The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS.

FOR a good many years, my wife and I had been looking for a summer hideaway. I mean a quiet spot within commuting distance of Boston, within easy reach of the sea, and if possible hidden from the week-end traffic: and of course it had to be small and inexpensive if it was to be operated on a literary budget.

We found it in 1940. On a back road walled with trees and so narrow that two cars can barely pass, we discovered a three-acre wood lot with a barn, a cottage, a guesthouse, and a pigsty which had been converted for the use of a sculptor. All this on the rising flank of a rocky ridge, two miles from the beach and station, yet in its quietude seemingly as remote as a camp in Maine.

Our three acres are shut in by the trees. We have oaks, the oldest of which are over a century, a fine cluster of weeping beech, pine, hickory, a good many scraggly ash, and a few hemlock transplanted by former owners and now lugubriously blocking the view. The place had been untenanted for several years: and once the carpenters had left, our first impulse was to let the sunlight in and do what we could for the growing things. The grass plot in front of the cottage was crisscrossed with mole tracks and half choked with moss. So we sent samples of the topsoil to the State Agricultural College and received back from them this terse report: “Have seldom seen soil sample so devoid of plant food.”

We couldn’t afford to truck in tons of good earth, but we had leaves to burn, and instead of burning them we banked them up in a damp place. The sculptor in his day had constructed three small pools which he used to exhibit his fountain figures. The figures have now departed, but the pools lent themselves to rock gardening and, to the nervous delight of our spaniel, proved a wonderful seedbed for frogs. In small clefts of the rock face, ivy and tuberous begonia flourish. And out of fissures so small you don’t see how the root could have taken hold, two rugged little pines and one elm of about four feet are sprouting. Daffodil and lady’s-slipper have found a foothold on the composted grass plot. Fern form a natural fringe at the base of the guesthouse; and if we didn’t use the pliers, the bittersweet would strangle every small hemlock within reach.

This summer, at last, we “dusted” the wood lot to keep down the mosquitoes. A Piper Cub did the job, flying just above the treetops. The DDT not only gave us a two-month immunity from mosquitoes but on the day of the dusting it ejected thousands of the borers from the oaks. The tiny beetles descended from the branches on their spidery threads, gluey masses of them which perished as they reached the ground. Not a pretty sight but it made us feel better about the oaks.

I can’t tell yet how many trees we’ve lost from the long drought. Part of our screen on the rockier slope beyond reach of hose or sprinkler has had to come down. The oaks there were sickly last autumn and the winter finished them. They were blackened, greenless skeletons when we first saw them in the spring. This moraine ridge which follows the shore line from Boston to Essex has retained some magnificent woods ever since the country was settled. But I sometimes wonder if we are not seeing the last of the best of it. The great band of pine running from Montserrat through Pride’s Crossing and reaching its greatest majesty in Essex was cruelly treated by the two hurricanes. Now as the big new road bulldozes its way through the trees their remoteness, which was part of their safety, is gone. Instead of pines, we shall have fried-clam stands, overnight cabins, or a portable house with a sign like this to beckon you in: “Justamere Cottage.”

I don’t want to sound too gloomy but I wish those of us who care for trees were better organized. I wish for an organization like the vigilantes who could alert each community to the threatened danger before it was too late. The Dutch elm beetle is quietly chewing its way in our neighborhood destroying, as it always does, the oldest trees first. Yet last year when we attempted to rally enough interest to fight this invasion, people just weren’t interested. It seems to be an American habit to take our resources for granted and not to worry about them until they are gone. On my fishing trips to the Miramichi in New Brunswick and to the Kennebago mountains in northern Maine, I have seen the billions of feet of white birch dead or dying. I guess there was nothing we could do about that, the blight hit so fast. But I have also seen Maine townships (most states would call them counties) whose virgin growth had never felt the axe until 1946. Then those forests were ravaged by a lumber company. Nothing was left for reforestation and when, after the long drought, fire struck the brush, you can imagine what a desolation remained. This in the year 1947 and in a state which is justly proud of its beauty. The scars of the forest fires on Mount Desert should be a reminder to anyone in Maine that our forests need protection — more protection than many of our states are willing to give them.

“Men,” wrote John Evelyn in 1664, “seldom plant I rees 1 ill they begin to be w ise, that is, t ill i hey grow old, and find, by experience, the prudence and necessity of it.”

To those who share my interest and indignation, I heartily recommend Trees, The Yearbook of Agriculture for 1949. If is published by the Department of Agriculture and sold by the Superintendent of Documents, Washington 25, D.C., at the very reasonable price of $2.00.

This is an opportune book and one of the handsomest big books I have held in my hand this year. It has been compiled and edited, as Secretary Brannan says in his Foreword, with “the conviction that a basic resource is a national trust.”It opens with a decorative end paper mapping the Forested Area, the National Forests, and the Shelterbelt Zone of the United States, Alaska, and San Juan; it closes with a superb vacation guide, describing the special features— the game, the fish, the hiking trails, forest camps, accessibility, and area of every forest in every state; and in between are more than a hundred short chapters, illustrated with color photography and black and white, touching every vital phase of our forest life and informed with the knowledge, the warning, and the graphic experience of the experts in each region. Forest Renewal, Taming a Wild Forest, Four Billion Feet of Beetle-Killed Spruce, Wildlife in the Small Woodland, and Dutch Elm Disease wore the chapters I chose to read first, but there are scores of others to suit your climate and interest.

