The New York Times has a great article on an exhibition at the New York Public Library about Yaddo, the artist retreat outside Saratoga Springs in New York. As can be expected whenever Yaddo is discussed, the article veers into the social dimension:
John Cheever used to boast that he had enjoyed sex on every flat surface in the mansion, not to mention the garden and the fields. Yaddo has always been the kind of place where artists can, if they choose, experience a lifetime’s worth of relationships in a month or so. It was at Yaddo that Newton Arvin, a literary critic and professor at Smith College, met and began a long affair with the young Truman Capote, or “Precious Spooky,” as he calls him in a couple of charming letters, on display at the library, that manage to combine endearments with sound literary observation.
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Cheever boasted about it? Wasn’t he the guy married, with children, who claimed to be heterosexual but indulged in scores of extramarital homosexual affairs? One wonders how many of those affairs began at Yaddo.