On Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

At the last club meeting, we were discussing alternative ways to spend the winter break, and reference was made to ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’. This was the poem Robert Frost (1874-1963) said was "my best bid for remembrance." Some confuse it with his other woodland poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. That’s the one that starts and ends
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood …
And sorry I could not travel both
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This has been described as an 'autumnal' poem, and 'Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening' as a winter poem. It is set on 'the darkest evening of the year", implying the midwinter solstice which falls a few days before Xmas Eve. Spending Xmas in the woods today has a special appeal, for it is inherently less bleak than spending it in open country, and snow itself has a cushioning, deadening, effect. Even in urban settings, a heavy snowfall muffles sound so the day can be eerily quiet.
There’s an episode of the vintage sitcom Father Knows Best that illustrates the appeal of woods at Xmas. (As the title indicates, it belongs to an era of unquestioned certainties now long gone, though it was followed by 1970s Xmas specials, and is now being remade as a sendup.) The series’ all-American typical family, en route to visit country-dwelling relatives for Xmas, are forced by a Xmas Eve snowstorm to spend the night in a deserted forester’s cabin. The kids have been acting as spoilt ‘modern’ teens, whingeing about not having their own phones etc. But they rediscover an appreciation of the ‘thanksgiving’ basics by being snow-bound in a cabin. Since that time, many North American families have, or aspire to, a weekend cabin or cottage for this “R&R” purpose.
Frost’s poem is much darker, seen by some as a contemplation of “the dangerous seductiveness of the woods” – the seductive appeal of quietitude itself, to the point of contemplating death. This is a conception belonging to an age where the basics of survival are no longer central, as they had been until recently. The poem’s original inspiration had in fact been a family-duty trip at Christmas 1905, when “Frost had made an unsuccessful trip into town to sell eggs in order to raise money for his children's Christmas presents.” Today, its last lines can also be seen as social duty requiring one to postpone the personal, or natural desire to live the quiet life where one can spend one’s days and nights contemplating nature. Here it is, in full:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The Simple Life - Read All About It

The complaint Christmas has become too materialistic is so familiar it needs no further explanation. The title of this blog being Stories From The Diogenes Club, here are ten inspirational stories in the spirit of Diogenes. For those who intend, as I do, to spend Xmas quietly reading, these are ten books about, or sometimes by, those who pursued the simple life in their own ways. For there are more interesting ways to attempt the simple life than living in a barrel in Athens marketplace and insulting curious visitors.
Proceeding chronologically, our top-ten book list would have to start with Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe [free e-text version here], the original 'desert island' novel, based on a true story. Defoe's was a hit inspirational tale of survival, though today it seems somewhat naive in its slightly capitalistic and Christian-evangelist handling of themes of self-reliance and enterprise. The novel, written as if it were a real memoir, started an ongoing desert-island-castaway literary genre (from Swiss Family Robinson to plane-crash survivor stories like Cast Away with Tom Hanks). The list of real-life castaways includes some (like Gerald Kingsland and Lucy Irvine) who got themselves deliberately stranded as a lifestyle experiment (Wikipedia page here). The real-life original of Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, had done this, and after being rescued lived in a cave on his family property as a hermit until the new-found celebrity created by Defoe's book led to a stream of visitors, which forced him to return to sea, where he perished.
The first such inspirational work in American literature, with major impact, would be Walden (1854) . Henry David Thoreau's journal of his year or so living in a log cabin he builds by a pond in rural Vermont as an attempt at 'voluntary simplicity' became part of the modern American dream, rediscovered in the Sixties as part of the back-to-the-land approach to dropout culture.
We should also list his 1861 essay collection Walking here. It is the philosophical forerunner of the 'long walk' type of travel book, where the geographic journey is paralleled by an inner one, a journey which clears the mind of non-essentials.
When Thor Heyerdahl's The Kon-Tiki Expedition (1950) was sent to a New York publisher, her famous response was: who wants to read about a bunch of crazy Scandinavians crossing the Pacific on a balsa raft? Of course she could not have been more wrong - it was merely the forerunner of a new genre. The account provided a new way of vicariously experiencing getting back to basics while retracing an 'ancestral' route, and even had a desert-island finale as the raft grounded after 4000 miles on a coral reef near Tahiti.
In US literature Western novels dominate here: the typical hero is a 'saddle tramp', an exemplar of rugged individualism who owns and needs no more than can fit on a saddle, and sleeps by a campfire under the stars. In fact frontier literature went back to the so-called captivity narrative, an early sensational memoir or pseudo-memoir where a ‘civilised’ protagonist is made captive and forced to 'go native' - taking a native wife and so on. This was eventually worked into the conventional 20th-C western in novels like Will Henry's 1950 No Survivors, a pseudo-memoir where the narrator John Clayton (the birth-name of another Simple Lifer better known as Tarzan) is an ex Confederate who lives with the Sioux until dragged into the middle of Custer's last battle, which he survives. (If it sounds familiar it's because the story was later parodied in Little Big Man, and reworked in Dances With Wolves).
The 20th-Century conservation movement began in Canada with the nature writings of Grey Owl, who made the beaver a Canadian national symbol in the 1930s. He was actually an impostor, an Englishman from Hastings called Archie Belaney who after WWI service turned his back on civilisation forever and went to live his life in the Canadian woods as an Ojibwa Indian hunter and trapper. The biography Wilderness Man is the main one of several by his publisher Lovat Dickson, who knew him from his English tours. Grey Owl not only wrote outdoors books like Pilgrims Of The Wild but exploited his colourful image to promote the conservationist cause through gruelling speaking tours, which killed him – he died of exhaustion within days of returning to his log cabin.
Of course in the modern era it isn't practical for most people to go off into the wilderness for extended periods to pursue the simple life. The modern urban variant is the 'bohemian' option, pursued by many a starting writer - living a spare solo existence in a room in a strange town or city to be alone with one's thoughts. An example of this is Jean Paul Sartre's 1938 diary-style existentialist novel Nausea, where the alienated writer-protagonist finds his sojourn alone in a provincial French seaside town leads to an intellectual breakthrough.
There have of course been genuine hermits throughout history, the famous British one being Myrddin The Wild. In 1985 Nikolai Tolstoi (descendant of the Russian novelist) wrote one of those 'in quest of' books searching for the historical figure who inspired the Merlin of the Arthurian Romances. His The Quest For Merlin describes his search for biographical information regarding this 6th C. hermit who, after giving his king some disastrous advice, cast himself away in the Scottish Border Forests to live in a hut with only a piglet for company, where he wrote poetry and struggled to keep his sanity as he was overwhelmed by the awen, the bardic inspiration that can drive men mad.
Fantasy-SF literature has also contributed the idea of time warps whereby a modern civilised type can return to a primitive, perhaps ancestral environment. In England, this is “The Wildwood,” and the classic here, in terms of convincing detail, is a 1984 novel (again written in memoir or journal style) by Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood. Here the English hero spends months at a time on expeditions exploring a local woodland where a mysterious shamanistic vortex has created a Wildwood where ‘mythago’ (mythic-image) entities survive from Celtic, Saxon and prehistoric eras.
Of course, the token version of 'back to nature' is the modern camping trip, which in literature lends itself to satire (going back to Three Men In A Boat) where the characters are unable to abandon their civilised ways, even briefly. A modern non-fiction example set in wilder surroundings (America’s Appalachian Trail) is humourist-turned-conservationist Bill Bryson's autobiographical 1998 A Walk In The Woods, where the desire for ‘the wilderness experience’ is offset by inability to abandon modern comforts like junk food.
The simple life is a major and increasingly popular theme in literature, and even if you can't live it at the moment, you can still read all about it.

