Feature Articles

An Interview with Ernest Hebert, author of Spoonwood
by Missy Dustin, Supervisor, Customer Service Support

Ernest Hebert's novel, Spoonwood, was recently published by the University Press of New England (1584654902). Hebert got the idea for the novel's title after listening to and watching New Hampshire spoonmaker Dan Dustin at a local craft fair. (Dustin is the husband of Academia editor, Missy Dustin). Hebert, who teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College, was kind enough to grant the following interview.

Ernest Hebert

I was born in 1941, on May 4^th, at Elliot Community Hospital, Keene, NH, where I later worked in the laundry. There was a character that I got out of that experience. There was a woman who worked there who was more or less beaten down by life, in her 50's, but she was very proud of her hair; she kept her hair really well. I kind of noticed this: it stuck in my mind, and I used it in my book, The Passion of Estelle Jordan. It wasn't so much what she did to her hair; it was the fact that it was always clean and well combed. She didn't seem to care about the rest of herself - she was working in the laundry -- but she kept that hair beautiful. So I sort of imagined when I was thinking about the character that she had a kind of secret pride in her womanhood and it was reflected only in her hair. It was just something that passed through my mind glancingly and it didn't come back to me until years later as something to write about. It was just a passing observation. I was twenty-five.

After high school, I went into the army for a six-month reserve program, and then I went to work for the phone company. I went back in the army for a year when Kennedy called back the reserves in '61, went back to the phone company, then started college when I was 23 or 24…I can't remember which.

No, I went full time. I loved it. I was just born in college, you know? That's where I decided to become a writer. I decided to become a writer my sophomore year when I read a copy of a poem by T.S. Eliot called Preludes. I was so moved by that poem and I thought "if I could do this for other people, if I could make somebody feel the way that I just felt…!" So I decided to become a poet.

I sure did. I wrote a lot of poems. When I met my wife, Medora, I was writing poetry. Eventually, I got into graduate school. I got into Stanford University and I actually went there to study poetry and to write poetry. I went there to study with Donald Davie, who was a very well known British poet. He's the one who let me in the school. When we left for California, we had just gotten married. I was twenty-seven, Medora was nineteen. We got to Bennington, Vermont and Medora said, "Ern, this is the furthest west I've ever been." We're both local people. I'm the only New Hampshire person, I think, in the English Department at Dartmouth.

The class I was in had a lot of mean-spirited people. I just didn't like poets. There were two people I did like, but for everybody else in the class, I thought, "Am I going to spend the rest of my life with people like this?" I didn't click with the poets.

They are very supportive. Today, the people I work with are all poets. I really admire how poets support each other, unlike fiction writers who don't. But at the time, I didn't like the poetry scene at Stanford. I wrote this crazy short story called "Grace for the Bishop" and I gave it to Wallace Stegner to try and get into his class. Lo and behold, he said…I remember what he said," This doesn't have a fictional inevitability, but it sure has some power and I'm going to let you in." So, he let me into the class on the basis of that one story. I'll be forever grateful to him for that. And that's where I decided to write fiction.

My father worked in a factory and he only had …I'm never quite sure…one year he'd say "I went to school for six years" and then another time he'd say "seven years." He never did graduate from eighth grade.

Well, no. Nobody's ever accused me of writing about anybody I know. I've never done that, or even written about myself. But in the end, I think you do write about yourself, you do write about your life. For me, it's very much a mysterious process. The way I like to describe it is: to me, writing a novel is like telling a long lie to a psychiatrist. Let's say you have to go into therapy and you really do not want to reveal yourself. So you decide to tell a long "cock and bull" story every week. After a while you would reveal yourself in your lies. For me, that's how I write novels. I don't set out to write about my life or anybody I know, but in the end I think I do reveal myself and I do reveal my world in inferential ways.

I've tried everything. The way that seems to be the most successful for me is to start with something that's been on my mind a lot…bothering me. Usually it's a visual image. In fact, in Spoonwood, it was Dan Dustin at the fair with those spoons. That image kept coming back to me over and over and that was a real starting point for the novel. In Spoonwood the characters are characters I've used before: except for the boy, who I had to invent. Typically, I start with a visual image. A good example is the way my first novel, The Dogs of March, began. The character, Howard Elman, was based on a guy who came into a gas station where I was working at the time, pumping gas. He was a big powerful man, with little beady eyes and kind of a dull, intimidating glare. He wore work clothes that matched--dark blue or dark brown-sort of like a uniform. He was dressed like that, but then something happened that really made me remember him. He got into his pickup truck and with him was a small boy. I saw him look at the boy and there was this incredible tenderness in his eyes and vulnerability and it kind of stayed in my mind that this was a man who was tough and tender and vulnerable but also strong, and I just liked the idea. I actually immediately started writing about this guy - it didn't amount to much and it wasn't until years later that I got serious and decided I wanted to create a character based on this visual image. I decided to write a day in his life, because I didn't have a real story. It took me almost a year -- a long, long time of writing about this character-- in which I learned about his family, his hobbies and his cars: everything about this guy. As I was writing I would get ideas for stories that I would write down on a separate note pad. At the end of this time I took a long road trip to organize my notes. I've done that with quite a few books, as my wife will testify. She's been kind enough to let me go. I get in the car with a tape recorder and a yellow legal pad and just drive all day, alone, and take notes about plot, not character. I've already got the character. I've got the world in my head, but now I'm putting together the story and by the time I get to New Mexico, I usually have a plot. Then I turn around and come home. I've done this with lots of different books. I just stumbled upon it.

