Oral history interview with A. Hyatt Mayor, 1969 Mar. 21-1969 May 5

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with A. Hyatt Mayor, 1969 Mar. 21-1969 May 5, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

 

ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW WITH A. HYATT MAYOR
MARCH 21, 1969
INTERVIEWER: PAUL CUMMINGS

PC: PAUL CUMMINGS
HM: A. HYATT MAYOR

PC: March 21. Paul Cummings talking with A. Hyatt Mayor. What is the initial for?

HM: Alpheus. My grandfather was Alpheus Hyatt, my uncle was Alpheus Hyatt, my great-grandfather was Alpheus Hyatt. And his father was one of a number of sons in Baltimore and my grandmother used to say that they were called Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego and all died and Alpheus came along and he survived. But I don't use it because, when I was born, there was my grandfather Ally and there was my uncle Alph, so that kind of used up that name. I always thought that it was a classical name, the Alpheus and Eurydice and so forth. But, when I went to Mt. Athos, the monks would ask me my name. It was no use saying Hyatt or Mayor, so I would say Alpheus. And they would say "very apostolic." Sure enough, there are two Alpheuses in the New Testament: the brother of Zebedee and somebody else.

PC: Well, what is your family background? Is it all American for a long, long time?

HM: Yes. My great, great, great grandfather or something like that, Christian Mayor, came from Ulm in Wurtemberg as the Consul from Wurtemberg in the 1780's.

He settled in Baltimore and the family has been there ever since. My mother's mother came from Kinderhook in upstate New York. And the rest of them all came from Baltimore. The whole batch of them. My grandfather Hyatt was the son of the sort of Park & Tilford's of Baltimore, the very rich grocers. He was sent to Harvard just before the Civil War. The only letter of introduction he had was to the leading wine merchant of Boston. And he absolutely appalled his family by becoming a paleontologist. They didn't expect that. They'd much rather see him come back a drunkard, I think. I don't know. My grandfather Mayor also went North. He went to be educated at Stevens Tech where he later taught. He worked with Edison on the phonograph and the telephone and, in their house in Maplewood, New Jersey -- where my grandmother lived for sixty-odd years -- they had installed a telephone that went from the garret to the parlor. And when guests came, my father had to skip up to the garret and talk to guests in the parlor. And, having had just about the first telephone in those parts, grandmother was almost the last person to put in a real one, in the late 1920's. When she died there were two golden oak receivers of this telephone -- that was all that was left of it -- worse luck. My brother-in-law at that time was working at M.I.T. and Harvard. They had the first manufactured model of the telephone, lacking the receivers. So these fitted in and completed the set. I was very pleased with that.

PC: Well, since everybody was from Baltimore, how did you come to be born in Annisquam?

HM: Because my grandfather Hyatt got his first job as curator of the Natural History collections in the Peabody Institute in Salem. Then he also founded the Teachers School of Science in Boston. And, having gone to Harvard, you see, looked for a country place, and found this dilapidated 17th-century house which belonged to a family that had been bankrupt so that the house had passed into the hands of the bank. And he bought that house. Which was where I was born. That's the only time that land has ever been sold, which is rather unusual. It was a crown grant in the 1660's. I was born in a room in that house where my grandfather established the first marine biological laboratory in the New World, which then moved to Penikese and then moved to Wood's Hole. And that started right in the little back room in our old house. It's rather interesting.

PC: Is the house still standing?

HM: Oh yes, very much so. We go there every summer.

PC: How old is it now?

HM: Well, it's hard to say, you know. It's been one of those things that's been remodeled a great many times. According to the land grants of those days you had to start building (at least make a gesture toward it) six months after getting your grant. The grant dated from 1663 to a man called Francis Norwood. So something of the kind was started then. But the bulk of the house is mid-18th century and it's been all transmogrified and the hell ripped out of it. So it's no good architecturally at all.

PC: It's an architectural collage.

HM: Yes. Alas! It was a very fine house indeed once. All gone now.

PC: Is this a large house and is there a lot of land around it?

HM: Originally they owned a great deal of land. Oh, they owned as far as you could see. But my grandparents had seven acres there and then they divided that so now we have three-and-a-half, a point of land, the highest point. Oh, it's a pretty place. Wonderful tidewater country. Limitless marshes to look out on which are green-gold in spring and corn-gold in autumn.

HM: That's really where you grew up then?

HM: That's where I grew up, yes. It's a beautiful place. And ten-foot tides rushing back and forth. It was lovely.

PC: How large a house is it?

HM: Oh, gosh, I don't know. It has four bathrooms, I think. I once counted up the rooms, I can't remember how many there are. But it is a big house. It doesn't look big. But there was room for everybody. Well, four of us and then always cousins coming to visit.

PC: You have brothers and sisters?

HM: Yes, I'm the oldest of four. I have two sisters and a brother.

PC: Did any of them ever get into the art world?

HM: Yes. My younger sister Barbara painted very well indeed. She really had talent. She lives in Berkeley, California now. Whether she's painting or not I don't know. She didn't pursue it with enough energy to break through and become a real professional painter. But she has great, great talent, really great talent. Especially in portraiture. Wonderful children's portraits she made.

PC: What is her name now?

HM: Her name is Mrs. Theodore Money, my sister Barbara. She now lives at 5 Forest Lane in Berkeley.

PC: Not with all the riotous students?

HM: Well, it's way above. She's on a vast height.

PC: I don't know Gloucester. I don't know if the houses are close together or if there is a lot of space.

HM: Well, our house is on a point between two coves, Goose Cove and Lobster Cove and it's about a long mile from most of the summer houses on the other side of the village of Annisquam, which was a great trial for me as a little boy because I had to walk an awful long dusty way to get to anybody to play with.

PC: It was really rural?

HM: It was very rural. Oh, certainly, very rural. All the roads smelled of horse manure in that delicious way they used to and the dust and the watering cans. It was really charming.

PC: Well, you had brothers and sisters to play with after a while - right?

HM: Yes, exactly. So we didn't mind that too much.

PC: How about in the summer? You had lots of summer people around, weren't there?

HM: Yes. But the summer people, as I say, were over the hill.

PC: But in the winter what did you do?

HM: Well, we didn't live there in the winter. We only lived there in the summer. In the winter we lived in all sorts of places. My father was a marine biologist who ran a Carnegie Laboratory on the last of the Florida keys, the Dry Tortugas. A wonderful place. I went there to spend a summer with him once. It was absolutely great. A tiny island of sand, very hot in the day, of course; south of it nothing but the Gulf of Mexico as far as you could see. And after supper, when the sun dropped and the night sprang up, we would walk around the island. And if there was moonlight the fiddler crabs would be like the sand itself moving away.  Oh, it was a great, great place. I loved it.

PC: Did that inspire any interest in nature in a scientific way?

HM: It should have. I suppose everybody so expected me to be a naturalist that I couldn't do it. In a sense, of course, I suppose that I have combined art and natural history in art history.

PC: It's an interesting kind of natural history.

HM: Yes.

PC: What kind of school could you go to then if you were traveling and living in these different places?

HM: Well, it seemed to me that I was always the new boy in a new school wherever I went, because we never lived more than a couple of winters in one place until I was of high school age when we settled in Princeton.

PC: What were some of the places you lived?

HM: We lived in - dear me - where was it? Sharon, Massachusetts, which is where I first went to school. Then we went abroad and we lived in Mouse Hole near Penzance in Cornwall for a summer. This was when I was seven and eight. And then we lived in a place called Auber-sur-Oise. And that's really rather amusing. My aunt (Anna Hyatt Huntington) is a sculptor. And she was doing this big statue in Paris. She wanted a summer studio which would be cheap and on the ground floor so you could wheel in heavy sculpture. So she and my mother took a train out of the - would it be the Gare de L'Oest? - perhaps, I don't know. They took a way train and took tickets to the end of the line. Every time the train slowed down they looked out and they would see, you know, those silvered globes in the gardens. They would see a factory roof.

Finally the train slowed down to a little village where roses were growing over the garden walls and thatches. Beyond there were bachelor buttons and poppies in the field. It was just beautiful. So they got out. And they asked the Chef de Gare if he had any kind of barracks or shed that would serve as a studio. And he said, "Mesdames, nous avons des ateliers." And they landed in Auber-sur-Oise where Van Gogh shot himself, where Pissaro painted, where Cezanne painted. And they hired the studio of Daubigny whose backyard had been painted by Van Gogh.

And we lived there with a Madame de Plantier who was the mistress of some rich industrialist of the region who had died. She gave herself off as his widow but we always rather doubted it. She had a wonderful collection of faience. And I can still remember as a little boy the rose de Marseilles lavabo which was about a yard high with a pewter spigot. A wonderful object. That made a great impression on me. And she taught me French in the best way in the world. But you know all French are really teachers if you scratch them. Just as we're all missionaries. And she took me up among the cornflowers in the fields above and there she taught me French in the right way. She wouldn't let me learn any words until I could pronounce the vowels because that's the difficult thing for any English-speaking person -- to get the pure vowels. They're like an organ tone, not like a violin tone, mixed as ours are. So I had to say ba, be, be, bou, bu. And I had to say those absolutely exactly for about four or five days. And then she taught me words. And I've always been terribly grateful to her. That's how I started my children speaking French and it really worked quite well.

PC: It's true, that's the key to the whole sound of the orchestration of the voice.

HM: Yes. And all those continental languages except Russian all have pure vowels. And it's just very difficult to do. I'm sure that English had at one time the way Welsh has now. Shakespeare's English certainly had pure vowels. And the vowels got more and more mixed until now they make those awful vowels in England nowadays.

PC: Welsh is a strange language.

HM: It is a strange language but I'm sure that it preserves a great deal of early English just as Irish does.

PC: Does Irish? Do you mean Celt?

HM: Well, I mean the Irish learned to speak in the 18th century. So they say "tay" for "Tea," which is what Pope said after all -- "Here thou, great Anna, whom three continents obey doest sometimes counsel take and sometimes 'tay'." But that was a wonderful summer at Auber-sur-Oise. And great fun. Great fun. I remember my grandmother always tried to make me feel sorry for people and have a social conscience which doesn't come very readily to little boys.

So above the village there were chalk cliffs in which people lived. Troglodyte caves, you know. People I suppose have been living there for ten tousand years. And they had little modern facades with lace curtains or all that kind of thing. And my grandmother said it was such a pity that people lived there; it really must be very difficult for them, it must be so damp. And I tried to be sympathetic and I said, "Yes, that must be terribly bad for the piano." That was as far as I could go in my imagination.

PC: Did you ever visit one?

HM: I never did. We passed the entrances but we were never asked in. You know French peeple don't ask you into their houses.

PC: Never.

HM: We didn't dare try to get in. And I suppose those things still exist. I'm told that in the north of Spain there's a house still lived in that the archaeologists think was a neolithic house that has never been abandoned.

PC: Really! That's fantastic.

HM: Stone. That's really extraordinary.

PC: Good material that really lasts.

HM: Yes.

PC: Do you remember where in Spain?

HM: I don't remember. I was told about it. I've never seen a photograph of it but I was told by an archaeologist in Madrid.

PC: Well, you were how old? About seven or eight?

HM: I can remember very well because when I came home it was the spring of 1909 and the Lincoln pennies had just come out then. That fixes it in my mind as a little boy. We spent the winter after that in Naples in an apartment overlooking the whole Bay. Which is fascinating. Because, when storms blew up, the water in the Bay would turn chocolate brown and the sunken villas and temples (because all that land is sunk) out by Pozzuoli on the side away from Vesuvius would be squares of dark peacock green in the chocolate brown. And you could tell exactly where those buildings were. Its very curious. And that only happens when storms are brewing.

