Maggie's Farm

The recorder of East Coast blue-blooded life talks about his life and times at 90. From a piece by Butterworth at Financial Times:

Louis Stanton Auchincloss was born in Lawrence, New York on September 27, 1917 and grew up in Manhattan. He owes his lineage, and the good fortune to be born into America’s upper class, to Hugh Auchincloss, a Scottish merchant who left Paisley in 1803 to set up a branch of his family’s dry goods business in New York. Through adroit marriages and hard work, Hugh and his progeny multiplied and prospered into a new old world of brownstone houses, summers in Bar Harbor, Maine and Southampton, Long Island, New England prep schools, the bluer-blooded Ivies, secret societies, gentlemen’s clubs, Park Avenue and Wall Street – all the contours and peaks and exclusive domains of American Waspdom.

Arguably, the most significant event in Auchincloss’s life was attending Groton, a preparatory school in Massachusetts founded in 1884 by the Reverend Endicott Peabody and endowed with the help of JP Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt. As with many who find themselves in the cloistered and intense schools of the elite, Auchincloss never fully left; and the inspirational and feared figure of Peabody and the stern Episcopalian values and hyper-athleticism permeate Auchincloss’s most lauded work, The Rector of Justin (1964), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A piece on Auchincloss in New York Magazine noted:

Two things defined the Auchincloss family,” declares Louis Auchincloss—retired lawyer, ancient patrician, prolific novelist of manners—in a perfect mid-Atlantic accent. “One is that they ran to a very high degree in the male line. Most families disappear through the distaff side.”

The other signature Auchincloss trait is the family’s self-sufficiency. While the Scots are routinely credited these days with inventing America, this particular clan—descended from Paisley native Hugh Auchincloss, who emigrated in 1803—was carefully preoccupied with burnishing its own wealth and reputation. “There was no Auchincloss fortune,” says the writer dryly as we sit together on overstuffed sofas. “Each generation either made or married its own money. There isn’t a bum in the lot. They’ve always got an eye for the main chance. They’re not romantics; they don’t take chances.”

The good reason to visit Hyde Park, NY, in the lovely Hudson Valley, is not to visit the home of the worst President of the US, but to visit the CIA.  Paul Bocuse says it is "the best culinary school in the world." The other CIA - The Culinary Institute of America.

They have a choice of restaurants, relatively inexpensive and run by the students, and they aim to please.

The Badia (Abbey) a Passignano in the Chianti region of Tuscany. More nice photos of the area here. A Chianti walking tour sounds good to me, and, for refreshment, a glass of Chianti doesn't do much for me but a nice Chianti Classico can be a fine thing, and the Super Tuscans are the bee's knees.

The lovely tune is named "So What?"

Maggie's Farm is a state of mind, and doesn't really represent a single literal farm, as The Barrister has said.

At the same time, to add some ambiguity to the idea, it is partly inspired by a literal farm which was given as a land grant by King George lll to my ancestors, many of whom are buried in the graveyard by the side of the road. It is in the Massachusetts Berkshire Hills, and close enough to Tanglewood for convenience, but I will not say where.

It is remarkable that a place should be in the family, fully intact, after all of these years, although the original farmhouses burned down (cellar-holes still in place) and many of the barns, buildings, and the marble-cutting mill by the river have fallen down over the years.

Much of our stone is marble up here, and much of it was quarried in the first half of the 1800s and pulled by oxen to be floated down the Housatonic River for shipment to NYC, Providence, and Boston for their fancy buildings. All of our barns and buildings have marble foundations beneath their rickety structures. Even the diving "board" at the stream's swimming hole is a 6x4x4 block of marble sticking out into the water which must have been left behind when the last load of marble departed.

The marble was surely a nice income supplement for thse hardscrabble dairy farmers.

One of the two surviving, and gradually being renovated, liveable quarters on the farm was originally built as a rustic and simple dwelling for the mill workers in 1820.

Assistant Village Idiot, in his post Wisdom from a Liberal of Another Era, quoted this paragraph - among others - from a 1938 E.B. White essay in One Man's Meat:

I'm down now; the barn is tight, and the peace is preserved. It is the ugliest peace the earth has ever received for a Christmas present. Old England eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper is a sight I had as lief not lived to see. And though I am no warrior, I would gladly fight for the things Nazism seeks to destroy. (Living in a sanitary age, we are getting so we place too high a value on human life - which rightfully must always come second to human ideas.)

I say "Old England eating Islam instead of kippers." (I love kippers for breakfast.) The New Yorker has always had an anglophilic streak. But AVI  asks:

Does anyone at the New Yorker think that today?

Read his whole piece, which I have been thinking about for a week. AVI rightly observes that today's anti-war folks would probably renounce  pacifism, but claim that Iraq is not a place for Americans to die. That is debatable, but it seems that the bad guys need to be killed somewhere. Why not there?

But on to the bigger issues: Do we, today, tend to place too high a value on human life? Are there ideas we will die for, or communities we will die for, or will we only die for family? Is our precious selfhood, which some might term narcissism, more important than anything else to us and, if it is, what changed between 1938 (before the US was in the war) and today?

Photos: Yes, we are E.B. White fans. Below is the Maine boathouse in which he wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. A favorite E.B. White quote:

"I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have a hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult."

Albert King, 1980. How can you not love this guy?

The kids are back at school, and the sailing dinghies they took their lessons in all summer rest on the beach, waiting to be put away for the winter. This is Long Island Sound last Sunday (thanks, reader).

The way I see this fine photo is that the boats are a reflection of the row of clouds, and vice-versa - same as the sea and the sky.