The Ghost Orchard

by Helen Humphreys

  Of the paintings she made of subjects other than fruit, she seemed to favour landscapes, with enticing paths leading the viewer through mature summer forests, or a depiction of a tranquil lake in a bowl of hills at sunset. She painted pleasing views from her jaunts or objects that were readily at hand, such as a paring knife, two reddish pears on a blue dish and an unopened tin can. It’s interesting to note that she painted fruit in her off hours, not only when she was on the job.

  When an artist begins painting in childhood and maintains a singular focus for her lifetime, there is a large part of her—the part doing the creating—that is private, unseen. And so it is a bonus to find this description of Deborah Passmore at work on a painting, written by a friend, and showing the intersection of the inner and outer worlds of this gifted working artist:

  While painting she was quite oblivious to surroundings. She would sit in a greenhouse on an overturned box, her feet in the wet, and paint and neither see nor hear what transpired around her. Well I remember when she was painting the orchids of the White House for the Columbian Exposition; it was in August, 1892, and I went over to the conservatories to see how the picture was coming on; I found her working away in an orchid house, steaming hot as a Turkish bath. “Aren’t you smothered, suffocated?” I asked. She never heard a word I said, but wiping her dripping face and pointing to the half-done picture with a look of affectionate adoration, such as only a mother is supposed to give her baby, she exclaimed: “Beautiful things, are they not?”23

  After years of being an artist, or a writer, it is hard to separate who you are from what you do. I don’t remember a day—a moment, even—when my grandfather wasn’t painting or drawing or talking about art. I recall one conversation where he talked about Danish inventions, about how the Danes had invented many of the important items in our modern world—matches, lighthouses, yeast, the loudspeaker. He would often hold up something at the grocery store—a package of biscuits or a pound of butter—and say, “An artist designed that label.” Driving under a bridge, he would say, “An engineer built that, but an artist thought of how it should look.” He believed, and made me believe, that the role of the artist was the most important in the world, and that the hand of the artist was everywhere and in everything. “Someone had to think of that,” he would often say, about anything—a book cover, the design on a packet of tea. He was always appreciative of the creative efforts of other people, and always fired up about his own.

  James Marion Shull was born on January 23, 1872, the elder of Harrison and Catherine Shull’s two sons. James Shull worked as an illustrator for the US Forest Service from 1907 to 1909 before moving to the USDA; he worked there until his retirement in 1942, first as a botanical illustrator, and later as a botanist. He eventually became a fruit disease investigator, and many of his illustrations show diseased fruit rather than healthy specimens. Like Deborah Passmore, James Shull was also a Quaker. He had wide-ranging artistic passions, turning his hand to both writing and gardening, in addition to painting over 750 watercolours for the USDA.

  Shull was also an iris grower and breeder, and later a judge for the American Iris Society. He wrote a book about the iris, for which he provided full-colour illustrations. In the preface, he said that on his half acre of land in Maryland, the iris had become “the dominant note in this suburban garden where a professional man sought solace and relaxation and healthful exercise in hours of leisure from his desk.”24 He was proud that he had sold his irises throughout America and as far afield as England.

  After the First World War ended, Shull also wrote a rather poetic brochure with the idea of melting down the cannons used in the war and fashioning bells out of the metal. These bells would then form “peace carillons” for Washington, and indeed for every major city in Europe that had been affected by the war.25 It would be poetic justice, he reasoned, as a great many bells had been melted down to make the cannons at the start of the war.

  The White Winter Pearmain that James Shull painted for the USDA is a diseased and underripe apple, still green and yet covered with brown lesions on the outside, and having pockets of rotted flesh on the inside. This particular apple was from Washington State, and he painted it in 1913.

  A few years after retiring from the USDA, James Shull died at home in Maryland, on September 1, 1948, at the age of seventy-six. He was a lifelong bachelor.

  My grandfather fought in the Second World War. He was in a tank corps in North Africa and then in Italy. Like many of his generation, he spoke little about his war experiences, except to say that it was very hot and claustrophobic inside the tank. He had regular nightmares postwar, yelling and thrashing in his sleep, and once he told me that he hated the scent of lilacs because they reminded him of dead bodies.

  He wasn’t an enthusiastic participant in the army, often disagreeing with his superiors. He liked to say that there were two wars: “The English against the Germans, and Ronald Brett against the British Army.” What kept him sane was the art he managed to do while he was a soldier. He carried a tin cigarette box of pastels in his breast pocket and made drawings of the camps where he was stationed. He was the war artist for his battalion, and some of his paintings and drawings from that time now hang in the Imperial War Museum in London, England.

  Royal Charles Steadman, the last of the White Winter Pearmain artists, was born on July 23, 1875, in Portland, Maine. He was the second son of Alban and Emma Steadman, and his parents separated when he was still a boy.

  Steadman studied art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Cowles Art School, and then attended the Rhode Island School of Design, taking a job after graduation as a jewellery designer for a commercial company. He also worked designing stage scenery and as an instructor at RISD. He even submitted several designs for postage stamps to the postmaster general.