The Not So Simple Life

I don’t know who it was who first said "Oh, the simple life for me!" I don’t think it was Diogenes, who as American soldiers would say, walked the walk rather than just talked the talk. In other words, he lived the life, rather than just talking about it as a desirable future ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
The phrase seems to have come from its use in popular song, a cry of discontent that is natural and attractive when your life is hopelessly complicated.
The fantasy version comes in two flavours: one, where you live totally alone – like Robinson Crusoe; the other, as a group, like the Swiss Family Robinson. Living an "unworldly" life became part of Western Christian culture early on, as early Christian fathers took to living in the desert, in caves, in woods, when it was an unofficial, persecuted religion. The Celtic-Irish monastic movement that was a later communal extension of this which still allowed for hermits, called anchorites.
Later, Romantic poets indulged the notion of personal retreat as an attractive dream, like Yeats in his ‘The Lake Isle Of Innisfree’: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,/ And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:/ Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade./ And I shall have some peace there… Back when most people had rather primitive lifestyles anyway, it wasn’t so glamorised. There’s a Celtic poem about the original Merlin, Myrddin Wyllt (the Wild), going to live in the woods with only a piglet for company. He had fled there after giving bad advice as a court bard, leading to seeing his king defeated in battle, and the horror had driven him mad. This is an essential springboard in many actual cases, the retreat to recuperate from some disaster. (The author Nikolai Tolstoi, who was bankrupted in a lawsuit, became fascinated with Merlin The Wild and wrote a book on him as a genuine historical figure.) Such figures suffering from the experience of some catastrophe that made it impossible for them to carry on with a normal life still exist. In America, the designation "Bush Vets" describes Vietnam or subsequent-war veterans who could not re-adjust to ‘civilised’ life and so went to live in cabins in the woods. Even the original of Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk, after his return retreated from the possibilities offered by his new celebrity and went to live in a hut he built at the bottom of his parents’ garden before escaping back to sea.


