So how do we celebrate those too modest to tell us who they are?
Story by Colin Sargen
Portland Monthly Magazine

At a recent preview at Collins Auction Gallery in Kennebunk, locals are treated to the usual ‘unusual’ treasures: furniture, clocks, and gorgeous Ogunquit seascapes, all with stories to tell.

But three large paintings by an artist named Adomas Galdikas (biography) cause a stir.

They are militantly nonrepresentational “brilliant storms of color.” One of them is called Ballet, another Vision in Gold. They are powerful enough to blow a conventional lobsterboat painting clean out of the water.

“He’s a friend of Father Leonard,” a local whispers with Kennebunkian eclat, “from the Franciscan Monastery here. He painted Maine a lot. Fatha Leonid’s ova to the rest home now, neah Biddefid Pool. He’s the poet laureate of Lithuania, you know.”

Painter Adomas Galdikas

Now I am really interested. When the communists took over Lithuania, world class intellectuals were exiled here in a kind of underground railway. The monastery became the American beachhead for what was left of a thousand years of Lithuanian culture. A private boys’ school, St. Anthony’s, was run from 1958-1969 by the Franciscan monks here to train the young teenage princes of Lithuania in art, religion, philosophy, and culture in case the Soviets ever released their grip on the country.

I remember seeing the boys walking in groups along Gooch’s Beach with walkie-talkies connecting them to their home base, all of them cool, eccentric, many of them in black leather jackets, a stupendous anomaly – The Unbearable Lightness of Being meets Clear Blue Water Lobster Country. They had names like Kadadas, Kuzimikas, Kuzikoviskas, and many of them appeared to want to look like Elvis or Dylan. They flipped their collars up. They wore tight black chinos and white socks. They were ‘sexy.’ My parents were terrified my sisters might want to date one of them.

It is not necessarily to the Kennebunks’ credit that these boys were accepted rather coolly. They smoked a lot. They were “wee-id.” They ordered stuff funny. There’s the legendary story about one of them ordering a frosty glass of root beer: I say root-a-bie-iere!

In the early 1970s, after St. Anthony’s was closed down, local kids, myself included, used to sneak into the monastery’s deserted gym to play basketball. Sometimes, shivering with the imminent danger of being caught, we even slipped on the old green-and-white home and away basketball jerseys the St. Anthony’s boys had worn years earlier. We thought we were undetected. We thought we were magic. But how could the sensitive monks have not heard the giant “ringing” sound our basketballs made while echoing through their empty gym?

Father Leonard Andriekus has been a world-renowned poet since the 1930s

How could we in Maine have not heard of the giant accomplishments the Lithuanians in

residence here, scholar and monk alike, were making in the world community?

“But Father Leonard – is he still the poet laureate of Lithuania?” I ask a tall, white-haired, blue-eyed man at the auction preview who watches us carefully as we examine the paintings.

“Of course,” the man says.

On a frosty Saturday morning I drive to meet Father John Bacevicius, the provincial at the Franciscan Monastery. Through Barnes and Noble online I’ve already snagged a copy of a book of poems by Leonard Andriekus (biography).

Amens in Amber, its echoic title, reverberates with romance. Reading the poems, one can feel time and faith trapped in Lithuanian amber from around the Baltic Sea, not just through the arc of one life, but resonating through many lives.

But there is existential complexity here, too, for one cannot breathe in amber. In fact, some of the poems in this book are very dark.

Father John directs me to the salon to the left of the front hall, which is still adorned by a green Chinese carpet once owned by the Campbells.

“Our Franciscan province was originally founded in Lithuania a couple hundred years ago,” he says. “When Lithuania was a stomping ground for the Nazis and the communists, many of us were exiled to Siberia. But before World War II, some of us were still finishing studies for the priesthood in Italy and Austria. In fact, four or five friars were in Italy. One of them was Father Justin Vaskys.

“In 1944, he got permission from Rome to travel to the United States with the idea of temporarily establishing a location for the friars in the United States – a shoot or branch. First he found a location in Pittsburgh. He probably tried Chicago and New York, but we were not able to find an opening there. When he came to Maine with the support from some priest friends in Connecticut, he went to the bishop of Maine in 1944 or 1945 and asked permission to establish something in Maine. He agreed but said, ‘You have to find the place.’

“He was led to a place or hospital where he met Mr. [Jim] Campbell [who owned this sprawling 150-acre Tudor estate along the banks of the Kennebunk River that has since been converted into the Franciscan Monastery; Campbell earned his fortune as the owner of Palm Beach Clothing and the Goodall-Sanford mills (see “Inventing the Campbells,” Portland Magazine- July/August 1997)]. He was very friendly. The legend goes that Mr. Campbell had recently been to Italy, in Assisi, where the Franciscans were founded,” and found much to admire.

“The Campbells had a place in Miami and Brookline, Massachusetts, so he agreed to sell this place [originally built in 1900 for the Rogers family of Rogers Steel & Silver, Buffalo, NY] to us, with installments, at a very reasonable price [$100,000 down and $5,000 a year for 10 years, interest-free]”

By 1947, some of the greatest thinkers in northern Europe, exiles from the Soviet occupation, arrived here unheralded for studies and protracted visits. The establishment of the monastery might have received more notice but for the Fire of 1947, which swept through Maine the same year. Trees were naked and blackened everywhere along the Maine coast, all the more disturbing to the émigrés, because Lithuanian peasants consider trees unbaptized souls.

“In 1953, when I first came here,” says Father John, “we were building the shrine of Lourdes here. Vytautas Kasuba was here, too, installing Stations of the Cross, a 14-station [assemblage] constructed from Kentucky [hardwoods] that had been treated with a special burning process” to help them resist water damage and rot.

