The Lost Prince (16 page)

“I have indeed,” he said quickly, having good reason to take her at her word since he had already received two large checks from the Hyperion Fund. “I shall write Dr. Freud and do whatever persuading is necessary.”

MAHLER

I
n meeting Stanley Hall, Eleanor had initiated the first of the great instigations required by the Vienna journal. The second had been the mandate to bring Gustav Mahler to New York, one that had started with the popularity of the pseudonymous book
City of Music
. She had gone to Heinrich Conried, the director of the Metropolitan Opera, and made the offer, and he had, like Dr. Hall, been eager to receive the support.

“I will arrange for a gift to make it happen,” she said. “Of course it will remain anonymous.”

“People in New York are calling for this,” the flamboyant director said to her. “The man has become quite the rage, because of that book.” Then he reflected for a moment. “And what is the size of this offer you can arrange?”

And again, Eleanor, well accustomed to others’ difficulty in believing that she could guarantee such things, said, “Whatever your needs. My source wishes Herr Mahler to come to New York. That is the intention.” And she removed from her purse a check, which she handed to the director. He took the check, eyed it suspiciously, and then looked again.

“Will that suffice for starters?” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” Mr. Conried said. “This will do quite well for starters.”

“And you understand that there will be more to follow, considering your needs in persuading Herr Mahler and his wife to come to your company?”

The director nodded. “Yes, I understand this,” he said.

Heinrich Conried’s offer to come to New York arrived in Vienna at a most crucial moment, it turned out, just as Mahler was experiencing an intense controversy and vitriolic anti-Semitic attack. So, as Conried suspected, the timing was opportune, and, the funding secured, a deal was struck.

When the Mahlers first arrived in late December 1907, Eleanor had visited Arnauld’s friend Alma in the couple’s New York hotel room and had welcomed her, when her husband was off touring his new facilities. Recalling their first meeting in 1897, the two women rekindled their friendship, and they rediscovered an immediate rapport, with much affectionate talk of Arnauld. Alma had just lost her daughter, and Eleanor was able to be very comforting. Eleanor had expressed her hope that the couple would come to Boston and stay on Acorn Street. Alma had said graciously that she did not know the schedule that had been laid out for them in this new land.

One can only imagine what Eleanor experienced only a few weeks later, after all she had been through, when she actually heard her first Mahler performance in New York. How she must have been stunned when she first heard what was to be on the schedule in that first season, the opera she had last heard in Vienna ten years earlier, in the heart of her intensely emotional time.

“It is to be Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde,
” she told Rose Spurgeon, excusing her second trip to New York in as many weeks. “I have deep feelings about that opera,” she said without explaining. “I don’t know if I can bear it.”

Rose, who had become indispensable to the household and was becoming the closest Eleanor had now to a true soul mate, offered to help. “I could accompany you, ma’am,” she said, and Eleanor thanked her for the kindness but said she was up to going it alone. Rose, who knew nothing of what had happened in Vienna, had come to know much about her mistress’s heart.

The performance, Mahler’s American debut, was to be the night of January 1, the dawning of 1908. She had arranged, with Rose’s help, to be alone and away, which was not easy since it was New Year’s, but she did indeed get herself onto the train and into the city, amid all the celebration. Mr. Conried had seen to it that she had been given a ticket in a discreet position in the fifteenth row, and she sat by herself and watched breathlessly
as the energetic conductor entered, acknowledged the applause, took his position, raised his baton, and signaled the commencement of the powerful overture. Later, she admitted to Rose that it had been one of the most difficult and most powerful moments of her life. “Someday, I shall tell you about it, Rose,” she said. “It is music of a whole new order for me, and Herr Mahler conducting is something to behold.”

