Nearing writes `Loving and Leaving the Good Life’

LOVING AND LEAVING THE GOOD LIFE, by Helen Nearing, Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 197 pages, $19.95.

Maine author Helen Nearing — widow of political radical Scott Nearing, vigorous exponent of the back-to-the-soil movement — shines the bright lamp of her memoir over the 53 years she and Scott spent together as homestead partners and fellow activists in the socialist party.

“Neither Scott nor I have ever written in our books about our inner lives,” she says. “Both of us preferred to be reserved and private people …” Now, however, she enriches this most recent book with such personal recollections as the time Scott saw her off on one of her European trips in the 1930s and “brought to the boat a 20-cent flute he had picked up from a street peddler, and a large wholesale box of huge, black Bing cherries. I was to consume the cherries (a great favorite of mine) and spit out the pits as I walked the deck.”

Scott, who was Helen’s senior by 21 years, died nine years ago at the age of 100. His death, which took place at their Harborside farm on Cape Rosier, was self-induced. “A month prior to his hundredth birthday he said, `I think I won’t eat any more,”‘ the author relates. For a month thereafter he lived on juices: apple, orange, banana, grape, whatever he could swallow. This was followed by a week on water. “It was a peaceful way to die,” she writes. “Slowly, gradually, he detached himself, breathing less and less, fainter and fainter; then he was off and free, like a dry leaf from the tree, floating down and away.”

Both Helen and Scott were born to wealth and position. But Scott scorned temporal power and was convinced that his mission was to make the world a better place for the underprivileged. His passion was teaching, and after receving his doctorate in economics and sociology he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. During the nine years he was there, he wrote half a dozen school textbooks and was active in socialist reform extracurricular activities.

But when he went public on the heated Pennsylvania issued of child labor, he was fired for what the board of trustees deemed to be dangerous heterodoxy. Word sped through academia and no other large university would hire him. To worsen matters, his books were banned from schools. Finally, he received an offer from a small, liberal college in Ohio, the University of Toledo, and moved there in 1916 with his wife and two small sons to teach political science.

In 1917 the United States entered World War I, and Scott boldly denounced the war as “organized destruction and mass murder by civilized nations.” In response to the fury of the aroused Ohio public, Scott was dropped from the faculty. Although not yet 40, his reputation was by now so tarnished that he was never again to teach in the United States. He paid other penalties: his marriage broke up, and he was tried for treason in the federal court on the grounds that his book, “The Great Madness,” had obstructed recruitment and enlistment in the armed forces. Although a blue-ribbon jury acquitted him, it fined the Rand School which had published and circulated it.

At 45, having plunged to the nadir of his career, he met 24-year-old Helen Knothe, daughter of a prominent New York businessman. Trained in Europe, Helen was a gifted violinist. Like Scott, she was also a socialist, pacifist and vegetarian. Impetuously, they entered a relationship that was to last a lifetime (although because Scott never divorced his wife, their union was not legalized until 1947 when his wife died).

Their first home together was a cheap rented room in Greenwhich Village, followed by a brief tenancy in a fifth-floor tenement flat in New York City. In the late fall of 1932 they put a down payment on a rundown farm in southern Vermont. Scott, who had learned farming skills on his grandfather’s farm in rural Pennsylvania, adapted easily. “I had hardly swept a floor or boiled an egg or picked a berry before,” confesses Helen.

They both learned by doing and kept themselves solvent by selling maple syrup boiled down from the tree sap in their maple grove. They also wrote books, two of which — “The Maple Sugar Book” and “Living the Good Life” — became best sellers. Scott vented his socialist-communist convictions in such as “The Soviet Union as a World Power,” “Democracy Is Not Enough” and “United World.”

In 1953 the influx of developers forced the Nearings to retreat to the greater isolation of Maine, where they purchased a 140-acre farm fronting on a cove of Penobscot Bay. Here they started all over again to rejuvenate another rundown farm, and plant blueberry shrubs from which they ultimately harvested thousands of quarts of blueberries. As they had done in Vermont, the two took to the road periodically to lecture and sell Scott’s books wherever they found a welcome.

In 1979 he and Helen co-wrote “Continuing the Good Life,” sequel to their popular “Living the Good Life.” Now, by way of a benediction, Helen Nearing has limned this charming, delicately insightful “Loving and Leaving the Good Life.” It is a love story, captured in the rainbow of time, destined to fade, but destined also to leave behind forever its lovely glow.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a regular feature in the monthly Books in Review section. Goodrich also writes a review column, and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”