A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

Akron-Canton Airport: I knew I was not in California when I opened the driver’s side door of my rented Hyundai Accent and saw, laid across the passenger’s seat like a sword, a brand new ice scraper, with broom on one end. For use if needed. Thankfully, I never had to use it.

On the way from the airport to my distant hotel, I listened to the radio’s pre-set station, a talk radio station. Clearly local. The talk radio hosts batted around notions of what would happen when their contract with Clear Channel Communications came up for renegotiation. The host was pretty sure they’d be asked to move to a bigger market than Akron/Canton to extend, so to speak, their listening empire. His female sidekick, who followed the role of modern talk radio female sidekicks and enable—which consists mostly of never saying no—wasn’t so sure about that. But she sounded willing to believe. The commercials came. And after that they played “name that bitch,” which consisted of playing a sound clip from some recent woman in the news, and then guessing who it was. This day’s clip was Anna Kournikova. Is this what passeth for talk radio in the smaller markets? I wondered.

The next day, on my way to the distant Buckeye Book Fair from my centrally isolated hotel, I looked for another channel, as the talk radio had given away to heavy metal in the morning hours. The dial landed on a gardening show. And then another. Most of the callers, wondering what they should winterize, or what it meant if all the leaves on a particular plant turned yellow, were men. The Buckeye Book Fair was held from 9:30 am to 4 pm in the Fisher Auditorium, a low, wide building on the OSU/OARDC (Ohio State University/Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center) campus. We were invited to take part because A Journey Through Literary America features three Ohioans: Sherwood Anderson, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove. There weren’t very many other out-of-state authors. None from California. This year, in a bow to the economy, admission was free. The year before, 7000 people had attended the fair. The free admission seemed to help. By 9:30, people were lined up at the entrance to get in. We each had our names and table numbers at the tops of 3/4” dowels, attached to our tables by clamps. Around each dowel was tied a piece of red cloth. And when we ran low on books, we were to raise the red cloth so that runners could see and replenish our stock. On my left (from where I was seated in the booth) was a children’s book illustrator, Will Hillenbrand, who had to run up the red cloth many times. He was surrounded most of the day by a crowd. A kind-looking man, who seemed through his pastime to have discovered the gift of eternal youth, he took time to explain his drawings and the way they worked with the stories. His latest effort is a children’s book named “Louie!” based on the youth of Ludwig Bemelmans, the famous illustrator of the Madeline books. It was really quite well done. His appeal did not preclude him from being a canny salesman. He sold out of all four of his books by 1:45, spent a few minutes talking about plans for next year with the Book Fair’s impressed organizer, and then skedaddled.

To the right of me sat a former English professor named Lisa Klein who has authored three novels: Girls of Gettysburg, Lady Macbeth’s Daughter, and Ophelia that are sold and packaged as Young Adult (YA) but can easily stand up to sterner standards. The jackets all feature attractive young women. But these are not chick lit for the YA crowd. I don’t think you would find musing such as this, from Lady Macbeth, in YA novels:

My lord rules Scotland with a strong arm, and what grew weak under Duncan’s lax reign has been shored up: the armies enlarged and newly outfitted, the fleets repaired, castles restored. The people must be brought to heel and made to work for the good of the country. But instead they grumble out of ignorance and laziness, and foolishly fear that one unseasonable years means starvation and ruin forever. Shall we let England overrun us or the Norsemen sweep down from the sea? Not while Macbeth is king and I am queen!

Klein’s themes are not sugar coated. Her writing has power. The dialogue is meaningful, and has a Shakespearean cadence.

A Journey Through Literary America sold well at the Book Fair. Several buyers came by early in their Fair visit, perhaps fought some internal battle, then returned and paid the $42.00 the book was going for at the show. It was one of the most expensive books at the show. But to those who fell in love with it, it was a small price to pay.

