On Leverett Pond

A freewheeling spirit runs through the history of Leverett, Massachusetts, which celebrated its 250th anniversary this year. Named for a colonial governor who advocated for religious tolerance and political autonomy, Leverett, with a population of roughly two thousand, maintains a reputation for nonconformism. Visitors are drawn to its hilltop New England Peace Pagoda and to its beautiful pond, actually a ninety-acre lake. 

The ethos of the region was vividly captured in this year’s Janet Planet, Annie Baker’s bittersweet tribute to her childhood. The yurt-like circular house in the woods that provides the main setting for the film exemplifies the town’s eclectic taste. My wife and I live in neighboring Amherst, but Leverett has retained a special resonance for me reaching back to my first visit there nearly fifty years ago, when I felt that I myself had strayed onto a different planet. 

It was Christmas Eve, 1976, and the clapboard houses nestled in the snow around the Gothic Revival Congregational church looked like they were posing for a Christmas card. Richard Pettit, a Rilke scholar completing his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, had invited his sister Faith and me to spend the holiday in an A-frame house that he was borrowing from friends. I had met Faith, a dancer based in Boston, a couple of years earlier at a Quaker college in Indiana. She was teaching a dance class; I was her lone male student. We were dating that Christmas, but we both knew we were drifting apart.

Richard suggested a walk around Leverett Pond. Brother and sister ventured out on the thick ice. Faith executed an arabesque, then spun a pirouette. They lay down on their backs and made snow angels, laughing uproariously as they whirled their arms up and down. I remained on the bank, paralyzed, and consumed with a feeling of terror like nothing I had ever known. I was sure that something terrible was about to happen, or had already happened. 

Jeder Engel ist schrecklich, Rilke wrote in his Duino Elegies. Every angel is terrifying. Not Christian angels, he explained in a letter, but rather higher beings still in touch (like animals) with the invisible realm, and “terrible” to us because we “still depend on the visible.” Annie Baker, who has a character quote from the Fourth Elegy in Janet Planet, told an interviewer that Rilke, a major influence on the film, “spoke to connections I felt between childhood loneliness” and “the longing for some kind of angelic presence or oversight.”

After Christmas in Leverett I flew back to my parents’ home in North Carolina, where I was waiting for results from my scattershot graduate school applications, in French, Classics, and Comparative Literature. My mentor in those days was Jerry Godard, a psychology professor at Guilford College. He asked me about my trip and I mentioned my unsettling experience at Leverett Pond. “Leverett,” he said, looking at me with an odd expression. “That’s where Tom Weiskel and his daughter drowned.”   

Jerry had mentioned Weiskel before, as someone who could have helped me in my grad school quandary. He had told me that Weiskel’s wife, Portia, was a longtime friend of Jerry’s wife. He had told me that Weiskel was one of Harold Bloom’s favorite students and had written a book on the sublime in Romantic poetry. He had told me that Weiskel taught at Yale. He had told me that Weiskel had died young, at twenty-nine, as I later learned. He may have even mentioned a drowning. What he hadn’t told me, and on this point I was certain, was where Weiskel had died and under what circumstances. 

“Tragedy befell Tom Weiskel and his family on Sunday, Dec. 1, 1974,” according to the obituary prepared by Amherst College, his undergraduate alma mater. “Late in the afternoon, Tom had been skating on a pond near his home in Leverett, towing his two-year-old daughter, Shelburne, behind him on a sled. The ice gave way and both drowned.” Weiskel’s father-in-law, Reverend George H. Williams, took part in the memorial service at the Mount Toby Friends Meeting House in Leverett. A Unitarian minister, Williams was a professor of church history at Harvard. He had served in the infantry in World War II, Jerry Godard told me, and had suffered from severe tinnitus for the rest of his life. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, Williams once passed the collection plate to collect draft cards from war resisters at Boston’s Arlington Street Church. 

I met George Williams once, after learning the circumstances of Weiskel’s death: I happened to be seated next to him at a dinner at Adams House, at Harvard, when I was writing my dissertation on Emily Dickinson. He was a large presence with a full head of white hair. I told him I knew about his daughter’s tragedy. I told him I had consulted Tom Weiskel’s book for an essay I had written about Dickinson and the sublime. I quoted the lines about how a certain slant of light winter afternoons oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes. I told him about my terror at Leverett Pond. George Williams listened attentively as I talked. And then he said, in a low full voice, “Strange things have happened on that pond.” 

