The Greater Journey

by David McCullough

  More recently, as a kind of capstone to Saint-Gaudens’s major contributions to the memory of the Civil War, New York City had commissioned an equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman to stand at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street by the entrance to Central Park, and work on it was under way.

  By the late 1890s Saint-Gaudens was operating four studios in New York. He and Gussie were living in considerable style at a new address on West 45th Street and had purchased a country home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

  So it came as a shock when suddenly, with so much going on, he announced they were moving to Paris, and that work on the Sherman would continue there.

  “I suppose through overwork I had become nervous and completely disaffected with America,” he would later offer in explanation. Nothing would “right things” but “getting away from the infernal noise, dirt, and confusion” of New York. Worst on his nerves was the unending din outside his main studio at 36th and Broadway:

  … with the elevated road discharging oil on the persons beneath, the maddening electric cars adding their music, the ambulance wagons tearing by, jangling their diabolic gongs in order that the moribund inside may die in the spirit of the surroundings, and the occasional frantic fire engine racing through it all with bells clanging, fire, smoke, hell, and cinders.

  More besides his own troubles beset him. Gussie had suffered a miscarriage in 1885. His father had died after a prolonged struggle. And so had his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, of tuberculosis, at age forty-four.

  The Scottish writer had come to matter greatly to Saint-Gaudens. Stevenson’s books, beginning with New Arabian Nights, had set him “aflame,” and during five sittings for a relief portrait, as the ailing Stevenson lay propped in bed in a hotel room in New York, writing and smoking a cigarette, they had talked steadily on all manner of subjects. Saint-Gaudens brought young Homer to meet the famous author, and would eventually do numerous reliefs and medallions of him.

  Brother Louis Saint-Gaudens, still a mainstay for Gus, suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, Louis said, of “the high pressure tension” at the studio. “So Augustus went [on] to more and greater glories, and Louis went to a sanitarium,” Louis would write. But then Augustus, too, said Louis, began to “show the strain of his heroic labors. …”

  That he had, indeed, become seriously depressed, Saint-Gaudens acknowledged. “But I was sick,” in a “deplorable mental condition,” “miserably blue,” he would write. And Gussie had been suffering in the same way.

  The medical term in fashion was “neurasthenia,” its symptoms described as “mental irritability” and “morbid fear” often experienced by “gentlemen of middle life,” insomnia, “dyspepsia”—all brought on by nervous exhaustion.

  A Feeling of Profound Exhaustion [reads a contemporary medical text] … Attacks of a sensation of absolute exhaustion, as though the body had not strength to hold together. … This feeling of exhaustion, though not exactly pain in the usual sense of the word, is yet, in many cases, far worse than pain. These attacks may come on suddenly without warning. … The going-to-die feeling is quite common in these cases. …

  The definition given a century later would be “a syndrome marked by ready fatigability of body and mind usually by worrying and depression. …”

  In photographs taken about the time he returned to Paris, Saint-Gaudens appears truly exhausted. He looks almost haunted, and older than his age. Always thin, he had become gaunt. There was more gray in his thick head of hair and the short beard had turned nearly white. William Dean Howells was to describe him as having the face of “a weary lion.”

  His son Homer would later say that New York had taken its toll, that his father had been “crippled for the remainder of his life by the ardor of his work.” But, Homer insisted, his father’s sickness was not what had taken him back to Paris.

  Quite on the contrary, it was his knowledge that his art had reached its strength … [and] in Paris alone he could measure himself with his contemporaries, place his work before the world’s most critical audience, and learn, once for all, wherein it was good and wherein bad.

  Doubtless all this was valid, and from much he said later, there is no question that Saint-Gaudens agreed. But it would appear, too, that the burden of the very success he had achieved, and the added complications and responsibilities such success brought with it, had become too much for him.

