Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [414]
74 Unlike most The British novelist Arnold Bennett visited New York 15 months before the Armory Show and was dismayed at the low esteem in which Europhile Americans held their own culture. “They associate art with Florentine frames, matinée hats, distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead.” Bennett, Your United States (New York, 1912), 163–64.
75 He felt that TR, “A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition,” TR, Works, 14.405ff. Originally published in The Outlook, 29 Mar. 1913.
76 Roosevelt was in Journalistic glimpses of TR at the Armory Show describe his pace as leisurely and his mood one of calm enjoyment. He was escorted by Arthur B. Davies, president of the exhibition, Walt Kuhn, and Robert W. Chanler. The following account of what he saw is based on TR’s above-cited article, and on a virtual, though partial, tour of the exhibition compiled by Shelley Staples for the University of Virginia at http://xroads.virginia.edu/. Extra visual details, and identification of the artworks that caught TR’s eye, come from the scrapbooks, photographs, and clippings collected by Walt Kuhn in WCF. The Kuhn archive also includes a complete typed list of all the exhibits.
77 He was predisposed TR, Works, 14.410. Chanler (1872–1930) was a French-trained muralist whose intricately woven style was inspired by the polyphony of J. S. Bach. (Chanler, Roman Spring, 188–89.) For TR’s “American ideal” in the creative arts, see Taubenfeld, Rough Writers, 2–12, and Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR, 65–79.
78 It was clear that Davies (1862–1928) was, despite his romantic style, a member of “The Eight.” Considered by many in his day to be the greatest living American artist, he was an enthusiastic promoter of the European avant-garde. It was largely due to him that the Armory Show, originally intended as a survey of American art, became international. Davies selected most of the foreign works on display, leaving the American galleries to his colleague William Glackens.
79 Roosevelt was taken TR, Works, 14.410. Ms. Myers’s satiric sculpture is illustrated in The Century Magazine, 85.4 (Aug. 1913).
Biographical Note: TR’s casual evocation of the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus in reference to a piece of contemporary American sculpture might have struck some readers of his review as “showing off.” But nobody viewing the carved figures and reading the poem—both invoking nervous, chatterboxy, overdressed women, recoiling from yet half-excited by the press of flesh in a crowded street—could dispute the brilliance of the analogy. Such aperçus were so much a feature of his private conversation and correspondence that he could have published more of them if he chose.
TR’s memory was as comprehensive as it was photographic. It went far beyond the normal politician’s knack of remembering names and faces, although his ability in that regard was phenomenal. What he saw or heard, and in particular what he read, registered with an almost mechanistic clarity. A few days after the Armory Show, he received a letter from KR, asking if he could remember the words of a poem by Edith Thomas (1854–1925) about exile south of the border.
“[It] runs as follows, I think,” TR replied, and wrote in his clear hand: Beside the lake whose wave is hushed to hear, / The surf beat of a sea on either hand, / Far from Castile, / Afar in Toltec land, / Fearless I died who living knew not fear. / Dark faces frowned between me and the sky; / The Gordian knife drove deep; life grew a dream / Far from Castile! / Who heard my cry extreme / That held the sum of partings? / World, goodbye! (TR to KR, 26 Mar. 1913, ts. [TRC].)
He was not copying. His punctuation