Posterity (12 page)

Of course the main thing is solid strength in the art itself, to gain which the course of college studies with the atmosphere into which the pursuit of these studies will bring you, and the reading and the rapport that you may secure with the office will be the best means. This with as much familiarity as you can gain in holidays and vacations with good natural scenery and the study of landscape paintings.

But with reference to success as a landscape architect, to obtaining business and gaining a name, you must just as systematically study to acquire social power. You must be storing up through your college acquaintances social opportunities. Be not lazy or shy to avail yourself of opportunities, first to earn friendly acquaintances, second to train yourself in social art. It is as necessary to success as anything else that you should be able to make yourself pleasing and entertaining in any society but more especially to be at home and ready to contribute the general entertainment of the most cultivated society. You need to be well-informed, thoughtful and familiar with the literature of all topics of conversation likely to come up in such a society. For this reason you must set apart hours for keeping up with the world by reading certain books as they come out, certain periodicals and certain newspapers, and by looking at works of art as they become prominent, considering criticisms upon them, attending public entertainments,—all this and more, I mean, besides cultivating social standing assiduously in the ordinary way of parties, balls and “calls.” Do not think that you have only to follow your inclination in this respect. Use discrimination. Seek the best society. Seek to enjoy it. Seek to make yourself desirable in it. Make yourself well-informed on matters of conversation of the best and most fortunate sort of people. This is an essential element of your education. Follow it systematically. Arrange other studies and occupations with reference to it. You have disappointed me in not training yourself more to acquire better manners in respect to the small change of social grace. It is entirely a matter of will. You have it in your power to greatly increase your value in this respect, your power to be useful and through usefulness respectable to others and yourself, which is the chief defense against misery in life. You have your defects and weaknesses but on the whole you are in capital condition at the starting point of the University period of your life-work.

Your affectionate father

J
OHN
D
.
R
OCKEFELLER TO
J
OHN
D
.
R
OCKEFELLER,
J
R.

“Go carefully. Be conservative. Be sure you
are right—and then don't be afraid . . .”

The controversial industrialist John D. Rockefeller, creator of the giant Standard Oil Company, was America's first billionaire and perhaps the greatest philanthropist this country has ever known. To his only son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., he entrusted his fortune and his dream to “promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Here the eighty-seven-year-old father writes to his nearly forty-eight-year-old son at a time when managing the family's charitable giving was becoming an increasingly complicated and enormously demanding responsibility. Over the course of their lifetimes John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., gave well over a billion dollars for philanthropy.

Ormond Beach
Florida
January 26, 1922

Dear Son:

As to the sums which I have handed you from time to time, it is to be remembered that I have already set aside large amounts in our different trusts, for benevolent purposes, in addition to my regular giving personally, and with the careful and protracted study which I give to each object of any considerable moment, it is evident that I shall not fulfill to the complete extent, my heart's desire to make everything that I can give to the world available, for many years to come.

As you are in touch with the world from a somewhat different angle from mine, and there have been ample means left by a kind Providence, I have hoped that with your constant and careful studies, and wide and broad knowledge of the needs of the world, you would have the fullest enjoyment in personally determining and carrying out plans of your own for helping the world, and I rejoice to afford you this opportunity, in the confident assurance that great good will result therefrom.

I am indeed blessed beyond measure in having a son whom I can trust to do this most particular and most important work. Go carefully. Be conservative. Be sure you are right—and then don't be afraid to give out, as your heart prompts you, and as the Lord inspires you.

With tenderest affection,

Father

S
HERWOOD
A
NDERSON TO
J
OHN
A
NDERSON

“Next to occupation is the building up of good taste.
That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means
all the difference in the world in the end.”

What Sherwood Anderson needed to sustain him was to be writing, and to be writing well. Throughout his career, as he tried to reveal the lives and psyches of ordinary Americans, he did writing of all kinds—novels, short stories, lectures, articles, autobiography, plays, and poems. By the mid-1920s, although he continued to forge ahead, he was struggling unsuccessfully to make a mark that would surpass his earlier work.

Here, at forty-nine years old, he writes to his second child, seventeen-year-old John, a young man contemplating his future.

[Spring, 1926]

Dear [John]:

It's a problem all right. The best thing, I dare say, is first to learn something well so you can always make a living. Bob seems to be catching on at the newspaper business and has had another raise. He is getting a good training by working in a smaller city. As for the scientific fields, any of them require a long schooling and intense application. If you are made for it nothing could be better. In the long run you will have to come to your own conclusion.

The arts, which probably offer a man more satisfaction, are uncertain. It is difficult to make a living.

If I had my own life to lead over I presume I would still be a writer but I am sure I would give my first attention to learning how to do things directly with my hands. Nothing gives quite the satisfaction that doing things brings.

Above all avoid taking the advice of men who have no brains and do not know what they are talking about. Most small businessmen say simply—“Look at me.” They fancy that if they have accumulated a little money and have got a position in a small circle they are competent to give advice to anyone.

Next to occupation is the building up of good taste. That is difficult, slow work. Few achieve it. It means all the difference in the world in the end.

I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.

There is a kind of shrewdness many men have that enables them to get money. It is the shrewdness of the fox after the chicken. A low order of mentality often goes with it.

Above all I would like you to see many kinds of men at first hand. That would help you more than anything. Just how it is to be accomplished I do not know. Perhaps a way may be found.