Soon after my wife and I moved to Amherst in 1992, after I got a job at Mount Holyoke, there was a hesitant knock at our front door. A sturdy woman with an intense gaze and a cloud of white hair stood outside holding a clipboard. “My name is Portia Weiskel,” she said. She told me the cause she was collecting for. I said it was a good cause and I made a contribution. I didn’t say I knew who she was. I didn’t say I had met her father. I didn’t say I had seen her husband’s books for sale, each with his bookplate, in a used bookstore. As I closed the door, I had the strange sensation that I was back on Leverett Pond and that her visit—or visitation—was part of a pattern I couldn’t quite decipher. 

Our son Nick, a painter based in Brooklyn, visited us for Thanksgiving this year and showed us some recent paintings of cities at night. Some of them had supernatural elements: fantastical hummingbirds, zodiac figures, occasional angels. I asked Nick if he had ever seen the paintings of the nineteenth-century American folk artist Erastus Salisbury Field, which reminded me a little of his work. I mentioned that Field was from Leverett, another renegade from the village. As we scrolled through Field’s paintings online, I was surprised to find one of Leverett Pond, in Washington’s National Gallery. A portion of the bank fringed with pines was in the foreground, exactly where Faith and Richard stood that Christmas Eve before they slid out on the ice.

Field and his twin sister, Salome, were born in Leverett in 1805. He lived for a time in North Amherst and died in nearby Sunderland in 1900. He trained briefly in Samuel F. B. Morse’s studio in New York. After his wife’s death in 1859, he seems to have given up a busy life as an itinerant portrait painter. His portraits, which have the stiff formulaic look of the era, are sometimes set off with a reddish aura, possibly indicating the spirit world, near the sitter’s head. In his later years, Field devoted himself to hallucinatory religious and historical paintings.  

Scholars suggest that portrait painting took a hit after the invention of the daguerreotype. True enough. But I think Field’s work changed for another reason. I think he had a vision. Field painted the Garden of Eden several times; in a recently discovered version (“strangely and luckily” missing Adam and Eve, Sanford Schwartz notes in On Edward Hicks [2021]), a little elephant and a giraffe look backwards wistfully, as though the joys of Earth have run their course. In another work, Field painted his hero Lincoln accompanied by his generals and by George Washington. 

Field’s best-known painting is The Historical Monument of the American Republic—“one of the most remarkable pictures to come out of the United States,” according to the art historian Paul Staiti in his 1992 article on the painting. A copy hangs in the Leverett Town Hall. The painting itself, which I took Nick to see at the Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum in Springfield, is monumental, nine feet high and thirteen feet across. It features ten temples, connected by little railroad bridges, that reach up into the clouds. Field tried to cram the canvas with everything he deemed important in the nation’s history, from Pocahontas to the assassination of Lincoln. With its mingled images and puzzling texts—“like a cross between a map and a graphic novel,” as Schwartz puts it—it was painted for the centennial year of 1876, with an eye to a national tour and subsequent (for so Field hoped) construction of the temples, but his scheme seems to have garnered no interest from the authorities. 

Field saw the nation’s history as a bloodbath. A fierce abolitionist, he painted fugitive slaves hunted down and slaughtered. He painted the Indian wars. He painted the gory battlefields of the Mexican War and the Civil War. He painted John Wilkes Booth creeping into Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater and George Washington (again!) in a neighboring box raising his hand in horror. For Field, all historical events were simultaneous and rife with suffering.

For me, three of Field’s paintings have come to seem like a kind of summation, or rebus, of my terror on Leverett Pond back in the bicentennial year of 1976. The first is The Death of the First Born, in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection. In a high-ceilinged interior lit by candelabra, parents mourn their dead children. Mothers lift their arms or cover their faces or touch the diminutive corpses. It is as though every death of a child enacts the slaughter of the innocents. The second painting is The Historical Monument itself. If you look hard, as Nick and I did, you suddenly notice that the painting, so chockfull of historical events, is also festooned with angels. An angel crowns Lincoln as his chariot ascends heavenward. Tiny angels waving American flags ring the parapets of Field’s high towers. You could almost imagine that Walter Benjamin was looking at Field’s Historical Monument when he wrote his famous description of the angel of history with his face turned toward the past and perceiving “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”

The third painting is Leverett Pond. Sheltered by evergreens and backed by violet mountains, the picture looks at first as though it might have been executed on the spot. But I’ve come to think it’s something else entirely, an imaginatively enhanced memory remote from the ravages of the nation’s recent past. This impression is confirmed for me by a crucial detail. Missing from the National Gallery website is the flamboyant trompe-l’oeil frame (not an actual frame but an illusionistic feature of the painting itself) that surrounds the idyllic pond. This border, in Egyptian gold and blue, evokes the raised curtain of a vaudeville theater, frankly declaring the scene’s unreality. We are peering, for the moment, at a catastrophe-free zone, where nothing terrible has ever happened, where nothing terrible could happen. We wait for the curtain to drop.