35
Denouement (2): Maude

They were as unlike as two peas in a closely examined pod. Their likenesses were obvious: she was almost as tall as he was; the way they carried themselves and their sense of dress stamped them as forerunners of what would one day be the beautiful people. Arch, casual, immensely self-possessed, immensely inattentive to the passing scene (they were the passing scene), they were both of them offhand in the way they handled money, having the air of two people who had never known what it was not to have money, though both of them had grown up without much of it; he the son of a parson professor who reared a family on two thousand dollars or so a year. (Her family, Phelpses, McVeighs, were genteel New Yorkers, her father a well-paid editor of the Sun .)

He must have got his toploftiness about money at Yale, where, without a bean, pushing a broom, waiting table, tutoring, he had made his name and fame among the best-padded young men in the land. Somewhere, somehow he had learned to pick up the check without ostentation or a quaver, to the manner born. All his life he sent back letters on the stationery of the George V in Paris, the Hassler in Rome, Claridge's in London, and Excelsiors and Grands all over the world without, plainly, ever supposing that anybody anywhere would say, "What does he do for money?" Possessed of the small-time bourgeois trait of being utterly closemouthed about his finances, he nevertheless let it be known among his close friends that he was in debt down the years, down all the years. He was forty when, damping down a friend's suggestion that he let his name be put forward for the United States presidency, he wrote, "But I could use the salary." He was seventy-five when President Edward Levi asked him to return to Chicago to deliver a series of lectures, and he said, "On what?" "On your reflections," said Levi. Hutchins: "I have never reflected on anything ex-

cept how to pay my debts." And, again at seventy-five, he said to a friend, "I have always declined to write my autobiography. But if somebody would want to help me pay my debts by advancing $50,000, I'd do it." (The friend asked around; nobody would.)

"I never made any money," he said. He didn't have to. He was able to turn over to the university all the money he got from his lectures and books and still survive in style on his $25,000 wages (more or less), until he jumped to $35,000 at the Ford Foundation in 1950. He was able to survive in style in part because of the expense-account life he led from his early twenties on—remember, he was a law school dean at twenty-eight—and in part because the rich were always thrusting things on him, from summer houses to cars to, in Benton's case, great amounts of money for limited services to the Britannica operations. Still he was always heavily in debt, living not so much sumptuously as carelessly, the unselfconscious sybarite going blocks out of his busy way to buy himself a single pair of socks at Sulka's. Once, if only once, he revealed a passing self-consciousness: in his syndicated weekly column in the Los Angeles Times he wrote, in 1963, "Never in history has it been so easy for one group in a community to go through life without any awareness of the existence of others. Highways, trains, and airplanes take me quickly around or over sights that might shock my sensibilities or move my heart to compassion. I can travel from my agreeable home to my pleasant office and on to luxury restaurants and hotels serene in the assurance that I will meet nobody, not even a waiter, who looks much worse off than I."

The unselfconscious sybarite was an unselfconscious snob. Once Paul Jacobs and he were late for an appointment in New York and they couldn't get a cab. Jacobs suggested that they take the subway, and Hutchins said, "I never use public transportation in New York."^[1] And once, when he had a 12:30 luncheon date downtown in Chicago, and I was going to ride with him in the livery car that carried him around, and the car didn't show up, I suggested that if he hotfooted it to the Illinois Central suburban station he could catch an express that would land him at the Chicago Club in time, and he said, "I have never ridden the IC, and I never will."

On at least one occasion his unselfconscious snobbery played a mean trick on him. A New Yorker of his acquaintance was going to be in Chicago briefly between trains en route home from California. Hutchins was anxious to talk to him and they made a date at the university. But Hutchins was also going to New York that day, and it was agreed that they would travel together and continue their talk. The New Yorker would be boarding the train in downtown Chicago, Hutchins at the out-

