OG: No, I came with him, because when he came in the fall ’48, he came for the whole year because they offered him the position of Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. He brought his wife and his two children. Nobody knew what to do with me. I was eighteen then. So, I was the proper age to go to a university. I didn’t know anything about American universities. I was given the choice between Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. The only thing that distinguished it to me was the color. I still remember the three colors as being three different colors. Why I went to Harvard I have no idea. But in any event, I went there and eventually graduated from there. My father decided not to stay permanently at Dumbarton Oaks because of complicated reasons, one of which was my mother – she didn’t know English well enough. And he had a good job in Paris and felt that there was something wrong with an institution that was so un-American and located in Washington. He felt totally alien to the American world, and so did my mother. It was nice to come and study for specific periods of time, but to run it, as was offered to him at some point, he felt was wrong. There were other reasons as well. That’s how I came and so my first week at Dumbarton Oaks was Christmas, ’48, because when we arrived in New York I went straight to Cambridge and my family went to Washington. It was an introduction to the feudal world of Dumbarton Oaks because at Christmas time, in those days, Mrs. Bliss always invited everybody at Dumbarton Oaks for a Christmas party. Everybody received a gift. She’d never known me but she knew my father had an eighteen-year-old son. I forgot what gift she gave me, but there was a little package for me under the Christmas tree. Everybody received something like this, and this was my first introduction to her. Again, afterwards my father was again at Dumbarton Oaks when I was a senior at Harvard, and I worked on my thesis partly at Dumbarton Oaks because they had the books I needed. I’d had some advice from Father Dvornik and others on the medieval subject I was developing. My first impression of Dumbarton Oaks was that nobody spoke English. It was essentially a European institution with wonderful European manners. One of the lovely memories I have of Dumbarton Oaks at that time – I can’t remember exactly what year it would have been – was my mother, the old Russian historian Vasiliev, and Otto Demus, a handsome Austrian Byzantinist, and, at the time, the Princeton Byzantinist, Bert Friend, holding arms together and going up and down the Music Room, which was where the Greco painting is now, and singing Viennese operettas in German – nobody would sing them in anything but German. Then they went out and entered again singing the end of the first act of Massenet’s Manon – and then three voices sort of going up. It was really wonderful to me. That was their world. Their world was the Paris opera, the Vienna opera, the Merry Widow, and so forth. America didn’t exist as a culture for them. Nice and wonderful though it was, it was a world totally of its own, where tea was very important, where to be seen at the swimming pool was very important, and so to them it was part of a nice little feudal world. The hierarchy was very clearly established. Everybody knew who was who, who had the right to do what and not to do what, and all the fellows, like properly infeodated vassals, lived in the Fellows Building which now is something else. I don’t know what it is now.

ABF: Guest House.

OG: Guest House, is it? Okay. In the Fellows Building some of the older professors lived in the apartments attached to that building. It was wonderful but pretty much out of the real world, which I think it always was and has remained like that. Its first impression was that of a feudal place, where French was the dominant language because Mrs. Bliss, as I would hear it, did not like anything German, and Russian was a second language. She was a great friend of Stravinsky. He composed a Dumbarton Oaks symphony for her. Vasiliev – who was a reasonable and broad scholar but not a great scholar but an absolutely adorable person with a nice little mustache and smiling face and sort of walking the way I walk now – that is an old man’s walk – as an eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old, to walk with an eighty year old was sort of new to me. I hadn’t encountered that. And telling stories – his stories were absolutely endless, whether it’s in St. Petersburg, Australia, or Wisconsin, wherever he’d been. Father Dvornik was of the same vintage, but not as attractive. And then there was Sirarpie Der Nersessian who had an extraordinary personal history. After all she was born in Constantinople. Her uncle was the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople. She escaped dramatically during or just after World War One and then went to Paris to study. All three belonged to a little world of its own. Sirarpie Der Nercessian lived in Dumbarton Oaks with her sister. They were both very remarkable because they were very short. In the dining room in the Fellows Building – I still remember because it struck me at that time – when Sirarpie sat at the head of a table, as she often did, her feet did not reach the floor. They were sort of dangling. But those were very close family friends. To me, Dumbarton Oaks was a wonderful estate in which you do whatever you want – you read books, beautiful books. It was set up not like libraries, but on shelves surrounded by genteel living – you had a Monet here, then you had Byzantine books, then you had a nice work of art – it was your private library and your private collection, which is now being transformed into a mechanized and organized way.

ABF: Did your father know any of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks before he arrived there?

OG: Yes. He knew all the old ones. Vasiliev, Dvornik, Der Nercessian, probably Underwood and Kitzinger. No – I think he met Kitzinger at Dumbarton Oaks. Because then you had the old blokes – Vasiliev, Der Nerssesian, and my father who had been students together in the ’20s in Paris. So they had known each other for a long time. The new ones, the four professors at Dumbarton Oaks – I think there were four – they were Kitzinger, Underwood, Anastos and Downy. They were all supposed to be equal. Nobody knew exactly what to do with them, as the academic system was slowly taking over the feudal one. They had not participated in the exotic life of Europe after the First World War or of the ‘20s. Harvard had two Byzantinists at that time, but for reasons that I don’t know – Constable maybe would know better – the Harvard of that time was never brought to Dumbarton Oaks. Bobby Blake, for instance, who had been one of the big allied spies in the Caucasus during the First World War, who worked for the British, in Azerbaijan in 1919, never set foot in Dumbarton Oaks. That is something I don’t know – that part of the story. The Harvard establishment was not the Dumbarton Oaks establishment. Dumbarton Oaks was separate from Harvard and I think Harvard at that point didn’t know what to do with Dumbarton Oaks, and probably still doesn’t quite know what to do with it. The Princeton faculty was more visible there than the Harvard one. My father knew these four younger scholars, and he got particularly close to Kitzinger because they would often work on the same things, the same fields. In a way, I’m not sure that even this was very good for Kitzginer to have my father there because my father was about fifteen years older than he was. And he kind of a little bit made life difficult – I don’t mean technically but intellectually – for Kitzinger who was certainly the most intelligent, the most creative of these four professors. When he became Director of Studies, two of them – Downy and Anastos – left almost immediately. I think they were upset that they weren’t considered. Underwood – I forget when Underwood died – he died relatively young.

ABF: In ’69.

OG: But, he was so involved with Istanbul. He was constantly there. I have a wonderful memory of him because he found me my first hotel in Istanbul, which was the crummiest hotel I’ve ever been in my life. I shouldn’t say this, but he was very stingy in things like that.

ABF: So how was it for you, as a student of medieval history?

OG: I profited from being my father’s son, so that everything was open, everybody was very nice and sweet. For my work – at Princeton where I was a graduate student, then at Michigan or at Harvard where I was employed– their libraries were sufficient to me. I didn’t need Dumbarton Oaks. And I was never a Byzantinist, even though some people think I am, but I never was. So Dumbarton Oaks to me – let’s put it this way – Dumbarton Oaks to me was always a kind of second home. I always felt that I knew how to operate there. I got very distressed when they built the new shelves. I thought that the old Dumbarton Oaks would disappear. And I loved to go to the symposia. Every year we had a procession from Princeton where I was graduate student to go to Dumbarton Oaks for the symposium, where you kind of saw all the big shots you had heard about or read about. That was interesting and exciting. I think the symposium played a very important role up to whatever time it was when they changed the rules, when all the people who gave talks spent a semester at Dumbarton Oaks, so that the people preparing the symposium were all working together on the symposium. So, the symposium was not like now. People work wherever they are, then come the day before they give their talk, give their talk, and go away. This was a collective enterprise being prepared. But by the time I was involved in symposia, I guess in ’62, that wasn’t true anymore. I flew in from Ann Arbor the day before. So, as a collective operation, it was not as successful. These later symposia did not create as much excitement as the symposia of the ’50s, which were really, truly milestones – the one my father did in 1946, what Dvornik did, the first one Kitzinger did – they were really major intellectual creations. Since then it has become another meeting of professors to get their trips paid. Byzantine studies have been in trouble for the last twenty years. It’s not a field that is a growing – it has been taken over by all kinds of other forces than whatever is required of pure scholarship. The great thing about the central, western, and eastern European scholars of yore, as well as the first group of Americans who were there was that they were really only interested in scholarship. They had no other agenda. Now old national types have come, and Byzantine studies have tended to become a series of competing nationalisms, going from Greece to Ukraine or Russia. It is a series of national flags being waved, and that is very destructive. It is no longer what the old scholarship used to be. It is easy to say the old one was very nice and very good, because it was connected to empires, to big countries, and not to the small countries, which we are creating now one after the other. Have you heard of Southern Ossetia before last week? Now everybody’s excited about what Northern Ossetia and Southern Ossetia are going to do to each other. What I think is interesting about Ossetia, actually, is that the Ossetian language is the only Romanian language of its kind. It’s the only remaining Alan language that was known in the second century.

ABF: So, can you describe – speaking of the symposia – can you describe your experience at these early symposia?

OG: They were wonderful. I told you about the old symposia. I think they have changed quite a bit. The symposiums, first of all, never met on Sundays. That would have been immoral. Nobody went to church, but they did not do anything on Sunday. You rested. The old ones met on Thursday, Friday, Saturday morning and they always ended Saturday with a lunch at the Blisses’ private house, about several blocks down from the main building of Dumbarton Oaks. That was very important because not everyone was invited there. Speakers were invited, and a few selected guests. So, on Saturday morning after the last meeting, you could see the poor participants who had to go to the drugstore to have a hamburger on Wisconsin Avenue and the elect who walked down toward the Blisses’ house to have lunch at the Blisses’ house, which was always catered – waiters in white clothes – and where you met not only the Dumbarton Oaks crowd, but you also met some of the social people Mrs. Bliss was cultivating or who were cultivating her. It was a very social occasion, as were the dinners on Thursday and Friday – Friday dinner was at Dumbarton Oaks and comprised always the same menu, a magnificent single salmon, totally glazed. I’ve never seen a whole glazed salmon like this. White liveried, white-gloved characters were cutting it up to give you your portion with, I guess, some salad. I forget what was the menu on Thursdays. It must have been a meat menu, because those were days following the tradition of Thursday meat, Friday fish, Sunday sleep. Now I think that you buy your sandwiches or you buy your lunch box, which is kind of repulsive. The big thing about the symposium itself was also its ceremonial quality. Mr. and Mrs. Bliss used to arrive and sit in the back. And it was an event, like the arrival of the deacon or the bishop at a religious ceremony. They had their own chairs in the back. Mrs. Bliss would always listen very carefully, then ask the speaker to give her a copy of what he has said because she wanted to read it before she would comment on it. And she always read it and always commented on it. She always had something to say. I don’t think he ever did, and I think he slept through most of them. At the symposium itself, in the front row, were the big couches. I don’t know if they still have them at the symposium. Enormous couches where the very distinguished, elderly professors would sit. In my days it would have been Kantarovisz, Friend, Dvornik, Vasiliev – would sit there, I think sleep a little bit. They were too old to listen to talks. It was like a royal court. You have the top princes sit in front, then you have the variety of lower aristocrats behind, and then some poor little graduate students in the back. But the graduate students were future aristocrats, so they belonged there. What hardly belonged there was spouses. That didn’t exist. It wasn’t allowed. We never talked about things like that. Or companions – the word didn’t exist. But it was always very – you felt that you were actually into a ceremonial event. And that was part of its beauty, that even if it was a lousy paper – most of them were not, in those days – it was a liturgical ceremony to listen to it and to partake of the learning. You were supposed to understand whatever language was used by the speaker. If you had questions afterward – the questions were in most cases stupid. The questioners were not stupid, but nobody had anything intelligent to say because they had just heard a lecture, so they hadn’t had time to think of something intelligent to say – except the learned disputes between people, as with Weitzman and Morey, when they were present. But that’s a special case. That I think has changed quite a bit. Now it has become much more routinized, like older colloquial of academic life. It’s quite different. It doesn’t have that prestige of a religious act. Food was very important. The teas were served at the right moment, the coffees at the right moment, the dinners – and who went to what was very important.

ABF: Were there any particular moments at these symposia or papers or even just one symposium in particular –

OG: I remember mostly one symposium that my father directed, the one you mentioned –

ABF: The Emperor and the Palace.

OG: – The Emperor and the Palace, which was really remarkable. But, of course, he had gathered probably the most spectacular group of scholars available at that time. Just even seeing them – I was a graduate student then – those people whose books I had read or was reading, here they all were. They were living beings. And so that was one. I think the one that Sir Hamilton Gibb did in which I was involved in ’62 was also important because he brought almost for the first time the Near Eastern world into Byzantium instead of Byzantium always connected with Europe. Kitzinger led one on Sicily – that was many years later – which was also very interesting, because he had gathered an unusual group of people. If you look – and you probably have them all – the symposia still now have their liturgical function, that is, all the participants gather some place and get their picture taken with each other – the chairman must be sitting in the middle. The rest may be standing, but the chairman always sits. And if you look at those pictures, they’re very interesting to see as a sequence, because you can see how people age. Some age well, some age not so well. The other thing – nobody, I think, ever smiles. But I would check that, because I’m not sure –

ABF: They start smiling later. They smiled later, in the ‘80s.

OG: They all dressed with coat and tie, and probably dark suits and so forth because it is a liturgical act. It is a liturgical function to participate in a Dumbarton Oaks symposium, like serving at mass. It was a liturgical moment – even staying at the Fellows Building at some point. But, I think there were two apartments at the two ends which were real apartments. And my parents stayed there. And I came to visit for whatever reason and the lunches and dinners were prepared at the Fellows Building. Now you fix your own sandwiches or whatever it is. But there was a whole group of staff – black staff, from a sort of formal American servants class – were there to cook and do the bedding. And I remember when the change began to happen – I forget when it was my parents were there, and I came late. I must have gone out to dinner or the movies or whatever it is, and I came back late, and as I opened the door, I see an extremely distinguished scholar making love to a woman on the couch downstairs. Because you couldn’t do it in the rooms – I forgot now why – so they stayed down. It was a very odd thing. There were two small houses, to the right and to the left. And the one to the right was occupied at some point by Dvornik. And I got very irritated once when I was a graduate student because Kantarovich was here. Dvornik also was a great cook, both of them. And Kantarovich came to cook. And Kantarovich had asked me to help him prepare the chickens. He mixed some fancy I don’t know what. And I was supposed to inject it between the skin and the meat of the chicken. But I was not invited for the dinner. You see, the dinner was for big guys. I was allowed to help. I got accolades; he knew I was going to be a big guy at some point and I will eat the proper chicken. But at that point I had not acquired the right to eat the chicken that Kantarovich prepared. And similarly, much later, the person who occupied that building was called Kraeling. I don’t exactly know how many years Carl Kraeling was involved with Dumbarton Oaks. It was after he retired from Chicago. He went to Yale but spent a lot of time at Dumbarton Oaks. Carl Kraeling was a very American type. He was of German origin, very Lutheran – very strict Lutheran tradition – but very American in spirit. Carl spoke four languages. My mother said once that she had to go and ask him once for something – I’ve forgotten now what, some practical thing – and rang the doorbell, and he opened the door, and he was naked. So, he walked around naked in his house, which is, again, the kind of thing one didn’t do at Dumbarton Oaks in those days. The rooms upstairs were single rooms, and they shared the bathroom, which is no longer acceptable now. And I don’t know when they started buying or renting apartments. The result was – is – that people don’t connect with each other the way they did before. But that’s a price that one has to pay. Nearly all American institutions were based then on single people. So my memories of Dumbarton Oaks are mostly social. They are mostly social because my direct contact with it – until I became member of the board of scholars – but that again was part of the feudal system, because Giles Constable and I were classmates, we’d known each other since the ‘40s, and so there was a kind of automatic reliance on the people you knew to run whatever work was needed. On the whole that was good, but not always. But it was a completely different Dumbarton Oaks then. And as well as the board of scholars, we took care of masses of little details, which before were not handled by the scholars. They were handled by some assistant at Harvard or elsewhere. And that is one of the good but debatable things that Giles Constable did: he created an administration for Dumbarton Oaks instead of a tradition. You didn’t do things because Mrs. Bliss said it should be done that way. You did things because that’s the way you do things. That was the good side. There were some incidents with that too. I got into trouble with one of the members, with one of the fellows, whom I was interviewing because we all had to interview a certain number of fellows. And for some reason I can’t remember, she was known as a difficult person. And I remember both Ihor Sevcenko and Giles telling me, “Well, you’re so nice, you take her. We don’t want to deal with her.” And I said, “I suppose I can handle it.” And she absolutely beat me. There was nothing I could say to which she did not have already set answers. And I never felt so completely overwhelmed by an individual. I was supposed to be the powerful one that’s supposed to decide her fate, and she flattened me right there. I think she’s still alive. I haven’t seen her for many years. It became a different world when it became so much more Americanized and involved with graduate students and assistant professors, that is, with a very specific American problem, instead of being the haven to which the world’s scholars come. I suspect because there is no need for Dumbarton Oaks, from that point of view. There are many other places that have now good libraries, with Internet you can get everything anyway. So, congeniality and pleasure of being together, having breakfast together, lunch together, dinner together, and tea together – that has disappeared. The humanities do not have what here I see with mathematicians and physicists: collective work. That is, they don’t work collectively. We tend to work individually. Collective work is done in excavations, but that’s out of Dumbarton Oaks. And the other thing of the Dumbarton Oaks I knew a long time ago was it was involved in masses of activity outside. The Istanbul excavations, the Hagia Sophia, project, and then another one in Constantinople, and then excavations in Syria, but the big Hagia Sophia project was something – have you ever seen those books?

CW: No.

OG: Oh, you should see them because you probably would not know how to use that book. You need a whole table just to open the book to look at the pictures. But that was the extraordinary person, Van Nice, involved in the project. He was an architect. I think he went to Princeton. Many scholar-architects had done that. Underwood went to Princeton. And that’s an important side part of the relationship between Princeton’s adventures and architects, Dumbarton Oaks, the Near East, ARAMCO, the Arab petrol company, and the CIA. All of this was very closely interrelated. When I took a trip – when I was at the University of Michigan – with George Forsyth, who was on the Dumbarton Oaks board and who had been with us in Princeton – every embassy we stopped at had a Princeton graduate as a C.I.A. agent there, and they all knew each other. They all started as archaeologists and became O.S.S. during the war stage of the C.I.A. because it pays better than Wellesley, as in the case of one. This again is another world that’s gone. Now you have creepy individuals who went to military school. You don’t have any longer cultivated spies. But Dumbarton Oaks was very much involved in that. But it is interesting that Underwood was an agent there, and all the other Dumbarton Oaks activities were not done by the people that were at Dumbarton Oaks. Kitzinger was not involved; Downey was not; Dvornik was not. That was decided by Thacher, Jack Thacher. I knew Thacher quite well, but I knew him personally rather than academically. He would represent the kind of things my father was very much opposed to at Dumbarton Oaks, that is, the power of rich people, rich amateurs. To my father, Thacher was a great amateur – very cultivated and very sophisticated, but he was an amateur. He was not a priest. He did not belong to the priesthood of scholarship.

ABF: So, this was happening while you were on the board of scholars?

OG: No. I wasn’t on the board of scholars until the early ‘70s, and I would say that after the early ‘60s, for about ten years, I was hardly involved in Dumbarton Oaks. Then, in the ‘70s, after I came to Harvard, whenever Giles Constable became Director – he sort of got me back here. But I must admit, I was not as personally involved as I had been in early times. I didn’t know the people anymore; and, also, because I was also in a different field from most of the fields of the people at Dumbarton Oaks, I was not important to anybody at Dumbarton Oaks. I was important as an administrator, as a Harvard representative, but intellectually I was not important. But, anyway, it was no longer a hot intellectual center, where you talk to people about scholarly things. Like all these institutions, most of the people who were here were young assistant professors looking for jobs or people whose concern was not whether somebody discovered a new manuscript; their concern was, is the job in Vanderbilt better than the job in Oklahoma State? So, it was a completely different attitude, and much more mechanically involved. By 1990 I was already here, and I went to Harvard for a few meetings to find a successor to whoever it is who was – who was the director just before Ned Keenan? – it was Thomson –

ABF: Laiou.

OG: Laiou, it was for Laiou. Well, the Laiou appointment was a tricky one; because, first of all, Harvard professors were rarely appointed there and secondly, there was the Hellenization – a criticism made of Dumbarton Oaks, whether justified or not, that it was all taken over by the Greeks. But one could say that the early one was all taken over by Russians. Eventually, you will have the Serbs or the Bulgarians – there’s not enough of them – or the Romanians taking over; and that is the drama of Byzantine Studies. It has become national, instead of being global and since nobody goes to church anymore, there was no Orthodox streak. You could say that this was true in previous generations – that they became Byzantinists because they had learned to be orthodox. They were not believers, they did not go to church regularly, but they knew the services, they knew the religion, they knew the theology – Meyendorf and people like this; my father, who’s not religious at all, but knew every service. Weitzman went to every orthodox service he could lay his hands on. Kitzinger never did. They were no longer interested in Byzantium; they were interested in what happened to the antique world, the late antique world – that’s what Kitzinger did. It became a different world. The collection is still a Byzantine collection, but I wonder how many of the professors ever go there, to the collection. I mean, this is a separate, public thing and, in fact, I don’t think there are professors at Dumbarton Oaks anymore.

ABF: There aren’t. In your opinion, do you think that’s a good or a bad thing?

OG: I don’t know. I think, on the whole, it is a good thing. I can imagine having two or three ancient scholars – like Kazhdan was there; but usually, you do it because you can’t find him a job in regular universities. So , I’m not sure if that made sense at the time of war or with the Soviet regime; now, it is not necessary anymore. But that’s something you can argue about, whether it should be a kind of temporary place, where people stop early in their career in order to form themselves properly or whether it is a place to which you come for a year of rest and breathing within your normal career. I don’t know, I mean, I can argue it either way; and I can see people here who have exactly the same problem. Should it be a place to which people come with thoughts and to have peace of mind, or it a place where you go to magnify yourself to get a better job – which tends to be now that happens. So, half of our people at Dumbarton Oaks spend most of the time running out and giving lectures and showing off some place or other. And I’m not sure quite what it should be. I suppose that what an institution like Harvard has to decide – they have to set their policies for them, if they want to do that. It is no longer a great center for collective scholarship, except that it has a publication program, and the Dumbarton Oaks Papers are a very important thing. It is no longer because there are competitors for that; there are other places which do this. I don’t think the kind of scholarship that Ihor represents is something that is still of significance to most people. I mean, if you read any of the things that Ihor writes, it’s actually wonderful; but if you don’t know Greek, German, and Russian, it becomes very difficult to understand and appreciate.

CW: Do you remember anything about the rumors of Harvard wanting to move the operation of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard?

OG: Well, my thoughts on the possibility of transporting Byzantine Studies to Harvard? You’re going to be shocked if I even suggest this to Tom Lentz or anybody of that nature, but it would have been, probably, a good idea forty years ago. Now, there is no point in thinking about it. Harvard can’t handle its own collections in Cambridge, and to bring all this down suddenly. When I knew Dumbarton Oaks, it was all Byzantine – then suddenly appeared all the Pre-Columbian and then the Garden. Should all three of these continue on a more or less equal footing? I simply don’t know; but, then again, I don’t do the budget, so I don’t know where it is financially. I think it is strange bedfellows, I mean, these three things together; but maybe that is legitimate – I mean, if there is enough money, there is certainly enough space here to have all three of them. I want to go back to this question about the atmosphere of the place. Now the atmosphere of the place has changed because people are not in a monastery together. They are in a library together, whereas in the past it was like a monastery: you had breakfast together, you had lunch together, you had dinner, you spent all day together. Right now, you don’t have breakfast. You still have lunch, and I’m told it’s still very ceremonial: who is allowed to have lunch in the Fellows Building, who is not allowed. You have classes of visitors to the library, ones who are first-class visitors and second-class visitors. I don’t know whether it’s true, but in the past, it used to be a community working together, which I don’t think it is now. Maybe these kinds of worlds have simply disappeared, and there’s no point in trying to establish them. You’re not going to invent a Vasiliev, a Dvornik, or people of that nature – they just don’t exist. For instance, when Ihor tried very hard to get Hans Belting, who probably to the younger generation is the most brilliant Byzantinist or art historian or whatever you want – but he didn’t want to come to Washington. One reason is that he doesn’t feel at home in an American institution. And why should you bring somebody who’s not at home in that institution? It’s still easier to do here, at the Institute for Advanced Study – we still have quite a few people like that. Because here there is nothing around, you really live in your own secluded world with your lunches and dinners. And the world of Dumbarton Oaks can no longer be recreated. There was a mythology of Dumbarton Oaks, but it is really no longer clear to what objectives it responds. Is it a training place to prepare people for functions in American or other institutions. Usually, it has to be American institutions, because I don’t think you get yourself ready for a position in Italy by coming to Dumbarton Oaks. Or it is a place where you meet for seminars and symposia? These should be organized differently, that is, where people meet twice: once to organize something, and then they do work wherever they are, and then they meet again to expose the results of their work; or all kinds of other techniques or patterns that can be proposed. I don’t know, is there actually a board of trustees at Dumbarton Oaks now that is separate –?

CW: Yes.

OG: – that is separate from the Harvard one?

CW: No, I don’t think it’s – I think they are more or less the same.

OG: As the Harvard corporation, yeah. So to whom are they responsible? They are responsible to the Harvard president?

ABF: Probably

OG: See, one doesn’t even know who runs that place. It was alright as long as the people running it were the Blisses, Thacher, Thacher’s successor, Tyler, the former ambassador to The Netherlands. They were all American aristocrats, wealthy American aristocrats – they were superior to Harvard. They didn’t talk directly to Harvard and didn’t want Harvard to meddle with their little feudal entity. That’s fallen apart. Now everything is run by the actual rule of professors, which means the bureaucrats of an academic system; and they have it different – they are not wealthy for the most part (some exceptions you have there), and it’s a completely different world – and the academic world is a completely different world than it was thirty years ago.

ABF: When do you – what period do you pinpoint as the time when these changes began to take place?

OG: I think the ‘70s. This was when Giles Constable was Director.

ABF: This was when you were on the Board of Scholars?

OG: Yeah; and I think that the important thing is that Giles Constable is somebody who understood that. Giles knew that. Now, whether his solutions were the right ones is another questions, but he understood that there was something different – that you cannot recreate the world of wonderful, sophisticated learning – and cooking. I mean the idea of a bunch of professors cooking for each other is very interesting because all the professors I mentioned who cooked for each other – Friend and Dvornik and Kantorowicz – were all bachelors – and the whole history, which I haven’t thought much about, about the intimacies of people at Dumbarton Oaks – the ones with families, the ones without families. See, Kitzinger was remarkable. He had three children, and one of them stayed in England I believe when he was at Dumbarton Oaks, but maybe two of them, I think, were little children – or only one. Anastos had a son nobody ever saw. Downey had a daughter, I think, who eventually became a professor at UCLA. Underwood had a daughter whom nobody ever saw – they were already grown-up children. They were no longer part of the community. I don’t remember them showing up at Mrs. Bliss’s Christmas party – but I may be wrong. In other words, there is an old myth at Dumbarton Oaks, which is cute to remember, and you can write nice little stories about it, but it has nothing to do with what Dumbarton Oaks could or should be. What it is, it is a fabulous library, and, I suppose, I’m sure it now has all the right equipment for computer work of one kind of another. It probably spends more money, just as we do now here, on all kinds of ways to improve the computerization of the place – and not on secretarial help or research assistants. Because, who needs a research assistant when everything’s on the internet? But, that’s true, you have to know how to use that thing, and half the time, it falls apart [laughter]. But, since Ned Keenan became director, I haven’t been much involved with Dumbarton Oaks. Until then, I was. Thomson I knew quite well. Angeliki Laiou – that’s different. She belongs to – because she represented a very different objective for Dumbarton Oaks than what Thomson had been.

ABF: What was that?

OG: Nationalism.

ABF: One thing, actually, that you said that I was a bit curious about. You talked about your father being a bit critical of rich amateurs, amateur scholars; but, isn’t that how you would also describe the Blisses?

OG: Oh, they were not scholars. They were not trained to scholarship.

ABF: Amateur collectors.

OG: Yeah, amateur collectors; oh, collectors are mostly amateurs. But I think there is something interesting in that there was always a paradox in my father’s opinion of the Blisses because he genuinely liked Mrs. Bliss; he was very fond in a social way of what she represented. She had a kind of charm and she understood intellectual theories – or maybe she acted as though she understood – that I don’t know, but she understood, and she made you feel good. But she never claimed to be a scholar. She was a collector, but I think he was the bigger collector, Mr. Bliss. He was the real collector, but she was a collector too. I mean, that was a completely different attitude – and I suspect my father always thought museums should collect, not people – this is a public activity, not a private activity (which doesn’t work). Was the DO faculty ever dissolved, or they just didn’t replace people?

ABF: Well, they – in the ’70s, basically, there ceased to be a permanent faculty at Dumbarton Oaks.

OG: Yes, well, who was the faculty? Ihor was there, then he moved to Harvard. Was there anybody else?

CW: Mango.

OG: Well, Mango, well, Mango – that was one of the mistakes. I mean, Mango was a great man, but it was a mistake for Ihor to have brought him because they are very close friends and kindred spirits. They are very old friends, but they are separate from everybody else who was there. And, therefore, you create a kind of – two bodies running everything, and both very critical of most people; and that was a mistake, that was the wrong kind of person to have. But then anyway I don’t know that anybody really thought whether Dumbarton Oaks should have a faculty or not? So these guys are gone, or one goes and the other – “we’ll take him to Harvard. Let’s not do anything. Let’s see how it runs.” Was it a thoughtful decision or just it’s easier to not have a faculty – because nobody ever knew. These became the years under Bill Loerke about whom the question had arisen whether he should be adhoc-ed by a Harvard committee or not; and I don’t remember the discussion and decisions that took place. There was already a question as to whether Bill Loerke was a member of the faculty at Harvard or not; and similarly, you ask here why they abolished the position of Director of Byzantine Studies. Now I don’t know why it was abolished. I think it was abolished when Giles became Director.

ABF: Mmm hmm.

OG: Yeah, because I think he thought he could do it. And then he reestablished it – or was it reestablished after him?

ABF: After.

OG: I would imagine so, because this is – I could see very well, Giles would feel, being a medievalist and a scholar and an academic, that he doesn’t need a Director of Studies. But the moment you get somebody who doesn’t get – but, again, Giles is a strong personality with strong connections, who belongs to the striped pants general staff of academia (very complicated system in academia, where you have those people who went through War College to general staff and people who did not go to general staff). And the German military always had striped pants, if you went to general staff school; and Giles, like I, belonged to general staff. We went to all the right places: the right institutions, the right degrees, at the right time, and so forth. If there are no studies, should there be a Director of Studies? I don’t know, I mean, this is something – there is one now?

ABF: Mmm hmm.

OG: Who is it now?

ABF: Alice-Mary Talbot.

OG: Oh, she’s still at DO?

ABF: Yeah, for another year.

OG: For another year. She is very good at it; but I’m not quite sure what the purpose of it is, unless there are indeed – or they have now Junior Fellows, Junior Fellows, that’s right. So they have younger people – so Summer Fellows, that’s right. They have all kinds of groups of people to take care of, so therefore it would make sense to have a Director of Studies. Do they still have concerts?

ABF: Yeah.

CW: Primarily in the winter, I think.

OG: Yeah, in winter, usually. But, this again – the concerts or even the symposia or the lectures were a big social event in Washington, and I remember for the symposium, for instance, automatically, the whole staff of the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery came to the symposium, regardless of the subject, because they had to be seen. Right now, they don’t even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. I mean, I’m close to both the Freer Gallery and the National Gallery; I’ve been very much involved with both of these. They don’t even know what happens at Dumbarton Oaks. They don’t even get invitations any more. Just as Dumbarton Oaks is not invited to their activities. Now, in the Bliss period, the Dumbarton Oaks affairs, whether its concerts or lectures, were a social event in Washington, and you played for a Washington public; and I think this is almost gone now. Maybe they’ll try to – well, it should be reestablished. In a way, this is the kind of thing people like my father thought was silly, but they enjoyed it. It was a real occasion for them to see a certain Washington establishment. This is not the political establishment. This is the establishment of the Georgetown rich, old aristocratic Georgetown families that would meet there for a concert or for a lecture – symposia, usually they didn’t stay very long, because symposia bored them. Also, the nature of publication has changed so much that, is there any use for most of these symposia? I mean, we have them all the time here in the sciences; but, again, the sciences work as a team. I mean, that’s quite different as a way of doing things. But, the other great thing is the social change. A cooking staff disappears when most Fellows started being married, and therefore living in apartments, and not coming – but this is a rather important issue: do you create a social collective, as the Soviets would have called it, or do you create a convenience store, to which you come for whatever you need and then you go home? We have a wonderful library here. The great thing about this library in Princeton is that there’s almost never anybody in it, because it’s so easily accessible that people come at 3 a.m. or whenever it is they can come and work here. But it is a luxury. It is a luxury because all these books, no one – nobody ever touches them. They’re there in case you want it; and here and there you suddenly want it. I think all these institutions of research have a problem. They, as I said, become, either, like the Getty, which just brings younger people and older people for six months to do their thing, that’s one way; or you’re creating something together. That’s what Dumbarton Oaks tried to do, and I don’t think it has been able to do it anymore; but I don’t think we have common questions anymore. But, that, I mean, may be the pessimism of old age. Now, what I suggest, if you don’t mind, we have a very simple lunch. We could do that.

