immanence

This post follows up on my previous note about Alfred North Whitehead’s time spent in Greensboro, Vermont. It was updated on July 7, 2016, thanks to information obtained from the Mitchells’ descendants.

I have found out where the Whiteheads stayed when he was writing his philosophical magnum opus, Process and Reality. It was in a two-story cottage owned by economist Wesley Clare Mitchell and progressive educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The cottage is on the north shore of Caspian Lake very near to a place where the “Huckleberry Rocks” jut out into the lake, and on which the Mitchells used to hold fire gatherings they sometimes called “druid fires.”

The picture above is of the Huckleberry Rocks in the early 1900s. Below are the rocks today, with the cottage, known as the “Green House,” visible in the distance.

It seems I’m not the first to seek Whitehead’s history on the shores of Caspian Lake. Ralph Pred, author of Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (MIT Press, 2005), did that in the summer of 1999. At the time Pred was working on his book — a highly original synthesis of Whitehead, William James, John Searle, and contemporary neurobiology — he decided to make “a trip to Greensboro to visit the spot where Whitehead had his great productive and creative period.” (He notes this in a letter sent to the Greensboro Historical Society, which the Society’s Cathie Wilkinson kindly shared with me.)

This was where, according to Victor Lowe’s biography, “Whitehead’s metaphysical system was created and his magnum opus, later named Process and Reality, was shaped.” Based on hints in Lowe’s book, Pred visited the Mitchell property and found “a beautiful and prominent spot” on it where he “felt ‘shivers,’ which,” he writes, “led me to tell my wife that I would be surprised if Whitehead hadn’t spent time quite nearby, if not on the very spot.”

Confirmation that the Whiteheads stayed at the Mitchells’ property can be found in Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s biography Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clare Mitchell and Myself (Simon & Schuster, 1953). Mitchell writes:

“On the edge of the place when we bought it was an ugly little cottage with an enchanting close view of the lake. We fixed it up a bit and called it the Guest House and loaned it to a succession of friends for the summers. … For two summers, the Alfred North Whiteheads lived there.”

(After I first posted this message, one of the Mitchells’ descendants contacted me to let me know that the cottage is still owned by the family and that it is available for rental when they are not using it.)

Mitchell’s biographer, Joyce Antler, writes that

“For several summers, the Alfred North Whiteheads and their daughter, Jessie, used the cottage, joining in picnics and toasts on Huckleberry Rocks and the charades the family played in the evenings” (Antler, Lucy Sprague Mitchell: The Making of a Modern Woman, Yale U.P., 1987, p. 274-5).

Lucy Sprague Mitchell recounts one of these episodes with the Whiteheads:

“We had expected to find them the interesting and charming people they proved to be. But we had not expected to find Mr. Whitehead an able and extremely active actor. The Whiteheads, the ‘Harriets,’ who were in the Guest House, and the Mitchells played charades some evenings. … I don’t remember the word in the other memorable charade. But I can see vividly the learned Mr. Whitehead as an entomologist, springing spryly around the room catching rare flying creatures in his butterfly net.” [323-4]

The spryly “entomologist” would have been in his late 60s at the time.

Whitehead’s productivity at Caspian Lake is recounted in two letters he sent to his son, which are shared in the appendix of Victor Lowe’s biography. (Whitehead’s personal papers were destroyed after his death, according to his request — why he asked for that is an interesting question — but the letters sent to his son were spared.)

In one of the letters, dated August 22, 1927, and written from “Plympton Camp, Caspian Lake–Greensboro” (neither Pred nor I nor anyone I know has been able to determine the meaning of the name “Plympton”), Whitehead writes that “I have written nearly half a book on Metaphysics this summer … 9 1/2 chapters … out of a projected plan of 20 or 25 chapters.”

On the lakeside location Whitehead writes, “I do wish you could see this place in its glory,” and adds that the rainy cold days “are the price to be paid for the wonderful air and vegetation, of the other days.”

Two years later, writing again from Caspian Lake on August 12, 1929, Whitehead wrote to his son:

“At last I have got through with my Gifford Lectures — final proofs corrected, Index printed, and the last corrections put in. It is the biggest piece of imaginative work which I have attempted, and has been a great strain, especially for the last year. Whether it will be a success I cannot have any idea. It is rather an ambitious book, of the sort which may be a dead failure. We post the last package tomorrow.”

What this tells us is that Process and Reality took between two and three years to write, though it was much longer in its conceptual development. As Whitehead seemed to do a lot of writing in the summers, it’s fair to say, following Lowe, that the book was “shaped” in Greensboro during the summers of 1927-29. At least half of it was likely written there, if not more.

For a town of 700 (though the population rises substantially in summertime), the northeast Vermont town of Greensboro can now add one more thing to its boasts. In addition to being the longtime summer residence of Wallace Stegner and the focus of his novels Second Growth and Crossing to Safety; the final resting place of ecotheologian Thomas Berry, who was buried there at the “ecozoic” Green Mountain Monastery; and the home of award winning brewery Hill Farmstead (currently the “Best Brewery in the World” according to RateBeer), cheese maker Jasper Hill (makers of the 2014 “World’s Best Unpasteurized Cheese”), the youth circus outfit Circus Smirkus, the Greensboro Arts Alliance and Residency, and with the neighboring town of Hardwick the center of northeast Vermont’s lauded new agriculture scene; it is now also the place where Alfred North Whitehead wrote what is possibly the most important work of metaphysical philosophy of the twentieth century.

The Huckleberry Rocks as seen from the Highland Lodge beach on the northeast side of Caspian Lake. The green cottage is hidden by trees to the right of the boathouse visible in the center-right of the photograph.

Thanks to Maureen and Siobhan Mitchell for sharing information about the cottage, and to the Greenboro Historical Society and historian Allen Davis for helping me in my sleuthing for the site. The second photo above is taken from the Mitchells’ rental website for the property.