Ives, Diabetes, and His “Exhausted Vein” of Composition · his research on the life of Charles...

Ives, Diabetes, and His “Exhausted Vein” of Composition

Stephen Budiansky

American Music, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 1-25 (Article)

Published by University of Illinois Press

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American Music Spring 2013© 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Stephen Budiansky is a writer and independent scholar. He was the recipient of a 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to support his research on the life of Charles Ives. His new biography of Ives, Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel, will be published in 2014 by the University Press of New England.

STEPHEN BUDIANSKY

Ives, Diabetes, and His “Exhausted Vein” of Composition

The rapid decline of Charles Ives’s compositional output after 1918 has long been the subject of much mystery—and even more speculation. Fol-lowing a decade and a half of phenomenal creative productivity, during which time he produced nearly all of his most important works includ-ing The Unanswered Question, the Concord Sonata and First Piano Sonata, the Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies, Three Places in New England, the New England Holidays Symphony, two string quartets, and dozens of other compositions—while simultaneously building one of the most successful life insurance agencies in the United States—Ives, at age forty-four, seemed to have “exhausted the vein” of his creative resources as his wife, Harmony, described it some years later.1 From that point on he began only a small number of new compositions; the last was in 1926, and it was shortly after that, as Harmony related to John Kirkpatrick, that Ives “came downstairs one day and with tears in his eyes said that he couldn’t seem to compose any more—nothing would go well, noth-ing sounded right.”2

As Tom C. Owens notes, “The nature and extent of Ives’s health prob-lems during and after his period of active composition have posed a vex-ing series of questions for biographers and students of his music.”3 Mul-tiple theories have been propounded to account for this crucial turning point in Ives’s life as a composer. The explanation that his family always gave was that he suffered a serious heart attack in October 1918, having

supposedly had a previous heart attack in an earlier health crisis in 1906 as well.4 Ives himself, however, was always a bit coy on the matter. In his posthumously published Memos he referred obliquely to “a serious illness that kept me away from the office for six months”—it was in fact most of the entire year following the October 1918 crisis—and said only that following that incident he was never again in good health or able to “get going ‘good’ in music.”5 His authorized biographers Henry and Sidney Cowell also skirted the question of what exactly this unspeci-fied illness in 1918 was, but asserted that it “left him with permanent cardiac damage.” Subsequent biographers, including Jan Swafford and Frank Rossiter, repeated as fact that Ives suffered heart attacks in 1918 and 1906.6 The “heart attack” explanation, as Owens notes, still remains probably the most generally accepted, or at least commonly offered, in the Ives literature. Yet other authors, dissatisfied with the circumstantiality of the medi-cal evidence, have proposed an array of other hypotheses, of varying degrees of speculation and imagination, which attribute Ives’s decline as a composer to a variety of psychological, spiritual, political, or personal causes. Stuart Feder, himself a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, proposed a psychoanalytical explanation: Noting that Ives’s electrocardiogram upon admission to Roosevelt Hospital shortly before he died in 1954 was normal, or at a minimum inconsistent with that of a patient who had ever experi-enced a true heart attack as understood today (i.e., a myocardial infarction causing actual damage to the heart muscle), Feder suggested that Ives’s post-1918 decline was the end result of his extended mourning for his fa-ther, a process unnaturally prolonged by Ives’s own sense of guilt; once he reached the age of his own father’s early death (forty-nine), Ives’s will to create was spent.7 Agreeing that Ives’s collapse was fundamentally psy-chological, and suggesting that the family claim of Ives having suffered a “heart attack” was merely a cover story, Gayle Sherwood Magee advanced the alternative notion that his 1918 and subsequent ailment was part of an ongoing condition going back at least to his earlier 1906 “breakdown” that would have been understood in the context of the time as “neuras-thenia,” a supposed depletion of nervous energy often attributed then to overworked businessmen and creative individuals.8

Still others have proposed more personal or artistic explanations. Kirk-patrick, and to some extent Harmony Ives, believed that Ives had simply burned himself out creatively: his “double life” as a businessman and a composer, working late at night for so many years, left him spiritually exhausted and unable to go on, Kirkpatrick thought. J. Peter Burkholder suggested the more nuanced variation that it was not so much that Ives had “run out of ideas” or energy but that “his artistic aims had exceeded his grasp”: his ideals were too high. Rossiter rather less flatteringly at-tributed Ives’s inability to continue composing to a crushing loss of self-

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confidence he endured from the critical rejection of his self-publication of the Concord Sonata in 1920: his skin was too thin.9

Least flattering—and most tenuous of all—Ives’s notoriously unreliable biographer David Wooldridge constructed a tendentious argument that Ives made a willful decision to abandon his musical endeavors in 1916 in order to “make money” by speculating in the stock market, sinisterly suggesting that “no man can accumulate the kind of wealth he had, by 1919” by any other honest means. This totally unsubstantiated supposition is readily disposed of by reference to Ives’s tax returns, which document the considerable—and rapidly mounting—salary and commissions he was earning directly as a result of the phenomenal success of the agency he had managed for Mutual Life since 1909. By 1919 his annual income from Mutual was $22,850—at a time when the average family in New York City spent $214 a year on rent and $641 on food. With an additional $11,955 earned that year from renewal commissions, his total income that year was equivalent to more than half a million dollars in today’s terms. Two years later his salary and commissions exceeded $60,000. Throughout this period he had no income whatsoever to report from the sale of stocks; in fact, nearly all of his reported investments, more than $50,000 worth at that time, were in government Liberty Bonds.10

But even leaving such totally fabricated theories aside, the range of ex-planations to choose from remains considerable, and the confusion great, concerning a pivotal point in Ives’s career that is crucial to understanding his life and creative work. Frustratingly, all of these theories that have been advanced depend on a substantial element of speculation, circumstantial conjecture, and theorizing on a limited pool of facts; the controversies they have spawned have led to some lengthy debates over the American understanding of psychoanalysis, competing interpretations of history, and the nature of anachronism, but have shed relatively little light on the actual circumstances surrounding Ives’s creative decline.11

Several heretofore-overlooked documents relating to Ives’s medical record, however, offer the opportunity now to put our understanding of Ives’s 1918 health crisis and his subsequent reaction to it on a more solid footing. These documents show clearly: that Ives learned in Au-gust 1918 that he was suffering from diabetes; that in the ensuing years he underwent a devastating weight loss amounting to one-third of his weight owing to the ravages of this disease and his attempts to contain it, until he finally began receiving insulin therapy in 1930; and that by that time considerable damage had been done to his body and his psyche in combating the disease. Although at least some (though not all) of these documents were examined by earlier authors, including Dr. Feder, crucial medical information pertaining to Ives’s condition in them was missed. Moreover, none of Ives’s biographers have sufficiently appreciated the history of diabetes and its treatment. Today diabetes is a completely

Ives, Diabetes, and His “Exhausted Vein” 3

manageable chronic disease with a positive prognosis for patients who deal properly with it. But someone diagnosed in 1918 with diabetes un-derstood it, quite simply, to be a hopeless and incurable condition. For many patients, the only chance for even slightly prolonging life was with a diet so severely restricted that both patients and physicians referred to it with literal accuracy as a “starvation diet.” Before the first experimental treatments of diabetics with insulin in 1922 (it would be late 1923 before insulin became generally available to patients), a diagnosis of diabetes was as grim news for a patient as a diagnosis of cancer, carrying all the stigma of a terminal illness. Ives’s 1918 collapse, his hurried efforts in 1919 and 1920 to put his musical and business legacy in order, and his quickly ensuing physical and psychical deterioration are all substantially explained by these pre-viously neglected sources, which strikingly document the course of his diabetes and his feelings about it.

