♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -Howard Mansfield lives in a scenic and historic place, Hancock, New Hampshire, in an old house on land well tread by people and animals.

He's written seven books, one, Turn and Jump: How Time & Place Fell Apart will be coming soon to a bookstore near you.

His other books include In the Memory House, The Same Ax, Twice, and The Bones of the Earth.

Critic and writer Guy Davenport describes Howard Mansfield as a cultural psychologist, as well as a first class cultural historian who has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence.

It's true, I reread three of his books, looking for uninteresting or dull sentences-- [laughter] and I didn't find any.

[faint laughter] Well, maybe one.

[Howard laughs] I didn't find any.

What I write about, Howard says simply, is the place where we live.

We may think that we know all about it, but we don't.

Welcome, Howard Mansfield.

-Thank you Rebecca.

[applause] Thank you.

[applause continues] -So many people in this audience have read your books but for those who haven't, I've figured out that the essence of each is in the title.

Very carefully chosen titles I think, titles are hard, but when you get the right one, you know it, don't you?

-Yes, yes you do.

-So I have three quest-- three title related questions for you.

-Okay.

-Sort of like Jeopardy!

[faint laughter] What are the bones of the earth?

[Howard hums Jeopardy!

theme] [laughter] That's one of his books The Bones of the Earth.

-The bones of the Earth are what a lot of ancient people called rocks and stones because stone was animate, it was, it was living.

And, I came to feel that people have still had this relationship with their local places.

With rocks and trees, and that's how people choose their landmarks, and that's how people know that they're home.

And in New Hampshire, people are literal rock crazy.

-Yes, they are.

-I mean, you know, you can take a tour of elephant rocks and monkey rocks and-- -Frog Rock.

-Well, I'm sure, there, there you go.

-In New Boston, Frog Rock.

-I didn’t know that one.

-No, you'll want to visit.

-I-- right after this.

[Howard chuckles] -Well I was in Connecticut this weekend and I mentioned how we name our rocks in New Hampshire, and they were surprised.

[laughter] -We have longer winters than they do.

-Yeah.

Well, talk about how rocks are living or were living, because I kind of let you skim right over that I just nodded, but-- -Well, one of the reasons, if you go back to Sunday school, they always talked about heathens making idols, and, they regarded stone as living stone as having life.

And I think people sense that to some degree with the reverence people have for old stone walls, old stone fences.

For the reverence people had for the Old Man of the Mountain before it slid off the side of the hill there.

You know, people were saying, put it back, put it back.

I think that that's some examples of that.

-So that's I mean, that's a little introduction to one of your books.

The next title related question is-- -These are tough.

-Well, you should know these cause they are your titles.

[laughter] What do you mean-- or what did the man mean who said the same ax, twice?

It's the same ax, twice.

-Yeah, that's that's an old, It's an old joke.

I think a lot of people here may have heard it.

An old Yankee farmer says, you know, I've had the same axe my whole life.

I've only changed the head five times and the handle three times, and I have the same axe.

And the joke is supposed to be on him, what a fool.

-Yeah -But if you think about it, as I have, that really is a story of preservation.

That's the story of historic preservation.

I spent 25 years talking to people who restored old houses and ships and, Wright brother airplanes and one lunger machines, you name it.

And really, the essence of restoration and preservation is having the same ax twice.

Does that old does that old farmers still have that ax?

Yes, because a tool exists in the physical sense, but also in the knowledge and the love to make it so it exists in a double sense.

I mean, you can go to any museum and see rows of tools and no one knows what the heck they are anymore, but a tool in use is a living tradition.

So an axe repaired is a living tradition, and I think that's the best kind of reservate-- restoration there can be, is a living tradition.

It's a way that informs the present.

You're really getting down to the craftsmanship of it and you're carrying it forward.

It's just not something in a glass case.

-It's the craftsmanship of the repair.

You can tell who repaired it by the craftsmanship of the repair.

-And you are at the original purpose of it.

You know, it's funny about old tools.

I was at a museum, I'll have to leave it nameless, but they do sometimes this historical reenactment, and they wanted to get the old plow out, breaking up the ground.

So they had one in the collection, and they said this, this is in great shape.

Let's, you know, cast it and make it again, very expensive.

So they remade this new old plow got it out in the field and it couldn’t plow worth a damn like, well, what are we supposed to do with this back and forth, they couldn't get this thing to work, so they went and did some more research and that old plow had survived because it was a bad plow.