At the Buckeye Book Fair, my eyes were opened to the existence of Malabar Farm and the personage of Louis Bromfield when I was in Ohio. I had never heard of the Pulitzer prize winner, nor his progressive farm although, in the manner of many revelations, once I heard of Bromfield I began to see him in other places. He was mentioned in the latest issue of Harper’s (content unavailable without a subscription) by Wendell Berry. Who wrote: “At the time when farming, as a vocation and an art, was going out of favor, Bromfield genuinely and unabashedly loved it.” (Berry would be gratified by those men, and women, who tune into the gardening shows)

Louis Bromfield’s first novel was The Green Bay Tree. After its publication he moved to Europe and became part of the Lost Generation. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for Early Autumn. Bromfield returned to Ohio at the age of 40. “I was sick of the troubles, the follies, and the squabbles of the Europe which I had known and loved so long,” he said. “I wanted peace and I wanted roots for the rest of my life.” He set down those roots,  that at Malabar Farm, which is now a park. A Journey Through Literary Ohio would have to put Bromfield and Malabar Farm right near the top of its list.

At times the Buckeye Book Fair felt like an AKC dog show. The ceilings were low. The sound reverberating off the walls was intense. By the end of the show, though I had barely moved around much at all, I was exhausted. But at the same time I was gratified at the response to the book and grateful to the show’s organizers for the invitation.

I rode back the way I had come, through shorn fields, and some that were still green. I saw the largest flock of blackbirds I have ever seen taking off from one of those shorn fields in a cloud that seemed to stretch on for half a mile.

Back at the hotel, in the empty parking lot of the neighboring The Pointe office complex, was a small flock of geese stopping over on their way south. Perhaps they are the procrastinators. It seemed like most of the geese were on their way south two weeks ago when we drove through the country.

strip mall cul de sac geese

Safe travels. TRH

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.

America’s Places in Literature
It’s the Journey, and It Is the Destination

Maybe it’s these “tough economic times” we keep hearing about, or Ken Burns’s latest documentary on our country’s greatest idea, or even the fervent debate on health-care reform: but it feels like everyone is eagerly trying to define America. Not the United States, or the U.S.A but America, in its glorious, romantic connotation.

I’m not sure writer Thomas Hummel and photographer Tamra Dempsey attempted a definition in their new project titled A Journey Through Literary America, but they certainly succeeded in living, and capturing, one of America’s defining features: the journey itself.

One dog named Sherpa, two years, and 20,000 miles after embarking upon the oldest of American traditions, they’ve created a beautiful coffee-table book that combines a stirring narrative of America’s literary heritage with fantastic, sweeping photographs of places that inspired American authors.

“For the last 12 years, I’ve been thinking about a coffee-table book that hasn’t been done,” said Hummel, who came up with the idea for the book. “While I was reading American Pastoral, I realized Phillip Roth had some vivid descriptions of places in Newark, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do a photo essay on the places authors wrote about, accompanied by the words they used to write about them?’”

A phone call to Dempsey later, and a mere essay quickly evolved into a list of 50 favorite American authors, which was then scaled back to a more feasible group of 26 who “all had something to say about America,” explained Hummel.

Hummel spent the better part of a year flying all over the country on the weekends, researching writers and their hometowns for his own contributions to the text, and compiling a short list for Dempsey.

Armed with only a Canon D5 and a black lab named Sherpa, Dempsey then set out on the road with her fiancee in an Airstream Interstate. For three months they explored America, starting in Santa Barbara and making a clockwise journey up to Washington, across the Midwest, up into New England, down the East Coast, and to Georgia, then through Mississippi, Nebraska, and Colorado.

“We were traveling constantly, and had maybe 24 to 48 hours, at most, in each location,” said Dempsey. “We just showed up; we didn’t set anything up in advance. We shot with available light under all sorts of conditions.”

Dempsey’s interest in the project came, in part, from her father, who “always had a huge appreciation for America,” she said. “When we were kids he took us out of school for six or eight months and we traveled, visiting all but three states. We really learned a lot, traveling that way.”

And though Dempsey and Hummel experienced America separately, they still shared the experience. “You feel the same thing that inspired the writers,” explained Hummel.

One example of this commonality centers on a photograph Dempsey took in Sherwood Anderson’s hometown of Clyde, Ohio. “There’s a scene in Winesburg, Ohio where George Willard goes for a walk at night. He walks by a picket fence and stops underneath a streetlight, and I told Tamra that I wanted that shot,” said Hummel. She got the shot – a beautiful, dark photograph overlaid with Anderson’s famous words.

And though we Americans continually try to define our namesake, our patriotism, our ideals, and ourselves, Dempsey may have already pinpointed what makes us distinctly American: “I found that most of these authors had a real appreciation for their hometown. What they wrote about well was what they knew. We’re always searching for something different to explore, when most of the time it’s right where we already are.”

