UofL Libraries: Hubbard: Anna

An Unlikely Pair

Harlan and Anna were seemingly opposites. Anna Eikenhout was a "city girl" from a midwestern middle class family. Quiet and shy, she was a home body growing up. She was a talented musician and enjoyed playing piano.

The pair met while she was working as a librarian in Cincinnati. They were both middle aged, he was forty-three and she was forty. They bonded over a mutual love of music, quickly realizing that they worked well together as accompanists and as partners.

Anna adapted seamlessly to Harlan’s unusual ways, and encouraged him in his passions. Harlan appreciated how Anna’s gentleness and consideration complimented his rugged lifestyle. The pair was married in 1943, embarking on a shantyboat adventure shortly after. They settled in 1951, building their remote riverside home, Payne Hallow. The two shared a life of adventure and simplicity for forty-three years.

Harlan and Anna during the summer of 1943, a few months after their marriage.

Marriage

After a couple years of dating, Harlan proposed in an "unorthodox decleration."

"Unorthodox Declaration"
"One of our meeting places was Music Hall in Cincinnati where the symphony concerts are played. After one of the concerts, it must have been in the spring, maybe March, I walked with her to the corner where her street car stopped. As she stepped aboard I said in parting, from a sudden impulse - I had not thought about it at all - "Anna, we must pass this spring together." Other passengers intervened and the car started or Anna would have come back in. Not long after this unorthodox declaration on my part, we decided to be married at once. There were all sorts of difficulties: I told Anna I could not go through with the kind of wedding she probably had in mind, on account of my mother's condition, but a more compelling reason was my abhorrence of typical wedding ceremonies. I believe I would have given up Anna had she insisted but she seemed to understand my feelings about this and accepted them. I've often wondered about the feelings of her mother and sisters. It must have been hard for her mother to see her oldest daughter marry and not even be there or not even be in the same city."

Harlan and Anna were married in Maysville, Kentucky on the 20th of April, 1943. Though their wedding was by no means glamorous, neither seemed to mind. Their honeymoon was spent exploring the countryside of Northern Kentucky.

Wedding Day
“Anyway, Anna let me arrange this affair and we went to Maysville to be married. I like Maysville; it's a river town some fifty miles above Cincinnati, but an independent city of its own and still a country town. This was April 20, 1943, that we were to be married. We traveled there on the morning C&O train called the Accommodation. Anna boarded it when it left Cincinnati in the dark of the predawn. This was war time, clocks were set on daylight and war time after that, two hours ahead of time. So the mornings were really dark. I was to get on the train at Brent a half an hour after it left Cincinnati. She must have wondered if I would be there but of course, I was. I had a match ready to light a newspaper as a signal for the train if it did not slow up to stop at the station.”
“Were you nervous?”
“No. I just thought this was another day we were going to spend on the river together. A little more complicated, a little more elaborate, perhaps.”
“You sound like you were very ready to be married.”
“I was. I'm quite surprised at myself. I'd never been that way before. I think I've given you some ideas of my love life up to this point but this was something different.”
“What was it that made Anna different?”
“Well, you're asking me a question that's very difficult to answer. You think you can analyze a person, especially your wife or any woman, but they're hard to pin down. You think you have it figured out, but it turns out that you're all wrong sometimes. Anyway, I kept learning new things about her. I felt from the beginning that we'd make a go of it and it would last a long time, and we would be happy. And that's the way it was.”
Marriage
“After we got off the train in Maysville, we delayed a little while in the station, maybe to give each other a chance to back out if they wanted to, then we walked over to the courthouse, which was not very far. That was one of the attractions of Maysville, the old building, and inside was just what we hoped it to be, very quiet and dark and we went into a large chamber where no one was, but there was a fire crackling in the stove and a big dog stretched out on the floor. All that seemed a very good beginning. It was shattered pretty soon, though, because a young woman came in, very officious and seemed to be unhappy about something, and treated us as if we were running away just to get married. She even spelled my name wrong in the document. Anyway, she performed the ceremony. All that was not very auspicious but we didn't mind. We left Maysville and walked on up the track a ways to a little town named Springdale, not very far, I'd been there before. We left the river there and walked back up the country road, beautiful country in that April spring. It was bleak though, windy, chill and damp. Every April 20th comes, we notice that it's often that way, that kind of weather. The day seemed to pass quickly. We went back to Springdale and down to the railroad where we were to wait at the station for the train to come back in the evening. They called that train the Accommodation; it was number seven when it left in the morning and number eight when it came back in the evening. It carried mail to little places along the way, some even across on the Ohio side of the river. And the mail was carried over in a rowboat, carried up the bank and put on a train at some of the little stations where there was no other way to handle it. That's the way it was done at Springdale. While we were waiting for the train, we built a little fire along the track and made some hot cocoa and we had something else to refresh ourselves with and then we rode back."

