#reta nickerson maxwell

[thisbluespirit]

I made a post about the lure of Dame Edith Evans that brought James Maxwell from the US to the UK, but the flipside of that is, of course, to ask what he was leaving behind him.

The draw of the Old Vic was clearly a big one, and once he got there, it wasn’t only the theatre work that kept him in the UK - he met his wife Avril Elgar there and they married early in 1952.  But it does seem that in some way he wasn’t happy in the US - England was quickly home to him, and he didn’t want to go back. According to Braham Murray, his fellow artistic director at the Royal Exchange, "He had disliked America, disliked academia and had fled to England.” 

His friends also noted a deep contradiction in him - that he was highly intellectual and yet hated academia or to be thought of as such, but that he couldn’t help being so “by dint of grey matter.” He was, said Braham Murray, possessed of an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and literature and easily the intellectual match of their fellow directors Caspar Wrede and Michael Elliott, though he disguised it “behind a languid and tolerant drawl,” giving “the impression that he wasn't sure of anything much.“ Tom Courtenay, meeting him as a student, felt he was “far more intelligent than anyone teaching at RADA,” and to Caspar Wrede he was “the most cultured, musical and literate friend we all have ever had.” 

His background wasn’t as average as he liked to imply, although in contrast to some of the group he hung around with*, it probably was more regular and stable - and records give the impression of a close family.  (Braham Murray has nothing to say about any issues with James’s family or his father, unlike some of the other people he mentions in his autobiography.)

* [To put in context: He was not, for instance, the seventh son of a Finnish Baron, and didn’t have an uncle who sent female members of the family mad.]

So, why did an otherwise fairly reasonable-seeming son of a US professor come away with such a lifelong loathing for academia and possibly the country of his birth?  Well, that’s a question only he could really answer, but I can at least throw some light on the matter!

While James Maxwell was American - he was born James Ackley Maxwell Jr  in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1929 - both of his parents were  Canadian, so he may easily have felt as much Canadian as American, growing up.  The family returned to Nova Scotia several times to visit relatives while he and his older brother William (born in 1927) were young, and neither of his parents became US citizens.

[Main Street, Westville, Pictou County, Nova Scotia in 1910.]

His father, James Ackley Maxwell Sr, was the son of William Maxwell, a successful coal owner from Westville, Nova Scotia, and his wife Anna Marshall, but his path to academia hadn’t been smooth.  When he reached adulthood, World War I was in progress, and study had to wait on duty.  In 1915, aged 18, he left his post as a bank clerk to join the Nova Scotia Highlanders, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant by the age of 21 and received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for an “extremely high act of bravery” at the Battle of Amiens.  He “carried himself in a magnificent, soldierly manner and displayed the greatest devotion to duty...” inspiring “with confidence all with whom he came in contact. He went from section to section as they held up by his skill and coolness cleared the opposition and made advance of the company possible.”

After the war, James Sr finally got to down to serious study - first at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (1919-21), before leaving for the US to study at Harvard (1921-23), where he also gained a Ph.D in Economics (1923-27), thanks to a scholarship.  By that time he was already an assistant professor at Clark University (from 1925), where he would remain until his retirement in 1966.

[James Ackley Maxwell, via SaltWire; background Clark University, from their website.]

He specialised in  Public Finance and Fiscal Policy and was in demand as a public policy adviser to the US government throughout his career.  Outside the US, he acted on various occasions as adviser to the Royal Commission on Provincial Financial Relations in Ottawa, was a visiting lecturer at Melbourne University and National University, Australia, and at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and took part in the International Institute of Public Finance in Istanbul, Turkey.  He wrote several books, including Tax Credits and Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations, Financing State and Local Governments, Tax Credits and Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations, The Fiscal Impact on Federalism in the United States and Commonwealth State Financial Relations in Australia, work that displayed “his command over a most complex and intricate area of public finance.” 

[Conant Hall, Harvard - the post-grads’ hall - where James Maxwell Sr was living at the time of his marriage.]

He married Reta Nickerson in 1923, shortly after her arrival in the US.  She was also from Nova Scotia, born in Halifax in 1897.  They must have met before he left for the US in 1921 and probably had to wait on his studies to marry.  James Sr was living in Harvard’s Conant Hall, while she was staying nearby at Hingham.

