Earl Hamner Jr.'s Blog, page 2

April 30, 2012

Amigos!

      Sorry to have been out of touch for a bit but I have had several distractions. There were some short stories that wouldn’t let me alone until I got them down on paper. I attempted a huge writing project but I got in over my head and had to face the fact that I wasn’t man enough for the job. One other, a more pleasant chore, was to gather and organize “my papers” which the Library of Virginia has consented to house and to nurture and to make available to one and all. There is pride!

So back to BETWEEN YOU, ME AND THE LAMP POST. I’m calling this entry:

”PARADISE ON FIVE DOLLARS A DAY!”
       Every writer yearns for an inexpensive place were he can enjoy privacy and where he can write without interruption. Aware of that need, at this time of year, writer’s magazines arrive, not only with helpful tips on how to find an agent, how to conquer writer’s block, or the surest pathway to publication, but also with advertisements for writers retreats. Descriptions of such havens tend to sound more like poetry than invitations to a place to get some serious work done.

      Recent ads that I came across were: “Private room on the banks of the river Seine, only an hour from Paris!” “ Come to our mountain cottage for silence, solitude, and the sight of deer grazing in the meadow!” Or my favorite - “Old Virginia farmhouse on the James River in the Blue Ridge foothills, explore nearby vineyards and local history.”

      I once rented such a retreat. Following my graduation from the University of Cincinnati I had the good luck to land a job as a radio writer at WLW, the major radio station in the state.

     It was a terrific time in my life, a transition from student to professional writer, a time of growth, of learning, of forming friendships that would last a lifetime. Cincinnati was home to some of the most beautiful girls in the country and I fell in love with each and every one of them.

     WLW paid handsomely, and I led a frugal life that allowed me to save a sizeable nest egg.

     I once had the good fortune to interview Katherine Anne Porter. When I asked her to describe her writing process, she said, “Somewhere out of experience, out of travel, life, the past, or just imagination, an idea seizes me and won’t let go. I don’t act on it immediately but put it away to cook. After a while faces, language, customs, traits, colors, events, all come together around that idea like iron filings around a magnet. Even then I don’t begin writing, until one day the book tells me it is ready to be written and that is when I begin.”

    I knew what she was telling me. I had reached that point. The novel I had dreamed for years was clamoring somewhere in my brain - demanding to be written.

    I quit my job at WLW and rented a small cottage I found advertised in the “Writer’s Digest” column called “Paradise on Five Dollars a Day.”

    I rented “Paradise” sight unseen through the mail from the owner, a lady named B. B. Caverly. The ad described a small stone cottage at the foot of Rich Mountain in the heart of the Ouchita Mountains of Arkansas. The ad went on to mention that the cottage had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. To compensate for the lack of such amenities, Miss Caverly informed me that food has a special flavor when cooked over an open fire and there were fish in the stream nearby for the price of a worm.

   I traveled by bus to the small town of Mena, Arkansas, and spent the first night in a charming old hotel called The Antlers. Miss Caverly, my new landlady, called for me there the next morning. There was a Texas twang in her speech and her dark hair and chinquapin eyes made me think she might be partly American Indian. Many folks in that part of the country do have Indian ancestry and will quickly and proudly boast of what percentage of Osage or Cherokee or Comanche blood runs in their veins.

   After a stop for groceries, Miss Caverly drove a distance out of town until we came to a deserted stretch of highway. She parked her pickup truck on the roadside and led the way down a narrow path through some underbrush. I carried my duffel bag and the groceries. She carried my portable typewriter. We crossed an abandoned railroad track where weeds grew up to our knees between the rusted rails and the rotting wooden ties.

   Past the railroad tracks she led me to a fallen tree trunk. It turned out to be the only access to the other side of a small creek. I wobbled across the log after her and made it successfully to the other side where a six foot long black snake reared up in the path ahead.

   I recoiled, ready to abandon “Paradise” and rush back to civilization, but the lady said, “Don’t be scared. It’s a good snake. They eat the poisonous ones! Practically wiped out the water moccasins!”

   Slightly reassured I followed her up the mountain to the cottage. It really was as charming as promised. There was a wide veranda across the front that afforded a fine view facing Rich Mountain. There was a kitchen, a living room with fireplace and a bedroom. A suitable distance out in the woods was an outhouse and in the side yard was the cooking facility – a barbeque grill made of the same native stone as the house.

