by Iris Origo
Yet, in the course of reading old letters and hearing family stories, it has been borne in on me that, beneath so much prosperity, such deep and genuine ties of family affection, the youth of my father’s generation was marked by tensions quite as acute as those which may affect families today. It is of course a commonplace that the members of each generation in turn tend to reject the values of the preceding one and to derive little satisfaction from what has been handed down to them ready-made. But I still think that the Cutting children (my father Bayard, his brother Bronson, and his sisters Justine and Olivia) were particularly allergic to the taste of their silver spoons, unusually determined to carve out new paths for themselves. There is a photograph of all four of them (varying in ages between twenty-two and eleven) sitting on the steps of the Westbrook ‘piazza’, in which the moody rebelliousness which they themselves referred to as ‘Westbrook gloom’ is plainly carved on their features. They partly attributed it (except Olivia, who was always happy there, and later on took an active part in running the farm and planting the park) to the damp and relaxing climate of Long Island. But another more personal factor was also just beginning to affect their lives: the shadow of ill-health, which (except for my grandmother and Justine) fell upon each of them in turn. My father (of whom I will speak more fully in another chapter) contracted tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two and died eight years later; both Bronson and Olivia, in a lesser degree, were attacked by the same disease and spent several years of their youth in fighting it. My grandfather—heart-broken at Bayard’s death and attacked by the two prevalent complaints of his generation and class, heart-disease and gout—died only two years after his eldest son. It is hardly surprising that, with this family history, apprehension and solicitude should have overshadowed the lives of the survivors, while a constant preoccupation with health and comfort ruled the ordering of each day. The afternoon rest, the morning walk, the great glasses of creamy milk from the prize Jersey herd, the reading-light falling at precisely the correct angle over one’s left shoulder—these were the outer tokens of a concealed but oppressive apprehension. But I think that what the younger generation minded most was something more subtle: the gentle, constant awareness of an unrelenting care for their happiness and preoccupation with their plans. They felt (in my youth I felt it, too) entangled in fine, suffocating cobwebs of solicitude and affection. An old friend, Olivia’s contemporary, to whom I recently showed these pages, has commented that while she thinks the general picture to be true, I have omitted the fun they had in youth: the house-parties, the lawn-tennis, the canoeing on the river, the blazing of paths in the woods and, above all, the unceasing laughter. That this was so at week-end parties I do not doubt, and when guests such as Elizabeth Lindsay (then Hoyt), Laura Chanler or Alice Longworth were in the house—but how difficult it is to catch the echoes of past laughter! And certainly, for all Olivia’s love of Westbrook, she could not deny (when I questioned her) the existence of the atmosphere I have described, though she never found it as oppressive as it seemed to Bronson and Justine (and, after his boyhood, I believe, also to my father).
It was from this world that all my grandparents’ children, except Olivia, escaped in turn, to carve out new, if widely different, paths for themselves. All four of them possessed inquiring, original minds, singularly intolerant (at least in youth) of any form of conventionality or stodginess, and almost morbidly afraid of seeming to possess anything (especially money) that made them different as they grew up from the new friends they made. Each of them very soon broke away from the family orbit, or at least discarded, in different ways, the manner of life of their parents. Not one of them took pleasure in luxury in itself, and they all found something faintly ridiculous, as well as distasteful, in the solemn rites connected with the possession of money, whether the visits of the family lawyer or of the manager of the family office, or the ceremonial visits to the bank to ‘cut off coupons’. Moreover Bronson and Olivia, in particular, felt an intense sense both of responsibility and discomfort at possessing a large private fortune. I remember my grandmother telling me that when, at the age of twenty-one, Bronson was told that he was about to receive his share of the family fortune, he at first bluntly refused to accept it and then—realising that this was impossible—shut himself up in his room for two days, in solitary gloom. Later on, however, according to his sister Justine, he became ‘very indifferent to money’ and, in New Mexico, spent almost all of it (except what was required for his political campaigns) on the poor people of the State, while his Will broke up his fortune into innumerable small legacies, mostly to people to whom the relatively small sums were of great value. Olivia too, when not living with her mother at Westbrook, arranged her life in New York for many years on a much more modest scale than her income would have allowed, and chose some of her friends, too, from an entirely different world than that of her youth. As for Justine, she wrote that, to her, money had been ‘simply a convenience. What I loathed was the stuffy, unreal type of existence it often produced.’ She was, however, a woman of great taste, and certainly she got much pleasure from the fine Chinese bronzes and vases and French tapestries which adorned her Washington house, as well as the excellent French wine and food that she offered to her guests—though the bulk of her fortune, together with her talent, energy and almost all her time were devoted to her method of teaching Gregorian Chant to children, which, as it developed and took root, became the main interest of her life.
