11
“My god! I thought you were an old lady!” Quinn exclaimed as he opened the door.[1] Standing before him was an unblemished enchantress in her midthirties who might have stepped out of one of his Laurencins. It was a few weeks after the Armistice, and Quinn was getting his first look at Jeanne Foster. Though they had never met, he had invited her over for dinner in gratitude for nursing old man Yeats—W. B.’s father—back to health.
Just as the war was ending in Europe, John Butler Yeats had fallen dangerously ill, and Quinn, fearful that it might be Spanish flu, had hired the best nurse he could find to care for him. But Yeats, who was nearing eighty, was an obstinate man and utterly refused to be tended to. Instead, he had insisted on the company of Foster, his poet friend, and so Quinn telephoned her to go see him.[2] She and Quinn had spoken almost daily since then, as she monitored Yeats’s recovery, but Quinn had no idea that she was two generations younger than Yeats himself.
Standing in his doorway, Foster was amused. Here was the genius-hunter she’d heard so much about, fumbling. In fact, as he later confessed to her, Yeats had sent him an adoring pen-and-ink sketch of her, but he simply didn’t believe it. He thought the old man was being fanciful. To the contrary, she was even lovelier in the flesh.[3] He led her into his apartment—past Brancusi’s Mlle Pogany and other smooth marble forms that stood in the hallway, past the stacks of newly arrived books, past the rows of paintings turned to the wall—and they began to talk.
Almost immediately, there were flashes of recognition. Foster had met most of the Irish, English, and American writers in Quinn’s circle. She’d written about Irish dramas he supported, books he helped publish, paintings and sculptures he owned. She’d been to Dublin and seemed to know Paris better than he did. She also seemed to have a razor-sharp mind and spoke fluent French. No wonder Yeats craved her company. Here was the new beginning Quinn desperately needed.
By the final years of the war, Quinn’s accelerating professional and personal entanglements had nearly driven him into the ground. Whether self-willed or not, he now woke up to a multiheaded hydra of duties, expectations, and involvements, encompassing law, politics, finance, literature, and art. As the Wilson administration finally prepared to join the Allies in the war—a step Quinn had called for since 1915—he had taken on a series of colossal government projects, from negotiating tax policy for the wartime munitions industry to designing sanctions against German-owned corporations. (On the day the United States entered the war, Quinn was lunching at the British embassy with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, and Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador.) Still mired in Ireland’s independence struggle, he recruited two leading Irishmen, the critic George Russell and the Irish statesman Sir Horace Plunkett, to help him write a 183-page treatise on the ideal shape of a new Irish constitution, which he then sent to British prime minister David Lloyd George and his powerful foreign secretary Arthur Balfour.[4] In Washington, Quinn was also being pulled back into his old “art fight”: In an effort to raise war revenue, Congress was threatening to undo all his efforts back in 1913 and reinstate the art tax. And in New York itself, drawing on his growing connections to France and Britain and his considerable rhetorical powers, he had been giving speeches to rally politicians and business leaders to the Allied cause.
Meanwhile, his cultural activism continued unabated. Despite what he’d told Huneker about narrowing his field of view, he was supporting exhibitions right and left, bailing out insolvent galleries and painters to an extent that baffled his own beneficiaries: “You will certainly die with your cheque-book in hand,” Ezra Pound told him, “paying the debts of some irrelevant artist.”[5] He was working constantly on Alfred Knopf, who had now started his own publishing house, to take on the writers he had been discovering in Europe. (“I do not know if it is great poetry or not,” Knopf wrote him, a few days after Quinn sent him a copy of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” “I do know that it is great fun and I like it.”[6]) And to stir interest in James Joyce’s work, Quinn had written, in Vanity Fair, one of the first American appreciations of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Especially consuming was The Little Review, the modernist journal run, with frequent assistance from Pound in Europe, by the brilliant but not-at-all business-minded Margaret Anderson. (Its motto was “Making No Compromise with the Public Taste.”) As Anderson’s principal backer, Quinn found himself continually writing checks to support some of the most incisive new prose in the English language, including work by Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Wyndham Lewis, W. B. Yeats, and Sherwood Anderson. Yet nearly as often, he found himself defending The Little Review in court, on the multiple occasions when it ran afoul of censorship laws for publishing allegedly obscene fiction. “Don’t burn your candle so fast, dear Quinn,” an Irish friend warned him in the fall of 1917. “We only get one each.”[7]
That winter, it finally caught up to him. For weeks, he’d been having stomach cramps, which, ascribing them to overwork, he simply ignored. By January 1918, however, he was seriously unwell, and suffering from rectal bleeding. When he at last found time to see a specialist, the verdict was dire: a malignant tumor in his lower abdomen. Quinn was incredulous, but a second opinion concurred, and the only option was to try to remove it as soon as possible. He was given five days to prepare for the operation and told he might not make it. There was barely time to gather his thoughts.
