WOODCHUCK LODGE AND LITERATURE
Have I proof of my contention here? Throughout this book, on many sides
of the question, I have argued that the earth is as young as it ever
was; that Nature, though it can all but be destroyed in spots, as in
New York City, cannot be tamed; that we are still the stuff of dreams,
if we could find rest for our souls and the chance to dream. We are
not lacking imagination and the power for high endeavor. We master
material things; we can also handle the raw materials of the spirit
and give them enduring form. But how can we come by the raw materials
of the spirit? And where shall we find new patterns on which to mould
our new and enduring forms? Matter and pattern are still to be found in
nature--substance, essence, presence,
“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”
I have had much to do with young people, especially with those of
creative minds, divinely capable minds, could they be freed from the
doubt of their times, and the fear of their own powers. Here let me
give them a glimpse of an _old_ man of their own times, these evil
times when all of the raw material of books has been used up; an old
man with a boy’s eyes and a child’s heart and a pen and a bluebird or
two, and a woodchuck--and, of course, a magical chance.
It was an October day. And how it rained that day! An October day in
the Catskills, and I was making my way, with my friend DeLoach, out of
the little village of Roxbury by the road that winds up the hills to
Woodchuck Lodge. Hardscrabble Creek knew it was raining, and met me
noisily at a turn of the road, just before I came to the square stone
schoolhouse (now a dwelling) where little Johnny Burroughs had gone for
his book learning some seventy-five years before. Leaving the creek, I
found myself on a roller-coaster road athwart the hills, making up with
spurt and dip to a low, weathered farmhouse, thin and gray and old,
that seemed to be resting by the roadside thus far over the mountain
on its way to the valley.
I knew it from the distance and through the rain, only it seemed even
older, smaller, poorer than I had expected to find it. But how close
it sat to the roadside, and how eagerly it gazed down into the valley
where the store and the station and the meeting-house were--to see who
might be stirring, I thought, down there in the valley! Or perhaps it
sat here for the landscape. I was approaching Woodchuck Lodge, and it
seemed very old and lonely in the rain that slanted along the wide gray
slopes, and too frail to stand long against the pull of the valley and
the push of the heights crowding hard upon it from behind.
A tiny kitchen garden at its corner, and across the road a stone wall,
an orchard of untrimmed apple trees bent with fruit, and a small barn
on the edge of a sharply falling field--this was the picture in the
rain, the immediate foreground of the picture, which stood out on a
field of hay-lands and pastures rolling out of the rainy sky and down,
far down where their stone walls ran into the mists at the bottom of
the valley.
These were the ancestral fields. Burroughs was born a little farther
along this road, the house no longer standing. Here at the Lodge he was
now living, and in the old barn across the road he had a study. These
were his fields by right of pen, not plough; these were his buildings,
too, and they showed it. They sheltered him and gave him this outlook,
but they utterly lacked the pride of the gilded weathervane, the
stolid, four-square complacency, that well-fed, well-stocked security
of the prosperous American farm. An old pair of tramps were house
and barn, lovers of the hills, resting here above the valley. It was
in that old barn, on an overturned chicken-coop, with a door or some
other thing as humble for table, that Burroughs had written most of
the chapters in “The Summit of the Years,” in “Time and Change,” “The
Breath of Life,” and “Under the Apple-Trees.”
So a literary farm should look, I suppose,--a farm that produces books
as abundantly as a prairie farm produces cattle and corn; yet every
farm, I think, should have a patch of poetry, as every professional
poet certainly needs to keep a garden and a pig. For years Burroughs
grew fancy grapes and celery for the New York market, along with his
literary essays for the reading public.
As we came in on the vine-covered porch of the Lodge, we were met by
Dr. Barrus, Burroughs’s physician and biographer, who told us with
considerable anxiety that the old man was not at home.
“He is out visiting his traps, I suppose,” she said. “He’s just like a
boy. I can’t do anything with him. He’ll come home wringing wet. And
he’s not a bit well.”
He came home true to form. It was an hour later, perhaps, that I saw,
from the steps, a dim figure in the blur of the rain: an old man
plodding slowly down the hill road, a stick and a steel trap in his
left hand, and in his right hand a heavy woodchuck.
