frozen in time

We were given a tour of the Yaddo mansion yesterday. It’s closed in the winter, mostly because it’s impossible to heat. We tramped through the great hall, the dining hall, the few fabulous rooms, and the plethora of servants quarters, where most of the writers are housed. The beds wrapped in ghostly plastic, our high-spirited pretend-haunted voices echoing down the empty corridors, our breath chasing, gauzy white as one of Katrina Trask’s gowns; all fifty-five rooms frozen in time, we were just plain frozen.

"One can imagine the whole scene; the chill in the countless rooms, the dry fountain in the atrium, the baptismal fonts and the throne chairs covered with sheets." John Cheever, A Century At Yaddo

Whenever I quote Cheever on Yaddo I feel compelled to balance things out with a word from my friend Camilo, a past guest of Yaddo, who may well terminate our correspondence once he figures out that I’m pillaging his old emails for raw material. I can’t resist. Camilo, like me, is not an American and his descriptions share some of my semi-detached pot-colonial train-wreck fascination with the American Empire:

"The mansion itself, which we visited today, is an impressive scenario of ghostly splendour and opulence. It is a most intriguing and enticing space, tinged with history and everywhere you turn there is another famous name. The people who come here are the cultural "over-achievers" of this country and you hear places like Yale and Harvard being thrown around, but really a good and affable environment, where you meet wonderful people and put on the pounds like a criminal."

Speaking of over-achievers, here is Flannery O'Connor circa 1948 in Katrina Trask's "Tower Room" which many people think of as Truman Capote's room. I was in it yesterday (see above photo) but no-one calls it J. R. Carpenter's room.

To review the Yaddo pre-history: After fighting in the American Revolutionary War Battle of Saratoga Campaign in 1777, Jacobus Barhyte builds a tavern on this site and runs it successfully for the rest of his life. The Barhytes are buried on the grounds. 1856, Dr. Richard S. Childs moves the tavern and builds and ornate Italianate Late Victorian Queen Anne Villa on the site. By 1871 he’s in financial ruin and the villa sits abandoned for ten years. 1881, the Trasks rent the Childs place for a summer get-away. In her Chronicles of Yaddo our benefactress Katrina Trask writes:

"One morning in the late autumn of 1881, I sat in the desolate hall of the hideous old house which we had rented and occupied for five months… It mattered not at all that there were no comforts, not even running water; that the broken locks, open doors and every possible inconvenience tried our patience – if we allowed ourselves to think about them; all that was but as the dust of a high mountain road..."

Katrina’s longwinded, for a poet, but you get the idea: it was a hideous house. It burned down in 1891. An accident? Or a stroke of luck… Either way, the Trasks rebuilt immediately, completing the present mansion in 1893. The fireplace in the great hall sports a Tiffany mosaic of a phoenix rising from the ashes.

The Latin inscription reads:

flammis invicta per ignem Yaddo ad resurgo pacem

Our mansion, as I like to think of the present house, was modeled on Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. One problem with building an Elizabethan English country house in upstate New York is how much colder it is here. And hotter! In the summer, writers toil away to the whirr of electric fans like in the olden days, or, like how we do in Montreal, without any air conditioning.

I doubt I’m cut out for the social strain of a high summer season stay in the mansion, but I know I’ll apply one day. I’m just too curious a person. No matter how small a garret I am granted, no matter how loud it is, no matter how hot the days and bat infested and debauched the nights, and no matter little work I get done, I’d like join the fray just once so I can write about it after. I’m sure there’s a story lurking in every corner. Take this still life, for example. At least a thousand words.

