This morning at breakfast my wife seemed tired and discouraged. I thought perhaps it was the measles upstairs (which we had wrongly identified, at first, as a boil in the ear). “Do you know,” she said after a while, “that the fox sparrow can easily be mistaken for the hermit thrush? They are about the same size, and they both have a red tail in flight.”

  “They don’t if you look the other way,” I replied, wittily. But she was not comforted. She thumbed restlessly through A Field Guide (she carries it with her from room to room at this season) and settled down among the grosbeaks, finches, sparrows, and buntings while I went back among the smoked bacon, blackberry jam, toast, and coffee.

  “My real trouble is,” she continued, “that I learn the birds pretty well one year, but then the next year comes and I have to learn them all again. I think probably the only way really to learn them is to go out with a bird person. That would be the only way.”

  “You wouldn’t like a bird person,” I replied.

  “I mean a sympathetic bird person.”

  “You don’t know a sympathetic bird person.”

  “I knew a Mr. Knollenberg once,” said my wife wistfully, “who was always looking for a difficult finch.”

  She admitted, however, that the problem of the birds was virtually insoluble. Even the chickadee, it turns out, plays a dirty trick on us all. Everybody knows a chickadee, and in winter the chickadees are our constant companions. For nine months of the year the chickadee announces himself plainly, so that any simpleton can tell him; but in spring the fraudulent little devil gives a phony name. In spring, when love hits him, he goes around introducing himself as Phoebe. According to the author of the Field Guide he whistles the name Phoebe, whereas the Phoebe doesn’t whistle it but simply says it. Still, it’s a dishonest trick, and I resent it when I’m busy.

  Mr. Peterson, the author of the Guide, has made a manly attempt to enable us to identify birds, but the attempt (in my case) is pitiful. He says of the Eastern Winter Wren (Nannus hiemalis hiemalis): it “frequents mossy tangles, ravines, brushpiles.” That, I don’t doubt, is true of the Eastern Winter Wren; but it is also true of practically every bird here except the chimney swift and the herring gull. Our whole country is just one big mossy tangle. Any bird you meet is suspect, but they can’t all be Eastern Winter Wrens.

  The titmice, the wrens, the thrushes, the nuthatches, the finches are bad enough, but when Mr. Peterson comes to helping me, or even my wife, with the warblers his efforts are indeed laughable. There are dozens of warblers, many of them barely visible to the naked eye. To distinguish them one from another is like trying to distinguish between two bits of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight. Of the Chestnut-sided Warbler Mr. Peterson says: “Adults in spring:—Easily identified by the yellow crown and the chestnut sides. The only other bird with chestnut sides, the Bay-breast, has a chestnut throat and a dark crown, thus appearing quite dark-headed. Autumn birds are quite different—greenish above and white below, with a white eye-ring and two wing-bars. Adults usually retain some of the chestnut. The lemon-colored shade of green, in connection with the white under parts, is sufficient for recognition.” Well, it is sufficient for recognition if you happen to be standing, or lying, directly under a Chestnut-sided Warbler in the fall of the year and can remember not to confuse the issue with “adults in spring” or with the Bay-breast at any season—specially the female Bay-breast in spring, which is rather dim and indistinct, the way all birds look to me when they are in a hurry (which they almost always are) or when I am. A hurried man trying to identify a hurried bird is palpably a ridiculous situation.

  Even the author of the Guide admits, in places, that a bird spotter is in for real trouble. The Sycamore Warbler, he says, is almost identical with the Yellow-throated Warbler, but might be distinguished “at extremely short range” by the lack of any yellow between the eye and the bill. It helps some though if you can remember which side of the Alleghenies you are on. I try to keep that in mind always.

