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 (Carl Safina, on February, ‘The Deepest, Sparest Part of Winter’)

“To animals whose food stopped breeding last summer, February makes no promises. For those of us accustomed to supermarket shelves that endlessly get restocked, it may seem like news to remind ourselves that winter is a race against time in a season getting hungrier. February becomes the deepest, sparest part of winter.

“But lengthening days mean the sky is about to draw a deep breath.”—American ecologist, nature writer—and MacArthur “genius” Fellow—Dr. Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (2011)

I took the accompanying image four years ago this month in Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on ‘Beauty Visible to Us in the Landscape’)

“Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden. Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand. Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more.”—American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Autumnal Tints,” The Atlantic, October 1862

I took the image accompanying this post in late October 2008.

Quote of the Day (Rachel Carson, on What’s Found ‘In Every Curving Beach’)

“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is a story of the earth.” ― American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist Rachel Carson (1907-1964), “Our Ever-Changing Shore,” Holiday Magazine, July 1958

The image accompanying this post was taken on a beach while I was on vacation in Hilton Head, S.C., in November 2014.

Quote of the Day (James Kilpatrick, on a Blue Ridge ‘Etched Impression of a Snowy Night’)

“Nothing much happens up here in the Blue Ridge mountains—only life, birth, death, law, philosophy, the harvest of a summer, the etched impression of a snowy night.”—Conservative columnist, editor and TV commentator James Kilpatrick (1920-2010), The Foxes’ Union (1977)

Quote of the Day (Annie Dillard, on the ‘February Squawks’ of Birds in the Valley)

“The birds have started singing in the valley. Their February squawks and naked chirps are fully fledged now, and long lyrics fly in the air. Birdsong catches in the mountains’ rim and pools in the valley; it threads through forests, it slides down creeks. At the house a wonderful thing happens. The mockingbird that nests each year in the front-yard spruce strikes up his chant in high places, and one of those high places is my chimney. When he sings there, the hollow chimney act as a soundbox, like the careful emptiness inside a cello or violin, and the notes of the song gather fullness and reverberate through the house. He sings a phrase and repeats it exactly; then he sings another and repeats that, then another. The mockingbird’s invention is limitless; he strews newness about as casually as a god. He is tireless, too; toward June he will begin his daily marathon at two in the morning and scarcely pause for breath until eleven at night. I don’t know when he sleeps.” —American essayist Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

Quote of the Day (Hal Borland, on ‘Each New Season’)

“Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.”— American journalist and naturalist Hal Borland (1900-1978), Sundial of the Seasons (1964)

Welcome, Summer!

Quote of the Day (Carl Safina, on Sighting Loons on Long Island in May)

“The rich rouge of first light seems to purge the lingering chill, and even if the effect is purely psychological, it works for me. Well before sunrise, the air over the beach and ocean has become a conveyor of loons. More loons than I ever remember seeing—all Common Loons— are streaming northeast into the red-throated dawn. Continuously, I have loons in sight. If a casual glance upward reveals none, a scan with the binoculars reveals many. They flap constantly, as if flying is always an effort. With their long necks extended and legs outstretched, their wings seem smaller than needed for so long and hefty a body. They come singly or in loose groups of up to about a dozen. Many come close overhead, their blacks lustrous, their whites luminous. By the time I leave the beach, the red sun of dawn has already mellowed to yellow, the blue sky paled, but loons are still coming.”—American ecologist, nature writer—and MacArthur “genius” Fellow—Dr. Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (2011)

(Photo of Carl Safina taken by Carl’s Crew on Feb. 7, 2011.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Safina, on Long Island’s Eastern Shore in Mid-September)

“By mid-September the light has paled. Sunrise comes later, dusk earlier. The dawn bird chorus, so energizing in the spring and early summer, is gone. Only Blue Jays announce the day, their raucous calls ringing through the cooling mornings. No mockingbirds play minstrel to the dead of night, or issue their aubade. That’s not to say the world has fallen silent. Insects fill the air with a deep-pile trill that carpets every corner of night, colors the dusk, and tints the morning. It is time for their cadenza.”— Blue Ocean Institute founder Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (2012)

(Photo of Carl Safina taken by Carl’s Crew on Feb. 7, 2011.)

 

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.