PC: I wonder what causes that?

HM: I don't know. Something about the light on the water or something like that.

PC: That's fantastic.

HM: It was a very pretty place.

PC: You must have had a household going around you of scientists and quite widely assorted people?

HM: Yes. My father at that time was on an expedition to Australia. He wanted to measure the growth of the Great Barrier Reef, the coral reef there, and he had to spend a while. And while he was absent on those long trips, we were taken abroad to learn languages. That was first in 1908 and 1909 and again in 1912, 1913, and 1914. Those were trips. And on the first trip he came back and joined us all in Naples. And he was a great friend of Anton Dorn who was a German who ran the great aquarium in Naples. And I remember going out on their trawler when they were trawling for specimens and we'd go close in to those extraorindary volcanic cliffs at Pozzuoli and Sorrento. And it was absolutely spectacular. Because the water falls off practically to a submarine precipice so you can go up and almost touch them in the boat and not get rammed or go ashore. And I remember very vividly those extraordinary cliffs and the birds and strange things they dredged up out of the bottom of the sea. It was fascinating. It was a wonderful winter.

PC: Did you learn a lot of things about what came out of the sea?

HM: No. I just thought they were spiney and definitely not to be touched because they would pinch me. That I do remember.

PC: Was there interest in art in your family?

HM: Yes. Oh, yes. All the women have always painted. My mother and my aunt were sculptors. My mother is dead now. My aunt is still alive at ninety-four. She still works every day in her studio. And their mother painted and their grandmother painted. My great-grandmother who was Lily Ann Reynolds - Aunt Bebe as she became - used to design patchwork quilts. And one night she dreamt a design so she lit her candle and drew the design. And we have it. It was an extraordinary dream. It looks like snow crystals made of Indian clubs in indigo blue on a white ground, great big crystals, quite an extraordinary design.

PC: It's interesting that the whole art tradition was carried on by the women.

HM: By the women, yes. It's very curious. Maybe that's why I never began to paint. It could be. I don't know.

PC: Was there music when you were young?

AM: Well, my aunt who is a sculptor had to choose whether she'd play the violin or model. And she thought that her fingers would last longer modeling than playing the violin. So she forsook violin lessons. Which I think was a very sensible choice to make.  My grandmother played the piano in an old-fashioned and pretty way. She composed little waltzes which she used to play with her arthritic fingers; rolls and roulades and things. But my sister Barbara, the painter, has a real gift of music just as my daughter has. But they've both remained amateurs. They didn't want to get into the rat race of professional music making.

PC: You didn't go to concerts or anything like that?

HM: No. Concerts, you know, were very rare. You can't imagine what the world was like before radio and phonograph.

PC: It was quiet.

HM: It was quiet. When I was in Princeton as a little boy Stokowski would come once a winter and play Tschaikowsky's Pathetique and a few things like that that everybody wants to hear. That was the music for the winter. And when the first phonograph records came out and I bought the Bach Inventions and the Partitas that was an extraordinary thing that happened. I remember it very well indeed. I was in my early teens. I got a little wind-up machine. I used to play those.

PC: With a big horn.

HM: Yes, a big horn. A sort of morning glory horn.

PC: That's marvelous. Going back to our chronology for a minute, after Naples you went where?

HM: Then we came home and we lived in Princeton for a while, for several years. And then we went off to Germany for two winters and the summer between. That was into the summer of 1914. So we came home because of the war. And then we settled in Princeton where my mother lived until a few years before she died when she joined my aunt in Bethel, Connecticut. And we lived in various houses in Princeton and around, moving from one house to another.

PC: How did you like living in Princeton? You lived there quite a while.

HM: Yes, we lived there quite a while. I really never liked Princeton very much. It was very different in those days from what it is now. It was very much of a Scotch Presbyterian town and one had to mind one's P's and Q's very much indeed. It was a small narrow town dominated by the university. It's entirely different now. It's a great big commuting center, a bedroom for New York and Philadelphia.  We lived at one time in a beautiful 18th-century farmhouse out at the end of Witherspoon Street. And you could look across a great sag of empty fields and there was Princeton on the crest of the hill about a mile away. We lived there while I was going to college. I would bicycle in to the University that way. And now that is absolutely solid houses, solid, solid houses.   The house still exists. It was very well maintained. Very well restored. It was a beautiful house.

PC: Your parents always seem to have picked interesting houses to live in.

HM: They usually were ones with low rent. Just like this apartment here. Tumbledown, picturesque places is where we lived. Just exactly like where we are now.

PC: But it was fun.

HM: It was fun. Oh, yes. I wouldn't have had it otherwise. It was just great.

PC: You went to Princeton because you were living there?

HM: Because we were living there. Because my father, although he was not a member of the faculty, had a lectureship there. He was really employed by the Carnegie Institution. But having a lectureship, we could go there free for ten dollars a year in library fees. And also to save money by living at home. And when I was there my father, poor thing, got a tubercular throat, which was why we had to live out in this so-called country air out in the country. And there the poor man lived in a sort of horrible little greenhouse on a roof with no heat in it. You know the barbarous treatments they had for tuberculosis in those days. And finally, he died a few days after I graduated. It was all very, very sad. Very terribly sad. Because he could only whisper for several years. It was just awful.

PC: It must have been terrible after having had such a busy life.

HM: It really was. A dreadful way to die. He finally died, thank goodness, in his laborary on Dry Tortugas. He went to Tucson for the spring and the doctors saw that he was a goner anyway, and that he might as well do as he pleased. Which was very sensible of them. They didn't keep him hospitalized. He went off, opened his laboratory and there, while he was wading in the shallow water, he dropped dead, finally, of a heart attack. But actually it was brought on, of course, by this terrible tuberculosis of the throat. But, for a man who was enormously communicative and talkative and charming, it was a real cross to be locked up like that. Awful. Awful. And of course it took him out of circulation just when a son needed him.

PC: You were the oldest child?

HM: I was the oldest child. I was 21, just turned 21, my 21st birthday, my graduation and his death all occurred within less than a week. Barbara would have been 10 years younger. But then I had to grow up in a great hurry, all of a sudden.

PC: What was Princeton like as a school in those days? Was it large?

HM: Well, it was fairly large. I suppose there were fifteen hundred students there. And what it was really like I don't know because I didn't live on campus. I just simply bicycled in to classes. It was just like a continuation of high school really. There were some very, very good teachers there. Wonderful people. There was a Frenchman called Louis Conce [Conz?] who looked like a truffle pig always buttoned up in absurd overcoats and going around to rummage sales and coming home hugging ghastly lamps that he'd bought at a small price. A charming, wonderful man. And he gave a course in -- it was announced as being "Rabelais, Montaigne and the Pleiades." It was to be three hours a week and outdoors if possible. So we'd take pillows or blankets and sit on the grass and then he would really talk. I never got so much out of anybody. He was an absolutely marvelous man. We started off I think with Rabelais. And of course we hardly got through him so we had to do it the next spring again for the Pleiades, which was very, very good indeed. It was just great. And he would then ramble off in free association on all the kinds of subjects that would occur to a wonderfully stored historical mind. Latin grammar of the Middle Ages, the voyages of discovery, the travels of Isabella the Catholic, Rabelais's student days. A word would send him off on some extraordinary dissertation. He was a great, great teacher. A great teacher. And we didn't do one lick of work. He would say, "For the next week take the next five lines." It was so minute an assignment one forgot about it. But I never got so much out of anything that I ever did. Because there was a mind nourished out of whole books, not out of the little gray pamphlets with vocabularies that we had to read. Princeton had a great many wonderful people in those days. And it was a great education also, of course, to have the run of the stacks of the library. You'd go looking for a book and find four or five much more interesting on the way. That was wonderful.

PC: Right. That's one of the secrets of an education.

HM: That really is. Books should have a difficult classification. They should be hard to find just so you would stumble on something better as you go around.

PC: Right. It always happens, too.

HM: Always. Absolutely always, yes.

PC: Well, what did you major in?

HM: I didn't realize I was majoring in anything. And when I had my cap and gown on that rainy day of the graduation, it was an overcast day, there was a program and I discovered that I was graduating with high honors in modern languages. Somebody had kindly added it all up and said I could rate that. I don't know who ever did it. But that's how it happened.

PC: Did you have a lot of language courses? Or was it because of the European travel?

HM: I must have. You see I was simply interested in that. I was not aware of having taken many language courses, I just simply took the things that interested me but it happened to be a good many language courses. Curious.

PC: It sounds as if they were rather easygoing and didn't have a formula to apply the way it is now.

HM: That's probably sure true. I daresay it would be very different now.

PC: Do you remember other things that you studied?

HM: Yes. I took one or two courses in the history of art, one with Frank Stuart Mather who was wonderful. A great undergraduate teacher. And he gave a course in Italian painting, mostly the early painting. He was a magnetic, marvelous mind; not, I would say, a great scholar, not a graduate teacher. But an incredible man for attracting people in. He could lead the horse to water and make it thirsty, which is a rare, rare gift. So I owe him a great deal. I think really I owe my interest in the history of art to him.

PC: That was the beginning then?

HM: And that was the beginning. Curiously though, in those days he collected beautfiul drawings and some rather good paintings but it never occurred to him to bring a drawing or a painting into the class and pass it around.

PC: Oh, really? So you studied from -- what?

HM: One studied from photographs and slides. But he was a fascinating man, a little sort of rabbit-shaped, hairy man, very impulsive, warmhearted, charming. I loved him. And of course descended from all the Mathers there are. Right by the front door in his house on Effenden [?] Place, he kept an impression of that famous woodcut of Doctor Richard Mather, which is the first woodcut made in North America, which had been given to him by an aunt who kept it in her sewing box. And he was so attached to this thing that he hung it always by the front door so that, in case the house burned, he could always rescue that. That was nice, sympathetic. Yes, he was a lovely man. He really was a lovely man. A great man.

PC: That's marvelous. Who was the other instructor -- do you remember?

HM: Well of course Rufus Morey was going in those days. And I signed up for his course in Early Christian and Gothic Art. Then Morey traipsed off to Rome and the course was given by Baldwin Smith. Perhaps he was better than Morey. Morey, as I found out later, was an absolutely disastrous lecturer. He would stick his face into the manuscript and go "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm." He read it all in a monotone,rfapidly, indistinguishably. And, curiously enough, he knew it; he absolutely knew it; and he couldn't help it. Because I know somebody who was in the graduate school who had to give a lecture when Morey was there and Morey gave him a criticism and said that his delivery was monotonous. Then Morey added, "But who am I to criticize anybody for that." It's strange that he could be aware of it and do nothing about it. Very strange. He was a great scholar, a very great scholar. It was just not his dish. He was not a communicative man at all.

PC: Do you think that's true of many scholars? Have you noticed that in working with them over the years?

HM: Yes, I think so.

PC: They're very reticent verbally.

HM: Yes. Panofsky of course was entirely different. There was a very interesting session on him last week at the Princeton Museum, more as a memorial celebration for him. And there William Hecksher [?] gave an excellent talk about him and said that he prepared his writings so carefully beforehand that he could recite you chapters out of his unwritten books at any time. I'm afraid that, in season and out, is exactly what he did. Out they came. No word allowed for anybody else until the chapter had ended.

PC: Well, from Princeton you became a Rhodes scholar?

