I couldn’t be more pleased at the acceptance of your novel, though I had no doubt about it ever since I read the opening pages.  What I hope now is that you’ll come off the notion that you don’t want to go on with the work.  The novel is just what Lawrence called it, “the one bright book of life.”

The recipient is novelist Walker Percy; the novel in question is Percy’s seminal The Moviegoer.  The letter continues thus:

By the end of the month I expect to have killed Stonewall Jackson dead as a mackerel; which makes an excellent stopping place before I tackle the complexities of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The letter’s author, Shelby Foote, was hard at work on his own masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative.  His sprawling 3 volume, 1.5 million-word masterwork on the American Civil War took more than 20 years to write and is arguably the definitive work on the subject.  I say “arguably” because critics assail the fact that it reads more like a novel than “proper history,” something I consider to be a success rather than a failing.  If you want a line-by-line breakdown of the conflict, try some Bruce Catton.  Foote, on the other hand, crafts a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of the conflict while avoiding the tacky sentimentality of Ken Burns.

Percy (the adopted nephew of Lanterns on the Levee author William Alexander Percy), on the other hand, spent years honing his fiction and working on what Foote dubbed, “his apprentice novels.”  The Moviegoer, with its portrayal of New Orleans stock broker Binx Bolling’s post-war suburban ennui, would go on to win the 1961 National Book Award.

To be frank, I’m writing this entire piece to recommend Jay Tolson’s The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy.  Though most of the correspondence is from Foote (who, as a friend accurately points out, has the definitive Southern accent — when I imagine what God must look and sound like, it’s Shelby Foote), the collection reveals a deep bond between two masters of their craft and lays bare the anxieties, failings, ambitions, and ultimate successes of two giants of literature, Southern or otherwise.

School friends from Greenville, MS, Foote and Percy keep in close contact for over 40 years.  While Foote labors for decades on what he simply refers to as, “the narrative,” Percy soldiers on and writes Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and several other novels as well as scholarly articles.

Tolson’s collection is not only valuable as a connecting thread between two sharp literary minds; the book itself is readable from cover to cover, expertly edited and footnoted with explanatory bits for the more ambiguous references.  For fans of either writer, it’s a must.  If you’re new to one or both, it works as a pretty good introduction to the context of the works’ creation if not the works themselves.

Further reading:

UNC: The Walker Percy Project

YHP: There is exactly one way to make a mint julep

To say that director Martin Ritt plays it safe here is an understatement.  In 1958, a big budget movie about the South knew better than to touch on the issues of social and racial inequality that course through Faulkner’s work.  Ritt crafts a safe, “Sunny South” version of Faulkner with jovial black servants and scores of drawling but affable locals.  He hasn’t quite translated Faulkner to the big screen so much as he has sanitized him and extracted from his revolutionary fiction what amounts to little more than a gassy boy-meets-girl story.

Summer tells us less about Faulkner than it does the society that gave birth to it.  Ritt, once an accused communist whose schooling at North Carolina’s Elon University shocked him into a fascination with the rigidly stratified South, leaves no hint of his personality on this film.  The whitewash of Faulkner’s South is so weak-kneed and treacly that at one point, Ben Quick compares the size of a bedroom in the Varner manse to the size of his entire family home, prompting the black house manager to nod in a sort of familiar agreement, a scene seemingly designed to cement a bi-racial “us versus them” approach to Southern poverty.  Modern viewers’ eyes will roll early and often.

Still, Summer’s box office and critical success speak volumes about the prevailing view of the South, at least in contemporary cinema.  Watching this film, one gets a feeling that “it’s not as bad as all that,” that the black underclass is perfectly content to serve the aristocracy, that the grinding poverty of rural whites consisted of little more than lazily chewing tobacco outside the general store, and that the lily white flower of Southern womanhood need only receive an injection of strong farm stock to rescue her from the effete man of the New South.

If it’s Faulkner you want, you’ll only find him between two covers.  The Long, Hot Summer, however, plays less like “Barn Burning” and more like Song of the South.  Skip this and see The Accountant. Twice.

View the trailer here.

George Singleton

• Oxford American has a list of The Best Southern Novels of All Time.  1o novels, more or less all considered the greatest hits of the Southern Canon.  How many have you read?

• Finally, the surreal.  What’s more Southern than Sweet Home Alabama?  Love it or hate it, there’s something hysterically odd about hearing this perennial barroom favorite performed by a Finnish rock band backed the Soviet Red Army Choir.  I can’t wait for the comments on this one.

