” on Jan. 26, and Kathryn Frank offers “Planning for Resilience to Sea Level Rise in the Matanzas Basin” on Feb. 10.

Writers Sandra Meek, Ryan Rivas, and Richard Mathews discuss how beginning writers can get published at the creative writing conference “Blank Pages,” hosted at the University of South Florida Tampa Library on Feb. 25.

“Florida Stories,” a free, illustrated walking-tour app for St. Augustine, can be downloaded at www.FloridaStories.org.

Speakers Bureau programs include “Florida in the Civil War? Believe it!” by Eliot Kleinberg at Brooksville City Hall 40 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

A Roundup of Activities Sponsored by the State Humanities Councils

—Garcia in the 1990s with Mike Holmgren of the Green Bay Packers, Jessie Garcia Collection

COMPILED BY LAURA WOLFF SCANLAN

THE FIRST FEMALE SPORTSCASTER IN WISCONSIN, JESSIE GARCIA, LEFT, DISCUSSES WORK-LIFE BALANCE FOR MOTHERS IN WISCONSIN.

on Jan. 7; “Florida’s Amazing History and Why You Should Care” by Eliot Kleinberg at the Citrus County Historical Society in Inverness on Jan. 21; “Transparent Waters: The History and Significance of Florida Springs” by Tom Berson at the Emerson Center in Vero Beach on Jan. 21; “Florida Environmental History” by Steve Noll at the Highland Art League in Sebring on Jan. 22; “RAIN: A History for Stormy Times” by Cynthia Barnett at the Ding Darling Wildlife Society in Sanibel on Jan. 22; “Our Stories, Ourselves” by Caren Neile at Corrine Costin Gibson Memorial Gulf County Public Library in Port Saint Joe on Jan. 29; “Florida’s Fleet: A Boatbuilding and Fishing Legacy from the First Coast”

by Brendan Burke at Anderson-Price Memorial Building in Ormond Beach on Jan. 30; “Florida Cattle Ranching: Five Centuries of Tradition” by Bob Stone at Calvary Baptist Church in Arcadia on Feb. 11; “Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Comes to Life” by Ersula Odom Knox at Nova Southeastern University’s Alvin Sherman Library in Davie on Feb. 17;

“The Highwaymen: Florida’s African American Landscape Painters” by Gary Monroe at Lake Wales Public Library on Feb. 18; “Spanish Colonial Foodways” by Cathy Parker at South Florida State College Museum of Florida Art and Culture in Avon Park on Feb. 18; panel discussion on “Florida Cattlemen’s Role as Environmental Stewards” by Jim Handley, Paul Gray, Jimmy Wohl, and Raoul Boughton at Highlands Art League in Sebring on Feb. 19; and “Two Takes on a Dream: Mary McLeod Bethune and Zora Neale Hurston” by Ersula Odom Knox and Phyllis McEwen at Midtown Center– St. Petersburg College on Feb. 24.

ILLINOIS “Jewish Heritage in the Quad Cities” remains on display at Western Illinois University in Macomb through Feb. 29.

Road Scholar programs taking place include “Music of the Civil Rights Movement,” with Chris Vallillo at John A. Logan College in Carterville on Feb. 2; “Superheroes and Patriots: Comic Book Propaganda Unveiled” by Brian Russell

at the Gurnee Police Station on Feb. 13; and “Ann Stokes: African-American Civil War Nurse,” with Marlene Rivero at Algonquin Area Public Library on Feb. 21.

Lilia Fernandez, author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago, presents “Latino Panethnic Politics in Chicago: Social Activism and Grassroots Origins,” moderated by Kristin Huffine with response by Simon Weffer, at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb on Feb. 25.

INDIANA The University of Indianapolis hosts the Richard M. Fairbanks Symposium on Civic Leadership on Feb. 5.

“Chew on This” takes place at various locations around Indianapolis, featuring discussions of Latino immigration on Feb. 9.

