By Jill Knight Weinberger, Globe Correspondent
LENOX -- Last fall, I set out for the Berkshire hills to celebrate the
start of another year of teaching. Mine was a literary pilgrimage, for as a
professor of English, I had long wanted to revisit the homes of two great
American writers, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, both of whom had lived
for a time in the Berkshires.
While I was aware that many other prominent 19th- and 20th-century
writers had Berkshires connections -- among them William Cullen Bryant,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick -- I was delighted to find
in planning this two-day literary tour that I could pay homage to them, as
well as to Melville and Wharton. I visited Bryant's home in Cummington, open
to view on summer and fall weekends, and a replica of Hawthorne's ``little red
house,'' which is found on the grounds of Tanglewood, site of the renowned
summer music festival, and where he wrote ``The House of the Seven Gables.''
Any present-day visitor can see how the unspoiled beauty of the
Berkshires' dense forests and mighty hills could have nurtured the literary
imaginations of local writers and beckoned to those from beyond its
boundaries. And to visit these writers' homes is to glimpse the landscapes
that inspired and informed some of America's literary treasures.
First, however, I visited the Stockbridge grave of Catharine Maria
Sedgwick (1789-1867), an important writer in her day, if now relatively
obscure. Contemporary critics ranked her alongside James Fenimore Cooper and
Washington Irving as one of the premier writers of the time. Although she
wrote several novels and collections of stories, most of which are out of
print, her best-known work is still available, an 1827 novel titled ``Hope
Leslie,'' a book that generated some controversy because of its criticism of
colonial-era racism and sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans.
The Sedgwicks of Stockbridge were a prominent family, and their gravesite
in the Main Street cemetery is referred to locally as the ``Sedgwick Pie''
because of the circular arrangement of the headstones. I was touched by the
simplicity of Catharine Maria's gravestone, a lovely ivy-laced cross rising
from a stone base inscribed with only her name and dates.
From Stockbridge, it is a short drive north to Lenox, where in 1850 and
1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) resided in a small clapboard house
belonging to the Tappan family. The Tappan estate is now home to the
Tanglewood summer music festival that attracts some 300,000 visitors every
year.
The cottage where Hawthorne wrote ``The House of the Seven Gables'' is a
1947 replica of the original that burned down in 1890. Not open to the
public, it contains practice rooms for Tanglewood's student musicians.
During his short stay here, Hawthorne met Herman Melville and recorded
the occasion in his journal. On Aug. 5, 1850, the two men were among a small
group (that included Oliver Wendell Holmes) making a day's excursion to
Monument Mountain in Stockbridge. It was a jolly party, complete with
champagne and poetry readings, and one that established a firm friendship
between the two men. They traded visits and corresponded, but after Hawthorne
departed from the Berkshires the following year, they would meet only once
more, in England, in 1856.
Herman Melville (1819-1891) and his family resided in nearby Pittsfield
at Arrowhead, a rambling yellow-and green farmhouse built as a tavern in the
1780s.
The 13 years the author spent in the Berkshires were stunningly
productive ones, although not remunerative. Working the 160-acre farm and
leaving home periodically to travel or to try his hand at the lecture circuit,
Melville nonetheless managed, between 1850 and 1863, to finish work on
``Moby-Dick'' and to write three other novels (``Pierre,'' ``The Confidence
Man,'' ``Israel Potter''), all of his ``Piazza Tales.''
A walk through Arrowhead affords glimpses into both Melville's domestic
world and the highly disciplined life he led as a writer. Two rooms in
particular represent the poles of his existence: the family man of the kitchen
and the writer of the second-story study.
Like many colonial houses, Arrowhead was designed around a massive center
chimney. The small kitchen in particular is dominated by fireplace and
hearth, and here is found one of Arrowhead's most delightful and distinctive
features. On the wood paneling surrounding the fireplace, Melville's younger
brother Allan, who bought the house in 1863, had lines painted from Herman's
story ``I and My Chimney,'' a charming tale about a man, his chimney, and a
bit of domestic disharmony.
The wife of the story goes to some lengths to persuade her husband to
condemn the center chimney -- and its offensive bulk and attendant dust -- and
replace it with a more convenient and cleaner heating system. (Melville's
wife, Elizabeth, claimed her mother-in-law was the model for this character,
not she.) The wife, daughters, and local architect are eventually thwarted,
and the ``two grey headed old smokers'' are left undisturbed. This Melville
voice -- playful and affectionate -- may not be as familiar to readers
accustomed to the ponderous prose of ``Moby-Dick.''
Melville's study on the second floor, however, conjures no images of a
lounging, pipe-smoking husband who sits cozy by the fire on a brisk Berkshire
evening. The room has an ascetic look, not uncomfortable, but spare: plain
walls in cream and muted green, a bookcase, a writing table. A few artifacts
remind us of Melville's years at sea, before his marriage -- maps, a harpoon,
and a copy of a ship's docket listing Melville among the crew.
There is little question that the writer was nourished by country life at
Arrowhead. His writing table faces a north window so he needed only to look
up and out for a view of Mount Greylock, about 25 miles distant and the
highest peak in the Berkshires. Greylock's twin peaks reminded him, he said,
of the humps of a whale's back.
Another of Arrowhead's noteworthy features is what Melville referred to
as his ``piazza.'' It is a simple porch that Melville had built onto the
north side of the house, again, in view of Mount Greylock. A house without a
piazza, he wrote, is like an art gallery without a bench. ``For what but
picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills? --
galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into
pictures ever fresh.''
