Chapter 4: The Young Man
So far, nothing has been said about an interest in the opposite sex, but its members were beginning to play a part in Holty’s life, certainly in his fantasy life:
The chosen career (or profession) is not the only decisive factor in the life of an adolescent. At that age the heightened appeal of the opposite sex with the desire and romantic dreams it inspires, can well turn the head for quite awhile and sometimes for good. In my case this drive to live and to enjoy propelled me into another sort of dream world, one filled with fantasies of the future from then to the very end of life. There was not one dream but many or, if one will, many variations of the same dream. This dream encompassed love, marriage, begetting and having children, aging comfortably, living well, and of course success in all ventures.
I saw myself walking down church aisles or standing with my bride under magnolia trees. My fantasy pictured an outdoor wedding and the bride was any one of a long succession of dishwater blondes. In those painful years all beautiful girls were blonde haired, blue eyed, and were either lissome or better yet pleasingly plump. The growing style worship of the flat-chester almost boyish type girl that became ever more popular with my contemporaries did not alter my dreams. Beginning then with the bride I continued, in imagination only, to proceed through life itself in a dream world, vapid and unreal. . . .
The longer this state of mind prevails the more one escapes from reality and effort. Others than myself knew this malady of artistic youth and survived. Some, in looking backwards, regret the waste. Wiser and richer personalities will admit that they gained an indefinable something in his shadow life and later put it to good use. Who knows the cause of this derailment? Perhaps it is because one wants well knowing what there occurs in “empty” hours, days, and years. Perhaps it is a period when the personality requires a respite from the factual, or is being tested for affinity with a greater reality. I experienced this waiting period, but whether it was necessary, or due to self indulgence and pleasure seeking and craving for rewards undeserved, that I do not know. It matters not now. I was 19 at the time and all of 23 when it ended on a late spring morning. (IV, 11-12)
My social life while at Art School was a delight. We were the first of the dancing generations. We danced at lunchtime, after school, and in the evenings, in public, or at someone’s house. All we required was a few square yards of flooring and a piano player with a four chord base. If one was lacking there was always the phonograph and that sufficed. We danced in the gymnasium at school dances, every Friday afternoon and we attended subscription dances Friday and Saturday evenings.
Until the Middle of World War I dancing was restricted to social functions. There were society balls and the annual popular dances of what in Europe would have been called the Guilds. There was the butcher’s hall, the brewers’ ball and other such. There were also dances given by private clubs and of course one dance everywhere on New Year’s Eve.
During the war, New York and later other big city hotels ushered in the dansant, a French import and couples danced in Hotel Grillrooms at lunch and tea time. Dancing schools had been time-honored institutions, but in New York, Vernon and Irene Castle created a stir by giving lessons in modern dancing. The Bunny Hug, the Turkey trot, and the Two Step displaced the older Ballroom styles and of these, only the waltz survived.
The important thing was that dancing had been liberated by the dansant sessions and was henceforth divorced from the rigid confinements of traditional social functions. So we danced with the girls we thought we loved and we took other girls out to the public dances because they were good dancers or danced particularly well with us. Professional dance, or as we called them, “Jazz” bands sprung up all over the country and played at roadhouses in the suburbs of the city and schoolboy orchestras mushroomed and furnished the music for our “subscription” dances and the tired three-piece dance bands that had furnished the music for house dances disappeared. The Dixieland musicians from New Orleans and Memphis moved north to Chicago and Kansas City and the first Hip generation found its crystallization and I enjoyed every hour of life.
The summer and early autumn we spent our evenings at some far away beach on Lake Michigan, rarely alone with the girls of our hearts but in groups of young people who knew how and when to rejoice in concert and when to respect the romantic privacy of couples whose need for a hug or a kiss caused them to saunter away from the group.
Perhaps the prevailing double standard of morality of the time, hardly an attitude worthy of praise, was responsible for a certain innocence in our conduct. It certainly sounds smug now to say that we were all “nice” people and knew when to set bounds and limits to our natural impulses, but we did.
