Private Letters: Helen and Roy Bates
Roy in studio with brush and palette, 1915
A premonition, perhaps? The artist and poet Roy Elliott Bates once wrote – at least partly in jest – of his reluctance to purchase land in Tryon – “Perhaps on account of the frequent fires.”
Roy had indeed experienced several fires, there and elsewhere – most of them vicariously, with the notable exception of the Mimosa Inn fire in early spring of 1916. From that one he barely escaped. As it happened, he was perfectly safe until he ran back into the Inn to rescue some belongings. He helped an elderly lady – Madame Cartaya – out through the choking smoke. He gathered up some of his clothing, leaving behind his derby hat. He’d lost in the fire all of his paintings – his stock in trade – and painting equipment – the tools of his trade. And, not for the first time, he’d lost the edge of his health.
For Roy had traveled first to Asheville – and then on to Tryon – in his “quest for health and paintable landscapes” (as he wrote in his Harvard Class of 1905 Report). In 1910, having completed studies at Acadia College in Nova Scotia, and graduate studies at Harvard and at Merton College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and having embarked on his calling as an artist in travels through Europe and North Africa, he learned that he had contracted tuberculosis. He was then 28 years old.
He wrote a letter to a young American woman he’d met in Italy. In a brief encounter in a hotel lobby in Palermo, they’d struck up an instant friendship over poetry, painting, and travel. He sent a postcard to her from Tunis. Five months later, he was back in the States, and he wrote a second letter to her – mentioning almost as an aside, and very much in his style – “Anyway, it’s nothing more serious than advanced chronic tuberculosis of both lungs, and at the worst you only die of it….”
September in Picardy, R. E. Bates, exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français, Paris, 1909.
(Collection of John Bates and Susan Werbe)
Those two letters were the first in a 10-year progress of correspondence and a romantic relationship that was glacially slow in its development – in large part, because the young woman’s parents bitterly opposed the relationship. In large part, too, by dint of their seemingly incompatible situations – she, Helen Maxcy, the only daughter of a wealthy industrialist in Maine, a graduate of Smith College; he an itinerant artist, a poet – and a tubercular.
Searching for health, Roy traveled. South to Bermuda and Florida. West to Arizona, California, and New Mexico. North to art colonies in New York. When his health was poor, he would return to his parents’ homes in Mystic and New London, Connecticut. Always, however, sooner or later, he would return to Tryon.
Their romance progressed through their correspondence. Irregularly in the first years, then almost daily. They had remarkably few in-person encounters. Often, when things began to look serious, one or the other would seem to shy away, always aware of the Maxcys’ deep and abiding disapproval of the match.
In 1912, recovering from his early, serious bouts with tuberculosis, first near his family’s home in Connecticut and then in Asheville, Roy was able to regain some health and resume an active painting daily regime. He met, at an art exhibition in Asheville, an illustrious resident of Tryon who would in time become a lifelong benefactor. She invited him to visit Tryon – and visit he did – writing to Helen in early 1912:
Tryon hillside with cabin, early spring.
R. E. Bates (1912-1913)
“…I found [Tryon] to be more paintable than anything this side of Sicily, and as I was quite mad, I painted hard and furiously for two weeks, and came back to Asheville a wreck…I forget how much I told you about Tryon. It is hopeless to describe it, anyway. It is like an Italian Valley and actually has Italian Villas perched around just where you want them. Dogwood like snow in the woods, apple plum peach cherry – every kind of blossom… It was rather intoxicating, and as one frequently does when intoxicated, I did some foolish things.”
In Tryon, Roy had stayed at Emma Payne Erskine’s “Lynncote” estate – a stay that piqued his interest in Tryon and that swiftly advanced his move into the community’s cultural and artistic circles. “Mrs. Erskine herself was a wonder and her estate a dream out of fairyland,” he wrote to Helen, describing the Tudor Revival house and glorious setting of the Erskine property. Promisingly, he completed – and sold – several paintings.
Roy sought rest and recuperation for several months back at his family home, but he returned to Asheville early in 1913 and to Tryon in the spring. There he was invited to deliver an address at the Lanier Club on April 3rd. The subject of his talk – the then-popular English poet Alfred Noyes (“The Highwayman”) – was the same poet who had in effect first brought Roy and Helen together in that hotel lobby in Palermo, for she had been reading a book of Noyes’s poems when he approached her, enchanted to learn of their common interest.
