John Jay Chapman

Artist Info

John Jay ChapmanNew York, 1862 - 1933, Poughkeepsie, New York

Chapman, John Jay (2 Mar. 1862-4 Nov. 1933), essayist and poet, was born in New York City, the son of Henry Grafton Chapman, a well-to-do stockbroker and later president of the New York Stock Exchange, and Eleanor Jay, the great-granddaughter of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States. From 1874 to 1877 Chapman studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where he suffered a nervous breakdown. After then being tutored privately for college, he entered Harvard in 1880 and profited intellectually by touring Europe as an undergraduate. He received his bachelor's degree in 1885 and studied at Harvard Law School for the next two years. In January 1887 he mistook the harmless attentions of Percival Lowell, the future Orientalist and astronomer, toward Minna Timmins, his own close friend, and he beat Lowell with a heavy cane. Learning of his error in judgment, Chapman punished himself by burning his left hand in a coal fire so severely that it had to be amputated. After vacationing in Europe that summer, he was admitted to the New York bar the following year. He married Timmins in 1889 and lived with her in New York; the couple had three children. He practiced law in New York until 1898 but preferred to read and involve himself in political reform.

Partly because his wife was half Italian, Chapman studied Italian literature and published "The Fourth Canto of the Inferno" (Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1890) and "Michael Angelo's Sonnets" (Bachelor of Arts, June 1895). In the 1890s he also published The Two Philosophers (1892), a comedy based on an incident involving the Harvard faculty, and essays on William Shakespeare (1896), Robert Browning (1896), and Walt Whitman (1897). A major work was his "Emerson Sixty Years After" (Atlantic, Jan.-Feb. 1897). In March 1897 he also began to edit and privately publish a monthly periodical titled the Political Nursery, rebuking Tammany Hall chicanery in New York City and promoting suggestions by the local Good Government Club. He was to discontinue the magazine in January 1901. Chapman's wife died in 1897. A year later he married Elizabeth Chanler; the couple had one child.

By the time Chapman published Emerson and Other Essays in 1898, Ralph Waldo Emerson had become the single most important influence on his self-reliant moral, social, and intellectual stance. His Causes and Consequences (1898) and Practical Agitation (1900) reflect his disgust at the unholy alliance of party politics, commercialism, and conservative writers. No longer a Republican but now an independent, he was outraged when he and others persuaded his friend Theodore Roosevelt in 1898 to run for governor of New York as an independent only to see him switch back to the Republican Party. Meanwhile, Chapman was viewing with dismay America's steady drift toward imperialism after the Spanish-American War.

Chapman was stricken in 1901 with a mysterious physical and nervous breakdown, was bedridden for a year, and walked only with crutches for a year after that. He was devastated when his nine-year-old son drowned in Austria while the family was vacationing there in 1903. During this period he received psychological help from his friend William James.

Chapman's work on the stage began in 1907 with seven plays he wrote for children. Mostly comic, romantic, and unoriginal, they feature lost children, witches, hermits, knights, and the like, have passages of blank verse, and praise idealists and reformers. The plays, which were performed by vacationing groups and in schools, were published in 1908 and 1911. Chapman also wrote three adult dramas, one of which, The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold: A Play for a Greek Theatre (1910), retains its value. It depicts a heroic figure gone tragically astray, and its use of varied rhythms, episodes, chorus, and intermezzo provides variety and excitement. Writing plays was undoubtedly of therapeutic value to Chapman.

In 1910 he suddenly felt well again. He published Learning and Other Essays that year and took a trip to Italy and North Africa the next. In 1912 he made a penitential pilgrimage, in an effort to cleanse the American soul, to Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He rented a room in a vacant store, advertised a meeting, and on 18 August read a moving address to memorialize the unusually brutal lynching one year earlier of Zacharia (or Ezekiel) Walker, an African American who killed a white man during a robbery. Chapman's speech urged love in response to hate and reverence for human nature and in the process exposed a dark corner of the American soul. He spoke to an audience of two people. Getting a better response was his spirited, well-documented William Lloyd Garrison (1913), in praise of unpopular, but occasionally necessary, violent action against evil, in this instance abolitionist Garrison's war against slavery.

In June 1914 Chapman and his wife visited his son Victor, an architecture student in Paris. In July the couple were in Germany. When that country invaded France, the Chapmans returned home via London, but Victor joined the Lafayette Escadrille and was killed in action in June 1916--the first American aviator to die in World War I. Earlier, Chapman had published Deutschland über Alles; or, Germany Speaks . . . (Nov. 1914), in which he mostly let Germany condemn itself by quoting bellicose German statesmen, writers, and militarists. He also more sanely, if vainly, asked American leaders--including President Woodrow Wilson in person--to seek, first, disarmament, and then, after America entered the war, unvengeful treatment of Germany, the predestined loser.

