The DeWitt Henry Evening, in photos and introduction

Radnor High graduates of the class of '59 came out in force last night to welcome DeWitt Henry home.  Pamela Sedor, the ever-young, always-beautiful mistress of the Radnor Memorial Library, did what she does to make the evening seamless.  Elizabeth Mosier and Chris Mills brought Ben Yagoda, Kelly Simmons, Cynthia Reeves, and me to their warm hearth; Kathye Fetsko Petrie brought her most ineffable self. And I was given the honor of introducing a man who has given stories—his own, those of others—a place of permanence. 

This was his evening.

When DeWitt Henry turned 30 years old, he wrote the following in a journal he was keeping:

“I can’t get a job.  I can’t have the things that normal people my age enjoy.  I can’t afford a family.  When I was twenty-five, that was clearly a matter of choice.  I was trying to be an artist, and I could always give up that ambition and still succeed by worldly standards.  But here I am skilled, educated, and living alone on $4,000 where any stiff can make $10,000.”

It’s classic DeWitt.  Self-effacing.  Never murky.  Sentences built of particulates.  It’s also preamble.  Because DeWitt Henry wasn’t actually just moping around in his thirtieth year.  He was on the verge of a next great thing, a brand new future—not just for himself, but for all us readerly stiffs.

So he was frequenting a bar called Plough.  So, in the early fall of 1971, $2,000 were played against 1,000 copies of what would become the first issue of Ploughshares, now one of the most esteemed literary magazines in the world.  What writer doesn’t know Ploughshares, or lust after a Ploughshares page?  The intention was, to quote DeWitt quoting Gordon Lish, to make “a distinct contribution to the national adventure in writing” and, to now quote DeWitt quoting Ted Solotaroff, “to convey the bright hope” of contemporary writing.

DeWitt has brightened the bulb of hope in many ways throughout his career—teaching at Harvard before becoming the Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, and publishing his own essays and stories, pieces that the great Tim O’Brien called “flat-out wonderful.”  He has made a career of launching careers while steadily tending his own.

Through the thickness and the thinness, DeWitt Henry never forgot his roots.  The house on Bloomingdale Avenue.  Howard, the butcher at Espenshade’s.  Kay’s Dress Shop.  The Anthony Wayne Theater.  St. David’s Golf Club. St. Martin’s Dam. The halls of Radnor High.  These memories are the stuff of Sweet Dreams, the memoir he’ll be sharing tonight.

In an essay called “On Aging,” about running the Boston marathon, DeWitt writes “There is the lesson of self-awareness and acceptance, beyond unrealistic ambition....” and then:  “There is the lesson of celebrating, from your individual limits, the glory of full human possibility.”  Tonight we celebrate DeWitt Henry—self aware and wholly accepting, the absolutely full human.

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Celebrating DeWitt Henry

I've been re-reading DeWitt Henry these past few days—all in anticipation of his appearance tonight at the Radnor Memorial Library.

(Be there.)

He's a man of letters, this DeWitt Henry.  An essayist, novelist, and memoirist whose books include Safe Suicide, Sweet Dreams, and The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts.  And while he taught at Harvard and chaired the Emerson Writing, Literature, and Publishing department (translation:  he has been living in Boston for a very long time), his roots are here, where I live, along the storied Main Line.

If you know DeWitt Henry as one of the founding editors of the esteemed literary magazine Ploughshares (for he is that, too), so be it.  If you are one of his nearly 5,000 Facebook friends, well—but—of course you are.  But I am one of those who has the privilege of reading a passage like the one below (from Sweet Dreams) and nodding my head in recognition, for I have been there.  I live there.  Indeed, my son has worked at this very theater (seasonally, of course) for many, many years.

Welcome Home, DeWitt. 

The Anthony Wayne Theater, our single movie theater, was ornately Victorian, with an overhanging marquee outside and a castle-like facade.  The three-sided ticket booth, with a circle to speak through and a loop to get your tickets, was out front under the shelter of a marquee.

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Sweet Dreams/DeWitt Henry: Reflections

As the founding editor of Ploughshares and the former Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, DeWitt Henry has stirred, ushered, and promoted all manner of writerly dreams. He's put first stories into print and published the work of our greatest living (and sometimes not living) authors. He's sat in classrooms, seducing and exhorting.  He's said to others, You can. You will. 

With his memoir, Sweet Dreams (Hidden River Press), Henry traces and comes nearly to terms with his own fantasies and emergent needs, as he tells the story of his rising and his wanting. Much of the book is devoted to a childhood and adolescence spent in the very swath of the suburban Philadelphia that I have, since my eighth-grade year at Radnor Middle School, called my own, and so I turned the pages of this book with acute interest, admiring the precision of Henry's recall—the stunning accuracy of descriptions about a place that has changed entirely and, then again, changed hardly at all.

I have (unknowingly) walked by two of Henry's childhood homes many a time; in Sweet Dreams the porches, yards, rooms, rooftops come alive with Henry's artist mother and alcoholic father, with siblings that struggled to find their own way, with episodes of generosity and scenes of terrible despair. I spent my time at Radnor High; DeWitt did, too, with peers whose last names are familiar to me. Henry walked among the ponds and water wheels and the majestic Walton Estate before it became Eastern University. I have walked there, too, plenty of times, taking photographs like the one above. The local movie theater can be found in Henry's pages, as can Eaglesmere, an outpost I have visited. Roadways and greenways and pause and hurry—it was then, it is now, and Henry brings it to vivid life.

Sweet Dreams is a coming-of-age book. It is a book about the boy who grew up with candy wealth, fell in love with a toy printing press, and decided, early on, to be a Writer. One can decide to be a Writer, but the world, in some ways, has to stand equal to that dream. It's a contest of wills, or it can be seen as one, and DeWitt takes us through the bruises and glories. He dreams out loud. We're there.

Here he is talking about the aforementioned Walton Estate (Walmarthon), now the heart of the Eastern University campus:

... Walton's was ten minutes or so away—you waded and pushed through overgrown bushes, ferns, and low hanging branches, with dankness, cobwebs, and with shade from the branches interlocking and arching above, while woodpeckers hammered, echoing, and cicadas whirred. You'd come out, then, following a creek, above the smaller of two ponds, set in the estate's open expanse of lawn, gardens, driveways and walks. A big white house, lived in, was to the left, far off were the gatehouse and wall, and far to your right, the castle-like mansion, deserted now.

 

 

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My good book fortune(s)

I'm not quite sure who this lovely lady is—Dionysus, I'm guessing—but I found her standing tall within a Philadelphia street festival, utterly and peaceably alone above the crowds (she was stilts-assisted). I return to her on this rainy morning because I feel her mood. Because I have looked out upon my pile of unread books and determined my short-term future.

Having just left Cleopatra (Stacy Schiff) in her tragic, epic Alexandria, I turn toward next titles. Some of them I've read before and will be re-reading. Some are brand-new both to the world and to me. Some are written by friends or friends of friends, one by a Pulitzer Prize winner who once surprised me with a glorious response to my Chicago Tribune review of her March, some by people I doubt I'll ever meet; two were gifts. I feel decadent, to be honest, to have found this time to read. But I have it; I'm claiming it; it will be forever mine.

My au courant (can I use that term this way?) book list, then:

Sweet Dreams, DeWitt Henry
When We Danced on Water, Evan Fallenberg (a Kindle book—about dance! about Berlin! Becca recommended!)
Dreamland Social Club, Tara Altebrando
Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
The Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd
Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue
The Blue Flower of Forgetfulness, Cyrus Samii
The Boneshaker, Kate Milford

Stay tuned for my responses.

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