Letter from Lenox

A Moment in The Lost World

There is a gracious wooden porch through the double French doors to my left. It faces a corridor of tall old evergreens. Their dark brown bark is ragged. Beyond their solemn company stretches a slope of velvety green lawn. Sunlight slants white-yellow through the boughs of the pines, touching the grass here and there into glowing lighter-green fairy patches, as if the whole scene is posing for an old-fashioned landscape painter.

The porch is several feet wider across than are the porches that are built today, and I know why. This inn, now called the Constance, was originally built — in 1825 — as the Williams Tavern; it housed lawyers and judges, as the courthouse was nearby; an outpost of civilization in what was at that time a dense wilderness stretching across the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. In the 1880s, then-owner Frederick Constance Perkins moved the structure to its current location — a main street of the picturesque resort town Lenox. Perkins added late Victorian embellishments inside and out.

The porches to my left are so wide because the ladies who sat in the rocking chairs of that hotel at that time, wore skirts that took a great deal of management. Fashion for elegant Northeastern women called for voluminous skirts in the 1880s. The days of the crinoline were now over, but very elaborate drapery, down to the ankles, had replaced that bell silhouette of the decades past. The 1880s called for layers of petticoats - even, daringly, the single layer of a red flannel flounced petticoat, among multiple layers of white cotton petticoats; the red flannel would just flash when skirts were lifted to cross muddy streets. Over all these layers cascaded overskirts, often in contrasting colors to the underskirts. Both skirting layers fell from fitted tunics — these were tailored as separate pieces too — that covered tightly corseted hips and cinched waists. All of that complex drapery was attached in turn at the rear of the skirting, to cover high horsehair bustles. The drapery then descended from the bustles in flounces, which were often finished in tassels.

With the ladies for whom it was built having all of this complicated skirting and related costume architecture to manage, of course the porch to my left had to be constructed to be wide.

I know a lot about the 19th century. It was the subject of my graduate studies. I know intimately how fashionable women dressed in the 1880s. I have been obsessed with Victorian fashion, literature and culture, even since I was first conscious of history and culture.

I was eleven, and living with my family in Jerusalem in 1973 — this was just before the Yom Kippur war — when I first stumbled upon this period. Since I had no English books to read at home, and did not yet speak or read Hebrew well, my mother would take me to the old grey stone British Council Library, a treasure trove of English books. That library system, which was international, had been established by the British foreign service, in order to bring British culture to what had been British colonial outposts around the world.

The English culture that the British Council Library had brought in the early 1970s to Jerusalem compiled and presented for readers, memories of the aristocratic England of two to three generations prior. So, book-deprived pre-teen as I was, I spent my afternoons on the sunny limestone porch of our apartment devouring the ephemera of fifty years of British scandal and gossip: accounts of the lives of famous prostitutes in the 19th century; novels of Edwardian country house life, with its louche adulteries, its gambling, and its hunting; and later stories, in novella formats, of the mad antics and silly costume parties of Londons’ “Bright Young Things” of the debauched 1920s. By the time I was twelve, I knew what it meant to be “ruined” (too sexually experienced to find a proper husband), what it meant to be a second son in an aristocratic family (landless), and what it meant when respectable ladies would not acknowledge your visiting card (social death, as you were being judged a hopelessly “fast” female). I remember asking my mother, who was trying to cook our dinner on the primitive kerosene stove in the cramped kitchen, what a “courtesan” was.

I was especially interested in this because it became clear from my reading that the Victorian wives had constricted and tedious lives, but that the courtesans’ lives were adventurous, independent, prosperous and wild. So I inhaled the stories of the great courtesans of the late Victorian period —such as that of Lily Langtry, the “Jersey Lily.”’ Langtry was the first “professional beauty”; she was also the first mass-advertising icon; an actress as well; she was mistress of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII); and she was Oscar Wilde’s friend and confidant. He called her “The New Helen.”

Lily Langtry:

Catherine Walters, called, endearingly to me, “Skittles”, was another famous Victorian courtesan memorialized by the British Council library. (Did they really understand what books they had?) “Skittles” had been a widely admired equestrienne and style icon, and reputedly had had many political leaders as lovers (or, as we would say today, clients).

“Skittles”:

Cora Pearl, for her part, had been an English girl who set out for Paris to set herself up as a legendary courtesan. This goal may sound off to modern ears; but in the 19th century, well-paying jobs for single women were almost completely nonexistent. High end prostitution was one of the only ways that single women could acquire both independent lives and money of their own. So the temptation into the world of prostitution was as imaginable then to daring (or reckless, or immoral, depending on one’s outlook) young women at that time, as would setting out to try one’s luck in Hollywood, tempted with the prospect of opening an OnlyFans account, be to young women today.

Cora Pearl:

The life of a scandalous Victorian woman that impressed me most was that of Jenny Jerome: she was not a courtesan. Rather, she was the daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, “the King of Wall Street.” As “new money”, this fortune was considered too vulgar for Jenny to marry into the American elite. So, like many young ladies similarly situated, Jenny Jerome was brought by her mother to London, to seek an advantageous match among cash-poor British aristocrats.

