Why I'm Supporting Barack Obama

The American people are tired of politics that is dominated by the powerful, by the connected. They want their government back.

--Senator Barack Obama

Richard H. Rovere, the New Yorker’s late Washington correspondent, once characterized himself as being radical by intellect, conservative by temperament and liberal by compromise. I would describe myself pretty much the same way. Though I’ve been a registered Democrat since I first began voting, I’ve really had no political home in America. If I lived in Europe, particularly in Italy where I came of age politically, I would vote with the post-communist Left. Contrary to what conservatives have erroneously represented, liberalism in America is not the left end of the political spectrum—it’s really the center, as Arthur Schlesinger once described it in The Vital Center—anymore than classical Burkean conservatism is the right. Though neo-conservatives come closer in belief and behavior to the old right, the far right in America has, since the 19th century, been occupied by a know-nothing native fascism, just as the left was traditionally the domain of communists.

To understand this shift of meaning and attention is to begin to understand the kinds of political derangement the country has been suffering from at least since the Goldwater campaign of 1964, whose aftermath saw the rise of a well-funded conservative movement focused on changing the face of political culture in the U.S., indeed moving the entire country from its natural, non-ideological New Deal liberalism to a hard core conservatism represented by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (remember, Lyndon Johnson was unanimously voted into office in 1964 by an electorate whose majority characterized itself as “liberal.”)

A crucial step in the process of moving the country rightward was the demonization of liberalism by associating it first with communism (even though most liberals were anti-communist) and then as being dangerously “out of step” with mainstream America. Indeed, it could be said that just as McCarthyism had demoralized and destroyed the traditional left in America, so under Ronald Reagan and the rising power of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, liberalism was both discredited and forced into hiding. The L-word became the bugaboo of American politics. In retrospect, Barry Goldwater’s conservatism appears more like old fashioned libertarianism. Were he alive today, he would doubtless disown the neo-cons.

But I’m not setting out here to write about ideology—that can be for another time. I’m merely attempting to ground my argument—why I’m supporting Barack Obama for president—in the process of my own political evolution.

The first politician I admired was Adlai Stevenson. Although I remember President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom my nominally Republican parents idolized, he was still a shadowy figure from my childhood, a grainy image of a man in a cape, smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, in Saturday matinee newsreels about the war, the Yalta Conference, and his death in Warm Springs, after which I first saw my father cry. I was in college when Stevenson made his second presidential attempt, in 1956; and I was old enough to understand his speeches, most of which he wrote himself in a resonant, elegantly literate prose (much like Obama’s today) and to canvass for his campaign as a member of Students for Stevenson. My classmates were Ike likers (“I Like Ike” was the first campaign button I remember); and I had separated myself from my parents, who, under the pall of McCarthyism, had re-embraced the Republican party. Once I heard Stevenson deliver his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, I knew this was a man I could believe in, and nothing he did after his considerable loss to Eisenhower (a greater loss to the nation, I might add) disabused me of my admiration for him.

You might expect that after cutting my political teeth on Stevenson I would naturally have given the very first presidential vote of my life to John F. Kennedy, but I didn’t. I was living in Europe, where the Cold War arms build up was not a rhetorical crusade but a fact of life, and it was clear to me that there was very little difference between the militant anti-communism of Kennedy and his Republican opponent Vice-President Richard Nixon. I joined a group of expatriates, who signed letters, petitions and newspaper ads urging Americans living abroad not to vote for either candidate, as a protest against their joint refusal to curtail the nuclear weapons race. Indeed, after his election Kennedy proved to be every bit the Cold Warrior he promised to be.

Returning home frightened by Goldwater’s apparent extremism, I felt compelled to support Lyndon Johnson. I registered to vote as a Democrat and I have not changed that designation since, though I have voted for Republicans, notably Edward Brooke, who served Massachusetts ably as a senator, and Francis Sargent, who was one of the state’s finest governors, an early environmentalist and a liberal Republican of the old school.

I turned against Johnson as soon as he escalated the war in Vietnam, later canvassing for Senator Eugene McCarthy whose upstart presidential campaign drove Johnson from office. When Hubert Humphrey won the 1968 nomination at a convention reminiscent of Nazi Germany, I was forced to make another of the odious choices I have had to make as a Democrat, given the fact that Humphrey’s opponent was none other than Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a plan to end the war, which he kept running for another six years, resulting in the deaths of 55,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese. After my disappointment at Nixon's 1972 victory over George McGovern, another Stevensonian figure, I voted eagerly for Jimmy Carter in 1976, though as president he, too, disappointed me (he’s since become a hero for his courageous stand against Bush’s pre-emptive wars). I can say nothing more about the Reagan debacle (like Thatcher’s in England) than I wrote in column after column in the Gloucester Daily Times during his tenure as one of the worst presidents in history before Bush. I don’t subscribe to the conservative’s myth of Reagan as having ended the Cold War—not the Reagan who sponsored death squads in El Salvador, while illegally supporting a war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua with funds secretly obtained by selling weapons to our putative enemy Iran. This was also the president who turned Americans against their own government, another of those conservative-managed derangements I’ve spoken of, under which Americans have been convinced to vote against their own best interests.

After George Bush’s prelude to his son’s invasion of Iraq, I welcomed a young, fresh-faced Bill Clinton to the White House, only to discover that he was another sweet talker, though a highly intelligent one, at least as regards policy matters. I might even have pardoned his philandering had he not done the unthinkable, when he effectively dismantled the Welfare system, "ending Welfare as we know it," and driving thousands of women and children deeper into poverty, not to “reform” a system badly in need of it, but to take the issue away from the Republicans as he prepared to run for a second term. The move was called “triangulation” (adopting for oneself the ideas of one’s opponent, both to take credit for them and to insulate oneself from criticism by the opponent on those issues) and the Clintons have been running on this fuel ever since. (Note: Under George W. Bush 37 million people, or 12.7% of the population, live in poverty, according to the latest Census Bureau figures--the highest poverty rate on record for the U.S.)

I’ve never believed that the Democrats were less corrupt or more honorable than the Republicans. After all, I live in Massachusetts, whose state politics and most of whose offices are controlled by an in-group of Democratic old boys (and girls), as intransigent politically as they are intellectually bankrupt. This is the gang that gave us a string of Republican governors, who have left cities living off lottery funds, turning public schools into dilapidated detention centers, where the only teaching that occurs is to prepare students for useless state competency exams. This is also the crowd we can thank for three LNG terminals that further undermine our endangered fishing industry, while leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to attacks from those who would target the terminals. And we can’t forget the gambling casinos that will soon be built, presumably to increase the state’s tax base, depleted for some twenty-six years as a result of Proposition 2 ½, one of the early anti-government initiatives conservatives foisted on an unsuspecting public. Would the state’s “liberal” Democratic leadership ever push to repeal this dinosaur that’s driven the Commonwealth into penury? Don’t even think about it!

If I’m cynical about the party I’ve belonged to and most of whose candidates I’ve voted for since 1964, the above is self-explanatory. You could ague that I’ve had alternatives in Ralph Nader’s spoiler campaigns or the candidates of the nascent Green Party. However, when you live in a two-party system it’s foolhardy to vote for or support third parties, even if their agendas are appealing. You may feel personally good about it, but you will usually be undercutting the lesser of the two evils we’ve been presented with for most of our recent political history. Of course, one can opt out of the system entirely, but in doing that one cedes any small effectiveness one might otherwise have enjoyed, and you only end up throwing your vote away. Politics in America is, after all, the art of the possible.

