“Doing Your Own Thing”

Novelist Ernie Hebert on studying with Stegner, reading the critics, and what it means to be an American.

Ernest Hebert, a professor of creative writing, isn't all that comfortable in academia's ivory tower, even though he's been here for 13 years. That he holds a tenured faculty position at all is somewhat amazing. When New Hampshire's Keene State College denied him admission in 1959 because of low test scores, the 18-year-old joined the Army reserves and bounced around a series of dead-end jobs before gaining admission to Keene State in 1964. From there he wrote his way into Stanford University—where he studied with novelist Wallace Stegner—but left after a year. Still, he went on to write, mostly about the people he knew—the hard scrabble inhabitants of small-town New Hampshire. They became fodder for his first five novels.

Heberts latest book, The Old American (University Press of New England), is a departure for the writer. The protagonist, Caucus-Meteor, is a Native-American king who lived more than two centuries ago.

Why the change in subject matter?

I came to Dartmouth because when my wife and I started making babies, I couldn't quite hack it out there as a freelance writer. I loved teaching, but academia undermined my fictional world. When I was a newspaper reporter I was always in touch with the kinds of people I wrote about. Here I got away from them and suddenly found myself with nothing to write about. The environment doesn't lend it self to creativity. When you are a professor, you don't take in the world around you, you spin out what you know, and you're not learning anything when you're talking. I actually had to reinvent myself as a writer, and Dartmouth provides a beautiful library and lots of really good people. So, I sort of found myself wanting to write this historical narrative, because the resources were here for me.

How true to history is your novel?

Pretty close. It's a narrative based on a real guy named Nathan Blake from my hometown of Keene, New Hampshire, who was captured by the Indians. My research gets down to the living thing. How did people live? What kind of clothes did they wear? What kind of structures did they live in? What kind of transportation did they use? Their weapons and even their philosophies—l didn't do any writing on this book for almost three years; it was just research.

Did the Native-American studies programat Dartmouth play any role?

Yeah, a really weird thing happened. One of my best sources for this book was a historian named Colin Calloway. I read three of his books because he dealt with Indians in New England. And all of a sudden, I just happened to drop his name to someone and they said, oh yeah, he's right here at Dartmouth (as chair of Native-American studies). I had no clue.

So you talked to him?

I asked him to read an early draft of the manuscript for historical purposes, looking ing out for the obvious faux pas I might have made.

What do you like most about The OldAmerican?

I think the character Caucus-Meteor, for me, is the heart and soul of the book. He's a sort of disguised version of how I envision myself at his age. There are elements of my father in him and also elements of my father-in-law, Leo Lavoie, who is a good friend as well as kin. So I took these two old guys, I took my own hangups, like ambition and all these things that make me unhappy, and all of it somehow ended up in this crazy old Indian guy.

What do you want the reader to get outof this new book?

An answer to the question, "What is it to be an American?" To me, being American, what we can all agree on, is doing your own thing, the individual before the group, but also consensus democracy. Where do these values come from? I think most of them come from Native America, and I try to show that.

Which writers have influenced you?

I think John Gardner was my biggest influence. I've embraced his philosophy of the fictional dream, and I think he's the biggest influence on me intellectually. I can pick up a Gardner novel anywhere and be interested. The other writer who really influenced me was George Orwell. I've actually read every single word of his that I could put my hands on.

What did Stegner teach you that youcan pass on to your students?

Stegner did his job. I mean he would give you good critiques and he never cheated. He's my model for teaching. I try to give the students as complete a critique as I can and try to make myself as available as I can. I'm a big believer in taking the job seriously.

The Old American received good review.Do you read them?

Well, you can't not read them because your publisher sends them to you via e-mail.

What about the bad ones?

What bad ones? Bad reviews used to ruin my day. Now, thanks to advancing age, I just forget them. a

Randy Stebbing is an English major fromBowman, North Dakota.