Southern Literature

[lionel]

There are a number of interesting points you make here, Bubba. I agree that the list of books smacks of political correctness, although I feel it would have made more sense to lengthen it, and even include one of the (gay) Reynolds Price novels here, such as his debut: A Long and Happy Life! I can't comment on Absalom, Absalom!, as I've not read it.
　
The term 'regional' can be demeaning of course, and although, say, Faulkner, O'Connor, McCullers certainly wrote regional literature, it seems too much of a limitation, a kind of straitjacket, to impose the word on them, although paradoxically I appear to be doing it by using the 'Southern literature' label. But I don't think this is the same as, say, calling D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and a few of his early plays 'regional'. As I think I tried to make clear above, I'm exploring the concept of something that's far from clear in my mind, but I'm also certain that Southern literature is very different from other 'regional' literatures, for want of a better term.
　
So do any other areas of the US have a literature with such an elephant in the room as the plantation and its slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction, the jim-crow laws, etc? It's fortunate that many rare books from the 19th century can be read fully online through Project Gutenberg and similar sites, as we can discover the fear - often written by members of the aristocracy on the plantations - of the wolf at the door, and there are works written before and after the war - try Augusta Jane Evans, for a good example, or any anti-Tom novel, through all the postwar denial (hello, Thomas Nelson Page) stories, where we can clearly see this fear - or defiance - in action. Beyond the 'moonlight and magnolias' romanticism of the pro-slavery mob, other, different voices took many years to come forward with a more realistic literature, athough at the end of the 19th century the solitary voice of Ellen Glasgow was in the vanguard of the Southern Renaissance.
　
Almost all 20th and 21st century Southern literature literature seems to be a comment on the history of the South, whether it is concerned with race, gender, sexuality, religion, or all in one. The Southern lady defending the plantation was also defending her purity, and any sexuality had to come from the workshy, priapic black man and and the black woman, a vagina dentata. Religion was the glue keeping it together. Much of this literature, including the very significant book (but not the film) Gone with the Wind, is a reworking of the Southern lady, sometimes receiving horrified reactions from the reading public: Frances Newman, for example, had a hard time with her The Hard-Boiled Virgin.
　
Coming to this century, the popular Joshilyn Jackson's Gods in Alabama, which has a contemporary setting, is really a very strong reaction against the Old South, or the old Southern mentality, at the same time as it shows that the New South is very far from being free from the Old. The white Lena Fleet makes a point of fucking every boy in her class apart from her best friend's boyfriend, smashes a bottle of tequila (or is it whiskey?) across a male aggressor's head, and, she thinks, kicks him dead into the kudzu. Terrified of what might happen if she's found out when the kudzu just becomes bones in the winter, she makes a pact with God that she'll remain celibate if He doesn't reveal her actions to anyone. She flees north but keeps her promise, and, years later, returns with her sexually frustrated black boyfriend. Yes, of course the people in small town Alabama are very unhappy with this relationship. I'm afraid this hasn't really answered your points, Bubba, but I've got a girlfriend breathing down my neck desperate for us to go out. Maybe you can better understand the field I'm exploring, though, and realise its richness and - dare I say it - fascinating uniqueness.

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[Bubba]

All right then, Lionel, you seem to have an almost academic interest in southern literature; I read for entertainment alone, or perhaps to discover work I might enjoy translating, so much of what you've read from the South is necessarily unfamiliar to me. My point is that if we continue this conversation we will surely end up talking past each other, each of us content to make his own points.

I nonetheless note the relegation to a prepositional phrase of the "'moonlight and magnolias' romanticism of the pro-slavery mob." I'm not sure if you're referring to a specific school of writing, but there's plenty of moonlight and magnolias, and even ambivalence about slavery, in Julien Green, the American Frenchman whose work I mentioned above, and his southern novels are simply too good to be dismissed out of hand. It is perhaps partly instinctive dismissals of this sort that have made it hard, if not impossible, for recent southern US writers to write work dealing in any serious way with plantation life. Sure, there's Gone with the Wind, which I haven't read, but that was a while ago. Southern writers seem to prefer instead to celebrate the smallholder, the descendant of indentured servants (Wendell Berry) or the blue-collar beer drinker (Larry Brown); and they do a good job of it. But keeping the plantation off limits, as it were, seems to me an unnecessary impoverishment.