Harlan and Anna in Payne Hollow by Guy Mendes, 1983. from 40/40—FORTY YEARS FORTY PORTRAITS, by Guy Mendes, published by institute193.org.

The Hubbards, by Guy Mendes 1983.

Anna's Death

In 1986, after forty-three years together, Anna Hubbard passed away. Harlan reflects that she looked "beautiful to the very end."

Anna's last months
"I even feel, looking back on the hospital experience, that Anna wanted it that way, and willfully brought it about. The doctors were pleased with the operation and predicted that she would return home after a period of recuperation, but instead of getting better, she remained about the same. The reason, one reason, seemed to have been because she refused to eat, and all the persuasion and cajolery that her friends used was ineffectual; she just wouldn't eat. Of course, she was kept alive by transfusions, but -- not transfusions exactly, but by the IV machine, but there's a limit to that, and finally she began to get worse and the disease that she had spread through other parts of the body. She didn't suffer any, not a great deal, and she never complained or never wished anything was different. But she died very peacefully and as I have said, she looked beautiful to me to the very end."
Anna's Burial
"There was no religious ceremony at all. And when Anna was buried there was none. Didn't have a preacher around. I tried to make a speech but I didn't get very far because I was . . . but the whole point of my speech was something that Anna said when she was in the hospital and some good friend, certain good friends had left and she said, "I wish I could tell them how much I love them." And that's as near as she ever came to religion, I think"
Hubbard on grief
"The transition from living with Anna, forty-three years of it, very closely, too, to living by myself was made with less difficulty than one would imagine. I was -- I realize now that I was in a state of mild shock; it was hard to concentrate, hard to get simple things done, and so many new things to do that I had -- facing me. But I never experienced a deep mourning and excessive grief that I've known men to suffer in that situation. I was helped partly by a feeling that I had that we should be thankful that Anna made such a clean and decisive break with life. I knew she would be pleased to have done that instead of lingering a long time in a semi-helpless condition or even in a slightly impaired condition, compared to the way things used to be."
Hubbard reflecting on his life with Anna
"When I started to live alone there was not only the necessary adjustment to living alone but also to living without Anna. It's hard to say how much I missed Anna and how much I realized that that was that and there was no something, to which there was no appeal, and I just had to get used to being without her. But even now our life together is suddenly revealed in unexpected ways and I'm very touched by it, by our life together and the fact that it's all part of the past. But I think I've done a lot better than I ever thought I would in living alone. I never was one, much of a person to think about the past or derive much pleasure from it. I never expected much from the future, either, so there's nothing left but the present and that's all you have anyway so you have to make the best of it."

Hubbard and Anna's grave, at her memorial service, 1986.

When Harlan met Anna

Though it was not love at first sight, the pair bonded over music. Their relationship grew gradually out of a mutual respect. Harlan knew they worked well together after a trip to the Ohio River.