ABF: Sure, thank you very much.

LF: Yes, that is about right.

VKM: What was your background in garden and landscape?

LF: My background in garden and landscape was practically non-existent. I had never lived anywhere that had a garden, and I loved a beautiful garden when I saw one. But I had never studied gardening. My background was as a reference librarian. I had done my undergraduate work in General Studies at the University of Chicago, taken a master’s degree in library science, and I worked as a reference librarian at the University of Chicago until 1961, when we moved to Washington. And then I worked again in a very general collection at the U.S. Information Agency, which in those days – it no longer exists, it’s been folded into the State Department – but it’s job was essentially to do public relations for the United States worldwide. We ran the Voice of America. We had a large publishing collection – publishing operation rather – that we distributed materials very, very widely. And the library here was a backup. It was like a good small university library, or maybe more like a college library with a very up-to-date collection – we collected newspaper clippings daily that would prepare us to answer questions from abroad and publish things about the states that people wanted to know. I did that for about ten years. But in work as a librarian, you begin to understand the importance of little things that most people ignore, like punctuation and consistency in bibliographic citation. And when I – well, things changed at the U.S. Information Agency during the Vietnam War and it became less interesting to me. I had a background – I’d done some editorial work at the University of Chicago for the press there, and my husband was traveling a lot. I just decided I didn’t want to go to an office five days a week. And so I stopped my library work in the ‘60s and started doing copyediting, and that’s what brought me to Dumbarton Oaks.

VKM: So, how did you first become aware of Dumbarton Oaks?

LF: Well, I – we had a good friend named Bates Lowry. I should go back. You can’t live in Washington and not be aware of Dumbarton Oaks. My husband and I had subscribed to the concerts; I had walked frequently in the gardens here. It was a gorgeous place and a place I was drawn back to. But in 1977, a friend of ours named Bates Lowry, who was an architectural historian, came here. He had a project at that time; he and his wife were doing some publishing of microfiche in American art and architecture. He subsequently became very interested in the preservation at the Pension Building downtown, which today is the Building Museum, and he ultimately became the first director and really organizer of the Building Museum. But I think in ’77 he was still working at something called the Dunlap Society. Anyway, he was an old college friend of my husband’s. They moved down here, and I can’t remember at this point whether that was about the time that Betty MacDougall came to Dumbarton Oaks, or whether she was already here.

VKM: I think she started around ’72, so –

LF: Okay, then she was here. But, Bates knew her. They were good friends. And through Bates Lowry, I met Betty MacDougall. My husband and I met her, and we became friendly. And she knew what I was doing. I had at that point just finished five years editing the rare book catalogue of the Lessing Rosenwald Rare Book Collection for the Library of Congress, which was a very demanding assignment. But I had finished it, I’d finished the indexes, I’d done the bibliography, it was at press, and I was looking for other assignments. Betty was about to reissue a symposium on Persian gardens that had been held here, I guess in the early ‘60s. And I think it was out of print. She wanted to have it reprinted, and she hired me to do that job.

VKM: So, you had already seen Dumbarton Oaks before you came to work here. So when you first saw Dumbarton Oaks, or visited, what were your initial impressions of it?

LF: Oh, I was awed. It was very very beautiful and it was – well, one of the joys of having this assignment was that I got into the gardens when they were not necessarily open, and I could wander at leisure. I was – as I recall – I wasn’t working by the hour, so I had time to take breaks and enjoy the gardens, and I had met Mrs. Bliss once.

VKM: Really?

LF: Yes, she was an old lady, but when we first interned – ’61 – she was still on the scene, and not that I had any long conversation with her, but it was kind of fun to be in her home and see what she had created. At that time – and at this point I don’t know to what extent things have changed – but the garden operation, the garden library, and the exhibition space for the rare book collection were all right here, sort of on the 32^nd Street side, and the library was on two levels, the rare books were on the street level and the working collections – the working gardening collections – were underground, down that circular staircase, that you may have seen. Much of my work was done at home because, as I remember it, on the first project, which was the Persian Gardens, I didn’t see it until the galley stage. Now that may not be familiar to someone who has grown up with a computer. But publishing in those days was – there were many parts to it. A manuscript would come in. It would be edited. It would be sent to a printer who would then type in the printed text. It would come back in a first stage of prints, which were called galleys. It wasn’t divided into pages; it was just, you know, line by line. They would be edited and proofread. The manuscript would already have been proofread, but then the galleys would be proofed. Corrections would be made. They would go back to the printer. The corrections would be made, and then the text would come back again in page proof form. You would have to correct – you would have to check that all the corrections had been made, and then at that point any indexing could be done because there would be page numbers related to the text. So you would prepare an index at that point, if there was to be one. And it would then go back to the press. If I remember correctly, I wasn’t around for anything until the galleys came back because I think a copy of the first edition would have been sent to the printer for resetting in type. Oh, and I should also answer that the joy was – I did have to work at home mostly – but when I came in, I could sit at an absolutely gorgeous desk in the garden library, which looked out on the gardens and it really felt good.
VKM: So, you worked on the Persian Garden.

LF: That was the first publication.

VKM: What were your other projects?

LF: Well, following that – I don’t know if it is still the case, I think it is, but the garden library, the garden – I shouldn’t just say library – but the gardening section of Dumbarton Oaks. I can’t remember exactly what it’s called.

VKM: I think they call it Garden and Landscape studies now.

LF: Okay, the Garden and Landscape Studies section would hold an annual symposium, and the papers from that symposium would be published, which again added to the length of time. Papers would come in. The authors would be told that six months later they were supposed to have final copy. They would have delivered them orally at this symposium. Then they were supposed to submit a final typed version of their papers. Some of them would come. Some of them wouldn’t come. It was always a struggle. But probably within six months or so, they would have all appeared. Betty would have decided what order they should appear in. She would, probably by then, have written a forward of some sort, organized it, asked for any major substantive changes that she might have wanted. She might have asked an author to elaborate on some subject. And then, they would come to me – the manuscripts – at that point, after, not Persian Gardens, I think the next one was the sixth colloquium, which was on John Claudius Loudon and the nineteenth century in Great Britain, and at that point I had manuscripts and I would change them for punctuation, spelling. Again, because it was a different world, there was no such thing as spell-check.

VKM: Oh, I can imagine!

LF: And even today, with spell-check, you have to check because “to” is a very different word from “too.” But in those days, the authors would’ve type their own manuscripts because they were all academics and they didn’t have secretaries. And some of them could type, and some of them couldn’t. And typewriters did not make corrections, so the corrections were either made in whiteout or by hand by the authors, before the manuscript would come here – some of them legible, some of them not. And it was my job at that point as a copy editor not only to check for spelling and punctuation and correct grammar, in some cases – because often, not often but sometimes, the authors were foreign and there would be rather awkward translations. But I had to get the manuscript in shape to go for that first stage of typesetting, and I did that for the John Claudius Loudon Colloquium, which finally was published in 1980. And I’ll tell you about another publication that came out in 1980 later, because I want to talk about two of them together, but also the Roman Gardens which came out in 1981. In between I did Beatrix Farrand’s Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks, but that was a very different publication from the symposium – from the colloquium. And then again I worked on the Beatrix Farrand colloquium in 1982. On the Beatrix Farrand books, what I did was more substantive.

VKM: So who did you work with the most during your time at Dumbarton Oaks?

LF: Betty MacDougall, who essentially was my boss. She was the fulltime person in charge of the garden and landscape research effort. I never quite understood it, but I think that at least at that point the staff members here had faculty appointments at Harvard – they may still. I don’t know. She was something like an adjunct professor. She was a very distinguished landscape and architectural historian. I should say architectural historian – I guess in those days – with a specialty in landscape architecture. Italian gardens were her great specialty. Betty was the fulltime person here. She supervised the librarian, Laura Byers, with whom I worked a lot because I had to check references and things down in the reference library. Betty would have, I gather, made any acquisitions of rare books at that point. Although, I think, I don’t know how much money was left in those days.

VKM: Not very much.

LF: Once Mrs. Bliss died – actually once the property was transferred to Harvard – the rare book library may have stopped making additions.

VKM: I think what basically happened was they had to sell the books that weren’t related to the gardens in order to afford to buy new books.

LF: Could be. I don’t know that. I had never heard that. So that could have been a later development.

VKM: It was. There was a lot of stuff in the records about how Harvard felt about Dumbarton Oaks selling books that maybe weren’t related to their collection, but Harvard wanted.

LF: Oh that’s very possible. Yes, but I would imagine that the rare books related to the gardens –

VKM: – Oh, those they kept.

LF: Those they kept. The others might have been sold, if they were duplicates from Harvard, or gone up to the Harvard libraries. Yes, I think, it’s my impression that for all three of the studied collections, the books, rare books even, related to those collections remained here, because they were certainly shelved in the garden library here and exhibited in that entrance – in that long hallway leading to the garden library doors, just as you came in the 32^nd street entrance, where they are exhibited today. Betty would have supervised all of that, anything having to do with the – ah, the garden – oh, but not the gardens themselves. That was a totally different operation. There was a gardener on staff and of course a large staff of gardeners, and he had charge of the gardens. He might have used the library, although I rather doubt it. But, by then those were two entirely separate departments, and that’s where the Beatrix Farrand Plant Book comes in.

VKM: Can you talk about any changes that took place in 1980 when Diane McGuire took over while Betty was on sabbatical?

LF: Yes, and that’s exactly where the plant book comes in, and – Diane McGuire was a landscape designer, landscape architect. She was not an academic. She was a hands-on designer and gardener. She was also an ardent feminist. Feminist – Feminism as a movement was really blossoming just about that time. There were a lot of women in the landscape architect profession interested in the history of women in the profession, and Beatrix Farrand was the first. She had been, I don’t know, should I talk about her background; who she was?

VKM: Beatrix Farrand? Sure.

LF: Yes, Beatrix Farrand.

VKM: I’d be curious to know how much was, you know, common awareness, when because –

LF: No, I mean this, the original research, or most of the major research on Beatrix Farrand was done here at Dumbarton Oaks, and subsequent to the symposium – colloquium. I keep calling it symposium. Sorry about that.

VKM: I get them mixed up too.

LF: Correct the record, please – colloquium. Diane came in. I can’t remember whether she came as a fellow or exactly what. I don’t remember the order in which she was actually employed here. But Diane’s interest was in the Dumbarton Oaks gardens and in Beatrix Farrand, who had designed the Dumbarton Oaks gardens. Beatrix Farrand was a very, very interesting person. She was the first major female landscape architect in this country. She came from a very prominent old New York family. She was Beatrix Jones Farrand and the “Jones” was always part of her signature. The Joneses in New York were the sort of family that looked down on the Astors as nouveau-riche. Beatrix’s father was a Jones of that family. His name was something Cadwalader Jones. These were all New York Dutch and English names. Her mother was an interesting person in her own right. Henry James was one of her mother’s closest friends. She had a kind of salon in New York. The parents separated when Beatrix was twelve, and I think that may have had something to do with Beatrix’s independence of mind, growing up with a mother who didn’t have a lot of money anymore. She had enough to live on properly in New York. But she grew up sort of in that salon, meeting a lot of very interesting people. In the Beatrix Jones Colloquium – there it is – there is a biographical section on Beatrix, and it talks about her background. She – now we’re talking now about the 1880s, ‘90s – she may have been born earlier; I don’t remember the birth date. But like girls of her societal rank, she was homeschooled. She never went to college. But growing up in her mother’s salon, she was well-read. She must have been a good listener, I think. She was certainly brought up with all of the manners that would be required to deal with high society, wherever she went. And I think I failed to mention that her father’s sister was Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton was also well-connected and was also, as you may know if you’ve read any of her history, a very independently-minded woman. She took a great interest in her niece, who was considerably younger, and they were always very close, and indeed Farrand was her executor, after Edith Wharton’s death. At some point, long after the father had left – Beatrix must have been in her late teens – I think I remember reading somewhere that she actually had a coming-out party, which I’m not sure of. I may be wrong about that. But anyway, at some point she was sent, and I made a note here, she was introduced to Charles Sprague Sargent, who was a horticulturist and was at that point the either coming or already director of the Arnold Arboretum in – outside Boston. She was sent up to study with him, to apprentice – although they probably would not use such a low-class term. But she was sent up to work with him, and he took a great interest in her, and she apparently fell in love with plants and planting and really took a great interest in it and was a prized student of his. But at some point, probably under her aunt’s influence, instead of following Sargent, who was basically a horticulturist – he was interested in how plants worked, in naming plants, in the relationships of plants and plantings in a kind of wild landscape. Meanwhile Beatrix had done some traveling, mostly in Italy, where Wharton was living, and had been introduced by her aunt, who was interested in interior decoration and garden design, to the great Italian gardens, and at that point, I think, Beatrix realized that what she wanted to be was a designer of gardens, not a horticulturist. She began her career and was the first female member of the American – I think it’s called – the American Society of Landscape Architects. She was the one woman accepted by all these men, who were designing gardens in those days, like Fredrick Law Olmsted and a number of others whose names just escape me at the moment. But anyway, they invited her to join them in founding this society. So, Diane, who was very interested in gardens, as a designer was also interested in Beatrix Farrand’s history. She came here, I think she may have been assigned, and I’m not sure of this, it would have to be checked. She may have been sent down by Harvard to work with the gardener because in 1970 or before, she was familiar with Beatrix Farrand’s Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks. The Plant Book had been requested, I think, and it’s somewhere here in these books, but I’m not going to look for it now. It’s in the introduction to the Plant Book. I believe Mrs. Bliss, at the time Dumbarton Oaks went over to Harvard –

VKM: I read the introduction. I think it was William Tyler, maybe, who asked her to write up –

LF: Maybe it was Tyler –

VKM: – all the plants she had in the garden

LF: Right. He asked her, probably employed her, to go through section by section of the gardens explaining what her vision had been for that particular garden; how it related to the house, and then list the plants that she had proposed, because even by 1940 some changes had been made, during the war I’m sure the gardens had been neglected – everything else in this country had been neglected. Those were hard times. They wanted a record which hadn’t been here when she could come annually and oversee and work with Mrs. Bliss on the gardens and work with the gardener. And at that point she had prepared a plant book, which existed in manuscript and manuscript only. Diane, working with it and working with the gardeners here, realized that it was a valuable document, and she was very eager to have it published. And she – I guess she must have persuaded Betty to hire me to help her bring out that manuscript, because Diane wasn’t used to writing a lot and this was a pretty – what should I say – Farrand wasn’t a writer. I mean, Farrand gave directions usually orally, or notes, and this was not something that was ready for publication. So, it was much more substantial from my point of view. I really worked on the text, and then Diane taught me, bless her, to identify the – and not just identify – but correct for or research for correctness the plant names and link them up with the popular plant names, because the plant names were give in Latin usually. Sometimes in the text they would be in popular form, and to know the relationship and be sure that it was accurately depicted was a big part of the job, which I really enjoyed. I learned a lot from that particular – I learned from all the assignments – but I learned a great deal about gardening from that one. And then, I would – I can’t remember exactly the dates of Diane’s coming in and substituting for Betty, but Diane also took responsibility for the colloquium on Beatrix Farrand, and I worked very closely with her on that. And, indeed, I think I am given credit on the title page of that one. We had a good time. Well I met her friends and by then I was really interested in Farrand, so I really – I loved doing that book. I subsequently visited as many gardens of hers as I could, and it turned out that she had been the original landscape designer for the University of Chicago, where I had gone to school – something I had never known. But Diane was here and while she was working on the colloquium, she had – she was very very keen to see the gardens returned to the state that Farrand had left them – that they had been on Farrand’s last visit. She wanted them returned to where they had been designed. Well, over the years there’ve been many different gardeners, many changes made, that beautiful Italian pool, reflecting pool, had been added. Diane always said that Farrand would have been very upset to have seen that happen. But, and of course that could not be removed at that point. But, Farrand had – Farrand – well first of all there was no air conditioning when Dumbarton Oaks was built. There was no such thing as an air conditioned interior. This house was designed for – to be lived in and entertained in by the Blisses in the spring and the fall. They would take residence here in those seasons and do a lot of entertaining, and the gardens, as envisioned by Farrand, were an addition to the house in which entertaining would take place. So, as you may have noticed, as they move away from the house, they get more and more wild, but near the house they are quite formal, almost like rooms. And I’m sure tables would have been set up and entertaining would have been done in many of those rooms, and Diane was very conscious of that, made me conscious of it, and, I think, tried to make the gardeners increasingly conscious of that, and tried to bring the landscape as much as possible back to where they had been. I don’t know how the gardener at that point felt about Diane. I’m sure there were conflicts. I don’t know if Giles Constable is still around, but if there were conflicts, he would be able to tell you about those. Diane would sometimes grumble. The gardener was never anything but nice to me, but I hadn’t of course – there were – Harvard was paying for all of this and I don’t know how Harvard felt about it all, but if Diane had had her way and unlimited funds, the gardens would have been returned to Farrand’s plan, and were returned to a certain degree, I have no doubt. I can’t tell you specifically how much. But and – again that was what 19 – she was here in ’80 –

VKM: 1980,  ’80, ’81?

LF: The book came out in ’82, with again the same process of reading it, the proofs and all of that. But what – it’s thirty years – the gardens today – I would have to go through these gardens with the plant book to tell you whether they still reflect Farrand’s plan or not. I imagine they do, fairly close up. I know that the number of major trees that were fundamental to her plan, that had been preserved from the eighteenth century, maybe early nineteenth century, and on which she had focused various views came down in various storms over the years, subsequent to this work. And I hope that they have been replaced at least by the same kind of tree. But, they can’t possibly be at the same height and majesty that they were when Dumbarton Oaks was at its height, in the Blisses’ days. But I imagine that the gardeners have worked with the plant book now that it is published and have probably followed as much as possible the plan. Anyway, the Beatrix Farrand colloquium was the last book that I edited here at Dumbarton Oaks. Yes, very shortly after that, I think – well I was told – whether I was fired for cause, whether I was fired because there wasn’t any money anymore, I don’t know. I was told the latter.

VKM: I think they were a little short on funds.

LF: Simply that they were short of funds, that they were no longer – that they no longer had funds to pay for editing these things. They were going to hold the authors responsible for seeing that their text was clean, and I suppose Betty must have read the proofs after those years, and I’ve never looked at them to see if I felt they needed editing. But my formal connection with Dumbarton Oaks ended at that point. I should say that I went on to do some work with Betty, with Diane, who edited a book called – or was instrumental in putting out a book called Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes, which has a big section, as you can imagine, on Dumbarton Oaks, and I edited that book when it came out in 1985. So that is really my last formal connection. Anything else you want to ask me?

VKM: Did you say that there was the Beatrix Farrand Colloquium? Did you attend it?

LF: Oh yes, of course. I attended all the colloquiums that I edited except Persian Gardens, which – I was young. It was the year – actually it was just the year before I came to Washington. But I attended all three colloquiums that I edited. That was always very pleasant. It meant – people would come from all over the country. They all were delighted to see one another because there aren’t that many people – professors – interested in landscape architecture. It’s still – I imagine it’s still a fairly small group and they know one another, and they were thrilled to come. We would have lunch in the gardens, a boxed lunch of some kind, and there were cocktail parties and the papers obviously were delivered, and then there would be question and answer sessions, and that was one reason why the authors went back following the colloquium because often points were raised that they wanted to elaborate on. So, it was a genuinely scholarly meeting and – but it was lovely. Usually your scholarly meetings are at universities in the basement of the library, and to come to Dumbarton Oaks was a very special treat.

VKM: This is maybe a strange question, but you mentioned that Diane McGuire was still very feminist, and there were – I mean, I’ve noticed that there’re a lot of women who worked in garden and landscape studies here, but not so many of the junior fellows were women. It was very male dominated in the records. Did you ever get a feeling that –

LF: The world was male dominated until about 19 – let’s face it, today women still get paid less, not at universities, I am happy to say, but I have watched a tremendous change in the way women are regarded in the world. Let’s face it, Beatrix Farrand would not have been the success she was without her social background. A lot of the women who pushed in the early days – women writers. You know, George Eliot was not that woman’s name. The Brontë sisters had to publish – one of them, I think, published under a man’s name. Women didn’t do things like that, professionally. Farrand had the advantage of a lot of very good social connections and her early work was paid for by friends of the family, who recognized her talent and who gave her the opportunities to work on their gardens, because she needed to make a living, until she married Max Farrand. But she – she could do that early pioneering work. In art history, generally, and architectural history, I’m sure most of the professors at the universities were male, if you start looking at bibliographies. I suspect that they were not awfully interested in gardening; that it was thought of as a woman’s – something the woman did. The man designed the house; maybe the lady of the house designed the gardens or worked on the gardens. So, I would guess that women probably – and I am really talking off the top of my head here – but probably entered academia working on gardens, before men did. Women might take a degree in art history and then study Italian gardens, which meant you had to do your graduate work in Italy. I’m sure that that’s what took Betty over there. I mean, she loved Italy. But her good friend here, Hank Millon, who ran the National Gallery’s Studies program for years – Hank studied sculpture and not gardens. I’m sure that that’s what attracted a lot of women to the profession, and over the years of these colloquiums, when you got distinguished professors, distinguished academics, there would have been more women in this profession than men. Now, I think younger men probably don’t even think twice about it. They don’t think of it as a woman’s profession, which would mean that there would be more fellows today – male – more than thirty years ago.

VKM: You mentioned that you used to attend events here, even before you worked here. Was there – did you do a lot of socializing with people who had worked here at Dumbarton Oaks?

LF: Not a lot. My husband was, in those years, curator of prints and then Chief of the Prints and Photographs division at the Library of Congress. I’m trying to think how we met Mr. Tyler, whether he did research over there, whether we met here. The art world here was much smaller in those days, than it is today. Many museums didn’t exist. My husband ended his career as Director of the Portrait Gallery. There was no such thing until the Johnson administration, until the late ‘60s. I remember meeting Tyler and being invited here to concerts by him. But I don’t remember the particulars of how it happened. It probably happened through my husband. So, I didn’t pay attention. We subscribed at one point to the concert series here, and that was lovely. It would be held in the music room, and would spill out at intermission onto the terrace in the gardens, and that was very special. What I honestly don’t remember is whether that was before or after I worked here. So, I’d have to check in your records as to when the concert series began.

VKM: You know, I actually don’t know.

LF: It was an invitational. You had to wangle an invitation to subscribe, and I imagine Mr. Tyler arranged that for us. And it may have been at one of those concerts that I met Mrs. Bliss. It’s very possible because I don’t remember her coming to any of these colloquia. But I honestly can’t tell you.

VKM: I think the colloquia started after she died, so –

LF: Very possible, yes.

VKM: This is maybe a funny question, but someone mentioned that Dumbarton Oaks used to be a part of the diplomatic social scene.

LF: Oh, of course!

VKM: Was that still going on while –

LF: I mean, after all, it was built by a wealthy diplomat, and in those days diplomacy was very different. At the highest levels of the diplomatic posts, and still to a certain extent – but in those days the posts were filled by people not only with money, but with social connections; good family from usually the east coast. Today, because so much of the entertaining has to be paid for by the ambassador, the government has very small budgets, they’ll pick wealthy people who made their own money. But in those days, it was old family, and the diplomatic community was very socially elite. I would say a lot of diplomats lived in Georgetown. Georgetown was the place to live if you had social connections, when we moved here in 1961. It still is to a certain extent, although there’s – it’s diversified a lot, as the whole world has diversified. But I’m sure that when the Blisses’ entertained personally, a great part of their – a great many of their friends would have served in diplomatic posts, not just as ambassadors, but as chiefs of mission. Many would be ambassadors coming to this country from countries where Mr. Bliss had – where Ambassador Bliss had served. I’m sure he kept up his connections abroad. He would have welcomed new ambassadors. I can’t remember now where he served. But there had to be Latin American ones because that is where he developed his interest in the pre-Columbian part. I didn’t do my homework on the Blisses. But oh yes, I mean it would have been a center for entertaining in the diplomatic community. You could probably check that out just looking at the social pages of the Washington Post during the Bliss years. I’m sure those pages – those parties were covered, probably with guest lists, at least of the most important guests

VKM: Did they still have parties and stuff in the ‘70s when it was just a Harvard institution?

LF: Well, the parties would be in conjunction with the colloquia. I can’t tell you about the Byzantine and the pre-Columbian. Have you spoken with Betty Benson?

VKM: I’m mostly doing garden and landscape. But, I believe someone has.

LF: That’s good. I’m sure that they had parties. As I say, there was the whole entertaining in conjunction with the concerts. I think the director entertained. I would not be surprised if the director entertained Harvard graduates. And I’m sure it was – you know you entertain to raise money, let’s face it. Dumbarton Oaks was, as I understood it – if it couldn’t raise its own, enough money to run it, it was going to revert entirely to Harvard and folded into Harvard. The collections would be folded into the Harvard collections. For all I know, the building would be sold, the building and gardens. I don’t know that. I have not read the documents. But it was always my understanding that Dumbarton Oaks had to stand on its own two feet in terms of budget.

VKM: Yes, I mean –

LF: And believe me, maintaining these gardens costs a lot of money. And the endowment in those days – and it’s even like the Phillips today. I’m sure when Mr. Phillips left his money to the Phillips Collection, he thought that that would ground it in perpetuity. But inflation has been such that those early endowments just do not cover, and I am sure that Giles Constable had to raise money for Dumbarton Oaks, and there would have been parties entertaining people who wanted to support the house and gardens, in those years. And once Mrs. Bliss was dead and Harvard owned the collection – Harvard administered, they didn’t own but they administered Dumbarton Oaks. I would guess that the guest list would change considerably.

VKM: Did you – I don’t know the exact financial details of how Harvard related to Dumbarton Oaks, but did you get a sense of how people here felt about the threat of Harvard maybe taking –

LF: They were all aware of it, because that is where I heard about it – I would have no reason. You know, they paid me; I think the biggest job was $5,000, and mostly it was considerably less than that. Of course, when I was told that they were letting me go or that they couldn’t employ me anymore, they didn’t fire me, they just said next year we’re not going to have an editor, and as far as I knew, they didn’t. It was made clear to me that that was because they were strapped financially. I mean, not strapped – that’s probably much too strong a word. But, they were having to watch their expenditures more than they had in previous years. Whether – I don’t think that Betty MacDougall ever felt that she would lose her job. It may have affected her travel budget. That I don’t know. She never spoke to me about that. She did travel. By the time – well we kept up our relationship until she died. But in the ‘80s, ‘90s she was on a number of UNESCO panels and international panels, and I’m sure that paid for much of her travel in those years. If she was still at Dumbarton Oaks when that happened, they were probably thrilled that somebody else was picking up the tab. But I don’t know. She never spoke to me about feeling that she’d lose her job. But I know that there was a consciousness among the department heads, at least. And it may have happened that they may have had to have fewer and fewer fellows. There was entertaining incidentally for the fellows. Fellows all got free lunches. I don’t know if they still do. The fellows – there were parties for the fellows. It was a very congenial situation, almost like a small college at Oxford, and Tyler was, I’m sure, very eager to keep it that way, which was great because they would all go from here out to colleges and universities all around the country and they’d still know each other from their fellows days. And I’m sure that it was instrumental in making the history of landscape architecture a true profession and in spreading it from east coast schools to universities all around the country. That kind of collegiality is another of the contributions of Dumbarton Oaks.

VKM: So, I have a list of the people who were on the Senior Fellows Committee. I don’t know if you would have known any of them – but, Joseph Alsop, David Coffin, Howard Adams –

LF: Howard, I knew. Alsop, I knew to shake his hand. My husband knew him better because he was involved with the Portrait Gallery. Howard, Adams I knew. Howard was at that point at the National Gallery, I think. I think he was assistant director under Carter, but I – he may have just been heading the education department. I don’t remember exactly. Howard Adams was an Adams of the Adams family. He was a descendant. I can’t tell you exactly how, but his genealogy went way back in American history, and he was very proud of that. He was a really nice guy, and maybe he was the first director of the – no I can’t think what it’s called – Mr. Millon’s program at the National Gallery that brings in fellows and professors, distinguished professors, and it’s got an acronym –

VKM: CASVA.

LF: CASVA, CASVA. Howard may have been involved, if not as first director, in helping to set that up. But I’m not sure. But he would certainly have been – he was a good friend of Betty’s. They were buddies. And I think he’s still alive. You might talk to him about Betty.

VKM: He’s still alive. That was the first interview I read.

LF: Oh, you did.

VKM: That’s how I knew to get in touch with you.

LF: Oh, okay, yes. They were maybe college friends. They went back.

VKM: Did you –

LF: Who else was on the list?

VKM: Peter Hornbeck, Judith Colton, Allen Tate, Wilhelmina Jashemski.

LF: Allen Tate, I knew, but not from this connection. I sailed to Europe with Allen Tate on the Liberte. In 1961 my husband and I – and oh he was fun. He was fun when he was drunk. Don’t – but that should not go in the record. But he loved his – was it a gin? – there was something. And his wife at that time was a niece of – I can’t think of the name. She has a – her house is a gallery in Boston, beside the museum. It’ll come to me in a minute.

VKM: The Gardner Museum?

LF: The Gardner Museum! Isabella Gardner. Thank you, thank you

VKM: It’s a beautiful museum.

LF: And his wife was a niece of Isabella’s.

VKM: Really?

LF: And it – oh they – wonderful stories to tell. But we – a seven day crossing, and we would sit around and drink on the crossing, and that – that was a joy. And he took us up to Forenza. He really knew Italy, and from Florence, he gave us a guided tour of Forenza, which was a day I’ll never forget. And he loved gardens, so I can understand why he was on that committee. But as I say, I had nothing to do with him here at Dumbarton Oaks. It was just a lucky accident.

VKM: It’s still nice to know.

LF: And, of course, I read his poetry. But, we all – in those days he was a really famous poet.

VKM: Did you ever get to meet Wilhelmina Jashemski? Because she –

LF: Yes, I mean I’ve heard –

VKM: – she died before we could – before the project started.

LF: She lived out in Silver Spring. And I was – when I was working on her essay, I had to go to the house once or twice to check things out with her. Very gracious lady! Lovely person. I know Betty was very fond of her. She, if I remember correctly – and now I’m trying to remember her paper, that was just about the time that the horticulturists were discovering that they could – as they were digging up seeds – that they could identify the seeds that were used in Roman gardens, and I think that appears in her paper.

VKM: She did, I think, the gardens of Pompeii.

LF: Yes, oh yes, of course. Those would have been very much buried, and she was able to, you know, tell us what was actually planted in those gardens. So, she had a certain scientific background as well. She was – she really – but, you know, I met her a few times. She was always lovely to me. I heard her deliver her paper. I’m glad you reminded me that that was in it. But, I can’t tell you much about her otherwise.

VKM: Well, I think that’s – do you have any memories of Dumbarton Oaks that are particularly prominent or that you think that we should know about?

