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

6. Merlin in Bloomsbury

6 MERLIN IN BLOOMSBURY The interpretive quality in architecture is its main fascination. There is no form of art which so faithfully portrays the character of its creators as this does. —Lisle March Phillipps Harvard's club-land Gold Coast... a faint odor of Anglican incense . . .The Cowley Fathers, known ubiquitously as the "Cauliflowers" . . . raccoon coat[s] . . . red-and-black Pompeiian chambers on upper Beacon Street. . . [Boston in 1924] as I experienced it was a predication of Bloomsbury. —Lincoln Kirstein 31. Cram's lavish remodeling of Henry Vaughan's St. John's, Beverly Farms, was his major church work on Boston's North Shore, providing the setting for "some of [Charles Connick's] best work," in Peter Cormack's words. But most of Cram's North Shore work had to do with his more "arty-Bohemian" interests. (Above) Cram's Gallery-on-the Moors in Gloucester, a leading art center, is shown as it appeared in an office perspective reproduced in American Art Annual in 1911. As in the Toy Theatre, Cram's dramatic interests were also reflected in this work, which he remodeled within a few years into the Playhouse-on-the-Moors. IN 1922 Ralph Adams Cram stepped down as head of MIT's School of Architecture ; at the start of his sixties he shook off most of the angst the war had engendered and plunged into the Roaring Twenties in every sense. Fresh from some of his best architecture—above all Princeton and St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue—it is true that, being long-lived for those days, yet more triumphs would await him in his seventies , in the 19305. But as World War I had altered the course of his fifties, so would the Great Depression have a decisive influence on his seventies. In between was Cram's high summer: clear sailing, one good thing after another—right through his sixties. Summertime is a good image for Cram in the 19205 because he and his wife began the decade with a half-year stay in Spain and ended it with a glorious Mediterranean cruise on the John Nicholas Brown's yacht, peregrinations which open and close Cram's late middle age, both personally and professionally. As lived experience , of course, the more personal and the more professional were hardly so separate as they appear to be here, though even the most personal aspect of those years (the subject of this chapter) have direct issuein the only possible rival to All Saints', Peterborough, New Hampshire, as "Cram's perfect church"—St. James', Lake Delaware, New York—and on one of his greatest landmarks, Newport's St. Georges School Chapel in Rhode Island, as well as the founding of the Medieval Academy of America, all of which bring Cram's medieval quest very much back into the forefront in this biography. Think Merlin in Bloomsbury. THE TOY THEATRE: ACT ONE There have been a number of American Bohemias in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at least three of which were Boston Bohemias centered, as was Cram all his life, on historic old Beacon Hill. Indeed, Cram himself,in league with publisher and photographer Fred Holland Day and poet Louise Imogene Guiney,was a leader of the first bohemia (detailed in Volume One of this biography) of the 18905. The second, apparently much less important, though it has not been looked at closely enough, which flared in the 19205, described by Lucius Beebe in Boston and the Boston Legend as "sudden, raucous and boozy,"1 Cram played hardly any part in at all, though one of its leaders, actor and producer Catherine Huntington, was a fellow worshipper with him every winter Sunday at the small mission of Cowley St. John's. 2,13 M E R L I N I N B L O O M S B U R Y Between the first and second Beacon Hill Bohemias, however, there was what might be called an afterword to the first or a foreword to the second. What to call it? I like Lincoln Kirstein's appropriation of the English word (more accurately,perhaps , in America, I should insist on pre-Bloomsbury). Whatever you call it, this link between the two Bohemias—from the 19005 shading into the 19205—is mostly forgotten today. Indeed, the old Bohemian spirit of the Hill since Abolitionist days, which has yielded contributions of national importance (ranging from Fred Day's books and...