Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, was the favorite beach town of America’s intellectuals in the 50s ad 60s. Writers, artists, scientists, law professors, historians, psychoanalysts – many of the most prominent names took up residence in summer cottages on the dunes and held their evening cocktail parties overlooking the magnificent Atlantic. Devastating wit and incomparable learning were concentrated in one of the coast’s most pristine settings.

But, the ship of American culture was showing serious cracks. If you looked closely, it was already listing to one side. Alfred Kazin, the New York literary critic, spent his summers in Wellfleet. He wrote a moving essay about both the beauty and decadence of the place. He said of his wife of the time, who was consumed with her work as a novelist and with her love of highbrow parties, “I came to think of R. not as a wife but as a brilliant, wayward daughter, so dogged that I would never be able to help.”

Kazin’s essay “Wellfleet and the Beach of the Intellectuals” is not available online, but here is its melancholy closing:

End of summer. End of a marriage. How strange it was at the “violet” hour of the day, when the light was fading and the couples in odd corners were getting cozier by the minute – how strange it was to look out on the outermost Cape with nothing else in sight but a last fishing vessel. Somewere in that thrilling, frightening emptiness was Portugal, even Galicia in northwest Spain. How strange it was then to think that career can be the greatest passion, capable of destroying a marriage. How little, really, the intellectuals on the beach made of summer. They – all of us – used Wellfleet, that last great wilderness, in a way that cut us off from the primitive, everlasting heart of the world beating in our ears as we gabbed on the beach. 

How sad it must have been to witness the vessel of America’s elite slipping over the horizon.

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