A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

I have visited Salt Lake City several times. When you get on the Interstate near the airport and head East towards Salt Lake City, you see “Cheyenne, Wyoming” on large signs framed against the nearby mountains. I have always been tempted to disregard my immediate purposes and just keep on driving towards Cheyenne. Now I will get my chance. 

 

 Wyoming is featured in A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA through the stories of Annie Proulx, a former resident of Laramie, Wyoming, who has since moved on to other pastures. One thing I am looking forward to experiencing for myself are the long sightlines. As Proulx told Charlie Rose in an interview, “When you can stand at your kitchen sink and look out your window and see a hundred miles down the road…you’re ‘on the beam.’”[i] She says that Wyoming is her writing place: “You go into it and it’s almost as if you were trailing a little cord behind you, plugged into the side of the mountain.” 

Researching Proulx led me to Owen Wister as well. Wister, a sickly young man, fell in love with Wyoming on a trip out there and wrote one of the most popular cowboy novels ever published: THE VIRGINIAN, about a cowboy and gentleman in a wild West that was vanishing even in Wister’s lifetime. 

I’ll report back on my findings from on the road.

From the Introduction to GOOD POEMS FOR HARD TIMES, collected by Garrison Keillor, who recently broadcast his first “Prairie Home Companion” since suffering a mild stroke earlier this month:

People complain about the obscurity of poetry , especially if they’re assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don’t know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience….Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn’t matter–poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart.

I do agree what the good man from Lake Wobegon says, though I like to take my poetry with some mysteries in it that take time to unravel. The poetry featured in A JOURNEY THROUGH LITERARY AMERICA — that of Rita Dove and of Robert Frost — provides two good examples.

Now, if you google “Thomas Hummel” you will come across some very obscure verse. Some quite, if I may quote from Keillor again, “twittery and lit’ry” stuff. Those lines were not produced by me. In fact, there is another Thomas Hummel. He  is a poet. It is as though I had some Doppelgänger, and it had decided to get an MFA.

Just a disclaimer, in case you ever happen upon the other Thomas Hummel and wonder which is the real me…

TRH  

 

 

 

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[i] Interview with Charlie Rose, June 3, 1999

Herd to believe,but in 15 days the booksigning at Santa Barbara’s Chaucer’s Books will be behind us and we (my wife, my son, and I) will be taking to the open road on our way to the East Coast.

Our first stop will be Las Vegas. Why? Because it’s there. Though it certainly does have a certain literary and cinematic allusiveness, to boot. I hope that, unlike Hunter S. Thompson, I won’t see giant bats flying at the windshield as we get close.

The second stop will be Salt Lake City–city that Wallace Stegner came to consider home,  and home to one of my major clients as a printer: Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We will definitely stop in at Gibbs Smith, Publisher, where I want to introduce my son to Marty Lee- Vice President of Production and a fine human being. 

Gibbs Smith, Publisher grew from very small publisher to one of the powerhouses of the Western United States. Below, some of their history (lifted from their website)

The Beginning

Gibbs M. Smith always wanted to be a history professor. But while in pursuit of his master’s degree, Smith wrote a dissertation on Joe Hill–American labor martyr, proletarian folk hero, and songwriter–that profoundly changed his life. After the book was published by the University of Utah press and made into a movie, Gibbs started entertaining the idea of starting his own publishing company. While riding a cable car in San Francisco and contemplating this venture, he wrote Alfred Knopf a letter. “In my view, he was the greatest publisher in America,” reflects Smith. Knopf wrote back with words of encouragement; later they spoke over the phone. Gibbs now had the inspiration needed to embark upon this extraordinary entrepreneurial adventure. In 1969, Gibbs and his wife, Catherine, started the company known today as Gibbs Smith, Publisher. With $12,000 in cash earned from the Smiths’ work on the movie Joe Hill, the company published four initial books, which would be used as supplementary texts in college history classes. The first few years were tough, as Gibbs and his wife, Cathy, ran the company out of their studio apartment in Santa Barbara.