It was John Burroughs, the real Burroughs, for I knew as I watched him
that I had never seen, never clearly seen, this man before--not exactly
this simple, rain-soaked man with the snow of more than eighty winters
on his head, with the song of eternal springtime in his heart, and a
woodchuck, like a lantern, in his hand.
This figure in the rain should be seen coming down every page of
Burroughs’s books. Every line should be read in the light of this
lantern in his hand, for its wick is in his heart, and its flame
shines from “Wake-Robin” to “The Summit of the Years.” Burroughs was
the eternal boy--splashing through the puddles, wet to the skin; the
boy for whom these fields of his father’s farm were as wild as the
jungles of Africa; and this woodchuck in his hand (it _was_ a big one!)
a very elephant, except for the tusks. But to be like this is to be
both boy and philosopher--boy and writer, I should say. And to see him
thus--falling with the rain, whirling with the dust, singing with the
birds, growing with the grass, his whole being one with the elements,
earth and wild-life and weather--thus to see the man is to know how to
read his books.
As he came up to the porch, his slouch hat spouting like an
eaves-trough, he greeted me cordially, but as a stranger, not
recognizing me for an instant; then dashing the rain from his eyes,
he dropped the woodchuck, drew off, and with a quick righthander to my
chest, which almost took me off my feet, he cried, “Sharp, we’ll have
woodchuck for dinner!”
And we did--not the one he had just dropped on the floor, for that
one he skinned and salted and gave me to bring home to Boston. We had
canned woodchuck that noon at the Lodge. It was Burroughs’s custom to
serve his guests a real literary dinner; and of course it must savor of
the locality.
This called for woodchuck, or “Roxbury Lamb,” as you preferred; and for
roast Roxbury Lamb the rule for rabbit-stew prevails: first get your
woodchuck; not always readily done, for the meat-market down at the
village is sometimes out of woodchuck. So the Laird of the Lodge keeps
them canned ahead.
The clouds cleared in the afternoon, the sun came down upon the
mountains, and we looked out from the porch over a world so large and
new and lovely that I remember it still as a keen pain, so unprepared
was I for it, with my level background of meadow and marsh and bay.
Endless reaches of river and bay, of wavy marshland and hazy barrens of
pine, were my heritage of landscape as a child. And I have never been
able to measure up to the mountains, nor to this scene, here from the
porch--this reach without level; space both deep and high as well as
wide; this valley completely hiding a village below you; ridges above
you where stone walls climb over the sky; mountains far across with
forests flung over their shoulders, and farms, like colored patchwork,
stitched into the rents of the forests; runnels singing down the
pastures; and roads, your road to school, so close to the verge that
only the stone wall stays you from stepping off the edge of the world!
None of this had I known as a boy. “Who couldn’t write,” I muttered,
“born into this glorious world!” I have seen much grander mountains.
“Not a rugged, masculine touch in all the view,” Burroughs said to
me. “It is all sweet and feminine, and doubtless has had a feminizing
influence upon my character and writing.” It may be so. There is a
plenty of wilder, stormier landscape than this in these Western
Catskills, but certainly none that I ever saw that is lovelier for a
human home. And here Burroughs now sleeps, under the boulder where he
played as a child, and where all this beauty of winding valley and
blue, bending sky upon the mountains lies forever about him.
There is something terribly important and lasting about childhood.
Almost any environment will do, if only the child is happy. It is the
child who counts. In every child the world is recreated and in his
memory stays recreated. More and more, as the years lengthen, do we
find ourselves longing--for the pine barrens, for the vast green reach
of the marshes; and were my feet free this summer day, they would run
with my heart to the river--not to the mountains; to the river, the
Maurice River, where the bubbling wrens build in the smother of reed
and calamus, and where this very day the pink-white marshmallows make,
at high noon, a gorgeous sunset over miles of the meadows. I love and
understand those great, green levels of marshland as I shall love and
understand no other face of nature, it may be. I know perfectly what
Lanier means when he sings,
“Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn.”
