A Naturalist by Default

Joseph Wood Krutch A Desert Naturalist by Default

No one who knew him in his youth would have predicted his becoming a naturalist and eloquent defender of the Sonoran Desert, specifically the region around Tucson, the city that became home for Joseph Wood Krutch during the last 20 years of his life. In a newspaper article published just after his death in 1970, he confessed to a callow insensitivity to nature: "Originally, I was a city man. I admit with shame that . . I would have been willing to echo the opinion of the legendary London club man who responded to an interviewer's question about his attitude toward country life by saying, 'I don't really know anything about it myself, but I understand the country is a damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked.'"

That was the insouciant Joe Krutch of 1915 who, college diploma in hand, fled provincial Knoxville where an editorial attacking what he perceived as the hypocrisy of the Prohibition movement, penned for the University of Tennessee Magazine, almost got him kicked out of school. As a young man with acknowledged pretensions, Krutch was determined to mold himself into an urbane intellectual.

By 1920, with a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University, he was teaching at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Already a free-lance reviewer of books and plays, Krutch was hired in 1924 as drama critic for The Nation. His starting salary was $65 a week which, along with commissioned magazine work and his wife's supporting income, allowed him to quit teaching. By mid-decade he had become associate editor at The Nation, sitting on its editorial board. Now, in addition to writing reviews of plays and books for the back of the magazine, he contributed unsigned editorials to the front.

In 1926 Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius was published and, three years later, The Modern Temper, an appraisal of the social and intellectual history of the modern era, and Krutch's most widely read and vigorously discussed book. Although not a commercial success, reviews of The Modern Temper were almost unanimously favorable, some of them comparing Krutch to such well-known writers and thinkers as Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken, John Dewey, and Lewis Mumford. Krutch's reputation as a man of letters was sealed. He was 35 years old.

But things changed. In the 1930s, when many of Krutch's colleagues embraced Marxism, he wrote a series of forceful essays attacking the dogmatism, arrogance, and intolerance of the new political fashion, thus alienating many on the editorial staff at The Nation and others in the intellectual community whose favor he had sought. In 1937 Krutch resigned as literary editor of The Nation and returned to Columbia, this time to teach, but continued as drama critic for the magazine until 1952.

Meanwhile, the "city man" had gone to the countryside. In the fall of 1925, Joe and Marcelle Krutch bought a house in Cornwall, Connecticut, intending to spend summers there. Increasingly, however, they lived in the country and rarely stayed in their Manhattan apartment. In 1930 they sold the Cornwall house but bought another in Redding, Connecticut, when they returned from traveling abroad.

As a child, Krutch had been keen about science and nature, spending hours reading old copies of the Scientific American or peering at pond water under a microscope. And as an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, he studied botany, chemistry, physics, and mathematics, intending eventually to teach college math switching to literature only during his final year. In the Connecticut countryside, many of his long-suppressed interests returned. Now his journal notes showed more entries on his daily observations of nature or notes on readings in natural history. He also resumed his boyhood habit of looking at things under a microscope.

At about this time, another landscape impressed itself on Krutch's imagination. In 1937 he and his wife made the first of four road trips through New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Marcelle drove to Lamy, New Mexico, and Joe flew out to meet her. Krutch describes his reaction: "No sooner were we speeding along the roller-coaster road which leads across the undulating desert . . . than I felt a sudden lifting of the heart. It seemed almost as though I had lived there in some happier previous existence and was coming back home . . . That I might actually make my home in some such region certainly did not occur to me then, but the seed was planted."

Back East, Krutch wrote a nature essay. "The Day of the Peepers," he called it, and, although it was his first try at nature writing, it cut the die. Often, his essay subjects were ordinary objects or events discovered within a short radius of his own house. This time it was the common tree toad, Hyla crucifer, the peeper whose song heralds spring.

Cordial, direct, and candid, and speaking in the first person with no show of scientific detachment, Krutch describes his subject in detail. Then allowing his reflective intelligence to browse, he shows how this commonplace plant or animal fits into a larger scheme, including its meaning for humans. In the American Scholar Krutch says: "By contact with the living nature, we are reminded of the mysterious, nonmechanical aspects of the living organism. By such contact we begin to get, even in contemplating nature's lowest forms, a sense of the mystery, the

“That anyone would rather live on a parcel of land than sell it at a profit, they simply cannot understand.” (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 24 AND 25) Fiddle-neck, cholla and owl clover flourish in southern Arizona side by side. (LEFT) While it appears similar to the saguaro, the many arms of the organ pipe cactus radiate from the plant's base, not its trunk.

By contact with the living nature, we begin to get a sense of the mystery, the independence, the unpredictableness of the living as opposed to the mechanical.

J o s e p h W o o d K r u t c h

Continued from page 22 independence, the unpredictableness of the living as opposed to the mechanical. And it is upon the recognition of these characteristics that any recognition of man's dignity has to be based.

Krutch produced a dozen essays on the Connecticut natural scene, collecting them into The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar for the Country. To writer Edward Abbey he remarked of this book, "It was the most deeply felt thing I've done."

