F. P. Grove's In Search of Myself
e-Edition ©2007
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AND BEYOND -- Page 441
HOW, in these years from
1931 to 1940, did we manage to live?
Early in 1932 my wife had once more taken matters into her own hands and opened a Kindergarten School which, during that first term, was operated at a loss. IN SEARCH OF MYSELF -- Page 442
But she
saw an opportunity; and, within a year, she turned the
kindergarten over to a sister of hers who came to live
with us; and she added a full public-school curriculum,
with striking success. By 1934 she had an enrolment
sufficient to warrant the expectation that, within a
short time, her enterprise would expand into a private
school of considerable reputation and proportions. We
were living in the open country; but people were willing
to see to the transportation of their children over
the two, three miles from Simcoe; and even over the
five, six miles from Waterford.
The house, large enough to harbour both school and living-quarters, was in bad repair and badly laid out; it could be heated only at an exorbitant expense. In the fall of 1934 we made up our minds that it was imperative to rebuild it, starting with the outside. These building activities promptly took charge of us. We now had the outer shell of a well-built house; the interior was next to clamour for improvement. We had to keep our minds focused on material things. Personally, I could have gone on living under any conditions. Over Prairie Trails, an inspired book, had been written in surroundings worse than our present ones, and under difficulties which to many would have seemed insurmountable. The point had been that, at the time, I had never paid the slightest attention to my environment. There had been the routine of teaching, of course; just as, in the two decades before 1912, there had been the routine of farm work. But my inner consciousness had remained free; even while expounding the intricacies of the binomial theorem, my mind had been on my book. Provided I did this and that, and did it well, the material necessities were "added unto me". AND AFTER -- Page 443
From 1934
on, our whole thought was, for years on end, almost
passionately concerned with our material surroundings.
I suddenly saw the conditions under which we
lived; I became conscious of the ugliness of this interior
of a house. The wood-work, for instance, was old, worn,
shrunk, and warped; it was an offence to the eye; worse,
it was of pine painted to resemble oak
As I said, I could have lived and worked in any surroundings; provided always that I did not need to consider these surroundings as the final setting of my life. So far, my eyes had been focused on a goal, namely, artistic production; I had closed them to the road over which we had to travel to that goal; and that road consisted in our lives from day to day. From the point of view of life, this is, of course, profoundly wrong: it would be far better to live from moment to moment. Any overwhelming ambition annuls life from the moment of its conception to the moment of its attainment. I suddenly saw. Now I am so constituted that, to look at ugliness, consciously and day after day, is the same to me as having to listen, day after day, to lies. When I began to see the end of my life in our day-to-day existence, the inside of our house became an eyesore to me. Such a life, to a constitution like mine, spells tragedy. But the trouble with all material ambitions is that they are realizable; realized, they leave you in the void. Improvement in material conditions involved the keeping of a maid. But the moment you have a maid, you are no longer master in your own house; you are not even the one who decides your own standard of living; that standard you have to adjust to what your maid expects of you if she is not to consider it as below her dignity to serve you. You are in the power of a machine which directs IN SEARCH OF MYSELF -- Page 444
you with a cumulative compulsion. Maids,
for instance, demand so-called modern "conveniences";
or they turn their noses up at the job you offer.
