Stone Soup
Book Review: "Stone Work," by John Jerome. Viking, New York, 1989.How sweet it is, for us lazy incompetents, to watch someone else working hard and well. Sweeter still to watch a world-class watcher watching himself at work.
Such is the rarified pleasure of this unsung little masterpiece. By the time he died at age 69 in 2002, author John Jerome had proven himself as a self-trained jock, instinctive naturalist, amateur stone-mason and writer's writer.
In mid-career, after a modicum of success as a magazine hack, Jerome gave up the "jokey, aggressive, distracted" life of the urban workplace. He and his wife withdrew to the country to "get some kind of sensory reconnection with the physical world" – an impulse well-known to many a Trinity transplant.
I'd never heard of him until I stumbled upon "Stone Work" at an Oregon thrift store. The book and its author both deserve way more recognition, but Jerome just might have gotten a perverse kick out of his relegation to the 25 ¢ bin.
After all, he's the definitive Bard of Thankless Undertakings, to judge from the wry, "contrarian" voice he adopts in his first-person vignettes. Nothing seems to delight him more than an insurmountably strenuous task – rebuilding a vintage truck from scratch, say, or training as a competitive swimmer at age 50.
In "Stone Work," we find him dismantling a quarter-mile wall of boulders and reassembling it way at the other end of his New England homestead, just to "organize the open space" of his front yard. This Sysiphean effort also serves to organize the open-ended chatter of his hyper-active mind.
The wall triggers meditations on physics and mechanics and physiology, light and seasons, work versus play, human versus various animal perceptions. We learn about Jerome's family dynamics and we get to job-shadow some of his craftsmanly mentors. We join him on a scuba-diving vacation in the Caribbean. Any sort of digression's allowed in a book like this: the sheer, automaton imbecility of his stone-stacking task sets his mind "as free as a colt turned out to pasture."
That sense of freedom frisks across every page of Stone Work. "His curiosity was inexhaustible," wrote his hometown paper, The Ashfield (Massachusetts) News, in the only obituary that marked his death four years ago. "He found his subjects in the world immediately around him. and it must have been a joy for him to rise in the morning."
Maybe so, but, for a colt at play, he worked most conscientiously, turning out at least a thousand words a day. With writing, as with any other strenuous obsession of his, the sheer effort of the thing was its own reward – mindful, all the while, that it was a quest for effortless awareness that had inspired his retreat to the country in the first place.
The irony of this predicament was not lost on Jerome. "Words, I am beginning to think, are the specific barrier against seeing things clearly in these woods," he wrote ruefully in Stone Work. "At the same time, [they are] the only specific tool I have for penetrating the barrier … the writer's curse."
So he set himself the task of penetrating "the uncommonness of common things," according to the eulogy delivered in 2002 by his brother-in-law, Bruce McCall. The result was a body of work that was "pitched … both too far over most readers' heads and too far below their threshold of interest."
In other words, just about right for a those of us here in Trinity in tune with Jerome's back-to-the-country wavelength. His dozen volume opus may be (in McCall's phrase) "so devoid of commercial sizzle as to give agents the fantods and hip editors the yawns."
But they are (still quoting McCall) "solid, meaty, meditative books of a terse lyricism." Well worth the dollar or two that they now cost on Amazon or Powells.com; a rare instance where you actually get way more than you pay for.
