THE POISON OF NON-FULFILLMENT

by Blair Fuller

      My father, Chas Fuller, grew up in what was at the turn of the century the most prestigious artists' colony in America, Cornish, New Hampshire. The first artist attracted to this community of failing farms on the east shore of the Connecticut River, facing rugged and "totemic" Mt. Ascutney in Vermont, had been the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). Famous and rich from the sculptures he had made for the neo-classical extravagances, both public and private, of the Gilded Age, the charismatic Saint-Gaudens had drawn some 40 Beaux-Arts-influenced, artistic families to Cornish by the time of his death.
      Cornish was remote, but a rail line connected it directly to New York, where most of the Cornishers spent most of the year. Only a few relatively young and less successful artists remained at Cornish through the long winters, "chickadees," they were called, after the small, hardy birds that do not migrate south. This group included Chas's parents--both of them painters, Lucia Fairchild Fuller and Henry Brown Fuller, called HBF--and their neighbor, Maxfield Parrish.
      Lucia painted popular, well-paid, and greatly admired miniature portraits. She was frequently ill, however, with what was finally diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, and her debility often prevented her from working and disabled her entirely before she was 40. HBF won awards for his paintings, and a reproduction of one of them was eventually sold in large numbers, but he was a perfectionist and suffered depressions, and he seemed incapable of turning admiration for his work into commissions that he could complete. Money was thus a difficult and haunting subject in the family.
      As Chas and his older sister, Clara, neared secondary-school age, Lucia made them promise that they would not become artists. They had both shown strong artistic aptitudes--they had inherited them, perhaps. Not only were their parents artists, two Fuller uncles were, and, too, their Fuller grandfather, great aunt and great uncle, and great-great-grandfather. In the Cornish atmosphere of their childhood, art of the highest order was the only thing held to be of important value. But Lucia told them that the rewards of art were too uncertain, and that she wanted them to have solid, secure lives. Her will was impressive, and her children accepted it without apparent difficulty.
      Lucia raised money from one in-law and a few of her richer patrons--the J.P. Morgan family among them--to send her children to the very best schools. Clara went to Brearley and Bryn Mawr, Chas to Groton and Harvard. At Groton there were certainly no classes in art, and Chas excelled at nearly everything. His grades were honor roll. He quarterbacked the football team and captained the baseball team from behind home plate. At the close of his next-to-last year, the legendary headmaster, the Reverend Endicott Peabody, appointed him senior prefect, the "best boy" position, for his final year. But when Chas returned to Groton in September he confessed to Peabody that during the summer he had smoked a cigarette. Peabody took away the prefectship but did not expel him.
      At Harvard, Chas quarterbacked the freshman football team, caught for the baseball team, and was elected treasurer of his class. In 1917, he enlisted in the Navy and soon became the 123rd young man to have Navy pilot's wings pinned to his chest. There is a family-album photograph of him in the open cockpit of a biplane, goggles perched on his dark, curly hair, grinning delightedly at the camera.
      He was assigned to submarine patrols over the English Channel. Flying itself was hazardous; otherwise the duty was relatively safe, and his life was lively. He wrote his sister that he was spending all his money in London on cigarettes and whiskey. In an Army-Navy baseball game, played with members of the royal family in attendance, Chas caught Herb Pennock, who later pitched for the Yankees, and won the game with an r.b.i. single in the sixth. Although it was a short war for America, two of Chas's best friends were killed in it, and a photograph of one of them stood on Chas's dresser all his life.
      Harvard reduced its degree requirements for returning veterans; thus, Chas could graduate with his class in 1919. He went on to the Columbia School of Architecture, and in his second year there he met my mother, Jane White. She had come to New York to study sculpture with, among others, Frances Grimes, who had worked for a number of years as assistant to Saint-Gaudens at Cornish and had known Chas as a boy.
      Jane was tall, striking, capable, independent-minded, extraordinarily confident, and rich. Her mother, whose family had become wealthy through logging operations in the Adirondacks and then in forests further west, died in the year that Jane met Chas. Jane and her two sisters were left not a "great" but a "considerable" fortune--we children were seriously taught this distinction.
      In the year of Jane's birth, 1897, it would have been almost unthinkable that a young woman "of family" should marry an artist. Like the musicians who played in the grand houses, artists generally came in through the service entrance to do their work. Patrons were not shy about telling the musician or portrait painter exactly what was wanted, or about telling the artist that the result of his effort was unsatisfactory. Prices were agreed on in advance, and money was withheld if the patron was not pleased.