But this time I refuse to take the lesser road. As a “Democrat” I now have two choices for my party’s nomination, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and I’m throwing my support to the candidate I believe to be the better choice, Barack Obama. Clinton and her husband (they are indistinguishable politically and they tell us disingenuously that if we vote for Hillary we’ll be getting “two for one”) represent the old politics of either party. Behind them lies the power of the special interests and their lobbies (especially the Israel Lobby, which has had such an inhibiting effect on American foreign policy), the money of the giant corporations and Wall Street, the health insurance cartels, the party hacks and back room old boys, who wouldn’t know a progressive idea if they fell over it; yes, and the Democratic Leadership Council, which has done more than its conservative opponents to undermine what little progressivism remains in the party. Beyond that, the presidency is not Hillary’s entitlement, as she seems to be suggesting. It may be an office she has prepared for and fought for during a good deal of her political life. She may even be the hard working senator she wants us to believe she is. But those not uncommon desires and putative accomplishments do not automatically guarantee her the highest elective office in the land.

If you listen to Hillary, who gave Bush permission (as Barack did not) to fire bomb thousands of women and children in Iraq and won’t repudiate her vote, you’ll hear the same old litany: “universal health care” but not “single payer,” or a much needed national health system, (Hilary and Obama both remain in the thrall of the health insurance industry); the conflation of the working class (which is now poorer than ever) with the middle class, which used to be the working class and still earns what the old working class earns, even as their industrial jobs dwindle or are shipped out of the country; no major critique of Bush’s phony “war on terror,” which has depleted our treasury and turned the rest of the world against us, just the same old “it’s a dangerous world and we need strong, experienced leadership” (it’s a dangerous world because every action Bush takes creates a more threatening reaction). Underlying so much of this is Hillary’s attempt to project a posture of power, of assurance (“I may be a woman but I am as strong and willful as a man.”)

However, the most significant factor for me in my decision not to support Hillary, is her uncritical embrace of neo-liberalism; and that, I believe, is the most insidious force threatening our political, economic and social wellbeing, far more than the canard of “terrorism” or Islamo-fascism. Neo-liberalism, an outgrowth of right-wing libertarian economic and philosophical principles, posits a market-dominated system, which seeks to privatize the entire public sphere into a globalized uber-market, which, according to social philosopher Pierre Bordieu, benefits least those who are most adversely affected by it, including the world’s poor and indigenous peoples whose local economies, communities, languages and folkways are endangered by globalization.

George W. Bush is also a neo-liberal, as is Tony Blair, for neo-liberalism makes no ideological distinctions. Its proponents believe in deregulation of markets, tax relief for the richest corporations and individuals (neither of whom need it), the transformative power of wealth, liberalization of trade, and market-determined interest rates—in other words, in non-governmental interference in an unfettered market. The consequences of neo-liberal economic policies are now being experienced by Americans as our economy falls into recession and millions of working people are losing both their jobs and their homes.

At bottom, Hillary and Obama are scarcely liberals of the Ted Kennedy or Gary Hart schools. They are both moderates and their records on that account do not differ much, though Obama gets higher marks than Hillary on his positions from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action organization.

When you listen to Hillary her speeches are all couched in terms of “I, I, me, me.” In contrast, Obama talks of “we, our, ours and us.” The differences are striking, if you care about the nuances of language and how arguments are framed. Hillary talks about giving us “solutions,” while Obama outlines ways of bringing people together to create our own solutions and to take back our country from the very special interests who support Hillary and Bill Clinton (and Bush). Deeper than that, Obama talks about hope, about caring again for our country and each other. Hillary, instead, raises the old Bush specter of fear. “It’s a dangerous world,” she reminds us, just as Dick Cheney did, while preparing to invade a country that was no threat to us. What emerges is the image of Hillary, who wants to be our first woman president, as Commander in Chief—as a warrior, a polarizing figure right out of the Cold War: “Us against Them.”

In comparison, Obama steps forth as a unifier, a healer. He wants to bring Republicans and Democrats, Independents and the disenfranchised together. I believe Americans are ready for that dialogue; indeed, we yearn for it. After eight years of the world hating us because of George W. Bush’s exceptionalism; eight years of secret government under an imperial presidency; eight years of payoffs to the rich, of thousands of deaths in unnecessary wars, and retaliation, threats and abuse against those of us who have tried to voice our opposition, I think the nation is poised for a new beginning. For that reason I’m placing my hope in Barack Obama.

Some Thoughts on Finishing a New Book

Et in Arcadia ego--Olympia, July 18, 1960

I’ve just finished a new book. It’s a sequel to At the Cut, my memoir of growing up in Gloucester, Massachusetts in the 1940s. I’m tentatively calling this one From Gloucester Out. I should be happy, or at least relieved after the completion of a not insubstantial piece of work. Instead, I feel sad—and it isn’t the melancholy one often experiences after giving birth or reluctantly letting go of something that has engaged us significantly. I’m sad because I think I’ve written a consequential book about how reading liberates, how education empowers, and how speaking up and fighting for what one believes in is ultimately liberating; yet I know there is little hope of its ever finding the kind of publisher who could make it accessible to a wider readership than it will have when it is inevitably published by a small press, or, barring that, when I bring it out myself.

I’ve read the stories about authors who self-publish and whose books are subsequently picked up by trade imprints after they create a sensation. But these books are generally of the self-help variety, or they are novels that would have elicited a commercial interest anyway, due to their subjects or the genre to which they belong—romances, mysteries, thrillers, the occult. There is a further story that accompanies the accounts of success of such books, and that usually tells how the authors promoted them vigorously and often with great creativity. I recently read about a couple in Salem, MA, who spent $50,000 of their own money self-publishing and promoting the wife’s historical novel about women with the ability to read the future in the patterns of old lace to the extent that it won the author a million dollar two-book contract from a major trade publisher. Again: history-mystery-the occult. Also: women's lives.

But I have not written such a book. There is little or no suspense or mystery in the story I’ve tried to tell about my life from high school to the present—the teachers who’ve influenced me, the books that have mattered, the places I’ve visited and the people I’ve met, both in my own country and in Europe. The book is also about my political and intellectual coming of age, narrated against the backdrop of life in America’s oldest fishing port. Furthermore, it’s a record of my search for and discovery of an identity through my involvement in the life of the place where I grew up, a city I left briefly, and, against all expectation, eventually returned home to live and work in.

In my earlier memoir, At the Cut, I wrote about my childhood in one Gloucester neighborhood and about the city, as I watched it change under the pressure of time and historical events. In this sequel, I’ve attempted to write about what it meant to attend a local high school at the height of the McCarthy “Red Scare,” and what it felt like to be a small town boy, the son of Greek immigrants, at an upper class college in New England. I’ve tried to describe what it was like to return to the Europe of my family’s origins during the Cold War—and then to come home on the eve of the war in Vietnam, where I married, started a family, divorced, and have spent the rest of my life living and working.

From Gloucester Out is not a memoir of trauma and recovery. It does not explain how the author overcame addiction, incest or abuse and found religion, peace, or a new life, as many current memoirs do. Neither does it describe how a writer escaped from her New York society life with a distant father and a drug-taking mother, who tried to seduce her boy friends, to find eventual happiness as a housewife and newspaper columnist in rural Montana, as another recent memoir, which one reviewer called “an emotional thriller,” recounts.

