One of my favorite stories about Wellfleet in the summer is told by the critic Alfred Kazin in his memoir, New York Jew. Kazin recounts one day in the 1950s when he was walking through Wellfleet center and passed a front yard in which there were several boys playing rather noisily. A woman in the nearby house put her head out of a window and said, “Would you children please find another yard to play in? My husband is trying to write a book review, and I’m sure your fathers are, too.”
The story may be apocryphal, but it accurately reflects the large proportion of the town’s summer population who are novelists, poets, essayists, play-wrights, historians, and other scribblers of various stripes. In an ill-considered move several years ago, the Wellfleet Chamber of Commerce decided to label our community “The Art Gallery Town,” which is absurd. Wellfleet may have a handful of fine galleries, but it is no Provincetown. I guess “Wellfleet – The Writers’ Town” doesn’t have the same ring to it. And besides, what would they do, stage guided walks to writer’s homes and let tourists peek through their windows to watch Genuine Writers at Work?
In any case, local writers, in my experience, keep pretty much to themselves here, and when we do get together we don’t tend to talk much about writing. In fact, many writers I know go to great lengths to hide the fact that they are writers at all, or at least to give the impression that they don’t spend that much time actually writing. I remember one morning several years ago in a now-vanished local coffee shop. It was about 10 a.m. and there were about a dozen of us there, mostly writers, most of us reading. At one point Mike Lee, another local writer, walked in, looked around, and said, “Doesn’t anyone in this town work? We all laughed, then raised out cups in chorus and replied, “We are working!”
Still, especially in the summer, when there are all sorts of writers and artists in town, there is a certain expectation, usually unspoken, that, well…. how shall I describe it? Let me tell you about an incident that happened here one summer several years ago.
Kathy and I had been invited to a party at the house of our friend Helen, who is a painter. It so happened that Kathy’s brother Bill was visiting us from Boston, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in education. Bill is one of the world’s great schmoozers and fits in comfortably in almost any social situation, so we asked him to join us at Helen’s. Sure enough, he quickly struck up conversations with several of the people at the party.
At one point a man we didn’t know came up to Bill and, without preliminaries, said, “So, are you a writer?”
Bill replied, “No.”
“A painter, then?”
“No.”
“Sculptor?”
“Nope.”
“Musician?”
“No.”
“Photographer?”
“No.”
“Actor??”
“No.”
“Potter???”
“No.”
Finally, in frustration, the man asked, “Well, then, what are you?”
To which Bill replied, “I guess I’m just kind of a nice guy.”
