Boston Bohemia, 1881-1900 by Douglass Shand-Tucci

...The conservative Gothicist was yet to come...

...If we are to believe the most recent of the novelist's biographers-assuming Charles Ryder is, indeed, his alter ego-Waugh did nothing of the kind...

...The author describes Cram's early masterpiece, All Saints, in Ash-mont, Massachusetts, as "voluptuous," arguing that his buildings were "not only expressive of [Cram's] conscious beliefs and convictions, religious and artistic, but also of his unconscious life...

...The author of this learned and first of twovolume study on Cram proposes the thesis that late nineteenth-century Boston aestheticism and bohemianism served as code words for homosexuality, and that Cram, both formed in and contributing to that cultural model, cannot be understood without taking account of it...

...were uninterested in ceremony as such, later phases of the Oxford Movement did in fact connect traditional Anglican doctrine with increasingly elaborate ritual...

...A memory of some of Cram's group survives: photographers still esteem the pioneering work of Fred Holland Day...

...No student of American architecture or indeed of our wider culture will want to miss it, because it not only introduces readers to what the author claims to be the first American avantgarde, but revives awareness of an extraordinarily gifted and once-influential architect...

...The vexing question which keeps recurring as one reads this long and fascinating book is, "Who cares...

...He likens Cram's churches to "Trojan Horses in Puritan New England," but reads into all of Cram's early work a startlingly contemporary aesthetic...

...Architectural historians have fixed on Frank Lloyd Wright as having introduced Japanese art and architecture to an American audience, but at about the same time or earlier Cram was building superb residences influenced by Japanese domestic architecture and his own book on Japan's arts continues in print one hundred years later...

...There the mature Cram, whose fervent medievalism was combined with New Deal liberalism, will receive the long overdue attention he and his work deserve...

...The Reverend Joseph W. Goetz is pastor of Saint Paul Church in Yellow Springs, Ohio...

...One of the few women associated with the Boston Bohemians, the poet Louise Imogen Guiney, was a committed feminist and, in a recent biography, is described as "the first modern nun...

...Volume 2 of this study is eagerly awaited...

...Neither did Ralph Adams Cram, the American architect, convert to Anglo-Catholicism from New Hampshire Unitarianism, and one of the founders of Commonweal...

...Shand-Tucci, however, joins a growing number of cultural historians in decrying the "closet-ing" of uranism, as homoeroticism was then termed, as a formative influence upon the arts, and architecture in particular...

...Shand-Tucci obviously does, for he sees in the very diverse productions of the Boston Bohemians a sensibility charged with homoeroticism which in turn bestows on them a "modernism" hitherto unremarked upon by cultural historians...

...Thus emerged the aesthetic wing of Anglo-Catholicism...

...The varied buildings of Cram and his partner (and, according to the author, possible lover) Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, have rekindled enthusiasm among postmodern architects and architectural historians...

...In addition, after a long life of single-minded commitment to the beauty of worship coupled with a selfless devotion to a wife afflicted by mental illness for much of their marriage, a strong argument can be made that he was a saint...

...In his advice to Charles Ryder, the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, upon the latter's coming-up to Oxford, Jasper lists people and groups to be avoided: "Beware of the Anglo-Catholics-they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents...

...As his role in the founding of this magazine testifies, Ralph Adams Cram was not only a remarkable architect who changed the character of American church buildings, but a social critic whose message, had it been heeded, would have made for a very different world from the one we live in...

...Thus Cousin Jasper's sweeping albeit unkind generalization...

...If this book sounds like a lovingly researched, massively learned, and regrettably repetitive "outing," so be it...

...For the rest, alas, their names are forgotten...

...It has been something of a commonplace that "high" Episcopal-ianism, especially when actively prohibited by ecclesiastical authorities-as was the case in both England and the United States during the nineteenth century-served as a religious shelter for sexual outsiders...

...Although the Oxford Apostles (Newman, Keble, Pusey, etc...

...Shand-Tucci makes a very good case for his thesis, namely that a brilliant band of architects, painters, poets, photographers, book designers, and musicians formed a company of like-minded votaries worshiping at a shrine designed by the Pre-Raphaelites, set to music by Richard Wagner, and presided over by the divine Oscar himself...

...Along with critics like Lewis Mumford (a Commonweal contributor), he believed that the evolution from small, organic communities (Gemeinschaft) to huge, soulless cities (Gesellschaft) has wrought terrible damage on the human spirit...

...books designed by Daniel Updike fetch big prices among knowing bibliophiles...

...Once more the love that dare not speak its name is broadcast as vastly more important a cultural factor than has been previously allowed...

...Joseph W. Goetx Cousin Jasper was right...

...Ralph Adams Cram is best remembered-when he is remembered-for his hundreds of churches and college buildings from New York to California: West Point, New York's Saint Thomas Church, the unfinished Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Princeton's chapel and the graduate school, Rice University, the never-built Japanese Parliament buildings, and many, many others...