Beach Read

One of the more puzzling questions that arose after the successful publication of The Outermost House is what happened to Beston as a writer. It was not until 1935 that his next book, Herbs and the Earth, was published, and not including edited collections and largely republished material, he wrote only two more books during his lifetime, The St. Lawrence (1942) and Northern Farm (1949), and the latter was drawn largely from the “Country Chronicle” essays that Beston wrote in the late 1940s for The Progressive. He was not a literary idler for the last forty years of his life, for he still wrote many articles for a wide range of periodicals and was a regular speaker on the lecture circuit, but lecture hall triumphs were no substitute for the enduring literary fame of a classic book, and while Beston was confident that The Outermost House had secured an unassailable place in American literature, he was afraid, as he wrote to his friend Rosalind Richards, that he would be known as “homo unum libris.” Beston’s relatively limited literary output was a stark contrast to that of his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston, a poet and children’s author (she won the Newbury Medal in 1931 for The Cat Who Went to Heaven), who was an astonishingly prolific writer; during the course of her long career she published over one hundred books.

There have been other excellent writers—Ralph Ellison and Henry Roth come readily to mind—who also had trouble following up on the success of a classic work. Beston had written several books prior to The Outermost House and had a number of promising options for his next work. John Farrar, his editor at Doubleday, had founded his own publishing company, Farrar and Rinehart, in 1929. He urged Beston to move from writing nonfiction to writing fiction. As Henry wrote to Elizabeth in early 1930 after a visit to New York City to meet with Farrar: “He is all for my doing a novel anywhere and anytime [and] will give me a contract anytime I ask for it.” 

Doubleday and Doran, the publishers of The Outermost House, were eager to publish a book on the inner shore of Cape Cod, the bay side, which Beston had been contemplating for several months. They offered him a contract with far better terms than that for The Outermost House; Beston signed the contract and over the next two years spent a substantial amount of time on Cape Cod doing research for the book. Almost from the start, however, there were some telling indications that the quiet, isolated life on the beach that had proven so conducive to writing The Outermost House had lost much of its charm—particularly after the birth of the Beston’s first child in June 1930. He spent relatively little time at the Fo’castle, preferring instead to stay at local inns, where meals were provided and there were people with whom to socialize. “I’m afraid I’m pretty well exploded as a hermit, dear,” he wrote to Elizabeth from the Fo’castle in January 1931, “in other days I would have pulled this isolation in around me like a spiritual cloak; now I wear it uncomfortably, wriggling my shoulders in it and fidgeting with the sleeves.”  

By 1932 Beston had abandoned the book on the inner Cape; as his wife later wrote in Especially Maine: The Natural World of Henry Beston From Cape Cod to the St. Lawrence, “He finished a fine chapter on eeling at Eastham Salt Pond and part of another chapter on the marshes, but he was ruthless with his own work. He refused to write a minor book about the country of which he had written what he was sure from the first was a classic, and so tore up all he had begun.

There are certainly a number of other possible reasons, in addition to the understandable anxiety about following up on a great book with a lesser work, why Beston took several years to write another book after The Outermost House, and why his literary output was relatively small over the latter half of his career. Shortly after his marriage to Coatsworth in 1929, the Bestons had two daughters, Margaret and Katherine, and Elizabeth adapted far more successfully to the necessary change in her writing routine than did Henry. Furthermore, he had always written slowly and painstakingly, and this tendency became more pronounced. Ultimately, however, Beston’s constant struggle to build on his success with The Outermost House was primarily about two things: finding a landscape that inspired him as much as Cape Cod had, and finding a place to work that was as conducive to establishing a writing routine. After their marriage the Bestons settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, an old South Shore village that was rapidly turning into a suburb of Boston. Henry heartily disliked life in Hingham, complaining, “there is no nature for a naturalist to see, there are no birds save ‘the spotted Chevrolet and the Greater and Lesser Buick’…[a]nd the touch of Boston Harbor which lies in front of the house and beyond the cars has absolutely no meaning to me in terms of beauty and the spirit; it is nothing but a glacial spillover surrounding a tub de mud.” Not surprisingly, Beston wrote very little while living in Hingham.