  The thing that amuses me about songbirds in our amazing springtime is the way my wife takes her troubles out on the birds themselves, who are, in a sense, innocent enough. She is puzzled and annoyed at her inability to master, in a few crowded weeks, the amazing intricacies of bird markings—made even more difficult because we sent our binoculars to England year before last to help in the defense of the British Isles. A little while ago I saw her pause for a fleeting moment at a window as she was passing by and heard her mutter peevishly: “There goes one of those damned little Yellow Palm Warblers.” Then she added, in a barely audible whisper, “I guess.”

  Songbirds can be ruinous as well as hard to tell apart. A few days ago I seeded last year’s garden piece to grass. Next morning a great flock of juncos came in, wave after wave, white-bellied evil-minded juncos, slate-colored hungry juncos, smaller-than-a-house-sparrow-something-like-a-Vesper-sparrow juncos. They swarmed into the field and ate up all the seeds. It was the first time I had ever sprung after a songbird with a foul oath.

  When we first came here to live, the road in front of our house was a dirt road. But after a while they tarred it. Now, in war, with the automobile on the wane and the horse returning, I think probably they will have to throw some dirt back on the road, the surface being too hard on the feet of animals. Moral: men should settle their differences before they improve their roads.

  Our county had its first blackout the other evening, on Palm Sunday. It was considered a success, although no bomb fell. It was a lovely day for a raid—one of those quiet days full of a deceptive peace. When I looked out at daybreak the ground was white with frost, but you could tell it was going to be a fine day. I got up promptly to tend some new chicks and was busy with them for a half hour before breakfast, thinking of palms and Christ and bombs and dry litter. After breakfast a new lamb turned up with a sore eye, which I bathed with boric acid so it could see well for the blackout, and then was summoned to help a scholar with his grammar but with no success. When I could not think of a pronoun used with conjunctive force and did not know what an adjectival complement was he grew restless and discouraged.

  “You really don’t know anything about grammar, do you?” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” I replied, with only a trace of regret.

  Only three or four cars passed, the whole morning long. We saw no palm leaves and did not go to church. After his homework was done the boy left to dam a stream, and from the kitchen came the drowsy sound of something being chopped in a bowl. Mostly we just lay around, waiting for the blackout.

  A little after nine o’clock in the evening, our phone began ringing the numbers on the party line (we are on a line with seven other subscribers and each has his own distinctive ring, almost as hard to tell apart as the warblers). I sat by the phone waiting, with my jacket and cap on and my gloves handy. When our call came, I picked up the phone and the voice of our chief air raid warden said: “The yellow has just come through.”

  Outside, the truck stood ready, trembling, its engine running, its headlights on (we were instructed to drive with lights for this first raid). I hung up the phone, ran outside, and jumped in. My assignment was to give the alarm on a stretch of road between our house and the center of the village two and a half miles away. The signal was to be a continuous blowing of the horn.

  As I turned out of the drive into the highway and jammed the horn button down, trying to shift gears, blow a horn, and make a turn, all with only two hands, the thing seemed entirely real to me—just as the first second or two of the fire drill in grammar school used to seem real, when the gong sounded suddenly and you had to guess whether the fire was a hot one or an imaginary one. To race through the countryside at night, blowing your horn steadily, stirs the blood up. For a few minutes I was brother to Paul Revere.

  The villagers had been reading about the blackout for a week in the newspaper and were prepared, some with blackout curtains, others with the simpler defense mechanism—blowing out the lamp. As I passed farmhouse after farmhouse, making my horrible racket, shades were quickly drawn and lights went out. I drove as fast as I could considering the condition of the road, which was full of holes where the frost had heaved the tar. The horn button proved treacherous; it would make contact only if held in a certain position, and occasionally I’d lose the horn and have to worry it on again.

  As I drew in to the village I heard the church bell ringing. The church was black, the two stores were black, and the four or five houses at the corner were black. I peered into the church and tried to see the sexton at the bell rope but couldn’t. For a minute or two my horn and the church bell quarreled, the sacred and the profane, riling the Sabbath evening. Then I turned the truck round and started back home—no horn this time. One house still showed lights. I stopped and tooted peremptorily. The lights were quickly extinguished. I glanced in at the house where the old lady lived who had said that she was so far off the road she wouldn’t be able to hear the signal but that it wouldn’t make any difference because she always went to bed before nine o’clock anyway. Everything was dark at her house.

