The Story of My Heart. Richard Jefferies
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he listened, calmed down.
“Who is this writer?” he asked. I shook my head. Brooke took the book in hand and opened the cover. “It’s seventy-five bucks,” he said. “We should find out more about him before we buy it.”
And then, we left.
I kept thinking about that small, thin book. What would propel an Englishman in the nineteenth century to write such a personal account about his soul intertwined with nature and with such longing?
Had Richard Jefferies been influenced by the Transcendentalists? Or was he more closely aligned with the British romanticism of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge? Or was he more philosopher or naturalist in the lineage of the great ornithologist Gilbert White? I felt like I had just located a lost relative through the genealogy of a genre, a genre that remains undefined and undervalued. Critics continue to be embarrassed by a passion for nature and a call for reflection, especially if it has to do with the body and the body politic.
Brooke and I were walking along a beach of Deer Isle, each of us content in our own thoughts. It was Labor Day weekend in Maine and unexpectedly, we had this particular beach to ourselves.
The next weekend was my birthday. We returned to the bookstore and there in the corner The Story of My Heart remained. This time, we noticed a handwritten sign, “All prices are negotiable.” Brooke asked the elderly woman hidden behind piles of books on a wooden stool, pleasant enough, if this book, in particular, might be purchased for less than the penciled price marked inside.
“Did you get it over there?” she asked, pointing to the cabinet in the corner. Neither one of us had appreciated the elaborately carved bookcase made of black walnut.
“Everything in that cabinet is sixty-six percent off,” she said.
Brooke pulled out his wallet and paid her $25.50.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
THE READING OF THE BOOK
In a long marriage such as ours, Brooke and I often wonder about the balance between what we imagine to be true and what is actually the truth. The story that Brooke and I tell ourselves about first reading The Story of My Heart is this:
After we purchased the book, we read it to each other on the rocky shore of Goose Cove on Deer Isle. It’s a favorite place of ours, a Nature Conservancy site enjoyed by many.
It was low tide, the sandy stretch of beach that links two islands was open. We found a flat ledge of pink granite and laid down together, my head on Brooke’s chest, as he read the first three chapters from beginning to end until high tide reached us and we were forced to leave.
The swish of the surf, the small oscillations of the sea acted as punctuation marks to the cries of gulls carried by the breeze. Sometimes, while Brooke was reading, I would focus on the rolling horizon, watching sailboats pass or the occasional lobsterman pulling in traps from a sea of buoys that cover the blue waters like confetti. My mind would drift and then, a beautiful or evocative sentence would call me back because of its unexpected exuberance. Or a fly would create a disturbance. Or Brooke would stumble over an odd construction of Jefferies’, slow down, and reread it.
Sometimes, we would stop mid-page to talk about a particular phrase and analyze it, either because we had felt that way, too, or we found it overwrought and overwritten, an homage to self-pity. And then, there were the moments when we sat upright and read the passage again, marveling over the power and poignancy of Richard Jefferies’ perception.
This is how I remember the romance of that day when we first read The Story of My Heart out loud, outside, together.
Here is the truth of that day as recorded in my journal:
Today, Brooke and I spent a sublime day at Goose Cove, one of our favorite trails through the hushed forest. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot on the lush spongy moss, one of the great delights of my life literally bouncing on the floor of the forest deep and rich and vibrant green dotted with white luminous mushroom. To a desert dweller, this much green, this much water is a fantasy.
Once at the beach, we found a great perch on the pink granite rocks. So in awe of the clarity of the day, the iconic beauty of the islands, pink geometric blocks floating above the blue sea, where the middle landscape of islands populated by green spruce and firs—dense against cobalt sea and sky with wisps of clouds—point upward—my heaven.
Brooke pulled out The Story of My Heart from his pack as we lay on the rocks, my head on his chest facing the horizon. He began reading Richard Jefferies out loud as the sea whispered in the background with gulls.
Eloquent, florid, effusive prose. No, make that ecstatic prose. Jefferies speaks to both of our wild hearts. He speaks of “soul-thoughts,” how the external wonder of the world ignites his inner world and you have the sense that while his outer body is very still, his inner life is on fire.
I loved the passage of him being tied to the molten core of the Earth, yet able to feel the reach of the stars. He desires his self to be this expansive, his intellect wide and in communion with the beauty that surrounds him. He wishes to write a “new book of the soul…a book drawn from the present and future, not the past. Instead of a set of ideas based on tradition, let me give the mind a new thought drawn straight from the wondrous present, direct this very hour.”
We also loved what he had to say about idleness and leisure, the import of dreaming by the sea which was exactly what we were doing: Brooke sitting against the pink wall of granite; me, flat on my back, eyes closed, arms outstretched like a cross; sun beating down, no one around but the gulls and the loons and an albino guillemot playing in the surf at low tide, visible in the light only through a different kind of motion.
Rachel Carson is reported to have had two books by her bed stand at all times: Walden and The Story of My Heart. Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House, was also a fan of Richard Jefferies. Both of these “nature writers” lived in Maine. They were friends. I wonder how and when The Story of My Heart came into their lives, and with whom did they read these electric pages, and where?
THE MAN BEHIND THE BOOK
Our interest in Richard Jefferies grew. He was born in Swindon, England, in 1848.
His family farmed. He was a free spirit and ran away from home when he was fourteen years old. When he finally returned 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