CHAPTER EIGHT

“Friendship is built on shared experiences, be they of the mind, the heart or the soul.” Perhaps that is why Joe Lincoln counted his friends by the tens of thousands. For forty years as a writer he shared the greatest adventure of all with the world--the adventure of living.

“He placed that adventure in New England, mostly on Cape Cod and he found it chiefly among the people of the little towns, sometimes inland, sometimes against the constant wash of the sea. But whatever he was, to read him is to be one with his people, to share their laughter and tears, to participate as no bystander could in their affairs; to relish at first hand the homely wisdom and pithy wit which permeated his pages and to identify experience, thought and feeling with one’s own.”--Thus wrote Alice Dixon Bond, literary editor of the Boston Herald, in an interview with Joe Lincoln in September of 1941. Further describing her visit with Lincoln, she wrote:

“It was one of those rare September days when summer lingers in the soft haze of a cloudless horizon and the warm sun turns garden and field into a riot of brilliant color. The sea was a magnificent blue ribbon around our world, held in place here by great sand dunes topped with gently waving grasses.

“Mr. Lincoln sat contentedly puffing his pipe, gazing across the nodding heads of flowers to the line of surf along the shore to where Portugal was lifting her head from the sea, if we had the magic eyes to see her.

“We were seated in the sun porch of his house at Chatham, a Cape Cod house of gracious rooms and spacious views, filled with the treasures he and Mrs. Lincoln had collected, and I had been asking him about his newest book.

“‘No,’ he said, ‘I do not feel that realism and sordidness are synonymous terms. I have wanted to tell of the people I have known. By that I don’t mean that I draw my characters from life, for I most certainly do not. If I did, I might hurt someone’s feelings. I draw their characteristics from people I have known. I believe that most people want to be decent according to their lights and capacities. I never could write a crusader book, for the extreme reformer sees only one side. There is always an excuse for any action, or if there is not, we can find one. Life contains both laughter and sorrow and to me one is as real as the other. I have chosen the cheerful side because I would much rather make people cheerful and keep myself cheerful at the same time. I think tolerance is essential. I have written of the average man, for it is the average man who is the backbone of the nation.’

“Joe Lincoln loved the Cape, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t laugh at its peculiarities. And he made his reader laugh with him until finally he created a world of laughter.

“The world owes Ripley Hitchcock,” according to Mrs. Bond, “a vast debt, for it was he, back in the early days of Joe’s career, who convinced young Lincoln that he could write a novel. Hitchcock was also the man who discovered David Harum.

“‘I could go through the Cape,’ Lincoln said, ‘and find a great many mean people, as one could anywhere for that matter, but I haven’t.’ In that fact lies one of the greatest charms in the Lincoln books. For they have kindness in them. His work is not brash or contemptuous or arrogant. His people are his readers’ people, impelled by the same longings, harried by the same troubles; and if they prove to have feet of clay, well--Joe managed, in one way or other, to get them sea boots in which to weather the storm of life.”

During the interview Lincoln talked of the history of the Cape, of the great fortunes which were made there. Many Cape Cod men were in the revolution, but the war of 1812 affected that section more directly when it fell under the blockade of New England’s seaboard. There was a big frigate trapped in Provincetown harbor, and another in Nantucket, and sloops patrolled the coast. Salt was one of the great businesses of the day. Chatham alone had twenty-three salt works. But during the blockade, Lincoln said, one authority states that two hundred thousand bushels of that necessity remained static there.

After his son Freeman was born the Lincolns moved to New Jersey, and later moved to a lovely home in Villa Nova, Pennsylvania. But the Cape reclaimed Joe Lincoln and at the time of the interview in question he was making his official residence at Chatham and he had again become a legal resident of Massachusetts. This was in 1941. Lincoln’s Chatham home was a lovely place. A great hedge guarded the house from the street while the back opened to a lovely garden with magnificent views of the sea and sky. The living room reflected his taste and his affection, for here was the special loveliness of Cape Cod. Hooked rugs of varied pattern strew the floor: the chairs and couches were simple, practical, graceful in line and eminently comfortable. A miniature bureau, shining like satin, flanked a chintz-covered love seat stirring one’s imagination as to its history before it came to rest there.

