Here are photos of the cars  (listed by chapter) which appear in Jack Matthews’  1967 novel Hanger Stout, Awake!  The novel was will soon be for sale as an ebook . This page is a reference for readers; it contains  a LOT of photos underneath relevant quotations in the novel, so click the Continue Reading  link to see all the cars. I found these photos from the Internet (Wikipedia, etc), and so I do not own the rights to any of these images; the copyright belongs to the owner.

The 1967 novel Hanger Stout Awake! is  a story about how a teenager grows up and widens his perspective. But on a literal level at least, the story is simply about cars. The teenager Clyde “Hanger” Stout works in a filling station, hangs out at junkyards, can identify cars from 20 years ago  and is always working  on his 1956 Chevy,  which he paints solid black.  Hanger has this knack for noticing every car that whizzes by   and even starts identifying people with whatever car they drive.  Some people (like his ex-girlfriend Penny) hardly pay attention to cars except when it’s the latest  sports car.  But for Hanger cars hint at  personality;  over time they accumulate   dents and scratches, ornaments and used parts to replace the original ones. They become the setting for everyday dramas, and at some point acquire a history closely aligned with its driver.

To an older person, this preoccupation with cars might seem materialistic or  superficial. But as I reread this novel on my ebook reader, I realized that I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what the cars mentioned in the book actually look like!  So I googled around and found an amazing assortment  of styles and colors.  As a person already  habituated to   the slick ergonomic designs of Camry’s and Porsches,  I expected the   cars of Hanger Stout Awake!  to look quaint and old-fashioned.  Instead, I found a lot more variety of styles and customizations than what appears on roads today.    Even more amazing to me was how popular these vintage cars still are. They are still being displayed at shows, bought and sold on ebay, rebuilt and restored…almost to the point where the restored cars look in better shape than   they were when they first  hit the American scene.

Perhaps  over time a character like Hanger might  outgrow his teenage  interest in cars and move onto more important matters — like computers, business, raising a family,  pondering the meaning of life  and dabbling perhaps in the arts. But thanks to the Internet, I see now that there’s  an entire army of Hangers out there still tinkering with the contraptions that once captured their imaginations. Even younger people are messing around with vintage cars, finding in it  both a technical challenge and a way to assert their individuality.  I’m not a car guy — never was, and never will be. At the same time, it’s easy to marvel at the efforts of the dedicated few to make these  machines destined for the scrapheap to  outlast the company that produced it or  even its original human owner.

1956 Chevy black (Hanger’s Car)

I had been wanting to get a rear-vision mirror for my ’56 Chevy, which I painted all black last fall with some lacquer paint I got special from Bert Wilson’s secondhand store.

From the 1956 Chevrolet Story, a promotional book published by Chevrolet.

(From the About Chevy Ads, a blog which reprints a lot of old car ads).

See also: the official 1956 Chevrolet manual (online).

Chapter 1

The tire bell rang and I went out to fill the tank of a ’63 Corvair. Its hood had waves on it, it was so hot.

I look up at the grease rack and see a ’62 Fairlane up there. It was waiting for a lube and oil change.

I shook my head no, and Bo Thompson, who just come in from filling a ’63 Dart with regular, said, How could you tell with Clyde there?

Chapter 2

Then some crazy guy come roaring through the square, doing about sixty in a ’53 Mercury with twin carbs.

Chapter 4

Along about noon, Pete comes to me when I’m checking the spark plugs on a ’61 Buick Special,

Chapter 5

This new T Bird come in, and I see Bo Thompson start to drop his Coke, because he likes to take care of the expensive new cars. But I beat him to this T Bird and I hear Pete laughing at us because he thinks it’s funny the way we fight to get up next to a new car especially if it is a real good one.

And I tell him the only reason he doesn’t laugh at Mr. Comisky is because he’s got a new Caddy instead of a ’56 Chevy, and he’s rich. Pete isn’t the sort of person who laughs at a rich person.

Chapter 6

After a while I come across this ’53 Pontiac that has been sideswiped and there is a side mirror on it, right on the side that has been wrecked, only it don’t seem to be damage at all.

