AMERICAN FRIENDS
Gene Tunney, ‘an engaging young giant with a gentle handshake’. He went out of town to spend a Sunday with Christopher Morley, ‘genial & pleasant & very unaffected’, and his wife and four small children. He played bridge at a party with the actress Cissy Loftus, ‘quite white-haired now’.
The delay in delivery of letters from his wife worried him, but on a flying visit to Boston he was able to write: ‘I’m in much better spirits now I have had your letters, dear dear old Edyth.’ His anxiety about her health, and the effect on it of his own absence, drew from him one reassuring letter that was deeply personal: ‘Oh my dear old Edyth, it is so difficult for me to make you feel how close close close, how one our lives have been for me. How outside, how unrecorded, how without influence my wanderings have been to me. … The reality of my life has been that with you. …’
One of the most interesting results of Rackham’s trip was a commission from the New York Public Library to provide for the Spencer Collection there a series of special water-colours illustrating A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. These were exhibited at the Library in 1929, and bound up in a beautiful manuscript book written by Graily Hewitt. The closing days of his stay were spent on a water-colour portrait – ‘a handsome young Jewess’ – for which he was paid £250. His sitter proved ‘very amiable & patient fortunately & anxious that her mother, for whom it is, should have a Christmas present that she will like’.
On his last day in America, before sailing in the Olympic at midnight to get home for Christmas, Rackham visited an exhibition of drawings in the Children’s Room of the New York Public Library, met the young artist, and spent the evening with him and Anne Carroll Moore, who later described the occasion in The Horn Book (Christmas, 1939). He told them he was ‘free to kick up my heels until sailing time’, so they drove him in a taxi over the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to see the lights of the city, took him to supper at
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