Homage to Hoagland: "Tiger Bright"

This is the third post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Tiger Bright” (included in Hoagland’s 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River).

Hoagland loved circuses. He worked in one for a few months in the spring of 1951, when he was eighteen. The experience made a lasting impression: see “Calliope Times” (The New Yorker, May 22, 2000; chapter 3 of his 2001 memoir Compass Points). In “Tiger Bright,” he writes about circus tigers and their trainers. The trainer he most admires is Gunther Gebel-Williams, “who constitutes a circus all by himself.” Hoagland calls him “the best animal trainer alive.” 

Hoagland’s descriptions of Gunther’s tiger act are extraordinary. For example:

Gunther’s tigers are mostly males, because a male, though surly and slow, is bigger – “more tiger,” as he says, measuring with his arms. They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese. He chants and sings like Glenn Gould as he works with them, swinging back and forth, drawing murmuring rumbles and air-blast roars. Tigers growl softly but roar far more explosively than lions do. He spreads his arms wide so the animals have both of them to keep track of, as well as watching his face; it’s like having two assistants in the ring. He holds his whips in one hand, butt and lash reversed, and pets tiger chins with the other, grinning like a lapsed angel, a satyr – it’s a lean V face, the flat planes cut for mischief and glee, or a big-eyed lemur’s, a tree-dweller’s face. Singing and chattering, he composes their ladylike lunges into a fluttering of stripes, touching his forehead with his fingers in a Hindu salute to acknowledge applause, and kneels theatrically while the tigers sit. Throwing sawdust on their turds so that he won’t slip, he pitches his whip like a jokester, his crucifix bouncing on his bare chest, his eyes big and round, organizing them into a jungle trot. They look bulky as bulls, but when he bats them they rise into a pussy pose, paws up. “Ziva!” he calls, running to one, mimicking the twitch of her white cheeks and black mouth, and stroking her rump. “Hubblebay!” he says, and they all revolve. The band accelerates into a keynote of victory.

And:

Maybe the loveliest moment is when Gunther simply has them walk: not a feat many trainers would consider exciting or could even achieve by the adversary technique. Two leave their pedestals and promenade as they might alongside a water hole. He induces another pair to join them – but counterposed – the two pairs passing in the center of the cage. Then he gets the other four to join in, crisscrossing as in Chinese checkers before lining up in formation like the spokes of a wheel. Round and round they slink, keeping abreast, looking up at him, delaying behind the band to exercise their claws (tigers never “march”).

And this beauty – my favorite of the piece:

Bidding this group good-bye, he welcomes a middle-aged, equable tiger, redder than most, and fluffing and scratching it, introduces two elephants, an African with tusks and an Indian one without. The Indian voices its aversion in squeals, the African is indifferent to the tiger, having perhaps inherited know feelings about it one way or the other. The tiger springs to the howdah that each of them carries, down to the ground and up again, then leaps between them, back and forth, finally mounting a platform near the roof of the cage, and jumps again onto the African’s back. Gunther directs all this choreography only by words, sitting at his ease on the ring curbing and watching. The elephants and tiger mount three pedestals and rotate quietly as he talks to them; he tugs on the African’s tusks and feeds it a loaf of Italian bread. The band plays traditional Spartan brass, the tiger mounts the African elephant again, and so does Gunther, his face in a Pan-like grin. He sits on the tiger, and leaning over, tugs its tufted chin, rubs his eyes and lips, and has it roar elegantly into his face. Then he and the tiger drop down to the ground, the elephants leave the cage, and he fondles the cat, tickling its black lips and its orange rump. Then he sits lightly astride its hips and rides it across the stage at a lumbering gallop, a sight not often seen.

Wow! Wow! Wow! A tour de force of evocative writing! Hoagland unfurls detail after amazing detail. The explosive roars. The fluttering stripes. Gunther’s crucifix “bouncing on his bare chest.” He even tells us what the big cats smell like: “They smell like rye bread smeared with Roquefort cheese.” Hoagland is an inspired describer. “Tiger Bright” exemplifies his art magnificently.

Homage to Hoagland: "Knights and Squires"

This is the second post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Knights and Squires: For Love of the Tugs” (included in Hoagland’s 1970 collection The Courage of Turtles).

This exuberant piece is an account of a day Hoagland spends aboard the tug Teresa Moran, “a new, 4290-horsepower, round-the-clock boat which had just changed crews, as it does every other day.” 

He introduces us to the crew: Captain Biagi (“Biagi’s back hurt because he’d been raking fertilizer into his lawn the day before; he’s peppy, talkative, competent, clever, and lives in East Brunswick, New Jersey”); co-captain Ray Carella (“Carella, who started on the Erie Canal at sixteen as a deckhand, now lives in East Meadow, Long Island, but is a gaunter, less assured, somber man”); Ture Eklund, deckhand (“a soft-spoken, civilized fellow who lives in Westchester County and builds model boats”); Walter Anglim, deckhand (“a raw-boned, rugged American sort”); Tom Rasmussen, engineer (“young, gangly, and energetic”); Joe Gallant, engineer (“a husky, hard-headed old customer”); and Candy Coelho, cook (“a Portuguese who is a veteran of forty-four years on the tugs, though his tightly smooth face doesn’t show it”). 

Hoagland’s account begins at noon with the Teresa Moran helping the ocean liner United States get underway from its slip in the North River:

The United States, though the biggest of ships, is not a particularly memorable proposition among all the tasks that come to a tug. We were helped by the Esther Moran, which tied onto the stem: we were at the bow, with Carella in the wheelhouse. Captain Biagi, on the ship’s bridge, gave his directions by walkie-talkie, each tug answering with its peep whistle to conform that the order was understood. Two longshoremen cast the hawsers off, and the ship, its engines reversed, provided its own motive power, while the Teresa and Esther kept it clear of the pier. Especially at the Manhattan piers, which are finger wharfs, built at right angles to the river, undocking a ship is a great deal simpler than docking it. The ship has been moored bow-in, so the tug which is at the bow only acts as a rudder as the ship backs away. In a kind of a dance, the Teresa nudged first one side of the stem, then the other – the stem looming overhead as sharp as a blade. There were acres of black steel plating, rivets in twisting patterns, and the two anchors like a whale’s eyes. The ship blasted its whistle to warn any traffic on the river and in no time it had backed into the current whereupon the two tugs pushed it around ninety degrees to head towards the sea. Compared to the rigamarole of warping a big ship into its slip, this was as easy as kicking your shoes off.

