© Columbia University Press
Yaddo: Making American Culture
Paper, 184 pages, 125 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14737-8
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November, 2008
Cloth, 184 pages, 125 illus.
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Introduction: Creative Power: Yaddo and the Making of American Culture
Micki McGee
"Is it right for one person to own vast property whilst another has nowhere to lay his head? Should the fortunate few possess so much more than the unfortunate many who do the work? The wretched inequality of life staggers me. What right have I to an income that enables me to live a life of ease and luxury, whilst my fellow-men can wrest by their toil only the merest pittance. It is all wrong. The time will come when the distribution of wealth will be very different. In the meantime, however, no one alone can change the established order: we can only go on working and doing our best to make new laws and to help on a new order: and during the waiting for the coming of these economic changes great homes and great houses will still have their place; and our first individual duty is to make, in that waiting time, at least a new spiritual order."—Katrina Trask , 1918
"Yaddo we are glad to believe has come to be a source of fruitful help & inspiration to many, and especially to those Gifted with Creative power & who have had the impulse to use it for their fellow men.... We desire to found here a permanent Home to which shall come from time to time for Rest & Refreshment authors painters sculptors musicians and other artists both men & women few in number and chosen for their Creative Gifts & besides & not less for the power & the will & the purpose to make these Gifts useful to the World."—Spencer Trask, 1900
Financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, the poet and playwright Katrina Trask, conceived of Yaddo as a gift to those “gifted with Creative power”—as a place of respite for creative workers whose labors were not likely to be supported by the mechanisms of an expanding market economy that had so generously rewarded the Trasks’ own undertakings. The 400acre artists’ retreat in upstate New York was incorporated in 1900 at a moment in America’s history when a division between popular and high culture had only recently taken hold. With this new cultural stratification came the idea that an elite culture, one that would uplift rather than pander to popular tastes, would require new, nonmarket-driven forms of patronage. The ideal of culture as a gift to be protected from the exchanges of the marketplace emerged. Yet despite these origins in a late-nineteenth-century moment when economic and cultural elites were concerned with supporting a particular sort of “pure” high art with a capital “A” that would civilize the teeming masses, across the coming decades a divergent array of cultural products, many of them immensely popular and hardly haute, can be traced to Yaddo’s support. Yaddo’s story, only now emerging from its records made public at The New York Public Library, provides a window on these developments. Yaddo’s archive reveals not only the labors of those cultural figures whose names might appear in a survey course of twentieth-century American literature or art but also a sense of the vast expanse of usually underrecognized creative activity and unrecognized administrative labor that contributes to the bedrock of cultural life.
The story of Yaddo’s impact on American culture begins with the Trask family in the late nineteenth century. Spencer Trask was a passionate member of an emerging class of financiers who bet on the new technologies and intellectual properties of the Gilded Age and won big. He built his fortune from the expansion of the railways, the distribution of electricity, and by rallying support for the New York Times when the paper seemed doomed to bankruptcy. Katrina Trask, in keeping with the gendered spheres of the era, ran the family’s multiple households, cultivated her own talents as a writer, and developed a series of salons at Yaddo that hosted some of the most distinguished artists and luminaries of the day. The Trasks shared an abiding faith in creativity as a transformative force that would necessarily improve life for humankind. Creative power would not only ameliorate the conflicts and hardships wrought by modernity’s ingenuity but also transmute personal loss, of which the Trasks would have more than their share, into public goods.
The mythology that has sprung up around Yaddo’s founding inevitably places individual actors as prime movers in a saga of personal triumph over considerable adversity. However, from other perspectives, Yaddo owes its existence to a convergence of forces. A roiling and rapacious American capitalism that was expanding westward with the advance of the railways allowed Yaddo’s founders to accumulate a vast fortune, some $15 million at the turn of the century, roughly equivalent to $1.1 billion today. An economic inequality that Katrina Trask herself found deeply troubling was at the heart of Yaddo’s emergence. The prevalence of childhood mortality that just a few decades later would be vastly reduced with the medical advances of antibiotics and vaccines deprived the Trasks of their four biological heirs. The nineteenth-century division of daily life into separate arenas for men and women focused Katrina Trask’s considerable talents on developing Yaddo as a salon for artists and intellectuals of the day. Perhaps most significantly, these social and material circumstances were animated by a Romantic impulse, an antimodernist sensibility replete with a pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for round-table gatherings in medieval courts, courtly damsels in flowing white gowns, and mystical epiphanies in wooded glens. At Yaddo these Arthurian ideals were inscribed in the baronial mansion itself, with its heralds and the Trasks’ own emblems—for her, the rose, and for him, the pine tree. Katrina’s image, as the woman in white who would preserve purity and morality from the encroachment of instrumental reason and the monotony, regimentation, and conformity of an advancing industrial era, presides over the mansion.
