Tools and the Hand

I

IT is my good fortune to live in a countryside where hand tools still persist for many a use that, in the modern world at large, is more and more relegated to machines. Good hand tools are, for that reason, generally cherished, and the niceties of their idiom well understood by old and young. The explanation of this regional conservatism — lag, a sociologist would call it — is that our characteristic transactions are on a small, highly individualized scale, the scale of the hundred-acre or ‘one-man’ dairy farm, without the possible margin of profit that would support such overhead as mechanization always involves.

When one of our framed barns needs a ten-by-twelve structural timber replaced, there can be no question of inviting some town contractor to put in a stick from Georgia or Oregon, already saddled with the tolls of a unionized lumber crew, power dragsaws, caterpillar tractors, a sawmill, a long haul by railroad or freighter, several short hauls by truck, and four selling profits. Instead, some old fellow, very likely nearer eighty than seventy, goes into the wood lot with measurements penciled on a spruce chip in his overalls pocket, picks his hemlock, drops it with the aid of a boy on the other end of the crosscut saw (which he has filed and set himself), trims the trunk, with adz or broadaxe hews it to shape where it lies, works the mortises in it with auger and chisel, ‘twitches’ (i.e., hauls) it with the farm’s yoked oxen or team of horses, and finally — with the aid of building jacks and perhaps an ingenious arrangement of tackle in lieu of the many hands that make light work—‘slips it in.’ (That piece of understatement is the only locution ever heard from our one-man contractors for an operation that demands the utmost niceties of engineering skill; an operation in which everything must be exactly right from beginning to end if the whole is not to be exactly wrong.)

When that old fellow’s lifework is done the past beneficiaries of it gather at the auction and compete for the tools with which he did it; and the result, always a little mystifying to city visitors who have come on the chance of picking up antiques, is that these tools fetch a good deal more than they cost him new. The bids are not made primarily in memoriam, out of sentimental piety. What coaxes the dollars out of our tightbuttoned pockets is the belief that we are buying some residue of the merit that was worked into the tools by the hands that laid them down.

And that is a perfectly true belief. For the relation between man and tool is a reciprocal one. The well-designed tool will subtly train and reëducate the hand that uses it, but hardly more than the hand in its turn will modify the tool. The quality of workmanship seems to impress itself upon the substance of cold steel, gradually improving or impairing its constitution. Some obscure kind of polarization or ionization seems gradually to take place in the very particles of the cutting edge, until its temper is matched to the temperament of the user. This phenomenon, indefinable but observable, explains why every skilled hand worker possesses at least a few cutting tools that he will lend only with great reluctance — tools that no silent borrower can help himself to without the owner’s knowing it the moment he starts to use them again. It also explains why he insists upon sharpening his tools himself. Such a workman, when at last his eyesight becomes too impaired to trust, will keep his edged tools in shape by a delicate combination of touch and the sound of contact with grindstone or oilstone or file. Experience has taught him that the apparently keener edge produced by someone else will not hold up under his kind of stroke. It is harder to grind a tool to another’s muscular habits than to perceive a match flame in bright sunshine.

This whole fine interaction between implement and man is experienced in a typical enough way by anyone who has learned to use a grass scythe with moderate proficiency. It is possible, of course, to pick up the rudiments of the swing and of the all-important footwork by studying someone who is, as we say, ‘a good man on the crooked stick.’ But every learner finds that the real niceties of scything, the differences between a feat of main strength and an effortless art, are taught by the crooked stick itself—its balance, the adjustment of the handles to his own height, the distribution of weight and leverage between snath and blade. Submit yourself to the genius of the implement, and it swings itself and you, like the enchanted broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice. There you have the tool as teacher. You meet the tool as pupil when you undertake to grind a blade that someone else has been grinding for his own use. The first edge you put on it may gladden your critical eye and fill you with pride, but after a few minutes’ scything you will think the grass is fence wire. The other fellow has ground his different personality into it; it has become tuned to his habit, his touch. You will have to put it through all of three or four sharpenings to make it yours.

