Arts and Letters

Catherine Drinker Bowen died on November 1, 1973, at Haverford, Pennsylvania. She was 76 years old. Death, I know, is never an easy thing. But if it helps, at that moment, to know that you have lived a life rich in effort and achievement, that you have fulfilled yourself as it is given to few to do, and that you have left richer than it was before the culture of which you are a part, her passing must have been eased to this extent.

The family into which Catherine Bowen was born was in some ways a very normal one, in other ways a remarkable one. It cannot be defined in our present terms. To call it an upper-class family would be as misleading as to call it a middle-class one or a family of intelligentsia. It was a respectable urban family of the turn of the century, with old-American roots and strong cultural interests, flourishing in that confidence in a firm set of inherited values which was the mark of her father's generation, and of mine. It turned out also to be a family of many-sided talents, although in her childhood the family itself was probably not aware of it, except through the fact that an aunt of the Drinker children, Cecilia Beaux, was one of the great American portrait-painters of her time, and a member, incidentally, of this Institute.

As the children grew up, their interests, sometimes as dilettantes, sometimes as professionals, went in different directions, so that one brother was, in addition to being a lawyer of note, an accomplished musician who contributed importantly to the musical life of the Philadelphia area; whereas two others were distinguished medical scientists. Catherine herself was brought up in the musical world of her elder brother; and trained as a violinist at the Juilliard School; and it was through music—through an aroused interest in the lives of Tchaikovsky and the Rubinstein brothers—that she may be said to have come to biography, and through biography to literature. This transition once made, and her real dedication discovered, she then went ahead to produce the extraordinary series of biographical and autobiographical works by which we know her.

Being by nature a shy person and never one to claim too much for herself, she felt, especially at first, an intruder in the company of the professional historians. They contrived to give her the feeling that biography was either not a form of history at all, or, if it was, then a very inferior one. She never made bold, accordingly, to think of herself as a historian. And a pity it was, because she had every right to do so. History can be seen through the experience of governments, or of peoples, or of social classes, or of individuals. What makes it history is not the prism through which it is viewed but the honesty, the patience, the imagination, the charity, and refinement of judgment that go into it. These latter qualities she had in high degree; and the fact that the prism through which she viewed the historical process was the prism of individual experience was incidental. Whether she knew it or not, she was, even if judged only from the standpoint of profundity of research and insight, a magnificent historian—one of the finest American historians of her age.

But history, which need not always be written as literature in order to be history, can also be literature, as well, and gains immensely by it when it is. Catherine Bowen was of course also a literary person—not one who discovered herself, or developed herself, in this capacity at an early age, but one who, like many another literary figure, learned to write literature, and then became aware that she could write it, through the experience of simply writing for more mundane, less esthetic, less strictly literary purposes. The talent she obviously possessed in this respect grew gradually upon her, so that a woman who began by writing clearly, plainly and correctly, with little pretension to literary effect, ended by writing with grace and power as well, evoking not just the factual surface of reality but the enduring undercurrent of beauty and tragedy in all that she touched.

Catherine Bowen has left us vivid and unforgettable portrayals of the lives of a number of great men, of the human social environment of her own childhood, and of the subjective experience of writing biography. For these alone, she would have deserved her membership in this institution, our respectful memory, and our attention today. But this was not what was most important in her work. What was most important in it was something of which she may not have been aware at all: and this was the image that emerges from it of her own quality as a person.

Hers was a healthy spirit, devoid of morbidity, reserved and fastidious with relation to self, immensely sensitive and understanding with relation to others. It was a spirit that retained throughout a long life something of the old-American innocence of the family into which she was born. She bore the values of that outlook to the end: its moral wholesomeness, its belief in fairness and charity, its faith in the ultimate redeeming power of sheer human decency.

It is primarily by the image of this personality, which she was probably never aware of projecting at all, which was deliberately put forward on no single page of her many works but which was visible on every one of them, that her friends will remember her, and her readers of the future be enriched and affected.