Upper Bohemia

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  For Blair

  Preface

  Our mother was a terrible mother, wasn’t she?” My sister and I share a rueful laugh. A part of each of us wants to say, “No, she was wonderful.” After a pause to search through memory, one of us nods. “Yes, she was a terrible mother.” But our terrible mother gave Blair and me a wonderful life. And, she was not the only terrible mother. Most of our friends had terrible mothers, too. When we talk with friends about childhood, we compete about whose mother was the worst. This is consoling. Our mother’s terribleness becomes a joke. It’s not fair: our fathers are off the hook. For all his charm and wit, Blair’s and mine was an absent father. As one of his wives observed, “Your father never lost a night’s sleep over anybody.”

  My father and mother in the British Virgin Islands, 1935

  In addition to their numerous love affairs, my father and mother were each married five times. They believed in the importance of pleasure, of living life to the hilt. To follow their own desire was a moral imperative. Repression, sacrifice, and compromise were cowardly. What our parents desired was not always in the best interests of their children. If they fell in love and had to pursue a new lover, they did not hesitate to stash their children with some friend, relative, or boarding school. Children were secondary to the leading of a passionate life.

  What I want to understand is how could our mother have behaved the way she did? And what made the parents of our friends be impervious to their children’s needs? Why did our father think it was acceptable to live in another country and to turn up now and again with a different wife? And why, if they ignored us, were Blair and I so captivated by our parents?

  Our mother called her friends “upper bohemians.” Most were artists or writers living in Manhattan and the Outer Cape (Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown) and most were born between 1908 (the year of both my parents’ birth) and 1920. These so-called upper bohemians had privileged childhoods but rebelled against their parents’ way of life. They rejected convention and insisted upon personal liberty. Their lives were full of adventure and drama, mixed with chaos. The flush of excitement that came with a new love affair made a marriage worn down by progeny seem dull. The sense of security and continuity, of duty fulfilled, that might have come from sticking with a spouse for the sake of the children was not enough to hold them back from the thrill of the unknown.

  In a way, these upper bohemians constituted a second lost generation. They did not directly experience the horror and pointlessness of World War I, but they were affected by its aftermath, the upheaval of traditional value systems, the feeling that life is cheap and death is around the corner, so you might as well live it up. Coming of age in the late twenties, my parents absorbed that decade’s disenchantment and the concomitant insistence on having fun. Unhampered by Prohibition, they were part of an alcohol culture. The cocktail hour was sacrosanct. It loosened inhibitions, allowed people to follow their impulses.

  During Prohibition breaking laws became habitual. If one law could be broken, why not all? Women, who had not been welcome in saloons, joined the fray at speakeasies. Women’s status changed in the 1920s. They were less submissive, more outspoken, freer to choose their own lives. For my mother and her friends, defying all norms of proper behavior was fashionable. Conformism was beneath contempt. When my mother spoke of “family values” or “togetherness” you could hear the disdain in her voice.

  My mother, c. 1940

  My father, 1948

  The Great Depression cast a pall on the madcap modes of the 1920s. When my parents’ family wealth was lost or diminished after the 1929 stock market crash and after the 1932 collapse of the Swedish Match company (a Ponzi scheme controlled by Swedish investor, the so-called Match King, Ivar Kreuger), my father and mother had to change their way of life. They changed their worldviews as well. Now nothing was permanent. Life was precarious and impecunious, but never boring. Since nothing could be taken for granted, life was an invention.

  Because they were born into a world of privilege and they belonged to what my mother called “good families” (meaning upper class), they had the gift of confidence. My parents did not have to earn confidence by achievement. Self-esteem was bestowed upon them by birth. My father, John Charles Phillips’s first American ancestor, Reverend George Phillips, was educated at Cambridge University in England and came to this country in 1630 aboard the Arbella, the flagship of the Winthrop fleet. His descendants founded Phillips Exeter and Phillips Andover Academies.

  My mother, born Elizabeth Cornell Blair, couldn’t have cared less about her forebears, but she did once tell me proudly that she had Native American blood and that she was related to King John the Bad. When she had an exhibition of her paintings in Mexico City in 1949, she told a newspaper reporter that she was descended from John Paul Jones, a Scottish-born naval officer who, after killing two subordinate seamen in two separate incidents of rage, joined the Continental Navy and became a hero of the American Revolution. That her great grandfather, Ezra Cornell, founded Cornell University did not seem important enough to tell me. (Her more class-conscious younger sister made sure that Blair and I knew.)

