A MEMORANDUM
TO: Prank Smallwood '51 V.P. and Dean for Student Affairs FROM: Richard Hovey '85 SUBJ: ART
IN SOOTH, yours is a nice poetical title, although a little light in scansion. "And the smallwood and the murals. ..." There are a lot of zurn, zurn, zurns before that, but perhaps you've already heard too much of them, buzzing around, and don't want to hear any more.
It has come to me, up here in Arcadie (indeed it has been wafted, by spirits hand-crafted), that there is trouble among the hills, the shaggy hills. It has been whispered in lute song, in almost Aleutsong, that the murals in my room in Thayer Hall (Ah, Ma Thayer! "That breakfast next morning/(A subject she's scorning)/Is mighty uncertain!"), are being fleered at by unco' youth. It is being bruited about that these pastiches by Mr. Humphrey - of what one observer called "voluptuous Indian maidens and muscular braves" - should be covered up, or taken down.
They are, Elysian messengers have told me, illustrations for my lyrics, "Eleazar Wheelock." Well, you know, those lyrics were an amusement of mine, withal a genuinely sentimental one, and they seem to me to be a nice counterbalance to all that "granite of New Hampshire" and "rock-boned and wind-blown sibyl of the snows" that I used in other Dartmouth verse.
But, alas, the word also susurating through the empyrean is that "Eleazar Wheelock" is never - or seldom - sung by four good fellows (or even by fourscore good fellows and good girls in glee clubs assembled). The reason, my Muses tell me, dimly o'er the void, is that the murals and lyrics are offensive to what I once called "the tribesmen autumned-skinned,/Silent and slow as clouds, whose footing passed/Down the remote trails of oblivion."
Well, look you, Franklin: I cannot answer for Mr. Humphrey and his murals, although 1 was never one to throw down artists, but I can say this. If you are to have the wolf-wind wailing at the doorways and the hill-winds knowing your name, no matter how many logs you throw in the fire, you may jolly well need five hundred gallons of New England rum - and the bowls well filled-up.
Not to mention voluptuous Indian maidens. Have I not said that "I have played/With the sleek Naiads in the splash of pools/And made a mock of gowned and trousered fools"?
No, I did not mock the Indians; nor, I think, did Mr. Humphrey (though, as I say, I cannot speak for him). I did once say about America's tortured search for culture in the late 19th century, "Some people think originality in American art means aboriginality. If an American painter paints a Sioux Indian, he does it as much from the outside as an Englishman or' a Frenchman would. Neither did American literature come out of the picture-writing of Lake Superior nor will American architecture be an efflorescence of the wigwam."
Do not the undergraduates of your day occasionally have this impulse (as I did)?
"I have need of the sky.
I have business with the grass.
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, Lone and high."
Or do they think themselves pharasaic arbiters of taste, grass or no grass? For, remember, Franklin:
"Here we are free To be good or bad, Sane or mad, Merry or grim As the mood may be, Free as the whim Of a spook on a spree— Free to be oddities, Not mere commodities, Stupid and salable, Wholly available, Ranged upon shelves; Each with his puny form, In the same uniform. Cramped and disabled; We are not labelled, We are ourselves."
And watch out for those zum, zum zums, will you?
