Published onJEdward Hoagland at the Irasburg Church Fair in August 2009. Photo by Joseph Gresseranaury 26, 2011
Sex and the River Styx, by Edward Hoagland with a foreword by Howard Frank Mosher, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, 2011, 272 pages, hardbound, $27.50
Reviewed by Joseph Gresser
Every spring, around when the spring peepers’ song is peaking and the summer crop of birds is preparing to take up the slack, a familiar green hat appears on the streets of Barton Village, and in brief appearances at this paper’s offices. Under that hat a pair of glasses focuses the acute gaze of Edward Hoagland.
Even the casual observer will spot him at parades, village fairs, senior lunches, and sitting perilously close to the band on Sundays at the Bread and Puppet Theater’s weekly circus.
Around the beginning of fall, in a pattern established during his years as a college professor, Mr. Hoagland migrates south.
Only slightly less regularly, a copy of Mr. Hoagland’s latest book will arrive in the mail, with a note inviting our consideration. This month we received a pre-publication copy of the twenty-first book of his 78-year career. (Actually, Mr. Hoagland was in his early twenties when his first book was published, but he began laying the foundation for his life’s work much earlier as a child with a gift for close observation.)
As the title of Sex and the River Styx — which will be available in bookshops this March — suggests, Mr. Hoagland’s age is very much on his Sex and the River Styx by Edward Hoagland is scheduled for publication on March 22.mind. In all but two of the 13 essays in the book, he makes an unflinching survey of his aging body — from no longer being able to take steps two at a time to his too-frequent need to pull off the interstate for the convenience of his bladder.
Mr. Hoagland says that his fellow old men honk in solidarity when they see him standing by his car at the roadside. It’s a typical observation from a writer who sees himself as being closely enmeshed in the web of existence.
In “Small Silences,” the first essay in the collection, Mr. Hoagland traces this attitude back to the days when a stuttering nine-year-old discovered the rich world of nature by tracing the path of a stream near his family’s Connecticut home.
With a child’s stealth, Mr. Hoagland hid from his parents the fierce attraction he felt for that stream, the pond into which it flowed, and the surrounding hills, and more to the point, for the huge variety of creatures who were his companions.
Mr. Hoagland still revels in the abundance contained in even a small portion of nature and lengthy lists are a notable feature of his prose. He writes as if by naming the creatures who, unnoticed by most, share the world with humans, he can save them from the calamitous consequences of our species’ inattention.
The words of many of the essays in this collection have a high pressure flow, like water from a firefighter’s hose. Mr. Hoagland is passionate in his love for the planet and its inhabitants, but he makes clear his eagerness to depart without being witness to the seemingly inevitable destruction of other species by humanity’s overreaching technology.
Even within the human world Mr. Hoagland sees a constant stream of extinctions. In “Circus Music,” he recalls the tent shows of his youth, where he spent a couple of summers caring for the Ringling Brothers’ large cats and elephants.
Just as the habitat of these magnificent animals is being destroyed and they suffer the consequences, Mr. Hoagland traces with care and affection the ecology of the roustabouts, the fliers and the clowns who once traveled the country by train and truck. As it happens, I had some slight brushes with the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers show late in its touring life, and to me Mr. Hoagland’s description rings true in every detail.
Mr. Hoagland, himself, is something of a survivor, one of the last American writers to be able to sustain himself by writing essays for magazines, such as Harper’s Magazine, The American Scholar, Outside, where the contents of Sex and the River Styx first saw print.
The current volume is a valedictory collection. In it, Mr. Hoagland recalls his youth, considers his present situation, and prepares for a future that he hopes will return him, through the process of decay, to the cycle of nature. In its pages Mr. Hoagland relates his attempts to contact old lovers and his relief at discovering they hold no grudges, his visits to far-flung places and, a clear-sighted and humane anticipation of the end of the journey his nine-year-old self began by the banks of a Connecticut stream.
