COLUMBIA LIBRARY COLUMNS mill linn ii ii ii ii FEBRUARY Columbia Columns VOLUME XLI FEBRUARY 1992 NUMBER 2 CONTENTS Lewis Galantiere: The Last Amateur DavidAlethea 3 Sadlerand Sadleir: Scholar-Collectors CarolZ. Rothkopf 12 Livesofthe Prophets: An Illustrated Islamic Barbara Schmitz 20 Manuscript OurGrowingCollections KennethA. Lohf 32 Contributors toThis Issue 39 Publishedby the friends of the Columbia libraries Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 Three issues a year Lewis Galantiere, in thelate 1950s, posingwith his characteristicTurkish cigarette s Lewis Galantiere The LastAmateur DAVID ALETHEA H e was a small man, standing no higher than about 56", and he had a somewhat myopic look behind his thick glasses. But the impression he made was of someone muchlargerashespokeinflowingyetmeasuredaccents,withpreci- sion and eloquence, almost as one might write. As his hand ele- gantly swept the air he held his trademark Turkish cigarette, the kindhehadsmokedevenasapennilessyoungman recentlyarrived inChicagofromLosAngelesduringtheheightoftheChicagoRen- aissance. His name was Lewis Galantiere, and it was perhaps the factthathecarriedsuchafineoldFrenchname, despitethefactthat his father was aJewish immigrant from Riga, that determined the shape ofhis life, the persona he was destined to make for himself. Fifty or so years later, within the subdued elegance ofthe Cen- tury Association, the Coffee House Club, or some other equally exclusive locale almost invisible to the general public, the accom- plishedraconteurmightbetalkingoftheearlydaysinChicagowith Sherwood Anderson, Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, and his closest friend, the literary journalist Burton Rascoe, sitting around Schlogl’s tavern orfrequentingthe South Side salons where a new literary vision was being shaped for our century. Or he might be speaking of the Paris years, of the time of friendship with Hemingway, of the literary and artistic life of France, or of the many literary personnages he chaperoned around his Paris whose contoursheknewsowellandwhoselanguagehespokeso perfectly that he could, and often did, pass himself off as a native. Or he might be talking of his friendship with the ill-fated author-pilot Antoine deSaint-Exuperyandofthetrialsoftranslatinghisworks. The man knew everybody, but nobody, it seems, knew him. He carriedwithin himselfacompendium ofthe culture, the personali- ties, thepoliticsandforeignaffairsofourcentury. Hewasawriter’ writerandacritic’scritic, aswell asoneofthefinestFrenchtransla- 3 . 4 DavidAlethea torsofourtime,yetheleftusnoworkbywhichwemightknowthe man. Perhapsheisbestdescribedinhisownwordsfromthesupple- ment to his translation ofthe GoncourtJournals “In every civilized : society,” he wrote, “there are men who leave nothing of signifi- canceto posterity, butwhosetalents as commentators orconversa- tionalists, or animateurs were a precious leaven in the society of their time.” By the time Sherwood Anderson and his wife Tennessee arrived inParisinthespringof1921, Galantierewasalreadyinstalledthere. In Paris, he reported, Anderson was in great form: SherwoodwashappyinFrance, andthereasonwassomewhatthat theFrenchlikedhimsomuch....Hecarriedwithhim,whereverhe went,theauthenticAmericanculture,andhemadeAmericaappear to bewhat at its best it is—aband ofshrewd, friendly, unenvious, good-looking people; not particularly concerned to understand othermen,butreadytoappreciatethemandveryfarfromassuming that therewasn’t room in theworld fortheir kind and histoo. Galantiere must have carried this image with him for a longtime, for, severaldecadeslater, when hefound himself, in averydifferent world, workingandwritinginthefieldofforeign affairs, itwasjust this America that he sought to represent to Europeans. After Anderson’s visit Galantiere became a kind of one-man receiving committee for American writers, and he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed it. “I have Paris, her eating places, her geogra- phic bistoidale, in the palm of my hand,” he wrote to Rascoe. Indeed, whetherhisguestswishedtoseeandbeseenatLaCoupole like Sinclair Lewis, to drink all night at Aux Peres Tranquilles like Rascoe and Cummings, to visit aquaint old Lrench villagelike Sherwood Anderson, or to frequent those places favored only by the inner circles ofthe Lrench literati, Galantiere was at home in them all. Lurthermore, Galantiere spoke impeccable Lrench. Rascoe wrote: GalantiereisthenativeAmericanwho isbest informedon current and classicalFrenchliterature....[He] knows, moreover, theargot of Montparnasse and Montmartre as few Frenchmen know it. Frenchmen consult him on colloquial innovations in thelanguage, hecan arguewith acabman in thecabman’sown patois... The LastAmateur 5 Galantiere was there to receive Harold Stearns when he arrived in Paris after his famousJuly 4 departure from New York, a departure that is supposed to have initiated the 1920s expatriate movement. Andheevenhadafewgoodwordstosayabouthim. GilbertSeldes, Galantierewith Sherwood Anderson (right) at Anderson’s home “Ripshin” nearTroutdale, Virginia another who often had difficulty finding defenders, was housed by Galantiere in his lie St. Louis garret while he wrote the Seven LivelyArts. Without question, however, Galantiere’s mostfamouscallerwas Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway and Galantiere were fond ofone another and saw a good deal ofeach other for a couple ofyears. Galantiere read much of what Hemingway was writing. He thought some ofit very good and sent the little book Three Stories andTenPoemstoRascoeinNewYorkforreview. Afteratime, how- ever, theirfriendshipcooled, apparentlyasaresultofHemingway’s intense dislike ofGalantiere’s fiancee. 