by Alec Waugh
The Colony is in New Hampshire, a mile and a half from Peterborough, which claims to be the original of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, and probably it is, since Thornton Wilder has been many times a colonist. Early in the century Edward MacDowell, the composer, bought an estate there; he was in retirement, and he built a log cabin in the woods where he could work; he went off to it every morning after breakfast, and he had his lunch left in a basket outside his door so that the current of his thoughts should not be disturbed. He was visited by a number of his friends, in particular Edward Arlington Robinson. He had studios built for them, and the pattern of the basket outside the studio door was maintained for them. They all agreed that they had never had conditions more congenial for work. When MacDowell died, his widow, in tribute to his memory, decided to enlarge his home, with its log cabins in the woods, into a summer colony for writers, painters and composers.
It opened in 1907, very simply, with three studios; the first colonists were guests, though they contributed a nominal sum to their support. During the winter, Mrs MacDowell was an assiduous fund-raiser; she toured the country, she gave concerts, she organized committees, enrolled benefactors. The funds increased steadily; and as the balance mounted, so did the number of cabins in the woods. There were twenty-four in 1951.
Mrs MacDowell was still alive then, and actively alive. The traditions of her authority were continued. Those traditions have been amusingly described by Margaret Widdermere in Golden Friends I Had. Mrs MacDowell was a strict disciplinarian, and she was resolved that the cabins should not be used for any purpose but work. They were unlighted, and there was a rule that no one should go to his or her studio after dinner. A colonist, she explained, might fall and injure himself in the dark and be unable to get assistance; there was also mention of a fire risk. She herself dined with the colonists and expected them to be in attendance until they retired to bed. She did not encourage them to have local friends. The colonist who absented himself with any regularity would not receive a second invitation.
When I paid my first visit to the Colony, Mrs MacDowell was in her late eighties. She played no part in the life of the Colony, but she was alert, behind the scenes. She lived in her own house, Hillcrest, and one by one the colonists would pay their respects to her. It was a little like the ritual that is observed by a British visitor to a British colony; he signs the book at Government House and awaits from His Excellency an invitation appropriate to his social status, the invitation coming through the A.D.C. At the Colony, on one’s fourth or fifth day, one would write a little note to Mrs MacDowell, saying that one was now in residence, that one greatly appreciated the amenities and opportunities one was receiving and hoped that one would be given an occasion of expressing one’s gratitude in person. A day or so later, there would be a letter from the secretary, asking one to tea at four o’clock on such and such a day.
She was small and slim and very straight. Her hair was brushed back from her forehead. She was in black; I have retained an impression of lace and taffeta and whalebone; of a head held high, above a stiff high collar. There were rings and necklaces. She had great dignity, but she was not stern, which I had expected her to be. She had had herself briefed before the interview. She knew what kinds of book I wrote. She enquired about her English friends, wondering if I knew any of them. She asked, in particular, about Charles Morgan, with whom she was in correspondence and whose wife, Hilda Vaughan, had been a colonist during the war. She asked if T. S. Eliot’s reputation stood as high as ever. She was interested in ‘the new thing’. She was living in the present and in the future rather than in the past. She asked me if I was finding the conditions at the Colony conducive to steady working. I told her that I had been looking all my life for just those conditions.
I did not exaggerate. The daily routine was this. The men lived in a house, The Lodge, a third of a mile from the central building, Colony Hall. The women lived in two smaller cottages: Pan Cottage and The Eaves, close to Colony Hall. Colony Hall itself was a large, two-storeyed building—it had once been a barn—which contained, in addition to a few bedrooms on the first floor, a dining-room and a large recreation room that housed a small library in addition to billiards and ping-pong tables. There was also, within range of Colony Hall, a very charming library, where in the evenings there would be an occasional concert or poetry reading.
Breakfast was from seven thirty to eight thirty. At seven fifteen a first bell would be rung; at seven thirty a second. The ringing of these bells caused consternation among some of the colonists who wanted to sleep on to the last minute, or even beyond the last minute, who were ready to forego breakfast and heat themselves a cup of tea or coffee in their studios. In every group there is invariably one colonist who will find some original reason for complaint.
Breakfast is usually a gay meal, with a good deal of laughter. But it would be surprising if a group of twenty-four did not contain several who do not feel in the mood for bright conversation early in the day. At one time the experiment was made of having a special ‘grumps’ table at which conversation was not permitted. But the experiment did not work because the grumps did not like the the sight of each other early in the morning.
By 8.45 the dining-room was empty, and a day of industry, nine and a quarter hours long, until dinner at 6 p.m., stretched ahead of us. Each colonist was promised complete isolation, and the strictest colony rule is that which forbids the visiting of one student by another without an invitation.
Each colonist arranged a different schedule for himself. In the early summer, it is still so cool in the morning that one needs the studio warmed. The first act of the day is the building of a log fire, and the maintenance of that fire through the morning is one of those menial tasks that cradle the creative processes. I am a fast worker and I work to a piece programme of two thousand words a day; that is about four hours’ writing; so that by half past eleven I had done three-quarters of my daily stint. It was time for exercise and I would walk into Peterborough to make any purchases I might require and to take a tomato juice at the village pharmacy which is presided over by Myer Goldman, a fervent enthusiast for the arts who has made himself the father confessor to the Colony.
