Ghost Storeys: Ralph Adams Cram, Modern Gothic Media, and Deconstructive Microhistory at a Canadian Church 9780773549906

Citation preview

G h o s t S to reys

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Ghost Storeys Ralph Adams Cram, Modern Gothic Media, and Deconstructive Microhistory at a Canadian Church

C a m e ro n M ac don ell

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-4988-3 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4989-0 (paper) 978-0-7735-4990-6 (eP DF ) 978-0-7735-4991-3 (eP UB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Macdonell, Cameron, author Ghost storeys: Ralph Adams Cram, modern Gothic media, and deconstructive microhistory at a Canadian church / Cameron Macdonell. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISB N 978-0-7735-4988-3 (hardcover). – IS BN 978-0-7735-4989-0 (softcover). – ISB N 978-0-7735-4990-6 (eP DF ). – IS BN 978-0-7735-4991-3 (eP U B ) 1. St. Mary’s Anglican Church (Windsor, Ont.). 2. Anglican church buildings – Ontario – Windsor. 3. Cram, Ralph Adams, 1863–1942. 4. Gothic revival (Architecture) – Ontario – Windsor. 5. Church architecture – Ontario – Windsor. 6. Church architecture – Details. I. Title. NA 5247.W4M 33 2017

726.509713'32

c2017-901659-8 c2017-901660-1

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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For my missing A.R.M.

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Contents

Figures ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xvii Introduction 3 1  Cram, the Anglophile  24 2  Gifts of the Magi  67 3  Encrypting the Gothick Body  112 4  The Castle Perilous, Walkerville  159 Postcrypt 211 Notes 223 Bibliography 265 Index 287

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Figures

Unless otherwise stated, all figures for this book are provided courtesy of the author. 0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

1.6

1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

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Exterior, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n  4 Exterior, St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Cohasset, m a  31 Map, Walkerville, o n  34 Floor plan, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on  35 Exterior, All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Ashmont, m a  37 Exterior, St Michael’s Anglican Church, Bray, Berkshire County, uk [Cram, English Country Churches, plate viii] 38 Over-mantel statues, offices of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, New York, ny [Cram, Church Building, 2nd ed., 225] 47 Castle tile, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on  65 High-altar reredos screen, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on  65 Adoration of the Magi window, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on  73 Exterior, Anglican Church of the Epiphany, Kingsville, on  85 Apse windows, Anglican Church of the Epiphany, Kingsville, on  89 Central light, King memorial window, Anglican Church of the Epiphany, Kingsville, on  91

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x Figures

2.5

Prototypical village church [Cram, Church Building, 1st ed., 23] 102 2.6 Prototypical village church [Cram, Church Building, 1st ed., 24] 104 2.7 Liturgically southern aisle interior, St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Cohasset, ma   1 0 5 2.8 Baptismal font, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on 106 2.9 Adoring magi, William Morris’s Adoration of the Magi, 1894. [Scanned from Wildman and Christian, Edward Burne-Jones, 295. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Adoration_of_the_Magi_Tapestry.png] 108 2.10 Melchior and the vessel of myrrh, Adoration of the Magi window, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on 109 3.1 Nave window with ss Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on 124 3.2 Wonderland white roses partially painted red [Delafield, Alice in Wonderland, back cover] 126 3.3 Exterior, Willistead Manor, Walkerville, o n  133 3.4 Christ’s torso, high-altar window, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 139 3.5 Pulpit, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on 140 3.6 Nave arcade, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, on 142 3.7 Liturgically southern exterior, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 144 3.8 Sermon on the Mount window, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 151 3.9 Sermon on the Mount window, St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Cohasset, m a 153 3.10 Spes and Transfiguration windows, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 156 4.1 Communion in the Grail castle, Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, n j  164 4.2 Angels and the veiled Grail at the Round Table, Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, n j  165

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Figures xi

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 4.15 4.16 5.1

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Galahad and the Holy Grail in Sarras, Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, n j  166 Exterior, St Paul’s School Chapel, Concord, n h  169 Four winds on cornice plaques, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 170 Nave clerestory windows, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 179 Choir-stall finials, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 180 High altar, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 181 Maltese crosses, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 184 Knight charging a centaur, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 186 Knight and his dog charging a demon, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n  187 Etin, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n  190 Fish cross, high-altar reredos, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 192 High-altar window, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 193 Chalice-holding angels, high-altar window, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n  194 Credence shelf, new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 197 “Leper’s squint,” new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, o n 212

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Acknowledgments

I acknowledge first that my acknowledgments are a confession: the new St Mary’s Anglican Church in Walkerville, Ontario, Canada, has been an object of curiosity for me since childhood and an obsession since my undergraduate education. As a child I often visited cousins on the east end of Windsor, Ontario (the city that annexed Walkerville in 1935). On quieter summer days we would ride our bicycles to our favourite comic-book shop, which stood on a stretch of Wyandotte Street that crossed the former town (still proud neighbourhood) of  Walkerville. And as we pedalled past the tree-lined blocks of Devonshire Road I caught glimpses of the church’s massive tower mediated through the verdure on the street. As a teenager my interests increasingly turned to comic books. I planned a career as an illustrator of superheroes and supernatural storylines, and I attended the University of Windsor as something stimulating to do while perfecting my portfolio for submission to comic-book studios. However after one semester of introductory art history, I set aside my illustrations to pursue academia while retaining my fascination with the relationship between the visual and the textual. Thus when I joined a small undergraduate seminar course about the architecture of Ralph Adams Cram and his sometime partner Bertram Goodhue, I saw an opportunity for future research through Cram’s work as a Gothic Revival architect and an author of  Gothic ghost stories. In particular the seminar focused on five churches Cram and / or Goodhue designed in the Windsor-Detroit region, and I chose to research the Walkerville church that I glimpsed all those summers ago.

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xiv Acknowledgments

With my undergraduate essay I touched on a profound iconographical program within the Walkerville church, and my graduate research pursued the question of Walkerville’s Gothic interdisciplinarity through Erwin Panofsky’s iconographical analyses, W.J.T. Mitchell’s critical iconology, Karl Marx’s ideological critiques, and Jacques Derrida’s spectral Marxism. This book is the result of that graduate and undergraduate research, strategically reimagined as a meditation on microhistory and the allegorical relationship between the specific and the general in the global phenomenon of the Gothic Revival. As this book is bound to my work as a student researcher the writing is indebted to my many advisors and examiners. I am especially grateful to Martin Bressani, my PhD supervisor. Undeterred by my sporadic haunting of McGill University’s School of Architecture, Martin would cleverly question my antic disposition every time I rattled off chains of ideas in his office. And his expertise in the Gothic Revival and nineteenth-century historicism was invaluable for untangling the good ideas from the dead weight. My thanks go to the other members of my doctoral advisory committee as well: to Jodey Castricano, whose apprehension of deconstruction and Gothic literature held the mirror, as ’twere, to my speculations; and to Annmarie Adams, who knew just how to extort the uphoarded treasures of medical secrets lingering in modern architecture. Annmarie also first suggested microhistory as a conceptual terrain on which to build my analysis of the Walkerville church. My thanks likewise go to the chorus of insightful and encouraging remarks from members of my doctoral defence committee: Maggie Kilgour, Nik Luka, and Ipek Türeli, and to Anthony Vidler, an academic godfather for my research, who graciously communed with me via his external examiner’s report. Prior to my doctoral research I had the pleasure of studying with Malcolm Thurlby at York University’s graduate program in art history. Malcolm thoroughly enriched my knowledge of the British and Canadian Gothic Revival, providing several insights that appear in the second and third chapters of this book. My gratitude for the York University years extends to Guy Métraux, who shared my ­fascination with Cram’s architecture, to Brian Grosskurth, who sophisticated my interest in deconstruction, and to Matthew Brower, who indulged me in conversations about interpretive strategies for nineteenth-century art.

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Acknowledgments xv

I am also grateful to Michael Farrell of the art history program at the University of Windsor, who encouraged and supported my ambition to pursue art history as a career and who first introduced me to Cram and Goodhue’s architecture and American art history. In addition I recall fondly all the discussions I shared with Julie Glover, Mikael Kriz, Gavin McDonald, and Katie O’Meara (now McDonald) during the Cram and Goodhue seminar. And I am thankful to William Acres (once of the History Department at the University of Windsor) for an early education in microhistory and the rigours of graduate school. I am grateful as well to the many ecclesiastical and scholastic organizations and archival communities in dialogue with this project: Kim Tenney at the Boston Public Library; Art Jahns at the archives of the former Hiram Walker & Sons Ltd; Brian Owens and Ana-Maria Staffen at the Leddy Library archives of the University of Windsor; Leslie Edwards at the Cranbrook Academy archives in Michigan; Mark Richardson at the archives of the Incorporated Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Huron; Alexandra Snyder at the new St Mary’s Anglican Church of Walkerville, Ontario; Marc Crichton and David Scudder, who opened the homes of Cram’s descendants to one in search of Cram’s surviving library; and the friendly faces and helpful hands at the British Library, the Windsor municipal archives, the Windsor Communities Museum, and the many churches and campuses across Europe and North America I visited to contextualize the Walkerville design and construction. Having received my doctoral degree from McGill University, I am thankful to Laurent Stalder, my postdoctoral supervisor at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (e t h ), for the time and resources to complete this book. By extension I am thankful to my many colleagues at e t h, especially Tobias Erb, Moritz Gleich, Elisabet Jönsson Steiner, Samuel Korn, Jacqueline Maurer, and Caspar Schärer for our luncheon and dinner conversations. And I am thankful to all the graduate students I have taught at McGill and e t h for their discussions on the related topics of the ghost and the uncanny. At McGill-Queen’s University Press Jonathan Crago offered an abundance of sound advice in developing this book and facilitating the peer-review process. I am consequently grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their many recommendations. And on a personal note, I call attention to Kathryn Simpson’s copy editing.

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xvi Acknowledgments

Kat and I have known each other since we were graduate students at York University, and I truly appreciate having had such a trusted critical voice at the end of the writing process. Finally I am grateful to my family for their unwavering support during my student career: to Judith Kavanagh and Jan Peeters, for their endless hospitality every time I came to Montreal; to Nathan Innocente and Jo-Anne Marcuz in Toronto, for a much-needed physical and intellectual way station between Montreal and home (now Zürich and home); to my mother, who helped so much during the tough final years of my doctoral research; to my sisters, for their encouragement; to my father-in-law, an old Walkervillian who shared stories about his youth; to my daughter, Kathryn, for her compulsive need to type with me; and especially to my wife, Crystal, who patiently indulged my process of pacing and talking through theoretical and organizational writing problems and who travelled with me, for weeks on end, in pursuit of Cram and / or Goodhue architecture. Research for this project was made possible through generous contributions of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research ­ Council of Canada, the Ontario Student Assistance Program, and the York University entrance scholarship program, as well as the g re at award program and the Maureen Anderson prize of McGill University’s School of Architecture. Portions of this book have been republished from articles. I am especially grateful to Luc Noppen of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada for permission to do so.

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Abbreviations

bsw

Black Spirits and White

cb

Church Building, 1st ed.

gq

The Gothic Quest, 1st ed.

jc

The Judicial Committee’s Feet of Clay

m da

Le Morte d’Arthur

mlia My Life in Architecture ra

The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain

wr

William Robins v the National Trust Company

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G h o s t S to reys

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Introduction

On Sunday morning, 24 July 1904, a reporter for the Detroit NewsTribune boarded a ferry on the Michigan side of the Detroit River. The river, then as now, served as a national border between the US and the Canadian province of Ontario, and the reporter, Henry Booth, crossed the border to visit a company town called Walkerville. More precisely he crossed the river to review the new St Mary’s Anglican Church (fig. 0.1) in Walkerville, and when he entered the building a feature of its modern Gothic architecture “puzzled” him. The high altar and the altar in the morning chapel are made of “unmistakable stone – Bedford limestone, I believe – there is no communion ‘table’ here.” Yet no candles were lit on the solid stone altars. Thus the puzzled reporter could not understand where St Mary’s Church stood on the spectrum of Anglican churchmanship. Was the building a site of “low-church evangelical protestantism or of highchurch sacerdotal sacramentalism, or of broad-church rationalistic latitudinarianism?”1 The stone altars suggested a High Church affiliation; the lack of candles suggested evangelism. After the service and after a teatime interview with William H. Battersby, the rector, Booth broached the topic with a paradoxical statement: As I was coming away I remarked [to Battersby]: “Well, I should set you down for an evangelical high-churchman.” “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “first, you were educated at Durham, an evangelical stronghold … On the other hand, however, I do not see how you could advise, or consent to, the erection of a church on this plan unless you have some kind of high-church,

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0.1  The new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, has an attached rectory flanking to the liturgical south and an attached parish hall flanking to the liturgical north, both half-timbered in the Tudor Revival style

ritualistic aspirations.” At which he laughed as we shook hands, but said nothing.2 In the wake of that sudden burst of laughter the church faded into silence and the reporter left the building without an answer. He had assumed, logically enough, that the architectural plan had materialized through the religion’s institutional agents and that the new Walkerville church was subject to its Anglican rector. However planning and building the architecture was not really under the rector’s control. To be sure Battersby was the local clergyman when the church was under construction, and he performed his version of the Anglican liturgy from within the building once it was consecrated, but the question of the plan remains unresolved in the enduring silence that followed his laughter. In 1979 Walkerville historian Cyril Hallam tried to fill the gap in Booth’s review: “it had been the architect and not the rector who had insisted that the church be built on this plan.”3 Hallam referred to American architect Ralph Adams Cram (1863–1942), who was indeed an Anglo-Catholic High Churchman during the Walkerville commission. Furthermore Cram’s Boston-based firm sent the church

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Introduction 5

plans to Walkerville, along with a letter dated 29 July 1902, in which Cram wrote: “We have tried to make this an absolutely perfect piece of ecclesiastical design.”4 For Cram at that time, perfect design was High Church ritualistic Gothic. But neither the plans for the building nor the aforementioned letter were sent to Battersby, the rector. They were sent to the eponymous Walker brothers of Walkerville: Edward Chandler (1851–1915), Franklin Hiram (1853–1916), and James Harrington (1859–1919) Walker. The Walker brothers commissioned the church. More precisely I contend that among the Walker brothers, Edward, the eldest, had a specific stake in the project: “The Church itself Mr. Ed[ward Walker] is very anxious to have pretty nearly as designed by Mr. Cram.”5 Thus the new St Mary’s Anglican Church was not simply the rector’s building, as the reporter thought. Nor was it something Cram necessarily “insisted” on building, as Hallam would have us believe. Rather it was Edward Walker who anxiously accepted the design. And although I focus throughout this book on a confluence of issues that came together when Cram’s firm designed the Walkerville church, the question that frames my research is to ask why Edward was so anxious to see it built. During the design and construction phases of the Walkerville church (1902–04) Edward Walker was secretly dying of syphilis. Based on this assertion I investigate the lead architect, the primary client, and their church-building project to provide insights into numerous intersecting fields of research. If ethically motivated architecture simultaneously reflects and seeks to shape the society that produces it, then architectural revivalism indicates a belief in the past as something that can solve current social issues. With the “ethical” turn in the Victorian Gothic Revival, architects and social critics (often both in one person) rallied metaphors of health and sickness to describe the ills of modern society as well as the restorative power of medieval architecture.6 Cram was among the last vociferous champions of that belief for the North American Gothic Revival, and the opportunity to work with the ailing Edward Walker allowed Cram to present the Walkerville church as a Petri dish of sorts, testing the health of Anglo-North American culture in his day. Therefore I examine the Walkerville church through its iconography of sickness and restoration, through its social function in the health of paternalistic town planning, and through metaphysical questions about the building’s role in the physical and spiritual health of its congregants. More importantly I emphasize Cram’s pessimism about modernity’s health because such a reading (which is not the only possible

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reading) opens new perspectives on the emerging interdisciplinary field of Gothic studies. Scholars have mostly limited their inter­ disciplinary analysis of modern Gothic architecture and literature to the Georgian era (1714–1830) of Britain because Georgian gentlemen such as Horace Walpole (1717–1797) wrote Gothic novels and built Gothic Revival mansions.7 Consequently for reasons I have explored elsewhere, scholars have mostly neglected Gothic architectural and literary encounters from beyond Georgian Britain.8 Yet Cram designed dozens of Gothic Revival churches across North America and published a book of Gothic ghost stories in 1895 called Black Spirits and White. In that text Cram relied on a Shakespearean correlation of sickness and the supernatural to organize his stories, wherein the collected phantoms were manifestations of modernity’s illness – be they the victims or the perpetrators of social ills.9 Thus Edward Walker’s malady allowed Cram to explore certain narrative techniques and horror tropes from his Gothic literature while positioning the Walkerville church in the heart of a sick society. I also offer biographical reflections on the client (the sickly Edward Walker, anxious to commission the church) and the architect Cram, who was pessimistic about his ability to cure his patron. No biography of Edward Walker exists, but I did use information gleaned from the proceedings of a posthumous court case concerning the validity of Walker’s last will and testament. In fact the testimony of Edward’s doctors, the summary statements from that case, and a book that the plaintiff William Robins wrote about the court decisions constitute the main corroborating evidence for my reading of syphilis in the Walkerville church.10 Cram’s legacy on the other hand has benefited from the activities of recent literary, cultural, biographical, and architectural historians.11 Nevertheless because of Cram’s long and prolific career, biographical studies have relied on very general patterns throughout his life. Focusing my analysis on a single church from Cram’s early career allows for a detailed exploration of his architectural strategies to revive the Gothic past in the modern world. In particular I foreground Cram’s fear that the modern world limited his ability to revive the Gothic, and I emphasize sexuality as one such limitation. After all syphilis is a venereal disease and sexual anxiety is a telling subtext for the horror in Cram’s Gothic literature and in the Walkerville church. Finally Cram scholars have relegated the Walkerville commission to the periphery of his career, in part because the project ended in the

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Introduction 7

wake of Cram’s firm winning the prestigious 1902 competition to redesign the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. The West Point commission was so important to Cram’s national reputation and the final florescence of Collegiate Gothic in America that his admirers have understandably minimized the Walkerville church in favour of evaluating the contemporaneous military campus. In addition those primarily American scholars have passed over the Walkerville commission because it stands on the Canadian border and thus ­outside the scope of “American” architecture. Therefore I offer the Walkerville church as an introduction to the importance of Cram’s firm to AngloCanadian architecture of the early twentieth century. Certainly for the Canadian Gothic Revival, Mathilde Brosseau rightly noted Cram’s influence on Canadian church architecture at that time.12 However Brosseau omitted the Walkerville design, turning to Canadian cathedral projects that Cram’s firm either built (All Saints’ Anglican in Halifax) or planned (St Alban’s Anglican in Toronto).13 In terms of formal design the Halifax cathedral probably influenced Canadian architecture the most among the firm’s commissions, but in terms of cultural history the Walkerville design set a pattern for Anglo-Canadian architectural production – one that the Halifax cathedral merely reinforced. In other words because Canada stood between British and American cultural empires, Cram’s emphasis on an Anglo-American architectural heritage provided Anglo-Canadians with cultural perspectives to negotiate British and American hegemonies. Annmarie Adams and Martin Bressani have consequently described Canadian architecture as the edge of empire,14 and with the Walkerville church standing near the edge of Canada’s border, this marginal position sets the stage for the “exceptional normal” paradigm of microhistory.

M a r g in a li a Episodic microhistorians typically gravitate toward marginal moments in history, providing “thick” descriptions of those relatively obscure events. These descriptions in turn usually present revelatory insights into the norms of larger historical structures. Carlo Ginzburg for example famously studied sixteenth-century Italian inquisitorial records in The Cheese and the Worms to reconstruct the worldview of Menocchio, a Friulian miller who was eventually burned at the  stake for heresy. Ginzburg was particularly interested in using Menocchio’s case to build “a general hypothesis on the popular

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culture (more precisely, peasant culture) of preindustrial Europe” and to reveal aspects of that culture that were otherwise fragmentary, distorted, or silenced in the inquisitorial archives of repression.15 Hence Menocchio was “exceptional” because his heretical beliefs survived in an archive but was “normal” inasmuch as those beliefs belonged to a tradition of peasant culture otherwise obscured among the elite cultural artifacts of Early Modern Europe.16 Microhistorians have subsequently sophisticated Ginzburg’s approach to institutional oppression. In Inheriting Power Giovanni Levi argued that institutions are not simply sites of elite social control that members of a popular culture can either accept or reject (the ­latter to their peril).17 Social actors have agency: “they try to exploit the contradictions of an inconsistent system of norms” to negotiate their individual desires and social expectations.18 Microhistorians have also broadened the chronological and geographical scope of microhistory beyond Early Modern Europe.19 For example Sigurður Magnússon, founder of the Center for Microhistorical Research in Reykjavik, recently wrote a social history of Iceland mainly through microhistorical case studies.20 Nevertheless Ginzburg, Levi, and Magnússon all privileged microhistory as a bottom-up methodology to investigate popular cultures and the institutional agents who dealt directly with those cultures. In this book I am not interested in microhistory as a tool to examine repressed or socially opportunistic “peasants.” There are other ethnographic techniques to use when analyzing the proletarians of Edwardian Walkerville – for example oral histories that live on in the pages of The Walkerville Times. My point is that fragmentations and silences in the mundane corners of historical records need not reflect elite cultural tensions with the popular. After all Walkerville’s Anglican rector was an institutional agent, and the silence that ­followed from his sudden burst of laughter was indicative of tension between elite cultural agents.21 Edward Walker and his brothers commissioned the local church, and their family business dominated the town. Therefore I am interested in how culturally elite acts of creation might involve a degree of self-censure (be it purposive and / or unintentional), and I explore the consequent fragmentations or silences in the available archives through a strategy akin to microhistorical interpretations of marginal clues. This strategy is perhaps clearest in Ginzburg’s essay subtitled “Clues and Scientific Method,” in which Ginzburg developed a

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Introduction 9

medical analogy for microhistory.22 Like a physician the microhistorian gathers the marginalia of symptomatic clues to offer plausible conjecture on otherwise concealed historical events.23 Ginzburg consequently combined the medical backgrounds of Giovanni Morelli, Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Conan Doyle – synthesizing art historical, psychoanalytical, and detective literary knowledge – to justify his method of conjectural reconstruction. He also used that combination to extend his conjectural strategy into various fields of research.24 For instance in an essay on art historical interdisciplinarity, Ginzburg rehearsed an argument for the attribution of a Renaissance-era botanical study in watercolour.25 Drawing on knowledge from ­botany, paleography, and art historical connoisseurship, Ginzburg (re)presented a constellation of marginal details – the sum total of which led to a plausible attribution for that painting. More importantly the attribution challenged a larger argument about the history of botanico-scientific representation in German Renaissance culture, which perfectly suited the case study to Ginzburg’s conjectural model of episodic microhistory (i.e., marginal details changing macrohistorical structures). I take my cue therefore from Ginzburg himself when I call attention to a marginal comment in that essay. In defence of connoisseurship Ginzburg rebuffed Derrida for what he called a “gross simplification” of the connoisseur’s concern with attribution.26 Nor was this the first time Ginzburg criticized Derrida.27 From at least as far back as The Cheese and the Worms Ginzburg had condemned Derrida’s work as a heap of “facile, nihilistic objections.”28 And in a 1986 interview Ginzburg continued: “I am deeply against every kind of Derrida trash, that kind of cheap skeptical attitude … I start with a kind of realistic attitude in the sense of a realistic notion of truth. At the same time, I am convinced that you can have a kind of creative misreading of what, for instance, I am trying to write.”29 Ginzburg’s use of the phrase “creative misreading” should give pause to any deconstructive scholar, especially because Derrida frequently “misread” marginal elements in philosophical texts, thereby undermining the textual presentation of “truth.” Thus Tony Mohlo rightly wondered what distinguished the Ginzburgian act of misreading from Derrida’s “trash”30 – a question that at least partly turns on the issue of why microhistorians use marginal details. Do we misread the institutional mechanisms controlling cultural production to hypothesize about the repressed truths of other voices embedded in historical

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narratives? Or do we understand those other voices not as truths but rather as indicators of intractable complexities that undermine the alleged truth of any historical narrative? I find Ginzburg’s quick dismissal of “facile” Derridean philosophy glaringly ironic. The supposed relativism of deconstruction is not a fixed methodology to be dismissed as facile. W.J.T. Mitchell stressed the difference between facile relativism – which is a “nihilistic ­abandonment to free play and arbitrary will”31 – and a “hard, rigorous relativism that regards knowledge as a social product.”32 For Mitchell’s rigorous relativism, “our modes of knowledge and representation may be ‘arbitrary’ and ‘conventional,’ [but] they are [still] the constituents of the forms of life, the practices and traditions within which we must make epistemological, ethical, and political choices.”33 Mitchell’s observation could be applied to Ginzburg’s project, but more significantly it pointed to the late Derrida. Although Derrida did revel in the free play of arbitrary will, it was not necessarily in the name of nihilistic abandonment. Rather deconstruction (or at least that which I choose to inherit from it) is an affirmation that neither knowledge nor the act of representation can be extracted from the full contradictory complexity of history. This was exactly Derrida’s point concerning the readability of a legacy in Specters of Marx: “An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing.”34 Engaging with the legacies of historical modes of representation – such as modern Gothic architecture or literature – requires an acknowledgment of choice (both Cram’s and our own) in relation to an undecidability that overflows the limits of any given choice. Deconstruction is the persistent lingering on that which is not “present” in any chosen mode of representation, and a deconstructive microhistory draws upon marginalia in different disciplinary representations to trace the effect of one discipline phantomiming another. Ultimately deconstructive microhistory comes closer to the “conflicting results” of “real interdisci­ plinary work” than does Ginzburg’s celebration of interdisciplinary connoisseurship in pursuit of true art historical knowledge.35

P r e - F ac e In this book I do not simply speculate on the presence of Cram’s Gothic literature in the Walkerville church. I do not speculate in the

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sense that I invest myself in something that will necessarily return in the form of “true” knowledge. Such would be the Holy Grail of interdisciplinary Gothic studies. Instead I am reminded of Derrida’s point that “speculation always speculates on some specter, it speculates in the mirror [speculum] of what it produces, on the spectacle that it gives itself … to see.”36 What I see written on the pages of Gothic ghost stories is something paradoxically impossible to see. It is a literature that revels in the unspeakable limits of representation, and it does justice to the word Gothic only when it refuses to present its subject fully in the presence of black ink on white paper.37 Cram’s “black spirits and white” frequently play upon that textual effect, and I explore the Walkerville church as a site in which the unspeakable haunts the Gothic conventions of its social, spatial, structural, and semiotic mechanisms. Interdisciplinary historians of modern Gothic media have much to learn from the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, especially if we are willing to deconstruct the speculative processes that generate what we know (or presume to know) about the Gothic. On that condition I invoke Derrida’s engagement with the great dialectical speculator G.W.F. Hegel. Derrida stated: “We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point.”38 Derrida’s engagement with Hegel will never be finished in part because he constantly undermined Hegel’s systemization of knowledge as well as the teleological structure of Hegel’s speculation. Knowledge for Hegel was the culmination of dialectical oppositions – every concept in contradiction with another. Hegel then speculated that the contradictions resolve, not simply in the sense that one concept abrogates another but because all concepts syllogistically assimilate into a hierarchy of truth. The contradictions are positive and negative values (thesis and antithesis) of the same synthesis of information. In short there is nothing meaningless, nothing outside knowledge in the inevitability of Hegel’s speculative system. This is why the German word Aufhebung was so important to Hegel’s dialectics. It translates (complexly) as lifting up, but also as sublating – an elevation of contradictions in a teleological process that conserves contradictory complexities while negating unassimilable oppositions. Paradoxically the verb aufheben means both to conserve and to negate; this contradiction is then lifted into the privileged result of Aufhebung. Derrida summarized Hegel’s position

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thusly: “Hegel, in the greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction only in order to resolve it … to lift it up (according to the syllogistic process of speculative dialectics) into the self-presence of an onto-theological or onto-teleological synthesis.”39 At stake then for deconstruction is the spectralization of Hegel’s speculative process, a disturbance that dislocates the assimilation of contradictions within the Hegelian Aufhebung. Consequently because Derrida described deconstruction as a “spectral asymmetry [that] interrupts here all specularity,”40 I read “specularity” as an allusion to Hegel’s dialectics – that of Hegel qui genuit Marx. And because Derrida visualized deconstruction as a “visor effect” that cannot be lifted (aufheben) to reveal the spectre’s identity,41 this “Pre-Face” does not speculate on the true face of an interdisciplinary Gothic. A spectral indeterminacy is at play instead. What is a spectre? A spectre cannot be present and accounted for. It has no proper self to be known, “not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge.”42 The spectre can never be known precisely because it disturbs the ontological categories of self and other, presence and absence, life and death, body and spirit, visibility and invisibility. It is neither the former nor latter value of any dialectical binary; nor can it be assimilated as a syllo­ gistic “B” value between them. For Derrida, to be or not to B is an impossible question. Hence his interest in the spectre’s visor and the impossible lifting thereof was also an allusion to Hamlet, in which the ghost wandering the battlements of Elsinore is dressed from top to toe in armour. Even though the armour looks like that of Hamlet’s father, and even though the spectre wears its visor up (allowing Hamlet and others to see “his” “face”), it does not mean that the spectre is in fact the father’s spirit. Hamlet doubted that he had met his father’s ghost because “the one who says ‘I am thy Fathers spirit’ can only be taken at his word.”43 Thus the inaugural question of the play (“Who’s there?”)44 can never be answered because we cannot lift the visor’s limitation on identity. To do justice to the spectre and the effect of its visor, we have to consider that it does not look at us with the ontological eyes of some future-present we will eventually know. According to Derrida its vision is not ontological but hauntological. This “Pre-Face” marks the site of hauntology. Derrida was suspicious of the ontological role traditionally assigned to a preface, in

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Introduction 13

which the “pre of the preface makes the future present … The pre reduces the future to the form of manifest presence.”45 In other words the traditional promise of a preface is to tell us what we are going to read after we lift up the final page of this prefatory exterior, to tell us what is present in our future reading of the proper text that it prefaces. I am therefore forging the status of the preface into the spectre’s armour. In writing this “Pre-Face,” I am concerned with how the spectre’s visor effect disrupts the dialectical relationship between a preface and the subsequent text. Effectively then the chapters that follow this introductory caveat are still a preface by another name or names, none of which will ultimately reveal the self-fulfillment of a conclusive text. Moreover since this is an English text that plays with the textual structure of the “preface,” I call attention to an English translation of the word’s Latin root, præfatio: “to say beforehand.” That translation can be deconstructed in terms of the spectre’s visor effect, suggesting that the armour of a gauntlet appears before the hand and disrupts any conclusive knowledge of whomever or whatever is waiting within the gauntlet’s shell. For the metaphysics of presence the hand (fingerprinted for example) is as identifiable as the face. Indeed the hand is supposed to be another “face,” another signifier of the self. And such a gauntlet effect, as I call it, before the hand is an image of the preface’s beforehand that spectralizes the Gothic as much as does the visor of Hamlet’s ghost. On the one hand Shakespeare’s Hamlet was crucial to the inauguration of Gothic literature. Horace Walpole, the “first” Gothic novelist, acknowledged his debt to Shakespeare as an inspiration for The Castle of Otranto (1764). In his “Preface to the Second Edition” of Otranto (1765) Walpole wrote: “That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied.”46 On the other hand Shakespeare’s ghost underwent a prestidigitation to inhabit The Castle of Otranto. Walpole apparently had a dream prior to writing his Gothic novel: “I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.”47 Thus the Gothic gauntlet is interchangeable with the Shakespearean visor, and Walpole (his head filled with Gothic stories and storeys) handed the spectral gauntlet to the architecture of his book. The servant Bianca reported: “I looked up, and, if your greatness will believe me, I saw upon the uppermost banister of the great

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stairs a hand in armour as big, as big – I thought I should have swooned – I never stopped until I came hither – Would I were well out of this castle!”48 More than once I shall return to the question of the hand. For now it is enough to note that Walpole placed the severed gauntlet within The Castle of Otranto because a broken legacy haunted the titular house, a legacy whose brokenness Walpole visualized as a spectral series of armoured bits, starting with his dream of the gauntlet.49 Manfred, the novel’s antagonist, inherited the principality of Otranto through an ancestral usurpation, and the castle remained haunted until rightful ownership was restored.50 Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Castle of Otranto occurred in a time of usurpation, a time “out of joint” (Hamlet, 1.5.189); and like Shakespeare’s drama, Walpole’s novel called for someone who might be “born to set it right” (1.5.190). Returning to the case at hand, Cram’s ghost stories also occurred in a time out of joint. Not only did the title Black Spirits and White come from Macbeth – another Shakespeare play of usurpation and spectral consequences – but Cram’s narrator also admitted: “I had a strong predisposition to believe some things that I could not explain, wherein I was out of sympathy with the age.”51 As we shall see, the unspeakable horror of living in the modern world disturbed Cram because modernity had usurped the medieval church of its Catholic rites, and that act of usurpation ended the aesthetic and metaphysical supremacy of medieval architecture, leaving Cram in an architectural wasteland. And whenever Cram tried to heal that wasteland with his architectural theory and / or actual buildings, he encountered critics who claimed that “either the time or Mr. Cram is very much out of joint.”52 Therefore Cram is of interest for interdisciplinary aesthetics because of the broken Gothic legacy that he saw as haunting the world both textually and architecturally. The spectral condition of this broken legacy is also where deconstruction irrupts within Cram’s Gothic aesthetics. As Jodey Castricano argued, “Derrida’s concerns intersect or fold into those of the Gothic at the point where each approaches the issue of inheritance, legacy, and haunting precisely through the figure of a ghost, phantom, or revenant who, having returned from the dead, haunts the living with unspeakable secrets.”53 Castricano may have limited her analysis to the literary Gothic, but because architectural discourse also converges on the Gothic adjective, deconstruction inhabits the history of

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Introduction 15

architecture as well. Thus deconstruction dwells on a broken legacy that simultaneously underwrites Cram’s Gothic architecture and literature. And neither the Walkerville church nor Cram’s collected ghost stories could put to rest the horror of inheriting a broken legacy rooted in the Gothic adjective.

T h e G o t h i ck Gothic architecture is an anachronism. The earliest surviving criticisms of the “Gothic” came from Italian Renaissance art theorists who treated medieval architecture as a stylistic counterpoint to their own Roman-inspired designs for building. Giorgio Vasari (1511– 1574) in particular remarked that Gothic architecture “is very different in its proportions and its decorations from both the antique [Roman] and the modern [Renaissance]. Its characteristics are not adopted these days by any of the leading architects, who consider them monstrous and barbaric, wholly ignorant of any accepted ideas of sense and order.” He continued: “This manner of building was invented by the Goths, who put up structures in this way after all the ancient [Roman] buildings had been destroyed and all the architects killed in the wars. It was they who made vaults with pointed arches … and then filled the whole of Italy with their accursed buildings.”54 The wars that Vasari lamented were the ancient Gothic invasions of the Italian peninsula, a clash of European north and south that ­culminated in the sack of Rome in a d 410, which “began” the Middle Ages. Yet because we have long since discredited the Goths with inventing “vaults with pointed arches,” the later medieval architecture that we still call “Gothic” is doubly anachronistic. First the adjective situates the architecture of vaults with pointed arches in a cultural context that is too early – namely the fifth-century Goths. Second it is applied only after the fact, from a “modern” critical perspective that presumes to come after the medieval past. In the strictest sense the Gothic adjective is both too early and too late to represent the architectural presence of later medieval Europe. I am interested in deconstructing the Gothic Revival and not the medieval “Gothic.” Therefore I am not suggesting that we abandon the Gothic adjective in favour of a word specific to the later Middle Ages – if such a word even exists. Rather the “pre-originary anteriority” of the Gothic (its mythically pre-destined condition assigned only after the fact) is precisely what calls attention to its modern

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spectrality.55 I insist upon the Gothic adjective precisely because it was not present in the later medieval architecture that we still anachronistically call Gothic. It inhabits that architecture in a way that accentuates the Gothic Revival as the disjointed simulacrum of an original that in the strictest sense never happened.56 Volumes may be written on the Gothic Revival’s quest for authentic architectural precedence, but that semiotic procedure of matching modern signifier with medieval signified is not exactly a question of Gothic architecture. The Gothic-ness of medieval construction does not haunt us until after the Renaissance declaration of its death. And no matter how successful the subsequent revival of medieval architecture may have been, modern Gothic architects could not entirely avoid the Gothic adjective precisely because they justified their architectural revival through a semantic network that intersected with mythic Gothic origins. One might further argue that even though the Gothic does not strictly address itself to the past-presence of later medieval Europe, it does address itself to the past-presence of the fifth-century Gothic invaders. As such the Gothic adjective of modern Gothic architecture should properly represent the revived presence of the ancient Goths. Yet even that admission would lead to an impossible question: who were the ancient Goths? What did their invasion mean, and on whom are we to project that meaning to understand the invasion as a matter of ancient Gothic presence? Was the Gothic invasion of Rome an act of total barbarity, as Vasari proclaimed? Not necessarily, for a group of sixteenth-century scholars at the University of Uppsala had researched the then newly unearthed De origine actibusque Getarum, better known as the Getica. The Getica is a sixth-century text on the origins of a “Gothic” tribe called the Getes, and its author “represented the Goths not as barbarians, but as a young and vigorous people opposing an empire [in Rome] which was moribund and corrupt.”57 Perhaps the Gothic invasion was also an act of liberation from imperial Roman decadence and tyranny. And could there not have been at least as many other motivations to invade Rome as there were ancient Goths to raise an armoured fist, or two, against it? This last question is the crux of the matter. Just because terrifying barbarity and enlightened liberation are the most readily accountable meanings for the Gothic invasions, we cannot conclude that they define the Gothic. This is why fifth-century Gothic “origins” cannot be fully present for modern Gothicists to represent. The ancient Goths were not

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Introduction 17

simply barbarians or liberators; nor can those meanings add up to the dialectical sum of true Gothic culture. The spectral conditions of inheritance are crucial here: “If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it … One always inherits from a secret – which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ … The injunction itself … can only be one by dividing itself … differing / deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times – and in several voices.”58 Like the ghost of Hamlet’s “father,” Gothic heritage is an inscrutable phantom wandering the battlements of Roman ruin. The spirits of ancient Goths may gesture at us with their gauntlets, and we may think we know what they mean, but we cannot lift their spectral armour to see the truth of who they were. Hence with so many inheritors speaking simultaneously and in so many voices, the Gothic is an undecidable that I contribute to Derridean scholarship. It is never truly one with itself. The implications of this spectral Gothicism are myriad and worth exploring in several contexts. This introduction deconstructs the Gothic legacy at a pivotal moment in the history of its architectural revival. As Michael Hall paraphrased from John Summerson, “British architecture in the 1830s and 1840s encouraged an intellectual cordon sanitaire between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies … The 1830s have become a moat which surprisingly few scholars cross with ease.”59 Inasmuch as deconstruction constantly undermines the prophylaxis of any cordon sanitaire, my reading of the Gothic will disturb scholars who have reassured themselves that the moat between Georgian and post-Georgian Gothic architecture is sanitary [sanitaire], especially when discussing the sacred spaces of postGeorgian Gothic churches. Architectural historians too often study (or dismiss) the post-Georgian Gothic on behalf of an architectural discourse that sought to cleanse the Gothic of everything unworthy of the house of God. Those scholars treat the post-Georgian Gothicists as if the metaphorical waters of Summerson’s moat were more than sanitary; they were holy. Starting with the trenchant writings of A.W.N. Pugin (1812–1852) the 1840s cleaved the discourse of Gothic architectural history in such a way that post-Georgian architects could cast aspersions on their Georgian predecessors. According to Neil Levine, Pugin had introduced a new standard of architectural realism in the 1840s, one

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that exorcized the Georgian “fictions of ‘verisimilitude,’”60 and Pugin himself positioned his True Principles of post-Georgian Gothic architecture in opposition to the mere “fictitious effect” of Georgian Gothic décor.61 Consequently when architectural historians turn to the postGeorgian eras of the Gothic Revival, they often presume to exorcize the fictions of Gothic literature alongside the “fictitious” effects of Georgian Gothic architecture. The 1840s have become a cordon sanitaire not only between architectural periods but also between the disciplinary spaces of Gothic architecture and literature. When Chris Brooks surveyed the Gothic Revival as a multidisciplinary phenomenon, he submitted that the Georgian Gothic occupied “a kind of ideological armoury,” one that was “charged with a formidable complex of meanings and associations.”62 For instance when Walpole built his Gothic Revival mansion (begun 1749) at Strawberry Hill, he armed his bedroom with a copy of the Magna Carta and the order to execute King Charles I – one on each side of his bed. Walpole thus inhabited his papier-mâché castle as a stronghold of British parliamentarian liberty. But his dream of the spectral gauntlet haunted him from within that same bedroom. It prompted his writing of Otranto, in which the fictional Italian architecture – having many features in common with Strawberry Hill – transformed the stronghold of British liberty into a dungeon of barbaric foreign tyranny. In short Gothic ideology was dialectical for Brooks; it “might connote political freedom, but gothic castles housed feudal tyrants.”63 And by projecting the liberty and tyranny of the ancient Goths onto Walpole’s dichotomous projects and the eighteenth century at large, Brooks tried to resolve the contradictions: “the discourses of literary and architectural gothic were complementary.”64 Walpole’s mansion and novel were thus the twinned gauntlets of a Georgian Gothic semantic, the dextrous and sinister hands of an armoured Goth. Brooks then extended his argument into Victorian Gothic discourse. Ever the dialectician, he still supported the complementarity of Gothic architecture and literature – but he offered no one among the Victorians who indulged in both modern Gothic media. Instead he maintained Summerson’s cordon sanitaire while syllogizing unrelated architects and authors as the thesis and antithesis of a ­continual Gothic identity. Victorian Gothic literature occurred in the modern cityscape because “for all its apparent stability, the midVictorian world frequently seemed to writers ominous and estranging.”65 The invisible hand of the capitalist marketplace for example

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crept into every aspect of Brooks’s Victorian world. He continued: “The literary gothic that re-emerged in the mid-nineteenth century internalized terror and fear, made them less escapable, more commonplace. Nightmares no longer inhabited medieval piles in far-off locations, but smart suburban villas here and now.”66 Conversely Victorian Gothic architects became rigorously attentive to medieval structural and cultural principles. They sought an ethically wholesome and authentically handcrafted revival of medieval Gothic construction, what they called “reality” in architecture. And this Gothic architectural “reality” represented “a talisman to ward off a [modern] world many felt to be increasingly unreal.”67 In sum Victorian Gothic literature expressed the estranging unreality of modern life while Victorian Gothic churches served as a talisman against it. But did the talisman of Victorian architectural “reality” successfully exorcize the unrealities that disturbed Victorian Gothic literature? I contend that the talismanic force was ineffective at sustaining the cordon sanitaire that ostensibly divided post-Georgian Gothic architecture from Gothic literature. And I make this argument in the name of the “Gothick” because the word Gothic endured a grammatological transformation in the eighteenth century, one that seemingly sanctified the cordon sanitaire of post-Georgian “reality.” During the eighteenth century it was not uncommon to spell the word Gothic with a “k.” In the nineteenth century however, “‘Gothick’ came to stand for any Gothic Revival building that was particularly naïve, flimsy or historically incorrect.”68 Post-Georgian architects condemned the houses of Georgian Britain for the naïve reduction of Gothic structure to a series of decorative appliqués, for the flimsy construction of papier-mâché decorations, and for the incorrect application of religious details to domestic environments (or vice versa). Thus the archaic and extraneous letter “k” came to represent the fictitiousness or unreality of Georgian Gothic architecture and by extension all Gothic fictions. Yet we cannot simply exorcize the Gothic “k” from the spaces of a modern church – as if silently signing the cross could somehow make the letter disappear. The spectral fingers of its sigil still reach into the corners of Gothic Revival architecture. Stemming from the Hebraic kaph, meaning the palm of the hand, the English letter “k” is a severed hand haunting the post-Georgian Gothic Revival with its extraneousness.69 Furthermore the grammatological mark of the Gothic “k” (a mark that is written but can never be heard) is the unspeakable

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horror haunting Cram’s work in Walkerville. Thus rather than trying to erase the “k” from post-Georgian Gothic architecture, I put it under erasure (sous rature) as a sign that is neither present nor absent.70 And thus crossing out the letter “k” does not save the Walkerville church from Gothic fiction – it merely marks the grave of an ambiguous Gothick spectre dwelling within the house of God.

R a l p h A da m s Cram Cram was well aware of the ambiguous nature of the Gothic. He stated that architects and scholars have “a nebulous idea of what it means.”71 Therefore he would occasionally embrace the Gothic as a posthumous title for later medieval architecture: “first given in scorn by the Pharisees of the so-called Renaissance … [Gothic], like so many epithets applied first in contempt … has gradually become a synonym of honour.”72 Cram would consequently use the word to distinguish himself and his fellow Gothic Revivalists from the “Parisian Renaissance” of the modern École des Beaux-Arts.73 In that sense he was proud to be a Goth in the modern world, and he declared that the “modern Goth is the defender of Christian civilization against paganism” (gq , 158) – specifically against the paganism of classical culture and its Renaissance. More often Cram tried to save later medieval architecture from the pejorative conditions of the Gothic label. For Cram later medieval architecture was “misrepresented by the most undescriptive and misleading epithet imaginable. ‘Gothic,’ as a title, is perfectly and exquisitely meaningless. The last of the Goths had been in his unquiet grave centuries before the style that bears his name was even thought of” (gq , 59). He continued: “It seems to me rather curious to adopt as a title for the most delicate, scientific, beautiful, even metaphysical product of the mind of man, the name of a tribe of savages [i.e., the Goths], a name still linked with that of the Vandals as representing the quintessence of raw, sodden barbarism … For my own part, I wish the term ‘Gothic’ – i.e., savage – might be forever discarded, or applied exclusively to the architecture of the nineteenth century, where it belongs, and that we could all agree to call the style we are considering the Christian style” (63). However he subsequently admitted that even the word Christian was insufficient for his beloved architectural style. Cram longed for “some title the discovery of

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which is beyond my powers” (64), but ultimately resigned himself to the twice-anachronistic Gothic. Cram’s engagement with the Gothic adjective is important for at least three reasons. First he identified nineteenth-century architecture as being Gothic in the pejorative sense of barbarism. More precisely Cram believed that the barbarity of nineteenth-century architecture was the culmination of “four centuries of barbarism” (gq , 164), which began with the murder of the Middle Ages and all the consequent losses in Catholic unity. With the re-introduction of pagan cultural values during the Renaissance, the introduction of destructive religious schisms during the Protestant Reformation, and the democratic declarations against God and king during the French Revolution, the modern world became as barbarous as the ancient Goths were accused of being. Second Cram identified the ancient Goths as a people who remain un-quietly interred. As pagan barbarians the ancient Goths are not at peace in the afterlife. Instead they linger in a modern world as barbaric and thus as spiritually restless as they are. Third Cram acknowledged his inability to offer the true name of later medieval architecture. In that sense he felt the helplessness of being born in a world of barbaric modernity, which meant that he could never fully comprehend the medieval architecture that he loved and pre-emptively lost. Cram’s Gothic literature seethes with the impotent horror of being subject to the world’s barbarity, and a microhistory of his design for the Walkerville church uniquely sets the stage for that horror to haunt Gothic architectural discourse as well. The first chapter of this book consequently deconstructs the biographical dimensions of microhistory to expose an irreconcilable contradiction in Cram’s thinking, one that established the marginalized moment for his Walkerville design. In particular I investigate Cram’s construction of biological and architectural lineages to connect himself and his American firm to British cultural heritage. Architecturally this is crucial because Cram’s inheritance of the British Gothic Revival via the Pugin family placed his work in Walkerville along the cordon sanitaire of the Georgian and postGeorgian Gothick. Furthermore his choice of the Perpendicular Gothic style for that church (especially in the bell tower) haunts the metaphysical threshold of Anglican architecture as a house of God as opposed to a human household. When a Perpendicular tower – as in Walkerville – is missing the lance-like spire that would crown a Pugin

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church as the house of God, it conflates with castle architecture. And as we shall see, the eponymous Edward Walker of Edwardian Walkerville was the king of that castle. The spectral hand of Canadian capitalism also haunts Walkerville’s Anglican architecture. In the second chapter I draw on Derrida’s theory of the gift and the Matthean economy of salvation to articulate a spectral transaction at work in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church. Such a transaction is seen specifically through the iconography of gift-giving magi. Edward Walker, as one of three brothers, hired Cram’s firm to reap the spiritual dividends of aligning the memory of Walker family generosity with the church’s ritual activities. Furthermore the Walkers seem to have learned this strategy through their friendship with the King family of neighbouring Kingsville, Ontario. Thus through a micro-analysis of the intercity short-line railway system, I trace the theme of gift-giving magi who journeyed from Kingsville to Walkerville for the spiritual health and wealth of the Walkers. Edward Walker had more than his spiritual health at stake in his church commission. Inasmuch as Edward was secretly suffering from tertiary syphilis, Cram positioned Edward’s patronage as a cryptic plea for miraculous intervention. Thus in the third chapter I explore Derrida’s crypt theory as a strategy for semiotic incorporation and the Walkerville church as Edward Walker’s ailing metaphorical body (made literal in the hope of future expansion). Building on family resemblances in Cram’s early churches (c. 1888–1904), I suggest that Cram shortened the southern aisle in Walkerville by the length of a bay to replicate the missing hand of a leper depicted in an aisle window. Edward Walker, like the leper, had approached Christ for the restoration of his physical health. Unlike Christ however, Cram was impotent to secure Edward’s recovery. Instead the Walkerville church stands as an anticipatory space, haunted by the hope of a messianic future that might not come in time to save its patron, if at all. Inasmuch as the Walkerville commission brought together Edward Walker’s secret illness and the hope for miraculous recovery, Edward then became the sickly Fisher King of Grail mythology. Cram integrated a Grail simile in his book of ghost stories, and that analogy had the potential to become reality in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church. Thus in the fourth chapter I peregrinate through the Walkerville church in pursuit of a Grail narrative, even though the Grail is only present in Walkerville as an absence. A chalice is there

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that might become the Holy Grail, healing Edward Walker of his sinful illness and the modern world of its sinfulness too. But this is only possible if the Grail knight should arrive and then pierce the side of Christ in such a way that divine light flows into the church. This ultimately is the architecture’s impotent horror. Having discovered Edward’s secret illness and the prospect of the healing Grail, we are powerless to save Edward and the sick world that made him. Our hands are as useless as the leper’s stump, and we are caught in Derrida’s diabolical pas, awaiting a Grail knight whose arrival is perhaps always a-venir – to come.

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1 Cram, the Anglophile

Bertram Goodhue (1869–1924), Cram’s sometime architectural partner, wrote a biographical sketch of Cram for an 1896 article. In that sketch Goodhue described Cram as a veritable “Proteus” because of his “manysidedness.”1 Cram could acquit himself in the fields of architecture, literature, political science, military technology, viticulture, and many more. Consequently when scholars sift through Cram’s vast historical records, they encounter several contradictions within his polymathy. He was both a fierce optimist and a dire pessimist, a Romantic visionary and a blunt pragmatist, an advocate of democracy (after a fashion) and a conservator of monarchy, an overt racist and a sincerely inclusive collaborator. Thus as with previous writers about Cram, I have chosen from among the contradictions. However the motivations for my choice are radically different than those found in existing texts. Richard Guy Wilson for example noted that there were many Ralph Adams Crams and that Cram’s “public persona[e] … could frequently appear at odds.” Nevertheless Wilson believed that the contradictions “hid the real Ralph Adams Cram,”2 which was Douglass Shand-Tucci’s point as well. As the leading Cram biographer, Shand-Tucci wrote his massive biographical volumes to present Cram as a man of many, and at times contradictory, quests. He complained: “Alas, historians more often read Cram’s dramatic scene painting in his Walled Towns than his clearly modernist pleadings in Low Cost Suburban Homes, not his best-known work today but key to understanding his life and work.”3 Beyond the contradictions Shand-Tucci claimed to have the “key” to Cram.

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It is of little consequence here what Wilson or Shand-Tucci thought the key to Cram was. What matters is their mutually biographical belief in a fundamental truth to someone’s life, and that the truth can and must be discovered to authenticate the full scope of the subject’s life and work. Shand-Tucci in particular chose to highlight Cram’s modernity in an effort to revive Cram’s architectural reputation after decades of scholarly oblivion. Cram died in 1942, during the ascendency of American modernism, and over thirty years later Shand-Tucci offered himself as Cram’s ideal mourner, one who provided Cram with an appropriate eulogy – unlike Cram’s contemporary eulogists, who lacked “the longer perspective” necessary to assess the entirety of his life and work.4 Thus biography is seen as a work of mourning in which the biographical subject is made known to the reader through the words of someone who has so completely assimilated the corpus of the subject’s life and work that biography and autobiography become one. Shand-Tucci wrote about Cram in the style of an “intellectual autobiography” because he and Cram supposedly shared so much in common.5 Deconstruction renders Shand-Tucci’s (auto)biographical mourning process problematic. Deconstruction does not presume to offer “a master key”6 to unlock the “borderline between the ‘work’ and the ‘life’” of a biographical subject.7 Instead Derrida insisted that the “names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value.”8 Julian Wolfreys explained further that biographers who reference a work of art sometimes presume to “substitute the author’s proper name in rhetorical formulae … as though the [work] were merely a conduit, a spirit medium if you like, by which the author communicates.”9 The moment we presume to have the authority of a master key, of unlocking the conduit that leads from the work to the life, we run the risk of burying the complexities of the subject, as if we could put a life to rest when we close the biographical text: “So that’s who Cram really was.” Derrida suggested that “the one who reads a text … for instance a tiny paragraph, and interprets in a rigorous, inventive and powerfully deciphering fashion is more of a real biographer than the one who knows the whole story of an individual’s life.”10 Here again we  are not far removed from Tony Mohlo’s question about what distinguishes microhistory from deconstruction. Derrida called for rigorous and inventive (mis)interpretations of any tiny detail in a

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biographical system of knowledge to expose fundamental problems that constitute such a system. And as Jill Lepore proposed in her essay on biography and microhistory, “Traditional biographers seek to profile an individual and recapitulate a life story, but microhistorians, tracing their elusive subjects through slender records, tend to address themselves to solving small mysteries” about a person’s life as a means to question that person’s cultural context.11 Granted Cram’s records are hardly slender (that aspect of microhistory is more important for Edward Walker). Nevertheless the small mystery at stake in this chapter is a contradiction at play in Cram’s work while his firm designed the Walkerville church. Thus although I occasionally draw on texts and architectural projects from throughout Cram’s career, this chapter focuses on contradictions in his work in temporal proximity to the Walkerville design. Derrida also argued that every work lives on [sur-vivre], “even if what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, whether he is provisionally absent, or he is dead, or if in general he does not support, with his absolute current and present intention or attention, the plenitude of his meaning, of that very thing which seems to be written ‘in his name.’”12 Therefore I do not posit Cram’s name as if it were the essential presence of a life to be seen in “his” work, through and through. Furthermore I do not follow Harold Bloom’s formula for critical misreading, which seeks to parse artists (poets, in his case) from the incidentals of their lives.13 Granted I share in Bloom’s “meditation on the melancholy of the creative mind,”14 inasmuch as I am interested in Cram’s belatedness as a Gothic Revivalist.15 Nevertheless for the purposes of this book I disagree with Bloom’s humanism when he pitted his critical misreading against deconstruction. He regretted “those like Derrida … who imply for all language what Goethe erroneously asserted for Homer’s language, that language itself writes the poems and thinks.” Bloom countered: “The human writes, the human thinks, and always following after and defending against another human, however fantasized that human becomes in the strong imaginings of those who arrive late on the scene.”16 But contrary to what Bloom (perhaps not disingenuously) called his “preferences” for humanism over the linguistic turn of cultural studies,17 I prefer to support the argument that language constitutes the human subject and that the ambiguities of language ensure the impossibility of finding the true human subject within or beyond

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their communicative acts: textual, architectural, performative, etc. To that end I am as interested in (mis)reading the architectural “language” of Cram’s churches as I am in (mis)reading the words in his other texts. Such a claim is especially relevant to architecture (as opposed to the myth of the poet’s individuality) because Cram’s buildings were the work of a firm with other architectural partners and several draughtsmen – not to mention the clients, on-site architects, and many artisans who participated in the projects, as well as those who are still contributing to the projects today and in the years to come. As Derrida subtly (at times parenthetically) warned in Specters of Marx, we should not read Karl Marx as one homogeneous voice because, at the very least, the voice of Frederick Engels is so thoroughly implicated in the texts.18 The name Marx was for Derrida the mark of a signature that always already compromises the identity of the signer. Marx’s hand could never be his own authorial gesture. Consequently I use Cram’s name as a signature on a series of buildings and books that can never be authentically his own, and I treat those buildings and books signed Ralph Adams Cram as a legacy that continues to act from beyond his grave. To reiterate Derrida’s point from Specters of Marx, “an inheritance is never gathered together, it  is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing.” I choose therefore Cram’s Anglophile inheritance as the first flange of the ghostly gauntlet effect, the first angle among the spreading fingers of the Gothic “k.” I do this not because Anglophilia was Cram’s only reality but because it is a heritage that continues to haunt his Anglican architecture.