In Tobacco Road, his most well-known work, the Lesters, headed by the impossibly lazy and licentious Jeeter, are a sort of low-budget Snopes family.  Jeeter’s children have mostly left home for work in the cotton mills of west Georgia.  His daughter Pearl married a local railroad man at age 12.  The only children remaining at home are his disfigured daughter Ellie Mae and the borderline retarded Dude.  (Dude, however, eventually marries a disfigured “woman preacher” 20 years his senior and spends the rest of the novel idiotically crashing her car into various objects.)

In God’s Little Acre (made into a feature film, as all terrible books are, in 1958), Caldwell reprises his earlier hit with the Walden family.  Replacing laziness with a comically unbelievable “gold fever,” the Walden’s brain-dead paterfamilias, Ty Ty, occupies his time by digging vast pits on his fallow cotton land in search of a lode of gold.  The ensuing plot is of little consequence and seems to be little more than a shabby backdrop for his parody of rural idiocy.  The Waldens and their various in-laws do little more than have sex with one another indiscriminately and have mind-numbing conversations about the presence of gold on their crumbling farm.

Caldwell primarily traffics in ignorance and incest, making his characters either unbelievably stupid, unbelievably libidinous, or both.  In God’s Little Acre, Darling Jill Walden manages to sleep with pretty much every male in the novel, including a captive albino named Dave.  Her father is obsessed with her older sister’s breasts and often praises them loudly in public.  Also present is an impossibly dim and obese would-be sheriff named Pluto who may or may not have been the inspiration for Boss Hogg.

These novels are naked farces, and to an extent that absolves them of their failures.  Unlike the best examples of the genre, however, Caldwell falls back on cheap laughs and absurd sexual situations to provide ballast to his leaden narratives.  Though both novels briefly light upon serious issues (misuse of farm land and the sacrifice of the small farmer at the altar of greater profits), neither does more than indicate Caldwell’s awareness of social injustice and ruinous farming policies.

In short, neither novel is worth the reading.  They survive largely because they lampoon poor rural whites, and that is the last socio-economic group acceptable to abuse.  It is difficult to imagine any work of fiction whose reputation survives into the 21st century that treats any other group so roughly.  Caldwell fails as both satirist and cultural critic, and both novels would be better off relegated to the scrap heap of forgotten books.  His narratives are plodding and amateurish, his characters achingly one-dimensional, and his books will almost certainly make you wish you hadn’t read them.

Who cares?

His novels are engaging, readable, and present us with a version of the South that is rapidly disappearing.  Burke’s primary interest is the Cajun South, the bayou South, the French-speaking South that is rapidly being subsumed by larger interests.  Yes, he trafficks heavily in nostalgia for a long-gone cane-farming Cajun world, but ultimately that is part of his charm.  His novels are mysteries and feature characters who are knowable and accessible.  Their covers are cheap, yes, and appeal to airport travelers looking for a few hours’ entertainment.  This is a shame, and I do not blame him for it.  My time in the publishing industry taught me just how little control authors have over the way their work is marketed, and I imagine that somewhere on the bayou is a man who deeply resents the packaging his work has been given.

I first came across his work while working for his publishing company and have enjoyed it ever since.  His work is woefully packaged  as glossy, embossed-cover airport bullshit, but it’s so much better.  He is, despite the packaging, no Dean Koontz and I am immeasurably thankful for that.  Burke engages his readers in intellectual gamesmanship, daring them to penetrate not only the mystery at the heart of the novel itself, but the complex social structures that surround his bayou culture and make it viable as a novel setting.

So what does it tell us about the South?  Not very much that we didn’t know already.  Unlike inferior novelists, Burke does not rely on the South as a dramatic foil, nor does he use it to advance his plot when poor writing fails him.  Instead, he creates a swirling bayou world that is both engrossing and utterly believable.  Much more than airport fare, Burke’s work is as engaging as it is accessible.  Ignore the cheap book jackets and enjoy the books themselves.

In The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Singleton unpacks the lives of Forty-Five’s sparse population in short, comic sketches.   Common themes here are childhood friendship, alcoholism, and the uniquely small town phenomenon of the cheating spouse that everyone is aware of but the cuckold himself.

More than anything, The Half-Mammals of Dixie is funny.  It will make you laugh frequently and occasionally aloud.  But, like jokes delivered in rapid succession, they can become muddled if read all in one sitting.  Each story, while related to the other pieces in varying degrees, works as a stand-alone narrative that doesn’t rely on the rest of the collection for buttressing, and that may be Half-Mammal’s greatest strength — pull if off your shelf at random and read a story to lighten a bleak mood.  I frequently ask my girlfriend to read them to me when cooking, doing taxes, etc.  It’s really unbeatable for that sort of thing.