HM: Then I became a Rhodes scholar, yes.

PC: How did that happen? I'm very curious because two or three people I know who were Rhodes scholars and they never talk about it.

HM: Oh, really? Indeed. Why?

PC: Well, I don't know. One is an actor and they're various kinds of people and it's a big secret, you know.

HM: Really? How curious!

PC: Is that something that one receives or applies for? I don't know how it works.

HM: Yes, you apply for it. Let me see, in my day it went by states. Now it goes by regions. It is really not quite fair because if you live in Montana you simply go up and say you'd like to go to Oxford and you're sent. If you live on the Eastern seaboard, you have a great deal of competition. So that it is rather unfair regionally. But I tried out for it in my senior year at Princeton. At the time the examination was held in Princeton and they very sensibly gave it to a man called Bill Stephenson, who I believe became a lawyer; who exactly had all the specifications the Rhodes ordered: he was an athlete, a good high scholar, and what Rhodes called "a leader of men." I was never an athlete. I never by any stretch of the imagination could be called a leader of men. So they very sensibly gave it to Bill. He then went to Oxford. And unfortuantely the climate cut his wind so he couldn't run in track. And so I suppose the next year they thought they might try something entirely different and they sent me. At that time the examinations were held in old Castle Stephens in Hoboken. Which was a marvelous house (it's gone how), a Tuscan Gothic villa with a circular hall three stories high and enormous rooms with chandeliers all draped in brown cloth and brown dust covers on all the vast Victorian furniture and the doors -- the examinations were held in the dining room -- the rolling doors would open and absorb somebody and bang! Shut again. Then they would open again and somebody would stumble out as though they'd been in a torture chamber and somebody else would go in. I came towards the end. I sat there for hours and hours and hours with a lot of other people. I was so tired and so exhausted I didn't give a darn whether I got it or not. And that was just the mood to get it for; that's exactly the mood. So that I was totally lucid and just not frightened at all because I had ceased to care. And curiously enough -- it was evidently a very close decision --there was one very, very nice man there, I don't know his name, I've forgotten all about him, but I took a great shine to him as we all sat there talking during this waiting period. And when finally, after a long discussion (I must have got it by a very, very close margin) they announced that I had it, I went to this poor fellow and, with total sincerity, said that I wished he'd gotten it. I was entirely wrong but that was what I felt at the moment. I was just so exhausted . . . .

PC: How did you decide to go to Oxford anyway?

HM: Well, the Rhodes scholarship takes one to Oxford.

PC: Right. But I mean you had interest either in the scholarship or in Oxford to . . . .

HM: In those days I thought that English literature was my dish and that I wanted to write. And Oxford seemed like a good place to prepare for that. I don't exactly know why I was really hipped on being a Rhodes scholar but I was. I really wanted that very much indeed until this final moment of exhaustion when I got it. At any rate, I went over there on the boat with Francis Ferguson and various other Rhodes scholars -- there was quite a batch of us. You have to pick the college that you want to go to and, of course, I just knew them as pictures of pretty gardens and Tudor facades and things like that. One was exactly like another to me. An ex-Rhodes scholar said he'd help me. And he said, of course, your first choice must be Balliol; that's a good place to go; and then after that it doesn't matter. And so the second choice happened to be Christ Church, and I don't know what the others were, I've forgotten now. Thank goodness, Balliol wouldn't have me. You sent your photograph and your curriculum vitae, then they'd bat you around there at Oxford. And Balliol wouldn't have me I'm happy to say because that was a purely political college. I wouldn't have been a bit happy there. I was sent to Christ Church which was the largest college with the richest and the poorest and the greatest variety of people. And that was exactly where I would love to have gone, if I could have chosen with knowledge, that is what I would have chosen. And I was given a tutor called Ridley who had been brilliant in greats and was therefore given a tutorship in English about which he didn't give one hoot. And he was so discouraging and so limp and lax and lackadaisical and dreadful, I thought I'd just have to get rid of him.

I moved heaven and earth and changed my degree to a B.Lit., which was rather hard to do, and was determined to do it with some non-Oxonian, either a Frenchman or a Spaniard. I went around one evening to the head of the French department who was a man called Rudelaire; who wasn't home that night. Then I went a few streets away to Wellington square to the head of the Spanish department who was Francisco de Aguila  who was home. He opened the door himself. He was a little, white-haired man with bright blue eyes and all the warmth and impetuosity of a Madrilene. And he and I just fell on each other's necks immediately and that was it. A wonderful man. A marvelous man who had married an Englishwoman much younger than he. He used to write couplets while he was shaving, you know, little verses. And he showed me a bureau entirely full of them which he wrote and never read -- just filed away in a drawer. He just wrote them on the back of receipted bills, envelopes, anything. Oh, he was great. Absolutely great. A great scholar. And wonderful fun. I liked that man.

PC: You liked Oxford then more than Princeton?

HM: Yes. Oh, yes. Well, Oxford after all was an experience and Princeton was just a day school. And the intoxication of just sitting down and talking about any darn thing with no holds barred was really absolutely intoxicating. It was just wonderful. Talk, talk, talk. I'm sure that if I had lived on the campus in Princeton I would have had that experience then. But coming to me later in life when I was 22, it meant more. It was more of a revelation. You know, youth is wasted on the young and if you can have some of the experiences a bit later, it's so much the better.

PC: Are there any professors there that were important to you besides . . . .

HM: Besides Aquila?

PC: Yes.

HM: No. You see, in Oxford they really realize the usefulness of the printed page and you don't have to go to lectures. You can just read. The result is nobody goes to lectures. A few of the girls, but nobody really goes to lectures. And there is very little contact between the teachers and the taught as far as I remember the experience. You have your tutor, of course -- and that was Aguila -- and you're in touch with him but not with the others. The ideal college in Oxford is All Souls which has about three dozen dons and one or two undergraduates.

PC: Oh, really? That's marvelous.

HM: That's where they would all like to be.

PC: What did you read then? Or what did you study there?

HM: Well, Spanish. And of course I did a thesis degree which left me entirely free. Therefore I could read all kinds of things. And did. I read all sorts of things and got my silly old thesis finished, and passed, and satisfied the requirements of the people who sent me so they wouldn't feel I had let them down, which I did have to do.

PC: What did you write on?

HM: I wrote on the influence of the Quixote on English literature. A stupid subject. Happily a German had written a Ph.D. thesis on exactly that subject of which I got a copy by writing to somebody in Germany. And my examiners could not read German, didn't realize that most of what I had was rearranged from this German with a few little additions I was able to find on my own. And it was a miserable performance. You know, all Ph.D. theses are miserable.

PC: A tortured experience.

HM: Exactly. And I was examined by Aguila and that lovely man Henry Thomas from the British Museum, who used to be head of the Spanish department of the British Museum. When I came in, Mr. Thomas asked me if I was going to publish this thesis. I said, "Certainly not." And you could just see the sigh of relief that he gave.

PC: How many languages did you know by this time?

HM: Well, of course I had learned French really well at Auber. And then I learned Spanish quite well at Princton from an excellent teacher called Marden. He was a dandy teacher. Then, let me see, when I taught at Vassar, I picked up Italian from a wonderful girl there called Gabriella Bosano. She let me sit in the back of the class with all the girls in the back rown and I could listen in on that and that gave me a start on Italian. Then I got one of those wonderful Temple classics, Dante's, which had an excellent English translation on the right hand page and the Italian on the left. And with that you really were set.

PC: Your French maybe helped all those.

HM: The French helped all those things, of course. And of course living in Germany for two winters I got German quite thoroughly. But it was terribly interesting. Languages are useful not so much to speak them but it is useful to read them because then you have all sorts of information accessible. And I've found it absolutely invaluable (my reading knowledge of the languages) to be able to read rapidly, to skip through a page of French or Italian or Spanish.

PC: And pick out really what you're looking for.

HM: And then to know where you've got to read slowly and concentrate. That's very useful. I must say that German is a language that I still can't read with my heels higher than my head; that I cannot do. I can go through it but it is a murderous language because they think in a different order.

PC: Yes, that's true.

HM: And that damnable "nicht," you know. You turn a page and there's a nicht, you reread the whole sentence with that in mind. Oh, it's really difficult.

PC: So what were you interested in doing then after Oxford?

HM: After Oxford I thought that I'd probably never have leisure again (which indeed was true), and that I'd better see something of classical Greece. So I spent a winter at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens with the money that I'd saved up out of my Rhodes scholarship. And that was extremely interesting also, very interesting. In the spring I went off for two or three weeks to Egypt, for about ten days to Constantinople. And then we traveled all over Greece; the school did in a body. It was extremely interesting. They used to organize those tours beautifully. You had to read up. You were given an assignment and you read up on that assignment in the library in Athens and then, when you got to the site, you conducted the rest of them through the temple ruins or the fortification or whatever it might be. And I was given the sculptures of the pediment of Olympia. So I read up on that. And on meeting them for the first time I introduced others to them.

PC: That's terrific. So you knew what was going to happen.

HM: Yes. And that's a very good discipline, and excellent discipline.

PC: You don't come to it cold.

HM: And, when the others stumble through their introductions, you're a little more kindhearted because you've been there or are about to go there yourself. I don't know how they organize those things now but we used to go in a fleet of open cars, and of course Greece in the autumn is terribly dusty. I arrived in October. It had not rained one drop in all of Attica since April; not one. And the roads were ankle deep in limestone grit. So unless you were in the first car of this cavalcade of cars you were absolutely covered -- in your hair, in your ears, up your nose, in your joints.

PC: Who was there? Were there any professors that you remember in that group?

HM: Yes. Karl Blagen was there, who was the great Helladic archaeologist, and so was Mr. Hill who was the great authority on the Parthenon. And, while I was there, William Dinsmore came for a visit; he was the great archaeologist who used to teach at Columbia, and was the great idea reconstructor of buildings. He was a fascinating man. I remember going with him to the Propinclea of the Acropolis. And he reconstructed the southwest wing which lies in moldy boulders all over the place. And he would say (of course the walls of these buildings were battered so they were slightly thinner at the top than they are at the bottom, very slightly so the incline is imperceptible), but he would say, "Now of course this stone over there measures only 35.5 centimetres through; that one over there is 40 centimetres through so therefore this goes two courses above and three stones to the right." He played chess in the air with these stones until you went absolutely crazy trying to follow him. He was a genius, the kind of man who could play chess against himself while walking in the woods. I remember when I met him for the first time (I was in Egypt when he arrived). I was going out of the school one day when he was coming in and he said, "Oh! You must be Mayor by elimination." I was the last stone in the wall slipped in place and the wall was complete.

PC: I only know one recent wall built that way. That's the back wall of the Covent Garden Theatre.

HM: Really! Oh, indeed! It is? Why, I wonder?

PC: I don't know.

HM: How do you happen to know that?

PC: Well, I used to work in the theatre.

HM: Oh, really?

PC: And I studied with -- I always forget names -- a man who is a descendant of a great American actor, a theatre historian. Oh, well, anyway it will come to me later. You pick up all those useful bits of information like that.

HM: That's interesting.

PC: So you had seen a great deal of the world by the time you came back to this country.

HM: Yes. So much that I really didn't care about traveling again very much. I really got my belly full. And that was a very good idea.

PC: Because you were young and everything was happening, school and education.

HM: Yes, that's right. I bicycled in Provence. I did it the hard way. It's amusing.

PC: Right. I think you always get to know a country better, you get the feel of the real earth.