In the final thirty years of the 19th century, many old English aristocratic families needed fresh infusions of capital to finance their opulent homes and lifestyles. “New Money” heiresses, disdained by the matchmakers for the New York and Boston old families, needed husbands. The fascinating marketplace that these sets of requirements created, for the impoverished sons of old English and European families and the daughters of robber barons and heiresses to steel and meatpacking fortunes, provided material for novelists ranging from Henry James to Edith Wharton.

Jenny Jerome was a grand success in her new milieu; she (like Langtry) became a lover of the Prince of Wales, among other reputed suitors. She eventually married Randolph Churchill, scion of the great family who were owners of the magnificent Blenheim Palace. And she became the mother of the future Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. The scandals of her life did not end with her marriage; called “Lady Randy”, she was reputed to have had an insatiable sexual appetite and eventually to have had 200 lovers.

Jenny Jerome, revealing draped overskirt:

I recap all of this because this - the 19th century, its personalities, manners, books, fashion, culture, crises, joys — is my soul’s imaginative dimension. I was academically trained for years mentally to inhabit this world. I had planned to do so for the rest of my life, and to explain it and share its wealth to upcoming generations. This was the civilizational task for which I long studied.

So when I found myself in that old Lenox hotel, I knew in my very bones where I was. I understood the wide entrance-hall, with its dimensions that allowed serving-girls to carry steaming platters out from the original rear kitchen and scullery areas, workspaces that were now torn down and reconstructed into into additional bedrooms.

I understood that the spacious parking area had once held stables. I knew that the transoms above the doors — and at the tops of the high windows, with their smaller panes separated from one another within the larger dark wooden frames by beautiful diamond-shaped patterning — were necessary, to allow cross-breezes into stuffy rooms, before air conditioning was invented.

I understood the octagonal windowed bay in one corner of gracious sitting room had originally been designed as a setting for women and girls to sew, or for guests of both sexes to read or to play cards, while seated at a round table; as it would have had to be illuminated by a single oil lamp, at a time before radio or television, and before there was abundant lighting after sundown.

I knew that there were no original closets in my high sage-walled bedroom that faced the village green, because people in the 19th century usually kept their clothing in freestanding wardrobes, or on hooks.

Lenox had been a destination for elegant, very wealthy women and men who sought its high mountain breezes in the summer, to escape the sweltering heat, and the stench of sewage, tanneries and manure, of Boston and New York. The wealthy upper classes had then built what they called “cottages” — massive mansions, all designed to outdo one another in “rustic” elegance — along the main avenues. It was here that novelist Edith Wharton “summered,” as a restless young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to a high-born, mentally unbalanced society husband. And it was here that she expended her extraordinary creative energies on her architectural masterpiece, the massive white Italianate “cottage” built on a wooded hillside, known as The Mount:

The novelist Edith Wharton, as a young socialite:

I had thrilled to find myself in this environment, to which I resonated so deeply. I had fallen happily, the night before, into the heavy oak four-poster bed.

But I understood sadly by late morning, as I sat in the living room, leafing through one of the 19th century novels that cleverly lined the bookcases — that the dream I had long harbored was no longer possible.

The civilization in which thinking about this era for the rest of my life was an honorable choice, no longer existed. The civilizational continuity and confluence that such a life represented, was gone.

The signs of the destruction of that world, even though lovely structures from it still survived, were everywhere.

I had spent the evening before in the harsh new reality that had succeeded that elegant world.

I had travelled to this part of Massachusetts to appear on a panel with distinguished health freedom warriors: Mary Holland, CEO of the children’s health activism organization Children’s Health Defense, which had been founded by RFK Jr; Dr Adam Urato, a highly-rated maternal and fetal medicine doctor from nearby Framingham, Massachusetts; and fertility expert Debra Sheldon, VP of the MAHA Institute.

This historic panel shared devastating facts and evidence that should be shaking the world and dominating global headlines.

Mary Holland revealed a collapse in populations, and related it to various factors, including toxins in the agricultural environment and in our air. Dr Urato demonstrated that many pregnant women these days are on an average of four prescription medications, and that many cannot wean themselves from their prescribed SSRIs. He showed graphic images of the corpses of fetal mammals whose growth had been visibly stunted in utero, from exposure to SSRIs. His slides also displayed visible damage to neural dendrites, caused by SSRI activity in mammalian brains. Dr Urato noted that the longterm effects of SSRIs taken in pregnancy cannot yet be known. Debra Sheldon, fertility expert and VP of the MAHA Institute, revealed details of the damage to women’s mental and physical wellbeing, and especially to their cycles, caused by chemical contraception. And I, of course, shared my standard talk summarizing the 360 degree attack on human reproduction — and especially on the bodies of pregnant women, and of babies in utero — that my team of 3500 doctors and scientists, under the leadership of my colleague Amy Kelly, uncovered, in The Pfizer Papers.

