Katherine Garrison Chapin

Katherine Garrison Chapin (September 4, 1890 – December 30, 1977), sometimes known by her married name Katherine Biddle, was an American poet, librettist, and playwright. She is best known for two collaborations with composer William Grant Still: And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) and Plain-Chant for America (1941).

Katherine Garrison Chapin
Born(1890-09-04)September 4, 1890
Waterford, Connecticut
DiedDecember 30, 1977(1977-12-30) (aged 87)
Devon, Pennsylvania
Resting placeSt. Thomas' Church Cemetery, Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania
NationalityAmerican
EducationMiss Keller's School
Columbia University
Home townNew York City
Notable worksLament for the Stolen (1938)
And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940)
Plain-Chant for America (1941)
Years active1920s–1950s
Spouse
(
m. 1918)
RelativesCharlotte Mason (aunt)
Cornelia Chapin (sister)
Marguerite Caetani (sister)
Schuyler Chapin (nephew)

Chapin wrote on a variety of subjects, but evinced a particular fascination with politics and racial justice. She published widely in literary journals and magazines. Critics regarded her work as skilled, traditional, and somewhat lacking in feeling.

Life
The Burrill House, at 36 East 38th Street in Murray Hill, built c. 1862. Chapin's childhood home at 5 West 37th Street would likely have resembled this one.

Katherine Garrison Chapin was born to a wealthy, well-connected family in Gilded Age New York. Her mother Cornelia Garrison Van Auken (1865–1925), daughter of Catherine Garrison Van Auken and financier Barret Van Auken, was an actor.[1] Her father Lindley Hoffman Chapin (1854–1896) was a Manhattan lawyer who had spent his childhood in Paris and Dresden and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1874.[2][3] Her parents were married on February 14, 1888 at 421 Fifth Avenue, Cornelia's family home.[4]

Several of Katherine's siblings also became artists, including her sisters Marguerite (a woman of letters and later, by marriage, an Italian princess), who was especially close with Katherine;[5] and Cornelia (a sculptor).[6] She would later work to gain recognition in the United States for Marguerite's journal Botteghe Oscure.[7]

New York

Born in Waterford, Connecticut—the location of Rock Lawn, the Chapins' ancestral summer home[8]—Katherine grew up in Manhattan. As a child, she would often attend operas at the old Metropolitan Opera House on 39th Street, which was near her family's brownstone at 5 West 37th Street in Murray Hill.[9][10]

Her elementary education was at Miss Keller's School, a private school Dennett calls "less-expensive and more socially inclusive" than St. Mark's, to which her brother was sent.[11] It was evidently progressive for the time: an 1896 article in The Illustrated American describes Miss Keller's as an exemplar of cutting edge educational methods, noting that "[p]racticality is the motto of the school, and the lessons are invariably taught with relevant illustration".[12] Reflecting on her education, Katherine would call Miss Keller's "somewhat experimental".[11]

Chapin later attended Columbia University, where she studied under Franz Boas, Max Eastman, and Kurt Schindler.[9][13] By her time at Columbia, she was engaged to Francis Biddle. Biddle would serve as a judge at the Nuremberg trials and Attorney General under Franklin D. Roosevelt.[13] They married in 1918.

Philadelphia and Washington

Francis was from an old Philadelphia family and practiced law there for many years, which explains why Katherine was living there in the 1930s.[14][15] Francis was appointed to the National Labor Relations Board in 1934, whereupon the couple relocated to Washington, D.C.[16] Francis and Katherine likely moved back to Philadelphia when Francis briefly became a judge on the Third Circuit, as a letter from Chapin to William Grant Still indicates that they were again moving to Washington in the late 1930s when Francis was appointed Solicitor General.[17]

Francis and Katherine had two boys, Edmund and Garrison. Garrison died at age 7, and became the inspiration for Bright Mariner (1930).[18]

