The Territory Around Us: Collected Literary and Political Journalism, 1982-2015

By Robert J. Begiebing

In his literary journalism, critic, novelist, and memoirist Robert J. Begiebing offers readers a rare view of American authors at transformative moments in their careers. Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, poets Sydney Lea and Wesley McNair, and novelists Merle Drown and Norman Mailer are among the authors profiled and reviewed. And readers will discover connections between the literary and the political essays. Begiebing’s provocative political commentary addresses issues as significant to us today as they were at the time of original periodical publication: the nature of American conservatism, the political economy of our budgetary priorities, and the looming global ecological crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781614682844

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Preface

In 1977 at the age of thirty I completed a Ph.D. and found a modest college teaching position in New Hampshire. Because that was one of the worst years ever for finding a teaching job in English (as the Modern Language Association Job List testified), I began to climb thankfully my humble academic ladder. I taught as well as I knew how, served on college committees and on community boards and councils, and wrote academic books and articles. By 1987, while completing my second academic book, and having achieved job security, I knew that my time writing that particular kind of literary criticism was coming to a close. I published that second book but viewed it as my goodbye to all that. I knew I wanted to do other kinds of writing. I had in fact already begun to write literary journalism, my first two pieces spinning off from my book on Norman Mailer, Acts of Regeneration, published in 1981. The spinoffs were a long review of Mailer’s two recent books in the magazine USA Today for the May 1982 issue and an interview with Mailer that was the cover story in Harvard Magazine in the spring of 1983. Following those publications, I received an open-ended assignment to write a series of literary profiles for The New Hampshire Times. I stuck with that assignment through four profiles featuring New England authors at a crucial moment in their careers: Merle Drown upon the publication of his first novel; Sydney Lea after the publication of his second book of poetry and his transition from Dartmouth to Middlebury College (transferring as well his editorship of The New England Review/ Bread Loaf Quarterly); historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich after her first book and on the verge of her second, a book that would win her the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes (and a teaching position at Harvard); and Wesley McNair upon the publication of his first book, which won the Devins Award for poetry in 1983.

One of the stories I kept hearing from these writers was that all four of them while teaching to make a living had struggled to determine how they could become the writer they really wanted to be, how they had made difficult decisions about family, work, personal goals, and the direction of their professional careers. That story resonated with me, and I began to get serious about writing my own fiction, a genre I had started writing during my sophomore year in college. Except for those few aborted attempts every apprenticeship seems to demand, however, I had had to neglect writing fiction over the course of seven years in graduate school, two years in the Army, and the better part of another decade writing academic articles and books. When one has committed to a spouse and children, wouldn’t it be a betrayal to chuck it all and stumble selfishly, romantically, up into a garret? Besides, why should anyone have to give up the people one loves simply to serve the inner demon to write? Of course many have done so, but I wasn’t built that way.

So I began to write and eventually publish fiction. But I also began to write political commentary that I’ll loosely call political journalism. These essays focused on the true nature of conservatism, our priorities in governmental spending, and the global ecological realities we’ve chosen to ignore. I based a portion of my commentary on the work of Donella Meadows (a biophysicist and MacArthur fellow at Dartmouth) and John Mack (a psychiatrist and Pulitzer winner at Harvard), among others who have done ground-breaking research that politicians and the mass news media largely dismissed. And still do. I did continue, as well, to write literary journalism in the form of book reviews—of Baron Wormser’s poetry and Mailer’s later work. Mailer has strong New England roots, as do these other authors; my interview with Mailer focused largely on his four transformative years in Cambridge at Harvard, and beginning in 1946 he lived for decades in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as well as in Brooklyn, New York, finally in the last twenty years of his life making Provincetown his home and the setting of a book, a film, and a portion of several of his other books. Mailer also lived briefly in New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Berkshires, and he often took summer vacations in Maine with his extended family.

Collected here then are two categories of journalism: literary and political, divided into three logical parts. After retiring from teaching and publishing a memoir of growing up in the Berkshires in the 1950s, I also wanted to have in one accessible place a body of earlier published work that had interested certain editors and readers over the course of three decades, and that may still hold interest for readers today. In original newsprint and magazine formats, the journalism selected here I donated to the special collections of Southern New Hampshire University’s library, along with 40 years of other literary papers. I might add that it feels to me as if this book of journalism serves as a pendant to that recent memoir of my boyhood and youth. If the journalism is a record of my continuing impulse to write—come what may—from my experience of the world even during the arid years of writing academic criticism, the memoir of my boyhood in the Berkshires probes my earliest roots as a writer through memory, especially memory of interactions with the natural landscape. The memoir is a story of a boyhood both personal and representative that builds through dramatic scenes and speculative interludes. It is also a record of witness to the fraught relations within my family. I reread the 1805 Prelude before starting my memoir; Wordsworth became the presiding spirit of my efforts to recapture a lost landscape and childhood. D. H. Lawrence became the presiding spirit of my efforts to understand how family relations shaped me.