T h e A n g l e o f C r a m ’s Anglophi li a Cram’s texts were often preoccupied with the issue of inheritance. At one point he explained his love of Richard Wagner’s music in terms of his familial lineage: “Just why Wagner … should have made – and still makes – a more personal and poignant appeal than even Bach or Brahms or Beethoven, I do not know, unless it is because, from the time of Louis le Débonnaire to that of Henry VIII, my forebears in direct line were Teutonic Freiherrn in the Grand Duchy of Brunswick, and some inherited racial inclination persisted in my subconscious personality.”19 On occasion Cram would give himself the Germanic

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cognomen of von Kramm. More often though he invested his lineage with Britishness. Even when describing his Teutonic forebears, Cram included a British reference to King Henry VIII, implying the Protestant Reformation that disturbed the social contexts of Britain and the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Furthermore Cram insisted that “Englishmen and Americans are simply like two brothers, sojourning in different lands, but tied together by all the heritage of family, the indestructible chain of an infinite sequence of common ancestors” (gq , 122). And when he published Excalibur, the first play in a prospective Arthurian trilogy, Cram included an apologetic advertisement: “The attempt is again made – however inadequately – to do for the [Arthurian] epic of our own race, and in a form adapted to dramatic presentation, a small measure of that which Richard Wagner achieved in an allied art [i.e., opera] for the Teutonic legends.”20 In that context Cram’s “own race” was Anglo-Saxon – distinct from the Teutonic Wagner. Cram’s father, for one, tied his family to their Anglo-Saxon heritage. Cram declared that his paternal lineage emerged in colonial America when “the first of the line came over from England in 1634, becoming one of the founders of Exeter [New Hampshire] by charter from King Charles I.”21 Cram likewise wrote of his maternal grandfather, Squire Ira Blake of Kensington, New Hampshire, and of the squire’s house on New Hampshire’s one-time colonial land. His maternal ancestors acquired the property during the reign of King Charles II, and what Cram remembered of the squire’s “Old Place” was the localized continuity of British feudal nobility, the singing of old English folk songs, and the brewing of a honeyed liquor called metheglin. Cram noted that metheglin was an extinct beverage, primarily referenced in medieval English literature (in Chaucer for example). And although Cram recalled his family brewing metheglin “in Kensington as late as 1878, [he had] found no trace of it in England, Scotland, Wales, or the Southern American states.”22 Thus through paternity and especially the distaff Cram claimed to inherit a direct familial link with the feudal-agrarian culture of the British Middle Ages – a culture that once tied together England and the New England of America, and might tie them together again. On that familial basis Cram believed that British Gothic architecture was the “inalienable heritage” of America, by which he meant Anglo-Saxon America.23 Even though Cram was lifelong friends with art historian Bernard Berenson, a Lithuanian Jew who immigrated to

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Cram, the Anglophile 29

Boston in the 1870s, Cram’s architectural practice thrived on an Anglo-American taste that reacted against non-Anglo-Saxon immigration. As Walter Muir Whitehill once noted, at the start of the nineteenth century Boston was “a homogenous English seaport with 25,000 inhabitants; in 1900 it was a polyglot city of over half a million, nine-tenths of whom were immigrants or the children of immigrants.”24 Cram himself acknowledged the change in a paper he presented at the Royal Institute of British Architects. In describing relations between England and New England Cram stated that “we [Americans] were all English, – or rather British, – in bone and blood and tradition, down to half a century ago.”25 Likewise in his preface to American Churches Cram admitted that America “is no longer even predominantly Anglo-Saxon.”26 Depending on his argument and audience Cram presented this fact as a regret or as an opportunity. During the early years of his architectural practice (c. 1888–1904) Cram’s presumed audience was primarily Anglo-American because his firm developed a niche market for Episcopalian architecture with a strongly Anglo-Catholic bent.27 In his history of postbellum Boston, Van Wyck Brooks specifically linked the rise of Anglo-Catholicism with the city’s Anglophilia: “The Anglo-Catholic church had risen … marking the gradual return to the colonial feeling. The new Back Bay streets and apartment-houses [not unlike the apartment-houses Cram’s firm designed for New England] also reflected this change: the names that most of them bore were notably English … and it concurred with the growth of aesthetic feeling.” Brooks saw the development of distinctly British forms of urban, architectural, and spiritual living as “the break of the Boston mind with its Puritan past,” and this was certainly the case with Cram.28 The one criticism Cram levelled against communal life at Squire Blake’s “Old Place” was the “hard and unlovely religion” of his ancestors. They were decidedly Protestant, of the puritanical New England sort, and “the arts had wholly disappeared” from their community.29 Conversely Cram’s ideal community was a small Catholic commune in which art and devotion were united. Consequently as with A.W.N. Pugin before him, Cram assumed an intrinsic relationship between art and Catholicism (although that relationship led Pugin to the Roman Church in the 1830s). Cram (the son of a Unitarian minister) had his conversion experience in Rome, at the Roman Catholic Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, but Cram’s Anglophilia led him to become an Anglo-Catholic instead.30

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According to his autobiography Cram had always hated the “Rococo” architecture of San Luigi dei Francesi, but on Christmas Eve 1887 “it was blazing with hundreds of candles, crowded with worshippers, and instinct with a certain atmosphere of devotion and of ardent waiting … Suddenly came the bells striking the hour of midnight, and with the last clang the great organs and choir burst into a melodious thunder of sound; the incense rose in clouds, filling the church with a veil of pale smoke; and the Mass proceeded to its climax with the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ. I did not understand all of this with my mind, but I understood” (mlia , 59; his emphasis). Cram’s conversion was not the result of Protestant intellectualism; it came with the sensory experience of Catholic atmosphere, despite San Luigi dei Francesi’s garish architectural setting. How much better, Cram concluded (and how much more appropriate for New England), to revive the aesthetics of  England’s Catholic mass in massive English Gothic churches? Therefore in 1901, when Cram published his most influential treatise on architecture, his first rule of church building was to build in the  British Gothic style because it was the only style worthy of “the American branch of the Anglican communion of the Catholic Church” (cb , 43). Furthermore he encouraged American architects and congregations “to build village churches that shall be worthy to stand with those our forefathers built in the old home four centuries ago” (41). British Gothic builders were thus the architectural “forefathers” of Anglo-Catholicism in modern England and New England. Because Canada was (and still is) part of the British Commonwealth, Cram’s lineal argument echoed across the Canadian-American border. Nevertheless Cram had very little to say about Canada during his long career – despite the fact that Bliss Carman, the Canadian-born poet, was a dear Bostonian friend; Charles Brent, the Canadian-born Anglo-Catholic priest, was his godfather; and an unnamed FrenchCanadian architect was his “inveterate enemy” while training together in the Boston architectural offices of Rotch and Tilden (mlia , 48). Apparently that rivalry festered in Cram’s memory because, in his autobiography, he recalled their altercations in detail. The rivalry may also have affected a rare published comment on Canadian architecture from his essay The Catholic Church and Art. Concerning the Roman Catholic Church at least, Cram insisted that “in Canada the worst traditions and practices still largely obtain, partly because of the French affiliations of the Church,” and “no French architect for

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1.1  St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Cohasset, stands tall on its granite outcropping, with a winding stairway to Main Street and a half-timbered parish hall flanking to the liturgical north

three centuries has had the faintest idea what constitutes the art of Christianity.”31 Here was a bit of revenge that Cram could dish coldly to his French-Canadian nemesis. Cram did not have the same enmity for the Anglican Church of Canada, and here we come closer to the Walkerville commission. In January 1903 the Eighteen Club (a Torontonian architectural society) displayed photographs and drawings from an Architectural League of America exhibition, including images of churches that Cram and his firm designed. On 16 January 1903 the club also invited Cram to lecture at the exhibition gallery, and Cram’s presentation highlighted his design for St Stephen’s Episcopal Church (begun 1899) in Cohasset, Massachusetts (fig. 1.1). As one 1903 reviewer put it, Cram’s Toronto lecture and his Perpendicular church at Cohasset simultaneously spoke “in favor of the same church design for the same form of worship [i.e., Anglicanism throughout the British Empire and within the American Episcopal Church].”32 In other words Cram emphasized his Cohasset design in his Toronto lecture as a means to interconnect the entire north of Anglo-Saxon North America. At that same moment Cram was finalizing plans for

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the new St Mary’s Church in Walkerville, and when his firm published a presentation drawing of the Walkerville church (in the May 1903 issue of the Canadian Architect and Builder), the connection with Cohasset could not have been clearer.33 With their monu­ mental stone towers and their flanking half-timbered parish halls, St Stephen’s Cohasset and St Mary’s Walkerville were part of the same structural lineage. For Cram the American Episcopal Church and the Church of England in Canada both stood to inherit from their British Gothic ancestors. In each building the bell tower dominates the exterior, and the main question for Canadian reviewers of the Cohasset church was the extent to which the granite tower looked as though it belonged on the outcropping whence it sprang. On the one hand the aforementioned 1903 reviewer claimed: “An old English church or a modern English church may be, and are, of the same family … but there is no getting over the feeling that [the Cohasset church] is an imitation, an English importation, planted on foreign soil … It is safe therefore to say that the style of church design, which seems good on English soil and does not seem good on American, is good in England and is not in the United States.” Instead the 1903 reviewer preferred “French logic,”34 perhaps in response to Cram’s 1896 and 1899 criticisms of Beaux-Arts architecture and French influence in America.35 On the other hand when the Eighteen Club showed a photograph of the Cohasset church in its 1905 exhibition, another anonymous reviewer for the Canadian Architect and Builder wrote that the granite Cohasset tower “looks as if it had grown there – a desirable characteristic for Gothic architecture in America.”36 Cram certainly had both critics and admirers in Canada.37 In fact when the bishop of Toronto announced Cram’s firm as the architects for a new (though ultimately unrealized) cathedral in Toronto, a delegate at the fourth annual convention of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (1911) objected to the choice of the American Cram over a Canadian or even British architect.38 Nevertheless the delegate admired Cram’s work inasmuch as it followed British traditions, and other Canadians who supported Cram’s Anglo-centric Gothic Revival did so because of the potential to adapt such a revival to North American geography. This makes sense in terms of Kelly Crossman’s analysis of Canadian architecture during Late Victorian and Edwardian eras: “Architects remained open to and dependent on foreign ideas, but the view was

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now widely held that Canadian architecture should be rooted in the soil of its own country. If not unique in form and structure, it should at least be adapted to local conditions, climate, materials, and way of life.”39 To that end in a 1908 issue of the Canadian Architect and Builder, Cram’s firm published an article about their recent design for All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In it they described the cathedral walls as having “the extremely beautiful variety of seam-faced trap rock known locally [in Halifax] as iron stone, whose long flat forms and rugged surfaces are familiar to every resident of Halifax.” And they concluded: “The materials of a building should savor of the locality whenever possible.”40 Thus a few years before the Halifax cathedral, the parish church in Walkerville had already made use of a local limestone – from nearby Amherstburg, Ontario. Ultimately the Walkerville tower may not have had ironstone from the “rugged slope” on which the Halifax cathedral stands,41 or even the rusty granite and dramatic promontory of the Cohasset tower. Nevertheless the cool silvers and aqueous greys of its  Amherstburg limestone underscore the placid greenery of the lawns and foliage that ring the church. Hence a local architect stated that Walkerville’s Anglican architecture was “a bit of 16th century England transplanted to North America,” and there was nothing in his description to suggest that the transplantation had failed.42 Both the Cohasset and Walkerville bell towers function as vestibules and are thus the foremost feature on the liturgical western front. Yet the scale and situation of the two towers are appreciably different. The Cohasset tower dominates the town not only through the elevation of its granite outcropping but also through the exaggeration of its belfry level. Montgomery Schuyler described the ­elongated Cohasset tower as “a sprightlier and more self-conscious picturesqueness” than that of most parish churches assigned to Cram’s firm. Typically, wrote Schuyler, Cram designed in the style of a “drowsy village church which seems to assure you that nothing ‘sensational’ has happened in its neighborhood for immemorial time, nor is likely to happen in the time to come.”43 Walkerville does indeed seem to be such a village. Nevertheless the Walkerville tower achieves dominance through an accentuation of its communal position. Unlike the approach to the Cohasset tower (on a winding stairway from the oblique angle of Cohasset’s Main Street), the approach to the Walkerville tower aligns with the progress of Walkerville’s Devonshire Road. Situated on an island of well-manicured earth that divides the

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1.2  This map of Walkerville shows a direct route down Devonshire Road from the Walkerville-Detroit Ferry Terminal to the new St Mary’s Anglican Church

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1.3   This floor plan of the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, enumerates some key features for this book

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traffic of Walkerville’s once wealthiest street (fig. 1.2), the limestone tower serves as an exclamation mark punctuating the importance of Anglicanism to Walkerville’s social elite. It also extends the trajectory of Devonshire Road down the nave alley of the church, all the way to the sacrificial high altar. Cram aligned the tower door with the street; he also aligned the tower with the nave and the nave alley with the church’s high altar (fig 1.3). Therefore in Walkerville the faithful experience the Eucharistic sacrifice of body and blood as an AngloCatholic conclusion to an Anglophile street – Devonshire Road. Even more than the sprightly tower at Cohasset, the Walkerville construct is an example of what Henry Booth described as “massive simplicity. The monumental tower will perhaps stand till the end of time.”44 Towers erected in massive simplicity were a hallmark of Cram’s firm, as evident in the first church (fig. 1.4) he built in partnership with Charles Wentworth (1861–1897) and Bertram Goodhue. Furthermore Cram’s love of massive towers began with his admiration for Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886) when Cram moved to Boston in the early 1880s. Though writing much later in life, Cram described his first viewing of Richardson’s famous Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston thusly: “There was something about those massive walls … the masculine scale and powerful composition … that gave one the sort of thrill experienced on a first seeing of any of the great churches of Europe” (mlia , 33). However with Richardson’s early death in 1886, the Romanesque Revival fell into the inadequate hands (according to Cram) of Richardson’s disciples. Consequently in 1900 Cram wrote: “For Richardson’s genius I have unbounded admiration; for the style he brought into vogue I have little liking; while for the nameless horror that it has engendered, I have only feelings of mortal dismay … Only a giant can handle Romanesque – and Richardson was a giant. His imitators were dwarfs, and in their hands the materials the master wielded with vast and wonderful power became the very millstones that drag them down into the sea of contempt” (gq , 193–4). Thus by the end of the 1890s Cram had called Richardson’s architecture “the fictitious vitality of the alien style” (cb , 10), and the Richardsonian phase became a mere tangent to the Anglo-centric history of Cram’s North America.45 By the time Cram opened his architectural firm in 1888, he was rapidly developing a preference for British Gothic architecture over the Richardsonian Romanesque, finding many massive Gothic

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1.4  The massive, square-topped bell tower of All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Ashmont, dominates the exterior, and a stringcourse at the base of the tower’s second tier runs to the chancel roof eaves line

towers worthy of modern adaptation, especially towers from the ­fifteenth century. He declared as much in an 1893 article: “When the  House of Tudor succeeded to the throne there was scarcely a town in England where a new parish church, fresh from the hands of loving workmen, could not be found, or at least where was not some tower … newly added to the parish church … It was the flowering of Christian civilization.”46 His British model for the Walkerville tower (and thus loosely for the Cohasset tower) was St Michael’s Anglican Church in Bray, Berkshire County (fig. 1.5). More precisely with its squared top, angled stepped buttressing, and quintet of tiers, the bell tower at Bray was the only part of St Michael’s Church to inspire the Walkerville design. The rest of the Bray church is an early fourteenthcentury triple-gabled construct, a type of church Cram never built. Conversely the Bray tower was a later addition, dating from the Perpendicular period of British Gothic – Cram’s flowering of Christian civilization. Essentially then Cram’s attachment to the Bray tower, as opposed to the Bray church, was to its massive form and Perpendicular status.

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1.5  The massive, square-topped bell tower on the liturgically southern side of St Michael’s Anglican Church, Bray, helped to inspire Cram’s pursuit of Perpendicular Gothic architecture

In the early years of his career, during the Walkerville and Cohasset designs, Cram emphatically stated: “One style, and one only, is for us; and that is the English Perpendicular” (cb , 224).47 Architects might integrate “what we will, of course … from earlier periods, even from as far back as the Norman. But the root must be the English Perpendicular Gothic of the early sixteenth century” (cb , 45). The complexities stemming from Cram’s British Perpendicular root are too complicated to discuss at this juncture. In the simplest sense Cram believed that the British Perpendicular held the promise of “a purely national and uniquely beautiful style” (218). Consequently if Englishmen and Americans (and Canadians) were all “one people, with one history and one blood” (190), then the Perpendicular Gothic was the international style of Anglo-Saxon North America. Cram’s admiration for Perpendicular Gothic was not unique. It was part of a wider Anglo-cultural pattern among the later Gothic Revivalists. The use of continental European Gothic models had been dominant during the so-called High Victorian period of the 1850s and 1860s. This was partly due to John Ruskin’s influential books, such as The Stones of Venice (1851–53). However many Gothic

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Revivalists of the Late Victorian period rejected the continental vogue and embraced the possibilities of the British Perpendicular. As Michael Hall pointed out, Benjamin Ferrey’s 1861 biography of A.W.N. Pugin included an attack on the Italianate emphasis of High Victorian Gothic: “the continental type … suddenly thrust on the public notice, diverts attention from the beautiful forms of northern Gothic, and claims consideration for the Lombardic peculiarities. This is to be regretted, because it has diminished the opportunities of  showing the full capability of our national architecture.”48 Furthermore in January 1865 Alphonse Warrington Taylor – an advocate for the burgeoning British Arts and Crafts movement – published a long letter condemning the use of French Gothic models for Victorian architecture. George Edmund Street, an architect of the continental vogue, retorted that the first medieval Gothic architects in Britain based their work on the French models that Taylor condemned. Therefore condemning the French was to omit the Gothic altogether. Taylor partially conceded the point; the French were indeed the inspiration for the first British Gothic buildings. Yet for that very reason, Taylor countered, the British should abandon the Early English Gothic altogether in favour of the later, Perpendicular style. The Perpendicular was a Gothic architecture of truly British character, leaving the French behind: “At last, then, we attained a decided national architecture.”49 Thus British Gothic architects of the late 1860s onward regularly returned to the Perpendicular. These included George Frederick Bodley (1827–1907), John Dando Sedding (1838–1891), George Gilbert Scott Jr (1839–1897), Thomas Garner (1839–1906), and numerous students trained in their offices. Henry Vaughan (1846–1917) was one of Bodley’s students. In 1881 Vaughan received the commission to design a chapel for an Anglo-Catholic convent in Boston, Massachusetts, and with that commission Vaughan immigrated to America to practice a revived Perpendicular style throughout New England. Vaughan was also Boston neighbours with Cram, the latter becoming a fellow congregant of the same Anglo-Catholic parish. Thus Cram considered Vaughan to be his “local mentor” (mlia , 39) and “the apostle of the new dispensation” (cb , 220). Specifically through Vaughan Cram garnered a greater appreciation of the Perpendicular style as revived in Late Victorian Britain. For instance when Cram wrote his article on “Good and Bad Modern Gothic” in 1899, every example of good design was the work of British or Anglo-American Perpendicular

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Gothicists. He praised Vaughan for his adherence to the work of Bodley and Garner. He praised Bodley and Garner for the “infinite sweetness and poetry” of their Hoar Cross church.50 And he praised Sedding for the “poetic fire, the religious devotion, and the intense nationality of one man.”51 Cram then summarized his article with a  statement that Gothic architecture is a matter of “proportion, ­combination, poetic feeling, imagination, and Christian dogma.”52 And because Vaughan, Bodley, Garner, and Sedding were all AngloCatholics, the final listed value was of particular importance to Cram. His love of the Perpendicular Gothic implicitly referred to his AngloCatholicism because, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Perpendicular was deemed the only appropriate style for his faith. Even though Cram, from the beginning of his career, had designed several Gothic Revival churches for staunchly Protestant denominations, he assured his critics that it was not by choice. In those cases he held that “there was something incongruous in using Catholic Gothic to express the ethos of that Protestantism which had revolted against all things Catholic and had done its best to destroy its architectural and other artistic manifestations.” He continued: “We did our best to induce our ‘Non-conformist’ clients to let us do Colonial structures for them [instead],” frequently to no avail (mlia , 96). And when nonconformist clients insisted on Gothic architecture, Cram justified his concession thusly: “In my own practice of architecture I am constantly providing Presbyterian, Congregational, and even Unitarian churches, by request, with chancels containing altars properly vested and ornamented with crosses and candles, while the almost universal demand is for church edifices that shall approach as nearly as possible in appearance to the typical Catholic church of the Middle Ages. Of course some of this is due to a revived instinct for beauty, that almost sacramental quality of life which was ruthlessly destroyed by Protestantism, and also to a renewed sense of the value of symbol and ritual; but back of it all is the growing consciousness that … Protestantism has definitely failed, or at least become superannuated.”53 According to Cram Protestantism had “ruthlessly destroyed” the Catholic Middle Ages, murdering the latest expression of its British beauty (i.e., the Perpendicular), and when Cram traced his architectural lineage back to his Perpendicular Gothic “forefathers,” he did so in terms of a renewed English Catholicism. Beyond the Anglo-Catholicism of Cram’s Late Victorian peers such as Bodley, Garner, Sedding, and Vaughan, the Anglo-Catholic revival

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extended to the Oxford movement of 1833, which “aimed at the restoration to Ecclesia Anglicana of her Catholic heritage.”54 Furthermore Cram believed that the British Gothic Revival had its first worthy champions during the 1830s, when “the Oxford movement found the Pugins ready to serve the Church with perfect service” (cb , 225). Consequently when “the steady and noble work of Bodley and Garner and Sedding had borne fruit in England … continuity was restored with the original movement begun by Pugin” (220).55 Pugin was the name that linked the Late Victorian Gothicists with their Perpendicular Gothic forefathers. Likewise in America Cram placed himself in a local architectural tradition that responded to the British Gothic Revival. Just as Britain had Pugin and the Ecclesiological Gothic of the Early Victorian era, America had builders such as Richard Upjohn (1802–1878), a High Church Episcopalian whose Trinity Church (begun 1839) in New York City was clearly based on Puginian ideals.56 As Cram explained it, “From the moment Upjohn’s Trinity was built, the reign of paganism [in American Episcopal architecture] was at an end” (gq , 147). Nevertheless the eclecticism of the High Victorian Gothic that followed after the original Puginian movement in both Britain and America (and Canada) struck Cram with ambivalence: “It is generally considered very awful indeed – and so it is, but it was the first sincere and enthusiastic work for generations, and demands a word of recognition.”57 Cram admired the vigour and muscularity of High Victorian Gothic, but he deplored the decorative emphasis born of eclecticism because it diminished the ritual focus of British-based architecture for a British-based faith. Hence in addition to the work of his own firm, Cram celebrated the purer Perpendicular Gothic of his contemporaries in the “Philadelphia Group.”58 Citing Philadelphia as “the purest in [Anglo-Saxon] blood of all the great American cities,”59 Cram lauded Frank Miles Day (1861–1918), whose architecture “harked back to the preceding English work,”60 and especially Walter Cope (1860–1902) and John Stewardson (1858–1896), whose buildings were “the lawful adaptation to American conditions of the ancestral style of England, a patrimony that none can take away.”61 Ultimately just as Pugin, then Bodley and Garner and Sedding, restored Perpendicular continuity in  Britain, so too did Upjohn, then Cram and Day and Cope and Stewardson (through Vaughan), restore Perpendicular continuity for Britain’s brothers sojourning in America.

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Yet their combined aim – British and (North) American – at restoring Catholic heritage to the Anglican Church was never simply and completely successful.62 After all Cram’s Walkerville church was a place in which Henry Booth found evidence of Anglo-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant contradictions. Cram may have invested his buildings with an Anglo-Catholic emphasis (e.g., solid stone altars), but he opened those buildings to a world still tainted with the murder of the Catholic Middle Ages. To design an Anglican church in 1902 was to subject the house of God to tensions that marked its place in a time out of joint. Thus the imperfections of that world continue to haunt the Walkerville design, and Cram’s Puginian inheritance helped to shape his perception of modernity’s spectral contradictions.

T h e A m e r ic a n Pugi n Cram’s Puginian heritage overlapped with his problematic inheritance from John Ruskin (1819–1900). Without question Cram appreciated Ruskin’s rhetorical power: “Here is a man of stupefying ability … gifted with a facility in the use of perfectly convincing language such as is granted to few men in any given thousand years” (gq , 149). Consequently Cram would rehearse several Ruskin aphorisms in his own architectural writing. For instance Ruskin wrote: “It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.”63 And Cram echoed the sentiment: “we must remember that, though it seems a paradox, the passion for perfection that fails is sometimes more noble than the passion for perfection that achieves” (gq , 65). However after Cram was fully accepted into Anglo-Catholic communion in 1889, he could not deny that the ultra-­Protestant Ruskin was dogmatically as “narrow as Geneva.” Furthermore inasmuch as Ruskin loved Gothic architecture for its decorative beauty and its continental European manifestations, Cram fuelled his distaste for the ornamental and continental elements of High Victorian Gothic with Ruskin’s “inflammatory rhetoric” (149). Cram may have been an avid reader of Ruskin during his adolescence, and he may have been Ruskinian as an arts critic in the mid-1880s, but after his architectural career began in earnest in 1888, he would soon come to label Ruskin as a “bigot.”64 Much worse, by 1905 he had called Ruskin “quite the most unreliable critic and exponent of architecture that ever lived” (gq , 149). Thus by the

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time Cram designed the Walkerville church, he had found Ruskin’s architectural advice unreliable. Ultimately the Ruskinian criticism of note here is the one that Ruskin indirectly turned upon himself. Ruskin regretted every “cheap villa-builder” and every “public house” that “sells its gin and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of the Madonna of Health or of Miracles.” According to Ruskin these were “the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, [his] own making.”65 Hence Cram would curse cheap modern architecture as “the monster of Frankenstein, a dead horror … without a soul.”66 However the Gothic interdisciplinarity of the Walkerville church is not the soulless horror of a Frankenstein monster. It is the tormented ghost of a murdered medieval past – an aesthetic Cram inherited from Pugin, not Ruskin. When exactly Cram started reading Pugin is unclear. A secondedition copy of Pugin’s Contrasts and his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England survived a fire in Cram’s private library. However when (or even if) Cram acquired them cannot be determined. Cram’s sometime architectural partner Bertram Goodhue recounted his own apprenticeship in the New York City offices of James Renwick Jr, stating that “in those days the gospel [was] … Pugin’s various books, with a sort of thoroughly credible Apocrypha, the works of Viollet-le-Duc.”67 Perhaps when Goodhue joined Cram’s firm in 1891, he introduced Cram to Pugin’s writings. More likely Cram first learned the Pugin name through Ruskin. In an appendix to The Stones of Venice Ruskin attacked Pugin for assuming that Gothic architecture was (and should again be) a Catholic style.68 Thus if the Anglo-Catholic Cram found Ruskin’s Protestant architectural approach unreliable, he perhaps found Ruskin’s condemnation of Pugin equally so, subsequently exploring Pugin’s texts for a kindred Catholic spirit. In any event Cram declared his affiliation with the Pugin name in 1893: “The work of the Pugins was the beginning of the new architecture. In quick succession came the great Gothicists Street, Scott and Sedding. It is significant that of the leaders in this architectural revival, the Pugins [and] Street and Sedding were all ardent and zealous Catholics.”69 So too was Cram an ardent and zealous Catholic in the 1890s, situating himself as an American heir to the Pugins. Crucially Cram wrote of the Pugins (plural), and his 1893 article was not an isolated incident. In a later book he noted: “In England

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the reform [of modern Gothic architecture] had begun with the Pugins” (cb , 11), who had a “sensitive appreciation of architecture as a living thing” (219). Elsewhere he wrote of the new life of Gothic Revival architecture, starting with “the early nineteenth-century Pugins.”70 And he asked his readers: “Do you think the Pugins in England in the early part of the nineteenth century chose to build Gothic churches because they liked the forms better than those of the current Classic then in its last estate? Not at all, or at all events, not primarily; but rather because they passionately loved the old Catholic religion that voiced itself in these same churches they took as their models.”71 Finally concerning his partnership with Bertram Goodhue and the decoration of Gothic churches, Cram wrote: “Historic data, as, for example, various books of the Pugins’ treasured drawings, might serve as a basis, but what in the end issued from [Goodhue’s] fertile imagination and deft fingers had suffered a seachange into something rich and strange” (mlia , 78). Goodhue was Shakespeare’s Ariel, the deft spirit of Gothic magic – and Cram seems to have p ­ ositioned himself as Prospero, the magician-mastermind of The Tempest. Cram also wrote of “the immortal Pugin” (singular), whose Gothic Revival had been “instantly and astoundingly victorious in England. Ten years sufficed to see the last shards of the classical fashion ­relegated to the dust heap” (gq , 119). More explicitly, “the rise and progress of modern religious architecture in England … began with the labour of the elder Pugin, the prophet of the new life, and developed through the cautious and scholastic work of such men as Pugin the younger” (171). In other words when Cram wrote of the Pugins, he referred to Auguste Pugin (1769–1832), the father, and A.W.N. Pugin, the son. He was not referring to A.W.N. Pugin, the father, and E.W. Pugin (1834–1875), the son, as Romy Wyllie suggested.72 After all Cram’s reference to “various books of the Pugins’ treasured drawings” alluded to the two-volume Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821–23) and three-volume Examples of Gothic Architecture (1831–36) that Auguste first illustrated. His son, A.W.N. Pugin, contributed several drawings. Thus when Cram wrote of the “immortal Pugin,” he referred to Auguste Pugin, who was “the first in a long and brilliant line of competent architects” that extended culturally to Cram himself.73 Cram’s assumptions about the elder Pugin were somewhat eccentric, as I have explored in more detail elsewhere.74 The relevant

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argument for this book is Auguste Pugin’s apparent admiration for  the Perpendicular Gothic architecture of William of Wykeham (c. 1320–1404). I say apparent because the elder Pugin did not publish many illustrations of Wykeham’s work. However E.J. Willson, who wrote essays and descriptions to accompany Auguste’s “treasured drawings,” offered an important analysis for Cram. Willson not only identified a distinctive Perpendicular style for Wykeham’s architecture but also explained the constituent elements of that style. Wykeham’s architecture was “distinguished by solidity and bold ­proportions: exhibiting a happy medium between the severe simplicity of the early Gothic … and the gorgeous accumulation of minute ornaments, displayed in the [Perpendicular Gothic] chapels at Cambridge, Windsor, and Westminster.”75 This juxtaposition of severe structural simplicity and lavish ornamental surfaces is what drew Cram to Wykeham’s Perpendicular Gothic. When celebrating Wykeham’s renovations to the nave at Winchester Cathedral, Cram announced: “English Gothic had attained its majority … The perfected style came into universal use, and its beauty fell like a garment over the stern old Norman and Early English cathedrals and abbeys” (cb , 223). Therefore Cram’s advocacy of Perpendicular Gothic for use in modern (North) American churches included the statement that “when we turn to the last great Gothic of all, the Gothic of William of Wykeham, we turn to the work of our own race, to our own inalienable heritage” (224). And Cram’s firm uniquely visualized that heritage shortly after the Walkerville commission. As mentioned in the introduction to this book, Cram’s firm won the competition to renovate the US Military Academy at West Point in 1902. As a result the Boston-based architects opened a second office in New York City in 1903, with Bertram Goodhue at its head. While Goodhue organized his New York City office, he also designed a heraldic over-mantel for the office’s reception-room fireplace, which included the coats-of-arms for all three architectural partners: Cram, Goodhue, and Frank Ferguson (1861–1926). Furthermore Goodhue flanked the partners’ heraldic shields with statues of four Gothic architects: William of Sens, William of Wykeham, William Bolton, and Pugin the Elder (fig. 1.6). William of Sens, the Frenchman who introduced Gothic architecture to Britain with Canterbury Cathedral, held a model of that cathedral in his arms. More precisely he held the model to showcase Henry Yevele’s Perpendicular Gothic renovations to the nave, which cascade over the Early English cathedral like the

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“garment” Cram celebrated on Wykeham’s work. Beside William of Sens stood Wykeham himself, who held a model of Winchester Cathedral to celebrate his Perpendicular renovations there. Beside Wykeham stood William Bolton, who held a model of the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey – the famous Chapel of Henry VII in the full flower of Perpendicular Gothic. And beside Bolton stood Auguste Pugin, who, like William of Sens, was a Frenchman who came to Britain and stimulated the British love for Gothic architecture. Only the elder Pugin did not hold a church model in his hands; he held a T-square and book for the measured exaction and recording of Gothic architecture. His value to the history of Gothic architecture was through his illustrated texts rather than any specific building. And Cram so admired these statues that he included their photograph in the second edition of Church Building. Ultimately for both Cram and Goodhue, the elder Pugin stood as an intermediary between their Perpendicular Gothic forefathers and their modern Gothic production. For as long as he remained his father’s son, the younger Pugin was also heir to this tradition. In the first edition of Contrasts he claimed that medieval Gothic architecture continued to develop in Britain until the advent of the Protestant Reformation, whereby Protestant fervour destroyed the perfect relationship between Gothic architecture and Catholic faith. As a result the younger Pugin originally celebrated Perpendicular architecture and designed Catholic churches in the 1830s with Perpendicular Gothic features. However in the second edition of Contrasts he clearly changed his mind: The author gladly avails himself … to enlarge the text, and correct some important errors which appeared in the original publication … He was perfectly correct in the abstract facts, that pointed architecture was produced by the Catholic faith, and that it was destroyed in England by the ascendency of Protestantism; but he was wrong in treating Protestantism as a primary cause, instead of being the effect of some other more powerful agency, and in ascribing the highest state of architectural excellence to the ecclesiastical buildings erected immediately previous to the change in religion … [These Perpendicular Gothic buildings] still exhibited various symptoms of the decay of the true Christian principle.

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1.6 (a, b, c, d)  The four statues of Gothic architects from an over-mantel in the offices of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, New York, include (a) William of Sens, (b) William of Wykeham, (c) William Bolton, and (d) Pugin the Elder

The real origin of both the revived Pagan and Protestant principles is to be traced to the decayed state of faith throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, which led men to dislike, and ultimately forsake, the principles and architecture which

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originated in the self-denying Catholic principle, and admire and adopt the luxurious styles of ancient Paganism. Religion must have been in a most diseased state.76 As of 1841 the younger Pugin was no longer his father’s son. According to the Victorian Pugin the Protestant Reformation was not directly responsible for the destruction of medieval art; it was merely consequential to a society that had already turned away from the “self-denying Catholic principle” in pursuit of luxurious Renaissance paganism. The self-indulgence of human frailty thus infected the church, and humanity thoroughly tainted the house of God. For example the carbuncular pendants hanging from the fan vaults of Perpendicular Gothic churches were nothing more than an “ingenious trick” to distract people from the true purpose of a church – honouring God with a place worthy of his presence.77 Consequently the Victorian Pugin quarantined the “diseased state” of British architecture from the fifteenth century to the 1840s, evoking the cordon sanitaire that my introduction deconstructed. And he condemned Georgian Gothic architects and theorists (including his father and his younger self) for their advocacy of the diseased Perpendicular style. Between the first edition of Contrasts and the second, Pugin had reflected on John Milner’s 1811 Treatise on the Ecclesiastical Architecture of England, During the Middle Ages, and the argument that Perpendicular Gothic was “an undue depression” of the lancet arch into four-centred variations.78 Because of Milner’s discourse Pugin came to see medieval architecture as a completed lifeline, starting with the aspirations of the Early English Gothic (c. 1180–1275) and reaching the zenith of the Decorated period (c. 1275–1380) before declining into death with the Perpendicular (c. 1380–1535). In other words the life of medieval Gothic architecture followed the rise and fall of the lancet arch, from the first reaches of the Early English to the mature grandeur of the Decorated period to the faltering “depression” of the four-centred Perpendicular arches. The Victorian Pugin argued that Gothic Revivalists had to choose between the various stages of the completed Gothic trajectory – and the only logical choice, he thought, was the Decorated zenith.79 Shand-Tucci consequently held that Cram “ignored” Pugin’s biological model because a completed style meant that there was no more need for development, which meant that the Gothic Revival was an imitative art.80 Yet Pugin’s claim that “Christian architecture

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had gone its length” by the Reformation did not mean that he always blindly sought to imitate the past.81 On the contrary Pugin also stated that “we do not wish to produce mere servile imitators of former excellence of any kind, but men imbued with the consistent spirit of the ancient architects, who would work on their principles, and carry them out as the old men would have done, had they been placed in similar circumstances, and with similar wants to ourselves.”82 In that context (for Pugin was no more consistent a writer than Cram was) Pugin sought a Gothic Revival that addressed the “circumstances” and “wants” of his fellow Victorians. Thus what separated him from Cram was not always a fundamental difference in the purpose of the Gothic Revival but rather the drawing of a line in Britain between the “consistent spirit of the ancient architects” and the inconsistencies of modern architects. The Victorian Pugin contended that the inconsistencies began with the Perpendicular; Cram (and the Georgian Pugin) contended that they began with the Protestant Reformation. Consequently Shand-Tucci went too far when he declared that “Cram never subscribed to such ‘Puginisms’ as that height was of the essence in Christian art because emblematic of the resurrection.”83 Cram loved the image of Gothic churches that “rise from the midst of clustering cottages or village shops” (cb , 181), and he believed in the emblematic relationship between Gothic architecture and the Catholic resurrection. As I assert in the next section of this chapter, Pugin’s equation of the resurrection with the vertical principle is something that haunted Cram at Walkerville.

H au n t in g t h e H o us e of God Pugin’s interest in Catholic architecture and the resurrection exposes a contradiction in his thinking. On the one hand, in his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England Pugin believed that his Victorian churches were a true Catholic revival in comparison with his earlier products, up to and including his work in 1840: “In my own case I can truly state, that in buildings which I erected but a short time since, I can perceive numerous defects and errors, which I should not now commit; and, but a few years ago, I perpetuated abominations. Indeed, till I discovered those laws of pointed design, which I set forth in my ‘True Principles,’ I had no fixed rules to work upon, and frequently fell into error and extravagance … But, from the moment I understood that the beauty of architectural design

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depended on its being the expression of what a building required, and that for Christians that expression could only be correctly given by the medium of pointed architecture, all difficulties vanished.”84 That was Pugin at his most optimistic, believing that he had finally exorcized the Perpendicular “abominations” perpetuating from the fifteenth century to the Georgian era. In his True Principles he claimed to have discovered the essential Christian principle – verticality – because “the vertical principle, emblematical of the resurrection, is the very essence of Christian architecture.”85 Likewise from the second edition of Contrasts, “According to ancient tradition, the faithful prayed in a standing position” as an allusion to the resurrection.86 Thus for the Pugin of 1841, Gothic architecture was a vertical construct, and ancient Christians worshipped on their feet because their faith held the promise of a corporeal resurrection. True Christian architecture, according to him, stands in (for) the future-present of that perfect day – hence the frontispiece to his Apology, where his various Gothic Revival churches stand with the sun rising in the eschatological east. If Christ is the resurrection and the life, and if Pugin believed that medieval Catholics truly communed with the sacramental presence of God, then medieval architecture immediately prior to the “undue depression” of the Perpendicular period was the perfect realization of that vertical communion. For the optimistic Pugin the Gothic Revival was not just a revival; it was the vertical stance of a resurrection. But Pugin was not always so optimistic. Years later he confessed: “I can truly say that I have been compelled to commit absolute suicide with every building in which I have been engaged, and I have good proof that they are little better than ghosts of what they were designed [to be].”87 That was Pugin at a melancholic nadir. He still believed in the possibility of a true architectural resurrection, but the economic conditions of the modern world and the narrow-mindedness of selfindulgent building committees had made that revival practically impossible. His Gothic architecture had not been “the restoration of the real thing” but a haunting simulacrum thereof.88 The diseased state of a modern world, still at odds with the “self-denying Catholic principle,” made a ghost of the Gothic Revival – whereby sickness and the supernatural were coterminous conditions. Nor was Pugin himself safe from that diseased state. As Rosemary Hill suggested in God’s Architect, Pugin seems to have contracted syphilis in his youth. Certainly he had enduring medical problems,

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and Martin Bressani and I have subsequently shown that the taint of Pugin’s illness affected his tirades against the sickness of the modern world, as it did his dire bouts of depression in failing to save Britain or even himself.89 Pugin saw the vast majority of his buildings as a suicidal throng incapable of the corporeal resurrection that their vertical principle held in trust, because they could not escape the sickening conditions of modernity. As the “American Pugin” Cram inherited that Puginian contradiction – on the one hand the optimistic faith in the revival; on the other the melancholic dread of a syphilitic society and the sickening ghosts it produced. At times Cram would optimistically defend the Gothic Revival as a work in progress: “Of course in some measure the new work must be halting and uncertain; an art that has been dead three centuries is not easily to be revived. But from the days of the elder Pugin there has been a steady advance.”90 More precisely Cram said that true Christian architecture returned for good when the elder Pugin became the “prophet of the new life,” declaring that “‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ would no longer do, for the consciousness had grown up that … shams and lies and affectations and stage scenery were the final negation of the spirit of life that had made mediaeval architecture possible, and that had come again into the world, not as a revenant, but as the product of a resurrection” (gq , 132–3). Furthermore the use of Christian eschatology was no accidental metaphor for Cram. Medieval Gothic architecture was once “the trumpet blast of an awakening world, a proclamation to the four winds of heaven that man has found himself, that the years of probation are accomplished, the dark ages extinguished in the glory of self-knowledge” (56). Thus the Gothic Revival (the new life that the elder Pugin prophesied) was the renewed trumpeting of that eschatological morning glory: “the light of the wonderful dawn … has risen over this fortunate country” (28). At his most optimistic Cram believed that his Perpendicular churches stood in the first light of that glorious dawn. Cram often played with diurnal imagery. Yet as with the Victorian Pugin he did not always feel that the modern world truly rose to a Gothic resurrection. In his novella The Decadent Cram pitted his glorious optimism against an intractable skepticism. He divided the contradiction between two characters whose argument significantly received no resolution by the novella’s end. He expressed his optimistic faith in present change through the character of Malcolm McCann,

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a socialist revolutionary who came to New England to stir the fervour of his favourite former pupil – Aurelian Blake. McCann discovered however that Blake no longer fought to change the world. On the contrary Blake sought refuge in a country villa called Vita Nuova, saying: “Malcolm, dear boy … the battle is already lost even before it is fought. I thought once when you filled me with ardour of war that we could win. I see further now. Dear Malcolm, you are waging war against the gods; you have mistaken the light that is on the horizon; you have waked from sleep, but the flush of light that is in your eyes is not the dawn, – it is sunset. You taught me that we lived in another Renaissance; I know it now to be another decadence, inevitable, implacable.”91 Blake continued: “There is other work before me. Even as in the monasteries of the sixth century the wise monks treasured their priceless records of a dead life until the night had passed and the white day of medievalism dawned on the world, so suffer me to dream in my cloister through evil days; for the night has come when man may no longer work.”92 The “new life” of Blake’s refuge Vita Nuova was not in the present but the dream of some unknown future-present. Unsurprisingly McCann accused Blake of being “the worst pessimist I ever saw!” to which Blake replied: “Of course, for I am an optimist; and one can’t be an optimist touching the future without being a pessimist touching the present.”93 For Cram – the present pessimist – the world was mired in the dark ages of “another decadence.” Night is upon us. Consequently when Cram wrote his treatise on Church Building he acknowledged: “We do not possess a genuine, vital civilization … There have always been dazzling personalities that flash out of the surrounding gloom like the writing on the wall at the great king’s feast; but they are not manifestations of healthy art” (cb , 1). In other words the ostensibly resurrected purity of the Gothic Revival was not simply a “healthy art” that surpassed the diseased state Pugin projected onto the modern world. Just as Pugin occasionally felt that his buildings were little better than “ghosts of what they were designed [to be],” so too did Cram pessimistically feel the melancholia of a Gothic Revival that conjured mere “revenants,” not the bodies of a resurrection. Thus if Cram pessimistically implied that the post-Georgian Gothic remained an undead revenant, like the “Strawberry Hill Gothic” of the eighteenth century, then his Walkerville design is a grammatologically Gothick haunt, even if (or perhaps even because) he never used the word Gothick.

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Gavin Stamp touched on this spectral condition in his biography of George Gilbert Scott Jr, another architect of the Late Victorian Gothic Revival. According to Stamp, Scott Jr’s Perpendicular architecture “had articulated that compelling dream of Pre-Reformation England which became so important to the sensibilities of many Edwardians: a dream of a nation that was English and yet Catholic. This was the historical vision, haunted by consciousness of broken continuity, which, earlier, had initially inspired Pugin, yet there was a crucial difference. Pugin really believed that England could be made Gothic and Catholic again; Scott’s generation knew at heart that this was impossible. In consequence, their vision was tinged with melancholy.”94 Stamp’s “crucial difference” is faulty of course. Pugin’s architecture calls for someone willing to do justice to its tinged melancholia, and Scott’s generation, which overlapped Cram’s, was never so wholly reconciled to the impossibility of that Pre-Reformation dream. Nevertheless at Walkerville Cram did create a melancholy architecture that was (and still is) “haunted by consciousness of broken continuity.” Cram wrote that the Perpendicular at the end of the Middle Ages “had died a violent death, not a death from exhaustion.”95 The style and the society that produced it “were done to death in most untimely fashion and in the strength of their mature manhood” (gq , 133). In short, “Henry VIII killed all art of any kind whatsoever in England” when, poisoned with secular dreams of absolute power, he decided to usurp British Catholicism, opening the way for Protestantism (101). However killing the Gothic style in the prime of its Perpendicular life did not put the Gothic to rest. Cram envisioned the modern world as a place haunted by the murder of the Catholic Middle Ages. This is evident in Black Spirits and White, Cram’s book of Gothic ghost stories. Cram chose that title in homage to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a play in which the supernatural emerged as a result of usurpers who broke the bonds of fealty with God and king. Having committed regicide offstage, Macbeth entered to ask a disturbing question: “But wherefore could not I pronounce ‘Amen’?”96 During the murder he had “most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’ / Stuck in [his] throat” (Macbeth, 2.2.30–1). His wife reassured him to “Consider it not so deeply” (2.2.28), but that metaphysical question festered in the body politic of Scotland, leaving Macbeth a haunted tyrant and Lady Macbeth hauntingly insane. Thus when Macbeth summoned a doctor to save his wife, he added: “If thou couldst, doctor, cast / The

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water of my land, find her disease, / And purge it to a sound and pristine health, / I would applaud thee to the very echo, / That should applaud again” (5.3.52–6). But the doctor could neither cure Lady Macbeth nor save Scotland from the sickness of Macbeth’s usurpation, and Cram pursued Shakespeare’s correlation of sickness and the supernatural from that play. This Shakespearean theme structured “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince,” the first tale from Black Spirits and White. The haunted house at the titular address was locally known in Paris as the Bouche d’Enfer, the “Mouth of Hell,” a former den of satanic witchcraft led by Mlle Blaye de Tartas and Sar Torrevieja, King of Sorcerers. When Cram’s autobiographical narrator approached the house with three Parisian friends (Eugene d’Ardeche and Drs Fargeau and Duchesne) he described the architecture thusly: “Beyond lay the courtyard, a curious place rendered more curious still by the fitful moonlight and the flashing of four dark lanterns. The place had evidently been once a most noble palace. Opposite rose the oldest portion, a three-story wall of the time of Francis I., with a great wisteria vine covering half. The wings on either side were more modern, seventeenth century, and ugly, while towards the street was nothing but a flat unbroken wall” (bsw , 13–14). Then they entered: So far as we could see, the house was apparently perfectly uninteresting inside, all eighteenth century work, the façade of the main building being, with the vestibule, the only portion of the Francis I. work. “The place was burned during the Terror,” said Eugene, “for my great-uncle, from whom Mlle. de Tartas inherited it, was a good and true Royalist; he went to Spain after the Revolution, and did not come back until the accession of Charles X., when he restored the house, and then died, enormously old. This explains why it is all so new.” (16–17) Therefore the violence of the French Revolution had forged the architecture of the Bouche d’Enfer. Cram’s narrator imagined what must have been a “noble palace” from the end of the Middle Ages, from the reign of Francis I, and he specifically named the revolutionary “Terror” as being responsible for its destruction. The only portion left behind was the wisteria-draped façade, serving as a silent memorial of the grandeur lost to modernity.

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Just as Eugene reassured Cram’s narrator that he would like Eugene’s Meudon estate better because it was “all furnished, and nothing in it newer than the last century” (bsw , 6), the oldest remnants of 252 Rue M. le Prince were the only parts that appealed to Cram and his discriminating narrator. Not even Eugene’s great-uncle, a “good and true Royalist” like Cram himself, could restore the palace to its late medieval glory. From the moment of its rebirth in the flames of revolutionary terror the Parisian manse was a corrupt architecture, a composite form that disturbed Cram with its incongruous mixture of noble medievalism and ugly or uninteresting additions from the modern world. Furthermore no matter how “perfectly uninteresting” the great-uncle’s restorations may have been, Mlle de Tartas hid something awful amid the banality. Behind a dense iron door covered in green baize stood a trio of chambers dedicated to her black magic. And having toured the chambers Eugene confessed that “it is all just about as queer and fin de siècle as I can well imagine” (21). The characters declined to spend the night within those spaces. Instead they each took a room down the hall, and during the night a “hellish succubus” (27) tried to suffocate the narrator with her demonic mouth, nearly draining the life from his body and the light from the room: “My body was like lead, my tongue was paralyzed. I could hardly move my eyes. And the light was going out. There was no question about that. Darker and darker yet; little by little the pattern of the [wall]paper was swallowed up in the advancing night. A prickling numbness gathered in every nerve, my right arm slipped without feeling from my lap to my side, and I could not raise it, – it swung helpless … The darkness was coming fast” (24). Ultimately he survived the enervating kiss of the Bouche d’Enfer only at the last second, when his friends burst into the room and then rushed him to the hospital. More precisely they rushed him to the Hôtel Dieu. Earlier in the story Cram’s narrator described Fargeau and Duchesne as “doctors in the Clinical Hospital … up by the Parc Mont Souris” (bsw , 7). Yet just like the doctor in Macbeth, his friends were medically helpless in saving him from the trauma of the supernatural succubus. In fact knowing that they worked at the clinical hospital near the Parc Mont Souris, why did they rush him to the Hôtel Dieu? Granted the Hôtel Dieu is slightly closer to the Rue M. le Prince than is the Parc Mont Souris. Nevertheless Cram chose that locale so that his narrator could recover in the Catholic context of the Hôtel Dieu and not the

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clinical context of the friends’ hospital. And when the narrator awoke he noted that the ward was “very white and sunny, [and] some yellow fleurs-de-lis stood at the head of the pallet” (28). Unlike the fin-desiècle darkness of modernity at the Bouche d’Enfer, which “swallowed” the “little pattern of the [wall]paper,” the yellow fleurs-de-lis in the white and sunny Hôtel Dieu stood out as the pre-revolutionary royalty of Catholic France. Furthermore unlike the demonic womanhood of the succubus who tried to swallow Cram’s narrator in that same darkness, a nun kept vigil over his recovery in the sunny hospital with her spiritual guidance. The narrator had to ask for his doctor friends, and only “by and by” did Duchesne come to see him (28). To the end they remained medically useless. Cram’s narrator survived the haunted house precisely because his convalescence occurred in the medieval hospital of Paris, with its royalist Catholic care. Significantly when Cram wrote “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” he borrowed many story elements from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Victorian Gothic novella The Haunted and the Haunters. In fact when the succubus attacked Cram’s narrator, he directly referenced that story (bsw , 24) “to match Bulwer-Lytton’s tale on its own terms.”97 For instance Bulwer-Lytton made an effort to give his characters credibility so that they would not appear as “superstitious dreamer[s]” to his target audience of Anglo-Protestant readers.98 These characters were rational men who approached the haunted house as a site of “phenomena” in need of investigation.99 Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator treated his visit as an “experiment,”100 testing the validity of his theory that “what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant.”101 And in the end his theory was proven correct, as the apparitions of the house were really the work of a “dazzling charlatan” who developed a superior form of mesmerism to control people and objects from a remote distance.102 Conversely in Cram’s story Eugene d’Ardeche was a dabbler in the occult who believed in the supernatural. Likewise Sar Torrevieja was no charlatan, and his curse (which left the house haunted) was not of natural origins. Hence Cram’s Anglo-Catholic narrator, who had a “strong predisposition to believe some things that [he] could not explain,” could not rely on reason to survive a night in the Bouche d’Enfer. This allusion to Bulwer-Lytton is part of Cram’s claim that the stories in Black Spirits and White are not original. He only wished to succeed in “clothing” the tales “in some slightly new vesture” (bsw , 151).

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Like a gruesome Sartor Resartus Cram turned the Anglo-Protestant conventions of British Gothic literature inside out to stitch together a series of ghost stories befitting an Anglo-Catholic at odds with the modern world. In particular the British Gothic conventions of the “explained supernatural” allowed the presumed Anglo-Protestant readers to revel in the irrational terror of ghosts and demons, but only insofar as the readers could master their fears with a rational explanation at the story’s end. An author such as Bulwer-Lytton “almost ludicrously over-explained” the supernatural events to reveal natural phenomena behind the chicanery.103 But Cram’s Anglo-Catholic narrator could not explain what happened in the Bouche d’Enfer, and in the face of that supernatural terror his arm slipped without feeling from his lap to his side; it swung helpless. Therefore he was impotent of the Anglo-Protestant “mastery” to overcome his fear; all he could do was to seek refuge and recovery in the Catholic medievalism of the Hôtel Dieu. The story ends with news that the haunted house burned down in the night – and not because of some rational act on the part of Cram’s narrator or his friends. At most they might have knocked over a lantern in their desperate escape, but even that remains unconfirmed. Ultimately what makes Cram’s story “Gothic” is not the inability to represent the source of his horror – the context of revolutionary modernism is quite clear – but rather the inability to represent the actions needed to stop that horror from continuing. His narrator always survived his encounters with baleful spirits for unexplained reasons, and sometimes the hauntings continued after the story’s end. Returning to a specifically British architectural context, Cram published a treatise on The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain in 1905. The Ruined Abbeys was a protracted dirge over the destruction that Protestant reformers had visited upon the Catholic abbeys of Great Britain. Thus just as Black Spirits and White inverted AngloProtestant conventions of British Gothic literature, so too did The Ruined Abbeys invert an Anglo-Protestant justification for the ­sixteenth-century suppression of Catholic monasticism. Cram specifically relied on medical terminology to invert that justification, noting that Protestant defenders of the suppression viewed medieval monasticism as “a poisonous canker on the body politic” because its sequestered nature encouraged greed and its homosocial context encouraged vice.104 Cram countered, stating that the vice that crippled Catholicism and made it susceptible to a Protestant Reformation

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was not monasticism but the fourteenth-century Avignon Captivity and the anti-popes it created. This internal schism “paralyzed and rendered [the church] impotent to stop the flood of paganism that was fast rising into the deluge of the Renaissance” (ra , 7). He continued: “[When] the virus of the pagan renaissance flowed at last into the veins of religious life, the [institution of] commende sapped its vitality on the continent … England, spared the horror of com­ mendatory abbots, retained a monastic organization singularly and unexpectedly pure, while its episcopate, though suffering grievously, had not fallen so low as was the case across the Channel” (284–5). Hence the Protestant destruction of British monasticism was among the rankest offences of the Reformation because, unlike corrupt commendatory monasticism on the continent, the English institution was “pure.” As such the destruction of that pure institution haunted the industrial society following in the Reformation’s wake. For instance Cram told the story of Walter Taylor, a nonconformist who took ownership of Netley Abbey after the Protestant seizure of the monastery. Taylor wished to turn a profit on the resale of the abbey’s building materials, but he had a dream that he would die if he touched the sacred stones. Nevertheless – and despite having the ghost of “a gaunt old monk” subsequently warn him of the same danger (ra , 89) – Taylor pulled down the abbey’s venerable roof and was promptly crushed in the collapse of the tracery from the great western window. Furthermore at Jedburgh Abbey Cram noted that a ghost appeared at the medieval wedding feast of King Alexander III. Alexander (a faithful Catholic who feared the spectre’s ill omen) abruptly ended the feast, but he still died without issue, and Cram wondered if the spectral omen extended beyond that event. Specifically Cram noted that “the curse of failure of male issue” was endemic to the secular families who took hold of suppressed monastic estates, including Jedburgh: “In 1846 of the six hundred and thirty families to which monastic estates had been granted, only fourteen had not been extinguished through failure of male issue. Since then several more have come to an end, and whether we attribute the fact to judgment or coincidence, it is certainly notable that shame, disgrace, violent deaths, and total extinction have followed the names of all those who took part in the Suppression” (248). Thus according to Cram the ghost of Jedburgh Abbey was an omen of familial extinction that haunted not only the isolated incident of Alexander’s feast but also the entire monastic suppression of the modern British world.

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Cram, the Anglophile 59

More importantly for the Walkerville commission, Cram lamented the destruction of St Mary’s Abbey, Yorkshire, in the fires of industrial lime-kilns: “[the] sculpted stones [of the abbey] worthy to stand in the British Museum by the Elgin Marbles were given to the fire that they might acquire a commercial value when transmuted into quicklime” (ra , 212). Modern society (in a transmutation Marx had known too well) had reduced the aesthetic value of medieval sculpture to the exchange value of industrial commodities. Cram consequently described his disgust in spectral terminology: “It is with feelings of horror and unutterable dismay that, as we stand beside the few existing fragments, realizing the irreparable loss they make so clear, we call into mind … the mercenary savagery of the nineteenth century when from smoking lime-kilns rose into the air the vanishing ghosts of the noblest creations that owe their existence to the hands of man” (227). The ghosts linger though, even as they vanish, in the haunting evocation of Cram’s despair. Thus with only the ruined architectural foundations to see, Cram imagined St Mary’s Abbey in its original glory where above all, “crowning the composition and tying it all into an aspiring pyramid, lifts a single lofty tower with its lance-like spire flashing in the sky” (ra , 219). In other words Cram was perfectly willing to appreciate Gothic architecture as an essay in steeply pyramidal verticality, where “lance-like” spires flashed in the light of Catholic Britain’s eschatological daylight (i.e., verticality and the resurrection). Cram spectralized the destruction of that aspiring verticality through the ghosts of modern lime-kiln smoke rising into the air, and in his pessimistic moments he felt that he was not born to set this right, meaning that he designed buildings that were nothing more than revenants of the true Catholic architecture that went up in smoke. From that perspective Cram’s architecture was as incomplete as the Reformation-born ruins of a medieval abbey. St Mary’s Walkerville is thence a haunted house, like St Mary’s Abbey in Yorkshire, because it is missing the “lance-like” spire at the termination of its tower.

D e c o n s t ru cti ng t h e [ H au n t e d ] Hous e of God Deconstruction inhabits Cram’s architecture on the pessimistic angle of his Puginian inheritance. As Mark Wigley demonstrated in The Architecture of Deconstruction, Derrida was interested in

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architecture because the entire tradition of western philosophy (from Plato onward at least) depends on a paradoxical spatial image, one that is both central and peripheral to philosophical discourse. Wigley called relentless attention to this fact: western philosophy is built on a spatial metaphor that has always been implicit to the claim that truth belongs inside philosophy’s discourse. The metaphor of a philosophical interior became architecturally explicit with René Descartes’s “construction of an edifice,” Immanuel Kant’s edifice of metaphysics, “erected on secure ‘foundations’ laid on the most stable ‘ground,’” and Martin Heidegger’s transformation of the grounded edifice into a house that grounds: “Language is the house of Being.”105 Western philosophy is consequently built on a tripartite system of groundstructure-ornament (i.e., presence-presentation-representation), in which the structural edifice that builds an interior for philosophical discourse can stand on its own only because it is supposedly grounded in the metaphysical presence of truth. Philosophy is said to present the truth of metaphysical presence, and that structural presentation is then properly represented through the metaphor of architecture: the grounded edifice or the house that grounds. Architecture, as a metaphorical ornament, has been indispensable to western philosophy. Conversely as those philosophers called greater attention to the architectural attributes of their spatial metaphor, they simultaneously sought to subordinate the aesthetic materiality of actual construction. Specifically even though philosophy has come to rely on a certain image of architecture to explain and sustain itself (its interiority), such an explanation is supposed to come directly from the philosopher’s mouth. “Language,” once again, is said to be the “house of Being.” Some philosophers have consequently privileged speech as the only way in which philosophy can truly present itself because speech is supposed to be the immediate and immaterial expression of thought: “the [linguistic] figure of the house is that of the privileged interior, the space of unmediated presence, or, more precisely, the site of the exclusion of space by presence.”106 Thus since philosophers have made their architectural metaphor explicit, and because actual architecture is both spatial and material, some philosophers have deemed an architect’s work to be farthest from the metaphysical truth that the philosopher’s voice alone can present. According to Kant especially, “In architecture the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object to which the aesthetic ideas are limited.”107 As a metaphor architecture is central to philosophy; as a material construct it

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is peripheral, and deconstruction is everywhere concerned with the impossibility of exorcizing the materiality of architecture from its metaphorical usage. In 1841 Pugin published a theory of architecture that renegotiated the philosophical contract between metaphysical truth and the material construct of a building. Because the Victorian Pugin was a Roman Catholic, and because the gospel according to St John (1:14) declared Christ as “The Word … made flesh,” Pugin sought an architectural language, a monumental / material language of church building that embodied the metaphysical truth of the incarnation. The Catholic faithful discover the truth of metaphysical presence not simply through the spoken word of the gospel but through the invocation of the material reality of transubstantiation: “our blessed Lord truly present and abiding in the temple in the holy sacrament of the altar.”108 Pugin was thus obsessed with designing Catholic churches worthy of housing the material reality of that metaphysical presence. More precisely he sought to control ornament so that his churches could be the structural presentation of God’s metaphysical presence.109 In that sense Pugin wrote his True Principles so that the truth of those principles would not be limited to architectural issues, but would rather constitute an aesthetic grounded in the metaphysical truth that Catholic architecture is supposed to reveal to the faithful. For Pugin the truest principle of Catholic architecture is verticality, emblem of resurrection. We recall that the terrain on which a Catholic church stands is the hallowed ground of dead generations who are waiting to stand in the glorious light of resurrection. A church at present may only be emblematic of that future-present (it stands inasmuch as it stands in for the promised land of Christianity), but in the moment of transubstantiated glory the church actually inhabits that future-present. As Cram put it, “the awful Presence of God enters into His holy temple … a foreshadowing of the unspeakable glory of the Kingdom of God” (gq , 111–13). Christ’s body is thus momentarily resurrected and presented in the sacramental bread and wine. The Word is made flesh. The privileged status of the incarnation also explains why Pugin insisted that a Catholic church, as the house of God, is a unique architecture among all building types. It is the only site worthy of God’s presence: “There is a vast difference between a building raised to God and one for temporal purposes.”110 The house of God is

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supposed to be unlike any other kind of house, which is precisely where we might deconstruct Cram’s Puginian inheritance. Inasmuch as deconstruction is concerned with how architecture is used to control distinctions between the material and metaphorical, Pugin’s theory that church architecture is a material truth (simultaneously aesthetic and metaphysical) is dependent on his control over the word “house.” According to him if we understand a Catholic church as the only site worthy of God’s “abiding” presence in the sacramental miracle of transubstantiation, then church architecture transcends mere domestic housing to become God’s material reality. In that sense “house of God” is a metaphor to describe an architecture that cannot be a house in the sense of human habitation. If however human vanity afflicts a church with temporal concerns (such as social acclaim) and mixed types (incorporating domestic architectural features), then a church is too much of a house (i.e., domestic architecture) to be God’s “house.” It cannot transcend. Consequently the Victorian Pugin was concerned with the potential confusion of church architecture with the temporal houses of humanity, in that he lamented his inability to keep his churches free from the taint of our temporal self-indulgence in a diseased modern world. His churches are haunted houses inasmuch as they cannot exorcize the ambiguities of the word “house.” Pugin’s concern became explicit with the question of designing a church tower. Inasmuch as a church tower is “a beacon to direct the faithful to the house of God,”111 its loftiness plays a crucial role in God’s household. In short Pugin said that a tower “naturally suggests a spire as its termination”112 – and not just because a spire’s vertical accent punctuates the emblematic resurrection of the building. If we were to exclude the spire, we would run the risk of confusing the house of God with the mere domestic architecture of a castle: “There is no instance before the year 1400 of a church tower being erected without the intention at least of being covered or surmounted by a spire … In fine, when towers were erected with flat embattled tops, Christian architecture was on the decline … Towers surmounting gate-houses were never terminated by spires, for, being originally built for defence, the space at top was required for that purpose. This is the real reason why square-topped and embattled towers are said to be of a domestic character.”113 When the younger Pugin of the 1830s designed Perpendicular “abominations,” he indiscriminately included the flat roof of a square-topped tower. When the Pugin of

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1841 and beyond designed churches, he always included (or intended to include) a spire; to do otherwise was to compromise the vertical structure of the house of God, as evident in the “diseased state” of Perpendicular Gothic churches intentionally built without spires. To an extent Cram agreed. He certainly argued that the material construct of a church is supposed to be “the most delicate, scientific, beautiful, even metaphysical product of the mind of man” (gq , 63). He also claimed: “First of all, a church is a house of God, a place of His earthly habitation” (cb , 6). Yet he blamed the Reformation, not the medieval builders of the Perpendicular, for the modern world’s failure to achieve that metaphysical point: “As the house of God became the [Protestant] house of man, there was born the bare and ugly meeting-houses, the parsimony and grudging doles of money, wrung from greedy purses, where once had been eager generosity and noble emulation in doing honour to the incarnate Lord” (gq , 247). He even condemned architects who made churches look like domestic households: “Recently a fashion has developed of treating a small church like a cottage, of trying to obtain an effect of ‘cosiness,’ which is quite the most wrong-headed scheme that has [been] offered. A church is a church, not a sitting room; and, even if it seats only a hundred people, it must be a church in every detail” (cb , 29). However Cram also thought that all modern architects are fundamentally incapable of building churches that are simply and completely the house of God. Cram’s role as architect was proof of this point: “We ought to be able to build a church without the intervention of an architect, but we can’t. He is a product of the new conditions of life wherein art is an exotic, no longer the inalienable right of the people.” Cram added: “So long as these conditions continue, he is a necessary evil. No single architect can build as perfectly as the old priests and abbots and stone masons; but he can build better than anybody else in this day and generation, and so he must be accepted and his authority recognized” (cb , 48–9). Cram thus considered himself a “necessary evil” in an unhealthy world, meaning that his Perpendicular architecture could not simply ignore the Puginian accusation of being a measure of its diseased state. The difference once again is that Cram believed medieval Perpendicular was a healthy architecture and only the melancholia of modernity tainted its revival. Thus Cram might have praised Bodley and Garner for the “infinite sweetness and poetry” of their Hoar Cross church, with its

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square-topped tower, but he also situated their church in the context of its modern construction: “as seems to be inevitable in all contemporary work, there is something of self-consciousness, of the striving for perfection; but attribute no blame for this to the architects. The cause lies in the spirit of the epoch, and no one man shall escape it” (cb , 66–7). When building the new St Mary’s Church in Walkerville, Cram consequently acknowledged his self-consciousness as a limitation born of an unhealthy world – a world in which Cram’s Anglocultural context was far from Catholic in unity. On that condition the Anglican tower in Walkerville marks the house of God tainted with a domestic detail that Pugin abhorred. The square-topped tower of its castle-like design demonstrates a failed resurrection. When stepping inside the Walkerville church the first detail in the tower / vestibule floor is a cluster of diamond-shaped tiles with several foot-worn, almost illegible castles pressed into the clay. These castles originally had crenelated square-topped towers in sunken relief. Furthermore when approaching the Walkerville high altar we find that the castle tiles repeat in the diamond quarries of the sanctuary floor (fig. 1.7).114 Only now the castle’s shape echoes the structure of the wooden reredos screen standing above the altar (fig. 1.8). The castle tiles have a tall centralized tower dividing their horizontal bodies, which have minor vertical accents towering on the terminal ends. The reredos also has a tall centralized tower dividing its horizontal body, which has minor vertical accents on the terminal ends. And although the reredos’s terminal accents are canopies that project only slightly above its horizontal parapet, several crenelated finials clearly project above that parapet as well, ensuring the castellated equivalency. Altogether from the moment we set foot within the tower door to the moment we ascend to the sacrificial high altar, we are reminded that this church is also a castle, the house of God tainted with humanity – the house of Walker in particular. Granted the presentation of a church as a metaphorical castle was already well established in Christian symbolism. Martin Luther for example took Psalm 46 from the Bible and composed a famous hymn, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, translated into English as “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”115 Furthermore we have already read that Cram encouraged the modern Goth to defend Christian civilization against the onslaught of pagan modernity. What better way to reinforce that call to arms than to offer churches with all the massiveness and all the associative features of castellated fortifications? A

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1.7  This castle tile (flanked with fleurs-de-lis in the upper left and right) in the sanctuary of the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, does not experience as much foot traffic as do the vestibule tiles; its tall centralized tower leads toward the high-altar reredos screen

1.8  The castle-like, high-altar reredos screen in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, has crenellated finials, a tall centralized tower crowned with a Vesica Piscis cross, and the following saints from left to right: Stephen, John the Baptist, Thomas à Becket, Mary with the infant Christ, George, King Edward the Confessor, and Columba

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Cram church is a mighty castle from which to defend Christianity. Further still the Walkerville church is not the only Cram design with a square-topped tower; nor is it the only one with Moravian castle tiles decorating the floor. It is however the only Cram church to create a direct relationship between the castle tiles and the reredos screen above the altar. And for reasons that will become apparent when we turn to the ailing Edward Walker’s place in the design, the castellated relationship demonstrates that the Walkerville church is not just a metaphorical castle. The building conflates the roles of church and castle in such a way that the castellated features cannot remain purely metaphorical. I contend that Cram was aware of Pugin’s attack on castle-like Perpendicular towers and chose in his optimistic designs to dismiss Pugin in favour of the Perpendicular style and all its metaphorical mightiness. In Walkerville though, working for a sick patron, Cram reimagined Pugin’s condemnation of diseased Gothic architecture to create a Perpendicular tower that is a revenant, an incomplete resurrection from a Puginian perspective. Here I also leave the trajectory of our first approach to and through the Walkerville church incomplete. Just as the tall tower in each castle paver points the way to the sacrificial high altar, so too does the tower on the high-altar reredos screen lead the eye up the Anglican altar wall. What exactly the reredos tower points to – and why – are ­questions that must wait for later chapters. For now as we turn to Edward Walker’s patronage, it is enough to note that Cram conflated the architecture of church and castle in Walkerville because Gothic Revival architecture is inescapably part of modernity’s sickness. And although Cram believed that the Perpendicular style held the promise of a revival that was perfectly medieval and yet perfect for the redemption of the modern world, he designed the Walkerville church as an architecture that is helplessly caught in the interval between a past- and future-perfect.

