8. The Lyricist
8
THE LYRICIST
In the early 1850s, the Institution was visited by such celebrities as the English poet Martin Farquhar Tupper; the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind; and Ole Bornemann Bull, the Norwegian violinist. When the famed soprano gave a concert of operatic arias, Swedish folk songs, and American patriotic airs, Fanny “could imagine that I was in heaven and hearing an angel sing.” Fanny got to meet the blond, blue-eyed Lind personally at—of all unlikely places—a wake!
Fanny went to Bridgeport every summer and often brought friends with her. Mercy and the children, now living outside the city limits in the “Fairfield Woods,” were enchanted by the visitors from the Great City. In manner, speech, and dress they seemed so very different from the rustic inhabitants of that rural community. Years later Fanny’s older half-sister Julie would recall the fascination with which, as a tiny girl, she first sniffed the perfume Fanny brought on her visits.
Even though Mercy was a stern disciplinarian, she was also inquisitive and open-minded and never condemned her daughter for her perfume and jewelry. Mercy took an interest in the culture of the city and welcomed her daughter’s guests, whether students or professors, eagerly following their conversation. She delighted them with her Puritan customs, New England cooking, and picturesque Yankee twang.
Jule and Carrie insisted that “every poem that I composed since I saw them before” be “duly recited and subjected to their criticism.” Fortunately, these junior literary critics were unabashed admirers of their sister’s work. Little Jule aspired to be a poet herself and imagined she could achieve her goal by creeping unobserved into her big sister’s room at night, when Fanny was composing poetry, and copying exactly her physical gestures and position.
In the fall of 1853, a young man named William Cleveland was appointed head of the Institution’s literary department. Shortly thereafter, he arranged the hiring of his sixteen-year-old brother, who was to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography to the younger children and serve as a clerk in the office of the new superintendent, T. Colden Cooper. The boy’s name was Grover.
Shortly after the Clevelands arrived, William consulted Fanny “in regard to the boy.” Fanny, now the “preceptress,” or dean of students, was recognized as the best-loved teacher on the faculty, a woman to whom both teachers and students went in times of difficulty. The Clevelands’ father had died recently, William told her. “Grover has taken our father’s death very much to heart, and I wish you would go into the office…and talk to him once in a while.” Of course, Fanny agreed to do so.
The boy was quite mature for his age and, though very thin, was almost six feet tall and wore “a very respectable goatee.” Young Cleveland was quiet and introverted. But Fanny was soon able to win his confidence, and he entered into a deep friendship with the older woman. Motherlike, Fanny took the young teacher under wing. She frequently warned him, when he seemed overly absorbed in bookish pursuits, not to “study too much and injure yourself.”
Grover read to Fanny from his favorite poets, Lord Byron and Thomas Moore. He volunteered to copy down the poems she dictated. This collaboration on the job irritated Superintendent Cooper, and he began to give them a difficult time. In her writings, Fanny never referred to Cooper by name, but simply as a “cruel incompetent.” She felt Cleveland’s copying poems for her violated no rule.
On two occasions, Cooper stormed into Grover’s office while the youth was copying poems dictated by Fanny. “Miss Crosby!” he snapped. “When you want Mr. Cleveland to copy a piece for you, I will thank you to ask me. My clerks have other work to do than copy poetry!” When she repeated the “offense,” he forbade Fanny to even speak to Cleveland again without his permission.
Fanny seethed in silence. Her young colleague stepped in to give a few words of advice. “Now, Fanny Crosby, how long do you intend to allow that man to harrow up your feelings like that?” he asked soothingly.
“But what can I do to stop it?”
“By giving as good as he sent it!” said Cleveland. “Give him a few paragraphs of plain prose that he will not very soon forget.”
“But Grover, I’ve never been saucy in my life,” she protested.
“But it is not impudent to take your own part, and you never will be taught independence and self-reliance any younger,” said the youth, lecturing the middle-aged teacher and dean as if she were his daughter.
To be lectured like a child by a boy half her age might have been nearly as offensive to her as Cooper’s insolence, but she accepted Grover’s counsel. The next day she was dictating to Grover when Cooper again flew into the office, this time exploding with curses, insults, and threats. Fanny turned and said icily, “I want you to understand that I am second to no one in this Institution except yourself, and I have borne with your insolence so long that I will do so no longer. If it is repeated, I will report you to the managers.”
Cooper slunk from the office and gave her no more trouble.
The Clevelands hated the Institution. They found the building hideously ugly and the life there depressing. During Cooper’s regime, the Institution became overcrowded, growing from about 60 students in 1850 to 116 three years later. The children were treated more as inmates than pupils. Cooper instituted severe punishments for minor offenses, whippings for major ones. The Cleveland brothers resigned in late 1854.
