Nine
115 nine Of these home fires that must be kept burning lest another Dark Age settle upon the world, the one that is in the gravest danger of neglect is the sacred flame of art. In all times of depression the artists are the first people to suffer . . . As prices of food go higher, other men get an increase of wages, but the artist gets no wages at all, for as art is commonly looked upon as a luxury, it is the first thing to go.This is a grave danger and must be gravely met and prepared for. Maud Howe Elliott, “Keep the Home Fires Burning” The death of Julia Ward Howe in October 1910 altered the Howe family dynamics and circumstances to a great extent. Once the division of the estate was attended to, the preservation of their mother’s legacy proved far more acrimonious. 241 Beacon Street was sold. Maud and Jack acquired a renewable two years’ lease on Oak Glen, leading to hard feelings by Flossy,now widowed and poorer than ever,who pictured Maud dead, and Jack Elliott, whom she had never liked, living on there indefinitely.1 Brother Harry emerged as the real villain in the ensuing arguments, as he had had enough of Jack using Julia for profit. “This morning came a letter from brother Harry in which he expresses himself as distressed about the Fanueil Hall portrait and said that he spoke for himself and his sisters in saying that the family did not wish to back Jack’s having the order for mama’s portrait,but for any other portrait would do as well . . . I feel that I have been stabbed in the back by my brother and sister.”2 Harry had to defend this decision to Laura: “My explanation is a dislike of Elliott’s work, and my feeling that you,Tom [Flossy], and I 116 Carrying the Torch should join in telling Maud kindly that in our judgment she should make it clear . . . that the family wishes the committee [Boston Art Commission ] to feel that its choice of an artist is wholly unhampered.”3 Harry was also the most assertive in his wish to have Laura write “The Life”of their mother—with no collaboration from Maud, and it went without saying, none from Flossy, whom he deemed totally incompetent. Harry, an academic, felt that Laura’s previous work, The Journals and Letters of Samuel Gridley Howe, set the standard, and that Laura alone was qualified to write the biography. He was willing to pay for a secretary for the project, only if she worked under Laura’s direction in Gardiner. At the age of fifty-five, Maud still maintained her reputation in the family as impulsive, demanding, and temperamental. In Harry’s mind this disqualified her from the serious undertaking of writing a biography . In truth, the year following her mother’s death plunged Maud into mood swings and depression.“The worst day since October 17.A dagger, poisoned, was driven into my heart—et tu Brute!” she recorded in her diary.4 She found it difficult to deal with the mountain of sympathy letters , the tributes, the ceremonies. Harry wrote to Laura, Here is Maud speaking in public, according to the newspapers, yet according to Rosalind unable to envisage the future. Why, if she is that, she ought to be in a sanitarium. Really, Laura, I feel much troubled about her. She seems to me absurdly fat, and suggesting dropsical tendency . . . the sort of intensity in which she lives is terrible. I always come home about sick after being with her,and what must it be for her,whose poor body can never escape the turbulent peaceless soul to which it is attached? . . . Let us hope that she may pull herself together; but that she can keep this way for a good long term of life seems too much to expect.5 Harry—who incidentally died twenty-six years before Maud—really did not get his sister. Oak Glen beckoned to Maud and Jack as a place of solace and rejuvenation , and they moved there in July of 1911. Laura and Maud worked out a collaborative plan for “The Life,” to be indeed written by Laura at Gardiner, with substantial input by Maud. As Harry had pointed out to Maud, “It is true that you have a vast fund of knowledge which Laura lacks; and that you and mama were most close . . . those facts, as [3.149...
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