A Tribute To Alex Hammond
Never Rush a Good Idea
By Debbie Lee
“Is shedding all these books synonymous with retirement?” I asked Alex Hammond. One day last spring I walked by the Avery Hall Bunding Reading Room and saw 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, “FREE BOOKS.” Anyone was welcomed, 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.
So I coaxed Alex into talking with me about his books. As usual, he answered my question by taking me on a journey.
"One of the things the US Government hated about Northwest tribal groups was the potlatch," Alex told me, referring to 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 absolute 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 macabre 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 in the WSU English Department. He’s enjoyed his teaching immensely and he’s equally pleased with the transitions that the department has 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 for what others in the department, and the university, are doing. In the past year, for example, I’ve seen him 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 our 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 his status as a Professor Emeritus, Alex will 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.
Deep Scholarship
By Jana Argersinger (From the 2008 volume of Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation)
Several waves of change make themselves felt in this issue of Poe Studies. The first is an editorial change of the bittersweet kind: Alexander Hammond retired from Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation with the publication of our double-volume festschrift (2006-2007) in honor of founder G. R. Thompson. Professor Hammond's contribution to this and other journals has been deep: following a term as assistant editor at Nineteenth-Century Fiction (UCLA) from 1971 to 1975, he took on the duties of coeditor for 
Poe Studies (the pre-1985 title) and worked in partnership with Thompson from 1976 to 1979; he served as editor for the journal from 1980 to 2003 and, finally, as coeditor with Jana Argersinger beginning in 2003; and along the way, in summer 1977 and spring 1984, he coedited ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance with Robert C. McLean. It is characteristic of Professor Hammond that he will brook no lengthy encomiums, but it must be said that the culture and tone of this journal have long reflected his commitment, in equal measure (and as far as they are separable), to the human side of scholarly relation and the demands of intellectual integrity. The scholars who have benefited from his willingness to spend hours poring over sources and writing generously detailed letters of advice, if gathered together, would make a crowd much larger than he is likely to credit. Professor Hammond claims the freedoms of retirement but has agreed to consult for us from time to time, a boon that will help keep the standards of Poe Studies high. And Poe scholarship at large will benefit from his projected labors in the Palmer C. Holt Collection of Poe annotated source texts, held in Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections at Washington State University Libraries.