HIDING BEHIND THE TREES
A New England novelist critiques the regions literary lure.
New England writers fall in a line of a tradition of big names and big stories—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Thoron Wilder, Robert Frost; Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Our Town,The Road Not Taken. Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, perhaps the most acclaimed of all American novels, takes off from a New England seacoast town. And the most influential American novel ever, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a New England townswoman.
Even Mark Twain, that great writer of mid-America and the Mississippi, eventually made his home in Hartford, Connecticut. (He was a neighbor of Harriet Beecher Stowe.) In his later years, Twain wrote and sounded like a misanthropic, reticent Yankee.
The literary tradition in New England flashed onto the screen of this century in unexpected guises. One of the biggest sellers in the history of American popular fiction was Grace Metalious's Peyton Place. The place was based, much to the chagrin of local people, on Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Jack Kerouac, the father of the Beat Generation, best known for Onthe Road, was from Lowell, Massachusetts, with roots in New Hampshire. Besides his more celebrated works about restless youth and bebop ways, Kerouac also chronicled life in his native mill town in his first novel, TheTown and the City, and in subsequent works such as Doctor Sax.
Like Twain, Metalious and Kerouac often wrote about Yankee matters, but they themselves were Franco-Americans, not Yankees. This trend of nonYankee writers in Yankee land continues. Perhaps hundreds of published fiction writers live in New England, but most come from someplace else, and the native writers often have roots outside of Yankee land. Of course, not all New England writers are transplants; some started life here. To name a few natives: Russell Banks, Carolyn Chute, Stephen King, Tabitha King, John Irving, Mary McGarry Morris, Robert Olmstead, E. Annie Proulx. Yet whether transplant or native, if a writer stays here long, the Yankee ethic gets into his or her blood. The harsh social climate of Hawthorne's The ScarletLetter is repeated in Peyton Place. The alienation, innocence, and strange hope of Thoreau and the Transcendentalists comes again in the alienation, innocence, and strange hope of Kerouac and the Beats.
Land and weather help shape New England writers; so too does the New England village. There's something about a New England town that is forever local and forever universal. As long as the New England town exists, writers will find subject matter as well as sanctuary.
What is this community all about, and why does it make such good material? The town common (or green), the stark white meeting house, fall leaves, maple syrup, stone walls, and dairy farms provide a rich and varied setting. The land that surrounds the town is rugged, hilly, beautiful but harsh. Like the land, the people are often closed in; shaped by their weather, they're sometimes mean in spirit but deep. They hide metaphorically behind the trees. They're full of secrets; they're worth writing about.
I think the main feature of the New England town is its diversity. Here you'll find: The reticent village Yankee, suspicious but practical-minded, concerned with hanging on. The upland farmer, suspicious but practicalminded, wondering whether to sell out or pass the farm to ungrateful kin, concerned with real estate, taxes, and the price of milk. The tweedy squire, suspicious but impractically minded, concerned with matters relating to the environment and the decline of the L.L. Bean product line. The poor folk in shacks and trailers with junk cars in the yard, recyclers by necessity, concerned with hanging on. The commuter in a new home with a giant septic system, concerned with improving the schools, changing the zoning, and preserving the identity of the town, in that order.
Rich and poor, young and old, male and female, dignitaries and desperadoes weave in and out of each other's lives. They bump into each other at the general store and at sugar-on-snow parties and at Old Home Day. Once a year they look each other in the eye as equals at the town meeting. The New England town is neither cosmopolitan nor suburban; it's an arena for this endangered, democratic institution that certifies the uniqueness of the region: town meeting.
Cities are too big for one writer to comprehend; suburbs are, well, bland. The mid-American town is fragmented, wholesome but not whole, governed as it is by the county. Only the New England town remains a political and social unit. Whether such a place succeeds or fails in the real world, it provides terrific material for the writer.
Most contemporary fiction with a New England tone is produced by writers north and west of Boston. That's not surprising. So much of southern New England has merged into suburban or urban America that it has become like anywhere-else U.S.A. But the North Country hangs on, if just barely, to its identity.
Here are a few works of fiction by living writers with roots in our area.
Ernest Hebert writes about life on theother side of the tracks.
The odds are pretty good that an Ernest Hebert fictional character has a couple of clapped-out Dodges and a rusted Chevy entombed in the dooryard. In November, Hebert, an acclaimed novelist and assistant professor of English, will have published the fifth and final volume in a series (The Dogs of March, A LittleMore Than Kin, Whisper My Name, ThePassion of Estelle Jordan, and Live Freeor Die) centered on the fictional town of Darby, New Hampshire—the place the impoverishedjordan clan, a group its creator describes in his first novel as an "illiterate, uncouth, congenitally defective" family, calls home. Why write about people like the Jordans? "To even the score," says Hebert, whom The New York Times hailed in 1984 as a writer who "will do for the hinterlands what John Updike has done for the suburbs." "Nobody writes about these people,"says Hebert. "Or if they do, they write about them in a condescending way, from the point of view of the middle class. I travel the backroads of America a lot, and most of the people I see aren't in that class. I'm just trying to show a different world." Born himself into a working-class family in Keene, New Hampshire, Hebert worked at an assortment of blue-collar jobs and served in the army before enrolling at Keene State College at age 23. In college, Hebert decided to become a poet. He later enrolled at the Stanford University Writing Center, where he switched from verse to prose. After graduate school, he returned to New England where his writing career was enriched by stints as a gas station manager, reporter, and college professor. In contrast to his professional progression, Hebert's entire literary life, a total of 15 years, has been spent in Darby. This year he decided it was time to say goodbye to the townspeople for economic as well as artistic reasons. "They haven't earned me a living," he notes, simultaneously explaining why a winner of a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation teaches undergrads. Moreover, he maintains, being tagged by critics as a "regional novelist" is "the kiss of death in sales." Hebert's students, however, learn that there is more to writing than sales. He tells them that writing good fiction is like "going to the mat with your soul," and he recommends that all students go through a writing phase: it is a way "of learning about one's self, society, and history." Joni B. Cole
