The Rags of Time

by Maureen Howard

  An amateur gardener, I count this my favorite letter, not a biographer’s choice, the only time he writes a personal letter as a horticulturist, plant by plant observed. Of course, it is the very reverse of the emotion sought to be produced in the Mall and playground region—rest, tranquility, deliberation and maturity. As to how it is caused—I mean how the intensity of it which I yesterday experienced is occasioned—it is unnecessary to ask. . . . Because it is unspeakable. All the landscaper’s vernacular of harmony, effect, the sublime is no use. In a show-don’t-tell moment, he draws a little tree, vines streaming off its canopy to the ground.

  He sends for his family. They make the best of Mariposa, live comfortably over the Company Store, camp out, take pleasure in the rugged territory of this West, its timeless lakes and extravagant mountains far from their natural habitat, the water effects and mild hillocks of the Park across Eighth Avenue.

  The mines are mined out. Chinese are put to panning in streams of the Merced River for the least glitter. There’s mention of an oil well, but primitive equipment can’t drill to depth, no yield, though there will be in the spoilage plotted if—this year, next year, 2008—the protection of Yosemite is violated.

  We ride every day to the top of the mountain, where Mrs. O and I are doing some child’s play gardening work, and where we make tea—in sight of the Yo Semite & 5000 feet high—the change of air from the valley being delicious.

  —Letter to Calvert Vaux, June 8, 1865

  By this time his salary—reason he took the job—is no longer paid by the fraudulent board of the Mariposa Mining Corporation.

  “Think of it? I think it is but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn’t worth ten cents an acre!”

  So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to earth and left me stricken and forlorn.

  —Roughing It, but Mark Twain wrote of silver, not gold

  Had Frederick Law Olmsted been hired to give stature to a bankrupt claim? Hard to make the best of that. Meanwhile, Fred improves the rowdy frontier within his reach. Discovering the culture of the Golden West impoverished, he establishes a lending library; writes a proposal to preserve Yosemite and Big Tree Grove as a wilderness park, first of its kind in our country. Out of a job, he thinks to stay on in California. To Vaux:I can safely calculate on getting three times as large an interest on my accumulated capital, as I could in the East.

  Capitalists here generally regard it—the Santa Barbara & other New York Cal Petroleum companies—as stupendous swindles, ala Mariposa. I think they are not swindles but they are gambles.

  Meanwhile, Mary Olmsted plans a camping trip that will take her to fourteen hundred feet. Pert and smart, solo adventures suited Mary who did what she pleased. He invested in a vineyard, growing grapes in the sunshine, a good gamble. Why did he come back to New York, to his work in the Park? It’s never explained in his letters. A speculator, not a biographer, I’m curious, the detective’s daughter. In my hometown of Bridgeport, the Park City, we have two parks, Seaside and Beardsley, both by the Olmsted firm. When he was young, my grandfather broke rocks for the seawall down at Seaside. I rode my bike to Beardsley in the North End, fed my lunch to the caged deer, never knew the park maker’s name. Olmsted’s improvement of our city was all that we had by way of recreation: a dig in the sand with a view of Long Island Sound; a miniature zoo with monkeys, chatty parrots, a few peacocks fanning their tails. Meanwhile, Singer Sewing and GE chugged in slow motion during the Depression. By the time I was twelve and rode my bike to one park or the other, the factories had geared up for the war, that war. It would be a while before I knew that our country, coast to coast, is blessed with extensive Olmstediana, before I took an interest in Paradise Pond on my college grounds and those of Berkeley and Amherst, Prospect Park, and looked into the City Beautiful Movement with its many consoling cemeteries.

  There is something unsettling about Olmsted’s swift recovery from his misfortune so far from his upright Yankee world. I believe—biographers allowed?—that letters from his partner, Calvert Vaux, the more experienced landscape artist, goaded him to invest once again in his profession. Vaux was the little guy, a transplant from England, trailing the great man, working with earnest devotion at his job in the Park. His talent was immense. I forgive his overinvestment, his devotion to storybook nature and the picturesque, and his corny rustic benches and arbors. He designed the most elegant ironworks of the era. Machine-tempered, his bridges adorn the garden across the street. Fred’s swagger cast his partner in a supporting role. Vaux cared about that injury. They had it out in long letters during the Mariposa years, heated exchanges raking over the past, settling into a quibble about titles awarded to Fred: Superintendent, Architect in Chief. Yet they were bound to each other. Vaux’s letters to Olmsted woke me from the archival swamp sucking the adjunct biographer under. As though hovering above the rectangular dream of the Greensward, Vaux viewed from on high all that the city and its people must yearn for—Ramble, Meer, Cascade, Parade Grounds of his democratic vista. He is faithful, passionate, true to his dream. For a while I believed I’d fallen in love with the wrong man. Vaux staked his impossible claims for art—a heartbreaking proposition, don’t I know. To Olmsted, 1863:I am mixed up in these affairs and am proceeding in a very half and half sort of way for alone I am a very incomplete Landscape Architect and you are off at the other end of the world, depriving the public of your proper services as I argue. My position is that the art element ought to have been the controlling element. . . .