For Quinn, the situation was as unimaginable as it was terrifying. A vigorous forty-seven, he had, only a few months earlier, felt almost invincible. Now, apart from confronting the prospect of his own imminent demise, he found himself taking stock of his life. Despite his formidable and varied career, there was a decided chaos to the garden he had sown. Many of his most cherished plans and projects were undone, or half done, or never quite started. Opting for independence, he’d turned down prominent judgeships and political posts; instead, he pursued the unforgiving finance work that had supported his interests but left little lasting legacy. In his cultural ambitions, he had not come close to creating a permanent beachhead for modern art in the United States, or even building the exceptional personal collection he sought. And for all his romantic conquests, his fierce resistance to emotional attachments had left him remarkably alone. He felt “like a man going over the top,” he told one friend, invoking the gruesome trench warfare of Europe, but in his case he was staring at death without a platoon to back him up.[8]
In the days before the operation, Quinn raced to put his affairs in order. Drawing up a short will, he resolved to leave to his remaining relatives, his sister and her young daughter, as much as he could. (His other surviving sister, having joined a convent, was provided for.) His estate was depressingly meager. Though he was handsomely compensated for his law work, he had poured so much of his earnings into his cultural pursuits that he was constantly behind in his own finances. Still, he did have his sprawling collections of art and books. Already he had amassed the most significant pile of modern paintings and sculptures in the United States, even if, as he saw it, the sum total was hardly enduring. Far better, he reasoned, to have everything sold off to provide something for his sister and niece. In the event of his death, he instructed his executors to liquidate the entire collection.
In the end, the will did not have to be invoked. Not this time. Led by one of the best doctors in New York, the operation went off unexpectedly well and the tumor was removed. “A miracle of successful surgery,” Quinn wrote to Joseph Conrad two weeks later.[9] Nonetheless, he faced a long and painful convalescence, starting with five weeks in the hospital and months of slow rehabilitation at home after that. When he did return to the fullness of life, he was ready to act on feelings that had set in the year before. “You will do me a great favor, if you spread the legend that I am a changed man,” he had told John Butler Yeats. “That I murder poet-asters [sic] on sight; that I have no interest in the drama; that I have ceased taking any interest in artists or writers; that I have given up being the defender of the oppressed; that I don’t give a damn if all of Washington Square is indicted and tried and convicted.”[10] The universe was finite. From now on, he would rigorously limit where his energies were spent, but he would be all the more determined to pursue those things that mattered.
It was in this frame of health and mind that he found Jeanne Foster on his doorstep. At the time, Foster herself was in a moment of transition too. Following her war reporting, she had returned to New York, where she managed to publish two different volumes of her own poetry in quick succession. (The second volume, called Neighbors of Yesterday, hugely impressed John Butler Yeats, who read it in a single sitting and told her, “You have something to say.”[11]) She also had become something of a literary patron of her own, discovering and mentoring a teenage Russian-born poet named Marya Zaturenska, who would decades later win the Pulitzer Prize. And though she continued to be burdened with her elderly, ailing husband, the marriage had long ago been reduced to an intermittent caregiving arrangement, from which she escaped as often as she could. Now that the war was over, she was impatient to reengage with Europe.
