The Seacoast of Bohemia

By Joan Marks
PROVINCETOWN ARTS

1994

In her novel,  A Charmed Life, Mary McCarthy makes it plain that the despised “New Leeds” is recognizably Wellfleet, where she lived during her marriage to Edmund Wilson. It is a place McCarthy populates with those “who had no object in life except to see each other over a drink,” and she excoriates it mercilessly with the unflagging whip of hr irony.

And it was typical of New Leeds that you could not take a drink without wondering whether you might become and alcoholic. Everything here cast a menacing shadow before it, a shade of future peridition. There was something sinister…in the fact that you could not get anything repaired. There was nobody to fix the clock; the man who sharpened lawn mowers had died during the summer and nobody had succeeded him; the local laundry service could not clean a suit without tearing and discoloring it; the garage-man’s only accomplishment was the ability to scratch his head. Everything in the village was relentlessly running down, buckling, warping, mildewing—including the human beings…the gay, smart wives, mottled and bedizened, fantastically got up with shawls and peasant bangles—when two of them got together…they made the First National check-out look like a fortune tellers’ convention. New Leeds was, literally, the seacoast of Bohemia.

Forty years after it first appeared, this then-scandalous tale of adultery, between two people who once were married to one another, had lost much of its shock value. But to Beatrice Grabbe, a peppery, gray-haired Wellfleet resident of long standing who knew but was not fond of McCarthy at Vassar College, it is an old sore that still festers. A close observer of the local scene, she points out, “One of the couples in the book Mary was not gracious about had been very kind to her. I thought it too bad that she returned their kindness by laughing at their idiosyncrasies. Mary was looking for trouble—remember, she divorced Edmond Wilson. She was biased because she was bitter.”

McCarthy’s chronicle of shallow people who “come here to gather dust, on a pair of small incomes and the revenue from an August rental,” and who “eventually go to pieces, like everybody else,” hits a nerve but trivializes a community by ignoring its complexity.

Approximately the same number of people inhabit Wellfleet today as lived here during the mid-19th century, when it was a hamlet of 2400 mackerel fishermen and their families, a group of sober and serious folk, partial to discussing topics such as temperance, agriculture, and education at the town’s Lyceum Institute, So tight a hold did religion have on the fisherman that they were nicknamed “Biblebacks” for their reluctance to cast their lines on Sundays. Sunday prohibitions, however, represented only a vestige of religion’s power, as the unfortunate Robert Jordan discovered when the Methodist congregation out him on trial and expelled him because his wife have birth five months after their marriage.

How did such sober-minded, Godfearing citizens metamorphose into drunken, sybriatic wastrels in less than a century? Or was the change really that dramatic? Surely not. Wellfleet of the ‘40s and ‘50s  was in fact an amalgam of both bohemia and puritan strains, just as it is today. A few notable personalities, along with a host of others not as well known, gave this small community and artistic and intellectual identity that is complex and dynamic.

During the first half of this century, a multi-faceted new population transformed Wellfleet from a solid bedrock of conservativism into a shifting, many-layered terrain which nurtures quirkiness, applauds alternative lifestyles, and beckons to those who have the ingenuity to live by their wits. Some people who fell into these categories were to service in the throngs of writers, architects, professors, psychiatrists, scientists, and intellectuals of all stripes who pour seasonally into Wellfleet in numbers which kept increasing exponentially for several decades.

Wellfleet’s 20 square miles are bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay. The area is bisected by a main highway, Route 6, which runs for eight unremarkable miles between the Audobon Sanctuary in South Wellfleet and the Truro border. The town center is a decaying vision of Victorian gentility. Once-imposing sea captains’ homes now shelter upscale art galleries and craft shops, while other turn-of-the-century homes, spruced up with paint and new siding stand out like gingerbread oddities among traditional Cape Cod houses. Only when you leave the main highway and walk or drive the back roads, dirt paths, and hiking trails do you become surprised—even astonished—by the hidden Wellfleet, glistening with glacial ponds sheltered by stands of pine and scrub oak, so silent that even the wind whistling through the trees seems like an intrusion. The ponds are Wellfleet’s glory, but no less breathtaking are its superb bay salt marshes and rolling ocean dunes.

