Even the most industrious artists, in fact, sometimes have trouble adjusting to the colony experience. “It was stark at first,” Bobbie Carrey, a Cambridge photographer who was a Yaddo guest last fall, tells me. “I had thought I was a hermit, a recluse — but when I got to Yaddo and confronted the silence, I was surprised by my reaction. The walls were bare and unfamiliar, there was no mail, no phone calls — nothing to bounce off, so to speak. For the first few weeks I spent a lot of time taking self-portraits just to confirm that I was still there. Then, once I got used to it, I began to appreciate the situation. The whole environment was so simple, so stripped, so clear — that everything I did stood out, as if in neon. It was like a drying out, and I learned a lot about how I work.”
Return guests, on the other hand (both colonies allow artists to come back again and again), usually know exactly what to do when they get there. Ruth Whitman, a Brookline poet, has been to MacDowell five times. “When I arrive, I turn into a work machine,” she tells me. “During the year, as a mother and a teacher (at Harvard), it’s hard to get the time to write. So when I get to MacDowell, well, it’s like water to a thirsty man: I start working immediately. I’ve discovered that at MacDowell, I can accomplish in one month what would take me a year to do in Cambridge.”
Whatever the artists do all day, work usually stops at both colonies in the late afternoon-- around 4 o’clock — when people get together for drinks, swimming, walks or tennis. Then, after an elegant dinner in the main dining room, there are the colonies’ own versions of social life, reminiscent of one of those 1950s shipwrecked-on-a-deserted-island melodramas: 30 artists, all away from friends and spouses, find themselves huddled together far from civilization. Naturally, social fireworks ensue, and though some of the colonists are content with an after-dinner drink and a game of checkers (there is no television at Yaddo, and no one seems interested in the set at MacDowell), each season witnesses its share of passionate affairs, artistic confrontations and general boarding-school behavior. At Yaddo, as John Cheever related in an article in the New York Times, things frequently get out of hand after hours. “We would slide down the banisters, put hats on the statuary,” he wrote, “and romp naked in the atrium pool.” Romantic entanglements, of course, are too numerous to consider. As one colonist told me, “Put 30 artists together — non-stop — for two months, and things are going to get very warm and passionate. Sometimes it gets a little complicated to be sure, but ultimately, I think it all contributes to the creative life of the colony.”
For these reasons and others, applications to the colonies have increased over the years. Last year MacDowell received 1200 applications for 200 places; Yaddo, 600 for 125. And fortunately, since many of the more successful artistic and literary luminaries already have their own rustic hideaways, the bulk of the openings go to their unknown and undiscovered contemporaries.
Applications are screened at both places by advisory panels consisting of noted writers, artists and alumni. Typically, the panel’s decision is based on the recommendations and work samples that must accompany the application. MacDowell, for example, asks composers to send two or three scores, including a large-scale one (a string quartet, sonata, or work for orchestra); visual artists are required to send five color slides of their work; and writers must submit six poems, a portion of a work in progress, or a published work.
However, even with the number of applicants rising, the funds to support these colonies have been drying up at an alarming rate. At Yaddo, annual expenses run to almost a quarter of a million dollars a year, and the only income from the Trask endowment — the rent from a perpetually half-vacant office building in lower Manhattan — was cut off when the building had to be sold last year. For the past four years, then, Yaddo has had to depend on a small endowment, the generosity of past guests, fund raisers, and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. The colony’s appearance — just this side of picturesque decay — is also a matter of concern. Director Curtis Harnack was recently quoted in a publication of the National Endowment for the Arts as saying, “Things are falling apart; we need new wiring, new plumbing, just a lot of overdue general maintenance.” Apparently, Yaddo will need a healthy infusion of funds just to keep it going.
The MacDowell Colony is in only slightly better shape. Since it is larger, it costs more to run — $326,544 in 1976 — but it has recently started charging those guests who can afford it $10 a day for room and board (against the $50 a day per person it actually costs to run the place). No consideration of payment is made, however, until applications have been approved on the basis of artistic merit.
