Country Retreat Research Articles

A drinking water investigation.

The aim of this investigation was to ascertain whether untreated water drawn from rivers, springs and rainwater tanks, and which is intended for drinking purposes in rural accommodation establishments (such as caravan parks, wilderness resorts, ‘country retreat’ and bed and breakfast style accommodation), complied with the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines.

Love That Will Not Let Me Go: My Time with Theodore Dreiser (review)

Reviewed by: Love That Will Not Let Me Go: My Time with Theodore Dreiser Jerome Loving Love That Will Not Let Me Go: My Time with Theodore Dreiser. By Marguerite Tjader. Edited by Lawrence E. Hussman. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. xx + 131 pp. $19.95. Ever since W. A. Swanberg’s roguish portrait of the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy appeared in 1965, Theodore Dreiser’s reputation as the first great American novelist of the twentieth century and the “father of American realism” has been tarnished, if not obscured, by his reputation as a philanderer. Indeed, Dreiser himself is partly to blame because he was painfully honest in his autobiographies and personal statements; moreover, he sometimes boasted of his success with women. The problem has been further compounded by books written by many of his lovers and the publication of his American Diaries in 1983. The heaviest blow was probably dealt by Yvette Eastman in Dearest Wilding: A Memoir (1995), in which it is revealed that the fifty-eight-year-old Dreiser took the sixteen-year-old future author to bed at his country retreat in Mt. Kisco, New York. Two of the book’s illustrations show the virginal-looking (she had earlier been seduced by Max Eastman) Yvette at age seventeen and a foxy-looking Dreiser in front of one of the log cabins on his Mt. Kisco estate. When Helen Dreiser (the “second Mrs. Dreiser”) published her memoir, My Life with Dreiser, in 1951, she dedicated it to “the unknown women in the life of Theodore Dreiser, who devoted themselves unselfishly to the beauty of his intellect and its artistic unfoldment” (dedication page). Except for passing speculation in the formal biographies and memoirs of Dreiser, we know little or nothing (outside the fictional portrait of her in The “Genius” [1915]) of the first Mrs. Dreiser, Sara Osborne White. There were many women in between: from Thelma Cudlipp in 1910, when Dreiser’s first marriage broke up, to Marguerite Tjader Harris in 1944, when he finally (secretly) married Helen after living with her for nearly twenty-five years. Tjader, as she is known as an author, published Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension in 1965, and now (posthumously through the scholarly assistance of Lawrence E. Hussman) has published her second book on the subject. [End Page 268] If Dreiser scholars were not completely convinced that Tjader and Dreiser had a sexual relationship after reading her first book, they will be after reading Love That Will Not Let Me Go: My Time with Theodore Dreiser. Unlike Dreiser’s most literary mistress, Louise Campbell, who seduced Dreiser by letter after reading A Hoosier Holiday (1916), Mrs. Harris had read absolutely nothing by Dreiser—by then famous as the author of a best-selling novel in l925—when they first met at a dinner party in 1928. She was twenty-seven, “but already married and restless.” Their relationship began soon thereafter and continued off and on until 1944, when Dreiser decided to finish The Bulwark (1947), a novel about a Quaker family he had first begun more than thirty years earlier. During a visit to New York to receive an award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, the two spent some blissful days together. Afterward, Dreiser persuaded her to follow him back to California to assist with the completion of The Bulwark. Under Helen’s watchful eye, the two continued the relationship on a more spiritual level—perhaps uplifted by the religious theme of The Bulwark. Tjader’s purpose in Love That Will Not Let Me Go is to fill in the spaces between the lines of her first book. In doing so, much ground previously plowed in Dreiser biography is covered, but new insights and documentary fragments will add to the record. Tjader includes a letter from John Cowper Powys, one of Dreiser’s best friends and a soulmate in superstition, to Helen Dreiser after Theodore’s death. In it he urges Helen to polish and publish her husband’s “philosophical book” (Notes on Life, edited by Tjader and John J. McAleer in 1974), something Helen was hardly qualified to do. Tjader’s most important contribution to...