“A Man’s Death is More or Less a Personal Matter”

Although it has been well known that Ives suffered in his later years from diabetes, and that he was definitively diagnosed with the disease by the preeminent diabetes specialist Dr. Elliott Joslin at his famous Boston clinic in 1931, the accepted view in the Ives literature has been (as Owens observes) that “we do not know when the disease first devel-oped.”12 In writing to a few close friends at the time of his 1918 health crisis, Ives acknowledged that he had experienced some health problem but was characteristically evasive. In a letter written in early 1919 to his Yale classmate Thomas McLane, he joked about the supposed efforts by his doctors and himself to pin down his ailment:

So finally, to fulfill all the doctors[’] hopes, I had a few attacks—the nature of which apparently were as different as the nature of true doctors are different. . . . Personally—tho’ I won’t go on record—I think I have had the “flu”—for that is the one thing that all the doc-tors have eliminated. But, I’m glad to say, that all the doctors are now dead—to me.13

Although both Feder and Sherwood have taken Ives’s self-diagnosis of flu with complete seriousness—Sherwood for example writes, “Accord-ing to Ives’s own description, he believed he had influenza”—it is hard to read his statement about the flu as anything but completely facetious and ironic, part of a similar effort throughout the passage quoted above to evade the subject by making a joke of it.14

Yet despite Ives’s own bantering, coyness, and vagueness about the nature of his illness, the medical history form completed on his arrival

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at the Joslin Clinic on January 26, 1931, indicates that Ives had known perfectly well back in 1918 exactly what was wrong with him: a medical exam in August of that year had confirmed that he was a diabetic, based on the discovery of sugar in his urine. Joslin’s standard form includes a section headed “Onset.” Under that heading, in the space “Sugar First Discovered,” Joslin wrote on Ives’s record, “August 1918.”15 Enough was known about diabetes by the early years of the twentieth century that it was routine to test for the presence of sugar in the urine, or glycosuria, during medical exams—including those routinely required for life insur-ance applicants—in order to screen for the disease. Ives was also well aware from his insurance business just how grave the prognosis was for these “sugar cases,” as he and his insurance partner Julian Myrick termed them: applicants with any detectable glycosuria were automati-cally rejected for life insurance policies as unacceptable risks. The occasion for Ives’s 1918 exam was his application as a volunteer to serve in France with the YMCA, which following America’s entry into the world war in April 1917 undertook a massive effort to construct and operate post exchanges for American troops in forward areas as well as recreation centers for soldiers on leave. (Although it has frequently been stated that Ives was applying to the YMCA to drive an ambulance, this is not the case.)16 For a few days after learning of his positive glycosuria result, Ives apparently clutched at straws trying to deny, perhaps even to himself, the seriousness of his condition. On September 4, 1918, he wrote to the YMCA’s assistant personnel director, who had written Ives six days earlier requesting a copy of his medical certificate, and tried to play down the problem; he stated that Dr. William M. Bradshaw (an MD in Mutual’s medical department whom Ives consulted a number of times as a personal physician) “seems to think that there are a couple of medical points to be cleared up before approval.” Ives continued:

I know that there is nothing whatever the matter with me except that I have been at business steadily for some time with no let up. I have decided to take two or three week’s vacation, and am sure that I can give a clean bill of health before the end of the month.17

But that illusion quickly crumbled. In any event, Ives apparently made no move to take time off from work, as he suggested he would, to get in shape to pass a reexamination. His letter to the YMCA was dictated to his secretary, indicating he was still at that point regularly commuting to his New York office from his country house in Redding, Connecticut (where the Iveses stayed every summer); a week later he was still coming into the city, where he presented himself to register for the draft (required at that point for all men up to age forty-five) near his place of work in lower Manhattan on September 12.18 Three days after that, Harmony


noted “back to NY” in their diary, recording their usual autumn move back to their New York City apartment. Two weeks later Ives suffered the collapse that left him out of work for most of a year.19

Feder was certainly aware of the finding of glycosuria in Ives’s August 1918 medical exam but treated it as of relatively little significance as he sought other, psychoanalytically based explanations for Ives’s subse-quent behavior—going so far as to insist that rather than looking for “a presumed physical, organic illness,” the key to Ives’s post-1918 decline was to be found in essentially psychoanalytic origins, particularly his father’s early death.20

Missing from Feder’s and other accounts, however, is a historical perspective of what a devastating blow a diagnosis of diabetes would have been to anyone in 1918. There is no need to seek subtle Freud-ian explanations about Ives’s guilt and incomplete mourning for his father, or to invoke the speculative possibility of Ives as a “neuras-thenic,” to account for the reaction Ives underwent. Although Dr. Joslin himself made a point of being upbeat to his patients and emphasizing the progress that had been made in managing diabetes through diet and patient education, the statistics he presented in his 1917 landmark textbook The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus more honestly laid bare the stark truth. Of the 1,300 diabetes patients he had seen in the previous two decades at that point, 70 percent had died within six to ten years of their initial diagnosis, 94 percent within fifteen to twenty years.21 It was the common experience of doctors treating diabetics in this era that a child diagnosed with the disease had a life expectancy of little more than a year; a man of Ives’s age at initial onset might live for five, ten, or even fifteen years, but there was no escaping the steady toll that the disease immediately began to take, leading to a variety of associated health problems and significantly shortening life expectancy.22 Even mildly chronic elevated levels of blood sugar cause progressive damage to blood vessels and organs, leading to the destruction of nerve cells, high blood pressure as the heart attempts to overcome the restrictions of blocked blood vessels, pain in the extremities, degeneration of vi-sion, and other cascading ills. As Joslin had correctly discovered through his meticulous (and still well-regarded) studies of metabolism and diet, the only hope for pro-longing life in the pre-insulin era was by so restricting caloric intake, particularly of carbohydrates, that blood-sugar levels were kept down as much as possible, mitigating the harm. For the most serious cases it was a brutal regimen. A colleague of Joslin’s remembered the horror he felt at first seeing the skeleton-like patients he had to care for, and try to encourage to stick with their diets, even as they were wasting away. “A quarter of a century after the discovery of insulin,” notes the medi-

