The Acquaintance of Charlie Gibson, Jr. and Isabella Stewart Gardner

Oftentimes visitors to the Gibson House Museum ask our guides about Charlie Gibson Jr.’s relationships with other well-known Bostonians, especially Isabella Stewart Gardner. Although the two were neighbors for nearly forty years, there is not much evidence that they were close. (Isabella Stewart Gardner was both a generation older than Charlie and was part of a higher social class.) There is, however, evidence that they were acquaintances. Isabella Stewart Gardner was, and still is, considered one of the most prominent, and perhaps

Drawing Room at 152 Beacon Street, 1900.
Image: Gardner Museum

eccentric, members of Boston’s elite in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was born in New York City in 1840 to a wealthy family. In 1860, just before she turned twenty, she married Jack Gardner and they moved to Boston, to 152 Beacon Street in the Back Bay. Although the couple traveled abroad quite a bit, Beacon Street was their home until Jack’s death in 1898, after which Isabella purchased land in the Fens for the museum and home they had been planning. During this same period, Charlie Gibson was born (1874), grew up in the Back Bay at 137 Beacon Street, and went on the trip to France which inspired his travelogue, Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899). The Gibson family lived just two blocks from the Gardners during the entire time they resided in the Back Bay.

Part 3: The Poet

This post is the third of a three-part series on the life and writings of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., founder of the Gibson House Museum. You can read the first part here and the second here.

The mysteries of our lives resolve themselves very slowly with the progress of years. Every decade lifts the curtain, which hides us from ourselves, a little further, and lets a new light upon what was dark and unintelligible.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1896

A portrait of the artist as a young man: independent and well-traveled, Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (1874–1954), the bachelor-poet of Boston, achieved early success. His first two books, Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899) and Among French Inns (1905), both on French

Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., c. 1920.

travel, were so popular they went into second editions. In Two Gentlemen in Touraine, Gibson explored the art, architecture, and social customs of rural France, depicting it as an enchanted “fairyland,” a greenwood and pastoral escape route in the gay Arcadian literary tradition of the Victorian era—in sharp contrast to the cooler, monochromatic stones of old Beacon Street. As explored in the second blog post in this series, Two Gentlemen in Touraine told a thinly veiled autobiographical tale of initiation into the transatlantic gay subculture of the 1890s, with the Count Maurice Mauny Talvande as guide and mentor. Among French Inns takes the form of a travel book embedded in a comic novel—a farce—containing a wry parody of Isabella Stuart Gardner and John “Jack” Lowell Gardner, Jr. in the character of Mr. and Mrs. James Blodget Wilton.

Gibson’s first love, however, was poetry, and in the first decade of the twentieth century he produced two substantial volumes, The Spirit of Love and Other Poems (1906) and The Wounded Eros (1908). Working closely with the Riverside Press of Houghton Mifflin, he planned to produce a total of four volumes, to be bound as an elegant set, including Odes and Elegies (1908) and Dialogues and Satires (1909). The last two volumes were never produced, although most of the poems were prepared in manuscript.

Part 2: Two Gentlemen in Touraine: A Pilgrimage to Fairyland

This post is the second of a three-part series on the life and writings of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., founder of the Gibson House Museum. You can read the first part here. 

Let us then take a sweeping glance around, for we may not have another half so grand, half so fair, or half so high, while we are in the old Touraine which lies before us, there in the last orange glow of the departed sun. And if we follow these avenues of the roof below us, if we wind our way around these great towers, around the high and pointed roofs of slate, we may well imagine ourselves in some fairyland. This maze of cupolas, of domes, of towers, appears more bewildering to us than ever. And we lean against the stone, in an artistic intoxication, so overpowering is it.

 

—Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., Two Gentlemen in Touraine (1899)

In 1899, when Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. (“Charlie”) published Two Gentlemen in Touraine, a lighthearted but sophisticated book about the historic and picturesque French royal chateaux of Touraine, he was just twenty-four years old. A young Bostonian educated at elite New England prep schools, he also briefly attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became captivated by French history and architecture. Charlie had talent, a refined sensibility, and an entrepreneurial spirit. His family, part of the last wave of Boston’s Brahmin elite, wanted him to become an engineer of some kind and so sent him off to MIT, then called Boston Tech and located, like his family’s fashionable brownstone residence, in the Back Bay. Charlie would later recall that he resisted such a utilitarian path. “I wanted only to create beauty, and, through my verse and my garden, I think I’ve done that.”

