Featuring:
Also, Ferrol Sams, James Dickey, Robert Inman, Louis Rubin, Ellen Glasgow, Kate Chopin, Lee Smith, Alice Walker
I
The memoir of an English veterinarian. Somehow, it didn’t sound like a book that I would want to read. But the reviews and the testimonials of friends finally began to wear down my resistance, and James Herriot did not disappoint. From the very first page of All Creatures Great and Small I was swept along by the story-telling charm of a gifted writer from an unexpected place. This was 1973, still a troubled time in America with the continued rumblings of racial unrest and a war still raging in Vietnam, and the first intimations of a national scandal that would bring down a president.
As I read Herriot's wry and warm-hearted stories, delivered against this backdrop of gloom, I discovered a most welcome reprieve. This, however, was more than escape. Herriot was not only a fine storyteller, but he was also a man who understood human nature. His real name was James Alfred Wight, and in 1939, at the age of twenty-three, he began a veterinary practice in the Yorkshire Dales, an often cold and windswept land, where a sturdy band of farmers raised their cattle and horses and sheep. For more than twenty years, Herriot simply told his stories by the fire, but he also nursed a desire to write, to capture the humor and wisdom of his neighbors as they coaxed a hard-earned living from the land. He became convinced, as he rumbled along the rutted back roads, that the farther from civilization he traveled, the more fascinating the people seemed to be.
At the bottom of the valley, where it widened into a plain, the farmers were like farmers everywhere, but the people grew more interesting as the land heightened, and in the scattered hamlets and isolated farms near the bleak tops I found their characteristics most marked; their simplicity and dignity, their rugged independence and their hospitality.”
Sometimes their stories were touching and sad, as when Herriot told of a visit to a farm where an old man lived alone with his dog, his wife having died the previous year. “He’s my only friend now,” the old man said. “I hope you’ll soon be able to put him right.” But Herriot discovered an inoperable tumor, and suggested that the dog—a fourteen-year-old Labrador retriever—be put to sleep. The patient, he explained, was already in pain and it would only get worse.
The old man was silent, then he said, ‘Just a minute,’ and slowly and painfully knelt down by the side of the dog. He did not speak, but ran his hand again and again over the grey old muzzle and the ears, while the tail thump, thump, thumped on the floor.
He knelt there a long time while I stood in the cheerless room, my eyes taking in the faded pictures on the walls, the frayed, grimy curtains, the broken-springed armchair . . .
Herriot, of course, is not the only writer to tell such stories. Fred Gipson did it earlier in Old Yeller, and Willie Morris soon followed with My Dog Skip. But in Herriot’s case, whatever his tender regard for his patients—the four-legged kind—he was moved most deeply by the grace of their owners. He somehow managed, page after page, to keep his sentimentality at bay, sometimes skating, purposefully, perilously, close to the edge. But in the end his stories displayed a deft sense of timing, a pacing, which held the attention of a few million readers, including me.
Throughout the course of more than four hundred pages, we came to share in his irrepressible delight, not that the land and the work weren’t hard, even backbreaking, nor feelings of loss a constant possibility in a life spent working so closely with animals. But in these mountains, he found a rhythm and an authenticity, and from time to time a certain perversity in human nature that offered a ready supply of entertainment. Once, for example, Herriot was chatting with a colleague named Grier, a crochety old vet who told him the story of an ungrateful client—a former British admiral who once had Grier examine his horse. Grier warned that the animal had a bad heart, and the admiral, having hoped for a different diagnosis, took the horse to another veterinarian who pronounced him sound. Herriot picks up the story from there:
The admiral wrote Grier a letter and told him what he thought of him in fairly ripe quarter-deck language. Having got this out of his system he felt refreshed and went out for a ride during which, in the middle of a full gallop, the horse fell down dead and rolled on the admiral who sustained a compound fracture of the leg and a crushed pelvis.
“Man,” said Grier with deep sincerity, “man, I was awfu’ glad.”
