Arts and Letters

Arthur Stanwood Pier, teacher and man of letters, was born in Pittsburgh on 21 April 1874, the son of William Stanwood Pier, a prominent lawyer, and Alice Moore Pier. As his parents had a low opinion of the local public schools, they gave him a classical education at home until the age of thirteen, when he entered St. Paul's School with flying colors and remained at the head of his form until graduation in 1891, winning the top Ferguson scholarship. By that time he had grown from a shy, gangling boy to a tall, athletic young man and an expert tennis player. He became Western Pennsylvania champion in men's singles and, with Lewis Perry, the future headmaster of Exeter, won for two successive years the doubles championship of Massachusetts. Until well over sixty, Arthur's stalwart form could be seen "belting it out" at the Hoosic-Whisick Club in Milton or on the St. Paul's School tennis courts.

At Harvard, Pier specialized in English and graduated magna cum laude in 1895. He wrote stories for The Advocate, then the leading college literary magazine, became president of its editorial board, and had a commencement part, but did not make Phi Beta Kappa or any of the fashionable college clubs. During his senior year he won a prize in a story competition held by The Youth's Companion, and that led to his first job after graduation. In the meantime his father had died, leaving three younger children for whose education Arthur assumed the responsibility.

His main support for many years was the assistant editorship of The Youth's Companion, and his short stories and books. Of these, the most successful were novels built around life at a church school called St. Timothy's, a thinly disguised St. Paul's. Boys of St. Timothy's (1904), greeted as an American Tom Brown at Rugby, led to many sequels: Harding of St. Timothy's (1906), The New Boy (1908), The Crashaw Brothers (1910), The Jester of St. Timothy's (1911), Grannis of the Fifth (1914), Dormitory Days (1919), David Ives: A Story of St. Timothy's (1922), The Captain (1929). At the request of a publisher he wrote three books on boys' life at a public high school: The Coach (1928), The Cheer Leader (1930), and The Champion (1931). These, together with The Rigor of the Game (1929) about Harvard, The Hilltop Troop (1919) about Boy Scouts, and The Plattsburgers (1917) about the officers' training camp, belong to the category formerly called "Books for Older Boys," which has now disappeared from publishers' catalogues.

Older boys today are no longer interested in Oliver Optic, Frank Merri well at Yale, or other tales which lay stress on the Spartan and Christian virtues; if they get beyond the "comics," they read the same books that their parents do, and in popular stories of school boys, trickery, evasion, and sex are the favorite themes. If there is ever a Ph.D. thesis on Books for Older Boys, the name of Arthur Stanwood Pier will surely head the procession. In their time, these works were popular and successful, selling from three to five thousand copies each. David Ives is autobiographical, describing struggles of a boy like himself to obtain a good education after the death of his father.

During the last seventy years of his life, Arthur Pier lived in New England and completely absorbed its scholarly and literary tradition. He married Elise Riche Hall, a beautiful and talented Boston girl, in 1909; they made their home on Brush Hill in the Boston suburb of Milton. Mrs. Pier's death in 1922, after she had borne him several children, was the second tragedy in his life, and he rose to the occasion as he had on the first, by becoming both father and mother to their children, supporting them through college and, in the case of Arthur, Jr., through medical school. His own tastes were simple, and he gave away a large part of his by no means affluent income.

Even before the St. Timothy series started, Arthur Pier tried his hand at regular, grown-up novels; but whilst his boys' books were supreme in that field, these ran into severe competition and were only moderately successful. The earliest, The Pedagogues (1899), is an entertaining story of life at the Harvard Summer School; The Sentimentalists (1901) describes the struggles of an intellectual family like his own, left fatherless and without financial means. Other titles are The Ancient Grudge (1905), The Young in Heart (1907), The Women We Marry (1914), and The Son Decides (1918). The Triumph (1903) came out in serial form in McClure's Magazine, and many of the St. Timothy series similarly were originally serials in The Youth's Companion. Pier's novels are mostly about "nice" people, with a home in Boston or New York and a country place, Irish servants, and all that. In Confident Morning (1925), the most exciting event is the contest for an Episcopal bishopric between a war-decorated chaplain and an elderly society rector, with a very proper love story on the side. He deviated from this pattern in two books: Jerry (1917), about an Irish Catholic family in western Massachusetts, and God's Secret (1935), a Wellesean fantasy about the inventor of a vest-pocket death-ray which so frightens a dictator like Hitler that he calls off his plans for war.

Always a loyal alumnus of school and college, Arthur Pier was the man to whom each turned when in need of a teacher or writer. In the series on American colleges he wrote The Story of Harvard (1913); and five years later, when still helping to edit The Youth's Companion, he became editor of The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, a scholarly quarterly which set the standard for other university organs. He helped Mark Howe edit the Memoirs of the Harvard Dead in the War Against Germany. He served as instructor in Harvard's English Department, 1916-21, teaching a course on English Composition "primarily intended for Sophomores." This venture was terminated abruptly by President Lowell in 1921 on the ground that the increased enrollment of the course from 65 to 400 indicated that it had become too easy; and Pier once confessed that he "found it very hard to flunk students."