The complete woodsman makes acquaintance with a brand-new axe — and what a calamity he makes of having ever to get one! — by putting it, directly after helving, on the grindstone. He does this, not to make it sharper, but to familiarize himself with its temper and to work out any warp in the metal or inequality between its sides. On an occasion when time pressed I saw such a woodsman forgo this initial process of teaching his blade something of himself while learning something of it; and his second stroke, which had to go through a hemlock knot charged with frost, took out a half-moon of steel that included a good third of one cutting edge. (It was a double-bitted axe.) He looked at it mournfully and said: ‘I knew I ought to have ground it. I mistrusted the two sides weren’t even. They almost never are.’ His self-punishment was drastic, even for his kind of rugged moralist. He made himself use the other edge for two winters after that one.

Kitchen utensils, too, I hear it testified, receive in the course of time an impress that makes them invaluable and irreplaceable. A giver of loaves who cooks with a locally famous versatility and originality — also with incredible ease — makes daily use of tools from two gifted cooks of other generations, one born in 1838, one in 1859. She avers that one of the old mixing spoons, with bowl worn down to the shape of the gibbous moon and maple handle lathe-turned with a sculptor’s regard for the nature of the human hand, can impart more about the knack of beating cake batter than all the teachers of cookery in all the seminaries. When she tries to make shift with one of its modern counterparts she finds that the new handle was designed for the eye only, or perhaps for the convenience of automatic machinery; until she can get someone to whittle half the wood out of it and sandpaper it to the contour of the old one it cramps her hand and presently lames it.

The proverb about the new broom that sweeps clean may have been true when it was coined, but it is hopelessly false of today’s brooms, which never sweep clean until taught to by discipline and much wear.

There is, in short, no tool like an old tool.

II

A chronic distress of the latter-day Jack-of-all-trades — and he still exists in legions — is the dearth of small hand tools fit to replace the old ones when they are finally worn out or ground away. More and more he has to depend on implements with so little character of their own that they will take no impress from his, or so short-lived that they have to be thrown away before he can get them broken in. This deficiency of an age teeming with improvements is the more maddening because it exists side by side with very remarkable advances in the science of metallurgy. But hardly anyone finds it to his advantage in these days to make and sell small things except in great volume; everything seems to be sacrificed to ‘turnover,’ to ‘repeat orders.’ The result is that instruments once bought for a lifetime are now bought for a year, and those once good for a year have to be replaced for the single job. Whence the needle that (unless you can get it from England) will not sew, the razor blade that will not shave, the carving knife that will only haggle, and the new half-inch bitt that bends under a pressure not quite sufficient to make it penetrate. Whence, too, the replacement of the water-cooled grindstone with a geared, high-speed bench grinder that removes twenty times the metal it ought and burns the temper out of what is left. Whence, finally, a national junk pile that is bound to be one of the future wonders of archæology; it has already created a well-nigh insoluble problem of disposal, and at a time when everyone concerned with the military defense of the nation is having nightmares over threatened shortages of essential metals.

Consider the trifling matter of files — which is not so trifling if you reflect that every kind of wood saw in the world, whether operated by hand or by power, whether used for lumber or for fuel, is constantly dependent on files for its maintenance in service. My wagon-building grandfather, who renewed a lot of saws between 1860 and 1910, used to keep a running biography of every file he used. It was in the form of notches on the wooden handle, one notch for every saw filed. The handle was always uncommonly large — he had turned it on his own lathe to fit his own hand — and the notches were so fine and close that to count them was a test of eyesight. For the best files of that period the notches ran all the way down one side of the handle, around the end, all the way up the other side, and part way down on a second circuit. The occasional file that took him only half or two-thirds of the way down the first side was a ‘bad one’; it left him disgusted and nursing a grievance. The proportion of bad ones, he noticed, was greatly on the increase toward the end of his working life. Today, after all our discoveries in technology and in the face of national advertising in which the file manufacturers claim scientifically rigid standardization and make almost religious protestations about keeping faith with the public, any man who takes care of his own saws would gladly pay a fivefold price for the worst ‘bad one’ my grandfather ever laid eyes on.

