On a fall day in 1961, Walter D. Wetherell sat in his 8th-grade classroom at Garden City Junior High on Long Island, not realizing that he was about to discover his life’s purpose.
To mark Halloween, Wetherell’s English teacher, Richard Goodwin, had decided to read aloud the short story The Birds by the English author Daphne du Maurier, later turned into a 1963 film by Alfred Hitchcock.
Although he looked professorial and tweedy, Goodwin had a reputation as a free thinker in a buttoned-down place, just miles from that postwar epicenter of white suburbia, Levittown. The students, Wetherell among them, admired his unorthodoxy.
To heighten the atmosphere, Goodwin turned off the lights in the room. Wetherell listened rapt to the inexorable building of tension as du Maurier described great flocks of birds wheeling in the sky, massing on telephone lines, hammering against windows, waiting for their chance to attack and kill the humans who, over millennia, have attacked and killed them.
“Between Mr. Goodwin starting reading that story and ending that story, I knew I wanted to be a writer,” Wetherell said.
That he accomplished.
Using the nom de plume W.D. Wetherell, he has soldiered through 50 years of writing and publishing, doing things his own way without apparent regard for chasing literary fame. It’s a long run that began in Goodwin’s classroom when Wetherell wrote a story that earned from Goodwin his highest possible grade of “A+ cubed.”
“To this day that’s the most important praise I’ve gotten,” said Wetherell, in a recent interview in the Lyme home where he lives with his wife of 35 years, Celeste.
Wetherell has been up and down, been awarded significant literary prizes, and watched as the appetite for the printed book has waxed and waned and waxed again.
The main thing is that Wetherell has made a career for himself as a productive, consistent, working writer, tackling only those subjects that most interest him. To pull that off is just as hard as it sounds. How do you keep a faithful readership while cultivating new audiences?
The answer to that is, simply, keep going. Recently turned 70, Wetherell has just released a new collection of short stories, called Where We Live (Green Place Books), and a novel Macken in Love.
The latter is a new venture for Wetherell, as the novel is being released as an Audible Original, an offshoot of Amazon, which publishes straight-to-audio books. That is, it’s being performed by an actor, rather than printed on paper. Audible’s slogan is: “Listening is the New Reading.”
“If it’s a new and different way of getting readers to my work, I’ll explore it,” Wetherell said.
Straight to audio might be a new way forward, Wetherell said, although he was dubious at first. How can you write a novel that does not take the form of a printed book, with nothing physical to hold?
But, a Forbes Magazine article this spring noted that while print book sales rose about 1.5 percent and e-books dropped by 5.4 percent in the first eights months of 2017, audio book sales had increased by about 20 percent, and they continue to build.
The speed of the process made his head spin, Wetherell said. He had already written Macken in Love when he picked up a copy of the New York Times earlier this year and saw an article about Audible Originals. Although some of his books had already made the leap into audio, he’d never thought about having a novel go to audio first.
He approached Audible this summer. He sent Macken to them on a Monday and had a contract by that Friday. The novel is a love story, something he had always wanted to write and that doesn’t often find its way into contemporary literary fiction.
Set in Maine and Boston — “Please, no Boston accents!” Wetherell recalled telling Audible — the story follows the courtship of Kevin Macken, who emigrated with his family from Northern Ireland to Boston when he was 10, and Jill Novak, who had the kind of extraordinary looks and talent in her hometown of Bangor, Maine that set her apart and seemed to predict future success.
The protagonists are 50, old enough to have seen plenty of what life can throw at you, still young enough to get into trouble, Wetherell said.
That neither character has led the life she or he hoped to, seems to go without saying. This is a literary novel, after all. The book is narrated by a third character, a writer of third-rate mysteries named Mike Renshall, who is friend to both Kevin and Jill.
The short stories in Where We Live, published by the Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press, were written over the past 10 years. From a selection of 40, Wetherell culled nine “keepers.”
They look at the lives of those who tend to escape notice: a man selling blueberries by the roadside in Maine, who is captivated by a woman who comes to buy them; a young married couple who return every year to the same vacation spot and set great store in two Adirondack chairs that never seem to move; a game of paintball in a small town that takes a dark turn; and a girl struggling to return a pile of books to the local library in a blizzard, among others.
These people aren’t famous or wealthy. But beneath their seemingly mundane exteriors, they are more willful and idiosyncratic than they first appear.
Wetherell has not followed a conventional literary path from an MFA program to agent to publication to the book launch and cocktail party circuit. He dropped out of Middlebury College his sophomore year because, he said, he didn’t think its history or English programs had anything useful to teach him: “It sounds arrogant, I know.”
He wrote his first mature story in longhand on a yellow legal pad while sitting on a ping-pong table in the basement of his parents’ home. He was accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop but chose not to go. “I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do. I was so cocky, but it was the right thing to do.”
He took odd jobs here, there and everywhere to make just enough money to continue writing.
That was how he met his wife, when he was leading bus tours on Cape Cod and she was a waitress at The Red Jacket, a hotel in South Yarmouth. He also taught writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts from 1985 to 1998. He made close friends there, but again, it didn’t quite feel like a natural fit.
“I served a long apprenticeship, and here I am 51 years later still doing the same thing. … I’ve been working under the radar. Working in a certain amount of obscurity was good for me, and is still good for me.”
He has to his credit six novels, four short story collections, five essay collections, three memoirs, two travel books and a history of the forgotten literature of World War I, published in 2016. He writes a column on literature for this newspaper. His career is reminiscent of that of a 19th-century or early 20th-century writer, who feels that nothing less than the whole world is his subject.
In l998, both he and Marilynne Robinson received the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award of $250,000 for five years gave Wetherell the financial freedom to write.
He has also published regularly in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, Georgia Review and, not least, Fly-Fisherman.