When Harlan met Anna
" Well, I first saw Anna in the Cincinnati Public Library and it was the old building on Vine Street. It's torn down now, they built a new library in another place, but this building had been built to be used as an opera house and was converted into a library, not very successfully in some ways. Anyway, Anna was stationed in the art and music department where
I sometimes went as a beginning artist -- also I was interested in music –
and about that time I had acquired a fiddle; it was my father's old fiddle and Frank had taken up violin and he sent me this when he could get a better one. So I was practicing and I was getting music over there, too."
First Impressions
“Did she catch your eye right off?”
“No. Isn't that strange? My interest in Anna was not aroused until after several visits. She was a very quiet, reserved person, not putting herself forward and I think we . . . what got it started was music. I told her about my violin when I was getting some music and she said she played the piano and the first thing we knew we had arranged a meeting at her house to play together. The music did not go well but we got along well in other ways, it seemed. At that time she was living in an apartment in Clifton on one of the hills that surround the city. She shared the apartment with her younger sister and with another girl named Barre. In spite of the way I played, I derived a strange, new pleasure from playing with the piano, the two parts intertwined and supporting each other, and Anna was a wonderful accompanist. That was her strongest point, really. She never lost her place and she never lost me. And she played her part beautifully. This beginning we branched out in other directions before long; we went to the art museum to see a special collection, I forget what it was, and on one of her days off I took her to the river. She had never seen the Ohio River hardly, living where she did, and no reason to go look at it, although she did have friends in Covington whom I met later and she must have seen the river when she crossed over the bridge, but it was different to go out and sit on the real bank and get mud on your feet and see the waves on the shore. Although she seemed a city person and was raised in the city she told me that her vacations, and her father's vacations, were on a lake in Michigan and were a large
part of her early life."
"So she seemed to enjoy herself that first day?"
"Yes, she seemed to take to the river and for many other reasons I soon became to respect her, I respected her intelligence and her consideration. Somehow she reminded me of a character from Jane Austen, Eleanor perhaps. And I think she would not mind my saying that because she enjoyed reading Jane Austen and we often read her novels together through it all in time."
Harlan on what made Anna special
“I wanted to ask you a little about Anna. I know that, that, after you first met, it took a couple of times being together before you finally warmed up to her, but what about Anna did you find special?”
“Well, those are hard questions to answer and I don't think you can be too logical about it; it's a matter of feeling, more than information, or, so I…in reality there was not much to bring us together. We were pretty much the same age, she was three years younger, I think, but she was living in the city and always had and seemed contented there. And all my ideas of living in the woods and on the river living a life in nature and that sort of thing would all be new to her, I knew. But there was something about her that attracted me and I think maybe it's better to follow those hunches instead of being too logical about what you do. Anyway, it turned out very well in our case. She seemed to have no objection to going down to the river with me and having picnics on the bank and taking canoe -- paddling around in the canoe.”
“So she liked the outdoors?”
“I think it goes back to her earlier life. Her father was a city man but he insisted on having a vacation on a lake in Michigan, away from town, and he always brought his family. His wife didn't like the whole idea but she went along just because he wanted to, but her participation and interest was very limited. But Anna liked those excursions very much. They lived in a cottage on the lake and there was fishing and boating and swimming and all that and I think that's where, that was a sign that she had some interest in the out of doors and the natural life.”
Anna's temperment
“You say she was a shy person.”
“Well, she seemed to be but she had a very strong mind and she could carry through anything that she thought was worthwhile. I wouldn't say she was weak in any department. We had . . . one interest we had in the beginning together was music; I had just begun to study violin and she hadstudied piano all her life since she was a little girl. Her father was a musician in church, in charge of the choir and all the church music, and Anna would play accompaniments for him when she was quite small. When she was still a girl he bought that Steinway piano that we've kept until just recently. It was a used piano then -- I think it was made around 1900.”
“Was Anna easy to talk to?”
“Not especially. It's hard to say just what we talked about. I know one time I came in, I didn't know what else to say and I said, "Well, I've just come back from a long canoe trip." She seemed to take an interest in it and we talked some more about it. The more I saw of her, I don't know, you might say the more deeply I was in love with her, I guess. But it was all contrary to reason but still we carried through and our marriage that we've already described, I think, and the fact that she would submit to a thing like that all by herself and ruling out her family entirely so they had no participation in it meant something.”

Life Together

The Hubbard's first summer as newlyweds coincided with the declining health of Harlan's mother. They lived in the backyard of Rose's house. Despite being fulltime caretakers, Harlan and Anna found happiness in simplicity.

First year together
“Did Anna like your mother?”
“She liked her as much as she was allowed to but we found it was just best to live our own lives out there and I'd spend all the time that was necessary in the house with Mom and we had a very good summer. We planted a garden, raised some vegetables for ourselves; went down to the river now and then; we read together a lot, but we had no music together. Not very long after that I got a cello for Anna, something she always wanted, so then we could play together, even on our shantyboat, because we took the cello with us. The music was the thing that brought us together really. I wouldn't say it was the thing that held us together but it was . . . without it we might have wondered what to do sometimes.”

After the death of Harlan's mother, Harlan and Anna itched for adventure.

Ripe for change
“Was it difficult for you to adjust to married life? To the routine of it?”
“It wasn't a routine at first, it was all exciting and new to us, to both of us. And I don't think we had any trouble at all in that way. Or any trouble in any way. We were faced with an important decision to make, though, now that my mother was dead; we had to decide what to do with the house and what to do with ourselves. To me it seemed that travel might be the best solution. I was ripe for change and I think Anna was, too.”

Despite her seemingly reserved nature, Anna was the one who recommended that Harlan build a shantyboat. After barely a year of marriage, Harlan and Anna embarked on a seven year journey aboard a ten by sixteen feet cabin. With them they brought a few dishes, two dogs, a multitude of books, and a cello.

Shantyboat
“So, once you got back to your hometown, what was your next course of action?”
“Well, of course, we settled back in the studio and it seemed best - and we had the house rented and the tenants were very obliging friends of ours and they let us live in the studio while they were living in the house. But that was just a temporary arrangement, we had to do something more permanent so at this point Anna made the brilliant suggestion, "Maybe this is the time to build that shantyboat that you've been dreaming about for so long." Well, I couldn't object to that, of course, and I set about it with all dispatch because it was October and if I wanted to build a shantyboat before wintertime set in, we'd have to get busy at it. I told all this in the book ShantyBoat so I won't say much more about it now but we went down to the riverbank and built a little cabin, a shack is all it was, that we could live in while we worked on the boat. That was when Anna's mother came down one nice day and I felt quite honored that she would come all the way down to the riverbank to watch us build a boat because I thought that would be one thing she might not approve of.”
“What was her reaction?”
“Oh, she never did say a word against the shantyboat to me. I don't know, she might have said something to some of her close friends up in Michigan. But all I can go on is what I know that she said to me. The main thing was that letters Anna wrote back were showing that she was having a good time and not suffering so everyone accepted the idea. The shantyboat lasted from 1944 to 1952 and then it made its way back in the swamps of Louisiana.”

