My first national magazine byline. Originally titled "Unplan Your Life."
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5.07.2009
Make Me Laugh: S.J. Perelman
Comic essayist S.J. Perelman died thirty years ago this October 17, which anniversary raises an important question.
Who cares?
The answer is, No one, really, except for a few fusty English professors submitting articles to Studies in American Humor. In libraries, the due date stamps on his books have yawning gaps between them, with the most popular rarely checked out more than once a year. Perelman’s essays don’t appear in high school anthologies or in college course catalogs, and it’s a rare Student Activities Committee that will sponsor an all-night S.J. Perelman reading over a Simpsons marathon. Many of his twenty-one books are out of print. No on dresses up like him on Halloween.
Send that Who cares? back in time anxd a different and altogether more fanatical answer emerges. In the 1960s, Perelman was already the doyen of comic writing, a 1957 Oscar for his Around the World in 80 Days screenplay clocking in as his latest accolade. Anyone in America’s literary, theatrical, or film circles would have recognized his finely tailored suits and stooped shoulders, his ginger-colored moustache, his small silver spectacles (bought in Paris in 1927), and his melancholy blue eyes (one of which wandered). More importantly, most everyone in those circles would have read his writing. “His eyes,” wrote Ogden Nash is 1966, “peering through the sort of steel-rimmed spectacles we associate with kindly old horse-and-buggy doctors, rove continually over the foibles and fatuities of his era, and when they spot a particularly virulent boil or carbuncle, his lancet is ready and ruthless.”
Though Eudora Welty in fact called for Perelman to be designated a Living National Treasure in 1970, there are good reasons for his anonymity today. His short first person essays, published mostly in The New Yorker from the height of the Jazz Age in the late 1920s until the late 1970s, are rollercoaster rides through wild absurdity, recondite vocabulary, and layers upon layers of puns and allusions. For example,
I had a suit over my arm and was heading west down Eighth Street…when I ran smack into Vernon Equinox in front of the Waffle Shop. Fair weather or foul, Vernon can usually be found along there…scanning the bargain Jung in the corner bookshop or disparaging the fake African primitive masks at the stationery store. His gaunt, greenish white face, edged in the whiskers once characteristic of fisherfolk and stage Irishmen and now favored by the Existentialist poets, his dungarees flecked with paint, and his huaraches and massive turquoise rings clearly stamp Vernon as a practitioner of the arts, though which one is doubtful. The fact is, he favors them all impartially.
“Who Stole My Golden Metaphor?, 1956
That’s a lot of literary work for any reader, let alone those of us who didn’t incubate in a dictionary or grow up during the Jazz Age.
The better question, then, is Why care that Perelman died thirty years ago, or that he lived at all?
Perelman himself didn’t expect his writing to last long; in an interview he hoped that it would stay relevant for four or five years after publication. Comedy in general has a hard battle against obsolescence—will Jon Stewart be funny in 2039?—as tastes and talents change. But Perelman’s champions in the 1970s saw the beginnings of true longevity: his surreally madcap, unabashedly erudite, absolutely Perelmanesque essays gave American humor a new, complicated, intelligent voice. It was now possible to do brilliant parody in the guise of silly loop-de-loops, with diamond-like language full of meaning. His touch is most visible in Woody Allen, who extended Perelman’s persona to the inner life and relationships, but glimmers even now in the madcap, winkingly un-erudite, absolutely Colbertesque Stephen Colbert.
Not only is Perelman’s writing just under the surface of today’s kind of funny, the essays are a biography of nearly 80 years of American culture. All his life, Perelman absorbed everything he encountered—silent films to jazz to pulp detective novels to Depression-era women’s magazines to advertising copy for skirt steaks to insurance policies to ocean liner travel mores—and in the course of writing about it, preserved it at its highest, funniest pitch.
Reading and caring about Perelman’s work is like doing the jitterbug while making a soufflé. It requires a deft and difficult determination (and, yes, a dictionary), but the reward is this glittering, distinctly American writing. The effort goes more easily with an understanding of the cultures that shaped Perelman’s life and work, and so we start with a New England chicken farm.
***
Russian Jewish immigrants Joseph and Sophie Perelman moved from Brooklyn to Providence, Rhode Island, in late 1904. There, Joseph tried his hand and mostly failed at different jobs, the most memorable of which for young Perelman were dry goods shop owner and poultry farmer.
Their son, Sidney Joseph, born February 1, 1904, early on showed a knack for drawing, particularly cartoons, and a deep hatred for both chickens and the family’s penury. Later he tumbled headlong into reading, each weekend loading his knapsack with seven or eight library books, and returning them, all read, on Monday morning.
These books weren’t just Ivanhoe or Henry V, though he very likely read those, too. Perelman read every two-bit detective novel, trashy romance, and adventure yarn he could carry. At Providence Classical High School, he was learning Greek and Latin (he did not like his teachers, however: forty years after graduation, he drew horns and beards on a newspaper photograph of five female teachers and sent it to a childhood friend, with the caption, “A Jew Never Forgets”). Meanwhile, at home his parents spoke Yiddish and in town he absorbed the Providence version of the New England accent. And when he was a teenager, Perelman fell in love at once with silent films.
On a slumberous afternoon in the autumn of 1919, the shopkeepers along Weybosset Street in Providence, Rhode Island, were nonplussed by a mysterious blinding flash. Simultaneously, they heard a sound like a gigantic champagne cork being sucked out of a bottle, and their windows bulged inward as though Dario Resta’s Peugeot had passed, traveling at incalculable speed… The first report [was] that anarchists had blown the cupola off the state capitol [but] a bystander appeared with a green baize bag dropped by the fugitive, establishing him as a sophomore at Classical High School. Among its contents were a copy of Caesar’s Gallic commentaries, a half-eaten jelly sandwich, and a newspaper advertisement announcing the premiere that afternoon at the Victory of Cecil B. DeMille’s newest epic, Male and Female.
“When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Films,” 1952
In the 1950s, Perelman revisited the books, silent movies, and characters he’d adored in his teenage years—Erich von Stroheim, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Theda Bara, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—in a series for The New Yorker called Cloudland Revisited. The essays were cock-eyed exaggerations of his youthful ardor, but the movies and books had a flamboyant ridiculousness that influenced Perelman’s writing. The contrast between life in Providence, what he called “lower-middle class bourgeois,” and the glamour on the screen reappeared in the comic self he developed: the smart rube bumbling toward dubious sophistication.
The Perelmans weren’t religious Jews, his father identifying more strongly as a Socialist, and Perelman didn’t seem to experience his Jewishness as a distinct part of his growing up, though Yiddish phrases daisy chain nearly every essay he ever wrote. The anti-Semitism at Brown University, however, made him an obvious second-class citizen, as Jews were not invited to join fraternities and intellectually conservative Protestant greybeards dominated the faculty. He was also a commuter student, working in a cigar shop after classes to help pay for his tuition, which placed him even further down the social ladder. His biographer, Dorothy Hermann, writes in her 1985 account of his life that Perelman was a quiet, indifferent student, until he met Nathaniel Weinstein, nicknamed Pep, his sophomore year.
Pep was a wild card: he’d faked a Tufts University transcript in order to enter Brown and graduated without his ruse being revealed. He wore dandy suits and carried a cane (imitating Percy Marks, a young Brown professor), pulled pranks and wrote amused screeds for the Brown Jug, one of the campus literary magazines.
Perelman and Pep became friends and Pep became the blueprint for the fine haberdashery and slightly absurd English gentleman persona Perelman explored during and after college (the sartorial taste lasted to the end of his life). When asked in a 1970 interview why one of their pranks involved stealing an “elephant folio of Hogarth” from the Brown library, he answered, “Decadent aestheticism.”
When he became editor of the Brown Jug, Perelman published his surreal, stylized cartoons and started writing his own polemics against hypocrisy on campus. One scathing editorial lambasted a rule that allowed students with a high enough grade point average to skip chapel. Furthermore, when the Brown fraternities came after him to join their groups once he’d become editor, he took great pleasure in rejecting them. This sense of outrage at hierarchy not based on merit appeared in his later writing, as he skewered pompous characters from the English gentry he liked to ape, to shopkeepers gone supercilious with the power of the till.
Perelman did not graduate from Brown, but only because he failed trigonometry four times. In 1925, he moved to Manhattan to make a go as a cartoonist for Judge magazine. The Jazz Age was in full swing. More than the hallowed flappers and Algonquin Round Table, Perelman was drawn to the style: urbane, exaggerated, wild. He often said in interviews that as a cartoonist he’d been influenced by John Held, Jr., whose drawings were part champagne, part sex—curvy light lines both elegant and lascivious.
Judge proved to be a bust, paying Perelman next to nothing and being of unsound editorial quality. Perelman’s captions, however, had gotten longer and longer the more he drew, and he decided to start writing essays instead. Like the Jazz Age, they sought to be ironically and suavely debauched, poking fun at cultural foibles while careening from pun to gag to surreal image, a twenty-turn rollercoaster ride in 1,000 words.
The Perelman persona that had begun at Brown took on greater definition at this time. In S.J. Perelman, his study Perelman in the context of American literature, Douglas Fowler describes it:
He has ever minor vice and defect except stupidity: he is vain (with little to be vain about), lecherous (although usually unsuccessful in his pursuit of the ladies), greedy, slothful, and a braggart. Only his vocabulary and perceptions really separate him from the grosser clowns and con-men… He is a schlemiel, but an aware schlemiel, never a passive victim… If Perelman’s persona should ever be written up for use in a movie, the part should be played by Don Knotts—with a thesaurus in his pocket.
Fowler, S.J. Perelman, 1983
But the control of his later work wasn’t present yet, resulting in a one uneven comic novel and a first collection of essays, neither of which made any money. In a sign of endearing jejuneness, Perelman remembered in a 1963 Paris Review interview that he was so excited the book was coming out he forgot to make sure his name was on the cover. Unless readers looked at the spine, he said, for all they knew Dawn Ginsberg’s Revenge was written by the publisher, Horace Liverwright.
It wasn’t until Perelman met Groucho Marx in 1928 that things began to take off for him professionally and creatively. The Marx Brothers, made up of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and for a time Zeppo, were a raucous radio and theater vaudeville act, probably the most anarchic troupe in the country, if not the world. Perelman sent Groucho a note after a theatrical performance of Animal Crackers he especially liked. They met, talked, and Groucho asked him to write some radio material. After Groucho read the finished jokes, he announced it would become the script of the Brothers’ next movie, Monkey Business.
Monkey Business marked Perelman’s Hollywood initiation, a place he came to loathe and write about for decades. Many writers sought work as script, or scenario, writers, not so much because the work was inspiring or the city of Los Angeles tempting or the people ennobling, but because it was the Depression and the work paid pretty well. Perelman’s vicious descriptions of Hollywood varied over the years, but one of the tartest might still apply: “A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched.”
