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

Travel, a sense of place, and writers are old friends, and Thomas R. Hummel has written a book that showcases that relationship. In his wonderfully written and packaged project, A Journey Through Literary America (Val de Grace Books, 978-0-9817425-1-9), Hummel chases down the physical landscapes that inspired twenty-six of America’s finest authors, beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper’s Catskills’ haunts in New York, to the Wyoming known and beloved by Annie Proulx. Because many of these locales are spectacularly picturesque, Hummel’s essays are accompanied by more than 140 photographs by Santa Barbara photographer Tamra L. Dempsey. For example, Ernest Hemingway’s writing drew on the summers of his youth, spent on the lakes and rivers of northern Michigan, and Dempsey helps us to understand why. All of the essays include telling passages from the great authors themselves.

If you’re a reader, and you’re tuned into the sense of place that is critical to the work of many great writers, this handsome book is for you. The photographs capture the essence of the places that inspired 26 American writers, from Thoreau to Steinbeck to Faulkner to Proulx to Dove. The text is readable, to-the-point, thoughtful and economical, with the photographs providing the perfect amplification.

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.

The first "bench by the road"

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

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

Hemingway was, all things considered, perhaps lucky to extricate himself, though the way he did it was rather unpleasant. For more details, click on this link from Steve King’s fine Today in Literature website.

TRH

Sinclair Lewis in a room he rented for his writing

On February 7, 2010 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, it is 18 degrees but  “feels like 8 degrees” according to Weather.com. This is not so different from this day 125 years ago when Sinclair Lewis was born. It was bitter cold in that day in Sauk Centre (population 2,800). Ice glittered on the 30 lakes that dotted the landscape around the town. The wagon ruts down the mud of Main Street were frozen as solid as the iron-clad wheels that had made them, the ridges at the top brittle and crunchy like exceedingly stale chocolate. The steam from the locomotive of the Great Northern coming into town hung over the rails, too frigid to billow. On that day a baby named Harry Sinclair Lewis was born. No one knows where the Harry came from. Sinclair, the name he adopted as his nom de plume was the surname of a Wisconsin dentist who was a good friend of Lewis’s father.

It had only been 24 years since the first white child was born in the former Indian territory. Harry Sinclair Lewis’ parents did not take his convulsive sobbing any more seriously than they would take any other baby’s. Infants find conditions to be unfamiliar and harsh, but they adjust, grow into little children and naturally find their way in the world. Little did they know that young Harry would find life to be such a trial, that he would eventually make them all famous—or how little they would like that fame.

Sufferer from severe acne as a youth, Lewis did not have the best face for putting on a stamp. But he certainly deserved the honor.

His father was one of the two doctors in town: the stiff and stern one, the one of whom it was said you could set your clocks by. He left his home promptly at 7 am to walk down Main Street to his office. He would leave the office at 11:30 on the dot to go home for lunch and change his hat—always the same hats every day, always the same peg for each one. Lewis’s natural mother died when he was still young. Dr. Lewis promptly married again (after all, he had sons to raise) and the second marriage proved beneficial for young Sinclair. She was as good as a natural mother to him, and a buffer against his father, whom Lewis later pilloried (along with the town itself) in his breakthrough novel of Main Street.

Main Street, published in 1920, lifted a corner of the roof off small-town American life so that one could peep inside and see its inner workings. He wrote from experience. His fictionalized town of Gopher Prairie was easily recognizable as Sauk Centre—and a thousand other towns like it along the American expanse. This is how Carol Kennicott, Main Street’s sprited protagonist saw it when she arrived for the first time by train:

“The huddled low wooden houses broke the plains scarcely more than would a hazel thicket. The fields swept up to it, past it. It was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it and no hope of greatness. Only the tall red grain elevator and a few tinny church steeples rose from the mass. It was a frontier camp. It was not a place to live in, not possibly, not conceivably.”

Sinclair Lewis’s success following Main Street could be held up as a triumph of that much heralded American virtue of stick-to-it-iveness. As he was fond of saying: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair.” He had an entire file of plots (some of which he sold to Jack London—and some of which London paid for), he wrote five novels before his breakthrough novel Main Street, the novel that many mark as the beginning of his career. But though he spent a lot of time writing, he did not spend much time in any one place. His was a restless life. He worked on a cattle boat, sought work in Panama, did janitorial work at Upton Sinclair’s experimental community, and acted as handyman at a writers commune in Carmel (where he met Jack London) before he achieved fame. After he achieved it he continued to move from place to place to do research.

