Letters
Biography
A central personage in Howe's memoir is her father, Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe (1864-1960), a friend of Sarah Orne Jewett. He associated with Jewett in his time as associate editor of the Youth's Companion (1888-1893, 1899-1913), and as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1893-1895). He married Fanny Huntington Quincy (1870–1933). Their children were Quincy (1900-1977), Helen (1905-1975), and Mark (1906-1967). His Memories of a Hostess (1922) includes biographical sketches of Annie Fields, Jewett and their circle of friends.
When Howe quotes her father, she draws from his A Venture in Remembrance (1941).
This biographical sketch of Helen Howe appears in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America finding guide for her papers.
[Helen Howe], monologuist and author, was born in Boston on January 11, 1905, the daughter of Mark Anthony DeWolfe Howe, biographer and author, and Fanny Howe, essayist. She was the sister of Quincy Howe, editor and radio commentator, and of Mark DeWolfe Howe, professor of law at Harvard University. HH attended Milton Academy and Radcliffe College x'27, and studied acting with Georges Vitray in France. She taught at the Fiske School in Boston for one year and then went to the New York Theater Guild in 1926. There her talent for monologues was encouraged and she began performing, at first for friends and then in public. She was acclaimed in London in 1936 and ranked with Ruth Draper and Cornelia Otis Skinner for her pungent satirical sketches. During World War II she toured the country for "Community Concerts." Her first novel The Whole Heart was published in 1943, followed by We Happy Few (1946), The Circle of the Day (1950), The Success (1956), and The Fires of Autumn (1959). The Gentle Americans, 1864-1900: Biography of A Breed , a family history that focussed on her father, MADH, was published in 1965. In 1946 HH married Reginald Allen, Curator of the Gilbert and Sullivan Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, and former administrator of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Pgs. 74-75
For Father, as for the young
Willa Cather, Mrs. Fields served as a link in the chain that
led back to "the great shades" who, Miss Cather felt, were
most likely to appear at teatime, coming up the deeply
carpeted stairs into the long, narrow, heavily curtained
drawing room, looking out across a garden to the Charles
River. And yet that chain, at its nethermost tip, could be
stretched to touch even Quincy and me, at approximately nine
and four years old. All that remains for me of one visit to
that drawing room is a misty impression of two old ladies,
letting loose for our benefit some balloons which floated
airily beneath the high ceiling. One of the ladies wrote to
Father afterward, saying, "We had such a dear time
with Helen and Quincy on Monday. I call them very dear young
persons with manners of the very best." Her letter is signed,
"Yours affectionately, S. O. Jewett." I doubt that at the time
I identified her as the donor of two books of her own
authorship, inscribed to me in the month of my birth "from one
of her oldest friends." Quincy figured more prominently in the
life of the salon than I. In the same drawing room in which,
after one of his public readings, Dickens had made burnt
brandy punch and sung comic songs, the same drawing room to
which Emerson so often came, bringing one day his wife and
daughter, murmuring that there was not such another in all
Boston, while he "looked about and told them the wrong names
of the painters," Quincy, whom the ladies most often called by
his pet name of "Kinky," recited "The Sands of Dee." The miniature future
broadcaster held his audience spellbound, from his opening, "O
Mary, go and call the cattle home," building up toward the
climax which he gave forth with full tremolo,
They rowed her in across the rolling foam
The cruel crawling foam
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea.
leaving the tenderhearted ladies dissolved in tears.
Pgs. 83-87
Mrs. Fields was by no means
the only magnet to draw Father to the long drawing room in
Charles Street. There were, in my parents’ circle of friends
in Boston, several households consisting of two ladies, living
sweetly and devotedly together. Such an alliance I was brought
up to hear called a "Boston marriage." Such a "marriage"
existed between Mrs. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Father
wrote of it as a "union -- there is no truer word for it."
What Henry James, whose The Bostonians was published
in 1888, found to "catch at" in the friendship between the
Charles Street ladies we can only guess. All we get is that
"their reach together was of the firmest and easiest and I
verily remember being struck with the stretch of wings that
the spirit of Charles Street could bring off." He writes of
them both with such affection, nostalgia, and downright
chivalry that we are left confronting merely shadows.
When Sarah Jewett’s wings stretched in verse, they gave us Together.
A few lines suffice:
In fading firelight, then in peace
I idly rest: you come to me --
Your dear love holds me close to you.
If I could see you face to face
It would not be more sweet and true.
