A sad tale of Milton Waldman, to whom Tolkien wrote a famous letter

Lately, I've spent a fair amount of time reading, outlining, and thinking about Tolkien's famous letter (# 131) to Milton Waldman of Collins Publishing. For a letter it's huge, much larger than we've been led to believe. It's always spoken of as being "some ten thousand words long" as the introduction to it in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien has it, but in truth it's over 14,000 words. That's quite a difference.* It's also huge in a much more important way because it really represents the first time Tolkien steps back and attempts to explain his entire legendarium, from the Music of the Ainur to The Lord of the Rings to someone outside his immediate circle of family and members of the Inklings. Fans and scholars, myself included, have long mined it for information, but no one that I have come across has sat down to read it as an essay of sorts, which I have come to believe is as important to the study of Tolkien as Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and On Fairy-stories. 

The other day I was looking at the following passage in which Tolkien is explaining the Valar:

"On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet be accepted – well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity."

(Letters, revised, # 133, p. 206)

The nature of the Valar is of course of great interest on its own, but what caught my attention this time through was that last bit of explanation from "which" to "Trinity." In particular the odd phrase "well, shall we say baldly" reads as an attempt to be delicate yet candid. So, I decided to see what more I could learn about Milton Waldman. What I learned was as heartbreaking as it is intriguing. Be warned. The tale involves three people dying, two of them small children.

First I discovered that in the 1920s Waldman had been married to Barbara Hazel Guggenheim, daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, whose older brother, Solomon, later founded the well-known museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Benjamin did not have a museum named after him, but perhaps he should have. He went down on the Titanic, choosing to make sure women and children made it aboard the lifeboats at the cost of his own life. When last seen he was dressed in formal attire and smoking a cigar. 

While Hazel's father's story is intriguing, her story is horrifying. She and Milton had two young sons, Terrence, born in 1924, and Benjamin, born in 1926. On October 20th 1928 Hazel and her boys were visiting a relative who lived at 20 East 76th Street in New York City. Milton was not with them because he had remained at home in Paris on business. Somehow -- how is not at all clear; there seems to have been a tussle involving the children and their mother too close to the edge -- both Terrence and Benjamin fell to their deaths from the rooftop penthouse garden on the sixteenth floor. It was ruled accidental. The next day, October 21st, they were buried in the Guggenheim Mausoleum in the Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, which is connected with Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York City. 

These last few details indicate that the Waldman family was Jewish, and so Tolkien's words to Milton Waldman in the letter would seem an attempt to be honest but inoffensive about a Christian aspect of his writing. At this point, however, the story of these two little boys, the elder four and the younger just over a year, dead almost a century ago, seems far more important if only because for a moment they are remembered again. 

In 1930 Milton and Hazel divorced, and Milton moved to London where he remained until his death in 1976. 

 

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The sources for this post may be easily found by following the links above. I also consulted findagrave.com. 

There's also a rather scurrilous tell-all style biography of Hazel's sister, Peggy, which speaks of the incident and includes some rather horrifying gossip. The chapter in question is called "Medea," which tells you a lot about what some people thought happened. Yet no one saw it happen. The book is Peggy, the Wayward Guggenheim by Jacqueline Weld.