Justin Kaplanarcheology

The ITH M Justin KaplanArcheology Y PHIL S B PHOTO of E M Remembered Lives THE WRITER IN HIS TRURO HO JUSTIN KAPLAN had no early dream of being picture himself as a “double orphan.” An uncle money than Walt Whitman, but Whitman did a writer. As a boy, he was busy civilizing himself. shepherded him until his older brother, Howard, have a small amount, and that was all he needed. His father, Tobias, born in Russia, was an ortho- was old enough to become his legal guardian. Kaplan’s biography Mr. Clemens and Mark dox Jew who dreamed of becoming a rabbi, until In his memoir Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s Twain was publishedBy Christopher in 1966, winning Busa both the he immigrated to America, where he prospered New York, written in alternating chapters with his Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Walt as a businessman. By the end of the Depression, wife, Anne Bernays, Kaplan remembers wonder- Whitman: A Life, published in 1980, also won a Na- his family emerged, Kaplan said, “moderately ing: “What will become of me?” tional Book Award. His next major inquiry into wealthy.” His immigrant family had become Indeed this question haunted him for two de- the era, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, investigated Americans, living on native grounds. cades, opening up concerns about identity, lineage, the investigators of corruption. Steffens was The Kaplans lived in a comfortable apartment family allegiance, and career accomplishment. The called a “muckraker,” a word that is derived from on the Upper West Side in New York, where Justin primal example shown by his father’s endurance John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, castigating those attended the nearby progressive Center School. On and success in handling hard times became a “who cannot look up to heaven because they are snowy days, he sledded in Central Park. At sum- model for the son’s perseverance through his own so obsessed with the muck of worldly profit.” mer baseball games, he lusted after the hot dogs turbulent foreground. Kaplan was mindful that But President Theodore Roosevelt said, “The his father forbade. He read the New Testament on his father had the practical sense to leave his son a men with the muck-rakes are often indispensible the sly. He began to suspect a Puritanical dimen- confidence-building trust fund. For years, his cir- to our well being. They inquire into and publish sion of Judaism in its denial of joy, spontaneity, cumstances embarrassed and emboldened him at scandal or allegation of corruption.” and tennis. He learned to enjoy quotation guessing once. His skin suffered from acute dermatitis that Exploring the historical convulsions of the games, delighting at the nimbleness of language to was soothed by the excitement of a compensatory post–Civil War decades, and the literary efforts to dance out of difficulty. He paid attention to apho- itch to excel scholastically. He learned about “the describe them, became Kaplan’s life’s work. Huge risms, epigrams, parables, proverbs, and otherwise difference between no money and a small amount transformations were taking place. The railroad pithy utterances. He learned Hebrew. When he of money compared to the difference between became transcontinental; time zones were created was seven, his mother died. When he was on the a small amount of money and vast amounts of to adjust vast distances to a common clock. Fron- verge of puberty, his father died. Kaplan came to money.” Mark Twain may have had much more tiers closed. Western territories became states. 98 PROVINCETOWNARTS 2010 The invention of barbed wire kept buffalo out of more film and pop culture references. Setting high marred Whitman’s poems: “While you farm pastures. Steel was forged in spider thread as standards for politicians, he was criticized harshly think it is his highest merit that he is so strong as massive stone, allowing floors and walls for not finding examples of eloquence in Ronald unlike anybody else, to me this seems to to be hung in the sky. At impressive heights, tiny Reagan’s speeches. But he found truths in utter- be his demerit.” Arnold coined the widely from the street, construction workers appeared to ances that echoed real insights into our ethos, such used term “touchstone” to situate step- maneuver as securely as insects bobbing on a leaf as Gore Vidal’s observation, “Film is the lingua ping points in the progress of literature. and as thrillingly as high-wire circus performers. franca of our time.” Kaplan said to me more than In my understanding, a touchstone is Inventions abounded: the telegraph, typewriter, once that it was a misconception to say that, when akin to an annotated essay upon a quo- telephone, mimeograph machine, lightbulb, and literary people get together, they talk about litera- tation from Bartlett’s, a way of remember- camera. ture. The truth is rather, the talk is about