The Teresa’s next job is to go around Lower Manhattan and up the East River to an oil depot at 138th Street in the East Bronx to pilot the Liberian tanker St. Grigorousa:

A silent back stretch, 138th Street is beyond Hellgate Bridge, off Sunken Meadows and by North Brothers Island, where the planes sweep low every thirty seconds to land at LaGuardia Airport. The St Grigorousa, scruffy, patch-painted, offered no problems, except that our tug in maneuvering got careless and snapped a few pilings on an adjoining dock. The Greeks on the ship watched this little miscalculation with the attention which seamen of different nationalities bestow on each other’s blunders. Anglim had had trouble throwing a line up on deck, and that interested them, too. 

While accompanying the St. Grigorousa downstream, they see the Marie Moran, the Patricia Moran, and the Esther Moran pushing the broad side of a lumber boat, the Seamar from Coos Bay, Oregon, which had managed to draw parallel with its pier but was unable to approach closer. The dispatcher tells them to go to its assistance quickly. Hoagland writes,

Without waiting for Biagi to come off the ship, we swung away, and putting our bow amidships on the Seamar, shoved full ahead for what amounted to nearly an hour. Our extra horsepower did stop the drifting, but then no more progress was made, though the four tugs shifted position and pushed as hard as they could. First the outflowing tide had been the villain, but soon it was just a case of the ship being so heavily loaded that her keel was touching the bottom; we were trying to push her into a list sufficient to bring her deck close to the dock where the cranes would be able to unload her. It was tedious business; the tug captains talked back and forth on the radio and talked to the pilot, who was from the Patricia.

Eventually the Teresa leaves the other three tugs shouldering the Seamar and heads for Governor’s Island to pick up Biagi, who’s been deposited on a small barge boat called the Lester. On this mission, there’s nearly an accident:

A German freighter, the Hilde Mittman, was travelling beside us as we entered the curve that the East River makes near Delancey Street. At the same time, however, a tug called the Carol Moran was coming upriver, as well as a Penn Central Railroad tug which was roped between two unwieldly carfloats. The Hilde was outside of us and signaled them both to go outside her – or, in other words, closer to Brooklyn – but the Carol swerved inside instead, between the Hilde Mittman and us. The Hilde had to veer toward the railroad tug suddenly, and the railroad tug was almost forced into a pier on the Brooklyn side of the river – trying to avoid a collision, she reversed engines and swung dangerously sideways, and the bow lines on one of the carfloats broke. The Carol went on, the Hilde went on, but we lingered a moment or two to see whether she needed help.

The Teresa’s next job is to help a McAllister tug sail the freighter Fraternity from Pier 1 in the Erie Basin. Hoagland describes the trip:

We passed a good many ships in berths on the way: the Alamahdi, the Concordia Lago, the Lexa Maersk, the Lichtenfels. A paint-company launch puttered by, towing rafts and scaffolding; also a union launch collecting dues from the barge and lighter men whom it encountered. The sun had come out, the weather was warming up genially. Tugboats ride very low in the water, with the stubby bow pushing waves that are higher than the decks. It was a lovely, foamy, noisy trip. Standing on the fantail, I had the sense I was aquaplaning, a feeling of victory. “How are you doing – meditating?” asked Eklund.

They guide the Fraternity out of its slip and out of Erie Basin without difficulty. I love this passage:

It’s always a sharply focused instant when a ship separates from the tugs. Water slashed in as the gap opened; the wind seemed to blow harder, no longer blocked by the ship, and it was an ocean wind. For the first time, the ship’s screw kicked up a deep, worldly froth, a green wake, and the Fraternity pointed away, heaving us where we were. 

The next job is across the Upper Bay at Pier F in Jersey City. Hoagland writes,

The Baltic Sea (Goteberg) was our new eight o’clock ship. Eklund heaved up the throwing line, which has a ball on the end so that it will hang over the ship’s rail until it’s retrieved. Since the ship was white, he put a white cloth over our bow, where we would rub paint. Up on deck the silent Swedes with their beards and curly blonde hair and muted manner looked down at us, though their captain was pacing restlessly. We waited three quarters of an hour while they finished swinging cargo aboard and setting the hatches to rights. Tugboatmen kill these odd bits of time with cards, and tying up all over the harbor, they know little waterfront stores everywhere which can be reached by froghopping over a series of pilings and climbing a fence or two. Then Carella, as pilot, performed a simple and classic soft-shoe undocking from Pier F “into the stream,” as they say, scrambling down to the Teresa again while the Swedes watched. The ship had its running lights on, green on the starboard and red on the port, and the uncountable lights of Manhattan were emerging in all their bravado as the dusk darkened. The water churned between ship and tug; the sea breeze struck us as we slid clear of the ship – the mystically warm-and-cold wind of May.

The last job Teresa performs before Hoagland debarks is to help the Joan Moran sail the Ixia, an English timber boat. Hoagland describes the trip to Greenpoint where the Ixia is docked:

The spray plumed like cream at our bow, and the water was like crinkled tinfoil. The lights of the city were like jubilant news. They were flung out so far that what can one say? They’re not man-made; they’re the work of some several million men. The lights in the office buildings are a blunt blind yellow, blaring into the muffling night, but the lights of Stuyvesant Town and the other big centers of home life are like stippled banks of amber, glowing. I sat on the capstan in the stern, and it was like a whole screwy radar screen. It’s so dazzling that one’s eyes go dead every minute or so, looking. You can’t take it in; you look until your eyes go blank, turn them away to the darker water, and then look again at the sweep of it and the shining water, until again your vision wilts and goes dead.

The Teresa and the Joan push the Ixia out into the stream, and she gets underway. Hoagland’s ride is over. The Teresa drops him off on South Street on her way to another job. He writes, “I stood on the bow fender and climbed over the rail at Pier 9, East River, waving good-by and shaking hands, worn out, exuberant, and caught a bus home.”

“Knights and Squires” exemplifies Hoagland’s tremendous descriptive power. It contains several inspired sentences. This one, for example:

Eklund, a relaxed man, worked with brief motions, snuggling the thick Dacron lines around the horns of the bitt as easily as if he were tightening his belt.

