BOOK REVIEWS 163 Biography Is Based
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BOOK REVIEWS 163 biography is based. And “well constructed” is just the sort of book Gridley Bryant would have expected from his biographer. Jonathan M. Beagle is an Assistant Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at Western New England College. His review of James Grant’s John Adams: Party of One and Andrew S. Trees’s The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character ap- peared in the September 2005 edition of the Quarterly. A Place for the Arts: The MacDowell Colony, 1907–2007. Edited by Carter Wiseman. (Peterborough, N. H.: MacDowell Colony, 2006. Pp. xiii, 227; 115 illustrations. $39.95.) In 1896, American composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, pianist Marian, purchased a farm in Peterborough, New Hampshire. At the time, Edward, the first head of Columbia University’s music department, would often escape the hurly-burly and pressures of New York and retreat to the quiet woods to compose. Sometimes when Edward was absorbed in his work, Marian would quietly leave a basket holding his lunch on the cabin porch. When her husband died in 1908, Marian decided to honor his memory by establishing a colony where other artists might enjoy the same quiet and solitude that Edward had treasured so dearly. Marian remained active in colony affairs until the day she died, at age ninety-nine; indeed, “several people received letters from her written” that very morning of 23 August 1956 (p. 102). In the last hundred years, the list of those who’ve experienced the MacDowell Colony’s legacy of splendid solitude comprises a virtual “who’s who” of American arts and letters. It was in a cabin deep in the MacDowell woods where Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town; where Leonard Bernstein put the finishing touches on Mass; and where Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Milton Avery, Willa Cather, Aaron Copland, Galway Kinnell, Virgil Thompson, and thousands of other dedicated, talented (if less well known) artists benefited from what Edward MacDowell had cherished: the time, space, and privacy to create. A Place for the Arts was commissioned by the colony on the oc- casion of its one-hundredth anniversary. According to project editor Carter Wiseman, the intent was “to document—and, to some extent, explain—the relentlessly creative evolution of MacDowell” (p. 10). The book includes eleven thoughtful and elegant essays by former Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.1.163 by guest on 25 September 2021 164 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY fellows (or “colonists,” as they’re known locally). Journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg observes that the MacDowell doesn’t just provide space and time to work, it offers “a landscape, both natural and artificial, that is powerful enough to overlay whatever habitat we consider our- selves native to. I mean the moment when the inevitability of your surroundings falls away, and you see under the skin of the world you live in” (p. 24). Poet Kevin Young comments that he usually finds the distractions of his San Francisco home pleasant and inspiring but that “it’s another thing to learn to write without distraction, to face every day the blank page that is already inscribed with fear of both failure and success” (p. 39). Marian MacDowell’s lunch basket deliveries began what might be the colony’s most treasured and enduring tradition, one that colonist Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, considers “the ultimate gift of a sojourn at MacDowell.” “Anyone can find a desk,” Reichl suggests, “but a lunch that whispers encouragement is a very fine thing. It is edible acknowledgement that your work is worthwhile” (p. 44). A Place for the Arts includes a comprehensive history of the colony written by Robin Rausch, a music specialist at the Library of Congress. A compelling portrait of Marian MacDowell is the focal point of the piece. Generous, loyal, resourceful, and fiercely commit- ted to the welfare of the colonists and staff, she comes across as a force of nature whose influence is still felt strongly today, more than fifty years after her passing. But Rausch’s history is much more than an extended love note to the colony’s grande dame; he also shines a light on some of the MacDowell’s darker moments, such as the jealousies and conflicts that inevitably emerge in such a charged at- mosphere and the ungraceful way the elderly and ailing Marian was relieved of the directorship. Histories and biographies commissioned by the subject often give the reader the feeling of being held cap- tive by a Chamber of Commerce tour guide, but Rausch’s balanced approach helps avoid that pitfall. A Place for the Arts is a handsome coffee-table book, replete with beautifully reproduced photographs—vintage and new—that evoke the bucolic wooded setting, offer peeks into the studios (every one dif- ferent), and show artists through the decades at work and at play. The volume offers a fascinating view of America’s first—and preeminent— artist’s colony. As a journey through the book’s pages makes clear, after one hundred years of nurturing both the bodies and spirits of its guests, the MacDowell Colony appears to be just getting warmed up. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.1.163 by guest on 25 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 165 Charles Coe is Program Coordinator at the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His collection of poems, Picnic on the Moon, was pub- lished in 1999. American Silk, 1830–1930: Entrepreneurs and Artifacts.By Jacqueline Field, Marjorie Senechal, and Madelyn Shaw. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. Pp. xxvii, 320.$45.00.) Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing. By Mary Beaudry. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 236. $55.00.) If this review is about books—specifically two new studies related to the history of textiles and sewing—it is also about books, that is, bundles of raw silk, “white and glistening ...containing an incalcula- ble length of reeled fiber” (American Silk, p. 102). Like the books that provide raw materials for our intellectual activities, books of silk contain ever smaller bundles of material (mosses, then skeins) that must be opened, sorted, and graded; in time, the silk is reconfig- ured, woven and transformed by other makers into something new. The symmetry between the silk and scholarly enterprises is appeal- ing, for obvious reasons—a small homonymic tidbit that is but one of the many small pleasures contained in the two works considered here. American Silk is unusual in that it embodies the work of three scholars engaged in three separate projects arrayed in succession more so than formulated in collaboration. The book has three parts, each of which, in the neighborhood of ninety pages (mosses, if you will) discusses one element in the history of American silk: The Nonotuck Silk Company (1830–80) of Northampton, Massachusetts; the Haskell Silk Company (1874–1930) of Westbrook, Maine; and H. R. Mallinson & Company (twentieth century) of New York, New Jersey, and Penn- sylvania. Together, these case studies provide an overview of the silk industry in the United States. Senechal’s account quite usefully begins with the earliest attempts at sericulture in the future United States, including the settlement at Jamestown, where silk occupied some part of the colonists’ attention until the starving winter of 1609 focused their thoughts on more pressing matters (the silkworm, we learn, was also featured on Georgia’s colonial seal). The story of the Nonotuck Silk Company details early silk crazes, the Northampton Association of Education and Industry (a utopian community devoted to aboli- tion), and the particular challenges of manufacturing serviceable silk Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.1.163 by guest on 25 September 2021.