AMERICAN SALONS

``My purpose is to tell a story,'' Crunden (American Civilization/Univ. of Texas at Austin; Ministers of Reform, 1982, etc.) writes in this spirited, learned, and epic first volume in a projected three-volume history of American encounters with modernism. After introducing the ``precursors'' of American modernism (James Whistler, William and Henry James), Crunden describes centers of modernism such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, their special institutions, and the music, film, and people associated with them—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude and Leo Stein—who were seminal to modernism in America. American encounters with European modernism took place in the salons of W.B. Yeats in England (where, ironically, Pound met T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost) and of the Steins in Paris (where Picasso painted Gertrude and discussed William James). The alchemy of people and places continued in N.Y.C., in the salons of Alfred Stieglitz, Mabel Dodge, and others, who in turn encouraged new artists, styles, criticism, exhibits such as the Armory Show, and various kinds of communal endeavors such as the Provincetown Playhouse. Each group had its own preoccupations—whether photography, education, politics, or painting—and each had its own personality. Crunden excels at depicting personalities, building his story on well-told biography and anecdote: The first encounter between modernism and postmodernism, he tells us, was a pretend tennis match between Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in New Jersey. The author concludes with a stunning reading of Wallace Stevens's ``Sunday Morning'' as a summation of American modernism. Crunden assimilates an amazing amount of information and, like his modernists, brings an inventive form, charm, color, and imagination to what were once aesthetic abstractions. He tells his ``story'' very well indeed.