As they talked, Foster was fascinated by the intensity of Quinn’s enthusiasms, and when he asked her if she would like to help him find publishers for the new writing he was receiving from London and Paris, she immediately said yes. Over the coming months, as they discussed Eliot, Pound, and other writers, they found other affinities. Already initiated into Quinn’s aesthetic world, Foster soon became enthralled by the sweeping assuredness of his judgments and his rapid absorption of almost anything new, but also his fearsome reputation in the legal world and his perpetual distemper with ordinary life. At one point, he gave her a copy of his friend Joseph Conrad’s autobiographical sketch, A Personal Record; concurring on Conrad’s “incomparable” talent and his “freedom from sentimentality,” Foster remarked that he wrote “primarily for those who are passionate beyond passion.”[12] She might have been talking about Quinn himself.
For his part, Quinn was disarmed to find someone whose restless spirit and sharp outlook so often anticipated his own. In his earlier conquests, Quinn had known a number of exceptional women. Alice Thursby, the vivacious daughter of a prominent social philosopher and the sister of one of the country’s leading newspaper editors, had had a nomadic upbringing in the United States and Europe. Lady Gregory, stunning even at eighteen years his senior, was the aristocratic playwright and guiding light of the Irish Renaissance. May Morris was an accomplished modern designer and the daughter of William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement. Yet until he met Foster, he had never encountered someone so thoroughly self-created like himself—a woman who had come from mountain girl poverty to the most advanced end of culture purely by her own drive. With Foster, the new art and literature was not merely a sport; it was nourishment for the unquiet mind. “You are not trapped by life. You are free,” she told him.[13]
Collaborating first over literature, and then, more and more, painting and art, Foster soon became Quinn’s secret weapon. In contrast to his abrasive impatience and exacting, if sometimes impossible, demands, her quiet poise could win over skeptical publishers and unpaid dealers; and her French and her frequent transatlantic travel gave him coveted insights into the emerging postwar scene. Sometimes, she assisted with Quinn’s legal dealings as well, reading briefs to him at breakfast, which he would then commit to memory—he liked to appear in court without any notes—or supervising a French legal team he was collaborating with on a case. (“These lawyers seem much in awe of you,” she reported from Paris at one point.[14]) For much of her adult life, Foster had been pursued by men who tried to wrest her away from her marriage; but Quinn, for all his outsized ego, cherished her independent spirit. When Foster had to leave him, briefly, to look after her elderly husband in Schenectady, Quinn told her he had no right to be angry, but was “writhing like a man in hell.” She told Quinn he was everything to her. “Love me or love me not, it makes no difference,” she said. “To have found you is enough for me.”[15]
Only gradually, though, did Foster realize that she was also leading him into a crucial new phase of his career as a patron. A few months after they met, Quinn received a letter from the painter Segonzac, who had recently been discharged from the French army. After the war, Quinn had tallied with bitterness the artists and writers who had been lost, among them Gaudier-Brzeska; the poet Apollinaire, who had died of Spanish flu even as the war was ending; and Duchamp’s brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon, whom Quinn regarded as one of the greatest sculptors in the world. Others, including the brilliant Cubist Roger de La Fresnaye, had returned in such poor health that it was unclear whether they would ever make art again. But Segonzac had survived, and he said that he had seen Picasso, Braque, Derain, and Léger, who had also come through okay, and that a new school of art was emerging, something he called Purisme.
Quinn was fascinated by the report. By now, he owned a large number of paintings by Derain and Picasso, and several of Braque’s Cubist still lifes, and he was familiar with Léger. He understood, if on a purely instinctive level, that they were part of the group that was upturning the rules of painting and was writing what he described as a new chapter in the “history of the development of art.”[16] He was excited by Segonzac’s impression—however simplifying it was—that a new school was, as Quinn put it, “coming into life” from the wreckage of war.[17] Here was the drama of creation he longed for in New York. But the letter also made him wincingly aware that he lacked a personal rapport with any of these artists and had still seen remarkably little of their work.
What Quinn lacked was in Paris itself. Without establishing himself in Europe, it would be very difficult for him to sustain the kinds of friendships—among artists, critics, and dealers—that had undergirded his activity in New York. But he also knew this was out of the question. Even before the war, his incessant work obligations had severely limited opportunities for transatlantic travel. (“Personally, if I didn’t have to be on this side, I’d give almost anything to be in Paris,” he’d written Congressman Underwood after the passage of his tariff reform.[18]) By now, it was nearly seven years since he last visited the Continent, and he was newly constrained by his precarious health. What he needed was someone already in Paris—someone who shared his gift for connections, his decisive taste, his anticipatory interest in new art and new artists. Not even Foster, for all her talents, could do that. And besides, he wanted her here.
