MAUDE PHELPS McVEIGH HUTCHINS (1899–1991) was born in New York City. Her mother came from an old New England family, and her father was an editor at the New York Sun. Orphaned at a young age, Maude and her sister were raised by their aunt, a prominent member of Long Island society. Maude attended a finishing school, and soon after graduating became engaged to Robert Maynard Hutchins, who, at the age of thirty, would leave his post as the dean of the Yale Law School to become president of the University of Chicago. Maude Hutchins studied painting and sculpture at Yale, participated in exhibitions at major museums and galleries, and collaborated with Mortimer Adler on a collection of “psychological drawings” and poems entitled Diagrammatics. In 1948, after the collapse of her marriage, she moved with two of her three daughters to Connecticut and took up writing, publishing nine novels, as well as short stories, plays, and poems, over the next twenty years. Her books include A Diary of Love, The Memoirs of Maisie, and Honey on the Moon. Maude Hutchins was also an accomplished amateur pilot who made a number of cross-country trips in her small plane.
TERRY CASTLE has published eight books of literary and cultural criticism including Masquerade and Civilization, The Apparitional Lesbian, and the prize-winning collection The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall. She writes frequently for the London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Times Literary Supplement. In 1997 she was named Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.
VICTORINE
MAUDE HUTCHINS
Introduction by
TERRY CASTLE
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
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Introduction copyright © 2008 by Terry Castle
All rights reserved.
First published in the United States by Alan Swallow Press, 1959
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hutchins, Maude, 1899–1991.
Victorine / by Maude Hutchins ; introduction by Terry Castle.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-270-4 (alk. paper)
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Problem families—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3515.U8457V53 2008
813'.54—dc22
2008002812
ISBN 978-1-59017-249-5
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
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CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
VICTORINE
I. THE MYTH OF CHILDHOOD
II. THE HIRED MAN’S HIDE-OUT
III. DADDY’S YOUTHFUL INDISCRETION
IV. ALLISON’S INTUITION
V. THE HOLY BUM
VI. “CONTINUED”
VII. DEAREST COSTELLO
VIII. THE GLAMOROUS TOMBOY
IX. HOMER SPEAKS
X. OLD SADIE LOVEJOY
XI. FOOL FRED
XII. THE LOVERS
XIII. THE AFFAIR AT THE TENNIS COURT
XIV. MAGDA SMITH
XV. THE LITTLE MISSIVE
XVI. HOMER’S JUMP
XVII. WHAT ABOUT MILLIE?
XVIII. SPRING
INTRODUCTION
Leaf through old New York Times reviews of the novels of Maude Hutchins—from the 1950s and early 1960s especially, when her literary reputation was at its height—and one is instantly struck by it: the old-maid-like embarrassment she aroused in her critics. Not one of them could get through an essay about her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. “Maude Hutchins,” wrote James Kelly in 1955, does “as she pleases” as a novelist and “to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.” Hutchins, said Maxwell Geismar, was a writer who went about “describing casually all the ‘taboo’ subjects that are perhaps better repressed.” “A career of this kind,” wrote Stanley Kauffmann in 1964, “that takes sexual and other sensory pleasures so seriously, is unusual”—
Many novelists pass through such a period, but there comes a time when “then they went to bed” suffices; or when the bed is to society what war was to von Clausewitz, a continuation of politics by other means. To remain as interested intrinsically in sex as Colette was all her life long, and as Mrs. Hutchins continues to be, requires an almost monastic single-mindedness.
George Saintsbury couldn’t have said it better.
Now some of the coquettishness here—s-e-x, et cetera—is simply that of the time and place: Boring Old America Before the Sixties. As late as 1964, as the nervous joking reminds us, many of those unbuttoned attitudes we now associate with the “Sexual Revolution” of the second half of the twentieth century had yet to infiltrate the world of American letters very fully. Premarital sex and birth control remained inflammatory subjects. Homosexuality and masturbation were largely unmentionable. Mildly explicit works of art could be banned for obscenity (and were). Nude scenes were proscribed in films and on television. It is true that in the literary realm a number of influential mavericks—from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, and the Beats—had been chipping away for some time at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ill-starred career, Maude Hutchins 1899–1991) seems to have provoked more than her share of misogynist sex-baiting and condescension.
Yet in some uneasy degree one may also sympathize with Hutchins’s first critics. As readers new to her will discover, there is something peculiar about the novelist’s erotic preoccupations, her almost queasy-making interest in the sensations of embodiment. Witness the first paragraphs of Victorine (1959)—the best of the nine (now mostly forgotten) novels Hutchins published between 1948 and 1967. The book opens with Hutchins’s heroine, the twelve-year-old Victorine, on her way to church:
Victorine felt a lovely thrill in her very bones, a sweet taste in her mouth and along the edges of her teeth, and her thighs felt soft and warm and pneumatic to the touch of her palms, even through her gloves, as she walked to church alone. “Please, oh, please, oh, please, I want to go alone,” and They had let her.