I said the clouds cleared late that afternoon, but it was still raining
when, after dinner, I brought a box from the woodshed to the front
porch for Burroughs to skin the woodchuck. Here we sat down together,
the flabby, flaccid marmot between us, the whole October afternoon our
own.
Burroughs pulled a rudimentary whetstone out of his coat pocket and
touched up the blade of his knife--of his spirit, too, running his
thumb along the blade of every faculty as he settled to the skinning,
his shining eyes, his vibrant voice, his eager movements, all showing
how razor-keen an edge the old man was still capable of taking. He got
hold of a forefoot of the ’chuck and started to talk on the flight of
birds, reviewing the various stages of the controversy on the soaring
of hawks that he had been carrying on in the press, when, suddenly
dropping his knife, he disappeared through the door and returned in
a minute with a letter from some scientist, whose argument, as I
remember it, was wholly at variance with Burroughs’s theory, but which
closed with a strange word, a word the old man had never seen before
and could not find in his dictionary. It was some aeronautical term, I
think. Handing me the letter, his finger, as well as his eyes, fastened
to that stranger from beyond the dictionary, he said:
“That chap doesn’t know much about soaring hawks; but there’s a new
word. See that! He knows a heap more than I do about the English
language.”
He sat down to the skinning again. No cut had yet been made, nor ever
would be made, apparently, unless he used the back of his blade, for
it was plain that Burroughs kept that old whetstone for his wits only.
He sawed away and talked as if inspired. I held the other forefoot, a
short, broad foot, like a side-hill gouger’s, on the oldest, toughest
’chuck in the Catskills.
“Do you know what I am going to do?” he asked, switching the
conversation into the hard-working knife. “I’m going to pickle this
old rascal and send him by you to your family. I want you all to have a
dish of ‘Roxbury Lamb.’”
“But we have our own Hingham Lamb out on Mullein Hill,” I suggested
cautiously. “And I don’t like to rob you this way.”
“No robbery at all. Besides, these are a better breed than yours in
Hingham.”
“But my folks don’t seem very fond of ’em,” I protested. “They cook
with a rank odor.”
“Oh, you don’t know how to prepare them,” he answered. “Let me show you
a trick,” and deftly cutting in between the neck and the shoulder, he
took out the thyroid glands.
“Now you’re going to take this one home. There’ll be no strong smell
when you cook this fellow.”
* * * * *
Our talk turned to poetry--the skinning still going forward--the
woodchuck brimming full of verse; for Burroughs, at every other turn of
his knife, would seem to open up a vein of song. The beauty of nature
to Burroughs had always been more than skin deep. He wanted the skin
for a coat; the carcass he wanted for a roast; but here was a chance
for him to look into some of the hidden, fearful things of nature, and
the sight inside of that woodchuck made him stop and sing.
But how old and frail he looked! And he was old, very old, eighty-four
the coming April 9. And he was suddenly sad.
Resting a bit from his labor, he began to chant to the slackening rain:
“’Tis a dull sight
To see the year dying.
When winter winds
Set yellow woods sighing,
Sighing, O sighing.
“When such a time cometh,
I do retire
Into an old room
Beside a bright fire;
Oh, pile a bright fire!
“I never look out
Nor attend to the blast,
For all to be seen
Is the leaves falling fast,
Falling, falling!”
And he rubbed his thin hands together, spread them to the warmth, and
repeated two or three times,
“Oh, pile a bright fire!”
“Oh, pile a bright fire!”
More than once, I heard him returning to those lines; and saw him
several times reading the last stanzas of the poem from a typewritten
copy on his porch table, chafing his hands the while, and extending
them before the imaginary fire as if they were cold, or as if he felt
through his hands, so sensitive was he physically, an actual fire in
the written lines. The poem is Edward Fitzgerald’s “Old Song,” and I am
sure Burroughs was learning it by heart, and making rather hard work of
it, I thought, for one who had already in memory so much good poetry.
But he was getting very old.
Then, at my request he said some of the lines of his own poem,
“Waiting.” “The only thing I ever did,” he remarked, “with real poetry
in it.”
“How about the philosophy in it,” I inquired, “Do you find it sound
after all these years?”