Justine had been, from childhood, the arch-rebel, egging on her brother Bayard (the other two were much younger) to daring and defiance, laughing at all that seemed to her ‘stuffy’ in their upbringing, and demanding from her parents the only gift that they were not prepared to give her—freedom. Possessing great musical gifts, she passionately longed, at fifteen, to go to Europe to study music there, but this, in the New York of the 1890’s, was even more inconceivable than it would have been in the corresponding Victorian world in England. ‘Never let anyone know that you play the violin: it would wreck your career!’ was the advice given by the celebrated lawyer and Ambassador to England, Joseph Choate, to the promising young lawyer George Ward (whom Justine married later on)—and as for allowing a girl to take it up as her profession! Even the most cultivated and enlightened parent would have drawn back, as may be gathered from the following story, which Justine told me herself. One day, when she was still a schoolgirl and was practising on the drawing-room piano, the door opened and her mother brought in Edith Wharton, to show her a tapestry. Justine naturally stopped playing and stood up, but no-one addressed a word to her. As Mrs. Wharton was leaving, however, she turned to her husband and remarked in a loud voice, “Well, Teddy, it may be just as well that we never had any children. Just think, one of them might have been musical!”
It is curious, incidentally, that it should have been Edith Wharton to make this remark, for she herself had suffered, as a successful writer, from a very similar social ostracism. ‘My literary success’, she wrote in A Backward Glance, ‘puzzled and embarrassed my old friends far more than it impressed them, and in my family it created a kind of constraint which increased with the years … The subject was avoided as though it were a kind of family disgrace which might be condoned, but could not be forgotten.’ And music, indisputably, was still worse. “Having a child that was musical,” my aunt remarked to me, not without some retrospective bitterness, “was like having an epileptic in the family or a hunchback. My parents were to be pitied for their misfortune. The attitude changed towards the turn of the century, perhaps owing to more contact with the European point of view, but that came too late for me.”
In her later life, in the beautiful house on the outskirts of Washington which her brother Bronson had left her, Justine led a life wholly dedicated to her vocation, and almost entirely cut off from her family and from any conventional social life. She was married in 1901 to George Ward, and in 1904 she became converted to Catholicism. She did a good deal of writing on musical subjects, parti
cularly after Pope Pius X’s Encyclical on Sacred Music. It was then that her work caught the attention of a remarkable man, Dr. Thomas Shields, then head of the Education Department of the Catholic University in Washington, who encouraged her to prepare a most original and lively series of textbooks for teaching singing to children, but, when she came to Gregorian Chant, she realised that she needed further preparation herself, and started studying the subject under the great Benedictine musician Dom Mocquereau, first at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight and later on at Solesmes, spending half of the year in the little town of Sablé-sur-Sarthe, a few miles from the Abbey, and the other half teaching in Catholic schools in New York and Washington. Eventually her method spread to almost every Catholic country in Europe, as well as to South America and Canada. Once, for two days, I stayed with her in Sablé, in a serene little white house in a silent provincial street, to which life was brought only by the constant sound of the swift waters of the Sarthe just outside the window, and one morning she took me to the great Abbey to hear the Plain Chant of the Mass—a glimpse of a world of serene and austere perfection, of subtle and complex harmonies, such as I had never conceived. It was then that I realised how far she had travelled from the Westbrook lawns and the brownstone house in 72nd Street, and guessed at the strength of the impulse that was leading her to attempt, after a long period of arduous self-training, to transmit something of this tradition to the Catholic children for whom her method was