Small Town

III: What Came With the House

When we went farm hunting in the spring of 1932, it was simply a house we were looking for, a house in which we could spend our summers. In a general way we knew what we wanted: privacy, a view, open fields, some woods, perhaps a brook. The house, we assumed, would be run down, or else we could not afford it, but an advanced stage of decay would put an impossible strain on our budget and on my meager skills. Taking Troy as a center, we drew a circle with a fifty-mile radius and began to explore the northeast quadrant, which included the southern end of Vermont and the western end of Massachusetts. If we had happened to find our house in a New England state, this would have been a different story, though perhaps the conclusions to be drawn from it would have been substantially the same. As it turned out, we discovered what we were looking for—everything but the brook—fifteen miles from Troy. The importance of a house should not be underestimated. To people of the middle class owning a house is security and proof of success of life. My parents had never owned a house, and now I owned one. I might be an intellectual, and a radical intellectual at that, but I took the same kind of pleasure in the ownership of property that my mother and father would have taken. And, as a matter of fact, they shared that pleasure, for in time the house became a home for them, too. There is more to be said about it, however, than that. In 1932 it seemed completely clear to me that the capitalist system was collapsing and that communism was going to take its place. Today I think we are a long way from the kind of communism I Wh a t C a m e Wi t h t h e H o u s e iii envisaged in 1932, but I am not sure that I was wrong about the breakdown of capitalism. At any rate a house and land seemed relatively permanent at a time when banks were closing and factories were going into bankruptcy and even great institutions of learning thinned out their faculties. In the immediate future, I felt, a house might enable a young writer to survive without the salary he had been receiving as a teacher. And in the more distant future, the future that I could not very concretely visualize, when production stagnated and disorder grew, when there were barricades in city streets and the army of the proletariat braced itself for the final conflict, the house and land would still be there. I did not assume that I could or would want to absent myself from the battle, but I had a family to think about, and, even beyond such considerations, there was a feeling that in the house something valid in the world of the past might survive into the world of the future. My attitude toward the house seems to indicate that I was not reconciled within myself to the detachment of the intellectual class to which I belonged. I wanted roots. The house, it is true, was still only a house, a shelter, an arrangement of rooms; it was not, even potentially, so far as we were concerned, part of a community . But just as a house, a house with land around it, just as seven rooms and a porch and a garden and a lawn and a well and a woodshed and a garage, it deepened our lives as individuals and our life as a family. We lived in it only in the summer and on occasional weekends throughout the rest of the year, but it was there all the time, and we were always conscious of its being there. As more and more of our wishes, our work, and our money went into it, it became our home in a sense that the rented house in which we spent the greater part of the year could not be. Roxborough, on the other hand, was a post office address and nothing more. The house had to be located within some political framework, and Roxborough happened to be it. There were neighbors, yes, and neighbors who rather quickly became friends, w h a t c a m e w i t h t h e h o u s e 35 [18.221.165.246] Project MUSE...