Places that Writers Write

     

My Study, Lucey Bowen, 2010                    

     My study is in half of our garage, and it has taken 15 years to tame its peculiar feng shui. You reach it by a curved path around the house, and it was not until my children were grown and gone and I unplugged the phone, that I've used it properly. Still, I periodically take my notebook down to our independent Cafe Barrone, next to our independent Bookstore, Kepler's, and take in local humanity.

     Do writers all feel a  tension between having a quiet place to work without interruption, and the desire to be interrupted?  The New Yorker gave its writers office space, rather spartan and smelling of pencils. I remember that smell from a single visit to my father there. In our suburb, Chappaqua, he had a study off the front hall, with built-in bookshelves. At some point, to limit distraction, he borrowed office space from a realtor in the Village. After he moved back to Manhattan, he had a typewriter table and a partner's desk in one corner of his shabby-elegant apartment on the Upper East Side. 

     One of the most attractive writer's spaces I've known belonged to the late Henry Allen Moe in Sherman, Connecticut. Set in an old workshop, 25 yards from the main house, he could work there and still observe the family swimming in the mill pond. He'd had to mouse-proof it to avoid his manuscripts becoming lining for mouse nests. North of Sherman,  Malcolm Cowley's son Robert put painter Peter Blume's old studio to use as his study, with floor to ceiling bookshelves, and high windows that let in light but no distraction.

     The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay had a little cottage built for her at a distance from her house Steepletop, in Austerlitz, New York. I visited it on my Hudson River peregrinations last summer. I thought about it when I read Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own. The two structures seem to share the geomancer's wisdom of place.                                                    

"Sovereign Pronouncements with Authoritative Tone"

The Grave of Vassar's Founder, Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery, Lucey Bowen, 2009

     

     So Mary McCarthy described the characteristic speech of both the founder of Vassar College and the speech of Vassar girls in general. Mary McCarthy is another writer with which I triangulate my father's adventures between his college years and my birth. Mary McCarthy entered Vassar in 1929, just as my father should have been graduating from Yale. McCarthy graduated in 1933, a decade before my mother. In that period my father spent a lot of time on the Vassar campus, with a variety of women who had the self assurance that McCarthy describes, the last being my mother. There was Meg Hockaday, who went on to establish a very successful New York advertising agency. Theodora Finney was a great beauty who married a doctor instead of my father, the struggling journalist. Journalist Eunice Clark was actually a room-mate of McCarthy's, and was part of the literary scene in New York. After a few years of marriage, my mother's authoritative tone and sovereign pronouncements came to be labeled argumentative.
     McCarthy published the complete text of her novel The Group in 1963. It traced the lives of eight young women, who like McCarthy, roomed in the South Tower of Vassar's Main Building and graduated in the class of 1933. It was a smashing financial success for McCarthy, but it made life miserable for those of us about to become freshman at Vassar:  full as the novel was, of seduction, birth control devices and secret lesbians. I've had a bad taste in my mouth about Mary McCarthy ever since. Probably because, unlike my mother and her mother before her, I missed out on the "Sovereign Pronouncements with Authoritative Tone" seminars.  McCarthy's other specialty was using marriage as a kind of intellectual ladder, on which men older and smarter than her were the rungs. She made a lot of people miserable, most of all herself. I'm neither quick witted nor cruel enough to enjoy the prose combat and sudden death bon mots that were her specialty. What I did learn at Vassar were two things: to love reading in general, and original sources specifically. Whether those sources are reliable has taken me decades longer to discern.