HM: Yes. Oh, yes. The bicycle is a wonderful way to travel. Not nowadays with motor traffic; but in those days, back in the Twenties when the roads were empty it was a great way to travel. I hired a bicycle once in Avignon in the spring and went around the Mt. Ventoux for a week where it was so exceptional to have a tourist that I was arrested as a suspicious character. And, when the gens d'armes had inspected my minute baggage, they stood me to a beer. I thought that was delightful.

PC: But people always say the French are so difficult.

HM: I find them easy. I've always found the French very easy. You know, you take them the right way and they're perfectly easy. You just boil over like milk as they want you to and then it's all right.

PC: Well, did you have intentions of teaching after you finished school?

HM: Well, I did teach actually.

PC: You were at Vassar.

HM: Yes, I taught at Vassar. Knowing nothing whatsoever.

PC: What did you teach there?

HM: History of art. About which I knew absolutely nothing.

PC: Well, it was after Princeton?

HM: Just after Princeton exactly. With two courses at Princeton! You know those old days were so informal. One never could do those things nowadays. The head of the art department at Vassar was a lovely man called Oliver Tonks who was an Englishman, totally lazy. He didn't want to be bothered, thank you. He was the ideal boss. I could go ahead and do exactly as I pleased. Just provided I didn't make any trouble for him it was all right. Frank Mather recommended me, bless his heart. Tonks wanted me to go up and see him. So I went up to Portland, Maine where he was, a long, long trip from Gloucester. And I met him in a hotel and he said, "My wife is in a movie. Come on." And that's all we ever said about this. Nothing else. We sat in the movie until it was time for the only train to take me home. I left. And that's all we said. Nothing whatsoever else.

PC: That was a great interview.

HM: It was a great way to do it. He hired me.

PC: What was the movie?

HM: I don't know. I was so perturbed by the whole matter I have no idea what the movie was. I wasn't in to see it very long.

PC: You went all that way to see a movie.

HM: Yes. I got in after it was started and left before it was finished. I arrived at Vassar on a hot day in September carrying my rather dingy, very heavy suitcase. And I had no idea where Tonks's house was (I was supposed to check in there). I met one beautiful Juno of a girl after another but without the courage to ask them. Finally I found a seedy old gardener who was pruning a hedge and I asked him. And then I got to the art building there and I found the photograph collection which I would have to work with was in total disorder. There were cabinets all around the room and there there would be a photograph of the Cellini chalice in the Metropolitan Museum next to the Vassar chapel in construction, next to the Sistine Madonna, in total confusion. So I hauled out all those photographs that weekend, dealt them out simply in piles: architecture, painting, decorative arts, and so forth, so I'd have something to use. And Tonks was delighted. He didn't care if they were arranged or not. But if I did it without bothering him he was charmed. Oh, he was a wonderful, wonderful man to work for. That's just the kind of man that really makes you roll up your sleeves and go to work.

PC: The man who wasn't there really.

HM: Yes, he was. Oh, he was great fun though. He was great, great fun. And when he left he said I was almost a genious. And I said, "Why almost?" . . . . You could say those things to him. I was very fond of him. We were great friends for years. And in the middle of my year one of the teachers left, got married, and they rushed around and telepphoned and telegraphed here and there and got Agnes Rindge to take her place, who became the great lady of Vassar and was until her retirement. When was it? -- a year ago -- something like that. So Agnes and I shared a minute office. There was just room for our two desks and two chairs and, if we wanted to stretch out, we'd have to pull out a desk drawer and put our feet into it. You know we had more fun that spring term. She was great. She had just come from Paris and she had all the Parisian latest wrinkles. She washed her hair in gasoline. She had Louis Philippe amethyst earrings that tickled her shoulders; the highest heels that had been seen on the Vassar campus. And she had an umbrella with a sort of horn handle that looked like a tear in a cow's eye. Oh, she was great! Oh, she was great fun. And of course just totally saucy and amusing. I loved her. Oh, yes, we had a wonderful time. And it was a very jolly bunch of people, lovely people. Then when I left to get my Rhodes scholarship I was succeeded by Alfred Barr; I think he was immediately the next one. Then came Jerry Abbott, Russell Hitchcock. It was a very good system to take on young men for their first jobs, take them for a year or two and then send them on their way. That's what the Frick does with their lecturers nowadays. They kept something fresh and amusing going there. I'm very happy to say that I was the head of the procession.

PC: That's marvelous. And now of course it's one of the places to have been. Or to go to.

HM: Yes, that's right. Yes, yes.

PC: How were the students?

HM: Very nice, charming, interested in me but not in the history of art.

PC: Well, you weren't much older than they were.

HM: No, I wasn't. I was absolutely terrified. Oh, my God, I was terrified! And to make matters worse, there was a girl called Mary Lou Howe who was from Annisquam. We had played together when we were both shedding our front teeth as little children. And she of course had about as much respect for me as she had for a toad. She was determined she would get in my preceptorial and I was determined she wouldn't. Finally she won. And in my first preceptorial there she was right in the middle of the row grinning at me. It was very difficult! It was very hard for me.

PC: But those are the things that make it fun.

HM: Yes. It was a great winter.

PC: That's great. And then after Vassar it was Oxford?

HM: Yes. And then Athens. And then I came home. And by that time all my connections with the United States and home were entirely withered up and broken. And I had not the slightest idea of what I'd do. But at Oxford I had known Francis Ferguson and Francis was then teaching in the American Laboratory School Theatre.

PC: What was that?

HM: Well, that was over on 53rd Street and First Avenue. Or was it 53rd? It was 53rd. It had been founded by Richard Borislavsky and by Marie Ouspenskaya: Ouspenskaya had come here with the Moscow Art Threatre in the twenties. She played the governess in The Cherry Orchard, the German governess. That's how I remember seeing her because I remember very vividly when she stands on the log and jumps off, you know, a suicide. I remember her saying [quoting in German]. And, oh, I remember her very vividly in that performance. She then had a nervous breakdown here and remained behind when the company went back to Russia; existed God knows how. And then she and Borislavsky founded this school together with Mrs. Stockton to get people to finance it, and organize it. Out of that of course grew the Actors' Studio, the Method, and everything else. In the long run it had a great repercussion on the American theatre. And Madame, as she was called, was perfectly wonderful. She was a little creature always dressed in what my grandmother used to call pin silk, ( don't just know what pin silk is, but it's a sort of rustly silk) with Florentine sleeves, you know, points to the fingers so that her hand would have a gesture with this pointed sleeve. And she looked like a little Hammacher Schlemmer gnome; terribly unhappy, brilliant. Her only real friend was a little white dog called Petya. And she had really fascinating classes in the method of acting that started with the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and went through Stanislavsky. You see, all this tradition was behind her, a century of naturalistic acting. She would start them off with exercises like picking up a chair and walking across the room with it, then walking across the room as though you were holding a chair; threading an imaginary needle; lifting a sack of excelsior as though it were full of rocks. And from simple little things like that then she would go on to lessons in attention. I remember one spring day she opened the windows, everybody was to sit with their eyes closed and count the number of kinds of sounds they could hear, you see: a bus, a motor horn, somebody talking in the street, a bird; all that sort of thing. Then one was to sit very tense and see how much you could hear. And then one was to sit relaxed and see how much you could hear. They were exercises in awareness. And they finally wound up to elaborate comedia dell arte scenarios. I remember one time she came in and said, "Now this is the bank. It's nine o'clock. You are the vice-president. You are the president; you are the vice-president's secretary; you are the president's secretary. You have overheard a telephone conversation which indicates the president and his secretary are getting married. Now you do so and so. You do so and so. Now it's nine o'clock. Start!" And it was a tremendous exercise. Tremendous. She was really wonderful. She went to Hollywood to play in the movies -- the countess in Arrowsmith, which she'd also played here on Broadway. And she played opposite Mary Astor. She arrived in Hollywood with a typical Hollywood reception. She had a little black ebony cane with a garnet handle and her little white dog Petya, got off the train this way, and was received by photographers. Mary Astor thought, Ugh! This little thing! What is she doing in my bailiwick?  They had a scene together in which Mary Astor made a different mistake for twenty-odd takes, to try to break Madame down. And Ouspenskaya gave a perfect performance for as many takes as it took to break down Mary Astor. Which she did.

PC: Oh, that's incredible. There's nothing like two actors feuding.

HM: Yes. And she had, of course, such a command of energy of the right kind that she could reduce you to tears while she was reading out a laundry list. And she could do things you would not think possible. I remember once in that dismal side room of the Colony Club, one of those tall rooms with the top light, horrible rooms, for some reason or other -- I don't know why we should have been at the Colony Club, but we were -- she put a chair on a table, she sat up on the chair looking like a little gnome, looking even more like a withered apple under the top light while a young man called, I think, Dick Gaines (somebody I suppose who never amounted to anything), the two of them played the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. You cannot imagine a more grotesque juxtaposition. And somehow or other, you know, it was grotesque for a minute and then came the line "The moonlight on fruit trees." Boy, you were off. It was extraordinary. The dismal room melted, Madame was a beautiful young girl, everything worked from then on out.

PC: What did you do there? Did you teach?

HM: Yes. Francis Ferguson invented a course for me, invented a title for it. It was called "Style and Background." And I would borrow photographs from the Metropolitan Museum, from their lending collection, that showed -- well, it showed how you wore a toga or a farthingale or whatever it may be. Then I would read extracts from some play or other illustrating them with these photographs: how you'd enter, how you'd sit and walk. In other words, a bit of the visual with the literary. It was just a fascinating thing to do. It taught me an immense amount. How much it taught them I have no idea. I don't know if they got a thing out of it. But I did. After all it's the teacher who learns, not the pupil. It's the parent who learns and not the child. And I used to do that for ten dollars a week. When the Laboratory Theatre finally folded, they owed me for several lectures and gave me this sofa I'm sitting on. That was my final payment from the Laboratory Theatre. It had been part of their furniture for their summer stock company on which people were murdered, seduced, laid out dead, everything has happened on this sofa.

PC: I'm curous about the people you might have met at Oxford or the American Laboratory Theatre. Are there many of those people that you've kept track of for a period of time?

HM: Yes. I used to know Auden. He was at the house (Oxford). So was Harold Acton. I didn't know them well; but I knew them. I also knew -- oh, dear, what's his name -- he's now very prominent in the British theatre, that Welshman who wrote . . . .

PC: Emlyn Williams?

HM: Emlyn Williams, yes. I knew him. They were very different from what they are now of course. Emlyn Williams was a violent, messy, dirty, exuberant man, very prominent in what they call Oudes, the Oxford University dramatic society. And Auden was also furiously messy; well, he is now, still is. And I've seen them since, not really very much. I mean we see each other from time to time, usually at Lincoln Kirstein's nowadays. But he's grown into a very different kind of life from mine. He came around once to the Museum to see what had become of me.

PC: Auden?

HM: Auden, yes. It was rather amusing to see him do that. Then Harold Acton was there who was at that time exactly the way he is described in Brideshead Revisited as the esthete -- who walks down the High as though he were swathed in Oriental embroideries. That's exactly how Harold Acton actually walked. Very apt. He was already then balding and so he had this vast, bald, bare forehead and a retrousse nose and he had bright, black, impenetrable parrot eyes and a little red mouth like a Japanese female impersonator; wicked, vicious, a perverse little mouth. But an amusing man, terribly amusing. And in those days very flamboyant; fantastic. His brother Willie was also there, who painted. And Willie had a room a couple of flights up. He used to drink a very great deal, lived on champagne wafers and champagne. One night when some people were in the room he put on a melancholy tango, sat on the windowsill and let himself fall out onto the grass. Luckily it had been raining all day so he made a dent in the grass, dislodged his liver, was laid up in the hospital for a few days and then went back to champagne and wafers. Finally, of course, the poor thing did kill homself.

