Red Hats, Malabar, and Lauren Bacall

I visited Malabar Farm State Park in the midst of an invasion. It was a warm, perfectly clear early fall day, and the valley was as captivating as Louis Bromfield had described in several of his books. Arriving at the new visitor’s center which had opened only three days earlier, I learned that I would have to wait an hour for the next house tour. So, I decided that I would practice my country meadering and just walk about the fields, look at the animals and the garden and listen to the sounds of nature while I tried to absorb the soul-penetrating blue of the nearly cloudless sky. Except for a couple of retirees and a family of Amish children, I had the place to myself. But- why did I want to come here anyway?

Louis Bromfield is far from a household name. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, writer of over thirty books, successful Hollywood screenwriter (The Rains Came, Mrs. Parkington) and agricultural innovator, Bromfield was well-known in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s for his popular fiction and his connection to other famous writers and and movie stars. He helped Hemingway get published and had a long-standing correspondence with Edith Wharton on one of his favorite topics- gardening. Malabar Farm is the home that he built when he returned to the U.S. from France in the late thirties when the Second World War was imminent. Bromfield loved France and had lived in the French countryside near Senlis ,north of Paris. He had studied agriculture at Cornell and journalism at Columbia and was passionate about both. Bereft of the human tragedy that he saw unfolding in Europe, Louis (Louee) was ready to find a new home in the sylvan valleys of his childhood home, Richland Co., Ohio. In his book, Pleasant Valley, he describes his motivation for leaving the fast paced life of a sought after author. He said “When I returned home, I knew that permanence, continuity, alone was what I wanted, not the glittering life of New York and Washington, not the intellectual life of universities. What I wanted was a piece of land which I could love passionately, which I could spend the rest of my life in cultivating, cherishing and improving… a piece of land upon which I might leave the mark of my character, my ingenuity, my intelligence, my sense of beauty- perhaps the only real immortality man can have. I cannot see that man could wish a better afterlife than the peace of oblivion and the immortality that rests in houses and trees and vines and old walls.” (p9) Bromfield wanted to bring his wife and three girls to a place that would truly mean “home.”

As it approached time for my tour. I positioned myself on the porch of the house anticipating seeing this vintage house with the original Grandma Moses paintings, mass of rooster figures (how French) and star memorabilia. Suddenly, I turned to find a swarm of ladies in bright red and purple climbing the steps to the porch. These stalwart members of the Mt. Gilead, Ohio Red Hat Society were about to take Malabar by storm. Thus me and my twenty-eight reddish purple babes were about to become a team. Who were these women and- WHY? The Red Hat Society was begun in the 1990’s by Sue Ellen Cooper (referred to as Queen Mother). She explains “The Red Hat Society began as a result of a few women deciding to greet middle age with verve, humor, and élan. We believe silliness is the comedy relief of life, and since we are all in it together, we might as well join red-gloved hands and go for the gusto together. Underneath the frivolity, we share a bond of affection, forged by common life experiences and a genuine enthusiasm for wherever life takes us next.” These women certainly reflected this credo.

As we toured the house and learned about all of the mid-century stars who had visited regularly, film greats like Tyrone Power, Myrna Loy and Kay Francis, it was great to experience the group spirit and attitude of helping and supporting each other that these women displayed. Nobility and good humor have far more in common than I might have imagined. Malabar farm has over thirty rooms. The most famous, of course, was the guest bedroom where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall spent their wedding night. The guide was careful to point out that the room had twin beds, but added that the beds were on rollers. This was Bogart’ fourth marriage and Bacall’s first, and the last for both. They were to be married in the garden, but because they had used the phone and, of course, in 1945 everyone had a party line, word

got out that these famous stars were to be married at noon, so the whole town of Lucas, Ohio showed up. The wedding therefore was held in the grand entrance hall, However, the happy couple did go out to wave to the throng after the ceremony, and the party that followed was legendary.

Louis Bromfield was truly devoted to improving farming and making it more in tune with the preservation of the land. If you were a guest in his house, then you had chores. If you wanted to eat, you needed to work and a note delineating your daily task would be placed on your breakfast plate with your napkin. The State Park continues to use many of the land use and recycling ideas that Bromfield started. He was successful, it seems, in making this new endeavor in his beloved valley truly into his “home.”