going Englewood stop near the university. Hutchins duly boarded the extra-fare Twentieth Century Limited (which he always rode) at Englewood, but he couldn't find the New Yorker. The reason he couldn't, he learned later, was that by "the train," the New Yorker meant the slower, regular-fare Commodore Vanderbilt on the same line. The New Yorker was John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Hutchins could not plead, and did not attempt to, that he had no competence in personal finances—that his mind was on higher things. His mind for the last fifty and more years of his life was on lower things a great deal of the time. As an administrator, first at the Yale Law School, then successively at Chicago, the Ford Foundation, the Fund for the Republic, and the center in Santa Barbara, he knew who got how much money and why, and spent a great deal of his time listening to people who wanted more and deciding whether they should get it. He knew all the Eleusinian mysteries of a thousand families' finances (or what was presented to him as family finances). Men who would talk freely about their religion, their politics, and their sex lives could not be got to talk about how much money they made or had or spent—except by the boss to whom they were applying for a raise on the ground, always, of need. He knew all about poor-mouthing and had to indulge in it himself when, on extremely rare occasion, he went to his boards of trustees to get a raise for himself; extremely rare because his to-the-manner-born manner moved him to an apparent indifference to the sordid concerns of the workaday world.

It was an expensive life, partly because he lived it that customized way, partly because, as the big money earner, he was always a generous donor to members of his family near and far, including the three daughters he'd had (and regretfully said he'd had) too little time for. Plagued by his self-proclaimed neglect of his children—the claim was an honest one—he tried more than a little naively to compensate for the neglect by his financial generosity to them. Between Maude's work and her demand on his attention and his own work and weariness, their daughters were nearly always left to the mercies of nannies. They were not happy children, and the lives of the two oldest reflected childhood distresses. They were all three very bright. The oldest, Frances ("Franja") was thrice married, the last time to an orthodox Jew whose religion she adopted; she and her husband both died of cancer in early middle life. The second, Joanna Blessing ("Jo-Jo"), lived alone in Berkeley pretty well alienated from the family. Only the youngest, Clarissa, married to a Brandeis University faculty member, and herself an effective public-service lawyer in Cambridge, both stood up to her parents and fulfilled the hopeful role of the academic's child. But even bold and perceptive Clarissa, who said she regarded Hutchins as "a great

guy rather than a great man," had grown up in relative isolation from her art-centered mother and her job-centered father. In 1965 an outfit called the National Father's Day Committee designated him Father of the Year (an honor awarded to Spiro Agnew in 1972), and he said it must have been to present the world with the world's most horrible example. The son of a strong father and a docile mother, brought up with two brothers, he had no early training in dealing with women and was never able to come to terms with them, whatever their proximity, whatever their age or his. He was infinitely polite, infinitely careful to see to it that they were appointed to posts and recognized in discussion, and infinitely capable of masking what may well have been a deep-seated scorn of their not unusual demand for special recognition as a sex. His attention, and attentiveness, to them was meticulous and faultless; it was clear, to those who knew him well, that it was not the attention or attentiveness given recognized equals. Incapable of recognizing their due, and of giving it because it was their due, he gave to them in the futile spirit of largesse.

It didn't work, not with women who wanted their due as due them. It didn't work, above all, with Maude Hutchins. He tried to buy her satisfaction for twenty-seven years, and had finally to acknowledge failure—without being able to acknowledge his failure as the consequence of his trying, for want of another way, to buy her satisfaction by buying her the things that money bought. Maude Hutchins was as rare a bird as he was; rarer. Her talents were several, each of them considerable, all of them aesthetic. She was, purposively, illiterate on social issues (including education) and as indifferent as she was illiterate, likely because of her resentment of him, just as likely because of her intense preoccupation with her variform artistic enterprises. She was a fine sculptor, a very good pen and pencil artist, and a hurry-up novelist (or novellaist) of parts. (Her published fiction was all of it embarrassingly racy, both for him and for the 1930s and 40s. Her Diary of Love^[2] was characterized by the Chicago police censors as "purple.") But she was much more than her aesthetic capacities. Much, much more.

If he was imperial, she was imperious; imperious and impervious to what (and who) went on around her, as he never was. Hers was a nose-in-the-air posture which he, whatever his inclination, was foreclosed from maintaining consistently by virtue of his job. The two of them were born to trouble with one another as the sparks of their intercourse flew sideways. Their fiercely competitive—and exhausting—wit was singular to each of them; his saucy, hers caustic. (As when told Ruml was quitting the social sciences for Macy's: "Exchanging ideas for notions, eh?" or encountering one of her husband's friends after many years: "You're as ugly

as ever.") Their public conversation was diamond-cut-diamond, their tête-à-tête imaginably acrid behind the forbidden doors of the president's house on the campus.