Working with the Marx Brothers was, he often said, a nightmare. Perelman and his co-writer Will Johnstone had no idea what they were doing and ended up writing a 118-page script loaded with technical camera terms they didn’t understand, just to make it sound smart. The first reading to the Brothers (plus assorted wives, relatives, studio executives, and afghan dogs) took Perelman 90 minutes to complete, after which Groucho proclaimed, in front of the mostly sleeping crowd, “Stinks.” And everyone left the room.
All was not lost. The Brothers hired three more writers to assist Perelman and Johnstone, and the resulting film was a smash hit. Perelman collaborated on one more film, Horse Feathers, released in 1932. “I did two films with them,” he said in 1970, “which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten minute intervals…than ever work for these sons of bitches again.”
Critics and fans twinned Groucho and Perelman for the rest of both men’s lives, much to their mutual resentment, and their friendship was by turns cordial, loving, rancorous, and hateful. It is hard to tell who influenced whom: both were American Jews, and used that alienated- outsider trope to give their jokes heat; they both loved double entendres and unexpected turns of phrase; they both relied on a sense of the unpredictable; and they both died grumpy old men. They even looked a bit alike. The best way to distinguish them is by their genre: Groucho was an actor, with a big personality and broad humor; Perelman was a writer, modest and literary.
By this time Perelman was married to Pep’s younger sister, Lorraine Weinstein, though both brother and sister had changed their names, Pep to Nathanael West and Lorraine to Laura West. This anglicization mirrored Perelman’s own distance from his Jewishness in his work, as well as the general disinclination among Jews in the arts to claim their ethnicity. Perelman’s freelance career had gathered steam, and he started his long relationship with The New Yorker in 1931 with the essay “Peeper Fads and Fancies.” Money was tight despite the success, and he and Laura were drawn back to Hollywood many times. They worked as a writing team on a number of dreadful B movies, some never released, and lived in temporary rental after temporary rental. The first child, Adam, was born in 1936, and their second, Abby, in 1938.
Perelman’s life took on a measure of stability for the during much of the late 1930s and 1940s, though stability for him meant regular upheavals to move from Manhattan, where the family owned an apartment, to Los Angeles, then from Los Angeles to their newly bought eighty-three-acre home in Erwinna, a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and back to Manhattan (but a new apartment this time), or maybe a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, or a trip to Europe, and to Los Angeles again.
Several constants emerged. First was a ceaseless anxiety about money, though it is unclear if the Perelman’s were ever in true financial danger. Second was a widening circle of famous friends and acquaintances, from Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash to Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor. Third was Perelman’s many infidelities, some sexual affairs and some romantic friendships with women, to whom he wrote playful, ribald, longing letters. He gained a reputation as a Lothario for the rest of his life, though he did not write explicitly about his dalliances in his writing
For Perelman’s writing, if not his personal life, these were indeed boon years. In a rare Broadway triumph, he and Ogden Nash collaborated on a 1943 hit musical called One Touch of Venus starring Mary Martin. More importantly, in advertising and movie dialogue, language was full of folly to be lampooned. “When Mr. Perelman wrote the superbly hilarious pieces of the thirties and forties,” Eudora Welty wrote in 1970, “our misuse of the language was in its own vintage years.” In “Dey Gustibus Ain’t What De Used to Be,” Perelman crafted a parody of Glamour magazine’s breathless advice on how to redecorate a drab apartment. His single girl in the city ended up with a fishing net suspended from the ceiling, a boyfriend in the corner plastered with gold notary seals, and a tree.
Perelman assiduously kept his work light and comic, never using it as a means of personal expression or serious social commentary, even in the midst of tragedy. In 1940, Pep died in a car accident. Only one mention of Pep’s death survives in all of Perelman’s writing. He’d been asked to write a kind of eulogy for the Pep in Clipper magazine; in a letter he replied, “I haven’t any perspective about him, just a dull sense of unreality and shock which I am afraid will be a long while in disappearing.”
His work did shift slightly, though, as he began his travel writing. With his friend Al Hirshfield, the celebrated portraitist, he circled the globe on steamships, planes, and trains in 1947, in an age when travel was both dicey and romantic, spending much time in Southeast Asia. He wrote about the trip for Holiday magazine and published the essays in 1948 book under the title Westward Ha!
His travel is less antic than other pieces, with the small encounters sustained around a long narrative, though the each essay is familiarly short. In the beginning of Westward Ha! he describes an encounter with a map seller in Manhattan:
Even the veriest tyro knows that the first consideration of the experienced world traveler is a good set of maps…With an air that clearly implied he found the role of salesman demeaning, [a listless citizen] nodded toward a rack. I dug out what I needed and reached for my wallet. To my chagrin, I discovered I had only thirty-seven cents in change. Producing a blank check on the Vulturine and Serpentine National Bank…I scribbled out a draft…The salesman picked it up as though it were infected, vanished into the stockroom, and returned with another incompetent.
“This is our manager, Mr. Register,” he said.
“Cass Register,” he superior added with an important cough, “at your service. Is this your check?”
“No, I replied sweetly, “it’s an old sampler woven shortly after the Deerfield Massacre by Charity Sumpstone, my great-grandmother fifth removed.”
Westward Ha!, 1948
The fifties and sixties brought Perelman to the beginning of his middle age and a graduation to literary lionhood. His career continued swimmingly, each new book receiving good reviews, if not copious income. He won the Oscar for Around the World in 80 Days in 1956, and he nearly had another Broadway winner with The Beauty Part, a spoof on the delusion of plumbers, housewives, and the like who think they are capable of creating artistic masterpieces in their spare time. Critics and colleagues were fairly confident Perelman had a hit on his hands until the newspaper strike of 1962 killed any chance of the public knowing that the play existed.
Douglas Fowler points out that in the play’s severe emphasis on propriety—amateurs should back off from thinking they’ve put in the time to be equal to professionals—Perelman’s devotion to good taste positioned him in rigid opposition to other strongly American values, namely that any person can realize his dreams and experimentation is necessary for the self-realization. In a Mobius-like contradiction, Perelman in fact needed the messiness of his country’s culture. In the mid-seventies, after defecting to England for three years, Perelman articulated the push-pull he felt with his home. “New York is a very difficult place to be,” he told the interviewer, “[but] when I am away, I miss the tension, the give and take…My style is a mélange—a mixture of all the sludge I read as a child, all the clichés, liberal doses of Yiddish, criminal slang, and some of what I was taught in school by impatient teachers. When I tried to think of an idiomatic expression in London, I had to reach for it. I felt out of touch with the idiom.”
Perelman’s comic sensibility and persona did start to show their first signs of strain in the mid-sixties and seventies. He was still highly-regarded, regularly named the Best Humorist in America (first by Dorothy Parker, no less), but the cultural revolutions he observed were loud, brash, ugly, and angry; the language was coarse, the dress bizarre. The blatant sexuality, despite his torrid letters to his lady pen pals, especially offended him. Newer critics disparaged him for his trivial subjects, and young comics, such as Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen, staked their careers on their Jewishness. Perelman’s absence of ethnicity cast him decidedly out of vogue.
Even worse, the entire genre of the comic essay was dying. He was watching it wither in real time in the face of television and stand-up comedy. Prudence Crowther, then a young and comely woman who became friends with Perelman just before he died and edited his selected letters in 1987, recalled his reaction to seeing Robin Williams for the first time. “He was both baffled and distressed. If people wanted to be bludgeoned to death by maniacs, where did that leave him?”
His old pal, The New Yorker, was publishing writers he couldn’t stand, such as Donald Barthelme and the overly sexual John Updike. The language around him had changed, too, becoming both rigid and humorless. “Now the misuse of language has proliferated and spread everywhere,” Eudora Welty wrote. “To make it more menacing, it is taken seriously. Promoters of products, promoters of causes, promoters of self have a common language, though one with a small vocabulary.”
At no point, however, did Perelman stop writing. He continued getting travel assignments, writing more New Yorker pieces than the magazine chose to run, and batting around Broadway ideas. He and Laura kept up their itinerant habits, shuttling between Erwinna and Manhattan, again reaching a peculiar equilibrium of movement, money anxiety, hard freelance work, and visiting friends.
In 1970, Laura died two weeks after her breast cancer diagnosis. She was 58. Once more, Perelman wrote only few phrases in a few letters about his grief. In a note to E.B. White after White’s wife died in 1977, he wrote, kindly, “There aren’t any consolations at a time like this, and the assurance of friends that time will lessen the pain tends to sound glib, but it does happen very, very slowly. I just wish it were possible, though, for the dead to stay out of one’s dreams.” Unlike his peers—Pep, for example, or their mutual friend F. Scott Fitzgerald—he did not use his work to deal directly with his life, and this absolute reticence may contribute to his absence in contemporary literature. When the man behind the writer is a mystery, his subjects of parody light and small, there is less for a modern, memoir-raised reader to hold, no matter how delicious the prose.
Perelman sold the Erwinna house and nearly all his belongings immediately after Laura’s death. Though he didn’t write about it, it’s easy to speculate that losing Laura unmoored him, as troubled as their marriage was. He flitted from country to country, actively sought new lady friends, and disparaged New York. He spent his three years in England and returned in 1974, settling at last in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel.
His writing changed, too, as perhaps befit a man in the last years of his life; he became at once angrier and more reflective. Angry pieces jabbed at the ineptitude he encountered in his travels abroad and at Ernest Hemingway’s fabled machismo. The reflection showed in essays such as “Farewell to Bucks County,” a New York Times article.
Certainly long before the big stone barn had been raised on the ridge and equipped with hex signs to ward off spells or the cattle, [the deer], these original inhabitants of the land—and the pheasants, groundhogs, squirrels, moles, and all the other rightful owners of this place—had been quietly going about their business of balancing the ecology.
“Farewell to Bucks County,” New York Times, 1970
The comic torch was already being passed, as Woody Allen, the comedian who mostly closely hewed to Perelman’s persona, wrote popular pieces for The New Yorker and made successful movies. Perelman was even a fan, going to see Annie Hall three times, and when Allen won the New York Film Critics award for the screenplay of Annie Hall, Perelman was the presenter.
On October 17, 1979, Perelman died of a heart attack due to arteriosclerosis, the disease that killed his mother. Biographer Dorothy Herman remarks on the strange synchronicity of the date: Pep was born on October 17, 1903, and his mother died on October 16, 1964. Perelman probably could have written a funnier ending for himself, but the piquant elegy of this death was, like his writing, very well done.
***
S.J. Perelman chose the ricocheting life of a freelance comic essayist, made doubly hard by yoking himself to perfection in every sentence over five decades of wildly changing American culture. It is likely he never would have found professional or personal peace, but he did find a home in the language he knew best and changed most, his American idiom.
Today, nobody writes like Perelman (though David Sedaris has in particular resurrected the form), but the kind of humor he developed has been subsumed so thoroughly into what ‘funny’ is that even a Catholic, southern, apparently well-adjusted white guy can be a Perelman heir.
Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report is a performer, not a writer, and the scripts he works from are team-written, not eked from a single mind in a barren room. His material starts in serious politics, science, and business, not magazine advice columns and silent movies; his persona is an egomaniacal, irrational, gun-loving right wing talk show host, miles from Perelman’s literary schlemiel.
At heart, though, they are toiling along the same chain. The heat and twist of Colbert’s humor comes in part from his (and his writing team’s) sensitivity to language, and delight in it. Where Perelman pierced the bloated bubbles of advertising copy and film scripts, artistic pretensions and country aphorisms, Colbert skewers the doublespeak of politicians, the hysterical ejaculations of cable news shows, and the faux-intellectual vapidity of popular ideas. His is a parody of words, above all—“truthiness” may be the best example—and how the use of them displaces or restores reality.
Eudora Welty observed in 1970 that, “the value of the word has declined. Parody is among the early casualties of this disaster… Parody makes its point by its precision and strictness in the use of the word, probing the distinction between what is real and what is false… It’s a demanding and exacting art, and there are few with the gift of penetration, and the temerity, let alone the wit and the style, to practice it.” Her dismay at the demise of parody came at a time when social upheaval was fiercely commandeering language away from reality: free love wasn’t free; Vietnam was not a win; Nixon most certainly was a crook. She believed that Perelman could save parody, but his scope was so narrow and so light, it’s doubtful that he would have been able to deal with real politics and injustices.
Colbert, then, picks up where Perelman left off. His monologues follow loops and exaggerations, sudden incongruities of logic next to absurdity. He is in perfect control of his persona, bending and twisting it for maximum punch lines; he, again like Perelman, is the smart, careful thinker inside the buffoon, and part of their shared humor is the obvious co-existence of the two. But for Colbert, the weighty stuff of American life—so degraded after an eight-year run of gross manipulation of language (“Mission Accomplished,” Axis of Evil, enhanced interrogation techniques)—is the home for his love of idiom, and his Perelman-like wit, style, and skill.
***
Perelman wouldn’t have been surprised at his anonymity, but we can be, and we can ameliorate it if we choose. Why bother? Why care? Certainly, his work belongs to us as Americans, so why not take advantage of that; but we would be forsaking a great gift not to claim him, even with his topical subjects and unfamiliar vocabulary. “A great humorist” wrote William Zinsser of Perelman in 1969, “operates on a deeper current than most people suspect: pure courage. No other kind of writer risks his neck so visibly or so often on the high wire of public approval. It is the thinnest wire in all literature, and the writer lives with the certain knowledge that he will frequently fall off. Yet he is deadly serious, this acrobat teetering over our heads, or he wouldn’t keep going back out, trying to startle us with nonsense into seeing our lives with sense.”
And making us laugh.
Who cares?
The answer is, No one, really, except for a few fusty English professors submitting articles to Studies in American Humor. In libraries, the due date stamps on his books have yawning gaps between them, with the most popular rarely checked out more than once a year. Perelman’s essays don’t appear in high school anthologies or in college course catalogs, and it’s a rare Student Activities Committee that will sponsor an all-night S.J. Perelman reading over a Simpsons marathon. Many of his twenty-one books are out of print. No on dresses up like him on Halloween.
Send that Who cares? back in time anxd a different and altogether more fanatical answer emerges. In the 1960s, Perelman was already the doyen of comic writing, a 1957 Oscar for his Around the World in 80 Days screenplay clocking in as his latest accolade. Anyone in America’s literary, theatrical, or film circles would have recognized his finely tailored suits and stooped shoulders, his ginger-colored moustache, his small silver spectacles (bought in Paris in 1927), and his melancholy blue eyes (one of which wandered). More importantly, most everyone in those circles would have read his writing. “His eyes,” wrote Ogden Nash is 1966, “peering through the sort of steel-rimmed spectacles we associate with kindly old horse-and-buggy doctors, rove continually over the foibles and fatuities of his era, and when they spot a particularly virulent boil or carbuncle, his lancet is ready and ruthless.”
Though Eudora Welty in fact called for Perelman to be designated a Living National Treasure in 1970, there are good reasons for his anonymity today. His short first person essays, published mostly in The New Yorker from the height of the Jazz Age in the late 1920s until the late 1970s, are rollercoaster rides through wild absurdity, recondite vocabulary, and layers upon layers of puns and allusions. For example,
I had a suit over my arm and was heading west down Eighth Street…when I ran smack into Vernon Equinox in front of the Waffle Shop. Fair weather or foul, Vernon can usually be found along there…scanning the bargain Jung in the corner bookshop or disparaging the fake African primitive masks at the stationery store. His gaunt, greenish white face, edged in the whiskers once characteristic of fisherfolk and stage Irishmen and now favored by the Existentialist poets, his dungarees flecked with paint, and his huaraches and massive turquoise rings clearly stamp Vernon as a practitioner of the arts, though which one is doubtful. The fact is, he favors them all impartially.
“Who Stole My Golden Metaphor?, 1956
That’s a lot of literary work for any reader, let alone those of us who didn’t incubate in a dictionary or grow up during the Jazz Age.
The better question, then, is Why care that Perelman died thirty years ago, or that he lived at all?
Perelman himself didn’t expect his writing to last long; in an interview he hoped that it would stay relevant for four or five years after publication. Comedy in general has a hard battle against obsolescence—will Jon Stewart be funny in 2039?—as tastes and talents change. But Perelman’s champions in the 1970s saw the beginnings of true longevity: his surreally madcap, unabashedly erudite, absolutely Perelmanesque essays gave American humor a new, complicated, intelligent voice. It was now possible to do brilliant parody in the guise of silly loop-de-loops, with diamond-like language full of meaning. His touch is most visible in Woody Allen, who extended Perelman’s persona to the inner life and relationships, but glimmers even now in the madcap, winkingly un-erudite, absolutely Colbertesque Stephen Colbert.
Not only is Perelman’s writing just under the surface of today’s kind of funny, the essays are a biography of nearly 80 years of American culture. All his life, Perelman absorbed everything he encountered—silent films to jazz to pulp detective novels to Depression-era women’s magazines to advertising copy for skirt steaks to insurance policies to ocean liner travel mores—and in the course of writing about it, preserved it at its highest, funniest pitch.
Reading and caring about Perelman’s work is like doing the jitterbug while making a soufflé. It requires a deft and difficult determination (and, yes, a dictionary), but the reward is this glittering, distinctly American writing. The effort goes more easily with an understanding of the cultures that shaped Perelman’s life and work, and so we start with a New England chicken farm.
***
Russian Jewish immigrants Joseph and Sophie Perelman moved from Brooklyn to Providence, Rhode Island, in late 1904. There, Joseph tried his hand and mostly failed at different jobs, the most memorable of which for young Perelman were dry goods shop owner and poultry farmer.
Their son, Sidney Joseph, born February 1, 1904, early on showed a knack for drawing, particularly cartoons, and a deep hatred for both chickens and the family’s penury. Later he tumbled headlong into reading, each weekend loading his knapsack with seven or eight library books, and returning them, all read, on Monday morning.
These books weren’t just Ivanhoe or Henry V, though he very likely read those, too. Perelman read every two-bit detective novel, trashy romance, and adventure yarn he could carry. At Providence Classical High School, he was learning Greek and Latin (he did not like his teachers, however: forty years after graduation, he drew horns and beards on a newspaper photograph of five female teachers and sent it to a childhood friend, with the caption, “A Jew Never Forgets”). Meanwhile, at home his parents spoke Yiddish and in town he absorbed the Providence version of the New England accent. And when he was a teenager, Perelman fell in love at once with silent films.
On a slumberous afternoon in the autumn of 1919, the shopkeepers along Weybosset Street in Providence, Rhode Island, were nonplussed by a mysterious blinding flash. Simultaneously, they heard a sound like a gigantic champagne cork being sucked out of a bottle, and their windows bulged inward as though Dario Resta’s Peugeot had passed, traveling at incalculable speed… The first report [was] that anarchists had blown the cupola off the state capitol [but] a bystander appeared with a green baize bag dropped by the fugitive, establishing him as a sophomore at Classical High School. Among its contents were a copy of Caesar’s Gallic commentaries, a half-eaten jelly sandwich, and a newspaper advertisement announcing the premiere that afternoon at the Victory of Cecil B. DeMille’s newest epic, Male and Female.
“When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Films,” 1952
In the 1950s, Perelman revisited the books, silent movies, and characters he’d adored in his teenage years—Erich von Stroheim, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Theda Bara, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—in a series for The New Yorker called Cloudland Revisited. The essays were cock-eyed exaggerations of his youthful ardor, but the movies and books had a flamboyant ridiculousness that influenced Perelman’s writing. The contrast between life in Providence, what he called “lower-middle class bourgeois,” and the glamour on the screen reappeared in the comic self he developed: the smart rube bumbling toward dubious sophistication.
The Perelmans weren’t religious Jews, his father identifying more strongly as a Socialist, and Perelman didn’t seem to experience his Jewishness as a distinct part of his growing up, though Yiddish phrases daisy chain nearly every essay he ever wrote. The anti-Semitism at Brown University, however, made him an obvious second-class citizen, as Jews were not invited to join fraternities and intellectually conservative Protestant greybeards dominated the faculty. He was also a commuter student, working in a cigar shop after classes to help pay for his tuition, which placed him even further down the social ladder. His biographer, Dorothy Hermann, writes in her 1985 account of his life that Perelman was a quiet, indifferent student, until he met Nathaniel Weinstein, nicknamed Pep, his sophomore year.
Pep was a wild card: he’d faked a Tufts University transcript in order to enter Brown and graduated without his ruse being revealed. He wore dandy suits and carried a cane (imitating Percy Marks, a young Brown professor), pulled pranks and wrote amused screeds for the Brown Jug, one of the campus literary magazines.
Perelman and Pep became friends and Pep became the blueprint for the fine haberdashery and slightly absurd English gentleman persona Perelman explored during and after college (the sartorial taste lasted to the end of his life). When asked in a 1970 interview why one of their pranks involved stealing an “elephant folio of Hogarth” from the Brown library, he answered, “Decadent aestheticism.”
When he became editor of the Brown Jug, Perelman published his surreal, stylized cartoons and started writing his own polemics against hypocrisy on campus. One scathing editorial lambasted a rule that allowed students with a high enough grade point average to skip chapel. Furthermore, when the Brown fraternities came after him to join their groups once he’d become editor, he took great pleasure in rejecting them. This sense of outrage at hierarchy not based on merit appeared in his later writing, as he skewered pompous characters from the English gentry he liked to ape, to shopkeepers gone supercilious with the power of the till.