Then, it was not until a year later, during Mahler’s second season in America, that she first heard one of his symphonies, with or without his conducting. The actual selection was Mahler’s first, the one she had seen in score form in 1896, the spring of her senior year, the introduction that had launched her remarkable story, but she had never actually
heard
the music. A friend had visited Budapest and heard the exciting young conductor and had arranged to have a complete score brought back to the Smith College music department. Weezie Putnam had sat with it for hours following the cello part and trying to hear in her head how the whole piece sounded with a full orchestra.

It was from this experience that she wrote her critique of the New York Philharmonic that the
New York Times
published under the pseudonym she had invented from the name of the dormitory janitor Johnny Trumpp, and it was from the publication of that article and the subsequent invitation from the
Times
to keep writing that the idea of her going to Vienna had sprung.

Her Vienna sojourn had begun later the next year, 1897, after her graduation, when she had gone there to write something of significance about music and to meet and hear this new conductor who had recently moved from Budapest. She did in fact attend a performance of Mahler conducting Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde
at the Vienna opera with the man she met there who changed her life forever. For years, she thought that she would never be able to attend a similar musical event, and she avoided Wagner whenever played by the Boston Symphony.

And so, here she was years later, during Mahler’s first visit to Boston, a visit she had herself made possible, hosting the Mahlers, as she had offered, at Acorn Street. Now she was to hear for the first time the symphony that had started it all, and she wished to experience it alone, not certain what her reaction would be, but she knew she would be sitting beside her husband, Frank, of course, among the Boston Symphony’s major donors, all of whom she knew well.

She watched the energetic conductor enter once again; take applause that seemed even greater than in New York, this time in her native city; and then rise to the podium, lift his baton, and pause. Her heart stopped. Then the first strains of this symphony she knew well in theory filled the air of the symphony hall she had known since childhood. She fought to show no emotion as the music transported her, whether she wished it or not, back to an unimaginable place, back again to that city that had filled so many of her dreams and back to that moment of utter fulfillment of a love she had never known before and would not know again.

Of course neither Mahler nor Alma ever knew that it was her Hyperion Fund that had caused the invitation in the first place. That gift would remain forever anonymous. Always, if Gustav Mahler was aware of her significance at all, he saw her as a respected patron of the Boston music scene, one he always met with the beneficent smile he used for supporters. She heard him conduct a few more times over the years of his visits.

Ironically, Arnauld met up with the Mahlers only once during his first year in Boston, as the great conductor’s last season was in the winter of 1910 and 1911, Arnauld’s first in America. He gave what was to be his last performance at Carnegie Hall on February 21, 1911, an event Arnauld regretted missing due to obligations of his new teaching role, not realizing the event’s significance.

Mahler returned home shortly after that concert, in April. More gravely ill than people in New York or Boston realized, he died in Vienna on May 18, 1911.

PUTNAM CAMP

T
he Stanley Hall offer came to fruition in the early fall of 1909, with Sigmund Freud’s arrival in America, as planned. He and Carl Jung landed in New York on the German steamship
George Washington
and immersed themselves in the life of the city. It is rumored that Freud said to his young disciple as the ship entered New York Harbor, “If the Americans had any idea of the sexual underpinnings to the ideas we are bringing with us, we would not be permitted to disembark.”

It was to be the first and last visit to America by the famous Viennese doctor, who would claim later that he had hated his time there. But it was to be the first of many American visits for the younger Dr. Jung, and many Americans traveled to Zurich over the years to seek his counsel.

At the time of the visit of the two European psychologists, William James was ill and limited in his mobility, but he attended the Clark University lectures with enthusiasm, listening with especial attentiveness to Freud’s carefully chosen words and responding encouragingly. By 1909, William James was well established as the most prominent of American pioneers in psychology, the one at the conference everyone had traveled to see, the one whom everyone wanted to impress. His few conversations with Freud were brief and weighty, but those with Jung were more animated, and it was easy to see from the tall, young Swiss doctor’s face that he took the attention as a deeply affecting compliment.