  In all this I may be mistaken. You may be no artist. You may be Nap III in disguise. You may be a selfish fellow, who would like to get power & reputation on other men’s brains. You may be a money grubber. You may have no patience &c &c, but it is to be presumed by my acting as I do that I think differently and that I am under the impression that the humble modest artist spirit is within you. If so, and if you can, taking art in its widest sense, devote yourself to it, your chance was never better than it is today.

  I believe the Park to be the big art work of the Republic. I have always felt it would be mean on the part of its makers to let the success be an administration success—it would seem as if they were ashamed of their work.

  Olmsted would not take on the mantle of artist, not when he returned to resume his work on the Park, not when he was pleased with the Brooklyn Park built in continuing partnership with Vaux. Just a land scaper, difficult to place him in Lives of the Artists, or Saints, or demote Fred to almanac entry, a touch of the recoverable past, with my grandfather heaving slate stone to his design, nothing to gain as in working the pathos of Columbus begging for royal privileges, or the mythmaking of Raleigh’s El Dorado preserved in our haute bourgeois lobby.

  Old and exhausted by his trade, Olmsted is persuaded to sign on as Landscape Architect of the World’s Columbian Exposition. He is seventy years old, could not resist the offer, was brought on board for his fame, I suppose. Built of insubstantial stuff, the exposition’s White City is faux classical: imperial boulevards, Greek pillars, and many Italian-ate domes draw more than the calculated millions to the four hundred years of progress and entertainments on the Midway Plaisance. Olmsted attempts to soften the architectural grandeur with greenery, then retreats offshore to create his Wooded Island and Lagoon with a Japanese temple. The man-made Lake had worked in Central Park. Why not make Lake Michigan perform? His refuge from the White City’s vulgarity is planted with tropical flora he admired in Panama and Acapulco. The imports wilt in the heat of the Chicago summer. By that time he had moved household and business to Brookline, Massachusetts, where his sons prosper in the family trade. I have trouble forgiving him. We both found our way to New York from Connecticut’s manufacturing cities. Olmsted had a good run, Park rupture and all. Now the Boston Brahmins sought him out for their Arboretum. It was time to think of industrial growth disfiguring the city. He designs small arboreal jewels to ring round Boston, the Emerald Necklace, and enjoys the r
efinement up there, I suppose.

  For seven years, a long decline, he lives with Mary in the McLean Asylum, taking what pleasure he can in its conservatory gardens. Does he know he designed them? They are maintained in their glory. Dr. Bhuvaneswar, once my student, walked her troubled patients on the healing woodland paths during her residency in psychiatry. I find the famous landscape gardener online: the portrait by John Singer Sargent, weight on the good leg; weak eyes dreamy, turned inward. Fred’s posted between rhododendrons—buds swollen, flowering kalmia and the last blooms of shad, the native dogwood that flares white among the pines in our scant acre in Monterey. He’s on the grounds of the Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate in North Carolina, his last commission. Olmsted was for an Arboretum, not the simulacra of an English village to be set within the grounds. He disliked the clearing, mourned the loss of trees here and across America, joined in the first efforts of reforestation. Still sharp, Fred had saved the sequoia forest back in Mariposa days, yet he now detected his mental dislocation. Sargent’s portrait—moving, though I prefer a photo of the old couple picnicking at the asylum: He’s propped by a tree, straw hat shadowing his vision, lost to this world. Mary’s abandoned herself to a patch of bare ground, frizz of white hair in disarray.

  Olmsted is not at once informed of his partner’s death—a suicide, some biographers claim; that dramatic note in keeping with Vaux’s passion. Arguments with the Parks Commission again: He designed, then demanded that the drive for traffic to be built along the Hudson River must have a scenic walkway. One hundred years later, the promenade is near completion. It ends at 125th Street, at a wharf with sturdy benches, frail saplings, a stunning view of the Palisades.

  Olmsted’s writing is the best history of him: in his papers, I find notes toward an essay never finished: The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization. Not surprising that he returned to his literary calling to speak of the wilderness as rough and uncivil. The Chinese serving the miners were miserably treated; so were the Indians. Olmsted’s lending library was a gentleman’s gesture in the surround of guns and whiskey, barroom brawls. Desperados! Ever the reformer, he aimed to take our beloved Westerns out of the West, but that show already had its run. Buffalo Bill Cody was quick on the draw at the White City. For twenty years Indians had staged war dances at Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway. All he wanted, for Christ’s sake—Mimi, your language—was a civil society. At Mariposa he had sketched out proposals for a school, perhaps a dry-goods emporium like his father’s in Hartford. He suggested that a journal, the Nation, be founded, and served for a while as an editor. I do not imagine he expected that its liberal views would be widely distributed among the semiliterate staging their barroom scenes. For The Pioneer Condition, he read up as his mind clouded, all sorts of enlightening books: Goethe, Thackeray, Washington Irving. The fragments of that essay read as notes for a sermon he could no longer deliver; yet he’s fine in his overreaching to make common cause with all who are inconsiderably abused. Still dusting off the phrase “Literary Republic”? He surely read Mark Twain, who wrote the frontier story strong and true in Roughing It, 1872. Absorbed on his return from Mariposa to the unfinished business of Central Park, gentrifying the Wild West was not as pressing as slavery when he traveled the seaboard states. Like Huck, Fred lit out for the Territory but turned back to the sivilized city.

