by Jane Brown
Jane Brown is the author of seventeen books on varied subjects, including Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jekyll, Edwin Lutyens, Henrietta Luxborough and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, and the critically acclaimed classic Gardens of a Golden Afternoon (Penguin, 1985). All of her earlier books inform Angel Dorothy. Jane has lectured in the UK and in America, and she enjoyed a Harvard fellowship for her book Beatrix (Viking, 1995), a biography of the landscape architect Beatrix Farrand. She has also curated exhibitions and written garden histories for three Cambridge colleges.
This edition first published in 2017
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ISBN 978-1-78352-314-6 (trade hbk)
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‘I doubt the accuracy of the reporting. Nobody has ever recorded a miracle accurately… How could it have happened that Fate should have placed an immense fortune in the hands of a woman so brave, so true, so beautiful as Dorothy Straight? A real angel.’
—Alvin Johnson in 1952, recalling the founding of The New Republic in 1913
In Memoriam
William Knight Elmhirst, 1929–2016
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
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AUTHOR’S NOTES
The image of the galleon used at the opening of the American chapters is taken from Herbert Croly’s 1920 sketch for the masthead of The New Republic. The badge of King Richard II – the white hart set on the Red Rose of Lancaster – used at the opening of the English chapters is from a photograph of a ceiling boss found at Dartington Hall in the 1920s. Dorothy’s Whitney bloodline was traced back to Edward III by Henry Melville, thus she was descended from King Richard II, though she would never have mentioned this.
Dorothy was an avid diary-keeper. The early diaries and notebooks she brought with her when she came to England in 1925, as well as those she kept until her final year, 1968, are in the Papers of Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst 1914–1968, in the Devon Record Office, see endnotes 228, 230, 243, 276 et seq. These small and fragile diaries, the key to her life of activity, have formed the bedrock of this book; in quoting from them I have preserved Dorothy’s original writing rather than attempting to correct her.
Introduction
Dorothy’s story is an alternative history of more than half of the twentieth century. It is a feminine, not feminist, history, closely following her own record of her life of incessant activity. Here are some truths, truly ‘stranger than fiction’, that did not need fictionalising, though my readers may find themselves in scenes reminiscent of Henry James, which the passage of time melds into situations found in the novels of Nancy Mitford.
Dorothy Whitney was born within a whisper of the White House and it was confidently expected that she would live there herself one day; she was an orphan at seventeen, and started to give her energies and her money to help the emigrants crowding into New York’s Lower East Side and to other radical and reforming causes. As Dorothy Straight she financed an influential liberal paper of opinion (which was to last for one hundred years), and as she and her husband Willard were political favourites it seemed likely that her destiny would be fulfilled. Many of her admirers thought that she should be the first female president of the United States.
The Great War and Willard Straight’s death ended all her hopes. She was left with a remnant belief in the power of education to change society, inspired by the progressive methods of John Dewey, with whom she had campaigned for international disarmament, and also for the defence of Sacco and Vanzetti, which failed. In 1925 she married an Englishman, Leonard Elmhirst, so committing herself to a life spent on two continents; she was to make almost one hundred crossings of the Atlantic by sea and air. In Devon they set up the Dartington Experiment to revive farming and the related rural industries to build a community embracing her progressive school. Dorothy’s fortune enabled these enterprises to prosper for more than five years, employing a hundred local people, and sometimes twice that number, until Dartington was organised into a limited company and a charitable trust in the early 1930s.
To enrich community life Dorothy introduced studios for art and design, drama and contemporary dance; to stimulate efforts and Dartington’s reputation she ‘courted’ and supported the potter Bernard Leach, the actors Paul Robeson and Peggy Ashcroft, the painter Ben Nicholson, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth and the composer Benjamin Britten, to name but a few. As the political mood of the 1930s darkened she unhesitatingly found housing and employment for dozens of refugees from Germany. In her war work in America (accompanied by Leonard Elmhirst) and in England (on her own) she was embroiled for months of speaking and travelling in the cause of the ‘Special Relationship’ between the Allies, on anything but a primrose path.
Dorothy was sixty in 1947; she encouraged the post-war revivals at Dartington, especially of the musical life under Imogen Holst and the establishment of the College of Arts with Peter Cox as principal. She played her part as consort to her now distinguished husband and as a grandmother, and she enjoyed her garden, which gave pleasure to all who found their way there. She was seriously ill in 1955, but ‘the warm-hearted Elmhirsts’, as they were known, continued their benevolent influences on the social and cultural life of Britain in unnumbered ways. They discreetly and politely declined the honours that were offered. Dorothy died at Dartington in December 1968; Leonard married Dr Susanna Isaacs and they went to live in California, where he died in 1974.