Because each piece included here has been previously edited and published, I decided to take charge of the structure, content, and look of this book myself. So I set to work with Troy Bookmakers to produce a book in a limited edition that might serve as the artifact of record, so to speak. I originally sold only first serial rights to each work collected here and have received permission where appropriate from the authors or publishers to quote from the original texts. Considering the literary journalism alone (the largest portion of essays), for example, the book offers readers a view of transformative moments in the lives of American writers of real accomplishment, all nurtured in one way or another by their time living in New England. I am equally struck looking back at the political commentary that the issues so much with us in the 1990s are still with us two decades later—and are arguably now more significant than ever for us as American and global citizens to our political and ecological survival.

Literary Journalism: Some of the Writing Tribe

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting.… It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.… The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

[My profile of novelist Merle Drown first appeared in The New Hampshire Times (August 29th, 1983), initiated by the publication of his debut novel Ploughing up a Snake (Dial Press, 1982). The profile served as the first of four literary profiles for the Times]

Beating the Odds with Merle Drown

If you’ve ever thought of writing a novel, you may know about that Great American Long Shot—getting your first novel published. A New York editor once put your odds at 500,000 to 1. So how does one do it?

Merle Drown, a high school teacher from Concord, beat the odds. With the help of a freshman English teacher and others, Drown realized about halfway through Macalester College that he wanted to be a writer, even though he had entered as a chemistry major. At college he wrote for the literary magazine and produced two book manuscripts: a Hemingwayesque short story collection about a young man’s coming of age and an autobiographical novel about a real murder that happened in Vermont where his relatives lived. After college and a year in graduate school at the University of Washington, he went into teaching, continued writing short stories, and began the ritual of collecting rejection slips for stories and novels. All told, between 1965 and 1982 when Dial published Ploughing up a Snake, Drown had written five books in seventeen years, three of which made the long rounds of agents and publishing houses during a fifteen-year period. So the first lesson from Drown’s experience is that you had better be ready for a long apprenticeship.

His second would be that you need discipline and encouragement. Probably the most important thing for Drown was getting into the Master of Fine Arts program at Goddard College in 1976. These days you are more likely to pass through such tutelage than to ship on a whaling voyage or land work as European correspondent for the Toronto Star. At Goddard, Drown learned discipline from Kansas City writer Dick Rhodes: one chapter every three weeks come what may.

I figured out that if I was going to write a novel, I was going to have to sit down every day for a few hours and write, Drown says. And that the whole romantic notion of starting with a full fifth and an empty page at ten and ending with an empty fifth and a full page at six in the morning doesn’t work. He also began to realize that in the evenings his language wasn’t fresh. And all the dream images and all the work of the subconscious are so much more active and closer to consciousness at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. So I started getting up. The house is quiet. There are no commitments but to write. Then hit the shower and begin the day at whatever time.

In the Goddard Program, Drown was also working on still another semi-autobiographical novel under John Irving (before Garp). Irving was very imaginative, open, encouraging. With Irving’s name to help him, Drown sent his MFA thesis to publishers, but again without success. At least the rejections started getting more specific and positive.

There seems to be a third lesson here: Better get that unsifted autobiographical material out of your system and in the basket, especially the stuff about the sensitive youth languishing in a world of Yahoos. Once you get out of yourself enough to write about other people too, find a good story. If the story has three or four murders, a couple of infidelities, and a half-dozen lines of conflict among major and minor characters, that doesn’t hurt.

Lesson #4: A writer can’t give up. You don’t choose to be a writer, Drown argues. You are infected with it. Most writers I know are not comfortable when they are not writing. They have that daemon Faulkner talked about. They just do it. So Drown finally went back to that old manuscript about an actual unsolved murder because his father had told him about thinking he had seen the culprits dragging the body toward the river. When he finished, he sent the manuscript to poet Donald Hall, whom he had met at Goddard, and Hall advised him to try a particular agent. The agent took it within a month, and the first house the agent sent it to bought it. Drown’s rite of passage was over.

Ploughing up a Snake opens with two terse paragraphs describing the murder of Forrest Langley, a dairy farmer obsessed with proving himself better than everyone else through his mechanized improvements and success. But the more he looks for recognition of his superiority, the more it recedes. A lot of his power and strength, Drown comments, comes from his lack of any human ties. To the people of Enoch whose links and ties are very human, Langley is not only a prideful outsider, and eccentric, he is something of a mystery, a kind of strange representative of mechanized progress in a rural backwater. He is, in short, ripe for the townspeople’s animosity. And when he beats up a likeable young man named Billy Harmes for returning spoiled milk, Langley is ripe for their violence. It fits the psychology of the situation Drown is probing that the three murderers should be models of small town normality and respectability, just as it is that the whole town should marshal behind the murderers.

There is a strong tendency in America to say that the people rule, that sometimes they rule without law. They rule by custom, by tradition, by force, Drown says. There are those occasions when people say: ‘That so-of-a-bitch needs killing.’ Drown cites a recent vigilante murder in Missouri. And small town psychology in some ways works nationally, Drown continues, in large city neighborhoods, and even in the way our national politicians can be sacrificed in our primary process, if they are seen as too eccentric, too much left or right, too crude, too bright.