      By the twenties, much had changed. Adventurous young women of wealthy backgrounds had perceived that while accumulated money had liberated people in many ways it had, at the same time, created a stultifying, defensive, and self-protective upper class in which they were expected to play pawn-like roles in games of family betterment. Increasingly, rich young women were having affairs and making romantic marriages with artists. Peggy Guggenheim married several and had affairs with many more. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney became a sculptor and started an art school that later became the Whitney Museum. Jane's second cousin, Kay Sage, was a surrealist painter and married the better-known surrealist Yves Tanguy. These relationships resembled, in the clarity of their ambition and the greater wealth on the female side, the earlier marriages of rich young American women to titled Europeans, of which Henry James and Edith Wharton had written.
      Jane was dazzled by Chas's artistic background and acquaintanceships. Throughout her life she spoke reverently of Thomas Dewing, Barry Faulkner, Herbert Adams, and other Cornishers, and she never became able wholeheartedly to approve of art made from other-than-Beaux-Arts precepts. Chas had grown up with these precepts exemplified in the houses and gardens of Cornish, and this made the architectural-school curriculum "too easy" for him, in Jane's words. One of his teachers told her that Chas was "almost too talented." There was something that Chas would not learn at Columbia, however. "An architect is a businessman with a slight artistic leaning," to quote the Impressionist painter Edward Simmons, who later became an architect. In the parlance of Cornish, most business- men were "Philistines," and how could Chas wish to be that?
      Chas and Jane married in 1922. During the first two years of their marriage Chas used condoms to protect Jane from the syphilis that he had contracted, he believed, in London in 1918.
      In the autumn of 1924, they went to Paris for a year's study in their respective arts. That winter Chas took a number of trips to see, sketch, and take notes on particular buildings and sites. Jane, now pregnant with my older sister, Sage Fuller Cowles, did not have a studio but was welcome at HBF's.
      In 1860, Paris had provided Chas's grandfather, George Fuller, with the revelation of the Barbizon School's vision and techniques, and the invaluable notion that an artist must feel wholly free of the past to do his best work. In 1891, Paris had given HBF a means, Symbolism, to separate himself from George's artistic patrimony. Paris had less of an effect, aesthetically, on what Chas and Jane produced, because the classics were already familiar to them through reproductions, and neither saw a way to use the new, anti-bourgeois modern art for their own purposes. At some unfixable point, however, Chas's heart went over to the avant-garde, and he would be more interested in what Picasso and Man Ray were doing than he would be in conventional architecture. The year had its strongest effect on how they saw themselves and their generation.
      Archibald MacLeish and his wife, Ada, became friends of theirs, as did Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett of The Sun Also Rises). They met Gerald and Sara Murphy and Ernest Hemingway, but several of the lost-generation survivors who made up the bulk of the cafe-frequenting and Dingo Bar society remained in Chas's mind more significantly than the famous did. He often spoke of an American who handicapped race horses at the Paris tracks, and an Englishwoman, a former showgirl, who disappeared one day from the Dingo and was never seen or heard of again.
      Sage was born in May, 1925, at the American Hospital in Neuilly. The family spent August and September in St.-Jean-de-Luz, travelled south to Italy for two months, and sailed from Naples for New York in November.
      Many opportunities seemed to be waiting for Chas. His Groton and Harvard friends had married and were building houses for themselves, and soon a wider circle of people wanted his services. His greatest opportunity, however, would come from within the family itself.
      Jane's two younger sisters, Marian and Babs, had now also married and not only were the sisters close friends, their husbands were friends of Chas's. One, Tim Coward, had spent some of his childhood summers at Cornish, and the other, Douglas Burden, a naturalist and Vanderbilt heir, had followed Chas by several years at both Groton and Harvard. The three couples decided to go in together to buy a property within commuting distance of Man-hattan, and to build houses for each family, all designed by Chas.
