Newton’s expenses for the Book, for salaries as well as production outlays, continued to mount. He fell behind in his payments. He contacted the print dealer Jos. F. Sabin in July 1914, stating, “I am very sorry to have kept you waiting so long for a check in payment of the enclosed bills, but on account of my book I have been very hard up these past months, and hope you will forgive me.”
Harry Stevens, Newton’s principal dealer in London, began to encounter the unthinkable, as his normally voracious client refused collecting opportunities. “I wish I could afford to add it to my collection,” Stokes wrote Stevens about a particularly choice map, “but until the book is finished and paid for I must resist nearly every temptation of this kind.” Ultimately, of course, the obsessive accumulator reconsidered—the particular piece proved too tempting. Newton directed Stevens to buy the map for him.
“In addition to its great interest cartographically,” he wrote in a wan justification, “the coloring is so pleasing that it makes a beautiful framing piece and, as you know, this counts a good deal with me as I frame nearly all of my prints.”
Throughout the 1920s, Stokes still pushed—and still paid—to publish the final two volumes of the Iconography. His longtime deputy Thomas Hotchkiss remained on an otherwise decimated staff to dig up and confirm the avalanche of arcane information that would make the Chronology in Volume Five a researcher’s gold mine.
Jennie Macarthy, too, contributed to the final onslaught. Having now served in Newton’s employ for fifteen years, she stayed on through her grief over the sudden death of her brother Clinton in 1919. Her admiration for “Mr. Stokes”—Newton and his workers stayed ever on a formal basis, whether acquainted for a day or a decade—endured.
“We have lost so much . . . about old settlers and settlements . . . ,” she wrote Newton. “On the other hand, when your wonderful work is finished you will have collected so much for all time, that future generations can never be sufficiently grateful to you for having rescued the material and codified it. No other city will live in the future as New York will.”
Newton remained a taskmaster to the end, as evidenced by this communiqué to Hotchkiss: “The copy must be jammed through by July 1st [1927]. Even this date will jeopardize the distribution of the 5th volume this Autumn. Please understand that my instructions are absolutely explicit. You and Miss Ahern will please make a comprehensive report and have it ready to submit to me on Friday, at three o’clock, showing just what you can do, and what you cannot do, to complete copy by July 1st. It is perfectly possible, the only question is the amount of sacrifice, and I am ready to make any necessary sacrifice to this end. There is nothing new in all this. It is the method which nine out of ten books are written . . .”
When the final volume of the Iconography appeared in 1928, thirteen years after the first volume and nineteen since work on the project began, it was not just filled with footnotes. It was all footnote, 677 pages of dense, tiny type, constituting the kind of minutiae, add-ons and indexes (a subject index and an index of all the plates in the previous volumes) that could make only a scholar’s heart beat faster. Victor Paltsits’s comprehensive Bibliography, begun way back in 1910, had bulked up to hundreds of pages. A Volume Six addendum featured material cut from the Chronology in Volumes Four and Five, edited out so that neither of them would tip the scales at more than five pounds.
Newton the tardy publisher felt it necessary to extend an olive branch to subscribers (it was typical to sell substantial works such as the Iconography in advance). “As an apology is, on the whole, the easier alternative, the author hastens to offer it—very humbly—and he sincerely thanks his subscribers for their considerate forbearance. He will only add that during all these years the work has never halted, but has proceeded as rapidly as circumstances would allow.”
He might have been conversing with an imaginary reader. He printed only 402 copies of the set, each with a sticker price of $100 (roughly $1,250 today). All were taken.
No other work exhibited the scope and perspicacity of Newton’s masterpiece. Most critics saluted him for his achievement, but a more sour reviewer noted that owing to the price, “what should have been the common property of all New Yorkers is doomed to be the choice possession of only the few.”
There was only one review that mattered. The New York Times hailed the publication of the “Valuable Iconography,” bearing a “magnificent title” and treating the early history of the city “in a manner never before attempted on so elaborate a scale.”
Students have come to believe that scarcely anything that was new and vitally important on the early history of New York could be found. Mr. Stokes, however, has discovered three ancient records of the greatest interest which have never before been described or reproduced in any account of New York City.
Apart from the deep historical interest in these old and newly discovered records, the great charm of The Iconography to many lovers of old New York and especially to those whose hobby is the collection of early views of the city, will lie in the richness of the pictorial illustration.
As glowing as the praise was, it could never be enough. The Iconography was a niche project, not one designed for mass appeal. That was its charm, and its limitation. Newton, the collector, had made a book aimed at other collectors. That his work eventually transcended its niche is a tribute to the great city that is its subject, and to the obsessive genius of the bookish soul responsible for its creation.
And then, to make his success all the sweeter, daughter Helen had a success of her own. Her happiness had always seemed a given. A committed athlete when she attended Miss Chapin’s School for Girls, she matriculated at Bryn Mawr, attended for two years, but ultimately graduated from Barnard College. When she married Edwin K. Merrill in 1928—providentially, the same year the last volume of the Iconography was published—the reception took place at High-Low. Guests chatted under the romantic plaisance of small-leafed lindens, danced by the reflecting pool, gazed out over the sparkling Sound. The young couple would make their home on Fifth Avenue. Her parents couldn’t be more pleased.