   Before she left, Miss Caverly suggested that I not go out after dark, or if I did to carry a strong flashlight. She then went on to say that the cottage was in the middle of something called “a snake run.” She explained that the snake population at the top of the mountain had no water supply, and they came down to the creek whenever they got thirsty, and that the cottage happened to be right smack in the middle of their path.

   At that point it crossed my mind that I might be sacrificing my life in order to write my book, but I bravely decided to risk a week or two before returning to civilization.

   Being an old country boy I was accustomed to the shrill and creepy sounds that come to life as soon as the sun goes down. But I had usually snuggled under the covers with the comfort of being surrounded by a sprawling family of brothers and sister, a protective mother and father. Now I was alone in strange country and the sounds were not familiar like the old hoot owl from back home, or the sleepy lowing of a cow. Out here in nowhere the night sounds reached a crescendo of screams, screeches, and howls. On top of that I was convinced there was a water moccasin under the bed. I slept not a wink.

   Gradually I grew used to being a hermit and facing the challenges of my paradise. I received my mail by tetter-tottering across that cursed log to get to a mail box on the highway. I hiked the four miles into town once in a while when supplies ran low. No matter how many times I made the trip I was never comfortable walking across the fallen log and the risk of falling into the moccasin-infested water.

   As primitive as my cottage was, it provided a perfect atmosphere in which to write. I had no human visitors. Occasionally a deer would wander across the property or a cottontail would hop by going about its business. There was no telephone, no radio and the only sounds were the songs from a variety of birds that came and went.

   By the end of that summer I had finished more than half of a manuscript that I had first conceived in the hedgerows of Normandy. It was to become my first published book and to this day I have to thank Miss Caverly for placing an ad in “The Writer’s Digest” titled “Paradise on Five Dollars A Day.”

My roots in the Virginia earth are deep. My mother’s people came here from the walled city of Lucca in the Tuscany region of Italy. They came as indentured servants to Thomas Jefferson who intended to start a wine industry in Virginia. They brought cuttings from their vines but the grapes did not adapt to the Virginia soil, and withered away.

Not so the Gianinni clan. On land granted to them by Mr. Jefferson they became farmers in the shadow of Monticello Mountain. They prospered in Albemarle County and intermarried with a group of footwashing Baptists.

At the same time my father’s people had emigrated from Wales, leaving their village of Hanmer near the northern border of Wales and England. They had acquired land along the James River and were raising tobacco. They tended to be tall and thin, a sentimental crew, who loved their families, and their wine, and who had to be goaded by their wives to attend church, but once there they could out sing the clearest and loudest voice in the choir.

Somehow descendants of these two clans, in the Great American Melting Pot tradition, found each other, married, and their descendants, the families of my mother and my father, early in the new century moved to a small village in Nelson County to work in the soapstone quarries and mill. When my Grandfather Hamner developed polio, and was no longer able to take care of his family, my own father, at twelve years of age quit school, and took a job toting water to workers in the soapstone quarries at Schuyler. My mother graduated from high school but, as she used to claim, she went through high school eight more times while coaching each of her children through to graduation.

Of their eight children seven of them were normal, but one was strange. That was me.

I was an odd looking boy, leaping to six feet tall when I was fourteen, all long, skinny wrists, unruly red hair, shoulders slumped in an attempt to lean closer to my companions.


Earl and friends at Schuyler High School. 1939.

We were in the midst of the Great Depression of the Twenties and Thirties. Like our neighbors we were self-sufficient but cash money was almost non-existent. And I had a secret, strange and impossible dream.

Years later, when I was writing the screenplay for my television movie “The Homecoming” I tried to put into words some of those alien, confused, and mysterious yearnings.

In the play, Olivia, John-Boy’s mother has just discovered a tablet the boy has hidden under his mattress. She demands to know what is in it. He replies:
“You know what’s in this tablet, Mama? All my secret thoughts- how I feel, and what I think about. Things I never told anybody ‘till now. What it’s like late at night to hear a whippoorwill call and its mate call back, the rumble of the midnight train crossen the trestle at Rockfish, watchen water go by in the creek and knowen that some day it’ll reach the ocean and wonderen if I’ll ever see the ocean. Sometimes I hike over to Route 29 and watch the people in their cars and wagons go by and I wonder what their lives are like. Things stay in my mind, Mama. I can’t forget anything. It all gets bottled up and sometimes I feel like a crazy man. Can’t sleep or rest till I rush off up here and write it in that tablet.

“I do vow,” replied Olivia.

