Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith
A great biography—Go buy it at your local bookseller!
(A disclosure: I met John Szwed at the American Croatian Club of Anacortes when he visited in 2018, already well into his research on Harry Smith. He knew I’d been studying Harry’s early years in our hometown. I’ve been here since 1962, the year my immigrant grandfather passed away, the steeple blew off our church, and the Smiths’ old Apex cannery collapsed into Guemes Channel. John described his plans for a full biography of Harry. Unfamiliar with Szwed’s books, I read his Lomax biography and knew he was up to the challenge of taking on Harry and his cosmos. I happily shared my research on Smith-world as I worked to complete Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences, for which John wrote the foreword.)
To make sense of a life, a biography is written, then it all seems fated for the subject. The improbability of Harry Smith is crucial to understanding his life and times. John Szwed has written a number of music biographies: On Sun Ra, Billie Holiday, Alan Lomax, Miles Davis, and now Harry Everett Smith, acknowledging in Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, “though I thought I'd never again encounter anyone as mysterious and undecipherable as Sun Ra, along came Harry.”
Szwed summons relevant voices, like a symphony conductor: “Any damn subject you talk to him—Harry is like tuned into a computer memory bank on Pluto that has every subject in the world and he can talk about it,” Lionel Ziprin says of Harry, “anthropology, science, grammar, medieval logic, modern scientific electronics; also he knows how to work a camera; use any measuring tools…then there's the Tibetan thing too.”
Decades before Google Scholar existed, Harry Smith possessed the capacity and desire to become the search engine for the Village underground, with all of his virtual index cards sorted, cross referenced, and filed for idiosyncratic recall.
Cosmic Scholar unsnarls 20th century American creative communities, then weaves hundreds of cultural influencers into Harry's story with artistry and depth. “Art operated very differently before the 1950s and early 1960s, especially among the avant-garde,” Szwed writes. “An artist could be famous in one such group, and not be known at all by those in other arts.” In Chapter One, Szwed compares and contrasts surrealism’s interest in Northwest Coast First Nations art with Harry’s approach. Exploring Max Ernst’s use of collage, the author notes how “throughout Harry's life he worked somewhere close to such breaks … in the natural or forced cracks in cultures.”
“I try to bring people together,” Harry said: “I'd seen myself sort of turning into a derelict, and I didn't know what to do. Every move I made seemed to be wrong... But the reason, as I say, is that I try to fill all the moments that God, whatever that is, that... infinitely small immensity that draws all things together by thrusting them apart...”
“Rather than a bum, Harry might instead be thought of as the ultimate bohemian, Szwed describes how Village culture “understood those who were in search of a community, without the ties of a community.
“Harry had pushed the bohemian life to its extremes, and even some of those who found him annoying grudgingly admired him as pure a bohemian as could be imagined.”
Cosmic Scholar always provides ample context and expert testimony, like “photographer Robert Frank said about Harry that he was ‘The only person I met in my life that transcended everything.’”
Szwed elaborates:
“Harry, more than anyone else, had devoted his life completely to art, in some ways turned his life into a work of art, his own personal surrealism... He approached life in an artistic manner and, in doing so, weakened the distinctions between life and art.”
People in the Harry Smith world focus a great deal of attention on The Anthology of American Folk Music when trying to make sense of Harry in the mainstream, so much so it tends to eclipse the rest of his work and the way he lived his life. Harry publicly declared the import of the Anthology. In a short speech on accepting his Grammy Award, he said: “I’m glad to say that my dreams came true—I saw America changed through music.”
Szwed finds supporting quotes from Harry to help us understand: “When I first decided to compile the folk music anthology, much of my impetus was created by me noticing that the folk or ethnic music of America was not included in the popular music of America. This is the sign of a very sick culture, perhaps unprecedented in history, for this was not the natural flow of development. So, I felt I might be able to adjust this somehow... But well, I never thought it would turn out like this.”
Then, Szwed points the telescope at the other planets in Harry Smith’s creative solar system, examining some of Harry's lost spells for changing the world. Harry was a community catalyst and mentor wherever he lived. Always the dutiful interdisciplinarian—though beset by the trials of living multiple lives at once. Disguised as a bum, but actually trying to create recipes and portals for humanistic social change.
Cosmic Scholar provides a galaxy of star witnesses. “There was so much to learn and absorb from Harry in the scene at the Chelsea,” Patrick Hulsey remembered: “Harry would relate tales from his life experience, stories that were at once ironic, comic, and tragic. How his mother was Anastasia. How he'd been arrested many times for pulling fire alarms. How he had never had sexual intercourse with another living thing.” After months of hearing Harry’s anti-linear collage of narrative philosophy, Hulsey concludes “… I would finally get the whole point, sometimes.”
“But who wants a psychiatrist to explain a work of art,” Szwed asks, “much less biographers writing as if they were trained to evaluate an artist patient?” Meanwhile, Harry himself said: “I have always used my God-given gift of mental disease as perhaps the most valuable component of my work.”
Fear not for your sanity. Go to your local bookstore and buy Cosmic Scholar, if you haven’t already. It is a college course in recommended readings on collisions at America’s cultural intersections. The second time through it, I found myself looking up all of the luminaries I’d never heard of, then trying to watch the index as a YouTube playlist. Mr. Szwed guides us through the always captivating and sometimes depressing labyrinth, ultimately bringing us up to speed on the question he asked at the outset: “How are we to understand the paradox of an artist whose life was almost completely outside the public's view, always on the edge of calamity—if not death—and yet was so influential in so many ways?”
For those of you living in Western Washington, consider attending one of three events that John and I will be appearing at, in Seattle on September 15, Anacortes the 16th, and Bellingham on September 17th.