My first visits to Dartington were at that time; beside
me now is a copy of Dartington Hall and its Work, published in 1976. It is a booklet of few words and many plainly informative black and white photographs of the place and some of the people, of the school, the Tweed Mill, Staverton Joinery and Dartington Glass, of the activities of the College of Arts, outreach to youth clubs and adult education, and to the welfare of the very young and the elderly. The tone is more practical than utopian, and refreshingly welcoming, telling visitors where they are free to wander rather than where they are not; no ticket kiosk barred the approach to the Great Hall nor to Dorothy’s beautiful garden. Her memory was fiercely protected by the many Dartingtonians who had known and loved her, and her legacy – her papers and books, her art collection and her home – were all intact and well guarded. She had not wanted her story told, it was said, and in that timeless and enchanted place, there seemed no need.
However, on the other side of the Atlantic things were different, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author W.A. Swanberg had become fascinated by the youthful Dorothy while he was writing about her father. His book, Whitney Father, Whitney Heiress, published by Scribner’s in 1980, had a dedication, ‘Blessings on Dorothy’. It is a flamboyant society saga of the Gilded Age, the excesses of avarice and ambitions all redeemed by one ‘princess’. Swanberg leaves his princess in 1919 as she faces up to her widowhood; perhaps like many of her friends he is dumbfounded at her decision to leave America for England and is unable to follow.
With the benefit of his own experience as part of her extended family at Dartington, and to put the record straight, Michael Young published The Elmhirsts of Dartington in 1982. His affection for Dorothy is revealed but the book is dominated by the philosophy of Dartington and the character of Leonard Elmhirst, to whom Young (later Lord Young of Dartington) was ideologically devoted.
In another part of the wood my first two books were also published in 1982, The Everywhere Landscape and Gardens of a Golden Afternoon (the story of the partnership of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll). I wrote Vita’s Other World (1985) without discovering that Vita Sackville-West and Dorothy had a lightweight friendship, visiting each other’s gardens several times through twenty years. If any thought crossed my mind it was that Sissinghurst was so outrageously famous, while Dartington was very little known, both gardens reflecting the minds of their mistresses. A commission to write about Lanning Roper, the much-loved American gardener who worked in Britain, and who had died in 1983, sent me to stay with his sister-in-law Laura Wood Roper in Washington. Laura, the biographer of Frederic Law Olmsted (of Central Park fame), was a formidable, well-connected and very dear person, who mixed huge whiskey sours; she gave me an American home for whenever I needed it and introduced me to her friends, one of whom was Belinda Straight, Dorothy’s former daughter-in-law. The ambience and talk of Laura’s home in Georgetown had not changed for twenty-five years or longer, there were echoes from Camelot, and the America of Dorothy’s last visits. It was a short walk up the hill to Dumbarton Oaks, the garden masterpiece of Dorothy’s older friend Beatrix Farrand, whose English and European travels and her own hard work had established her as a successful landscape architect. I must confess to a ‘mystical moment’ at the Oaks after hours in the library reading Beatrix’s letters when I paused halfway down the stairs and looked out over the snow-covered garden – seeing, or rather feeling, her encouraging presence.
From that moment serendipity took over, expressed by one of Laura’s most distinguished friends who had known Beatrix. After quite a severe grilling over my intentions he stood up to leave, saying, ‘Well, she’s just been sitting here waiting for you, hasn’t she?’ I paid a return visit to the University of California at Berkeley where Farrand’s Reef Point Gardens Collection of drawings and other belongings are held; ‘return’ because the archive includes Gertrude Jekyll’s drawings which were rescued from wartime England on Farrand’s behalf, and were part of my research in 1979 for Gardens of a Golden Afternoon. Buoyed by the warmth and enthusiasm of American friends and strangers I searched out Beatrix’s gardens from Maine to Virginia and back again, and along the way came across Dorothy’s places, not only the remnants of her beloved Old Westbury home but the other Long Island and New England haunts that meant so much to her. These adventures feature in ‘How This Book came to be Written’ in the early pages of Beatrix, which was published in New York in 1995.
Several years later, for Spirits of Place in 2001, I was at Dartington for the Ways With Words festival, speaking in the Barn Theatre; it was a sunny morning and we all lingered on the lawn afterwards. I remember being introduced to a group of people, which included William Elmhirst, Dorothy’s youngest son, and his wife Heather. Over convivial lunches, literary festival conversations tend to run on well-worn paths:
‘What are you working on now?’ – followed by, ‘Why don’t you write about so-and-so?’
