SOURCE: “The American Adam in the Southern Wasteland: William Hoffman's Follow Me Home and the Ethics of Redemption,” in The Fictional World of William Hoffman, edited by William L. Frank, University of Missouri Press, 2000, pp. 24-45.

[In the following essay, Van Ness examines the theme of spiritual redemption in the short stories of Follow Me Home. Van Ness identifies Hoffman's protagonists as American incarnations of the biblical Adam, situated in a fallen “southern wasteland.” As such, Hoffman's protagonists are viewed as independent, self-reliant individuals whose rediscovery of old-fashioned morality and the virtues of the heart lead to renewal and “a spiritual wholeness.”]

William Hoffman’s third collection of short stories, Follow Me Home, constitutes a continuation of his earlier volumes, Virginia Reels and By Land, by Sea. Hoffman’s protagonists have almost always been outsiders, men and women who reject the traditional values sanctioned by society; they keep their own counsel and act on their own beliefs. This intense individualism, at times solipsistic, often warps their moral consciousness, and they become grotesques, having so accepted their personal values or so distorted commonly held ethical standards that, in their envy or resentment, they resemble the biblical figure of Cain, not so much losing their innocence as never seeming to have possessed it. Their self-serving and self-justified actions condemn them, as it were, to a moral wasteland they themselves have created, a world distinctly southern in geography, in which personal gratification in what they do becomes synonymous with personal redemption.

This attitude is particularly true in Virginia Reels, a darkly pessimistic collection of stories where Hoffman’s strict Presbyterian upbringing reveals itself through its Calvinist depiction of good and evil. Mr. Gormer, for example, the narrator in “The Spirit in Me,” possesses fundamentalist religious beliefs, including the handling of poisonous snakes, that set him apart from the rest in his rural community in the Virginia mountains. His inability to resolve his inner conflicts and his literal adherence to biblical injunction result in his loosing his “children” (5) on an amorous young couple he has locked in a boathouse. His spiritual corruption is nowhere better stated than in Hoffman’s final sentence, where Gormer effectively damns himself through his smug self-righteousness and his lack of human compassion: “As I walk toward the forest I hear her gasp. I do not turn even at the first scream” (14). Similarly, in “A Darkness on the Mountain,” Roy’s courtship of Anna Mae and his dislike of Buster, a “heller” (86), result in his tying his rival deep within a mine shaft. Like Gormer, he walks away, and though he believes Buster lies “in a darkness that never lifted” (94), he is blind to the fact that he himself walks in an ethical darkness deeper than that of any mountain.

Hoffman’s presentation of human nature becomes less severe in his next collection, By Land, by Sea, though his characters continue to act according to and on behalf of their own self-interests. Published a decade after Virginia Reels, these stories still depict outsiders motivated either by a corrupt (and corrupting) spiritual certainty or by their physical needs. In “Lover,” for example, Dave lives a regimented and sterile life that masks his desperate efforts to deny age. A successful business manufacturer whose wife, Helen, has died some seven years earlier, Dave first shadows and then rapes a young woman, needing her youthfulness to affirm his own vitality. “I must live it one last time,” he declares, “the youth and Helen, the hope, the promise of glory, the soaring” (81). As he waits for the police to arrive in the isolation of his materially comfortable but emotionally perverted home, he recognizes his own differences from others: “They will come for me, yet no matter how I explain, they’ll never believe what I have done is out of love” (82). Such a recognition sets him apart from Gormer and Roy, who have no real sense of themselves and who never attempt any psychological or sociological analysis. Yet in his surrender to personal need, an ethic of selfishness, Dave belongs with the grotesques who people Virginia Reels.

However, By Land, by Sea also depicts another sort of figure, also an outsider but not a spiritual grotesque. While he remains solitary, often a refugee from society who now lives by choice in self-imposed exile from it, his independence is a source of strength. Earlier characters also possessed this freedom, but it acted upon them, as it were, either to heighten their need for retribution or justice or to deepen their sense of alienation, thereby causing them to further their personal values by using others. Hoffman’s new protagonist still possesses the self-reliance that enables him to endure; however, his selflessness, or what might simply be labeled Christian charity, assures that he will persevere. In By Land, by Sea, for example, Dave’s selfishness in “Lover” is countered by Peck’s effort in “Altarpiece” to extend love to one more isolated than he; rather than taking, he offers. Peck’s wife, like Dave’s, is dead. However, instead of remaining among the memories as Dave does (even using his wife’s clothing as an excuse to bring the woman he rapes into the stately house), Peck leaves, selling his Cumberland farm, giving much of his material possessions to his children, and contracting with an auctioneer to dispose of the remainder (his wife’s clothes go to Goodwill). Haunted by the words in his wedding vows, “Whom God has joined together, let no man rend asunder,” he flees to his small and economical Chesapeake cottage, though later, as the memories flood back and leave him “run over and bleeding” (130), he drives three hours one night to lie across his wife’s grave. His values and attitudes require him to reach out to Jenny, a bereft woman whose own sorrows exceed his: “So much trouble, so much misery for Jenny,” he thinks, “those husbands, a wayward daughter, the frantic attempts to hold things together by selling cosmetics. He pictured her brave smile beneath those desperate eyes” (136). When his shyness and formality cause him to jerk free as she tries to kiss him, he is genuinely shocked to see the total despair into which she falls after she leaves him: “He’d never witnessed such sorrow, not even in himself—a pain that wrenched and shrank her body. She flinched as if being flogged. Her mouth’s wail was soundless through the beaded window. Her suffering, he believed, came not from him alone. Rather, his rejection of her on the porch had been but the last step down a pitiless slope to a final, all-conquering despair” (142). This revelation transforms Peck, and as he now hears the words of a new vow—“Whom grief has joined … Whom grief has joined” (143)—he reaches out to her, literally and figuratively, as the story concludes, finally understanding that love redeems.