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2 Gifts of the Magi

The Walker brothers (Edward, Franklin, and James) presented the new St Mary’s Church as a gift to the Anglican Diocese of Huron on  behalf of their parents: Hiram (1816–1899) and Mary Abigail (1826–1872) Walker, founders of Walkerville. A massive stone plaque inside the church testifies to the building’s status as a memorial gift: To the Glory of God / and in loving remembrance of / Hiram Walker … / and his wife / Mary Abigail Walker … / their sons Edward Chandler Walker / Franklin Hiram Walker and /  James Harrington Walker have / given this Church with the Rectory / Parish House and the ground attached / to the Church of England in Canada. In addition to the land and building complex, the Walker brothers presented the Lord Bishop Baldwin with a deed of gift during the consecration ceremony on 10 April 1904. The deed stated that the named properties are to be “held forever by the Synod in Trust of a free Church, to be known as St Mary’s Church, for the celebration of Divine Service according to the doctrines and rites of the Church of England in Canada.”1 Furthermore to ensure survival of the properties in trust, the Walker brothers endowed the parish with $25,000 for insurance and annual maintenance. Consequently the vestry board of the new St Mary’s Church wrote a letter of gratitude to the Walker brothers, assuring the latter that “we [the vestry] can entertain no doubt that the adherents of the Church will show their appreciation of this splendid gift in a practical way.”2 How quickly the

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Walker brothers’ gift became a parish debt of “practical” and practically perpetual “appreciation.” In his essay Given Time Derrida considered the aporetic (im)possibility of the gift. A gift must be given, and yet a gift can never be given and remain a gift in the strictest sense. The moment it appears as such – the moment a present is present – it ceases to be a gift but a debt, an (un)intentional call for restitution, exchange, gratitude. The phenomenon of a gift, commonly registered in the circular logic of exchange, becomes a measure of economy. Derrida deconstructed traditional anthropological studies of the gift – at once highlighting and undermining Marcel Mauss’s classic 1925 study. “One could go so far as to say,” wrote Derrida, “that a work as monumental as Marcel Mauss’ The Gift speaks of everything but the gift”3 because Mauss “speaks of it blithely as ‘gifts exchanged.’ But he never asks the question as to whether gifts can remain gifts once they are exchanged.”4 As a result it never occurred to Mauss that the “simple phenomenon of the gift” transforms the gift into “a phantom” and the gift-giving act into “a simulacrum” of the (im)possible presentation of a pure gift beyond exchange.5 A spectral economy is at work in the act of giving: all gifts given are haunted by a spectral hand – not simply the invisible hand of the capitalist marketplace but one that remains extended once it has presented a present. This spectral hand disturbs the potential purity of its own gift-giving gesture with the metacarpal strings attached via the social contract of restitution. In Specters of Marx Derrida rehearsed the stage of the socius on which spectral economics are performed. He argued that Marx’s distinction between use value and exchange value is not secure, although he agreed with Marx that an object’s use value is not the same as its exchange value and that the commodity form of exchange value haunts an object placed on the social stage of the marketplace. Nevertheless Derrida did not agree with Marx that haunting occurs only when the object is placed on the market as an exchange value. It does not simply become a spectre of its former self. On the contrary, Derrida asserted, the use value of an object does not precede and transcend its exchange value: “[even] before the coup de théâtre … the ghost had made its apparition … having already hollowed out in use-value … the repetition (therefore substitution, exchangeability, iterability …) without which a use could never even be determined. This haunting is not an empirical hypothesis. Without it, one could not even form the concept either of use-value, or of value in general

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… or determine any table, whether a wooden table – useful or saleable – or a table of categories.”6 Even the gift of a table on which the Lord’s Supper might be set cannot escape the haunting prospect of its exchange value, inasmuch as it has value (social, spiritual, aesthetic, etc.) in the first place. Moreover because gifts are not necessarily valued monetarily the contingent debts of restitution are not measured solely in monetary returns. Christian acts of charity – be they gifts of money or otherwise – carry the implication of a debt that need not be given back in monetary form but in salvation, an economy of salvation. Derrida consequently revisited the Christological gift economy in his deconstruction of the gospel according to St Matthew, the spiritual tax collector. The Matthean gospel circulated Christ’s beatitudes through an economy of salvation, as evident in St Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, in which the supplicant asks God to “forgive us our debts” (6:12) – as opposed to St Luke’s “forgive us our sins” (11:4) or “forgive us our trespasses,” as written in the English Book of Common Prayer.7 For Derrida the exchange value of this divine economy is evident in a shibboleth Jesus issued to be learned by heart: “and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly” (variations in Mt 6:4; 6:6; 6:18).8 The faithful are to learn this shibboleth by heart because the heart is the storehouse of salvation’s treasures – hence Derrida’s point that in St Matthew’s gospel “the line demarcating celestial from terrestrial economy is what allows one to situate the rightful place of the heart.”9 Furthermore because God’s rewards are heavenly, St Matthew’s Christ assured the faithful that God’s celestial economy is not a risky marketplace. It is a place to store one’s charitable actions safely, “where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal” (Mt 6:20). Consequently Derrida’s reading of that celestial economy emphasized the principle of secrecy, meaning that Christians give privately and anonymously so that no one save God can see what has been done and that no one save God can reward them. As Christ preached in St Matthew’s gospel (6:1–4), “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. / Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. / But when thou doest give alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: / that thine alms may be in

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secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” How then are we to reconcile the Walker brothers’ public gift of a church with the Christian economy of salvation? What is the right hand of their spectral economy doing? In his remarkable study of Derrida and religion, John Caputo reminded us that St Matthew’s gospel is “highly polyvalent … filled with many voices, and our debt to Matthew is a matter of responding selectively to his several spirits.”10 St Matthew’s account is another spectral gift, and our debt is to recognize that the heterogeneity of voices assigned to Christ therein renders the text uncanny. It is not entirely at peace with itself. Caputo could thus select the Matthean Christ of 6:25–34 (who trusted in providence and told his disciples not to worry about the future) as a means to countersign Derrida’s shrewdly calculating Christ. For the purposes of this chapter I too am countersigning Derrida’s investment in the Matthean economy, not to counteract the calculation but to address another facet of the economy, one that does not depend on the secret exchange between God and the privacy of the individual heart. In Caputo’s terms I am selecting another spirit to spectralize St Matthew’s gospel – the spectral economy of the gift-giving magi. In the second chapter of that gospel (Mt 2:1–12) we are told that the magi journeyed to visit the infant Christ, following the light of a wandering star. The magi interpreted the star as a proclamation that the messiah, the king of the Jews, was born, and they entered Jerusalem to ask Herod, secular king of the Jews, where the infant was. Herod, though furious at the news of a new king, concealed his rage and told the magi to let him know where he could find the messiah. The magi then continued to follow the star until it led them to a “house” in Bethlehem, which they entered, falling to their knees in homage of the messiah therein and then “opening their treasures” to offer Christ gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (2:11). In exchange for the gifts, God warned the magi (in a dream) not to report back to Herod but to return home by a different route, and thus Herod’s initial plan to murder Jesus was foiled. Even though the magi were among the first to venerate the infant Christ (being prototypical Gentile worshippers) their relationship to Christianity was minimal in the Bible. Coming from the east they fulfilled Judaic prophecies of the homage other nations would pay to  the God of Israel (e.g., Ps 72:10–11; Is 60:5). In following the Christmas star they specifically fulfilled a passage from Numbers

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(24:17). In falling prostrate before the infant Christ they fulfilled a passage from Isaiah (49:23). And in opening their treasures to the messiah they fulfilled another aspect of Isaiah’s prophecy (60:6). Having done their part to confirm Jesus as the messiah the magi then went back to “their own country” (Mt 2:12), and St Matthew wrote them out of biblical significance, never to be mentioned again. In the end the Bible left the magi as a necessary but momentary tangent to the Christian story, and the magi would not ascend to Christian sainthood until subsequent exegetical and apocryphal developments.11 Several fathers of the early church commented on the Matthean magi. In the late second century Irenaeus recorded the prophetic association of Numbers 24:17 with the star that the magi followed. Irenaeus also associated the three gifts of the magi with the three aspects of Christ: his kingship (i.e., the gold of royal treasuries, as in 1 Kgs 10:14), his divinity (i.e., the prayer offerings of frankincense, as in the aromatics of Ps 141:2), and his mortality (i.e., the embalming perfume of myrrh, as in Jn 19:39). Pope Gregory the Great likewise gave the wandering magi an exegetical resonance for Christianity. According to him the magi’s return home by a different route was a metaphor for Christian conversion; the conversion experience indicates that the faithful cannot wander through the world in the same ways that they knew before Christ’s glory. Several apocryphal gospel accounts further enriched the Matthean narrative. The Armenian Infancy Gospel, dating from the sixth century, declared the magi to be three brothers: Balthazar, King of the Arabs; Gaspar, King of the Hindus; and Melkon (i.e., Melchior), King of the Persians. The Holy Spirit visited all three brothers in their separate lands, announcing the messiah’s birth and prompting them to meet and journey thence to Israel, following the Christmas star. Once in Bethlehem, they offered their gifts to Christ: Balthazar’s gold, Gaspar’s frankincense, and Melchior’s myrrh. And they each had a vision while giving their gifts: Balthazar saw Christ on a throne with an army kneeling in adoration (i.e., his kingship); Gaspar saw Christ on a throne surrounded by angels (i.e., his divinity); and Melchior saw Christ raising the dead from their graves and restoring them to life (i.e., his mortality).12 Moreover in affiliation with the medieval shrine of the magi at Cologne Cathedral, Johannes von Hildesheim wrote the apocryphal Historia trium regum (c. 1400), in which the three magi, having returned home to the east, were later baptized courtesy of the apostle Thomas. Ultimately by aggregation

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the magi were eventually named, numbered, and canonized as Catholic saints, serving as a paradigm of charitable Christianity. They presented their gifts to Christ, engaging in an economy of salvation that repaid them with the heavenly rewards of their saving grace and sainthood. Given all this, the depiction of the adoring magi (fig. 2.1) in the new St Mary’s Walkerville is an important image of the celestial economy. More precisely the image is a stained-glass window depicting their adoration, with the Christmas star shining in the hands of angels at the apex of the tracery above the adoration scene (outside the frame of fig. 2.1). In thinking that the “public” act of gift-giving is unworthy of God’s spiritual exchange rate, we risk losing sight of the guiding Christmas star, the celestial star that facilitated an economy of salvation between God and the gift-giving magi. Derrida consequently missed the nuance of that guiding light when he chose to concentrate on St Matthew’s sixth chapter, as opposed to the second. In the sixth chapter Christ assured the faithful that when they are charitable in secret, God still sees and rewards them because the spiritual light of their eyes illuminates their charitable hearts: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single [i.e., spiritually healthy], thy whole body shall be full of light. / But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness” (Mt 6:22–3). The light does not simply illuminate the body’s exterior; it shines inside and thus illuminates the heart where God alone can see it. Hence God is inside the individual heart, prompting Derrida to add: “This sort of omnipresence is more radical, effective, and undeniable than that of a spy satellite that turns, as one says, ‘in space.’”13 For Derrida God is less effective when we think of an eye in heaven, ­outside our bodies, looking down through space. Instead Derrida approached St Augustine’s formulation of God as “something more interior and intimate to me than I am to myself.”14 Derrida’s God renders the self uncanny by inhabiting the heart of our interiority with the omnipotent knowledge of secrets that we ourselves have consciously or unconsciously buried therein. Derrida also projected this secret photology onto another Matthean passage: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid” (5:14). Derrida called this a mutation in the history of secrecy because the light comes from within, from the heart, and not from the world without.15 Yet the metaphor of the un-concealable hilltop city refers precisely to a light that others can see. It is not for

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2.1  The Adoration of the Magi window in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, includes the three magi, St Mary, Joseph (with his blooming staff of lilies), and the infant Christ in the central light; above and outside the frame, in the tracery apex, angels hold the Christmas star aloft

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God alone. It complicates the Matthean discourse on secrecy in a way that Derrida’s truncated reference elided. The Matthean Christ continued: “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. / Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (5:15–16). In the sixth chapter the Matthean Christ admonished public acts of charity because “in the synagogues and in the streets” such activities wrongly “have glory of men.” In the fifth chapter however the “house” in which an act of charity shines forth is not a synagogue or a street in old Judea.16 The house is a Christian church – a community in which the faithful, seeing a charitable act, already know to give their praise to God in heaven.17 God guides the good Christian in an act of charity and, knowing this, the fellows of a Christian house give their thanks to God – and not to the charitable heart of the individual. Thus the charitable have not had their reward directly from their fellow Christians when the former give alms in their congregations. Rather God rewards the charitable with his celestial economy every time others praise God for the gifts he guided the charitable in giving. Consequently because Christians congregate to become one with God through the body of Christ, the house of a Christian church is a sequestered “public.” The congregation can retain a level of secrecy because gifts given by members of that house might shine forth for one another while remaining concealed from (or simply ignored by) the fora of the secular public: Herod and the unbelievers of the synagogues and the streets. And even if the general public hears of the charitable act and praises the giver, it will not change the fact that those properly installed within the church house give their praise to God instead. The issue of public charity was very much on the minds of biblical commentators in the nineteenth century. From at least as far back as the fourth-century homilies of St John Chrysostom intent has been central to Christ’s statement about secret almsgiving. In particular the two clauses in Christ’s warning, “do not your alms before men, to be seen of them,” are not redundant. They emphasize Christ’s condemnation of those who desire to be seen, not necessarily acts of charity that happen to be done in public.18 Hence one nineteenthcentury exposition on the Matthean gospel specified that “there may be proper seasons and fit occasions, when a Christian’s liberality should be public and seen of men. He is to be a pattern of good

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works, that others may imitate them. All depends upon the intention.”19 And another expository text made explicit the link between the “light of the world” in St Matthew’s fifth chapter and Christ’s censure of self-serving motives in the sixth chapter: “We are not to suppose that this admonition [in the sixth chapter] is contrary to the direction given in chap. v. 16, to ‘let our light shine before men,’ for what the Saviour here condemns is the ostentatious and studied exhibition of our good works, for the purpose of gaining the applause of men.”20 Furthermore beyond the general concern with the potential selfishness of public acts of charity, nineteenth-century theologians named a danger specific to their time: “This is an advertising age, and flowers that used to blush unseen are forced now under glass for exhibition. Nobody needs to blow his own trumpet nowadays. We have improved on the ruder methods of the Pharisees and newspapers and collectors will blow lustily and loud for us, and defend the noise on the ground that a good example stimulates others.”21 Here the author relied on a contemporaneous language of commodity collection and display, but the problem was not limited to the secondhand praise of technological dissemination. These same commentators used capitalist terminology to name those whose gift-giving motives were less than pure. One noted: “And what a poor thing it is which they seek – the praise of men! – a breath, as unsubstantial and short-lived as the blast of the trumpet which they blew before their selfish benevolence. Their charity was no charity, for what they did was not to give, but to buy. Their gift was a speculation. They invested in charity, and looked for a profit of praise.”22 And another, Alfred Plummer, quipped: “They [the praiseseeking hypocrites] receive their pay then and there, and they receive it in full … God owes them nothing. They were not giving but buying.”23 However inasmuch as “God owes” those who are rightly charitable, the act of gift-giving cannot escape the logic of economy that might appeal to modern capitalists donating to their parish churches. The correct investment in charity gathered “a profit of praise” from God, not humanity. Plummer also tried to elevate the celestial rewards that God grants for right-minded (and right-handed) gift-giving, separating it from the belief that forgiveness of “debt” (as in St Matthew’s version of the  Lord’s Prayer) equals redemption from sin: “Our Lord leaves unnoticed the doctrine that alms can remove the consequences of sin, and even purge men from the stain of sin … Purity of motive was the

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essential thing, and if that was secured, the idea of buying pardon for sin would lose its hold.” Plummer then declared that “the heresy that alms can cancel sin is less common [in the modern world],”24 and he traced the “heresy” back to Pope Leo the Great in the fifth century. In a sermon Leo stated that “by alms we redeem our sins,”25 and Plummer consequently divided Catholic dogma from a Protestant reading of the Bible itself, in favour of the latter. The Anglo-Catholic Arthur Hall, Cram’s baptizer and spiritual educator, had a different approach to this relationship between debt, sin, and almsgiving. In his Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer Hall noted St Matthew’s choice to pray for and act upon forgiveness from “debt,” specifying that Matthean debt signifies sins of omission, “a failure to come up to our duty, to fulfil God’s will.”26 Consequently Hall asked of his readers: “What are we doing … in correspondence with this prayer, in the way of self-denying alms and personal labor, in the dedication of time and talents, in the use of our influence, for the work of instructing the ignorant, reclaiming the lost, consoling the afflicted?” He continued: “The piteous appeals (with their pitiable returns) of missionary boards for men and money to extend Christ’s Kingdom, should fill us with shame.”27 As with Plummer, Hall emphasized that almsgiving must be “self-denying,” but he clearly situated the act of charity as payment for the debt of one’s duty to build Christ’s kingdom. Furthermore as evident in Hall’s reference to “consoling the afflicted,” the debt of those blessed with material wealth is to share their plenty in the name of Christian stewardship: “We are to remember concerning any gifts which the great Father of all has bestowed upon us that we are entrusted with them as stewards of His bounty, and that we are to use them ‘for the common good.’”28 And although Hall never drew upon the magi as an example of sharing one’s bounty (in fact I have found no texts that explicitly link the magi with the economy of charity and debt in later Matthean chapters), nineteenth-century authors who focused on the adoring magi highlighted the magi’s paradigmatic role for wealthy Christians. In the broadest sense the inclusion of the magi narrative in the Bible served as an object lesson for the conditions of faith: “Prayer is edifying, and preaching may be edifying, but something more than the offering of prayer and the harkening to preaching belongs to Christ’s religion if we may be guided by the example of the holy Magi, who adored and gave gifts to the infant Christ.”29 Furthermore

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in an effort to communicate the Bible to nineteenth-century capitalists, J. Cynddylan Jones linked the magi with the economics of mercantile wealth. More precisely Jones drew on a parable from elsewhere in St Matthew’s gospel (13:45–6), in which the kingdom of heaven was symbolized as a valuable pearl: “the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: / who, when he found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.” Consequently the magi were “merchantmen in a spiritual sense; it was their profession to seek the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,”30 and when they found Christ they “sold” all they had (i.e., their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh) to purchase their salvation. Hence Jones directly addressed his nineteenth-century audience: “Do you hear, ye rich men of England? ‘Gold! gold! gold! and frankincense and myrrh.’ Here is the culmination of religion, the union of devotion and service.”31 Finally for those who thought that the magi’s gifts (the latter two especially) were impractical and therefore excessive and wasteful, another commentator added: “It is a warrant for us that we must not only expend upon the house of God and its ritual what is absolutely needful, but that we may lavish upon it what is costly and beautiful … ‘The palace is not for men but for the Lord God.’ The service is that of no earthly sovereign, but of the ‘King of kings’ … Is it lawful for us to use such things as the precious things of the earth, or the beautiful productions of painting, statuary, curious carving, music, architecture, for our own private delight, if we cannot hallow their use by consecrating their first-fruits to God?”32 John Henry Newman was then quoted to support this view: “The earth is full of God’s wonderful works … what are we to do with them? what [to] do with marble and precious stones, gold and silver, and fine linen? Give them to God … Are they not a portion of the great natural temple, the heavens, earth, and sea, – a vast cathedral for the Bishop of our souls, the all-sufficient Priest, Who first created all things, and then again became, by purchase, their possessor?”33 God, from this perspective, organized a gift economy in which the faithful return the material universe to him in the form of precious works of art so that he can “purchase” them with the rewards of salvation – provided, I would add from the fifth and sixth chapters of Matthew, that the faithful give for the sake of God’s praise only and in such a way that the example shines forth for others to do the same. This is the practical way in which the Walker brothers’ gift was to be appreciated. The three magi, guided by the Christmas star to the

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first “house” of Christ’s presence, gave rightly to God, establishing an economic paradigm so that others could give praise to God as well. In that sense the magi’s investment of gold, frankincense, and myrrh appreciated by the light of the guiding Christmas star, indirectly accruing the celestial dividends of the magi’s sainthood. God is still a satellite that “turns in space,” only it is the sequestered space formed by the interstitial network of Christian souls in communion. Through the Christmas star his light not only passes through the eye to illuminate the giver’s charitable heart but also reflects outward again, guiding other Christians of the house to give as well. It is all a question of following the star to the rightful place, the lawful house. If therefore an “economy” is the law of the house – oikonomia, the nomia of the oikos – then the Walkers gave Walkerville a new church-house for their own indirect salvation. They used the magi to contextualize their gift in a strategy that thrived in the economic circumstances of church building in the Canadian province of Ontario.

M o rt m a i n Cultural historian William Westfall presented nineteenth-century Christianity in the province of Ontario as a dialectical relationship of Two Worlds – the secular and the sacred. For Britain’s Anglican Church to maintain its status as the religious establishment, it had to receive sanction from the secular state, operating in conjunction with (and through the financial support of) the kingdom’s secular government. It was an alliance of God and king, church and state, for the mutual maintenance of moral and legal order in the kingdom and by extension the king’s empire. Ideally then from the beginning of its British colonial roots Canadian Anglicanism was supposed to be state-sponsored as an establishment of the British Commonwealth. Indeed in 1791 when British parliament passed the Constitutional Act of British North America, the state enacted the endowment of “clergy reserves” to fund the continuation of a “Protestant clergy” in British North America.34 The clergy reserves were parcels of crown land in Ontario (what was then called Upper Canada) intended for the development of state-funded Anglicanism.35 The reserves also created revenues for clerical salaries, mission work, and church building. More to the point the Church of England in Canada was supposed to have enjoyed the benefits of the clergy reserves in perpetuity. In medieval

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legal parlance their lands were supposed to be in the grasp of the mortmain – the “dead hand.” This meant that the Church of England in Canada was legally treated as a perpetual corporate entity, whereby the lands of the clergy reserves were supposed to be immune to secular taxation and appropriation. When a clergyman of the Anglican Church perished, the state could not take the parish properties from his dead hand; the property rights simply passed to the next incumbent, from one dead hand in anticipation of the next, and the next, ad infinitum. More precisely inasmuch as those who took religious oaths were considered dead in the eyes of civil law, they were all extensions of the church’s dead hand, the corporation holding the church’s property rights.36 The legal status of the mortmain frequently came into question. As Alan Wilson noted, “the French Revolution initiated a wholesale attack [on the mortmain] … by the confiscation of church lands under the revolutionary slogan: ‘The land may not belong to the dead but to the living.’”37 Furthermore the language of the Constitutional Act of British North America specifically compromised the mortmain’s security in Canada. By declaring the lands of the clergy reserves for the maintenance of a Protestant clergy, the government opened the mortmain’s grip with the ambiguities of the word Protestant. Was the act strictly referring to the Church of England in Canada or to any Protestant denomination? With the prospect of endlessly dividing the reserves among several denominations and a rapidly growing number of parishes, the government foresaw the futility in keeping the reserves intact. In addition even though Britain would retain the mortmain of the establishment church at home until the Mortmain and Charitable Uses Act of 1888, American congress had passed a land ordinance in 1785, by which no provisions were made for lands that would support a national clergy. Church and state had no official allegiance in the US, and at least some Canadian politicians aspired to that arrangement. Consequently the Canadian clergy reserves did not survive the mid-nineteenth century. By then the circumstances of Canadian parliament had changed to a “responsible government” that banked on aggressive economic expansion,38 and the amount of profitable land in Ontario dwindled to the point that the government openly coveted the lands of the clergy reserves. Thus, “with responsible government came railways and progress,”39 and the clergy reserves were secularized in 1854 to provide more land for Canada’s capitalist economy.

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According to Westfall the secularization of the clergy reserves meant that the old “alliance between church and state was irrevocably broken.”40 Nevertheless the Church of England in Canada anticipated a time of dialectical synthesis: “if properly monitored and controlled, secular progress led directly to sacred conclusions.”41 As railways demonstrated the state’s secular aspiration for progressive nation-building through vast economic networks, Anglicans were determined to have churches stationed at every village, town, and city across the nation. Their sacred spires would tower as beacons in an avaricious world – reminders of progress toward God’s future kingdom. To that end, as part of the ideological re-appropriation of the secular world, sacred institutions could look at secular progress as proof of God’s inevitable dominion, mainly through a confidence in technology. If part of Adam’s fall from grace in the Bible was the loss of control over the natural world, then technological progress was interpreted as our capacity to regain that control, guiding humanity to the future paradise. Indeed Westfall demonstrated that many Ontario Anglicans (lay and clergy) hoped to re-align the sacred and the secular along those lines of thought. One limitation of Westfall’s argument was his dependency on a macro-level analysis of sacred and secular institutions. The old ­alliance of church and state may have been irrevocably broken with the secularization of the clergy reserves, but Westfall situated the ­Victorian faith in sacred and secular synthesis as progressing toward a new alliance of church and modern techno-capitalist state. Consequently Westfall marginalized the importance of micro-social ­alliances between the Anglican Church and local economies. He privileged the image of the railway as a capitalist tool for nation-building, as a spine to unify the country, but he did so at the cost of diminishing the intricacies of the economic networks that occurred as the railway system branched off into numerous local boom economies. The locallevel capitalists of Protestant Ontario had important reasons to develop short-line railways for their villages, towns, and cities – reasons that were not simply incremental measures of the growth and unity of a nation. Furthermore the secular capital gained through local railway economies had real implications for the building of sacred churches. In other words the mortmain of the old alliance of church and state may have disappeared by the mid-nineteenth century, but it was sometimes replaced with another kind of mortmain

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created via the spectral hand of local gift economies – the Walker brothers for example donating the new St Mary’s Church to be “held forever” by the Church of England in Canada. Chris Brooks and Andrew Saint saw similar patterns emerge in Victorian Britain. Saint noted that because the economic advantages of the mortmain remained in effect in Britain until 1888, the idea that someone (other than a rural landowner) would pay (beyond general state taxation) to found a new Anglican parish church was unthinkable at the start of the Victorian era, especially in a city. However, “Peel’s Act of 1843, followed by Blandford’s Act of 1856, transformed the parish-making system. Thereafter if anyone, clergyman or layman, volunteered to found a church and could get the consent of the vicar, archdeacon and bishop, he could do so.”42 Thus the rapid increase in wealth among Victorian Britain’s emerging professional and entrepreneurial classes meant that they could establish and enrich their local parishes directly. Likewise Brooks noted the emergence of voluntary funding from professionals and entrepreneurs in Britain’s rural parish systems, in which the generous patronage of local squires had been a common tradition. More importantly Brooks considered an implication of the new entrepreneurial economic reality: “The most representative products of this oligarchic funding were the sets of fittings that began to accumulate in rural churches in the last years of Victoria’s reign. Particularly telling was the conversion of such fittings into commemorative objects; lecterns, clergy desks and choir-stalls, pulpits, reredoses and, most of all perhaps, stained-glass windows – each object carefully accompanied by its memorial label, its tag of date and donor.” Brooks continued: “Such a plethora of personal signs, each in effect appropriating a bit of the church fabric to the individual or a family, connotes the appropriation of the church as a whole by the funding oligarchy. The rural church had found its new possessors, and their wealth, of course, came increasingly from professional fees, from commerce, from trade – from the occupations, that is, of the successful middle classes.”43 Nevertheless both Brooks and Saint relied on macro-level heuristics (statistical change in particular) to assess the shift from state / estate-run parishes in Britain to the voluntary funds of professionals and entrepreneurs who thrived in the market conditions of Victorian Britain. In few Brooks and Saint did not offer microhistorical inquiries into how or why the nouveau riche valued that change at the local level.

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Returning to Canada: Westfall bypassed the micro-mortmain because he limited the scope of economic salvation.44 He acknowledged the precarious economic position of the Church of England in Canada, especially after the secularization of the clergy reserves in 1854. He also understood that the Anglican Church became dependent on “volunteerism,” by which individual members or entire families of the congregation gave their secular capital to patronize their local parishes: “Each congregation had to call on those who had prospered in the new economic order, and their benefactors are still acknowledged in the hundreds of memorials that grace the churches they helped to build.”45 He even stated that volunteerism could undermine Anglicanism’s spiritual authority because the Church of England in Canada “relied upon the very people over whom they were supposed to exercise spiritual guidance.”46 Thus the necessity for local funding gave power to wealthy congregants who were willing to place their personal and / or familial salvation at a premium. Nevertheless Westfall tried to diminish that line of research. He argued that “economic development may have generated the capital to finance new churches, but economic development in itself cannot explain the decision to invest so much wealth in a religious sector that was hardly known for its secular dividends.” He continued: “A vaguely conspiratorial interpretation that focuses on the ability of religion to keep the masses in their place might give such investment a higher economic rationality; but this is a reductionist theory and … it ignores the way society at that time tried to understand the relationship between economic and religious life.”47 I would argue that this conspiratorial interpretation is not necessary when we consider the magi-inspired economy of salvation. More recently Barry Magrill investigated the exchange of “economic capital for cultural, social, and spiritual capital”48 in Canadian church-building projects during the nineteenth century, especially after the secular appropriation of the Upper Canadian clergy reserves. Magrill also examined the proliferation of architectural pattern books in nineteenth-century Canada and the consequent publishing market that facilitated the exchange of money for taste, status, and salvation. To that end he noted an American strategy for pattern book production in which the author-architects included drawings and plans not only for existing buildings of note but also for

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prospective buildings that advertised the authors’ architectural skills. This was certainly the case with Cram’s Church Building of 1901.49 In addition to the presentation of drawings and photographs of British medieval and modern churches, Cram included drawings, photographs, and plans of churches his firm had already designed in America as well as drawings and / or plans for ideal churches yet to be built – from tiny chapels to a grand cathedral. It is quite possible that the Walker brothers agreed to hire Cram’s firm for the Walkerville church based on the designs displayed in his pattern book output.50 And if so the cultural conditions of pattern book architecture may have influenced the Walkers’ economic approach to church building. As Magrill aptly noted, “In the sense that one could browse through a pattern book for a suitable church design, building a church became associated with ‘buying’ a church.”51 In the Walkers’ case however it would be more accurate to say that they invested in the Walkerville edifice; their gift was an expenditure that enacted an appreciative economy of salvation. Ultimately I challenge Westfall’s dismissal of economy because it “cannot explain the decision to invest so much wealth in a religious sector that was hardly known for its secular dividends.” Not all Christian dividends were secular, and the thematic gifts of the magi powerfully visualized the economy of salvation at work in an Anglican church. Furthermore even if wealthy capitalists did not invest in church building as a conspiracy to “keep the masses in their place,” such an investment did (and still does) put the congregated masses to work in the ritual activities of countless Eucharistic masses and baptismal rites. Consequently in the remainder of this chapter I concentrate on the Walkerville church as a partner in a microhistorical pair of ecclesiastical environments in which the theme of gift-giving magi articulated a perpetual economy for the salvation of those who ran their patronymic towns. Kingsville and Walkerville, Ontario, were neighbouring communities, conjoined by a short-line railway and named for the patriarchs of the allied King and Walker families. And if the macrocosm of the Canadian railway system demonstrated the progress of church and state across the nation, then the Walker’s short-line track – the Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway – created a microcosmic journey of the magi. Through the King family of Kingsville, the Walkers of Walkerville seem to have discovered the magi’s economy of salvation.

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P at ro n y m ic K i ngsvi lle The present Anglican edifice (fig. 2.2) in Kingsville would not have been possible without the economic stimulus of the Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway. That railway in turn would not have been possible without the ambitions of Hiram Walker, father of the Walker brothers. Having successfully petitioned the Canadian government for infrastructural subsidies, Hiram Walker organized the Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway Company, which first met on 16 July 1887.52 Furthermore being the founder and majority shareholder of the company he accepted the company presidency at that time, and plans for the railway were drafted in August of that year. Finally having celebrated the birth of Christ on 25 December 1888, Hiram Walker opened the line for business the following day and watched the train trundle toward the season of the Epiphany. In particular the railway connected Walkerville with the village of Harrow in the south, and then due east to Kingsville. Hiram Walker had many reasons to develop the Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway. For one the railway ran south to Harrow so that it could pass through his Marshfield properties. As the Marshfield name suggests, the boggy terrain was supposed to be ideal for cranberry production – though that agricultural project never succeeded for the Walkers. More practically (and extensively) the railway travelled through areas of the Essex County countryside rich in forestry and general agriculture. It provided easy access to those lands and ready transport of goods and raw materials to market. But most of all Hiram Walker wanted the railway to connect Walkerville with Kingsville because the latter is located on the placid shores of Pigeon Bay, Lake Erie. He hoped that Kingsville would become a resort town for his friends and family and for his wealthy contemporaries in Detroit. Moreover as of 1881 he had established (and owned the majority shares in) the Walkerville-Detroit ferry service and its three ferries: the Essex, Ariel, and Sappho. At first the ferry service simply facilitated traffic between Walkerville and Detroit, via the Detroit River; however in conjunction with the railway service in 1888 it became part of a traffic relay from Detroit to Kingsville. Altogether because Hiram Walker controlled the ferry service from Detroit to Walkerville and because he controlled the railway from Walkerville to Kingsville, he could profit twice over from American leisure travellers, if only he could persuade them to vacation in Kingsville.

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2.2  The bell tower on the Anglican Church of the Epiphany, Kingsville, stands in the foreground, with a trio of lancet windows above the door and trefoil tracery in the transom window; the trefoil transom recurs in the second narthex entrance to the church

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Having established the Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway in 1888, Hiram Walker then commissioned a massive 133-bedroom luxury hotel and casino in Kingsville to enhance the town’s status as  a resort destination. Designed by George DeWitt Mason and Zachariah Rice of Detroit, the rambling edifice was named the Mettawas Hotel and Casino. It was under construction by 19 March 1889 and opened for its first summer season about four months later. Hiram Walker’s business partner on the Kingsville end of the venture was his friend Dr Sidney King (1844–1907), son of Kingsville’s patronymic founder Lieutenant-Colonel James King (1805–1880). Nor were the railway, hotel, and casino the only Kingsville opportunities that the King and Walker families shared. They were also investors in natural gas, a burgeoning resource for Kingsville. In fact Ontario’s natural gas industry began in Kingsville, when a large deposit of that resource was discovered there in January 1889.53 Thus the prospect of a natural gas industry and the development of Kingsville’s resort status (thanks to the new railway, hotel, and casino) meant that the King and Walker families were financially booming in the last decade of the nineteenth century. And the Anglican Church of the Epiphany (begun 1891) replaced the meagre Anglican church of the town – St John’s (c. 1852). Even though the Walker family prospered in the boom economy of Kingsville, they never saw Kingsville as their town; it was not eponymous Walkerville. Consequently the Walkers do not appear to have directly contributed to the construction of the Kingsville Church of the Epiphany.54 Instead Sidney King and his extended family, the second generation of Kingsville Kings, were congregants and major contributors to that Anglican architectural project. The Kings were also offered the highest honour in the spatial and symbolic discourse of their parish church, just as surely as they possessed symbolic hegemony over the town itself. They were the Kings of Kingsville after all – a royal coincidence of nomenclature that served them well in the Anglican Church of the Epiphany. Not surprisingly then, among the many Kingsville Anglicans buried in the adjoining cemetery, the King family is the only one to have a fence demarcating their family plot for spatial and symbolic distinction. They were a family apart. Ostensibly the church received the Epiphany dedication because the ground-breaking ceremony occurred at the site of construction in the beginning of January 1891, during the liturgical season of the

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Epiphany. However the Epiphany Church’s cornerstone was not set in place until June of that year, and because of the six-month gap between the winter ground-breaking ceremony and the summertime laying of the cornerstone, it seems likely that the building committee went out of its way to break ground during the winter season of the  Epiphany. More precisely Sidney King and his brother-in-law Dr  Edward Allworth (1837–1909) were two of the four building committee members.55 I propose that they wanted the designation because the Epiphany is the season wherein the magi, a group of kings, paid homage to God with gifts symbolic of the messiah’s worth. The Kings of Kingsville, patronymic leaders of the town, made use of that coincidence to select the Epiphany dedication for their parish, paying homage to God through their gifts in the new Kingsville Anglican church. They asserted their kingly position as the social elite of the town while using the spectral hand of their gift economy to transubstantiate their secular donations into sacred gold. John Alexander Maycock (1850–1940) designed the Kingsville church. On the exterior, as with the Walkerville church and countless others across Ontario, Maycock foregrounded the church’s single tower and broach spire from where the building stands at the affluent corner of Prince Albert Street and Main. Furthermore Maycock placed trebled lancet windows on the tower’s second tier, directly above the doorway. This detail is commonly associated with the Holy Trinity, but I call attention to it (as well as the trefoil flourish in the transom window above each Kingsville narthex door) because the Epiphany dedication enriches the Trinitarian imagery with a reference to the three magi. Hence the triplicate details concentrate at the points of egress because the tower door and the other narthex door inaugurate the ritual journey of the Christian faithful. To approach the altar within the Kingsville church is to enact a modern-day journey of the magi. Inside the Kingsville church the spatial configuration shifts from a  broad rectilinear nave to a small polygonal apse, wherein a trio of lancet windows illuminate the apse’s polygonal sides. To that end the arrangement of the church interior draws our vision into the polygonal sanctuary, with its luminous windows. Furthermore these windows are memorials of the type to which Westfall alluded; they remind us of how Anglican parishes in Ontario had to call on those who had prospered in the new economic order. In conjunction with their status as memorials these windows are also gifts – three of them

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to fit the magi theme (fig. 2.3). The window to the liturgical southeast of the altar is dedicated in memory of Captain Andrew Stewart, the man who offered the Anglican diocese the parcel of land on which the Epiphany Church was eventually built. Indebted therefore to Captain Stewart the Anglican parish made a gift of that window in memory of him. Likewise to the liturgical northeast of the altar is a window dedicated in memory of Dr William Drake (1832–1910), another member of the Epiphany building committee, and his wife Eliza Ethel. Though alive when the window was constructed, Drake commissioned the glass so that his gift to the church would continue to commemorate his generosity long after he and his wife were dead. Finally the altar wall of the Epiphany Church contains a memorial window for James King and his wife, Sarah (1804–1864), the founding generation and namesake of Kingsville, Ontario. They were also the parents of Sidney King and the in-laws of Edward Allworth, both of whom sat on the Epiphany building committee. Thus the King children by blood and by law likely gave the altar window in memory of their parents. The King memorial window adds another referential layer to the magi theme. All three apsidal windows were likely the work of the same glazier’s studio, in that all three display some of the same textures and colours in the glass and have the same calligraphic style in the memorial inscriptions. Nevertheless the relative position of each window within the apse and structural and aesthetic variations in the comparative designs all differentiate and privilege the church’s Epiphany theme for the King family of Kingsville. First the Stewart and Drake memorial windows, positioned on the angled walls of the apse, are subordinate markers of spatial and symbolic value. Unlike the King memorial, they do not face the congregation directly, nor are they directly aligned with the church’s altar – the ritual focus. The Stewart and Drake memorials are also divided into two lights; the King memorial is divided into three lights – another reference to the trio of magi (in addition to the standard Trinitarian context of the ritual focus). Therefore the journey of the magi leads from the trefoiled narthex doors to the tripartite King memorial window. Furthermore the King memorial is the richest endeavour of relative value, as reflected in the design choices for the glass and the construction materials. For one, even though the Drake and Stewart memorial inscriptions at the base of their respective windows have the same calligraphic style as the inscriptions on the King memorial window, the King inscriptions are framed with the additional flourishes of

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2.3 (a, b, c)  The memorial windows in the apse of the Anglican Church of the Epiphany, Kingsville, are dedicated to (a) Dr William and Eliza Ethel Drake, (b) James and Sarah King, and (c) Andrew Stewart; the King memorial window includes the grapes and grain of the Eucharist and the scriptural revelation of the Bible

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delicate arabesque motifs (fig. 2.4). Likewise even though the Drake and Stewart memorial windows make parsimonious use of cabochon and textured glass, neither one affords the same tactile interplay available to the King memorial. The central light of the King window not only uses cabochon glass and rippled quarries; it also frames the corners of the windowpane with four stubby pyramidal jewels of glass that project into sculptural space. And the elongated quatrefoil that surrounds the open Bible in the centre of the com­ position reintroduces the flourishing arabesques from the “King” inscription below. These combined differences all privilege the King family as patrons of the church. What then are we to make of the Epiphany’s economy of salvation? How exactly are the Kings of Kingsville appropriating the theme of gift-giving magi? It begins with the use of memorial glass. It is one thing to give in God’s name so that others can praise God for inspiring such a gift (God rewarding the giver in return), what does it mean to give a gift in memory of another (e.g., the patronymic Kings)? Such a memorial gesture trebles the reciprocal economy at play in the magi’s paradigm. Not only did the second generation of the King family give so that others might praise God, thus facilitating God’s reward to them; the celestial economy extends to reward the founding generation of Kingsville Kings as well, those who made the gift-giving possible in the first place. And thus the second generation of Kingsville Kings are rewarded once again for honouring their memorialized parents. By placing their window in memoriam the children of the patronymic Kings could receive the reward of upholding God’s commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” (Ex 20:12), doing so through a window that facilitates the gift of grace for both generations of the family. The iconography of the King memorial’s three-light structure further facilitates the gift of grace (fig. 2.3b). The Bible appears in the memorial’s central light, and images of bundled wheat and ripened grapes flank the open Bible in the right and left lights, respectively. In other words the tripartite King memorial window celebrates the threefold gifts of Anglicanism: scriptural truth and the bread and wine of the Eucharistic ritual. Consequently in giving praise to God for the scriptural passages to be read and the Eucharistic food to be consumed, the Anglican parishioners of Kingsville perpetually contribute to God’s economy of salvation and the rewards bestowed on both generations of the King family. By placing their window directly

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2.4  The central light of the King memorial window in the Anglican Church of the Epiphany, Kingsville, includes textured and sculptural glass and delicate arabesques surrounding the Bible and bookending the “King” inscription

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above the church’s altar the Kingsville Kings have performed the greatest feat of alchemical magic, using the Eucharistic magic of the weekly mass to transform the baseness of their secular currency into the spiritual wealth of the magi’s gold. Their one-time expenditure on  a gift of memorial glass will reap the perpetual dividends of God’s celestial economy as generation after generation of Kingsville Anglicans journey to the ritual altar and kneel in gratitude of God’s greatest gift – the body and blood of his only son.

P at ro n y m ic W a lkervi lle 5 6 Hiram Walker was born on 4 July 1816 at an agrarian homestead near Douglas, Massachusetts. His ambitions were entrepreneurial, so he moved to the capital city of Boston in the 1830s to become a grocer of dry goods. However having failed to entrench himself in  Boston’s established economy he took advantage of the newly opened Erie and Welland canals (1825 and 1829, respectively), travelling westward to the boomtown of Detroit in 1838. Thriving there, again as a grocer (among other things), Hiram Walker accumulated enough money by the 1850s to realize his latest ambition; he wanted to build a combined distillery and mill for the production of whisky and flour, respectively. There were at least three circumstances impeding his ambition. First was a matter of competition; many other distillers and millers were then operating in the Detroit area. Second was a matter of expenditure; though Hiram Walker had the capital, he needed the land and raw materials to initiate his enterprise. Third was a matter of jurisprudence; in 1855 the State of Michigan passed a law of prohibition against alcohol. Though the law was seldom enforced, it was illegal for Hiram Walker to sell whisky in Detroit by the time he could afford to build a liquor distillery.57 Thus he looked across the Detroit River to the banks of Ontario, finding fewer local competitors there, cheaper land and materials for construction, and no prohibition laws against alcohol. In 1856 he purchased the riverfront Labadie estate, due east of Windsor, Ontario, for £300. The following year he developed his combined distillery and mill on the property; he then opened his business in 1858, moving from Detroit into the old Labadie homestead with his wife, Mary Abigail Walker (née Williams), and five of their soon-to-be-six children.58

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That was Walkerville’s inaugural moment as a company town, although it would not take the name Walkerville until a post office opened there in 1869. Before then, in 1857, Hiram Walker purchased 300 acres of the surrounding Ontario farmland and timberland to stimulate his fledgling business, becoming the largest property owner and employer in the immediate area. The flour-milling side of his business did not last beyond the 1870s, but the distillery made him a wealthy man, producing the brand of liquor called Canadian Club Whisky, a label still available today.59 Therefore with his fortune in hand Hiram Walker moved his family back to Detroit in 1864, purchasing a mansion at the intersection of Fort Street and Shelby.60 And as a result he could commute between the amenities of Detroit’s growing social scene and his business affairs in Walkerville – eventually relying on the same ferry service that would later bring Henry Booth to and from Walkerville to write his article on the new St Mary’s Church. Walkerville too was growing because of Hiram Walker’s good fortune. Ronald Hoskins summarized the following: “After twenty-five years of existence [in 1882] the unincorporated village of Walkerville had a population of approximately six hundred souls. Almost all of these people lived in cottages built and owned by Hiram Walker. They used and drank water pumped through pipes laid by the Walkers. They received police protection free of charge and likewise free fire protection from the Walkers … The children of the community attended school on a site donated by Hiram Walker. [And in] the absence of a banking establishment, the inhabitants might place their savings in the Walker bank at seven per cent interest rates. Walkerville, indeed, was Walker’s town and he planned it and exercised complete jurisdiction over it for his own benefit and for those who resided in it.”61 Not everybody saw the benefit in Hiram Walker’s paternalism. The Detroit Journal published an anonymous article in 1890 in which the author(s) criticized the paternalistic town: “To-day Walkerville, just over the river in Canada, is the queerest, quaintest place in all Christendom. Day after tomorrow it will lose its novelty … For years the inhabitants of this village have been satisfied to live and die without the suffrages usually exercised by free-born people; have had absolutely no say in how they should be governed, and have lived under the sway of one man, whose dictation was … absolute … No one

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lived in Walkerville that Hiram Walker did not like.”62 Nevertheless to call the socio-political situation in Hiram Walker’s Walkerville a novelty was misleading. After all company towns were not uncommon in North America. For instance just outside Chicago, Illinois, stood the thriving town of Pullman (begun 1880), in which George Pullman (1831–1897) developed a similar but even more autocratic community for his Palace Car Company.63 And Detroiters would have known the Pullman situation well, given that the Palace Car Company began when Pullman purchased the Detroit Car and Manufacturing Company in 1869. Having built a successful and growing business, Pullman then purchased thousands of acres on the western shore of Lake Calumet in Illinois to build the town of Pullman64 – as opposed to Hiram Walker’s 300 acres for Walkerville. Pullman did this, despite only needing about 500 acres to construct the actual town, because he wanted a buffer of company land to shield the town from outside development. Furthermore as with Hiram Walker Pullman built amenity-rich domiciles for his employees in that town – from simple flats to multistorey houses – and as landlords they both used their housing projects for profit. But Pullman exercised total control over the town’s real estate and construction, whereas Hiram Walker allowed individualized construction for those who could afford it on land that he leased. Hence Hoskins’s summary of Walkerville as a town totally under Hiram Walker’s jurisdiction is a little inaccurate. Moreover the difference between Pullman and Walkerville at least partially reflected the fact that George Pullman built his eponymous town on the back of a thriving and well-established company. He hired an architect and landscaper to organize a completely planned community, and the restrictions in that plan eventually exacerbated tensions between management and workers in Pullman’s town, directly contributing to a devastating American railway strike in 1894.65 Conversely Walkerville and Hiram Walker’s distillery grew at the same time, and Hiram took less-than-autocratic control over housing in his town as the business flourished, especially once he moved back to Detroit. Nevertheless if the Walkers coveted a parcel of land, they apparently had no qualms with exercising their local power. Peche Island (once Pêche Isle, Isle a la Pêche, or Isle aux Pêcheurs), named for its abundant fishing, lies off the Canadian banks of the Detroit River. In 1870 a man name William Hall submitted a land patent for nearly all of Peche Island because he entered into an agreement with a family

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of squatters there, the Laforets, leaving them four acres on the isle for their homestead. Hall died in 1882, and the Walker brothers purchased his claim to Peche Island, looking to develop a summerhouse for their father and / or another resort destination (to compete with Detroit’s nearby Belle Isle). According to the Laforets the Walkers’ men then came to their homestead, tossed money on the table, and told the squatting family to leave the island by the spring of 1883. When the Laforets left, the matriarch Rosalie allegedly dropped to her knees and in a scene worthy of Gothic fiction cursed the Walkers and the island. The Walkers’ plans for the land subsequently failed (they sold it to the Detroit and Windsor Ferry Company in 1907), and Walkerville historian Elaine Weeks has playfully pondered if the curse was real – noting for example that Willis Walker, the first Walker brother and the lawyer who handled the island purchase, died tragically in 1886 at the age of thirty-seven.66 Weeks also mentioned that Edward Walker died relatively young, aged sixty-four – though she neglected to mention that syphilis contributed directly to his decline. And as we shall see in a later chapter, Cram envisioned Edward Walker as the Fisher King of Walkerville – “Fisher” being a pun on the French for sinner (pécheur) and fisher (pêcheur) – because the sinfulness of syphilis motivated Edward to commission the new St Mary’s Church. Thus regardless of whether the Peche Island curse was real, Edward Walker’s sin haunted him.67 I propose that he enacted the magi’s economy of salvation in Walkerville to wash that sin from his soul, if not his body. Returning to the Detroit Journal critique of Hiram Walker’s Walkerville, it was no accident that the article appeared on 10 May 1890. A month earlier (on 7 April) Walkerville was incorporated as a town, whereby most of the land that Hiram Walker privately owned was transferred to the Walkerville Land and Building Company (of which the Walker family still held the majority interest). Furthermore 12 May (the “day after tomorrow” mentioned in the Detroit Journal article above) was the first meeting of the Walkerville civic council to discuss the town seal.68 Ironically when the citizens of Walkerville were finally incorporated into that political body they symbolically named Hiram Walker as their mayoral representative.69 The frontrunner in Walkerville’s first mayoral election had been Thomas Reid, head distiller of Canadian Club Whisky. Then Hiram Walker’s nephew, a man named Hiram Alexis Walker, declared his candidacy,

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and all other candidates withdrew so that “Hiram Walker” could win the election by acclamation. Even from across the Detroit River Hiram Walker was still considered the town’s leader, albeit by proxy of his nephew. This cross-border representation of Walker power extended to Walkerville’s religious history. Hiram Walker built the first church in Walkerville (c. 1870) at his own expense. He was an Episcopalian, and having returned to the US in 1864, he worshipped at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Detroit and had no apparent interest in controlling the denominational status of the Walkerville parish. He built the structure and then held a survey among the people of Walkerville, asking them which denomination they preferred for the building. The majority wanted Methodism, so Hiram Walker petitioned the Canadian Methodist Conference to send a minister, which it did: John Semmens, a seminarian from Victoria College, Cobourg; then Reverend Edwin McCollum; and then Reverend Alex Hardie. Ultimately with a church set prominently in place (right across the street from the riverside Walkerville distillery) the Walker family invited the Methodist ministers to stay at “The Cottage” – the old Labadie homestead located nearby. The structure of Walkerville’s first church was also well suited to a nonconformist service, such as Methodism. The stairs to the main floor were quite high, suggesting that Hiram Walker commissioned a full basement beneath the church. Nonconformist denominations in Canada had a history of integrating the Sunday school directly into the church’s structure, often using a full basement level for that purpose.70 Furthermore the foundations of the old church (still extant) suggest that the chancel was nothing more than a shallow bay projecting off the back of the building. That arrangement would have especially suited nonconformist denominations because for them a church was a meeting hall – an auditorium in which the community could sing and the minister could preach the Word of God. Consequently they would not have needed a large chancel for ritual worship; they would only have needed space enough for a pulpit (and perhaps a choir) at the chancel end. Having built the church Hiram Walker then placed two vital provisos on the Methodist ministry in Walkerville, demonstrating the extent of his control over the town from across the Detroit River. He would keep the deed to the building, and the Methodist ministers could not under any circumstances preach against the consumption

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of alcohol, remembering that Hiram Walker and many of the local residents made money from whisky production.71 It was one thing to let people build their own homes in Walkerville; it was another thing to let a social institution undermine the capitalist enterprise driving the town’s economy. But despite this warning one of the Methodist ministers apparently condemned drunkenness, and Hiram Walker cancelled the Methodist service and without any further public canvassing on the matter offered the church to the Anglicans. In the 1870s Walkerville in-deed was still Walker’s town. In fact once he restructured the deed to the building for the Anglicans in 1874, the church was rededicated to St Mary.72 Yet the choice of Mary as the church’s titular saint had nothing to do with the Anglicans per se. Hiram’s wife, Mary Abigail Walker, died on 14 September 1872, and the church was rededicated in her memory.73 Hiram Walker would inevitably follow her to the grave. His health was failing throughout the 1890s, and he suffered a stroke in 1895, dying on 16 January 1899. By then his three surviving sons had taken over the family corporation. They also inherited much of their father’s vast fortune, as well as his Kingsville hotel and casino and his majority shares in the ferry and railway companies. Yet by the start of the twentieth century the Kingsville boom was slowing down and the profit margins for the Mettawas Hotel and Casino were thinning. Thus the Walker brothers sold the hotel-casino and the Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway Company in 1902, instantly accruing millions of dollars – and with that money they renovated their patronymic company town. Meanwhile William Battersby, Walkerville’s Anglican rector, and his vestry board conducted their annual meeting on Easter Monday 1902. They met in the basement of the old St Mary’s Church to discuss the pressing matter of the building’s condition, acknowledging the basement’s poor state and the fact that Walkerville’s busy railway led to “frequent interruptions at every service.”74 In short they wanted to build a new church somewhere else in the parish, somewhere far removed from the noisy trains. However because the Anglican diocese lacked the internal revenues to pay for a new church, the vestry board had to rely on the “volunteerism” of local congregants, and they consequently decided to discuss the matter openly with the entire parish to assess the viability of a new building project. The vestry reconvened on 7 April 1902 with an invitation to all Walkerville Anglicans. The Walker brothers were not present at this

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meeting – in fact two of them lived in Detroit. Nevertheless they submitted a letter for the rector to read to the congregation: “The disadvantages of the present site [of the church] have been manifest to us for some time, and we have had in mind to provide a Church, School Room and Rectory in a more suitable location. Indeed, we have been considering plans for several months past, and the action of the Congregation has only slightly anticipated the announcement of our purposes.” They continued: “As you are aware, St. Mary’s Church has been a memorial to our Mother, for which reason we have naturally been reluctant to see it abandoned. We intend the new Church and Companion buildings to be a memorial to both our parents.” And they concluded: “Finding the question of the new buildings disposed of, those who have been contemplating an effort in that direction may wish to consider some other step for the promotion of the Church; and perhaps it may be thought well to adjourn this meeting until we have thought out the plan of endowment.”75 With but a letter the Walker brothers not only “disposed of” the Anglican desire for a new church complex, they also stripped the community of any real power to shape its form. In the years between that meeting and the dedication of the completed church the minutes of the Walkerville vestry board meetings have only three brief mentions of the new church under construction – an absolute dearth considering the importance of building a new church for the parish.76 The first reference, dating from the meeting in which Battersby read the Walkers’ letter, was a resolution for the rector and other vestry board members to meet with the Walkers to  discuss their potential involvement with the building project. The second, dated 13 April 1903, was a resolution to meet with the Walkers for a second time. And the third, dated 2 May 1904, acknowledged the composition of a letter of gratitude for the Walker brothers’ gift, from which I quoted at the start of this chapter. Comparing these dates with the surviving correspondence from Cram’s firm to the Walkers, there is no indication that the first or second meetings of the Walkers with the church’s vestry board led to any changes in the church’s plan or construction. Instead the meetings seem to have been opportunities for the vestry board to determine other ways to use their funds. In particular the vestry board recorded the following in their annual report of 1904: “With the exception of the Rector’s study and the ordinary moveable furniture for the Rectory, the Donors have furnished all the buildings down to the smallest detail.”

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Hence knowing that the Ladies’ Aid Society of the parish had raised some funds for the church, “the suggestion was made [by the vestry board] that the society instead of contributing to the expenses of the church [which the Walkers had already paid and provided for] should finish the Rector’s study in the new rectory.”77 This was how little the local Anglican agents could contribute to the church’s design. Likewise the bishop of the diocese, Maurice Scollard Baldwin (1836–1904), had nothing substantial to say about the commission. We might have expected Baldwin to object to the Walker brothers’ patronage for two specific reasons. First Baldwin openly advocated temperance reform as a social initiative for the Anglican Church to spearhead: “In the face of the awful and acknowledged evils of the liquor traffic, the untold misery and horrible crimes everywhere resulting from it, it seems to me not merely wrong, but culpable in the extreme for the Church to stand apart in cold and haughty indifference … From the teachings of Scripture, from the arguments which the case itself presents, I would say the sacrifice demanded, if sacrifice at all it be, is our total and continuous abstinence from the use of all intoxicating liquors when used as a beverage. This is the position which I assumed some years past when burthened with the spiritual wants of a vast congregation. And this is the position I would still retain as Bishop of the Diocese of Huron.”78 As those who led the liquor traffic in Baldwin’s diocese, the Walker brothers would seem to be the last people from whom Baldwin would accept the gift of a new parish church. Second Baldwin wrote: “The great mistake the Church is making in our age is giving the world credit for owning the silver and gold. ‘The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the lord of hosts.’ No, says the Church, they do not belong to thee; they belong to the Rothschilds, the Astors, the Stewarts and the Vanderbilts. And in this belief we have the ghastly spectacle of the professing Christian Church doing homage before the idol and crying out, O Baal, hear us. Give us money for our churches, money for our organs, money for our ministers, money, money, money, O Baal, hear us. It is Israel turning its back on the temple and worshipping its idols in the chambers of imagery.”79 To Baldwin’s list of moneyed Americans he should have added the nearer threat of Walker wealth, even in 1884. And the chamber of imagery they later commissioned in the Walkerville church is replete with a stone inscription of their names as donors. However for all the fiery rhetoric of Baldwin’s charge, when it came to addressing the Walker’s plan for the church in 1902, he simply sent

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a letter of gratitude to the brothers, saying that he would be happy to assist them in any way.80 They did not take him up on the offer. And early in 1904 the bishop’s office wrote: “His Lordship the Bishop, and I may add, all parties interested, are very grateful to your firm (Walker Sons) for their magnificent gift and the great care they are taking to have everything properly arranged.”81 At least publicly Baldwin was content to let the Walkers build the new St Mary’s Church. Edward Radford, a member of the vestry board during the design and construction period of the new church, was the only person (other than the Walkers and the architects) to raise a recorded voice in the process. In 1903, independent of the vestry, Radford sent a critique of the new cornerstone for St Mary’s Church to the architects in Boston – a cornerstone that significantly was already in place before Radford could judge its worthiness. In response to Radford’s objection to the type of Roman numerals used to date the cornerstone, Cram began his reply with an admission: “The fight as to the proper method of expressing the current year in Roman numerals has never been definitely determined, unless” (and this is where he appears to have dismissed Radford for parochialism) “you accept the dictum of the professor of Classical Languages in Harvard University. He has declared that the form we used is the only justifiable one.”82 Briefly then neither Edward Radford nor anyone else was especially welcomed into the design process – except for the Walker family. Thus the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, just like the old one, was a Walker monument built with Walker money, and as a memorial to both Walker parents. And although the Walker brothers liquidated their financial connections with neighbouring Kingsville, they appropriated the King family’s use of gift-giving magi to establish a comparable economy of salvation in Walkerville. It should also be noted that although the new St Mary’s Anglican Church provides an unusually specific example of the architect-client relationship for an institutional architecture, the Walker brothers do not appear to have been overly concerned with the iconographical program Cram’s firm implemented in the Walkerville project. Perhaps the Walkers had much to say about the iconography in their private meetings with the architects, but as we saw in the notes to the introduction, Edward Walker’s main point of concern on record was trimming the budget through a reduction in seating. (The other Walker brothers had no specific comments in the surviving records.)

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Furthermore after the reredos statues were shipped from Boston to Walkerville the Walkers must have sent a message to Cram’s firm, asking how the statues were to be arranged in the wooden casement (fig. 1.8). Cram sent a telegram back to the Walkers with the correct arrangement, but even then the Walkers installed them incorrectly.83 The order from left to right should be s s Stephen, Thomas à Becket, John the Baptist, Mary (with the infant Christ), George, Edward the Confessor, and Columba. As installed, s s Thomas à Becket and John the Baptist are out of order, damaging the intended symmetry of the composition. Ultimately if the Walkers were intimately involved in the iconography, they would have known how the statues were to be arranged – an important issue, as we shall see in the next chapters. The iconography was mostly Cram’s, and I propose that one of perhaps only two details that the Walkers implemented was the Adoration of the Magi window (the other being the Edwardian Tudor Revival features discussed in the next chapter) because the window’s purpose in the building forced Cram to find a compromise to a liturgical arrangement he developed in his early churches. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Walkerville church is part of a transatlantic architectural family that included St Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Cohasset and St Michael’s Anglican Church in Bray. These family resemblances extend to a prototypical church Cram presented in the first edition of Church Building (fig. 2.5). He designed an ideal church whose thick square-topped tower with angled stepped buttressing shares much in common with the churches at Bray, Cohasset, and Walkerville. With the Bray church for example what Cram admired most about the tower’s liturgically southern position was the contrast between the vertical pile and the horizontal stretch of the nave-chancel axis. Consequently the prototypical church Cram designed for Church Building also has a vertical tower on the liturgically southern side to contrast with the horizontality of the nave and chancel. The difference though is in how Cram moved the tower farther east along that liturgical axis. The Bray tower takes place almost at the liturgically western end of the nave, whereas the Church Building tower takes place at the transeptal divide between nave and chancel. As a result the Church Building tower externally punctuates the point of spiritual progress from the lay to the clerical side of the building. On the inside Cram used the girth of his Church Building tower to create a ritual space that would accommodate the baptismal font.