I have different ways of actually writing. The way I used to do it with a typewriter was I would write out a scene on paper in long hand and then type a page out. I'd take the page out of the typewriter and pencil edit it and then retype it. I didn't want a page to go by that wouldn't have something to make the reader "pop" a little bit or actually make myself "pop" a little bit. That was a good method because I was so careful with each page - I might type it 10 or 15 times, so by the time I got to the end of each chapter, it was pretty well together. And it was good departure point for the next chapter. Now with a computer the problem is that you tend to type so fast that you can just type reams of junk and you'll find that you can type one bad chapter that will lead you off in a bad direction. When I write on the computer, I try to find ways to slow myself down. Sometimes I'll actually go back to the typewriter, or I'll try to print and retype. If something isn't right, I'm not going to sit there and fool around with copying and pasting. I'll retype it; because when you retype you tend to rethink. So, that's very much part of my method. After I finish a draft or two, I have a rule which is not to show it to anybody until it's as good as I can make it -- then I'll show it to people. The very last draft, I just try to work with language. My feeling is that the language tests the truth of your vision. If you write something and the language is mundane, what's usually happening is that there's something wrong with the scene: something either false or stupid or just wrong. What the language is telling me is that I should change the scene. This is really my favorite time: I've got the novel, I believe in it, and now I can play with the language.

I can't think that way. I have to think about what's in front of me, not who's going to read it. I don't even know what's on my mind, how can I know what's on somebody else's mind? I can't think about audience. I sometimes think about audience when I'm going into a new work, but not when I'm actually working.

Actually, I hardly work on dialogue at all. The fact is it probably does come easily to me. I had to cut a lot of dialogue. I don't like books that are all dialogue. I can type dialogue all day. I like working on narration. That's the part that really satisfies me, especially interior monologue. My feeling is that's what a real novelist does: he tells the story of the person's mind. It's nothing you can do in any other art form. You can't do it in movies or stage plays, except in a very artificial way. For me, the story of the character's thought processes: that's where a novelist shows his power. I think my dialogue is very artificial. It's not the way people talk. I leave out an awful lot. I cut a lot. I just want to have what's necessary for the scene.

Yes. I think I'm definitely influenced by two writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, is one of my favorite books of all time, and the other writer would be Howard Mosher from Vermont, who wrote a book called Disappearances. It's just a dazzling book. You don't know quite where you are, but it's all clear. In Spoonwood, I had some technical problems. The main one was that I wanted to show twenty years of growth, but in a short book. I didn't want to write a tome; I didn't want to write an 800-page book; I wanted to write a 300-page book. But I wanted to make all this time go by. Most of the action takes place when this character is very young. I tried writing from Frederick's point of view, and it didn't quite work out. Then when I was writing from the point of view of the infant, I thought, "Infants can't remember all this stuff!" And then I can remember hanging out with an old friend of mine, a very good writer named Craig Nova, and talking about my favorite movie, "Total Recall" and he said, "You know, Freud said that total recall is a sign of hysteria." Sure enough, I did a little reading about that and the idea is that some people who are traumatized can remember everything. So I thought, "Well, since there's some basis for this in psychology, I'll have a character that is traumatized first by his birth who literally remembers everything."

It definitely happens afterwards. I'm after meaning but I try to plumb a character's depths and from that build some meaning for the reader. I don't have a theme of my own: "I know this is going to be about this and then I write around it." I want the theme to come out of the fiction, rather than the fiction trying to create a theme in an artificial kind of way.

Right! The regional writer is "suspect."

Well, of course. But if you walk into a bookstore, the one place where you always see people browsing around is the local writers' shelf. It's a stigma you get stuck with. But everybody gets stuck with something. You know, Janet Ivanovich, who is this gigantic bestselling author, she's stuck with being a genre writer.

Anybody who is interested in class conflict would be interested in my books. And I think The Old American is a book that tells people what America was like before America was America. However, I think one reason I haven't sold a lot of books is that I don't have a good answer to that question.

In addition to Spoonwood, Ernest Hebert is the author of The Old American (2000), The Dogs of March (1995), Live Free or Die (1995), Mad Boys: a Novel (1993) and The Kinship: a Little More Than Kin/The Passion of Estelle Jordan (1993): all available from YBP and Baker and Taylor. Find out more information about Ernest Hebert at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~ernesthebert/index.html<