from his adventures at sea and in Paris, he spent the rest of his life roaming close to his farm in Coates.
Jefferies wrote. He wrote voraciously, prodigiously. Putting pen to paper for Jefferies was like breathing and every bit as necessary. We learned he had written more than five hundred essays, nineteen books (including nine novels), and five more books published posthumously. He died of tuberculosis in 1887. He was survived by his wife of thirteen years, Jessie Baden.
The British literary scholar H.S. Salt wrote shortly after his death, “There are few figures more pathetic or more heroic in the annals of our literature than that of this solitary, unfortunate brave-hearted man, who with ‘three great giants’ as he recorded in his journal, ‘disease, despair, and poverty’ could yet nourish to the last an indomitable confidence in the happiness of the future race.” The Guardian recently called Jefferies, “arguably the founding father of British environmentalism,” reporting on the irony of development threats near his family farm in Coate, England, where he would “ramble, wait, and watch.”
In the winter of 2013, Brooke and I visited the Jefferies farm near the Coate Reservoir, bordered by woods animated by rooks and robins, blue-bridled tits, and squirrels, not far from the town of Swindon. The old farmhouse, now a museum, is only open once a week and less in the winter, but as luck would have it, the day we were there the six members of the Richard Jefferies Society were conducting their annual meeting and they welcomed us inside with tea and biscuits.
We wandered through the museum noting the various busts and portraits of Jefferies. His eyes in all mediums were intense and haunting. There were cases of artifacts from Ice Age spear points to hammer stones. Locks of hair, letters, a pocket watch were also on display. Natural history dioramas were plentiful from an era long gone. I was especially drawn to the snowy egrets with their gold painted feet. And up the staircase were the paintings of Kate Tryon, an artist from Naples, Maine, born in 1864, whose obsession with Richard Jefferies in the early 1900s was not unlike our own. She visited the Coate landscape with a desire to paint the places that had inspired Jefferies, pastoral settings where his poetic prose were written. A pleinair painter fell in love with a pleinair writer.
But the place of power in the museum where the spirit of Richard Jefferies spoke to us was on the third floor in the attic where the curators had reconstructed his childhood bedroom. It wasn’t the mannequin of Richard as a boy (black-knickered, white-shirted, and suspendered) lying on his brass bed reading a book with his chin resting on his hand that moved us. Nor was it the rabid-looking red fox, badly mounted, with a snide grin perched on the wooden chest. What moved us was his writing desk, a simple drop-leaf piece of furniture made from pine with thin tapered legs situated in front of the window framed by blue curtains. A small chair with a wicker seat was tucked inside. The window was open. The curtains billowed. There was a vitality here I felt nowhere else.
“To be beautiful and to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of Nature,” Richard Jefferies wrote. “If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it.”
Back home, we continued to reread The Story of My Heart. We became obsessed with bringing this book back into print so another generation could encounter his ideas. Ideas like the importance of being idle:
I hope succeeding generations will be able to be idle. I hope that nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will work towards that end with all my heart. If employment they must have—and the restlessness of the mind will require it… They shall not work for bread, but for their souls.
Ideas like humility and the value of Earth’s indifference:
There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though loved so dearly, would let me perish on the ground, and neither bring forth food nor water.
Ideas relevant to the discussion of a sustainable life:
I verily believe that the earth in one year produces enough food to last for thirty. Why then, have we not enough?
When Richard Jefferies says, “The circle of ideas we possess is too limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside our circle as are outside those that were pondered by Augustus Caesar,” I believe him.
But my growing kinship with Richard Jefferies as a fellow writer of natural history and memoir paled next to my husband’s relationship with him. Day and night, Brooke was reading Jefferies. Night and day, he was quoting him. A river runs itself clear in the night. In other words, goodnight. And this: Let me be fleshly perfect. Translation: I need to go exercise. It got to the point that before leaving home, whether we were going to dinner with friends or to any public gathering, be it a party or a political hearing, Brooke had to promise me he would not bring up Richard Jefferies. Promise after promise was broken. No matter the occasion, Brooke managed to insert Jefferies into the conversation. I began to believe that Brooke and Jefferies were a ventriloquist team. I could no longer tell where Brooke’s voice ended and Jefferies’ voice began.
In the end, I gave up. I simply set a place for Jefferies at the table and let the two of them talk endlessly over breakfast, lunch, and dinner without Brooke ever moving his mouth. It was the look in his eyes. He was a thousand miles away.
But isn’t that how marriages go, we survive one another’s obsessions be it a person, place, or thing. Marriage is the accommodation of nouns. Brooke has survived my love affairs with Hieronymus Bosch, Philip II, and prairie dogs. He has traveled with me to Rwanda and returned home with a son. He has endured the re-enactment of the battle at Gettysburg and attended a Civil War ball. And early on in our marriage, he didn’t say a word when I told him I would be gone for several months studying ophiuroids in the Gulf of California, nor did he balk at our growing library focused on death and dying.
Likewise, I have learned to live with his passions: backcountry skiing, wet wool, two dogs, and dragonflies. Because of Brooke’s obsession with dragonflies, I now know how to distinguish meadowhawks from darners, darners from skimmers, and skimmers from sand dragons. And the absolute certainty that whenever we find ourselves in a landscape of stray rocks (often), Brooke will turn them into standing stones; sculptures perfectly poised on the edge of a river or lake or ocean regardless of the occasion, including wakes and weddings.
I knew the how of Brooke’s obsession with Jefferies; I had been part of it. What I didn’t know was the why.
Last fall, we returned to Maine as we do each year. Richard Jefferies traveled with us. And once again, we read The Story of My Heart out loud outside. But something had changed. This time, when Brooke read the words of Richard Jefferies he was no longer reading them with a sense of curiosity and astonishment, he was reading them alive. He was reading them passionately, lyrically, and when called for, emphatically. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul. He exhorted the ocean to answer Jefferies’ questions: Why then, do we not have enough? When a gull landed near us on the granite slabs of Schoodic Point, Brooke faced the gull and read, Let me be in myself myself fully. Will you believe me when I say the Herring gull nodded? With all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plane; give me a soul beyond these…The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder; the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.
Brooke was no longer reading the words of Richard Jefferies. He embodied them.
Give me bodily life equal in fullness to the strength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul-life of my desire.