The Barn

In 1973, the company relocated to Utah, where Gibbs and Cathy reinvested profits back into the business and lived on savings. They spent the first summer there converting an old barn (built in 1916) on the family farm into offices. It was a race against time, as the barn had no roof and winter was rapidly approaching. During that summer they also managed to publish a new textbook, Utah’s Heritage. This proved to be a very wise decision, as the company’s textbook division provided financial stability during the early years.

Working in a semi-converted barn was challenging at times. Madge Baird, who joined the company in 1974 and now serves as Managing Editor, recalls a meeting with an author that was interrupted by the birth of a lamb. “When I heard the news I jumped up, ran outside, and started ‘lambing,’” she said.

Gibbs will never forget sharing the barn with cows those first few years. “You could hear them mooing through the walls,” he says with a smile. “People could hear them over the phone, too.” When he would explain the ruckus, the response on the other end of the line was always the same: “You do what . . .from where?”

Today, many of the employees of Gibbs Smith, Publisher continue to work in the small but rustic and charming barn, and thankfully, the cows are long gone.

 

I’ll tell you more in the days that follow.

TRH

Yesterday I couldn’t write about what it felt like to hold the finished book in my hands. The experience was too fresh. Robert Frost said that he always wrote in after thought, after some mulling had taken place and some thoughts had accumulated. That’s how I feel too. But I must say that the spell of the new book was somewhat broken after I leaned the book against something else on the top of my car while I wrestled my son Felix out of the child seat. From where I was on the other side of the car I heard the thud as the book slid off the car and landed on the street.

It survived remarkably well (french fold jackets should be required by the government on all books.)

A Journey Through Literary America has a promising heft to it. But because of the rounded spine it fits well in the hand. It is a joy to see two years and nine months of work transformed into something so lovely to look at and so portable. I looked randomly at the book: back towards front, here and there. I read two of the entries that I had not read in a long time. I still liked what I wrote. The language is more ornate than I had remembered. In that regard, the initial capital letters of each entry, which are set in Doyald Young’s Young Baroque script, work really well. 

I still think there is no other book like it. 

Robert Frost also said: if you are not secretive you will have nothing to secrete. Sure, there’s lots of other things I think when I gaze at the book. But I hope you will soon enough have copies of your own and will be able to share your conclusions. 

I also found three errors overlooked in the text. One was a doozy:

ERRATUM: In the conclusion of the entry on Thomas Wolfe I wrote that he passed away in 1939. That was granting him an extra year of life. I got the 1938 date right at the beginning of the entry. 

 

TRH

Again a nod to Today in Literature: on this day, Thomas Wolfe passed away from tuberculosis that had been lurking in his body since he was a boy. He was just shy of 38 years old.

The event that occasioned it was an exhausting grand tour of the national parks of the West.

 

Wolfe was a writer for hire on the National Parks project. But no doubt the project appealed to the man who once wrote of his thinly-veiled autobiographical character, George Webber:

His life had always seemed to shift between the poles of anchored loneliness and foot-loose voyagings–between wandering forever, and then the earth again–and now the old and restless urgings of “Where shall we go? And what shall we do?” again became insistent, would not down, and demanded of him a new answer.

In his introduction to Look Homeward, Angel, Maxwell Perkins quoted a passage from War and Peace that Wolfe loved: “Prince Andrei looked up at the stars and sighed; everything was so different from what he thought it was going to be.” This was a theme for the young Thomas Wolfe, who came to earth trailing clouds of glory, who retained them in his mind but was batted back and forth between his mother and father, a perpetual vagabond. The line about Prince Andrei would seem a fitting epitaph for Wolfe were it not for the success he achieved in his books. At the end of Look Homeward, Angel, Eugene Gant meets his brother Ben again, temporarily resurrected, leaning against the porch of his father’s shop on the Square and smoking as usual. What happens next is that the marble angels outside W.O.’s shop come alive. What Wolfe achieved in his best writing is no less of a feat. Wolfe was the greatest revelation for me when I was researching A Journey Through Literary America. I had thought it would be a struggle to get through such a long book but it was a pure delight.