The first thing that was needed was an automatic water supply. Technically, this offered no difficulties; for throughout my farm, which is crossed by a creek, the water table lies high. But the installation involved an expense of a thousand dollars; for walls had to be opened and closed. That, in turn, brought up the question of rearranging the whole interior. We might have installed the water system and left the house unchanged. But sooner or later the alterations would impose themselves. Next came the question of toilet and wash-room for the school; and it opened up the whole question of plumbing. One proposed change inevitably led to another. The expense would be more than we could hope to pay off in three or four years. All this planning was done in the spring of 1935. It seemed a pity that nothing should come of it. When the summer holidays began, we were still divided in our counsels. Even with the school flourishing - and it did flourish - we could not hope to lay by more than a few hundred dollars a year; and beyond the land and the buildings we had no reserve. Yet I seemed to see that my wife had set her heart on going through with the scheme; not to do so would have meant a personal defeat to her. For days, for weeks we talked of nothing else; and, while we were living through this mental upheaval, I, of course, was doing no work. It was impossible to live the life of the imagination when material actualities demanded undivided concentration. I felt unhappy. It was all or nothing. If we carried AND AFTER -- Page 445
out part of the plan, we must carry out
the whole; or we must accept the fact that it would
remain fragmentary for good. The expense of duplications
we could not afford. My bad conscience arose from the knowledge that I was a ratepayer in good standing. It was true, there was a mortgage on the place; but interest and amortization had always been paid without a day's lapse. Banks live on the loans which they make. I knew I could go to town, and any bank would gladly advance all the funds needed. One day, late in June, I cut the Gordian knot. I saw the banker with whom I had done business during the preceding years and arranged for the necessary credits; I signed contracts. My wife I confronted with the accomplished fact; and I saw she felt relieved. For week upon week we lived in dust and dirt; but when the work was finished we had a new house, the admiration of friends and callers. When our family doctor entered the dining-room for the first time, he stood and exclaimed, "Why, this is a jewel !" Yet it was all done with comparatively cheap materials. While the building operations were going on, I was, of course, kept busy. The dining-room, to mention one thing, was panelled in chestnut and elm, to be finished in the natural colour of the woods - all the finishing to be done by myself. Every panel had to be selected, to be compared with all the other panels, to be matched and tested in the light to which it was to be exposed. The "figure" of the wood used for the posts had to be scanned and harmonized; the three doors were made up from timbers inspected at the mills. As they are today, they look, without imitating anything, like three symphonic movements from Beethoven's Sixth. In the
end we had, in addition to the three-thousand-dollar
mortgage, assumed a debt of two thousand dollars. There
had been a few pretty anxious days; but at last I could
cast up accounts.
I had bought the place for seven thousand dollars; I had stocked it for three, covering this latter sum by the mortgage. Now, including alterations made at the barn and fencing in the fields, a total of fourteen thousand dollars had gone into the making of the place as it stood. More than ever was it necessary that my books should yield an income; more than ever was it impossible for them to do so! As matters worked out, we could not have done the work at a more opportune time; in 1934 and 1935 the prices of building materials as well as wages of skilled labour had reached their nadir. Shortly, the Dominion housing scheme and the so-called Home-Improvement Plan drove prices up along a steep gradient. Within a year the cost would have been forty percent higher. It is ever so; when a government sponsors a scheme ostensibly designed for the benefit of the "consumer", business, real ruler of the country, sees to it that the benefit accrues to itself. Income dwindled. Lectures were asked for now and then; but the fees offered dropped from twenty-five to ten dollars. On one occasion I received, for three lectures given at Toronto, a fifteen-dollar fee plus fifteen dollars expenses; on my way home I had a thirty-dollar repair on my car! A newspaper agreed to carry certain materials of mine. It took me an average of three days a week to supply it; they paid me seven dollars for the first month. AND AFTER -- Page 447
The greater
the need, that is the everlasting refrain, the less
my ability to supply it.
*** One asks
at last, what does this standard of living amount to?
The argument which I mean to set forth does not apply to myself alone; if it
did, it would not be worth my while to expound it. It does not even apply to
individuals only; it applies to whole nations; ultimately it applies
to mankind.
It is the argument against material progress. Not that my argument necessarily outweighs other arguments which may be advanced in favour of the present and more especially American trend. From time immemorial material progress has been interwoven with the spiritual life of the race; it will probably remain so to the end of time. Besides, the possible increase in the material welfare of the masses - of, let me say, the Badawin in the Rub' al Khali of Southern Arabia; for we must cease considering such question from the purely local point of view of the illiterate - may be worth any retardation it necessarily involves in their spiritual pulses. In many cases - I have tried to hint at this before -material progress stimulates spiritual endeavour; and spiritual, or intellectual, effort as often as not advances material welfare. It may well be that that is what Christ meant when he said, "Do not ask what shall we eat" . . . In the total balance, the material victories of mankind may, in terms of human happiness, be worth more than the benefits conferred upon it by its religious leaders, philosophers, poets, sculptors, painters, and musicians combined, though I doubt it. But I am not competent to cast up such a cosmic account;
if I were, this would not be the place to do it. Yet
the argument remains; and it should be stated.