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2.5  In this prototypical village church design, Cram positioned the massive, squaretopped tower at the transition between the nave and chancel, placing the baptismal font within it

This was important to Cram because he shunned the baptismal spaces in other modern churches: “It is difficult to reconcile one’s self to the process of change that has reduced the baptistery, once a thing of honor and dignity, a structure that showed through its very solemnity and importance the greatness of the sacrament to which it was consecrated, to an insignificant font hidden in an aisle, crowded

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against the wall” (cb , 111). Therefore Cram’s Church Building tower restored a degree of solemnity to the modern rites of baptism. In Cohasset and Walkerville however, Cram did not place the tower along the liturgically southern side of either building. He moved the Bray-inspired tower to the western end of the nave, using its girth to define the nave’s width.84 We would then expect that the baptismal fonts in Cohasset and Walkerville had been moved to the western end as well, given that Cram understood baptism to occur “either before the church [in a separate baptistery] or at its very entrance, so symbolizing its function as the point of the beginning of the Christian life” (cb , 114). Nevertheless in moving the tower to the western front of the Cohasset or Walkerville church, Cram followed another prototypical church designed for Church Building (fig. 2.6). In that ideal church Cram not only positioned the tower at the liturgically western front but also added an aisle to the southern side of the nave, placing the font in that aisle. And to avoid simply reducing the font in figure 2.6 to an insignificant vessel hidden in an aisle, crowded against the wall, Cram reduced the length of the pews in the aisle’s southwestern corner to keep the font away from the wall and near the tower entrance. As a result those witnessing baptism could occupy the shortened pews, and those participating in the sacrament could stand on both sides of the aisle’s corner. Likewise in the Cohasset church Cram added a southern aisle and placed the baptismal font therein (fig. 2.7). Cram also included a second vestibule on the southern side of the Cohasset aisle, leading directly into the aisle and thus retaining the equation of baptism with a ritual entrance. However the font stands against the aisle wall in Cohasset, which would seemingly undermine the font’s solemnity. Yet because the aisle seating is not the fixed pew but the moveable chair, the aisle furnishings can be rearranged to ensure the solemnity of baptism. Finally in Walkerville the baptismal font stands in the liturgically southern aisle with no secondary vestibule through the aisle’s southern side (figs 1.3 and 2.8). The font has moved so far from the tower’s western entrance and occupies such an inconspicuous space – sandwiched between the fixed pews and the chancel arch for the aisle’s morning chapel – that it would seem to be exactly what Cram despaired of. In fact however, by crowding the font against that wall, Cram could then accentuate a ritual relationship between baptism and the window located directly above the font. The window is

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2.6  In this prototypical village church design, Cram positioned the massive, squaretopped tower as a vestibule spanning the nave width; a liturgically southern aisle also includes a baptismal font standing away from the wall to dignify the sacrament

the Adoration of the Magi, and the window’s theme – combined with the baptismal rites – initiated an economy of salvation for the Walker brothers in Walkerville.85 The King family used their patronym to correlate their memorial window and the gifts of the kingly magi. Clearly the Walker brothers did not have the same felicitous namesake – unless we conflate the wandering magi with the ambulatory Walker name – but the Walkers

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2.7  The liturgically southern aisle of St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Cohasset, has moveable chairs to surround the baptismal font in the left middle ground; the aisle also has a porch entrance in the left background

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2.8  The baptismal font in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, stands between the liturgically southern aisle’s fixed pews and the transverse arch leading into the chapel

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did have the advantage of being a trio of brothers. In St Matthew’s gospel the magi were unnumbered and were never named as kings or brothers. It was later apocrypha that enriched the magi narrative to make them a trio of gift-bearing kings, and according to the Armenian Infancy Gospel they were brothers. Thus in the Walkerville window there are three magi, crowned in reference to their kingship, each with a separate gift of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (fig. 2.1). We might also determine who among the three is carrying which gift. In Church Building Cram included a celebrated image from the  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as an example of superior church art (cb , 129). The Pre-Raphaelite painting by Edward Burne-Jones depicted the Adoration of the Magi. That painting in turn served as the cartoon for William Morris’s famous tapestry of the same subject, and in the Pre-Raphaelite imagery the magi present their gifts to Christ in the order listed in the Matthean gospel, from left to right (fig. 2.9). The first and eldest magus holds an open box in which gold coins are implicated. The second magus, dressed in armour, holds a censer in hand, suggesting the aromatic incense from the gift of frankincense. The third, stereotypically Moorish magus holds a sealed jar, presumably containing the pungent balm of myrrh. Likewise in the Walkerville window the elderly magus, kneeling closest to Christ in the middle-ground, holds an unopened box that probably contains the gift of gold. The second magus, whose armour has been reduced to an epaulette projecting from beneath his cloak (the one with his back turned, kneeling closest to our position before the window), holds an urn of similar shape to the vessel that the second PreRaphaelite magus carried, only much bigger in scale. Thus his is likely the gift of frankincense. Finally the farthest magus in Walkerville, looking more stereotypically Arabian than Moorish, holds a white stone vessel, presumably containing myrrh. Cram called specific attention to this Pre-Raphaelite parallel in Walkerville so that a subtle difference could emerge. Of the three gifts illustrated in the Walkerville window the gift of myrrh is the most divergent from the Pre-Raphaelite imagery (fig. 2.10). With its white stone vessel, the vessel’s octagonal shape, and the vessel’s inset decoration of blind tricuspid arches, the magus’s gift parallels the baptismal font located beneath Walkerville’s Adoration window (fig. 2.8). The Walkerville font is also a white stone octagon with the inset detail of blind tricuspid arches. It is the only font Cram’s firm designed of this specific type. Consequently the Walkerville font and the

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2.9  This detail of the adoring magi, from a William Morris tapestry of the Adoration of the Magi, includes the eldest magus with a box of gold, the armoured magus with a censer of frankincense, and the Moorish magus with a sealed jar of myrrh

Adoration window are set together so that the gifts of the magi are understood directly in terms of baptism. And the trio of Walker brothers could thus situate their gift of the new St Mary’s Church (along with its font and Adoration window) in a Matthean economy comparable to the one at work in the Kingsville church. In Kingsville the King memorial window stands above the church’s high altar so that the sacramental experience of Eucharist can maximize the dividends on the King family’s investment. Every time an Anglican parishioner in Kingsville gives thanks to God for the gift of communion (which King money helped to provide) God rewards the King family with an incremental measure of their salvation in his celestial economy. Likewise in Walkerville every time a parishioner gives thanks to God for the gift of baptismal ablutions (which Walker money provided) God rewards the Walker brothers with an incremental measure of their salvation. In addition just as the Kingsville Kings gave their window in memory of their parents, extending the celestial rewards to the patronymic generation of their family in the town, so too had the Walkers given their magi window and the entire

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2.10  The Arabian magus in the Adoration of the Magi window for the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, holds a vessel of myrrh, which resembles the baptismal font beneath the window

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Walkerville church in memory of their parents. It is a process of familial dividends that will continue for as long as the Walkerville church remains in the grasp of its mortmain, in the trust of a church dedicated to the sacraments of the Anglican Church in Canada. Thus contrary to Marx’s statement that religion is an “opiate” for the masses,86 the Walkerville church was not the pacifier of indolent faith. The Walker brothers put Walkerville’s Anglican congregation to work on Sundays, just as they employed many of the congregants in their whisky distillery during the workweek. Because Anglican liturgy is structured in terms of repetitious rituals (e.g., baptism or communion), the Walker brothers realized that they could acquire the greatest spiritual returns on their charitable investment by connecting their generosity with the gifts of the magi and by visualizing that connection through the window that stands above the ritual focus of the baptismal font. Inasmuch as Westfall rightly noted the hundreds of memorials that grace the churches built by Ontarian capitalists (indeed such memorials are found throughout the entire Anglo-imperial world) this pattern of Christian charity does much to explain the lack of “secular dividends” for those who donated to their churches. Their investments appreciate by the celestial light of economic salvation. It was no accident then that the Walker brothers – following the King family’s example – visualized their gift through stained glass. Because the guiding light of God’s Christmas star illuminated both the journey of the magi and their gift economy, the secret photology of St Matthew’s gospel passed through the eye of the magi’s spiritually sound bodies to illuminate their charitable hearts. Their hearts consequently shone forth for all good Christians to see in the “house” of their sequestered communion, as a paradigm of the Christological gift economy. Therefore the light that passes through the memorial windows of Kingsville and Walkerville illuminates the charitable hearts of the magi (and the patronymic families of the respective towns) in a way that shines forth to those inside the house of their Anglican churches. And just as Herod and the hypocrites in the synagogues and on the streets of old Judea were incapable of seeing this epiphany of luminescence, so too are we oblivious to the gifts of the magi when we stand without the church, on the other side of the glass. Once inside the church however, the illuminated magi reveal another detail about the Walkers’ gift. As I mentioned earlier and will elaborate on in the next chapter, Edward Walker – the eldest brother

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– was particularly concerned with the building’s completion as planned because he had syphilis. In addition he was the only brother who actually lived in Walkerville. Thus of the three magi the one with his back turned to the viewer became Edward’s self-projection into the Adoration scene (fig. 2.1), following in the Romantic tradition of the Rückenfigur. In many ways this was his church to look upon. More importantly the way in which that particular magus kneels and turns his body allows his cloak to reveal part of a red rose emblazoned on his epaulette. As we shall see this flower is indicative of Edward’s place in Cram’s design – and it is not the only rose within the Walkerville church.

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3 Encrypting the Gothick Body

Cram made no direct mention of the epiphany’s economy of salvation, even though he wrote an entire book for which the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh served as a structural metaphor: “Gold is the pure, imperishable quality of the monastic ideal, Frankincense the supreme act of worship through the Blessed Sacrament, Myrrh the saving quality of a right philosophy of life that yet must be bitter to the taste of many people.”1 However Cram did refer to the Matthean gospel when he stated that “Christ’s life of ministry, of good works [was] … full of injunctions to those who were with him to ‘tell no man’: therefore the good works which are done ‘in His likeness’ must not be done in public.”2 As we have seen, the Christian concept of publicity is complicated because a charitable act performed within the sequestered public of a congregation differs from an act performed within the secular public at large. In this chapter I suggest that Cram, an Anglo-Catholic familiar with the sacrament of confession, understood yet another complication in the relationship between publicity and Christianity. The Walkerville church does not have a confessional booth as a physical space for secrets that each layperson can keep from the others. Nevertheless Cram encrypted Edward Walker’s confession of illness within the church’s structural body and in such a way as to keep the casual observations of curious laypersons at bay. And through Derrida’s theory of the crypt we can read the architectural convolutions of that secret confession. A crypt is not simply a receptacle for the dead. It is an architecture of concealment. It hides, and it hides the act of hiding in a process that responds to psychoanalytic discourse but does not “abide by the common order of psychoanalysis.”3 Instead the crypt para-sites the

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semiotic mechanisms of Freudian mourning. Freud’s dialectical approach to the semiotic binary (i.e., signifier / signified) stretches across the border of the conscious mind because trauma is commonly repressed into the unconscious only to return in the form of perplexing dream signifiers and Freudian slips in conversation. The purpose of therapy, or of psychoanalyzing one’s dreams, is to bring repressed trauma to light by matching conscious signifier with unconscious significance – giving voice to one’s trauma so that the subject can grieve and heal. Conversely the deconstructive crypt does not “abide by the common order of psychoanalysis” because it disrupts the dialectical binary of signification. Following on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Derrida wondered what would happen to that semiotic procedure if  the trauma were not strictly speaking one’s own. What would ­happen if the repressed trauma were actually that of someone else with whom the subject identifies? Such a question requires the retranscription of identity through the psychoanalytic mechanisms of mourning. Abraham and Torok consequently asserted that one forms attachments to another through Sándor Ferenczi’s theoretical “introjection,” defined as the narcissistic enlargement of the self. Whenever someone discovers a point of identification with another person, place, or thing (real or fictitious, material or abstract) they introject the other, narcissistically adopting the latter as part of the self. In other words the psychological act of introjection is a metaphorical act of ingestion. One does not simply extend their cathectic energies to bond with another; they use those energies to absorb the other metaphorically into the self. Thus when that other is lost (e.g., through death) the introjective metaphor of ingestion becomes a digestive metaphor for mourning. The mourning process of introjection is the subject’s re-appropriation of the cathectic energies investing the other within the self before expelling the remains of the other (the otherness of the other) by letting them pass. So ends Abraham and Torok’s normal work of mourning. Against the normalcy of introjective mourning Abraham and Torok posited the cryptic fantasy of incorporation, a fantasy that marks the pathological refusal to end the work of mourning. With incorporation the subject takes the metaphor of introjection literally, pretending to consume the other in a fantasy that is secretly taken for reality. The subject identifies with another’s secret and unspeakable trauma (whether real or imaginary) and cannot let the other pass

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away because of it: “So in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost, as if it were some kind of thing.”4 Consequently the pathological mourner is caught in a paradoxical desire – the desire to mourn the traumatized other and the desire to conceal the unspeakable shame to which the other is inextricably bound, as if it were the subject’s shame and trauma to be mourned. Thus instead of a metaphorical act of digestion, incorporation secret(e)s the other into a cystic pocket in the topography of the subject’s ailing psyche: “the fantasy involves eating the object (through the mouth or otherwise) in order not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside, into the pocket of a cyst.”5 The other is expelled into the inside of the self so that it can live on, even in death, in a pocket of internal exclusion called the crypt. The crypt consequently encrypts the other’s trauma among the signifiers in the subject’s normal psycho-semiology because the subject cannot utter or inscribe a particular word needed to express their grief. Revealing that word would expose the other’s unspeakable trauma. Instead the crypt functions as a confessional, a space in which the words of grief are made safe to present publicly: “Hail Mary, full of grace …” And there are at least two methods of cryptic confession. In the simplest sense the crypt transforms the secret word into a tableau that both desires and confounds interpretation. Freud’s famous case of the Wolf Man had the tableau of the washerwoman seen scrubbing the floor from behind. Freud hypothesized that this image was the Wolf Man’s repressed infantile experience of witnessing his parents having coitus-a-tergo. Abraham and Torok countered that the Wolf Man identified with his sister who may or may not have manually masturbated their father and who in turn may or may not have performed that act on her brother as well. The tableau of the washerwoman thus allowed the Wolf Man to openly desire the erogenous suggestion of coitus-a-tergo while secretly desiring the woman’s act of rubbing that in his fantasy (whether based in reality or imagination) his father had his sister do, and she in turn had done to the Wolf Man. The Russian word tieret (to rub) is the Wolf Man’s unspeakable word. More complexly the secret word returns as a “broken symbol” that escapes the crypt only as bits and pieces of the secret word – purloined letters and sounds and syllables that are translated into quasihomonyms and quasi-synonyms “along both semantic and phonic

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paths.”6 For example the Wolf Man received his pseudonym because of a recurring nightmare of wolves in a tree.7 His dream hypothetically depended on the broken phonetic interplay of siestra (sister) and the pack of six (or so) wolves, a “sixter.” Coupling this with the Wolf Man’s dream of the skyscraper (in German Wolkenkratzer), Abraham and Torok highlighted the syllabic “wol,” which echoes the sister-wolf who would scrape or rub. Ultimately through the “double density” of the tableau and the broken symbol,8 the subject can covertly express their traumatic desire (which is, of course, the trauma of the incorporated other) while keeping alive the cathectic energies attached to the other. Derrida’s theory of the crypt however introduced the scruple of a challenge to Abraham and Torok. Derrida did not challenge their theory of incorporation or their cryptic strategies. Instead he questioned the assumption that there could be anything other than incorporation. Concerning the crypt, Derrida agreed that the metaphor of introjective ingestion “is taken literally in order to refuse its introjective effectiveness,” but he crucially added that introjection is an “effectiveness that is always … a form of idealization.”9 Derrida elsewhere elaborated on the point: “Not having been taken back inside the self, digested, assimilated as in all ‘normal’ mourning, the dead object remains like a living dead abscessed in a specific spot in the ego … The dead object is incorporated in this crypt – the term ‘incorporated’ signaling precisely that one has failed to digest or assimilate it totally, so that it remains there, forming a pocket in the mourning body … By contrast, in normal mourning, if such a thing exists, I take the dead upon myself, I digest it, assimilate it, idealize it, and interiorize it in the Hegelian sense of the term.”10 The so-called normalcy of introjection is an ideal form of mourning, one that does not actually happen. The work of mourning is never done. In fact, “the work of mourning is not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general.”11 This includes a work of art. Certainly Nicolas Abraham explored the artistic potential of incorporation when he presented his reading of the “transgenerational phantom” in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.12 More importantly for this study, Martin Bressani has incorporated Abraham and Torok’s theory to unearth a crypt in Viollet-le-Duc’s architectural historicism.13 The architect endured a primal scene of synesthetic trauma (when visiting Notre-Dame de Paris as a child), filling that traumatic

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scene with the impossible mourning for his mother and her traumatic distillation of the pain of France’s revolutionary misfortunes. Therefore Viollet-le-Duc’s Gothic Revival was caught in a conflicted desire to restore and commemorate a lost past both personal and social. However Bressani also rightly noted that Abraham and Torok’s crypt “must hide even from the ego” of the subject who incorporates the lost other.14 Viollet-le-Duc did not know that he encrypted his mother in that traumatic primal scene, and Derrida’s other challenge to Abraham and Torok’s theory was his interest in the crypt as a conscious act of creation. Derrida’s stake in consciously cryptic creativity is evident in his special affinity for the nineteenth-century poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, in which the ciphers of textual meaning “pirouette”15 in ways that mimic the “second-degree distancing” of the cryptic fantasy.16 Gregory Ulmer consequently proposed that Derrida’s textual strategy was “to learn to write the way the Wolf Man spoke,”17 and Jodey Castricano named her study of Derrida’s textual strategies as Cryptomimesis.18 The double move at work in deconstruction can then be described as the strategic act of miming the pathological act of incorporation, which mimes the so-called normalcy of introjective mourning. The trauma is real, as is the act of identifying one’s own trauma with another’s, but the act of identification is conscious and the resulting crypt is a conscious effort to hide and to hide the act of hiding on behalf of a shared trauma. This would not seem far removed from traditional studies of iconography. We can imagine a Renaissance engraver for example creating a complex allegory to encrypt his patron’s trauma and rendering the tableau so poignantly because he distilled his own trauma within his patron’s. But the rebus-text of the cryptic allegory is not merely complex – it is impossible. The ciphers of the broken symbol pirouette in such a way that meaning cannot be conclusive; the work of mourning is never done. As Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville aptly noted of Albrecht Dürer’s allegory, Melencolia I: “The task of interpretation is less a matter of deciphering the meaning of a text and more like an encounter with an enigmatic object that brings us up against the limits of interpretation. If the viewer of Dürer’s print does not experience this moment of dejected frustration, it seems fair to say that he or she has failed to encounter it as a work of art.”19 And even if we trace the trajectory of shards from a broken symbol back to the primal scene of the site of signification (as we will in

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Walkerville) we lack the transcendental hand necessary to bring them back together, to make them whole. In that sense I pay close attention to Cram’s failed desire to be an architect who “grasped his art with both hands, [who] devoured and assimilated it” (gq , 150–1). Cram wanted nothing more than to introject the Gothic past lost to him in the murder of the Catholic Middle Ages. Yet his melancholy belief that he was inextricably bound to the social sickness that murdered Gothic architecture (or its potentially better-named late medieval equivalent) meant that he lacked the hands necessary to grasp the Gothic and assimilate it in his own work. All he could do was to build a cystic crypt within his creativity to be filled eventually with Edward Walker’s trauma. Therefore the encryption process only occurred in Walkerville because Cram could identify with Edward’s unspeakable illness, encrypting the secret within the structural and semiotic languages of the Walkerville church.

E n c ry p ti on How do we trace Edward’s secret from within the Walkerville crypt? Derrida noted that the crypt “sometimes mak[es] use of probability or facts” as a strategy of concealment.20 The crypt hides under the expectations of probable outcomes and given facts. One such expectation in Walkerville is the drowsiness that Montgomery Schuyler noted as the standard measure of a Cram village church. Cram designed his drowsy churches, dreaming of Anglia Perdita, to make us think that there is nothing “sensational” about them. They look as though they merely belong in the Anglo-Saxon context of their construction: “Surely one would say here is a church [in Walkerville] built by our forefathers when Canada was young, who brought with them from their homeland love and reverence for the House of God.”21 Yet such a dream of  Anglo-North American heritage is a ruse to draw the viewer away from the urgent contemporaneousness of the building, Edward Walker’s present and pressing need for the architecture. Consequently our understanding of how Cram encrypted Edward’s illness within the drowsiness of the Walkerville church requires an examination of Cram’s encryption strategy in “Sister Maddelena,” the fourth ghost story from Black Spirits and White. “Sister Maddelena” occurred in March 1888, when Cram’s narrator and the narrator’s friend Tom Rendel ventured to Sicily in

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search of architecture.22 While there they befriended the Cavaliere Valguanera and his wife, both of whom were “charming and gracious in their pressing hospitality” (bsw , 84). The couple invited Rendel and the narrator to stay at their home, the former convent of Santa Catarina, and the cavaliere indulged them in a ghost story after dinner. He told them that the ghost of Sister Maddelena would visit one of them during the night, but he insisted that she was a harmless spirit and that he would not have even mentioned it – only that, being a gracious host, he thought it best to spare his guests “any unnecessary alarm” (87). Ultimately whoever received the visit that night would simply hear Sister Maddelena say that she could not sleep and then never hear from her again. This intrigued Rendel and the narrator, both of whom entreated the cavaliere to tell the woman’s story. Sister Maddelena was born Rosalia di Castiglione, whose father was an adjunct to the court of Charles III, King of Spain and the Two Sicilies. Her father was an ambitious man, determined to marry his beautiful daughter into the royal family. To that end he secured the proposal of Prince Antonio, a cousin of the king, but Rosalia was already in love with a military officer named Michele Biscari. Her father was furious when he discovered their plans to elope, and because Rosalia refused to marry the prince, her father had Michele sent to war and convinced Rosalia that Michele had died in combat. He then forced her to join the Carmelite nuns at Santa Catarina and  gave her the name of Sister Maddelena in reference to Mary Magdalene and the sins of the flesh. Meanwhile Michele returned from the war unharmed, finding his beloved at Santa Catarina, and they renewed their love in secret. They rendezvoused every night at the window of her convent cell – Michele climbing a rope that she concealed among the window bars – and they had planned another elopement to Spain. But a fellow sister of the convent spied the lovers and informed the mother superior. The cruel mother then offered Sister Maddelena a choice: either Michele’s life or her own. Sister Maddelena consented thus to die for love, tying a farewell note to Michele’s rope and cutting it from her window. Michele never saw his lover again, and her body was never found. Therefore she haunted the convent, in search of her missing funereal rites. After the story the cavaliere and his guests retired for the evening, and later that night Sister Maddelena visited the narrator. So moved was he by her plaintive sorrow – “I cannot sleep” (bsw , 101) – that

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he leapt from bed and followed her down to the locked door to her old cell, where she repeated her sorrow and disappeared. The next morning the narrator requested permission to pursue the mystery, and the cavaliere “courteously gave the whole matter into [the narrator’s] charge” (103). But when they unlocked the former cell of Sister Maddelena it looked entirely commonplace at first – eight feet squared, with solid masonry walls and a single window. Still the narrator procured the keys and began investigating the neighbouring cells. They were all the same – eight feet squared, with a single window. Then it occurred to him; Sister Maddelena’s cell should not have been the same. Her cell was on the corner of the cloister, and if every cell along each side of the convent had a single window on the exterior wall, then a corner cell should have had two windows. Sure enough the embrasure of any window in the convent was deep enough to entomb a standing woman, and when the narrator removed the bricks from Sister Maddelena’s second window, he found her corpse – an ivory statue frozen in the agony of suffocation.23 Thus a Catholic priest was summoned from the neighbouring village to perform the necessary rites, and when the priest applied the Catholic asperge to her ivory torment, the strange corpse of Sister Maddelena crumbled to dust. They then performed a midnight mass for the repose of her soul, and the narrator gathered dust from the local cemetery, casting it into the embrasure of her tomb. Finally the narrator assisted the cavaliere in ordering a memorial tablet that would re-seal the sister’s final resting place in the window. And while thinking of the cruel nuns who “with remorseless hands and iron hearts” had sealed their sister in a living tomb (bsw , 108), the narrator added a parting thought: “Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone” (112). Given Cram’s Catholicism it would seem curious to put Sister Maddelena’s death in the “remorseless hands” of Catholic nuns. Yet in keeping with his sartorial desire to clothe Anglo-Protestant stories in an Anglo-Catholic “vesture,” Cram wrote “Sister Maddelena” in response to a Gothic literary tradition that used monastic settings to stimulate Anglo-Protestant fears of Catholicism. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was the quintessential novel of that tradition, whereby the seclusion of monastic life was a breeding ground for vice. The Anglo-Catholic Cram however specifically wrote The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain to defend the monastic ideal.

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Monasticism was intrinsic to the health of Cram’s medieval society. Nevertheless Cram was also pragmatic about monasticism. Monks, medieval or modern, were still “fallible men, and their vast responsibilities sometimes bred failure, sometimes were responsible for a grievous falling off in spiritual things” (ra , 5). The cruel mother superior of “Sister Maddelena” and her accomplice, the spying sister, were two such fallible people. Furthermore because Cram believed that medieval monks and nuns, fallible as they were, belonged to a generally wholesome Catholic culture, those who suffered “a grievous falling off in spiritual things” were rare. Conversely the modern world suffered an “atmosphere weakened and impoverished by three centuries of aesthetic as well as ethic folly” (gq , 236). Thus because Rosalia di Castiglione became Sister Maddelena during the reign of Charles III (1759–88), at a time when the world was so weakened and impoverished, her fellow nuns were that much more likely to falter in spiritual matters. Sister Maddelena’s conventual family had forgotten a basic Christian tenet. If Rosalia’s father gave her the name of Sister Maddelena in reference to the Magdalenian prostitute, then Cram repeated Christ’s warning to those who would deign to kill an adulteress: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Jn 8:8). In the biblical context the referential stone was the first of many rocks to be thrown at the adulteress. In the context of Cram’s story the referential stone was the first of many bricks used to entomb the poor sister. Hence in contrast to the failed spirituality of the mother superior, the Catholic priest summoned to perform the saving rituals at the story’s end was Padre Stefano. St Stephen – the padre’s namesake – was a Christian martyr, a man who died in a hail of prejudicial stones.24 If anyone could appreciate the plight of Sister Maddelena it was a priest named for a saint who died at the hands of those who presumed to cast the first of many stones. Padre Stefano represented a Catholicism that endured the modern world, despite its atmosphere of moral weakness and spiritual impoverishment. Cram’s narrator was also a representative of Catholicism who endured the modern world, and he combined that faith with his “architectural knowledge” (bsw , 106) in “Sister Maddelena” to help put a fellow Catholic’s spirit to rest. More precisely his architectural knowledge was such that he could recognize patterns of structural expectation and test them against his spatial awareness of the site. Hence he tested the expectation of equality among the convent cells

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(i.e., one window in each) against the patterned fenestration on the convent’s exterior to discover that Sister Maddelena’s corner cell must have had two windows before she died. More to the point her remorseless conventual family was clever enough to conceal her in the unexpected window of the two. Inasmuch as they condemned Sister Maddelena to death for pursuing her former love affair at one window in her cell, it would have been horrifically appropriate to choose that window for her tomb. However that might have tipped off her lover as to where they had buried her. Thus they chose effective encryption over vicious irony. Furthermore Cram’s interest in effective encryption through patterned expectations connected “Sister Maddelena” with other stories in Black Spirits and White. He embedded tiny hints of foreshadowing in the first three stories. For instance entombing Sister Maddelena in the embrasure of her window could only have worked if the embrasure was deep enough for her standing body. Hence when Cram’s ­narrator retired to his bedchamber in the former convent on the night before his investigation, he took a moment to ponder the sublimity of a stormy night while standing at a “deeply embrasured window” (bsw , 99). At that point in the collected ghost stories, the detail of the window’s depth appeared trivial. In “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” when the narrator retired to his bedroom in the Parisian haunted house, he noted that there were “two deeply embrasured windows looking out on the court” (22). Likewise when a pair of ghost hunters awaited the arrival of an armoured spectre in Cram’s second ghost story, “In Kropfsberg Keep,” they heard the village clock strike twelve “muffled through the high, deep-embrasured windows” (43). Thus by the time we encounter the words “deeply,” “embrasured,” and “window” in “Sister Maddelena,” they appear to be nothing more than common bywords for Cram’s architectural descriptions. Yet through those words Cram had revealed the secret of Maddelena’s tomb before his narrator (and the casual reader) could discover it,  using the clue of the window’s depth by which the narrator stood contemplating the stormy weather and the stormy afterlife of Sister Maddelena. Further still because Cram described the façade of the Bouche d’Enfer in the first ghost story as having a “great wisteria covering half,” and because he described the gates of the house in his third ghost story, “The White Villa,” as having “brambles growing all over them” (bsw , 60), we might have expected an extensive plant-life to

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spread itself across the convent of Santa Catarina. Sure enough, when the narrator arrived he noted that the convent was “draped in smothering roses” (86). Yet when we later learn that Sister Maddelena was born Rosalia di Castiglione, and when we finally learn that she had died by suffocation, we can appreciate in retrospect the encrypted nature of that floral clue. Rosalia revisited her torturous suffocation on the convent, her tomb, in the form of “smothering roses.” And Cram used a similar encryption technique when draping the new St Mary’s Anglican Church in its own version of bloody roses.

W a rs o f t h e Roses Another aspect of Cram’s Puginian inheritance was his hatred for the Protestant Reformation. Granted by the Victorian era Pugin had declared that the Reformation was only an “effect” of the disease that destroyed the medieval Gothic. Nevertheless he still derided the Reformation as a damnable offence to Christianity. In The True Principles he wrote that “all the large churches of [Britain] … fell a prey to the rapacious tyrant Henry [VIII] and his abettors, in the general wreck of faith and art at the period of his lamentable schism.”25 Protestantism and Henry’s tyranny were coterminous effects of the same “decayed state of faith.” Likewise Cram provided several passages in which he condemned Henry VIII as a tyrant of the Protestant era: “during the last days of Henry VIII., and through his deliberate action, architecture … was utterly stamped out of England as it was also stamped out in the other nations that accepted the reformed faith.”26 However in the second edition of Contrasts Pugin emphasized that Henry VIII was not a true Protestant; Henry was a tyrant who took advantage of Protestantism to suit his will and increase his coffers with ecclesiastical treasures, but he did not truly believe in Protestant dogma.27 Cram stated the same: “As for Henry VIII., to do him justice, we must admit that he hated theological innovations … He had exterminated monasticism for reasons the most base and scandalous, but … bad as Henry was, it can never be said of him that he aimed in the least at a substitution of Protestantism for Catholicism in England” (ra , 289–91). Instead both Pugin and Cram turned greater rancour on Henry’s son, King Edward VI (r. 1547–53). Pugin argued that it was not until Henry’s “infant son, Edward VI, ascended to the throne that the real feelings produced by the new

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opinions were displayed, or the work of robbery and destruction fully commenced.”28 For Cram the problem began with the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) and became catastrophic in Edward’s subsequent reign. The Wars of the Roses had “practically exterminated the families ancient in honour, and Henry was surrounded by a throng of new creations without blood and without traditions” (ra , 11). This was how Henry VIII’s tyranny was allowed to thrive. Consequently the “false reformation began in England when with Henry’s death a child came technically to the throne, while the actual power passed into the hands of a junta of unprincipled conspirators” (291). In other words the disastrous Protestant ­ Reformation had truly begun in Britain when the sickly child-king came to the throne, allowing Britain to fester under the “utter moral obliquity of the race during the malignant epoch of Edward VI” (279). And because the modern malignancy of the Protestant Reformation fully emerged with King Edward VI, and because the head of the Walker family was the sickly Edward Walker, dying of a degenerative illness, Cram played upon the Edwardian appellation in his Anglophile church at Walkerville. The Wars of the Roses were crucial to that name-play. When approaching the Walkerville high altar we pass a quartet of large windows at pew-level in the nave. These windows, subdivided into twinned lights, follow a set pattern. The subject matter is a collection of eight church fathers, eastern and western, and the patristic saints each stand in their separate lights, two per window, each with a floral motif decorating the space between their figuration and their identifying label. Each window also has a flourish of tracery above the figures, with an open book and a scroll unravelling to reveal a cardinal virtue in Latin. Yet among the four windows, the one depicting ss Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great introduces a subtle variation on the theme (fig. 3.1). Unlike the other three windows, in which the vegetal motifs repeat in the twinned lights, the motifs for ss Augustine and Gregory are different. Beneath St Augustine is a white lily; beneath St Gregory is a red English rose. The latter is appropriate inasmuch as Gregory was a pope who sent a Christian mission to Britain; nevertheless among the myriad meanings of the rose to an Anglican church, the flower’s colour indicates more than a generic signifier of Britishness.29 Cram contextualized that detail in the British Wars of the Roses and thence the malignancy of the Edwardian Reformation.

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3.1 A nave window in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, depicts S S Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great, and it includes a white lily beneath the former and a red English rose beneath the latter; the scroll in the tracery above reads Veritas

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The Wars of the Roses were a power struggle between the two branches of Plantagenet Britain – the house of Lancaster, with its red rose insignia, and the house of York, with its white rose. The wars concluded when the throne went to the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, who married Elizabeth of York. Hence the Tudor rose became a hybrid of red and white petals, with the white rose of York typically set within the Lancastrian red. Furthermore after the Tudors passed out of British succession, the Catholic house of Stuart reigned in waves until the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Stuart King James II fled Britain to the succession of his son-in-law, the Protestant William III of the house of Orange. James II was the last Catholic monarch of Great Britain, and British-Catholic monarchists believed that his son James III was the rightful heir to the British throne. So began the British Jacobite societies, the members of which used the white rose of York as a nostalgic symbol of Britain’s Catholic purity prior to the house of Tudor and the advent of the Protestant Reformation. Cram was a Jacobite royalist, believing in the rightful British succession of the house of Stuart. He even corresponded with Queen Mary of Bavaria, the “‘legitimist’ English Sovereign” of the time. He was also a leader of the American Jacobite society called the Order of the White Rose, holding the charter rank of “Prior” to all American territories “between the Canadian border and the Rio Grande” (mlia , 20). Consequently when Cram wrote his book on The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain he included an English rose on the threshold between his introductory title and the rest of his text. For a treatise in which Cram made occasional use of red ink, it is telling that the rose relies on the negative space of the white paper to “colour” its form. The insignia is a ghostly variation on the white rose to remind us of the Catholic purity of Great Britain prior to the Protestant Reformation that destroyed its monastic glories. Furthermore Cram’s architectural partner Bertram Goodhue illustrated Emily Delafield’s dramatic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland stories (fig. 3.2). In Carroll’s Wonderland the Queen of Hearts had a rose garden in which the gardeners accidentally planted a white rose-tree. Red is the colour of the Queen of Hearts, so the gardeners busily painted the white roses red to conceal their error and avoid the queen’s tyrannical anger. Thus in Goodhue’s drawing the roses are charged with a political agenda. Goodhue’s white roses are from the house of York and the red-rose bloodiness of the queen’s

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3.2  Bertram Goodhue designed the back cover of Delafield’s play Alice in Wonderland with white English roses, painted red under the tyranny of the Queen of Hearts

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reign washes over the purity of their white colour. In other words Goodhue equated the Lancastrian line and the tyranny of its consequent house of Tudor with the morbid monarchy of Wonderland. For someone like Cram, who had “always had a passion for stained glass … interfering with the makers to [his] heart’s content” (mlia , 192), the opportunity to deploy that same political message in glass was apropos of the Walkerville commission. When looking to the red roses in the Walkerville windows, we note that their red colour is the product of a distinct glazier’s process called flashed glass, whereby the glazier fused clear or grisailles glass with a thin veneer of red.30 The roses in Walkerville are white blossoms painted in a flash of bloody red and are charged with the same political lament as the uncoloured rose in The Ruined Abbeys and the slathered roses in the Wonderland story. The purity of the white rose is tainted with the sinful blood of a malignant British world that broke faith with Catholicism – a world that according to Cram did not fully begin until the reign of Edward VI. Thus Edward Walker was heir to the tainted Edwardian name, and his church bears the mark of that sin. This leads to the lily in the neighbouring light. St Augustine is not typically associated with that floral symbol. On the contrary because Augustine wasted his youth in sinful dalliance, the purity of the lily (pure like the white Jacobite rose) seems incongruent with his history. The lily becomes comprehensible however when looking into the tracery above, where the cardinal virtue is Veritas, Latin for “Truth.” St Augustine may have wasted his youth, but the earnest confession of his sinfulness meant that his sainted soul became as pure as the white lily. Thus the lily marks a miraculous cleansing of the tainted soul through the truth of confession, and the Walkerville church has much to confess, not the least of which being Edward Walker’s confession that he too wasted his youth in sin. His illness was a direct result of this, and the fact that Edward Walker was in power in Walkerville during the Edwardian era (1901–10) further strengthens the correlation of his name with the British monarchy and its sickly heritage via Edward VI.

T h e E dwa r d ian Era 3 1 The successful encryption of Edward’s trauma in Walkerville depended on how the church architecture shifted attention away from him. Hence when the Walker brothers submitted their letter to

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the town’s Anglican congregation concerning the construction of the new church, they emphasized the architecture’s role as a memorial for their parents, the founding generation of Walkerville Walkers. In 1902 with Hiram Walker recently dead and buried on the other side of the Detroit River, the civic body of Walkerville required a space to mourn the loss of their communal patriarch. The new St Mary’s Church provided that space (for Anglicans at least), which supposedly accounted for the Walker family’s generosity. The communal memory of Hiram Walker and all that he had achieved in Walkerville was so prevalent that the idea of parental deference was enough to convince people (then as now) that Edward Walker had no other reason to give Walkerville an expensive new church. This is why when Shand-Tucci wrote his brief paragraph on the Walkerville church, he named it as part of the “Hiram Walker estate.”32 Granted the Walker family was still mourning the death of their patriarch (and matriarch for that matter) when they commissioned the architecture. Nevertheless the crypt operates precisely by masking the secreted space of its incorporation under the expected process of socalled normal mourning – the introjection of Hiram Walker’s memorial into the town’s communal body and the continued introjection of Mary Abigail Walker from the old church to the new one. Local historians of Walkerville have consequently focused on Hiram Walker’s legacy, almost to the exclusion of his sons.33 The sons are typically acknowledged only for their continuation of their father’s beneficent paternalism. One notable exception however is the Windsor Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee’s (wacac ’s) guidebook for Walkerville architecture.34 Because Walkerville is richer in architectural heritage from after Hiram Walker’s death than it is from commissions during his lifetime, wac ac could not simply focus on him. Instead the guidebook subtitle named Walkerville as “An Edwardian Company Town” in a play on nomenclature similar to the one Cram employed in the Walkerville church. Edward Walker became the head of his family – and thus de facto head of Walkerville – at about the same time that King Edward VII ascended to the British throne. In fact the coronation of King Edward VII came shortly after the Walker brothers announced their plans to construct the new St Mary’s Church, and the family included a copy of the coronation program in their corporate archives.35 Thus the twentieth century began as the Edwardian era for the Walker family too.

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Architecturally the Edwardian significance for Walkerville began with what the Walker brothers described as finding “a more suitable location” for the Anglican parish, which required a change to the Walkerville map. Previously Hiram Walker had imposed spatial order on his town through a municipal plan called the Georgian gridiron. It was typical of the time.36 Streets were laid out on right angles wherever possible (the riverfront being a necessary exception), many of which were given perfunctory ordinals: First Street, Second Street, etc. Hiram Walker also followed a typical pattern of paternalistic company town owners in that he used the divisions of streets to regulate distinctions in economic and social class.37 On the east end of town were two streets composed of cheap cottages or semi-detached brick houses and terraces for employees to rent. Third Street (Argyle Street, today) had brick terraces and detached houses for specialized employees, and Second Street (Devonshire Road, today) became the main street of Walkerville because the ferry service to Detroit stood at its northern extremity. Consequently most of the important buildings of Walkerville were situated near Second Street, including the Walker family’s “Cottage,” the company offices, the old church, the train s­tation, the hotel, the school house, and several fashionable houses and semi-detached houses reserved for company management and adjunct entrepreneurs (fig. 1.2). The measure of architectural fashion in Late Victorian Walkerville was the Richardsonian style – in both its Romanesque and Queen Anne Revival modes. Richardson’s architectural popularity was such that many cities across North America had at least one firm that could emulate his Boston-based designs. In Detroit it was Mason and Rice who best accomplished that task, and Hiram Walker favoured them.38 However as the patriarch’s health was failing throughout the 1890s, his sons took greater control of the family corporation. Thus when the Walker brothers commissioned new corporate offices (1892–94) in Walkerville, they jettisoned the Richardsonian vocabulary in favour of Italian Renaissance classicism. Mason and Rice were still the architects, but they designed the façade in reference to the famous Palazzo Pandolfini in Renaissance Florence. It would seem therefore that the Walker brothers chose palatial architecture from Renaissance Italy for their corporate offices because of the ­aristocratic pretensions of Florentine mercantile wealth.39 Like the Medici (who incidentally celebrated themselves as adoring magi in their palace chapel) and other Florentine Renaissance merchant

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families, the Walkers used a revived classical architectural vocabulary in the 1890s to validate their economic empire in terms of ancient patrician wealth. More importantly the Walker family strengthened their de facto claim to aristocracy through the British royal family. On 17 September 1898 Queen Victoria gave Canadian Club Whisky a warrant to ­display the royal coat-of-arms on their whisky label – apparently because her Physician in Ordinary, Sir William Jenner, recommended that she stop drinking claret and champagne and start drinking a mixture of Canadian Club Whisky and mineral water as a digestive. Furthermore the royal heir Edward VII, who was then Prince of Wales, apparently enjoyed the Jenner-prescribed mixture, and it became a preferred drink of his social circle. Consequently Canadian Club Whisky acquired the rare honour of holding warrants from both the British monarch and the Prince of Wales, as both coats-ofarms were evident on the label. And when Edward VII ascended to the British throne in the twentieth century, he renewed the royal warrant for Canadian Club Whisky. It had become the drink of kings, and royal favour gave meaning to the coincidence of nomenclature when Edward Walker became “king” of Walkerville right before he commissioned the new St Mary’s Church. Technically all three Walker brothers commissioned the new church, but this was also a fact used to conceal Edward’s crypt. By signing the declaration to build the new church along with his brothers, Edward drew attention even farther from himself. Nevertheless he was the most prominent patron for the commission. With the death of Hiram Walker Walkerville became Edward’s town. We recall that Hiram Walker moved back to Detroit in 1864. Franklin and James Walker followed his lead, building handsome homes for themselves in the same general area. Once Edward became head of the Walker family however, he made Walkerville (not Detroit) his official residence, at first living in the “Cottage” beside the company offices (fig. 1.2). Furthermore while the Walker brothers commissioned the new Walkerville church, they also commissioned Cram’s firm to design new chancel furniture for Christ Episcopal Church in Detroit. With Franklin and James living in Detroit, the latter commission was for their benefit while the Walkerville church was for Edward’s.40 After all Edward was the only Walker brother buried in the cemetery of the new Walkerville churchyard – Franklin was buried in the same Detroit cemetery as his father, and James was buried in Detroit’s

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Woodlawn Cemetery. Moreover Edward was buried in the middle of Walkerville’s Anglican cemetery adjacent to the church, giving him pride of place among the town’s Anglican dead. Thus when it came time to approve the Walkerville church design, we recall that it was  Edward’s opinion that finally mattered: “The Church itself Mr. Ed[ward Walker] is very anxious to have pretty nearly as designed by Mr. Cram.”41 In many ways it was Edward’s church. Edward’s anxiety for the church was part of a greater concern with changing the spatial and architectural character of the Walkerville map. It was a change that the kingly Edwardian name spurred in a  particular direction. Hiram Walker tersely designated the northsouth streets of Walkerville First, Second, Third, etc. His children renamed those streets during the Edwardian era. First Street became Kildare Street; Second Street became Devonshire Road, and so on, most taking a distinctly Anglophile tone. More importantly as president of the Walkerville Land and Building Company, Edward had the authority to change the monotony of his father’s gridiron plan. With the ferry docks to Detroit located at the northern foot of Devonshire Road, and major buildings of the town positioned on either side of the road, Edward made a change to accentuate the road’s importance in a way that the standard gridiron could not achieve. In other words the problem with Hiram Walker’s street plan was that Second Street (later Devonshire Road) simply ended in open fields – hardly a grand crescendo for such an important street. Thus instead of that agrarian vista, the new church occupies an island of earth to bifurcate Devonshire Road. That way, we recall, the building could provide an architectural exclamation mark for the street, especially because the church’s British Gothic tower was perfect for (and perfectly aligned with) the thoroughfare and its new Anglophile name – Devonshire Road.42 More practically the commission situated the new church seven blocks south of the waterfront to answer one of the complaints that Walkerville Anglicans had about its architectural predecessor. We recall that the old church stood near the noisy railways of Walkerville, a complaint that Edward Walker must have known well. He was a member of the parish and a resident at the old Walker family “Cottage,” which stood near the railways as well. Thus the decision to move the parish to its current location was meant to provide not only a quiet environment for worship but also a new neighbourhood for living and leisure.

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The Walkerville Land and Building Company reserved the lots of land surrounding the new Anglican churchyard for residential projects no less than 3,500 square feet in size. The Walkers then developed the land to the geographic southeast of the church as the Walkerville Golf and Country Club (under the legend in fig. 1.2), and they situated Edward Walker’s new mansion, Willistead Manor (c. 1906), on the land to the geographic southwest of the church (fig. 3.3).43 Thus the new St Mary’s Church stood in conjunction with Edward Walker’s Willistead estate, built immediately behind it. Furthermore Kildare Road – the street aligned with Willistead Manor – did not pursue the gridiron regularity of the nineteenth century (fig. 1.2). It curves toward the new church before continuing to the Willistead park entrance. Consequently between the placement of the new church in the middle of Devonshire Road and the bending of Kildare Road toward the Anglican architecture, Edward Walker wanted his church to be the gateway to the new Walkerville neighbourhood under his kingship. Hence the Walkers named the street along the front of the church complex St Mary’s Gate. Detroit architect Albert Kahn designed Edward Walker’s mansion, Willistead Manor, in association with the British-born architect Ernest Wilby (1868–1957). Kahn and Wilby were also the supervising architects for construction at the new St Mary’s Church, acting as liaisons between the Walker family and the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson. Wilby reflected on Walkerville’s Edwardian neighbourhood, in which the new Anglican architecture was “a bit of 16th century England transplanted to North America.” He continued: “Here in Walkerville is reproduced the English scene of church, churchyard, and rectory, and nearby is Willistead taking the place of the English manor house. Combined, these buildings make a picture of peace and beauty found in England, rarely found in America, which will endure and grow in beauty with the passing years.”44 Wilby likely took his sixteenth-century cue from the parish hall and rectory that flank the church to the liturgical north and south, respectively. With half-timbered gables and a projecting second storey on the rectory, these subordinate structures are examples of the Tudor Revival style – Tudor architecture coming from sixteenthcentury Britain.45 Furthermore Edward Walker commissioned his neighbouring mansion in the same Tudor Revival style.46 On that condition the shared Tudor features united the neighbourhood for the church and manor house, and the leading architectural taste

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3.3  The half-timbering and projecting second storey on Willistead Manor, Walkerville, signify the mansion’s Tudor Revival style

of  Walkerville shifted from the Richardsonian styles of the nineteenth century to the Tudor Revival style of Edward Walker and his social circle.47 Granted the use of Tudor Revival architecture was not unique to Edwardian Walkerville. It was common to the repertoire of modern Gothic domestic architecture, and it came to great popularity in Britain when Richard Norman Shaw designed houses such as Leys Wood (1868) in Sussex.48 Likewise in America Cram’s first domestic projects show Shavian influence, for example the Fellner House (1890) in Brookline, Massachusetts. Nevertheless it was how Edward Walker appropriated the Tudor style that made his use of it significant in Walkerville. Prior to King Edward VII ascending to the British throne there hadn’t been a British King Edward for centuries. King Edward VI, son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, was the last Edwardian king in Britain and a Tudor monarch from the sixteenth century. Thus the Edwardian name was synonymous with the Tudor style, and to revive the Edwardian appellation was to revive the Tudor style – a detail of Anglo-centric nomenclature that has gone unnoticed in Walkerville, even among those who recognize the  many Tudor hallmarks in the town’s Edwardian architecture.

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Consequently in 1905 when Walkerville commissioned a new schoolhouse, Kahn predictably designed a Tudor Revival structure.49 Edward’s wife laid the cornerstone on Empire Day, and the community named the building King Edward’s School in explicit homage to Britain’s new Edwardian monarch, Edward VII. Nonetheless it was also an implicit homage to Walkerville’s newly elevated “king,” Edward Walker, done in the style of the last Edwardian monarch before them. This Edwardian pun takes us back into the new St Mary’s Church. According to the parish endowment the pews for the new church were not for rent, meaning that Anglican congregants can sit wherever they please in the nave. However according to Florence Robinson this was not exactly the case in Edwardian Walkerville. Robinson was only a child when the new church opened, but she remembered that “there used to be a red cord marking a special pew,” and that she, sitting under the pulpit, “across the aisle … sometimes would see Mr. E.C. Walker sitting in [that] pew reserved with a red cord. Behind him sat the Robins’s and the Coburns.”50 Of William Robins there will be more to say. J.H. Coburn was a local lawyer – the one in fact responsible for the transfer of the newly completed St Mary’s Church from the Walkerville Land and Building Company to the Anglican Diocese of Huron. More importantly Robinson’s account is valuable because it situated Edward Walker in a pew specifically marked for him, a pew located across from the pulpit and thus to the right forefront of the congregation. The choice of that pew was extraordinary because (sitting to the right of centre) it held a privileged relationship with the reredos screen behind the high altar. The wooden reredos screen gathers eight Christian saints and martyrs, most of whom are not surprising for Walkerville’s Anglican parish (fig. 1.8). St Stephen for example, on the far left, is there because St Mary’s congregation once united with St Stephen’s Anglican parish in Sandwich, Ontario. Furthermore St Thomas à Becket, standing third from the left, reinforced the Anglo-Catholic emphasis of the design. The most important choice however was King Edward the Confessor, standing second to the right. In deference to the newly crowned king of England this Anglophile selection refers to Edward VII. Yet given the other Edwardian projects underway in Walkerville, and given the fact that the statue stands immediately across the chancel from the pew reserved for Edward Walker, the statue also refers to

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the “king” of Walkerville. Thus King Edward the Confessor was a paragon of royal virtue staring back at Edward Walker every time the latter attended church. This also brings us back to Cram’s use of Macbeth in the title of his book of ghost stories, Black Spirits and White. In the first chapter I noted that Cram chose Macbeth as an analogy for his ghost stories because the supernatural haunted Shakespeare’s titular tyrant, a man who had broken his bond with God and king when he usurped the Scottish crown. More precisely I noted that Macbeth called upon a doctor to cure his insane wife and perhaps the sickness of Scotland itself under his illegitimate rule. Conversely when Malcolm, the rightful king of Scotland, fled Macbeth’s coup d’état, he sought refuge in Britain under the rule of King Edward the Confessor. Consequently Edward the Confessor marked the difference between a healthy, legitimate monarchy and the sickliness of Macbeth’s Scottish tyranny. For Shakespeare this meant that the British king possessed the royal touch, the touch that could miraculously heal.51 Hence a British doctor in conversation with Malcolm lamented the limits of his medical training: “Their malady convinces / The great essay of art, but at [King Edward the Confessor’s] touch, / Such sanctity hath Heaven given his hand, / They presently amend” (Macbeth, 4.3.143– 6). Therefore the statue of King Edward the Confessor in Walkerville is not just a paragon of kingly virtue looking to Edward Walker in his special pew; he also represents the prospect of divine health through the touch of a miraculous hand. Ultimately the red rose encrypted in the Walkerville nave window signifies the malignancy of Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation that spawned him, and the statue of the medieval Edward, standing above the altar, holds the promise of healthy restoration. And if true medieval architecture had been glorious for Cram “without pause from the days of Edward the Confessor,”52 then his greatest hope for Edward Walker and the Edwardian era was a return to the healthy architecture of the medieval Edward and not to linger in the sick modernity of the Protestant Edward VI. Nevertheless the Edwardian reredos statue in Walkerville is not the church’s crypt; it merely confesses the fact that the church operates on behalf of a sickly Edward looking to become as virtuous and pure as the medieval Edward. In pursuit of Edward’s crypt we must sound the walls of the entire structure as a metaphorical-cum-literal body.

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A B o dy o f F l e s h and S tone The correlation of architecture with the human body is perhaps as old as the art of building. For Christianity the correlation was fundamental to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In St Matthew’s gospel (26:61) the Pharisees accused Christ of saying: “I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.” Elsewhere, in St Mark’s gospel (14:58) the accusation was as follows: “I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.” Christ confirmed the accusation in St John’s gospel (2:19–20), to which the author added an exegetical commentary (2:21–2): “Jesus answered and said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. / Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? / But he spake of the temple of his body. / When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed the scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.” Thus the body of Christ is the prototypical Christian sanctuary. In the moment of sacramental transubstantiation every Catholic church becomes Christ’s resurrected body – a belief that Guillaume Durand articulated in the Middle Ages. Durand consequently wrote about the material construct of a church in bodily terms: “The arrangement of a material church resembleth that of the human body: the Chancel, or place where the Altar is, representeth the head: the Transepts, the hands and arms, and the remainder, – towards the west, – the rest of the body.”53 Furthermore the Cambridge Camden Society began a translation of Durand’s work in the 1840s for the benefit of Gothic Revival architects and the Anglican liturgy of their churches, and Cram celebrated Durand in his Six Lectures on  Architecture.54 Thus Cram used comparable bodily metaphors in his architectural theory: “Far back of structural expedients lay a determining force, a driving energy, and the embodiment of these, the incarnation, was … Gothic architecture” (gq , 58). Moreover we can trace that driving energy on its trajectory from the Middle Ages through the Pugins55 to the Late Victorian Gothicists, who took the trans-substantiality of the Corpus Christi as seriously – if not more so – than did the Tractarians of the Oxford movement, with whom Cram counted the Pugins.56

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In the broadest sense Cram thought of church architecture as a living organism: “A church is organic; and every line, every mass, every detail, must be carefully considered and perfectly adapted to its ends, forming an essential part of a great and living whole” (cb , 125).57 He explored the arboreal aspect of that organism for a Gothic Revival that started with the Perpendicular at its root. Henry VIII and the Protestant Reformers “laid the axe not at the root of the moribund tree, but at that of the strongest and healthiest growth in the English Church” (ra , 9). Cram wrote of Gothic architecture as an organic synthesis of “arboreal development from roots to trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, and flowers.” He continued: “This is not an exaggerated simile, as will be seen if you consider its vertical system from pavement to ribbed vault” (mlia , 182). Nevertheless Cram primarily saw architecture as a corporeal organism: “All great architecture is organic … Like the horse, the tiger, or the eagle, all its parts are perfectly adapted to their function.”58 Yet a Gothic church is a special incarnation: “To the simpler forms of building, [a church] bears the same relation that man bears to the lower forms of life; and, like man, it possesses that which raises it immeasurably above every other organism, a soul, and that soul is the altar” (cb , 151).59 Therefore a church becomes a metaphorically human body that transcends the lesser organisms of other architectural types. Not only did the transubstantiation of bread and wine give proof to the corporeal reality of God incarnate; it also vitalized the raw materials of the church into a living body that “drew to itself every soul in the community, tying them by every bond of love and memory and association” (cb , 37). The church is a body of flesh and stone made one through the communal experience of the sacraments. And although the corporeal metaphor (made literal through sacramental faith) was more important to Cram than the arboreal simile was, the Walkerville church demonstrated how Cram could combine the two. Meanwhile Cram’s Gothic architecture was also a gendered body. His article on “Good and Bad Modern Gothic” declared the “masterful, manly, fearless Gothic” of the Middle Ages as the ideal for modern Gothic construction.60 A modern Gothic building was to be manly, and by manly Cram meant “strong and frank” (ra , 53) but also refined and reserved. Thus Cram’s first lesson in manly church building was the monumental strength and frankness of Richardson’s Trinity Church, Boston: “Here was a real man at last … Here was

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something of force and majesty and authority, solid, consistent, and beautiful” (mlia , 32; his emphasis).61 It was not enough though. In the first chapter I noted that Richardson lacked the “refinement or subtlety” of Cram’s Gothic reserve (33). This combination of manly strength and refinement Cram found instead in the “stern old” British Gothic churches on which the refined Perpendicular style “fell like a garment.” Thus when Cram cursed the Protestant Reformation for destroying Perpendicular buildings in “the strength of their mature manhood,” he was referring quite literally to the Perpendicular as a manly architecture of strength and refined maturity. And even though the Walkerville edifice is called the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, the architecture’s incarnate body is that of Christ. After all Pugin reminded his fellow Gothic Revivalists of a “very common error, of speaking of churches and altars as being dedicated to such a saint. The Church has never sanctioned the dedication of a church to any saint; they are all dedicated to God, (but according to the most ancient and laudable custom), in honour of certain saints, by whose names they are distinguished.”62 The new St Mary’s Church is dedicated to Mary’s son, God incarnate, but in honour of her memory as the mother to the incarnate body of flesh and stone. To that end the significance of the Walkerville church as an incarnate body begins with the massive and refined (read: manly) western tower, with its thick proportions and the “crushed velvet” of its supple, sparrow-pecked ashlar.63 We recall from the first chapter that Cram erected the Walkerville tower as an (albeit incomplete) emblem of the corporeal resurrection, a vertical thrust raised from the earth and reaching for the heavens. Likewise the castle tiles clustered in the vestibule pavement are another “vertical” thrust, leading the eye (and foot) up the nave alley to the high-altar reredos, where the tall centralized tower of the screen leads the eye skyward once again. Specifically the reredos tower draws the eye up the body of Christ in the Crucifixion altar window above, and that body is not a frail spindly husk but the muscular form of manhood incarnate (fig. 3.4). Thus the massiveness of the Walkerville tower aspires, without a spire, to reflect Christ’s manly body in the window. Furthermore inasmuch as the cruciform shape of a Gothic church is a symbol of the incarnate body Christ sacrificed on the cross, Durand’s corporeal diagram is crucial in Walkerville. The chancel is the head of the church, the transepts (and their extension into the parish hall and rectory) are the arms, and the rest of the nave, toward the west, is the

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3.4  In the Crucifixion window above the high altar in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, the musculature of Christ and the deep shadows beneath his armpits match the manliness of the bell tower and the Mannerist soffits in the nave arcade, respectively; the lead cames also form a triangle for the lance to pierce Christ’s right-hand side

rest of the body (fig. 1.3). Consequently the pulpit at Walkerville is a unique reminder of this diagram (fig. 3.5). Ernest Wilby noticed that detail, calling attention to the “quaint and unusual pulpit corbelled out of the north wall and reached by a stairway in the thickness of the wall,”64 but he left unacknowledged the significance of such a choice. Only occasionally would Cram’s firm design a stone pulpit, and very rarely would they design the pulpit as part of a wall – and they practically never designed a pulpit to stand on the lay side of the transeptal divide. In other words not only did Cram’s firm design a stone pulpit at Walkerville, located among the pews of the laity, and surmounted by stairs in a wall; the wall itself demarcates the external boundary of the church. This style of pulpit – located on the western (lay) side of the transept – is thus a reminder that the church is Christ’s body. If the transeptal ends are  the outstretched arms of Christ crucified, then the Walkerville pulpit is located in the chest of the cruciform body, precisely where the spear pierced the side of Christ during the Crucifixion. Thus the

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3.5  The stone pulpit in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, projects from the external wall of the nave at the transeptal divide, suggesting the spear wound in Christ’s right-hand side; the circumscribing grapevine also suggests the blood of that wound

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rector stands within Christ’s wounded side when preaching to the Walkerville faithful, with a relief of grapevines circumscribing the pulpit’s polygonal form. The grapes represent the blood of Christ’s sacrificial wound. Cram then extended the corporeal metaphor into the nave arcade (fig. 3.6). Typically when Cram designed arches to span the bays of a nave arcade, he created soffit profiles that project outward in various rhythms of light and shadow. In Walkerville the soffits undercut that expectation because they recede into the structure of the arches. This is in keeping with a design strategy Cram employed in one of his early domestic commissions, wherein a Renaissance Revival fireplace overmantel did not project away from the wall to envelop the chimney stack. Instead it recessed into the wall in a trick that Shand-Tucci rightly hailed in the name of Mannerist playfulness.65 In Walkerville however the soffits do not recede simply for the sake of witty Mannerism. Rather because the nave arcade demarcates the structural torso of the church (as it extends west of the transeptal arms) the recessed soffits represent the armpit of that structural body. This for instance is why a church tower positioned at the corner of the nave and a transeptal arm is called an armpit tower. Just as Christ’s cruciform body in the high-altar window has deep shadows in the pits between his torso and his outstretched arms (fig. 3.4), so too do the nave arches have shadows playing in the depths of their recession. The new St Mary’s Church is indeed dedicated to the body of Mary’s son. Yet if we are to take Durand’s diagram to its logical limit, then the only soffit recession should have occurred on the easternmost arch, at the transeptal limit of the nave – literally in the armpit of the church. Furthermore if this church is to be understood as Christ’s crucified body, with arms extended along the transeptal paths into the parish hall and rectory, then Cram should not have included an aisle along the southern side of the building. Simply put, if the body of the Walkerville church is truly the flesh and stone of the crucified God incarnate, then why does an asymmetrical aisle act as an extraneous arm that reaches down the body of the nave? This is where Edward Walker’s crypt begins to spill its secret, for Christ was not the only son of a woman named Mary. The Walkerville church was dedicated to God in memory of Mary Abigail Walker, Edward’s mother, and Cram designed the building as a site of malady, in which the house of Walker compromises the house of God. As such the church’s body is not just God incarnate, son of

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3.6  Unique to the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, the nave arcade soffits recess into the arches, suggesting the bodily limit between the nave torso and the aisle arm; the aisle arm also ends one bay short of the liturgically western tower

the Virgin Mary – it is also the body of Edward, son of Mary Abigail Walker. Cram encrypted Edward Walker’s ailing body in the aisle of the church, and he relied on the conventional understanding of a church as Christ’s body to conceal Edward’s trauma. The inclusion of a single, asymmetrical aisle is certainly not unusual for an AngloGothic church. In Church Building for example, we recall that Cram offered an ideal village church with a southern aisle (fig. 2.6). In Walkerville however Cram presented a structure so wholly indebted to the cruciform body that the extraneous aisle becomes conspicuous. It requires further consideration.

