Heads and Talesby Malvina Hoffmann

University of Northern Iowa

Heads and Tales by Malvina HoffmannReview by: Eleanor L. Van AlenThe North American Review, Vol. 242, No. 2 (Winter, 1936/1937), pp. 429-433Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25114829 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 420 The chains of his art do not bind him; rather, they give him

that sense of freedom known only to the poet who actually loves the captivity of form and sure foundations. He wonders

about that "person from Porlock" who interrupted Coleridge when he was writing Kubla Khan:

Was he the world of prose That strode to the door and knocked, And shattered the dream like a rose Till the magical reverie rocked, Splitting the shell? Who knows?

In his Nature pieces he betrays his finest lyric gift and poetic sensibilities.

Brief summer of the aspen bowed, No sorrow broods upon your leaf; Your laughter shakes no bell; no shroud Commemorates your grief.

And he knows that

It is ourselves that divide The sun from the rush of rain, The ebb of passion from the full tide, Pleasure from pain.

This is a profound note in English poetry: eloquence mixed with rich emotion. In these perilous times we need a voice like

Joseph Auslander's, to give us faith for cloudy days. CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

HEADS AND TALES. By Malvina Hoffmann. Scribner's, $5.00.

TO A REFLECTIVE person who visited the World's Fair

in Chicago in 1933, the most memorable features were

two permanent exhibits not directly a part of the exposition itself

? the planetarium and the Hall of Man in the Field

Museum. The latter was incomplete at the time, having only seventy-three of the one hundred and one bronzes by Malvina

Hoffmann. These anthropological figures, a mammoth under

taking in sculpture, represent five years of unrelenting labor in all corners of the globe. And as Sir Arthur Keith, whose

sculptured head is the final one in the collection, said, "Solely



430 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW a mind endowed with the gift of such sympathies (that extend

alike to all races of mankind) was capable of creating the

sculptures arrayed in the hall, which are pervaded by a human

and kindly spirit." Of further interest is the fact that "many a

vanishing race will continue to live only in the statues or busts

displayed in this hall." In Sir Arthur's opinion then, Miss

Hoffmann is a "great sculptor who lavishes her art in the in

terests of anthropology." Paderewski, to whom Heads and Tales is dedicated, per

suaded Miss Hoffmann to write her book. It was to have been first merely the account of the Field expedition, but that would

have been incomplete and fragmentary without the autobio

graphical material, the career, the lifetime of unconscious

preparation for that stupendous task. The visitor to the Hall

divines that each head had its "tale," and is aroused by a

curiosity to know it and to know about the remarkable person

ality who modelled it. Henry Field, one of the heads of the

department of anthropology of the museum, tells this story of one figure

? that of the woman of Hieedley caste of Jaipur, India, the untouchables. A blind man of some education

visited the exhibit, and paused to feel the features of this par ticular portrait. As he did so, tears silently rolled down his

cheeks. He afterwards dictated a letter to the curator, saying that never before had he discerned such suffering in a human

countenance; a suffering that made the handicap of his blind ness seem as

nothing.

When M. H., as she likes to sign herself, volunteered and was sent by Herbert Hoover to the Balkans on Red Cross relief

after the War, she first consciously awoke to an interest in

racial types. There she learned by heart that expression of

"resignation toward life," and those revealed "stigmas of a

poverty that bears malice towards none." Out of her ex

periences in the Balkans grew the plan and later the execution

of a relief plaque and bronze group of the four dread horsemen

of the Apocalypse. Much of her chronicle is not in direct time sequence. While

it does not lack unity of thought, its content is mostly formless

and unplanned. Its style vacillates between a sort of shorthand

and diary-note prose, and an occasional formal phrasing, when she is telling of the death of some fellow artist, for ex



BOOK REVIEWS 431

ample. This very unevenness in the writing points to the fact

that unlike so many of its predecessors in kind, Heads and Tales

is not ghost-written. But no one could entirely bungle a life of

such amazing achievements. The memoirs are an avowal of

M. H.'s fears and ambitions, and of those relationships that

promoted her artistic career. Yet there is little that is personal or intimate in the narrative itself, for M. H. is an able reporter,

among other things, and sprinkles humor generously through the pages.