The modern notion that living the simple life in a cabin or on a desert island is a solution to the psycholigical and spiritual problems of modern life grew as society itself became more materialistic. Again, the early proponents here were religious types whose world-view repudiated materialism, a fact which much contributed to the founding of America via agrarian communes. The later westward drive by desperately poor immigrants from European cities led an entire generation to live for a time in covered wagons, sod houses, and log cabins. (For an example of a pioneer memoir, see Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1935 Little House On The Prairie.) This ‘pioneer experience’ was venerated by their descendants, and soon the notion of being raised in a log cabin soon became something politicians like Abe Lincoln would boast of as the lifestyle itself became less common. (You can read all about this process in Henry Nash Smith’s classic study Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth
Today, The Simple Life is an attractive idea for the world-weary, but as we become accustomed to material comforts like central heating and electronic communications, more difficult to adjust to. The generation I grew up with in the Sixties adopted Thoreau’s account of his "experiment in simple living" Walden Or Life in the Woods as a sort of lifestyle ‘bible.’ Thoreau’s simple life involved building himself a cabin outside Concord, Mass., and living a contemplative life there for two years in the 1850s, writing about marching to the beat of a different drummer, etc. This ‘dropout’ lifestyle included being jailed for not paying his poll tax, in line with his earlier essay – admired by Gandhi – On Civil Disobedience. For in the late Sixties and early Seventies, over a hundred thousand Americans became social outcasts when they fled the prospect of service in the Vietnam War. Mainly they heading north to Canada, where they set up house in county communes or in log cabins in the woods, until the government repealed the old ‘Homestead’ Act. Many others drifted back to civilisation, disillusioned. (You can read about this stressful time in The Eden Express, by novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s son Mark, who suffered the fate of too many who abandon civilisation - descent into mental illness.) Nevertheless a whole counter-culture mythos grew up around the experience, popularising expressions such as sustainable living, voluntary simplicity, and downshifting.
Of course the notion of The Simple Life remains an attractive vicarious fantasy, much played up in the media, most recently in wilderness-survival TV shows, either with groups of amateur ‘castaways’ or celebrity experts. But disillusion can set in as soon as you look behind the scenes. This week we had press exposes how British survival expert Bear Grylls stayed in luxury hotels while demonstrating onscreen how to survive with only a knife and a flint. Even with Thoreau, his cabin was relatively close to town, his sister bailed him out after he spent a night in jail for not paying his tax, and so on.
Also this week, BBC Digital radio has been repeating the classic Tony Hancock episode "The Wild Man Of The Woods" where he announces he is forsaking civilisation to live as a hermit. It turns out his hermitage is a bus shelter on the Common, "so I’ll be near the shops." And he finds the simple life is not so simple after all, due to the fascination others have with the lifestyle. I found listening to this on cassette particularly memorable during my own formative writer’s retreat living in a snowbound wilderness cabin. For in most ‘civilised’ countries it is difficult to find true wilderness where one can live in isolation, and so two traditions of The Simple Life have evolved, the Arcadian and the Bohemian (which I’d tried earlier on).
The ‘arcadian’ approach is where you find a rural paradise which will support you in your chosen lifestyle. One thing you learn if you live in a cabin is that 9-5’ers think you don’t ‘work’ for a living – idly imagining living off the land involves no effort. In fact it is difficult to arrange and sustain. Such paradises also never last, as the occupants themselves bring the seed of destruction with them. (On this, see Alex Garland’s bestseller The Beach or the 1970s Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson.)
Thus we also have a ‘bohemian’ tradition of leading a simple, dropout lifestyle in an urban setting. Diogenes, hanging about the Corinth marketplace, seems the first known example of this. The Beats or Beatniks of the post-WWII era and the hippies of the Sixties are the best-known recent examples. Earlier there was a smaller but influential group, the post-WWI ‘Lost Generation’ of writers who had survived the war but couldn’t face going home, and stayed on in France as expatriates. For it’s a lifestyle pursued by many a writer wanting to keep his life uncomplicated while he gets his writing together, living anonymously in a city outside the ‘bourgeois’ conventions of career and marriage from which he feels alienated. (Sartre’s 1930s writer’s-journal novel La Nausee – Nausea - is a prime example of this.) Yet the Bohemian approach has only a narrow appeal, pursued by those unable to realise the arcadian version favoured by the Romantic writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge.
This is increasingly popular today as a consumerist daydream: polls indicate that up to a third of the British population wants to emigrate – perhaps retreat to some still-undeveloped Spanish Costa, or build that crumbling ruin of a dream farmhouse in Provence or on a Greek island, just like they’ve read about in the books of Peter Mayle, or Gerald or Lawrence Durrell. The reality is most people can only pursue the simple life at certain times - youth, old age, or while on holiday activities such as hiking and camping. (The Arcadian and the Bohemian worlds uniquely co-mingle in the English enthusiasm for spending summers in beach huts on the fringes of conurbations.) Yet even if it can only be indulged for a short time, it remains a useful tonic. This month, the Boy Scout Movement celebrates its 100th anniversary, of the very first Scout camp on Brownsea Island, an international event endorsed by some surprising examples of celebrityhood (like rock stars), who testify how their own youthful camping-out experiences changed their lifelong outlook to a more self-reliant one.