Adam FriedbergIN THE CLUB — A 1949 cottage at the Colony of Wellfleet.
One person who didn’t have to use the pay phone was Diana Trilling, for whom a telephone line was installed in No. 6, where she stayed after Lionel’s death and where a sign reading diana trilling cottage was propped up on a tree during her visits. Richard Avedon took her photo through the cottage window for a New Yorker article, in 1993, about the memoir she worked on for years at the colony. Alison Mills, who worked at Herridge Books in town, also served as Diana’s secretary. One afternoon at the bookstore, she recalls, “This guy came in, and it turned out it was Adam Gopnik. He was dying to meet her. And so I set it up.”
At the same time, Wellfleet itself — much quieter than its flashier neighbor to the north, Provincetown — was becoming another sort of club. Edmund Wilson, the literary critic, arrived with his third wife, Mary McCarthy, in the 1940s, and they were followed by what seemed like the entire faculties of Columbia and Harvard, the staffs of Partisan Review and The New Yorker, and half the psychoanalysts on the Upper West Side, who began to descend upon the village every summer, and particularly in August. (McCarthy famously called Wellfleet “the seacoast of Bohemia” in her novel “A Charmed Life,” and Wilson, in his journal, credited the historian H. Stuart Hughes with the memorable sobriquet “la plage des intellectuels.”) But as weather-beaten shacks and skinny-dipping in the ponds became the order of the day, the colony continued to maintain certain standards.
In fact, Lopate says, it was the pedigree of his rental, the former house of the critic Dwight Macdonald on Slough Pond (where Schlesinger had his house as well), that gave him an entree into that world. “The softball games were very important,” he remembers. “My book had come out, and it had gotten a middling review. I went to the game, and someone said, ‘I saw your review,’ and there was an awkward silence.” But there was a sort of writerly kismet about the place as well. “The most important thing that happened to me in Wellfleet,” Lopate says, “was, I loved to go through people’s bookshelves. And — I think it was on the Macdonalds’ bookshelf — I found the selected essays of William Hazlitt, and I went out to the hammock and started reading it. And that’s how I became a personal essayist.”
A brochure from the era notes that “Maid service is quite complete, but rendered unobtrusively. Beds are made and turned down. Rooms are cleaned. Baggage is carried. Fires are laid and fireplace wood kept replenished.” Meals and picnic baskets could be ordered from the Continental Casserole Kitchen. There was a Picking Garden for contemplative blossom gathering. “Mr. Saltonstall started the Picking Garden,” Eleanor says with a laugh. (Guests quickly come to call her by her first name.) “I doubt that the people he had staying here were accustomed to going out and picking their own flowers. Most of them didn’t know how to boil water, never mind hold a pair of clippers. They were people who were accustomed to servants and service, and when they came here Coach Sale Online, they got it.” Eleanor and her husband, Loris Stefani, who is no longer alive, bought the colony, including the main house, which then served as an art gallery, from Saltonstall in 1963. “I was looking for a summer house,” she remembers. “And the minute I saw that house! Mr. Saltonstall said, ‘Unless you buy what goes with it. . . .’ ”
The Colony of Wellfleet is open late May to mid-September; (508) 349-3761; colonyofwellfleet.com. Cottages from $1,250 per week.
Once the Stefanis owned the colony, it was no longer run as a private club, although the maid service and carried baggage continued and one could order lobster and coquille St.-Jacques from the Casserole Kitchen, cooked by a Mrs. O’Gorman and sometimes by Eleanor herself. Since the place was no longer reserved for Boston’s patrons of the arts, the new Wellfleet literati began to descend. Bernard Malamud and his wife were regulars. Lionel and Diana Trilling drove up from Manhattan — or, rather, were driven up by a graduate student who had the job of chauffeur for the month of August. They stayed, always, in cottage No. 3, where Diana held dinner parties for friends like William Phillips, the Partisan Review editor; and Philip Hamburger, the New Yorker writer (who had a house nearby and composed a number of “Talk of the Town” pieces about Wellfleet for the magazine).
The essayist Phillip Lopate was a student of Lionel Trilling’s at Columbia and wrote an essay about him in which he recalled sending a letter one summer to his former professor: “His reply was brief and handwritten. It came a week later, on stationery that read the colony of wellfleet with a red-inked seahorse logo on the letterhead.” Years later, in the late ’70s and ’80s, Lopate himself was drawn to Wellfleet. By then the titans of the earlier times, like Wilson and Trilling, were dead, and the years were past when Coach Sale Online, as Lopate marvels now, “literary critics had groupies.” But it was still possible to step into their world, as into a tableau vivant, and almost catch sight of their ghosts.
A trim figure in neat blue jeans and gardening gloves, Eleanor has gray hair pinned back and clear, blue-gray eyes as changeable as the color of the bay. She speaks with the distinctive tones of a Boston Brahmin accent — although she categorically denies the label — that renders tomatoes “tomahtoes” and is now all but vanished, along with the perfectly charming manners that go with it. “One day I came in here,” she recalls over a tray of English Breakfast tea with toast and butter. “I saw Nathaniel Saltonstall in the garden. I thought he was the gardener! Oh, he was so annoyed. I’d caught him in a moment of dishabille. He didn’t dirty his hands very often, let me tell you!”
Above: Everett Collection/Rex USA From top: a memento bearing the colony’s original name; Paul Newman, a onetime guest.
Bettmann/Corbis The writer Mary McCarthy, an early town resident.
The cottages, with their clean right angles, wide windows, transoms and louvers for cross-ventilation, screened porches, decks and fences with vertical slats for an almost Japanese effect, have scarcely changed over the decades. Inside, the airy, spare theme continues with Herman Miller, Eames and Knoll furniture. Paired single beds (they can be pushed together) are made up as couches during the day. Sisal rugs lie on the painted cement floors. Bookshelves are stacked with issues of Foreign Affairs and Granta, and the kitchens are stocked with eggbeaters, kettles and Le Creuset enamel pots and pans. “Practical things,” Eleanor says approvingly.
For visitors in search of lost time, the colony is most certainly a last redoubt. Sitting out on the deck behind your cottage in the cool, misty morning air, with coffee steaming at your elbow, the umbrella up over the glass table and the wind soughing in the pines, you can understand why so many poems, books and articles have been written here — or, at least, read. Everything here seems to suggest that there is a right way to do things. “I’ve held onto it,” Eleanor says. “Each cottage was so separate and private. Nobody was watching to see how you dressed, or whether you had shoes on or went barefoot. And you could read all day if you wanted, or go to the beach, or sail Coach Sale Online, or do anything. The marvelous freedom to walk out of that cottage and have somebody put it in order for you. It was my idea of perfect summer living.”
Well, it was a club,” says Eleanor Stefani, the longtime owner of the Colony of Wellfleet. “It was a private club. You had to have your name in the Social Register — literally!” The 10 Bauhaus-style cottages, which have housed devoted guests for decades, were first known as the Mayo Hill Colony Club. They were built on the bay side of Wellfleet, the little Cape Cod town, in 1949 by Nathaniel Saltonstall, an architect from a prominent Boston family who was a founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Along with his business partner Oliver Morton, he designed it as a midcentury Modern retreat for high-society art collectors, with views of the sparkling bay and grassy fairways of the Chequessett Yacht and Country Club through the pines.
The colony, meanwhile, was becoming a refuge for those less inclined to socialize. Eleanor remembers watching Paul Newman stroll down the twisty little road that runs through the property, though she won’t say any more about his visit there. “When Faye Dunaway was here,” she recalls, “she and Harris Yulin made a reservation for a week, and they stayed over a month; they didn’t want to leave. And she was in my kitchen — ‘What are you cooking?’ and ‘How did you do that?’ ” That degree of comfort, Eleanor emphasizes, was because “I wasn’t talking about her or calling the newspapers and saying, ‘We’re special at the colony, we have movie stars.’ I never, ever intruded on their lives.”
Adam Friedberg PRIVATE LIVES — A cottage interior today.
“I always worshiped Edmund Wilson,” Lopate says, “and I loved the idea that Elena, his widow, was still there, still having gin-and-tonics with Arthur Schlesinger.” Lopate remembers his sense of awe at the guests he mingled with at Wellfleet dinner parties: “Elena Wilson; Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the book reviewer for The New York Times, and his wife, who stayed on the bay side; Herman Badillo, who ran for mayor of New York many times; Arthur Schlesinger Jr. You got a chance to watch how these lions were at their most unbuttoned. Some of these dinner parties were really like a Manhattan dinner party. There’d be an enormous amount of conversation about real estate — ‘Who’s renting that now?’ ”
In the days before cellphones, guests took turns at the colony’s phone booth (where my husband, when we stayed there 10 years ago, heard the news that his first book had been sold). “They were lined up,” Eleanor says. “And occasionally somebody would say to me, ‘I have to meet someone in 15 minutes, and I really have to make this call to my publisher,’ and I would say, ‘Go in and use my office phone, of course, no problem.’ ”
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