It so happened that not long after reading James Herriot, I set to work on a first book of my own and was delighted in 1976 when it was accepted for publication by St. Martin’s Press. This was Herriot’s publisher, and my feelings about All Creatures Great and Small only grew warmer when I learned the backstory—confided by a bemused editor—of the press’s acceptance of my own modest work. It seems there had been an editorial meeting at which my book was judged to be tidy enough, but questions were raised about whether it would sell. I was, after all, a literary nobody.
“Well,” my editor was reported to have said, “we’ve got James Herriot. I suppose we could take a chance on Gaillard.”
II
Not long after this happy development I came upon a new storyteller, another man of healing who plied his trade in Fayetteville, Georgia. Ferrol Sams was a good country doctor, whose patients, unlike Herriot’s, tended to be of the human variety. Both writers were products of the same generation, Herriot born in 1916, Sams in 1922, and they had a similar storytelling style: each inclined to see the humor in things, perhaps as ballast for a corollary sadness.
Sams’s first novel, Run with the Horsemen, appeared in 1982 about the time the author turned sixty. I thought as I settled in with the story that it was unlike any Southern novel I had read. It took me a while to figure out the difference, but then it came to me clear as a bell: there was no urgency or anguish about this book, no particular sense of regional suffering. It was a coming-of-age novel morphing out of memoir, set in Georgia during the Depression. There were inevitable references to poverty and race, but it was primarily a book of gentle recollection with an edginess rooted chiefly in humor.
That was not the case for most Southern writing in the twentieth century. Regardless of the ideology of the author, there was pain at the heart of most Southern stories, a sense of a time and a place deeply troubled. That was certainly the case in 1902 when Thomas Dixon wrote The Leopard’s Spots, and two years later, a follow-up novel called The Clansman. Now largely forgotten, Dixon was arguably the first superstar of Southern letters. Not that we would claim him today. A racist to his core, he believed that blacks had caused the Civil War, and, once freed by the tragic defeat of the South, were returning to a natural state of bestiality.
The remarkable thing about Dixon’s premise is that most white people in America believed it. Millions of them read his books, and a few years later he wrote a screenplay with the same basic theme, The Birth of a Nation, that soon became the most popular movie of the silent-screen era. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson arranged a special showing at the White House. He pronounced the story—with its exaltation of the Ku Klux Klan—“so terribly true” and famously said it was “like writing history with lightning.”
Ideology aside, it was a story of suffering, and so, of course, was Gone With the Wind, which appeared in 1938, as Margaret Mitchell supplanted Thomas Dixon as the most popular Southern writer of her time. Her characters also were sifting through the ruins of the Civil War, filled with nostalgia about the Southern past and feelings of urgency about the future. And then in 1949, when Lillian Smith turned the Old South ideology on its head, she, too, in Killers of the Dream, set out to explore the anguished Southern soul.
Much of it had to do with race, though there was also the related issue of poverty—a reality explored directly by James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and indirectly in much of Southern fiction, from Robert Penn Warren to Flannery O’Connor. Even as late as 1970, it was present, you could argue, in James Dickey’s Deliverance, a swashbuckling novel of four city slickers who brave the wilds of the north Georgia mountains. The primary reason for Deliverance’s popularity—and it became iconic—was Dickey’s great gift as a storyteller; that, and the poetic beauty of his prose:
It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north. Lewis’ hand took a pencil and marked out a small strong X in a place where some of the green bled away and the paper changed with the high ground, and began to work downstream, northeast to southwest through the printed woods. I watched the hand rather than the location, for it seemed to have power over the terrain, and when it stopped for Lewis’ voice to explain something, it was as though all streams everywhere quit running, hanging silently where they were to let the point be made. The pencil turned over and pretended to sketch in with the eraser an area that must have been around fifty miles long, through which the river hooked and cramped.
“When they take another survey and rework this map,” Lewis said, “all this in here will be blue . . .”