[laughter] It hadn’t been used, the good plows, you know had all gone to rust and ruin and worn out.

-Yeah.

-So you gotta be, you gotta be careful.

The historical artifacts tend to be unrepresentative, you know?

-Hey, one other, where is the memory house?

That's the third one, In the Memory House.

-Memory houses, to me are those historic little historical societies that every town has.

I mean, you think that nobody's living there.

They're just memories.

There’s artifacts.

That really strikes me.

That strikes me.

It kind of stands in for how people in New Hampshire have long memories about things and really cleave to memory.

I was at a, when I was working on the memory house.

I was up at a town meeting, I think, up in the town of Washington and it was, they were meeting in the old meeting house then we got out people, these guys sitting around me, well, back in 41, we did this, you know, most of American, well, two weeks ago we did that, I mean, that's, the other thing about it that really it's really striking is that you can see people in the act of remembering something in some of these little historical societies.

I mean, we, we had moved up here about 25 years ago or whatever it was, and the first, one of the first nights we had unpacked, I was walking around Main Street and this little historical society was open.

It was like, it's in a one room schoolhouse, not heated in the winter.

You know, it had these old labels in the proper cursive script, and they were faded, so kind of yellow.

And I was just looking around and there was, it had something, it looked like this yellow braid it said fringe from the funeral car of the late President Lincoln.

And I said, whoa, that's kind of like so right there, the late president, and then there was some old cracker sitting there, and it said, this is hardtack sent home by so-and-so to so-and-so to show what his reactions were.

And there it was, as inedible as the day it was made, still sitting there.

So that's that's the kind of memory house and if you kind of expand it and open it up, you talk about, well, who gets to enter the memory house?

Whose stories are told?

Whose stories are denied?

Who gets the names on the landscape?

Who gets the holidays?

Who gets the monuments and who's left out?

And what stories people do not want to tell?

And so from there, you can begin to look at the way we essentially create our cultural landscape -It was so interesting to me to go back and I had read your books when they came out, I think each, each one and then I reread them all together for this interview and to trace the Washington Elm, which pops up in your books again and again.

But will you talk about the Washington Elm?

I love that story, which sort of develops over the book, over your books, -the Washington Elm, what a great story.

The Washington Elm stood on the Cambridge Common, the Cambridge Cow common.

And it was believed that Washington took command of the troops under that very elm and turned around the American Revolution.

And the story got grander and grander, he rode in on his white horse in his uniform, there were men arrayed in uniforms, there were people cheering in parades, It was amazing moment.

Well-- -and people remembered it.

-Oh, people testified that they remembered it.

-They were there.

-More and more people were there than were there, you know?

[laughter] like the 60s, like Woodstock, more people were there-- -Everybody was at wood-- we were all at Woodstock.

I was there were you there?

-I was 11 and I was there.

But, it's all wrong.

-Yeah.

-Washington may have ridden past this tree with his aides-de-camp when he was kind of ill, on a rainy day to take over the troops.

No one was around.

Boston was under siege.

There was no houses around.

It's only there because he-- So that didn't happen a lot of people thought it happened because of this false memoir that came out.

But you start looking in the archives and there's a poem by Longfellow about it, and there's a the tree is decorated these celebrations, these big holidays.

So what you-- And the tree is preserved all the way into the 1920s -Great efforts were made-- and the tree is like this old thing like this [Rebecca laughs] streetcars went past it, but you realize they were wrong about the facts, but right about the truth, which is, you know, like Faulkner's definition of fiction and novels.

Okay, Washington didn't take command, but this elm stands as the axis mundi of people's belief in Washington.

It stands for-- And so in that way, they got closer to the truth of who Washington really was than we are with all our facts and memoirs and everything else like that.

So it's a, it's a it's a great poetic story.

So it's a, it's a it's a great poetic story.

-I love that term axis mundi.

-Yeah, center of the Earth.

-The center of the Earth.

-And, if you look at how people decide how their home, it's that kind of axis mundi that they're picking.

-How close are they to that?

-Yeah and then if you look at why people are kind of unsettled, things go faster and faster when you feel like, well, there is no more axis mundi.

There are many centers.

And how do you navigate them?

-Yeah, yeah.

Well, I, we like to have our writers read a little bit from their work- -just to show we can do it.

