On 2000-06-03 Paul J. Rask, Portland, Oregon USA wrote: Two Rooms : The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood By Robert Hamburger
This is a crackerjack of a biography about one of the most fascinating Americans of his time: dashing West Point graduate, Indian fighter, outstanding lawyer, poet, anarchist, romantic lover, satirist, visionary, discriminating patron of arts and the list goes on an on. So many facets, in fact, had Charles Erskine Scott Wood that it is hard to believe that they belonged to one swashbuckling champion for justice and independence.
Perhaps that is why Colonel Wood needed two rooms for himself in his suite of law offices in Portland, Oregon. One room was where he counseled his corporate clients whom he represented with zeal and intelligence to earn the large fees he needed to maintain his luxurious life style. The other room was for his other life, the life of the poet-anarchist-romantic where he let his other self flourish. It was the two room symbol that inspired the title to Robert Hamburger´s well written, hard-to-put-down biography.
The life of C.E.S. Wood reads like a cross section of American history -- covering his 92 year life span. As a lad, Wood saw Abraham Lincoln campaigning to become president. As a young man, Wood was appointed to West Point by President Grant; was ordered to Oregon and later he fought the Nez Perce Indians in the last great Indian War of the Northwest after which Wood recorded and made famous the thrilling, yet tragic, words of resignation by Chief Joseph: ´From where the sun now stands, Joseph will fight no more, forever.´
Wood chose to remain in Portland in the late part of the 19th century, studied law, became a respected member of the bar, handled complicated and high profile cases while all the time he remained dramatically vocal about his anarchism.
Many famous personalities of his time paraded through Wood´s life, like a march of American and literary history: Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens, Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, John Cowper Powys, Emma Goldman and many others. If they were prominent, he met them, hosted them, corresponded with them, befriended them.
Wood had great passions and he wore them grandly. His early passion for wife Nan cooled over the years. In his 50´s he was all but consumed by his turbulent affair with the Portland suffragette Sara Bard Field. Finally, after providing for them financially, Wood left his wife and family and moved to San Francisco to spend his vintage years with Sara and to devote the rest of his life to being his other self, the creative, poetic self, the occupant of the ´second room.´
One may not entirely approve of everything Wood did, but that certainly does not detract from the absorbing review of his unique life.
6/3/2000. And summed up by saying A crackerjack of a biography. Currently Two Rooms: The Life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood has an overall rating of 8 over 10.
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University of Nebraska Press claimed Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944) led an exuberant life that seemed to embrace the entire nation and its times. Wood remembered seeing Abraham Lincoln, he knew Chief Joseph, Clarence Darrow, and Lincoln Steffens, and he survived to the dawn of the atomic era. Among his acquaintances he counted Mark Twain, Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Ansel Adams. He fought in the Indian campaigns of the post–Civil War era; he represented wealthy businessmen as an attorney in Portland, Oregon, during the Gilded Age; he befriended the political and cultural radicals of New York in the early twentieth century; and he became a central figure among the West Coast artists of the 1930s. He was, in short, a man of extraordinarily wide—and often conflicting—impulses and talents. In this captivating, highly readable biography of Wood, Robert Hamburger presents both the life and the times, Wood’s work and the intellectual, political, and cultural crosscurrents of his era. Hamburger ably captures Wood’s many contradictions yet unearths the enduring essence of the man: his rebelliousness, his hatred of social and economic inequalities, his unbounded appetite for life, beauty, and pleasure.
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