lapsus linguae

pieces came together

This is my last night at Yaddo. It’s too soon for elegies. It’s bloody cold here at the moment, but these lines from Jane Mayhall’s poem “Balland of Playing Tennis With Theodore Roethke at Yaddo” and this photo I took of a Yaddo backwoods radiator graveyard are somehow emblematic of my contradictory thoughts on leaving. Am I sad to go? No. Am I glad to have been here? Absolutely. Did I get a lot done? How should I know? Things have accumulated. I’ll look at them later.

… And pieces came together
in the unifying decree of
the holt melting
Yaddo sun.

. . . . .

Roads Out of Rome

Roads Out of Rome appears in Geist #63, on newsstands now.

All roads lead to Rome. It stands to reason that they lead out of Rome as well. It’s helpful to know someone who has a car. And isn’t afraid to use it. When in Rome, one thing to do not as the Romans do, is to drive. In Roads Out of Rome, my Roman friend Barbara drives me around and I live to tell the tale.

Here’s an excerpt:

“So now I trust Barbara: to not kill us, even when she’s shout-talking in Roman dialect on her mobile phone; to know where we’re going, even if not how to get there; and to always be late, unless I’m late, in which case she will be early. Today I was early and she was very late.”

J. R. Carpenter, Roads Out of Rome

See also: How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
. . . . .

Is this place haunted or am I just tired?

No way Yaddo is as haunted as Wyoming, but still, some strange stuff has been going on around here. For one thing, none of us can sleep. That’s the good news. For the longest time I thought I was the only one showing up at the dinner table out of sorts. For a month now I’ve been stumbling through surreal somnolent conversations feeling like the odd-man-out but now I see that none of us are quite ourselves.

One guy here reminds me of a much calmer version of a friend in Montreal. He says, if he appears calm it’s only because he subdued from not having slept in five nights. I was envious of the composer for having the composer’s cabin all to himself, with no neighbours to walk on his ceiling, but then he gave quite a convincing impersonation of the heating system that wakes him up every two hours and I did my best rendition of the acetylene torch sound the pipes in the wall by my bed make every time the guy in the room above mine opens his faucet. Now the composer and I are pals. Until one of us gets some sleep anyway. The guy in the room above mine says he was out walking in the woods late one night last week and an animal bigger than a fox and smaller than a German Shepard ran across his path. Then the PA system the Saratoga Race Track come on and played some off-to-the-races type music. In summer Race Track fanfare comes though the Yaddo woods loud and clear, but the stands and stables are all empty in winter and no matter how fantastic a sentence one finishes, one never hears the roar of the crowds.

I have heard screams on three late night occasions, a woman screaming in the woods back behind Pine Garde. The screams do not sound like they’re from pleasure. One hears about all the illicit sex that goes on at artists’ colonies. I imagine that during the summer season the bat-infested mansion is a carnival fun house of screams and moans. In this small cold season of close quarters and hot dry rooms, whatever sexual indiscretions may or many not be transpiring, they are most discreet. Some guests live nearby enough to arrange for conjugal visits. Others drink. Ping-pong is fun for a few minutes. Generally, most are too insomnia-exhausted to think up more imaginative uses for excess night hours. That’s where the ghosts come in. They see their opening and they go for it. My friend Daniel C. wrote in an email yesterday:

“I have a theory about sleeplessness in castles: that is the way that the ghosts insure their reality – keeping us awake to wonder at their presence.”

All four Trask children died young, but none appear to haunt Yaddo. Their mother, Katrina, took to wearing shapeless white dresses after, attempting, perhaps, to get a head start on her haunting of the place while she was still alive. Many guests have claimed to hear other guests claim to see Katrina’s ghost. Mostly it’s past guests themselves who haunt Yaddo. When my friend Camilo was here he said:

“I believe that I got Sylvia Plath’s room, I kept on thinking about her cold dead body when lying in that cold, cozy bed and hoping to have an extraordinary encounter with her mythological phantasm.”

Just when I thought I’d tried everything to shake my insomnia, yesterday afternoon I hit upon my new favourite miracle-cure: really loud punk rock music. I made a play-list of songs so aggressive they compelled me out into the freezing afternoon and propelled me around the lakes very fast twice. This tuckered me right out. Then I went to bed with drunken dead old Truman Capote. In his 1948 novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, the lakes and mansions are so much more haunted that Yaddo’s… but maybe he caught his haunt as a guest here. This is the last passage I read before drifting off to sleep last night:

“Drowning Pond. That was the name colored folks gave it. Slowly old creek-slime, filtering through the limestone springs, had dyed the water an evil color; the lawns, the road, the paths all turned wild; the wide veranda caved in; the chimneys sank low in the swampy earth; storm-uprooted trees leaned against the porch; and water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom’s decaying piano. It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.” Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms

Despite this haunt-ridden reading material, I slept quite well. No water-snakes strummed my dreams and, I went and checked, the Yaddo mansion’s wide veranda has not caved in.

. . . . .

privacy being of the utmost importance

I wonder if Jonathan Ames is any relation to Elizabeth Ames, first Executive Director of Yaddo, who’s house I’m living in at the moment. Jonathan Ames’s novel, Wake Up, Sir! is set at an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. He calls his not even thinly disguised Yaddo The Rose Colony. Katrina Trask loved roses, as manifest in rose colours, carvings, windows and sconces all over the mansion, and, of course, Yaddo’s famous rose gardens, open to the public in season.

“The track and the colony were on Union Avenue, and separating the two was a stretch of dense forest, and in the middle of these woods was the rather secretive entrance to the Rose, privacy being of the utmost importance for artists, since you don’t want the tax-paying public to know about the creative process – how much napping and procrastinating are involved – because otherwise what little funding there is would be cut immediately.” Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!

Apparently the entrance to Yaddo was originally just south of the track on Nelson Ave. It’s now east of the track on Union. Opps! Pay no attention, tax-paying public. You didn’t hear that from me.

. . . . .

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.
. . . . .