KANSAS Jane Holwerda leads the on-air discussion of Plainsong by Kent Haruf from Jan. 4 through Feb. 7 on High Plains Public Radio in Garden City.

Two programs take place as part of the “Latino Americans: 500 Years of History” initiative: Valerie Mendoza moderates a discussion of the film Foreigners in Their Own Land (1565–1880) at the Dodge City Public Library on Feb. 20, and “La Colonia de Emporia: Stories of the Latino Community” opens at the Lyon County Historical Society in Emporia on Feb. 16.

MASSACHUSETTS Literature and Medicine reading and discussion series are held for medical professionals at Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford on the topics of “Moral Injury and Just War Theory” on Jan. 12, and “The Transgenerational Impact of War” on Feb. 9.

MINNESOTA The Minnesota Humanities Center in St. Paul hosts an all-day workshop titled “Increase Engagement through Absent Narratives” on Jan. 23 and Feb. 26.

—Linda Rodriguez

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

STILL LIFES BY GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ARE SHOWN IN TEXAS.

MONTANA Speakers Bureau talks include “Homestead Dreams” by Hal Stearns at the Gallatin History Museum in Bozeman on Jan. 13; “Jimmie Rodgers” by Ed Kemmick at Miles Community College in Miles City on Jan. 28; and “A Visit with Teddy Roosevelt” by Arch Ellwein at Havre High School on Feb. 9.

NEBRASKA Elliott Elementary School in Lincoln offers a Native-American Prime Time Family Reading Time program beginning Jan. 13.

The Smithsonian traveling exhibition “The Way We Worked” closes at the Sarpy County Museum in Bellevue on Jan. 7, then heads to the ElkhornValley Museum in Norfolk where it will be open from Jan. 20 through Feb. 18.

As part of the “feedback” writing program, Gustavo Adolfo Aybar and Tammie Kennedy give a reading at KANEKO in Omaha on Jan. 14, followed by a writing workshop on Jan. 16.

The Kearney Area Storytelling Festival features nationally known storytellers Kate Campbell and Ed Stivender as well as local talent from Jan. 19 to 23.

The Midwest Theater Community Cinema in Scottsbluff continues its Community Cinema series “Indie Lens Pop-Ups” from Jan. 21 through Feb. 18.

South Sioux City Public Library hosts a discussion on Mary Pipher’s The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community on Feb. 1.

“Go West! Art of the American

Frontier from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West” continues at the Joslyn Art Museum during January and February, featuring a lecture by Emil Her Many Horses, curator in the office of museum scholarship at the National Museum of the American Indian, on Feb. 4, and a talk by Heather Fryer of Creighton University on Feb. 25.

Edward Curtis IV discusses “Black Muslim Contributions to U.S. History and Culture” at the University of Nebraska at Omaha Community Engagement Center on Feb. 11.

The Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Church in Lincoln presents a six-part lecture series, “National Identity and the Politics of Nationalism,” from Feb. 14 through March 13.

NEW HAMPSHIRE Humanities to Go programs will take place throughout the state in January and February and include a costumed portrayal of Oney Judge Staines by Gwendolyn Quezaire-Presutti at the Amherst Town Library on Feb. 18.

Staines was a slave of George and Martha Washington at Mount Vernon who escaped to New Hampshire in 1796.

NEW MEXICO In conjunction with the exhibition “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” on display at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe from Feb. 5 to 28, Eric Rasmussen presents the talk “The Mysteries of the Shakespeare First Folio” on Feb. 10; HUMANITIES 41

ROSA BONHEUR’S PAINTING OF COL. WILLIAM F. CODY IS PART OF THE EXHIBITION “GO WEST” AT NEBRASKA’S JOSLYN ART MUSEUM.

John F. Andrews leads a discussion on Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen Grant on Feb. 19; and on Feb. 20, Heather James lectures on “The Graveyard and the Frontier: Hamlet Among the Buffaloes” plus Marissa Greenberg presents “The Very Large Shakespeare Array.”

