Animals are a weakness with me, and when I got a place in the country I was quite sure animals would appear, and they did.
IN THE SUMMER of 1933, Andy and Katharine soon learned that the Allen Cove farm belonged to a music professor at Juilliard. He parted with its forty acres—which included three hundred feet of coastline—for eleven thousand dollars. Another immediate expense came from the decision to continue employing the caretaker, Howard Pervear. Both Katharine and Andy had grown up with servants, and Katharine still employed a cook and housekeeper and occasionally other help; adding a caretaker for their country home came naturally to them. In the middle of the worst economic times since before the Civil War, Andy and Katharine were able to buy the farm while maintaining their large, two-floor apartment on Eighth in New York, and later one on Forty-eighth Street in Turtle Bay. With The New Yorker flourishing—in 1934 profits passed six hundred thousand dollars—both writer and editor brought home a good income throughout the Depression. Harold Ross wisely decided that both were indispensable and kept raising their salaries. Earning close to thirty thousand dollars together in the mid-1930s between writing and editing and Katharine’s small inheritance, they continued for years to live half in New York and half in Maine, with the romanticized freedom of farm life calling from behind the urban world’s honking horns and claustrophobic subways.
Exposed above Allen Cove, the house encountered strong winds, but with its thick walls and broad plank floors—it had been built around 1800—it felt secure even in a snowstorm. They set up ground-floor studies across the hall from each other, his in the northwest front room and hers in the southwest, where he continued to write for and she continued to edit for the magazine that had brought them together. Over the years they developed a companionable routine. Late mornings, after farm chores were done and the rural postman had driven up with their daily array of fat envelopes containing books and manuscripts, both settled down to work. Their facing studies were separated only by the narrow space of the front hall, and neither felt the need to close a door for more privacy. His study was one giant map, the room wallpapered corner to corner in connected survey maps of Penobscot Bay, showing blue inlets and narrows and countless irregular tan island shapes from Rockport to Deer Isle and beyond. The wall to Andy’s left held cabinets below and bookshelves above—a worn thesaurus, an old set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, eventually the fat green 1940 edition of The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, other favorites, oversize bound copies of The New Yorker, various editions of his own books. The shelves fluttered with notes that Andy taped up as reminders to himself.
He situated his pine desk perpendicular to the window, with the light coming in behind him to the right and his typewriter table forming the left leg of a U in which he worked, seated in an old oak swivel chair. Thus while typing he faced the doorway. He could look up and see Katharine at her desk, wearing a pale sweater over tweeds and girlishly sitting on one leg. Smoke from her cigarette spiraled up around tortoiseshell glasses, which sat halfway down her nose, as her pencil moved along an oversize page of New Yorker galleys. Occasionally one or the other read aloud from a letter received or an article undergoing revision, but seldom from what they were actually writing. Andy wrote Comment and his essays in staccato bursts of typing separated by long, thoughtful silences. At a young age, her son Roger noted how much effort and time Andy invested in these seemingly casual paragraphs.
An aromatic woodshed linked house and barn, a common adaptation in the north that facilitated animal care and milk-gathering during subzero winters, and there were also a henhouse and a cowshed, an icehouse and a garage. Andy wrote that the connection between house and barn meant that “without stepping out of door you can reach any animal on the place, including the pig. This makes for greater intimacy.” From the first, he found the huge, lovely barn evocative. Its high loft, piled with aromatic clover and timothy hay, sparked memories of the stable behind the house in Mount Vernon, where he had spent so many golden hours as a child. As soon as he closed the lift-latch on the kitchen door and stepped down into the barn, he smelled the tang of straw, cow breath, tack, rubber boots, and manure. Stalls and alcoves testified to the many skills that farming required. They held milk pails and looped rope, rusty rat traps and empty grain sacks, a harness rack here, an old wooden vise there, on one wall a penciled worming calendar and on another an agricultural-service spraying chart for pesticides. Overhead, canoes slept upside down across rafters. Everywhere tools hung on pegs or nails: axes, wooden hay rakes and metal leaf rakes, both round-headed and square-headed hoes, a primordial scythe, a curving, three-tined pitchfork. Angled light from the south windows glittered on the mean gapped teeth of two-handed saws and the metal pneumatic tubes of Crystal Duster pesticide sprayers still mounted to their Mason-jar reservoirs.