It had been decided that I was to go to New York to study in 1920. The family raised no objections to my happy-go-lucky existence those last years at home, regarding it as a sort of last vacation before going out into the serious world of study where I was supposed to face reality as a student and as a budding professional.
Early in the summer of 1920 my grandparents took me to New York for a week’s visit. My grandfather had a purchasing office on lower Broadway and this was his semi-annual business visit to the Big City. Business was combined with the social activity of introducing me to friends of the family and showing me around so that I would get a foretaste of my new surroundings.
My grandparents had social engagements of their own and I was given five dollars each day to buy myself a theater ticket for the evenings when they were busy and my youth disqualified me as their companion.
We stayed at the Hotel Astor which was my grandfather’s favorite hotel. On the first evening we went to the theater together and saw a musical comedy called “Irene.” I promptly fell in love with the very young leading lady, Pattie Johnson, and on the following evenings when I was on my own, I went to see “Irene” again and again. I never bought a ticket to any other play and was content to sit there and look at that week’s girl-of-my-dream.
I went to the Metropolitan Museum and down to Washington Square on those very hot summer days, walking as though I trod on hallowed ground. I remember my heels sinking into the heat-softened asphalt decks of buses hoping to be taken for a native by the other passengers. I remember the smell of the exhaust fumes that were so characteristic of New York City. I was to be in love with New York City for the next few years, but only after the loneliness of my first months in residence had passed.
We returned to Milwaukee and I replaced my luggage and set out from Chicago via the Graham Morton Boat Line for Saugatuck, Michigan and summer art school. {IV, 29-30)
The summer at Saugatuck was to expose me to quite a number of new experiences. For the first time I was to know what it was like to live among complete strangers. Many of these came from entirely different backgrounds and I was to find people who disliked me for no other reason than that we were strangers in every way. Out of touch with my family, I missed hearing and speaking German and English as we had used the language most akin to the thought of the moment. Having used both languages interchangeably, I now sensed an inexplicable partial loss in all conversation, and I once walked for miles down the beach to where I had heard a German speaking Chicago artist was living, just to talk with him. For the first time in my life I was to fall in love with a brunette and to know the pangs and pains of jealousy and the sweet and inescapable suffering and longing of an on again, off again love affair. Because of my unhappy feelings, I walked around with a long face and I made of myself the ridiculous figure of a love-sick, moon calf for the first but alas, not the last time in my life. I was to learn that these bruises to my soul or my ego, could be turned to good account in painting. The metamorphosis, however, was painful as I suffered through that sweet, sad summer of 1920. (IV, 31)
It was a better summer than I thought it was. Other summers like it, or even better, that I was sure would follow never came. Had I been more aware of the future, I think I might have been more grateful for what was given me—the moonlit nights sitting with friends on the sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan, listening to the stories so well told by some of the older artists, seeing the love in the faces of others gathered about campfires, feeling the sweat run down my back in the hot mornings while painting and the soothing cool water of the midday swim. All this was mine, and I was unhappy because everything wasn’t perfect. I had no idea what loneliness was in store for me in the coming year or I too might have said “Verweile doch du bist so schon.”
In New York I lived with the Lenzes. Professor Lenz was a language teacher in the high schools of New York City. His wife, a very pleasant woman, had a thoroughly non-materialistic approach to life. I accepted the role of older brother to their son, a boy about eight years my junior, which meant that he still wore short pants and went to public school. I was to have the two front rooms for the first half of that year, because my colleague, Armin Hansen was to join me in the Spring. Then we were to have one room apiece.
The apartment was a typical railroad flat, not in very good condition. We had gas lamps. Outside light was on the two extremes of the apartment, that is, in my “sitting room” and in Professor Lenz’s room which faced a back court. The only other daylight we had was that of a half court in the middle of the apartment where the dining room was located. That dining room was our club and it was really very gemuetlich.
