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The visionary goes west: Stephen Graham's American odyssey

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13645141003747264

1755-7550

Michael Hughes,

Canadian Identity and History

Abstract Stephen Graham is best remembered today for his numerous books and articles popularising the idea of Holy Russia in the years before 1917. He was in fact a prolific author, who wrote more than 50 books, including works of fiction, travel books, and historical biographies. In the early 1920s Graham made a number of trips to North America, both because he recognised that there was a buoyant market for books about the region, and because he hoped to find there a new ‘land of lost content’ to take the place of Russia in his life. Graham's travel books about North America were full of acute observations and anecdotes. They also, though, reflected his deep horror at the social and environmental consequences of industrialisation. During his trips to America, Graham gradually came to terms with the contradictory realities of life in the modern United States. While he relished the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of the South West, he increasingly realised that the future of American society was being indelibly shaped by the forces of commercial development that were no longer confined to the towns and cities of the North West. Keywords: Stephen GrahamVachel LindsayHoly RussiaNew Mexicolynch lawtrampingutopia Notes Notes 1. The Times, 20 March 1975. 2. For a useful overview of Graham's life see Marguerite Helmers, ‘Stephen Graham’, Dictionary of Literary Biography (London: Gale Research, 1998), Vol. 195, 137–54. For a brief review of Graham's time in Russia, see Svetlana Nikolaevna Tret’iakova, ‘Angliskii pisatel’-puteshestvennik Stefan Grekhem o Rossii nachala XX veka’, Voprosy istorii 11 (2002): 156–60. On Graham's influence on Anglo-Russian relations during the Great War see Michael Hughes, ‘Searching for the Soul of Russia: British Perceptions of Russia during the First World War’, Twentieth-Century British History 20, no. 2 (2009): 198–226. 3. Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London: Granta Books, 2007), 229–31; Helmers, Stephen Graham, 154. 4. Javier Marias, Dark Back of Time, trans. Esther Allen (London: New Directions, 2004). 5. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Fussell does however refer in his The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) to Graham's The Challenge of the Dead (London: Cassell, 1921), describing his tour of the battlefields of France and Flanders where he had himself fought as a private in the Scots Guards. For a helpful overview of the development of travel writing between 1880 and 1940, see Helen Carr, ‘Modernism and Travel’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70–86. 6. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (University of Texas), John Lane Company Records, Box 17, Folder 4 (Graham to John Lane, 31 May 1910). 7. Stephen Graham, Russia in 1916 (London: Cassell, 1917), 83. 8. Hughes, ‘In Search of the Soul of Russia’. 9. Stephen Graham, Russia and the World (London: Cassell, 1915); Graham, Russia in 1916. 10. For his description of this period in his life see Stephen Graham, A Private in the Guards (London: Macmillan, 1919). 11. For some helpful comments on the way that the experience of war–both immediate and mediated–fostered a longing for the exotic see Fussell, Abroad, 3ff. For a discussion of the way that the experience of war heightened convictions about the supposed decay of Western society see Carr, ‘Modernism and Travel’. For Graham's account many years later of the impact of war on his outlook on life see Stephen Graham, Part of the Wonderful Scene (London: Collins, 1964), 173. 12. The New York Times, 6 April 1913. 13. Stephen Graham, With Poor Immigrants to America (London: Macmillan, 1914), xi, 66. 14. Graham, With Poor Immigrants, 115. 15. Graham, With Poor Immigrants, 140. 16. New York Times, 6 April 1913. 17. Graham, With Poor Immigrants, 306. 18. For a rather negative review of With Poor Immigrants, condemning its sketches of American life as ‘flimsy and unimportant’, see The New York Times, 1 November 1914. 19. Stephen Graham, ‘On the Pilgrim Boat’, Harper's Magazine, July 1913. 20. Graham, Part of the Wonderful Scene, 173. For a useful overview of Graham's views on the United States after the war see, too, Stephen Graham, ‘The Spirit of America after the War’, Fortnightly Review, June 1920, 874–85. 21. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on their Economy, 2 vols (New York: Dix and Edward Press, 1856). 22. Graham's notes of his trip are held by Special Collections at the Strozier Library of Florida State University (henceforth Graham Papers). Graham Papers, 578, 18–19. 23. The review of the American edition that appeared in The New York Times on 12 December 1920 did however accuse Graham of making numerous historical mistakes in his discussion, as well as painting too lurid a scene of slavery in the opening chapter of the book. 24. Stephen Graham, Children of the Slaves (London: Macmillan, 1920), 11. 