. . . . .

casual elegance

Last night a dear friend from Montreal, who now lives near Saratoga, swept me away from Yaddo for the evening, Cinderella style, though we drove in a late model Volvo rather than a pumpkin-turned-carriage. Snow boots for glass slippers we slipped into The Gideon Putnam Resort and Spa, quite happy to have found the place, as most of what Barbara had by way of directions was: It’s in a sort of forest. Hmm… We now know it’s in the Saratoga State Park, near the Roosevelt and Lincoln Mineral Baths, golf, tennis and much more! There was an auction going on in the Georgian Dining Room, so we ate in the bar. From our corner table we surveyed the formal wear waltzing by. Most of the women wore evening dresses that differed slightly from one another in the amount of sequins and/or bare flesh shown. One woman walked by in a plain black paint suit. That’s me, Barbara said, That’s what I’d wear. I looked around. I haven’t got here yet, I said. Our Cinderella story shifted into an Eloise at the Plaza adventure as our small square table quickly became littered with cocktails and their accoutrements. Our waiter asked if we were from The City. Yes, we said. Montreal, we said, knowing full well he meant New York. I ordered a Manhattan, to further confuse him, and I told him I was at Yaddo. He said he’d wound up at Yaddo one night at 4AM and drunk out of his mind. That’s some crazy castle they’ve got, he said. They prefer to think of it as a mansion, I said. Since we now had Yaddo in common our waiter took a liking to us, took to slipping us glasses of Chardonnay pilfered from wandering wait staff trays intended for the formal wear clad headed for the auction in the Georgian Dining Room. Barbara and I giggled and gossiped our way through a lovely meal and made it home before her Volvo turned into a pumpkin. We’re thrilled to discover that, according to the postcards we swiped on the way out, The Gideon Putnam Resort and Spa is known the world over for its casual elegance and historic charm.

In “A Century At Yaddo,” the America novelist, short story and travel writer Eleanor Clark wrote of “the usual evening jaunts into Saratoga” during her stays at Yaddo between 1936 and 1951. There was a stable with saddle horses for hire on a side street on the other side of Union Avenue. “I used to ride from there when I could get the few dollars together, and was astonished the first time, on reaching a straight stretch of field of a mile or two, somewhere over by the Gideon Putnam, to have my steed turn on the instant into the equine equivalent of a bullet, headed for the horizon and impervious to bit, reins or human panic. I stayed on, having had a similar experience in Mexico with a horse trained for the movies... My present mount, I learned on slinking back to the stable, was neither a wicked beast nor an aspiring movie prop, but a recently retired race horse just doing his duty when the terrain called it to mind.”
. . . . .

The Best of Simple

American poet Langston Hughes was a guest at Yaddo in the early sixties. The Yaddo Authors’ library has four or five volumes of his short stories. I didn’t even know he wrote short stories. I’ve been reading The Best of Simple. Simple is a wisecracking Harlem rooming house living workingman night owl barstool philosopher. Funny, fast-talking and street-smart, these stories have got me started calling people daddy-o. In honour of the one glass of whiskey I drank at the open studio last night, one being enough to fuzz my head, here’s an excerpt from “Vacation” in which, Simple has just returned to Harlem having cut short a vacation in Saratoga Springs:


“What’s on the rail for the lizard this morning?” my friend Simple demanded about 1 A.M. at 125th and Lenox.

“Where have you been all week?” I countered, looking at the dark circles under his eyes.

“On my vacation at last,” said Simple.

“You look it! You appear utterly fatigued.”

“A vacation will tire a man out worse than work,” said Simple.

“Where did you go?”

“Saratoga – after the season was over and the rates is down.”

“What did you do up there?”

“Got bug-eyed.”

“You mean you drank liquor?” I enquired.

“I did not drink water,” said Simple.

“I though people went to Saratoga Springs to drink water.”

“Some do, some don’t,” said Simple, “depending on if you are thirsty or not. There is no water on Congress Street, nothing but bars…”

Langston Hughes, “Vacation” in The Best Of Simple, NY: Hill & Wang, 1961, p 34.

