Farwell Knapp (Yale College, 1916) died by suicide in 1942, leaving behind two daughters and his wife, Helen. He also left behind an abnormally extensive collection of letters and diaries containing each of his thoughts and feelings since he was thirteen years old. Helen Bayne Knapp, faced with this overwhelming volume of material, decided to look for a love story.
When I stumbled upon the Farwell Knapp papers, I was also looking for a love story. In a last-ditch effort to find an appropriately interesting topic for a Valentine’s Day Herald feature, I had come across Farwell’s name after inputting some combination of keywords “love” and “sex” into the Yale Archives website.
I don’t know why the Farwell Knapp papers particularly intrigued me. Perhaps the website’s mention of his “involvement with the secret society Skull and Bones” or the “explicit details of sexual experiences” contained in his journals promised some sort of scandalous, Yale-adjacent biography.
Farwell Knapp’s papers span twenty boxes. After an initial survey of the containers that I had reserved for research, I realized that a comprehensive investigation of Farwell’s papers would take years. He collected everything—newspaper clippings, letters, photographs. For several years, he provided a weather report at the outset of each day’s diary entry.
Farwell’s meticulously kept papers recorded his close relationships with painter Russell Cheney and poet Phelps Putnam, both Yale alumni. Dr. Melissa Barton, the curator responsible for the Farwell Knapp material, told me later that it is not unusual for the Beinecke to acquire the papers of Yale alumni; nevertheless, she speculated that Farwell’s friendships with Putnam and Cheney played a significant role in Yale’s possession of the material.
In any event, I would like to imagine myself as the first person who walked into the Beinecke Reading Room with the intention of learning about Farwell Knapp, not his more famous friends. I paged through his diaries and hoped that, like most of us, this randomly chosen Yale alumnus had something to say about love.
Born in 1893 to Harold and Emily Knapp, Farwell grew up near Hartford, Connecticut. On a loose sheet of legal paper kept alongside his early diaries, I found a strange preamble for what I was about to read. “This year of 1907, when he is 13 years old, marks the beginning of all his diaries, marks also the beginning of his…long mental and nervous breakdown. Though the boy is young to be articulate about his emotions in his entries, the trouble is quite unmistakably there as a shadow which will continue to spread and darken the young years of his life…”
Despite his relative anonymity, Farwell Knapp had a biographer seemingly as meticulous as himself—his wife, Helen Bayne Knapp. As she sifted through her husband’s diaries, she emphasized significant quotes and contextualized particularly confusing entries. Her vague references to a “long mental and nervous breakdown” and “the trouble” in her commentary on Farwell’s first diaries carry a tone of gloomy retrospection that is often present in her notes. As I encountered more of Helen’s annotations, it occurred to me that she was collecting evidence for a thesis she had established long before her decision to catalogue her husband’s papers.
Aside from Helen’s occasional foreshadowing, Farwell’s early diaries depicted an endearing, deeply thoughtful child. His entries in 1907 began with short, factual accounts of his day, such as “40 [degrees]. Light Clouds. Not much doing. Shooting at birds and reading all day. Put books in new bookcase. Took a short walk about 5.00.”
As he grew older, Farwell supplemented his entries with black-and-white photographs portraying the people and places that he mentioned. One diary began with a picture of himself completely naked. I paged through photos of his schoolmates, women he had kissed, and newspaper articles he had held between his hands and annotated. Through his almost obsessive record-keeping, I found myself inside of his mind. I’m not sure that you can get more intimate with a person than that. I’m not sure if I’ve ever known anyone as well as I know Farwell Knapp.
During his time at Harvard Law School, Farwell copied letters that he had received from his mother into his diary. After receiving one of Farwell’s letters detailing his academic frustration, his mother responded, “I have been thinking of what you wrote about your discouragement in study. I don’t believe it is as bad as you make it out…If what you say, that you are stupider than some of the bright men in the school, that doesn’t trouble me either. Perhaps you are. Nobody expects you to be smarter than anyone else, even if you did make Bones and Phi Beta Kappa at Yale!”