Such compassionate figures dominate Follow Me Home—women and men who know themselves and who possess in their hearts a treasure of values that separates them from society on the one hand but which provides them a spiritual richness on the other hand. It is not that these figures remain ignorant of the fallen world around them, failing to see the invasive and debilitating morality against which they have set themselves. Rather, it is as if the values by which they live and to which they have committed their lives serve to free them from the attitudes and actions that derive from modern life, where money and materialism have replaced manners and corrupted the will to excellence. In their innocence the characters consequently resemble Adam, not Cain, in the world as it were but not of it, who find or who have already found an inner paradise. In their ethic of self-reliance and adherence to old-fashioned values that ironically have become new in the southern wasteland where they live, Hoffman’s protagonists find redemption, a spiritual wholeness. Like Adam, each character in Follow Me Home is alone, an individual who stands—and acts—in this fallen world, depicting the traits or characteristics identified by R. W. B. Lewis in The American Adam: “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources. … His moral position [is] prior to experience, and in his very newness he [is] fundamentally innocent.”¹ The difference, however, is that the moral position of Hoffman’s protagonists is after or beyond experience, what William Blake, in his understanding of man’s development, described as a higher innocence whose achievement is only possible after a fall into experience, a movement beyond childhood naïveté into an innocence made possible by but which nevertheless transcends experience. Thus, having portrayed in earlier stories the wasteland into which modern southerners have fallen—not so much the Fugitive sense of an Eden paved over by business and industry as Milton’s spiritual depiction of Paradise lost—it is as if Hoffman now offers to show the way back: Paradise regained. The collection’s imperative, to follow me home, connotes as much, and what Hoffman clearly and quietly reveals in story after story is that home is where the heart lies. Redemption is there, the end of exile, peace. Only in “Night Sport,” the earliest written of the stories, does Hoffman create a figure who again resembles Cain, a character motivated, like Gormer, Roy, and Dave, by selfishness.

Hoffman’s fictional development from characters whose lives reflect a southern wasteland to those whose ethics redeem Jericho has biographical origins. Like R. W. B. Lewis, who as a major in the army surveyed the distant shores of the United States from the destruction of postwar Europe, detecting an American character type, Adam in a New World, Hoffman similarly discerned differences in the two cultures. Having participated in the invasion of Europe three days after Normandy, he witnessed the brutality and bloodshed as part of the Ninety-first Evacuation Hospital. Recently he recalled his impressions of the fighting, characterizing his mental understanding then as “a state of mind when everything was seen as destructible. Nothing stood firmly. Everything in life could equally vanish to no purpose,” adding, “I did recognize that theirs was a culture different, much different, from ours, especially in art.” Discharged in December 1945, Hoffman lacked any sense of self-value, feeling only the need to survive and often aroused to a fanatical response by even the slightest cause. Later, he declares, when he revisited Europe in 1949, courage and self-identity arrived, and he recognized that “the most impressive monuments we have are words.”² Just as the juxtaposition of America and the Old World enabled Lewis to glean a distinctive personality in this country’s literature, so too did this counterpoint offer Hoffman a sense of character understanding, not simply with respect to his own fictional protagonists but with himself as well.

What Hoffman insists upon in Follow Me Home is acceptance of what one may only call spirituality, a code of conduct or weltanschauung centered not on religion so much as on the realization that in the modern world all are wounded, lost, vulnerable. Consequently, what is required are the old-fashioned virtues of love, compassion, piety, humility, selflessness, and self-sacrifice. Through the thoughts, characteristics, and actions of the figure that Henry James labeled the center of revelation, Hoffman himself offers to show the reader in his eleven stories how to return home, echoing the words of the narrator in Robert Frost’s poem “Directive”:

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. …
. …. …. …
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.(3)

The journey involves women and men freed from the past (emancipated is Lewis’s term) whose independence and self-reliance set them apart from the society around them and whose innocence, while not prior to experience (in a fallen world, that is not possible), derives from the inner realm of the heart. They often become childlike, with a simplicity or perhaps clarity of mind and thought that involves a “newness” of self.

Generally speaking, the Hoffman hero is representative of American diversity. Of the eleven stories in Follow Me Home, four feature women, one of whom is African American, and while the monied aristocracy perhaps most evidences itself, the lower and middle classes also have their protagonists. Gender and economic status, in other words, have nothing to do in Hoffman’s vision with finding the way home from the wasteland. Indeed, business acumen and wealth often hinder the journey toward wholeness, and “feminine” sensitivity and common sense are often prerequisites. The collection’s balanced perspective speaks to spiritual inclusiveness, not political correctness, the idea that whatever the journey’s path, it begins and ends with the inner self rather than outward circumstance.

