Transcription of Jane Goodrich for the show Island Authors #297
Dr. Lisa Belisle: My next guest is Jane Goodrich who is the author of The House at Lobster Cove, which is a novel about George Nixon Black, Jr., the owner of the now-demolished Kragsyde in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. Goodrich and her husband built a replica of Kragsyde on Swan’s Island. Nice to have you in today.
Jane Goodrich: Thank you. Nice to be here.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: I’m very impressed with all the effort that you have put, not only into the house, but in researching this novel. I mean, this was really a long time coming.
Jane Goodrich: Yes, it was. 20 years for the house and ten years of research on the novel, so they’re both similar tasks.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me why you first became interested in Kragsyde.
Jane Goodrich: Kragsyde is a well-known shingle-style house. It’s considered the masterpiece of the style. I saw it in a book when I was a child, and then later saw it years later when I was in college when I was beginning to think about wanting to build a house of my own. I went back to see the house, thinking it still existed, and found it was torn down. My husband and I, almost on a whim, said, “We should rebuild it. Someone should do things like this. Someone should take these old plans of houses that no longer exist and just rebuild them.” It was almost a whim, really. It’s odd to say, but it was. We thought we could do it, “We can do that,” and we could. We were able to, and so we did that.
Then in that process, of course, when you’re wandering around what, essentially, were someone else’s rooms in a house that belonged to someone else’s life in many ways…. It’s a completely livable house for modern day, but you begin to wonder, “Who was this? What went on here? Who lived here? Why is this room this way or that room? What was the taste of the person who lived here?” So I began to become interested in Mr. Black, and as I did some cursory research on him, found out how fascinating he was.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: His is a name that doesn’t immediately pop up in the history books, but there is something very fascinating about his interplay with the times in which he lived.
Jane Goodrich: Yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me a little bit about him.
Jane Goodrich: He’s not anyone that anyone knows about, which makes him all the more beguiling. He was a Maine resident. He was born in Maine, which I didn’t know when I bought land in Maine or when I moved here. I went to a small museum in Ellsworth, and I was shocked to find out that that was the home he had grown up in. I had no idea. That made him all the more interesting to me.
He was a person who was born in Maine whose family left Maine when he was young, and so he really was a Bostonian, actually. I’m sure he considers himself a resident of Boston or a Bostonian. He lived there most of his life, but he always kept his roots here in Maine. He always maintained the house in Ellsworth, the Woodlawn Museum it is today, as, I think, a memento of his past and of his family’s history in Maine. His family’s history in Maine goes back some generations and was influential in the growth of the state, particularly in the area in which he lived.
Once he was in Boston, he was a great philanthropist. Again, people in Boston don’t even know about him. I hope my book will introduce him to people in Boston to realize that he was a massive philanthropist at both the Museum of Fine Arts and a collector of antiques and antiquities, which he loved, animal charities, children charities, hospitals. Very modest man, but he had a great impact on philanthropy at the time. He was Boston’s largest taxpayer in 1890. No one knows his name.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Is that because he never had children?
Jane Goodrich: Some of it is that. Some of it that he was intentionally incredibly modest. He didn’t join clubs or groups of people, that’s largely why. I mean, he was just a quiet person. His personality was such that way. As I’ve always been told by the few people that remained, no one remains today, but the few people who remained 20 years ago who ever spoke with him said he was soft-spoken, modest. He wasn’t a very boastful or proud person.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: The Ellsworth of the time that you describe in the novel was pretty rough-and-tumble.
Jane Goodrich: Yes, it was. Ellsworth was a frontier. People can’t imagine that. In 1842, we hadn’t even settled the northern border of Maine with Canada when Mr. Black was born, when he was just born, so it really was a frontier town. It was on the edge of this vast forest that was really uninhabited in every way. It was difficult to live there. Farming, as nearly everyone knows, is not a prime thing in Maine. The land is difficult to farm. It’s rocky and not very productive, and so it was not an area that people settled in easily because you couldn’t live on the land that you…. The weather was rough.