She had also had a college education and, now as Professor Maxwell’s wife, was involved with campus life at Clark - having students back to the house after the Spring Spree, or attending meetings of the Massachusetts branch of the American Association of University Women, who were at the time, concerned with the experiences of foreign students.  She was a singer and musician, although not, it seems, professionally as such.  She was a soprano and soloist and did sing in public on occasions.  In 1934 she assisted (a friend?) Annie Russell Marble in her work collecting songs of latter-day poets, by accompanying her to talks to sing some of the songs at various places, including the association’s meetings and Boston Public Library.  One of them was “O Moonlight Deep and Tender” by poet James Russell Lowell, to music composed in 1921 by Henry Leland Clarke.

James Maxwell spoke of inheriting his love of music from her, and how he, too, had started out as a singer - as an actor in musical theatre and had considered at first making that his career. 

[2 Stoneland Road, off Main Street, Worcester, close to Clark University.  The Maxwells were living here in 1930, in a flat separate from the main house.  Later that year, James & Reta made a trip back to Canada with their two young sons, William aged 3 and James Jr, 18 months.]

Clark University had been founded in 1887 as a post-graduate research university, with Clark College for undergraduates from 1902.  The two amalgamated under new president Wallace W. Atwood in 1920, a few years before Professor Maxwell joined the staff.  It was one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities (one of three in New England; the other two being Harvard and Yale).  Although female post-graduate students had been permitted since 1907, the undergraduate courses were male-only until 1942.

The campus is on Main Street, and centres around the green.  The Maxwells lived very close to the university in both 1930 and 40, so James and William must have grown up very familiar with its grounds.

[1930s postcard of Clark University, showing various buildings, including the Library.]

In 1938, Professor Maxwell was invited to lecture at either Melbourne University or the National University in Australia, or both - and he took Reta and the two boys with him, so James Maxwell had made a cross-continental voyage long before he left for the UK, and got to see something of a third continent.  I’m not sure how long the Maxwells were in Australia, but they left Sydney for the US on the SS Mariposa on 19th August, arriving in San Francisco on 6th September.  

[5 Shirley Street, close to Clark campus, where the Maxwells where living in 1940s.]

Once back in the US, nine-year old James must have resumed his usual studies - and it’s clear that his friends weren’t exaggerating his intellectual abilities.  His scholastic achievements earned him a place at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, a college prepatory boarding school (boys only at that time).  It currently accommodates 444 students.   The age range was 14-18, so presumably he started in fall 1943 - but he graduated only two years later, at 16. 

His classes included German (which he would later use to translate Buechner & Schiller).  The Academy was founded in 1836 and had several long-standing traditions, some of which continue today. Pupils regularly gathered on the Main Steps to sing, and all students belonged to one of two Literary societies, who competed against each other in a midwinter weeklong competition that could be intense and culminated in a debate-like event known as the Declamation.  James Maxwell belonged to the John Marshall Literary Society and it looks as if he may have played a significant part in the 1945 competition, perhaps as one of the five John Marshall students to give a monologue in the Declamation.  (The yearbook is online, but only as a preview, so I could be mistaken.)

[Mercersburg Academy chapel, 1930s or 40s postcard.]

The school had 300 acres of grounds, plus its own chapel, and doctor - but it was still an institution, and 420 or so miles away from his family in Worcester.  The local doctor’s son, growing up at the same time in Mercersburg comforted himself through a bad bout of scarlet fever that at least he got to be at home, unlike the “Students at the Academy [who], we knew, were removed from the dormitories by Dr. Hitzrot and made to tough it out in a separate building near the Infirmary that we called The Pest House.”

[The 1945 Karux (Mercersburg yearbook) is only partially viewable to  passing Brits who can’t enter their own high school graduation details, but despite the blurriness, you can see a small "JAMES ACKLEY MAXWELL JR.”  He’s signed: “Best of luck [?], James.”]

While he was studying there his family life changed dramatically.

