Is Harry an Angry Man?

I got a call the other day from a delightful woman who knows me as a storyteller. She had read Harry’s Our Man and said that she was surprised that Harry was an angry book and went on to say, “You’re such a positive person. You’re not an angry person are you?”

For the moment I felt my mask had been ripped off.

Later that day I was swimming in the ocean with my friend, Joe Beals who said, “Your character, Ernie Marion in Harry’s Our Man is angry but he’s not mean. He’s not evil.” As I swam about in the lumpy ocean at Humarock Beach in Scituate I thought of Shakespeare.  Now Shakespeare had a merry time with Falstaff. Nothing seems to overwhelm Falstaff. He’s full of wit and good spirits. And yet Shakespeare also wrote King Lear which is like an angry thunderstorm roaring out of someone’s heart. So Shakespeare knew a great deal about anger as well as merriment and I imagine he was a very pleasant man to be with.

I also thought of Flannery O’Connor. Some of the reviews said that her work was so dark that it was almost monstrous. Flannery was exploring the human heart and she was a cheerful, thoughtful artist. She was not an angry person.

I think Harry’s Our Man is often a funny book. Yes, Harry’s angry about injustice. He’s a searcher and a man of big enough heart to fall deeply in love after going through the most difficult time of his life. It’s nice when people call or email about the novel because that rarely happens with a told story. Ah, the mystery of print.

Harry is Taking Me in Many Directions

My novel, Harry’s Our Man is leading me in different directions. One of those directions is that ordinarily I would tell a story at a bookstore. But with Harry’s Our Man I want people to be interested in the book, so if I just tell a story it takes their mind off the book. What I’m experimenting with is telling the audience about the place of the story then reading sections.

There are two central places. One is Pill Hill, a neighborhood of big old-fashioned houses where there are many doctors and it’s called Pill Hill because those doctors predominate and they can drive fifteen minutes to the Boston hospitals. The second place is a tenement section only a five-minute walk from Pill Hill at the bottom of the Hill called the Farm. They are two very different places. On the Hill everybody’s been well educated and some of the people have money and some have position and power, and that’s not true down at the bottom of the Hill. Most of the men there work for the town. Some of them are truck drivers, some are policemen and some are firemen. Most of them have not gone to college and their children will not.

Once the place is clear, I introduce Harry Hutchinson whose life is finally on a smooth track. Harry has grown up in a wealthy household and his father is a descendent of Governor Hutchinson who was the British governor at the time of the Boston Massacre. And Harry’s father has a few commandments. Commandment number one is you go to the Episcopalian Church. It doesn’t matter if you believe in God or not, that’s not important, but you go to that church. Number two is you go to Harvard. Young Harry is accepted at Harvard but doesn’t go. He rebels. Ah, we have a problem, a broken commandment. The third Commandment is you go into a profession,  a profession that makes money, ideally banking.

Now that we have a sense of place and character, I begin reading short sections of the book. My purpose is to imagine the characters and read the book so the characters seem to be leaping out of the book. I can look away from the book and be the narrator but then I have to go back and read the actual lines and it’s this balance that is new. For an actor this is second nature. For a storyteller this is something new.

Reading aloud brings me back to my childhood when I would lay in bed and listen to the Lone Ranger on the radio. I heard the Lone Ranger’s deep voice and imagined him on his horse, Silver. The voices, music and sound effects were all I needed to imagine it all – the town, the villain, the horses, the light, the wind, the sky . . . all there in my mind. So here I am reading Harry’s Our Man aloud and coming back in a sense to the days of my boyhood.

Reading at the Brookline Booksmith

I did a reading of Harry’s Our Man at the Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts on June 6th. We had sixty people and they were warm and enthusiastic and for the first time I felt the mixture of telling and reading worked well. I’m enjoying discovering the voices of the characters.

A friend of mine told me the other night she had lost a bracelet her mother had given her fifteen years ago. She lost it in a parking lot early in the morning in Boston and had to teach all day. In the evening she went back to that parking lot that’s heavily used and there was the bracelet. She had the joy of finding something she loved. Well, that’s the way I feel about Harry’s Our Man. I’ve been at a bit of a loss as to my focus recently and I just loved bringing the book alive for the audience.

As usual someone in the audience said, “Are you going to make an audio book?” And I am!

For thirty-five years I’ve made stories and characters have fascinated me. One of the ways I bring character alive is finding their voice and so doing an audio book seems perfect.

