GLENWAY WESCOTT
393
Mrs. William Vaughan Moody, the widow of that academic poet
who wrote a popular symbolic play,
The Great Divide,
early in
the century. A little way down the mountainside, where the
woods petered out, there stood an old two-room cottage-or per–
haps I should say, a tidied-up shack - which was William Cullen
Bryant's birthplace. Mrs. Moody owned that also, and I used it
for my study and wrote the first part of my first novel there. Not
long ago someone told me that a young or youngish poet,
William Jay Smith, had lately acquired it. It pleases me to
ponder this continuity, a century and a half of writers great and
small, haunting one place.
Mrs. Moody was the foremost literary hostess in Chicago in
the twenties. She a lso conducted a superior and flourishing cater–
ing business, and with its accumulated profits intended to estab–
lish a living for poets, that is, for one poet after another, in per–
petuity, modeled somewhat upon one of the forms of support of
the clergy in olden times in England. Her plan was original:
She, with the advice of friends, would select the first poet, who in
turn was to pick the second, and so on. No payments of the life–
long windfall would be forthcoming to any of the selected poet's
beneficiaries unless and until he had confidentially provided the
bank with the name and address of his successor. As it turned out,
worst luck, Mrs. Moody suffered a considerable financial loss
and let the project drop. Ordinarily, in the twenties, the patron–
age of literature and the arts was personal and whimsical like
that, a far cry from the principles of foundation and estate and
federal support in which people have believed more recently.
Edwin Arlington Robinson was a MacDowell colonist that
summer of 1921; Frost was to be there as a visitor for a few days;
and the Chicago great lady asked me, indeed ordered me, to go
over there from West Cummington one of those days, to ascertain
what the two well-known poets thought of her scheme. Of course
I now realize what did not occur to me at the time-that both of
them needed some such support almost desperately.
Frost answered Mrs. Moody's questions unselfishly, help–
fully, in depth, in his way, with a certain medicinal bitterness.
He didn't like me, but that didn ' t trouble him, given the purpose
of our meeting. What a diplomat he would have made! I didn't
like him either, and I remember priding myself just a little on