Allen Tate, who would name her one of the inaugural Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress was a friend of Chapin's, as was Alexis Léger, a poet who wrote as Saint-John Perse.[19][20] She was a correspondent of philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke, with whom she developed the concept for And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940).[21]

As a Fellow in American Letters, Chapin was on the jury for the first Bollingen Prize in 1948. That year, the prize went to Cantos by Ezra Pound.[22][23] Chapin was one of only two jurors who voted against Pound. She thought it would be "unwise for the Library of Congress to single out a traitor for recognition; the traitor could not be separated from the poet—his anti-democratic, anti-Semitic fulminations ran through his whole work".[24] In addition to her service on the Bollingen Prize jury, Chapin judged the National Book Award for Poetry and the Shelley Memorial Award and lectured at the Library of Congress.[16]

Katherine remained in Washington for just under 40 years after her move in 1934, presumably with a short interlude in the mid-1930s during Biddle's term as a circuit judge. She moved back to Pennsylvania following a stroke in 1973, and died in 1977.[9]

Poetry and libretti

Chapin began to publish in the late 1920s, in Harper's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, Saturday Review, North American Review, Poetry and Ladies' Home Journal, among other publications.[9]

Lament for the Stolen

Lament for the Stolen (1938), a poem about kidnapping written not long after the Lindbergh kidnapping and apparently with the Lindbergh tragedy in mind, became the libretto for a composition by Harl McDonald.[25] The Philadelphia Orchestra premiered the work on December 30, 1938.[26] The New York Times, in a notice for And They Lynched Him on a Tree, called Lament "a dirge for the mother of a child who has been stolen and killed".[27] Alain Locke praised Chapin's writing in Lament, in letters to Chapin and to Charlotte Mason, but disparaged McDonald's score.[28]

And They Lynched Him on a Tree
William Grant Still in 1949. Chapin collaborated with Still on And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) and Plain-Chant for America (1941).

Williams describes And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940), with music by William Grant Still and libretto by Chapin, as the "the first piece of concert music that protests lynching".[29][30] It was also Still's first "large-scale choral-orchestral work".[15] The composition features two choruses, one Black and one white.[31]

Chapin's aunt Charlotte Osgood Mason, a white patron of artists of the Harlem Renaissance who was known for her tight grip on those who won her favor,[32] conceived the work in collaboration with Alain Locke, likely in spring 1939.[33][34] For a time, Chapin helped to manage Mason's affairs with her sister Marguerite.[35]

Alain Locke introduced the poem to Still as follows in a letter of August 9, 1939:

Mrs. Biddle, who writes as Katherine Garrison Chapin, has done a powerful poem on lynching, really an epic indictment but by way of pure poetry not propaganda. … [And They Lynched Him on a Tree] is more powerful than the Lament for the Stolen, but has the same skill at transforming a melodramatic situation into one of tragic depth and beauty.[36]

Still wrote to Chapin just over a week later, on August 18, 1939, to express his enthusiasm for the project: "I've long wished to add my voice to the general feeling against lynching, and have been waiting for the proper vehicle to present itself".[37]

While Still was working on the score for And They Lynched Him, Congress was debating an anti-lynching bill sponsored by Representative Joseph A. Gavagan. The measure passed in the House but did not move forward in the Senate.[31]

The piece premiered on June 25, 1940 at Lewisohn Stadium to an audience of 13,000.[38][15] Artur Rodziński conducted the New York Philharmonic; the choral sections were sung by a choir under the direction of Wen Talbert and New York MacDowell Club, known as the Schola Cantorum.[38] Wendell P. "Wen" Talbert, a pianist, cellist, and jazz bandleader,[39] led the Negro Chorus of the Federal Theatre Project, which had performed in several Federal Theatre productions including Bassa Moona and How Long Brethren? (1937), a dance by Helen Tamiris.[40][41] The program also included a performance by Paul Robeson.[42]

A notice by Still's wife Verna Arvey in the New York Times in advance of the premiere wrote:

