John Gould Fletcher’s prose is excellent. Years ago I heard that his history of Arkansas was impressionistic, not bound to facts, so I dismissed it. I regret that. The parts I’ve read are delightful, and we have plenty of resources now for fact-checking his history.
I avoided his autobiography till last year for the same reasons I avoided Marcel Proust until 2015: fear of getting pulled into a stream of melancholic introspection and not being able to drag myself out. But they’re both worth reading. Great observers who got out and about when they were young. Witnesses to the implosion of Western civilization.
Those of us who still accept that there’s such a thing as Western civilization can spend decades on the chicken-or-egg question of whether art at the turn of the 20th century caused the implosion of 1914 or merely anticipated it.
Either way, John Gould Fletcher was there. I don’t approve of his decision to go to Europe and spend away his inheritance, which must have placed quite a burden on his sisters, but he was present for all of the things we used to learn about the early 20th century in school.
The Rite of Spring, for example. We’re all accustomed to chaotic music now; a tribute to rock and roll graces the upper east wing of the Old State House, and if that’s what it takes to get the baby-boom babies in a nostalgic mood to enjoy that beautiful place, well, let it be.
But John Gould Fletcher attended the first performance of The Rite of Spring in Paris in late May 1913. He was present for the cat-calling and the fist fights that this annunciation of modernity caused.
In the first of the ballet’s two scenes, representing the first morning of spring, “the elders were to come forth and dance around the sacred rock which lay in the open fields beyond the village.” Then youths (young men) and virgins would draw together, “the virgins alternately fleeing or inviting their advances; until only one virgin was left, who was to signify, by a gesture of touching the earth, that she chose, instead of a mortal mate, the high and fatal privilege of becoming the bride of the sun.”
Think of that the next time you see a debutante curtsy. And be glad that the pageant does not continue thus:
“The virgin who had elected to be the sacrifice would stand, festively decked, alone on the stage. She would express, in a long solo dance, her ecstasy at having been chosen to ensure the earth’s fertility for yet another year. Then the elders would rush forward, clad in the skins of bears, strangle her, and hold her body aloft to the sky.”
Another chicken-or-egg question: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, claimed by some to have invented rock and roll, was not yet born when John Gould Fletcher saw and heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. (Tharpe was born in 1915.) The birth of Johnny Cash (1932) was a long way off yet. Who’s conservative? Tharpe and Cash or Stravinsky?
Stravinsky was older. His musical training was “classical,” and his works are now thrown into that great unwieldy lump known as classical music. The musicians who played The Rite of Spring drew upon intensive training in high technique, though the rhythms Stravinsky used were “primitive.”
And are we sure that such rites ever existed in human culture? It’s strange of God to let us do that sort of thing before he started talking to Abraham to get us to purify our rituals.
So Stravinsky was reaching back to the kind of sacrifice that Abraham’s religion abolished. But Tharpe and Cash were both church-trained, drawing their music from layers upon layers of Abraham’s religion.
So maybe Tharpe and Cash are conservative. But maybe Stravinsky was just doing what artists do, absorbing and scoring the vibrations of his age. Anticipating the awful things to come.
But John Gould Fletcher, our literal home boy, was there.