My book doesn’t have a single narrative arc--I always tell several stories simultaneously. It isn’t written to mimic a novel, like most memoirs published today. Though separate chapters focus chronologically on my life from high school and college to the present, the narrative also moves backward and forward in time, developing a series of inter-related themes, including my psycho-social development, my search for an identity, my political and intellectual growth, and a prolonged vocational crisis. From Gloucester Out also tells how an alienated bookish young man became a political activist, how I was finally able to combine potentially conflicting interests into parallel careers as a writer, teacher and social worker; indeed, how, contrary to what Thomas Wolfe suggested in You Can’t Go Home Again, I was actually able to return to the place of my birth and enjoy a rewarding life, though not without difficulty and struggle.

All of this should be of interest to book lovers beyond my usual readership on the North Shore of Massachusetts. But I’m skeptical. Agents or editors who have looked at my previous work tell me that because I focus on a single American place, which I know better than any other, my books are “too local,” or that they lack commercial appeal. One agent confided to me that the “gritty, unrelenting realism,” of my novel Broken Trip (which was eventually published by the late Grace Paley and her husband Robert Nichols’s Glad Day Books) wouldn’t sell because “readers want to feel good.” At the very least, they want “redemption.” In writing about loss and pain, about troubled lives at the bottom of the social ladder, about the violence of an addict’s life, I would apparently be depressing my readers, the implication being that everyday life is hard enough for most people, why make them read about adversity when all they are really seeking is escape?

Readers who, like me, grew up and went to school in the 1940s and 50s will remember that it wasn’t always this way. While publishers still churned out best sellers and television had begun to cut into the time many had previously spent reading, there was a wide readership for serious literature. Books also did not have to compete with the Internet, and we had not yet shortened the attention span of readers currently conditioned by cell phones, iPods and text messaging. Equally, the saturation in violent action and the hyper-visual stimulation today’s media offer make it more difficult for a reader to sit for hours absorbed in a book. Life moves too fast for those who do not already have the habit of print.

Nevertheless, like all of my books, my memoir is simply and directly written. I focus on a single American place, a city like Gloucester, which is fairly well known in the world. Even after the notoriety of The Perfect Storm, readers paradoxically don't appear to be curious about other views of Gloucester (so editors tell me); and there are so few readers of serious literary writing, fiction or non-fiction, today anyway. My best hope is to find a small press that will take a chance on me, like Grace and Bob did with Broken Trip, or a university press that likes the way I write and finds my work of some intrinsic interest or value because they ultimately know they won't make much money from me. Otherwise, I will publish and promote my book locally, with a friend’s small press or under the imprint a group of us have created to produce books and promote and distribute them via the Internet.

I am fortunate to have a loyal readership in Gloucester. These are the people I write for and care about, and they respond by coming to readings and buying books. To my great pleasure, they actually want to discuss my books with me. Still, like most writers, it remains my hope that somewhere out there is an editor who will pick up my manuscript and say, "This is interesting. I like the way he writes. The voice is unique and the approach to memoir is original. I think we'll take a chance on it." Perhaps one can still dream...

Addendum: February 21, 2008

As if to corroborate what I wrote about the current state of publishing, this morning's New York Times has a double review of father-son memoirs. The son is writing about his addiction to methamphetamines and the father is writing about the effect his son's addiction had on him. Again: addiction/recovery; trauma/salvation (redemption). The reviewer even notes that the nation seems "addicted" to reading this sort of memoir. I don't know what it will take to break the cycle. Publishers just seem to want to cash in.
But the rejection of books that don't fit into established (and marketable) patterns is a form of censorship, and that is very dangerous. It forces writers either into silence or the pitfalls of self-publication, which is both costly and often self-defeating because it's hard to gain a wider readership. Main stream media outlets don't generally review self-published or small press books. Without reviews book stores won't stock a title, hence sales are limited and the vicious circle continues.

There is a further concern. Just as market demands can act as a kind of censorship, there is the self-censorship writers are often forced to undertake if they write to meet commercial demands instead of writing the books they are compelled to create, books that take their own shape and find their own form, books that say what they want to say, regardless of what commercial publishers feel they can sell or what the readership wants. Some of the greatest books in contemporary literature, like Joyce's Ulysses, would never have existed if their authors had not fearlessly followed their own dictates rather than pandering to a market. Who is to say what significant books are lost to us today as writers turn away from what is best in them, away from the great risks that are inherent in our most important works of art? And what happens to the artist who is not faithful to his or her vision; what damage is done to one's creativity, not to speak of what is lost to the world when a writer or artist does not respond to what is best in him or her?

John W. Aldridge, 1924-2007

I heard John Aldridge speak only once. It was in 1956, during the spring of my freshman year in college, when he delivered a major address on the role of the writer in the university at an American literature conference held at Bowdoin. Renowned as a critic, though still young, Aldridge was an imposing figure. Looking more like a Southern aristocrat than a literary critic (born in Sioux City, Iowa, he’d grown up and gone to school in the South before graduating from Berkeley), Aldridge was tall and well built, dressed in a beautifully tailored dark blue suit. His hair was long for the time, though well cut, and he smoked a pipe constantly during the discussion period. Actually, I heard him speak twice that weekend because he also delivered a paper on Robert Frost during a session on the poet, a brilliant essay that advanced a reading of Frost's enigmatic poem "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep" that was so complex and densely argued that I missed its point entirely, though other scholars attending the conference challenged its premises during the often contentious discussion that followed.

But it was Aldridge’s keynote address on the growing phenomenon of creative writers—novelists and poets—as college and university teachers, and the rise of graduate writing programs, that forced me to confront an issue I had never considered before, especially since I myself had, that past year, begun to dream about becoming a writer with the expectation that I would also be teaching.

The substance of Aldridge’s presentation, based on two of his most important and controversial essays, “The Young Writer in America,” and “The Writer in the University,” was that academic life was no place for a creative writer. Not only was the teaching of literature counterproductive for a writer, who hoped to produce imaginative work of any originality or distinction, the life itself—faculty parties, departmental meetings, the seemingly endless grading of student papers, and the intellectual careerism—was deadening, he argued. Aldridge himself was a teacher. At that time he was an associate professor in the English department at the University of Vermont. He had also taught at Princeton, and he would continue to teach, beginning a long career, in 1964, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor that would last until his retirement, in 1990. But, as he later wrote about his own teaching, “I do not see that any purpose is served in attempting to make a virtue of the necessity which impelled me to teaching, nor in remaining blind to the many dangers inhering in it for the writer.”

Aldridge continued: “I am specifically concerned with the tendency now rapidly accelerating in the intellectual world to endow the university with creative powers and advantages which it cannot and does not possess, and I am particularly opposed to the development which has made the university the seat of literary politics and power in our time and which has transformed so many of our younger intellectuals into university apologists and literary politicians.”

Aldridge wrote these words in 1956, shortly before his Bowdoin address. They also formed the core of the presentation I heard. I needn’t point out how prophetic they have become to readers with any knowledge or understanding of academic life or literary politics today, when writing programs are centers of power and their faculties and graduates produce most of what’s published today as literary fiction and poetry.

All this was new to me as an eighteen-year-old with literary aspirations. But when Aldridge set the text of his talk back down on the lectern, looked out over the audience, and said, in effect, that if there were any aspiring writers among the students in the hall they shouldn’t be listening to him, they should be on the first train out of Brunswick, I was stunned.