LF: Two – well one being Betty – and I’ll talk about her in a minute. The other being – as I mentioned, the garden library was in this west wing, and the research part of the library, as opposed to the rare books, was down in the basement, and there was no elevator. Prominent on the landscape architecture scene in Washington was a man named Charlie McLaughlin. His widow is still living in Chevy Chase. Both Charlie and his wife Ann had been victims of polio, I guess in their teens, and Charlie was paralyzed from, I guess, the hip down. He had no use of his legs at all. Charlie was a great expert on Fredrick Law Olmsted and his gardens. Indeed Charlie was one of the team that was editing the Olmsted papers, which of course are scattered all over the country. And they were editing and publishing the Olmsted papers, and they were based here in Washington, and Charlie’s office was here in Washington, and from time to time he would come to use the library here at Dumbarton Oaks, which was down in the basement, and there was no elevator. And I would watch in horror as Charlie would get up and tighten the braces on his legs and then work himself backwards down the spiral staircase, hanging on to the armrest going arm by arm. It was like you’d go down a rope, if you were going down a fire escape. He would work his way down to the library, where Laura Byers by that time would have brought down his crutches and he could get around. So, that is one of my great visual recollections of Dumbarton Oaks. And the other of course is working with Betty, who was wonderful fun, and very learned, and always willing to share her knowledge, and a good-time-Charlie. She came from Texas. She was not an eastern socialite, although she had gone to Vassar, I think. I believe she’s a Vassar graduate, and then I guess she did her – I think I remember that she did her graduate work at Harvard. But she was a good Texas – I don’t know- she spoke her mind as you would in Texas. And then she was a lot of fun – she was good – lots of fun at parties. I always loved to – she came to dinner a lot. She had been coming to dinner before she hired me, and the Lowrys were good friends, and we used to have a good time together, and we visited her well after her retirement. Up in Vermont she had a country place. It was – we had a good time there. So, I have only fond recollections of Betty. She was a hard worker, and I think very highly respected in her profession. She must have been to get on all those UNESCO panels, and I think she did a lot of good things for Dumbarton Oaks, at least to my mind. She had one daughter down in Texas, and the daughter died before Betty did, which was rather sad. Betty had been divorced – never heard her speak about her husband. And she moved up to Cambridge, where she lived in the winter. She had an apartment. I don’t think I ever saw her apartment there. I knew the building it was in. Bates pointed it out, and she and Bates Lowry were good friends too. I think she died before he did. I can’t remember. That generation is pretty much gone. Not Betty Benson – she’s still around. But there aren’t a lot of people. I guess, if you had to come to me with my short years, there can’t be a lot of people who remember.

VKM: Well, you’ve been really really informative, so –

LF: I hope so. Talking to people, I know, gives you a kind of view that you can’t get from reading the record.

VKM: Yes.

LF: And if any other questions occur to you, feel free to call me.

VKM: Thank you so much!

LF: Are you going to transcribe this? Or does it –?

VKM: Yes.

LF: Well, if questions occur –

VKM: Okay. Thank you very much.

EG: Elizabeth Gettinger.

AS: And Anne Steptoe.

JNSL: We have the honor today of interviewing James Carder. We are here at Dumbarton Oaks to speak with the Archivist. Do you guys want to start with a question?

EG: Sure. So, I guess just a sort of start up question – we see that you were a Junior Fellow here in the '70s?

JNC: Yes, I was.

EG: And so we wanted to hear how you first got involved with Dumbarton Oaks and what your initial impressions were.

JNC: I actually first got involved very modestly when I was an undergraduate. I was working on an excavation in Yugoslavia at the Palace of the emperor Diocletian and wanted to read an eighteenth-century description of the palace by Robert Adam, a rare volume of which the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine library had a copy. And I somewhat naively came to Washington to work in the library as an undergraduate and learned – then as now – that undergraduates don't have easy entree, but I did manage to get a photocopy of that book sent to me, which was otherwise hard to come by. I was on a Ford Foundation Archaeological Traineeship Grant, so there was money for doing that sort of thing. So, that was my first introduction in the later '60s, and then when I went to graduate school I applied for a Junior Fellowship and received it, as you said. It was a two-year – it turned into a two-year fellowship at that time and I finished my dissertation at Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: So, what was the fellowship program like when you first arrived here?

JNC: It was, I think, pretty much the same as it is today in many important aspects. Like today there were more Byzantine Fellows than Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Architecture Fellows. One difference that I remember, and I think it might have been both a difference of chance and possibly a difference of design, was that there were more art historians in the mix of Fellows than there has been in subsequent periods. There were easily five if not six art historians in my group, which made for a very nice situation in terms of getting intellectual stimulation from your peers. Ioli Kalavrezou was a Junior Fellow as was Ruth Kolarik and Jeffrey Andrews and Kathleen Shelton. And Rob Nelson was a Junior Fellow in my second year. And besides that, Otto Demus and Hugo Buchthal and Carlo Bertelli were Fellows, and Ernst Kitzinger came occasionally from Harvard. And, of course, Bill Loerke was Director of Studies, so there were a lot of Byzantine and Early Christian art historians around. The other thing that I remember very much about my fellowship years was that there was a great camaraderie, and the Fellows themselves organized parties and all sorts of events, sometimes costume parties, where, for example, at Seka Allen’s home, we put on elaborate silk and brocade clothes and masqueraded as some historical figure, real or imagined!

JNSL: What did you dress up like?

JNC: I think I was an emperor. It wasn't very – my costume wasn’t particularly successful, as I remember, but I tried. Many of the staff, including Sue Boyd, who was assistant or associate Byzantine curator at the time, as well as Seka Allen – Jelisaveta Allen – a research librarian – were very conscientious in inviting Fellows to their houses or otherwise organizing events for them. There was a real spirit of being part of a group that was well taken care of.

AS: Did this social camaraderie extend between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian fellows, or was it more of a Byzantine community?

JNC: It did extend among all of the Fellows. I believe – and I really should check the archival record on this – that there couldn't have been more than two Pre-Columbian Fellows and maybe only two Landscape fellows, or possibly only one. The numbers in those junior programs – junior in the sense that they came later in the institutional chronology than the Byzantine Studies program – and really only began having Fellows in the early ‘70s. I remember Frank Alvarez in Garden and Landscape and Peter Joralemon in Pre-Columbian. But even though there were only three or four non-Byzantine Fellows, I think they were always included in the parties. Then occasionally there were Byzantine-specific activities, such as an exhibition at the Walters or something like that – then it was just the Byzantine group that went.

EG: How did you find the atmosphere here academically; was it an easy place to work on your dissertation? What resources were of the most value?

JNC: It was a dream. I didn't have too much to compare it to, though I'd had a Fulbright the year before I came here in Germany, and I was using primary material libraries in Wolfenbüttel and elsewhere and not necessarily so much using secondary resources. But I had that as a benchmark. But here, even before I came, I received communications asking what microfilms or -fiches I might need that I would be expecting to work on as they wanted to check whether they had them or not. And if they didn't have them, they'd do what they could to get them, which I just found wonderful and remarkable. I don't think I ever needed a secondary resource, a book or whatever, that they didn't have or couldn't get. And at that time there was a liaison person to the Library of Congress, and he had the wherewithal to make a weekly trip to the Library of Congress and bring back materials that Fellows and others had requested. I don't think that program lasted much longer, but it certainly was in effect the two years I was here and that, of course, just doubled the possibilities of doing research. So, I thought the resources at Dumbarton Oaks were terrific, as I believe people continue to think to this day.

AS: Were there any academic mentors that you met and became close with during those two years?

JNC: Yes. As you probably know from the history of Dumbarton Oaks, there actually were, in the early period, faculty members – permanent faculty members – here, and that was just being dissolved, in a way. But Ernst Kitzinger was still here – or at least occasionally – when I was a Junior Fellow. Although he was frankly more in Cambridge than at Dumbarton Oaks, though he did come to Dumbarton Oaks for several months and, so, he did have a presence. And he and I discussed many aspects of my dissertation. Hugo Buchthal, I don't think, had a professorship but he had an appointment of some sort while I was here, and he was invaluable. And then people like Kurt Weitzmann would come around, and he had asked me to write some catalogue entries for the “Age of Spirituality” exhibition that he was planning for the Met, so we knew each other in a way, and his advice was great. But I also think that my peers were terrific. We did the same thing that's done today, we gave progress reports on our dissertation topics or our research topics depending on our level. And it wasn't pro forma; people thought about them and critiqued them, and if there was some tangent that perhaps the speaker hadn't considered, someone in the group might say you should look at this book or you should consider this primary source of some ancient author and see what they have to say. I found it invaluable.

AS: How often did those occur?

JNC: Those research reports? I think on average once a week, as they do now, scattered throughout the academic term – followed incidentally by a sherry hour. There was also sherry served before lunch on Tuesdays, I think it was. I think Jan has now revived this and has it at his house, but that apparently was a tradition that Mildred Bliss had inaugurated before her death in 1969, and I don't know if it had continued unabated until my tenure here in the mid-'70s, but I think it then sort of fell off the board soon thereafter.

JNSL: Did you ever hear any anecdotes from the older, say, the older Fellows or older scholars about Dumbarton Oaks while you were here as a Junior Fellow or any stories about some of the early days that caught your ear or that stand out in your memory?

JNC: I didn't – I don't remember much, if I did, and so consequently I think I didn't. I heard innumerable times the story about climbing over the perimeter walls to swim illegally in the swimming pool. I must have heard that fifty times from fifty different people or people reporting on their best friends who had come over the wall at night to swim, and otherwise I don't remember anything either boring or juicy. I'm not sure how much I was really aware, too, of the institution and its institutional history. I don't know how much I was aware of the Blisses, although I did meet Jack Thacher who was still alive at the time. I had a friend at the Carnegie Museum of Art, David Owsley, a curator, who knew Jack Thacher, apparently fairly well, and he suggested, since he knew I was coming as a Junior Fellow, that I – that Jack Thacher invite me over for tea or something, which he did. He talked about the Blisses, and I remember now that you mention it, thinking that I should somehow know more about the Blisses. It's too bad I don't have a time machine and could go back, as I know a great deal more now. But he talked about Mildred Bliss at this tea.

JNSL: And how did you come into your current position today? What was the story behind that journey?

JNC: When I finished my dissertation and left Dumbarton Oaks, I started as an assistant professor, first at Case Western Reserve University while someone was on sabbatical, and then I came back to Washington where I was at Mount Vernon College and then at George Washington University at the Mount Vernon Campus. And in 1989, I received notification from Sue Boyd that there was a notice of a job position – but it was a part time job position – at Dumbarton Oaks for someone to advise on the objects that are now formally known as the House Collection. Apparently, the president of Harvard University had received some letters questioning whether some objects were in the best care, and the president had written to then director Angeliki Laiou, asking if there was curatorial responsibility for these prints and drawings that were hanging on walls and that sort of thing. And so she realized in a way that there wasn't – there was a Byzantine curator and a Pre-Columbian curator and so forth, but the so-called House Collection was not particularly well situated in anyone's sight lines. So, I interviewed with her and was offered this job, and the first element of it was to do an assessment, a condition assessment of things – especially things of value – and things that were possibly in harm's way. And I did that, and while I was doing that assessment I was also trying to get any information on these objects, because there were no dossier files and, really, no sort of curatorial management for this part of the Collection – the House Collection, as we know it today. So, I was bothering people asking where invoices might be kept or where conservation reports might be kept, and so forth. And that caught Angeliki Laiou's attention. So, she asked me to start putting together a complete dossier for the House Collection. You can see the snowball moving down the hill here!

EG: When was that?

JNC: This started in '89, as an advisor; and I became a staff member in ’92. So, I was here during her entire tenure. When Ned Keenan came, early on he talked to me and said that he wanted to revisit the new library project and even revisit it situated under the North Vista – that very controversial location where it had started out in the 1970s. He said, “I need to find all the plans and all of the correspondence and documents from the '70s to see where things were left off.” And so he went around looking for them, and of course there was no Archives at the time and things were where you might least likely think they should be. But since I had also taken this route trying to put together things for the House Collection dossiers and had literally looked in the attic and in the basement and in people's file drawers – really just any place – I had something of an unwritten road map of where things were. So, I was actually able to put my hands on these drawings which I knew to be rolled and stored under this building in not the best of circumstances, and I also was able to put my hands on the correspondence files. But there was no logic to it, and they were in cardboard boxes, and I think they were labeled but there wasn't any reason to know that they were there. So he was both horrified – Ned Keenan was – and relieved, and he said, “Would you be willing to take on the reorganization of the archives in much the same way as you took on the dossier building of the House Collection?” And I said, “Yes.” So, that's how I came to be House Collection Manager and then later Archivist.

EG: So, what were some of the goals of the archives project and what was the organization of it?

JNC: The mission of the Dumbarton Oaks Archives is to retain and conserve in perpetuity any item that is of importance to the institutional history of Dumbarton Oaks. And that, of course, can be interpreted broadly or narrowly, and a caveat to that is to understand the physical limitations of space, at least in terms of hard copy or hard object storage. So, not every scrap of paper that happens to have survived is fair game for the Archives because it would overwhelm the real estate. So, the first objective was to find out what was still around that really was critical to retain and, if it was in deteriorating condition, what to do to make an analog copy of it somehow to keep its shelf-life going. Then, to find a way to organize it so that it could be easily accessed by people who would want to see this material in the future, and to weed out things – but not capriciously – weed out things that shouldn't be saved. And so I spent the first two years of my life as an archivist just interviewing people in their offices and seeing and telling them that I thought that it was very fair game if they were actively using files or materials that these files should continue to reside with them, as that was a very good use of institutional space and resources. But, if they had things that were just clogging their file cabinets that they themselves felt should be retained for the institutional memory, these should come to the Archives. And so, things began to flow in, and it was greatly interesting to me to make coherency out of all these disparate files and images and objects. And the system I devised now can be added to very easily. For example, when Alice-Mary Talbot retired recently – although she had been a very faithful contributor to the Archives – she did one final sweep of her office files and took things out that she didn't think Margaret Mullett would necessarily need and sent them down to the Archives, and that's how it's grown. And it works pretty well, as I think you can attest because you've been using files from the Archives.

AS: What role do you see the Archives playing at DO?

JNC: It has an absolutely critical role in that we've never written either a periodic history, other than the annual reports or biannual reports, or an official history of the institution. There are a number of history-like discussions – the Pre-Columbian Studies program has a good one and so forth. But, there's a lot of very important institutional activity from the past that hasn’t been chronicled in a historical narrative, but it is captured in the correspondence and in the interim reports to the president of Harvard University and so forth, and this material sits waiting for someone to rediscover it. And this material really informs us as to what happened and what people thought they were doing and how they went about their business as they defined it at the time. And it shows that there were mistakes and how people learned from them and how the institution moved on. I think every institution needs an archives and it should use its archives to find out who it was. Here we also use the Archives to check when scholars propose things to us – either fellowship applications or research proposals or what have you. We can go back and see what they've done for the institution before, what we have on file. It's not always complete, but it’s very useful. And unfortunately when a scholar dies we often use the preserved archival material for writing an obituary, because sometimes we're the institution that has the best knowledge of the contribution that that particular scholar has made to the field of Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or Garden and Landscape Studies

JNSL: Could you perhaps comment on the uniqueness of Dumbarton Oaks in terms of an institution and what its mission is – both the museum and the professional library, the fellowship program, and its sort of general position here in Washington?

JNC: In a certain sense, Dumbarton Oaks is not unique, in that it's a research institute. There are many research institutes, and they tend to have all of the same phenomena: they have libraries, they occasionally have collections that support the focus of the research, they have a fellowship apparatus, and so forth. But Dumbarton Oaks is, to a degree, unique, and part of its uniqueness is the mandate of its founders, the Blisses. They wanted the institute Dumbarton Oaks to be in Washington, D.C., and although it was to be administered in many ways through Harvard University, they did not want it at Harvard, and during their lifetime they were very clear on that point. They thought things that happened at Harvard were perfectly wonderful and that the student body and the faculty interaction with the student body and all of these good things were what a university of great standing such as Harvard should have. But, for them Dumbarton Oaks was something other, it was, in a way, a retreat, and although they wouldn't have used and didn't use the term “ivory tower,” in a way it was just that. Dumbarton Oaks was something other than an urban campus, it was sixteen acres of beautiful gardens, it had an ambiance of sophistication and, to a degree, elegance in the architecture and appointments of that architecture. It allowed people the breathing space and the environment in which to be reflective in their studies. And then, of course, the studies programs themselves are not your average studies programs. You don't have a choice in Byzantine studies between twenty different research studies programs so that you might apply to them all and choose the best one that responds. If you're a Byzantinist and are going to go to a research institute in America, Dumbarton Oaks' Byzantine studies program is probably the first and, to a degree, only choice, and Pre-Columbian and Garden and Landscape Architecture are very similar. In a way, the narrow foci of this institute ensure its quality and ensure its ability to remain vibrant and relevant. If we did twelve other things from ancient to contemporary abstract expressionist studies programs, we would dilute ourselves. You have to be very wealthy to do that. CASVA is very successful because of its high level of funding and amazing resources. But to be a CASVA you have to be very wealthy and you also have to be very astute at what you collect as research materials and what mix of people you bring together in a far-ranging research institute. So the very small focal nature of Dumbarton Oaks makes it unique, I believe.

EG: Could you speak a little bit about the relationship between the Dumbarton Oaks Archives and the Bliss archives at Harvard which I believe were moved to Harvard in the '80s?

JNC: In 1982, right? In 1982. That was, of course, before my time. I believe from what I've read is that the Blisses themselves had deposited at Dumbarton Oaks a considerable collection of their correspondence and memorabilia. How well organized it was and how topically organized it was I can't say because I know it was completely rethought and re-catalogued at Harvard and wonderfully so. The woman who took that on as a six-year project – I don't believe she was working on it full time necessarily, but I think she was working on it consistently – she did a really remarkable job putting together a first rate finding aid and so forth. Anyway, Dumbarton Oaks had this on its premises, and it had other related things that the Blisses themselves had not accumulated. And the librarians here put this material into folders and boxes because they were, I think and rightfully, concerned about it: one, in terms of making sure that it didn't get lost or misused or thrown out or left to deterioration, and two, they were concerned that they didn't really have the physical room to store it. Until the new library was built, the Main House, as you well know, served as the complete campus with the exception of the Fellows Building, and that really wasn't used for much other than the purpose of feeding and housing Fellows. So, the Main House was really everything: it was library, it was research space, it was meeting space, it was museum space, it was everything, and as Ned Keenan was fond of saying, it was at two hundred percent capacity when he came as director, and that was very true. There were bookshelves in the hallways, and there were often bookshelves in people's closets. And, you know, if you said, “I have 125 linear feet of Blissiana memorabilia, where shall I put it?,” there wasn't an easy answer. So in 1982 under Giles Constable, it was decided that everything sort of pre-1940, the date of the Blisses’ gift of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, would be sent to Harvard which was willing to accept it to establish the Bliss Papers, and that was done. And everything 1940 and after would remain at Dumbarton Oaks. But as I've said, not much was done with this later material until the '90s. It was in boxes and filing cabinets, and I don't think anyone much cared about these archival materials. The problem with the decision was that there is now a segregation: there is a sort of Bliss family, residential pre-1940 group and a Dumbarton Oaks institutional, post-1940 group of documents. So, there is a segregation. But, there is in fact a seamless continuity between these two groups of documents, and anyone who is researching the origin or the early years of Dumbarton Oaks has to use the Bliss Papers at Harvard to get the complete picture. So, it's a little inconvenient. On the other hand, Harvard is a wonderful caretaker and curatorial manager of such things and they're in perfect storage conditions and housings. Although I personally would like to have the Bliss Papers closer to hand, but I don’t think they need to be sent back here. I'm not going to compare them to the Elgin Marbles, because I don't think we would have lost this material, but they're at Harvard and well cared for in a way that perhaps historically Dumbarton Oaks wouldn't have had the physical space or the staff to look after them.

AS: After the Archives, you've had the opportunity to work on a number of publications, lots of cataloging projects. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most memorable projects?

JNC: Yes. I started using the Bliss Papers in order to complete the dossier files for the House Collection, learning, as I just explained, that many of the pre-1940 documents were at Harvard. And since many of the objects that the Blisses acquired that are now at Dumbarton Oaks were acquired before 1940 – in fact the vast majority of them were – much of their dealer correspondence and any other kind of ephemeral reference to an object that might be in the House Collection would be at Harvard rather than here. So, I was able periodically – usually yearly – to get a small budget line item to go to Cambridge and sit in the Archives for a week or so and just call up box after box after box of correspondence and either key-enter it into my laptop or get a Xerox of it and enter it into the dossier system. And that really allowed me to get a much better understanding of where the Blisses came by their Renaissance, Baroque, Western Medieval, Asian, and other collections, the documents for which didn't end up in the Byzantine Collection department because they weren't relevant. As you can imagine, for one good document you read five hundred that are very interesting but aren't relevant, so I also knew to a large degree what else was going on in the Bliss Papers, and I soon realized that there was a player out there in the Blisses' life, Royall Tyler, who was just absolutely instrumental in forming the Blisses’– that is the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. I mean, but for Royall Tyler, I think the collection as we know it today would not exist. And as it happens, the Royall Tyler Papers are also at the Harvard Archives. These are a long series of correspondence between 1902 and 1952 mostly from Royall Tyler to Mildred Bliss. And when I was asked to do some catalog entries and essays for an exhibition in Athens, Georgia – when Byzantine objects and American paintings from the House Collection were asked to go on loan there – I alerted Rob Nelson, then at the University of Chicago, now at Yale University – who had been asked to do the Byzantine Collection essay for that catalog – that he should look at both the Royall Tyler Papers and the Bliss Papers at Harvard. And he did, and it opened his eyes as it had mine, and so we then began to think about how useful this correspondence would be if it could be transcribed, annotated, and published in whatever format – hard copy or perhaps electronically, or both. And so, we wrote up a proposal, and the project was put into the works. And so, now when I go to Harvard, I'm also looking at the Bliss-Tyler correspondence. The correspondence starts in 1902 and ends roughly in 1953, the time of the death of Royall Tyler, and I'm through '35 on it. The '30s is the most voluminous part of the correspondence run, and '35-'39 is still a sizable chunk, but in the '40s and early '50s it drops off, so I'm about eighty percent done with the transcription. I've written an introductory essay to what will be the first chapter, and I've annotated the letters from that first chapter. I'm hoping soon to do the second chapter, and Rob is working on the '20s and '30s material – he's working on the '20s material now. And when the '30s’ correspondence is transcribed, that will chronicle the meaty, Byzantine-centric part of their buying and corresponding. So, we hope in a year and a half time, if that's not too ambitious, to have this at least in a good draft form. It's going to be huge – that's the unfortunate part of it. It's – if you publish every letter, which I think we should, even the ones that say “Thank you very much, it was a delicious meal,” and they occasionally do that, although these are intellectual people who take some time to write what they want the other person to know about life as they see it and art as they know it. I think if we publish it all, it's going to be very lengthy. If it's in hard copy format, it would certainly be two or more volumes, and there's cost implications there. If we publish it electronically, it'll be very usable by people in the future no matter how it ends up, because you can search it – if the spelling is correct, hopefully it will be. And, for example, I was talking with Gudrun – I don't know how anecdotal you want this interview to be, we can scrap this at the end if you like – who was interested in why the Blisses never acquired significant enamels, Byzantine enamels. And I said, “Oh well, you know, they really wanted to and they wrote to Tyler and Tyler to them about getting a significant enamel,” and she said, “Oh, that's very interesting. I'd always wondered if they just didn't like enamels or what.” And I said, “You know, once this document is done, you'll be able to, even in a Word format, type in the word enamel and just graze through their correspondence finding every time the world enamel is mentioned. It'll just be easy to sate your curiosity as to what the Blisses were doing with enamels, or icons, or manuscripts, or Stravinsky, for that matter. It's just going to be much easier to do research on the Blisses, if anyone is interested to do that. So, those were my two primary uses of the Harvard Archives, for the House Collection dossier files and this Bliss-Tyler project. And, in the interim, every time I've found something of interest to me about the Blisses or about Dumbarton Oaks, I've typed it in a document, a so-called chronology, called “master chronology,” that is easily three hundred pages long now in Word format, and is just date, line item, and the source, taken both from primary materials such as the correspondence and secondary materials that tell the life of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks.

EG: Is that something you intend on publishing someday?

JNC: I don't at the moment, although I think a history of Dumbarton Oaks is long overdue. Certainly this chronology will remain at Dumbarton Oaks, and it can be migrated to whatever technology is used in the future.

EG: So, in terms of your role as the manager of the House Collection, could you speak a little bit about what your impressions were of the Blisses' mission in collecting the House Collection and about their acquisitions there?

JNC: Yes. If I could answer it slightly differently, I would say that when I came as a Junior Fellow to Dumbarton Oaks and long thereafter when I talked to people at Dumbarton Oaks or colleagues at Dumbarton Oaks I always had the strong impression that the Blisses collected Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare landscape books and sometimes botanical prints and manuscripts, and that they had a focus of collecting that brought about the collections as they were then displayed. And then they had some household furnishings and some paintings and sculptures, but in a sense just as they had clothing and a wine cellar: these were part of the comme-il-faut nature of being a wealthy resident. Since I have taken on a curatorial role as House Collection manager, I realize that the Blisses were considerably broad in their collecting interests. And we tried to make this point in our first special exhibition, “The Collector's Microbe,” where we talked about how the Blisses not only collected  Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, but also Asian and American and this, that, and the other. And I see my role as House Collection manager not only as a true curatorial position to protect and catalogue the collection as it has come down, but also as an advocacy position to make sure that the Blisses' vision for Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of art, isn't interpreted in as narrow a way as I understood it initially and I think others have understood it. And this is proven, I think, much beyond a shadow of a doubt, when you look at what they collected in the '37 through 1940 period when they knew that they were gifting the property and its collections to Harvard. That's when they bought a Degas and a Riemenschneider and a Rouault and other great paintings and sculptures knowing that they weren't going to ever really live with them, but believing that this “home of the humanities,” the famous phrase that Mildred Bliss uses in the preamble to her will and testament and was used other times in her correspondence, needed to have these great things; that great art inspired great conversation which inspired great research. And the same was true with music. There is absolutely no reason to continue musical offerings at Dumbarton Oaks in a Harvard institutional fellowship arena, because it wasn’t a music research institution. But the Blisses were adamant about that and really hoped Harvard would find the wherewithal to continue some kind of musical programming. And the Friends of Music series, which was inaugurated in 1946, was the result of that. All this they saw as being for the Fellows. The music was for the Fellows. The art was for the Fellows. The garden was for the Fellows. Yes, they eventually were opened to the greater and broader public, but that isn't the Blisses’ initial interest. The uniqueness that we talked about earlier in the Blisses' vision was that this was for scholarship and fellowship enrichment. So, I see that also as part of my job description to try to make the House Collection a little bit more integral to the institutional wealth.

JNSL: What is the most exciting project that you have been a part of in your time at Dumbarton Oaks, of all these wonderful things, the one closest to your heart that brings back the happiest memories?

JNC: Had you not qualified your statement at the end, I'd have given you a couple. But, the most exciting event – clearly and without a doubt – was the planning for and all of the activities that ensued with the building of the new library and the renovation and rehabilitation of the Main House, including the Music Room. This would be the thing that is dearest to my heart and that makes me the happiest. But the whole renovation will stand out in my memory after I leave here as being my most important contribution. That said, it was arduous and it was painful and it was time consuming and often laborious, and I often thought I never, ever wanted to do that sort of thing again. There are the seemingly never-ending meetings over minutia on plans and the inevitable problems that come up when you're planning for new architecture and the renovation of historically significant architecture. But, it really was terrific; I learned enormously from it. I had great colleagues and superiors – Mike Steen, certainly, who was project manager on a consulting basis, and certainly the director Ned Keenan – and working with great architects, I really loved that. The renovation of the Music Room ceiling is probably my fondest part of the project, especially because the results were, to my mind, so stellar, and I worked with great people on that project as well. But the removal of a world class collection from its housing, the incredible amount of detail work of making sure you knew every object's condition and crate housing and shelf storage housing and this and that and then bringing it all back and making new mounts and new vitrines and designing all of that in the interim before it comes back…. Again, I never want to do it again, and probably won't have to, but those are once-in-a-lifetime curatorial opportunities that would probably be distasteful to many who are not curators, but I think are just the meat of what you do when you're in charge of a great collection.

AS: If we could go back a little bit to your curatorship of the House Collection, to what extent have acquisitions been active after the Bliss days?

JNC: The House Collection is not an actively acquiring collection. That said, we do still acquire, although not in the way or to the degree that the Byzantine or Pre-Columbian or rare book collections from the library might collect. They would want to collect great examples of their particular genres, if they can be acquired legally on the marketplace. That is their mission. Their collections are not necessarily static as they were deposited by the Blisses. The House Collection, on the other hand, is. What remains from the House Collection is a kind of finite collection of Blissiana material, some of which was sold off to increase revenue for collecting in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian. We don't do that any longer, but we do acquire for the House Collection occasionally. We acquire furnishings when things wear out, especially Middle Eastern carpets. We also – although we haven't done much of this in my tenure – we also buy Blissiana material, if it's relevant. We would certainly try to buy any portraits of the Blisses that came onto the market. And they had their portraits made many times – Mildred Bliss, in particular – but they didn't choose to retain them. The one painting of Mildred Bliss that hangs over the fireplace in the Refectory they actually gave away to a friend, who later gave it back to Dumbarton Oaks. If there was some significant object that the Blisses had owned that had left Dumbarton Oaks, we might try to get it back if it was relevant to us. There have been pieces that have come up for auction – furniture in particular – that we know the Blisses owned that we haven't tried for. We just don't need it.

JNSL: Was anything ever stolen? Was there ever any – as far as you know, were there any issues with that?

JNC: There have been a few thefts, particularly of things in the gardens. The Pan figure that sits in an arched bricked area pointing towards the Acadian pool that's called Lovers Lane Pool was stolen twice and returned once and not recovered the second time. In my tenure, I learned that the artist who did that sculpture was Sedgwick and I learned that a cast of it had been acquired or given to his daughter and that she still had it. So, we made arrangements to make a mold of her sculpture – the mold that he had used was, I guess, long gone or no one knew where it was. The daughter was very willing to have a mold made of it, and so we took an impression and we made the cast that you see. One of the eighteenth-century putti riding dolphins that are in the Fountain Terrace was stolen, also twice, once recovered, and once not. And fortunately they are an exact pair – they're not bilaterally symmetrical, as bookends are, they're literally the same object cast twice, so we made a cast of the existing one. There are two in the garden, and one of them is modern, cast from the other, which is the original. Smaller things have been stolen, but theft has been minimal.

EG: So, could you tell us a little bit about the interaction with the House Collections with the Fellows and the scholars and if that's changed over time?

JNC: I don't know if it's changed over time in the sense of predating my arrival here, because I don't really know what happened vis-à-vis the Fellows and the House Collection. When I first came, we used to do an orientation for the Fellows, which is still done, but that orientation also included a tour through the house and especially the areas where there was significant architecture and interiors or significant House Collection objects that might be of interest to the Fellows. They also had a tour with the Byzantine curators of the Byzantine Collection and they had a tour with the Pre-Columbian curators of the Pre-Columbian Collection. The House Collection tour got dropped after five years or so, I don't quite remember, because the schedule of what the Fellows did upon arrival just became somewhat onerous and the House Collection was expendable. So, we've never done that again except by request. And certainly when we reopened, there were a number of requests that I take people through the house and show them what happened during the renovation, and this involved taking both the docents and the Fellows. Also, occasionally, Fellows are interested in House Collection objects, especially the western medieval ones, and so of course they come to my office and, like any reader, they sit and read the dossier files and look at the historic photographs and so forth, but that's somewhat unusual. And every now and then someone is interested in the Blisses so they come and ask questions.

EG: Is that also true of the Archives? – interest in the Archives?

JNC: I have a lot of interest in the Archives from the studies programs, especially the directors. They change fairly frequently, as you know, sometimes every five years, sometimes every ten years, so they often, depending on their interests and the way they want to define their ongoing or upcoming projects – they want to see what's happened. Sometimes they have that material in their offices, but frankly a lot of the historical material is in the Archives, so they check out what they need. Also, by chance, I have a number of scholarly files that relate to research or projects that were given to Dumbarton Oaks by, especially, Byzantine scholars, although in one case by a Pre-Columbian scholar, and when Fellows are working on similar topics, they come and use these materials. However, I've had about ten Fellows in the twenty years that I've been here do that, so that's not a huge number.

EG: Is there much relationship between the House Collection and the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections in terms of organization and exhibition?

