“There, Mother, I bet you can’t guess where that wood come from.”
“No. Where did it, Jake?”
“From that piece o’ land yer uncle Ezra left yer that Mr. Saint-Gawdeens and them dudes calls ‘Too Good to be True.’” Great laugh from both.
But every year or two with Gussy the Irish would get on top. A day would arrive when the work he was doing would disgust him too much. Then he would fire his assistants, helpers, and everyone out and smash everything in the studio. He would spend two or three days loafing in the club and with his friends, then back again, clean it all up, and begin work, saying, “Now we can get ahead.” The year that he was forty-nine he came to me, feeling very blue.
“Simmy, I’m out of it. I caught the model we had to-day in class winking at the fellows when I exclaimed a little too enthusiastically about her charms. The same thing happened to my master in Italy when I was a student, and I remember wondering how he could be so silly at his age.” Then he told me how he had always jumped upon the platforms of the cars while they were in motion. That day, as he did this, the driver said, “Peart for yer age, ain’t yer?” In the future he intended to wait until the car stopped and get on properly.
When he got these blue streaks he had the habit of coming down to The Players, finding me, and saying: “Now, Simmy, you must help me. Order anything you want, on me, but stay right here and talk to me.” I suppose the sound of my voice was, for him, like Vergil’s bees in the lime trees—a susurrus. The talk was anything and everything. Sometimes a discussion about a college education—as to whether Lincoln would have been the same if he had had one, etc., etc. I told him once about my discovery that every man, secretly and in his own soul, thought himself the ideal type of human being. An art class in Boston had been given as a subject for Saturday afternoon an ideal head of a young Greek. The results were placed on easels, and I easily picked out the author of each drawing from its resemblance to himself. Then Gussie remembered that in Italy there was a humpback in the class with him who made everything deformed.
In Chicago, where I went at one time to consult Daniel Burnham, I met Saint-Gaudens and McKim. To my astonishment, they had come to collect money to start an academy at Rome. They raised about one hundred thousand dollars, I believe, and this was the beginning. I always have been and still am opposed to formal organizations, and an academy seemed to me just another of the same kind. I couldn’t see Gussie in this position and asked:
“Que fais tu donc dans cette galère?”
His reply was very logical.
“No, I don’t, but when I was a boy I wanted to learn sculpture. If there had been an academy in Rome at that time, I could have gotten studio, materials, models, and all that I wanted for nothing. Let Chicago and everybody subscribe. Who are they, anyway? After one hundred years, the money will have been well spent if only one artist—say a Michael Angelo—is helped to get what he needs.” He was willing to sacrifice the whole pig-killing town if one genius could be helped.