Keep digging
Canzi and Fitzgerald’s excellent review and photos of UVA’s architectural history [“‘Jeffersonian’ quest,” May 17] was a delightful, but limited, exposé of Charlottesville’s primary real estate holder and employer. While I trust that the writers are being factually true to someone’s history of each significant UVA structure mentioned, I think that one or two of their titles for the segmentation of the timeline (of construction) are somewhat misleading. I am referring to the prefatory phrases “Baby steps off the lawn” for Brooks Hall, and “Tampering with Jefferson’s Vision” for Cabell, Cocke and Rouss Halls.
Architectural history that I read while living in New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, explained why Yale’s squat, red-bricked Peabody Museum of Natural history looks like a structure belonging to the UVA campus, and why UVA’s soaring, dark-stoned Brooks Hall looks like a structure belonging to Yale’s campus. Simple reason. Because that’s where they belong.
The UVA architectural plans and the Yale architectural plans got mixed up in Stanford White’s architectural firm in New York City while White (1853-1906) was paying less attention to business and more attention to a young, married woman whose husband ultimately killed him (i.e. White), a dramatic event portrayed in the movie Ragtime. If this mix-up is the “real facts” behind Brooks Hall being what it is and where it is, architecturally speaking, then Brooks Hall definitely belongs under the timeline segment title “Tampering with Jefferson’s vision”, or, alternatively, under a re-write of the segment title “Baby steps off the lawn.” May I suggest the title “Unwanted baby near the Lawn,” or “Strange body under the lawn”, or something like that.
Whatever the change, and I know writers and editors must consider community sensitivities, the ideal of the fifth estate still applies: to communicate accurately the processes of continuation (tradition), growth (reform), and corruption (power mongering) with historical tags that fit the facts (veracity), shared facts being the real basis of an academic village, fancy buildings notwithstanding.
Jefferson and White were both brilliant men with a similar history of miss-calculations and collisions with other people’s social agendas. All the more reason to follow the facts to bedrock. With the items I have focused on, I don’t think this article is there yet. A fine piece of research and writing nonetheless.
Clay Moldenhauer
Charlottesville
Flattery files
I am visiting for a few days in Charlottesville and by chance picked up the latest issue of C-VILLE.
Wanted Mr. Beard to know that I was thrilled with your writing of the article on the ex-Mrs.Kluge [“Wine in the time of poverty,” May 24]. I live in San Francisco and my interest in the subject was mild at best but the quality of your writing was quite exceptional.
I have had a long career in media and content and am nearly finished with my 1,000 page memoir so I believe I have a learned eye for excellent expression—which you have clearly demonstrated. In fact, as a long-time reader of Vanity Fair I think your article would fit in that publication quite comfortably.
J. William Grimes
San Francisco
CORRECTION
Due to a reporting error, last week’s feature story, “Wine in the time of poverty,” flubbed a quote from Ernest Hemingway—the work, context and precise wording. Hemingway wrote a scene in The Sun Also Rises in which one character asks another how he went bankrupt: “Gradually,” he replies, “then suddenly.” The article misattributed the quote to For Whom the Bell Tolls, incorrectly stated that it was in reference to the 1929 stock market crash, and altered it to “Slowly, and then all at once.” Also, in the same article, we failed to catch a misspelling of “ark” in a pull-quote.