Mr. Black’s grandfather was really an early person in understanding that the timber was an asset. He wouldn’t even try to farm the land. He thought we needed to cultivate the timber and sell it, and that’s how he became a very early timber tycoon, which coincided entirely with the need for timber in cities to the south. He became very wealthy by timber.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: You describe in the novel some friction that occurred when his grandfather married for a second time and a family split that took place. Is that something that happened in real life?
Jane Goodrich: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. The grandfather, whose name was John Black, who was the timber tycoon, had eight children and he was married for a long time to his first wife. She died and very shortly after, he remarried a second woman who was his wife’s niece. She was much younger than him, and not all the family was on board with that. Interestingly, it nearly split the family in two. There were eight of the children. Four of them were fine with it, four weren’t. That changed very much the dynamic of the family. It also changed the way in which the Woodlawn Museum became here for us, because the last wife was allowed to live there until she lived out her life, and she did live there alone. Had that not happened, had the house been broken up amongst the eight children, it probably wouldn’t be a museum in Maine today. We have her to thank for that.
Our Mr. Black, George Nixon Black, Jr., who I’ve written about, was very, very good friends with the second wife, so much so that she named him as the executor of her will. They remained on very good terms and, to some extent, he carried the flag for her for the rest of her life. He was supportive of her and not as friendly with the side of the family that didn’t support her. That happened. It’s classic. You don’t hear these great stories, but this happens in every family, no change from 100 years ago, 200 years ago. We all have the same family issues.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: He also dealt with some amount of tragedy. In his small family, he lost a sister much earlier than he would have wanted, and then another sister at a fairly young age as well.
Jane Goodrich: Yes. He outlived nearly everyone he loved. He did lose both sisters, the first to a heart condition and the second to an appendicitis. Sadly, the year she had the appendicitis and she died was the same year that they realized at a school in Boston that appendicitis probably ought to be operated on in order to cure it. Had she had the thing ten years later, she probably would have lived. Just the time in which she lived, 1886, they still weren’t operating on appendicitis when you had it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: That is one of the things that I really enjoyed about the book was the historical perspective that…. Of course, appendicitis now, people usually survive because we diagnose it early….
Jane Goodrich: Exactly, yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: … but there are many things that you brought up in the book itself that caused me to really think, “Oh, this is… The times that he was living in are so very different than where we are now.”
Jane Goodrich: They are. I tried to include much of that in my book so that it would be interesting. People don’t realize how disease-stalked, and death, and tuberculosis, and how uncertain even the world was for very wealthy people. You weren’t guaranteed to live out the week. Those things are very important, childbirth, disease, war, the way a woman was treated with a disease as opposed to the way a man was treated. A man was expected to behave differently than a woman when they had certain diseases, which is fascinating, but it was just the period of time that it was and how much it changed and affected their lives.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: How did you learn about these things? What type of research were you engaged in?
Jane Goodrich: Once I found out that my characters…. They were characters in my novel, but they were real people. Once I found out what it was that they suffered from, I did a lot of research on 19th-century tuberculosis, 19th-century heart conditions, also injuries from war wounds and how they were treated, so that I could write that accurately within the novel, because there’s Civil War wounds to be discussed as well. Yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: There is a sense of, for a big part of the novel, of great loneliness on his part. Part of it is outliving his relatives, but part of it was also that he was gay.
Jane Goodrich: He was gay and in a time in which there was absolutely no template for how to behave. You didn’t see someone else gay on television and say, “Oh, well gee, maybe that’s the way it should be.” It was completely known by just secret signals or maybe suspecting someone else was like you. Given the fact that he was gay, he live a incredibly happy and successful life. His long-time partner he lived with for 34 years and they were completely…. It was just endearing fidelity the way that they lived with one another. He didn’t misstep in the way of Oscar Wilde or others. It was also important me to write in my book this fact that the lives of gay men are always written as tragedies nearly so you end up with disease, or death, or in jail. It wasn’t that way for every gay man, and so in some ways, I say it’s wonderful to write about this man who had this happy, successful life.
