Saint-John de Crvècoeur’s Tale of a Tuber

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Foreword

I have known Robert Maccubbin for a quarter of a century. During these years he has resided in four different homes, each with a garden, his garden, each a labor of love. His plantings, admittedly, have been ornamental rather than edible, meant for aesthetic display rather than the larder. But regardless of whether one grows peonies or potatoes, roses or radishes, tulips or tomatoes, the contact with the soil remains unchanged. Digging, fertilizing, cultivating, getting your hands coated with earth, loving it all. I therefore thought that an appropriate subject for the present volume would be another lover of the land and its cultivation, namely, Saint-John de Crèvecoeur. This transplanted Frenchman was also, in all senses of the term, a man of letters, a writer. ¹ As is Bob, who, quite apart from his own writings, carefully cultivates the articles that ornament Eighteenth-Century Life, another labor of love. Candide's garden is not far off.

True, the ornate replication of a French country-house dinner at the 1986 ASECS meeting in Williamsburg--on which occasion Bob obligingly put his home at the disposal of a mobile kitchen staff headed by Sarah Gillies--did not feature the tuber on its menu. Two hundred and some years ago, such an edible would have been considered too lowly for serving at a fancy meal. The 1986 dinner was more in keeping with the salon life the "American farmer" led during the time he spent in France in the 1780s. Yet, while Crèvecoeur was wined and dined in Paris à la française, in great part through the efforts and high-level contacts of Sophie d'Houdetot, ² his mind, seconded by his pen, was on persuading the French to think more à l'américaine. The work my essay targets, Crèvecoeur's little-known and untranslated Traité de la culture des pommes de terre et des différents usages qu'en font les habitants des Etats-Unis de l'Amérique, ³ was meant for French consumption. It portrays a metonymic yet down-to-earth potato, a root image of what we label the American way of life. Little did Crèvecoeur dream that one day the French would be devouring French fries served in paper containers as they sit in a "Mac Do" with a view of Paris' magnificent Luxembourg garden while under the shadow of a pantheonic monument where some of France's Great lie in eternal repose. ⁴

Just who, exactly, was this chameleon-like character named...just exactly what? Standard biographies, as well as the catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, refer to his bona fide name as Michel-Guillaume Jean Crèvecoeur (with or without the "de"), born to a Norman family of the lesser nobility in 1735. For reasons not entirely clear, he left for England to visit relatives when he was barely twenty and became a confirmed Anglophile. ⁵ From there he moved on to Canada (Nouvelle France), fought as an officer with Montcalm's troops, left after the French were defeated, and for the next ten years led a nomadic existence as a traveling merchant and surveyor, covering vast amounts of territory in the Northeast and Midwest (some of which is described in his later travel accounts). During these years he anglicized his name to John Hector Saint-John (sometimes appearing as J. Hector or simply Hector Saint-John, and at times as J. Hector Saint-John de Crèvecoeur), became a British subject, an official resident of New York, and was adopted by the Oneida tribe in Connecticut. His life then took a turn to the domestic. He married, had children, and farmed a property named Pine Hill in the Hudson Valley. Thus began his commitment, both literally and philosophically, to an existence tied up...