Everywhere in the room the lovely grain of maple and pine was polished to a burnished gleam. A set of shelves supported a rare collection of old glass. In this room, too, was a Tobey jug from the Widow Nolan’s collection and among the lustre pitchers was a Leeds Lustre resist in the Bird pattern.

In the room also was a Sandwich glass salt dish with a cover--the only one Lincoln had ever seen--and the mantle was dotted with choice China ornaments collected here and there throughout the Cape. Among them were two extremely supercilious dogs with flower baskets in their mouths.

The dining room held some lovely pewter, together with baseline Sandwich glass, and everywhere throughout the house were paintings and models of old ships.

Above the living room mantle was Harold Brett’s painting of Silas Bradford’s Boy, while another one hung in the Lincoln’s bedroom above the fireplace.

Upstairs the rooms were filled with furniture made from maples which would turn an envious collector a delicate mauve. The rooms opened into a spacious hall. The Lincoln suite was at one end of the hall and here were some of the choicest objects in the house.

To describe Lincoln’s collection of paper weights, his ships or his glass would take hours, according to Mrs. Bond.

For recreation the author played golf or fished. In his dining room was a carved bass done by E. Harwick, the nationally known carver of birds. Since this was the first fish Mr. Harwick ever did, and because it was done at his instigation, Joe Lincoln treasured it accordingly.

“The New Hope,” said Mrs. Bond in her Boston Herald article, written as the result of the interview, “is his latest book and will be published September 29 (1941). It is another collaboration with his son, Freeman, their third. Counting these, his volumes of poetry, and his one play, this will be Mr. Lincoln’s forty-sixth book.

“Time never hangs heavily on his hands,” continued the article. “He can’t sleep, once the sun comes into his room, so he is an early riser. After breakfast, which is a modest one (every two years he takes off fifteen pounds, for somehow they do keep returning) he reads the Boston Herald--he volunteered this. By nine o’clock he is at his desk.”

Lincoln’s afternoons were spent on the links or with rod and reel, while the evenings were given over to reading and the enjoyment of friends.

“What he has done for New England,” said Mrs. Bond, “is priceless for he has made her traditions, her manners, and her people a part of America’s memory, while his characters reach out into universal living.

“So New England does well to honor this grand old man (Lincoln was about seventy-one at this time) whose spirit is one of the blithe ones of the world and whose kindly knowledge has helped many.

“Joe Lincoln has truly ‘lived in a house by the side of the road and been a friend to man’.”

Lincoln’s new book, “The New Hope,” was published in September, 1941. The story took place in the typical but also mythical town of Trumet during the British blockade in the summer of 1814.

As far as Trumet was concerned, the townsfolk did not have to worry about starvation. “You can’t starve a population that lives where the bays and coves squirm with fish.” But they could worry about stagnation. Coop a sea-faring man up on land and something is bound to happen which it did in Lincoln’s book. It was Jonathan Bangs who first gave Captain Isaiah Dole his big idea. Jonathan and the captain had seen plenty of fighting together aboard a privateer, and Jonathan had come to Trumet with the captain while the latter recovered from his wounds. The idea had to do with converting an idle merchant ship into a privateer, and then slipping out to sea past the British blockade to claim whatever prizes the water might offer.

But the sailing was not smooth--for anybody. First the British brought their ships in and closed the mouth of the harbor. Then, although “The New Hope” was a cooperative venture and every man concerned was a loyal patriot and a friend of everyone else, secrets began to leak through to the enemy. More than one thing went wrong. Suspicion reared its ugly head. There were unexplained happenings, voices in the darkness, a lovely girl who might be English, an almost disastrous fire, a British spy, and a foul murder.

For good measure the Lincolns threw in some pretty keen Yankee ingenuity, some bitter hatred, some kindly “characters,” a nice romance, and a woman “whose tongue always had a full breeze astern of it.”

“The New Hope” at times had all the excitement and violence of a riptide, as mystery, adventure, love and patriotism joined their swift currents, forming a turbulent, full-bodied and suspenseful book. It was Joe and Freeman Lincoln at their best.