Every time I would tell her something about my Chevy or what Bo was doing with his ’58 Ford, she would take a quick breath like somebody just poured a glass of ice water down her back.

I finished the milk shake and coney and got in my Chevy. I waved at Bo as I turned out into the street and then waited as some old man in a tan ’65 Fairlane up ahead turned into the automatic laundry owned by Bruce Myers, who has a false eye from the war.

Later on, Penny told me about the MG, and I said, I thought you didn’t like cars.
And she said, Oh sometimes I do. And then she just stayed silent, like she didn’t want to tell me any more. So I figured she liked them if they were new and expensive. But what did Charlotte’s boy friend know about that MG of his? I bet I could tear the engine down and put it back together again, and he probably don’t even know where the generator is.

Chapter 7

Jim Boynton pulled up in his ’59 Dodge, and yelled out, Hey Hanger, what you doin boy?

It was a blue ’64 Plymouth. A nice looking car with a stick shift, which you don’t often see a woman driving.

I was on a bad angle, but our old wrecker, which is a ’62 Ford, is heavy duty and can lift just about anything.

Then the tire bell rang, and I said I better hang up because a ’66 Buick has just drove in.

Chapter 8

Last year I fixed the water pump on his ’63 Impala. It’s got a nice pale green color and dark green upholstery.

Chapter 9

There was an old Buick station wagon there that looked like it was big enough to haul pianos. Its rims were sunk in the ground, clear up to the hubs, it had been there so long.

Chapter 11

Just then I hear the tire bell ring, and there is a ’66 Buick coming up to the far pump.

when I got through filling a Volkswagen with about three teaspoonfuls of gas, as Pete is always saying when he puts gas in a VW, I went around in back to see how the racing stripe was drying, which was not too bad.

I saw a blue ’66 Chevy drive up to the far pump, and I went out.

Chapter 13

I was sweeping up the garage with the long push broom when I see a clean ’63 Corvette come in.

Is that yours? I ask.

And he says, What do you think of it?

Pretty nice, I said. I tried to sound kind of bored, but it was an awful nice car. It looked like it had all the extras. And it had been babied, you could tell.

Things were quiet a couple seconds while Jim passed a Rambler station wagon, ’61 or ’62, I’m not sure which, because I was worried about what Jim was going to tell me.

Chapter 15

The next time I saw Phyllis, she was making up a big order of barbecue sandwiches and orange drinks for a stranger who I never saw before. He had his family in a pale green ’67 Buick.

I ask Rigolo if he thought maybe I could put a ’58 Plymouth grill on my Chevy.

Chapter 17

I saw Perry Wilson’s ’47 Ford panel truck, which he says he has put two hundred thousand miles on without changing the oil once.

Chapter 18

Pete got out an egg salad sandwich and a 7-Up out of the cooler, and Bo went over to the Dairy Freeze to kid with Phyllis and I took care of a ’60 Plymouth that come in. Its tailpipe was all rusty and dragging on the cement.

Chapter 19

Rigolo had walked out ahead of me and I saw him go over to his ’62 Dodge and get in. Mrs. Rigolo was in there with him, so I guess there was nobody out watching the junk yard.

Somebody pulled the plug, and there was only this ’64 Dodge pickup, which Bo was filling with gas.

Chapter 21

A ’65 Ford Galaxie come in then, and I went out and filled it with regular. It was somebody from out of town and I didn’t know him.

Chapter 22

When Dean comes back I am just throwing my milk shake carton away and Pete
is putting new plugs in a ’64 Pontiac with mags on the wheels.

Chapter 23

Along about two o’clock, somebody pulled the plug, and right then the phone  rang and it was Pete’s wife, who talked to him about twenty minutes. Only two  cars come in while he was on the phone  –  a new Olds and a ’56 Chevy four  door, not in as good condition as my Chevy was.

Then he walk outside toward the pumps, and a ’64 Dodge come in at the same time, and Bo filled it with regular, looking like he was mad at the whole world, which I guess he was.

