I spent the night in a stable, among the Dane’s horses. The rats were scuffling under my cot.
But my failed expedition did not end my romance with pastures, woods, and streams, with what geographers call the Eastern Woodlands, the New England countryside; it only modernized my perspective. I was an Eastern Woodlander by birth, a native of Lachine, Quebec, on the Saint Lawrence. True, I had lived most of my life in Chicago, but the Middle West had never seemed quite right to me; its soil was different, its very molecules were fatter, grosser. I imagined, apparently, that the East was materially finer.
Millions of farmers were leaving the land; but city dwellers, among them writers, entertained visions of ease and happiness in the fields, under the trees. Edmund Wilson sometimes rusticated himself on the Cape or in upstate New York; Delmore Schwartz settled near Frenchtown, New Jersey; Mr. Salinger withdrew to New Hampshire. Clearly some of these gifted people looked to the country for relief from town-engendered troubles.
I myself, a case of nerves but trembling also with natural piety, moved to the country in the mid-fifties, investing a small legacy in a house in Dutchess County, where I lived for seven or eight years and became countrified. This grand house (fourteen rooms, a Dutch kitchen, a lordly staircase, countless fireplaces, twenty-foot ceilings) turned me into a handyman. I had no money to spend on plumbing and carpentry. I had to paint walls. I mowed and gardened. I had literary neighbors—Richard Rovere, Gore Vidal—but repairs and grounds keeping left me no time for conversation or reading and writing. Besides, I couldn’t bear to think that I had squandered the money left me by a hardworking father on a collapsing river mansion—“How typical of you,” he would have said. I got rid of the place.
For the last ten years (I see that I am old enough now to be prodigal with decades) I have spent much of my time in Vermont.
My guess is that the land between Great Barrington and New Canaan had become too valuable for farming. Perhaps it had been acquired by developers and it was temporarily desolate because they had not yet begun to “develop” it. The broader reason for desolation was that America had gone urban after World War II. Land had been sold or abandoned. In the Northeast, a scrubby second growth of new forests had taken over fields and pastures. If you wander in the backlands of Vermont, as I often do, climbing over wavering, dilapidated stone walls and moss-covered ledges, you come upon old foundations, heaps of red brick, overgrown water mills. Along the roads, the sites of vanished farmhouses are marked by pairs of lilac bushes that once grew beside the driveway and by apple trees surviving among the maples and yellow birches. Here you can commune, if you have a taste for that kind of thing, with the premechanized America of horse-drawn harvesters and harrows. Also locks, hinges, doorknobs, old bottles, and every sort of treasure trash. The stone walls had made relatively small fields. It takes no great imaginative effort to put in some sheep or cows or crops—Lilliputian in scale to a Middle Western eye.
But in the yard one can sit in peace under a great shagbark hickory, under a maple even greater that began its life in the eighteenth century. The size of these trees seems to give more height to the sky. Few planes pass this way. Except on weekends, the dirt roads are relatively empty. In the town itself there are no shops or taverns, no industries, no gas stations or garages. The occasional sound of a chain saw or the concussions of a hammer can be heard miles away. The nearest farm is half a mile to the east. It is operated by a widow named Verna and her son Hermie, an earnest, solid, silent, simple country laborer. Hermie is known locally as an artist in fence maintenance. He spends no money on barbed wire. His fences, acres and acres of them, are spliced with odd pieces of wire, the greater part of the work well rusted, some of the bits no longer than an inch or two. There is not a whole yard of new wire anywhere. The artist is muscular, uncommunicative, unsmiling, in farm boots, bib overalls, and a peaked cap.
I have no near neighbors here. The closest is a biologist from Yale who prefers Vermont to any college town and teaches science in a local high school. His wife designs and makes jewelry. Half a mile to the west is the house of the ingenious, extraordinarily inventive man who built my place. He and his wife, an obstetrital nurse, have become my friends. There are few townspeople out this way, most of us are newcomers or summer people. No township would be complete, I suppose, without its eccentric squatter. Ours collects old heaps—cars and trucks. His huts, plastic fluttering from their windows, are surrounded by ditched machinery of every sort. His livestock browses on weeds or eats broken rice cakes trucked in from a factory somewhere near the Massachusetts line. Enormous long-legged pigs run into the road, looking as if they were wearing high heels. They invade the vegetable gardens of the people along the road and root in them. Some say that the squatter comes of a respectable family and was well educated. In the old days he would have been called a remittance man, or a gypsy, or a tinker. The property on which he squats adjoins a dam recently abandoned by the beavers.
The Old Vermonters in this neighborhood acquired their land in the reign of George II. Virtually indistinguishable from these are the French settlers who came down from Canada generations ago—people who call themselves La Rock and worship in Protestant churches. There is an immovable, change-resisting population of Vermonters in the backcountry. Some of them claim, with partly defiant pride, that they have never visited a big city. Flossie Riley, who still gets up before daylight to milk her cows (no machines for Flossie), said that she had been to Burlington once, and that was bad enough; the noise gave her a headache, and the traffic fumes were suffocating; she wouldn’t dream of going to New York. She knew perfectly well what Manhattan was like; she had seen it on television and wanted no part of it. Adherents of the ancient ways dig, chop, tend their animals, tap maple trees; their talk is about the roads in mud time, about frostbite or thermal underwear, the price of cordwood, or the volunteer fire department. Many of the locals hold jobs in the larger towns—in a surgical-dressing factory, for instance, or in a mill that manufactures old-looking barn board for householders who want a living room that looks rustic. Centers like Brattleboro, or Greenfield, Massachusetts, attract workers who drive in from “bedroom communities” twenty or thirty miles away. Some of the remoter villages resist the real estate developers and the temptation of high land prices. From fear of outsiders and their outside noise and restlessness, they refuse to license new shops. Rural Vermonters install TV dishes in their yards and put up aerials; their children, like children elsewhere, are absorbed in the voodoo beat of a Walkman. No part of this country can be “out of it.” What is happening everywhere is, one way or another, known to everyone. Shadowy world tides wash human nerve endings in the remotest corners of the earth. Villages are nevertheless controlled by insiders. Newcomers are accepted on certain conditions. They must pay their taxes, behave decently, and follow a few quite minimal rules.
My wife and I arrive in the spring, like Canada geese, sometimes taking off again but intermittently visible until the fall. The postman and the garbage collector have hard information about our comings and goings. There are, however, other mysterious underground channels of information, for when Jack Nicholson, accompanied by William Kennedy, the Albany novelist, and his wife called on me a couple of years ago, advance word got around. Nicholson, then filming Kennedy’s Ironweed in Albany, had come to chat about a film based on one of my novels. Pus white stretch limousine could not make the narrow turn between my gateposts. Silent neighbors watched from a distance as the chauffeur maneuvered the long car with its Muslim crescent antenna on the trunk. Then Nicholson came out, observed by many. He said, “Gee, behind the tinted glass I couldn’t tell it was so green out here.” He lit a mysterious-looking cigarette and brought out a small pocket ashtray, a golden object resembling a pillbox. Perhaps his butt ends had become relics or collectibles. I should have asked him to explain this, for everything he did was noted and I had to answer the questions of my neighborhood friends, for whom Nicholson’s appearance here was something lik
e the consecration of a whole stretch of road.
Our roads—the whole township network—were described by another visitor, a motherly old person from Idaho who came here to visit her son, as “one green tunnel after another.” From the perspective of a driver, shaded roads would look like that. On warm days a walker is grateful for the shelter, although when the wind dies down, the blackflies, deerflies, and no-see-ums will be waiting in the hollows. When it rains, you are kept almost dry by the packed leaves, and you hear the drops falling from level to level. You will have become familiar over the years with each of the beeches, yellow birches, and maples, the basswoods, the locusts, the rocks, the drainage ditches, the birds, and the wildlife, down to the red newts on the road surface.
People whose leisure time needs to be organized are the profitable concern of professional organizers worldwide. Daily papers and monthly magazines suggest, or advertise, holidays for all seasons, in all zones. East, west, north, and south, preparations are made to receive and entertain tourists, swimmers, skiers, diners, loungers, dancers. Whole regions are organized by giant corporations for travelers in quest of new scenes. More important, perhaps, than palm trees, pyramids, beaches, the temples of Angkor Wat, is the quest for peace. Repose, quiet, peace. But the restless few, longing for singular delights, find themselves once more among the many in facilities the same the world over—room, bed, shower, TV, restaurant, and at 10:00 A.M. your party will be lectured in the Uffizi or on a woodland trail.
But in the Vermont I have been talking about, there are no such preparations. In the nearest town, yes, people will be descending from their buses to buy baskets, maple syrup, aged cheddar, and knick-knacks. But ten miles away, through the woods, you hear no engines. When the birds awaken you, you open your eyes on the massed foliage of huge old trees. Should the stone kitchen be damp, as it may be even in July, you bring wood up from the cellar and build a fire. After breakfast you carry your coffee out to the porch. The dew takes up every particle of light. The hummingbirds chase away hummingbird trespassers from the fuchsias and Maltese crosses. Grass snakes come out of their sheltering rocks to get some sun. The poplar leaves, when you narrow your eyes, are like a shower of small change. And when you walk down to the pond, you may feel what the psalmist felt about still waters and green pastures.
Winter in Tuscany
(1992)
Travel Holiday, November 1992.
Winter in Tuscany? Well, why not. Millions of Italians do it. The modern tourist takes his winter holidays either in the sun or on the ski slopes. But business brought me to Florence in December, and I had put it to my wife, Jam’s, that, with two weeks free when business was done, the Sienese countryside might be just the place to restore the frazzled minds of two urban Americans. The crowds of winter would be madding elsewhere—in the Caribbean or on Alpine slopes—and we should have the whole of this ancient region to ourselves, sharing the cold with the populace.
Anticipating severe weather, we had brought our winter silks, goose downs, rabbit linings, mufflers, and Reeboks. Montalcino was cold, all right, but the air was as clear as icicles. Autumn had just ended, the new wine was in the barrels, the last of the olives were in the presses, the sheep were grazing, the pigs fattening, and ancient churches and monasteries were adding yet another winter to their tally. From the heights near Montalcino we could see Siena. In forty kilometers there was nothing to block the view. I have no special weakness for views. It was the beauty of the visibility as such, together with the absence of factories, refineries, and dumps, that penetrated the twentieth-century anti-landscape armor of my soul. To admire views, however, you need to stand still, and you had to endure the cold. The tramontana was battering the town when we arrived. It forced open windows in the night and scoured our faces by day.
Generations of Americans brought up with central heating can endure the cold on skis, in snowmobiles, on the ice, but they lack the European ability to go about their business in cold kitchens and icy parlors. Europeans take pride in their endurance of winter hardships. It gives them a superiority that to us seems less Spartan than masochistic.
I can remember cursing the management in grim English hotel rooms while going through my pockets for a shilling to drop in the gas meter, and as a guest in a Cambridge college I was driven once to the porter’s lodge to ask for a little warmth. The gentleman porter said, “If you will look under the bed, sir, you will discover a heating device.”
Under the bedspring when I lifted the coverlet I found a wire fixture holding a naked forty-watt bulb. The heat this bulb threw was supposed to penetrate the mattress and restore you to life. This austerity went with the dusty ragged academic gowns of the dons, held together, literally, with Scotch tape and staples. It pleased these scholars to be dowdy, indifferent to blue fingers and red noses, and heedless of freezing toilet seats. For the mind was its own place and made a heaven of hell. The door to this mental heaven stood open, but I was freezing.
Once freed from dependency on heating, you don’t mind the cold. The Tuscan winter didn’t affect your appreciation of Tuscan cheeses, soups, and wines. On your hummocky mattress you slept well enough, and after breakfast you went to visit a Romanesque church, a papal summer residence; you walked in the fields. You can sit comfortably in sheltered sunny corners and watch the sheep grazing.
