“Friendship is built on shared experiences, be they of the mind, the
heart or the soul.” Perhaps that is why Joe Lincoln counted his friends
by the tens of thousands. For forty years as a writer he shared the
greatest adventure of all with the world--the adventure of living.
“He placed that adventure in New England, mostly on Cape Cod and he
found it chiefly among the people of the little towns, sometimes
inland, sometimes against the constant wash of the sea. But whatever he
was, to read him is to be one with his people, to share their laughter
and tears, to participate as no bystander could in their affairs; to
relish at first hand the homely wisdom and pithy wit which permeated
his pages and to identify experience, thought and feeling with one’s
own.”--Thus wrote Alice Dixon Bond, literary editor of the Boston
Herald, in an interview with Joe Lincoln in September of 1941. Further
describing her visit with Lincoln, she wrote:
“It was one of those rare September days when summer lingers in the
soft haze of a cloudless horizon and the warm sun turns garden and
field into a riot of brilliant color. The sea was a magnificent blue
ribbon around our world, held in place here by great sand dunes topped
with gently waving grasses.
“Mr. Lincoln sat contentedly puffing his pipe, gazing across the
nodding heads of flowers to the line of surf along the shore to where
Portugal was lifting her head from the sea, if we had the magic eyes to
see her.
“We were seated in the sun porch of his house at Chatham, a Cape Cod
house of gracious rooms and spacious views, filled with the treasures
he and Mrs. Lincoln had collected, and I had been asking him about his
newest book.
“‘No,’ he said, ‘I do not feel that realism and sordidness are
synonymous terms. I have wanted to tell of the people I have known.
By that I don’t mean that I draw my characters from life, for I most
certainly do not. If I did, I might hurt someone’s feelings. I draw
their characteristics from people I have known. I believe that most
people want to be decent according to their lights and capacities. I
never could write a crusader book, for the extreme reformer sees only
one side. There is always an excuse for any action, or if there is
not, we can find one. Life contains both laughter and sorrow and to me
one is as real as the other. I have chosen the cheerful side because
I would much rather make people cheerful and keep myself cheerful at
the same time. I think tolerance is essential. I have written of the
average man, for it is the average man who is the backbone of the
nation.’
“Joe Lincoln loved the Cape, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t
laugh at its peculiarities. And he made his reader laugh with him until
finally he created a world of laughter.
“The world owes Ripley Hitchcock,” according to Mrs. Bond, “a vast
debt, for it was he, back in the early days of Joe’s career, who
convinced young Lincoln that he could write a novel. Hitchcock was also
the man who discovered David Harum.
“‘I could go through the Cape,’ Lincoln said, ‘and find a great many
mean people, as one could anywhere for that matter, but I haven’t.’
In that fact lies one of the greatest charms in the Lincoln books.
For they have kindness in them. His work is not brash or contemptuous
or arrogant. His people are his readers’ people, impelled by the same
longings, harried by the same troubles; and if they prove to have feet
of clay, well--Joe managed, in one way or other, to get them sea boots
in which to weather the storm of life.”
During the interview Lincoln talked of the history of the Cape, of the
great fortunes which were made there. Many Cape Cod men were in the
revolution, but the war of 1812 affected that section more directly
when it fell under the blockade of New England’s seaboard. There was a
big frigate trapped in Provincetown harbor, and another in Nantucket,
and sloops patrolled the coast. Salt was one of the great businesses
of the day. Chatham alone had twenty-three salt works. But during the
blockade, Lincoln said, one authority states that two hundred thousand
bushels of that necessity remained static there.
After his son Freeman was born the Lincolns moved to New Jersey, and
later moved to a lovely home in Villa Nova, Pennsylvania. But the Cape
reclaimed Joe Lincoln and at the time of the interview in question
he was making his official residence at Chatham and he had again
become a legal resident of Massachusetts. This was in 1941. Lincoln’s
Chatham home was a lovely place. A great hedge guarded the house from
the street while the back opened to a lovely garden with magnificent
views of the sea and sky. The living room reflected his taste and his
affection, for here was the special loveliness of Cape Cod. Hooked rugs
of varied pattern strew the floor: the chairs and couches were simple,
practical, graceful in line and eminently comfortable. A miniature
bureau, shining like satin, flanked a chintz-covered love seat stirring
one’s imagination as to its history before it came to rest there.
