wish I didn't have all of this money

 

Paul Mellon

A Reader Comment on a Washington Post book review:

---------------------------- Years ago, a Bed and Breakfast guest shared with me a conversation she had with Paul Mellon, in which the noted philanthropist confided to her:

"I wish I didn't have all of this money.  I'd much rather own and manage a small book store."

     This offhand musing seemed kind of odd to me, because I kind of make the assumption that if someone has lots of money they may do anything they want, including buy a small bookstore and run it.

     But I suppose having so much money -- the Mellon fortune was huge -- kind of obligates you to carry out certain responsibilities, and perhaps becomes a "job" in itself.

     Kind of like -- I saw a You Tube video of Princess Diana's brother Charles, the 9th Earl Spencer:  he was discussing Althorp, the family's ancient stately home in the English countryside.  At first one might think, "Oh great, I inherit a giant mansion" but in truth it's an ongoing job and responsibility.

     Those old houses are full of history and special paintings and furniture that isn't just a -- couch, for example, but it's a piece from back in the 1500s and so-and-so had it and it represents this-and-such historical period.  An old house such as Althorp and its contents, are considered by the powers-that-be, and indeed by the British people, to belong both to the family and to the nation.

     And then you have to keep it up -- the maintenance would be no joke, and the continuous restoration of something that old -- trying to keep it livable for your own family, and nice for visitors, and also preserve all the history....  To help get money to do this, even though they are rich, they still have to open the home for sightseers during part of the year.  It would be like you lived at a museum.  (But yet you don't bitch about it because it's an honor, and you are fortunate, right?...)

     To me, that relates to Paul Mellon's idea of the road he did not travel (one lined with bookshops...?) -- because contrary to the concept that large inheritance gives a person freedom, in reality the circumstance may place the person in certain roles and positions which are not all fun and games, but rather obligations and responsibilities.

______________________________

English people take their history super-seriously:  they are intense about it.  In The Diana Chronicles (2007, Broadway Books-Random House) Tina Brown wrote,

     Althorp House evolved from the red-bricked, moated redoubt of the first Earl into a princely power house with a superb collection of eighteenth-century furniture, a world-famous library, and a picture gallery hung with masterpieces by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, and George Stubbs.  

In the words of a leading historian of the aristocracy, David Cannadine, "The Spencers were the very embodiment of glamour and grandeur, high rank and high living." ------------------------------- 

And then this other passage from the same book illustrates how the paintings in your picture gallery and the books in your library belong to you -- and to the country.

-------------------- [excerpt] --------------- ...When the Earl of Warwick went so far as to flee his ancient family seat of Warwick Castle for an apartment in New York, taking with him a cache of Old Masters that the nation expected to stay right where they were. -------------------------------- 

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