Geoff Wisner

Balancing Acts

by Edward Hoagland. Simon & Schuster, 1992. 351 pages, $23.00.

Throughout his career, Edward Hoagland's strenuous, vivid, sometimes knotty prose has been fueled by the tension between the city and the country, the First World and the Third World, the present and the past. To negotiate these oppositions gracefully is one meaning of Balancing Acts, the title of his new collection of essays.

For readers who've been taught that an essay is an orderly progression from a premise to a conclusion, Hoagland is liberating. His longer essays, particularly, have a looping, intuitive form that welcomes digression -- and the digressions can be the best part. A spell of loneliness on a long-distance train trip, for instance, leads him to digress about the strange character of the travel writer: "He is likely to be both smarter than and not as smart as he appears, or more weirdly dangerous, a devotee of voluntary poverty, an Eton boy like George Orwell down and out in London and Paris, certain to come up with lawless ideas. Or, as with Lawrence Durrell, Sir Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence, his sexuality is faintly alarming."

Balancing Acts, like Hoagland's other works, is stuffed with odd facts about the human and natural worlds. The meat of a bear fed on blueberries, we learn, may taste as if it's had sugar sprinkled on it. Hungry foxes catch cats in the winter by rolling on their backs like playful kittens. Trapeze artists complain that there's "too much gravity" on certain days. Hundreds of bent nails dug up at Walden Pond attest to Thoreau's bad aim with a hammer. Unlike the idealizing John Muir, for whom there were "no carrion smells beneath his landslides," Hoagland respects and even relishes reminders that life means suffering and corruption as well as exaltation. Reversing the usual idea that sauces came about as a way to mask the taste of spoiled meat, Hoagland says that we "dash sauces on our meat ... to restore a tartness approximating the taint of spoilage that wild meat attains."

Many of the facts that Hoagland preserves for us are gleaned from the lore of trappers, hunters, or cowboys -- trades and traditions that are disappearing. Parrots, he explains to a friend in Alaska, use their beaks just as elephants use their trunks, to reach, pull, pry, and taste. But now that elephants and parrots are becoming rare, "it's like archeology to know these things." People who care about bears and frogs, he says elsewhere, don't have much time left to write about them, "not just because -- among the world's other emergencies -- a twilight is settling upon them, but because people are losing their capacity to fathom any form of nature except, in a more immediate sense, their own."

The essays included in Balancing Acts range from appreciations of John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Abbey, to a dark meditation on the cruelty of cities, an assortment of journal jottings, and accounts of expeditions to Alaska, Wyoming, Yemen, Belize, and the Okefenokee Swamp. (The descriptions of train trips that begin the book struck me as the weakest pieces -- muted and conscientious -- perhaps because the straight line of a railroad track is not Hoagland's preferred mode of travel or writing.)

The more recent essays refer to the author's temporary blindness, due to cataracts, and his dismissal (also temporary) from a teaching position, due to "political incorrectness." In Belize, where he went to escape the "razor cuts and rabbit punches" of academic politics, Hoagland recuperated in the rainforest and in Belize City, which "has a flavor like Mombasa's a couple of decades ago, a peaceable, planetary hum that can transport you out of the Americas for a very cheap airfare." Here's what it looked like:

Haulover Creek is lined with slapped-together shacks of misfitted boards in cheap landsmen's pastels or deeper, sea-savaged mariners' colors, some built of salvagers' booty off the teeth of the reef, some out of junkyard crating and hurricane damage. Nothing to make you weep unduly if it blew down again, but handy and homey, set up on stilts; people run for the concrete schools in a flattening storm. The gardens are hedged with conch shells, sharks' heads, turtle skeletons, crocodiles' skulls.

The slightly old-fashioned flavor of the language, appropriate for describing a Central American backwater, and the resourcefulness and good humor implied about the people who live there -- coexisting with nature rather than subduing it, picking up after each hurricane and lining the garden with sharks' heads -- are typical of the generous spirit that is so attractive in Hoagland's work. Hoagland's essay on becoming a writer is called "The Job Is to Pour Your Heart Out," and he continues to do just that.

Published in the Harvard Post, January 15, 1993.