For nineteenth-century Romantics, creativity was the antidote not only for the shortcomings of any given life but for the failures of modernity as well. The poet was the hero of this world, and the bucolic countryside, rather than the barricaded boulevard, was the site of social transformation. Creative evolution offered an appealing alternative to the political revolution that everywhere threatened to erupt and change the social landscape. Culture—a “high culture” that was not readily viable in the realm of commercial exchange—had begun to be seen as sacred, rarefied, and redemptive, as a civilizing force that would enlighten the populace and transform the unruly masses. Private symphonies and operas became not-for-profit enterprises, and the groundwork for the museum as a nondenominational temple of fine art was laid. Artists’ retreats, though not exclusively a phenomenon of modernity, were part of this trend toward alternative means of artistic patronage and a desire to sequester art making from the labor of everyday life and the vagaries of the marketplace. America’s artists’ retreats, among them the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Byrdcliffe in New York’s Catskills, the Provincetown Fine Arts Workshop in Massachusetts, and the Cos Cob and Old Lyme colonies in Connecticut, offered rural or seaside refuge from the noise, congestion, and poverty of urban centers. The new spiritual order that Katrina Trask envisioned was an alternative to the breakneck speed of industrialization and the ruthless competition of capitalism. Yaddo would be a place apart, an alternative universe where shadows—not only of childhood mortality but also of desperate poverty and urban squalor—would be vanquished in the glow of a “sacred fire.”
George Foster Peabody was Spencer Trask’s business partner for a quarter of a century, a close and influential family friend, and a resolute admirer of Katrina, whom he married in the last year of her life. Shortly after Katrina died in 1922, Peabody set about establishing Yaddo in accordance with the trust the Trasks had set up in 1900. The civic-minded progressive and philanthropist had developed a close relationship with a young woman named Marjorie Knappen Waite, whom he adopted in 1926. Waite’s sister, Elizabeth Ames, visited the estate in 1923 and took on the task of cataloguing the Trasks’ eclectic art collection. Within the year, the thirtyeight-year-old Ames was named the first executive director of Yaddo.
Although little is known about Elizabeth Ames before her arrival at Yaddo, over the next four and a half decades she would have a lasting influence on American arts and letters through her leadership and administration of the Trask-Peabody legacy. Ames took on the project of establishing the administration of Yaddo with the utmost dedication. She reached out to leaders in the literary, musical, and visual arts to establish a network of confidential advisers, including Lewis Mumford, Alfred Kreymborg, and the Van Dorens—Irita, Carl, and Mark—whose recommendations shaped the earliest guest lists and, in time, the membership of Yaddo and its board of directors. Alfred Kreymborg, who was editing the influential annual American Caravan with Lewis Mumford, wrote Ames in 1928 to alert her to the fact that “Mr. Aaron Copland, the distinguished young American composer, is most anxious to spend a couple of months at Yaddo if the idea is agreeable to you and there is room for him.” Ames would find a space for Copland, who visited in 1930, composing his Piano Variations in the Stone Tower, a studio that had once served as the estate’s icehouse. He also conceived and established the Yaddo Festival of Contemporary Music, which continued for two decades and helped to reposition American classical music. Lewis Mumford was a particularly influential adviser. In 1928 he wrote Ames: “Are the gates to Yaddo closed for the summer? If not, I should like to recommend to you Mr. Newton Arvin. He is a very able young critic & scholar, one of the very best in the country.” Arvin visited in the summer of 1928, working on his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and developing a relationship with Yaddo and Ames that continued for the rest of his life. (Barry Werth’s essay in this volume considers Arvin’s long and complicated relationship with Yaddo.) Mark Van Doren, then an editor at the Nation, recommended Lionel Trilling, who in turn nominated Alfred Kazin, who in turn proposed a young Smith College student: “The best writer at Smith, and a very remarkable girl in every way, is Sylvia Plath, she is the real thing. She is graduating in June.” Also in 1928, Irita Van Doren, book review editor at the New York Herald Tribune, recommended a promising young poet and translator: “I haven’t any candidates right off the bat, except one young man, Malcolm Cowley, for whom Yaddo would be perfect.... He is a poet of infrequent but distinctive verse, an excellent translator from the French . . . poor as a church mouse with no visible means of support.” Cowley’s prospects would improve. He went on to join the editorial staff of the New Republic , wrote his first book of literary criticism, Exile’s Return, at Yaddo in 1932, and participated in shaping policies and admissions at Yaddo over the next five decades, supporting the applications of Agnes Smedley, Truman Capote, and countless others.