Malvina Hoffmann was the daughter of Richard Hoffmann, the pianist, who toured the country with Jenny Lind in the

1850's. He once said to her "above all you must be an artist, after that you may create art." This advice she consciously

obeyed. Her first work was a bust of him which she took to

Rodin in Paris, in her successful effort to interest him in her

as a pupil. She quotes the great and lovable idealist repeatedly, and she it was who helped arrange the posthumous exhibition

of his sculpture years later. She married the young violinist, Samuel Grimson^ who played several seasons with her father

and who was later to be of such invaluable assistance, with his

photography and indefatigable energy and patience, on the

Field Museum project. M. H. conveys admirably the excitement of a young artist,

consumed by ambitious fires, advised by the great master who

recognized her flare for portraiture and character. At Rodin's

instigation she studied anatomy by dissection minutely. Mestrovic, Yugo-Slav sculptor under whom she studied for a

considerable time in 1922 said "that the first thing I must do was to learn the principles and technical side of my work better

than most men, before I could start even." This she did, be

coming very absorbed in the practical side of her art. She fol

lowed painstakingly the processes of plaster casting, the use of

negocoll, the repairing of tools. Indeed one of the most dra

matic sections in the book is devoted to the mysteries of the

sand-mold method, and the lost wax method of bronze casting described by Cellini. The reader will marvel at her limitless

patience, her unswerving faith. "The fact that we cannot

correct our faults once they are recorded in metal, seems to

sever us from our work," she writes.

She was unquestionably influenced by the belief of Rodin



432 THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

and Mestrovic that soul is lacking in most modern sculpture. M. H. is religious in a deeply cosmic sense. And she devoutly

insists that "it is the eternal cosmic consciousness which binds all races of man together." She knows the thin veneer of civi lized society which coats over the savage in the sophisticate and

makes rickshaw runner and scholar brothers under the skin.

As a traveler, M. H. carried the wealth of the Indies in a

fertile brain and inquiring mind. Everywhere she was pro

foundly struck "by the instinctive art of primitive races"; and

she predicts that many pieces now kept in natural history mu

seums for ethnographical reasons will one day be ranked as gen uine art. She is informing to the uninitiated reader and pricks the imagination of the traveled one, when she correlates and

compares the various religious practices of old civilizations ?

the cult of snake worship in Persia, Mexico, India, and Burma, or among the ancestors of the Japanese, the still surviving

Ainus; the uses of the masks for ceremonial purposes and the

medicine man's strange practices in different countries. She

finds parallels in primitive housing, as in Mongolian yurt or

tent, and Navajo hogan or nomadic hut. She indicates similar

ities between racial types like the Ainus and Mediterranean

peoples, and conjectures about the lost continents of Atlantis

and Mu.

Her ingenuity and resourcefulness illuminate the enormity of her job. She often modelled types "on the hoof with a pack

ing case rigged up on a stand at the back of a Ford car, in

every kind of weather. Intervals aboard forty different types of ships were never spent in idleness but in frenzied endeavor to finish some head while it was still docketed freshly in her

mind. New Mexico saw "the end of it all," and some of the

best description in the book is of her visit to her friend and

D. H. Lawrence's, Mabel Dodge Luhan at Taos. There she

renewed herself mentally and physically in the beauty of spring and early summer. This was necessary, since the well-springs of creation had gone dry after so much tapping.

Malvina Hoffmann, wherever her artistic niche may be in

posterity, and however negligible may be ultimately the

literary significance of her book, emerges here as a super woman. She courted danger with a colossal nerve and had the

self-confidence of the accomplished craftsman-artist ? an in



BOOK REVIEWS 433

trepid temperament, with strength of will and purpose beyond

ordinary endurance. She elected a lonely role in life, and an

art effected with tiring tools out of a medium more resisting than most. She has wielded her chisel not merely in the desire

for self-expression, but in the interests of science and human

knowledge. Such gifts and spirit are not to be despised whether

revealed in bronze or on the printed page. The end papers are a needle point tapestry by Ginevra King,

showing the world tour of the Field expedition; and the illus

trations consist of fine photographs of the sculptures, people, and travel incidents. There is an index, and an appendix of

translation from the French. ELEANOR L. VAN ALEN

DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK. By Walter D. Edmonds. Little, Brown, $2.50.

THREE BAGS FULL. By Roger Burlingame. Harcourt, Brace, $3.00.

REGIONAL LITERATURE when it is well written and

^ authentically constructed revitalizes the historical inci

dents of the past. Individuals and events become more tangi ble when portrayed against the colorful and changeable pan orama of our early national life. In the past the South and

New England dominated this particular field of literature. Now it is upstate New York with Mr. Edmonds telling the

story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary war and Mr. Burlingame concerned with his imaginary, feudalistic Van Huyten family which he traces,

most effectively, over a period of a hundred and thirty years. With exemplary thoroughness, both men have written books

that will long be remembered for their fine blending, of the facts of history and the fancies of fiction.

At Oriskany, on a sultry day in August of the year 1777, General Herkimer, with his inadequately trained New York

militia, met the British and Indians under the leadership of

Barry St. Leger and Joseph Brant. After a short while the

battle became a mere hand-to-hand conflict, interspersed with the usual atrocities that soon became synonymous with Indian and Tory warfare along the Mohawk. Old Herkimer, despite



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Heads and Talesby Malvina Hoffmann