movies. ing consolidated wisdom in the language Following his major biographies, Kaplan The chronological arrangement of Bartlett’s of the original. Matthiessen established published a shorter book about those with a vast significant sayings has always served as a strik- the idea that American literature had its amount of money: When the Astors Owned New York: ingly emotional guide to the evolution of Western Elizabethan equivalent in the writings Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (2006). civilization. Antique wisdom is freshly polished, of Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne The fortune amassed by John Jacob Astor was its youth showing through its age. In the intro- and Melville, Longfellow and Whitman, riters dispersed to his heirs when he died in 1848, and duction to his edition of Bartlett’s, Kaplan spoke and that the idiom of the subsequent the wealth swelled exponentially during the nine- of “inviting readers to travel over land masses and generation was born between 1850 and teenth and twentieth centuries. Kaplan details an archeological layers of remembered words.” The 1855, when Emerson published Nature, W array of signs and symbols that were displays of genius of Bartlett’s is that its subsequent editions Thoreau Walden, Melville Moby-Dick, W luxury, and he reads them with the acumen of an are plotted through continuing time, where small Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter, Longfellow anthropologist and the exactness of a sociological twists of thinking are often noticed in language Hiawatha, and Whitman Leaves of Grass. micro-study in the manner of Erving Goffman: that becomes vastly popular, signifying a common Today Matthiessen is widely credited interest. Often money is involved, and trading be- with initiating the proliferation of uni- The private palaces of the robber barons of tween states or countries. Sometimes a marriage versity programs in American studies. riters the Gilded Age had outgrown their limits and between the children of rival countries creates He was a champion of political causes. evolved into the grand hotel, an establishment the occasion for some fresh discourse. Kaplan de- Writing at a time when America was bigger and grander and more impressive than scribed his efforts as “both intellectual history and fighting in Europe, Matthiessen fos- any private palace: accessible and logical, or- cultural montage, a key to past and present taste.” tered the radical yet patriotic idea that ganized from cellar scullery to roof garden on Justin Kaplan At Harvard, Kaplan majored in English, receiv- American literature, in its contempo- principles of comfort and display married to ing a Bachelor of Science degree in 1946. I was efficiency, ingenuity, fanatical attention to rary vitality, rivaled the best that could detail, technical improvement, and publicity. curious why he did not receive a Bachelor of Arts be thought or said across the Atlantic. Combining the functions of marketplace and degree, and he told me that Latin was required, Matthiessen was also discreetly open town square, the hotel lobby, only recently and he had not passed his exams. We sat in his as a gay man, his romantic relationship evolved from barroom and parlor, became high-ceilinged office, lined with books, on the said to be an “open secret”; he shared one of the theaters of modern life. ground floor of his century-old house on Francis two decades with the painter Russell Avenue in Cambridge. Cheney, spending summers in Kittery, Now luxury touched everybody. Kaplan quotes I asked, “Given your interest in languages, why Maine. When Cheney, much older, Émile Zola’s description of the “democratic lux- did you not zip through Latin?” died, Matthiessen, a few years later at ury of department stores,” which offers “ordinary “I’ll tell you. War broke out when I came to age forty-eight, committed suicide. Last people the opportunity to view and touch expen- college. I saw that if you were studying premed year Harvard University announced sive goods of all sorts without obliging them to you were in a better position for an exemption plans to endow a chair called the F. O. buy anything.” from the draft and in a better position when you Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Kaplan remembers that his father, drawn to finally were drafted. Instead of the Latin I should Gender and Sexuality. Russia, would read Dostoevsky in his evenings have been taking, I did horrible work in chemis- When he was a student, Kaplan said, “Ameri- after work, as a way of thinking about Russia. On try and biology courses. Really hideous. I couldn’t can lit was way, way down on the scale. It existed Justin’s twelfth birthday, his father gave him a copy even look reliably through a microscope. I was a and was barely acknowledged. Matthiessen woke of the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

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