Appreciations: Edward Hoagland, Peerless Essayist With ‘The Reformer’s Impulse,’ R.I.P.

Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary on Henry David Thoreau will, I hope, earn the great New England essayist, nature observer, and commentator on the human condition countless new readers, and/or send others back to his work. As they do so, perhaps they will see how other writers have followed in his path—few as beneficially or as powerfully as the American essayist, travel writer, memoirist, and novelist, Edward Hoagland, who died in late February at age 93.

As an undergrad, I came across his essays as an undergrad and interviewed him for my college newspaper. Ever since then, whenever a magazine (usually Harper’s) came out with a new piece by him, I eagerly snatched it up.

Two anthologies of Hoagland’s nonfiction (The Edward Hoagland Reader and Hoagland On Nature), appearing a quarter century apart, were issued by his publishers at the time. I hope that a comprehensive career retrospective will come within the next year or so. It would be a shame for his idiosyncratic but lyrical voice to die with him, without exposing a new generation of readers to his work.

Hoagland wrote half a dozen novels and a collection of short stories. But the average suburban library is unlikely to hold these on their shelves. (I could find only one, In the Country of the Blind, in my county system of 78 libraries). As for publishers: trying to package or market long fiction can be tricky, and so nonfiction will probably be the realm where most readers will encounter him.

Somehow, in a book sale or, if necessary, Amazon, I’ll have to hunt for this fiction. But his nonfiction will still work for me.

Although his virtues into fiction were not permanently stymied, lack of commercial success and an inability to project a suitable narrative voice propelled Hoagland towards nonfiction in the late 1960s. He worked on his third novel, The Peacock's Tail (1965), set in New York City, he “for five years and it sold 900 copies,” he told me in the 1980 interview, “so if you divide the years into 900 you can figure out now much I worked for how little."

The personal essay beckoned, Hoagland observed, because he had to “tell my own story, and also I have the kind of mind that speaks easily in an essay form, in a direct, preachy tone of voice, I suppose"—in other words, fulfilling what Hoagland termed "the reformer's impulse," or the urge to tell the world how it should be.

Quirky and honest, Hoagland mined for material in multiple aspects of his life: the straitlaced WASP upbringing that provoked his rebellious instincts, Harvard literary mentors Archibald MacLeish and John Berryman, working with animals in a circus, travels to places like British Columbia and Africa, and marital relations.

Dividing the year in his prime between Greenwich Village and Vermont, Hoagland hardly disdained the rich variety of life in cities. “I loved the city like the country — the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook — and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir, Compass Points.

You can’t consider Hoagland’s life and work without keeping in mind his two disabilities: one, stuttering, affecting him most at the beginning of his life, and the other, blindness, in late middle age until his death.

When I met him, at age 48, his stammer was intermittent but protracted. Even knowing of his condition beforehand, I felt for him as he struggled to push the words out. Speech therapy could not eradicate or, it seemed, even ease what he called his “vocal handcuffs” to any degree.

"Since I didn't talk so much I had a dialogue in my own mind,” he told me. “Writing is a kind of dialogue in one's own mind, so it all fitted in, I suppose, with that."

This difficulty lent special urgency to his desire to express himself—or, as he put it in a 1968 Village Voice essay, “The Threshold and the Jolt of Pain,” it "made me a desperate, devoted writer at twenty. I worked like a dog, choosing each word."

One of the painful ironies of American literature in this past quarter century has been that this essayist and novelist, who noted in Tigers and Ice (1999) that “A writer's work is to witness things,” increasingly battled blindness from late middle age onward.

Even his worsening medical condition, however, was a matter of rejuvenated appreciation for nature and physical acceptance. Given a temporary reprieve by successful midlife eye surgery, he returns to Vermont to see “the juncos wintering in the dogwoods, the hungry possum nibbling seeds under the birdfeeder, the startling glory of our skunk’s white web of fur in a shaft of faint moonlight.”

The titles of three late-life essays in Harper’s—“Last Call,” “Curtain Calls,” and “Endgame”—testify to his calm, pantheistic acceptance of death, and the hope that his decomposed body would mix at last with the natural world he had so long loved.

I find it hard to accept that I won’t find new work by this unabashedly independent spirit. But I will continually come back to the rich legacy he left behind, of essays that contained, as he put it in The Tugman’s Passage, "a 'nap' to it, a combination of personality and originality and energetic loose ends that stand up like the nap on a piece of wool and can't be brushed flat."