Chautauqua programs include “Diné (Navajo) Blessingway Stories,” with Sunny Dooley at the Kit Carson Home and Museum in Taos on Jan. 22, and “Estevan the Moor: Journey into the Unknown,” with Edward Wallace at OASIS Albuquerque on Feb. 5.

OKLAHOMA The traveling exhibition “WATER: Congressional Representation to Protect a Precious Resource” is on display at the Western Plains Library in Clinton through Jan. 31, and at the Oklahoma Museum of the Western Prairie in Altus from Feb. 1 to 29.

OREGON Conversation Projects across the state include “A World Without Secrets: Privacy and Expectations in the United States” by Wendy Willis at Hard Knocks 42 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Brewing in Cottage Grove on Jan. 7 and the McMinnville Public Library on Jan. 24 ; “Beyond Human? Science, Technology, and the Future of Human Nature” by Prakash Chenjeri at the Astoria Public Library on Jan. 9; “Grave Matters: Cultural Diversity on Life and Death” by Courtney Campbell at McMinnville Public Library on Jan. 10; “What Is Education For?” by Alex Sager at Beaverton City Library on Jan. 11; “Too Busy to Rest: Boundaries and Balance in a Nonstop World” by Lisa Naas Cook at Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham on Jan. 12; “Northwest Mixtape: Hip-Hop Culture and Influences” by Donnell Alexander at Jefferson County Library District Rodriguez Annex in Madras on Jan. 13 and Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham on Feb. 9; “White Out? The Future of Racial Diversity in Oregon” by Emily Drew at Tigard Public Library on Jan. 18, Corvallis-Benton County Public Library on Feb. 7, and Clackamas County Historical Society in Oregon City on Feb. 24; “What Do You Do?: Work and Worth in America” by Adam Davis at the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum

on Jan. 23; “Understanding Disability: Family and Community Stories” by Jill Crawford Hurt at the Eugene Public Library on Jan. 27 and McMinnvil e Public Library on Feb. 21; “How Much Inequality Is Acceptable?” by Julia Hammond at Rogue Community College in Medford and Grants Pass on Jan. 28, Hard Knocks Brewing in Cottage Grove on Jan. 29, and Central Oregon Community College in Bend on Feb. 11; “Life after War: Photography and Oral Histories of Coming Home” by Jim Lommasson at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City on Feb. 4; “Lost and Found: Community in the Age of the Internet” by Tod Sloan at McMinnville Public Library on Feb. 7; “Good Food, Bad Food: Agriculture, Ethics, and Personal Choice” by Kristy Athens at Corvallis–Benton County Public Library on Feb. 17 and Hard Knocks Brewing in Cottage Grove on Feb. 18; and “Mind the Gaps: How Gender Shapes Our Lives” by Jade Aguilar at Friendly House in Portland on Feb. 17.

Talking about Dying discussions take place at the Canby Public Library on Jan. 12 and at the Beaverton City Library on Jan. 19.

Adam Davis, executive director of Oregon Humanities leads a “Think & Drink” conversation with Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland on Feb. 16.

—Courtesy Humanities Washington

—Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, given in memory of William R. Coe and Mai Rogers Coe

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

DAVID GORDON DISCUSSES ENTOMOPHAGY, EATING INSECTS, IN WASHINGTON.

AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION • AROUND THE NATION

TENNESSEE Bobby Lovett gives the talk “War and the Struggle for African-American Equality” at the Fredonia Baptist Church in Stanton on Feb. 19 as part of the Geneva Miller Historical Society’s “Let’s Talk About War” series.

TEXAS “Eloquent Objects: Georgia O’Keeffe and Still Life Art in New Mexico,” featuring 45 paintings, is on display at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi through Jan. 3.

The Denton Public Library South Branch sponsors a book and discussion series featuring Texas Woman’s University professors Gray Scott and Ashley Bende on January 13 and February 10, respectively.

