A Journey Through Literary America :: Blog

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

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

East of Denver, more of the same. Interstate lanes, buttes and rises and hillocks smoothed by mighty earthmoving equipment to create the Eisenhower Interstate System, alongside which not a living soul is to be seen…Our TARP dollars at work in mile after mile of road repairs: white line painting, paving, inexplicable spraying of liquid on the shoulders, miles upon miles of orange striped road work barrels taller than my son with signs warning of increased fines in road work areas (trying to give some of that TARP money back?)

Back in Denver at the Tattered Cover the booksellers gathered ’round the book, admiring it. The Tattered Cover, another died and gone to bookstore heaven experience, a different heavenk, this one in a former opera house or theather…immense…with comfortable chairs, the barnes and noble experience of pleasanty seating but un-canned, the furrniture not something you would find at the Holiday Inn Express…W.P. Kinsella, Annie Leibovitz looking dramatic, Al Gore looking not, Nick Bantock, Opalonga Pugh, Bobbie Ann Mason looking like a Bobbie Ann (with all due respect), Amy Tan, Kazuo Ishiguro looking like his prose, George Plimpton looking like a living icon (may he rest in peace), Susan Minot with flashes of early beauty, Walter Mosley looking friendly, Larry McMurtry looking like we saw him at the Academy awards for Brokeback Mountain, Martin Amis looking British and very much like a writer–these are the black and white photographs of authors who have read at the Tattered Cover. These framed photographs line the two staircases leading to the lower floor, and these are just a few of the names cuylled from one flight of stairs. The Tattered Cover is an inspiration, a landmark for book lovers in a Denver landmark building with statuary across the street against the watery blue Denver sky that makes it look all the more a wonderment.

The Tattered Cover

The kind of view, coming out of a bookshop, that could fill one with purpose...

As Colorado segues into Nebraska the terrain changes. A few men in pickup trucks are seen on country roads, a golden retriever in the back of one, fur flowing in the strong breeze. Finally, some people. And then more of the same: ribbons of highway cut through the midst of everything, though with some wather here and there at the side of the road. Then Gothenburg, a town of 3,000, with the second floor of an old Pony Express stop in the midst of the town square with a cheerful guide who relates how the stop was moved from a nearby farm to here and how it snowed six inches the week before. the Pony Express only existed for less than two years, running all the way from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California and the investors took a bath on it before they were replaced by the telegraph. But what an impact they have made on the collective memory.

Cabins like these were positioned every 12 miles through all kinds of terrain

Rika and Felix in the Gothenburg town square

A few miles later, a covered arch over Interstate 80 in Kearney. This would be familiar to those who read The Echo Maker by Richard Powers which takes place in Kearney. Bonnie, the erstwhile girlfriend works there in authentic period dress. We didn’t stop in Kearney but Powers’s book has made it a fit subject for literary america.

The interstates this time of year belong to the tractor trailers. Long haul carriers, short haul carriers, passing each other in the manner of racers in a very long race. On the sides one sees the railroad tracks every now and then, and the immensely long coal trains that probably come from the Powder River in Wyoming (John McPhee wrote about them in a New Yorker two part article a few years back which is now only available with a subscription). That night at the Holiday Inn Express we check out the movie CARS, by Pixar, which turns out to be a celebration of the beauty of the old Route 66 and the way things wuz before the Interstate came in and sterilized the driving experience–a message that was lost on felix who was, however, transfixed by the cars. A good road movie for the child.

 Hastings, NE…city of 25000, where Kool Ade was invented. At the local museum: “Mount It! The Art of Taxidermy”, a convenience store named Smokes ‘N Jokes, a hair cutting place with a sign up that says “sometimes this business gets a little hairy.” Suggestion to comedians who cannot make it in the big leagues: move to Hastings. Hastings is just 43 miles, pretty much as the crow flies, from Red Cloud, the former home of Willa Cather.  

En Route to Red Cloud

Red Cloud: it’s Sunday. The town is closed up. Dead leaves skittering through the intersection in the middle of town. No stoplight. street paved with bricks. Only place open are the Sinclair gas station, with its logo of a brontosaurus (a comment on fossil fuels?) a convenience store/gas station names “The Bootleggers” where I ask for directions, and Cutters Cafe, where I drop off a book with the proprietor. By prearrangement she is going to give the book to the woman who runs the Cather Foundation bookstore tomorrow. When I walk in to Cutters, she asks, “So you’ve brought our book?” How on earth did she know who I was?

Cutter's Cafe, a little cut off...

Like a ghoulish tourist, I ask for directions to the cemetery. I need to set something right. In My Antonia, Antonia’s father commits suicide and, because that is a sin, is buried at the crossing of two roads, rather than in the cemetary. This was a story based on the real-life person named Annie Sadilek, whose father killed himself. In the book, I wrote that his grave was still out there in the prairie. It is not. he has been moved to the Catholic section of the cemetery where he now rests with his wife and his son, Anton.