There was a man who lives on Pill Hill at the reading and his house is only two houses away from where I imagine Harry Hutchinson, the main character of my book living. Another man in his early thirties came up saying he loved The Minister of Others’ Affairs. I could have danced. I love the story of The Minister of Others’ Affairs but I think there are probably only twelve of us around the country who really know and love that story. It’s one of my favorites and I haven’t told it in thirty years. The reading at Brookline Booksmith was filled with delightful moments like that. One woman told the audience that her son was now in the Air Force in Alaska and he had grown up with my stories. I imagine him flying a jet plane singing,

             I’m Herman the Wormin’

            And I like my squirmin’

            And I like being close to the ground. Boom, boom!

My friend the poet, David Andrews was there and he told me later that he was watching the basketball between the Boston Celtics and the Miami Heat. Miami Heat lost on their home court and on television you could see the players leaving and you could hear a young boy encouraging the Miami Heat saying, “Good effort, good effort!” How beautiful. How important it is to celebrate good effort.

Well I’m celebrating finding this focus, putting in the effort and thinking of Harry Hutchinson and the wonderful effort he’s making in his campaign for Congress.

On the Road with Harry’s Our Man

I’m on the road with Harry’s Our Man. In late May I was at the Hingham Public Library doing a reading of Harry. I’ve spent thirty-five years making stories and performing them, so standing and just reading is new. I’m exploring a combination of reading a bit and having the reading flow into telling. A few weeks ago my wife and I went to a poetry reading by Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi was welcoming, funny and gracious. The funniest parts have nothing to do with her poetry. So I tried the same thing and found I was a bit wooden.

I prepare the programs and I have a wonderful time reading the book. The characters are completely alive for me and so are the places.

I reflect and I realize how important language was on Pill Hill. Everybody was well educated and had fun with the language. There was one Pill Hill doctor who was famous for being at cocktail parties and when he disagreed with someone he would say, “There is mush in what you say.” And then of course there is the famous quote of someone talking about her great aunt saying, “She was in the pink of decay.” Language at the tenement section at the bottom of Pill Hill, a section called The Farm, was fiery, wild and often rude. That reflected their lives. Most of the people living in that tenement section had tougher lives. They did not have the protection of lots of money, an important profession, power and influential friends.

After I gave the talk at the Hingham Public Library a lovely woman came up and said she grew up in The Farm. The woman had a bright intelligence as well as a confidence and a clear delight in life. I said that I knew a boy named Chickie from The Farm and she said, “He’s my cousin.” A few days later we had coffee together at Starbucks in Marshfield. And the woman said she grew up in one of the tenement sections and moved three times. Each time their apartment looked down upon the tar playground that was the center of The Farm. The playground seemed a dangerous place to me. I can remember some of my friends not only climbing up the telephone poles but climbing right on top of the crossbars, and from there they would leap to the branch of a tree. I was a good climber but that was beyond me. But the woman I was talking to said she would look out of the windows and would be delighted with the bright colors of the swings. “They were wooden swings and they were bright. Some were orange others blue others yellow.” I could imagine her as a girl full of the poetry that all children are filled with. And that saddened me because the two areas, Pill Hill and The Farm both had their stereotypes. The people on the Farm called us “richies” and I know from my friends there was some resentment and anger towards “the richies”. And the people on Pill Hill had their own prejudices and felt some scorn for everyone who lived down at The Farm.

The woman I was talking to said that drink took a terrible toll on the people who lived on The Farm and I said, “The men?” And she said no, the women too which surprised me. So there was a great deal of drinking down on The Farm but that was true also on Pill Hill and more importantly on Pill Hill many of the teenagers tried to take their lives, and three succeeded. In my novel the central character, Harry Hutchinson, is very upset that young people are taking their lives and he doesn’t understand it. Harry wants to find the words, the language to understand the connection between the atomic bomb, the splitting of the atom, the young people taking their lives on Pill Hill and the fear he feels in the whole of the society. It’s 1950 and there is some fear that there will be a nuclear war. There is also a fear of communism and a good deal of red baiting going on. As a young man Harry decided to be a socialist and he knows if he runs for Congress he may be the victim of red baiting.

So just going off to Hingham to do a reading of Harry’s Our Man brought me in contact with a woman who grew up at the bottom of Pill Hill with a very different life. She was a brave, lively woman who remembered The Farm fondly and yet felt the pain of those who had become alcoholics. This coming Wednesday, June 6th I’ll do another reading at the Brookline Booksmith only a few miles from where I grew up. I’m excited being on the road with Harry’s Our Man.

