Book Review//We Took to the Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich

I have a new life goal. I shall buy a little house on a river in the Maine woods and move my family there. We shall be isolated from the world in general but completely happy with our own company. We will be surrounded by woods and water and nature. And obviously I will write a book in my spare time.

Louise Dickinson Rich beat me to this life plan and I have just had the joy of reading all about it. We Took to the Woods was published in 1942 and became an instant bestseller. Rich’s conversational style and forthright descriptions of her life are eminently readable. Each chapter is titled with a question asked regularly by their visitors; such subjects as “Aren’t the Children a Problem?” or “Do You Get Out Very Often?”

Interspersed with accounts of life in Maine are many passages about what it is like to be a writer. I particularly liked this.

In theory, at least one of the advantages of writing is that you can work anywhere and any time. You aren’t tied down. Actually, thisis true within limits. I have found that unless I make myself some office hours and stick to them—8.30 to 11 A.M. and 1 to 3 P.M.—I don’t do any writing. I pick some wild flowers and arrange them, wash the dog, and make a cake, and then it’s too late to start this morning. So I read another chapter of the book I started last night and get dinner. After dinner I think I might as well finish the book and go swimming. Morning is really the time your mind is clearest, I remember being told. There’s no sense in trying to start writing in the afternoon. So I’ll write tomorrow. I really will. . . . Another reason I like to be a writer, aside from the fact that I can live in the backwoods instead of off Times Square is that I like to see my name in print. This is pure exhibitionism, and we’ll say no more about it. I don’t like exhibitionists, either. And while I’m baring my girlish heart, I might as well admit that I enjoy having people look respectful when I say, “Oh, I write.” I get a kick out of it, even if I do feel like a fraud.

Feeling like a fraud is one of the bad things about being a writer. You have to be a little disparaging about your work sometimes. Because of its nature, it is so closely tied up with your own personality that taking it seriously verges perilously close to the pompous. So there’s a lot of talk by writers about just doing pot-boilers until one is financially secure enough to embark on a really serious work. Frankly, this is hooey. Writing pot-boilers implies writing down, and condescension is immediately apparent to, and rightly resented by, the editor. I believe that any writer who sells enough to eat off the proceeds is writing the very best he can all the time. When he stops, he stops eating.

I enjoy the window into Rich’s world in the Maine woods but her writing is also a window into the world of the 1930s. There is an absolutely lovely section about her ordering from the Sears catalog and imagining the life of the woman featured in the sample order. When she writes about what she wears in her day-to-day life she contrasts it to what she used to wear in town which, in both cases, provides a look back at how things used to be. The party telephone connects her to neighbors whom she comes to know well without having ever met them.

Rich very clearly loved the Maine woods dearly and that love of the woods and her life there is highlighted in her writing. Here is another lovely passage.

Winter, to look forward to, is a long, dark, dreary time. To live, it’s a time of swirling blizzards and heavenly high blue and white days; of bitter cold and sudden thaws; of hard work outdoors and long, lamp-lit evenings; of frost patterns on the windows and the patterns of deer tracks in the snow. It’s the time you expected to drag intolerably, and once in a while you stop and wonder when the drag is going to begin. Next week, you warn yourself, after we’ve finished doing this job on hand, we’d better be prepared for a siege of boredom. But somehow next week never comes. There’s always something to keep it at bay.

Then one day there’s a patch of bare ground on a sunny slope, the dog starts going wild with the smell of spring, and someone says that the break-up ought to come early this year. The break-up! But Good Heavens, the lakes only froze up a couple of weeks ago. Well, a little more than that, maybe. Let’s see—Why, it’s time to tap the maple trees and overhaul the cars and clean house! The next thing you know, the smelts are running and the loons have come back into the growing patch of open water in the Pond-in-the-River. There’s an ant hill in the flower garden and a dandelion blossom up by the road. Gerrish has begun talking about a good mess of dandelion greens, cooked with salt pork. It’s time to clean up the vegetable garden and paint the boats, and the consensus is that the ice will be out by next Tuesday.

Next Tuesday!

Where has the winter gone?

Rich writes so clearly about what she loves without ever giving the impression that she thinks this is what everyone should love. Somehow, while doing that, she manages to convince the reader, even if only briefly, that they do indeed want to live deep in the Maine woods. I’ll leave you with some concluding words from the chapter “Don’t You Get Awfully Out of Touch?”

No, poor Riches, we don’t have plays and music and contact with sophisticated minds, and a round of social engagements. All we have are sun and wind and rain, and space in which to move and breathe. All we have are the forests, and the calm expanses of the lakes, and time to call our own. All we have are the hunting and fishing and swimming, and each other.

We don’t see pictures in famous galleries. But the other day, after a sleet storm that had coated the world with a sheath of ice, I saw a pine grosbeak in a little poplar tree. The setting sun slanted through a gap in the black wall of the forest, and held bird and tree in a celestial spot-light. Every twig turned to diamond encrusted-gold, and the red of the bird’s breast glowed like a huge ruby as he fluffed his feathers in the wind. I could hardly believe it. I could only stand still and stare.

Rich was a fairly prolific author and I have already requested a few of her other books from the library. In the meantime, I’ll be spending my evenings looking at houses for sale in Maine. That’s perfectly reasonable, isn’t it? I believe Louise Dickinson Rich would think so.