1. By BILL ACKERBAUER
The Leader-Herald
GLOVERSVILLE — “But what a
nest of thorns the past can be.”
So writes Richard Russo in “Else-
where,” a new memoir in which he tries
to untangle his troubled relationships
with his hometown and his late mother.
Four decades after he left to embark on
what would become a brilliant career as
a novelist, Russo remains haunted by
Gloversville, the place he describes as
the wellspring of his literary imagina-
tion.
The book doesn’t attempt to chronicle
Russo’s entire life story, but it begins
and ends with his bittersweet rumina-
tions about Gloversville, and along the
way it details his relationship with his
mother, Jean, who raised him mostly on
her own as a rare working mom in the
1950s and ’60s.
Russo said he started writing the
memoir in earnest after she died in
2007.
“When I decided to start writing about
Gloversville, the effect of that was to
enter her world again,” Russo said in a
recent telephone interview, speaking
with The Leader-Herald from his home
in Camden, Maine. “It really opened up
the floodgates of memory, and it be-
came more imperative to write. She was
in my waking thoughts and also visiting
my dreams, and it just seemed ... there
was some unfinished business there.”
The book is as much about his mother
as it is about the writer himself, and
Russo says it was she who insisted he
leave Gloversville, which had begun to
fall on hard times with the decline of the
leather industry. His mother faulted not
just the community’s bad economic
luck, but what she perceived as the lim-
ited ambition of its occupants.
Russo explains in the book: “She al-
ways maintained that her one claim to
fame was getting me out of there, away
from the shambling, self-satisfied, un-
couth, monumentally stupid people who
believed they were lucky to live where
they did, lucky to have low-paying jobs
in the skin mills that starved them and
chopped off their fingers and gave them
cancer before moving shop to the Third
World.”
But the acid of such sentiments in the
book is tempered by Russo’s depiction
of his mother as a complicated woman
troubled by “nerves,” who never seemed
comfortable for long, no matter where
she lived or with whom.
“The first strong opinion that I as a
child can remember was that Gloversville
was a dangerous place, that it would trap
you if you let it and you had to get out —
nothing good could come of staying
there,” he said. “Now, that may not be
true, but it was something that was drilled
into me when I was really little.”
Russo said he’s aware that some
hometown readers might take offense at
this dark description of the place, but the
Gloversville portrayed in “Elsewhere”
is the one seen through his mother’s
eyes, not his own.
He said people should read his fiction
for a more balanced view of how he re-
ally feels about Gloversville and its
denizens.
“If people want to know how I really
feel about Gloversville, they should not
look at [‘Elsewhere’] as the definitive
statement,” he said. “What they should
look at is everything I’ve written about
Gloversville, even when I was calling it
‘Thomaston’ and ‘Empire Falls’ and
‘Mohawk.’ I think it’s impossible to
read ‘Mohawk’ and ‘The Risk Pool,’
‘Nobody’s Fool’ and ‘Bridge of Sighs’
without understanding just how deep
my affection runs.”
Unsettled existence
The new book’s title stems from his
mother’s love-hate relationship with
Gloversville and the family home on
Helwig Street, which to her felt like “a
cage” while she lived there but beck-
oned as a familiar haven at other times,
when she lived near her son in Arizona,
Illinois and Maine.
“There had always been two
Gloversvilles for my mother,” he said.
“That was kind of her gift to me. The
paradox of her needing to be elsewhere
when she was there and needing to there
when she was elsewhere had manifested
itself for me but it was just as real.”
But instead of literally moving back
home from time to time, as his mother
did, Russo revisited Gloversville in the
pages of his novels.
“Rather than confront my love-hate
relationship with my hometown, I sim-
ply created other Gloversvilles in my
imagination,” he writes in “Elsewhere.”
He said writing a memoir was, in
some ways, more difficult that writing
fiction.
“When writing fiction, you start call-
ing Gloversville ‘Mohawk’ or ‘Empire
Falls’ or ‘Thomaston’ or something like
that, then invention kicks in — in addi-
tion to memory, which you always call
upon — but there’s that wonderful re-
lease into invention, where you can take
things and make them the way that you
want them rather than the way they are.