When they moved in, Andy began immediately to envision more occupants to fill his barn and his days. From childhood he had always experienced an urge to care for animals; he had seldom been without a dog, usually supplemented with a canary, a goldfish, or some other pet. He envisioned a farm full of animals before they even found the house. The morning sun shone through these windows and side-lit the nineteenth-century cattle stalls. Their thick handmade stanchions that could still lock with hewn pegs and tumblers, and their hoof scars in the plank floor, conjured like a genie the barn’s own memories of and need for cows. A museum-worthy milking stool all but demanded that Andy sit on it and acquire a cow to complete the picture. Many animals came through this barn and the other buildings—not only cattle but chickens, pigs, ducks, cats, dogs, sheep, the occasional goat. Andy was as self-conscious about farming as he was about everything else. Suspecting that neighboring farmers were skeptically watching this citified newcomer, he was embarrassed to find himself doing such things as walking across the barnyard carrying a paper napkin.
Andy noted early on that in one year his 148 laying hens produced 5,784 eggs. He still loved eggs, the first glimpse of their not quite roundness and their potent weight in his hand—“a morning jewel, a perfect little thing,” he wrote about finding one in the dawn. He recalled the collection of wild-bird eggs that had graced the attic on Summit Avenue, that hot, close space where he could be alone with Meccano and William J. Long’s animal stories. Now, decades later, the reality of hen and goose fertility never undermined eggs’ symbolic value for him. One goose laid her eggs in a nest she made beside the feed rack in the sheep shed so that when she was off the nest, the lambs would climb in for the cozy straw and incidentally warm her eggs. This was an unusual burst of imagination. Usually the members of these two groups—sheep in their solemn cliques and yammering klatches of geese—moved together in such a way that they seemed to have little individual identity. Other aspects of his birds’ behavior fascinated him, such as how during the war anxious chickens mistook the silhouettes of patrol planes for hawks.
A couple of years after Andy bought this place, his mother wrote to him about his new life in the country. She recalled the toy barnyard of her own childhood, with its miniature sheep and pigs and cows and a barn with a painted sky behind it. Quite secular, lacking an infant Jesus and Wise Men, this farm by the Christmas tree nonetheless acquired in young Elwyn’s mind an aura of sacred nativity. His formal, elegant mother had fondly called this toy world her “dream farm.” Here in Maine, one day when Andy was using desk scissors to trim lambs’ wool before entering them at the fair, he realized that he was gently biting his tongue the way he had as a child when performing such a task with one of his pets. When he finished trimming the lambs, he saw that they looked half like the sheep-bulletin photos he had used as a model and half like the little wooden lambs in his mother’s toy farm. To instinctively further the emotional connections between childhood and newfound playground, Andy anchored a metal loop in the beam over the north door of the barn and ran a thick, coarse rope through it. He and Joel would climb up into the loft, grasp the rope with both hands, wrap their legs around it, settle upon the heavy knot at the base, and swing down toward the earth and back up toward the sky. It was a dizzy, joyful sensation he hadn’t experienced since the Strattons’ barn in Mount Vernon.
Andy was not a gentleman farmer. He didn’t sit on the veranda and direct a subordinate who in turn bossed those who worked the land and tended the animals. He worked the land and tended the animals himself. True, when writing about his tasks on the farm Andy neglected to mention Katharine, Joe, their cook, their housemaid, and the full-time hired man who often employed assistants. (Eventually a Brooklin neighbor, Henry Allen, replaced Howard Pervear.) But even surrounded by help, Andy was always in the midst of the work. When he decided to dynamite boulders in his field, to create a pasture for the ideal cow he envisioned, he hand-drilled holes for dynamite, helped maneuver the blasted rock fragments onto drags with chains, drove a tractor with its Paleolithic burden scraping broad flat furrows in the field, and unloaded each stone for deposit in the edge of the woods. “People have quit calling me an escapist,” he once remarked, “since learning what long hours I put in.” He thought it funny that after moving to Maine and reducing his workload at The New Yorker, he found himself addicted to a venerable weekly farm paper called The Rural New Yorker.
From the barn the east windows framed the cove where they had first anchored. This stretch of Maine coast resembled Andy’s beloved Belgrade Lakes region farther inland except that here the sea gave the land a hardscrabble air. But bleakness appealed to Andy’s Romantic sensibilities. Sunlit days alternated with sudden fog that could trap a sailor but made the world look mysterious and poetic to a writer safely moored on shore. Fog was always a threat in the back of Andy’s mind when he was out in a boat. On land it could be so thick it smothered a cigarette after a few puffs and would leave forgotten tennis shoes sopping merely from having wicked moisture out of the air. In this damp climate some homes and businesses smelled of mildew.
