A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

It is now two decades ago that I got my first job after college: as assistant to the manager of Access Services of Gelman Library, George Washington University. I had come to Washington, D.C. with hopes–no, expectations–of landing a well-paying job in editing or some other aspect of publishing. After several months of rejections (it was not as bad a time to come out of college as it is now, but the class of 1990 graduated only a three years after Black Monday, the day on which the Dow plunged over 22% and bankers jumped out of windows) I fell back on the only relevant work experience I had and applied for jobs at the library.

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

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

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

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