There was an audible chuckle inside of him. Then rather solemnly he
replied: “My father killed himself early trying to clear these acres
of debts and stones. I might have been in my grave, too, these forty
years had I tried to hurry it his way. I waited. By and by Henry Ford
came along and cleared up the whole farm for me. Here I am, and here
“Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more ’gainst Time or Fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.”
We were soon deep in a discussion of free verse, no hungry trout
ever rising to the fly with more snap than Burroughs. He called the
free-verse writers the Reds of American literature, the figure sticking
to him, until some months later in California he worked the idea out
into a brief newspaper article under that title, the last piece, I
think, for publication from his pen.
“Name me one good modern poem,” I said, “moulded on the old forms, with
rhyme and meter.”
He let go his knife again, turned his face once more to the rain,
through which the mountains were now emerging, and asked,
“Do you know Loveman’s ‘Raining’ and how he wandered up from Georgia
to find himself in New York City, his boat gone, or his money gone,
or something gone--for he was someway stranded, I believe--and it was
raining?” And the old man began--
“‘It isn’t raining rain to me,
It’s raining daffodils;
In every dimpled drop I see
Wild flowers on the hills.
The clouds of gray engulf the day,
And overwhelm the town,
It isn’t raining rain to me,
It’s raining roses down.,’”
while the rain across the hills, shot through with sunset light, fell
all violets and clover-bloom and roses on the mountains and on the roof
of Woodchuck Lodge.
The thing on the box between us was utterly forgotten, but only for the
moment.
“Damn those fleas!” the old poet exploded, at the end of the
recitation, swinging with both hands at his long white whiskers, “That
’chuck’s alive with fleas!”
So I had observed; and I had been speculating, as I watched them
quitting their sinking craft and boarding the sweeping beard of the
poet, how many of them it might take to halt the flow of song. I was
far off in my reckoning. Burroughs knocked them out and went on:
“That’s a good poem because it goes straight to the heart. It’s an
experience. He lived it. And its form is perfect. You can’t change a
syllable in it. It’s on the old forms, yet it’s true to itself. And see
how simple, direct, and sincere it is! and how lovely! I call that good
poetry.”
* * * * *
We had been more than three hours getting the pelt off that woodchuck
and all of the poetry out of him. As I sat by, I saw what I had hardly
realized before: that the hand with the knife must often rest, though
the eager mind seemed almost incapable of resting.
The national elections were approaching, and from poetry we plunged
into politics, where I feared we were bound to disagree, but where,
to my surprise, I found we were standing together on the League of
Nations, Burroughs having forsaken his party on that issue.
“It’s the only thing!” he cried. “That’s what we fought for. Rob us of
that, and the whole terrible sacrifice is futile--criminal!”
And later, after my return home, he wrote me:
“Well, the elections did not go as both of us had hoped. DeLoach was
on the winning side, as I suppose all the great moneyed interests
were. But thank heaven I am not in that crowd. If it means an utter
repudiation of the League of Nations, then for the first time I am
ashamed that I am an American. If I were in Europe I could not hold up
my head and say, ‘I am from the United States!’ If we have failed to
see ourselves as a member of the great family of nations, with solemn
duties toward the rest of the world, to perform as such a member, then
we have slumped morally as badly as did the Germans when they set out
to enslave the rest of the world!”
But to return to Woodchuck Lodge, to the old man with the boy’s
jack-knife in his hand, and the boy’s heart in his breast--and so, the
poet’s outlook in his eyes. For he was more poet than scientist, more
poet than theologian, though every poet, like all Gaul, is divided into
three parts, and these--science, music, and theology--are the parts.
The theologian is the ultimate thinker. His chief attribute is
consistency--even unto death. Nothing will shatter a system of
theology as will a trifling inconsistency. Burroughs was a bad
theologian, the worst I know by the test of consistency. Yet who
among the theologians is more religious? Or leaves us with a realer
consciousness of the presence of God in nature?
“You and I approach this thing from different angles,” he said to
me. “We come to God down different roads. Our terms differ. You say
‘Father.’ I say ‘Nature.’ But whatever we call Him, He is the same, and
the same for each of us. Our divergent paths at the start, come out
together at the end. We worship the same God.”
