Joseph Giovannini Oral History of Esther McCoy Archives of American Art, 1987, 1920s
Interview with Esther McCoy
Conducted by Joseph Giovannini
At her home in Santa Monica, California
June 7-8 and November 14, 1987
Interview
[BEGIN TAPE 1 SIDE 1]
JG: The interviewee is Esther McCoy, in Santa Monica, on June 7th. This is tape 1.
EM: Oh, let's see. Eight of my grandparents [ancestors] came to the United States before the Revolution. They were all intensely political and intensely interested in lumber. My mother was born in Illinois, my father in Ohio. My education started with one child reading aloud to the other, so we read very early and . . .
JG: Were you the oldest?
EM: No-- You're not to ask questions! My sister and I went to a boarding school. She was two years older than I, a little less than two years, and I think I was thirteen and she was fourteen and three-quarters. Or I was twelve, I can't remember. [Laughs] It was a very great experience. In English class, there was a Miss Hamilton and we had half, maybe a month, or a month and a half on one thing. One was Canterbury Tales and we memorized a great deal. I still remember the opening lines of Canterbury Tales, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote" et cetera, et cetera. And then we [also read] Shakespeare and others, but it was nice to spend enough time on one thing so you began to know it and like it. But there was a great deal of memorizing, and I think it was many years after I memorized the Milton's "On His Blindness" that I understood that when [it said] "My light was spent" that it meant that he was blind. I took it more literally that his light, his electric light--so . . . I read a great deal, and my sister was a very bright, much brighter than I was. We were so close and we were in the same grade in school, and so it wasn't any use for me to try to keep up with her. I was always the youngest one in my class and not a great deal was expected of me, but my mother urged me just to do the best I could and so I did. But I usually went into things that my sister wasn't interested in because--I can remember once in a psychology examination where the professor said, "You will know this so well that all you'll have to do is just start writing," and I was sitting next to my sister and she started writing and I [laughs] I couldn't. And I've found it happened later too. Once, anytime Schindler--R.M. Schindler--would come up behind me and ask me for some figures on something, I simply couldn't--under pressure--do anything. And so, I'm writing about that right now, something about Schindler and his asking me for an area of . . .
My sister and I then finally went to different schools. I went to Michigan, Ann Arbor, and she went to Northwestern. I was very eager to go to New York and to Paris. I'd had quite a bit of French, but I did go to New York, then, after school, and I have written about that in Grand Street.
There isn't very much more to say about it except that when I got off the train I left my bags and trunk at the station, at Pennsylvania Station, and took a taxi to a bookshop. What's the name of that bookshop?--publisher and bookshop?--on 47th street?--Brentano's. Because I'd had an account at Brentano's there while I was in college, and so it seemed a good place to get a job. So I did get a job. It turned out that it was selling Christmas cards.
I loved New York; I loved it. I wanted to live some place not in a big apartment house but in one of those nice [laughs] Georgian houses. I think most places I go I like to pick out my newspaper early and my cafe in all cities, European cities especially. So I found the World. Also, I was intensely interested in the Sacco and Vanzetti case and so I found that in the World and found they were sympathetic; they were on my side. That was one of the things that endeared me to the World, and also I liked the columnists. So I found a place listed, and I took a taxi and went over and rented it. It was on the Bowery and it was [run by] the wife of a reviewer--a writer, who reviewed books. So, they'd separated. She rented me a room. I didn't have any sense of money, whatever. None. Because I was using up . . . I didn't have too much and I was determined not to depend on my father, so that was using up quite a bit on taxis and the rent. I was getting, I think, something like sixteen dollars a week from Brentano's and paying ten dollars a week on rent.
I went to the theatre almost every night. I would run from Brentano's to Gray's cut-rate place . . . Is this the kind of thing?
JG: Yes; also some of the items, some of the people you met in the meantime, and some of the ideas that you encountered as well.
EM: I didn't encounter any ideas then, I was just all eyes and ears.
JG: What were you reading?
EM: I wasn't reading anything except the World, and I took lots of books with me to New York, a Victrola, and lots of records, but I really didn't do anything except just learn New York and go to the theatre, the cut-rate . . . After [work I'd] run down to Gray's and get cut-rate tickets and then standing room. I would usually get in late from the theatre. And I had a friend who would stand in line at the Met for me--so I could get standing room at the opera. That would be one night a week anyway.
JG: What years were these?
EM: This was '27, I think, 1927. No, it would be '26.
JG: So you were twenty-two.
EM: I was twenty-one and a half. Then I got a job in . . . As soon as Christmas was over, Brentano's let me go. I got a job in . . . Well, the place I was living, the woman decided to close the house and leave it, so I had to move very hurriedly. Someone at Brentano's, a girl who lived on in the hundred's in New York, in the Bronx, took me home with her to get a room. So I got a room in her house. She was going after work, after Brentano's, to get a job in garment center. And that was a wonderful experience, working in garment center. I got on as a-- You know, showing dresses, and modeling them. I was on a draw and I sold only one.
JG: You were on a draw, that's a percentage?
EM: Yes. I wasn't making any [money]. At the same time I was going to publishers at noon to see if I could get a job. I wanted to get a job doing editorial work, which I finally . . . Dreiser [and I] had met and--
JG : How did you meet him?
EM: He came to Ann Arbor, and so he gave me a job doing a small research job, doing research at the public library in New York on Emma Goldman.
JG: Back to Ann Arbor. Had you been an English major and a French major or . . .
EM: English. So, then Dreiser left. There may have been another little job I did for him, I don't know. He left, and so I was just going to publishers and answering ads and at the same time working at the garment center.
JG: This was the start of your long association with Dreiser as a researcher and as a friend. When you researched for Dreiser what did you do? Did you read and calculate the material, or . . .
EM: Yes, it was on Emma Goldman, because he had wanted to write something about her. He felt that she needed something sympathetic written about her.