MY EARLY LIFE
I knew what I should become at a very early stage in my growth, in the Treasure Cabinet of my lovely parental home in Chixauga, New Mexico-not far from where Robert Dale Owen University is so beautifully situated.
Everblest House is full of beautiful and strange things collected by my grandfather and great-grandfather, all of them museum-pieces of the most excellent quality, though garnered in with no guiding principle other than their rarity, or special associative interest with some great figure or other from the past. We had a fine mahogany music-stand that was built for Jefferson himself according to his own ingenious mechanical directions as to hinges and angling. We had a bust (of Wieland) that had once belonged to the genial diarist and acquaintance of many great men, Crabb Robinson, who had himself rescued it, with discerning eye, from the oblivion of a glory-hole. We had a theodolite used by Swedenborg and a hymn book of Charles Wesley as well as an ingeniously designed new hoe employed by Robert Owen in his pioneering days in New Harmony. We had a striking-clock, presented by Lafayette to Benjamin Franklin and a walking stick of Honoré de Balzac's, encrusted with jewels in a somewhat opulent and tasteless way. My grandfather used to compare this parvenu ostentation with the true dignity and simplicity of Owen's hoe. Since the hoe was in pristine condition, there is some uncertainty as to whether it was an object of such utility as my grandfather imagined, but the sentiment does him honour all the same. We also had many objets de vertu, including fine collections of Sèvres porcelain, pâtetendre, Venetian glass and oriental tiles. The majority of these pieces-the European objects-were collected by my grandfather, a patient searcher-out of unconsidered trifles, a wanderer on four continents, who returned always with new treasures to the gleaming white house fronting the mesa. The high glass-fronted cases in the Treasure Cabinet were of his own design, a harmonious blend of the simplicity of the early utilitarian furniture of the idealistic settlers from whom he was descended, and the crude but powerful Hispanic work of the people among whom they had tried to build.
My father, who suffered from what would now be called periods of clinical depression-which effectively prevented him from pursuing any profession although he had graduatedsumma cum laude in Divinity from Harvard-amused himself from time to time by allowing me to examine these treasures, to the cataloguing of which he devoted his more lucid days, somewhat unsuccessfully, since he could never establish any guiding principle as to how they should be ordered. (Mere chronology, of fabrication or of acquisition, would have been the simplest, but his mind did not tend to simplicity.) "Here, Morty, my boy," he would say to me, "here is History to hold in your hand." I was particularly taken by the collection of portrait sketches and signed photographs of eminent nineteenth-century figures- drawings by Richmond and Watts, photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron-which had mostly been presented to, or solicited by my great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper. Those very fine portraits-unequalled, I believe, as a single collection, by any other in the world-now form the nucleus of the portrait section of the S tant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University, of which I have the honour to be the Chairman. In those days, they were my childhood companions, and my imagination animated their solemn features and made them smile kindly. I was enthralled by the craggy features of Carlyle, enchanted by the sweetness of Elizabeth Gaskell, in awe of the heavy, solemn thoughtfulness of George Eliot and lightened in spirit by the saintly unworldliness of Emerson. I was a frail child, educated mostly at home by my dear Ninny, my governess, and later by a tutor, a Harvard man, recommended to my father as a poet who would gain by this employment a safe basis for writing a great work. His name was Hollingdale, Arthur Hollingdale; he early claimed to detect considerable literary talent in my youthful compositions, and thus encouraged me to turn my mind that way. He attempted to interest me in modern writing-he was, I recall, enthusiastic about Ezra Pound-but my own tastes and aptitudes were already formed, my passion was for the past. I do not think Mr. Hollingdale ever wrote his great work. He found our desert solitude not to his liking, took in a poetic way to drinking tequila, and finally departed, with no regret on either side.
In my family's possession was one letter-one very significant letter-addressed by Randolph Henry Ash to my great-grandmother, Priscilla Penn Cropper, née Priscilla Penn. This ancestress was a most forceful, and so to say eccentric personality, a native of Maine, a daughter of devoted Abolitionists, who had housed runaway slaves and had participated in the ferment of new ideas and lifestyles then to be found in the New England States. She was a fervent speaker for the Emancipation of Women, and was also, as was common with those doughty fighters for human rights, involved in other movements. She was a firm believer in mesmeric healing, from which she claimed to have benefited greatly, and she was also very much involved in the spiritualist experiments of those days, which blossomed so freely in the United States, after the Fox Sisters heard their first "raps"; she entertained the visionary Andrew Wilson, author of the Univercoelum, or Key to the Universe, who in her house (then in New York) conversed with the spirits of Swedenborg, Descartes and Bacon. I should perhaps add that though she did not disclaim any kinship with the Pennsylvania Penns, the Quakers, my own researches do not indicate that there was any solid connection. She went down to history, maybe unfairly when we consider her versatility and inventiveness, as the creator of Priscilla Penn's Regenerating Powders, a patent medicine which I devoutly believe killed no one, and may have saved some at least of the thousands of lives claimed by my ancestress, if only through a placebo effect. The Powders, imaginatively marketed, made Priscilla's fortune, and Priscilla's fortune erected Everblest House. Everblest House comes as a considerable surprise to visiting strangers, being an exact replica of a Palladian mansion in Mississippi, lost during the War between the States by my paternal great-great-grandfather, Mortimer D. Cropper. It was his son, Sharman
M. Cropper, who rode North in those troubled days in search of a living and was, so family legend runs, transfixed by the sight of my great-grandmother addressing an open-air meeting on the Fourierist principles of Harmony and the duty to prosecute a search for free passion and pleasure. Whether from passion or opportunism I do not know, he attached himself to her following and thus came in 1868 to New Mexico when a group of them attempted to found a phalanstery. Some of them had previously formed part of what we would now call splinter groups from the model communities and rectangular villages built unsuccessfully by Robert Owen and his son, Robert Dale Owen, author of The Debateable Land Between This World and the Next.
The project of the phalanstery, less austere than Owen's villages, failed because the magic number of 1620 inhabitants, representing all possible variants on all possible passions of both sexes, was never attained, and also because among the enthusiasts there was no one who was skilled in agriculture or knew anything about desert conditions. My great-grandfather, a Southern gentleman, also an entrepreneur in a personal way, bided his time and proposed to my great-grandmother a rebuilding of the Paradise of his lost youth according to the rational and harmonic principles of her way of life-basing their happiness on the attainable pleasures of family life (with servants, though of course without slaves) without repining for the enthusiastic group-love that had proved so divisive and so unmanageable. Accordingly, the proceeds of the Regenerating Powders were put into the erection of the lovely house which I and my mother still inhabit, and my great-grandfather turned to collecting.