Guggenheimers

Last week 60 ambitious U. S. citizens, including a shop salesman and a post-office clerk, trembled with excitement to hear that next year they could throw up their jobs, settle down somewhere to do the work they like best. In Manhattan the $4,700,000 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed in 1925 by Mining Tycoon Simon Guggenheim and his wife Olga Hirsh Guggenheim, was ready to give its 1937 Fellows $115,000 with no strings attached. Two thousand dollars was the average stipend.

Of the 60 Fellows one-half are hardworking scholars and scientists who need money to travel, buy books and equipment. Such a one is Entomologist Lloyd R. Watson, who will try to breed a race of honeybees with tongues long enough to pollinate red clover. More public acclaim, however, arises around the Guggenheimers annually chosen for their promise of notable artistic or literary achievement.

A Guggenheimer is not formally required to do anything for his money. Guggenheim money, however, has helped many a first-rate artist produce many a first-rate work. Stephen Vincent Benet wrote John Brown's Body on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927. Louis Adamic wrote Native's Return on another in 1932. Criticized for giving assistance to big names, the Foundation has concentrated lately on little ones, although few Fellowships have gone to people without a respectable body of work behind them. This year's literary crop is notable for its youth (average age: 35) and radicalism, a fact which should go far to silence ill-willed proletarian snarls that the Guggenheim Foundation is a "capitalist racket" conceived to avoid income taxes.

Only a pale pink is Novelist James Timothy Farrell, who, like his hero "Studs" Lonigan (Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, Judgment Day), began in Chicago a generation ago as the frilled darling of an Irish family, grew up to be wonderfully rough & tough. Progressively ruddier are Novelist Josephine Herbst (The Executioner Waits); Playwright Albert Bein (Let Freedom Ring); Critic Granville Hicks ( The Great Tradition), who on his Fellowship will carry past 1890 his revolutionary interpretation of U. S. literature. Ultra Red is satiric Poet Kenneth Fearing, who bitterly wrote of a poor man run down by a truck:

Take him away, he's as dead as they die. . . .

Go through his clothes. . . .

And give the dollar and a half to the

Standard Oil. It was

His true-blue friend. . , .

Give the key of his flat to the D. A. R. . . .

. . . Donate his socks to the Guggenheim Fund. . . .

Blond, muscular, young Surrealist Peter Blume upset many a critic two years ago when he won first prize in Pittsburgh's Carnegie International Exhibition with a slickly painted abstraction of twisted topography and soaring sailors called South of Scranton (TIME, Oct. 29, 1934). One of the eight art Fellowships went last week to Surrealist Blume to continue daubing at a small anti-Fascist canvas he began on Guggenheim funds in 1932.

To become Guggenheimers, young writers do well to know such bigwigs as Critic Henry Seidel Canby (Saturday Review of Literature), who have much unofficial say-so as to who gets what. Applicants may do even better by knowing a modest, soft-voiced scholar named Henry Allen Moe, who is Secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, has in twelve years threaded his way through a round 10,000 applications. Secretary Moe spends much time digging out prospective Fellows. A few have been so shy that he "had to drag them in by the heels." When Secretary Moe lights on a likely applicant, he interviews him, tries to find out how much Guggenheim money he will need, what he wants to do with it. After that the fellow is free as air, may go anywhere he likes, spend his stipend as he sees fit.

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