Posterity (9 page)

As for the other matter you brought up—that of bringing Betty here—even if you had come over I wouldn't have advised that. What I am writing now is strictly between you and me, sabe? It is the fruit of whatever worldly sagacity various kicks in the pants, my own pants and others, have given me. Keep your love affairs free from all relatives and their homes if you want to avoid complications with your love or with your relatives or both. Why run the risk with your love of forcing it into human interrelationships where you never can foretell what the answer may be? For example, how do you know Betty would like me or Carlotta, or that we would like her? You may say that you know but that [is] only because you
feel
affection for all concerned. And if one dislike crept into this combination, then all the slumbering prejudices would awake and the complications would start—and spread! Ideally this sounds rather crass but practically all it amounts to is that everyone is human and more or less petty in small things no matter how nobly they may respond to soul-trying crises. My dope is emphatically that love should be kept on a pedestal and not made to run unnecessary risks, for it is very fragile and has a hard struggle to endure even with all the breaks one can give it. Family contact I rate as risk A One. Please understand me right. I respect your love for Betty and she sounds like a brick to me and I would sure like to meet her if I come to New York. Also understand that Carlotta has nothing to do with what I am writing and doesn't even know I am writing this. It is honestly for the sake of your preserving the glamour of your love that I am writing. It is for Betty's sake most of all. You shouldn't want her to be put in such a position, that's my notion. It might work out all right, but then again it mightn't and my whole idea is the practical one that when you are happy as it is why run any risks? If you were married it would be different—only because it would have to be different. But even in the case of marriage you have only to go back to your Mother and me. If families had been kept out of it we might have had a chance. I must confess, with the guy I was then, the chance was slim and she was probably well rid of me—but you never can tell how much family interference and prejudices had to do with it.

Well, that's off my chest. What I have written is far from clearly stated but I rely on you to get the gist of it and give me credit for good intentions even if you think I am all wrong in this particular case. One of the principal reasons for my caution, as I hope you will guess, is that your and my relationship is too fine for us to place it in a position where, through neither your fault or mine, it might be hurt or messed with. Put that one in your pipe and smoke it!

Well, there's no news except work. I have been writing every day for four months half the day and thinking about it the other half so there wasn't much chance for anything to happen.

Good luck and all love to you! Write me and let me know how everything is coming at Yale. I expect to be back here on the job in three weeks, or at most four. I hope this vacation will buck me up. I'm fagged out.

As ever,
Father

N
.
C
.
W
YETH TO
A
NN
W
YETH
M
C
C
OY
AND
J
OHN
M
C
C
OY

“To sustain the integrities which you are both generously endowed with, to keep alive that sense of charity toward one another, to be sensitive with a purpose, and with vast energy and deep-laid ambitions, you two will go far—and by this I mean you will go far into the realms of human happiness.”

That marriage might take one away from art and work was always a concern for N. C. Wyeth. The great American illustrator worried about his painting when he himself married and he was equally apprehensive about the effects of matrimony on his creative and productive children.

By the time of her wedding at twenty years old, Ann Wyeth was already an accomplished composer whose piece
A Christmas Fantasy
had been performed by Leopold Stokowski of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Her new husband, John McCoy, was a painter and a student of N. C. Wyeth.

Nine days after they were married in his studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, N. C. Wyeth wrote to Ann and John McCoy.

Studio
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania
November 4, 1935. Monday

Dear Ann and John,

Your splendid letters came in this morning!

The time, since you left, has been strangely vacant and strangely full to repletion. We all go around with a hollow feeling and yet our thoughts, and actions too, fairly teem! We seem to be vaguely seeking to pick up the loose strands and in some way to seek a new combination that we may tie them together again to start anew. At the same time our lives are actually very full and each one is accomplishing something.

The canvas I thought sure was a failure has turned into one of my good ones. Andy has done his strongest landscape as well as several superb life drawings. Carolyn has come out of the dark woods with a powerful still-life and her bust. Henriette painted a corking portrait of John Wyeth and on the side captured first prize in the Wilmington show with her “Miss Flaherty” (and Andy sold his “Seiners” to Mrs. Meeds). And Ma has been turbulently busy in the home and making many dashing visits to your homestead beyond the brook.

Back of it all are the resurgent echoes of the wedding, memories of which will never fade. It is all a massive dream to me, real and unreal as all dreams are.

As John truthfully said, the procession of events on that evening of the 26th left a deep mark on most of the friends who were here. There was a poignancy about it all which I believe transcended the vast majority of similar occasions. The surroundings were indeed happy and felicitous, but the important ingredient was the great sympathy and the great faith in you two—in you, as individuals, and together as builders of a new generation. To sustain the integrities which you are both generously endowed with, to keep alive that sense of charity toward one another, to be sensitive with a purpose, and with vast energy and deep-laid ambitions, you two will go far—and by this I mean you will go far into the realms of human happiness. All else, by comparison, is nothing.

I am sorry, of course, that the fog has persisted. Perhaps Nature herself has conspired to give you privacy on your honeymoon!

But if I know you two, even persistent fog will not be lost and it will always take on a certain hallowed beauty and character which never existed before.

Our weather here has been dark, wet, lowering and commonly called
lousy
. But no! It has been like a great gray curtain dropped after a magnificent “third act.” It has given us a remoteness—a chance to get our emotional breath. It has been gorgeous!

[N. C. Wyeth]

C
LARE
B
OOTHE
L
UCE TO
A
NN
B
ROKAW

“If you don't love him that's your business—if you do
it becomes partly mine, darling.”

