Richard Hovey

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Richard Hovey (1864-1900) was an American composer, poet and playwright. Graduating from Dartmouth College in 1885, he is known in part for penning the school Alma Mater, Men of Dartmouth. The Hovey Murals (photographic copies by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth) -- a controvertibly "racist" series of paintings that adorn the walls of Hovey's Pub (in the basement of Thayer Hall) but that are currently shielded from public view (except by scheduled appointment) -- are named in his honor. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]

Poems SeaGypsy, When We Are Dead, John Keats, To a Friend, Philosophy, The Old Pine, In Memoriam, Squab Flights, Kronos, College Days, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The South. [10]

[edit] Biography

Here by the Fire

Every year on the occasion of the first snowfall I place a special telephone call to an old college roommate. When I see the white-washed sky begin to spill snow, I sing a song. I have a scandalously awful singing voice, tone-deaf, warbling, unsuited for human consumption; in ninth grade the chorus director told me, as we prepared for a concert, to mouth the words. I think my roommate, Taylor, prefers coming home in deep California sunshine and get an answering machine message of me singing, rather than a live performance, so he can turn down the volume and fast forward the more egregious parts. But Taylor enjoys the sentiment, for I sing to him a song of remembrance, the Hanover Winter Song.

Traditionally Dartmouth undergraduates gather on the lawn of the Dean's house on the night of the first snowfall and sing the Hanover Winter Song. The Dean, cheered by the dulcet tones, invites the chorallers in for a warm drink and conversation around a log fire. When I was a freshman I chanced upon the group assembling at Robinson Hall and joined in the expedition. Numbering about three dozen and mostly culled from the ranks of the Outing Club, we walked in a light, dusting snow through the nether regions of the Choates to the Dean's house. We knocked on his door, he and his wife came out, and we started singing the Hanover Winter Song. My well-trained mouthing abilities were fully utilized, as I hummed along to a song I had only heard once before, at Moosilauke during Freshman Trips. Upon the final zum zum, the Dean dutifully applauded us, and we scrambled inside to munch on pretzels and cheese and drink warmed cider. This custom had been going on for some time, even longer than Princeton's first-snow ritual of sending its sophomores out on a naked jog through campus. One fellow choraller told me, in that inimitable Dartmouth style of historical embellishment, "They've been doing this for years, banging on the Dean's door and singing this song. Of course,"-with a saddened look-"the party used to be pretty wild, with beer chugging and singing all night. Now it's cider and chips and we go back to the library. Winter's not what it used to be."

A century ago Dartmouth students did not welcome the first proof of winter with the same throaty enthusiasm. Winter was an interregnum between brisk, colorful autumn and river-splashing spring, a black hole so bleak no happiness could emerge. There was no Winter Carnival, no snow sculptures, no ski team, no skating on Occum Pond, no keg jumping at Psi Upsilon, no ski jumping at the Vale de Tempe and no canoe races down powdery Freshman Hill. There was just half a year of hibernation. Vegetative, numb, Dartmouth men huddled in drafty dormitories heated by clanking wood stoves and played card games into the night. They periodically emerged for classes, chapel and head-lowered trips to the tobacconist and whiskey-man. Snowshoeing, one possible winter activity, failed to capture undergraduates' imaginations after a Cardigan Club sent four members on an inaugural venture up Mount Cardigan in March 1888. Only one man remembered to bring his snowshoes. The trip was the last for the club.

Historians credit Fred Harris '11 for changing the College mind-set. Harris founded the Outing Club in December 1909 and, with clumping cross-country skis, Harris demonstrated the advantages of a long North Country winter. But the original cause for the shift, the initial push along the niveous path that now encircles the core of Dartmouth, was the Hanover Winter Song. First published in December 1898 the song celebrated what had formerly been scorned. True fellowship developed only when the wind wailed, ice coated the windows and snowdrifts clogged the streets. No longer a liability, winter was a necessary adjunct to the Dartmouth spirit. Unlike Harris however, its author, Richard Hovey 1885, was an improbable champion of the cold. He hated winters.

