Berkshires, by the Book

I set out recently for the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, a two-hour drive from Boston, to celebrate the start of another year of teaching. As a professor of English, I had long wanted to visit the homes of two great American writers, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, both of whom had lived for a time in the Berkshires.

While I was aware that many other prominent 19th and 20th century writers had Berkshires connections--among them William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Catharine Maria Sedgwick--I was delighted to find in planning my two-day literary tour that I could pay homage to them, as well as to Melville and Wharton. I visited Bryant’s home in Cummington, open for viewing on summer and fall weekends, and a replica of Hawthorne’s Little Red House on the grounds of Tanglewood, site of the renowned summer music festival. It was in the Little Red House that Hawthorne wrote “The House of the Seven Gables.”

Any present-day visitor can see how the unspoiled beauty of the Berkshires’ dense forests and mighty hills could have nurtured the literary imaginations of local writers and beckoned to those from beyond its boundaries. To visit these writers’ homes is to glimpse the landscapes that inspired and informed some of America’s literary treasures.

First, I visited the Stockbridge grave of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), an important writer in her day, if now relatively obscure. Contemporary critics ranked her alongside James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving as one of the premier writers of the time. Although she wrote several novels and collections of stories, most of which are out of print, her best-known work is still available, a 1827 novel titled “Hope Leslie,” a book that generated some controversy because of its criticism of colonial-era racism and sympathetic portrayal of native Americans.

The Sedgwicks of Stockbridge were a prominent family, and their grave site in the Main Street Cemetery, in the center of town, is referred to locally as the Sedgwick pie because of the circular arrangement of its headstones. I was touched by the simplicity of Catharine Maria’s gravestone, a lovely ivy-laced cross rising from a stone base inscribed with only her name and the dates of her life.

From Stockbridge it was a short drive north to Lenox, where in 1850 and ’51 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) resided in a small clapboard house belonging to the Tappan family. The Tappan estate is now home to the Tanglewood summer music festival, which attracts about 300,000 visitors every year.

The cottage where Hawthorne wrote “House of the Seven Gables” is a 1974 replica of the original that burned down in 1890. Not open to the public, it contains practice rooms for Tanglewood’s student musicians.

During his short stay here, Hawthorne met Herman Melville and recorded the occasion in his journal. On Aug. 5, 1850, the two men were among a small group (that included Oliver Wendell Holmes) making a day’s excursion to Monument Mountain in Stockbridge. It was a jolly party, complete with Champagne and poetry readings, and one that established a firm friendship between the two men. They traded visits and corresponded, but after Hawthorne departed from the Berkshires the following year, they would meet only once more, in England, in 1856.

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Herman Melville (1819-1891) and his family resided in nearby Pittsfield at Arrowhead, a rambling yellow-and-green farmhouse built as a tavern in the 1780s.

The 13 years the author spent in the Berkshires were stunningly productive ones, although not remunerative. Working the 160-acre farm and leaving home periodically to travel or to try his hand at the lecture circuit, Melville nonetheless managed, between 1850 and 1863, to finish work on “Moby-Dick” and to write three other novels (“Pierre: or the Ambiguities,” “The Confidence-Man,” “Israel Potter”), and all of “The Piazza Tales.”

A walk through Arrowhead affords glimpses into both Melville’s domestic world and the highly disciplined life he led as a writer. Two rooms in particular represent the poles of his existence: the family man of the kitchen and the writer of the second-story study.

Like many colonial houses, Arrowhead was designed around a massive center chimney. The small kitchen in particular is dominated by fireplace and hearth, and here is found one of Arrowhead’s most delightful and distinctive features. On the wood paneling surrounding the fireplace, Melville’s younger brother Allan, who bought the house in 1863, had lines painted from Herman’s story “I and My Chimney,” a charming tale about a man, his chimney and a bit of domestic disharmony.