Sharp-tongued and hard-driven, Clare Boothe Luce succeeded in the professional world of men in a way no woman ever had. Blonde and athletic, she was striking in appearance and when in the company of men, she made sure her good looks, ambition, and bold mind were not overlooked. She was the managing editor of
Vanity Fair,
an original and popular playwright, congresswoman, the first woman ever to deliver the keynote address at a national political convention (Republican National Convention, 1944), and she was the American Ambassador to Rome. Her husband was Henry Luce, the creator of TimeLife, Inc., and one of the most influential publishers of all time.

She had one child, a daughter, Ann, with her first husband, a wealthy playboy named George Brokaw. The girl was attractive and smart and so admired her mother that she once wrote in her diary. “Was that glorious woman really my mother?”

Here Clare Boothe Luce writes a conversational letter of advice to eighteen-year-old Ann, a sophomore at Stanford University. Two days before receiving her mother's endorsement, Ann had told her boyfriend, Walton Wickett, that she didn't want to see him again. The following letter from her mother “threw [her] into a tailspin . . .”

November 24, 1942.

Ann darling:

Thank you so much for your lovely flowers, my sweet, for the beautiful red picture frame, for the McArthur bowl, and above all for your telegram on our anniversary.

We had the loveliest party in one of the big suites upstairs in the Waldorf. I am enclosing a list of the guests. Everybody made wonderful speeches about how nice Dad and I were, cracked a lot of jokes and toasted us in champagne. And then afterwards we all went to Noel Coward's movie, “In which we serve” which was very fine indeed. And then we came home and yammered some more and went to bed. We missed you as we always do!

Now I would like to tell you for your own information, and not for his, about your young friend Walter. As you know, I told you when you first began to speak of him that in spite of all the hard things you said of him, he somehow or other “came through” as a very nice guy indeed. He sounded pretty nice to me although I thought at the time, and still do, that he is a little on the old side for you. However, you made the thing sound so unexpectedly serious when I spoke to you on Sunday that I reacted rather spontaneously as a loving Mama might be expected to do and made certain inquiries through the heads of Panam on the subject of your young man. I am glad to report that the Panam tycoons and bigwigs gave him a remarkably fine bill of endorsement. They said he was not only a young man of complete sobriety and dependability but that he had plenty of brains and marked ability. They said also that he had a great future in the airways—which as you know is one of the businesses with the greatest future of all in the postwar world. They said, in short, that he was a swell guy, that his family was as nice as it could be—all of which is very reassuring to me. My instincts at the time when you told me about him were that he was a very nice beau for you to have, and it seems to me very nice that you should have one. If you don't love him that's your business—if you do it becomes partly mine, darling. If the young man is really serious about you and you think there is a chance you might get serious about him, I wish that you would urge him to come East shortly and let Dad and me look him over and see if we really think as highly of him as his business associates seem to. I think you had better bring a couple of snapshots of him when you come home, because I would like to see what kind of a creature I am discussing with you. Well, that's all there is to that. I am, as I say, very much more comfortable in my mind about it than when I talked to you on the telephone because he sounds so nice and so clever.

I am looking forward so eagerly to seeing you on the 20th. We will be here in the Waldorf until a day or so after Christmas and then instead of going down to Mepkin, we will go down to Washington and you will have a chance to look that over and see what you think of it.

Don't worry about your studies. When you want to do them well you will do them superbly but for the moment the main thing is to get what little happiness there is out of life in this wartorn world because “these are the good old days” now.

With bestest love to you,
[Clare Boothe Luce]

“. . . any time you want to make an ogre out of mama,
in order to get rid of some wretched youth,
I am only too happy!!”

Less than two weeks later, with the relationship between Ann and her “young man” deteriorating even further, Luce writes again.

December 4, 1942.

Ann darling—

Your young man sent me a sad little note, the purport of which was that I was not only threatening to wreck his chances of persuading you on the subject of matrimony, but I was spoiling your college career by urging you to come to Washington. Now, I have written him a little note which I am enclosing. I don't know what you have told him. It is conceivable to your old ma that you are using me as an excuse to spare his feelings, and any time you want to make an ogre out of mama, in order to get rid of some wretched youth, I am only too happy!!

So, o o o o, I leave it entirely up to you whether or not you want to send him this letter after you have read it. He will probably think I am even more of an old meany for not answering him at all, so you had better let me know if you don't want to send this one, and tell me what you would like me to say to help you out in the best way possible.

Always (you wretched little flirt),
Your adoring,

P.S. If you want this letter sent, drop it in the box yourself.

Ann sent Clare Boothe Luce's letter to Walton Wickett. (It has since disappeared.) Wickett felt it was a “kind and eminently sensible letter,” and he and Ann eventually went their separate ways.

J
OHN
S
TEINBECK TO
T
HOM
S
TEINBECK

“Glory in it . . .”

“I like to write. I like it better than anything.” From the time he was a teenager in California, John Steinbeck wrote, and wrote all the time. He produced a wide breadth of material, ranging from
Of Mice and Men
, to
The Sea of Cortez
, to
Travels with Charley
—some twenty-six volumes of fiction and nonfiction in all. For
The Grapes of Wrath
, he won the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1962, for his entire body of work he was awarded the Nobel Prize. At the time of his death in 1968, Steinbeck was the most popular novelist in the world. A shy man, awkward, and built large, he wanted people to care about his words but often resented their interest in him. He was married three times and the father of two sons.

He once wrote, “We are lonesome animals. We spend all our lives trying to be less lonesome.” In the following letter to his eldest son, fourteen-year-old Thom, who was away in Connecticut at boarding school, Steinbeck identifies two kinds of love, both of which he himself had experienced firsthand: the “crippling kind” with Gwyn Conger, the boys' mother, whom he had grown to despise; and the “outpouring of everything good in you,” which he felt he had found with his third wife, Elaine.