The moral seems fairly plain. For every improvement in the collective, machine-turned, mass-producing aspects of workmanship we have paid something out of the individual, hand-turned, made-to-order aspects. The questions in my mind are such as these: Can we afford this price? Do we really have to pay it? In the long run does not industry itself need, as a permanent part of the national background and atmosphere, the man who can turn his hand to anything and whose animating ideal is the best work he can do with the best tools he can get? In the end can any number of factory inspections, however rigid, be a competent substitute for the all-round artisan’s self-judgment — for individual conscience? Is it truly a good thing for the future of American housebuilding, furniture, shipbuilding, aircraft, dynamos, radio sets, tractors, textile machinery, ordnance, and so on, that we should ask the amateur mechanic, the Jack-of-all-trades, the farmer and his boy, to make shift with screwdrivers that turn in their handles, planes with adjustment screws that cross-thread after a few turns, and cutting tools that, if they will accept an edge at all, will not hold it? Can we suppose for a minute that these two things have nothing to do with each other, and that we can bypass integrity in the small affairs and yet collect its benefits in the great ones?

In lieu of undertaking direct answers to these questions I will cite two representative circumstances that have, for those who want to see it, a bearing on the answers: —

(1) The personnel executives of industries under a necessity of rapid expansion in the interest of national defense have taken to assuring us almost with one voice that their mainstay among the hordes of new learners is the youngster from the farm — the boy who has grown up with assorted tools, done miscellaneous tinkering from as far back as he can remember, and rooted himself in the habit of taking every difficulty as an invitation to his faculty of contrivance.

(2) The officers of a military engineering detachment consider under official instruction the problem of replacing quickly a bombed bridge over a small river with heavily forested banks. The first thing they are taught is that the time has gone by when it could be expected that a regiment of the United States Army would include enough able axemen to supply the makings of such a bridge from timber felled on the spot. Their best procedure will be, if you please, to demolish some sound building in the vicinity, say a ruggedly framed barn, and haul its girders to the site.

Maybe the axemanship is really not there any more; maybe it is still there and the military higher-ups can’t believe it or find it. The truth must be one or the other. Either seems deeply shocking. Also, it brings up the interesting question how far a nation can get toward the winning of a war or any other crucial struggle of t he present by trading on its past virtue—the virtue, say, of those excellent hewers of wood, our grandfathers.

III

There are, to be sure, a good many Americans who refuse to be at all shocked by evidences that all-round manual competence is on the wane. As a rule they are the ones whose acquaintance with hand tools is restricted to implements designed for propelling a ball or landing a game fish. Their very definition of progress is the conquest of nature, the conquest of leisure. In the fact that machines increase while hand tools diminish they read the news that sweat and blisters and fatigue become all the time less necessary to the conduct of the world’s work; and, unable to conceive that any rational person will coarsen his body with avoidable toil, they find this news worth celebrating. In every laborer who takes off his overalls, in every process that is translated from a pickand-shovel basis to the pushing of buttons, the adjustment of levers, and the reading of dials, they perceive a net gain for civilization.

With all respect for Mr. Stuart Chase and other panegyrists of the power age, the labor-saving device, I believe they are rushing the pace of evolution and ignoring some deep, permanent needs of the animal man. We happen to be pretty effective machines ourselves, and it is self-evident from the way we are constituted that these machines are designed to do work. They have to do it to keep in what is significantly called ‘working order.’ The unworked body starves for work as the unfed body starves for food. One proof is the gratuitous rigors undertaken to get Mount Everest climbed or a mile run one-fifth of a second faster. Proof of a left-handed sort is also discoverable in the woman of the all-electric, completely mechanized ultramodern kitchen, who finds herself with the leisure to contract a fine assortment of the new nervous and psychic diseases while standing around waiting for automatic appliances to do their stuff.

What is forgotten or conveniently ignored by those who are always bemoaning the foot-pounds of energy wasted by walking upstairs or lifting a flatiron or hand-feeding a steam boiler is the simple primary fact that we have the energy. Our only conspicuous modern way of wasting energy is by not using it. The sedentary American is notoriously losing his teeth on a labor-saving diet, his legs and his lungs on labor-saving developments in transportation; and the medicos who look him over in great numbers in connection with military service find a deplorable recent softening of his whole body, significantly accompanied by losses of mental toughness and elasticity. We congratulate each other on the release from tools and toil, lapse into a lopsided life that is bound to result in jumpy nerves and jangled wits, and then try to cure each other’s ills by psychiatric methods, when all that is needed

What the times call for is another Past and Present, a new Carlyle’s new affirmation of the dignity of labor — real, regular labor that uses the body for what it is good for and tires it enough to teach it what a supreme luxury is earned rest.