6 DavidAlethea Galantiere, however, continued to have a high estimation of Hemingway’s work. In a Chicago Tribune review ofIn Our Time, Galantiere wrote with considerable insight and discrimination of Hemingway’s earlywork. WritingofHemingway’s first published book, ThreeStoriesandTenPoems, Galantierepointedtoexactlythe quality that was to become the hallmark of Hemingway’s distinctive style: In these verses, as in the three stories contained in the same small book, the accent ofrevolt is reduced to the minimum compatible with an intelligent apprehension of reality....The maturity of Hemingway’s work consists in the suppression ofthe instinct to revolt, in the possession ofa sense ofproportion which leads to a careful, frequentlyapoetic, constatationwithout commentary. Galantiere’s final estimateofHemingwayand hisworkwas con- tained in his 1964 New York Times review ofA MoveableFeast: Morethananythingelsethebookisachantofloveaddressedtohis firstwife. He knew that in the invincible armorofhercandorshe possessed a strength greater than his own and forever denied him. Two natures struggled in thebreast ofthisFaust—andtheydied in each other’sgrasp, so to say, thelowernature resistingwith itslast breath. Because therewas this struggle, we must speak oftragedy, not ofpathos. But Galantiere saw the lower nature slowly take hold. “Were war and bloodsports,” heasks, ”apsychicneedtowhich his prodigious talent responded by makingofhim the supreme poet ofthe age of violence in which he lived?” WhenRascoebecameliteraryeditoroftheNew YorkHeraldTrib- une, hisfirst actwasto hireGalantieretowritealiteraryletterfrom Paris. Hiscolumnsoverthenexttwo yearscontain, besidesanalysis oftheFrench literaryscene, past and present, briefinsights intothe workand playoftheliterarycircleinwhich hewas akind ofinvisi- ble presence. He writes of visiting Proust in the company of Proust’sfriendWalterBerry, oneofthefewallowed intothat inner sanctum; ofcollectingmoneyto supportJamesJoyce and listening tohimsingofMollyBloomand, perhapsmostfrequently, hewrites ofJean Cocteau whom he considered to be by far the finest ofthe youngerFrench writers and whose novels Thomas theImposterand The GrandEcart he translated. The LastAmateur 7 Though invited byJoyce to undertake a lecture tour on Ulysses withhiscollaborationandurgedbySylviaBeachtowriteaguideto reading Ulysses Galantiere undertook neitherofthese projects. By , the time he returned to New York in the late 1920s, he had pro- ducedonlyapeculiarlittlesatireentitledFranceIsFullofFrenchmen, a book which he never later mentions and which he perhaps pre- ferred to forget. Through the unlikely theme of a contingent of midwestern congressmen and chamber ofcommerce leaders come to teach the postwar French how to get their society together, Galantiere displays his lively understanding of the differences between the French and American characters. In 1928 Galantiere returned to New York where he took up a position in the foreign department ofthe Federal Reserve Bank of which hewouldeventuallybecomethehead. Itwas inthefinancial district that he met and befriended the youngjohn Houseman, an as yet unsuccessful writer and actor just weaning himselffrom his position as American representative of his father’s grain trading business. The two collaborated on several very mildly successful Broadway plays in the French “boulevard” tradition. But the cru- cial moment for Houseman came when Galantiere, whose charm and brilliance alwayswon him entree to the circles ofhigh culture, took Houseman with him to the Sunday salon at the Askews’. There he introduced him to Virgil Thomson, just returned from Paris and looking for the right person to direct his opera of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts. The two hit it off famously, and Houseman’s imaginatively unique production was successfulbeyondanyone’swildestexpectations. “Hewasresponsi- ble for my whole career,” Houseman once said ofGalantiere. In 1937 Galantiere published probably the only work ofwhich he was unequivocally proud, the English edition of the Goncourt Journals. The Goncourt brothers fascinated him. They were the chroniclersofthe artistic, cultural, and social life ofParis in thelat- ter half of the nineteenth century. Authors of about fifty books, their diaries remained their masterpiece. The Goncourt brothers were the progenitors ofthe naturalist school ofliterature in France 8 DavidAlethea and the first to see in the small items ofeverydaylife contributions to social history Galantiere, the bankerand amateur, mayhardly strike one as an adventurous figure. But he did have a taste for writer-adventurers. In the late 1930s he became involved literarily and personallywith Several ofGalantiere’stranslations from theFrench became best sellerssuch asthis autobiographical account bythe French novelist and aviatorofadangerouswartime mission. two writer-adventurers who bore a certain similarity to one another: Gontran de Poncins and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Both children ofthe highest aristocracy, theyhad forsaken theirheritage to pursue lives ofadventure and literature, yet both retained to the end a certain aristocratic hautiness and sense ofgrandeur that was both charmingand offensive. And, oddlyenough, both found suc- cess in America before they did in their native country. De Poncins, after sailingthe South Seas, embarked upon a lone voyage to the frozen north in search ofthe most neolithic existing