  At some point early in the 1880s—it may have been after the triumph of the Farragut monument—Saint-Gaudens began having an affair with the stunning young Swedish model who had posed for the nude Diana and probably for the Amor Caritas as well. She was Albertina Hulgren but went by the name Davida Clark.

  Relatively little is known about her, but in the summer of 1889, she had a baby, a boy, whom she named Louis, and this, it would seem, had something to do with Saint-Gaudens heading off to Paris that same summer. After his return, he established a separate ménage for her and the child in Noroton, Connecticut, and it is believed he provided support for the child thereafter.

  It has been speculated that Gussie found out soon afterward, but no one knows. The only supposed details of the affair came nearly fifty years after Saint-Gaudens’s death, from a woman in New Hampshire named Frances Grimes, who was then ninety-two. She had been an assistant to and reputed confidante of the sculptor late in his life and told a local newspaperman that Saint-Gaudens had had “many affairs,” but that in the case of Davida he was “madly in love.” How much of what she said was valid, how much the imaginings of a very old woman, is impossible to know. It is clear, however, that her claim that Gus and Gussie no longer lived together after Gussie learned of the affair is wholly mistaken.

  With age Gussie’s deafness and the sense of isolation it brought became an increasing handicap. Her battles with poor health and depression were equal, if not greater, than his own. She suffered back pains and, with her deafness, an almost constant ringing in her ears. Some people found her difficult to like, as Stanford White had in Paris years before, and attributed her ailments to hypochondria. But Saint-Gaudens is not known ever to have written or said a critical word about her.

  She began spending much of her time away from home, traveling to health spas in places like Nova Scotia and Bermuda, whether for her health only or for relief from the strains of their marriage is again not clear. Probably it was both.

  Long adamant about keeping personal matters private, Saint-Gaudens became even more so. His infidelity was not a subject about which he was proud. That some of his circle, like Frederick MacMonnies and Stanford White, both of whom were married, were known as “ladies’ men” and seemed to enjoy talk of their philandering, Saint-Gaudens found repellent.

  His and Gussie’s marriage was badly shaken. Assuredly she felt a dreadful sense of betrayal and loss. And he suffered as well, from regret and self-reproach over his failings and the hurt he had inflicted on her. He loved her still, as he told her in an undated, heartfelt note. It is the only surviving, authentic evidence of what they were going through.

  Sweetness and kindness in women is what appeals mostly to men and a blessed charity for human failings makes one well loved. The quiet dignity of Mrs. MacMonnies and Mrs. White for the gross action of their husbands is far finer and commands a deeper respect than any other attitude they could possibly have taken, and way down their husbands respect them all the more. Although my action is a mere peccadillo in comparison to others, it has caused me a misery of mind you do not dream of.

  You are a noble woman, Gussie, and I love, admire, and respect you more than you have any conception of. We are both sick and for our mutual peace of mind on this earth I beg you not to come down from the high place you hold in my heart.

  Gus

  Love and courage were “the great things” in life, he felt. That he saw both in her there is no doubt.

  In October of 1897, a memorial fund in Chicago agreed to pay Saint-Gaudens $100,000 for another Lincoln statue and provided a substantial advance. T
hat same month he, Gussie, and Homer left for Paris.

  They found a suitable apartment off the Champs-Élysées. Homer was enrolled in a Paris lycée, to prepare for Harvard, and, after a “maddening” search up and down the Left Bank, Gus found the studio he wanted at 3 rue de Bagneux near the Luxembourg Gardens and his old studio on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He called it one of those “out-of-the-way corners of Paris the mere existence of which makes life worth living.”

  Any thought he may have entertained of finding peace of mind in Paris, or in such tranquil pleasures as watering flowers—as once he imagined while watching the old “codgers” in their gardens—was not to be. It was not in him. He had much work to do on his Sherman, assistants to hire, equipment to assemble.

  It was to be a colossal statue representing Sherman on horseback at the head of his army and led by a winged goddess of Victory, holding a palm branch. Sherman would be bareheaded and wearing a cloak. Horse, rider, and goddess would all be gilded and stand thirteen feet tall.