For Newton, completion of the Book was a marathon from which Helen’s marriage was a welcome distraction. He would probably have known the story of Pheidippides, the exhausted Greek messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens, announced “We have won” and then collapsed and died. At the end of any long campaign, there is always a price to pay.
18. Our Goddess
Health, wealth, art and floor space. When the Great Depression afflicted the nation, Edith and Newton lost it all, their lives shrinking down like the iris of an eye. The year after the publication of the last volume of the Iconography, in 1928, the economy entered free fall. The last decade of their life together was one of deterioration and retrenchment, a quiet, private, sometimes painful coda to lives that had long been lived in public.
In the end, it was Manhattan Island itself that betrayed them. The family holdings were almost all in residential apartments, almost all concentrated in Manhattan. His finances increasingly strained by a real estate market in dire decline—it was not a time to build structures speculatively, his stock in trade—Newton began to sell off his prized collection of prints and views, at first offering them to fellow collectors of Americana, then begging the Metropolitan Museum, New York’s Central Research Library—anyone!—to purchase the whole collection. He approached the philanthropist Edward Harkness to take his offerings for $500,000, with the understanding that they would be donated to the Metropolitan. Newton would contribute the other half of the collection’s value, which he set at an even million dollars. Harkness demurred.
When Newton and Edith’s household was wounded, it bled art. The couple’s collection, accumulated over decades of steady but fastidious effort, went out the door piecemeal. They strove to draw desperate distinctions. This would go, that would be saved. The Sargent portrait of Edith and Newton as Parisian newlyweds would always be theirs, displayed in whatever home they found themselves, n
o matter how humble. Likewise the Beaux.
There were quirks. Newton refused to part with the Greek and Roman busts he had always treasured, antique sculpted heads that asserted an increasing, almost mystical hold on him. They “return my admiring and speculative gaze with eyes full of mystery and the lore of remote ages, when art was simpler, stronger, truer and more beautiful than it is to-day, and more full of meaning.”
By 1929, financial constriction had forced Edith and Newton out of their Gramercy Park mansion. They moved into a modest duplex overlooking Central Park, 953 Fifth Avenue, at 76th Street, ten rooms on the seventh and eighth floors of a narrow, fourteen-floor, white limestone building, one that Newton had designed. He had built it as real estate speculation thirteen years before, never imagining that he and Edith would live in it themselves. Decent enough lodgings, with a view “as fine as Windsor castle,” as the original sales brochure had it, but another step down in terms of space. More important, they were just down the way from Helen and Edwin Merrill, her new husband.
The hard-put couple discovered they could no longer afford a Connecticut getaway. In 1925, Edith and Newton began to try to sell off parcels of Khakum Wood as a highly restricted development. It took years. The depth of the Depression was not a time to sell vacation homes. In 1944, High-Low would finally sell to a buyer who tore the great house down for a modern structure. Though the Gilded Age was over by the mid-1890s, ushering out the concept of the 400, great wealth persevered. But it was impossible for some to hold on to their fortunes.
As they stood amid the ruins of their former lives, Edith and Newton did not need to ask themselves what had happened. The whole country was collapsing economically. Fellow heirs and heiresses lost their shirts as well. But another, more familiar physical symbol of their downfall resided closer to home. The massively heavy sets of the Iconography had sold to subscribers, but Newton had no reason to believe that his work would have any shelf life beyond that first four hundred copies. He bent his head for the laurels but also realized the price he had paid.
THE BEDCHAMBER OF Edith’s painfully gradual, five-year-long decline lay at the front of the Fifth Avenue apartment. She could look out at the changing seasons in Central Park. Their world had contracted to that single room, with its centerpiece the handsome Empire bed they had shared for the entirety of their marriage. Edith, sixty-nine years old, the same age as her husband, lay against the plumped pillows, her locks of wavy hair—once glossy black, now nearly all gray—streaming over the white linen bedclothes. Adding to her physical pain was an emotional wallop: the death of Susanna in 1926 at the age of eighty-seven.
In April 1932, the couple had arranged a dinner before the last Knickerbocker dance of the season. Edith appeared pale and drawn, but felt she should not shirk her place in the receiving line. Finally, at the urging of a friend Newton brought her home. She had her customary crackers and milk and went to bed at midnight. The next morning she was quiet and still. She was breathing, but when Newton tried to wake her, she did not open her eyes and just turned away.
The doctor called it a “leakage,” the minor stroke she had so long feared. The Neurological Institute in New York kept Edith in the total isolation it recommended for such cases, preventing any outside contact (shades of “The Yellow Wallpaper”), even with her husband of thirty-eight years. When Newton came into her room after nine days of separation, Edith burst into uncontrollable sobs.
The nightmarish episode ended any attempt to treat her high blood pressure with rest cures. They had progressed to a different phase of their lives together, during which Newton would give Edith all the creature comforts he possibly could. The comforts might be fewer now, but they found they could make do with less. They needed only each other.
