“My father was half Portuguese, his father was Portuguese but his mother was Irish.  That could have had some bearing on his original interest in O’Neill.  She had left Ireland at 16 for New York, was shipwrecked on the way over, lost all contact with her family, was rescued by a Boston Brig and in that way met my grandfather.”  The source of this information was Celia Francis and she provided it to set the record straight for Louis Sheaffer, then writing his richly detailed biography of the great American playwright Eugene O’Neill.[1]  Sheaffer replied:  “Thank you for setting me straight about your father’s progenitors—I’ll make the correction.  Not only as an Irishman but as one who loved the sea, O’Neill must have been much intrigued by the romantic manner in which your father’s parents met.”[2]

Celia Francis kept a scrapbook of clippings, most of them memorializing her half-Portuguese father, John Francis, who died in 1937 at the age of sixty-four.[3]  One such obituary was sent to O’Neill by his friend the drama critic George Jean Nathan, “I feel a genuine sorrow.  He was a fine person—and a unique character,” O’Neill wrote back.  “I am glad the article speaks of him as my friend.  He was all of that, and I know he knew my gratitude, for I often expressed it.”[4]  Celia’s scrapbook also contains a single (loose) clipping about the death of her brother in 1963.  It, too, brings up the Francis—O’Neill relationship, reminding its readers that “Mr. Francis’ father was a much appreciated benefactor of artists and  writers who were contemporaries of his working here,—notably Eugene O’Neill to whom he was materially helpful and close in friendship.”[5] 

John Francis was the son of Joseph Francis, an Azorean immigrant from the island of São Jorge.  There is not much known about the father, though we have this romanticized description, published long after his death: “The father of John Francis, a Portuguese who had married an Irish lass, was a fisherman with rings in his ears and full of tales of risks and rewards of the Grand Banks.”[6]  The son, a person of good will and many good offices, showed little interest in fishing but he did take to running the country story he inherited from his father.  The Young Francis’s trade was business—store-keeper (, landlord, realtor, insurance broker—but he was, perhaps above all, a benefactor, especially to eager young writers and cash-free artists.  O’Neill called him a “fine person, a unique character”; others described him as “guileless,” “dogged and patient,” “beloved,” “benevolent and Buddha-like, simple and kind,” “rotund” and “tender-hearted,” “eccentric,” “avuncular,” “paternal,” “liberal-hearted,” “large round-faced” with “calm eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses.”  He has been called “an ombudsman,” “an almost saintly man.”[7]  For decades he was the friend and benefactor of Provincetown artists and writers, staking them to credit at his store and rooms and houses at low-rent, and when they were away—in Connecticut (the Eugene O’Neills) or Greece (“Jig” Cook and Susan Glaspell)—he watched over their local property, paying taxes and providing insurance coverage.

When in 1916 Eugene O’Neill walked down the gangplank of the Dorothy Bradford in the company of his friend, the free-spirited, free-thinking Terry Carlin, he was not the first of those artists and writers who would become beneficiaries of Francis’s good will and “material” support.  Nor were all those others as needy as O’Neill.  But some of those knew a good thing when they saw it.  Mabel Dodge was one of those.  Her dealings with Francis in 1914-15 involved both the make-over of the Peaked Hill Bars Life-Saving Station, work that would turn the place into what O’Neill would later call his “chateau on the Atlantic” and—a more mundane task—finding Mabel a house to live in until the work across the dunes was finished to her satisfaction.[8]

In her memoirs Mabel Dodge Luhan tells the story of Sam Lewisohn, one of “those very wealthy people,” who are “often scrupulously generous, thoughtfully so,” and his decision to buy the Peaked Hills Bar station and “share the place” with her, “turn and turn about.”  Her part of her bargain was to “do it up for him exactly” as, of course, she “had intended to do” it all along.  “I was always proud of the way I did that job at a distance,” she recalled.  “I thought out the whole thing, every detail of it, ordered it, and got it executed by letter.”  And then added: “I am so glad I saved the fascinating correspondence with John Francis, who kept the principal store in Provincetown and who carried out my orders!  They form part of the long volumes of letters I have saved to while away the hours when I am too old to do more than remember!”[9]

In all there are ten letters from Francis among Mabel’s papers at Yale University Library.  The first letter, dated October 15, 1914, refers to Mabel’s desire to acquire the Peaked Hills Bars Life-Saving Station and should that effort fail, her need for a seasonal rental in 1915.  “Will say that the house you wrote me about is small and a widow lady lives up stairs it has no indoor toilet has the old fashioned out door kind and I do not think you would like that.”[10]  This is a typical Francis sentence, with its lack of punctuation until a thought and everything pertaining to it is set down.

