Up on the Farm

By Charles Elliotf

LIVING THE GOOD LIFE: HOW TO LIVE SANELY AND SIMPLY IN A TROUBLED WORLD by Helen and Scoff Nearing. 213 pages. Schocken. $4.95.

All over the country on hundreds of little subsistence farms and rural communes, young Americans are scavenging for a simpler way of life. Their move back to the land is a heartening quest, honored both by a long pioneering tradition and the envy of countless city dwellers surfeited with subways and smog. But putting Swiss Family Robinson into practice often proves tougher than the new Utopians count on.

Fortunately, among their guides in the wilderness, along with the works of that philosophical survivalist Henry David Thoreau, is a bracing little book called Living the Good Life. First published in 1954 and lately reissued in response to demand, it tells how a pair of rebels from an earlier generation moved out of New York City, settled on a derelict farm in a remote Vermont valley, and there created a quiet, workable noncapitalist, nonindustrial life for two.

In 1932 Scott Nearing was already a radical of some note, veteran of many political battles. Fifty years old. a sociologist, ex-professor and pamphleteer, he had separated from his wife and the Communist Party ("Such elements." declared a party statement about him, "should be deposited on the scrap heap of the revolution"). Along with Good Friend Helen Knothe (whom he finally married in 1947), Nearing considered American society "a competitive, acquisitive, aggressive, war-making social order, which butchers for food and murders for sport and for power." The coupie was determined to reject it in theory and in practice by living "as decently, kindly, justly, orderly and efficiently as possible" upon the stony and precipitous hillsides of Vermont.

While there is no reason to doubt that a high degree of decency and kindness were involved in the process, what comes through most plainly in the Nearings' account of the next 20 years is the almost Prussian discipline by which they achieved order and efficiency. First they drew up a ten-year plan ("in the spirit of the times") and followed it as scrupulously as they could. They built a stone house and a number of outbuildings. They cultivated several large gardens, terracing and improving the soil. They made maple syrup and sugar in quantity, enough to bring in all the cash they needed--though they sometimes augmented their income with fees from lectures. By hand, they cut cordwood to heat the house and, more important, to boil down all that sap. And yet they had time to spare: "Our aim was to get a year's livelihood in return for half a year of bread labor."

Arcana. Certain key facts about the Hearings' experience remain obscure, perhaps purposely (what was their initial capital investment, for instance?). But there is enough specific information on such arcana as composting and stonemasonry to qualify their book as an authentic long-term survival tool, and to explain its current promotion in journals like the Whole Earth Catalogue. The most dedicated food faddist, though, might be put off his feed by the manner in which they dismiss milk ("The secretion of the mammary glands of cows, goats and sheep") and eggs ("the reproductive media of birds"). The one thing Living the Good Life most lacks is what Walden has in such abundance--a sense of real delight in the natural world. Man does not live by bread labor alone, nor did the Nearings, but you would not know it from their book.

Their system worked well for them and, in fact, is still working pretty much the same way today, transplanted to the Maine coast. Though they never had children, their achievement is a useful model for anyone with the Nearings' admirable ability and energy who is eager to escape the manifold idiocies of urban existence. As Paul Goodman points out in his introduction, however, it does not really bear much relation to the freewheeling life-style being hashed out now in the communes and children's colonies. These new seekers are hungry not for parsley root and multiplier onions but for meaning, personal identity and love--the sort of things the Nearings could take for granted in 1932. If they find what they are looking for, the discovery could help redeem the country. In the meantime they could do worse than heed the word from Cold Comfort Farm: Keep your compost wet. After a hard winter, even a turnip can look like a godsend.

Charles Elliotf

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