Summers in New England: On Building a Community of Writers in Vermont

My memoir, Still Life at Eighty starts with houses, the several roofs we lay beneath in the now-distant past. In the early years of our marriage, my wife Elena and I and our two young daughters—Francesca and Andrea—lived in a remodeled barn. It sat at the edge of the campus of Bennington College, where I taught from 1966 to 1985. The structure itself had been rebuilt and moved to a site above a meadow that gave out on a distant view of the Green Mountains and the Glastonbury Pass. Constructed for a past president of the college, and known as “Leigh House” in his honor, it had no visible neighbors, though there were surrounding roads.

The ground floor was a single large room, nearly fifty feet by thirty feet, with a two-story central apse and haymows up above that had been transformed into bedrooms and bathrooms; it still had the feel of a farm structure, with rafters and beaming exposed. When the building had served as the president’s house, it doubled as reception space, its kitchen tucked into a corner underneath the stairs. Since Mrs. Leigh had had no desire to cook, the dining service sent over their meals. Elena, however, soon became expert at large-scale entertainments and our dining table was constantly in use.

At first we paid rent to the college; then, when I became director of a summer program, the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, we lived in Leigh House rent-free. We did much entertaining there, and tried to raise funds for the program and school, since the house was a showplace of sorts.

Once, I remember, the president of Bennington brought over a Hollywood mogul who’d made a killing with a TV series and was ready to be someone’s patron, if they paid adequate suit.

We plied the man with drinks. The long view out over the mountains was both austere and picturesque; a full moon began its ascent.

As it did so, the house lights went out. They did this often, at the slightest puff of wind, because the electricity was—to be generous—erratic. We locals stood in the dark unconcerned and watched the rising moon. That orb, resplendent, rose. After ten minutes or so, once the harvest moon had cleared the cleft of Glastonbury Pass and filled the night sky, gleaming, the lights of the room went back on. The mogul turned to me and said, meaning it, “You people really understand the way to stage things. What an effect!”

I fashioned a studio under the eaves and wrote there happily, staring out across the meadow and the maple trees. We acquired a dog and a cat. When the college went into one of its periodic spasms of near-bankruptcy and de-accessioning of buildings and land, we bought the house. Expanding it—enlarging the kitchen and adding a screened porch—we made the property our own. Adding a chunk stove to the fireplace chimney (the aptly named “Defiant” from Vermont Castings), we burned cords of wood and huddled in cold evenings on a nearby couch. Late night poker games and holiday revels—carved pumpkins and high-raked leaf piles and, when the snows came, cross-country ski treks out the kitchen door—all stay etched in recollection as the generous spirit of place. Leigh House had, in abundance, what some describe as fêng shui. The slope of the meadow was gradual, graceful; a stand of pines behind the building protected it from drive-by sighting from College Road. Two birch trees supported a hammock; large bushes of hydrangea flanked the entrance drive.

I came to love the interior space, its intimate grandeur, its blend of the folksy and formal, its graphic art and photographs and masks on every wall. Of all the houses in my life, this one felt most like home to me—the place where our daughters declared themselves as personalities (and where Andrea would get married), the place where I wrote Sherbrookes, my trilogy of novels about a clan of Vermonters, the place where Elena and I could cultivate our garden and grow practiced at the marriage-dance as we entered middle-age. The Bennington Summer Writing Workshops and the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing—for both of which I served as founding director—brought a host of friends and semi-strangers to our table. It was a halcyon time.

These lines deal with geography, but it is of course the people who create and imbue the spirit of place. Just to list a smattering of “Johns” who sat at that table is to spell old ghosts: John Ashbery, John Cheever, John Gardner, John Irving, John Frederick Nims, John Updike were among our glad companions there, and of that half dozen only one, John Irving, remains alive. Of the “Marys”—Mary Robison, Mary Ruefle, and Mary Lee Settle, to name three who graced our gatherings (not to mention Grace Paley), the first two quick, the last two dead—all of them remain, in memory, under the one roof.