PC: That's incredible.

HM: Yes. Strange. Harold Acton was really a very pathetic man. The pair of them lived in an enormous house outside of Florence called La Pieta which now belongs to New York University. It had been built by a cardinal when he was not made Pope. So, to console himself, he built this gigantic thing, a great square block of a thing. His father was descended from the William Acton -- let me see, how does it go? -- anyway the Acton who managed the affairs of the Kingdom of Naples when Sir William Hamilton was there around 1800 or so. It was that family and they have always been Italianate since then. And Harold's father dealt more or less in Florentine antiquities, and was supposed to be the only Inglese that the Florentines could not cheat. They would be cheated by a rough, tough, nasty man. I remember we were there once when I was on my wedding trip years and years later in 1932 when Harold was -- God, it was 1932, Harold would have been in his thirties, you see -- oh, no, no, this was later, for heaven's sake, Harold was then about fifty years old. We went out to La Pieta on a very cold November day and Harold charmingly showed us over the gardens. We then got in most gratefully to the warmth of the house and started having tea when some latecomers came. And Mr. Acton said, "Harold, show them the garden." And poor Harold had to bundle up and go out and show them the garden. There was no two ways about it. At night Harold would be sent to bed at nine o'clock with his candle in his hand.

PC: Unbelievable!

HM: Unbelievable! Then he would open the window, slide out over the roofs and amuse himself in Florence. But a dreadful life.

PC: How long did that go on?

HM: Until Mr. Acton died when Harold was in his mid-fifties or later. Unbelievable! Unbelievable!

PC: They'd lived there for decades then? Through the war and everything?

HM: Yes. And he's now become of course a quiet, inconspicuous, middle-aged old man and all that amusing flamboyance is entirely gone.

PC: It's a kind of horrible way to live.

HM: Oh, dreadful, dreadful! Just dreadful!

PC: Let's see, you got married -- when?

HM: In 1932.

PC: That was when you were with the American Lab Theatre. You were also involved with The Hound and Horn?

HM: Yes, that's right. They all came at the same time sort of, yes. And the Laboratory Theatre folded and The Hound and Horn folded shortly after that. Just after I was married.

PC: How did you get involved with the publication?

HM: Let me see, I think that was through Francis Ferguson who knew -- I think that's how it went, I have such a bad memory for how things happened -- but I think Francis introduced me to Lincoln Kirstein, who was then a senior at Harvard. He had taken over Hound and Horn from Varian Fry and he was running it from Harvard; he was about to graduate and bring it here. Then I came in with them. They needed somebody really to read manuscripts. Lincoln was very busy about all kinds of things at that time, and somebody really had to do it. And they came in at the rate of about three hundred a week. God, it was an awful chore! But I did undertake it just as a volunteer because I was interested. And it was a difficult thing to do because it was a magazine whose formula was to have no formula. If you're reading stories for, say, The New Yorker you know the kind of thing you want. And the first paragraph will tell you. But when you want to encourage unknown writers who are trying, feeling their way, you have to read, skim through the whole darn thing. And you find that your standards of adequacy decline so that you just have to knock off for a day and read oh, Measure for Measure or something which really is written good and tight and hard. But I did that for quite a long time until the magazine folded. And then I'd write occasional pieces for it. But it was very interesting. And Lincoln and I worked together a great deal. We understood each other very well indeed. I suppose Lincoln is just about the oldest friend I have now.

PC: How did you meet him?

HM: We first met in his rooms at Harvard. And I think it was Francis who introduced us but I just don't remember. At any rate, we had a wonderful sort of free-for-all relationship. I remember when Virginia and I were engaged there was something that I thought Lincoln was doing wrong. So I sent him a saucy telegram of some kind or other, a violent telegram. My fiancee was sure that he was going to come down on the next train with pistols in hand. Of course naturally there was nothing of the kind. It was just our way of communication and it made for something delightfully free. There were no holds barred. We could say any doggoned thing to each other. And thrashed out a lot of interesting things as a consequence.

PC: That's great. So he's really been a friend for thirty-odd years?

HM: Yes. Yes. Thirty-five or more years.

PC: He's always interested me because he's been active in so many things.

HM: Yes. He's an astonishing man. One would have thought in those days that he was a man with a great future behind him. But not at all. He has lived up to his promise. And that takes a lot of doing, especially when you promise to innovate. The most difficult thing is to keep really running in the front of things. Oh, yes, I admire Lincoln very much.

PC: Well, you started at the Metropolitan then. Was everything else closed or did that overlap? Or how did that come about?

HM: Well, I got engaged in the late summer of 1931.

PC: Where did you meet your wife?

HM: In Annisquam. My wife's family rented a house there just after her father died. Her father was a nose and throat specialist in St. Louis, had helped found the medical school there, was very prominent in the Barnes Hospital, in fact was the great nose and throat specialist in the United States. All the opera singers and people like that used to come to him. He died I suppose in 1930. And the family then took a house in Annisquam where we met. And when I wanted to get married, of course, it was in the draggy depths of the Depression. So I hawked myself around to all the people I knew in the universities on the Eastern seaboard. Who would just have none of me; it was just "throw that man out, it breaks my heart." And finally, just completely by accident, I just stumbled in to the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum. Ivins had the courage to hire me. And believe me it took courage because I had no qualifications whatsoever beyond being able to read languages. And that was his reason, that I could inform myself, I could teach myself.

PC: Well, you had used the library there you mentioned before. So you knew it.

HM: Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, I'd used that library for a long time. And Ivins was an astonishing man. He was trained as a lawyer. His father was a prominent reform lawyer here in town. His brother was the attorney-general of the State of New Jersey. And Ivins himself had done the accident work on the Hudson [River] tubes. There were lots of accidents. He was very busy indeed. He had also been a lawyer for a team of people who had tried to float a loan for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad on the Paris Bourse.

PC: Oh my goodness!

HM: They'd gone over there to Paris to interview the people, everything was going very well until the Paris people asked how many kilometers of track the railroad owned. And Ivins then, as the junior member of the team, did a little figuring on an envelope, turned the miles into kilometers and said how many it was. And this all stopped. "Impossible!" And [they] threw them out and would have nothing more to do with them from then on out. They were just imposters; you could not have such a long track. And his father was a very remarkable man indeed. That was William Mills Ivins, Sr. who really felt that he came to life when he was facing an angry crowd in Carnegie Hall or Cooper Union auditorium and beating them into coming around to his way of thinking with such effort that, as Ivins told me, he could feel the sweat trickling down his arms. That's an erratic way of describing the predicament but that is what he enjoyed, a fight like that.

PC: Well, that was just sort of the end of the great public haranguers.

HM: Yes. This was the age of muckraking and all that. His mother had an apparently rather intellectual salon somewhere downtown, sort of the rival salon to the Gilder's salon. Those were the two salons.

PC: Richard Gilder?

HM: Yes. Exactly. And Ivins was brought up in this very bright Old New York kind of atmosphere. His sister was much interested in music and she used to go to all concerts and would read orchestra scores the way somebody else might read a novel. And then, when she was about fifty, she decided one day that, after all, she really had never been interested in music at all; and stopped from that day on. It was a strange family, a very strange family.

PC: So what were you hired to do at the Metropolitan?

HM: I was hired to learn the Print Department business.

PC: Oh, that's where you were when you started?

HM: Yes, that's where I started. And I was hired because I had not gone to the Fogg.

PC: Oh, really?

HM: Was therefore not warped, tainted, smeared, or whatever . . . .

PC: They were anti-Fogg?

HM: Yes, they were anti-Fogg, although he was a great friend of Paul J. Sachs, a personal friend. In a sense he was right. Because the Fogg in those days didn't turn out museum curators; it turned out directors. And probably rightly. Because, back in the Twenties, museums were springing up all over the country and what they needed was bright personable young men who could persuade people to give money and keep the old ladies happy and get things going. And they didn't have to know much. But they had to know something of the world of dealers and a little smattering of works of art. So that was a perfectly sensible way of looking at it. But that was not what he wanted for his assistant. Also very sensible.

PC: What did you do there when you started? This was really coming into a new world in a way.

HM: It certainly was coming into a new world entirely. Well, I was simply turned loose with no instructions except that I was to learn the Collection. And the Collection then was several thousand boxes of prints; it's now about ten thousand; I don't know how many it was then but it was perhaps about five. A great many things. So that I would take the various catalogues and the books and I would open the boxes and try to remember what was in them. Which is a taxing thing to do, which you can't do all day long. And then I had to man the study room which is the room where the public comes in and asks questions and you get stuff out for them. It's the maid service for the Collection, which teaches you an enormous ammout because just about every other question knocks you off your perch and you have to go and look it up. And if you know where to look it up you are doing very well. I've always felt that I wasn't held to know things but to know where to find out things. Specialists have never bothered me or intimidated me because I feel that everybody is a specialist. I know the contents of my pants' pockets better than anybody else does and I'm a specialsit on that. And it was of course extremely educational to try to answer people's questions. Naturally I made a fool of myself time and again in the beginning. But that's allowable because, when I did something wrong, I'd simply say, "Sorry, I've only just come to work here." And people were very nice and didn't mind. And then you set yourself to work. And of course there's a very great deal in the museum world, there's an enormous amount of stock-taking and inventory-making.

HM: And cataloguing.

HM: And all the things that come in have to be given their numbers and described and cards made for them and all that kind of thing. I did a great deal of that. Which is interesting and which is the way you learn the Collection. The first job that I set for myself outside that was to make an index of the plates of Diderot's Encyclopedia. Which was eleven volumes, about 3,000 engravings of all the arts and techniques and sciences of the 1760s and 1770s. And that was a fascinating thing to do. I've never regretted that. It's been a most useful index ever since. But really in the end you had to set yourself to your own -- find your own way. Which was a very nice thing.

PC: Did he organize that department?

HM: Yes, he did. The Museum had no print department, although it had some Whistler prints in the library, until 1916 when a paper manufacturer upstate called Harris Brisbane Dick died and bequeathed his entire collection to the Metropolitan Museum. Then they had to decide what to do.

PC: That was really the beginning?

HM: That was the moment of truth. They decided to accept most of it, to sell off a great deal in order to get funds for purchasing. And Ivins then separated what should be kept and what should be sold: separated it very intelligently I think. He was, as I said, doing legal work downtown.

PC: How had he gotten involved anyway?

