Around 1911, a Columbia University student was riding on the subway and trying to catch up on his Livy assignment. A subway guard saw the student struggling with the writings of the Roman historian and approached the young man between stations.
“Hard going?” asked the guard. “Plenty,” said the student. “What’s troubling you?” asked the guard. The student pointed to the troublesome passage. The subway guard took the book and translated the text without a pause. The amazed student later said, “He read it right off.” Then, the subway guard remarked, “You ought to read Livy at sight. Now take Horace…”
That subway guard was my great Uncle Rob, my paternal grandmother’s brother. Robert Virginius Costello was an amazing man. He was fluent in seven or eight languages, including Latin, Greek, German, French and Erse (the Scottish or Irish Gaelic language). He could also recite entire books from memory. A particular favorite was Bleak House. His recitations were performed with great dramatic flare requiring that he frequently wipe his brow with a silk handkerchief kept in his breast pocket just for that purpose.
Despite his amazing intellect, Uncle Rob chose to be a subway guard. In 1936, The New Yorker magazine wrote an article about Rob entitled No. 896, a reference to his guard number. The article was subsequently picked up by The Reader’s Digest.
The New Yorker article explained Rob’s vocation this way, “(He) entered the subway service …much as thoughtful youths used to enter the monasteries in the olden days, to meditate. He had thought of Yale and Heidelberg and a life of teaching Latin and Greek, but the dream passed. The I.R.T. (subway) portals were nearer and easier.”
The New Yorker article went on to explain that while Rob only earned $31 a week, he had half the day off and the entire night in which to read, translate and do the work which mattered most to him. At the time of The New Yorker article, Rob was working on a novel about the Irish in New York, which was probably never finished and certainly not published. But Rob also wrote to the newspapers–90 letters in The New York Daily News alone.
Rob’s newspaper letters displayed an amazing knowledge of a vast number of topics. The New Yorker article described Rob as “…a gray-haired, blue-eyed, amiable (unless aroused) Irishman.” The newspaper letters suggest that Rob was often aroused!
Rob criticized Communists, the Reds as he called them, frequently and ferociously. He wrote more articles on Communists from the early 1930s forward than on any other topic.
In September of 1941, less than two months before Pearl Harbor, he had this to say,
“A sickening spectacle of the depth of depravity to which people can sink is furnished by the local Communist rags, which I call the New Asses and the Daily Shirker, beslobbering their Red masters in Moscow. It seems only yesterday that these two sheets were denouncing Roosevelt as a warmonger seeking to enlist us in behalf of imperialistic England and roaring the slogan “The Yanks Are Not Coming.” Then bloody Joe (Stalin) was attacked by Hitler, and Joe’s stooges in the United States did a somersault, and are now in full cry for all help to England, including the sending of an American Expeditionary Force, II. Whoops!”
He also denounced Tammany Hall constantly. He praised the Gaelic language and would be so pleased to see it spoken in Scotland and Ireland today. Despite identifying as Catholic and Irish, he was critical of both the Church and the Irish. He could expound, it seems, on an endless number of topics from early American furniture to Edgar Alan Poe, whom he considered the greatest American writer.
In April of 1938, he wrote of Poe,
“Surely, in his originality, Poe was an authentic genius. Unlike the literary slobs of our present era, he wrote like a gentleman. The clarity and athleticism of his style were most admirable, and in form and technique he has never been surpassed. Literature, like life, has its vogues and whimsies and shoddy goods, which appear and fade out, but the stream of time, constantly washing away the cheap fabric of other American writers, passes without injury by the adamant of Poe.”
When I was growing up, Uncle Rob was so often discussed during family dinners that it was as if he were still alive. He died when I was a baby, but the force of his personality was such that he lived on and on. My sister and I constantly heard of his prodigious knowledge of history and literature. During family discussions of current events, the question would be raised, “What would Rob think?”
My grandmother loved to describe the family recitations of books and poetry when she was growing up. Her older brother, Charlie, was also well versed in the writings of Dickens, Tennyson and so many other writers. He would occasionally prompt Rob should Rob forget the next line. Until I was a teenager, I really thought all families entertained themselves back in the day with dramatic readings and assumed one family member did all the memorizing.
My grandmother loved, too, to describe going up to bed as a child. She said it could take more than an hour because Rob would debate fine points of history with their father on every step. One I particularly remember was Rob replaying the Battle of Waterloo. To Rob, it was quite clear that the British would not have won that battle without the Prussians. This mattered greatly to Rob because he considered Napoleon such a great general as he made clear in this 1934 letter:
“In its foolish attempt to disparage Napoleon, The News evidently gets its ideas from that pseudo-historical work, H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, instead of from military critics who place Napoleon first among great generals. As to Napoleon’s never beating the English, the English were careful to keep out of his way. At Waterloo Napoleon did beat the English, who would have been driven from the field had not (Prussian Field Marshal) Blücher (Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Fürst von Wahlstatt) arrived and saved them.”
