Dennis Miller Bunker: Ill Health

"Kenneth R. Cranford" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"The summer of 1887 took Dennis Miller Bunker to Newburyport. Here he had as companions Henry Walker and his old friend Charles Platt, 'le vieux Platt [the old Platt],' as he affectionately called him. He liked the country and he liked the company of his friends. But it was not a happy summer, for he was not well.

He wrote to his friend Joe Evans: 'As to me, it goes not at all. I do not work and don't feel as if such a thing would ever be possible.' 'God is pleased to afflict me with poverty and many adversities.' 'Figure to yourself one racked with pains and doubts and with an indefinable fear of the future and you have a striking portrait of your friend.' 'I am mostly occupied with cramps and such.'

The letters of this summer are never free from such comments. It would be impossible to arrive at any understanding of Bunker's attitude toward life without a full realization of the extent to which he was tortured by ill health. His own outward appearance did not suggest this to his friends. The melancholy, often verging on despair, to which he was so frequently subject, was unquestionably intensified by his physical condition. And the constantly recurring headaches and bouts of indigestion sadly interfered with his enjoyment of the opportunities that were open to him. 

It is all the more remarkable that many of his less intimate friends thought of him as a high-spirited and entertaining companion, the Gay Troubadour, as they sometimes called him. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the complete absence in his work of any suggestion of fatigue or moodiness. Serenity and unhurried workmanship are among the characteristic traits of Bunker's art."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)