THE CHILDREN WERE TREATED MORE AS INMATES THAN PUPILS.
About the same time she met Grover Cleveland, Fanny came to work with a man who, though less important to American history, was to be far more important to her own future. She had known George Frederick Root for ten years. An American born the same year as she, he had studied in Europe and, on his return, worked diligently—as Lowell Mason had done—to introduce European-style music to America. He went so far (as did many musicians and artists of the day) as to Europeanize his name to George Friedrich Wurzel. Like many cultured people of the day, he considered American music crude and employed elements of the music of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and others to write suave and sophisticated popular songs.
Root had given music lessons at the Institution in the 1840s, but it wasn’t until the next decade that Fanny came to know him as a person. One day in 1851, Root was playing the piano, and Fanny was listening. The poet was deeply moved by the strains of an original composition, which sounded like the music of some European master. “Oh, why don’t you publish that, Mr. Root?” she asked.
Root, a small, bearded man, looked at her with his piercing, birdlike eyes and said, “Why, I have no words for it.”
“Oh, I can think of words. Your melody says:
‘O come to the greenwood, where nature is smiling,
Come to the greenwood, so lovely and gay,
There will soft music, thy spirit beguiling,
Tenderly carol thy sadness away.’ ”
Root was enthusiastic. “I can use you!” he said. “I need someone to supply words to the songs that I write. Would you be willing to do that?”
Fanny was too busy to work with him until the next summer, when she was offering courses at the Normal Academy of Music at North Reading, Massachusetts. Root, along with Lowell Mason, was a director, and it was here that Fanny began to supply words for his tunes.
Fanny wrote several songs that first summer. Root supplied all the music, Fanny all the words. At least two pieces became fairly popular: “Fare Thee Well, Kitty Dear” and “The Hazel Dell”—trite, tearfully sentimental songs of the type that appealed so much to listeners of that era. Root was pleased, recognizing Fanny as “a lady…who had a great gift for rhyming, and better still…a delicate and poetic imagination.”
That autumn he put her to work on an absurd composition called “The Flower Queen,” which Fanny later called “the first American cantata.” Root, who already had the preposterous plot in mind, would tell her what he wanted certain characters to say, “and the next day the poem would be ready.”
In fact, she sometimes had two or three poems ready. Root generally “hummed enough of the melody to give her an idea of the metre and rhythmic swing wanted, and sometimes played to her the entire music of a number” before she undertook the writing. He rarely saw fit to modify her poems and had only to choose between the alternate versions she had written. Root then “thought out the music” in its final form while commuting to classes.
“The Flower Queen” became popular all over the East Coast. The next summer, the two tried a similar composition, “The Pilgrim Fathers”—this time with Lowell Mason collaborating with Root in writing the melody to Fanny’s poems. Later, Fanny collaborated with Root and William B. Bradbury in turning out another cantata.
“THE FLOWER QUEEN” BECAME POPULAR ALL OVER THE EAST COAST.
During the summer of 1855, Fanny once again collaborated with Root in writing songs. Several became hits, including the slave song “They Have Sold Me Down the River,” the morbid “Proud World, Goodbye,” “Birth of the North,” and “O, How Glad to Get Home.” Three songs they wrote that year became especially popular: “The Honeysuckle Glen,” about the death of a beautiful maiden; “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” which became more popular than anything Fanny had written up to that time; and “There’s Music in the Air,” which was sung in schools and colleges well into the twentieth century.
Nobody knew Fanny Crosby was the lyricist for these songs, which appeared solely under Root’s byline. The royalty on “Rosalie” amounted to three thousand dollars, but Fanny received only a dollar or two! Root bought the poems from Fanny, published them himself, and reaped the benefits of their popularity alone. He considered that he had no further obligation to Fanny after paying the standard fee publishing companies normally paid their poets.
While writing hit songs for Root, Fanny became reacquainted with a man who was to prove even more important in her life: her future husband. “Some people,” she commented later, “seem to forget that blind girls have just as great a faculty for loving and do love just as much and just as truly as those who have their sight.”
At thirty-five, Fanny “had a heart that was hungry for love,” but she was still a spinster. Her increasing output of poems on disappointed love perhaps betrayed her frustration. However, in 1855, the Institution acquired a new teacher, Alexander Van Alstine, whom Fanny had met as a boy years earlier during a tour at Oswego, New York. “Van” studied for a few years at the Institution and became a brilliant pupil; in 1848, he became the first pupil from the Institution to enroll at a regular college. His chosen vocation was music; he also mastered Greek, Latin, philosophy, and theology. By the early 1850s, he had a teaching certificate and was giving music lessons in the Albion, New York, public schools. In 1855, he returned to the Institution as a music instructor.
