A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

Just learned the terrific news last night that A Journey Through Literary America has won the Eric Hoffer Award in the category of Art Book.

From the award notice for the art category: Titles in this category capture the experience, execution, or demonstration of the arts, including art, fine art, graphic art, architecture, design, photography, and coffee table books.

Winner

A Journey Through Literary America, Thomas R. Hummel, photographs by Tamra L. Dempsey, Val De Grâce Books - This unique literary tour spans the country to highlight the life and work of America’s best-known writers. From Washington Iriving (1783-1859) to Richard Ford (1944- ), both the essays and photos delve into the writer’s biographies and major literary achievements. It is a unique point of view and perhaps overdue in literary examinations. Expected elements such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables and Langston Hughes’ Harlem don the pages. Steinbeck’s Salinas wasn’t missed, but little treats like Sherwood Anderson’s houses, Philip Roth’s Weequahic, and Faulkner’s map of Yoknapatawpha County help bind the collection.”

Who was Eric Hoffer? Known by many as “the Longshoreman Philosopher,” Hoffer was born at the turn of the Twentieth Century, in New York City. No official record of his initial appearance on this earth exists, nor does he seem to have attended any school. According to Hoffer (our only source for the early biographical details), his mother fell down the stairs while carrying him when he was around the age of five. Two years later, she died. Hoffer went blind, and remained so for the next eight years. And then, as inexplicably as it had vanished, his sight came back. As Hoffer wrote: “I had no schooling. I was practically blind up to the age of fifteen. When my eyesight came back, I was seized with an enormous hunger for the printed word. I read indiscriminately everything within reach—English and German.”

Around 1920, taking $300 given to him by his father’s cabinetmaker’s guild, Hoffer headed west. “Logic told me that California was the poor man’s country,” he wrote. He did the work of the poor in Los Angeles, and then up and down the San Joaquin Valley as a fruit and vegetable picker. In 1938, he submitted a 30-page long letter to a publication called Common Ground. It was turned down. But Margaret Anderson, assistant to the editor, who had sent him the rejection note, also took the liberty of forwarding Hoffer’s letter to Harper & Brothers (book publisher and publisher of Harper’s–what we know today in the world of publisher mashups as Harper Collins). Sincerely or not, Harper & Brothers suggested Hoffer write his autobiography. Hoffer refused.

1943 found him in San Francisco, where he joined the union and worked as a longshoreman for twenty-five years. Hoffer kept writing, while at the docks and after work, and eventually sent the manuscript for his first book, The True Believer, to Ms. Anderson, who typed it up and sent it again to Harper & Brothers. Published in 1951, it was dedicated to Margaret Anderson. The thesis of the book, as an excellent biography of Hoffer on the Hoover Institution website (which I credit for many of the facts in this piece) has suggested, can be summarized by one of Hoffer’s own aphorisms: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

Hoffer was a late bloomer. He was at least a half century old by the time The True Believer was published. He once related that all of his relatives had died before forty. So, to have passed that mark and still be alive gave him a great sense of freedom. “I went through life like a tourist,” he said.

San Francisco is where he remained for the rest of his life, in a series of small, sparsely furnished apartments. He wrote ten more books, doing a lot of his composing while on long walks through Golden Gate Park. “The words, the ideas, come to me in the park,” he stated in a 1967 interview. “I shape them in my head there, and I write them in my notebook. Blind people write full sentences in their head. Sentences they can see. I still do.”

He entered onto the national scene in 1965, when Eric Sevareid conducted a series of interviews with him on CBS. This American original, who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere nearly a century earlier, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1983.

It feels good to be honored by an award given in honor of Eric Hoffer: original thinker, working man, one who did not ascend through the normal literary channels. Thanks to the Eric Hoffer Project for recognizing the work.

Click here for the Guardian UK’s list of the best bookshops in the world. These were chosen mostly for their architectural magnificence, it seems, and do, of course, exhibit  British perspective. But if they aren’t enough to make a book lover slaver, I don’t know what is.

If you are ever in the Portland, Oregon area and at a loss for what to do, I highly recommend Cameron’s Books. I stumbled on the store a few years back while killing time before meeting a client in the SW district near the river. It was a cold day (my usual experience in Portland) and the shop was pleasantly warm, stacked floor to ceiling with used books and magazines, all in order.

Just a week ago when I visited the city (another cold day, and visiting the same client), I dropped in. I looked for a copy of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Not only did  I find a handsome hardcover copy with a painting of a bleak New England scene on the cover but the book was only three dollars. Each time I have visited Cameron’s I have come out with something I had wanted or something serendipitous.

Cameron’s is on the same block as a Western outfitter and the storefront of a strip club. I don’t remember the strip club being there before. Perhaps it has crept in in the downturn. At any rate, I’d be willing to bet that Cameron’s, which has been in business since 1938, will outlast it. The proprietor looks the same way he always does. Perhaps he looked that way in 1938 as well.

If you are ever in the area, do pay them a visit. Kids, this is the way used bookstores used to be.

TRH

John Steinbeck was born 108 years ago today in Salinas, California, the “Salad Bowl of the World.” His family lived in a Victorian house that still stands on one of Salinas’s main streets. It is a restaurant now. And down the street just a couple of blocks sits the National Steinbeck Center, at the head of Main Street, which anchors the Oldtown district of the city. Freight trains crawl along in the near distance, running along the tracks above the underpass that the city’s many visitors use to get to Route 101. Route 101 that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles, running past green fields devoted to crops; some of them traditional, like lettuce, garlic, artichokes and others marking evolutions in America’s gustatory superabundance: maché, nuts, grape vines for wine.

