IRVING BERLIN. (1888 – 1989). One of the most prodigious and famous American songwriters in history. Autograph inscription signed. (“Irving Berlin”). 1page. 8vo. (5 1/2 x 7 1/8 inches). [Bermuda], N.d. On Monarch of Bermuda stationery. Inscribed with “all good wishes” to Helen Bandre [?], possibly a fellow passenger on the Monarch of Bermuda.

With a life that spanned more than 100 years and a catalogue that boasted in excess of 1,000 songs, Irving Berlin epitomized Jerome Kern’s famous maxim, that “Irving Berlin has no place in American music – he is American music”. Berlin’s prodigious musical output included songs such as “Blue Skies”, “Easter Parade”, “God Bless America”, “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, “Steppin’ Out with My Baby”, “White Christmas”, and musicals including This Is the Army, Annie Get Your Gun, Yip Yip Yaphank, and Ziegfeld Follies.

The Monarch of Bermuda was one of two luxury liners, known as “the millionaires’ ships”, operated by the Furness Bermuda Line in the early part of the 20th century. Cruises aboard these elegant vessels ran from New York to Bermuda allowing four days on the island and several days aboard the ship in each direction. By the 1920s, the Furness Withy Steamship Company and the Bermuda Development Company had built a golf course and established an enclave for wealthy visitors in the area of Tucker’s Town in Bermuda’s St. George’s Parish. Both the Fricks and the Rockefellers had summer homes there and visitors included such celebrities as Harpo Marx, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth, and Irving Berlin. Both the Monarch of Bermuda and her sister ship, the Queen of Bermuda, were requisitioned for military use during World War II. The Monarch of Bermuda was scrapped in 1966.

Folded once horizontally while the ink was still wet, resulting in ink transfer to the bottom blank margin of the page and slight smudging of the inscription and signature. In very good condition.

Filename: BerlinIrving

Categories/Keywords: Music, Bermuda, Nautical

HENRY B. BROWN. (1816 – c.1869). American artist and United States Consul to Bermuda from 1856 to 1859. Document Signed. (“Henry B. Brown”). 1 page. Tall 4to. (7 7/8 x 12 1/2 inches). Hamilton, 28 December 1857.

Consulate of the United States of America

Bermuda

I, the undersigned, Consul of the United States for Bermuda, hereby certify that Col. Freeman Murray whose signature is affixed to the annexed Certificate of Probate, under the Colonial Seal, is Governor &c., of the Islands of Bermuda, and the proper officer for granting such Document. I further certify that Robert Kennedy is Colonial Secretary also affixed is genuine, and that said Certificate is worthy of full faith and credit. Given under my Hand and Seal of Office at Hamilton, Bermuda, this 28^th day of December, 1857

Henry B. Brown

U.S. Consul

Brown was a portraitist and engraver who traveled to California, Mexico and Central America drawing the local countryside as well as the native peoples. As part of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Commission, he also recorded the local languages, made maps and contributed to the 1854 book Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua. After three years as U.S. Consul to Bermuda his poor health forced him to resign from office.

Bermuda and the United States, its closest neighbor, have had a close relationship since the 17th century when Bermudians brought supplies to the decimated settlers of Virginia's Jamestown Colony. Relations between the British colony and former British colony were sometimes strained. In 1777, during the American Revolution, the U.S. invaded Bermuda, and well into the 19th century, American spies were deployed to Bermuda. Freeman Murray was colonial governor of Bermuda from 1854 – 1859 and 1860 – 1861. This document also mentions Colonial Secretary Robert Kennedy (1785 – 1864), a descendant of the Plantagenet royal family.

Penned on light blue paper to which the green paper seal of the U.S. Consulate in Bermuda and a ribbon is affixed. Bearing four small holes probably by which the certificate of probate (absent) was attached. Folded with light wear. In very good condition.

File name: BROWN, Henry B.12281857

Categories: Leaders, political

EUGENE O’NEILL. (1888-1953). Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American playwright.
Autograph letter signed. (“Eugene O’Neill”) Hamilton, Bermuda. 31 May [no year, but likely late 1920s]. 1 page, 4to. (8.5 × 11 inches). To Mr. Gatz, an aspiring playwright who sent O’Neill a script for his feedback.

Dear Mr. Gatz, I read your play a long time ago and meant to send the script back you then. Just now I have been looking over it again briefly. The one criticism that hits me at a glance, as it did when I read it, is that your dialogue is stilted and ‘written’ – that is, meant to be read and not to be heard. This is a serious fault. You’ve got to write by ear, the spoken word, in a play. There’s a great intangible difference in rythym [sic] and quality between written conversation and spoken. For example, the talks in even the finest novels – there are exceptions, of course – would sound absolutely artificial and unnatural if heard in the theatre. The theme of your play struck me as excellent, I remember, and the construction seemed good. And that ’s about all I can say. You must face the fact that there is a lot of work to be done on it if you ever hope to get it into theatrical (in the good sense) shape. All best wishes. I meant to write you from New York but didn’t get the chance.

