A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

Gift Books for the Holidays, Part III

This absolutely gorgeous book belongs in every book lover’s library. Beginning with Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, ending with E. Annie Proulx and Richard Ford, Thomas Hummel examines the relationship between place and an author’s identity, writing about 26 authors, with brief biographies and excerpts of their prose. Tamra Dempsey’s photographs are the perfect enhancement to Hummel’s essays. Willa Cather is evoked with golden prairies and a farmhouse in a sunset-red sky; Langston Hughes with brownstones and Bailey’s Funeral Home in Harlem; Raymond Carver with the site of his childhood home in Yakima (“living on a staple of bitterness”) and the Cornerhouse Restaurant and the marina in Port Angeles.

Original: http://news.shelf-awareness.com/mv/a1/801347.html

Hudson to Binghamton was a long stretch of empty highway, often squeezed down to one lane in each direction (though TARP was not officially credited) with some of the tiredest looking traffic cones I have ever seen. The view from the highway was of trees, more of a mix of firs than I had seen, the occasional Quonset hut, of exits for towns like Panama and Cuba and Coopers Plains (which I thought might have been a model for Fenimore Cooper but might actually be named after an Australian town), some beautiful, stark countryside. As it grew dark, the signs telling how many miles to Binghamton ceased. It was with great relief that we finally entered the outskirts of the connected communities of Vestal (where my mother was born), Endicott, Johnson City, Binghamton, and Chenango Forks. Once mighty manufacturers of the Empire State, they are now remnants of their former selves. The people of these towns knew how to make things once. Great things. It is one of the heedless cruelties of capitalism that the factories that made the region prosperous have pulled out or gone under.

It was with an unbelievable sense of relief that we got off at the Chenango Bridge exit and called my Aunt Debi, who talked us in to her house, situated in a cul de sac, over a long hill. But my relief probably paled in comparison to that of Felix, who seemed absolutely in heaven at finding himself in a large house, with many toys, and a kind great aunt.

Aunt Debi with the weary travelers

Cooperstown, New York

Cooperstown was a mandatory stop on the tour both for the Baseball Hall of Fame and for its literary significance as the location of James Fenimore Cooper’s father’s house (the town is his namesake) and destination of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe. In fact, the entries on those two authors happen to be the first and last, respectively, of the book. All along the route from Chicago to Cooperstown, we had been on the same latitude, and had seen many V’s of geese winging their way south. On the way we passed an old silo with a huge rent in its side, and an old farmhouse that looked as if it had been stove in by the falling of a giant tree. We passed through a town comprised of fine old houses, lining each side of the road like teeth, in various states of repair. I came to Cooperstown once as a child (my parents finally relented after our endless campaign) and remembered that the drive from he highway to the town seemed too long. It still did, but not so much for me as for our schedule.

In Cooperstown, I snapped a picture of the geese resting on Otsego Lake, which Fenimore Cooper, at his lyric “painter with words” best, dubbed Glimmerglass Lake. 

Statue on the Cooperstown waterfront

The town gave me the impression of a place enslaved by tourism. The shopkeeper at the bat store I went into seemed like he family went back generations in Cooperstown, and that she would have made a fine farmer, or clerk. But there she is selling bats to the great unwashed. The Baseball Hall of Fame has a luster that the bleakness of the season and frigidity of the air could not dim. It is a luster that was lost on the extremely antsy Felix but felt, here and there by me.

I do not mean to romanticize the sorrowful decline of the region and, in the process, belittle the upstate New York region. But I feel I need to bring it up because there, in Upstate New York, which we had been visiting since I was a baby, I finally felt like I was among my people. I felt it more there than anywhere else on the trip (though I had started feeling it as we crossed into Ohio). On our way out, we passed that farm with the rent in the silo and the collapsed house. I wanted to take a picture but I didn’t. For one thing, the house had passed by fast. For another, even as we slowed, I saw that there were still people living on that property. They’d constructed another dwelling but perhaps, I thought, left the ancestral home as it had been smitten.

When I was younger I felt like I knew the spirit of America, could taste the air of America. I went looking for that when researching the book and the visceral sense of it I had felt as a child and a young man eluded me. In upstate New York, it seemed like I found it again. Part of its essence is the lurking tragedy that seems to stalk the region, along with the beauty of its agrarian regions, and its old towns and cities. Perhaps that “America” feeling I had in my youth is something that I outgrew, like the idea that I might become wealthy, or famous. Or perhaps it’s just that I conflated America with towns in upstate New York and the well-preserved towns in Vermont where I grew up. Whatever the truth is, it was comforting and bittersweet to travel through the region once again, on the final stretch of the trip.

The wonderful thing about a cross-country trip is that, by the fact it has a beginning and an end, and a lot of rough terrain in the middle, it takes on dimension, creates its own story. On the day we slipped into the driveway of my parents’ home near Boston, Massachusetts, while they sat visible in the front windows, having cocktails, I felt that we had brought the epic journey to a satisfying close. We were 3,700 miles from where we had started and were coming, in a sense, home.

The next day we saw the most we had seen of Chicago—in our rear view mirror.

