Lit Friday

It took me almost a lifetime to finally visit the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan.  Pegasus once served as the organization's seal which seems kind of cool until you check out the winged horse's genealogy:  sired by Poseidon and foaled by Medusa!

The Academy is relying on its membership to come up with a new one, like this owl by Joan Jonas.  As a former Dowel Owl, I'm charmed, but the line drawing does lack the grandeur of its predecessor.

That's probably a step in the right direction.  The Academy, a membership organization founded in 1898, has been evolving for as long as that.  I got a lot more out of a visit to its website than the three buildings on Audubon Terrace, which also houses the Hispanic Museum and Library.  A little TLC could restore the terrace's considerable faded glory.  I particularly liked the statue of a charging El Cid and the bas relief of Don Quixote.

Three hundred American writers, artists, musicians and architects comprise the Academy. Foreign peers fill another 50 seats. This very exclusive, curriculum-vitae-burnishing club awards prizes of $5,000 to $25,000--many to younger creatives in these disciplines who aren't necessarily members. 

For example, Foreign Honorary Member E. M. Forster bequeathed royalties from the sale of Maurice to member Christopher Isherwood who arranged with the Academy to establish an award named for the older author to provide a cash prize (now worth $20,000) to young British or Irish writers for a stay in the United States.  Winners of the E.M. Forster Award have included Sally Rooney (2019),  Jez Butterworth (2007), Nick Hornby (1999), Colm Toibin (1995) and Alan Hollinghurst (1991).  Now that's what I call a significant ROI!

And why has someone who reads as much as I never heard of the William Dean Howells Medal? It's named for the father of American realism--he wrote The Rise of Silas Lapham, a book I was assigned as an English major at Columbia--and recognizes the best novel published by an American author during the past five years.  What should be as prestigious as the Man Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award isn't. Too many Academy prizes and too few competent Academy publicists may be the problem.  I'll definitely be adding The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, the last winner, to my reading list.

New members are elected to replace those who died.  Surviving members eulogize those who have passed; these tributes--they go all the way back to 1905--are archived on the website.   Here's how Harold Bloom assessed Gore Vidal in 2012:  

When I try to sum up Gore's literary achievement, I would place Lincoln first, and then the novel Burr. In a very different mode, the sublime nastiness of Myra Breckinridge achieves a rancidity that Gore raises to a level of aesthetic splendor.

Other notable pairings include John Guare on Edward Albee; John Updike on Kurt Vonnegut; Edward Albee on Arthur Miller; Toni Morrison on James Baldwin;  and James Dickey on Truman Capote.  

But back to the IRL Academy itself.  Under a different structure, early in its history, it had what I'll call a "star chamber," at least for book nerds like me.  BTW, that statue under the arch seems to move around, at least in historical photos. 

Metal plates denote who sat in each numbered chair.  Rachel Carson, Tennessee Williams, Alexander Calder and Norman Mailer were among those who planted their butts in number 19.

An exhibition of collages called "Knots" by Lucy Sante--my second since returning to New York this spring--drew me to the Academy in the first place.  BTW, she's not a member and I learned from the chatty young man keeping an eye on the library that Sante isn't a member and the Academy uses much of its space to exhibit works by artists who aren't.

He described the art form this way to the New York Times in April:

One principle of collage, for me is you have to kill one thing to make another. It’s a small-scale model of revolutionary behavior.

Sante's distinctive collages are hung in the Academy's Library.  

I must confess that I spent as much time checking out the shelves--which include every book published by or about a member--as the collages.  They're arranged alphabetically by the member's last name, in this case Allen Ginsberg.  Unfortunately, members whose last name falls after the letter "G" are kept in a non-public area due to lack of space, one of several frustrations I encountered during my visit.

Nor are visitors allowed to pull them from the shelves which, while understandable, remains irritating to a book nerd.  The collected works of Robert W. Chambers occupy all five shelves on the left side of this bookcase.  "Who?" you might ask, as I did but I had to wait for Wikipedia to answer the question.  

I also embarrassed myself when I asked why works by Mark Twain occupied one library corner.  "Because his real name was Samuel Clemens," I was told by the chatty young man. 

Mark Twain by Abbott Handerson Thayer (1881)

Yes, but had he read Willa Cather, Edith Wharton or Henry James (all members) who are represented in the gallery upstairs where items from the Academy's permanent collection are exhibited?  

This novel was the initial selection of a book club I organized not long after graduating from college

1926 Edition

. . . I still haven't gotten over the disappointment of Apple TV cancelling Sofia Coppola's planned adaptation of The Custom of the Country

Edith Wharton (at the age of 18) by
Edward H. May (1881)

. . . and The Portrait of a Lady remains my favorite classic novel of American literature.

Henry James by Abbott Handerson Thayer (ca 1881)

The unnamed gallery (a missed funding opportunity for sure) looks over Trinity Church Cemetery.  Two Academy members--John James Audubon and Ralph Ellison--are buried there.

The gallery has the opposite problem of the library:  too much space, particularly for the small size of most of the items exhibited except for the wall of paintings by Eugene Speicher, a successful 20th century portraitist.  Without ever having read a word by Robert W. Chambers, the library hog downstairs, I'm pretty certain I can say that I admired his paintings a lot more even if his body of work seems to have suffered the same fate.  IMHO, it's time for a reappraisal!

"Girl in Velvet Dress"

"Girl in Flower Dress" 

I ended my perfect Friday afternoon by walking nearly four miles south on Broadway to Barnes & Noble where German author Daniel Kehlmann was promoting the paperback release of The Director.  During a chance encounter in the elevator before the discussion and book signing, I got to tell him it was the best modern novel I've read in years.  He definitely deserves to become an Academy FHM for his literary reinvention of fiction based on historical figures and circumstances!

MJ Franklin & Daniel Kehlmann