It took him a long time to come out, which is not a surprise. I don’t know how, really, when he understood his difference, but I can make guesses when that was. Once he did that, he chose carefully. He didn’t engage with people who would hurt him in any way or blackmail him. People think, “Oh, he was wealthy, so it was easy.” Well, maybe not. If you’re wealthy, you could be blackmailed or any number of things befall you because of that. He stepped carefully and was successful and well-loved by his friends and remained friends with people for a lifetime. He had lifelong friends. He was a happy, successful person, and you just don’t read that story. It’s just never told, so I think that’s good.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: There’s an intersection between his character and the character of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Jane Goodrich: Yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: In real life?
Jane Goodrich: Yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: They knew each other.
Jane Goodrich: Yes. They would have had to because they certainly…. They gave money to the same charities. I’ve read letters in which they were somewhat rivalrous in the quality of their horses. The two finest horse carriage teams in Boston were known to be him and her, and so they may have been somewhat rivalrous in that way. The both left money to the Nevins Farm, which cared for city horses in their retirement. That was an early MSCPA or ASPCA effort which they both gave money to.
Isabella, however, was incredibly different. She was very flamboyant. She didn’t care what people thought of her. She had a huge group of gay male men that were her friends and her associates. George Nixon Black would have avoided that like the plague. He didn’t really want to be called attention to. He didn’t require a patron, so although they moved in the same circle and knew one another, there would be no real reason for him to be around her, and he might be frightened to be. I always believed that he would think, “This would only put a neon sign on me as to what I am, and I don’t need that kind of publicity.” They behaved differently.
They were both, interestingly, outsiders in Boston. Mr. Black was always a Mainer no matter of the fact that he was wealthy. He was not a Boston Brahmin. Isabella Stewart Gardner was from New York, so terrible, terrible in Boston society. They were both outsiders, and I think they both understood that with each other and, perhaps, admired it.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Most people, of course, know her now because her name is on a museum, but you’re describing someone who has a very interesting life before she came kind of institutionalized, the name became institutionalized.
Jane Goodrich: Yes. I took care to introduce her in my book when Mr. Black would have first met her. They had a mutual friend in Carolyn Crowninshield, who was the mother of Frank Crowninshield, who was essentially the man who Mr. Black first had a crush on. They had a mutual friend in her, so he would have met her at that time. Isabella Stuart Gardner is never shown or written about as a young pregnant woman, which indeed she was. She did give birth to a child who died during the Civil War, and she seemed so vulnerable at that time in her life compared to the way people see her as all the myths about her. I mean, you’ve heard everything, her walking down the street with a cheetah on a leash and all these sort of fake things, but she was very flamboyant. When George Nixon Black, Jr. first met her, she would have been unsure of her way in Boston society, somewhat uncomfortable, also young and pregnant and all that goes with that. I wanted to write her at a time in which people might not have known her so well. I think that’s interesting.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me about Kragsyde and the way that he got interested in building this house for himself in the town of Manchester-by-the-Sea.
Jane Goodrich: He and his family had vacationed in Manchester, so they were aware of the land that was there. Why he wanted to be in Manchester as opposed to coming to Ellsworth in the summers, I’m not … Certainly, Ellsworth was far. It was a distance to get up to Maine. This was closer. You could get there more easily. He was friends with Robert Swain Peabody, the architect who designed the building for him. What particularly led him to actually want this, I’m not sure. I don’t know. It was certainly something that was done by people of his time.
Today, Kragsyde looks like a architectural icon. At the time, it was a fairly avant-garde piece of architecture. He was someone who was willing to try building something strange and new, which was…. It doesn’t look that way to our eyes, but it was at the time. More example, I think, of his interest in art and architecture and also because he had given stained glass windows to Trinity Church, he was interested, I think, in art as actual craft as opposed to just painting or the fine arts. He was interested in art at all levels. I think he just built it as a retreat for his family in a fashionable neighborhood, and he hired his friend who would give him a piece of this new avant-garde architecture, although it also did contain elements of the Colonial Revival which was just beginning to become popular. He would have been interested in that because he was interested in historical things. They did see it somewhat as a slightly historical architectural style in some ways.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: For you, choosing to build a replica of this on Swan’s Island was really an enormous undertaking.
