A Brief Berkshires Memoir

Every time I find myself driving Interstate 70 (the Mass Pike) through western Massachusetts I recall “a song they sing when they take to the highways.”   It is James Taylor’s 1970 “Sweet Baby James.”
    Now the first of December was covered with snow
    And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
    Lord the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting
    With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.
There was no snow on the mountains when my wife and I drove through the Berkshires, a southern extension of Vermont’s Green Mountains, in a late October after spending a couple of weeks at the lake cottage in Maine.  We decided to take a different route home to do a little leaf-peeping and enjoy the tint of autumn in western Massachusetts and through the Taconic Range across the border in Upstate New York.

But it was not just the rolling hills and autumnal colors that brought us to the Berkshires.  Our detour afforded us the opportunity to visit with a very dear friend – the former Alaskan poet laureate and essayist John Haines (1924-2011) who was in the midst of a writer residency in Lenox.  I brought along two bottles of good single malt Scotch I picked up at the state liquor store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and I was looking forward to a long chat, that lovely usquebaugh properly loosening our tongues and inhibitions.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at 22 Nielsen Lane, just off the Old Stockbridge Road on the southern edge of Lenox and not far from Edith Wharton’s estate The Mount and the Tanglewood Music Center.  At first blush there was nothing exceptional about the house, a small Cape Cod bungalow built in 1941 and sheathed in clapboard painted a dull leaden blue.  What made this house special is that it was the last home of the American poet Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).  A native of Iowa, she had lived and worked most of her life in New York City, and in 1993 purchased this first house with funds awarded to her as a MacArthur Genius Grant the previous year.  Clampitt was first introduced to the Berkshires by Karen Chase, a local poet whom Clampitt met in Italy where both of them were residents at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, on Lake Como.  John had also been a resident there at another time.  Clampitt planned to use it as a summer get-away cottage. She and the NYU and Columbia University legal scholar Harold Corn, her partner of 25 years, lived in this house until her death from ovarian cancer.  They married here just three months before she died and he continued to live here alone until his own death, in 2001.  Before he died, Korn willed the cottage to the newly-established Amy Clampitt Fund to be administered as a writers residence by the Berkshire-Taconic Community Foundation.  It would be made available rent-free to selected poets who would have the time and solitude to work on a manuscript-in-progress while enjoying the tranquility of the Berkshires. 

William Spiegelman, Clampitt’s biographer and the cottage’s first writer-in residence, has called Clampitt “the patron saint of late bloomers.”  She attended Grinnell College, in her native Iowa, and later Columbia University, and worked as a secretary at Oxford University Press, an editor at E.P. Dutton, and as a freelance writer and researcher.  She was an avid birder and was also employed for a time as a reference librarian at the National Audubon Society.  She began writing unpublished fiction in the 1950s, and she released two poetry chapbooks in 1973 and 1981, but The Kingfisher, her first volume of poems published by Knopf did not appear until 1983 when she was 63.  Spiegelman wrote that her poems combine her Quaker austerity and the “luiciousness” of Keats, perhaps her favorite poet.  Clampitt’s career as a poet would only last eleven years during which she would publish five volumes of poems, the last being A Silence Opens published around the time of her death in 1994.  She had also served as a writer-in-residence at William and Mary, Amherst, and Smith College where she taught and instructed younger poets

John ambled out of the cottage into the front yard as we pulled into the driveway.  I admired the exterior admitting it was not quite what I had pictured in my mind although I cannot say for sure what I was expecting.  One conjures up all sorts of visions when one thinks of a writer’s cottage, especially one sequestered deep within the Berkshires.  Perhaps a small cottage set back in a copse of trees with ivy growing on its stone walls.  Instead it was one of eight modest homes with large yards situated on a quiet cul-de-sac and surrounded by autumn-colored woods.

John gave us a short tour of the property and I remarked on the size of the large backyard.  One side was lined with trees and shrubbery and I commented on the orange and yellow foliage of a stately beech tree.  I would learn later that evening that Ms. Clampitt’s small memorial service was held in the backyard and her ashes had been scattered under that very tree.

The neighborhood, and the cottage itself, both seemed very conducive to writing, offering solitude without being reclusive.  John was the fifth poet to enjoy the benefits of the Amy Clampitt Fund and to date 28 poets have spent months there working on their projects.  The cottage was simply furnished with many artifacts from Ms. Clampitt’s life and travels scattered throughout . . . her many hats and small collections of sea glass found during her summers spent in Corea, a tiny fishing village in Down East, Maine.  The walls were lined with books, many of them filled with Clampitt’s marginalia and with various ephemera employed as bookmarks.  Prominent among them were the collected works of her beloved Keats.

John had set up shop in Clampitt’s study to which her bed was moved during her final months so that she could watch her beloved birds flying to and from that stately beech tree in the backyard.  “What I like about the view is that there is so much going on.”  It was here she passed away on September 10, 1994 having lived in the cottage for only a year.  She would be pleased to know the tree and its birds were still there.  Her Olivetti typewriter sat nearby, a silent reminder of a stolen life.  Next to it were John’s notes and drafts for what he always referred to in his letters as his “big omnibus project,” a collection of essays that would eventually be published by CavanKerry Press as Descent in 2010 just months before his own death at age 86.  I was please to see that close by he had a copy of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines, which I had edited and published with CavanKerry Press in 2003.