Determining who was to be invited to Yaddo was of central importance; establishing the routine of daily life at Yaddo was only slightly less so. Ames would develop a regimen at Yaddo that was singularly conducive to any creative art that required solitude. Quiet hours—from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. each day—prohibited visiting or loud conversation anywhere on the premises. Deviations from this rule ended in enforced departures. A 1931 guest, Diana Trilling, reported that she was summarily dispatched back to New York City on the next train “without lunch” for having visited a photographer during quiet hours to have her photograph shot in available light. In general, families were supposed to be left behind in the city. The exception to this rule was for couples where both were artists and had been invited on their individual merits or, in the earliest days of Yaddo (between 1926 and 1940), when the corporation also hosted guests at a second estate on Triuna Island in Lake George and allowed some guests with families to stay on at a renovated farmhouse on the north end of the property called North Farm.
The idea that one needed to be sequestered for creativity to thrive, although widely accepted, was one that some writers have found perplexing. The theologian and writer Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps best known for crafting the Serenity Prayer invoked by millions of recovering addicts, was invited by Ames in 1937 at the suggestion of Lewis Mumford. Niebuhr expressed bewilderment at the idea of leaving his family to isolate himself and do creative work: “I am afraid that even such an inviting project as a month at your place would do me no good if the hospitality is meant just for an individual, as I have a wife and small son.” Others invited to Yaddo—for example Robinson Jeffers, recommended by Mark Van Doren in 1926, and Arthur Miller, invited in 1955—declined invitations as they felt well situated to write exactly where they were. The poet Delmore Schwartz, who was recently married when he arrived at Yaddo in 1939 for a visit, defied the ban, smuggling meals to his new bride, Gertrude Buckman, whom he had hidden in his studio. Eventually, Ames relented and allowed the newlyweds to join the group for dinner in the mansion. Novelist Mario Puzo, who had twice visited Yaddo to work on his earliest novels, left early on a third visit, writing Ames: “Sorry I didn’t get to see you before I left and I was sorry I couldn’t stay. I was having a good time but for some reason I wasn’t working too well. Probably because the older I get the more Italian-peasant I get and so I can’t be happy unless I’m bossing a bunch of kids around and hearing a lot of noise.”
An escape from family responsibilities and earning a living was not the only sort of refuge that Yaddo provided. Shortly after it began receiving guests, the stock market crash ushered in an era of widespread economic desperation. Ames saw to it that all possible buildings on the property were made ready to house artists and writers whose prospects were crushed by the economic crisis of the Great Depression. As the financial crisis deepened, life at the colony was adjusted so that shrinking budgets could meet the needs of more artists and writers than ever before. A formal breakfast and lunch gave way to a buffet in the morning and lunchboxes at noon, saving on sta. time, and guests were asked to take care of their own housekeeping.
Artists and writers counted on their time at Yaddo as a lifeline for themselves and their work, and extending stays became a matter of concern. Until the mid-1940s, confidential advisers made recommendations for Yaddo’s guest list, but Ames had extraordinary discretion in deciding whom to invite and to whom extended invitations of more than a month would be made. Beneficiaries of Ames’s favor included a young John Cheever, who spent several Depression summers at Yaddo, including at least one working as the boatman ferrying guests back and forth across Lake George to the Triuna property; novelist James T. Farrell, whose wife, Dorothy, worked as Ames’s assistant, drawing a paycheck that supported the couple while they lived at the North Farm property; and husband and wife visual artists Philip Reisman and Penina Kishore, each of whom created illustrations for Yaddo.
As the economic crisis of the Depression precipitated the rise of European fascism and World War II, Yaddo increasingly came to host individuals escaping the expansion of the German Third Reich. When the mansion reopened for the summer of 1939, Yaddo’s guest list included six refugees from Germany and Austria, including Hermann Broch, author of The Sleepwalkers; Rudolf Charles von Ripper, a painter and printmaker; and Richard Berman, a newspaper correspondent, who would die of a heart attack in his room at Yaddo when he learned of the German invasion of Poland. By the summer of 1943, Yaddo’s guests also included the Danish novelist Karin Michaëlis, whose support for Jewish refugees ultimately forced her to flee the advancing German army.
Although artists at Yaddo were insulated from the demands of daily life—from familial obligations and the labors associated with making a living&mndash;isolation was (and remains) an occupational hazard of many creative pursuits. While solitude may be productive, isolation can be stultifying. At Yaddo, the hours spent writing, composing, and painting, largely alone, are alleviated both by the social life that unfolds in the late afternoon and evening and by the sense that one is surrounded by the history of artists and writers who have labored at Yaddo. In later essays in this volume, literary critic Helen Vendler describes her experience of solitude and community at Yaddo, Allan Gurganus hails the legacy that launches and supports ongoing accomplishment, and Marcelle Clements captures the inspiration that comes from working in a room where literary legends have also toiled.