The American Adam qualities of the Hoffman hero are nowhere more apparent than in Lizzie, in “Dancer,” and Rachel, in “The Secret Garden.”⁴ Both women have figuratively left an old world whose attitudes and standards they believe inappropriate or insufficient in order to live among new values by which they define themselves. It is not that they follow Frost’s less-traveled path; instead, they pursue a geography completely of their own making. Lizzie, for example, lives by herself in a small farmhouse that has been the “family place” (1) for five generations. She keeps its unused rooms neat and sequesters herself in the kitchen on winter days when the Virginia sun offers little warmth. Self-sufficient, she stubbornly clings to her independence, unwilling to accept visits from the Methodist preacher or assistance from her sister Mary Belle and brother-in-law Chester. Lizzie occasionally hears music, a fox-trot or waltz whose sounds reach her in spite of or through the wind, and when they do, she imaginatively dances with her arms around Oliver, her dead husband, a city-bred man who took to farming. Though he could not plow a straight furrow, he “dance[d] like a god … [and] knew how to make a lady feel she floated on air” (12). When Mary Belle discovers Lizzie dancing in her long johns, sweat shirt, and slippers during a snow-storm, she brings her to Richmond, believing that the comfort her wealth assures will be healthy for her. In such seeming opulence, however, Lizzie withers; she is “accustomed to space and air” (8). The guest rooms, painted “piggy pink” with pictures of “southern belles and hat doffing cavaliers” (8); the master bedroom, “baby blue with white flounces everywhere” (8); and the dining room, with its long table and Williamsburg chandelier, all suffocate her independence and constitute a wasteland of richness that oppresses her inner world, where music swells. “No use attempting to explain how the music came and went,” she thinks, “the sound nothing like violins or saxophones but chiefly a feeling, if you could mix into melody the smell of hay curing, the whisper of the river dragging under willow branches, the taste of a freshly picked tomato still warm from the sun, the sense of a good horse under you, the sight of a spiraling hawk in a fresh summer sky, the touch of a loving man” (11). Only in this element does Lizzie thrive.

The deaths of her husband and son years ago and the inability of her sister to offer her a better life now leave Lizzie severed from all family “inheritance.” In her simplicity, Lizzie finds contentment, and her independence and self-reliance sharpen her desire to confront life with only her own resources. She desires no assistance, only freedom, in whose music she touches life more closely than her sister and brother-in-law, who “knew money, scented it like a bird dog winding” (8). However, her self-sufficiency demands she escape the imposed internment. Two attempts fail, but when Lizzie one day recognizes the full presence of spring and hears “a sea of music around her” (18), she follows it, climbing a ladder left by the painters up to the roof. Her innocence renders her beyond experience, a woman whose childlike delight in the world is unsullied and complete: “As she looked up into the limbs of a tulip poplar, she held out a palm to catch the slowly spiraling pollen” (18). When Lizzie, fearing that her sister will commit her to a mental institution, follows the music onto the roof, the reader understands that, in the completeness of her imaginative world, Lizzie achieves a spirituality that derives not from what was but from what is, a wholeness that skeptics might label dangerous and delusional but which Hoffman portrays as truly “home,” a place in whose heights Lizzie might breathe “fragrances filtered through a green veil of trees” and where she feels “weightless” (19). That home, richer and newer than any Mary Belle and Chester know, opens to her like spring, as fresh and complete as Eden.

For Rachel, too, in “The Secret Garden,” home becomes not a physical location but a spiritual state of mind. As with Lizzie, past events have conditioned the present, hastening her into a new geography whose inner landscape of moods reveals itself when she plays the piano. “I make a garden of quarter notes,” she thinks, “I climb music as if it is a rose trellis reaching the sky” (180). Rachel has long ago abandoned the country of conventional morality, whose rigid standards mandate sexual propriety, the meaning of marriage, and the nature of personal giving. With her childish belief in love, she offers herself to men, a woman possessing “a heart too soon made glad” (188), though she realizes that they do not comprehend “the nature and completeness of my gift to them” (191). Certainly her husband has not understood what he believes to be her wantonness, her continual sexual offers to other men, and her inability to perceive the failure of their marriage. To his abiding concern about her affairs, she simply responds, “‘We are all flowers, and they are beautiful children. … Who serves best, the bloom or the bee?’” (188). Indeed, her innocence most reflects itself in Rachel’s identification with flowers. “I am a tea rose,” she declares, “a purple iris, and often a long-stem tiger lily” (191). She knows, like an intuitive child, that “there are always gardens. … Women giv[ing] off nectar to the bees. It is so obviously a part of nature’s plan you wonder why everyone doesn’t see we are all gardens. I am the mimosa, and hummingbirds dart to me” (181). Rachel’s romanticism lies not in her search for the spiritual in nature but rather in her belief that she herself is such an intimate part of the natural world. Despite the social, familial, and medical forces arrayed against her, all intent on altering who she is and how she acts, Rachel recognizes what they do not. “I have been chiefly a flower,” she asserts. “It is the great truth I’ve perceived” (191).

