The great service Mr. Highstone has rendered in his book is to clarify the scene. He tells what self-sufficiency means, tells where back-to-the-landers go wrong and how they confuse the idea of being self-sustaining with the idea of running a country business for profit. Of course even the most realistic subsistence farmers are sometimes wanderers in the paths of evil. I can picture the day in the Highstone family when the news got round that Father was writing a book called Practical Farming for Beginners. He started secretly, but writers give themselves away eventually, and pretty soon the family knew that something was up.

  “What’s Pop doing, Mom?” one of the little Highstones asked.

  “Sh-h, he’s writing a book, dear,” replied Mrs. Highstone.

  “You can’t eat a book, Mom.”

  “Well, no-o. But you see your father will receive money from the sale of the book, and with the money we can buy what we need.”

  “What about that sauerkraut he was going to put up today?”

  “He will soon have money so we can buy some sauerkraut.”

  “Will we have sugar in our coffee instead of honey?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s cheating, isn’t it, Mom?”

  “I wouldn’t know, darling. Ask your father.”

  And so, above the Highstone farm, the specter of Profit raised its ugly head.

  [ September 1940 ]

  SANITATION

  The good world will be impossible to achieve until parents quit teaching their children about materialism. Children are naturally active and somewhat materialistic, but they are not incurably purposeful. Their activity has a fanciful quality and is harmless although often destructive to property.

  We teach our child many things I don’t believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, but I do not honestly think there is any considerable good in punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by example, that the greatest defeat in life was to miss a train. Only after many years did I learn that an escaping train carries away with it nothing vital to my health. Railroad trains are such magnificent objects we commonly mistake them for Destiny.

  We teach cleanliness, sanitation, hygiene; but I am suspicious of these practices. A child who believes that every scratch needs to be painted with iodine has lost a certain grip on life that he may never regain and has acquired a frailty of spirit that may unfit him for living. The sterile bandage is the flag of modern society, but I notice more and more of them are needed all the time, so terrible are the wars.

  We teach our child manners, but the only good manners are those that take shape somewhat instinctively, from a feeling of kinship with, or admiration for, other people who are behaving in a gentle fashion. Manners are a game adults play among themselves and with children to make life easier for themselves, but frequently they do not make life easier but harder. Often a meal hour is given over to the business of enforcing certain standards on a child, who becomes petulant and refractory, as do the parents, and the good goes out of the food and the occasion. It is impossible for a mature person to take manners seriously if he observes how easily they shape themselves to fit the circumstances. Ten or fifteen years ago it was customary in a restaurant to rise when someone approached your table. But when the Pullman-type booth was invented men discovered they couldn’t rise out of their seat without barking their belly on the edge of the table—so they abandoned the rule and kept their seat. This is most revealing. If a man were truly bent on showing respect for ladies he would do so even if it meant upsetting every table in the room.

  I teach my child to look at life in a thoroughly materialistic fashion. If he escapes and becomes the sort of person I hope he will become, it will be because he sees through the hokum that I hand out. He already shows signs of it.

  I guess there are two reasons for my not interpreting life more honestly for my son. First, it is too hard. (It’s almost a full-time job to interpret life honestly.) Second, if you tell a child about the hollowness of some of the conventions, he will be back in ten minutes using his information against you.

  When three coasting schooners, one right after another, tacked into our cove and dropped anchor I knew there must be something wrong. In these days one schooner is news, three in a bunch are almost unheard of. It soon was apparent that the vessels were dude-carriers. Their decks, instead of being loaded with pulp wood, held that most precious freight—men and women on excursion. I rowed out into the cove to see the sights and was invited aboard one of the vessels by an enthusiastic old sea dog who, after three full days of life afloat, was bursting with information of a feverishly nautical character. He kept tying knots in things and rushed me all over the little ship, above and below, showing off its rude appointments and instructing me in the proper handling of a coasting schooner in fair weather and foul, including the management of a sail that he called the “jib flapsail.” The schooners’ yawl boats were busy taking passengers ashore for a lobster dinner on the beach, and our usually quiet cove, whose only regular night visitors are myself and a great blue heron, was soon gay with the vagrant screams and cries of persons temporarily removed from their normal environment.

  I was told that the schooners were all owned by the same man—he has five or six of them and is buying others as fast as he can find them. Dude business is good. Not much has to be done to the ships—some bunks built into the hold, a toilet installed, a new sail or two, and some paint. They are old boats, most of them, but plenty good enough for summer-time cruising, and are competently sailed by Maine captains, who accept the arrival of vacationers on their foredeck with the same stoical reserve with which they accept fog on a flood tide at evening.

