MABARNST-L Archives

Archiver > MABARNST > 2002-03 > 1017290467


From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 11, part 5
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:42:37 -0600
References: <200112191104.fBJB48Q10270@lists2.rootsweb.com>


======================================================================
Cape Cod Pilot, by Jeremiah Diggs, American Guide Series, published by
Modern Pilgrim Press, Provincetown, MA, 1937. This was a work
underwritten by the Federal Writers Project, Works Project
Administration (WPA) for the State of Massachusetts.
======================================================================

Chapter XI - PROVINCETOWN I [part 5]


In the meantime, two Irishmen came down the Cape. They were broke, and
for several months they lived in the hulk of an old wreck half buried
in the Truro beach. One of them, the elder, had once worked in a shoe
factory, had had a row with his employer, and had made a solemn vow
never to work again. His companion had dabbled in prospecting for
gold, in newspaper work, and in a strange assortment of other
professions. Captain COOK had a housekeeper to take care of his home
on Commercial Street, a French woman, who met these two wanderers,
befriended them and told the younger man a strange story about a
Provincetown sea captain, his wife, and a long and tragic imprisonment
in the Arctic ice pack.

On November 30, 1917, the Provincetown Players gave a performance in
their Macdougal Street theater in Greenwich Village, New York. It was
a new play, by a young writer who had been chopping away at the
stilted theater in which Broadway was encrusted at the time. The play
was built around a grim search for oil in Arctic waters; a long
imprisonment in the ice; the suffering of the ship's people; and
finally, the lapse of the captain's wife into insanity, coming after
his refusal to turn back when he had the chance.

"I know you're foolin' me, Annie," says "Captain Keeney" in one of the
closing speeches. "You ain't out of your mind. (Anxiously) Be you?
I'll git the ile now right enough - jest a little while longer, Annie
- then we'll turn home'ard. I can't turn back now, you see that, don't
you? I've got to git the ile. (In sudden terror) Answer me! You ain't
mad, be you?"

The title of the play was "Ile;" the author, Eugene O'NEILL.


The Provincetown Players established themselves in 1915; the names
that stand out from that group include, besides O'Neill, John Reed,
George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, Mary Heaton Vorse, Max Eastman and
Wilbur Daniel Steele. Since then a long list of nationally known
writers have been in and out of the town - among them Sinclair Lewis -
with a few perennials who have taken root and still pay property
taxes. Outstanding among these is John Dos Passos.

At present, along with the fringe of dawdlers whose souls go
sun-bathing in reflected glory and the hangers-on of the "old school,"
there are still "new writers" in Provincetown. In spite of the fact
that the town really has no particular raison d'etre as a literary
center, young people with some ability and no reputations do keep
coming. Whether Provincetown will carry on its importance as a
literary center through future years, I am not prepared to say, but as
long as the "unknowns" continue to come here, I think it has a chance.

The art colony sails ahead under a healthier breeze than mere
tradition. The dunelands and the harbor, the rooftops and the streets
are tangible inducements to those who can paint, and there are
established schools to attract those who want to learn. Architects say
Provincetown has the greatest area of skylights in proportion to its
rooftops of any city in the United States.

Evidence of a good sturdy condition, promising long life, is the fact
that hostilities go on practically unabated between the "academic" and
the "modern" factions. The moderns become the academics; then there
are new moderns. It looks like perpetual warfare. And as long as there
are reinforcements, the "colony" will breathe and good painting of all
sorts will be done in Provincetown.

Heresy was already scandalizing the elders when the late Charles W.
HAWTHORNE began to teach here. HAWTHORNE, equally famous as painter
and teacher, ran a school that drew its students from all parts of the
country, and his work outlives him not only in the canvases that hang
in the Metropolitan and many other museums, but in the tradition which
later schools have carried on, and in the work of men whom he taught,
and who in turn have gained wide recognition.

HAWTHORNE insisted upon strength and meaning in the pictures of his
students, and he had a grand contempt for frills and fancywork. He was
sharp-spoken in his criticisms, and he made it a practice to lash out
mercilessly at his best pupils. Those who were obviously hopeless he
passed with a vaguely encouraging word; but upon those who showed they
"had the stuff in them," he came down with both feet, stamping and
grinding until he drew sparks.

One day his most promising, and hence most browbeaten, student, made
the mistake of stealing off to paint a "pretty" landscape featuring
the High Land Light. It was no sin to paint the High Land Light, but a
lighthouse does lend itself peculiarly to the sort of "pretty-pretty"
sentiment that Hawthorne despised; and the well-meaning young man
brought his finished product back, hope and pride welling within him
as he placed it on the rack in front of the classroom, for the
master's criticism.

The teacher was in a particularly sadistic mood that morning. From
canvas to canvas he went, like a cyclone leaving the wreckage of fond
hopes in its wake. Deliberately he saved the High Land Light for the
last. When he came to that, he lowered his voice to a calm, ominous
monotone.

"And now," he said, "I've come to something I've had my eye on, trying
to think of a title, so that when it is hung in the Metropolitan
Museum, the
name will do it justice. I think I've hit on it."

With arm outstretched towards the "masterpiece," he declaimed: "Papa
Kiss Mama!" HAWTHORNE died in 1930. Of his own pictures, the best are
the portraits of the fishermen and their wives and children. Hawthorne
knew them, was close to them. Like other men of his caliber who have
lived in Provincetown, he was delighted with its people and disgusted
with its politics. The art colony carries on, and annually the
editions of "Who's Who" and "Who's Who in American Art" show that
whether or not the fire of inspiration flares, the smoke of reputation
is still here in abundance. And now and then a really "great" painter
still emerges from the mass.

[more to come]
transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall







This thread: