Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Clara & Richard Winston

104 Clara & Richard Winston Early upon our arrival in Amherst, we were invited for drinks to the home—an Amherst College apartment, really—of Bill and Mary Heath. He was a young assistant professor of English, as I was at the University, who was to remain for years at the College as a beloved teacher. Mel, as Mary was always called, and my wife Anne had been recruited by Leo Marx to be graders for him in American Studies. And so we met and became lifelong friends, Mel ultimately working at every position at The Massachusetts Review, including years as senior editor, a job she loved, as she said, and what she had always wanted to do. At that late afternoon hour Ben and Peggy Demott were present, as were Clara Winston and her husband, Richard. I mention all this because Demott, even then a wellknown literary light, announced in his usual assured manner that Anne was the best poet in the Pioneer Valley, and Clara Winston was the best prose writer. Neither Anne nor I knew at the time who Clara was, nor had we read a word she had written. After such high praise, not too long afterwards, we did read her three novels, The Closest Kin There Is, The Hours Together, and Painting for the Show. We had to agree with the high estimate of Clara, certainly about The Hours Together, an extraordinary and moving story, too little known these days, 105 about a German Jewish refugee couple in New York, their therapy and their deaths. The feeling, the sharply observed detail, are palpable and brilliant as when the couple visit the Metropolitan Museum and are overcome by a painting of the Crucifixion: “Imagine, real nails, through human flesh.” The first novel was about incest in rural New England, feelingly told and sensitive, too, but not up to The Hours Together, and Painting for the Show had a rather nasty view of an artist whose abstract expressionism was just an instrument for commercial success; and there is even some unlikely Mafia involvement in the whole sordid thing. That book was published only in England, not finding an American publisher , despite the great talent the writer had displayed in her previous book, which had also received good reviews. A sad commentary on American publishing, even worse now in its all-out commercialism, where many well-published serious writers are finding it difficult to get work accepted. All of this is important to recount, recover, and celebrate, but what is most interesting to me is, in effect, the interesting “back story” of the lives they led. They had been paci- fists, New Yorkers, before America entered World War II, and had decided in 1940 to abandon the city and the dominant politics of their time. They would try to make a go of hardscrabble subsistence farming in Vermont, while also leading a literary life they saw as their real vocation. A familiar dream to many over the years, but they did it, striking out with little money, city folks braving a tough farm life. The farm, right over the border from Massachusetts, was ultimately a lovely place and piece of land, which they named Duino Clara & Richard Winston 106 Farm, honoring the great German poet Rilke, author of The Duino Elegies. Richard became a major translator of German literature, occasionally of Thomas Mann, and other lesser or equal eminences, as well as an accomplished historian. He and Clara worked very assiduously at these translations, a hard way to make a living, but essential to supplement the meager farm income. Richard told me he had milked their cow twice daily, and rather missed it when they were able to devote full time to literary pursuits. We had many lovely dinners and occasions there; they were lavishly hospitable. The reason they had been in Amherst where we met them is that at a certain point, their two daughters needed a better high school than rural Vermont offered, so they moved to our town for the winters (not always a pleasure on the farm in any case). These girls were extraordinary; they would excuse themselves from a dinner to go up and read the Latin and German classics they so enjoyed, and not because they were school assignments. They thought that was the most natural thing in the world, didn’t everyone do the same...