Edward Hoagland would like to be thought of as the best essayist in America. "I think I still have a shot at it—and I'm talking about people writing now, not the likes of Emerson and Thoreau," he says.
As an essayist, keenly observant nature writer and venturesome travel writer about remote corners of the world, he has always had a far better critical than popular reception, and the galley of his latest book, a memoir called Compass Points: How I Lived (Pantheon; Forecasts, Jan. 8) comes larded with extravagant praise from writers of the caliber of Alfred Kazin, John Updike, Philip Roth and Diane Johnson. Perhaps David Rieff puts the nature of his achievement and appeal best: "Resolutely unfashionable, iconoclastic and intransigent, Hoagland is a writer who will endure."
Dan Frank, his current editor at Pantheon, concurs. "What I loved about Ted's memoir, in view of the spate of autobiographies we've seen about the overcoming of childhood anguish, is that this is a big, bold life reckoning, which makes it a bit anachronistic. Ted always says just what's on his mind, which is unusual and refreshing." Meanwhile, he has been out of sight for some time because of a variety of circumstances to be chronicled below, and "now," says Frank, "we're required to introduce him as a new name to a whole new generation of readers and booksellers."
Hoagland, a slight but sturdy figure with white hair and a boyishly beaming smile, sits down with PW in a bar near the magazine's offices, nurses a beer and talks, with a charming mixture of assertiveness and relaxed diffidence, of a career that has never ignited quite as it should; it has brought him many award nominations (but few awards) and a reputation among admiring fellow writers as a master of his craft. He has never lost the stutter his interviewer recalls from previous encounters over a span of nearly 20 years, although he acknowledges with a grin that during a period when he was legally blind, 10 years ago, the greater affliction temporarily drove out the lesser one. Now it, along with his sight, is back, and certain sentences cause a number of false starts, though no longer the facial contortions and sputterings of yore.
The account of his blindness, particularly devastating to one who has seen and captured the natural world with such startling vividness throughout his writing life, is offered with riveting immediacy in the opening chapter of Hoagland's memoir. It was his blindness and his dismissal from his teaching job at Vermont's Bennington College, the victim of a group of students who took a far-out political correctness position on a piece Hoagland had written in Esquire, that led to the memoir.
"I'd just lost my job, I was legally blind and I needed money," he said. So in early 1991, he went to Ileene Smith at Summit (which had done his last novel, Seven Rivers West), "and I told her I needed a good advance to keep me going. She asked what I could do for it, and then said: 'Why don't you write your memoirs? I could get you a good advance for that.' I thought I was too young at the time, but I needed the money, so I said yes. In the end, it took me nearly 10 years to write it, and by the time I finished I was 68, which was just right."
While a series of brilliant operations by a plucky woman eye surgeon restored his sight a year after he got the advance, he was only at the beginning of his publishing vicissitudes. Editor Smith and Jim Silberman, her boss and Hoagland's mentor at Summit, were fired, and Hoagland, who had been given the biggest advance of his career to date—$75,000—was homeless. By then he was acting as his own agent (a long relationship with Robert Lescher, who still represents his backlist, was dissolved in the late 1980s) and bethought him of Dan Frank at Pantheon, with whom he had collaborated on a series of nature books when Frank was at Penguin.
Frank recalls that old relationship fondly: "Joyce Carol Oates had done a piece in the New York Times Book Review, saying that all nature writers sounded alike, and Ted wrote a strong reply listing people worth reading. Together we did the Penguin Nature Library, collections by the likes of John Muir and John Wesley Powell, with introductions by people like Stegner and Matthiessen. I'd always admired Ted's writing, and his essays nearly always had that personal element, so I thought he would do a terrific memoir."
Hoagland secured a release from his S&S/Summit contract and took the book over to Random, though in the process, "Sonny [Mehta] lopped $25,000 off the previous advance."
Meanwhile, Bennington quickly realized a mistake had been made and restored Hoagland's teaching position. Although he now had his sight back, he was warned that it might vanish again, and that perhaps he should embark on an odyssey to "see whatever I wanted to see while I still could." So Hoagland, an inveterate wanderer, but mostly in obscure corners of North America—the bayou country of Louisiana; remote hamlets in Alaska; Canada's rugged Pacific Northwest, where perhaps his greatest book, and his own favorite, Notes from the Century Before, was set—began to wander further afield. In recent years, he has been to India twice and Africa three times, penning pieces along the way for journals as various as Harper's and the Nation. Hoagland began young as a writer, publishing his first novel, Cat Man, with Joe Fox at Random when he was only 23 and still in military uniform as a conscript. He recalls visiting PW in the mid-'50s, one of his only contacts in New York at the time his first book came out, hoping he might meet one of the reviewers for a date. "A kindly older woman—she must have been the editor—seemed to understand what I wanted, and introduced me to a strikingly sultry Italian girl, something like Anna Magnani, but my stutter rendered me speechless, and we just stared at each other wordlessly. Then the editor thought perhaps a 'nice Irish girl' might be better, 'someone you can talk to,' and I did in fact have supper once or twice with that nice Irish girl."