By the time I was back in my studio, my lunch basket would be outside my door. It would contain, in addition to the two statutory sandwiches, and a Thermos of soup and coffee, my morning mail. I kept a bottle of wine in my studio and as I munched my sandwiches and sipped my Californian claret I would read my letters. It is a great advantage to get one’s mail with three-quarters of the day’s work behind one. One tackles the morning with undivided energy, and with only a quarter of one’s work ahead of one, one can take one’s problems in one’s stride. They seem less important.
Some men who take an afternoon nap prefer to take it directly after lunch. I prefer to wait an hour which gives me just enough time to deal with those last five hundred words. By three o’clock my desk was cleared, and I could, with a clean conscience, lie down for ten minutes’ sleep on the bed with which every studio was supplied.
I was fifty-three years old when I first went to the Colony, though I no longer played golf in England, I did when I was abroad; and off the road between the Colony and the town was a nine-hole golf course. The ground had been presented to the community with the stipulation that members of the Colony would be honorary members of the club. During my first two years, this agreement was honoured by the club committee. Later, however, it was not; and colonists had either to join the club or pay a green fee, the secretary arguing that you could not expect an agreement like that to run in perpetuity. I retorted that they had the land in perpetuity. The secretary grinned. ‘You can very well afford the subscription, can’t you now, and we need money.’ Which was a typical example of the modern unilateral dishonouring of agreements; I could, of course, quite easily afford the small subscription and it was an amusing course. I enjoyed my evening round, and I was back at the Lodge in time to take a shower and consume a couple of bou
rbons before dinner.
Dinner was at six, a barbarously early hour for a hot meal in the summer; and who wants to eat a heavy meal, without wine, at any time? Certainly not me. The dinner hour was the only one in the day that I found difficult. But the evening that followed it was enchanting. There was croquet on an uncertain lawn when the mosquitoes permitted it. There was music, or poetry readings in the library; sometimes we played ‘the game’, a Colony variation on the traditional guessing game that is played week-ends in the country; there were strolls into the village, to the cinema, or to a tap room where you could get beer without having to eat a meal as well, or the village pharmacy for an ice-cream soda; or you could motor out into the open country and see the sunset from Monad-nock. By eleven I was in bed, pleasantly worn out by a day of work and exercise and open air.
I did not exaggerate when I told Mrs MacDowell that these were the working conditions for which I had been looking all my life. There was complete quiet, the freedom from interruption—colonists cannot be reached by telephone during a working day—the solution of all material problems, that you get on shipboard: your ticket is booked, your meals are paid for, you are provided with company and entertainment, you have not to make a single decision for yourself. There was all that at the Colony, but there was in addition the atmosphere of work: which is the very thing I had found lacking in Chagford and in the South of France. There, I had been in touch with holiday makers, with playboys and their companions and with local residents, many of whom were in retirement or were dilettantes, pretending to paint or write. They offered distractions and temptations. ‘Oh, come along,’ they would say, ‘let’s make a night of it. Never mind about tomorrow. It’ll do you good to take one day off.’ And because one is working at high pressure the temptation has an insidious appeal. ‘Perhaps I am overworking. Perhaps it would be good for me to knock off for a couple of days. I’ll come fresher to it afterwards,’ one thinks. There are no such temptations at the Colony. Though there are parties on occasions; though there is private conviviality; though colonists do take their baskets round to each other’s studios and share them over a bottle of wine, there is a recognition of the fact that one is there to work, and the colonist who introduced a playground atmosphere would not be encouraged and would have his application to come back refused.
There is also the influence not only of the present but the past. On the mantelpiece of every studio is a collection of wooden boards on which the colonists sign their names and the period of their residence. The studio in which I am writing these pages—The Schelling—is one of the oldest. There are five boards here. And the first entry is for 1909. As I sit at my broad, long desk, looking out across a stretch of grass towards the pines, I think of all the writers who have sat here before me, of all the dreams that have been dreamt, of all the books that have been written here.
Many of the names on these boards are now long forgotten; but on the first board, against the date 1921, is Hervey Allen’s name. He had inscribed himself as a poet, as had Du Bose Heyward, the next name upon the board, an inch lower down is Luis Munoz Marin, who was to figure so prominently in the world’s affairs as Governor of Puerto Rico, but in 1924 thought of himself as a writer; and below his name is that of William Rose Benét.
On other boards there are other names familiar to me—Theodore Maynard in 1931, Carl Carmer in 1934, Rumer Godden and Marjorie Fischer in 1949, Peter Viereck in 1954, Louise Bogan in 1957, and in more recent days Kathrin Perutz and Lael Tucker Wertenbaker. They are friendly ghosts at my elbow, looking over my shoulder, wishing me well.