      There would be a number of Cornish-like features to the scheme of Crowfields, the failed dairy farm that they bought near Bedford Village, New York. As the Fuller swimming pool at Cornish had been "communal," so there would be a single swimming pool and tennis court for the three families. Just as, at Cornish, certain responsibilities had come to be the province of certain people, at Crowfields sister Babs would be in charge of theatricals, Tim of all competitive games, Douglas of the woods and fields and all things pertaining to nature, sister Marian of the arts of painting and singing, and Chas and Jane of "the plant," the leftover buildings from the farm and the new houses. All would host jointly-organized house parties.
      Several important things distinguished Crowfields from Cornish. One was that, initially, the three families were not concerned about expense. Another was that the three sisters were believers in family planning, something that had been virtually impossible 30 years before. I have first cousins almost exactly my age--Wendy Burden Morgan and Gregg Coward Sims; my younger sister, Jill Fuller Fox, had cousins her age--Douglas Burden, Jr. and the late Sue Coward Marquand. The concept was that each of us would have playmates our own age within the family.
      Another difference was that no serious effort was made at Crowfields to divide off parcels to accommodate other artists, or to find other properties for them.
      A young architect would have had difficulty finding a better opportunity than Crowfields to display his talents, and Chas responded with three memorable houses, each in a different style. Ours was Georgian with a mansard roof; the Cowards' was French Provincial; the Burdens' a slate-roofed, native stone "cottage," which grew to be the largest of the three. Jane made sculptural emblems for the houses, as she had for other of Chas's projects--perhaps these were her best works. But in a letter of Chas's to HBF in 1929, when Crowfields was at about mid-completion, he was not brimming with enthusiasm: "Architecture . . . has given me at last the assurance that I can do good work. . . . You have to keep your freshness--and I would like to save mine." It was Jane's and her sisters' enthusiasm that made Crowfields.
      The Burden house was completed as planned in 1932, but the aftermath of the Crash of '29 eliminated some features of the overall scheme. A playground where the three families' children would meet was never built, nor was a hillside amphitheater for summer theatrical events.
      Relative to many other architects, Chas had some impressive jobs in the thirties, although the market for private houses had dried up. He designed the Town Hall of Islip, Long Island, and a science building for the Choate School. In 1937, he won a competition to design the first joint federal/state/city housing project, the Harlem River Houses at 153rd Street and Harlem River Drive.
      The Houses are extraordinary to see today. While the Harlem that surrounds them is a desolation of boarded-up, unreclaimable buildings and rubble-strewn empty lots, the block and a half of Houses are in excellent condition, their walls without graffiti, their sidewalks and interior courtyards swept clean. It would seem that a majority of the tenants have lived there for many years and have seriously cared for their environment.
      The thinking that went into the Houses' design must be partly responsible for their success. The four-story brick-faced buildings are without elevators, flat-roofed, and with unadorned facades. There is nothing grand about them. But their low rise ensures that there will not be overcrowding, and the large courtyards are shaded by high trees and contain pleasantly arranged benches and playgrounds. In the largest yard are two sculptures by Paul Manship, who was also responsible for the heroic flying Promethus at the skating rink in Rockefeller Center.
      Manship had once rented the Fuller Cornish house, and he had been a teacher of Jane's, but he was not Chas's first choice for the commission. Chas had wanted someone more "contemporary." One of Manship's idealized figures is of a muscular African American man stripped to the waist, the other of an African American woman with a child at her knee. Although the depiction of a manual laborer and his family may seem patronizing today, the figures do project strength and seriousness of purpose. They have stood for 60 years without being defaced.
      By the late thirties Chas's life had become so chaotic that it surprises me that these projects were brought to completion. As his drinking increased, automobiles were frequently dented, trains were missed, connections and phone calls not made. He and Jane took a number of vacations from one another, Chas sometimes writing her painfully contrite letters. He went twice to a kind of recovery program, a "farm" in Rhode Island where the objective was to teach moderate drinking, but Chas could not control his alcoholism for long. He had "great charm," as many people have told me, a humorously insinuating, flashing-eyed, teasing vitality which I did not enjoy because I knew how fast it could change.
      He had many love affairs during these years, some with Jane's knowledge and some even with her collaboration. At least two of his lovers came for weekend visits to our house, one of them with her husband, and these women remained friends of Jane's long after their affairs with Chas had ended. With Chas's encouragement, Jane had at least one affair of her own.
