Pericles of Provincetown*

Pericles of Provincetown* "What is it, this thing we call personality? One wants to tell about a man, 'make him real.' He is an intellectual man and a religious man, a man with a great gift of wonder, so one tells much of the life within, particularly as he himself has left the record, tells truly as one knows how, of struggles and failures as well as visions that became creations. All this is true, yet somehow the man himself is not there. . . ."

But never did a man himself come closer to being in his biography than the late George Cram Cook now comes. Susan Glaspell, the wife with whom he lived his richest years, is an attentive woman. She appears to have seen him whole and in part, forgotten nothing. Her spirit is great enough to put self entirely aside except at moments of the greatest intimacy and importance--the very moments when an inferior nature would have quailed ox bridled. She has recreated and interpreted times and persons she could not have shared, with a quality of understanding that makes the book perhaps the finest thing a woman ever wrote about a man.

Besides notebooks, unmailed letters, jottings, reviews, novels, plays and much plastic work of his hands, he left himself in people. Education in Iowa is finer because of him. Floyd Dell, his onetime gardener, is partly his work. The sea soughed in the piles and spouted up through the planks of the wharf on the first night of Bound East for Cardiff but the sea was never kinder to Eugene O'Neill than his first producer, "Jig" Cook, to whom the poets of Greece gave a fragment of Apollo's temple at Delphi for a tombstone, for whom Greek athletes have revived the Parthian games.

In Iowa, where his family had gone in wagons, he felt the vast age and oneness of life. It amused him to say that since his direct ancestors numbered millions 30 generations ago, therefore he was descended from the entire English-speaking race. Running up his family tree eight branches he would drop down two and land on Benjamin Franklin, "the bourgeois." The Nile, he would say, is an upstart compared to the Mississippi. Five-toed little Eohippus lived for him in his farm horse, Daisy.

He was a powerful, sensitive boy who mixed baseball and Emerson, swimming and Wordsworth. He read Plotinus before he went to Harvard and his spiritual life always returned to a silent noon in the library at Iowa City when, aged 16, ecstasy first came upon him. Thereafter he was a "panarchist."

After Harvard and Heidelberg he taught in Iowa, never marking attendance, always forgetting the drab scene and his lecture subjects to stray into ancient Greece. But one day his blackboard bore a note: "No class today. I've gone to war." He had met Rudyard Kipling at sea. Twenty years later he had renounced war, rebuked Kipling.

He looked into the chasm of the insanity that is higher than sanity during a wilderness period following the failure of his first marriage, but regained a balance fortified by the experience. It taught him the relation of self-expansion and self-obliteration, the phases by which, like two legs constantly passing each other, mankind has marched--Roman power, Christian abnegation; Renaissance, Reformation; hayfoot, strawfoot. He renewed the motion of his days, saying: "The stream of life, like running water, can purify itself."

Writing criticism for the Chicago Post he called for an American Lucretius to transform the new miracles of science into a new religion. He moved Athens to Iowa, in his imagination, and outlined a Sacred Book. Then he was the Pericles of Provincetown, creating the creative mood in others by his prodigious vitality, sympathies, humor, dreams. He remade his own house with ax, saw and chisel (building in an elevator when his wife's heart ailed) ; made beach sand yield greens; painted, modeled, wrote; created a new national theatre. On the wall of his house he made a fresco showing the evolution of Living Church out of Theatre.

He deemed his Provincetown Players a failure when they were an obvious success and was for beginning afresh on his ideal of a community playhouse. But he was 48 and Greece had called him since he was 16. They went. He built huts for them on Parnassos, shared his "drunkenly Greek" mind with the shepherds, revived Socratic dialogs beside the Acropolis, relived his whole life, by memory and poetry, garbed as a Delphic shepherd. He died there (1924) of glanders contracted by nursing a stray puppy.

The Author. "Jig" Cook's genius for play, rich and unashamed, was the thing that made him a great "spiritual communist." When there was little wine left in the bowl, "Give it all to me," he cried, "and I guarantee to intoxicate all the rest of you." Susan Glaspell may puzzle folk who would have withheld their share of the wine. Just when this radiant book, dedicated to "Jig" Cook's children (she has none), is published, she has remarried.

It might equally surprise puzzlers that another of the plays which "Jig" started her writing opened last month in Manhattan (TIME,

March 21). Her new husband, Norman Matson, is her new collaborator.

*THE ROAD TO THE TEMPLE--Susan Glaspell--Stokes ($3). Biography of the late George Cram Cook, founder of the Provincetown Players, the man behind the scenes of Playwright Eugene O'Neill and many another whose name is better known to the wide world than "Jig" Cook's.