All cities have their secret venues known only to insiders or the native born. Every Southern city has its own splendid enclave of privilege where the very rich build their mansions in earthly paradises that block most intrusions from the rowdiness and havoc of the outside world. Katherine Clark grew up in the magical kingdom of Mountain Brook, a forested chapel of ease that looks like God’s own dream of a suburb. It is Alabama’s answer to the Garden District in New Orleans, or Atlanta’s Buckhead or Charleston’s South of Broad. Overlooking the battle-scarred city of Birmingham, it remained aloof and barely touched by the brutal struggles of the protestors for civil rights against police dogs, fire hoses, and all the shameful laws in the Jim Crow South. When the explosion at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four black girls dressed in their Sunday best, my friend, the novelist Anne Rivers Siddons, was staying at a sorority sister’s house in Mountain Brook. When Annie heard the news, and questioned the parents of her sorority sister about what had happened on the streets of Birmingham, she was told again and again, “It’s nothing to worry your pretty little head about, Annie.”
That is Mountain Brook. It’s the second most important character in Katherine Clark’s marvelous debut novel, The Headmaster’s Darlings. And what a powerful character it becomes in her satirical view of the pampered location of her childhood. Looking down on a city of steel and iron, it served as an island of reprieve for the honored families lucky enough to inhabit its grand estates. It was built beneath the canopy of a hardwood forest and rose up as a communal ode to perfect taste. Like an Umbrian hill town, Mountain Brook can wound an outsider with its uncommon beauty, its inlaid tastefulness, and its proud rebuttal to all forms of excess or lack of restraint. This is a place that will always possess a quiet sublimity that maintains its own love story to a vanishing South. With its manicured gardens and sloping lawns and the lush, green rivers of golf courses cutting behind the margins of its famous houses, Mountain Brook would seem to be the happiest place to grow up for a white child in the South. It is an elegant, cutoff world of such languorous, slow-moving beauty that it appears as isolated and innocent as the Shire in Tolkien’s fantasy universe. Children spend summer days by the pool at the country club in sight of a golf course as green and well-tended as they are. In the evenings there are debutante balls where young women celebrate their fresh flowering into womanhood and young men dazzle in the sheer glory of their prime under starry Alabama nights. But the town, in all the directions of the compass, finds itself surrounded by a real world that lies in wait.
Though Mountain Brook provides the setting for this novel, it has little to do with its prodigious heart. That belongs to the novel’s central character, the art and English teacher at Brook-Haven School, the outrageous and unforgettable Norman Laney. In a nation that does all too little to honor its teachers, Katherine Clark helps us to remember how a single man or woman in a classroom can light immeasurable fires in the imaginations of a whole generation of grateful students. Our teachers lead us by the hand toward the secrets that enlarge our vision, the deep mysteries of poetry, art, history and mathematics. They place us on those hidden pathways where our truest selves lie ready for awakening.
Norman Laney is the most magnificent teacher I’ve read about since I read A. S. Neill’s Summerhill in that impressionable year before I became a teacher myself. But I think now that Norman Laney is a far superior educator to A. S. Neill and I would have given up a year of my writing life to encounter such a man. As it was, I was taught English by three giants in their field: Joseph Monte, Gene Norris, and Millen Ellis. If I’d finished off my high school education with a year monitored by Norman Laney, I would have enjoyed the finest high school education in the beauties of the language of any boy who ever lived. Laney seems to extol the whole world in every breath he draws and opens that world to anyone he meets, student or adult. The world is his to give and savor, whether you have the willingness to accept his generous vision or not.
In many ways, Norman Laney serves as the anti-Mountain Brook, a poor white fat boy from a lower-middle class section of Birmingham who is called upon to teach in the most prestigious private high school in Alabama. He is a man of voluptuous, uncontrollable appetites, a great hippopotamus of a man. His obesity seems almost superhuman; his hugeness is a necessary ingredient in a personality that is loquacious and flamboyant to a fault. There is nothing trim or ship-shape about him. You come to believe while reading this Laneyesque novel that a small body could not contain such richness and raw fabulousness of a life well-lived, that a thin vessel could not contain such energy. Normal Laney, several hundred pounds and gaining weight by the chapter, hovers over this book and the souls of his students like the triumphant archangel casting Satan out of paradise.
It is his encounter with Mountain Brook society and its sons and daughters that forms the solid core of this work. He finds he enjoys life among the rich and he takes Mountain Brook by storm. But it is Laney who recognizes that he and his fellow teachers at Brook-Haven have a sacred responsibility to open up the possibilities of the outside world. For him, it is a credo that his students know there is brilliant, radiant life teeming with enlightenment and fulfillment outside their home state. He is indefatigable and can’t stop teaching from the time he wakes up in the morning until he puts his enormous girth to bed at night. He is sexless, but comes across as sexy and charismatic as he moves with ease and grace through the living rooms and salons of Mountain Brook. Yet individuals such as Norman Laney always have a hazardous gift for drawing ground fire from their enemies.
Like her unforgettable main character, Katherine Clark moves with ease through the dinner parties and soirees of Mountain Brook society. She was raised as a Southern belle in the 1960s and didn’t know until high school that her native city was one of the great battlegrounds of the Civil Rights Movement. She didn’t have a clue where the jail was in which Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his magnificent letter. But she has spent a lifetime reading and reflecting, not to mention four years at Harvard getting a college education. Now she trains that well-read, well-educated mind onto Mountain Brook, and what she has done is to create a world. This is something I always look for in fiction: Did the writer make me a world? The great writers know how to build a world for their readers, like Dickens does with London, Saul Bellow with Chicago, William Faulkner with Yoknapatawpha County. Katherine Clark knows how to capture a world, turn a phrase, tell a story, and write a comedy of manners that peels the beautiful layers off Mountain Brook society and shows the rancor and ugliness and tragedy below.
Story River Books is publishing The Headmaster’s Darlings with great pride and a serious commitment to Katherine Clark’s talent. This is the first of many novels that we are calling the Mountain Brook Series, the first of many that will bring to life the world of Mountain Brook and chronicle the fates of Norman Laney and his various darlings. Katherine Clark will write her name in the book of great Alabama writers, and she will long be remembered as the creator of Norman Laney, the greatest portrait of an American teacher I have ever read, immortalized, as I believe he richly deserves, by one of his golden girls, one of his darlings. Here’s how good this book is—for the rest of my life I will also be one of Norman Laney’s darlings.
PAT CQNROY