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American poet and scholar of Chinese literature, Witter Bynner was hired
as Professor of Oral English at Berkeley in 1918 to teach in the
Students' Army Training Corps. He
rented rooms at the Carlton
Hotel at the corner of Telegraph and Durant. When World War I ended on
November 11, 1918, only a month after Bynner had joined faculty, he was
asked to prepare a poem for the armistice celebration to be held in the
Greek Theatre. He composed a “Canticle of Praise,” a long dramatic ode
for six male voices and a chorus of five hundred Berkeley school
children. Flanked by young men in uniform and dressed himself in
flowing scarlet robes, Bynner whipped the audience into a patriotic
frenzy. “The whole thing was effective,” the Daily Cal reported
breathlessly, “and quite new for California.”
Bynner and sailor at rehearsal of A Canticle of Praise.
When the government military school at Cal was discontinued in January
1919, Bynner was asked by the Dept. of English to stay on and teach a
course in verse writing. “Can the writing of poetry be taught?” he
asked rhetorically in an article published in The New Republic in 1923.
“To poets, yes; to others, no. There, in two sentences, is the question
I asked myself at the University of California in January 1919, and the
answer I brought away in June.” Bynner preferred to hold class
outdoors; the twenty-three students in his class met for the first time
in a clearing just below the Greek Theatre. A photograph shows him
seated against a large tree, his students before him on the hillside.
Bynner teaching his poetry class outdoors.
At other times he entertained students in his rooms at the Carlton Hotel, a practice which would draw the ire of Charles Mills
Gayley, chairman of the Department of English. Bynner and his fellow
instructor William Lyman were sternly reprimanded for serving cocktails
and intoxicating wines to innocent freshmen. Gayley wrote a report to
University President Benjamin Ide Wheeler explaining the disciplinary
action he had taken against the professors: “They recognize that not
only in the present temper of the time [Prohibition], but at no time and
under no circumstances, should alcoholic beverages be offered to
students, whether graduate or undergraduate — most especially Freshman.”
Bynner’s teaching contract was not renewed for the following year, but
his students continued to meet as a group and he from time to time
joined them at their poetry readings. As a tribute to their instructor
the students in the class produced a volume of poetry titled W.B. in California in which they lavishly thanked him for
nurturing their creativity. Some of the poems contain hints of a sexual
awakening prompted by Bynner’s warm friendship.
While Bynner was having a profound emotional effect upon his students at
Berkeley, his own private life was opening like one of his beloved lotus
blossoms. In 1916, two years before coming to Cal, he met the Swiss
artist Paul Thévenaz and embarked on what Bynner’s
biographer terms “his first acknowledged love affair.” At 28, Thévenaz
was ten years younger than Bynner, and represented for him a new
generation of artistic and personal freedom. Thévenaz chided Bynner
about his stodgy, repressed New England approach to life, and gradually
during his stay in California the poet began to relax and relish his
sexuality, for the first time living as openly as a gay man could during
the era. His happiness was cut short when on July 6, 1921 Thévenaz died
suddenly in a New York hospital of a ruptured appendix.
After leaving his teaching position at Cal, Bynner traveled to China
accompanied by sculptor Beniamino Bufano. In collaboration with Kiang
Kang-hu he translated eighteenth century Chinese poetry. He eventually
settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, moving into an adobe house with
Berkeley student Walter Willard “Spud” Johnson. Johnson had
drawn the ire of the University administration with an irreverent
student journal called The Laughing Horse. He dropped out of
school and brought the journal with him to Santa Fe. Bynner and Johnson
were soon drawn into the circle dominated by the cultural doyenne of the
region, Mabel Dodge Luhan (who at one point in their stormy friendship
accused Bynner of single-handedly introducing homosexuality into New
Mexico). Through Luhan they met Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, and
accompanied them on a trip to Mexico. Bynner and Johnson appear in
Lawrence’s fictionalized version of their journey, The Plumed
Serpent, as the characters Owen and Villiers.
Bynner and Indian friends in Santa Fe.
Witter Bynner’s former home in Santa Fe is now operated as a gay bed and
breakfast named The Inn of the Turquoise Bear
(http://www.turquoisebear.com/).
Links on This Page
Read More About It
- Witter Bynner. A Canticle of Praise (San Francisco :
John Henry Nash, 1918)
- ----------. Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections
Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (New York : J. Day, 1951)
- ----------. Selected Letters / edited with an introduction by
James Kraft (New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981)
- W.B. in California: a Tribute (Berkeley : Privately Printed,
1919)
- Heng-tang-tui-shih. The Jade Mountain: a Chinese Anthology,
translated by Witter Bynner (New York : A. A. Knopf, 1929)
- James Kraft. Who Is Witter Bynner?: a Biography (Albuquerque :
University of New Mexico Press, 1995)
- D. H. Lawrence. The Plumed Serpent (New York : A. A. Knopf, 1926)
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