Without the ability to make things up,
memory played a much bigger role.”
A local following
Though his books have been contro-
versial here, Russo has a loyal follow-
ing in the Glove Cities.
“We sell his books continually,” said
Priscilla Mitchell, owner of the Myster-
ies on Main Street bookstore in John-
stown. “I have to keep his books in
stock all the time.”
Mitchell said her store already has
copies of “Elsewhere,” but she can’t sell
them until the book’s official release
date, which is Tuesday.
Barbara Madonna, director of the
Gloversville Public Library, said
Russo’s novels are popular with library
patrons. “Empire Falls” and “Bridge of
Sighs,” in particular, seem to stay in
constant circulation.
Madonna recalled a time when an-
other writer came to Gloversville specif-
ically to donate autographed copies of
his own books to the library.
“He said he wanted his books to be in
Richard Russo’s hometown library,”
Madonna said.
The Fulton County intellectual
Russo has inspired many writers who
call the Mohawk Valley home.
William Bradley, who lived in
Gloversville as a teenager in the 1990s,
now teaches English and creative writ-
ing at St. Lawrence University in Can-
ton. In correspondence with The
Leader-Herald earlier this year, Bradley
said Russo’s novels, especially his first
two, helped set him on his career path.
“I read ‘Mohawk’ in the spring of
1994, and it had a profound effect on
me,” Bradley said. “I knew before then
that I was interested in writing, but I did-
n’t realize how much material sur-
rounded me — I thought I would either
write superhero comic books or have to
backpack through Europe for ‘inspira-
tion’ before I could be a writer. But
when I read ‘Mohawk,’ I felt like I rec-
ognized my hometown.”
Bradley says he appreciates that some
people in Gloversville are sensitive
about Russo’s depictions of the place.
“I can understand why people might
bristle at the suggestion that the town
and many who lived there were ‘un-
lucky’ — it can sound condescending,
and nobody wants to feel pitied. But I
do feel like there was a very unique pain
inflicted on the community ... I was im-
pressed — and am still impressed — by
the town’s resilience in the face of such
hardship. ... I see that same type of re-
silience in my favorite Russo characters.
Sam Hall and Donald ‘Sully’ Sullivan
have difficult lives, but they retain a
work ethic and sense of personal dignity
through it all. And, of course, Russo
characters always retain a sense of
humor even as they struggle.”
As critics have pointed out, one of
Russo’s strengths as a novelist is his
ability to write authentically about
working-class people.
“For me, Russo represented — and
continues to represent — the idea that a
‘Fulton County guy’ could also be a
‘discerning intellectual,’” Bradley said.
“More to the point, reading Russo’s
work as I was trying to find my own
writing voice caused me to see the com-
plex beauty that surrounded me, and
helped me to realize that daily life in
Gloversville was compelling and note-
worthy and beautiful and heartbreaking
enough to be turned into art.”
Half-full or half-empty?
Many longtime Glove Cities residents
object to what they perceive as de-
featism, whether it’s in Russo’s fiction
or in attitudes expressed by their neigh-
bors. One Gloversville resident has tried
to dispel the pessimism with a book of
his own.
In 2007, then-City Court Judge Vin-
cent DeSantis published “Toward Civic
Integrity: Re-establishing the Micropo-
lis,” a treatise spelling out his view of
the challenges facing Gloversville and
his prescription for overcoming them.
DeSantis sent a copy of his book to
Russo, encouraging the famous author
to adopt a more optimistic outlook about
Gloversville.
Russo, who says the two have had
“not only cordial but warm” correspon-
dence, read DeSantis’ book and agreed
with him about certain aspects of civic
planning and economy. But while De-
Santis’ book recalls the heyday of the
tanning and glovemaking industries as a
golden age, Russo’s accuses the mill
owners of exploiting workers and dev-
astating the environment.
“What Richard Russo and I disagree
on is the nature of Gloversville’s past,”
DeSantis told The Leader-Herald earlier
this year. “I have a positive memory of
it, and he has a negative one. ... He re-
members a lot of negative aspects asso-
ciated with the leather industry. I argue
that those negatives were not particular
to Gloversville but typical of mid-20th-
century industrial society in general. But
the past is gone in spite of the fact that
everyone seems to be exclusively fo-
cused on it. We need to focus on and en-
vision a future.”