W a l k e r ’ s A is l e   /   W a lker’s I ’ll 6 6 To reiterate from the previous chapters, St Michael’s Church in Bray was the architectural ancestor of a prototypical church in Cram’s Church Building, as it was for St Stephen’s Cohasset and St Mary’s

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Walkerville. They all have the same tower type, and they all rely on the contrast between the tower’s verticality and the horizontal reach of the church complex. In Bray and Church Building the tower contrasts with the horizontal nave-chancel axis; in Cohasset it contrasts with the flanking parish hall; and in Walkerville it contrasts with the flanking parish hall and rectory. However Cram’s interest in the visual tension between vertical and horizontal elements did not end with the general silhouette. In his essay on “Good and Bad Modern Gothic,” Cram admired Bodley and Garner’s Hoar Cross church because “the vertical lines of the buttresses and the [horizontal] lines of the stringcourses strengthen the wall admirably.” He then contrasted that work with an inferior church, “where, with the exception of the water-table, and a belt and a cornice in the tower, there isn’t a single horizontal line to tie the thing together.”67 Consequently when Cram saw the Bray tower’s stringcourses juxtaposing with its vertical thrust, he saw an opportunity to use those horizontal lines to tie together his spatial composition at Walkerville. The lowest course of the Walkerville tower aligns with the eaves line of the southern aisle roof, and the second course aligns with the eaves line of the nave roof (fig. 3.7). Even on the third tier of the tower the clocks (both present on the front and to be added to the sides) align at the height of the nave roof apex. Cram designed the Walkerville tower as the organizing feature of the church’s structural body, where every major horizontal line of the building follows from a tower detail. Thus insofar as Shand-Tucci concluded that the gabled end was the “basic genetic code” of Cram’s domestic architecture,68 the stringcourses that demarcate the tiers in the Walkerville tower are the basic genetic code of Cram’s ecclesiastical body of flesh and stone. Crucially though, in comparison to the second stringcourse at Walkerville, which continues from the tower to become the eaves line of the nave roof, a gap occurs between the first course of the Walkerville tower and the southern aisle roof. That gap does not simply reflect the fact that the Walkerville aisle stops well short of the tower. At All Saints’ Church in Ashmont Cram took a stringcourse all the way from the western tower to the eaves line of the chancel roof (fig 1.4). Why then did he choose not to continue the stringcourse at Walkerville from the tower to the southern aisle roofline? This question connects the crypt of Edward’s body with the extraneous arm of the southern aisle, and an answer comes from William Robins, the

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3.7  The liturgically southern side of the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, demonstrates the relationships between the tower’s stringcourses and the eaves lines of the aisle and nave roofs

man who sat behind Edward Walker’s special pew and who eventually fought a court battle concerning Edward’s legal will. William Robins was an Englishman who apparently moved to Walkerville in 1888 because he was good friends with Edward and James Walker. Edward’s wife, Mary Griffin Walker, often wrote to Robins, saying that “Ed. sends his love.”69 Likewise a letter from a  mutual friend of James Walker and Robins assured the latter of James’s “enduring fondness for you.” The affection extended to the rest of the Robins family as well. Mary Griffin Walker cor­ responded with and visited Robins’s daughter Margaret in Britain, writing to Margaret that “Ed. always thought so much of your father” (jc , 178). And while Edward ascended in the family business, William Robins served as a business manager for Hiram Walker & Sons Ltd (starting in 1888), and as a company director from 1896. Robins’s intimacy with the Walker family is also evident in the fact that Edward Walker named Robins as an executor of his first will, signed 21 December 1901. In addition Edward decided to give Robins 1,000 shares in the Walker family company as a legacy in the 1901 will. The shares were valued at $100 each at that time. Yet even

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though Edward and James were good friends with Robins, there was tension with the middle brother, Franklin. In July 1905 Franklin quarrelled with Robins over some undisclosed matter, and Robins threatened to resign his position with the company. This prompted James (who was then out of the country) to write Robins: “You must know, I am sure, how sorry I was to hear how you have been treated … By no means must you resign; if you should do anything of that kind, it would make things all the harder for us … I cannot begin to tell you how deeply I feel for you. I realize fully what you have stood for a long time, on [Edward’s] and my account, and now to feel that matters are even worse [between Franklin and you] makes me very hot. If you cannot manage to get along until when I intend returning, I will go home at once, for I cannot bear to have you treated so … However, it is [Franklin’s] usual way, and until we come to some understanding, I presume he will continue” (jc , 137; Robins’s emphasis).70 They did reach an understanding, and it lasted until the winter of 1911–12, at a time when Edward was away in Europe and in poor health. James, having suffered a stroke in 1911, was in poor health as well, and Franklin used the situation to expel Robins from the company. Robins left Canada in 1914, bound for Britain, and he would not return until 1922. Edward Walker died in 1915, and his last will and testament prompted Robins to return in 1922. Robins claimed that he did not consider Edward’s will until 1922 because he was unaware that Edward left him a legacy in 1901 (despite being an executor of that will), and he was unaware of what happened in Walkerville after Franklin Walker had expelled him from the company. On 27 February 1914 Edward signed a new will, expunging Robins’s name as executor and cancelling Robins’s vast legacy. The new executors were the directors of the National Trust Company, which included Franklin Walker and Z.A. Lash.71 Then, according to Robins, in April 1922 Mary Griffin Walker arranged to meet with him in London, England. She described how she was “violently bitter against Mr. Z.A. Lash and her brothers-in-law” (jc , 92) and how Robins should take legal action against the 1914 will. The problem with the 1914 will (as Robins saw it) was Edward Walker’s state of mind when signing the document. In Canada there were two types of wills available at that time: the first was the highly official “solemn form” of probate; the second was the “common form.” Edward’s 1901 will was in the solemn form; the 1914 will was

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in the common form, and the legally relevant difference between them was that only the former required proof of mental competency to be authentic, which meant that common form wills could be challenged on the grounds of mental competency. Thus because Edward Walker’s 1914 will was in the common form, Robins had a legal right to challenge its authority on the question of Edward’s state of mind, and the writ was issued on 23 June 1923.72 The case was tried without a jury in May 1924 in the town of Sandwich, Ontario. Justice Mowat made it clear in his final statement that onus was the point of contention. The judge ruled that the plaintiff must prove that Edward Walker was mentally incompetent, whereas Robins and his counsel felt that onus, according to British law, was the defendants’ need to prove mental competency. Having lost the case Robins sent it to the Appellate Court of Ontario in 1925. The Appellate Court upheld the trial judgment, and Robins appealed again – this time to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, who in 1927 again upheld the original judgment on the grounds that the appellate court in a colony may differ in opinion from the appellate court in Britain. The judicial committee also stated that precedence existed for ruling in Ontario that onus fell to the plaintiff. Thus Robins had the difficult task of proving that Edward was not having a “lucid interval” when signing the 1914 will (jc , 52). And thus Robins sought an appeal directly to the British crown, publishing a book about the case for public distribution, in which he included a letter of appeal to the king’s secretary. In the end nothing came of it, and the decision was never overturned. Regardless of the debate on onus, the crucial point for Edward Walker’s crypt at the new St Mary’s Church is the testimony of Edward’s many physicians, especially Dr Charles Hoare of Walkerville – who attended Edward from 1891 to 1907, with 1,317 consultations (approximately 82 consultations per annum). Hoare was the first witness to testify in the case, and he stated that he first consulted Edward Walker about a “specific infection” in 1893 (wr , 17). Hoare continued: “About 1900 there were manifestations of infection in connection with the nervous system, which became progressively worse” (18). From 1900 to 1905 symptoms of the resulting nervous disorder included “numbness in the face, hands, [and] legs,” and bouts of aphasia were added to the list from 1905 to 1907 (18–19). Furthermore by 1900 Edward Walker had “pronounced arterio sclerosis” as a result of his specific infection (4), and he became “very

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apprehensive of the condition of his heart. He would have some, what seemed to be functional disturbances which would distress him very much, he was always dwelling on his own case” (24). Finally as there was no known test for Edward Walker’s specific infection at the time of consultation, Hoare relied on his clinical experience to offer a diagnosis (31), and his treatment was a combination of mercury and iodine (24). The trial judge, lawyers, and testifying physicians (starting with Hoare himself) all made a conscious effort not to name Edward Walker’s “specific infection” openly in court. Nevertheless in the context of gathering testimony about the infection, several key details arose. A lawyer for the defendants asked Hoare for his professional opinion on the Wassermann test (wr , 32). This was a blood test introduced in 1906 to confirm the presence of syphilis in a patient. Hoare pointed out that a negative Wassermann test result (even a ­series of negative results) could not prove the absence of syphilis. Furthermore Dr Peter Dewar of Windsor, Ontario – Edward Walker’s general physician from 1910 to 1913 – referred in court to the “606 treatment” (52). That treatment, also known as Salvarsan, was the first effective treatment for syphilis. It was introduced in the 1910s. Further still the lead lawyer for the plaintiff referenced Power and Murphy’s book called A System of Syphilis when arguing points about the progression of the “specific infection” (474; 552). Finally once the case switched from the courts in Ontario to the chambers of the judicial committee, the plaintiff’s lawyers felt no need to be vague about the infection. In their summary argument they openly claimed that Edward Walker had syphilis (4). And although the defence would rely on a negative Wassermann test (administered to Edward Walker in June 1910) to argue that the testator had a sound mind when he signed his second will in 1914, they did not challenge the contention that Edward Walker had his “specific infection” prior to 1910. Within a year of contracting syphilis in 1893, Edward would have experienced the first two stages of the disease: primary syphilis, when a skin lesion usually appears at the point of syphilitic transmission, and secondary syphilis, when a rash typically spreads across the trunk and extremities, often recurring and highly infectious. Syphilis then goes into a latent stage, in which it might lie dormant for the rest of the person’s life, or it might re-emerge at any time in the potentially devastating forms of tertiary syphilis. Thus Edward Walker’s body

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began to experience the effects of tertiary syphilis in 1900, as the spirochetes targeted both his central nervous and cardiovascular systems – hence Hoare’s extensive list of neuronal and cardiovascular symptoms that were “typical of the infection” (wr , 4).73 The need to avoid naming syphilis in court as anything more than a “specific infection” with “typical” symptoms also speaks to the social issue of the illness. Syphilis was a venereal disease so stigmatized in Edward Walker’s day that public discourse would often rely on a euphemistic vocabulary. Allan Brandt quoted a physician from late nineteenth-century America: “A convenient and somewhat elastic medical nomenclature lends itself to this policy of concealment … A vast number of morbid conditions which should be charged to venereal infection are entered [into medical records] under some non-compromising name which does not indicate its real value.”74 Thus Prince Albert Morrow, a dermatologist from the same era, stated: “Social sentiment holds that it is a greater violation of the proprieties of public life publicly to mention venereal disease than privately to contract it.”75 Edward Walker carefully controlled public knowledge of his private illness.76 This compulsion for encryption was at least partly due to the Judaeo-Christian structure of western morality, which saw venereal disease as the proof of lust and therefore sin.77 Alfred Fournier attempted to rearticulate syphilis in terms of merited cases (pre- or extra-marital sexual activity) and unmerited cases (the innocent wives of syphilitic men, and children who received syphilis during gestation),78 but the merited cases still carried the Christological assumption of the “wages of sin.” For example the American Committee on the Prevention of Venereal Disease (acp vd ) declared in their 1881 report that “if venereal diseases were restricted to those who sought illicit sexual gratification, ‘it might be well to let the guilty suffer and die.’”79 Thus the Christological discourse on lust and punishment did not disappear from an increasingly secular-scientific medical profession. The specific circumstances of Edward’s life and the acquisition of his fortune further stigmatized a syphilis diagnosis. When Fournier wrote his study on syphilis and society, he made special note of a “remarkable work” on syphilis and alcohol published in 1882.80 Quoting from that work, Fournier specifically condemned bars that  included women: “These bars are the despair of families, because their sons find in these houses the three plagues of modern society: loafing, alcoholism, and syphilis. Morally and physically,

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these women’s bars are sinks of iniquity.”81 In his medical practice Fournier consequently argued that the “subjects we have to treat for syphilis nearly always present, independently of their syphilis, a certain pathological individuality … some are alcoholics, and others suffer from excess of pleasure or overwork; so that most patients, for one reason or another, add to syphilis a morbid idiosyncrasy.”82 Thus when social reformers of the era looked to create prophylaxes against the spread of syphilis, those who did not simply call for the regulation of prostitution placed some of the blame on the men (rarely the women) who had pre- or extra-marital sex, and their solution was to teach and enforce self-control. For example Morrow insisted that preventative measures against venereal disease would be “incomplete without impressing upon young men that the use of alcohol is one of the most powerful of all influences in the incitation of sexual debauch.”83 Therefore as the producer of Canadian Club Whisky Edward Walker risked being twice stigmatized: for the wages of sin and the social lubricant assumed to seal the “sinful” deal. Certainly in a town where Hiram Walker shut down the first Methodist ministry because a preacher sermonized against alcohol consumption, the Walker family did not take the social issue of their business lightly. And with Bishop Baldwin railing against the evils of alcohol from within the Anglican Diocese of Huron (at least in the mid-1880s) the stigma did not disappear with the cancelled Methodist service. Walkerville’s status as a paternalistic company town throws this issue into sharper relief. Christian stewardship was the nineteenthcentury justification for paternalistic communities, by which the beneficent lord used his good fortune to secure a better life for those who perpetuated his fortune.84 The Walkers provided or contributed significantly to the cottages, water pipes, police and fire protection, churches, bank, and school houses of Walkerville. In exchange for the cost of these amenities, the Walkers and other company town owners sought a productive workforce – and temperance was often assumed to optimize productivity. Temperance was not enforced in Walkerville, but the owners of several other company towns would strictly regulate or abolish the consumption of alcohol in order to promote a sober and focused workforce. For example even while privately believing that “wine taken with meals was an enjoyable comfort,” Titus Salt – founder of Saltaire, Britain – enforced temperance among his workers.85 The Lever family at Port Sunlight, Britain, also experimented with temperance.86 And in America George Pullman’s

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eponymous company town restricted the consumption of alcohol to the luxury hotel in the managerial heart of the community.87 Even British town planners of the early twentieth century, such as Ebenezer Howard, had a “strong undercurrent of temperance” running through their utopian plans. They believed that the existing cities of the nineteenth century were “full of ‘pernicious excitements’ such as beer-shops and brothels.”88 Likewise American landscape designers such as Frederick Law Olmsted stated that the urban and suburban parks they created were exercises in a “distinctly harmonizing and refining influence upon the most unfortunate and lawless classes of the city – an influence favorable to courtesy, self-control, and temperance.”89 Thus in Walkerville (where the Walker brothers created an Olmsted-like suburban park around the new Anglican church) the ideal of the paternalistic company town constantly operated in tension with the whisky that the company produced. Altogether Edward Walker’s anxiety to construct the new St Mary’s Church takes on new urgency in light of his secret and (socially constructed as) shameful illness. He was not simply devoted to his dead parents; he was also “very apprehensive of his physical condition” (wr , 24). Having surpassed the symptoms of primary and sec­ ondary syphilis, he married Mary Emma Griffin (1857–1937) on 3 September 1896. This provided a three-year buffer between his initial infection in 1893 and his wedding date, as per the standard advice concerning syphilis, latency, and marriage during the time.90 And although Edward and Mary would have no children together, likely because of their age but also perhaps out of fear of the stillbirths that were common among children with congenital syphilis,91 Edward was hopeful that his infection would remain dormant for the rest of his life with Mary. That hope was shattered in 1900 with the onset of tertiary syphilis in both his cardiovascular and nervous systems. With his doctors unable to provide a cure for the unspeakable trauma of his rapidly escalating condition, Edward turned to God, commissioning the new St Mary’s Church as a gift that God might favour with the reward of a miraculous cure. Syphilis is thus the unspeakable word-thing that Cram tried to conceal and confess on Edward’s behalf, as evident on the southern wall of the Walkerville aisle, where Cram positioned a stained-glass window bearing “The Sermon on the Mount” as an inscription in the lowest pane of its central light (fig. 3.8). In the context of Edward’s illness the figures in the central vignette take on a new light.

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3.8  In the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, the central light of the Sermon on the Mount window conceals and confesses a leper with a single arm and missing hand

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Harry Goodhue constructed this window, and he constructed a comparable depiction of the Sermon on the Mount for St Stephen’s Cohasset (fig. 3.9). Both windows place Jesus at the centre of the composition, looking out at the viewer. He raises his right hand in the gesture of benediction, as the light of his blessing extends beyond the pictorial space to illuminate the architectural spaces of the Cohasset and Walkerville churches. Both windows also place Jesus on slightly higher ground to indicate the rocky terrain from which he delivered his mounted sermon, and in both windows the crowds are limited to a tight circumference of people surrounding Christ. Yet whereas the Cohasset window has five figures surrounding Christ, the narrower span of the central light in the Walkerville window meant that only three could crowd him, and the man kneeling in the left foreground of the Walkerville window crucially differs from his Cohasset counterpart. Unlike the bearded man kneeling in the Cohasset window (who turns his body into the pictorial space, with naked hands extended in prayer), the bearded man in the Walkerville window looks down to pray, his arm shrouded in fabric. He does not have a hand to offer Christ in prayer. In fact he does not even have a second arm to offer – only the stump of one limb that he buries in a swath of green mantle. The concealment of this unusual figure in the window partly depends on the fact that he does not technically belong to the Sermon on the Mount. He is from an event that immediately follows the mounted sermon in the Matthean gospel. In Matthew 8:1–4 Christ descended from his sermon and a leper approached him, humbly stating: “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” Christ, who had just finished telling the crowds “Ask, and it shall be given you” (Mt 7:7) – the same Christ who would later admonish his disciples for not having the faith of a mustard seed (Mt 17:20) – saw in this leper the seed of true Christian gratitude. Thus Christ “put forth his hand” and replied, “I will [cure you]; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.” This is the tableau that Cram used to encrypt the unspeakable condition of Edward’s syphilitic body, transforming syphilis into the synonymous (if only euphemistically so) condition of leprosy.92 Furthermore in the tracery above the leper’s appearance is a banner that unfurls to reveal the start of the Lord’s Prayer, which is significant to Cram’s Anglo-Catholic education. Arthur Hall once quoted the following in his Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to clean us from all unrighteousness,” to which Hall added:

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3.9  The Sermon on the Mount window in St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Cohasset, is comparable to figure 3.8, the key difference being that the kneeling man in the left foreground of the Cohasset window has his hands intact and visible

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This is indeed the “double cure” which fallen man needs as he groans beneath sin’s guilt and bondage: “Be of sin the double cure, Save from wrath and make me pure.” This is the two-fold work of grace – to cleanse and to restore … “not merely to remit the penalty, but also to forgive the guilt, to blot out the stain, to heal the wound.”93 Edward Walker required the cure to both his spiritual and corporeal sins through the utterance of the Lord’s Prayer. Cram envisioned Edward Walker in terms of the Matthean leper and then conflated that leper with the Matthean man with the withered hand (Mt 12:9–13). In other words Cram concentrated Edward’s syphilis into the leprosy of his withered appendage, concealed but confessed in the Walkerville window – a tableau that is concealed, yet again, in the de-contextualization of its place within the Matthean narrative. The window is and isn’t about the Sermon on the Mount. And having established that encryption in the window’s iconography, Cram then extended the crypt into the church’s structural language. The single truncated southern aisle at Walkerville is the leprous limb of the window’s tableau; it is Edward’s corrupted body, extraneous to the perfect cruciform of Christ’s body. This draws another comparison with Cram’s Cohasset church, which also has a single southern aisle (fig. 2.7). The Cohasset aisle extends all the way from the transept to the western limit of the nave. Conversely the Walkerville aisle extends from the armpit of the transept (made literal in the Mannerist detail of the recessed soffits) until it terminates one bay short of the western limit (figs 1.3 and 3.6). This is why Cram included a gap between the lowest stringcourse of Walkerville’s western tower and the eaves line of the southern aisle. The gap is the potential space reserved for the leper’s healthy hand, a space that is not present in the church except as the haunting presence of an absence – the healthy hand to be. Just as the Walkerville tower is missing the lance-like spire that would complete its vertical resurrection, so too is the southern aisle missing the bay of its hand that would complete its horizontal reach toward the tower. Furthermore having transformed Edward’s ailment into the Matthean leper, and having concentrated his leprosy into the withered hand of another Matthean man, Cram then let the withered limb reemerge through the Walkerville crypt as the broken symbol of the

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letter “k,” the unspeakable letter of the building’s Gothick legacy. As a revenant of the modern world, still caught in the abysmal night of its decadence, Cram’s church silently confesses the condition of its Gothick-ness. However the question still remains: what healthy hand, basking in the dawn of a true Gothic resurrection, might redeem the unspeakable “k” of Cram’s modern Gothick church? And an answer waits in the final chapter. For now it is enough to note that on either side of the corner that constitutes the limit of the aisle’s leprous arm (the western end of the aisle and the southwestern end of the nave), Harry Goodhue produced additional windows. As we recall from earlier in this chapter, the ground-floor windows in the Walkerville nave contain a quartet of twinned patristic saints, each window with an open book and banner in the tracery above. The banner in the window on the nave side of the leprous limit reveals the Latin virtue of Spes, meaning “Hope,” and the window on the leprous end of the aisle is the Transfiguration of Christ (fig. 3.10). The Walkerville church seeks the restoration of Edward’s body in the hope of transfiguration – the hope that God might miraculously absolve Edward of the syphilitic infection that secretly ravaged his body and by extension the body of his church. Secrecy is the crux of the matter. In the Matthean gospel (17:9), after the disciples bore witness to the Transfiguration of Christ, the messiah warned them to “Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead.” Furthermore when Christ cured the leper in the Matthean gospel (8:4) he told the leper: “See thou tell no man; but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.” Thus the Matthean gospel turns on a secret economy that, at the start of this chapter, we saw Cram himself identify. Through Cram’s architectural efforts Edward Walker wished not to have his private illness become a matter of public knowledge (even within the sequestered public of the congregation) but rather to show his body, miraculously transfigured, in the community of the church that he and his brothers gave as a gift to God. Publicly this gift was offered in terms of filial obligation to Hiram and Mary Abigail Walker. Yet within that “public” gift we find a secret offering given solely in the name of Edward Walker. This brings us back to the baptismal font and its relationship with Edward’s Rückenfigur, the kneeling magus with his back to us in the Adoration of the Magi window (fig. 2.1). The magus has a red English rose emblazoned on his epaulette to recall that same rose – charged

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3.10 (a, b)  The two walls that demarcate the leprous limit of the aisle in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, include (a) the banner Spes in the nave window with SS Gregory Nazianzen and Athanasius, and (b) the Transfiguration of Christ

with the malignancy of the modern Edwardian namesake – beneath Pope Gregory the Great on the other side of the nave (fig. 3.1). As with Edward Walker the magus with the emblazoned rose is an imperfect king who gave his gift to the King of kings in exchange for his spiritual health, and in Edward’s case his physical health too. Furthermore beside the English rose of Gregory the Great, Cram included the lily of St Augustine, who confessed his youth of sinful dalliance. Thus Cram also included lilies in the Adoration window; St  Joseph holds the once-barren staff that miraculously burst into pure white lilies when he became Mary’s bridegroom (fig. 2.1).94 This is how Cram conflated the arboreal and corporeal metaphors for his Gothic church. The leper’s missing hand (the barren staff of his arm) in the Sermon window returns in the Adoration window

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with a miraculous burst of lilies. Therefore Edward Walker confessed the problem of his now-barren “staff” in the neighbouring Sermon and Adoration windows, hoping that God might cure his sinful illness now that he had become the bridegroom of Mary Griffin Walker. This is why the church’s only tile of a griffin stands beyond the altar rail in the aisle chapel.95 If the high altar of the church (with Mary holding her infant son in the reredos screen) is dedicated in memory of Edward’s mother Mary Abigail Walker, then the aisle chapel (with its griffin tile) is dedicated in honour of Edward’s Catholic wife, Mary Griffin Walker, and the newfound propriety of Edward’s life with her. Finally inasmuch as Cram encrypted Edward Walker through an Edwardian name-play and encrypted both Mary Walkers through Marian and griffin puns, Cram also played with Joseph’s name when depicting him with a blossoming staff in hand. In “The Dead Valley,” the sixth story from Black Spirits and White, Cram presented the ­eco-Gothic horror of a desolate valley terrain: “A great oval basin, almost as smooth and regular as though made by man” (bsw , 146). He continued: “In the midst of the basin, perhaps a mile and half away, the level expanse was broken by a great dead tree, rising leafless and gaunt in the air” (147). This was Cram’s image of a modern “architecture” that mocked the organic forms of nature and the arboreal metaphor of art: “Art is a flower; it will only appear on the tree of life under certain circumstances. Without the bloom, life is barren and valueless, for the flower is the proof of the healthy growth of the tree.”96 More explicitly he stated: “You cannot sever art from society; you cannot make it grow in unfavourable soil, however zealously you may labour and lecture and subsidize. It follows from certain spiritual and social conditions, and without these it is a dead twig thrust in sand, and only a divine miracle can make such bloom, as blossomed the staff of St. Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury.”97 Thus the Joseph standing in the Adoration window is not simply Christ’s earthly father; he is also the apocryphal Joseph who, according to Catholic legend, first brought Christianity to Britain. St Joseph’s staff was a symbol of medieval Catholicism taking root in an as-yet spiritually barren land; he thrust his staff into the ground and the staff miraculously flowered. Conversely in a world that thrice broke ties with medieval Catholicism (through the Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution), the resultant architecture was as barren and lifeless as was the great dead twig Cram placed in the almost architecturally smooth and regular floor of the Dead Valley. Crucially

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then, when Joseph came to Britain and planted his staff in the ground at Glastonbury, the staff’s miraculous flower blossomed but twice per year, during the winter (Christmas) and spring (Easter). Hence in Walkerville Joseph stands with his blossoming staff beneath the Christmas star of the magi’s Epiphany season. More importantly, according to British legend St Joseph of Arimathea brought not only his blossoming staff to England but also the Holy Grail. In the next chapter I examine Edward Walker’s role as a sickly king, demonstrating Cram’s desire for a Grail narrative that spoke to both the sickness of the legendary Fisher King and the prospect of miraculous recovery in the wasteland of modernity.

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4 The Castle Perilous, Walkerville

In 1907 Cram compiled several of his early essays into a book called The Gothic Quest, and he introduced his compilation with a brief explanation of why Gothic architecture is a quest. For Cram later medieval architecture developed from the same cultural impulse as the quest for the Holy Grail: “In the old legends … we read of the mighty quest, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and how, year after year, right valorous and stainless Knights out of every land in Christiantie rode into the four winds of heaven searching for, and never finding, the sacred Chalice wherein St. Joseph of Aramathie had gathered the very Blood of Christ that had been shed for men on Calvary” (gq , 7). The knights on the Grail quest were men in search of the divine: “The quest failed, as men count failure, but it brought to all brave, knightly adventure and the doing of great deeds of chivalry.” The quest for Gothic architecture was thus the “lawful heir” to the Grail quest, and its medieval manifestation “followed close upon” it (8). Medieval Gothic builders sought the architectural divine, failing just as well but leaving behind monuments of true Christian worship. Cram presented both quests as the work of ardent Christianity in pursuit of beatific vision, and he argued that the Christian architect’s “quest to-day is the Gothic Quest in a varied guise, as that was the Quest of the Grail under another form” (10). The varied guise of Cram’s modern Gothic architecture, its optimism and pessimism, consequently meant that he too inherited the hope and failure of the Grail quest.1 Although Cram wrote that introduction in 1907, he had been interested in the Grail quest since the late nineteenth century. If we are to believe Cram’s prefatory advertisement to Excalibur (1908), then he wrote most of that Arthurian play in 1893. Excalibur was the

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first in a dramatic trilogy (the other two plays were never published), and there are enough clues to the Grail quest within the first play to ensure the quest’s role in the trilogy.2 Furthermore if Cram’s 1919 preface to The Hill of Vision is to be believed, then he had visited Glastonbury Abbey, “the most holy place in Britain in the year 1886, and thereafter as often as [he] was in England – some seven or eight times in all.” Cram continued: “From the first [Glastonbury Abbey] had overwhelmed me by its almost mystical influence, partly august and enormous history, partly dim and evocative tradition, partly the sense that the story was not finished, but that in some way ‘these dead bones may live’ again.”3 This is why Cram placed Glastonbury first among The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain. Glastonbury is “the unquestioned site of the first Christian church in Britain” (ra , 27), founded by “St. Philip the Apostle and his twelve disciples, amongst whom was St. Joseph of Arimathea … bearing the Holy Grail” (30). And inasmuch as Glastonbury Abbey stands in ruins, Cram despaired that “beneath the vanished vaults once rested the Holy Grail” (34), as if the Grail might still be there had not the Protestant Reformation occurred. Thus the story of Glastonbury Abbey remained unfinished for Cram because the Grail is gone and in need of knights in quest of its discovery. In “Sister Maddelena” Cram likewise drew upon his knowledge of Grail lore. When his narrator first arrived at the story’s convent setting he reflected on the gorgeous surroundings: “all were but parts of a dreamy vision, like the heavenly city of Sir Percivale, to attain which he passed across the golden bridge that burned after him as he ­vanished in the intolerable light of the Beatific Vision” (bsw , 87). Sir Percival was a knight from Arthurian lore; he was also, according to some traditions, the Grail knight – the one who found the secret location of the chalice that held the very blood of Christ from the Crucifixion. This is why Cram referred to the “heavenly” city in which the Grail was kept.4 And in Cram’s story the cavaliere’s role as host to such a place is crucial to the Grail simile. The Fisher King, keeper of the Holy Grail, is sick with a sinful wound in his thigh (i.e., groin) when the Grail knight arrives – hence the “Fisher” pun on the French pêcheur (fisher) and pécheur (sinner) – and his sickness extends to the very land of his domain. It is only with the Grail knight’s arrival that the king’s wound, and the land itself, might finally recover. The challenge of the Grail quest is the Grail knight’s ability to recognize and act upon his necessary role in

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healing the Fisher King. The quest is a test, and the Fisher King cannot directly reveal how the Grail knight is to accomplish it. Thus the narrator of Black Spirits and White had his dreamy vision in Sicily because Cram had written “Sister Maddelena” to extend the Grail simile beyond the mere beauty of the convent’s surroundings. The cavaliere, Italian for “knight,” himself the lord of the convent’s domain, became like the Fisher King for Cram’s ghost story.5 The cavaliere’s wound was the festering sickness of modernity itself – he claimed not to believe in the “priestly hocus-pocus” of Catholicism (bsw , 98) – and the sickness of his atheism affected his household and the surrounding lands.6 In particular the cavaliere told the narrator that “we have fierce tempests here” (89), implying that the land itself was in spiritual turmoil. And with that comment we get our first sense that the cavaliere is not quite what he seems. We recall that the cavaliere told the narrator and Tom Rendel the tale of Sister Maddelena after dinner at the convent. Notably though, he did not tell them of Sister Maddelena at first – only that he had something to say that might spare them “any unnecessary alarm.” To this Rendel interjected that the convent must be haunted, a sudden comment that caused the cavaliere to smile a little. In other words Rendel had passed the first part of the Grail knight’s test; he anticipated the extraordinary circumstances of the convent. Cram’s narrator then added a telling detail: “There is a storm coming … See, the lightning is flashing already up among the mountains at the head of the valley; if the story is tragic, as it must be, now is just the time for it.” In response the cavaliere “smiled that slow, cryptic smile of his that was so unfathomable” and replied: “As you say, there is a shower coming, and as we have fierce tempests here, we might not sleep; so perhaps we may as well sit up a little longer, and I will tell you the story” (bsw , 89). The cavaliere’s motives were as cryptic as the illicit tomb of Sister Maddelena, and through his reaction to the narrator’s comment we glimpse that the latter was the first to link the cavaliere’s stormy lands with the tragedy of the suffocated nun. The narrator would prove to be a Grail knight of sorts, causing the cavaliere to smile knowingly in the hope that the narrator might not sleep once he had heard the tale. We also recall that when the narrator retired to bed, he watched the storm from the deep embrasure of the window: “I had thought out the whole matter to my own satisfaction, and fancied I knew exactly what I should do, in case Sister Maddelena came to visit me.

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The story touched me: the thought of the poor faithful girl who sacrificed herself for her lover, – himself, very likely, quite unworthy, – and who now could never sleep for reason of her unquiet soul, sent out into the storm of eternity without spiritual aid or counsel. I could not sleep” (bsw , 100). Thus Cram’s narrator (who would prove worthy of saving the “poor faithful girl”) confirmed in that moment that the storm he saw outside the window reflected the turbulent afterlife of someone who died unsanctified. It moved him to the point of action, and after a sudden blast of lightning, he saw the ghost of Sister Maddelena. Furthermore when she breathed her predicted line, and when she moved to depart, the narrator “leaped from the bed and stood waiting.” This earned a “look of utter ­gratitude” from the ghost (101), and he pursued her to the cell in which her conventual family cruelly entombed her. Like the Grail knight the narrator understood the quest at hand and chose to act accordingly. Finally we recall that Cram’s narrator used his “architectural knowledge” to solve the mystery of Sister Maddelena’s tomb. Yet in light of his host’s “cryptic smile,” he might have known that the cavaliere was more than just “curious” to see him solve the mystery (bsw , 103). The cavaliere’s soul hung in the balance. The night before, the cavaliere noted that his servants wanted a proper mass said for the repose of Sister Maddelena. He cursed their request as kowtowing to “priestly hocus-pocus” and then (being a gracious host) apologized to Cram’s Catholic narrator for the offence he had caused. The narrator in turn (being a gracious guest) accepted the apology. The next day however, when Padre Stefano arrived from the neighbouring town to sanctify Sister Maddelena’s grave, the narrator noticed that the cavaliere “no longer spoke of the Church with that hardness, which had hurt [the narrator] so often.” He also wondered “if it might not prove that more than one soul benefited by the untoward events of the day” (110). Sure enough when Padre Stefano held midnight mass for the repose of Sister Maddelena’s soul, the chapel, which had gone unused for so long in the cavaliere’s household, returned to its full Catholic service, including the use of the Eucharistic chalice. Restoring the chapel of Santa Catarina meant the discovery of something comparable to the Holy Grail through the magical transubstantiation of wine into Christ’s blood. Thus when Cram’s narrator turned to leave the chapel, he saw the cavaliere kneeling in prayer. This then caused the narrator to smile to himself “with quiet satisfaction and gratitude … content

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with the chain of events that now seemed finished” (111). He had healed the cavaliere. Crucially the Grail narrative only functions in “Sister Maddelena” as an extended simile because the reused Eucharistic chalice is not to be confused with the actual Holy Grail. To be sure the Holy Grail is a Eucharistic chalice, “the sacred Chalice wherein St. Joseph of Aramathie had gathered the very Blood of Christ that had been shed for men on Calvary.” Furthermore in Le Morte d’Arthur Thomas Malory wrote that Joseph was “the first bishop of Christendom” because the prelate presented the Holy Grail to Sir Galahad and Galahad’s retinue before he “made semblant as though he would have gone to the sacring of the mass.”7 Cram had been reading from Malory’s Arthurian romance since at least J.M. Dent’s 1893 edition with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley.8 And he later advised his students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to read Le Morte d’Arthur to get a sense of the social context in which Gothic architecture thrived.9 Most importantly Cram used Le Morte d’Arthur as source material for the episodes depicted in the Grail window at the refectory of Princeton University’s graduate college. In that window we are told: “See ye here / Joseph / the first / Bishop of Crystendome” (fig. 4.1), quoting directly from Malory. Thus both Malory and Cram called attention to Joseph’s connection with the Grail and the Grail’s connection with the prelate’s performance of the Eucharist. Yet as both Le Morte d’Arthur and Cram’s Princeton window demonstrate, a hierarchy of revelations determines the Grail quest. At Camelot during the feast of Pentecost, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table witnessed a miraculous event: “there entered into the hall the Holy Greal covered with white samite, but there was none might see it, nor who bare it” (m da , 376). Thus in the lowest register of the Princeton window not only is the Grail depicted at Camelot, covered with white samite, but the angelic figures are likewise covered – they that, unseen, bear it (fig. 4.2). With that miraculous event Sir Gawain inaugurated the Grail quest so that he might see the Grail “more openly than it hath been seen here [in Camelot]” (377), and when the other knights heard Gawain’s vow, they joined in the quest as well. But Gawain was not destined to achieve the quest. Sir Galahad was the Grail knight, keeping company with Sirs Percival and Bors. Consequently in the middle register of the Princeton window, St Joseph stands within the Grail castle, Carbonek, as the first bishop of Christendom, with Sirs Bors and Percival to the left and right, respectively (fig. 4.1).

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4.1 (a, b, c)  In the Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, (b) Bishop Joseph stands beside an angel in Castle Carbonek, with Sirs Bors (a) and Percival (c) flanking them in the left and right lights, respectively; the angel holds the bloody spear that pierced Christ’s chest during the Crucifixion



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4.2  In the Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, veiled angels bring the Grail (also veiled) to the Round Table in Camelot, inaugurating the quest for the Holy Grail

Joseph however only “made semblant” of the mass at Carbonek, and a vision of Christ appeared within the chalice, informing Galahad that the Holy Grail, as it appeared in Castle Carbonek, was not a full revelation: “but yet hast thou not seen [the Grail] so openly as thou shalt see it in the city of Sarras in the spiritual place” (m da , 442). Hence on the highest register of the Princeton window Galahad ­himself stands in the central light of Sarras (fig. 4.3), the only person capable of withstanding the trembling in his body when his “flesh began to behold” the Holy Grail in its full and perfect glory (444). Even we are not permitted this experience, for the glazier introduced ribbons of cloud that stand between us and the conclusion of Galahad’s quest. Our mortal perception of the Grail is by necessity veiled because our bodies cannot endure the Grail’s perfection. Derrida unravelled the veil’s importance to Christianity when he considered the biblical accounts of the Crucifixion. Not only did Christ’s death generate the Holy Grail through the shedding of his blood but also ss Matthew, Mark, and Luke all noted that the veil in the Jerusalem temple tore when Jesus died. The Crucifixion links the Grail and the veil. More precisely ss Matthew and Mark stated that

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4.3  In the Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, Galahad kneels in witness of the Holy Grail that Christ holds aloft; thin ribbons of cloud obscure our unworthy view of this miracle

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the veil tore in two, St Luke that it tore in half (Mt 27:51; Mk 15:38; Lk 23:45). Consequently Derrida insisted that even in tearing, the veil did not disappear: “Shall we say that in tearing thus the veil revealed at last what it ought to hide, shelter, protect? Must we understand that it tore, simply, as if the tearing finally signed the end of the veil or of veiling, a sort of truth laid bare?” The veil marks “the separation between the holy and the most holy, between the tabernacle and the tabernacle of tabernacles.”10 By tearing the veil Christianity did not lay bare the truth of God’s absolute presence for eyes of flesh and blood to witness. The veil remains, though torn, because the holiness of the holiest of holies is by necessity in the veiling of that space. Thus when Cram wrote of the Christian soul, “by the grace of God penetrating beyond the veil that limits our mortal sense, achieving the quest of the Holy Grail of ultimate truth,” the temple veil marks the boundary of body and soul.11 And the tearing of the veil created a passage for the immortal Christian soul alone to penetrate. According to Cram this is the truth that all Christian mortals, save one, must face – all save the Grail knight, whose flesh is pure enough to endure the Grail’s absolute presence. This bodily limitation is essential to understand the distinction between the Holy Grail and every other Eucharistic chalice. The Holy Grail is indeed a Eucharistic chalice, but not all Eucharistic chalices are Holy Grails. For Cram this was the difference between the Catholic truth – as revealed to our mortal flesh through sacramental transubstantiation – and the Absolute Truth of God. He indicated as much when he wrote about the Grail quest: “it was none other than the Beatific Vision in quest of which they [the knights] rode: Beauty and Truth, absolute and unmingled of any imperfection, and these are attributes of God, not of man, and not to be perceived by eyes of flesh and blood” (gq , 8). Hence Cram would later insist: “Absolute Truth is not for us here on earth, for its flame would not vitalize but destroy.”12 It must be veiled to all save the Grail knight. Cram further elaborated the point in terms of sacramental phil­ osophy: “man, of his own motion, cannot remotely touch the ‘thingin-itself,’ the noumenon, the Absolute, but is able to deal only with the phenomenon or, as Aristotle calls it, the ‘phantasm.’ ‘In the present state of life, in which the soul is united to a passible body,’ says St. Thomas, ‘it is impossible for our intellect to understand anything actually, except by turning to the phantasm.’”13 In other words because we exist within our sensory bodies, “philosophers tell us that

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the Absolute, the ultimate Truth that lies behind the show of things, can only be apprehended or expressed through the symbol.”14 Thus for Cram the symbol is the Aristotelian “phantasm,” and the Eucharist is “the unique symbol of the redemption and transformation of ­matter, since, of all the Sacraments, it is the only one where the very physical qualities of the material vehicle are transformed.”15 This is because “by the act of Consecration the very substance of the bread and wine are transformed into an altogether different Substance, the very Body and Blood of Christ, only the accidents of form, colour, ponderability, etc., remaining.”16 Yet the “accidents of form” remain in the Eucharistic chalice to ensure that the bread and wine are still symbolic phantasms, differentiated from the divine by the slightest (but still crucial) degree. With the Holy Grail there are no accidents of form to distinguish the fluid in the chalice from the Blood of Christ. Communing with the Holy Grail is to touch the Absolute in a way that only the faith of the average Christian soul might achieve through the simulacrum of every other chalice. Otherwise the Knights of the Round Table would never have needed to leave Camelot to attain the Grail; they would have found it waiting on the Eucharistic high altar in any parish church or chapel. The Eucharistic chalice in Walkerville is not the Holy Grail. From Cram’s Anglo-Catholic purview the former retains the accidents of  form that perpetuate its symbolic status. Nevertheless because Edward Walker suffered from a festering illness, and because he was “king” of his community, and because that community was far removed from Cram in Boston, Walkerville was the ideal location for Cram to implement an architectural Grail quest. There are several chalices in the church, and discovering the Grail in Walkerville begins with the same cryptic patterning we used to examine Edward Walker’s illness in the previous chapter.

T ow e r o f t h e F our Wi nds In the first chapter we saw that thick spireless towers were a hallmark of Cram’s firm – in part under H.H. Richardson’s influence but also, in part, under the influence of Henry Vaughan and the Perpendicular Gothic. As William Morgan said of Vaughan’s school chapel (fig. 4.4) in Concord, New Hampshire: “It was the Perpendicular tower, based on the most glorious phase of English art, that so appealed to Cram and other architects of his generation. From St. Paul’s onward, the

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4.4  The chapel at St Paul’s School, Concord, gave Cram and other New Englanders first-hand experience with the Perpendicular Gothic vogue from Late Victorian Britain; the cornice beneath the tower’s ornate crenellations contains floral plaques in stone

square, spireless tower became one of the characteristic forms of the Modern Gothic style.”17 However there was more to the Concord tower that so appealed to Cram. He admired Vaughan’s choice to integrate little sculptural plaques along the tower cornice. In fact Cram used several of the same floral details, sculpted by the same studio of artists – the John Evans Company of Boston – for numerous towers from his early career, including St Stephen’s Church Cohasset; the Emmanuel Episcopal Church Newport, Rhode Island; and the new St Mary’s Church Walkerville.18 Nevertheless within the patterned regularity of these crowning cornices the Walkerville commission presents a subtle variation to distinguish the Grail quest for Walkerville. Every side of the Walkerville tower has sculpted details that repeat the same grape leaf, oak leaf, ballflower, budding, and rosy emblems found on other Cram churches. On the centre of every side of the Walkerville cornice however is a face blowing in one of the four ­cardinal directions (fig. 4.5). These faces are unique to the Walkerville design (at least in terms of Cram’s career) and personify the four

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4.5 (a, b, c, d)  The four winds of heaven blow from the tower cornice on the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville: (a) Zephyrus, the west wind, (b) Eurus, the east wind, (c) Boreas, the north wind, and (d) Notus, the south wind

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winds of heaven.19 For example the geographically eastern and western winds of Walkerville are similar depictions of faces that emerge from vegetation, blowing with puffed cheeks. The west wind, Zephyrus, blows in the direction of the Anglican cemetery. As the wind of springtime Zephyrus is an eschatological reminder that the Christian dead – like Christ himself in spring – will arise from their graves and join Christ in paradise. Conversely the east wind, Eurus, is the wind of rains. He faces in the same direction as the lone gargoyle of the Walkerville church, and that gargoyle, its mouth gorging on a downspout, spews forth rainwater as a reminder of what the east wind brings. The back of the tower holds the cold north wind, Boreas – also known as the Devourer. Boreas does not breathe life into the world, as does Zephyrus’s springtime breezes; the cold wind frostily devours life, leaving only the dead husks of once vernal growth. Thus the carving of Boreas in Walkerville does not purse his lips to blow. His mouth splits open to inhale and consume. Finally the church front holds Notus, the south wind – bringer of fog and rain.20 His mouth is neither pursed to blow nor inhaling to devour; he is seething his foggy breath through a sneer of cinched lips – a miasma akin to the rolling folds of cloth that envelop his head. This is why Notus is the only personification of wind at Walkerville to have his eyes closed. Unlike the other winds, the fog that sputters from his mouth is blinding. This is also why Notus is located directly below the cross that projects from the tower parapet. With his southern source, his quasiArabian headdress, and his shut eyes Notus represents the sirocco of spiritually blind pagan cultures, Islam included, over which the cross of Christianity is supposed to stand victorious for Cram. After all Cram feared “the Mohammedan tide [that] washed up to the walls of Vienna on the one hand, across the width of Africa, through Spain, and almost to the gates of Paris on the other, while Sicily and lower Italy were lost, Rome threatened, and even Christianity itself put in peril of its life.”21 Thus the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was further proof for Cram that the Renaissance era was the first step in modernity’s downfall.22 A zealously optimistic viewer of the Walkerville tower would ­consequently believe that Cram’s modern Gothic architecture was a victorious defence of Christian civilization against the decadent paganism and heresy that Islam helped usher into the world. We recall Cram’s celebration of later medieval architecture as “the

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trumpet blast of an awakening world, a proclamation to the four winds of heaven that man has found himself … in a word, that Christianity has triumphed over paganism, the Catholic faith over heresy” (gq , 56; my emphasis). Furthermore this image of Christianity as a sonorous proclamation to the four winds of heaven echoed in an article Cram wrote on campanology, in which he commended the restoration of the old colonial bells in a local Massachusetts church. He applauded the “homogeneity of metal” in the old bells and the resulting quality of their musical tones.23 He then advocated the proper casting, hanging, and playing of church bells, calling the art of campanology a “manly recreation.”24 And he concluded his article with the assertion that the re-hanging of old bells and the rediscovery of proper campanological music were proofs positive of the restored beauty of liturgical art, “proclaiming [their] rediscovered truth to the four winds of heaven.”25 The single tenor bell of Walkerville, cast by a Cram-approved foundry (i.e., Mears and Stainbank of London, England), might very well be an example of Cram’s rediscovered truth. Indeed the sound of the tenor bell of Walkerville pealing manfully from its Anglican belfry could be interpreted as a proclamation of Christian victory over paganism, ringing out to the four winds of heaven as depicted on the belfry’s crowning cornice. Pessimistically though, Cram did not actually think that his era would secure such a victory. He reminded his readers that “Paynim and infidel roll up in surging ranks, break, ebb, and are sucked back into their night, or, as happens now and again, sweep on in victory over fields won from them once by the Knights of the Gothic Quest, and all is to do again. There is neither rest nor pause, neither final defeat, nor definite victory” (gq , 9). In other words Cram envisioned modernity (living in a time of surging infidelity) in terms of Robert Browning’s questing poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and he quoted from Browning at length (7, 10–11).26 Like Browning Cram saw his modern Grail quest as the noble but hopeless journey of one who, dauntless, fought against the odds.27 This is why Cram’s Boston friend Louise Imogen Guiney, the “laureate of the lost,”28 named Cram as her knight; she admired him as a “mad agitator for ‘dead issues.’”29 Thus Cram fought for the lost cause of a Gothic resurrection because it was presently dead to the decadent minds of the modern world. And thus the seething, be-turbaned “night” of the foggy south wind is not simply crushed under the Walkerville cross.

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As we shall see (or rather not see), the veiling condition of Notus’s breath seeps into the Walkerville church, ensuring that Cram and other knights of the modern Gothic quest could not ultimately achieve their goal. They were certainly no better than the medieval knights who “rode into the four winds of heaven searching for, and never finding, the sacred chalice wherein St. Joseph of Aramathie had gathered the very blood of Christ” (gq , 7; my emphasis). Their failure was evident in the act of dispersion, searching for the Grail by necessity one wind at a time. Thus the Walkerville tower, the site on which Cram converged the four winds of heaven (perhaps even the site from which the four winds originate), marks the location of the Grail. This important detail is lost on those who approach the church thinking that the cornice sculptures are just another decorative crown on yet another square-topped Perpendicular tower, so “characteristic” of Cram’s Gothic Revival style. For those who note the unique detail of the four winds however, the Walkerville church interior becomes a different experience altogether. This distinction between ignorance and awareness also calls attention to divergent traditions for the Grail quest. For the tradition in which Sir Galahad is the Grail knight, as in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Galahad’s role was never in question. He only needed to find the chalice to achieve the quest. There was however a pre-Malorian tradition, as in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval Parzival, in which Sir Percival was the Grail knight. That version of the quest had Percival approach the Grail castle as an innocent fool. There he met the wounded Fisher King, and there he witnessed the Holy Grail and blood-tipped spear that pierced the side of Christ. But he failed to question what he saw and thus failed to transcend his lack of comprehension. Consequently Percival lost the opportunity to achieve the quest until much later in life, when he was no longer ignorant. Whereas Percival progressed from an innocent fool to the knowing achiever of the Grail, Galahad – utterly pure as he may have been – was never the fool, never unaware of his role as the Grail knight. At Walkerville Cram combined aspects of both traditions for the Grail quest. His favourite opera was Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, in which the titular hero (a variation on Percival) was Wagner’s Grail knight. But when Cram stated that Excalibur was an attempt “to do for the epic of our own race … a small measure of that which Richard Wagner achieved … for the Teutonic legends,” his source was not the “Teutonic” Parzival of von Eschenbach. His source was Malory’s

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Anglo-Arthurian romance. Therefore Galahad, not Percival, was Cram’s Grail knight, as evident in the Grail window at Princeton University. Nevertheless Cram used the Wagnerian Parsifal narrative to articulate our limited experience of the Grail quest at Walkerville. Cram assumed that we cannot be the Grail knight, but he wanted us to become like Percival, a subordinate knight who can recognize Walkerville as the Grail castle.30

W ag n e r ia n Gothi c Cram disparaged those who think that “architecture is frozen music” (mlia , 5). He did not disparage the musical analogy. On the contrary Cram claimed that a church “should be composed almost like a piece of music” (cb , 125). In another essay he stated that “a Gothic church is a gigantic composition, worked out like a symphony … Built out of innumerable details as a symphony is built out of innumerable notes, it becomes the most exalted expression of art that man can achieve.”31 It was the assumption that architecture is frozen that Cram disparaged. For him architecture is a temporal experience, as evident in a long passage describing a ceremony in an ideal Gothic church. After the service Cram imagined himself sitting in awe for hours: “All day like a flowing river the lights and shadows sweep to and fro, gathering now in transept, now in aisle, now in some silent vault, changing ever, moving endlessly” (gq , 112). Furthermore in Cram’s ghost story “The White Villa” his narrator first witnessed the ancient temples of Paestum in the full light of May sunshine: “three temples, one silver gray, one golden gray, and one flushed with intangible rose” (bsw , 57). As the sun set, “a red flush poured from the west, and painted the Doric temples in pallid rose against the evanescent purple of the Apennines” (60–1). At night a “flat, white mist, like water, lay over the entire meadow; from the midst rose against the blue-black sky the three ghostly temples, black and silver in the vivid moonlight” (68). Finally he described the ruins at sunrise, “when the mistlike lambent opals bathed the bases of the tall columns salmon in the morning light” (77). Yet Cram loved the temporal act of moving through the ritualized spaces of a church interior even more than he appreciated the transient chiaroscuro and atmospheric colouration of edifices in situ. He insisted that a Catholic ceremony was a fine art that once rightly ranked with the aesthetics of architecture, painting, sculpture,

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music, poetry, and drama, “demanding every adjunct of perfect beauty that can be brought to its environment” (gq , 292).32 Thus because Cram designed churches with precise ritual activities in mind, he could orchestrate their spaces to maximize the aesthetic and spiritual impact of the ritual narratives performed therein. For instance he used musical terminology to describe the experience of approaching a church’s high altar: “with the choir screen there is a change; and both from the standpoint of reverence and from that of artistic composition it is imperative that, to borrow a musical term, the crescendo that culminates in the climax of the altar itself should begin here” (cb , 90).33 Cram’s churches build to a crescendo of Catholic ritualism. Nor was the musical analogy limited to the structure of a Cram church. Concerning the crafted details that decorate the buildings, Cram asserted that “whoever the craftsman is he must work with and not for the architect, although the latter must exercise a general oversight over everything … Really an architect is, or should be, more a coordinator than a general designer … by means of which architectural designers, workmen, artificers, craftsmen, and artists should come together, and, while preserving their own personality, merge their identity in a great artistic whole, somewhat as the instruments of a great orchestra are assembled to the perfect rendering of a symphony by the master and conductor.”34 Cram considered himself the master and conductor of his architectural compositions, and although the architect should be more a coordinator than a general designer, the all-controlling architect was a lamentable but inevitable necessity of Cram’s modern world. In selecting an architect a church’s building committee must then “rely on him implicitly” (cb , 43) because modern social conditions are not right for a church to grow as an organic extension of the community that uses it. Cram may have wanted to limit himself to the role of conductor, but his “general oversight” could be quite overbearing. Cram’s firm had close control over the artisans working on the Walkerville church. All the key decorative flourishes were the work of artisans in the Boston area (i.e., people in close contact with Cram’s firm) or artisans who met Cram through the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. The Boston-based John Evans Company carved the stone sculpture for the new St Mary’s Church, and Cram’s firm specifically requested the carvings of the four winds unique to Walkerville’s tower cornice. Henry Chapman Mercer’s Moravian Pottery and Tile

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Works in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, produced all the paving tiles for the church floor. Cram first saw Mercer’s tiles in the exhibitions of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, and the inventory of tiles ordered for the Walkerville church indicate that Cram’s firm selected the exact images they wanted from Mercer’s 1901 catalogue.35 Johannes Kirchmayer of the Irving and Casson Company, Cambridge, Massachusetts, carved all the wooden figures at the ­Walkerville church. Cram would later boast that Kirchmayer was such a rare talent that the architects simply gave the Bavarian émigré “a free hand” in the designs.36 Nevertheless at Walkerville Cram’s firm provided Kirchmayer with detailed drawings to follow; he would have no free hand there. Finally all the church’s stained-glass windows were the work of Harry Goodhue, Bertram Goodhue’s younger brother, whose studio was also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. However as we might expect of an architect who “always had a passion for stained glass,” Cram did not give Harry Goodhue a free hand in Walkerville either. In fact Cram’s firm “laid out the general scheme for all the stained glass in the [Walkerville] church,”37 and Cram’s control over that scheme emerged through a miscalculation in the commission. Harry Goodhue quoted a price for his work based on the wrong number of windows, and he was forced to apologize to the Walkers for the discrepancy. In his separate correspondence with the Walkers, Harry then wrote: “I regret exceedingly this misunderstanding regarding the colored glass for St Mary’s Church and wish I might have dealt directly with you at every point.”38 Instead he had to deal with Cram. Cram’s admiration of Richard Wagner is demonstrative of his need to control every aspect of an architectural composition.39 In 1886 when Cram journeyed to Europe for the first time, his ultimate destination was Bayreuth, Germany, to witness Wagner’s music at the Festspielhaus designed expressly for Wagner. Cram had already heard some of Wagner’s music in Boston, but he heard it at Mechanics Hall “of all inappropriate places” (mlia , 7). Granted the deficiencies of the Boston setting did not stop Cram from becoming “a besotted Wagnerite … holding stubbornly to [his] idol” for the rest of his life (8), but he wished to experience Wagner’s music as the latter had staged it, “with Richter conducting and Materna, Winckleman, and Scaria singing, together with others personally trained by Wagner himself” (9). Therefore it was Wagner’s personal training and input at the Festspielhaus that made Cram’s 1886 journey to Bayreuth worth

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more than his previous experiences at Mechanics Hall. The Festspielhaus was Wagner’s attempt at a total work of art – a Gesamtkunstwerk – in which Wagner coordinated and approved of everything (e.g., the music, staging, lighting, costumes, and scenery) to maximize the aesthetic experience of theatregoing. At Bayreuth Cram attended three performances of Parsifal and three of Tristan und Isolde (another chivalric drama). When Cram later distinguished between “Good and Bad Modern Gothic” architecture, he drew upon his Bayreuth experience: “When you hear Tristan one night and Traviata the next you are enlightened and become convinced of the gulf that lies between good and evil.”40 The Gesamtkunstwerk of Tristan und Isolde was the same as good Gothic architecture. Thus Cram defended the musicality of Gothic archi­ tecture with a Wagnerian analogy: “We can no more reduce Gothic architecture to the terms of a structural formula than we can dismiss Greek architecture with a word on trabeate construction; the stone beams and dead loads are there in the one case, and the pointed vaults with their supporting ribs and resisting buttresses in the other, but these are no more the essence of the two styles than the leit-motifs are all of Wagner” (gq , 59). The isolated structural formulae of Gothic architecture did not matter to Cram, nor did the isolated leitmotifs of Wagner’s opera. What made Cram’s architecture and Wagner’s music “good” was the way they coordinated the constituent elements of their compositions. The interplay of leitmotifs in service of the narrative is what made Wagner’s music profound to Cram. Likewise it was (and still is) the interplay of visual leitmotifs that reveals the cryptic profundity of the Walkerville church. The four evangelists are a dominant leitmotif in that building, and Cram orchestrated their depictions to punctuate the Gesamtkunstwerk of the church’s sacramental mass. Tellingly when Cram corresponded with the Walker family he stated that the church’s final cost should include four choir-stall finials, each depicting one of the four evangelists. He insisted that “these [finials] are almost imperatively necessary to the design,”41 and the finials’ necessity depended on the tripartite division of the church along the ritual axis of nave, choir, and sanctuary. In the nave the protomes of the four evangelists occupy four of the six clerestory windows – the angel of St Matthew, the eagle of St John, the lion of St Mark, and the ox of St Luke (fig. 4.6). Then in the choir the four evangelists become the aforementioned wooden finials, with their protomes in clipei at their feet (fig. 4.7). Finally in

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the sanctuary the four protomes recur as relief carvings along the base of the high altar (fig. 4.8) – two on the front, one on each side. Hence when the faithful approach the high altar in Walkerville, they witness the four evangelists as a leitmotif that gets closer and closer to their ritual approach, and thus stronger and stronger in tangible materiality. The evangelistic protomes in the nave are translucent glass, high in the clerestory. In the choir the evangelists solidify into the wooden finials that sit on either side of the approaching faithful. And as the faithful kneel before the altar rail they come face to face with the evangelistic protomes made substantial in the durable stone of the same altar on which the body and blood of Christ are made, trans-substantially. With the evangelistic leitmotif the architecture guides the congregants to the liturgical climax of the church – kneeling before the sanctuary to commune with the body and blood of Christ. But for at least once in Cram’s architectural career the liturgical climax in Walkerville is not the aesthetic climax of his church design. At stake in this moment of communion is the difference between the Holy Grail and a Eucharistic chalice. Cram structured the Walkerville leitmotifs along the church’s ritual axis so that as the faithful approach to receive communion they run the risk of being innocent fools, like Parsifal in the beginning of Wagner’s opera. Likewise if we approach the Walkerville church without heeding the quartet of winds, and if we pass through the nave thinking that the church is simply about the sacramental Eucharist, then we have failed to appreciate the mystery encrypted in the architecture. The evangelists have fooled us into thinking that the Walkerville church is merely a site of Eucharistic sacrifice and not the castle of the sickly Fisher King, keeper of the Holy Grail. Henry Adams further articulated the point in a book Cram edited and prefaced: “As knights-errant necessarily did the wrong thing in order to make their adventures possible, Perceval’s error [in first failing to comprehend the Grail mystery] cannot be in itself mysterious, nor was the castle in any way mysterious where the miracle occurred. It appeared to him to be the usual castle, and he saw nothing unusual in the manner of his reception by the usual old lord, or in the fact that both seated themselves quite simply before the hall-fire with the usual household. Then, as though it were an everyday habit, the Holy Grail was brought in.”42 Thus the Grail castle is a site in which the domestic and the religious converge, a site in which the customs of a typical household conceal the miraculously religious. In that context the

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4.6 (a, b, c)  The clerestory windows in the nave of the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, include evangelistic leitmotifs and clues to the Grail quest’s finale: (a) the lion of St Mark and the eagle of St John the Evangelist, (b) the angel of St Matthew and the sacrificial lamb, and (c) the pelican piercing the right-hand side of its breast and the ox of St Luke

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4.7 (a, b, c, d)  The “necessary” choir-stall finials in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, depict (a) St John the Evangelist, (b) St Mark, (c) St Luke, and (d) St Matthew

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4.8  The high altar in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, includes the angel of St Matthew and the lion of St Mark on the front; the ox of St Luke and the eagle of St John the Evangelist decorate the sides

Grail knight’s test is his ability to question the typicality of the household and then heal the Fisher King. Cram inverted the terms of this equation in his Walkerville design. The new St Mary’s Church is a building that might appear to be a typical sacred space in which “nothing sensational” (to echo Schuyler’s phrase) appears to occur with the churchly business of transubstantiating bread and wine. Yet as we have seen in the previous chapters the Walkerville church is the house of God tainted with the disease of modernity, of which Edward Walker was representational. He was Cram’s Fisher King, and his church was (and still is) the secretive Grail castle.43 To heal the Fisher King of the modern world Cram required the Grail knight to see beyond the conventions of his religious architecture. Our inability to see this leaves us like Parsifal, a knight errant whose path to comprehension is slower than that of Cram’s perfect Grail knight Sir Galahad. Galahad would simply travel the ritual axis of the Walkerville church, from vestibule to high altar, knowing that the Grail quest lay before him. Conversely the path of the Parsifalian knight errant lies in the southern aisle of the Walkerville church – act two of Cram’s Wagnerian Gothic.