For Marianne Strengell and Olav Hammarstrom, who were born and raised in small villages in Finland, Wellfleet’s charm was irresistible. Now a frail couple in their 80s but still tall and erect, they came to Wellfleet in the ‘40s and were married here.  She is a well-known and versatile fabric designer; he an architect who designed the Chapel in the Pines of the Church of St. James the Fisherman. “It’s changed remarkably little over the years, it’s really still like a quaint New England village,” Hammarstrom remarks, adding that these qualities can be particularly attractive to people like themselves who came from European countries. “The contemporary buildings are all in the woods and interesting people are well hidden.”

The need for quiet and isolation preoccupy many in the area. B.J. Lifton, an author specializing in the subject of adoption, describes herself as a virtual recluse, prizing her privacy and her “special relationship to the sea,” enjoyed from the ocean-front home she shares with her husband, Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and renowned author of books on the Holocaust, human survival, and protean fluidity of human identity. He finds an extraordinary quality in the local atmosphere that transforms everyday life: “Everything I experience is more intense than elsewhere: the work, the ideas, the encounters with people. Everything is more purified and more of a risk. Once doesn’t have the protective barriers, the interruptions and intrusions.”

Edmund Wilson, whose worship of Wellfleet’s physical beauty was especially lyrical, wrote in his journal” “The pond was dark through the trees as I approached, and then I saw a doe and a well-grown fawn, light and tawny against the green, that made away into the woods, and they were followed, after a moment, by another fawn. As I came down, a black-and-white loon flew away from the smaller pond. The cranberries, yellow, were reddening like little apples and crunched under my feet as I walked.” And even Mary McCarthy can quit caviling long enough to relish the “steel-blue fresh-water ponds and pine forests and mushrooms and white bluffs dropping to a strangely pebbled beach.”

Wilson described Wellfleet, where he bought a house in 1941 for $4000 and lived on and off until his death, as a “bit of enchanted ground at Cape Cod” and the corner of America he loved best, except in summer when he called it “the fucking Riviera.” Indeed, with one main street, few restaurants, and a non-existent night life, what residents and visitors did for entertainment was to give parties and go to the beach. By the mid-60s, on any August afternoon, the notables has assembled, including, according to Alfred Kazin in an essay about Wilson: “television producers, government and U.N. ‘advisers’—social scientists, pyschohistorians, professors by the dozen…Arthur and Marian Schlesinger, Gilbert Seldes, Allen Tate and Isabella Gardner, Edwin and Veniette O’Connor, Richard and Beatrice Hofstadter, Robert and Betty Jean Lifton, Irving and Arien Howe, Harry and Elena Levin, Daniel and Janet Aaron. At times there could also be seen Stuart and Suzanne Hughes, Jason and Barbara Epstein, Phillip and Maggie Roth, Marcel and Constance Breuer. Once there was a view of Svetlana, daughter of Stalin, accompanied by the Georgian writer Chavchavadze, whose wife was a Romanoff.”

“Wilson’s arrival on the Wellfleet beach regularly caused a stir,” Kazin writes. “A definite mental avidity and nervous unrest fixed itself around his bulky antique figure. He was so definitely not of this time. The sight of him in his Panama hat and well-filled Bermuda shorts, the cane propped up in the sand like a sword in declaration of war, instantly brought out in me a mixed anxiety and hilarity that I used to feel watching Laurel and Hardy about to cross a precipice. There was so much mischief, disdain and intellectual solemnity wrapped up behind that get-up, that high, painfully distinct voice, that lonely proud face.”