Pete said, yes, that wasn’t a bad idea, come to think of it, and he walk out of the door and just then a new Continental come in, but neither Bo or me made  a move toward it, and Pete took care of it.

Later on, Bo took off for the Dairy Freeze, when I had a ’61 Pontiac at the pumps…

and Pete had a DeSoto up on the rack, draining the oil. Then a new Ford comes in, and Pete ask me where Bo is, and I told him. Pete  cusses him again for taking off like that, but a few minutes later, Bo comes   back with milk shakes that he had bought for both of us, and Pete didn’t say  anything.

chapter 24

I go up and sit on the hood of an old Hudson, which they don’t make any more, and look around at all the cars which I practically know by heart.

chapter 25

A few minutes later, Bert Wilderman, the four minute man from Detroit drove up in a battered old ’49 Plymouth. If we had seen a car like that in the station, we would of kicked sand over it, as Pete is always saying. So nobody would see it and get scared away.

chapter 28

After a little bit, a ’66 Fairlane comes in, belonging to a man named
Holzaple, who is a good golfer and has an aunt who is drunk all the time and
really makes a mess out of herself around the town, writing bad checks and
things like that. She lives at Mr. Holzaple’s house sometimes.

When she finished, the two women went over to a ’65 Dodge convertible and
got in and started eating their banana splits, and Phyllis started right in
talking about my horoscope again.

Bo was emptying the oil pan on a ’64 Buick.

I knew all the other cars by heart. So I went up and down the rows, and I
look at them. The birds were chirping and flying all around. I saw a sparrow
fly right through an old Packard. The glass was all out of the windows. It was
a ’36, 1 think Rigolo told me one time when I ask him.

Publisher’s Book Info & Purchase Page:

Jack Matthews’s fiction has been praised by Eudora Welty, Tim O’Brien, Anthony Burgess, Doris Grumbach, W. P. Kinsella, Walker Percy and a host of other distinguished writers and critics. His novel, Hanger Stout, Awake! (Harcourt Brace, 1967; Hock Hocking Books, 1997) was the only book selected by NBA-Award poet, William Stafford, in an Antaeus series on “Neglected Books Of The 20th Century.” (Matthews says that with luck, it might become one of the neglected books of the millennium.)

In his latest novel, Matthews returns to the 1850s, the time of his novel, Sassafras (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983)–a book “the young Mark Twain might write” if he came back to life, according to James Dickey, author of the best-selling novel, Deliverance. Here, in The Gambler’s Nephew, you will enter a world of slavery, abolitionist passion, murder, hypocrisy, grave-robbery, chicanery, holiness, memory, guilt and plain old-fashioned cussedness.

It’s a politically incorrect world of unrepentant capital punishment, when there were plenty of scoundrels just asking to be hanged by the neck until dead, thus coming as close as they could ever get to being civilized. In contrast, however, the reader will come upon the beauty and grandeur of the old steamboats plying the Ohio River, along with people troubled by such grand irrelevancies as love and tenderness.  In short, The Gambler’s Nephew brings us a world as richly confused as our own–familiar yet different . . . and as alive as living can get.

Other places to purchase: Amazon, BN, Half.com

Reviews on Social Networking Sites: Librarything, Goodreads

Reviews and Criticism

Review by Robert Nagle,  “Matthews doesn’t  pass judgment on beliefs and superstitions which might seem repugnant to the the modern reader. Instead Gambler’s Nephew  shows how people lived with such beliefs while still professing  themselves to be religious and upstanding. ..The key thing, I think, is recognizing the parallels between Nehemiah the abolitionist and the slave owner; both were guided by moral impulses and both were troubled by the guilt of their decisions.”

Review by David Atkinson, Pank Magazine, “This indirect manner of revelation about the characters making up this community pervades the book, providing delightful secretive discovery after another for the reader.  For me, this is one of the most magical aspects of what Matthews has accomplished in this work. “

Review by Claire Blechman, Ploughshares, “For a story focused on morality and rife with violence, The Gambler’s Nephew is surprisingly light-hearted. Many contemporary authors try to make you writhe under the weight of heavy philosophical issues, but Matthews would rather you shake your head and give a small smile.”