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cal historian Michael Bliss, “the doctors were reminded of these pre-insulin diabetics when they saw the pictures of the survivors of Belsen and Buchenwald.”23 So discouraging was the only scientifically based approach to managing the disease that quack remedies abounded, the most common being opium—which at least “dulled the despair,” Bliss notes—and was still extremely prevalent among the treatments being prescribed for diabetes by general practitioners as late as 1919.24

The best encouragement that knowledgeable practitioners could offer was to hold out the hope that some effective cure might emerge within a few years. Initial research had begun with the aim of extracting whatever substance it was that scientists now suspected the pancreas produced that was essential to the body’s normal regulation of blood sugar. Fred-erick Allen, another prominent diabetes specialist, tried to be optimistic, too, but his message to diabetics in 1919 was a stern admonition that they needed to steel themselves for the ordeal of clinging to life in order to buy time while research continued toward a treatment: “The knowledge of diabetes is advancing rapidly enough that even the patient whose outlook seems darkest should take courage to remain alive in the hope of treatment that can be called curative.” One of the first patients to re-ceive insulin when the first experimental preparations became available in August 1922 was the daughter of the former Republican candidate for president and future chief justice Charles Evans Hughes. Elizabeth Hughes had been Allen’s model patient, faithfully adhering to her diet. Fifteen years old in 1922, she weighed a horrifying forty-five pounds, and was literally within days of death, when she received her first in-sulin treatment. (She went on to live to age sixty.)25

Patients like Ives whose diabetes first appeared in adulthood gener-ally did not require such extreme dietary restrictions, nor did they face such an immediate death sentence, but they still were confronted with the knowledge that they had an incurable condition that would in time kill them, and in the meanwhile debilitate them. So it is not difficult to see why Charles Ives, on the eve of his forty-fourth birthday, father of a recently adopted four-year-old daughter, suddenly confronted with his mortality or at a minimum a future of mounting chronic physical impairment, sank into a period of black despair. Though he tried to joke about it in his letter to Tom McLane in January 1919, his despair is plain when he says that if the YMCA (“that God-like institution”)

had turned me down for super-abundant morality or a subnormal mentality, I might have borne it without surprise but to be found so physically sub-standard that I cannot be even ever entrusted to pass around cigarettes (to say nothing of selling them)—is humiliating to say the worst.


He also gave McLane one hint of his true condition: after a joking sug-gestion that in “imposing all this on you” he had not even begun to pay McLane back for the torments he inflicted on his fellow members of the secret society they had both belonged to in their senior year at Yale, Ives excused himself for mentioning his own troubles on the grounds that “when one has been on his back long enough he takes desperate chances to amuse himself—; and the outbursts of mind become as heedless as those of his pancreas.”26

That Ives fully understood that his onset of diabetes dated from his August 1918 exam, and that he was powerfully affected by the stigma and fear associated with such an alarming and incurable diagnosis, is further confirmed by a remarkable letter that I believe has completely escaped the notice of Ives scholars to date (see fig. 1). It was written by Ives in 1930 to Clifton Furness, an authority on Walt Whitman who taught English at the New England Conservatory of Music. Furness became an early champion of Ives’s music, and eventually a close friend, having been one of the first to write Ives an admiring letter after receiving a copy of the Concord Sonata in 1921. At the time of Ives’s writing to him in July 1930, Furness’s father had just been diagnosed with diabetes (though incorrectly, as it later turned out), and Ives wrote him an extraordinarily unusual, personal, and revealing letter in which he frankly discusses his own experiences with the disease. Nowhere else—not even in the handful of letters to his business partner Julian Myrick in which he briefly men-tions his diabetes—does he reveal his condition, and his feelings about it, with such candor.27 Ives wrote Furness:

We were disturbed to hear of your father’s bad health. But I am glad that I can say something that will help you—as far as diabetes goes. It isn’t the hopeless thing it used to be. I’ve had it for 12 years—almost before the days of insulin. We didn’t say anything about it—as so many had the idea that somehow death and diabetes had something to do with each other—they haven’t so g——— d——— much. —And then a man’s death, you know, is more or less a personal matter—and also being favored with 2 ailments, I used the “heart” method instead of the “pancreas” when I had to use any. . . . I kept the diabetes condition down quiet [quite?] evenly as a rule by “diet.” Lately they have been giving me insulin as the blood-sugar test apparently changed a little—and have gained quite a little in weight under it. . . . It’s no trouble to take it—through a hypoder-mic about 20 minutes before meals, after the tolerance and balance are found. . . . As far as I can make out, one can take insulin all his life and live longer than he ought. It’s getting used to a physical handicap which is the meanest part—but time straightens that out

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quite alright. . . . Don’t let him get it on his mind too much—it isn’t necessary—and even if it were it wouldn’t be—It is a hard period for you and your mother, but she’s a brave person, one can see that by knowing her—and so are you.28

There are several points of considerable significance here that Ives reveals:

1. Regarding the question of the onset of his own diabetes, he forth-rightly affirms that he has “had it for 12 years,” that is, since 1918.

2. He notes the common assumption at that time that “death and diabetes” had “something to do with each other,” while his ad-ditional observation that “it isn’t the hopeless thing it used to be” quite clearly and accurately reflects the fact that back then it was a “hopeless thing.”

3. Similarly, in a manner that plainly suggests the psychological trauma he himself endured coping with his own discovery that he had diabetes twelve years earlier, he counsels his friend not to let his father “get it on his mind too much” and notes that “the meanest part” of being a diabetic is “getting used to a physical handicap.”

4. Most striking of all, Ives admits here that he and his family de-liberately disguised his diabetes with his (possibly trivial) heart problems, as a way to avoid mentioning the gravity of his medi-cal condition.

Feder and Sherwood were thus correct in discounting the “heart at-tack” explanation and in suspecting that that was, all along, something of a cover story. (The story of his having suffered an earlier heart attack in 1906 is likewise extremely dubious given the available medical evi-dence.) But it was a cover not for “neurasthenia” (about which it remains mere speculation that Ives ever received any such actual diagnosis by any doctor), or for any other psychogenic or imaginary illness, but instead for the very real and very crushing fact of his diabetes—and for the crisis that this diagnosis precipitated as he tried to come to terms with the fact that he had a chronic and incurable illness that would in all likelihood kill him in just a few years.

Unfinished Business

From October 1918 to the end of the year Ives remained mostly at home in his New York apartment. As his letter to McLane alluded, it was a trying time for him. It was a trying time for his family as well. In January 1919, the Iveses traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, for a two-month winter vacation, apparently at Harmony’s behest. A few days after their arrival


Figure 1. A typewritten transcript (probably made by Clifton Furness at the time) of Ives’s July 1930 letter to Furness in which he discusses at length his diabetic condition. Source: Clifton Furness Papers, University of Buffalo Archives.