Then, in the late summer of 1919, Quinn made a serendipitous discovery. An unusual Frenchman he had met in New York during the war was about to return to France. Henri-Pierre Roché was a tall, red-haired man in his late thirties who had been sent to the United States on a wartime economic mission for the French government but whose primary interests lay elsewhere. A man of deep acquaintance with the world, he spoke many languages and was disarmingly earnest and enthusiastic. (Among his idiosyncrasies in English was to close any conversation with “good, good, excellent.”) He also seemed to know a great deal about the Paris art scene. One Sunday in early September, Quinn invited him over for lunch.
When they had first met, Roché had learned about Quinn’s unusual interest in modern art, but since Roché was in New York, there was little he could do to help him. With Roché headed back to Paris, however, Quinn was anxious to talk about his paintings and explain his dilemma.[19]
For Quinn, Roché was an improbable match. Not only did he share Quinn’s deep interest in modern art, he also had a gift for meeting people and seemed to know nearly everyone in Paris. Before his arrival in New York, he had been a regular boxing partner of Derain and Braque; he had also been friendly with Picasso since the artist’s days with Fernande at the bateau-lavoir. It was Roché who first brought Gertrude and Leo Stein to Picasso’s studio back in 1905; Roché who had helped Picasso find Braque when Braque had been shot at the front; Roché who, when Picasso was hard up during the war, had introduced him to Jacques Doucet, the prominent Parisian fashion designer, and persuaded Doucet to buy several paintings.[20] Along with his social proclivities, Roché was also intellectually omnivorous, and there was seemingly no artist or writer of interest—in France or anywhere else—who had escaped his attention. “He had done a great many things,” Gertrude Stein observed. “He had gone to the austrian mountains with the austrians. He had gone to Germany with the germans and he had gone to Hungary with the hungarians and he had gone to England with the english. He had not gone to Russia, although he had been in Paris with russians.”[21]
Along the way, Roché pursued his other great vocation: women. In the meticulous diaries he kept nearly every day and would continue to keep for more than fifty years, Roché recorded his prodigious love life with remarkable candor. “My desire [is] to write the story of my life one day,” he wrote in his diary around the time of his meeting with Quinn, “like Casanova, but in a different spirit.”[22] In his diaries, he developed an elaborate system of code names for his various partners—Wiesel, Bigeye, Maho, Cligneur (“winker”)—as well as for his own penis, which he referred to as “p.h.,” for petit homme or “little man.” (Alternatively, he called it “mon God.”) Yet he did not see himself as a conqueror. To the contrary, he was fascinated by relationships and their complexities, and many of his overlapping attachments endured for years; somewhat like Quinn, he maintained friendships with former lovers years after an affair had cooled. He also had a predilection for sharing his partners with friends. “This one is one certainly loving, doing a good deal of loving,” Stein wrote. “Certainly, this one is one who would be very pleasant to very many in loving.”[23]
Only occasionally did Roché’s extraordinary libido get him into trouble. Before the war, he spent extensive time in Germany in particular, where he had shared a series of women with the German writer Franz Hessel, his close friend. In Paris, foreigners were frequently seen at his apartment, and he kept up a continual correspondence with friends and lovers, often in German. A few weeks after the war broke out, he was falsely denounced as a spy and taken to the Conciergerie, the notorious French prison, pending charges of treason. In the end, he was held for two weeks before he could clear his name. (Finding himself incarcerated with an assorted group of con men, beggars, and Alsatian waiters, he quickly made friends with all of them. “On the tenth day,” he wrote, “we received the news, tapped through the walls, that the war was going well, but the prisoners in the neighboring cell needed tobacco.”[24])
Notwithstanding the arrest, the French authorities decided that Roché’s unusual talents would be useful to the war effort, and after a stint at French military headquarters, he was dispatched to the United States to assist with a Franco-American industrial commission. Bored by the government work, he soon plunged into New York’s wartime art scene, making friends with Duchamp, playing chess with the exiled painter Francis Picabia, falling in love with the patroness and salon host Louise Arensberg, and starting a short-lived Dada magazine called The Blind Man with a free-spirited young American named Beatrice Wood. It was amid this activity that, in the spring of 1917, Roché had attended a large gathering of artists and writers hosted by Quinn. Now, two years later, they were finally becoming properly acquainted.
