Another Look at George Cram Cook

George Cram Cook

Susan Glaspell was already making a name for herself as a reporter when she met George Cram Cook — “Jig,” as his friends called him. She’d been covering murder trials and city politics for the Des Moines Daily News, trying to make sense of the world through facts. He was trying to make sense of it through philosophy. The University of Iowa had hired him to explain Shakespeare, but he preferred explaining freedom. It didn’t go well.

He was a Harvard man in sandals. She was a small-town girl in sensible shoes. “Art must be dangerous, or it isn’t art,” he liked to say. She listened, smiled, and made a note of it. Iowa wasn’t sure what to do with either of them. People there were still arguing about whether corn or beans made a better crop, and here came George Cram Cook, talking about Nietzsche and the soul of art.

They got married in 1913 — a philosopher and a journalist — and went looking for a place big enough to hold both of their ideals. They found Greenwich Village, where everyone was broke, brilliant, and talking too loudly. It was the kind of place where George could deliver a two-hour lecture on “spiritual democracy” to people who’d just stopped in for coffee. Susan wrote short stories that actually sold. One of them brought in twenty-five dollars — enough to cover rent, groceries, and one more week of George’s grand ideas about saving humanity through beauty.

They had an unspoken agreement: he dreamed, she edited. When he declared, “The artist must create a new moral order,” she replied, “Fine, but we still need milk.”

In the summer of 1915, they escaped the city for Provincetown, Massachusetts — just a quiet fishing town then. Someone joked about putting on a play in an old wharf shack. Cook said, “We’ll build a theater.” It was exactly the sort of thing he said before someone else had to find nails. So they did it — cobbled together a stage with lamps, planks, folding chairs, and a cat that refused to leave the set. From that gloriously unstable foundation came the Provincetown Players.

Susan Glaspell

Susan wrote Trifles, a one-act play about women noticing what men ignore — a theme she knew by heart. It was inspired by a real murder she’d covered back in Iowa. Audiences were stunned. Critics said the acting was uneven but the truth in it was impossible to miss. Cook said that was the point: “Life itself must walk upon the stage.”

When Eugene O’Neill wandered in with a stack of one-act sea tragedies that nobody wanted, Cook saw something. “They stink of salt and life,” he said. “Perfect.” O’Neill later said Cook was “the only man who ever made me believe I could be honest.” That honesty eventually earned O’Neill a Nobel Prize.

By 1918, the Players had gone from a group of friends to a full-fledged theater movement. Reviewers started calling them “the most exciting thing to happen to American drama.” Others called them anarchists with props. A Boston critic wrote that their plays “reek of fish and truth.” George kept that one pinned to the wall for months.

Success ruined them, of course. It always does. “We began as a family,” Cook said, “and ended as a business.” The magic slipped away. The idealism that built their little stage couldn’t survive ticket sales and critics.

So George and Susan did what they always did when civilization disappointed them — they left. They sailed to Greece in 1922, trading New York’s clamor for the silence of Delphi. George started growing olives, reading Plato, and dreaming up a utopian community for artists. “We are seeking a democracy of the spirit,” he wrote to a friend, “where beauty is duty.”

Everyone back home thought he’d finally lost it. Susan didn’t. “He had a soul that could not live on small things,” she said later. She watched him sketch plans for a school with no grades, only truth. “No one will come,” she told him. “Then it will be perfect,” he said.

In 1924, malaria caught up with him. He was fifty-one. Susan scattered his ashes on Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses, because he’d been chasing them his entire life.

She kept writing, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison’s House in 1931. Eugene O’Neill won everything else. The Provincetown Players dissolved, but American theater never stopped sounding like them — raw, honest, a little rough around the edges.

After his death, a newspaper called George Cram Cook “a man who built cathedrals in barns.” It wasn’t far off. People started calling him the father of modern American drama. Maybe he was. But if that’s true, Susan Glaspell was its mother. He had the vision; she built the furniture. He dreamed about the New World of Art; she kept the rent paid long enough for it to exist.

Their marriage was like two fires sharing one stove. Together, they produced enough heat to warm half of American literature — though they burned themselves out doing it. Even near the end, she never called him foolish. Just extraordinary. “He believed life could be made beautiful,” she said. “And for a while, he made me believe it too.”