Within a decade of Harvard's rejection, St. Paul's School called on Arthur Pier, and during fourteen happy years, 1930-44, he taught English at Concord. It was a hardy experiment for a 56-year-old man of letters to instruct schoolboys and serve on a faculty with an average age of about thirty. Arthur accepted the challenge and performed the role of wise scholar and sympathetic, skillful teacher to perfection. He played tennis with the boys, entertained them at tea Sunday afternoon, and took unusual pains over their essays. If one was very bad, he would mark it up, go over the errors with the writer, and say, "I won't grade you on this; write another which will be better, and I'll grade you on that." As a teacher of history at Harvard at that time I was struck by the superior English of the St. Paul's alumni in my courses, and inquired why. "Arthur Stanwood Pier" was the answer. As the school approached her centenary, Pier became the natural choice as historian, and his History of St. Paul's School (1934), remarkably objective for so loyal an alumnus, will (I predict) prove to be the most enduring of his books.

Intensely interested in national and world affairs (difficult to keep up in the atmosphere of a church boarding school), Pier ardently supported Al Smith for president, but in 1935, in his fiftieth-anniversary class report, wrote, "My chief aversion is the New Deal and all its promoters and sponsors—next to Hitler." He urged America's entry into World War II; and when it came, at the earnest request of the Rector since most of the young masters entered the armed services, continued teaching at St. Paul's until the age of seventy.

As a summary of his teaching experience Pier wrote, in his fiftieth-anniversary class report, that Charles Lamb was right in saying that boys "are unwholesome candidates for grown people." He then added, "Constant association with boys disables a man for standing on his own feet among men. In the … competitive life of a man's world, the schoolteacher has no part."

Accordingly, in 1945 he settled down in Boston, living in Louisburg Square for several years with Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe (of whom he wrote a charming Memoir in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, LXXII, 403-08), and savoring the men's clubs, dinners, and literary-historical societies which are the chief consolation of advancing age to otherwise lonely old Bostonians. Two more books appeared after his retirement. He wrote an excellent biography of a little-known but significant man—William Hathaway Forbes. This appeared in 1953 as Forbes: Telephone Pioneer, and it includes a straightforward account of the Pan-Electric swindle. American Apostles to the Philippines (1950) was written at the request of Governor William Cameron Forbes to record the most significant American contributions to the development of the Philippines.

Pier was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1928 and subsequently contributed several papers to its Proceedings. The first, "George Washington and Sally Fairfax" (LXIV, 405-14), was the byproduct of a fictionalized biography of the young man Washington. The second, "Major Forbes and Colonel Mosby" (LXX, 65-75), was a byproduct of his life of Forbes. During 1953-57 he delivered three papers: "The Early Years of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford," "Count Rumford and his Daughter," and "Shakespeare and the Scholars." These were not printed; but the last, attributing Shakespeare's plays to the Earl of Oxford, provoked a very lively discussion. He wrote a book on the subject, but it was still in manuscript at the time of his death. For Pier had become an enthusiastic advocate of the Earl of Oxford, corresponding with other "Oxonians," talking on the subject to anyone who would listen. A friend who gave Arthur a ride in his car from Concord, N.H., to Boston, reported that he was "treated to a two-hour lecture on the Earl of Oxford." But he never became a bore; his natural tact and feeling for people, his intuitive friendliness, always told him when to stop.

Pier appreciated greatly the honor of election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters at the age of thirty-four, but seldom attended the meetings after World War I because he felt out of his depth among the younger generation of writers and artists. He was active in the affairs of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, to which he was elected in 1922, serving for several years as recording secretary and member of the council, and in his good-humored way taking part in the discussions.

Pier was no innovator, no herald of a new style, no Joyce, Proust, or Hemingway. His model, so far as he had one, was George Meredith. His writings belong definitely to the Victorian tradition, depicting pleasantly, and always in good taste and good English, incidents and problems of the limited world of sweetness and light that he knew intimately. Unlike Edith Wharton or Henry James, he never touched on abnormal psychology or tried to make complex analyses of motives and personality traits. Always modest about his own attainments, never ambitious for fame or greedy for recognition, he aspired to no higher degree than his A.B. of 1895, and to no deeper enjoyment than that afforded by his family and his many, many friends. He died quietly and painlessly in his ninety-third year at 186 Marlborough Street, Boston, on 14 August 1966; and Trinity Church was almost too small for the people who returned from their vacations to pay their respects to a loyal friend and a great gentleman.