Event
Stonington Authors Borough Tour
Which noted novelist put the Wad club into a tizzy? And who stored his boat in rafters of a church? On July 26, the Historical Society offers an encore of its racy litrary Stonington walk The poet J. D. McClatchy says he lives in a literary village, and indeed he does. Stonington is a place where writers lived and worked hard in days before the 20 th century, and on into the present. The place itself was often the topic, both in its own identity and under thin disguises. Last summer the Stonington Historical Society commissioned James Boylan and Betsy Wade to prepare a tour of some of the places where their friends and others -- poets, nonfiction writers, Pulitzer winners and best-selling authors -- lived. It proved entertaining and popular and Jim and Betsy have agreed to guide one more tour in person, at 1 P.M. on Saturday, July 26. Tickets will be $20 a person, and sales will be limited. A focus of the tour is the laureate of Water Street, the late James Merrill, now the subject of a major biography. Merrill, wealthy from birth, bequeathed his eyrie, three flights up at 105 Water Street, to serve as a retreat for young poets, who offer public presentations at the Free Library during their sabbaticals. Anthony Bailey, who also took the Borough as his topic, had used church rafters as a rack for his sailboat, one of his reasons for believing we should all live in villages. Grace Zaring Stone, also known by her pen name, Ethel Vance, and Eleanor Perényi, a mother and daughter, lived on Main Street but kept their workrooms at opposite ends of their big house. This captious couple appear as Nora and her mother in Merrills curious long poem, The Summer People. The poets Stephen Vincent Benet and Rosemary Carr Benet got along better, but money was tougher for them, his Pulitzer Prizes or not. Peter Benchley, a towering son and grandson of writers, regularly visited the Wadawanuck Club from his place at Elihu Island to vanquish shorter tennis players. His first novel, Jaws, and its now classic film version, ruined beach-going all over New England but didnt seem to harm Stonington. And Mary McCarthy? The Group, a barely fictionalized account of her Vassar classmates sex lives, was a best-seller before the summers McCarthy rented houses in Stonington. It caused potential Stonington groupies to back off lest they find themselves in her next book. Her subsequent novel Birds of America, whose opening section involves a place she calls Rocky Port, hung a lot of local people out to dry anyway.
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LocationMeet at Cannon Square (View)
Cannon Square
Stonington, CT 06378
United States
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