Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/11/09/perrins_pastoral_paradise.php
Thursday, November 9, 2006
Best Person Rural, an essay collection by former Dartmouth Professor Noel Perrin, opens by following a young Dutch prospector through newly minted Vermont in 1791. The young man, Jan Linklaen, is looking to buy 23,000 acres of maple sugar groves. Lincklaen’s company back in Amsterdam already owns 4 million acres in New York State. As the Dutchman nears the end of his tour, he stops in on Governor Thomas Chittendon.
Lincklaen later wrote of this visit: “His house & way of living have nothing to distinguish them from those of any private individual, but he offers heartily a glass of Grog, potatoes, & bacon to anyone who wishes to come and see him.” Perrin writes, “maybe rural Vermont is a little like that still.” That said, the reader can only imagine the face of young Lincklaen if he had found himself across the table from Howard Dean instead of Chittendon on that fortuitous night.
Perrin, who died in 2004, wrote prolifically about his small farm in Thetford, Vermont. Many of his essays found their way into four separate collections over the years: Best Person Rural collects twenty four of these essays into one final book.
The success of Perrin’s work lies in his charm and untempered idealism; nearly every piece in this volume is soaked in a thick coat of down-home quaintness—a quality that can wear thin at times. The volume is (wisely) not a long read, and so the sometimes-sappy nature of his writing rarely has a chance to weigh down the book as a whole.
More often than not, Perrin’s style is the perfect accompaniment to his chosen subject. At the age of 35, the author bought his small 85-acre farm in Vermont, where he lived for the next 40 years of his life. His folksy charm is wholly appropriate for topics like small town life, fence building, and the soul of the country: “Not all regions have souls, at least no living ones. But New England does. The central truth about our landscape is that it’s introverted. It’s curled and coiled and full of turns and corners. Not open, not public; private and reserved. Most of the best views are little and hidden.”
The essays too are little and modest, given in a generally chronological order. The reader becomes acquainted with Perrin’s farm as the author himself learns of its twists and turns. In the beginning of the book, we read of cows, fence post materials, sugar making, and other rural pursuits. In essays like these, Perrin is an ideal narrator; he too is an amateur who at the time of writing his memoirs is able to anticipate questions and explain fundamentals whom many, otherwise born into the setting, would consider second-nature and would neglect to explain fully.
In one essay, Perrin recounts the circumstances of his move from a male only farmyard. After eleven years of buying young male calves and lambs, he decides he wants more continuity from year to year, a continuity that necessitates heifers and ewes supplying the farm with its own community.
The touchingly comic climax of the story comes as the date of Michelle’s (his new heifer) first birth nears. Perrin computes the exact date of birth—having himself witnessed the insemination—and clears his schedule for that day and the days on either side. As the day approaches, his giddiness is palpable. As luck would have it, Michelle begins dilating two days after the due date—a night he had accepted an invitation to a get-together. He reluctantly sits through the dinner party, thinking all the while of the birth he is missing, thinking of his “farm’s” inauguration. The next morning he rises early and searches high and low for Michelle, to no avail; she has vanished. Fortunately help, in the form of his neighbor, soon arrived: “About 8:00 A.M. I was plodding back toward the road, rather worried, and met Floyd walking briskly out. He likes births, too…he was coming over to see how Michelle handled her first delivery.” With the extra pair of eyes, they soon found the heifer—and she had yet to give birth! He watched in awe as the newest member of his farm-family emerged. Having witnessed the first of many births on his farm, the author would write, “Our farm is now a farm.”
Perrin’s best work is written in this transition period, the time when he hasn’t the slightest idea of what being a farmer is all about. A prime example of this is an essay on fence-making. In the beginning everything he knew about fences was from Robert Frost’s “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.”
The author has his work cut out for him.
After many years and many fences, the author has become something of an expert, espousing the virtues of wood over metal, cedar over elm, self-made over store-bought, etc. Many of his essays, written years afterward, follow this Bildungsroman format, from the naïve first-time farmer to the knowledgeable country-hand. Perrin invites us in to share in his unearthings; after all, it’s hard not to smile at the unequivocal joy in his discovering something so simple as a post-hole digger.
In another essay, Perrin revels in advising the reader on the simplicity of distilling sugar from maple syrup; he’s particularly excited about how awful the syrup can be before he starts the progress. Some is just left-over syrup, while some has been burnt in the process of turning the sap into syrup, while still other syrup has been sitting out in the open for 15 months and has developed a thick green layer of mold. It all works; he reports, “when [the moldy] syrup produced pale, delicious maple candy, I knew I was onto something.”
