Yaddo (Artists' colony)

Yaddo is an artists' retreat located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo first began welcoming creative guests in 1926, but its roots extend back to the final decades of the 19th century. After the loss of their fourth child, Spencer and Katrina Trask decided to bequeath their baronial mansion and its surrounding grounds to future generations of creative men and women. Yaddo's guest list has included Newton Arvin, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Aaron Copland, Malcolm Cowley, Philip Guston, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Ulysses Kay, Jacob Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Anne Porter, Mario Puzo, Clyfford Still, and Virgil Thomson.

The Trasks gave consideration to how to bequeath their financial investments and their estate. Katrina in particular was adamant that Yaddo's future purpose would coordinate with the unique spirituality that she had always associated with its surrounding grounds.

In 1900, the Trasks co-authored a joint Testamentary Agreement that outlines their vision for Yaddo as an artistic community: "… we desire to found here a permanent home to which may come from time to time for rest and refreshment authors, painters, sculptures, musicians, and other artists both men and women few in number and chosen for creative gifts and besides and not less for the power and the [will] and the purpose to make these gifts useful to the world." In the winter of 1900, the trustees of Pine Garde -the corporation established as the legal and financial basis for Yaddo- gathered for their first meeting at Peabody's residence in New York City; the trustees included Spencer Trask, George Foster Peabody, Edward Morse Shepard, Henry van Dyke, Allena Pardee, and Katrina Trask. Katrina died at Yaddo on January 7, 1922.

Yaddo Following Katrina's death, Peabody assumed the responsibility of providing for Yaddo's legal establishment as well as the more daunting challenge of overseeing Yaddo's practical inception. While Peabody's business experience provided a basic sense of how to proceed with legal and financial arrangements, implementing the Trasks' unprecedented vision proved more difficult.

By 1923 Marjorie Peabody Waite was living at Yaddo and working as a research assistant for George Foster Peabody. Waite was 18 years old and from Minnesota. Three years later Peabody legally adopted Waite, a practice not entirely foreign to the 19th century when it was generally used to justify indiscreet relationships. Also in 1923, Marjorie's sister, Elizabeth Ames, arrived at Yaddo. While the precise circumstances of Ames' arrival remain vague, her invitation was apparently related to an appointment to catalogue the contents of the Yaddo mansion. Ames engaged Peabody in discussions of American aesthetics, and her insights convinced Peabody that she was capable of administering the Trasks' estate. In 1924, Peabody appointed Ames to the position of Executive Director.

Between 1924 and 1926 Ames was occupied exclusively with preparing the estate for the arrival of the first group of artists who would benefit from the Trasks' unique legacy. She oversaw the preparation of the mansion and grounds, which included the renovation and conversion of outlying buildings to serve as artists' studios, and developed a process by which guests were recommended and invited to Yaddo.

Under Ames administrative control, Yaddo's integration into the intellectual and creative community was intentionally furtive. In order to maintain Yaddo's tradition of isolation and detached independence, Ames adamantly opposed publicly advertising Yaddo's purpose. Instead, she devised a process by which prospective candidates were invited to apply based on a confidential recommendation from a trusted member of the creative or academic community. Lewis Mumford played an important role during Yaddo's formative years by putting Ames in contact with members of an emerging intellectual community. In April of 1928, he wrote Ames in order to recommend Newton Arvin, a young professor from Smith College. Arvin arrived at Yaddo in June and spent two months developing his biography of Walt Whitman. He brought to Ames' attention Granville Hicks, another young member of the Smith faculty. Also in 1928, Irita van Doren wrote Ames to recommend that Malcolm Cowley be considered for Yaddo. Though he would not visit until 1932, Cowley provided important recommendations including one for a young John Cheever whose letter of application included, "Other than Malcolm's word and a few published stories, I have little to recommend me." Finally, in 1928, Alfred Krymborg recommended that Aaron Copland apply for residency. Copland arrived in July of 1930 and took up residence in Stone Tower (the original icehouse). Like Arvin and Cowley, Copland provided Ames with important recommendations.

By 1933 Newton Arvin, Aaron Copland, Carl van Doren, Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks, Simon Moselsio, and Lewis Mumford were all closely advising Ames. The intersection of Ames' administration of Yaddo's nebulous admissions process with the developing careers of these young creative thinkers provided for much of Yaddo's early success in fostering creative development. Throughout the 1930s, Ames remained firmly at the center of life at Yaddo, liberally extending offers of admissions and prolonging guests' stays independent of any administrative control. In the words of Malcolm Cowley, for Yaddo's first 25 years, "Elizabeth Ames was Yaddo."

During the 1930s the creative environment at Yaddo was also heavily influenced by the economic uncertainties of the depression. While the opportunity for immersion in sustained quiet free of economic concerns has always been conducive to creative development, during years of extreme want, acceptance at Yaddo often meant escape from deprivation. (Ames' repeated accommodation of Cheever during the hungry days of the early 1930s proved essential to his artistic development.) Economic uncertainties also made an impression on the creative environment. While political dissent was common to academic and creative communities throughout America, Yaddo's tradition of detached isolation encouraged the expression of radical sympathies. For some guests, the political environment was inhibiting. Dinner tables frequently divided according to political conviction and debate was often intense.