JNC: Yes and no. The three Collections are all part of the same department, which is the Museum department. There's a little bit more of a sophisticated curatorial apparatus for the two primary collections, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian, less so for the House Collection, but we meet sort of on equal grounds otherwise. The exhibition space, so-called, for the House Collection is the Music Room, and it is by plan and tradition a different type of exhibition space than the gallery type of space that the Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Collections use. We have decided to retain a kind of residential, Edwardian, Kunstkammer look for the Music Room – no wall labels, no vitrines. Yes there are spot lights and there are a few museum fittings, but they are meant to be discrete. The only – I'm not quite sure how to answer your question, that's why I said yes and no. So, let me end by saying the new thing that we've done recently since the Collections were reinstalled is to bring collecting at Dumbarton Oaks and the Museum Collections at Dumbarton Oaks into something of a unified focus. And the Bliss Gallery – which was inaugurated with that reinstallation – has a vitrine which, as of tomorrow, will have an inaugural exhibit of animal bronzes, which come from at least two of the Collections. We had wanted them to come from all three of the Collections and they could have, but the Pre-Columbians needed their very few animal bronze sculptures for the permanent installation. We will probably do a hard stone exhibition there at some time, which will be House Collection Asian, House Collection European, Byzantine, and Pre-Columbian, in order to show that the Blisses were interested in artworks made of hard stone from many cultures, and that way refocus attention on their collecting and collecting interests rather than on the cultural nature of the collection. And that certainly was true, as I said a moment ago, with the inaugural special exhibition – hallway exhibition – titled “Collector's Microbe,” which put objects from all three Collections into the same vitrines and onto the same walls in order to show that this was a Dumbarton Oaks collection in the singular, our literal and legal title – we are the Dumbarton Oaks Research Institute and Collection “singular,” and I think that use of the singular was purposeful – I think that was by choice.

EG: Other than the creation of the Bliss Gallery, the House Collection has always been housed in the Music Room?

JNC: Housed, in a public sense, in the Music Room. Housed, in an institutional sense, throughout the building, so the paintings and furnishings that you see on the first floor – what we call the first floor gallery, the hallway between the museum wing and the Founders Room, for example – the paintings in the Founders Room and so forth, these are all House Collection items, including the Founders Room itself, the boiseries, the wall paneling of the Founders Room – these are all accessioned House Collection items. They are now actually on public display to a degree because we've just started running docent tours on Saturday by sign-up appointment, but that's a very new and historically unique moment in our public persona. But, we've always had House Collection objects used the way the Blisses wanted them to be seen and that is as beautiful things to delight, inspire perhaps, staff and Fellows and scholars. So, there's a public space and a private space, and there's a big storage space where a number of things don't see the light of day at the moment, because there's no room for them.

JNSL: Are you aware of any attempts either in the immediate past or the more distant past to take some of the stories associated with Dumbarton Oaks and its history and turn them into any kind of dramatic or sort of novelistic element? Has anyone ever shown an interest in doing that, because when I listen to these stories I think sometimes it sounds like it would make a great movie, or make a great play, or make a great story?

JNC: I've never heard of such a thing. I do think that a history of the institution needs to be written.

JNSL: That's something that several people whom I've interviewed have said.

JNC: And I think through the Oral History interview project and through the archival holdings, both the Bliss Papers at Harvard and the ones that we've now talked quite a bit about, it’s all there. One might identify additional people to interview once one started writing a history, as always is the case with biographies or institutional histories. But easily eighty percent of it is already there, it just needs the time and the interest.

EG: So, have you noticed any significant changes over the time that you've been here since your undergraduate ‘til the present, in terms of the academic or social or even physical setting here at Dumbarton Oaks?

JNC: Let me start with the physical setting. The physical setting was in need of renovation by the time that Giles Constable became director. He pointed that out in the interview that I did with him, and he wrote about it in his biannual report several times. He points out that well-made buildings are not like the buildings that he or I, as he put it in his interview, might buy because we can't afford to buy better-made buildings. We have to replace the roof every twenty years, whereas roofs on better-made buildings last for fifty years in all respects. But when he came to Dumbarton Oaks, the fifty year time bomb was about to explode. And it was absolutely true – the infrastructure of the physical real estate of Dumbarton Oaks was in dire need of renovation. And he was the one that reinforced the third floor – the attic floor, which is now used for the publications office space – in order to house shelving for the Byzantine library, and in Thomson's tenure, the courtyard gallery was built and all of that space underneath which had been just dirt was excavated to form a connection between the basement of the Garden Library and the Pre-Columbian Collection and underneath the Music Room, which allowed for offices and shelving and storage space and so forth. So, the physical plant improved fairly steadily. Air conditioning was added in the Constable era, and the physical plant continued to improve steadily in the years that I knew the institution. It improved dramatically in the '90s and at the turn of the century  with the acquisition of new real estate: the director's house and the apartment building La Quercia, which took a certain amount of pressure off of the existing real estate, including some questionable legal pressures: the old director's house, now the Refectory, probably could not have housed a family of more than two people because using the upper floor as a bedroom space might have been considered illegal from a life-safety aspect. There were reasons to move on and certainly in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the decade we're in, the building of considerable new physical space – the library, the gardeners’ court – and the renovation of the existing physical spaces was a remarkable change. That's the easy answer. Socially, I don't know. I was in my twenties when I was a Junior Fellow, and the parties and the swimming pools activities and going into Georgetown for impromptu, on-the-cheap dinners and beers was great fun. Do Fellows still do this today? Probably. I think when you interview some of the younger Fellows or staff, that's an interesting question to ask. I see Fellows being very serious here. They're very nice and when I interact with them on a social level I always enjoy that, but I see them being very serious, and I have a feeling that was always the case. That hasn't changed, but possibly the pressures of the world and the paucity of job openings in academic humanistic professions and just the need to spend your money wisely and move on and get your research and your dissertation done or your next book done and so forth leaves you little time to have a beer and a pizza. I don't know. You had a third prong on that question?

EG: Academically.

JNC: Academically. Oh, the standards here have always been very high, remarkably high I think, in everything – the choice of people that come. I know that sounds slightly self-serving, so forgive me. But the publications, the programs and projects that the institution has sponsored – I mean, Dumbarton Oaks has a stellar record, and I don't say that because I'm “in-house.” I think I could write a critical review if I had to, but you know, you look at the history of what this institution has done in the world and here in its self-appointed research areas or interest areas, and it's just remarkable, it's remarkable.

AS: Has the evolution of the faculty to speak of here at Dumbarton Oaks changed the academics?

JNC: The Blisses and the early administrators wanted some kind of faculty presence, a kind of senior mentorship, I believe from what I've read. Let me back up to say that I think the Blisses initially just wanted senior research people here. When more junior people came and were given a kind of task working half day on their dissertations and half day on putting together a census of Byzantine objects in America or, if they were text people, looking at textual references for objects. (If you haven't read David Wright's paper on the early years of the institution, I highly recommend it to you.) I think the Blisses and the administration realized that there needed to be a kind of mentorship program for the more junior people who came – that this was something that would be very valuable. And because of the Harvard association, a kind of academic model was first chosen where there would be professors. But, it didn't make a great deal of sense because they didn't have students and they didn't give classes, per se. I mean, they might offer seminars maybe or give occasional lectures, but they didn't – it just wasn't a good model. And if they became tenured – initially a few of them did – what did they see their role to be? Did they see their role to be tenured faculty who fortunately didn't have to teach so they could spend one hundred percent of their time doing research, or just what? And so it was hard, it was a very hard model to keep going, and I think they were right in doing away with it, and in providing academic leadership and academic mentorship in other ways through having a coterie of like beings of all stages of life physically in one space. As is true now with the symposia and catalogue projects and the coin and seal seminars that are run in the summer, people with similar interests can come from different institutions and talk together, talk to senior members, talk to junior members. Dumbarton Oaks facilitates that, makes the bread and butter of that happen. It would only happen otherwise through email or through something much less interactive.

EG: So, sort of in closing, could you talk a little how you see the role of the Archives and the House Collection in the future?

JNC: The Archives should be exactly what it is today, only better. It should have every significant bit of Dumbarton Oaks institutional, intellectual history that's pertinent to the institution, housed there. It should be user-friendly, it should be – in a conservation sense – secure and well maintained. If we ever enter into an economic period and a digital period where things like that can be more easily accessible through digital technology, then that should happen. It happens obviously to a degree because everything you're doing will eventually become, if it hasn't already, part of the Archives and this comes in digital format, so the transition is underway. The House Collection should also carry on as it is, should maintain its course, ensuring that its role in both the Blisses' lives and in the institutional life of Dumbarton Oaks should not be forgotten. Its status should be maintained and honored because many of the art objects – by no means all, but a good many – are museum, world-class pieces that show a great level of connoisseurship and interest by the founders of this institution. Maintenance of this Collection should be insured, because it isn't inexpensive to maintain an art collection. But Dumbarton Oaks has and, I hope, will continue to do so. And I think that it should. In bad economic times, or when the world has moved on, one has to make choices, and it's possible that things will change, but for the moment I think we should stay the course for both the Archives and the House Collection.

JNSL: Thank you very much.

JNC: Thank you very much.

JNSL: It's been wonderful.

MD: 50s.

JNSL: Yes. So let’s begin this by saying how did you first come to Dumbarton Oaks and what were your first impressions of the place?

MD: Well, I first came to Dumbarton Oaks when my friend, Virginia Deville, asked me if I would be interested in helping catalogue sort of a preliminary catalogue of the Blisses’ manuscripts, letters, and books that had never been catalogued before. So I came here, into Georgetown, and since I was somewhat of a Washingtonian it was a familiar spot. But coming into the entire – into the building and the grounds, you’re struck by the otherworldly quality of it. And even then in the 50s, how many things were changing. The swimming pool was gorgeous; the house of course showed signs of wear and tear. Harvard used the library and had used the library upstairs, the Byzantine library, so there were scholars around. But, there was very little interaction actually between the Blisses’ operation in the small Founders’ Room on a daily basis and what Harvard was trying to establish.

JNSL: What year was that?

MD: I think it was 1956, the spring of 1956.

JNSL: And did you meet Mrs. Bliss right away? Were you introduced to her?

MD: Yes – well, yes. When we were working on our project, she would come in occasionally, not frequently. She wasn’t a hands-on person as far as that was concerned. The gardens were her real passion. And she would come in and she would look at something. Or if we had a question, we would try to gather together the questions we had about personal correspondence or books, and she would answer those questions. So, she was available, very much so.

JNSL: And did you meet any of the Fellows while you were here or were they in their own little world?

MD: They were in their own world. We were such a separate and sporadic operation because we weren’t there on a daily basis that the Fellows really weren’t at all involved with us.

JNSL: And looking at your notes here, you say that you, as you just mentioned, worked at Dumbarton Oaks cataloguing the Blisses’ personal papers and these were housed in the Founders’ Room.

MD: This is the room that I recall, but I also recall that the room had lots of bookshelves. So, James earlier said the library was upstairs, and it may have been that that was upstairs. It’s been almost fifty years, so I’m not sure I could walk through the door again [laughter]. But I remember a warm room, so there must have been some paneling. And maybe the Founders’ Room was used more for formal occasions. I refer to that in my notes.

JNSL: Right. And at that time the Blisses had already moved out of the house?

MD: They moved into this little red brick house. It was much smaller – very sweet. And I think it was right for them.

JNSL: Right. So the collection that you were working with consisted of letters, photographs, and books. Do you remember any impressions about the material itself or things that struck you?

MD: I was thinking about that the other day and really comparing them, comparing that time to Duncan Phillips, who had such a hands-on relationship with all of his arts and with people who collected it. And he carried on an enormous correspondence, which was in an exhibition recently. It’s marvelous. I don’t recall anybody specifically. I was thinking about Stravinsky and I was thinking that I must have seen his composition. It’s hard. It’s been so long. And it’s just sort of a little vignette in a way. I think that we were aware that these had some historical significance – all of the personal correspondence, all of the books – because the Blisses were philanthropists and many of these people, they had given gifts to them to help them support their art.

JNSL: Did you meet Mr. Bliss as well?

MD: Oh, yes. And they were a very loving couple.

JNSL: That’s very interesting. So, you actually have some insights into their personal lives. So you could recall – there are very few people who have that good insight into that.

MD: She was quite regal in a sense. She was tall, and as I said, frequently, every time I recall seeing her, she wore these pearls. And I noticed that in your display in the hallway the pearls were were there. And she wore an award given to her by the French government which I think was a Legion of Honor or a cross, I’m not sure. I’d have to but she always had this thing for her appearance. She was very proud of that. As to their relationship, I think each one had passion for running this collection, so that made their lives very interesting. He had his pre-Columbian art, and she had her gardening. And her gardening was her passion.

JNSL: And how did she relate to the two of you coming in?

MD: Oh, very friendly, very pleased. I think they kept in the house – the mansion – the Founders’ Room and the library for their own purposes. That was all that was theirs. The rest of it was Harvard’s. So I had a sense, as I said earlier, there was a distinct difference between the Blisses’ involvement at that point and Harvard’s. It was just a divide. And that was all right. I mean, but it was definitely there. So, I think Harvard would have preferred probably to have the whole place for themselves without anybody here. But that wasn’t really going to work, and that was fine.

JNSL: Did you ever meet any of their friends coming through? Many people have talked about how the Blisses were at the center of a very interesting time in Washington social life.

MD: Well, that’s true. I think they were. I have a stepson-in-law whose family knew them. And so, because everybody – I mean, they were also in the Foreign Service. And the Foreign Service has great circles within circles within circles. It’s amazing. And so I think because his family also worked for the service and met important people in the great houses and knew people from the Beauvoir School. But the Blisses knew all of them; everybody was connected. How closely? I don’t know. But they were older by then and kind of really into another phase of their lives. And as I say there were subtle changes, things were changing, their society.

JNSL: Right. This would have been in the 50s?

MD: In the 50s, pre-Woodstock by several years but the Blisses wouldn’t have known that. It would be interesting to get their views on that. And because they had no children, and this is what I wrote in my message, they were happy to leave their property to Harvard. And because they didn’t have children, they felt there was no one really they could leave it to that would have the same impact as a large university.

JNSL: Did they have any pets?

MD: And I don’t recall too much about their dogs. I know they really liked dogs.

JNSL: You speak about the unstructured nature of the entire set-up. Can you talk about some of the things you and your friends used to do every day, because that’s very interesting?

MD: Well, we had keys to Dumbarton Oaks. And our hours were really flexible, and we could fit things in.  And then of course, we found the swimming pool. Now, the swimming pool was an issue because John Thacher – who was then Director of the Byzantine Collection – was not pleased to have that swimming pool, not really at all. It was the bane of his existence, and he would happily have had it paved over. And there were several attempts to get rid of it, but it never worked. So we were all thrilled. Because the Fellows used to swim in it, and probably we did meet some of the Fellows who were at the pool; I don’t really recall. And so often we worked in the afternoon or maybe sometimes in the early evening and then we would swim. Or maybe on a day off we would just come and swim. It was pretty dreamy. It was very nice.  Now there were other swimmers as well, but they were not legal swimmers. People would scale the walls and come over and jump in the pool. So you could understand that Thacher wasn’t too happy about the idea of invaders. But we weren’t invaders; we were regulars.

JNSL: Right.

MD: And when I left Dumbarton Oaks I never got back in because I was very busy afterward. And I left my swimsuit hanging by the pool, and I think that sort of said something to me; I don’t know what it was – about the unstructured quality of life [laughs].

JNSL: And you said there were a couple of guards when you walked in the door.

MD: There were a couple of very old, old guards that would be on one at a time. And they just were not, you know – they were guards: they were night guards and day guards and that was it. No one really saw this place, except the swimming pool, as having a lot of allure.

JNSL: And when you were cataloguing for this project did you actually have a chance to read through some of these letters?

MD: Oh yeah. They were completely un-catalogued. I mean they were just in boxes, some of the letters in boxes and books on shelves. So this was just the beginning. I noticed it when I went to check the Harvard Dumbarton Oaks site and saw boxes listed in their collection, but I couldn’t open that site because obviously it was just the records. The boxes listed these personal papers from Washington, and I had a feeling that maybe all those three by five cards we were putting together might be up in Harvard some place.

JNSL: There was a whole collection, called the Blissiana collection, that got moved up there when the library itself needed more space, so that may very well be the case.

MD: I wonder if anything has been done with that collection at all.

JNSL: Well, people use it for their research at Harvard, but it still would be interesting if it were at Dumbarton Oaks.

MD: So, it’s never really – the catalogue’s never been finished?

JNSL: No, no. You speak here about a time when you went through the gardens with the head gardener.

MD: That was quite an experience.

JNSL: You were there when the pebble garden was being built.

MD: That was very special. One morning we were working, and Mrs. Bliss came over and she said, she said, “Would you like to walk through the gardens.” We sort of hesitated because I think we had things I wanted to do, and I just thought walking through the gardens could take a long time. And it did, but it was well worth it. It was a memorable walk, really. And we walked, and she and Kearney would talk, and we started out at that end of the house by the Founders’ Room and walked around the building, walked down to the pebble garden, and it was under construction. This had been the tennis court, and I could see that she was sad in a way to lose it as a tennis court. But they had lost their years for playing tennis, and their friends were no longer playing tennis, and she was ready to move on and turn it into something else. And I’m not sure but I believe that Beatrix Farrand had presented a garden plan to create a pebble garden. So they were starting to work on it, and it was partly finished. And she described it to Kearney. And Kearney, as I recall, wasn’t swept away as I recall by this garden, because he was involved in living green things.

JNSL: What was he like?

MD: He was you know, just like a gardener. He was sort of a ruffian with a very nice, very pleasant, Irish accent. He was not afraid to speak up. He wasn’t intimidated by her at all. They were good friends. You could see that they had spent many, many hours together plotting and planning these gardens and admiring their work as well. So, whenever we would stop, for instance, by the wisteria area, they would sort of talk about something or maybe they would mention something they would like to do. Some of it all has drifted because there wasn’t anything that I was quite into, but when we got to the rose garden that was a different scene. That’s where we talked about each rose bush and she would look at each one. They loved roses. And I think it was really touching that that’s their resting spot.

JNSL: Yes, yes. And did you ever meet Beatrix Farrand?

MD: No. I’m not sure that she was alive then. I’m not sure when she died. She had a place, if I’m correct, she had a place in Bar Harbor, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she didn’t have a place in Bar Harbor. She was married to Max Farrand who was in California at the Huntington Library. So my husband knew Max Farrand somehow. But I wasn’t married to him then. But anyway I think that Beatrix Farrand had a place in Bar Harbor, and when she died – maybe somebody else knows – when she died she had all the gardens ripped up because she said there was no one who could carry on here. It was just temporal. That should be checked. And of course there was Edith Wharton who played into all of this. So there was a lot of Edith Wharton correspondence and books and stuff.

JNSL: Thacher [sic] was Edith Wharton’s godson.

MD: That could be right.

JNSL: I think that was one of the connections.

MD: And there was somebody named Tyler. There was a Royall, and he –

JNSL: Yes.

MD: I’ve been dredging my mind. Did I meet a Tyler? I just can’t remember. Maybe my husband did.

JNSL: And I think that Mrs. Bliss had a personal assistant as well. Does that ring a bell at all?

MD: No. I remember sometimes thinking that –

JNSL: Maybe that was later.

MD: – some of the people they were surrounded by, it made me sort of sad. Well, I was a little saddened that perhaps the stellar quality that they had been used to was not there. I think perhaps sometimes aging people have some advantages taken of them – especially people who are extremely important and prominent. The advantage is more or less for the person’s advantage and is not necessarily and advantage for them. Those are just some observations.

JNSL: Did you ever attend any of Mrs. Bliss’ teas?

MD: No, because I think she never had them except for the Fellows – teas weren’t served to the staff.

JNSL: They were just for the Fellows.

MD: Yeah and we were busy. We may have been invited to some of them, I’m not sure that I recall that. We were there sometimes of Saturdays and at other times that didn’t overlap. We were pretty busy.

JNSL: Right, right. And you have a lovely memoir here in your notes that Mr. Kearney gave you a lesson in rose gardening.

MD: Well, there was talking – because listening to him describe this sort of rose bush, how they decided when that rose bush would work and when it hadn’t worked. And this one was coming along nicely. The garden was a constant concern, and gardening a constant progress, as gardeners should know. So, I mean, I had a fairly basic lesson in rose gardens.

JNSL: And you go on here to talk about an invitation you received from Mr. Bliss.

MD: That was very special, I can tell you. And he called and asked me if I would like to join a small group – and there were only about five or six of us – for tea in the Founders’ Room to celebrate Mrs. Bliss’s birthday. And this would have been in September because it was a rainy day, I remember for some reason. And we gathered and served and talked and had conversations about things. Then he gave her her birthday gift, and it was a first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. And I was an English major and I studied modern American lit, and that was a moment I never forgot. I did not think I’d ever see a first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in my life. But it was a wonderful moment, and it was very touching. I thought it really exemplified things that were important to them. She had everything she needed. She didn’t need jewels, she didn’t need things, but this was very sweet.

JNSL: Do you recall what the party was like; was it in the evening?

MD: No. It was in the afternoon. It was just a small – just a regular little tea in the Founders’ Room. And I don’t recall who else was there. There must have been – it wasn’t a very big celebration. Maybe there was something later in the day or something like that. But it was so dear, and she had on her little award. And she was pleased and very touched, but I can’t recall any specific details other than I think everybody was pretty blown away by this gift. And it would be fun to know where to that book is now in the collection of books, I think that would be worthwhile.

JNSL: Oh yes, indeed.

MD: There must have been many first editions here in the collection that we were cataloguing. Plus, there may have been some music manuscripts as well, and they may have gone to the Library of Congress.

JNSL: How would you characterize the tone at Dumbarton Oaks at that time, was it sort of relaxed, was it sort of formal or –?

MD: I think it was formal in the sense that I think it was still finding its way. I mean, it had come out of the years where it was a center of important gatherings. Now it was becoming a study, a research institution, and that takes awhile. You have to build up your faculty and your staff. If you’re a research institution, you have scholars on site and you have your collection well organized, and the growing pains were there for several years. And I don’t know how much Harvard was able to do there and be hands-on, because this was here in Washington—it wasn’t moved to Harvard.

JNSL: How did you see Dumbarton Oaks maybe at that time or later since you stayed in Washington through the years? How was it situated in your life in Georgetown as far as you recall?

MD: I think the gardens like Montrose the gardens were always open. In fact, when I was married and living in Georgetown, and then having my own children, we would always come to Dumbarton Oaks. It would be open in the afternoon. And I’ve taken my grandchildren through on various visits, and they just love it when I tell them stories. In its heyday, there were great many servants who worked here. They had a staff of maybe forty-two, or maybe forty-three. And one of my granddaughters said to me, “What if they left it all to you?” And I laughed and I said, “Well, if Mrs. Bliss had walked me through the garden and said, ‘that’s right we want to leave this to you,’ I would have say ‘thank you so much but there must be something else you have to leave me to insure the gardens, you have to leave me the forty-two or forty-three people to keep it going.’” [Laughs.] So that’s one of the – but it’s wonderful begin able to walk through it with them and still have that continuity. So I think that answers the question. Georgetown has a special spot – seeing some of the trees and see all that wisteria vines. Years later when I was at Time–Life Books and I was in the middle of producing a book on vines, I said we have to take a photo shoot over to Dumbarton Oaks and photograph the wisteria – the ficus vine in the garden room. And they did. It’s in one of the books. So, it has – Dumbarton Oaks was always an special place, and I don’t think people ever used it for parties much; it wasn’t that kind of a place.

JNSL: That’s a nice way of thinking about it, a sense of proximity to a certain era.

MD: And it’s also one of the special spots. When I have friends who visit me in Washington, I always try to take them places that they would not know about. The Phillips is always one of the special places. And Hillwood, which is out – Marjory Merriweather Post’s home. But Dumbarton Oaks is something that is just a wonderful place to take people.

JNSL: And did you have interaction with Mr. Thacher or just –?

MD: None whatsoever. Of course, we were happy not to have any because all that we could see was the possibility of a cement mixer pulling up in front of the pool [laughs]. We did not want to see that! So, every time I come here, I see if the pool still had water in it. I didn’t see it today. I’m a swimmer; I swim laps every single day. So it’s important. Do you all swim in the pool?

JNSL: Oh me? Yes. Yes, it’s fun, and it’s used by the Fellows. And so how long all together were you here?

MD: Well, I would guess it was about from spring to perhaps September or October. For about six months I think, really, a small time. Because then I took a job at USIA, and that was very different from this. So, I’m guessing, I wished I’d – I’m going through my mind over and over trying to nail down the time. But you know we all have our summer jobs and such and its difficult keeping track of them.

JNSL: Right. I’ve been told in those days that there was a distinctly European feel to Dumbarton Oaks.

MD: Yes. Oh, yes. We walked down the steps into the garden and into the pool, and we’d feel we were as if we were in Italy, in Tuscany.

JNSL: And also the Fellows have always had a very strong European presence too.

MD: Oh, yes, yes, definitely. And that carries back to the earlier days where they’d have the various meetings here at Dumbarton Oaks and the discussions to establish the United Nations.

JNSL: That’s right.

MD: Do they do the oral histories for Fellows?

JNSL: Oh, yes, absolutely. We’ve been trying to track down as many people as we can. This is really interesting.

MD: I don’t know many – I also mentioned Louis Auchincloss in here because he was such an admirer of Edith Wharton, and somehow – it just popped into my mind the other day – I thought were there letters from Louis Auchincloss to the Blisses? Possibly. And he is still alive. He is one of the people who testified at the Brooke Astor trial – about her estate. So he is alive. And if you ever wanted to – I would strike while the iron’s hot, so to speak.

JNSL: Right. Certainly.

MD: He might be still articulate; he might have some memories about the Blisses somehow.

JNSL: What is your – you’ve shared some lovely, lovely memories. What would you say – what did you appreciate the most in your entire six months?

MD: Well, I think what I realized is that it was extraordinary to be in the presence of two people who had accomplished so much, and that this was at the end of the aristocracy. And to see their interests still very strong and that they were collecting and that they were able to do this. And I have a sense of history, I think; I certainly had that with Duncan Phillips when I was involved in some social aspects with the Phillips. And you don’t meet people like this in a personal setting without suddenly having a whole localized scope of history and life going around it. And then you realize it was a very special time. And some of them are more articulate than others. Now with Dr. Phillips, I mentioned – I think he was very special, and Marjorie – they were both artists – I mean, she was an artist. But he would bring things home from his gallery, and when he wanted to bring a couple of Cézanne paintings, you know, they’d be there and so you’d go to have dinner and sit beside him and look – an incredible Cézanne – which he’d brought home for a day or two days or three weeks or whatever he wanted. And eating was very difficult; you have to elegantly bring your fork to your mouth without being overwhelmed by the paintings [laughs]. In some cases it’s extreme, you can have an extreme sense of what’s going on, and for others it’s more subtle, and I think for the Blisses it was more subtle. They were very charming, cultured people.

JNSL: Well, do you have any other points? This has been just wonderful. I am so grateful for all of these wonderful memories and what you thought of the Blisses themselves because that’s something which a lot of the Fellows only had limited access to. Because they were in there, studying.

MD: Right, they were busy and the Blisses, they had their own little world. But it is strange that obviously there was some strong impact. I was in my early twenties; I was so – I must not have been but 21 or so. So for me to be remembering for all these years – those particular moments – says something about the Blisses and their impact.

JNSL: Thank you very much.

MD: Thank you for all your questions.

JNSL: Thank you.

EE: Yes, twenty-second.

GB: 2009. And we sit here together in the Fellows Building with former Fellows here in our Guest House. And we have a wonderful special guest here, Elizabeth Ettinghausen, former Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1945, ’44–’45. So we were just about to talk about your, at that time, not-yet-husband, Richard Ettinghausen.

EE: Yes, for the opening of Dumbarton Oaks, Mrs. Bliss had a special invitation, the note, whatever it was. And my husband, I mean Richard Ettinghausen, and others were invited, among them Weitzmann, Kurt Weitzmann. And the question was: who would sit to the right of Mrs. Bliss? And I don’t remember the details anymore. I think Kurt Weitzmann was a little older. At first she wanted Richard Ettinghausen to be to her right and then she realized or was told that Kurt Weitzmann was older and therefore he should be to the right, her right. And Richard Ettinghausen was to her left.

GB: Ah. Do you know –

EE: Of course, I wasn’t here.

GB: You weren’t here. And you knew about, of course, the event through your husband.

EE: Yes.

GB: Do you know where this took place?

EE: No.

GB: I guess it was the Music Room, but I’m not sure about that.

EE: I really don’t know.

GB: Yeah. That’s nice – choosing who’s first according to seniority, that’s interesting. Now, Elizabeth, we would be very interested in learning more about your first visit, when you arrived here to come as a Junior Fellow –

EE: Yes.

GB: – and how this came about.

EE: I was told that I should go to Harvard and ask them about it, because somebody had suggested that I go to – that maybe that would be a possibility, to become a Fellow here. So I went to Harvard University, and I was given the names, whom I should interview with. It was, first of all, Professor–Director Paul Sachs, and then Koehler, and also one other person, one other professor. And I’m not sure whether I met Blake there, too, Richard Blake. I did meet him here and I was very much – everyone was very much impressed by him. He was very, very nice, really, and very kind to all the Fellows. What was so exciting about him: he was married to a Georgian princess. But we were told there were a lot of princesses in Georgia.

GB: So you went to Paul Sachs and to Koehler up in Cambridge.

EE: Yes, that’s right, and it was a very nice interview. He was very friendly and I don’t remember anymore what he asked or anything like that. I just told him what I had done and where I had been before, which was in Istanbul.

GB: So, what had you done by then? What was your kind of scholarly –

EE: Well, I had done my MA, which I did on Byzantine tiles from a certain site, which had been excavated by the department where I worked, but it was before me so I never saw the excavation. But I was asked to work on the tiles from – Byzantine tiles from that site. Now, hardly any Byzantine tiles were known or had been excavated before that. At that time, there was a great deal of freedom in the Museum, the Topkapi Sarayi Museum in Istanbul, and I could go, which would be impossible now, of course, to go through big stacks of material – whatever it was; I mean, of course the tiles, but also look, I could find other tiles or anything like that and nobody supervised me. I felt actually a bit – I was a little bit scared, really, but of course I didn’t do anything wrong; but how could I prove it? Well, it was very nice. I even was then told by the chemist connected with the Museum how to clean them, which I did, not too much, I hope. And then I worked on that and the drawing, the pictures and everything, and then for my PhD thesis I did something quite different. And then later on, many years later, I was asked by André Grabar to write an article on that for the Cahiers archéologiques, which I did. I was – I wrote that when I was, when my elder son was four months old. And I wrote it all, worked on it and wrote it all at night.

GB: And that was later, as you said.

EE: That was in – he was born in ’52, so I worked on it, beginning of ’53. I think it was published a few years later.

GB: Yes. So, if you’ll allow me, we may come back to the interview you had with Paul Sachs and Koehler and to introduce yourself, to present yourself as a young Byzantine art historian and eager, I guess, to continue and to take the opportunity to study at Dumbarton Oaks. What did you know at that time about the Dumbarton Oaks institute?

EE: Nothing.

GB: Nothing. So, soon after you learned that you had been accepted, you arrived. And how was this, kind of, arriving time for you? How, yeah, did you get the whole institute to understand and how was the set-up at that time?

EE: Well there were three other Fellows besides me; we lived upstairs here in this building. Paul Underwood, who was married, lived outside so I met him at the library and for meals here, for lunch here. In fact, he asked me, always, to translate anything in Italian for him, which I didn’t know well. I knew Latin well enough, but somehow I could always satisfy him – it wasn’t too much, but still. They were all very nice, the Fellows.

GB: And you were a Junior Fellow –

EE: I was a Junior Fellow.

GB: – at that time, having finished the Ph.D.

EE: Yes.

GB: And you were a Fellow here, which meant something different from the work the Fellows, Junior Fellows, nowadays do and –

EE: Well, there was one exception. One person didn’t have a Ph.D. yet and worked on this, her thesis, but she had already quite a lot of experience. It just happened that she hadn’t done it yet.

GB: Do you remember her name?

EE: Margaret Ames – Alexander.

GB: Margaret Alexander.

EE: Well, Ames. Ames was her name at that time. She wasn’t married.

GB: Okay, thank you. That’s important. And your co-Fellows: you remember three.

EE: Well, she was one of them.

GB: She was one of them.

EE: And Rosalie Green and Josephine Harris.

GB: And Josephine Harris.

EE: Yes and, of course, we saw – there was a sensation – that we had a nun here, also.

GB: And that is Sister Monica.

EE: Sister Monica Wagner, yes. That’s right. She came a little bit later. She came, I think, in spring.

