Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900: Ralph Adams Cram, Life and Architecture. - book reviews

Cousin Jasper was right. In his advice to Charles Ryder, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, upon the latter's coming-up to Oxford, Jasper lists people and groups to be avoided: "Beware of the Anglo-Catholics--they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents." If we are to believe the most recent of the novelist's biographers--assuming Charles Ryder is, indeed, his alter ego--Waugh did nothing of the kind. Neither did Ralph Adams Cram, the American architect, convert to Anglo-Catholicism from New Hampshire Unitarianism, and one of the founders of Commonweal.

Although the Oxford Apostles (Newman, Keble, Pusey, etc.) were uninterested in ceremony as such, later phases of the Oxford Movement did in fact connect traditional Anglican doctrine with increasingly elaborate ritual. Thus emerged the aesthetic wing of Anglo-Catholicism. It has been something of a commonplace that "high" Episcopalianism, especially when actively prohibited by ecclesiastical authorities--as was the case in both England and the United States during the nineteenth century--served as a religious shelter for sexual outsiders. Thus Cousin Jasper's sweeping albeit unkind generalization.

Ralph Adams Cram is best remembered--when he is remembered--for his hundreds of churches and college buildings from New York to California: West Point, New York's Saint Thomas Church, the unfinished Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Princeton's chapel and the graduate school, Rice University, the never-built Japanese Parliament buildings, and many, many others. The author of this learned and first of two-volume study on Cram proposes the thesis that late nineteenth-century Boston aestheticism and bohemianism served as code words for homosexuality, and that Cram, both formed in and contributing to that cultural model, cannot be understood without taking account of it. Shand-Tucci makes a very good case for his thesis, namely that a brilliant band of architects, painters, poets, photographers, book designers, and musicians formed a company of like-minded votaries worshiping at a shrine designed by the Pre-Raphaelites, set to music by Richard Wagner, and presided over by the divine Oscar himself. The vexing question which keeps recurring as one reads this long and fascinating book is, "Who cares?"

Shand-Tucci obviously does, for he sees in the very diverse productions of the Boston Bohemians a sensibility charged with homoeroticism which in turn bestows on them a "modernism" hitherto unremarked upon by cultural historians. The author describes Cram's early masterpiece, All Saints, in Ashmont, Massachusetts, as "voluptuous," arguing that his buildings were "not only expressive of [Cram's] conscious beliefs and convictions, religious and artistic, but also of his unconscious life." He likens Cram's churches to "Trojan Horses in Puritan New England," but reads into all of Cram's early work a startlingly contemporary aesthetic. The conservative Gothicist was yet to come. Architectural Gothicist was yet to come. Architectural historians have fixed on Frank Lloyd Wright as having introduced Japanese art and architecture to an American audience, but at about the same time or earlier Cram was building superb residences influenced by Japanese domestic architecture and his own book on Japan's arts continues in print one hundred years later.

A memory of some of Cram's group survives: photographers still esteem the pioneering work of Fred Holland Day; books designed by Daniel Updike fetch big prices among knowing bibliophiles. One of the few women associated with the Boston Bohemians, the poet Louise Imogen Guiney, was a committed feminist and, in a recent biography, is described as "the first modern nun." The varied buildings of Cram and his partner (and, according to the author, possible lover) Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, have rekindled enthusiasm among post-modern architects and architectural historians. For the rest, alas, their names are forgotten.

Shand-Tucci, however, joins a growing number of cultural historians in decrying the "closet-ing" of uranism, as homoeroticism was then termed, as a formative influence upon the arts, and architecture in particular. Once more the love that dare not speak its name is broadcast as vastly more important a cultural factor than has been previously allowed. If this book sounds like a lovingly researched, massively learned, and regrettably repetitive "outing," so be it. No student of American architecture or indeed of our wider culture will want to miss it, because it not only introduces readers to what the author claims to be the first American avant-garde but revives awareness of an extraordinarily gifted and once-influential architect.

Volume 2 of this study is eagerly awaited. There the mature Cram, whose fervent medievalism was combined with New Deal liberalism, will receive the long overdue attention he and his work deserve. As his role in the founding of this magazine testifies, Ralph Adams Cram was not only a remarkable architect who changed the character of American church buildings, but a social critic whose message, had it been heeded, would have made for a very different world from the one we live in. Along with critics like Lewis Mumford (a Commonweal contributor), he believed that the evolution from small, organic communities (Gemeinschaft) to huge, soulless cities (Gesellschaft) has wrought terrible damage on the human spirit. In addition, after a long life of single-minded commitment to the beauty of worship coupled with a selfless devotion to a wife afflicted by mental illness for much of their marriage, a strong argument can be made that he was a saint.

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