-To show that you’re a-- Yes.

-We are indeed literate.

-Another test Howard, it's all about the test.

-This is rough.

-It’s rough.

You're being grilled.

But you and I talked about what you might read maybe you would read from your new book that no one has read yet.

-Sure.

-Sy has, Sy has-- -Sy has read it Sy is my best editor- -Sy is his wife and editor, who was also a guest on this show.

So the first husband and wife team on our show.

-There it is.

-There it is.

Thank you.

[applause] So you’re going to do a little bit of reading from your your new book that will be out in Dec-- -September.

Yeah, it's called Turn and Jump: How Time-- How Time & Place Fell Apart.

-Turn and Jump: How Time & Place Fell Apart.

-And you might say, well what is that about?

-I’d say, what does that mean?

-And what it's about is how our experience of time has changed over the last several hundred years.

Borges famously said that we are time.

So we are clocks.

We are clocks within clocks.

And the book starts out when there may be a clock or two in town-- an entire town goes on through the 1880s, when the railroads are the ones who discern-- determine the time zones, the one we have today and before that, there were like 200 different time zones.

And as you go on, time starts, the tempo increases and becomes more standardized also at the same time.

And the book is a series of nonfiction essays, stories about mostly New Hampshire.

Early watermills, the vaudeville which actually was a New Hampshire, invention, and also in the book, I have, a story about something that was almost every town, which was a the general store that grew up to be the five and dime that grew up to be the department store.

In Peterborough, it was Derby's for almost 100 years, and I was in the archives once researching something else.

And when I get into a locked archives, you know, you sign in, what I immediately do is open every book on the shelf and I put it back, but I open up- I just start pulling through everything I’m really curious about.

-That's a good idea.

-There's a lot of weird stuff in there, but, so why does someone say this?

But there were these five volumes.

Loose leaf binders that said Derby’s and good now is history pictures or something.

I opened it up and it was the most amazing thing, Clarence Derby, whose family had owned Derby's and who later went to UNH before he had to drop out to take care of the family business, I put together in his retirement this incredible memoir of the business.

Each page had a picture maybe an invoice, a receipt, and the memory of what happened.

So what you get all of a sudden is incredible form he kind of invented this scrapbook, kind of thing, almost like a roman-fleuve you might say, is-- -You might say what?

-French, you know like the- that novel that kind of flows along like a river, do I have that right?

-It sounded nice.

-What you see is the entire American century moving through one store, and he starts in the basement pumping molasses.

Pretty soon he's selling, you know, in the 60s he’s selling the first color television set.

Then kids are shoplifting all of a sudden, what the heck is that about?

It's almost as if a social historian had ordered these things.

You couldn't- you couldn't do it any better.

And Clarence, like a lot of people, kept these little daybook diaries.

I think you've seen them in the archives, if you've been there.

A lot of people kept them in the in The Bones of the Earth I talk about these two brothers, the Nims brothers.

They had a stone lot with, north of Keene and they took a lot of stone out of the Earth, granite, and they would write, really short you know, move three loads oxen to be shod, and day after day like this, you know, ministered a dinner moved ten loads, wife died, you know, oxen to be sh-- [laughter] [laughter] -Rained.

[laughter] And it goes by that that terse, you know, really terse and Clarence was that kind of guy too which I didn't know til I was further into the book.

-Oh my gosh so this is about Derby’s.

This is about Derby’s in the 1960s, early 1960s, Clarence was a devout diary keeper.

Here he types out some of his entries each day, noted in a sentence or two.

I recognize the form, the terse, telegraphic daybook of labor.

I don't know why I should find this surprising.

He kept many lists.

Clarence kept track.

He was a timekeeper of commerce.

That's one reason why he succeeded.

He tracked what was selling and what wasn't, what it cost to advertise how fast stock was turning over.

In November 1963, he wrote this in his journal, November 1st, someone attached Ekey’s pay.

He was a service man.

Some kid stole a hat.

November 6th, Manchester to buy Cinderella dresses with Marion Griswold.

November 7th, went to Newport with Roy Robins about a new manager.

November 20th, Boston to Wellington Sears for special merchandise.

November 22nd, President Kennedy assassinated and closed the store.

November 25th, Kennedy funeral closed all day.

A kid steals a hat.

Clarence goes to Manchester to buy Cinderella dresses.

The president is murdered.