Traveling exhibitions on display include “Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America through Galveston Island” at the W. K. Gordon Center for Industrial History of Texas in Mingus through Jan. 18 and “In His Own Words: The Life and Work of César Chávez” at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art beginning Feb. 1.

“The Power of Children: Making a Difference,” a traveling exhibition documenting the lives of Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White is on view at the Altharetta Yeargin Art Museum in Houston during February.

The Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville hosts a photography exhibition, “Mennonites in Texas: The Quiet in the Land,” through February.

UTAH Educators and their families are invited to “We Dig History!” open house at the Ogden Union Stations Museums on Jan. 21 to provide feedback on the

ALASKA HOLDS ITS ANNUAL GOVERNOR’S AWARDS FOR THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES.

new program before it is offered to the public on Feb 6.

The Guest Writers Series at the University of Utah and the Center for the Book at Utah Humanities presents poet Dan Beachy-Quick at the Art Barn in Salt Lake City on Jan. 28. The Art Barn also hosts a Hivemind Book Club Conversation with Douglas Kearney and Raphael Dagold on Feb. 25.

WASHINGTON David Gordon, author of The Eat-aBug Cookbook, discusses entomophagy (eating insects) at Centralia College on Jan. 13 as an eco-friendly alternative to eating meat.

Storyteller and historian Eva Abram talks about the history of racism, and how it affects specific groups at China Harbor Restaurant in Seattle on Jan. 14.

VIRGINIA Documents Compass and Encyclopedia Virginia present a poster on Virginia Foundation for the Humanities’ contributions to the study of slavery at the American Historical Association Conference in Atlanta, Jan. 7–10.

WISCONSIN “ShopTalk: Let’s Talk about Work” programs take place around the state in January and February.

—Photo by Cheryl Senter

SOUTH DAKOTA The McLaughlin School District presents “Lakota Star Knowledge” to students and their families on Jan. 26 and 27, featuring interactive programs in a simulated planetarium as a way to teach traditional Lakota stories.

—Courtesy Alaska Humanities Forum

SOUTH CAROLINA The McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia hosts the “Sound, Silence, and South Carolina” conference on Feb. 26 and 27, featuring a panel discussion, paper presentations, a keynote speech by ethnomusicologist Mellonee Burnim, a performance workshop by Aunt Pearlie Sue and the Gullah Kinfolk, and an exhibit titled “Heard at Every Turn: Traditional Music in South Carolina.”

GWENDOLYN QUEZAIRE-PRESUTTI PORTRAYS RUNAWAY SLAVE ONEY JUDGE STAINES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

HUMANITIES 43

—Continued from page 23

things are hopeless is when I really begin to work.” He walked into his office in Wren that June, according to Elizabeth Hayes Goddard, and dictated a letter to her. “It was to be ‘a letter,’ he said, ‘that could have consequences so farreaching that they could be of national value for all time.’”

Goodwin paced back and forth, Hayes Goddard recalled, puffing on his pipe with “the look of the pioneer in his eyes.”

The letter was addressed to Edsel Ford, heir to the Ford Motor Company fortune and monopoly. Goodwin told Ford that he wanted his father to “buy Williamsburg. . . . No man yet has had the vision and courage to buy and preserve a Colonial village and Williamsburg is the one remaining Colonial village which any man could buy.” He wrote to Ford— and this is where you can imagine his imposing Piedmont baritone taking over—that “you and your father are at present the chief contributors to the destruction of this city.” He was speaking of the new concrete roads, the garages, and gas stations that were “fast spoiling the whole appearance of the old city.”

The scathing pitch letter was secretly forwarded to a newspaper editor in Detroit, and from there it went viral.

Goodwin came under attack for “huckstering off [the Old Dominion’s] ancient capital to an outsider, in order to get a flivver imitation of departed glory,” an editor ranted in the Baltimore Sun. The scolding responses only strengthened Goodwin’s resolve, according to Hayes Goddard.