Dickey didn’t develop these skills by accident. A graduate of Vanderbilt University where he double-majored in English and philosophy (and minored in astronomy), Dickey was also a football star and former fighter pilot. He began publishing poetry in 1960 and in 1965 his collection, Buckdancer’s Choice, won a National Book Award. “It has a passionate quality,” the New York Times said of the collection, “. . . a kind of carefully separated madness that makes it one of the remarkable books of the decade.”
In Deliverance, his debut novel, Dickey constructed a new sense of madness, an animating danger that sprang from depravity—a predatory violence among the poverty-stricken people of southern Appalachia. So wretched and crazed are these mountain dwellers that they are driven to mayhem, murder and rape, and four suburbanites, who have come to see a mountain river before it is dammed, are caught in a desperate struggle to survive. In James Dickey’s mind, the South—even on the precipice of major change—could still be a terrifying place.
But in the writing of Ferrol Sams it was not, and similar books soon followed. In 1987, first-time author Robert Inman, a North Carolinian by way of Alabama, published Home Fires Burning, a novel set in a small Southern town. It is a home-front story from World War II: an aging generation of leaders—a newspaper editor, a small-town mayor—awaiting, with double-edged anticipation, the return of their sons from the European theater. They sense already, as the war is winding down, that their own time is beginning to pass, and the future will belong to somebody else. There is thus a seriousness at the heart of the story, but it is written with elegant humor and affection; an author clearly at ease with his place.
“Just telling a story,” Inman once explained when I asked him about his hopes for the novel.
It struck me then, intuitively at least, that one reason for this change in the literary South—this kinder, gentler era of Southern writing—was a shift in the psyche of the region itself. It began to take shape in the 1970s; somewhere in there it dawned on us that we had shed the great albatross of our existence: that officially codified racism which seemed in retrospect to be so absurd. Had we really had white and colored signs? Separate drinking fountains? Requirements for seating in the back of the bus? Not only had these tangible symptoms disappeared, but somehow the civil rights movement itself, which seemed at first to have simply slipped away—as one writer put it, “like a piece of driftwood beneath the surface of the water”—in fact for a time had been largely absorbed. Its broader assumptions about brotherhood and justice, if not fully realized, had become a part of mainstream thinking, and the benighted South, now all of a sudden, seemed to be leading the way for the nation.
For a time, at least, that was how it felt, and I can remember precisely the moment when all of these things came into focus. It was the summer of 1976, and a white Southern governor named Jimmy Carter had won his party’s nomination for president. Nearly six years earlier Carter burst upon the national scene when he declared in his inaugural address in Georgia, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” Now here he was at the Democratic National Convention, sharing the stage with Martin Luther King Sr.—two Georgians, one black, one white, reaching out across the divide. There was a feeling almost of old-time revival as King closed his eyes and declared with a passion that had long been his trademark: “Surely the Lord is in this place.”
Whatever the religious implications of the moment, the Southern implications were immense, becoming more so the following January when Carter became president of the United States. It was clear to all of us by then that the South was no longer the national stepchild, the perpetual embarrassment that the rest of America didn’t want to discuss. Our celebration spread quickly from politics to culture, beginning with music, as great Southern bands from the Allman Brothers to Lynard Skynard helped make us proud, unequivocally, at last, to be the sons of Sweet Home Alabama.
III
When these same feelings spread to literature, when fine Southern writers no longer felt shackled by apology or shame—or even an appropriate display of Southern anguish—one of my favorites among the new storytellers would soon become a good friend. Clyde Edgerton was a North Carolinian by birth, a member of the first generation in his family to move away from the farm. His daddy’s family raised tobacco, his mama’s cotton, and when they moved to the little town of Bethesda, just outside of Durham, they were still not far from extended family. There were, by actual count, twenty-three aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, most of them living out in the country, where young Clyde loved to hunt and fish.
