I have since thought that "Paradise Lost" would have been a better
title for that book. It was published in the autumn of 1907, and
since that time our life has never been the same. By some mischance
the book became the success of the season; it was widely commended
as "a gospel of health and sanity" and Andrew received, in almost
every mail, offers from publishers and magazine editors who wanted
to get hold of his next book. It is almost incredible to what
stratagems publishers will descend to influence an author. Andrew
had written in "Paradise Regained" of the tramps who visit us, how
quaint and appealing some of them are (let me add, how dirty),
and how we never turn away any one who seems worthy. Would you
believe that, in the spring after the book was published, a
disreputable-looking vagabond with a knapsack, who turned up one
day, blarneyed Andrew about his book and stayed overnight, announced
himself at breakfast as a leading New York publisher? He had chosen
this ruse in order to make Andrew's acquaintance.
You can imagine that it didn't take long for Andrew to become
spoiled at this rate! The next year he suddenly disappeared, leaving
only a note on the kitchen table, and tramped all over the state for
six weeks collecting material for a new book. I had all I could do
to keep him from going to New York to talk to editors and people of
that sort. Envelopes of newspaper cuttings used to come to him, and
he would pore over them when he ought to have been ploughing corn.
Luckily the mail man comes along about the middle of the morning
when Andrew is out in the fields, so I used to look over the letters
before he saw them. After the second book ("Happiness and Hayseed"
it was called) was printed, letters from publishers got so thick
that I used to put them all in the stove before Andrew saw
them--except those from the Decameron Jones people, which sometimes
held checks. Literary folk used to turn up now and then to interview
Andrew, but generally I managed to head them off.
But Andrew got to be less and less of a farmer and more and more
of a literary man. He bought a typewriter. He would hang over the
pigpen noting down adjectives for the sunset instead of mending the
weather vane on the barn which took a slew so that the north wind
came from the southwest. He hardly ever looked at the Sears Roebuck
catalogues any more, and after Mr. Decameron came to visit us and
suggested that Andrew write a book of country poems, the man became
simply unbearable.
And all the time I was counting eggs and turning out three meals a
day, and running the farm when Andrew got a literary fit and would
go off on some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book.
(I wish you could have seen the state he was in when he came back
from these trips, hoboing it along the roads without any money or a
clean sock to his back. One time he returned with a cough you could
hear the other side of the barn, and I had to nurse him for three
weeks.) When somebody wrote a little booklet about "The Sage of
Redfield" and described me as a "rural Xantippe" and "the domestic
balance-wheel that kept the great writer close to the homely
realities of life" I made up my mind to give Andrew some of his own
medicine. And that's my story.