Everywhere in the room the lovely grain of maple and pine was polished
to a burnished gleam. A set of shelves supported a rare collection of
old glass. In this room, too, was a Tobey jug from the Widow Nolan’s
collection and among the lustre pitchers was a Leeds Lustre resist in
the Bird pattern.
In the room also was a Sandwich glass salt dish with a cover--the only
one Lincoln had ever seen--and the mantle was dotted with choice China
ornaments collected here and there throughout the Cape. Among them were
two extremely supercilious dogs with flower baskets in their mouths.
The dining room held some lovely pewter, together with baseline
Sandwich glass, and everywhere throughout the house were paintings and
models of old ships.
Above the living room mantle was Harold Brett’s painting of Silas
Bradford’s Boy, while another one hung in the Lincoln’s bedroom above
the fireplace.
Upstairs the rooms were filled with furniture made from maples which
would turn an envious collector a delicate mauve. The rooms opened into
a spacious hall. The Lincoln suite was at one end of the hall and here
were some of the choicest objects in the house.
To describe Lincoln’s collection of paper weights, his ships or his
glass would take hours, according to Mrs. Bond.
For recreation the author played golf or fished. In his dining room was
a carved bass done by E. Harwick, the nationally known carver of birds.
Since this was the first fish Mr. Harwick ever did, and because it was
done at his instigation, Joe Lincoln treasured it accordingly.
“The New Hope,” said Mrs. Bond in her Boston Herald article, written as
the result of the interview, “is his latest book and will be published
September 29 (1941). It is another collaboration with his son, Freeman,
their third. Counting these, his volumes of poetry, and his one play,
this will be Mr. Lincoln’s forty-sixth book.
“Time never hangs heavily on his hands,” continued the article. “He
can’t sleep, once the sun comes into his room, so he is an early riser.
After breakfast, which is a modest one (every two years he takes off
fifteen pounds, for somehow they do keep returning) he reads the Boston
Herald--he volunteered this. By nine o’clock he is at his desk.”
Lincoln’s afternoons were spent on the links or with rod and reel,
while the evenings were given over to reading and the enjoyment of
friends.
“What he has done for New England,” said Mrs. Bond, “is priceless for
he has made her traditions, her manners, and her people a part of
America’s memory, while his characters reach out into universal living.
“So New England does well to honor this grand old man (Lincoln was
about seventy-one at this time) whose spirit is one of the blithe ones
of the world and whose kindly knowledge has helped many.
“Joe Lincoln has truly ‘lived in a house by the side of the road and
been a friend to man’.”
Lincoln’s new book, “The New Hope,” was published in September, 1941.
The story took place in the typical but also mythical town of Trumet
during the British blockade in the summer of 1814.
As far as Trumet was concerned, the townsfolk did not have to worry
about starvation. “You can’t starve a population that lives where
the bays and coves squirm with fish.” But they could worry about
stagnation. Coop a sea-faring man up on land and something is bound to
happen which it did in Lincoln’s book. It was Jonathan Bangs who first
gave Captain Isaiah Dole his big idea. Jonathan and the captain had
seen plenty of fighting together aboard a privateer, and Jonathan had
come to Trumet with the captain while the latter recovered from his
wounds. The idea had to do with converting an idle merchant ship into
a privateer, and then slipping out to sea past the British blockade to
claim whatever prizes the water might offer.
But the sailing was not smooth--for anybody. First the British brought
their ships in and closed the mouth of the harbor. Then, although “The
New Hope” was a cooperative venture and every man concerned was a loyal
patriot and a friend of everyone else, secrets began to leak through to
the enemy. More than one thing went wrong. Suspicion reared its ugly
head. There were unexplained happenings, voices in the darkness, a
lovely girl who might be English, an almost disastrous fire, a British
spy, and a foul murder.
For good measure the Lincolns threw in some pretty keen Yankee
ingenuity, some bitter hatred, some kindly “characters,” a nice
romance, and a woman “whose tongue always had a full breeze astern of
it.”
“The New Hope” at times had all the excitement and violence of a
riptide, as mystery, adventure, love and patriotism joined their swift
currents, forming a turbulent, full-bodied and suspenseful book. It was
Joe and Freeman Lincoln at their best.