When, after her friend’s death, Mrs. Fields brought out a volume of her letters Father laid a restraining editorial hand across her enthusiasm, particularly "regarding the nicknames -- especially where an assumed childish diction is coupled with them. An occasional ‘Pinny’ [the tall, slender Sarah was so called because of her head which was no bigger than a pin’s] I should think might be left, but four-fifths of them -- I think -- should go for the mere sake of the impression we want the book to make on readers who have no personal association with Miss Jewett…. I doubt… whether you will like to have all sorts of people reading them wrong." In the copy of these letters inscribed to "Dear Mark and Fanny with ever true affection from Annie Fields" I have found tucked three letters, all addressed to Mrs. Fields, two in Miss Jewett’s own handwriting and one typewritten copy. It is in this copy that one sees the gentle pencil has been obediently at work. Miss Jewett’s nickname for Mrs. Fields has been obliterated throughout. Is it any wonder, when we learn that it was "Fuff"? Concerning a paper Mrs. Fields must have written about Leigh Hunt Miss Jewett says, "You must write all your stronomizing proclivities will let you (!) about the bookatees and their being your dear bookatees…."
want to see you! What is in bloom in the garden? I wish I
could send you a sniff of our big flowering currant bushes.
Your own P. L.
She had written earlier: Father was obviously
distressed to have to recognize the sentimentality in
"Miss Jewett" -- as I was brought up to hear her
called. To recognize the existence of a personal
sentimentality, however, is only to emphasize the
mystery concealed in the tangled skein of gifts from
which the artist weaves his finished tapestry. In her
stories of New England the clear unsentimental
tone of Sarah Orne Jewett still reverberates,
authoritative, unobtrusive, true, with -- in Willa
Cather’s words -- "a quality which any ear trained
in literature must recognize."
It was during these years
of editorial apprenticeship dealing with most of his
writers by correspondence -- and not
face-to-face as with Miss Jewett -- that
Father was laying a firm foundation of the craft that
was to stand him in such good stead in his own
biographical writings: a sense of form, style, and
proportion. What was relevant and what was irrelevant to
the subject became part of his own equipment as a
writer.
It was as the so much
younger editor (first, on the Youth’s Companion,
then on the Atlantic, and again on the Youth’s
Companion) that Father offered Sarah Jewett
editorial judgment she appeared to value.
And now about the cheque! It doesn’t seem very easy to take it, at first thoughts, but neither does it seem easy to send it back since that might seem to have a pettishness that does not exist! Will you therefore mark the sketch Left Out (instead of Counted Out), which I believe comes closer to its meaning, and then put it in a pigeon hole? You can use it in your announcement (out of which I refuse to be left!) as before the time comes for printing, either you shall have something that you like better, or this story shall be made better, itself.
Lest we idealize such
a relationship across mists of time, it is almost
heartening to hear the human ring of her voice in a
P.S. "I am not usually so mercenary but I should be
glad if you could have the cheque sent me as soon as
may be. It is one I wish to spend now!!"
Thomas Bailey Aldrich,
as editor of the Atlantic, had said that
whenever Miss Jewett sent him "one of her perfect
stories the whole number seemed to bloom." No wonder
that she wrote to her editor on the Youth’s Companion that she hoped
the "Green Bonnet" would remain
in fashion until another spring.
No more Green Bonnets for
me, or short sketches which are soon written -- I am
still hard at work on the story which begins in the
November Atlantic and there is a long stretch
of hard work ahead before I can put it out of mind. I
feel just now as if I had all the cloth without having
my coat made!-- I have written most of the chapters,
but every one must be written at least once again and
put into shape.
The Companion gave me a great surprise and pleasure, I was monstrous pleased to be put on the first page "featured"!! and with such a really nice and really illustrative picture! They are so few in my long history as a writer! The little boy is charming -- and our story which began in a bit of frolic turned out better than might have been expected, didn’t it?
When an accident to her carriage in South Berwick threw Sarah Jewett out, causing a slight concussion, her concern was not that she was incapacitated for writing, but that she could not be with Mrs. Fields, who had been ill. "I know so well what a difference it would make if I were there…. I try to be reasonable, for if I were no stronger than now I should only make things worse by being there! I do hope that you and Fanny can be let in to see her very soon." Recovery was painfully slow, and she admitted to being "rather dull and confused after the accident" though she could close "with much love to Fanny and Kinky and yourself, believe me Your affectionate friend." She herself did not know that she was never to write again. A letter to "My dear Friend" confessed:
But Mrs. Fields is better and things are going well with her, which is a great happiness to me.
Perhaps some day too, she could write some charming little short papers about her Greek experiences -- there is one about a Brigand’s Head in a Bag!!! She gets a little lonely in these days with so many friends gone and her old activities hindered by 84 years -- but her brain is the brain of a young student in the best of trim!
