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PARTISAN REVIEW
would have been model residents in my Radcliffe dormitory. Everyone
was quiet-voiced and decorous, prompt to meals, conformable in dress
and speech. At dinner we engaged each other in courteous conversation
and, when the meal was done, we lingered politely in the central hall
over our coffee. In recent decades there has been a stringent retrenchment
at Yaddo: services have been drastically reduced, and former guests are
solicited for funds to maintain the colony. But in 1931 a stay at Yaddo
was for most of us an unprecedented experience ofluxury. In addition to
a handsome bedroom, each of us had a workroom or studio. Both the
house and the grounds were fully staffed, and the food was consistently
the best I have ever eaten. There was nevertheless something about the
place, perhaps its wish to persuade so motley a group of hopeful writers
and artists that they were the houseguests of a dead millionaire, which
infected even the servants. One of the elderly waitresses was said to have
worked for the Vanderbilts. As she passed a platter of chicken to Lionel
one evening at dinner, he lightly inquired whether the chicken was
"public or private" - the vegetables which were served to us at Yaddo
were grown on the estate, and he was asking whether the estate also
raised the chickens. "Public, like Yaddo," the waitress snapped. There
was also reason to suppose that the housemaids had the auxiliary function
of spying for Mrs. Ames, for how else could she have known that Lionel
and I slept in only one of our twin beds or that, oblivious of the rule
which forbade our visiting in each other's rooms before four in the after–
noon, I had allowed one of the guests, a photographer, to take my picture
by the morning light in his studio? Mrs. Ames was hard of hearing and
preferred to communicate with the guests by note . A few days after our
arrival, Lionel received a note asking if we intended to use our second
bed; if not, the maid could be spared the necessity of making two beds.
My ill-timed picture-taking brought me two notes in rapid succession. In
the first, I was informed that having broken a Yaddo rule, I would have
to leave the next day. The second note instructed me that I was to leave
by the early afternoon train, "without lunch." The financial appeals
which are now sent to former guests ofYaddo contain many reminders of
the colony's worthy yesterdays. These include fond recollections of
Elizabeth Ames, who was early and long in charge of the colony. No
doubt Mrs. Ames changed with the years: I indeed heard that she had a
love affair with one of the guests and that she was much altered by it; she
became kinder and less suspicious. When Lionel and I knew her, the best
that we or any of our fellow-guests would have said of her was that she
must be forgiven her behavior because of her sad past. Her young hus–
band had been killed in the First World War.
Lionel and I had our twenty-sixth birthdays at Yaddo; we were not