 

Ballet by Adomas Galdikas

In 1956, Father John left to begin advanced philosophical and theological study in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Wappingers Falls, New York. “I was ordained in 1962 and returned.”

But in the interim, in 1958, the monastery had “created a ‘minor seminary’ for young students preparing for divinity school who we hoped might one day become Franciscan friars.”

Then, when enrollment began to disappoint, “we created the St. Anthony’s boarding school for boys.” The capacity was 90-95, with dormitories and so on. The former Campbells’ stables and servant quarters were converted to living quarters for seniors. Next, the gym was built, regulation size. After that, the ‘white cottage’ was built. Finally, a pool was built “where the Campbells once had their greenhouse.”

The school flourished.

“We had a good basketball team, nicknamed the Friars. Girls from South Berwick were our cheerleaders, with green sweaters. The boys even had green [letter] jackets.”

Meanwhile, since worship was all but banned in Soviet satellite states, the monastery helped foster the ideologically militant and physically dangerous enterprise known as the silent church in Lithuania. The Soviet Union had conquered the nation of Lithuania, but would never come close to conquering the Lithuanian spirit. Expatriate artists and scholars stepped up their visits to the monastery during this period, especially once Father Leonard Andriekus, 88, was permanently assigned there in 1965. An important poet since the 1930s, Andriekus had an international reputation. Not only was he, and is he, a world-recognized poet and poet laureate of Lithuania, “he was for many years the editor of the world-renowned cultural magazine Aidi (Echoes).”

Perhaps Andriekus should have been in the Kennebunkport show:

“But Father Andriekus is not in good health,” Father John tells me. “He is 88, and he is staying at St. Andre’s Health Facility on Route 9 in Biddeford, near the University of New England campus. But you can call him on the telephone if you like.”

At 10 a.m., I call St. Andre’s. They tell me he is asleep, but that I can call him at 1 p.m. He picks up the phone in the hallway and tells me he feels cold. He talks for a while about his friend Adomas Galdikas, but pauses a moment when I ask him, “Of all the poems in Amens in Amber, what is your favorite?”

I hear an icy silence on the line.

“Ask someone else what my favorite is.”

It’s a brilliant, paradoxical answer. He has bigger fish to fry. He’s already off the phone and back into his extended meditations.

But it’s emerging that Adomas Galdikas was possibly Father Leonard’s best friend.

“Galdikas visited here many times,” says Father John. “Galdikas was like a very simple person. His language was sometimes uncouth. He looked and talked like a simple person and saved everything he had for the canvas.”

Their association goes back to the 1930s, but deepened with the years. Still, Galdikas was renowned for wild spurts of creativity, usually twice a year.

“It seemed as if all the rest of the time he was like a bird building its nest. Then he would work for weeks like a madman and fly into a rage if he were interrupted.”

One time, the painter shouted at the poet: “Why did you come here? Why didn’t you phone? You know I don’t want to be interrupted. Now I must find my form again.”

Once in Germany, he confessed he felt like killing an intruder who interrupted him while he was working on one of his most crucial passages.

Viktoras Vizgirda (more info) is another artist connected with Andriekus and the monastery. A picture of Father Leonard done by Vizgirda, not unlike a Walt Kuhn portrait from the 1920s, adorns the walls of the “Antique Room,” where the monks keep many of the Campbells’ possessions that were left from the house: their enormous oak dining room table and Jacobean revival chairs, their library (including a Who’s Who, 1922-1923), a portrait of Mrs. Campbell, and a full-sized Steinway grand piano “that the monks had to carry across the lawn to the gymnasium a few years ago when Bill Smiddy, a.k.a. Prostakof, a student of Horovitz, gave a concert there,” says Father John.

“He was very good. But that piano! My goodness!”

As for Vizgirda and his long creative ties and visits here, “I didn’t like his art,” Father John confides.

But the world does.

Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas was “very, very famous,” says Father John. “He was about the same height as Father Leonard, 5’4”. My mother remembers Jonynas in grammar school. I drove him here one time from New York. His statue was brought here from the entrance to the Vatican Pavilion of the New York World’s Fair. He stayed here and worked on our chapel here.

Artworks by Jonynas

“Then there is Zoromskis (more info). Father George liked him and appreciated his art. He painted a very large painting in the gym of St. George Killing the Dragon. I don’t know where it is now. Because our printery is in Brooklyn, New York, and because of Father Leonard’s presence here as an editor, two other significant essayists have shuttled back and forth between New York and Kennebunk, chief among them Suziedelis, a constant contributor, and Braizaitis, quite a big man in Lithuania before the war.

“Adai, now that there is a free Lithuania, moved back to Lithuania in 1988 and operates under a new name.”

Poet Gary Lawless, of Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, recently travelled to Lithuania while writing In Ruins, his new book of poetry.

There, his guide was a writer named Liudvikas Jakimavicius, whose brother is an amber dealer.

Contacted for this article, Jakimavicius was immediately familiar with the names of Andriekus and Galdikas. “Galdikas is a well known painter. But in [the] contemporary context he is a grandfather. Leonardas Andriekus is well known” too, for his religious poetry.

In his travels, Lawless, like Andriekus, could not escape the motif of amber as beauty trapped in time.

“The [post-]Soviet mob is now making a false amber out of chemicals,” he says.

“Jakimavicius took me to amber museums and to a lagoon where big hunks of amber just lie on the shore in different colors. The false amber is identical to the eye. They stick insects and impurities in it to really fool people. But dip it in water and real amber releases a wonderful smell of pine resin.” Like Andriekus and the incredible circle of intellectuals he brought to the Kennebunks, “You cannot mistake the real thing.”

Here in Maine, we are only beginning to hear the echoes.

All poetry by L. Andriekus

©2002 Portland Magazine

Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher
editor@portlandmonthly.com
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