I should say too that I've never really enjoyed F. O'Connor's gallery of grotesques (even worse are her many acolytes), and that of lot of what I've read of southern literature I've read despite its southernness, not because of it. I also detest the work of the many southern writers who labor too mightily to churn out working-class "southern" literature, complete with the standard accouterments like 'coon hunts, mad dogs, trucks, drywall, double-wides, okra, kudzu, firearms of all sorts, and whatnot. These writers, and there are a lot of them, are simply trying to cash in on a fad that they and their publishers don't seem to realize peaked long ago. For similar reasons, I can't stand the books of the Latin Americans who go on writing in a magical realist style; or those who perpetuate the myth of the revolutionary. Intolerance, I might add, for which I take no small amount of grief!

Although I agree that some of the particulars of the history of the South may be unique, I'm not so sure that, more broadly speaking, southern literature is so "fascinatingly unique" as all that. Take the New Englander Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example. One of his distant forebears, a judge in Massachusetts Bay Colony, was involved in the persecution of the Quakers and, I think, in the Salem witch trials. Nearly two centuries later, Hawthorne writes "The Gentle Boy" (www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/nh/tgb.html), about a Quaker youngster orphaned when his parents are executed ("An indelible stain of blood is upon the hands of all who consented to this act") and taken in by a Puritan family. This story is informed by Hawthorne's inherited guilt (it also goes some way to redeeming it) in a way I don't think I've ever seen in southern writing, perhaps because, as I have suggested, those who might want to seek to redeem ancestral guilt, as Hawthorne did in "The Gentle Boy," are discouraged from writing.

Finally, Lionel, far, far better to go out with a girlfriend than to spend one's Sunday exchanging posts on the Internet with strangers by whom one may well find oneself accused, on not entirely shaky grounds, of, say, "sour grapes!"

 

[lionel]

All right then, Lionel, you seem to have an almost academic interest in southern literature

Well, slap me with a coon's tail.

I read for entertainment alone

I suppose it depends on what you mean by entertainment, but I don't honestly recall ever - and I mean ever in my life - doing anything for that reason, as it just seems to me that entertainment kills mental life. If that sounds pretentious, I don't give a fuck, as I think it's only in being pretentious that we can ever make progress.

My point is that if we continue this conversation we will surely end up talking past each other, each of us content to make his own points.

Not necessarily, although an open mind helps. (I'm not trying to score points or make any criticism by that remark, by the way: this ain't a game I'm playing.)

I nonetheless note the relegation to a prepositional phrase of the "'moonlight and magnolias' romanticism of the pro-slavery mob." I'm not sure if you're referring to a specific school of writing, but there's plenty of moonlight and magnolias, and even ambivalence about slavery, in Julien Green, the American Frenchman whose work I mentioned above, and his southern novels are simply too good to be dismissed out of hand.

This is where we make progress, and I can clarify that I was talking about such writers as Thomas Nelson Page, John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms in particular. I'd been aware of Julien Green, but I think I'd just put him to one side because of his, er, Frenchness. But I know next to nothing of Green, although it seems that that could be a big error on my part.

Southern writers seem to prefer instead to celebrate the smallholder, the descendant of indentured servants (Wendell Berry) or the blue-collar beer drinker (Larry Brown); and they do a good job of it. But keeping the plantation off limits, as it were, seems to me an unnecessary impoverishment.

OK, and I certainly take the points about Wendell Berry and Larry Brown, but where does enrichment lie by including the plantation?

I should say too that I've never really enjoyed F. O'Connor's gallery of grotesques (even worse are her many acolytes), and that of lot of what I've read of southern literature I've read despite its southernness, not because of it. I also detest the work of the many southern writers who labor too mightily to churn out working-class "southern" literature, complete with the standard accouterments like 'coon hunts, mad dogs, trucks, drywall, okra, kudzu, firearms of all sorts, and whatnot.

I'm not an enthusiast of Flannery O'Connor's, or Erskine Caldwell's, or Harry Crews's, or any imitators of these writers.

These writers, and there are a lot of them, are simply trying to cash in on a fad that they and their publishers don't seem to realize peaked long ago. For similar reasons, I can't stand the books of the Latin Americans who go on writing in a magical realist style; or those who perpetuate the myth of the revolutionary. Intolerance, I might add, for which I take no small amount of grief!

