The Many Voices of David Huddle

Spend any time in an independent bookstore and you learn the buying and reading habits of literary readers. Back in the mid-80s, before the advent of big box bookstores, back when the Williams Corner Bookstore held a weekly reading series in Charlottesville, Virginia, the clerks there were M.F.A. candidates or already held an M.F.A. or a Ph.D. In that blessed time, you could buy a book you wanted without having it first vetted by some central ordering location. The book did not have to appear on a list of likely sellers. There was a brain behind the bookstore. At Williams Corner, I picked up a new copy of Paper Boy by David Huddle, my old one having been commandeered by a fellow M.F.A. candidate, a poet who later traded in her poetical ambitions for what she describes as “commerce,” the world of situation comedies. (E.A. Gheman developed the television shows Boston Common and Will and Grace. She has a gazillion dollars now.)

The clerk stopped in mid-cash register-ring. She asked me if I knew what I was buying. Sure I do, I said, a book of poems by David Huddle.

“That book is why I became a poet,” she said, with gravitas.

“I just know the guy, that’s all.”

“You know him! You mean you MET him?”

The clerk was clearly star struck by David Huddle. To me he was the most ordinary of ordinary men, one of older sister’s boyfriends. And there were legions.

“Paper Boy is the first book of poems I read all the way through,” she said. Her name was Debra Albery. She showed me her book of poems, Walking Distance, and I bought it.

I didn’t tell her this, but I had never really read Paper Boy. I wanted to own it, because David wrote it. I didn’t know if I wanted to read it. I’d tried to read his short story in Esquire when it came out in 1970. His old girl friend, my sister Melva, had it in her house and pressed it on me.

“It’s not that good unless you know David. Then it’s fascinating. He has certain obsessions.”

“Like what?”

“Hands.”

The story was about the Vietnam War, which I’d protested against, and was about a soldier, a job I didn’t like or want. I didn’t finish reading it but pretended I did.

Fifteen or so years later I open Paper Boy and Ivanhoe, Virginia is revealed to me in a way I’d never before experienced it. To tell the truth, I probably hadn’t experienced it at all; it is likely we rolled up our car windows when we passed through Ivanhoe, a tiny community in Wythe County, the county that encompasses my hometown of Wytheville. Though it sounds ridiculous now, we in Wytheville felt superior to the denizens of places like Black Lick, Speedwell, and Ivanhoe. Here inside a book is Deetum and Monkey, the New River where that child drowned, the Carbide plant that closed and made the whole place look like a ghost town.

Zoom ahead to well past the millennium. Williams Corner, along with two other Charlottesville bookstores, closed when Barnes and Nobles opened. Only New Dominion Bookshop remains, in part because of book events, like the ones I coordinate, in part because John Grisham signs there exclusively. Having exhausted the scant teaching opportunities for writers who graduated from UVA but are not on staff, I go to work part-time at New Dominion. A shy man comes to my cash register with a copy of The David Huddle Reader. Unaware I am repeating that memorable déjà vu moment, I say, “Do you know who you are buying?”

He rolls his eyes slightly, as if to say, “Doesn’t everybody know this guy?” and says, “He was my teacher at the Bread Loaf School.”

From The Writing Habit: I am a known person.

Before I check stock, I go into my routine about Ivanhoe, Wytheville, and Wythe County. The shy man...