I left my new red-hatted friends after I had helped them climb onto the wagon for their Malabar Farm wagon ride. Their smiles and chatter seemed a fitting testimony to their commitment to each other and to good humored engagement with life. Bromfield was ever the optimist, surrounding himself with family, his beloved Boxers and friends and secure in his life affirming vision of finding a place that is home which allowed him to give something in return for all of the beauty and wonder that life had provided him. He would have liked having the Red Hat Society at the “Farm.”

Hart of Ohio

GARRETTSVILLE,OH - Ohio is Midwest, and Garrettsville is vintage small town middle border. In the gently rolling hills of the Western Reserve, this village with a mill and a one block main street is the perfect model for the small community which both Crane and Anderson cited for serial suffocation of the artist. This just happened to be Hart Crane’s birthplace. The large Victorian house of his parents which stands next door to his grandparent’s house was the one home that Crane had where his parents were actually happy. They spent most of Hart's life at war and then apart. I often think of this house when I read Crane’s poem “My Grandmother’s Love Letters’ because you can picture him in the attic with an oil lamp or candle finding the letters and thinking about the “love” that his grandmother had experienced long before she was ever known to him.

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

“There are no stars tonight
But those of memory
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.


There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow…”

I went to Hiram College which is only 2 miles from Garrettsville. While a student there, I read Crane's poetry, so whenever I passed this house, I imagined him writing in the attic, even though the real attic or turret room that he was purported to use occured several years later on East 115th St. in Cleveland at his maternal grandmother's house that was razed to make room for what is now The American Heart Association building. This new use seems oddly appropriate. (See picture) But no matter, the romantic vision of the young poet reaching out to the past while intently beginning to shape his craft is a powerful personal
image, mythical in fact and function as a way to construct a vision of the poet at work.

Yet Crane was on to something here that he would long explore- the emotional connection through time that love and parallel experience can provide, and the realization that feeling a passion for beauty and a belief in love is worth the struggle to try to grasp at least a fleeting understanding of both of these. Through this creative act, Crane ultimately and completely immortalizes and universalizes the moment forever even as it crumbles, evaporates and is gone- but not gone . He ends this poem in this way:

“Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:

“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter. (from White Buildings)

Clarence Crane, Hart’s father, was a businessman and an entrepreneur. He invented the lifesaver candy and worked his entire life ensuring the success of multiple ventures. One of the central conflicts of Hart Crane’s life was his inability to be a worthy heir to his father’s endeavors because, it is undeniable -Hart Crane was at his center a poet, and he paid the ultimate price for this choice, even though, you could argue, he really had no choice at all. Hart had no intesest in being a salesman or working in the factory or even writing advertising copy, although he did all of these things at some point in his life. He was pure and simple – a poet, and from his teen years to his too soon demise at 32, only the muse- in attic, basement, pub or ship – did this Hart ever have a heart for. Van Winkle

Pittsburgh, PA

I love Pittsburgh! This is a jaunty city with a past. It sits on an amazing chunk of American real estate and exudes American history. Two rivers, (the Allegheny and the Monongahela (The Mon) come together at Point Park in downtown Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The view of this first order confluence from Mt. Washington is almost mystical in its beauty. This vision is a perfect marriage of natural contours and modern architecture. There is no doubt that this spot is the center of life in Pittsburgh. Many cities have become amorphous collections of dispersed centers, not Pittsburgh. You are clearly at the vortex when you approach downtown and “The Point.” From the lighted fountain at the very tip of downtown to the towering PPG and Alcoa buildings to the thousands and thousands of lights which line all sides of the rivers- at night, this is almost a fantasy vision- elegant yet real, gritty yet dreamlike. Pittsburgh is like a big small town. People are friendly and helpful, and they are fierce and constant sports enthusiasts. High school football is every bit as much a religion here as it is in any small town in Texas. Both the Pirates and the Steelers have new stadiums right where the rivers meet emphasizing the central importance that these teams have for ‘burghers. Ben R is a god here, and the great number of neighborhood bars and new “sports grills” alike rock with cheers and Iron City that flow profusely during games.

