The Alternative Experience

GETTING BACK TOGETHER by Robert Houriet. 412 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $7.95.

WHAT THE TREES SAID: LIFE ON A NEW AGE FARM by Stephen Diamond. 182 pages. Delacorte. $5.95 (paperback $2.45).

Their friends in the cities call them escapists. The New Left scorns them as naive. To their "straight" neighbors on farms or in small villages, they all too often look like sex-mad anarchists. But the thousands of Americans who have chosen to create a new life in rural communes regard themselves as a new generation of pioneers pursuing that most elusive of goals--the ideal society.

They are a widely varied crowd, according to these useful, firsthand accounts of the commune movement. Some of the members are rather younger at heart than in years, like Moishe, an energetic 60-year-old participant in a group-marriage experiment outside San Francisco. Some of the new communalists were disillusioned radical antiwar protesters. Others were drug culturists seeking freedom from legal hassles, or flower children trying to recapture the euphoria of San Francisco's brief "summer of love." Still others were intellectual Utopians out to build non-nuclear families along the lines of B.F. Skinner's Walden Two. Most of them were urban ex-bourgeois who had frustrating confrontations with agricultural hard labor.

One of the first communes to rise and fall, Author Houriet reports, was Oz, a fantasy-ridden experiment near Meadville, Pa., which featured daily readings from Dr. Seuss, Winnie the Pooh and (naturally) The Wizard of Oz. Meadville's citizens, at first tolerant, gradually turned against Oz, largely because of the commune's lack of concern with flush toilets and regular baths. Once, Houriet reports, an Ozite named Patty-Pooh tried to "vibe away" unfriendly visitors by "performing a nude dance on the farmhouse roof. Of course," he adds, "it had the opposite effect."

More disciplined communes had better luck. Houriet describes the evolution of New Buffalo, between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in New Mexico, which painfully expelled the hordes of parasitic potheads who had drifted in to live off the efforts of a hard-working minority. A different proposition is Harrad West,* a six-member group-marriage web in Berkeley, Calif. Houriet, who notes regretfully that he missed its "honeymoon" phase, found unsettling resemblances to an erotic soap opera. One feature was "the Chart," which ordained who was to sleep with whom on any particular night. "There's really no other way to do it if you have six people," says Alice, a participant.

Getting Back Together is probably the best account so far on the movement, partly because Author Houriet retains a certain amount of wry detachment, though the book also records his own deepening involvement with the experiments--an interest that finally led him to found his own community in northern Vermont. It was not an easy metamorphosis for "Robert the Writer" when the eternal problems of real sharing appeared. "I was unwilling to let go of what was mine," he writes, "my car, my money, my wife." After considerable agonizing, he managed to lose most of his hang-ups on personal possessions--though he did hang on to his wife. The basic lesson, says Houriet, is summed up in the words of a friend: "No more me, no more you."

Ego-Tripping Rods. The painful difficulty of learning that lesson is made clear in Stephen Diamond's What the Trees Said, the story of a single commune located near Montague, Mass., just south of the Vermont line. Diamond's book chronicles how a cadre of city-bred radical journalists slowly adapted to life on an abandoned farm. For some of the ego-tripping rads, the hardscrabble experience was, quite literally, unbearable (one committed suicide). For Diamond, it was a solution with flaws--very like his far-too-cute journal of the change.

Neither Houriet nor Diamond pretends to be a prophet of a green new order, and neither really spells out just where he believes the movement is heading. It is enough for both that these "alternatives" exist and flourish, after a fashion and for a while. Perhaps it is just as well that the authors have chosen not to brood on the history of communal societies in the U.S. Few have lasted long; those that endured often lost much of the founding spirit, and came to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the society they had abandoned.

Already the world outside is pressing in on many of the new communes. "South of us," writes Houriet, "Interstate 91 is being blasted through the hills. At night, part of the sky glows an eerie green from the towers of light over a supermarket parking lot. A few years ago, we were safe in Vermont from the urban monster. Now, we're not so sure."

* Named after Robert H. Rimmer's novel, The Harrad Experiment, about a group marriage.

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