Carrying the Torch: Maud Howe Elliott and the American Renaissance

Ten

128 ten For you the storied seasons have rolled, a stately stream, Of rich and magic enterprise, inspired glow and gleam. Of travel and of romance, achievement and of dream. Till now within this gray-roofed town you hold a torch on high. And all who see that flame shall know what name to call it by, For Art is written in the light—nor shall it wane and die. Dear leader, so to you we bring our garland bright with praise. For all you are and all you do, the wisdom of your ways; And may the long light follow you down many generous days. Edith Ballinger Price, 1924 In 1925 Maud and Jack were on their way home from a winter visit to St. Augustine, Florida, when Jack became seriously ill in Charleston, South Carolina. He had “angina” followed by pneumonia and died there in May at the age of sixty-six. Maud had lost her brother Harry, sister Flossy, and niece Alice in 1922; Belle Gardner in 1924; and now came this devastating blow, necessitating a complete rethinking of her life’s purpose. She cloaked herself in black and wore her husband’s and her medals on her chest, as shown in a Bachrach photograph from 1928. As Maud later recalled, she went to a therapist, Dr. Joseph Pratt of Boston: “It was just after my Jack’s death when life seemed over for me. He taught me to walk alone! Never in the twenty years has he prescribed any drug. His advice and the books he sent me or made me buy gradually lifted me from black despair to active life again.”1 In 1923 Maud had Chapter Ten 129 published an anecdotal autobiography called Three Generations, and now she began work on her husband’s biography, John Elliott, the Story of an Artist. Without Jack there to discourage her, she renewed her efforts to place his work in public and private collections, writing letters to all her old contacts. The Art Association held a memorial exhibition in 1925.2 One reviewer noted that in spite of Jack’s connections through the Howe family,he essentially “lived in a world of his own,a world of poetry which he tried to express in paint.”3 With her biography of Jack,Maud began the last phase of her writing career, in which she both documented and disguised her family history. In The John Elliot, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1930, Jack was transformed from an indolent, irritable artist into a brilliant visionary, too exalted to even sign his work or try to promote it.His tedious execution of the Boston Public Library Commission, which drove Maud so crazy she couldn’t live with him, is presented as a struggle for an ideal, a legacy for the ages. According to Maud, Jack’s destiny was to convey through his art the beauty that he, among few, was privileged to see. As for the Art Association, which he once said was “gobbling up our lives,” he originated the design and implementation of adding the Griswold House stable onto the house,transforming it into a gallery and exhibition hall (working with Maud’s nephew, architect Samuel Prescott Hall); he taught a few courses before deciding teaching was not for him, he went to Council meetings—but he certainly was not and had never been, as she wrote,“the leading spirit,the lengthening shadow”of the institution. Maud wrote innocently about her husband’s penchant for making her costumes, fussing over her appearance in public, decorating for parties and arranging flowers—all activities that one hundred and fifty years later some would certainly find suggestive of homosexuality. Laura once wrote—perhaps equally naively—“As to Peter Wiggins—his name is Carl,by the way—I really don’t know what Jack would do if he saw him; carry him off bodily, I fancy—no, he couldn’t—but manage somehow to paint him . . . A splendid young Hercules.”4 The liberal and tolerant Howe family likely would be among the vanguard in supporting gay rights today, but in the nineteenth century there were no such options, no mention of homosexuality. The most intriguing indication of Jack’s sexual orientation was his friendship with Giacomo Boni, the Italian 130 Carrying the Torch archaeologist who shared Jack’s love of gardening, birds—and Dante, on whom he wrote a treatise. As mentioned...