Pittsburgh’s reputation as a steel , coal and heavy industry center still colors most people’s opinion of it. Yet the rivers, once lined with steel mills and other large brick industrial monoliths, now sport condos and “Waterfront” shopping meccas with Filene’s and Dave and Busters and palacelike cinema centres. There are still many neighborhoods and river towns that have yet to find the resources to revitalize, but there is a crispness and wonder to this “down-home” tough and tender city which inspires great loyalty and a distinct culture that has produced both Andy Warhol and Joe Namath.

It may be shocking that I actually had a reason – two of them really- to visit Pittsburgh. Two of my authors Robinson Jeffers and Willa Cather spent important years in this metropolis, and, of course, I wanted to see if there were any physical remnants of the places where they lived. Robinson Jeffers, the poet of nature and the California coast, was born right here in Pittsburgh. His birthplace is gone, probably sitting under PNC Park or an adjacent parking lot, but the house where he lived, off and on, from 1889 until 1903 is still in use in Sewickley, an upscale suburb a couple of miles down the Ohio River. Jeffers’ mother was from Sewickley. His father was a professor at Western Theological Seminary which probably explains “Robin’s” great interest in the classics. This was a second marriage for William Hamilton Jeffers. He was a widower and 47 years old while his new wife Annie was only 25. With the help of Annie’s parents, they built the house at 44 Thorn St in Sewickley. The house is large and quite beautiful. It sits in the middle of Sewickley, just one block from Sewickley Academy. This would have been a comfortable existence for the Jeffers. They often traveled to Europe, and Robin spent time at boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was always an interested and engaged student and was considered a bit of a prodigy, learning Greek and Latin as part of his early childhood education. His father retired in 1903, and the family soon relocated to California. They still maintained many family ties in Pittsburgh.

Willa Cather’s connection with Pittsburgh is quite different. She came to take a job as editor for Home Monthly in 1896. Pittsburgh at this time was an industrial center. Pollution was an ever-present problem and the smoke from the mills and factories could obliterate the sun. Cather came to the East to advance her writing career. She worked for awhile as an editor, then she taught at two high schools in Pittsburgh, and eventually after ten years, left to work for McClure’s Magazine in New York. She stayed in New York for the rest of her life.

After spending her first year or so living in boarding houses and cramped apartments,Willa moved in with her lifelong friend, Isabelle McClung and her family at 1180 Murray Hill Ave. in Pittsburgh’s tony East End. This house, on a vertical cobblestone street next to the Woodland Ave historic district and Chatham College is imposing and still towers over the rest of Shadyside, one of Pittsburgh’s best neighborhoods. Andrew Mellon built a home one block away in 1896. Willa lived with the McClungs for 5 years. Her room was on the third floor of the house, and she refers to having time to write without being disturbed. It is probable that many of her early stories were written here, especially her widely anthologized story, “Paul’s Case” and her breakthrough story, The Troll Garden.” “Paul’s Case” is set in Pittsburgh and deals with the disenchantment and dissolution of a teenage boy, who finds his middle class life so stifling of his creativity that he steals money and has a “last” embracing of beauty in New York. Willa seems to have had real ambivalence about Pittsburgh and the strong orthodoxy that she saw around her. In this story, Paul catches the trolley only a block away (Negley St.) from the house that Willa shared with the McClungs. She was always divided by the love she felt for the towns and cities that she knew provided the form and substance which give our lives meaning and yet she disdained the way that they also thwarted and sometimes killed the creative instincts of the artist.

Do artists need to leave home? Do the restrictions of home-grown society limit access to the muse and leave the artist to be a stranger in his own land among her own people? With Jeffers, his time as a poet was yet to manifest itself when his family left Pittsburgh to travel to Europe and ultimately relocate in Southern California. As for Cather, Pittsburgh seemed to nurture her and help her form her art. This was a far cry from Gore, Va. or Red Cloud , NE or even Lincoln, NE, and it provided access to ideas and a different culture than she had ever experienced. She was certainly ready after her ten years to take the next step and find her place in the literary world of New York.

And, now the journey goes ever westward. I am on to eastern Ohio and Cleveland to explore the haunts of Hart Crane, the mystical poet and Sherwood Anderson, the fiction writer who William Faulkner (they met in New Orleans) called “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.” We carry on.