The wife in the story goes to some lengths to persuade her husband to condemn the center chimney, and its offensive bulk and attendant dust, and replace it with a more convenient and cleaner heating system. (Melville’s wife, Elizabeth, claimed her mother-in-law was the model for this character, not she.) The wife, daughters and local architect are eventually thwarted, and the “two grey headed old smokers” are left undisturbed. This Melville voice--playful and affectionate--may not be as familiar to readers accustomed to the ponderous prose of “Moby-Dick.”

Melville’s study on the second floor, however, conjures no images of a lounging, pipe-smoking husband who sits cozily by the fire on a brisk Berkshires evening. The room has an ascetic look, not uncomfortable, but spare with plain walls in cream and muted green, a bookcase and a writing table. A few artifacts remind us of Melville’s years at sea, before his marriage, including maps, a harpoon and a copy of a ship’s docket listing Melville among the crew.

There is little question that the writer was nourished by country life at Arrowhead. His writing table faces a north window so he needed only to look up and out for a view of Mt. Greylock, about 25 miles distant and the highest peak in the Berkshires. Greylock’s twin peaks reminded him, he said, of the humps of a whale’s back.

Another of Arrowhead’s noteworthy features is what Melville referred to as his “piazza.” It is a simple porch that he had built onto the north side of the house, again, in view of Mt. Greylock. A house without a piazza, he wrote, is like an art gallery without a bench. “For what but picture-galleries are the marble halls of these same limestone hills?--galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh.”

The view of Mt. Greylock from Melville’s porch remains a magnificent, unspoiled vista, thanks to the Berkshire County Historical Society, which purchased the adjacent fields to prevent development. The society owns and runs Arrowhead and has created a nature trail through the surrounding acreage.

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Edith Wharton’s grand home in Lenox, the Mount, seems a world away from the rustic charms of Arrowhead, but she, too, fell under the spell of the Berkshires.

“‘The country quiet stimulated my creative zeal,” she wrote in her autobiography, “A Backward Glance.”

The best-known of Wharton’s novels, set in the Berkshires, is “Ethan Frome,” although neither it nor “Summer,” a lesser known but fine novel, were written at the Mount, where Wharton spent only 10 years before moving to Europe in 1911.

She wrote that the two Berkshires-set novels “were the result of explorations among villages still bedrowsed in a decaying rural existence, and sad, slow speaking people living in conditions hardly changed since their forebears held those villages against the Indians.”

Wharton (1862-1937) was born into a wealthy, socially prominent old New York family, an unlikely candidate for a literary career. Building the Mount to escape what she called “the watering place trivialities of Newport,” the summer enclave of America’s social elite, allowed Wharton to develop her identity as a writer.

Wharton’s interests and accomplishments were far-reaching. While she is perhaps best known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of novels and short stories, she also coauthored a classic book on interior design, “The Decoration of Houses.” The Mount, as a tour of the house reveals, was the ultimate expression of the principles she and architect Ogden Codman Jr. put forth in their famous book.

Set on a ridge overlooking Laurel Lake, the Mount (named for Wharton’s great-grandfather’s Long Island estate) is today covered by scaffolding. Stabilization of the exterior is an urgent concern of the Edith Wharton Restoration group, the nonprofit organization that owns and runs the estate.

But Wharton’s exquisite taste and personality are evident throughout the house. Rejecting the clutter of Victoriana with which she had been surrounded growing up, and understanding the interplay between architecture and interior design, she and Codman created a house more reminiscent of 18th century Europe than 19th century New England. Indeed, Belton House, a stately home in Lincolnshire, England, provided the model.

It was a home conducive both to writing and entertaining. While the wood paneled library is equipped with a desk and looks every bit the serious author’s study, Wharton composed nothing but letters there. For all the years of her writing life, her routine seldom varied: She wrote every morning propped up in bed, her pages dropping to the floor to be later retrieved by a secretary who would transcribe them. She would appear at lunch, ready to join her husband and guests in the day’s entertainment.

Among the select group invited to the Mount was Wharton’s dear friend Henry James, who made several visits to Lenox and turned her library into a true literary salon. The lively talk and poetry readings stimulated Wharton, if not her decidedly nonintellectual, sportsman husband, Teddy.