It was an ironic
stroke of fate that Mrs. Fields, so much the older
of the two friends, should have been called upon
to survive the younger Sarah, at whose funeral a
poem by Father was read.
Pgs. 92-94
The year 1903 -- two years before the dinner in Charles Street -- had seen the publication of Father’s Boston, the Place and the People. Sarah Orne Jewett had written him in that year, on Christmas evening:
You are very kind to send me your Book-- I am delighted to have it with your name and mine in the beginning, and I am not writing before I read it, because I have read it already with the greatest delight and admiration.
Yours, very affectionately…
S. O. J.
On another sheet of paper she had written:
And on yet another piece of paper, in her fine handwriting, Miss Jewett had taken the trouble to copy out the following, from Henry James:
And
so, if Mrs. Fields "went back" for
Father, Father himself, mourning her
death in the Brimmer
Street
reception room, "goes back"
for me. I have up to now been able
only through imagination to attempt
to recapture the flavor of the
headwaters whence he came. I leave
here my approximation of Father’s
memories -- those shadows of a
shade -- and, in returning to
Brimmer Street, shall pursue instead
the flesh and blood of my own.
Pg. 275
Speaking of Mother’s writings in his autobiography, Father wrote:
Poor Father! Even late in his
life, looking back, he used to
say, "I am sometimes afraid that
it was my fault that she gave up
writing. I encouraged her too
much."
Notes
The editor has attempted to gain
permission
[ Back ]
The Sands of Dee:
"The
Sands
of Dee" is by Charles
Kingsley (1819-1875).
[ Back ]
Together:
"Together"
first appeared in Atlantic
Monthly (35:590) May
1875. Howe seems to imply
that the poem is addressed to
Annie Fields. Judith Roman
in Annie Adams Fields
finds the earliest confirmed
contact between Fields and Jewett
in a letter of 1877 (p.
105). While it is possible
they had met as early as 1875, the
sort of intimacy that would lead
the pair to spend months of each
year together did not blossom
until about 1881. Gollin in her Annie
Adams
Fields says that the
friendship began in earnest in
1880, when the pair spent time
together on Star Island in the
Isles of the Shoals (p.
216). It is unlikely, then,
that "Together" is addressed to
Fields. A more likely
addressee is Jewett's father, to
whom she speaks similarly is
several of her poems, notably the
opening pair in Verses
(1916). However, Jewett
wrote, in a letter to Mellen
Chamberlain on 30 May 1875:
Leigh Hunt:
Fields's
paper on Leigh
Hunt opened her collection,
A
Shelf of Old Books (1894).
[ Back ]
Under the Olive:
Annie
Fields's volume of poetry, Under
the
Olive, appeared in 1881,
early in her friendship with Sarah
Orne Jewett.
[ Back ]
handkerchief doll:
A
handkerchief
doll may be handcrafted from
a handkerchief.
[ Back ]
Green Bonnet:
"The
Green
Bonnet: A story of Easter Day"
appeared in the Youth's
Companion (75:169-170),
April 4, 1901.
The
Tory
Lover began to appear
as a serial in Atlantic
Monthly in November 1900.
"Counted
Out" was published Youth's
Companion (77:646-647),
December 24, 1903.
[ Back ]
the featured and illustrated story:
It
is likely that the featured and
illustrated story Jewett refers to
is "The
Lost
Turkey," in Youth's
Companion (76:609-610),
November 27, 1902, with an
illustration by S. Werner.
[ Back ]
Boston, the Place
and
the People:
the admirable
city: It is likely that
James's paper on Boston eventually
appeared in his collection, The
American
Scene (1907).
Chapter 7 is entitled
"Boston." The book arose
from James's
visit to the United States
in 1904-5.
In Annie
Adams Fields, Rita Gollin
summarizes accounts of the evening
Henry James spent at Annie
Fields's 148 Charles Street home
in the company of Mark DeWolfe
Howe and Julia Ward Howe in the
winter of 1905 (pp. 205-6).
[ Back ]
Brimmer
Street reception room:
Judith Roman, in her Annie
Adams Fields, says that
after Annie Fields died on 5
January 1915, according to her
wishes, a modest ceremony took
place in her library (p.
163). Mark DeWolfe Howe
resided a few minutes away from
Fields, on Brimmer Street.
At his home, he gathered Fields's
papers after her death and
produced from them his book, Memories of a
Hostess (1922).
[ Back ]
[ Back ]
Edited and annotated by Terry Heller, Coe College
assisted by Tanner Brossart and Emily Weber.
Main Contents & Search