The Hardscrabble Chronicles

Ms. Morrow moved to Freedom, Ford's adopted home town, with her husband early in their married life, and quickly adapted to country New England living, much to the horror of her urban New York parents (yes Humphrey was from NYC). She learned how to fix up her drafty old farmhouse, cook on a woodstove, raise bird dogs, and she became an avid sportsperson and hunter herself. After she started her own family, the editor of an area newspaper persuaded her to take over a gossip column, once written by Mr. Ford, while the regular columnist was recovering from an illness. During her temporary tenure, she then began to learn more about Freedom's most famous citizen, and the more she learned the more she wanted to learn, developing such an interest in the man that she eventually obtained an authorization to write a Ford biography from Dartmouth University, which controls his literary estate and papers.

Most of The Hardscrabble Chronicles; however, is really a biography of Ms. Morrow's own experiences in Freedom, re-fictionalized again as Hardscrabble, but written in the same funny, character-driven anecdotal form as Mr. Ford's "Lower Forty" series that appeared in Field and Stream. Only the last chapter, styled an "afterward," is a biographical essay about Corey Ford (the pen name of James Hitchcock Ford, born 1902, died 1969).

In it we learn that the rumpled, curmudgeony, pipe smoking sportsman the world came to know in his fifties and sixties was, in his twenties, a member of fashionable New York literary society's Algonquin Roundtable, trading party barbs with legendary uptown wits and poseurs alike (apparently he was also a drinking buddy of Humphrey Bogart). In his thirties he was a Hollywood screenwriter whose main staple was romantic comedy and musicals. It was in his forties that he turned his back on the world of glitter and city lights where he was only really a minor player, and essentially "re-invented himself" as the bucolic personae who would finally achieve fame as a writer, becoming a sort of backwoods James Thurber for the hunting and fishing crowd. He was literate enough in his style to be taken seriously as a major American humorist, but folksy enough in his presentation to become loved by millions of people who never read anything more "highbrow" than the daily sports page, and his columns in Field and Stream.

Ms. Morrow presents in the afterward an edited, unpublished rough draft of Ford's most famous and evocative short story, "The Road to Tinkhamtown" that she found in the Dartmouth library, and then "put together." The published version is considered by many to be one of the best hunting fiction pieces ever written. Even if you are not a hunter, and I'm not one, you can appreciate the published story as a piece of well written, popular literature. This story served as my introduction to Corey Ford's writing. I first read it when I was about thirteen years old as a reprint in a Reader's Digest issue. Even at that age, as a city kid who had never hunted a day in his life, and judging it by the standards of my usual fare of horror and science fiction, I considered it one of my favorites, a masterwork, transcending genre. It is a timeless and otherworldly classic, melancholy without being maudlin, about a dying man and his long dead favorite bird dog going out together once more on the "last hunt." Less skillful pens than Ford's probably would have turned out a forgettable, sentimental mess using such subject matter.

The more wordy and less polished version presented in The Hardscrabble Chronicles' still contains the original story, but Ms. Morrow uses it along with inferences (but no real specifics) from one of Ford's diaries she uncovered in "carton 23" of the Ford papers at Dartmouth, along with details about Ford's own death experience, all in what seems almost like faint praise to probe into certain aspects of Ford's personal life, never to my knowledge revealed publicly before. Detailing her discomfort with her discoveries in Ford's papers, and how she managed to come to terms with them takes up much of the short biography chapter and makes it read at times like a bizarre, somewhat reluctant expose that's more suggestive of "Peyton Place" (in real life, Gilmanton, just "down the road apiece" from Freedom) than "Hardscrabble." After what seems (and I believe is genuinely) a loving and excellent paean to the literary legacy of this man, the dramatic shift in tone at the end of an otherwise inspired collection of Ford pastiches makes the book fascinating, if oddly uneven.

After reading this book, if you are the curious sort like me, you may be tempted to visit the Corey Ford Papers at Dartmouth, and look in "carton 23" yourself, if such still exists, to see what's really there. I think I may do some hunting and fishing right there if I get up that way anytime.


Long Gone Hardscrabble   February 13, 2003
As a faithful reader of Corey Ford's Lower Forty stories in Field and Stream in the late 50's, I wanted to like this book a lot. The problem is that the Hardscrabble of the 1950's doesn't transport well to today. Those lovable characters that I knew in an Upstate New York town much like Hardscrabble, are long gone. The hardware store has been replaced with a Gap and the general store that was filled with old curmudgeons is now a Starbucks populated with twenty-something latte drinkers. Ms. Morrow does an admirable job trying to resurrect the old place, but the lingering feeling that many readers will have is that old Hardscrabble is a faded photograph that is best left to the past and not "colorized" for the 21st Century. If you want the real Hardscrabble, read Corey Ford. Ms. Morrow is a good writer; she should apply her considerable talent to the word beyond Hardscrabble.


Good, quiet reading   December 6, 2002
1 out of 2 found this review helpful

If you're looking for alot of urban excitement in your reading, this is not the book for you. If you're looking for depth and serenity for a good read in front of a fire on a winter's night, this IS the book for you. I found this in the library and decided to try it, in front of the fire on a winter's night of course, and actually enjoyed it more than I expected to. This will go in my list of good books read and I will seek out other titles by this author. This is a good, quiet read - enjoy!