16. Written Out
16
WRITTEN OUT
With the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in May 1883, it became fairly easy for those who worked in busy New York City to commute to the more suburban city of Brooklyn. Many people bought or built homes across the East River, among them George Coles Stebbins and his wife and son, who moved from Chicago. Around the same time, Ira Sankey brought his wife and sons from Chicago. Fanny now had an opportunity to know both families more intimately. The gentle, quiet Stebbins became one of her “most devoted and precious friends.”
Fanny was frequently a guest at the Stebbinses’ home, but more often the two met at the Sankeys’ home. The high-strung Sankey was similar in temperament to Fanny. For the next decade and a half, she was a regular guest in the Sankeys’ spacious parlor. Next to Moody, she may have been Sankey’s closest friend.
She and Sankey began to write more hymns together, many of them at the Sankeys’ reed organ. Sankey set her poems to his simple but plaintively melodious airs. He and Phoebe Knapp probably were her closest friends at this time.
In 1883 or 1884, Fanny moved uptown to First Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street. Now too far away to attend the John Street Methodist Church, she began to frequent and eventually joined the Cornell Memorial Church on Seventy-sixth Street. It was the first church she ever officially had joined. Perhaps she felt she was at an age when it was wise to be affiliated with a congregation, if for no other reason than to be assured of having a clergyman to conduct her burial service!
Whether she was still with Van at this time is in question. It is certain he no longer figured prominently in her life. As of 1882, the couple was still together, but because of different interests and circles of friends, perhaps compounded by a waning of physical passion with the advancing years, the two blind musicians were growing apart. There apparently was no overt unhappiness between them, but they were less often in each other’s company. They still loved each other, according to Fanny, but gradually the relationship was downgraded, by mutual consent, from that of husband and wife to one of simply good friends. There was no hint of infidelity, only of seeking support and companionship elsewhere.
Besides Ira Sankey and Phoebe Knapp, Hugh and Louise Main were good friends of Fanny. On March 24, 1884, they held the first of the annual Fanny Crosby birthday parties that were to become a yearly tradition at the offices of Biglow and Main on Ninth Street and Madison Avenue. After twenty years and some three thousand hymns, Hugh thought Fanny was more than due an annual tribute. A sumptuous table was spread at the office, prepared by the wives of members of the publishing firm. The highlight of the evening was the reading of birthday poems written in her honor by Main, Sankey, Kirkpatrick, Lowry, Doane, and others. Hugh’s comic poem so delighted her that it became the highlight of subsequent celebrations.
In October 1884 Moody came to New York to lead, along with Sankey, a “Christian convention” on evangelism. They held meetings at the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, a short distance from Sankey’s home. Moody was concerned about the personal evangelism of church members. If there were to be a meaningful revival, laymen had to do their part. So Moody suggested individual churches hold revivals at regular intervals.
Fanny continued to write hymns for Sankey and for Biglow and Main. She was writing perhaps her most successful hymns at this time for Kirkpatrick and Sweney. Among the many she contributed to Songs of Redeeming Love (1882) and Glad Hallelujahs (1887) were “Tell Me the Story of Jesus,” “Redeemed, O How I Love to Proclaim It,” and “We Are Never Weary of the Grand Old Song.” By far the most successful hymn she wrote for them was “He Hideth My Soul in the Cleft of the Rock,” for which Kirkie provided the music.
BY FAR THE MOST SUCCESSFUL HYMN SHE WROTE WAS “HE HIDETH MY SOUL IN THE CLEFT OF THE ROCK.”
Fanny continued her work in the missions, although she lost a good friend in Jerry McAuley. The Irishman had never been well, and his labors at the mission put his health under a terrible strain. By his mid-forties, he was suffering from tuberculosis. The end came unexpectedly in October 1884. Sam Hadley took his place as director of the Water Street Mission.
Fanny came to know and admire Sam, but she was better acquainted with his brother, Henry Harrison Hadley, known as the Colonel, who had a distinguished Civil War record. Alcoholism cost him his thriving law practice, and he began publishing a weekly paper in Upper Manhattan, for which Fanny wrote poems espousing temperance. Hadley thought he could learn to drink in moderation, but he was forced to conclude that for people of his type, a “moderation society” was useless. He stayed off the bottle for a while, but in trying to drink socially he had become addicted again and by the summer of 1886 was taking more than forty drinks a day.
Fanny tried her best to counsel the Colonel, who was a nominal Anglican but held “original ideas on religion.” He finally was converted after hearing the testimony of a recovered alcoholic at his brother’s mission. Hadley prayed to God not to remove his “appetite for drink” but to enable him to bear “this thirst” as long as he lived, in gratitude for Christ dying for him on the cross. He awoke the next morning singing. He no longer felt a desire for strong drink or tobacco.
Before he died sixteen years later, Hadley had founded sixty rescue missions and became an internationally known Christian lecturer.