  In 1915, Royal Charles Steadman joined the USDA in the Division of Pomology, working as a botanical illustrator, and then later as a botanical artist. Like some of his contemporaries there, he had an interest in the effects of storage and cold on fruit, and he made many wax models to show the impact of these conditions. Steadman worked at the USDA until he retired in 1941, and during that time, he produced over nine hundred watercolours, as well as pen-and-ink sketches and wax models of fruit. He married three times, divorcing twice, and had one son by his second wife. He died on August 6, 1964, at the age of eighty-nine.

  The example of the White Winter Pearmain painted by Royal Charles Steadman in 1918 is the most recent depiction of the apple in the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. The painting is done in a simple grey wash, with no colour in the apple and just one illustration of the fruit rather than the customary two. Steadman’s apple is in cross-section and sits crookedly on the page, with a single seed in its left-hand ovary.

  I think of my grandfather hunched over his desk upstairs in the rented house near Tunbridge Wells, painting a pea pod or a cabbage or a stalk of Brussels sprouts, arguing back at Margaret Thatcher on the radio. And I think of the USDA artists who went to work every day and painted apples. Making a painting from something real to be used to identify something real. The painting a little island where painter and subject existed together for the length of time it took to make the rendering. What did the USDA painters make of their subjects? What did they learn about apples from years of close observation? Were they happy to have a regular source of income, or did they regret not taking more of a chance on their art, not trying to make a career out of painting only what they wanted to paint?

  When I was in my twenties and driving around with my grandfather on his errands, he confessed to me that he thought he’d made a mistake in not choosing to be a full-time painter. “But what could I do?” I remember him saying. “I had a family. It felt selfish. Like Gauguin going off to the South Seas.”

  At the Slade School of Fine Art, my grandfather had won a prize. He’d had his early work exhibited, and my mother still has a photograph of him, when he was a young man in his twenties, impossi
bly handsome, striding down a London street with his prize-winning painting tucked under his arm.

  When my grandfather told me that he regretted his choices, I was living in England, giving myself the self-imposed test of remaining there for a year and trying to complete a novel, attempting to write every day to see if I could do it, if I was suited to the solitary life. That conversation galvanized me into becoming a full-time writer, into making writing the number-one priority of my life, into forming my life around my commitment to writing and into not having the same regrets as my grandfather. But of course, every choice has its sacrifices, and though my grandfather lived until I was forty, he didn’t live long enough for me to be able to tell him that the life of a full-time artist is also full of regrets. They’re just different ones.

  None of the USDA watercolour artists in the Division of Pomology wrote about their experiences of painting apples for a living. Or if they did, those reminiscences didn’t survive into this century. So I can only guess what that experience was like for them. But it’s an educated guess, because my grandfather was engaged in a similar pursuit and I had the good fortune to observe him while he was making his illustrations for the seed catalogue.

  What I remember was the liveliness around him—the voices from the radio, the birds outside his studio window. I remember his work surface cluttered with the tobacco tins he used to store pencils, and his many paintbrushes standing stiff and tall in an old can. I remember him rushing downstairs and rummaging through the fridge in a terrible hurry, then rushing back upstairs again with whatever fruit or vegetable he needed to paint. (Halfway down the staircase he’d attached a metal bar to the ceiling so he could hang by his arms for a few seconds whenever he descended the stairs, stretching out his back from all the hours hunched over his work table.)

  I never saw him doing the illustrations. No one was privy to those moments. That was between him and his art—how he applied colour and light to the blank page, and made something that had once been alive come alive again. This was private and shared with no one. It was his business, his struggle, his pleasure, his meaning, his life.

  ROBERT FROST

  The poet Robert Frost had a long relationship with apples. On the Derry, New Hampshire, farm that he owned for nine years, he worked an orchard that was the inspiration for his several famous poems about apples, including the much-vaunted “After Apple-Picking,” which begins:

  My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

  Toward heaven still,

  And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

  Beside it, and there may be two or three

  Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

  But I am done with apple-picking now.

  Although the farm in Derry was the source of much of Frost’s poetry, he wasn’t a very successful farmer, and in 1909, at the age of thirty-five, he sold the place. In 1912, after working briefly as a teacher, he moved his young family to England, intending to concentrate solely on his writing. It was a bold choice, but it paid off. He befriended Ezra Pound and Wilfred Wilson Gibson, moved his family north to Gloucestershire on their recommendation and had his book North of Boston reviewed three times in three different publications by the English poet Edward Thomas. Each of these reviews was equally laudatory, and together they were responsible for establishing Frost’s critical reputation in England.

  Frost and Thomas developed an intense friendship, and Thomas moved his own family to Gloucestershire to be near his new friend. He had been depressed before meeting Frost, working constantly at writing non-fiction books, reviews and articles to try to support his wife and three young children.1 It was Frost who, after reading In Pursuit of Spring, Thomas’s eloquent account of travelling through England by bicycle, convinced him that he really should be writing poetry.

