lapsus linguae

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.
. . . . .