Ives recorded in the diary they kept of their trip: “H. stays in bed most of day, resting after 3 mos. work in a boiler factory.” A penciled nota-tion on John Kirkpatrick’s typed transcription of the diary provides the explanation that Harmony gave Kirkpatrick decades later for what Ives meant: “HTI: ‘boiler factory’: C’s expression for H’s taking care of him.”29

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But once Ives recovered from the initial blow, he embarked at once on a series of actions in his musical, business, and personal life that look very much like a man trying to put his affairs in order without further delay. Even though Harmony noted that during their stay in Asheville, “Charlie had sort of a relapse & we didn’t have a very cheerful time,” he accomplished a significant amount of work.30 During their stay he finished copying the Concord Sonata and writing the Essays Before a So-nata, his introduction and explanation of the movements of the work


as well as an ambitious statement of his own philosophical ideas about music and transcendentalism. On January 22, 1919, Ives recorded: “Try-ing to write something to make people think Thoreau movement sounds like Thoreau.” On February 15 Harmony noted: “C. reading ‘Pride & Prejudice’—& copying music.” On February 20: “Emerson, Alcotts & Thoreau all finished & copied 3 movements.”31

By fall of that year the sonata was being engraved, at Ives’s own con-siderable expense, by the G. Schirmer music publishers in preparation for printing. After almost two decades that saw no public performances or publication of any of his musical works, Ives was suddenly hurrying to do something to secure his artistic legacy. It was a typically Ivesian quix-otic solution, spending thousands of dollars of his own money to publish one of his most ambitious and challenging works and then sending out copies unsolicited and free of charge to a miscellaneous list of musicians, critics, publications, and influential people who he thought might bring him some belated recognition as a composer. But even this somewhat quirky effort to get his music noticed was a considerable departure from his aversion to publicity and self-promotion that had characterized his whole approach to his musical endeavors ever since he “resigned as a nice organist and gave up music” in 1902 in the wake of the indifferent reception of his cantata The Celestial Country.32

Beside his aversion, or even fear, of public notice for his music, Ives had often experienced a great psychological barrier in completing com-positions, preferring to keep the possibility of revision indefinitely open. (He would continue to do so throughout his life; he once told Clifton Furness that after a piece was “written down” it always seemed “dead” and “no good” to him, the notes on the page never “what I wanted it to sound like.”)33 But now he was biting the bullet in earnest. In 1920 and 1921 he threw himself into another considerable task of compiling, revis-ing, and preparing for publication a second self-published volume of his compositions, the 114 Songs. If he was beginning few new works during this time it was because he had—at last—stirred himself to tackle the tedious and time-consuming job of putting into final form and preparing for publication what would in fact become two of his most important musical contributions, works upon which his subsequent fame would be considerably based. In Ives’s business activities there are also signs of a man hastening to tie up loose ends and look to his legacy. Upon his return to work in the fall of 1919 he quickly completed several new instructional pamphlets and creative short stories for the agency newsletter (“Broadway,” “George’s Adventure”) aimed at helping agents sell more effectively; he prepared a revised edition of his best-known insurance pamphlet, “The Amount to Carry,” originally published in 1912; and he wrote a lengthy, thoughtful, and in parts quite courageous memorandum to the president of Mutual,

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challenging many aspects of the company’s operations and proposing, among other reforms, a substantial increase in salary for clerks.34 Al-though Ives always had an independent streak, this memorandum has a different tone from any of his earlier writings, including an earlier letter he wrote to Mutual’s president in 1917; it is that of a man who is looking back on all that he has learned in the business and who no longer has to worry what anyone thinks if he tells it like it is. His 1920 pamphlet, “How to Read the Rate Book,” also has a curiously valedictory tone about it: fifteen pages of technical explanation devoted to helping agents understand how to determine the costs and payouts of policies and translate this information to potential clients suddenly segues into a half-proud, half-defiant declaration of Ives’s business philosophy and accomplishments. Noting his longstanding faith in “a primary prin-ciple of transcendental philosophy (if you will stand for that term in a business paper), viz., ‘Belief in innate ability and virtue,’” he proclaims:

We were told, when starting out for ourselves, that a business based unqualifiedly on such an idea was too visionary—that it did not allow for the under-values of human nature—that among the elements in the success of any business was one that required or was more dependent upon an arbitrary discipline rather than upon a natural confidence in all matters relating to the ethical or moral side (or what-ever you prefer to call it) of life. In short, we were told that the plan would not work out. All we can say to that is that it has worked out.35

In 1922 Ives also moved to put Harmony’s financial future on a secure basis, transferring to a trust, for her sole benefit, his interest in the Ives and Myrick partnership business. Although Ives and his partner since 1909 were directly employed by Mutual as managers, they continued to operate a separate partnership business to purchase renewal commis-sions from the agents under them. An agent typically received half of the first year’s premium as a commission on new policies written and then in ensuing years received smaller additional commissions if the poli-cies were renewed annually. These renewal commissions amounted to 30 percent of one year’s premium over three years, or in some cases 45 percent over nine years. Ives and Myrick offered to purchase from their agents the rights to their renewal commissions for a flat 15 percent at the time the policies were written. Many agents were happy to have the additional ready money up front, and the two partners assumed the risk that the policies would be canceled or that the policyholder would die before the renewal commissions came due. But for those that paid off, the investment reaped a hefty profit, doubling their money in three years or tripling it in nine years. By 1923 the partnership owned more than $100,000 in renewal commissions and continued to reinvest the proceeds in additional renewals. Ives’s share earned a steady $10,000–20,000 a year


throughout the decade.36 The trust proceeds, invested in an extremely conservative portfolio of Treasury securities and blue-chip stocks, would provide Harmony a considerable income after Ives’s death in 1954.

“Maybe You Think I Like This Kind of Idleness”

It is not possible to establish with certainty just how long Ives might have been suffering the effects of diabetes at the time his glycosuria was first detected in 1918. Urine testing is at best a rough indicator of the underlying condition; generally only when blood sugar rises to a level of around 180 mg/dL does sugar begin to be excreted by the kid-neys into the urine. In a normal healthy adult, the insulin regulatory mechanism usually maintains blood-sugar levels within a tight range, and even after meals would typically not exceed 125 mg/dL. Thus it is possible that Ives for some time had been suffering from what would have been diagnosed as diabetes based on a fasting blood test, even if no sugar was present in the urine at times. Ives stated that his last previ-ous medical exam before the August 1918 exam that detected glycosuria was in 1916. That exam was apparently normal, as was a 1909 exam performed in conjunction with a life insurance policy he took out from Mutual shortly after his marriage. But by the same token, Ives was also not showing any sugar in his urine in April 1930 (and had not for several years previous) when a fasting blood test registered a blood-sugar level of 195 mg/dL, considerably above the 126 mg/dL that defines diabetes. This was the finding that led his personal physician in New York City, J. Godfrey Wells, to place him on insulin at that time and subsequently refer him to Joslin. (A fasting blood sugar of less than 100 is considered normal, 100–125 is “pre-diabetic.”)37