Once again, Roy established relationships with women of a certain age who would be important patrons and supporters through the remaining years of his life. One, Frances Kent, a regular visitor to Tryon, would be among his closest confidantes. And Mrs. Erskine invited Roy to stay for several weeks at Lynncote, and again he fairly swooned with the sensation of spring in Tryon,
“The terraces are a dream now, and all kinds of roses are fairly weighing down the vines. Gold of Ophir in hopeless profusion are hanging just outside my window. (Hopeless because I want to paint them and can’t) My windows aren’t really windows but “casements”. Long horizontal ones with diamond panes in the top you know. The kind to reach out from and grab roses. Thrushes and cardinals and a dozen other soloists favor us from time to time. At night the whip-poor-will keeps up a continuous plaint... Down in the valley below we can always hear the river on the stones, and at night the little insects out in the trees and places make their little summer noises. It is quite an approximation to the Earthly Paradise.”
Seemingly quite taken with Roy, Mrs. Erskine floated the idea of creating a colony of artists and cultural figures at Lynncote, even suggesting she would make property available to Roy “offering me a fine building site on one of her wooded hills if I would get married and come and live here. I told her the only difficulty would be the getting married part.”
His weeks at Tryon were productive ones. He wrote to Helen in late June: “My season in Tryon came to a good end a few days ago, leaving me with three big canvases and about fifteen small sketches. One of the canvases is my masterpiece, and everyone who has seen it has straightway taken leave of their senses. I, however, have not as yet been arrested.”
‘…[A] photograph of a lantern-jawed artist!’
– Roy Elliott Bates, describing his 1915 Christmas present to Helen
Roy needed to travel for new horizons when his health permitted and to hunker down whenever his health deteriorated. He painted in Connecticut, Bermuda, and New York in 1914 – and returned to Tryon in 1915. He was now a regular in Tryon’s cultural life – and he could be waspish in his letters to Helen – for example:
"Tryon is at present packed with second-rate celebrities, among whom you are to recognize me as one! For this delightful town has been visited by so many sure-enough big guns, that in a charming provincial way the people accept anyone who says he paints, plays an instrument, acts, writes, or sings, as if he were the real thing, lest by failing so to do they might entertain an angel unawares. The other night there was a gathering of these lookers toward fame.
"They (ahem) we, were entertained at the “Mountain Industries” by Miss Large, the proprietor thereof, herself an author of “Mountain” books. The man of largest caliber (“Who’s Who” measurement) was Leonard Ochtman, a very fine landscape painter. The “leading lady” was I suppose Elia Peattie, one of the best known literary critics in the country and author of several successful books (not counting poems). Then there were six other artists, by name Stevens, Rowell, Mrs. Ochtman, Miss Wilcox, Fred Rich [Reich] and Bates. Mrs. Erskine whose newest activities are a kind of Greek opera and some “Movie” plays. A Mrs. Holden, critic, and several people whose names slip from me. Ralph Waldo Trine, author of “In Tune with the Infinite” left the day before, and Philip Hale’s sister (an artist) and Miss Clements, an interior decorator and Cathedral painter were unable to come as they have refused all evening invitations this season and were afraid to offend someone.”
He held exhibitions – a disastrous "no-sale" at the Oak Hall Hotel, followed by a “highly successful” show at the Mimosa Inn. An attack of grippe forced him to cancel a scheduled lecture at the Lanier Club.
In May, sitting in a long chair on a green terrace at Villa Barbara (another estate in the Erskine family), Roy wrote to Helen to cheer her in her difficult recovery from diphtheria, contracted in the course of her nursing work at Boston Children’s Hospital. He wrote again of the pastoral beauties of Tryon:
"There are apple trees, pink and white and fragrant..." Helen writing to Roy in 1919, on her first visit to Tryon.
Spring Landscape, R. E. Bates.
(courtesy Brunk Auctions)
“The little flowers are all out those that hide around the bottoms of trees and pop out at you when you aren’t expecting them. You have to get pretty near to smell those fellows, and it is a wee dampish for the knees. Wet pine needles you know. Then the sounds are also a little confused, altho the effect of them is a wonderful silence, ungrammatically punctuated. I’d be willing to listen to that solitary thrush remarking upon the satisfactoriness of the day just gone, but I can’t make out what he says on account of some cardinals and various small fry who are whooping it up. Even the river down in the valley would be enough for a pleasant obbligato to one’s thoughts, but it’s always getting mixed up with the sound the wind makes in the tops of the trees.”
And added thoughts on painting:
View of shallow Pacolet upstream from Howes Bridge.
R. E. Bates
Roy's later works took on a more painterly style.
