Like many books, Ernest Hebert’s Darby novels have had a tough life.
Set in a fictional town in Cheshire County, the Darby novels tell the lives of a working class family, the Elmans, and an upper-class family, the Salmons, and their surroundings.
The first five Darby books appeared from 1979 to 1990 through Viking, a major New York publisher. The local publisher of Hebert planned to pack the five books as a set for publication.
What happened after that reflects the way the working class characters in Hebert’s novels experience the world: he was at the mercy of the greater economic forces.
At Viking, “new people went through and saw that I don’t sell a lot of books, and they essentially fired me,” Hebert said. “Another editor told me, ‘If you’re out, you’re out,’ and that turned out to be true.”
The University Press of New England picked up some of the Darby books, but Dartmouth College, where Hebert taught creative writing for 25 years, closed the Lebanon-based Imprint in 2018. At the end of his long career, Hebert was looking for a home for his fictional world.
A writer’s life can seem comfortable, but it takes perseverance and resilience, qualities that can be more important than talent to get a book off to press. Hebert’s novels are full of characters, many of them like the people he grew up with in his Keene homeland, who rely on their determination and courage. More than anyone else in New England letters, Hebert held up a mirror to the working people. At 80 he is still there.
Wesleyan University Press released new editions of Hebert’s Darby novels on Tuesday. And he wrote a new one, Whirlybird Island, coming out of a small print in New Hampshire.
Aside from a few stints outside of New England and the years he spent in western Lebanon while teaching in Dartmouth, Hebert lived in Cheshire County. Last week Hebert received the Ruth and James Ewing Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
On the screened porch of his Westmoreland, NH home, Hebert took the award, a thick wedge of engraved glass, out of the protective box. The Ewings own the Keene Sentinel, where Hebert had his first writing job. The award honors a native son who, like everyone else, defined class tensions at work in New England, a job that no one else wanted and otherwise earned little thanks to Hebert.
For a reader interested in learning more about the economic and social pressures at work in New England, there is no other writer than Hebert to turn to, said Phil Pochoda, who knows Hebert well and some of the Darby books and published his later novels Mad Boys (1993) and The Old American (2000), at UPNE.
“Ernie brought class back to American fiction,” said Pochoda.
“You would have thought teaching was a mature subject in American fiction,” he added. “But we always refused to take classes.”
Hebert’s first novel The Dogs of March (1979) featured an indelible character, Howard Elman. As a worker in a textile factory, like Hebert’s father was for 45 years, Elman loses his job when the factory closes. At the same time, the wealthy salmon are trying to buy his old farm from him.
“He’s one of the great characters in fiction,” said Pochoda. “Nobody but Ernie could persuade Howard Elman.”
The only series of American regional novels that outperform the Darby books are William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County novels, Pochoda said. The best Darby novels, Dogs of March and Live Free or Die (1990), deserve a wide readership.
“He’s writing like a dream at his best,” said Pochoda.
None of this guarantees publication. Hebert campaigned for the remaining UPNE employees to receive the rights to his books. He got them back, with the exception of The Old American, which is being distributed by the University of Chicago Press.
He thought he could publish them himself, as e-books or with self-made cover art. Fine arts has been his main occupation since he retired from Dartmouth in 2009.
But Wesleyan University Press contacted him out of the blue, he said. He liked having someone else do the publication, he said.
It was more difficult to get Whirlybird Island under pressure.
“Not only couldn’t I get an agent, I couldn’t even get someone to read it,” Hebert said.
While it’s set in Darby, Whirlybird Island is a departure to Hebert. It’s a murder secret.
The story was inspired by Hebert’s father and the generation of men who fought in World War II and who returned to civilian life still paralyzed by the horrors they experienced.
Hebert’s father, Elphege Hebert, put on a suit and tie every morning and sat by the window of his house on Oak Street in Keene. This went on for months, and eventually he went back to work and lived again. Post-traumatic stress disorder has been passed down the generation, Hebert said.
“I think a lot of the madness of the 1960s was the result of young people being traumatized by fathers who were traumatized by World War II,” Hebert said.
A cousin of Hebert, whose father fought in the Battle of the Bulge and whose mother was a combat nurse, experienced the trauma firsthand.
“She said, ‘My parents were never violent, but it was kind of lonely growing up in this house,'” said Hebert.
He had wanted to write about this idea for a long time, but had the feeling that as long as his father’s generation was still alive, he couldn’t. In 2017, he discovered that they had all died.
He found a publisher in Plaidswede Publishing Co., a small company in Concord.
The seven previous Darby novels were easier to sell, both initially and later.
“We went through some of the books UPNE published,” looking for titles to reprint, said Stephanie Elliott Prieto, a publicist at Wesleyan University Press, in a telephone interview. The Darby novels are of continued regional interest, she said. (The press also picked up Going Up the Country, Yvonne Daley’s account of hippies moving to Vermont in the 1960s and 70s.)
The novels follow Howard Elman and his son Freddie as they negotiate how higher education pulls at a person’s roots. After the first five novels, which appeared in a dozen years, Hebert added Spoonwood in 2005 and Howard Elman’s Farewell in 2014.
The last book came to him in a flash, at lunch with the Hanoverian publisher Chip Fleischer, who had been Hebert’s student in Dartmouth and who suggested Hebert write another Darby book.
“My suggestion was really a selfish request,” said Fleischer. “I wanted to read more about the people and places in the Darby series. But when I talked to him I also felt that it might be something he wanted to do, but just hadn’t made himself aware of it. “
During this conversation, said Hebert, he could suddenly see the whole book. “I will always be grateful to Chip for inspiring this book,” he said.
When asked about his legacy, Hebert wasn’t sure what to expect. He takes care of it, but realizes that it is out of his hands.
“I think you shouldn’t run away from your vanities,” he said. “Everyone wants to leave a legacy”
He would like to get The Old American into the hands of Wesleyan University Press, he said. And he would like to have what he as a writer is denied: a high score. The Darby books, he said, would make “a great background for a television series.”
Hebert and his 52-year-old wife, Medora Hebert, a former photographer with Valley News, lead comfortable lives, he said. He wants what most working class people want.
“I would love to do it for my children,” he says. His daughters Lael and Nicole are nearing middle age, and he has a grandson with Lael, Zeno in Washington state.
Hebert has been back in his home country since 2009. Westmoreland is north of Keene. He goes to the gym in his hometown and is still in touch with friends from elementary school, some of the people who made him the writer he is.
“I am very closely connected to my roots here,” says Hebert.
He spends much of his time in a basement office in the little house he and Medora built for their retirement. The windows look out onto his pile of wood and the trees and a stone wall that crosses the back yard. He draws or writes on a tablet. His creative life goes on.
“If I could live another 50 years,” he said, “I would have many stories to write.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.