We all try to live without regrets, but sometimes they sneak up your sleeve a decade later, climb onto your collar and whisper, “What were you thinking? Did you really think that would happen again?”
Somehow I did. I consoled myself that it would. And then, it didn’t.
Ashfield in the two-thousand-aughts was like Paris in the ‘20s, swarmed with literary luminaries who gathered at each other’s houses and, to my head-shaking awe, on Friday nights at Elmer’s, just to talk and enjoy the heck out of the conversation.
Richard Todd, writer, former editor at Houghton Mifflin and executive editor at The Atlantic, and New England Monthly. Bob Nylen, writer, founder and publisher of New England Monthly. Carol Sheehan, editor of Country Living Magazine. Her husband, Laurence Sheehan, author. Geoffrey Precourt, writer for Fortune and a former editor at the Boston Herald and the San Francisco Examiner, and his wife, Kathryn Precourt, editor in chief at Decorating/Remodeling magazine. John Jerome, author. Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of ”The Soul of a New Machine.” Dick Todd was Tracy’s editor.
Todd wrote in Jerome’s obituary, “It is one of the peculiar charms of our little town that at any one moment it harbors several people better known in the world at large than they are around the corner.
All but Kidder lived in Ashfield, and he lived just down the mountain. Me, I served the dinners and the wine, cleared the plates and, as I did, listened in on their conversations. Who they were talking about. Storied tales of literary greatness.
One afternoon in the mid-aughts I sat reading a New Yorker magazine and wondered aloud (just like in a movie), “Who is this Bruce McCall? He paints covers for The New Yorker, he writes “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces for them. He’s all over The New Yorker. Who is he and how did he become himself?”
The next morning while I served breakfast and talked with Nylen, a man walked in the front door of the place, my place, and Nylen said, “Well, look who’s here! It’s Bruce McCall!”
I rose to greet McCall and told him about my ponderings of the previous afternoon — the coincidence of it all, alone, was a story. He wasn’t interested in accolades, he just wanted coffee. Turned out he was in town visiting his sister, Chris Jerome, an Ashfield resident, editor, author, and member of The Gang.
Me, I was the restaurateur and wannabe writer, with my monthly articles in the Ashfield News and my weekly Elmer’s emails. Nylen saw something in those that he liked and began encouraging me, even unto connecting me with a literary agent friend of his. As much as I wanted to write, I was a slave to duty, and my master was Elmer’s Store, so that I was never able to faithfully follow through with Nylen’s connections. In those early days of Elmer’s there was so much to build, so much to maintain. So little time to sleep. And then there were dishes to wash.
Ashfield has always had a strong literary connection; Robert Linscott, senior editor at Random House, lived here until his death in 1964. Truman Capote and William Faulkner passed through town for various reasons, and major writers of earlier days came to town to speak at the Ashfield Dinners, a speakers’ series begun in the late 1800s by Charles Eliot Norton (author, critic and scholar) and George William Curtis (author and political editor for Harper’s Weekly), to fund Sanderson Academy, the Ashfield public school. G. Stanley Hall, the father of modern child psychology, was born and raised in Ashfield, so he was a frequent speaker, but William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, James Russell Lowell, and even Booker T. Washington spoke at the dinners. Mark Twain was invited several times but allegedly said something along the lines of, “Remember I used to say I was too old and tired to go all the way up there? Well, now I am too old and tired and so I’m still not going.”
Nylen and Todd were the Charles Eliot Norton and George William Curtis of Ashfield’s 20th century. They knew everybody.
One afternoon Nylen invited me to a gathering of his literary posse, local and far-reaching, all together in one room. It would be lunch at his house, and I wasn’t invited to cater it, I was invited as a guest. I wasn’t a writer, I was a dilettante, but Nylen said I belonged there. Said he saw promise in what I was doing and he invited me like I was somebody.
So excited to go, and then something happened. Trouble at Elmer’s of some sort and I couldn’t leave. The dishwasher hadn’t shown up. The furnace went out. Something. “There will be other gatherings,” I told myself. “I’ll get to go next time.”
But there were no more. Jerome passed away in 2002, Nylen left us in 2008, Carol Sheehan parted in 2013, and now Todd, whose obituary appeared in the Recorder two weeks ago, has gone to join his colleagues in the big editing room beyond.
Ashfield in the aughts. It was the literary best of all times.
Nan Parati lives and works in Ashfield, where she found home and community following Hurricane Katrina. She can be reached at NanParati@aol.com.