Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

Dear Gutzon, Heaven bless you. What a glorious time God had of it when He made you. A glorious thought that, seeing the Infinite Hand reach down and gather up the dust of the mighty and the great and mold it with terrific force into the hardest—and softest—soul I have ever known. Out of Milton and a speck of Angelo, and a grain of Napoleon, an atom from Paul and a flame from the Immortal Redeemer. It is a thought to play with. Such a strange, complex, unlimited person you are ... counting a line of vital importance, throwing away a fortune, soothing a crying baby, harboring an army, fighting for peace, loving a friend. You and Mary are destroyers of weak faith, and I love you both.

“Missy’s” picture of him is the one that his friends knew best. He never felt that he or anybody else had been endowed at birth with superior talents, though he always felt that he had done well with what he had. His ability to be successful as an artist, he declared, was due to trained observation and hard work. As a matter of course, he never talked down to an individual or to an audience. Once a Texas friend of his, Ralph Bradford, remarked that he was going to a “little hick town” to give a speech and didn’t need to prepare for it. Gutzon disagreed with him. “You never know the brains of an audience by the size of the town,” he said. “How do you know you won’t be talking to some ‘king maker’ who’s just there waiting for a train?” So Bradford, who presently moved on to an important post in Washington, did so because he stopped to prepare what he had to say—and the ambient “king maker” was in the audience.

“If there hadn’t been any ‘king maker,’” Gutzon commented afterward, “it would have been just the same; somebody, if it was only Bradford, would have known that the orator was doing a good job.”

Among the sculptor’s oldest friends was the painter Martin Borgord, a man of Norwegian extraction whom he had known in California and France. Borgord received honors in Paris and late in life returned to California. He stopped to visit Gutzon in South Dakota. Through him Gutzon met another well-known painter, William Singer, and his wife, and visited them in Norway. Mrs. Singer bought two of his marbles for her museum in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Another friend of the early Paris days was the Belgian sculptor Paul Nocquet, who came to New York to be near Gutzon and lost his life in a balloon ascension. After his death Gutzon collected his art works, had some of them cast in bronze and arranged an exhibition. The sale netted several thousand dollars for Nocquet’s mother and sisters in Belgium. Among the patrons of the show, whose names appeared in a handsome catalogue, were President Theodore Roosevelt, Sarah Bernhardt, and the French and Belgian ambassadors to the United States.

Gutzon took care of Nocquet’s burial in Mt. Kisco and prepared a calf-bound volume, In Memoriam, which contained, among other mementos, prints of the first air photographs of Long Island. Nocquet had taken a camera on his final trip, and the films were found in his pocket. Though wet, they were successfully developed and are probably the first pictures taken from the air to be reproduced in the public press.

Gutzon, after his return from Europe in 1901, met the Herbert Wadsworths of Washington and the Genesee Valley. They were horse enthusiasts. So was Gutzon. Martha Wadsworth was a dominating personality, and she was a social power in Washington. But once she motored all the way to Hermosa, South Dakota, and again to Stamford, Connecticut, just to visit with the Borglums.

Herbert Wadsworth’s attitude toward his wife’s activities was one of whimsical tolerance and his view of Gutzon’s enthusiasms was much the same. In 1912 he wrote this to Borglum:

Any indication that you are recovering from the Too-Many-Things-at-Once disease is most gratifying. Once I wanted to reform the world and now I’m too exhausted to reform myself. By and by, when you can take a long time off, come up to Ashantee—The Dawdlers’ Do-Nothing Roost—and do nothing with me. Say, where is home, anywhere?...

Another equally old friend and brilliant woman who also motored out once to Texas to spend the winter near Gutzon was Edith Cornell Smith, wife of Sydney. She and her husband lived in Thirty-eighth Street, near Gutzon’s studio. They were old New Yorkers to whom tickets at Carnegie Hall and the Opera House, and various club memberships, were as much a part of the annual budget as taxes and rent. Edith was deeply artistic and after her husband’s death spent most of her summers in Stamford where she was a welcome part of the Borglum family. There were many such travelers. In time Gutzon came to look on their arrivals as he did the rains or the rising of the sun. But he was overcome with wonderment when Julian Lee Rayford, then an obscure young artist, thumbed his way from North Carolina to Texas just to talk to him. “I don’t think I ever meant that much to anybody before,” said Gutzon. And he meant it.