After seven years of river coasting, the Hubbards found their land-legs with a cross country road trip to California. When they returned to Kentucky a year later, they struggle to find the perfect place to build a home. Again, it is because of Anna's recommendation, that the couple settles in Payne Hallow.

Payne Hallow
Well, let's see, we finally got back to Kentucky in the early spring and we were just about where we started from the year before. Then we started looking for a place to live now in earnest, and we went to all the old places we knew so well up the river to Wellsburg and stopped. On up to Maysville, Vanceburg but all that country was being spoiled by a new highway they were putting through and all the little towns had been destroyed in the 1937 flood so we felt discouraged. After all our search we had no leads at all. Anna said, "Why don't we go down to Payne Hollow for awhile and visit our old friends there?" So we took our outfit on the road again and put a canoe on top of it and went down to Payne Hollow.
"Did it look the same way you remembered it?"
"Yeah, and the people were the same, too, they came out the door and said, "Hi, Harlan," as if we’d never been away. Then when we got down to Payne Hollow it suddenly dawned on us, this, the place we were looking for, and we’ve been there ever since. The rest of the, from there it's told in the book Payne Hollow. So we have to think of something new to talk about now. I think we can tell a good deal about our life together in Payne Hollow. That's where Anna and I really started living together because up till now it had just been camping in the studio and camping on the road and travelling but now…I think that's what Anna was longing for all the time, for settled habitation."
“Well, you built the back part of the house first.”
“Yes, it was October when we came down here so we had the old problem again; we started building the shantyboat in October and we started to build this house in October. We had to get something to shelter us so we built that upper level where the construction was very simple. By Thanksgiving we could move into it.”
“Well, from the shantyboat to the rig on the automobile to this space, the upper space, you all seemed to always live in very small quarters.”
“This was spacious up here.”
“Comparatively.”

Though Harlan and Anna's life in Payne Hallow was frugal by modern standards, it was abundant in joy.

Pass times
“I understand that you and Anna used to read to each other?”
“Yes, that was a great part of our life. One would read while the other would do some of the endless chores that we had to do at the time, in front of the fireplace, and Anna was always sewing or mending something and did a lot of the knitting for me and I was always making something or fixing something or cracking nuts or picking them out, toasting things over the fire, toasting soy beans, sorting over beans that needed to be cleaned up before we could use them, dry beans. And somehow we both enjoyed the reading so much that it made the chores seem part of the enjoyment, whereas if we had had to do them separately, they would have seemed tiresome, maybe. But we read, I can't say what we read because it was such a great variety. There was many things on music, musicians, the history of music, and that sort of thing; some books on painting.
“And you said you kept a list of the books that you two read?”
“Anna kept a list of them; she was always a great person for keeping a list, lists of all kinds. She had many lists going but I don't know where that list is now unless it's with the Hubbard Collection at the University of Louisville, which I suppose it is. I might find parts of it anyway, sometime. But one thing we were interested in was Jane Austen; we read those novels over and over and it's even stranger that I'm reading them still, by myself. I've just finished, starting all over again, first I read "Sense and Sensibility" and then, after an interval of some weeks or months, I read "Pride and Prejudice." And I think, I still think they're great novels, I think she's a great writer. And I can enter into them thoroughly; I enjoy every word.”
Just Two Hubbards
“How do you think your life would have been different if you all had had children?”
“Well, that – that was impossible because Anna had had an operation before I knew her that rendered that impossible and that was one of the conditions I accepted her on. If I had wanted to have a family of children I would never have married her, so that must indicate that I was not desirous of having children. In fact, the whole idea of children is baffling and frightening to me; I don't believe I could go through with it. I mean, not having the children but bringing them up, especially in the world of today. And I think that I felt that my life was so full already with my ideas of art and living that it was not necessary to bring in children just for amusement or variety. I feel in a way it's a mistake, too. I think if we had had children we'd managed it somehow. It would have been a challenge and maybe we couldn't have done everything we did together, but I think a family and babies on a shantyboat would be all right where they wouldn’t thrive as well as any other place. When I first started she said, she told me the condition that she was in and I said then, "Don't you feel like you're losing something out of life by not having children?" And she said she did feel that way at one time but now she'd gotten used to it. But the interest she took in her younger sister’s children shows that she would have liked to have children herself, I guess, but it was impossible. But I can say that it was not my fault in any way."