• Email this page
• Print this page
• del.icio.us
• digg
• yahoo!
• Comments
• Feed
  Subscribe to Down East Online : Media Mutt Subscribe to Media Mutt : Media Mutt Feed

    (I wrote the following column a couple of years ago, in hopes it would inspire readers to seek out Bill Clark’s work on the dusty back shelves of used book stores and also to nudge the Maine Press Association into correcting a grievous oversight by finally installing Clark in the group’s hall of fame. I went 0 for 2. No harm, though, in trying again.)

    People die and are forgotten, almost before the funeral flowers wilt and the little sandwiches at the reception get soggy. Their friends and relatives may mention them once in a while, but the old stories get less accurate with each retelling. Finally, they aren’t told at all. The ordinary man or woman’s heredity might endure in a little DNA handed down through the generations, but the original person gets lost in unsorted boxes of old photos and worn clothes given to Goodwill.
   
    Except for the famous. (By which I don’t mean the overnight phenomenon, the pop star of the moment. They return to dust and thrift stores like everybody else, only much sooner.) The truly talented, the unquestionably brilliant, the publicly beloved don’t fade away, because their contributions to art, sport, science, business, philosophy or philanthropy endure long after eulogies, bouquets, bite-sized blobs of ham salad, even tombstones have vanished. Their celebrity inoculates them against death’s impending anonymity.

    So how come nobody remembers William M. Clark?

    For over 30 years, Clark wrote a column for the Portland Press Herald’s editorial page that covered everything from politics to poetry to forestry practices to the social conventions of rural Maine. He turned out eight books, both fact and fact thinly disguised as fiction. In prose that was somehow both plain and elegant, he captured the lives of an entire era of small-town residents. He was widely read – his work frequently appeared in national magazines – and critically acclaimed – he was compared to everyone from James Thurber to Thornton Wilder to Edgar Lee Masters to Sherwood Anderson.

    You remember them, don’t you?

    No?

    This might be harder than I thought.

    Try this: He was a crustier, blue-collar Garrison Keillor long before anybody realized the prairie needed a home companion.
I asked a friend who serves on the nominating committee for the Maine Press Association’s Journalism Hall of Fame why Clark, who died in 1988, hadn’t been inducted. “He might be a good candidate,” he said. “But to tell the truth, I don’t remember much about him.”

    To tell the truth, neither did I, so I Googled his name. But Clark belongs to that misty era before blogs. He’s not mentioned on the Press Herald’s Web site. His books are out of print. He barely rates a paragraph on a local library’s listing of Maine authors. What little I learned came from his essays and an introduction to his last book by fellow-columnist Jim Brunelle.
Clark was born in Caratunk in 1913. He attended local schools, Colby College and served in the military, after which he worked as a teacher, logger, sawmill operator, electrician and bulldozer driver. In 1957, angered by what he called “the stupidities of thoughtless woodcutting,” he wrote a commentary for the Press Herald on how quality hardwoods were being wasted in Maine sawmills. Shortly afterwards, the paper asked him to contribute a regular feature. Thus was born the column that became “Some Logrolling.”

    Clark had a conservative viewpoint, back when conservative didn’t mean government-imposed morality, but a belief in personal liberty and personal responsibility. In his fictional town of Cedar River, a composite of the many small settlements where he’d lived, “The local legal code, developed and refined, protects the residents from almost nothing but themselves, and that but rarely.”

    Clark didn’t care for environmentalists. He felt they were intent on preserving land to the detriment of logging, hunting, fishing and other traditional uses, and without regard for how this would impact rural residents. “It was not a question of interference or of forbidding,” he wrote. “It was a question of courtesy, of a pattern that seemed worth keeping.”
He detested bureaucrats, who he believed were trying to force one set of rules on a state with radical differences between its cities and countryside. “Complexity,” he noted, “was not born with Suburbia.”

    Clark was never harsh or didactic and had little patience with those who were. His most pointed criticisms were almost always leavened with humor, using Cedar River’s imaginary inhabitants to drive home his points. Here’s his take on the town bootlegger and general ne’er-do-well:

    “My uncle Oscar was one of the only men I ever knew who recognized the extent to which most people deceive themselves in order to reconcile conscience with happiness. If he hadn’t recognized that, he might have followed their example. That would have been a deadly thing, actually, because as a solid citizen he would have been a bore and a blithering nuisance.”
   
    His Maine was populated not by the stereotypical hicks of alleged Maine humorists, but by complex characters tied closely to the land:

    “Cedar River people have always been more undecided than Hamlet about whether to be or not to be. Their ancestors built them a town in a hidden land that was mostly gravel and river and ledges and ridges and hills. Sometimes the people grow weary of the need to force growth from seeds sown on a rock, and they retreat from reality. Thus they are not there when the census taker comes and their town torments the topographers.”

    His columns and books are so filled with gems, there’s a temptation to go wild quoting them. I’ll yield to that temptation.
On happiness: “Anybody can be happy. Unhappiness is a gift. The unhappy see what others do not see. Need and desire and demand, those are all gifts.”

    On the education he received in Mrs. Kelly’s classroom: “She could pound facts into heads through any openings she chose. If the normal openings were particularly tough, she opened a gash or two and worked on that.”

    On the myth there’s a novel in every life: “Up here, there isn’t. Nobody can keep his mind on anything except perhaps unusually dedicated adultery for long enough to make even a short story.”

    On winter: “There were no prayers for winter warmth. We knew that winter was already planned. The wind would bring what cold it willed. The skies would allocate what misery seemed due.”

    On the town poet: “It takes a real high-caliber drive toward rhythmic expression, though, to force itself to the surface when everything in the poet’s environment is mundane or repulsive. Only a true prophet can continue to cry out in a wilderness. Only a dedicated dispenser of dreams can cheerfully hawk his wares in an atmosphere of grim reality.”

    On being forgotten: “Memories are not neat like an orderly classroom full of Mrs. Kelly’s scholars. Memories are jumbled in a bureau drawer with a covering of folded handkerchiefs, placed just so, in order that a burglar looking for money will know that the housewife is tidy. Impressions of a burglar are important.”

    If the journalists’ hall of fame isn’t interested in Bill Clark, maybe there’s a place for him in the poet’s hall.

Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.

Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 in Permalink