Social life at Yaddo, especially dalliances and liaisons of any variety, has become the material of literary lore. Newton Arvin, the refined and closeted literature professor from Smith College, met and mentored the young, unabashed Truman Capote at Yaddo in the summer of 1947. The three-year relationship that followed was life-changing for each of them, but especially for Capote, who benefited from Arvin’s passionate support. Henry Roth, whose 1934 novel Call It Sleep used the groundbreaking modernist stream of consciousness of James Joyce’s Ulysses to portray New York’s Lower East Side, came to Yaddo in 1938 at the recommendation of his Greenwich Village lover, Yaddo adviser Eda Lou Walton. That summer he met and married the singer and composer Muriel Parker, who put aside her career in music to support their life together. The novelist Josephine Herbst visited Yaddo in 1939 and fell in love with painter Marion Greenwood, forming a deep relationship that ultimately led to the end of her long marriage to fellow writer John Herrman. On a later Yaddo visit, Herbst met the poet Jean Garrigue, and the two formed a passionate and lifelong attachment. An infatuated Carson McCullers, visiting Yaddo for the first time in 1941, is said to have prostrated herself outside the door of Katherine Anne Porter’s room until a disgusted Porter, anxious to avoid being late to dinner, stepped over the younger writer without saying a word. The enmity that followed peppers the letters of McCullers, Porter, and their mutual friend, composer David Diamond, who attempted, often to no avail, to maintain good relations with each of them. Porter wrote of McCullers and a fellow guest, Rebecca Pitts: “My personal feeling about them is very simple: so long as they do not get near enough to me to behave as they so barbarously do to me ... I cannot care what they do or where they are. I think—and this opinion was formed on a first reading of Carson’s first book long before I ever saw her or any one who knew her—that it was a peculiarly corrupt, perverted mind and a small stunted talent incapable of growth: and her further work has borne this out in my mind.”
The constant flow of guests, some distinguished and some emerging talents, created a heady mix that allowed for what social networks theorists call “the strength of weak links.” A community gains strength in the numbers of connections and relationships rather than simply by the intensity of the relationships or the frequency of contact. Close friends or mentors may offer the occasional assistance. For example, Katherine Anne Porter sponsored the young and unknown Eudora Welty for a visit to Yaddo in 1941 and wrote a critically important introduction to the younger author’s first book of short stories, A Curtain of Green. But a larger network of support, inspired by the amicable surroundings that Yaddo fostered, provides more extensive and long-lasting assistance. So, for example, several Yaddo guests rallied to support the work of ailing composer Dante Fiorillo, assisting him in securing the first of two Guggenheim foundation grants. Yaddo friends John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Katz, and Hilton Kramer ensured that realist novelist and political activist Josephine Herbst would not live out her senior years in penury by facilitating support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and, in Kramer’s case, by handling the Beinecke Library’s purchase of her papers. .. Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor would leave Yaddo in the winter of 1949 in part so that Lowell could introduce the younger writer to his editor, Robert Giroux, whom he thought would be more sympathetic to her singular vision. .. As Ames observed, “Yaddo brings together naturally and in amity a wide range of backgrounds and personalities, minds and interests. Probably nowhere else is this diversity of minds and experience to be found coming together, not for a purpose common to all, but each for its especial achievements, the contribution to the whole being a by-product. Th e important contributions which our guests make to each other are spontaneous and occur because of Yaddo’s unprogrammed leisure.”.. The secret of Yaddo’s success in supporting artists was in kindling the a. ectionate a.liation among members that would build a network of support for them far beyond the gated enclave in Saratoga Springs. As painter Cly.ord Still wrote to Ames after a 1934 visit: “Yaddo has given me friends to paint for: you, and Dante, Jimmy, Harris, the Norrises—ever so many.”.. These creative communities, as Karl Willers points out in his consideration of the visual artists who have worked at Yaddo, are in great measure the source of an artist’s creative power. Although an artist’s work may seem to be authored alone, an artwork is a social activity, situated in a dialogue with the conventions that preceded it and, if widely enough disseminated, the artworks that follow.
Although never at the center of Yaddo’s mission, collaborations were also an inevitable outcome of Yaddo’s pattern of mutual aid and community building. The early avant-garde photographer and filmmaker Ralph Steiner, who was a guest in 1929, collaborated with Yaddo advisers Lewis Mumford and Aaron Copland (as well as with Willard Van Dyke) on the 1939 film The City, a visual essay articulating Mumford’s vision for environmental planning. Critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin, a guest numerous times between 1942 and 1971, and photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a guest in 1946 and 1947, published a text-and-image homage to the Brooklyn Bridge in the September 1946 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The two had been guests at Yaddo in 1946 when Cartier-Bresson, who had been in hiding throughout World War II, arrived in the United States to put . nishing touches on his Museum of Modern Art retrospective, an exhibition that the museum had originally imagined would be a posthumous memorial. In 1959 poet Mona van Duyn and printmaker Frederick Becker collaborated on a limited edition book, Valentines to the Wild World. Mischievous and informal partnerships flourished as well—painter Philip Guston adorned the body of novelist William Gass; poets Jane Mayhall and May Swenson wrote and performed the “Yaddo Blues,” an insider’s lament of being cast back out into the real world at the end of a stay.