Profile and Review by Jim Phillips  in Athens News, “Matthews looks at his people with a clear and merciless eye, laying out all the pettiness, greed and self-absorption that humans are prone to, but he does it without a hint of rancor, and more than a little affection – jaundiced and cynical affection, but real nonetheless.”

February , 2012 Personville Press will be publishing an ebook version of the novel “Hanger Stout, Awake!” by Jack Matthews.  It will be for sale on Amazon.com, Lulu and Barnes and Noble.

See also: The Cars in Hanger Stout, Awake, a photo gallery consisting of all the cars which appear in the novel. Coming soon: The Hanger Stout Discussion & Study Guide.

Book Description.

Clyde Stout is a high school graduate in a small Ohio town; he loves tinkering with cars and dreaming about his girlfriend. He has interests and aspirations, but no definite goals. He is coasting….until he discovers he has a new talent: the ability to hang from a metal bar longer than anybody!

Others start calling him “Hanger,” and an out-of-town stranger, trying to help the boy to profit from this talent, organizes various “hanging competitions.” At first, Hanger goes along, but after a while he becomes suspicious of the stranger’s motives; is he for real? Hanger is no longer a boy and not yet an adult – but he finds himself in a world where older adults are constantly offering advice and supervision and alleged wisdom. Until then, Hanger had always been an amiable and trusting sort; now Hanger needs to look at things through adult eyes — can he adapt to a world which seems less safe  or reliable but possibly more profound?

This slender 150 page novel was first published by Harcourt in 1967 and reprinted several times. Now it is available as an ebook. Time Magazine described it as a “gentle first novel told with a fine ear for adolescent patois,” and National Book Award winning poet William Stafford called it one of the most neglected works of the 20th century. Southern novelist Eudora Welty said about the book: “I like it, and warmly admire his sturdy subject and delicately restrained treatment. It seemed to me blessed with honesty, clarity, directness, proportion and a lovely humor. . . .”

The book is a fun and easy read… Not too much seems to happen in the novel, and the protagonist (we’re sorry to report) is not a werewolf or vampire or time traveler or wizard or superhero; to all appearances, he’s just an ordinary guy, but if you penetrate beneath those appearances, you’ll find that he’s defiantly and unforgettably unique. This book will help you remember how it felt to be a teenager…before you needed to start worrying about more serious matters. Like life, or what passes for life in the world of adults.

About the Author

86 year old author Jack Matthews has not only written more than 15 works of fiction, he was distinguished professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades. Winner of Guggenheim and several arts grants, Matthews has been anthologized widely, translated into several languages and nominated for a National Book Award. His own books have been praised by Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Ann Grau, Tim O’Brien, Doris Grumbach, Walker Percy and a host of other famous and highly accomplished authors.  In 2011 he published the novel Gambler’s Nephew (about the accidental killing of a slave by an abolitionist while trying to save him) and a writing guide.

• updates 4-6 times a year.
• Book promotions & discounts
• New titles, plus new published articles.
• Probably not too chatty; just the summary highlights.

Keep in mind that a lot of the same information will go on the Facebook group page. But news tends to be drowned out in Facebook; hence this mailing list.

Half the pleasure in the book comes from its resemblance to a huge, shuffling, shaggy-dog story. Every time a new character comes on stage, the narrator – whose identity we don’t learn until the end – wanders off to talk at length about the new person’s history, quirks and kin. He later circles back to the main plot – now a little askew from where we thought it was heading originally. Later on, we learn that the silly, apparently offhand information imparted earlier is important.

Matthews looks at his people with a clear and merciless eye, laying out all the pettiness, greed and self-absorption that humans are prone to, but he does it without a hint of rancor, and more than a little affection – jaundiced and cynical affection, but real nonetheless.

He tries to let his characters have it out among themselves, without coming down on anyone’s side, or imposing some ultimate author’s truth. He cites the notion of men-de from classic Greek rhetoric (he has degrees in English Literature and Classical Greek) – which seems to mean something like, "one the one hand – but on the other hand" The idea, he suggests, is that nobody in the human world has the whole truth, and those who think they do – even if, like Nehemiah Dawes, they’re generally on the right side – end up crazy and mean.

