Arts and Letters

The sculpture of Anna Hyatt Huntington is a subject for Ph.D. candidates—not for me—but I can say something about Aunt Anna, my mother's younger sister, who did as much as anyone to bring me up. Like gray-eyed Athene high above the battle, she dispensed the comfort of impartiality to four turbulent children. We knew that we could always count on her to settle our squabbles with the clarity of love without jealousy, without self-interest, and we returned her gift with our total loyalty. Her presence set us a model of order and concentration, of time scrupulously used, of energies unobtrusively channeled. The minute she came home, she changed into her work clothes and reached for her clay to shape what her mind's eye had been revising until her hands could model the vision without fumbling. As a girl her name in the family had been The Clam.

Both my aunt and my mother were born with a zest for rebellion. My mother played on a baseball nine as the only girl, and used to take the dolls that her grandmother brought her from Paris, pin them to a clothes line, and shoot them with her air rifle to watch the sawdust run out. Aunt Anna hitched rides on the back axles of buggies, and, long before she could swim, peered so intently at minnows that she toppled off our dock at Annisquam into the running tide and hauled herself back with the painter of a boat. Of course she told nobody. As soon as she could crawl, she headed for horses' hoofs to examine them, and later filled scrapbooks with clippings of animal pictures. All her life she understood how to control animals, caressing dangerous dogs without being bitten and without breaking her bones, although a camel was once morose enough to cough stickiness from all its stomachs at her. Annisquam became a rest home for distinguished elderly horses who sometimes stumbled but still kept enough handsomeness to serve as models. She had a flashlight memory for poses. At the Bronx Zoo she modeled all day from an instant glimpse of a jaguar halted by a shout as it descended from its branch to its breakfast meat. In her eighties at Bethel she studied her kennel of Scottish deer hounds by tramping for miles among a pack of them and laughing as she tossed tidbits for them to spring at higher than her head.

Aunt Anna had once thought of playing the violin, but was deflected when my mother, seven years older, began to model excellent portraits and figures and Aunt Anna joined her to supply the animals. Together they dreamed of founding an American school of sculpture, but the partnership dissolved when my mother's marriage in 1900 relegated modeling to an avocation desperately snatched at between the chores of running a household on a biologist's salary and bringing up four children. Yet through all my childhood, my mother modeled heads of us under the studio skylight whenever she got a chance, while my aunt modeled animals as long as daylight lasted. Evening gathered us around the yellow circle of the oil lamp, where my grandmother read aloud and Aunt Anna heated her spatulas over the blue-alcohol flame to shape little animals in pungent wax for casting directly in bronze. Modeling went on as an occupation as domestic as my grandmother's preparation of the bean pot for baking on the wood stove over Saturday night. And we children commented as freely on the sculpture as we did on the beans. At intervals life shifted gears when the plaster caster messed up the studio, just as it did when the dressmaker lived with us for a week each fall to make the year's clothes. The first housebreaking that I remember was to be told that if I wanted to watch the caster throw his powders about (and I always did) I must pass from the studio into the house by way of the grass to avoid tracking plaster on the rugs.

Aunt Anna consoled my adolescence by inviting me to perch on the couch of her Tenth Street studio each Christmas vacation, for which she bought tickets to every interesting play. I then took it for granted that she should have wasted hours at ticket windows and should have been willing to climb the stairs to the top balcony seats that she could afford. What memories she gave me—John Barrymore as the only princely Hamlet, Stanislavsky and Olga Knipper-Chekhova in the convincing intimacy of their home life at the Cherry Orchard, Sarah Bernhardt's real last appearance as the Dame aux Camélias at the old Palace Vaudeville ("Madam Boinhardt's toin comes on at nine-toity") where she sensed that the audience was giggling because the bed covers showed plainly that she lacked a leg, the rumble of destruction rousing her to shake off her weariness, dig her elbows into the pillows and put forth her cunning in calculated strikes that brought us all to our knees in tears. What a heartful of memories from Aunt Anna!

We said good-bye to her in a last party at her house in the gaudiest sunshine of October. While all around us the Connecticut hills smoldered like banked embers, she was still with us, we regretting that such a woman must die after ninety-seven years, but sharing expansion of the heart as we recalled her in her decades of serene triumph, and a liberality larger than life.