Once, I remember, Donald Barthelme was visiting the workshop, and came to the kitchen door at seven o’clock in the morning. “Do you have any bouillon?” he asked me, bleary-eyed. He carried a bottle of vodka, most of which he’d drunk the night before, and needed what he called a bull shot to steady his outstretched hand.

“What’s a ‘bull shot?’” I inquired.

He looked at me with amused condescension. “Vodka, beef broth. The hair of the dog.”

I did have a can of consommé and rummaged for it through the shelves. Then John Gardner stumbled down from the attic, where he’d been sleeping in my studio, and soon enough the two of them were shouting at each other. In his just-released On Moral Fiction (1978), Gardner had savaged Barthelme’s writing as an example of the frivolity in art that he despised. Barthelme did not take kindly to having been insulted in print, and the pair were close to blows when a third writer, Frederick Busch, came in.

Busch, stone-cold sober, was a member of our Writing Workshop faculty, and a creature of habit who wanted strong coffee to begin his day; he’d stopped by, he told me, to borrow a grinder and pot. These three large men—two of them big-bellied, one tall—stood in the kitchen arguing, when my wife arrived in her diaphanous nightgown to say the kids were sleeping and the shouting was too loud.

This quieted them. Barthelme departed, with his can of consommé. Gardner withdrew again to bed, and Busch went to his studio with the makings of espresso. All three of them are dead. Elena said, “Enough’s enough,” and retired to check on the children, silk billowing behind her. From then on out we had a rule: No writers in the house till ten…

For some years in the late 1970s and early 1980s the very notion of professional identity was, for me, collective. Though now beyond full retrieval, the gathering of writers—novelists, short story writers, journalists, and poets—who came to Bennington stays vivid to me still. The late John Gardner and I conceived of a summer writing workshop as a context for developing texts—as opposed, say, to the model of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, where participants would bring in finished texts for critique. Our students were to start afresh or hand in new drafts of their work, not wait to be commended for what they had earlier written. We designed the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops to last a month, though with an option for two-week stays, and—to begin with, at least—relied on friendships to fill out the faculty ranks.

By now there’s a certain “been there, done that” feel to such gatherings, and the tedium of repeated experience. You can’t throw a rock in New England without hitting a writers’ conference, and there are “workshop junkies” addicted to making the rounds. Back then, though, few if any authors refused an invitation, and soon enough our roster of literary luminaries became a kind of honor guard, a group people hurried to join. In the first five years, our list of invitees included Lisa Alther, Rosellen Brown, Frederick Buechner, Hortense Calisher, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Louise Glück, John Irving, Jamaica Kincaid, Carolyn Kizer, Maxine Kumin, Bernard Malamud, David McCullough, Joe McGinniss, Ved Mehta, Bharati Mukherjee, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Robert Pinsky, Anne Roiphe, Mary Lee Settle, Ted Solotaroff, John Updike, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Jay Wright, and too many more to name. In the span of time I directed the program, (1977–1985) nearly two-hundred writers joined us in Vermont.

One of our central tenets was an equivalence of treatment, so that first-time authors and grandees received the same payment—an honorarium of two hundred dollars, which even then was notional. Over time the fee enlarged to an extravagant two hundred and fifty dollars. There was also, of course, the chance to stay on the picturesque campus and revel in the Green Mountains and the local streams and pastures in July. (John Cheever, I remember, returned his honorarium, as did many others, refusing to be, for such company, paid.) Each visitor spent the same amount of time at a shared podium; each panel discussion was comprised of apprentices and recognized artists, without hierarchical rank. In this way apprentice authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Ruefle, Mona Simpson, and David Foster Wallace took center stage along with their elders, and the spirit of collective effort was very much in play.