Around the garden of herself lies a morass of southern manners and southern attitudes that admonish, scold, coerce, and guard. Her mother and children constantly observe her, returning behind Rachel’s back the gifts she buys for others, and the doctors seek to curb or inhibit her behavior. Partly their actions derive from the perception of Rachel’s emotional vulnerability and her physical unsteadiness, the “faint blue bruises on the elbows and forearms she used as fenders” (176), but they are also conscious of local gossip, the need to be discreet in a world whose wants and attitudes wither her bloom. Rachel senses their coldness, thinking, “Words are often wind. Pleas and threats. The first rule is never trust any wind. Voices speak of God” (181–82). Her innocence, which is beyond morality, lies in her motivation, her purity of thought, and her need for “my perfect little garden.” That garden, with its biblical overtones of Eden, lies within herself, a mindscape where “wind cannot enter, my private place. Only a riot of blooms, the bees, the music” (182). Her independent behavior as well as her willingness to stand alone and to depend upon her own instincts and abilities sets her apart from the community. In the pristine climate of her private world, Rachel remains pure. Leaving family behind, she is undefiled by their inherited morality. Though “The Secret Garden” concludes with the family driving her north to a mental institution in Baltimore, Rachel remains undeterred, seeing upon her arrival not the “partially dark Victorian main building” but the flowers growing in front. In a story Hoffman structures by alternating perspectives, Rachel has the last word, “Coralbells” (193), she excitedly says, identifying the flowers, and in the play on words with “choral bells,” Hoffman suggests her inner spirituality.

Hoffman balances Lizzie’s and Rachel’s monied backgrounds with his presentation of Celeste, the black cook of Miss Alice Louella in “Coals,” and the unnamed narrator in “Boy Up a Tree,” the sixteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Tidewater aristocrat who learns more from the values of L. C. Spraggs, the lower-class son of a miner, than she does from the manners of her father. The two stories broaden Hoffman’s depiction of the American Adam by effectively negating economic as well as gender qualifications while focusing on the character’s emancipation from family, her self-reliance, and her innocence.

Celeste’s independence lies in her determination to keep her word. As cook and caretaker of Miss Alice Louella, Celeste long ago promised the former’s now-deceased husband that she would look after her. “‘I give him my word’” (42), she asserts, and that frequently repeated declaration as well as her knowledge of human nature leads her not only to ignore the increasing requests of her dependent for “my tonic,” the kind that made “birds fall out of trees” (42), but also to ban Raincoat, the man who surreptitiously brings the alcohol, from making his deliveries. Celeste, moreover, refuses to submit to the verbal harassment that Miss Alice Louella, whose late husband’s wealth admitted him to the governor’s patronage, is accustomed to using with her black help. When she admonishes Celeste, “‘You continually try my patience,’” for example, the latter’s response is direct and immediate: “‘What patience?’” (43). Despite being first reprimanded and then released, Celeste remains untouched by monetary considerations, by the accepted role assigned to domestic help, and by her own family considerations. She has buried two of her previous husbands while refusing to live in the past.

Adherence to her verbal promise has only accentuated her self-reliance. Simply speaking, she does for herself, confronting whatever situation she meets with determination and her own abilities. That innate trust in who she is may be due partly to the physical disability of her present husband but more particularly to a fundamental faith in her beliefs. She is both practical and perceptive, able on the one hand to forgo her required uniform because her own dresses are cooler and on the other hand to negotiate a new business arrangement that pays her if Miss Alice Louella fires her again. Indeed, this new arrangement and the financial security it assures result in Celeste’s assuming a moral position that elevates her from servant to protector. When Miss Alice Louella, angry and frustrated because Celeste requires her to leave her self-enforced isolation and return to the living, declares, “‘You hate me, don’t you?’” Celeste responds simply, “‘I don’t hate nobody. … Hate is sin’” (52). Celeste’s care and concern are nothing less than love, a selfless expression of compassion. “‘I nice not for what you has been but what you was and can be’” (54), she tells Miss Alice Louella; her love, which transcends economic considerations, not only causes her ward to rediscover a sense of vitality and purpose but also transforms Celeste into an individual whose spiritual innocence lies beyond the experiences that would otherwise cause bitterness and even hate. She remains morally pure, having long ago discovered and chartered a geography of the heart.

The unnamed narrator in “Boy Up a Tree” also learns from another individual, a teenaged boy from Cinder Hollow, where the inhabitants are “ridge-running hillbillies, mostly unschooled people who’d drifted down from the high country to find work in the mines” (81). However unlike “Coals,” “Boy Up a Tree” centers less on how the narrator affects another as on how this outsider influences the main character, the young daughter of a Tidewater aristocrat who, in effect, reacts emotionally, physically, and psychologically to the other’s actions and attitudes. Her decision to go out with L. C. Spraggs runs against the aristocratic traditions in which her parents have been raised and to which her father particularly adheres. “Gratitude has limits,” he admonishes his daughter. “‘You have to be kind, but don’t encourage relationships’” (87). His daughter, however, is less concerned with distinctions of class and ancestry than with what might simply be called manners, the fact that this poor, uneducated admirer so persistently places her before himself. She accepts a date with L. C. but later, shortly before she attends boarding school, he distances himself from her out of shame. Only then does she recognize how important he is to her sense not only of herself but also of how life should be lived. Despite a parental injunction to “perpetuat[e] a tradition” (96), she follows another path within her heart, one more independent and leading to newer understandings, deeper truths. “Homesick among the blue bloods” (96) of her new school, she figuratively reaches out to him and sees his face, “like looking back,” she thinks, “into a dark tunnel you’re leaving and know you’ll never return to” (97). Though she comprehends they will no longer meet, her willingness to abandon family, including the class traditions to which it subscribes, as well as her stand against economic prejudice, creates in her a simple, moral goodness or purity of heart that effectively renders her, in its newness, innocent, a fact Hoffman reinforces when the reader learns at the end of the story that she lives in Cinderella, West Virginia.