… Miss Chapin's poem is the voicing of her deep conviction that lynching is a serious flaw in the fabric of our American democracy, and her belief that this conviction is held by the majority of Americans in the South and the North.[43]

Plain-Chant for America

Soon after And They Lynched Him, Still and Chapin collaborated for a second time on Plain-Chant for America (1941).[44] According to Chapin's New York Times obituary, she regarded the work as "her reaffirmation of democracy".[9] The poem is dedicated to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.[45]

In an article on Plain-Chant, Arvey quotes Chapin on the genesis of the work:

An American poem had been germinating in my mind for a long time, but the final circumstance that thrust it into being was the fact that I had spent a few days in the company of some persons who were sympathetic with the Fascists, whose talk showed me vividly the gap between totalitarianism and the American democracy in which I believed. The emotion of the poem began there; it found completion when we stood behind President Roosevelt in the sunshine at Key West … while he made a fine radio broadcast opening the San Francisco Fair.[46]

The piece, for orchestra and baritone, premiered on October 23, 1941. John Barbirolli conducted the New York Philharmonic, and Wilbur Evans delivered the baritone solo.[45][47]

Reception

Critics have generally regarded Chapin's work as skillful but unoriginal.

Harriet Monroe, reviewing Chapin's collection Outside of the World in Poetry in 1932, noted "the quietly meditative tone of the poems, the poet's sensitiveness to the beauty of common experiences, and her compact and imaginative expression of them".[48] However, Monroe did express some reserve, seeing "nothing strikingly original" in the collection.[49] Monroe thought "Nancy Hanks", a poem about the birth of Abraham Lincoln to Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was the "most ambitious poem in the book".[48]

A New York Times review of Plain-Chant for America: Poems and Ballads (1942), although it compared Chapin's work favorably with that of e e cummings, criticized her for a perceived lack of "sensibility":

As in the case of John Peale Bishop, her poetry will augment the sphere of your sentiments without modifying your sensibility. Katharine Chapin has an ideology … but lacks a sufficient volume of texture in her technique to give her work the dualism of images and logical substance which makes for major poetry. … Katharine Chapin has in the main an ideology without a private sensibility to give her scope varied dimensions.[50]

A review in Poetry of Chapin's last collection The Other Journey (1959), advanced a similarly lukewarm assessment:

Seriousness and technical competence, even together, do not necessarily sustain one's interest in a group of poems. Katherine Garrison Chapin's The Other Journey makes that quite clear. It is hard to find anything actually wrong with the book except that it is not particularly exciting. … The whole book is curiously lacking in personal impact …[51]

Turner, in a biographical sketch, writes that "in poetic technique [Chapin] is barely influenced by the modernist poets. Her lyrics are chiefly in rhyme and meter, controlled but not exceptionally tight or brilliant, and in no way innovative".[3]

Drama

Her 1948 play Sojourner Truth, about the historical figure of the same name, was produced by the American Negro Theater that year starring Muriel Smith.[52]

Works

Criticism
  • Chapin, Katherine Garrison (November 1941). "The Quality of Poetry". Poetry. 59 (11): 90–95. ISSN 0032-2032.
  • Chapin, Katherine Garrison (1970). "Poet of Wide Horizons: A Note on Saint-John Perse". The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress. 27 (2): 104–108. ISSN 0041-7939.

Drama
  • The Tapestry of the Duchess (play, 1925). Unpublished.
  • Sojourner Truth (play, 1948). Unpublished.