After two days at the Worcester conference, his diminished energies spent, James was ready to return home. Sigmund Freud accompanied him
on his walk to the railroad station, and on the way James was stopped suddenly with debilitating chest pains and handed his companion the bag he was carrying, asking Freud to go ahead without him, offering that he would catch up as soon as the attack of angina passed. Freud commented later on the remarkably unruffled manner in which the older man handled the serious situation. “It is my hope that I can handle my own end time, when it comes, with the same mature dispatch.”

From the start Eleanor knew she was going to be reintroduced to Sigmund Freud, whom she had met in Vienna ten years before, and introduced for the first time to the young Swiss physician, who was by coincidence exactly her age. She was greatly looking forward to the opportunity. It was clear to her even before it occurred that the first meeting would be enjoyable, but what was not clear from the beginning was that there was to be an immediate and vibrant attraction between these two magnetic personalities.

At that time, Carl Jung found himself strongly affiliated with the brilliant Dr. Freud, so much so that few observers knew where Dr. Freud ended and Dr. Jung began, the father-and-son analogy obvious to everyone who saw the two together or knew of their correspondence. Even though the younger man had already developed for himself a strong reputation in Zurich, Jung had fallen under the sway of Freud and his Vienna movement, and Freud had chosen him to head the newly formed International Psychoanalytic Association, the vehicle by which Freud expected the study of the unconscious to spread, precisely according to his directions.

Nineteen years apart in age, Jung and Freud had met in 1906, when the younger man sent Freud his book about word associations. Their first conversation, one that according to legend had lasted over fifteen hours, proved a sign of an intense bond. For a period of six years, Freud considered the immensely talented and energetic Jung his heir apparent, and the two of them shared a strong belief in the power of the unconscious mind and its effect on everyday life.

From the beginning of their relationship, it was clear to everyone in the movement that Freud was the patriarch and Jung was to be his disciple, a perception the younger man tolerated willingly but at which he quite obviously chafed a bit. And as close as the two German-speaking doctors were there were always signs of tension, including a number of
times when Freud actually accused Jung of wanting him dead and out of the way, citing the ancient Greek myths in which sons killed their fathers.

From the first moment of their arrival in America, Jung was in no way overshadowed, at least in Eleanor’s mind, by the older Freud. On his own Jung was tall and lean and energetic, and he took her hand and held it for just a moment longer than customary, looking straight into her eyes with an intensity of focus that would bind them for the next fifty years.

During the conference, she had stood as much as she could in the background, asking Dr. Hall to keep her significant role anonymous. It was not until the group had moved to Putnam Camp, Eleanor’s family retreat in the Adirondacks, that she came forward.

In the days following the conference, at the invitation of Eleanor’s older cousin James Jackson Putnam, a Harvard colleague of William James, the eminent group had taken up a few days’ residence in the guesthouses at the family camp, which Eleanor knew well and where she had been an eager participant during the summers of her childhood and adolescence.

The two visitors traveled by train and stayed in a hotel on Lake Placid the night before, then were transported by horse-drawn carriage along the remote road to Keene Valley and the camp. Quite according to character Dr. Freud was reserved about the whole experience, and Jung was exuberant.

“To get to the remote family camp,” Putnam had warned, “you will be subjected to a long carriage ride from the ramshackle hotel at Lake Placid through splendid Adirondack wilderness. I think you will find the experience an exhilarating one.”

And those who knew the two visitors well could have predicted their separate reactions. It was not difficult to call up the image of diminutive, soberly outfitted, fifty-three-year-old Sigmund Freud rattling along in a two-horse buggy over a pitted dirt road into the heart of the American wilderness, fretting about whether he’d brought the right walking shoes or wondering about how he would manage his rustic toiletries. Freud, who was temperamental and predisposed to dislike things American, would have cast a skeptical eye on the surroundings, unfit, it would seem, for the work ahead. Jung, on the other hand, famously emotive and expansive, would most likely have been awed.