  On Sherman’s march “from Atlanta to the sea,” in late 1864, more than 60,000 Union troops crossed Georgia destroying towns, plantations, railroads, factories, virtually everything in their path for three hundred miles. Twenty-four years later, Sherman, who by then was living in New York and with only a few years left, agreed to more than a dozen sittings as Saint-Gaudens sculpted a bust to serve as a study for the larger work.

  Seen up close, the finished head was not easy to look at. Grim, whiskered, and pockmarked, it seemed the very image of the horrors of war. It could have been the face of a madman.

  Saint-Gaudens hated war, despised what it did to people. Sherman agreed. “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. … War is hell,” Sherman had said in a widely publicized speech.

  Several busts and studies of Victory had also been done in New York prior to Saint-Gaudens’s departure for Paris. The young woman who posed for him was a twenty-four-year-old model named Hettie Anderson from South Carolina, whom he described as “the handsomest model I have ever seen. …” Few were to know that she was an African-American, but for Saint-Gaudens and the others who did, it must have seemed especially fitting that she be the one to lead the triumphant Union commander on his way.

  Her youth and beauty, as Saint-Gaudens sculpted her, are unmistakable, and particularly in contrast to the face of Sherman. But there is no joy, no gleam of triumph or glory in her expression. Her eyes are wide, her mouth open, as if she were under a spell.

  For the horse Saint-Gaudens had chosen as his model a famous, powerful, high-jumper of the day named Ontario. To give power to the work, he knew, he must embody the power of the horse.

  In Paris he began the full-size group, and for sufficient space for a work of such scale, he had taken over not one but three adjoining ateliers at 3 rue de Bagneux, knocked out the walls between two of them for the main studio, leaving the third for himself. Eventually he would have a crew of fifteen on the job.

  Good fortune came with the addition of a highly gifted Beaux-Arts student in sculpture, James Earle Fraser, the young man who had grown up on a South Dakota ranch. He had come to Paris with a small statue of his own called End of the Trail of a “spent Indian brave” slumped on his pony. Seeing it, Saint-Gaudens told him, “You haven’t done a man. You’ve done a race,” and immediately offered him a job.

  Homer Saint-Gaudens would later write that the “state of turmoil” at the studio became “only too like” what it had been in New York, and “constant.”

  In addition to the Sherman, Saint-Gaudens was working on another version of the Amor Caritas, which stood against one wall. He had no aversion to doing the same subject many times over, striving always for something stronger. “I make seventeen models for each statue I create,” he once said.

  Friends kept coming by for visits, and just as in New York and in former days in Paris, he would feel obliged to stop what he was doing. The new assistant, Fraser, would remember tiny James Whistler appearing at the door in top hat and long coat, and how “being a dominating little character,” he made it impossible for Saint-Gaudens to work just when work was most needed.

  John Singer Sargent stopped to talk about the murals for the Boston Public Library that he was painting in London. “He is a big fellow,” Saint-Gaudens wrote of Sargent, “and what is, I’m inclined to think, a great deal more, a good fellow.”

  Gussie seems to have come and gone often, as she had at home, traveling to health spas at St. Moritz, Aix-les-Bains, and elsewhere. From the relatively few surviving letters between them, it is difficult to know where she was or how extended were her absences. But write they did, continuously, and nearly always assuring one another of their affection. (As Homer Saint-Gaudens would explain, “the entire collection of the most vital letters” between his mother and father was lost in a studio fire in New Hampshire in 1904.)

  Gus continued to suffer spells of severe gloom, his “blue fits,” and especially in winter. But they would pass. “I am feeling very well now,” and the Sherman was progressing “very well,” he reported to her early in 1898. “Lovingly, Gus,” he closed the letter, “for I love you more than you think or than I ever express.”