. . . . .

postcards from yaddo

I read about this thing on the Internet where people take days off. The week ends, apparently, and the people just stop working. Sounds crazy, but I thought I’d give it a try. Since I got here I’ve been working on a series of very short stories. Very short stories are sometimes called postcard stories. So I took the day off today and wrote postcards. Nine of them. All bearing the same picture…

The Yaddo Mansion, of course. All the postcards for sale in the Yaddo office are in black and white. Black and white makes everything look older. Especially old stuff. Sepia makes old looking old stuff look even older.

This look isn’t for everyone. I hope Yaddo sold colour postcards back when Elizabeth Bishop was a guest here.

“Postcards come from another world, the world of the grandparents who send things, the world of sad brown perfume, and morning. (The gray postcards of the village for sale in the village store are so unilluminating that they scarcely count. After all, one steps outside and immediately sees the same thing: the village, where we live, full size, and in color.)”

Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Village,” Questions of Travel, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965, page 52.

. . . . .

the smell of the sun

I was delighted to discover that New Zealand author Janet Frame was a guest at Yaddo in the late sixties. All the eight or so of her books in the Yaddo Author’s library are signed. Authentically, I think. The spectre of the post-mortem Plath autograph still haunts me. And speaking of haunting… here are the first paragraphs of The Reservoir, a short story which originally appeared in The New Yorker:

It was said to be four of five miles along the gully, past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse, and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits eating like modern sculpture into the hills, though how could be know anything of modern sculpture, we knew nothing but the Warrior in the main street with his wreaths of poppies on Anzac Day, the gnomes weeping in the Gardens because the seagulls perched on their green caps and showed no respect, and how important it was for birds, animals and people, especially children, to show respect!

And that is why for so long we obeyed the command of the grownups and never walked as far as the forbidden Reservoir, but were content to return “tired but happy” (as we wrote in our school compositions), answering the question, Where did you walk today? with a suspicion of blackmail, “Oh, nearly, nearly to the Reservoir!”

The reservoir was the end of the world; beyond it, you fell…

Janet Frame, “The Reservoir” in The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches, NY: George Braziller, 1963, pages 1-2.

It's hard to say why I love this story so much without giving the ending away. In the end, nothing happens! They all come out of it unscathed. And this is thrilling. A shock, after all the build-up. If I remember correctly, one of Frame’s sisters drowned in a reservoir. If that’s true, it makes the story all the more chilling. If it’s not true, it’s a testament to how chilling the story really is that I’m now convinced that someone drowned even through in the story no one did.

On a lighter note, Yaddo also has a beautiful illustrated children’s book by Frame: Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, in which: “Once upon a time, not long ago, almost now, there was a young House Ant called Mona Minim who was preparing to make her first journey out of the nest.” Here’s what Mona Minim wants to know: “What is the smell of blue when you are flying in the sky and the smell of the sun and of the wind that never blows close to the grass and earth? What is the smell of the sun?” Having already ruined the ending of one story I won’t divulge the answers to these very good questions.

Janet Frame, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, NY: George Braziller, 1969.
. . . . .

the birds are confused

My new favourite thing about Yaddo is its backup diesel generator. It kept us in dans le jus, as it were, while the rest of the region was black-iced-out. There were conflicting reports at the during-the-worst-of-it dinner. A fun kind of ghost story doomsday apocalyptic worst-case scenario sitting around the campfire let’s scare ourselves silly speculation went around the table. Some guests said some on the staff had said they’d rarely seen Yaddo in the dark. Others guests said they’d known other guests who’d been here without power for two days. We were only without for a few minutes on Monday and by now most of the region is up and running again. The branches stopped dropping but the temperature didn’t. It’s bright sun cold today.