In 1926, the clouds lifted. Goodwin got word from Dr. James E. Gregg, Hampton’s president, that Rockefeller wanted to see the old capital on his way back from visiting Hampton. He was finally coming. The visit proved fruitful.

Although Rockefeller didn’t commit to anything, he said he favored that “some means be found to save the old buildings from further destruction.” He also asked if any detailed plan had been drafted. Upon hearing this, Goodwin set to work, seven days a week, 16 hours a day.

In July, Goodwin became rector of Bruton Parish for the second time. The departing rector told him that the George Wythe house, which sat next to Bruton and was considered one of the grandest old homes still standing, was for sale.

Goodwin lobbied his vestry to buy the home, insisting they could use it for additional church space. The local chapter of the Colonial Dames of America intervened and raised the funds for a down payment. Soon afterwards, he immersed himself in Colonial architecture, seeking out national authorities on the subject.

The plan he ultimately presented that November to Rockefeller’s right-hand man, Colonel Arthur Woods, detailed a restoration that included the entire city, not just the college.

And it called for Williamsburg to be transformed into a “great teaching center” of founding principles.

I arrived at Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall and stopped in front of it. The building, which honors the prestigious academic honor society founded by William & Mary students in 1776, is the main performing arts complex on campus. It was quiet on this side of campus, but a few lights were on inside 44 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

the building, and the tinkling of a piano took center stage for a few moments. If there were a few buildings in Colonial Williamsburg that held happy memories for Goodwin, surely this was one of them (the present building replaced the original, which burned down in 1953). It was here, during a formal dinner, that Rockefeller gave Goodwin the green light to commission architectural renderings for the restoration of the Wren building. It was a cautious foot in the water, but, as far as Goodwin was concerned, it was all the splash he needed. As Goodwin later wrote, “Mr. Rockefeller then stated that he would associate himself with the endeavor to restore colonial Williamsburg!”

FROM THE START, ROCKEFELLER’S ORGANIZATION

envisioned a visitor experience shaped by Virginia hospitality and twentieth-century sensibilities. This meant heated buildings, indoor plumbing, restaurants, a recreated merchants’ square, fife and drum corps, and such aesthetic touches as tree-lined streets devoid of chickens and their scat. They wanted the restoration to pay for itself. Ever the purist, Goodwin chafed at such comforts and feared they would taint the “spiritual endeavor ” he envisioned. Dennis Montgomery adds, “He wanted you to feel like you were on hallowed ground and to leave feeling inspired and more committed to democratic values.”

Goodwin was appointed the local director of the entire operation, which meant that not only was he still acquiring properties, but he was also juggling the architects, builders, lawyers, and everyone else working some angle of this increasingly complicated operation. Rockefeller made it clear that the acquisition of homes and buildings, the title and deed work, the negotiations, the interfacing with locals at town meetings, all of it had to be handled by Goodwin and to leave Rockefeller ’s name out of the discussion—until he said otherwise.

By early 1930, Montgomery says, the restoration project nearly folded. “Everyone was pursuing different goals, and no one was talking to each other about what they were doing.” Over the next five years Goodwin’s role was exponentially diminished to the point that—although he was still a trustee—he wasn’t being invited to staff or trustee meetings. Kenneth Chorley, the restoration’s vice president and ultimately president, grew so annoyed with Goodwin griping about the commercialization of Colonial Williamsburg that Chorley refused even to let Goodwin use the foundation’s stationery, which Goodwin helped design.

Montgomery says that Goodwin’s relationship with Chorley and his colleagues grew so “acrimonious” toward the end that, after Goodwin’s death, Chorley “asked Goodwin’s son Rutherfoord to burn Goodwin’s correspondence with the president’s office to avoid embarrassing himself and the institution.” Despite the bad blood, Goodwin worked hard until the very end to nurture one relationship—that with Rockefeller. Goodwin’s family, says Montgomery, remained “distant from Colonial Williamsburg until the 1990s.”