Perhaps the greatest number of collaborations took place in the more formal settings of the Yaddo music festivals. Despite the financial hardships of the Depression era, Ames and Yaddo’s directors took the remarkable step of sponsoring the Festival of Contemporary American Music in 1932. Instituted at the urging of Aaron Copland, the festival was intended to establish a place for America’s classical composers to share their work and to develop a more congenial dialogue with music critics who had been openly hostile to newer musical explorations. Tim Page’s essay details the history of this seminal project and the sense of community and collaboration that the festivals engendered. In 1937 Ames and Yaddo’s board again defied the economic constraints of the period by investing in a recording system that preserved many of the performances of the 1937–1940 seasons. Over the following two decades, there would be nine festivals (later renamed Music Periods) that fostered collaborations between musicians and writers that often continued long after the festivals at Yaddo had concluded. Marc Blitzstein composed an opera based on Bernard Malamud’s short story “Idiots First” (1957); Ned Rorem wrote “Conversation” (1957), a song for piano and voice based on a poem by Elizabeth Bishop; and David Diamond composed “Twisted Trinity” (1943), a cycle of songs based on texts by Carson McCullers and others.
“Community” and “collaboration”—these words invoke a sense of an unambiguous goodness, a vision of cheerful cooperation of the parts resulting in a seamless whole. But any community or collaboration that exists without contention is fictive, utopian precisely because they exist nowhere. Yaddo is no different in this respect. Often controversies concern the boundaries of the community itself: who shall be included and who shall be excluded, or in some cases banished. In the earliest years of the community, sponsors made these decisions, identifying and recommending possible guests. Later, admissions committees evaluated work samples in a more formal process that determined who would be invited. The fabric of a community is woven by these many modest moments of admitting one and rejecting another, in the reinvitation or refusal of the next. An institution, although conceived in its papers of incorporation, is made and remade in the minutiae of such actions. Over time and in the aggregate, these decisions accumulate into a sense of who made an appropriate Yaddo guest—and who wasn’t quite suitable.
Thus the efforts of editor Dorothy Norman to secure Henry Miller an invitation to Yaddo were fruitless. Though the archival documents are silent on the particulars, Miller was never a Yaddo guest, and one imagines that his roguish reputation preceded him. Members of the Beats were not sought out as guests; admissions committee member Morton Dauwen Zabel, a long-standing editor of Poetry magazine, listed Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti under the heading “Doubtful cases” in his 1960 admission commitee notes. Zabel commented: “I recommend that they be passed over; it is fairly certain that difficulties would result from their visits. Moreover, I myself do not believe they merit consideration as writers, whatever their present reputation may be.” Sculptor Eva Hesse, applying in 1967 with enthusiastic letters of support from critics Brian O’Doherty and Lucy Lippard, did not gain admission. One admissions committee member described her early postminimal string sculpture as “sprayed glue, strings attached, all sprayed gray,” concluding with the judgment: “Bad taste and weak form.” Another commented, “I would like to see more craftsmanship in her work.”
These judgments and occasional misjudgments were typically anonymous and confidential, and therefore appear seamless. However, on occasion the warp and woof of the social fabric is stretched or torn as it comes into contact with larger social forces. At Yaddo some of the most notable moments of disjunction coincided with the significant issues of social justice at stake during the twentieth century: the segregation and discrimination that marked the Jim Crow era, the paranoia and betrayals that characterized the red scare of the McCarthy period, and the secrecy and the sensationalism that accompanied the outing of homosexuals prior to the gay rights movement (and that regrettably continues today). Yaddo, though imagined as a place of respite from the affairs of the world, was anything but sequestered from these conflicts.
To Yaddo’s credit, and in keeping with the values of its founders—who had sponsored Adolph Ochs to take control of the New York Times when anti-Semites would have opposed the move, hosted Booker T. Washington in their home, and, in the case of George Foster Peabody, devoted the second half of his life to cultivating educational institutions for African Americans—the artists’ retreat was significantly ahead of the rest of the country in voting to end racial segregation among its guests. In 1941, some six years before Jackie Robinson would cut through baseball’s color line and play with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Yaddo’s directors made the controversial decision to integrate admissions. Urged on by literary critic and longtime adviser Newton Arvin, who had been deeply troubled by the racial exclusions of the admissions advisers with whom he served, the Yaddo leadership voted to open Yaddo’s doors to “Negroes properly qualified.” For a more detailed discussion of this, see Barry Werth’s essay.)