Ummm. I note your dislike, even hatred(?), of Bola?o, which I simply fail to understand: Bola?o is now, I think, generally (and very justifiably) recognised as a major writer, but for some reason you refuse to acknowledge this (see below).

Although I agree that some of the particulars of the history of the South may be unique, I'm not so sure that, more broadly speaking, southern literature is so "fascinatingly unique" as all that. Take the New Englander Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example. One of his distant forebears, a judge in Massachusetts Bay Colony, was involved in the persecution of the Quakers and, I think, in the Salem witch trials. Nearly two centuries later, Hawthorne writes "The Gentle Boy" (www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/nh/tgb.html), about a Quaker youngster orphaned when his parents are executed ("An indelible stain of blood is upon the hands of all who consented to this act") and taken in by a Puritan family. This story is informed by Hawthorne's inherited guilt (it also goes some way to redeeming it) in a way I don't think I've ever seen in southern writing, perhaps because, as I have suggested, those who might want to seek to redeem ancestral guilt, as Hawthorne did in "The Gentle Boy," are discouraged from writing.

This seems to be an interesting point, and I'll look into it.

Finally, Lionel, far, far better to go out with a girlfriend than to spend one's Sunday exchanging posts on the Internet with strangers by whom one may well find oneself accused, on not entirely shaky grounds, of, say, "sour grapes!"

You're very observant, Bubba. As it happened, we got caught in a snowstorm, and on top of this I had to contend with drivers who appeared to be under the influence of something I wasn't. Not a pleasant experience, and I'm certain I'd have been much better employed reading Bola?o.

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[lionel]

Your post must have escaped me, accidie, when I was looking at Bubba's posts. I've already mentioned my ignorance of Green, but..

I was very surprised to see Stoner on one of the lists. In what way is it Southern?

This one slightly puzzled me too, until I realised that the University of Central Arkansas is being as inclusive as possible, and believes that Missouri should be included in the definition of Southern.

To me there is very much a Southern feel to James Purdy's books. But is he considered southern? He grew up in Ohio. I lived for a short time in central Ohio and not only did the area seem in some way Appalachian, it was the only place I've heard 'she' pronounced with three syllables.

I've never heard of Purdy mentioned as a Southern writer, but this is a very interesting point, and I like the remark about the three-syllabled 'she'. As I've suggested above, Ohio doesn't conventionally seem to fit into a definition of 'Southern', but perhaps it's a strong borderline candidate.

Isn't there some vague sensiblity, perhaps of the grotesque, in Southern writing that transcends location?

Fascinating question. The plot thickens.

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[lionel]

'Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles towards Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody's face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon my Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it) - when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back "Don't" and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.'
　
This amazing first sentence - all 192 words of it - marked the debut of a major novelist. Reynolds Price is from North Carolina, and was praised by, among others, Harper Lee and Eudora Welty for this book, A Long and Happy Life (1962), also the first book in the Mustian trilogy. Constance Rooke called it 'a clarion call announcing the start of a long career', and Price continues that distinguished career today, although he is surprisingly little known.

In Understanding Reynolds Price, James A. Schiff calls the language 'sexually charged', and although he notes Price's ability to 'cross gender lines', he also realises that Price is in a sense proclaiming, and rejoicing in, his homosexuality in many of his works: 'Price seems far more interested, at least in his Mustian novels, in male sexuality and beauty. The central erotic figure in each Mustian novel is a desirable, handsome, and virile male [...], who attracts the gaze of women and men alike'. Price has turned around the norm: Rosacoake is just as (if not more than) central to the book as Wesley, but it's the male rather than the female body that is seen as sexually exciting.

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[lionel]