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Geoff Wisner Balancing Acts by Edward Hoagland. Simon & Schuster, 1992. 351 pages, $23.00. Throughout his career, Edward Hoagland's strenuous, vivid, sometimes knotty prose has been fueled by the tension between the city and the country, the First World and the Third World, the present and the past. To negotiate these oppositions gracefully is one meaning of Balancing Acts, the title of his new collection of essays. For readers who've been taught that an essay is an orderly progression from a premise to a conclusion, Hoagland is liberating. His longer essays, particularly, have a looping, intuitive form that welcomes digression -- and the digressions can be the best part. A spell of loneliness on a long-distance train trip, for instance, leads him to digress about the strange character of the travel writer: "He is likely to be both smarter than and not as smart as he appears, or more weirdly dangerous, a devotee of voluntary poverty, an Eton boy like George Orwell down and out in London and Paris, certain to come up with lawless ideas. Or, as with Lawrence Durrell, Sir Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence, his sexuality is faintly alarming." Balancing Acts, like Hoagland's other works, is stuffed with odd facts about the human and natural worlds. The meat of a bear fed on blueberries, we learn, may taste as if it's had sugar sprinkled on it. Hungry foxes catch cats in the winter by rolling on their backs like playful kittens. Trapeze artists complain that there's "too much gravity" on certain days. Hundreds of bent nails dug up at Walden Pond attest to Thoreau's bad aim with a hammer. Unlike the idealizing John Muir, for whom there were "no carrion smells beneath his landslides," Hoagland respects and even relishes reminders that life means suffering and corruption as well as exaltation. Reversing the usual idea that sauces came about as a way to mask the taste of spoiled meat, Hoagland says that we "dash sauces on our meat ... to restore a tartness approximating the taint of spoilage that wild meat attains." Many of the facts that Hoagland preserves for us are gleaned from the lore of trappers, hunters, or cowboys -- trades and traditions that are disappearing. Parrots, he explains to a friend in Alaska, use their beaks just as elephants use their trunks, to reach, pull, pry, and taste. But now that elephants and parrots are becoming rare, "it's like archeology to know these things." People who care about bears and frogs, he says elsewhere, don't have much time left to write about them, "not just because -- among the world's other emergencies -- a twilight is settling upon them, but because people are losing their capacity to fathom any form of nature except, in a more immediate sense, their own." The essays included in Balancing Acts range from appreciations of John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Edward Abbey, to a dark meditation on the cruelty of cities, an assortment of journal jottings, and accounts of expeditions to Alaska, Wyoming, Yemen, Belize, and the Okefenokee Swamp. (The descriptions of train trips that begin the book struck me as the weakest pieces -- muted and conscientious -- perhaps because the straight line of a railroad track is not Hoagland's preferred mode of travel or writing.) The more recent essays refer to the author's temporary blindness, due to cataracts, and his dismissal (also temporary) from a teaching position, due to "political incorrectness." In Belize, where he went to escape the "razor cuts and rabbit punches" of academic politics, Hoagland recuperated in the rainforest and in Belize City, which "has a flavor like Mombasa's a couple of decades ago, a peaceable, planetary hum that can transport you out of the Americas for a very cheap airfare." Here's what it looked like: Haulover Creek is lined with slapped-together shacks of misfitted boards in cheap landsmen's pastels or deeper, sea-savaged mariners' colors, some built of salvagers' booty off the teeth of the reef, some out of junkyard crating and hurricane damage. Nothing to make you weep unduly if it blew down again, but handy and homey, set up on stilts; people run for the concrete schools in a flattening storm. The gardens are hedged with conch shells, sharks' heads, turtle skeletons, crocodiles' skulls. The slightly old-fashioned flavor of the language, appropriate for describing a Central American backwater, and the resourcefulness and good humor implied about the people who live there -- coexisting with nature rather than subduing it, picking up after each hurricane and lining the garden with sharks' heads -- are typical of the generous spirit that is so attractive in Hoagland's work. Hoagland's essay on becoming a writer is called "The Job Is to Pour Your Heart Out," and he continues to do just that. Published in the Harvard Post, January 15, 1993.