During his lonely Wellfleet winters, years before he wrote his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wilson would reflect on the plea spoken by Orthodox Jews in synagogue when they finish each scriptural book: “Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another.” In Hebrew letters, this is engraved on his tombstone in Wellfleet cemetery. A talented linguist who could read five languages fluently, Wilson had a predilection for Hebrew so pronounced that his daughter, Helen, says, “When I was gong to the Wellfleet Consolidated School, there were no Jewish kids and no black kids. I thought I was Jewish until I was 10, because my father kept going over to Israel and studying Hebrew.” Norma Simon, an author of children’s books whose daughter Wendy worked at the South Wellfleet General Store when Wilson was a regular there, relates that Wendy was so accustomed to seeing him that she scarcely gave him a thought until the day he stopped coming anymore. After she sent a note of condolence to his widow, Wendy was amazed to discover the extent of his fame and accomplishments in an obituary. The next time Elena Wilson came in, she told Wendy that no matter how tired her husband was he always wanted to come into that store to see “that girl’s smile.” And Wendy said, “I thought we’d just miss Mr. Wilson in Wellfleet, but now I see the whole world is going to miss him.”

One person who was pivotal in shaping the community’s distinctive character is Jack Phillips, referred to as the ‘Boston Brahmin,’ a painter and courtly charmer of 85 whose suave good looks and British accent seem tailor-made for his sometime role in Tetley Tea commercials. During the 30s, Phillips inherited some wooded acreage perforated by ponds and hidden in n area of Wellfleet between Route 6 and the ocean known as the “backwoods.” When he moved there year-round from Boston in 1936, he helped transform the area into a glade settled by architects, artists, writers, and political scientists who clustered near the ponds they found so irresistible. His father tried to persuade him to dump the land, claiming he could never afford the taxes on property then valued at $12 an acre. Instead of selling the scattered lots, Phillips bought more wilderness filled with ducks and geese. He acquired a small hunting lodge and made it his home, adding rooms to accommodate everyone who wanted a pond view until it greatly increased in size “like a railroad train.” This isolated spot was once the center of town, but the only other structures in the area in 1936 were one house and one of the original Wellfleet schoolhouses, which is now commemorated by a marker.

Phillips soon tackled another project, quickly dubbed the Phillips Paper Palace, a two-story house overlooking the ocean and built from second-hand lumber and homosote, a paper sheathing. Durin one summer in the midst of World War II, he rented it to the Chilean surrealist known simply as Matta, who paid $450 for the season and promptly invited carloads of international guests such as Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst to join him. To Phillips, hardly a Puritanical person himself—he has been married five times—they were a revelation. He recalls: “ I had to go over there frequently to check on things. I acted as a sort of janitor for the property. They thought I was a very conservative type and teased me about being a stuffed shirt. They seemed to have a cute, cozy relationship with one another which was very different than with the rest of us. They told me about the games they played, all sorts of surrealist games, including Truth or Consequence, where the penalty was to masturbate in front of one another.”

That era was a skittish time when many were haunted by the notion that German spied would land there. Phillips’ daughter, singer Blair Resika, still recalls being scared as a child by stories of the enemy marching over the dunes. In this climate, the house Matta occupied became an object of close scrutiny because so many foreigners lived there. Max Ernst was hauled off for questioning by the FBI and became so incensed he never returned. Matta’s brush with the law was more comical, as Peter Watts, who helped renovate Phillips’ cottages, recalls: “The house he was renting has many flat roofs at different levels. A group of local Nazi hunters suspected spies were operating from them, and once when Matta was alone came to check because they suspected someone was sending semaphore signals to submarines. They asked Matta, ‘How many ladders do you have?’ Matta thought for a while and responded, ‘I have five; M-A-T-T-A.’ With his imperfect English, he thought they said letters, not ladders. After that, they left him alone.”