  He treasured the albumen prints by early photographers Carleton Watkins and Seneca Ray Stoddard, who went out West to deliver breathtaking news of the scale at Yosemite, the great height of El Capitan, the massive trinity of Three Brothers, luminous sunlight on Lake Tahoe. I imagine (biographers are not allowed) that Fred came to love this landscape far beyond human design or estimate per bush and tree, though at times he was equally overwhelmed by the beauty of his Park, the great artwork of the Republic.

  Olmsted finally allowed that he had raised his calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession—Art, an Art of design, which would have pleased Vaux, but the letter, written to a lost love of Fred’s youth, was private.

  I’m urged to walk in the Park each day, a short way, no Reservoir Track, though not long ago I spotted an owl near the North Pumping Station. I disobey, find my way to the Dairy, now a gift shop, where poor children were once served fresh milk, or I settle for a favorite bench looking over the field that was Seneca Village. I seldom make it as far as the Mall, where I once again wonder at the statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck set on his pedestal, sic transit gloria.

  I wish we could go to the Bandshell, dance to Benny Goodman on a Saturday night.

  Goodman played Carnegie Hall, remember?

  I remember we had a 78.

  So, forgiveness sought. I never meant to cast Olmsted as a bronze of some note to take his place in the Park along with Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Beethoven, or the Angel of the Waters. I never meant to withhold him, just couldn’t figure where he comes in. Everywhere—that’s the trouble, public and private. I remember my mother laying out the braided strips of rag on the dining room table, then with a big needle lacing the strands together. The rug was oval and smooth. With wear the lumps appeared and a bit of unraveling, as in my dormitory room. Before she married the detective, my mother taught Latin and mathematics.

  Still, there are places I must know above 96th Street, what goes on there. Someone is needed, you or a Virgil, to lead me. Olmsted said little about that territory, just, as he lay with his broken leg in a splint, that the mighty black stone should not be blasted. He had something in mind, a vision. Disabled by his injury, he watched from his window, the clearing of the impoverished land. Mary caring for him while their child was dying. The war pending.

  This song I sang, having sung about the care

  Of fields, and trees, and animals, while Caesar

  By the deep Euphrates River thundered at war. . . .

  We are at war. We tend to forget. The Georgics was a civil war poem. And the bees, I think they had it figured; a near-perfect society building their thyme-honored hives, stopping in midswarm to spin a story. Working hard, of course.

  And gloriously sought Olympian heights,

  Of idle studies, I,

  I tend to forget . . .

  who bold in youth

  Played games with shepherd’s songs and sang

  Of how you lay in ease in the beech tree’s shade.

  ZENTRALPARK

  Now Cleo or my brother will say, Professoressa, don’t do the Walter Benjamin bit. It’s simple, really, simpler than the book Fred never could bring himself to write, the big study of our American culture, its triumphs and deficiencies. Benjamin, another moralist, master of the essay as life and death force, called his work in progress Zentralpark, a place he’d never seen, hoping he might get to this mythic greensward in the US of A. Fleeing the Fascists, he didn’t make it over the Pyrenees to freedom in Spain (1940), was turned back, paperwork not in order. That night he killed himself. The story of his famous lost briefcase often told: You must understand that this briefcase is the most important thing to me. I cannot risk losing it. It is the manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I am.

  I would love to have talked with him.

  You said: It wouldn’t have worked out, you know. He would have been forty-eight. In ’40 you were a ten-year-old girl.

  I know he was already honored and with no time granted. Later, but there was no later, he would have been old beyond listening to a college student who muddled her way through Grail legends in lousy translations. But just to talk with him, about old toys and the voyage incarnate of postcards, that’s all. To turn the tin key that set my clown tumbling, admire the dolls made of corn husks, folk art of our Depression. To confess the burden of my clippings and too many books and the fetish of The Angelus, our enslaved object, watching over us in the dining room, praying as we gobble our turkey. My acrobats risking their tricks in thin air mock her bronze immobility, their bodies unlimited. Though I would argue with him, given the ner
ve and the chance—You were wrong about information stealing life out of a story. That’s such a romantic notion. See, it’s all different now. You have to live it, live with the glut, the lottery prize of mechanical reproduction and still tell your story.

  Now we must get ready, pack enough for the journey, hope our credentials for the artwork are in order. Time bends.

  Above 96th Street

  Sequence of words were crystallizing events into a picture, almost a story.

  —Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor

  She thought about Macy’s ad, young men modeling sweaters—crewnecks, cardigans with zippers, no less. Her husband needed just that, trouble with his stiff fingers. In the morning she buttoned the cuffs of his shirt before he went to the office. Christmas coming on. Everything on sale now that money was tight. A trip to 34th Street on the subway was verboten, of course. She was never to go down those steps to the C line, a promise made months back. Never venture out in a storm, however light the rain or snow.