On 1 February 1944, his mother Reta died, aged 47.  James was still not quite fifteen.  I don’t know the circumstances of her death, although the distance from Mercersburg inevitably raises the question of whether or not he was able to be there.   It wasn’t the only family loss that month, although it must have been the most significant for James.  Back in Nova Scotia, his grandfather William Maxwell also passed away on the 13th.

James continued at Mercersburg until his early graduation in 1945, after which he went straight onto Amherst College in Massachusetts.

In 1946 Professor Maxwell married again, this time to Mary Newall.  The couple went on to have three more children over the next few years - Daniel, Anne, and Ellen.

By that time, James Jr had been at Amherst for a year.  He started in 1945, aged 16, and continued to do well, graduating in 1949 magna cum laude (with great disinction).  Amherst was another male-only educational institution, but it allowed him to explore more of his his own interests - after starting out in Glee Club in his first year, he joined the drama club, The Masquers, which was where he first became seriously interested in acting as a career. By his last year, he was vice president of The Masquers, and even got the chance to play Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar recorded at the Folger Library and broadcast on TV.

[James Maxwell, third row, in the ‘Lord Jeff Club’.]

He also avoided joining one of the more traditional frat socities and instead opted for the Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, described in the yearbook as “a new and different kind of social organization on the Amherst campus.”  It was “completely democratic, and no unaffiliated student is barred from membership for any other than scholastic reasons” and they invited faculty members and visitors to lead political, social & economic discussions. 

He graduated from Amherst in 1949, but it was another year before he left for the UK.  I don’t know what he was doing, but Caspar Wrede, who had known him since his arrival at the Old Vic in 1950, wrote that he “studied at Yale.”  A post-grad course of some kind is certainly feasible, given his claim of having run away from academia, and Yale would put him in the right area to be able to see Edith Evans on Broadway that September. 

[Extract from Google Maps, showing (L-R) Amherst, Worcester, Harvard & Hingham (where Reta Maxwell was staying at the time of her marriage).]

So, as to why he was so set against academia, it’s clear that he had already experienced a surfeit of it, from his childhood at Clark, through Mercersburg, to Amherst and maybe even elsewhere, after.  Despite the elegant buildings and privilege of his scholastic institutions and their beautiful surroundings, James Maxwell preferred smoggy, dirty, war-damaged 1950s London - and a theatre school that might be world-famous but was “the aesthetic equivalent of a boot camp.”  One, some, or all of these places left him with his lifelong distaste for academia in the US, even if we can’t know exactly which, while the death of his mother and remarriage of his father may have made it easier to leave than it otherwise might have been. 

Whatever the case, he didn’t leave forever in 1950 - he went back to the States the summer of 1951, after his first year at the Old Vic Theatre School, even if it appears to have been the last time.  The address he planned to stay at was his father’s, despite his dramatic exit the previous year.  He never gave up his US citizenship, either, settling for dual citizenship status through his marriage to Avril Elgar.  And (whether coincidentally or not) their younger son Dan shares the same name as his half-brother Daniel.

He had a gardening anecdote he used to tell Tom Courtenay, on the subject of transplantation - that he had a shrub in his garden, in a spot where it wasn’t getting enough light, but it had a tap root, so couldn’t be moved:  “It will have to stay where it is,” he said.  “It may have to have a less than perfect life.”

[sources: Braham Murray The Worst It Can Be Is A Disaster; Tom Courtenay Dear Tom; The Royal Exchange Theatre Company Words & Pictures 1976-1998; US/Canada Border records, ancestry; Field Family Tree website; irwincollier.com; “Westville’s War Hero Economist” SaltWire; Boston Globe (various, 1920s-1960s); Cambridge Chronicle 1923; Ancestry.com 1930 US census & 1940 census, Maxwell household; Clark University website; Boston Symphony Orchestra 53rd Season 1933/4; Wellesley College News, 1934; The Stage, 1968; Wikipedia; Ancestry US Passenger records; The Karux1945 via Classmates & e-yearbook.com; Mercersburg Historical Society; Findagrave James Ackley Maxwell & Reta Nickerson Maxwell; The Olio 1948, 1949, Amherst College website; Aberdeen Evening Press July 1964; Google Maps; Michael Billington State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945; various images from Google StreetView & Google Images.]