  No matter how much my parents eschewed elitism, they felt entitled. To be sure, in the 1930s, like their fellow upper bohemians, they were attracted to left-wing values. They believed that all people are created equal and should have equal access to the comforts of life. My parents did not use English expressions like “Not quite out of the top drawer, dear” or “Not quite our sort, dear,” for which, those in the know, say “NQOSD.” Theirs was a snobbism aimed not at the lower classes or at different ethnic groups, but at the bourgeoisie and at Wall Street. No matter what your background, if you were an interesting writer or a talented painter, you could be part of “upper bohemia,” a milieu that did not see a person’s worth as defined by being, or not being, rich or well-born. My parents looked down on people who did not read books, look at paintings, or listen to music. My mother in particular despised vulgarity. She also loathed the “filthy rich.” To her, people who had no taste were appalling. The scorn in my mother’s voice when she spoke of Levittown, Howard Johnsons, billboards, Tip Top white bread, indeed anything commercialized or tacky, was chilling. She was an aesthetic fascist.

  With the rise of fascism in the late 1930s and early 1940s, East Coast upper bohemia was enriched by the arrival of European émigrés. The so-called Surrealists in exile—writers like André Breton, painters like Matta Echaurren and Max Ernst—added to the intellectual and artistic effervescence. With the defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, World War II, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, came a renewed sense of horror and disgust with the way people in authority ran the world. Unlike many of their upper bohemian friends who flirted with Communism, my parents’ response was to turn away from political realities and to seek happiness in art and in nature.

  Since they didn’t have much money, they prided themselves on living hand to mouth. They and their fellow upper bohemians spurned ostentation and did their best never to look as though they had money. If they worked, it wasn’t to get rich. They worked to create something—a painting, a book, a concerto, a modern house. Most of them did not have a ferocious work ethic, nor were they driven by a desire for power or fame. For t
hem, beauty was the most important thing in the world, but if making beauty got in the way of fun, time at the easel or the writing desk could be postponed.

  Perhaps my father’s indifference to making money was part of his background. His father, also named John Charles Phillips and a graduate of Harvard Medical School, did not practice medicine because, he said, he didn’t want to take jobs away from people who needed them. Instead he was an ornithologist, zoologist, environmentalist, and hunter who published 204 articles and books, among them the highly regarded four-volume study: A Natural History of the Ducks. Indeed, legend has it that the Phillips family did not come by their wealth through work. On an ocean crossing, a Bostonian Phillips met a childless English Phillips. The two men struck up a friendship and the English Phillips left his fortune to my Bostonian forebear.

  My parents and their friends shared a reverence for nature that was, for some of them, a kind of religion. They were not churchgoers. They disapproved of established religions, in the case of my mother, especially Catholicism, that opium of the masses. Most were atheists. A walk in the woods, looking down at the ocean from the top of a dune, lying naked in the sun, or gazing at the night sky—that was their form of worship. They wanted to live as closely as possible to trees, ponds, fields, and the ocean. Watching birds, muskrats, and turtles was their prayer. If a great blue heron flew over the water, they were awestruck. If a human being contaminated their view, they were annoyed. A house built within their sight was an affront. Privacy was prized.

  Being part of nature entailed a rather free and easy approach to sex. Married people had love affairs, and no one was shocked. Abstinence was bad for you. Frigidity was a curse. My parents agreed that sexual satisfaction was essential to happiness. Intellectual development was equally crucial. You had to expand your knowledge and develop a worldview by reading. To that end, they read D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Paul Sartre, D. T. Suzuki, Edith Hamilton, Freud, and Jung. Travel was important, too. Not to know France or Italy was barbaric.

  Even though they wanted a simple life, my father and mother valued sophistication. They were city people taking seasonal refuge in the country. Yet, even as they immersed themselves in European culture, they were entranced by unspoiled, indigenous “primitive” peoples, who, they thought, lived closer to elemental truths. For my mother, this belief lead to a romance with Mexico, a land she saw as not yet sullied by American vulgarity and a country where agrarian life followed age-old patterns. Reading D. H. Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico published in 1927 and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) increased Mexico’s allure. Mexico became a mecca, a fount of meaning and affirmation, not only for my mother (who lived there from 1948 to 1984), but also for several of her upper bohemian friends who, in the early 1950s rented houses in and around Cuernavaca. Both my parents took an increasingly dim view of the United States. To them it was a place where people lost their souls, where everyone chased after money and possessions and competed for success and fame.

  My parents’ haphazard approach to child rearing had much to do with their own upbringing. Reared by nannies, they saw their parents when a nanny had scrubbed them clean, dressed them nicely, and escorted them into the living room or library for a brief visit. The problem for us was that after the crash, there was no money for nannies, so we children often tagged along to adults’ parties. Or were left to our own devices. These upper bohemian parents allowed their offspring a great deal of freedom. They didn’t organize play dates or lessons. They did not help with homework. Their children spent many hours alone. This could be lonely, but it was beneficial. We learned to entertain ourselves. We learned to stare at the opening and closing of spaces between blades of waving grass while thinking up something to do. The child’s terror of boredom could be dealt with: we had resources. We invented games, we daydreamed, we used our imaginations. Also, we had books, siblings, ponds, the ocean, and hideouts in the woods.

