Strange Things Happened Here & All Colors are the Same, a portrait of Alan Porter
This is one of two gatehouses to Edgewater, Gore Vidal's house right on the bank of the Hudson River at the bottom of the hill. Edgewater has an octagonal library. “Gore Vidal with dogs, Billy and Blanche, on the front lawn of Edgewater. Circa 1965.
“When a writer moves into the house he most wants or needs, the result is often a sudden release of new energy… In my case, there was a burst of energy and imagination of a sort not accessible to me before. Overnight – the result of the octagonal library?” he later recalled.” *
The library at Edgewater
“I learned that John Jay Chapman, a very good if obscure American essayist, had lived at Edgewater,” Vidal later wrote, “and I could feel his presence in the house.”
This is the story about the octagon house. Strange things went on there. I believe this had dilated to, strange things happen in all octagon houses.
Saul Bellow lived there. It is where he wrote Henderson the Rain King, modeled on his landlord Chandler Chapman, local aristo/wild man/pig farmer. I lived next door at Rokeby. I always picture the octagonal house if his name comes up and imagine it as the setting if I read him. "When I read, reread, re-encounter “Henderson the Rain King,” I do so in a state of naked amazement and gratitude. It’s one of those books I can’t really consider in any sort of critical or analytical light because I feel about it the way I feel about a beloved person. Perfection? Not at all, not at all. Like its hero, the enormous and spiritually incontinent Eugene Henderson, it bulges with flaws." [James Parker in the New York Times]
The story is that a professor at Bard was working on his doctorate and as he got to the end of writing it, all his papers vanished, the notes everything. They searched for days and finally gave up. Time passed. Then one day while the professor was telling the tale to a friend papers began drifting down out of the air followed by a deluge of pages. It was, of course, the dissertation.
This was told to me by a woman who babysat for the professor.
More on Chandler Chapman from Sports Illustrated:
Given the drabness of the present age, it is heartening to note that the spirit of the eccentric sporting Chanlers lives on in Barrytown, N.Y., 100 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Here, in the decaying but still gracious estate country of Edith Wharton novels, a handful of Chanter descendants carry on in their own fashion. There is Richard (Ricky) Aldrich, grandnephew of Uncle Archie and grandson of Margaret Livingston Chanler Aldrich, who fought for the establishment of the U.S. Army Nursing Corps. Ricky, 36, manages Rokeby, the family seat and farm, where he collects and rebuilds antique iceboats (such as the Jack Frost, a huge craft that won championships in the late 19th century) and ponders the intricacies of Serbian, Croatian and Polish grammar. Ricky studied in Poland for a spell, but left in 1966 after he was caught selling plastic Italian raincoats on the black market. [ fondest memory of Ricky is him showing off his latest “steal” from an auction, a large tractor of some unfamiliar make. It just needed hydraulic fluid. Lots of it. It was poured in the thirsty old beast. Ricky fired up his “steal.” The entire load of fluid shot perilously close to his head and ascended to the heavens becoming a near invisible mist it went so high, giving us ample time to run from the drop zone.] The most obvious fact about Ricky is that he seldom bathes. As one boating friend says, "Ricky would give you the shirt off his back, but who'd want it?"
Then there is Chanler A. Chapman, regarded by his kin as the legitimate inheritor of the family title of "most eccentric man in America." As Ricky's brother, J. Winthrop (Winty) Aldrich, says, "Only members of the Chanler family are fit to sit in judgment on that title." Winty, who is Chanler Chapman's first cousin once removed, says, "Television has done Upstairs, Downstairs, The Forsyte Saga and The Adams Chronicles, but they should do the Chanlers. The whole story is so improbable. And true."
Everyone who has met Chanler Chapman regards him as brilliantly daft. While teaching at Bard College, Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate, rented a house on Chapman's estate, Sylvania ("the home of happy pigs"), and found in him the inspiration for his novel Henderson the Rain King. In the novel, written as an autobiography, Henderson shoots bottles with a slingshot, raises pigs and carries on extravagantly in general. "It's Bellow's best book," Chapman says, "but he is the dullest writer I have ever read."
Now 76 and possessed of piercing brown eyes, a bristling mustache and wiry hair, Chapman nearly always wears blue bib overalls and carries a slingshot. He is fond of slingshots, because "they don't make any noise," and he shoots at what tickles his fancy. Not long ago he fired a ball bearing at a Jeep owned by his cousin, Bronson W. (Bim) Chanler, former captain of the Harvard crew, inflicting what Chapman calls "a nice dimple" in the left front fender. Ball bearings are expensive ammunition, however, so, for $4, Chapman recently bought 600 pounds of gravel. He calculates this supply of ammo should last at least five years.