Original: http://www.independent.com/news/2009/oct/09/americas-places-literature/

Clyde “Winesburg” Ohio

It was pitch dark and my motel, with its faux colonial columns seemed to be surrounded by empty space when I arrived that night from Lorain, Ohio. I was somewhere near Sandusky. That night I heard the sounds of several freight trains running past, and heard the mournful sound of the whistle. I had forgotten how much I loved that sound. We used to live close enough to the train tracks in the South End of Burlington, Vermont to hear the Central Vermont freight trains that rumbled by.

The next morning I breakfasted at the continental buffet. I sampled from many of these “added bonuses” in my journey through Literary America. This one consisted of some bagels and miniature tubs of processed cream cheese, toaster waffles with flavored corn syrup, square slabs of white or wheat bread, already going stale, generally poor coffee. Since dawn had broken, I could see my surroundings, which were pretty much empty fields. I broke camp and got on the road. I wanted to be in Clyde before noon.

More evidence of trains in Clyde: separate tracks coming around a bend and converging just before Main Street, before running off into a green tunnel of trees and underbrush on the other side. I found a parking spot in the shade near a house from whose porch some president had once made a speech. I was only a few blocks from the library—a Carnegie library with a prominent gothic turret with the names of the United States’ early writers carved into the granite: Longfellow and Hawthorne, Melville, and others. The library has a pleasant addition to it. At one time, Sherwood Anderson’s books had been banned from this library. Nowadays, there is a room devoted to him. Researchers welcome.

After spending some time there I left the choicest streets behind for a while and walked down Spring Street to look for Anderson’s first home. The Anderson family had not owned the house. They merely rented. Perhaps as a consequence, the first home of Clyde’s most famous son is unmarked. It was, at the time I passed by, an upholstery shop. Close by was the former site of the spring that had given the street its name. It was covered over after a child drowned there.

My notes from the visit include the following, which I wrote about the side streets:

“The houses seem like they should be huddled close together, like commuters on a sparsely-filled platform, waiting on a train. Thin-shouldered and plain commuters, with elbow room in mind. Anderson would have seen a story in each one.”

A few blocks further on I found the Waterworks. A stream meandered through a cut in a grassy field, into the waterworks basin at one end and out the basin at the other. In the 1950’s, a writer and photographer, David Scherman and Rosemarie Redlich, traveled through the United States photographing literary sites for a book called (coincidentally) Literary America. They had come through Clyde, and photographed some boys fishing at the waterworks. There were no boys fishing there the day I came through, though the area is now a town park. In fact, the entire downtown seemed strangely deserted; plenty of cars parked but no residents on the the street except for one young man who went to get a haircut and for the county fair, whose carnies were setting up the rides near the former train depot.

The commercial blocks of Main Street still look pretty much like they did in Anderson’s time. Behind them, on both sides of the street, run the back alleys that once fascinated Anderson. They are not as fecund, nor as confining, nor as littered with refuse as they were in his day. But they still demonstrate the symbolic power the author saw in them: on the Main Street side, the buildings show their public facades, and in the alley they display something more private, less ordered.

I walked down a few more of the nicest streets, such as Main Street and Buckeye Street. Clyde is full of beautiful trees and has some impressive houses. Green backyards open onto other green backyards, In one of those backyards is the watering trough that used to be part of the county fairgrounds, now replaced by a public school. I would have loved to see it.

I can see why the residents of Clyde were upset by Anderson’s book. It has been pretty well proven that, although the names of some of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio had a strong resemblance to the names of real residents of Clyde, the lives of those (mostly unhappy) characters were not lifted from the real people. Clyde really felt like Sherwood Anderson’s town, nonetheless. Anderson had described a small town in Ohio with a great deal of accuracy. The fact that nearly all of the residents of Winesburg had unhappy inner lives was Anderson’s take on life, I think. These were the “ugly things of life” as Anderson described them in a letter to the editor he sent the stories to. I don’t believe he had meant to impugn the people of his home town. For a humorous take on this, see the Onion newspaper’s article on Wal Mart coming to Winesburg.

I wish I could recommend some restaurants in Clyde but I had to get over to Akron before the end of the day. I drove on some country road through the farmland outside of Clyde for a little while but, fearing that I would get lost, I meandered back to the main route and left the town behind.