25. See, for example, Stephen Graham, Characteristics (London: Rich & Cowen, 1936). 26. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 22. 27. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 26–7. 28. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 161. 29. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 209. 30. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 30, 175, 210. For his views on New Orleans, which he described as ‘an unpainted city’ of mouldy and collapsing wooden buildings, see Graham Papers, 578, 18. 31. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 82–3. 32. Times Literary Supplement, 11 November 1920. 33. Athenaeum, 5 November 1920, 615. 34. Stephen Graham, ‘Marching Through Georgia I & II’, Harper's Magazine, April 1920, May 1920. 35. Graham, Part of the Wonderful Scene, 233–4. 36. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 15. 37. Graham, Children of the Slaves, 27. 38. On Lindsay see for example Ann Massa, Vachel Lindsay: Fieldworker for the American Dream (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). 39. Graham, Part of the Wonderful Scene, 234–5. 40. See, for example, Paul H. Gray, ‘Performance and the Bardic Ambition of Vachel Lindsay’, Text and Performance Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1989): 216–23. 41. Vachel Lindsay, A Handy Guide for Beggars (Norwood, MA: Norwood Press, 1916), 5. 42. Lindsay, Handy Guide, 39, 45. 43. Lindsay, Handy Guide, 132. 44. Lindsay later immortalised his hometown in distinctly utopian terms in The Golden Book of Springfield (New York: Macmillan, 1920). 45. For a review complaining that Graham should in fact have made his book less of a travelogue and more a literary biography of Lindsay, see Times Literary Supplement, 6 January 1922. 46. Vachel Lindsay, Going-to-the-Sun (New York: Appleton, 1923), 2. 47. Stephen Graham, Tramping with a Poet in the Rockies (London: 1922), 11. 48. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 17. 49. Graham Papers, 578, 33 (Graham's 1921 Journal). 50. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 73. 51. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 72. 52. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 129. Lindsay did note in his introduction in Going-to-the-Sun that he did not always recognise himself in the portrait painted by Graham, although in this case the views ascribed to him are consistent with everything else he believed. 53. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 112. 54. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 47. 55. For details see the various papers in Haverford College Library, Haverford, PA, Special Collections, Morley Family Papers, Coll. no. 807, Box 22. 56. Graham, Tramping with a Poet, 244. 57. See, for example, the various letters from Lindsay to Graham contained in Marc Chénetier, Letters of Vachel Lindsay (New York: Burt Franklin, 1979). Most of Lindsay's letters to Graham sadly appear to have been lost after Graham's death. 58. Graham, Changing Russia, 117. 59. For a recent account of Ewart as a ‘war-writer’ see Hugh Cecil, The Flower of Battle (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995), 119–53. 60. See, for example, The Bookman, June 1924; The English Review, May 1924. 61. For a fictionalised account of these events see Marias, Dark Back of Time. 62. Stephen Graham, The Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart (London: G.B. Putnam, 1924). 63. For a recent account of the literary colony at Santa Fé, see Lynn Cline, Literary Pilgrims: The Santa Fé and Taos Colonies, 1917–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007). 64. For a useful collection of diary entries and letters relating to Lawrence's life in this period see Edward Nehls, ed., D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Vol. 2 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 164ff. 65. Stephen Graham, In Search of El Dorado (London: Macmillan, 1924), 93. 66. Graham, In Search of El Dorado, 94. 67. See, for example, A.C. Henderson, ed., The Turquoise Trail: An Anthology of New Mexico Poetry (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1928). 68. On the whole tradition of cowboy poetry see David Stanley and Elaine Fletcher, ed., Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 69. Graham, In Search of El Dorado, 98. 70. Graham, In Search of El Dorado, 110. 71. Graham, In Search of El Dorado, 127. 72. Graham, In Search of El Dorado, 126. 73. Graham, In Search of El Dorado, 205. 74. Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1926), 5. 75. Graham, Art of Tramping, 210–11. 76. Stephen Graham, Undiscovered Russia (London: John Lane, 1912), 7–8. 77. Stephen Graham, London Nights (London: John Lane, 1925); Stephen Graham, New York Nights (New York: George H. Doran, 1927). 78. Graham, London Nights, 1. 79. Athenaeum, 17 October 1919, 1034 (Review of A Private in the Guards).