It is likely, though, that the organic effects of the disease had already begun to take a toll not long after his initial 1918 diagnosis, adding a physical blow on top of the mental anguish that the receipt of the di-agnosis apparently brought on. The most direct effect of chronically elevated blood sugar is constant and often considerable fatigue. The letters reprinted in Owens’s Selected Correspondence document a range of ills suggestive of complications of diabetes, beginning in the mid-1920s and steadily worsening over time: fatigue, pain and loss of sensation in the feet and hands, cataracts and deterioration of vision, and general debilitation. (Diabetes can also itself increase the risk of heart disease, though it is quite plausible, as Feder suggests, that the heart symptoms Ives complained of—tachycardia and palpitations—were the product largely of anxiety, not at all an uncommon phenomenon.)38

But unrecorded in any of the letters from this period—and completely unnoticed by authors to date—is the significant weight loss Ives un-derwent during this time, which would likely have been the most im-

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mediately debilitating and traumatic consequence of his diabetes as the symptoms began to mount in the 1920s. Ives had always been trim; at his heaviest (in 1896, at age twenty-two) he weighed only 160 pounds according to his Joslin medical history form, and his 1918 draft registra-tion card noted his build as “slender.” Diabetes itself causes weight loss as the body is unable to fully utilize the glucose derived from food, and by the mid-1920s Ives had begun a restricted diet in an attempt to control the effects of the disease. By the time he was examined at the Joslin Clinic he was bordering on emaciated.39 During the five days he was assessed at Joslin his naked weight was precisely measured and recorded each day as his caloric intake and insulin dosage were adjusted and balanced; the minimum weight recorded during this assessment was 112 pounds (see fig. 2). For a 5' 9½" man, this was severely underweight. In a letter to Myrick in July 1929, Ives had remarked that Wells was “trying to get the weight up,” and in his letter to Furness in July 1930 he observed that by that point he had indeed gained “quite a little in weight” already thanks to the insulin treatments begun three months earlier. Thus the minimum weight he reached in the late 1920s before he was started on insulin must have been considerably under 110 pounds.40 Such weight loss would have placed him in the category of “cachectic,” a degree of wasting and shrinking that not only would have left him feel-ing weak and miserable but that also often strikes very hard at a man’s body self-image, especially a man used to vigorous athletic activity as Ives was. Several visitors who saw Ives around this time mention their impression of him looking thin, “fragile,” and “very tired and very old.”41

Coping with both these mounting physical hardships and the blow of being unable to lead the life he had enjoyed are more than adequate to explain the increasingly frequent “slumps” and depressions he frankly reported during this time. Ives had always been an avid athlete, playing baseball and football in his youth and at college, and after buying their

Figure 2. Ives’s chart from his assessment at the Joslin Clinic notes a minimum weight of 112 pounds in January 1931, down from a maximum of 160 pounds in 1896. Source: Ives Papers, Yale University Music Library.


country place in Redding he had enjoyed vigorous manual farm work: planting and digging potatoes, chopping wood, getting the hay in. (He liked to boast that he was even as good as the farmer down the road in getting these jobs done.42)In 1913 he wrote up a rigorous schedule for his vacations at Redding that testifies to his considerable energy and zest for both physical and mental labor:

6.30 up & at them6.45–7.30 chores (fire, coal, pump, spring water, etc.)7.30–7.45 Bach7.45–8.15 Breakfast8.15–11.00 Hard work11–12.30 Farm work12.30–1 loaf1–1.30 lunch1.30–2. read2–6 Farm work & wood & water trees6–6.30 Rest (hard work)6.30–7.30 dinner (big)7.30–8 smoke & talk8–9 read (Jim to barn)9- to bed. D.C. * @ codaFarm work = potatoes, husk corn dry beans, burn weeds, dig (around not up) apple trees, current bushes, rye to flour (So. N.) (Oct 15 screens off.) cut weeds around spring43

But by 1922 he was already miserably complaining that he had had to give up his beloved farm work on his doctors’ advice.44 By 1923 evidence of any further contributions by Ives to the work of the Ives and Myrick agency all but vanish from the meticulous scrapbooks he maintained of all of the pamphlets, sales and training materials, and advertisements he wrote. His limited extant correspondence from this period suggests that he was increasingly absent from the office owing to his declining overall state of health.45 His continued loss of weight and the worsening of his blood-sugar numbers by the end of the decade coincide closely with the severe physical and psychological “slump” he fell into in the summer of 1929 and his decision to retire from business that year. “Dur-ing the last two months in NY . . . I couldn’t do anything physically or mentally,” Ives told Myrick in his July 1929 letter. Ives noted that Dr. Wells “said it was a kind of n x over the usual physical condition”—“n x” probably being a reference to “nervous anxiety.”46 The emphasis makes clear, however, that the root of Ives’s anxiety and depression was what by then had indeed become the “usual physical condition.” Undoubt-edly, he was feeling physically wretched a great deal of the time from

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about 1923 on as he dropped one-third of his normal body weight and his diabetes began taking a steadily mounting toll. Joslin’s 1931 examination confirmed that Ives was indeed diabetic, duplicating the high blood sugar reading Wells had found in April 1930. (During his stay at the Joslin Clinic, Ives had one blood-sugar reading of 190 mg/dL, even with twice-daily insulin injections and his diet limited to a bare 1,600 calories per day.) Joslin afterward wrote Wells that he was hopeful their patient “will be more comfortable than he has been for a long time,” with a modest increase in his diet, which continued insulin treatment would permit.47

As Ives’s letter to Furness shows, he had largely come to terms men-tally by that time with the fact that he had a chronic physical disability. But by then he had also begun to complain of deteriorating vision and pains in his hands, and as these conditions worsened his frustrations mounted. In a letter to Slonimsky in 1931 he wrote, “My hands and arms have been bothering again—it’s hard to handle a pen but the meanest part is not to be able to play the piano when I want.”48 And in 1935: “For some time past haven’t been in shape to do anything I want to—As for music—sometimes for days at a time‚ can’t see it, hear it or play it—not even a nice wrong note!”49

Ives summed up his frustrations one day to Kirkpatrick in late 1938 or early 1939, bursting out as Kirkpatrick was about to depart after a visit, “Well, maybe you think I like this kind of idleness, this doing nothing!”50 Although Ives’s life was saved by the advent of insulin and he continued to live another quarter-century after he was started on insulin therapy in 1930, the damage done, particularly to his eyesight and hands, and the continuing toll the disease took on his energy level had effectively ended his composing career.

“Nice Snake Tracks—His Mark!”