In his next letter, three weeks later, he writes to say that the Coast Guard has not yet decided what to do with the station. He offers to sell her one of his own houses.  “This is no run down shack out of repair or one fixed up to sell,” runs the pitch, “it is a first class property.”  Six days later he offers her other choice properties, including one located “opposite the property owned by Lombard the Millionaire.”  Another six weeks elapse before he reports that “proposals for bids” on the station are now open.  “Think over what you want me to render in for a bid,” he tells her, “and be prepared to send check if you get it.”  He closes with one last detail: “I think your letter of authority to bid on same should have 25 cents of Government stamps on it you had better consult some one about that to be sure.” Francis’s next letter, dated January 22, 1915, takes up two matters: Mabel’s renting a cottage from a Mr. Rogers, and advice regarding what Mabel might do to protect her rights to the land on which the station stands.  The Coast Guard does not own it. 

Another of Mabel’s requests is to find her a horse. 

I talked with a man in the next town who has eleven horses and he says that he has a good stout horse but old that is working every day that is of a moderate turn but good puller and worker that he would be willing to surrender the middle of June or the first of July to any one that wont abuse him for $40. on the following condition that when you get through with him you have him shot he does not want him knocked around by different people you can get him put out of the way in the fall for a couple of dollars this would make it pretty cheap as forty is no price to pay for an animal any one that handles horses will tell you that. 

The main concerns of Francis’s March 17^th letter are the walls and floors at the station that Mabel wants painted.  The work can begin around April 1^st, he assures her.  He has two good men who “will work for 25¢ per hour there will be no transportation charges as they will hoof it out there and a regular union man would charge you for teams and you know what this expense is… you would have to pay just what it cost and no more there would be no teams no padded pay roll or graft of any kind just a square honest deal.”  But getting the painting done not only right but to Mabel’s satisfaction (seldom the same thing, apparently) would eventually become a major concern for Francis.  Seemingly, the job was still well under control when he wrote on April 10th: “I forgot to mention the shade of paint for the floors I sent you a color card sometime ago will you please select the number you want and state the number of coats you want on the floor I think you would have to give it two where it is a new job.”  The oak floors, Mabel decided, were to be “a translucent blue” and the walls white.  “To meet Dodge’s sophisticated tastes,” it turned out, Francis had to carry “out the meticulous job of seeing that the walls were precisely covered with layer after layer of white glistening paint”—white being, as Francis found out the hard way, a color especially meaningful to Mabel.[11] 

Francis’s April 21^st letter opens with bad news about the mattresses in the Rogers rental.  “Mr. Rogers was here,” he begins,

and made the report that the party that had his cottage last season put their children in the beds and spoiled the mattresses he did not know about this until his wife started to clean I told him I would take the matter up with you as I told him you were accustomed to sleep on the best there was there might be a possibility that you might bring one for your own personal use if not he would put in new ones but his means are limited and the kind he would put in are just the ordinary kind I await your reply in this matter.

He then turns to what is going on out at the Station.  The painting is not going along as well as he expected, so he has had to hire “a man that has got a lot of push.”  His pay is “35¢ per hour instead of 25¢ the price the others are getting,” but with him out there “handling the matter,” he quickly adds, “there will be no waste of time or stock leave the place.” “There is one more thing that should be attended to,” he concludes, “and that is the outside closet or toilet this is an outdoor affair in one of the outer buildings this has been used by the men for a long time and needs cleaning out and the seats should be painted and the thing put in condition for a lady to use.”

In the last of these letters, written in time to reach Mabel before she leaves for Provincetown, Francis reports that everything is in order.  He has found her “a nice clean woman with sewing machine to do the sewing,” he will “attend to the boxes as they come in,” and he can rent her “a good shed” for an automobile.

I always get three dollars a week for the use of each stall but if you want one for the season you can have it for the whole season for $12.00 if this is not good enough for you you can have the machine taken up town but the charges are a great deal more and it will be unhandy, however do as you think best.