Andy considered that the farm extended far beyond its official property lines, into the bay and what he described as “the restless fields of protein.” Always Andy needed to feel self-sufficient. He liked knowing that he could walk past his barn and henhouse, past the garden with its potatoes and asparagus and beets and cucumbers, down the lane of pigweed and thistles, through the pasture where the heifers and calves dodged granite rocks in the soil to nibble wild strawberries, stroll in between the low blueberry bushes and past the ground-hugging cranberry vines heavy with crimson fruit, settle into a boat, and find himself still harvesting from the water itself. In fact, he could start harvesting marine animals even before he got into the boat, in the clam beds that he cautiously prowled barefoot. The tide could vary as much as sixteen feet in a day, and in flood tide the dock’s pilings attracted flounder, with their surreal condition of two eyes clustered together on the flattened body, and hand-size cunner, a notorious bait-stealer so small that most fishermen threw them back into the water. Just beyond the point, lobsters lurked. Every summer, only two miles out into the bay, schools of mackerel lured a regatta of family boats to a local Sunday social event simply called mackereling. “When you have your own boat,” Andy observed, “you have your own world, and the sea is anybody’s front yard.”
When Katharine and Andy moved in, the farm had no running water. There was, however, a fresh spring in an always damp glade not far away. There, in the shade of tamarack and alder, amid the ethereal calls of woodcock and the splashes of a frog fleeing his approach along the path sprinkled with tiny tamarack cones, Andy often glimpsed an eel that had somehow navigated up the pasture’s brook with blind commitment. Trekking all the way here and back to the house seemed a burden at the time. Later, however, after he had the spring encased in stone and concrete and fitted with an electric pump that drew the water out of a copper pipe, he missed the days of carrying heavy, splashing pails through the woods.
In the country Andy reveled in the parade of nonhuman neighbors. Flotillas of fat black coots drifted by with their white bills visible from surprisingly far away, and beyond them toured loons, whose elegant motif and pared silhouette made the coots look frumpy. Gulls screamed and seals barked. In the course of a day Andy met deer and porcupines, skunks, squirrels both red and gray. He might spy the tracks of weasel and mink. Chittering squadrons of barn swallows flew in and out through the open barn door, their rich blue wings flashing. Where could he find a greater range of birds than between the red-throated hummingbird hovering at Katharine’s tiger lilies and the great horned owl that dropped silently out of an alder down by the swamp? Whip-poor-wills called and tree toads chirred. The soil itself was populous—chipmunks, snails, moles, snakes, frogs, woodchucks. The margins of Andy’s day were busy with their scurry, their naive surprise at his approach and their predictable rush down a burrow.
Later, he enjoyed the company of the raccoon that nested in the big, hollow balm of Gilead tree in front of the house. This particular neighbor gave birth to her young thirty-five feet in the air, just outside and slightly above Andy and Katharine’s own bed. Since childhood, especially since the stories of William J. Long about Mooweesuk the raccoon—“a pocket edition” of Mooween the bear—Andy had found raccoons charming. He grew so accustomed to this female’s predictable nocturnal habits that he would get out of bed at three in the morning to watch her shimmy back up the tree trunk to her sleeping kits. He liked to glimpse her silhouette against the sky and he admired the watchful way she sniffed around the door of her home to learn if enemies had trespassed in her absence. During Joe’s early childhood, Andy guarded his own house and family in a similar way, making the rounds every night before bed, locking all the doors, checking the lamps and stoves, and taking a last quiet peek into Joe’s room for a glimpse of his innocent sleep.
IN 1934, DURING Katharine and Andy’s first summer on the farm, his now white-haired parents—Samuel was eighty and Jessie seventy-six—came to visit. They enjoyed the bracing country air and the rugged coast so close to where the family had summered every year in Andy’s childhood. Married and with a son, happy on a farm, their youngest child seemed to be finally settling into life. The next August, Samuel died at Mount Vernon, and Jessie moved to Washington, D.C., to live with Clara, Andy’s middle sister.
In April 1936, Christopher Morley, a founder of and now a contributing editor at The Saturday Review of Literature, wrote to invite Andy to become the magazine’s new editor. A decade older than Andy, Morley bridged the generations between one of Andy’s heroes—Don Marquis—and Andy himself. A close friend of Marquis’s, Morley had become, since the publication of his quirky novels Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, around the end of the World War, one of the more versatile men of letters in the United States. Poet, journalist, essayist, novelist, and editor, Morley had been one of the first judges of the now decade-old Book of the Month Club and had just been asked to edit the eleventh edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Two years earlier, he had cofounded the Baker Street Irregulars, a loose affiliation of Sherlock Holmes fans who met at the Algonquin Hotel, where Morley had also helped launch the informal and unofficial but already legendary Three Hours for Lunch Club. Andy was touched by Morley’s invitation but made clear that he could not seriously consider such an offer. With numerous asides about his congestion and fever—including a reference to “when the Last Great Bronchitis comes”—he protested that he read “so slowly & so infrequently” that he would make a terrible editor, adding, “What a fine, mad bunch of people you must be, anyway, to have cooked up such a notion!”
