Ernie Hebert: A Real Writer
by Theresa A Ludwick
What is it that separates the wannabe from the “is already,” the writer from the scribbler, the jotter, the “I’d love to learn to write someday” dreamer? You might ask the Tin Man from the Land of Oz, or you might ask the once – and soundly – rejected New Hampshire writer, Ernest Hebert (call him Ernie). Successful author of nine novels, including Spoonwood, published in 2005, Hebert treaded the yellow brick road early in his writing career to find that, like the Tin Man, what he sought was inside himself.
He firmly defines himself as a fiction writer. “It’s what I believe in and who I am,” he says plainly in the introduction to his website. What he does, though, follows the pattern of most writers who live in the real world: work (translation: maintain a steady income) with one hand and write (translation: fulfill an undeniable calling) with the other. The first, Hebert does at Keene State College, where he is a Professor of English. It was here that he earned his B.A. (and met his wife, Medora) before going on to obtain his M.A. at Dartmouth. The second, he does from his study at home several sacred hours a day, a time through which no lesser thing penetrates.
Hebert is easily intimate with the characters he creates in his books, particularly the Darby Series: five novels set in the fictional town of Darby, New Hampshire. Like neighbors in a small New England town, the stories mingle plots and passions, and are not necessary to be read in order. From The Dogs of March to Spoonwood, Hebert holds up a mirror, covered with words, to quintessential New Hampshire, while exploring the socioeconomic elements that divide and, many times, conquer the creatures of his imagination.
A native of Keene, New Hampshire, Hebert has also lived in Swanzey, Nelson, and Westmoreland. Early on, he worked for the phone company traveling all over the state, and then as a gas station attendant where he served a patron who unknowingly inspired the creation of what would be Dog’s protagonist, Howard Elman. Hebert went on to work as a reporter in Keene and Manchester, while continuing to work on his novel.
In 1975, at the urging of his wife, Hebert attended the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont where, it turned out, his aspirations as a writer were put to the test. He was assigned a writing mentor; an author he highly admired. Not just any author, but John Gardner who, before his untimely death in 1982 at the age of 49, wrote The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, bibles to many hopeful fiction writers. After only a partial reading of Hebert’s manuscript, Gardner told him, “No real writer would write a sentence like that.”
For a writer, to be rejected is to enter Dante’s Hell, where the words “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE” stand out in full relief, living words ready to engulf one’s self-belief. Many who enter, never return. Fortunately, Ernie Hebert found his way out of the dark wood with a new resolve. “I realized that I had lost my way as a writer,” he says. “I was writing too fast; I was trying to write for money and acclaim.”
His usual quick, conscious-level writing, well suited
to the news writing he had done as a reporter for the Keene Sentinel, would
not serve the more necessarily intense, soul-searching and revealing process
needed in fiction to vitally connect the reader to his words. “Gardner
showed me that I had to write from the heart and never mind if anyone would
publish it. I was born as a writer after my traumatic encounter with Gardner.
I was thirty-four years old.”
The Dogs of March was published four short years after Hebert’s valley-bottom epiphany. “I was first giddy, then numbed by the response,” he admits, noting changes in how he was treated. “My sex appeal rocketed; when I started talking at a party, the women would listen instead of walk away. Conversely, the men felt threatened. It was really nice to be in the spotlight.” What about John Gardner? Did Hebert feel vindicated? “John Gardner never entered my thoughts.”
And Dogs was no fluke, but the prelude to a long and successful authorial career that includes several novels and as many writing awards. Three, awarded by United Press International, while Hebert was a reporter in Keene, attest to his proficiency in a genre that required different – though no less crucial – elements of writing. The Dogs of March earned him a Citation of Excellence from the Hemingway Foundation. 1993’s Mad Boys, a foray into cyber-culture, and 2001’s historically-set The Old American, both earned applause from the New Hampshire Writers Project. Most recently, and perhaps most impressively, was Hebert’s 2002 Sarah Josepha Hale Award for Lifetime Achievement as a New England writer. Somewhere in the countless pages he has penned, then, are the sentences of a real writer.
With real, or almost real, characters; resembling people he has met, or otherwise observed on the stage of life. “…people who have physical characteristics that stick in my mind. [For example], I remember a guy from a poor family when I was a kid, who used to wear a suit jacket, no shirt. He’d walk very erect, holding the bottoms of his coat sleeves. He became Ollie Jordan (of the Darby Series).”
Darby is a composite of actual towns that represent the social strata to which Hebert’s characters are relegated. They are locales he has lived in or known of; all reflecting parts of a place – New Hampshire – that he firmly considers home. Though he may enjoy his travels outside the state, the enjoyment is short-lived. “I’d find myself feeling empty inside,” he says. “I wouldn’t feel right until I returned. It’s just home.”
And so “home” is what he recreates in his works of fiction. “Recycling reality,” he calls it. “It’s like a long lie you tell your psychiatrist. It’s a hideout for Truth. It’s beauty. It’s bull-ticky.” And his advice to writers embarking on the amber road? “To be a good fiction writer,” he says, “you have to release the wild child inside of yourself.” Like Dorothy, Ernie Hebert learned that everything he needed was in his own back yard.