In her memoirs Mabel recalled her season of bossing Francis around: “He had been very diligent and faithful in carrying out orders and had suffered, as much as any three men would have, from the awful responsibility combined with his usual melancholia and anxiety.  I think it took at least ten years off his life!”[12] 

By summer’s end in 1915, John Francis was familiar to the Players group to be incorporated into one of their plays.  As Mary Heaton Vorse recalled, “The character of the beneficent landlord who took his pay in paintings was easily recognized as the beloved John Francis, the friend of writers and artists.”[13]  In George Cram Cook’s “Change Your Style” the Francis character is named Josephs (recalling his own father’s given name).[14]  A grocer and a landlord, he is offered a painting in lieu of the rent owed him by a young post-impressionist painter.  At first Josephs refuses the trade because the painting puzzles him, but when he connects the painting with some sort of recognizable realism, he changes his mind.  It happens that Josephs, whose English is poor, mishears the wealthy art patron’s explanation for her decision to return the painting.  She had bought it, thinking, mistakenly, that it was a “shaping of the sacred umbilicus.”  When Josephs accepts the painting, he remembers it as that of “a heathen billigoat.”  He will hang it in his store; it “might be good for trade.”  Josephs represents the common man, uninformed about art but naively receptive to it in his own simplistic way.  Needless to say, Josephs is used by Cook much in the way the Players group and their friends used Francis—friend-in-need, handyman, gofer, stooge.  Incidentally, like Francis, Mabel, too, inspired the playwright.  Cook theatricalizes her as Myrtle Dart—“Lover of the Buddhistic”—attired in “East Indian robe and turban.”[15]  

For his pains and considerable efforts—managing the make-over of the Peaked Hill Bars station—Francis was given “a gold watch with an inscription inside the cover.”[16]  This gift came from Sam Lewisohn, not Mabel, though it was she, of course, who initiated the matter.  It use to take fifty years of service on the railroad to get someone a gold watch; Francis earned his watch for one season with Mabel.  To put this gesture into perspective, recall that O’Neill’s one recorded gift to Francis was a picture of himself.  “I certainly appreciate the present,” Francis wrote back, “and I have had it framed and have it in my office.”[17]  Who knows—perhaps it was good for business.

Mabel, of course, was not the only Player to take advantage of Francis’s willingness to serve.  With nary a second thought, you can be certain, Susan Glaspell counted on Francis to meet her at the train whenever she arrived in Provincetown.  On one such occasion, writes one of Glaspell’s biographers, “the unexpected bustle of the station disconcerted her, and it took longer than usual to find John Francis.  He gathered her bags and asked after Jig, his blue eyes twinkling.”[18]  Of course he was happy to see her, or so Susan implies.  Revealing of just how much Susan counted on Francis is her letter dated only May 11^th.  She writes from Davenport, Iowa, probably in 1926.

My dear Mr. Francis;

I am leaving tomorrow for New York, and then Miss Huffaker and I are coming at once to Provincetown, to open our house.  She will be there with me for a week or two.  I am writing to ask you if you will have them turn on the water.  We will arrive Thursday or Friday.

Would it be possible for women to go in a day or two this week, and clean and air the house?  I know you often have women working in your houses at this time of year, and thought if they were engaged for people who are not coming until a little later, perhaps they could do our house first, so I could begin putting things away as soon as I arrive.  This would be a great help to me, if it is possible.  I would have written about it sooner, but did not know until yesterday that I was coming this week.  If closets and bureau drawers could be cleaned, beds aired, and a fire in the range for a day or two, to take out the dampness, that of course would make it much easier when we arrive.  I hope I am not putting you to too much trouble in suggesting this, and of course do not let it worry you at all, if it is not possible to arrange.  I know I am not leaving much time.

Also I am anxious to get a girl for the summer.  Would you inquire among the people who come in the store, and perhaps there would be some one in the neighborhood.  My work will not be at all hard, but I am hoping I can get some one at once, as I am not very well, and have much work of my own to do.

I had a letter from Mr. Bianco, a relative of Mrs. O’Neills asking about Rice Cottage.  If these other people did not rent it, will you let him know—Mr. Francesco Bianco, No. 7 Macdougal Alley, New York City.

I am sending some things to Provincetown by express.  Would you be so kind as to call the express office for me, telling them if the trunk, etc. should arrive before I, to hold things for me, as I will be there the last of the week.

Thanking you for these many favors,

Sincerely yours,

Susan Glaspell Cook

Then—she thinks to add still another task to his burden.

If the Advocate comes out Thursday or Friday, would you put this ad in for me: Wanted: Girl for general housework.  Inquire Saturday, or thereafter, at 564 Commercial st.

Susan Glaspell Cook[19]

Glaspell, too, put Francis into a play (though not on stage).  “The Outside” is set in “the old Peaked Hill Life-Saving Station.”[20]  “I was in Bill Joseph’s grocery store, one day last November,” says Bradford (“a life-saver”)—

when in she comes—Mrs Patrick, from New York.  ‘I’ve come to take the old life-saving station,’ says she.  ‘I’m going to sleep over there tonight!’  Huh!  Bill is used to queer ways—he deals with summer folks, but that got him.  November—an empty house, a buried house, you might say—off here on the outside shore—way across the sand from man or beast. …  Bill had men hauling things till after dark—bed, stove, coal.  And then she wanted somebody to work for her.