      In this period Chas was psychoanalyzed--so he maintained--by a man to whom I was once presented. He was entirely hairless, no eyebrows or stubble, a middle-aged Viennese who presided over a dim, deeply-carpeted Manhattan office. The doctor had been told of my enthusiasm for baseball, but since he knew little about the game it seemed a difficult subject. Toward the end of the interview he showed me his astonishing collection of shrunken human heads, the war trophies of a South American tribe.
      In August, 1937, Jane told Chas of her decision to divorce. When she returned from her required residency in Reno, Chas moved into a small New York apartment. Within the next year, Marian and Babs had also divorced their husbands. There were soon three new men resident at Crowfields, but the Cornish aspects of the place understandably fell away. They were men of differ ent interests, and the sisters had lost some idealism about the arts.
      In 1938, Jane married Cass Canfield, then president of Harper and Brothers, publishers, now HarperCollins. Cass had played center on both the Groton and Harvard football teams that Chas had quarterbacked. Endicott Peabody had appointed Cass Groton's senior prefect after taking the appointment back from Chas. Jane and Cass remained married until my mother's death in 1982.

      The Choate Science Building was Chas's last important design commission. He kept office space, but had little use for it. In addition to new women partners, he experimented with at least one homosexual affair. The "poison of non-fulfillment," a phrase he had used in a 1929 letter to HBF, had been avoided, but nicotine and alcohol and purposelessness diminished and depressed him.
      In 1940, he took a job with the Federal Housing Authority and moved to Washington, D.C., but resigned shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was certain that he would be recommissioned as a Navy lieutenant and was profoundly shocked by the Navy's unwillingness to take him back. His health problems were obvious.
      Feeling deeply shamed, I believe, Chas returned to the Rhode Island "farm" and, after some weeks of sobriety, shipped out as an ordinary seaman in the merchant marine. He sailed on a number of Atlantic convoys over the next two years, then injured a hand in a shipboard accident. He was on disability pay in New York when he met and soon married Anne Jones Thacher, a fashion editor at Town and Country.
      During the few sober years that followed, Chas seemed to have found a new and happier life. In 1945, he enrolled as a graduate student in city planning at M.I.T., and received his master's degree two years later. He then became a project architect with the New York State Housing Authority, and, in 1952, was appointed a city planning advisor to the newborn government of Indonesia under the federal program that later became A.I.D.
      But he had begun to drink again, sporadically in the late forties, but with abandon once he and Anne had reached Jakarta. She told me he often could not get to the office for days at a time. Nonetheless, he was given a temporary assignment to advise a Middle-Eastern government (which one I do not know), and traveled there alone. The American ambassador gave a dinner party to introduce Chas to the local dignitaries with whom he would be working, and, drunk, and apropos of what he could not remember, Chas announced to the table, "I HATE America!"
      That ended his government employment.
      He spent his six remaining years in New York and Stonington, Connecticut, where he and Anne refurbished and then sold several houses, including a deconsecrated church on Main Street. His emphysema grew worse and he suffered several small strokes.
      Something that I heard him say in that time both shocked me and seemed enlightening. He was drinking with a painter friend, Louis Bouche. "Fuck taste!" Chas had said. "Isn't that right, Louis? Fuck taste!"
      Bouche agreed, as it was logical that he would. An original artist whose aim is to produce something both unfamiliar and true must suppose that his or her work may look strange, even ugly, at first. In any case, it will not conform to any preconceived "good taste." But "taste" was precisely what Chas possessed as a heritage from his Cornish childhood. His acceding to his mother's command that he not become an artist had confined his work to "good taste" and a profession he had come to despise.
      In one of our last conversations he ruminated about his life, about any meaning that it might have had. He said he believed he might be remembered as someone "who amused some members of my generation."
      I asked if he did not feel that he would leave a legacy in the buildings he had done and in his children. . . . He brushed us and them aside with a wave of his hand.
      Would his feelings have been different if he had practiced a "soul-absorbing art?" I use a phrase of his great-aunt, the painter Caroline Negus Hildreth. Perhaps he would have been more bitterly disappointed, but I do not believe that in his own eyes his life would have been reduced to such triviality. I do not believe he would have said, "I HATE America!"
      Chas died in 1960, in a New York hospital where he had gone to dry out.

Blair Fuller (ZYZZYVA 4, 12) lives in San Francisco. An editor of The Paris Review since the fifties and a co-founder of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, he has set three novels in Africa. His most recent book is A Butterfly Net and A Kingdom (Creative Arts, Berkeley).