Those doors closed behind him at five minutes past five every weekday; and the man who had a hard day at the office every day, and before the day at the office a stretch of writing between 6 and 8 A.M. , was under the imperious duty to be entertaining. He did not succeed very well or very often. He wanted to read, or work, for an hour after drinks and dinner and before his preferred bedtime of nine-thirty (better yet, nine). It wasn't vouchsafed him (as it isn't many men) to do so. He spent thirty years angrily yielding. At six in the evening, even six-thirty, he might phone one of three or four intimates in the neighborhood and ask him to come over—without his wife —for a lap dinner. A shameful command performance on the inviter's part, a shameful acquiescence on the invitee's. These gatherings à trois were as luxurious and uncomfortable as the well-staffed dinner parties, where she went through the ironic motions of scintillating and he repressed his distress and his tiredness and did his dutiful best, at so late an hour, to unbend. The dinner parties were infrequent, mingling an occasional trustee or an even more occasional donor or prospective donor with one or two close friends who could be counted on to help keep the iron ball rolling. With Maude as the unvoiced alibi, no more than a handful of senior faculty—still fewer junior—ever saw the inside of the president's house during the Hutchinses' twenty years' residence.

He would not, of course, complain, beyond lifting his eyes to the hills when a friend asked him, vaguely enough, how things were going, or replying, "You know how things are going." Or if the friend asked, "How are things otherwise?" "There isn't any otherwise." Or, if the friend was close: "None of your business." He exploited his intolerable situation: he could, and did, reject invitations he didn't want to accept by saying, "I'm sorry" without having to say why he was sorry. It was widely and long understood that things were rough at home behind those doors, with marvelous Maude serving as his lightning rod, no less effectively than she served as his lightning. Yielding to her bolts or, sufficiently sharply jolted, hurling one or two back, he did himself and the relationship no good at all. The suspicion that the world had, of an isolated hell behind those doors, proved in the end to have been completely valid. Pastor William James Hutchins and his wife had not brought up their sons to be divorced; and their second son, until he was, could not have believed that a Hutchins ever would be.

None of the yielding could have done any good, and none of it did, however scandalous the lengths to which he carried it. None of those

lengths was more scandalous than the one that involved a half-dozen carefully spotted friends who he knew would do anything for him within—or without—reason, and to whom he could go unblushingly. A few months after I went to work in the president's office I discovered, to my fiscal horror, that I had been admitted to this shameful circle. He was willing to employ his silent, shrieking agony not only to duck engagements, not only to generate a generalized sympathy ("poor Bob"), but to get his hands on money to keep his wife "quiet"—as if Maude Hutchins were in want of repeated sedation and solicitousness.

There were probably half a dozen—maybe more—such coconspiratorial victims of the ridiculous keep-Maude-quiet or keep-Maude-busy campaign strategy. Mortimer Adler was one (like the Mayers, the Adlers, too, wound up with a bronze head of the Mrs.) Millionaire Bill Benton was another, whose three children were all headed. Benton was angrily willing to play the game, but his anger overcame his willingness after he was persuaded to commission Maude to do a life-size bronze statue for the garden at his home on Long Island Sound. As Will Munnecke later recalled it—the statue was real and the story too, no doubt—Maude hired the model, made the plaster statue, and had it cast and delivered to the Benton home all within the space of a week, complete with an invoice for $7,500. It was the end of a friendship, between Mrs. Hutchins and Mr. Benton, that had been really warm—but it had kept Maude "quiet," "busy," for a week at a cost of only $7,500.^[3]

Tried and truest of the sycophantic friends who served as accomplices to the Hutchinses' domestic melodrama was Mortimer Adler, whose role as public and private associate went all the way back to New Haven, where, on his first visit to the young dean, he was taken up by Maude. By the time the Hutchinses were a year or so ensconced at Chicago—with a costly studio added to the president's house at the president's expense—Adler was ensconced in the law school (having been disensconced from the philosophy department). Though he lived across town on the near North Side, he served as domestic end-man to the Hutchins menage more regularly than any other member of the progressively less charmed circle. Maude had been invited to speak before the ladies of the Friday Club, and she showed them a series of her steel-point anatomical drawings, which characteristically had bodies toting their own heads. She explained straight-faced that her work was "nonnarrative and nonrepresentative." "It is incidental that the human form may be recognized in them," she told the clubwomen, who suspected that their legs were being contemptuously pulled. "The forms you see are not necessarily people." She showed Adler—and, willy-nilly, Hutchins—the drawings on one of those à trois