In the twilight of the Brahmin era, estates and inherited wealth were divided and subdivided; young men had to pursue careers and establish themselves, socially and financially. And so Charlie’s decision to become a traveling bachelor-poet created tension at home, especially with his father, Charles Gibson, Sr. Although mitigated by a close and loving relationship with his mother, Rosamond Warren Gibson, this tension would come to define his life in significant ways. A similar pattern of intra-familial conflict would play out with other gay men of Charlie’s generation, and beyond, in legal struggles over inheritance and, in some cases, disinheritance.

Manuscript copy of the first chapter of Two Gentlemen in Touraine.
Collection of the Gibson House Museum

Part 1: The Wounded Eros

This post is the first of a three-part series on the life and writings of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., founder of the Gibson House Museum. Stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming months.

Gibson in his rose gardens
at Forty Steps, c. 1910.

How does one measure a life dedicated to poetry, a writing life?   Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. dedicated his entire adult life to the art of poetry, as poet, critic, editor, and literary personality.  He published his first poem in the Boston Transcript in 1894, and, toward the end of his career, he quipped to a curious listener at one of his many public readings, “My dear lady, I have been writing poems for fifty years.  They are like the droppings of pigeons all over the house.” His manuscripts overflowed from portfolios, closets, desk drawers, cabinets, drawing rooms, and even toolsheds! In some ways, Gibson’s poetry was closely connected to the domestic spaces he crafted, curated, and inhabited--his “Victorian Museum,” the Gibson House, and the spectacular gardens of his family’s exclusive summer residence, Forty Steps, Nahant. Like many traditional poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gibson’s work is highly context-dependent.  His poems tend to be formal, referential, commemorative, and backward-looking--vintage before their time--the kind of poetry that was almost completely obscured by the advent of literary modernism.  On the other hand, viewed holistically, there is a compelling sense of quirky humor, passion, historicity, and mystery about Gibson’s writing, a body of work peppered with veiled autobiographical fragments that conceal as much as they reveal.

Tributes to Allied Leaders Part II: Winston Churchill

 

In a previous post (see “Tributes to Allied Leaders, Part I," November 1, 2015) I discussed Charles Gibson Jr.’s poetic tribute to President Franklin D. Roosevelt following Roosevelt’s passing, which Charlie sent to President Truman, Roosevelt’s successor. In this post, I will discuss Charlie’s ode to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Writing to the editor of the New York Times in late 1944, Charlie requested that his “To Winston Churchill” be published in both the Times of London and New York. The simultaneous publication, he wrote, could “make a complete international gesture.” As Charlie would later write to MIT Chairman Karl T. Compton, “one of my efforts has been Anglo-American, as well as world[,] fellowship.” Charlie certainly held a lifelong interest in international diplomacy and goodwill (in fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if he were a supporter of the United Nations when it was created after the Second World War). However, nothing came of Charlie’s plans for an “international gesture.” The Times rejected his poem for publication.

But 1949 presented a new opportunity for Charlie’s poem to be read and appreciated, and MIT Chairman Compton would prove vital in this respect. That year MIT held a convocation for members of the scientific community “to appraise the state of the post-war world, [and] to consider the progress of scientific enterprise.” The event’s keynote speaker was Winston Churchill.

Tributes to Allied Leaders Part I: Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

 

Visitors to the Gibson House will be familiar with the framed letters displayed in the dressing room on the third floor. When giving tours of the house, I always point out my two favorites. One is from Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the other is from President Harry Truman. Both are short but serve to thank Charles Gibson, Jr. for poems he sent to them. Charlie wrote an ode to honor the English prime minister, which was read to him at a science convocation hosted by MIT. And after the passing of President Franklin Roosevelt, Charlie wrote a poem in his memory and sent it to Truman, Roosevelt’s successor.