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T h e K n ig h t Errant Cram’s interest in the errantry of knighthood began at least as early as 1892, when he co-founded and co-edited an aesthetics journal called The Knight Errant. As the apologetic editorial for the first issue declared, Cram fashioned himself as a knight in combat with the modern world, riding for the “succour of forlorn hopes and the restoration of forgotten ideals.”44 He and his contributing allies were “men against an epoch.”45 Yet as Cram’s dear friend Guiney made clear in her “poem of salutation” for the journal’s inaugural issue, the knight errant is someone who fights against the epoch from within, not from some transcendental position beyond the sickness: “The passion of perfection / Redeem my faulty way!”46 The knight errant is not perfect but endlessly pursues perfection – hence Cram’s Ruskinian belief in the nobility of imperfection. Thus when Cram wrote to the Walker brothers that the Walkerville church was an attempt to create “an absolutely perfect piece of ecclesiastical design,” he already knew that that perfection was impossible – especially under the present circumstances of the degenerate “spirit of the epoch,” from which no one can escape. If the ritual axis of the Walkerville church seems to be Cram’s perfect piece of ecclesiastical design, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of perfectly orchestrated ­leitmotifs, it does so to create a juxtaposition with the southern aisle, which becomes the “faulty way” of a knight errant in pursuit of perfection. The very position of the Walkerville aisle expresses the faltering path of the knight errant. We recall that Cram reduced the southern aisle by the length of one western bay in order to represent the leprous arm of the syphilitic Edward Walker. In turn this truncated arm represented the sickly condition of modernity’s Gothick revenant. This chapter details the aisle in terms of the sickly Fisher King, folding the Walkerville church as a structural body into the Walkerville church as a ritual space. The circumambulation needed to enter the southern aisle is that of a knight errant – a manoeuvre that Cram learned from the game of chess. Shand-Tucci rightly noted how Cram “rather fancied himself at chess in his youth.”47 Furthermore in Black Spirits and White the game of chess featured in two of the six stories. In “In Kropfsberg Keep” two ghost hunters played games of chess to keep awake (bsw , 43), and in “The Dead Valley” Cram’s narrator learned the story

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while he and a friend had “some close, fierce battles” at chess (133). Shand-Tucci consequently used the knight’s move on a chessboard as a metaphor for Cram’s life and work; every chance Cram had for advancement came at the cost of a pragmatic compromise – two steps forward and one to the side.48 At Walkerville though, the metaphor was literal and intrinsic to the errant condition of modernity. The knight’s move on a chessboard was for Cram the errant path of modern knighthood, and as we move through the Walkerville church, circumambulating the leprous limit of the southwestern corner, we enter the southern aisle by moving two steps into the nave (past the vestibule and the Spes window’s bay) and one step into the aisle (fig. 1.3). Our errant path is the direct result of sick modernity. Another leitmotif within the Walkerville church accentuates the significance of the knight’s move into the southern aisle. That leitmotif is the Maltese cross, as worn by the Knights Hospitaller (fig. 4.9). The Knights Hospitaller were a chivalric order of the Middle Age, affiliated with St John’s Hospital of Jerusalem, and they developed their stylized cross as a symbol of regeneration. In the Maltese cross a quartet of spear tips converge on a central point to form the four arms of the cross.49 Because the spear tips are double-edged, creating eight sides among the four converging spears, the cross furthermore served to connect the Knights Hospitaller with their patron saint John the Baptist. The eight sides echo the typically octagonal shape of the baptismal font.50 Thus just as the ablutions of baptismal w ­ aters regenerate the soul, cleansing Christians of their original sin, so too did the Jerusalem Hospital of St John the Baptist seek to regenerate the Christian body, cleansing the flesh of its wounds and ailments51 – the “double cure” for which Arthur Hall prayed. The Knights Hospitaller provided safe passage for pilgrims seeking corporeal and spiritual regeneration in Jerusalem. In Walkerville a crude version of the Maltese cross marks the passages through the church.52 More precisely Cram situated the Maltese cross at the edges of the pavement in the nave, along the “perfect” ritual axis of the alley. The Knights Hospitaller are guiding the faithful to sit among their fellow congregants and to witness the miracle of transubstantiation before partaking of the spiritual nourishment at the high-altar rail. In the southern aisle however, Cram did not situate the Maltese crosses at the edge of the pavement; they are clustered in the middle of the aisle’s passageway (as seen in fig. 4.9). Thus in the southern aisle the Knights Hospitaller do not guide us to sit

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4.9  In the liturgically southern aisle of the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, the Maltese crosses cluster in the middle of the pavement, guiding us to pass the baptismal font before engaging in knightly combat on the steps to the morning chapel; the monogram of the Moravian Pottery and Tiles Works sits in the middle of the crosses

among the pews. Instead we are encouraged to walk the errant path of Edward Walker’s aisle, all the way to the morning chapel – the Chapel Perilous of Walkerville. On the step immediately before the kneelers of the morning chapel Cram placed more Moravian tiles. On the left is a knight, lance in hand, charging into combat against a centaur (fig. 4.10); on the right is another knight, lance in hand (dog in advance), charging into combat against a demon (fig. 4.11).53 When Arthur Hall wrote a book on Christ’s Temptation and Ours, he called specific attention to the devil’s choice in tempting Christ immediately after the latter’s baptism in the River Jordan.54 Approaching the chapel steps from Walkerville’s southern aisle, we pass the baptismal font and are invited to think of Christ’s temptation and ours. Christ is “the captain of our salvation, who fought His way through the hosts of evil, and calls upon His disciples to follow where He had gone before, to trample under foot the enemy that He has first smitten to the ground.”55 The first battleground was the desert into which Christ

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had ventured for forty days and forty nights immediately after his baptism, and of the three ways that the devil tried to tempt Christ in the wilderness, the first is of consequence in Walkerville: “the lust of the flesh.”56 For Christ the lust of the flesh was the temptation of hunger. Having watched Christ wander in the desert for days on end, the devil tried to offer him food to sustain the flesh of his body, but Christ refused. At Walkerville however the lust of the flesh is the temptation of sex – hence the chosen combat with a centaur. In the broadest sense the centaur represents “evil passions”57 and is thus often located near the cleansing waters of a church’s baptismal font.58 For Cram the centaur specifically represented the evil passions of paganism, against which the “modern Goth” is supposed to defend the world. In fact he offered the following advice to his fellow Gothic Revivalists: “steep yourselves in the solution” of medieval beauty, “let it soak in until you are full of its medicinal power, and then, sloughing off the pagan hide that has grown over your bodies during four centuries of barbarism, come forth men and Christians” (gq , 164). The pagan hide to which Cram referred was the poisoned shirt of Nessus, the centaur from ancient Greek mythology who ferried people across a river. When Nessus ferried Hercules’s wife, Deianira, the centaur tried to abduct and rape her, and Hercules shot him with an arrow. As the centaur lay dying, he told Deianira that his blood had the magical power to restore her husband’s love should Hercules ever abandon her. Deianira then collected the centaur’s blood-soaked shirt (or hide) and eventually gave it to Hercules on the suspicion that he no longer loved her. Yet Nessus had deceived her; the shirt was poisoned with his blood, and Hercules died in agony. Everywhere in the modern world Cram pessimistically saw proof of that betrayal, despite the “medicinal power” of medieval beauty. He specifically wrote that the renewed paganisms of the world in all their myriad manifestations – Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution – were “strands” that have “gone to the weaving of the poisonous shirt of Nessus.”59 In other words this myth served as a historical metaphor. The medieval Catholic Church performed the Herculean labour of slaying the centaur of ancient paganism, but that mighty institution was brought low by the poison of pagan revenge when the lasciviousness of modernity corrupted the bodies and souls of humanity. Half man, half beast, the centaur was indeed subject to evil passions, and the Walkerville knights errant must fight against this – hence the other knightly combat on the chapel step. The lancing

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4.10 (a, b)  On the steps to the morning chapel in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, a knight (a) charges into combat against a lustful centaur (b)

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4.11 (a, b, c)  On the steps to the morning chapel in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, a knight (a) and his faithful dog (b) charge into combat against the demon of lust (c), whose “tail” falls ambiguously between its legs

knight and the dog of his Christian fidelity do battle with a demon whose “tail” is ambiguously located between its legs. The knight must fight against the demon of lust. This ultimately was the failure of Malory’s Percival. In Le Morte d’Arthur the devil seduced Percival in the form of a damsel in distress. Having promised to help the maiden, Percival then accepted her invitation to dine in her pavilion. There he drank “the strongest

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wine that ever he drank,” and he so marvelled at her beauty that he swore to be her “true servant” and do nothing but her command (m da , 398). She lay down naked on her bed and bade Percival to join her. Only at the last minute did he see the red cross on the pommel of his discarded sword, remembering his vow to the Grail quest and crossing himself. This caused the devil to shriek and reveal himself from within his damsel disguise. And as penance for the near loss of his chastity, Percival “drew his sword unto him[self], saying, Sithen my flesh will be my master I shall punish it; and therewith he rove himself through the thigh” (399), his self-inflicted punishment echoing the wounded thigh (i.e., groin) of the Fisher King. Unlike Christ, who refused the devil’s proffer of food in the desert, Percival accepted the devil’s wine and it weakened his resolve in a way that Galahad – the true Grail knight – would never suffer.60 This is also where Cram parted company with Richard Wagner in pursuit of the epic of his “own race.” In act two of Parsifal the hero is constantly on the verge of dallying with the flower maidens who tempt him in the fallen realm beyond the Grail kingdom. The maidens cried: “Who’ll play with us now?” and Parsifal replied: “That fain would I!”61 Klingsor, the villain of the opera, also sent Kundry, the Magdalenian seductress, to corrupt Parsifal, and her efforts were almost in vain – until she recalled Parsifal’s love for his mother and drew upon that tenderness to steal a kiss. Only then did Parsifal fully understand what had happened to the sinful Fisher King, who had also fallen for Kundry. In addition Parsifal understood the foolish innocence of his initial failure to save the king in the opera’s opening act, and with that, he, like Malory’s Percival, wandered off, seeking penance for his failure. Yet Wagner’s Parsifal ultimately succeeded in the third act, returning to the Grail kingdom, healing the wounded king with the spear, and owning his destiny as the Grail knight. In Malory’s account Percival also succeeded in returning to the Grail castle, but only as Galahad’s predestined subordinate – the right-hand man to the Siege Perilous. Galahad’s perfection is unassailable to all save Christ, whose blood, absolute and unmingled of any imperfection, Galahad alone could taste in the end. Thus in coming to the end of the Walkerville Grail narrative – moving back to the ritual axis of the high altar – we come out of the errant southern aisle no better than Percival. At best we might understand the lustful temptation that brought low the Fisher King (i.e., Edward Walker’s syphilis), and we might

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sympathize with his wounded repentance. But we cannot perform the miracle to save him.

Amfortas! Die Wunde! Die Wunde! Back in the nave alley we now recall that there are six lights in the clerestory windows, not four. In addition to the quartet of evangelistic protomes, there are images of the lamb and of the pelican feeding its young (fig. 4.6). The lamb, holding the banner of “Agnus Dei,” is in reference to Christ as the sacrificial lamb. The pelican is also symbolic of that sacrifice because it was once believed that the pelican pierced its own breast to feed its children with the blood it shed. The pelican became a reminder that Christ’s sacrifice was sanguineous – as are the split pomegranates that wreath all the windows in the nave clerestory. More precisely in the Walkerville window the pelican pierces the right side of its breast – a gesture that will be significant when the Grail is discovered. In the meantime as we approach the sanctuary, a pair of devouring etins threatens us in the form of Moravian tiles flanking the altar rail (fig. 4.12).62 An etin is a giant, only these giants have great, leonine manes that conflate several questing traditions into one threatening motif. For one in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur Sir Lancelot pled to God that “in despite for [his] sins done aforetime,” he might see “some thing” of the Holy Grail (m da , 437). Then Lancelot discovered the Grail castle, Carbonek, at which he passed through a gate guarded by flanking lions that “made semblant to do him harm” (436). Cram depicted that vignette in his Princeton window, in which Lancelot passed the test of valour. However Lancelot still carried the taint of sexual sin (i.e., his adulterous relationship with Guinevere). Thus he could only see the Grail through a “red samite” covering (437), and he was thereafter told that his quest was done, for “never shall ye see of the Sangreal no more than ye have seen” (438). Furthermore the etins, as giants, echo another test of Lancelot’s valour, in which he freed a castle from “two great giants, well armed all save the heads, with two horrible clubs in their hands” (109). Hence we see the giants’ heads exposed in Cram’s choir floor, daring the blades of valorous combat or at least the trampling feet of the faithful that Arthur Hall invoked in the name of Christ. Finally these etins bring to the fore Browning’s questing poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Cram, who specifically identified with Childe Roland

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4.12  One of the two etin tiles in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, flanks the sanctuary entrance, testing the valour of knights in quest of the Holy Grail

in his introduction to The Gothic Quest, also implemented an aspect of  that poem in the Walkerville church. When Browning’s knight approached the end of his quest, he described the environment thusly: “The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: / The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, / Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay – / ‘Now stab and end the creature – to the heft!’”63 The etins in Walkerville, like the metaphorical giants of Browning’s poem, await the Grail knight’s arrival to thrust his lance into the dying sunset of decadent modernism. Therefore in the sanctuary the central tower on the castle of the reredos screen (fig. 1.8) culminates with a cross unique in Cram’s architecture (fig. 4.13). This cross, composed of four intersecting crescents, not only creates an eccentric variant on the eight-pointed Maltese cross but also represents the Vesica Piscis that the younger Pugin noted in his Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament. Pugin stated that the Vesica Piscis is a “symbolical figure, consisting of two intersecting segments of circles, introduced as an emblem of our Lord … in reference to the waters of Baptism. Hence it seems probable that the mode of representing our Lord in a Nimbus of a fish form ori­ ginated.”64 However the Walkerville cross atop the reredos castle is

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made of four segments – two for Christ and two for the palimpsestic Fisher King, Edward Walker.65 The fish are intertwining emblems of Christ’s and Edward’s fates. After all, the blood of Christ’s wounded side from the Crucifixion is the same blood used to heal the Fisher King: “And Galahad went anon to the spear which lay upon the table, and touched the blood with his fingers, and came after to the maimed king and anointed his legs … [Galahad] had healed [the Fisher King]” (m da , 443). Consequently the fish cross directly relates to the Crucifixion scene depicted in the altar window above the reredos (fig. 4.14). This image of the Crucifixion is not unique to Walkerville. Cram wrote to the Walkers, praising Harry Goodhue’s work on the highaltar window at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Newport.66 At the heart of the Newport window is the same depiction of the Crucifixion. However the Walkerville Crucifixion is not a small, central episode among several glass vignettes. At Walkerville the entire altar window depicts the event in full scale. Furthermore although the Crucifixion composition is not unique to Walkerville, the structuring of the composition is; the Crucifixion spreads across three massive lights, with a pair of three-light ladders intervening to either side of Christ’s torso. Thus unlike the Newport window, the Walkerville window has a series of angels placed between Christ and his mourning companions. And because Cram’s sense of cryptic architecture plays on repetitive expectations, the flanking angels form a final pattern to be studied, leading to the Holy Grail. The two angels at the tops of the Walkerville tracery ladders look down in prayer, their garments coloured in reciprocal combinations of red and blue. Likewise the censer-swinging angels at the bottom are dressed in reciprocal combinations of red and purple. The same reciprocal combinations are evident from beneath the green mantles on the chalice-holding angels in the middle, save one crucial difference (fig. 4.15). The angel on Christ’s left-hand side (our right) is wearing a pallium that consists solely of a long ribbon of fabric draped down the centre of its body; a chasuble drapes the shoulders instead. That angel’s pallium is inferior to the angel on Christ’s righthand side (our left) because the right-hand angel has not only the ribbon of fabric down the centre of its body but also a ribbon across its shoulders. Therefore the right-hand angel’s pallium is cruciform, indicating that the chalice in its hands is the one from the Crucifixion and is thus the Holy Grail or rather the chalice that would become the Holy Grail.

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4.13  The fish cross that crowns the reredos screen above the high altar in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, comprises two Vesica Pisces, one for Christ and one for the Fisher King, Edward Walker

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4.14  The high-altar window in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, depicts the Crucifixion, with SS Mary and John the Evangelist to the left and right, respectively, and pairs of colour-coordinated angels flanking Christ’s sides

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4.15  In the high-altar window at the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, the angel on Christ’s right-hand side (our left) holds the chalice that would become the Holy Grail; the angel’s pallium is cruciform, and the angel turns to look at Christ’s genitally folded loincloth

Not incidentally in the Princeton Grail window Cram depicted Joseph, the first bishop of Christendom, with a cruciform pallium (fig. 4.1). But Joseph’s pallium is a mixture of blood-red jewel tones laced in a lattice of pure white fabric, both of which are in reference to the pure blood Christ shed into Joseph’s chalice. At Walkerville the angel holding that chalice aloft has a pallium of pure white embossing only. Christ has yet to shed his blood in the new St Mary’s Church. In fact the glazier organized the lead cames of the Cruci­ fixion window to triangulate a vector into Christ’s waiting flesh, tempting us to pierce it (fig. 3.4). As we look back into the nave alley, with the Walkerville pulpit projecting into the right-hand side of the church’s structural body (fig. 3.5) and the pelican in the nave clerestory piercing the right-hand side of its breast (fig. 4.6), we are reminded time and again that Christ’s sacrifice involved the  piercing of his right-hand side. Likewise looking back to the many spear tips of the Maltese crosses in Walkerville (fig 4.9), we are reminded that the lance is required to pierce Christ’s side. In other words because the spear tips of the Maltese cross symbolize

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regeneration, the spear tip from the Crucifixion is the tool necessary to regenerate the Fisher King. In Walkerville the necessary lance waits in St George’s hand – he who stands right of centre in the castle of Walkerville’s reredos screen, with a Maltese cross emblazoned on his visor (fig. 1.8). As we kneel before the altar, looking to the woodwork, the imperative of Christ’s wounding (and thence the Fisher King’s healing) is evident. From the centre of the reredos the Virgin Mary, lady of the castle, looks down to us with long-suffering patience, waiting for us to act: “Behold how sad she is, and in her eyes / Infinite sorrow, infinite despair. / Not her own mother’s grief it is that lies / Upon her soul, a weary weight of care, / Not the pity of self, but the blind, yearning cry / Of the world’s hopeless, helpless misery.”67 To her right John the Baptist, patron saint of the Knights Hospitaller, turns a Leonardesque finger, pointing not heavenward but inward toward himself as he looks down to where we kneel. He awaits the arrival of someone as saintly as him. Even farther to her right is St Stephen – he who was martyred at the hands of those who threw prejudicial stones. If Cram reminded the readers of “Sister Maddelena” that only the sinless could cast the first stone, then at Walkerville he reminded the knights errant that only the sinless could cast the first lance. Furthermore while designing the Walkerville church, Cram commissioned his friend George Hallowell to paint an altarpiece at All Saints’ Ashmont. In the central panel of that altarpiece Hallowell painted St George to look upon the congregation, with a sword in hand and the red-cross shield at his side. He awaits the Grail knight on whom he might bestow these weapons for use in pursuit of the Holy Grail. In Walkerville St George holds the lance that would achieve the Grail quest, but he does not turn to engage the congregation. He does not afford the Grail knight such an obvious clue. This is the test. The Grail knight must look into the window, horrified in the knowledge that Christ is still suffering, and he must take the lance from St George’s feigned-indifferent hand, thrusting the blade into Christ’s side: “Now stab and end the creature – to the heft!” And having done so the Grail knight will end Christ’s torture and use the bloody lance to anoint the Fisher King’s sickly body, healing not only Edward Walker but also the very wasteland of an ailing modern world. The stakes in this church could hardly have been higher for Cram, and the unusual shape of the Walkerville lance further articulates the

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point. It is bladed at both ends. Wagner’s Grail knight came to understand the power of the Grail only when he finally felt sympathetic compassion for the Fisher King’s suffering: “Amfortas! The spearwound! The spear-wound! In my heart is it burning.”68 The wound of Amfortas, the Wagnerian Fisher King, burned in the Grail knight’s heart as well. As only the Grail knight can stab the lance into the heart of the high-altar glass, the lance simultaneously can only stab the Grail knight’s heart “to the heft!” This is why Cram chose the Presentation in the Temple as the subject matter for the other window in Walkerville’s southern aisle (fig. 1.3). During the Presentation in the Temple an old man named Simeon recognized the infant Christ as the messiah and prophesied to the Virgin Mary: “yea, a sword shall pierce through your own soul also” (Lk 2:35). Hence the two lights surrounding the Presentation vignette in the Walkerville window include red hearts amid the Marian fleursde-lis, the same heart-shaped motif positioned above Mary’s head as she witnesses the Crucifixion in the high-altar window (fig. 4.14). Thus inasmuch as the Walkerville church is dedicated to God in the name of St Mary, the Grail knight must let his heart be pierced with the utter compassion of the Virgin Mary’s sorrow at witnessing her son’s torture. In the words of Arthur Hall, “We sing of her as standing by the Cross of her Son, but it is much too solemn and awful a thought for mere sentiment.”69 And thus if Percival stabbed himself in the thigh for the taint of lust in his heart, then Galahad, “a clene maiden” whose soul was unblemished with lust (m da , 444), has the purity of compassion necessary to pierce both Christ’s heart physically and his own heart emotionally. Yet we ourselves can only appreciate this event through the “mere sentiment” of ceremony, as evident in the woodwork of the Walkerville sanctuary. Cram’s firm designed the credence shelf, on which the Eucharistic chalice is prepared for transubstantiation, with twin grapevines trained into the shape of hearts (fig. 4.16). Grape is to wine as wine is to blood, by which the vineyard’s “accidents of form” still taint our participation in the Eucharist. This is the closest that we might come to the Holy Grail. To that end we might sympathize with Christ’s suffering, but we cannot bear its full and utter sorrow, just as surely as we cannot bear the arms of the double-sided lance or the full presence of the Holy Grail. Cram further demonstrated this distinction in yet another difference between the chalice-holding angels in Walkerville’s high-altar

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4.16  Above the credence shelf in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, a pair of grapevines takes the shape of twinned hearts, symbolizing Christ’s blood and our compassion

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window (fig. 4.15). The angel to Christ’s left looks to the congregation. Like the vessel for the Eucharistic performance of the priests below, the chalice of the left-hand angel is a diminished version of the Holy Grail – as diminished as the pallium worn upon its body. Conversely Christ’s right-hand angel turns to look at him, or rather at his loincloth. As Leo Steinberg has demonstrated (and Shand-Tucci has echoed in his biography of Cram) the folding of Christ’s loincloth could be a veiled reference to Christ’s genitalia beneath the fabric.70 Moreover Arthur Hall emphasized that Christ “had a human body, subject … to all sinless infirmities.”71 Christ could bleed – as he did during the Circumcision. In that sense the significance of the angel’s glance is a reminder that Christ’s circumcision was the first shedding of his blood, a prefiguration of the blood he will eventually shed at Walkerville’s Calvary if the Grail knight were to arrive. More importantly the flaccid folding of Christ’s genital loincloth signifies that his circumcised penis would not be moved to sin. His genitals were a requisite part of his “real and perfect Manhood” – “real” inasmuch as God incarnate must occupy a fully human body and “perfect” inasmuch as that body transcended the temptation to sin. If Christ lacked a penis, then the chastity of his real and perfect manhood would have been a meaningless victory to the fully human faithful who follow his example. This is why Cram later lamented the castration of Peter Abelard: “one is driven to believe that the terrible mutilation to which he had been subjected had broken down his personality and left him in all things less than man.”72 For  Cram when Abelard repented his sexual sins, his castration robbed him of the opportunity to follow in the example of Christ’s chaste manhood. This was also Klingsor’s problem, the fallen knight in Wagner’s Parsifal. Knowing that he could not sustain the requisite chastity to be a knight of the Grail kingdom, Klingsor castrated himself to escape the physical act of sex. The sin however was already real in Klingsor’s lustful heart, and although his self-castration kept him from fully acting on his lust, it also kept him from the real victory of transcending sin: “Unable in himself the lust of sin to deaden, his end sought he by violence; toward the Grail his hand he turned, [and] contemptuously its Guardian drove his thence.”73 Klingsor lacked the strength and restraint to be worthy of the Grail. Thus just as the structural body of medieval Gothic architecture was for Cram a “manly” combination of strength and restraint, so too did the mortal flesh of Christ’s

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incarnate manhood embody the strength and restraint necessary to sustain his perfection under the threat of sin.

C e r e m o n ia l Gothi c The sexual aspects of Grail mythology and their correlations with Christian morality underscored Cram’s inability to be the Grail knight Edward Walker needed to save his body from syphilis. Inasmuch as Cram’s friend Richard Hovey wrote about the “swift orgasm of the knife,”74 and inasmuch as another friend, Gelett Burgess, wrote to Cram about “the long ambitious strokes of an excited and madly turgescent penis,”75 it was impossible for Cram to stab Christ’s body and not see the homoerotic implications of such a  gesture. It was impossible for him to be a “clene maiden” like Galahad, thanks to the decadence of his bohemian youth. Furthermore inasmuch as Cram’s friend Fred Holland Day developed controversial photographs of himself as Christ, which directly inspired Christ’s face in Walkerville’s Crucifixion, the homoeroticism of Day’s photography could have affected Cram’s presentation of Christ’s flesh as the Grail knight’s test.76 However I would not go as far as Shand-Tucci does in claiming that Cram was essentially homosexual. Nor would I follow Shand-Tucci’s thesis that Cram’s “gay Gothic” architecture is an alternative modernism psychologically charged with an emerging socio-scientific discourse on homosexuality and sexual orientation in general.77 The many times Cram used the word queer in his ghost story “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” (see bsw , 5, 6, 9, 11, 21) were not likely modern euphemisms for homosexuality.78 Rather inasmuch as Cram’s story offered a counterpoint to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, it is more likely that Cram used “queer” in “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” (and only in that story) in response to Bulwer-Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton’s protagonist asked a servant if he had “not seen nor heard anything remarkable” at the haunted house. To this the servant replied: “Well, sir, I must owe that I have heard something queer,”79 the queerness of which referring to the strangeness of the situation, without any apparent homoerotic subtexts. Furthermore although I agree with Shand-Tucci that Cram probably had in  mind the hidden house of Beacon Hill (74 ½ Pinckney Street) from  his Boston neighbourhood when he envisioned the exterior of 252 Rue M. le Prince (both buildings have a courtyard entered

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through a long tunnel from the street), I cannot agree that the tunnel leading to Cram’s haunted house was an example of rectal architecture and thus essential to Cram’s “gay Gothic” sensibilities. For Shand-Tucci, “it says something about New England that back doors there are always more significant than front doors,”80 but the entrance to the hidden house of Beacon Hill is not a back door (nor is the door to the Bouche d’Enfer), and such a reading of the Bouche d’Enfer skews the sexual politics of that ghost story and, by extension, the horror haunting Cram at the Walkerville church. We recall that Eugene d’Ardeche named the trio of secret rooms in the Bouche d’Enfer (the rooms dedicated to Mlle de Tartas’s black magic) as “just about as queer and fin de siècle as I can well imagine.” And the queerest (i.e., strangest) part of the enfilade was the middle room, with a large, hemispherical dome: “[The] walls and ceiling were dark blue, spotted with gold stars; and reaching from floor to floor across the dome stretched a colossal figure in red lacquer of a nude woman kneeling, her legs reaching out along the floor on either side, her head touching the lintel of the door through which we had entered, her arms forming its sides, with the fore arms extended and stretching along the walls until they met the long feet. The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw. From the navel hung a great white object, like the traditional roc’s egg of the Arabian Nights” (bsw , 19). The room’s unspoken detail was the placement of the other doorway leading to the inner sanctum of the Walpurgisnacht. If the lacquered woman’s head rested on the door by which the characters entered, and if her misshapen arms bent from either side of that door so that her forearms wrapped around the room to meet her elongated feet, then the other door stood between her legs from where she knelt. In other words the architecture of the Bouche d’Enfer was vaginal, not rectal – hence the ovarian image of the white object suspended umbilically from the lacquered woman’s navel. Cram’s narrator described his spectral assailant at 252 Rue M. le Prince as a “hellish succubus” – a demonic femininity – because Cram knew how to distinguish a succubus from her counterpart, an incubus. An incubus is a male demon that crushes the chest of its victim with nightmarish oppression. When Cram lamented the modern market of land speculation he called it an “incubus” (cb , 70), implying that it crushed the real value of property with a perverse sense of the squatter’s right. And when one of Cram’s Decadent characters

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cursed the modern system of industrial and commercial economics he called it a gigantic “incubus,” as if it were crushing the last breath from a dying world.81 Conversely that same Decadent character dreaded the prospect of state socialism, calling it “the most awful and omnipotent succubus that ever waxed fat on the blood of a dying nation.”82 In other words the succubus took on the vampirism of a lamia, growing fat on what it drained to create a perverse pregnancy. Therefore in “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” the succubus tried to drain the narrator’s life, enveloping his face with the vaginal orifice of her “wet, icy mouth … shapeless, jelly-like” (bsw , 26). And as “enormous and shuddering folds of palpitating jelly swept sinuously around [the narrator’s face]” (26–7) his friends burst into the room to save him, finding that the “floor and walls to the height of about six feet were running with something that seemed like stagnant water, thick, glutinous, sickening. As for [Cram’s narrator], [he] was drenched with the same cursed liquid. The odor of musk was nauseating” (29). Ultimately the satanic womb in the “scarlet aunt’s unholy of unholies” (18) pursued the narrator to his bedroom, where he nearly died in terror of live emersion in demonic amnion. David Blair has suggested that in Cram’s description of the Bouche d’Enfer a “Gothic of the female body seems to be pathologically embedded in a way that goes beyond the traditional misogyny and the traditional repertoire of Gothic anxieties.”83 Cram’s misogyny was time-specific. He openly dismissed “woman suffrage” as one of many modern political gestures that were futile in attaining true democracy.84 At most he would applaud the “suffragettes” in their attempt to destroy modern political conventions, but only insofar as they ushered in the destruction of modern society’s status quo. If and when suffragettes tried to rebuild society in the guise of their own political agenda, then according to Cram “we must arise to do them battle.”85 Cram did not believe that women were intrinsically inferior to men, but rather that modern women – suffragettes included – were no more capable of laying claim to a healthy society than men were. Consequently, “The Middle Ages are as full of lovable and admirable women as the Renaissance [and the modern world thereafter are] of sinister and regrettable representatives of the same sex … and a study of the Middle Ages reveals a certain feminine dominance that is startling to the male of to-day … Of course, it was all a part of the very real supremacy of Christianity over all domains of activity, all phases of life and thought. As soon as its power began to lapse and old

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pagan theories came in with the Renaissance, while Our Lady and the saints were dethroned by the Reformation, the wholesome balance was overthrown and women slowly fell back to that earlier position where the only defence against male oppression was the power of sex.”86 The succubus at 252 Rue M. le Prince was the terrifying extremity of that female sexual power, further perverted by satanic witchcraft. With this interpretation I am not suggesting that Cram was essentially heterosexual either. Shand-Tucci partly understood the sexual implications of Cram’s second ghost story, “In Kropfsberg Keep,” in which Rupert, a ghost hunter, witnessed the danse macabre of a spectral ballroom: “a mad, evil, seductive dance that bewitched even while it disgusted” (bsw , 48).87 But the dance was a ghostly orgy for the spirits of licentious men and women, so the dancers who elicited Rupert’s conflicting emotions of allure and revulsion were not genderspecific. More to the point I do concur with Shand-Tucci’s reading of “The White Villa,” Cram’s third ghost story, in which the narrator and his travelling companion Tom Rendel lingered together in the “Greek love” of ancient temples at Paestum, Italy, and were forced to spend the night in the nearby titular villa.88 During the night the narrator found himself caught in the phantom struggle between a jealous husband and his adulterous wife, and nearly died in the course of the wife’s re-enacted murder. To that end Shand-Tucci rhetorically pondered: “Could Cram have identified himself any more explicitly or any more intimately with sexual transgression? The punishment is all but visited on Cram himself as he is crushed under the weight of the transgressor’s collapsing body.”89 Such is an excellent example of so-called “fin-de-siècle homosexual panic,”90 but only inasmuch as the panic stemmed from the discovery of same-sex desire and not the discovery of an essentially homosexual orientation. Moreover it is important to note that the punishment for sexual transgression was even more severe for the adulterous woman than it was for Cram’s dallying narrator. Therefore with the terror of aggressive female sexuality in the Bouche d’Enfer, orgiastic confusion in Kropfsberg Keep, and pre- and extra-marital relations in the White Villa, it was the polymorphous perversity of the modern world that made it such a queer place for Cram. This is why Cram dreamt of future communal existence in Walled Towns, a book that certainly was not just a bit of “dramatic scene painting” for Cram. He envisioned a future in which: “In addition to

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the groups of either men or women, living in a community life apart, and vowed to poverty, celibacy and obedience, there will be groups of natural families, father, mother and children, entering into a communal … life … in the midst of the world but not of it.” These sameor opposite-sex communities were to be loci of “real” identity – little sanctuaries in the midst of a still corrupt modernity, but not of it. It was the celibacy of the same-sex monastery and the natural procreativity of the opposite-sex commune that constituted Cram’s ­perception of a “wholesome” society.91 Cram’s sexuality was not the construct of an emerging twentieth-century discourse on sexual orientation (homo- vs hetero-sexuality) and certainly not ShandTucci’s adoption of the Kinsey scale.92 Instead Cram constructed his sexuality through the nineteenth-century Christological discourse of love and lust.93 For him male sexuality was a question of men who did or did not chastely love other men, and men who did or did not love women through the procreative Christian institution of monogamous marriage. Any socio-sexual desires or activities for men that fall outside this moral position were thus symptomatic of Cram’s queer modernity. On that condition I invoke a deconstructive queerness that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick described as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances, resonances, lapses, and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”94 Cram’s sexuality (more precisely the nexus of desires signed in his name) was never stable enough to affix a scalar Kinseyan value. Furthermore in terms of Cram’s Gothic aesthetics, I call attention to  Nicholas Royle’s deconstructive juxtaposition of queerness and the uncanny because Cram named his Parisian haunted house as “uncanny in the extreme” (bsw , 14).95 The house was both queer and uncanny. Importantly however, the uncanniness of the Bouche d’Enfer and the sexual politics embroiled in its architectural orifice do not entirely accord with the Freudian framework commonly applied to the uncanny aesthetics of Gothic fiction.96 Freud defined das Unheimliche (commonly translated into English as the uncanny) as “a particular shade of what is frightening.”97 More precisely, combing through the nineteenth-century dictionaries of Daniel Sanders and the Brothers Grimm, Freud noted an ambivalence in the seemingly antonymic pairing of the German words das Heimliche (the homely) and das Unheimliche (the unhomely). In

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addition to being intimately familiar, das Heimliche signifies something “concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it.”98 In other words the intimacy of das Heimliche depends on secrecy buried in the house (architectural, lineal, etc.). Furthermore of all the meanings for das Unheimliche, including “eerie, weird, arousing gruesome fear,”99 Freud isolated Friedrich Schelling’s definition from 1835: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light.”100 Thus in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis one strives for the intimacy of das Heimliche by repressing secrets, only to experience the fear of das Unheimliche when that repressed material resurfaces. For Freud this dreadful experience registers both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. The ontogenetic register depends on his famous oedipal drama, in which the fear of losing an eye or having a hand severed is not simply the projection of horrific physical pain but also the resurfacing of the castration complex that underwrites the infantile rivalry of father and son. Likewise the terror of suffocation or live burial is not just the thought of an excruciating death; it is also the return of infantile homesickness for the maternal womb, tainted with the knowledge of an impossible amniotic existence. Hence the uncanniness of Cram’s haunted house at “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” would seem to operate on this ontogenetic level, with his narrator nearly drowning in a demonic womb and his arm not severed but nevertheless impotently swinging at his side. And perhaps Cram’s parents did inflect that nightmare; his relationship with them remains somewhat murky. But inasmuch as the “hellish succubus” represents modern womanhood, driven and riven by sexuality (as opposed to the power of admirable medieval women) and inasmuch as the narrator’s impotence was his being subject to modernity’s sickness (as opposed to the architectural potency of medieval monks and priests and masons), the haunted house at 252 Rue M. le Prince is phylogenetically uncanny. The dreadfulness of the architecture is culturally (not individualistically) dependent. Freud presented human life as a psychological trajectory from infantile and adolescent trauma and repression to (ideally) healthy adulthood. From that perspective the ontogenetic uncanny is the return of repressed trauma to the not-yet-entirely-healthy adult mind. Likewise for the phylogenetic uncanny Freud projected an individual’s psychological trajectory onto western culture at large, meaning

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that primitive humanity was a cultural childhood, filled with all the  credulous beliefs in ghosts and monsters, fate and magic. According to Freud such a culture has since progressed toward a modern, rational, scientific civilization that strives to “surmount” primitive beliefs.101 And the phylogenetic uncanny occurs in a panicked moment when an otherwise rational modern mind encounters something that makes it wonder if old superstitions are real. Therefore Freud’s phylogenetic uncanny is the “toxic side effect” of the modern culture that came to maturity with the Enlightenment.102 Prior to the Enlightenment “the souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the supernatural apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy or terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than Homer’s jovial world of gods.”103 In other words the writers of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance fictions still belonged to cultures mired in primitive beliefs (i.e., religion). As Freud claimed in a later essay, these pre-modern cultures felt “at home in the uncanny.”104 How then are we to read Cram’s use of the word uncanny in his Parisian ghost story, when he positioned his autobiographical narrator against such a rational modern world? Was Cram not entirely at home in the uncanny? At stake in an understanding of Cram’s uncanny Gothic is a concept of history fundamentally different than Freud’s. As a rational scientist of the early twentieth century (publishing Das Unheimliche in 1919), Freud offered a linear model of historical evolution, in which post-Enlightenment modernity works toward the threshold of a purely rational civilization immune to the lingering credulities of the primitive. Conversely from at least as far back as 1893, with his diurnal metaphor in The Decadent, Cram believed that history was not evolutionary but revolutionary, with civilizations rising and falling in 500-year cycles of sunsets, sunrises, and the dark nights in between. Years later he even tentatively diagrammed his model of history in criticism of evolutionary biology, drawing on theories of social degeneration as proof that the human race does not simply progress through time: “The upward drive of the élan vital constitutes what may properly be known as evolution, the declining fall the process of devolution or degeneration.”105 In other words based on his Anglo-Catholic belief in the spiritual transubstantiation of matter Cram proposed that the élan vital of God’s pure spirit vitalizes the raw matter of human society once every 500 years or so to initiate a new wave of civilization as the previous wave comes crashing down,

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as in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”106 Hence the Roman Empire collapsed into early medieval monasticism, which then gave way to the high-water mark of later medieval cathedral building before dying at the violent hands of the Renaissance pagans, Protestant reformers, and revolutionary democrats, industrialists, Bolsheviks, etc., of the modern world. If one experiences the Freudian Unheimliche from the liminal position of a nearly rational modern world that has not quite evolved beyond primitive superstitions (such as a belief in ghosts) then one experiences Cram’s uncanny from the liminal position of the tidal forces near a nodal point in cyclical history. Cram optimistically believed that the next epochal wave of western civilization would occur around the year 2000, an epoch that would restore the spiritual heights of the later Middle Ages. And yet in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, Cram pessimistically felt that the threshold of that epochal transformation was just out of reach and that he could not fully escape the drowning force of modernity’s undertow. To see a ghost in Cram’s book of haunted houses was to experience such a sinking feeling, the “dying fall” of a collapsing civilization.107 One final detail of the Bouche d’Enfer consequently highlights Cram’s cyclical model of history. We recall that his first description of the house from within the courtyard listed a wall from the time of Francis I as part of a noble medieval past that came to an end when the house burned during the French Revolution. More precisely Cram noted that a great wisteria vine grew along the old wall of the house, implicitly indicating that the wisteria vine, like the wall supporting it, survived from the time before the revolutionary wave of sick modernity. This is important because, in the hours before the attack of the hellish succubus, Cram’s narrator got a better look at the wisteria vine as it endured in the modern world. He noted that “great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the window in the sluggish air” (bsw , 22). Hence Cram, who imagined art to be a ­metaphorical flower, argued that the wisteria vine – like the haunted house on which it grew – was not a healthy regrowth. The “second ­blossoming of purple flowers” (as opposed to the first metaphorical blossoming during the Middle Ages) occurred amid rank and dead wisteria leaves. Furthermore after the house burned down at the end of the story, Cram noted that the only parts of the twice-conflagrated

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architecture to survive were the wall from the time of Francis I and the wisteria vine growing over it, both subsequently blackened from the flames. Thus the opportunity to rebuild the house, to restore it to its medieval glory, was there. But that’s not what happened. Instead the old wall was levelled and the vine destroyed. Cram’s pessimistic point was that the late nineteenth century was not yet the right time to revive the Middle Ages. Any effort to do so would only result in another haunted house. As we have discovered throughout this book Cram’s narrator was impotent to make such a change. He was born too early to set things right. The one exception of course was the ghost of Sister Maddelena – but the conditions of her haunting were unique in Cram’s sextet of Gothic stories.108 Rosalia di Castiglione loved one man, Michele Biscari, and wished to engage with him in the “wholesome” Christian institution of matrimony. Her tyrannical father denied her love and submitted her to the same-sex institution of a convent. And when she (as Sister Maddelena) sought to marry her beloved again, her actions remained innocent of sin. As the cavaliere explained, Sister Maddelena was “only a novice, and even that unwillingly” (bsw , 89), which meant that she had not yet taken her vows. In turn this meant that she was not yet a bride of Christ, so relations with her earthly lover were not yet adulterous. More importantly, when her hopes of holy matrimony with Michele Biscari were ultimately dashed, Sister Maddelena did not fight her conventual family; she willingly died for her beloved. Consequently when Cram’s narrator followed her ghost to her former cell, they passed a great fresco of the Crucifixion that became visible every time the turbulent lightning struck. In the end Sister Maddelena’s self-sacrifice made her worthy of salvation. Returning to Walkerville: Edward Walker was not a sinless victim of modernity. That is not to say that he was beyond salvation, just beyond Cram’s ability to provide it. In the Walkerville church Cram offered instead the possibility of a Grail knight’s miraculous grace – he who would follow the cryptic clues of the Walkerville design, leading to the unused lance. As Cram said in Excalibur, “Take it … if ye have the hand.”109 But like his narrator in the Bouche d’Enfer, whose hand fell “helpless” to his side, or like the leper in the southern aisle of the Walkerville church, Cram’s hand was incapable of such an act. Thus in Walkerville Cram was not as potent as his narrator in “Sister Maddelena.” He was more like Maddelena’s lover, “mad with the horror of impotent fear” (bsw , 96). And thus the horror of the new

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St Mary’s Anglican Church is not the “jump scare” of a sudden apparition, nor is it the grotesque sensorium of a charnel house. It is the nightmare of being caught in the machinery of seemingly endless repetition.110 In effect Cram feared what David Punter called the ceremonial Gothic. Punter explained the undecidable condition of this Gothic horror: “ceremonial strikes in two ways. It strikes toward the unearthly, the hieratic, the sense of the beyond, and signs which might be directed toward or might emanate from the beyond … But ceremonial also stands in for the conventional, the quotidian, that which is reduced to ‘mere ceremony,’ that which is drained of meaning … Ceremonial, then, as a surplus of meaning or as an absence of meaning; the term begins to deconstruct itself.”111 Cram was well aware of this ceremonial slippage between the surplus of meaning and the enervation thereof. In his quest to restore the sacramental Catholicity of ceremony Cram hailed the art of liturgy as “the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpressible ideas” (gq , 263). The sacraments direct the faithful toward the beyond. Conversely concerning the Renaissance era’s Roman Catholic Church, Cram lamented that the sacraments endured, “but as hardly more than a series of obligatory forms” (267). The ceremony had been drained of meaning. Yet no matter how earnestly one may pursue sacramental ceremonies, Cram reiterated that “in itself [sacramentalism] is not an eternal reality, therefore it must be accepted and valued only as an agency or as a symbol.”112 Punter would thus agree: “The ceremony … signifies, even in its superflux of meaning, the absence of whatever it was that preceded the ceremonial. Similarly, ceremonial speaks of repetition: a repetition without which the ceremony is not a ceremony, a repetition which also serves through the very force of its stability to invoke a past which has always already vanished. Ceremonial as reminder, as a gesture toward what is absent, as a site that is perennially haunted by all that it is not.”113 Therefore as dreadful as the transgressive actions of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution might have been for Cram (creating the ghosts that haunted his literature), the paralytic horror of his Gothic fiction occurred when his narrator could not himself stop the repetitious cycles of haunting. Punter consequently offered a telling image to conceptualize the potential horror of the ceremonial: “we find ourselves, then, in the realm of the ceremonial up against a barrier; we can see this barrier

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as the altar-rail beyond which lies the mystery of transubstantiation, or in magical terms as the barrier of incomprehension.”114 To this I would add a definition of the uncanny that Freud repressed in his tirade against religion: “To veil the divine, to surround it with a certain unheimlichkeit.”115 I have elsewhere articulated the uncanny potential of that veiling in terms of Pugin’s liturgical philosophy.116 As with Pugin, Cram could not physically comprehend the utter truth of transubstantiation, only the symbolic gestures of the liturgy. And thus the altar rail in Walkerville is an uncanny veil that stands between mortality and the divine. The veil may be torn, like the temple veil in Jerusalem, but it has not fallen. It remains like the ribbons of cloud between Galahad and the viewer of the Princeton Grail window. And even if we physically enter the sanctuary of the new St Mary’s Church, the veil continues to hide our mortal eyes from the Absolute Truth of the Holy Grail. As Derrida may have written, in Walkerville we experience the “diabolical” sensation of the pas – the step (pas) that is not (pas) a step.117 In our errant knighthood every step we take toward the Grail brings us no nearer to Galahad’s miraculous accomplishment. We may take the holy lance in hand, but unless we are the Grail knight (being worthy of such a weapon) our piercing of the Crucifixion window would only Vandal-ize the church with our barbaric violence. On that condition the light flowing through the broken glass would be nothing more than earthly glare, whereas the light of the Grail is so much more. Even in Camelot at the beginning of the quest, the Holy Grail entered to the accompaniment of a “sunbeam more clearer by seven times than ever [the Knights of the Round Table] saw day” (m da , 376). Even more in Sarras, at the end of the quest, the Holy Grail blazed with a light “intolerable” to all save Galahad. This is why stained glass was so important to Cram’s Grail quest: “In its mingling of material definiteness and transcendent glory, [stained glass] was that which seemed most perfectly to express the ardent and comprehensive religion of the [Middle Ages].”118 Thus the chalice in the hands of Walkerville’s right-hand angel will become the Holy Grail only when the stained and material definiteness of the Walkerville glass is pierced to reveal the luminescence of pure transcendent glory. It is the materiality of stained glass that veils the Walkerville Grail, separating the holy from the holiest of holies and keeping us (in the fog of a seething south wind) from the “definite victory” we might seek as knights in quest of the Grail.

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This was also the point of Cram’s Mediterranean revelry, years later, when he saw the ruins of a Frankish castle high above the coastal city of Mausolus. From the sea the white marble castle seemed “almost intact, a silvery silhouette unreal, intangible. So should Camelot have seemed, or Joyous Gard or Montsalvat, the dream castle hoarding the Holy Grail.”119 Cram then added: “We know little enough of the Beatific Vision, but one thing we can safely assume … is that it has this perfect whiteness that has its pale simulacrum in the white cities of the Ægean Sea.”120 The whiteness of the Grail’s glory is pure and perfect, beyond the simulacrum of white marble walls or even the streaming daylight that our imperfect efforts might release, were we to break the window waiting above Walkerville’s high altar. Only if the Grail knight were to pierce the glass would a flood of light as pure and perfect as Christ’s blood flow into the righthand angel’s chalice, which would then become the Holy Grail. And so we wait, hesitating before the lance, tormented by the knowledge that Christ is suffering on the cross and the Fisher King is “anxious” for a miraculous cure. In the end this paralytic waiting on the verge of transcendence is what horrified Cram the most.

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Postcrypt

Will the Grail knight ever arrive? In lieu of a conclusion I post this question through an odd aperture that overlooks the chancel in the new St Mary’s Church (fig. 5.1). Specifically the aperture connects the Anglican rectory with the liturgically southern side of St Mary’s chancel, accessed through a closet in the rector’s second-storey bedroom. In Walkerville this aperture is also known as the “leper’s squint.”1 And although that term is a misappropriation of the medieval leper’s squint (a type of lychnoscope), such a misappropriation is all too appropriate for the Walkerville design.2 A squint or hagioscope is an aperture typically cut into the wall of a chancel on an oblique angle, allowing for a view of the high altar from a transept, aisle, or chapel.3 The purpose of such an aperture is open to debate, but inasmuch as it provides a line of sight from the high altar to a chapel it could be used to coordinate the Eucharist at multiple altars. In Walkerville the liturgically southern side of the choir has a massive arch that spans the length of the choir stalls, providing just such a view above the stalls, from the morning chapel to the high altar. But a leper’s squint is an aperture on the liturgically southern side of a church exterior (shuttered and / or barred with a grille), supposedly for lepers to receive communion without risking the spread of their infection to those within the church.4 Therefore the leper’s squint must be near the ground for communion to occur, and the second-storey aperture in the Walkerville chancel cannot have fulfilled that purpose. Instead the skewed view of this elevated pseudo-leper’s squint provides another angle on the spreading fingers of the Gothic “k” – the gauntlet effect of an armoured ghost that has been haunting the church all along.

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5.1  The “leper’s squint” in the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, summarizes the diseased state of Edward Walker’s patronage and conflates the sacred and the domestic in this church

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Pugin once again provides a referential clue as to why Cram would use this aperture. In his 1843 essay The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England Pugin noted that several British medieval churches had a second-storey chamber set aside for non-liturgical purposes – in the north porch at Salisbury Cathedral for example. He furthermore explained that “occasionally these apartments appear to  have been occupied by the sacristan, and they are sometimes ­provided with tracery apertures, through which the church would be watched at night.”5 Pugin was presumably referring to apertures that overlook the exterior of the porch entrance, as found atop a gatehouse, to observe the church’s nocturnal visitors. In that sense the domestic space of the sacristan’s apartment did not infiltrate the sacred space of the church – it was an adjunct architecture whose aperture(s) communicated not with the internal body of the church but the secular world without. Cram reoriented this medieval arrangement for the sake of modern Gothic architecture. Just as the square-topped tower in Walkerville demonstrates the malady of the domestic infecting the sacred, and just as the sickly Fisher King’s Grail castle conflates the domestic and the sacred, the aperture of the “leper’s squint” perforates the sacred space of the Walkerville church to demonstrate the leprosy of Edward Walker’s secular commission. Through it we watch the church for as long as we endure the “night” of our modern decadence – hence Cram’s proclamation that even the best of us are presently only “blind leaders of the blind,” for we “walk in the darkness that fell when the light of art went out” (gq , 225). Thus in the third chapter we explored Cram’s encryption of Edward’s illness through the broken symbol. Edward became the leper of the Matthean gospel, whose leprosy Cram truncated to the withered hand of another Matthean man. In turn that withered hand infected the structural body of Edward’s church, withering the western bay of the aisle and cryptically confessing that Cram’s Gothic Revival architecture was still only a Gothick revenant of the once-healthy organism of medieval society. We have thus left the brokenness of the Gothic “k” in suspension for the Grail knight’s arrival. If the sickness of modern Gothic architecture is intrinsic to the darkness of the night through which we wait, the Grail knight brings a hand worthy of grasping the lance that would heal the broken symbol. Through the knight the unspeakable

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“k” of modern decadence is redeemed. The Grail knight relieves the (k)night, thrusting the lance into the Crucifixion window so that divine Truth might flow through the wounded glass in a flood of eschatological light – the same light in which the tower’s missing spire should bask. The missing spire is the lance and the missing bay is the hand that should hold it; the Grail knight completes the church.6 Yet the Grail knight is at present as grammatologically haunting as the Gothick revenance of the building’s missing parts. The gaps are the result of both past trauma and an elusive future, and thus the church is twice haunted: by the alpha and omega of glorious medieval art and the messianic glory of a Gothic resurrection yet to come in the next wave of Cram’s cyclical history. Inasmuch as Grail mythology is a palimpsest written over the Bible, the Grail knight’s arrival is a messianic future that overlaps the Christian messiah. To be sure Sir Galahad was not Christ; his lineage “is of the ninth degree from our Lord Jesu Christ” (m da , 376). Nevertheless the achievement of Galahad’s quest marked a messianic moment that for Cram might recur in the modern world. If Christ was the messiah of Cram’s spiritual Truth, then Galahad was the messiah of true earthly art, the symbolic vessel by which the Christian faithful might glimpse the beauty of Christ’s Truth. We recall Cram stating that the Grail quest “failed, as men count failure.” Yet with Sir Galahad as the Grail knight, how exactly did it fail? Cram would later explain: “Sir Galahad rode for the Grail, and all other knights of honour and of old courtesie, questing for the lost Chalice of the Blood of God, achieving it never … They could not bring back the Grail, but they marked the way to its shrine, and the way is still there for the finding.”7 Galahad did not fail to experience the Grail himself; his failure, “as men count failure,” was the impossibility of bringing back the Grail for the rest of us to witness. Such would be an apocalyptic revelation. Instead what the knights in quest of the Holy Grail achieved was the “mystical knowledge of Art” (gq , 9), and the ritual path of the Walkerville church aspires to what Cram called “The Second Coming of Art.” Therefore setting aside the obvious eschatological concerns with a church as the ritual path toward the Second Coming of Christ and the preparation of one’s soul for that moment – and Edward Walker surely used his church for that purpose – what makes the new St Mary’s Church profound is the ritual path for the messianic Grail knight. The knight might

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save Edward’s earthly body and inaugurate a new era of mortal life in which the Gothic Revival would no longer be a Gothick revenant but a Gothic resurrection. Yet this is also where Cram’s thinking is exposed to the pre-deconstructive limits of its structure.8 For Derrida the messiah is a promise, or rather the “being-promise of the promise.”9 The messiah can only be the messiah inasmuch as we cannot anticipate the form or content by which the messiah may or may not arrive. For Derrida faith in the messiah meant opening oneself to the impossibility of knowing the future, of knowing what is to come (a-venir) – up to and including the possibility of the messiah’s eternal absence. The messiah, said Derrida, is also a spectre that Karl Marx could not escape. Thus despite Marx’s vitriol against religion, Derrida demonstrated that Marx still structured his revolutionary thought in the onto-teleological, onto-theological terms of Judeo-Christian faith. When Marx stated that “a specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism,”10 he was referring to the spectral presence of a new, messianic International yet to come. Marx consequently dedicated much of his work to detailing a dialectical system, a program by which we would recognize the spectral conditions of modernity as well as how to move toward a future in which the messianic promise would no longer be a promise but a reality. Likewise Cram believed that Catholic rituals would lead inevitably to the Second Coming of Christ, and he optimistically foresaw the inevitable return to a healthy civilization via the “Second Coming of Art.” But Cram’s architecture is deconstructively interesting because he did not know if his buildings were part of that restorative inevitability. Was he on the right path? Of all the voices to inherit from Cram, deconstruction might therefore choose the following admission: “whether or no we choose from the ramifying roads the one that leadeth to salvation is a matter altogether veiled in impenetrable cloud” (gq , 75). In that sense Cram’s faith was a belief in something he could not know, and because his architecture was inescapably part of a sick world, he put his faith in a quest that was ultimately (and as yet uncannily) veiled to him. If the Gothic Revival began with the gauntlet effect of the ancient Goths, inscrutably haunting the ruins of ancient Rome, then the barbaric night of modernity (its Gothickness) would only end with the arrival of the Grail knight’s redemptive hand, a hand that continues to be veiled in the haunted armour of a gauntlet that has yet to come.

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Allegoresis The unique features of the Walkerville church – the four winds, the shortened southern aisle, the corbelled pulpit on the lay side of the transept, and the reredos fish cross – are all indicative of the Grail quest Cram set in motion in Walkerville because of Edward Walker’s secret sinful malady. But Walkerville was not Cram’s only Arthurian architecture. As mentioned he commissioned his friend Hallowell to paint an altarpiece for All Saints’ Church in Ashmont. In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur Galahad collected artifacts at the beginning of his knighthood, indicating to the other Knights of the Round Table that he was the one destined to achieve the Grail quest. One artifact was a sword that no one else could wield (Sirs Gawain and Percival tried [m da , 375]); another was the red-cross shield, which no one else could handle (King Bagademagus tried [379]). Therefore in the ­Ashmont altarpiece St George, the paragon of Christian knighthood, holds the sword and shield for Galahad to claim at the onset of his Grail quest.11 Furthermore in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur a parish church in Camelot (the one in which King Arthur and Queen ­Guinevere were married) was dedicated in honour of St Stephen (46). Thus St Stephen’s Church Cohasset, being of the same architectural lineage as St Mary’s Church Walkerville, could be Cram’s setting for another Arthurian narrative. After all the newel post in the western vestibule stairway has a guardian knight as a finial. Finally inasmuch as Cram believed that a proper education was not vocational training but the building of a student’s moral and intellectual foundations,12 he used the Grail narrative as a model for chivalrous student life in  quest of knowledge and the adventure of life beyond the walls of academic institutions. Hence in addition to the Grail window at Princeton (for graduate students to contemplate while taking meals in the refectory), Cram placed a Grail window at a preparatory school chapel (begun 1916) in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Specifically that window depicts the Grail vision in Camelot at the start of the Grail quest, and the youths of the Mercersburg Academy are to learn from that miraculous event before pursuing their quests to other schools and adulthood. This last example is Cram’s great optimism for Gothic architecture as a stimulus to affect change toward a better future. But I have yet to find an example outside Walkerville in which Cram pessimistically enacted his encryption strategy from “Sister Maddelena.” Nor have

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I found an example in which repetition plays such a crucial role in the paralytic horror of the ceremonial Gothic. To be sure Cram’s pessimism about reviving the Gothic in the modern world was not specific to the Walkerville design or even to the early years of his architectural career (c. 1888–1904). Nevertheless it would seem that the unusual (if not unique) situation of Edward Walker’s patronage allowed Cram to explore the melancholy potential of living and building in a time out of joint. Likewise Cram built several square-topped towers for his churches; it was a defining characteristic of his Gothic architecture. Nevertheless since Grail mythology depends on the lance as a palimpsest for the blood shed at the Crucifixion and the blood spread on the wounded Fisher King, Cram’s willingness to see a church spire as a lance in the sky allowed him to imagine its absence in Walkerville. It represented the phantom limb pain of an errant knighthood questing for a Grail that is just out of reach; the Gothic horror in Walkerville is the hell of Tantalus. Therefore although Cram may not have consciously conflated his  modern Gothic architecture and literature other than in the Walkerville church (and even there the extent to which he “consciously” did so remains speculative), there were perhaps many commissions in which Cram’s horror literature inflected his architecture subconsciously. This seems to have been Shand-Tucci’s point when he claimed that Cram used local New England granite at All Saints’ Ashmont and used his local experience with New England’s seaside storms to colour “Notre Dame des Eaux,” Cram’s fifth ghost story.13 Quoting from Henry Adams’s theory on the abstract relationship between coastal granite in Normandy and New England, ShandTucci implied that Cram’s choice to set “Notre Dame des Eaux” in Normandy was really about New England.14 More importantly quoting from Edith Wharton, Shand-Tucci suggested that Cram’s interest in granite was intrinsic to his being from New England because its citizens are “granite outcroppings; but half-emerged from the soil,” to which Shand-Tucci added, “so much was there so characteristically left unsaid.”15 According to Shand-Tucci, Cram was interested in granite (and thus setting “Notre Dame des Eaux” in Normandy) because of his unspoken homosexuality and “gay Gothic” sensibility for architecture and literature. But Shand-Tucci offered nothing to substantiate a homoerotic reading of “Notre Dame des Eaux” – the story of an artist driven mad by his love for the daughter of a Catholic royalist nobleman and for the titular Catholic

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church that brought them together. That church remained untouched by “the horrors and follies of the [French] Revolution” because of its obscure location on the Norman coast (bsw , 177). And as with the rest of Cram’s Gothic literature, the curse of the three Rs (Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution) haunted him far more than did his alleged homosexuality. In lieu of Ashmont’s granite a more effective use of Cram for a “material cultures” approach to interdisciplinary Gothic studies might investigate the presence of lead in his design for the Firmin Desloge Hospital Chapel (begun 1931) in St Louis, Missouri. The Desloge family descended from French Catholic nobility, coming to America in the nineteenth century and making a fortune through lead mining. Firmin Desloge bequeathed $1,000,000 in 1930 to build a new hospital for St Louis University, and his wife donated $100,000 to build the Firmin Desloge Hospital Chapel the following year. Inasmuch as Cram wrote “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince” to venerate the Catholic royalist hospital in Paris as a site of refuge and restoration in a sick modern world, did the patronage of the Desloge family inspire Cram to integrate his Gothic literature in the lead work of the hospital chapel’s sweeping French roof and crocketed flèche? Cram described his narrator in “No. 252” as having an arm and body that felt like lead when the hellish succubus attacked him (bsw , 24); did Cram likewise plan any windows for that chapel in which the lead cames encumber the stained-glass figures with the same paralytic horror when confronted with modernity’s sickness? Or did the glazier(s) who eventually installed the chapel windows introduce their own sense of horror, having read Cram’s Gothic literature? This last question leads to one of the richest possibilities for architectural topics in future Gothic studies. A collaborator who brings an element of Gothic horror to a building project need not have been someone who wrote a Gothic story. In fact very few authors of Gothic fiction were also collaborators in architectural projects. Horace Walpole and William Beckford are famous examples from the British Georgian era. Walter Scott could be added to that list, assuming that one highlights the occasional touches of horror in Scott’s literature and not his abiding fixation on medieval chivalry and community as the safeguards of a wholesome society.16 John Soane has recently attracted interdisciplinary attention, but mainly insofar as his son George wrote a Gothic novel that directly attacked Soane’s efforts to create an architectural legacy through his family.17 Finally in the

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Victorian era Thomas Hardy trained as an architect before turning to literature as his claim to fame. How might Hardy’s strategy to site Gothic tombstones from the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, London, have related to his later choice to cite medieval monuments in his occasionally Gothic literature? Beyond these examples I have yet to find any modern Gothic author-architects. Nevertheless some of the most famous Victorian architects and architectural theorists relied on a discourse of Gothic horror when dwelling on their melancholic moments of despair. Pugin, we recall from the first chapter, lamented that the majority of his churches were “little better than ghosts of what they were designed [to be].” And yet despite Rosemary Hill’s enticing suggestion that Pugin’s fears were as lurid as those in a Gothic novel, few scholars have investigated Pugin’s sincere belief in the supernatural and its impact on his architecture.18 Likewise we recall from the first chapter that Ruskin criticized the international Gothic vogue he stimulated during the High Victorian era, calling such buildings “the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, [his] own making.” Yet no one has explored the potential horror of a Gothic architectural repertoire in actual Victorian buildings that stitched together bits and pieces of medieval design from across Europe. How had the accretion of international architectural elements produced the perception of monsters, and how had technology (e.g., iron columns and capitals in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History) facilitated the monstrosity?19 More importantly the encounters between modern Gothic architecture and literature need not involve architects or architectural collaborators who have directly quoted or loosely paraphrased from Gothic literature. Stephen Arata rightly noted that the success of Gothic literature depends on the genre’s capacity to be an index of social anxieties during the processes of textual production and reception.20 Hence many British Gothic stories preyed on AngloProtestant fears of Catholicism. Others (and not just those from ­Britain) exploited sexual violence, gender trouble, and / or racist imperialism, to name only a few sources of anxiety. These fears were as real for Gothic Revival architects who never read or wrote about Gothic fiction as they were for Gothic interdisciplinarians. On that condition a broad exploration of Gothic horror and Gothic Revival architecture (especially the “ethical” architecture of the post-Georgian Gothic) must approach textual and architectural juxtapositions from angles other than those previous cultural histories have taken.

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In his interdisciplinary Gothic study Richard Davenport-Hines excluded Victorian Gothic architecture because the architects of that era “succumbed to a craze for ethical uplift. They came to feel that moral environments must be created by moral architecture.”21 Granted, but the creation of moral environments involved the perception of an immoral social context against which Victorian Gothic architects aspired to create an ethical refuge. To reiterate a point from my introduction, why are we to assume that those buildings successfully excluded the social anxieties of immorality? Rejecting that assumption, a different history of the Gothic Revival emerges – one that addresses itself to Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s recent study of Bleak Houses, a history of architectural losers. In this case the losers are not necessarily those who failed to rise to fame; they are architects, famed or otherwise, who could not help but let their social anxieties creep into their architecture and undermine their ethical aspirations. Such a history could also investigate a building’s collaborative conditions (during construction and / or subsequent use) to study the horrors that unexpected individuals bring to the architecture. Over time the ethical intent of the architect, artisan, and / or client could be ironically undermined. For example Late Victorian Gothic Revivalists such as Bodley, Garner, Sedding, and Scott Jr revived Perpendicular Gothic architecture partly in response to a social discourse on British “purity” during the waning years of the empire and the influx of “degenerate” foreigners in Britain. To that end one of the social anxieties indexical to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is the projection of racial stereotypes onto the atavistic monstrosity of Mr Hyde. Seeking for Hyde beneath the skin of a Late Victorian revival of “pure” British Gothic models, how did foreign Gothic elements violate British purity – for whom was it understood as a violation, and how did that violation colour their experience in the building? Returning to a North American example: the primeval forests of the Americas and their native denizens haunted the Gothic fictions of European colonists (e.g., John Richardson’s Wacousta of 1832). How might the lumber that colonists appropriated from indigenous peoples to erect carpenter Gothic architecture carry the terrors of the forest into the whitewashed walls of “civilizing” churches? Ultimately as we drift farther from Cram (a rare modern Gothic author-architect who designed the Walkerville church specifically

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through the shared social sickness of his ghost stories and Edward Walker’s patronage) we approach a fundamental question about microhistorical investigation. How might the details of an isolated example be of interest to other scholars researching other examples or scholars gathering examples to substantiate hypotheses about larger historical structures (e.g., Victorian social anxieties)? Likewise because microhistorians must re-evaluate their methodologies within the current globalizing emphasis of history, how might one architectural case study in Canada relate to the Gothic Revival as a global phenomenon, particularly of the British Empire? In few how does microhistory relate to macrohistory?22 This question led Jill Lepore to include the following argument among her four propositions for microhistory: “however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies in how it serves as an allegory for the culture as a whole.”23 If we are to assume that Lepore treated allegory as a synonym for synecdoche, then microhistory is a part that stands in for the macrohistorical whole. Hence Ginzburg argued that Menocchio’s worldview in sixteenth-century Italy – no matter how singular Menocchio’s life circumstances may have been – represented general patterns in peasant culture that countered the hegemony of elite cultural institutions (i.e., church and state). If however we treat “allegory” as an act of speaking otherwise (allo = other; agoreuei = to speak) a different relationship emerges. Walter Benjamin understood allegory as a melancholy dwelling on ruins: “Allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete – an affinity which finds its most comprehensive expression in the ruin … identified as the allegorical emblem par excellence.”24 The speaking otherness of allegory is the desire to complete the ruins, to make them whole again, while the melancholia of allegory is our “dejected frustration” at the impossibility of such a task. Consequently Benjamin (and Derrida after him) used the biblical Tower of Babel (Ge 11:1–9) as an emblem of allegorical ruins.25 The tower stood incomplete precisely because the builders could not convey meaning to one another, and the allegorical fragments of their collaborative efforts did not translate into the sum total of their collective parts (architectural and / or linguistic). To that inconclusive end any effort to translate the whole through a part or series of parts inevitably leads to ruin. Likewise any effort to translate the architectural aspects of Gothic aesthetics through literature (including the writing of architectural history) is inevitably incomplete. But it is

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through an exploration of any one building’s ruined state that we can see how a work of art continues to work in relation to others. A microhistory of the Walkerville church is thus a fragment, not a condensed version of the Gothic architectural (or literary) whole. It does not simply expand to demonstrate its universality as it encompasses other actual or potential examples of the global Gothic Revival. It is always open to the iterative possibility of Derrida’s spectral history. But it cuts macrohistory with the fragmentary edges of its broken symbol every time we try to make it fit – revealing more fragments, which reveal more fragments, and so on. Hence Angus Fletcher envisioned the infinite extendibility of a mathematical sequence as emblematic of the allegorical process: “[Allegories] have no inherent ‘organic’ limit of magnitude. Many are unfinished like The Castle or The Trial of Kafka.”26 Indeed the protagonistic “K” of Franz Kafka’s Castle is constantly waiting for a resolution that will never come, not unlike the Gothic “k” of Walkerville’s Anglican architecture, awaiting a Grail knight who has yet to arrive. In the meantime I imagine the letter “k” as a crack spreading farther and farther from the ruins of the Walkerville church. As this crack spread throughout the long nineteenth century and across the globe, it demonstrated not that the same horrors necessarily recur outside the new St Mary’s Church but that an increasingly rich sequence of buildings emerge. And each building has the possibility of speaking other than the triumphalist ethical intent of the Gothic Revival.