Perelman did not graduate from Brown, but only because he failed trigonometry four times. In 1925, he moved to Manhattan to make a go as a cartoonist for Judge magazine. The Jazz Age was in full swing. More than the hallowed flappers and Algonquin Round Table, Perelman was drawn to the style: urbane, exaggerated, wild. He often said in interviews that as a cartoonist he’d been influenced by John Held, Jr., whose drawings were part champagne, part sex—curvy light lines both elegant and lascivious.
Judge proved to be a bust, paying Perelman next to nothing and being of unsound editorial quality. Perelman’s captions, however, had gotten longer and longer the more he drew, and he decided to start writing essays instead. Like the Jazz Age, they sought to be ironically and suavely debauched, poking fun at cultural foibles while careening from pun to gag to surreal image, a twenty-turn rollercoaster ride in 1,000 words.
The Perelman persona that had begun at Brown took on greater definition at this time. In S.J. Perelman, his study Perelman in the context of American literature, Douglas Fowler describes it:
He has ever minor vice and defect except stupidity: he is vain (with little to be vain about), lecherous (although usually unsuccessful in his pursuit of the ladies), greedy, slothful, and a braggart. Only his vocabulary and perceptions really separate him from the grosser clowns and con-men… He is a schlemiel, but an aware schlemiel, never a passive victim… If Perelman’s persona should ever be written up for use in a movie, the part should be played by Don Knotts—with a thesaurus in his pocket.
Fowler, S.J. Perelman, 1983
But the control of his later work wasn’t present yet, resulting in a one uneven comic novel and a first collection of essays, neither of which made any money. In a sign of endearing jejuneness, Perelman remembered in a 1963 Paris Review interview that he was so excited the book was coming out he forgot to make sure his name was on the cover. Unless readers looked at the spine, he said, for all they knew Dawn Ginsberg’s Revenge was written by the publisher, Horace Liverwright.
It wasn’t until Perelman met Groucho Marx in 1928 that things began to take off for him professionally and creatively. The Marx Brothers, made up of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and for a time Zeppo, were a raucous radio and theater vaudeville act, probably the most anarchic troupe in the country, if not the world. Perelman sent Groucho a note after a theatrical performance of Animal Crackers he especially liked. They met, talked, and Groucho asked him to write some radio material. After Groucho read the finished jokes, he announced it would become the script of the Brothers’ next movie, Monkey Business.
Monkey Business marked Perelman’s Hollywood initiation, a place he came to loathe and write about for decades. Many writers sought work as script, or scenario, writers, not so much because the work was inspiring or the city of Los Angeles tempting or the people ennobling, but because it was the Depression and the work paid pretty well. Perelman’s vicious descriptions of Hollywood varied over the years, but one of the tartest might still apply: “A dreary industrial town controlled by hoodlums of enormous wealth, the ethical sense of a pack of jackals, and taste so degraded that it befouled everything it touched.”
Working with the Marx Brothers was, he often said, a nightmare. Perelman and his co-writer Will Johnstone had no idea what they were doing and ended up writing a 118-page script loaded with technical camera terms they didn’t understand, just to make it sound smart. The first reading to the Brothers (plus assorted wives, relatives, studio executives, and afghan dogs) took Perelman 90 minutes to complete, after which Groucho proclaimed, in front of the mostly sleeping crowd, “Stinks.” And everyone left the room.
All was not lost. The Brothers hired three more writers to assist Perelman and Johnstone, and the resulting film was a smash hit. Perelman collaborated on one more film, Horse Feathers, released in 1932. “I did two films with them,” he said in 1970, “which in its way is perhaps my greatest distinction in life, because anybody who ever worked on any picture for the Marx Brothers said he would rather be chained to a galley oar and lashed at ten minute intervals…than ever work for these sons of bitches again.”
Critics and fans twinned Groucho and Perelman for the rest of both men’s lives, much to their mutual resentment, and their friendship was by turns cordial, loving, rancorous, and hateful. It is hard to tell who influenced whom: both were American Jews, and used that alienated- outsider trope to give their jokes heat; they both loved double entendres and unexpected turns of phrase; they both relied on a sense of the unpredictable; and they both died grumpy old men. They even looked a bit alike. The best way to distinguish them is by their genre: Groucho was an actor, with a big personality and broad humor; Perelman was a writer, modest and literary.
By this time Perelman was married to Pep’s younger sister, Lorraine Weinstein, though both brother and sister had changed their names, Pep to Nathanael West and Lorraine to Laura West. This anglicization mirrored Perelman’s own distance from his Jewishness in his work, as well as the general disinclination among Jews in the arts to claim their ethnicity. Perelman’s freelance career had gathered steam, and he started his long relationship with The New Yorker in 1931 with the essay “Peeper Fads and Fancies.” Money was tight despite the success, and he and Laura were drawn back to Hollywood many times. They worked as a writing team on a number of dreadful B movies, some never released, and lived in temporary rental after temporary rental. The first child, Adam, was born in 1936, and their second, Abby, in 1938.
Perelman’s life took on a measure of stability for the during much of the late 1930s and 1940s, though stability for him meant regular upheavals to move from Manhattan, where the family owned an apartment, to Los Angeles, then from Los Angeles to their newly bought eighty-three-acre home in Erwinna, a small town in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and back to Manhattan (but a new apartment this time), or maybe a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, or a trip to Europe, and to Los Angeles again.
Several constants emerged. First was a ceaseless anxiety about money, though it is unclear if the Perelman’s were ever in true financial danger. Second was a widening circle of famous friends and acquaintances, from Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash to Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor. Third was Perelman’s many infidelities, some sexual affairs and some romantic friendships with women, to whom he wrote playful, ribald, longing letters. He gained a reputation as a Lothario for the rest of his life, though he did not write explicitly about his dalliances in his writing
For Perelman’s writing, if not his personal life, these were indeed boon years. In a rare Broadway triumph, he and Ogden Nash collaborated on a 1943 hit musical called One Touch of Venus starring Mary Martin. More importantly, in advertising and movie dialogue, language was full of folly to be lampooned. “When Mr. Perelman wrote the superbly hilarious pieces of the thirties and forties,” Eudora Welty wrote in 1970, “our misuse of the language was in its own vintage years.” In “Dey Gustibus Ain’t What De Used to Be,” Perelman crafted a parody of Glamour magazine’s breathless advice on how to redecorate a drab apartment. His single girl in the city ended up with a fishing net suspended from the ceiling, a boyfriend in the corner plastered with gold notary seals, and a tree.
Perelman assiduously kept his work light and comic, never using it as a means of personal expression or serious social commentary, even in the midst of tragedy. In 1940, Pep died in a car accident. Only one mention of Pep’s death survives in all of Perelman’s writing. He’d been asked to write a kind of eulogy for the Pep in Clipper magazine; in a letter he replied, “I haven’t any perspective about him, just a dull sense of unreality and shock which I am afraid will be a long while in disappearing.”
His work did shift slightly, though, as he began his travel writing. With his friend Al Hirshfield, the celebrated portraitist, he circled the globe on steamships, planes, and trains in 1947, in an age when travel was both dicey and romantic, spending much time in Southeast Asia. He wrote about the trip for Holiday magazine and published the essays in 1948 book under the title Westward Ha!
His travel is less antic than other pieces, with the small encounters sustained around a long narrative, though the each essay is familiarly short. In the beginning of Westward Ha! he describes an encounter with a map seller in Manhattan:
Even the veriest tyro knows that the first consideration of the experienced world traveler is a good set of maps…With an air that clearly implied he found the role of salesman demeaning, [a listless citizen] nodded toward a rack. I dug out what I needed and reached for my wallet. To my chagrin, I discovered I had only thirty-seven cents in change. Producing a blank check on the Vulturine and Serpentine National Bank…I scribbled out a draft…The salesman picked it up as though it were infected, vanished into the stockroom, and returned with another incompetent.
“This is our manager, Mr. Register,” he said.
“Cass Register,” he superior added with an important cough, “at your service. Is this your check?”
“No, I replied sweetly, “it’s an old sampler woven shortly after the Deerfield Massacre by Charity Sumpstone, my great-grandmother fifth removed.”
Westward Ha!, 1948
The fifties and sixties brought Perelman to the beginning of his middle age and a graduation to literary lionhood. His career continued swimmingly, each new book receiving good reviews, if not copious income. He won the Oscar for Around the World in 80 Days in 1956, and he nearly had another Broadway winner with The Beauty Part, a spoof on the delusion of plumbers, housewives, and the like who think they are capable of creating artistic masterpieces in their spare time. Critics and colleagues were fairly confident Perelman had a hit on his hands until the newspaper strike of 1962 killed any chance of the public knowing that the play existed.
Douglas Fowler points out that in the play’s severe emphasis on propriety—amateurs should back off from thinking they’ve put in the time to be equal to professionals—Perelman’s devotion to good taste positioned him in rigid opposition to other strongly American values, namely that any person can realize his dreams and experimentation is necessary for the self-realization. In a Mobius-like contradiction, Perelman in fact needed the messiness of his country’s culture. In the mid-seventies, after defecting to England for three years, Perelman articulated the push-pull he felt with his home. “New York is a very difficult place to be,” he told the interviewer, “[but] when I am away, I miss the tension, the give and take…My style is a mélange—a mixture of all the sludge I read as a child, all the clichés, liberal doses of Yiddish, criminal slang, and some of what I was taught in school by impatient teachers. When I tried to think of an idiomatic expression in London, I had to reach for it. I felt out of touch with the idiom.”
Perelman’s comic sensibility and persona did start to show their first signs of strain in the mid-sixties and seventies. He was still highly-regarded, regularly named the Best Humorist in America (first by Dorothy Parker, no less), but the cultural revolutions he observed were loud, brash, ugly, and angry; the language was coarse, the dress bizarre. The blatant sexuality, despite his torrid letters to his lady pen pals, especially offended him. Newer critics disparaged him for his trivial subjects, and young comics, such as Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen, staked their careers on their Jewishness. Perelman’s absence of ethnicity cast him decidedly out of vogue.
Even worse, the entire genre of the comic essay was dying. He was watching it wither in real time in the face of television and stand-up comedy. Prudence Crowther, then a young and comely woman who became friends with Perelman just before he died and edited his selected letters in 1987, recalled his reaction to seeing Robin Williams for the first time. “He was both baffled and distressed. If people wanted to be bludgeoned to death by maniacs, where did that leave him?”
His old pal, The New Yorker, was publishing writers he couldn’t stand, such as Donald Barthelme and the overly sexual John Updike. The language around him had changed, too, becoming both rigid and humorless. “Now the misuse of language has proliferated and spread everywhere,” Eudora Welty wrote. “To make it more menacing, it is taken seriously. Promoters of products, promoters of causes, promoters of self have a common language, though one with a small vocabulary.”
At no point, however, did Perelman stop writing. He continued getting travel assignments, writing more New Yorker pieces than the magazine chose to run, and batting around Broadway ideas. He and Laura kept up their itinerant habits, shuttling between Erwinna and Manhattan, again reaching a peculiar equilibrium of movement, money anxiety, hard freelance work, and visiting friends.