  I was back home about twenty-five past nine, and at nine-thirty the phone rang again and the warden announced: “Red light.” The raid was on.

  Sitting by the radio in the dark living room (our own curtains hadn’t been installed) we turned on Fred Allen for the duration of the raid. When the all-clear came through I repeated the trip to town, sounding the horn again, but the bloom was off the rose: the second trip was anti-climactic. The church bell was ringing again, and this time the sexton was visible in the vestibule.

  One of the things I had to do, to get ready to black out our farm, was to devise a blackout hood for the pilot light on my electric brooder stove, which goes on and off as the thermostat switch operates. I found an old tin cup and inverted this over the bulb, a simple precaution involving two hundred and seventy-two lives, not counting our own.

  [ May 1942 ]

  QUESTIONNAIRE

  The mail this morning brought my occupational questionnaire from Selective Service headquarters. I have been working on it off and on all day, trying to give my country some notion of what sort of life I lead—which I take to be what it is after. Since my life is cluttered with dozens of pursuits, some of which seem wholly unrelated to the others, the form has proved hard to fill out. Explaining oneself by inserting words in little boxes and squares is like getting an idea over to a jury when you are limited to answering the questions of the attorneys.

  I was rather surprised, but not alarmed, to discover that “writing” is not recognized in selective service, either as professional work or as an “occupation.” Nothing is said in the questionnaire about a writer. In the lengthy list of pursuits and professions the name of writer does not anywhere appear. Scarfers, riggers, glass blowers, architects, historians, metallurgists—all are mentioned in the long alphabet of American life. But not writers. This, I feel, is as it should be, and shows that the selective service system is more perceptive than one might suppose. Writing is not an occupation nor is it a profession. Bad writing can be, and often is, an occupation; but I agree with the government that writing in the pure sense and in noblest form is neither an occupation nor a profession. It is more of an affliction, or just punishment. It is something that raises up on you, as a welt. Or you might say that it is a by-product of many occupations and professions, which the writer pursues (or is pursued by) recklessly or necessarily. A really pure writer is a man like Conrad, who is first of all a mariner; or Isadora Duncan, a dancer; or Ben Franklin, an inventor and statesman; or Hitler, a scamp. The intellectual who simply says “I am a writer,” and forthwith closets himself with a sharp pencil and a dull Muse, may well turn out to be no artist at all but merely an ambitious and perhaps misguided person. I think the best writing is often done by persons who are snatching the time from something else—from an occupation, or from a profession or from a jail term—something that is either burning them up as religion, or love, or politics, or that is boring them to tears, as prison, or a brokerage house or an advertising firm. A great violinist must begin fairly early in life to play the violin; but I think a literary artist has a better chance of producing something great if he spends the first forty years of his life doing something else—grinding a lens or suryeying a wilderness. There are of course notable exceptions. Shakespeare was one. He was a writing fool, apparently. And I have often suspected that some of his noblest passages were written with his tongue at least halfway in his cheek. “Boy,” you can hear him mutter, “will that panic ‘em!”

  Since I now lead a dual existence—half farmer, half literary gent—I found difficulty making myself sound like anything but a flibbertigibbet. The initial disappointment at not finding my life’s work listed among the selected occupations, professions, and sciences was greatly relieved, however, when after a careful study of the list I found, under the “f’s”:

  Farmer, dairy

  Farmer, other

  I’m not getting a cow till next year, but it is something in this life to be Farmer Other. Not Farmer Brown or Farmer White but Farmer Other. I liked the name very much and immediately wrote the words “4 years” in front of Farmer Other. When I consider that most of my neighbors have been carrying pails for half a century, four years is a mere apprenticeship, I know; but nevertheless, it is a beginning, and in the greatest occupation of all.