DeSantis, who has retired from the
bench and is traveling in Europe, said he
plans to return to Gloversville armed
with ideas gleaned from his experiences
overseas and will continue his efforts to
energize the community.
“Richard Russo is a brilliant author,”
DeSantis said in a recent message to The
Leader-Herald. “He knows much about
the world and human nature, but he
doesn’t know a thing about Gloversville
in 2012. It is entirely possible that we
may stay ignorant of our potential and
choose not to create a bright future, but
if he says that we can’t reinvent our
community, he’s dead wrong.”
A feeling of home
Russo acknowledges the information
he has about Gloversville is either out-
dated or comes to him secondhand from
relatives in the area, but he said what has
happened here over the last century is
reflective of the boom-bust-exodus
cycle played out in many towns in
America.
“Since the guys came home from
World War II, and so many of them
went to school on the GI Bill and had
opportunities elsewhere ... people have
gone elsewhere,” he said.
But he said people who pull up roots
and move away in search of affluence
still express a yearning for the kind of
simple, close-knit community he bene-
fited from in Gloversville as a youth,
where he grew up surrounded by grand-
parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. He
said he has tried to capture that feeling
in his novels.
“There’s so much that I love about
America and so much that I fear the loss
of in America, and it’s all right there, it’s
all in those books. But, strangely, the
only time I can see the Gloversville that
I love and the Gloversville that I will al-
ways be devoted to ... is when I’m writ-
ing stories about it, when I’m writing
fiction.”
While he has lived in Maine for more
than a decade, Russo says Camden
doesn’t feel like home for him the same
way Gloversville might feel like home
for his relatives who still live here.
“I’m probably never going to have a
home in that sense,” he said. “I’m never
going to feel about any place the way I
feel about Gloversville, at least the
Gloversville of my novels. For me, the
only home I’m ever likely to have, re-
ally, when you come right down to it, is
the blank page.”
But in another sense, he said, home
for him is where his wife and daughters
and grandchildren are: “Home is where
I need to be, not a particular house or a
particular town.”
Keeping his distance
Russo hasn’t set foot in Gloversville
in years. In “Elsewhere,” he self-diag-
noses his anxiety about coming back to
his hometown as something akin to the
obsessions that plagued his mother.
“I’d love to say this book made me
feel better about everything, having got-
ten it off of my chest, but it’s still very
difficult for me,” he said. “It still feels
very raw.”
He said on one hand, he would like to
return to Gloversville, but he also fears
that spending time in the real-life ver-
sion of the place that has inspired him
might “turn the spigot off.”
“What if I make my peace with the
real place and it turns out that, as a result
of that, I’m out of stories? That would
be awful.”
But Russo says he won’t rule out a
homecoming. Meanwhile, he’s working
on a screenplay with Robert Benton,
who directed the film version of his
book “Nobody’s Fool,” which starred
Paul Newman, and he’s also working on
a sequel to that novel.
“I’ll be back in North Bath very
soon,” he said. “Which is to say, of
course, I’ll be in Gloversville.”
Features Editor Bill Ackerbauer can be
reached at features@leaderherald.com.
Section
C
Sunday,
October 28, 2012
Celebrations – 2C
Horoscope – 3C
Health – 4C
Weddings – 6C
Living
Photo by Eleina Sebert/Courtesy of Knopf
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Russo, who
grew up in Gloversville, has written a new memoir in
which he discusses his hometown. The cover of the
book, “Elsewhere,” is shown at left. It will go on sale
Tuesday. Below is Russoʼs 1967 yearbook photo
from Bishop Burke High School.
Richard Russo pens memoir
about ‘two Gloversvilles,’
the real and imagined
The Leader-Herald/Bill Ackerbauer
The house at 36 Helwig St., Gloversville, where Richard Russo lived with
his mother and grandparents in his youth, is shown earlier this month.
Writing from‘Elsewhere’