He was an only child, close to both parents, and partly because of those early years he became that rarest of literary creatures, a happy writer. As a teenager he was a good student with a good sense of humor, and his adolescent passions included baseball and music. Edgerton was fairly good at both, and he also read a little on the side. Mark Twain was one of his favorites, but his love of literature didn’t hit full stride until he went away to the University of North Carolina. There, he read Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and later the stories of Flannery O’Connor, and decided he wanted to be an English teacher.
It was the kind of decision he would make several times in the course of his life: very deliberate and rational, reflecting a healthy, good-humored confidence that he could accomplish whatever he set out to do. Military service intervened before he began his career as a teacher (he was a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force), but when he came home to North Carolina he took a job at his old high school. He quickly discovered that he loved to teach, loved to share with his students his own growing passion for the written word. He had not yet started to write, but then one day, May 14, 1978, he saw the great Mississippian, Eudora Welty, reading one of her stories on public television.
It was a short story called “Why I Live at the P.O.,” an edgy account of family dysfunction, published in A Curtain of Green, Welty’s first book. So enthralled was Edgerton that he made the following entry in his diary:
“Tomorrow, May 15, 1978, I would like to start being a writer.”
Seven years later his first novel appeared, and the critical acclaim was instantaneous. Raney told the story of a mixed Southern marriage—the rocky union between a girl who grew up Free Will Baptist and a young man who was raised Episcopalian. Among the humorless within the ranks of Southern Christians, the novel brought forth gasps of horror. But in other quarters it was widely regarded as brilliant satire, and it was chosen by the New York Times as one of the notable books of 1985.
“This book is too good to keep to yourself,” concluded the Richmond Times Dispatch. “Read it aloud with someone you love.” And the New Yorker praised Edgerton for “his tolerant humor and his alertness to the human genius for nonsense.”
For me, those qualities were in even greater abundance in Walking Across Egypt, Edgerton’s second book. It occurred to me within a few pages that this was one of the funniest, most warmhearted stories that I had ever read, and three or four readings later nothing about that impression has changed. Edgerton told me in one conversation that the book took shape around a story from his mother. It seems that one day at the age of eighty, she had taken a seat in her old, familiar chair without realizing that the bottom had been removed, apparently to be reupholstered. She became stuck and thirty minutes passed before the moment of rescue. Edgerton knew when he heard the story that he had to write it.
He invented the character of Mattie Rigsbee, a seventy-eight-year-old small-town widow who wishes she were a grandmother, but her two grown children have not yet obliged. Mattie talks often about “slowing down,” by which she means she’s starting to grow a bit forgetful, and one of the things she happens to forget is that she—like Edgerton’s mother in real life—has removed the bottom of a rocking chair to have it redone. One day after lunch she goes to her den to watch a soap opera on TV and quickly realizes she has made a mistake:
Ah, the commercial—New Blue Cheer—was still on. She had started sitting down when a mental picture flashed into her head: the chair without a bottom. But her leg muscles had already gone lax. She was on the way down. Gravity was doing its job. She continued on past the customary stopping place, her eyes fastened to the New Blue Cheer box on the TV screen, her mind screaming no, wondering what bones she might break, wondering how long she was going to keep going down, down, down.
Mattie discovers she is thoroughly stuck, her bottom barely an inch from the floor, her arms and legs pointed straight up, and there she remains until a dogcatcher arrives at her house:
He walked around to the backyard, looked for a dog. There: a fice on the back steps. He wondered if that was the dog he was supposed to pick up. The back door was open. He looked in through the screen, glanced down at the dog. Dog’s a little tired or something, he thought. He looked back inside. “Anybody home?”
“Come in. Please come in.”
He opened the door and stepped into the den. The room was dark except for the TV and someone sitting . . . Damn, she didn’t have no neck at all. That was the littlest person he’d ever . . . Wait a minute. What in the world was . . . ?
It spoke: “I’m stuck in this chair.”