Against this array of female protagonists, Hoffman establishes an equally diverse group of male characters who also exhibit the characteristics of the American Adam. Amos, in “Sweet Armageddon,” and Harmon, in “Abide with Me,” not only represent the lower classes but also continue Hoffman’s interest in depicting figures whose obsessive religious beliefs alienate them from the larger community. Amos, for example, lives with his wife, Martha, in a dilapidated neighborhood threatened by crime. His fundamentalist attitudes have effectively precluded him from obtaining his own ministry. Having earlier in his life deliberately chosen not to pursue a path promising wealth and material possessions, Amos recognizes that he and his wife have “[a]ll their lives together … been sojourners” (57). Living in a rented residence whose broken furniture and poor heating seem to mock his years of devoted service, he now works for the reward of Christ’s Second Coming, “a celestial conflagration”: “He pictured the cataclysm, the rolling thunder and horrible lightning streaking down black corridors of the earth, the dazzling rapture in the heavens” (59). Ignored by those with money, the “world’s victors” (74), as well as by the church, which believes he carries “spiritual contagion” (75), Amos principally survives on his small ministerial retirement check, abandoned by “a sick, facile society that had forgotten its roots” (75). Though at times resentful, he is never jealous. His reward, he believes, is not of this world but a spiritual home whose richness surpasses any earthly feast.

Amos is literally “bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race.” He and Martha never mention family, to whom they would not turn for financial assistance should relatives offer. Amos has long ago left behind those whose wealth blinds them to “the sacred inviolability of Scripture” (75). Their independence purifies his faith. His part-time work as an orderly in a nursing home and her job as a clerk in a florist shop enable him to persevere, propelled by his beliefs and the knowledge that “at last God collects His loving family” (78). Certainly, Amos believes himself morally superior, especially when he unexpectedly breakfasts with an old college friend, a banker whose money and three marriages mock Amos’s own faith. Indeed, the simplicity by which Amos lives, his abiding love of Martha that acutely acknowledges what she has surrendered for him, and his innate trust in God’s Word give Amos an innocence that does not so much involve his ignorance of the world’s evil (indeed, he is very conscious of man’s wantonness) as it does an inner purity and childlike belief in his Father. When he wakes the following morning to “a crimson glow” through the nailed window, he thinks again of Armageddon. Wondering if he hears a trumpet, he holds Martha’s hand and lifts his other “as if offering her and himself skyward on his own agitated palm” (78). The act is instinctive, and Hoffman clearly suggests that their rich faith has brought them to an inner home as abundant in religious provision as Eden was in bodily sustenance.

That same faith evidences itself in “Abide with Me,” when, during a serious operation, Harmon sees Christ in a vision. As he “teeter[s] over the black pit” and stares at “the foul dog of death,” “Him” appears, and Harmon finds himself “floating to the light” (100). Subsequently, he fulfills a promise made at that time, creating a huge, stone face of Jesus on a mountaintop and then lighting it so that “He seemed suspended in the high darkness” (103). Like Celeste in “Coals,” he believes it necessary to keep his word. “I always been proud of doing that” (103), he thinks. Though not as poor as Amos, Harmon and his wife, Glenna Anne, live frugally, and he remains just as determined to adhere to his beliefs, particularly when the hewn image increasingly becomes a source of social contention and ridicule. Against a minister who suggests the face “don’t look like Our Lord and Savior” (104) and an unidentified telephone voice who warns, “‘Don’t want no blue-eyed Eye-talians ’round here’” (105), Harmon remains resolute, insisting that the image is what he saw. “‘I made a real promise’” (104), he states, believing in his independence and innocence that he will overcome the increasing community distress. He pays the cost of a building permit and turns away the ministerial delegation that arrives at his house seeking to convince him to take the statue down, declaring, “‘I don’t mean disrespect, but I been brought up to keep my word. I couldn’t sleep nights if I didn’t’” (108). Harmon even incurs the additional cost of fencing off the image, posting a No Trespassing sign, and paying for a newspaper advertisement. When his wife asserts, “‘It’s not worth it,’” he responds simply, “‘Never been a question of worth but of word’” (112). Complaints that the face is anti-Semitic and that it affronts feminist groups do not deter him, nor does he yield when offered fifteen hundred dollars by a private collector of folk art. Yet when local rowdies deface “Him” and use the area to drink, Harmon finally responds. He drives them off and then, almost apologetically, “cover[s] his eyes and bow[s] his head” (116), blasting the base of the image with dynamite he has stolen and burying the face in one of his wife’s clean sheets. When the police arrive the next morning, he says to the deputy, “‘I always believed it about the most important thing in the world for a man to keep his word’” (116).

