I Had a Lawn Mower

READING the other day, in a book about the menace of machinery, that ‘industrial civilization, having created for unknown ends a race of mechanical drudges, requires nevertheless a contribution of human toil more intense, more exacting, more irksome than ever before,’ I was pleasantly surprised to find this light on our industrial civilization illuminating and explaining also a suburban mystery — the tacit conspiracy of men who mow their own lawns to lure others into the same employment. There is little propaganda, no concerted and conscious effort, no formal organization; but rather a single impulse common to all men who operate their own lawn mowers, and making them, so to speak, all push together in the same direction. Each advances the common purpose by his assumption of innocent enjoyment, for any one of them is a moving picture and living advertisement of the pleasure that a lawn owner derives from taking care of the lawn himself.

I remember, as it were but yesterday, my first lawn. A lawn mower came with it, left behind by the previous tenant. I had often watched men mowing their own lawns, and, even if there were nothing else to be said for it, mowing the lawn myself would be an easy way to save money. But health, as well as pocketbook, would be benefited by this pleasant exercise. With my lawn mower — and this was truer than I then suspected — there would always be something to do in the open air before supper. It was rather a large lawn — but so much the more exercise, so much the more benefit to my health, so much the more appetite for my supper. Without criticizing the advantages of wealth, it had often struck me, looking over the fence, that the men who mowed their own lawns had much the better of it compared with those who hired professionals. Pushing, they seemed to make a fair world safer for democracy; and their wives, affectionately watching them from the screened porches, seemed to make divorce an idle invention of a sensational press. Although I did not then know it, hardly anything gives a wife more satisfaction than watching a tired husband pushing a lawn mower. Often, indeed, when he thinks he is done for the day, and is wearily dragging the lawn mower back to its resting place, she will come out from the screened porch and show him all the spots he has unwittingly missed. Then, if any stranger is watching him, he will prance back with his lawn mower.

A lawnless man may observe, say, twenty gentlemen mowing their own lawns and they all look very much alike, their twenty lawn mowers smoothly cutting the grass, and their twenty wives smoothly watching them from their twenty screened porches. What no lawnless man may know, for not one of these twenty gentlemen will ever tell him, is that they are doing something that they have come to regard as work. For one reason or another — thrift, unsuspected poverty, innate perversity, labor troubles with professional pushers, a quixotic desire to please the wife, or this reason or that — each has become the motive power of a machine for grass-cutting. Yet I do not mean that these gentlemen are acutely unhappy. Things might be worse. Think of those poor wretches who used to row in the galleys, and the brute of an overseer who walked back and forth and kept them at it with a long whip! There is nothing like that on the screened porch; and, after all, a man who is mowing his own lawn ought to be grateful to a wife who shows him where he has skipped a blade or two. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well. But they are not so happy as they pretend to be, nor anything like so happy as they look from the other side of the fence. They know now, in fact, that a lawn mower is one of those mechanical drudges, created by an industrial civilization, that enslave the operator and enforce a contribution of toil more intense, exacting, and irksome than ever before; and these slaves — having, as it were, caught and sold themselves to their master — instinctively desire to minimize and conceal their servitude and enlarge their company. An informal Fellowship of the Lawn is established, whose seal, if it had one, would bear a lawn mower rampant and the bravely satirical motto, ‘Apud novercam quærere,’or — if the reader has forgotten his Plautus — ‘Complain to your stepmother.’ To distinguish himself from these slaves, as a free man following a respectable calling of his own volition, any man who mows a lawn for hire dons a derby hat two sizes too large for him. It is an odd sort of uniform, but unmistakable at a distance.

Yet it is not really the lawn mower that makes the trouble. These gentlemen would be just as unhappy with scythes and sickles, though they would get better exercise. It is the lawn itself — those innumerable blades of grass whose incessant growth the professional in his derby hat naturally regards as a beneficent provision of nature, and the gentleman who mows his own as one more infernal example of the futility of human effort. Never at rest, never in a hurry, and no sooner cut down in one place than they have grown up in another. A man who mows his own lawn must not think too much about that: it grows while he mows and he mows while it grows, and it grows while he mows and he mows while it grows, and it mows while he grows and he grows while it mows. An imaginative man who mows his own lawn must watch himself lest he fall into a dangerous habit of watching his lawn — looking at it just before he goes to bed, and again the first thing in the morning; wondering about it in the office, and hurrying home by an early train to look at it in the afternoon. When I mowed my own lawn I used sometimes to go back and take a look at it after I had put up the lawn mower. One should take it lightly.

One does not think of these things in the beginning. The first week that I mowed my own lawn I wrote an essay on the subject. ‘Although such persons,’ said I, ‘no doubt exist, I have never met a man who did not in some degree enjoy operating a lawn mower. The moving guillotine of dandelions and buttercups advances gayly over the lawn, tossing in the air a pleasing cascade of cut grass and dandelion and buttercup heads. The mower follows along the smooth green carpet of his own laying, like the bridegroom of an invisible bride on his way to the altar.’ ‘Compared with tennis, golf, croquet, archery, or other outdoor sports,’ I said also, ‘mowing the lawn is easy to master to such a degree of competence as gives a man comfortable self-respect in the company of other followers of the same pastime.’ ‘Although mowing the lawn,’ I said further, ‘has hitherto been accepted as an exclusive and oneman occupation, there is no good reason why it should not be followed in company, as companionable a pleasure for intellectual men as golf.’ I described the joy of a man mowing his lawn in the early morning when ‘a bird pipes in the tree, another twitters in the bushes as he lifts the lawn mower out of the shed and sets it in the unmarked path that it will presently follow.’ It was an appreciative essay, and, as one reader bitterly remarked to the editor, anybody who could write it deserved to spend eternity mowing the palace grounds of Lucifer.

For this mood does not last, and the operation of a lawn mower, as time goes on, is even productive of odd and disturbing hallucinations. The machine seems to vary in weight, though never lighter than it ought to be; and the lawn itself, level to the eye, seems at times to have a perceptible upgrade in every direction. Inanimate objects take on an uncanny semblance of life, stealthily retreating as the lawn mower is pushed toward them, and as stealthily following when the lawn mower is turned about and pushed in the opposite direction. Twigs and pebbles gather from all over the place and struggle with each other to get into the lawn mower. It is like a crowd in the subway. The pusher deviates, in spite of himself, from the straight and narrow path from the rose bush to the apple tree. I remember one day when my wife asked me what I was doing. And I said mowing the lawn. And she said, with what seemed to me a foolish laugh, that it looked more like marcelling. And I said: —

Sometimes except for his wife a man would neglect his lawn. But this rarely happens. It is more likely that he will find it takes longer to mow the lawn than he had anticipated, — as it always does, — and that the wisest economy, all things considered, will be to give over this pleasure, and engage a professional. His wife may object, and he will be tacitly dropped from the Fellowship of the Lawn, but he will not care.