Whenever I directed tour groups into the dressing room to show them the letters, I always wondered whether there were any existing copies of those poems and whether there were any way to find out why Charlie cared so much about having them read by these men. After all, couldn’t he simply have submitted the poems for publication in some newspaper? Fortunately, I was able to locate copies of these poems and related documents—including Charlie’s response to Churchill’s thank you note and the letter he sent to Truman with the FDR poem—in the museum archives.

In a two-part post, I want to share these poems and provide background information regarding their creation and why Charlie wanted to have them read by Churchill and Truman. This week I am focusing on Charlie’s poem on President Roosevelt, and in our next post, the one on Winston Churchill.

To the Heroes of the Sea

“The tremendous drama attending the tragedy of Warren’s going, the terrific explosion through the whole metropolitan area of New York, the blowing to atoms of the officers and crew, . . . whirled into the snow storm and melting with the snowflakes into the sea; its repercussions here . . . were calculated to stir the emotions to their depths, and I think they have.”

The above excerpt comes from a letter Charlie Gibson, Jr. wrote to his nephew Henry Allen after the death of Lt. Warren Winslow, another nephew, aboard the USS Turner, which exploded and sank off the coast off New York in January 1944 (see “The USS Turner Disaster,” August 7, 2015). Lt. Winslow, like most officers aboard, went down with the ship.

While there is little documentation to provide us with greater insight into just how deeply this bereavement affected Charlie, he did write a poem that could be read as an expression of grief. Entitled “Antinous,” it is an elegy “to the heroes of the sea who have given their lives during the war.” Select stanzas of the poem, which is quite long, appear below.

A few details concerning the poem’s classical references and central theme are necessary to make its meaning clearer. Although Charlie describes the poem as an elegy to American sailors killed in the war, like his nephew, he does not speak directly to them or Lt. Winslow. Rather, his poem is an elegy to Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138 CE). Antinous was universally admired for his youth and beauty. He met a similar and equally tragic an end as Lt. Winslow when he drowned in the Nile.

Charlie holds Antinous up as the “symbol of youth,” and this relates to the central theme of the poem, therefore explaining why it is Antinous and not Lt. Winslow whom Charlie addresses. As the “symbol of youth,” Antinous represents, for Charlie, all the young sailors killed in the war, and in a more general sense the poem expresses the sorrow over so many young lives cut short by war. Charlie does not write of war-time death in romantic or glorifying terms as Lord Tennyson did in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Rather, his lines speak only of pain and grief and the profound absence felt in Charlie’s family and so many others as a result of the Second World War.

The Forty Steps

The Gibson House Museum's founder, Charlie Gibson, continued to spend time at his family's summer home in Nahant throughout his life. The home was called Forty Steps, because there were forty steps separating the home from the water. A few months after D-Day during World War II, Charlie wrote this poem, partly based on the fact that there had been guns placed near this place that had been a sanctuary for the Gibson family for generations.

                                                                                       

  The Forty Steps

             

I.

Once Forty Steps; now thirty nine – 

   And they in doubtful state,

Like ravished riches in decline,

                                        The blasting of the great.                                          

II.

Yet God has blessed the sacred spot,

   Now touched by time and war,

While echoing the cannon’s shot

   Beyond the ocean’s roar.

       III.

Once peopled by a stately throng,

   That bathed upon the shore,

Now to the poet still belong

   Their annals and their lore.

      IV.

O footprints of an age outworn

   By fickle time and tide,

Your hallowed dust lies all but gone,

   Its grandeur and its pride.

      V.

Today a soldier’s martial tread

   Guards what is now no more,

The gaiety from laughter bred,

   The peace – that led to war.

Although my tourees might note that I'm often fairly harsh when I talk about Charlie's poetry, I think this poem really captures a part of his personality. Here we find him remembering the Nahant of his childhood, and comparing it to what seems to be a desolate and laughless place during the war. Charlie had a hard time accepting that we live in an ever changing world- and for someone who lived through two world wars, can we really blame him?

by: Katie Schinabeck, Former Museum Guide