We did differ radically in our approach, in our terminology, and as I
had always thought, must of necessity differ as radically in our faiths
and works. That was a foolish, vainglorious conceit. I wish every
disconcerted reader of “The Light of Day” and “Accepting the Universe”
had heard the old author interpret himself that day. That reader would
have understood, as he sat there watching the light of a real day
breaking in over the rainy autumn landscape, what Carruth meant by,
“A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky,
The ripe rich tint of the corn-fields,
And the wild geese sailing high,
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod--
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God!”
The pelt was finally off; the carcass in pickle for me; and the sun
was out, flooding Montgomery Valley and the heaving ranges beyond. An
automobile load of callers came, stopped a little time, and went away;
another load came and went away, and Burroughs, now quite rested,
brought out the manuscripts of two new books, which were about ready
for the publishers.
I looked at the piles of work, then at the frail old man who had heaped
them up, and thought with shame of my own strength--and laziness. To
be approaching eighty-four with one book on the press and two other
books in manuscript! What a long steady stroke he had pulled across
these more than sixty years of writing to be bringing him in at the
finish, two full volumes ahead of the race! Three volumes indeed, for
“Accepting the Universe” had not yet come from the press.
The quiet and calm of it all deeply impressed me. The extreme opposite
in temperament and action from his friend Roosevelt, there was nothing
“strenuous” about this plodding old man, nor ever had been. “Serene I
fold my hands and wait” he had written in his twenty-third year, and
had practiced all these four-and-eighty years. Yet look at this amount
of durable work accomplished. It is well for us Americans to remember
just now that there is another than the “strenuous” type of life, which
is just as worthy of emulation, and which is likely to be even more
effective.
This was an October day at Woodchuck Lodge. Sixty-one years before
the “Atlantic Monthly” was actually printing Burroughs’s first essay,
“Expression.” I looked at the old man beside me with the pen in his
fingers. Was it the same man? the same pen? Lowell was the editor;
then Fields, Howells, Aldrich, Scudder, Page, Perry, to the present
editor, who has held his chair these dozen years; and I watched the
pen in Burroughs’s hand travel slowly across a corrected line of the
manuscript and I remembered that in all the years since Lowell was
editor, not for a single year had that pen failed to appear in the
pages of the “Atlantic.” Was it strange that as I looked from the
pen away to the Catskills surrounding me I wondered if I were really
looking into Montgomery Valley and not into Sleepy Hollow?
We guests had a plenty that night, but Burroughs went to bed
supperless. We guests slept indoors, but Burroughs made his bed out on
the front porch, where he could see the stars come over the mountains,
and the gates of dawn swing wide on the wooded crests, when the new
sweet day should come through and down into Montgomery Valley.
For Burroughs has lived and loved everything he has written. He cannot
write of anything else. Our present-day writers, especially our poets
and nature writers, take the wings of the morning (or of the night)
unto the uttermost parts of the earth for copy. Burroughs visited
distant places; but he always wrote about the things at home. “Fresh
Fields,” to be sure, is out of England; yet England was only an older
home. Burroughs had seen strange, extraordinary, tropical things; seen
them, to write little about them, however, for it is only the homely,
the ordinary, the familiar things that stirred his imagination and
moved his pen. These were his things, the furniture of his house, the
folks of his town; for it was the hearth where he lived, his home, that
he loved, and it was the creatures living on it with him that gave him
his great theme. “The whole gospel of my books,” he wrote, “is stay at
home, see the wonderful and beautiful and the simple things all about
you. Make the most of the near at hand.”
* * * * *
It was a constant wonder to me how one could be so simple as Burroughs,
and yet know so many places, persons, and books. Burroughs had met
many people; he had read many books, and had written more than a
score himself; yet he was the simplest man I ever knew, as simple
as a child,--simpler, indeed. For children may be suspicious and
self-conscious, and even uninterested; but Burroughs’s interest and
curiosity grew with the years. He carried his culture and his knife
and his whetstone in his pocket. They belonged to him; but he belonged
strictly to himself. He remained to the end what the Lord made him--and
that is to be original.