The city of Salinas is not a nonpareil of a resort like nearby Carmel. It is not ocean-kissed like its near neighbors of Monterey and Pacific Grove. There are other towns like Salinas that seem down at the mouth, even embittered. But if Salinas does not have the wallet-and purse-opening allure of a place that draws people solely for its beauty, it does exude an air of optimism, of something beyond mere grappling with survival. Its Oldtown looks much more alive than it did when my brother and I passed through it a decade ago on a trip north. “Could Salinas evolve into an internationally-recognized literary-historic destination, appearing regularly in national press and travel literature, sought after by tourists and the employees of new businesses as a unique place to visit?” the city website asks. Salinas has become the epicenter for Steinbeck fans. And Steinbeck fans, especially in this part of the world, are legion.

Nearly every native or long-term Californian who picks up A Journey Through Literary America, takes a test drive by reading the piece on Steinbeck. In a piece called “Why Ready John Steinbeck, Dr. Susan Shillinglaw wrote: “Steinbeck wanted his prose to recapture a child’s vision ‘of colors more clear than they are to adults, of tastes more sharp…I want to put down the way afternoon felt and of the feeling about a bird that sang in a tree in the evening.’” In hundreds upon hundreds of pages of prose, amateur naturalist John Steinbeck captured California through his close observance and vivid description of the flora and fauna. Amateur sociologist and philosopher Steinbeck captured its people. California is a massive state—as large as and more economically mighty than many nations (though it is currently gasping for air). The odds stand firmly against one artist being able to wrap his brain around it. But by dint of perseverance, inexhaustible curiosity, willingness to travel, and a unique combination of gifts, Steinbeck succeeded in doing just that.

For a fairly recent Newsweek article about conditions in the agricultural area around the Weedpatch camp (the model for the migrant camp that the Joads reached in The Grapes of Wrath) click here.

And below, selections from Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, presented to him with these words: “Thanks to your instinct for what is genuinely American you stand out as a true representative of American life.”

Trivia Note: Alfred Nobel made his fortune through the patenting and sale of better and better explosives. Perhaps Steinbeck is the only Nobel Prize-winning author who was experienced in the use of dynamite.

From the speech:

“Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches – nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.



Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.



The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.



Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about.



Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.



This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.



Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.



I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”



TRH

In case anyone was paying attention, I wasn’t…

I missed Wednesday, February 17ths doubleheader: the birthdays of Wallace Stegner and Toni Morrison. To miss the birthday of either one is bad. To miss both is deplorable.

My apologies to both.

Toni Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio is covered in A Journey Through Literary America. An old African proverb, often trotted out, goes: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Hillary Rodham Clinton, our Secretary of State and the wife of the man whom Toni Morrison famously called “the first black president,” even used it as the title of a book. In the case of Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, the “village” that raised her is the black community in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on the shores of Lake Erie. With their support and encouragement, she left Lorain after high school for Howard University to make her way in the larger world. “If black people are going to succeed in this culture,” she said in a 1979 interview, “they must always leave. There’s a terrible price to pay.” But, she went on to say, her departure did not take away her power to “savor” that village she left. It is to the environs of Lorain that Morrison returned in her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. She has not used the city specifically as a setting in later novels, but she has always returned to it—to the way she saw it in her youth—in order to depict what has been the major focus of her art: the “elaborately socialized world of black people.” In the forty years since the publication of her first novel, Morrison has gone on to become truly one of the lions of American literature. She is a woman with a formidable intellect and gift for storytelling and writing.

Not far from Lorain is Oberlin, Ohio. Oberlin is home to a very well regarded liberal arts college. It was also one of the well-known stops on the Underground Railroad. In honor of that connection, the Toni Morrison Society recently installed a bench there as part of the Bench By the Road Project.

Wallace Stegner’s name has many associations for me. He wrote that a person who has adopted the West as a home must adopt a different aesthetic. I still struggle with the acceptance of that aesthetic even as I admire the beauty of the West. He also owned a home in Greensboro, Vermont (my home state). Of Vermont he famously remarked that it was a state that “has watched humanity go by and has recovered from the visit.” These are but two of the associations. Within the past year, I heard a story on NPR about a typewriter shop in Los Altos where Stegner used to take his manual typewriter to be serviced (he eschewed electric typewriters as being too fast). It is a charming little piece. If you are going to visit that, you should also take a listen (or another listen, if you’ve ever heard it) to Leroy Anderson’s wonderful “Typewriter Song”—another charming evocation of a bygone era. Silicon Valley, the place that made the typewriter a museum piece, surrounds Palo Alto, where Stegner taught at Stanford for many years.

TRH

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[i] Profile by Colette Dowling in The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 1979, p. 44

A clue to the fashioning of Yoknapatawpha County: The New York Times ran a story Wednesday about a diary belonging to some Mississippi slaveholders that appears to have heavily influenced Faulkner. He was fascinated by his contents and apparently took lots of notes. Much of the details in the diaries wound up, in one form or another, in his books. The descendant of the man who kept the diaries suppressed them for years. It was his wife who finally convinced him to make them public (and he doesn’t sound entirely convinced). He is not a Faulkner fan. He let on that he tried to read Go Down Moses once and got so angry that he thew it across the room. What stoked his anger is left a mystery.

Speaking of things coming to light: also in the New York Times books section is an article about some Salinger letters, written to his dear friends, that are now being made public. They contain, among other things, the titillating detail that he kept writing long after his vow of silence. But they don’t tell where the manuscripts are buried.

TRH