“A writer’s work is to witness things”

Tigers & Ice, by Edward Hoagland.  A collection of essays. 206 pages. Published by The Lyons Press, New York.

reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

Ted Hoagland’s new book, his first in seven years, can be read as a huge sigh of relief.

“A writer’s work,” it begins, “is to witness things.”

Mr. Hoagland was thrown out of the witness business in his late ’50s when his eyes went bad.  He was legally blind for a couple of years, until surgery restored his vision.

Thanks to his recovery, he writes, these new essays “are probably love letters to life.”

Everything is relative, however, and fans of this writer — arguably the best essayist America has —  need not fear that his blunt, irascible style has given way to sweet sentiment.

Early in “Behold Now Behemoth,” the first of these 11 essays, he assures us that “unmixed glee is beyond my capacities. I begin to flag if I am required to be upbeat for many hours at a stretch...”

Delighted as he is to be able to see again, to return to his vocation as a witness, Mr. Hoagland has not lost his essential vision of the beauty of nature and the bleakness of the human soul.

“On the street, with my rejuvenated sight — fifteen-thousand-dollar plastic implants — I seemed to see right back into the exhaustion and poignant anxiety in the recesses of other people’s eyes, the thwarted potential for love and fun and dedication, the foiled altruism, now in abeyance, and the exasperation.  And yet I could also see the imp that lived in them, the child that hadn’t died.”

Mr. Hoagland has published seven collections of essays, two travel books and five novels. Tigers and Ice combines two of these forms.  The book is structured around two long travel pieces.  During his sixty-first year, Mr. Hoagland took a rough sort of tour boat to Antarctica, and accepted an invitation to visit (and, his hosts hoped, write about) the unspoiled Nilgiri Hills of southern India.

The two pieces that resulted are vintage Hoagland, rich in detail, offsetting his love of nature and its creatures with the edgy concern that one of those creatures — us — is making a mess of things.  “In my lifetime alone,” he writes, “perhaps half the species that were alive on earth when I was born will have been snuffed out.”

Readers with an interest in either of these places can buy Tigers and Ice with the assurance that they will learn a good deal. And what they learn will be delivered with the wit, elegance and style of a master of the language.

What makes the book a book, however, is the material that leads us to these two travel pieces. A series of eight essays, some as short as four pages, offer Mr. Hoagland’s insights into the life of the late-twentieth-century American male. 

The first explores religious belief, and conveys at least the suggestion that the blind author thought of himself as Job, the Old Testament plaything of an egotistical God. He might be forgiven for that, considering that blindness was the second vital facility that Mr. Hoagland pretty much lost. The first was speech.  Writing essays, he suggests, was a way to compensate for a speech defect.   “A bad stutter from childhood made me want to ‘talk.’”

With vision restored, the author considers in his second essay a process that can’t be reversed:  “What do you do when you’re 60 and haven’t rehearsed for it?”

From there, in “Heaven and Nature,” Mr. Hoagland moves on to a lengthy discussion of his own and his friends’ impulses to suicide. 

“Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of 50.  Incipient cataracts or arthritis, outlandish snores, tooth grinding, ankles that threaten to turn are part of the game.  But not to trust one’s mind?  That’s a surprise.”

I like that passage not only for what it says, but also for its style. It epitomizes the rhythm and pace that I am not enough of a critic to analyze, but quickly recognize whenever I open a Hoagland book, and unconsciously imitate for days or weeks afterward.

Here’s another good sentence, from the Antarctica essay: “We marveled at the blowing, fluking whales in trios, pairs, quartets, blue-black, bundled in the gray water.”

The fourth essay, “Running Mates,” deals with friendship in ten brisk pages. Mr. Hoagland is in favor of it.

“Stepping Back” is an even brisker recounting of two painful and faintly embarrassing episodes from the author’s childhood. One comes to expect such confessional material in Mr. Hoagland’s books.  I’m not sure why, but I suspect it clears the author’s ethical pipes for his harsh, sometimes painfully intimate, judgments of others.

“A Peaceable Kingdom” is a celebration of the author’s summers spent atop Wheeler Mountain Road at the south end of Barton.

He shares that solitude with his dog Wally, who gives the author this opportunity to sneak up behind us and, just when we think we’re most different from all those other mammals, clobber us with the truth:

“For Wally,” he writes, “our outings are a matter of glee, not necessity.  He’d rather simply haul home a dehorned head or a gut pile a poacher has left than hunt for more than a few minutes himself.  Carrion tastes, I suspect, a bit winy, cheesy, anchovy and green olivy, béarnaise and sour-creamy (which may be why we late primates try so hard to approximate the piquancy of fermentation with sauces).”

“Headwork” is about writing. Mr. Hoagland doesn’t call what he does real work, “because I never write anything I wouldn’t do for free if no one would employ me.”

But to say this writer does no more than he is driven to do is not to say it’s easy. Farmers put their energy into what they do.  Writers, Mr. Hoagland makes clear in a very funny passage, put their energy into an infinity of things that will keep them away from the task at hand.

“A friend asked whether I go to a gym, seeing that I’m a sixtyish type of slim.  ‘No, I don’t need to,’ I said.  ‘I’m a writer.’”

Later, however, comes a splendidly practical paragraph from a love letter to life.  It should stand, I think, as the last word about the creation of a very good book:  

“The gift of life can turn rancid if we press our luck and take too many chances, or seem as stale as a dead glass of beer if we risk nothing whatsoever.  And this balance is perhaps epitomized in how we work:  To ‘hold’ a job, to please a readership, to keep a farm or business afloat year after year, shaking off the nutty spells and saving for a rainy day, yet making the most of the sunny ones.”