On leave from Columbia, Krutch and his wife lived in Tucson during 1950-1951. William Sloane, publisher of The Twelve Seasons, asked him to write "a book reporting the experiences of a newcomer whose innocence and ignorance might give a special tone to his discovery of the desert and desert life." The result was The Desert Year, a chronicle of his sabbatical in Arizona.

In 1952 the Krutches moved permanently to Tucson, building a house on roughly five acres near the intersection of Swan and Grand roads on the outskirts of town. Open desert lay all around them; their front patio afforded an unobstructed view of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the north.

Population 50,000, Tucson in the early '50s must have reminded Krutch of the Knoxville of his youth. But just as its smallness attracted him, the subsequent swelling growth of the city repelled him. In 1956, invited to speak before the Tucson Rotary Club on "Tucson as a Place to Write," Krutch told his audience that Tucson was a pretty good place but was becoming less good daily: "Every time I saw one of the Chamber of Commerce posters which read 'Help Tucson Grow,' I said to myself, 'God forbid.' Should they not, I asked, adopt a new motto: 'Keep Tucson Small?'" The next day, The Arizona Daily Star reported "a rather unusual address," and wondered if Mr. Krutch was "speaking in a more or less humorous vein."

When Joe Krutch was almost 60 years old when he moved to Tucson. The following years, he said, were "the happiest years of my life so far." And the healthiest, he might have added. Plagued by nagging illnesses all his life, Krutch discovered an elixir in the bright, clear desert air.

He was never more productive. Soon after arriving, he wrote The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation, marking the first time in print he referred to himself as a naturalist. "I probably know more about plants than any other drama critic and more about the theater than any botanist," he wrote. "That, I am afraid, the ill-disposed may call the perfect description of a dilettante."

One book followed another, not all on nature: The Measure of Man (1954), Human Nature and the Human Condition (1959), and Krutch's autobiography, More Lives Than One (1962). But the desert books and the ones set in the Southwest - The Great Chain of Life (1956), Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays (1958), and The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California (1961) - gave him the most satisfaction. To his dearest friend, poet and critic Mark Van Doren with whom years earlier he had begun his academic career at Columbia, Krutch wrote, "I find more satisfaction in writing this sort of thing than in almost any sort of writing I have tried."

The most arresting feature of his nature essays is the agile intelligence of their creator curious, studious, contemplative, and endowed with an extraordinary recall of seemingly all he had heard or read. Krutch was bookish; one never forgets that. In one short essay, "How to See It" in The Desert Year, he quotes "I probably know more about plants than any other drama critic and more about the theater than any botanist."

Wordsworth, Thoreau, Walter Pater, Shakespeare, and Mozart, and alludes to Italian dance, Hindu mysticism, and to the great French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. Sprinkled throughout are quotes in French, Italian, and Latin.

Ann Woodin, a close friend of Joe and Marcelle Krutch, describes Krutch as a man who shunned attention. His wife, much more gregarious than he, buffered his privacy and guarded his working hours against interruption. But his intimates also describe him as warm, witty, intelligent, and a gifted storyteller. "I think of Joe as telling stories," says Ann Woodin, "and his brilliance always came out in them."

When the Krutches first moved to Tucson, Ann and Bill Woodin were building a house for their four small boys and assorted pets near Sabino Creek. Joe and Marcelle, who were childless, found surrogate grandsons in the Woodin boys. The families became close and the Krutches spent frequent weekends at the Woodin place. Bill Woodin was director of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum at the time, and Joe Krutch became a great champion of the facility, serving as secretarytreasurer and sitting on its board of directors.

In his 60s, Joe Krutch went on his very first camping trip, guided by the Woodins, who led him and Marcelle to the remote Sierra Pinacate in northern Sonora, Mexico. Later, the Woodins accompanied the Krutches on their first trip to Baja California. "One had the impression, looking at him, that he didn't fit the surroundings," says Ann Woodin. "Something about his body type didn't look right in the outdoors. But he always managed very well." The "city man" had traveled far.

For years "progress" had nibbled at the edges of the Krutch five acres and finally swallowed it. A shopping center sprawls where their modest ranch house once stood. Joe Krutch had watched the city consume the desert around him, watched Tucson's population multiply six times, from 50,000 when he arrived to 300,000 less than two decades later. Shortly before his death in 1970 he wrote: "My five acres are still a sort of oasis despite efforts of real estate agents to persuade me to sell. The new developments, so they tell me, have increased the value of my property many times.

"And when I ask, 'Increased its value for what? Certainly not as a place to live,' they look at me in amazement. That anyone would rather live on a parcel of land than sell it at a profit, they simply cannot understand.

"Every time a stretch of good earth becomes real estate, that is obviously progress as is admitted even by those who are not any happier as the result of what has been done. It is assumed that progress has nothing to do with the possibility of leading a good life."

Additional Reading: We recommend Eternal Desert, a study of the great Southwestern deserts as seen through the camera of premier landscape photographer David Muench, and interpreted by the prestigious historian Frank Waters. The hardcover edition encompasses 114 superb full-color photographs. For information or to order, call toll-free 1 (800) 543-5432. In the Phoenix area, 258-1000.