The Two Sisters: A Nonfiction Story (Part 2 of 3)

About the time Mr. Henry Bruton passed away, or not too long afterwards, Martha was telling her stories to the mountain children in the neighborhood who used to steal out of their hills and shacks on Sunday morning to hear her. 


The Anglo-Saxon race may have made its mark in history, but it has never been a stranger to hardscrabble poverty either. The people that James Agee and Walker Evans wrote about in their photographic text, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, -- those Gudgers, Gumps, and Googes  -- these were the same people Martha Berry  told her stories to.  The difference was that  Martha Berry believed in  noblesse oblige and James Agee and Walker Evans were sentimentalists.  Martha Berry  stood behind the Gudgers, pushing them into the modern world, whereas James Agee stood in front of them, marveling at how little of the distance they had come and what a  transcendent mystery poverty was. 


The Berry School grew from these intervals of Sunday storytelling  to one building,  then another and another and another.  Miss Berry, like her father before her, was not the least bit averse to going North to beg for money.  Henry Ford,  by then famous in the field of automobile manufacture, contributed funds for many beautiful buildings. But when Mr. Ford wanted to open an automobile manufacturing plant on the Berry campus, he found that not even his riches could sway Miss Berry on this point.   She was horrified at the idea of her students doing the rote  work of the assembly line, and she let him know it.  On another occasion, it is said that once when Miss Berry and Mr. Ford were driving back to the campus one afternoon,  Martha asked to be put outside the gate rather than be driven to the campus. “Why,” asked the genial Mr. Ford, curious at this latest turn of Martha’s whimsy.  “Because people will think you’ve given me money,” she snapped, “and you haven’t.” 


Occasionally the Berry School philosophy of educating the whole person - head, hands, and heart - would be talked about in some newspaper or journal, commended, and as soon forgotten. This was because (though people wouldn’t put it like this) it was “a school for the poor.” Rich people do not need  having their hands trained or their hearts developed. But poor students would pay for their education by working in agriculture or carpentry or home economics or crafts or engineering. The idea was not only to gain a liberal education but to become skilled as well. 1 


In the entry under Martha Berry for the Dictionary of Georgia Biography, it is estimated that Miss Berry raised over twenty-five million dollars for her school: “Her continuous fund-raising ventures and growing reputation as a reformer kept her near the stage of the politically and socially prominent from the Progressive era to the New Deal era,” it said. Teddy Roosevelt, visiting the school in 1911, declared it “the greatest practical work that has been done for American citizenship in this decade.” 


Still, all was not harmonious in this educational paradise. In August, 1933, the students enrolled in the Berry High School for Boys went on strike, ostensibly over the low wages they were being paid for their farm work. A reporter from The New Republic, Hamilton Basso, visited the school and later wrote “About the Berry Schools: An Open Letter to Miss Martha Berry,” (April 4, 1934). It criticized the school for excessive supervision of the students, inadequate social life, not allowing the older boys to have a smoke openly now and then, and for treating the students like wards of charity. “These mountain boys and girls, also, have more pride than one is likely to imagine. They are not ‘poor whites’ in any sense of the word... The way they think about themselves is that instead of working for a living they are working for an education. The idea of accepting charity is intolerable to them. It seems to me, Miss Berry, that it was a combination of little things like these, rather than a single big thing like a wage cut, which motivated the Berry strike.” 


Mr. Basso acknowledged that he was received courteously by Miss Berry and the school, but then accused her of “shadowing” him with a detective. He invited her response to this letter, but none was forthcoming. The editors of The New Republic said that, “if any reply or comment is received, it will be published at the earliest possible moment.” 


None ever was, apparently. No word was forthcoming from the calm citadel of Berry. The New Republic, back in those days, was pretty polite, and it wouldn’t have wanted to hound Miss Berry too far into the wilderness of self-justification. Even so, Miss Berry was not about to dignify the journalist by replying to his challenge. Neither of Captain Berry’s two eldest daughters was known to flinch at the prospect of opposition or let themselves be intimated by mere journalists or plutocrats.  


But Martha Berry was not without her critics.  One comment from my brother, who was not a liberal of the Hamilton-Basso-New Republic stripe, but a conservative after the darkest, deepest forgotten heart of the yearning world, almost shocked me. “One of the least attractive features of the twentieth century,” he said, “is using other people’s needs to build up one’s own empire.” Those poor children were convenient for Martha Berry’s good - all the better because  it was not for herself,  or for her own sake, but for their sake and their good. Hers became the prototypical liberal way, that of achieving self-fulfillment and moral superiority at the same time. This nearly drove my brother to despair.  But he did later amend his judgment to acknowledge that what Martha Berry achieved as an individual was later taken over by agencies of the government. 


As a character, the regal, selfish Jennie appealed to him more. Or maybe the difference was that Martha had crossed the threshold into history and had become, at least in a minor way, a historical character, whereas Jennie was just a character.  Thus people outside the family might have heard of Martha, whereas only insiders knew about Jennie.  We were free to like or to detest Jennie. But Martha demanded at least a semblance of obeisance, family loyalty, closed ranks.

   
And on my mental horizon, too, it was Aunt Jennie, the Princess Ruspoli, who came to assume legendary proportions, due no doubt to my mother’s frequent association with her.  It was the imperial Jennie rather than the historical Martha who left a mark upon my mother - the willful and imperial aunt who bequeathed to my mother such a struggle between notions of sacrifice and selfishness. And yet, in reflecting upon this dilemma as it helped to shape my mother’s philosophy of life, I wonder if the legend of Jennie’s selfishness was quite fair. Jennie must have been difficult to live with, but her letters and writings show a vigorous mind, and one deeply involved with questions of duty and care to others. Her notions on culture and education were no doubt strict, but from the perspective of American educational philosophy today (and it is generous to use the term “philosophy”) even snobbery begins to reveal its redeeming features. It begins to seem like the price that has to be paid for human development beyond that of the savage.   


