Nov 18, 2008 - Sale 2163

Sale 2163 - Lot 36

Price Realized: $ 55,200
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
COMPOSER, ANTI-FASCIST, AUTHOR, DIPLOMAT (BARLOW FAMILY.) Archive of the papers of Samuel L.M. Barlow II. Several thousand letters and other documents, 8 linear feet in 8 boxes; various sizes and conditions. Vp, mostly 1925-1964
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Renaissance man Samuel Latham Mitchill Barlow II (1892-1982) was best known as a significant American composer in the late 1920s and 1930s. His 1935 opera Mon Ami Pierrot was the first work by an American performed at the Opera Comique in Paris. He was also a diplomat with wide-ranging ties to Latin America and the Middle East, and a crusader for many leftist and anti-fascist causes. A 1914 graduate of Harvard, he published a well-received history of creativity called The Astonished Muse in 1961. His primary residence was on Gramercy Park in Manhattan, and he also kept a house on the French Riviera.
At the heart of this collection are Barlow's correspondence and diaries. The correspondence spans 1906 to 1967 and contains letters from many of the most influential artists, politicians, musicians, writers, and thinkers of his time, among them Jacques Barzun, Leonard Bernstein, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau, Aaron Copeland, Noel Coward, John Dos Passos, Felix Frankfurter, Learned Hand, Lillian Hellman, Herbert Hoover, Somerset Maugham, Archibald MacLeish, H.L. Mencken, three Rockefellers, Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, Andres Segovia, George Bernard Shaw, Adlai Stevenson, Leopold Stokowski, Edith Wharton, and Thornton Wilder. Regular correspondents included art historian Bernard Berenson, the biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen (Barlow's sister-in-law), and artist Rockwell Kent (who included a pencil sketch of Barlow's French home). Numerous opera singers such as Lucrezia Bori and Dame Nellie Melba are also represented. Heads of American arts organizations wrote to him for financial help, or to use his influence for their causes. Varian Fry (known as the "American Schindler") wrote in 1942 to secure a visa for an artist trapped in occupied France. Barlow also collected 5 Erik Satie letters, as well as an undated autograph poem signed by Paul Verlaine and letters from Wystan Auden and William Makepeace Thackeray.
The correspondence as a whole captures the opulence, creativity, and energy of the Jazz Age, the anxiety of the 1930s, the dark years of WWII, and the repression of the individual during the Cold War. Because his friends lived and traveled all over the world, the correspondence also documents daily life in countries such as India, South America, China, Russia, and Iran, a country whose art and culture Barlow worked diligently to promote and preserve.
This collection also includes 8 of Barlow's diaries, kept continuously from 1953 to 1966. In addition to the expected concerts and rehearsals, the diaries are rich in cultural and political content. After his lecture was nearly cancelled by McCarthyites in 1954, Barlow reassured himself that "the tensions and vituperations were markedly less than last year. Praise be! Can people be getting fed up with fear?" (XIV:128). He later theorized that "McCarthy is but a distractive front for the Texas oil interests who grab after the tidal oil, and for those who would gobble up our conservation-land" (XIV:144). He discusses many of his famous correspondents and countless society figures. A typical entry reflects on the 1953 death of Grace Vanderbilt, who had thwarted the relocation of the Metropolitan Opera "because she clung to the prestige of her box" (XVII:77). After Adlai Stevenson visits his house in 1961: "He looks like a zombie. He has been made to kill the shining honesty of his first campaign, and to mouth hypocracies he cannot believe in" (XIX:143). The collection also includes 5 reels of Barlow's earlier diaries on microfilm, 1921 to 1953, as well as extensive photocopies and typed extracts from them.
Beyond the correspondence and the diaries is other material which defies a short description, including: Dozens of family photos going back to the 19th century A scrapbook of photos from Paris in 1942 Typed libretti for Mon Ami Pierrot and other works Numerous political speeches and lectures A typed memoir of his 1918 encounter with Gertrude Stein Short stories, plays, poems, and essays A file on Barlow's protest against the denial of his 1952 passport application due to his alleged support of "Communist front organizations."