A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

In case anyone was paying attention, I wasn’t…

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.

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

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[i] Profile by Colette Dowling in The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 1979, p. 44

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.

Safe travels. TRH

I’ll start this review by admitting that I’m not the easiest guy in the world to shop for, and I really do feel bad for all of the people in my life who have to buy me gifts whenever my birthday or Christmas rolls around. The problem, if you can call it that, is that I’m just not into things. I am, however, a book lover, but this also raises a number of issues in the gift-giving arena–the biggest of which is that nobody (including myself half the time) knows which books I own or have read, and so nobody knows which books to give me. And, yes, there are always gift cards to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, but these gifts, heartfelt and sincere though they may be, smack slightly of defeat. They say, “I wanted to get you something, but I didn’t know what, so I’ll let you figure it out for yourself.”

I say all of this because I’m sure I’m not the only person out there who’s hard to buy for. And I further suspect that all of these people who are, like me, hard to buy for have people who love them and who want to buy them something out of the ordinary whenever gift-giving season rolls around. But they (the people who love the people who are hard to buy for) can never find the right gift and will–at the last moment, when all hope is lost–always settle for giving yet another gift card each holiday season even though they’d much prefer to buy a gift from the heart that say, “Hey! I care about you, and I know you well enough to get you this wonderful gift!” To put it bluntly, I’m saying all of this because I know how hard it is to shop for book lovers. But no more–for A Journey Through Literary America by Thomas R. Hummel and Tamra L. Dempsey is, I daresay, the perfect gift for book lovers.

First, the book is, objectively speaking, aesthetically beautiful. Illustrated with page after glossy page of vibrant photographs, it explores the settings that inspired many of America’s most loved authors–from Washington Irving’s Castkills to Robinson Jeffers’ Big Sur and back to Toni Morrison’s Lorain, Ohio (and many, many other places in between). Yet the book is more than just a collection of pretty (or, more accurately, stunning) pictures. And it’s even more than just an examination of the specific places that had a profound effect on the literary output of certain authors. Rather, it’s a meditation on relationship between place and author, or, even more broadly, upon place and self, place and identity. This is no small feat, for it takes the authors we admire in the abstract and places them squarely in the real world. Seeing their homes, seeing their towns, seeing the streets they walked and the rolling vistas that inspired them makes the 26 authors examined in A Journey all the more real to me, all the more human.

Needless to say, this volume is both a treat and treasure. Informative as it is beautiful, it will make a wonderful addition to any library. And, if you’re looking for the perfect gift for the book lover in your life, look no further than A Journey Through Literary America.

Original: http://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/a-journey-through-literary-america/