In the early 1930s, Beston began making regular trips to Maine, often staying with his friends Maurice and Bee Day and their family in Damariscotta. While visiting the Days in May 1932, Beston heard of a farm for sale in nearby Nobleboro. As Elizabeth later recalled, “Without more than a passing glimpse of the house he decided to buy the place. He, who might hesitate for hours on the choice of a few words, could make up his mind on the future course of his life in an instant. Once back in Hingham Henry took me out for lunch in Quincy…‘How would you like to have us buy a Maine farm?’ he asked at the end of the meal, and I said, also in a split second, ‘It sounds fine.’ A few weeks later we bought the farm.”

Although it would be many years before the Bestons completely severed their ties with Hingham, Beston spent more and more time at the farm in Maine, which they named Chimney Farm for the five chimneys rising from the house. The Beston girls attended school near Hingham, so during the school year Beston often lived at the farm alone for extended periods while the rest of the family stayed in Massachusetts. The routine that he established early on after buying the farm was to rise early, usually by 6 a.m., and to write during the morning. Each new experience at the farm elicited a delighted reaction that he would report to Elizabeth in daily letters: the seasonal return of the alewives up the Damariscotta River to the lake, the local custom of gathering tender spring dandelion greens from the fields, spotting a moose or eagle by the lake, or planting new apple trees in their orchard. 

Since his experience as a volunteer ambulance driver in France during the first World War, Beston had come to believe that modern industrial civilization was responsible for severing humankind’s vital connection to nature and its rhythms. In the agricultural traditions and cycles of rural Maine, he found a possible countermeasure to this condition of modernity. Although he was more of a gentleman farmer than a working one, he spent a great deal of time in the fields and orchards of the farm and planted an herb garden near the farmhouse. He was soon writing about the experience, but the problem of finding a place to write persisted. He sometimes worked in a book-lined study in the farmhouse or at the kitchen table from where he could look through the windows at the garden. When the rest of the family was at the farm however, he needed a quiet place where he could work, so sometimes he would write at a small table he had set up in the attic, surrounded by books and the herbs that had been set out to dry. On rainy nights he often slept up in the herb attic so that he could listen to the sound of the rain on the roof. None of these places completely satisfied Beston, so he finally decided to recreate, at least in some small way, the atmosphere of his dune shack on Cape Cod. He gathered up some lumber that had been stored in the barn and built a tiny (seven foot by eight foot) studio nestled in a wooded depression in the fields overlooking Damariscotta Lake. He put in a small army cot, a wood stove, and a tiny writing desk. “The light is fine,” he wrote to a friend, “and I am far enough away from the house to be completely by myself, yet near enough to be got at in case of serious trouble.” 

In 1935, seven years after the publication of The Outermost House, the resulting book, Herbs and the Earth, was published. Beston described the work as “part garden book, part musing study of our relationship to Nature.” Herbs and the Earth is a quieter, more intimate study of nature than was The Outermost House, but in many ways it is a profound and wholly appropriate successor. 

Even after Herbs and the Earth was published to favorable reviews, the problem of finding a physical place to write still seemed to plague Beston from time to time. In the late 1940s as he was working on the essays that would later be published as Northern Farm, he created yet another writing space, this time in the attic of their barn (the family whimsically referred to it as the “Barnetheum”). Still, as much as Beston loved Maine, it never completely supplanted Cape Cod in his literary imagination. As he wrote to his young Eastham friend Truesdell Fife in 1932: “there is always a door in my inner spirit from behind whose panels rises a great sound, a sound which is part of life for me, the great roar of the October ocean beyond the dunes. No high wild cry of evergreens shall ever drown it, no sound of other waters confuse it, that vast and memorable cry.”