Contributed by the Henry Beston Society
“So what’s it all about?” you may ask. Well, if you’re looking for clues, a search could start among the surf, sand, and stretches of the outer beaches and marshes of Cape Cod. After all, it worked for Henry Beston, who came to these fragile Eastham sands looking for answers during the 1920s and left here with the notes that would become the Cape Cod literary nature classic, The Outermost House.
As a tribute plaque to The Outermost House would read years later, “Beston … sought the great truth and found it in the nature of man.”
“The Outermost House is a passionate book about winds, tides, sea birds and stars, and what it’s like to fall in love with a beach,” wrote a New York Times reviewer about Beston’s Cape Cod literary classic in 1993. “His lovely beach is lovely still ... On most foggy afternoons, the beach has not a soul but Henry Beston’s on it.”
Shortly after his outer-beach bungalow was built in June of 1925, the thirty-seven-year-old Beston retreated to it “in search of something for himself,” according to the late Nan Turner Waldron, author of the book Journey to Outermost House. Only a few months earlier, Beston had had the twenty-by-sixteen house constructed on top of a dune two miles south of the Nauset Coast Guard station. It contained two rooms – a main living area with a fireplace and small kitchen, and a smaller bedroom.
He named it “the Fo’castle” because it had ten windows and gave its occupant the sense of being on a boat, inside the fo’castle, at sea.
"The Fo'castle" floats sideways in Nauset March, before being carried out to sea and crushed by waves in 1978 storm.
Coast Guard officers and the house’s carpenter, Harvey Moore, all warned him: “Great location, but too close to the high water line.” Two moves and fifty-three years later, the elements proved the skeptics to be correct.
Beston’s book was published in 1928, and over the years it came to be considered as “the definitive book,” set apart from all the other books written about Cape Cod, according to Waldron. The book went through dozens of printings, and the house and the author were honored at a special ceremony in 1964, designating the Fo’castle as a “National Literary Landmark” at the Cape Cod National Seashore by the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior. Now, nearly three decades after the house was swept away by a monstrous winter hurricane, Beston’s house is still looked upon as an icon of Cape Cod. As Waldron, who stayed for parts of seventeen years in Beston’s seaside hideaway, wrote in Journey to Outermost House, “Still they come – pilgrims of a sort – stirred by his sense of wonder but drawn by his vision of hope.”
Beston immersed himself in this solitary wonderland -- wind blowing through the dune grass, bird migrations, the power of a winter nor’easter and the thunderous but calming roar of the surf. These elemental factors cast a particularly enchanting spell in September and October -- it was during this season that Beston was sold on the idea of staying here for a year after a two-week stay.
“As the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go,” he wrote. He had dedicated his life to being a “writer-naturalist,” and was opening himself to the experiences that could be found on the Outer Beach.
“Like so many great nature writers before and after him, Beston uses the controlling metaphor of the natural year to structure his book,” wrote author Robert Finch in his highly-acclaimed introduction to the most recent editions of The Outermost House. “Much of the style, imagery, and power of The Outermost House flows from the author’s central concept of his year on the beach as a celebration of a fundamental and ongoing ritual.”
Born in 1888 as Henry Beston Sheahan, he was the son and brother of noted physicians in Quincy. (His father was a founder of Quincy Hospital.) After graduating from Harvard, the young writer joined the ambulance service in his mother’s native France after the first shots of World War I rang out. Here he was subjected to the horrors of death and destruction on a regular basis. After returning from the war, the scarred writer told a story of wandering through a battle-ravaged field, finding a human heart wedged in a burned tree. Someone had been blown to bits and the heart got caught in the branches.
In 1923, he drew a magazine assignment for an article called “The Wardens of Cape Cod.” Wandering the beach with the Lifesaving Service of the Outer Cape, the young writer found a crew of men he greatly admired. A short stay in New Mexico followed – it was there that he became friendly with Navajos, and it’s been said that he developed his keen sense of the natural world through this association.
Beston’s stay on the beach stretched out over two years, with his experiences being molded into one “year of life.”
In time, Beston’s Cape classic drew comparisons to Henry David Thoreau’s works (even though Thoreau was hardly Beston’s favorite author). Beston’s dear friend Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, The Sea Around Us) said the Outermost scribe was the only one to influence her writing. When visiting Beston’s “Fo’castle” for the first time, Carson stood for a long time in a meditative silence.
“In a lot of ways, Henry Beston is an underappreciated writer that has not been discovered by a lot of people yet, and deserves to be,” insists Cape Cod’s Greg O’Brien, author of Secrets in the Sand. “My hope is that in years to come, there will be more people who read Beston, and realize that in his day, and in his era, and the type of writing that he did, he was probably the best. And that’s a secret -- I don’t think a lot of people know that.”
“He was certainly ahead of his time, and when you read some of the passages from the book, it sounds absolutely modern, absolutely up to date, and he realized just what he was about,” echoes composer Ron Perera, who wrote a musical cantata tribute to Beston’s work. “He was an inspiration to a whole generation.”
At Beston’s National Literary Landmark tribute in 1964, Massachusetts Gov. Endicott Peabody stated: “You’ve given the American people a heightened awareness of the value of the Outer Beach of Cape Cod as a part of our inheritance. And you’ve described our great beach here and the ocean that comes in upon it, as no one else ever could or ever will – The Outermost House as a testament has had immeasurable influence. Your book is one of the reasons that the Cape Cod National Seashore exists today, to protect the beach and many acres around it, for our future generations.”
When the Outer Cape was being considered for National Park status in the 1950s, Beston’s words played a big role, stated George Palmer of the Department of the Interior at the tribute ceremony. “Our man who had been up here for the first time had selected a quotation from The Outermost House, and in such a few words, it summarized this rather thick report that had first come in: ‘Outermost cliff and solitary dune, the plain of ocean and the far, bright rims of the world; meadow land and marsh and ancient moor; this is Eastham, this is the Outer Cape.’ And it took us several chapters of a report just to say this. As we went along, we found that much of our work was picked up again in Mr. Beston’s book.”
As Waldron puts it, Beston’s experience on Coast Guard Beach “inspires a quest, perhaps inherent in man, to understand human nature.” Today, those ideals are alive in the hearts of the dwellers of the outer beach camps of Chatham and the dune shacks of Provincetown.
“I knew I’d found something that was talking to me personally, because we did live in a beach shack, and this man was talking to me in a language that I understood, and I understood that he got it,” noted Dana Eldridge, author of the book Cape Cod Lucky. “Beston got it, and he got it in spades, as far as I was concerned.”
There is little to commemorate Beston on the Cape today. At the Coast Guard Station in Eastham, there are several plaques overlooking the ocean. One is dedicated to Beston and The Outermost House. And the dedication plaque from the National Literary Landmark ceremony in 1964 is on display at the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.
But the world of The Outermost House has endured for eighty years, and the spirit of what Beston tried is still with us. “It’s about relating to nature, being part of nature,” offers My Provincetown author Amy Whorf McGuiggan. “I find something even more intangible going on, that it’s about what we can take away from a relationship with nature -- something very philosophical.”
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The Henry Beston Society is a Cape Cod-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the philosophies and ideals of the author of The Outermost House. The group is working toward rebuilding Beston’s “Fo’castle” and establishing a museum, and presents lectures and other events across Cape Cod and beyond. For a list of events involving the Beston Society this summer, and for more information about the society, visit www.henrybeston.org, or call 508-246-7242.