Main Gate and Main Building, Vassar College, Lucey Bowen, 2009

Apple Battling circa 1977

     What does a flat broke All-But-Dissertation Ph.D. student do for a living in northwestern Connecticut in 1977? I saw an add for apple-pickers in the Danbury newspaper. Ever since I had read the ethnology Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, I was curious about apple picking and orchards. So I drove my rusted Volkswagon Beetle down to Blue Jay Orchards in Bethel, Connecticut and applied for a job. What I didn't know was that the advertisement was merely one of the requirements that permitted the orchard owner to sponsor the real picking crew from Jamaica for the season. Labor has been a problem for New England farm owners for as long as they've been growing rocks, and especially difficult since World War II. No one wants to pick apples if they can find other work.
     The farm's owner was obligated to give anyone who applied a try. Most lasted a day. I was in luck. The owner, Bob Josephy saw my name and asked if I was Croswell Bowen's daughter. Turned out, he'd known dad in New York of the thirties and forties, when Josephy was a noted book designer. He created a job for me, stacking boxes of apples onto pallets, and removing excess leaves from them. With my interest in the languages of the Caribbean, I was delighted to work with the Jamaicans, listening to them sing hymns form their pyramidal ladders high in the trees. They competed with each other to pick the most, of course. I also became friends with the crusty farm manager, and invited him to dinner at Hidden Hollow in Sherman. Josephy seemed shocked at this, and invited me to dinner at his house. A year or so earlier, he and his wife had separated, and she lived at the Heritage Village retirement community nearby. We had a good chat, and he made a subtle pass at me. He liked women in general. I worked at the orchard until the first hard frost shut things down.
     I can think of one reason why I didn't pepper him with questions about my father. I didn't know what to ask. Josephy died in 1993. Fortunately for my curiosity, the year before he died, Josephy completed his autobiography, Taking Part, A Twentieth Century Life. Taking Part gives me some insight into the thinking of my father's circle.
    It's odd that Josephy was shocked at my friendship with his farm manager, as he was very involved in the labor movement in the thirties. That's what I'd ask him about Dad. I can't, so Josephy's experiences are just a hint at Dad's. Both men came from privileged backgrounds. After a military boarding school, Josephy chose not to go to college, but went to work for the publisher, Knopf. After a decade, he became a freelance book designer. His experiences led him to help organize the workers in the book designing and publishing industry. He states that after the Crash, Americans of all classes thought there needed to be a change in the unfettered capitalism of the day. Some of those most dedicated to improving the lot of workers were members of the American Communist Party, and Josephy joined. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 was a turning point for him as he was a committed anti-facist. He left the Party, and indeed, the Guild he helped organized did not survive.
     Josephy's ties to Dad included mutual friends like Malcolm Cowley and Matthew Josephson. Josephy's second wife was Martha McCleery, who had been married to Bill McCleery, Dad's editor at the freethinking newspaper, PM. The breakup of friendships over politics is a theme that runs through Taking Part. That resonates with my childish eavesdropping at my parent's and their friends cocktail parties. If in my youth, Vietnam caused ruptures between some fathers and sons, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and then the witch-hunting red scares of the Cold War must have broken up scores of friendships. And of course, then as now, accusations of communism and socialism were lobbed about with results that destroyed careers as well. Belatedly, thanks to Josephy's book, I'm getting a sense of those times.

Painter's Words, Writer's Brush

    
     For no particular reason, I decided that one had to choose between visual art and writing. At about age 13, I decided that I was an artist of the visual kind. The college preparatory curriculum in high school kept me from actually taking art classes, but my decision was made. In college, if I studied Art History, I was allowed to take studio art classes. As meagre as the offerings were, I had great teachers, like Concetta Scarvaglione for sculpture. The strangest part of this forced choice legend was the corollary that one could not make a living as a painter.
     Maybe these messages came from the choices of my father, whom I knew as a writer, and his brother, ostensibly a painter. Now I know better than to be so binary. First of all, my father pursued photography to augment his journalism. Secondly, my uncle worked as a screenwriter more successfully than he did as a painter. In fact, there's a wonderful book, The Writer's Brush, by Donald Friedman, that is an encyclopedia of writers who were quite competent as painters or sculptors. Just to mention a few, and only going from A to C, there's James Agee, whose brush and ink sketches have great line; there's Hans Christian Andersen's intricate cut-outs; there's Antonin Artaud doing very weird sketches; Ludwig Bemelmans gave us both the prose and the wondrously loose watercolor's of Madeline's Paris; Vassar's Elizabeth Bishop, painter and poet, who said "painting is more fun than writing." Please may we skip William Blake, as I grew up, as did my children, staring at a reproduction of one of his illustrations, hung over the dining table. And skipping right along to the family haunt of Sherman, Connecticut, the poet Hart Crane painted, something he only confessed to his Sherman neighbor, Peter Blume. I admit I am so un-with-it for assuming this visual - written dichotomy. Even as I write this, the daughter unit is taking a college course on the graphic novel, adding Daniel Clowes and Will Eisner to the list.
     The Chinese, of course, wouldn't admit to this dichotomy either. Learning Chinese characters requires mastery of the brush strokes that are used in painting, and the placement of a poem in a painting is part of the form. Good thing I can now take on the retirement from the world of Chinese scholars and paint AND write.
Top Left: Mistress of the Dance, Lucey Bowen, 1992

Stuff White People Worry About

     My daughter introduced me to the website Stuff White People Like, now available as a book. I like this concept because it reminds me that my pre-occupations are of miniscule importance to most of the world. Similarly, my privileges, like education and great health care, are exactly that: privileges. Bear with me, I'm setting the context here for an illustrative anecdote about Susan Cheever, and her first husband, Rob Cowley, that's told from the Cowley perspective in Scott Donaldson's biography of Cheever. In this story, I recognize that same mysterious social insecurity that plagued my father.
     Reading the New York Times engagement announcement of Cheever and Cowley, they sound a matched pair: both were prep school and Ivy League graduates. One's father is described as the novelist and short story writer, the other as the historian and literary critic. Alas, at the wedding itself, "there was some tension between the two principal families...The Cowleys thought the wedding too expensive and ostentatious, while the Cheevers were determined to give their daughter the best sendoff they could afford."
Here are two families, one of New England stock, the other from Pennsylvania, who are indistinguishable in pedigree to, let's suppose, a Parsi, or a Tibetan. But they are worried about appearances. There is a certain irony here, as eventually, Rob Cowley married an heiress, Didi Lorillard, who maintains an etiquette Web site, newportmanners.com .
     At times in his life, my writer father agonized over begin excluded from the "inner circle," of those white males born to wealth and power. Maybe it isn't just white males that worry about this. Maybe some percentage of people from every race and creed are always striving to enter the inner sanctum of their world. I like my father better when he's worrying one of the criminals he wrote about.
 