We're doing the small things, and then there's an earthquake.

This is how most of us experience headline news.

Where were you when...?

We ask each other.

Where were you when Kennedy was shot?

The lights went out on the East coast.

The shuttle exploded.

The planes hit the towers.

In the first collection of essays about the attacks of 9/11, the writers had to tell everyone where they were when they heard the news.

I was here, I was standing there, I was doing this, I looked out of where I was and this is what I saw, my breath, my hand, my love, and off on a wire and a wave comes the world and its news.

There's always this comparison.

Our lives and the big event.

As if two parallel universes had opened to each other at a moment of calamity.

Two clocks are revealed to be clicking side by side the clock of the Empire and the clock of our lives, born along the current.

I was living my day, I was on my way to Manchester to buy a Cinderella dress.

Once I was briefly involved in a local Amnesty International chapter that was forming to petition governments to release political prisoners.

We were packed full of ourselves.

Our letters would free prisoners.

We were working to right the world.

Coming into the library where we met, we passed a room full of people 30 or 40, happily playing bridge, playing bridge while the world burned.

We didn't have to take a vote to commend ourselves in our virtue.

But why did we want to free the poor prisoners in other countries?

Why?

So they would be free to pass the time, make a thousand meals with their families, sit in the pub, play bridge so they'd be free to buy their daughter Cinderella dresses.

We live in the mundane.

You can dismiss daily life as trivial, or you can welcome it's simple joys.

Mundane, done again.

Thousands upon thousands of items flowed out of Derby’s.

nail clippers, thumbtacks, underwear, toothpaste, shoes, Cinderella dresses, each mundane each also a devotion.

Clarence Derby knew this.

He was a curator of this kinetic museum.

He looked after his customers and his neighbors by procuring the best goods he could find.

We had, he said, a subconscious feeling of the way Peterborough wanted this store to be managed.

We gave our best to do this always.

-Thank you Howard.

[applause] -I love how you take local history, the little things that are so very local and so very specific to Peterborough, and then becomes a story about all of us, you know, wherever we live.

-That's what I'm looking for when I'm looking at this local history, is that kind of resonance, that kind of thing that just strikes you and you say, oh my God, that's how people are living their lives.

That's, that's it's almost like you see these old pictures in the archives and so-and-so and so-and-so are exchanging a check or doing something official, and then your eye goes to the back, goes, oh my God, tomatoes were like $0.11 a can then.

[laughter] Wow!

-Exactly right.

-And it's that kind of information that we're all kind of looking for when we look at this kind of local history, what you're looking for in the past is the presence really.

-Absolutely.

-You're looking for that that moment, you know?

-Well, I know that place is very central to your work and that you're also inspired by the stories of the people who are deeply rooted and connected to those places so I wanted to talk a little bit about inspiration and are there-- who are the writers and we can find some of them as we read your books but who are the-- the writers, the artists, the thinkers, famous or not, who inspire you?

And I think we should probably start with the most inspiring of all, Christopher -Oh, oh, sure.

-Hogwood.

-Well, I was going to say Sy but-- [both chuckle] Christopher Hogwood.

Now see, I just want to mention-- Christopher Hogwood is very inspiring.

-He was the, -He was.

-700 pound pig that lived with us and was a real local character.

We'd come home and find all sorts of people visiting him in the barn, people we didn't even know.

He was very well known.

He never left his barn, but he commanded the slops empire.

People always bring him treats, singing to him as they fed him.

He was a real great spirit.

-He was he was-- -He was a little runt when he came home in a shoebox and of course, we were told he wouldn’t get bigger.

-So you did a chil-- You did a children's book.

-I did, yes.

-That's a departure.

-A lot less words in there.

-Probably, was it easier to write?

-I really enjoyed writing it, yeah, it was a lot easier.

-You knew the story.

-I’m gonna get in trouble now from children's books writers, but I thought it was.

-I knew the pig, yeah.

-You knew what you had to say about the pig.

-The research was easy.

-So, and then, of course Sy wrote The Good Good Pig, which is another-- he's just inspiring everybody all over the place.

-He was an inspiring pig.

-Yeah I just want to read a little from -Sure.

-this because I love, I love this whole book, but, Christopher goes on a little walk around town.

-As he was prone to do sometimes.

-As he was prone to do.

And it's told from the point of view of the pig?

-Porcine eye view we call it in the trade.