The birds are confused. Their houses are icicled over and their trees are rearranged. They land on ice-fat limbs and find themselves sliding down sagging glissandos. They alight just like they used to onto familiar fur branches, only to find themselves singing their treetop songs three inches off the ground. There were lots of different kinds of birds surveying the scene outside the Pine Garde sun porch yesterday. I wish I were better with names. The very little ones were as excited as apostrophes. A few fat ones did some resting. Maybe they weren’t fat; maybe their heads were just really small. They were rat-coloured and had nothing to say. The white and blue duo might have been blue jays. Anyway, they were blue, and just flew through. The red one must have been a cardinal. He was very handsome, and knew just where to sit. In the high white frozen branches he looked his reddest. Witness to all this activity it’s clear to me that I know nothing about birds and perhaps a bird book would come in handy.
. . . . .

All Wrong for January

Sunday I took my first real walk around the grounds. A light freezing rain falling, I crunched across an ice-stiffened carpet of fallen pine tassel and glazed orange oak leaf. Ice coated emerald green mosses and brightened bare black branches to dull hematite sheen... colours all wrong for January's pallet.

Chickens appear to have been invited guests of Yaddo at some time. Their sagging long-abandoned coups are not the only half-ruined or boarded-up buildings one stumbles upon in these woods in winter. The northern edge of the estate edges on the Saratoga Race Track stables, all empty. In season the roar of the crowds can be heard at Yaddo. Especially, as one guest who has been here in summer pointed out, if you ditch your writing and join them in the stands.

According to a postcard procured from the Yaddo office, the stone tower is the Acosta Nichols Studio. According to Yaddo Yesterday and Today, the pamphlet written by Marjorie Peabody Waite in 1933 that’s left in all our bedrooms for perusal, the tower was built to store the year’s ice-supply, back in the days when ice was cut from lakes. A pretty idea, but not practical: condensation accumulating inside the stone tower, dungeon style, made the ice melt faster. The fanciful upper half of the tower is or was a composer’s studio. But not right now. Like the mansion and the chicken coop the stone tower is closed for winter.

Rain fell on a thin layer of lake ice frozen green. A sign said: No Swimming. Okay!

More freezing rain fell in the night. Much more. I woke to a sharp crack followed by a shower of glassy-tinkle. An ice storm. Anyone who was in Montréal for the big one knows the sound of big branches falling. And plenty fell today. I watched through my sun porch studio’s three walls of windows. The irony of “sun porch” in January never ceases.

Something went though George’s rear windshield so for a while everyone was out there moving cars. Cause shit’s coming down, my housemate said in a hurry to get to open ground. It’s five o’clock, still raining and the big branches are still coming down. Only now it’s dark and I can’t see them, only hear them, and jump, and imagine how far off they are, or how near. Okay, that one was damn near.

Pine Garde sun porch the morning after.
. . . . .

Pine Garde

Yaddo has always been called Yaddo. Well, ever since our benefactress Katrina Trask asked her four-year-old daughter: “What shall we name the place, Cuckoo?” And she said: “Call it ‘Yaddo,’ for it makes poetry! Yaddo, shadow – shadow, Yaddo!” That was in the 1880s. The Corporation of Yaddo was founded in 1900, but it was called Pine Garde until the spring of 1922, that is, until both the founders, Spencer and Katrina Trask, had passed away. In the fall of 1923 Elizabeth Ames was named Executive Director. She set to work preparing the mansion and estate for its first artist guests. Yaddo as we know it today opened its doors in June 1926. Elizabeth Ames lived in the mansion during guest-season and in town the rest of the year until April 1928 when a house was built for her on the grounds. They named it Pine Garde after the original title of the Corporation of Yaddo. It’s my house now, for a little while anyway. That sun porch… that’s my studio. Pas mal, pas mal du tout.


. . . . .

happiest days

A few days before I left for Yaddo my friend poet Todd Swift reminded me that Sylvia Plath was once a guest at Yaddo. Ariel was among the first books I sought out in the Yaddo Authors Library.

These poems, written in the months before she stuck her head in the oven, send a chill down my spine. Take these lines from Lady Lazarus:

Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.