Before his infatuation with slingshots, Chapman was big on guns. He hunted deer, small game and upland birds and ducks, mostly on his estate. Indeed, at one time he had 115 guns, and his shooting habits were such that friends who came to hunt once never cared, or dared, to return again. Chapman had only to hear the quack of a duck and he would let loose with a blast in the general direction of the sound. On a couple of occasions it turned out that he had fired toward hunters crouched in reeds, using a duck call. "Almost got a few people," he would say matter-of-factly. Sports Illustrated Sports Illustrated: [https://vault.si.com/vault/1977/06/13/step-in-and-enjoy-the-turmoil
*https://classicalamericanhomes.org/discoveries/gore-vidal-at-edgewater/
Alan Porter, who lived right around the corner from the octagonal house, was the social director of the Museum of Modern Art (ret). He was my neighbor when I lived off campus at Bard. He was a New Yorker through and through, didn't have a car and by the looks of it was new to bicycle riding too.
The giveaway was that he pedaled everywhere in the top gear of his English three speed including up the steep hill into town. This was a hill I would walk my bike up but Alan did it in third, seated. I tried it. The trick is to creep up the hill as steadily as possible with no thought of gaining speed.
A single downstroke might take ten seconds or more. I never had the patience to apply this approach to biking but I was reminded of it when I got a one day temp labor job emptying a boxcar of 100 lb. bags of dental plaster. I noticed the guy who worked there didn't jerk the bags to get them started, he took his time and floated them off.
One day Uncle Tommy, who was an architect, came to visit and went to have a look at the converted one room schoolhouse Alan lived in.
"You know that's not the correct red, right? This is barn red not schoolhouse red." Alan's reply: "Oh, all colors are the same except red which fizzes a little " A few more questions brought out that he was completely color blind except for red and didn't know it. Not sure how he navigated all those swoony conversations about The Wonderful Colors. I think he said,"Oh, i just ignore them and talk about the patterns, the textures and the rest. Diplomacy in action; it did, however alert me that the art world might be more of a smoke blowing contest that I thought.
Note to a friend:
Sally Chamberlain here's something I didn't know:"During the 1950s, the reclusive film star Greta Garbo was a regular visitor to Barrytown, where she would stay with her friend Alan Porter."
“The American essayist and critic John Jay Chapman, a descendant of Chief Justice John Jay and grandson of the abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, lived in Barrytown. His second wife, Elizabeth Chapman, owned the Edgewater estate from 1902 until 1917, and may have lived there briefly before the couple built the Sylvania estate on adjacent land.”
The room at Rokeby where John Jay Chapman repaired to during his one of his spells, one of which lasted over a year in which he rarely left his bed as his hair and fingernails grew. “Chapman was a man of extreme, sometimes violent impulses: his Harvard friends had called him "mad Jack." His political work in the 1890s was by no means cloistered: though a patrician to his fingertips, he was more than willing to harangue the Broadway crowds at the tumultuous political rallies of the time and even to leave the platform to grapple with hecklers….After his first wife's early death in 1897, he had married Elizabeth Chanler, a member of the Astor family, and by 1901 they had moved to an estate at Barrytown on the Hudson River….For all its aristocratic ease, Chapman's life was often dark and troubled. One evening he had escorted Minna to a social function at the Walter Cabot home in Brookline. He momentarily left Minna unattended and when he had returned to her side he had witnessed one Percival Lowell, a Boston bachelor, hovering over her and had misinterpreted the fellow's actions as being injurious to Minna. In a jealous rage, Chapman had immediately attacked Lowell with his walking stick and had severely bloodied him.
Chapman soon learned that Lowell was a member of Minna's dramatic club and had only spoken to her out of courtesy. Upon the realization of his error. Jack was horrified at his actions and was overwhelmed with remorse. Next morning, following a night of brooding, he had stoked the coal fire in his Cambridge apartment until it was burning brightly and as an act of expiation he had thrust his offending left hand "deep in the blaze". Then he took a horsecar to the Massachusetts General Hospital where he was immediately anesthetized and his left hand was amputated. All his life he was subject to breakdowns and bouts of apparently psychosomatic illness. During World War I, in which he lost a son, he became--quite against his character--a hysterical war-lover, and in the 1920s he took up the paranoid cause of crank anti-Catholicism.” [https://harvardmagazine.com/2001/01/john-jay-chapman-html]
The mural of crows lighting on a field of poppies is by Robert Winthrop Chanler . At the end of one of my episodes of nervous strain Mrs. Aldridge offered to have me restore it. Fortunately I still had enough sense to say no.
