Not at All What One Is Used To: The Life and Times of Isabella Gardner
392
Not at All What One Is Used To: The Life and Times of Isabella Gardner
392eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Born in 1915 to one of New England’s elite wealthy families, Isabella Gardner was expected to follow a certain path in life—one that would take her from marriageable debutante to proper society lady. But that plan was derailed when at age eighteen, Isabella caused a drunk-driving accident. Her family, to shield her from disgrace, sent her to Europe for acting studies, not foreseeing how life abroad would fan the romantic longings and artistic impulses that would define the rest of Isabella’s years. In Not at All What One Is Used To, author Marian Janssen tells the story of this passionate, troubled woman, whose career as a poet was in constant compromise with her wayward love life and her impulsive and reckless character.
Life took Gardner from the theater world of the 1930s and ’40s to the poetry scene of the ’50s and ’60s to the wild, bohemian art life of New York’s Hotel Chelsea in the ’70s. She often followed where romance, rather than career, led her. At nineteen, she had an affair with a future president of Ireland, then married and divorced three famous American husbands in succession. Turning from acting to poetry, Gardner became associate editor of Chicago’s Poetry magazine and earned success with her best-received collection, Birthdays from the Ocean, in 1955. Soon after, her life took a turn when she met the southern poet Allen Tate. He was married to Caroline Gordon but left her to wed Gardner, who moved to Minneapolis and gave up writing to please him, but after a few short years, Tate fell for a young nun and abandoned her. In the liveliest of places at the right times, Gardner associated with many of the most significant cultural figures of her age, including her cousin Robert Lowell, T.S. Eliot, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Virgil Thomson, Tennessee Williams, and Robert Penn Warren. But famous connections could never save Isabella from herself. Having abandoned her work, she suffered through alcoholism, endured more failed relationships, and watched the lives of her children unravel fatally. Toward the end of her life, though, she took her pen back up for the poems in her final volume. Redeemed by her writing, Gardner died alone in 1981, just after being named the first poet laureate of New York State. Through interviews with many Gardner intimates and extensive archival research, author Marian Janssen delves deep into the life of a woman whose poetry, according to one friend, “probably saved her sanity.” Much more than a biography, Not at All What One Is Used To is the story of a woman whose tumultuous life was emblematic of the cultural unrest at the height of the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826272324 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 12/31/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Not at All What One Is Used To
The Life and Time of Isabella GardnerBy Marian Janssen
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2010 The Curators of the University of MissouriAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1898-8
Chapter One
"The Walled Garden," 1915–1933
Brother do you remember the walled garden, our dallies in that ding dong dell where my fistful of violets mazed the air we moved through and upon and a swallow of brook skimmed your tabloid sloop to sea and gone? ("West of Childhood")
"My birth was a disaster to my mother," Isabella Gardner told a prospective biographer when she was in her fifties. "It was desperately important to her (because of another woman my father loved) to bear a son. I was the 2nd daughter. She has (but I love her) rejected me all the years of her life." And around that time Gardner's aunt Catherine Gardner Mayes wrote her niece: "I remember that though you were a perfectly healthy baby you cried continually most of the time you were awake. None of the others did. Maybe you had some sort of premonition of what a world you had come into and what a hard road you had to travel."
Isabella Stewart Gardner was the second child born to Rose Grosvenor Gardner and George Peabody Gardner. She was called "Belle" after her godmother, the Isabella Stewart Gardner known in Boston as flamboyant "Mrs. Jack," who had founded the wonderfully idiosyncratic Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. On September 7, 1915, proud father George wrote to "Dear Aunt Belle": "Little Isabella Gardner arrived this morning and seems a very healthy specimen. Rose is feeling very happy and well. She sends her love and says you may see your namesake anytime and hopes to see you the first of next week sometime. The doctor is going to be very strict about her seeing people. Much love from all three of us, we are so pleased that we can call her Isabella for we are very fond and proud of her namesake." His great-aunt Belle noted on the letter: "Time of arrival 10.30 A.M., weight 7 3/4 lbs."