And this beauty:

In the spotlight a leaping reindeer on the smokestack came alive, and the smoke, bowel-gray, bulged out of the stack, vaulting and rolling.

In detail after splendid detail, “Knights and Squires” evokes the action of a working tug in one of the world’s busiest harbors. I first read it fifty years ago. I've never forgotten it.

Postscript: Two more excellent “tugboat” pieces by Hoagland: “The Tugman’s Passage,” in his 1982 collection of the same name; and “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2013). 

Homage to Hoagland: "Fred King on the Allagash"

This is the first post in my series “Homage to Hoagland,” in which I consider seven of Edward Hoagland’s best essays – one per month – and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is “Fred King on the Allagash,” included in Hoagland’s excellent 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River. 

This great piece is an account of a six-day, ninety-two-mile canoe trip that Hoagland made through Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway. The exact date of the trip is difficult to ascertain. We know it was July 17, because Hoagland says so in the piece. But the year is unspecified. The piece originally appeared in the January-February 1973 issue of Audience magazine. I’m guessing Hoagland made the trip the previous year, 1972. His purpose was pretty basic: “I wanted to see what it was like.” He says he hired a guide “so that I could use my paddle as a writing table part of the time and, being a novice, not bother with questions of navigation.” 

The guide’s name is Fred King. Hoagland describes him:

He’s fifty-eight, looks forty-five, has short hair which is bluish gray, round glasses, a boyish doggy grin, a face deeply cut by grinning and a mouth big enough to grin with. It’s a pleasing face; his body is straight and quick like a chipmunk’s and he has an immediate laugh, provocatively loud, and likes to stop still when on the move and sound off on the matter at hand, then impulsively move forward again, seeming never to walk if he can run. At home in Augusta he keeps a jug of Allagash water to mix with his drinks, and doesn’t much like December because of the short days: “I’d sell December awfully cheap.” 

Fred is as much the subject of Hoagland’s piece as the Allagash river. You can tell Hoagland admires him. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but it’s implicit in the many vivid lines of description that he devotes to him. This, for example:

He still likes to be by himself. His ideas sound as if they had been worked out in isolation in the woods and perhaps spoken first in a loud voice all alone. He has a tight shipshape cabin on Chemquassabamticook Lake where he goes in midwinter and works on improvements, hauling now with a snowmobile. He’s got to break trail for the snowmobile on snowshoes – it’s not like the ads – but he loves the rigor of the winter woods, cooks for himself and sleeps fitfully, listening to the radio and waiting for his mouse trap to snap. The mice he feeds to the gorbies – Canada jays – outside.

And this:

When we walked, Fred was quick, and with his small intelligent face looked like a professor afield, though his right arm is beginning to go bad on him – too much holding a chainsaw. In the black-fly season he sometimes sews his socks to his pants to protect his ankles, and leaves them on for four or five days, he said. 

The trip begins on Chamberlain Lake. There are two others in their party – a Long Island couple, Jim and Audrey, being towed in a second canoe. The foursome go up the lake toward Lock Dam, pass through the lock, and then head down the river to Eagle Lake, where they run into a storm:

We ran into waves tipped with whitecaps, the wind shifting into a headwind, and a navy-blue curtain lowered in front of us. The murky curtain turned purple, the water turned black and the wind hard and strong – the waves coming in gusts, the canoe shipping water – as we met the storm. It was a smothering front, and passing beyond it, we were soaked in a pellety rain, but found some protection in the lee of Farm Island, then in a narrows, where we tied up at Priest’s Camp. In the drumbeating rain as, laughing, we threw up our tents, Fred pretended we’d almost drowned to make it more dramatic for us. He said that when he first began guiding he’d been scared he might do something wrong and had gone to an old-timer for advice: “Just take lots of eggs and jam, Fred.” 

Next day, they explore the lake:

We circled the lake, slipping into each estuary and up Soper Brook, then up Snare Brook. Dozens of ducks: fish nests down through the water, scooped in the gravel. A great blue heron flew up. A dragonfly chased by a kingfisher got away by dodging close to our bow. The brooks were silty but the wetland grasses were a tender light-green. After a half-mile or so the alder growth would close in and beaver cuttings would block the brook, and where we had to stop we’d see moose tracks.

They stay at Priest’s Camp a second night. Next day, they head for Churchill Lake, where they encounter a moose:

On Churchill, with the sun a silvery band on the water, we caught up with a swimming cow moose midway across. Her body was invisible; her head was like a blunt boat, the ears the housing, and her hairy neck hump nearly underwater. It was a groping blind-looking head, sightless as a whale’s, a feeling and suffering-looking head, the nose so huge and vulnerable that other undiscovered senses might have been contained inside. Two terns were diving on her with creaky cries. Her ears lay back as her big pumping legs hurled her ashore, and she swerved to look at us, first over one shoulder, then over the other.

Hoagland and his group move on through Heron Lake and into the Chase Rips – “the one risky spot” on the route:

The river before us fell off, abrupt as the end of a table; all of a sudden it didn’t appear to be there. Then, curling up like a hairdo, it fluffed around us, high at the prow, as we slid down into the rapids themselves. The noisy water was popping in points, peaks and tufts, blotting out all other sights and sounds. We could have been surrounded by other canoes and not noticed them. This was the first pitch, full of rocks, several hundred yards long. The second was shorter but “downhilly,” the many rips sticking up as if to chum with us, as the water curled and crabbed around. Riffles, bumps, a wild backdrop of trees.

They stop at a place called Big Eddy to dry out and have lunch. Then they push on, “the Allagash partying along, popping with rocks but forty yards wide, leaving plenty of current, till it tipped down steeply again and we slid at the edge of a whole thievish mob of rocks that nattered away, feeling their tug, zipping by Harrow Brook.”

They enjoy peaceful minutes of drifting, too. Then “for three hundred yards the river would turn feisty, roaring, tergiversating, as busy as rush hour, each rock having its say.” Hoagland writes,

We twisted through new rips and rapids, eluding sweepers, seeing the trout jump, and dragonflies in a mating clinch; jays called in the trees. The clouds were lovely, if we took time to glance upward. There were still-water sloughs, and gulls on the mud-banks, and parakeet cries from the bear-jungle. Then a swift chute, dark choppy water, on into a wide, luxurious pool. Buzzing birds in the woods, occasional pines, more shaggy cedar, big pairs of spruce, a heron flying high with folded neck, a gangly flying loon, some green grassy islands. A winter wren sang. Then again the water crawled with ripples, with stream birds flying up, the water slanting alive with bubbles over a gravel bar.

