Discovery

“Is shedding all these books synonymous with retirement?” I asked Alex Hammond. I was talking about the rows he had heaped in the Avery Hall Bundy Reading Room kitchen one day last spring. I walked by and saw the hundreds of paperback books stacked on the cafeteria-like tables. Everything from Philip Roth novels to Norton Anthologies to dated collections of feminist criticism. Attached to the door was a sign saying, simply, “FREE BOOKS.” Anyone walking by was welcome, even encouraged, to take them.

These were Alex Hammond’s books, mingled with those from the office of Dick Law, another retiring colleague. Alex was in the midst of cleaning out his office upon his retirement from 34 years in the WSU English Department where he has been a teacher and scholar of American Literature, editor (along with Jana Argersinger) of the scholarly journal Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism, Undergraduate Studies Director, Vice Chair and Scheduler, Interim Chair, frequent commentator in the Faculty Senate, and a role model for how to be one of those people whom no one wants to see retire.

One day last spring, I sat down with Alex and asked him about his books. As usual, Alex answered my question by taking me on a journey.

One of the things the US Government hated about Northwest tribal groups was the potlatch, he told me, a ceremony in which members would give up all their worldly possessions. When the US was trying to get post-Civil War control of the country, one thing they tried to do is outlaw the potlatch, which they saw as very anti-capitalist. Alex likened his book purging to the potlatch. “But I’m not giving away anything that’s worth much on the used book market. It feels great, if people will take them,” he said.

Alex didn’t give away everything. He’s been saving a series of scholarly projects his ambitious service duties to the English Department and his talent at procrastination, he insists, have prevented him from completing. The projects closest to his heart right now are a book review and a paper on Poe and Scott he’ll be giving for an upcoming Edgar Allan Poe bicentennial conference. “One regularly gets questions about what you’re going to do,” he said of his impending retirement. He doesn’t see himself stopping anything except administrative work and grading.

One long-delayed project he really likes is the essay “Subverting Interpretation: Poe’s Geometry in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’” he recently published in The Edgar Allan Poe Review. I was fascinated by this project he referred to as “[solving] a puzzle.” He first presented the argument in 1983. “You don’t want to rush a really good idea,” he told me, as an aside. Edgar Allan Poe was fond of building puzzles and riddles into his stories. There is one in “The Pit and the Pendulum” that few had ever noticed and nobody had solved until Alex worked it out some 25 years ago. As he explained to me, Poe sneers at people who think they’re good rationalists and trust their powers of logical interpretation. In his detective stories he does this with stupid cops, for example, and in “The Pit and the Pendulum” he does it with his reader.

Poe’s narrator is a guy being tortured during the Spanish Inquisition. He is put in a torture chamber in the dark, and he must survive a threatened fall into a pit and a pendulum that can cut him in half. The narrator, writing after the fact, explains the mental reasoning he used to keep himself both sane and alive during the torture. But in one of the things he works out, the dimensions and shape of his cell, he’s dead wrong. “It’s easy to see why he’s dead wrong if you try to figure it out,” Alex said, but not even as insightful a critic as Mutlu Blasing, who first noticed the problem in the 1970s, tried to figure it out before him.

I was curious about Alex’s life-long interest in Poe, but I quickly found out there are certain things he won’t talk about. I explained that it puzzled me. Here he was, the “soul” of the English Department, the most generous-spirited colleague I could think of, the one person who looked out for students, instructors, graduate students, and professors whose talents and commitments might otherwise go unnoticed, and he had spent his career with the author of the “The Tell[-]Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Instead of answering my question, Alex said—grinning but taking no insult—”I enjoy what I do.” He puts his time into the things that are important to him. When I told him he was a role model for many of us in the department for how to have a balanced career, he started to fidget. I could tell he was getting uneasy. He said he’s been very happy with his time at WSU. He’s enjoyed his teaching immensely and he’s equally pleased with the transitions that the department have gone through. “Wonderful” was the word he used. “The department I joined which was heavily into traditional scholarship has developed a long way since then. The people who do cultural rhetoric and those opening up literary texts to history and theory have really invigorated our department.”

One aspect of Alex’s career I most admire is his unflagging support of what others in the department, and the university, are doing. In the past year, for example, I’ve seen him at the Landescapes party, all the Visiting Writers events, budget meetings, lecture forums, and even small events hosted by the English Club or individual classes. Why does he do it? “I enjoy it,” he said. “I’ve been to more of these things than a fair number of people because it’s been one of my indulgences,” he said of the Visiting Writers Series. “I have a daughter who reads, and the writers’ books end up with her.” He also has wanted, as Vice Chair, to show the support of the department administration for everything from the most celebrated to the most unobserved activities.

For the moment, Alex is working on “becoming emeritus and avoiding ceremonies.” He refused to have a retirement party, something we as a department almost honored. At the department’s annual award ceremony last spring, our Chair George Kennedy along with the staff and such colleagues as Dick Law, Linda Kittell, and Michael Delahoyde, tried to surprise Alex by appearing with prepared remarks, a plastic trophy, and pom poms. We all clapped and congratulated Alex by presenting as a gift a first edition of Harry Clarke’s famous illustrated version of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, a book selected by his fellow editor Jana Argersinger and purchased by our office secretary Sarah White with funds she had collected from us as a group. One book to replace the many he gave away earlier that spring. Somehow, Alex managed to miss the event. Later, after a routine faculty meeting, which we knew Alex in his assiduousness would attend, our Chair brought out a cake and we all got a chance to wish him luck.

In retirement Alex has made an arrangement with the department to continue to have access to a computer and some of the materials for projects he’s built up over the years with his work on Poe—some donated by other scholars such as the Palmer C. Holt Poe Collection at MASC and some his own collections of Poe criticism, which will become part of the Poe Studies library in the journal offices.