Man of Letters
Michael Robinson and his partner Donald Boutté are passionate about art. Every room of their Baton Rouge home—including bathrooms, laundry room and garage—is filled with a vast collection of paintings. Other surfaces hold sculptures and ceramic works. Selections from their collection—mostly contemporary and mostly by Louisiana artists—were featured in an exhibit at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum last year.
But Robinson is equally enthusiastic about his family heirlooms, particularly literary ones. He grew up in a large family that seemed to know or be related to just about everyone. (His step-great-grandfather was James K. Vardaman, who served as governor of Mississippi and as a United States senator.) “He had a five-thousand-volume library,” says Robinson, who inherited some of the books.
Among his most cherished possessions are signed first editions by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Eudora Welty, a family friend.
Robinson’s paternal uncle John Fraiser Robinson (1909-1989) was a lifelong friend of Welty and a writer himself, who won a stay at the Yaddo colony and published short stories in magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. His friendship with fellow Mississippi writer Welty (1909-2001) flourished over many years, cemented by the exchange of hundreds of letters.
Michael Robinson, whose father grew up in a house across the street from Millsaps College in Jackson, recalls that his family and Welty’s were always connected. “All of them were master bridge players,” he says. “When they were still teenagers, my aunts and uncles would play bridge with the adults. They were at each other’s houses all the time.”
Robinson recalls tagging along when an uncle took figs or strawberries to Welty, who would make preserves from them.
Robinson’s Uncle John was a figure of glamour and intrigue whose trips home were a major occasion. “He came for a visit when I was in high school,” recalls Robinson. “He hadn’t seen me in a long time, and he said ‘Omigod, you grew up!’ ”
Although they saw each other infrequently, Robinson says he always felt a bond with his uncle. “He was tall—six-one—and very good looking. He was a sweet, sweet, sweet person. He and I were very close. He loved young, bright people. Money and material things meant nothing to him. He was bright, bright, bright. He read everything.”
Having heard and absorbed the details as a child, Robinson is not always clear on the parameters of his uncle’s life. “He had a lot of stories, but you had to ask him questions. He wouldn’t talk (unless prompted).
“He was on (World War II general) Mark Clark’s staff as an intelligence officer. He was in North Africa, Sicily. When he got to Florence, he decided he wanted to live there. He went to the Ginori porcelain factory, had a place setting for fourteen made and sent it home to Jackson.”
Opening a cabinet, Robinson pulls out a Ginori plate—the set was a gift from his uncle.
“He graduated from Ole Miss around 1928,” says Robinson. “After the war, he went to graduate school at Cal Berkeley on the GI Bill. In 1946 he was in the first class of Fulbright scholars. He left school, returned to Florence to study Italian and never went back.”
In Florence, John Robinson met Enzo Rocchigiani, twenty years his junior, who would become his lifelong companion. “Enzo was uneducated, but he was a sports fanatic,” says Robinson. “We (children) were fascinated with his soccer skills. Enzo didn’t like to fly so they’d come over on a Lykes Brothers steamer. Their German shepherd Rocky only understood Italian. They used to make their own pasta. They were like the couple in La Cage aux Folles.”
Once Michael Robinson had graduated from LSU (the retired banker now works for the LSU Foundation as a fundraiser), he saw more of his uncle. “He would visit me in the States and I’d visit him in Italy,” he says. “Uncle John and Enzo had two houses in Tuscany, a summer house in Riparbella and a winter house near Florence.
“He spoke five languages—English, Italian, French, Spanish and German. He just had an ear for languages. He was brilliant. He’d go to Florence for cultural events, go to London to see theater. But he never became an Italian citizen or resident.”
Throughout his travels, John Robinson kept up a steady correspondence with Welty, who dedicated two of her books to him—the novel Delta Wedding, which was based on family diaries he had let her read, and the short story collection The Wide Net.
On one of his uncle’s visits to the family home in Jackson, Michael Robinson discovered a cache of Welty’s letters in a steamer trunk in a large storage area under the house. “The house was built on a hill,” Robinson explains. “We could walk under it. I found a trunk under the house with hundreds of letters from Eudora. Uncle John said, ‘The writer of the letters owns the letters,’ so I put them in a garbage bag and took them to Eudora. There must have been hundreds of them.” He believes Welty later donated them to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.
After John Robinson’s death, more letters turned up; his nephew inherited them. Robinson isn’t sure how many letters, but he has found good homes for them. He donated some to the archives in Mississippi and about forty to the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections in Hill Memorial Library at LSU.
Welty’s voice, folksy and at times quite funny, comes through in her correspondence with an old friend. Many are scrawled in her hard-to-decipher handwriting, others are typed. (When she got to the end of a page, she’d often turn it sideways, reinsert it in the typewriter and keep typing.)
In a letter postmarked February 23, 1951, she writes: “Willia is getting along pretty well these days, she is in Mineral Wells, Tex.—do you remember, Crazy Crystals?—but they, the baths, seem to really help her. She of course likes hotel life (Crazy Hotel), lobbies, new people, and unsuspecting Yankee acquaintances to whom she can tell stories of the Old South.”
Another sample: “Hubert and Dolly and I went to a party where Diana Trilling was. Her first remark to me was Miss Welty have you ever eaten bear? (I couldn’t think whether I had or not at the moment.)”
In another letter, Welty confides, “New linoleum in kitchen going in now” and describes in detail a primitive painting she purchased from “a lady named Tiny Mason, fat as she can be of course. I think the name of it is ‘A High Class Restaurant in Meridian.’”
Welty, who would win the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, often discussed her work in progress with Robinson. She also critiqued his work and urged him to submit it to magazines. In October 1951, she wrote, “I’ve had so much pleasure writing this summer on this long thing. I groan to everybody and say I’m tired, but the truth is I only want to get back to it.” Later, she notes, “It’s so dry, I’ve been watering camellias all morning, while trying to work out whether I’m going to have to kill my heroine or not. I don’t think so—in the languors of noon and wet grass.”
In an undated letter, she writes, “It was grand to have Robert Penn Warren here. He is a darling man, I fell for him hook line & sinker, but he could stay less than 24 hours, flew down and back from Yale. A wonderful tale teller.”
In another missive, Welty paints an unforgettable picture of herself at work, courtesy of her niece: “Mary Alice Welty, 4, has just catechized me, ‘WHY do you type in blue jeans and a pretty pink bed jacket and why don’t you paint your fingernails red and if you have 2 suitcases why don’t you go somewhere, Chicago.’”
When John Robinson died at his house in Riparbella in 1989, his nephew was in Istanbul. Michael Robinson flew to Tuscany. Although he doesn’t speak Italian, he picked out a casket and arranged for his uncle to be buried in the English Cemetery in Florence. “He didn’t want flowers, so I had them put one rose on his casket,” he says.
While Robinson was in Italy, Enzo pointed out a typewriter Welty had left behind on a long-ago visit. “It was heavy, but I brought it back and donated it to the archives in Jackson,” he says. “It was a manual. The hum of the electric one bothered her, but she later got used to it.”
Among his treasured possessions are first editions of Welty’s books, inscribed to both him and his uncle. He also has two sculptures of the author, one a ceramic piece he commissioned from Mississippi artist Susan Clark, the other a signed and numbered bronze depicting Welty clad in a long overcoat. “Only one hundred of these were produced,” he says. “Mine is number eight.”
Perhaps his fondest possession is the family resemblance to his much-loved uncle. “The older I get, the more I look like him,” says Robinson.
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.