Irony is a powerful literary device.
There’s plenty of it in the literal and figurative heart of Terre Haute right now.
British author Tim Dalgleish traveled from his home in Litchborough, Northamptonshire, to Terre Haute in 2019. He researched the life of Max Ehrmann, the Hautean who penned the iconic “peace poem” — “Desiderata” a century ago. Dalgleish aimed to write a book on Ehrmann. Dalgleish even snapped a selfie while seated beside the bronze sculpture of Max, crafted by artist Bill Wolfe and placed on a park bench on the corner of Seventh and Wabash downtown.
That sculpture, unveiled in 2010 before a crowd of 600 people, also featured “Desiderata” passages captured in bronze plaques and inlaid on a brick plaza. Thousands of visitors and locals also have read those words and posed for photographs with Max in the past 14-plus years.
Now, Dalgleish has released his book — “Desiderata, the Origins of an American Classic: The Story Behind Max Ehrmann’s Poem and Excerpts from a New Biography.”
Queue the irony.
As Dalgleish discussed his brand-new “Origins” on Thursday by phone from England, he was surprised to learn the Ehrmann sculpture was removed this week to accommodate a new hotel complex.
The sculpture and its companion “Desiderata” text and passages were removed on Monday, Ally Midgley, executive director of Wabash Valley Art Spaces Outdoor Sculpture Collection, said Thursday. Bronze Max will remain in storage until his new location — the sidewalk bump-out across from Swope Art Museum on South Seventh Street — can be contoured for the art pieces.
“Max at the Crossroads,” as the sculpture plaza became known, will in essence become — as Wolfe the artist quipped to Tribune-Star reporter David Kronke — is destined to become “Max Half a Block Down from the Crossroads.”
“[The Crossroads spot] was a perfect place,” Dalgleish said, “and so, it’s a shame that they moved it.”
Indeed, it was hard for this columnist to see Ehrmann and his poem missing from the heart of downtown, as the sun rose over that spot Friday morning. Volunteers and arts employees serving on the Terre Haute Cultural Trail Committee, which assisted Art Spaces in organizing Ehrmann’s sculpture development, knew from its beginning that such a change was possible in the future. Still, it’s sad the Max plaza couldn’t be incorporated into the new hotel complex. That said, the arts and landscape architects responsible for the sculpture’s relocation are talented and will do the job right.
Meanwhile, folks understandably concerned about the relocation should be interested by Dalgleish’s new book.
“It basically tells the story of ‘Desiderata,’” Dalgleish said.
Originally, Dalgleish wrote a “weighty tome” of 700 pages, interwoven with the saga of Max’s brother Emil and the fatal shooting of a striking Teamster outside the Ehrmann family’s clothing factory at 929 Wabash Ave. The same building now houses the Vigo County History Center, which contains several historic Max relics. (More irony.) Dalgleish found much to tell on his 2019 visit to Terre Haute, and shot an incredible 30,000 photos.
“I literally had no sleep. It was pretty amazing stuff,” he said.
Nonetheless, a potential publisher advised Dalgleish to focus just on Max’s life and shorten the book, which he did.
Still, a staffing change at that Hoosier-based publisher later dashed its interest in Dalgleish’s book. So, he’s independently published “Desiderata, the Origins of an American Classic,” and the 120-page work is newly available in paperback and audiobook via Amazon. Dalgleish details Ehrmann’s path toward writing “Desiderata,” which was copyrighted in 1927 with a modest response, and then gained a global following two decades after Ehrmann’s death in 1945.
“Desiderata” found its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s. Two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson died with a copy of the poem at his bedside in 1965, earning it notoriety through news stories. Then, in 1972, Los Angeles disc jockey Les Crane recited “Desiderata” over background music on a vinyl record, and it became a hit single, reaching No. 8 on the Billboard charts and earning a Grammy.
Unfortunately for the departed Ehrmann, both in the Stevenson episode and on Crane’s record, the writing of “Desiderata” was incorrectly attributed to an “unknown” 17th-century poet connected to Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Baltimore. An Old Saint Paul’s priest left a copy of the poem in pews in the 1950s, crediting the unknown poet. Posters with the poem, tacked onto dorm-room walls in the ‘60s on college campuses across America, also lacked Ehrmann’s name.
Eventually, Ehrmann got his overdue recognition. The 2010 installation of the Crossroads of America sculpture in his hometown sealed that status. It also gave “Desiderata” fans a rightful mecca of sorts. For more than four decades, Old Saint Paul’s had fielded calls and inquiries from Desiderata-ites, looking for copies or information about Ehrmann’s roadmap to a happier life.
Dalgleish uncovered the backstory, and fills “Origins” with it.
The book also contains a chapter on Ehrmann’s Jewish-German American roots and another detailing the 1913 shooting involving his brother, which briefly resulted in Max being detained. “Certainly, Max saw the inside of a jail cell for the evening,” Dalgleish said. The poet later sought police protection, got denied and hired a body guard.
“Imagine it,” Dalgleish said. “That’s got to affect you. And in his writings, he never mentions it.”
Other pivotal moments in Ehrmann’s life go unmentioned in his many poems, short stories, novels and plays. Ehrmann saw the aftermath of the 1901 lynching of George Ward, a Black man accused of murder and brutally killed by a mob in Terre Haute. Ehrmann never directly wrote of the episode, but Dalgleish believes that experience led Max to alter the ending of his novel, “A Fearsome Riddle,” in which a Black servant escapes an attack in a hotel.
The sum of Ehrmann’s experiences — from his birth in 1872 to his boyhood in a wealthy, immigrant family, his studies at DePauw and Harvard, his brief career as a lawyer, and his commitment at age 40 to writing for a living — framed his writing, especially of “Desiderata.” He was often seen, dapperly dressed, downtown, contemplating and scribbling on a notepad.
Just as Bill Wolfe’s sculpture depicts.
“I think he’s worthy of a biography,” Dalgleish said.
But why would an Englishman go to such lengths for a poet from a small Indiana city who died 80 years ago?
“It was ‘Desiderata,’” Dalgleish said. “And it’s still ‘Desiderata.’” Millions understand his attraction.
“That is the poem that draws you in,” he added. “It draws most people in.”
Dalgleish’s book explains how Ehrmann’s masterpiece came to be.
“Have I done it all justice? I don’t know,” Dalgleish said. “But I’ve tried.”
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