GB: Aha. So you were –

EE: And she was here, of course, for meals. She was here only for lunchtime, of course. And she had to answer some unusual questions, I would feel, but she was always of good humor and she didn’t mind that, because one person asked, for instance, “Well, which church do you like to go to especially? I mean, one church versus another church,” and she said, of course being Catholic, “They’re all alike.” Actually it was Professor Vasiliev who asked that question.

GB: You were four, five – five young scholars. Young women, which is quite amazing.

EE: Not so amazing during the war. It was still war.

GB: Wow. Okay. That is interesting.

EE: I would say that’s the reason.

GB: Was that a topic of this being, kind of, discussed or mentioned, wanting to work here? Or was that such a, kind of, just everyday life fact that it was not even remarked on?

EE: No, it wasn’t remarked on. And the advantage was – so we were four women upstairs. At that time we couldn’t have had a man there to – now of course this is a different situation.

GB: Yeah, yeah, this is very interesting indeed. Yeah. So Paul Underwood was not living here in this building; it was just the five of you – four of you.

EE: Four, yes. And of course Monica – Sister Monica, of course, didn’t live here.

GB: Oh, she didn’t live here?

EE: Oh, she couldn’t have.

GB: No, she couldn’t have. So she was here in a –

EE: The same way as Paul Underwood, coming to the library to do her work.

GB: That’s interesting. Now, your work when you were here as a Junior Fellow – can you describe this a little bit, what you did, what you researched, and what kind of – what your scholarly life as a Junior Fellow was at the time?

EE: Yes. One was supposed to divide one’s time half, really half and half, for research, one’s own research on the one hand, and working for the archives for Dumbarton Oaks – archives of monuments, all the publications of monuments – and all details, everything within the monuments – of different regions. And each person was assigned to a different region and I, of course, was assigned to where I had been before: to Istanbul, Constantinople.

GB: So you were looking into photos, our photos of –

EE: Not just photos.

GB: Archival material.

EE: The articles, all articles that were published, all photos that were published. And also I had some photos, which I had taken, and I also contributed some of those.

GB: What was the goal of this work? Do you remember having been told a certain project mission or goal, doing this type of archival – how would we describe it nowadays? – maybe a kind of database, to set it up, on Byzantine monuments all over the eastern world, or maybe not just eastern but Byzantine world.

EE: The Byzantine world, yes, because one was doing it for Tunisia, for instance. And it could have been expanded, of course, to all regions. Rosalie Green did it, for instance – she did it for Jerusalem. And Josephine Harris did Egypt, I believe. Yes, definitely she did Egypt.

GB: So you were told to just look into what we had collected already at that time or was there a system?

EE: No, go through it – get the bibliography and except the – what was published. It is a kind of index, like the Index of Christian Art, but with more detail.

GB: Yeah, indeed with all the monuments.

EE: Which one could have updated, of course, if one had continued.

GB: Yes, indeed. Where were you placed? Where was your office and the office of the other Fellows? Where did you work?

EE: We didn’t have offices. We were in the library, on the big table in the center of the library, which was on the second floor of the main building.

GB: The books around you –

EE: Yes, and sometimes one needed interlibrary loan books, which one could get. I remember, for my own research I did some of that. Maybe also otherwise; that I don’t remember. But I remember specifically that I did for my own research.

GB: Mentioning the library, who were the librarians at that time?

EE: I see her in front of me and I can’t think of her name now. She was very good and very nice. Actually, the person really in charge was Barbara Sessions, but the one who was active, you know, helping you with getting the particular book or something like that was the person whose name I can’t think of. She had blonde hair, she was very slim and very nice, very fast always. Everybody was very cooperative. Oh yes, and there, of course, if you had something, for instance, in Russian, there was Mrs. Schafer. And I did something absolutely terrible by having a Bulgarian book – asking her. And she said – she didn’t see the cover, and I didn’t think of it. Of course, Bulgarian is not Russian. It’s similar. And she first said, “Oh but that’s terrible Russian. That’s not proper Russian.” And then, but she was kind enough and she was able to – I didn’t need too much, but I needed a few things.

GB: So there was one librarian. Is that correct? She was the librarian and she was –

EE: Mrs. Schafer was just – this other – well there were more than one but I don’t remember the others.

GB: What do you remember about the acquisition policy? How many books – what was the policy of acquiring books for the Dumbarton Oaks Library? Was there, kind of, a “we would get all books we know of,” or what was the policy?

EE: I don’t know about the policy, but I think certainly all the main books. And every week, and possibly more often, maybe twice a week, books came from the Library of Congress, also.

GB: Aha, so there was an exchange with the Library of Congress.

EE: But also with other libraries, of course.

GB: With other libraries, of course, yes.

EE: But this was more regular. Of course, this was not just for us. This was for the professors as well, or more so, perhaps.

GB: When you found any book, which was not in the library, you would have told the librarian and she would have looked into either first looking into acquiring it, purchasing it, or first looking into where we could get it from a different library?

EE: I only had the experience that she was getting it from interlibrary loan, but there may have been cases when she’d ordered the book – that’s possible, too.

GB: So that was your work for hire, so to speak, and that was half-day. And then there was the other side of your research, and maybe you want to talk a little bit about the research part you conducted at that time and how it was perceived here at Dumbarton Oaks.

EE: Well, I tried to find out more about the, for instance, the representations – I mean the art of designs one finds of tiles and collectibles, where else you find them, and comparisons and so on and how it came about that one had tiles at all. I have developed more interpretations since then, of course.

GB: And was the library and the environment of help – adequate for your study and research? How did you communicate with your co-Fellows about your research? Did this happen at all or was there, kind of, everybody quietly researching?

EE: More or less it was everybody for himself or herself. I mean, you could, of course, if you wanted to especially discuss something, but basically it was each one for himself or herself, while that had been very different before, because there were seminars every week while Professor Koehler was in charge here and in residence here, which was the year before I came here. There were these seminars and working together and reporting about one’s work and one’s questions and interchange. And that was not the case while I was here the first year, not at all, because the professors in residence were not in the field at all. I mean, they were historians and not really interested in art history. And the second year it was Professor Friend, formerly from Princeton. He was interested in some projects – if that fitted in, fine, and if it didn’t fit in then it wasn’t of much interest to him. There was one person who worked with him; it was Rosalie Green, because he was interested in that project, but that was it, really.

GB: So, compared to what we have now: every week a research report; the fellows have to present and the interest, of course, not only in exchanging research ideas and topics; but presenting it to the community is very much, of course, in the foreground today. At least – correct me if I’m wrong. And I’m trying to explain this with my mind. In those years, the primary interest point in Dumbarton Oaks, having you here, was to get to develop a database and to, yeah, get this built up, and to, of course, provide the opportunity, the outstanding opportunity to, beyond that, do research in your specific area. It was more the kind of, almost a position, which – actually I say “position” because I know this structure similarly from the German Archaeological Institute, where I actually was at a time one of those – that’s not the term they use – but a hired staff person to do half-day work for the Institute and half-day I had to do my research, but in a way nobody cared about that research because that was kind of an add-on to the proper hired work. Is that something, that picture I –

EE: Well, I would say it simply was not structured at all. There was no structure. You were here on your own. You could hook up with anybody else if you wanted to and if you felt it would do, it would advance your project or help somebody else to advance his or her project, but otherwise there was no structure, really.

GB: And were there meetings to follow up on the database work, on your proper assignment?

EE: No, none whatsoever.

GB: And how did this kind of –

EE: You simply did what you did and when each project – let’s say working on such-and-such a church – was finished, you handed it over to be typed, because you just – there were no computers, of course. You wrote it by hand, really, and then it was formalized.

GB: I have on this list of 1944–45 another category and that’s “Fellows,” and Fellows here listed are Milton Anastos –

EE: Oh yes, of course. Anastasios. Anastasis, Anastasis. I’m sorry, of course. How could I say that?

GB: Yes, I see it is incorrectly spelled. And Peter Charanis.

EE: Yes, that’s right and he was married to a Belgian.

GB: Can you explain a little bit where the position of being Fellows – what they contributed to the Dumbarton Oaks Harvard community?

EE: Well, they were much more advanced scholars. While the Junior Fellows were at the beginning of any career, Peter and Milton were both in the midst of their career, more or less in their midst. They gave papers at symposia; they worked on the more advanced projects. I remember Mr. Friend asked Peter Charanis to work on a special project of a church that doesn’t exist anymore, but there were some records about it, a poem actually it was, a longer poem, and he worked on that, for instance.

GB: So they had similar assignments to do specific research, the Fellows, Milton and Peter.

EE: Well they – I don’t think it was obligatory for them to do it, but once they were Fellows they were asked and they could agree or maybe they could also disagree. It was a special project, though, what Mr. Friend was interested in, so he asked about that. But I don’t think it was, so to say, the bylaws that he had to designate a particular topic or anything like that. It was just a personal matter.

GB: And they were studying with you in the reader room in the second level of the main house?

EE: No, I think they were somewhere else, because there wasn’t enough space.

GB: So they might have had offices or –

EE: I think there were some other rooms where they could be, but basically there were no offices in that sense and certainly not that everybody had an office to him or herself.

GB: What do you remember about the main house first level at that time? Was the library –

EE: No, no, there was no library. Well, there may have been some books. Yes there were books, of course. In one room downstairs, there were books. But I think there were also more general books, not just something about the early Christian, Byzantine art, but the Blisses’ collection, for a private collection, some of it, I think.

GB: Do you remember the term “Founders’ Room” at that time? And this place—do you remember what was going on in that space or was that a library space? Were there books in there?

EE: Yes. But it was also a kind of reception room.

GB: We will come back to the receptions and the more, kind of, social life, but let me ask you now a little bit about the other scholars, resident scholars at that time now that we have learned about the Junior Fellows, the Fellows, and you have mentioned already Albert Friend. And there were more professors in residence.

EE: Yes, there were Mr. and Mrs. Young, Sirarpie Der Nersessian, who had been professor at Wellesley before.

GB: How was the relationship with Sirarpie, she being a young woman as well –

EE: Not so young.

GB: Yeah. Right. Yes.

EE: It was fine and we usually had arranged for dinner – there was no dinner on Sundays here, so we made our own dinner and Miss Der Nersessian usually joined in. We did it together.

GB: Albert Friend – how was – he seemed to have had a major impact regarding the suggestions, regarding the research part. Is that right?

EE: Not for the Junior Fellows. Well, except for he was interested in what Rosalie Green did, but otherwise no. I mean one could, of course, ask him or get advice but one had to specially go and ask for it. He never asked you about it.

GB: And then we have at that time Edward Kennard Rand and Alexander Vasiliev.

EE: Well yes, they were professors in 1944 already and they were not art historians. Professor Rand was particularly interested in Carolingian manuscripts and he did a lot of work – not the pictures, the miniatures, but the text – and he was very much interested in all of the signs, the pinpricks and so on and that he continued to talk about time and again when I was in residence.

GB: And Alexander Vasiliev.

EE: He came a bit later. I don’t remember exactly when. I would say he loosened things up and made it much more lively and interesting, because he was a very interesting person of course and very Russian in a very pleasant way.

GB: Do you remember specific – or specifically –

EE: No, he was interested in, much more interested in music, I mean also in music and so on. Actually Koehler had started that. He got us a record player and records so we could have music, also.

GB: He and the Fellows.

EE: Yes, here. It was right here.

GB: You were listening to records together?

EE: Oh, of course, yes, yes. It might have been right after lunch, for instance, or in the evening, so we could do that. That’s how I got to know some music very well.

GB: Lunch is a good topic.

EE: That was on the big table, and the two professors – La Piana and Rand – were at the ends and the Fellows in between.

GB: So you had to appear, to have lunch and dinner together.

EE: I suppose so. I don’t remember about dinner, but there must have been dinner. And of course, there were servants and one was served. One never got up or anything.

GB: Was there communication going on over lunch? How was that?

EE: Yes. Well it was particularly Professor Rand who spoke and you listened.

GB: Scholarly exchange or everyday small talk?

EE: Well, it wasn’t very scholarly. It was not very exciting. Well, I’m sorry, but Mr. Rand was not his former brilliance anymore, and that was the reason.

GB: I see.

EE: And La Piana also talked, but always trying to be very, very nice to Mr. Rand and taking him as the head of it all.

GB: At that time who was the director of Dumbarton Oaks? It was kind of –

EE: It was – oh my God.

GB: It must have been Thacher.

EE: Thacher, yes. He came once in a while. I mean, of course you saw him at the main building.

GB: Why that? You saw him at the main building?

EE: No, well sometimes, because that’s where he was, that’s where his office was, too.

GB: Mhm. Do you remember where his office was? In the main house on the first level, where it is now?

EE: Yes.

GB: And, he being the director of the Dumbarton Oaks institute, filling the specific role, what did you understand of that role at that time? How did you feel about the overall mission if we want to use this word, which is of course not the word you would have used at the time, but what was the, kind of, general mission of the Dumbarton Oaks institute?

EE: Well, he was a very good go-between – the Blisses and the institute, Dumbarton Oaks, and you saw him a great deal with the Blisses. And he understood very well to implement also what Mrs. Bliss really hoped the institute would be like and he was, of course, director of the museum, which was in storage then.

GB: Which was packed, indeed.

EE: Yes, because of the war.

GB: Yes. So you did not get to see an object while you were here – is that correct?

EE: No. Some pictures I saw.

GB: Oh yes, some pictures, but no –

EE: No, it was impossible. And one understood very well why.

GB: Yeah? Why?

EE: Well because of the war, the danger of possibly some problems.

GB: Did you feel this – I mean, being here, I mean, sure we know that at that time there was quite some realistic fear or reason to be afraid. What was the situation in Washington and Dumbarton Oaks besides that the collection was stored, protected, and downstairs in storage, in the basement.

EE: Well I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I did know that the downstairs, the basement, was taboo for anybody in Dumbarton Oaks, at least the Fellows, because there were government projects going on. Well it was really – in fact the president of Harvard was intimately connected with that, and he came for visits from time to time. So I met him that way also because he came to lunch sometimes.

GB: The president of Harvard University?

EE: Yes. Well, it was the Manhattan Project, as I now know, but not then, of course.

GB: The Byzantine galleries being closed, because of the collection being stored – did you ever enter that space? Was it just closed because it was empty, or was there anything – I mean, thinking of the Barberini sarcophagus, for example, which was certainly –

EE: There were a few pieces I knew. I don’t remember details anymore, I must admit.

GB: Well, it was a closed-off area, so it was not of any interest and, of course, it was not really a happy story, to be not up but in protection, in storage. So, Thacher was, well, trying to do the best, to make the best out of the situation and to, of course, as you said, to work with the Blisses closely.

EE: Yes, and also he was very good, I suppose, in spreading the news of Dumbarton Oaks, I assume. I mean, he was very good at parties and so on, so he knew – he met a lot of people and knew a lot of people in Washington. And I’m sure from that point of view he was very useful for spreading the word – what Dumbarton Oaks was.

GB: So there was some interest in connecting to the social life of Washington?

EE: Absolutely. But that was he alone.

GB: But not the Blisses?

EE: Oh, the Blisses, of course, were. Oh yes. But I mean not the people for, not the Fellows or the professors or so.

GB: So let’s talk a little about receptions and the Blisses. At first maybe about your – as a Fellow – your meetings or whenever you had a chance to meet and talk with Robert and Mildred Bliss. Did this happen on a regular basis?

EE: She came to tea. I don’t know whether there still is tea being served, probably not, but then it was de rigueur, one could almost say, to come to tea, and Mrs. Bliss appeared a great many times – not every time, not every day, but most days, or often, let’s say.

GB: Was it once a week, the tea, or –

EE: No, no, every day. I mean, except for weekends. There was tea and cookies or anything. I think rather fancy, too.

GB: So that was kind of a break in the afternoon. Is that what I am to understand?

EE: Yes.

GB: Yeah. Nice. So that everybody came together for a short time I guess – an hour maximum or even two of them.

EE: Probably not as long as that. And Mrs. Bliss talked also to, of course, to the professors and to Fellows, but also to the Junior Fellows.

GB: Was she curious about finding out what you were up to, regarding your research, or was she curious about hearing your opinion about Dumbarton Oaks institute, or –

EE: No, never, no. It was rather what you were doing.

GB: Researching.

EE: What work you were doing.

GB: And do you remember being asked – Mildred Bliss asking you about what your research, what she kind of asked?

EE: No, I must admit I don’t remember, but she did ask, yes. I don’t know how interested she really was in the specifics. She was, I think, more interested in the general and what went on in general. And the sort of policy and strategy.

GB: When she was present, did you talk or did she mention any kind of objects in the sense of collecting, of her passion of collecting art, which we, as we see now, is quite a major part.

EE: Oh yes, yes.

GB: Did she mention this? Did she talk about, “Oh, I have seen recently something coming up?”

EE: No, no I don’t remember that. I don’t think that; it could have happened that she talked about such a thing to somebody, but certainly not to, so to say, everybody present.

GB: Another point which is, of course, very related to Mildred Bliss is the garden. Was that a topic or how did you –

EE: Oh yes, and I do remember, also, for instance, I once looked and said, “Well, I don’t see – whatever it was, a tree or shrub or what and I was told, “No, Mrs. Bliss had changed her mind. She wanted it to be changed.” She was very active in helping with the design for the garden. Of course she had a very well known garden architect.

GB: Beatrix Farrand.

EE: Yes, that’s right. Who also did some work at Princeton, Princeton University, but on a very small scale there.

GB: I do not know, I cannot remember if Beatrix Farrand was – no, she was no more around. She had to agree, setting it up in the very beginning, the twenties, and by the forties, she, I think, was no more around Dumbarton Oaks, but she was certainly –

EE: No, she definitely wasn’t around when I was here. And I think in some cases that Mrs. Bliss did it on her own, and I wouldn’t be surprised, because Mrs. Bliss was extraordinarily intelligent and clever and just as her range of knowledge was amazing, so I’m sure she had learned a great deal from Beatrix –

GB: Farrand.

EE: Farrand, yes. And could design things on her own, too.

GB: Yeah, yeah. We know of many projects where she was really the designer and participated in all kinds of different things with a high interest in every little detail. Do you know how the gardens were administered at that time? How were they maintained? What about the gardeners and the staff?

EE: Well, I don’t remember the name of the head gardener anymore, but he was an important person, of course. We always – we talked to him and so on. And the associate gardeners – I suppose they were the two who lived in this house at the corner there.

GB: The double cottage.

EE: Yes, the double cottage

GB: Which is nowadays security.

EE: And at night I understand there was somebody, a guard; there was a dog going around. I’ve never seen him but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t there, of course.

GB: Could you enter the main house at any time? Was it, so to speak, open to go back to the office or to study?

EE: That I don’t know. I only heard that, you see, and I don’t know anything more about that.

GB: There was one important feature attached to the gardens at that time, as nowadays, and that’s the pool.

EE: Oh yes.

GB: You used the pool? You were allowed to use the pool?

EE: Yes, oh yes, yes.

GB: And everybody shared the pool?

EE: All the members of the – the Fellows and professors, yes.

GB: Was there kind of a senior Fellows hour or –

EE: No, no it was simply whoever wanted to go, whenever, could go there and, I mean, not normally during work hours.

GB: And at that time the pool is – of course the public came to visit the gardens or were the gardens closed as well – I mean specifically in this year were the gardens open to the public? Do you remember?

EE: There were times when they were open, yes. I think it was from two to four or something like that. I think we usually went, you see, after work, so it was a little bit later except for weekends, and I don’t remember how that worked with the public and the – because we certainly couldn’t be there when the public came and there were – and guests could come, too. I mean if they had permission from, I suppose, the director. My – Richard Ettinghausen, for instance, was a friend of the director and therefore he could go and use the pool.

GB: And you met your husband –

EE: I met him, yes. I didn’t meet him at the pool, but I met him at the library and I asked him for some advice. And also it was the head of the library, Barbara Sessions, who was a friend of my future husband, and we were good friends. She was very, very friendly and very nice and, of course, she was a friend of the Blisses, so – and so we went on some outings because she liked to walk, and we both liked to walk, too.

GB: That means, mentioning your future husband, that there were – visiting scholars, we would say nowadays – there were scholars who stopped by, who had a specific period of study time they spent here at Dumbarton Oaks. Is that what I understand?

EE: Yes, there were some.

GB: And they were sitting, then, again, in the library and next to you and the other Junior Fellows or were they at any kind of specific place?

EE: They were in various places, I think.

GB: Various places. And that must have been, then, on that second level, which –

EE: I would think so.

GB: – I understand was at that time the main library research space.

EE: I assume that’s where they were.

GB: Talking about receptions, or the Blisses, Mildred Bliss especially being present in the afternoon for the tea hour or the tea gathering: were there any kind of other specific events you had been invited to?

EE: Lectures.

GB: Lectures. Public lectures? Were they open to the public, as it is nowadays, or was it –

EE: I doubt whether they were open to the public, but to, I suppose, to scholars or friends, of course, of the Blisses.

GB: In the Music Room?

EE: Yes, in the Music Room and those were always very nice events, of course, and then there were concerts also and those were special events and the finest event was, of course, the symposium. Always.

GB: Yes, the annual Byzantine Spring Symposium.

EE: Yes.

GB: Do you remember the symposia you have attended – was it something very outstanding compared to the symposia of the recent past, which you have, of course, attended on some occasions?

EE: Well, I’m –

GB: Can you describe the sort of atmosphere, the set-up, and, of course, the scholarly contributions?

EE: I suppose it would be very hard for me to judge, really, because I was, after all, at the beginning, and it all seemed marvelous, so insofar – perhaps I would say later on it was perhaps not as marvelous, but because I knew more, so no, I don’t think there’s any conference ever which is all tops – I mean every scholar absolutely perfect and so on. And I could, of course, discriminate much more and notice the differences much more than I could at the beginning.

GB: What was the –

EE: But it was – there were outstanding scholars who came.

GB: What was the general atmosphere compared to a nowadays symposium, where we have a lot of discussions and open the floor, of course, and ask the public – nowadays it’s indeed the public – of course, the interested public, who is invited to attend the symposium. What do you remember about that aspect when – the years you were here?

EE: I’m not quite sure how I should answer that.

GB: Was it more – I mean, I, looking at the pictures we have of the symposia and the speakers, it looks to me much more formal and going of course by the appearance of the gentlemen, the speakers, and it’s just that the only way, incorrectly, I guess, you project that into the audience or into the place where it took place and you think that this was probably more, kind of, formal, overall formal event.

EE: Oh, absolutely.

GB: Yeah, we talked about the symposia at that time.

EE: Yes, well, I think especially we Junior Fellows felt that way – that was the apex of the whole year. And the great scholars came and they discussed matters, and that was very interesting, of course, to hear them sometimes agree and sometimes not agree. These semi-gods acting like that, that meant something very special, of course. And the lunches and the dinners and everything – that was wonderful and speaking with those special scholars. And they were all very nice and open. Well, and otherwise you wouldn’t encounter them quite so much, all that easily.

GB: Kurt Weitzmann and Hugo Buchthal, for example, both – did you meet them here at Dumbarton Oaks?

EE: Yes, I met them here first, for the first time. Later on they became friends, but that was when I wasn’t a Fellow anymore.

GB: But you got introduced to Kurt Weitzmann while you were here.

EE: Yes, absolutely. Oh, yes. It was a very nice encounter. He was always very, very jovial and very nice, easy to talk to.

GB: Ernst Kitzinger?

EE: Of course, yes, I met him. Well, I’d met him before because he came once in a while. I mean, he was working for the O.S.S. at that time, Office of Strategic Services, but he came sometimes as a, just, visitor to see the people, and so I met him. And then there was the famous dance, also, yes. And I wasn’t prepared for anything like that. I didn’t have a formal dress, so I had to buy that, and actually the other fellows helped me with that, because I didn’t know where to go or what to do, so – and that was a very nice occasion, too, and of course there were people from outside who came. Oh, yes, there was one other person, who was – he had been a fellow here. He was Greek and so was his wife, and he worked at the embassy, at the Greek embassy.

GB: It was not Milton, no?

EE: No, no, not Milton. Milton was American.

GB: Yeah. Maybe Pelopidas Stephanou?

EE: No.

GB: Um –

EE: I think it was something with “A”, but I’m not quite sure. Very nice person, whom I met that way, also. Now, maybe he hadn’t been a Fellow here, but he was coming to lectures and whatnot, and thus Margaret had met him. That’s all I can think of. There were a number of people who came to the lectures who were not directly connected but were very much interested in early Christian, Byzantine art, I suppose, and that’s how they came here—for lectures and so on.

GB: When you were here, something very specific and nowadays a rare historical moment or, actually, event took place and that is what we would call nowadays the United Nations Conversations.

EE: Well, yes, that happened during the summer and therefore we couldn’t be here. Of course, we didn’t know what was going on, but it was something government, we were told, or so – so we had to leave.

GB: So you were not informed in any detail about that – of course, for security reasons.

EE: Exactly, oh absolutely, and also it wasn’t yet certain what was going to happen – I mean what the result would be. So many people, when one said, “I work in Dumbarton Oaks” – “Oh, you’re connected with the UN.” And I had to inform them, “No, no, no, that happened to take place here, but it had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks; it’s just the place that was handed over to them for the summer.”

GB: And as far as I remember from what I have read about it, it was indeed that the start of the fellowship term had to be postponed, I think. You had to leave, of course, for several – it was, kind of, already booked but then extended – it got into more rounds and additional discussions. And I don’t know if you remember that, but that’s, I think, what I gather from the reports: that the fellows had to be a little bit late, in fact.

EE: Yes, I think, I don’t remember specifically but just very vaguely I remember something for me that was lucky, actually, because I had gotten sick – I had had a very severe case of infectious hepatitis while I was in Turkey and it was a sad thing, because I was told Iran has just a more liquid yogurt, and I didn’t know that it was mixed with water. If I had known that – I was told it’s just more liquid. If I had known that it was mixed with water, I would never have taken it. And I got very sick from that, and I had a relapse at that time. So it was good that it started later. I had to be on a diet for quite a while.

GB: One point I had noted down is about Koehler, and although you said that Koehler was not here – you have heard about that – the event or the years before, about his role –

EE: Yes, and I missed that very much, really.

GB: That is my interest, actually, when you say you missed it: so, is that in retrospect or is it that you had known already at the time when you were here that the earlier years starting in 1940, until 1943, were under a different guidance because of Koehler and how he thought that Fellows at the institute could be built up – was it that you knew?

EE: No, I didn’t know about it at all. I didn’t know that – how it worked before. Koehler had not told me.

GB: How’d you learn about that – do you remember?

EE: It was from, especially, Margaret Ames and also Josephine Harris, who told me.

GB: So, your co-Fellows told you.

EE: Yes, they told me.

GB: And how did they talk about that time? That was a really interesting time.

EE: They loved it. They all thought it was wonderful.

GB: Can you explain what they thought and what it was?

EE: Well, it was a collaboration. I mean, one’s work was being discussed and helped by discussing it not only with Professor Koehler but with the other Fellows also, in an informal but formal way – I mean, by getting together.

GB: And that’s what they called seminars.

EE: Yes.

GB: Was it on a regular basis?

EE: It was on a regular basis, yes. And that – I realized I felt a little bit footloose as a result of it, having heard what it was, because when Professor Koehler came, it was for – oh, I don’t know – two days or something like that, so really he couldn’t do much and you couldn’t get much from that, because he came for other, mainly other purposes.

GB: But he came to visit Dumbarton Oaks when you were here. But, he did not –

EE: He didn’t stay.

GB: And were there any kind of discussions between you and the other Fellows, how to, maybe, get back to this, or why this had stopped, or was there any kind of understanding –

EE: No, it was – that was never being discussed, and I didn’t have the initiative at that time, at all. I was too junior, really. I mean I had to adjust to a new life. Today, yes, I would do something –

GB: It seems –

EE: – or try to do something.

GB: – as if there was a common sense that this was very much appreciated –

EE: But it was something of the past.

GB: Yeah. It was something of the past, which was not – no more the everyday life of the institute. Yeah, that is very interesting. That is very –

EE: And I would say that Margaret Ames and Josephine Harris had gotten all the groundwork done this way, and they had found all the right directions and it wasn’t so important for them to get any help or further directives. But, as far as I am concerned, it would have been a great help.

GB: Were they conducting – no, actually, you had said they all had their Ph.Ds already.

EE: Well, Margaret Ames didn’t.

GB: Margaret Ames didn’t, so she – but you said she was on her own track, so to speak. She did not necessarily need any more guidance –

EE: Well, I suppose she was getting it also when she – where did she get her Ph.D? I forget where she got it, really. But, well, it was – for her, at that stage, it was more cumulative. You see, she had to explore more, other sites, also. But the basic part was already there – of basic directives or direction.

GB: You weren’t able to take that into the next, following year, actually, or following years. I see that both of you left after that year and only Rosalie Beth Green continued to stay so that the only one to benefit was her, I think, she is listed under this ’45-’46 fellowship year. You came to the end of your term – of your years at some point and you – did you know where to go and did you get any kind of support or advice from the co-Fellows –?

EE: Oh no, nothing whatsoever.

GB: – or was it just a, kind of, natural coming-to-the-end of the fellowship?

EE: That was it, yes.

GB: And when you left, what was your, kind of –

EE: Well that was – in May I got engaged, so before I left – not that I told anybody, though.

GB: Oh, yeah? No?

EE: No. Well, Barbara Sessions, I think, knew. But otherwise, no, nobody. And I got married in the fall, September of ’45. And then I helped my husband.

GB: And you moved – well, you lived –

EE: First in Washington, D.C. and then we moved to outside Vienna, Virginia, to the country. And there we did a lot of work for the house, something I’d never done before – but everything. I was a contractor and I did painting and I did woodwork and I did everything. Oh, and garden work.

GB: And while you were here, in Vienna, which is not far away, by – no, actually, it’s –

EE: No, it’s in northwestern Virginia.

GB: Did you come back to Dumbarton Oaks? Sure, I guess, as you continued –

EE: Yes, I did. Not very much.

GB: And your husband was still working here, I mean researching, conducting research here at Dumbarton Oaks?

EE: Here? I don’t think so. I mean, he came before maybe once for research but mainly for just visiting Thacher or some other friends he had.

GB: So when you decided to stay here in D.C., was this because of –

EE: Because my husband was curator at the Freer Gallery, in charge of the Islamic department.

GB: Until when?

EE: Until ’65

GB: So that’s a long time.

EE: Yes. Well, we had moved back then, to Washington. I was very much – I wanted very much to go back, because it was difficult, really, always that long drive and so on.

GB: And I guess you connected, then – through the professional relationship and work relationship – you connected more to the Freer-Sackler Gallery and the landscape at that time – of course, such institutions stood in a different all-around shape, I think, an organization, than nowadays – but particularly your focus shifted toward that.

EE: Well yes, one year we went to the Middle East. That was nineteen fifty-fi – well, oh, before that, one year before that, I worked at the State Department, which was actually a very interesting experience. It was in the research department on the Middle East. The only problem was that I didn’t dare to discuss anything about the Middle East because I wasn’t sure whether I’d read it at documents in the State Department or in the press. So I kept quiet. But I read about some friends of ours, also, who were in the Middle East. It was broadening my experience, I would say. And then, of course, when we went to the Middle East, for one year – actually it was even fourteen months – we went over Europe to the Middle East to countries I’d never been – my husband had never been – to. He knew a great deal about it, but he had never visited there. And we started, from Italy we went to – we flew, for me it was my first flight, to Egypt and the Patriarch, the Patriarch of Cairo, was on the same plane, and it was his first flight and my first flight. There were very few passengers. It was an Alitalia plane. And he would say, “Oh look down here! No look down there!” So we were like two children, really. It was very exciting.

GB: Speaking of this makes me realize that you came, of course, from Europe to America for your fellowship by boat.

EE: By boat.

GB: And not at all by airplane.

EE: No, by boat. It was, it took a month to get here, and my parents and I were the only passengers. It was on a freighter, an American freighter. And it was – well, we saw something; nothing happened, but we saw something of what – of the war, of course. First of all, it was all darkened – or blackened. And it was interesting to learn about the experience of the sailors. They were informed that I was a – well, a fairly young person, of course. They’d have to behave, so to say. So they treated me like a sister, and they told me all kinds of stories of their lives.

GB: How old were you?

EE: Pardon?

GB: How old were you at the time?

EE: I was twenty-four, I think. So it was quite an experience being exposed to American life, not of exactly the type of person I would normally meet. But there were also some, of course, who went rather into the Merchant Marine than joining the regular forces.

GB: How did it come that you were on that boat, on that carrier, as the only family, you said?