Olive Ann Burns (1924-90) was brought up in Commerce, Georgia, educated in Macon, Georgia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and spent a number of years working for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was during her fight with cancer that she decided to write a novel, Cold Sassy Tree, a book set in 1906 and 1907, modeled on Commerce, and published in 1984.
　
How does a person react to a book like this that has all the attributes of a popular novel: it's frequently on school syllabuses, and - horror of horrors - the cover calls it a 'national bestseller': just the kind of thing I normally eschew. But then I began to apply to it what I believe are the special preoccupations of the Southern novel: race, religion, gender, and sexuality. It's rare that all attributes fit, but they do in this case, and this is in fact a fascinating, and in some respects brilliant, Southern novel.
　
It's a coming-of-age novel about the observations of a 14-year-old boy, narrated by the same person some years later. The story concerns E. Rucker Blakeslee, the owner of the general store and a 59-year-old widower of just three weeks who has decided to re-marry. The knowledge that Rucker is marrying again when the general opinion is that he should still be in mourning is enough to cause considerable anger in small town Cold Sassy, but the fact that this is a May-December relationship (Love Simpson is almost half his age), added to the fact that she comes from Baltimore, Maryland, and is therefore almost a Yankee in the eyes of those in the Deep South - the novel is set only some 40 years after the South lost to the Yankess, of course - makes matters far worse.
　
The narrator Will Tweedy is Rucker's nephew and he's very close to his grandfather. He often visits the couple and not only likes Love but also finds her sexually attractive, although that is as far as it, er, will go. But his rapid friendship with Love is, by various and unintentional means, the cause of Will's gaining access to privileged information about the couple. He learns, for instance, that this is a marriage of convenience, and that Rucker isn't sleeping with his wife but is in effect employing her as a housekeeper in return for deeding his house and furniture to her on his death. When Rucker's daughters become aware of this arrangement, they are understandably far from happy with the prospect of being largely disinherited.
　
But Rucker's death has not yet come, and both the reader and Love have to learn a lot more of Rucker, who is by appearances a mean, old-fashioned man, and of course a person whose property still has an earth closet and no electricity. After a visit to New York - and this is set during an era when a trip from Commerce to Atlanta and back, just 140 miles, was seen as an event - Love and Rucker not only become a little more friendly, but Rucker returns with the information that he is expanding his business into the nascent car sales trade: he is developiing from something of a Luddite to a modern man, such is the influence that Love (both capitalized and otherwise) is exerting on him. In the end, Rucker dies after just a year of marriage, but leaves Love pregnant.
　
So in what way is this novel particularly Southern, apart from the obligatory patterns of speech, the occasional mention of scuppernongs or grits, and the white trash from the mountains come down to be town lintheads? As the novel closes, we learn that the old sassafras tree - which gave the town its original name - has been felled to widen the road, and the town is to be renamed Progressive City. Although the narrator doesn't comment on the new name, the reader is no doubt expected to disapprove of it, but not to disapprove of progress itself. Rucker said that Cold Sassy would change its name over his dead body, which it does, but then he is a complex character anyway: he loved the 'Yankee' Love from afar almost from when he saw her, he is completely without racial prejudice, and he hates the violent Old Testament god that everyone around him worships. Love Simpson didn't really have to do so much to change Rucker, but in many ways she represents the New South transforming the Old South, and the marriage - consumated by the life growing within Love's womb - symbolizes a profound change. The future will not be easy, but at least there is room for considerable growth.
　
Very, very glad I read Cold Sassy Tree.

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[lionel]

I don't believe Ernest J. Gaines has been mentioned here, but having read Catherine Carmier and A Lesson before Dying, I have to say that I'm very impressed. Gaines, originally from Louisiana and certainly preoccupied by that state in his fiction, is a major writer, not just a major black writer as some perhaps foolishly classify him (and he's a wonderful writer on the taxonomy of color!). Gaines deserves to be read much more, and I'll come back to this in more detail.

 

[Sevigne]

T.R. Pearson = Southern English as she is spoken.

 

[lionel]

T.R. Pearson = Southern English as she is spoken.

Wow, many thanks for this, Sevigne! I don't recall ever hearing of Pearson, but this link looks fascinating: "A Conversation with T.R. Pearson" by Bella Stander.

Also, now I'm here, why has no one here - and I mean anywhere here - mentioned Madison Jones? Unfortunately, this Wikipedia link, small as the information it gives is, seems to be the best one around: Madison Jones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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[Sevigne]

T.R. Pearson's earliest books are his best...A Short History of a Small Place and The Last of How it Was are my favorites.

 

[lionel]

T.R. Pearson's earliest books are his best...A Short History of a Small Place and The Last of How it Was are my favorites.

Thanks again, Sevigne. As I've as yet no knowledge of Pearson as a writer, would you say this is because there was a falling off of some kind? Very often, I find that first and second books are the best, as all the things that the author wanted to say are there, and there's really nothing else to write. If success comes at or near the beginning, then it's sometimes artistic death. Other books are a postscript, maybe far better written as the craft is learned, but never with the same passion that drove the initial waggon.

