Edward Hoagland. Sex and the River
Styx. Howard Frank Mosher, foreword.
White River Junction, Vermont.
Chelsea Green. 2011. xiv + 247 pages.
$17.95. isbn 978-1-60358-337-4
Those who agree with Edward Hoagland
that Emerson is the “cynosure
of American literature” and have a
taste for a writer who is “by temperament
a rhapsodist” will share
the general opinion that Hoagland
is a major essayist. An argument
can be made for such views. They
account for Hoagland’s undoubted
seriousness, his biophilic concern
for all of nature, including humans,
and the moral stance which mandates
that we “act purposefully but
minimally, and keep [our] reason
under wraps.”
But these premises also explain
the underlying current of self-satisfied
moral superiority exhibited
in batches of reader-nudging rhetorical
questions, often followed
by abstract assertions of principle
that allow no questioning, as in
“anybody winning more of life’s
rewards than we are is probably
selling out to some extent, don’t
you think?” He dislikes the spread
of technology but admits that some
of it has prolonged his life, and he
calls for seniors to make space for
new generations. (That’s rather like
the publisher’s note, which boasts
that 30 percent of the paper used is
postconsumer, saving all kinds of
resources and energy. The logical
conclusion is never reached.)
Hoagland’s Emersonian desire
to embrace “All”—he quotes “All
natural fact is an emanation”—may
account for his inability to end a
series in three elements or anything
near it. Some of his rhapsodies
about nature sound rather like William
Boot’s column “Lush Places” in
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The relative
absence of a sense of humor and
a marked irony deficiency may be
traced to Hoagland’s kinship with
what Philip Rahv called “Palefaces”
as opposed to “Redskins” like Mark
Twain. Twain and, later, Hemingway
were able to show us the wonder
of nature rather than (not quite
merely) insisting on it through generalizations
in a style that, in Cyril
Connolly’s terms, is mandarin rather
than plain.
Furthermore, the sense of the
interconnectedness of everything
may relieve Hoagland of the necessity
of imposing a structure on most
of the essays. For most of the book,
the prose is like water from an office
cooler—you can get more, but it
won’t ever have a different flavor,
and the only principle of organization
is provided by the cup.
The most coherent essays in
the book are the travel pieces about
India and China, since they deal
with movement from one place to
another. And to offset overwritten
passages like the one about “one’s
ability to marinate in the spices of
solitude,” there are quite sensible
observations like “Existentialism . . .
was kind of fun, when hedonism
and pessimism still boasted of their
novelty.” His views of his generation—
he was born in 1932—accord
with those of many of his contemporaries,
and his attempts to understand
what happens to us as we age
are often quite sensible, though he
may be wrong about older people’s
being kinder and more forgiving.
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma
world literature in review