In 1970, Laura died two weeks after her breast cancer diagnosis. She was 58. Once more, Perelman wrote only few phrases in a few letters about his grief. In a note to E.B. White after White’s wife died in 1977, he wrote, kindly, “There aren’t any consolations at a time like this, and the assurance of friends that time will lessen the pain tends to sound glib, but it does happen very, very slowly. I just wish it were possible, though, for the dead to stay out of one’s dreams.” Unlike his peers—Pep, for example, or their mutual friend F. Scott Fitzgerald—he did not use his work to deal directly with his life, and this absolute reticence may contribute to his absence in contemporary literature. When the man behind the writer is a mystery, his subjects of parody light and small, there is less for a modern, memoir-raised reader to hold, no matter how delicious the prose.
Perelman sold the Erwinna house and nearly all his belongings immediately after Laura’s death. Though he didn’t write about it, it’s easy to speculate that losing Laura unmoored him, as troubled as their marriage was. He flitted from country to country, actively sought new lady friends, and disparaged New York. He spent his three years in England and returned in 1974, settling at last in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park Hotel.
His writing changed, too, as perhaps befit a man in the last years of his life; he became at once angrier and more reflective. Angry pieces jabbed at the ineptitude he encountered in his travels abroad and at Ernest Hemingway’s fabled machismo. The reflection showed in essays such as “Farewell to Bucks County,” a New York Times article.
Certainly long before the big stone barn had been raised on the ridge and equipped with hex signs to ward off spells or the cattle, [the deer], these original inhabitants of the land—and the pheasants, groundhogs, squirrels, moles, and all the other rightful owners of this place—had been quietly going about their business of balancing the ecology.
“Farewell to Bucks County,” New York Times, 1970
The comic torch was already being passed, as Woody Allen, the comedian who mostly closely hewed to Perelman’s persona, wrote popular pieces for The New Yorker and made successful movies. Perelman was even a fan, going to see Annie Hall three times, and when Allen won the New York Film Critics award for the screenplay of Annie Hall, Perelman was the presenter.
On October 17, 1979, Perelman died of a heart attack due to arteriosclerosis, the disease that killed his mother. Biographer Dorothy Herman remarks on the strange synchronicity of the date: Pep was born on October 17, 1903, and his mother died on October 16, 1964. Perelman probably could have written a funnier ending for himself, but the piquant elegy of this death was, like his writing, very well done.
***
S.J. Perelman chose the ricocheting life of a freelance comic essayist, made doubly hard by yoking himself to perfection in every sentence over five decades of wildly changing American culture. It is likely he never would have found professional or personal peace, but he did find a home in the language he knew best and changed most, his American idiom.
Today, nobody writes like Perelman (though David Sedaris has in particular resurrected the form), but the kind of humor he developed has been subsumed so thoroughly into what ‘funny’ is that even a Catholic, southern, apparently well-adjusted white guy can be a Perelman heir.
Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report is a performer, not a writer, and the scripts he works from are team-written, not eked from a single mind in a barren room. His material starts in serious politics, science, and business, not magazine advice columns and silent movies; his persona is an egomaniacal, irrational, gun-loving right wing talk show host, miles from Perelman’s literary schlemiel.
At heart, though, they are toiling along the same chain. The heat and twist of Colbert’s humor comes in part from his (and his writing team’s) sensitivity to language, and delight in it. Where Perelman pierced the bloated bubbles of advertising copy and film scripts, artistic pretensions and country aphorisms, Colbert skewers the doublespeak of politicians, the hysterical ejaculations of cable news shows, and the faux-intellectual vapidity of popular ideas. His is a parody of words, above all—“truthiness” may be the best example—and how the use of them displaces or restores reality.
Eudora Welty observed in 1970 that, “the value of the word has declined. Parody is among the early casualties of this disaster… Parody makes its point by its precision and strictness in the use of the word, probing the distinction between what is real and what is false… It’s a demanding and exacting art, and there are few with the gift of penetration, and the temerity, let alone the wit and the style, to practice it.” Her dismay at the demise of parody came at a time when social upheaval was fiercely commandeering language away from reality: free love wasn’t free; Vietnam was not a win; Nixon most certainly was a crook. She believed that Perelman could save parody, but his scope was so narrow and so light, it’s doubtful that he would have been able to deal with real politics and injustices.
Colbert, then, picks up where Perelman left off. His monologues follow loops and exaggerations, sudden incongruities of logic next to absurdity. He is in perfect control of his persona, bending and twisting it for maximum punch lines; he, again like Perelman, is the smart, careful thinker inside the buffoon, and part of their shared humor is the obvious co-existence of the two. But for Colbert, the weighty stuff of American life—so degraded after an eight-year run of gross manipulation of language (“Mission Accomplished,” Axis of Evil, enhanced interrogation techniques)—is the home for his love of idiom, and his Perelman-like wit, style, and skill.
***
Perelman wouldn’t have been surprised at his anonymity, but we can be, and we can ameliorate it if we choose. Why bother? Why care? Certainly, his work belongs to us as Americans, so why not take advantage of that; but we would be forsaking a great gift not to claim him, even with his topical subjects and unfamiliar vocabulary. “A great humorist” wrote William Zinsser of Perelman in 1969, “operates on a deeper current than most people suspect: pure courage. No other kind of writer risks his neck so visibly or so often on the high wire of public approval. It is the thinnest wire in all literature, and the writer lives with the certain knowledge that he will frequently fall off. Yet he is deadly serious, this acrobat teetering over our heads, or he wouldn’t keep going back out, trying to startle us with nonsense into seeing our lives with sense.”
And making us laugh.
4.23.2009
This Good Life: A Profile of Food Activist Roger Doiron
Roger Doiron could pass for a twenty-first century Buster Keaton, had the silent film actor smiled easily and loved growing food. The forty-two-year-old founder of Eat the View, one of two successful petition campaigns for a White House vegetable garden, has the wide dark eyes, the thin, graceful frame, and that particularly Keaton-like stillness at the center of a chaotic world.
From his living room office in Scarborough, Maine, his childhood hometown, Doiron works at a long wooden table empty but for a laptop computer perched on a cardboard box. A woodstove warms the quiet room—honey-colored wood floor, children’s artwork on the yellow and beige walls—and behind him, two glass doors look onto a small yard buried emerging from the winter’s snow. Come summer, that yard will burst with Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, raspberries, and more, producing over $2,000 in fruits and vegetables from $100 in seeds. Today, though, Doiron is cultivating a bigger plot: to radically change how people think about, make, and eat food.
***
It’s a good time in the world to be a food activist. Public health crises, from obesity to heart disease, have put what we eat at the center of our health care concerns, and food-borne illnesses, including avian flu, are a reality of the deeply interconnected global food production systems, with experts suggesting that an outbreak of avian flu, for example, could kill fourteen million people worldwide. Mainstream industrial agriculture is alone the source of 70% of the United States’ total climate change emissions, and will be one of the first industries to suffer if our planet’s atmosphere does indeed change. Industrial agriculture also relies almost exclusively on cheap, plentiful oil supplies—not a sure thing geologically or politically these days—for everything from fertilizer for crops to fuel for farm machinery to gasoline for transportation.
Meanwhile, the world’s arable land, along with our capacity to improve it, is running out just as the global population is exploding: the United Nations predicts that in order for the world to get fed, we’ll need to grow more food in the next forty to fifty years than we have in the last ten thousand. Throw former Homeland Security Secretary Tommy Thompson’s wonderment that terrorists haven’t yet attacked our obviously vulnerable food supply on the doom-and-gloom compost pile—also, shrinking global seed diversity, and dwindling water sources, and a thirty-year-old federal food policy that rewards farms that irreparably damage the soil, and the statistic that nearly two billion people on the planet suffer nutritional deficiencies, despite years of booming global grain productivity—and food panic becomes a responsible state of mind.
Roger Doiron stepped into this tangle of crises with a simple idea. In 2003, he founded Kitchen Gardeners International, a social networking Web site for home gardeners. He wanted to support and promote the idea of local food production as a palliative to food insecurity and inequality, and at the same time help people and communities strengthen themselves by rebuilding the knowledge and traditions that surround growing one’s own food.
***
A long tradition of alternative food thinking preceded and informed Doiron’s idea, from the agrarian movement that flourished a century ago to the current “localvore” vogue and farm-to-school programs. The 1970s back to the land movement was perhaps the 20th century’s most visible response to the developing industrial food systems, as primarily young people from white suburbs rejected their mainstream lives for communes, small farms, and home gardens that provided them with good food and a direct relationship to the land. The clarion call for these hopeful pioneers, and the bridge from this food movement to Doiron’s work, was Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, Scott and Helen Nearing’s philosophical treatise on and practical guide to rural homesteading, published in 1970.
Doiron was born in 1966, just as the young back-to-the-landers were shoveling their first composted manure, but he didn’t encounter The Good Life for thirty years, even though Scarborough was still an agricultural town when he was growing up and his parents tended a “tomato and cukes” garden in the backyard.
“I was probably a little more interested in the garden than my brother or two younger sisters,” he says on a late spring afternoon, at home between weekend lectures and conferences. His Belgian wife and two younger sons are in Belgium, visiting family, and his 16-year-old stepson is still asleep. In the small outdoor cold frames, or handmade miniature greenhouses, hardy lettuces are peeking up. “It wasn’t like Roger the Little Gardener out there with a farm stand by the side of the road, but I was definitely paying attention.”
That attention wandered elsewhere through his adolescence and early adulthood. “I basically became a Francophile,” he says, traveling abroad at fifteen and living with a French family, who incidentally ate very good, fresh food. After that, life was all about trying to get back to France. He majored in French and psychology at Holy Cross College in Indiana, took his first job out of college teaching French in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, then earned a Master’s degree in International Relations at Tufts University.
Doiron moved to Brussels in the early 1990s to work for the coordinating office of Friends of the Earth, a grassroots environmental organization. Other issues dominated the scene, including wildlife and forest conservation; food and farming didn’t emerge as compelling concerns until the late 1990s, when mad cow disease and transgenic foods, which many Europeans vociferously rejected, hit Europe at the same time.
Soon, his work at Friends of the Earth stopped feeling like the best response to the enormous and urgent problems in front of him. “Around me, Europe was starting to think about food and the environment, and to some extent food and well-being. I wanted to find a way to translate this work into something more concrete—not just into policy like we were trying to do at Friends of the Earth, or subject matter for conversation, but something that the average person could understand and do.”
The sprout of the idea had formed, but Doiron couldn’t see how to make it manifest in how he lived his life. The epiphany came over the weekends he and his wife, Jacqueline, whom he’d met in the mid-nineties, visited her family in the Belgian countryside. Gardening and home cooking were living traditions there. “It was natural for them to grow and cook these foods that had been in the region for ages, almost unremarkable, and it was difficult at first to convince my wife’s mother that I really wanted to be involved.” Doiron smiles. “She was a 4’11” whirlwind of energy, do-it-yourself in the sense that she did it all. She would say, ‘You leave the kitchen, I do it all.’ But she let me in eventually.”
