Whispering Pines: Twelve Days in May (1925)

In this month’s column, John Cross ’76 writes about Bowdoin’s Institute of Modern Literature, which for almost two weeks in the spring of 1925, seemed like the center of the universe for contemporary American literature.

Not a week passes during the academic year without one or more lectures, performances, or exhibits by scholars and artists of note who are drawn to the campus and to the vibrant academic community at Bowdoin. At times it seems as though there are not enough hours in the day to take advantage of these extraordinary opportunities to see firsthand and interact with people who are expanding our understanding of the world. The richness of these learning experiences is not limited to the present, however. Rummaging through the College’s past (in a figurative sense) yields a never-ending supply of stories about Bowdoin’s role in the broader currents of American education.

President Warren G. Harding expressed his enthusiastic support for the institute in a letter to President Sills.

As part of its celebration of the centennial of the graduation of the Class of 1825 and two of its most famous sons, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the College organized an Institute of Modern Literature in the spring of 1925. From May 4 to May 15, the campus drew crowds from around the state and the region to hear public presentations by distinguished authors, poets, playwrights, and literary critics. By any account it was an impressive line-up: poet Robert Frost; poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay; novelist Willa Cather; poet and Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg; playwright and winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize Hatcher Hughes; novelist John Dos Passos; short-story writer Margaret Deland; Irish Renaissance poet and short-story writer James Stephens; French literary scholar Edmond Estève; novelist, essayist, and poet Christopher Morley; and literary critics Irving Babbitt and Henry Seidel Canby.

The 1925 Institute of Modern Literature program.

The idea for a series of biennial institutes originated with President Kenneth C. M. Sills, Class of 1901, who saw them as a way to bring outstanding figures in politics, the arts and humanities, and the natural and social sciences to the campus. Speakers were selected by the faculty in departments that were most closely linked to the theme of the program. The first institute (Modern History) in 1923 featured eight participants, seven of whom had been involved directly in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 that spelled out treaty terms, international boundaries, and reparations in the wake of World War I. President Warren G. Harding expressed his enthusiastic support for the institute in a letter to President Sills. Biennial Institutes were continued until the early 1950s, although none of them attracted more national attention than the 1925 event.

From the program itself one can gain a sense of the intensity of the focus on the literary world at Bowdoin for a period of less than two weeks. Each lecture was followed the next morning by a round table discussion with the featured speaker and Bowdoin students. Mercifully, Sunday, May 10, was a day of rest for the College community. The public presentations were held in the second-floor auditorium of Memorial Hall, which, before its renovation in 1955, had a low stage, seating on a level floor, and poor acoustics. Nearly all of the lectures would be classified as “standing room only,” requiring additional chairs on the stage and around the hall.

Arthur G. Staples of the Class of 1882, writing for The Lewiston Evening Journal, captured some of the atmosphere of the first lecture: “Robert Frost being properly introduced came forward and promptly extinguished the reading lamp and put his ‘thin volumes of verse’ on the table and looked about, after a poetic pause, which is so eloquent as almost to be metaphor. It seemed as though he were looking over the class to see how many of the football team were absent.” In his 90-minute talk Frost used Longfellow’s “The Flight to Egypt” and two of his own poems, “Birches” and “The Code,” to demonstrate how the spoken word fires the imagination.

Miss Millay has a sort of post-Titian hair, a complementary color to her gown, last evening…It looked like the color of the inside of a million dollar limousine.

The most breathless reviews were reserved for Edna St. Vincent Millay, who read several poems and her play “Two Slatterns and a King.”  “Miss Millay has a sort of post-Titian hair, a complementary color to her gown, last evening…It looked like the color of the inside of a million dollar limousine. It was a sort of indescribable ashes of the leaves of which the gods made their ambrosia, before the gods were forbidden to brew by Volstead…Her neck is like Annie Laurie’s. Her hair is bobbed – by the way. Her face…is childlike, yet very wise. Her voice is altogether too musical for reading. She should sing her poems and be done with it. But she was lovely and a poem.”

In front of the Institute’s largest crowd Carl Sandburg brought his guitar onstage and played several songs,  in addition to reading from Rootabaga Stories, a collection of his stories for children. In Staples’s words, “He puts his hands in the pockets of his old suit and plays the part of what he has been – porter, scene-shifter, truck-handler, harvest-hand, college-man, newspaper man, poet-laureate of the industrial classes, emotional democrat, with a face as immobile as a ‘broken gargoyle’…Then he began to read from his Chicago poems. Then our eyes began to open and we lost ourselves in the measureless labyrinths of Mr. Sandburg’s voice and in its strange melodies and nuances.” Unfortunately there is no audio recording of any of the lectures, as far as I know.

The Institute of Modern Literature produced other memorable moments:

• When Margaret Deland observed that “all great men have been dunces in college,” the students surprised her by wooding – a college custom of thumping the feet on a wooden floor to show their approval.
• Playwright Laurence Stallings withdrew from the program on short notice. John Dos Passos, a young writer whose own wartime experiences were the inspiration for two novels, was a last-minute replacement. Wearing a borrowed tuxedo, Dos Passos acquitted himself well in his first public lecture, although his nervousness was apparent to all.
• Edmond Estève of the University of Nancy delivered his lecture on Longfellow in French, to the delight of many Franco-Americans in the audience.
• Christopher Morley’s lecture at the close of the Institute inspired a prolonged ovation and calls for an encore – an unusual (and perhaps unprecedented) request of a lecturer. He returned to the stage, offered a poetry recitation, and the 1925 Institute of Modern Literature was history.

At the 1925 Commencement honorary degrees were awarded (among others) to Alice Mary Longfellow, daughter of the poet and “Grave Alice” of The Children’s Hour; in absentia to Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop; to Maine poets Wilbert Snow, Class of 1907, and Edwin Arlington Robinson; to Professor Edmond Estève who addressed the Institute on Longfellow in French; and to newspaper editor Arthur G. Staples, Class of 1882, who wrote the series of stories on the Institute of Modern Literature for The Lewiston Evening Journal.

Bowdoin and Brunswick are deeply connected to 19th-century American literature: Longfellow Days are celebrated in February each year; the Hawthorne Society held its biennial meeting at Bowdoin in the summer of 2008; and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society will meet at Bowdoin in June 23-25, 2011, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of her birth. The 1925 Institute of Modern Literature provided a snapshot of what ideas (and who) were considered important in the field of literature by the faculty at the time. From a perspective 86 years removed from the event we might view the literary world of 1925 from a different vantage point, but I know that many of us would have enjoyed sitting in a front-row seat in Memorial Hall for one or more of those 12 days in May.

With Best Wishes,

John R. Cross ’76
Secretary of Development and College Relations