—
Before they sat down to lunch, Quinn wanted Roché to see his paintings. As they wandered through the apartment, Roché was stunned. In room after room, there was hardly any furniture. Instead, everywhere he looked were thick standing rows of paintings, turned nose to the wall. In a front bedroom were the Irish marine pictures that Quinn had collected in his youth; another room contained the big Augustus Johns and works by other British contemporaries. There were a huge number of paintings by new American artists, like John Marin and Charles Prendergast and Walt Kuhn. And then, in several back bedrooms, the heart of the collection, dozens of paintings by the French and European moderns. Though Quinn had only a small number of works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne, each one, it seemed to Roché, was a masterpiece. And then, perhaps most surprising, came a series of important works by the painters he knew in Paris: Braque, Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Picasso. As he would later describe it, these were toiles de combat, canvases you could go to battle with.[25]
Yet Quinn was deeply dissatisfied. As he showed Roché different paintings, he confided that he felt that much of what he owned was second-rate. Several times, as he got out a particular work, he told Roché, “I would like a better version of this.” He also mentioned a series of exceptional works he wanted, needed. Then he asked Roché if he could help him. What Quinn was proposing was for Roché to be his “informant,” finding and telling him about paintings, in exchange for a commission on each painting Quinn bought. Aware that Roché himself collected, on a small scale, works by many of the same artists, he added that he wanted Roché to show him the paintings that he would be tempted to buy and offer Quinn the opportunity to buy them first: a hard bargain that was at the same time a flattering endorsement of Roché’s taste. Roché didn’t know what to say. He had already dabbled in the modern art trade, linking artists to collectors as he maintained his vast social network in Paris. He also needed a new vocation, having finished his wartime mission for the government. Clearly, the lawyer had a powerful sense of what he wanted but it seemed unclear how much Roché would be able to do. Some of the paintings Quinn wanted were so scarce, or hidden away in artists’ studios, that they were likely unattainable.
After the lunch, Roché thanked Quinn for the offer and they agreed to stay in touch. Then, the night before his departure for France, he received a letter from Quinn, restating the lawyer’s interest in collaborating with him. “I am going to try to limit my purchases, as much as possible, to first-rate examples,” Quinn wrote, “…to works of museum rank or what we refer to here as star pieces.” He also outlined his proposed method. It would be up to Roché to cultivate artists, identify standout paintings, and send him black-and-white photographs, along with careful descriptions; then Quinn would make his own judgment. He warned that he would likely reject most of Roché’s suggestions. “I may not be interested in many of the things you write about,” he said. More gamely, he suggested that whatever came of their work, Roché had gained a place in his circle. “I shall be glad to hear from you, when you feel in the mood for writing,” Quinn wrote, adding that he hoped to find him “enjoying life as much as possible.”[26]
The next morning, as he waited for his boat to leave New York harbor, Roché read the letter again. What Quinn proposed was almost comically impractical. He would not only have to stand in for a difficult American collector who disliked most of what was offered; he would also have to persuade leading Paris artists and dealers that this New Yorker, who rarely came to Paris and might take months to make up his mind about any given work, was sufficiently important that they should covet the chance just to get their canvases into his hands. Having been to Quinn’s apartment, though, he sensed how closely his tastes aligned with his own. He also found Quinn almost as interesting as his paintings. With the boat still at the dock, he scrawled out a short reply and put it in the mail: “I quite approve your plans.”[27]
What Roché did not know was that Quinn’s ambition to create the first museum-like collection of advanced modern art in the United States faced a personal obstacle as well. As she began to see Quinn, Jeanne Foster wondered if he was more ill than he let on. With his morbid fear of disease and death, Quinn never mentioned cancer to anyone. But he wore a brace, and there seemed to be other lingering effects of what he referred to as his ulcer operation, or simply, “the trouble.” Foster was sure there was more to it, and a few months after they met, she asked his doctors, who told her that they were sure that he had no more than six years to live.[28] It amounted to a very short span for a project that, by Quinn’s own account, would require “more time and involve more patience” than anything he had undertaken.[29]