My hosts, because I never could think of them as landlords, lived a very modest existence. The family was burdened with all kinds of obligations so that the ample salary of Professor Lenz, or I should say salaries, because he taught in both day and night schools, were exhausted without the breadwinner having a chance of using them for luxuries of any kind.
Mr. and Mrs. George Lenz were old friends of my family, who before World War I had lived in Milwaukee. It was my father’s idea that it would- be better for me to be eased into the great stream of the New York world gradually. He was quite aware of the fact that I had been babied too much at home. He felt that a little supervision by reliable and congenial people would be better than abruptly cutting all family-type world I had known. He was right. It was pleasant to live with these people whose thinking was parallel to mine and who, at the same time, were removed from the immediate circle of my family and erstwhile intimates. (IV, 35)
Holty’s first year in New York City was spent in rather aimless pursuits. The Art Students League, where he presented himself without prior notification, had no vacancies. He found his way into a course on dynamic symmetry that he was told, and believed at the time, was “the golden key that would unlock all the secrets of· craft and art.” (IV, 36) Then, he discovered that the National Academy had a free school open to any student who could pass an entrance examination in portrait painting. Holty hired a well-known, elderly male model as his subject and brought him into the Lenz house to pose for him; the resulting portrait won the young artist a place in the Academy school, although it took considerable trouble for the Lenzes to get rid of the bed bugs introduced into their home by the model. Holty learned more at the school from his fellow students than the instructor’s criticisms, which were offered only on a weekly basis. Even though the school provided models, he decided after about a year and a half to get his own studio and to work independently. This meant leaving the Lenz family (although he still visited them frequently) and moving to his own place on 8th Street. The move was a step toward adulthood, but growing up also brought with it an unwanted loss of innocence.
When I exchanged the comforts of my grandparents’ house to live with the Lenz family in that ill smelling tenement I had the sensation of having gone from riches to rags. I got used to it, and when I finally installed myself in the comfortable studio attached to which there was a small bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom of my own, I felt the losses and gains had leveled off. But I had lost something after that Saugatuck summer. I could no longer fall in love. I had fallen in love year after year from my childhood on, but now I seemed to have lost the capacity for this and I felt it keenly. Life had lost a savor and a glamour but try as I would to talk myself into amorous feelings, I failed dismally to recapture that loveliest bit of my yesteryears. (IV, 40)
Holty was growing in his realization of art (even though his aims had somewhat diminished) and of the larger world of the arts and society he had come into:
I do not know, even now, just what I expected to find in New York in the three years I spent there. I imagine that my immediate aim was to pursue my art studies in a methodical way much as I had begun them but under better masters.
It was the aim of every art student then to attain as rapidly as possible the status of a professional and to put behind him the grinding work years of the apprentice.
I came closest to such an accomplishment in the year and a half that I worked at the Academy, and might have done better had I spent all of my three years there. But we were terribly crowded in the school studios and a studio of my own, with room enough and privacy was too great a temptation, and I made the premature move towards independence.
My aim in painting was to perfect a style of decoration like that of the Viennese and Munich artists of the “Secession” movement whose works I had studied in reproduction when I was only 16 years of age. My objectives as such were not opposed by the older artists and teachers of my acquaintance. They may have had some doubts about the hasty way in which I went about my work but I gave off such an air of self-assurance that older and wiser persons felt it best to let me work out my own destiny without interference. (IV, 38)
The Art World of New York at that time had no real shape and consisted of divergent groups having little in common with each other. Years later my somewhat older colleague, Stuart Davis, told me that the famous Armory Show of 1913 had had a profound and stimulating effect on the young men of his generation, but that a commercial camarilla of Art dealers and a reactionary group of museum directors and critics stifled the movement that might have become the springtime of modern art in America while it was still in the bud. I did not meet Stuart Davis, seven years my senior, at that time though I might have done so for we both frequented Romany Marie’s Cafe on Christopher Street. I did not get to know Mark Tobey, another habitue of the place either and we met for the first time twenty-five years later. The Romany Marie people, if I may call them that, whom I did know, I met at a far more prosaic place—in the National Bakery and Restaurant on 6th Avenue above 9th Street where I took most of my meals. There I got to know Edgar Varese, Howard Scott, and Hans Stengel, the caricaturist, and it was at their tables at Romany Marie’s that I found my place.