Snake is really the story of two people who work toward exposing the truth—Clay Freeman and Marjorie Langley. Affable, brimming with good will, quietly enterprising, Clay Freeman, or The Candy Man as he advertises himself, is Forrest Langley’s cousin. But his humane qualities become his flaw once he is caught up in the web of murder, hatred, and guilt. Although after twenty years of marital fidelity he will become the widow Langley’s lover, and although he will finally confront the three murderers who happen to be his drinking buddies and beg them to come clean by putting the best possible face on their act, Clay spends most of the story avoiding Marjorie’s argument that the town is shielding the murderers, until in his hesitation and inability to act decisively he loses nearly everything he has—his wife and child, his closest friends, and Marjorie herself. And during Clay’s futile vacillations three more men die.

The most powerful character is Marjorie Langley, widow of the murdered man. Against Clay’s naïve hopes that justice will somehow be done, peace somehow kept, the town’s reputation somehow saved, Marjorie acts. The more I wrote the book, the more Marjorie Langley just grew and grew, Drown explains. "She insisted on her role. She would keep counterpointing whatever Clay was doing. Yes, it seems easy to agree. Wherever that imaginary world is that characters come from, Marjorie would above all insist on her role. A sort of latter-day Hester Prynne, she is beautiful, independent, shrewd. More than the makeup, though, Clay says of her, was the glow of craziness, the wildness of a woman who could put on furs and deliver jeremiads, which shook him like a fever chill of the heart."

Until the murder, Marjorie appeared to be a woman of her time, living dutifully in the shadow of her husband, rearing their mentally impeded son. But suddenly caught alone in the net of town allegiances and social pressures, she is then cast out. As few of her counterparts would, however, she responds with courage and independence, if not, perhaps, with highest wisdom. Too many women didn’t truly change, she thinks, they just did more. After telling the congregation what she thinks of them—they are miserable, cowardly, contagious, wicked in their silences—Marjorie constructs her own justice. Craft will be her method; so much the better if the town thinks her crazy.

In one of the best scenes of the novel, Drown captures the essence of her ostracism and her independent spirit. Her son Peter entrained, she walks into her field to practice rifle shooting with the same determination that she practices driving her car. The practical arts of self-protection (she has received threatening phone calls) and independence she must learn from scratch.

There was an awkwardness to her raising of the rifle, as though it stiffly resisted her; but once it was up, she stood in perfect control. She looked back over the stock to check Peter, who held his hands like a pair of earmuffs over his ears. She smiled at him, turned back to face the bales, and squeezed off a shot as Jonas had shown her. She thought it was appropriate to squeeze and not pull or yank the trigger, appropriate because squeezing made the gun seem more natural.…

Sharp, like the pains of labor, the kick of the gun came, but she accepted it; it seemed as necessary as contractions. The soreness afterward was just her weakness and wouldn’t affect her accuracy. Jonas had said she could fix a pad to her shoulder. She had told him she couldn’t go around wearing a pad all the time.

It was a new target. The single hole from her first shot was within the black-lined man’s form, in the lower body. She didn’t walk up to check closer but worked the next shell into the chamber. Before she fired, she looked at Peter, who was standing in the same place, his hands still over his ears, smiling now.

Anytime I’ve worked on a book, it’s when the characters come alive that I feel, yes, this is what I want to do; this is real, Drown says. I never felt good about pushing characters around. Drown still holds to the distinction between round and flat characters, and in this way as well as in his belief in the well-made story, he is a renegade himself. For nearly two decades now, the regime in serious contemporary fiction has been, as Drown puts it, post-modernism or whatever the hell they’re calling it now; that is, fiction that finds value in flatness of character and that places technique or style above story or content. It is a regime that has tended to deny that art enlivens or enriches our daily lives or increases our perceptions of reality or truth. I want my characters to be genuine, authentic, Drown says. The fiction writer’s primary responsibility is to tell the truth, the truth within his art. So I don’t care what’s currently popular when I write.… That’s a losing battle.

Drown is no slouch, however, when it comes to craft and technique. That may be why his dozen or so reviews have been favorable. Any reader would be taken with his ability rapidly and gracefully to shift between points of view, sometimes within a single paragraph. And each scene, as the whole plot, is carefully constructed. Burton Hersh, a nationally prominent writer based in New Hampshire, says about Drown: He has a sound kind of talent, a good story-telling instinct, and a good capacity to build structurally. And intuition for structure is rare and important in a writer.

A further technical achievement is Drown’s controlled but powerful use of metaphor and symbol, a technique that parallels the laconic Yankee writing style in this novel. When the metaphors do come, they come with aptness and power. Likewise, each symbol is carefully chosen, apt, and muted, yet each one reverberates throughout the novel and helps bind the work into a whole. And more impressive still is the way the symbolic language reaches beyond the novel to that literary tradition which has forever probed the moral dilemmas arising from our loves, infidelities, and frailties, and from our guilt and innocence. Here one finds echoes of the Bible, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Joyce, and Faulkner, among others.

Just to take one example. Perhaps the overriding symbol in the novel is Marjorie herself. She is the snake this town plows up. When the murderer Zach repairs the other murderer Duncan’s car, he tells Duncan that the car now runs "quiet as