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Austin Strong by Helen Wilson Sherman
AUSTIN STRONG WAS AN extraordinary man who brought Nantucket into the twentieth century. When new people flow into the scene without knowing its history, from the 1920's, and ask, "Who is Austin Strong?" it is time to set down what he did for this island. He came from a glamorous and illustrious life which began as Robert Louis Stevenson's step-grandson, and evolved into a playwright, author, raconteur, as a man of letters with fame at his back, when he made Nan tucket his stage set and created a new elegance here which celebrated (and still does) Nantucket greatness as a whaling port, before the stockmarket crash. This dapper blue-eyed man, with smooth and shiny black hair and pink and white complexion, clean shaven, with heavy black eyebrows in his round face, had great style and charm. All of his delight in life was in spired by Stevenson. He loved pirates and Spanish galleons (influenc ed by Treasure Island). The old deviltry on the high seas, and buried treasure became artistic imaginings in which he dreamed of himself as THE CAPTAIN OF THE SHIP. In fact he acted it out on Nantucket, which became his buried treasure. He first knew Nantucket when he married my father's sister, Mary Holbrook Wilson, and the couple visited the great house on the Cliff Road, south of the Sea Cliff Inn that my grandfather Ellery H. Wilson rented for the summer. It was around 1910. The island bespoke so strongly of the sea, in the romance of his dreams he knew that he had found with joy the place to create them and bring enchantment to the visiting population who had already bought houses here and came for the sum mer. He wanted to elevate the Nantucketer with a sense of its heritage for what was heavily asleep to their inheritance of silent heroism. He bought the 1731 house at 5 Quince Street after spying it from a horse and carriage, in a delapitated state of run down decrepitude. While my aunt sat in the carriage, Austin knocked on the door and asked the bushywhiskered unwashed, lanky man if the house could be bought. The man scratched his head and said he allowed it could. Uncle asked to see the attic and bounded up the stairs, took a look at the full-length empty room under the eaves and fell in love. The deal was made. (I remember the former owner whose last name escapes me. I used to see him in hip boots wading the shallows at the corner of Easy St. and Old North Wharf, spearing garbage into a hemp bag. His first name was Frank, a Nan tucket neer-do-well, symptom of island loss of purpose.) The attic became Austin Strong's study and studio where he wrote plays and stories, designed tiny stage sets and plotted the two great Nan-