As Andy’s fame grew, his past receded. Four days later, before he was even over the bronchitis, an exhausted Andy had to take a train to Washington, where his mother was having gallbladder surgery. The family had been optimistic about the surgery’s ability to cure Jessie’s pain and extend her life. But the surgeon found not only that her gallbladder was clotted with a half dozen acorn-size stones, but also that it, her liver, and parts of her colon were eaten up with cancer so badly that he felt nothing could be done. Surgery itself would kill her. He stitched the incision back together and quietly informed the family that their mother might be able to hang on for a few more months. They didn’t tell Jessie about the cancer, only about the stones. “She is very vague about diseases, anyway,” Andy wrote home to Kay, “and she has never been the sort of person to face facts realistically.”
Clara had been tending their mother since Samuel’s death. Because of her husband’s mental breakdown, she needed work and was about to launch a country inn that would serve three dozen guests per day, a venture requiring a huge investment of her energy and money. It was time for someone else to care for Jessie, so Lillian and Andy discussed alternatives. They looked at a nursing home in Chevy Chase, Maryland; Lillian suggested that she could rent a beachside cottage near Washington and move their mother in with her; and Andy considered moving her and a nurse to Maine to be near him and Kay.
But Jessie’s energy and will to live raced downhill over the next couple of weeks. On Wednesday, May 13, Andy was back in Washington, arriving at the Catholic hospital during a hot and noisy thunderstorm—ominous dark clouds, lightning flashing, the heat and air pressure wreaking havoc with Andy’s always delicate respiratory system. Jessie lay in her hospital room, small and frail amid the antiseptic white sheets and metal bed frame, frightened by the loud, bright lightning and suffering almost unbearable pain. Her tormented children stood around in a helpless tableau, looking at the tortured limbs of silent Christ on a crucifix at the foot of her bed.
The storm cleared the air. During the night the humidity and temperature both fell, and Thursday morning was clear, the blue sky fresh and clean. Back at the hospital, Andy found his mother also looking cleansed and calm. She seemed to be past the pain, at least for now. Light flooded in the window and showed Jessie small and weak in the bed, yet almost alarmingly bright-eyed.
The contrast between last night and this morning prompted Andy to indicate the benign weather and say, “Isn’t it beautiful, Mother?”
But Jessie was thinking about death, not weather. With surprising fervor she exclaimed, “Oh my, oh my—it’s perfectly beautiful.”
Her mood seemed exalted, transcendent. Knowing she had little time, apparently worried she might even run out of energy to speak, she assured them that the approach of death was actually a beautiful experience. They could hear children singing in the parochial school across the street, and Jessie said she loved the sound of their voices. Andy didn’t know how much she was influenced by painkillers—she could barely focus her gaze on them—and how much her own internal system was deluding itself.
Clara took Jessie’s hand and asked, “Mother, you’re perfectly comfortable, aren’t you?”
“Perfectly comfortable.”
“And you’re perfectly happy?”
“Perfectly happy,” Jessie sighed. She seemed to need desperately to reassure her children, as if to soften their loss of her. Whenever a spasm of pain went through her, making her whisper “Oh” again and again, she would soon manage to conjure a weak smile and murmur, “That means absolutely nothing at all.”
She died that night, with Clara beside her in the darkness.
That summer the long, slow rhythms of life were more visible than usual. As he grieved over the deaths of his parents only nine months apart, Andy’s mind kept journeying down old back roads to revisit the best days of his childhood. He was only thirty-seven, but he kept looking back. He decided to risk returning to Belgrade Lakes, to try to recapture his magical experiences there. He took the train again, the Bar Harbor Express, and watched mist rise from the pastures as the tracks skirted around Lake Messalonskee. He revisited old sensations and renewed their potency: the chime of a distant cowbell, the scent of woodsmoke and lumber and coffee, the taste of birch beer at Bean’s old lakeside store, the sparkle of whitecaps in the wind, his bare feet on the warm wooden boards of a dock. It all seemed reassuringly familiar, as if he had returned to the one place in the world where time didn’t move, where nothing changed, where childhood and parents lived forever. Toward the end of his visit there, overwhelmed with observations and memories, Andy sat down to write a long letter to Stan, detailing a few changes but mostly reminiscing and emphasizing the similarities between then and now. “Yes, sir, I returned to Belgrade, and things don’t change much,” he wrote. “I thought somebody ought to know.”
