As to [?] at Washington, Brooklyn &c, we will do the best we can by telegraphic correspondence. I simply now do not want to deal with these matters alone.
Yours affectionately,
Frederick Law Olmsted
* John Charles Olmsted was actually Frederick Law Olmsted's nephew and adopted son. In 1859, Olmsted married his brother's widow, Mary, and adopted their three children, John, Charlotte, and Owen. Then, together Olmsted and Mary had four children, two of whom, Marion and Frederick, Jr., survived beyond infancy.
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED TO
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED, JR.
“As long as I have interest in anything earthy
it will be in what interests you.”
Throughout 1895, Olmsted's condition worsened. He was becoming more and more forgetful, so much so that one day he wrote the same letter to Mr. Vanderbilt three times without realizing what he had done. He had “rarely felt so little master of [him]self,” yet he continued to be keenly interested in the work of the firm, and especially in twenty-five-year-old Rick's development as a landscape architect. Sensing that time was short, he wrote page after page of advice to the young man and pleaded with him to be kept apprised of the continuing work at the Biltmore. News from Rick lifted Olmsted out of his feeling of desolation and gave him, he wrote, “the assurance that you are taking up what I am dropping.”
By October, when he sent the following letter to his youngest son, Olmsted knew a shade in his mind was about to be drawn. He spent the last five years of his life in a cottage at the McLean Asylum in Waverly, Massachusetts, where he was surrounded by a landscape he himself had created.
Brookline, 15th October, 1895
Dear Rick:
I write only in yielding to a constant impulse, vain tho' I feel it to be, to be doing something for you. My time for that has past. I can only pray, and I am a poor hand for that. I try in vain to think of something that I can yet do. I am sure that you do not need advice. You can give yourself better advice than I can offer you. It all comes back again to Sir Walter's “Be good.”
You can still write me for some time I hope. As long as I have interest in anything earthy it will be in what interests you.
Your affectionate father
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS TO
WILLIAM W. HOWELLS
“Hold fast to my hand, dear little boy,
and keep me with you . . .”
William Dean Howells was one of the most important American writers of the late nineteenth century. The author of travel books, fiction, campaign brochures, autobiography, and hundreds of essays, he had a sharp eye for talent and was the editor of the influential Atlantic Monthly magazine. Howells was considered a pillar of cultural life in America, so when he reached his seventy-fifth birthday, it was an occasion for a national celebration. He was a man who throughout his life made hard work a habit, finding comfort and refuge in it; he distrusted anything that came easily.
By 1909, he was still writing, but most of his best work was behind him. Younger writers, feeling Howells's form of realism was outdated, were beginning to call his work vapid and timid. He sensed the era to which he and his work belonged had already passed. For his seventy-second birthday he was sent a card by his grandson, Billy. The card was sent in the boy's name, as Billy was just three months old at the time. Here grandfather William Dean Howells responds.
130 West 57th st.,
March 1, 1909.
Dear Billy:
It is very sweet of you to send that birthday card, where we are walking toward the sunset together. It is a lovely sunset, but sad, and the night is beyond it. Hold fast to my hand, dear little boy, and keep me with you as long as you can. Some day, I hope not too late, you will know how I love you.
Your aff'te grandfather,
W. D. Howells.
N. C. WYETH TO PETER AND
HENRIETTE WYETH HURD
“This watching of the unfolding of all the younger members of the family is a glorious episode in my life . . . But . . . I am still in the battle myself, in spirit at least, and I still have a fairly clear vision of what lies ahead to be done before a real mark is achieved.”
N. C. Wyeth, the greatest American illustrator of his day, felt illustration was but a lowly craft, yet to be a “painter” was noble. It was as a painter, not an illustrator, that he wanted to make “a real mark.” Though he painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and enormous murals, it was for his powerful illustrations that he was known and celebrated. As the father of five remarkably creative and successful adult children, he was both exhilarated by their achievements and depressed by his own struggle. Upon seeing his son Andrew's paintings he wrote, “I am at once stimulated beyond words to new, purer effort, and plunged into black despair.”
In 1939, at fifty-six years old, N. C. Wyeth had been painting for thirty-seven years. He and his wife, Carol, were at their house in Maine where the family gathered in the summer. Here he writes to his eldest daughter, Henriette, and son-in-law, Peter Hurd, both accomplished painters, who lived and worked, far beyond the Wyeth family fold, in remote New Mexico.
Port Clyde, Maine
August 27, 1939
Dear Henriette and Pete:
Ironically enough, this day has blazed forth into brilliant sun, jewel-blue sky and water, with a “westerly” pouring over us from Caldwell's Island like some crystal liquid. I say ironically, because Nat and Caroline vanished from our doorway yesterday in a thick murk of fog, a condition which dominated their two weeks with us. However, we all had an unusually splendid time, and every hour of clearing weather was used for exciting explorations of islands, events usually garnished with clam bakes or lobster boils—and in one case the return to “Eight Bells” in an impenetrable fog cleverly mastered by Nat with chart and compass so that we landed within thirty yards of our wharf.
