As a teenager, I fell in love with Hemingway’s early stories, set in upper Michigan. To this day I would rate them among his best work. Like many another young writer, I tried, self-consciously and futilely, to imitate Hemingway’s inimitable style. For several years the sentences in my sad little shoot-’em-up Westerns and baseball and fishing stories were clipped-off sound bites, five or six words long. Except for their brevity, these snippets had no more in common with Hemingway’s prose than with Sanskrit. Midway through my junior year in college, I was rescued from my slavish emulation of a writer who has never been successfully emulated by my devotion to another novelist. William Faulkner was totally different from Hemingway in his approach to writing, but after reading Light in August, I became a lifelong Faulkner fan. Predictably, my own sentences began to lengthen out. By the end of the semester, a short one was a hundred words long.
In my senior year at Syracuse I took the only creative writing class of my career. I had a good and sympathetic teacher, one who had already published several prize-winning stories and a novel. For these admirable attainments, not to mention his tremendous popularity with students, he was denied tenure and summarily discharged at the end of the year. The fact that he was, so far as I know, one of only two Jewish professors in Syracuse’s relentlessly Waspish English Department may have been regarded as a black mark beside his name. At any rate, he was a fine writer, a fine teacher, and a fine guy, who has long since far exceeded the literary accomplishments and reputations of his mean-spirited former academic colleagues. During the winter of 1964–65, while I was teaching at Orleans High and going through an especially bad patch in my writing apprenticeship, in which I’d produce one five-word sentence like Hemingway, followed by a five-hundred-word sentence like Faulkner, my former professor wrote to assure me that if I persisted, I’d come up with my own voice. Night after night I kept struggling to do so, while I wracked my brain each day for ways to keep the kids I was trying to teach “out of the mill.”
Like the off-again, on-again furniture factory back in Chichester, the Ethan Allen furniture mill kept Orleans alive economically. Not unionized, Dickensian in its working conditions, slouching between the river and the railroad tracks like the infamous nineteenth-century textile mills of southern New England, it was, by all accounts, a horrible place to earn one’s living. Parents of backsliding offspring held up working at the mill as a fate worse than jail. Night and day, from inside our apartment across the river, we could hear the whirring blowers on the factory roof. Their perpetual low thrum was a constant reminder of the mandate we’d been given. “Keep the kids out of the mill, keep the kids out of the mill,” murmured the big tin ventilators hunkered down on the factory roof like gargoyles, in the same part of my mind where I sometimes heard Huck Finn talking. But never the voice of my own that I was desperate to find. “Keep the kids out of the mill,” said the blowers when I sat down late at night and tried to write the stories of our new home. “Out of the mill,” chanted the blowers the next morning as I mogged off down School Street toward my day job.
Soon after the first of the year, at the advice of Prof, Phillis and I took a tour of the mill. Powdered with sawdust from head to toe, gray-faced, half-deaf, often minus one or more digits, lung-shot workers not fifteen years our senior looked ancient as they worked fast, fast, fast, doing piecework on shrieking saws, whining planers, roaring drills, and screeching edgers for wages that made my pathetic teaching salary seem princely. After the tour, “Keep the kids out of the mill” acquired a new urgency for us. But as the Kingdom winter arrived in earnest, the ever-present admonition of those blowers—I could actually hear them in my sleep—began sending me an urgent personal message. I loved working with the kids. I loved reading to them, talking to them about books, telling my ridiculous Bad Boy stories, reading the essays in which they poured out their hearts. Yet the harder I worked at teaching, the more evident it became that my heart wasn’t entirely in what I was doing. Lord knows I tried. But to me teaching remained a road on the way to writing. Every day I heard more wonderful Northeast Kingdom stories crying out to be written. Yet I couldn’t find the voice to write them in. Scribbling late into the night in our three-room garret, going to sleep every night and waking up every morning to the endless chivvying of those damnable blowers—“Keep the kids out of the mill”—I began to fear that it was not only my students who were in danger of tailing a ripsaw inside that inferno for the rest of their lives. If I couldn’t teach and couldn’t write, I might wind up there myself.