Legends of Bard College
by Frances Sandiford & Paul De Angelis

Local lore can center around the most unlikely landmarks. Take the old fashioned cast-iron pump that stands beneath a white wooden shelter on the Annandale green. According to local gossip (probably inspired by a 1997 article in the Long Island Voice), this particular pump was the inspiration behind the line that ends "the vandals took the handles" from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Apparently Dylan used to hang out on the Bard campus before his years in Woodstock, and ascribed some totemic significance to the nonfunctioning pump.

A more direct connection with Bard can be found in several of Steely Dan's songs, particularly the line about California falling into the Pacific in "My Old School." The creators of this legendary rock band, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, met and first made music together while students at Bard in the late 60s, where they were once busted in a drug raid (the name Steely Dan itself was taken from William Burroughs' drug-driven novel, Naked Lunch).

Another bit of local literary gossip: For years residents of Tivoli have referred to the house that Saul Bellow lived in during part of the time he taught a Bard College in the 1950s as the "Herzog House." According to a memoir Bellow wrote about his home-owning experience in a 1998 issue of Partisan Review, the novel that was written while Bellow lived there was Henderson the Rain King--Bellow's lampooning tribute to his earlier Barrytown landlord, Chanler Chapman

The Hudson River mansion that Bellow had bought had a Dutch cellar kitchen of flagstones complete with fireplace and a dumbwaiter that ascended to a vanished dining room. The house was in drastic need of repairs. Bellow did not have the money or spirit to make them, especially after his marriage fell apart. In fact, though his Partisan Review piece does not mention it, the Tivoli house was the locus of that break-up, which Bellow later depicted in his breakthrough novel, Herzog--hence the sobriquet "Herzog House."

Living alone, Bellow invited fellow writer Ralph Ellison to share the house with him and help with the expenses. This literary odd couple--fastidious Ellison and "stumblebum" Bellow--lived together for two years.