  The Cape Cod upper bohemians had their own style. They did not wear conventional or fashionable clothing. The women preferred loose, handwoven clothes or Mexican peasant skirts and blouses. The preferred footwear was espadrilles or sandals, but going shoeless was even better. Jewelry tended to have an indigenous flavor—bold silver necklaces from Taxco, strands of heavy, pre-Columbian jade beads, or, even better, necklaces made with Native American chunks of turquoise interspersed with silver beads and animal teeth. My mother observed that artists’ wives in the 1950s looked like Vikings.

  In her milieu, home decoration was the opposite of what you might find in a WASP Park Avenue apartment. Our homes had no mahogany, no heavy drapes, no chintz, no chandeliers, and nothing much in the way of upholstered sofas and armchairs. My father made sofas and tables out of plywood doors to which he attached metal legs. Everyone had cheap, foldable directors’ chairs with their canvas seats and backs. For a coffee table, a power company’s discarded rough, wooden cable spool or a plank supported by two stacks of cinder blocks was sufficient. The kinds of houses my parents and their friends preferred were modest, light-filled, lightweight, and in harmony with nature. Since several of their friends were architects, the houses were often modern. But nothing lavish. Aesthetics were more important than comfort. A view was essential. A big kitchen or a luxurious bathroom was not. Some people had traditional Cape Cod cottages—just a couple of bedrooms and a kitchen/living room, nothing like the mansions that millionaires in fancier parts of the Cape called “cottages.” My father went so far as to build what he called a “lean-to” out of cinderblock and milled wood—a permanent version of an overnight wilderness shelter.

  The upper bohemians had their own style of entertaining. Food was simple. Alcohol flowed. My parents loved to give dancing parties. Since money was scarce, guests brought bottles. On Cape Cod summers, the best way to see friends was to organize a beach picnic to which people brought their own food and cooked it over a communal fire. Years later, my father bemoaned how dull and staid social life on the Cape had become. In the old days, he said, people at parties flirted purposefully and they rarely went home with the person they came with.

  My parents were stars within their own community. They were talented and intelligent, but their most important asset was their beauty. They were so secure in their physical attractiveness that they were known to walk to a neighbor’s cocktail party and mingle without clothes. My mother liked to tell me she was a “great beauty.” My father was just as handsome as Gregory Peck. They did not have to make an effort to be popular. Being beautiful, like being born into the right class, gave them an unassailable self-worth. But beauty was also part of what made it possible for my mother to be such a terrible mother. Narcissism isolated her. Men loved her because she was unapproachable, the ice queen. My sister and I kept on loving her because we never stopped hoping that she would take us under her wing. Although beauty gave her power, it was, I think, a blight on her life. For her, the person that was visible from the outside did not harmonize with the person she was on the inside. She was forever restless, seeking and not finding contentment and peace.

  My mother, British Virgin Islands, 1935

  My father, British Virgin Islands, 1935

  My mother, c. 1937

  My father in the 1960s

  2017: View from the Porch

  The wind picks up. I sit at our porch table and watch waves of light pass through lily pads and pickerel weeds as they move toward the pond’s shore. One after another the ripples touch the water’s edge and sink into the deep, like memories not set down. Imagining the pond’s depths, alive with swaying lily pad stems, I can follow strands of time back to the beginning. The pond water is the fluid of my birth. Every time I walk into it I am born. If I stare at it, everything that happened, or most of it, will rise to the surface.

  Horseleech Pond, Truro, Cape Cod

  Me, Horseleech Pond, 1981

  1 The Big House

  When I was old enough to walk, my mother took Blair and me for aftern
oon swims in a place on Horseleech Pond where the reeds and lily pads parted and the sediment of dark brown leaves had been brushed aside to create a bright path of sand stretching all the way out to where the water looked dark and deep. To get to this place, my mother had cleared a trail through tupelo trees, pitch pine, and cat briar. Some parts were covered with pine needles. Other parts were blanketed with dead leaves. Under bare feet dry leaves made a nice crackle. Pine needles felt like cushions. Sunlight fell in patches on the path—light, dark, light, dark. I tried to step only on the light parts. Sometimes I had to leap. My mother pointed out wild tiger lilies and the occasional lady slipper. She told us not to pick them. If we left them, more flowers would grow next year. Following my mother single file along the narrow path, I felt like an explorer.

  Blair was allowed to go over her head because she had learned to swim. She could swim out to the far side of the lily pads and poke her nose into a water lily. I was not allowed to go beyond where the water came up to my belly button. While my mother did her swift crawl out to the middle of the pond, I stood and watched a damselfly land with its luminous blue stick of a body at a right angle to a reed. Farther out much larger black dragonflies buzzed over the water like helicopters. One of them settled on a lily pad for a moment, then flew away. We never wore bathing suits. Overhanging branches shielded us from view. Anyway, we were the only people living on Horseleech Pond. To me the place our mother took us to was secret. Only Blair and I and our mother knew how to find the path to it. Lots of people knew about our usual swimming beach where our rowboat was pulled up just downhill from our house. Our mother seemed so brave, the way she discovered new places. With her our lives were an adventure.