“They” are Victorine’s oddly named parents, Homer and Allison L’Hommedieu—upper-middle-class denizens of a staid New England village. (As official family changeling Victorine will ignore them for much of the novel, even as her older brother, Costello—shy and broody and horny, “as if there were milk in him”—struggles, rather more defiantly, to escape the banality they represent.) During the church service itself, after Victorine sucks down a “big swallow” of communion wine—avidly pulling the cup to her mouth before the startled clergyman, the Reverend Fulton-Peate, can even tilt it toward her—she feels “the colour hit her cheeks and her insides respond to Jesus’ blood at the same time. She felt it like a hot thread exploring her intestines.” Yikes. No wonder the pale reverend recoils.
It’s all a bit hysterical, of course, like Victorine herself. (She is on the visionary cusp of puberty and desperately trying to avoid growing up.) Yet at the same time it is hard not to feel—however obscurely—the inward sensations described here. The language itself acts as a weird kinesthetic prompt. As the novel unfolds—delicately alternating between Victorine’s regressive daydreams and the very real sentimental education of Costello—this flagrant appeal to the reader’s own
body-world will be both incessant and disquieting. To read Hutchins with any pleasure, and this is both the good news and the bad news, one must be willing to be aroused, if not embarrassed, by her sensual provocations. The embarrassment is part of the plan: it means that you’re alive.
Why this urge to tickle and flutter? (Even Nature is prurient in Hutchins: walking home in the “fresh November air,” Victorine imagines the trees by the roadside experiencing, like sentient beings, that “thousand-felt loss, the pinprick severance of uncountable leaves causing tiny lesions and abrasions, a strange inevitable infinite mutilation, pleasurable perhaps, like a passionate itch.”) The Hutchins backstory, a baleful one, sheds some light here, on both the vicissitudes of the career and the frank titillations of style. Like other taboo-breaking writers—D. H. Lawrence and Sylvia Plath come to mind—Hutchins seems to have written for some fairly unpleasant emotional reasons, and the wish to mortify her nearest and dearest was no doubt among them. Such difficult wishing—let’s really wind them up—may be far more deeply implicated in artistic creation than is often acknowledged. Hutchins was difficult from the start—proud, incorrigible, intransigent, and wedded to revenge.
But against whom exactly? Born in 1899 into an old and genteel New York family—her father was Warren McVeigh, an editor at the New York Sun, and her mother one of the Phelpses of Long Island—Hutchins was orphaned at an early age and raised by a grandfather and wealthy aunt. Like the skittish Victorine, she seems to have been lonely and fantastical from the outset. She was also ambitious, highly intelligent, and to judge by photos, strikingly attractive. Art was her first emotional outlet: she began sculpting in her teens and later earned a degree from the Yale School of Fine Arts. In 1925 she received first prize in a competition sponsored by the Beaux Arts Institute of Design for a daring draped male nude figure entitled Disarmament.
Over subsequent decades she would work hard—though never with great success—at being a visual artist. She had solo shows in New York and Chicago, carved portrait busts, and had a book of Beardsleyesque silver-point nudes published in 1932. (The latter, a vanity production called Diagrammatics, was a collaboration with the University of Chicago philosophy professor Mortimer Adler, who contributed Gertrude Stein-like nonsense “poems” to accompany Hutchins’s drawings.) But one also gets the sense that none of it added up to much. While scattered references to her can still be found in old art directories—Who’s Who in American Sculpture and the like—Hutchins never received, it is safe to say, either the praise she thought she deserved or recognition enough to relieve her increasingly urgent psychic needs.
Nor are the reasons far to seek. From 1921 to 1948—nearly the entire first half of her adult life—Hutchins found herself up-staged, maddeningly enough, by an authentic Boy Wonder. The same year she began her college art studies Maude Phelps McVeigh married the precocious, prodigious, “collar-ad handsome” Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977), a brilliant young teacher and law student who became secretary to the Yale Corporation in 1925 at the astonishing age of twenty-six. In 1928, soon after receiving his law degree and a professorship, Hutchins was made dean of the Law School—the youngest in Yale history. But that was hardly the end of it. The next year, at the age of thirty, he was made president of the University of Chicago—the youngest ever in its history. (When he and Maude arrived in Hyde Park in 1929, the news was reported—literally—around the globe.) Hutchins presided over the university for the next two decades, establishing himself in the process as one of the pioneering figures in twentieth-century American higher education. At the height of his prestige, in the later thirties, the phenomenal “Bob” Hutchins was not only regarded as an obvious candidate for the Supreme Court, his most ardent admirers urged him to run for president of the United States.