While Singleton ultimately lacks the sophisticated prose styling of later Rash (buy yourself a copy of One Foot in Eden or, even better, Serena) or Berry’s inimitable sense of place, his work succeeds in providing sharp comic sketches of rural life with taut prose and impeccable narrative pacing.  But perhaps above all, there is no hint of corn-pone in Half-Mammals.  Singleton manages to keep the stories recognizable, relatable, and hilarious without once going for the low-brow “dumb cracker” joke.  There is not one single dead mule.  The humor is deft and original, and that alone warrants a read.

Sure, it’s not Faulkner.  But nothing is.

See also: George Singleton interviewed on IndieBound

And so we come to a book by Bob Brewer and Warren Getler alternately titled Rebel Gold: One Man’s Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy and the less unwieldy Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man’s Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy. The publisher seems to have tried out both titles to see which one would stick.  Regardless, it’s an ostensibly nonfiction book about a retiree who allegedly comes from a long line of treasure guardians and sets out to decipher their intricate code of carvings on rocks and trees in the Arkansas wilderness.

The alleged treasure belongs to the Knights of the Golden Circle, an order who, as the book would have us believe, was ultimately behind the Civil War and who ran the Confederacy as a sort of shadow government.  I’m not joking.  After the war was all but over, the KGC apparently decided to squirrel away vast amounts of gold in the Arkansas hills in order to finance the next war of secession, which they believed would come relatively soon.  And so, we are faced with a book in which a retiree and his wife chase around the woods with Radio Shack metal detectors and unearth Mason jars full of coins.  Wheee.

I’m going to be completely honest here: I didn’t finish this book.  I couldn’t.  That’s why this post is so delinquent; I kept putting it off for another day, hoping to finish this book and be able to write a review of it so punishingly snarky that it would make the authors weep with shame and self-reproach.  But I couldn’t.  I thumbed the last 100 pages or so, which seems to involve some sort of Confederate helicopter.  Again, not joking.  What I did read (the first 200 pages or so) was a deadly mixture of terrible narrative pacing, absurd logical leaps, and brutal and oppressive boredom.

We are expected to believe the following, among other gems:

1. An immensely wealthy group was secretly financing the Confederate government.  At a certain point they decided that, rather than pouring their remaining funds into the existing war, that they would tuck it away and wait for the next national bloodbath.

2. This immensely wealthy group chose to stash its money in Mason jars in the Arkansas wilderness rather than use, say, foreign banks.

3.  The Knights of the Golden Circle entrusted penniless backwoodsmen with the treasure’s safety.

4.  That, while much of the country was starving and their own families were living at subsistence level, these backwoodsmen dutifully guarded a vast hoard of wealth that could have made them rich beyond imagination, and did so out of some fierce loyalty to a twisted version of Lost Cause ideology.

5.  That there is some sort of massive cache of Confederate gold stored somewhere in Arizona, but if you get near it, helicopters will come and shoo you away.

So.  Needless to say, this book doesn’t contribute in any meaningful way to the discourse on the Southern condition.  It is a poorly written and dreadfully boring thing and relies solely upon conjecture and the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief in order to get the least bit of traction.  So why am I writing about it?

Because, as sad as it may be, it’s an effort to tie Southern culture (or at least elements of Southern history) to a larger milieu of broad, vaguely Masonic conspiracy theories.  In this case, the Civil War just happens to be a convenient target.  Brewer and Getler wield Southern history like a weapon and use its history in the cheapest of ways (the cover of the book is so low-rent as to be offensive).  They are essentially cashing in on America’s vague fascination with the otherness of Southern culture and landscape and cobbling together a silly conspiracy as a means to sell books.

I don’t begrudge them their right to capitalism.  I just wish they would take it somewhere else.

Cracker Culture is McWhiney’s most well-formed manifestation of his Celtic thesis.  Other books, like the slim and morbid Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, rely on it but don’t explore the idea in full.  Cracker Culture draws on 3 main points to link early Southern culture with Celtic heritage:

1. Early Southern people liked to get drunk.  Irish and Scottish people like to get drunk.
2. Early Southern people didn’t like to work and preferred to rely on herded cattle and swine to make a living, since it was easier than tilling and raising crops.  Same for Celtic peoples.
3. Early Southern people liked to have fun (see #1) and valued leisure above prosperity.  Same for the Celts.