In 1942, Yaddo’s doors opened to African American writers, composers, and visual artists including first Langston Hughes and composer R. Nathaniel Dett (in 1942) and later poet Margaret Walker (1943), sculptor Selma Burke (1946), sociologist and memoirist Horace P. Cayton (1946, 1947), editor and folklorist Arna Bontemps (1947, 1948), painter Beauford Delaney (1950, 1951), composer Ulysses Kay (six times between 1946 and 1971), and novelists Chester Himes (1948) and James Baldwin (1955), among others. Elizabeth Ames would take a personal interest in the integration of Yaddo and the surrounding Saratoga Springs establishments, writing to the owner of The New Worden, a local hotel and restaurant, to ensure that Langston Hughes would not be excluded. Despite these extraordinary efforts, a question raised by correspondence in the Yaddo records but not yet fully answered by research, is to what extent the formal integration of Yaddo was subtly undermined by “well-intentioned” inquiries about the behavior of African American guests. An initial review of the files of several African American men at Yaddo—Baldwin, Cayton, and a young Caribbean American novelist of the 1950s, Alston Anderson—suggests that African American men were held to a different and higher standard of conduct than their Caucasian counterparts. Overweening concerns about drinking, sexuality, and the payment of debts, specifically the payment of toll charges on the house phone, characterize the correspondence in these files. Concerns about offending the sensibilities of the surrounding community of Saratoga Springs and causing embarrassment to Yaddo were articulated in internal correspondence. One lesson from Yaddo’s integration may be that even when the leaders of institutions courageously seek to rectify racial injustice of the time, the unconscious attitudes of the individuals charged with carrying out their policies, coupled with pressure from the surrounding environment, may play a significant role in preserving inequality.
Perhaps one explanation for a decreased tolerance of guests who might cause embarrassment to Yaddo in the surrounding and then-segregated Saratoga Springs community of the 1950s can be found in the events of the late 1940s, when Yaddo was again on the forefront of American cultural politics. While “McCarthyism” would not be coined until 1951, Yaddo experienced its own red scare in late 1948 and early 1949. That winter the poet Robert Lowell, along with fellow guests Flannery O’Connor, Edward Maisel, and Lowell’s soon-to-be-wife Elizabeth Hardwick, sought to have Elizabeth Ames removed as Yaddo’s executive director for supposedly harboring Communists and fellow travelers. The events that followed—now known as “the Lowell Affair”—were precipitated by the long residence at Yaddo of Agnes Smedley, a novelist, journalist, and China activist who was a guest almost continuously between 1943 and 1948. Smedley’s biographer, Ruth Price, tells this story in detail in her essay in this volume, but in short, Smedley’s renown as a journalist who had covered the rise of Mao Zedong’s Revolutionary Army, along with her information-gathering activities for the Soviet Union during a period when the Soviets and the Americans were allies, made her an early target of Cold War army and FBI investigations. Her stay at Yaddo, in turn, brought Yaddo under FBI scrutiny.
On Valentine’s Day 1949, two FBI agents visited Yaddo and interviewed two guests, Edward Maisel and Elizabeth Hardwick. Disturbed by the intrusion on the retreat and beginning to feel the first paranoia of his not-yet-diagnosed manic-depressive illness, Lowell was seized with the idea that Yaddo must be purified by the removal of Elizabeth Ames, whom he accused of being “somehow deeply and mysteriously involved in Mrs. Smedley’s political activities.” The events that unfolded, including an emergency board meeting for which Lowell insisted that a typed transcript be kept as if a court proceeding were under way, represent a remarkable moment in the long annals of America’s culture wars. The crisis became a cause célèbre in New York City’s literary and cultural circles, with petitions circulated supporting the continued tenure of Ames and letters calling for her ouster. Ultimately, those in favor of Ames prevailed, but the costs to her were high. Personally devastated by the betrayals, she retreated to a hospital to recover from the strain, and her long-standing latitude in extending invitations as she thought appropriate came to an end as more active board oversight of the admissions and day-to-day affairs of the colony were instituted.
In each of these defining moments for Yaddo, literary critic Newton Arvin played a pivotal role. In the case of integrating Yaddo, he had instigated the move to racial equality in admissions. In the Lowell Affair, his anxieties about having his own personal life and past political activities scrutinized may have led him to lend a sympathetic ear to Lowell’s pronouncements and accusations. By the late 1950s, it would be Arvin’s own personal story as a closeted gay academic that collided with the cultural politics of the period, ending his official relationship with Yaddo, even as his Yaddo friends rallied to his support. Arvin, as Barry Werth chronicles in his essay, was caught in a Massachusetts morals crusade that led to his indictment for supposedly trafficking in gay pornography. Once convicted, Arvin was asked to step down from Yaddo’s board. Although he was personally welcomed back as a distinguished guest by Ames and his deeply concerned Yaddo friends, he never returned to the estate that had supported him and his work for more than three decades.
