In 1923, the Van Dorens bought a farm as a summer home near Cornwall, Connecticut. Poet and critic Mark Van Doren once wrote, “To me it was an earthly paradise.” Here, he writes to Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his second wife, Sara Field, of how he spent his time there. The description does not stretch far from his initial impression. The family was so enamoured with the farm that it grew to become their permanent residence. Van Doren also mentions his Nation review (where he was working as literary editor) of Robinson Jeffers most recent collection, The Women of Point Sur. Van Doren’s review stated, “I have read it with the thrills of pleasure at its power and beauty, and I shall read everything else Mr. Jeffers writes. But I may be brought to wonder whether there is need of his trying further in this direction. He seems to be knocking his head to pieces against the night.”
Falls Village, Connecticut
11 July 1927
The way I live up here is this. I get up with Dorothy and Charlie fairly early in the morning, watch him eat breakfast in his bathrobe and red slippers, take him out of his pen or his sand pile to play while we eat breakfast, get wood for the fire if it is a cold morning or ice for the icebox if it is a hot one, walk around a while over my grass or along the borders of Dorothy’s flower beds, go down and talk to Charlie, call Sandy the big Airedale that we are keeping this summer while Glen Mullin is in Europe, and wade the wet grass to my study across the meadow. This study is a long, low, grey-brown, sway-backed hay barn and saw mill shed, with a small room partitioned off at one end within hearing of the water that overflows our ice pond and spills into a little jungle of ferns, mint, moss, forget-me-not, willow shoots, and columbine. There, with the door open aback on the meadow, I write a poem—always write one, good or bad. Then back for Charlie’s dinner and ours, and an afternoon devoted to very serious chores—mowing the lawn, scything the orchard, mending something, making something for Charlie, tending the garden, going to tow, or anything whatever that is good and hot and hard. Then supper—crackers and milk and cheese—and a short evening of talk or sitting or reading. Almost no letters at all except to C. E. S. W. and S. B. F. Indeed a life lived altogether for me and mine, and all saved up and centered on three things: Dorothy, Charlie, and the sawmill house. The Nation, of course, goes hang. So does Columbia. So does New York….
And do you really want me to let the sonnets lie? I read them again just before I left on vacation, and they are certainly too beautiful to lie in a drawer. I was terribly moved and impressed. Maybe I’ll disobey you and try once more anyway. It never has been any trouble to send them around—don’t think so for a minute.
Have you read Jeffer’s latest? I hope you see my review of it in the Nation, and tell me whether you agree. Powerful and beautiful, of course, but over the line I think. The question is, though, what is the line?
Dot is tapping away daily on her third novel, which is at its hundredth page and going well. For the first time in any of the three she is concentrating on a man (he is only 18 so far), and she finds him difficult. But she isn’t too much worried about the supposed differences between men and women, and goes right ahead—and goes beautifully….
From The Selected Letters of Mark Van Doren. Edited by George Hendrick. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. pp. 23-4.
FURTHER READING
Read the Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
View a video on the life of Charles Erskine Scott Wood.
Read the Harvard Crimson’s account of a reading by Mark Van Doren in 1963.