Phillips kept on building. The idea was to erect houses cheaply and then rent or sell them. After the war ended, inexpensive army barracks were available. Phillips purchased some and had them shipped north from Georgia on railroad flatcars. “It turned out to be a bad idea,” he concedes. The structures were loaded onto the cars in the rain and they reached the Wellfleet railroad station in the midst of a snow storm. “The wood pieces had frozen together, and it was quite a challenge to pry them apart and get them to different locations.” It took backhoes, bulldozers, and pickaxes to accomplish the task. “I finally got five cottages built out of the barracks, and added chimneys and fireplaces to make them look more homey. When the architect, Marcel Breuer, took a look at them later on, he told me he could have done it cheaper.”

Phillips kept thinking up schemes to use his land to better advantage. After an attempt to grow celery in a swamp proved fruitless, he experimented with raising turkeys, installing 100 birds in his ocean front studio. “What a view they must have had!” marvels another daughter, writer Hayden Herrera. Encouraged by early success, Phillips increased his flock to 3,000 chicks and built brooder houses to lodge them. He did pretty well until the turkeys got every known disease and he had to sell short. For a long time, the family ate nothing but turkey. The former “turkey houses” now serve as a summer retreat for Phillips daughters.

Even when he did not make the sale himself, Phillips was still sometimes the catalyst responsible for it. Marcel Breuer happened to get stuck in the sand near his house and asked if he could make a phone call; Phillips found the land nearby where Breuer built his home. In an interview Howard Wise videotaped in 1974, Breuer is relaxed and self-spoken as he philosophizes about art and architecture: “Art is really to get along with limitations, and if the artist doesn’t have any limits, he sets them himself. The achievement is to master these limitations.” Referring to the design of the Whitney Museum, one of his major projects, he remarks, “I think the Whitney itself has a personality without hurting the exhibitions—that is the architects job.”

Breuer’s legacy to the area consists of four houses: his own and three others virtually identical to it. They are L-shaped structures whose elegance is derived from starkly simply lines. One that overlooks Long Pond is owned by Gyorgy Kepes, a painter, photographer, and teacher, writer, and thinker, recently retired from MIT, who draws no clear boundaries between art and science. Sitting on his cantilevered porch which seems to be floating on the water, he says, “Here I can be myself.” Kepes and Breuer were acquaintances in Europe who became friends on the Cape. “Breuer was more than happy to design my house,” Kepes says. “Unlike artists who paint whether there is opportunity or not, architects have to wait for a chance to show their talent. He was a kind man who always listened to his clients; our architect-client relationship was without conflicts.”

Barbara Wise had the same kind of experience when she and her husband Howard commissioned their house in the ‘60s. “We had rented a house Breuer built on the bay off Chequesset Neck Road and I found it just wonderful to live in, so that when we bought our property in Indian Neck Heights I said I wanted a Breuer house. We called him, and he said why don’t you let me do a version of my house, because to start a new design would cost too much money. H looked at our land and said it was perfect for a mirror image of his house. We got Ernie Rose, the same builder who did all the Breuer houses. And it was so easy. If Ernie called with a question, I’d say, ‘Go over to Breuer’s house and see how he did it.’ Ernie gave us an estimate of what it would cost, and it came in for less. We loved working with Breuer—he was the sweetest, most gentle man, wry and witty.”

Another neighbor of Breuer’s who preceded him here, Anna Hamburger, is preoccupied with helping preserve the area’s essential character, so much so that she requested its exact location be kept secret, fearful of intrusion by those who might not respect the ponds fragility. She is a charming woman, but her tone of voice changes to reflect her anxiety when she discusses the National Seashore, which could pose threats to the ponds: ironically the Seashore protects the area from further building but at the same time makes it accessible to outsiders. There is even a plan to put a bicycle path there, all of which worries her because she feels these encroachments could mean the end of the kind of life she has enjoyed for more than half a century. Her husband Philip Hamburger, a writer for the New Yorker, says the place has such a magical quality for her that when she is in New York she can close her eyes and drown out the sounds of Lexington Avenue just by imagining the walk between their place and the nearest pond—“She knows every step of the way.”