-Porcine eye view.

I smell something else on the breeze deep, earthy, vintage earth rich mud I follow my nose on my way, I stop to check out a green line I put my nose down and it just rolls back.

I can roll up a whole lawn like a carpet if I want, I tear a huge hole in this green lawn, stick my snout far in there's dirt all over my face.

It feels good, try it sometime.

[laughter] So are there writers, artists, and thinkers besides Christopher Hogwood who are who are inspiring you these days?

-Yes, certainly.

When I was trying to figure out what you could do with the essay, the master essayist E.B.

White, Joan Didion and Joseph Mitchell, would be like a triumphant, a really untouchable, and actually and Elizabeth Bishop's, essays, her nonfiction, they're translucent, they're incredible.

They're really wonderful.

They look like they're effortless.

They weren't.

And then writing about what sometimes called the built world, architecture, buildings, the way we live here.

There's this geographer, J.B. Jackson, who drove around on his motorcycle and, in New Mexico in the 50s and 60s, had this little self-published magazine called Landscape.

Very well known now, but he was one of the first people to write about trailer homes and pickup trucks, and not in a non condescending way.

He's great.

Stilgoe, John Stilgoe the professor at Harvard who has written great things about common landscape.

-I wanted to talk about community.

-What about it?

-Just in general.

-You've lived in Hancock for, -What-- -About 25 years.

-So you're new, new to town?

-Absolutely.

-And yet and yet you've made a place for yourself.

You’ve found a place in that community.

In fact, I've heard read that you are chair of the village planning committee.

-Now, that's a toxic two thing two words, you put those two words together it's like putting the words root and canal together, isn't it?

-Share of the vill-- -Dread, sheer dread.

-I bet there are a lot of people up for that job.

-Well, no.

[laughter] -So you are contributing to-- you're part of that community.

What do you love about Hancock, and what do you love about small town life?

Because I know that you love it.

I can read not between the lines.

It's in your books, it's clearly there.

-I like the mix of people you get to know.

People of all different ages, backgrounds, jobs and political differences too significant political differences.

-Oh, yeah.

-And yet you've got to work things out, and be civil to each other to some degree.

And I really like that.

I think that's terrific.

And I like that people really care about the place, which I find all throughout New Hampshire.

I mean, this committee, you mentioned this planning committee, we are charged with making changes and not making changes in the historic district.

And essentially what you have there is people really care so strongly about this place.

So you have essentially a mainstreet that's like an old house that's owned by 1700 different people, and they're all going to let you know what they think about it.

So it's fascinating to me, I like that.

I like that a lot.

-Is there anything you don't like about small town life just between ourselves.

-Is the tape rolling?

[laughter] No, not really.

Not really, no.

-Were you, were you do you come from a small town originally?

-I'm a flatlander from a, postwar suburb, so I just I find small towns and mountains and this whole New Hampshire thing really fascinating.

-You love it?

you like the New Hampshire thing?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

In, at the end of Same Ax Twice, you list restoration principles, pleas and prayers.

-Yeah.

-And that seems like a really important list to me.

A kind of a summary of of your thinking, at least at that point and I wonder if you could you can read them or talk about them, but what are some of the highlights of the things that Howard Mansfield really, it's what you really value that's there.

-Yeah, there's 14 of them I can rea-- I can read you like a couple of them?

-Read a couple of them.

This is what Howard Mansfield wants to have happen in the world.

-One: restoration is praise.

(whispering) -Restoration is praise.

-Ancient religion and modern science agree we're here to give praise or to slightly tip the expression to pay attention, writes John Updike.

Two: the future.

Good restoration schools us in the graces of the old ways, freeing us to build anew.

When we bring our loving attention to that which is old, it is not the past we were restoring, but the future.

Good restoration saves the future.

Three: mending.

Good restoration is a two way street.

The object being mended in turn, mends the worker.

As important as a restored building may be, the real value lies in how this work restores and awakens us.

When preservationists talk on about technique and tax codes and architectural history, they have often lost sight of why we save old things.

They've lost touch with the animating spirit that call them to the old ways.

We save these old things to save ourselves.

I could go on, but I-- -Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I suggest that one way to learn about what history means, to us is to read the books of Howard Mansfield, -Could you come with me everywhere and say that?

That’s great!

[laughter] -Thank you Howard.

You were great, you were great.

[applause] ♪♪