Isabella Gardner's parents were both in their mid-twenties and had been married since January 1913; their first child, Katherine, "Kitty," had been born in December of that year. Rose Grosvenor proudly traced her ancestry back to John and Esther Grosvenor, who came from Cheshire, England, in 1640 and settled in Roxbury, Massachusetts. In 1836, her grandfather, the physician William Grosvenor, married Rosa Anne Mason, a descendant of John Brown, the wealthy and socially prominent merchant of Revolutionary fame, who had led the expedition which ended in the burning of the British warship Gaspee. Dr. Grosvenor moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and soon turned from a practicing physician into a wholesale dealer in drugs and dyes and, later, a manufacturer of cotton and calico, owning most of the stock of the steadily prospering Grosvenor-Dale Company. The eldest son, William, attended Brown University, the college founded by his maternal forebears, and became one of the chief executives of the Grosvenor-Dale Company. He married attractive red-haired Rose Diamond Phinney in 1882, but according to her grandson William Congdon, she was crazy: "The Phinney family were all mad." Successful William Grosvenor and his beautiful Rose had seven children, the fourth of which, Gardner's mother Rose, was born on October 13, 1888. "Without money my mother's brothers would have been skid row bums," Gardner wrote much later, for in her view, too, her mother's line had "[t]emperament without what it takes."
George Peabody Gardner Jr. had been born on January 27 of that same year, with, as he later wrote in his Harvard twenty-fifth yearbook, "a silver spoon in his mouth." In America's famously classless society, George Peabody Gardner Jr. was even more blue-blooded than his wife. Ten generations earlier, his forefather Thomas Gardner, sailing from England on the Zouch Phenix, had settled in Cape Ann in 1624, moving to Salem two years later. His descendants intermarried with other early and increasingly prominent New England families like the Coffins, Endicotts, Lowells, Putnams, Pickerings, and Peabodys, building a firm Boston Brahmin background for their heirs. Where Thomas Gardner had been a planter, his lineage branched out into shipping, manufacturing, and financing, prospering in the China trade and securing a strong financial base, even if by the early twentieth century their fortunes had been eclipsed by those of the more recent nouveau riche Rockefeller, Frick, or Carnegie families.
Isabella Gardner's paternal grandfather, George Peabody Gardner, was born in 1855 in Boston, and he went on to be "actively and intimately connected with the development of two of the largest industrial concerns in the country, namely the General Electric Company and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company." When George was still a boy, his uncle John Lowell Gardner, hardly penniless, had married new money in the person of Isabella Stewart from New York City, the daughter of an enterprising businessman. Extravagant, magnetic Mrs. Jack Gardner would soon scandalize good old Boston, filling the tabloids with tales of her real and imagined eccentric behavior: terrifying crowds by taking out a lion on a leash; recommending a show, "The Red Moon," with black participants, which true ladies should not attend even in disguise; and strutting with two enormous diamonds mounted on waving antennae in her hair. Most shocking to Boston's eagle-eyed, judgmental matrons was her obvious partiality, when she grew older, for creative younger men such as the popular novelist Francis Marion Crawford. Mrs. Jack allowed herself to be painted by John Singer Sargent in a tight black dress that displayed a hint of cleavage with her famous pearls wound around her wasplike waist, but her affable husband locked the portrait up for his lifetime after an ill-bred scoundrel had hinted at her liaison with Crawford by alluding to a steep and narrow gorge in the White Mountains: "Sargent has painted Mrs. Gardner all the way down to Crawford's Notch." Belle Gardner remained unperturbed and with her "quaint habit of doing as she pleased" was described admiringly in a Florida journal as "[t]he Boston woman who is getting columns upon columns of free advertising out of her love of privacy ... a genius in her way." By 1915, when her godchild Isabella Stewart Gardner was born, Mrs. Jack, at seventy-five, had been grudgingly adopted by Boston society. That she and her husband had raised his brother Joseph Peabody Gardner's three children after their father's suicide had not quite won over Boston's staunch defenders of propriety, but her fabulous museum with its fine collection of paintings, her renowned admirers of impeccable station and repute, like Henry Adams and Henry James, and her friendship with noted artists Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, had finally guaranteed her her place among Boston's ruling class. And then, she had become simply too old to cause scandal.
When Gardner's father, known as Peabo, was still a schoolboy, he often hid out of embarrassment when his great-aunt Mrs. Jack came to see her favorite grandnephew at hockey practice. A "small, excited figure," she would be "cheering wildly on the side lines at every game his team played," sitting, "wrapped in furs, on an upended packing case to watch him skate with his ... team." He attended the proper schools in the Boston suburb of Southborough—Fay School, which prides itself on being the oldest junior boarding school in America, and the socially equally selective St. Mark's, founded by his maternal grandfather Joseph Burnett—then followed in his forebears' footsteps by entering Harvard. He belonged to the well-known class of 1910, where he excelled among a celebrated grouping of classmates as different as T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, and John Reed. If he graduated cum laude from Harvard, his interests were hardly academic. "He was a member of the varsity track, hockey and tennis teams for three years and the varsity baseball team one year—doubtless the year when his [great-]aunt became a baseball fan. He won 'eight major and two minor H's in all,' and his countless trophies pleased her as much or more than as though she had won them herself." An intercollegiate tennis champion, he also was president of Harvard's student council during the last half of his senior year and vice president of its union.