HM: He got interested in prints because he once went to study for a year in Munich. And on his way in Paris he bought Goya's Disasters of War for twenty bucks. And that got him interested. And, as a lawyer, he was not free to go to museums because he was working while they were open. He wanted something that he could afford to buy out of his rather small earnings that he could play with and study at home, so that prints and facsimilies of prints seemed to be the answer. And he would sit around and look at these things and try to find out about them. His wife was an excellent illustrator, she drew beautifully. She drew that little portrait over there of my daughter. And out in the hall there's a lovely watercolor of my wife. She was really skillful. And her things don't look old-fashioned and don't look silly after all these years. She was good. So that helped him also, to be interested. Then, when this crisis came to the Museum, there were no people trained to prints around except, I suppose, Rossiter at the museum in Boston, who after all was head of a department and didn't want to leave. So some of the trustees had known Ivins as a lawyer and they knew of his interest in prints and they took a deep breath and invited him to come as full curator. Such a career would not happen nowadays. Those opportunities no longer present themselves. In fact, anybody with my qualifications wouldn't be hired nowadays either. It's a great pity, a very great pity. Because by those bold decisions you sometimes come a cropper and get somebody in who's no good, but you sometimes get somebody who is a genius like Ivins. That's what he was, a genius. Then he had great friends who helped him: Mortimer Schiff and Nathan Strauss and, I think, Herbert Strauss. And so he would go abroad to the print auctions at Leipzig which occurred in May. And they would give him money to spend, the Museum would give him funds, and he would go with $40,000 or $50,000 in his pocket and bid at those tables there where all the museums in the world and all the great dealers were also bidding. And there he laid in this marvelous print collection with intelligence, with a sense of what is important that I can't but admire more and more as I think about it. It was the last time that such a collection could have been made. It was between the wars, you see, during the wars and when the great German princely collections were broken up, when the Russians sold off prints, and a good many of the British families went bankrupt and sold their things. Everything washed into a central auction house of Bermans' in Leipzig. And you simply had the great prints of the world channelled to that one green baize table. And so he would go there and come home with things that have never come on the market again and never will.

PC: They just don't exist any more.

HM: They are just not free. And he was a great respecter of the traditional opinion. So he read the great connoisseurs of the past, like C. J. Bulliet, Varga, and those people. And if they admired somebody very much, like Papagano [Papozzona(?)] who was then not considered worth picking up, he thought -- well, these people are extremely intelligent, we should get what they admire. So he got what had been admired through the ages. You see, it was a kind of consensus of opinion.

PC: And it was out of fashion at the time.

HM: It was out of the purchases of his own time. And that was extremely intelligent. And time has shown the wisdom of all that because he got things that in those days people laughed at him for getting, but now everybody runs for: all those Mannerist people, the Fontainbleau School, all that kind of thing.

PC: And there's growing interest in that now.

HM: There's growing interest. So he really laid in -- he missed very, very few great things that came up in his time. Among the moderns he had not much sympathy for Toulouse-Lautrec, none for the German Expressionists, and none for Munch. But otherwise he did well with his contemporaries, too. He didn't have much sympathy with Picasso either. But he got very good Matisses. He didn't even have a Klee. I mean the people who somehow have emerged out of the modern movement now seemed violent to him and rough. And, when all those things exist in the Museum of Modern Art, it doesn't particularly matter whether they're at the Metropolitan or not. They're here in town to be available. And we always work together with the Museum of Modern Art as though it were one collection in two places, we lend to each other and help each other; it's always perfectly safe.

PC: He dropped his legal practice, didn't he? And the Museum then became full-time.

HM: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I'm told by his old cronies that he never really liked the law. He was restless in it. His was a very restless nature.

PC: I've been able to find out very, very little about him.

HM: Oh, really?

PC: So I'm quite curious about how he worked and what kind of personality he was and all this sort of thing.

HM: Well, he was a very tall, slatternly kind of man, he didn't quite shamble like the two halves of two camels the way Steichen does, but he walked a little like that. And he looked like a sort of Goethe, rather consciously sloppy. He had the Harvard hat, all in holes and tatters; but that wasn't because it was an old hat; it was the style, it was quite deliberately conscious. He was more an owl than a lark and he'd work late at night as lawyers do and would come into the Museum at eleven o'clock in the morning and then stay late sometimes. As a lawyer he had an intemperate way of arguing and it was always the argumentum ad hominum.

PC: Somebody did mention that he was vitriolic when he would argue.

HM: Yes. He had a terrible temper, absolutely un ungovernable temper; a mad temper. And when a fit of temper came on him he simply was a being who should be put away and not seen until he cooled off, radioactive for the moment, you see. And it was very curious. He would see things that he didn't like and he wouldn't tell you anything about them at the time but these complaints would rankle in him over weeks or months and then he would simply march up to you one day and there would be the shaking forefinger and the stuttered accusation and you would blanch and it was really embarrassing, really embarrassing. And shaking. He hurt everybody who was near him, everybody absolutely, his family and everybody else. But you could always say that he hurt himself more. You know Hume said that Rousseau was a man without a skin. So that you could understand all that but it didn't make it any easier. It was really very, very, very annoying. And if I hadn't had school bills and pediatricians and diapers to pay for, I would not have lasted out, and it would have been a great mistake to have left. But I would have flounced out certainly if I had been a bachelor. There's no question about that. But somehow to pay for a family gives one a stomach for crow.

PC: You have to sort of pull the belt in and fight.

HM: You just have to bear it, that's all. And his writing came out of controversy.

PC: Oh, really?

HM: All of it. Wrangles often at the directors' lunchroom. His great antagonist was Gisela Richter who took care of the Greek and Roman things. She was a wonderful woman but not with anything approaching a sense of humor or proportion. So he would lambast into her until she was practically in tears. And out of that an article would come. The result was that when he retired to the country and had nobody to fight with he stopped writing.

PC: It was therapy or something.

HM: It was. He was writing really legal briefs to prove a case. And he had to trump up a litigation in order to get up the energy to write his brief. It was a curious state of mind.

PC: Did he work like a lawyer, I mean in his thinking and in his processes?

HM: Yes. All words had to be absolutely exact. You had to say exactly what you meant and if one word was out of place he jumped on it and tore you all to pieces. Curious. He made an a exhibition of the techniques of printmaking with labels that explained how you'd make an etching or a woodcut. This thing hung for years in our hall and was used by classes. Then the hall got painted one time long after he had retired; we had to take the thing down and take it all apart. A man called Chapin Rogers was then working in my department. And we thought we would see how they were. We looked these things over. There was an error in every single label. It's so difficult, you see, to describe in words what you do with your hands, I mean try to describe how you tie your shoelaces; you just can't.

PC: It's incredible.

HM: It's incredible, yes. So we thought we could do better. We rewrote all those labels, laid them aside for a month, looked at them again, and there were just as many different mistakes. But it was the right idea. And he did just as well as one person could have done working all alone on those labels. He was a brilliant writer. And he would write and rewrite and rewrite. I remember the first bulletin article that I did. It was a very bad little thing on Goya's Colossus, a terrible little job -- oh, no, it was on Moreau Le Jeune's Monumental Costume. I handed in my script to him and he took it. Ten days went by. Nothing happened. Two weeks. Finally I said, "Was my article all right?" He said, "Article? What article? Did you give me an article?" I said, "Oh, yes, I gave you an article." He said, "Well, I must have lost it. Back to the anvil," says he. I said, "Oh, that's perfectly all right. I have a carbon." And it was as though I had grabbed candy from a baby. His face fell. I wasn't aware, you see, that he was putting me through the hoops. I was totally innocent.

PC: That's a marvelous device.

HM: It wasn't often one could really catch him. But of course naturally I always keep a carbon of anything I write, keep it in two different places, too, in case it gets lost.

PC: I'm curious about the early collections or groups of prints that came in to the department. There was the first Harry Dick collection. Were there other ones like that?

HM: Yes. There were a good many. A charming little tiny old lady came in once called Georgiana Sargent and she had a Durer woodcut of Samson and the Lions, which was one of the woodcuts he made around 1500, a very early one. This was part of her father's collection. Her father collected Biblical subjects. And she said, "This is so fresh and new of course I'm sure it is a facsimile but you might want it perhaps." Ivins looked at it very, very closely indeed and said, "No, my dear, it's not a facsimile. It's just simply about the best impression that's survived from this block." She was delighted with that and gave her father's whole collection. Which is a curious, very miscellaneous collection indeed, but it had wonderful things, offbeat things that a regular print collection would not have collected, since he collected subjects. And the Georgiana Sargent Collection has gone through the entire collectors -- Oh, I suppose perhaps 500 - oh -- probably 1,000 prints. Then Junius Morgan, who I think was the nephew of J. P. Morgan was very much interested in Durer. And he sat in Paris for some thirty years collecting Durer's prints and other things, too. He would swap out things when he got better impressions; so he was always bettering the impressions he had. Finally he sold the copper plates to the Museum and gave woodcuts. Which is a wonderful thing. That was in the early Twenties, maybe 1920, I don't quite remember. So that gave us the best Durer collection in the country, or, as a matter of fact, one of the best Durer collections anywhere. I suppose you could get a better one in the British Museum, or Berlin, but not in Paris. And I don't think anywhere else really. It's a wonderful lot. Then perhaps one of the most remarkable gifts came from Felix Warburg, who lived where the Jewish Museum is now. And in the billiard room there (it was the corner room on the ground floor) on the billiard table they kept the large portfolios of books of prints. And I know that Gerald Warburg told me that he and his brothers were very annoyed by this collection because, whenever they wanted to shoot pool, they had to take off these great big heavy volumes. He also had some posts with those whirlarounds of frame things, two of those.

PC: Oh, yes.

HM: And when he died he bequeathed his collection to Mrs. Warburg for her lifetime and, at her death, the children were to take what they wanted out of it and the remainder was to come to the Metropolitan. Well, the family got together and said they didn't want that at all, that they would like the Metropolitan to choose immediately (this as 1941) what it either lacked altogether or had in worse impressions. A very good proviso, you see. In other words, we were not to take duplicates; we would only swap. Absolutely correct. So the whole batch of us, Ivins and I, it was a big collection, three or four hundred things, worked very hard on this and very scrupulously observed these requests. And in came some of the most wonderful Rembrandts you ever, ever saw! Oh, my God, things you'd never, never get nowadays or again. Never. And the wonderful early German things which had belonged to Junius Morgan. Because Morgan had bought the early Germans. And all sorts of things. It was one of the very, very great gifts. Then Mrs. Havemeyer's collection which came in 1929, I think it was, also contained some wonderful things. It contained beautiful impressions of the color etchings by her friend Mary Cassatt, as well as marvelous Rembrandts and some Durers.

PC: You must have quite a large Rembrandt collection?

HM: Yes. Ivins was extremely sensible there. He never bought what people collected because he knew that that would be dropped in the poor man's hat some day. And he was right. So the result is we had very little of Rembrandt's youth, which really was when he wasn't making very interesting things because of the later work, but a marvelous collection of stuff that he made, say, after he was in his mid-thirties when he began really going strong. And from there to the end it coasts along in wonderful style. And that was very intelligent of him, very. He never bought Whistlers because they would come in. And they did.

PC: They were around, and people would give them.

HM: Absolutely.

PC: That's interesting. Are they the main groups that have come into the collection?

HM: Let me see. No, we bought various large lots, too. I think perhaps the biggest purchased lot that ever came in was what I got out of the collection of Prince Lichtenstein who lived in Vaduz -- Prince Valery Lichtenstein -- and had a collection which I suppose goes back to the early fifteen hundreds, 1505 or something like that, when the Emperor Maximilian would give his woodcut portraits to his various friends and one happened to be the then Prince Lichtenstein, you see. This thing had been greatly augmented in the 18th century, all laid down on 18th century cardboard which was very carefully sized and calendared on the back of each sheet so that the sheets wouldn't be rough against the prints facing them. And these things were put away in large red morocco portfolios with green linen flaps to keep the dust out. About 350 portfolios. We bought, I supppose, 50 or 60 of those portfolios in two goes. And what I got -- this is when I took over after Ivins retired -- was all the unsaleable things. I got the reproductive prints of the Italian schools, of the German schools; I got the theatre prints, a wonderful lot of those, marvelous; and varied things like that. It was a great purchase because they are not collector's prints. They are not prints you ever show on the walls, they're not works of art; but they're the prints that answer questions. And there's no collection like them outside the very, very old collections like -- well, like Paris or Vienna. There aren't too many of them in the British Museum. But they were the collections that were the pre-photographic approach to works of art, you see, when you got engravings of things for lack of any better picture of them.