They go through a bog and then out onto Umsaskis Lake. They camp for the night in the Thoroughfare leading from Umsaskis into Long Lake. Fred keeps a jeep at Umsaskis. Next day, he drives the group forty miles across International Paper Company roads to Chemquassabamticook Lake, where they boat to his cabin. Hoagland describes the place:

His curtain rods are old setting poles, his clothesline is tied between saplings skinned by beavers. He had a potato garden to tend, and we went out to see the stump of a virgin pine with the marks of a broad-ax that cut it still visible and a forty-year-old birch tree growing on top. We saw two barred owls calling each other, and a woodpecker drinking down ants on a stump, and moose and deer prints on the sandy beach, among the debris of mussel shells the gulls had dropped. 

In the morning, “the sun was golden through the thick trees. A soupy mist covered the lake, which smoked like a hot spring. Two connubial loons floated side by side, then dived together. The water was as dark as blueberry jelly.” They head back to the Allagash and get underway toward Long Lake again:

We passed bits of islands covered with driftpiles, saw a doe and a fawn, a sheldrake with seven ducklings, a squirrel swimming the river, its tail like a rudder. A heron flew up and stood for a minute atop a fir tree. The river curved gently in a stretch as sweet as honey, softening its water sounds so that we could hear the white-throated sparrows. After tilting again with a few rocks we entered a dead water which lasted for an hour’s paddling, birds warbling all around, the water smooth, black and waxed. Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws. Sweeney Brook, Whittaker Brook and Jalbert Brook joined the current.

That “Tying the canoes together, we drifted as a raft, eating Fig Newtons, and hearing chain saws” makes me smile. It’s quintessential Hoagland – “raft,” “Fig Newtons” and “chain saws” bumping against each other surreally. No one but him could’ve written it.  

They camp at Round Pond for the night. Next morning, they’re on the river early: “We got started at 6 A.M., a sailing hawk peering down at us. A mist almost the color of snow lay between the lines of trees, so that although the weather was warm it was a wintry scene.” They go through the Round Pond Rips. Next, the Musquacook Rips. Fred’s loud voice in the quietness irritates Hoagland "exceedingly" because it’s scaring away moose and other animals. He writes, “I had to remember that this was real history he was reliving, that he was a link with the boisterous rivermen whose intent was to knock down the forests and let the light in.” 

And now comes one of my favorite passages of the piece – Hoagland’s vibrant description of the river from the Musquacook Rips to Allagash Falls. It’s worth quoting in full:

A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds. We saw a merganser family, a ridge scalped by a tornado. In a dead water we looked down and saw grasses growing on the bottom, while a whole populace of insects bounced in the air. The sun streamed through the morning vapors in warm yellow combinations on the west bank, but on the east the view was still snowy-looking. The black-growth forest humped into low hills. We floated past grassy islands, then sibilant stretches, the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light and leaving a platter of calm downstream of each. There’s a disastrous-sounding crunch when a canoe hits a rock and the floor lifts under one’s feet, but the sound is worse than the results. We passed an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries, and saw Savage Brook debouch through its delta, and Five Finger Brook. The water itself looked like running gravel, and we passed several old cabins that used to belong to characters like Sporty Jack (so called because of a birthmark he sported), and the Cunliffe Depot, the abandoned headquarters of a logging boss who rivaled Michaud. Michaud’s hay farm was two miles below, now devoid of buildings but spacious after so many miles of woods. Then beaches and finally a slough called Finlay Bogan, where we saw kingfishers, fish jumping, islands foliaged with willows and silver maples, ice-scarred. It became a still, rainy day with some occasional neighborly thunder. We ran by a few gentle rapids and shoals, seeing huge waterlogged stumps that were shaped like moose. The river here was a dream – rustling, windy, wild-looking and lush – chipper with birds, overhung with sweepers, dense with slow channels forking between the islands. It was beautiful and remote. 

“Platter of calm,” “neighborly thunder,” “stumps shaped like moose,” “chipper with birds” – who writes like that? No one. Only Hoagland. He’s incredibly specific. He's the king of specificity. He loves using place names: Savage Brook, Finger Brook, Cunliffe Depot, Finlay Bogan. His words call up pictures: “A buckskin-colored deer exploded with springy bounds”; the water combing through the rocks, turning the big ones yellow with reflected light”; “an old shack with a sod roof, now burgeoning with raspberries”; “The water itself looked like running gravel.” 

The trip is almost over. Hoagland swims below the falls, “in deep potholes where the water was warm.” Then they carry on down the river to its mouth where it empties into the St. John River, at which point the trip ends and the parties disperse. Hoagland writes: “Fred King departed like a boy let out of school: no more entertaining or catering to us, no more wincing at the bumps delivered to his canoe. He would drive south until he got tired and sleep by the side of the road.”

Accounts of canoe trips on wild rivers are catnip to me. I devour them. This is one of the best. Hoagland puts us right there on the Allagash. His writing is active, concrete, vivid. Great subject, delectable prose – the piece is double bliss. 

In Praise of the Unfiltered View

Edward Hoagland, in the Introduction to a 1993 re-issue of two of his essay collections – The Courage of Turtles and Walking the Dead Diamond River – talks about how he shifted in his late thirties from being a novelist to being an essay-writer. He says,

Now, however, I wrote the thirty-four essays in these two books breezily abruptly in just four years, with a new baby enlivening the house besides, and published many of them in the Village Voice, whose offices were located a few blocks down the street from where I lived. My stuff thus came out immediately, and instead of reaching three or four thousand people, might be placed in the hands of one hundred and fifty thousand. On Staten Island ferry or the Coney Island subway I could see it read, and was plumbing heartfelt material, not filtered through the artifices of fiction.

Not filtered through the artifices of fiction – that is exactly why I prefer factual writing to fiction. It strives to see life plain – no distortion, no embellishment, no fabrication. 

Vladimir Nabokov, among others, would disagree. In his view, “The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction” (“Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, 1980). But seeing the world this way misses so much! It misses the beauty and strangeness of what actually happens. In support of the unfiltered view, I quote Philip Larkin: “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are” (“Big Victims,” Required Writing, 1983). 