BEFORE HEADING HOME, I WANDERED OVER

to Bassett Hall, one of the few destinations in CW I had never visited. During the early part of the restoration

—Jerry Shell

A REENACTOR AT COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG.

Rockefeller and his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, lived in this mid-eighteenth-century frame house tucked back off the road at the edge of the historic area. It was closing time—I could see docents walking to their cars—but that wasn’t a problem. I hadn’t come to tour the home.

I followed a long path that serpentined over some of the property’s 585 acres of gardens and rolling woodlands. I wanted to find the site of the Great Oak. On November 27, 1926, days after Rockefeller conceded serious interest in restoring the city, Goodwin showed his new partner the tree that stood 80 feet tall with a canopy 120 feet around, still bearing its sparkling autumn foliage. The tree was more than 300 years old when it toppled during a 1998 ice storm.

It was a tree and a spot that so entranced the philanthropist that he later wrote to Goodwin, “I have thought many times of that marvelous oak tree you took me to see and of the fall woods into which we looked. What a wonderful picture it was.” The moment seemingly radiated for the otherwise shy and reticent Rockefeller, as well it should, for this was the beginning of not just a partnership but a heady preservation effort the likes of which no one had ever seen.

Rockefeller showed a friendly, almost childlike deference toward Goodwin, whom he asked, “If I come back some day, can we bring our lunch down and eat it under the oak tree?”

Soon, it began to grow dark, and I sat down on an expanse of grass near an oak sapling, behind a small worm fence where the original oak had stood. From my backpack

I pulled leftovers, Stilton and jaegerwurst, and ate a picnic dinner. Spring peepers and crickets commanded the soundscape, which was disturbed only briefly by the distant sound of the last car leaving the parking lot. Alone, I closed my eyes and trained my ears to the deeper, nocturnal script: the stories the spirits still had to share.

Andrew Reiner’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. His essay about his quest to find E. B. White’s Maine was selected as “Notable” in the Best Travel Writing of 2015. He teaches in the Honors College at Towson University.

Since 1977, NEH has made 31 grants to Colonial Williamsburg.

Most recently, NEH awarded the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation a $250,000 grant to replace and upgrade its environmental systems at its art museums. In 2008, CW received a $1,000,000 challenge grant for which it raised $3,000,000, in support of long-term programming on the lives of African Americans during the Founding era. Other grants have supported research and programming related to Colonial and eighteenth-century history, bookbinding, church architecture, and archaeology. Sources: A Link Among the Days: The Life and Times of the Reverend Doctor W.A.R. Goodwin, the Father of Colonial Williamsburg by Dennis Montgomery, The Interpreter, Colonial Williamsburg, Summer 2001, A Memory Sketch of Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin 1921–1926 by Elizabeth Hayes Goddard, Wallace Ribble’s Norwood memoir, WPA of Virginia Historical Inventory of 1937 by Annie L. Harrower.

HUMANITIES 45

—Continued from page 11 More Shakespeare is obviously better than less. This edione volume, printed by Isaak Jaggard, in fol.” Isaac Jaggard tion of the Third Folio was more complete than any that came was William’s son, and he had taken on much of the responbefore. And the new, more complete Shakespeare was what sibility for the family business, as his aging father had gone was republished in 1685 in the Fourth Folio, and indeed again blind. Clearly they had hoped the book would be available in 1709 when Nicholas Rowe published his six-volume edifor sale, but it would not appear until the following year. tion of the plays.

