Across the Fence #515w (Special edition for the Westby Times)
Wisconsin author, Ben Logan, died September 19, 2014 at the age of 94. We’ve lost a great gentleman and a great writer. I wrote about him in my “Across the Fence” column this week. I was asked to write a story about Ben to commemorate his life and it’s an honor to do so, because he was one of my writing mentors.
Many of you are familiar with his book, The Land Remembers, published in 1975. It’s one of my all-time favorites. He also wrote a novel, The Empty Meadow, In 1991. I think his “Santa Claus is a Woman” from Christmas Remembered, published in 1997, should be read every year as a Christmas classic.
Those are his writings that most people are familiar with, but there was so much more. He was a wonderful person. I like to say he was a gentle man and a gentleman. He was full of curiosity, knowledge, and life experiences. He was a delight to visit with and I’ll always cherish the many visits we had across his kitchen table, sipping green tea, and talking about writing, life, his World War II experiences, and his many years working in New York City.
Howard and Ben at his kitchen table.
I think if I tell you how we first met, it will tell you a lot about the real Ben Logan. It was the summer of 2004. My brother-in-law, Lon Bartling and I both love The Land Remembers. One day while we were talking we decided to go on a road trip and drive by the Logan “Seldom Seen” farm, located between Gays Mills and Seneca. But we wouldn’t know which farm it was without knowing the farm number. I decided to call Ben. I explained who I was and why I was calling. He gave me his farm number and said that as long as we were driving by, we should stop and say hello. The next weekend we headed for Seldom Seen. We each brought with a copy of The Land Remembers that we hoped he would sign. I also brought a print of a drawing I did of my father with his team of horses, to give him in appreciation for allowing us to stop. He invited us in. We expected to be there for just a few minutes to say hello and get the books signed. Over three hours later we left! He invited these two “pilgrim” strangers to have tea with him. We sat at the old kitchen table and talked for a long time. Then he showed us around the house, telling us about various things he had picked up in his travels around the world. He showed us where his father had come from in Loga, Norway. I told him it was only ten miles from where my Skjerpe ancestors came from. We sat in the living room, that was part of the old log house, and talked some more. Then he wanted to show us around outside. We ended up by the old maple tree stump, as he told us how it had finally blown down, across the house, but the branches had held the trunk off the roof and hadn’t damaged it. Anyone who has read The Land Remembers knows the story about that old maple tree.
The old stump and a new tree taking its place.
Two strangers who loved his writing were no longer strangers by the time we left. He invited us to come back so we could visit some more. What a gracious, caring man he was.
I visited with him many times after that. Linda was with on a couple of our visits. I learned much about the man during our talks and I learned much about writing and life from him. I’d like to share with you some bits and pieces of things he said. I think it will give you an even better appreciation of the man.
He often talked about the importance of curiosity in life and how important it is to a writer. After graduating from high school, where his principle discouraged him from being a writer, he attended college in Platteville for two years.
“That city was a marvelous place,“ he said. “I was wandering around my first day at Platteville and discovered the library, and just stood there inside the door in awe! Rows and rows and rows of books. A young librarian came up to me and said, ‘What do you want to know?’ ‘Everything!’ I said.
She spent over an hour taking me around the library, showing me the card catalog and how it worked. Then, every time I came to the library she would ask me, ‘What do you want to know today?’ It was a wonderful learning experience.”
I asked who some of the important teachers were in his life.
“I never took a course in geology, but by accident, a geology professor became a private tutor. “He stopped me in the hall one day and wanted to talk to me about a story I’d written for the literary magazine. While I had his attention I started asking questions about what I’d been discovering on my walks around the countryside. I asked him about the fossils I’d discovered in limestone cliffs and how the complexity of the fossils increased as they went up the banks. That professor took an interest in my curiosity about things. It was the first time I realized how significant my curiosity was and how that instantly won all the teachers to me.”
Rachel Salisbury, an English professor at Platteville, was one of my most important teachers. She was also fascinated with my curiosity. She thought I had a special talent to touch people’s feelings. She dared me to be emotional in my writing, to put more substance in my stories. When people realize you have a hunger to learn, they open the world up to you. I spent two years at Platteville and it was a wonderful place!”
He then studied Ag Journalism at the UW-Madison Ag School. Professor Sumner, a very common sense person, was one of his teachers. “Professor Sumner told me, ‘The trouble is, most journalism students write pretty well, but they don’t have a damn thing to write about!’ He had me taking philosophy and other courses to learn a wide variety of subjects. This fit perfectly with my curiosity.”
The legendary Helen C. White and Aldo Leopold were also influencial in his learning process at the university.
After college, Ben was in World War II, but his family says he rarely talked about his war experiences. He talked extensively with me about them. I think he knew I would understand when he found out I was a veteran.