This being Black History Month, it is worthwhile noting that he wrote a novel called Kingsblood Royal about a white man who finds out he’s part black. He also wrote a novel about the takeover of the United States by a populist leader who turns it into a military state (this novel was repackaged and re-issued during George W. Bush’s presidency). I know of no American writer who has surpassed Sinclair Lewis for pure lacerating satire and dead-on dialogue. As time passes, I wonder if he will yet be looked at as an interpreter of our American spirit or whether, as the nation evolves, his works will come to be seen as time capsules of an American era now part of history.

TRH

Brownstones - Artist: Jacob Lawrence (Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries)

I have been remiss. Yesterday (February 1) was the birthday of Langston Hughes and the kickoff to Black History Month. Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, at the beginning of he last century. He lived briefly in Mexico with his father, whom he disliked intensely. He was “discovered” in Washington, D,C, by Vachel Lindsay when, working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel, he slipped a few poems to the Lindsay in the dining room as the august poet was eating dinner. Although by that time Hughes had already won awards for his writing, he was briefly celebrated as the “busboy poet.” Hughes’s poetry was often deceptively simple. His life was also rich with ironies. There was that breakout moment at the Wardman Park Hotel. Later, there was a wealthy white patroness in New York City who decided that Hughes was her vehicle for uplifting the African American race. Hughes would riding to performances in her limousine during the days of the Great Depression, while others slept on park benches, and realized he wasn’t cut out for that kind of plush life.  His poetry suffered.

Both Hughes’ life and his poetry were rich with the suggestion of jazz and blues—an art form he came to admire on 7^th Street in Washington D.C. and in the halls of Harlem. He was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and became an institution in the neighborhood. As an ambassador of his race, he was peerless—liked and respected by black and white. He was also pretty fearless. His poetry has a resilience, approachability, and bounce, in tones of joy and sorrow. His place in American letters is assured.

Some links:

1.  Busboys and Poets Restaurant and Bookstore in D.C. and Virginia

2. Hughes on Haiti from Foreign Policy

3. A bit of Hughes-flavored uplift in an economic downturn

4. Recently discovered poetry of Langston Hughes, revealing a depth of anger he rarely displayed, but that he was unafraid to confront.

5. Jazz collaboration with Charles Mingus and Leonard Feather.

TRH

I wore a suit (I had two) to my job every day. I had a variety of ties. I was half convinced the job would be a steppingstone to some other management position and half in utter denial of the fact that I had put my shoulders in the harness of a 9-5, 40 hour per week job. I wanted to be a writer.

It was there, in the Gelman stacks, that I discovered the collected Paris Review interviews–an impressive row of hardbound volumes, featuring the famed quarterly’s interviews with some of the greatest writers in the English language, probably bound in some dim library bindings.

I was enthralled.

The interviews, and the works of Henry Miller (particularly Tropic of Capricorn) became the arrows I used to ward off the idea of spending the rest of my life in a 9-5 job. Had I known what I now know (happy marriage and son aside), I might have put my suit and ties in a bag with a rock in it, tossed them into the Potomac and striven for a minimum of five years to become a writer. But such is hindsight.

The memory of the pleasure those interviews gave me has never been dulled. I would just  disappear into the stacks on the upper floors (while I was supposed to be checking on the Access Services staff to make sure they were maintaining smooth access to the building, busting people for chewing gum, drinking soda, looking up skirts with mirrors, etc..) to read what William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, or Robert Frost had said about their craft.

When internet sites, like Alibris, for buying rare books came into being, I remember thinking that what I would one day buy the collection for my library.

Well, it turns out I didn’t have to wait  until I had a library to put it in. Last year I read that Picador was releasing the complete interviews in paperback. And, thanks to my parents, and Hopkin’s Bookshop, I am now the owner of it; it being the only thing I wanted for Christmas.

It stands there in front of me right now, in its black slipcase with an open quotation mark on one side and a closing quotation mark on the other, and its list of 64 authors down the spine or the back, depending on which way you like to display your slipcases. Volume one is bright yellow, volume two is azure, volume three is a muted red and volume four a royal purple. The outer edge of the pages is deckled. The pages themselves are quite thin. I do not like slipcased paperback collections. From the moment you open the shrinkwrap, the cardboard slipcase is already dented and the white of the paper underneath is visible. Chances are that at least one of the books is a bit crunched or dinged as well, and the covers often look shopworn and scuffed from whatever was done in the bindery before they went into their own box.

That said, as soon as I opened volume two and started reading the interview with Graham Greene, I was thrown, I would almost say violently, back to those days in Gelman Library, when each word of those interviews was like water on parched ground. I had forgotten that one of the keys to the greatness of the Paris Review interviews was the brief scene the interviewers set before the interview itself. For instance:

The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Jack Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, Berrigan simply showed up at the Kerouacs’ house….Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once….It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs’ looking for the author of On the Road and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations.”

