AMERICAN FRIENDS
times before breakfast every day,’ an observation that will cause no surprise to the many friends of Grainger. Rackham did not put on much weight; when he reached New York the scales showed ‘two pounds under 10 stone’.
He stayed at the Yale Club, and at a first impression New York appeared to him ‘surprising and exciting’. His enthusiasm waned when he found it extremely noisy, and the comfortable Yale Club no exception to the rule: ‘Oh that brass band – in our hall now. Every third tune is the Wacht am Rhein … I imagine Yale must have bagged the tune for a college song. Bang, bang, bang, blare, squeal.’ He found ‘everything overdone … much too much – of everything. To live here must vulgarise an artist … I could easily run off & dump my bags & self on the first ship to Europe. … Bang bang bang bash. That man will bust that drum if no one stops him.’
Later letters were more cheerful. Rackham at sixty was obviously unable to come to terms with New York, but he found much to enjoy there. ‘Everyone is excessively kind,’ he wrote; ‘Everyone was brought up on my work – if young enough – or brought up their families on it if old enough.’ He soon had the run of six New York clubs, and was inundated with invitations. ‘The nature of my work seems to have made my name familiar to so many others than artists: the bookish people – librarians, book-lovers & so on. … The artists are extraordinarily friendly, too. I cannot think any American artist coming to our country (except a Whistler or Sargent) could find himself so heartily greeted.’
Rackham’s meetings with many publishers and magazine editors in their ‘gorgeous offices’ proved satisfactory and productive, though he was disappointed to find that, as in England, ‘all the publishers are shy of costly books’. A book-seller encouraged him to ‘get together a complete set of all I have ever done. They have sold one such lot for about £400’. He visited Mrs Joseph Pennell, who ‘said she thought I was even better known here than in England’. He was introduced to
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