Other Writer's Daughters

     In 1984, when Susan Cheever published her memoir, Home Before Dark, about her father, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever, I was quite simply green: jealous, envious, covetous and naive. John Cheever was the quintessential New Yorker writer. Susan, already a published novelist, hit the memoir ball out of the park with this one, and it is still in print. She was married then, to Robert Cowley, the son of Malcolm Cowley, one of my father's and my favorite resident writers in Sherman, CT.

     The not so pretty part of this story was John Cheever's alcoholism and depression. Later Susan Cheever herself battled alcoholism and what she describes as an addiction to sex. All three of her marriages ended in divorce. Through it all, while raising two children, Susan Cheever kept on writing: 10 books published, when last I counted. I find it astonishing that knowing what she did about the writer's life, she decided to pursue it.
     If she's anything like me, she did it because she wanted her father's approval. She wrote that he expressed his disapproval of her, admonishing her to loose weight, dreaming that she would marry a fabulously wealthy man. In my father's letters to his mistress, he observed that I seemed to able to attract boys, even though I had, in his words, absolutely no sex appeal. Both fathers viewed their daughters thru the lense of men's primal attraction to beautiful women. Not much support for a career in that blindered evaluation. Susan Cheever makes an observation about Home Before Dark, ''having written it I know my father better than I ever did while he was alive.'' I've certainly felt the same in writing about Croswell Bowen. One of the reasons I envied Susan Cheever was that she got about 15 more years with her father than I did with mine. Of course, it's possible she kept marrying those writers as the closest she could get to her father's complete approval. When my father died, I divorced my writer husband; I don't think you can earn the approval of the dead.

Mrs. Fisher

In the 1922 novel, four women of various ages flee to Italy to escape the English climate.

     

     For the past three years or so, I've resembled Mrs. Fisher in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April. As the story begins, Mrs. Fisher seems a rather dis-agreeable old woman. von Arnim wrote of her:
Her father had been an eminent critic and in his house she had seem practically everybody who was anybody in letters or art. Carlyle had scowled at her; Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee; Tennyson had sonorously rallied her on the length of her pigtail. My father's friends sometimes seem to me more alive than my contemporaries.
     At first Mrs. Fisher studiously finds nothing in her present circumstances to live up to her memory of those distinguished dead white males. I don't go to that extreme, but it has seemed to me that Croswell Bowen knew an awful lot of very colorful characters, including some distinguished artists and writers. Was it simply that Greenwich Village in the 1930s was overflowing with talent? Or was it his gregarious personality, cranked up for social occasions, that made for so many interesting encounters?  Perhaps I live in a world where the concentration of intellectual energy is far less than it was then or in post-War Manhattan.  Or maybe these people are fascinating because I am beholding them from a distance, anchored in a time I'm just learning to understand.
     Mrs. Fisher has no desire to produce. No new criticism or essays or poetry will come from her. She only asked, she said, to be allowed to sit quiet in the sun and remember. Eventually, she does grow out of her passivity, and becomes mentally and emotionally much younger, more responsive and feeling. I do want to produce in these post-middle age years. I'm hoping for a sort of Picasso or Matisse like run-up to the end. Take that Mrs. Fisher!

Writer's Daughters Writing

    
My starter husband's daughter just published her first book, the account of her first 30 years, which includes her marriage and divorce. The book is How to Get Divorced by Thirty by Sascha Rothchild, who quotes her writer father on the subject of me and our honeymoon. People think I'm crazy for reading the book and laughing. Actually, I have a great deal of empathy for her, having had a writer for a father myself. My failings are not the only ones exposed; she more-or-less does open heart surgery on herself. It is an impressive first book, maybe her screenwriting successes account for that. The book helped me finally get a bead on one of the many theories I've had about why my starter marriage ended way before I was thirty. Deep incompatibility. I take everything seriously and I hate Florida. My X took nothing seriously and was born and has stayed in the Sunshine State. I couldn't imagine a child of mine enjoying Las Vegas or living in Los Angeles, which Sascha does. So everything works out the way it is meant to, and along the way, I've acquired a sense of humor, but I will never like Las Vegas or Los Angeles.