I have lived in four states, in many small towns and cities, but the place that remains in memory most restful, most temperamentally compatible, most like “home,” though I lived there for only six of my almost 55 years, is Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Out-of-towners know it for the thoroughbred track, the mineral springs and their spas, and for its links to the American Revolution, but I think first of its small scale (I could run a Saturday of errands in one hour), the walkable downtown (with benches, ideal for people watching), the first-rate bookstore (Lyrical Ballads, owned by John DeMarco) and canopies of trees on nearly every street. This was where my wife and I lived when we married, where we bought the first house either of us had ever owned, and where our youngest sons were born.
In the Aug. 11, 1870, edition of The Nation, 27-year-old Henry James published “Saratoga,” a brief travel piece. His Saratoga is not precisely mine, though I recognize the outlines. Much has changed in more than 130 years – the grand hotels with James’ beloved piazzas are long gone -- and James and I traveled in different circles:
“The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been repeatedly informed, is the largest `in the world.’ There are a number of objects in Saratoga, by the way, which in their respective kinds are the finest in the world. On of these is Mr. John Morrisey’s casino. I bowed my head submissively to this statement, but privately I thought of the blue Mediterranean, and the little white promontory of Monaco, and the silver-gray verdure of olives, and the view across the outer sea toward the bosky cliffs of Italy. The Congress water, too, it is well known, are excellent in the superlative degree; this I am perfectly willing to maintain.”
James pokes fun at boosterism, small town Babbitts dealing habitually in hot air, and refers to “the dense, democratic, vulgar Saratoga of the current year.” Morrisey, a former prize fighter from Troy, N.Y., opened the Club House (now called the Canfield Casino) in 1870 in what is now called Congress Park, where we used to walk on Sunday evenings in summer to hear outdoor band concerts – show tunes, light classics, patriotic songs, George Gershwin and Aaron Copland. James the cosmopolitan weighs Saratoga against Europe. In another 14 years, he will return to Europe and not revisit the United States for another 20 years. The spawn of that final return of the native, in 1904-05, will be The American Scene, his final masterpiece. In “Saratoga” he writes:
“On the piazza, in the outer multitude, ladies largely prevail, both by numbers and (you are not slow to perceive) by distinction of appearance. The good old times of Saratoga, I believe, as of the world in general, are rapidly passing away. The time was when it was the chosen resort of none but `nice people.’ At the present day, I hear it constantly affirmed, `the company is dreadfully mixed.’”
Or at least it was until the “dreadfully mixed” Kurps left town.
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"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due places. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in ehich they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives alien among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search of something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."
-- W. Somerset Maughham, in The Moon and Sixpence
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