Pietro, the sculptor, has made Burroughs in bronze, resting on a rock,
his arm shading his face, his eyes peering keenly into the future or
the far-away. Pietro has made him a seer or a prophet. He was much more
the lover and the poet. I sat with Burroughs on that same rock, the
morning after the rainy day at the Lodge, and talked with him of some
things long past, of many things round about us, but of few things of
the future. I saw him shield his face with his arm, and look far off
from the rock--to the rounded, green-crested hills in the distance,
and down into the beautiful valley below. But most of the time he was
watching a chipmunk near by, or scanning the pasture for woodchucks.
Had I been Pietro I should have made the old man flat on that boulder,
his beard a patch of lichen, his slouch hat hard down on his eyes, his
head just over the round of the rock--and down the slope, at the mouth
of his burrow, a big woodchuck on his haunches.
“I’ve been studying the woodchuck all my life,” he said, as we sat
there on the rock, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him.”
I do not know whether Burroughs climbed over the walls and up through
the field again to this favorite spot of his boyhood in the few
remaining days he had at the Lodge. This may have been the last time he
looked out with seeing eyes over this landscape of valley and mountain
that had been one of the deepest, most abiding influences of his life.
As we sat there together, the largeness and glory of the world: colors,
contours, the valley depths, the quiet hills, the wealth of life, the
full, deep flood of autumn light--almost too much for common human
eyes--the old man beside me said, with a sigh:
“I love it. But it is hard to live up to it. Sometimes, especially of
late, I feel it a burden too great to bear.” Then, as if guilty of some
evil thought, he brightened instantly, pointed out a dam that he had
built as a boy in the field below us, for his own swimming-hole, the
ridge of sod and stone still showing; told me stories of his parents;
described his sugar-making in the “bush” behind us; nor referred again
to the burden of the years, weighing so heavily now upon him, until we
were leaving. Then, as he came out to the road to see us off, he said
with tears in his eyes:
“I hate to have you go. I wish you could stay. You boys are life to me
now. Come again soon. Good-bye.”
We promised we would, and we did--in April, the next April, when we
went up to say our last good-bye. Meantime he was off to California for
the winter months. Before leaving he wrote to me from West Park, his
home on the Hudson:
I neglected to make any apologies for the long letter I wrote you
the other day. I promise not to do so again. I am sending you an old
notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings, as you will see.
I send it as a keepsake.
We are off for California to-morrow. Hope to be there in early
December. We leave Chicago on the 29th. My address there will be La
Jolla, San Diego. Good luck to you and yours.
Ever your friend
JOHN BURROUGHS
He kept his promise. This was his last letter to me. They were not
very happy months in California. Visitors came to see him as usual;
he spoke in the schools; and wrote up to the very end; but he was
weak, often sick, and always longing for home. He knew if he was ever
to see home again he must not delay long; and he counted the days.
He wished to celebrate his birthday with his old friends, at the old
place; and he was on the way, speeding homeward, with most of the
long journey covered, when, suddenly, the end came. And is it at all
strange that his last uttered words, as he sank into unconsciousness,
should have been “How far are we from home?”
On the front of the boulder which marks his grave, those last words
might well be cut, as expressing the real theme of all his books, the
dominant note in all his life.
His old friends kept his birthday in the old place--in the “Nest”
at Riverby, for the funeral; and the next day, his eighty-fourth
birthday, they carried him into his beloved mountains, to his grave
by the rock, where so lately we had talked together, and where, since
childhood, he had found an altar for his soul.
How great a man Burroughs was I do not know. Time knows. I know that
he had three of the elements of greatness as a writer: simplicity,
sincerity, and a true feeling for form. And he had these to an
uncommon degree. I know that great men and little children loved him;
and that three generations already have been led oftener and farther
into the out-of-doors by him than by any other American writer.
I know how Burroughs thought of himself and of Thoreau; for in a
letter, several years ago to me he wrote:
Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human, but he is
as certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I think is much
greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot approach.
But I am not trying to estimate Burroughs. I am only sketching, through
the gray rain and in the golden light at the far end of the autumn, one
whom thousands of us read and love.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.