Here is publisher information about the book  and purchase page on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Price is currently $12.

I read this book last month and enjoyed it very much. I’ll be posting a review and analysis at a later date. For now suffice to say that it’s a fascinating story, a well told tale, a relatively fast read, lots of twists and surprises and confronts a time period in America’s past where people operated under different kinds of moral codes than from how we do today.

Description of Book

Since the early 1990s, Jack Matthews has distributed a photocopied version  of this 75,000 word writing guide to students in his fiction writing classes at Ohio University.  This guide offers insight about how successful writers mold raw  experiences into a story and how language helps you to do that.  It offers lots of  good examples and practical advice for getting a story idea off the ground; it analyzes several stories (including one of  Matthews’ own) and offers several paradigms for understanding how stories work. Erudite, witty, idiosyncratic, serendipitous, mischievous, sesquipedalian, entertaining, introspective and colorful: these are  adjectives  which come to mind when reading this book.

About the Author

86 year old author Jack Matthews has not only written more than 15 works of fiction, he was distinguished  professor of Fiction Writing at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio for over 4 decades.  Winner of Guggenheim and several arts grants, Matthews has been anthologized widely, translated into several languages and nominated for a National Book Award.  His own books  have been praised by Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Ann Grau, Tim O’Brien, Doris Grumbach, Walker Percy and a host of other famous and highly accomplished authors. NBA-Award poet William Stafford listed Matthews’s novel, HANGER STOUT, AWAKE! as his only title in an ANTAEUS series on “Neglected Books Of The 20th Century.” In July 2011, Estruscan Press published his novel, The Gambler’s Nephew, a dark 19th century tale about slavery, guilt, memory. In Fall 2011 Personville Press will be republishing his 1967 novel Hanger Stout, Awake.

Related Links

• 2009 Interview  (also reprinted at the end of this ebook).
• Audio: 1984 Interview with Don Swaim (mp3), “A Woman of Properties,” (mp3) a short story read by Miette Elm.
• Bibliography and an essay,  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Untold Tale published recently in  The Chronicle Review.
• Jack Matthews Fan page on Facebook.  With updates every month or so.
• Some background about how the ebook was published.

Random  Quotes from A Worker’s Writebook  Ebook

Years ago, a national magazine reported a conversation between Frank Sinatra and Spiro Agnew, who had just fallen from power and glory as Vice-President under Richard Nixon and like many of the idle famous, decided to turn his hand to writing. He and Sinatra debated whether his first undertaking should be “a novel or a serious book,” whereupon Sinatra advised him to write a serious book first.

And yet, most students realize that the same effort expended upon almost any other enterprise would be vastly more profitable. There’s something mystical at work here, and we should think about it. The money you make by having a novel or short story published isn’t like other sorts of money. The cashier at K Mart or your attendant at the local Gulf station may not acknowledge the difference, but you know how that money was earned. It was earned by selling the trophy you brought back from a long and exhausting hunt somewhere in the wilds of your imagination – a place where you ventured, equipped with all the suitable accouterments of craft and guided by your own polestar of inspiration.

***

Ideas belong to writers in secret ways. The instant you draw a circle around a public idea and recreate it in your own language, that idea becomes personal and private. And, as the writer, you alone – and no one else – are responsible for its fulfillment. The story idea becomes intimately your personal possession the instant you begin to work with it. But your function is even greater than this, for you are also the first reader of what you write.

What I do at such times is yell at the little monsters to shut up. I’m not their father, dammit; and I’m certainly not their mother. What am I supposed to do? How much can I claim responsibility for? After all, I have twenty novels in various stages of completion, all abandoned in fits of impatience, or in spasms of deadly insouciance when l simply didn’t care enough about my characters to listen to their yammering any longer. And what sorts of clamor do you suppose they make, when I’ve abandoned them … and when the moon is full and the tree shadows spill like black ink onto the gray sward, etc.?