In distressing contrast is the handwritten inscription inside the front cover, which can't be real as the dates are all wrong:

The talented but notoriously unstable poet Robert Lowell wrote the forward to this edition of Ariel. In early 1949 Lowell was a guest at Yaddo, and quite happy about it too, until he got wind of a rumour that long-time Yaddo resident Agnes Smedley was a Soviet spy. He believed this to be true in part because the New York Times said it was. In an elegantly savage harangue Lowell demanded the dismissal of Yaddo director Elizabeth Ames. One of Lowell’s biggest supporters in this campaign was fellow Yaddo resident Flannery O’Connor, though she had also been very happy at Yaddo until the communist controversy arose. February 14, 1949 she wrote:

We have been very upset at Yaddo lately and all the guests are leaving in a group on Tuesday – the revolution. I’ll probably have to be in New York for a month or so and I’ll be looking for a place to stay… All this is very disrupting to the book [Wise Blood] and has changed my plans entirely as I won’t be coming back to Yaddo unless certain measures go into effect here.

Smedley, though a committed communist, was not a spy. Ames stayed on as director. Lowell had a nervous breakdown. O’Connor was invited back to Yaddo, but never returned. She finished writing Wise Blood in a room in a NYC YWCA, which, she noted: “smelled like an unopened Bible.” Yaddo’s copy of Wise Blood, sadly, is not signed. I took it back to my studio anyway, to remind myself to stay away from political plots hatched by unstable poets lest I wind up demoted from Yaddo to the Y.
. . . . .

a dream come true

Very early yesterday morning I boarded a Greyhound bound for Saratoga Springs, New York. And what are you going to do in Saratoga Springs; they wanted to know at the border. I was somewhat disappointed that none of the US customs and immigration officials had ever heard of Yaddo, but relieved that they let me into the country anyway.
Rain cratered the Saratoga Springs bus stop parking lot puddles. I found a taxi right away, but the driver had never head of Yaddo either. And he was al local. I was starting to think that Yaddo was fictional. Makes sense considering it’s a place you hear about most from fiction writers. I quickly learned, from my chatty cranked-up cabbie, that he was really a bricklayer – in the union and everything, he assured me – who had only just started driving a cab after his recent injury. Luckily I had consulted a number of online maps prior to my departure and was able to tell him where to take me: it’s on Union Avenue, past the racetrack. It’s an estate; look for a gate, or an archway or something. So what are you going to do at Ya-doo; he wants to know. It’s a place for artists and writers… You mean poets? Yeah… Well, it turns out my fast-talking bricklaying cabbie is a poet. What do I want to hear – a wisdom poem, a love poem, or what? Okay, give me your best wisdom poem. And off he goes. A street poet. A white rapper. Very 8 Mile.

Just when I think he’s going to challenge me to a poetry slam duel right there in the cab, he spots the gate. Ya-doo! he cries. Good eye. We turn in onto a narrow road that winds through close tall evergreens, across a river, past a waterfall… So you’ve never been here before? No. Damn! Now that’s a mansion. We take a few wrong turns and wind up out on the road again. He pulls a u-turn across four lanes of traffic and then another one and there we are back at the gate. When we finally find the office I ask him to wait till I find someone who can tell me where to take my luggage. He comes into the office with me. We’re both impressed by how old the building is. This wall is plaster, he says. You couldn’t punch a hole through it if you tried. Good to know. A few minutes later, and not a moment too soon, the programme coordinator gets into the cab with us and we proceed deeper into the estate. At the dreamy creamy cottage that will be my home for the next 5.5 weeks, we get out and I ask my cabbie what I own him. Whatever you want to give, he says. This one’s off-meter.

And so now all of a sudden I’m here. Yaddo does exist after all. The mansion is closed for the winter, though it hardly feels like winter. It’s January and the grass is green. I live in Pine Garde, a house much lovelier than its name, which is evocative of cleaning supplies and deodorants. My studio is in the sun porch. My other studio is in the back off of my bedroom. Two studios? Yes, and an en suite bathroom. And a kitchen and living room with a working fireplace and only one other writer living and working in the house. Could I be dreaming all this? It is quite possible that I am.