Throughout the story, Harmon relies on his clarity of vision and on promises he has made, undeterred even when Glenna Anne expresses reservations that not so much abandon him as leave him free to confront the rigid community with his own abilities. He does so, using resources that effectively stand against southern narrow-mindedness. Only when he recognizes that he has kept his word and that taking the hewn stone down benefits “Him” does Harmon settle the issue by eliminating the cause. He is genuinely ignorant of the prejudice and political correctness that subvert a simple expression of private gratitude and spiritual love. “The first trouble he didn’t suspect was trouble at all” (103), Hoffman writes, and while that lack of suspicion gradually yields to the expectation of problems, Harmon remains morally innocent, conscious of what a promise means, his spiritual position “beyond experience.” As the police car takes him away from Glenna Anne, he never leaves the purer home that lies within his heart.

While Amos and Harmon center themselves with the spiritual, other protagonists live essentially within this world. Stories such as “Tides,” “Points,” and “Business Trip” portray protagonists searching for self who discover a revitalized future as they abandon old beliefs. They enter a new world either deliberately or unexpectedly, facing situations never before confronted and determined to accommodate themselves and persevere. Self-reliant, they are survivors. In “Tides,” for example, Wilford and his son Dave are sailing for the last time before the latter begins a banking career following his college graduation. Dave refers to their Chesapeake Bay trip as “a ritual celebrating the official end of fun in my life” (20). A quiet man, Wilford also hopes to make the cruise a “celebration” (21), during which he might summon words of appreciation. When the boat, appropriately named Wayfarer, is commandeered by a criminal and forced to sail towards Baltimore, Wilford faces a dangerous dilemma, conscious that he must act but also that his own son has “never really been strong” (30). He fears for Dave and recognizes in the reminiscences he allows himself that their past together up until that morning has been safe: “He remembered how the night before he and Dave had lain on the cabin top and identified the Pleiades, Orion, and Andromeda. The sky had seemed benevolent” (31). The outside world, however, almost always forces itself upon Hoffman’s protagonists, threatening to coil its contagion into the Edenic innocence.

As the boat sails to Baltimore, Wilford seems literally to free himself from history, leaving behind in the boat’s wake all sense of security and safety. His past becomes irrelevant, everything dependent on what happens now. What Wilford discovers is not that he does not know how to act but that he is in danger of thinking too much, of “second-guessing himself into immobility” (35). With a silent prayer, “God, let me be brave this once” (37), he propels himself into action, relying on his own instincts when his son distracts their abductor into losing his balance; together they subdue the intruder. Dave loses a tooth in the struggle, but Wilford, temporarily suffering a loss of focused vision from a gunshot, more importantly surrenders his fear that Dave lacks manhood, that he is too soft. Wilford’s decision always to keep the incisor his son has lost symbolically suggests his entrance into a new world, a realm where childhood and manhood are not magically determined by age and where he and Dave now share renewed bonds of trust and respect. Moreover, Wilford, though conscious of the evil that always threatens to intrude, nevertheless maintains a moral position above experience. He gratefully acknowledges his debt to all who have helped his son, including Dave’s girlfriend: “The filling satisfaction to have him as he was now. Bless Margaret too, Wilford thought, and lowered his head to the sand” (22). His reverence is sincere, uncorrupted by selfishness.

Beau in “Points” and the unnamed narrator in “Business Trip” also exhibit this reverence whose nature is essentially religious and whose efficacy owes to the protagonist’s fundamental innocence. Although Hoffman’s southern wasteland is sometimes physical, as a result of industrialism and urban growth, it is more often a spiritual corruption. In this view, moral innocence, while no longer a priori as with Adam, nevertheless represents a general state or condition unsullied by selfishness and ego. Hoffman’s protagonists possess a special attitude, a faith that resides in this world but is not of it. In “Points,” for example, Beau’s belief in foxhunting is as pure and unrelenting as Lizzie’s love of music, Rachel’s identification with flowers, or Amos’s trust in the Second Coming. Prior to the hunt, he repeats a silent prayer: “Let there … be no wind. Let the sun warm the earth, yet not so faintly that the ground thaws only on top and remains frozen inches beneath. Allow footing to be safe. Permit no jump approaches to become icy bogs horses slide and crash into. Let the fox run straight and true” (139). Alive in its traditions, Beau does not so much reside in the past as respond to the present southern emptiness, a recognition of evil and the assumption of a pure ideal. Beau considers it “a statement of where one stood in respect to a world becoming increasingly common, disordered, and hateful” (139), which is to say that he deliberately chooses a moral position that transcends experience while being conscious of it. In so doing, Beau achieves a spiritual purity.

His choice creates divisiveness, and Hoffman clearly indicates that with his present attitudes, Beau has separated himself from his family, a man now “untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances.” He has divorced his first wife, whose infidelity and sarcasm insulted his values, leaving her their house. His second divorce resulted from that wife’s miserliness, her unwillingness to enjoy life by spending money even reasonably (she had requested he not flush the toilet unless absolutely necessary). Beau believes in what he terms “the art of life” (146), the charm and beauty and fullness money permits, a Fitzgerald-like attitude different from that of his son Alfred, who thinks “of money only in terms of dollars, not the grace attached, the concomitant manners” (146). While Beau understands that life expects a response, Alfred has “failed to grasp that living could be a portrait in which a person was both subject and artist” (146). That belief sustains and incites Beau to action during the foxhunt, a chase during which he confronts modern degeneration and diminishment by relying on his abilities and instincts, a knowledge of when to act. When Clive, who overpowers his mounts and who preserves the fox’s brush in Lucite, mounting it as a trophy, determines to keep the lead, Beau challenges him, believing the latter’s egotism an affront to the gentility of his code of conduct. His trust in and use of his horse, Windlord, enable him to overtake Clive, ending the hunt with dignity and ritual, his independence and self-reliance affirmed.

