A freewheeling spirit runs via the historical past of Leverett, Massachusetts, which celebrated its 250th anniversary this 12 months. Named for a colonial governor who advocated for spiritual tolerance and political autonomy, Leverett, with a inhabitants of roughly two thousand, maintains a fame for nonconformism. Guests are drawn to its hilltop New England Peace Pagoda and to its stunning pond, really a ninety-acre lake.
The ethos of the area was vividly captured on this 12 months’s Janet Planet, Annie Baker’s bittersweet tribute to her childhood. The yurt-like round home within the woods that gives the primary setting for the movie exemplifies the city’s eclectic style. My spouse and I reside in neighboring Amherst, however Leverett has retained a particular resonance for me reaching again to my first go to there almost fifty years in the past, once I felt that I actually had strayed onto a unique planet.
It was Christmas Eve, 1976, and the clapboard homes nestled within the snow across the Gothic Revival Congregational church seemed like they have been posing for a Christmas card. Richard Pettit, a Rilke scholar finishing his doctorate on the College of Massachusetts, had invited his sister Religion and me to spend the vacation in an A-frame home that he was borrowing from buddies. I had met Religion, a dancer primarily based in Boston, a few years earlier at a Quaker school in Indiana. She was instructing a dance class; I used to be her lone male pupil. We have been relationship that Christmas, however we each knew we have been drifting aside.
Richard advised a stroll round Leverett Pond. Brother and sister ventured out on the thick ice. Religion executed an arabesque, then spun a pirouette. They lay down on their backs and made snow angels, laughing uproariously as they whirled their arms up and down. I remained on the financial institution, paralyzed, and consumed with a sense of terror like nothing I had ever identified. I used to be positive that one thing horrible was about to occur, or had already occurred.
Jeder Engel ist schrecklich, Rilke wrote in his Duino Elegies. Each angel is terrifying. Not Christian angels, he defined in a letter, however fairly increased beings nonetheless in contact (like animals) with the invisible realm, and “terrible” to us as a result of we “still depend on the visible.” Annie Baker, who has a personality quote from the Fourth Elegy in Janet Planet, instructed an interviewer that Rilke, a significant affect on the movie, “spoke to connections I felt between childhood loneliness” and “the longing for some kind of angelic presence or oversight.”
After Christmas in Leverett I flew again to my mother and father’ house in North Carolina, the place I used to be ready for outcomes from my scattershot graduate faculty functions, in French, Classics, and Comparative Literature. My mentor in these days was Jerry Godard, a psychology professor at Guilford School. He requested me about my journey and I discussed my unsettling expertise at Leverett Pond. “Leverett,” he stated, taking a look at me with an odd expression. “That’s where Tom Weiskel and his daughter drowned.”
Jerry had talked about Weiskel earlier than, as somebody who may have helped me in my grad faculty quandary. He had instructed me that Weiskel’s spouse, Portia, was a longtime good friend of Jerry’s spouse. He had instructed me that Weiskel was certainly one of Harold Bloom’s favourite college students and had written a ebook on the chic in Romantic poetry. He had instructed me that Weiskel taught at Yale. He had instructed me that Weiskel had died younger, at twenty-nine, as I later discovered. He could have even talked about a drowning. What he hadn’t instructed me, and on this level I used to be sure, was the place Weiskel had died and beneath what circumstances.
“Tragedy befell Tom Weiskel and his family on Sunday, Dec. 1, 1974,” in keeping with the obituary ready by Amherst School, his undergraduate alma mater. “Late in the afternoon, Tom had been skating on a pond near his home in Leverett, towing his two-year-old daughter, Shelburne, behind him on a sled. The ice gave way and both drowned.” Weiskel’s father-in-law, Reverend George H. Williams, took half within the memorial service on the Mount Toby Associates Assembly Home in Leverett. A Unitarian minister, Williams was a professor of church historical past at Harvard. He had served within the infantry in World Conflict II, Jerry Godard instructed me, and had suffered from extreme tinnitus for the remainder of his life. Passionately against the Vietnam Conflict, Williams as soon as handed the gathering plate to gather draft playing cards from battle resisters at Boston’s Arlington Road Church.
I met George Williams as soon as, after studying the circumstances of Weiskel’s loss of life: I occurred to be seated subsequent to him at a dinner at Adams Home, at Harvard, once I was writing my dissertation on Emily Dickinson. He was a big presence with a full head of white hair. I instructed him I knew about his daughter’s tragedy. I instructed him I had consulted Tom Weiskel’s ebook for an essay I had written about Dickinson and the chic. I quoted the traces about how a sure slant of sunshine winter afternoons oppresses just like the heft of cathedral tunes. I instructed him about my terror at Leverett Pond. George Williams listened attentively as I talked. After which he stated, in a low full voice, “Strange things have happened on that pond.”