Another kind of “spirit” was everywhere in evidence; I can remember William Kennedy and Thomas Flanagan working their way through two bottles of scotch in one evening at our house. Madison Smartt Bell, George Booth, Blanche Boyd, John Darnton, Stephen Dunn, Mary and Jim Robison, Lee Smith, Arturo Vivante, Hilma Wolitzer, and Al Young all graced the table, drinking and singing and smoking, telling jokes and telling lies. Annie Dillard, Betty Friedan, and Norman Lear flew in. Richard Bausch, Richard Eberhart, Richard Ford, Richard Howard, and Richard Wilbur each stood at the podium; editors and agents and publishers from New York and Boston came to our corner of rural Vermont to speak about components of the trade. I’m aware that all this is mere summary and dull as a recounting of someone else’s party, with its list of soon-to-be-forgotten notables. But at the time the dead were quick, and those of us who now grow old were young.

Elena was the hostess for the whole. Our house served from the start as the focal point for visitor gatherings; she cooked routinely for a dozen and sometimes, on weekends, for seventy-five. Our mandate from Bennington College was to break even (and fill the empty campus), not to make a profit. Accordingly, we spent large sums on entertainment, and even if those revels are now ended they remain, in memory, lightsome and laughter-filled. Faculty members such as Susan Richards Shreve and Dave Smith arrived with their young families, and there was a gaggle of children, always, in the fields. The nearby lake and tennis courts were chockablock with what I liked to call “typists,” and though there were some dissatisfied students and a spate of brief or failed romances, my overarching memory is of the serious good humor of it all.

Two colleagues were central to our gatherings. The first was the poet, short story writer, and novelist George Garrett, the second the fiction writer and journalist Alan Cheuse. Both, alas, are gone: George at the age of seventy-nine in 2008 and Alan in a car crash in 2015. The former died at home in Charlottesville, Virginia, the latter on the road to Santa Cruz, California. Both of these regular faculty members—along with the much-mourned Anglo-Welsh author Jon Manchip White—embody the spirit of place. The ring of high-pitched hilarity or impassioned argument sounds in my ear resoundingly long after their voices went mute.

I have never known a man so generous of spirit as George Garrett, so unstintingly supportive of his acolytes and students. Not possible to pay for a meal if George were in the restaurant, not possible to count the number of bottles he brought to the house or bouquets for Elena. His Elizabethan trilogy—Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun—still seems to me a masterful achievement, yet he wore his learning lightly and was gracious to a fault. The quizzical smile, the soft southern inflection, the glinting ribaldry and low muttering chuckle have disappeared, but the books remain.

Alan Cheuse was also crucial: an omnivorous reader and tireless writer, best known perhaps as the book reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. He came to the practice of prose fiction late, or relatively so, having acquired a doctorate in comparative literature, and writing on the great Cuban Alejo Carpentier. Convivial yet exacting, he was a beloved teacher and—like George—unstinting in his sponsorship of other authors. Always, he asked me, “What are you reading?” and would commend a new book.

Many of the writers I’ve named—Calisher, Cheuse, Gardner, Garrett, for instance—I tried to hire so they could keep teaching at the college during the academic year. For one reason or another, the long-term arrangements failed to work out, and the term-time yield of colleagueship was, by comparison, scant. But the month-long gatherings of the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops seem emblematic still of what a shared circle offers, and how the presence of an admired friend and fellow traveler invigorates one’s own engagement with the work of words.

A further memory. Each summer the King Brothers Circus came to the town of Bennington, performing for two or three days. It was a seedy traveling troupe, but they had the full regalia of a Little Big Top: painted trucks and clowns and jugglers and tightrope walkers and dogs and ponies and, to raise the tent, three elephants. These troupers bedded down in the rear fields of the college, not far from one of the faculty houses where Alan Cheuse and his two daughters lodged. When, in September, he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and enrolled his children in the local preschool, the teacher asked the entering students where they had been and what they had done for the summer. Alan’s elder daughter, Emma, said she watched the elephants outside her bedroom window—and, that afternoon, when her father came to collect her, the teacher took him aside.

“Your child has quite the imagination, Mr. Cheuse,” she said. “But should you let her make things up, oh, what’s the word? Brazenly? Elephants in Vermont?”

I don’t know if he told her his daughter was telling the truth.

In Bennington, those summers, there were wonders in the fields.

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Adapted from Still Life at Eighty: A Memoir by Nicholas Delbanco. Copyright © 2024. Available from Mandel Vilar Press.