Sincerely, Eugene O’Neill

O’Neill led a dissolute life from the time he left college until he made the decision to become a dramatist. From 1907, when he was suspended from Princeton, to 1913, O’Neill worked as a seaman, panhandled, drank, frequented prostitutes, and contracted malaria and tuberculosis. However, when he made the decision to focus on the theater, he found his true calling. In 1916, he joined the Provincetown Players, which staged many of his plays and launched his career. His output was prolific and included such masterpieces as The Iceman Cometh, Desire under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, Beyond the Horizon, A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He won four Pulitzer Prizes and the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature for his work. In the 1920s O’Neill lived in Bermuda with his second wife. At his home at Spithead in Warwick Parish, he worked on The Great God, Lazarus Laughed, and Strange Interlude.

EUGENE O’NEILL. (1888 – 1953). Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning American playwright. Autograph letter signed. (“Gene”) 1 page, Tall 4to. (13 x 8 1/2 inches). Bermuda, 3 April 1925. To his literary agent, Richard J. Madden, upon hearing that the Theatre Guild had dropped its option to produce his 1923 play The Fountain.

Dear Dick, I’ve marked down some changes in the Belasco contract which you’d better try out on him at any rate. Your cable about Guild – “Fountain” was not unexpected. I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry about tying up with Jones-Greene, not until I’ve seen Kenneth and had a talk with him, and after we’ve all had a chance to reread the play. I imagine I may want to do a lot of rewriting on it. And so much depends on the man for the part, perhaps for Walter Hampden and that Bobby, Kenneth & I might make some arrangement to cooperate with him on a production, if he should fancy the part that much. But all these notions are “in the air”. What I must do before deciding on anything definite is talk it all over with Kenneth & Bobby. They are coming down here soon, I believe. I’ve finished “The Great God Brown” and am having it typed. It is a “lulu”. I'm going to start another before very long and try and get it done before I see the States again. I’m the busy kid, what? All best! Gene

Critic and Academy Award-winning producer Kenneth MacGowan (1888 – 1963) and expressionist designer and “new stagecraft” pioneer Robert Edmond “Bobby” Jones (1887 – 1954) were close friends and collaborators with O’Neill. In 1923, the three men took the leadership of The Experimental Theatre, Inc., a reorganization of the Provincetown Players where O’Neill first got attention as a playwright. Jones did design work for O’Neill’s plays Desire Under the Elms, Anna Christie and The Great God Brown. Jones and MacGowan wrote several books together and both had lasting relationships with O’Neill.

In 1923, O’Neill completed The Fountain, a romance about a conquistador. However, he failed to find a production company interested in staging the work. Finally, in 1925, he produced it with MacGowan and Jones at the Greenwich Village Theater. The run lasted for a mere 28 performances. A scathing review in The New York Sun said, in part, ‘ “The Fountain,” as has been told here in the past, is no new venture – on the author’s part, at any rate. Mr. O’Neill wrote it all of a few years ago and sold it in turn to two other managerial organizations, both of which made wiser solutions of the bargain, forfeited their advances, and have no doubt freely added their blessings on the production as undertaken downtown by that triumvirate of which Mr. O’Neill is himself a member. And, if blessings avail, “The Fountain” needs a sea of them’, (Gilbert W. Gabriel, ‘De Leon in Search of His Spring’, New York Sun, 11 December 1925).

David Belasco (1853 – 1931) was a playwright, director and significant theatre impresario, perhaps best known for the plays Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West, which later became famous as Giacomo Puccini operas. ‘To most adherents of the Art Theatre movement, the name of David Belasco was anathema… Belasco’s imitation of surface appearances was slavish and dull, a trivial naturalism whose product was without truth or delight. It is a matter of some amusement, therefore, to visualize the moment when O’Neill and Jones, the chief young Turks of the anti-Belasco theatre, with hat and the script of Marco Millions [completed in 1925] in hand, approached the enemy to interest him in producing O’Neill’s new work. The proposal must have given even Belasco pause. As O’Neill wrote it, he told MacGowan, he let the sky be the limit and was putting “every fancy” …The producer was courteous, took an option on the play, and, it is said, offered to send Jones to China for two years to do research for the scenery. He dropped the option in April, 1926… It was not produced until 1928 when the Theatre Guild staged a much shortened version that O'Neill had prepared in 1927’, (Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Oxford University Press, 1972).

