Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests- Medieval, Modernists, American, Ecumenical

2. The Medieval Quest

2 THE MEDIEVAL QUEST Both knew the stab of Joy, and ... for both, the arrow was shot from the North . . . The cold Wagnerian gusts of Northernness. . . "deeper magic from before the dawn of time." —A. N. Wilson C. S. Lewis: A Biography 4. The monks of Caldey Abbey? A drawing found in Cram's papers pasted into a scrapbook on the facing page of which was clipped an articlefrom PAX, Caldey's magazine. Cram's important relationshipswith two British architects, Henry Wilson and Sir Ninian Comper seem to have centered on this all but explicity homosexual monastery inBritain, where Cram, Wilson, and Comper all contributed to the monastery's artistic fabric. 1HINK Ralph Adams Cram as knight-errant. Then think again—which we will do time and time again here, for he was far from the one-dimensional romantic Goth and zealot posterity has famously cast him as. But his medievalquest was real enough, if more complex than is usuallyput forward; and because it was in many ways the foundation of all his work it is the first quest of four of Ralph Adams Cram's we will take up here. Yet to rescue meaning from the medieval past was, I sometimes think, an easier task for him than is ours to understand from today's perspective Cram's own life and work. In fact, the best example of the problem is Cram's perhaps improbable but very evident deepening fixation with the Middle Ages in the wake of "modern" West Point, that New World landmark, a fixation most deeply nourished, however, by what I can only call some very exotic goingson Cram was involved in while in the Old World. After Cram fell in with wife, children, and fame, a side of him that his earlier life suggests must still have been there found its most obvious and recoverable outlet for three or four months of usually alternate years in England. In America by that time Cram was directing what had become an important modern architectural office in Boston (even as his partner reigned similarly over their firm's New York office ) as well as presiding as paterfamilias of a growing family: his and Bess's first child, Mary Carrington, had been born in 1901—she the one so unimpressed at six months with West Point—their second child, Ralph Wentworth—named after Cram's old partner, CharlesWentworth—in 1904. For whatever reasons, however, at this time his thoughts turned more and more toward, not just the Old World, but the ruins of the Old World. Though by the standards of the day Cram neglected neither his office nor his family (Bess often accompanied him on his travels), when his time was his own in those years in old England (hiswife ensconced in London, perhaps, or at some country house), he seems to have disappeared into a kind of romantic monastic and medieval mist. And that was only on the surface of things. The mist was also distinctly mystical and shaded after all (is it so surprising?) into the Bohemian. The result was some very important architecture. His first such peregrination to England of those years was very much a threesome (shades of his honeymoon). The third adult member of the party was one of Cram's oldest Bohemian friends (though he too had married in his mid-forties), the painter Tom Meteyard. On the next such trip it was also a draftsman in his office , Wilfred Anthony, whom Cram asked along.1 Meteyard illustrated Cram's Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain, the book he was going to England to prepare. 2-5 T H E M E D I E V A L Q U E S T Significantly, when it was published, Ruined Abbeys was dedicated by Cram to both Bess and Tom. The work continues the new church-building theme of Cram's turn-of-thecentury writing but also evokes the somewhat darker themes of his books of the early 18905, The Decadent and Black Spirits and White—though the tonality of the darkness is more of the seance than of the opium den.Cram was in full sail. Here is his evocation of Netley Abbey: When the spangled turf is wet with dew and the mist from the water is veilingthesundered walls; when the sun rides high and the mellow stone glows deep and golden, whilst deep shadows lurk under the transept vaults...