Arts and Letters

He was born (1904) in New Orleans and went to public school there, when he wasn't reading at home or playing on the wharves with the tough kids, the wharf rats; sometimes they dived for bananas thrown overboard from United Fruit steamers. Then he spent four years at Tulane University Law School, though he got tired of law and stopped attending classes a few months before he would have been graduated. He worked for three New Orleans newspapers; he wrote a first novel, Relics and Angels, duly published but not read; and he went around with the crowd that contributed to The Double Dealer, which included Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and other temporary Creoles.

In 1930 he married Toto—that is, Etolia Simmons—stealing her away from twenty or thirty young lawyers and newspapermen who had the same glint in their eyes. In 1932 they moved to the North Carolina mountains, where they planned to live on next to nothing a year while Ham, book by book, would conquer the literary world. The first book in his program, a life of General Beauregard, was a critical success but a financial disaster, for it appeared in that week of March 1933 when all the banks were closed. Immediately Ham set to work on Cinnamon Seed, which was published with a little more success the following year.

In 1935 the Bassos moved to New York and Ham joined the staff of The New Republic, where I was then literary editor. He enjoyed writing for the paper, but he never liked to move in literary circles, notwithstanding his fondness for many writers as individuals. "There was too much pretentiousness," he said through one of his characters, the hero of Courthouse Square, "and too much doing something you were not…. It was much better to get off in your own room and be your own self and do your own work, and if that imposed the penalty of loneliness … it was more heartening and satisfactory in the end."

Working in his lonely room, whether in New York or somewhere in the Carolinas—for the Bassos kept moving from South to North to South—Ham was then producing a novel almost every year: In Their Own Image (1935), Courthouse Square (1936), Days Before Lent (1939), Wine of the Country (1941), and Sun in Capricorn (1942). Each was better constructed, more dramatic, and smoothed to a higher finish than the novel that preceded it; he had a passion for learning his craft. None of the novels was autobiographical, but the central character in almost all was a man involved in the author's dilemma of being a Southerner deeply attached to the South and to the soil, yet repelled by what Ham was the first to call Southern Shintoism, while also being repelled by the coldness and impersonality of the North; he was a man who couldn't, and yet must, go home again. It was a dilemma that would find its most compelling expression in his longest and most successful novel, written many years later, The View from Pompey's Head.

After 1942 the novels appeared at longer intervals. Ham had always been a careful writer, but now he became excessively careful. At some point toward the end of every book, he would begin to suffer from physical complaints, often serious. They were extremely serious when he was trying to finish The View from Pompey's Head, in the spring of 1953. "Yes, I'm over the meningitis episode (and don't tell me that was mumps!)," he wrote me. "…What now? Well, a week after I got out of the hospital, I thought I'd better do something about getting our place in order"—by then the Bassos were permanently established in Weston, Connecticut, where Ham was an active member of the school board—“so I went out and worked up a good sweat and put myself back in bed again… more pains in this battered thing I call my head, and a few more pounds of terramycin, etc. I could manage to be more cheerful about it were it not that the period from January 1 was the time I had set aside to finish my book."

His last novel, A Touch of the Dragon, was the hardest to finish, and the illness that interrupted it was not merely serious but fatal. The last pages were written in October 1963, when he was already under sentence of death, but they give no hint of his deathly fatigue; they are, they had to be, as perfectly finished as anything he had ever consented to publish. In view of his medical history, one has reason to say that he sacrificed his life to his passion for honest craftsmanship. The work came first, and living second. Like Ham's friend Thomas Wolfe, he was a hero and martyr of the act of writing.