The idea for A Journey Through Literary America came to me in January of 2008 in Kawasaki, Japan (near Tokyo), where I was visiting my wife’s family.

On the plane on the way over, I had devoured American Pastoral by Philip Roth. The book is narrated by one of Roth’s literary alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman, but it mostly concerns itself with the life of someone he grew up worshiping: one of the greatest athletes that Zuckerman’s Jewish Newark neighborhood of Weequahic had ever known: “Swede” Levov. So named because he looked so Swedish rather than Jewish, the Swede had married a Miss New Jersey (Catholic, much to the horror of his parents) and waved goodbye to a promising baseball career in order to take over his father’s glove factory in Newark.

The Roth house (second from the left). Photo: Thomas Hummel

Weequahic is not only Nathan Zuckerman’s stomping ground but also the neighborhood where Philip Roth grew up. One might use the term “predominantly Jewish” nowadays for how it was, in order to be respectful of other races that might have lived there, but back then I am sure it was known simply as the Jewish neighborhood. That is, solidly, squarely, any way you slice it—like a Snickers bar is packed with peanuts—Jewish. That was then. Nowadays, the neighborhood is quite mixed.

Photo: Thomas Hummel

There is a plaque on the house Roth grew up in, and a nearby intersection is named “Philip Roth Plaza,” The term seems misleading to me. I usually think of a plaza as a place to gather. I wouldn’t recommend gathering in the middle of a Newark intersection.

It is proper of Newark to honor Roth with at least an intersection, because some of his best writing is about Newark, starting with Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)—the novel that made him a household name and suggested a heretofore unheard-of (in literature anyway) use of liver for a sex-crazed boy. American Pastoral (1997) features vivid descriptions of Newark, from World War II through the Newark Riots in the 1960’s, and beyond. It sparked something in me back in 2008. I remember, for example, marking the passage where Roth writes about the Newark viaduct, “the Swede’s first encounter with the manmade sublime that divides and dwarfs. (American Pastoral, 220).” As Roth went on to say:

“That grim fortification was the city’s Chinese wall, brownstone boulders piled twenty feet high, strung out for more than a mile and intersected only by half a dozen foul underpasses. Along this forsaken street, as ominous now as any street in any ruined city in America, was a reptilian length of unguarded wall barren even of graffiti. But for the wilted weeds that managed to put forth in wiry clumps where the mortar was cracked and washed away, the viaduct wall was barren of everything except the affirmation of a weary industrial city’s prolonged and triumphant struggle to monumentalize its ugliness.” (p. 219)

Photo: Thomas Hummel

What was so special about American Pastoral that it lit the fuse for a book? I think Roth did it for me by the way he attached importance to surroundings. In one passage he writes:

“Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surfaces of things.” (p. 43).

As Samuel Johnson once said, “The true art of memory is the art of attention.” And what Roth created—and sold me on—was a truly artful job of memory and art. Through a preponderance of evidence, real and imagined, he brought the particular character of the city of Newark to life on the printed page.

After reading American Pastoral, I wanted to go to Newark with my brother, who lives in New York City and is always up for poking around a down-at-the-mouth area, and photograph the Viaduct. Put images to Philip Roth’s text. Part of the spark, then, came because I felt sure that the Viaduct was still there, and as Roth had described it. If I had to follow the river of this book’s inspiration all the way to its headwaters, this would be it: the little spring at which it all started was the idea of capturing places in pictures that great authors have described.

My original intent was to write text that was more like what you would find in a guidebook. Lively, yes, but mostly spare and functional. A side dish. And then what happened is that fervor of the writers gripped me. A side dish wasn’t good enough. I needed to do them justice, as much as I could. And at times, I felt as though I were competing with them. I did so with a pure pleasure in the sport of it, as I might get from leaping to catch a baseball, or a running down a fly ball.

I sometimes think that in 2007 I was inching my way towards an early senescence. I got tremendously tired at night. There was hardly a movie that I didn’t fall asleep in the middle of. I still had the lifelong desire to write but the novel I was working on sometimes put me to sleep while writing it. That fog has now lifted. Willa Cather once claimed that in order to write well she had to “get up feeling 13 years old and all set for a picnic.” Since I started working on A Journey Through Literary America, I have gotten up feeling, well, not that good but with a relish for life and for writing that I think must be akin to what Cather felt. TRH

Author’s note: capturing the Viaduct the way that Roth described it turned out to be nearly impossible—for me anyway. Tamra Dempsey, who took all the photographs for this book, had more success than I. But the best picture of it that I have seen remains the picture of it that Roth created, using words, in his book.