Robert W. Chambers' secret Manhattan studio

Chambers is best known as a resident of Broadalbin, NY, but spent his winters in New York City.  In that less private environment, he found it useful to maintain a separate space for writing, away from the distractions of New York society life. 

Broadalbin historian Lewis Cornell is sadly no longer with us.  But in the 2000s his successor, Jay Nellis, passed on his recollections to Chambers researcher Larry Loc, who posted the relevant correspondence on his website:

Mr. Chambers kept as a secret the location of his New York City office.  [His chauffeur, Leon] Crannel left him at a club each morning, from where he walked to his office. He was then picked up at the club following the day’s work.

This echoes Stanley J. Kunitz's 1934 biographical reference book Authors Today and Yesterday, which says:  

During the winter months Chambers lives in New York City and has an office, the location of which not even his family knows. Here he writes daily from ten to six, secure from distraction. He says his stories have the most erratic way of developing. "Sometimes I begin with the last chapter, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes I lay out an elaborate skeleton. The despair of my publisher is this uncertainty of working method. I have sometimes written thirty thousand words, waited two weeks to decide what should happen next, and torn up the whole thirty thousand to get rid of the dilemma. It was much easier for me to do that than to doctor the manuscript."  

This has for quite some time been spoken of as a lost location, kept so secret that future researchers were unable to find it.  I don't know how much serious effort has been made and how much of this talk is truth or myth, but I do believe I may have found it.  

Late-1920s editions of The Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association include membership rolls, complete with addresses.  Several list Mr. Chambers thus: 

 

 Chambers, Robert W. - 43 East 83rd St., New York.  

At first I'd thought this was the family home, not a secret studio.  Chambers' wife Elsie was active in the NYC art and antique community (contemporary sources note her making donations of paintings and furniture to institutions), so it seemed unlikely Chambers would use a private address in a context that would be published.  But of course, the sources and oral history may have overstated the absolute secrecy for effect, and the world was so much less searchable back then.  

This weekend I got ahold of Chambers' 1934 New York Times obituary (which is paywalled and not available through my library's Newspapers.com subscription, so I hadn't read it before) and it very briefly mentions the location as well:

In his studio off Fifth Avenue, Mr. Chambers painted while the light was good, then wrote stories in the evenings. 

The building at 43 E 83rd no longer exists, but the lot is a block from Fifth Avenue, right down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in fact. That's not proof-positive, but it's pretty persuasive, and an attractive location for such a devotee of art and beauty as Chambers. 

"A Writer of Romance" by Duffield Osborne: an early positive review of Chambers' weird fiction

  

In addition to my bibliography of Chambers-inspired work, I'm always collecting cited details about his life, appearances of his work in periodicals (almost all, but not quite all of which were reprinted in books), and writing about Chambers, trying to build the fullest picture I can of the man and his work. 

Today I found a real prize.

People frequently ask about the reception of The King in Yellow in its own time, and the answer is always unsatisfying: literary critics dismissed Chambers in general, and references to his weird work are usually in passing, even his fans generally preferring his historical fiction. 

 But check this out: an 1898 review from The Overland Monthly covering Chambers' early weird books The King in Yellow and The Mystery of Choice, and an overwhelmingly positive one. 

 Note that in this article, when the writer speaks of "romance," etc. he is referring to the Romantic movement in literature, which by Chambers' time had been mostly displaced by Realism and made him read as dated to fashionable critics. He doesn't necessarily mean "love stories" in particular. 

 

A Writer of Romance

by Duffield Osborne

IN VIEW of the recent and almost simultaneous publications of "Lorraine" and "The Mystery of Choice," the moment seems auspicious for a short resumé of Robert W. Chambers' work. To say that, all things considered, Mr. Chambers stands foremost among the American writers of fiction who are alive today, may occasion a stir of surprise among a certain great public that knows little of his claims, may call up a sentiment of languid indignation among some half dozen authors who have gotten into the habit of patting each other on the back and assuming it as axiomatic that the best name lies somewhere within their little circle. Mr. Chambers may be fairly termed an out sider. He did not begin by writing down to the standard of magazine commonplace nor up (?) to the flattery of society complaisance. He was not unobjectionable from the standpoint of the young female person of North Shelby Center, nor did he fire the heart of the matinee girl with impossible pictures of her truly godlike though four-hundredesque hero. He just wrote what was in him to write; and the name and locale of his first publisher would have sufficed to cause the literary pharisees to lift up their hands and make the usual pharisaical comments, had not the aforesaid pharisees felt it quite impossible for them to notice a book bearing such an imprint.

