Second Person Rural:
More Essays of a Sometime Farmer
By Noel Perrin
Illustrated by F. Allyn Massey
David R. Godine, $10
THIS IS A DANGEROUS book. It almost made me decide to go ahead and get pigs. The country, where I live less agriculturally than Noel Perrin, is full of such temptations: to go ahead and get chickens, sheep, ducks, a tractor … And I have resisted all of them except cats, dogs, a wood stove, a compost heap, a vegetable garden and a horse (who looked at me the other day as I was picking up a wheelbarrow full of manure and said, “Uh … You realize what that is?”). Still, Mr. Perrin makes pigs sound pretty inviting.
Of course, it is hard to write badly about pigs. But Noel Perrin makes pigs seem pretty inviting anew. He had one that jumped, and two more that were into earth art. He also had a diminutive farmyard-bred Bantam rooster that eventually (by proffering worms) befriended, but never managed to seduce, four imposing virgin Golden Comet hens that had been raised in a modern egg-factory and therefore lacked passion. The worms, and the bugs that two of the hens learned to catch, made their eggs’ yolks much darker and more savory, though. This book almost made me decide to go ahead and get chickens.
Since I finally fought off these temptations, I would fail the immigration test that Mr. Perrin urges for the control of urban influx: When an upper-middle-class family moved to a rural area, “they would be issued visas for one year. At the end of that year … they would present evidence of having acclimated. For example, they show proof of having taken care of two farm animals of at least pig size, or of one cow, for at least nine months. Complete care would be rigorously interpreted. Even one weekend of paying someone to feed the pigs or milk the cow would disqualify them.” This proposal may seem Draconian, but I like the spirit. I even favor some strictures; the country tends to become a place for weekenders, many of whom seem to think that it exists for the sake of their relaxation.
Even though Noel Perrin grew up suburban and his main work is literary (the book Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England & America, for instance, and teaching English at Dartmouth), and though he confesses with chagrin that “the two-by-six evaporator that we use to make maple syrup is called the Pleasure Model,” he seems somehow to have become very nearly a farmer. Sometimes people, in fact, mistake him for the real article—thereby doing his soul good and providing him subjects for essays.
That’s what this book is—a collection of essays about New England country living, a sequel to Mr. Perrin’s equally felicitous First Person Rural. I have a high resistance to this genre, but here it is farmed well. If you are at all interested in splitting wood—as who with halfway decent instincts is not—you will enjoy reading Noel Perrin on various newfangled riving devices’ inferiority to the good old maul. I think anybody, or at least anybody interested in leverage, will want to read Perrin on the peavey. (“How about Peavey on the perrin?” hardened urbanites may be snorting. Fine. Let them stay down on the pavement among the pigeons.)
Mr. Perrin does have an odd tendency to wrap up otherwise crisp essays a bit too bouncily: “Doesn’t that sound almost as lively as the average conversation in a bar? Maybe even livelier than some? You know it does. If you want real talk, forget the city.” And the dialogue he occasionally puts in the mouths of animals lacks pungency: “Oh, Mr. Teaser, what strong teeth you have! And that blond mane is so cute!” His sensibility seems less richly manured than those of two very disparate country writers, E. B. White and Harry Crews.
But Noel Perrin appreciates manure, and animals and wood and dirt, and the irony in the fact that he could have bought seven cows with the money that Newsweek spent getting a photograph of him without cows. (Time had run one of him with cows.) He cites any number of reliable friends and neighbors with whom he shares knotty chores. It might be more interesting if he were to characterize some of these folks more thoroughly, but then it might not be so neighborly. Though detached enough to be a student rather than an instinctive grasper of country codes, Mr. Perrin seems to belong where he lives, and it’s always remarkable to read a good writer who manages to do that.
He says it is not true, incidentally, that farm kids grow up knowing all about the birds and the bees from watching farm animals. Farm animals, he says, are discreet. He has a Hereford bull who “must handle all his affairs between three and six on cloudy mornings.” An affectionate nine-hundred-pound cow, however, once came within an ace of mounting Mr. Perrin.
This book did not make me want to go ahead and get cows.