If, as Eudora Welty once said, good writing is a matter of learning to see, learning to hear, and finding a voice, Edgerton clearly has done all three. But it is his ear, I think, that sets him apart, his ability to hear the way his characters think and talk. What he hears most in Walking Across Egypt is a kind of relentless, counterintuitive logic coming from the mind of Mattie Rigsbee. She has lately been reading her Bible a lot, perhaps a bit more seriously than in the past, and she fixates on a particular verse.
“That scripture,” she says, “Jesus talking about visiting prisoners and all, was ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have done it unto me.’” It is, of course, one of the most radical pronouncements in the Bible, and when Mattie begins to take it seriously, people around her reach the only conclusion they can—the only one that makes any sense in the small-town world in which they are living: they assume that Mattie has lost her mind.
Specifically, they are worried that she has taken in a juvenile delinquent, a teenager named Wesley Benfield, nephew of the dogcatcher who saved her from the bottomless chair. Wesley has stolen a car and been sent away to the Young Men’s Rehabilitation Center. When Mattie goes to visit him there, Wesley is at first astonished, and then concludes that this old woman must be his grandmother.
Everything unfolds from there in scenes that range from slapstick to poignant. In the process Mattie Rigsbee takes her place, certainly for people who have read this book, as one of the unforgettable characters in American fiction. No matter that Walking Across Egypt is fundamentally a lighthearted story, at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic writers that Edgerton admired. This is a splendid piece of storytelling, as cheerful as it is well-crafted, and when it appeared in 1987 Clyde Edgerton, at the age of forty-three, modestly, confidently assumed his role as one of the fine new writers in the country.
Actually, he was part of a movement of sorts, one of several emerging authors discovered in the 1980s by a veteran editor named Louis Rubin. Born in 1923 to a Jewish family in South Carolina, Rubin was a journalist turned literary scholar. His interests were vast, the subjects of his own books ranging from baseball to Jewish history to an early biography of Thomas Wolfe. But his greatest contribution, almost certainly, was the way in which he embodied the link between the Southern literary present and past. In addition to writing about Thomas Wolfe, he also explored the work of Ellen Glasgow, a beautiful, aristocratic Virginian who produced a steady stream of novels from 1897 until 1942, ultimately winning the Pulitzer Prize. Glasgow was a woman ahead of her time, writing The Descendant in 1897, a novel in which, as one critic put it, “an emancipated heroine seeks passion rather than marriage,” a scandalous choice in Victorian Virginia. Glasgow also wrote The Ancient Law, a novel set in the textile mills of Virginia, exploring the social ills of that particular form of capitalism; and she arranged for the posthumous publication of The Woman Within, her own writer’s memoir. In it she acknowledged, among other things, an extended affair with a married man.
In her fearless honesty, she has been compared by some to Kate Chopin, another brilliant and beautiful Southerner who began her career in the 1890s. Chopin, writing in her adopted state of Louisiana, first raised eyebrows with her short story, “Desiree’s Baby,” published in Vogue in 1893 and then in her collection, Bayou Folk, in 1894. The story, on its face a kind of post-Victorian romance, explored the unexpected themes of miscegenation and racial prejudice. And then in 1899 Chopin stirred even greater controversy with her novel, The Awakening, a multilayered story of a woman’s sexuality: a startling reflection, or so it was said, of the writer’s own romantic life. At the very least she was, like Glasgow, an author who pushed her writing to the edge.
Louis Rubin, who studied the South in all of its dimensions, did not want to see such writers forgotten. In 1957 he joined the faculty of Hollins College in Virginia, and there in addition to his work as a scholar, he helped promote the work of two student writers, Lee Smith and Annie Dillard, both of whom went on to greater fame. Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 with the publication of her first book, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. Smith too became a national best seller, almost as well-known for her generosity to other writers as for her string of brilliant novels, Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies, and The Last Girls, among many others.