Fortunately, however, we have in this country a small but ever widening class of readers who can recognize and enjoy what is really good; and "The King in Yellow" won at least a name for its author, where a name was best worth having. I maintain now, as I have maintained from the first, that there are no better short stories in the language than "The Demoiselle D'ys," "The Court of the Dragon," "The Street of the Four Winds," and "Rue Barrée": nothing more weirdly imaginative, nothing finer in sentiment, nothing more finished in execution, and nothing more absorbing in interest. At times it has seemed to me as if Poe had come to life; but Poe with an added lightness of touch and shading, Poe with a newly developed sense of humor.

Previously to "The King in Yellow," another book had been put out by the same publisher: a novel which, though showing unmistakable promise, had failed somewhat of fulfillment. Later appeared from a New York house a second collection of stories, called "The Maker of Moons," wherein was the same remarkable combination of weirdness, naturalness, and humor. Several of the tales, including the title story, "The Silent Land" and perhaps "A Pleasant Evening," were fully up to the high standard of the earlier works. Then came two novels and they came like a fulfilled vaunt of triumphant versatility. In "A King and a Few Dukes," Mr. Chambers sauntered over into Anthony Hope's home grounds and beat him handily at his own game; while in "The Red Republic" he wrote an historical romance of Paris under the Commune which is warranted to hold the interest of any living reader, not to mention a few who have not been too long deceased. I do not speak of Mr. Chambers' book of poems: "With the Band" because they hardly seem to be truly Mr. Chambers'. What he himself may do in poetry is better foreshadowed by some stray dedication or introduction or scraps here and there under the titles of his tales.

And now to open the new books. "The Mystery of Choice," contains several stories that show their author at his best, such as "Pompe Funebre," "The Messenger," and "Passeur;" while, if in two or three instances both here and in the "Maker of Moons," he has revealed a trace of the blighting magazine impulse, it cannot be said that he has ever forgotten to be interesting, and it is perhaps his misfortune that the author of "The Demoiselle D'ys" and "Rue Barrée" has condemned himself to be judged by a higher standard than most of us. As for "Lorraine," it is another historical romance - a tale of the Franco-Prussian war, and unquestionably the best of Mr.Chambers' longer works - best in style, proportion, truth, and sustained interest.

And now a general word by way of conclusion. I have not ventured to use the term "great" in this paper. It is one that is used much too freely now-adays. Nor do I feel that an individual critic is justified in applying it unless supported by a very general critical sentiment. Besides, I am a confessed adherent of the romantic cult and might fairly be said to have some measure of bias. [I] do not mean by this, that there are not realistic novels that have aroused my strongest enthusiasm and interest - but these novels are not by the professed, and if I may say so, professional realists. The latter parties may be pretty safely counted upon either to evolve some pitiful libel on humanity or to invite you to meet a lot of people who would bore you to death in the flesh and whom I find equally competent when translated into type. I do not affect such hosts whether they be social or literary. It is he who writes well what is known as romance, that tells me of things which, while they may not happen very generally, certainly ought to - if only to enliven life; who takes his guests away on short vacations-away from the sordid details of office and shop, away from the monotonous routine of domesticity and society, and who presents them to people they have perhaps never known - people very pleasant to meet-people whom, for the moment at least, you feel convinced you might have met had you only turned that last corner in the other direction. Is not this the highest art? To me the best realist is only a painter of portraits and landscapes; a man endowed with observation, judgment, taste, and skill. The best romanticist must be all of these but he must also be a creator of great compositions, a thinker of great thoughts. It is to Robert W. Chambers, the romanticist that I pay my respects.