SallyAnn retired to the guest room upstairs and John opened one of the bottles of Scotch and we returned to the living room to chat.  Clampitt and Korn were married here and there was a photograph of them taken that day sitting next to one of her caches of sea glass.  It seemed that Ms. Clampitt’s spirit was everywhere watching over those who came to live and create in her cottage.  John and I discussed our respective projects and I caught him up on news of our mutual friends back home in Washington.  And there was also the upcoming off-year election and what it meant for our troubled country.  He and I never had a problem coming up with something to talk about.

SallyAnn rejoined us later and we invited John to join us for dinner at Bistro Zinc, on Church Street in the center of Lenox; it had been recommended to me by a friend back home who spends his summers in the Berkshires.  SallyAnn ordered the French onion soup and a small salad while John and I both selected the grilled flank of salmon served with couscous over a bed of crisp baby spinach.  John never considered himself a gourmand as such, yet having lived for so long in Alaska he found it hard not to appreciate a nice piece of salmon well prepared and beautifully plated.

Returning to the cottage, SallyAnn took her leave to read upstairs before turning in.  It was a very cozy space with bookcases lining the walls and a writing desk below a small window looking out toward the quiet street.  John and I retreated to the kitchen where we polished off the first bottle of Scotch before moving on to the second.  John may be considered taciturn by many; people he does not know.  But he and I had been good friends for almost two decades, having corresponded regularly and worked closely while I was editing A Gradual Twilight.  That night, with the skids properly greased, he was quite chatty and we talked long into the night on anything and everything.

When I finally went upstairs I found myself restless and unable to fall asleep.  I perused the book shelves and chanced upon a copy of Clampitt’s collected poems published in 1999.  I was particularly struck by the poems occasioned by her time in Down East Maine and also by the fact that none of the later poems, some of which may have been written in this cottage, made any allusion to the Berkshires or her time there. I also leafed through Clampitt’s guide to the English Lake District which she filled with notes on Wordsworth, his homes at Rydal Mount and Dove Cottage, and about her beloved Keats who traveled the region on foot in June 1818 hoping to visit Wordsworth there.

SallyAnn slept in the following morning but I arose early not surprised that Clampitt and her cottage had filled my Scotch-fuel dreams.  Before dressing I sat at the writing desk and sketched out some notes thinking they might some day give rise to a poem.  When I finally ventured downstairs I found John sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and writing down some of his own notes.  I poured some coffee and joined him, the two dead soldier Scotch bottles observing us from the far end of the table.  We talked about his plans to return home to Montana once his residency was over and we dredged up memories of our time together there in Big Sky a couple years earlier which was the last time we had spent any real time together. 

SallyAnn eventually joined us and John suggested that we drive down the Old Stockbridge Road to the nearby town of Lee for breakfast at Joe’s Diner.  It had been a local meeting place for locals and rusticators from away since 1955.  It served breakfast all day which was good because it was already approaching the noon hour.  Pancakes, eggs, bacon and sausage, and plenty of coffee was just the ticket.  While we were eating I noticed a framed copy of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting “The Runaway” hanging behind the counter.   Our server told us that Rockwell, who moved his home and studio to nearby Stockbridge in 1953, had used the diner as the setting for the painting although I would later learn that he had actually used the counter at the former Howard Johnson’s in Stockbridge.  Frankly, I think the painting more closely resembles Joe’s than any HoJO I had ever visited.  Doing some research later on I also learned that in the mid-1960s the downstairs portion of the building housing Rockwell’s Stockbridge studio was a small eatery known as the Back Room (aka Alice’s Restaurant) where you could get anything you want.  The same thing held true for Joe’s.   

After breakfast we dropped John back at the cottage and we loaded up the car and set out for home.   We had a long drive ahead of us.  The morning fog had lifted and it looked to be a beautiful day for some more leaf-peeping along the Taconic Parkway on our way toward New York City.  Before leaving Lenox, however, we stopped at a small bookstore we had spotted the previous evening.  It had a wonderful selection of poetry and I purchased a copy of Clampitt’s collected poems for my own library.  We also drove past the former site of Alice’s Restaurant in Stockbridge before we continued on our way . . . With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go.
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In case you are wondering if those journal notes ever evolved into a poem . . . .Yes they did.

                     A Storm in the Berkshires
                                                      For Amy Clampitt (1920 - 1994)

            Perhaps it was only a dream, a violent autumn storm
            wrawling through darkness and raking the Berkshire hills;
            maple and oak riven from deep ancestral earth,
            and with them your beloved beech tree beneath
            which your ashes have reposed for many years.

            Branches stripped of leaves now broken and lying
            sprawled across the lawn, bird feeders tossed and shattered,
            their seed scattered far and wide in a tempest rush.
            Gone, too, the many birds, their homes and fodder
            carried by the winds to every near compass point.

            The storm has dissipated as I sit silent in your study
            where your breath quieted watching your birds on the wing.
            Drinking coffee I stare out at what nature has wrought,
            a gentle breeze blowing through an open window,
            a cadence your body followed to its early extinction.

                                                          John Haines  (1924-2011)