At a wedding reception this past spring I chatted with an older woman who was pleased to talk about Dartmouth. Gail, small with a serene smile, asked if I knew Richard Hovey. "Sure," I said, "an 1885. He wrote the alma mater." I faltered, not knowing much more except a vague recollection that Hovey must have been involved with those banned murals. (I silently grinned at recalling his class. My non-Green friends were always amused at my Dartmouth habit of automatically attaching a number to a person's name.)

"Hovey's a cousin of mine," Gail said. "My grandmother and he were first cousins and close friends. I have a couple of boxes of Hovey's letters and poems. No one has gone through them before. They're piled in these boxes. You should come look."

A few months later I drove down to Charlottesville, Virginia and spent a day with Gail and her husband Tom. We sat at a kitchen table and poked through her overflowing boxes. In ancient, brown manila folders lay reams of letters and newspaper articles. Paper-clipped notes bore an imprint of rust and more than a few envelopes carried a single, well-franked one-cent stamp. Some of the materials were about a proposed memorial stone that some Dartmouth classmates wanted to lay at Hovey's grave, a controversy that evidently sputtered and spat for almost sixty years. Magazine essays argued over the hearsay that Hovey, a pro-Spanish-American War man, first coined the phrase "Remember the Maine." I read letters from Bliss Carman, an intimate friend of Hovey's and co-author of two popular books of poems, Songs of Vagabondia. I pulled from crinkly obituaries from a dozen newspapers after Hovey's death, from a heart attack, at the age of thirty-five in 1900. Carman wrote one in Harper's Weekly and spoke of his "sheer grasp and capacity of intelligence, that lucid wide spirit."

Tom, Gail's, imposing, straight-backed husband and retired Admiral, kept coming in and out of the kitchen where we worked. He left for a haircut, he went to fix a tire on his car, he drove to a deli to fetch sandwiches, but he always returned to pick a letter or article up and pose a question. "How do you think he made money?" he asked when reading an article about poets in the 19th century. He excavated a couple of Bliss Carman letters and asked, "Do you think they were lovers?" With the explosion of films and plays about Oscar Wilde, a contemporary of Hovey's, I could not be sure. Hovey, like Wilde, married and had children and was likewise famous as a flamboyant aesthetic, a lover of art, a deliberate provocateur. Even in backwoods Hanover, Hovey wore his hair long, cultivated a long mustache, carried sunflowers and maintained an unconventional wardrobe of oversized felt hats, pastel-colored stockings and polished long riding boots. He marched, Tom thought, and I had to agree, to his own orchestra. But perhaps our modern sensibilities were reading too much into one man's eccentricities.

The son of an alum, Hovey naturally attended Dartmouth. In one letter Gail showed me, written on 7 March 1880, Hovey wrote in verse of his future:

My plans? I am studying now to pass

The examination to enter the class

Of eighteen hundred and eighty four

In that institution of classical lore,

Called Dartmouth College. And when I am finished

My education—if undiminished

Is the strength of my wishes—it seems to me

That a naturalist I shall probably be.

Hovey waited another year before matriculating, but still, at age seventeen, the youngest member of the class of 1885. He loved the College, but bemoaned the endless winter. A Dartmouth professor, Allan Macdonald, produced a biography of Hovey in 1957. Hovey, Macdonald wrote, was raised in Washington, DC and found the New Hampshire cold unbearable. He thought, that first winter, of transferring to Johns Hopkins, but soon figured out the best maneuver was to stay away as much as possible. Hovey extended all his winter holidays, leaving early in December and returning well after classes resumed in January. When he was forced to be in Hanover, he grimly cursed the gray skies and cutting wind. One letter Hovey wrote to his mother, in November 1884, made it clear he was not singing at the sight of the first snowfall: "Snow is on the ground now; no fields and hills and brooks to stray and rest and gladden in,-in such a situation, you see there is no relief." Even alcohol, the usual restorer, was not a help. Macdonald records an incident at the annual mid-winter Freshman Beer, a night when the freshmen set up kegs at both ends of the third floor of Dartmouth Hall and invited upperclassmen to rotate up and down the hallway with mug in hand. Looking out the window, the revelers saw Hovey appear, "with a coffin he had purloined from the Medical College. Unsmilingly he slid down hill on this improvised toboggan, and then solemnly trudged up the hill again."

