Where do art and the humanities belong? David Kipen on the new American Writers Museum
What were you doing in Los Angeles on the night of Aug. 10, 1939?
Actuarially speaking, hundreds if not thousands of native Angelenos can still answer that question. Even a 5-year-old on that night would only be 82 today.
But how many 5-year-olds in 1939 went to art openings? Itâs just possible, then, that no one now alive visited a modest but elegant L.A. art gallery under a candy factory for the unveiling of the most important painting of the 20th century, Picassoâs âGuernica.â
What on earth was Picassoâs antiwar masterpiece doing midway between Bullockâs Wilshire and Lafayette Park, its paint only two years dry? Brought to town by European exiles like Fritz Lang and art dealer Galka Scheyer (and New York exiles like Dorothy Parker) as a fundraiser for Spanish Civil War orphans, did âGuernicaâ really belong here?
For a new project, Iâve been thinking hard lately about the question of where art and the humanities do and donât belong. In federal budgets? In course requirements? And while weâre at it, in what universe does the newly opened American Writers Museum belong in Chicago?
The birth of the American Writers Museum
If youâre anywhere between Canada and Mexico and you care about reading, maybe youâve already heard about the American Writers Museum. It aspires to become a showplace for the discovery and exploration of American literature, and it pretty much started in late 2009 when my office phone rang.
At the time, I was winding down my tenure as director of National Reading Initiatives for the National Endowment for the Arts. Loafers on the desk and the Post in my lap, I felt like Spade in Dashiell Hammettâs âMaltese Falconâ â a book Iâd been evangelizing around American cities and towns encouraging my countrymen to read. There was a new NEA chair in town, and literature seemed to rank pretty low among his priorities. On my watch, the writing had always mattered most. Now the writing wasnât just off the agenda, it was on the wall. I picked up on the first ring.
Seven floors down, I heard the security guard hand off the phone. In a papery brogue that sounded two weeks, tops, out of Dublin Harbor, a manâs voice said â actually said â âI tâink Iâd like to talk to someone about gettinâ a grant.â
As a federal arts administrator, you get calls like these from time to time: Hi, Iâm working on a Civil War novel set on Alpha Centauri, and the first paragraph is almost done. Can you spot me a couple grand til Oprah calls?
Ideally, the calls go to voicemail. This one hadnât. For whatever reason â maybe because Iâd been on the needy end of one or two professional calls myself of late â I bit.
âWhat for?â I drawled, in no hurry.
Charm wafted up the line, fragrant as peat smoke, as I heard him utter the magic spell: âIâd like to start a museum of American literature.â
He said something else too, but I didnât catch it, because I was already racing downstairs three marble steps at a time. Before he could hang up the phone, I was standing next to him. He looked somewhere in his mid-60s, beaming, bemused, his hair as silver as his tongue.
âMalcolm OâHagan,â he said, offering his hand. He identified himself as a docent at the Library of Congress, retired from a successful career in engineering. I couldnât help liking him. Nobody can. And so, right there by the guard station, just by lending Malcolm a sympathetic ear, I literally got in on the ground floor.
Within a month, I was squiring him around to share whatever literary friendships of mine looked to survive the looming loss of my job. I introduced him to the writer Marie Arana, who edited Book World at the Washington Post. I introduced him to the man who was my NEA boss, Dana Gioia. Trained up to New York to meet Max Rudin, who publishes the Library of America. All came on board to help bring this twinkling Irishmanâs dream to life.
This year, on the night of May 16 in Chicago, after eight years of solicitous jawboning around the country from Malcolm, the American Writers Museum finally opened its doors to the public. Now and then Iâve consulted for it over the years, pushing hard for the inclusion of genre writing, screenwriting, funny writing, and other old hobbyhorses of mine. Before the museum smartly de-emphasized artifacts in favor of inspiration, I even pushed for a shelf of great writersâ dictionaries. Since Malcolm and I met, my ideas about reading promotion have run more to nonprofit storefront lending libraries than to major museums, but I still canât wait to make my first pilgrimage to the place.
So whatâs the American Writers Museum doing in Chicago? Civically, Chicago was the only city with big enough shoulders to support it. If the museum couldnât be in New York (which all of us lobbied against), and it couldnât be in Los Angeles (which I alone lobbied for), where better than Raymond Chandlerâs hometown? What more American place, really, than the city where once you could have caught Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker and Studs Terkel around the same water cooler, all griping about the Federal Writersâ Project that was only keeping them alive and working?
If the American Writers Museum can find a way to tell complicated, timeless, local and national literary stories like that â while also inspiring a new generation of American scribblers âthen good luck to it and godspeed.
Oh, the humanities
It may bear mentioning that, more than any early introductions from me, the Writers Museum wouldnât have happened without a couple of key grants from the now-precarious National Endowment for the Humanities. This, even though nobody has ever agreed on whether literature really belongs to the humanities or the arts. Thereâs that pesky question again: Where do the humanities in general, and writers in particular, belong? And whatâs a humanity, anyway?
After three years of teaching in UCLAâs Division of Humanities on the Writing Programs faculty, the humanities look to me like a Chinese student who writes so engagingly about food trucks that she may have to tell her family she isnât cut out for medicine after all. The humanities look like a freshman from Boyle Heights trying to make a point about George Orwellâs essay âSuch, Such Were the Joysâ â the one about life as a scholarship boy, trying to belong among the toffs â without losing it completely. And in my case, the humanities are a Westwood-bred writer-turned-lending librarian, getting to meet each of these astonishing apprentice adults, watching their thoughts and vocabularies take turns outracing each other, figuring out where they belong.
Iâve lately begun to suspect that the humanities are really just a high-minded alias for storytelling. Fiction, nonfiction, history, essays, criticism, dirty jokes, Picassoâs âGuernicaâ â itâs all storytelling, and anything with ideas and momentum is a story.
So, where were you on Aug. 10, 1939, when an L.A. gallery full of refugees, writers and artists, each confident they belonged anywhere but here, showed a painting that belonged in a museum, by an artist in Paris who belonged in Spain? Where were you this month when American writers finally rated a museum of their own? Where are you now? Do you belong there? Whatâs the story?
Kipen, founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library and the former NEA director of literature, now teaches on the UCLA Writing Programs faculty and is one of The Timesâ Critics at Large. He is at work on ââGuernicaâ in Hollywood: The Night L.A. Grew Up.â
Sign up for our Book Club newsletter
Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.