Book Review : Following in Footsteps of Thoreau on an Island

The Devil in the Dooryard by Gregory Blake Smith (Morrow: $17.95)

The banks of Walden Pond are virtually tree-to-tree these late summer days with picnickers and other refugees from the lingering Boston heat. Thoreau would have to come early to find a parking place.

But the Thoreauvian vision never really dies in our country. It is a persistent antibody in the blood of a people better known for the pursuit of progress and a fuller life. The fullness of the emptier life calls us, too; it hikes the Appalachian Trail and the High Sierra, and turns up with a frying pan beside remote Canadian lakes.

It has been a recurring part of our literary tradition, though pretty much crowded, of late, by such themes as urban and suburban failures to connect, searches for feminine identity, the new Southern school of hilarity, and a few others.

“The Devil in the Dooryard,” Gregory Blake Smith’s first novel, gives us a protagonist John Wheelwright in search of his own Walden. He locates it, with all unlikeliness, on an uninhabited island in the middle of Boston Harbor, where he goes through a whole series of ordeals.

Constricted Temperament

Some are occasioned by his own quirky and constricted temperament, some by the skewed nature of his project. Others arise from his efforts to persuade a Boston girlfriend to share his island, and by a seriocomic war with a band of Indians intent on claiming his Eden for their own.

Wheelwright is a terrible snob; the son of rich and eccentric parents who live on Beacon Hill and summer on a New Hampshire lake. Snobbery is his mortal sin and mortal illness. Masquerading under the passion for self-discovery and the simple life, it is more fear than passion, more rejection than discovery. Smith’s novel, by turns enchanting and messy, gets his hero at least partway out.

Part of the delivery is at the hands of two ghosts who buzz about Wheelwright’s efforts to settle his island. They are those of its original inhabitants. Samuel Mavericke, an amiable and independent Anglican, moved there with his wife, Amias, a few years before John Winthrop arrived to set up his shining city on a hill and founded Boston, instead.

Samuel and Amias helped the Winthrop expedition through the first hard winters, but otherwise kept to themselves. This suited both sides. The Puritans had little use for a man who wore brocaded vests and practiced a philosophy of live-and-let-live.

‘Onion-Headed Children’

It is the memory of the Maverickes, in fact, that attracted Wheelwright to their island, which has now become a stop on the Boston Harbor Island tour, and, in his priggish words, a haven for “platoons of trooping housewives and their cement-footed and onion-headed children.”

Wheelwright came across the Maverickes as a child when, characteristically, he was tracing his own Yankee lineage in the Boston Public Library. From that moment, they became his vision of Utopia.

He plays Mavericke games during summers on the New Hampshire lake. He uses a raft as the island, and enlists his skeptical cousin, Hetty, to play Amias. Innocent enough; but when some local boys come too close, he shoots at them with a BB gun. Hetty flees and will flee him, on and off, for the rest of the book.

Wheelwright’s dream of a bucolic life is inextricable from a rejection of life, per se. He grows up to study old methods of carpentry and the restoration of antique furniture. He spends his days fashioning mortises and tenons, and learning, he says, “a certain quality of moral salvage.” After work, he visits furniture stores to demonstrate the shoddy quality of the goods by prying them apart.

Finally, he moves to the island and begins to build. When he does, both he and the book--inevitably constricted by his own cramped vision--begin to pick up. There has been a wildness along with the fussiness, and it comes out. And the ghosts of Mavericke and Amias arrive to lecture him.

Mavericke, the book’s best character, is alarmed by his disciple’s fanaticism. For the ghost, solitude was at least as much a positive good as it was a flight from habitation. “This was not my island,” he tells Wheelwright, sitting beside him in his temporary island shelter. “My island had Amias.” And the two ghosts begin a charming campaign to get Wheelwright to seek out, woo and win Hetty, who is living her own kind of modern solitude in Boston as governess to a pair of autistic children.

Shifting of Balances

It is a wild courtship, full of outbursts, hysteria and a continual shifting of balances. Smith’s untethered imagination and errant speculations find a buoyant release in his characters’ comical melodramatics. These go on to get out of hand, and finally, out of even fantastical belief, when a gang of descendants of the original Massachusetts Indians invade the island and take John and Hetty prisoner.

If the beginning of “Devil in the Dooryard” is uncomfortably precious and choked-up, and if the last part goes grandiloquently haywire, there is enough partly eclipsed energy and imagination to make “Devil in the Dooryard” very much what first novels have rather lost the habit of being. It is clumsy but challenging, in other words; with a restless spirit, imperfectly contained and a reach beyond its grasp.

We read in a literary time and place of beautifully crafted grasps. It’s nice to read an untrammeled reach.