At first, Fan and Van had merely a platonic relationship, based on their mutual love of music and poetry. Van became deeply interested in Fanny’s poetry, and she became interested in his music. In her words, “Thus, we soon grew to be very much concerned for each other.”
VAN BECAME DEEPLY INTERESTED IN FANNY’S POETRY, AND SHE BECAME INTERESTED IN HIS MUSIC.
In the fall of 1857, Van left the Institution and began to give private music lessons in Maspeth, Long Island, in what is now the borough of Queens. Fanny was prepared to follow him. The “cruel incompetence” of Colden Cooper had made the Institution, once her “happy home,” into a dreary place. Children were mistreated, teachers were underpaid, the building was ice cold in winter, and the meals grew increasingly bad. Devoted teachers like Van and Fanny felt they no longer could function well under Cooper’s Spartan regime.
Fanny terminated her long relationship with the Institution March 2, 1858, and headed toward Long Island, marriage, and an independent life. They were married in a private ceremony March 5 in the little town of Maspeth. Van was twenty-seven, Fanny thirty-eight.
Her existence was changed altogether. She was no longer the center of attention, as she had been at the Institution, visited and feted by dignitaries. She no longer lived near the nation’s greatest cultural center, famed as “the Blind Poetess.” She was now a housewife, married to a struggling music teacher, living in rented rooms in a country town where few of the farmers, merchants, and laborers realized their blind, dwarflike neighbor was a nationally known poet.
Yet this life pleased her, for she never liked publicity and the attendant crowds. For the first time in two decades, she was back where she loved to be, in the country, and she felt she was living to benefit not so much the general public but her husband. In the spring of 1858, Fanny seemed to be on the threshold of a dream come true.
About her married life we know almost nothing. Precious little is known of her husband. We do not even know how his name was properly spelled; records show it as “Van Alstine” and “Van Alsteine,” while in later life Fanny always spelled her married name (which she used only on legal documents) “Van Alstyne.” In one of her autobiographies, Fanny says his father, an engineer, was “from the banks of the Rhine” and emigrated to the States as a young man. His mother was born in England. Van is said to have lost his sight in early childhood as a result of sickness. The two pictures we have of him indicate a handsome man, slender, with a finely chiseled Teutonic face, clean-shaven (unlike most men of his generation).
Van was one of New York’s finest organ virtuosos. He also was proficient at piano, cornet, and other instruments. When he was at the keyboard, his features were said to be transformed into a look of unutterable delight. He was jovial and easy-going, apparently well liked. His mission in life was to make his beloved European classical masters available to the common people, and he concentrated on providing music lessons to poor children at low cost. To support Fanny and himself, he served as paid organist in various area churches.
In the late spring and early summer of 1858, Fanny was busy compiling a third volume of poetry, A Wreath of Columbia’s Flow- ers. While there are many excellent poems in the collection, others are trite. Fanny included three short stories. There were poems on various subjects, ranging from the Metropolitan Police Force to unrequited love to the death of Daniel Webster. A Wreath of Columbia’s Flowers was the least successful of her volumes of verse.
Meanwhile, there were changes in her family circle. Her uncle Joseph, with his wife and children, Frank and Ida, had gone to Savannah, Georgia, to open a regional branch of Crosby and May Saddle Goods. There he contracted tuberculosis and died May 2. The same year, Fanny’s sister Jule married Byron Athington of Bridgeport. Jule was no longer the mischievous little sprite who disturbed her sister’s attempt to write verse, but a plump, dark-haired young woman, short but still a head taller than her older sister. Mercy continued to live at Fairfield Woods with fourteenyear-old Carrie.
About 1859, Fanny became a mother, but the child died in infancy. This was perhaps the greatest misfortune of Fanny’s life. She almost never spoke of it. We do not know whether the baby was a girl or boy or the cause of death.
ABOUT 1859, FANNY BECAME A MOTHER, BUT THE CHILD DIED IN INFANCY.
After this tragedy, Fanny’s dream of a quiet, secluded life on rural Long Island seemed to have been exploded. She gradually recovered, but she longed to return to familiar surroundings. What was once a rustic paradise had become an inferno, and she yearned to escape the scenes of her suffering. So she and Van returned to Manhattan about 1860 and took a room a few blocks from the Institution.
The New York City to which they returned was a city engulfed in the zeal of religious revival.