No trade publisher could possibly have printed so compendious and beautiful a book at such a low price; the taxpayer helped finance this, and he should read and be proud of the result.

The collapse of Lee’s army on that starved, dizzying, desperate retreat from Petersburg to Appomattox is the setting Scott Hart has chosen for his short novel, Eight April Days (Coward-McCann, $2.50). It was a hectic time: Union cavalry were slashing at the railroads, and Lee’s provisions — as was so often the case—did nol come through; weakened by siege and desertion the army had dwindled to less than 30,000, and companies were down to ten men in charge of a corporal. Lee’s only chance was to retreat, picking up stores as he went, for a possible junet ure with Joe Johnston, whose army was in flight before Sherman.

Against this setting Mr. Hart high-lights the misfortunes of two couples: the half comic, half pathetic affair of the sutlers—“Old Pine,” a camp follower, great-hearted and loud-mouthed, and her “Mr. Baker,” a cowed, convalescent veteran whom she is prodding back into the army; and on the higher level, Judith Crosland, the Yankee wife of a Confederate captain, whose insufferable loneliness on the abandoned plantation has caused her to betray her husband. The two couples are flung together in that final week. With Judith we can sympathize, remembering as we must the effect of long separation in the Second World War; and the magnanimity of Old Pine we must admire since it offers the only solution.

It was the author’s intention that one mood should lead to another — that our pity for the lovers should deepen our awareness of the tragedy of the South. But the story falls short of pathos and far short of tragedy because it is overwritten. This was indeed a hectic time. Civilians and soldiers were driven as in a delirium and the author is right in trying to make us feel this; where he is wrong is in piling on theatrical words and phrases. His people never talk — they “shriek,” “yell,”or “scream.” About the only characters who lower their voices are the pregnant woman and the drunken doctor. On facing pages (102, 103) I count five gelled’a and four screamed’s, and the bedlam concludes with this description of Old Pine: “ Her great body shook, and tears bounced down her big face.” That is excessive writing and it leaves us skeptical, just as does this account of Captain Crosland: “The action at his feet broke his depression. A laugh flew like a rock from his mouth.” The use of violent phrases does not necessarily produce the effect of violence.

The best scenes in this book are those of intimacy: the burial of the baby, Phil Crosland’s talk with Judith, the comedy between Mr. Baker and the gouger Piggy Biggs. Old Pine I never quite believe in, though I like her best when she flares out. But when Mr, Hart writes his next novel about the Civil War, as I expect he will, I hope he will remember the understatement with which Clifford Dowdey described the burning of Richmond, and the genuine emotion which Margaret Mitchell aroused when she wrote of Atlanta.

Ever since I first saw one of Ma Green’s paddlewheelers churning down the Mississippi on its way to New Orleans and the Mardi Gras, I have flirted with the notion of taking that boat trip in congenial company. This very voyage, though with a more touching ending than the Carnival, is the theme of Robert Nathan’s new novel, The River Journey (Knopf, $2.50). Mr. Nathan has long been one of my favorite poets. Few writers can match his command of the simple but exquisite sentence charged with meaning. His pages have the effortless lucidity of Housman’s lyrics, and so often they surprise and touch the heart.

In The River Journey he tells us the story of Minnie and Henry Parkinson, a middle-aged childless couple. For twenty years they have lived in Steubenville with, as Minnie thinks, “nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing much to remember.”And then one afternoon in May, a little after three o’clock, Minerva Parkinson comes out of Dr. Bliss’s office in the Grain Company Building and starts up the street. She was smiling, but Mr. Nathan writes: “It was a fixed smile of embarrassment, for she had just been told that she was going to die.” She has about a year and she wants it to be one which Henry really will remember. So, to the shock of Mr. Blakcny, the town banker, she sells her bonds, and proceeds to buy and outfit a houseboat on which she and Henry can make the river voyage that he has long dreamed of.

Minerya has courage: she never lets Henry know, and so the doom back of her words, held back because she won’t confess, gives the reader a double meaning in what she says. “I need to live a whole life, in just a year,” she says to herself, and she sets out to do it. And Henry, whose life she had been wearing out “like a gentle grindstone,” begins to rejuvenate in the audacity of their trip. He fishes and he steers, he worries about the snags and is doubly comforted when they tie up the Myosotis in safety each night. And when at Nebraska City they are joined by Mr. Mortimer, who says he knows the channel and who has with him a blonde young lady who worked in the local hairdressing salon, the Parkinsons, instead of being shocked, are rather grateful. At this point the reader must take over and surrender as Minerva does to the steering of Mr. Mortimer.