Dunno. Just a thought.

 

[Sevigne]

Pearson dried up and published nothing for seven years after turning out six novels in just about as many years. Even if he did "fall off" you can read and enjoy what he wrote before he took a tumble.

 

[lenz]

I think it's only in being pretentious that we can ever make progress.

You might want to give this another think, Lionel.

 

[lionel]

You might want to give this another think, Lionel.

I'm not too sure about that, lenz. I think the dictionary, and people in general, have given the word a bad press. You're laying claim to something, attempting something, and I can't see what's wrong with that. Surely it's what progress is about.

Two writers that spring to mind - James Joyce and T. S. Eliot - are surely among the most pretentious writers ever. That's largely where their greatness comes from.

 

[lionel]

T.R. Pearson's earliest books are his best...A Short History of a Small Place and The Last of How it Was are my favorites.

Is there something wrong with Off for the Sweet Hereafter, though? I note that this novel's the second part of the trilogy in which the two novels you mention above stand on either side. Maybe the 400-word opening sentence made you want to throw it at the wall?

 

[Sevigne]

Couldn't remember.

 

[DB Cooper]

I'm testing things here, as I don't have any answers, only questions to a vast and diverse literary subject of which I'm merely a student. I don't like repeating myself too much, but many of my posts over the last few months here have concerned Southern literature, by which I mean the literature of the American South (and I capitalize that word as I think it's important to do so). What is the South? It depends on your perceptions, your ideology, etc, but after the obvious Texas (or is that in the south-west?), Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, where else do we include? Personally, I don't care, as long as there's a very strong Southern element (whatever that means) in a work. So, welcome Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, even West Virginia, Missouri and Maryland, and how about splitting states and including the extreme south of Illinois? It ain't easy, but nor is it easy to find the borders of, er, Southern mentality. And what does that mean? I don't know, which is why I'm just feeling my way around the subject. Sure, I could go to theses and books, but they might mislead me. But I'm certain that key issues in Southern fiction involve history, race, gender, sexuality, power, etc., in a way that the northern, central, and western states have never encountered. Southern literature, despite the warmer weather, seems to have extra layers of clothing, which makes it all the more fascinating to explore. What works am I talking about? This is where I repeat myself in order to gather posts to make things clearer, but in such a vast subject we have to begin with lists:

A few months ago, judges of Oxford American, a quarterly journal of the University of Central Arkansas, voted on the ten best Southern novels. Their verdict:

1. William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
2. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men
3. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
4. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
5. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer
7. William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
8. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
9. Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood
10. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

I have done some work with the Oxford American and am friends with many of the staff there. They do a wonderful job of finding funding, which is very hard, but every time the magazine is about to fold they are able to find a benefactor. Its getting increasingly hard to find investors for a literary magazine around here.

I was quite surprised that True Grit by Charles Portis didnt make it. He is a native, and his son, John Portis, lives in Little Rock and does some freelance writing in addition to working on his longer projects.

 

[lionel]

Couldn't remember.

So you probably didn't think too much of it, but didn't hate it enough to throw at the wall.

 

[lionel]

I have done some work with the Oxford American and am friends with many of the staff there. They do a wonderful job of finding funding, which is very hard, but every time the magazine is about to fold they are able to find a benefactor. Its getting increasingly hard to find investors for a literary magazine around here.

I was quite surprised that True Grit by Charles Portis didnt make it. He is a native, and his son, John Portis, lives in Little Rock and does some freelance writing in addition to working on his longer projects.

Have you any idea of the circulation? I imagine it must be very small. My only copy of Oxford American is getting pretty battered as there's so much interesting material in it. I've taken out a subscription, but would still probably be unaware of its existence if I hadn't chanced upon a copy in Barnes & Noble in Edgewood, Atlanta.

I've yet to read True Grit, but I'll rectify that soon enough. I note that the Coen brothers' remake is scheduled for 2011, and will be far more faithful to Portis's book than the Henry Hathaway. I like what Joel says about it: 'the book is just an oddity. It's a very odd book.'

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[DB Cooper]

Lionel, Im not sure of the circulation numbers but I agree they are surely quite small. They get a lot of support from the (dwindling) local bookstores. The OA partnered with the University of Central Arkansas who is helping greatly with expenses such as printing. Without their aid I highly doubt the magazine would still be alive and kicking.