I arrived at Yaddo exhausted, trailing a string of late nights, sleepless nights, groggy mornings and busy days. I’m sure I made a less than clever first impression. I kept re-asking people’s names at dinner but they were nice about it. Most imagined Montreal was a long day’s travel from Saratoga. And in an attempt to justify my mental sluggishness I did little to dispel this myth. Geographically Montreal and New York City are the same distance from Saratoga Springs. Culturally, New York is very close to here. Many of the New Yorkers in residence have been to Montreal and love the city. I am the only Canadian here at the moment and although I have not traveled a greater distance than most to get here, yesterday, after dinner, perusing the library of Yaddo Authors, it came over me what a long journey it has been.

Last night I crawled into bed early with a stack of books written by illustrious guests of Yaddo, some written at Yaddo, some quite possibly written in my Pine Garde sun porch. I fell asleep immediately and for the first time in weeks I slept heavily and for a long time.

Toward morning I dreamt that I was at Yaddo. I have been having this dream for years, but this time it was much more vivid. Finally, all the details filled in. I woke up and guess what! A dream come true.
. . . . .

off to the races

It seems like I just got home from Wyoming. Time flies in festivity city. We’ve been socializing non-stop for a month. We used up all our going-out clothes. And drank enough to last us into February. And now all of a sudden, I’m off again! Next Monday I board a Greyhound bound for Saratoga Springs, New York, where I'll spend six weeks at a writing residency at Yaddo: http://yaddo.org/

Yaddo is America’s oldest artists' community, but most Canadians have never heard of it, so here’s a bit of history: Saratoga Springs is a small Victorian city nestled in the Adirondack Mountains, about half way between Montréal and New York City. There was a decisive civil war battle there in 1777. Politicians and robber barons – from Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson and Washington Irving to the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and J. P. Morgan, et al. – have graced Saratoga’s mineral spring spas. With the influx of the wealthy social elite, horseracing developed. Naturally. The first thoroughbred crossed the finish line at the Saratoga racetrack in 1863. The financier Spencer Trask and his poet wife Katrina founded Yaddo on their 400-acre Saratoga Springs estate in 1900. The property had previously housed a farm, gristmill, and tavern operated by Jacobus Barhyte, a Revolutionary War veteran. Many well-known writers of the 1830s and 1840s dined at Barhyte's tavern, among them Edgar Allen Poe, who is said to have written at least part of "The Raven" on a visit there. Spencer Trask died in a train wreck in 1909 and Katrina Trask died in 1922. Yaddo has been operating in its present form since 1926. In the 1930's natives began to complain about the influx of gamblers, gangsters, bookies, pimps and prostitutes. I’m sure there’s no connection. John Cheever once wrote that the "forty or so acres on which the principal buildings of Yaddo stand have seen more distinguished activity in the arts than any other piece of ground in the English-speaking community and perhaps the world."

On the other hand, my friend Camilo De Las Flores had this to say upon his arrival at Yaddo two years ago: "Yaddo is really an easy going and welcoming sort of place. There is what appears to be a huge castle that they promote in the brochures, but it really is only what it appears to be a medium size mansion. I initially thought it was a practical joke to get in such a prestigious historical place. I was hoping to see a lot of old mummified aristocrats with powered wigs and monocles, but instead found a bunch of young and vibrant kids and a couple of moms hanging out and having a good time. You do get really remarkable people like, Harvard Professors and guys in their mid thirties with Guggenheim and other such fellowships and CV's the size of my head. There was a very young but very talented writer who was a high school dropout, but who was certainly endowed with great talent. I really think that that is what they are looking for."



"the castle they promote in the brochures"
. . . . .