Rural Gentrification and Livestock Raising: Texas as a Test Case, 1940–1995

One characteristic of an affluent society is that wealthy individuals often seek a place in the country to spend weekends and summer vacations. In the United States second homes in rural areas first became popular in the Gilded Age when elites in the northeast tried to ape English patterns of leisured country living. Americans, however, had to contend with hot and humid summers. As a result, access to water became a vital ingredient in any choice of a country retreat. An alternative motivation for migration to the countryside in the late nineteenth century came when elites desired to take part in field sports, especially foxhunting. In New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and of course, Virginia, where reasonably mild winters permitted activities to continue with some frequency throughout the winter, foxhunting became part of the yearly ritual of small numbers of urban based elites. Horse ownership went hand in hand with livestock raising. By the twenties cattle breeding had become another hobby pursuit of the gentry in northeastern states; herds of Angus or other breeds grazed in paddocks on either side of a long driveway which led up to a large country home.

The Future of American Strategy (review)

238 SAIS REVIEW and ideological roots of the pacifist unilateralism represented by the Greens and different parts of the peace movement. Gress takes a very critical tone regarding these developments from the beginning—great parts of this book are dedicated to the author's confessions of supporting a "conservative" Western defense and deterrence policy. In his preface Gress labels himself a traditionalist — placing his view in a great community with such well-respected men as Raymond Aron, Pierre Hassner, Samuel Huntington, and Hans-Peter Schwarz. Unfortunately, Gress does not always reach their level of sophistication, especially when he disagrees by adopting the reprehensible tradition of linking critical intellectuals like Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Boll to totalitarianism or even terrorism. The strengths of the book are undoubtedly in its historical parts. David Gress is knowledgeable about the German political and philosophical history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reader also gets a good overview of the unique national and intellectual situation of the divided nation. Specifically, the author points out the reasons for an increasing interest in history and the "renaissance" of the Heimatgefühl. He is correct — both trends signal important changes in the political culture of the Federal Republic. But the reader also gets the impression that Gress tries to dig out the roots of a phenomenon that he fails to analyze adequately. The main shortcoming of this study is that the author does not bother to differentiate among the current trends within the SPD, the Greens, or the peace movement. In view of the numerous publications and positions on the subject, this would not be an easy goal, but it is absolutely necessary to get an idea of what is happening within these groups. Instead, Gress adopts the ideas and often the clichés of critics of the peace movement in Western Europe and the United States. Gress's exclusive use of secondary literature is not at any time representative and accentuates the bias of his analysis. David Gress surely tells a specific group of his American readers what they want to hear: that many West Germans are anti-American and neutralistic and favor appeasement toward the Soviet Union. All that other readers will gain from this book is a good example of a conservative view of the security debate within the Federal Republic, without discovering what is happening in Germany. The Future of American Strategy. By David C. Hendrickson. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1987. 210 pp. $34.95/cloth, $16.95/paper. Reviewed by David K. Boren, M.A. candidate, SAIS. Evaluating America's position in the world during the last decades of the twentieth century, David C. Hendrickson sees cause for significant changes in U.S. strategy. Drawing on insights of some of the most noted scholars and strategists of our day, Hendrickson argues in The Future ofAmerican Strategy that the United States must realign its commitments with its resources rather than BOOK REVIEWS 239 exaggerate its responsibilities and run the risk of unduly jeopardizing otherwise secure vital interests. Despite Hendrickson's admonishment that the United States restrain its tendency for seeing all interests as vital, he does not recommend that the country retreat from playing the role of a global power. Far from it, Hendrickson embraces the conventional wisdom that the United States is the keystone in the postwar balance of power. Hendrickson's central point is that U.S. strategy must pay more attention to the "core" of the international system and less attention to the "periphery." Only in this way, argues Hendrickson, can the United States cope with military competition with the Soviet Union and simultaneous economic competition with Japan. The area of the periphery to which Hendrickson devotes the most space is the Persian Gulf, which he believes has lost much of its strategic importance as a result of declining U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf oil. Assuming that this trend will continue, Hendrickson argues that increased reliance on air and naval power would serve both strategic and economic interests. Such a policy would enable the United States to channel more resources toward the core of Western security, Europe. As Hendrickson sees it, proposals to cope with the...