In vegetable gardening, the act of skillfully and pleasurably nourishing himself with food he’d grown, he found the substance of his professional life. Gardening could be a concrete, positive and doable response to ecological and economic threats, to energy crises, to health problems resulting from poor diet and lack of exercise, to social inequalities and failed policies that serve expensive excellent food to some and cheap bad food to most others. It had the potential to help people build strong communities and strong connections to their culinary heritage and to the earth. It would allow him to be of service to a hurt world, and to help it change.
The appeal of kitchen gardening, also known as home or food gardening, was personal, too. He loved the actual work, and it was a way to ground the values becoming clearer and more important to him as he and his wife considered life after their sixth-floor Brussels apartment. He started reading about gardening and discovered Maine gardener Eliot Coleman, whose books The New Organic Gardener and Four Season Harvest, and through him have become must-read manuals for modern organic gardeners. Though Coleman, Doiron found Living the Good Life.
***
“Eliot Coleman was sort of a disciple of theirs, as so many young people were when Scott and Helen Nearing were alive.” He pours fresh coffee for himself and offers a small bowl of chocolate chip cookies. The more Coleman he read, the more he wanted to go directly to Coleman’s source of inspiration.
“I was really intrigued by the deliberate choices they made to control their lifestyle and their food, and to have a good social impact in their lives.” The Nearings modeled a lifestyle separated from mainstream culture and relying on as few modern conveniences as possible. “My wife and I were thinking deeply about how to raise our young children, and we wanted to try some of that.” He takes a small bite of cookie. “Or at least move a few floors down.”
The obvious question, if the Doirons wanted to build the kind of independent and value-driven life articulated by the Nearings, one that involved growing their own food, was where to find the land. After six years and 3,000 miles away from Maine, Doiron longed to reconnect with his home state. They considered emulating the Nearings’ rigorously austere rural homesteading, but realized that such a life would prevent them and their sons from being part of a larger community. Isolation and exclusivity of purpose, radical in the Nearings’ time, didn’t fit the Doirons’ 21st century need to engage with a complicated and confusing world while keeping their values intact.
In 2001, the Doirons began their move, making meticulous plans to find nonprofit work and settle the family. “We moved the week before September 11, and then everything changed.” He shakes his head, still bewildered by the experience. The non-profit jobs they’d researched dried up; the careful arrangements they’d made for their oldest son, a Belgian citizen, to come to the U.S. were in disarray. In a week the family had become wild seeds, whirled by wind, unsure where they’d land.
In 2005, the family, bigger now by two boys, finally bought a home in Scarborough, a suburb near Portland, Maine. They settled 200 yards from Doiron’s parents, new roots next to old.
Before the move to Scarborough, however, Doiron had started writing freelance articles about employment, and unemployment, simply to make money to support his family. In doing so, he found a second career.
“I never meant to write, but I had to start in the Brussels years,” he says. “As someone who purported to want to Change the World, I realized I couldn’t just do it in the corner; I had to communicate publicly.”
On the page, Doiron’s voice is solid and passionate, often clever and always smart. His manifesto on kitchen gardening appeal to both converts and the uninitiated: “Kitchen Gardeners do not dream of eating a good tomato, but a true tomato, picked warm and juicy from the vine at the peak of its ripeness. They taste not only the fruit, but the care and honest labor that went into making it.”
Despite being published in Mother Earth News, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Saveur, and Organic Gardening magazine, among others, Doiron still suffers doubts. “I never feel my writing is exactly what it should be. I just say, I’m going to write what I know, using words that I’m comfortable using. I want authenticity. In the end it’s just about communicating well.” His brother, the editor of Down East magazine, is The Writer in the family, but Doiron can hold his own. The manifesto continues: “Kitchen Gardeners more often than not have a strong, independent streak, bringing their day-to-day cuisine into the realm of the divine.” At the very least the family has two “Writers.”
***
When Doiron began thinking about kitchen gardening in Europe, he looked at the landscape of non-profits he knew and found nothing connecting people who grew their own vegetables. Nor did he find groups advocating for and supporting gardens on a lawn-by-lawn basis. The lack of a social and practical network for home gardeners was a strange situation, given that people who grow their own vegetables tend to fall loopily, unabashedly in love with gardening, to filling entire photo albums with shots of their carrots and salad greens. Food activism and interest has for some time been a diffuse thing: in his book Blessed Unrest, the environmentalist and author Paul Hawken writes that although food reform “is the largest social movement in human history,” with are perhaps two million different organizations worldwide working in one way or another on the subject, this movement is “unknown to itself and unknown to the media.”
“I started talking up this idea once I was back in Maine,” Doiron says, of the part-gardening resources clearinghouse, part-meeting place, and part-activism platform he envisioned in Kitchen Gardeners International. “I found some people who I thought could help out, and they said, ‘Yeah! Why not!’” Doiron had been doing Web design and management for his work with other Maine non-profits, and with the encouragement of his early supporters, put a couple of pages up on the Internet. In 2003, Kitchen Gardeners International went live.
The goals even then were ambitious, local and international at the same time. As the social networking tools morphed into a kind of specialized Facebook, using the Ning platform, KGI initiated the annual International Kitchen Garden Day, a loosely structured celebration of community backyard harvests. Gardeners in Pakistan, England, the United States, France, Holland, and Argentina held public Kitchen Garden Day gatherings in August 2008. KGI also wanted to raise money for small grants to help communities start or expand kitchen garden projects. Groups in El Salvador, Nepal, Kenya and India have received grants, and KGI has provided materials and technical assistance to new and young programs in the United States.
Jan Maes, a Belgian expatriate and New Hampshire gardener, discovered KGI through an online search for vegetable gardening resources in 2005. A former organizer in international microfinance, he was especially interested in the grant program and he called Doiron for more information. “He was very excited that someone with my background called him up, because he had neither time nor much experience to develop the microgrant idea,” Maes wrote in an email. “So he asked me if I wanted to become a board member.”
As this loose association of home vegetable gardeners and experts started coalescing around and developing his ideas, Doiron relentlessly promoted KGI through every media outlet he could find. The unexpected freelance career came to fruition: he wrote a monthly newsletter; nabbed food and gardening assignments for Mother Earth News, Saveur, and Organic Gardening magazines; and had articles, op-ed pieces, and letters to the editor published in national newspapers and online news sites. He produced videos for YouTube; redesigned the Web site; reached out to potential donors; and used his international contacts to grow the membership base. Local and national reporters and writers soon came calling, including the New York Times’ Anne Raver, who profiled Doiron in April 2008.
“I could describe him as a weed, because he is so persistent,” wrote Maes, “but let’s call him Belgian endive. They grow outside until September like Roger does in his own kitchen garden, then keep on growing once transplanted inside during the winter, as Roger does at his computer for KGI. It is a long process, and hard work, but the result is well worth it, and to be enjoyed for a long time.”
In early 2008, Doiron was selected to be a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow. Professionals in food and agriculture receive a stipend and training to promote sustainable food systems through the media. For Doiron, this has meant lecturing at for non-profits, schools, and conferences across the country to help teach how to harness new media tools for activist causes, as well as ramping up the media presence of KGI, which currently boasts nine thousand members from one hundred countries.
***
In February 2008, halfway through the presidential campaign, Doiron posted an idea to a contest at OnDayOne.org, a site run by the Better World Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to improve relations between the United States and the United Nations. The contest invited “ideas for creating a better world”; visitors to the site would vote on one idea to be taken to the new president’s administration.
Doiron called his idea Eat the View: “Replant a large organic Victory Garden on the First Lawn with the produce going to the White House kitchen and local food pantries. The White House is ‘America's House’ and should serve as a model at a time of economic and environmental crisis. The president would not be breaking with tradition, but returning to it (the White House has had food gardens before) and leading by personal example on global challenges such as food security, climate change, and energy independence.”
In conjunction with the contest, he created an Eat the View Web site and sent a petition out on the winds of the Internet asking for support. He also created and posted a clever, cheerful, silent movie-like video to promote the idea, showing him digging a small garden in front of his own “white house” to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land” (the video ended up winning third place in a national contest). Six months later he’d gathered ten thousand signatures, including many from food luminaries such as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Bill McKibben.
In July, Doiron put the petition on Facebook. Ten thousand more people signed within one week. Eat the View won the On Day One contest in January 2009, beating out 4,000 competing ideas. Because winning the contest by no means guaranteed the White House would plant and garden, he continued to push the petition, and by February 2009, over 100,000 people had signed.
The idea, the petition signatures, and the many comments from signers were delivered in February to Michelle Obama’s staff, who talked with Doiron several times in the following weeks. Doiron started to hear whispers of progress, hints in speeches by Mrs. Obama, and gossip from his fellowship colleagues, and then, on March 20, Mrs. Obama, twenty-two area school kids, and White House kitchen staff started digging up ground on the South Lawn for a 1,100 square foot organic garden that will grow more than 55 varieties of vegetables, fruits, edible flowers, and herbs.
“Begin pinching yourself now,” Doiron wrote in a letter to KGI members on March 20. “THEY ARE REALLY GOING TO DIG THIS GARDEN! AND WE HELPED MAKE THIS DAY POSSIBLE!”
***
Breathless euphoria aside, not everyone is hoeing the garden row. From 1870 to 2005, home gardening production in the United States fell from 35% to 1%; it is not part of contemporary mainstream culture to want or know how to grow food. There is also the problem of access to healthy soil and safe water, neither of which is a guarantee in, say, large cities or arid climates. Seed availability is also troubling, writes Paul Roberts in The End of Food, as a virtual cartel of three companies—Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta—control nearly half the world’s seed supply; Monsanto in particular has sued farmers who save seeds, claiming copyright infringement of their patented seeds.
Yet more difficult, Roberts writes, is that backyard food production simply can’t begin to meet the immense needs and weaknesses of a politically powerful and inextricably entwined global food production systems. Whatever can’t be produced locally, which is a lot, will fall back on the same long-distance, high-energy, and all around-ecologically disastrous mainstream system. In the face of such massive problems, kitchen gardening appears just whimsical.
Doiron isn’t fazed. “All these are things that can be overcome, because we have to live in reality: we have to grow a lot more food now than ever before, this time with fewer resources. That’s going to require a complete rethink about what good food is and where it comes from and who produces it.” Paul Roberts agrees: “With so many food problems converging, and a new President in town, there’s a feeling that these issues might finally get some attention,” he said in a recent phone conversation. “The White House garden is a pretty small thing, mostly symbolic, but every moment is a potential tipping point. There is a hunger for a new attitude about food.”