But there had to be time for relaxation, too, and at Harvard, where not making a club spelled ostracization from the magic circle of future leaders, Peabo was a member of the elegant, ritualistic, snobbish Porcellian Club, according to insider Cleveland Amory "the ne plus ultra of college clubs," clubs that were meant to keep people out as much as let the chosen few in. Nelson Aldrich, another American aristocrat, noted that "Scott Fitzgerald and Tommy Hitchcock might be friends, but there was no way, even if he had gone to Harvard, that Scott Fitzgerald could belong to the Porcellian Club. To belong to the Porcellian Club it was not enough—it still isn't—that one be friends with a member. One has to have been friends with him always, and in that elusive past perfect tense of the verb to be the socially ambitious read their sad fate." In "the United States membership in the 'Pork' was equivalent to a peerage in England," a Porcellian graduate said to one of his friends, whose son wondered which club he should choose; Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy were among the many who were blackballed. More central to Peabo's college experience, though, was his membership in and presidency of Harvard's super-select Hasty Pudding Club, which dated back to the eighteenth century and put on spectacular shows with its men playing both male and female roles. Here he could revel in his love for the theater.
A dashing man of enormous potential, after graduating Gardner was far too vibrantly energetic to buckle down straightaway to the restricted life of a Boston gentleman. He embarked on a grand tour, another crucial ingredient in the old money educational curriculum. With friends, he visited the East and depicted their experiences in a privately printed book, Chiefly the Orient:
In spite of my great enthusiasm for the trip which had lasted for a long time, when the time came for leaving it began to ooze rapidly until there was barely a drop left. How sad it was leaving my mother and the Boyers at Monument Beach on Tuesday and later my father in Boston! However, once on my way, it began to return and the words of my grandfather when he told me that he would not be alive when I returned bore less heavily on my mind and the sorrow at leaving my dear family became less poignant.
Here and now I want to thank my father and mother for their generosity and absolute unselfishness in letting me go or rather in sending me. For it is not conceit on my part to know how much I am to them—much, much more than I deserve, for there never were two better, sweeter, or more loving parents.
They traveled from Boston to Moscow, Peking, Seoul, Osaka, Kyoto, Manila, Batavia, Benares, Delhi, Karnak, and via Constantinople and Athens to London, visiting many cultural highlights, mingling with members of their class wherever they went. From Kyoto, on October 24, 1910: "After tiffin, we left our cards at the Minister of Foreign Affairs, met Mr. Schuyler, the first secretary, and Captain Summerlin, the second secretary of the American Embassy. We then had a few sets of tennis at the tennis club with an old Yale man, Condit. In the evening we dined with Curtice and Eldridge, two student interpreters." Or from Singapore, on January 18, 1911: "At seven o'clock Mrs. Du Bois, the consul's wife, took us to the Economic Gardens, where they have an experimental rubber plantation."
In this way his undigested, rather juvenile journal goes on for almost four hundred pages, ending in Europe, where Peabo visited the Paris Independent Exhibition of 1911, which brought the terms fauvism and cubism into common speech: "If all the lunatics were to be let loose in a paint shop they might be able to produce a result equally terrifying, but I doubt it." Nevertheless, "after a most delightful week" he left for London in the early summer, "to join my mother who had been waiting there some time for me." There he was swept up in a whirlwind of social events: he played tennis, danced—finding "charming girls," but also "numerous long, rather scrawny necked women, their heads bent forward under the weight of large but unlovely jewelry"—went to the Derby, nearly "died laughing at cousin John," and "spent one day at Mr. Astor's place, Clivenden with Bobbie and Priscilla Grant and Frank Paul." On the very last page of his journal he briefly noted: "Rose Grosvenor was also in London some of the time with her mother and younger sister. We went to several plays and visited various galleries together which was most enjoyable." Reading Peabo's travelogue in 1951, when Peabo Gardner was in his sixties, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, a distant relative of Rose's and the first full-time editor of National Geographic, was impressed with this "delightful record.... It is amazing to me that you at that early age should have been so observant and eager to see everything. I wish I had lured you into the National Geographic work before you got so intensely absorbed in Boston and Harvard affairs. The National Geographic Society would have at least 10,000,000 members instead of a measly 2,000,000. Think of all your energy and talent wasted on Harvard, American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, etc., and looking after the millionaires of Boston and Boston's museums."