intended, and who still, in over a hundred convent-schools in Belgium, France, and the United States, are being taught to sing by it. To her family she only came back, even after her return to America after the Second World War, for brief, fugitive visits: her life had taken on too different a pattern. In old age, as in youth, she retained the quick wit and strong will, as well as her passion for hard work, and much of the elegance and gaiety of her youth, and—together with a devoted friend, Agnes Lebreton—led for many years in her secluded house in Washington a life which was a remarkable mixture of austerity and luxury: two elegantly-dressed old ladies following an unswerving routine of early rising, work and prayer in a setting of Ming vases, ’Tang horses, Persian carpets, French cooking and French wines—cut off from the world, but not in the least unaware of it; free, self-sufficient, humorous and serene. Even now—though Agnes died three years ago and daily life has become lonely—Justine, at the age of ninety-two, has been teaching Gregorian Chant herself for a whole winter, in a teacher’s absence, to a class of children in Washington.
The life of her younger brother Bronson followed a very different course. In childhood a thin, serious, spectacled little boy, passionately addicted to the study of the classics and spending most of his holidays abroad in the British Museum or the Louvre, he promised to become a distinguished scholar, but distressed his elder brother in his boyhood at Groton, by his refusal to show an interest in any form of sport, or any attempt to be a ‘good mixer’. It would have been difficult to imagine then that that studious, silent, and introspective little boy would ever become a public figure in American politics, but a sudden haemorrhage during his last year at Harvard, brought about, as well as an interruption of his studies, a complete transformation of his personality. In the company of Justine—who seems to have felt that a removal from family life, quite as much as the dry air and sunshine of Arizona or New Mexico, were essential for his recovery—he set off for the West. “As we got off at a little station on the way to Santa Fe,” she has told me, “we noticed some Spanish peasants cooking on outside stoves, with the characteristic smell of burning pine and tortillas, and saw beyond them a little Spanish village, with a few Indians. Bronson, silent as usual, gave me a look which said, ‘This is our place.’”
It was, indeed, the beginning of an entirely new life for him, as remote, in its very different way, from his point of departure, as Justine’s at Sablé had been from hers. After a first year of outdoor life and rest, to recover his health, he had planned to join a group of archaeologists, but as soon as he began to see something of the life of Santa Fe, he developed an intense interest in local politics, identifying himself with the cause of the ‘under-dog’: the Spanish population of the State and the Indians who still survived in their reservations and villages. He built a house on the outskirts of the town, bought up a local paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican, chose for his friends a group of Spanish Americans and a wild Irish journalist, Brian Boru Dunne, used all his energy and influence to protect the interests of the Indians and to clean up the corruption of local politics, and eventually, at the age of forty, returned East as Republican Senator for New Mexico—a large, inscrutable, powerful politician, an ardent supporter of FDR’s New Deal, an opponent of prohibition, an expert on foreign affairs—as silent as the young man who had gone West some eighteen years before, but very much more formidable.
When I stayed with him in Santa Fe, I still found all the classics—Greek, and Latin, English, French and Italian—in his bookshelves, and sometimes, without a comment, he would hand me a new poem by Yeats, or, when no-one was about, would sit at the piano playing Bach. But in the company of his New Mexican friends, no trace of these interests was allowed to appear, partly no doubt from a natural distaste for what he would have considered a form of showing-off, but especially owing to the feeling which Justine has described as ‘indignation at any form of inequality between human beings, including inequality of education or opportunity’. Today it would be called a repudiation of privilege.
