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

We finally left Santa Monica on the eastward journey (on the Christopher Columbus transcontinental highway) as the rain started falling on the windshield of the Dodge Grand Caravan. The storm was coming from the north and I expected we would pass through it by the time we reached the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, which stretch on and on until they finally subside into barren desert. But instead, the rain stayed with us almost to Barstow. Near Barstow we passed the hotel in whose parking
lot my friend Richard and I and my cat Xerox slept on my journey from the East Coast to the West Coast more than a decade ago. We had planned to stop in Las Vegas then, after a grueling trip from New Mexico. But the rodeo was in town and there was no room in Vegas. At least not any that we could, in our weariness and ignorance, find.

This time, Rika and I were prepared, and had already booked a room at the Excalibur (going almost solely on price, not on the aesthetic appeal of its legoland like turrets and battlements). It was a good choice. Though the bed left something to be desired (pillows that wilted at the slightest touch and a mattress that made me feel, all night, as if I were about to roll off the side of the bed), the accomodations were ok and the view of the Strip was grand. Felix stared raptly out the window at the flow of cards, at the golden lion in front of the MGM Grand, and at the tram below us that looked like a black viper as it issued forth from its station on the way to the Mandalay Bay casino.

We left Las Vegas at ten in the morning and headed up Interstate 15 towards Utah. Passed a Wal Mart distribution center in St. George that looked big enough to have its own weather. St. George is at the crossroads of the route to Salt Lake City and the route south to Arizona. There were some rather large new apartment buildings, seemingly abandoned, at the outskirts of town. And I wondered, as we drove by, how many others of the many many new brown tile rooftopped houses in St. George were owned by the bank, or by many banks and investors in tranches. A strip across America that includes its less-populated areas seems like a good way to take a sounding of the depth of the bubble and its bursting over the last few years. It seems the tide was a huge one. And when it receded it left a lot of places dry. I read somewhere that nearly all of the growth in the GDP over the past decade was due to investment banking and other forms of investment trading. It is amazing to see how far its effects reached. It is also instructive to see how many people in this country live in trailers, as Annie Proulx has written about in WYOMING STORIES. Trailers dot the landscape, as do the remnents of failed ventures. Stegner wrote how, in the East, a ghost town would be swallowed up by nature whereas in the West it leaves a scar.

Around Nephi it began to rain again. I had been expecting this entire trip, at least until we got through Nebraska, would be dry. And my thoughts kept returning to those 100 books we have in the back of the minivan, each encased in its own cardboard mailing carton, but certainly not impervious to the dampness. Books are like barometers. They do react to the humidity (though they cannot forecast storms).

An hour or so later the rain paused and a double rainbow arched across the road. As we climbed out of Nevada the land seemed to become less hardscrabble. Though its mountains are many and forbidding, in its valleys Utah looks, as one of its towns is named, quite bountiful. Livestock and horses grazed in fields. The grass by the side of the road and in the median was a beautiful pale yellow color, almost a platinum blond.

Now here we are in Layton, Utah, home of Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We will visit there tomorrow. And then I will approach my first two bookstores.

TRH

Herd to believe,but in 15 days the booksigning at Santa Barbara’s Chaucer’s Books will be behind us and we (my wife, my son, and I) will be taking to the open road on our way to the East Coast.

Our first stop will be Las Vegas. Why? Because it’s there. Though it certainly does have a certain literary and cinematic allusiveness, to boot. I hope that, unlike Hunter S. Thompson, I won’t see giant bats flying at the windshield as we get close.

The second stop will be Salt Lake City–city that Wallace Stegner came to consider home,  and home to one of my major clients as a printer: Gibbs Smith, Publisher. We will definitely stop in at Gibbs Smith, Publisher, where I want to introduce my son to Marty Lee- Vice President of Production and a fine human being. 

Gibbs Smith, Publisher grew from very small publisher to one of the powerhouses of the Western United States. Below, some of their history (lifted from their website)

The Beginning

Gibbs M. Smith always wanted to be a history professor. But while in pursuit of his master’s degree, Smith wrote a dissertation on Joe Hill–American labor martyr, proletarian folk hero, and songwriter–that profoundly changed his life. After the book was published by the University of Utah press and made into a movie, Gibbs started entertaining the idea of starting his own publishing company. While riding a cable car in San Francisco and contemplating this venture, he wrote Alfred Knopf a letter. “In my view, he was the greatest publisher in America,” reflects Smith. Knopf wrote back with words of encouragement; later they spoke over the phone. Gibbs now had the inspiration needed to embark upon this extraordinary entrepreneurial adventure. In 1969, Gibbs and his wife, Catherine, started the company known today as Gibbs Smith, Publisher. With $12,000 in cash earned from the Smiths’ work on the movie Joe Hill, the company published four initial books, which would be used as supplementary texts in college history classes. The first few years were tough, as Gibbs and his wife, Cathy, ran the company out of their studio apartment in Santa Barbara.

The Barn

In 1973, the company relocated to Utah, where Gibbs and Cathy reinvested profits back into the business and lived on savings. They spent the first summer there converting an old barn (built in 1916) on the family farm into offices. It was a race against time, as the barn had no roof and winter was rapidly approaching. During that summer they also managed to publish a new textbook, Utah’s Heritage. This proved to be a very wise decision, as the company’s textbook division provided financial stability during the early years.

Working in a semi-converted barn was challenging at times. Madge Baird, who joined the company in 1974 and now serves as Managing Editor, recalls a meeting with an author that was interrupted by the birth of a lamb. “When I heard the news I jumped up, ran outside, and started ‘lambing,’” she said.

Gibbs will never forget sharing the barn with cows those first few years. “You could hear them mooing through the walls,” he says with a smile. “People could hear them over the phone, too.” When he would explain the ruckus, the response on the other end of the line was always the same: “You do what . . .from where?”

Today, many of the employees of Gibbs Smith, Publisher continue to work in the small but rustic and charming barn, and thankfully, the cows are long gone.

 

I’ll tell you more in the days that follow.

TRH

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.”

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.

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