The Soil of Literary Fertility

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

In December 1959, Flannery O’Conner wrote to her friend and fellow writer, Cecil Dawkins, to tell him that “I really think you ought to look into the Yaddo business. The food is very good. The quarters are elegant. The servants are very nice. The scenery is magnificent. Mrs. A. [Elizabeth Ames, the director at the time] runs it efficiently.”

Among writers’ colonies—nowadays called “writers’ conferences” or “writers’ workshops”—no name conjures up the magic of the golden days of American arts and letters more than Yaddo does. Nestled among the wooded dells of upstate New York, and just down the road from Skidmore College, Yaddo’s hallowed cottages have been home to generations of America’s greatest writers, artists, critics, and musicians. Lasting friendships commenced at Yaddo, but friendships just as often broke up angrily in the languorous passions that shook the grounds of the community. Carson McCullers famously draped herself on the threshold of Katherine Anne Porter’s door, hoping for a conversation with a writer she adored, and Porter just as famously rebuffed McCullers and called her “a peculiarly corrupt, perverted mind and a small stunted talent incapable of growth.” Through the portals of Yaddo passed luminaries such as O’Connor, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Bishop, Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, and Malcolm Cowley, and Newton Arvin. Unlike the more experimental Black Mountain community—which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary this fall and produced poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley as well as the father of the geodesic dome, R. Buckminster Fuller—Yaddo’s revolving doors ushered in and out a tremendous variety of modern writers and artists searching for some retreat from the demands of their everyday lives or some respite from the chores of teaching that limited the amount of time they could spend on their creative endeavors. The creative soil is so fertile at Yaddo that its residents have racked up 62 Pulitzers, 58 National Book Awards, 24 MacArthur Fellowships, and 106 Rome Prizes.

In a marvelous new book, Yaddo: Making American Culture, cultural critic Micki McGee offers a compelling glimpse into the history of Yaddo and its pervasive and enduring influence on American arts and letters. Philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina, founded Yaddo in 1900 as a gift to those “gifted with Creative power.” Spencer Trask waxed poetic as he described the spiritual power of the imagination and the ways that Yaddo could help artists exercise their creative gifts: “Yaddo we are glad to believe has come to be a source of fruitful help and inspiration to many, and especially to those Gifted with Creative power and 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 and Refreshment authors, painters, sculptors, musicians, and other artists, both men and women, few in number and chosen for their Creative Gifts and besides and not less for the power and the will and the purpose to make these Gifts useful to the World.” Chock full of photographs, letters, prints, and other materials from the Yaddo archives at the New York Public Library, this lavishly detailed book offers an intimate glimpse into life at Yaddo. Nine short essays by writers ranging from Helen Vendler and David Gates to Tim Page and Allan Gurganus cover topics from Newton Arvin’s homosexuality, the Agnes Smedley affair that involved Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and charges that Smedley was a communist, and the roles of visual artists and musicians at Yaddo. For example, Vendler recalls the glittering conversations she had with various artists during her three separate stays and the freedom, solitude, and inspiration her stays gave her to delve deeply into Yeats’ life and work and to produce her latest book, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form.

Yaddo endures in the popular imagination, and among its tall pines, Leonard Bernstein is forever raising his glass to Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin and Carson McCullers talk shop, Virgil Thomson plays poker with Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Truman Capote and Carson McCullers exasperate Katherine Anne Porter. In another letter to Dawkins, Flannery O’Connor captures with her always sly humor the enduring spirit of the place: “In my day at Yaddo, the maids were all well over forty, large, grim, granite-jawed or shriveled and shrunk . . . Of course, I was there in 1948 and this is 1960 almost. Things may have changed but in my day the help was morally superior to the guests . . . Liquor was not served by the management but of course you could get your own and in any collection of so-called artists you will find a good percentage alcoholic in one degree or another . . . In such a place you have to expect them to sleep around. This is not sin, but Experience, and if you do not sleep with the opposite sex, it is assumed you sleep with your own . . . You survive in this atmosphere by minding your own business and by having plenty of your own business to mind; and not by being afraid to be different from the rest of them.”

McGee’s splendid book accompanies a forthcoming exhibition at the New York Public Library that will be on view from October 24, 2008 through February 15, 2009. The exhibition is drawn largely from the Library’s collection and covers the years 1870-1980.

Books mentioned in this column:
Yaddo: Making American Culture (Columbia University Press)
9780231147378


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Contact Henry.