The view of Mount Greylock from Melville's porch remains a magnificent,
unspoiled vista thanks to the Berkshire County Historical Society, which
purchased the adjacent fields to prevent development. The society owns and
runs Arrowhead, and has created a nature trail through the surrounding
acreage.
Edith Wharton's grand home in Lenox, The Mount, seems a world away from
the rustic charms of Arrowhead, but she, too, fell under the spell of the
Berkshires.
``The country quiet stimulated my creative zeal,'' she wrote in her
autobiography, ``A Backward Glance.''
The best-known of Wharton's Berkshires-set novels is ``Ethan Frome,''
although neither it nor ``Summer,'' a lesser-known but fine novel, were
written at The Mount, where Wharton spent only 10 years before moving
permanently to Europe in 1911.
She wrote that the two Berkshires-set novels ``were the result of
explorations among villages still bedrowsed in a decaying rural existence, and
sad, slow speaking people living in conditions hardly changed since their
forebears held those villages against the Indians.''
Wharton (1862-1937) was born into a wealthy, socially prominent old New
York family, an unlikely candidate for a literary career. Building The Mount
to escape what she called ``the watering place trivialities of Newport,'' the
summer enclave of America's social elite, allowed Wharton to develop her
identity as a writer.
Wharton's interests and accomplishments were far-ranging: Best known as a
Pulitzer prize-winning writer of novels and short stories, she also coauthored
``The Decoration of Houses.'' The Mount, as a tour of the house reveals, was
the ultimate expression of the principles she and Ogden Codman Jr. put forth
in their famous book on interior design.
Set on a ridge overlooking Laurel Lake, The Mount (named for Wharton's
great-grandfather's Long Island estate) is covered by scaffolding.
Stabilization of the exterior is an urgent concern of the Edith Wharton
Restoration, the nonprofit organization that owns and administers the estate.
But Wharton's exquisite taste and personality are evident throughout the
house. Rejecting the clutter of Victoriana with which she had been surrounded
growing up, and understanding the interplay between architecture and interior
design, she and Codman created a house more reminiscent of 18th-century Europe
than 19th-century New England. Indeed, Belton House, a stately home in
Lincolnshire, England, provided the model.
It was a home conducive both to writing and entertaining. While the
wood-paneled library is equipped with a desk and looks every bit the serious
author's study, Wharton composed nothing but letters there. For all the years
of her writing life, her routine seldom varied: She wrote every morning
propped up in bed, her pages dropping to the floor to be later retrieved by a
secretary, who would transcribe them. She would appear at lunch, ready to
join her husband and guests in the day's entertainment.
Among the select group invited to The Mount was Wharton's dear friend
Henry James, who made several visits to Lenox and turned her library into a
true literary salon. The lively talk and the poetry readings stimulated
Wharton, if not her decidedly nonintellectual, sportsman husband, Teddy.
One of the pleasures of visiting The Mount during the summer season is
the chance to attend a performance of a Wharton-inspired play. Shakespeare
and Company, The Mount's resident theater group, has adapted some of Wharton's
works to perform in repertory along with their complement of Shakespearean
works.
While my husband and I drove through the Berkshires on those warm June
days, I kept in mind an image of Wharton, who loved to take afternoon
excursions in her ``motor'' and returning to The Mount ``stupid with fresh
air.'' One of our drives took us through the sparsely populated eastern
Berkshires to the summer home of William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) in
Cummington.
While Bryant's poetry is out of fashion these days, every English major
was once required (and still is, I hope) to read his most famous and finest
work, ``Thanatopsis.'' (The title is generally translated from the Greek as
``A Meditation on Death.'') But the regard with which the nation held this
early man of American letters had less to do with the quality of his poetry
than with his influential position as journalist. As editor of New York's
Evening Post, he turned it into one of the most respected newspapers of the
19th century, and through his editorials the paper passionately supported the
candidacy of Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery.
The Bryant Homestead, where Cullen, as he was called, spent his youth and
the summers of his retirement years, receives far fewer visitors than The
Mount and Arrowhead, perhaps owing to its isolated location overlooking the
Westfield River valley, east of Pittsfield. More than the other authors'
homes, the Homestead is chock full of original furnishings and Bryant's
personal possessions. Among them are the straw hat and smock he wore berry
picking, his jigsaw puzzles, and the Turkish robe and fez he brought home from
his travels abroad.
Bryant's study remains much as he arranged it in 1865, when he returned
to Cummington to buy and renovate his childhood home. In this ground-floor
room, formerly his physician father's consulting room, Bryant continued to
write editorials and support favorite causes, and to complete his translations
of the ``Iliad'' and ``Odyssey.'' Here, as throughout the house, his life is
in the details on display.
Bryant was a fitness buff. His modest upstairs bedroom contained a chin
bar for pull-ups. Servants heard him early in the mornings pole-vaulting over
his bed. And he was careful about his diet, avoiding red meat, coffee, and
tea.
Strolling the peaceful acres surrounding the Homestead, watching the
slow, steady march of cows across a field, I was reminded of a stanza from
Bryant's ``Lines on Revisiting the Country,'' which surely must have been
inspired by a similarly glorious day in the Berkshires:
Here I have 'scaped the city's stifling heat,
Its horrid sounds, and its polluted air;
And where the season's milder fervors beat,
And gales, that sweep the forest borders,
bear
The song of bird, and sound of running stream,
Am come awhile to wander and to dream.
Published 08/09/98 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section.