“You will not learn how to write by first studying the writing of others,” he said. “That can come later—most good writers do it on their own anyway.” “What is primary,” he insisted, is that the young writer gain “a fund of experience in the world outside of the academy.” He didn’t say “real world.” It was not a term used then. Travel the country, Aldridge advised, like Jack London, Dreiser and Hemingway; take a series of jobs; do manual labor; work for a newspaper. Get the feel of the country. Come to know a diversity of people, men and women you will never meet in college. “Saturate yourself in the particulars of daily life—that’s where art comes from,” not from “an artificial environment,” like the university, where, Aldridge insisted, “more ideas are conceived than are ever put to use,” and “more passions are analyzed than are ever felt.”

As for those writers who were already teaching, Aldridge warned: “Remain here at your own risk and the integrity of your work, if not of your lives.” Writing and teaching about writing or literature were mutually exclusive practices, he concluded.

I left Aldridge’s talk reeling. A friend, with whom I had published in the college literary magazine, dropped out immediately and hitchhiked to New York, where he got a job and began living and writing in the Village, subsequently producing a remarkable series of plays. Another classmate left in June, heading for San Francisco, from which he sent me some poetry that made what had been published in our undergraduate magazine seem the merest imitation. Overhearing my own writing teacher, novelist Stephen Minot, in discussion with Aldridge and speaking with Steve later, I realized the impact Aldridge’s talk had on him. “It forced me to re-think my own choices,” Steve said.

I finished college, largely because I was afraid not to. I think it was also because I couldn’t bear to disappoint my parents. But my deepest wish had been to drop out, to travel across the country with my friend Mark Power, who’d gone ahead to San Francisco, and begin the living Aldridge posited as the primary consideration for a writer. I finished college and I went to graduate school, two in fact, though I was never a committed scholar and I always felt that writing was the principal focus of my life. Yet, as I struggled with remaining in school, I returned often to that warning Aldridge had issued to hopeful writers and to the books he’d written, which advanced and deepened his own critical thinking about writing, its making and function.

Until I’d heard Aldridge speak, I hadn’t read much literary criticism or even thought about it as a separate genre. I began by reading two books by Aldridge that had recently been published, After the Lost Generation (1951) and In Search of Heresy: American Literature in an Age of Conformity (1956). I can’t begin to describe the impact of those books on me. In fact, it can be said that if anything helped me ultimately decide to become a writer it was reading Aldridge, who had written so poignantly about what it meant to be an American writer, first in Paris in the 1920s, when he focused on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other members of the Lost Generation, and then in post-war America, in his no less powerful chapters on Norman Mailer, John Horne Burns, Vance Bourjaily and Gore Vidal. Aldridge gave me American writing as it was then being practiced, more directly than from any course I might have taken; and he also gave me the first means I had of evaluating that writing beyond the narrow New Critical precepts that were built into our English instruction. After reading Aldridge I went on to read Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, his first-hand report on the Lost Generation, and then Cowley’s The Literary Situation, about writing and publishing at mid-century. From Cowley I moved on to read Edmund Wilson’s literary criticism (it would be some years before I found To the Finland Station and Patriotic Gore) and Alfred Kazin's seminal study of American prose, On Native Grounds. By sophomore year I had begun to read formal criticism of a more academic nature in my literature courses; and then I took a year-long seminar from Lawrence Sargent Hall in the theory and practice of criticism. But it was Aldridge who got me started, and I have been reading criticism ever since, not only for what I can learn from it about writing, but also because I find the best criticism incredibly stimulating on a purely intellectual level.

I bought and read every one of Aldridge’s subsequent books, and there were many, including, A Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis (1966), The American Novel and the Way We Live Now (1983), and Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction (1992). There were further collections of his critical essays, Classics and Contemporaries (1992) and The Devil in the Fire: Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture, 1951-1971 (1972), an omnibus of his career. Aldridge even published a novel, The Party at Cranton (1960), which was coruscating in its criticism of academic life, especially English departments. He also published a book of social criticism, In the Country of the Young (1970), an attack on the inherent anti-intellectualism of the growing youth culture of the 1960s, which I disagreed with at the time, but have since come to appreciate for its prescience, the same clairvoyance that obtained in Aldridge’s essays about the danger of academic life for the creative writer.

As Aldridge aged his focus narrowed, as one might expect. Just as he had called for “heresy” in 1956 and when it arrived in the persons and work of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs he didn’t like it, Aldridge later rejected the fiction of Raymond Carver, who, like Hemingway before him, had given new voice and form to the American short story. Yet it was thrilling to see how Aldridge penetrated the stilted preciosity of John Updike’s prose and over-determined plots and the pseudo-portentousness of William Styron's "big" late novels, while being among the few critics to have understood the kinds of risks Norman Mailer was taking in books like An American Dream and Armies of the Night.

It is said that Aldridge was working on a memoir—he called it “a literary biography”— before his death, in Madison, Georgia, on February 7, 2007. I once saw a chapter about his early life and family in The American Scholar and found it hauntingly beautiful ("Hostages to Fortune": A Memoir," The American Scholar, Vol. 58, No. 1, Winter 1989). I’m posting this essay in part because, aside from a death notice in the June 2007 newsletter of the Hopwood Writing Awards program at the University of Michigan, which Aldridge once directed, I was unable to find an obituary for him anywhere on the Internet, though I can’t imagine a writer and critic of his importance not having been memorialized. I’ve also written these words of tribute because had it not been for hearing John Aldridge speak in 1956, and having then discovered his books, I would not be writing today. I would probably not be the person I am either.

A Canticle for Bread and Stones: Emilio DeGrazia's novel of Italian-American life

Growing up in immigrant families one hears stories. These stories are one of the ways we make sense of our histories, of each other, ourselves. When we are very young we can’t get enough of them. As we become acculturated we can’t seem to put enough distance between ourselves and the stories. And then there comes a time when we must have them again, a time when these stories are so essential to us that, at any risk, we must recover them, even though the original tellers may now be dead or suffering from the attrition of memory that comes with age.

A Canticle for Bread and Stones is a novel about stories; it’s a novel of stories. More specifically, it is a beautifully imagined narrative of the Italian experience in America, and as such it is a response to what Gay Talese asked for in his 1993 New York Times Book Review article, “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?”

In that controversial article, Talese, a novelist-turned journalist, asserted that “it is a fact that there is no widely recognized body of work in American literature that deals with this profound experience.” While there may not yet be Italian-Americans who have produced an oeuvre like that of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow or Bernard Malamud--and Talese offers some of the reasons for this disparity--there are both established novelists like the late Pietro di Donato and Gilbert Sorrentino and emerging writers like Joe Torra, Maria De Marco Torgovnick, Frank Lentricchia and Rita Ciresi, who have written trenchantly in memoirs, stories and novels about what it feels like to grow up Italian in America. With the publication of A Canticle for Bread and Stones Emilio DeGrazia, already the author of two prize-winning collections of stories, Enemy Country and Seventeen Grams of Soul, and the Minnesota Voices Award novel, Billy Brazil, joins their company.

The drama of this luminous novel involves not only the telling of stories about four generations of an Italian family’s experience in a mid-Western city, but the very quest for such stories. Its narrator-protagonist Salvatore “Sal” Amato, is an unemployed 28-year old “BA in History, City University” whose marriage is dissolving even as he and his non-Italian wife Sandy cling to each other sexually. As Sal half-heartedly looks for work, entranced by the women he encounters on the street and in shops (“God, what a lovely woman the stranger was!”) he becomes obsessed with a family legend.

