MOODY, WILLIAM VAUGHN: 1869-1910.
" William Vaughn Moody , American poet and playwright, was born in Spencer, Ind., on July 8, 1869, the sixth of seven children. His father, Francis Burdette Moody, was a retired riverboat captain who had plied between Pittsburgh and New Orleans until his steamer was seized by the Southern troops at the beginning of the Civil War. His mother was Henrietta Emily Stoy, daughter of a pioneer Indiana family.
"When Moody was one year old the family moved to New Albany , on the Ohio River, and there he spent his boyhood. He began writing poems at fifteen, usually tearing them up as soon as they were written. After leaving high school, where he was editor of two newspapers, he studied drawing and painting for a year at the Pritchett Institute of Design in Louisville, Ky.
"The death of Moody's mother in 1884 and his father in 1886 broke up the family home, and he taught country school for a year near New Albany . During the next two years he prepared for college at the Riverview Academy, New York , earning his way by teaching.
"In 1889, at the age of twenty, Moody entered Harvard, his entire capital consisting of twenty-five page: 226[View Page 226] dollars. He supported himself by working at typewriting, tutoring, and proctoring, and in his senior year, having acquired enough points for graduation, he traveled in Europe as tutor to the son of a wealthy family. The trip was notable for a walking tour of the Black Forest and Switzerland , a winter spent in Florence, and a visit to Greece. Returning in time to read the class day poem, 'The Song of the Elder Brothers,' he was graduated in 1893.
"The next year he did graduate work at Harvard in medieval philology, earning his living by doing editorial work on Bulfinch's Mythology with his intimate friend, Robert Morss Lovett. The following year he was an assistant in the English department at Harvard and at Radcliffe College. The poems of this period were mostly in imitation of Keats, Browning, and Walt Whitman, and there were few of them that he did not later reject.
"After a summer of travel in Europe with Daniel Gregory Mason, Moody went to the University of Chicago in 1895 as instructor in English and rhetoric and he remained there seven years, attaining the rank of assistant professor in 1901. During those years his heart was never in his work, he longed for the vacations and leisure to write, and took frequent leaves of absence.
"In the spring of 1898 and the winter of 1899 he was in New York editing the Cambridge edition of Milton. The year 1900 he lived in New England, dividing his time between creative work and a textbook he was writing with Lovett. That year he made his debut in print with the publication of The Masque of Judgment, a lyrical drama in five acts. It had been begun three years before on a walking trip thru the Dolomite country of the Italian Tyrol. The summer of 1901 he went camping in the Rocky Mountains with Hamlin Garland. A collection of his Poems appeared in 1901.
"The publication of Moody's and Lovett's History of English Literature in 1902 liberated Moody from the drudgery of the classroom and permitted him to devote all his time to writing. John M. Manly, head of the English department at the University of Chicago, repeatedly scheduled courses for him, and he was offered full salary to lecture a single quarter a year, but he declined and taught no more classes after 1902, maintaining, however, a nominal connection with the university until 1907. He took a trip to Greece in 1902, spending much of his time reading Greek tragedy. The next few years he divided his time between Boston, New York, and Chicago . His New York home was in Waverly Place in Greenwich Village.
"In 1904 Moody published The Fire-Bringer, another lyrical drama intended as the first member of a trilogy on the Promethean theme, of which The Masque of Judgment was the second member. After this his work was sought by magazines …
"He went on a trip to Arizona with Ferdinand Schevill in 1905. He lived for a week at Orabi among the Hopi Indians and saw the spring dance at Walpi, and definitely planned his prose play, The Great Divide, which was based on a story from real life related to him by Mrs. Harriet Converse Brainerd of Chicago , who later became his wife. The play was written on his return from the trip. It is the story of the marriage by capture of a New England girl with an Arizona outlaw, providing a contrast between Eastern puritanism and the paganism of the West.
"The Great Divide made Moody's name known to the general public. He showed the play to Margaret Anglin, the actress, who gave it a trial performance in Chicago at the close of her season in the spring of 1906 under the title of A Sabine Woman. After the triumphant first act, she declined to go on with the play until Moody had affixed his name to a contract, while the audience waited tensely. He spent the summer at Cornish, N. H., revising the play, working with fierce concentration, and it was produced in New York by Henry Miller in the fall of 1906.
"Moody wrote with facility and thought it easier to write blank verse than prose. Poetry was his one ambition; all other undertakings were for the purpose of financial remuneration. He declined offers of assistance from friends, preferring to live poorly and have his independence. He helped support his sisters.
" 'Physically he was slightly above medium height,' recalls Lovett, 'graceful and well proportioned, in young manhood with a strength beyond his stature, and with great endurance. In college he wore a moustache; later in life, a Van Dyke beard. His hands were unusually deft and sensitive. His voice was clear and resonant.' He had blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. 'He was always a good companion, walking, swimming, riding, at a concert or art gallery, spending the night smoking before the fire or under the stars. I think he was at his best with one other person, or at least a small group …' In large groups he was inclined to be self-conscious and silent. He had a varied store of songs which he would render to the accompaniment of a guitar. He was very fond of tobacco. In literature he liked particularly the medieval French romances. page: 227[View Page 227] Returning to his early love, painting, he did, among other things, his own portrait.
"Moody was in perfect health until 1906 when he had an operation for the removal of a growth from his leg which had been injured in a severe fall while climbing Mount Parnassus four years earlier. (He was passionately fond of mountain-climbing.) The pain returned while he was on a trip to Italy in 1907, and in the spring of 1908, while living in New York , he had a serious attack of typhoid fever from which he never completely recovered. He spent that summer with Ridgely Torrence, the poet, on an island off the coast of Maine, and was nursed by Mrs. Brainerd, who became his wife in Quebec on May 7, 1909. There was a falling off in Moody's high spirits and his work after this, but he completed his second prose play, The Faith Healer, which had been forming in his mind since 1896 when he read newspaper accounts of Schlatter, a Western faith-healer. He called the play 'a queerish thing, at the antipodes from The Great Divide in method and feeling …' The Faith Healer was produced in St. Louis in the autumn of 1909, and in New York in Dec. 1909. Dramatically, it was less successful than its predecessor.
"After the play opened, he visited London and broke down badly. He wrote to a friend at home: 'The work which I did on The Faith Healer, together with the excitement of attending its production, came too soon after my typhoid convalescence.' Thereafter he was extremely ill.
"He died in Colorado Springs on Oct. 17, 1910, at the age of forty-one. He left unfinished The Death of Eve, intended to complete the trilogy of dramatic poems. His works were collected in 1912 in two volumes under the title Poems and Poetic Plays. Daniel Gregory Mason edited Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett edited his Selected Poems in 1931 …"
Condensed from Authors Today and Yesterday.
- The Masque of Judgment: a Masque-Drama in Five Acts, and a
Prelude. Boston, 1900.
- Poems. Boston, 1901.
- History of English Literature (withRobert Morss Lovett). New York, 1902.
- The Fire-Bringer. Boston, 1904.
- The Great Divide: a Play. New
York, 1909.
- Gloucester Moors, and Other Poems.
Boston, 1910.
- The Faith Healer: a Play in Three Acts. New
York, 1910.
- Poems and Plays. Boston, 1912. 2 vols.
- Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody. (Edited byDaniel Gregory Mason.) Boston, 1913.
- Selected Poems. (Edited byRobert Morss Lovett.) Boston, 1931.
- Letters to Harriet; (edited byPercy Mackaye). Boston, 1935.