Fanny was overjoyed in the summer and autumn of 1886 not only by the conversion of her editor friend but by the things she had seen happening in Northfield, Massachusetts. In 1879, D. L. Moody had held the first of the Northfield Christian Workers’ Conferences that would become an annual affair in his hometown. Moody liked to spend the summer in study and relaxation at Northfield, where he owned a fine home. He could not relax for long, however, and soon he was conducting public Bible readings in his dining room, inviting everyone in the area who was interested. There were so many people, they could not get into the house; the porch was crowded with people looking through the window.
Encouraged by the show of interest, Moody decided it might be a good idea for Christian workers to meet for a week each summer in that rustic paradise, to pray and study scripture and find greater strength to perform their service in Christian work. Three hundred people attended the first retreat in September 1879. Housed in the Northfield Seminary dormitory, they met for ten days, studying “the doctrine of the Holy Spirit” and praying for various Christian institutions.
Fanny had heard of the meetings since their inception, but it was not until 1886 that she attended. She stayed with the Sankeys at their summer home in Northfield. She was very pleased with the meetings, held in tents and in the seminary chapel. Moody wanted her to speak from time to time, but she always refused. Nor would she speak at Ocean Grove. Undoubtedly, she came to the retreats as a recipient rather than a dispenser of religious instruction. These were her vacations, her only respites from the constant round of talks and addresses she was obliged to give during the year.
She did compose a few hymns there, however. Vacation or not, she could not resist the promptings of the Holy Ghost.
That fall, her rest over, she returned from the “mountain air so sweet” to New York’s foul atmosphere. She was happily at work on her hymns, as usual—and on a sentimental operetta, Zanie, which would be produced the following year. Fanny had been engaged as librettist by Hart Pease Danks (1834–1903), a well-known composer of secular music, famous for his hit song “Silver Threads Among the Gold.”
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Fanny was not opposed to the theater. Moody and Sankey would never attend, but Fanny felt that as long as the content was wholesome and edifying, there was nothing wrong with a play or opera or popular music. The year after Zanie, she collaborated with Howard Doane in writing a totally secular Christmas cantata titled “Santa Claus.” An introduction explained that “this cantata has a religious sentiment pervading it, intending to illustrate the triumph of Right over Wrong.”
UNLIKE MANY OF HER CONTEMPORARIES, FANNY WAS NOT OPPOSED TO THE THEATER.
Fanny was very concerned with her family. Her sister, Carrie, in Bridgeport was again a widow; her husband, Lee Rider, an epileptic, had died in December 1883 at thirty-six. Carrie worked out her grief by providing a home for her aged mother, who still lived with her.
Fanny now was more concerned with Jule and Byron. Byron’s health was failing. Despite a weakening heart, in the spring of 1887, he took a job in New Haven, Connecticut, and forced himself to commute about fifty miles each day on the train. It proved to be too much. In the fall he had to give it up; he died in December at age fifty.
Fanny felt the loss of her brothers-in-law keenly, for she was very fond of them both.
Within a month of Byron’s death, she lost her one surviving aunt, Polly Decker, to a heart attack at seventy. Polly was just two years Fanny’s senior and had been more of a sister than an aunt during their childhood. Until she was five, Fanny had been Polly’s constant playmate. One of the last links to her childhood was broken forever. From those long-vanished days in Gayville, only one figure remained: “Mother Dear,” still hale and hearty at eightyeight.
In March 1889, Grover Cleveland completed his term as president of the United States and moved to a home on Madison Avenue in New York. Soon afterward, he invited Fanny to come see him. Thus, after an interval of thirty-five years, a friendship begun at the New York Institution for the Blind was renewed. At their reunion, she was received kindly by her old friend, grown bald and jowly, and by his beautiful young wife, Frankie. Cleveland insisted they regularly keep in touch.
In 1889, Fanny contributed forty hymns to Lowry and Doane’s Bright Array, but none achieved any degree of popularity. She was now almost totally written out. Everything she produced was probably the fifth or sixth paraphrase of something she had written years before. The quality of her hymns was deteriorating. But Biglow and Main wanted more and more hymns, and Fanny supplied them. They even insisted she write paraphrases of popular hymns by other authors, such as “Wonderful Words of Life” (Bliss) and “Showers of Blessing” (Whittle). But her versions were quickly forgotten.
Fanny wrote so many hymns, most of them rapidly and mechanically, that she often could not remember what she had written. She sometimes could not even recognize her own hymns when they were sung.
She would write perhaps no more than a half-dozen good hymns in the next quartercentury, but her fame continued to grow immensely because of her past achievements and her reputation as a preacher and lecturer. Her most effective contributions in the future would be from the pulpit or lectern, but she was always known as “the hymn writer” and “the queen of gospel song.”
HER MOST EFFECTIVE CONTRIBUTIONS IN THE FUTURE WOULD BE FROM THE PULPIT OR LECTERN.