Day One: The Road West, Gore and Fallingwater

The road west (aka the quest) beckoned on Sunday morning and the journey began. It is entirely appropriate that the first stop or “place” was only twenty-five miles west of Middleburg in Gore or Back Creek Valley, Va , just outside of Winchester. In this Appalachian foothills hamlet, Willa Cather was born and spent her first nine years. Just one ridge east from West Virginia, this pocket valley was the birthplace and first home which Willa reluctantly left behind at the age of nine when the family joined other Cathers in Nebraska. There are still Cather relatives in Frederick County, Virginia today. With his parents already in Nebraska, Willa’s father decided to sell Willowshade, the family home that Willa remembered vividly and fondly throughout her life. This stately brick home appropriately shaded by willows sheltered the then four Cather children – Willa the oldest, Roscoe, Douglas, and Jessica. Three more children were born in Nebraska. Today, it still sits stately, nestled in trees along busy US 50, simple in design but elegant and comfortable in its still rural landscape. Of her first Virginia home, Willa once told her friend Edith Lewis that she loved “every tree and every rock, every landmark of the countryside, all the familiar faces, all their things… all their ways.”

This tight-knit Virginia community was to be repeatedly called on by

Cather for her fiction. In My Antonia,,Jim Burden, who is ten, leaves his Virginia home to live with his grandparents when his parents die. The Cather family had had a history of susceptibility to tuberculosis, so the drier Nebraska climate figured in their decision to go west. It is natural to romanticize our childhood and our first home, yet by leaving Back Creek Valley at ten, Willa’s memories become caught in the past, sealed from the reality of watching childhood friends and loved ones grow up and change. In a sense, they became completely hers because they were suspended in time and seen perpetually through the lens of her minds eye and the filter of her lifetime experience.

It may be a coincidence or it may be a monumental tribute to the unshakable significance of the first home in her life, but Willa Cather’s most extensive use of Back Creek Valley was in her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, written fifty seven years after she had left Virginia. Based on the life of her maternal grandmother, the novel’s real success is in the verity of community that she reconstructs. Childhood experience is initial experience written on a pad of utter innocence. Those first feelings, actions, longings become our default settings because they have no competition, no point of comparison in the mind. Their vividness and influence- joyful, painful or otherwise are indelible and to be returned to and reckoned with throughout life.

All through the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland, I was content in the knowledge that I had started this trip on a day which was quintessentially summer. Perhaps there was a small bleep of autumn- an occasional errant maple branch already dazzling in its red and yellow or the plethora of scarecrow door decorations in the houses of every ilk. Yet this day emphatically declared “Summer” even as it rested tightly against the unforgiving calendar indicators and our decked-door expectations of fall.

It was fitting to use the second part of this first day to visit one of my favorite “places’ in the world. Fallingwater is an American artistic icon and still seems to boldly state its being. This summer home, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh (of Kaufmann Department Store fame. Alas- another victim of the “Macy’s-ization of American retail) is remarkable in its setting over a waterfall deep in the Pennsylvania mountain woods and its insistent vision which unifies human living space with the landscape. As I stood in the great room right with its right angles and long furniture perched over the falls with every view shaped by horizontal lines to give the impression of being in the trees over the falls, a young boy on the tour asked why it was so hard to see the falls.
It occurred to me that the point of this house wasn’t seeing the falls but being the falls or one with it, an organic harmonious part of the natural thing itself. This place- this structure is breathtakingly beautiful, but, in the end, it isn’t about the view. It is about being someplace, feeling a part of something more universal and timeless than any postcard or refrigerator magnet can ever capture. This is an evocation of “home” in its most basic sense. Where do we belong? We need the artist to shake the cage, and on occasions to slash and burn our time-warn expectations and give us a refreshed vantage point from which to confront that often illusive but never gone part of us which allows us to glimpse the divine, that which is universal, bigger than us but ironically unmistakably and indelibly us always. Fallingwater takes me there.

Now- on to Pittsburgh and Primanti Bros, home of the pastrami and ham two-fisted sandwich which features the slaw and fries as the upper deck of what can only be described as an Iron City Dagwood-an architectural wonder of the culinary kind and certainly redolent of a more attainable sort of divinity. We are on our way…. VAN WINKLE

Place, Home, and Landscape: A Journey

The Journey will begin on Sunday, September 17th. Be ready to travel!