'Dense, Democratic, Vulgar'

When high summer arrives  -- in Texas, long before this Thursday’s equinox – I think of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where we bought our first house and lived for seven years. The Saratoga Race Course was less than a mile away. So were Yaddo and Broadway, the main drag downtown. We could walk everywhere. The town had a first-rate bookstore – Lyrical Ballad – housed in a former bank, where the pricey merchandise was kept in the vault (which a friend always called the oy gevalt). After twenty years in Texas, we still romanticize Saratoga, especially its sense of small-scale intimacy, the friendliness of neighbors and summertime. 

The public, if they have heard of Saratoga, likely think of the thoroughbred track. I know nothing about horses and have never placed a bet in my life but for two newspapers I covered the raffish, Liebling-esque characters who inhabit the track. I visited Yaddo only once, for a story, and interviewed a writer who had brought with him a complete set on Joseph Conrad’s work. I saw many concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) and once spent nearly an hour on one of the small stages, chatting with the late pianist Junior Mance. I was an audience of one, as the bigger acts attracted more listeners at the jazz festival.

 

In the summer of 1870, Henry James, then twenty-seven, spent a month in Saratoga, and in August published a travel piece about the town in The Nation, later collected in Portraits of Places (1883). The young James succumbs to a nostalgia for the past inspired by delightful places:

 

“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.’ What society may have been at Saratoga when its elements were thus simple and severe, I can only vaguely and mournfully conjecture. I confine myself to the dense, democratic, vulgar Saratoga of the current year.”

 

That was my Saratoga too, thankfully.