The legend is about his great-grandfather Raphael, an accomplished stone mason, who left his native village of San Giovanni, south of Naples, to travel with the famous French architect Pierre Vente to America There, in a city bisected by a wide river, they were commissioned to build a great cathedral to be called St. Paul’s through which Raphael could make concrete his and Vente’s dream of a structure symbolizing faith, love and the redemptive nature of work (“He was in charge of the stones,” Sal’s mother says of Raphael. “He built the walls.”) The cathedral was completed to wide acclaim, but Raphael did not remain on the job to see his vision made manifest. Depending upon who tells the story, the family or the local diocese, Raphael was either dismissed from his job or left of his own volition because of irreconcilable differences about the details and design of the structure. The family’s version is one of betrayal, dismissal and regret, and it sets the theme for the family’s sense of its unsuccessful history in America. For in the next generation Raphael’s son Guido, Sal’s grandfather, was forced out of business, according to the family, by an unscrupulous landlord who sold him the building that housed his grocery store and then foreclosed on him when he was unable to make two mortgage payments.

The sense of betrayal and a concomitant loss of the promise of America emerges again in Guido’s son Paul, Sal’s father, recently retired after thirty-three years of hard labor in an automotive factory, where he made “the side part for carburators…three hundred a day.” Yet Paul reminds Sal, whom he calls a bum for not working, “Who ever said you were supposed to like work? We all hate work. That’s life.”

So it falls to Sal, who, with his pianist-composer brother Bruno and his “little sister” Bea, still an undergraduate, are the only members of the family to have had a college education, to get to the heart of the mystery of the family’s betrayal by America and the dream of success which has eluded them, and to find some way beyond their ambivalence about the very work that was to make the dream come true. Paul tells Sal, “Our people came here to this country to get out of the jungle, and we worked like animals all our lives. We came because we didn’t have washing machines and cars, because we were tired of living from hand to mouth, because we worked in the field all our lives.” Yet Paul, like his father Guido, yearns less for success or wealth than for a small plot of earth where he can grow beans and tomatoes; and Guido, long bereft of his store, returns daily to its empty rooms and backyard to brood over the lost business and his ruined garden. What are Sal and his siblings to make of this legacy of betrayal and ambivalence, of the conflicting and conflicted feelings about the new country the family has uneasily settled in, the nostalgia for the one that was abandoned (Sal’s mother’s mother Serafina had left America for Italy, never to return; while Guido, in his 90s, talks constantly of “going home” again—“It’s all in my mind, just the way everything was.”)?

Bruno’s choice is to make a precarious living playing piano in nightclubs and dives. By day he composes music (“some crazy blue tune”) in the vacant storefront of Guido’s old grocery, his grandfather constantly brooding outside in the garden. His lover Kate, born Protestant like Sal’s wife Sandy (“You Catholics are really weird.”) runs the Socialist Workers Party headquarters across the street. Kate idealizes work, but Bruno remains a drop-out from the Great Society, and Sal refuses to spend a life doing “stupid useless things.” Of himself and Bruno he says, “Bruno and I were alike: We both wanted to find a habitable hiding place away from a world growing too ugly for words.”

Under pressure from wife and parents, Sal searches desultorily for a job. He also searches for the elusive woman, the “soul,” which his father tells him is counterpart to man’s “flesh,” embodied in the unknown women he encounters in the ever more alien streets of his native city or the waitresses who serve him coffee along the Via Crucis of his quest. But his real search is for the truth of Raphel’s abandonment of St. Paul’s and for the man, Waldman, who cheated Guido out of his store, a German immigrant, now Catholic, now Protestant, who became a self-made millionaire. In getting to heart of Guido’s dissapointment and in finding and perhaps even punishing the mysterious and contradictory Waldman, Sal hopes to live up to his name and become the Savior of his family’s honor and history. Only this, he feels, will provide release from the uneasy tension he experiences in his marriage and from the taunts and exhortations of his family to become a man, that is, a worker, and a father himself.

The quest will not be an easy one. It will end with his mother’s death and the demise of his marriage. Sal will find a job briefly as an apprentice wood worker and uneasy comfort in seeing Bruno and Kate married and the parents of a child. He will watch his father entering a new life with Edna, a born-again Christian Pentecostal whom his mother befriends before her sudden death. Bea will settle down with Kate’s hippie-musician brother Dylan, and Sandy will move out to live with another man. Equally, Sal will come closer to an understanding of Raphael’s relationship with the church heirarchy under whom he was to build St. Paul’s. He will even confront Waldman, who emerges less an exploiter than a recluse whose wealth has brought him only confusion and isolation. But, more ominously, Sal will witness the destruction of his neighborhood as the city evicts his father, Bruno, Kate, and himself from their houses to make way for a gigantic sports complex. And with the razing of the places where the family has lived out its history the visible monuments of that history will dissolve.

All that will remain will be the stories and versions of stories, which Sal has patiently listened to, gathered, sifted and compared, his family’s stories and those of his mentor and ex-professor of history, Seymour Markels, who guides Sal’s work as family historian. All that will remain is what Sal has learned from the attempt of others to make sense of the myths of belief, labor and family they have accepted largely on faith and under the pressures of tradition. Sal’s own education, warily assented to by his parents, for they know it will eventually take him away from them, provides no key to his enlightenment, nor even a well-paying job in a city that renews itself by destruction as racial tensions mount and public space becomes privatized.

If A Canticle for Bread and Stones is a novel of stories it is also a novel of voices. Just as DeGrazia shows exceptional skill in weaving the stories told by and about the novel’s characters throughout the narrative, he is equally skillful in giving us the voices of the characters themselves. There is the sound of Sal’s father’s rough resignation: “Thank God I’m through. Thank God I’m almost dead myself.” Of Guido’s feisty hatred of the land that he never made his own: “Don’t talk to me about Amerdica!” Of his wife Rosina’s fluent piety: “All these years and no baby comes. What do you expect? Don’t forget to say the rosary every morning and night by your bed. You’ll see then a baby will come.”

If the bread of the novel’s title is what Sal’s family has lived on, the warm, sustaining, sacramental homemade loaves his mother has baked and served in spotless white napkins since his childhood, whose recipe will die with her, it is the stones of the world the men must ultimately shape and master in work in order to feel that their lives have purpose. The women have faith in prayer and song, the men seem to need something more concrete, those three hundred carburetor parts hatefully turned out or the plot of tomatoes lovingly tended after a day on the assembly line.

Canticle is song or psalm, celebration. In the book’s division into thirty-three chapters or cantos, each with its own theme or refrain, Emilio DeGrazia has given us more than a novel of Italian-American culture. A Canticle for Bread and Stones is also hymn to a vanishing way of life, to the once vital ethnic communities now disappearing everywhere in the face of mass culture and consumerism, and to love in all its exalted or perverted forms, especially, as Sal re-discovers as an Italian and Roman Catholic, the love of woman—Queen of Heaven, mother, sister, wife, stranger:

“What did I know about Her? Maybe even less than she knew about Me. But this I felt deeply and therefore knew all along: That she was vital to my work, that she who could bring new life out of passion (call it love) had the power to create and conserve I craved, that in her absence all work went wrong.”

(Emilio DeGrazia. A Canticle for Bread and Stones. Rochester, MN: Lone Oak Press, 1997. 312 pp. The author's photograph is reproduced from the dust jacket.)

Reflections on Turning Seventy

(Sky in Honfleur by Nicholas de Stael)

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...