Yes, these things are generally true.  And yes, much of Celtic culture that is lost even to Europe survives (or at least survived) in the Deep South.  In the chapter on hospitality, McWhiney quotes a Yankee traveler “The food generally amounts to no more than fried fatback and cornbread.”  And a Northerner noted ” that dyspepsia was a common complaint in Kentucky, as God knows it ought to be.”  That could describe the meals my grandparents spoke of and still ate into the 1990s.  Cornbread (which no one but Southerners truly know how to make — try ordering it elsewhere, and you get a vile, sweet yellow stuff unfit for human consumption), pork, buttermilk, field peas, and collards were a typical meal for my grandparents.

Celtic folk music also survives in the Deep South and informs Old Time and Bluegrass music to this day.

Yes, many if not most Caucasian Southerners are of Celtic extraction.  However, what McWhiney misses is that the Deep South is an extremely cosmopolitan place.  McWhiney loves to contrast the Celtic Southerners, with their love of whiskey, horse races, and knife fights, with the staid Ango-Saxon Northerners, with their pasty complexions and general love of industry and hatred of all things fun.  Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

The first problem here is that Southern culture (specifically music and cuisine) owes a great deal to African culture.  The banjo, after all, is derived from an African lute.  McWhiney also glosses over German, Dutch and English settlers and especially over the heavy population of French who settled the Southern Gulf coast (fun fact: Demopolis, AL was founded by French exiles from the Napoleonic Wars).

The second problem is that many of the attributes he ascribes to Southerners are endemic to basically all people.  People of all stripes enjoy fun and will generally avoid work if possible.  Were early Southerners primarily Celtic in descent?  Yes.  Does a Southerner’s distaste for work and love of fun equate a connection with Celtic culture?  Not in the least.

McWhiney’s idea is valuable in that it illustrates the connection between the New World and Old Europe as it pertains to the Deep South.  It’s certainly worth a read.  However, it also neglects large swathes of Southern culture and goes to great length to connect the slimmest of threads from Dixie to the Celtic hinterland.  Does it deserve a place on your bookshelf?  Sure.  Does it deserve to be taken as gospel?  Not a chance in hell.

The Southern tradition certainly bears its share of the guilt.  It’s easy enough to play those same 3 chords over and over and grind out South-as-genre work until the cows come home.  The recent SIBA awards list bears this out — though there are rare moments of masterful literary fiction like Ron Rash’s Saints at the River (even this is hardly his best work), most of it is treacly, sappy pap like Marley and Me or Because of Winn Dixie.  Good God.

So what is the current state of Southern lit?  Let’s consider 3 prevalent archetypes:

Trendy scholarship: dime-a-dozen academic work obsessed with race, class, and violence.  It paints the South’s white population with the broad brush of guilt and regards Southernness as a kind of pathology to be studied and eradicated like a communicable disease.  But for the moment, let’s discount academia.  Its motivations are clear enough.  I spent long enough inside it to see the man behind the curtain — class issues never go out of style in academia, but violence and trauma are all the rage and the American South is a convenient and plentiful source.  The victims and perpetrators are clearly delineated and the least amount of thought is required to churn out something tenure-worthy.

Absurd nostalgia: cutesy, South-as-genre work with all the trimmings.  Familiar tropes here are the placid simplicity of country life, the superior values of the pre-industrial South, and that the South never was all that racist to begin with and everyone’s just exaggerating.  Nostalgia for the Old South began almost as soon as the Old South itself had ended.  One of the earliest perpetrators was Thomas Nelson Page, who once declaimed that the Old South was “the purest, sweetest life ever lived” and that it “made men noble, gentle, and brave and women tender and pure.”  This, of course, is utter bullshit but it sold like hotcakes in the wake of Reconstruction as Southerners looked for a Golden Age on which to cling in order to maintain identity in the tumult of the South’s rapid industrialization.   Sadly, it didn’t end there.  C. Vann Woodward noted that the New South’s “most significant invention” was the Old South, and what an enduring invention it was.  We are still bombarded with antebellum romance, as well as nostalgia pieces reaching throughout the early to mid 20th century.  Think Fried Green Tomatoes.*

Lampoon: Ah, this old chestnut.  Some hapless out-of-towner lands in some small Southern burg. Hijinks ensue.  The South itself is a foil, and the locals enjoy having puckish fun at the confused (usually northern) traveler.  The reverse is also prevalent;  a Southerner finds himself elsewhere and completely incapable of acclimating.  As Ray McKinnon in The Accountant says, “Gomer, Goober, Cletus, Enos, Jethro, Ellie May, Billy Bob?  Don’t insult my intelligence.”  The list of dim-witted, slow speaking Southerners in literature and film is endless and shows no signs of abating.