My first studio was The Cheyney. On one of its boards was the name Tess Slessinger. I had never met her. But I had been very struck by the collection of her short stories that I had read in the 1930s. She died young; she came to very little; I believe that she went to Hollywood, and that things went unluckily. But she had a genuine talent, and more than that, her stories gave the impression that she was in herself a rare and precious person.
She was very real to me during the time, six months in all, spread over three visits, that I spent in the Cheyney studio. As I paced its length, I would picture her pacing it in just that way, relieving the tension in her limbs and nerves; and in the afternoons when I would lie out on the hammock settee on the balcony, looking across the trees, to the majestic mountains, my mind abrood, I would think how she must have lain there, looking out towards Monadnock, while the characters in her stories talked to her, and their ideas took shape in action.
I have never seen a photograph of her, only a head and shoulders snapshot on the cover of one of her books. She was in her late twenties when she was at MacDowell. I pictured her as tall and slim, with long, straight legs; dark-haired, pale skinned, with eyes that often looked very tired, with a deep contralto voice. She would stride up and down the studio like a restless panther. When she lay out on the hammock settee she would be completely immobile. Hour after hour, day after day, I was conscious of her presence there. Why should I not have been? One day perhaps my ghost will loiter there.
I had been apprehensive, before my first visit to the Colony, lest I should find many of the colonists precious or peevish. I need have had no such fears. The list of colonists that I have set down is proof enough of that. Moreover, the fact that the group was equally divided between composers, painters and writers, removed the danger of professional jealousy. The writers did not expect the composers to know anything about their work, nor did the composers expect adulation from the painters. Very little ‘shop’ was talked because there was no common ground for ‘shop’. Talk was general, as it would be in a drawing-room, and friendships were not determined by a community of professional interests.
Inevitably there were likes and dislikes, but it was easy to avoid, certainly in the summer, anyone whom you found irritating. You could synchronize your exits with their entrances, and vice versa; for the most part we lived in amity. Inevitably there were one or two quarrelsome colonists, but they were so few that each in his or her different way became part of a legend. There was the lady who was always putting everyone right, who threatened to leave when anyone contradicted her. Finally she did leave. A fellow colonist expostulated, ‘Now surely, May, that is a rather foolish point of view.’ She retorted, ‘I am not going to stay here and be called a fool.’ She left the table, breakfasted next morning in the kitchen and was gone by ten o’clock.
One year when I was on the house committee, I made the experiment of having a wine evening twice a week; the colonists each contributed their thirty cents and received with their dinner two glasses of Californian red. This mild libation proved fatal to one frail colonist who, with the ramparts of her restraint undermined, polished off a bottle of bourbon in her bedroom, took off all her clothes, went into the telephone booth and proceeded to abuse a male admirer in New York. She might have escaped detection had not another colonist wanted to ring up her husband. The fact that another colonist had a legitimate consort with whom she wished to speak enraged the occupant of the booth. She refused to give up her post and punctuated her vituperations to New York with shouts of ‘I won’t let that bitch Marigold in here’. She, too, left next morning.
Occasionally a colonist would be unable to tolerate the loneliness and isolation of the life; this particularly affected those who had not already come to terms with their project, or who came up, their minds blank, believing that they would get ideas once they were on their own. If ideas did not come, they found themselves in a fury of frustration. More than one colonist during my visits has left suddenly before his time was up.
One case was a pathetic one; a young painter from California who had never seen snow before and could not come to terms with it. He felt himself in an alien world. He could not concentrate on his canvases; instead he began to write poems to another colonist; rather good poems. He was tall and blonde and gentle. Everybody liked him, but the loneliness of the long, empty hours got upon his nerves. He decided that he had to leave.
He kept this decision secret. I happened to know because I was chairman of the house committee and the manager of the Colony had told me. There was a curious quality of dramatic irony about his last evening. He sat down to dinner as though it were any ordinary evening. He took his usual part in the conversation. He was not very talkative. After dinner he took his place at the Scrabble table. Half past seven became half past eight. I began to wonder whether he had changed his mind. Shortly before nine, he stood up after playing his hand. ‘I won’t be a minute,’ he said. We went on with the game. It was assumed that he had gone to the lavatory. Five minutes passed. It was his turn again. We waited. We looked at one another. ‘Perhaps we should go on,’ I said. Presently the friend who had driven him to the bus station returned with the news that he would not be coming back. Two weeks later we each received from him a gracious friendly letter, saying how much he had enjoyed meeting us, thanking us for our kindness to him and hoping that we should be meeting again soon.
Enmities at the Colony are very rare, but a number of deep, warm friendships have been started there. There have been also a number of Colony romances, some of which ended in successful marriages, some in disastrous ones. It is inevitable that there should have been. There was a community of interests; there was also a similarity of status, since all colonists are partially displaced persons, otherwise they would not be at the Colony. Mrs MacDowell was very much on her guard against such frailties. Margaret Widdermere stated in her autobiography that Mrs MacDowell had her spies who reported on the nocturnal movements of her guests, and she had part of the porch of the Eaves cut away so that members of the opposite sex could not sit out there in the evenings.