On the Horizon: Homage to Hoagland

Edward Hoagland died February 17, 2026, age 93. He’s one of my heroes. As an act of homage, I want to consider some of his best essays. Over the next seven months, I’ll pick seven of them – one per month – and try to express why I like them. A new series then – “Homage to Hoagland” – starting May 10. 

Postscript: Edward Hoagland 1932-2026

Edward Hoagland (Photo by Michael Cummo)

I see in the Times that Edward Hoagland has died, age 93. He’s one of my literary heroes. His Notes from the Century Before (1969) is one of my favorite books. His “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his wonderful 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River) is one of my favorite essays. John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation.” I think this is true. 

Hoagland’s writing style was unmistakably his own – an associational way of linking thought and observation in fresh, surprising, delightful combinations. Consider this beauty – the opening paragraph of “Of Cows and Cambodia”:

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

Hoagland had total faith in the validity of his own experience, his own way of seeing. He was subjective to the bone. His masterpiece, Notes from the Century Before, chronicles his 1966 trip up British Columbia’s Stikine River, “left as it was in the nineteenth century by a fluke of geography.” The geography is breathtaking – eighty thousand square miles ("like two Ohios") of wild rivers, snow-topped mountains, and thick forests, containing tiny villages that are “unimaginably isolated.” Hoagland traveled by boat, plane, and truck. He did a lot of walking, roaming the settlements, talking to old-timers, seeing what there was to see, noting it all down – detail after amazing detail. Here, for example, is his description of the village of Eddontenajon:

The mountains stood close and steep, with silver runnels and pockets of snow and passes going off in every direction, as if the country were still full of sourdoughs and mystery trips. Plank bridges have been laid across a creek that bisects the village beside the church, which is another log cabin. On the low hill backing the whole, a cemetery is already getting its start, picket fences around the few graves. I walked up and down, pretending to have business to do at the opposite end from wherever I was, practically sifting the place through my hands like a miser. The cabin foundations sit edgily on the ground, as though on an unbroken horse. Initials are cut on some of the doors to tell who lives where, and fuzzy fat puppies play in front, next to the birch dog sleds which are seven or eight feet long and the width of a man’s shoulders, weathered to a chinchilla gray. The grown dogs sleep in the fog of hunger. Swaying and weak, they get up and come to the end of their chains, like atrocity victims, hardly able to see. Snowshoes hang in the trees, along with clusters of traps. 

And here’s his portrait of Willie Campbell, one of the oldest residents of Telegraph Creek:

At last Willie turned up, a stooped twisted man on a cane with a young tenor voice and another of those immense Tahltan faces, except that his was pulled out as long as a pickaxe and then bent at the chin. A chin like a goiter, a distorted cone of a forehead. He looked like a movie monster; he was stupendous. He was wearing hide mittens and shoes, and he pointed across the Stkine to where he had seen a grizzly the day before.

And here’s his depiction of a young man in Eddontenajon roasting a moose head over a fire:

On the scaffold overhead a batch of pink trout was drying. Pieces of meat hung down, a hole punched in each and a rope strung through. Some rib cuts were drying too, but mainly the fire was roasting the head of a moose, kept in its skin so the meat wouldn’t burn. It rotated steadily at the end of a wire which he wound by twisting from time to time. The eyes were closed, the hair was blackened and sometimes afire, the antlers were gone, the ears had been cut off to feed the dogs, yet it was as recognizable as a moose as in life – as at peace as a comic strip, humorous moose. He said the head would feed his family for a meal or two and that the body would keep them provisioned for the whole summer while he was away on a job.

Hoagland was incapable of writing vaguely. He dealt in particulars. He was a brilliant crafter of metaphor and simile. In Notes from the Century Before, he says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this one, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

I could go on and on quoting Hoagland. He was the consummate writer. He’s gone now, but his splendid work lives on. I cherish it immensely. 

Edward Hoagland's Splendid "Tugboats on the Tanana"

A few weeks ago, I praised Robert Macfarlane’s “The Living River” (see here). There’s another river piece I’ve read recently that I want to commend – Edward Hoagland’s “Tugboats on the Tanana,” chapter 13 of his Alaskan Travels (2012).

“Tugboats on the Tanana” is an account of a 1983 trip that Hoagland took down the Tanana and Yukon Rivers on a push boat called the Tanana. The boat pushes two fuel barges from Nenana to Galena, a distance of 430 miles. Hoagland describes the trip superbly. Here are a few samples:

Streaks on the water’s surface showed Captain Keith Horton where the current was, although ruffling up to signal a shallows. He followed the flow, taking the long way around most of the bends, as it chewed at each side of the river in turn, but pointed the prow of the frontal barge out of the curve before the Tanana’s twin propellers lost their purchase and we skidded close to colliding with the bank, or slid too far to keep within the current’s five-to-seven-knots-per-hour boost. Deadwood lay strewn at sixes and sevens across the sandbars materializing inconveniently midstream; or jouncing stubs and spars poked out from the bottom like horse’s heads, galloping relentlessly till they would get scrubbed away. The banks were an atrocity zone for standing trees – havoc and slaughter wherever the river inched toward gripping them, though some survived at crazy angles if the roots had found a hidden boulder that had not been pulled loose yet. 

At Shirttail Channel – seven miles and forty minutes below Nenana – we passed several Indian fishing camps on the east shore, each with a fish wheel placidly turning. Maybe twenty feet high, these water wheels, set upright, rotated with the river’s push to scoop up any spawning salmon swimming upstream on a tangent to connect with the wooden blades, producing a sudden Ferris wheel hoist for the fish, till it was flipped backward into basket, then dumped into a collecting bin, where it twitched, smothering in the air, and eventually somebody would grab, gut, and fillet it, laying the strips with others to dry red on racks in the sun.

White birch and black spruce lined both banks, all different ages according to what the river had wrought. It chomped on trees like a horse crunching carrots, or else tipped them whole into the roil to travel beside us, the branches jutting up like a brown shark’s fin. Clouds built up on some of the knolls to make them look like snow peaks, or else turned bruise-blue, or pewter-colored. Sawmill Island stood two miles below Soldier Slough; then the deadwater of Totchaket Slough eight miles beyond that, at Pritchard Crossing. The complexities of Twenty-four Mile Slough followed soon after, and in another mile, Sawmill Slough, and, next, the braidings of Minto Slough, at an abandoned Indian settlement twenty-nine miles below Nenana, where beaver swamps and shortish streams congealed. At Campbell’s Crossing we tied up for lunch.