ANDY’S CAREER HAD proven as unpredictable as his personal life. In a surprising 1934 critique of The New Yorker in Fortune, Andy and Katharine’s former colleague Ralph Ingersoll had taken the magazine in general and Andy in particular to task. He referred to Andy’s “gossamer” writing, describing him as “frightened of life,” complaining that his recurring themes were terriers, guppies, and a crusade “against the complexity of life.” The latter criticism was true and not necessarily wounding. The charge of ephemeral irrelevance, however, stabbed Andy in his most sensitive doubts about himself. Ingersoll was right about another point: Andy had indeed been a part of the magazine’s decision to resist for too long commenting upon the poverty and strife of Depression-era America. This kind of attitude had kept Hollywood producing comedies—Swing Time, Bringing Up Baby, Show Boat—at which hard-earned quarters could be traded for escape from breadlines and rumors of war.
Ingersoll’s mockery helped fuel Andy’s restlessness with The New Yorker and with New York itself. Despite glowing reviews of his 1935 collection of Comment pieces, Every Day Is Saturday, he was unable to persuade Ross to let him write a longer signed column and thus escape from the anonymity and lightweight reputation of the Comment pieces. The Atlantic and Scribner’s rejected his essays, leaving him yearning for the opportunity to prove himself, or perhaps find himself, in a more demanding form. But his growing fame led to a timely invitation from Harper’s to write a monthly essay-length column, roughly twenty-five hundred words, for three hundred dollars apiece. “I was a man in search of the first person singular,” he wrote. He continued to write Comment for The New Yorker, but in his Harper’s column, “One Man’s Meat,” he explored new ground. He published a lighthearted tribute to, yes, his long-deceased Boston terrier, a survey of a new kind of field guide invented by a man named Roger Tory Peterson, nostalgic snapshots of the journals young Elwyn had kept in high school during World War I, passionate meditations on freedom and democracy in the new world situation, lyrical glimmers of mortality, and an ode to his favorite writer, Henry David Thoreau. Andy seldom wrote about books or other writers, but he returned often to Thoreau. He once described Walden as the only book he “owned,” that others merely lived with him. “The note he sounded,” he wrote of his hero, “was like the white-throat’s—pure, wavering, full of the ecstasy of loneliness.”
Often Andy thought of Thoreau and Walden Pond. The neon distractions of Times Square could not compare in Andy’s mind with the seals that swam beside his boat in the cove, raising their slicked wet heads out of the water like mermaids and barking through the fog. In 1938 the White family moved to the farm full-time—despite the looming obstacles of long-distance editing and writing, despite having to pull Joe out of a private New York school and move him to a one-room schoolhouse in a village—and despite Katharine’s decision, in wanting Andy to be happy, to leave what their colleague Wolcott Gibbs called “the greatest job in the world,” a prime editorial position at one of the most influential literary magazines in America.
Having moved as the war was building up in Europe, Andy often felt that his new preoccupations were trivial and even futile. Why was he so fortunate as to be able to milk his cows and write his sly New Yorker paragraphs rather than die on a battlefield? One cold early-spring evening he was tending the fickle brooder stove in his henhouse, trying to maintain a maternal fire for the 254 innocent chicks gathered around it—depending upon its warmth for survival—when Joe came out to tell him that dinner was ready and the war news on the radio was bad. A few months earlier, Germany, Italy, and Japan had signed the Tripartite Pact to form the Axis. Clearly they were planning to invade Russia. When Andy wrote up this particular evening for his Harper’s column, he thought of recent Third Reich propaganda claiming that Aryan domination was the spring (Frühling) that would not end, so he said, “I soon knew that the remaining warmth in this stubborn stove was all I had to pit against the Nazi idea of Frühling.” He redistributed a hundred or so chicks to areas where they were likelier to stay warm and went indoors to be with his family. The kitchen was cozy and the lights bright. In his essay he crafted a home-front manifesto featuring his favorite symbol of life: “Countries are ransacked, valleys drenched with blood. Though it seems untimely I still publish my belief in the egg, the contents of the egg, the warm coal, and the necessity for pursuing whatever fire delights and sustains you.”
In the summer of 1941 he further sustained himself by turning again to Belgrade Lakes, this time with Joe. He worried that time would have tarnished what he thought of as a holy spot, but the major change was in Andy himself. Emotionally disoriented, he kept seeing his own childhood in Joe’s every move with a fishing pole or canoe. And if Joe was the young Andy, then Andy had to face that he, now orphaned, had become his father.