Eccentrics and half-lived lives

 One of the stories in Donald Hall’s String Too Short to Be Saved is about a character named Washington Woodward. (His real name was Freeman Morrison.) 

Woodward decided the world was not a good place to live in, and so he bought a few acres on Ragged Mountain in New Hampshire, built a cabin and lived there for 50 years.

He did odd jobs, but was largely self-sufficient. He paid his taxes by working on a road crew for a week or two each summer.

He could fix anything, and he appeared around the farm owned by Hall’s grandparents occasionally to repair machinery and to help with heavy chores. He was an excellent hand, but he didn’t come around often.

Hall despaired of him, rather than celebrated him. When his grandfather told stories about characters such as Woodward, Hall, even as a boy saw them in a different light.

 

So many of them lived a half-life, a life of casual waste.

 

The story on Woodward is called “A hundred thousand straightened nails.” Woodward made a practice of collecting materials he might need. He thought it was a sin to waste good materials. Here’s Hall’s summary:

 

The waste that he hated, I thought, was through him like blood in his veins. He had saved nails and waisted life … He worked hard all his life at being himself, but there were no principles to examine when his life was over … The life which he could recall totally was not worth recalling.

 

It’s a harsh judgment, and I’m not sure it’s fair. Perhaps it is. But Hall recalled this life thoroughly.

It’s one complaint about a book I like. The subtitle of Hall’s book is “Recollections of summers on a New England Farm.” I’ve written elsewhere about summers spent on a Texas farm, and perhaps I tend to see the past with feelings that color my vision. But I also think you can see these characters as Hall’s grandfather saw them. Some rural people lived with integrity in response to a world that they didn’t understand — and has never been completely understood. We tend to think that our own age is more open, more tolerant to eccentrics. Perhaps that’s just not so.

• Sources and notes:  Donald Hall, String Too Short to Be Saved; Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1979, pp. 21 and 31-2. For a note on finding Hall’s book, see “Eureka!” July 17, 2023. And for another view of the same book, see “A trail of the mind,” July 28, 2023.