One of the pleasures of visiting the Mount today is the chance to attend a performance of a Wharton-inspired play. Shakespeare & Co., the Mount’s resident theater group, has adapted some of Wharton’s works as well as produced original plays about her life. The 1997 season opened with a run of “Ethan Frome”; two Wharton one-acts, “The Pretext” and “The Verdict,” also are offered in repertory, as is a fall run (Oct. 23 through Nov. 1) of her famous ghost story, “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell.”

While my husband and I drove through the Berkshires on those warm June days, I kept in mind an image of Wharton, who loved to take afternoon excursions in her “motor,” returning “stupid with fresh air.” One of our drives took us through the sparsely populated eastern Berkshires to the summer home of William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) in Cummington.

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While Bryant’s poetry is out of fashion these days, every English major was once required (and still is, I hope) to read his most famous and finest work, “Thanatopsis.” (The title is generally translated from the Greek as “A Meditation on Death.”) But the regard with which the nation held this early man of American letters had less to do with the quality of his poetry than with his influential position as a journalist. As editor of New York’s Evening Post, he turned it into one of the most respected newspapers of the 19th century, and through his editorials the paper passionately supported the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery.

The Bryant Homestead, where Cullen, as he was called, spent his youth and the summers of his retirement years, receives far fewer visitors than the Mount and Arrowhead, perhaps owing to its isolated location overlooking the Westfield River Valley east of Pittsfield. More than the other authors’ homes, the Homestead is chock full of original furnishings and Bryant’s personal possessions. Among them are the straw hat and smock he wore berry picking, his jigsaw puzzles and the Turkish robe and fez he brought home from his travels abroad.

Bryant’s study remains much as he arranged it in 1865, when he returned to Cummington to buy and renovate his childhood home. In this ground-floor room, formerly his physician father’s consulting room, Bryant continued to write editorials and support favorite causes, and to complete his translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” Here, as throughout the house, his life is in the details on display.

GUIDEBOOK / Author Abodes in Massachusetts

Getting there: American and United fly nonstop from LAX to Boston. Delta, US Airways, America West, Continental, TWA, Northwest and Frontier Airlines fly, with one stop but no change of planes. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at $295.

Where the authors lived: Edith Wharton’s the Mount, P.O. Box 974, Lenox, MA 01240 (corner of U.S. 7 and Plunkett Street); telephone (413) 637-1899. Admission: adults $6, seniors $5.50, children 13 to 18 are $4.50 and under 12, free.

Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, 780 Holmes Road, Pittsfield, MA 01201; tel. (413) 442-1793. Admission: adults $5, seniors $4.50, children 6 to 16 $3.50 and under 6, free.

Little Red House (Nathaniel Hawthorne cottage) on the grounds of Tanglewood, Hawthorne Road, Lenox, MA 01240. There is no phone for the cottage.

William Cullen Bryant Homestead, Bryant Road, Cummington, MA 01026; tel. (413) 634-2244. Admission: adults $5, children under 12, $2.50.

Where to stay: Gables Inn, 81 Walker St., Lenox, MA 01240; tel. (413) 637-3416. This is a former Wharton family summer home, where Edith Wharton periodically stayed while the Mount was under construction. Doubles are $90 to $210, including continental breakfast.

Gateways Inn, 51 Walker St., Lenox, MA 01240; tel. (413) 637-2532. Doubles are $60 to $325, including continental breakfast. No smoking permitted.

White Horse Inn, 378 South St., Pittsfield, MA 01201 (U.S. 7 and 20); tel. (413) 442-2512. Doubles are $95 to $170, including breakfast.

For more information: Berkshire Visitors’ Bureau, Pittsfield Common, Pittsfield, MA 01240; tel. (413) 443-9186.

Shakespeare & Co., P.O. Box 865, Lenox, MA 01240-0865; box office, tel. (413) 637-3353.

Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism, 100 Cambridge St., Boston, MA 02202; tel. (617) 727-3201.