The people you meet are happy to have you here; they take your off-season visit as a mark of admiration for the long and splendid history of their duchy and like to reward you with bits of information. In passing, one tells you about the deforestation of hilltops during the Dark Ages; another mentions the ravages of malaria and the Black Death of 1348; a third fills you in about exports to England from medieval Tuscany. The soils of all these fields seem to have passed through millions of human hands generation after generation. Our American surroundings will never be so fully humanized. But the landscape carries the centuries lightly, and ancient buildings and ruins do not produce gloomy feelings. Romanesque interiors in fact are a good cure for heaviness.
The region is as famous for its products—oil, wine, and cheeses—as for castles, fortresses, and churches. A disastrous freeze killed the olive groves some winters ago—the ancient trees now furnish farms with winter fuel. The new plantings do not as yet yield much oil, but the wine reserves are as full as ever.
In the Fattoria dei Barbi, belonging to the Colombini-Cinelli family, the vats, some of them made of Slovenian oak, resemble the engines of 747 jets in size. On walls and beams there are thermometers and gauges. We are conducted here by Angela, a young woman whose pretty face rivals the wine display in interest. Clean quiet cellars, level after level—the only living creature we meet below is a cat, who seems to know the tour by heart. During World War II, false partitions were put up to hide old vintages from the Germans. The almost sacred bottles are dimly, somewhat reverentially lighted. You feel called upon to pay your respects to this rare Brunello di Montalcino. With a banner tail, the cat is an auxiliary guide and leads the party up and down, in and out, from cellar to cellar. We take to this tomcat, who has all the charm of a veteran of the sex wars.
When we return to ground level the cat leaves the building between our legs. We enter next an enormous room where white pecorino cheeses, regularly spaced on racks, are biding their time. After the cheeses come the meat-curing rooms. In spiced air the hams hang like the boxing gloves of heavyweights. To see so much meat takes away the desire for food, so that when we go into the excellent Taverna dei Barbi I am more inclined to admire the pasta than to eat it. But you can never lose your desire for the Brunello wine. Your susceptibility returns at the same rate as the glass fills. Once again it makes sense to be a multimillionaire. The Brunello fragrance is an immediate QED of the advantages of the pursuit of riches. (I never joined up.)
“Don’t miss Pienza,” we were many times advised, so we recruit Angela to drive us there on a sunny but very sharp morning. Pienza was the birthplace, in 1405, of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope P
ius II. He was responsible for the handsome group of Renaissance buildings at the center of the town. It is the finest of these buildings, the Palazzo Piccolomini, that we have come to inspect.
From our parking place we ascend to the main street. The first impression is one of stony Renaissance elegance combined with the modern plate glass of shops. The temperature is a bar or two below freezing. A fine group of old gents standing outside the open door of a café acknowledge us with dignity as we move down the all-stone pavement to the palazzo. As cultural duty requires, we look into the church of Pope Pio, where we see long fissures running through the stone nave. (How to keep up with the maintenance of monuments?) Continuing to the palazzo, we are overtaken in the courtyard by the custodian. He spots us from the café en face, his warm hideout Thickly dressed in wool and leather, he comes with his ring of silver-glinting keys to lead us up the stairs. We pass through the small living quarters used until not very recently by surviving members of the family. A Piccolomini Count Silvio lived in the three front rooms until 1960. We understand from our guide that a picture of an aviator atop the piano in the music room represented the last of his line. Perhaps he was Count Silvio’s son and heir—exact information is hard to come by.
In the living quarters there is a framed genealogical tree weighed down by hundreds of names. We pass through the noble library and the armor room. We circle rugs so ancient, so thin, so pale, that a step might shatter them. On bookshelves are huge leather-bound volumes of the classics. I note that fifteenth-century popes were reading Thucydides and even Aristophanes, and as we enter the papal bedroom I think how difficult it would have been to handle these folios in bed. In this freezing chamber the imposing bed is grandly made and formally covered in dark green, a dire seaweed-colored fabric and sinking, sinking, sinking into decay. Perhaps it goes back to the last century. The mattress and bedding may be no more than eighty or ninety years old, but the thing carries a threat of eternity, and you feel that if you were to lie down and put your head on this seaweed-colored bolster you would never rise again. There is a fireplace, or rather a Gothic cavity in the wall big enough to accommodate eight-foot logs, but you’d have to stoke it for a week to drive out such an accumulation of cold.