Odd Jobs (134 page)

We could have used more generalization. In de Tocqueville, the proportion of incident to generalized assertion and description is no more than one to ten;
Blue Highways
reverses the ratio. We hope for more from a travel book—especially when its terrain is the land where we live, and whose news we see nightly on television—than a heap of piquant facts, however nicely chiselled and arranged. “Reading my notes of the trip—images, bits of conversations, ideas—I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule.” Heat Moon’s inner quest keeps sinking out of sight; his
Weltschmerz
merges with road weariness, his muffled marital grief—his wife, also of mixed blood, is identified simply as the Cherokee—is relegated to a single long-distance phone call, which leads nowhere. His intermittent wish to pump significance into his material drives him toward tangled rhetoric like

He is a great believer in bars as forums of opinion, and we hear a good deal about café cuisine. Some of the conversations he has are good; others feel stagy and forced—forced by his need to produce them for his unacknowledged companion, this book in embryo. It seems bookishness that tugs him toward towns bearing quaint names—Nameless, Looking-glass, Dime Box, Othello. His regional descriptions can be magical—such as that of the Palouse, a weirdly fertile area, in Washington State, of hills so steep that special machinery has to be built to harvest the crops—but sometimes feel as obligatory as postcards. There are too
many pushed metaphors, including a peculiar type of pathetic fallacy, highway personification:

More might have been done with the author’s partial Indianness; this was meant, perhaps, to provide the angle of vision, the spin on the pitch. Few stretches of land and pages pass without a reminder of some past battle or treaty whereby the first Americans were deprived of their continental domain. Heat Moon takes along with him as literary companions Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
and J. G. Neihardt’s
Black Elk Speaks
. Black Elk even has some words on “the blue road”: it is the route for “one who is distracted, who is ruled by his senses, and who lives for himself rather than for his people.” There is something Indian, too, about the ordeal of Spartan travel that Heat Moon has imposed upon himself; James Ferry, another Native American, has written in a recent short story, “My grandfather once told me that there was a certain pain that purified. Because of the pain, some Indian ceremonies may seem like mere torture to outsiders. But beyond the pain there is something else, if only one can get beyond the pain. The inside is reduced to ash, as the sun has touched you, sanctified you.” Yet William Least Heat Moon’s actual encounters with Indians, and his long drives through old Indian territory, fall rather flat. In Texas, he picks up an elderly hitchhiker who turns out to be the offspring of a
vaquero
(cowboy) and an Apache mother, and, though “he was the only Apache, mestizo or otherwise,” the author had ever talked to, neither man can find much to say: “When the silence got noticeably long, he said, ‘Pretty good country.’ ” Driving on west, Heat Moon sagely observes that “there’s something about the desert that doesn’t like man.” Visiting the Hopi reservation in Arizona, he has “no luck in striking up a conversation,” and among the Navajo is bluntly snubbed:

The old pothead has sensed, no doubt, that his interlocutor is part paleface—a literary man, an educator, an instinctive alluder to Henry Miller and H. L. Mencken, Calvin Trillin and John McPhee. Heat Moon is a fractional brave well enough assimilated to worry winningly about being eaten by a bear while he sleeps in his steel truck. “I lay a long time, waiting for the beast, shaggy and immense, to claw through the metal, its hot breath on my head, to devour me like a gumdrop.” Though he does get a Hopi student at Southern Utah State College to talk about being Indian, and to explicate the maze at the heart of Hopi philosophy, when the author climbs back into his truck and drones through the monotonous immensity east of where Sitting Bull at last surrendered it is not Whitman or Black Elk that comes to his mind for quotation but one of Gertrude Stein’s incomparable epigrams: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.” Farther east still, he is insulted as “Tonto” and a “freak” by a businessman in Michigan, though the photograph on the back of the jacket shows a pale, fine-featured man with a studiously shaped haircut and beard. The only things that look Indian about Heat Moon are his dark eyes and his enviably flat stomach.

After being called “Tonto,” the author seems to wake up, and to cease wishing to see the invisible things that full-blooded Indians see, and to exercise his eye more satirically, especially as upper-class Northeasterners hove into view: “In the piney taproom I sat near a table of two men and their wives who wore the colors for that spring: pink and Kelly green touched up with white. The women were in perfect trim like mortuary lawns, and the husbands wore clothes for the man who knows where he’s going.… The conversation was about suitable gifts to take the children at home with grandmothers. The decision: volleyballs for the boys, stuffed kangaroos for the girls, brandied apricot cakes for grandmothers.” And in Kennebunkport, Maine:

Smile though he will, Northeasterners, from Cheshire, New York, to Smith Island, Maryland, were the warmest people Heat Moon met—the most amusing and the least wary, the most giving. He was invited to eat dandelion salad and fried venison with an Italian family in the vineyard country of New York State, to tramp through an old-timer’s sugar-maple farm in New Hampshire, to join a fishing expedition in Maine, to sing the praises of atomic submarines (“They’re longer than the Washington Monument”) in Connecticut, to have drinks and dinner in southern New Jersey, and to go on a private tour of a six-by-four-mile island in Maryland. The author has a few friends in this region, and some memories: he was once a sailor stationed at Newport. He walks Thames Street, sanitized and commercialized since the Sixties, when it was “still a dark little guttery thing filled with the odor of beer and fried food and dime-store perfume,” and remembers an old fisherman he met in a tavern where a parking lot now exists:

That carved bit of your own bone might have served better than the Hopi maze as the ruling metaphor for this book. By sticking to the back roads, Heat Moon by and large met Americans who have stayed put, where fate set them, gradually gathering dignity to their lives from the continuing history of places like Shelbyville, Kentucky, and Melvin Village, New Hampshire. Their talk, where they do not grudge it, is firm and, within the tiny given periphery, authoritative. One doubts if life has many lessons they would have learned better by moving around. And one doubts, when
Blue Highways
and all its passing sights have been traversed, if William Least Heat Moon learned much about himself or about America that he could not have discovered in Columbia, Missouri.

C
HARACTERS AND
T
HEIR
L
ANDSCAPES
, by Ronald Blythe. 208 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

This book in its original English publication was called
From the Headlands
—a more suitably diffident title for a collection of essays, some quite brief, written over the years for various occasions. What the occasions were we are left to guess. Some, to judge from the acknowledgments, were introductions to paperback reissues of classics (Hazlitt, Tolstoy, Hardy); others have the tone of radio talks and were previously published in
The Listener
. Though Mr. Blythe’s introduction, which naturally emphasizes the something heaven-sent and unifying in his sundry inspirations, claims, “A few of these essays have been previously published in the scattered way of such things, and quite a few of them have not,” only three of the fourteen, in fact, escaped prior publication. One would be grateful to know what prompted the delivery of such relatively offhand and inconclusive accounts as “Dinner with Dr. Stopes” and “Interpreting the Shades.” What has dictated their preservation in this volume, we are told, is “the native element,” “a linkage of mood, thought and autobiographical facts,” “writing which ‘doubles’ certain literary and personal reactions to readings and events.” Mr. Blythe protests too much; he is a distinctive writer with a pervasive passion for rural England, and any collection by him would have unity enough.

He is best known, of course, for the exquisite assemblage of village testimony called
Akenfield
(1969); a somewhat lumpier but still remarkable set of interviews with the elderly,
The View in Winter
(1979), has followed. As well as a good listener he is a keen reader, not so much a critic as a connoisseur, whose fresh enthusiasm would send us warmly back to the classics. In this volume, the essays on Hazlitt, on John Clare, on Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and on Hardy’s
A Pair of Blue Eyes
and
Far from the Madding Crowd
are superb appreciations. Hazlitt he portrays as the unreconstructed radical among the Romantics, “cursed with everlasting youth,” his writing marked by “ultimate defencelessness.” Mr. Blythe does some writing of his own to describe Hazlitt’s:

Hardy touches Mr. Blythe most deeply and touches off his highest praise. Of
Far from the Madding Crowd
, he writes:

The word “sumptuous” recurs, in connection with the novel’s sheep-shearing scene:

Mr. Blythe is a partisan of those writers who have let the English countryside speak, Hardy foremost: “No one before or since has given the full village picture with such original authority, no writer conceded less to what it was generally held to contain, either socially or spiritually.” The cultural assumptions that muffled the countryside and its villages in silence are sketched in the essay “The Dangerous Idyll,” which begins,
“Extreme though it may sound, any literary undertaking by an English villager has until quite recently, by which I mean the late nineteenth century, been received with much the same suspicion as novels and poetry written by English women. Each, by daring to produce literature, had broken through ancient orderly concepts of their functions.” First cited, and fondly referred to throughout this book, is the unhappy case of John Clare—a ploughman of Helpston (“a gloomy village in Northamptonshire,” in Clare’s own description) whose poetic efforts were negligently destroyed by his mother and loudly ridiculed by his fellow villagers. “From about twelve years onward, Clare lived a furtive, aberrant existence, hiding in woods with his books, hoarding old sugar-bags to write on, muttering behind the plough.” Yet, when literary London opened to him in 1820, upon publication of his first book of poems, Clare stuck to Helpston for his residence as well as his inspiration, and, according to Mr. Blythe, found the forced move to a village three miles away so traumatic he became mentally ill. Such sensitive attachment to the land was rare; the rural reality was grimmer than the bucolic poems of Pope and Thomson indicated, and a former bumpkin like George Crabbe, when once accepted in urban circles, quickly and totally severed all connection with the Suffolk farm-laboring class into which he was born. Robert Burns, we are told, published
his
ploughman’s poems “not to celebrate his oneness with the village of Mossgiel but to make enough money to get off the land altogether and sail to Jamaica and work on a plantation.”