Doiron is pushing that tipping point potential by retooling Eat the View as campaign for food gardens in prominent public spaces across the country, starting with governors’ mansions. And for those who love and support kitchen gardening already, the White House garden and the community-building of KGI are not too far from small miracles. One petition signer and KGI member wrote to Doiron, “Thank you. This has been a childhood dream of mine, and I thank you for taking it to where it might be a possibility.” An Iraq War veteran, also a KGI member, wrote that his vegetable garden was keeping him connected to his desire to get healthy, and in February, a Kenyan organic farmer asked Doiron if it was okay to start a White House garden petition over there. Then he offered to take up a collection for the cause.
“It is so, so touching.” Doiron finished his coffee an hour ago; he’s getting ready to go back to work on the laptop, which he calls his favorite gardening tool. “These messages really help me understand the power of this idea. I don’t expect the Obamas to read the notes, probably, but I get to see over and over again my place in this powerful process. It was never just about the White House, but the millions of gardens it could inspire.”
***
For a quiet man, Doiron has handled the explosion of media interest in his work gamely, his eye on the big picture. “There is such fear and exhilaration when you get a call from a big time newspaper. I’m not naturally an extroverted person; I have to pull up out of my shell to put myself out there. But you do one interview, you do one lecture, and afterwards you can say, ‘That worked; I survived; I didn’t make a fool of myself.’” Here he departs from Buster Keaton, whose art was playing the fool. Growing food often does look silly—dirt has a way of getting all over a gardener’s face, and a new grower might have three pockmarked tomatoes and a bushel of crab grass to show for a week’s work—but that awkward vulnerability, under the sun or in writing or on the phone, is the first step toward something more than food security and lower household bills. Across cultures, gardens have been the metaphor for the start of life, and an original source of joy.
For many KGI members, it’s the just action that feels best and right. It’s not violent, but it is consuming; it’s personal, but it is also a response to political and global concerns. It seems in this moment there is room to believe that a practice so militantly peaceful as to be good for us could help save us from the disasters we face.
In such a moment, a new kind of leadership can emerge, too, like a still point in a storm, from a person with quiet integrity and intelligence and imagination, with a sustaining desire and skill to shape the world into a more equitable and safer and happier place, with a love for his work and respect for the people he serves, someone who cultivates his mind as thoroughly as a garden plot and cares for his family as tenderly as one brushes the tops of young tomatoes, to give them sturdier stems.
***
The Doirons are preparing now for their spring planting—lettuces, kale, snap peas, and spinach. Indoors they’ve filled black plastic trays and small peat pots with tomato, pepper and melon seeds, all plants that need head starts of heat and light to make fruit in Maine’s short growing season. As the snow melts, Roger and Jacqueline will rake back last fall’s mulch, turn the soil with new compost, seed rows and mark them with sticks and string. His boys will plant winter squashes in their plot, though squashes take up so much room, Doiron learned last summer, he may need to transplant a raspberry bush from a front corner of the 1.3-acre yard and let his boys start digging there.
In the meantime, Doiron is looking forward to parsnips. “I’ve never had a decent parsnip crop before. They’re under all that snow, though, little parsnip popsicles. I can’t wait to dig them up.”
From his living room office in Scarborough, Maine, his childhood hometown, Doiron works at a long wooden table empty but for a laptop computer perched on a cardboard box. A woodstove warms the quiet room—honey-colored wood floor, children’s artwork on the yellow and beige walls—and behind him, two glass doors look onto a small yard buried emerging from the winter’s snow. Come summer, that yard will burst with Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, pumpkins, raspberries, and more, producing over $2,000 in fruits and vegetables from $100 in seeds. Today, though, Doiron is cultivating a bigger plot: to radically change how people think about, make, and eat food.
***
It’s a good time in the world to be a food activist. Public health crises, from obesity to heart disease, have put what we eat at the center of our health care concerns, and food-borne illnesses, including avian flu, are a reality of the deeply interconnected global food production systems, with experts suggesting that an outbreak of avian flu, for example, could kill fourteen million people worldwide. Mainstream industrial agriculture is alone the source of 70% of the United States’ total climate change emissions, and will be one of the first industries to suffer if our planet’s atmosphere does indeed change. Industrial agriculture also relies almost exclusively on cheap, plentiful oil supplies—not a sure thing geologically or politically these days—for everything from fertilizer for crops to fuel for farm machinery to gasoline for transportation.
Meanwhile, the world’s arable land, along with our capacity to improve it, is running out just as the global population is exploding: the United Nations predicts that in order for the world to get fed, we’ll need to grow more food in the next forty to fifty years than we have in the last ten thousand. Throw former Homeland Security Secretary Tommy Thompson’s wonderment that terrorists haven’t yet attacked our obviously vulnerable food supply on the doom-and-gloom compost pile—also, shrinking global seed diversity, and dwindling water sources, and a thirty-year-old federal food policy that rewards farms that irreparably damage the soil, and the statistic that nearly two billion people on the planet suffer nutritional deficiencies, despite years of booming global grain productivity—and food panic becomes a responsible state of mind.
Roger Doiron stepped into this tangle of crises with a simple idea. In 2003, he founded Kitchen Gardeners International, a social networking Web site for home gardeners. He wanted to support and promote the idea of local food production as a palliative to food insecurity and inequality, and at the same time help people and communities strengthen themselves by rebuilding the knowledge and traditions that surround growing one’s own food.
***
A long tradition of alternative food thinking preceded and informed Doiron’s idea, from the agrarian movement that flourished a century ago to the current “localvore” vogue and farm-to-school programs. The 1970s back to the land movement was perhaps the 20th century’s most visible response to the developing industrial food systems, as primarily young people from white suburbs rejected their mainstream lives for communes, small farms, and home gardens that provided them with good food and a direct relationship to the land. The clarion call for these hopeful pioneers, and the bridge from this food movement to Doiron’s work, was Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, Scott and Helen Nearing’s philosophical treatise on and practical guide to rural homesteading, published in 1970.
Doiron was born in 1966, just as the young back-to-the-landers were shoveling their first composted manure, but he didn’t encounter The Good Life for thirty years, even though Scarborough was still an agricultural town when he was growing up and his parents tended a “tomato and cukes” garden in the backyard.
“I was probably a little more interested in the garden than my brother or two younger sisters,” he says on a late spring afternoon, at home between weekend lectures and conferences. His Belgian wife and two younger sons are in Belgium, visiting family, and his 16-year-old stepson is still asleep. In the small outdoor cold frames, or handmade miniature greenhouses, hardy lettuces are peeking up. “It wasn’t like Roger the Little Gardener out there with a farm stand by the side of the road, but I was definitely paying attention.”
That attention wandered elsewhere through his adolescence and early adulthood. “I basically became a Francophile,” he says, traveling abroad at fifteen and living with a French family, who incidentally ate very good, fresh food. After that, life was all about trying to get back to France. He majored in French and psychology at Holy Cross College in Indiana, took his first job out of college teaching French in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, then earned a Master’s degree in International Relations at Tufts University.
Doiron moved to Brussels in the early 1990s to work for the coordinating office of Friends of the Earth, a grassroots environmental organization. Other issues dominated the scene, including wildlife and forest conservation; food and farming didn’t emerge as compelling concerns until the late 1990s, when mad cow disease and transgenic foods, which many Europeans vociferously rejected, hit Europe at the same time.
Soon, his work at Friends of the Earth stopped feeling like the best response to the enormous and urgent problems in front of him. “Around me, Europe was starting to think about food and the environment, and to some extent food and well-being. I wanted to find a way to translate this work into something more concrete—not just into policy like we were trying to do at Friends of the Earth, or subject matter for conversation, but something that the average person could understand and do.”
The sprout of the idea had formed, but Doiron couldn’t see how to make it manifest in how he lived his life. The epiphany came over the weekends he and his wife, Jacqueline, whom he’d met in the mid-nineties, visited her family in the Belgian countryside. Gardening and home cooking were living traditions there. “It was natural for them to grow and cook these foods that had been in the region for ages, almost unremarkable, and it was difficult at first to convince my wife’s mother that I really wanted to be involved.” Doiron smiles. “She was a 4’11” whirlwind of energy, do-it-yourself in the sense that she did it all. She would say, ‘You leave the kitchen, I do it all.’ But she let me in eventually.”
In vegetable gardening, the act of skillfully and pleasurably nourishing himself with food he’d grown, he found the substance of his professional life. Gardening could be a concrete, positive and doable response to ecological and economic threats, to energy crises, to health problems resulting from poor diet and lack of exercise, to social inequalities and failed policies that serve expensive excellent food to some and cheap bad food to most others. It had the potential to help people build strong communities and strong connections to their culinary heritage and to the earth. It would allow him to be of service to a hurt world, and to help it change.
The appeal of kitchen gardening, also known as home or food gardening, was personal, too. He loved the actual work, and it was a way to ground the values becoming clearer and more important to him as he and his wife considered life after their sixth-floor Brussels apartment. He started reading about gardening and discovered Maine gardener Eliot Coleman, whose books The New Organic Gardener and Four Season Harvest, and through him have become must-read manuals for modern organic gardeners. Though Coleman, Doiron found Living the Good Life.
***
“Eliot Coleman was sort of a disciple of theirs, as so many young people were when Scott and Helen Nearing were alive.” He pours fresh coffee for himself and offers a small bowl of chocolate chip cookies. The more Coleman he read, the more he wanted to go directly to Coleman’s source of inspiration.
“I was really intrigued by the deliberate choices they made to control their lifestyle and their food, and to have a good social impact in their lives.” The Nearings modeled a lifestyle separated from mainstream culture and relying on as few modern conveniences as possible. “My wife and I were thinking deeply about how to raise our young children, and we wanted to try some of that.” He takes a small bite of cookie. “Or at least move a few floors down.”
The obvious question, if the Doirons wanted to build the kind of independent and value-driven life articulated by the Nearings, one that involved growing their own food, was where to find the land. After six years and 3,000 miles away from Maine, Doiron longed to reconnect with his home state. They considered emulating the Nearings’ rigorously austere rural homesteading, but realized that such a life would prevent them and their sons from being part of a larger community. Isolation and exclusivity of purpose, radical in the Nearings’ time, didn’t fit the Doirons’ 21st century need to engage with a complicated and confusing world while keeping their values intact.
In 2001, the Doirons began their move, making meticulous plans to find nonprofit work and settle the family. “We moved the week before September 11, and then everything changed.” He shakes his head, still bewildered by the experience. The non-profit jobs they’d researched dried up; the careful arrangements they’d made for their oldest son, a Belgian citizen, to come to the U.S. were in disarray. In a week the family had become wild seeds, whirled by wind, unsure where they’d land.
In 2005, the family, bigger now by two boys, finally bought a home in Scarborough, a suburb near Portland, Maine. They settled 200 yards from Doiron’s parents, new roots next to old.
Before the move to Scarborough, however, Doiron had started writing freelance articles about employment, and unemployment, simply to make money to support his family. In doing so, he found a second career.