EE: Yes. Well, my father had connections, all kinds of connections. He had connections from Istanbul with the British and the Americans.

GB: And you came from Istanbul? That’s where you –

EE: From Istanbul we went to Cairo and from Cairo, then, to – on the boat, on the Liberty Ship.

GB: And you lived in Istanbul.

EE: For almost five years.

GB: Five years.

EE: At first I didn’t continue my studies there, and then I was advised that I could do that and I did. And I learned. I took courses in four languages: in Turkish, in German, French, and English.

GB: At the university?

EE: Yes, Istanbul University. I mean, it was professors from different countries. Of course, it was all translated into Turkish, but I took the original. One of my teachers was Runciman and he taught, of course, history, but also art – Byzantine art.

GB: Was that how you got started, the interest –

EE: Pardon?

GB: Is that how your interest got started or piqued in –

EE: Well, it was, I mean – in Istanbul you can’t avoid it, almost.

GB: Well, you could have had an interest in later, Ottoman art and –

EE: I developed that there, actually, but I was extremely lucky in Vienna, because I – Sedelmeier was the chief of the art history department. He had just come in when I started. And the last term I had with him – he not only did the general history of art course (he did it over four years), but also then special courses in whatever interested him or he had worked on. And that was on St. Sophia. So I knew quite a bit about it, as a result of it. And when I saw it for the first time, in Istanbul then, the amazing thing was, I noticed the chandeliers so much and they bothered me so much that I couldn’t really enjoy and understand the space and the greatness of the church. And I went out again, quite disappointed and went another day, again, and then I didn’t see the chandeliers, but I saw the space and ever since then I’ve seen the space – and of course all the details.

GB: That is amazing to think of Sedelmeier giving a lecture, or a seminar, on Hagia Sophia.

EE: No. He had worked on that.

GB: He had worked on it?

EE: Yes.

GB: I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.

EE: On the baldacchino system, especially, yes.

GB: An architectural component.

EE: Yes, well the domes and the semi-domes and so on. And that’s how he got to it. And that was always very interesting for me, then. I mean, I saw things differently from, probably, what – people who really know structures and so on, of course, too, but for me it was the essence or the most important part. So I saw it differently, probably, from others.

GB: And before Istanbul, you lived in Vienna.

EE: Oh yes, yes I was born in Vienna and went to school in Vienna.

GB: Now of course, you, what – that your life would be directed in quite a – by a marriage of course, and coming – something very important, that you would have, you would have never thought of that, that this was going to be life altering, so to speak, which is of course not true, but one – at the end of the fellowship, so to speak, that was quite amazing to see that you continued your professional interest and found a wonderful husband and together you could manage to work in the area of architecture, and that’s what you do, up to today, which is amazing to think. And looking back and seeing this –

EE: Well, I think, actually, it was very lucky for me that in Istanbul, for instance, the emphasis was really on Near Eastern archaeology, so I also – I mean I took also history of art but also Near Eastern archaeology – so I got a broader vision, which actually Sedelmeier had started for me, because he was very much interested in the broader vision. I know some of my fellow students in Vienna criticized him: “Oh, some details are not right.” But it meant a great deal to me. There were other professors who went into details. So I saw the advantages of the one and the other. But you know there are some who never see the broader picture, which is a pity.

GB: How would you characterize the Dumbarton Oaks tenure and your fellowship here, with this respect, regarding the overall scholarly interest and what you just formulated – you mentioned the broader picture – and cross-cultural exchanges and –

EE: Except for, I would say, except for the lectures and more so the symposium, it didn’t further that. But I think things have changed. I mean, everything has changed. Not here. Life has changed; everything has changed. It’s much more open to other cultures in general. And so, of course it would be also in Dumbarton Oaks.

GB: Yeah, indeed. Very much so and I think that is – it’s good to look at this change.

EE: The broader picture.

GB: Not only the different disciplines, which at that time didn’t even exist here at Dumbarton Oaks. There was no Pre-Columbian Department. There was no Garden-Landscape Department. And not only having these two other – so important – other branches or disciplines at Dumbarton Oaks, but to connect them, to exchange and to see the Fellows exchanging ideas freely across the aisle, so to speak, which is really quite nice. And I understand that this was, indeed – if we again apply this term, which is not correct, because there was no talk about a mission at that time – but if we think of the mission of a research institute, that has very much changed, you know, from an institute which was, at that time, I understand, driven by establishing at such a – I forget the term. There was a term at the time, how they called this database work. I can’t remember, but I read it somewhere. But this was a kind of major point of activity of the institution, to develop this pool of material culture, evidence, records, and with that, of course, to facilitate research and to offer this to other Byzantine scholars and to everybody who’s interested –

EE: I remember Kitzinger once mentioned to me that it was quite helpful for some work he did.

GB: He did. So he took advantage of that.

EE: Yes, because he knew about it, of course. And he took advantage of it.

GB: That’s interesting. Yeah.

EE: If I may say one other thing, I think Mrs. Bliss would be really delighted that the broader vision has been reached, because she was that kind of – just as that quotation –

GB: Yes, indeed. Yeah, that’s interesting, because, I mean, I see this, I read this out of what I know of correspondence we now know about and so on, but that you say this – that is, of course, you with your knowledge of her as a person. You have experience; you have encounters. How would you – why do you – can you expand on this? Can you – when you think of her and how you perceived her, was it because she was just the kind of lady walking into this place and embracing this place by nature of being the owner, previous owner, at least, of that place? That’s what I see – what she has really created, an all-over Bliss creation, the collection they collected, the gardens they built up from scratch, the house they bought but very much remodeled, rebuilt – was that what I – was that what she, kind of – was that her realm when you –

EE: Well, she may not have known it then, but I have the feeling she would be pleased. Sometimes, you don’t know exactly what you want, that is, how you can realize or what you can realize, but I think it would be – not only for Mrs. Bliss but also for Mr. Bliss.

GB: How do you remember the proper introduction? How were they introduced or were you introduced to the Blisses? Like, “This is Mildred and Robert Bliss,” or, “These are the founders of the institution,” or how was that, kind of –?

EE: I don’t know. I only know that I just met them, and I don’t think anything was said, because I was probably told beforehand, so: “May I introduce –”

GB: Because I ask – we know and we learned from various sources that they were very modest, indeed, about their donations, about participating, about funding projects, about supporting artists; often it was done anonymously. They didn’t want to be named on all sorts – so, that’s in a way what I, kind of,  – just, you know, from being told or having read, I think that is very much confirmed through what you – you can’t remember what you, basically –

EE: Of course, times were very different. So, and she was used to – both of them were used to being in certain circles and that there were certain behaviors and formalities and all that – that would be different. And I’m sure, I have the feeling they would understand the difference.

GB: They were very much open-minded regarding the avant-garde. I mean, they were very much – well, it’s maybe wrong to say they were contemporary regarding their living taste of, the set-up of houses – it was very, I think, traditional and very much, of course, according to the Zeitgeist of the time.

EE: Yes, that’s right.

GB: But at the same time we know – not only because they, as I said, supported artists, contemporary artists, but, of course, music – and by the way, which reminds me that you had heard Stravinsky – that you attended the premiere of Stravinsky’s concerto.

EE: Yes. That’s right. I heard it the other day, by the way, on the radio again.

GB: But not conducted by Stravinsky, I guess.

EE: I guess not.

GB: So that was indeed –

EE: Oh yes, indeed.

GB: Do you remember the occasion? It was while you were here on your fellowship?

EE: Yes, I think so.

GB: And you met him. You were introduced to him.

EE: Well yes, I somehow met him. I mean I didn’t talk to him at length.

GB: And you may know – I don’t know if you know – that later on they commissioned a piece by Copland, so again a contemporary.

EE: No, I didn’t know that.

GB: And later on, late, very late, Dumbarton Oaks commissioned a piece for their—well, on the anniversary for the Blisses, 100^th anniversary, and by coincidence it would just be the year we had premiered here at Dumbarton Oaks – it was indeed the year of the opening of the reinstalling there in 2008, which was the 100^th wedding anniversary of the Blisses. It was a kind of nice –

EE: And, uh?

GB: Oh, Joan Tower, the composer, an American contemporary composer—she’s quite known and it’s –

EE: Great, wonderful.

GB: With Stravinsky, the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Copland’s piece, and Joan Tower’s piece, which is, I’ve forgot the title; it’s Dumbarton Oaks Quintet, or something like that – no, actually that’s – I think, the Dumbarton Quintet, if I’m not wrong. And we had all the three pieces.

EE: Wonderful.

GB: And it’s just wonderful to see and to hear the three different pieces and to know about the three different musicians and composers and to link all these to the Blisses as the one couple, who connected so many arts and so many visionary ideas in their life.

EE: I should, perhaps, say something that I was told, true or false – that Mrs. Bliss expected that all the scholars would just go to the garden and they would discuss things like in ancient Athens or so. And, well, we shook our heads over that – that it was not – it doesn’t work that way. But, I think she would have understood that it doesn’t work that way. I mean, it was understandable with her background, her upbringing, and so on – and the time was different – and it has changed and as through scholarly discussions and so on, this was, perhaps, more forward-looking, I mean different, already, formally. And she didn’t know that. But I still think – I mean it’s wonderful what she has done, really. I appreciate it much more now than I did then, to be quite frank.

GB: Yeah, it is again a nice confirmation of what I know only by reading letters and other articles, which have been written in the meantime about the Blisses. She very much understood the gardens as an essential part of the Dumbarton Oaks research institute and she liked the idea of the scholars walking and getting inspired and talking and exchanging ideas by walking and encountering this landscape, this extraordinary space she created, which is kind of an ideal, like, locus amoenus. And it was maybe a paradise, even, what we may call an ivory tower, but the ivory tower very much with an extension, which is indeed this kind of muse temple of thought-provoking ideas – inspiring. And it’s very much what she expressed in her last will, that this scholarship and the lives of the scholars at Dumbarton Oaks should never be de-attached from the gardens and from the trees, not just a nice, green landscape around the house, which is the library and collection. It’s really a part of it and that’s quite interesting.

EE: I didn’t realize that, but I must say, personally, I went through the garden a great deal. I mean, instead of going over the street, I went through the garden, through what then was called the Fellows Building. And, well the gardens meant a great deal to me. So, in being unaware of that, it did help me.

GB: Did you see changes? Did you see changes over the past recent years? Have you looked into the gardens? Is it still the same or is it changed?

EE: No, it’s very different, of course, because of the new buildings – for me, new buildings.

GB: And the public part of the gardens – the rose terrace and the fountain.

EE: There was a fountain before.

GB: Mhm, yeah, I know that. It’s the setting and the park-scape parts that are totally the same, unchanged, but one should not forget that the gardens, the trees, of course, change. So, I say this because only over the past two years we have fought and had many losses, many trees lost to lightning.

EE: Oh, that also. Well, you have those ancient white oaks.

GB: Yeah. They would be interesting to – and I guess you haven’t had a chance to walk –

EE: No, unfortunately not. I mean, I walked in that part [points to her left, east of the Fellows Building/Guest House] and that is, of course, entirely different, because they’re, so to say, formal walks now. Paths, I should say. But that’s, of course, necessary under the circumstances.

GB: That’s so wonderful that you – to have you sharing all these memories with us and –

EE: Well, I hope I contributed something, at least.

GB: Oh yeah, oh yeah, indeed. It is a very, very specific year, or years, here and it’s – yes – a treasure of recollections.

EE: I mean it’s, of course, personal recollections and objectively it may be different, slightly different.

GB: That’s exactly what we all have: personal recollections. And they each piece together, so to speak, and there’s history at the end – it’s history. And that’s very much appreciated. Do you remember the – you remember quite well the year that was your arrival and – because I’m not sure if we are even correct in our documents. When you arrived – and you said in May – your marriage was in the fall of ’45, yeah? And you –

EE: No, no. Yes.

GB: Was it ’45?

EE: No, you see, I was here in ’43-’44 to ’45.

GB: So you arrived in ’43, in fall of ’43?

EE: Yes, in late fall. I didn’t get here at the beginning of the year, because I wasn’t here yet. I mean I wasn’t here yet in this country.

GB: You arrived in this country in ’43.

EE: Yes.

GB: So you were pretty new to the country.

EE: I was quite new. I also experienced Ellis Island for three days, which for me was an interesting experience. It wasn’t the same for my father, of course. But I was young, you know. I could take things like that. I just observed. And actually it’s very good for everybody to once experience being confined. One understands things better, certain things much better that way – [laughs] Well.

GB: Thank you so much. That was really wonderful.

EE: Well it’s a pleasure to be here. And if I can contribute anything, I’m delighted, of course.

GB: Well, whatever memories and recollections you have, please continue to send us an email and share them and maybe some memories will come up and –

EE: Sometimes. It could happen, yes.

GB: This was wonderful, wonderful.

EE: Now perhaps I should say one thing about Professor Friend, because the way I put it sounds, actually, negative, I think, and I don’t want that to be the case. He just was interested in certain things in a, perhaps, different way.

GB: Yeah. So I think that we have covered quite a lot: various aspects, Fellows, research, professors, social life, dancing –

EE: [Laughs] Oh yes.

GB: –lunches, the Blisses, the United Nations –

EE: Perhaps I should – I don’t think that came up, actually, that we were invited also at the Blisses. I mean we Fellows. That may have been at the end of the year, but I don’t remember. Maybe in connection with a symposium or something, which was very nice, of course. So I saw their house and –

GB: Their house in Georgetown. So they really cared. I mean it was – they were present and they were engaged. They were really active.

EE: It was their children.

GB: Yeah, yeah indeed. Yep. Yep. Wonderful.

EE: Well, thank you very much.

GB: Oh, I would – it’s my pleasure.

EE: Do you know how to turn it off?

INT: I’m Anne Steptoe.

INT: I’m Elizabeth Gettinger.

INT: We have the honor today to interview Helen Evans and Angela Hero. We are here in New York City at the Metropolitan Art Museum. Good afternoon to both of you.

AH: Good afternoon.

HE: Good afternoon.

INT: Now we can get going. So, Dr. Hero, can you tell us something about your work in editing monastic documents at Dumbarton Oaks?

AH: Well, Professor Constable thought that the entire range of monasticism, both eastern and western, could not be studied properly until sources for eastern monasticism were made available, collected and made available. And he assigned that project to John Philip Thomas, whom he had known from Harvard. John was at that time on a joint appointment at Dumbarton Oaks and Georgetown. He was putting the final touches on his dissertation at Harvard, which was published a couple of years after that—I think it was the early eighties—and very, very well received. It was an excellent study of private religious foundations in Byzantium, so it was related, you see. And he became – he took over the project. And I was appointed—this was all started in ’81—I was appointed philological editor for the Greek, because when we got a grant from the Foundation for the Humanities, they said that they wanted also a Greek editor, since these were translations. And we got together a group of translators. It was a problem, because these documents were written in various registers of the Greek language, ranging from the classicizing Hochsprache to the vernacular. And there weren’t many scholars, many Byzantinists, who wanted to take on such a task. It was very difficult, because there were—to give you an idea—in the so-called inventories, the brevia, there were words that were not found in any dictionaries, so the two of us worked together – it was a very harmonious collaboration between John and me. We were very lucky finally in getting together a group of international scholars that – some of them were from England, others from Belgium, from Italy. And there’s also a – very satisfactory, really. It was a very fine work, my favorite. I mean, it’s there in five volumes; you can see it. It was published in 2000, the year 2000. It’s the index. This is the part that I value very much, because it was, it is research-friendly. You see, if I – can you bring down volume five, please? That whole volume is the index.

INT: Wow.

AH: Yes so it gives you an idea. If you look under “monks”, you have so many entries. [Flipping through the book]

HE: Do you use this in your research at all?

INT: I work in Syriac sources more and I didn’t – I know what a tremendous contribution this has been to the field. I work more in the earlier period.

HE: What period are you working in?

INT: Late Antique.

HE: Up to about the seventh century, or –?

INT: Up to about the seventh century.

HE: I’m working on an exhibition on the transition from Byzantium to Islam. We should discuss that at some point.

AH: I’ll read it to you so you get an idea. For instance, you start: “Monks, appointment of, assignment to fix duties, attempted assassination of, care of aged, conspiring to flee, contract workers, definition of, dietary concessions for, documents offered by, expulsion of, esthete of the community, electoral college, foundation of.” You know, you have, on monks you have how many pages, yes? Monks continued, monks, you have four to five pages. But it followed the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in the format – what it means is that we wanted to produce something that was research-friendly. Now, the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium is unique. I mean, Alice-Mary Talbot, who was the executive editor – of course the idea was Kazhdan’s, Alexander Kazhdan. There you have a dictionary, an encyclopedia practically of Byzantine life in all its aspects: politics, not just as before, you know, the great, important events, people who took part in these events, patriarchs, kings, emperors; but you have also: sports, food, clothing, footwear. The entry on women in the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, it’s cross-referenced to Eve, the Virgin Mary, birth of women, girls, you know, education of, marriage, fertility, divorce, concubinage, prostitution, empresses, nuns, so it is – these are extraordinary reference books, standard reference books. That’s all I can tell you.

INT: This was a long labor of love for you, these volumes. You worked twenty years and I understand that there were some difficulties at times.

AH: Well, there was, because, as I said, the grant ran out of money, and John and I carried on, on our own expenses. And of course he, fortunately, was – of course we are talking now twenty-five, thirty years ago – he was a master of the computer. He was a computer whiz. And the word processing – he turned in a manuscript over 5,000 pages in ’96 to Dumbarton Oaks. And that was all done, you know. I couldn’t help there, because my first computer I bought in 1990. And still I use it because it has an excellent Greek font. My Macintosh, the one there, has access to the Internet. I google, now. But I still miss my nice Greek font. In this Macintosh that I have, the Greek font leaves a lot to be desired, especially the accents, the iota subscript – forget it. It’s a mess.

INT: Well, while we’re on the subject of publications, you were also involved in the Dumbarton Oaks Holy Women of Byzantium series.

AH: Well, I am on the advisory committee on hagiography, yes.

INT: And contributed the life of St. Theoktiste of Lesbos –

AH: Yes, but my dissertation, which was published by Dumbarton Oaks, was – at that time, Alice-Mary and I were doing correspondence, you see, where I did fifty-nine letters of Gregory Akindynos, who was condemned as a heretic, because he was involved in the Hesychast controversy. And then I edited – to give you an idea of my background, it was Professor Ševčenko who introduced me to the study of manuscripts and suggested that I do – both Alice-Mary and myself; we were his students – that we focus on unpublished sources of the fourteenth century. So, she did Patriarch Athanasius; I did Akindynos, and then I edited and translated the only surviving correspondence by a Byzantine woman, the letters of Irene Choumnaina Palaiologina and out of that the correspondence of her spiritual advisor, Theoleptos of Philadelphia.

INT: You were working on sources on the history of women –

AH: They’re all fourteenth century.

INT: -- before a lot of people were doing that, really. You were at the beginning of that.

AH: Yes, we were. It was the beginning of the study – you know, gender studies and all that. But, and then of course, you know, in Byzantine Hagiography and Theoktiste of Philadelphia, er, Theoktiste of Lesbos.

INT: When did you first come to visit Dumbarton Oaks? When was that, and what were your first impressions of the place?

AH: Well, originally I was very impressed, because I felt that it was an ideal place for scholarly research. At that time, I think in ’66, Mrs. Bliss was still alive.

INT: She was still there.

AH: And during the symposia they had a beautiful buffet, as you know, and the table set out with the best china and silver, and it was something to see. And of course the gardens – the symposia were always during the spring and outdoors. And the opportunity offered of interacting with other scholars – I met some of the world’s top Byzantinists there: Robert Browning, oh so many – Romilly Jenkins, Trypanis, Laourdas, Vryonis, Sir Steven Runciman, so many, Anastos from California – my friends, yeah; and Alice-Mary, with whom I feel like, you know, like a sibling, like sisters. We were very close and we still continue to be. But our mentor is sick.

INT: Doing better, though, I understand.

AH: And Meyendorff passed away fourteen years ago.

INT: Can you talk about Father Meyendorff, what he was like, since we don’t have the opportunity to interview him?

AH: No, no, he died in ’92 and he died – it was so sudden, because I had seen him at Dumbarton Oaks two months before he passed away. He was a real man of God. Bickerman, my other teacher at Columbia—he was of course a classicist—said once that Meyendorff was the last intelligent man to believe in God, which shocked me, of course, because I was still very innocent and very not used to that kind of talk. He said to me, “Are you with Meyendorff?” I said, “Yes.” Ha! Last intelligent – I couldn’t believe it. Yes, Father Meyendorff was a true believer. He was a pioneer, an intelligent man, despite what Bickerman said, and very erudite, a very learned man. And easy, kind to work with – you know, very congenial, very – I found him. He was exceptionally good to his students. And he had a lot to give. It’s a shame that he died. He was in his – sixty-two years old when he died. He died of pancreatic cancer. And fortunately he didn’t suffer. As I said, I’d seen him two months before his death. I couldn’t believe it when I opened up the New York Times and saw the obituary – because he had then retired from Fordham and had gone to the Institute for Advanced Study.

INT: Right, Princeton.

AH: Yeah, Princeton. They had built a house that summer and everything. He died, and she had to sell the house, Mrs. Meyendorff.

HE: Did he just not know he was ill at all until it was just the very end?

AH: No, no, no, no. All of a sudden he died in Canada. He used to spend the summers there, at a retreat.

INT: Do you remember, as a student, hearing about Dumbarton Oaks from him or did you get a sense – he was quite a giant at Dumbarton Oaks. Did you get a sense of his opinions on the place as a place of study for scholars?

AH: You mean from Father Meyendorff?

INT: Yes.

AH: Oh yes. Well, he thought he was – I think they considered him for director, but he didn’t want to accept that job, because he was at St. Vladimir’s. He was very active at St. Vladimir’s with Schmemann, Father Schmemann.

INT: They made Byzantine theology accessible, I think, to the West in a way that few have replicated. They opened that world up to a lot of people in the West – English-speaking.

AH: Yes, yes. Schmemann’s son is a journalist. He’s, I think, one of the senior editors – not editors; what do you call them? Correspondents – he was a correspondent for the Times and the head of the Times bureau in, I think, in Moscow for a while. But he went back, you know, to Russia and visited the estates of the family, because these were princely families in Russia – the Meyendorffs, yeah. Meyendorff didn’t use the title himself, but it was a princely – again, they were titled people, going all the way back to the first German pope in Rome, before the schism, before 1054. There was a Bavarian pope, a Meyen –

HE: A Meyendorff.

AH: They were Germans, yeah.

HE: And you tell me he came with –

AH: And they went from Germany with Catherine the Great. They married into an Orthodox family in Russia. And that’s why he was no longer a Catholic; he was a Russian, he was an Orthodox. But, I asked him – before, of course, the reform of communism, he visited Russia – and I asked him if he went to see their property there, their estates. And he said, “No, my home in St. Petersburg is in the museum.” The estates – but Schmemann’s son went there and wrote a book. I think it’s Echoes from a Native Land – something like that. I don’t – I’m not sure, but it’s something – yes, Echoes. It’s brilliant. And Schmemann’s wife was related to another of those, you know, white Russian families, the Trubetskoys, Franz Trubetskoy, so she was the headmistress at Chapin, I think, or Brearley, one of those schools for years. She taught French and Russian, because you see Meyendorff and Schmemann were, of course, refugees from the revolution and they settled in Paris, so they both had doctorates from the Sorbonne. And they were bilingual – more than that.

INT: Multilingual.

INT: It seems that an entire generation of scholars at Dumbarton Oaks had a similar story – Kazhdan.

AH: Kazhdan, yes.

INT: It must have had a very European feel in those first years.

AH: It did. But then after a while, they started, you know, one by one – well, you’re the future! [Laughter] It’s up to you, now.

INT: Well, I wonder, along the lines of these early years and even later – and you’ve attended so many Dumbarton Oaks symposia – there must have been some quite memorable experiences among those; I understand there were quite heated debates.

AH: Mm, no. Of course, Professor Ševčenko was always asking a series of questions, you know, but –

INT: How was he as a teacher? How was it having him as your mentor?

AH: Well, I owe everything to him. I’ll tell you why: because I went there not knowing what my strengths were, what I wanted to do, my strengths and my weaknesses. And he said to me, “You know the Greek language. You like the written word, don’t you?” I said yes. “Well,” he said, “continue that.” He gave me, when I went to his seminar – he opened up Patrologia Graeca and gave me a passage to translate and I did. He said, “You’ve seen that before.” “No, sir.”

HE: It’s not my bedside reading.

AH: I said, “I’ve studied the classics, which I admire, but I never studied the fathers of the church. He said, “Hm. Well. Alright,” he says. “You’ll be my student. You can take my courses.” And I remember: there was another woman, who was – she was also from Europe. And he said to her that she had to take the test. And she said, “Over my dead body.” She says, “I have a degree.” And he said, “Then, you’re not my student.” Well, he could be – I’ll tell you. I mean, Meyendorff was, by nature, a very gentle, very mild person. The other one – you’ve known Ševčenko, haven’t you? But, I’ll say something else for Ševčenko. Ševčenko would go to bat for his students. Yes. He was there for us all the time. And knowing how demanding he was, we worked hard. You couldn’t produce for Ševčenko something that was substandard; he’d throw it in your face! Sure. So, I – he was – for me, he was the guiding light. Afterwards, I wanted to continue with him but he left Columbia and went to Dumbarton Oaks, as acting director, interim director. And he told me to go to Meyendorff, because Father Meyendorff had come to Columbia as a visiting professor for a year. And when I told him that I wanted to continue for a doctorate, he said, “You have to come to Fordham. I’m leaving. I can’t accept a position here, and I’m offered something at Fordham.” And that’s it. That’s the story of my life, girls. I’ve got to go now, because –

HE: -- because you think you’re going to get rained on.

AH: So, of course, I was going to – I didn’t know if you had interviewed Alice-Mary.

INT: We’re planning to.

INT: In August.

AH: Yes. And I was going to suggest that you go to her, because she is Dumbarton Oaks. She’s been there from ’65 all the way to last, this past year.

HE: This year.

AH: She retired. And we are now – in fact, I’m writing an article for her Festschrift. So, she is phenomenal, as far as I’m concerned, because not only is she a superb scholar, but she’s also an excellent administrator. I envy this, as far as administration goes. I can’t, I hate it, I dread it – administration. Don’t give me such duties, no, in my white tower there, ivory tower.

INT: You were quite involved with the Byzantine Center here at Queens.

AH: Well, yes, I was there, yes, but not in the administration, yeah. Right. And it was a small center. We started it with, you know, Professor Psomiadis, who was the founder of the center, and I helped him out. It’s – I cannot dismiss – I’ll tell you why: because I cannot fire anybody. [Laughter] I can’t! I would die before I had to fire somebody, before I tell somebody, because I can’t use you anymore. I have a cleaning lady and the poor thing now is getting older, and I do more work than she does. [Laughter] My sons tell me, “This is absurd.” I can’t, I can’t tell anybody, “I don’t need you anymore.” I can’t. But Alice-Mary is fantastic. And then, like Helen – they can juggle, as I said, fifty different projects, here, there. I hate traveling – that’s another thing.

HE: She still goes to Greece.

AH: Not anymore. And I can’t travel because I’ve got problems with my back and sitting is not good for me. So, if you’ll excuse me – I’m eighty-three years old.

INT: Thank you.

INT: Thank you, that’s amazing.

HE: Do you want me to get somebody to get you out to a taxi?

INT: I can walk you out.

HE: Do you need to do your introduction or do we just keep going?

INT: I think we can just keep going.

INT: This is part two and now we will be speaking with Helen Evans at the Metropolitan Art Museum. We’re so honored to talk with you today. Thank you so much. So, we understand that you were a summer fellow in 1981. Was that how you first came to work at Dumbarton Oaks, or were you involved earlier than that?

HE: No, it’s not how I first came and – I can’t remember. I remember being at the symposium that was the first symposium that Robert Thomson from Harvard attended. And I spoke at the symposium “East of Byzantium,” and I had not even, really, picked Byzantine studies as my dissertation topic at that time, and so it was a paper I had given for Tom Matthews, and he was one of the co-higher-ups of the symposium. And I remember giving the paper and being so stunned that I was giving it, and my mother had just almost died, so I’d come from the hospital to the conference, and I’d re-written the paper in the hospital so that I hadn’t – the research wasn’t good enough. I had no access to the books to do anything about it. And I was so nervous that when I finished speaking – and people were very, very positive about it – I essentially tore off the platform and had not unclipped the mic. So, I remember that, mercifully, somebody gasped, I stopped, and the mic cord was as tight as it could have gotten. One more step and I could have discovered whether I fell down or the platform turned over. [Laughter] So that’s one of my first great memories of Dumbarton Oaks. But then in ’81, as I began my dissertation, I had a fellowship. I started graduate school to do Japanese art history. I think I’m the only Byzantinist that went on the Silk Road backwards, from your point of view. We had lived in Tokyo for several years, when my husband set up a merger venture there. And I began studying at Sophia University, the Jesuit school in Tokyo, and then ended up studying Hagia Sophia, so it was a reverse. And when the man I went to the Institute of Fine Arts to study with retired, himself –

INT: Was that Krakow? [?]

HE: No, I went to study with Alexander Soper, who was the Pelican History of Arts author of art and architecture of China and art and architecture of Japan and was a grand old man. It led me to tell everybody who asked me for advice on dissertations to be sure that your advisor is either tenured, or you have time to finish before they come up for tenure and is young enough not to retire before you finish, which used to infuriate Tom Matthews as a set of basic advice, but it was highly relevant to my life. Soper was a wonderful person to study with. I just had no intelligence that would lead me to have figured out how old he was. I knew he was old, but I didn’t know that he would retire, himself. And Tom Matthews, whom – I’d taken every course that Tom had taught at the Institute. I arrived just before, er, just after he did – then let me become a Byzantinist. So I, overnight, left Japan and went to the other end of the Silk Road. And I had published my talk in the Dumbarton Oaks “East of Byzantium” series. It was on an Armenian topic. And the Byzantine topic, Greek topic I thought would be a dissertation topic I couldn’t get the permissions I would need to do it. Tom told me that if I would answer a question for him on a book he was working on, then it would be a perfect topic for me, because the manuscript I was studying would be in the States and I would be able to cope with two children and the husband I had—have, too, now. So, I suddenly became an Armenologist and went and took courses in Armenian and have backed up the Silk Road ever since then. So, I have the advantage of – or disadvantage, depending on your point of view of my scholarship – of having skipped classical Greece – took one course. I think the advantage is that I studied Al Gandhara a good deal in college with Soper and it makes you ask two questions that I don’t think you always think to ask when you come out of the great western classical tradition. And so one of them is, “Did the motif travel?” but the second question is, “Did the meaning travel?” And we assume a transmission of meaning that I don’t think we should always assume, and that’s been a part of what I’ve always thought that you had to prove was how – even when the image is as simple as a Christian symbol, does the community that continues to use it receive it in the way the community that produced it thinks of it. And it may be a subtle difference, or it may be a very big one. For Gandhara it was usually very big. If you go to the Afghan gold show that we have on right now – if you haven’t seen it – there’s a wonderful necklace that has a cameo, and it’s a classical god—I think its Mercury—but it’s one of the classical gods and its hung sideways. Clearly the man who had to put it in the necklace did not care that he had a male figure. He could not have missed the head and the feet, so it’s not like, “I don’t know it’s a human being.” It just meant nothing to him. To him, it meant, “I’ve got an exotic rock from the other end of the earth that proves how powerful and wealthy I am.” And then in the catalogue, of course, they do it upright so you have no idea that it’s a total other meaning to whoever in the world owned it in the vast past.

INT: So, it was through Tom Matthews that you came to know Dumbarton Oaks.

HE: Through Tom Matthews – Tom Matthews encouraging his students to go to Dumbarton Oaks symposia. I went to graduate school, like Angela did, later than you all are. I had returned to – I had come to New York – I grew up in Tennessee – from having studied in Tokyo, and the person I studied with, Julia Meech, had written the letters that got me into the Institute of Fine Arts as an Asian student. And I had been interested in medieval art in college, and so I took all the medieval courses that were of interest to me and that was everything Tom taught, so I had all of Tom’s courses, I had all of Soper’s courses, and I had, like, three other courses by the time I was taking my orals, but I turned in a qualifying paper for Tom and a qualifying paper for Soper and used Japanese answers for some of the issues that I took my orals on – on Byzantine for Tom – a year and a half later. It was several years before I felt like I really knew Byzantium.