Walter Hamden (1879 – 1955) was the manager of Hamden’s Theatre from 1925 – 1931 as well as an actor especially known for his Shakespearean roles. Madden was a partner in the American Play Co. and represented O’Neill from 1918 until the playwright’s death. Despite declining to produce The Fountain, The Theatre Guild produced a total of seven Eugene O’Neill plays.

O’Neill believed that The Great God Brown, completed in Bermuda and mentioned in our letter, was his crowning achievement to date. His daughter, Oona, who would marry Charlie Chaplin at the age of 18 and be disowned by O’Neill because of it, was born in Bermuda on 14 May, only a few weeks after O’Neill wrote this letter.

Folded with some light creasing. Two small tears along the left edge affecting one word. Mounting traces on the verso. In very good condition.

Filename: ONeill4325

Categories: Bermuda, Literature, Performing Arts (Theatre)

KENNETH ROBERTS. (1885 – 1957). American author known for his depictions of New England. Postcard Signed. (‘Kenneth Roberts’). 1 page. Postcard (3.5 x 5.5 inches). [Hamilton, 1950]. [To H.S. Tvedt.] A postcard printed with Kenneth Roberts’ bookplate depicting a harbor and sailing ship in the background and in the foreground a globe, books, tennis rackets, pitcher and cups, musket and powder horn, bow and arrows. Underneath the image, Roberts has typed, ‘Many thanks and all good wishes’, underneath which he has signed his name.

Roberts was a contributor to the popular Saturday Evening Post as well as the author of such works as Why Europe Leaves Home, The Collector’s Whatnot, Antiquamania, The Shell Game, Arundel, Rabble in Arms, and the wildly popular Northwest Passage, later made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy.

However, Roberts is notable for more than just his many historical novels. ‘Roberts first became interested in dowsing – the controversial practice of finding underground water by means of a forked stick – sometime in the late 1930s when he was building his stone house on his Kennebunkport estate. He soon became a passionate advocate of dowsing, and with Henry Gross, a retired Maine game warden and expert dowser, traveled around the world proselytizing for the art of water divining and helping people locate water. By 1950 the two men were besieged with requests for Henry Gross’s dowsing services… Thus, in 1950 they formed “Water Unlimited.” …To ensure that his dowsing experiences were accurately recorded and preserved and “to prove to scientists that [dowsing] IS possible”, Roberts wrote three books: Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod (1951), The Seventh Sense (1953), and the posthumously published Water Unlimited (1957),’ (“ ‘At the nadir of discouragement’ The Story of Dartmouth’s Kenneth Roberts Collection”, Dartmouth College Library Bulletin, Bales).

Perhaps their biggest dowsing success occurred when Gross, in response to the 1949 drought in Bermuda, used his dowsing rod to locate four sources of water on a map of the island. Potable ground water had not previously been found in Bermuda, leaving residents at the mercy of the rains. In 1950, the year our postcard was written, Gross’ dowsing resulted in the drilling of four productive fresh-water wells. Despite criticism in the press and by the public at large in dowsing as a science, Roberts never lost faith in its potential.

A postal cancellation is partially visible on a portion of the bookplate image. On the verso, the postcard bears a 2-cent Bermuda sailing definitive postage stamp tied by a Hamilton, Bermuda, 18 January 1950 machine slogan cancel and addressed to Claremont, New Hampshire. With edge wear and one creased corner. In very good condition.

Filename: RobertsKenneth

Categories/Keywords: Literature, Bermuda

JAMES THURBER. (1894 – 1961). American writer and humorist best known for his cartoons in The New Yorker magazine. Typed letter signed. (“James Thurber”). The Ledgelets, Somerset Bridge, Bermuda. 1 June 1951. 1 page, 4to.(8½ × 11 inches). To poet and folklorist Addison Barker.

Dear Mr. Barker: I have taken too long to thank you for the book of poems, which are excellent and charming. I am especially fond of your poem about the design in the chaos of the magpie’s nest, and tried to work a reference to it into a piece I was working on when the book arrived, only to discover that, while it enhanced the paragraph, the prose didn't do justice to the verse. Poetry has to be quoted in full if it is not to lose its flavor and effect. Maybe that is why Pope wrote so many couplets. He must have known they could be easily and successfully quoted in any context, as they have been ever since he wrote them. Thanks again and all best wishes. Sincerely yours, James Thurber

After working at the Paris Embassy during World War I, Thurber returned to the U.S. and worked as a journalist for such publications as The Columbus Dispatch, New York Evening Post and, most famously, The New Yorker magazine. His colleague at The New Yorker, E.B. White, was the first to notice the genius and wit in Thurber’s unique cartoons, literally discovering them in a trash can and getting them published in the magazine. White and Thurber became frequent collaborators on such projects as Is Sex Necessary? or, Why You Feel The Way You Do.

