Books: Whistler’s Parents

WHISTLER’S MOTHER—Elizabeth Mumford—Little, Brown ($2.50).

WHISTLER’S FATHER—Albert Parry—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

The standard Life of James McNeill Whistler by the etcher Joseph Pennell and his wife was published in 1908, five years after Whistler’s death. Since then the artist’s famed picture of his mother has become such a Mother’s Day ikon* that a separate study of the Woman Behind the Painting became inevitable. If Biographer Mumford† had had the style to confine her monograph within 200 incisive pages, she might have added something to literature. By being half again as long as that, and by a dutifully winsome acceptance of Anna McNeill Whistler at face value, her book achieves another kind of effect: the case history in 19th Century terms of a dear, good, pious, plaintive, prissy, possessive woman.

Implicit in Mumford, this interpretation of the saintly old figure is rudely expressed in Albert Parry’s biography of her husband, the great but forgotten Major George Washington Whistler. Biographer Parry has a lively if somewhat insistent irreverence for the Motherhood which the Major’s wife exuded throughout life and continues to symbolize in paint. As he reads the evidence, she snagged him after the death of his first, beautiful wife, Mary Swift, and did her best to take all the joy out of his and their children’s life from then on. But Parry’s story is mostly about the Major and his times. Son of the founder and first commandant of Fort Dearborn (later Chicago), a handsome soldier and famous engineer, constructor of the then marvelous Western Railroad of Massachusetts, Major Whistler was engaged by Tsar Nicholas in 1842 to build Russia’s first long-distance railroad — from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

Travelers who have never heard of Whistler’s Father have remarked that this 400-mile line is one of the straightest on earth. According to legend, the Tsar so ordered it by ruling a line on the map. According to Parry, Major Whistler’s skill and economy had much to do with it. A firm Irish Yankee, he was amazed to find Russian engineers behaving like poets, actors, priests and revolutionaries (Dostoevsky graduated from the Imperial Engineering School in 1843). He proudly refused a commission in the Tsar’s army, refused to say “Your Majesty” to Nicholas. Nicholas found him indispensable.

Mother Anna joined the Major in St. Petersburg in 1843, bringing young Jimmie and Willie (aged 9 and 7) and Deborah, the Major’s child by his first marriage. While Mrs. Whistler glowingly distributed Bible tracts to the Tsar’s soldiers, who used them to stuff their boots, Major Whistler saw 30,000 serfs sweating twelve hours a day to make his embankments symmetrical, heard his haughty Russian friends warn against ever giving the serfs a decent meal lest it upset their stomachs. In the evenings the Major solaced himself by playing the flute (he had been “Pipes” at West Point), but never on Mrs. Whistler’s Sabbath. Despite Mrs. Whistler’s disapproval, Deborah went to balls. Young Jimmie picked up a love of courtly manners.

Parry’s account of Russia as it appeared to the first of a long line of U. S. technicians is well documented, full of life: flea-bearing servants who slept on their masters’ furs at all-night balls; half-insane Count Kleinmichel whom the Tsar allowed to milk the railroad, to Whistler’s despair; winter nights when sledges came in from the country with drivers and passengers frozen to death; the Tsar’s crazy alarm in 1848 when liberal revolutions broke out in the West of Europe. That alarm finished the railroad for the time being (money went to the Army), and it finished Major Whistler. He died of the after-effects of cholera early in 1849. But not before his first section was finished and 118 locomotives were built in his shops. The Russians called the Iron Horse by their own magnificent name: “The Harnessed Samovar.”

. . .

With more pertinence than gallantry, Biographer Parry last week made public some letters exchanged with Biographer Mumford on the subject of Mrs. Whistler. Wrote Biographer Mumford: “I have no doubt she tried to dominate her males, but there are some good things about her relationships. . . .” Wrote Biographer Parry: “She made upon me an appallingly poor impression. . . .” Wrote Biographer Mumford: “I think you have plenty of basis for it. . . . But even if you are entirely right, I don’t propose to destroy the legend. . . . I am interested in a book that will appeal to the ladies. . . .”

* Exhibited in the U.S. in 1933-34 to 2,000,000 souls and reproduced in1934 on a postage stamp.

† A pseudonym of two collaborators: Mrs. Howard MumfordJones and Mrs. Elizabeth G. Herzog.