For “Bill Joseph” read John Francis and for “Mrs Patrick” read Mabel Dodge.[21]   

Then there was Agnes Boulton, whose marriage to O’Neill took place in Provincetown.  Here is what I suspect is a typical set of requests while the O'Neill family occupied the station at Peaked Hill Bars:

Dear Mr Francis—

I wonder if you would be good enough to put up an order for us, and then telephone Pete Carr—and arrange to have him take it across the dunes after supper on this coming Friday evening?

The order is:	five or ten gal. Kerosene.
I salt.	I olive oil.
I0 sugar.	I vinegar.
2 butter.	I cheese.
4 bread.	2 macaroni.
i orange P. tea.	2 cans tomatoes.
2 lbs best coffee.	2 cans string beans.
I Baker’s chocolate.	2 Ivory Soap.
4 condensed milk.	4 kitchen soap.
4 evaporated milk.	I gold dust.
I pepper.	Doz safety matches.
2 lbs mixed cookies.	4 new wicks for kerosene
doz bananas.	stove purchased last year
I peanut butter.	from John Francis.
doz best eggs.	i doz candles.
2 jars bacon.	some fresh vegetables if
2 cans Pork&beans.	you have any.
5 flour	Apples or fruit if you have any.
2 cream wheat.	I canned pineapple.
2 oatmeal.	2 lbs prunes.
i corned beef.	I new broom.
I box dates.

Mr O’Neill says that he is afraid that he will not get in in time Friday night, so will you ask Carr if he can go about ten o’clock on Saturday morning?  If he has to make it earlier in the morning, tell him to be sure and stop at Mrs [blank] and get Mr O’Neill’s suitcase, etc.  He will spend the night there.

If you have not got the above list of things, could you hand it to Burch, please?  or if there are any items that you haven’t got, if you will phone Burch to send them to your store I am sure he will do so.

I am wiring Capt Gracie to leave the key of the house with you, so that Mr Carr can get it before he goes out.

Thanking you, and with all best wishes,

Sincerely,

Agnes O’Neill[22]

The particulars of O’Neill’s dependence upon Francis, and the comfortable way he called upon him, is too well-known to rehearse here.  Everyone knows them: providing cheap rents and loans, brokering the deal for the station at Peaked Hill Bars, or indulging O’Neill when he painted slogans on the walls of his rented rooms in Francis’s Flats.[23]

One thing is certain.  Francis’s loyalty to O’Neill remained strong.  When O’Neill was accused of plagiarizing his innovative play Strange Interlude, Francis offered his own opinion in words that were meant to comfort the beleaguered playwright: “We had discussed that thing in the office here several times and everyone that knows you know that you have brains enough to write your own plays without stealing them from a woman of that kind who likes to be in the public eye I hope it will come out all right but you can never tell what the lawyers will do when they think a man has a bank account.”[24]

In conclusion, I shall take up, briefly, two other matters:  the disappearance of the Peaked Hill Bars house and Edmund Wilson’s acquaintanceship with John Francis.  

Even after the O’Neills left Peaked Hill Bars for Ridgefield, Connecticut, first, and then Bermuda, they still counted on the loyal John Francis to rent Peaked Hill Bars for them and—in what surely must have been at best an annoyance—to monitor its use by strangers, not all of whom, it seems, were O’Neill’s friends.  “The place has been occupied several times,” Francis informed O’Neill’s lawyer, “but the tenants have always told me they were friends of Genes and it always seemed to me there was no rent paid or a very small one.”  He doubted, in fact, that O’Neill would want to rent it “as it would take a good part possible all of the rent to put it in order the house is so hard to get to it is almost impossible to get any one to clean it and put it in order.”[25]  As it turned out, however, Peaked Hill Bars had seen its last tenant.

On January 12, 1931, after several months of gradually sliding into the sea, the Peaked Hill Bars house finally went under.  Within two days Francis had a report for O’Neill’s lawyer, listing the possibilities for salvage.  In this detailed account he saw fit to mention that looters had already taken the toilet in the still-standing barn.