I was twenty when I first read the opening line of Dante’s Inferno in my undergraduate Italian literature class. It would be another fifteen years before I reached the age the poet claimed for himself at the beginning of the journey he describes in the Commedia. Now I am twice that age and the years have appeared to pass with inconceivable rapidity. One moment, it would seem, I was sitting in my Italian professor Jeff Carre’s basement office, in Brunswick, Maine, where three of us met twice a week to read Dante in the original, and the next I’m standing in front of my bookcase in Gloucester, Massachusetts with the same volume of Grandgent’s edition of Dante I used in 1959, seeking out those words, which led me into one of my own life’s great journeys.

How nice it would be to find myself transported back to Jeff’s comfortable book lined sanctuary in Sills Hall to read Dante once again under his guidance, particularly with what I now know about literature and about life itself. For Dante, was, after all, one, if not the first, of the great literary realists, and that poem, as allegorically as it can be read, is also the story of a real journey—Dante’s through the inferno, purgatory and paradise of his own existential and spiritual quest, and the reader’s by extension.

How nice it would also be to return to Florence, where I again read Dante, this time with the great Medieval and Renaissance scholar Eugenio Garin, whose lectures on the Divine Alighieri sent me in search of the poet’s movements in the streets and alleys of the ancient city I came to love above all the cities I had visited or would ever visit.

But I can’t turn back the clock on my life. I can’t recover the years I’ve lost. All I can do is return to Dante, as I’ve been doing for most of the intervening years—years during which my Italian has faltered, while my understanding of the poet’s meaning has deepened with the help of my teacher’s teacher Charles Singleton’s incomparable six-volume edition of the Commedia.

It is hard not to think of Dante and the extraordinary months during which I read him so many years ago, not to speak of the nearly three years in Florence during which I pursued his shadow through that enchanting city. They were years of youth, years of excess, years of blunders and mistakes—but they were also years during which the foundation for the person I was to become was laid. While my college classmates were serving in Korea or laboring away in law or business school, I was granted a moratorium. I was given the gift of enormous space in my life, space in which to study, to read, to write, and to explore a culture rich in artistic and literary achievement, and I lost no time in doing so. In fact, I threw myself into that experience with a greater passion than I have ever since felt. I suppose one could call it the passion of youth, or what the offer of Bowdoin College described as “generous enthusiasm.” As we age we learn, hopefully, to temper that enthusiasm but not to lose it, for if we were to let go of that thirst for life there would surely be no reason to go on living.

But I sit down now to write not so much about Dante or Florence, as I’ve surely done elsewhere and hope to do again, but to reflect on the stage of my own life’s journey I’ve recently arrived at. I turned seventy on November 15, 2007, a birthday I had the privilege of celebrating with some of the people who mean the most to me, my three children, my life partner, and her two children and granddaughter, in Santa Fe, a city that I've come to love almost as much as Florence. That our children suggested this special celebration and that we were all able to meet where some of us had gathered before was as much a treat for me as the actual weekend we spent together walking, talking, breaking bread, and reminiscing under a warming sun and in the clear, clean, dry mountain air of New Mexico.

I don’t feel physically much older at seventy than I did at fifty or sixty, though my memory is not what it used to be. My former wife liked to tell people that I could recall every meal I’d ever eaten. Today I’m lucky if I can remember what I had for breakfast; and the names of writers or the titles of their books that were at my finger tips ten or twenty years ago, are hard to retrieve, along with the titles of songs I once loved or the singers who made them famous. I suppose one has to accept these losses as part of aging. Fortunately, the Internet provides me with much of the information I’ve forgotten; and my spell check is handier than ever, though the right word or phrase I’m often searching for takes longer to arrive.

These are small consolations for aging. If what I read recently is true, that seventy is the new fifty, perhaps there’s still hope for some productive years. But what I can’t have again is what has seemed to me to be irretrievably lost in the world around me as I’ve aged. Things change and places are transformed under the pressures of time and human willfulness. Some of these changes—the rehabilitation of historic houses that had fallen into disrepair, or new technologies that make our lives easier—are to be welcomed. But the losses I feel both in the community where I’ve lived most of my life and in the larger culture itself are more problematic.

Reading Dante as an undergraduate and studying history, literature and classical languages and culture were part of an old fashioned humanistic education that has pretty much disappeared in today’s over-mediated society. Living in the crass, materialistic world that has replaced it, I often feel obsolete, my interests shared by few. To be sure, literature is still studied by a waning number of graduate students, but I found it ominous to read recently that most choose their specialization with an eye toward the current needs of academic departments rather than as a response to their own passions. And most graduate students I meet today are woefully under-read, if not also under-educated.

Of course, the decade of the 1950s, during which I went to high school and college, was no golden age of the intellect. Though more students majored in literature or the humanities than they do today, I still found myself surrounded in college by classmates, who, though bright and ambitious, appeared largely incurious about the world. They were, for the most part, politically conservative; some were openly anti-intellectual. They tended to major in economics or the hard sciences, while dismissing those of us who cared about painting or theater. Many of those classmates of mine, who became doctors, dentists, CEOs, and military officers, or who made fortunes in real estate, have now retired affluently in gated communities. They boast about their golf games, while donating annual sums to their alma mater that far exceed my meager income. They are, in a word, successful, at least as the culture defines success. They have money and expensive possessions, and many have known great power.

I, in turn, have lived simply in a city that still feels like a small town. I’ve written and taught; I’ve also spent thirty years as a social worker, helping the kinds of people—displaced workers, alienated teens—who often harassed us as undergraduates on the streets of Brunswick. I have no regrets about my life choices. I could have remained in the academic world; but I ultimately came to experience it as an unproductive place for a writer, especially one like myself, who felt the need to interact with a broader range of humanity than what exists on a college campus. And even in a surrounding community, as I learned in Maine, it’s hard to know people who have no connection to the college or university. So I returned from Italy to Gloucester, where, except for travel and vacations, I have spent the rest of my life.

It is a sobering experience to live in one’s home town. You observe the generations as they come and go. People who once seemed incredibly old to us as children have died and we are now their age. I have only recently become a grandparent, but some of my high school classmates already have great grandchildren. I’ve watched neighborhoods deteriorate or become gentrified; I’ve seen a once thriving fishing industry become endangered through restrictive federal regulations. The Italian I once heard on the waterfront or in Gloucester’s West End has been displaced by Spanish, though the Azorean Portuguese of my childhood continues in the voices of new immigrants from Brazil.

The changes I’ve experienced in Gloucester have mirrored those in the larger society. Living through them, watching them occur with often dramatic immediacy, rather than through the distorting prism of the media, has been important to me as a writer. I’ve watched human behavior enacted on the sidewalk and in the consulting room, and I’ve observed and participated in political dynamics that have taught me more about democracy in action than any course or textbook. I’ve also stood by, often impotently, to watch as those in power have sold our birthright to developers, who wished only to exploit Gloucester’s uniqueness and great natural beauty for their own purposes, not for the common good. In the end, I’ve tried to do what I could as a writer and citizen in concert with others to make our community aware of what it was losing of its heritage, of the mistaken direction our leaders were often taking us, sometimes with success, but more often with a deep sense of failure. Much of what I experience now is loss—loss of people and places that were special to me as a child, of fields and forests I played or walked in, of folkways and values that were an intimate part of a closely knit community that served as a larger family to those of us who grew up here. While I understand that I cannot have back what was lost, often through human ignorance or lack of imagination or vision, I can’t help but feel angry that it was taken away in the first place and that so few seemed to care about what we were losing.