Four days after Nat's arrival, I completed the last vestige of work for The Yearling. This included two extra drawings for the special edition, besides the thirteen panels in color. Three others, of course, were done at home, as you know.
It's a long, long time since I've written a letter and I seem to have lost what little I had of spontaneity and free flow of expression. Your own letters are full to bursting of truly “winged words,” and they have given joy to all who have read them—and many have! You will never realize what pleasure they've given.
When I think of the gamut of experiences that Pete has gone through since he left Chadds Ford, I feel hopeless to express my own reaction to it all, except to say that I have followed it all like a small boat tossing in the wake of a ship, rising, falling and rising, but exhilarated in the end over an experience based upon life, energy and enthusiasm.
This watching of the unfolding of all the younger members of the family is a glorious episode in my life. As you both know I am asked interminably, “Aren't you proud of it all?” Of course I am, beyond the expression of any words. But my answer is always restrained because I am still in the battle myself, in spirit at least, and I still have a fairly clear vision of what lies ahead to be done before a real mark is achieved. I believe, as I never believed before, that we, as a group, have got something and that there is a real promise of sound achievement—of major achievement in the offing. Based upon the sound and constant seeking for the truth, and out of all this the gradual unfolding of personal spirit and mood, and all based upon intensive and simple living, the possibilities are limitless.
You will like to know that John has made extraordinary progress in his watercolors, and under the stimulation of very busy people around him, has done a quantity of work.
Andy's results are to me astounding. Just at the conclusion of his summer's work he went starry-eyed over a very attractive young lady. She's really a splendid person, very handsome and very sound. Betsy James is her name. She hails from northern New York. Her family are, or at least seem to be, solid, sensible people. As long as such an event must happen, it is deeply gratifying not to have to wo
rry about what is a girl's background.
Earlier in the season there were some very lurid distractions here in P.C. which can be told you better by word of mouth. That's all over now, thank heavens.
I start tomorrow on my first tempera panel for myself. I shall have a full month to do what I want. I hope it goes well.
The European situation is the only headache. I believe the present crisis a colossal bluff, one which conceals a very ominous one of the economic tie-up between Germany and Russia which, if allowed to progress through the years, will enslave the world in a terrible manner.
We may stay on here into October if my painting goes well. My first spell of freedom from commissions in a long time.
OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN TO
BILL HAMMERSTEIN
“What a good boy am I!”
Lyricist, playwright, director, and producer, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd made an unprecedented and enduring mark on the landscape of American theater. In collaboration with Jerome Kern and later with Richard Rodgers, Hammerstein's musicals brought a new form of theater into existence in which story lines, dialogue, songs, and dances were fully integrated to create the vibrant and cohesive new American musical.
In 1953 Oscar Hammerstein 2nd was fifty-seven years old. He had had brilliant success with Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I. The Sound of Music was still years ahead. He had experienced smash hits as well as disappointments, but many of his songs—like “Ol' Man River,” “All the Things You Are,” and “Some Enchanted Evening” had taken on lives of their own. Through life's ups and downs, he remained steadily and optimistically committed to the work at hand.
With dark lashes and a heavy brow, he was a large, gentle, and soft-spoken man. As the father of three and stepfather of two, he felt that “to be a good man” was the best any father could be for his children.
His eldest son, Bill, asked his father to write letters to him about the early years in the hopes of helping his father assemble an autobiography. The project was never completed, but this letter remains a fascinating example of Hammerstein's personal philosophies about life, philosophies that permeated his works.
January 18, 1953
Dear Bill:
I have just started to read Carl Sandburg's autobiography of the first twenty one years of his life, “Always The Young Strangers.” I cannot help contrasting it with these haphazard memories I am giving you. His life starts a little earlier than mine in a small town, Galesburg, Illinois, and how simple and pure and orderly it seems compared to mine. He was the son of a poor but industrious Swedish carpenter. It was a good clean orderly family life they all led, he and his mother and father and eight other children. They seemed never to have wanted for meals or shelter, but they all had to work pretty hard at one chore or another. A political parade was a big event to be seen and cherished. Carl Sandburg built his experiences slowly but solidly into a philosophy, and a talent for expressing his philosophy. Whatever order or form I have got out of life has been extracted from chaos. This was true when I was a child, and it is true now. The farm and my determination to be down here as often and for as long a time as possible expresses my eagerness for peace and systematic living. As far back as I can remember I always wanted to live in the country. Even in the city, if I saw an empty lot with a few weeds and a tree in it I was attracted by it. In your first year we took a small cottage in Far Rockaway in a street jammed with cottages, but just across the street was a tall tree, and I used to sit on the small porch and look across at the tree against the sky as the light was fading in the evening, and it gave me a great feeling of peace and even happiness, and it made me thoughtful about life in the abstract, as I sometimes get thoughtful listening to a symphony without actually “hearing it.” I remember telling Walter Redell about this feeling, and he used to kid me about the tree for a long time. It became a symbol to him of my naive idealism.
