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Show 443, by living up to an entirely artificial image of himself. And he planned on using this advantage. Yet there was an irony about the public persona he put on in the late eighties: he couldn't take it off. He would have to function according to a paradox: on the one hand he would produce the mannered, heavily artificial kind of writing which the public expected, but on the other hand he would cultivate the popular image of John the Baptist, or the innocent prophet, or the faun just come from the woods - pure nature. Muir had used the same kind of artifice in the conduct of interpersonal relationships. His shrewd strategy with Robert Underwood Johnson was not, however, any indication that Muir didn't like the man. Johnson became an important ally, as the thick file of letters he wrote in the battle for Hetch Hetchy demonstrates. But more than that, the correspondence between the two men indicates that they felt genuine concern for each other. Yet the aesthete of Century who devoted himself to projects like a Keats-Shelly Memorial in Rome was a perfect type of Muir's eastern audience. And when Muir was willing to play the role Johnson expected, he was a good deal more sophisticated than he appeared. After all, he had been a successful fruit farmer and businessman for many years. He wasn't likely, in the nineties, to be lost or dazzled by the lights of Civilization, as he had been in the early seventies. Even as his strategy required that Johnson believe he had originated the idea of a Yosemite Park, so Muir realized |