Chanler rose to prominence as an acclaimed American artist when his work was exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. Robert had 10 brothers and sisters, including politicians Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler and William Astor Chanler. His sister Margaret Livingston Chanler served as a nurse with the American Red Cross during the Spanish–American War. Robert's eldest brother John Armstrong "Archie" Chanler married novelist Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy. His older brother Winthrop Astor Chanler[1] served in the Rough Riders in Cuba and was wounded at the Battle of Tayacoba.
His siblings and he became orphans after the death of their mother in 1875 and their father in 1877, both to pneumonia. The children were raised at their parents' Rokeby Estate in Barrytown, New York. John Winthrop Chanler's will provided $20,000 a year for each child for life (equivalent to $470,563 in 2018), enough to live comfortably by the standards of the time. Several of Chanler's paintings still decorate the mansion at Rokeby.[10] [link to wiki]
This is living room with the 1820 wallpaper mostly intact. We were invited to tea one day. Mrs. Aldridge apologized for the delay coming to the door. There had been a minor flood. The bath had overflowed. Behind her you could see water in a series of cascades, still coming down the stairs. The scene was right out of one of my childhood story books in which beavers make a dam out of Chippendale furniture to quell a flood in an old lady's house? Mrs. Aldridge was very kind and had the flutie up and down delivery like Julia Childs.
This is Ricky, the patriarch of the family on the way to pulling a visiting bus out of the mud. . I worked with him bringing in the hay. The mower was broken so we used a bush hog which sent seed flying everywhere, the seeds being most of the nutrient. To keep the bush hog from producing seedless hay, the idea was to do the whole thing in third, open throttle. Big fun and as the hours went by the repetitive motion of cranking the wheel would become automatic and detached, the tightening circle giving on to a reversal in which the tractor was the center of the world, gobbling up the field fed under it.
Something similar happened when we forced my poor VW to the top of Lookout Mountain over by Woodstock. It was the first place I had the sensation of the Earth tumbling toward the motionless Sun, rising in the sky as we got closer. The land falls away abruptly so there is little foreground, I think that sets up the illusion or in this case the reality.
Ricky just a few years ago. I worked with him and the farm manager Sonny Day who was sixty 68 which I thought was ancient. He took me under his wing, something I sorely needed as he had Ricky years before. Sonny always started his explanation of any job with the way you could get killed doing it. Not in a dark way, more a grandfatherly safety talk. He had a high tenor voice which I eventually figured out was perfect for being heard over the baritone of whatever tractor was in on the conversation.
I realize just now, these are the people I knew better than my classmates, save for half a dozen in the art department. I only lived on campus the first semester, never hung out, never went to Adolf’s a bar comprising the entirety of Downtown Annandale-on-Hudson. Having a kid swept all that aside, made college once this big thing, no longer the biggest.
I think I didn’t want to know what I was missing and it wasn’t politic that I lead a crazy college life. Also having a kid came with permission to delve back into my own childhood which was at least familiar territory unlike learning the ropes of early adulthood. I was so green, this was the first co-ed school I’d been to since the fourth grade. On top of that, in 1966 marriage had just begun to crack, not too many freshmen were even thinking about marriage so there was a strong sense of being ‘off limit.’ Since I only had one innocent summertime girlfriend up until that time, I didn’t have anything to compare it to, it was a little hard to figure where I fit into things, a little hard not to introject some of that distance. Everything was moving so fast so it was marvelous to have this refuge and to have the refuge of family life keeping me out of trouble. I was meeting my first blood relative, a fact that was twisting my tail in a special way. I had been told that when I was twenty one I could find out who my birth parents were and a countdown clock was ticking.
Napoleon’s sheep. Favorite trivia: At first the estate was known as La Bergerie (the Sheepfold); later changed to Rokeby by Armstrong's daughter Margaret. General Armstrong pastured Merino sheep here, a gift from Napoleon, hoping to improve American wool production.
My friend Sarah Satterlee took me to see this at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. It was shot at Rokeby.
IN “The Visitors,” a nine-screen video installation by Ragnar Kjartansson that will have its first American showing next month, the artist lies in a pedestal bathtub almost in a trance, strumming a guitar as he repeatedly sings a refrain, “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” Over the course of an hour his voice falls and rises, on its own and in unison with performers on the other eight screens — each seen as if in a painting, playing an instrument in a different room of a beautiful, run-down mansion and singing the same enigmatic refrain at a dirgelike pace.
The screens are quite large, standing near them I felt as if I were invading the performer’s space at times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/design/the-visitors-by-ragnar-kjartansson.html
[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/garden/22hudson.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&fbclid=IwAR0z10b0CxnoGlAs2W-KZF6SbOfgFgzHr19Ym7wLSLA4hPwm7s_NiaJ_tUI]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Winthrop_Chanler#cite_note-10]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Armstrong_Chaloner]