“I never meant to write, but I had to start in the Brussels years,” he says. “As someone who purported to want to Change the World, I realized I couldn’t just do it in the corner; I had to communicate publicly.”
On the page, Doiron’s voice is solid and passionate, often clever and always smart. His manifesto on kitchen gardening appeal to both converts and the uninitiated: “Kitchen Gardeners do not dream of eating a good tomato, but a true tomato, picked warm and juicy from the vine at the peak of its ripeness. They taste not only the fruit, but the care and honest labor that went into making it.”
Despite being published in Mother Earth News, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Saveur, and Organic Gardening magazine, among others, Doiron still suffers doubts. “I never feel my writing is exactly what it should be. I just say, I’m going to write what I know, using words that I’m comfortable using. I want authenticity. In the end it’s just about communicating well.” His brother, the editor of Down East magazine, is The Writer in the family, but Doiron can hold his own. The manifesto continues: “Kitchen Gardeners more often than not have a strong, independent streak, bringing their day-to-day cuisine into the realm of the divine.” At the very least the family has two “Writers.”
***
When Doiron began thinking about kitchen gardening in Europe, he looked at the landscape of non-profits he knew and found nothing connecting people who grew their own vegetables. Nor did he find groups advocating for and supporting gardens on a lawn-by-lawn basis. The lack of a social and practical network for home gardeners was a strange situation, given that people who grow their own vegetables tend to fall loopily, unabashedly in love with gardening, to filling entire photo albums with shots of their carrots and salad greens. Food activism and interest has for some time been a diffuse thing: in his book Blessed Unrest, the environmentalist and author Paul Hawken writes that although food reform “is the largest social movement in human history,” with are perhaps two million different organizations worldwide working in one way or another on the subject, this movement is “unknown to itself and unknown to the media.”
“I started talking up this idea once I was back in Maine,” Doiron says, of the part-gardening resources clearinghouse, part-meeting place, and part-activism platform he envisioned in Kitchen Gardeners International. “I found some people who I thought could help out, and they said, ‘Yeah! Why not!’” Doiron had been doing Web design and management for his work with other Maine non-profits, and with the encouragement of his early supporters, put a couple of pages up on the Internet. In 2003, Kitchen Gardeners International went live.
The goals even then were ambitious, local and international at the same time. As the social networking tools morphed into a kind of specialized Facebook, using the Ning platform, KGI initiated the annual International Kitchen Garden Day, a loosely structured celebration of community backyard harvests. Gardeners in Pakistan, England, the United States, France, Holland, and Argentina held public Kitchen Garden Day gatherings in August 2008. KGI also wanted to raise money for small grants to help communities start or expand kitchen garden projects. Groups in El Salvador, Nepal, Kenya and India have received grants, and KGI has provided materials and technical assistance to new and young programs in the United States.
Jan Maes, a Belgian expatriate and New Hampshire gardener, discovered KGI through an online search for vegetable gardening resources in 2005. A former organizer in international microfinance, he was especially interested in the grant program and he called Doiron for more information. “He was very excited that someone with my background called him up, because he had neither time nor much experience to develop the microgrant idea,” Maes wrote in an email. “So he asked me if I wanted to become a board member.”
As this loose association of home vegetable gardeners and experts started coalescing around and developing his ideas, Doiron relentlessly promoted KGI through every media outlet he could find. The unexpected freelance career came to fruition: he wrote a monthly newsletter; nabbed food and gardening assignments for Mother Earth News, Saveur, and Organic Gardening magazines; and had articles, op-ed pieces, and letters to the editor published in national newspapers and online news sites. He produced videos for YouTube; redesigned the Web site; reached out to potential donors; and used his international contacts to grow the membership base. Local and national reporters and writers soon came calling, including the New York Times’ Anne Raver, who profiled Doiron in April 2008.
“I could describe him as a weed, because he is so persistent,” wrote Maes, “but let’s call him Belgian endive. They grow outside until September like Roger does in his own kitchen garden, then keep on growing once transplanted inside during the winter, as Roger does at his computer for KGI. It is a long process, and hard work, but the result is well worth it, and to be enjoyed for a long time.”
In early 2008, Doiron was selected to be a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow. Professionals in food and agriculture receive a stipend and training to promote sustainable food systems through the media. For Doiron, this has meant lecturing at for non-profits, schools, and conferences across the country to help teach how to harness new media tools for activist causes, as well as ramping up the media presence of KGI, which currently boasts nine thousand members from one hundred countries.
***
In February 2008, halfway through the presidential campaign, Doiron posted an idea to a contest at OnDayOne.org, a site run by the Better World Fund, a nonprofit organization that works to improve relations between the United States and the United Nations. The contest invited “ideas for creating a better world”; visitors to the site would vote on one idea to be taken to the new president’s administration.
Doiron called his idea Eat the View: “Replant a large organic Victory Garden on the First Lawn with the produce going to the White House kitchen and local food pantries. The White House is ‘America's House’ and should serve as a model at a time of economic and environmental crisis. The president would not be breaking with tradition, but returning to it (the White House has had food gardens before) and leading by personal example on global challenges such as food security, climate change, and energy independence.”
In conjunction with the contest, he created an Eat the View Web site and sent a petition out on the winds of the Internet asking for support. He also created and posted a clever, cheerful, silent movie-like video to promote the idea, showing him digging a small garden in front of his own “white house” to the tune of “This Land Is Your Land” (the video ended up winning third place in a national contest). Six months later he’d gathered ten thousand signatures, including many from food luminaries such as Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Bill McKibben.
In July, Doiron put the petition on Facebook. Ten thousand more people signed within one week. Eat the View won the On Day One contest in January 2009, beating out 4,000 competing ideas. Because winning the contest by no means guaranteed the White House would plant and garden, he continued to push the petition, and by February 2009, over 100,000 people had signed.
The idea, the petition signatures, and the many comments from signers were delivered in February to Michelle Obama’s staff, who talked with Doiron several times in the following weeks. Doiron started to hear whispers of progress, hints in speeches by Mrs. Obama, and gossip from his fellowship colleagues, and then, on March 20, Mrs. Obama, twenty-two area school kids, and White House kitchen staff started digging up ground on the South Lawn for a 1,100 square foot organic garden that will grow more than 55 varieties of vegetables, fruits, edible flowers, and herbs.
“Begin pinching yourself now,” Doiron wrote in a letter to KGI members on March 20. “THEY ARE REALLY GOING TO DIG THIS GARDEN! AND WE HELPED MAKE THIS DAY POSSIBLE!”
***
Breathless euphoria aside, not everyone is hoeing the garden row. From 1870 to 2005, home gardening production in the United States fell from 35% to 1%; it is not part of contemporary mainstream culture to want or know how to grow food. There is also the problem of access to healthy soil and safe water, neither of which is a guarantee in, say, large cities or arid climates. Seed availability is also troubling, writes Paul Roberts in The End of Food, as a virtual cartel of three companies—Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta—control nearly half the world’s seed supply; Monsanto in particular has sued farmers who save seeds, claiming copyright infringement of their patented seeds.
Yet more difficult, Roberts writes, is that backyard food production simply can’t begin to meet the immense needs and weaknesses of a politically powerful and inextricably entwined global food production systems. Whatever can’t be produced locally, which is a lot, will fall back on the same long-distance, high-energy, and all around-ecologically disastrous mainstream system. In the face of such massive problems, kitchen gardening appears just whimsical.
Doiron isn’t fazed. “All these are things that can be overcome, because we have to live in reality: we have to grow a lot more food now than ever before, this time with fewer resources. That’s going to require a complete rethink about what good food is and where it comes from and who produces it.” Paul Roberts agrees: “With so many food problems converging, and a new President in town, there’s a feeling that these issues might finally get some attention,” he said in a recent phone conversation. “The White House garden is a pretty small thing, mostly symbolic, but every moment is a potential tipping point. There is a hunger for a new attitude about food.”
Doiron is pushing that tipping point potential by retooling Eat the View as campaign for food gardens in prominent public spaces across the country, starting with governors’ mansions. And for those who love and support kitchen gardening already, the White House garden and the community-building of KGI are not too far from small miracles. One petition signer and KGI member wrote to Doiron, “Thank you. This has been a childhood dream of mine, and I thank you for taking it to where it might be a possibility.” An Iraq War veteran, also a KGI member, wrote that his vegetable garden was keeping him connected to his desire to get healthy, and in February, a Kenyan organic farmer asked Doiron if it was okay to start a White House garden petition over there. Then he offered to take up a collection for the cause.
“It is so, so touching.” Doiron finished his coffee an hour ago; he’s getting ready to go back to work on the laptop, which he calls his favorite gardening tool. “These messages really help me understand the power of this idea. I don’t expect the Obamas to read the notes, probably, but I get to see over and over again my place in this powerful process. It was never just about the White House, but the millions of gardens it could inspire.”
***
For a quiet man, Doiron has handled the explosion of media interest in his work gamely, his eye on the big picture. “There is such fear and exhilaration when you get a call from a big time newspaper. I’m not naturally an extroverted person; I have to pull up out of my shell to put myself out there. But you do one interview, you do one lecture, and afterwards you can say, ‘That worked; I survived; I didn’t make a fool of myself.’” Here he departs from Buster Keaton, whose art was playing the fool. Growing food often does look silly—dirt has a way of getting all over a gardener’s face, and a new grower might have three pockmarked tomatoes and a bushel of crab grass to show for a week’s work—but that awkward vulnerability, under the sun or in writing or on the phone, is the first step toward something more than food security and lower household bills. Across cultures, gardens have been the metaphor for the start of life, and an original source of joy.
For many KGI members, it’s the just action that feels best and right. It’s not violent, but it is consuming; it’s personal, but it is also a response to political and global concerns. It seems in this moment there is room to believe that a practice so militantly peaceful as to be good for us could help save us from the disasters we face.
In such a moment, a new kind of leadership can emerge, too, like a still point in a storm, from a person with quiet integrity and intelligence and imagination, with a sustaining desire and skill to shape the world into a more equitable and safer and happier place, with a love for his work and respect for the people he serves, someone who cultivates his mind as thoroughly as a garden plot and cares for his family as tenderly as one brushes the tops of young tomatoes, to give them sturdier stems.
***
The Doirons are preparing now for their spring planting—lettuces, kale, snap peas, and spinach. Indoors they’ve filled black plastic trays and small peat pots with tomato, pepper and melon seeds, all plants that need head starts of heat and light to make fruit in Maine’s short growing season. As the snow melts, Roger and Jacqueline will rake back last fall’s mulch, turn the soil with new compost, seed rows and mark them with sticks and string. His boys will plant winter squashes in their plot, though squashes take up so much room, Doiron learned last summer, he may need to transplant a raspberry bush from a front corner of the 1.3-acre yard and let his boys start digging there.
In the meantime, Doiron is looking forward to parsnips. “I’ve never had a decent parsnip crop before. They’re under all that snow, though, little parsnip popsicles. I can’t wait to dig them up.”
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