A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

Former Vermonter Creates an American Literary Journey
State of the Arts
By Amy Lilly

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

Lives up to its title.

Illustrated with full-color photography throughout, A Journey Through Literary America is a book for book lovers – surveying great American authors from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. Annie Proulx, and many more. Each author has a brief biographical profile combined with breathtaking photography of the places they lived or that inspired them to create masterpieces. A wondrous tour ideal for enriching any literary collection – and sure to appeal to armchair travelers as well, A Journey Through Literary America lives up to its title and is highly recommended.

I am now reading a book I picked up many years ago called New Burlington. It caught my eye because I am from a Burlington—Burlington, Vermont. But this book was about New Burlington, Ohio, a town that has been soaking under the Caesar Creek Reservoir waters for over thirty years. The author, John Baskin, a reporter for a city paper, came to New Burlington in the early 1970’s, was told that it had been condemned for the purposes of making a reservoir, and decided to move in to record the town’s last year. “I have come to live in New Burlington’s last farm house, surrounded by white brick and clean silence. I have come here to understand its death, my life. Nothing is revealed.”

Notice forbidding entry to New Burlington (photo: John Baskin)

New Burlington was like a lot of other villages. It had been settled by people pushing west. Its original buildings were solid mortise and tenon construction. Built so they wouldn’t blow down. There were town characters. And the stories of those characters were handed down from one generation to the next for edification and enjoyment. When New Burlington was settled, it was possible to walk from there to Chicago without ever leaving the forest. Electricity came slow to the community, as did most change. By the time Baskin happened upon it, the two village blacksmiths were still alive—men with big scars on their fronts from not wearing the proper equipment while using hot metal, man who looked back fondly on making wagon wheels and shoeing horses.

As Baskin wrote in his original introduction (the book later came out as a Norton paperback), he began the project with a great deal of sentiment, seeing the Army Corps of Engineers as the villains and the town as the victim. He wound up writing himself out of the narrative. It became a book about the residents in the town who, much like the characters that populated the crossroads of and hollows near the blue highways of William Least Heat Moon’s book, were characters in their own right. They were Americans whose memories and way of life seemed to stretch back beyond the turn of the last century, to a vanishing point that seems almost completely separated from the way we live today in the United States.

“It is likely,” Baskin wrote, “the reader will wish to look at New Burlington as a history. When I think of history, I think of a lady named Abigail Winas who said, ‘History is a drunk in the snow with his feet sticking out.’ I think of New Burlington as a book of stories and voices in which the characters ponder some of their time on earth.”

The kind of existence Baskin describes slowly dying out in New Burlington before it gets flooded away seems to me to be part and parcel of what poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry has been advocating for many years: the rhythms of the small town life, wisdom passed down, the long memory. Berry, who was born in the Bluegrass State,  obtained an M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky, then studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford and briefly made the rounds of academia before buying a farm in Henry County, Kentucky, not far from his family’s roots.

Sunset, Henry County, Kentucky

He’s been living there since 1965 and has produced prolifically, damning the corporatization and industrialization of agriculture and arguing for a more New Burlington way of life. In some ways, the “buy local” movement is a commodified version of his exhortations. In fact, most corporate efforts or missions to live more like Berry preaches (and they are ever increasing) come out sounding pretty commodified, full of buzzwords—a trap that he has never fallen into. Berry is a one man movement. He also has the poetic gift. Below are the opening three stanzas of “In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Mr. Williams,” a poem that seems to express what those old residents of New Burlington pretty much took for granted:

The poem is important, but

not more than the people

whose survival it serves,

one of the necessities, so they may

speak what is true, and have

the patience for beauty: the weighted

grainfield, the shady street,

the well-laid stone and the changing tree

whose branches spread above.

As Baskin wrote of New Burlington in the nineteenth century: “Buildings rise from the landscape like gigantic blooms of wood and stone. Their weight and symmetry are pleasing to the eye. Such building, for a time, may be seen as piety…Even the barns of New Burlington, like the architecture of ancient churches, had buttresses, arches, naves, and aisles.”

Same feeling as Berry’s poem. Same grave and respectful tone.

And here I must confess to somewhat of a feeling of failure: not only because I do not live as the New Burlingtonians lived, and the people off the blue highways lived, and Wendell Berry lives, but also because when I set out on my journey into literary America, I was hoping to come across those people. I set out thinking I would find the “salt of the earth” America and Americans that are rumored to be out there around the long curves on the blue highways, the ones who have the patience for beauty: the weighted graveyard, the well-laid stone.

I didn’t find them.

I cannot say with a certainty that they are there, though I believe they still exist.

I must come to terms with the fact that, in the process of doing the research for this book, I had very little time to meander around the back roads. I must also make peace with the fact that I am not going to (like Least Heat Moon) wander into a bar and strike up a conversation with the person on the next stool, who might somehow tie my entire quest together with a few well-spoken lines. I need to get the lay of the land before I feel I know what is true and what isn’t. Time did not allow that. Furthermore, visiting the rarefied air of Concord, Massachusetts, for example, is not likely to put me in touch with pithy Yankee wordsmiths (though it once served exactly that purpose for Emerson). I must also confront a bias of my own (that I am now noticing) that “authentic” somehow equals countrified. It doesn’t. Full-fledged authentic Americans can be found in large cities, medium cities, towns, villages.