Printing the book proved complicated, in part because There are many ironies to this, not least that two of these there were delays in acquiring rights to certain plays, but also plays are the two not by Shakespeare that Pavier and Jaggard because it wasn’t always the highest priority in the printing had misattributed to him in 1619: A Yorkshire Tragedy and 1 house. The presses stopped printing the First Folio to work Sir John Oldcastle. Indeed, of the belatedly added plays only on several other books, perhaps most importantly, Pericles has made its way from Jaggard’s point of view, a book of heraldry into the canon. The othby Augustine Vincent. Vincent’s book exposed nuers have become part of merous errors in the work of another herald, Ralph an “apocrypha.” They are Brooke. When some of Brooke’s mistakes had earthe ones not written by lier been identified, Brooke had blamed them on Shakespeare. But it is not the sloppy work of the printer and publisher, who clear how anyone could had been Jaggard. Vincent showed that the errors have known this in 1664 were matters of fact, not of typography, and Jagor 1685 or 1709. In addigard defended his reputation in a preface, insisting tion to the two “Pavier” that proof copies had been sent daily to Brooke, so plays that were published any errors were his own fault. Shakespeare was —The Tempest, Act IV, Scene iv as Shakespeare’s, The certainly not as important as this.

London Prodigal had been Late in 1623, however, the Shakespeare Folio published in 1605 as “By was finally finished. William Jaggard had died several William Shakespeare”; The History of Thomas Lord Cromwell weeks before. William Shakespeare had been dead for was published in 1602 as “Written by W. S.”; The Puritan seven years. But Heminge and Condell’s monument to Widow was published in 1607 and claimed to have been writtheir friend had reached print. But even then, in what ten by W. S.; and The Tragedy of Locrine was published in 1595 might seem the safest of circumstances, the book’s fate as “By W. S.” All of the added plays had been plausibly identiwas precarious. fied on earlier title pages as by Shakespeare. It would have Isaac Jaggard sent the sheets for the deposit copy to the been an irresponsible publisher who wouldn’t have wanted Bodleian Library at Oxford. In 1610, Thomas Bodley had to complete his Shakespeare and an irresponsible librarian arranged for “one perfect book” of every work printed in who wouldn’t have preferred a more complete edition to England to be sent to the library that he had established at the abridged one—and even come to think of the First Folio the university, though initially he had excluded “almanacs, as “superfluous,” since it was not yet a rare or valuable book. plays, and proclamations” as ephemera unworthy of colUnlike most stories of loss, the tale of the Bodleian First lection. There might be “some little profit” to be “reaped .

Folio has a happier ending than that of Edwin Forrest’s First . . out of some of our playbooks,” he wrote to his librarian, Folio. On January 25, 1905, W. G. Turbutt brought a copy of the but not enough to counteract “the scandal” to the library if Folio, which had been in his family at least since 1760, to the such unsuitable “riff-raff ” were allowed in.

Bodleian to ask about repairing it. The librarian recognized it Bodley died in 1613, and gradually playbooks would find as the original Bodleian copy, and suggested the library buy their way into the library, though by 1620 they still owned no it. A price was agreed upon and the money raised by public plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, or Beaumont and subscription. It was at the time the most money ever paid for a Fletcher. But the unbound sheets of the Shakespeare Folio single English book. It had taken a long time for this First Folio were sent to the university binder (who bore the wonderful to come home, but it had taken a long time for the First Folio name, William Wildegoose) on February 17, 1624; and it was to become, . . . well, the First Folio: a book so precious that bound and chained, as most big books were, to a shelf in Duke even a few charred pages are worth venerating.

Humphrey’s Library. It stayed there until 1664, when it was apparently deaccessioned (as librarians say) as one of a group David Scott Kastan is the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, a general editor of the Arden Shakespeare, and of “superfluous Library Books sold by order of the Curators” the author of many publications on Shakespeare and his contemand purchased by an Oxford bookseller for 24 pounds. poraries. His most recent book is A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and What made the book “superfluous” was that a new Religion (Oxford University Press, 2014). edition had appeared that year that seemed better able to deliver the plays written by Shakespeare: the second issue “First Folio!, The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” is a partnership of the third edition of the Folio collection. It seems to us an between the Folger Library, the Cincinnati Museum Center, and unthinkable, even an irresponsible, decision on the part of the American Library Association. The Folger received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to implethe library. But, in 1664, the second issue of the third ediment this national traveling exhibition, which opens January 4 at tion reasonably seemed the more desirable to own, renderboth the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and the Sam Noble ing the First Folio “superfluous.” This new version boasts Museum in Norman, Oklahoma. William Shakespeare is, of course, that “unto this Impression is added seven Playes, never the subject of numerous NEH-supported projects over the years, before Printed in Folio. Viz. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The including eight summer institutes, since 1990, for 775 high school London Prodigall. The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. teachers, run by the Folger. In 2013, NEH awarded a grant of Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A $500,000 to WNET to produce Shakespeare Uncovered, six one-hour documentaries on the plays.