Recognizing the primary importance of Ives’s diabetes in his post-1918 years may also help to elucidate another longstanding mystery about his declining condition and behavior during this period. Beginning around 1931, Ives’s handwriting frequently displays an extraordinary shakiness (see fig. 3). Ives often tried to belittle the problem with his usual self-mocking humor, referring to his handwriting as “snake tracks” or add-ing little wry marginal comments such as “not my fault—Creator’s!” or “don’t let anybody see them!—till 2776!”51 But in a few places, writing to close friends such as Slonimsky, he more candidly reveals his embar-rassment and frustration with this disability: “Hope you can make out this writing. I’m quite ashamed of it.”52

Part of the mystery is that the shakiness comes and goes without any apparent pattern; letters written only a few months apart show


considerable variations in handwriting, and some earlier letters show more of a tremor than later ones (see fig. 4).53 Tremors are not typi-cally associated with the peripheral neuropathy that occurs in diabetes, nor is Ives’s shaky writing characteristic of the tremors of Parkinson’s disease or the progressive neurological condition known as essential tremor. They are, however, consistent with the shakiness that occurs with hypoglycemia, which is a constant concern for diabetics receiving insulin treatment.54

Since the advent of reliable and easy-to-use home blood-testing kits in the 1960s, diabetics have been able to monitor their blood-sugar levels on a daily or more frequent basis and adjust their insulin dosage ac-

Figure 3. A characteristic example of the extremely shaky handwriting that Ives facetiously called “snake tracks.” Source: Kauffman Collection, Yale University Music Library.

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cordingly. Small changes in diet, exercise, stress, or alcohol intake can produce significant fluctuations in blood sugar requiring adjustments in insulin dosage to keep the blood-sugar level within a safe range. All diabetics are keenly aware of the danger of hypoglycemia, which can occur when too much insulin is administered and blood-sugar levels fall too low; many report hypoglycemic episodes as the worst part of being a diabetic. Hypoglycemia can cause tremors, sweating, and irritability; as blood-sugar levels fall lower, more serious symptoms including diz-ziness, disorientation, difficulty thinking, and faintness can occur. At its worst it can lead to coma and death.55

Correctly adjusting insulin dosage was much more of an inexact sci-ence in Ives’s day; home urine-test kits became available only in 1940 and even those could only tell a patient when his blood sugar was too high, not too low. Finally, consuming even a single alcoholic drink can cause hypoglycemia to occur up to twenty-four hours later—and Ives is

Figure 4. Three chronologically sequential samples of Ives’s handwriting, dis-playing mild tremor in July 1932 (top), almost none in May 1933 (middle), and severe tremor in August 1934 (bottom). The tendency for the “snake tracks” in his writing to come and go may possibly have been the result of hypoglycemic reactions to periodic excessive doses of insulin, which he began taking to treat his diabetes in April 1930. Source: Slonimsky Papers, Library of Congress.


known to have continued to consume alcohol even after being diagnosed with diabetes.56

Feder stated that Ives’s tremor is “a puzzle”; it has even produced some rather far-fetched theories, such as the (quite unsubstantiated) speculation that it may have been the result of exposure to mercury ef-fluent from Danbury’s hatting industry contaminating the groundwater at Redding.57 But the facts that Ives’s “snake tracks” do not appear at all before he began receiving insulin in 1930, that they come and go rather than showing a steady deterioration over time, and that they are at least consistent with what can occur in diabetic hypoglycemic episodes are certainly suggestive. Repeated hypoglycemic episodes are anecdotally linked to mood and personality changes; spouses of diabetics not infrequently report angry outbursts, irritability, and other mood disruptions over time. Ives’s well-known and increasing episodes of anger from the 1930s on are sugges-tive on this point as well.58 Moreover, repeated hypoglycemic events can lead to a patient becoming less aware of when he is experiencing hypoglycemia, resulting in a vicious cycle of recurrent episodes.59

No human being, needless to say, can be reduced to a sum of his medi-cal symptoms, and Charles Ives was a far more complex human being than most. But the centrality of his 1918 diabetes diagnosis to his entire outlook on life and self-perception, and the direct effects of the disease in the ensuing years—particularly the debilitation and significant loss of weight it engendered—deserve to be given far more consideration than they have heretofore in understanding the loss of his creative powers following the remarkable outpouring of energy and imagination and sheer hard labor that characterized his most fruitful two decades that preceded this pivotal event in his life at age forty-four.

NOTES

I am extremely grateful to Tom C. Owens, James Sinclair, and Wayne Shirley for reading and commenting on an initial draft of this essay.

1. Harmony Ives to Nicolas Slonimsky, July 6, 1936, in Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, ed. Tom C. Owens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 128. 2. Kirkpatrick in Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (Urbana: Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 2002), 224. James Sinclair, Descriptive Catalog of the Music of Charles Ives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Music Library, 1999; electronic version updated and revised 2012, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/music.mss.0014.1), 782, notes that the song “Sunrise,” with a start date of August 1926, was the last wholly new composition Ives is known to have begun. 3. Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 93. 4. This was for example stated by Ives’s cousin Amelia Van Wyck in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 12.

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5. Charles Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (New York: Norton, 1972), 112. In the diary kept sporadically by Charles and Harmony, “Our Book,” box 45, folder D7, Charles Ives Papers, Yale University Music Library, Harmony recorded, “Charlie taken sick Oct 1st [1918] out of business all winter.” But he also stayed away from the office all of the fol-lowing summer when the Iveses, as usual, shifted their residence from New York City to their country house in Redding; Harmony wrote on June 25, 1919, “to Redding. Charlie decides not to commute on doctors[’] advice.” It was not until September 15, 1919, that she recorded, “C. goes back to business.” 6. Henry Cowell and Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 76; Jan Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music (New York: Norton, 1996), 285; Frank R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America (New York: Liveright, 1975), 134. 7. Stuart Feder, Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song.” A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 286–89. Ives’s 1954 electrocardiogram and medical record, along with Dr. Feder’s notes about them, are in box 87, folders 11 and 12, Ives Papers. 8. Gayle Sherwood, “Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” Journal of the American Muscio-logical Society 54 (2001): 555–84; Gayle Sherwood Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 74–87, 141. 9. Kirkpatrick in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 224; J. Peter Burkholder, Charles Ives: The Ideas Behind the Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 114; Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 186–87. 10. David Wooldridge, From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives (New York: Knopf, 1974), 182–83, 187; income tax return for 1919, box 38, folder 1, Ives Papers; U.S. De-partment of Labor, 100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: Data for the Nation, New York City, and Boston (Washington, DC, 2006), 10; income tax return for 1921, box 38, folder 2, Ives Papers. For a devastating dissection of Wooldridge’s factual errors, if not propensity for outright invention, see John Kirkpatrick’s review in High Fidelity/Musical America, September 1974, MA33–36, and his subsequent exchange with Wooldridge in the same journal, December 1974, MA18–20. 11. Gayle Sherwood, “Ives and Neurasthenia: A Response to Stuart Feder,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001): 641–43; Stuart Feder, “Heard Maladies Are Sweet (‘But Those Unheard Are Sweeter’): A Response to Gayle Sherwood,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001): 627–41. 12. Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 93. 13. Ives to “Tom,” n.d., box 36, folder 9, Ives Papers. Ives’s allusions in the letter to his correspondent’s being a member of Wolf’s Head, the Yale senior secret society that Ives also belonged to, and to his correspondent’s activities in the YMCA definitively identify him as Thomas S. McLane, who was the only “Tom” among the members of Wolf’s Head in Ives’s class of 1898 and who led the YMCA’s efforts to organize musical and theatrical entertainments for American soldiers overseas: “Senior Elections,” Yale Daily News, May 28, 1897; Summary of War Work of YMCA (International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, 1920), 127. John Kirkpatrick dates this letter to January 26, 1919, based on several other references: see Kirkpatrick’s penciled notes on his typewritten transcription of the letter in box 87, folder 10, Ives Papers. 14. Sherwood, “Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” 565. 15. Box 34, folder 14, Ives Papers. Joslin published a copy of this standard blank medi-cal history form, which he had specifically developed for use in his practice, in his 1917 landmark text, and this is a useful reference for deciphering the words on the very difficult-to-read copy in the Ives Papers: Elliott Proctor Joslin, The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus, with Observations upon the Disease Based upon Thirteen Hundred Cases (Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1917), 480. 16. Summary of War Work of YMCA, 24–37. Nearly every author who has discussed this episode repeats the error that Ives was applying to the YMCA to serve in the “ambulance