“If things had been different, Mama, I think I could have done somethen with my life. What I would have liked, Mama, was to have tried . . .to be .. a writer!
“If that’s what you want, couldn’t you still try? “ Asked Olivia.

“It wouldn’t be right,” he answered. “Not in these times. It takes a college education to be a writer and even if we had the money it wouldn’t be right to risk it all on me. And anyway I can’t disappoint my daddy. He’s got his heart set on me taking up a trade.”

Olivia replied, “He just want you to know how to make a living.”
“I could sure never do that scribblen things down in a tablet.”

But time would prove me wrong. Through the intervention of Laura Horsley, the wife of our company doctor I received a scholarship to the University of Richmond. But that was only half the battle. The scholarship paid for tuition only. There was still food and board, textbooks to be bought, fees of several kinds. Through the generosity of three of my father’s sisters I was taken into their home in Richmond and given food and lodging. Our local Baptist minister gave me a crash course in Latin, one of the requirements the University needed before I could qualify to accept the scholarship. My father ruefully parted with the white shirt he had planned to be buried in, and my mother spent the money she earned from selling eggs and buttermilk to buy me a suit from Sears and Roebuck. She showed a picture of it to me in the catalogue before it arrived – “the fabric is of green herringbone, with vest to match and an extra pair of trousers.” And it cost nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents. Took every cent of my mother’s buttermilk money!

I entered the University of Richmond in the autumn of 1940. I was unsure of myself, in an alien world, among other boys who were obviously more sophisticated in their manner and dress. The largest city I had visited until now was Charlottesville, usually on a Saturday morning when country people clogged Main Street in their horse and buggies. I had never ridden a streetcar, driven a car, or talked on a telephone.

But I was on time for my first class, and the strangeness gradually went away. The tall boy with the red hair wearing the green herringbone suit was on his way! A writer was in the making!

That was the autumn of 1940. And just recently, decades later, I received the following stunning announcement.”

LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA ANNOUNCEMENT

Earl Hamner to Receive Lifetime Achievement Award

Nelson County native Earl Hamner, writer of novels, television shows, and movies and the force behind the semiautobiographical television series The Waltons, will receive the 2011 Literary Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Virginia at the 14th Annual Literary Awards Celebration on October 15, 2011.

Hamner grew up in Schuyler, Virginia, with seven brothers and sisters. From an early age he exhibited a love of words and writing. When he was six his poem, “My Dog” was published on the Children’s Page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His potential was recognized and he received encouragement from his teachers and members of the tight-knit community.

Hamner received a scholarship to the University of Richmond, but midway through his sophomore year Hamner was drafted. He spent time learning to drive tanks and diffuse mines, but his ability to type landed him in the Quartermaster Corps. While in the U.S. Army Hamner began to submit stories for publication.

After his discharge in March 1946 he returned to Richmond and briefly worked for local radio station WMBG. In the fall of 1946 Hamner enrolled in the school of broadcasting at the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 1948.

Shortly after graduation Hamner went to New York City and found work as a radio writer for NBC. His first book, Fifty Roads to Town, was published by Random House in 1953 and in 1961 his novel Spencer’s Mountain was published by Dial Press.

He began writing scripts for episodes of the Twilight Zone and CBS Playhouse. The film rights to Spencer’s Mountain were purchased by Warner Bros. and Hamner was on his way as a success in Hollywood. In 1970 The Homecoming was published by Random House and became a CBS special starring Patricia Neal and later was the basis of the long-running and hugely popular television series The Waltons. Hamner garnered additional fame as a writer for Falcon Crest, a prime time soap opera, which aired on CBS from 1981 to 1990.

Hamner has received numerous honors including:

TV-Radio Writers Award (1967)

George Foster Peabody Award for Distinguished Journalism (1972)

Virginian of the Year Award from Virginia Press Association (1973)

An Emmy for Best Drama Series for The Waltons (1974)

National Association of Television Executives Man of the Year Award (1974)

Virginian Association of Broadcasters Award (1975)

Frederic Ziv Award from the University of Cincinnati for Outstanding Achievement in Telecommunication

P.S. I know I'm shameless, but I couldn't resist adding that my new book ODETTE, A GOOSE OF TOULOUSE, has just been published and is selling briskly on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.

And I just received word that a new short story, 'The Woods Colt," has been selected for inclusion in an anthology of mystery and fantasy to be published in the fall.
Warm Virginia greetings by way of California!

Earl