  Theirs was a friendship of cross-pollination. Thomas became a poet because of Frost—a poet of such renown that, years later, Ted Hughes would state, “He is the father of us all.”2 And Frost secured his own reputation as a poet because of Thomas’s ecstatic reviews of his work, where he called Frost’s poems “revolutionary.”3

  Their friendship had its zenith in 1914, particularly that summer. Frost said in a letter to his fellow poet Amy Lowell in 1917: “We were together to the exclusion of every other person and interest all through 1914—1914 was our year. I never had, I never shall have[,] another such year of friendship.”4 It was a sentiment shared by Thomas, who wrote in a letter to Frost on October 4, 1915: “The next best thing to having you here is having the space (not a void) that nobody else can fill.”5

  Thomas and Frost spent their time traipsing round the countryside in Gloucestershire, doing what Frost called “talks-walking.” They shared a common idea of what poetry should be—that it should have musicality, but the musicality should come from both the sound of a sentence and the sound of the words placed within it, so that the two layers of cadence worked together, with the sound of the sentence imitating, on a subconscious level, the rhythm patterns found in everyday speech.

  The summer of 1914 in England was magnificent, with many warm, sunny days, and the walks taken by Robert Frost and Edward Thomas were plentiful. In an article called “This England,” published in the Nation on November 7 of that year, Thomas described finding “chiefly cider apples, innumerable, rosy and uneatable, though once or twice we did pick up a wasp’s remnant, with slightly greasy skin of palest yellow, that tasted delicious.”6

  Apples were of interest to both men, and that yellow apple with its greasy skin reappeared in a poem that Thomas wrote of their friendship, “The Sun Used to Shine”:

  We turned from men or poetry

  To rumours of the war remote

  Only till both stood disinclined

  For aught but the yellow flavorous coat

  Of an apple wasps had undermined.7

  And later in that same poem, he sums up the friendship by saying:

  like those walks

  Now—like us two that took them, and

  The fallen apples, all the talks

  And silence.8

  Frost also immortalized the walks with Thomas in a poem called “Iris by Night,” where he talks about the time they saw a circular rainbow, a miraculous occurrence in the short life of a miraculous friendship.

  In the fall of 1914, Frost and Thomas sat on an orchard stile in Gloucestershire, on the day war began, and wondered if the guttural booms of the guns from across the Channel in France would soon be audible where they were.9 In 1915, Frost returned with his family to America, with plans for the Thomas clan to join them there after the war, and for the men to take up farming together in Vermont. But Thomas increasingly felt that he should fight for England, and he joined up that same year. On April 9, 1917, at the age of thirty-seven, he was killed on the first day of the Battle of Arras. His battalion had been stationed in an orchard, and in a last letter to the poet Walter de la Mare, Thomas framed his chances of getting out of the war alive in terms of that orchard, saying, “We might see the apple blossom, but I doubt that.”10

  Years later, after the Second World War, Frost wrote about missing his friend in the essay “A Romantic Chasm”: “I wish Edward Thomas (that poet) were here to ponder gulfs with me as in the days when he and I tired the sun with talking on the footpaths and stiles of Leddington and Ryton.”11

  I find it interesting that he has cribbed a line from the ancient lament of the poet Callimachus for his fellow poet and friend Heraclitus:

  They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

  They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

  I wept as I remember’d how often you and I

  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.12

  One grief stands in for another. The friendship of one pair of poets has echoes in that of another pair.

  Walking has always been a ruminating activity favoured by writers. Maybe it is the natural rhythm of walking—which happens
in four-four time—that calls up a sympathetic cadence of words and ideas. Or maybe it is the act of movement after sitting at a desk all morning that helps to shake loose new thoughts and ways to express them. A writer walking alone has time for reflection, but writers walking together fall into discussion.

  I used to walk with Joanne before she was ill. There was a time when we walked every day, and there was a season when our walking inspired and gave shape to our writing. Unlike Frost and Thomas, we walked mostly in winter, and the particular winter that influenced us was over a decade ago now.

  The St. Lawrence River begins in Kingston and often freezes over. That winter it froze early and without much snow cover on it, making it perfect for walking on, and every day Joanne and I would trudge along the frozen river. Our walks took us along a mile or two of shoreline, both east and west, depending on our whims or mood, or the direction of the cold winter wind. We were on the ice at first freeze in December and off it at final thaw in mid-March, so we witnessed the progress of the season on its thick, then thinning, skin. We listened to the muffled boom of the trapped water shifting under the surface, and we saw the beautiful plates of blue-tinged ice piled up on one another near the shore. Walking east there were spots where streams had frozen on the faces of the scalloped banks, and the effect of the stilled movement was hypnotic and gorgeous. When the sun hit the frozen streams, they glittered and glimmered as though they were still moving.

  Walking on the ice made the world new again. The shoreline was unfamiliar when seen from the perspective of the river, so we took to naming parts of it. Elephant Rock was a large glacial erratic that was tucked up against a small cliff where an enormous willow tree grew. From above, from the land, the boulder was invisible, but from the river it was gigantic, its pink granite surface in folds like the skin of an elephant. Old Man’s Beard was one of the frozen streams that had adhered to the side of a small cliff. Dog Beach was the place where I took my dog to swim in the summer and was often our entry point onto the river—we could walk out gradually onto the ice there because there was no elevation change; it simply fanned out from the shore into the river.