16 ❧ chapter one
and seldom can plan more than two or three months ahead,”—continued to
be true for a number of years. But long after I became independent of any
locality, I retained the habits of defensiveness which I had cultivated in order
to carry on my work in the face of the irrelevances and distractions by which
one is all too easily assailed in New York.
Except for very brief moments, I have never been able to incorporate myself
into the life of that city and I have always considered my presence there as
something provisional, something to be endured. It was perhaps this attitude
which permitted me in December 1938, on what I believed a temporary basis,
to move into premises at 806 Lexington Avenue that I vacated only in April
1971 after thirty-odd years. Now, when I pass by that cast-off address at which
I spent the central part of my life, I marvel that I put up with it for so long.
Except as I used my small apartment as a kind of citadel of books and instru-
ments into which I could invite my friends, I welcomed every possibility of
escape. In summers I fl ed to Vermont, Nantucket, Colorado, Cape Cod, and
Europe, and from 1941 maintained a second domicile at Yale until after I had
built my own house in the country.
I longed for a farm in Vermont, but fi nding nothing that I could then afford,
I was unknowingly spared incalculable amounts of wasted time, and I ceased to
think of searching for property. But, just before returning to Europe in May
1947, I was taken for a picnic by a colleague with whom I shared rooms at Yale
to see the land he himself had just bought in an abandoned granite quarry on
the shores of Long Island Sound. On the hill across the road the shadbush
was then in full bloom, and views extended themselves over the water in three
directions. There were no uglinesses. Nearly all trace of quarrying operations
had disappeared under vegetation that was agreeable to contemplate. Less
than half an hour after I learned that property was available, I bought it. Never
have I made a quicker or better decision.
Unlike the Vermont farm of which I had once dreamed, this property was
perfectly accessible from New York in all seasons. It offered complete privacy,
although there was access to swimming in Long Island Sound. Furthermore,
it was on the Boston side of New Haven, a fact which gave me the agreeable
sensation of being insulated from New York. As soon as I had returned from
Europe in the autumn of 1947 I bought hatchets, machetes, saws, spades,
and pitchforks which I kept permanently in the trunk of my car. Picnics were
frequently combined with sessions of brush cutting and briar clearing and
rendered euphoric [not only] by the fresh air but by a bottle of good wine
at lunch. The lunch generally consisted of a thick steak broiled on a pitch-
fork over an open fi re. For the next three years, wine bottles marked the sites
of notable picnics, and when in 1951 my house was being constructed, these
relics of much laughter and good times were gathered up for reinforcing the
inner core of the fi replace chimney.
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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