INT: Have you worked at all – or perhaps you could comment on the importance of the collection, Byzantine Collection, at Dumbarton Oaks as you see it as a scholar of art history, of Byzantine art history, and also from your point of view here in New York, vis-à-vis the collection here of the Metropolitan – and the relationship.

HE: My predecessor Margaret Frazer was actually at one point offered the job as the head of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks. And I think that the Met and Dumbarton Oaks in varying ways have not precisely collaborated or cooperated, but also have been respectful of each other’s collections. They’re the two great collections in this country. I was charged when I was hired here to make the Met’s collection better than Dumbarton Oaks – you know, that was fully said to me. And whether you think I’ve done it or not, that is what I have been certainly trying to ensure – that we were as comprehensive and as important. I think that what the Dumbarton Oaks collection did in – for many decades – was to offer a place where, in this country, you could see a collection brought together and identified as Byzantine. When I renamed our collections – and now my title is the Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine art, I changed the focus of what this museum did. And our collection is built on the 1880s theory that the great northern tradition took a little bit from the Mediterranean Christianity and infused it with the noble people of the north to create Gothic art. And the early installation of the Museum, actually up until 2000, was origins of European art. And what we had done with the installation here in 2000, which Dumbarton Oaks already had, was to see it as the art of the Byzantine world, which as one of its aspects influences European art, but does not exist only for having influenced European art. So that it is a change that was very important here and with the exhibitions I did. And I think it is relevant, in that Anastasia Tourta, who just retired as the director of the museum in Thessaloniki, said it was the first collection in a major museum that used the word Byzantine. So Dumbarton Oaks was always this beacon that understood Byzantine, but what we added was Byzantine in a larger context, because of the breadth of our collections. The summer I was at D.O., I – which would have been when I should have spent all my time looking at the collection – I never meant to be a museum curator, so it wasn’t the way I particularly thought of my life. I actually spent the summer working at the Freer, because the manuscript I was doing my dissertation on was at the Freer, so it was really in their store rooms, looking at all of their Christian objects because they let me look at them all, and they have this amazing collection of Christian material that never goes on display that I remember as more influential on me than actually the D.O. collection.

INT: Do you remember from that time – I think you were also working with a piece at the Walters; am I right about that? Maybe that’s wrong in the record. During your summer fellowship?

HE: I went to visit the Walters that summer. I spent some time – I was looking at the Armenian manuscripts at the Walters, maybe that’s what it was, if you have notes. I was supposed to do my dissertation on a manuscript in the Freer that had not been fully studied and was filled with illuminations. It was, in theory, by the artist Toros Roslin and was therefore connected to the one by Roslin that is signed that’s at the Walters. And in the end, I turned in a dissertation that discussed the western influence on Armenian illumination in the kingdom of Cilicia, which was pretty much every image that Sirarpie der Nersessian had said was a native Armenian tradition. It was a very traumatic dissertation, to disagree with a woman that was as wonderful as she was when I met her and who was canonized in the Armenian community. And some people still don’t speak to me because of it; some people do. But at the time I turned it in, my first and second reader had not expected that dissertation, so it was not the dissertation that was supposed to be fast and dirty that I was sent out to do, where I was supposed to agree with her. But I think that has to be it, because I’d go up to the Walters and look at those manuscripts and then I would spend most of my time during the week in the Freer, going through the actual manuscript and then spend half the day at Dumbarton Oaks. And to me what was wonderful about Dumbarton Oaks was that I went in early in the morning and I left about ten or eleven at night and I had my children in camp and my husband in New York and I just read and looked at books all day. I had relatively little interaction with the people there. I was there the summer that the Fellows Building was closed down for something they were doing to it so we did not have the fellows’ lunch where we all talked together. And I stayed at night to use the library.

INT: So you were probably in the Wisconsin Avenue apartments.

HE: Yes. I was there the summer Prince Charles got married. This is the way I can remember it. And the Washington newspaper, afternoon paper, was going bankrupt. And they devoted the entire summer to wonderfully snarky articles on the wedding, which I would pick up the paper on the way up the hill, read all these kind of Vanity Fair articles on the wedding and then the next morning go back to Dumbarton Oaks and return to Byzantium. And when they got married – there were several Greeks there the summer I was there and they invited me – they rented a television and we all went and looked at the wedding, and they devoted the whole discussion to how the English had learned from the Greek wedding not to have flowers because that was what drove King Constantine off the throne. And any effort to say, “Well, actually we think it’s an incredibly expensive wedding in which flowers would have looked busy on TV,” was met with “No, no. They knew.” And I learned of everybody who was unacceptable to the Greeks at the wedding, starting with King Constantine. So that was the other thing I learned that summer: I learned more about Greek politics and Prince Charles’ wedding – and really remarkably useful and lovely access to the library.

INT: Could you get a chance from your time at D.O. to get a sense of the, I guess – an active relationship between institutions like the Freer, with which you were working closely, and Dumbarton Oaks?

HE: At the time I was there, the relationship was close to zero – largely from Dumbarton Oaks, then. I was welcomed extremely well at the Freer but not because of Dumbarton Oaks. And I made some use of the Library of Congress, where there may have been a little bit more of a connection than I ever perceived, but Dumbarton Oaks viewed itself as a self-enclosed entity. And the only thing I really remember is somebody unacceptable went swimming in the swimming pool and so there were large notes that you – it didn’t matter if you were on the board of trustees of Harvard – you were not allowed to swim in the swimming pool. I remember looking at that and thinking, that’s just really weird. But I don’t even know who it was that insisted that they should be allowed to swim in the D.O. pool.

INT: Was Giles Constable the director?

HE: Constable was the director and it either was the first summer that they had summer fellows or one of the first summers. I did not know that, but later I learned. So I, of course, appreciated very much the fact that he had opened it up in the summer. It was clear that summer that not all the staff was fond of the fact, but I didn’t know what they were un-fond of. I just – you could tell from their tone of voice. I think that it depends on where you stand. I came to Dumbarton Oaks late. I have no firsthand knowledge of when Mrs. Bliss had footmen seating people. The fanciest symposium I went to – we were in the Orangery, and the tables did have white tablecloths; maybe the food was served. What happened was that it was a weird moment in time where using red clay flowerpots was very chic for serving chocolate mousse, which would look like dirt and you’d stick some flowers in the middle of it and that was – those were the centerpieces on the table and my table of course was the young nobodies in the back – no matter what our age was. And so we didn’t realize that the waiters would serve us the mousse. And I do still remember the look of disgust on the waiter’s face when he got to us, having served like three other tables, and realized we had served ourselves our dessert. That’s the closest I ever was to the high Bliss years. There was, the summer I was there, a young man, who Giles had allowed to go through the Bliss archives, and his mother had been there before him and he put up a little exhibition on the Blisses and I remember that to me it was just interesting, and to an older generation at D.O. it was horrific. Mr. Bliss made very bad grades at Harvard, so I remember this guy saying to me, “But I found one where he didn’t have any Fs and that was very hard.” It was all Cs and Ds. But there they were – I think maybe even on the label. But someone was telling me that when you were there in Mrs. Bliss’ years you took her for a walk, told her what you wanted money for, and if she liked it, she’d pull the money out of a little purse between her breasts. So, then of course she dies and somebody writes—probably Ševčenko—and says “I want x money for next year,” and Harvard writes back, “Fill in the forms.” And these are people that have told amusing anecdotes to Mrs. Bliss; they haven’t filled in, “I’m going to spend $50 for transportation and $10 for food.” So I know there was a great deal of tension in the transition, and that Constable was one of the people that got the pressure of the transition. But for me he was always an extremely helpful person that was someone that I saw. I don’t remember particularly talking to anybody my summer there; I remember reading books.

INT: Have you been involved in symposia or colloquia or any of the conferences since your time as a summer fellow?

HE: I’ve gone to a number of the symposia. I have not been to the symposia for the last four years because I’ve been the editor – oh no, the head of the editorial board of the Art Bulletin, which unfortunately has its major annual meeting the same weekend as Dumbarton Oaks. So I have been fulfilling that thing and missing each and every one of the Dumbarton Oaks symposia as a result. I have used a number of people involved with Dumbarton Oaks in the writing of the catalogues for my two shows. I didn’t actually go to Dumbarton Oaks to do any major amount of research of my own. There are very few books, if any, at Dumbarton Oaks that are not in New York City – just a little bit more irritating how many different physical places you may have to go to to get them, but the getting of them is just as possible.

INT: You’ve also written on pieces from the D.O. collection for, I think, for catalogues here and in other aspects of your position here. Unless again, I’m –

HE: You may be right. Maybe for “Glory of Byzantium”, although I don’t know. For “Glory of Byzantium,” I was very intent that I would prove that American scholars were on par with Byzantinists in other countries, because if you look at the arc of Byzantine exhibitions, the ones in the generations right before it had been very much Byzantine art in France by French, Byzantine art in England by English. And it seemed reasonable to, in a way, prove that America had come of age in scholars. And I thought very hard at that time against having entries for catalogues written by scholars from other countries or from lending institutions, not that I won every one of them, but overall I won that I should get people who were involved in the object rather than the institution for authors. And then for “Byzantium: Faith and Power,” where actually Europe is ahead of American scholarship in looking at the late Byzantine, post-Byzantine period – or was at that time – we went in the other direction and drew on a much more international body of authors. I think Gudrun Bühl is an excellent head for the collection at Dumbarton Oaks, in part because she’s able to stand back from the pattern of Dumbarton Oaks and look at it from a perspective that comes out of, in part, the Bode Museum, which is so important in its collection because all the German scholars that were writing on Byzantine and early Christian art were looking at the Bode collection to define that for them. In a way, to me, if you look at collections, what you need to extend to is who’s using them. And that’s what, in a way, makes the Byzantine collection at Dumbarton Oaks important – is the variety of scholars who, whether they looked at any individual object by the hour or walked past them and to a degree defined themselves by them. I don’t know if you’ve looked at the collections here at the Met, but if you go to the Cloisters, everything’s big. Mr. Rockefeller bought a collection of a sculptor and it’s what that sculptor bought that drives that collection. Mr. Morgan, which is the core of our collection downtown, liked little things. So, if you take their big things and our little things, you’ve got some chance of knowing what people had in the Middle Ages. But one looks like nobody had any furniture and there are large stones, and we look like all they had was tchotchkas and no place to put a roof over them. It has nothing to do with the taste of the time; it’s the taste of the collector right around 1900, because they were both built up then. Now, Julie Jones is very interested in the pre-Columbian collection, for the fact that it’s, in her mind, accumulated largely in terms of aesthetics. And the Byzantine collection is increasingly interesting in the degree to which it ignored religion. The Blisses were not that interested in things that were Orthodoxy. Icons come in after them, and there’s a whole body of literature, of which I now have two shelves, of research on – beginning of the twentieth century – you begin to get the argument that modern art will be based on Byzantine art, that they both avoid looking at realism. And to a certain extent the Blisses fit into that – that you are looking at something or an aesthetic that doesn’t care about the religious meaning. And now we’re in a period where we’re going back to a focus on the religious meaning.

INT: They did have scholarly advisors, though, I think.

HE: Oh no, they had very, very good ones, and there was that one exhibition that was done in Athens, Georgia at the University of Georgia, on the Blisses’ collectors – no, and she broke off an engagement with Tyler –

INT: Royall Tyler.

HE: They had very, very good advisors, but they turned down works that they thought were too religious. There’s a lovely work in the V&A that they did not buy. They were not collecting orthodoxy. Then you can get into the argument—Rob Nelson enjoys it—whether they were collecting Royall Tyler’s taste or not. I think it’s actually and ultimately fairly irrelevant. They built up this collection and then supported the scholars. They could have just had this collection in their home and not brought in the scholars to research it. What puts their collection into a larger framework is all the Bliss scholars that came through – you now – if they had just seen it as Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post collection. Have you been to Hillwood? Have any of you been to Hillwood? Oh, you have to go to Hillwood. It’s in Washington, D.C., and you have to make an appointment ahead, but Marjorie Merriweather Post and her husband, Mr. Davis, bought a lot of things in Russia. Stalin was selling them, and Davis was the American ambassador to Russia. And so you have this house that makes Dumbarton Oaks look like a small, tiny little servants’ quarters, splaying across the hill, filled with things that are being studied more now, but if she had put the amount of money into paying for scholars to come out of Russia in those times of trouble and be around Hillwood and look at her pieces as the Blisses did to theirs, we would have a different understanding of Hillwood. It’s really the Blisses’ great gift that they understood the need to have things studied and to get them looked at from – what we may now go back and look at differently; but we go back and look at Syriac studies differently than 1900, when there’s several translations I like to quote. What else can I tell you that is any use?

INT: I wonder if you might comment on – one of the great contributions of your exhibits that you’ve done here at the Met was really to open up Byzantine art to just a tremendous amount of people, I think, who never thought about it. And just the amount of people who visited – it’s wonderful – the exhibits that you had. And Dumbarton Oaks still, despite the choices of its Byzantine art collection, doesn’t – there’s still a tremendous amount of people who don’t know about it. We don’t get the visitors, I don’t think.

HE: Keenan did not want visitors. Keenan told me he did not want visitors. I think that what the Met offers the opportunity to do – and it’s doing it right now with a show called “Pen and Parchment” – is to look at things from a new point of view. I study – I come from the periphery. I come out of Japan through Armenia to Constantinople. I think that the important thing about Byzantium to do in this generation was to knock down the idea that there was a unicum Byzantium that had only great art; it was only Constantinople. Everything else was bad to the margins. But in Europe every single town had a different style. If every town in Europe has a different style, then there are lots of different centers of wealth in the larger Byzantine sphere, and they need to be looked at with a certain amount of interest, at least in what they’re trying to say – so, how they receive Byzantium, how they turn it around, how they define themselves in relationship to it. And that’s what I tried to do in the Byzantine show and to show that this is an empire that for many, many centuries sets a standard for people, even if they don’t know what it looks like. They know it exists. So in “The Glory of Byzantium” we used a lot of quotations, because I also wanted people to know that they could read and write. And one of my favorite – the people coming to the Met don’t necessarily know that – in fact that’s why they don’t go to Dumbarton Oaks. My least amusing memory of “The Glory of Byzantium” was standing halfway through the show in a gallery of ivories, in which every single image had Christ – maybe a baby, maybe a dead man – every image had Christ – and listening to some man turn to his wife and say, “Who are these Byzantines—did they live before or after Christ?” I have no idea who he was. I thought, I’m just not going to be able to say politely: everything in this room has Christ on it. But that’s the audience. For all I know that man has a Nobel Prize. But he certainly was well dressed and sophisticated. I sought in the show at the lowest level to have – in both shows but certainly in the first one – to have people walk through the galleries and, if they read no label, to say, “I don’t know who those people were, where they were, but they certainly did interesting things. I should go back and read a label.” And then at the highest level to say, “I’ve always been interested in this issue, and she’s brought together the works that allow me to come to some conclusions.” So I wanted an Alice-Mary Talbot to gain what she could, but also to make people realize it’s really a great empire. In the second show a Russian scholar writing on an icon I borrowed – where I only borrowed it so that I could say that the style of the Palaiologan period continues on in Russia until past the end of the empire – her entry on it was that in the fifteenth century in Russia there’s a cult that believes that the world is going to end in the 1490s and it’s how they count the dates of the apocalypse. And months after the show was over I realized that they were right: the world ended at the date they said because it’s almost exactly the same year that the Portuguese break the eastern Mediterranean’s monopoly on the spice routes and that there will – it doesn’t matter who’s going to rule the eastern Mediterranean or Russia. No one will ever have a monopoly as they have had throughout all of history until that date. So, fire and brimstone didn’t occur, but a seismic shift in world power. And by the time we have academic institutions in the model that we think of, the eastern Mediterranean has already become relatively dead. Sinai—and I spent a lot of time studying it—looks like it’s at the other end of the earth. That’s our favorite opening sentence: Sinai at the other end of the earth. Well, Sinai’s actually right dead center on the most important trade route until the Portuguese find another route. It’s a balance that shifts, and we don’t even think about it because once we are doing academic scholarship, it’s already shifted so far we have trouble recreating it. So, I think what the shows here have done to a degree is to open it up again. And not everyone is happy with it. But I was quite appalled when I studied Byzantine history at Columbia with Nina Garcoian that I was the only person in the classes that was not from the Byzantine world, that every other student would say they were studying it because of their contact—through a grandparent or a great grandparent—with some aspect, whether it was Russia or Syria. And I think it’s – that Byzantium is too important to – what Suger thought at the abbey of St. Denis he built to compete with the church of Hagia Sophia. He didn’t build to compete with another church. He writes that he wants to know that his liturgical objects are as great as those the crusaders have seen. But my favorite quote before you end up is Harold the Bluetooth – do you know this wonderful –?, great fun – we borrowed for “The Glory of Byzantium” several objects from Scandinavia, and I wanted to show that the Varangian Guard were Scandinavians, that there was this northern route to Constantinople that we tend to forget, that exists by the ninth century, if not earlier. So first I go to Denmark to borrow, and the director of the Danish National Museum takes me into a special room, tells me it’s the office of the first director of the museum, and we have this long conversation in which I cannot figure out what’s happening, but I know I’m supposed to be incredibly appreciative that I’m there. And it turns out, which I don’t actually learn until the show opens, that in borrowing the Dagmar cross, which to me was a small, cloisonné enamel cross hanging in a case with several other things in the Danish National Museum, I had borrowed the liberty bell of Denmark, and that he has actually had to have a meeting of all of his staff to justify sending it to the show. It is Dagmar, who may or may not have ever owned it because it may have belonged to her sister-in-law or her mother-in-law, became a symbol of Danish nationalism from Germany in, like, the seventeenth century. She was buried next to her sister-in-law and mother-in-law in a church from which the tombs were removed and moved to a fancier burial church for the kings. And the women’s jewelry was commingled, so we don’t actually know which woman was wearing it. Her mother-in-law was from Kiev, and it led on one hand to a reappraisal of the cross from those who had wanted it to be from Thessaloniki, because it makes no sense for it to be from Thessaloniki. On the other hand, it made the Danes quite pleased to lend it. And I got this quote where Harold the Bluetooth, as he is raising money to go invade England, brings out all of his riches that he’s gotten from being a guard, a mercenary in the Varangian Guard, and shows it compared to the man who’s just been pillaging the British isles. And Harold has more loot. So Harold leads the next invasion of the British isles, which might have been a great success except that it’s the same year that William the Conqueror invades, so Harold ends up quite dead and Harold’s army ends up dead, but you have this saga in which Harold of the Blue – and therefore one expects dead – tooth is talking about having served in Constantinople, and I find that whole question of how you go north and what you go through quite fascinating.

INT: Fascinating.

INT: That story reminds me to ask about the different pieces and the story of getting things for exhibitions. In your experience for these exhibits or just in general, what is the accessibility of the D.O. collection, from the point of view of a curator at another institution? – for exhibitions and so forth?

HE: Well, I would preface it with saying that my borrowing was before Gudrun. Dumbarton Oaks liked to be exceptionally difficult, and it’s noteworthy for the degree to which it’s exceptionally difficult. I borrowed for both of my exhibitions the works that mattered to me from Dumbarton Oaks, and I found my relations with Sue Boyd and Stephen Zwirn to be, on one level, very comfortable and on another level – Sue Boyd, in particular, felt, I think quite accurately, that she was not respected – and one way to try to forge respect was to be difficult – loans – and so it was a circular pattern. Gudrun lent probably less than the Royal Academy would like to have borrowed, but since the Royal Academy asked me for four pieces, and I don’t think I sent five, because we opened our new galleries at the same time they opened. The problem for Dumbarton Oaks and its collection – the problem for me and my collection – is, if you’re getting ready to do a show, we are both fairly well published and so you pick up a book and you say, “Well, now, I’d like two thirds of their collection and that will solve all my loans.” And you just can’t borrow the entire Dumbarton Oaks collection and still have it seen at D.O. I think D.O.’s problem, which will be highly related to the attitude of the current director and Margaret Mullett and Gudrun, is – and maybe Georgetown’s neighbors – how much it wishes to do an aggressive outreach and try to get people to come. And historically it has not sought to do that. And under Keenan it actively sought not to do that.

INT: I know it’s been burned a little bit in the past with things getting stolen or lost. We hadn’t heard too many details about that, but we heard some talk of that. I don’t know if that’s a very old story or –

HE: Nobody kept records like we keep now. The first thing that happened to me when I came here was a very nice woman asked for the return of an object, I returned it to her, and she said, “That’s not what it looked like.” Mercifully, the woman took photographs herself of the piece when it had been installed in the gallery, so that we could point out to her that it, in fact, did look just like the piece when it was on display in the gallery. But our letter – first of all it was on nice lady stationery: thank you very much for the loan of your boxwood cross with the lapis lazuli pieces attached to it – which were blue glass. We sent a letter that was essentially, “You’re wearing purple, so it could have been a ball gown or a cotton smock.” We now – Dumbarton Oaks, I’m sure, now also – anything that comes in this building is photographed in every conceivable way. But it wasn’t what you used to do. And I don’t know how much documentation the Blisses kept of their purchases. They have to have done better than Mr. Walters, who burned all of his documentation, so there is no documentation for anything the Walters owned before the day Mr. Walters opened it in the museum. We’ve changed tremendously both how objects have to be kept in a building, how they have to be recorded. I don’t know what D.O. does but I assume they do something like what the Met does and our registrars office, once a year, comes into every department’s area and pulls a card out and says, “Show me that object,” and you’re supposed to be able to do it within five minutes, so that every work catalogued in this department, all 10,000, we’re supposed to know where they are at every section. And for the things that are mainstream, you normally do. It’s when they pull out something really weird that you’ve been hiding in a corner for forever, because you kind of don’t want it. So one time I watched the arms and armor people freaking out because they’d pulled out a card for a large wrought iron gate, and it took a great deal of trouble to figure out where over the years that gate had been moved over and over to get it out of the way. It was found. We had it, but it wasn’t in five minutes. So, I never know whether things are actually lost – that you used to be more comfortable, in Mrs. Bliss’ time I’m sure, with giving something, so you might have a record, but Mrs. Bliss might have given it to someone. Or maybe not. But the packing it up, moving it around – none of that is acceptable and hasn’t been acceptable for several decades by museum standards. But you went from being a large house, which people inhabited with objects in it, to being an institutional museum. And I suspect that the transition was awkward in the same way that it was awkward for people who expected to go ask Mrs. Bliss for money and suddenly had to fill out forms. Well I assume those same people had felt comfortable, as all the curators in the Hermitage used to feel comfortable, in taking the work they were studying to their office to study it. I’ve never seen anything in the Hermitage that was not on display that wasn’t sitting in somebody’s drawer, often for a long time, because they had to blow the dust off it to show it to me. Now that they’ve had this woman who was stealing things and then dropped dead on them before there was any chance to hide her thefts, they have all sorts of new rules. But, essentially they assumed that their curators were honorable people. I’m sure Dumbarton Oaks and the Met have always assumed that people are honorable. Now we have lots more security, and I do not bring things to my office to study them as I’m writing up purchase papers or considering where to put them, but Margaret would have. And the Museum would have thought it was reasonable for Margaret to have done it.

INT: Well, shall we wrap things up, maybe?

INT: Sure, I guess. Maybe, just generally, what do you see as the role that Dumbarton Oaks plays in Byzantine Studies, as someone from another institution, another city, and how do you see that role changing in the future?

HE: Well, I think that Dumbarton Oaks was for a very long time the only game in town and that that gave it the ability not to have to reconsider its role. And the Byzantine Studies Conference – I don’t know the whole warzones—but the Byzantine Studies Conference started as a war with Dumbarton Oaks, so if you have not interviewed somebody about that you should find somebody that knows its warzones. I came in after the Byzantine Studies Conference was so well established, I was stunned to discover there was actually a war. What’s happened now, which I think is for everybody’s good, is – you asked Angela about the program at Queens; Rob Nelson is building a strong program at Yale; Ioli’s program at Harvard, I think, is a little different because it’s tied to Dumbarton Oaks. We now have every year at least one, and in some years four, fellows that are doing Byzantine studies at the Met. Often they’re people that in another year do it at Dumbarton Oaks, so that it’s not like we do and you don’t take or vice versa, but there’s a greater diversity of places where you can go consider it. And I think that is making Dumbarton Oaks think about what it wants to be. Obviously there’s a greater pressure to have all three parts of Dumbarton Oaks more coequal, and for the Byzantinists, of course, that is not something that we ever recognized as appropriate. Now, for me and probably for you, we came in late enough that it doesn’t seem such a shock. But I assume when the will was read and it was recognized that they had left their money equally to all three parts, that that was a shock, that the generation who were there for the reading of the will had expected two thirds to Byzantine studies and to divide the rest to the other two. Pre-Columbian studies have been doing some incredibly impressive things, so it’s – I think back then there was a huge shock when garden studies went from formal garden design to social history. So, all those things, I think, move the institution forward and that one part of the institution will continue to do the very necessary translations that – it’s easy to fail to appreciate the amount that Angela’s text lets you look up aspects, for an art historian or for any other type of scholar, that were utterly inaccessible before and that all of those need to be made accessible and Alice-Mary is doing more translations in retirement. I don’t know whether Dumbarton Oaks will ever want to be extremely accessible. Keenan believed that his neighbors in Georgetown who were mad at D.O. for many reasons did not want lots of children coming through D.O. And it was in fact the pre-Columbianists that – who I talked to – that were the most upset, because there is no other good collection of that material in Washington as an alternative. I am hoping that the exhibitions we have done here not only have paid off in more Byzantine exhibitions—certainly Norman Rosenthal at the Royal Academy told me he did Robin Cormack’s show because we got such good attendance here – but that it will also make people look at the larger geographical sphere that you can include within the – sphere of influence isn’t quite right – but you can easily go from Slavic studies and Russia and the Balkans to Ethiopia and look at that material, I think, with a new interest. And Syriac studies, I think, is an important aspect of that. If Syria could just get off the terrorist list, my show would be so much happier. I have plans for an exhibition, and I clearly now am going to have to get real and drop the Syrian pieces and go for photographs. So, if you can get the U.S. government to drop Syria from the terrorist list, that would be my favorite choice at the moment. Syria’s willing to lend; it’s the U.S. government’s rule that is the problem. The other thing that I – either just because anybody who’s really angry doesn’t talk to me or because it’s actually changed – is there seems to be a greater willingness, except among some Greeks, to think of the Byzantine sphere in a broader circle. Now there are a certain number of Greeks that don’t speak to me so I do know about them, because they tell me so. But I think Dumbarton Oaks had a Coptic symposium a few years ago, which was a first for them. I think that none of this is brand new, but I think we’re moving toward a more elastic definition. And Constable may very well have been the beginning of that. He was the director who didn’t come from the inner circle.

INT: Well thank you very much –

HE: Thank you.

INT: – for your time.

WHA: Thank you very much.

INT: July 17th.

INT: Oh, I’m sorry, yes, today’s July 17th, 2009.

WHA: Everybody’s in [laughter]. Did you get TJ in over there? [laughter]

INT: Oh yes, and Thomas Jefferson is presiding [laughter]. Which is very appropriate.

WHA: Where’s his computer relay?, hanging on his – I assume my computer works wireless. When they were hooking it up, they said, where we gonna put it, and I said, just hang it around his neck, he’ll love it.

INT: That’s great. We’ll start off with: you were never a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks?

WHA: No, no.

INT: So how did you first come to be involved?

WHA: Well, I was trying to remember all of that, how I – my first introduction to the whole Dumbarton Oaks scene was through Walter Muir Whitehill, who was a great friend of the Blisses, and who wrote what was considered the official sponsored history of Dumbarton Oaks. Do you know it?

INT: No, to our knowledge, we’ve been told that there’s never been an official –

WHA: Not true. Walter Muir Whitehill, who was - well, I knew him through Boston connections, and he was a great friend of some of the Adams connections, obviously up there, and he was the head of the Boston Athenaeum, and very much involved, he was on the board of the art museum in Boston and the Massachusetts historical society, he was involved in everything, and at a very early stage in my life somehow I became a part of – I would see the Whitehills in Boston, and so I knew about the Blisses really second-hand but fairly intimately in terms of what they were doing. But his book is a very key document.

INT: I would imagine so. I’m not even sure there’s a –

WHA: And Walter died in the late seventies, I think, so this book would have been done, well obviously before Mildred Bliss died in sixty-nine, but anyway he was very much an intimate. Then when I came to the National Gallery, I’d been living in Princeton and I was working for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund briefly before I came to the National Gallery, and it may have been through some Princeton connection that we then – Mrs. Bliss, though she had just died, was very much a social and cultural presence in Georgetown, which meant basically Washington. And Tom Bayard – does his name ring a bell? You’ve come on to him. He taught at Trinity I think, after he left Dumbarton Oaks, and he was a kind of protégé of Mrs. Bliss, and after she’d moved out of the house, down on Q – we were on P just around the corner – and Tom was a friend of friends of ours in Princeton so there were all these, I suppose not professional, but just sort of these connections, and we became good friends of Tom’s, so I suppose that was really the first behind-the-scenes introduction, because the staff was very, very small.

INT: What year was this?

WHA: Seventy. Mrs. Bliss had just died. We’re told in Washington that they were referred to as the "Three Bs" – Mrs. Bliss, Mrs. Bacon – Virginia Bacon, Mrs. Robert Lowe Bacon – and Mrs. Beale, who lived in Decatur House, opposite the White House – still living privately in that house. Mrs. Bacon was living in I think what had been John Marshall’s house on F Street, pretty extraordinary, they were all contemporary buildings with the White House, and then Mrs. Bliss was out in the country. But those were really the powerhouse figures, and this is social history that has nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks, but it’s part of the texture. But we’re into the transitional period of Dumbarton Oaks throughout the ‘70s. I think through Walter Muir Whitehill I became well acquainted with the Tylers, and it was Bill Tyler who asked me to be a senior fellow. And you know the Tyler connections to the Blisses.

INT: He was the godson, I believe.

WHA: Yes, and he was also the godson of Edith Wharton. And Edith Wharton was a great friend of Mrs. Bliss, and also Beatrix Farrand, and that’s how Beatrix Farrand comes into the story, and I think that it was Royall Tyler, his father, that introduced the Blisses, I mean Mr. Bliss’s mother, to Bliss’s father.

INT: That was Royall Tyler?

WHA: She then became Mrs. Royall Tyler. [NB: It is unclear to whom he is referring.] So Bill – I always loved the fact that he was Edith Wharton’s godson [laughter].

INT: And I think he was heir to all her papers and things.

WHA: He did, which he then negotiated – I think Yale has them now. I think that’s right. I don’t know, the Bliss papers, I suppose they’re at Harvard?

INT: They were moved to Harvard. They originally were at Dumbarton Oaks, but Dumbarton Oaks didn’t really seem to have the space or the resources.

WHA: And that’s not – that kind of archival manuscript maintenance, it’s just like at Monticello; we don’t have any – other than a working library – we don’t keep any manuscript material there. It all goes to the University of Virginia. Anything that has to be taken care of.

INT: We do have the material related to the building of Dumbarton Oaks and the gift –

WHA: You have all of that? But her plans, all of that is out in California.

INT: Oh, I didn’t know that.

WHA: Well, she lived in California near the end of her life. So I know that a lot of the original garden plans, which have – all that’s been documented, published, that’s well-known. Well, anyway, that’s the best of my recollection.

INT: Did you know Mrs. Paul Mellon as well?

WHA: Well, I did know her, and in fact when I was on the board there was discussion even then about the possibility of her giving her collection to Dumbarton Oaks, but it was clear that this was not going to happen in the 1970s, because her interests were clearly very special, and she did not want to have it being institutionalized under either Dumbarton Oaks or Harvard, and we still don’t know where her collection is going to go – and maybe you do – or have not heard.

INT: I know that she’s built a library.

WHA: She has, there, that’s been a number of years ago. But it’s not – it’s fine for that but I can’t imagine that being maintained in perpetuity. I suspect – I’ve heard rumors that there is another institution where maybe it would go, but I don’t know any more than that. But she was never – was she actually ever on the board? I can’t remember.

INT: I believe she was.

WHA: Her name was on it, but she – I think that she was never really active. It was with the idea I think that this would happen, but it was quite clear that this was not – that she was going in her own direction and so on.

INT: Yeah, we tried to speak with her –

WHA: No, I don’t think it would make any sense now. She’s 98. Her stepson is a good friend of mine – pardon me, her son by an earlier marriage – lives in Washington and is a good friend of mine, and I don’t – people around Upperville never see her much. That would be not a productive avenue.

