A Different Kind of Wealth

As a rather romantic young man in my early twenties, I longed for a retreat, a cabin by a lake where I could learn to understand nature and write reams of lapidary poetry. Of course this never came to pass, not least because I could no more build a habitable hut than I could fly, but the lure of the self-sustaining rural life remains strong. My dream might have been inspired by Henry Thoreau’s Walden, his account of his life in a hut by a pond which remains an icon of American literature. In fact it was a book by another, later American that really inspired me ‒ Robert Francis’s Travelling in Amherst (1986), a copy of which I discovered one day in Hay-on-Wye.

I knew, very vaguely, that Francis was a friend of the more famous Robert, Robert Frost. Very vaguely is how most people now know Robert Francis. Born in Pennsylvania in 1901, he graduated from Harvard in 1923 and, determined to live as a poet, built a tiny wooden house, Fort Juniper, outside Amherst, Massachusetts, and made ends meet by teaching the violin while trying to persuade magazines to accept his work. Frost was a near neighbour and mentored Francis, rather as he had Edward Thomas. As a result, Francis’s early collections of poetry, and especially his long domestic epic poem ‘Valhalla’, are all rather Frost-like in their depiction of New England nature and rural life. Later on he found his own voice – playful, relaxed, sly, concise – and earned some recognition, winning the Academy of American Poets’ award for distinguished lifetime achievement in 1984, three years before his death. I didn’t know any of this at the time though. I just knew he was a friend of Robert Frost, who at that point was the biggest star in my poetic sky. Now I prefer Francis. Frost had tried farming in New Hampshire, but he soon found comfort in university departments and lecture tours where his garrulous public persona earned him a very decent living to support the writing of his poetry, which became more cosy and cracker-barrel as he grew older. You can’t blame Frost for making the best of his career, but the purist in me will always cheer for Francis. He really lived the Thoreauvian life without compromise, as Travelling in Amherst, the diary of his life from 1931 to 1954, shows. In it Robert Frost makes several appearances, as do Francis’s assorted landladies, his neighbours and many birds, but the focus is on the author’s daily life; the minutiae of existence alongside the joys and pains of writing for a living. A few of his poems are also included, showing how he transmuted his observations into verse. (The title of the book reflects his sense of humour, by the way ‒ he travels no more than about ten miles during the whole book.) The idea that home can constitute a universe is very important to Francis, because for him poetry is an introverted art. As he says in his entry for 22 June 1931: ‘The poet is a spider, forever spinning. The novelist is a caterpillar, eating great slices of life. But the poet spins his poetry out of himself, out of next to nothing.’ It is lucky that Francis was comfortable eking substance out of next to nothing because, as the book makes clear, that is pretty much what he lived on for twenty years. The diary records the period of his first modest poetic successes, the building of Fort Juniper, and then the long drought in the 1940s and ’50s when he published almost nothing. It ends before 1960, when his collection The Orb Weaver – not coincidentally, another spider image – brought him public recognition. The man’s ability to live through failure and poverty without once diverting from his poetic vocation, and to retain his good humour, is heroic. It is, in fact, inspirational to read, at what feels increasingly like the fag end of the consumer era, this entry from 5 July 1953:

Though I live far below The American Standard of Living, I am not impoverished or pitiful. All bills (except the property tax) are paid to date. I own my small home. I am well nourished and adequately clothed. Few writers have more propitious conditions under which to write.

Who needs anything more? To be so utterly beyond material aspiration is surely a joyful state. In fact it seems so thoroughly reasonable that I forget that Francis’s life was singular, based on a willingness to forgo all kinds of luxury and ease that I am, essentially, too lazy to give up. Francis had to work hard at his life – he did all his own repairs, grew his own food, ate a diet of squash, green beans and tomatoes, and counted his rejection slips. Yet he did it all so wholeheartedly that, for the brief span of this book at least, his way of life seems like the only way. It is a very American life, drawing on the tradition of New England self-reliance that we see in the essays of Emerson and Thoreau, the creed of owing nothing and creating everything:

So far as I know, I am free to go on living here at Fort Juniper as long as I go on living. Free to go on with my life. Free to go on living.

In middle age I now have reservations about that vision of life. Self-reliance can so easily become isolation, though it never did for Francis, whose one luxury was a radio that brought him music and voices from far beyond Amherst. Yet his single-minded life, in which he spun such riches from so little material, is still an inspiration, and this book the one I have reread more than any other. If there were any creed for those of us who feel the need to justify a slightly out-of-the-way life – and as an antiquarian bookseller in a Kindle world, I frequently have to, not least to myself and my bank manager ‒ it would surely be this:

Every kind of life costs something. The price I pay is different from the price others pay because my life itself is different. I cannot escape payment, but I can make my life worth payment.

 Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 56 © Chris Saunders 2017