It is equally no consolation to live in a nation governed by an unutterable mediocrity, surrounded by neo-conservative ideologues, who have brought this country closer to fascism than it has ever come. Neither do I have much faith in the Democrats, whom we helped regain control of Congress so that they would get us out of this absurd war in Iraq. Like her husband, Hillary Clinton is attempting to triangulate her way to the presidency, while the other candidates seem to be competing with each other to occupy an equally vacuous center. Meanwhile, the public sleeps the sleep of denial with the help of the narcotic of consumerism. I try not to be cynical in my old age; but I can’t help being skeptical.

Writing in the New York Times of November 11, 2007, Frank Rich argues that “to believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.” He concludes: “We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.” I can only agree. Were he here today, Dante, who lived through every political and social horror of his time, would doubtlessly concur.

Thoreau Comes to Town: Henry David Thoreau's 1848 Gloucester Lyceum Lecture and his Return to Cape Ann Ten Years Later

(1854 crayon portrait of Henry David Thoreau, by Samuel Rowse; Riverdale, by Fitz Henry Lane, as Thoreau would have experienced the parish during his walking tour of Gloucester in September 1858)

Henry David Thoreau was fond of telling people that he had traveled a good deal in Concord. As a consequence, many of his readers and lecture audiences came to believe that the writer and naturalist seldom strayed from the confines of his hometown. While it is true that he was scarcely the traveler that his friend and earlier mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson had been—even in his seventies Emerson was still on the Chautauqua lecture circuit in Oklahoma and Texas, not to mention camping out with John Muir in the California Sierras—Thoreau was not as sedentary as some imagine, or as he sometimes ironically gave the impression of being.

He traveled as far west as Minnesota, and north to Canada on the first rail excursion that was offered from Massachusetts to Montreal. As a younger man he spent a dreary winter on Staten Island, in New York, tutoring Emerson’s brother’s children. He covered most of Massachusetts and New Hampshire on foot; and before his tragically short life ended, he made three trips to Maine and several to Cape Cod.

Significant for North Shore residents, however, are the two trips Thoreau made to Cape Ann—one by invitation, the other on his own—for they show him in action in our home territory during two distinct phases of his life. An examination of these relatively obscure visits reveals how Gloucester first reacted to Thoreau as a social critic and how he, in turn, responded to what an earlier, more pastoral Cape Ann offered in the way of unspoiled landscape and natural beauty.

In 1848, after the Gloucester Lyceum (now the Sawyer Free Library) heard that Thoreau had given a successful lecture on November 22 in Salem, they engaged him to speak the following month. According to biographer Walter Harding, the Salem Observer thought that the thirty-one year old Thoreau had “created quite a sensation.” His Salem lecture, which he would repeat in Gloucester, was an early version of the first chapter of Walden, entitled “Economy.”

Thoreau offered his “Life in the Woods” as an antidote to the money-grubbing spirit of his age with its rising industrialism. But he didn’t suggest, as many think, that we should all build cabins in the wilderness as he had done at Walden Pond, in Concord, three years before, in 1845. Rather, he stressed that each one of us discover for ourselves some “essential” mode of life in accordance with our own inner promptings, so that, as he wrote, when we came to die, we would not discover that, in fact, we had not lived. Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose husband once—and not disparagingly—compared Thoreau to a “Red Indian,” when they were neighbors in Concord in 1843, found his Salem lecture “enchanting.”

Thoreau arrived in Gloucester on Wednesday evening, December 20, preceded by this notice in that morning’s Gloucester News and Semi-Weekly Messenger:

“Mr. Thoreau lectures before the Lyceum this evening. This lecturer is one of the eccentric characters of the age, of whom Ralph W. Emerson predicted a few years since that ‘He would be heard from.’ From the notices we have seen of Mr. Thoreau, we think an original and highly entertaining lecture may be expected.”

Since there exist no entries for 1848 in his otherwise voluminous and outspoken journal, we do not know what Thoreau himself expected of Gloucester, nor of his reactions to what he got here.

The anonymous reviewer of the Gloucester News reports approvingly on December 23 that Thoreau “attacked with keen but good-natured sarcasm the customs and fashions of the present age, and ridiculed with much force the folly of men.”

After summarizing Thoreau’s account of how he had built his cabin at Walden Pond, the reviewer somewhat skeptically reports Thoreau’s assertion that “good, wholesome food sufficient for one hermit can be procured for four cents a week,” and counters it with an interesting bit of localism:

“There are, we have been often told, families of eight or ten souls in this town, who live a year on one hundred and fifty dollars, which falls considerably within Mr. Thoreau’s estimate.”

Having apparently had his fill of Thoreau’s practical Transcendentalism (what the followers of Emerson would characterize as “plain living and high thinking”), the reviewer soon asserts the status quo:

“Mr. Thoreau and a few other men in the world can despise the pleasures of society, worship God out-doors in old clothes, can hear His Voice in the whistling or gently sighing wind, and read eloquent sermons from the springing flowers: but the great mass of men DO and WILL always laugh at such pursuits.”

Although the writer goes on to say that the lecture “certainly lacked system…and some of Thoreau’s flights were rather too lofty for the audience,” his does comment positively that “in originality of thought, force of expression, and flow of genuine humor, Thoreau has few equals.” Yet he found Thoreau’s delivery “decidedly Emersonian.” To him it was evident “that in this respect he is an imitator,” a consideration, in the reviewer’s words, “which always detracts much from the force of genius.”

He concludes that “although the lecture was entertaining and original, it was not calculated to do much good, and we think may be considered a literary curiosity [rather] than a practical dissertation on economy.”

The reviewer for Gloucester’s second newspaper, the Telegraph, which advertised itself as “Devoted to Patriotism, Sound Morals, Temperance, Literature and News,” reports also that Thoreau’s lecture was “rather a unique performance.”

Just the same, to Thoreau’s now famous “I have traveled a good deal in Concord: and everywhere in shops and offices and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways,” he—or she—has this to say:

“The lecturer gave a very strange account of the state of affairs at Concord. In the shops and offices were large numbers of human beings suffering tortures to which those of the Brahmins are mere pastimes. We cannot say whether this was in jest or in earnest. If a joke, it was a most excruciating one—if true, the attention of the Home Missionary Society should be directed to that quarter forthwith.”

The reviewer concludes:

“With all deference to the sagacity of those who can see a great deal where there is little to be seen—hear much where there is hardly anything to be heard—perceive a wonderful depth of meaning where, in fact, nothing is really meant, we would take the liberty of expressing the opinion that a certain ingredient to a good lecture was, in some instances, wanting.”

So much for the most famous chapter of Walden, a book destined to stand alongside such classics of the American Renaissance as Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grass (all published within the same five-year period) and to remain in print since it was first published in 1854.

“Gloucester, unlike Salem,” Walter Harding concludes, “had had enough of Thoreau.” There is no record of his ever having been invited to lecture here again.

Leaving Gloucester, Thoreau went on to speak before large and approving audiences from Concord, Massachusetts to Portland, Maine. Publisher Horace Greeley devoted an entire editorial page of the New York Tribune, on April 2, 1849, to the success of Thoreau’s lecture tour.

“There is not a young man in the land—and very few old ones,” Greeley wrote, “who would not profit by an attentive hearing of that lecture.”

When Thoreau next traveled to Gloucester it was ten years later, in 1858; and he came not as a lyceum lecturer but as a typical late summer or early fall visitor of the time, with a pack on his back, and probably, as the reviewer of the News had written, worshipping God “out-doors in old clothes.”