Harry at Hiroshima

The novel, Harry’s Our Man emerged from the first draft of another novel. Inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, I wondered if I could write a novel about Pill Hill that was set in one day. That novel didn’t work but the character of Harry Hutchinson emerged and so I started again and Harry was the central character. I sometimes think of Dante’s Paradise Lost. Harry Hutchinson has a long, long fall.

My parents had great, large parties with thirty, forty and sometimes more people, and they would sing, dance, laugh, discuss and argue. One argument that ran through the years was about dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Several of the people at the party were soldiers and they had strong feelings because they may well have died had we invaded Japan.

When I was in the Navy I went to museums in Hiroshima and I remember looking at one huge bottle, it was a couple of feet high and wide, and in the bottle in some solution was a fetus (I think that memory is accurate. I remember I was shocked.) I’ve always felt drawn to that moment of the explosion in Hiroshima. In my novel, Harry Hutchinson is in the army and he goes to Hiroshima a short time after the bomb has been dropped. Something happens when he’s there that he will never forget. And that moment in Hiroshima eventually helps him decide to run for Congress.

Ernie Marion

Writing the novel Harry’s Our Man gave me opportunities I don’t have when I’m performing a story. The longest time I have to perform in a theatre is two hours, but with the novel I have the time to tell the story of Harry Hutchinson’s long journey. In addition, I don’t have to be present telling you the story in the novel; the reader can take Harry home and sit in a chair and read. Finally, the novel gives me the chance to swear. Mark Twain said, “When angry count to four; when very angry, swear.” One of the characters in my book, Ernie Marion, is very angry and swears a lot. Swearing is part of the rhythm of his language. I would be uncomfortable using his language telling the story but in the novel it’s just right.

Ernie Marion is from the bottom of Pill Hill. Ernie lost both legs in World War II and returns home ready to explode. Like many of the veterans from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, he’s faced with the necessity of fitting in. Ernie finds it extremely difficult to get through his resentment and had he not gone to Northeastern University and sat in Harry Hutchinson’s American History course, he may have become a drunk. But Harry inspires him and although he carries a huge chip on his shoulder, Ernie becomes Harry Hutchinson’s campaign manager. Ernie is tough, sharp, a very good organizer and with Ernie’s help Harry’s campaign really takes off.

I’m interested in class in America. Harry Hutchinson is from an old Boston Brahmin family and Ernie is from a working class family. Harry Hutchinson manages to bring different worlds together. His campaign is run on a few thousand dollars. Today more than half of the members of Congress are millionaires. It’s hard to imagine those millionaires having much compassion or understanding of what a working class family goes through. The gulf between the rich and the poor has become so vast it seems there is no way to bridge it today.

Growing up with Politics

When I was a boy and a teenager I got involved in political campaigns. The campaigns were for small offices like Library Trustee and for big offices like Attorney General,  Governor and Congress. I loved the drama of knocking on doors, sitting around headquarters listening to adults talk about strategies and the possibilities of winning. The characters were unusual. Some of them smoked cigars, some of them wore odd suits and looked as if they lived around the corner. It was a new world. I’m sure that’s one of the reasons that I wrote the novel Harry’s Our Man. It’s a political love story set in 1950.

I think Harry’s Our Man is a story of our time. When Harry was running the Russians were the bad guys as were the Chinese. The bad guys have changed, now they’re the Islamists. We so easily  stereotype whole peoples and the stereotypes make it easy to make war.

I grew up in a big, beautiful house in a neighborhood called Pill Hill in Brookline, Massachusetts.  It was called Pill Hill because of the number of doctors on the hill. My parents and many of the people on Pill Hill loved literature, theatre, music, dance and parties. They were a generation that was bigger than life partially because they had lived through Prohibition, the Depression and World War II. There was a glamor about their lives that is caught in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway. That generation had style and flair.

As a boy I was aware of a darker side of Pill Hill. It was clear to me that many of the people on Pill Hill scorned those at the bottom of the hill who lived in tenements and projects. They were considered as not just uncouth and poorly educated, but as sub-humans. I went to school with a number of those working class kids and realized we stereotyped them and they stereotyped us.  I was considered a “richy” who lived in a castle like house. What was sad is that they began to believe their stereotype about themselves. There was also a strong current of anti-Catholicism and there was little ethnic variety on Pill Hill. There was a single Jewish family and the only African American was a world-renowned singer, Roland Hayes. The fire of prejudice was very alive in spite of the fact that everyone was well educated. In my novel Harry Hutchinson, the son of a Boston Brahman, wants to break through prejudice. Harry hasn’t got the personality to be a good politician but he jumps into the fray and runs for Congress. In order to say we need to change the way we think, he’s taken a huge risk and life breaks wide open for Harry and he is changed forever.