It was stunning to me, as I listened to the vitally important and undeniably documented set of presentations by my highly credentialed fellow panelists, that this potentially world-altering event was taking place in a tiny town, in the peach-walled upper room of the Lenox Community Center, and was convened by a small grassroots citizens’ group, the Berkshire County Resiliency Collaborative; and was being filmed by a single videographer, as opposed to having been presented at a packed event convened by ACOG — the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists — thronged by reporters from all the major media.

But that emergency, and that struggle for proportionate attention to global horrors - is the real world now.

Other fractures in the lovely imaginary world made themselves visible to me, as I looked out at the elegant pines and the slanting sunlight. I realized, as I clicked through the history of the inn on the internet, that the very building in which I found myself was not what it appeared to be; it was not in fact a cozy ancient inn, decorated with the antiques of many generations of family ownership.

Rather this too was now an illusion.

This 2022 article from the local website Rural Intelligence explains exactly what had actually happened to the building where I sat: the property that had formerly been renamed the Rookwood Inn, had gotten scooped up, with other historic properties in the area, by a pandemic-era conglomerate: “If the pandemic was good for anything, [italics mine] it must have created a moment in time conducive to buying and selling high-end lodgings: No less than eight inns have changed hands in Lenox in the past two years. Three of the properties were acquired by 388 Ventures, a New York-based company, who partnered with Life House, a hotel software, brand, and management company. Under Life House’s direction, the Rookwood Inn has become The Constance, The Church Street Inn is now The Whitlock, and The Birchwood Inn morphed into The Dewey. All officially opened this spring.”

I have written about this property grab before, in my book The Bodies of Others. “The pandemic”, of course, forced tourism to a standstill. Governor Andrew Cuomo forbade big weddings, which had been the bread and butter of the historic inn industry. So, in our area in the Hudson Valley, as well as in the nearby Berkshires Mountains, historic inns and Bed and Breakfasts had been desperate. Many could no longer survive in private hands, with no income at all to offset running costs and maintenance. Thus — dozens were forced into fire-sale acquisitions. By conglomerates — that had formed for just this purpose.

Conglomerates exactly like the VC company “388 Ventures”, which is partnered with “Life House”, which for its part is, of course, Big Tech — which was, as I showed in my book, one of the main drivers of the “pandemic narrative” — and which industry had wanted to get into new sectors, such as health care data - and such as hospitality.

So I was not sitting in a dream, though it looked like a dream.

I was kind of sitting in a nightmare.

Lastly, I thought of the young Edith Wharton; how she had looked out over these very streets, and sat in interiors exactly like this one, as a young woman; and had found the life laid out for her to be so repressive, so limited, that she had escaped it. She had divorced her husband eventually, and had fled to Europe; and had settled permanently in France by 1910, and had spent the rest of her life living in freedom, as a Bohemian among Bohemians, and writing a new world into being.

I thought of the decades and decades, indeed the 135 years, of struggle for women’s rights, that Wharton’s life foreshadowed and that her work in turn had helped to launch. And I realized with a shudder how the personal freedoms for which she longed, and for which she risked so much — as had the nameless and named women who fought similarly in the century and more that had followed her struggle for freedom — were now again at risk; and could be utterly eclipsed in my own lifetime.

These rights for women are under attack from CCP-friendly Marxism, stripping liberty from everyone and seeking to “erase gender,” and thus women’s actual experience, altogether; they are under attack, much as I hate to face and name this, from fundamentalist Islam, seeking to overturn norms of liberty in the West; and they are also under attack from the very same interests who profited from the “lockdowns” and snapped up unique assets such as the Rookwood Inn and digitized their data; they are under attack from the same people who designed the mRNA injection to destroy what was most precious about women themselves — the same people who are now chafing to commodify women’s cycles and their pregnancies and their “changes of life”; to dominate these processes, to control them; to gate-keep them; to market them: Big Tech and Big Pharma and biotech.

Multiple armies, I felt, from multiple directions, sometimes with converging interests and agendas, were trained on this gracious house and all it represented; and on the ghostly body of the young Edith Wharton, and all that she represented; on the ghostly lovelinesses of the bodies of Cora Pearl and Skittles, of Lily Langtry and Jenny Jerome; and on my body, whose flesh and blood I felt acutely as I sat on the chicly comfortable muslin-=covered couch; and on all of our own living bodies.

They are converging on our children’s living bodies, and on the as-yet-unborn bodies of their children.

So I shuddered.

My beautiful world was truly gone.

But as a blessing, Brian came in the stately front door — he had driven up from Brooklyn to retrieve me — and he had little Loki on a leash.

And Loki was looking around for me, leaping like a puppy and smiling. Loki must have caught my scent.

So I lay down the old novel, and I gathered up my computer; and I set out to meet them.

And we stepped outside, into the frigid contemporary air — back into battle.