Jane Goodrich: Yes.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: If you build on an island that’s accessible only by boat, no causeways, no bridges, everything needs to be brought over, all the people, all the materials. Did this ever seem daunting to you?
Jane Goodrich: It does now that I’m 57 years old, but when I was 25, I thought it was just great. No, it didn’t. It always seemed within the possible realm. We were able to do it all, you see. We understood how to build. My husband was a builder. We knew what that entailed. It didn’t seem daunting at the time. It wasn’t really daunting at the time. The finances seemed maybe insurmountable at times, and neither of us had money or family money in any way. We would build it until we ran out of money, and then live in it as it was, and build some more, and build some more, and so it was unfinished for years, in many ways. That was fine, too. We would only build when we had money. It was something that was never, “Oh, this is going to be done this week or this is going to be done within a year or two years.” We never thought that, so it never felt like there was a rush. We just worked on it as we were able. It’s sort of like eating a meal slowly.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why Swan’s Island?
Jane Goodrich: The land was inexpensive. It was what we could afford. It was topographically correct for the house, similar to what Manchester would have been in the 19th century, but also because it was island property it was less expensive and we, as I said, didn’t have any money to start with, very little actually. It was what we could afford.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Having put so many years into researching the house and the man who built the house, what was it like to finally come to an end, to have first the house and then the book be complete?
Jane Goodrich: That’s a question I’m still digesting because it still feels like it’s not quite at the end until my book is off the shelves and I’m no longer doing promotions like this, but it feels like I’m done with both of them and in a good way. I wanted to write about him once I finished the house and I wanted to tell his story, which I thought was incredibly interesting, but I’m done with it. I guess it’s like having a child grow up, perhaps, and go off. You’re done, and you hope you’ve done a good job, and something new will come.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: What is the next thing for you? What’s the new thing? I know you like to travel.
Jane Goodrich: I like to travel, so travel is always…. I’ve always traveled. In between everything, I would save money for trips. I don’t know. People are asking me to write something else, so maybe I will.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: The way you describe it, this kind of came to you…. It was almost on a whim that you built this house. Are there other things that seem to be catching your interest in a similar way?
Jane Goodrich: It’s different when you’re older because you don’t have as much time, so you don’t think you can…. I can’t take on another 30-year project, clearly, but yeah, there are other things. As I said, people have been asking me to write more things now that people have read the book. Literary agents, people call you and they say, “You should write more. You should write more.” I do have ideas about other stories that I might like to write, and so perhaps that’s what I’ll do. I think I might.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: How did your husband react when you said, “Let’s build this house on this island”?
Jane Goodrich: Well, it really wasn’t me that said, “Let’s build this house on this island.” It was more we were just astounded that it was gone. I don’t think we expected to find that it had been torn down. It felt somewhat like a body blow like, “This is terrible. This shouldn’t be.” We felt that way. We actually walked across the street from the historical society where we had been and went into a restaurant and commiserated, “Life is terrible, and all the good things are gone.” That was how we were. We said, “Somebody should rebuild these things.” I mean, it was that. It was kind of a mutual thing. It wasn’t, “Hi, honey. Can you build me a house?” It wasn’t that way. It was sort of almost a reaction to finding out it was gone. If it hadn’t been gone, it wouldn’t have happened at all. We wouldn’t have rebuilt it. We would have just said, “Wow, that’s a wonderful house,” and we would have designed our own, which was our intent. It was because it was gone. It seemed wrong that it was gone.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: This was a mutual interest, really, from the beginning.
Jane Goodrich: Yes. My husband was a builder, so yeah.
Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I encourage people to read your book The House at Lobster Cove. I found it very interesting, and the fact that you spent so much time researching this and being as thorough as you have been with the details makes it just a fascinating read.
I’ve been speaking with Jane Goodrich who is the author of The House at Lobster Cove, which is a novel about George Nixon Black, Jr., the owner of the now-demolished Kragsyde in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. Goodrich and her husband built a replica of Kragsyde on Swan’s Island.
Thanks so much for coming in. I appreciate all the work you’ve put into the book and also in being here today.
Jane Goodrich: Thank you, Lisa.