The intention of this post is not to enumerate the ways in which the South abashes itself literarily, but rather to ask “why do we keep doing it?”  Certainly, it’s profitable.  People find some measure of comfort or romance in the Old South, despite its heavily constructed identity and this is mostly harmless.  Similarly, people enjoy laughing at the dimwitted hillbilly or the unschooled redneck.  The problem here is that South-as-genre work is no more reflective of the actual South than the Dukes of Hazard (filmed in California, of course).   The plantations are long gone.   The internet et al has done more to homogenize the US than Reconstruction ever dreamed of.  There are no more country stores,  no more old men playing checkers and going on about the weather.  There are strip malls and interstate highways. There is Applebees and Target.

The South that South-as-genre fiction describes no longer exists.  And yet Southerners are complicit in its creation, reveling in both the glorification and humiliation that it brings.  Why?  I suspect the answer is very simple: we wish it did exist and genre fiction, no matter how poorly done, can resurrect it, if only momentarily.

*I quote here from James Cobb’s Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.

Malcolm Gladwell: Film Buff

In a review aptly titled Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, philosopher and critic (and a man upon whose work much of my graduate studies orbited) Terry Eagleton says the following of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”  Much the same could be said of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay in the New Yorker (natch) entitled “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and The Limits of Southern Liberalism.”

Before we go further, let’s accept that Gladwell, who Wikipedia refers to as “a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist” has likely never been to the South, save some airport-to-airport junket hawking his latest bit of pop-psych tripe.  We can be even more certain that Gladwell has never visited the South in question, that of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  Yet, Gladwell has managed to limn the crudest of understandings of Civil Rights-era Southern politics from Lee’s venerable novel and extrapolated from it the psychological makeup of Southerners.

Gladwell’s thesis is essentially this: that Atticus Finch, protagonist of Lee’s novel, was not a Civil Rights hero ahead of his time but a coward, a Folsomite, twiddling his thumbs while his fellow man endured unjust prosecution.  Rather, Gladwell would have preferred the bookish Atticus to at the very least stage a sit-in on the courthouse steps or even swashbuckle through the courtroom, pistols in each hand, prepared to go down in a blaze of glory for what he believed.

In short, Gladwell watched a movie, grossly misunderstood the social context in which it occurs, and ground out a ham-fisted essay in which his ultimate conclusion is that Southern liberalism is hamstrung by cowardice, and that is ever the way it shall be.

Perhaps most pitiable aspect of the article is that Gladwell seems to genuinely believe he has uncovered *gasp* that the Jim Crow South was an extremely unjust and unequal era in which to exist, and that’s putting it mildly.  My God, Gladwell has opened a veritable Pandora’s box of injustice — Tom Robinson’s innocence, Mayella’s machinations as well as incestuous relationship with her father, et al — all, presumably by reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  Well, let’s be fair — he’s less concerned about the novel than the movie — he rarely cites the text, opting instead to rely on Hollywood’s version of Atticus Finch to prove his point about Southerners.

Much of what I could say to impugn Gladwell’s argument has been said here and said well.  However, for argument’s sake I’ll throw in some anecdotal evidence as to just how naive and poorly formed Gladwell’s thesis is.

When my father was a small boy in the 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his family’s yard.  No one was hurt and he, his father and his brothers doused the flaming cross with water quite immediately, but the sinister intent was not lost on them.  They were farmers of, among other things, cotton, and had contracted a black family to help them bring in that year’s cotton crop.  They housed the black family in their house, ate with them at the same table and generally treated them as neighbors treat one another when both parties have the good sense to see past race. Needless to say, someone took offense and by supper time a fiery cross lit up the windows of my grandparents’ front room.

Racial violence in the South was truly, horrifyingly real.  Gladwell seems to want Atticus Finch (or perhaps just Gregory Peck) to become some kind of John Brown, storming arsenals and making demands.  What he pathetically misunderstands is that yes, Finch is playing the game, but he’s playing the game in such a way that will keep the maximum number of people, both black and white, alive and unharmed.  Finch’s unwillingness to be a revolutionary figure seems to have damned all Southerners in Gladwell’s esteem as spineless, ambivalent twiddlers, more content to slowly schlep defeated out of a courtroom than to start a revolution.

Atticus Finch, Che Guevara though he was not, stood and continues to stand as a man who acted according to his beliefs and defied a system of repressive violence, putting his own well-being and that of his family at risk by doing so.  While Gladwell may want him to have started a revolution, Finch won a timeless, if bloodless victory, simply by being right.

I have to thank alert reader and dear friend since time immemorial Lindsey Carmichael for alerting me to this.  Even though it made me furious, I still adore her.