Quickly after my spouse and I moved to Amherst in 1992, after I received a job at Mount Holyoke, there was a hesitant knock at our entrance door. A sturdy lady with an intense gaze and a cloud of white hair stood outdoors holding a clipboard. “My name is Portia Weiskel,” she stated. She instructed me the trigger she was amassing for. I stated it was an excellent trigger and I made a contribution. I didn’t say I knew who she was. I didn’t say I had met her father. I didn’t say I had seen her husband’s books on the market, every together with his bookplate, in a used bookstore. As I closed the door, I had the unusual sensation that I used to be again on Leverett Pond and that her go to—or visitation—was a part of a sample I couldn’t fairly decipher.
Our son Nick, a painter primarily based in Brooklyn, visited us for Thanksgiving this 12 months and confirmed us some current work of cities at night time. A few of them had supernatural components: fantastical hummingbirds, zodiac figures, occasional angels. I requested Nick if he had ever seen the work of the nineteenth-century American people artist Erastus Salisbury Subject, which jogged my memory a bit of of his work. I discussed that Subject was from Leverett, one other renegade from the village. As we scrolled via Subject’s work on-line, I used to be stunned to search out certainly one of Leverett Pond, in Washington’s Nationwide Gallery. A portion of the financial institution fringed with pines was within the foreground, precisely the place Religion and Richard stood that Christmas Eve earlier than they slid out on the ice.
Subject and his twin sister, Salome, have been born in Leverett in 1805. He lived for a time in North Amherst and died in close by Sunderland in 1900. He skilled briefly in Samuel F. B. Morse’s studio in New York. After his spouse’s loss of life in 1859, he appears to have given up a busy life as an itinerant portrait painter. His portraits, which have the stiff formulaic look of the period, are typically set off with a reddish aura, presumably indicating the spirit world, close to the sitter’s head. In his later years, Subject devoted himself to hallucinatory spiritual and historic work.
Students counsel that portrait portray took a success after the invention of the daguerreotype. True sufficient. However I believe Subject’s work modified for one more purpose. I believe he had a imaginative and prescient. Subject painted the Backyard of Eden a number of instances; in a just lately found model (“strangely and luckily” lacking Adam and Eve, Sanford Schwartz notes in On Edward Hicks [2021]), a bit of elephant and a giraffe look backwards wistfully, as if the thrill of Earth have run their course. In one other work, Subject painted his hero Lincoln accompanied by his generals and by George Washington.
Subject’s best-known portray is The Historic Monument of the American Republic—“one of the most remarkable pictures to come out of the United States,” in keeping with the artwork historian Paul Staiti in his 1992 article on the portray. A replica hangs within the Leverett City Corridor. The portray itself, which I took Nick to see on the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum in Springfield, is monumental, 9 toes excessive and 13 toes throughout. It options ten temples, related by little railroad bridges, that attain up into the clouds. Subject tried to cram the canvas with every part he deemed essential within the nation’s historical past, from Pocahontas to the assassination of Lincoln. With its mingled photos and puzzling texts—“like a cross between a map and a graphic novel,” as Schwartz places it—it was painted for the centennial 12 months of 1876, with an eye fixed to a nationwide tour and subsequent (for thus Subject hoped) building of the temples, however his scheme appears to have garnered no curiosity from the authorities.
Subject noticed the nation’s historical past as a massacre. A fierce abolitionist, he painted fugitive slaves hunted down and slaughtered. He painted the Indian wars. He painted the gory battlefields of the Mexican Conflict and the Civil Conflict. He painted John Wilkes Sales space creeping into Lincoln’s field at Ford’s Theater and George Washington (once more!) in a neighboring field elevating his hand in horror. For Subject, all historic occasions have been simultaneous and rife with struggling.
For me, three of Subject’s work have come to look like a form of summation, or rebus, of my terror on Leverett Pond again within the bicentennial 12 months of 1976. The primary is The Dying of the First Born, within the Metropolitan Museum’s assortment. In a high-ceilinged inside lit by candelabra, mother and father mourn their useless kids. Moms carry their arms or cowl their faces or contact the diminutive corpses. It’s as if each loss of life of a kid enacts the slaughter of the innocents. The second portray is The Historic Monument itself. If you happen to look laborious, as Nick and I did, you abruptly discover that the portray, so chockfull of historic occasions, can be festooned with angels. An angel crowns Lincoln as his chariot ascends heavenward. Tiny angels waving American flags ring the parapets of Subject’s excessive towers. You could possibly virtually think about that Walter Benjamin was taking a look at Subject’s Historic Monument when he wrote his well-known description of the angel of historical past together with his face turned towards the previous and perceiving “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
The third portray is Leverett Pond. Sheltered by evergreens and backed by violet mountains, the image appears to be like at first as if it may need been executed on the spot. However I’ve come to assume it’s one thing else solely, an imaginatively enhanced reminiscence distant from the ravages of the nation’s current previous. This impression is confirmed for me by an important element. Lacking from the Nationwide Gallery web site is the flamboyant trompe-l’oeil body (not an precise body however an illusionistic characteristic of the portray itself) that surrounds the idyllic pond. This border, in Egyptian gold and blue, evokes the raised curtain of a vaudeville theater, frankly declaring the scene’s unreality. We’re peering, for the second, at a catastrophe-free zone, the place nothing horrible has ever occurred, the place nothing horrible may occur. We watch for the curtain to drop.
