Word: hapgood
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...long ago Hutchins Hapgood was reminiscing about the good old days of pre-War bohemianism when "I was connected with all the isms and all the radical hopes and all the enthusiasms ... of the wonderful new world that we all felt was coming." Then he added up: "I have sinned, I have suffered, I have wasted, wasted, but how I have enjoyed!" His confidante nodded gravely. "Yes, Hutch," she said, "you have lived a wonderful wasted life...
Part of Hutchins Hapgood's "wonderful wasted life" has been told in the candid memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan, for whose famed Manhattan salon he once served as chief talent scout. He appeared again in the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, under whom he got his start as a journalist specializing in Bowery bums, thugs, anarchists and trends. His late brother Norman, famed reformist editor, and Mary Heaton Vorse are among a half dozen others who included him in their autobiographies. Last week he gave his own version of his story...
Comfortably brought up in Alton, Ill., in a period when a girl was "much more than a girl," young Hapgood was athletic, introspective, drawn to people "who are not worth while." At Harvard he read Shelley and Wordsworth, was complimented by Santayana for a deeply philosophical remark: "All girls are beautiful." Post-graduate study in Europe included art museums, mistresses, drinking, sightseeing, conversation, desultory reading. Said young Novelist Robert Herrick one day: "Hutch, you don't do a damned thing, do you?" Like many another obtuse observer, says Hapgood, Herrick was apparently correct. But "if I wasn...
...niece, Mrs. Helen E. Hapgood, said, "For years we have been trying to get him to go some place where younger and stronger people could attend to his needs. He never would go, preferring his own house and his own society. He is not rich, but has sufficient money...
...Hapgood stressed the fact that at times he had to get down on his stomach and perform various other dexterities in order to get through doors and around corners...