Yaddo’s more discordant moments suggest that the creativity fostered at the artists’ retreat and the constraints of social conventions are, at best, uneasy bedfellows. There may be more than cliché in the notion that creative individuals are necessarily socially unconventional. Indeed, some social theorists have argued that creativity is even more alive at the margins of a society, as individuals at the periphery have a distinctly different perspective from those at the center and are compelled to seek novel solutions to the problems that their outsider status creates. Although there are competing and contradictory views on this topic—some might cite Flaubert’s maxim that one should “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work”—the lives of many of Yaddo’s most celebrated guests were far from conventional. The sense of support and camaraderie that Yaddo afforded allowed for an alternative community, particularly in the years before the Lowell and Arvin affairs shattered the retreat’s sense of itself as a world apart.
One of the hazards of working in a world apart, of being what some would call “an artist’s artist” or “writer’s writer,” is that one’s work may fail to garner either recognition among a broader public or a spot in the literary and artistic canon. Between 1926 and 1980, the period that the exhibition accompanying this volume considers, nearly seventeen hundred artists, writers, and composers enjoyed Yaddo’s hospitality. Of these residents, only a handful of names would be readily recognizable to even an educated public. While some might find this lamentable—a sign of the staggering futility of most creative undertakings—others have argued that any of the works we think of as “masterpieces” or the people we label “genius” would not be possible without the unsung work of fellow artists, not to mention the incalculable labors that support the workings of any art world—the gallerists and collectors, publicists and literary agents, editors and publishers, curators and art handlers, music copyists and piano tuners, bookstore clerks and theater ushers.
Even those artists and writers who do achieve a measure of acclaim are subject to both the fiat of fashion and the power of political change. So a James T. Farrell or a Josephine Herbst, whose working-class realist novels of the 1930s enjoyed both critical and popular success, found their reputations waning in the postwar McCarthy period. During the Cold War era a more privatized aesthetic arose, an approach that lauded the more intimate stories of John Cheever and the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. The feminism of the 1970s took the poems of a young Sylvia Plath, herself a student of Lowell, and, with the personal reenvisioned as political, installed Plath as a feminist icon. Likewise the figurative prints and drawings of Philip Reisman, Hugh Botts, or Agnes Tait, artists working in the midst of the mobilization of laborers in Depression-era America, would fall out of fashion with the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism, which better served the international identity of the United States as an ascendant global postwar power. As David Gates points out in his essay, literary and artistic reputations are fashioned and refashioned in the broader contexts of political and social transformations, making folly of any quest for artistic immortality.
While shifting political landscapes can displace an entire generation’s aesthetic foothold, unequal social positions can bury the contributions of others. Poet Marcia Nardi’s vehement protofeminist letters to William Carlos Williams in the early and mid-1940s were incorporated without attribution into the second volume of what most of us think of as his modernist masterpiece, Paterson, published in 1948. Even as Williams appropriated the letters of many writers—Josephine Herbst and Allen Ginsberg, among others—in the case of Nardi, Williams elected to obliterate her identity and authorship, rechristening her as the fictive character Cress. Amazingly, the title page of the manuscript for the second volume of Paterson indicates that Williams originally intended to list Nardi as a coauthor, but changed his mind before the manuscript went to press. Ultimately, feminist scholars have recuperated Nardi’s role in the creation of Paterson, and Nardi narrowly succeeded in securing two stays at Yaddo despite an October 1951 recommendation letter from Williams to Elizabeth Ames that described her as “a difficult woman, an insignificant little woman of forty perhaps, foolish, frightened but gifted, who has somehow existed among the unfortunate beaten wastrels of Greenwich Village and the Bowery in New York. Yet, believe it or not, she is gentle and though erratic very intelligent. She has had a hell of a life—much of it her own fault. . . . She is not a parasite, but one for whom we must all share the guilt—that such people exist in the world.” Similarly, Wallace Stegner, a guest at Yaddo in 1937 and 1938, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972 for Angle of Repose, a work based on the life and letters of Mary Hallock Foote (later published as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West). While cultural appropriations constitute a particular form of collective authorship, the material in Yaddo’s records forces one to consider who retains the privileged status of authorship. Recognition for creative work is subject not only to shifting political climates and the caprices of aesthetic fashions but also to our unexamined ideas of who .ts the bill of “great artist,” “literary genius,” or “exemplary scholar.”
The poetry scholar and critic Helen Vendler, whose reminiscence of the community and creative solitude that Yaddo afforded her appears in this volume, writes persuasively elsewhere of the ways in which the poets who speak most profoundly to each successive generation are those who take the given circumstances of their lives and enter into a dialogue with the particulars of their individual lives and their historical moment. What is given matters, of course, but what remains at the end of a life is what one has made of it. Following from Vendler’s thesis, but transferring the principle across the art-life divide that Yeats had so carefully delineated, the Trasks’ success follows from their embrace of their late nineteenth-century moment, their ability to live at the edge of that century, singing the praises of a bucolic country retreat for artists modeled on a feudal estate with a storied mansion, while embracing—and investing in—the electrification of the city that would accelerate the industrialization and mass production of the emerging century. Creative power could be the epiphany in the wooded glen or the lightbulb moment at Thomas Edison’s workbench. Such creative catholicism—the Trasks’ abiding belief in human creativity and ingenuity in its many forms—has yet to achieve the economic and social equality that Katrina Trask envisioned, but it did go a long way toward eliminating the high culture–low culture divide that characterized the beginning of the twentieth century.