But all of that, my brother and I agreed, was another liberal lie. Liberals pretended to decry snobbery and ‘elitism.’ But what they really stopped caring about was putting any meaningful energy into shaping  human character.  Liberalism had turned sloth into a virtue.


After Henry Bruton died, Jennie moved to Washington, D.C., where she began to cultivate ties in diplomatic circles. As my Uncle Tom Berry put it, “She was up there speaking all these different languages with all these different foreigners.” In these circumstances she met the young Prince Enrico Ruspoli from Rome, Italy, who was attached as a consul in the diplomatic corps.  Family legend has it that he followed Jennie back to that other Rome, in Georgia, where he duly proposed. He was twenty-three, she was forty: though some have disputed this great gap in their ages. 


Such marriages in diplomatic circles were not uncommon. In The Social Side of Diplomatic Life, Maude Parker Child writes of a conversation with a diplomat on the subject of the difference between European and American ideas of marriage. It could have been a page, perhaps it was the very page, from the Berry-Ruspoli chronicle: ​

“The Europeans marry for a variety of reasons [he said] ... they may, from what seems to them the highest motives, make what we would call a mercenary marriage. For instance, a young foreigner I am very fond of, who is of a great family over [there], married a very rich American widow the other day -- a woman much older than himself. It was no secret that he was madly in love with a young girl and that he sacrificed himself in this marriage. But neither he nor the girl had any money, and his family were in actual need.” ​

Whether or not the actual personages in this drama are those of this narrative can only be guessed. But in any case the marriage was a quid pro quo: Jennie got the title, Ruspoli the money, or at least the  use of it. 

​Curiously, in this same book by Child there is a reference to a Ruspoli, though the name given is Eugenio (!), not Enrico. I do not know if the same prince is meant: ​

“We waited for some time for young Prince Eugenio Ruspoli to turn up, but we had arrived at coffee before he dashed in, went down on both knees in front of his hostess and kissed her hands in apology.  The other diners in the Grand Hotel were mildly amused; he remained with his tall figure in this abject position while he explained that he had entirely forgotten his promise to dine until the clock had struck eleven...” ​

There is little further to be learned of Prince Ruspoli. He too passed away after seven years of marriage to the formidable Jennie.  Each of Jennie’s two husbands had a seven-year run; after this magic number of years the lease on affection or durability was cancelled.


Ruspoli’s death precipitated an international scandal when his relatives brought suit to recover his property and Jennie contested it. According to an article in The New York Times on March 28, 1910, when Jennie returned to the United States after the death of Ruspoli - “The dispute over her husband’s will ended in her being dispossessed from the ancestral estate near Rome, which she said she had bought from him, and in her accusing her husband’s relatives of seeking to cause her death.”


On this voyage home the Principessa Ruspoli was accompanied by her brother, Thomas Berry (my mother’s father.)  At this time it was not known whether she would ever return to live in Europe. The Times noted that on this voyage, “The Princess and Mr. Berry occupied suites de luxe on the steamship, took all their meals in their rooms and did not mingle with the other passengers, few of whom had any inkling of the story of the princess. There was much mystified gossip over her actions.” 


The ancestral property referred to in the Times article was the castle in Nemi,  a village about twenty miles south of Rome. The Castle had changed hands many times since its original bestowal on Cistercian monks in 1153. In the twelfth century it belonged to the Orsini family and it was also this same family that owned it, many centuries later and after many intervening changes in ownership, when it was purchased by Signor Ruspoli. 


From the terrace of the Castle, you can see the lake of Nemi, far below, a perfect little blue ovoid. The lake is a volcanic crater, called the “Mirror of Diana.” The sparkling blue water, the little round lake, the sloping hills covered with strawberry bushes - it is a beauty of heartbreak, of otherworldly envy.   Lord Byron talks of a sinister quality of the lake and its environs in Childe Harold where he says – 
​​

“The oval mirror of thy glassy lake; 
And calm as cherished hate, its surface wears 
A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake, 
All coil’d into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.  ​

“As calm as cherished hate”? “A deep cold settled aspect”? A sleeping snake coiled round itself? These are strong metaphors for a piece of real estate that used to be one of the pleasure grounds of the Roman emperors.


It was in the wood near the Lake of Nemi that, in ancient times, a certain ritual was yearly enacted among the priesthood of the cult of Diana, goddess of the hunt and protectress of women. 


The description of this ritual, the slaying of the incumbent priest and the assumption to that office by the slayer, opens Sir James Frazer’s study of folklore, The Golden Bough. Frazer describes the precarious tenure of the King of the Wood in somber tones: ​

“The post... carried with it the title of the King of the Wood; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier or was visited by more evil dreams. For year in and year out, in summer and winter, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled sleep it was at the peril of his life... The dreamy blue of the Italian skies, the dappled shade of the summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun can have accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure... It is a sombre picture...now in twilight, now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs...” ​

I try to imagine that figure, the King of the Wood, slipping in and out of the woods beside the lake, alert and on edge to whatever went prowling in the dappled shade, that beckoned  from the other side of the water and twitched in the arboreal gloom.  A contender. Rival.  Newcomer.  Leaping.  Sword glittering.  Hoo hee. ​

Read Part 1 here. Part 3 is planned for next week.