Books: Yaddo and Substance

One summer day in 1899, a private banker named Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina were walking through the expensive wildwood of their big country estate, Yaddo, at Saratoga Springs, N. Y. Suddenly Katrina stopped, listened, raised her hands “as if in appeal to that Something which was too vast for me to define.” Few moments later she said with dreamy excitement: “Here will be a perpetual series of house parties—of literary men, literary women, and other artists. . . . At Yaddo they will find the Sacred Fire, and light their torches at its flame. Look, Spencer! They are walking in the woods, wandering in the garden, sitting under the pine trees . . . creating, creating, creating!”

Creating at Yaddo last week, at mid-season of the colony’s twelfth year, was a typical group of writers and artists who have given substance to Katrina Trask’s vision. But whether or not they fitted Katrina’s romantic conception was an open question. By contrast with aristocratic Katrina and the elegant capitalistic surroundings she provided, most of the season’s 27 guests stood out in striking left-wing contrast: Poet Kenneth Fearing (Angel Arms, Poems), Critic Newton Arvin (Hawthorne), Novelists Joseph Vogel (At Madame Bonnard’s), Leonard Ehrlich (God’s Angry Man), Henry Roth (Call It Sleep), Daniel Fuchs (Low Company).

One of the show places of the U. S., Yaddo is a 500-acre estate with pine groves, vast lawns, artificial lakes with ducks, famous rose gardens, white marble fountains. The name Yaddo was a baby pronunciation given by the Trask children (all four of whom died in childhood) to The Shadows, a famous inn formerly on the site of the Trask estate, where the Trasks had spent their summers. It was one of the dozen places where Poe was supposed to have written The Raven, and Katrina Trask said it inspired her own poetry. At the centre of the estate is a three-story Gothic mansion, whose vast rooms are carpeted with costly Persian rugs, lined with books and paintings, filled with bric-a-brac including everything from throne chairs to Swedish sleighs.

Executive director is Mrs. Elizabeth Ames, a dynamic, partly deaf, pleasant-featured puritan, now in her early 40s, who combines the social talents of a worldly hostess with the shrewdness of a corporation executive. Yaddo is something like a swanky monastery. Most guests sleep in The Mansion. Working quarters are private studios hidden in nearby groves. Breakfast is at 8:15. Box lunches are delivered to the studios. Until four, no visiting is permitted, and then only with special permission. At dinner, in The Mansion’s dining room, six tables accommodate the guests, who are shifted frequently to freshen conversation, prevent the formation of cliques. The food is famed. Coffee is served in the main parlor, where guests are expected to be interesting but not read manuscripts. Around ten, when Mrs. Ames retires, guests are expected to go to bed, too, not slip off to Saratoga for a beer. In this Yaddo differs from the MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, N. H., where village beer has been known to produce some excellent rhyming.

Monastic also is Mrs. Ames’s talent for smelling out incipient romances, nipping them with subtle but insistent notes. A young novelist, for example, may imagine that his walk with a poetess has gone unobserved. But next morning both parties are pretty sure to receive a cryptic note: “It is unwise to form youthful attachments,” or “Sorry you missed an interesting discussion in the parlor.” Yaddo is not bothered by rumors that it is a free-love colony. Nonliterary, nonartistic wives and husbands are not usually invited to Yaddo with their mates. Married artist-couples and their children are sometimes sent to a subsidiary colony called Triuna Island, located more than 50 miles away, on Lake George.