Having professed a feeling of failure, though, I must consider the achievement of the book itself. A Journey Through Literary America is a 304-page narrative, in picture and words, of the American experience. It features a range of voices. It reaches back to the furthest regions of America’s literary memory and carries forward into the present. It gets off the interstates and onto the less traveled roads, travels north and south, east and west, by ox cart, riverboat, train, automobile, on foot. After finishing the book I feel somehow that my own memory has been furnished—with recollections of events from previous decades and centuries. This happens when one immerses oneself in narrative.

I should also say this: those “authentic voices” I went out there to find are probably not the same ones who are going to continue the American literary narrative. Some writer, at some remove from them, is going to do that. And, while finding America in the back roads and back alleys is worthy of a quest, the experiences that will probably best equip us to move forward into this new and already troubled century are the ones we can get from America’s great writers and artists.

We are often reminded, especially now, in uncertain times, of America’s great ingenuity and positive spirit, of how the country has rallied to face down so many challenges and obstacles. May I say that many of the people who regularly trot out these palliatives have only the vaguest notion of the details underlying the supposed achievements? I am all for pep talks. But not substance-free ones. Not the creeds outworn. I am more and more convinced that the tide of history is what produces great changes. We had better study the tides and how they affected those who came before us.

Back now to “In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Mr. Williams,” to the closing stanzas:

To remember,

to hear and remember, is to stop

and walk on again

to a livelier, surer measure.

It is dangerous

to remember the past only

for its own sake, dangerous

to deliver a message

you did not get.

TRH

It is now August 12^th. In less than two months, my wife and son and I will be hitting the road in a one-way Budget SUV rental, headed from Santa Monica, California to Boston, Massachusetts. It will be a reverse journey in terms of the history of American literature: the California coast that became a symbol of promise—of sunshine and well-defined noirish shadows—backwards through Salt Lake City—the location that Brigham Young declared was “the right place” for his band of followers in 1847, eastward over the Rockies, through the prairies and past the isohyetal line of rainfall that defines the American Desert, back through the settlements of farms and white houses of Illinois and Ohio. A stop along the way will be Cooperstown, New York, founded by the father of James Fenimore Cooper—once the greatest “painter” in words of the American landscape. Then we will pass through the Berkshires of Massachusetts (once home to Melville and Hawthorne) on the way to Boston and to Concord, where the first shots of the Revolutionary War had been fired, and the first blood spilled, before Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Alcott made it their home.

As preparation, I have been reading a book I once read in paperback, in my teens: Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon, copyright 1982. Least Heat Moon, half Native American (they were called Indians in those days), leans against a cane on the back jacket of the 9^th printing that I borrowed from the library, a short-looking man with a thick head of hair, a pair of suspenders, and a soulful look in his level gaze. If I am right about his stature, it probably served him well for the long journey he took. After losing his job and, to some degree, his wife, he got in a van he named “Ghost Dancing” and drove around the country, sleeping in the van most nights.

“Bust” of William Least Heat Moon

William Least Heat Moon he explained the source of the book’s title thus:

“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back rods blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose itself.”

 

Detail of 1960 road map, with blue highways.

The above passage is typical of Blue Highways. Well-wr0ught, with a sense of rhythm and depth that suggest miles on the highway spent working out the sentences. Least Heat Moon’s observations, I am pleased to say, remain as trenchant as they did when I first read them.

This is the cover of the bestselling paperback I read in my youth

The text has aged well. Sadly, I bet 90% to 95% of the people he profiled along the road—venerable American men and women who were denizens of the blue highways—have passed away.

The atlas I have been consulting for our own travels is “The Mapquest Atlas,” copyright MMIIV, it says (a Roman numeral which doesn’t exist, I think) which I got for free with a book club offer. It is from back in the days when Mapquest was in its ascendancy and Google was perhaps nothing yet but a twinkle in is founders’ eyes. I felt bad obtaining it, with its jaunty Mapquest logo, even though it was free. Road atlases, it seemed to me, were the proper domain of Rand McNally. In my Mapquest atlas, the interstates are blue, with narrow white lines in the middle like a digestive tract, and the blue highways of the past are red or orange or nonexistent. Even when he made his jaunt, it seems like half the towns he visited out of curiosity, towns such as Liberty Bond or Moonax, Oregon, had already vanished from anything but his map. Towns like Nameless, Tennessee had ninety residents and a general store. Nameless has not been effaced. I can call it up on Google maps. The so-called”street view,” shows a bend in the road and the driveway of an unidentified house which seems to be in some other township though.

Blue Highways is great for stirring the traveling blood. And it is useful for travel tips, though I don’t know how well the following one has aged: according to the author, the best kinds of cafe are the ones with the most calendars.

No calendar: Same as an interstate pit stop.

One calendar: Preprocessed food assembled in New Jersey.

Two calendars: Only if fish trophies present.

Three calendars: Can’t miss on the farm-boy breakfast.

Four calendars: try the ho-made pie too.

Five calendars: Keep it under your hat, or they’ll franchise.

Unfortunately, that is one my little family may have difficulty putting to the test. With an eighteen month-old son, and a limited window of time, we’ll need to keep mostly to the interstates, which generally preclude eating establishments of an original nature. But it is a trip, and a trip all the way across the country, and nothing can take away the epic nature of that.

Book Update: due to a paginating error, what I thought would be a rubber stamp of approval on the plotter proofs turned into another wait for a new set of plotter proofs to be made. I won’t belabor the details of what exactly happened. The lesson learned is that not everything in printing can be anticipated, not even if one has been in the business for over a decade. Tune in again in a few days and I hope you will read that A Journey Through Literary America has gone to press.