Thurber’s creative output was vast and varied, including short stories, cartoons, plays, essays, poems, fables, and magazine articles. Among his most notable works are the short stories “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ and “The Catbird Seat”. Thurber visited Bermuda multiple times, including in 1950, when he wrote the fantasy The 13 Clocks.

Our letter discusses Barker’s book The Magpie’s Nest and the poem that gave the volume its title. The book was published by Wings Press in 1950. Thurber also mentions frequently quoted 18th-century English poet and satirist Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744).

With Thurber’s large, energetic signature in pencil. Folded and near fine. Accompanied by the original envelope addressed to Barker at Marshall College in Huntington, West Virginia and a black-and-white print of the 1939 photograph showing Thurber and his wife seated on wall at Felicity Hall in Somerset, Bermuda.

Filename: Thurber

Categories/Keywords: Art, Literature, Bermuda

WOODROW WILSON. (1856 – 1924). President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Typed letter signed as president elect. (“Woodrow Wilson”). 1 page. 4to. (8 x 9 3/4 inches). Bermuda, 30 November 1912. On his personal stationery. To Dr. William Hoyt, a cousin of his first wife, Ellen Axson Wilson whose mother was a member of the Hoyt family.

Your letter of November 10th has just come to us here, and I thank you most sincerely. It was very delightful to get it. We are all well, and hope to come back in fine shape.

Cordially and sincerely yours, Woodrow Wilson

The 1912 presidential election involved four different candidates. President Taft, the incumbent, was the Republican nominee. Former president Theodore Roosevelt, having lost the Republican nomination, formed the Progressive Party (nicknamed the Bull Moose Party) in order to challenge Taft and return to the White House. Labor rights activist Eugene V. Debs ran with support of the Socialist Party of America. The Democratic nominee was Woodrow Wilson, former president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey. The race was highly contentious and, famously, Roosevelt was shot on the campaign trail. However, with the Republican vote split between Roosevelt and Taft, Wilson was elected by a wide margin. The 1912 election was also notable for being the last time a third party candidate, in this case the Socialist candidate, came in second.

The election took place on 5 November, after which Wilson and his family took a Bermuda vacation lasting from 18 November to 13 December. He had visited Bermuda several times before, during which he played miniature golf with Mark Twain and, somewhat indiscreetly, formed a relationship with local society dame Mary Allen Hurlbert Peck. Wilson’s wife forgave his infidelity but his past relationship with Peck threatened to sully his reputation during the 1912 election. Ultimately, the allegations did not hurt him politically since few, including his rivals, could imagine this prim academic figure having an extra-marital affair. Even with evidence to the contrary (in the form of letters between Wilson and Peck) Roosevelt could not believe Wilson capable of the affair, commenting, “Nothing, no evidence could ever make the American people believe that a man like Woodrow Wilson, cast so perfectly as the apothecary’s clerk, could ever play Romeo”, (1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs: The election that changed the country, Chace).

Our cheerful and optimistic letter, written in the midst of his Bermuda holiday, is darkly signed. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope. Normal mailing folds and in very good condition.

Categories/Keywords: Leaders, Politicians, Bermuda

JOHN WOODALL(1897 – 1985). Signed Christmas card. (“His Excellency the Governor & Lady Woodall & Kate”). 1 page, Oblong 12mo. (6 x 4 inches). Government House, Bermuda, N.d. (between 1955 and 1959). With a gilt royal insignia on the cover and opening onto a two-sided card. On the left is the printed greeting, “With every good wish for Christmas and the New Year from … Government House Bermuda”. Underneath the printed message the card is signed in blue ink. On the right is a black-and-white image of the governor in full military dress saluting several officers standing on a pier.

Sir John Woodall was a commissioned officer in the Royal Artillery and earned recognition in both world wars. After World War II, he filled increasingly important positions at the War Office. In 1952, he was appointed General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland and, three years later, became Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Bermuda. His tenure as governor saw the 350th anniversary celebration of Bermuda’s founding, royal visits by Prince Philip and Princess Margaret, the opening of the U.S. Navy’s Naval Cold War listening post at in Southampton Parish, and the Bermuda meeting ofBritish Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and American President Dwight Eisenhower to repair strained Anglo-American relations in the wake of the Suez crisis.

Tied with a royal blue ribbon along the left side of the card. Minor age toning and near fine.

Filename: WoodallChristmasCard

Categories: Political, Leaders, Military, Bermuda