I went out to the station yesterday with Mr. Sears and looked the property over it seems to us while we cannot tell what the elements are going to do but it seems as if the balance of property might stay there the rest of the winter the big building known as the barn is in the greatest danger the small building and the one that is in the best shape is further in and it does not seem possible for that one to go this winter at the worst—It seemed to us the only way you can do any thing with that property would be to flake the barn and have it carted to some point where there never be a chance of its going and have it built up again but this would cost quite a few hundred dollars perhaps several thousand it is such a horrid place to get to that it is very expensive to get a thing done.  We found that some one had removed all of the door knobs and locks from the doors and also removed the toilet also broken all of the windows in the barn and pulled off some of the doors to get in and there is not one piece of furniture left excepting an old ice chest.  I sent Mr. Sears out there this morning to see if he could remove the lavatory and disconnect the bath tube and tank but he will have to have some one to help him if you want him to salvage what he can I thought he might get two or three doors though they have smashed some of them so if you want me to salvage what I think that could be used like tube and so forth wire me as soon as you get this as I do not want to make the bill any larger than is necessary and in this state men have to be insured and of course Mr. Sears is not covered and there would be some liability there.  I think if you would write to Capt Mayo that you expect for people to return what they have taken and put an add in this weeks advocate that your Mr. O’Neills attorney and wanted the stuff returned to either Capt Mayo or Joseph W. Sears you might get a little of it back as I think some of them might be afraid of being prosecuted.  I was told by a lady that some one took Mr. O’Neills field glasses if this is so and they can be located I would like to purchase them if Mr. O'Neill Junior did not value them so highly just because they were the property of Mr. O’Neill Wire me if you want me to try and salvage doors and plumbing I am afraid that might be gone if no one is there on the property.[26]

In addition to the looters, there were the merely curious.  As far as we know, Edmund Wilson can be safely numbered among the latter.  In 1927 Wilson had rented Peaked Hill Bars through Francis, acting for O’Neill.  In his diary for that year Wilson devoted a page to Francis (mentioning, along the way, the three generations of Francis men).  “John Francis’s gentle, appealing voice and gentlemanliness (an eccentric real estate agent),” begins Wilson’s notations for June 20^th.  During “his first real summer at Provincetown” Wilson had gone around with “John Francis, who, though professionally a real estate man, discouraged clients from taking any of the houses he showed them.”  “Fox said,” Wilson continues,

you saw the John Francis sign on all the houses —“you got kind of dazzled.”—His father [Joseph Francis] had been a fine strong upstanding man—he passed his boyhood on the farm—timid—believed in ghosts—moved tables—ghost followed him upstairs—never knew what houses he had—“asleep most of the time,” prospective tenant said—John Francis himself said he didn’t see how a man could look himself in the face after putting a lying ad like the other real estate man’s in the paper—half Portuguese, half Irish (Irish mother landed in wreck)—grocery store always out of stock—said I seemed like a lonely young man—couldn’t furnish house and get it in order in time—nice educated couple who had bought house but almost immediately got divorced—“Sacco and Vanzetti must die!”—wasn’t that an awful thing to shout out loud like that!’—gunboat in harbor for celebration what did they want to have a great big boat like that to go out and kill people for?—soft, whiny voice—they thought anybody was rich up there—he didn’t see much of the world, but was probably not so badly off—he worried about the meaning of life—intellectual son—read Thomas Mann, Hemingway, The Dial—voted the Communist ticket (only person in town who did)—asked if son would go to the city: “Will hasn’t the money to leave town!”[27]

Political opinions?  Sacco and Vanzetti?  Communist ticket?  Political views?  Who among the artists and writers of the group known to all as the Provincetown Players would have even thought John Francis could have even had a political view, even if they did consider him one of their group?  After all, “At one of the first meetings (in New York of the Provincetown Players) John A. Francis, the shy kindly man in Provincetown, was ‘unanimously elected an Honorary Active Member, as recognition of (his) sympathy and valuable services to the Provincetown Players from the beginning of their experiment.”[28]  This was honor enough, perhaps, especially since John Francis’s modicum of lasting fame derives mainly, if not entirely, from his connection with the members of that fabled group.  If that honorary membership hardly seems commensurate with the Azorean-American storekeeper’s many services and kindnesses to artists and writers over the years and decades, perhaps “John Francis,” the elegy by Harry Kemp, the Dunes Poet, should be thrown into the balance.[29]

In friends’ rich memories that never die
While life-blood courses through the active heart,
He also lives—but friends themselves depart,
To fold the hand, and close the outward eye:
If this were all, my words would be a lie:
I’m sure that life outweighs mortality,
With personal continuance, like that sense
The frailest carry, of omnipotence!
This man that was the poets’, artists’ friend,
Still, as he moved in gentleness and care
For others, finds the Life that Knows No End;
With that slow speech not slow in apt reply,
With that smile that was too kind to be sly,
He will surprise us, rising from his chair
To greet us with his fostering friendship there!

NOTES