After the Upper and Lower Tolovana Sloughs, where we’d stuck close to where the river’s volume poured in, we carefully rounded an island to David Crossing, alongside a log like a moose in the water – its roots sticking up like antlers – and toward Sand Crossing, which was recognizable by a certain sweeper – a tree now hanging semi-horizontally over the tumult, but still leafy and partially attached to the disintegrating bank. 

More red-rock bluffs on the north side led to extensive thickets of moose pasturage opposite them, where the river broadened again, with anonymous islands and flats, until at last we reached Miller’s Camp, where we tied our stern to a tree trunk at ten-forty-five p.m., dusk, pointing downstream, and walked a pirate plank to a clay bank six feet high, having covered a hundred-forty miles in ten hours from Nenana.

From the Kokrine Hills, Sunset Creek, and Lady, Burns, and Chokoyik Islands, a settlement called Joe De Louis followed one called the Birches. Then, between Kathaleen, Edith, and Florence Islands, the Nowitna River, an important if corkscrewed tributary, joined us from the south. Moose Point faced Mickey Island, and Hardluck Island, the Big Bend, and Kokrines Village; then Fox and Ham islands; the white cliffs of Horner Hot Springs, and Shovel Creek. 

I love the poetry of the place names – part of the magnificent Hoagland specificity that just keeps rolling, like the Yukon itself, detail after immersive detail. Hoagland is a master writer. “Tugboats on the Tanana” is one of his best pieces.  

Andrea Barrett's "Dust and Light"

On my recent trip to Italy, I took a little book with me – Andrea Barrett’s Dust and Light (2025). It’s a collection of seven essays on the art of fact in fiction. I enjoyed it immensely, even though my interest is in the art of fact, not fiction. In the essay “The Years and The Years,” Barrett praises Virginia Woolf’s ability to balance fact and imagination. She writes, 

Fact dissolved fully into fiction: what Woolf learned is to so deeply integrated into her imagination that it emerges in her characters with the same offhand immediacy as lived experience.

Fact dissolved fully into fiction – I found myself turning this phrase over and over in my mind as I cycled the Via Claudia Augusta. When facts are dissolved in fiction, they lose their factuality. They become fiction. For Barrett, this is a good thing, this is what art (her art, at least) is all about – the transformation of fact into fiction. But for me, the dissolution of facts in fiction seems like a waste. I much prefer their preservation as facts, in first-person chronicles of real experience, e.g., John McPhee’s Coming into the Country, Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before, Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands, Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau. These books are as artful and meaningful as any novel, and yet their narratives are real, not fabricated. When it comes to representation of reality, I’ll take fact over fiction any day. 

Factual Writing Is Just As Immersive As Fiction (Contra Nathaniel Rich)

Nathaniel Rich, in his recent review of James A. W. Heffernan’s Politics and Literature at the Dawn of WW II, argues that, as a reading experience, factual writing is less immersive than fiction. He says, 

There is one dark art, however, that nonfiction cannot fully replicate: the ability of immersive narrative literature, and especially fiction, to blur, or even eradicate, the boundary between reader and subject. Readers of a history are reminded on every page, with every footnote and dutiful scholarly reference and contextual aside, of one’s distance from the action. The reader even of a memoir or a diary can never fully suspend disbelief, since the dramatic stakes of the narrative rely on its authenticity—on the assertion that the events described really happened and that the people depicted really experienced them.

Novelists don’t tend to bother about that. A novel’s success depends not on its faithfulness to reality but on the author’s ability to beguile the reader into empathizing with its hero and, for a brief time, exchanging the reality of the world for the reality of the novel. (“Writing Under Fire,” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2023)

I strongly disagree. I’m currently reading Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory (1981), an account of his two-thousand-mile journey down the Mississippi River, piloting a sixteen-foot aluminum motorboat, and I couldn’t be more immersed. I’m right there with him as he tries to navigate sloughs, chutes, towboats, stumps, eddies, boils, locks, and wing dams. It’s one of the most immersive books I’ve ever read. Same goes for his Passage to Juneau (1999) and Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia (2010) and Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969). There’s no boundary between me and the worlds described in them. I’m there. These events really happened. No suspension of disbelief is necessary. Just sink in and experience them – that's the promise these great books gloriously fulfill. Rich underestimates the power of factual writing.  

On Jonathan Franzen's "The Problem of Nature Writing"

Sand Dunes, Prince Edward Island (Photo by John MacDougall)

Jonathan Franzen, in his absorbing “The Problem of Nature Writing” (newyorker.com, August 12, 2023), argues (1) nature writing should be evangelical; (2) in order for nature writing to succeed as evangelism, it must tell a strong story: and (3) without story, description of nature is tedious. I disagree with all three points. 

I love nature writing. I read a lot of it. I’ve never considered it a form of evangelism. To me, it’s quintessentially a descriptive art. If it helps to get people to care about preserving the natural world, so much the better. But, for me, that’s not its primary aim. Its primary aim is to describe nature’s beauty. For example, Robert Macfarlane’s description of the vast shingle peninsulas that jut from east England’s coastline:

There is exquisite patterning to the structure of these spits. They organize themselves in designs so large that they are best witnessed from the vantage of a falcon or an airman. At Dungeness, the shingle is arranged into giant floriate blooms. Orford forms itself in long parallel ridges, each of which marks a time when a storm cast up thousands of tonnes of gravel along the shore, and fattened the spit. These ridges are the stone equivalents of growth rings in a tree trunk. Aerial images of Blakeney show it to possess the complex beauty of a neuron: the long stem of the spit, and to its leeward a marshland that floods and emerges with every tide – a continually self-revising labyrinth of channel and scarp. [The Wild Places, 2007]

Or Edward Hoagland’s description of a wolf:

Her fur was in silver-fox shades and her head was larger than life. I stared at it the next day while she was being skinned. She had grim, snapping eyes set at a spellbinding slant, and a mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors. At the zoo you can watch wolves mouthing their meat like a cobbler turning a shoe in his hands or a tailor handling a bundle of clothes. Oversized as it is, the mouth can be used as a pair of hands. Wolves’ legs are long because they churn for a hundred-and-fifty miles in a line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles in another line and then a hundred-and-fifty more miles, all their lives. Their shoulders are large because they fight with their shoulders. And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse. [Notes from the Century Before, 1969]