Yorkshire Tragedy. [and] The Tragedy of Locrine.”

“ We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is

rounded with a sleep.”

46 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Deadlines EDUCATION PROGRAMS

William Craig Rice, Director • 202-606-8500 • education@neh.gov Seminars and Institutes Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Directors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Landmarks Workshops for School Teachers Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Directors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Humanities Initiatives at Historically Black, Hispanic-Serving, and Tribal Colleges and Universities . . . . . . .

Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dialogues on the Experience of War: A Standing Together Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Application guidelines and forms are available online at www.neh.gov TDD: 866-372-2930

DEADLINE

PROJECTS BEGINNING

March 1, 2016 Summer 2016 February 25, 2016 Summer 2017 March 1, 2016 February 25, 2016 June 23, 2016 September 7, 2016 September 15, 2016

Summer 2016 Summer 2017 January 2017 May 2017 May 2017

PRESERVATION AND ACCESS PROGRAMS

Nadina Gardner, Director • 202-606-8570 • preservation@neh.gov Humanities Collections and Reference Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . July 19, 2016

Documenting Endangered Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . September 15, 2016 Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . December 1, 2016 National Digital Newspaper Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 14, 2016 Preservation Assistance Grants for Smaller Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 3, 2016 Preservation and Access Education and Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 3, 2016

Preservation and Access Research and Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 21, 2016 Common Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . May 12, 2016

May 2017 May 2017 September 2017 September 2016 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Karen S. Mittelman, Director • 202-606-8269 • publicpgms@neh.gov Museums, Libraries, and Cultural Institutions Planning and Implementation Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 13, 2016 Media Projects Development and Production Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . January 13, 2016 Digital Projects for the Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 8, 2016

September 2016 September 2016 January 2017

RESEARCH PROGRAMS

Jane Aikin, Director • 202-606-8200 • research@neh.gov Fellowships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Summer Stipends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Collaborative Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Scholarly Editions and Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Awards for Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Awards for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Awards for Faculty at Tribal Colleges and Universities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Public Scholar Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

April 28, 2016 September 29, 2016 December 9, 2016 December 9, 2016 August 16, 2016 April 14, 2016 April 14, 2016 April 14, 2016 February 2, 2016

January 2017 May 2017 October 2017 October 2017 January 2018 January 2017 January 2017 January 2017 October 2016

CHALLENGE GRANTS

Katja Zelljadt, Director • 202-606-8309 • challenge@neh.gov Next Generation Humanities PhD Planning Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 17, 2016 Next Generation Humanities PhD Implementation Grants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . February 17, 2016

August 2016 August 2016

OFFICE OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Brett Bobley, Director • odh@neh.gov Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Humanities Open Book Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Digital Humanities Implementation Grants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

March 15, 2016 September 2016 September 13, 2016 May 2017 September 21, 2016 May 2017 February 17, 2016 September 2016

FEDERAL STATE PARTNERSHIPS

Scott Krawczyk, Director • 202-606-8254 • fedstate@neh.gov Each state humanities council establishes its own grant guidelines and application deadlines.

THE COMMON GOOD/STANDING TOGETHER Eva Caldera, Office of the Chairman • www.neh.gov/commongood

HUMANITIES 47

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES 400 7th Street SW Washington, D.C. 20506

PERIODICALS POSTAGE & FEES PAID NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES PUB. NO. 531-230

Official Business Penalty for Private Use, $300.00 ISSN 0018-7526

www.neh.gov