It is abundantly clear from Rob’s writings that he was a man with very strong opinions. The New Yorker article is misleading in that it suggests Rob was a man quick to help another. Actually helping that student was out of character. Rob was a very difficult person with whom to deal and it is just as well that he usually retreated to his books.
Rob lived with my grandparents, Isabel and Otto Ullrich, and my father, Charles, for many years. It must have taken a great deal of patience on the part of my grandparents. When my grandfather died, my grandmother moved with my father to a new apartment. I have to wonder if this was, in part, to get away from Rob.
My father told us more than once how as a youngster he went to Rob all excited saying, “Uncle Rob, I am going to read Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.” Rob’s response was, “You are too stupid to understand it.” That my father was certainly not “stupid’ and had, in fact, already skipped several grades in school was, of course, not the point. Rob was unnecessarily unkind and really hurt the feelings of a young person so much so that my Dad told this story more than once.
As often as Rob’s brilliance was discussed so was this unkindness. Rob said of one family member, “Oh, that one–she was only born to breed.” He particularly disliked women. Who knows why? I never heard anything to suggest my great grandmother was a difficult mother. Yet, Rob wrote in 1925 when he would have been 45 years old.
“(Anonymous) is right about women being mercenary and the champion of deceivers, but he must be very unsophisticated if he imagines that this dates from the war (World War I). It is as old as humanity. Their venality and treachery formed the theme of ancient writers and even the old Irish bards bitterly criticized women. Read Schopenhauer’s famous essay on women if (you) want to know their real nature. Though lacking those nobler qualities which distinguish men, women, however are invincible in their attractions; even the great Schopenhauer fell for them. And it is this very fact of their being irresistible, coupled with their falseness, hardness and ruthlessness, which makes them the scourge of man.”
It should come as no surprise that Rob was a bachelor. He lived almost the entire last 30 years of his life in a 6 room apartment on West 123rd Street in Manhattan. In addition to a large collection of books, some of which are still in the family, he had a very extensive wardrobe which he valued at $1500. That amount of money today equals about $28,000 so it represents quite a significant wardrobe. The New Yorker journalist explained, “His clothes are tailor-made, he gets his handkerchiefs and cravats at Sulka’s (an upscale men’s clothing store). When he steps out socially–and he wishes he knew more cultured and intellectual people–he has the air of a student and the manner of a man of the world.”
For years I have wondered if Rob was a savant like the Rain Man. We will never know. Sadly, he spent the last year and a half of his life in the Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York. He died there at the age of 65 and his death certificate lists the cause of death as “bronchopneumonia due to malnutrition”. The certificate also states that he suffered from psychosis caused by cerebral arteriosclerosis. Psychosis was, no doubt, the reason he was hospitalized.
Cerebral arteriosclerosis is a hardening and thickening of the arteries in the brain. In Rob’s case, arteriosclerosis resulted in psychosis defined in Lexico as “A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.”
The question will always be–was Rob ever in touch with external reality?
No. 896. The New Yorker, February 22, 1936, pp. 12-13.
Subway Latinist, The Reader’s Digest, April 1936, pp 37-38.
Costello, R. V. (1941, September 26). The Party Line. Daily News, p. 451. Retrieved from http://www.newspapers.com.
Costello, R. V. (1934, August 12). Napoleon Beat the British. Daily News, p. 39. Retrieved from http://www.newspapers.com.
Costello, R.V. (1938, April 4). Poe the Great. Daily News, p. 152. Retrieved from http://www.newspapers.com.
Costello, R.V. (1925, November 27). Scourge of Man, Daily News, p. 71. Retrieved from http://www.newspapers.com.
Lexico powered by Oxford, https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/psychosis (5 April 2020).
What a great job you did with such a sad story.
You know, Margie, I am not sure he was sad…until the very end of his life. I believe he lived in a fantasy world. Thank you for always following my posts!
Very interesting and unique. I would like to have had the opportunity to have had a conversation with him. I wonder if he would insult me as a stranger or maybe he saved insults for family members he knew. Of course he was unhappy which explains, not condones his insults.
Good question, Will. Maybe you, too, would have “earned” an insult depending on what you said!
Might be he was on the Autistic spectrum?
Wow, Lynn, Uncle Rob is a very interesting man. I am quite sure I would have enjoyed his company tremendously, even if he hated me! What a treat this story was.
Dear Rootscollector, what fascinating roots you do find! I love your stories, and particularly this one. I suppose that Uncle Rob must have been sad inasmuch as he was so insulting. And to hate half the population of the earth does bring difficulties. With Bonnie and Will, I am sure would have enjoyed his company so much that I would seek him out. I have so many questions! I hope you will keep collecting your roots! What wonderful fun, and so interesting!
I’m sorry you never got to spend time with your Uncle Rob. He sounds like a fascinating character. But yes maybe suffering a little bit from Aspergers.
Uncle Rob was certainly a very intelligent and intellectual man. It is unfortunate that his problems kept him from doing many great things with his life. I wonder why he accumulated such an expensive wardrobe since it does not seem he had much of a social life. I guess he just liked the best and it gave him satisfaction. I hope so!