What should be stated is the debit side which is so commonly overlooked; for there is a debit side even in the material field. We are apt to forget the cost of material progress, the cost to the nation and to mankind, the cost in human happiness, in human life. It will forever be one of the great tragedies of history to me that Sir John Franklin vanished in the arctic wastes; that Captain Scott and his gallant companions froze to death on their return from the South Pole; and these are merely two of the spectacular cases. Every sky-scraper erected in the United States, every canal dug through every isthmus, every air-line opened up exacts its toll of human life - and who will evaluate the worth of a life that is lost? It exacts its toll in human happiness as well; for the sheer physical labour required to bring such things about can be supplied only by some sort of slavery. I am profoundly distrustful of what is called civilization. Perhaps one has to have lived - as I have done; as I am doing - on the frontier, or beyond the frontier, of a life that is reasonably secure in order to understand why I call the present civilization the consolidation of barbarism; at least if security of life is acknowledged as the first postulate of what can legitimately be called civilization. But I am trying to leave the way open for an impartial trial. It is for that reason that I am emphatic in defining my attitude in this argument as that of the advocate who submits his brief with the full consciousness, yes, the definite intention, of presenting only one side of the question. For I repeat, the argument remains. I shall try to state it. AND AFTER -- Page 449
Why is
it that the most triumphant expression of human joy
should have come out of a life so devoid of material
enjoyment as Beethoven's? Why is it that, even in that
supreme scherzo of the Ninth, there are those terrible
undertones? Of course, I can state the argument only as a personal one, distilled out of my own life. When I was a farm-hand, I was happy; I had no material wants beyond those requisite to leave me free to follow my thought. To-day I have the appurtenances of a civilized life, if on a modest scale, and I am not happy. Necessarily, the fact makes me pause. If there were no responsibilities involved, I should gladly leave the place I live in and join the army of those who are on the road; and if, as it would be bound to do, such a course, at my age, led to my physical breakdown, I should still take a savage sort of satisfaction out of the fact that I should have to "crack up" by the side of the trail, by way of a protest against what we call civilization. I applogize [sic] for the vehemence and vulgarity of the expression; but only vehement and vulgar expressions are at all adequate to the case. Let me begin my exposition with an instance ludicrous in its pettiness. It will be remembered that, towards the middle of my thirteenth year, I had been seen by my father surreptitiously entering a barber-shop to have myself shaved. When my fourteenth birthday came around, my mother and I were far away; but a parcel arrived for me from my father, containing a fine and very complete shaving-outfit: razor, strop, and brush. I felt the irony; but it did not wound me. I used that outfit for decades; I am using parts of it to-day. In 1939, then, these things were fifty-three years old. The blockstrop
will easily do for the rest of my life; it may even
do my son as well. It is of the brush that I wish to
speak.
Like the other things comprising the outfit this brush was very good; my parents never bought anything but the best. It had given service for more than five decades; but now it was in its extreme old age; its life-span proved to be shorter than mine. It had become thin on the head; many of the bristles had dropped out; others had broken. Yet, to the age of sixty-six I had had no other. Then, one day, when I had to shave in a strange city where I was to give a lecture, I found I had forgotten that brush at home. I borrowed my host's. Compared with my own, this borrowed brush, still in its infancy, was a marvel. A single touch of it on my face covered an area ten or twenty times as great as that lathered by my senescent article. I conceived the bold and purely material ambition of owning a new shaving brush myself, the second in my life! On my return home I visited a shop where such things are sold; and since, nothing but the best would do to replace what had once been the best of its kind, I found I should have to expend the enormous sum of three and three-quarter dollars for what I wanted. I could not spare that amount for the moment; I was not going again to assume a debt. I continued to use my old brush. But it did not satisfy me any longer; my ambition would not let me rest. If I laid aside a quarter a week, it would take only fifteen weeks to make the purchase on a cash basis; and I acted accordingly. But, if the purchase as such had not been the easy matter it would have been for a Croesus, the worst was to come. While a stick of shaving soap had, in the past, AND AFTER -- Page 451
lasted me a year - this is based on the
records of decades - I found that, with my new brush,
such a stick refused to last more than the three months
which radio-announcers promise. The brush as such absorbed
many times as much lather as the old one had done; and
this lather, which does no work on the face, is just
so much waste; it represents an entirely unproductive
outlay. It is quite true that the task of lathering
- again as the announcers promise - became almost, though
never quite, a pleasure. Possibly a little time is saved,
too; but, in contradistinction to that of the business
man, my time is not money; and in my circumstances,
it was decidedly poor policy to pay seventy-five cents
a year for a saving of perhaps seven hundred seconds.
