HvS ON MONEY | Dec. 6–Conscience & Money (1957)

St. Nicholas Day - It strikes me that the whole area of finance has imperceptibly crept outside the boundaries of moral awareness. People tend to think in terms of profit and loss, not in terms of good and evil. Yet nowhere is ethical consideration so necessary.

I was looking at an American television program for children one Saturday morning, and I was struck by the bad quality of the program itself, full of improbable bad guys and improbable good guys, much too exciting and violent. Ten minutes were devoted to a lighting of a dynamite fuse about to blow up a sleeping boy in a cave, before the galloping horse was allowed to come to the rescue. It was interlarded with drooling appeals to children to ask their mommies to buy them succulent lollipops or chocolate bars or ice cream cones.

The thought that came into my mind was: “This is not fair!” I saw the harassed mother, trying to make ends meet and keep her children away from needing to see the the dentist or doctor, besieged by  cries of “Ah mom, give me a lollipop" or "Give me some chocolate.”

I felt it was hitting below the belt to address the modern barrage of advertising to little children, the most suggestible creatures in the world, without the sense to resist. There is a strong mother instinct that wants to make children happy, but should this be exploited for the purpose of financial gain?

Yet many people, when I talk about this, say: “I don’t see what morals have to do with it. It is good business."

If we appeal always to the weaknesses and vices of the public in our advertisements, we are necessarily going to increase these weaknesses and vices. Some Martian visitor to this planet might think that the only thing humans care about is to smell nice, to attract the opposite sex, to rival the neighbors and to eat quantities and varieties of food.

How we use our money determines not only our own lives but those of others too. If we wish for foolish, vulgar or ugly objects, and make others want them, a certain number of people will spend their lives making them. What we ask for, will be supplied. What we make, others will be induced to ask for.

I think we all have a responsibility, whether we like it or not. We will be answerable one day, I believe, for the way in which we spent our money, or caused others to spend it. Perhaps some day the irresponsible use of money will seem as strange and outdated to us as slavery seems now, and we will have learned to restrain our profit-making to what is legitimate and generally beneficial.

HvS | In Dublin, 1929-32

Hilda van Stockum as Art Student, 1929-32

The National Gallery of Art in Dublin has been including Hilda van Stockum's two portraits of Evie Hone in their calendars and catalogs. Since they are sticklers for obtaining permissions for every reproduction–doubtless because they expect the same in return–they are in touch with the family regularly.

Their latest question (from Marie) is about HvS's time studying art in Ireland. What information do we have on this period? Are there any relevant letters?

My search is not ended, but HvS's art studies in Amsterdam are much better documented for a simple reason. When Hilda was at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst (Royal or State Academy for Fine Arts), she lived with her Aunt Hilda de Booy and she sent long letters to her mother in Dublin.

My mother wrote out these letters in a copy book. I transcribed them into electronic form and posted them on the boissevain.us site. These letters, in a family collaboration, were turned by Brigid Marlin over several years into chapters for her Society for the Art of Imagination magazine into a book, the first 12 chapters of which are posted. I will post a corrected version and then the entire book shortly (one of the chapters I posted is out of order). We intend to add art from the period and publish the edited letters as a book through Boissevain Books.

The Irish periods occur before and after her time at art school in Amsterdam. She was at art school in Dublin before, and was a mature artist afterwards. Her second period in Dublin should be especially interesting, because she was mixing in the Trinity College crowd with her brothers, who were both students there. Through her brother Willem she met her husband.

In Holland she was just one of many good art students. In Dublin in the second period she had much more self-confidence and stood out because she had experience from two different centers of art. A book of Irish Artists of the 20th Century is limited to a small number of artists and HvS is one of them - her claim to Irishness being her Irish grandmother (Emily Heloise MacDonnell) and her two periods of residence in Dublin as a young woman and then another three years in Dublin in 1951-54.

Some of the drama of those years was focused on HvS's brother Willem. He was a prize-winning student of Mathematics at Trinity. He won a gold medal that is not awarded in many years. (He sold it in the Depression, to his great distress, to help out his sister. It would be good to know where it is and whether it could be repurchased.) His life has been written about in Time Bomber by Robert Wack, and it goes into considerable factual detail about Willem's love for Pic Gwynn and vice versa.

While they were in Dublin, the van Stockums - Olga, Hilda, Willem and Jan - shared the gardener's cottage at the home of Billy Kirkwood and Harrie Jameson Kirkwood on the Howth peninsula. Brigid reports that the cottage was divided in half and the gardener had one half and the three van Stockums had the other.

Willem, of course, moved out to be in Trinity College Dublin lodgings, where he roomed with Ervin R. (Spike) Marlin. Jan later also went to Trinity. Hilda and Spike got married in 1932 and rented a home somewhere. That is where Orson Welles, who I think was then also a student at Trinity Dublin, arrived for dinner a week before scheduled.

Spike then went ahead to New York City, to look for a job - no easy assignment in the Depression. He did some work on overdue premium collection for Prudential Insurance, I believe, before he took a competitive exam to join FDR's administration. He was one of 300 people selected out of thousands of applicants. He also found a publisher (Harper  Brothers) for HvS's first book, A Day on Skates, which was published with an introduction by her Aunt Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1934, also the year Olga E. Marlin was born.