Belonging to the smart set at the beginning of the twentieth century, Peabo Gardner and Rose Grosvenor were frequently, often fawningly, mentioned in the gossipy society pages of local, even national, newspapers. Rose's parents had built a "substantial" summer villa in fashionable Newport, Rhode Island—according to Town and Country, with an "unrivaled ocean view," a "dainty library," and an "artistic ... children's playhouse"—to ensure that their children would meet suitable marriage candidates. Rose Grosvenor was noted for her skills in driving small cars and playing tennis and bridge. She preferred the tango and waltzing to the old-fashioned cotillion, and even, daringly, with her friends stopped exiting directly into the water from the non-revealing bathing cabins and promenaded instead along the beach in their swimsuits, if fully covered by robes. For "the benefit of the Italian Children's Summer Mission in New York city," she faithfully represented the actress Sarah Bernhardt in a Whartonian performance of tableaux vivants, wearing "a gown of brown chiffon and a gold sash;" and she "won the applause of the audience" as heiress Miss Cecily Cardew in an amateur performance, also for charity, of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1910, too, she was one of the bridesmaids at the wedding of her beloved older sister Caroline to Yale man Gilbert Maurice Congdon; the description of their elaborate Edwardian gowns in "pink liberty satin veiled with pale blue chiffon" and "immense hats with accordion crowns and wide lace-edged brims with primroses and blue velvet ribbons" alone took up almost half a New York Times column.
Though "one of the most popular girls in Newport, a clever whip, musician, and scholar" and "the most amiable girl in Newport society," Rose Grosvenor at that time still had no suitable beau. Two years later, in September 1912, the New York Times captioned enthusiastically: "Grosvenor-Gardner Nuptials Expected," but had to admit that Mrs. Grosvenor, "when asked if the engagement of her daughter, Miss Rose Grosvenor, to George P. Gardner of Boston was to be announced," said "that there was no announcement to be made." The next day, one step behind the Times, the Washington Post tattled that "Mrs. Grosvenor says no" to the gossip that her daughter was engaged to "George Gardner, the Harvard man and noted tennis player," but the paper was happy to chronicle some two weeks later that the rumors had been true. Naturally, the wedding, set for January 1913, "was to have been a brilliant affair," but the bride's grandfather died in December, plunging the Grosvenors into mourning, and the couple had a subdued church wedding, followed, fortunately, by a "large reception at the home of the bride's mother." Newspaper coverage was duly restrained.
Once married, the Peabody Gardners were far less fascinating to the editors of juicy society pages. Living in Newport, Massachusetts—an old-time suburb of Boston—Rose Grosvenor Gardner soon got caught up in the more humdrum social pleasures and responsibilities of a cultivated lady of a Boston family of prominence: breakfasting in bed, discussing menus with cook, arranging the flowers, lunching at, usually, the elegant Chilton Club (newly founded in response to the men's clubs, which did not allow women to be members or even to enter), playing tennis and bridge with other members of her social circle, and being involved in charity work. Her husband became private secretary to Harvard's President Lowell and secretary to the Harvard Corporation but had ample time for sailing, tennis, amateur theatricals, and his many exclusive clubs. His favorite was perhaps the Tavern Club of Boston, with its record of Elizabethan plays "capably done," according to society watcher Dixon Wecter in 1937, "without doubt the most aristocratic," and "[e]xcessively reactionary in the matter of electric lights and pedigrees."
In Europe, in 1914, World War I had broken out, but it seemed remote to the young Peabody Gardners, whose main worry was the health of their daughters, Kitty and Belle. Kitty had to spend most of her youth as an invalid, crippled and flat on her back for months at a stretch because of spinal tuberculosis, aggravated by asthma, anemia, and other illnesses. Belle was miserable, a crybaby, suffering, in her aunt Catherine's words, from "one of the especially idiotic ideas, to which the medical profession seems prone ... the dictum that babies were better left alone 'to cry it out' and held to strict hours of feeding and human companionship." When Congress finally declared war on Germany, on April 6, 1917, Peabo immediately "went on active service as an ensign in the United States Naval Reserve Force—on transports whose hazardous duty it was to dodge German submarines and keep the supply lines open." During this difficult period of her early married life, amidst uncertainty and horror, Rose was pregnant with their first son, George Peabody Gardner III, who was born in September 1917.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Not at All What One Is Used To by Marian Janssen Copyright © 2010 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.