evenings and asked him if he could work up any nonnarrative and non-representative texts for them. He could. Some years before he had written a paragraph to illustrate the senseless use of sensible syntax: "We have triangulated with impunity in order that sophistication would neither digest nor slice our conventional drainage. Examples of serious solicitude, cleared away with dishes after dinner, leave some of us unfaithful to the beach and others of us unprepared to skate. You, perhaps, individually have bounced in isolation, careless of benefit derived from saracens, but not wholly too late for the Sunday papers."

The Adler syntactical nonsense was just the ticket. He collaborated with the nonnarrative, nonrepresentative artist in the preparation of a book of her nonsensical drawings with a collection of his nonsensical texts variously entitled "Prayer," "Invective," "History," "Definition," and so on, and Adler's friends Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer at Random House published the joint spoof in a volume of 750 copies called Diagrammatics . The two producers made appearances on and off the campus in the early 1930s to present and defend their skit, earnestly arguing what Adler called "the significance of form divorced from significant matter in a work of art." After Adler dropped out of the fun, Maude went on with it annually, as she prepared her exorbitant Christmas cards, usually with an extravagant but intelligent and able version of a biblical text, but on at least one occasion with the nude figure of a going-on nubile girl holding a Christmas candle—the model was sensationally reported around town and gown to be the Hutchinses' fourteen-year-old Franja.

Long before the curtain was rung down on the twenty-seven-year run of the Hutchins Follies, one of their friends, the plainspoken wife of a trustee, said, "They're a bore"—something she would not have said of either of the performers singly. They would have been less of a bore if Hutchins had been able to talk—even to the modest extent of saying why he had to make a last-minute change in plans, instead of grimacing, when his interlocutor was simple enough to say, "What's the trouble?" But down, at last, the curtain came, one spring evening in 1947, at the very peak of his multifarious preoccupation with world affairs. He appeared at the door of a close friend who lived just off the campus and said, "May I come in?" The friend might have made a stab at guessing what "the trouble" was; nothing like Hutchins at the door, any door, in the night had ever happened before.

He laid his underarm carrying-case on the living-room table and accepted a chair. He did not, however, accept the invitation to remove his coat. He said (in the same flat tone he used on the platform), "I've left home." The friend—whose wife was present—murmured something intended to sound sympathetic and be unintelligible, and added, "Where are

you going?" "Downtown," said Hutchins, who was then working at the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the leave of absence he had taken to see (as he said once, and only once, to a very few individuals) what he could do about his domestic situation. He asked to be allowed to phone for a cab, and left after a silent handshake.

The friend he walked in on that night said later, "At last Bob Hutchins had been caught up with by the things of the sort that make people human. He was human that night, off his demigodly perch—and he could look it, for once. Life, just for a moment or two, had cut him down to size, pulled him down to the level where the rest of us lived."

He took a room in one of the big hotels within walking distance of the Britannica offices and did not return to the President's House to get his things until arrangements had been made for Maude to be out. He said he would never speak to her again—and he never did. The lawyer—there was only one, retained by friends—was more than mildly surprised, even though he was an old friend of the family, when Hutchins declined to argue his wife's high demands. They were enough to strap him the rest of his life; for twenty-seven years he had tried to get himself, not peace and quiet, only enough quiet to do his work. He had used the most insulting and ineffective currency to buy it—giving her whatever she "wanted," whatever, that is, she wanted that could be bought. The last time around, after those twenty-seven years, he did it again; but this time the purchase would be permanent. The uncontested divorce settlement—the formal charge was desertion—awarded Maude $18,000 a year combined alimony, child support, and insurance premiums, but Hutchins was reported to have made an out-of-court contract bringing the total annual transfer to something like $30,000. The $25,000-a-year man was bankrolled by Bill Benton, whose Britannica Hutchins would go on serving, in one role or more (usually more) all his life.