She first came to Provincetown with her parents in 1928, and six years later moved into the 19th-century house where she still lives. “I’m happy to say there were no artists or writers, only three Colonial houses and a small wild bird hunting cabin owned by Jack Phillips.” That comment seems strange coming from one who has married two writers. Her first husband Normand Matson, had seen the house they bought several years before. At that time he was the husband of Susan Glaspell, a writer who was part of the circle which surrounded Eugene O’Neill. “The had a winter house in Provincetown and a summer house in Truro,” Anna Hamburger remembers. “One day, Norman was talking a walk, saw this house, and fell in love with it immediately. Later, he got into a roadster with his wife but couldn’t locate it because then there was no road. “ After Anna and Matson were married and had two small children, they contacted Elizabeth Freeman, a real estate agent who told them about a wonderful house in the woods. “She took Norman down to the ocean and then back towards Route , where he saw the house he had been looking for on any number of rainy days for eight years.”

The Matsons lived there year-round until their children were older. “When we spent the winters here,” she says, “there were literally only half a dozen people between here and Provincetown who read the New York Times. It was a tremendous privilege to live in that kind of semi-isolation: no telephone or electricity, just running water and a gasoline generator for power.” She did her best to guard her privacy: “I was up in the woods once when I first saw Xavier Gonzalez in a jeep coming from the ocean. He said he was lost—he was looking for Wellfleet. I asked him why, and he said he thought he was going to open an art school. So I told him I wasn’t going to tell him how to get there. I didn’t want to live in an art colony. Would you? Where artists go, the crowd will always follow.”

Over time the few people grew into a group numbering perhaps 50, banding together like members of a fraternity with a common password. Phillips called them the “friendly aliens.” Attracted to one another by a high level of sophistication and culture, they inevitably set themselves apart, although, as Philip Hamburger said, “among our friends, there is no cultural elitism. The animal life around here can be described as various forms of creativity. They don’t make a point of being intelligent—they just are.”

Just as hidden away as the Hamburger’s, but on the other side of Route 6 near the bay, is an area known as Bound Brook Island. Jack Hall, an artist who once augmented his income by serving as a property agent and rent collector for Jack Phillips, bought his first house there in 1938 for $3000, and has since purchased three others within a quarter mile of each other. Bound Brook used to be a real island which people would cross on a foot bridge, but when a dike was put across Wellfleet Harbour in 1909, the marshes and interior bays dried up and the island disappeared. Hall, who designed, built, and remodeled more than 20 houses in the immediate area where he lives, refuses to disclose who his clients are. “Their names are on the mailboxes,” he says. For Hall, a transplanted New Yorker, Wellfleet’s allure was its small-town atmosphere. When he first came here there was no police department. “In the summer, there was one policeman who directed traffic in the main town parking lot. He drank all winter, but when Memorial Day came he sobered up, put on a uniform, and went to work. If there was any commotion or ruckus in town, though, one of the selectmen who had been appointed chief of police would deal with it—that wasn’t the paid policeman’s job.”

Peter Watts, an artist who lives in an adjoining area, remembers how simple things used to be, even in 1970 when he bought his 19th century house. He recalls attending a town meeting when Charlie Frazier, the only lawyer in town, served as moderator.  “That night Davey Curran, the town drunk, rode his horse right into the meeting hall. Charlie said, ‘You’re a registered voter and you can stay, but that horse will have to leave!’” In another experiment in informal self-government, Watts relates that there was once a community vegetable garden on Bound Brook Island where anyone could take vegetables provided they contributed some money for seeds. During the McCarthy era, when the community was split between the John Birchers and the liberals, a further schism took place between the liberals. The anarchist Trotskyites slit off from the Stalinists and one group wouldn’t talk to the other. Afterwards, a sign went up: “Absolutely no Trotskyites can take vegetables from this garden!”

