Field Light
By Owen Lewis
129 pages
Dos Madres Press, 2020
$20
Field Light is an exquisitely rendered portrait of the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts, created with Owen Lewis’s inimitable blend of singular poetry and prose. Chesterwood in Glendale, Massachusetts, which was formerly the home and studio of Daniel Chester French and is now a museum, as well as Lewis’s own house, the Dormouse, which once belonged to the Chesterwood estate and was home to French’s daughter Peggy Cresson, also a sculptor, are as much characters in the book as are the people. With taut and evocative writing, Lewis layers personal vignettes with imagined ones of local residents of long ago, including Austen Riggs, founder of The Stockbridge Institute for the Study and Treatment of Psychoneurosis, an open psychiatric hospital, now the Austen Riggs Foundation. Physician-poet Lewis (in good company with William Carlos Williams among many gifted physician-poets) becomes a figure in the book as he learns to see himself (a unique memoir, might one say?) as part of the abounding and compelling history of the towns of western Massachusetts, rich with the likes of Hawthorne, Melville, Stanley Kunitz, Chris Gilbert, Norman Rockwell, the Sedgwick family, Elizabeth Mumbet, W.E.B. Du Bois, Arlo Guthrie, Gertrude Smith, Patty Hearst, Walt Whitman and many others. His narrative is often audacious and exhilarating as he sheds light on cultural, political and social forces of old-moneyed Christian white privilege, antisemitism and racism that continue to unfold to this day. With genuine reflection, he refers to himself as a Jew from New York, and asks the question “is there room here for a Jew?”
Lewis’s colleague and former student, now the director of Riggs, asks him to consult on a troubling case, an “old-fashioned psychotic.” Lewis agrees, as if even in his country down-time he is committed to his profession. Once inside the hospital, he’s introduced to Betty, the worrisome patient, who refers to herself as “the lesser Vanderbilt.” Their conversation begins inauspiciously with Betty insisting he’s not Dr. Lewis, but rather Dr. Riggs:
“But, Riggs, I did overhear you talking about Will and Agnes Gould again. Noble, their undertaking, those Goulds, but their crazy farm isn’t for me.”
“Miss Vanderbilt, remember I’m Dr. Lewis.”
“Come on, Austen, out with it. You thought me a bearcat at Frelinghuysen’s party a few weeks back when I asked you to dance. Was it all that jizz in their jazz?…….,” Betty assaulting Lewis with arch, acerbic blows, refusing to see that he’s Dr. Lewis.
“I am right, Riggs, am I right? And you, you let a patient dress up in Ku Klux Klan robes, and another with blackface. I’m right, Riggs? Is that what you’re hiding?” Betty’s nonsensical, contrary and paranoid ranting reminds one of the conversations between the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, Alice and the Dormouse at a Wonderland tea party.
Chesterwood and the Dormouse are nestled on Williamsville Road. It’s a bucolic dirt road where foxes streak by, a deer stands with caution at the edge of woods, birds soar, wild turkeys startle, all blessed animals turning one’s mind to the possibility of considering nature as grander than God, if indeed God is something other than nature. Walk past the Dormouse, past the swamp teeming with cicadas singing like angels, a Monet sweep of the brilliant pink of loosestrife (yes, an invasive species, but more so than humans?) Feel the history of the road. Read Lewis’s book and feel your heart quicken with the pulse of his lively, bold writing. Feel how entwined that which he knows and has lived assimilates his love of nature, his awareness of injustice, his enthrallment with those who once lived in his house, who once walked this same road. Walk with him up past the yellow Canary House, originally built for French’s chauffeur, now a rental property. Feel the majesty of Berkshire blue hills undulating along the horizon like prehistoric beasts, coyotes howling in the night, the nearby winding Housatonic River roiling and rushing by. Then all at once see the two white stucco buildings, French’s studio and house, as they shine with an eerie glow up on a hill beyond a tumbling-down stone wall, a swath of rolling lawn – Colonel Revival in understated splendor.
Walk also with me, his neighbor, who has had the privilege of walking this road for many years with my dogs, where I first met Owen, the two us becoming friends, seeing together treasures flung out by nature here, there, everywhere. See in the fields the pointillism of yellow buttercups, purple and white clover, wild strawberries like little hearts, rocks smooth as bone. The dogs running, their bodies streaking through sun-flecked woods, keening with grace over fallen logs. As we walk, we leave behind Owen’s children’s voices floating on the air, their notes of violin and piano practicing tumbling into the landscape, making me nostalgic for the days before my children grew up. We reminisce about the time Major, my old dog, wandered into the swamp and stood transfixed. Forgetting all he knew? A lapse in memory? Jack and Allie, my other dogs, running through the cattails and muck. Jack got on one side of Major, Allie on the other, and led him with their tender eyes and sublime dogliness back to us. Owen said, “We might have missed seeing what just happened if either of us had been alone.” But, I doubt Owen wouldn’t have seen such a remarkable and numinous moment if I’d not been there. Read Field Light and you’ll see what I mean, as it draws you into the realm of his elegant sensibilities. I promise, it will be a thrilling ride.