corps” or to “drive an ambulance.” In fact the YMCA had nothing to do with the American volunteer ambulance service in France; that was the work of the American Field Service, a completely unrelated organization. Ives did briefly entertain the fantasy of serving with the AFS ambulance corps: when he sent a $1,000 donation to the AFS in 1917 to buy an ambulance for the unit being recruited among Yale alumni, he asked whether he might be assigned to the car he had donated if he was “able to go to France later.” But as he no doubt quickly learned, the idea was wholly impractical. The AFS required drivers to be between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five; Ives was already well over the age limit. It also required ap-plicants to be “able to drive and repair automobiles” [emphasis in the original], and as Ives would surely have been the first to admit, his practical mechanical skills were virtually nil. See Ives to Mortimer H. Buckner, May 24, 1917, box 36, folder 6, Ives Papers; and “Adver-tisement for the Volunteer American Field Service,” Suckley Family World War I Collection, Wilderstein Preservation, http://www.hrvh.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/wilderstein/id/1043/rec/1. In any event, by 1918 these volunteer units had been fully absorbed into the U.S. Army Ambulance Service, established following America’s entry into the war, and were no longer recruiting civilian volunteers: see Annual Report of the Surgeon General, U.S. Army to the Secretary of War, 1919 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1919), 2:1484. 17. Ives to C. C. Whittelsey, September 4, 1918, box 32, folder 16, Ives Papers. This letter is reprinted in Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 98, though once again the error about this having something to do with the volunteer ambulance service has crept in; the origi-nal letter in the Ives Papers (a carbon copy of the letter dictated by Ives to his secretary) does not include in the address line the words “YMCA Ambulance Corps” that appear in Owens’s reprinted text. 18. Registration card for Charles Edward Ives, World War I Draft Registration Cards, Microfilm M1509, NY298, New York City Division no. 154, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 19. I can find no support for Feder’s contention that Ives “retreated to Redding to go into training in the form of farming and as much strenuous activity as he could manage for a repeat examination scheduled for October 2” (Stuart Feder, The Life of Charles Ives [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 140) or that “Ives spent three weeks in July in Redding working on a farm of his neighbor, Frank Ryder, to get himself into better condition for a repeat physical, scheduled for October 2” (Feder, Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song,” 285). On the contrary, as noted above, the available evidence shows that his first exam was in August 1918 and that he continued to commute to work in New York City during and after this time. Feder does not offer any source for his assertions, and possibly misread the entry in Ives’s diary, which noted—with a date of June 1, not July or later—“to Redding. 3 weeks of farming, planting potatoes, etc.” (“Our Book,” box 45, folder D7, Ives Papers). This was something he did every year, however; he frequently noted the enjoyment he derived from taking a vacation at Redding and doing vigorous farm work and there is no indication that his activities in 1918 were in any way related to his medical exam or differed from his routine in prior years. 20. Feder, Life of Charles Ives, 166; Feder, Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song,” 287. 21. Joslin, Diabetes Mellitus, 36. 22. “Insulin a Success, Doctor Declares,” New York Times, March 31, 1926. 23. Michael Bliss, The Discovery of Insulin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 39. A book on the diabetic diet published by the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1915 bears the rather startling title, The Starvation Treatment of Diabetes. 24. Bliss, Discovery of Insulin, 23. 25. Ibid., 42–43, 152. 26. Ives to “Tom,” n.d., box 36, folder 9, Ives Papers. Ives’s allusion to “selling cigarettes” refers precisely to the job that YMCA volunteers performed in France of operating post exchanges for soldiers.

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27. For Ives’s several letters to Myrick that mention his diabetes, see Selected Correspon-dence, ed. Owens, 108–11. 28. Ives to Clifton Furness, July 5, 1930, Clifton Joseph Furness Papers, box 1, folder 58, Clifton Joseph Furness Papers, University of Buffalo Archives, Buffalo, NY. This letter in the Furness Papers is typewritten, and a comparison of it to typewritten letters sent by Furness to Ives around this same time (see, e.g., Furness to Ives, April 22, 1929, box 29, folder 10, Ives Papers) suggests they were typed on the same machine; Furness thus presumably made this typed transcription of Ives’s letter himself, perhaps before sending the original to his father. There is no copy or draft of the original in the Ives Papers. 29. C. E. Ives and H. T. Ives, Diary, Asheville, 1919, etc., box 87, folder 799, verso p. 1, John Kirkpatrick Papers, Yale University Music Library. Sherwood links the choice of Asheville for their vacation to her argument that Ives was understood to be suffering from “neurasthenia,” as the town had a number of sanitariums that specialized in treating tuberculosis and nervous disorders (Sherwood, “Ives and ‘Our National Malady,’” 564). But Asheville was also a fashionable fall and winter resort destination for the wealthy, especially after George Vanderbilt built his magnificent Biltmore estate in the area in 1898 and convenient rail service from New York City began. The Iveses stayed not at one of the several health retreats but at the posh Battery Park Hotel (they later moved into a rented house where Harmony’s sister Sally was staying). Ives made a typically sarcastic allusion to the fanciness of the Battery Park Hotel in one diary entry: “the 1st hotel of magnificence erected for wealthy people of refined tastes in Asheville.” There are no references in their diary to Ives taking any of the “cures” offered by the health resorts in the town during their stay. There are however several mentions of Harmony “taking rest cure,” “still taking rest cure,” “getting in stronger shape now,” again a hint of what a drain it had been on her to look after her husband during the preceding three months. 30. Entry, January 15, 1919, “Our Book,” box 45, folder D7, Ives Papers. 31. Diary for 1919 trip to Asheville, box 45, folder D8, Ives Papers. 32. Ives, Memos, 57. 33. “Gleanings from Ives Culture, Collected during visit March 1928,” box 1, folder 58, Furness Papers. 34. Copies of these pamphlets and essays can be found in box 26, Ives Papers, and in the scrapbooks in boxes 502 and 504, AXA Equitable Archives, New York. Ives’s original marked-up draft of his 1920 memorandum on reorganizing the company is in box 432, folder: “Publications Written by Charles Ives,” AXA Equitable Archives. A clean copy, and a summary and explanation of its key points written by Julian Myrick to Sidney Cowell in 1949, is in box 1222, folder: “Organization Charts and Files.” 35. “How to Read the Rate Book,” pp. 15–16, box 502, Business Scrap Book, Charles Ives, AXA Equitable Archives. 36. “In the Matter of the Federal Income Tax Liability of Julian S. Myrick and Charles E. Ives for the calendar year 1929, Supporting Affidavit on Behalf of Taxpayers,” box 38, folder 6, Ives Papers. Although Rossiter alleges that Ives created the trust as a “tax shelter” and that “when the government tried to tax him anyway, he fought the case through the tax court for years” (Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America, 119), this seriously misstates the facts: the trust paid income tax on its earnings exactly as an individual would, and Ives was only challenging the IRS’s attempts to require him to pay tax again (on his individual return) on this exact same income. The tax court fully vindicated Ives in the matter; see Ives v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, U.S. Board of Tax Appeals, 29 B.T.A. 822 (1934). It seems clear that the trust was intended mainly to ensure that Harmony was financially protected after his death. 37. J. Godfrey Wells to Elliott Joslin, n.d. [January 1931], and Ives’s medical history form from the Joslin Clinic, box 39, folder 1, Ives Papers. Ives’s 1909 insurance medical report is extant in the AXA Equitable Archives and at least a summary was made available to


