Hugh van Skyhawk

Beaux and Bloomsbury

I found your Beaux Arts site some two years ago. I began thinking about my time there again and again. My memories didn't come back all at once. And some memories have only recently come back. My activity at the Beaux Arts was more literary; around 1964 ? when David Philhour (who had been a fellow student at Florida Presbyterian College) did his stand-up comedy I used to read my poetry which I took out of a canvas US Mail sack as though I had been searching among letters that couldn't be delivered and finally found an interesting one that I could read to my interlocutors. I sat on a stool on a small stage in the back room near the garden. That went on for some months without any rotten tomatoes being thrown until my 'poetic stream' had been exhausted for the time being.

Some time after I moved into the Beaux Arts but no longer performed on stage. I did talk to Tom a lot while living in his house. I want to share with you one or two conversations that I now remember very well. Once I was standing in the back porch looking at the bulletin board and Tom passed by and said as if we had been in conversation for some time: "We always took care of one another.", referring to his time in the art scene of New York. I remember answering that the productivity and later fame of the Bloomsbury Group (English literature was my major at university) was to a large extent the result of their sticking together (in various senses of the word) throughout life. Tom nodded agreement and turned his head away slightly, as though he were looking back to a time that had been very important to him. And then (typical of Tom whenever emotions threatened to overpower him) he started being busy with something, this time it was straightening the frame of a painting that was hanging slanted on the wall. Tom never discussed any subject at great length but was very gifted in finding a key verbal image that gave you his point of view unmistakeably.

I remember one such image to this day. I didn't offer it to you for publication because it's a bit bawdy... Homosexuality was certainly an important part of Tom's life, and it would be impossible to understand him, or even approach an understanding, without an awareness of his sexual orientation, which was also a part of the atmosphere surrounding the Beaux just as the sexual orientations of  the people of the Bloomsbury Group were an important part of their creative reality. 

- Hugh van Skyhawk