In 1982, after a stint at the University of North Carolina, Rubin and editor Shannon Ravenel, another Hollins graduate, founded Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a national trade publisher based in the South. Some in their impressive stable of new authors wrote with the same artistry and darkness that had long been a staple among Southern writers. Kaye Gibbons’s first novel, Ellen Foster, explored harsh themes of racism and domestic violence, and in Larry Brown’s debut, Dirty Work, two hideously wounded military veterans—one black, one white—form a friendship as they lie in adjacent hospital beds.
These were powerful, disturbing books, but other Algonquin authors, including Clyde Edgerton and Jill McCorkle, leavened their serious themes with humor. And there was also Dori Sanders, perhaps the most unusual of Louis Rubin’s finds.
Sanders was a peach farmer, an African American from a family still living close to the land. In 1915, her father, Marion Sylvester Sanders, a former sharecropper and son of a slave, bought eighty-one acres near the community of Filbert, South Carolina. Mr. Sanders was a man of intensity and will who worked his way through college, became a public school principal, and instilled in his children—especially Dori, the seventh of ten—a lifelong love of reading and books.
Still, she had never thought seriously of writing one herself until the day in the 1980s when she was working at her family’s peach stand. She saw two funeral processions passing by, one white, one black, winding slowly through the rural countryside. Caught in the palpable moment of sadness—these two processions so close together—she was deeply moved by the image of a child waving shyly from the back of a car. Sanders felt her imagination roam, mixing the two processions together, and she wondered what would happen if a child of ten in one of these lines—a little black girl, grieving for her father—found herself alone with a widowed stepmother. And what if the stepmother were white?
For weeks and even months after that, Sanders wrote scenes on scraps of paper, tossing them into a paper bag. Eventually, she pulled them out and began to arrange them on the floor, pondering how a story might fit together. Such was Louis Rubin’s skill as an editor that he and his partner, Shannon Ravenel, were able to help Sanders “work it like a puzzle.” The result was her debut novel, Clover, published in 1990 to rave reviews and almost immediate international acclaim.
“Sanders sews these family scenes together like a fine quilt maker,” proclaimed the Washington Post. And the Chicago Tribune declared: “Sanders writes with wit and authority in this unusual gem of a love story.”
What she produced, it seemed to me, was essentially the anti-Color Purple. Eight years after Alice Walker’s masterpiece, which won a Pulitzer Prize with its scenes of domestic violence and rape, here was a novel full of tenderness and hope. Clover was set, like The Color Purple, in the rural South, a terrain that Sanders understood well. In Clover she offers a confident portrayal, nothing glossed over, no pulled punches, her characters complicated and flawed. But her fictional world is not as hopeless, as fundamentally dehumanized, as the lives of Alice Walker’s characters. The world Sanders knew was not that way. It was true that growing up in the 1940s she saw the handiwork of the Ku Klux Klan and felt the insensitivity of racial segregation. But she also came from a family of achievers, loved a father who believed in education. Hers was an extended family who found fulfillment on a farm, and there was also this: through her educator-father she was keenly aware of the possibility of kindness.
She heard him speak with reverence about the philanthropy of Julius Rosenwald, the self-made president of Sears, Roebuck and Company. In the early years of the twentieth century, Rosenwald, working closely with Booker T. Washington, helped build fifteen thousand schools for African American children in the South. Dori herself attended one of those schools, and she heard her father speak often of this Jewish man from Illinois (raised, he noted, just up the street from where Abraham Lincoln had lived) who had left such a powerful legacy of progress.
The simple notion that things can get better, that barriers can fall before the force of good will, is the fundamental story line of Clover. It is a message wrapped in the storyteller’s art, delivered with the irony and charm of a ten-year-old narrator. Human foolishness and frailty are on full display. But our better angels are present as well, those moments of shared humanity and promise that are also a part of the human condition.
It’s a realm that writers need not forsake, and Dori Sanders—like James Herriot, and like Clyde Edgerton—understands the literature of that truth.