Personally, I did not miss the modern movement in Art and cared little that it had been discouraged. The handful of its devotees that I did get to know repelled me by their attitude of aloofness and superiority. I was not intrigued by the air of mystery with which they clothed their efforts and I avoided their company where I could. The explanations of what the great movement was all about only convinced me that I had better steer shy of its mystique. Four years later, I was to think differently about Modern Art but I was won over to it by arguments very different from those I refused to swallow at the tea gatherings of the initiated in New York.
There was nothing very new and revolutionary about anything in the New York I knew shortly after the war. Certainly the theater was as much a matter of show business then as it is now though I had not yet been so successfully organized for greater gains and fewer losses. The average “serious” play presented was a shallow piece of entertainment, usually having the marriage or love triangle as its subject. The comedies consisted of the play doctor’s arrangement of witty lines, mostly appropos of nothing. The musical shows were better. There were good tunesmiths at work, the girls were pretty and the costumes were tasteful and fresh unlike those of the European musical reviews where one had to overlook the rather tawdry and shabby habits of even the principals, not to speak of the choruses.
There were exceptions in this state of the theater. The Theatre Guild presented interesting plays and while the Guild sought the solvency it ultimately attained, it did not direct its efforts to the box office alone. Indeed, as long as the Guild plays were presented at the old Garrick Theater with only five or six hundred seats, no profit was possible. Only when the managers moved a successful play like R.U.R into a larger house in the Times Square area did the Guild backers begin to get a return on their investment. And there were the Provincetown Players down on McDougall Street who came up with a new playwright, Mr. Eugene O’Neill. Young America thrilled to this new realist. I, who knew Ibsen only too well from the performances at the old German Theater in Milwaukee, cared less for what seemed to me to be a warmed-over version of the gloomy Norwegian. I was probably unjust in my criticism of O’Neill and also of Elmer Rice, the playwright so favored by the Theater Guild. I understand now that there was a necessity for that kind of theater, if only as a counter irritant to the sentimental slush of David Belasco’ s presentations and the nostalgic atmosphere of such plays as “Romance.”
I was interested in the new writers and bought and enjoyed the books of Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather, but I was also enchanted by the naughty books of James Branch Cabell, who purveyed a washed out version of Anatole France. Cabell had a way of referring archly to sex encounters in a sort of mythological gobbledegook, my generation found both subtle and entrancing. Sex and four letter words, always popular, but never much spoken of or mentioned in public in America, now proceeded to break the sound barrier. How thrilled we were at the profanity of the soldier talk in the play “What Price Glory” and Jeanne Eagles calling the missionary minister a “Psalm singing Son of a Bitch” in Maugham’s play “Rain.”
In general the semi-social life of New York featured charm. The Greenwich Village tea rooms with their candlelight blue, yellow and brown dishware exuded charm, as did the new night clubs that mushroomed then. Prohibition interfered somewhat with the selling of hard liquor especially in the early years when the government agent actually tried to enforce the law on the retail level, but this affected my generation little. We grew up in the pre-Volstead era but had not been old enough to participate and so we didn’t much miss what we didn’t really know and women who had not yet become accustomed to hard liquor were readily contented with the soft drinks, ice cream and coffee served them when we were out on dates.
Along with others I succumbed happily to the charm, the entertainment, and all the diversions available to my young pleasure-seeking self. I sought enjoyment and had no longing for reform or exotic adventure, and I recall that I made but one gesture of revolt against my background. When I first moved to my own apartment, I ate the same dish, baked haddock and boiled potatoes, every evening for almost one whole winter. I had long felt that my family lavished far too much love and affection on the meals, prepared, planned, eaten, and discussed and this was my personal protest. I never told anyone about it. It was all strictly between me and myself. Despite a healthy animal nature and a rejoicing in all agreeable sensations, I did yearn for higher things and deplored an outright concentration on material values so it seems, I had a soul after all.