The problem is, I know better. I know how to save every blessed one of them, stories and novels both. It would all be very easy – a piece of cake, as they say. But do I revive them by means of mouth-to-ear resuscitation? Do I pound their chests until their little febrile hearts start bumping away? Do I bring them around? Absolutely not … at least not yet. Why? Because I’m not in the mood. I’m too shiftless, irresponsible, and lazy. I’m a good-for nothing  who just doesn’t give a damn.

Well, then, how do I know I could save them? It’s easy. I’ve done it. And, unlike real people who are temporarily dead, these characters always come out of their comas without having suffered anything in the way of ischemic brain damage. We all know that real live technically dead persons will begin to suffer brain damage within minutes after the blood stops feeding oxygen to their cerebral cells. But I have brought back characters after a quarter of a century, and they have not only come back alive and kicking, they’ve been far more vital than when I’d tossed them aside in a moment of exasperation all those heartbeats (close to a billion, a little fast arithmetic tells me) ago.

***

See also: a brief excerpt from the book about the art of naming characters.

Here is the preface I wrote for the ebook:

Jack Matthews has not only published more than 15 books of fiction, he taught classes in fiction writing to students at Ohio University for over four decades. This book consists of his teachings, insights, ramblings and ruminations about the art of fiction.

Many books have been written about the craft of fiction writing; how is this one different?

First, a Worker’s Writebook: How Language Makes Stories consists of essays and dialogue (called interludes). These interludes punch holes in the rules and pronouncements made in the essays; they also help the book avoid seeming too dogmatic. The two voices in the interludes are not exactly “characters” but the author and a contrarian voice within the author. The comparison to Platonic dialogues is apt; Matthews received his undergraduate degree in classical Greek literature and has always found echoes of the classical age in contemporary art and life. Still, the “poetics” of Writebook is grounded less in Aristotle than Aristophanes.

Writebook touches upon some practical aspects of writing fiction (such as naming characters and writing speech cues). But Writebook focuses on helping the writer write more boldly and with more attention to the linguistic vehicles of thought. For Matthews, most stories fail through under-invention, not because the rules of narrative have been disregarded.

Chapter 2 (Taxonomies) and 3 (Structural Matters) cover various paradigms for plot and character development. These are worthy subjects and Matthews has interesting things to say (especially when he tries to analyze his story Funeral Plots with these same paradigms). At the same time Matthews recognizes that there is no magic paradigm or archetype capable of explaining what makes all stories successful – these are just guides. At some point you just have to trust writerly intuition. Writebook helps the potential storyteller to cultivate this intuition and be flexible enough to bend rules when necessary. Matthews writes, “Anything can be done if it’s done in the right way: with style, panache and cunning.”

Many writing books include a chapter or two listing literary cliches to avoid. For the most part, Writebook doesn’t do that. Instead it goes deeper and analyzes why some metaphors succeed and others do not. The funny Parable of the Indifferent Ear provides a good case study about how linguistic inventiveness doesn’t always translate into effective writing.

Literary insights from Writebook can be applied to drama, novels and poetry; but they are especially applicable to smaller forms like the short story (though Matthews’ claim that a short story of more than 10,000 words rarely succeeds is sure to be controversial). Writebook’s musings on the novel are still interesting (Matthews has written several novels, including Sassafras, a philosophical-satirical work that is every bit as expansive as Dickens or Balzac). But if you are seeking a guide specifically about novel writing, you might check out Jane Smiley’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, Milan Kundera’s Art of the Novel or even (!) Stephen King’s On Writing.

Similarly, although Writebook includes a few writing exercises – Matthews calls them gimmicks – there are probably better books for that (with Josip Novakovich’s Writing Fiction Step by Step being a notable example).

Writebook introduces lots of new ideas and terminology: the non-sequential time opening, the Swamps of Antecedence, pointedness (which, as I understand it, is how stories gain enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull of the author), linguistic vehicles (the actual words which transport the thought) and why flat characters aren’t always bad. Also, the technique of overcoming writer’s block by trying deliberately to write something bad or meaningless actually works (I’ve tried it).