Farwell’s openness about his insecurities and constant awareness of his own failings rendered him immediately likable. If I did not love him, I had, at the very least, found my new obsession. After several visits to the Beinecke, I had become decently acquainted with the principal characters of Farwell’s life. I had met his friends as he had met them and examined his class schedules and skimmed through his various colds and toothaches and accounts of football practices. Sometimes, he used his diary to engage in mental exercises, such as listing surnames that could have possibly originated in medieval trades. I stared incredulously at a page where Farwell had written over a hundred such examples: “Carter, Cook, Sergeant, Tinker, Taylor, Hunter, Aldermann…”
Most impressive was Farwell’s enormous talent for writing and philosophizing. Around his college years, he became particularly enamored by the Stoics. In a 1917 essay entitled “The Stoicism of Epictetus,” he summarized the primary tenets of the philosophy. In a phenomenon that I have observed firsthand in many Directed Studies students, Farwell Knapp became enamored by Stoicism: “There are many things in Stoicism that we can respect, and much that we can profit by. True, the Stoics drew much [from] Socrates….”
In 1917, Farwell rejected the lack of emotions that he felt were characteristic of Stoic philosophy, writing that “Stoicism loses its human quality, and so cannot be absolutely satisfying—for all of us, way down deep in our hearts, want to remain human. To experience emotions. Reason is a pretty cold substitute for affection.” I wondered about this essay as I read Farwell’s account of his wife many years later, specifically his notion that reason would be “a pretty cold substitute” for true affection. During his marriage, Farwell had written that “It is one of the great blessings of our relation that [Helen and I] always do try to analyze feelings, sooner or later, and never hold grudges.” Despite the aversion to emotional detachment that Farwell expressed in “The Stoicism of Epictetus,” his papers were rife with cold analysis—his own objective accounts of his emotions, his wife’s scrupulous explanations of those accounts.
As I read Farwell’s later diaries, I became increasingly aware of the stranger aspects of his marriage, such as Helen’s seeming romance with Phelps Putnam. Nevertheless, the aspect of the marriage that I consistently found most intriguing was Farwell’s unrelenting analysis. Although Farwell attended college over a century ago, I felt as if I had finally achieved the unattainable by entering the mind of the Yale Man. Farwell Knapp––indecisive, intelligent, infuriatingly skeptical, not a little pompous—embodied what I recognized as characteristic of the modern-day Yale student. Was this the sorry consequence of the college seminar? The ever-doubting, dissecting husband?
I wondered what Helen had felt when she came upon Farwell’s diaries from the time of their marriage. Had she faltered in her note-taking as she read the pages that detailed her faults? Farwell described his feelings toward his wife with a degree of detail that I had never encountered before. Although I believe in the therapeutic effects of what might now be called “journaling,” and I have kept many diaries myself, I couldn’t help but feel that Farwell’s analysis went a little too far. In an entry that I encountered early in my research, he enumerates everything that he finds wrong with his wife, who he called “Hen”—beginning with “(1) that Hen is stupid, ‘of inferior and fast decaying intelligence.’” Farwell’s list, however, becomes introspective as it continues. In (9), he writes “…I am lazy, lethargic, and a coward…If I had had more initiative, I might well have been able to form Hen differently.” On his twelfth point, the list concludes with what seems to be a more nuanced opinion of his wife, “that while Hen will be a careful, anxious and thoughtful mother, always trying to do the best for her child, yet the latter may become infected with the narrow, illiberal, selfish qualities…But outside of this Hen will be a splendid mother.”
Why did Helen painstakingly annotate pages that criticized her? How can you create a love story with a person obsessed with your faults?
From 1921 to 1923, Farwell traveled through France before returning to the United States and falling in love with Helen. While most of Helen’s notes had been scrawled in hurried cursive, her commentary of the years 1921 to 1923 took the form of a typewritten booklet entitled “LOVE STORY OF A STOIC PHILOSOPHER.” Helen had found her love story not in the years that she shared a home with Farwell and their two daughters, but in the two years leading up to her marriage.