PC: Well, did that include decorative arts and architectural things and all the practical things?

HM: Yes. Yes, all that. All the practical things too. I got all that stuff. And at that time nobody wanted them. They came in for about a dollar or a dollar-and-a-half a throw. It was a huge lot.

PC: How many would be in one of those large portfolios?

HM: Well, it was a sort of man-high pile of stuff when we unpacked them all. And that was the kind of thing that never turned up in that mass during Ivins's activity because no such reproductive collection had come on the market. I don't think it ever had really; and certainly never will again. No one has formed a collection like that.

PC: Extraordinary. How did Lichtenstein come to have them?

HM: Well, you see, a great gentleman had a library. And he also had a picture collection.

PC: Which he had a lot of trouble with Vienna about.

HM: Yes, exactly. And these sort of illustrated or made a background for his great paintings by Rubens and other people. And they were the sort of art historical background that an 18th century man would have to illuminate his collection of works of art.

PC: When you think of famous collectors or families who collected for a long time, I can't really think of another one.

HM: No. There were very few. Although I was reading just the other day that the Duke of Medina-Thaley in Madrid has two left out of a set of six tapestries that a Duke of Medina-Thaley bought in Brussels in 1572. That's not so bad, you know.

PC: That's marvelous.

HM: The set is now split up; there are two in the Prado, one in the Metropolitan, and one somewhere else; they still have two.

PC: After whole centuries.

HM: After all those years that's not so bad.

PC: That's phenomenal. How are we doing on time? Is it all right for you?

HM: It's a quarter to five.

PC: We've got about 15 or 20 minutes left on this side.

HM: Right. Let's go to the end of this tape.

PC: I'm very curious about some of the other curators and other people who were active at the Metropolitan when you first came there. Who was the director of the Metropolitan at that time?

HM: I came when Winlock was director. Robinson, who had been director, had died perhaps around 1930. I came in 1932. Winlock had recently taken over. Winlock was an archaeologist - an Egyptologist. A terribly nice man. I was very, very fond of him. He looked like sort of a battered marble bust of a Roman pro-consul, very weathered and tanned and hardy. A lovely man. And wonderful when he talked with enormous nostalgia and romance about Egypt, about the nights there, about the fellaheen and their conversations, about discovering this and finding that. He was really a born Egyptologist. When he was a little boy he had mummified a mouse and made a set of coffins for it.

PC: Oh, that's absolutely fantastic! He kept it up.

HM: That's right. There was no question of what he'd be ever. He was just born . . . .

PC: How have the directors been in relation to the Print Department?

HM: Well, they varied. It's never been an important department because the things aren't terribly expensive. Francis Taylor used to call it the trash basket to tease me partly and partly he meant it. Of course that had its drawbacks but also it had its advantages because it means that nobody examines very much what this inconspicuous thing does.

PC: But the drawings are certainly expensive.

HM: Yes.

PC: They're also part of . . . ?

HM: No, they're not part of my department.

PC: Oh, they're not? I thought it was combined.

HM: We stored them; we got them out and we gave them out to people and did that kind of thing. But they always used to be bought and taken care of by the paintings department. We had nothing to do with it at all except the storing and the handling of them. Then, about five or six years ago, Jacob Bean was brought in order to make a separate department for drawings. It's a pity that couldn't have been done years ago when it was easier to get drawings. But I must say that the paintings department did pretty well with their left hand. After all they were so busy with paintings that they couldn't do very much with drawings, but they did awfully well. They got that beautiful Leonardo Head of Sainte Anne. They got the Buran Collection of Canaletto, Laguardia and Tiepolo. They got those two wonderful little Leonardos that came up years and years ago. It was not at all an inconsiderable effort. They have never been given credit for doing very much with the drawings but they did a great deal better than they're supposed to have done.

PC: What other directors besides Taylor had amused  ideas for the Print Department?

HM: Well, James Rorimer was always very nice to me except in a most curious way. This is rather indiscreet but, I don't know, it is funny. My last trustees' meeting, my last purchasing committee meeting before I retired, I proposed a lot of very remarkable early prints that I had found at Charlie Childs in Boston. They had been collected back in the 20's and 30's by Bendow in Kansas City. They had lain in bank vaults somewhere or other. And it was stuff you just do not find in Europe at all. It cost about $22,000 which, as purchasing committees go, is small-time. I was about to be sent abroad on a buying trip with, I think, $25,000. So I posed these things thinking that, you know, in my sentimental way, that my last meeting of the board of trustees with the purchasing committee that they would certainly give me anything that I asked for. Well, James Rorimer called me up the next morning and said that, if I bought them, I'd have to buy them out of my foreign purchase money. I said, "Okay, scratch the trip. I won't find anything as good." He was totally taken aback. But he just had not supported me. He just let me down. Which he would do from time to time.

PC: If he had other moves to make.

HM: Or his mood or something. You never could tell what. But I got that lot of prints. That was the last thing I bought and it was very worth getting indeed. And then he turned around and was very nice and gave me some purchasing money, not as much as before, but something that made it worthwhile to go abroad. But of course I didn't find anything as interesting.

PC: You made your point.

HM: I tried to get the best but it just does not exist.

PC: Yes. It's become more and more difficult.

HM: Yes. Actually one's best purchases are often made right in this country. Partly because it's not romantic. Stuff from a little gallery in Boston had no glamour to the purchasing committee. None whatever at all. If it had come from Colnachi's in London, all right. They would have been all for it.

PC: Right. That's another story.

HM: And that's one thing I think one has to be very careful about in collecting: not to let the grubbiness of the surroundings blind you to the magnificence of what may lie there.

PC: Oh, that's true.

HM: And to be willing to go into all sorts of flat, tame, uninteresting-looking places. Because you never know. And I've always gone in my collecting into expensive places and cheap places and just anything. Because expensive places often have things that they can't sell to their particular specialized clientele.

PC: Right. And they must get rid of it.

HM: And they must get rid of it.

PC: Do you have any observations to make on the kind of patronage that you were involved with? That is, collectors who were interested in your department who would, say, buy things for you or give things to you?

HM: Yes. There was a terribly nice man called Barry Friedman who was a banker, very sort of the aristocracy of Wall Street, very conservative, and was consulted by everybody. He loved to go around and buy things from little shops. Often interesting things. And he bought Near Eastern things and metalwork and all sorts of things which he offered to those departments and if they didn't particularly like them, or like him . . . . I liked him very much. He would give us a lot of things. Of course nobody can ever be led to give you or buy you what you want. You have to take what they want to give you. That's rule number one. And then Anne Stern, who was Mrs. Janos Scholz, and is now Mrs. Carl Stern, gave us $1,000 a year, which was very nice indeed. And I would get the kind of thing that I thought she would be amused by, which was usually rather spectacular ornament drawings and things like that which are very splashy, showy, fancy things. So that she was very helpful that way, very, very helpful. But on the whole the Print Department never had anybody who really helped the way Thornton Wilson has helped with porcelains and pottery. The porcelain collection is his gift and there he's collected the things not that he liked but that he thought ought to go into a representative collection of porcelains. Which is a very unusual attitude in a donor. We've never had anybody like that.

PC: Very few departments any place have someone like that.

HM: Yes. Very few. That's very, very exceptional. But we've been very lucky at the Metropolitan in having knowledgeable trustees. And there have been in my time several trustees who could have doubled as curators.

PC: Oh, really?

HM: Which is most unusual.

PC: Who would they be?

HM: Well, the first one was R. T. H. Halsey who was instrumental in organizing the American Wing, who did as much as any one man to dispel the grandmother's stories about American antiques and put them on some sort of firm historical basis.

PC: And now the prices are on a historical basis.

HM: Indeed they are. Indeed they are. Oh, he was such a nice man. He was a Baltimorean; and charming, charming, charming. You could go to him with any problem on any subject of the museum and know that you'd be heard with interest and sympathy. He was great! Then Walter Baker, who was also a banker, collected drawings. He's dying now, poor man, very slowly of Parkinson's Disease or something that paralyzes him; terrible, terrible, terrible. He was very good: a very intelligent man. He collected small Greek and Roman sculptures, terracottas and bronzes and things like that, and drawings, mostly early Italian drawings, and really took the trouble to find out about them. The third trustee would be Judge Irvin Untermeyer who knows an enormous amount about the decorative arts, especially the English decorative arts, and has formed an astonishing collection which is to come to us when he dies. Our collection of such English things is not particularly good nowadays but, when his things come in, it will never rival the Victoria and Albert Museum but it will be the next great collection after that.

PC: That's marvelous. Do you find that the trustees have interests in specific areas?

HM: Yes. Very much so.

PC: Before they're trustees?

HM: Yes, usually. Yes, certainly R. T. Halsey, and Walter Baker, and the Judge were formed in their taste before they became trustees. In fact, that's why they became trustees. The others probably less on the whole. Francis Taylor started assigning them various departments, they became visitors to their departments.

PC: What does that mean?

HM: Well, it means that the curator is supposed to go to them if he's in trouble and they will help out with advice or help him get purchases or something of the kind. He's supposed to go and look at the collection and get familiar with it, which is terribly embarrassing to him. The trustees are absolutely floored by this assignment. They don't know what to do to cover this lion's den of the curatorial departments. And I really do pity them. But they've come around and been very nice to us. Douglas Dillon was one. He was very nice. When the Seasongood Auction came just after he took over and became my visitor he bought some very good things out of the Seasongood Auction, German 15th century woodcuts. He was extremely helpful. He couldn't have been nicer. And then Mrs. Fosburgh, who was Mrs. Vincent Astor, she was another visitor. And I don't know who is now. Maybe she is still; I don't know.

PC: The trustees really have things to do, don't they?

HM: Yes. They have as much as they would like to undertake. Of course the prize assignment is the purchasing committee, to be able to spend all that lovely money, see all those pretty things.

PC: And to find it someplace, too.

HM: Yes, to find it. The good trustees are given that assignment. Well, of course the other trustee who knows a very great deal also is Robert Lehman, who knows a very great deal about his collection, which is enormous, which is the last great collection in American hands. Absolutely a supreme collection that would have rated as a great collection in 1900 of those things that can still be got. That's the last one. And there never will be another one.

PC: Who will get that collection?

HM: I don't know. I have no idea. Not the slightest idea.

PC: One hears this; then one hears that.

HM: I just have no idea. I just hope it comes to us. If it doesn't, it doesn't. It is so enormously valuable I shouldn't think the family could afford to keep it. I should think the inheritance taxes would be ruinous.

PC: It must be worth tens of millions.

HM: Oh, enormous, incalculable amount. And he's collected with great intelligence, very, very wisely. And of course he's been terribly nice and lent us his collection. As you know, that beautiful show that we change from time to time.

PC: Right. Why don't we stop here because there's really only a few minutes left and we can do another tape.

HM: Well, I don't think I've anything more . . . . I think I've talked myself totally out.

PC: Oh, you'd be surprised. I have a whole list of things.

HM: Really?

[BREAK IN TAPE]

PC: This is April 22. Reel 2. You had mentioned Francis Ferguson on the other side. Do you know him well? Have you known him well for a long time.

HM: Oh, yes, I knew him very well indeed.

PC: Did you have lots of interests and activities in common?