(Collection of Deborah Bates)
“About rivers: sometimes to paint them in the spring and in this country you have to sit in a thorn bush and cut an oblong through the stuff ahead of you with your jack-knife so you can get a good stretch of swirling water for your foreground, and have a nice mountain for a background, flat and blue and not too far away, and trees that lean out over the river on both sides and break out little yellow buds from red branches almost while you wait. I wonder what makes the water keep coming. Every rock is able to depend upon having a curl of water behind it all the time and yet it is not the same water. Brown water with sun spots on it and all kinds of colors around it on the banks and white sky to reflect in places and complicate matters – this is all very difficult business, and if perchance you have a stroke of good luck and get it to look right in places, you are quite likely to jump up quickly in excitement, forgetting the thorn bush, and then you will be very handsomely scratched and your sleeves will be torn and mayhap you will swear.”
And he invited Helen to join him in Tryon the following year “Come on down to Tryon next year in March. Fine saddle horses abound here and hundreds of mountain rides. Interesting people, heaps of flowers, everything lovely.”
Then Roy was on the move again, to reside for a time, and paint, at the locally notorious “Blue Dome Frat” in Shady, New York – where much life model painting was created “in sylvan tableaux” under curtains of blue gauze.
Back to Tryon in early 1916. Roy was disappointed in the dearth of celebrities – but the disastrous fire at the Mimosa Inn provided ample excitement and danger and personal loss. Roy escaped with a suit and a bathrobe – and lost all of his current stock of paintings and his painting tools. He wrote to Helen:
“You would laugh if I told you the things I miss most. Not my pictures. I haven’t been able to feel the least bit depressed about those. I shall add Phoenix to my name and start on my second period at once. But the convenient little dinky things I can’t replace. A French screw-top oil cup. My French box, some new Rubens brushes (no longer imported), a little bunch of hand tools that all fitted into the end of a jack-knife handle, and things like that. And I hated to lose your photograph and letters – and alas, your copy of Fannie Stearns Davis. Then there were other books – a new dictionary, my mss. book, my address book with all the addresses of my life carefully put down. I find myself unable to write to some of my best friends as I never committed their addresses to memory.”
Autumn Sheaves, R. E. Bates, ca.1909
(Collection of Jonathan C. Sproul).
In 1909 and 1910, Roy painted landscapes in England, France, Italy, and North Africa and sold many of those works at exhibitions stateside after his return home.
The Lanier Club graciously bought a painting of Roy’s, and local artists and various patrons helped him to restock his painting kit.
Only two months later, the Lynncote estate burned down as well. Roy wrote again to Helen,
“We have recently had two murders, another big fire, and The Merchant of Venice performed by local talent. Altho I was not a principal in any of these. I feel that Tryon is a place for strong men, not nervous women like myself. One man shot another man for walking with his (one man’s) sweetheart, and the sheriff shot [a man] because he was too drunk to get up and go to jail properly, and Lynncote burned to the ground because of a bad chimney, but we saved everything in the house, and I don’t know the reason for the other murder – I mean of the Merchant.”
By June, Roy had removed to the Tonalist art enclave in Arkville, New York, which for the time being served him as a “second Tryon”.
In 1917, Roy traveled first to Florida, with mixed success from a “sales” standpoint, and with some marked deterioration in his health. He returned to Tryon, briefly, enjoying reunions with fellow artists and with his most loyal patrons. Now, however, on doctors’ emphatic advice, and having lost 28 pounds, he returned to his family’s home at Mystic, Connecticut to rest and regain some strength. Later in the summer, he and Helen enjoyed a clandestine week together at the Berkshire Summer School of Art in Monterey, Massachusetts. Even though both suffered badly from apparent food poisoning on their last night together, and Roy lost even more weight, they now clearly, at last, saw themselves as a couple with marriage plans in their future.
And plan they did. By year’s end, Roy and Helen had mapped out a western itinerary that would take him to California, Arizona, and New Mexico, with intentions of a rendezvous in Arizona as Helen traveled west with her family. Roy was looking for situations more conducive to his health – Arizona in particular being advised for its dry climate and some institutions with new ideas on treatment of tuberculosis. He was hoping, too, for new success in his art.