Matthews wrote Writebook in the mid 1990s (and distributed it to his creative writing students throughout the years). Since then, Matthews has retired and kept busy with various writing projects (described in greater detail in his 2009 interview in Chapter 7). At 85 years old, Jack Matthews is still writing fiction and teaching occasional writing classes. For more information about the life and writings of Jack Matthews, see www.ghostlypopulations.com

I almost forgot; Writebook is wickedly funny. I won’t spoil the jokes; suffice to say that one of his former students said Matthews was “so damn witty” in the classroom that he reminded her of Groucho Marx. Writebook has serious and even lofty aims. But this is fun reading. Matthew’s style is playful and pedantic; Matthews enjoys inventing characters on the fly to illustrate his points and adding qualities to them until you begin to wonder if Writebook is going to veer into becoming a novel. After I finished this book, I still remember snarling black-eyed Greta Hutchins; she is still snarling, and I am wondering what she’s going to try next.

Robert Nagle, Personville Press, April 2011.

Here’s a random quote:

Mr. Cobb stamped his foot on the porch. “Solid as a rock,” he said. “Solid oak. Double flooring, even out here on the porch. They don’t build them like this anymore. Solid as a rock.”

At that moment, for no apparent reason, Mrs. Groestli was filled with a sudden, wrathful intolerance, and she fastened upon Mr. Cobb’s locution. Why did they always say solid as a rock? a needlessly anguished voice cried out in her head. Why didn’t they say as solid as a noodle? Or as solid as a party hat? Or as solid as a week of Sundays?

Oh, that Mrs. Groestli character is something else.

As usual, Miette brought the story to life; let me recommend some other amazing stories she has read on her site: Lydia Millet’s Sir Henry, Benito Lynch’s The Sorrel Colt, Dino Buzzati’s The Falling Girl, Monica Wood’s Disappearing,  Jean Stafford’s Interior Castle, Jack London’s Adventure in the Upper Sea. (Most of the other titles  are also excellent, but these are the ones whose titles stood out to me). Miette is also reading stories for Iambic Audiobooks, a great source of low-cost audiobooks.

All writing teachers have mixed feelings about trying to teach writing. Some creative writing teachers are better writers than teachers. Some are genuinely inspiring teachers. Some are just entertaining (even though not much teaching or learning is taking place). Some are exotic (or psychotic); take your pick.

I know that over the years former  students of Mr. Matthews will stumble upon this page. Therefore, I ask you to share any  favorite memories from your classes with him. My preference is that your use your real name. However, if you wish to leave a comment anonymously or pseudonymously, please do so.  Don’t be shy. I realize that while  this thread starts out, comments will come very slowly. But over the next few years,  this thread will increase in size.

Finally, if you would prefer not to share your memory in public, I would still appreciate hearing from you. Feel free to drop me a line (idiotprogrammer at gmail.com). I’m writing a book about Jack Matthews as a writer and would welcome hearing any  insights into his life as a writer and teacher.  (Anything you write to me  will be held in confidence unless you specify otherwise).

It is no surprise to literary scholars that Henry David Thoreau was soaked in Emerson’s thinking, but Julian tells us that even the younger man’s handwriting was like Emerson’s. And yet, Julian pointed out, unlike Emerson, Thoreau’s "surest happiness was in discontent," and furthermore, "his brain was poisoned by philosophy." Thoreau feared and despised the growing passion for land development, considering it "treason to the Great Mother"; and he found that birds, squirrels, and hedgehogs had not lost "their primeval courtesy." While those sentiments were oddities in his time, they verge upon being clichés today.

This small sampling demonstrates how rewarding a book Julian’s Memoirs is, with its wealth of warm chatter and curious anecdotes about the giants of the New England Renaissance. But the reason for my focus on the book here is an anecdote in it so astonishing that if I were vulnerable to mystic vapors, reading it would have left me adrift in unworldly speculation. And I am even more astonished that I have never encountered a reference to it elsewhere.

(You will have to read the essay to see what he was talking about.  But the anecdote about the son of Nat Hawthorne  is astonishing).