Ashokan Reservoir

The Ashokan Reservoir, located in Ulster County, NY, is now included in the eastern portion of the Catskills State Park. It was originally created as part of the system that supplies the metropolitan New York City area with drinking water.

Zulma Parker Steele (1881-1979) was an artists better known for her pottery than for her painting. This version of Ashokan Reservoir is one of several views that Steele created during her time at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in nearby Woodstock.

The Group Of Five, circa 1875

“Ah! We were not easy to provide for and the restaurants of Paris no doubt remember us. We often changed our meeting place. Sometimes it was at Adolphe and Pele, behind the Opera; sometimes in the square of the Opera Comique; then at Voisin’s whose cellar could meet any emergency and reconcile all tastes. We were wont to sit down to table at seven o’clock, and at two o’clock we had not finished. Flaubert and Zola dined in their shirtsleeves; Tourgeneff lounged on the divan; the waiters were turned out – a needless precaution since Flaubert’s “roar” could be heard from roof to cellar of the house – and we talked literature…” – Alphonse Daudet

“We kept the best of ourselves for those meetings. One would think to himself: I shall tell them this; or else; I shall read that page and take their advice on it. No truckling, no civility! Neither pupils nor masters, but comrades, respectful to the other men, warming themselves in the reflection of their glory and proving by their choice in our profession there is something else besides money and vanity.” – Alphonse Daudet

You could say there were five of them plus the ghost of a sixth. The five were Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Edmond de Goncourt (1822-1896), Ivan Turgenev(1818-1883), and Emile Zola (1840-1902). The sixth man in the group was the late Jules de Goncourt (1830-1870), brother of Edmond (1822-1896). During their adult lives the Goncourt Brothers were rarely apart, writing books and editing journals together, a unique collaboration that was ended by Jules' death from venereal disease (read: syphilis). Daudet and Flaubert died from the same cause. So did many others, famous and forgotten from the 19th century.

The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts (1881) offers a window into the prevalence of venereal disease and the havoc it brought to families and personal relationships. The very next year Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People, a play devoted to the havoc that daring to write about a common but tabooed subject brought to his life. So there were other ghosts at the table than just one missing brother, though that is another story.

The group first got together on April 14, 1874. They shared a frustration with the state of literature, with the popularity of melodrama. They shared the practice of close observation, of a new naturalism in fiction writing. Critics disdained their writing, finding their characters often contemptible and failing to realize that, particularly in the case of Flaubert, the author shared their estimation of his flawed creatures. Reading their works together is an experiment worth the effort, each one enriching the next. One final ghost in the room is the relative lack of available translations of Edmond de Goncourt's work. I offer these two brief quotes in place of more. "A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
"If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion."

Alphonse Daudet Letters From My Windmill, translated from the French by Geroge Burnham Ives, New York, Putnam’s Sons: 1903 (1869) FIC DAU

Alphonse Daudet Tartine Of The Alps London, Dent-Dutton: 1969 (1880) FIC DAU

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary: Patterns of Provincial Life, translated from the French by Frances Steegmuller, New York, Alfred A. Knopf: 1993 (1857)FIC FLA

Gustave Flaubert Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, translated from the French by Jacques Barzun New York, New Directions: 1954 (18-? ) 847 FLA

Ivan Turgenev The Torrents Of Spring, translated from the Russian by David Magarshack, London, Hamilton: 1959 (1872) FIC TUR

Emile Zola Therese Raquin translated from the French by Leonard Tancock, New York, Penguin Books: 1962 (1867) FIC ZOL

Image: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot - The Windmill, before 1875, Louvre Museum, Paris.

A Bridge Across The Hudson

There aren't very many bridges across the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. My guess is that Louis Lozowick's 1940 print Bridge Across the Hudson may be the Bear Mountain Bridge - not far from High Tor. In any case, this comes from the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

High Tor: Up The Hudson

HIGH TOR (in Four Verse Plays)
By Maxwell Anderson New York, Harcourt, Brace & World: 1959 812 AND

High Tor, the place, is just south of Haverstraw on the west bank of the Hudson, where the river is at its widest. Drenched in back story, it was Henry Hudson’s resting place on his way down the rover in 1609, after giving up his dream of finding a Northwest Passage. Here the eponymous traitor Benedict Andre met with Major Andre to plot the betrayal of West Point during the American Revolution. Here the fictional Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years.
“Torr” is an old English word for a rocky peak.

High Tor, a play in verse, dates from 1937. Anderson, who lived nearby, was aware of the renewed interest in American history, as embodied in the national government’s support of writers producing the WPA Guides to the States. From his home on South Mountain Road, he watched as the mountain’s owner, Elmer van Orden, resisted pressure to sell so that it could be quarried for stone, a job creator during the Great Depression. Van Orden died in 1943, and only then did the county step in to purchase High Tor for the Pallisades Interstae Park. In light of our current environmental problems, High Tor, the play, commands our renewed interest.
The Catskill Mountains possess magical properties, usually blue and purple, they attract wispy clouds of vapor even on sunny days. Against this backdrop Anderson created a fantastic comedy in verse. His protagonist is Van van Dorn, the man who owns the mountain that developers covet, and his fiancée Judith, who sees the price for the mountain as their fortune.

“They want to chew the back right off this mountain, the way they did/across the clove there. Leave the old palisades/ sticking up there like billboards, nothing left/ a false front facing the river”, van Orden tells Judith.
In response to Judith’s reminder that $10,000 is being offered, van Dorn says:
“Well, it’s Federal money/ Damn stiff evaporates. Put it in a sock/ along with mothballs, and come back, next year,/ and there’s nothing left but the smell.”
Art Biggs is a double-dealing developer who connives with Judge Skirmerhorn to push the deal through. Van Dorn sees portents of environmental destruction in the storms and the lightening that swirl around the mountain after the judge serves him with a court summons.Complications ensue after a bank robbery in a nearby town, when the robbers take refuge on the mountain and van Dorn is trapped there by a rockslide. A busy night ensues.

A master of the unlikely beginning, after graduating from the University of North Dakota, Anderson (1888-1956), moved to New York City where he wrote for the prestigious New Republic. His first play managed only 12 performances before closing, but Anderson went on to dominate the American theater for more than a quarter of a century with such plays as What Price Glory?, Key Largo, Knickerbocker Holiday, Winterset, Lost In The Stars, and Anne of the Thousand Days (like High Tor, a verse play). From Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks, Anderson absorbed the charm of setting your play far from home. For his own home in the Catskills of Rockland County, where he did most of his writing, he installed a sprinkler system on the roof, convinced that he did his best writing to the sound of rain.