The unnamed narrator in “Business Trip” possesses a code of ethics that echoes Beau’s, and the two stories follow each other in the collection. His fundamental innocence lies partly in the reverence he holds for the game he and Harrison, his business partner, kill during their seasonal hunting trips to the West Virginia cabin they themselves have built. The sparse accommodations and their reverential conduct constitute “our shrine to the ruffed grouse” (157). They impose on themselves a spartan regimen intended to ensure they remain “as unencumbered and untainted as possible by lowland civilization” (157). However, the surprise the narrator receives at the story’s conclusion where, despite his business acumen, he only later realizes that Clarence, an invited guest, has duped him, also suggests his ignorance of social evil and duplicity.

Hoffman’s protagonist most reveals an Adamic self-reliance in his efforts to keep out civilization. Though he is no Thoreau or Natty Bumppo, both because his endeavors are not solitary but in collaboration with those of his partner and because his errands into the wilderness are an escape rather than a mission, he nevertheless determines to create a refuge that constitutes a return to a more basic, even primitive life. In his efforts to clear the land, build a cabin (including a chimney with stones lifted and hauled from a stream), and limit the influence or encroachment of civilization, the protagonist exhibits a self-propelling independence, a willingness to confront nature on its own terms with only his own resources. It is a philosophy toward life that reveals itself in an almost Hemingwayesque code of conduct. The rituals that the narrator follows, particularly when hunting, clearly indicate a ruggedness whose prototype lies in frontiersmen such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. He believes, simply stated, that there is “joy in adversity” and that “in the high country truth prevailed” (158).

Entering that high country, the narrator leaves behind family, specifically his wife, Trixie, and his emancipation is significant in that she epitomizes all that he does not: “She was high style—tall, eyes dark, her stride sure. She carried a gloss. She liked the money” (158). The protagonist also likes success, but the cabin demands a different behavior, an alternative set of sustaining values that are also concrete. Good liquor is to be honored with glasses, for example, and a grouse killed is celebrated by not wasting the meat. When Clarence, who is Trixie’s boss, feigns outdoor ineptness and then reveals his proficient marksmanship, the narrator wonders at his motivation for remaining secretive. His wonder becomes genuine terror when Clarence’s furtive comments imply that Trixie would be better off with him, financially and emotionally, and when Clarence’s gait continually swings his Browning rifle toward him. The possibility that Clarence seeks to kill him, claim an accident, and then have Trixie and the insurance money causes the protagonist to flee. He falls, bloodies his head, and wets his pants, while Clarence laughs and yells to Harrison, “‘Look what I discovered!’” (175). Hoffman never indicates Clarence’s true intent, but the fact that the narrator believes the implied threat real indicates not only his essential innocence despite his worldliness but that the outside world continues to be dangerous, inhabited by individuals whose avarice or egotism creates a wasteland that Hoffman’s Adamic figures must acknowledge or confront.

“Night Sport,” published in the October 1986 issue of the Atlantic, is the oldest story in Follow Me Home, and its darkly pessimistic narrative and black tone link the collection to Hoffman’s earlier stories. Its inclusion in this most recent grouping of stories serves to underscore Hoffman’s development from a perspective almost rigidly Calvinistic in its bleak assessment of human nature to one more balanced and even affirmative in its depiction of human triumphs, the small victories that confront life’s larger diminishments and defeats. It presents a narrator whose Adamic qualities conceal a fundamental delight in imparting pain to others—an ironic reversal of the Christian principle that it is better to give than receive. Chip is a Vietnam veteran who lost his legs in an Asian jungle and who now insists upon his independence by buying a small frame house in “the western boonies of the county” (124). Despite his Electroped and two sets of legs—compliments of the Veterans Administration and the “prosthetic miracles of American ingenuity” (120)—he remains darkly bitter. With senses honed by combat, he feels the slightest vibration inside his “frame typee” (124) and senses the passage of a dung beetle through humid leaf mold, its scratchings as “loud as a scream” (120). He knows a truth, he believes, revealed in “the absolute brilliance which exploded not from outside but within—a white fire so searing and almighty it cauterized him clean” (122). Chip meets all offers of help or sympathy with abrasive sarcasm as intense as any comment by, say, Mr. Gormer in “The Spirit in Me.” Indeed, the knowledge he owns is religious, deep and abiding and irrevocable.