The sculptor Penelope Jencks, a tall, pleasant woman who with her husband Sidney Hurwitz, an artist and professor, is another near neighbor who has still earlier memories of the area. Her parents, Ruth and Gardiner Jencks, built in 1939 the house she still occupies. She remembers that Provincetown, in the ‘40s and ‘50s, was an hour away by car. “We’d go there every couple of weeks, a tremendous trip that we planned well in advance. We had no electricity until 1949. My father installed a generator that would work from time to time—when it was on, we’d fill the bathtub with water. I had a friend who lived in Sladeville, off Castle Road in Truro, and I’d visit her by bus, stay a week, and come back by bus. It was a nice place for kids to grow up because you didn’t have to worry about things parents worry about now, like talking to strangers. There were no strangers. My friend and I used to wander around near the island. If we got lost, wed climb the nearest hill and we could always spot my house.”

Finding a job as a nanny brought Florence Rich here in 1934. During the Depression, a friend of hers who was a single parent landed a job in Boston, and needed someone to take care of her little boy. Since Wellfleet was far cheaper than Boston, they chose to move into a former gunning camp near the center of town, where a contingent of newcomers had settled. Later, realizing she had to go to work when her husband went off during World War II, she pondered her choices: “I could be a real estate agent, except I didn’t have a car. I could open shellfish and sell them at a stand, but if people were waiting I’d be too nervous. Or I could open an art gallery which I could combine with teaching rug hooking.” She selected the last option, opening Wellfleet’s first art gallery in 1947 in her home on Commercial Street. She reasoned that people on vacation with time on their hands might want to visit a gallery. Initially, she carried work by some Boston artists and by “a lot of old ladies who cleared out their portfolios for whatever I could get for them.  I’d sell unmated watercolors for two dollars. My first real sale was $75 for a framed oil by an artist named Mo Com, bought by Mrs. Hutchins Hapgood who lived across the street.” When her husband sold their house the next year, she rented a former blacksmith shop where the Cove Gallery is now. The place was in bad shape. The floor was gone. She spread white sand in its place. There was a hole in the roof. If it rained during the night, she’d get dressed quickly and rescue the watercolors. For 10 years, until she gave the gallery up, she tried to offer the public something unusual, not just run of the mill landscapes by local people. Among the artists she showed were Lucy L’Engle, Peter Busa, and Sabina Teichmann. Forty years later, she looks back and laments, “I was too soon—everything I did was too soon.”

Two artists she represented became good friends of hers, Ethel Edwards and Xavier Gonzalez, a couple whose exotic good looks and considerable charm contributed to the mystique which surrounded them. Both Gonzalez, who died recently, and Edwards were attentive and empathetic listeners who seemed totally absorbed by others. At the same time, they were consummate storytellers themselves. 

A neighbor, Harriet Rubin, who, with her partner Del Filardi, runs the Blue Heron Gallery across the street, observed the couple often “They were the king and queen of Wellfleet. They used to go out every night. They would emerge from his studio and stand there a minute or two, he in rakish beret, she in one of her marvelous black outfits wearing a gold piece of sculpture he’d made for her—an extraordinary necklace—around her throat. I always wanted to take their picture, but by the time I got my camera, they were gone.”

Discovering Wellfleet during the ‘40s, the couple  looked for a house to purchase. On a rainy night they saw a somber, imposing Victorian, erected 100 years ago as a bank by Elizabeth Freeman’s grandfather, a sea captain who also built the Masonic Temple. Gonzalez started an art school on the third floor and Edwards took care of the registration. They ran the school for six years and made enough money to pay their bills. When it was over, they had a little ceremony and took down the sign that said “Xavier Gonzalez School of Painting.” Gonzalez’s fondness for the community inspired him to design a 300-pound aluminum Christmas angel which he presented to the town in 1955. The entire project was a group effort with Nickerson Hardware donating the aluminum and others contributing to the lighting and installation. The angel was displayed on the front of Town Hall every Christmas for five years until it was destroyed in a fire when slippery roads prevented a fire truck just one block away from reaching the conflagration. “The angel seemed to have mysterious healing properties,” Edwards said. “People said when they saw it, they would stop arguing—it had a wonderful calming effect.”