HM: Yes. We were Rhodes scholars together. That's where we met. We met on the boat going to England.

PC: I'm curious if he's had any influence on your activities because you always seem to have an interest in the theatre besides your working with the American Lab Theatre.

HM: Yes. And my reason for coming to the American Laboratory Theatre was because of Francis. He was there. You see, we were Rhodes scholars together. Went down in 1926. He went to New York and entered the Laboratory Theatre (Am Lab as it was termed). And I then went on and spent a year on my own in Greece. So I came back after an absence, pretty much uninterrupted, of four years. And all my connections here had vanished. Really about the only person I knew was Francis Ferguson. He was then working at the American Laboratory Theatre and he got me into it. And I used to give a course there called "Style and Background."

PC: Right. Which you talked about. I'm curious about things subsequent to that time.

HM: Yes. Well, after that broke up, which was just after I was married, say, in 1933 or something like that, then he went off. And I think he taught in Rutgers, was it? I've forgotten. He taught in various places. And has now become, of course, the grand white-haired old man of the drama, as I am the grand white-haired old man of whatever else it is. It doesn't seem possible. But there you are. But I have not seen very much of him since.

PC: Really?

HM: We met very occasionally. Just simply because he's always been in different places; there was no falling out at all.

PC: Are there any people that you've had long-term professional relationships with or friendship?

HM: Yes. I suppose Lincoln Kirstein is the person I've been sort of in closest touch with continuously for a long time. That also came through Francis. He knew him somehow or other. And I was once in Cambridge and was taken to Lincoln's rooms while he was a senior at Harvard and had just taken over The Hound and Horn from Varian Fry.

PC: Right. And you had worked on that.

HM: I worked on that, yes.

PC: But you see him -- well, Kirstein lives in New York, so you see him?

HM: Yes, so I see him from time to time. He would be a very interesting man to make a tape of; very, very interesting.

PC: Yes, he's had lots of activities.

HM: Tremendous! Oh, a very extraordinary man.

PC: Has he been interested in the Museum ever?

HM: He's been very generous to the Metropolitan and given us a lot of things on anatomy, popular prints, or images populaires, and all sorts of things. He's been very generous to the Museum, very generous indeed.

PC: Have you done any projects with him ever?

HM: Not since we worked together on The Hound and Horn. Well, you see, he went off from that into ballet, which doesn't particularly interest me. And then he went into the theatre which interests me more a good deal. But we never worked together again. Simply it didn't happen that way.

PC: But you still see him socially?

HM: Oh, yes. Every once in a while he'll call me up. Sometimes I'll see him two or three times a month for lunch. He always calls up around eleven o'clock in the morning and says, "What about lunch?" Well, usually I say no. He hates to commit himself.

PC: It's always last minute?

HM: It's last minute or nothing. He hates to be caught.

PC: No planning ahead.

HM: No.

PC: Well, you talked quite a bit about Harold Acton actually.

HM: Yes.

PC: Is there any more that one would want to say about him?

HM: No, I don't think so. The terrible life that he had with his father.

PC: Oh, yes. That sounds to be just unbelievable.

HM: Dreadful. Unbelievable, yes. I knew Berenson. I don't know whether I've talked about him.

PC: No, you haven't talked about him. How did you come to meet him?

HM: Oh, well, that was rather curious and rather amusing. When I was a small boy we lived for a winter in Naples. And there my family got to know an old lady called, not then, Ernestine Rudolph. Countess Rudolph who had been born a Fabri which is an Italian family that had come here and lived in Newport and then had gone back to Italy. So when I went to Florence on my first vacation as a Rhodes scholar which would have been the Christmas of 1923, my grandmother said to me, "Now be nice to dear Ernestine" (who I considered an old lady). So I telephoned to Countess Rudolph and she asked me to come around to tea. Well, she lived in a really very interesting place, Casa Caponi, which was behind the Annunciata, and was the largest private house in Florence. Which her brother Egisto Fabri had bought by selling off half of his Cezannes. He owned twenty-six Cezannes which he bought around 1900 when he was an art student in Paris. And he sold one-half of them to Wildenstein and with the proceeds bought this enormous house which was all divided into apartments. They had the top floor apartment of one half of it all hung with yellow silk.

PC: Oh, my goodness!

HM: And I went there. It was very impressive indeed. And Egisto Fabri was a fascinating man, absolutely fascinating, rather lame because he'd had a mistress in Paris from whom he had contracted some kind of tuberculosis of the bone that left him lame. And always kept at home in these grand rooms. The barber used to come and barber him there because he didn't like to stir out. He had a great oiled and curled beard like a Babylonian bull, very elaborate. Quite a fascinating man. And Countess Rudolph was an extremely nice old lady, very nice indeed. She said, "I suppose you'd like to meet the Berensons." I said, "Certainly. But I have no idea how." So she picked up the telephone, telephoned I Tatti. The next noon the Berenson's car was at my cold water hotel by the station to take me out to lunch.

PC: Marvelous!

HM: And he just could not have been nicer. Berenson has the reputation of being horrid to people and I've seen him being very horrid indeed. But he was absolutely wonderful to me. Perfectly wonderful. He wanted me to come out there and be a disciple. Which I did not want to do. I didn't like to get caught. So I stayed in my cold water room and I thought I wouldn't get too involved with I Tatti. But he let me have the run of his library. I went out there to lunch a good deal. And he let me take books home to read from his library which is enourmous generosity for somebody who really loves his books.

PC: Very rare.

HM: And he talked to me perfectly frankly. I can see why. Because I was no threat. I didn't know anything. I was young and absolutely agog at everything; thought Florence was absolutely the most wonderful place I'd ever been to. And he therefore opened up the treasures of his time which were very remarkable. I think the most wonderful thing he did for me was to take me on the walks. He used to have walks on which he took very, very few people. After lunch he would look out the window and say to Mrs. Berenson, "Mary, what shall it be today? Should it be the rock? Should it be the tree?" And she'd say, "Aw, B.B., the rock of course." And then we'd get into his car, which was one of those enormous old black limousines, the kind that bullfighters had, made very tall so they could stand up and bow to the crowd, that sort of thing, a little black house on wheels. We would drive up through all those miserable villages that lie above Florence, all that tawdry mess of rural Florence, get out at the crest of a hill somewhere or other, saunter along a hilltop path with, you know, Florence lying down on one side, Valdama lying on the other, Castello del this and that. We walked leisurely for perhaps half to three-quarters of an hour and came to what was the ultimate Chinese rock. In the meantime, the car had gone down to Fiesole, Florence, rushed up the other hill, arrived there, really in a boiling state.

PC: Well, what was the rock and what was the tree?

HM: Well, they were simply features that lay far away from any tourist track, beautiful natural features in the hills above Florence which he knew extremely well because he'd walked all over them as a younger man. And I remember one time there was a wonderful little woman called Pelegrina del Turco, a beautiful little sort of Florentine cameo of a girl, an exquisite little creature, of the del Turcos who had been prominent in 1200 and so forth, who was their social secretary. And who, shockingly enough, when the Germans came, was stood up against a wall and shot. Still incredible. Any way, he got Pelegrina to take me aside one time . . . . It had rained very heavily the night before, a real downpour, and the rain had flattened the grass, the tall spring grass in the upland meadows and, where it had gone down in temporary brooks, it had smoothed the grass to show where the water had rushed. Everything was still sparkling with rain drops that morning. And she took me into the fields, with these curious traces of the brook that lasted for hours, to a shrine put up, say, around 1450 in the style of de Cipriano, carved in pietro serana and there it was among the orange trees, exactly the way it had been put up centuries ago. You know, it was the kind of sculpture that, if you had seen it in a museum, you would have thought: "Oh, it's a school piece." But to see it in its source in that weather was an unforgettable experience. And that's the kind of thing that Berenson gave one.

PC: He planned little experiences.

HM: He planned little experiences. He was really wonderful that way.

PC: Isn't that marvelous.

HM: Really wonderful. He lived a wonderfully controlled and sort of air-conditioned life before air conditioning. Everything was exactly the way he wanted it in this small villa, a rather small house; no great architectural features. It had a beautiful garden designed by Jeffrey Scott, small, which went down in terraces.

PC: I've heard of the garden. But I didn't know who designed it.

HM: Very, very . . . . One approached it in a wonderful place. You went out on a trolley car to Ponta da Mansa, which was an untidy little place. Then you went up a muddy road, you went aside into a garden wall gate, you came to a great upward carpet of grass with cypresses on either side to wall it in. At the top there was a complicated little sort of stairs that divided and rejoined and then went into a grotto up again, and over that a little marble figure of Fortune. And that's how you entered the house. It was really very, very beautiful.

PC: It sounds like a very good set to work from.

HM: It was. It was absolutely great. Everything was exquisite in the house. The small fragments of paintings, the Chinese paintings.

PC: He was very interested in Oriental things, wasn't he?

HM: Very interested. He got things out of Tung-hwan. He had very beautiful Oriental things, probably at that time the only Chinese things in all Italy, I daresay. And I daresay they are among the very few that are there now. And the upholstery was exactly the right shade of dull gray or green, the agate ashtrays always clean and exactly in place. Everything was in order, always in order.

PC: That's interesting. But do you think he enjoyed living there?

HM: No, I don't think he did.

PC: Really!?

HM: He once said to me when we were alone coming back from one of these walks, "I feel I'm going back to my gilded coffin."

PC: My goodness!

HM: He said he thought he would be happier as a teacher in a Midwestern college. And it's possibly true.

PC: But why?

HM: And Mrs. Berenson -- well, Mrs. Berenson wanted to be married to a great man with the proper setting and the proper guests. And his life was really the creation of Mary Berenson. She worked on all his books, put them into better English because she was very literate (her brother was Percival Logan Smith), and I think she probably managed his business affairs. And I daresay the somewhat dubious way he made his money off Duveen was probably as much her doing as his.

PC: Oh, isn't that interesting!

HM: Hard as it is to think so. You know, as a proper Philadelphia Quaker, she knew the ways of this wicked world.

PC: Why do sometimes the most proper people know the most incredible ways?

HM: I know. They can afford to be proper.

PC: That's very, very interesting.

HM: He was a tiny little man. I remember the first time I saw him. His beard seemed to come up to his eyes and when he smiled his nose almost telescoped together.

PC: Well, did you write to him or see him frequently in the years that you knew him?

HM: We went back from time to time, yes. Yes, I saw him I think on two or three vacations while I was a Rhodes scholar. And then when I was married -- or rather, no, long afterwards, around 1950 or so, my wife and I spent a month in Rome with the Harry Francis's from Cleveland. Frances Francis (Mrs. Harry Francis) was a great friend of the Berensons, especially B.B., so she told him that we were in Rome and were coming to Florence. I was very much afraid to meet him really.

PC: Now you'd been with a museum and had all this experience.

HM: A very different situation. Very different.

PC: Had you correspondence in the intervening years?

HM: Very intermittent. A Christmas letter on both sides. That was about all. And we went from Rome to Florence by way of Siena. She told me that he was very angry with me because he sent me a book and I hadn't thanked him for it. Well, the book had arrived after I had left New York but I was wondering how to explain that. So I knew that I had to be awfully careful. And I wrote him that we were coming to Florence but didn't say where we'd stay or when we'd arrive. Well, we arrived, say, at ten o'clock in the morning at the Pensione di Consigli. Before lunch there was a telephone call inviting us out to lunch the next day.

PC: Spies were everywhere.

HM: You know, Florence is one of those places where everybody knows everything about everybody else. So the car came and took