The Henry David Thoreau who arrived in Gloucester on September 22, 1858, was a somewhat different person from the Walden hermit whose lyceum lecture here ten years earlier had seemed for the most part to have fallen on deaf ears. For one thing, he was older. He appeared to his friends as a more substantial yet serene presence in their midst. Many would attribute this to the fact that he had published two books of astonishing originality and force of expression—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden—the making of which had doubtless solidified his character, integrating many of his interests and concerns, especially his ability to observe and write about nature and the outward world, while also describing the inward world of his own thoughts and feelings.

A Week, published in 1849, a year after his first visit to Cape Ann, did not sell well. Unable at first to find a publisher who would take the manuscript at his own risk, Thoreau had finally paid Emerson’s publisher, James Munroe of Boston, to bring out his first book, which had been ten years in the making. Undaunted by the book’s poor sale (a recent rare copy sold for $19,500) and even poorer critical reception, Thoreau took back 706 unsold copies from an initial printing of 1,000, placed them on his personal bookshelves in the attic of his family’s home in Concord, where he had his room, commenting wryly in his journal:

“I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself.”

But those who had read A Week and who had truly understood it were well aware of its importance. The young naturalist and teacher, fresh out of Harvard when he made that trip on the rivers with his brother John, in 1839, was already predicting the impact of industrialization on the agrarian life and rural ecology of the New England of his time. Thoreau was the first writer to warn us about the adverse effects upon our waterways and the air we breathe of the new mills and factories under construction in the Merrimack Valley. In A Week and subsequent writings and lectures he pointed out how the once-clear waters of the great Merrimack were running purple and black from the dyes of Manchester’s cotton mills. He also noted the emergence of an entirely new kind of pollution in America—noise pollution—a result of the railroads and the new technologies of the factory system, which he also felt had the chilling effect of turning its laborers into human machinery.

In his imaginative use of local history and in the precision and accuracy of Thoreau’s descriptions of the places he and John visited during their travels on and off the two rivers, A Week stands today as one of the last visions of a pristine rural America before the Industrial Revolution destroyed its human scale agrarian economy forever.

Unlike A Week, Walden sold well when it was first published in 1854. As particular as Thoreau’s experience in the Concord woods had been—Henry James called it “parochial”—the book told a universal story. In detailing his encounter with the divinity and with himself at edge of the “holy well” of Walden Pond through all the seasons of the year, Thoreau gave us “one of the last great religious books of the West,” according to poet Gerrit Lansing.

As a rejoinder to those skeptics, mostly journalists, who poked fun at his “out-door religion,” Thoreau wrote in “Slavery in Massachusetts,” one of his most scathing essays, “We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not care for the Bible, but we do care for the newspaper!”

“Slavery in Massachusetts” was originally a lecture given in Framingham, in 1854, in which he warned his audience, including slaveholders, that they had better address themselves to their own moral turpitude and a corrupt state government, willing to uphold the Fugitive Slave Law, before they expressed concern for slavery in far away states like Nebraska.

But in September 1858, Thoreau did not come to Cape Ann to lecture or otherwise engage in polemics. He was on a walking tour of the North Shore with his friend John Russell of Salem. After examining the Indian relic collections at the Essex Institute (today the Peabody Essex Museum) in Salem, the two men toured Salem, Marblehead, Beverly and Manchester, “botanizing along the way,” as Thoreau wrote in his journal.

They “scuffed” along what Thoreau refers to as the “musical sand” of Singing Beach in Manchester and cooked their supper in a salt marsh “some two miles this side of Gloucester, in view of the town.” That night they “put up in Gloucester,” after enjoying some late blackberries, the persistence of which Thoreau attributed to “the cool air of the Cape.” He also notes that “the foliage had but just fairly begun to change.”

The next morning, September 23, the two men set out for Rockport. Thoreau writes:

“Having reached the shore, we sat under the lee of the rocks on the beach opposite Salt Island. A man was carting seaweed along the shore between us and the water, the leather-apron kind, which trailed from the car like the tails of oxen, and when it came between us and the sun, was of a warm purple glow.

“On the edge of the beach you see small dunes, with white or faun-colored sandy sides…Just before reaching Loblolly Cove, near Thacher’s Island [we] sat on a beach composed entirely of small paving stones.

“We could see the Salvages [T. S. Eliot’s "Dry Salvages"] very plainly, apparently extending north and south and east-northeast of Straitsmouth Island…”

“Rockport well deserves its name—several little rocky harbors protected by a breakwater, the houses at Rockport Village backing directly on the beach. At Folly Cove, a wild rocky point running north, covered with beach grass…”

The hikers paused there to look across Ipswich Bay to Newburyport and Plum Island before setting out for Annisquam. Thoreau continues:

“In Annisquam we found ourselves in the midst of boulders scattered over bare hills and fields. This was the most peculiar scenery of the Cape…”

He is referring to the moraine of the Dogtown section of Gloucester, and Thoreau’s description of his experience of this still relatively wild interior of Cape Ann is worth quoting complete:

“We struck inland southerly, just before sundown, and boiled our tea with bayberry bushes by a swamp on the hills, in the midst of these great boulders, about halfway to Gloucester, having carried our water a quarter of a mile, from a swamp, spilling a part in threading swamps and getting over rough places. Two oxen feeding in the swamp came up to reconnoiter our fire. We could see no house but the hills strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down, on every side, we sitting on a shelving one.

“When the moon arose, what had appeared like immense boulders half a mile off in the horizon now looked by contrast no larger than nutshells or buri-nut against the moon’s disk, and she was the biggest boulder of all.

“When we had put out our bayberry fire, we heard a squawk, and, looking up, saw five geese fly low in the twilight over our heads. We then set out to find our way to Gloucester over the hills, and saw the comet very bright in the northwest. After going astray a little in the moonlight, we fell into a road which at length conducted us to town.”

On the following morning, September 24, the two men left Gloucester, Thoreau proceeding immediately to Concord by train. A last note reads:

“There is a scarcity of fresh water on the Cape so you must carry your water a good way in a dipper.”

In his journal entry of September 30, Thoreau returns to the Gloucester visit:

“In our late walk on the Cape, we encountered Gloucester each time in the dark and mid-evening traveling partly across lots till we fell into a road, and as we were simply seeking a bed, inquiring the way of villagers whom we could not see, the town seemed far more home-like to us than when we made our way out of it in the morning.

“It was comparatively still, and the inhabitants were sensibly or poetically employed, too, and then we went straight to our chamber and saw the moonlight reflected from the smooth harbor and lighting up the fishing vessels, as if it had been the harbor of Venice…

“Walking early in the day and approaching the rocky shore from the north, the shadows of the cliffs were very distinct and grateful and our spirits were buoyant. Though we walked all day, it seemed the days were not long enough to get tired in. Some villages we went through or by without communicating with any inhabitant, but we saw them as quietly and distantly as in a picture.”

Although Cape Ann obviously left an indelible impression on him—some of his descriptions invite comparison with the views of native painter Fitz Henry Lane, who was an exact contemporary—Thoreau never returned. Four years after his second visit here, he succumbed to his lifelong struggle with tuberculosis, dying on May 6, 1862, two months before his forty-fifth birthday. His last two books, Cape Cod and The Maine Woods, accounts of other journeys he made in his beloved New England, were published posthumously, along with his masterful journals, in which the report of his walking visit to the North Shore can be found in its entirety.

(Earlier versions of this essay appeared in North Shore and Essex Life magazines.)