After Victor's death, Chapman never regained his previous creative energy. He edited and published Victor's letters from France (1917). He revealed surprising prejudices, wanting names of German students kept off the Harvard War Memorial (1917), objecting when a Roman Catholic was seated on Harvard's Board of Overseers (1924), and opposing the nomination of Alfred E. Smith as Democratic candidate for president because of his Catholicism (1927). To his credit, however, he published a book on Shakespeare (1922), Letters and Religion (1924), a study of Dante (1927), and three books concerned with Greek literature (1928, 1929, 1931). He visited Europe three more times (1919, 1925, 1930). He died in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Chapman was a brilliant, honest man of letters and advocate of reform. His interests were varied, and each of his twenty-five books is distinctive. His main, self-imposed challenge was to understand and reform the American mind. Everything he wrote is graceful, vigorous, and implicitly autobiographical.

Bibliography

Most of Chapman's voluminous papers are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif., and in libraries at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman, ed. Jacques Barzun (1957), reprints representative works by Chapman with an analytical introduction. Owen Wister, Two Appreciations of John Jay Chapman (1934), is a tribute by a lifelong friend. M. A. DeWolfe Howe, another close friend, in John Jay Chapman and His Letters (1937), quotes extensively from "Retrospections," Chapman's unpublished autobiography. Richard B. Hovey, John Jay Chapman: An American Mind (1959), is the standard biography and contains a select bibliography. Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers: Ten Essays on Literature (1938; rev. ed., 1948), contains the best short essay on Chapman. Daniel Aaron, " 'Strongly-Flavored Imitation Cynicism': Henry Adams's Education Reviewed by John Jay Chapman," New England Quarterly 93 (June 1990): 288-93, prints for the first time and comments on Chapman's adverse opinion of The Education of Henry Adams. An obituary is in the New York Times, 5 Nov. 1933.

Robert L. Gale

Citation:

Robert L. Gale. "Chapman, John Jay";

http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00281.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

Access Date: Fri Aug 09 2013 13:29:12 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)

John Jay Chapman (March 2, 1862 – November 4, 1933) was an American author.

Biography[edit]

He was born in New York City.[1] His father, Henry Grafton Chapman, was a broker who eventually became president of the New York Stock Exchange. His grandmother, Maria Weston Chapman, was one of the leading campaigners against slavery and worked with William Lloyd Garrison on The Liberator.[2] He was educated at St. Paul's School, Concord and Harvard, and after graduating in 1884, Chapman traveled around Europe before returning to study at the Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the bar in 1888, and practiced law until 1898. Meanwhile he had attracted attention as an essayist of unusual merit. His work is marked by originality and felicity of expression, and the opinion of many critics has placed him in the front rank of the American essayists of his day.[3][4]

He married Minna Timmins in 1889 and they had two children, including future pilot Victor Chapman. Timmins died giving birth to their third child. Chapman later married Elizabeth Astor Winthrop Chanler, second daughter of John Winthrop Chanler and Margaret Astor Ward of the Astor family, and sister of soldier and explorer William A. Chanler. Chapman became involved in politics[5] and joined the City Reform Club and the Citizens' Union. He lectured on the need for reform and edited the journal The Political Nursery (1897-1901).[6]

Notes[edit]

Jump up ^ "Retrospections." In John Jay Chapman and his Letters, De Wolfe Howe (ed.), Houghton Mifflin Company, 1937.

Jump up ^ "The relationship between Chapman's writings and his family history received more attention at midcentury. Chapman's grandmother was an ardent abolitionist and colleague of William Lloyd Garrison. Her grandson inherited her crusading spirit, but substituted the influence of money in politics for slavery." — Russello, Gerald J. (1999). "A Hero for the Truth," The New Criterion, Vol. 17, p. 74.

Jump up ^ Hovey, Richard B. (1959). John Jay Chapman - An American Mind, Columbia University Press.

Jump up ^ Wilson, Edmund (1976). "John Jay Chapman: The Mute and the Open Strings." In The Triple Thinkers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jump up ^ Crawford, Allan Pell (2013). "The Anti-Alinsky," The American Conservative, August 7.

Jump up ^ Stocking, David (1960). "John Jay Chapman and Political Reform," American Quarterly, Vol. 2, No.1, pp. 62-70.