One Man’s Meat will be forty-one years old come spring. Published first in 1942, it has remained in print in one form or another almost without interruption since it appeared. Never a big seller, it early showed staying power. A book that manages not to fade away after a few years occupies a special place in the heart of its author. I confess to a special feeling for One Man’s Meat.
The original edition consisted of forty-five pieces assembled from the monthly column I had been writing for Harper’s Magazine since 1938. After the book came out, I continued to contribute to the magazine, and in 1944 a new and enlarged edition of One Man’s Meat was published. It contained an additional ten essays—a total of fifty-five. This edition was popular. The United States had entered the war, and the war had entered the book. Soon my casual pieces depicting life on a saltwater farm in New England were finding their way to members of the Armed Forces in a paperback Overseas edition, and letters of thanks were arriving from homesick soldiers in distant lands. This relieved my mind, as I had been uneasy about indulging myself in pastoral pursuits when so many of my countrymen were struggling for their lives, and for mine. The Overseas edition, incidentally, was banned for a while, then reinstated without the matter’s being explained. (Some conscientious watchdog must have found it too rich a diet for our fighting men.) I recall a twinge of satisfaction in having a book banned: it suggested that my stuff might be more substantial than it appeared on first glance.
In all, there have been eight editions of One Man’s Meat, not counting a British edition, two German translations, and one French translation. When it was twelve years old, my publishers decided that the book was a classic, and they forthwith brought it out (hardbound) in their “Harper’s Modern Classics” series. This established me officially as an American Author, no longer to be trifled with. The Classics edition opened with an introduction by Morris Bishop, and this delighted me, because it was Professor Bishop who, years before, when he discovered I was headed for the country, had said, “I trust that you will spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.”
When I look back almost half a century to the events leading up to my move from New York to Maine, events that conspired to produce this book of essays, I am appalled. My decision to pull up stakes was impulsive and irresponsible. Prior to 1938, I had been working happily and gainfully for The New Yorker, writing its editorial page “Notes and Comment,” contributing stories and articles, and doing odd jobs around the place. My wife, an early career woman, had a job with the magazine that absorbed her and fulfilled her. We were living in the city in a rented house, uptown on the East Side. The depression had left us unscathed, the war was just a rumble in the sky. Everything was going our way.
Yet, sometime in the winter of 1938, or even before that, I became restless. I felt unhappy and cooped up. More and more my thoughts turned to Maine, where we owned a house with a barn attached. I don’t recall being disenchanted with New York—I loved New York. I was certainly not disenchanted with The New Yorker—I loved the magazine. If I was disenchanted at all, I was probably disenchanted with me. For one thing, I suspected that I was not writing quite the way I wanted to write, and sometimes I was oppressed by my weekly deadline. For another, in my job as commentator, I was stuck with the editorial “we,” a weasel word suggestive of corporate profundity or institutional consensus. I wanted to write as straight as possible, with no fuzziness.
Quite aside from all this, I had never felt really at home in the house we were renting. The rooms were always too hot and dry; I fell asleep every night after dinner. And the house wasn’t downtown in the Village, which had been my stamping ground for years and where I still felt at home whenever I returned. Some sort of drastic action seemed the only answer to my problem—and that is exactly what happened. Without considering what it would do to my wife to be uprooted from The New Yorker, or what it would do to my son to be switched from a private school in Manhattan to a two-room schoolhouse in the country, and without a thought of what I would be using for money in my rural incarnation, I led my little family out of the city like a daft piper. My wife was deeply shaken by the exodus, but she never flinched. She was sustained by her weird belief that writers were not ordinary mortals and had to be coddled, like a Queen Bee.
One Man’s Meat was not a premeditated book, it was an accident. Two days before I left town for good, Lee Hartman, editor of Harper’s Magazine, asked me to lunch. Before the meal was over he had invited me to contribute a monthly department. He offered me three hundred dollars a month, and I accepted on the spot. This last-minute, unexpected job as columnist was the genesis of One Man’s Meat. It turned out to be one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me. I was a man in search of the first person singular, and lo, here it was—handed to me on a platter before I even left town.
Once in everyone’s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those five years in Maine as the time when this happened to me. Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances—including the characters in the barnyard, who were later to reappear in Charlotte’s Web—I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper.
The saltwater farm that served as the setting for this most tumultuous episode in my life has seen many changes in forty years. The sheep have disappeared, along with several other accessories. The elms have disappeared. I am still visible, pottering about, overseeing the incubations, occasionally writing a new introduction for an old book. I do the Sunday chores. I stoke the stove. I listen for the runaway toilet. I true up the restless rug. I save the whale. I wind the clock. I talk to myself.
Certain things have not changed. Despite the great blizzard of April, the swallows arrived on schedule and are busy remodelling the mud nests in the barn. The goose sits. Rhubarb is showing. (I used to eat rhubarb because I loved rhubarb. Now I eat it because it retards arthritis.) The Egg has been an enduring theme in my life, and I have allowed my small flock of laying hens to grow old in service. Cosmetically they leave much to be desired, but their ovulation is brisk, and I greet them with the same old gag when I enter the pen: “White here. Cubism is dead.”
I keep telling myself that it is time to quit this place, with its eleven rooms and its forty acres, and cut myself down to size. I may still do it. But I can envision what would happen if I did: I would no sooner get comfortably settled in a small house on an acre of land than I would issue instructions to build a small barn and attach it to the house through a woodshed. A bale of hay would appear mysteriously in the barn, and there would soon be a bantam rooster out there, living in the style to which he feels he should be accustomed. I would be right back where I started.
EBW
May 1982