BOOKS, LIBRARIES AND BACKS TO THE LAND

“Deep in all of us”, wrote a Homes and gardens sub‐editor in April 1965, headlining Elspeth Huxley's article A cottage on a hillside, “is a craving for a quiet country retreat, old, mellow and secluded.” If true, this had clearly been true of England at least for a very long while. “Of late there has been a positive spate of books about living in the country”, wrote Philip Gosse in 1935. “The rustic life is all the rage.” “The cult of the country cottage”, declared J. Gordon Allen in 1912, “which was thought a few years ago to be merely a passing whim, has recently developed apace”. The manner in which a sizeable proportion of the English middle class were persuaded over several decades to forsake or at least to contemplate forsaking urban living is of some interest to, amongst others, sociologists and social historians. Since we are concerned here with the bibliographical aspects of this radical shift of attitudes, it would be as well to dispose at the outset of one possible analysis: namely the idea that literary precedents had much to do with this. Agreed, masters of urban living much earlier than the English—the Romans—invented apparently the away‐from‐it‐all stance: Horace, generals returning to the plough with Rome saved, the Georgics. Agreed also, their Augustan imitators had much to say about places in the country. But consider Wootton's

Excavations on the Site of the Tudor Manor House at Micheldever, Hampshire

Trial excavations prior to building development on the site of Thomas Wriothesley’s important manor house built about 1537 suggest a continuous succession of large houses on the site from the 14th century to the 18th. The earliest structures may represent a country retreat for the Abbots of Hyde.

Interview With Kurt Waldheim

The thirty-eighth floor of the U.N. Secretariat building, though it perches high over the East River, is hardly a setting of which dreams are made. No fairy-tale castle tower this, but a practical beige and green cocoon in which some of the most important work in the world gets done. Teak and "Scandinavian modern" are much in evidence, a legacy from the Hammarskjöld years.I was briefed by Press Secretary André Lewin before my interview with Kurt Waldheim and took that opportunity, to ask some questions about the Secretary-General. What are Mr. Waldheim's avocations, if any? He adores the opera, said Lewin, and would love to go when he is in New York, but he just hasn't any time. The Waldheims have a country retreat in Connecticut which they are able to visit from time to time on weekends.

Poet and Pine

small pines. Seen from the town they form a dark fringe where hills meet sky. Among these pine-clad hills, some two or three kilometers from Moguer, lies Fuentepifia the country retreat of the Jimenez family. The house, a white, onestory building with tile roof and an arcaded veranda, now stands vacant. Grass and weeds have reclaimed the yard, which was once a well-tended garden. It is a secluded spot, but on every side affords a view of grassy meadows, pine woods, groves of eucalyptus and poplars. In the spring wild flowers in astonishing profusion bloom on the hills, in the fields and along the narrow roadway-yellow, white, blue, lavender, pink, purple, red, orange in endless variety. A solitary pine, with the spreading limbs and round crown peculiar to the common Spanish species, casts its shadow over a large area of the yard at one corner of the house. It is much older and larger than the rather spindly pines that grow in dense clusters on the surrounding hill tops. The big pine delighted Jiminez, and he mentions it often in his writings. He spent much of his time at Fuentepifia, and many of his poems, particularly those of the years 1906 to 1912, were, in all likelihood, written in the pleasant shade of the pine, or close enough to the tree to hear the murmur of the wind in its boughs, and to breathe the air filled with its clean fragrance. The Fuentepifia pine, and pine trees in general, became deeply ensconced in Jimenez' poetic consciousness during his life at Moguer, and no later experiences were able to crowd them into oblivion. Long after his final departure from his home region and his native land, the sight of a pine tree awakened in him pleasant and poignant memories. The pine appears often in his poetry, not only in the compositions written in Moguer, but in those of a much later period, when virtually the only ties the poet still retained with his native town were his nostalgic memories. Somewhat analogous to the live oak (encina) in the poetry of Antonio Machado or the birch in that of Robert Frost, the pine became an affective, not simply a descriptive image, in the poetry of Juan Ram6n Jimenez. The pine does not appear in Almas de violeta (1900) or Ninfeas (1900) the first two books of verse Jimenez published. These two volumes are, at best, experiments in writing. They imitate more than create, and they reveal little about their author's literary potentialities. Rimas (1902) was written when Jimenez was in Bordeaux, convalescing from illness following the death of his father. Arias tristes (1903), Jardines lejanos (1904) and Pastorales (1905) were all written in Madrid when the poet was living in the Sanatorio del Rosario or in the house of Dr. Luis