  The invasion of western ranches and eastern schooners by paying guests who are neither cowboys nor sailors is an American phenomenon we have grown used to. Some of the ranches have even moved east, to be nearer their cash customers. It’s hard to say why the spectacle is saddening to the spirit, but there is no denying the way I feel when I see a coaster that has lost her legitimate deckload and acquired a crew of part-time gypsies. There is nothing wrong about it—anybody who is having a good time can’t be wrong—yet the eternal quest for the romantic past that lives in the minds of men and causes them to strike attitudes of hardihood in clothes that don’t quite fit them is so obviously a quest for the unattainable. And it ends so abruptly in reality. A dude, at best, is merely an inexperienced actor in the revival of an old melodrama.

  One change that has come about since the World War is the change in people’s feelings about dachshunds. I remember that in the last war if a man owned a dachshund he was suspected of being pro-German. The growth in popularity of the standard breeds has brought about a spirit of tolerance, almost a spirit of understanding. My neighbors here in the country don’t seem to attach any dark significance to our dachshunds, Fred and Minnie. In this war if you own a dachshund people don’t think you are pro-Nazi, they just think you are eccentric.

  If there was a shadow of a doubt about my Americanism, on account of the dachshunds, it was completely dispelled in the town hall the other night when I won a wire-haired fox terrier puppy on a twenty-five-cent lottery ticket. Everyone knows that a man’s allegiance belongs to the country where the jackpot is.

  In a news broadcast the other morning, I heard a minor item that has stuck in my mind. The reporter said that the Nazis were “re-Germanizing” the land of Alsace, eliminating all French influence. He mentioned some rules which had been made to this end: Alsatian men named Henri would have to write their name Heinrich, and all inscriptions on tombstones would have to be in German. It seemed to me that the German ideal of purity had suddenly met its match, when it sought to “re-Germanize” not only the quick Alsatians but also the old bones in the cemeteries. To say that a man shall remember his dead in German is like saying that he shall perspire in German, or taste his spit in German. I doubt that the memory of the dead is capable of revision at the caprice of a conqueror.

  Conquest in the disciplined German manner seems curiously lacking in the lustiness that is traditionally associated with victory in war. In earlier, more robust times, the victorious soldiery roared through town, drinking the bars dry and ravishing the girls. Today the new conquest seems to be mechanical, inhibited, orderly, and grim. A man back from ambulance service with the French army tells me that the German soldiers he saw in occupied France were well behaved: they all had excellent cameras and went round taking pictures of everything in sight.

  In Alsace, they not only snap pictures, they diligently revise the legends on gravestones.

  I was spreading some poison in the barn the other day for mine enemies the rats, when I came upon an unopened copy of the Boston American, dated Sunday, October 31, 1909. It was a special “Achievement Number” and contained 128 pages—at that time the largest newspaper that had ever been published in New England. Probably there haven’t been many bigger ones since, either. It contained fifteen sections, each one of them something of a journalistic nosegay.

  By inquiring around I discovered that the paper was one that had been in possession of my wife’s father. She remembers that, as a little girl, the Boston American was never allowed in her house; and apparently her father, true to his principles, had declined to open the Achievement Number that had been sent to him and that, we discovered, contained his picture along with the pictures of some other Boston industrialists of the 1900’s. He didn’t throw the paper away but just set it aside, and it has moved about from garret to storage warehouse to barn for thirty years, while its achievements dimmed and its pages yellowed.

  It made pretty good reading. In thirty years the greatest change has really been in our feeling about achievement itself. The Boston American of 1909 exuded a supreme sense of calm and pride in America. That is no longer a typical newspaper reaction. Even on that October Sunday in the proud and prospering Boston of 1909, the news of the day failed somehow to corroborate the dream of achievement. Holdup men had victimized two ladies of Quincy. In South Braintree a young husband, after shooting his wife, had hurried to the cellar and slashed his throat. In Melrose a young boy ran stark mad through the streets, driven out of his mind by a thwarted desire to play on the Melrose High School team. And there was immorality in Scollay Square. The leading story on Page One was the most sobering and contradictory of all—it was the account of the Harvard-Army game. Harvard had managed to win the game for the Achievement Number, but in doing so had broken the neck of Army’s left tackle, E. A. Byrne, and the player had died on the field.

  [ October 1940 ]

  MOTOR CARS

  The motor car is, more than any other object, the expression of the nation’s character and the nation’s dream. In the free billowing fender, in the blinding chromium grilles, in the fluid control, in the ever-widening front seat, we see the flowering of the America that we know. It is of some interest to scholars and historians that the same autumn that saw the abandonment of the window crank and the adoption of the push button (removing the motorist’s last necessity for physical exertion) saw also the registration of sixteen million young men of fighting age and symphonic styling. It is of deep interest to me that in the same week Japan joined the Axis, DeSoto moved its clutch pedal two inches to the left—and that the announcements caused equal flurries among the people.

  I have long been interested in motor-car design, or the lack of it, and this for two reasons. First, I used to like motoring. Second, I am fascinated by the anatomy of decline, by the spectacle of people passively accepting a degenerating process that is against their own interests. A designer sitting at his drafting board blowing up a mudguard into some new fantastic shape is no more responsible to his public than is a political ruler who is quietly negotiating a treaty for the extension of his power. In neither case is the public in on the deal.

