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."

Quote of the Day (Edward Hoagland, on City Walking)

“[I]f you ask people who have some choice in the matter why they live in a particular neighborhood, one answer they will give is that they ‘like to walk.’ Walking is a universal form of exercise, not age—oriented or bound to any national heritage, and costs and implies nothing except maybe a tolerant heart. Like other sports, it calls for a good eye as well as cheerful legs—those chunky gluteus muscles that are the butt of mankind’s oldest jokes—because the rhythm of walking is in the sights and one’s response as much as simply in how one steps.” —American essayist-novelist Edward Hoagland, "City Walking," New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1975, collected in Heart's Desire: The Best of Edward Hoagland: Essays from Twenty Years (1988)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Epstein, on ‘The Modest Reputation of the Essay’)

“One might, at an early age, wish to be a poet or a dramatist or a novelist or even possibly a critic. One somehow wanders or stumbles into becoming an essayist. But, given the modest reputation of the essay and the way it has tended to be taught in schools, it is quite amazing that anyone should ever again wish to read essays let alone write them.” —American essayist and editor Joseph Epstein, A Literary Education and Other Essays (2014)

Although I don’t think that one develops an interest in the essay from an early age, as one does for the other forms that Epstein cites, I would not attribute this to how it is taught. I think it has ever been thus.

Nearly 40 years ago, one of the best contemporary essayists, Edward Hoagland, told me, when I interviewed him for my college newspaper, that, at least in his case, resort to the essay resulted from “the reformer’s impulse” to set the world right. Even if you qualify it and say one’s own world, that still holds true.

The genre is a meditative one, one to come at the point in a life that calls for self-assessment or self-improvement. Childhood is hardly the time for that.

If one aspect of our age threatens the essay as a genre, it might the tendency toward assertion—i.e., simply stating a position—rather than persuasion—a thorough consideration of counter-arguments and an honest attempt to speak to them. The confessional impulse behind the essay may be stronger than ever, but without this attempt at reader outreach and understanding, I fear for its future ability to engage those who encounter it.

Quote of the Day (Edward Hoagland, on Secondhand Lives in the Digital Era)

“I appreciate the utility of power in the winter, but many people seldom see a sunrise or sunset nowadays; they’re looking at a screen. What will this do? The Northern Lights, the Big Dipper — are they eclipsed like the multiplication tables? There was a magnetism to aurora borealis or a cradle moon, to spring peepers’ sleigh-bell sound or spindrift surfing toward shore under cumulus clouds, that galvanized delights in us almost Paleolithic.

“Are we stunted if we lose it, a deflation associated with migrating indoors to cyberspace, Facebook instead of faces?” —Essayist-naturalist Edward Hoagland, “Living Life Secondhand,” The New York Times, November 9, 2014

Photo of the Day: Turtle Time, Sea Pines Forest Preserve, SC

One of my favorite essayists, Edward Hoagland, in the evocative title piece in his 1971 collection The Courage of Turtles, notes of these creatures: “They don't feel that the contest is unfair; they keep plugging, rolling like sailorly souls—a bobbing, infirm gait, a brave, sea-legged momentum—stopping occasionally to study the lay of the land. For me, anyway, they manage to contain the rest of the animal world.” No wonder he calls them “the particular animal I wanted to keep in touch with.”

I got “in touch with” this particular member of the species down in Sea Pines Forest Preserve, home to all manner of wildlife down in Hilton Head, S.C. (See, for instance, my prior post on a more exotic—and dangerous—animal I saw down there: the alligator.) I agree with Hoagland: for adaptability, endurance, indomitability—i.e., courage—you can’t top the turtle, though.