The Boyhood Memoirs of A.E. Hotchner
By A.E. Hotchner
Missouri Historical Society Press, 420 pages, $19.95 paper
The Missouri Historical Society Press recently reissued “King of the Hill” and “Looking for Miracles,” the coming-of-age, Depression-era stories by A.E. Hotchner, in a single, handsome volume, and here is the publication’s first lesson: Long before Frank McCourt, Rick Bragg, Jeannette Walls, or Natalie Kusz were turning their own true stories of childhood poverty into triumphant works of art, Hotchner had already established the childhood memoir’s gold standard.
Voice, tone, the size and shape of digressions, the assignment or absence of blame, the tentacles of truth within the anecdotal and the tender — Hotchner got it all right in 1972 with “King of the Hill.” He got childhood right — standing by his book (according to a 1984 radio conversation with Don Swaim) even when Nan Talese, then a young editor at Random House, turned it down after Hotchner refused to rewrite about his own adolescence from a grown man’s perspective.
It would be decades before memoir would have its commercial heyday; decades before it would experience its subsequent public comeuppance with James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” ironically a Talese title, in the center of that storm. Hotchner had already laid his claim, then gone on to continued acclaim in a career that spanned books, plays, even a multimillion-dollar charitable foundation created with Paul Newman. Now, with this reissue, he reminds us of what memoir could again be.
“King of the Hill” is a charming book crafted out of horrifying circumstances. With the Great Depression as its backdrop, King takes the reader into the musty hallways and empty pantries of the Avalon Hotel in St. Louis, a down-on-its-luck establishment that has begun to lock its in-arrears clientele out of their shabby rooms. Hotchner is 12 as the story begins, and his traveling-salesman father has hit hard times. His mother is having a heck of a time making ends meet, and Hotchner’s younger brother, Sullivan, has been shipped out to relatives. Survival isn’t guaranteed. Ingenuity is required. Characters emerge from the shadows, claim slices of sun, then retreat into the darkness again.
Hotchner is blessed with skills — with street smarts, with fast legs, with discipline in the classroom, with relentless charm — all of which readers are left to surmise; there’s no braggadocio here. He knows how to choose his friends, and when things go really lousy, something always miraculously shifts and leans back toward his favor. Take the time when a ball flying off a broomstick in a game of street baseball rips into Hotchner’s eye, rendering the poor, exposed eyeball seemingly blind.
It’s a terrific, thuggy friend named Lester who collects Hotchner into his arms and runs him all the way down the street, into a doctor’s office. It’s Lester who stays by Hotchner’s side throughout the perilous, seemingly hopeless next few days, reading to him from “Treasure Island.” It’s Lester, after the eye gets fixed, who looks after Hotchner — getting him odd jobs, scraping up clothes and shoes, taking him out for tomato soup, giving Hotchner a keepsake for all time. Maybe Lester isn’t the ideal young man. But he’s certainly a wonder in “King of the Hill” — a necessary buffer in a world in which neighbors down the hall are padlocked out of their homes and tossed out onto unforgiving streets.
Of course, things have to get very bad before there’s any hope of them getting permanently better. Hotchner’s mother will get so sick with consumption that she is packed off for a long-term hospitalization far outside of town. Hotchner’s father will go on the road, leaving Hotchner to himself. Hotchner’s own attempts at making money fail — bad luck, bad partners, the times. And as more and more locks appear on the Avalon Hotel’s third floor, the worst-case scenario — a personal lockout — seems increasingly inevitable. Where would a temporarily abandoned 12-year-old go? Just how bad were things going to get, even for a kid who, despite everything, wins school honors, not just for academics and athleticism but for character?
What makes “King of the Hill” such an exemplar of the memoir-told-in-a-child’s-voice is the sophistication of the structure (the well-paced insertions, nearly a chant, concerning the growing number of locks on doors) woven in with a fresh, beguiling, non-judgmental voice. Hotchner never tells readers what to think, never makes lists concerning his hard luck. He is, quite simply, telling a story — placing the awful beside the surprising, alongside the ineffably endearing:
“I was suddenly hungry, tremendously hungry, so I yanked up a handful of grass and started to chew it. That was something I did when I was really starved and I was around grass. You got a lot of sweet juice out of it, and when it wadded up you could chew on it like a good old tobacco cud.”
Twenty years after “King of the Hill” was released to great critical acclaim, it would find its way onto the silver screen, with actors Spalding Gray, Elizabeth McGovern and Adrien Brody taking key roles and Steven Soderbergh directing. Before that, however, Hotchner would produce the sequel, “Looking for Miracles,” which takes place in summer 1936, when Hotchner, who had never so much as sat by a campfire or swum across a lake, bluffs his way into a summer camp as a top counselor, taking his brother Sullivan along.
The scenario has much to recommend it, of course, and one expects to find the same lilting innocence of “King of the Hill,” the same fantastic allure. Unfortunately, I did not find as much of either as I’d hoped, for the Hotchner we meet in “Looking for Miracles” has grown up, at 16, into someone harder, less endearing, a young man whose fist seems harder clenched. The narrator of “Looking for Miracles” makes lists of the things life has set against him, not to mention lists of all of the things he does well. He relies on recapitulations more than revelations, hard facts more than intrigue. An early example:
“Whatever the cause, I was totally self-interested and self-possessed. Even before the Depression, when my father was out on the road with his samples and my mother worked as a secretary at Woodward-Tiernan Printing, I was on my own quite a lot. It was a good thing that I was, for I acquired a certain resiliency and inventiveness, a certain turn of imagination and fantasy, a certain shrewdness and belligerency that helped me enormously when, at the age of twelve, I had to live alone in that dreary room at the Avalon Hotel.”
And later:
“At Soldan I had been an overachiver, in scholastics, sports, and such extracurricular activity as editing the newspaper, writing and performing in plays and musicals, playing in the school orchestra, captaining the debate team, representing the school in oratorical contests. These achievements, and the recognition that went with them, counterbalanced the squalid conditions of our home life and were, in a sense, necessities for me.”
Certainly there are large swaths of “Looking for Miracles” in which story happens, dialogue dances and tenderness seeps through the cracks, and ultimately the book wins the reader over because of all that happens to change and solidify the relationship between the two brothers.
Still, as I read the books back-to-back, I was keenly aware of the contrast in tone, as opposed to the continuity in story. I was thinking about how memoir writing could be taught from this volume alone — all the things that one must do to get a memoir right, the things to be avoided. I was thinking, too, of how darned hard it is to return to one’s life story with the freshness, originality and verve one brings to the first round of telling. Frank McCourt’s “‘Tis” wasn’t nearly the book “Angela’s Ashes” was either, truth be told, and the same can be said of so many sophomore efforts. Perhaps when it comes to memoir writing, the first glimmer is the brightest. The first sorting through and looking back. The first wonder at ourselves.
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Beth Kephart is the author of five memoirs. Her first novel for young adults, “Undercover,” is due out in September.