However, no one outside of a few faddists and fanatics can seriously be expected to pray for the daily bread of hard labor just because he knows it is indispensable to a balanced diet. The real argument for a pick-and-shovel technique of living is not the therapeutic one, but the very argument commonly urged in favor of the machine-andkilowatt technique: to wit, the argument from efficiency. For there is more than one kind of efficiency, and nearly every enhancement of one kind is at the expense of some other. In agriculture, for instance, a corporal’s guard with machinery can produce the tonnage of food that would require, with hand methods, an army— but not on the same acreage. To save man-hours that we think important we waste land that we think unimportant. Let the density of population pass a certain point and you arrive at a reversal of values, of necessities. A thousand back-yard garden plots worked by a thousand men with hoes will then be incomparably more efficient than their combined area tractor-worked as a unit by a small crew.

Some days ago, with my two favorite implements of destruction, axe and bush scythe, I tore into a partly swampy corner of land that, as I found by the tree rings, had been neglected for some twenty years. It is potentially a fine calf pasture — which, indeed, it had been a generation ago, on the affidavit of rotted posts and rusted wire. Now, the ‘efficient’ way to reclaim this corner was to pick a morning of exactly the right conditions and burn it out — the same ‘efficient’ method our hard-pressed forefathers used on a hundred years’ supply of the fifty-inch pines that would be worth almost anything to us if we had them today. Well, it happens that my household had long sighed to have a tamarack growing within sight of the buildings. There had been but one such of any size, and that had been felled by the Big Blow of 1938. Inching my way into this jungle by the laborious method of clearing a few square rods at a time and piling the brush, I soon came upon a perfect young thirty-foot tamarack at the centre of a clump of scrub pines, where no one would ever have seen it if I had efficiently summoned fire to do my work for me.

Saving that tree to flourish in the open and become more beloved with every season and every inch of its growth — that seems incomparably more important than the alternative saving of myself, my hours and strength; more important to more persons, and for a far longer time.

IV

And then, when we elect to save ourselves there is always the pertinent, usually unanswerable question, What for?

The man who discreetly thins a wood lot and turns the surplus trees into firewood has the inestimable advantage of knowing perfectly well that in a variety of small ways he is making the world better. He is improving a bit of forest, whether as future timber or just as present trees. He is creating comfort out of nature’s waste. He is building up his own bodily strength and skill. He is having a good time; for virtually all such work is done by men who love it. And, following a practice as cordially approved by every department of local and national government as by his own common sense, he is basking in the good conscience of the good citizen. Imagine that by buying his fuel he saves his time for such white-collar pursuits as are supposed to be worth saving it for — specifically, the mental pursuits, such as participating in refined converse with his fellow time-savers on what the world is coming to, or plaguing his mind about what other people ought to do to be saved, or inventing one more laborsaving contrivance, or reading the Critique of Pure Reason, or shaping this essay. Can he then enjoy anything like the same assurance that his use of time will make the world better?

The work of our hands being so selfevidently good so much of the time, and that of our heads generally so dubious even when it is not palpably indifferent or bad, it seems rather wonderful that any creature should have the hardihood to stake the whole meaning of his existence on brain work alone.

Abroad in the land spreads a strange assumption that there is something peculiarly, preëminently cultural in leisure and its fruits — in superior articulacy, the wider diffusion of luxuries and refinements, the release of the mind from practical exigencies, the resulting appetite for generalizations and abstractions, the quest of amusement, and above all the dedication of more and more individuals to art and science and theoretic reflection. But culture, by any definition worth talking about, is the whole sum of a people’s arts of living; and of these its necessary work is by all odds the greatest item. Culture is not ornament: it is workmanship, which is integrity. Any man who looks down upon himself or another as a disinherited expatriate from culture because he has to work with his hands instead of his head is truly to be pitied, but not for the reason he imagines. He has already shown that he has little head to work with.

What in the world was ever more integral with the deepest meanings of culture than the conception, the evolution, the canon and tradition, of any basic tool?