Michael Broyles in the 1990s by the archivist of AXA’s predecessor company, Mutual of New York: Michael Broyles, “Ives and the Democratic Tradition,” in Charles Ives and His World, ed. J. Peter Burkholder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 158n50. Broyles states that the report is unremarkable and found Ives to be in good health. Owing to changes in privacy laws, and perhaps an overabundance of caution, AXA Equitable has now declined to make these medical records available to outside researchers. 38. Feder, Charles Ives: “My Father’s Song,” 287. Wells, in his letter referring Ives to Joslin, noted that Ives had been subject to “tachycardia of a severe type,” but “of late he has had none”; significantly, Wells says nothing about Ives ever having had a heart attack. The relative unconcern shown by Harmony, a trained nurse, to the frequent episodes in which Ives would suffer shortness of breath reinforces this conclusion that Ives was not suffering from any serious heart disease. Lehman Engel was one of several visitors who recounted similar anecdotes: Engel was momentarily horrified when Ives became overwrought about something they were discussing and suddenly flung himself down on a couch, gasping for breath. But “Harmony never looked up from her knitting, never looked concerned”; she calmly told Engel, “Don’t worry,” then blandly remarked to her husband, “Well, Charlie if you’re going to carry on that way, you know this is going to happen.” Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 195. By 1931 Ives was however clearly suffering from high blood pressure; his reading at Joslin was 150/85, which would today be categorized as stage 1 hypertension and likely warrant prompt intervention with drug therapy. 39. In response to a letter from Dr. Joslin in 1951 inquiring about Ives’s health, Harmony Ives mentioned that “he has kept very faithfully to his somewhat limited diet for twenty-five years”: Harmony Ives to Elliott Joslin, March 27, 1951, box 39, folder 1, Ives Papers. 40. Ives to Julian Myrick, July 1929, in Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 103. In his letter referring Ives to Joslin, Wells noted that he had “increased his diet” after starting him on insulin and he “has markedly improved” in the past eight months. David Nicholls, “‘The Unanswered Question of Her Son’s Biography’: New Thoughts on Mollie Ives,” Journal of the Society for American Music 5 (2011): 105, reproduces Ives’s Joslin Clinic medical history form but on page 103 mistakenly states that Ives’s weight was 160 pounds at the time he was examined at Joslin; in fact the entry on his chart notes that this was his “maximum weight” with a date of “1896.” 41. Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, rev. ed. (New York: Schirmer, 2002), 279; Jerome Moross in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 165. 42. “A Connecticut Yankee in Music,” draft of unpublished article for the New Yorker by Lucille Fletcher, in box 1, folder 4, p. 31, Charles Henry Kauffman Collection of Materials Related to Charles Ives, Yale University Music Library 43. Diary D7, “Our Book,” insert pasted on p. 35, Ives Diaries in JK Transcriptions, box 87, folder 799, Kirkpatrick Papers. By “Hard Work,” Ives is probably jokingly alluding to musical composition; even so, he was putting in over six hours of hard manual labor a day during these vacations. “Jim” is their dog; “So. N.” is probably South Norwalk. 44. Ives to Henry Bellamann, January 9, 1922, in Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 100. 45. Julian Myrick to Ives, June 22, 1926, in ibid., 101. 46. Ives to Julian Myrick, July 1929, in ibid., 103. 47. Elliott Joslin to J. Godfrey Wells, February 8, 1931, box 34, folder 14, Ives Papers. 48. Ives to Nicolas Slonimsky, July 10, 1931, in Nicolas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 5th ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1994), 1037. 49. Ives to Slonimsky, November 1935, in ibid., 1049–50. 50. Kirkpatrick in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 220. 51. Ives to Robert Schmitz, June 22, 1938, in Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 208; Ives to Charles Henry Kauffman, 1942, Kauffman Collection, box 1, folder 1, Kauffman Collection.

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52. Ives to Slonimsky, ca. August 18, 1931, box 145, folder 18, Nicolas Slonimsky Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 53. Ives himself observed that he could write much more steadily with a pencil than a pen, because he could bear down and hold the pencil steady on the paper, which further confounds comparisons of his writing from different periods (Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 2). The examples reproduced here in figures 3 and 4 are all in ink. 54. I am grateful to Dr. Sethu Reddy of Merck, an authority on diabetes and the former chief of endocrinology at the Cleveland Clinic, and to Dr. Donald Barnett of the Joslin Clinic for reviewing Ives’s handwriting samples and medical record and for offering important insights on the nature of diabetes and Ives’s condition. 55. Philip E. Cryer et al., “Defining and Reporting Hypoglycemia in Diabetes: A Report from the American Diabetes Association Workgroup on Hypoglycemia,” Diabetes Care 28 (2005): 1246; A. Mitrakou et al., “Hierarchy of Glycemic Thresholds for Counterregu-latory Hormone Secretion, Symptoms, and Cerebral Dysfunction,” American Journal of Physiology—Endocrinology and Metabolism 260 (1991): E67. 56. Charles Ives Tyler in Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, 107, recalled his grandfather “would sometimes drink whether people liked it or not.” And in an application for a life insurance policy with Mutual in 1928 or 1929, Ives apparently stated that he drank beer. 57. Feder, Life of Charles Ives, 167; David Morens to Stuart Feder, June 12, 1996, box 86, folders 11–12, Ives Papers. 58. See, for example, the irrational tirades in some of his letter sketches, notably one reprinted in Selected Correspondence, ed. Owens, 126–28; and John Kirkpatrick’s observa-tion that “you never know what will touch him off into a tirade,” Kirkpatrick to Brooks Shepard Jr., March 3, 1953, box 36, folder 8, Ives Papers. 59. Cryer et al., “Hypoglycemia in Diabetes,” 1246.


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