In Helen’s transcription, Farwell agonized as he hadn’t in any of his other entries. As he approached the time when most of his friends were falling in love and getting married, he renewed his stoic resolve: “No human being, therefore, can be fully happy unless he ceases to become a human being and becomes a beast like a solitary wild pig, who inhibits no emotions and has no mental conflicts….”
In the entries that Helen selects for her transcript, Farwell conducts an almost academic investigation into whether he is falling in love. Despite seeing Helen, he considers other women as an effort to decide on his feelings for her: “I had been wondering, off and on, whether I was in love with Hen; and decided that I was not: so after supper, in order to prove that, I went out to EG’s with the intention of making violent love to her; but that plan died a-borning, because she wasn’t at home.”
Helen carefully typed Farwell’s gut-wrenching indecisiveness at proposing to her. I would like to imagine her reaction when she first read the lines, “So I went on up to the 3rd floor and went to bed, but couldn’t sleep for a long time, lying with clenched hands in the grip, not of physical passion, but of love (which includes the former, but is more). (Why in hell do I fight it?). I almost got up and went down to her room and told her I was madly in love with her, and begged her to marry me. But I didn’t: and God knows why. I don’t.”
Helen had combed through his diaries and organized certain entries around a common theme—her husband’s agony at loving her. As I flipped through “LOVE STORY OF A STOIC PHILOSOPHER,” I no longer saw Helen as the passive, grieving wife. She had masterfully woven together a narrative that explained not only her husband’s character, but her own. She had also chosen to dwell on the moments when Farwell’s love for her emanated most strongly from his diary, ignoring the criticisms that he leveled at her later on in their marriage.
Farwell’s accounts from 1921 to 1923 revealed that he used to read his old diaries aloud to Helen as a shared activity. I realized that Helen had known what they contained all along. She had not discovered his diaries posthumously; rather, Farwell had willingly shown them to her in a seeming display of affection. Perhaps it was in this spirit that Helen gifted the transcript to her daughters, Emily Knapp Pitkin and Elizabeth Knapp Packard: “My dear Daughters: I use a well known phrase to describe the creation of this Christmas present for you: it is truly a Labor of Love. Nothing I ever gave to you or did for you has a better right to that title.”
In an effort to contextualize Helen’s gift, I searched for Farwell’s granddaughter on the internet and left a voicemail at a number that I found online. Despite my doubt that I had reached the correct person, I received a call back within an hour. Before I knew it, I was sitting underneath the stairs at the Beinecke, on a conference call with her mother—Farwell’s daughter—Elizabeth Knapp Packard.
They were warm people, and they answered my questions readily. I was surprised to find that, despite donating her father’s papers to Yale, Elizabeth “Betsy” Packard was not that familiar with their contents. Nevertheless, she kindly shared with me characterizations of her parents that she had written for a Story Worth project. While the stories that she wrote about her father aligned with what I would expect from his diaries, something that she wrote about her mother struck me: “Helen never went to college. She always thought of herself as too stupid to attend college but that was far from the truth.”
I wondered if Helen had internalized Farwell’s accounts of her “decaying intelligence.” I hoped not. It seemed apparent to everyone else that she was a woman of great intellect. If “LOVE STORY OF A STOIC PHILOSOPHER” highlighted Farwell’s expansive knowledge and writing ability, it also proved that Helen had understood and matched him. His papers were also her own.
If Helen had found her love story, what had I found? Farwell’s diaries did not leave me with a holistic, rosy picture of his relationship with his wife. But—though unsettling—there was something beautiful about Helen’s selective memory. She decided that her relationship was a love story, and she fashioned it in that image. I suppose that I’ve made a similar decision. I’ve decided that my investigation of Farwell Knapp, random Yale alumnus, was worth it—if only because, every so often, I stumbled across a few lines that really meant something:
“I remember that some years ago, in my diary, I had an uncanny intuition. I said, ‘the test of being in love is whether you feel you’ve swallowed a sunset.’
How in hell did I know that? Because that’s just exactly how I feel. And you wouldn’t hardly expect one who has swallowed a sunset to be able to express what it feels like—would you?”