Neither prospect materialized, however, in part because of the protracted (and ultimately public) collapse of the Hutchinses’ marriage. For all the glamour they exuded—the young Bob and Maude were as tall and beautiful, everyone said, as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald—their twenty-seven-year marriage was a union made in hell: the full-bore, martini-sloshing WASP nightmare. Hutchins’s biographers—worshipful to a man—place most of the responsibility on the high-strung Maude. She had no interest in the “parochial stuffiness” of academia, says one, and refused to entertain university dignitaries. Whenever “poor Bob” had to attend a presidential function, says another, Maude would throw a “window-rattling tantrum” and threaten to “blow the roof off.” She was “extravagant,” “selfish,” and “constitutionally uninterested in most of mankind.” She doted on her Great Dane, Hamlet, but “never” took her own young children out for a walk. (She and Hutchins eventually had three daughters and it’s true—they were mostly shunted off to nannies.) She invited undergraduates, male and female, to model for her in the nude. One of her most embarrassing freaks—or so the story goes—was to send Christmas cards to all the Chicago faculty and trustees featuring a drawing of the Hutchinses’ eleven-year-old daughter, Franja, likewise nude and in an alarmingly suggestive pose. Reports of even wilder misdeeds crossed the Atlantic: In 1934, Gertrude Stein received a letter from her French friend Bernard Faÿ, then visiting the Midwest, in which he described meeting one of Alice Toklas’s oldest friends, the alluring Bobsy Goodspeed: “a good-looking, silly-clever Evanston lady, wife of the foremost trustee and lover of the wife of the president of the University of Chicago.” If the description of Bobsy is accurate, the liaison would have been a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was President of the Arts Club of Chicago, and her husband Charles Goodspeed, the trustee in question, a son of the founder of the University.
Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 essay, tellingly entitled “The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder,” Joseph Epstein, an undergraduate at Chicago in the Hutchins era, compared her both to Zelda Fitzgerald and to T. S. Eliot’s schizophrenic first wife, Vivian. “[Maude] wasn’t meant to be a school-teacher’s wife,” wrote Milton Mayer in 1993; “perhaps she wasn’t meant to be anyone’s wife.” The gentlemanly Hutchins, he concludes, was forced to spend nearly thirty years in an “isolated hell,” struggling gamely to “keep Maude quiet,” sometimes by pressing colleagues and subordinates to commission expensive portrait busts from her:
None of the yielding could have done any good, and none of it did, however scandalous the lengths to which he carried it. None of those lengths was more scandalous than the one that involved a half-dozen carefully spotted friends who he knew would do anything for him within—or without—reason, and to whom he could go unblushingly. A few months after I went to work in the president’s office I discovered, to my fiscal horror, that I had been admitted to this shameful circle. He was willing to employ his silent, shrieking agony not only to duck engagements, not only to generate a generalized sympathy (“poor Bob”), but to get his hands on money to keep his wife “quiet”—as if Maude Hutchins were in want of repeated sedation and solicitousness.
As “poor Bob” himself later wrote to his friend Thornton Wilder, “we had to watch every word because we couldn’t tell what would set my then wife afire.”
One would of course like to know Maude’s side of the story. The biographies of her husband are at present the only substantial sources of information about her. Female self-assertion was not especially prized in the claustrophobic academic world of the 1930s and 1940s—least of all when conjoined with unladylike frankness. Might the harridan-Maude of the memoirs, one wonders, be seen in a more sympathetic light—as a troubled yet gifted woman, neglected by her husband and eager for attention? Though difficult to live with, her furies seem to have coexisted with a certain majesty and verve. (Later in life she learned to pilot her own plane and made several solo flights around the country.) Alas, like Torvald in A Doll’s House, the punctilious Bob seems to have been ill-equipped to deal with her. Robert Maynard Hutchins, says one writer, was “infinitely polite” to women but the politeness masked “deep-seated s
corn.” His emotional focus was entirely on other men, from whom he elicited intense admiration. As one protégé put it, “Bob has made homosexuals of us all.”
This Ibsenesque misery came to an end—finally—when Bob Hutchins moved abruptly into a Chicago hotel one night in 1948. Maude never saw him again. She was forced to sue for divorce on the grounds of desertion, and though she received a hefty alimony settlement, her mortification was intense. (Every sordid detail of the payout was reported in The New York Times.) Within the year her ex-husband married his secretary—a docile young lady named Vesta, twenty years his junior, who seemed happy to play the role of conventional academic consort. The troubled Maude, meanwhile, retreated with her two younger daughters to Southport, Connecticut, where she would spend the rest of her life in relative obscurity. Thirty years later, after Hutchins had died, she refused to comment on him, saying “it was all still too painful.” In 1991 she died in turn, virtually forgotten.
Such private ordeals no doubt prompted in some degree Maude Hutchins’s sudden turn toward prose fiction. She had already published a few “experimental” poems and plays in the 1930s and 1940s—James Laughlin included several in his early New Directions anthologies—but it was the defection of the Boy Wonder that seems to have changed her, almost overnight, from dabbler in the avant-garde to serious writer. Her first novel, Georgiana, appeared in 1948, the year her marriage fell apart, and was quickly followed by A Diary of Love (1950), Love Is a Pie (1952), My Hero (1953), The Memoirs of Maisie (1955), Victorine (1959), The Elevator (1962), Honey on the Moon (1964), Blood on the Doves (1965), and The Unbelievers Downstairs (1967). She published stories and poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and other popular magazines, and collected some of her short fiction in The Elevator.
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