It had not been an amusing marriage, the marriage of those two stunning figures out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was not an amusing divorce. It was a calamitous surprise, if not to the two parties or their children, to their friends who found them the kind of bore that would go on until death did them part. It was a calamitous surprise to the two families from the Calvinist parsonage of Brooklyn and the settled world of Oberlin. There were, indeed, no end of marriages made in 1921 that proved to have been made elsewhere than in heaven; but nearly all people stayed married, "whatever."

Maude Hutchins was no helpmeet, and Bob Hutchins was no help. He was hyperbolizing—but not lying—when he said that he never had time to think of anything beyond what he had to do in the next half-hour. He tried

to be and do too much, more than a man can try to be and do who has professional standards that do not permit him to shuffle off some, or most, of his work on others. This was a man who felt that he had to have time for every student who wanted to see him—with three exceptions: his daughters Franja, Jo-Jo, and Clarissa. And their mother was unwilling to be the kind of mother his and her mothers (and theirs) had been. The mismating of these two rare birds, so much alike, so colorful of plumage, so piquant of song, may have forced Maude Hutchins to behave shrewishly, but she was none of your ordinary shrews. She was as much of a person as he was, and as much of a woman as he was a man; in some respects, doubtless, more. But his public position was immeasurably higher than hers, and no matter what she achieved, or said, or did, she remained the talented wife of, the brilliant wife of, the artistic wife of, the great man. She could not overcome her resentment of him, or even check it (it grew visibly greater with the years)—resentment of his business, his importance, his independence of her, and the general adulation he had and doubtless enjoyed; the adulation that moved Scott Buchanan to say, "Bob has made homosexuals of us all."

If they were both ridden by the customary devils, and one of the customary devils that rode them both was duty—hers was duty to a hard master, art; and his to a master no harder, the Cause that an Oberlin boy brought to Oberlin with him from the parsonage and carried away to Yale and beyond. The great and terrible factor, the factor that may have held the union together for twenty-seven years instead of seven (or seven months) was the now bent figure of William James Hutchins. He had always counseled Robert against impetuosity; Robert had now to persuade his father that breaking the marriage vow—to which his father had sworn him—was not impetuous. He later insisted that going to his father now was the hardest thing he had ever had to do.

Mother and Father Hutchins survived, as mothers and fathers do, and even then did. (Everybody involved survived, more or less handsomely, as they usually do, and even then did.) Maude Hutchins has survived her ex-husband by many years, and until her old age was writing (and publishing) and sketching; she would not discuss her ex-husband; she said, thirty years later, that "it still hurt too much." Nor would he discuss her or his marriage. The mistakes he made—like those we all make—he would likely make again. His hope was that he would not again be thrown into such hopeless circumstances. Nor was he.

When he left home, his leave-of-absence boss, Bill Benton of the Britannica, instructed the Britannica office manager to furnish him with the brightest and best-looking secretary to be found anywhere. Little Vesta

Sutton Orlick, twenty years his junior, was a head shorter than he—he always called her the little corporal. She was the divorced mother of a small daughter, and very bright and very, very good looking. She was soon promoted to be Hutchins' secretary in his office as chairman of the Britannica board of editors, and a year after his divorce in July of 1948 they were married—by the Reverend William James Hutchins.

Vesta Hutchins was no Maude. Neither she nor her requirements were anything as flamboyant as her predecessor and her predecessor's. She wanted the things that a very busy man could provide—expensively, to be sure, but he was used to that—and provide for a woman who was devoted to him and his work and affected none of her very own. They lived quite privately as he and Maude had done (but without the ô trois accessory); entertaining little, and leaving parties as invariably early as ever. She was ailing a good deal, but she was much younger than he and survived him busily on their 90-acre estate in the Santa Barbara hills. She wrote no lively novellas, sketched no nude models (or nonnarrative, nonrepresentative figures), sculpted no sculptures to be sold to friends; she didn't need to do much more than travel with him, peripherally participate in his work, and look after the management of the house and garden.

During his twenty-seven-year marriage to Maude, he had never had time for his wife and children. He had never had time, period. But the last twenty-seven years of his twenty-nine-year marriage to Vesta found him differently situated. Once he left the university he was relieved of the intense pressures of the job there and left with the pressures that were within his own power, those that he put on himself. He was a very busy man between 1951 and his death in 1977, but never again as desperately busy as he was in the years at Chicago, never again too busy to pay any attention at all to the kind of life he was living and the kind of trouble that that kind of life entailed for him and others.