I not only had a soul, I also had a considerable capacity for hero worship. While I never stood in the neck-craning crowd on a curbstone waiting for an actor or film star to walk by, I enjoyed the feeling that I lived near and among so many people of distinction. I sometimes promenaded past the houses, where I knew certain artists lived and I recall the thrill of seeing Joseph Conrad standing before the Public Library as I walked past him. He stood there in a brown box overcoat and a black bowler hat just looking at the passing world, immobile as a cigar store Indian. One day when I met my uncle for lunch at the Biltmore Hotel, I saw Gilbert Chesterton, a rosy-cheeked behemoth of a man, studying a telegram he held like a cigarette paper in his huge hand. I had read, only the day before, in a newspaper interview what he had to say of Times Square with all its glittering electric signs. “That a man might think he was in Paradise—if he couldn’t read.” I loved walking in that “Paradise” myself often going out of my way to pass through it of an evening and I didn’t try to read. I believe that I enjoyed a real love affair with the “Magical” City for a time and that I found, at least temporarily the Home of the Homeless was my Home too. . . .
On a Spring morning in 1923 I was overwhelmed by the realization of artistic failure. There had been no previous warning for I had no premonition· of a crack-up in the preceding days or weeks. The defeat was not due to any lack of encouragement from others. Only a few days earlier I had asked a well known mural painter who lived in the Mews behind [the Lenz] house on West 8th Street to help me solve, what appeared to be baffling problems in a larqe canvas. Instead of criticism, I received his unqualified praise.
The new sensation of emptiness was not painful, but as the days went by, my feelings of exile from yesterday’s world of creativity reached the panic stage and I was sure that passersby on the street could tell from the look on my face that I had joined the legion of the lost.
I did not then realize that despite the intensity of my suffering, I was not alone in this experience and that it was almost universal, and shared at one time or another by all those who aspire to be artists.
The process of creativity has its own duality. There must be a reservoir of energies that provide the driving power for creativity. The artistic or creative process begins with these, not with the individual moment of inspiration. The energies are general, but the drive to create is directed towards narrower objectives. The pursuit of these objectives leads inevitably to a crystallization. Only renewed energies can break the crystallization and regenerate the creative process.
Contrary to modern folklore that artist does not spring full grown from the brow of Jove, but perhaps part of him does and the first store of energy is inherent in his personality. It is, one might say, a donative from life itself. It has many names. Some call it spontaneity, others call it talent.
How far the beginner can go or how long he can nourish his efforts on the gifts he brings into the world with him, one cannot say, as this is a matter of personality, and the measure or scope of his heritage.
The store of used up energies must be replenished but it is futile to try and find these energies at the original source. One can and must be reborn but one cannot be born again.
New energies must be drawn from life itself or better said perhaps from living, from an exposure to impressions, from a love and a generous admiration of the works of others for the great artist becomes such, as a filter of the life that passes through him. He was that from the beginning but probably wasn’t aware of it. To inherit from those who went before him, he must earn his inheritance, paying as he goes and willing to lose what he has attained to find a greater truth.
In the end this is an act of character. To destroy his past daily, to forget his achievements, to grow, he must become a Hero, for this is an heroic act.
Only the accumulation of new wealth will lift the bankruptcy and through all the artist’s years he must relive this agonizing transformation again and again.
The first snow of an artist’s many winters is the most bitter and the coldest. will never come again. To him it will seem that Spring will never come again. To many it will not. Those who weather this difficult period, either out of devotion to art or because they cannot stop will in the immediate future be faced with a number of choices. Diversion beckons as do games of love or the romance of the flesh. Some will dissipate, others will seek good advice (hard to come by) and the patient ones may just wait and do nothing, for a while putting their faith in time and challenging fate by their passivity.