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Notes

I nt ro duct i o n   1 Booth, “Peregrinations and Cogitations,” n.p. This article is available as a clipping in file 250, St Mary’s Church Papers.  2 Ibid.  3 Hallam, A History of St Mary’s Church, 31.   4 Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to Mr Walker, 29 July 1902, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers. Plans for the church began at least as early as April 1902. The congregation laid the cornerstone on 25 May 1903, and the Anglican bishop consecrated the church on 10 April 1904, a few months before Booth’s visit.   5 Albert Kahn to Mr J.H. Walker, 2 September 1902, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers. The one important change Edward Walker made was a reduction in size (and cost), from 300 seats in the nave to 250 seats.  6 In The Gothic Revival Kenneth Clark traced the ethical trajectory into Victorian Gothic architecture. Martin Bressani and I have more recently taken up the medical approach to that ethical trajectory in our article, “Remedies External and Visible.”   7 See Ames, “Strawberry Hill”; Davenport-Hines, Gothic; Lewis, “The Genesis of Strawberry Hill”; Morrissey, From the Temple to the Castle; Reynolds, Building Romanticism. For the scant research on Gothic interdisciplinarity from beyond the Georgian era, see Coffman, “Casa Loma and the Gothic Imagination”; Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests, especially 163–4; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, especially 120–3.   8 See Macdonell, “Gothic Historiography.”   9 For an overview of Shakespeare and sickness in Cram’s Gothic literature, see Macdonell, “Without the Pale of the Church.”

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10 Almost all the letters from the architects to the Walker brothers survive in the archives of the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor (file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers). However the file for correspondence about the Walkerville church in the Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson / Cram and Ferguson Collections at the Boston Public Library was empty from at least 2006 (when I first visited the library) to 2015 (when last I discussed the file with the library’s archivists). An investigation of the entire archive has not unearthed the missing correspondence. Therefore when or if Edward Walker and / or his brothers revealed to the architects that Edward was ill (or if they even named the illness as syphilis and not something else altogether) remains unclear. They might not have even risked the information in a letter. There were numerous references to meetings in Boston and Detroit found in the surviving correspondence at the Leddy Library. The sensitive issue of Edward’s illness might have been broached in private conversation. 11 See Anthony, The Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram; Clark, The American Discovery of Tradition; Dziemianowicz, “Introduction”; Muccigrosso, American Gothic; Oberg, “Ralph Adams Cram”; Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia; Shand-Tucci, Church Building in Boston; Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram; Wilson, “Ralph Adams Cram.” 12 See Brosseau, Gothic Revival in Canadian Architecture, 27. 13 Likewise Angela Carr omitted the Walkerville church when describing the influence of Cram’s firm on Toronto’s Edmund Burke in the early twentieth century (see Toronto Architect Edmund Burke, 43–8). Harold Kalman however gave the Walkerville church a passing reference when mentioning Cram’s importance to the late Gothic Revival in Canada (see A History of Canadian Architecture, 2:712). R.H. Hubbard gave the Walkerville church more significance, though he qualified his praise by saying that “St Mary’s is an isolated American gem set in Canada and built without heed to cost” (“Modern Gothic in Canada,” 8). Finally Peter and Douglas Richardson enticingly called the Walkerville church “one of the most beautiful places of worship on this continent” (Canadian Churches, 217) but did little to substantiate their claim – perhaps because Cram’s firm and the Walker family were Americans building in Canada. 14 See Adams and Bressani, “Canada.” 15 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xii. Other famous examples of microhistory in the context of Early Modern Europe include Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna; Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre; Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre.

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16 Menocchio was also “exceptional” in the sense that he was a literate and widely (if eccentrically) read peasant. To that end critics have questioned to what extent his worldview could ever represent the quotidian experience of peasantry in Early Modern Europe. This is in fact a constant criticism of microhistory’s extension from the particular to the general, and I issue a response to that criticism in my “Postcrypt” to this book. 17 See also Levi, “On Microhistory.” 18 Magnússon and Szíjártó, What Is Microhistory, 16. 19 American historians in particular have explored microhistorical approaches to the Early Republic and Antebellum America. See Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett; Lepore, New York Burning; Taylor, William Cooper’s Town. 20 See Magnússon, Wasteland with Words. 21 True to his training at Durham, Battersby was an evangelical Anglican, which led to at least one point of conflict with the Walker family. Edward Walker was buried in the Anglican cemetery at the new St Mary’s Church in Walkerville, and his wife, “a strong Roman Catholic,” requested that the Anglican Church let a Roman Catholic priest consecrate the ground beside her husband for her proper Catholic burial therein. Dutifully Battersby submitted the request to the bishop but clearly stated his opposition. The request was denied. See William H. Battersby to David Williams, the Right Reverend, the Lord Bishop of Huron, 5 November 1915, David Williams Papers. 22 See Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes.” 23 John Martin undercut the analogy because modern physicians usually rely on more than conjecture in their cases; they use quantitative tests in the tradition of the scientific method to verify or at least substantiate their in-clinic diagnoses (see “Journeys to the World of the Dead,” 623). Nevertheless during the design and construction of the Walkerville church the medical analogy was apt for Edward Walker’s case because no reliable test existed to verify a syphilis diagnosis. In fact Edward’s doctor from 1891 to 1907 testified in court that clinical observations were all he had (or needed) to make his diagnosis. Therefore my willingness to maintain that claim on Edward Walker’s health is inevitably conjectural. 24 For an art historical example, see Ginzburg, The Enigma of Piero; for a psychoanalytical example, see Ginzburg, “Freud, the Wolf Man, and the Werewolves”; and for a literary example, see Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island. 25 See Ginzburg, “Vetoes and Compatibilities.” 26 Ibid., 535.

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27 Ginzburg was not alone in that judgment; he was part of a larger microhistorical stance against the so-called “postmodern challenge.” See especially Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-modern Challenge.” Conversely in “Historiography and Postmodernism” Frank Ankersmit argued that the study of marginal details is the defining strategy of postmodern history, naming several microhistorical studies as proof of this point. Not surprisingly Ginzburg refuted Ankersmit’s correlation in “Microhistory,” and John Zammito echoed Ginzburg’s rebuttal in “Ankersmit’s Postmodern Historiography.” 28 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xviii. 29 Ginzburg, as quoted in Luria and Gandolfo, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 100. 30 See Mohlo, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 124. Magnússon also questioned Ginzburg’s “intransigent opposition to postmodernism” (What Is Microhistory, 114), even quoting from Mohlo’s article. Magnússon proposed instead a postmodern microhistory that emphasizes the importance of any historical moment’s singularity, aligning his strategy with the Deleuzian “process of singularization” that undermines the hierarchy of values – in this case, the hierarchy of macro over micro (“The Singularization of History,” 733–4n92). See also Mímisson and Magnússon, “Singularizing the Past.” A Derridean response to that strategy is to note that the singularity of an event is an idealization of the past to which no historical moment can aspire and remain historical. Derrida’s invocation of “Repetition and first time” (Specters of Marx, 10; his emphasis) called attention to the fact that each singularized event is always already haunted by an iterative potential that extends ad infinitum both before and after the event’s singular moment in chronology. 31 Mitchell, Iconology, 29. 32 Ibid., 38. 33 Ibid., 29. 34 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18; his emphasis. 35 Ginzburg, as quoted in Luria and Gandolfo, “Carlo Ginzburg,” 99. 36 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 183. 37 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick stated that the foremost convention of Gothic fiction is the representational limits of the unspeakable (see The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 4). Furthermore when Jodey Castricano explored the intersections of Gothic literature and deconstruction, she pursued Sedgwick’s point, citing the deconstructive topoi of the unspeakable (see especially Cryptomimesis, 13). 38 Derrida, Positions, 77. 39 Ibid., 44.

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40 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 6. 41 Ibid.; his emphasis. 42 Ibid., 5. 43 Ibid., 7. 44 Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1.1. For all subsequent citations of this play, the play’s title, act, scene, and line number(s) will appear parenthetically intext after the quoted material. 45 Derrida, Dissemination, 7; his emphasis. Derrida’s deconstruction of the preface was a response to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel spoke of the preface in negative terms. According to Derrida, the Hegelian preface “appears to be external to philosophy since it takes place rather in a didactic setting than within the self-presentation of a concept. But it is internal to the extent that … the exteriority of the negative … still belongs to the process of truth and must leave its trace upon it” (Dissemination, 11–12). Hence Hegel sought to lift up the preface into a higher unity of truth by virtue of the dialectical relativity of positive and negative values. 46 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 10–11. 47 Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 1:88. 48 Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 104. 49 As E.J. Clery noted of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, “Fragmentation is the order of the day, and the stage properties are vital” (“Introduction,” xvi). Hence John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld were early imitators of Otranto, publishing “Sir Bertrand: A Fragment” in 1773. Aikin and Barbauld not only employed Walpole’s severed hand but also extended the corporeal fragmentation to the very body of the text – abandoning “narrative coherence altogether in favour of a kaleidoscopic succession of Gothic effects … after which the text breaks off abruptly” (Clery, “Introduction,” xvi). 50 In Gothic Hauntings, Christine Berthin has recently questioned the rightfulness of the ownership restored at the novel’s end. 51 Cram, Black Spirits and White, 12. For all subsequent citations of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “bsw ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material. 52 This quote is from a pseudonymous editorial appended to Cram’s essay “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture.” See Primus, “Editorial,” 357. 53 Castricano, Cryptomimesis, 21. 54 Vasari, as translated in Brooks, The Gothic Revival, 10. The criticism of medieval “Gothic” literature soon followed. In 1570 a posthumous Robert Ascham book states that “our rude beggarly ryming, brought first into

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Notes to pages 16–19

Italie by Gothes and Hunnes, whan all good verses and all good learning to were destroyd by them … [was] at last receyved into England by men of … small learning and lesse judgement in that behalfe” (The Scholemaster, 177). The Renaissance criticism of Gothic architecture soon appeared among the humanists of Britain as well. In 1624 Henry Wotton wrote that lancet arches, “both for the naturall imbecility of the sharpe Angle it selfe, and likewise for their Uncomelinesse, ought to bee exiled from judicious eyes, and left to their first inventors, the Gothes or Lumbards, amongst other Reliques of that barbarous Age” (Elements of Architecture, 40–1). 55 Parkin-Gounelas, “Anachrony and Anatopia,” 128. 56 Barry Magrill nicely articulated this point from an obliquely Baudrillardian perspective (see A Commerce of Taste, 19). 57 Brooks, The Gothic Revival, 39. Brooks further noted: “Writers outside Sweden, particularly in England, expanded the story on the basis, ironically, of the first-century work Germania by the Roman historian Tacitus … Like the Goths in the Getica, Tacitus’s Germans were … distinguished by an intense love of liberty, preferred death to the possibility of enslavement, living in open countryside on their own land, choosing their own kings, and making major decisions through tribal assemblies” (ibid.). In other words what the British gained in combining the Getica with Germania was a historical precedence for the parliamentarian structure of their political culture, conflating the Germanic Getes with one of their own ancestral peoples, the Jutes. British parliament was an ancient Gothic tradition, according to that combinatory process. Furthermore, as Samuel Kliger noted in The Goths in England, the Translatio imperii ad Teutonicos strengthened that combination, emphasizing the Carolingian translation of power from the Roman pope to the Germanic emperor, which then legitimized the German-based Protestant Reformation as the overruling of a corrupt and tyrannous papal Rome. Thus Britain, as a land both Protestant and parliamentarian, could ultimately see itself as Gothic. 58 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18. 59 Hall, “Introduction,” 14–15. 60 Levine, Modern Architecture, 116. 61 Pugin, The True Principles, 45. 62 Brooks, The Gothic Revival, 130. 63 Ibid., 122. 64 Ibid., 130. 65 Ibid., 305. 66 Ibid., 307. 67 Ibid., 305.

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68 Lewis, The Gothic Revival, 15. 69 The Hebraic letter “k” developed from the Egyptian hieroglyph for “d.” Because the ancient Egyptian word for hand started with a “d” sound, the “d” hieroglyph was an open hand. Thus because the Hebraic word for the palm of one’s (implicitly open) hand starts with a “k” sound, the ancient Hebrews developed the pictograph for the letter “k” to represent an open hand. I am indebted to Jodey Castricano for this insight. 70 In conjunction with Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak explained the act of erasure thusly: “The sign cannot be taken as a homogenous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning), as ‘semiology,’ the study of signs, would have it. The sign must be studied ‘under erasure,’ always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such” (“Translator’s Preface,” xxxix). We have already considered the semiological unit of traditional Gothic Revival historians (modern signifier equalling medieval signified) as something haunted by an undecidable Gothic origin. 71 Cram, The Substance of Gothic, xii. 72 Cram, The Gothic Quest, 1st ed., 61. For all subsequent citations of this edition of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “gq ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material. 73 For Cram’s attack on the Beaux-Arts classicism of contemporaneous Paris, see Cram, “The Case against the École des Beaux-Arts”; Cram, “The Influence of the French School.”

C ha p t e r o n e   1 Goodhue, “The Written Work of Ralph Adams Cram,” 458.   2 Wilson, “Ralph Adams Cram,” 196.  3 Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests, 135.  4 Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram, 1.  5 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, ix. I do not seem to have much in common with Cram. In keeping with microhistory I am more like Henry Booth, the reporter with whom I opened this book. Like Booth I first visited the Walkerville church to write a report (an undergraduate essay in my case), and like Booth I left puzzling with what I saw. The difference is that I did not settle on the rector’s silence, even if my subsequent research has brought me no nearer to the “real” Cram.  6 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 12.  7 Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 5.

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 8 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 99.  9 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, xii. 10 Derrida, as quoted in Long, “The Auto-Bio-Thanato-Heterographical,” 11. 11 Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 133. 12 Derrida, Signature, Event, Context, 91. 13 Bloom remarked: “True poetic history is the story of how poets as poets have suffered other poets, just as any true biography is the story of how anyone suffered his own family – or his own displacement of family into lovers and friends” (The Anxiety of Influence, 94). Implicit in this parallel is the treatment of poets as a special subset of humanity. Hence Bloom continued: “[Percy Bysshe] Shelley says of the poets, however erring as men, that ‘they have washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time’” (ibid., 130). The family romances of poets do not necessarily coincide with their family romances as human beings. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 Another issue I have with Bloom’s formula for critical misreading is his exclusionary emphasis on “strong poets” influencing other “strong poets” within the confines of those canonized in the institution of western literature. My interest in Cram as a belated Gothic Revivalist complicates Shand-Tucci’s biographical desire to situate Cram in a pantheon of pioneering American architectural modernists (e.g., Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright). Shand-Tucci did this through a highly selective reading (misreading really) of modernist references from Cram’s career. 16 Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 60. 17 Ibid., 85. Bloom offered a concession for deconstruction: “Whether one accepts a theory of language that teaches the dearth of meaning, as in Derrida and [Paul] de Man, or that teaches its plenitude, as in [Owen] Barfield and [Walter J.] Ong, does not seem to me to matter. All I ask is that the theory of language be extreme and uncompromising enough” (“The Breaking of Form,” 4). Nevertheless he clearly preferred the plenitude of Barfield and Ong. 18 For example Derrida wrote: “In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, let us recall, a first noun returned three times on the same first page, the noun ‘specter’ … Marx, unless it is the other one, Engels, then puts on stage … the terror that this specter inspires in all the powers of old Europe” (Specters of Marx, 123). In “Spectres of Engels” Willy Maley subsequently explored Engels’s spectrality. 19 Cram, My Life in Architecture, 8–9. For all subsequent citations of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “mlia ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material.

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20 Cram, Excalibur, front matter. 21 Cram, Convictions and Controversies, 95. 22 Cram, “The Last of the Squires,” 83. Another thing Cram remembered of the “Old Place” was a room in the attic filled with great unopened chests. The question mark of the unopened chests gave the room an atmosphere “curiously mingled of delight and terror” (ibid., 82). Shand-Tucci consequently suggested that Cram’s Gothic literature owed something to the delight and terror of that room (see Boston Bohemia, 121). In this book I offer the Anglican church in Walkerville as another great unopened chest. 23 Cram, Church Building, 1st ed., 224. For all subsequent citations of this edition of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “cb ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material. 24 Whitehill, “Boston Artists and Craftsmen,” 389. For more on Cram’s context of American Anglo-centrism, see Clark, The American Discovery of Tradition; Lears, No Place of Grace, especially 198–215. 25 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 176. 26 Cram, “Preface,” in American Churches, n.p. 27 Anglo-Catholicism was already well established in America when Cram opened his architectural office in 1888. Bishops Samuel Seabury (1729– 1796) and John Henry Hobart (1775–1830) of Connecticut and New York, respectively, advocated High Church elements for American Episcopalianism years before the Tractarians at Oxford did so for the Church of England in 1833. In fact Hobart’s visit to Oxford in 1823 influenced founders of the Oxford movement, although both the Americans and Tractarians were under the influence of the seventeenth-century Caroline Divines of Britain, who had already proposed High Church amendments to Anglican liturgy. Ultimately some High Church members of Episcopalian America were already willing to embrace the Oxonian Tracts for the Times during the 1830s, leading Jackson Kemper (1789– 1870) to found the Anglo-Catholic seminarian Nashotah House in 1847, in Wisconsin. Furthermore closer to Cram, the Anglo-Catholic Charles Grafton (1830–1912), founding member of the monastic Cowley Fathers in 1866, was rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Boston until 1888, when he became bishop of Fond du Lac in Wisconsin. Cram’s spiritual teacher Arthur C.A. Hall (1847–1912) was also a Cowley Father, ­serving as rector at the Episcopal Church of St John the Evangelist, Boston, from 1882 until 1891, before becoming bishop of Vermont in 1894. For more on the history of Anglo-Catholicism in America, see especially DeMille, The Catholic Movement in the American Episcopal Church. 28 Brooks, New England, 331. 29 Cram, Walled Towns, 56.

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Notes to pages 29–32

30 After the service at San Luigi dei Francesi, Cram’s travelling companion, Thomas Henry Randall, a High Church Episcopalian, declared that the following morning he was going to take communion at the British Church in Rome. Much to both of their surprise, Cram said that he would attend the British service too, assisting in communion. Then back in Boston, 1888, Cram joined the congregation of the Episcopal Church of St John the Evangelist, Bowdoin Street, under the instruction of Arthur Hall, being baptized that year. On 3 February 1889 he was confirmed in the Episcopal faith. 31 Cram, The Catholic Church and Art, 110. 32 “Architectural League Exhibition,” 2. The reviewer also noted that a drawing of the Cohasset church would be “well known” to readers of the Canadian Architect and Builder (ibid.). 33 Significantly, having established and edited an American journal on Christian Art in 1907, Cram wrote an editorial on country church building in January 1908. The editorial included a series of photographs, and Cram selected St Stephen’s Cohasset and the new St Mary’s Walkerville as back-to-back images, further strengthening their obvious structural resemblances (see Cram, “Editorial,” 203–4). 34 “Architectural League Exhibition,” 2. 35 This raises a valid criticism of Mathilde Brosseau, who assigned Cram’s influence in Canada as part of a Beaux-Arts program of monumentality and axial planning (see Gothic Revival in Canadian Architecture, 26–7). Granted Cram admired the École des Beaux-Arts for “the training it affords in proportion and composition, the solid kernel of good in its ­system of planning” (gq , 305). However his approach to monumentality and planning had more to do with constructional traditions and liturgical imperatives of British Gothic churches than with Beaux-Arts principles. In fact Cram shared a pair of tragic stories about architectural students who tried to present Gothic church designs to their Beaux-Arts-trained teachers. In one case the results were “beautifully proportioned” but entirely unacceptable for church building (302); in the other the student gave up on the project because the instructors had reduced the design to “the kind of thing one finds in trade books on church building” (303). 36 “Drawing at the Eighteen Club,” 19. 37 Another anonymous reviewer for the Canadian Architect and Builder wrote: “There are no doubt spiritually minded men to whom Gothic represents, as it does to Mr. Cram, the ‘Christian architecture’; but for the many, to whom it represents a fashion to be followed, the animating spirit is the spirit of [Andrea] Palladio. Mr. Cram’s own churches have for some

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time been to the profession, an enviable attainment; and his West Point success has brought things to a crisis. The supply has created a demand, that is all. It is a fashion, not a movement” (“An American Gothic Revival,” 131). Thus the Victorian battle of the styles still raged in Edwardian Canada. 38 “Fourth Annual Convention,” 109. Kelly Crossman has examined the sudden sense of alarm among Canadian architects from 1885 to 1906 concerning the use of American architects for Canadian commissions (see Architecture in Transition, especially 9–10). 39 Crossman, Architecture in Transition, 3. 40 Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, “Cathedral of ‘All Saints,’” 14. 41 Ibid., 13. 42 Wilby, “St Mary’s Church,” 3. 43 Schuyler, “The Works of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson,” 46. 44 Booth, “Peregrinations and Cogitations,” n.p. 45 Cram would return to the Romanesque (albeit a primarily Anglo-Norman Romanesque, not Richardson’s Byzantine / Mediterranean Romanesque), starting in the 1910s. 46 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 353–4. This point sophisticates Shand-Tucci’s conclusion (recently echoed by Michael Hall) that the massive tower on Cram’s first Gothic Revival church was American and Richardsonian in massing (see Hall, George Frederick Bodley, 431; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 119). James F. O’Gorman more accurately said that that church combines “the seemingly irreco­ ncilable characteristics of Richardsonian robustness and Gothic grace” (“Either in Books or Architecture,” 198). Furthermore Ann Miner Daniel rightly noted that Cram’s first Gothic towers borrowed from hefty British Gothic churches at Streatley, Sulgrave, Bray, and others (see “The Early Architecture of Ralph Adams Cram,” 108), many of which Cram photographed for his 1898 portfolio English Country Churches. Thus Cram’s towers were Richardsonian to the extent that Richardson’s aesthetic of massiveness taught Cram to appreciate the massiveness of select British Gothic models while rejecting the Romanesque style during the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. 47 I emphasize the time-specificity of that declaration. Having extensively studied British monastic Gothic for his Ruined Abbeys, Cram would experiment more with other phases of British Gothic (and eventually continental Gothic) after 1904. On viewing Tintern Abbey Cram wrote of thirteenth-century British monasteries as “the noblest and most perfect examples of this first and purest form of English Gothic” (Ruined Abbeys, 109). Likewise concerning the choir at Rievaulx Abbey, he declared:

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Notes to pages 39–42

“Purely English, it contains no trace of French influence whatever and marks our own thirteenth century Gothic at the highest point of its development” (ibid., 160). Furthermore, from the retrospective of his third edition to Church Building Cram noted that he would change little about the earlier editions of that book, “unless perhaps it were the rather narrow enthusiasm for the latest phase of English Gothic as the sole basis for the new fabric of religious architecture so much desired at the time. Apparently, one becomes less the purist, or rather stylist, with advancing years, finding beauty in unexpected places and significance in things once disregarded … Perhaps also religion in its formal aspects seems less national, less racial than once it did, and so essentially more catholic as well as Catholic” (Church Building, 3rd ed., 276–7). 48 Ferrey, Recollections on A.N. Welby Pugin, 284. See also Hall, George Frederick Bodley, 110–12. 49 Taylor, as quoted in Hall, “The Rise of Refinement,” 119. At about the same time, George Gilbert Scott Jr (as quoted in Stamp, An Architect of Promise, 48) wrote a letter to J.T. Irvine: “Do you know I have become a great admirer of late work, and perpendicular … I believe intensely in English of all sorts and let French go to the dogs.” 50 Cram, “Good and Bad Modern Gothic,” 115. 51 Ibid., 117. 52 Ibid., 118. 53 Cram, Towards the Great Peace, 206; my emphasis. 54 Cram, Church Building, 2nd ed., 239. 55 Significantly when the Toronto Mail and Empire reviewed Cram’s Toronto lecture in 1903, the anonymous reporter noted that “Mr. Cram traced the history of modern English church architecture from the labour of the elder Pugin, to the work of Bodley, Garner, and Sedding.” See “English Gothic,” n.p. This article is available as a clipping in file 250, St Mary’s Church Papers. 56 See Upjohn, Richard Upjohn, 52. 57 Cram, “Style in American Architecture,” 235. 58 Cram, “The Work of Cope and Stewardson,” 413. 59 Cram, “The Work of Frank Miles Day and His Brother,” 397. 60 Ibid., 408. 61 Cram, “The Work of Cope and Stewardson,” 414. 62 There is for example the legend of Upjohn’s work at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension (begun 1840) in New York City. The rector of the parish, disapproving of Upjohn’s High Churchmanship, purchased the back of the church lot from the diocese to ensure that Upjohn would not have the

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space to include a deep chancel for High Church worship in his design for the building. See Upjohn, Richard Upjohn, 69. 63 Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 2:155; his emphasis. 64 Cram, “The Influence of the French School,” 66. 65 Ruskin, Arrows of the Chace, 1:153. 66 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 132. 67 Goodhue, as quoted in Smith, St Bartholomew’s Church, 31–2. Cram had little interest in the French Gothic of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), once claiming that Viollet-le-Duc’s restorations left Reims Cathedral with “a certain coldness and impersonality” (mlia , 137). We also recall Cram’s statement that “no French architect for three centuries has had the faintest idea what constitutes the art of Christianity,” a condemnation that presumably included Viollet-le-Duc. 68 See Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 1:339–42. 69 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 354–5. 70 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 21. 71 Ibid., 46–7. 72 Wyllie, Bertram Goodhue, 174. 73 Cram, The Catholic Church and Art, 103. In a later but still contemporary assessment of Auguste Pugin’s impact on the British Gothic Revival, Everard Upjohn wrote: “[Auguste] Pugin, himself an architect … depict[ed] plans, piers, doors and windows, tracery, and mouldings, of inestimable value to a designer who either wished or was compelled to work in the Gothic manner” (Richard Upjohn, 15). Therefore Upjohn proposed that the maturation of the Gothic Revival (implicitly beyond Georgian Gothick fictions) “possibly dates from 1821” (ibid., 16), when Auguste Pugin published his first Specimens of Gothic Architecture. 74 See Macdonell, “The American Pugins.” 75 Pugin and Willson, “Specimens of Gothic Architecture,” 2:14. 76 Pugin, Contrasts, 2nd ed., iii; his emphasis. 77 Pugin, The True Principles, 7. 78 Milner, A Treatise on the Ecclesiastical Architecture of England, 112. 79 His one common exception to that rule was the use of Early English Gothic (even Norman Romanesque) in remote and rugged corners of the empire, Ireland especially. 80 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 117. 81 Pugin, as quoted in ibid. and in Shand-Tucci, Church Building in Boston, 54. 82 Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, 22; his emphasis. 83 Shand-Tucci, Church Building in Boston, 101; his emphasis.

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Notes to pages 50–64

 84 Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, 15–16n11.  85 Pugin, The True Principles, 7n1; his emphasis.  86 Pugin, Contrasts, 2nd ed., 3.  87 Pugin, Some Remarks, 13.  88 Belcher, The Collected Letters of A.W.N. Pugin, 1:187; Pugin’s emphasis.   89 See Bressani and Macdonell, “Remedies External and Visible.”   90 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 355.  91 Cram, The Decadent, 31.   92 Ibid., 40.   93 Ibid., 30.  94 Stamp, An Architect of Promise, 10; my emphasis.   95 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 354.  96 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.2.29. For all subsequent citations of this play, the play’s title, act, scene, and line number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material.   97 Dziemianowicz, “Introduction,” xviii.  98 Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters, 2.   99 Ibid., 7. 100 Ibid., 12. 101 Ibid., 36. 102 Ibid., 81. 103 Dziemianowicz, “Introduction,” xviii. 104 Cram, The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain, 1. For all subsequent citations of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “ra” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material. 105 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, 7; Heidegger, as quoted in ibid., 97. 106 Ibid., 125–6. 107 Kant, as quoted in ibid., 125; Kant’s emphasis. 108 Pugin, A Treatise on Chancel Screens, 7. 109 Hence Pugin offered his most famous principle: “all ornament should ­consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building” (The True Principles, 1; his emphasis). 110 Ibid., 36. 111 Pugin, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture, 17. 112 Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, 26. 113 Pugin, The True Principles, 9–10; his emphasis. 114 This tile is listed as M C 85 in the 1901 catalogue of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. See Reed, Henry Chapman Mercer, 199. 115 See Julian, A Dictionary of Hymnology, 1:322–5.

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C ha p t e r t wo   1 See “Deed of Gift for St Mary’s Anglican Church, Walkerville, 1904,” file 243, St Mary’s Church Papers.   2 Vestry Board to the Messrs Walker, 2 May 1904, file 248, St Mary’s Church Papers.  3 Derrida, Given Time, 24.   4 Ibid., 37.   5 Ibid., 14.  6 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 202.   7 Cram’s spiritual teacher Arthur Hall articulated this distinction (see Hall, Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer, 85).   8 In this book I use the Authorized King James version of the Bible as the standard text for Anglicanism (and Cram’s spiritual teachers) in the late nineteenth century.  9 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 97. 10 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 223. 11 I am particularly indebted to Patricia Eldred’s “Shaping the Magi Story” for my reading of the magi’s apocryphal development. 12 The persistence of this apocrypha in the nineteenth century is evident in John Henry Hopkins Jr’s Christmas carol, “Three Kings of Orient,” ­composed in 1857, published in 1862. In that carol the first magus sings: “Born a King on Bethlehem’s plain / Gold I bring to crown Him again, /  King forever, / Ceasing never, / Over us all to reign.” The second magus sings: “Frankincense to offer have I; / Incense owns a Deity nigh; / Prayer and praising / All men raising, / Worship Him God on high.” And the third sings: “Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume / Breathes a life of gathering gloom; – / Sorrowing, sighing, / Bleeding, dying, / Sealed in the stone-cold tomb” (“Three Kings of Orient,” 13). In this song however Gaspard bears the gift of gold, Melchior frankincense, and Balthazar myrrh. 13 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 100. 14 Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 215. 15 See Derrida, The Gift of Death, 100. 16 In his annotations to the Matthean text, A. Carr stated that this gospel was for the Jews, and thus “all” who are in the “house” are Jews (see The Gospel according to St Matthew, 57n16). Conversely in St Luke’s gospel the passage reads: “they which enter in [the house] may see the light” (8:16), which Carr took to mean the Gentiles who enter into the Christian faith (see The Gospel according to St Matthew, 57n16). However inasmuch as St Matthew had the Gentile magi worship in

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Notes to pages 74–6

the “house” of Christ’s infancy, the “all” of his version would likely include the Gentiles as well. 17 In his annotations to the Matthean gospel, M.F. Sadler wrote: “So order the shining of your reflected light, that men may see your good works, and yet give the glory not to you, but to your Father in heaven” (The Gospel according to St Matthew, 59). Likewise Alfred Plummer explained: “Christian character is not individual and selfish, but social and beneficent. To attend only to his own soul is to lose savour and to obscure light. The light must shine ‘before men’; which is not the same thing as shining ‘to be seen of men.’ Good influence is to be allowed free play; not for self glorification, but for the glory of God” (An Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to S. Matthew, 73). 18 See Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 237. 19 Sumner, A Practical Exposition of the Gospel according to St Matthew, 99; his emphasis. 20 Bagot, An Exposition of the Gospel according to St Matthew, 176. Likewise James Morison noted: “Act out your Christianity to the full, in society, and before society, that society may get the benefit of it. Let that benefit indeed be ever in view. The injunction is in perfect harmony with what is said in Matt. vi. 1–18, for Christianity has an outside as well as an inside, and to turn the outside in is just as wrong and inconsistent as to turn the inside out” (A Practical Commentary on the Gospel according to St Matthew, 66–7). 21 Maclaren, The Gospel of St Matthew, 88–9. Plummer used the same theme: “In this advertising age, in which a man hardly needs to sound his own trumpet, because there are so many who are ready to sound it for him, the danger [of terrestrial rather than celestial rewards] is greatly increased” (An Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to S. Matthew, 90). 22 Maclaren, The Gospel of St Matthew, 89. 23 Plummer, An Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to S. Matthew, 91; his emphasis. 24 Ibid., 92. Nevertheless Plummer feared a modern world in which “the rigid orthodoxy of the economist is very prevalent, and there is a danger lest, through fear of pauperizing the recipients, there may at last be no ­givers” (ibid.). 25 Pope Leo the Great, as translated in ibid., 92n2. 26 Hall, Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer, 87. 27 Ibid., 40. 28 Ibid., 76–7; his emphasis.

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29 Ritchie, Through Fire and Water, 41. 30 Jones, Studies in the Gospel according to St Matthew, 30. 31 Ibid., 51. 32 Sadler, The Gospel according to St Matthew, 18n.11. 33 Newman, as quoted in ibid., 18–19n.11. 34 The Constitutional Act also extended the British practice of tithing to Canada. However, even while maintaining an obligatory legal status, ­tithing was never de facto enforced in Canada. Westfall further noted that as of 1823, it even lost its “worthless status at law” (Two Worlds, 94). 35 For detailed studies of the clergy reserves in Canada, see Magrill, A Commerce of Taste, especially 48–9, 82–5, 90–1; Moir, “The Settlement of the Clergy Reserves”; Moir, Church and State in Canada West, 27–81; Talman, “The Position of the Church of England”; Wilson, The Clergy Reserves of Upper Canada. 36 See Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1:467. 37 Wilson, The Clergy Reserves of Upper Canada, 4. 38 Responsible government describes a situation in which the Britishappointed governors in an imperial colony honoured legislative decisions made in the parliamentary houses of that colony. In the Canadian colonies responsible government began in 1848. 39 Westfall, Two Worlds, 201. 40 Ibid., 106. 41 Ibid., 189. 42 Saint, “Anglican Church-Building in London,” 39. 43 Brooks, “Building the Rural Church,” 73. 44 Westfall did use the term “economy of salvation” (Two Worlds, 185), but he explored that economy in terms of shared sacred and secular faith in technological progress. In so doing, Westfall situated his sense of economy in terms of the Pauline epistles. St Paul claimed that the introduction of original sin was a debt that humanity carried before the incarnation. With the redemption of Christ’s self-sacrifice, that debt was nullified for the faithful, leaving them free to follow Christ in triumph over sin. Thus if the debt of original sin carried with it the loss of control over the natural world, then the technological spread of a proselytizing Christian civilization across the Canadian landscape (via the railway) could free the nonbelieving segments of the country from that debt. It would truly become a dominion in the biblical and not just the political sense. 45 Ibid., 129. 46 Ibid., 100. 47 Ibid., 130.

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Notes to pages 82–6

48 Magrill, A Commerce of Taste, 84. 49 Cram connected his career as an American pattern book author with his Anglo-American purview. To that end it is worth adding a stipulation to Magrill’s contention that the Canadian consumption of pattern book architecture transitioned from British to American publications during the Victorian era: “The imported [British] church pattern books promoted Britain’s architectural fashion and contributed to the reinforcement of British mores, cultural values, and economic structures in the Dominion of Canada … These patterns were eventually overwritten by US hegemony” (A Commerce of Taste, 9). Cram’s success as an American overwriting British pattern book production actually hinged on his promotion of similar moral and cultural values to the British traditions he supplanted. 50 The Walker brothers supposedly first approached Albert Kahn (1869– 1942) of Detroit with the church commission, but ostensibly the Jewish Kahn demurred. This is entirely possible but unlikely. For example in 1898 Kahn had experimented with Gothic architecture in the Scripps Library of Detroit, and he adroitly designed a Gothic Revival cemetery chapel in Detroit in 1905, shortly after the Walkerville church commission (for which he served as construction supervisor for Cram’s firm). More likely the Walkers asked Kahn to recommend a church-building firm, and Kahn suggested Cram. Alternately in addition to possibly seeing Cram’s Church Building of 1901 or the 1898 Churchman articles that spawned it, the Walkers had firsthand experience with Cram’s religious architecture. The first church Cram’s firm designed outside New England was St Andrew’s Episcopal (begun 1894) in Detroit. In fact Cram often coordinated visits with Kahn and the Walkers in Detroit while visiting to discuss final details concerning St Andrew’s Church with the Detroit clergymen. Therefore the most likely scenario is that the Walkers saw St Andrew’s Church in Detroit, hired Cram’s firm for Walkerville, and asked Kahn – their trusted local architect – to supervise construction of the project. 51 Magrill, A Commerce of Taste, 98. 52 The company took this name because the railway extended from the shores of Lake Erie, through parts of Essex County, to Walkerville (along the Detroit River). 53 See Armstrong-Reynolds, Kingsville, 1:257–8. 54 The Walkers did hold charity events at their Kingsville casino, the proceeds of which being divided among the various denominations of the town for distribution to the poor. Thus they did contribute indirectly. See ibid., 1:127.

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55 The building committee also included Jasper Golden (1822–1916), the “first people’s warden [of the Anglican community] … school teacher, lay reader and long-time Sunday School superintendent” (ibid., 2:384). Jasper is a name related to Gaspar, one of the three magi, and because the magus Gaspar is occasionally associated with the gift of gold, Jasper Golden’s surname made the Epiphany dedication rather apropos. His place in the church’s economy of salvation has yet to be discovered, if not simply as an incremental measure of the thanksgiving for the entire church in which the Anglican congregation worships. The final member of the building committee was Dr William Drake, who first trained Sidney King in medicine. 56 Parts of the contextual argument in this section came from Macdonell, “‘If You Want to, You Can Cure Me.’” 57 More accurately the State of Michigan sanctioned the Maine Prohibitory Law, which meant that only pharmacists were allowed to sell alcohol, and only if they swore to sell it for medicinal purposes. See Files, “Hiram Walker and Sons,” 2–3. 58 The children were Julia Elizabeth (1847–1928), Willis Ephraim (1849– 1886), Edward Chandler, Franklin Hiram, Jennie Melissa (1857–1870), and James Harrington Walker. Another child, Alfred, was born and died in 1856. 59 Originally the liquor label was Club Whisky because of its intended market for finer men’s clubs. The name changed to Canadian Club Whisky in 1889 because of political pressure from the American liquor market. Kentucky whisky-makers complained that Walker’s Club Whisky was a name that American consumers mistook as American-made, and they demanded an appropriate label to identify the Canadian export – hence Canadian Club Whisky. See Files, “Hiram Walker and Sons,” 12–33. 60 Hiram Walker still kept the old Labadie homestead in Walkerville, affectionately dubbing it “The Cottage,” in which several of his children lived occasionally throughout the late nineteenth century. 61 Hoskins, “A Historical Survey of the Town of Walkerville,” 45. 62 Anonymous, as quoted in Fraser, Hiram Walker Remembered, 25. 63 The Pullman Palace Car Company produced luxury cars for trains like the one from Walkerville to Kingsville. For more on Pullman and his company, see Harding, George M. Pullman; Leyendecker, Palace Car Prince; Morel, Pullman. 64 For more on Pullman, Illinois, as a company town and social experiment, see Buder, Pullman; Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise; Lillibridge, “Pullman”; Reiff and Hirsch, “Pullman and Its Public”; Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief.

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65 For more on the Pullman Strike and its social context in Pullman, Illinois, see Lindsay, “Paternalism and the Pullman Strike”; Papke, The Pullman Case; Reiff, “Rethinking Pullman”; Schneirov, Stromquist, and Salvatore, The Pullman Strike. 66 See Weeks, “The Curse of Peche Island.” 67 In addition to all the variations on fishing (and thus sinning) in the Peche Island name, there was also the French pêche, meaning peach. The island apparently had an abundant growth of peach trees. It is thus noteworthy that among the several images of fruit-bearing trees in the windows of Walkerville’s new St Mary’s Anglican Church (most of which ranging in orange tones), the ones depicted in the Transfiguration window are peach coloured. In the next chapter I will address the significance of the Transfiguration window to Edward Walker’s ailment. 68 Significantly (and presumably spurred on by the accusatory Detroit Journal article) the Walkerville council also discussed their plans to hold a public celebration of Hiram Walker’s birthday that year. Thus on 4 July 1890 the council presented the town founder with a bronze statue, and he was much praised in the public celebration, especially by his long-time friend Sidney King. King refuted Hiram Walker’s anonymous enemies: “The people of Walkerville … point with pride to the fact that they have been for years in the enjoyment, through the thoughtfulness of [Hiram Walker’s] firm, of advantages and comforts which are rare under similar conditions of private control, and it is doubtful whether there could be found a more happy relationship between capital and labour, or a greater average of comfort among all classes than has existed here” (King, as quoted in Fraser, Hiram Walker Remembered, 59). 69 The corporeal metaphor continued in Walkerville, even up to the time of amalgamation in 1935, when Walkerville became a neighbourhood of the growing city of Windsor. As a declaration of protest against amalgamation, citizens of Walkerville posted a billboard in the neighbourhood, ­stating “walkervi lle: fou n ded 1858, inc or por ated 1890, c ruc i f i ed 1935” (Hallam, A History of St Mary’s Church, 12; his emphasis). 70 See Bowler, Chapel and Church Architecture, for nonconformist designs of the period. See also Thurlby, “Nonconformist Churches in Canada,” for a study of Canadian nonconformist traditions in architecture contemporaneous with the first Walkerville church. 71 According to local legend in Walkerville, Hiram Walker set down the ­second proviso to John Semmens on the understanding that because Semmens was still a student at Victoria College, he lacked the moral

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stature of an ordained man. Thus Semmens could not pass judgment on the use of alcohol in Walkerville. Nevertheless two ordained Methodist ministers followed Semmens, and the same proviso seemingly remained in place. See Hallam, A History of St Mary’s Church, 7–8. 72 Henceforth I will call that building the old St Mary’s Anglican Church, as opposed to the new St Mary’s Anglican Church, the focus of this study. 73 More precisely Hiram Walker dedicated the east window of the church in memory of his wife. That window was subsequently moved nearby to St Paul’s Anglican Church, Essex, Ontario. 74 See “Annual Church Wardens’ Report, 1902,” file 1, St Mary’s Church Papers. They also noted the lack of a proper chancel, which is further proof of the building’s original suitability for a nonconformist denomination and not Anglicanism. 75 The Messrs Walker to William H. Battersby, 7 April 1902, file 248, St Mary’s Church Papers. 76 See “Church Wardens’ Correspondence, 1900–04,” file 1, St Mary’s Church Papers. 77 See “Church Wardens’ Annual Report, 1904,” file 2, St Mary’s Church Papers. 78 Baldwin, The Primary Charge, 13. 79 Ibid., 10–11. Nevertheless Baldwin went on to remind his synod “that they [should] bring the whole matter of voluntary giving before their people and explain to them that it is a privilege and not a burthen, an honour and not a tax and especially impress on them the sovereign duty of supporting the Church in their own Diocese to the fullest extent possible” (ibid., 15–16). 80 See Hallam, A History of St Mary’s Church, 17. 81 See the Bishop’s Office to Mr Edward Radford, 12 January 1904, file 209, St Mary’s Church Papers. 82 See Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to Mr Edward Radford, 12 June 1903, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers. 83 See Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to Messrs Walker Sons, 23 March 1904, file 250, St Mary’s Church Papers. 84 To maintain the counterbalance of a vertical tower and horizontal church, Cram placed the long axis of the Cohasset parish hall to the liturgical north of the church so that it could act as the tower’s horizontal complement. In Walkerville he placed the parish hall and rectory to the liturgical north and south of the church, respectively, for the same reason. 85 This apparently is not the only time Cram implicated the salvation of a church patron in the ritual process of God’s economy. When Cram designed St James’s Episcopal Church (begun 1919) at Lake Delaware,

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New York, his patron was Angelica Gerry, for whom he subsequently built an estate house (c. 1925) near the church. The altarpiece in that church depicts the Adoration of the Magi, and according to local legend, Angelica Gerry’s dog served as the model for the canine accompanying the magi in that scene. Thus the relationship between her patronage and the gift-giving magi aligns with the moment of adoration at the Anglo-Catholic high altar. 86 Marx, “Introduction,” 3. For more on the complexity of Marx’s opiate reference, see McKinnon, “Opium as Dialectics of Religion.”

C ha p t e r t h re e  1 Cram, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, viii.  2 Cram, Towards the Great Peace, 235.   3 Derrida, “Fors,” xiii. Derrida would go on to explain how the spectre and the crypt relate: “I say a ghost and a crypt: actually the theory of the ‘ghost’ is not exactly the theory of the ‘crypt.’ It’s even more complicated. Although it is also connected to the crypt, the ghost is more precisely the effect of another’s crypt in my unconscious” (The Ear of the Other, 59; his emphasis). Therefore I negotiate the effects of the spectre and the crypt in this text by investigating Cram’s encryption of Edward Walker’s secret illness in the Walkerville church and implicating the effect of that crypt haunting my unconscious mind as I first left the church puzzling with my experience.   4 Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” 126.   5 Derrida, “Fors,” xxxviii; his emphasis.   6 Ibid., xli.   7 Carlo Ginzburg also analyzed the Wolf Man case in “Freud, the Wolf Man, and the Werewolves.” True to his interest in the transmutations of enduring myths via popular culture, Ginzburg argued that the case is indicative of enduring lycanthropy myths, traced through the workingclass nanny’s influence on the Wolf Man.   8 Derrida, “Fors,” xlii; his emphasis.   9 Ibid., xxxviii; his emphasis. 10 Derrida, The Ear of the Other, 57–8; my emphasis. Significantly inasmuch as the crypt theory challenges the dialectical process of Freudian semiology, Derrida referred to Hegel to reiterate that challenge. 11 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 121. 12 See Abraham, “The Phantom of Hamlet.” To an extent Derrida’s reference to Hamlet in Specters of Marx is a response to Abraham’s transgenerational

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phantom in the same way that Derrida’s “Fors” is a response to Abraham and Torok’s crypt theory. In Specters of Marx Derrida underscored the uncertainty of knowing who the ghost of Hamlet is. 13 See Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination, especially 11–36. 14 Torok, “The Illness of Mourning,” 114. See also Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination, 28–9. 15 Derrida, Dissemination, 240. 16 Derrida, “Fors,” xli–xlii. Tellingly Derrida subtitled his foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Word as “The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok” in homage of Mallarmé’s Les mots Anglais (English Words) and the phonic and graphic interplay of bits of words and words within words. Derrida directly referred to Mallarmé in his foreword (see “Fors,” xlvi). 17 Ulmer, Applied Grammatology, 60. 18 See Castricano, Cryptomimesis, especially 31–5. 19 Iversen and Melville, Writing Art History, 53. 20 Derrida, “Fors,” xiv. 21 Wilby, “St Mary’s Church,” 3. 22 It is not coincidental that Cram named his narrator’s friend Tom Rendel. When Cram travelled to Italy in 1887–88, he met a fellow American architect named Thomas Henry Randall. Furthermore according to Cram’s memoirs, he and Randall travelled to Sicily together on the suggestion of a pair of American naval officers from the “U.S.S. Quinebaug,” whom they met while sketching mosaics in the Trastevere region of Rome (mlia , 60). Thus in “Sister Maddelena” Cram’s narrator and Tom Rendel travelled to Sicily on the recommendation of naval officers “on the tubby U.S.S. ‘Quinebaug,’ that, during the summer of 1888, was trying to uphold the maritime honour of the United States in European waters” (bsw , 85). 23 This is the extent to which Cram’s ghost stories abided by an “American” Gothic tradition. His choice of the name Maddelena and the theme of live burial both speak to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Poe’s story plays on the architectural and lineal use of the word “House” to reference Madeline Usher’s live burial in the substructure of the Usher family estate. Furthermore the American Poe set his story in a vaguely European context of long family bloodlines and nowcrumbling architectural seats of inheritance. The European context became more specific in Poe’s Italian setting for “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), which also featured live burial. Cram’s settings were always specific to Europe.

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24 This was not the only significant use of a saint’s name in Black Spirits and White. In “The White Villa,” Cram named the Duke of San Damiano after St Damian, a patron saint of surgeons. As penance for the murder of his adulterous wife in a jealous rage, the Duca di San Damiano waged war on the bandits who plagued the Italian countryside. He became the surgical scourge of the Catholic church militant. 25 Pugin, The True Principles, 29. 26 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 353. 27 See especially Pugin, Contrasts, 2nd ed., 25. 28 Ibid., 26. 29 At least one other significance for the red rose in Walkerville is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the church’s titular saint. Inasmuch as St Mary experienced seven dolours at her son’s peril, the flower is also indicative of Christ’s blood shed during the Crucifixion and the agony it caused his mother in witnessing his death. 30 Window glass must be thick enough to withstand the buffeting of wind. However in the standard process of making colourful pot metal glass, the chemicals needed to make red glass are at such a concentration that fully thick red glass would be too dark, appearing as nearly black. Thus by laminating a thin layer of red with a thicker layer of clear or grisailles glass, a luminous red can occur. 31 An earlier version of this section appeared in Macdonell, “‘If You Want to, You Can Cure Me.’” 32 Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests, 150. 33 See Chauvin, “Hiram Walker”; Daniels, “Saint Mary’s Church”; Edwards and Weeks, The Best of Times Magazine; Fraser, Hiram Walker Remembered; Hallam, A History of St Mary’s Church; Hoskins, “A Historical Survey of the Town of Walkerville”; Walton, Hiram Walker. 34 See wac ac, Walkerville, Ontario. 35 See “Coronation Material; Edward VII, 1902,” box 5, Hiram WalkerGooderham and Worts Ltd Collection. Inasmuch as the Walkerville congregation met on 7 April 1902 to discuss the prospect of a new church, we recall from the Walkers’ letter that they were going to reveal their plans for the new church slightly later, choosing to do so pre-emptively in April to keep the congregation from wasting time and money planning a building that the Walkers were already going to build. Cram’s firm then sent the designs to the Walker brothers on 29 July 1902, twelve days before Edward VII’s coronation. Thus it is possible that the Walkers were going to announce the new church and showcase the architects’ plans on Coronation Day, instead of at the meeting in April.

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36 For other Ontarian examples of the Georgian gridiron, see Guelph (founded 1827) or Goderich (founded 1828). For another example of a company town using the Georgian gridiron, see Pullman, Illinois, which I discussed comparatively with Walkerville in the previous chapter. 37 For more on company town architecture as a mechanism for social organization if not social control in North America, see, for example, Buder, Pullman; Coolidge, The Mill and the Mansion; Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise; Fortier, Villes industrielles planifiées; Goltz, “The Exercise of Power in a Company Town.” 38 This is why he commissioned Mason and Rice to design the Queen Anne Revival hotel and casino in Kingsville, called the Mettawas. In Walkerville the now razed railway station, the Crown Inn, and several semi-detached houses all show Richardsonian influence. 39 In a broader sense the Walkers were responding to the Beaux-Arts classicism then fashionable in North America through firms such as McKim, Mead, and White. Ironically this was precisely the “Parisian Renaissance” architecture that Cram felt was the antithesis of what Anglo-Saxon America should be building: “Are we a province of France, are we in harmony with her ideals and her methods, are we French by instinct and sympathy? Are they [meaning American architects building in a Beaux-Arts idiom] not trying to express Anglo-Saxon ideas through the medium of a Gallic language” (“The Influence of the French School,” 65)? 40 James Harrington Walker is listed as a churchwarden and vestryman for Christ Church Detroit, as evident on a bronze plaque in the nave. 41 It is important to note that Albert Kahn sent this letter to James Walker. In fact if Cram’s firm did not address their numerous letters to the Walker brothers generally, they seem to have addressed all other letters to James specifically. James was also the one who typically met with the architects in Boston. However with Edward making the final decision about the design, this particular letter shows that James liaised with all the architects as Edward’s agent. No correspondence about the Walkerville church survives in Franklin Walker’s hand. Furthermore whereas Edward and James both left endowments for the Walkerville church in their wills, Franklin did not. Incidentally no word is given about their sole surviving sister from that time – Julia Elizabeth Walker. How Franklin, James, or Julia (and their dead brother, Willis) were encrypted in the architecture remains to be seen. 42 For more on the tradition of aligning church bell towers with prominent streets in Ontario towns, see Thurlby and Westfall, “Church Architecture and Urban Space.”

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43 Edward called his new mansion Willistead Manor because his older brother, Willis Ephraim Walker, died in 1886. With his mansion Edward declared that he had become the head of the Walker family in Willis’s stead. 44 Wilby, “St Mary’s Church,” 3. 45 The gable and the overhanging second storey on the back of the rectory were originally in the shingle style, not half-timbering. The change to halftimbering in the back of the church complex occurred in the 1970s. For more details, see Pratt, “Albert Kahn at Willistead,” 67. 46 In addition to the half-timbering in the gables and an overhanging second storey, Willistead Manor uses the same Amherstburg limestone as the new church does, applied in the same random courses as those used on the church. 47 This is evident in the two neighbouring houses built as part of the same development – Elmscroft (1906) and Foxley (1906–07) – both of which were the work of Albert Kahn’s firm, following the Tudor Revival trend of the new church and Willistead Manor. Hiram Holcomb Walker (1886– 1953), son of James Harrington Walker, commissioned Elmscroft. Clayton J. Ambery, secretary to William Robins (a business manager for Hiram Walker & Sons Ltd), commissioned Foxley. Robins himself, an Englishman, had already pursued the Tudor Revival style in his Walkerville house, Pentilly (1892). Furthermore inasmuch as Robins was close friends with Edward and James Walker at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is possible that Robins suggested the political use of the revived Tudor style. 48 See especially Saint, Richard Norman Shaw. 49 To be slightly more accurate Kahn added a stone Jacobean flourish to the school’s Tudor Revival body to accentuate the main entrance against the Tudor Revival brickwork. Walkerville also had a Roman Catholic separate school (under the patronage of Edward Walker’s Roman Catholic wife) called St Edward’s School (begun 1905) toward the east end of town. 50 Robinson, as quoted in Hallam, A History of St Mary’s Church, 79. 51 See Greenblatt, “Macbeth,” 2556–7. 52 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 353. 53 Durand, The Symbolism of Churches, 24. 54 Cram, Six Lectures on Architecture, 15. 55 Pugin specifically stated that with Gothic architecture, “we find the faith of Christianity embodied” (Contrasts, 2nd ed., 3; his emphasis), as evident in the correlation of the vertical principle and standing prayer with the corporeal resurrection.

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56 See Hall, “The Rise of Refinement,” 114–15. Consequently Hall explained that the Late Victorian Gothicists emphasized “the Eucharist as not simply … a commemorative moment in history, but a supernatural event that revealed the eternal nature of the Incarnation and the Sacrifice of Christ. This was … the primary fact embodied by a church building” (“What Do Victorian Churches Mean,” 86; my emphasis). 57 In addition to the medieval and modern advocacy of Gothic architectural embodiment, Cram’s interest in organic architecture stems from American architectural developments in the late nineteenth century. As quoted in Lauren Weingarten, Ruskin declared that “the essential character of Beauty depends on the expression of vital energy in organic things” (“Naturalized Nationalism,” 51). New England transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (for whom Cram was named) developed a similar American aesthetic through nature: “The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at the angle which gives the most strength with the least wax” (Emerson, as quoted in Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests, 321). Consequently American architects such as Richard Morris Hunt and H.H. Richardson, trained in the “Romantique” faction of the École des Beaux-Arts, reinforced New England’s transcendentalism with their Parisian lessons, spreading their “organic” architecture to Frank Furness, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. See especially Mumford, “Form Follows Nature.” I am indebted to Martin Bressani for suggesting this line of research. 58 Cram, Six Lectures on Architecture, 3. 59 Cram further articulated the point in another text: “A Gothic building is at its highest point of development as marvellous in its intricate simplicity, its logical organization, and its co-ordination of parts, as man himself” (ra , 121–2). 60 Cram, “Good and Bad Modern Gothic,” 116. 61 Shand-Tucci rightly noted that this declaration, made in 1936, echoed Louis Sullivan’s statement that Richardson’s design for the Marshall Field’s Warehouse was manly, but Shand-Tucci unconvincingly used that as evidence of Cram’s modernism from the beginning of his career. Cram’s use of “manly” in “Good and Bad Modern Gothic” points instead to his spiritual advisor, Arthur Hall, whose discourse included a statement on Christ’s “real and perfect Manhood” (Christ’s Temptation and Ours, 14). Hall’s concern with the manliness of the incarnate Christ was in turn an Anglo-Catholic response to the Anglo-Protestant discourse on Muscular Christianity from High Victorian Britain. Charles Kingsley and other British Protestants contrasted the manliness of Protestantism with the

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effeminacy of Catholicism (see Reed, Glorious Battle; Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit). Thus Cram’s interest in manly architecture, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century, had more to do with his Anglophile heritage than it did with American modernism. 62 Pugin, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture, 25n1; his emphasis. 63 Richardson and Richardson, Canadian Churches, 219. 64 Wilby, “St Mary’s Church,” 4. 65 See Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 102. 66 An earlier version of my analysis of the Sermon on the Mount window in this section appeared in Macdonell, “‘If You Want to, You Can Cure Me.’” 67 Cram, “Good and Bad Modern Gothic,” 118. 68 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 91. 69 Robins, The Judicial Committee’s Feet of Clay, 174. For all subsequent citations of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “jc ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material. 70 Franklin Walker corroborated his feud with Robins. Franklin wrote a ­letter to his friend and fellow National Trust director, Z.A. Lash, stating, “Both Ed. and Harry [James Harrington Walker] … think I am treating [Robins] badly. [Robins] has misstated several facts in his letters to them reflecting seriously on me, and I have been obliged to ignore them in order not to annoy my brothers” (jc , 142). 71 Lash, we recall from the previous note, was the same man to whom Franklin complained about the alliance between William Robins and Edward and James. 72 See William Robins v The National Trust Company. For all subsequent citations of this case, the abbreviation “wr ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material. 73 One nineteenth-century writer with syphilis wrote: “But above all, you see, the disease attacks the nervous system … It snaps the network of nerves at whim … Or perhaps it lays into the brain, kingpin of it all. And there’s your general paralysis, senility in all its glory, all its regularity” (anonymous, as quoted in Quétel, History of Syphilis, 147). 74 Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 10. Consequently Deborah Hayden reasoned that “the mortality rate from syphilis was often hidden under a cloud of inaccuracies when physicians were disinclined to give it as a cause of death, fearing publicity for the patient, further hurt to a sorrowing family, or risk of losing insurance” (Pox, 223). 75 Morrow, as quoted in Quétel, History of Syphilis, 149.

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76 Andrew Smith has explored the Gothic literary implications for the professional desire to conceal the identity of men with syphilis. Quoting from Jonathan Hutchinson, a Late Victorian expert on syphilis, Smith noted the medical advice that men should conceal their syphilitic past (believing that it had likely passed into latency) to “protect the wife from unnecessary upset” (Victorian Demons, 109). 77 When the Board of Social Service and Evangelism for the Presbyterian Church in Canada reprinted a translation of Alfred Fournier’s The Social Dangers of Syphilis in 1905, the translator Ernest A. Bell appended a poem called “The Doom of Lust.” See Fournier, The Social Dangers of Syphilis. 78 See Fournier, The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis, 310–11. Concerning the transmission of syphilis from husband to wife, Lucian Bulkley summarized a 1901 medical symposium, stating that the innocent wives and by extension their children were “made to suffer thus vicariously for the sins of others” (Syphilis, 5). 79 ac p v d , as quoted in Parascandola, Sex, Sin, and Science, 34. 80 Fournier, The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis, 315n1. 81 M. le Roy de Méricourt, as quoted in ibid., 314–15. 82 Fournier, The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis, 49. 83 Morrow, “Prophylaxis of Social Diseases,” 31. In another medical text of the era warning about the dangers of contracting venereal diseases, James Lane cautioned against “excessive sexual and alcoholic indulgence combined” (Lectures on Syphilis, 37). In addition Jonathan Hutchinson wrote that he received a letter dated 26 March 1899, which detailed the story of a sailor who “went ashore at Bombay and fell under the influence of alcohol. He copulated with a black prostitute once at the dockside. Between eight and ten weeks afterwards a single hard sore had developed” (Syphilis, 135; Hutchinson’s emphasis). 84 See especially Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise, 3–4, 28, and 32. 85 Huggins, “More Sinful Pleasures,” 590. See also Reynolds, The Great Paternalist, 184. 86 See Ashworth, “British Industrial Villages,” 382; Batchelor, “The Origins of the Garden City Concept,” 195. 87 See especially Buder, Pullman, 65. 88 Batchelor, “Origins of the Garden City Concept,” 191. 89 Olmsted, as quoted in Scheper, “The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted,” 385. 90 See Cooper, Syphilis, 426; Fournier, Syphilis and Marriage, 92; Hutchinson, Syphilis, 554; Hyde and Montgomery, A Manual of Syphilis, 275.

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91 Concerning the contextual medical literature on “hereditary” syphilis in children, see Cooper, Syphilis, 344–403; Fournier, Syphilis and Marriage, 30–75; Hutchinson, Syphilis, 384–506. 92 For contextual evidence on leprosy as a euphemism for syphilis, Michel Levy wrote about “this leprosy of our time, which is called syphilis” (Levy, as quoted in Fournier, The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis, 309). Alfred Cooper noted that for syphilitic patients who suffer from severe ulcerations and disfigurements, “delusions may occur that the victim of them is a leper, and is pointed out as such. The patient is first of all morbidly self-conscious of his disfigurement, and is likely to attempt to drown his thoughts in drink. This leads to hallucinations and delusions of persecution, and this form of insanity is frequently complicated with homicidal or suicidal mania” (Syphilis, 415). Likewise Jonathan Hutchinson noted that “forms of inflammation, simulating those called lupus, are very common as the result of syphilis, and it is the same with alopecia, leucoderma, true leprosy, and many others” (Syphilis, 104). By implication syphilis is a false leprosy that required Hutchinson’s distinction from the “true” form. 93 Hall, Meditations on the Lord’s Prayer, 90–1; his emphasis. 94 The sexual metaphor of this story would not likely have been lost on Cram, a long-time admirer of Richard Wagner’s music (more on this in the next chapter). In Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser the titular character oscillated between his pagan lust for Venus and his Christian love for Elizabeth, dying repentant of his lustful ways. Despite Tannhäuser’s penitent pilgrimage to Rome, the pope mockingly declared that he would as soon forgive Tannhäuser’s lust as the papal stave should burst into flower. Sure enough at the end of the opera the papal stave is brought forth, having blossomed with flowers. Furthermore Aubrey Beardsley began work on an even more openly erotic version of this story for the Savoy in 1896, and Cram was an admirer of Beardsley’s work, referencing the sexuality of his “brilliant and epicene” drawings (mlia , 18). 95 This tile is listed as the Griffin of Nuremberg (MC 62) in the 1901 catalogue of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. See Reed, Henry Chapman Mercer, 198. 96 Cram, “On the Religious Aspect of Architecture,” 351. 97 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 29.