“I’ve never sat down and said maybe I should do this because it’s hot,” Wetherell said. “You take your lumps. Working in the arts is not for sissies.”
Indeed, Wetherell seems to have gone out of his way to avoid playing the game whenever possible.
“On the one hand he’s one of the most normal people you’d meet, and on the other hand he’s one of the most eccentric. He doesn’t care about fame or celebrity. He doesn’t seem to have any of those writers’ neuroses,” said Phil Pochoda, a friend and former editor of Wetherell’s, who published his work when he was editorial director at the University Press of New England and then at the University of Michigan Press.
Speaking by phone from his home in Lyme, Pochoda said he is struck by Wetherell’s range. He writes realist novels, fantastical short stories, natural history books, meditations on fishing, history.
“What’s amazing is that he does each of them so confidently and appropriately. I’ve dealt with hundreds of writers, and he’s one of the most natural I’ve encountered. He just does things his way even if I feel it’s not in his interest to do so,” Pochoda said.
There’s a story that Pochoda feels exemplifies Wetherell’s approach to blowing his own horn — or not.
When Pochoda moved to Michigan he encouraged Wetherell to submit work to him. After taking over the University of Michigan Press, Pochoda established the Michigan Literary Fiction Award. Without telling Pochoda, Wetherell submitted to the contest his novel A Century of November, set during World War I. Out of hundreds of entries, Pochoda said, the novel won the award hands down. It was published in 2002 to glowing reviews.
“That was just Walter. I don’t believe anyone else would have behaved that way,” Pochoda said.
It’s a measure of how much publishing has changed during Wetherell’s career to note that University Press of New England, which was founded in 1970 and was based in Hanover and Lebanon, is due to shut down by the end of the year.
The morning of the interview, just a few days before his birthday, Wetherell steps outside to usher a reporter into the house. He has been listening to the testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, which has, he said, made him tear up.
Wetherell is tall and lanky, wears glasses and comports himself without any obvious need to show off. He looks and behaves like the kind of person who, to suit his own purposes, is happier receding into the background, the better to hear and observe.
He and his wife have lived in Lyme for more than 30 years, first in Lyme Center and then in this house near the Connecticut River, where they raised their two now-grown children. They moved to the Upper Valley in 1982 because Celeste wanted to work at a teaching hospital, and he “wanted to live in the country where the fishing was good.”
That the Dartmouth Bookstore had a copy of his first novel, Souvenirs, in the window on a day they visited the area seemed a happy portent. It was bitterly cold, Wetherell remembers, but it was also clear and sunny, and he was seduced by the snow.
The living room of the house is, as you would expect, lined with bookcases, which hold a collection of World War I memoirs, novels, stories and histories he amassed for his 2016 book Where Wars Go to Die, a study of the enormous body of literature written during and after the war in response to what was seen then as the most appalling tragedy ever to devastate humankind.
As a boy, Wetherell went through the “I want to be a baseball player” stage. But it was relatively short-lived. He loved reading and writing so much, he said, that the only question was what form his writing would take. Journalism? History? Fiction? He worshipped at the altars of Cather, Melville, Conrad and Thoreau, among others.
“I was aware from a very early age of that tradition. I came to understand that tradition, and it’s important to me. I’ve been nurtured by that,” he said.
As it turned out, he has tried his hand at all of the above: journalism, fiction, nonfiction and history. That omnivorous appetite is noted by Penny McConnell, co-founder of the Norwich Bookstore.
“Whether it be essays, fishing, nature or fiction, his ability to come up with unusual and interesting plots has always amazed me,” she wrote in an email.
Wetherell’s father, a World War II veteran also named Walter Wetherell, was a great storyteller, able to pull fantastic tales out of thin air. His mother was a nurse during the war. His father, who sold insurance for Liberty Mutual, was legally blind and would have recorded books delivered to the door: Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series, and books by James Michener. Out of loyalty Wetherell still buys insurance from Liberty Mutual.
As a kid, Wetherell and his older sister (his only sibling) would ride around with their father in the car, their mother at the wheel, while his father went door to door with insurance policies. Wetherell remembers seeing children out on the suburban lawns, mothers with their strollers, identical tiny houses, fathers emerging early in the morning to head to work.
It’s the kind of environment that would later be reimagined as a hotbed of stultifying repression and prejudice by countless filmmakers, artists and writers. And Wetherell disliked almost all of it. It made him feel restless, made him want to leave and not come back.
By contrast, summers spent with his family on a lake in New Milford, Conn., then more rural than suburban, were a balm. It’s where he learned to fish and appreciate nature, which figure heavily in his writing.
As a writer, Wetherell worries about the state of publishing and literature. Time was, he said, that reading was considered integral to culture. If you cared about such things, you knew which writers you should read, and be able to discuss. That hasn’t completely disappeared, but printed books, magazines and newspapers seem to be barely keeping their heads above the digital waves. The forums for printed literary criticism and book reviews have shrunk, although there is a presence online.
“I’m afraid it sounds pompous, but people who know me know I’m not that way. Literature is too important to be pompous or stuffy about,” Wetherell said.
Wetherell is still inspired by books he hasn’t encountered before. A trip to Iceland this summer introduced him to the work of Halldór Laxness, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Some well-thumbed paperbacks by Laxness sit on a coffee table. He has also been reading the 1945 novel The Bridge on the Drina by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić, another Nobel Prize winner.
With their intensity, breadth of characters and lives so different from Wetherell’s, they “make me excited to be a writer,” he said.
“I’m always challenged by writing about somebody very different from me,” Wetherell said. “The last thing I want to find is my voice. I want to find somebody else’s voice.”
W.D. Wetherell will read from
Nicola Smith can be reached at mail@nicolasmith.org.