Anyway, I'll see you this summer. We begin to pack for the country this week.

With love,
Dad.

“The thing of course, is to make yourself alive.”

At the end of 1926, Anderson and his third wife took his two younger children, John and Marion, to Europe. Eighteen-year-old John remained in Paris to study painting. Understanding the parallels between writing and painting and having painted himself, Sherwood Anderson sent his son the following advice.

[April 1927]

Something I should have said in my letter yesterday.

In relation to painting.

Don't be carried off your feet by anything because it is modern—the latest thing.

Go to the Louvre often and spend a good deal of time before the Rembrandts, the Delacroixs.

Learn to draw. Try to make your hand so unconsciously adept that it will put down what you feel without your having to think of your hands.

Then you can think of the thing before you.

Draw things that have some meaning to you. An apple, what does it mean?

The object drawn doesn't matter so much. It's what you feel about it, what it means to you.

A masterpiece could be made of a dish of turnips.

Draw, draw, hundreds of drawings.

Try to remain humble. Smartness kills everything.

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.

Any cleanness I have in my own life is due to my feeling for words.

The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces.

There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.

For days, weeks, and months now I can't do it.

You saw me in Paris this winter. I was in a dead, blank time. You have to live through such times all your life.

The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.

The point of being an artist is that you may live.

Such things as you suggested in your letter the other day. I said—“don't do what you would be ashamed to tell me about.”

I was wrong.

You can't depend on me. Don't do what you would be ashamed of before a sheet of white paper or a canvas.

The materials have to take the place of God.

About color. Be careful. Go to nature all you can. Instead of paintshops—other men's palettes, look at the sides of buildings in every light. Learn to observe little things—a red apple lying on a grey cloth.

Trees—trees against hill—everything. I know little enough. It seems to me that if I wanted to learn about color, I would try always to make a separation. There is a plowed field here before me, below it a meadow, half-decayed cornstalk in the meadow making yellow lines, stumps, sometimes like looking into an ink bottle, sometimes almost blue.

The same in nature is a composition.

You look at it, thinking—“What made up that color.” I have walked over a piece of ground, after seeing it from a distance, trying to see what made the color I saw.

Light makes so much difference.

You won't arrive. It is an endless search.

I write as though you were a man. Well, you must know my heart is set on you.

It isn't your success I want. There is a possibility of your having a decent attitude toward people and work. That alone may make a man of you.

S. A.

Tell Church that David Prall finally got the Cezanne prints.

Also tell the man at the shop where you go for the Picasso book—or if you have been there, drop him a note—the shop, I mean.

E
UGENE
O'N
EILL TO
S
HANE
O'N
EILL
AND TO
E
UGENE
O'N
EILL,
J
R.

“You write as if these were normal times, in which a young man of twenty-one could decide exactly what job he should choose as offering him the pleasantest prospect for a normal peacetime career.”

During April of 1941, when Eugene O'Neill was completing revisions on
The Iceman Cometh,
he wrote to each of his sons, twenty-one-year-old Shane and thirty-one-year-old Eugene, Jr., about their respective careers and futures. The letters, written only ten days apart, are at opposite ends of a spectrum from one another—but then too it seems were O'Neill's sons. Shane, who had thought superficially about careers in fishing, horse-training, and art had been expelled from a number of schools and was using drugs. Eugene, Jr., on the other hand, earned a Ph.D. in Classics from Yale, knew six languages, and taught at his alma mater where recently he had been promoted from instructor to assistant professor. Signs of trouble, however, were becoming apparent. Drinking heavily, Eugene, Jr., was often disillusioned with his work and, at thirty-one years old, he was already on his third marriage.

Eugene, Jr., and Shane both ultimately took their own lives.

April 18th 1941

Dear Shane,

Your letter is comprehensable to me only if I assume that you have decided to forget every word I said to you when you were here a year ago. And it is pretty evident by what you haven't done in the past year that you did not think any of my advice worth taking. Well, that is your priviledge and I am not questioning your right to decide for yourself, but on the other hand you have no license to ask my help as long as you continue to live as you are living.

There is no use in my repeating all I said to you last year. You certainly remember the points I emphasized, because I know damned well you realized then that what I said was true. It is even truer now, considering the disasterous way the world crisis has developed since then. That's one thing I can't understand about your letter. You seem to have no realization of what is going on in the world. You write as if these were normal times, in which a young man of twenty-one could decide exactly what job he should choose as offering him the pleasantest prospect for a normal peacetime career. Don't you know the country will almost certainly be in the war soon? Don't you know that those who became twenty-one since the draft law passed will soon be included in the draft? Don't you know that if this country gets into the war, it will probably go on for years, and that no one can possibly predict what conditions will be like even a year from now? The one sure thing is that for years to come the big opportunities for young men will be in one of the branches of the United States Service or in the industries directly connected with the Defense Program.

Until you show you have some conception that all this affects you—as it affects me and every person in this country—and that you are making some decision which faces realistically the crisis we are all in, I simply don't know what to say to you. But I am absolutely certain that planning to start a career in the movies at this time is no answer to anything. In fact, at any time, I would not regard it as an answer for you. The farther you stay away from any job that has to do with the theater, the better off you will be. And I certainly will not give you a letter to Kenneth Macgowan. It wouldn't do you the slightest good, anyway. I happen to know something about Kenneth's job. It is extremely specialized and he has nothing to do with hiring anyone.