In 1918, then, Roy traveled West, by steamship and rail, and although his travels yielded many good stories in his letters to Helen, the trip was disastrous for Roy’s health. He did not meet up with Helen (though he experienced an unexpected and humiliating encounter with her father). His landscapes sold only sporadically. And this time his health deteriorated to dangerous levels. He returned East, exhausted, weak. Through several months of enforced rest and care at his parents’ home, he now put his best hopes for recovery on the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium, a modern facility in Wallingford, Connecticut (he gained admittance in February of 1919). Even so, his thoughts, in his letters, turned often to Tryon, with the suggestion that Helen visit Tryon on her way north after a winter sojourn with her family in Florida.
Catskills scene, R. E. Bates.
After the Mimosa Inn fire in 1916, Roy took himself to Arkville, in the western Catskills of New York, known as an "enclave" of American tonalist painting. He returned in 1918 and was joined there by Helen in the autumn.
Helen – who in April 1919 did indeed arrive in Tryon with parents in tow – shared Roy’s enchantment – writing from her room at Oak Hall:
“There are apple trees, pink and white and fragrant, and pines aplenty. And a moon – and lilacs. And birds. One lovely flame colored thing sat nonchalantly on a stump today with a perfect green background and pretended he was nothing more than an English sparrow. ‘Only my love’s away’,” she wrote, quoting Browning.
In a swirl of activity, Helen admired Pearson’s Falls, hiked in the woods, visited Miss Yale’s Toy Shop, viewed several Wallace Fahnestock paintings (and a Bates!), went horseriding, and traveled with her father to the William Gillette estate. Caught up in thoughts of their future together, she freely admitted to Roy, that “I covet nearly every empty house I see. For us.” – and she visited several cottage possibilities in the village.
View of Taormina in Sicily. R. E. Bates, 1910.
Roy painted this around the time of his first encounter with Helen, in Palermo. Helen bought the painting from Roy in the early years of their correspondence.
(Collection of Deborah Bates)
Somehow – perhaps through the magic of Tryon – her parents’ attitudes had, at long last, mellowed. There was a hastily planned and joyous wedding in July, in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and itinerant honeymooning and early housekeeping in Massachusetts, along the Connecticut shore, and in Arkville.
And then came the opportunity they’d been dreaming of – Mrs. Erskine’s studio at Lynncote became available to them (she was now Mrs. Corwin, having remarried in 1917). Roy and Helen moved back to Tryon in December. Disaster struck only days later, as Roy reported in his 1920 letter to his long-time patron and confidante, Mrs. Kent -
“We don’t know yet how the fire started. It was at 7.30 New Year’s morning, before we were up. We usually waited for the furnace man to get away before we got up. He had hardly been gone ten minutes, if that. The morning was so warm he hadn’t started up the fire in the furnace, but had made one on the hearth in the living-room (the glassed-in porch at Mrs. Corwin’s Studio, now (or until Jan 1st) used as living-room.
"The fire didn’t start from there, however, and the living-room was the last to go. We smelled no smoke at all. I got up partly because it was time to get up anyway, and partly because I heard a tiny noise like glass breaking and dropping (as I thought) out back of the house. I opened the door into the dining-room, and that was as far as I could get. The room was black with smoke. I couldn’t even cross the room to telephone. I shut the door quickly and suggested to Helen that she get out her dresses. I made the mistake of obeying my natural instinct to put on some clothes. Helen had better sense and worked in her night-gown. She saved a lot more than I did, for I lost two or three minutes over my clothes. I hustled out one trunk and a blanket full of miscellanies. Helen slung her loot on the veranda and disappeared into the bedroom before I could stop her. The smoke had come through, and altho I didn’t know it at the time she got lost in the blackness and hadn’t a notion which way to go till she heard me call to her. Then she came out, with her jewel-box and a loose ring – and her glasses on her nose! Feeling quite sick with smoke – she told me afterward. We withdrew up the path toward Lynncote, and sat on our trunk and watched the show. The men who came from town were too late to do anything.”
Although Roy and Helen had escaped with their lives, Roy’s health was now fatally compromised. The couple made their way slowly back north to Helen’s family’s home in Gardiner, Maine, where Roy died in July, 1920, at age 38, a year to the month after their wedding. Helen had become pregnant that spring, before they left Tryon on their travels north. Their son, Roy Elliott Maxcy Bates, “Elliott”, would be born in October, three months after the death of his father, whom he would never know except through the trove of letters that Helen saved for him.
John E. Bates (a grandson of Roy Elliott Bates)
Riverdale, Bronx, New York
June 2023
Photograph courtesy of Susan Bates Eddy
Helen and her young son from Maine continued to visit Tryon after Roy’s death. Elliott returned to Tryon in later life, revisiting places and scenes that had figured so strongly in his parents' lives.