While researching at Gail and Tom's, I discovered more evidence of Hovey's attitude towards winter. In a letter written from Hovey's mother to Hovey's cousin dated 1 February 1885, "Dick" had just left for Hanover, late again for the spring semester. "He dreaded to go back in the cold, for 'tis very cold up in N.H. and Dick don't like cold weather any better than I do....By the way I don't know what Dick has gone back to, for the students wrote him [that] there had been a burglar in his room during the vacation and had stolen all he had there. What the poor boy will do I don't know. He had a great deal of value there which it will not be easy for him to replace. He says he left there about five hundred dollars worth of books, beside all his furniture. We are anxious to hear from him and to know what his real loss is. Isn't it too bad when he is on his last year." When I read that, I imagined Hovey disembarking at the Norwich station, defiant in his fancy clothes. He would have trudged across a covered Ledyard Bridge and up the steep, bitter hill. It was not snowing, but dark, and the icy road made him slip. He reached his room on the second floor of Reed Hall and saw his smashed furniture, empty bureau, books scattered. In the corner a window clattered, open to the drifting cold.

Thirteen years after graduation, Hovey, in a stunning volte-face, publicly embraced the New Hampshire winter. Hovey had spent the interim years teaching at Columbia, hobnobbing with French literati in Paris and writing plays. In March 1894, while living on Copley Square in Boston, Hovey penned a poem for the city's Dartmouth Lunch Club which became Men of Dartmouth. But he never published a book of his own poetry until Along the Trail: A Book of Lyrics (Boston: Small, Maynard) which the Copyright Office received and entered for copyright on 12 December 1898. Inside were fifty-nine poems. One was the Hanover Winter Song. The frosting wolf-winds and the log fire, Hovey believed, created a necessary frisson that led to the special Dartmouth camaraderie. In a way Hovey articulated the joys of the apres-ski life, the pleasure one gets, after a day skiing, of drinking around a warm fire with friends. It was what I like to call, after a Wendell Berry poem, the "how-exactly-good-it-is-to-melt" theory. Suffering becomes sweet when you come in from the cold. Freezing is memorable because of the thaw. The shower is better, the nap deeper, the beer tastier and most of all the conversation richer. No season can produce more suffering followed by more sweetness than a winter-or four-up in Hanover.

A hundred years ago this attitude was revolutionary, yet Dartmouth immediately absorbed the notion. Frederick Field Bullard, a Boston friend of Hovey's, set the song to music and throughout that winter Dartmouth men crooned and yodeled the new song. In March 1899 the college asked Small, Maynard to print a second edition. Two more editions appeared in October 1903 and August 1908, making the book Hovey's best-seller, after the two Bliss Carmen co-written Songs of Vagabondia. And suddenly Dartmouth men went outdoors. Snowshoeing trips became common. College men with wooden cross-country skis-some so long that they, like a tandem bicycle, had two sets of bindings-began schussing around the golf course. Around 1906 they started shoveling snow into mounds on Freshman Hill to create little ski jumps, good enough for twenty-foot leaps. Sixty students attended the inaugural Outing Club meeting.

What made Hovey suddenly decide winter was not evil? Was the reversal caused by the pipe-freezing winters he subsequently spent in Boston and London? Was it an extension of his aesthetic principles, that art creates reality? Was it a result of translating Mallarme, who argued that the artist must transpose the world into dream? My theory is that Hovey had a perfect sense of humor. He loved to play the fool, to invert the usual standards. The most enduring legend of Hovey at Hanover, spread in newspapers and recounted at his wedding, was of a duel. A fellow 1885, Sam Hudson, criticized a poem of Hovey's, and the young poet challenged him to a duel to be fought at dawn in Norwich. Hudson, making the whole affair absurd, chose a cannon as his weapon. Hovey in reply named a sword. "Hovey," writes Macdonald, "seemingly determined to charge the cannon with his gallant weapon, made his farewells. Only Hudson's refusal to go on with the game called halt to the vivid fancy of the gentleman from Washington." It was this kind of man, who attacked cannons with a sword and sledded hills in a stolen coffin, that could summon the imaginative flair to change an attitude and reinvent a college's ethos.

Author Unknown