The other thing that must be said for the interviews is the obvious dedication of the interviewers and the openness of the interviewees (what the Seattle Times called the “unguarded moment…the holy grail for any interviewer.” After reading some of these interviews, who wouldn’t want to join that fraternity of amusing and acutely intelligent scribblers?

Needless to say, in the past twenty years, the interviews have progressed beyond those classic great writers I was reading back then. (Incidentally, I used a fondly-remembered fragment of the Frost interview–about how he got jiu-jitsu flipped by Ezra Pound–in A Journey Through Literary America.) Maya Angelou’s in there now, and Orhan Pamuk, Stephen King, Alice Munro, and Paul Auster. I have only read the Graham Greene interview and the beginning of Kerouac’s. I am skipping around randomly, at this point. Savoring the collection.

Every time, when I explain why I would write a book about the places that inspired great Americans, I begin by saying that I have always been fascinated by authors, and what makes them tick. And every time I say those words, my mind flashes back to the Paris Review interviews.

So, here’s to Picador, for putting them out in paperback. For the masses.

TRH

When you read poems or novels, you may wonder how much they reflect the authors’ own experiences — particularly when their work is strongly rooted in a sense of place. Think Willa Cather and the Nebraska plains, or Langston Hughes and the streets of Harlem.

For ex-Vermonter and literature enthusiast Thomas R. Hummel, writers’ firsthand experiences of place are fascinating in themselves — and have become the subject of his beautifully produced coffee-table book A Journey Through Literary America. Now settled with a family in California, Hummel grew up in Burlington and earned his bachelor’s in English and German literature at Middlebury College in 1990. It was partly his fond memories of the Queen City that inspired him to look into how this country’s writers experienced the places they wrote about.

For the book, Hummel wrote absorbing bios of 26 American writers, four of them poets, whom he chose from an original list of 50 authors “who wrote with a descriptive sense of place.” Photographer Tamra L. Dempsey drove 15,000 miles over the course of a year to shoot the houses, neighborhoods and skylines that helped shape those authors’ writing. The subjects of her gorgeous, mood-evoking shots range from Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia farm, Andalusia, to the fields that inspired Robert Frost (the only Vermont author featured), to the rocky Pacific coastline where Robinson Jeffers built Tor House out of stone.

Um, Robinson Jeffers? The 1920s poet, whose work was profoundly shaped by place, “was once one of the most famous poets in America. Then his work fell by the wayside,” Hummel explains by phone from the printing house where he works in Marina del Rey, and which also printed his book. Including Jeffers “was an attempt to bring him back into the American canon, in my own small way,” he adds with a laugh.

Other choices are more obvious: Hawthorne and New England, E. Annie Proulx and Wyoming. Hemingway is included for his connections not to Paris or Spain but to Walloon Lake, Mich. On the other hand, Emily Dickinson did not make the cut, Hummel recalls, because “hers is not really location-based writing.”

A Journey Through Literary America is not a guide to literary landmarks. (The book doesn’t clarify, for instance, that Emerson lived at the Old Manse in Concord, Mass., for only a year, in 1834, while Hawthorne’s family moved in later, in 1842, and stayed for three years.) “We were investigating the locales that inspired great American writers, as opposed to the spots where they laid their heads,” Hummel says. ?

His essays on these locales and their immortalizers blend historical details — such as moments in war or politics that predate an author’s arrival, or trends in art history that helped shape an authorial viewpoint — with a sense of each writer as a person. Emerson wooed his second wife, Lidia, by letter, then “rechristened [her] as the more poetic ‘Lidian.’” Faulkner and Hemingway, who both “wanted desperately to be heroes in the Great War,” “each saw a good tailor and returned [from noncombat roles] resplendent in a uniform that was better than standard issue.”

If the book’s arresting photographs threaten to upstage its text, that’s only fitting: Hummel originally “figured the photographs were the key thing, and I’d write short little blurbs about each writer. But when I started reading the authors, I realized you had to do them justice,” he says.

He hopes the book inspires others to read American fiction — and possibly become writers themselves. Readers are invited to compose their own place-based recollections for the My Hometown Writing Contest, to be judged by Hummel, his editor, Malena Watrous, and his sister, Maria Hummel, a novelist and former Bread Loaf fellow who teaches writing at Stanford University. “There’s a lot that anybody can say about the place where they grew up, and there should be a venue for that,” says Hummel, a nascent writer himself. “And, who knows, there might be another book in that, too.”

Original: http://www.7dvt.com/2009former-vermonter-creates-american-literary-journey