Dorothy’s name floated across the lunch table towards me – what is a writer if not suggestible? In her garden afterwards almost everyone I met attested to her guardian spirit surviving in that place.
While working on other books my curiosity about Dorothy led me on to gain the permission of the Dartington trustees to research in their archive; William Elmhirst was characteristically kind and generous with his papers and memories, and I was fortunate to gain brief blessings from Michael Straight, James Cornford and Lord Young. At almost every stage I was astounded at the story, Dorothy’s story, that was revealed, soon followed by disbelief and not a little fury that my long and detailed book proposal attracted only publishers’ rejections. ‘No one knows who she is,’ they said, ‘and now celebrities are all the rage.’ It was a catch-22.
Change of tactics. Soon after their arrival in England in the spring of 1925, Dorothy and Leonard had driven to Stratford-upon-Avon, visited Shakespeare’s grave and Clifford Chambers and gone on to visit Mary Anderson de Navarro and her American friends at Broadway. The purchase of Dartington was not going well; was Clifford Manor an alternative? Dorothy had been an ardent Shakespeare fan since her schooldays, he was essential to her image of England, and his countryside sprinkled with genial gardening Americans was attractive, in contrast to chilly conservative Devon, where she, quite rightly, feared rebuffs. This diary whim led me to Sarah Hosking’s cottage refuge for women writers, which shares an ancient wall, ‘O wall, O sweet and lovely wall’, with Clifford’s churchyard. My 2010 Hosking Houses Trust bursary, and the conviviality and inspiring conversations in Sarah’s gift, encouraged me to write about Dorothy by giving her Thisby’s cue, ‘she is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall’, and to see her life through the words of Shakespeare’s heroines. This Dorothy, an essay fronted by Cecil Beaton’s 1935 portrait and elegantly designed and set by Libanus Press, was published in 2011.
William Elmhirst wrote that he was ‘thrilled to bits’ with this Dorothy and the ‘poetic treatment’ of his mother’s life, and ‘she’ was widely circulated and admired. I suppose his verdict released the catch of my nervousness at writing about his mother, to whom he was so devoted and spiritually close. I sat down to write the ‘big book’, which took me over a year and amounted to a hundred and twenty thousand words. This was read by colleagues and friends and revised, and I went down to Somerset with a copy for William – his response is dated Sunday, 7th April 2013:
Last night late I finished reading your manuscript, I am not a fast reader so this will indicate how absorbed I have been... Somehow, in describing her life’s journey, you become part of it, you lived it through, I suppose, your writer’s gifts – but more than that – through your own power of empathy...
Just by reading it, I feel as though I too relived her life and that a whole part of mine has been cleansed and purified... Surely you have joined her energy with yours in some mysterious way so that the relentless forward movement of the book or the journey never falters. Like her many sea voyages you are there to record every cross current and surge of the ocean as she and you journey on. So please be careful not t
o sacrifice this quality to please others who never knew her.
William gave me a generous commission to continue working on the manuscript, which went through careful revisions until that happy day in April 2015 when my agent Caradoc King introduced me to Mathew Clayton and his young colleagues at Unbound, who were thrilled at the prospect of publishing Angel Dorothy.
Apart from several visits to William’s serene house and garden overlooking the Bristol Channel, I knew very little of his present life, beyond the pages of this book, and Angel Dorothy filled our conversations. He was born in 1929 but that seemed immaterial; at the end of phone calls he used to say, ‘I’m here, always here, if you want to know anything, or I can help,’ which was the theme of his undemanding patronage. Then, at some time last year he said he was buying a small house in Jersey, where he spent weeks at a time and seemed very happy. I suppose I noticed that he no longer ended his phone calls with ‘I’m here, always here’, but perhaps that was because he could be in either place? Then, at the beginning of February 2016, he rang to ask for a copy of the latest manuscript version, the version with Unbound. I packed this off to Jersey; he rang at the end of the month with the surprising news that he was off to India, and we spoke several times over that weekend. He was again rapturous over the manuscript, grateful for it and the emotional release it gave him – ‘I have been able to shed a whole lot of baggage that she has been carrying for us’ – he felt he spoke for himself and other members of his family. He said that he was happy, and at peace. With his companions he left for India on Monday, 29th February; the next day he was taken ill in Dubai and died. Dorothy’s book is dedicated to her beloved youngest son, for it could not have been written without him.