Or Redmond O’Hanlon’s description of an anglerfish:

Because six inches from my right shin was a three-foot gape of mouth; and the inside of this mouth was black; the outer lips were black; the whole nightmare fish, if it was a fish, was slimy black. The rim of the projecting lower jaw was set with shiny black masonry nails, points up, all vertical, not one out of line – a mix of one-inch, half-inch and quarter-inch masonry nails, waiting. Above them, beneath the drawn-back curve of the upper lip, curling up to a snarl below the centre of the broad black snout, there was a complementary set of masonry nails, points down, waiting. And between the globular black eyes, wide apart, fixed on me, were a couple of long black whips, wireless aerials … And, very obviously, there was only one thing on the mind of this monstrous something – it wanted to eat. And it didn’t look, to me, as if it was a picky eater. Discrimination, taste, haute cuisine, no, that was not its thing. Not at all … [Trawler, 20003].

I relish such descriptions. My enjoyment has nothing to do with story. My enjoyment is sourced in the writer’s art – in that “mouth like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” There’s no plot in landscape, only the contingencies of rock, river, and wild animal. Narrative in nature books is usually simple – a chronological telling of a hike or a canoe trip or a mountain climb. 

Franzen’s most annoying statement is that nature description is tedious. I could quote a thousand passages to show that it is not. Here’s one more, from John McPhee’s great Coming into the Country (1977):

Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!   

Nothing Fictional About It (Contra Merve Emre)

John McPhee (Photo by Yolanda Whitman)

The critic Merve Emre argues that the “I” of the personal essay is a fiction and that individual subjectivity is an illusion: see her recent “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022). She makes a similar point in her absorbing “The Act of Persuasion” (The New York Review of Books, April 21, 2022), a review of Elizabeth Hardwick’s work:

In her essays, Hardwick reproved and indulged the temptation to fictionalize. How could she help it? Between the person and the page lies the prism of fiction, always. No genre can avoid it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of the lives and works of the dead, must bring the dead to life—the words of the past distilled in the words of the present. 

Well, the writers I admire most (e.g., John McPhee, Ian Frazier, Edward Hoagland) write in the first person major. They’re subjective to the bone. They write about what they want to write about, and say what they want to say. They get their words as close as they can to the solidity, the materiality of the world they’re noticing. There’s no “prism of fiction.” There is the prism of sensibility. We see the world refracted through the prism of who they are. That’s the secret of their art. There’s nothing fictional about it.  

3 for the Road: Conclusion

This is the last in a series of twelve monthly posts on my three favourite travelogues – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989). Today, I’ll try to sum up my reading experience.

When I started this project, I said I wanted to get to know these books better. I feel I’ve accomplished that. But I also feel I’ve failed to do them justice. In my concentration on their formal properties – structure, action, imagery, detail – I neglected their meaning. What do these books mean? What is their message? To one degree or another, they’re all concerned with loss. In Notes from the Century Before, it’s loss of wilderness (“It’s as though the last bit of ocean were about to become more dry land, planted and paved … The loss is to people unborn”) and loss of the pioneers who hiked the wilderness trails (“These walks were just about the last go-round – the last exploration of the continent by foot that we’ll ever have”). In Coming into the Country, it’s about preservation versus development (“With the pipeline, however, Alaska suddenly had more development than it could absorb. It suddenly had manifold inflation and a glut of trailer parks. It had traffic jams”; “To be sure, I would preserve plenty of land as well. My own margin of tolerance would not include some faceless corporation ‘responsible’ to a hundred thousand stockholders, making a crater you could see from the moon”). In Great Plains, the underlying theme is massive loss and destruction:

This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver, subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara; call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants’ dreams and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean, ship out the wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away; dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats.

So each of these books delivers a serious message. They aren’t just description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. But you know what? I love description for description’s sake, detail for detail’s sake. That’s why I read them. I love them for their writing as pure writing, for the sheer pleasure of their sentences. Three examples:

The scow up front is fun to ride because it slides vibrationlessly, but so is the galley of the Judith Ann, where the floor jangles in frenzy and the glasses and plates deafen the floor. [Notes from the Century Before]

To the palate of a travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye? [Coming into the Country]

I slept beneath the mercury lights of highway rest areas where my lone car was visible for six miles in any direction and the inside of the men’s room looked as if it had been sandblasted with tiny insects, and on the streets of small towns where the lawn sprinklers ran all night, and next to damned-up waters of the Missouri River where the white top branches of drowned trees rose above the waters. [Great Plains]

I’d give my left testicle to have written any one of those three inspired lines. And there are plenty more where they came from. 

Now, to conclude, I want to imagine a collage that captures the essence of these three great books. I picture it like this: a bright, multi-hued totem pole topped with a hatted ruling raven; a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick; a grizzly whirling a salmon around his head; a moose head roasting over a campfire; a de Havilland Twin Otter; a tumble weed; a D9 Caterpillar; a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling; Crazy Horse; a blue mountain slung with white snow; a bleached caribou antler; a double Klepper kayak; a white canvas tipi; a Grumman Goose; a rusty red fifty-five-gallon steel drum. Overlap these images; paste them at crazy angles to each other; and across the whole assemblage paint three wide wavy stripes – a gray-green one for the Yukon, a blue-green one for the Stikine, and a tan one for the Missouri. I call my collage “McHoagzier.”

3 for the Road: Details

This is the eleventh in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their quality of observation – their details.

What an astonishing density of detail there is in these three books! Everything is noted, named, and particularized. For example, in Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland, roaming around the town of Wrangell, meets totem-pole carver Tom Ukas. Ukas takes Hoagland to a shed in back of his house and shows him a totem pole he’s created. Hoagland describes it in detail: 

The totem is made of a fresh, beautiful, pale yellow wood. I’m amazed by it. Completely filling the shed, lying on several supports, it thrusts like a rocket, many times taller than me. Carving from the bottom upwards, he has finished all but the hat at the top, even the long Raven beaks which attach separately. The little tools rest on a bench. He walks back and forth, touching the segments with a certain humility, this probably being the last totem pole he will have enough energy for and the last anybody in Wrangell will carve. He is delaying finishing – an hour’s chipping at the hat would take care of it. The wood is red cedar, and it will stand in front of the post office, a marvellous huge piece with six succinct figures. At the top sits the hatted, ruling Raven. At his feet is the Power Box (like a box), holding the Tide Control and the Daylight Control for the moon and the sun. Under the box is the Raven again, though only his head, with a bright halo disk around it – this representing the Raven in his special capacity as Creator. Below the Creator Raven, scrunched up, is a kewpie-doll Man, and underneath Man is the Raven Mother, whose beak is carved to lie on her chest, not stick out grandly like the Raven Creator’s. At the bottom, under the Raven Mother, sits the Tide Control, who escaped from his box and triggered the flood and is personified by a big beaver. It’s all magnificently bright and incisive, as I try to tell him mainly by my excitement.