Poems

Poetry collections

Notes
  1. Dennett 2016, p. 24.
  2. Dennett 2016, p. 12–13.
  3. Turner 1979, p. 334.
  4. Dennettt 2016, p. 24, 26.
  5. Dennett 2016, p. 29–30.
  6. Williams 2016, p. 12.
  7. Dennett 2016, p. 271.
  8. Dennett 2016, p. 13–14.
  9. "Katherine C. Biddle, a Writer and Widow of Attorney General". The New York Times. January 2, 1978. p. 24. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  10. Dennett 2016, p. 26.
  11. Dennett 2016, p. 30.
  12. "Some Methods of the Modern School". The Illustrated American. 19: 678. May 16, 1896.
  13. Dennett 2016, p. 128.
  14. Geiger, Roger L. (July 5, 2017). Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class. London: Routledge. pp. 139–140. ISBN 978-1-351-49990-3.
  15. Shirley 1994, p. 426.
  16. Shaffer, Ron (December 31, 1977). "Katherine G. C. Biddle, Poet, Dies at 87". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  17. Shirley 1994, p. 433.
  18. Dennett 2016, pp. 193, 218.
  19. Underwood, Thomas A. (1992). "A Bard among Bibliographers: Allen Tate's Washington Year". The Southern Literary Journal. 24 (2): 36–48 at 44, 46. ISSN 0038-4291.
  20. Dennett 2016, p. 252.
  21. Shirley 1994, p. 428–419; passim.
  22. Roche, Thomas P. (1996). "Willard Thorp". In Marks, Patricia H. (ed.). Luminaries: Princeton Faculty Remembered. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 325. ISBN 978-0-691-01167-7.
  23. D'Ooge, Craig; Spyros, Marsha (1998). "In the Eye of the Library: Poets at the Library of Congress". American Libraries. 29 (4): 48–52 at 49. ISSN 0002-9769. JSTOR 25634925.
  24. Rector, Liam (2003). "Elitism, Populism, Laureates, and Free Speech". The American Poetry Review. 32 (1): 9–13 at 9. ISSN 0360-3709. JSTOR 20682098.
  25. Williams 2016, p. 13–14.
  26. Shirley 1994, p. 425.
  27. "Song on Lynching on Stadium List". The New York Times. May 29, 1940. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  28. Shirley 1994, p. 425–426.
  29. Kushner, David Z. (2002). "The Multifaceted Nationalism of William Grant Still". American Music Teacher. 52 (1): 32–95 at 35. ISSN 0003-0112. JSTOR 43546206.
  30. Williams 2016, p. 9.
  31. Shirley 1994, p. 435.
  32. Kellner, Bruce (2004). "White Patronage in the Harlem Renaissance". In Bloom, Harold (ed.). The Harlem Renaissance. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. pp. 53, 58–59. ISBN 978-0-7910-7679-8.
  33. "And They Lynched Him on a Tree: William Grant Still (1895–1978) and Katherine Biddle (1890–1977)". Georgetown University Library. 2006. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  34. Shirley 1994, p. 427.
  35. Dennett 2016, p. 54, 129.
  36. Shirley 1994, p. 429.
  37. Shirley 1994, p. 430.
  38. Taubman, Howard (June 26, 1940). "American Music Heard in Stadium". The New York Times. p. 27. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  39. Brooks, Tim (February 24, 2004). Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. p. 486. ISBN 978-0-252-02850-2.
  40. Tikkanen, Amy (June 27, 2007). "Helen Tamiris". Encyclopedia Britannica.
  41. Manning, Susan (2004). Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-8166-3736-2.
  42. Taubman, Howard (June 26, 1940). "American Music Heard in Stadium". The New York Times. p. 27. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  43. Arvey, Verna (May 26, 1940). "New Cantata by Still". The New York Times. p. 147. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  44. Williams 2016, p. 16.
  45. Downes, Olin (October 24, 1941). "New Work Given by Philharmonic". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  46. Arvey, Verna (September 14, 1941). "New Chapin-Still Collaboration". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  47. "Premier [sic] Playing Here of Still Work". The New York Times. September 15, 1941. ISSN 0362-4331.
  48. Monroe 1932, p. 168.
  49. Monroe 1932, p. 169.
  50. Swan, Maurice (January 18, 1942). "The New Books of Poetry". The New York Times. p. 55.
  51. Clower, Jean (December 1960). "Four Poets". Poetry. 97 (3): 185–191 at 189.
  52. "Sojourner Truth theater stills collection". New York Public Library. Retrieved July 12, 2020.

Sources
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