INT: Was Jack Thatcher still around the Washington scene in these years?

WHA: Oh, Jack was around, and he had just retired, I can’t remember when.

INT: Sixty-nine.

WHA: He was very much a gentleman about town and knew everybody.

INT: It seems like there was a great deal of integration between the Dumbarton Oaks collection at that time, or at least the administration, and the Washington social scene.

WHA: Dumbarton Oaks was very much a Georgetown social scene. There were very few people who had any real intellectual interest in what Dumbarton Oaks was doing. It was something of a mystery. I mean, first of all, garden history – people didn’t know what – that was such a new discipline or sub-discipline. Byzantine studies, that was totally off the books, and the pre-Columbian was also, really. That beautiful collection, that jewel collection – too bad you didn’t get to speak to the architect.

INT: Philip Johnson. He passed away, I think.

WHA: Oh, yes.

INT: Did you know him?

WHA: I did, just briefly, when we lived in New York, but through other connections that had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks.

INT: He did leave memoirs or something like that.

WHA: About Dumbarton Oaks? Oh, well then that’s good.

INT: It’s helpful.

WHA: And someone else that I knew who is still I think living is Louis Auchincloss, who’s a novelist and lawyer who lives in New York, who’s in his early 90s now.

INT: What was his connection to Dumbarton Oaks?

WHA: Well, he was a good friend of them. He would have been a much younger friend, but he would have known the Harvard-Dumbarton Oaks scene, and I remember him talking to me about how Harvard had somehow – whether his law firm or somebody that he was involved with – when the Blisses were persuaded to give Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, and he was rather critical of that. And he felt that Harvard had pushed them into it and used the threat of the war, the possible "invasion" like the war of 1812 – they ought to have – that somehow Cambridge Massachusetts was going to be safer, to own the property would add more stability. This is what I recollect Louis telling me, whether there’s any truth to it I have no idea. But that was inside gossip.

INT: Very helpful to have.

WHA: Mr. Kreeger was also on the board when I was on the board. Another name that you – he’s long since gone, the businessman in Washington. Does his name –?

INT: I don’t think we’ve heard anyone bring him up before.

WHA: Well, he was – they were great art collectors, and he was on the board of the corp., and he was involved in all kinds of positions around culturally, and I guess I knew him through being at the National Gallery and because of his collection. But Bill Tyler got him on the board because he was a Harvard graduate and could stand up to the pressure from Harvard, which – there was a sense of pressure, at least in that period; the rumor was that Harvard would be happy to close the whole thing down and take the all proceeds back to Cambridge.

INT: What was the gossip related to that? Because it seems so explicit in the Bliss will that that is not what they wanted.

WHA: They were very explicit about it, and Louis Auchincloss discussed that with me about that issue, but nevertheless –

INT: Harvard will be Harvard.

WHA: Everyone read Harvard’s ambitions.

INT: Yes, I think they took material from the collection up to – was it the Fogg during this time?

WHA: Yes.

INT: And that was a very big thing.

WHA: Was that during the war, when they took it?

INT: They might have taken it during the war, and then I think again maybe in the early seventies?

WHA: They could have, I don’t remember. And that was not a good idea, it made everyone very nervous. And then also the friction was over the way the money was redistributed. Harvard had its formula dealing with the Bliss bequest, the proceeds didn’t come back to Dumbarton Oaks, they got a fixed percentage.

INT: Really? Where was the other money –?

WHA: It was overhead for Cambridge, as we understood it.

INT: Were these for the Dumbarton Oaks professorships?

WHA: Well, all the operating funds, Dumbarton’s endowment went to Harvard, you see, they would distribute it, they earned 8% and Dumbarton Oaks got maybe 4% – I don’t know that, I’m just saying, that was at least – and Kreeger, who was very much of a finance man on the board, was quite outspoken and critical if ever anyone from Harvard ever came down.

INT: Were there visits from Harvard?

WHA: Well, not very often. The dean of arts and science – he was a very powerful dean, I can’t think of his name.

INT: Bok?

WHA: No, that’s the president. Bok came I think once during my time, and when you think how many institutions Harvard has, the very idea that he might have even come once – but the dean who was very powerful, and I think he was dean of arts and sciences but I can’t remember the names. But the problem at Dumbarton Oaks – Byzantines studies at Harvard, you obviously have a connection at Harvard, but the other two areas did not and do not, and that was always felt to be a weakness in the way the thing’s structured, and that gave the Byzantinists – they were, you know, not equal among equals. But that’s again part of the politics of the thing. But everyone understood all this.

INT: If we could go back for a second to your relationship to Mr. Whitehall.

WHA: Whitehill.

INT: Whitehill, excuse me. You mentioned he had talked to you a little bit about the Blisses, did he have any particular stories that you recall? We’re very interested in –

WHA: Not that I can recall now. I might be able to if I reread his book, but I’m sure anything he told me in the kind of after-dinner, over-scotch conversation would have been in his book and so on. He loved the style of the Blisses in terms of the way they went about supporting music and the whole civilized, really European atmosphere that really prevailed, certainly in the seventies. There was nothing else in Washington that came near that, because of the scale of it, small, intimate. And the Sunday night concerts – you had to be invited, as if Mrs. Bliss was still presiding. So it was very much a – the rituals were all figured out, and certainly carried on, with Jack Thatcher in the wings criticizing if they weren’t.

INT: He was also a godson, I think, of the Blisses. Or at the very least a friend.

WHA: Yeah, he probably was. I don’t remember that. But there was very much this curatorial reverence and caretaking of the image of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks as the Blisses related to it. So you had ten years – Giles Constable, maybe his father, who taught at Harvard, in art history I believe, probably knew the Blisses, and there may have been something, a little nepotism there, I don’t know. He surely must have talked about that.

INT: Yes. We didn’t actually get to –

WHA: Do that one.

INT: Well, I wonder if you might talk a little bit more about the European feel. Was it – I assume you must have gotten to know some of the scholars there at the time.

WHA: Oh yes, I did. And there were always European scholars, and we did see them, made a point that they would meet at the National Gallery and there was an atmosphere. Whether that goes on now or not, I don’t know.

INT: We haven’t gotten the sense that there’s as much interaction as you’re talking about.

WHA: Interaction, no. At that period there was, on a very informal level.

INT: Who were the major players there as far as academics, as you recall

WHA: Oh, I can’t remember now the names again. Betty MacDougal, of course, she was somewhat controversial as a director. She was not an easy person to get along with, and people had the impression that she really didn’t want anybody coming in doing research other than the fellows. And that’s fair enough to understand, that it was a limited facility and so on. There was a feeling she was not particularly friendly to scholars who were not – who had a legitimate reason – who were not [fellows]. That’s just a rumor and an impression I had. I think Betty suffered from the fact that while she was an art history major, garden history itself was parvenu, and didn’t have full credentials at Harvard, or certainly at the Fogg. You can understand that.

INT: Well, at that time Dumbarton Oaks was really the only center –

WHA: It was really the only center. There was – the scholarship going on – there was a good deal going on in England in garden history; it has its genesis I think really after the war. And lots of the fellows and people who came up and were influential read at some of the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks. They were all international figures but I think the English garden history crowd – they quite often were members of the symposia; you can read the lists and so on. The Byzantinists, not so much. Not in terms of such a specialized field of study, as you know. With garden history, people – even though they didn’t understand what the discipline was about and how it worked in terms of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks – nevertheless people said, well, you know, I have a garden.

INT: Did you have much interaction with the collection at Dumbarton Oaks?

WHA: Well, I’ve used it, yes. The study that I did on the French garden, I used [it] quite extensively, of course. At that point I had curated an exhibition on Jefferson at the National Gallery called “The Eye of Thomas Jefferson;” my catalog you may know.

INT: Seventy-six.

WHA: In working on Jefferson I did become very much involved in eighteenth-century garden history, because of his travels and interests, when he was in France. And it was actually through that rather narrow avenue that – and I realized at that point that there wasn’t a useful small volume – not a picture book, but a serious book on the history of the French garden. Which has now been translated into French and two or three other – which is interesting, you know. The French consider that an area that they – would not recognize an American scholar. Actually the French edition of that, they did really quite a beautiful job of it.

INT: Do you remember, during that time when you were interacting with it, what the state of the collection was? As you probably know, there still is no museum space for the garden collection.

WHA: No. And there wasn’t any – the museum part of the garden, it was a literary collection. It was works on paper. We never ever thought of it as objects or related to anything other than just seeing it all make perfect sense. Which is the way the Blisses began the collection – what they bought and so on.

INT: So at this point it was mainly the library. Because I know at least over the years they’ve managed to collect some of the prints and paintings that the Blisses originally had, of gardens.

WHA: Of gardens?

INT: Of botanical gardens.

WHA: Is that in the garden studies section?

INT: That’s my understanding. But it sounds like this was not at the time.

WHA: Well, there were things around in the hallways, hanging on the walls, but not in any sense as a part of the study collection.

INT: And in the early sixties things were in the garden library?

WHA: Yes. I didn’t know it until sixty-nine, seventy. I’d been there but I never used the collection at that time. I guess Betty MacDougal was there at that time. There was also Alan Fern’s wife, do you know her? Alan Fern was head of the prints and photographs at the Library of Congress, and then he became director of not the Portrait Gallery, but what we now call the National Collection, the American Collection. His wife was Betty MacDougal’s assistant; she’s in Washington. She’s somebody. She was very much in the working – I knew her very well, but I can’t think of her first name now. Mrs. Alan Fern. I suppose he’s living in Washington; I haven’t seen him in years. But it was very, very intimate and small; there would never be another person or scholar or anybody. The fellows would be in their little cubicles and I got to know some of them.

INT: Who was there, do you recall?

WHA: I’m hard pressed for names. They’d always be in, working on very interesting subjects, I remember.

INT: In your conversations with one another, did they tend to be about garden history, or the literary aspects, or theoretical? What was the tone at that time in the seventies in terms of the field itself, as you recall?

WHA: Mostly they came out of literature as well as art history, or they came out of history; it is a subdivision of history. And garden history wasn’t taught anyplace – what was his name, the head of the garden there; he’s English?

INT: John Dixon Hunt.

WHA: John Dixon Hunt. He’s very prolific in writing; have you talked to him?

INT: Spoke with him on Monday.

WHA: I remember him very well when he was there; I think later he catalogued Mrs. Mellon’s collection, or did two volumes on that collection, which is available to you. But I think that was after he was at – he’s at Pennsylvania I think now. He was a very conspicuous art historian, but he came out of literature. Interesting sort of background. My background is law.

INT: How did you get –?

WHA: Well, I don’t know.

INT: We talked a little earlier about your time at the National Gallery. I wonder if you remember from that experience what the relationship was like between the National Gallery, specifically, and Dumbarton Oaks; you talked a little bit generally about the close interactions between the institutions.

WHA: Well, of course, John Walker – I was there briefly when he was just retiring. I came in with the idea that Carter would become the director and I was to pick up what Carter was doing, which I did, but that overlaps a bit. But certainly the Walkers were the connection with the Blisses, an intimate part of that circle. Those were the two major international cultural institutions in Washington – I mean in the humanities, or art, not the sciences, but I can’t think of any – they were preeminent. No university had international stature in Washington during those years, true? And being both non-political institutions. Those were the two places European visitors would gravitate to, one or both, whatever. And certainly the Blisses were looked upon as major figures and made famous by the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the commissioning of Stravinsky. That was a big time. And far more sophisticated than Washingtonians on a day-to-day basis ever thought of themselves being. Washington then is no different than Washington now, I’m sure, just more people.

INT: It seems like there was a very practical relationship between the two institutions as well, because even when you did the Jefferson exhibit, Dumbarton Oaks I think lent books for that.

WHA: Yes, they loaned things. We had a close working – anything either would need, we were equals.

INT: So you got the sense that during that period Dumbarton Oaks was very generous in lending out the collection.

WHA: Oh, yes, absolutely.

INT: Because we’ve heard different things over different periods.

WHA: Well, it depends on what department they were. There was a special – we used to speak of our special relationship with Great Britain. There was a special relationship with Dumbarton Oaks. Both institutions were sort of latecomers; the National Gallery didn’t open until 1940. The same time as the Blisses, isn’t that true?

INT: Yes, the gift was in forty.

WHA: Were they living in Washington? He’d been in diplomatic service.

INT: They were living at Dumbarton Oaks briefly, but it was for really only about five years, I think, before the gift, and I think the museum and collection and center didn’t really open until forty-six.

WHA: Forty-six? Well, they were putting up all those Renaissance ceilings. Is the ceiling still there?

INT: And it’s been beautifully recently cleaned and renovated and reopened.

WHA: I’ve often wondered how much of that ceiling is original. I never saw a Renaissance ceiling in Italy that big. It’s huge.

INT: But it is lovely.

WHA: It is lovely.

INT: One thing we’ve also touched on, but I think haven’t talked about directly, is of course you got to know Giles Constable very well. He’s known now I think as a bit of a controversial director.

WHA: Is he? I don’t know what the controversy would be or what it was.

INT: There wasn’t a sense of that immediately when you were there?

WHA: Well, Giles – I didn’t know him that well. I don’t think Giles was an easy person to know as a personality. He’s a scholar. I think the Institute was a perfect place for him. I don’t know that he was particularly comfortable with administration. That was an area I don’t know anything about. That’s just my outside/inside reading.

INT: He must have seemed a very different director than Bill Tyler.

WHA: Oh, yes, Bill was a preeminently new administration, the skills of diplomacy. Everything was protocolé, as Mrs. Tyler used to say. And again the foreign service was involved in all the diplomatic – and that played into the diplomatic scene, which should be mentioned, certainly in the seventies, when the diplomatic corps in Washington I think was much more conspicuous and ambassadors played much bigger roles than they do now, with electronics and all the things that have changed their lives and everybody else’s. But then the diplomatic corps was very protocolé as who was senior, and they didn’t change a lot, and the British ambassador was always – even though he wasn’t number one in the pecking order – he was always very much number one on the social scene, and he was usually somebody new, because Washington was always a prime plum slot. But to give you the sense of that, the diplomatic corps really gave the scene around Washington an international feeling. Certainly we were aware of this at the National Gallery because the embassies – we were always being asked for this or that, not loans and so on but just to play some sort of a political role in who was coming to visit, heads of state or the Queen of England or whatever and so on. We had a very close regular relationship with the diplomatic corps. But just take, for instance, the senior diplomat, when we lived in Washington, was the Italian ambassador, and his name was Ambassador Ortona, and he’d been there longer than any other, he’d been through the war; his memory of Washington in terms of diplomacy was extraordinary. But those figures very much were part of the Dumbarton Oaks scene and they were people who knew what Dumbarton Oaks was and what its function was and so on. And that was very important. You usually found the European diplomatic corps in Washington was always of a very high caliber, so you can see how they fitted into the Blisses’ idea of this European salon, which is really what it was. And the salon was Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Bacon and Mrs. Beale, and they did run them; those houses were big enough, and certainly Mrs. Bacon was the only one still operating when we – and somehow we made her list so went there quite often so we got some sense of what must have been the same thing at the Blisses’ – when they were actually living in the house – in terms of the way the dinner parties were given and the circle that brought them together. None of that exists anymore in Washington – nothing like that, as far as I know.

INT: We’ve read how one of the things that Mr. Bliss had promised Mrs. Bliss if she would come to Washington was that he would create this sense of a country estate in the city, and of course then the gardens are a tremendous part of that. And I wondered, as a specialist, just for our records, how do you see the gardens themselves at Dumbarton Oaks as they sit in terms of their importance as an American garden or the uniqueness or not and just to touch upon that.

WHA: They are very important, and Beatrix Farrand was very, very important in that whole period, one of the real stars, and the close relationship she had with her patron Mildred Bliss was very important. And she was encouraged to do things that were really extraordinary in terms of the way the whole layout was done and how they worked it out. It was a country estate and in fact the house obviously was a country estate when Georgetown was first founded. I don’t know how large it was in the early – again Walter Muir Whitehill I think gives a good history. I was ex-official trustee of the National Trust when I was at the National Gallery, but then I was also on the board of Monticello, of which Walter had been on for long before I went on, and was very much involved in. He was one of the founders of the National Trust, so historic preservation was a part of this whole cultivated cultural scene that was led by people like that, and they all knew each other there, or seemed to. Does this give you any sense of the texture? And I really want to emphasize that the ‘70s were a transition in Washington culturally, politically, and certainly from Dumbarton Oaks’ standpoint.

INT: So people were leaving Washington, or it was just a different generation?

WHA: Just a different [generation]. The atmosphere changes, the power center seemed to shift. Washington always changes. That’s another whole big subject, we won’t go there.

INT: Oh, well, I wonder – probably should have gotten to this a little bit earlier: just for our institutional history, you were a member I think both of the senior fellows committee for garden studies and for the advisory board, and I wonder if you might talk a little about the differences and maybe even the relationship between the two.

WHA: In my earlier comments I overlapped, I really wasn’t making much of a chain. The garden program really was not too active as I remember. It was pretty much Betty’s. She was running it that way; the conferences were her contribution. Speaking of the conferences, I mentioned – she was a very important senior fellow, a scholar – the archaeology/classicist Wilhelmina Jashemski, and she was the leading scholar on the gardens at Pompeii, of all things. She certainly is an international figure, recognized in her field. In fact Mary Beard, who’s at Cambridge – who has a blog by the way.

INT: Yes, she does. I haven’t met her, but she’s come to our Cambridge a couple times.

WHA: Well, I’ve been in touch with her because I’m working on a book, which I managed to get a couple suggestions on, some ideas. She’s been very generous and very funny. Her blog is called “A Don’s Life;” she’s a don, and she’s a brilliant classicist and just gave the lectures at California – what are they called, the famous lectures, out there at Berkeley?

INT: Sather?

WHA: And those lectures are now online. You can hear her; it’s really quite wonderful, there are three of them, they’re marvelous, you can put them on your iPod. But Mary Beard, within the last few – I glance at her blog, and a lot of the time it’s things I have no interest in, and she writes on a lot of things, not about the classics or anything else, but another thing. She’ll really turn up some very interesting – in fact, I cite her in a footnote from her blog, which I thought she will enjoy. Her motto is "bloggo ergo sum". Anyway –

INT: She was never at –?

WHA: Oh no, but she did mention – I think Wilhelmina died or something came up – and she mentioned something in her blog because she knew everyone – and I was so delighted she did. I sent her an email, we’ve just been in touch basically by email.

INT: So she really was a figure from an international –

WHA: You mean Wilhemina? Yes, in fact, I helped her get this published; she had real trouble getting it published, you can imagine, and I’m sure it’s wildly expensive now. But she had a technique; she was particularly interested in biological archaeology, and there was somebody at the Smithsonian that worked with her in terms of identifying plant material, spores, and seeds and all that, and this was really a pioneer work that goes beyond – not a part of Dumbarton Oaks, but nevertheless to me her connection with Dumbarton Oaks was extremely important.

INT: What was your fondest memory or the most exciting project that you were a part of in terms of your time?

WHA: Oh, I don’t know about that. I think the music programs were great, which had nothing to do with anything else other than just the pleasure of it. The quality of the music program was so high.

INT: Was this the Friends of Music program?

WHA: It wasn’t called Friends of Music then, it was Mrs. Bliss’s musicale.

INT: We were told that there was a dress code for these, that if a fellow were to come underdressed –

WHA: Oh yes, absolutely. Oh, there’s no dress code now. But there surely must be at the concert? No. Well, it was on my invitation in those days and everybody knew everybody else, and Virginia Bacon would be sitting on the front row and she would be asleep in the first five minutes after whatever they were playing, snoring.

INT: That still happens!

INT: But a lot of the Blisses’ personal staff stayed on.

WHA: Were still around. I don’t know that the butler was, but he might have been. Wait a minute: somebody used to bring us sherry at the end of board meetings.

INT: We spoke with Tony and Silvia.

WHA: And the gardener, the head gardener was there.

INT: Don Smith.

WHA: Is he still extant?

INT: Yes.

WHA: So you’ve talked to him.

INT: Well, he’s up in Maine, and they’re going to go up and speak with him.

WHA: I think that’s extremely important. I would put him high, put him above Giles – no, not for the record!

INT: We spoke with his son, who of course grew up on the grounds in the gardener’s cottage, and that was very helpful.

WHA: Yes, and that would be another point of view, another level, of course.

INT: And he was interviewed, I think in ninety-three, it must have been, about the time he retired, just because of course he was such a figure that someone wanted to get his thoughts together, but we would like to talk to him. We haven’t heard though that he was Bliss staff.

WHA: Who, Don? He was not? I thought he was on the staff, but I don’t know that. You know, again, could be just loosely referred to.

INT: We’ve heard of an Antonio who was there, who was I guess Mr. Thacher’s butler. I don’t know that he ever worked for the Blisses, though.

WHA: No. And I think that’s probably the one I would have seen.

INT: Alfredo.

INT: Oh, yes, I’m sorry, Alfredo. And Mrs. Aston, who was there in the library. She was rumored to be Bliss staff originally.

WHA: No. She was only very unhappy. But unhappiness was not unusual at Dumbarton Oaks.

INT: We’ve heard she was a very stiff British enforcer of the dress code.

WHA: Oh yes, she was. But she would somehow unburden herself to me, for reasons I had no idea. Yes, of course. But I knew her; she was probably a neighbor, and I don’t really know – she was in a funny way sort of misplaced there; she wasn’t a scholar, and I wasn’t sure what her role really was.

INT: Our understanding is that she was in charge of the Princeton Index in the library.

WHA: The Index? Yes, it was something like that probably. And there was always particularly friction –

INT: In the library?

WHA: In the library.

INT: We’ve heard it was sort of a tumultuous time there, and that the staff dwindled down in the library to the point that –

WHA: Oh yes, there was just maybe one person, and there was curatorial work to be done in the rare book collection and prints.

INT: There was a rare book collection at that time? Because we’ve heard conflicting things really about the formality of that.

WHA: Well, is it not there, the rare book room?

INT: Oh yes, now of course, but we’ve heard in those days – we talked to Henry and Eunice Maguire, Byzantine fellows at the time, and they would talk about pulling – this was a little bit later, when Irene Vaslef came to the library, when she was head librarian – but they talked a lot about the course of the library with the main house; they’ve talked about pulling these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books off the shelf and taking them I think either to Irene or to Seka Allen, who was also in the library, and that was the beginning of the rare books collection as we understood it, at least for Byzantine.

WHA: Oh, that’s in the Byzantine.

INT: It must have been different for garden.

WHA: Oh yes, totally different. We never went there.

INT: How was the interaction between the programs?

WHA: Oh, absolutely none. Absolutely none. We never even knew where they were. You were talking about the sculpture being put in the garden or something – the thing that really stirred Georgetown up when I was involved there was the plan to build library facilities under the lawn, did you know about this?

INT: No.

WHA: Well this was a whole big –

INT: The North Vista? Yes.

WHA: Yes, and it was going to go – it meant removing one of the trees that had been there even going back before the Blisses, and it was going to be buried under that – what direction are we? North?

INT: Mm-hmm.

WHA: North. The North Vista. And people began to realize how much havoc was going to be wrought, digging this all up and supposedly putting it back. Hugh Jacobson, an architect and an old friend of mine in Princeton, was the architect for it. And I’m sure his plans – you want to talk to Hugh, because he ran into a real buzz saw over this, and he was a good friend of mine but I had grave reservations about the whole thing myself. I didn’t feel it was going to go anywhere, so I wasn’t carrying posters and picketing the place, but the feeling ran very, very high and it really had to do with the integrity of the grounds, just as simple as that. There would have been some irreparable changes if it had gone through.

INT: Were there any other major – you must have heard about the major projects going on at Dumbarton Oaks on the advisory board. Do you recall any other major projects or controversies or just discussions?

WHA: Oh, I can’t think of anything. That one, of course, the extension, it had moved beyond the rumor stage, and the rumors were already pretty horrific around Georgetown, gossip and so on, as to what they were going to do. There were no published plans at the early stage, and I don’t know if there ever were. And I think Giles – I think this comes under his – and it had to do with building facilities really for the Byzantinists, because the garden library wasn’t growing all that fast. I don’t even know now what the size of it is.

INT: I don’t know now. I know that – we looked a little bit into the library in the early ‘70s in our research and it was something like two thousand volumes added in a year for the Byzantine collection and maybe three hundred for the garden.

WHA: Three hundred, yeah. Well, it also has to do with the level of scholarship and so on.

INT: As long as we’re talking about the neighborhood, just very briefly, it’s interesting because we’ve talked about, of course, the great ties between Washington social scene and Dumbarton Oaks at the time. But also the controversy really, and hopefully you can speak to this since you were living on P Street, between the immediate neighborhood and Dumbarton Oaks. We’ve heard things before, particularly about Elizabeth Taylor when she was living in the house on S street.

WHA: On S street?

INT: Senator Warner’s house.

WHA: Oh, John Warner’s house. But that didn’t last very long, though. What was more dramatic was when Johnson appointed the neighbor to the Supreme Court – who am I talking about?, the lawyer in Washington. They lived right on R, just on the next block across the street from Dumbarton Oaks. Oh, famous lawyer, and he had to resign from the Supreme Court but there was some –

INT: Oh, he resigned – this isn’t Bork, is it?

WHA: Oh no no, who never made it to the court. No, this is a famous lawyer. And the press was all up there because – and I remember going up to Dumbarton Oaks for something and the press was all around his house and a streaker came down our street because the press was all there. This was the 1970s.

INT: Oh yes, we’ve heard very many –

WHA: And Elizabeth Taylor, they were really basically I think out in Middleburg.

INT: Oh, really. I know she didn’t like Dumbarton Oaks, you know, the gardeners being about and noisy in the morning.

WHA: Oh, that part I know nothing about; never heard anything about it. I can imagine.

INT: But were the neighbors sort of cantankerous with the center being so close?

WHA: I’ve never really heard anything. You know, being in Georgetown you usually heard those things. No, I think – Dumbarton Oaks kept up – obviously, because of the background of the place, they were very sensitive to its good neighbors’ relationships. Giles can speak to that much better because he would get the letters and the telephone calls or whatever. It’s too bad you didn’t get to speak to Tom Bayard. He was very young, younger than I, and he was very, very like Bill Tyler; he was very, very protective of the Dumbarton Oaks mystique, or the Bliss mystique if you want to call it that, and I remember the first time I was up to see him, because we had mutual friends at Princeton, he said, do you want to see my office. I said, yes, where is it? He said, it’s in Mildred Bliss’s bedroom. Is that still used as an office?

INT: It is. It’s no longer – I’m not entirely sure if Financial is up there –

WHA: Is Financial in the office now? In the bedroom? They haven’t changed anything. This was very much looking like her bedroom.

INT: Really? Did you get the sense that it really was a house?

WHA: Oh yes, that part was. I was very interested in that part of it and how the Blisses expanded it, and all that’s well-known, but I remember Tom taking me around, showing me all the expansion, the drawing room; they really did the whole – talk about a makeover. Big-time. When you see the original pictures of Dumbarton Oaks, that whole facade I think is new, on the south. I’m sure that’s true. You can, if you know the original plans, figure out what they did, but all the grandeur really was brought in by the Bliss hallway and the staircase and all that.

INT: It’s still very lovely.

WHA: It’s beautiful, isn’t it. What do those rooms get used for, the drawing room, anything much?

INT: There’s the director of studies’ office.

WHA: But the director’s office is in that section, but I always thought that was a former utility room or something.

INT: I’m honestly not certain what some of those places used to do. I know when they renovated and they redid the museum and everything some of that must have changed. Because of course the building of the whole library changed everything.

WHA: It’s amazing how dark it is. We’re going to have to light a candle. Do you need a light?

INT: Oh, we’re fine. I just want to make sure I haven’t left anything out. You’ve done quite a good job of answering our questions without our asking them. I wonder if – we’ve asked a little about the beginning of garden studies, but has Dumbarton Oaks played an important role in the development and progression of it?

WHA: I think that’s a very important question. Through its international program, through its fellows it certainly played a – in terms of giving scholars – a base. I never thought the collection was adequate as a real scholarly – when people would say to me, somebody would say, I’m going to apply to Dumbarton Oaks for a junior fellowship, I would say, have you looked at the collection first? Do you know whether it serves your purpose, or what other collections there are in greater Washington, if you look at the larger scene? But in terms of garden history, there was not a lot of energy behind building a larger collection. Excuse me just a moment. It’s such an important question. I never thought that they pushed to really establish a base at Harvard. Betty went up there and taught and she was very unhappy, and I think she left after a year, was that right?

INT: I’m not really sure of the exact timing, but I’ve heard that.

WHA: After she had retired, or left Dumbarton Oaks. It should have been something they were taking a major leadership role, either at Harvard or someplace else, and as far as I know they played no role in the development, say, that John Dixon Hunt has done at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s just larger because of his energy, but he’s singular in the sense that there’s not any others I can think of. Unlike the scene in England, where garden history has a much larger network and resources. Also garden history is built into the whole culture of Great Britain; it’s part of their personality, and they see that. Gardening not only at every level, even at the academic; when you think of the great physical artifacts of gardens, the great Royal Gardens are in England, some of them, and it goes back three hundred years. So you can understand why – and we don’t have anything like that, and there really isn’t, in my opinion, an indigenous American garden style. Not that this had anything to do with Dumbarton Oaks but I’m just saying that we’re no different from Byzantine studies. True?

INT: Absolutely.

WHA: But I never felt that Dumbarton Oaks took the leadership that it might have, professional leadership in terms of helping to build up any comparable academic programs. That may not be a factor.

INT: Do they exist now, or is this still a field that’s developing?

WHA: I don’t know; I’m out of touch with a lot of what’s going on now. But just in looking over journals and things – I’ve given my own garden history library away, I don’t have it here now; it was in another building here. It was a working library solely. I gave it to the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, because my family comes from there. I felt again there were no real resources for anyone interested in the subject in that part of the world. And there aren’t. But I’m just saying Dumbarton Oaks never really saw its role, and there may be a lot of reasons, a lot of political reasons, academic reasons in terms of Harvard. But it seems to me they could have done more. The garden conferences, are they still going on?

INT: Yes.

WHA: I used to get the programs regularly, but I didn’t attend them. I thought the subject matter had gotten somewhat off the track; just looking at it over-all, there wasn’t enough interest for me, but that’s just a personal point of view. The real quality of it, I don’t know.

INT: Well, I think you’ve answered most of our questions. I wonder, unless there’s anything that we’ve left out that you can think of –

WHA: No, I think your last question is one I haven’t said enough, but I’ve just put in my two cents.

INT: I wonder if in closing if you might talk a little bit about what you see, especially from your position as a person in Georgetown in the earlier days of Dumbarton Oaks, what the Bliss and the Farrand legacies are for Dumbarton Oaks.

WHA: Well, the institution itself is obviously their great legacy and I don’t know what one could say beyond that. I didn’t know either the Blisses or Beatrix Farrand – at least her work is a physical document that is studied periodically, and worried over in terms of its conservation and so on, and that’s alive in that sense, and there’s a great deal of academic interest and so on quite apart from the public interest. I don’t know if the Blisses are fading. I doubt if anybody other than – I think it’s so important institutionally to do what you’re doing, for a lot of reasons, though I don’t know who or how it will be made available.

INT: It will be placed in the Archives.

WHA: In the Archives? But I’ve been on a number of boards and I’ve always felt that when board-members come on, they usually have so little historical perception of an institution, just because of the nature – by the time they go off the board it’s too late, and with rotating boards and so on. So I think that having this institutional history is very important; how it’s disseminated or how it can be boiled down and useful, I have no idea. It seems to me there ought to be something that could go into a kind of handbook for directors and staff and any board functionaries – seems to me that would be important. Doesn’t have to be published but it certainly would be something that would be – because otherwise the Blisses are fading. I doubt the staff has any idea now. Is that true?

INT: For the most part. Dumbarton Oaks did found an Archives I guess in the eighties or around that time. So there has been some formal attempt to collect what they call “Blissiana.”

WHA: Blissiana?

INT: Yes. I’ve just noticed, and we work a lot with the Archives, that directors of study will come down for each of the programs quite a bit and take folders. The most major players, I think. There’s an attempt to look back, but whether everyone else at Dumbarton Oaks does, I don’t know.

WHA: No, of course not. Beatrix Farrand is a major figure unto herself, obviously, and her collection should have been there. But nothing can be done about that. Maybe copies of all of her papers should be part of – it seems to me that would be just the normal, natural thing.

INT: Thank you so much, you’ve been very helpful.