Details accrete and a marvellous totem pole is bodied forth. McPhee, in his Coming into the Country, works the same way, adding detail after animate detail until a bear or a river or a cabin or a mountain is re-created on the page. Here’s his memorable depiction of prospector Joe Vogler’s truck: 

Vogler travels the mining district in a big three-axle truck so much the worse for wear it appears to have been recently salvaged after a very long stay at the bottom of the Yukon. He drives it on what roads there are and, where roads do not exist, directly up the beds of rushing streams. Lurching, ungainly, it is a collage of vehicular components – running gear from one source, transmission from another – that Vogler selected and assembled to be “good in the brush.” The front wheels are directly under the cab, and the engine mount (high off the ground) is cantilevered a full eight feet forward to become a projecting snout, probing the way toward gold. The cab and engine are military fragments, artifacts of the Second World War. The frame was taken from a twenty-five-year-old tractor trailer. The long flatbed reaches out behind and is towered over by a winch and boom. There are no fenders. Much of the engine’s cowling is gone. The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes. Enfeebled as the rig looks, it has six-wheel drive and, thunking up ledges and over boulders, is much at home in a stream.

That “The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes” is pure McPhee. No one could've thought of that analogy but him.

Many of McPhee’s details are inspired! This one, for example:

We collected a marten that had climbed up a pole-set for a grouse wing and was now hanging by a leg in a life-like pose, frozen stiffer than taxidermy, its forepaws stretched as if leaping for prey, its eyes, at fifteen below zero, like white chick-peas.

And this:

On his head was a brown Stetson – the only Stetson I’ve ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout. 

And this:

On the stove is a tin can full of simmering tea, under a sheet-metal lid that is a piece of a fuel can with a scorched clothespin clipped to it as a handle.

One of the most memorable details in Frazier’s Great Plains is the tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick that he finds in the front yard of an abandoned house near Wellington, Texas, a house that figures in the legend of Bonnie and Clyde:

In front of the house was an old slippery-elm tree – once a friendly tree in a yard, now just a tree – with big roots knuckling up through te ground. The roots were skinned and smooth from people sitting on them, and on the bare dirt in between I spotted a silver-and-purple tube of Wet ’n Wild lipstick. The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges, of a shade of reddish-pink which its manufacturer calls Fuchsias Pearl. I thought about the kids who dropped it. They probably come here sometimes to park and make-out. Bonnie Parker would have been happy to find this lipstick. She would have opened it and sniffed it and tried the color on the back of her hand. As I examined it, my own hand seemed for a moment as ghostly as hers. I made a mark on a page of my notebook with the lipstick, recapped the tube, and put it back on the ground.

That “The tube was fresh, the stick still a little ice-cream-coned at the edges” is brilliant! The whole book is like that – an extraordinary feat of attention. 

In next month’s post, the last in this series, I’ll try to sum up my experience rereading these three great books.

3 for the Road: Figuration

This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many original, beautiful figures of speech.

One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this beauty, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”

Hoagland’s words call up vivid pictures, as do McPhee’s and Frazier’s. In Coming into the Country, McPhee describes a map of Alaskan mountains as looking “like calves’ brains over bone china.” He says of a grizzly, “His teeth would make a sound that would carry like the ringing of an axe.” He likens salmon to zeppelins (“Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins”). He says of caribou antlers: “Bleached white, the antlers protruded from the tundra like the dead branches of a buried tree.” Of a fisherman: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river.” Of the sound of a river: “In a canoe in such a river, you can hear the grains of mountains like sandpaper on the hull.” Of Labrador tea: “The leaves of Labrador tea, crushed in the hand, smelled like turpentine.” Of a bear getting ready to hibernate: “On a bed of dry vegetation, he lays himself out like a dead pharaoh in a pyramid.” Of arctic char: “They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws.” Of a grizzly: “His brown fur rippled like a field under wind.” Of Mount McKinley: “The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you.” He describes a river with “so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep.” He says, “People throng the post office like seagulls around a piling, like trout at the mouth of a brook.” Great floes coming on from upriver “roll, heave, compile; sound and surface like whales.” He describes riverborne ice: “big masses pounding into one another with the sound like faraway thunder, or, often, like faraway surf.” I love this one: “He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that it looked like a big caterpillar.” And this: “On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed.” And this amazing image:

A butchered grizzly: Burgundy is the color of the grizzly’s flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football. The bear was two years old.

Like an Eisenhower jacket? That’s an arresting, quasi-surreal point of reference. I guess we all remember who Eisenhower was. But did we know he wore jackets “short in the middle, long in the arms”? Who but McPhee could imagine the torso of a butchered grizzly resembling an Eisenhower jacket? No one. It’s an extraordinary simile conjured by an extraordinary writer.

Speaking of extraordinary, consider these gorgeous figures of speech from Frazier’s Great Plains: 

Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick! 

The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for a while and then largely forgot about. 

Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut of timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains. 

This one is crazy-good:

The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.

And this:

A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara.

This one makes me smile every time I read it:

Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain.

And this:

Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie.

And this:

Maybe you’ll hear a good bluegrass song, like “Blue-Eyed Darlin’,” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, that comes at you like a truckload of turkey gobblers.

Here’s an ingenious one:

Up ahead, in North Dakota, storm clouds came all the way down to the ground like an overhead garage door.

I love this:

Canvas tipis as white as water-cooler cups stood among the trees.

And this:

From the wooden floor came a dust that smelled like small towns.

How about this beauty:

Then the road twists to follow a river valley, and cottonwood leaves pass above, and someone has been cutting hay, and the air is like the inside of a spice cabinet.

Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier are masters of figuration. Another aspect of their art is their keen eye for detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.