This is a general argument, not a personal one. Seventy-five cents a year should be a matter of serious consideration to anyone, regardless of economic status; for these seventy-five cents represent so much of someone's labour. I tried to find my old brush in order to reinstate it; perhaps, I thought, I could still use the new one as a birthday-present to someone whom I wished evil. Unfortunately, my little son had appropriated it as a paintbrush to beautify his playhouse! Put the case this way. In an arctic expedition so-and-so much food is taken. If one of the members surreptitiously uses more than his share, all the others may be in serious danger. But so long as there is not an absolute surplus in the production of mankind, mankind as such must be considered as a unit embarked on the expedition of life; and mankind includes every Siberian, every Indian, every Chinese who may starve in a famine. Until we have acquired that universal outlook, there can be no true civilization on earth. For everything
we acquire, so-and-so-much life has to be paid. My life
was, or should have been, the life of the imagination.
The life which is peculiar to me consists in letting
other lives work themselves out within that, to me entirely
mysterious, entity which is known to others by my name.
What I am, as a consciousness, has nothing to do with
it; I have often doubted whether there is anything that
I can legitimately call "I". I have also doubted whether
any so-called personality can be considered as an end
in itself; for better or worse, our lives are part of
the life of mankind. Willy-nilly we live for a while
under the illusion that the link in the chain has as
much reality as the chain itself. Death destroys that
illusion; and death may well not be the cessation of
anything whatever. We live as much in others as we live
in ourselves. For the chain of the generations the life
we live for others, in others, is the one thing which
has any importance whatever. If we consider our indirect
influence, it may extend through eternity. All of which
is said here merely to indicate that the waste involved
in any so-called high standard of living, which is always
individual, may well be infinite.
But I admit that the illusion of the individual life considered as an end in itself is very powerful; at the stage at which I must leave this record, my wife and I were held in thrall by that illusion. It is the peculiarly American philosophy of life that to have is more important than to be or to do; in fact, that to be is dependent on to have. America's chief contribution to the so-called civilization of mankind, so far, consists in the instalment plan; and that plan imposes a slavery vastly more galling, vastly more wasteful than any autocracy, any tyranny has ever AND AFTER -- Page 453
imposed. A free life is impossible under
its rule except for the rich who can dispense with it;
that is axiomatic. But I wish to go beyond the mischief wrought by partial payments. We had rebuilt the outside of the house at a cost of roughly a thousand dollars; this was a so-called investment. But for its own protection it demanded henceforth a yearly expenditure equivalent to ten per cent or more of its cost. Every two or three years the house had to be painted if it was not to deteriorate at a rapid pace. There are hardwood floors; they demand wax instead of water. Even water is no longer free. It is supplied by a pressure system. Whenever a tap is turned to draw it, a motor in the basement is automatically set in motion, consuming electric current which has to be paid for. Since a bathroom is useless, at least in winter, unless hot water is available, an electric heating system consumes thirty dollars' worth of current a year. I might go on and on. In other words, the question arises what consumes more of "life", not only for the individual but for mankind: to do a thing in the direct or in the indirect way: to draw the water from a well or to have it pumped by a motor, for which we pay out what we call money - that is life -in purchase and upkeep; money which enslaves him who gives it and him who receives it - the latter by means of the money wage. One more such trifle, and I shall have done. During the winter of 1937 a thoughtless person inflicted upon us the loan of a radio set which was in her way; and for the first time we came into contact with this miracle of modern technique. I, for one, heard in quick succession Beethoven's Fifth, Sixth, Seventh Symphonies which I had not heard for fifty years.
My whole youth seemed to stream back upon me; my wife
felt that she was in touch with a wider world.