Whatever choice is made, nothing good is guaranteed for the need and the want of something is in itself insufficient qualification for the desired reward. (IV, 39-41)
Late in the Spring I received bad news from home.
Once again the oracular pendulum of my fortunes had awakened to movement. Inexorable in its swing it had returned to the point of descent that I had been destined to feel though not to know at the time of my birth. My grandfather who had recovered from earlier disaster and who had repaired his fortunes, was in financial difficulties again. The disaster was not serious but my grandfather being an old man thought it was. Unable to cope with the situation he was suffering a nervous breakdown. In her letter to me·, my mother suggested that I give up the New York venture for the time being, and return home to be company for my grandfather. My presence, she thought, would help as it always had and besides at home I would be less expensive to maintain. I sensed an alternative though unwritten suggestion in her letter, that I get out to face the world and earn my own keep.
At the moment, that would have been folly rather than heroic act. Had I concentrated on portrait drawing and painting I might have qualified as a professional. My work in those years was not directed toward any particular specialty and so I was unprepared to compete in any field of the profession where gainful employment could be obtained.
When I decided to fold my tent and go home, I did not take the road of least resistance. I took the only road open to me then.
Having relinquished my rather monastic existence I had entered into social life and had enjoyed our parties, talks, and gatherings. I had not stopped working even if I had backed away from the great program. I had not fallen in love but I had pursued the idea of it to the extent that I became engaged to a young girl I had met at a friend’s Sunday brunch. Even the doldrums I was in could not justify the monstrosity of my actions. This young woman more level headed than I was refused my proposals of marriage on several occasions. This did not discourage me for I was playing at a game. All my friends knew what I was doing and gently tried to bring me to reason but nothing could stop me in this heartless pursuit. Only when the young lady accepted me did I become aware of what I had done. One day after I became engaged I met the young woman I was to marry. It was love at first sight. If being right in time is nine points of wisdom, I was certainly the world’s greatest fool.
I didn’t have the courage to cancel the engagement immediately, as I should have done. It was dissolved much later and was more awkward and painful for the delay.
I did not make a clean break when I left New York. There was a measure of unfinished business.At home again I settled down to work. My grandfather had installed a skylight in the roof and a section of the attic had been insulated with building board to mitigate somewhat the summer’s heat and the cold of winter.
The financial situation was not disastrous. My grandfather had suffered losses through unconscionable speculation but his businesses were flourishing, and times were good. Life was unchanged at home. The family’s hospitality had not abated and there were many guests at table as usual.
I was to remain at home for about two years.
With the exception of the tragedies that occurred in that time there was no rising crescendo in my life or work. The days passed pleasantly, one like the other, and the tableaus of our existence resembled those of an underwater ballet with its sifting light and its undulating shapes.
The exit of the Maze was reached through the accumulation of events and not because of a well directed or planned search for it. I could not put my finger on any one experience I might consider more important than another that ultimately contributed to the release of the spirit. The tragedies, the death of my grandfather and that of my mother were realities and the effect of these on my life are clearly discernible.
The three years of my absence from home altered my social position. I left as a youth and I returned as a young man. I even enjoyed a local reputation as an artist. I was permitted to associate with older people as a quasi equal rather than as the talented and promising son of their contemporaries. (IV, 44-45)
Two portrait drawings I did in 1923 were to bring about a change in the agreeable monotony of my existence. The subjects were both persons native of or living in Chicago and both pictures were seen and admired by the Chicago friends of the portraitees. The following summer, i.e. in 1924, I was commissioned to do a half dozen portraits of children whose parents lived in the elegant northern suburbs of Chicago. I had been invited to stay at the summer home of my grand uncle Herman. My drawing of him had attracted the attention of those people who now had ordered work from me. The house was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and was situated on a tree-lined street in Winetka not too far from the homes in which I was to visit and work two or three days a week during most of the summer. That particular portrait served a number of purposes. I had discovered the technique of combined conte crayon and charcoal invented by the German portraitist Franz von Lenbach. The red or brown conte crayon spoke for warmth, the silver gray for the cool tones, in the drawing. This abstraction of color was attractive to the observer and banished arguments about the correctness of color tones. Everyone was delighted by the striking likeness of Uncle Herman’s portrait and my doing it had made for a measure of good will in the family although I had no knowledge of that at the time.