Consider, for example, what a profoundly, thrillingly original deed of the mind, what a really epic feat of synthesis, was performed by the unsung inventor to whom it first occurred to put the knife, the wedge, and the sledgehammer together into the one tool that we call the axe. It is a simple-seeming tool — now that we have it; its existence is what we glibly call inevitable; not to have it is, for us, unthinkable. But imagine your way back, back, and back into that shadowy prehistoric time before any living being had conceived the possibility. Does its existence seem one of the inevitable things now? Is it not, rather, one of the miraculous things? From a point an hour or an instant before it has come into the world can you regard it as a simple tool? Is it not the having it at all that has suddenly become almost unthinkable?

From this point grope your way forward and forward again and survey a little of what this axe has done in human history — the difference it has made to man’s environment and hence to man, the part it has played in his taming of the wild, the probabilities of where he would find himself today without it. As an incorporation of sheer mind-stuff the invention of gunpowder is not to be compared with it, for that was accident. As a determining factor in man’s tenancy of his habitat throughout the ages, gunpowder with all its extensions and applications may be trivial beside the axe, though it seem otherwise at certain violent hours of history. In relatively modern times and on our own continent some other unsung genius of cultural history hits upon the now standard retrocurved helve, and at last the tool is consummated, its dynamic efficiency instantly doubled by the inspired union of knife, wedge, hammer with the potent principle of the lever. What that the mind has ever been able to accomplish in the realm of abstractions is so difficult or so improbable before the fact, so unarguable a ministry to need, or so tremendous in its effect upon the life of the race? Yet there are those who take such things for granted and patronize them as representing a rudimentary, childish, ignoble cunning.

Nor is this all. The axe is a tool with a very eminent educative and disciplinary power. There is a code for its use, a complicated set of rules and prohibitions enforced by penalties — the same rules and the same penalties for all users everywhere. Axemanship is, in that, not unlike seamanship. A vessel will certainly kill you in the end if you do not handle it just so, and for that reason it must be dealt with by men whose fidelity to its requirements is so trained into them that their training will take automatic hold when they are tottering from fatigue or paralyzed with terror or running a fever. You have to respect the axe just so, or it will admonish you — and about the mildest admonition it knows anything about is an amputated finger. There are half a hundred specific niceties of precaution that you have to observe as inflexible laws. They govern the position of your hands in splitting, that of your feet in chopping or hewing, the way you carry the tool, what you do with it between strokes, the allowances you make for different kinds of wood, for knots, for invisible decay, for hard frost, for wet hands or mittens, for brush, for bystanders.

If a man is a sheer wizard of the axe, he can habitually short-cut some of these laws and perhaps get away with it indefinitely. Almost anybody can temporize with them a little at times when he is fresh and feeling fine and his strokes are going to a split hair where he wants them. But the unwritten law exists to protect the axeman from his own fallibility — from carelessness and the virtuoso’s cockiness, from a stumble, from numbing cold and the fatigue that sneaks up like a thief an hour before sunset. The high incidence of missing digits and of lamed and one-armed men in every wooded region says that the only real surety is to observe the letter of the law always — to behave as if all the conditions were chronically against you. The really finished axeman is distinguished from the novice, not only by his chips, but by the chances he forbids himself ever to take.

For my part, I think it salutary for every mother’s son of us to deal with at least one thing that, because he has a wholesome fear of it, will hold him up to this sort of mark. I cannot believe that the moral stature of the race, or even of its best, has as yet quite outgrown the profit of some such self-discipline. Whatever uniformly enforces it for a great number is a cult, which is to say a section of culture. And, in the way of all genuine culture, it is no departmentalized and irrelevant mastery, like a parlor trick, but an impregnation of the whole man, like the grain in wood.

I, for a trifling instance, never pick up an axe without remembering that it means something to me to keep ‘these ten toes upon my hands’ because I hope and intend to put in several thousand hours of my declining years playing, or playing at, the sonatas of Beethoven. These also are, if you like, a cult, a discipline, and the bond of a great sodality. What I deplore, not to say resent, is the vapid assumption that such an employment of time and tissue has a cultural significance above or alien to that of the varieties of manual work throughout which I shall, if provident and lucky, have preserved the necessary quota of fingers. What I presume to possess cultural significance is the meaning that Beethoven can have to us from the wood lot, the furrow, and the lathe; likewise the sustenance that at desk or typewriter, easel or keyboard, we draw from the work we have done and store up for the work we have yet to do.