One evening in mid-January of 1933, as Edith prepared for bed, she turned to Newton and said, “I can’t remember how I put up my hair.” It was so quiet, so small a statement, yet so significant a lapse. There could never be a time when Edith Minturn Stokes did not know how to manage her dark, lustrous coiffure. By the next morning her limbs were affected by the stroke. She had begun to drag her leg.
They spent silent days together. In the style of their class, the two of them were reserved, reticent. She had forever been much livelier than he. Not in any life-of-the-party sense, but by way of exhibiting some basic life force or vivaciousness. Edith energized people, her husband most of all. Newton always came off more formally, to the extent that people thought him stiff. Loving him, Edith considered Newton not stiff but soulful, seeing his depth where others saw impenetrable surface. But now she was the one rendered still and remote. Any animation in the room had to be left up to him.
Newton remembered Edith as she was in times past. Splashing in the frigid waters near her family’s summer house at Murray Bay, on the St. Lawrence River, the day before they were married. In a ball gown at Delmonico’s or the Astor Hotel, her hair up, looking like a queen. Rushing through London streets crowded with the Jubilee.
Later, in his memoir, Newton would characterize this time in their lives as exquisitely private, although with a grown, married daughter and grandchildren it would seem that the couple would now and then have company. On good days Newton took Edith in an upholstered wheelchair through the secluded reaches of Central Park. Once in a great while, Edith summoned up the impossible strength to rise from her chair and take a few halting steps, clutching his arm. He would reassure her: “You are wonderfully good and patient, my darling, and I am very proud of you.”
Once, on his birthday, Edith put on a dinner dress and came to the table to celebrate. But her powers of speech had essentially gone. Her doctors thought that beyond her physical paralysis, she cut herself off from her surroundings in order to conserve what little strength she had.
Newton talked to Edith about her life, about their times together. “Do you remember when Bob nicknamed you Fiercely?” he asked one afternoon near the end, in March 1936. In a burst of anguished happiness, Newton noticed that Edith had somehow responded to the question. On her immobilized, stroke-ravaged face, an “amused and self-conscious little smile played about the corners of her mouth.”
Eventually, Edith could do little more than nod yes or no. The prospect of death gave rise to bouts of mysticism. Newton would later insist that Edith contacted him from beyond the grave. He took to communing with a favorite life-size marble bust of a Greek goddess that had forever decorated the mantel of their bedroom, positioned where they both could see it upon waking or drifting off to sleep.
It seemed to Newton that the goddess’s expression grew less wistful, more radiant and content over the years of their glorious happiness. Before her illness, Edith used to take Newton’s hand or touch his shoulder in the early morning and whisper in his ear, “Do look at our goddess,” or “Isn’t she lovely this morning?” And the goddess was indeed beautiful, although her eyes had something of a faraway look, as though she were thinking of her distant home.
As Edith’s health deteriorated, the radiance of “our goddess” changed. The marble face took on an overt resemblance, Newton thought, of his dying wife. Grasping Edith’s stone-cold hands in his, holding on, he thought her still hauntingly beautiful. And she was, in the way posed photographs of the dead, so much in vogue in the 1880s, when they were both coming of age, haunted the living. The words of Whitman echoed through the chamber: “Come, lovely and soothing death.”
Newton retired his white tie and tails and settled himself by his wife’s bedside, spending six hours a day holding her hand, playing her favorite music, reading to her from Pride and Prejudice.
The phrases floated into the closed room.
. . . Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other . . .
Edith would listen, her eyes closed. At times, a tear. Leaving Jane Austen, leaving life.
. . . There was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for he
r to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman . . .
Edith died on June 12, 1937, “in our fine old Empire bed,” Newton later recalled, “without a wrinkle on her beautiful face.” She was seventy. Her will left her $10,000 estate to Helen, with a tithe to various charities, including the New York Kindergarten Association. Her husband buried her in the plain wooden box she had requested.
Epilogue
After such a loss, what remained? Newton lived on as a ghost. He still acted as a prominent denizen of the city he loved, but his circumstances were much diminished. He moved to a two-room-and-kitchenette apartment in Hampton House, a small residential hotel at Madison and 70th Street. He learned to appreciate the forty-cent breakfasts at Schrafft’s.
Newton was then into his seventies. Time magazine described him around this time as being “as long, as ascetic, as elegantly bearded as an El Greco cardinal.” A profile chronicled his efforts as president of New York’s Art Commission and as a New York Public Library board member to fill the empty panels on the third floor of the library with murals. A leading luminary among collectors of Americana, he no longer owned the collection to back up his reputation. The Iconography was a bulwark, but it remained obscure. Newton’s personal relation to his great work was tinged with regret. In his private memoir, penned at the close of Edith’s life, he speaks sadly of the “narrowing influence” his monumental work had on his life. The Iconography “occupied more than my leisure during nineteen years, and interfered, more than a little, with my professional career, as well as making sad inroads upon my ‘fortune.’”
Everything appeared haunted to him: the Book, Study D, the very streets on which he walked. Some of his closest siblings had died, although his brother Graham would outlive him, lasting until the age of eighty-eight, having split with the Socialist Party of America over the issue of American participation in World War I.
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