By mid-morning we had passed Garry, Indiana—the birthplace of Michael Jackson and by midday we stopped in South Bend (home of Notre Dame) for a bathroom and exercise break. The dominance of football was obvious from our entry into the city. The lanes of the public highway were marked (permanently, it seemed) with the parking lanes for the football stadium (VIP, Season Tickets, etc.). We found a spot in a quiet park by the river (the one that bends south, I presume). It was a beautiful fall day, the wind gusting and sending leaves floating down from the trees. It was something I was sure Felix had never seen before. I tried to get him to appreciate them but he was more concerned with running around, and the big dog we passed. The park had an old cabin that had belonged to the first resident of South Bend. It was locked and deserted. So were the public bathrooms. We moved on.

It was one of the longest days of the trip. We lost an hour as we passed into East Coast time. Nevertheless, I was pushing to make it to Clyde, Ohio—Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg”—before the bookstore on Main Street closed. Surely a book that featured Clyde should sell. I spoke with the proprietor at the Book Exchange. She was not the decision maker. The owners worked out of another bookstore they operated in Port Clinton, about an hour distant. We pulled in to Clyde at 5:30 and took a parking spot right outside the bookstore (parking spots were easy to come by). Rika and Felix went around the corner past the Presbyterian Church, which figures in Winesburg, Ohio. I made my pitch. The owners were going to be along in an hour or so. We would have waited. But, when I asked if there was any good restaurant where we could get something to eat near Main Street, the answer was negative. I had had the same feeling the last time I visited Clyde when I was researching for the book; the old Main Street block soldiered on, the buildings patched and cracking in the back alley. But the Clyde of old, as described by Anderson, was not so thriving.

“Factories had not come in and the people were engaged in farming, the selling of merchandise or in the practice of the crafts in the old sense. Two carpenters met on the streets in the evening and talked for hours concerning the best way to cut out a window frame or build a door.”

Feeling a bit like gypsies at this point, we headed out again, and ate at McDonald’s a few towns down the road. We made it to Cleveland after nightfall.

The Holiday Inn Express in Cleveland is in a beautiful old building, with an arcade a city block wide that was patterned after an Italian palace.

The Holiday Inn Express - Cleveland - old fashioned opulence, and free breakfast, too...

By then, I was feeling the steady presence of some sort of cold. We took our luggage to our spacious room with its twelve foot ceilings and settled in. Only one destination stood between us and Boston: Binghamton, New York.

The next morning, my nose was running and my head felt congested. My voice was a hoarse croak. Nevertheless, we stuck to the plan: to visit three bookstores before leaving for Binghamton. I was sorry to be leaving Cleveland as if we were on the run. It was nice to be in the canyon of tall buildings. Just down the street from us one could see the beautiful Terminal Tower skyscraper, built in 1930, with its top like a wedding cake. We headed out towards Shaker Heights.

Shaker Heights is an affluent suburb of Cleveland. Getting there, all the streets were Anglo Saxon, the fire hydrants painted silver. Once we reached the main drag (though such a word sounds like a profanity when used within the city limits of Shaker Heights), we could tell it was a very fine place. There were several Oriental rug stores, and not one of them had a clearance sale sign in the window. Where we come from, there is not a single Persian or oriental rug store (outside, perhaps, of Beverly Hills) which does not advertise a sale year-round. We stopped first at a bookstore in Shaker Heights which shall remain nameless. It was after 10:00 and the door was wide open, the interior of the shop impressive and fine. The staff was in the middle room, from which the open door, and my entrance, were clearly visible. They were engaged in a staff meeting. Perhaps I looked like some flotsam from the street. But in the time I was there, and during the time I returned to give them another try, no one acknowledged my presence. I wasn’t about to swoop down upon them with my crow’s voice and be sent on my way like some errant tradesman, so we left.

What followed was a beautiful drive through backlit fall foliage, leaves drifting down onto country roads on the way to Chagrin Falls—a town that looked the way I imagined Richard Ford’s Haddam, New Jersey to look: awfully tony and immaculate and with an ambiance money can’t simply buy. “Living in a place,” Richard Ford’s glib Frank Bascombe tells us, “is one thing we all went to college to learn how to do properly.” I believe Bascombe is referring to tutelage concerning how to live in a place like Haddam, or Chagrin Falls—places where living must be done properly, or shouldn’t be attempted at all.

Fireside Book Shop, Chagrin Falls

From there it was on to Hudson, Ohio, the most gratifying bookstore experience I had on the entire trip. Liz Murphy from the Learnéd Owl in Hudson, had responded to our early mailing about the book, requesting a review copy. When I called the shop from Chagrin Falls, she recognized me immediately, saying that the shop loved the book. The bookstore, which has been in business for over forty years, and has been owned by Liz Murphy for more than twenty, has an old-fashioned wooden screen door that banged as I went in—a sound that reminded me of cottage doors in summer camps by a lake. The shop has a sleepy golden retriever, who looked up when my son came in. It is situated on a healthy Main Street and gives every impression of being an integral part of the community. A steady stream of customers came in and out, and engaged in conversation. Ms. Murphy, if all booksellers were as enlightened as you, I believe the world would be a better place.