  I imagine that my local draft board, like any group of registrars, prefers to have lives fall into conventional patterns and will not take kindly to a citizen who is so far out of line as to be both farmer and writer. It doesn’t have a clean-cut sound. It is Jekyll and Hyde stuff, lacks an honest ring. In war it is better to be a clean-cut man: a hammersmith plain, a riveter simple, a born upholsterer, an inveterate loftsman, a single-hearted multi-purpose machine operator. To be farmer and writer suggests a fickleness of character out of key with the war effort. To produce, in a single week, seventy dozen table eggs and a twenty-six-hundred-word article, sounds confused, immature, and smacks of divided loyalty.

  Question 20 is called “Duties of Your Present Job.” Three lines are allotted for the answer, space for about forty words of crowded confession. I got myself into thirty-seven, by taking thought and by following closely the sample reply given above, starting “I clean, adjust, and repair watches and clocks. I take them apart … etc.” I could almost have followed the sample exactly, changing only a word or two: “I clean, adjust, and repair manuscripts and farm machinery. I take them apart and examine the parts through an eyepiece to find which parts need repair. I repair or replace parts. Sometimes I make a new part, using a jackplane or an infinitive. I clean the parts and put them back together again.”

  Under JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARE BEST FITTED I wrote “Editor and writer.” Under JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARE NEXT BEST FITTED I wrote “Poultryman and farmer.” But I realized that it was not so much fitness that I was thinking about as returns. What I meant was JOB BY WHICH YOU MAKE THE MOST MONEY. And NEXT MOST. It is hard to tell about fitness. Physically I am better fitted for writing than for farming, because farming takes great strength and great endurance. Intellectually I am better fitted for farming than for writing.

  Walt Whitman should be around today to see how the boys are regenerating his stuff. For a long time I kept wondering where I had heard all this singing before—the radio programs dramatizing America, the propaganda of democracy, the music in the President’s chats, the voices of the poets singing America. Then it came to me. It is all straight Walt. The radiomatics of Corwin, the sound tracks of Lorentz, the prophecies of MacLeish and Benét, the strumming of Sandburg, the iambics of Anderson and Sherwood. Listen the next time you have the radio turned to the theatrics of the air—you will hear the voice of old Walt shouting from Paumanok. If there were any doubt about where he stands in the literary ladder this decade has put an end to it. He is right at the top. He must be good or he wouldn’t be heard so clearly in the syllables of our contemporaries.

  There is a certain something about this sort of writing that is unmistakable; the use of place names, the cataloging of ideas, the repetition of sounds, the determination to be colloquial or bust, the celebration of the American theme and the American dream, the appreciation of the man in the street and the arm round the shoulder, the “song of the throes of democracy.” You can’t miss it when you hear it. Sometimes, when one is jittery or out of whack, it seems as though one heard it too much—so much that it loses its effect. But Walt unquestionably started it. He was the one who heard America beating on a pan, beating on a carpet, beating on an anvil. He heard what was coming, and he said the words.

  Paid off the mortgage on the farm last week, the first time I had ever done anything like that although I had read about it in books. I put on my best clothes for the occasion and presented myself at the bank, looking like a man of affairs. The disguise didn’t work very well though. While the proper paper was being drawn up, the president and I chewed the fat, and after a while I got a little nervous and said: “Don’t I have to sign something?” He looked at me in surprise and then smiled indulgently.

  “Sign something?” he repeated, “You don’t have to sign anything; we do.”

  The bank, it turned out, was very sad at losing title to my property and was not consoled by all the money I paid them. They painted their grief so vividly that they had me almost in tears when I left, and I felt like an old skinflint as I walked down the steps and out into the sunshine, free and clear. Actually I wouldn’t hurt a hair of a banker’s head and was only paying off the mortgage because the government was instructing people to pay their debts. No matter how hard a man tries to do the right thing someone is always hurt and grieved.