Bill Kauffman

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Batavia, New York Shrouded in legend, Black Mountain College was an experimental school outside Asheville, North Carolina. For almost a quarter century (1933-57) it incubated, nurtured and disgorged the holy fools, ragged prophets and pretentious frauds of the American avant-garde and the (in some cases reactionary) counterculture: John Cage, Paul Goodman, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning and Buckminster Fuller, to name a few. Yet for my money, the most remarkable couple to pass through Black Mountain were Bill and Martha (Rittenhouse) Treichler, two farm kids, the former an Iowan, the latter a daughter of Maryland, who met and fell in love at Black Mountain during the 1948-49 school year.

This article is the American Life column from The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Batavia, New York, my favorite place in the world, was described by Alexis de Tocqueville on his American tour: ‘Scattered houses then marshes. Rooms built of tree trunks.’ OK, it wasn’t the Frenchman’s most memorable passage. But Tocqueville was more charitable than my landsman John Gardner, the 20th-century novelist who called Batavia a symbol of ‘both spiritual death and the death of civilization’. Gardner, a nomadic academic who had left town years earlier, was responding to the federally funded razing of Batavia’s core in the 1960s under the cruelly misnamed Urban Renewal Program.