  Some years ago car manufacturers maliciously began reducing the size of windows and increasing the size of mudguards, or “fenders” as the younger generation calls them. By following no particular principle of design and by ignoring the functional aspects of an automobile, these manufacturers eventually achieved a vehicle that not only was stranger looking than anything that had heretofore been seen, but that, because it cut off the driver’s view, proved itself capable of getting into more scrapes. At first the advantages of this design were not apparent, but it didn’t take long before the motor-car industry realized that it had hold of something that, from a commercial angle, was pure gold. Every automobile was intrinsically self-defacing—and sometimes self-destructive—and this soon made the market ever so much brisker.

  I shall go into the evolution of this modern car in a little more detail. The way it happened was that a rumor got started (I don’t know why) that a motor car should be “longer” and “lower.” Now, obviously it was impractical to reduce, to any great extent, the height of a motor car. And it was just as impractical to increase, to any great extent, the length of a motor car. So the designers had to produce an illusion of great length and extreme lowness. The first thing they did was to raise the hood, so that the rest of the car would appear lower by contrast. Having raised the hood, they also raised the line of the doors, to carry out the illusion clear to the bitter end. This of course reduced the size of the windows, and the motorist began the long sinking process that was to end, in 1941, in his total immersion. Fenders also had to be raised (you notice that in order to build a “low” car everything was raised). But it was impossible to raise fenders without also enlarging them—otherwise they would rise right up off the wheels. So the designers began playing with new shapes in fenders, and they huffed and they puffed, and they produced some wonderful fenders—fenders that not only were a very odd shape indeed, but that would reach out and claw at everything that came anywhere near them.

  Meanwhile wheels had shrunk so small, and tires had grown so big, that the fenders were still further enlarged in a downward direction, so that they would not only be readily bumped but would scrape along the tops of curbings and culverts and miscellaneous mounds. They also made it impossible for anyone but a contortionist to change tires.

  The decrease in the size of windows, simultaneously with the increase in the size of fenders, produced astounding results in the automobile industry. Millions of motorists who had become reasonably proficient in driving their cars without denting them suddenly lost that proficiency because they no longer could see where they were going (or where they had been), and because the dentable surfaces had been so drastically enlarged. Car owners who were accustomed to keeping a car for six or eight years, found that their modern car was all dented up after a single season of blind flying. So they would trade it in for a new one. Here was a most favorable turn of events for the manufacturer. He wasn’t slow in catching on.

  The ultimate goal of automobile designers is to produce a car into whose driving seat the operator will sink without a trace. They have very nearly, achieved this goal. I know several women whose heads are permanently slanted backward because of the neck cramps they have developed trying to peek out over the cowl of a modern super-matic automobile. Incidentally, the steering wheel has been a big help to the designers in producing this type of cramp. If, after the hood had been raised, there still lingered any doubt that the operator’s vision had been blocked off, the designer settled it once and for all by moving the wheel up an inch or two till the top of it was exactly on eye level. Even a skinny little steering wheel can cut off about an acre of visibility if properly placed by a skillful designer.

  Mr. Arthur W. Stevens of Boston has computed that since 1900 the motorist’s angle of visibility has been reduced thirty-six degrees. That is nice figuring. All I know is that for almost two decades I owned cars and never dented them up, and a couple of years ago I bought a new sedan in the low-price group, and after two years of my conservative driving it looks as though it had been dropped from a high building. This doesn’t mean that I have become less skillful in driving a car; it means that the designers have become more determined that I shall not be given an even show.

  The public’s passive acceptance of this strange vehicle is disheartening, as is the acceptance by other peoples of the strange modern governments which are destroying them in a dulcet fashion. I think there will some day be an awakening of a rude sort, just as there will some day inevitably be a union of democracies, after many millions have died for the treacherous design of nationalism.

  [ October 1940 ]

  MAINE SPEECH

  I find that, whether I will or no, my speech is gradually changing, to conform to the language of the country. The tongue spoken here in Maine is as different from the tongue spoken in New York as Dutch is from German. Part of this difference is in the meaning of words, part in the pronunciation, part in the grammar. But the difference is great. Sometimes when a child is talking it is all one can do to translate until one has mastered the language. Our boy came home from school the first day and said the school was peachy but he couldn’t understand what anybody was saying. This lasted only a couple of days.

  For the word “all” you use the phrase “the whole of.” You ask, “Is that the whole of it?” And whole is pronounced hull. Is that the hull of it? It sounds as though you might mean a ship.

  For lift, the word is heft. You heft a thing to see how much it weighs. When you are holding a wedge for somebody to tap with a hammer, you say: “Tunk it a little.” I’ve never heard the word tap used. It is always tunk.