Chapter four   1 Concerning Cram’s architectural use of Grail mythology, Shand-Tucci lamented that in the 1890s “Cram never quite gathered his forces sufficiently to create an ‘Arthurian’ architecture to match his literary work”

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  2

  3

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(Boston Bohemia, 326). However Shand-Tucci unconvincingly argued that Cram did orchestrate his Grail narrative in All Saints’ Church, Ashmont, because the church’s patron “lay dying” (ibid., 452) when she commissioned a tabernacle door for the church in 1910. Mary Peabody, the patron, was elderly at the time and hardly dying as a result of sinfulness, a necessary aspect of the Fisher King (or Fisher Queen, in that case). Furthermore the tabernacle door design, depicting two angels flanking a chalice, recurs in Cram’s design for St Paul’s Episcopal Church (begun 1892) in Brockton, Massachusetts. It was not unique to the Ashmont church. Cram frequently referred to the play’s titular artifact as Joseph of Arimathea’s sword (see Excalibur, 17, 121, 157). Furthermore Merlin listed Excalibur among the Grail artifacts that Joseph brought to England (see ibid., 126). Finally Cram foreshadowed Sir Lancelot’s unworthiness of the Grail quest when Lancelot called Guinevere his Holy Grail (see ibid., 67). Cram, “Preface,” in The Hill of Vision, vii. Significantly Frederick Bligh Bond, author of the text Cram prefaced, claimed to have written about Glastonbury Abbey via automatic writing, communing with spirits from the abbey, and Cram himself acknowledged those “ghostly communications” (ibid., xi). Thomas Malory called the heavenly city Sarras (see Morte d’Arthur, 442–5). The correlation of horror vignettes and Arthurian romance long preceded Cram’s story. In Malory’s Grail narrative Lancelot approached the Chapel Perilous to the macabre sight of thirty dead knights who “grinned and gnashed at [him]. And when he saw their countenance he dread him sore” (Morte d’Arthur, 113). Thus modern Gothic writers, such as John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, combined the figures of chivalric romance with the gruesome vignette of a “dead cold hand” clutching at their chivalric hero (“Sir Bertrand,” 132). Furthermore when Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, a man named Arthur was one of the heroes who joined the quest to hunt and destroy the titular count. (I am indebted to Maggie Kilgour for the Arthurian reference in Dracula.) Obviously Cram could not have used Dracula as source material for Black Spirits and White, but Stoker based Dracula’s English lair, the fictional Carfax Abbey, on Britain’s ruined abbey at Whitby. Thus a few years later Cram revisited the tone of his Gothic literature when describing the ruins of Whitby Abbey, perhaps in homage to Stoker’s novel (ra , especially 54–7). I am indebted to Stephen Bann for the point about Stoker and Whitby Abbey.

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  6 The cavaliere’s cynicism toward Catholicism was such that his servants would be “astonished and delighted” (bsw , 110) should the cavaliere restore the convent chapel to its intended Catholic service.  7 Malory, Morte d’Arthur, 442. The text is ambiguous however as to whether the bishop is St Joseph of Arimathea or a later prelate who took the name of Joseph in honour of the former. For all subsequent citations of this book, an abbreviation of the book’s title “m da ” and the page number(s) will appear parenthetically in-text after the quoted material.  8 For Excalibur Cram specifically used the archaic spelling of character names based on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.   9 See Cram, The Substance of Gothic, xvi–xvii. 10 Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” 315; his emphasis. 11 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 221. 12 Cram, “Introduction,” in Church Symbolism, i. 13 Cram, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 69. 14 Cram, “Introduction,” in Church Symbolism, i. 15 Cram, Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, 101. 16 Ibid., 99. 17 Morgan, The Almighty Wall, 95. 18 Cram’s firm would design several more towers with sculpted bosses in the cornice (though most of the carvings were not the work of the John Evans Company), including the Cadet Chapel (begun 1905) of the US Military Academy, West Point, New York; St Mark’s Episcopal Church (begun 1907), Mount Kisco, New York; St Thomas’s Episcopal Church (begun 1909), New York City, New York; the House of Hope Presbyterian Church (begun 1912), Minneapolis, Minnesota; St George’s School Chapel (begun 1920), Middletown, Rhode Island; and the First Presbyterian Church (begun 1930), Greensburg, Pennsylvania. 19 Years later Cram would design a harbour mansion in Gloucester, Massachusetts, called the Tower-of-the-Winds (begun 1920). However that house lacks the specific detail of wind gods blowing in their cardinal directions. 20 See Smith, A New Classical Dictionary, 112. 21 Cram, Architecture in Its Relation to Civilization, 13–14. 22 See ibid., 13; Cram, The Great Thousand Years, 24–5. 23 Cram, “Christ Church Bells,” 640. 24 Ibid., 644. Consequently Cram encouraged the Walker brothers to establish a guild of bell ringers among the “men in [their Walkerville] works.” See Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to the Messrs Walker, 11 June 1903, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers.

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Notes to pages 172–7

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25 Cram, “Christ Church Bells,” 647. 26 Cram also referenced (and quoted from) Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (c. 1867) in this context (see gq , 9). 27 See Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 1211. 28 Fairbanks, Louise Imogen Guiney, xii. 29 Guiney, as quoted in Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 38. 30 Cram’s friend Richard Hovey likewise wrote of Percival in his own unfinished cycle of Arthurian plays. Specifically Hovey had the Fisher King tell Percival: “And as for thee, since thou art not the son / I wait, give o’er; the Graal is not for thee” (Taliesin, 49). Hovey’s Percival was not the Grail Knight either, even though he found his way to the Grail chapel. 31 Cram, “Good and Bad Modern Gothic,” 119. 32 Cram in fact considered Wagner’s Parsifal to be the closest thing to the sacramental glory of Catholic ceremony, where “art comes full tide” (gq , 292). 33 Cram further explained the sense of change as one moves through a church, using his art “to lift men’s minds from secular things to spiritual” (cb , 8). He continued: “Thus there is a steady progression in sanctity from the porch to the altar-stone, and this progression should be expressed in the fabric and the enrichment of the church” (89). To that end Cram used the choir-stall finials to create a humorous distinction in Walkerville between the evangelists on the lay (i.e., secular) end and clerical (i.e., sacred) end of the choir. The evangelists on the lay end of the choir are distracted, and the evangelists on the clerical end are focused on their work. For more on this detail and its relationship with humour and social health in Cram’s architecture via the bodily humours, see Macdonell, “Humouring the Humours.” 34 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 158–9. 35 See order “LB03-017-004,” dated 21 December 1903, in the archives of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. 36 Cram, Church Building, 2nd ed., 228. 37 See Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to Mr Walker, 29 July 1902, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers. 38 See Harry Goodhue to the Walker Sons, 22 October 1903, file 287, St Mary’s Church Papers. 39 Wagner was notoriously demanding in all aspects of Bayreuth productions. Geoffrey Skelton noted that the Zaubergarten scene for Parsifal “was redesigned seven times before Wagner was satisfied” (Wagner at Bayreuth, 56). 40 Cram, “Good and Bad Modern Gothic,” 115.

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Notes to pages 177–84

41 Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to Mr Walker, 10 June 1903, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers. 42 Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, 215–16. Cram, a distant cousin of Henry Adams, first read the private printing of this book in 1904, and he eventually persuaded Adams to publish it widely. 43 Cram’s friend Richard Hovey also saw the potential in this conflation. In Hovey’s Arthurian cycle the gateway to the Holy Grail was through the “Chapel of the Graal,” where the sickly, wounded king holds audience, awaiting the arrival of the Grail knight (Taliesin, 40). 44 Cram et al., “The Quest,” 1. 45 Ibid., 2. 46 Guiney, “The Knight Errant,” 3. Cram was so fond of the poem that he reprinted it in his memoirs (mlia , 87–8). 47 Shand-Tucci, An Architect’s Four Quests, 6. 48 See ibid., 22. 49 For the regenerative significance of the Maltese cross, see Webber, Church Symbolism, 117. 50 Of relevance to the octagonal shape of Walkerville’s baptismal font and its octagonal echo in the vessel of myrrh among the adoring magi of the ­window above, Cram (and his fellow editors) quoted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in their apologetic editorial to The Knight Errant (“The Quest,” 1). Specifically the Tennyson quote is from the last Arthurian knights, who declared: “Such times have been not since the light had led / The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh” (“The Passing of Arthur,” 1163). In other words Cram had fashioned the adoring magi (“holy Elders”) as knights errant who followed the Christmas star to their salvation. Thus the eight-sided Maltese cross of the Knights Hospitaller conflated with both the octagonal shape of the baptismal font and the octagonal shape of the “gift of myrrh” that the original knights errant, the adoring magi, gave to Christ in the Walkerville window. 51 Cram’s design for the Cathedral-Church of St John the Divine in New York City includes a window dedicated to medicine, with the vignette of Christ healing the leper next to a medallion depicting the Knights Hospitaller. 52 This tile is listed as M C 87 in the 1901 catalogue of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. See Reed, Henry Chapman Mercer, 199. 53 These tiles are listed as the Knight of Nuremberg (MC 61), the Centaur of Nuremberg (M C 65), the Dog of Nuremberg (MC 64), and the Demon of Nuremberg (M C 63) in the 1901 catalogue of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. See ibid., 198.

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Notes to pages 184–99

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54 See Hall, Christ’s Temptation and Ours, 36–9. 55 Ibid., 6–7. 56 Ibid., 6. 57 Webber, Church Symbolism, 85. 58 Ibid., 343. Significantly Cram wrote the preface to Webber’s book on Church Symbolism, and Webber largely illustrated that book with details from Cram’s churches, though not the Walkerville church. 59 Cram, The Heart of Europe, 317. 60 When a fiend confronted Galahad a demonic voice rang out: “Galahad, I see there environ about thee so many angels that my power may not dare thee” (m da , 381). Like Christ, Galahad could not be tempted, though unlike Christ, the devil would not even try to tempt the knight. 61 Wagner, Parsifal, 142. 62 This tile is listed as The Etin (M C 160) in the 1901 catalogue of the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. See Reed, Henry Chapman Mercer, 202. 63 Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” 1210. 64 Pugin, Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament, 214. 65 Arthurian legends are a palimpsest for the Bible in many ways. Inasmuch as the Grail vision occurred above the Round Table in Camelot during the Feast of Pentecost to the accompaniment of thunder and a holy luminescence that “alighted [the knights] of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (m da , 376), the event is an allegorical Feast of Pentecost from the Bible, in which the disciples experienced a mighty sound from heaven and “were all filled with the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:4). The disciples then dispersed to spread the gospel across the world. Likewise once the Grail vision occurred during the Feast of Pentecost, the Knights of the Round Table dispersed to quest for the Grail. 66 See Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson to Mr Walker, 7 May 1903, file 278, St Mary’s Church Papers. 67 Cram, “Two Sonnets,” 44. 68 Wagner, Parsifal, 184–5. 69 Hall, The Virgin Mother, 187. 70 See Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 16–17; Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 441. 71 Hall, Christ’s Temptation and Ours, 16. 72 Cram, “Introduction,” in Historia Calamitatum, xx. 73 Wagner, Parsifal, 39. 74 Hovey, “Three of a Kind,” 41. 75 Burgess, as quoted in Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 442.

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Notes to pages 199–202

76 For more on the homoeroticism of Day’s photography, see especially Crump, “‘Sacred’ Subjects and ‘Greek Love’”; Jussim, Slave to Beauty. For more on the relationship between Day’s self-portraiture as Christ and the Crucifixion window in Walkerville, see Macdonell, “Humouring the Humours,” 21–3. 77 Shand-Tucci’s biographical thesis was that eroticism is essential to human psychology and that an artist’s creativity is an expression of that eroticism. Therefore if Cram’s most important creative relationship was with Bertram Goodhue, another man, then Cram was essentially homosexual – regardless of whether he acted genitally on that fundamental eroticism. However Shand-Tucci undercut this thesis in the second volume of his Cram biography. He argued that Cram’s wife (she and Cram married in 1900) provided an austere asceticism that challenged and polished Cram’s Romanticism far better than the even-more-Romantic Goodhue ever could (see An Architect’s Four Quests, 10). Thus by Shand-Tucci’s definition (which I do not follow), Cram’s contentious creative relationship with his wife made him essentially heterosexual. 78 See Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 147–50. 79 Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters, 15. 80 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 219. 81 Cram, The Decadent, 18. 82 Ibid., 19. 83 Blair, Gothic Short Stories, xxv. 84 Cram, The Nemesis of Mediocrity, 24. 85 Cram, The Ministry of Art, 120. 86 Cram, The Heart of Europe, 192–3. Cram then reiterated the difference between medieval and modern women in terms of universal suffrage: “The problem to-day is not how women are to get the ballot but how they are to regain their old mediaeval equality (or supremacy if you like) without it” (ibid., 194). 87 Shand-Tucci strangely framed the spectral dance in terms of A.E. Housman’s poem “The Laws of God, the Laws of Man,” in which the homophobic agents of a moralizing society would “make me dance as they desire” (Housman, as quoted in Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 66). Yet the ghost demanding that Rupert join the dance in Cram’s story was not homophobic. If the orgiastic dance included same-sex sexuality (which is debatable), then the demand to dance would be quite the opposite of the metaphor in Housman’s poem. 88 For more on the social construct of “Greek love” in the late nineteenth century, see the corpus of literature on Oscar Wilde and his relationship

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Notes to pages 202–3

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with Lord Alfred Douglas (the exposé of which significantly affected Cram’s circles of Bostonian friends): Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 29; McKinna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, 270. Furthermore as a young man Wilde helped John Pentland Mahaffy compile a book on ancient Greece, which included references to the “repugnant and disgusting” practices of samesex sexuality (Social Life in Greece, 311). Further still Arthur Hall wrote a book about same-sex friendships in an effort to redeem “Greek love” through the chaste but passionate friendship of Christ and St John the Evangelist (see Christian Friendship). Thus the sexual dynamics of “Greek love” were certainly not uncommon knowledge in the late nineteenth century, and were clearly important to the Anglo-Catholic context of Cram’s Boston. 89 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 197. 90 Elaine Showalter, as quoted in ibid., 361. 91 Cram, Walled Towns, 36. This is also why Cram lamented the ruinous conditions of medieval walled towns in the modern world: “Carcassonne, Rothenbourg, San Gimignano, Oxford, ghosts of the past, arouse hauntings of memory today” (ibid., 6). Once again Cram found himself caught between a longed-for medieval past and a desired future-present of medieval restoration. 92 Shand-Tucci claimed that the Kinsey scale was, “like the laws of physics, as operative before discovery as after” (An Architect’s Four Quests, 7). 93 See especially Katz, Love Stories, for details on the love / lust dichotomy in sexual discourse during nineteenth-century America. 94 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8; her emphasis. 95 See Royle, “Impossible Uncanniness”; see also Royle, The Uncanny. 96 See, for example, Castle, The Female Thermometer; Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms”; Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs; Kofman, Freud and Fiction; Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny; Vidler, Warped Space; Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction; Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings. 97 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 221. Of course the “uncanny” can only ever be a translation of Freud’s German Unheimliche; the words are not synonymous, even though Royle traced a comparable ambivalence between “canny” and “uncanny” (see The Uncanny, 9–11). Nevertheless, in an article that appeared in an 1893 issue of The American Architect and Building News (an article that Cram may have read before assigning an “uncanny” resonance to his Parisian haunted house), the pseudonymous author prefaced his survey of European haunted houses: “It is difficult to realize that here, at the close of the nineteenth century, there should still be educated people who believe in the existence of ghosts” (Ex-Attache, “Haunted

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Notes to pages 204–9



Palaces,” 150). And he concluded his survey: “Of course, all this may sound ridiculous and childish to ordinary people who do not believe in the supernatural. But even they would experience an uncanny feeling if forced by circumstances to reside in houses which had been the scene of a suicide or of a murder” (ibid., 151). This use of the uncanny foreshadows Freud’s interpretation of das Unheimliche, even though Cram would not have counted himself among those “ordinary” people.   98 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 223.   99 Ibid., 224. 100 Schelling, as quoted in ibid.; Freud’s emphasis. 101 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 235. 102 Castle, The Female Thermometer, 8. 103 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 250. 104 Freud, “The Future of an Illusion,” 17. 105 Cram, Towards the Great Peace, 254. 106 Cram, we recall, quoted from Arnold’s “Dover Beach” when describing the cyclical necessity of the Grail / Gothic quest against the tides of paynims and infidels (see gq , 9). 107 Shakespeare, as quoted in Cram, Towards the Great Peace, 257. 108 Significantly Cram placed “Sister Maddelena” immediately after his third ghost story, “The White Villa.” Both stories involve the ghost of a woman who died “without the pale of the Church” (bsw , 80). In fact Cram’s narrator learned that the woman in “The White Villa,” called La Luna di Pesto, was buried unsanctified somewhere in the gardens below her bedroom window. And yet the narrator took no efforts to find her illicit grave because La Luna di Pesto was unworthy of salvation. She broke her marriage vows. 109 Cram, Excalibur, 3. 110 This is also a point on which I diverge from Harold Bloom’s Kierkegaardian approach to repetition in Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (see Bloom, A Map of Misreading, 120–2). Cram’s uncanny sense of repetition (or that which I choose to inherit from it) is precisely the fin-de-siècle ennui that Paul de Man articulated as that which “comes from the burden of the past” and thus separates deconstruction from Bloom’s “antithetical view of practical criticism” (ibid., 121; see also de Man, The Post-Romantic Predicament). 111 Punter, “Ceremonial Gothic,” 38. 112 Cram, The Sins of the Father, 88. 113 Punter, “Ceremonial Gothic,” 38. 114 Ibid., 46.

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115 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 224; his emphasis. Nor was this the only religious example of the uncanny. Freud also quoted the following without comment on it: “The protestant rulers do not feel … heimlich among their catholic subjects” (Daniel Sanders, as quoted in ibid., 222). Secular scientists were not the only ones who claimed to have a rational comprehension that transcended superstitious belief. Protestants, such as those quoted in Freud’s essay, could look upon their Catholic contemporaries as primitive believers. Hence the protagonist in Bulwer-Lytton’s ghost story spoke of the soul (in which he still believed) as “superior emancipated intelligence” (The Haunted and the Haunters, 63), not the purgatorial supernaturalism of primitive Catholicism – hence the Anglo-Protestant tradition of the rationally explained supernatural. 116 See Macdonell, “Gothic Historiography.” 117 Derrida, The Post Card, 269. 118 Cram, The Catholic Church and Art, 83. 119 Cram, Convictions and Controversies, 28. 120 Ibid., 32.

P ost cry p t    1 Hallam, “A Guide to the Unique Features,” n.p.    2 In the blueprints for the church, Cram’s firm labelled the space behind the aperture as “Room #5,” and there is no mention in the surviving project ­correspondence of a leper’s squint. Bertram Goodhue would use the same kind of second-storey aperture in a few commissions that his New York City office produced for the firm: see the Cadet Chapel at West Point and the Episcopal Church of the Intercession (begun 1911), New York City, New York. Cram would later reuse this type of aperture in St James’s Church at Lake Delaware, albeit for a chamber above the hallway linking the liturgically southwestern corner of the nave with the adjoining parish hall.   3 Curl, A Dictionary of Architecture, 342.   4 Ibid., 459.   5 Pugin, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture, 20.    6 Hence on the cover of the inaugural issue of The Knight Errant Bertram Goodhue drew a knight on horseback wandering through a dark and dangerous wilderness. Suddenly a burst of light pierces the clouds and illuminates the lance upright in the knight’s hand.   7 Cram, The Gothic Quest, 2nd ed., 359.    8 In addition to hating the resurgence of pagan values in the modern world, Cram dreaded the prospect of a “post-modern destruction of all values”

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Notes to pages 215–21

(Walled Towns, 24) – which is to say, the nihilistic abandonment to arbitrary will that Ginzburg read into Derrida’s philosophy.  9 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 131. 10 Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 11. 11 In his play Cram had a knight pray: “St George, an altar for thee” (Excalibur, 35), indicating the saint’s patronage for Christian knighthood. 12 See, for example, Cram, The Gothic Quest, 323–6; Cram, The Ministry of Art, 4–7, 84–8, 169–76; Cram, The Nemesis of Mediocrity, 31–7; Cram, Towards the Great Peace, 155–88; Cram, Walled Towns, 83–6. 13 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 120. 14 Ibid., 122–3. He erroneously quoted from H.P. Lovecraft, who appreciated Cram’s sixth ghost story, “The Dead Valley,” for its “potent degree of vague regional horror” (Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 72; Lovecraft, as quoted in Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 121). Shand-Tucci thought that Lovecraft referred to Cram’s region of New England, but he was actually referring to the fact that the regional landscape in “The Dead Valley” was vague enough to become anyone’s landscape, thus bringing the horror palpably closer to the reader’s experience. 15 Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia, 122; Wharton’s emphasis. 16 See Brooks, The Gothic Revival, 151. 17 See especially Reynolds, Building Romanticism, 113–43. George Soane’s Gothic novel was The Eve of St Marco (1812). 18 See Hill, “Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,” 34. The few articles that have explored the influence of the supernatural on Pugin’s architecture include Jelaco, “Faith and Reason”; Macdonell, “Gothic Historiography.” 19 Chris Brooks’s essay “Ruskin and the Politics of Gothic” offered a compelling comparison of Ruskin’s spectral imagery in the 1840s with Marx’s concurrent spectral imagery. However in the wake of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, no one has enriched the paradox of haunting for Ruskin’s architectural theory. That said, Paulette Singley’s article “Devouring Architecture” dealt with the unrepresentability of monsters in Ruskin’s architectural discourse, though she did not explicitly connect it with the Gothic literary themes in his writing. 20 See Arata, Fictions of Loss. 21 Davenport-Hines, Gothic, 221. 22 Thomas Kuehn noted the microhistorian’s “tendency to assume the typicality [i.e., macrohistoricity] of the [microhistorical] event under consideration” (“Reading Microhistory,” 516). And Robert Ross cautioned in a review essay that the leading peril of microhistory is “relating the details of the stories presented to the wider trends of which they are supposed to

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Notes to pages 221–2

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be exemplary, a problem exacerbated by the fact that in general those ­stories which historians can tell in detail are exceptional” (“Transcending the Limits of Microhistory,” 126). Alternately Roger Chartier celebrated the following of microhistory: “It is on this reduced scale, and probably only on this scale, that we can understand, without deterministic reduction, the relationships between systems of beliefs, of values and representations on the one hand, and social affiliations on another” (“Intellectual History or Sociocultural History,” 32). 23 Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much,” 141. 24 Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 70. See also Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, especially the final section on “Allegory and Trauerspiel.” 25 See Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”; Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel.” In fact Derrida hailed the Tower of Babel and Benjamin’s analysis thereof as “allegorical” (“Des Tours de Babel,” 111). 26 Fletcher, Allegory, 174. Craig Owens glossed Fletcher thusly: “Allegory concerns itself … with the projection – either spatial or temporal or both – of structure as sequence; the result, however, is not dynamic, but static, ­ritualistic, repetitive” (“Allegorical Impulse,” 72). Consequently the Eucharistic sacrament in a Cram church is supposed to be a transubstantiated part of Christ’s body, a symbol standing in for the wholeness of his incarnate / resurrected form. But inasmuch as the Eucharist in Walkerville occurs beneath the Holy Grail, the Walkerville Eucharist became a static, ritualistic, repetitive sequence in need of a Grail knight to affect a temporal change for a sickly world, breaking the repetitive sequence.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abraham, Nicholas, 113–16, 244–5n12 Adams, Annmarie, 7 Adams, Henry, 178, 217, 256n42 Anglican Church of Canada: and American church/state model, 79; and British church/state model, 78–9; and capitalist ­culture, 79–81, 82–3, 97; and clergy reserves, 78–80, 82; and economy of salvation, 82, 83, 239n44; and mortmain, 79, 80–1, 82, 110; and railway economies, 79–80, 84, 86, 239n44; and responsible government, 79, 239n38; and temperance, 99, 149; and volunteerism, 82, 97–100, 243n79 Anglo-Catholicism: and America, 29, 30, 39, 41–2, 231n27, 249– 50n61, 258–9n88; and Britain, 40, 40–1, 42, 249–50n61 Arata, Stephen, 219 Arnold, Matthew, 205–6, 255n26, 260n106

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Arts and Crafts movement, 39, 175–6 Ashmont (Massachusetts), All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 36, 37, 143, 195, 216, 217–8, 233n46, 252–3n1 Baldwin, Maurice Scollard, 67, 99–100, 149, 223n4, 243n79 Battersby, William H., 3–4, 5, 8, 97–8, 225n21, 229n5 Beardsley, Aubrey, 163, 252n94 Beckford, William, 218 Benjamin, Walter, 221 Berenson, Bernard, 28–9 Bible: Acts, 257n65; Ex, 90; apocryphal and exegetical readings of, 71–2, 72–4, 74–7, 136, 237– 8n16, 238n17, 238n20, 238n21, 238n24; Ge, 221; Grail quest as palimpsest for, 190–1, 214, 217, 257n65; Is, 70–1; Jn, 61, 71, 120, 136; Lk, 69, 165–7, 196, 237n16; 1 Kgs, 71; Mk, 136, 165–7; Mt, 69–70, 71, 72, 74,

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288 Index

75–6, 77, 107, 110, 136, 152, 154, 165–7, 237–8n16; Nm, 70–1; Ps, 64, 70, 71 Blair, David, 201 Blake, Ira, 28, 29 Bloom, Harold, 26–7, 230n13, 230n15, 230n17, 260n110 Bodley, George Frederick, 39, 40, 40–1, 63–4, 143, 220, 234n55 Bond, Frederick Bligh, 160, 253n3 Booth, Henry Wood, 3–4, 5, 36, 42, 93, 223n4, 229n5 Boston (Massachusetts): 74½ Pinckney Street, 199–200; Fellner House, 133; offices of Rotch and Tilden, 30; Trinity Episcopal Church, 36, 137–8 Bray (Britain), St Michael’s Anglican Church, 37, 38, 101, 103, 142–3, 233n46 Brent, Charles, 30 Bressani, Martin, 7, 50–1, 115–6, 223n6 British Gothic Revival. See Georgian era; Victorian era Brittain-Catlin, Timothy, 220 Brockton (Massachusetts), St Paul’s Episcopal Church, 253n1 Brooks, Chris, 18–19, 81, 228n57, 262n19 Brooks, Van Wyck, 29 Brosseau, Mathilde, 7, 232n35 Browning, Robert, 172, 189–90, 260n110 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 56, 199, 261n115 Burgess, Gelett, 199 Burne-Jones, Edward, 107 Cambridge Camden Society, 41, 136

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Caputo, John, 70 Carman, Bliss, 30 Carroll, Lewis, 125 Castricano, Jodey, 14, 116, 226n37 Church of England in Canada. See Anglican Church of Canada Cohasset (Massachusetts), St Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 31; approached from Main Street, 33; architectural lineage of, 31–2, 37–8, 101, 142–3, 216, 232n33; as Arthurian architecture, 216; baptismal font in, 103, 105; and Canadian reviews, 31, 32, 232n32; contrasting horizontal and vertical elements of, 142– 3, 243n84; cornice sculpture on, 169; half-timbered adjunct architecture of, 32, 143, 243n84; liturgically southern aisle of, 103, 105, 154; newel post in, 216; Sermon on the Mount window in, 152, 153; square-topped bell tower of, 32, 33, 36, 37, 103; use of local granite for, 33 Concord (New Hampshire), St Paul’s School Chapel, 168–9, 169 Cope, Walter, 41 Cram, Ralph Adams (rac ): and Henry Adams, 178, 217, 256n42; and American architecture, 6–7, 32, 41, 45, 249n57; as Anglo-American, 4, 5, 21, 28–9, 30, 31–2, 33, 36, 38, 39–40, 40–2, 43, 45, 51, 117, 125, 133, 233n46, 240n49, 247n39; Anglo-Catholic affiliation of, 29–30, 39, 112, 152, 168, 231n27, 232n30, 259n88; as Anglo-Catholic architect, 4, 30,

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Index 289

36, 39–40, 40–1, 42, 43, 112, 243–4n85, 249–50n61; as Anglo-Catholic author, 56–7, 119–20; on ancient Goths, 20, 21; and baptism, 101–4, 107–8, 184–5, 256n50; on campanology, 172, 254n24; and Canada, 6–7, 30–3, 38, 41, 117, 224n13, 232n32, 232n35, 232–3n37, 233n38, 234n55, 240n49; on centaurs, 185; and chess, 182–3; and Christological veiling, 163– 5, 167–8, 172–3, 209, 215; as church builder for Protestants, 40; and collaboration, 27, 100– 1, 127, 175–7; and communion, 30, 36, 40, 42, 61, 112, 119, 137, 162–3, 165, 167–8, 177–8, 183, 196, 198, 208, 211, 232n30, 255n32, 263n26; and confession, 112, 127, 135, 150, 154–5, 156, 213; on contrasting horizontal and vertical architectural elements, 143; and correspondence with Walkers, 4–5, 98, 100–1, 176, 177, 182, 191, 224n10, 246n35, 254n24; as critic of modern architecture, 20–1, 24–5, 43, 49, 52, 54–5, 56, 58–9, 63–4, 66, 102, 155, 157, 173, 175, 181–3, 206–7, 259n91, 263n26; as critic of modern society, 5–6, 14, 21, 23, 42, 51, 51–2, 53, 57, 120, 123, 135, 158, 161, 171, 172, 182, 185, 190, 195, 200–3, 206, 208, 261–2n8; and cyclical history, 205–7, 214, 260n106, 260n110, 263n26; and diurnal imagery in texts, 51–2, 56, 172, 205, 213; on education, 216; and

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encryption strategies in texts, 117–22, 161–3, 216; European travels, 29–30, 176–7, 232n30, 245n22; and floral imagery in texts, 54, 56, 121–2, 125, 127, 206–7; on the four winds, 51, 159, 171–2, 173; and the École des Beaux-Arts, 20, 32, 232n35, 247n39, 249n57; and French architecture, 30–1, 54–6, 206–7, 217–18, 233–4n47, 235n67; and Georgian architecture, 51, 52; and Gesamtkunstwerk of architectural leitmotifs, 177–8, 183–4; on Gothic adjective, 20–1; and Gothic interdisciplinarity, 5–6, 14–15, 217–18, 220–1; and Gothic literary traditions, 56–7, 119–20, 201, 245n23; and the Grail in Gothic literature, 160–3; on the Grail quest in architecture, 14, 159–60, 167–8, 172–3, 173–4, 210, 216, 252–3n1, 256n50, 260n106; on ideal future communities, 202–3; on the incubus and succubus, 55, 200–1, 202, 204; on Islam, 171– 2; lectured in Toronto, 31; and the magi, 112, 256n50; and Thomas Malory, 163, 165, 173– 4, 189, 196, 209, 214; and Mannerism, 141, 154; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 163; and manly architecture, 58, 137–8, 172, 198–9, 249–50n61; and massive architecture, 30, 36–7, 64–6, 198–9, 233n46; and medieval architecture, 5, 20, 28, 45–6, 51, 54–5, 56, 57, 83, 136, 137, 159,

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290 Index

171–2, 198–9, 204, 206–7, 209– 10, 213, 214, 259n91; and medieval literature, 28, 163; and medieval society, 14, 21, 28, 52, 120, 135, 157–8, 173, 185, 198, 201–2, 209, 258n86; and melancholia, 26, 51–3, 63, 117, 217; and the messianic future, 22, 23, 52, 61, 66, 214–15, 259n91; and metaphorical impotency, 21, 22, 23, 55, 57, 58, 66, 204, 207, 208; as microhistorical subject, 26; misogyny of, 201–2, 258n86; and monasticism, 52, 57–9, 112, 119–20, 125, 127, 160, 202–3, 206, 207, 233–4n47, 253n5; and murdered Middle Ages, 21, 40, 42, 43, 53, 117; and musical analogies for architecture, 174–5, 176–7; and New England, 28–30, 39, 51–2, 200, 217–18, 249n57, 262n14; on the “Old Place,” 28, 29, 231n22; opened architectural offices, 36, 42, 45, 231n27; as optimistic revivalist, 24, 51, 52, 66, 159, 171–2, 206, 215, 216; on organic architecture, 136–7, 157, 175, 213, 249n57, 249n59; as pattern book architect, 82–3, 101–3, 102, 104, 142, 142–3, 240n49, 240n50; and Perpendicular Gothic style, 21–2, 31, 37–8, 39–41, 45–6, 49, 51, 53, 63, 66, 137, 138, 168–9, 173; as pessimistic revivalist, 5–6, 24, 52, 59, 159, 172, 185, 206–7, 216–17; on postmodernism, 261–2n8; as polymath, 24; and the Protestant Reformation, 21, 28, 29, 30, 40,

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42, 43, 49, 53, 57–9, 63, 119, 122–3, 125, 135, 137, 138, 157, 160, 185, 201–2, 206, 208, 218; on Auguste Pugin, 41, 43–5, 51; on A.W.N. Pugin, 41, 43–4; and the Renaissance, 20, 21, 52, 58, 157, 171, 185, 201–2, 206, 208, 218; and Renaissance Revival architecture, 141; and the resurrection, 49, 51, 52, 59, 61, 64, 66, 138, 154–5, 172, 214, 215, 263n26; on Henry Hobson Richardson, 36, 137–8; and Romanesque Revival architecture, 36, 137–8, 233n45, 233n46; as royalist, 54–6, 125, 217–18; on John Ruskin, 42–3, 182; and sexuality, 6, 198–9, 199–203, 204, 217–18, 252n94, 258n77, 258n87, 258–9n88; and William Shakespeare, 6, 14, 44, 53–4, 55, 135; Shavian influence on, 133; on stained glass, 127, 176, 209; and Teutonic heritage, 27–8, 173; trained with Rotch and Tilden, 30; and uncanny, 203, 204, 205–6, 209, 215, 259– 60n97, 260n110; and the use of local materials, 33, 217–18; on Richard Wagner, 27–8, 173, 176–7, 255n32 Cram, Ralph Adams (rac ), ­architecture. See Ashmont (Massachusetts), All Saints’ Episcopal Church; Boston (Massachusetts): Fellner House; Brockton (Massachusetts), St Paul’s Episcopal Church; Cohasset (Massachusetts), St Stephen’s Episcopal Church;

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Detroit (Michigan): Christ Episcopal Church; Detroit (Michigan): St Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Gloucester (Massachusetts), Tower-ofthe-Winds; Greensburg (Pennsylvania), First Presbyterian Church; Halifax (Nova Scotia), All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral; Lake Delaware (New York), St James’s Episcopal Church; Mercersburg (Pennsylvania), St George’s Chapel, Mercersburg Academy; Middletown (Rhode Island), St George’s School Chapel; Minneapolis (Min­ nesota), House of Hope Presbyterian Church; Mount Kisco (New York), St Mark’s Episcopal Church; Newport (Rhode Island), Emmanuel Episcopal Church; New York City (New York): CathedralChurch of St John the Divine; New York City (New York): Episcopal Church of the Intercession; New York City (New York): St Thomas’s Episcopal Church; Princeton (New Jersey), Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University; St Louis (Missouri), Firmin Desloge Hospital Chapel; Toronto (Ontario), St Alban’s Anglican Cathedral; Walkerville (Ontario), n s m ; West Point (New York), US Military Academy Cram, Ralph Adams (rac), literature: Black Spirits and White, 6,

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10–11, 14–15, 21, 53–4, 56–7, 135, 218, 231n22, 253n5; “The Dead Valley,” 157, 182–3, 262n14; The Decadent, 51–2, 200–1, 205; Excalibur, 28, 159– 60, 173, 207, 253n2, 254n8, 262n11; The Knight Errant, 182, 256n46, 256n50, 261n6; “In Kropfsberg Keep,” 121, 182, 202, 258n87; “Notre Dame des Eaux,” 217–18; “No. 252 Rue M. le Prince,” 54–6, 57, 121, 199–202, 204, 206–7, 218; “Sister Maddelena,” 117–22, 160–3, 195, 207, 216, 245n22, 245n23, 254n6, 260n108; “The White Villa,” 121, 174, 202, 246n24, 260n108 Cram, William Augustine (rac ’s father), 28, 29, 204 Davenport-Hines, Richard, 220 Day, Frank Miles, 41 Day, Fred Holland, 199 deconstruction: and allegory, 116– 17, 221–2, 263n25; and architectural metaphors, 59–62; and biography, 21, 25–6, 26–7; and Christological veiling, 165–7, 215; and the crypt theory, 22, 112–13, 115–17, 117, 244n3, 244n10, 244–5n12; and the diabolical pas, 23, 209; and future anteriority, 23, 215; and economies of salvation, 22, 68–70, 72–4; and erasure, 20, 229n70; and the gift, 22, 68–70; and Gothic aesthetics, 10–11, 13, 14–17, 19–20, 52, 59, 61–2, 154–5, 182, 213–14, 214–15,

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221–2, 226n37; and marginalia, 9–10, 226n27; and microhistory, 9–10, 21, 25–6, 221–2; and misreading, 9–10, 26–7, 230n17; as parasite, 17, 112–13; and prefatory writing, 12–13, 227n45; and presence/representation, 9–13, 16–17, 60; and queerness, 203; and spectrality, 11–13, 14–16, 17, 19–20, 22, 27, 42, 68, 70, 80–1, 215, 222, 226n30, 230n18, 244n3, 244–5n12, 262n19; and speculative dialectics, 11–13, 16–17, 113, 115, 215, 227n45, 244n10; and uncanny, 70, 72, 203, 260n110 Derrida, Jacques. See deconstruction Detroit (Michigan): Christ Episcopal Church, 130, 247n40; St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 240n50; St Paul’s Episcopal Church, 96; and temperance, 92, 241n57; fhw buried in, 130; f h w residence in, 130; Hiram Walker buried in, 128, 130; Hiram Walker residence in, 93, 130; j h w buried in, 130–1; jhw residence in, 130 Durand, Guillaume, 136, 138, 141 Ecclesiological Gothic. See Cambridge Camden Society; Victorian era Edward VI (king), 122–3, 127, 133–4, 135, 155–6 Edward VII (king), 128, 130, 133– 4, 246n35 Edward the Confessor (king and saint), 65, 101, 134–5

28904_Macdonell.indd 292

Edwardian era, 8, 22, 32–3, 53, 101, 127–9, 131, 132–5, 232– 3n37; Tudor Revival architecture in, 101, 132–4, 248n47, 248n49 Eighteen Club, 31, 32 Ferguson, Frank, 45, 132 Ferrey, Benjamin, 39 Fletcher, Angus, 222 Fournier, Alfred, 148–9 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 112–13, 114, 203–5, 206, 209, 244n10, 259– 60n97, 261n115 Garner, Thomas. See Bodley, George Frederick Georgian era, 6, 17–18, 19, 21, 48, 49, 50, 52, 129, 218, 235n73, 247n36 Ginzburg, Carlo, 7–8, 8–10, 221, 226n27, 226n30, 244n7, 261– 2n8 Glastonbury (Britain), Abbey of, 157–8, 160, 253n3 Gloucester (Massachusetts), Towerof-the-Winds, 254n19 Goodhue, Bertram Grosvenor: as apprentice of James Renwick Jr, 43; as architect, 36, 44, 45, 46, 258n77, 261n2; as brother of Harry Eldredge Goodhue, 176; as illustrator, 125–7, 126, 261n6; joined rac ’s firm, 43; opened office in New York City, 45; on rac, 24; sexuality of, 258n77 Goodhue, Harry Eldredge, 152, 155, 176, 191 Gothic: as anachronistic adjective, 15–16, 20–1; and ancient Goths, 15–17, 18, 20–1, 215, 227–8n54,

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228n57; Decorated style of, 48; Early English style of, 39, 45, 45–6, 48, 235n79; as Gothick, 19–20, 21, 52, 154–5, 182, 211, 213–14, 214–15, 222, 235n73; interdisciplinarity of, 5–6, 10–11, 12, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 43, 216– 21, 221–2; Perpendicular style of, 21–2, 31, 37–41, 44–6, 48–9, 50–1, 53, 62–3, 66, 137, 138, 168–9, 173, 220, 234n49 Greensburg (Pennsylvania), First Presbyterian Church, 254n18 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 172, 182 Halifax (Nova Scotia), All Saints’ Anglican Cathedral, 7, 33 Hall, Arthur C.A.: on almsgiving, 76; on Christian friendship, 259n88; as rac ’s spiritual adviser, 76, 152, 231n27, 232n30, 237n7; on the incarnation, 198, 249n61; on the Lord’s Prayer, 76, 152–4; on Matthew’s gospel, 76; on sin and redemption, 76, 152– 4, 183; on temptation, 184–5, 189; on the Virgin Mary, 196 Hall, Michael, 17, 39, 233n46, 249n56 Hallowell, George, 195, 216 Hardy, Thomas, 218–19 Hegel, G.W.F., 11–12, 115, 227n45, 244n10 Henry VIII (king), 27–8, 53, 122–3, 133, 137 High Church. See Anglo-Catholicism Hill, Rosemary, 50, 219 Hoare, Charles W., 6, 146–8, 225n23

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Hovey, Richard, 199, 255n30, 256n43 Irving and Casson Company. See Kirchmayer, Johannes Iversen, Margaret, 116 John Evans Company, 169, 175, 254n18 Joseph of Arimathea (saint), 157–8, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165, 173, 194, 253n2, 254n7 Kafka, Franz, 222 Kahn, Albert, 132, 134, 240n50, 247n41, 248n47, 248n49 King family, 22, 83, 86–7, 88–92, 100, 104, 108, 110, 241n55, 242n68; magi as paradigm for, 83, 87–92, 104, 110 Kingsville (Ontario): and lee&dr r , 22, 83, 84, 86, 97, 100, 241n63; Mettawas Hotel and Casino, 86, 97, 100, 240n54, 247n38; and natural gas industry, 86; as patronymic town, 83, 86, 87, 90, 104, 108, 110; as resort destination, 84, 86, 97; St John’s Anglican Church, 86. See also Kingsville (Ontario), Anglican Church of the Epiphany Kingsville (Ontario), Anglican Church of the Epiphany, 85; architect of, 87; building committee of, 87, 88, 241n55; circumstances for dedication of, 86–7; and details in triplicate, 87–92; and economy of salvation, 87, 90–2, 108, 241n55; and

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294 Index

memorial gifts, 87–92, 104, 108, 110, 241n55; and memorial stained glass, 87–92, 89, 91, 104, 108, 110; as result of local boom economy, 84, 86; as sacramental architecture, 87–92, 108 Kirchmayer, Johannes, 176 Knights Hospitaller, 183–4, 195, 256n50, 256n51 Lake Delaware (New York), St James’s Episcopal Church, 243– 4n85, 261n2 Lake Erie, Essex, and Detroit River Railway (lee& drr), 22, 83, 84, 86, 97, 131, 240n52 Lash, Z.A., 145, 250n70, 250n71 Lepore, Jill, 26, 221 Levi, Giovanni, 8 Levine, Neil, 17–18 Lewis, Matthew, 119 Macdonell, Cameron, 6, 44, 50–1, 209, 223n6, 229n5 magi: apocryphal and exegetical development of, 71–2, 237n12, 237–8n16; and biblical cross-­ referentiality, 70–1, 77, 237– 8n16; biblical narrative on, 70; as model for gift giving, 22, 70, 72, 76–8, 82–3, 87–92, 95, 100, 103–11, 129, 158, 241n55, 243– 4n85, 256n50 Magnússon, Sigurður, 8, 226n30 Magrill, Barry, 82–3, 228n56, 240n49 Mallarmé, Stephen, 116, 245n16 Malory, Thomas: and biblical palimpsests, 190–1, 214, 257n65; on Camelot, 163, 209,

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216, 257n65; on Castle Carbonek, 163, 165, 189; on the Holy Grail, 163, 165, 173– 4, 187–8, 189, 191, 196, 209, 214, 216, 253n4, 253n5, 257n65; on Joseph, 163, 165, 254n7; on King Arthur, 163, 216; on King Bagademagus, 216; on Sarras, 165, 209, 253n4; on Sir Bors, 163; on Sir Galahad, 163, 165, 173, 188, 191, 196, 199, 209, 214, 216, 257n60; on Sir Gawain, 163, 216; on Sir Lancelot, 189, 253n5; on Sir Percival, 163, 187–8, 196, 216 Marx, Karl, 12, 27, 59, 68–9, 110, 215, 230n18, 262n19 Mason, George DeWitt, 86, 129, 247n38 Mauss, Marcel, 68 Melville, Stephen. See Iversen, Margaret Mercer, Henry Chapman, 66, 175– 6, 184, 189, 236n114, 252n95, 256n52, 256n53, 257n62 Mercersburg (Pennsylvania), St George’s Chapel, Mercersburg Academy, 216 microhistory, episodic: and allegory, 221–2; and America, 225n19; and biography, 21, 25–6, 229n5; as bottom-up methodology, 8; as conjectural method, 9, 225n23; and Early Modern Europe, 7–8, 9, 225n16; and “exceptional normal” paradigm, 7–8, 225n16, 262–3n22; and institutional archives, 7–8; interdisciplinarity of, 9, 10, 21; and local

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Index 295

economies of salvation, 22, 80–3; and macrohistory, 7–10, 80–3, 220–2, 225n16, 226n30, 262– 3n22; and marginalia, 7–9, 21, 226n27; medical analogy of, 8–9, 225n23; and misreading, 9–10; and postmodernism, 9–10, 25–6, 226n27, 226n30 Middletown (Rhode Island), St George’s School Chapel, 254n18 Minneapolis (Minnesota), House of Hope Presbyterian Church, 254n18 Mitchell, W.J.T., 10 Mohlo, Tony, 9, 25 Moravian Pottery and Tile Works. See Mercer, Henry Chapman Morgan, William, 168–9 Morris, William, 107, 108 Morrow, Prince Albert, 148, 149 Mount Kisco (New York), St Mark’s Episcopal Church, 254n18 Newport (Rhode Island), Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 169, 191 New York City (New York): Cathedral-Church of St John the Divine, 256n51; Episcopal Church of the Intercession, 261n2; offices of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, 45, 47, 261n2; offices of James Renwick Jr, 43; St Thomas’s Episcopal Church, 254n18; Trinity Episcopal Church, 41 Oxford movement, 40–1, 136, 231n27

28904_Macdonell.indd 295

Peche Island (Ontario), 94–5, 242n67 Plummer, Alfred, 75–6, 238n17, 238n21, 238n24 post-Georgian eras. See Edwardian era; Victorian era Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 107 Princeton (New Jersey), Grail window, Procter Hall, Princeton University, 163, 164, 165, 165, 166, 174, 189, 194, 209, 216 Pugin, Auguste, 21, 41, 43–5, 45–6, 47, 48, 51, 136, 234n55, 235n73 Pugin, A.W.N. (Augustus Welby Northmore): on church dedications, 138; on church towers, 21–2, 62–3, 64, 66; and Early English Gothic style, 235n79; and Georgian architecture, 17–18, 21, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50; and ghosts, 50, 52, 219; and incarnate architecture, 61–2, 136, 248n55; influence in America, 41; and Norman Romanesque style, 235n79; as optimistic revivalist, 49–50, 51; on ornamentation, 61, 236n109; and Perpendicular Gothic style, 46, 48, 49, 50, 62–3, 66; as pessimistic revivalist, 50–1, 53, 59, 219; preference for Decorated Gothic style, 48; and the Protestant Reformation, 46–9, 122–3; and the Renaissance, 47–8; and the resurrection, 49–50, 61, 62, 64, 248n55; as Roman Catholic architect, 29, 43, 46–8, 49, 49–50, 53, 61–2, 136, 248n55; on second-storey chambers, 213; on sick

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296 Index

modernity, 46–8, 50–1, 52, 62, 62–3, 63, 66; with syphilis, 50–1; and veiled sanctity, 209; on the Vesica Piscis, 190; and Victorian architecture, 17–18, 21–2, 41–2, 46–50, 59, 61–3, 122 Pullman, George, 94, 149–50, 241n63, 247n36 Punter, David, 208–9 Randall, Thomas Henry, 232n30, 245n22; as Tom Rendel, 117–18, 161, 202, 245n22 Rice, Zachariah. See Mason, George DeWitt Richardson, Henry Hobson: and American architecture, 36, 129, 168, 230n15, 233n46, 249n57, 249–50n61; and massive/manly architecture, 36, 137–8, 168, 233n46, 249–50n61; and Queen Anne Revival architecture, 129, 132–3, 247n38; and Romanesque Revival architecture, 36, 129, 132–3, 233n45, 233n46, 247n38 Richardson, John, 220 Robins, William: and friendship with e c w and jhw, 144–5, 248n47, 250n70, 250n71; and litigation against ecw ’s will, 6, 145–6; and social status in Walkerville, 134, 143–4, 248n47; and tension with fhw, 145, 250nn70–1 Rome (Italy): Gothic sack of, 15–17, 206, 215, 227–8n54, 228n57; Roman Catholic Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, 29–30, 232n30

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Royle, Nicholas, 203, 259n97 Ruskin, John, 38, 42–3, 219, 249n57, 262n19 Saint, Andrew, 81 St Louis (Missouri), Firmin Desloge Hospital Chapel, 218 Schuyler, Montgomery, 33, 117, 181 Scott, George Gilbert, 43 Scott, George Gilbert, Jr, 39, 53, 220, 234n49 Scott, Walter, 218 Sedding, John Dando, 39–41, 43, 220, 234n55 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 203, 226n37 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 12, 13–14, 17, 115, 205; Julius Caesar, 205; Macbeth, 14, 53–4, 55, 135, 205; The Tempest, 44; Twelfth Night, 206 Shand-Tucci, Douglass: on rac and architectural modernism, 25, 199, 230n15, 249–50n61; on rac ’s Arthurian architecture, 252–3n1; as rac ’s biographer, 24–5, 230n15, 258n77; on rac ’s church architecture, 48, 49, 128, 217–18, 233n46, 252–3n1; on rac ’s domestic architecture, 143; on rac ’s Gothic literature, 199–200, 202, 217–18, 231n22, 258n87, 262n14; on rac ’s love of chess, 182–3; on rac ’s Mannerism, 141; on rac ’s sexuality, 198, 199–200, 202–3, 217– 18, 258n77; and the Kinsey scale, 203, 259n92; on A.W.N. Pugin, 48–9

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Index 297

Shaw, Richard Norman, 133 Soane, George, 218 Soane, John, 218 Stamp, Gavin, 53 Steinberg, Leo, 198 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 220 Stewardson, John. See Cope, Walter Street, George Edmund, 39, 43 Summerson, John, 17, 18 syphilis: and alcohol, 148–9, 251n83; clinical treatment of, 147, 225n23; congenital type of, 148, 150; and Gothic literature, 6, 251n76; and marriage, 148, 149, 150, 251n76, 251n78; social stigma of, 148–50, 224n10, 250n74, 251n76, 251n77, 252n92; stages of, 147, 250n73. See also Pugin, A.W.N.; Walker, Edward Chandler Taylor, Alphonse Warrington, 39 Torok, Maria, 113–16, 245n12 Toronto (Ontario), St Alban’s Anglican Cathedral, 7, 32 Tractarianism. See Oxford movement Ulmer, Gregory, 116 uncanny: and das Unheimliche, 203–4, 206, 209, 259–60n97, 261n115; and deconstruction, 70, 72, 203, 260n110; ontogeny of, 204; phylogeny of, 204–5, 260n110; and queerness, 203; and religion, 70, 72, 205–6, 209, 215, 261n115 Upjohn, Richard, 41, 234–5n62 Vasari, Giorgio, 15, 16

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Vaughan, Henry, 39–41, 168–9 Victorian era: Gothic interdisciplinarity of, 6, 18–19, 218–20, 221; Gothic literature of, 18–19, 56–7, 220, 251n76, 253n5; Gothic Revival architecture of, 5, 17–18, 18–20, 32–3, 38–40, 40–1, 42, 48–9, 51, 52–3, 61, 62, 80–1, 122, 129, 136, 219, 220, 223n6, 232–3n37, 240n49, 249n56, 249–50n61 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 43, 115–16, 235n67 Von Eschenbach, Wolfram, 173 Wagner, Richard, 27–8, 176–7, 181, 182, 252n94; Parsifal, 173– 4, 177, 178, 188, 196, 198, 255n32, 255n39 Walker brothers (ec w, fhw, j hw): aristocratic pretensions of, 129–30; and Canadian Club Whisky, 8, 97, 99, 110, 150; as capitalists, 22, 99, 110; and church iconography, 100–1; commissioned furniture for Christ Episcopal Church, Detroit, 130; commissioned new offices in Walkerville, 129–30; commissioned nsm, 5, 8, 22, 67–8, 70, 81, 83, 97–101, 110, 128, 130, 240n50, 246n35; exercised local power, 94–5, 98–9; and Albert Kahn, 132, 134, 240n50; lived in Walkerville, 92, 241n60; magi as paradigm for, 22, 77–8, 83, 95, 100, 101, 103– 7, 108–10; and missing correspondence with Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, 224n10; sold

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298 Index

l e e &drr, 97, 100; sold Mettawas Hotel and Casino, 97, 100; renovated Walkerville, 97, 131–4; took over family corporation, 97, 129 Walker, Edward Chandler (ecw ): and budget consciousness, 100, 223n5; buried in n s m cemetery, 130–1, 225n21; and Canadian Club Whisky, 130, 148–9; childlessness of, 150; commissioned Willistead Manor, 132, 248n43; and “The Cottage,” 130, 131; death of, 95, 145; and the Edwardian era, 8, 22, 101, 123, 127, 128–9, 131, 133–5, 155–6, 157; as Fisher King, 22, 95, 158, 178, 181, 182, 188–9, 190–1, 195, 210, 213; friendship with William Robins, 144–5, 248n47, 250n70, 250n71; as head of Walker family, 123, 128, 130, 248n43; as “king” of Walkerville, 22, 128, 130–5, 168; last will and testament of, 6, 143–4, 145– 7, 247n41; married Mary Emma Griffin, 150, 157; as metaphorical leper, 22, 152–7, 211, 213; as microhistorical subject, 8, 26, 225n23; as president of Walkerville Land and Building Company, 131–2; as primary patron for n s m , 5–6, 22–3, 66, 95, 100, 110–11, 117, 130–1, 150, 213, 220–1, 223n5, 247n41; and secrecy, 8, 22, 23, 112, 117, 127, 130, 135, 141, 143, 146–7, 148, 150, 152–5, 157, 207, 213, 216, 224n10, 244n3; with syphilis, 5, 6, 22–3,

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66, 95, 110–11, 112, 117, 123, 127, 135, 145, 146–50, 152–7, 158, 168, 181, 182, 188, 190–1, 195, 199, 207, 213, 214–15, 216, 220–1, 224n10, 225n23, 242n67, 244n3; and temperance, 149–50. See also Walker brothers Walker, Franklin Hiram (fhw), 5, 67, 130, 145, 241n58, 247n41, 250n70, 250n71 Walker, Hiram: born in Massachusetts, 92; and Canadian Club Whisky, 92–3, 96–7, 241n59; criticized for paternalism, 93–4, 95, 242n68; exercised local power, 95–7, 129; favoured Mason and Rice, 129, 247n38; final years and death of, 97, 128, 129, 130; and first church in Walkerville, 96–7, 242–3n71, 243n73; as founder of Walkerville, 86, 92–4, 95–6, 129, 131, 242n68; with Sidney King, 86, 242n68; and the Labadie estate (“Cottage”), 92, 96, 129, 241n60; as landlord, 93–4, 95, 96–7; and lee&dr r , 84, 86, 97; and Mettawas Hotel and Casino, 86, 97, 247n38; moved to Canada, 92; moved to Detroit, 92; returned to Detroit, 93, 94, 96, 130; and temperance, 92, 96–7, 149, 242–3n71; and Walkerville-Detroit ferry service, 84, 93 Walker, James Harrington (j hw), 5, 67, 130–1, 144–5, 241n58, 247n40, 247n41, 248n47, 250n70, 250n71

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Index 299

Walker, Mary Abigail, 67, 92, 97, 98, 100, 108–10, 128, 141–2, 150, 155, 157, 243n73 Walker, Mary Griffin, 134, 144, 145, 150, 157, 225n21, 248n49 Walker, Willis Ephraim, 95, 241n58, 247n41, 248n43 Walkerville (Ontario): Anglican Ladies’ Aid Society of, 99; Anglican vestry board of, 67, 97–9, 100; and ferry services to/ from Detroit, 3, 84, 93, 97, 129, 131; first mayoral election in, 95–6; golf and country club of, 132; Hiram Walker & Sons company offices in, 129–30, 247n39; incorporated as town, 95–6, 242n68, 242n69; King Edward’s School, 134, 149, 248n49; and Methodism, 96–7, 149, 242– 3n71; old St Mary’s Anglican Church in, 96–7, 128, 129, 131, 243nn72–4; as patronymic company town, 3, 5, 8, 83, 93–4, 97, 104–7, 108–10, 128–9, 149–50, 242n68; Renaissance classicism in, 129–30, 247n39; Richardsonian influence in, 129, 132–3, 247n38; St Edward School, 248n49; street plans of, 33–6, 34, 129, 131–2; Tudor Revival architecture in, 101, 132–4, 248n45, 248n46, 248n47, 248n49; Willistead Manor, 132, 133, 248n43, 248n46, 248n47. See also Walkerville (Ontario), n s m Walkerville (Ontario), new St Mary’s Anglican Church (n s m ), 4, 35; Adoration of the Magi window

28904_Macdonell.indd 299

in, 72, 73, 101, 103–11, 106, 109, 155–8, 256n50; as AngloCatholic architecture, 3–5, 36, 42, 134, 168, 178; approached from Devonshire Road, 33–6, 131–2; architect-client relations of, 5, 6, 22, 66, 100–1, 117, 176, 177, 191, 217, 220–1, 224n10, 254n24; architectural lineage of, 22, 32, 37–8, 101–3, 142–3, 216, 232n33; baptismal font in, 103, 106, 107–8, 110, 155, 184, 256n50; as a body, 22, 112, 128, 135, 138–42, 143, 154–5, 182, 194, 198–9, 213–14; castle tiles of, 64, 65, 66, 138; cemetery of, 130–1, 171, 225n21; centaur tiles in, 184–5, 186; choir-stall finials of, 177–8, 180, 255n33; church bell of, 172; as confessional space, 112, 127, 135, 150, 154–5, 156–7, 213; contrasting horizontal and vertical elements of, 64, 143, 243n84; coordinated with Willistead Manor, 132–3, 248n46, 248n47; cornerstone of, 100, 223n4; cornice sculpture of, 169–73, 170, 175, 178, 209, 216; credence shelf in, 196, 197; Crucifixion window of, 138, 139, 141, 191, 193, 194, 194, 196, 199, 209, 214; as cryptic architecture, 22, 112, 117, 122, 127–8, 130, 135, 141–2, 143, 146, 150, 152–7, 168, 177, 178, 191, 207, 213, 216, 244n3, 247n41; demon tiles in, 184, 185–7, 187; diurnal metaphors in, 155, 172, 190, 213–14; dog tiles in, 184, 185–7, 187; and the

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300 Index

economy of salvation, 22, 72, 77–8, 80–1, 83, 95, 100, 103–4, 108–10, 155; Edwardian name play in, 123, 127, 134–5, 155–6, 157; etin tiles in, 189–90, 190; floral imagery in, 111, 123, 127, 135, 155–7, 169, 246n29; gargoyle sculpture of, 171; as a gift, 22, 67–8, 70, 72, 77–8, 80–1, 83, 98, 99, 100, 107–8, 110, 155–6; and Gothic interdisciplinarity, 10–11, 15, 43, 220–1, 222; and Grail mythology, 22–3, 158, 168, 173–4, 178, 181, 188–9, 189–91, 194–9, 207, 209–10, 211, 213– 15, 216, 217, 222, 263n26; griffin tile in, 157; half-timbered adjunct architecture of, 32, 132, 138, 141, 143, 211, 243n84, 248n45; as haunted house, 11, 19–20, 21–2, 27, 42, 43, 49, 52–3, 59, 95, 154, 200, 211, 214; high altar of, 3, 36, 64, 66, 123, 134, 135, 177–8, 181, 181, 188, 195, 210, 211; Josephine name play in, 156–8; Kahn and Wilby as supervising architects of, 132, 240n50; knight tiles in, 184, 185–7, 186, 187; “leper’s squint” in, 211, 212, 213, 261n2; liturgically southern aisle of, 22, 103, 141–2, 143, 150, 154, 155, 181, 182, 183, 183–4, 188, 196, 207, 213, 216; liturgically western vestibule of, 33, 64, 103, 138, 181, 183; local limestone used for, 33, 248n46; Maltese cross tiles in, 183, 184, 194–5; as Mannerist architecture, 141, 154; Marian name play in,

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141–2, 157; as memorial, 22, 67, 108–10, 127–8, 141, 150, 155, 157; monumental bell tower of, 21–2, 32, 33–7, 59, 64, 66, 103, 131, 138, 143, 154, 169, 171, 173, 175, 213, 214, 217; morning chapel in, 3, 42, 103, 157, 184, 185, 211; movement of knights errant in, 182– 4, 188, 209; nave arcade of, 141, 142; nave clerestory windows of, 177–8, 179, 189, 194; presentation drawing of, 32; Presentation in the Temple window in, 196; pulpit in, 134, 139–41, 140, 194, 216; reredos screen of, 64, 65, 66, 134, 138, 190; reredos statues of, 65, 101, 134–5, 135, 157, 195–6; Rückenfigur in, 111, 155; as sacramental architecture, 3, 36, 103–4, 107–8, 110, 112, 137, 168, 177–8, 185, 196, 198, 211, 263n26; scholarship on, 4–5, 7, 128, 224n13; Sermon on the Mount window in, 22, 150, 151, 152, 154, 156–7, 207; sexual anxiety as subtext of, 5–6, 150, 157, 185–7, 188–9, 198, 199, 207, 252n94; as site of AngloProtestant service, 3, 42; as space of regeneration, 22–3, 127, 135, 150, 152–5, 155–7, 157–8, 181, 191, 194–5, 207, 210, 213–14; Spes window in, 155, 156, 183; stringcourses of, 143, 144, 154; Transfiguration window in, 155, 156, 242n67; as unique architecture in rac ’s career, 21, 66, 107, 117, 139, 141, 169, 173, 175,

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190, 191, 216; as veiled space, 173, 209, 215; Veritas window in, 123, 124, 127, 155–6, 246n30; Vesica Piscis reredos cross of, 190–1, 192, 216; as Wagnerian Gothic, 173–4, 177– 8, 181, 182, 188, 196; ecw ’s place in, 111, 134–5 Walpole, Horace, 6, 13–14, 18, 218, 227n49 Wentworth, Charles, 36 Westfall, William, 78, 80, 82, 83, 87, 110, 239n34, 239n44

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Index 301

West Point (New York), US Military Academy, 6–7, 45, 232– 3n37, 254n18, 261n2 Wharton, Edith, 217 Whitehill, Walter Muir, 29 Wigley, Mark, 59–61 Wilby, Ernest, 33, 132, 139 Willson, E.J. (Edward James), 45 Wilson, Alan, 79 Wilson, Richard Guy, 24–5 Wolfreys, Julian, 25 Wykeham, William of, 44–6, 47 Wyllie, Romy, 44

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