Though she was hindered by economic uncertainty and struggling to maintain Yaddo's tradition of political neutrality, Ames was determined to further establish Yaddo's influence. In 1932, Ames, in close collaboration with Copland, organized the first American Festival of Contemporary Music. For an interview with a Saratoga newspaper Ames explained the purpose of the conference: "Yaddo will try not only to present what is best and representative in authentic modern music, it will also try to create a public which will understand the what and why of modern music as well as having knowledge of it in a broader sense." Six of the nineteen pieces preformed at the inaugural festival were written specifically for the event and included, George Antheil's Sonatina for Piano, Marc Blitzstein's Serenade for String Quartet, and Paul Bowles' Six Songs. The festivals would continue, though intermittently, through 1952 and would leave an indelible impression on modern American music.

By the 1940s, interpersonal and romantic entanglements replaced the political contentions of the decade before and Yaddo assumed a decidedly southern air. Carson McCullers and Katherine Anne Porter both spent protracted periods at Yaddo, and while their residencies provided for sustained work on The Member of the Wedding and Ship of Fools the two often acted with open hostility towards one another. In 1946, a young Truman Capote arrived at Yaddo with a partially completed manuscript of Other Voices, Other Rooms and developed an intimate relationship with Newton Arvin. The relationship would become, arguably, the most influential of their adult lives.

The 1940s also witnessed Yaddo's greatest crisis. On the morning of February 26, 1949, Robert Lowell, in collusion with fellow residents, Flannery O'Connor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Edward Maisel, presented to Yaddo's board of directors allegations that in Lowell's words involved, "the entire of the institution of Yaddo and perhaps its survival." Lowell maintained that Elizabeth Ames was involved in communist activities, and that under her administrative control Yaddo had accommodated known communist agitators. Lowell's demands were emphatic, "that Mrs. Ames … be fired; that this action be absolute, final and prompt; that pending a decision she be immediately suspended from all administrative functions."

Lowell's accusations were the result of an FBI inquiry into activities at Yaddo. Yaddo's association with radical politics during the 1930s was well-known to the FBI: the Albany office kept files on several Yaddo guests. During the 1940s, Ames allowed Agnes Smedley, known communist sympathizer and public supporter of the Chinese communists, to remain in residence at Yaddo for almost six years. When the New York Times reported that Douglas Macarthur accused Smedley of being a communist spy, the FBI's interest in Yaddo intensified. Ames' secretary served as an informant, and agents were dispatched to Saratoga. By the time FBI agents appeared at Yaddo and questioned Hardwick and Maisel, it was clear that Ames' protracted accommodation of Smedley had extended the reach of Yaddo's association with radical politics out of the 1930s and into the cultural hysteria that precipitated McCarthyism. The results for Yaddo, and especially Ames, were almost devastating. For two weeks Yaddo's board gave nervous consideration to the implications of Lowell's charges. While Yaddo's board ultimately decided to dismiss Lowell's accusations (and to severely censure Lowell) it was understood that In the context of a culture becoming increasingly uncertain about the threat of international communism, Lowell's accusations could prove explosive.

Despite the combined effects of the economic depression, global war, internal crisis, the dawn of the nuclear age and the cold war, as the world changed from decidedly modern to post-modern, Yaddo, for all intents and purposes, continued to foster creative development according to the principles the Trasks had intended. While Arvin, Cowley, Hicks, and Kazin continued to influence the guest list, though less emphatically than during Yaddo's first 25 years, it was Ames who seemingly undaunted remained thoroughly entrenched as the center of life at Yaddo until her retirement in 1968.

Prominent guests in the 1950s and 1960s included Newton Arvin, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Leonard Bernstein, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hortense Calisher, Malcolm Cowley, Babette Deutsch, Josephine Herbst, Granville Hicks, Ted Hughes, Philip Guston, Ulysses Kay, Jacob Lawrence, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Mario Puzo, Theodore Roethke, Philip Roth, David Del Tredici, and William Carlos Williams. After Ames' retirement, Newman E. Waite served as President of Corporation of Yaddo from 1969 until 1977, when Curtis Harnack assumed his position. However, despite administrative changes, life at Yaddo has remained, in its essence, unchanged. The Yaddo Cheever visited in the late 1970s remained familiar and recalled, in its most important respects, the Yaddo Cheever first visited in 1933. Despite the passing of more than one hundred years since Spencer and Katrina penned their collaborative agreement, Yaddo remains deeply rooted in the sensibilities of its founders. According to the Trasks' interest in fostering a broad range of creative development Yaddo guests list represents emerging artistic interests. During recent years, filmmakers and performance artists have begun to mingle with writers and composers amid Yaddo's secluded grounds.

Yaddo's dramatic origins also continue to shape its creative environment. Portraits of Spencer and Katrina, as well as their children, greet guests on the first floor of the mansion. Editions of works completed in whole or in part at Yaddo make up a sizable library which guests borrow from during their visits. Despite the passage of time, the Trasks' combined interests in community, quietism, and seclusion continue to provide the basis for Yaddo's creative culture.