The summer wore on and I drove around in my old Model T Ford coupe visiting and attending to my tasks. My sitters were all young, quite precocious and generally spoiled by indulgent parents. They often tried my patience but the likenesses all turned out well and the pictures of the sitters looked no older than· their real age.
My career as a paid portraitist was short and not too painful or humiliating. There were some internecine family quarrels fought around the portraits I had made and I had to suffer the conflicting opinions of mothers and grandmothers—and mother-in-laws. I survived these disputes and none of the portraits was rejected.
My wealthy clients paid me as little as I would accept and were not ashamed of their shabbiness. On the contrary, they bragged about having driven a bargain so favorable to themselves. More commissions kept coming and then suddenly everything stopped and my Chicago period came to an end. It so happened that all of my clients were Jewish and so were Messers Loeb and Leopold. Their cruel and senseless crime, the murder of Bobby Franks, was a shattering blow to a Jewish community dedicated to respectability and proud of its contributions to the city.
When the children of Nadia von Meck, the Russian millionairess sickened, her priest and advisor convinced her that she was being punished for spiritual frivolity. To purge her soul she withdrew her financial support ($3000 per annum) of the composer Tchaikovsky because he was a luxury—“Her Beloved Stranger.”
It is not a strange thing for a people upon whom catastrophe descends to entertain the idea of some sacrifice as a form of penance, to give up some luxury or gesture of vanity. The commissions for new portraits were cancelled abruptly. The crime was not only a blot and a disgrace to the Jews. Many of them were related to the murderers or the victim or to both.
If I was not consciously relieved at the turn of events it was good that this commercial portraiture, for that is what it was, had come to an end. I was not mature enough to recognize what was happening to me, but I had the satisfied client more in mind than the real problem of creating something worthwhile. I hesitated to develop the drawing once a good likeness had been caught and I was gradually slithering into artistic dishonesty. An artist or teacher might have caught me in time but there was none present. The sudden removal of temptation liquidated the entire situation.
In the fall of the year 1925 my grandfather took sick. This drew me even closer to him and when it seemed he was to be abed for a long time, I spent even more hours sitting with him reading to him and talking with him. He was never to leave his bed until he died early in the year 1926. He was bewildered and filled with worry mainly for me and my dubious future. He could not possibly assess the true state of his affairs, partly because he was old and confused and also because an archaic system of bookkeeping kept him in ignorance of his account for a year at a time.
In a household of five persons, the death of one of them narrowed the ranks and besides my mother was ailing and worry stalked the house. My mother had suffered so much in silence and kept her counsel so rigorously that she acted in a like way about sickness. She refused to submit to a medical examination and my father was obliged to resort to stealth and subterfuge to obtain any medical information. Once he had it the tests indicated nothing reassuring. My grandfather had reached the age of 80 and had died calmly in his sleep and there was some rule about this that made it bearable because one knew it had to be. But my mother was young.
When my grandfather died I attained a financial independence that was to last for 20 years.
The income was modest but sufficed to bring me freedom from material concern and I abjured, I believe wisely, all the thought of gain through the pursuit of my art. I was married shortly before my mother’s death in the fall of the year and we left for a prolonged stay in Europe the following spring. I used up the winter months practicing drawing and doing nothing but that in preparation for future work.
Our travel party consisted of four persons—my grandmother, my wife, Julia, her sister, and myself. My father who was to visit his sisters in Germany followed us away from home a few weeks later. No one was left in the old house excepting a cousin of mine and my uncle who had returned from his rooms at the Club to fill, for a while at least, the void. (IV, 46-47)