  With the arrival of spring he felt better than ever, and the work went better. Paris was having exactly the effect he had hoped for.

  “This Paris experience, as far as my art goes, has been a great thing for me,” he wrote to a favorite niece, Rose Nichols, the daughter of Gussie’s sister Eugenie. “All blindness seems to have washed away. I see my place clearly now.” Great was his longing to “achieve high things.”

  As progress on the full-size statue went forward in the large studio, Saint-Gaudens concentrated on small studies and other details in his own adjoining space. He could hear through the wall the clamor of the crew at work, and they, on his good days, could hear him singing as in his student years. He still had a “magnificent voice,” James Fraser would remember. “I believe he could have gone on to the Metropolitan in the baritone or bass parts of Faust and given a very good account of himself.”

  Late that summer, in a long letter addressed to “Dear old Fellow,” Saint-Gaudens told Will Low that coming back to Paris had been a “wonderful experience,” and surprising in many respects, one of which was “to find how much of an American I am.”

  “I belong in America,” he continued, “that is my home. …” So much that he had found unbearable about New York was exactly what he longed for now. He was unabashedly homesick.

  … the elevated road dropping oil and ashes on the idiot below, the cable cars, the telegraph poles, the skyline, and all that have become dear to me, to say nothing of attractive friends, the scenery, the smell of the earth, the peculiar smell of America. …

  “Up to my visit here I felt as if I was working in a fog. I knew not ‘where I was at.’ This is dispelled, and I see now my ground clearly.”

  I have acquired a strange feeling of confidence that I never have felt before (and which, oh, irony, may mean that I am losing ground), and together with a respect for what we are doing at home. In fact, I shall return a burning hot-headed patriot.

  But then he added, “What a place this is over here, though, seductive as a beautiful woman with her smile. I suppose when I get back, I shall want to return again!”

  The letter was dated September 2, 1898. Just ten days later he was writing again to Rose Nichols, but this time about “a feeling of weariness at this life of work,” and again on September 23, after working “late in the gloom,” he said it was “too sad in this big studio with the lamp flinging great shadows on the walls.”

  Life went on to the full, he reported to Gussie at the start of the new year, although he had had, he admitted, “another of those fearful depressions … so much that I felt I would cry at any moment.” Another day he claimed to be feeling “like a fighting cock.”

  Next he became convinced he was seriously ill, until a physician assured him he had had only a light attack o
f neurasthenia, and that there was nothing the matter with his heart. His gloom faded still more with the passing of winter and the coming of spring.

  “I had come to appreciate Paris in a way I never dreamed of in the heyday of my youth,” he would remember. “Paris in the spring is wonderful. There are two or three weeks when the pride and joy of life is at its full there as it is nowhere else. The people appreciate life more than we do.”

  The pressure of the work increased steadily. A plaster cast of the horse and rider was to be exhibited at the Salon, and the turmoil inside the studio on the rue de Bagneux was no less than in former days in New York.

  Seeing the giant horse and its rider emerge in full size gave the sculptor cause for reconsidering one thing after another. Nothing satisfied. He needed to change first this, then that. Months earlier Sherman’s cloak had been the issue. “Your father … is beginning the Sherman cloak all over again and I have been making lots of little cloaks,” Gussie had written to Homer. The cloak was still troubling him, and the fact that others said it was perfectly fine as it was mattered not at all.

  Once Farragut’s leg had been his bête noire. Now the left hind leg on the plaster horse was broken by accident. Saint-Gaudens sent a man to New York to make a duplicate from the clay original and bring it back as quickly as possible. The man returned with the wrong leg.

  In a letter to Homer, he later described the “insane asylum” atmosphere at 3 rue de Bagneux in the days leading up to the Salon. “Eleven moulders, some of them working all night with the boss lunatic, your illustrious father, at their head. Whew!!! Sometimes I’d cry, then I’d laugh, then I’d do both together, then I’d rush out into the street and howl and so on.”