A psychologist would be skeptical of my professed groping for peace. He would say: “Why don't you take it? You have enough copyrights to live on. Why don't you stop working? Why don't you leave the hectic life of New York and the theatre, live in Doylestown, take care of your cows, and have the peace you've always been after?” These would be hard questions to answer. I often think of doing this “some day.” Then I ask myself: “What would you do when the Kiwanis asked you to come down and speak to them? If you read an editorial in the Intelligencer which made you angry, would you not use your new leisure to sit down and write them a hot letter of protest? Would you not in a few years become as involved with as many friends and as many projects in and around Bucks county as you are now in New York? And would you have any more freedom as a big fish in a small pond than you have as a medium sized fish in a metropolitan pond?” I suppose I would not have more freedom—not at my present age anyway. I suppose you get free of these things when you get so old and feeble that they say: “Don't ask him to do that. He's an old man, and he hasn't been very well.” Sometimes I see myself as a lean and slippered pantaloon with white hair, wearing tweeds whose cut has become out of date, sitting on the porch watching the younger people playing tennis and receiving my sons and daughters when they come to visit me, and listening to them tell me of their doings in the great world outside. If this is the stage I must get to before I find peace and the orderly and systematic life, then the whole idea is very discouraging.
Using the word peace makes me rush to confess that if peace means peace of mind, I have this to an amazing degree compared to all the other people I know. I have always had this somehow. I have never been harried or extremely worried except for temporary specific causes. In a confused world I am confused, but I am not thrown into a panic by confusion. I am not unduly distressed by it. I can take confusion and imperfection in my stride.
All this brings me back to where we left off—my childhood. It is possible that there were many lucky accidents in my upbringing that were good for me. My strange disorderly unsystematic family may have developed in me a tolerance for disorder which makes it possible for me to live in a disorderly world, even though I crave another kind. But there is no other kind. The world is very much like my family, filled with people of unharnessed passions, illogical impulses, inconsistent religions and clashing philosophies. All these whirling atoms are held together loosely and kept going slowly in the same general direction by one element—love. You may substitute another word for this if you please. You may call it God or you may call it goodness. You may call it Seventh Day Adventism or Free Masonry or Democracy or Communism or the American Legion or the Doylestown sewing circle or Local 802—but it is the desire to be with a group of other people, all working with one another in an effort to do something which all consider a good thing to do. What one group considers a good thing to do may be thought the worst thing in the world by another group, but if you don't belong to a group that is doing something or thinks it is doing something, you haven't a chance. Within that group is the justification of that small atom that is you, and some day you hope to do something very fine which will make the group applaud you. The biggest and truest and most significant line in all nursery rhymes is a line in Little Jack Horner—“What a good boy am I!” That is what everybody wants to say to himself, but he can have little assurance of his belief unless it is endorsed by other members of his group. Everyone has this desire for approval. The trouble is that many people do not work hard enough to get it. Then they become unhappy paranoiacs, clinging for the life of their egos to their own self-approval, and blaming the rest of the world for not endorsing it.
This whole essay springs from what I have been telling you about my family and what I am going to tell you about them. In the light of the earnest and scientific approach that all the young people of your generation bring to the task of bearing and breeding and educating your young, my family and many families of that day, and indeed many families of today, seem like irresponsible maniacs, but all the science in the world is no good without this thing I have quickly
and carelessly called love. There must be love, unselfconscious, spontaneous and unscientific, shining out of all the dusty corners of the disorderly household. And specifically, the little atom whirling around among millions of other atoms very like himself must be given the illusion that they are not so like himself, that he is something very special, worth promoting, worth perfecting, worth building up to that position of prominence and achievement where he can lie in his bed or stand on a hill or walk down the street and say to himself with conviction: “What a good boy am I.”
M. F. K. FISHER TO NORAH KENNEDY BARR,
ANNA PARRISH, AND MARY KENNEDY WRIGHT
“I wish and want and hope to die in my own home.”
As a food aficionado and writer, in her more than twenty books and scores of articles, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher essentially told her readers, “Look, if you have to eat to live you may as well enjoy it.” She created a new genre for the written word and her work elevated the preparation and consumption of food from mere necessity to important and gratifying social occasion and opportunity for self-expression. She was tough and funny, tall and sometimes beautiful, and as the daughter of Rex Kennedy, a lifelong and fifth-generation newspaperman, from childhood she knew she would write. And write she did, but her adult life was more complicated than she ever expected—divorced, widowed, and divorced again—she evolved into a courageous mother who achieved nuch professionally and, by herself, raised two daughters.
As Fisher grew older she trained herself to remain detached from, yet keenly aware of, her own progressive aging. She “meant to work longer, and say more,” but by the 1980s her eyesight was failing and she was increasingly debilitated by arthritis and Parkinson's disease. At seventy-six years old, she wrote the following letter to her two daughters and her younger sister, Norah. She lived for another eight years, all the while working and writing as best she could.
Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children Page 25