Ben Logan in 1942
Ben wanted a college degree so he could go into the Navy as an officer. After graduating with a degree in Ag Journalism from the UW-Madison, he enlisted in 1942 and spent four months at Midshipman’s School in Chicago. He was there during Christmas of 1942. Even though he was away from home, there was something that made it Christmas. He said, “I went for a walk on Christmas Eve and it was snowing. When it snows… soft… no wind, it softens everything, even the sound is softened. It’s as if it put innocence back into the city.”
In military life he found himself desperately needing aloneness. There was no place to be alone. He said much of that feeling came from his farm upbringing where he often did things alone.
“I was the officer on a LCT, a Landing Craft Tank, or Little Crappy Tub as some people called it. It was 110 feet long and had a crew of 15-20 men. We’d go into the beach loaded with men or equipment. We’d stay at the beachhead ferrying men and equipment from ship to shore for weeks at a time. We’d work 24 hours a day. We lived on the LCT and even slept on it.”
“My first time in combat was the landing at Sicily. There were 2,000 ships along the shoreline. Lots of confusion.”
Christmas 1943, Palermo, Italy. “That was a bad time. I had lost a ship. It was another of those accidents of life. Life is basically accidental. I was one of 90,000 people who had been inoculated with infectious hepatitis, along with a yellow fever serum. I was starting to turn yellow from the hepatitis. I was the only officer aboard my landing craft at the time. There was no one to take my place. I finally went to an Army clinic. The doctor said, ‘I’m taking you off that ship and sending you to the hospital.’ Two of my best friends had an LCT that was broken down and they went aboard my LCT to take my place. Within six or seven hours everybody aboard was dead. They ran into what we called an enne-mene-mine-mo. It was a type of mine. Strangely enough, I heard the explosion from the hospital. It’s hard to figure out how I survived the war and other people didn’t.”
Ben Logan, standing 2nd from right, with his LCT crew.
All his crew members were killed.
We talked about that incident that made such an impact on his life. He decided he had to live for those friends too. He couldn’t waste any of the extra time he’d been given. I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Ben said, “The farm seemed impossibly far away when I was in the war. I could have swore that Christmas didn’t happen during my war years. I found back Christmas when I started writing. Writing is very therapeutic. Graham Green once said, ‘I can’t possibly understand how those who don’t write can deal with the anguish of life.’ I think that’s a good definition. It allows us to deal with things directly that are very personal.”
“War is contagious. War is a life changing experience. War becomes memories. The title of my war memoirs is ‘An Irresistible Sorrow.’ I tried to find a publisher but they said it was too grim. You can tell those publishers had never been in a war.”
He said he wanted to read three poems to me that he’d written about the war. Poems that he didn’t remember writing until he found them among other papers a couple years earlier. They are powerful. After he finished, he laid the papers down and looked wistfully out the window. His eyes were moist. I could tell he was back in Italy, remembering those experiences.
Ben pauses, and looks wistfully out the window.
I asked if he could ever forget his war experiences. “No!” he said. “I tell people… they talk about coming home from the war, and I’ll say, ‘Nobody comes home from the war… you come partway home from the war.’”
After the war he wandered around for a while as a merchant seaman, doing a lot of traveling in Europe and South America. “I still had a lot of dead faces hanging in my head. Hell, I didn’t know what I was looking for.”
Ben eventually returned to the UW, where he studied with Aldo Leopold. He went to Mexico and studied anthropology and met his wife, Jacqueline, in Mexico City. They moved to New York, where they had three children, Suzanne, Roger, and Kristine. Ben became an editor, writer, and producer for radio, film, and did television documentaries. He produced the first radio call-in talk show, whose guests included Bill Cosby. “Interviewing ordinary people was one of the greatest parts of my media work. Of course, there are no ordinary people,” he said.
Once you have lived on the land, it’s always a part of you. In 1986, he and Jacqueline bought “Seldom Seen” farm and moved back to the hilltop in Wisconsin where he grew up. She died in 1990.
Rural life and the land have always been a part of Ben, no matter how far he wandered from the hilltop, and it pulled him back. He said, “I learn about nature from the woods and meadows, and look out my windows and observe. From observing nature, I learn about us humans. A writer has to be a good observer and listener. There’s incredible wisdom in plain language among rural people. The country way is not to say too much.
I asked, “What’s the most important thing to remember as a writer?” He replied, “Never lose your curiosity and try to make the story happen in the mind of the reader. They must become participants in your story.” He certainly mastered that in his writing.
Ben was so full of life, and had such curiosity about everything, that it was hard to see his health deteriorate the past few years. It broke my heart for him every time I visited. He was lucky to have such wonderful friends, and former neighbors, Paul and Kathy Fairchild, who took great care of him these past years.
We have lost a great gentleman and a great writer. I feel fortunate and blessed to have known him. His Spirit is now free to return to Seldom Seen Farm and once again roam the meadows and hills that he loved.
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