I hesitated. I argued that the purchase of a radio would mean another break with our whole previous policy of going without. It would introduce a new factor of distraction. But, being half converted already, I said that, after all, we had missed many things. I took two wax imprints of the gold medal awarded me by the Royal Society of Canada and sold the metal for the exact price of the smallest receiving set I could buy. We forgot the implications. No matter what the salesman said, the set consumed current; a licence fee was needed for its operation; in time it would require repairs. What is perhaps worse remains: so far I had been able to think that man was a reasonable animal concerned with serious things; for all I knew, the world might be full of unguessed-at splendours. I found that, by and large, nothing of the kind is the case: the ether resounds with stupidity and vulgarity. There was a real danger. The mere possession of so many of these toys of a modern material civilization brought with it a change in our whole outlook on life. Standards changed. Sums which, in the past, would have staggered us appeared as mere trifles. No longer was a yearly income of nine hundred dollars sufficient, as it had had to be sufficient at Ashfield, to defray our expenses and leave six hundred over for doctor and hospital bills while I wrote Settlers of the Marsh and Our Daily Bread. I had, for what we both still considered my essential work, at best two or three hours out of the twenty-four; and they were never safe from invasion by worry. AND AFTER -- Page 455
A last
consideration will make the argument, as I can present
it, complete. An anecdote will serve to illustrate.
When my wife was at Falmouth and I went home, on Fridays, it so happened that one day, some six or eight miles north of Gladstone, I met the school inspector returning from my wife's school in his car. We stopped and exchanged a few words. It was a dismal, sleety day; and the inspector's car was splashed with mud, from top to bottom; mud had worked into every crack in the shell of the car; mud was grinding down its roller-bearings. I asked about the road. "You'll make it," he said. "You've got the advantage over me. It'll do your horse good to do a piece of real work. When he gets there, he'll rest and be the stronger for it. As for my car, I must write off seventy-five dollars in depreciation." He had touched on an essential point. Man had domesticated animals to do the roughest part of his work. Up to a certain point these animals recovered from any exertion that man might require; and in addition they reproduced themselves. That was "conquest of nature". Machines do not do that; they need upkeep, repair, and replacement. They neither recover; nor do they reproduce themselves. They are the bottomless pit. Their use is not conquest, it is exploitation of nature and of our fellow-men. More or less, all work is done, today, vicariously; surely, its total cost to mankind is thereby increased, not diminished. It is the curse of all material things that they do not renew themselves; and they require more labour in their preservation than in their production; and at the best even the preservation is only provisional. By the same token he who owns them pays in the aggregate
more for their upkeep than for their acquisition. Expense
- that is to say, waste of life - devours its own offspring,
like time; and it has a cumulative effect. Is it worth
it?
In that question lies the force of the argument against material progress. That part of mankind, of course, which lords it over the rest will answer the question in the affirmative. How about the total balance? In my own case, the price I paid was twofold. In the first place, there was the loss of my contentment. Henceforth I had to exhaust my mental, spiritual, and physical strength in the vain effort to keep up what I had acquired; the material things had enslaved me. As for my wife, she was no longer the brave, undaunted girl who, having found a purpose in life, had faced life squarely, courageously, in that destitution which in this country -and to an ever-increasing extent in others as well - is imposed as a penalty on those who dare to live for things other than material. She was pursued by the furies of worry; from morning till night she was bent upon making both ends meet; and at the same time she kept repeating that only through the financial success of one of my books could we ever hope to pull ourselves out of the slough of despond. But the very clarity with which this problem was grasped prevented its solution; there were no longer any new books which were bound to conquer, immediately or in the long run; this was the second instalment of the price I had to pay. The plans that emerged - for in spite of all they did emerge - were still-born from the start. Yet I feel as certain as I have ever felt of anything, though it can never be proved, that they would have matured of their own accord had I lived in a hut in the bush, never caring, What shall we eat, what shall we AND AFTER -- Page 457
drink, wherewithal shall we clothe ourselves?
Mentally, I was as alert as ever; though I was facing
the time, and saw it approaching, when that mental alertness
would fade into the twilight of a coming senescence.
That maturing of my plans would have satisfied me; and
I do not think it beyond the possibilities that it would
have redounded to the benefit of my wife, my country,
perhaps of mankind.
Was it worth it? Suppose I went out on the road once more, leaving wife and child? Suppose I merged myself once more in the life which is that of the unemployed - for mankind as such is unemployed so long as a fraction of it is - I could see myself sitting by the roadside, jotting down thoughts or imaginations that have come to me. I should taste once more the triumph of creation, the utter triumph of the pangs of birth; and I should grow inwardly as nothing can make a man grow except the vicarious living of scores of other lives. But, after all, there are things which a man does not do. As I have said, this is an argument against material progress; but it is an argument only; it is not the verdict. |
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