‘I remember’, Justine once wrote to me, ‘an occasion when I was sitting talking with ten or twelve of Bronson’s men friends in Santa Fe. They were discussing a subject with which Bronson was thoroughly familiar, and he knew the answer to what was puzzling them, but he never opened his lips. Afterwards, I asked him:
“Why didn’t you tell them, since you knew?”
“Why should I? They had a right to their own opinions.”’ And she commented: “I have never heard Bronson use his superior knowledge to put anybody on the right track. It seemed to me that he felt that his superior education was an unfair advantage; the fact that he could speak several languages, another unfair advantage; the fact that he could live in a comfortable house when others could not do so, another unfair advantage.”
The degree to which this sense of injustice weighed upon him is shown in another story. One day, after he had returned to Westbrook from New Mexico for a visit to his mother, they were walking together down one of the well-tended paths of the arboretum and passed one of the workmen who had been employed on the place for some forty years. My grandmother said a pleasant word to him, but Bronson pointedly looked the other way. “Don’t you remember Louis, Bronson? Why didn’t you speak to him?”
“I was ashamed to.”
“Ashamed of what?”
“Ashamed to think that a man’s whole life should have been spent in tidying paths for us to walk on.”
Bronson was the only member of his generation in our family to achieve success, in terms of public service—but at the cost of an outer transformation and an inner solitude at which one could only guess. He shared with Justine, as well as a love of music, a keen delight in the ridiculous, the grotesque, which would cause his large immobile face to expand into a slow irresistible smile; but it was only in the company of a very few people that he allowed this to occur. During his visits to us in Italy (for he came to Europe every year, and was better acquainted with European politics and ways of thought than any American I have ever known) he would drop some of his armour; and with my son Gianni, with whom he clearly felt a real affinity, he would hold long conversations on the Westbrook piazza—both the small boy and the large man entirely absorbed, happy and at ease. But after Gianni’s death he wrote to me that, though sympathising with my grief, he could himself only rejoice that the child had not lived to grow up, since he could not bear to contemplate the suffering that would have lain before him—a remark which I felt to be a sufficient comment on the writer’s own ‘successful’ life.
I
n 1935 he said to Justine that he was convinced that there was no place in America left for a man of his type.
“Then why do you plan to campaign for another year in the Senate?”
“Because I can’t let go, on account of the men who count on my support. I can’t let them down.”
Less than a year later, before he had been able to accomplish most of the public work he had planned, he died in an air crash on a flight back to Washington.
By then—since my grandfather, too, had died in 1912—only my grandmother and Olivia were left at home. Olivia, after a girlhood saddened by her father’s and brother’s death and by several years of ill-health, had made a marriage that had not been happy, and after its ending, had come back to Westbrook. It was there (except for a few winter months in New York) that she lived until her mother’s death, running the dairy-farm and managing the estate, planning her mother’s walks and rests (not without some occasional protests from her extremely active patient). She alone, owing to her deep attachment to Westbrook and her protective love for her mother, remained within the family orbit—but not without cost. She was a woman of great potential ability, of a singularly clear mind and judgement; she possessed a fine and discerning taste, she was immensely and sensitively generous; she performed valuable service in the First World War selecting personnel for the American Red Cross Overseas; she possessed, besides, a very deep (if carefully concealed) need for tenderness and affection. In her later years she seemed to me in the position of a person who has a dollar to give but of whom only change for a quarter is required. So she filled each hour of the day with self-appointed tasks, working on the boards of a few excellent charities, playing an active and constructive part in the activities of the Foreign Policy Association (which was then trying to educate American public opinion to a better knowledge of European affairs), giving support and help to a great many more people than anyone knew, walking about the house with little lists, sleeping badly, worrying about the welfare and daily routine of everyone she loved. Reticent, critical, unself-confident and generous, she had not found full scope for her qualities of either mind or heart; but in the last few years of her life—thanks to the companionship of a wise, cheerful and understanding friend, Nathalie Hopper, and to her own deep inner religious life—she achieved a certain serenity in accepting even this.