Among Hoagland's many endearing franknesses in his memoir is an unusual degree of openness about his sexual encounters. He found that with both of his wives and a series of later lovers, he lost his pulverizing stutter, and that therefore sex became, for him, a form of self-expression, much as the eloquence of his writing had enabled him to triumph over being verbally tongue-tied.
Despite his upper-middle-class upbringing (the family goes back many generations, and Hoagland's father, a senior corporate lawyer, did his best to block his son's burgeoning literary career, thinking it would discredit their social standing), Hoagland has a strong populist streak. Having begun by taking on such decidedly down-market jobs as working for the circus and being a fighter of forest fires, he is avowedly radical in his political outlook. As an ardent conservationist, he looks aghast at the dwindling of the world's lovely wild places, and blames unbridled capitalism for much of the destruction. Unlike many hand-wringing deplorers of such depredations, however, he has put his money where his mouth is, and recently donated 90 acres of Vermont land he owns to the Nature Conservancy.
Curiously, for one whose epiphanies seem most heartfelt amid wild nature, Hoagland has never lost a love for New York and its big-city delights. For many years, during his second marriage, he wintered in the city in an apartment overlooking the Hudson in the West Village and summered at a remote rural cabin in Vermont. His chapters on New York intellectual life and how it gradually became fragmented by the political pressures of the Cold War—second wife Marion was a neoconservative and a passionate advocate for Israel—are acutely perceptive; and his account of the bartenders and denizens of the Lion's Head, a now-defunct Village bar where he often hung out, a genial, quizzical presence, has never been bettered, though the place has been frequently written about.
He lives in Vermont permanently now, in Barton, a small community not far from Bennington, where his companion, Trudy, also works. In the current semester, he is teaching War and Peace and lamented to PW that his students were taking longer than he had hoped to read it: "I hoped they could do it in three weeks, but instead they're taking four"—which lowered the chances that he could sneak Graham Greene's End of the Affair into the curriculum. Being in constant touch with students gives him a sense of contact with the present often lacking in older writers, though he sees himself as a "social conservative", in the sense that he relishes personal attachments and deplores the increasing depersonalization of contemporary life. (He resolutely declines to use a computer for writing, and continues to do all his drafts on a series of manual Olympic typewriters—five in all, with two kept for spare parts; even that is an improvement over his early years, when he wrote his first books entirely in longhand—eight drafts each.)
His zest for human individuality draws him also to the rustic inhabitants of Barton, with their odd folkways and frequent dark secrets, like native people anywhere. Hoagland is tirelessly curious about his fellow beings, and can be touchingly generous. His travels to Africa in recent years have taken him to the southern Sudan and Uganda, where, he says indignantly, "Two million people have died of AIDS and starvation, and no one is taking any notice. I come back from there with an overwhelming affection for the people, and anguish at what is happening to them, and very little is being written about it." After a recent trip, he got a letter "out of the blue" from a 75-year-old Ugandan grandmother with five children of whom she was the sole support, surrounded by people suffering from AIDS. They had got his name from his driver. Hoagland sent them money hidden inside a Christmas card so no one at the post office could see and steal it. Then the grandmother had a stroke, leaving a 15-year-old boy in charge of the brood. Hoagland went back to Africa again at the end of January, found the family and offered more help.
Hoagland's range of interests and the brilliance of his style mean he is never lacking for markets, though in his 45-year writing lifetime he has always made far more out of magazine articles than books. Harper's and the Atlantic are key, but he is still resentful that an appearance last year in the New Yorker, under David Resnick, was his first there in 29 years. "David read me as an undergraduate at Princeton, where he studied under Geoffrey Wolff, who edited the Hoagland Reader, for heaven's sake! He knows who I am!" He attributes his many rejections by the magazine to the fact that his essays are in a personal voice "rather than the corporate, generalized tone they seem to prefer."
For someone whose books, as he ruefully admits, have never sold more than 5,000 or so copies on first publication, Hoagland remains widely available, thanks largely to Lyons Press (formerly Lyons & Burford), which has brought back many of his earlier backlist titles. ("I wish they could make more headway with the booksellers, though," he laments—and his books certainly seem like grist for the quintessential indie bookseller, who doubtless shares much of Hoagland's take on life and commerce.)
Despite his beginning as a novelist, Hoagland has begun to feel he "perhaps can't quite make the necessary imaginative leap," though he has published five and began work on "a quiet novel about hippies living in Vermont" about 10 years ago, which he never finished. His next book, he thinks, will be an account of his latest travels amid the African sufferers, often in the company of a CIA agent and a Mossad agent. This could be a novel, but is more likely to turn out as a nonfiction entry.
Both Hoagland and Dan Frank are eager to bring out a new collection of Hoagland's best essays, which means some of the best now being written. Heart's Desire (1988) was the last such collection, and since then there have been two more collections, Balancing Acts (1992) and Tigers and Ice (1999) Perhaps the new anthology will help redress what Hoagland sees as an unfair preference in the marketplace for short stories over essays. "I just don't think booksellers take essay collections seriously, and considering what short stories do, it's a cruel double standard."
Frank wants to see it happen, too: "I hope this memoir, and a new collection, will be the opportunity for a real rediscovery of Ted. He's a national resource."
