For a long time I wondered about my secret motives for writing my first novel, The Dogs of March, and the subsequent books of the Darby series. I did not choose to write those books. They were insisted upon by something inside of me that went against my common sense and ambition. I wanted to be a success in the world of books and I understood my material -- small town characters outside the middle class -- was not the best stuff to make either a literary reputation or a buck out of. Why did I do it? I didn't know. I was guided by unknown forces. And then a couple years ago my father died, and I began to have a clearer understanding of the source of my material.
My dad lived with my family and me in the last year of his life. He was crippled with arthritis, osteoporosis, and just plain old wear and tear. My dad had only seven years of education. He had worked in a textile mill as a weaver for almost five decades. When he came to live with me, he was flat-busted broke, and widowed. But he had a great attitude about life, a sense of humor, an eye for the ladies, and crazy optimism. Dad wanted a girlfriend. "What are you looking for in a woman?" I asked. Gripping his walker, he said, "One with a car." He died very together psychologically, but it wasn't always so. He came home from World War II so traumatized that he dressed every morning in a suit and tie and sat in a chair all day. It was six months before he was able to return to work, and years before he was able to heal himself. But he did it. I always wondered how a guy who had been in the Navy and had never seen any action could be so discombobulated by the war. In old age he told me the story.
When he was drafted into the Navy at the age of 33 he was sent to work in the engine room of his ship, an LCI, which was a small landing craft ship that only carried a five-inch gun. Well, one dark night the ship hit a rock in the ocean somewhere near the Philippines. They were there for days before another ship arrived to pull them off. Because dad worked in the engine room, he was at the very bottom of the vessel. As it turned out he was alone down there. Everyone else had been relieved of duty in that dangerous locale. He didn't volunteer to do this chore. Nor was he ordered to. He was just doing his job. When they were pulling the ship off the rock the craft pitched and heaved and threw him against the bulkhead. He tried to open the hatch to get out, but discovered that they'd locked him in. Or locked him out. Depends on how you look at it.
The source his trauma was not the moment of panic and the fear of death, it was that they didn't tell him that he might be sacrificed. This minor slip in common decency -- not telling him that they'd locked him -- alienated my father from his crew and especially from the officers. He would have done the job, he would have volunteered. But they didn't ask. He just did his job, for the good the ship, the crew, the United States of America.
I tell you this story about my father because I've come to think of it as a parable that illustrates the plight of the people who do the grunt work of America. The country needs them as a group to give the rest of us necessities and comfort, but as individuals they are dispensable and unimportant. The grunt laborers are uncelebrated and unacknowledged. They have been locked out of contemporary America.
I have had many role models without whom I never could have written the books that I have. My uncle, a Catholic priest, the Reverend Joseph Ernest Vaccarest, after whom I am named, my full name being Joseph Ernest Vaccarest Hebert. My mother, Jeannette Vaccarest, my father, Elphege Hebert, both of whom who taught me how to live and then, surprisingly to me, how to die. David Battenfeld and Malcom Keddy and David Leinster, and other teachers at Keene State College. I'm grateful to my editors and my literary agents over the years -- Alan Williams, Chuck Verrill, Kathryn Harrison, Michael Lowenthal, Phil Pochoda, Rita Scott, Nat Sobel, Sally Brady -- and to those who have read and critiqued my work when it was in a raw state -- Delia Daniels, Dayton Duncan, Audrey Lyle, Terry Pindell, and many others. Even in the last fifteen years when I've published books with some regularity I still need and, through the grace of the Divine, have found mentors. So thank you William Cook and William Spegemann, professors at Dartmouth College. (And by the way thank you Dartmouth for giving me a good job, pleasant working conditions, and colleagues who could teach me as well as our students.) But the influence I think about the most is someone I hardly ever talked to. He's one of those uncelebrated grunt guys.
His name was Harold Archer. He was a telephone man. I didn't go to college after graduating from Keene High School. I applied but I was denied admission because of low grades and low test scores. On the ACT test I scored a 6 percentile in English, which means that 94 percent of the people who took the test did better than I did. I went to work for the phone company. For four years I was on the road for the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company in towns like Belfast, Maine, Rumford, Maine, Rutland, Vermont, Wakefield, Massachusetts, and right here in Newport putting in the dial system in central offices. I was looking for self worth, a quality I lacked. For me, self worth was wrapped up in the idea of being good at something. I didn't know what it took to be good. I thought it just sort of happened. I was waiting for something or somebody to come along and clue me in.
Slowly, I grew to admire Harold Archer. Unlike many telephone guys who worked on the road away from home he rarely went to bars after work. His idea of a good time was to call his wife after supper. He seemed serene. But it was his attitude toward work that impressed me. If you can picture iron bays maybe ten feet high and thirty inches wide filled with relays and switches, all of which need solder joints for wires -- thousands of wires -- you have an idea of the work we did: put up the bays, run the cable, wire the relays. I can still remember the color code of the wires -- blue, orange, green, brown, slate. The wires would be carried in plastic-wrapped cables that ran on racks above the bays.
Harold Archer put his heart and soul and art into his work. We used to tie the colored wires in bunches with a waxy twine that we called twelve-cord. Harold made perfect solder connections, wrapped his wires with twelve-cord to make elegant turns. Guys would hang around his bay just to admire his work. Harold Archer not only did his work beautifully and competently, he did it with passion. Sometimes he would work right through the breaks and into the lunch hour and after five o'clock when nobody was paying him. The backs of Harold Archer's bays should have been in art galleries; however, replaced by the age of the chip, they've probably been scrapped. But his art lives today in my mind. Harold Archer taught me what it takes to be good at something.
They say that anybody who was around when John Kennedy was killed remembers where they were when the news came. I was on a cable rack in White River Junction, Vermont, when somebody said, "The President's been shot." I remember looking down ten feet at the floor while men whispered their fears, and I had no one to speak to or even a face to look at. I remember being suddenly aware that my head was only a foot from the ceiling. I felt just a twinge of that claustrophobic, alienated feeling that my father must have felt in the engine room when they were pulling his ship off the rock. The next year I was out of the phone company and in college, on a track that has brought me here today. So the answer to my earlier question -- why did I do it, write the kind of books I have? Well, I still don't know. But part of it has to do with honoring the working grunts.
On behalf of my parents and on behalf of the Harold Archers of the world, and the people who make stuff, fix stuff and serve stuff, who fix cars, build houses, prune bushes, plow roads, carry bed pans, sweep floors, flip burgers, operate the looms, weld the joints, keep the engine rooms humming, walk the steel beams, wait on tables, and scoop the ice cream (the scoopers, how I love them) you, the soul of America, the working grunts -- for you I accept and dedicate this award. Thank you.
