Beston’s words still ring true

THE BEST OF BESTON: THE NATURAL WORLD OF HENRY BESTON FROM CAPE COD TO THE ST. LAWRENCE, edited and introduced by Elizabeth Coatsworth, David R. Godine Publisher, softcover, $16.95.

In the summer of 1944, an American Red Cross Bookmobile stopped by the airfield near Attleboro, England, where I was based. In those days I was flying aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress, the plane that did most of that war’s daylight bombing. We had to work with the weather, and there were many days when we “stood down” without that much to do but wait for the

next mission. So I was happy to see

the Bookmobile parked by the mess hall and stepped into the narrow spaces between the bookshelves.

One of the books I borrowed was a worn paperback copy of Henry Beston’s “The Outermost House.” I spent the rest of that June day reading it and my life has never been the same. If I’d looked, I would have noticed the book had first been published in 1928, 16 years before I was lucky enough to find it. But to me, the words were as fresh, as lyrical and as moving as any I’d ever read. I wanted to hold on to that book forever. Something in the author’s voice – an author I’d never heard of before, by the way – seemed to speak directly to my dreams, and at 21, in a foreign land and a risky situation, I had dreams aplenty.

Beston’s poetic descriptions of his year alone in a small house at the very edge of the Atlantic Ocean have lived within me ever since. They have energized my lifelong determination to never live far from that ocean.

Now, more than a half-century later, I read Henry Beston’s words again and find them as valid, as lyrical, as moving as they were when they first washed over me like one of the great waves he writes about. And in this book, which David Godine has put together with such care and quality, I learn a great deal more about the man and his talented wife and soulmate, Elizabeth Coatsworth. For she contributes much to this Beston collection and her voice rings true as crystal. Together they were a wonderfully synchronized literary couple whose love for each other glows in their letters and in Coatsworth’s editing of words written by the man who shared her life, as she shared his.

An accomplished writer, she understood the challenge. “He observed carefully,” she tells us of Henry’s writing process. “He brooded long, and wrote slowly at the sturdy kitchen table overlooking the west and the great Eastham marshes. He wrote with pencil or pen … he never typed, for the sound of the machine would have interfered with the rhythm of his sentences, which meant so much to him … He sometimes spent an entire morning on a single sentence, unable to go on until he was completely satisfied with both words and cadence, which he considered equally important.”

In 1932, three years after they were married, Beston and Coatsworth moved to Chimney Farm, the old homestead Beston had bought in Nobleboro, where they lived for the rest of their long and productive literary lives. One of the joys of this collection is discovering how much writing Beston did in and about Maine, marking the passing of the seasons with his naturalist writer’s sharp eye and a love and appreciation for the unspoiled Maine that could give each season its fine and subtle distinctions.

“Here in the North,” he writes, “summer comes earlier to its close, and the sign of the turn of the year is less a first thinning and coloring of leaves than a first great drenching rain … . When the weather breaks and the sun shines again, it is autumn … the lake is a brighter blue, and a new quiet has come upon the land.”

Along with selections from “The Outermost House” and his Maine writing, there are excerpts from his long essay on the St. Lawrence River, and from his book “American Memory,” a prescient study of the American Indian.

This book is a comprehensive, rich, intimate and defining collection that gives us an insightful portrait of this remarkable man. More remarkable, really, than most of us realize when you remember that “Outermost House” was written several decades before most of us paid much heed to the natural presences in our midst.

“Perhaps Henry’s great gift,” Coatsworth tells us, “was to call attention to things that had always been there, but whose significance had gone largely unnoticed until he spoke or wrote about them.

“He was a great opener of windows.”

As I discovered on that June afternoon in 1944.