Perrin’s prose, though generally unceremonious and informal, can at times reach over the simplicity of the life he describes. In one example Perrin describes the entrance of his neighbor into his sugarhouse: “Tom can find a solution for almost anything. If he had been present at the burning of Gomorrah, he would either have figured out a way to put the fire out, or at least had the city rebuilt in no time.” Though the author was distraught at having botched a batch of maple syrup, this reader wonders if such hyperbole—with messianic undertones—is necessary.
Be that as it may, Perrin’s over-the-top excursions into the metaphorical tend to inspire not exasperation, but rather a loving condescension from the reader; he’s trying so hard you almost feel as if you should pat him on the head in consolation. But indeed, he was a professor of English, which begs the question: how could such a shoddy comparison survive the first revision, much less make it into the final product? Happily, these instances don’t overshadow the majority of the work; rather, the superbly agreeable nature of most of the work makes one cringe at those few misplaced steps, and a couple of those steps were annoyingly large.
A few of Perrin’s essays fail to fit seamlessly into the body of the book. One in particular, an essay entitled Nuclear Disobedience, fails to achieve both Perrin and Terry Osborne’s (the compiler of the volume) aims in compiling these essays into a book. Perrin admits as much when he writes the essay will be “like a Jehovah’s Witness who has strayed into an Episcopal picnic. He will preach…. If only he’d sit down and eat a deviled egg, and stop all that shouting.” Regrettably instead of eating the egg, Perrin steps on it, using it as an intermediate stair to his soapbox. He trots out tired argument after tired argument in a most self-righteous manner. This is Perrin at his idealistic worst; he advocates a solitary U.S. disarmament, acknowledging full well that the other countries of the world wouldn’t follow suit. “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive.” William F. Buckley’s quote here should be commonsensical, but Perrin’s essay makes Buckley’s point all too clearly.
During the obligatory portion dedicated to Thoreau that always seems to find its way into essays of this sort, Perrin even takes the pains to point out how clever he is for adapting the title for his essay from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Wandering from Thoreau to Cro Magnons, he finds his way to this inane sentence: “It is very easy to assume that government—ours, the Russian, the World Court, any government—must be right.” Perhaps this is what one calls a generational disconnect—as I’d be hard pressed to name one person who would mark that previous sentence as an easy assumption. Some would explain this away, for the essay was written in 1961. The essay, however, was published years later in 1983. In the postscript the author remarks, “the terrifying thing is how timely [the essay] remains.” Why is this essay here?
The fault must rest most heavily on Osborne’s shoulders. In slipping this piece into the book, Osborne risks upsetting the informal and enjoyable setting created by Perrin’s works surrounding that misplaced piece; indeed, he does succeed, for the reader is left scratching his head, lost and bewildered at how he had gone from reading about the pros and cons of different sheep breeds to a treatise on nuclear disarmament from an English professor turned rural farmer.
The focus of the essays change as the end of the book nears; Perrin becomes perceptibly more introspective. To be sure, there are still moments to be found that are the same in tone as those earlier in the book; he once goes a week without using money, and also recounts how he saves forlorn cars with his winch. The tenor, though, in the rest of the pieces does not have the same fireside quality. The reader can sense that mortality, while not brought to the forefront, is now a constant presence in the author’s mind. The change is neither despairing nor gloomy; it simply illuminates a more subdued aspect of Perrin. In one of the essays, he looks back fondly but sadly upon his short third marriage; in another, he weighs the soul of New England. Much of the end of this book, however, is devoted to the fate of his farm. A farm he lived on for more than 41 years, a farm where his children grew up, a farm tenderly nurtured, a farm where he grew old, his farm.
To look at the world through the author’s eyes is to look at a world ever changing. It is indeed ironic how well yet another Buckley quote—“Standing athwart history, yelling Stop”—would fit into such an avowed liberal’s mouth as Perrin’s. The great tragedy of non-classical liberalism is how unaware great swaths of its followers are of its consequences. Perrin isn’t a bad man for failing to see how his beliefs had a hand in creating today’s world; he’s a little ridiculous perhaps, but aren’t we all?
The pleasure in reading most of Perrin’s work is found within his earnest yearning for days gone by; his modest plea for a return to former simplicity, a simplicity that has past us all by. And that, I think, is a plea well placed.