His independence, moreover, involves leaving family behind, “happily bereft” (5) in his freedom not only from the wealth and cultural leisure of his parents, whose aristocratic background irritates him, but also from what he considers their intrusiveness. He has developed, literally and figuratively, “a sense of darkness” (117) into which others cannot see and from which he appears incapable of returning. With his Maytag to assure his cleanliness and a supply of basic provisions, he lives “on automatic alert” (120), psychologically prepared to inflict physical damage on someone—anyone—whom he has tricked into entering his deliberately unlit, seemingly deserted house. Only in their pain and disfigurement can Chip feel alive. Therefore, when Thomas Walker, a boy whose name subconsciously fuels Chip’s hatred, breaks into his house as part of an initiation into a private school club, Chip pretends to let him leave, only to fire both barrels of the rifle into the youth’s calves when he suddenly believes Walker feels sorry for him. He thinks, “they ought to have to learn. They needed to know” (134). As he dials the police to inform them he has shot an intruder, Chip delights in the boy’s new understanding, almost reveling as “the terrible knowledge, the deepest knowledge of all, flowed into those honey-brown eyes” (135). His moral position is never prior to experience but altogether outside it, his spiritual state beyond good and evil and therefore, ironically, beyond all such morality. Chip not only aligns himself with earlier characters like Gormer, Ray, and Dave, but in so doing reminds the reader of a larger truth. In the southern wasteland, whose expanse causes Chip, when he looks through his unwashed windows and sees “dirt either way” (124), the city of Richmond “oozing” west with a corruption that “devoured field and forest” (117), live characters whose Adamic qualities do not promise a paradise revisited, the way home, but a reaffirmation of its loss.

Chip’s inclusion in Follow Me Home underscores another aspect of the American experience delineated by Lewis in his seminal study. Noting that “[t]he dismissal of the past has only been too effective” (9), Lewis issues a warning manifested by American literature. To ignore the past, he argues, is to repeat it. “We regularly return,” Lewis declares, “decade after decade and with the same pain and amazement, to all the old conflicts, programs, and discoveries” (9). In linking Chip to earlier protagonists warped by self-centeredness and a debilitating resentment, Hoffman not only shows where Americans in general and southerners in particular have gone but also how we might once again become lost.

Yet the final statement of Follow Me Home is decidedly optimistic, a declaration that we need not repeat the past in our ignorance or forgetfulness of it but reclaim and replenish what we once were. In “Expiation,” the collection’s last story, Hoffman presents Leland and his wife, Anne, who, after leaving their daughter at an elite, private women’s college for her senior year, travel “roads little changed from the time way back” (194) to visit his southern boyhood heritage. A successful businessman who long ago moved to the North, Leland allows memories of his youth to unfold around him as he drives past fields grown wild with thistle and crumbling buildings covered with creeper, honeysuckle, and poison oak. Anne becomes increasingly unsettled at the decay she observes everywhere; familiar with wealth, she expects a South idealized by her husband’s images of magnolias and dogwoods lining the paved road to a white plantation. “‘So few houses’” (198), she says, and when the asphalt yields to hard-packed red clay, she nervously asks, “‘You’re certain this is the way, you’re not lost?’” (206). Leland, however, understands that he is only now finding himself. Having misled his wife for years about his childhood, allowing her to imagine “visions of past status and grandeur” (209), he courageously confronts who he was—a poor sharecropper’s son who ate possum and groundhog and who was once sent home from school with head lice.

Having lived for years in “Yankeeland” (211), his parents long dead, his past long closed to him, Leland remains “untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race.” As he meets the caretaker of the manor for which his father worked and that a timber company presently owns, he remembers the owner’s second wife, a rich, pretty northerner who took him riding one day, the horse so fast he learned “what flying is like” (207). More importantly, he understands not only the selfless generosity of her gift but also that his denial of the past demands a present atonement. When he sees a poor black “[t]ripping” (212), trying to leave the sun-baked county he himself had abandoned, his vision becomes larger: “he pictured youths leaving, all over the world, hundreds, thousands headed down alien roads to find what waited at the end. He saw himself” (212). Though he knows his wife, shocked and angered at his years of deception and fearful now of all blacks, will “punish him, make him pay” (213), he acts independently, writing the youth, whose fully packed car has broken down, a traveler’s check. As their Cadillac prepares to enter the junction that will lead them back to the interstate and “the other life” (213), Leland once again looks backward, alone in his determination, and notices “wildly flourishing trumpet vines” and “strands of rusted, broken barbed wire” (213), symbols of natural hope and failed human dreams that together represent the continuity of life.

Hoping their marriage will withstand the breach caused by “a good lie well intended” (211), Leland for the first time reconciles himself with his own past and prepares for what will now come, “fundamentally innocent,” as Lewis writes, “in his very newness” (5). The generous and spontaneous actions that move him backward in time while helping another social outcast travel forward become an ethic of personal redemption, enabling him to discover a new geography. It is a land he recognizes as home, that most necessary of places long forgotten in the crass materialism of the southern wasteland, having recovered it by driving over “uneven ground … down the road once forbidden” (209). Although the caretaker tells Leland, “‘All the people who was around here is gone. They all gone’” (210), he is wrong, quite wrong. William Hoffman has never left this realm of the human heart, knowing that the journey there is as much spiritual as physical. His stories are a directive mapping the way home. The reader need only follow.

Notes

1. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 5.

2. William Hoffman, telephone interview by author, July 12, 1998.

3. Selected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 251–53.

4. Lewis, in The American Adam, argues that in a Bible-reading generation the hero was not surprisingly “most easily identified with Adam before the Fall. Adam was the first, the archetypal, man” (5). His study centers primarily on nineteenth-century American literature, including writers such as Whitman, the elder Henry James, Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville. His focus consequently offers no opportunity for discussing what I call the American Eve. In discussing Hoffman’s protagonists, I have continued to use Lewis’s original term regardless of the gender of these main figures, believing that their principal characteristics remain the same.