By the time Yaddo opened its gates to guests in 1926, the project of defining a distinctly American culture was much on the mind of the critics of the day. The recognition of American authors as literary auteurs (Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman among them) was under way and Yaddo, through its support not only of artists but also of critics such as Van Wyck Brooks, Newton Arvin, Lionel
Trilling, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and Philip Rahv, played an integral part in the project of establishing an American culture, what Brooks called “creating a usable past”—one from which a future not just viable, but vital, could be built. For Brooks, critics had a central role to play. In his 1918 book Letters and Leadership, Brooks called for a criticism that would, in Matthew Arnold’s words, “make an intellectual situation of which creative power can profitably avail itself.” Observing that a young generation of America was deficient in creative power, but had “more creative desire than it knows what to do with,” Brooks called for a criticism that would support the country’s youthful inventive energies. Yaddo helped remedy the problem Brooks identified by supporting countless critics and scholars from both the literary and visual arts. Art historian Meyer Schapiro (at Yaddo in 1958) would demonstrate how artistic styles reflect the economic and social conditions of those who have produced those works. Novelist and art critic Robert M. Coates (at Yaddo several times between 1934 and 1970) would apply the term “abstract expressionism” to the movement he saw emerging in the work of a new generation of American painters. And the Yaddo music festivals took on the challenge of fostering links between America’s classical composers and its music critics who, at the time, continued to have their eyes trained on European masters. When Elizabeth Ames retired as Yaddo’s executive director in 1969, much of the work of establishing an American culture, both at home and abroad, was well under way. When Brooks had called for an American criticism and culture that would bridge the chasm between “high-brow” and “low-brow,” Yaddo answered, as Marcelle Clements explores in her essay. Yaddo had hosted an astonishingly diverse array of artists with widely divergent artistic agendas. From the realism of James T. Farrell’s novels and Philip Reisman’s drawings and lithographs to the southern gothic of Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Truman Capote to the abstract expressionism of Clyfford Still and the politically charged figuration of Philip Guston, Yaddo had remained true to Ames’s description, first voiced in her letters to guests in the midst of the political battles of the 1930s, when she wrote: “Yaddo supports exclusively no social or artistic philosophy, and . . . it is most decidedly a meeting place for ideas, a place for free discussion rather than propaganda."
By remaining a home to which creative workers came for “Rest & Refreshment,” Yaddo helped populate the American imagination with an astonishing cast of characters. Patricia Highsmith’s sensational first novel, Strangers on a Train, written at Yaddo in 1948, provided the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s popular masterpiece and paved the way for her memorable Mr. Ripley. America’s immigrants and ethnic people—the very unwashed masses for whom a rarefied high culture had been planned as a curative—unleashed their creativity in a flurry of works. There was not only the Jewish stream of consciousness of a Henry Roth in the 1930s but also Philip Roth’s equally masterful, if psychoanalytically couched, stream of consciousness in Portnoy’s Complaint in the 1960s. There was not just the Irish ghetto, with its Studs Lonigan that James T. Farrell conjured up from his Chicago’s South Side past while housed securely at Yaddo, but also the good man, so hard to find, that Flannery O’Connor would call forth after launching her career from Yaddo. There would be James Baldwin’s heartbreaking Giovanni of Giovanni’s Room and Alice Walker’s courageous Sofia in The Color Purple. And, of course, the blockbuster Corleone family of The Godfather trilogy, born of Yaddo’s support of the young Mario Puzo as he shaped his craft.
Critics may find it easy to locate the occasional gaps in Yaddo’s reach—most of the Beats took refuge elsewhere, pop and minimalism found other venues, and the mighty forces of jazz and rock ’n’ roll had no need of the quietude that Yaddo offers. What is more difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine is twentieth-century American culture without the work of the artists Yaddo fostered. A world without Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools or Saul Bellow’s Augie March or Carson McCullers’s Lonely Hunter? Without Holly Golightly’s blue-boxed aspirations in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s or the horror of the horse head in the bed of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather or the Jets and the Sharks of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story? Without the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the paintings of Milton Avery? It is hard to imagine—even unthinkable—and only so because a bereft millionaire and his wife, poised on the edge of two centuries, embraced the possibilities before them and imagined a parallel world where, until more equitable arrangements might be made for all, at least creativity would reign somewhere. The creative power that they—and a host of others—unleashed at Yaddo continues to illuminate American culture.
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