Warren Hassmer was born on August 3, 1921, in Brooklyn, and died on April 7, 2018, after a brief illness. He came to Provincetown first in the summer of 1947, where he made friends with people like Tennessee Williams, and returned often. In July of 1955, he and the architect Donald Jasinski built the magical modernist mushroom house called Farfalla (“Butterfly”), on the hill above 236R Bradford Street, a house that David W. Dunlap called “a fantasy spot for generations of neighborhood children” and “one of the few serious works of mid-century Modernism in Provincetown.” (See the Farfalla page in Dunlap’s on-line book
https://buildingprovincetown.wordpress.com/?s=236r+bradford+).
Warren lived in Farfalla for many summers with his partner, Bob Hayward; they sold plants and flowers down on Bradford Street. In the winters, they lived at Beverly Farms, where Warren was the chair of the English department at Endicott College (where Bob, too, was an English teacher), in Beverly Massachusetts, specializing in American literature, particularly American poetry; he knew most of Robert Frost by heart. In the late 1980s they retired from Beverly, sold Farfalla and the property around it, and bought Moorings Way on Tom’s Hill in Truro, on a high hill overlooking the Pamet River marsh. There Warren planted the fabulous 4-acre garden for which he became famous, and beloved, throughout the community and far beyond.
Warren’s youth in Brooklyn had been spent in grim poverty; for weeks on end, they ate nothing but beans out of cans that a kind neighbor gave them. He had one brother, Robert, a painter and stained-glass window artist, who lived in Florida and died a few years ago. From 1927 to 1935, Warren went to Public School 193, in Brooklyn (his note beside that diary entry is, “days of fear and trembling”), then to Erasmus Hall High School (from 1935 to 1939) and Middlebury College, Vermont, working as a janitor in the dorms to support himself. At the Breadloaf School, at Middlebury, he taught himself to play the flute (by practicing, measure by measure, a Bach flute sonata) and translated and scanned Sapphic odes.
On May 25,1943, on graduating from Middlebury, he was inducted into the army; he shipped to England (where, in Manchester, he managed to study Shakespeare, music, and Greek). He served in France, and traveled to Paris, Reims, Florence, Rome, Switzerland, where he hung out with wonderful people. He was discharged from the army on April 6, 1946 and returned to the United States to study under the G I Bill, first for a year at Colgate College and then at Boston University, where he graduated with an M. A. in 1948. Then came Bob, Beverley, and Truro.
Warren actually lived, both literally and figuratively, the life that Voltaire, at the very end of his novel Candide, advised Candide to lead: to withdraw from the horrors of the world and “cultivate his garden. “His life was made of literature, art, the beauty of nature and the love of friends. Walking through the brilliantly choreographed colors and shapes in Warren’s garden in Truro was like moving through a painting by Monet; he choreographed the colors and shapes in inspired combinations. He spent the winter months reading garden catalogues and ordering seeds and cuttings from all over the world. He planted exotic trees and countless varieties of roses, and he knew all their Latin names and their histories. Every autumn, he planted hundreds of bulbs, down on his knees, even in the last year of his life; he always had faith that spring would come. Bluebirds came and bathed in his elegant stone birdbath, and cardinals and chickadees. Sometimes a fox came right up on his deck and drank from the pail of water and took a nap right there. The only malice Warren ever felt for any living creature was for the chipmunks, who would climb up the stems of his lilies and bite off their heads, and every year ate his tomatoes on the very day before they finally ripened and he had planned to harvest them.
The garden kept him young and fit. Well into his 90’s he would swim with the afternoon high tide at Cornhill Beach, from the entrance right down to the breakwater, with a beautiful steady slow strong stroke that seemed natural, effortless. When the weather, or just nightfall, kept him out of the garden, he read--fiction, poetry, biography, history, newspapers, literary journals, everything, cover to cover. All his life he wrote poetry; his diary for January-March 1949 notes, “wrote 30 poems,” and for October 1-15, 1951, “4 poems finished.” He published a number of poems, several of them in Poetry Magazine in 1957, 1958, and 1960. He and Bob read aloud, every morning, for an hour after breakfast, working their way through all the masterpieces of English literature. To the end of his days Warren knew by heart hundreds and hundreds of poems, and the details of all the novels he’d ever read.
He remembered all his music, too, remembered the particulars of every performance of every piece in his extensive collection of records and CDs, not just the music but the conductor and the soloists and the year of the performance. One day he would suddenly recall how he loved Schubert, and for the next few weeks he would listen to all of Schubert—piano, orchestral, vocal, everything—night after night, following the score as he listened; he had a fabulous collection of scores. He and Bob would travel regularly to Boston for the symphony; they had seats in the first balcony right at the front, looking down at the stage. They played duets together every evening, he on the flute, Bob on the piano. His tastes, literary and musical, were classical, but he always remained open to new things too. He enjoyed the music of living composers and novels by people such as the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo.
Warren had friends from all over the world, people who had visited him in Provincetown or Truro years ago, or people he’d met in England or France during WW II, and they came back to visit him in his garden. He cherished his friends, maintaining his friendships all his life, and remembered conversations with them from decades ago. He was beloved by everyone who knew him; wherever he went he was greeted by friends, people in the town, at the post office, at Stop n Shop, at Savory and Montano’s. His neighbors on Tom’s Hill, when he got old, helped him every day, and shared their evening meals with him, and in return he gave them Meyer lemons from his trees and beautiful Hibiscus plants and Birds of Paradise.
The greatest sadness in his life was Bob’s death, on March 26, 2012, after a long illness. Warren missed Bob every minute of every day, and preferred to “dine with Bobby,” as he put it, alone in his dining room with the series of large photographs of Bob that gazed down on him there. He built a special memorial garden for Bob, overlooking the Pamet River, with a stone on which he had had engraved Shakespeare’s song, from Cymbeline, “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. . . .”
Everything he did he did with grace and elegance. Even his phone message was graceful: “Please leave a message or call back soon.” He lived the perfect life, right up to the end of it, busy and happy until he fell and, five days later, died. He did even that, even dying, with grace. There will be a memorial for him in midsummer, when his garden will be in its full glory.