featuring:
Also, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, Isabel Wilkerson, Dot Jackson, Ron Rash, Charles Frazier, Robert Morgan, Thomas Merton, Leo Tolstoy, Larry McMurtry, Tom Peacock, Rebecca Skloot
As I was nearing the end of writing this book, my friend Tom Lawrence, a literary soul brother in Tennessee, called my attention to Admiral Robert Penn Warren and the Snows of Winter, a tiny book by William Styron. Published in 1978 by Palaemon Press in North Carolina, it consists essentially of a single essay in which Styron proclaims his debt to Robert Penn Warren. Among other things in these elegant pages, Styron remembers his discovery of All the King’s Men, in 1947, during a blizzard in New York City.
Somehow the excitement of reading All the King’s Men is always linked in my mind with the howling blizzard outside and the snow piling up in a solid white impacted mass outside my basement window. The book itself was a revelation and gave me a shock to brain and spine like a freshet of icy water. I had of course read many novels before, including many of the greatest, but this powerful and complex story embedded in prose of such fire and masterful imagery—this, I thought with growing wonder, this was what a novel was all about, this was it, the bright book of life, what writing was supposed to be. When finally the blizzard stopped and the snow lay heaped on the city streets, silent as death, I finished All the King’s Men as in a trance, knowing once and for all that I, too, however falteringly and incompletely, must try to work such magic. I began my first novel before that snow had melted; it is a book called Lie Down in Darkness, and in tone and style, as any fool can see, it is profoundly indebted to the work which so ravished my heart and mind during that long snowfall.
Rarely, I think, has a writer captured more perfectly that rich and multilayered joy of discovery that comes to us periodically from books. As I read back over these accounts of my own discoveries, I can’t help but notice that many of these books—though not all—were those I read when I was young. I suppose it’s natural this would be the case. We are all more impressionable when we are young, more susceptible to new emotions and new ideas, but the beauty of it is the books keep coming. It’s true that reading habits have changed; the clamor for simple entertainment or escape often seems more prevalent than the yearning for something that will touch the heart. And yet there are multiple examples to the contrary. John Grisham, a fine storyteller, has soared to the top of the best seller lists with books that put a human face on capital punishment and corporate irresponsibility. Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help, became a number one New York Times best seller and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for General Nonfiction, as they continue to explore the dilemmas of race.
And there are also surprises, the books that seem to come out of nowhere—books such as Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain, a brilliant work of literary journalism which appeared in 1994. It was, looking back, part of a flood of Appalachian writing that has enriched the literary world for twenty years. Debut novels such as Dot Jackson’s Refuge and Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden have won the sparkling acclaim they deserve, ranking with Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain or Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek and Boone. But for me at least, none of these works has been more original, or more unexpected, than Salvation on Sand Mountain.
It’s a book that I very well might have skipped if I had not been asked to review it. How much would I want to read, after all, about snake-handling cults in the lower Appalachians? But Covington told a gripping tale. It began, for him, with a newspaper assignment. The New York Times wanted a story about Glenn Summerford, a snake-handling preacher in northern Alabama who, in a drunken, jealous rage, forced his wife, Darlene, to thrust her hand into a cage of rattlesnakes. Summerford assumed that Darlene would die. Unfortunately for him she managed to survive the multiple bites, and Covington was dispatched to cover the trial. It was a lurid, sensational event in the hill-country town of Scottsboro, Alabama, an odd, discordant echo, perhaps, of a trial the town would prefer to forget (and a trial that as we saw in Chapter 2 influenced a young Harper Lee). In 1931, nine African American hoboes, soon to be known as the Scottsboro Boys, were arrested and falsely accused of rape, and their rapid convictions by an all-white jury left a permanent scar on the town’s reputation. There was no such problem with the Summerford trial. The preacher was convicted of attempted murder, and the world at large was briefly intrigued, as it might have been by reports of a natural disaster or a massive train wreck. Covington, however, was transfixed, fascinated by this curious cult, which, at the very least, was not attractive to those of lesser faith.
In the beginning, he was appropriately skeptical of his subjects, offering this account of his initial encounter with Brother Charles McGlocklin, a man who would later become his friend.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “One night I was fasting and praying on the mountain, and I was taken out in the spirit. The Lord appeared to me in layers of light.” His grip tightened on my shoulder. “He spoke a twelve-hour message to me on one word: polluted.”
“Polluted?”
“Yes. Polluted. Now, you think about that for a minute. A twelve-hour message.”
I thought about it for a minute, and then decided Brother Charles was out of his mind.
But as the weeks and months went by and Covington set out on the snake-handling circuit, visiting churches in the mountains of northern Alabama, and in Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia, he found something contagious in the ardor of that worship; found himself wondering if what appeared at first to be nothing but hysteria, might conceivably be what the snake-handlers said it was: the Holy Spirit set loose in their midst. The Bible itself was certainly explicit.
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
Clearly, these people deep in the hills—worshipping, perhaps, in a converted gas station with a makeshift cross—believed the scriptures meant what they said. And there was something else as well. They seemed to Covington to be on a journey, some passionate rite of purification in a world so filled with unholy things. He soon discovered, after a dive into the genealogy of his family, that his own ancestors may have worshipped in churches such as these, and there came a time in the course of the book when he described the most unlikely of scenes.
Carl’s eyes were saying, you. And yes, it was the big rattler, the one with my name on it, acrid-smelling, carnal, alive. And the look in Carl’s eyes seemed to change as he approached me. He was embarrassed. The snake was all he had, his eyes seemed to say. But as low as it was, as repulsive, if I took it, I’d be possessing the sacred. Nothing was required except obedience. Nothing had to be given up except my own will. This was the moment. I didn’t stop to think about it. I just gave in. I stepped forward and took the snake with both hands.
As I read Dennis Covington’s remarkable tale I found myself thinking, improbably enough, about other books I had read on the subject of religion: the writings of Thomas Merton, perhaps, or Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You; books affirming that the journey of faith is not meant to be easy. But more concretely, I was simply in awe of Covington’s achievement, this exercise in literary journalism, at once so personal and so ambitious. I have tried on occasion to do the same kind of work. I understand the difficulties of the form, and this, I thought, was journalism at its finest, a discovery of meaning, melodrama and heart in such an utterly unexpected place.
In recent years, only one other book has had this effect, has taken me so completely by surprise. It’s one, in fact, that in the beginning was not a book at all, but rather a short story in the New Yorker. Published first in 1997, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain flew under the radar for a few years, until Larry McMurtry, a writer of great western epics such as Lonesome Dove, turned it into a screenplay. After seeing the movie and being stunned especially by Heath Ledger’s performance, surely one of the finest in the history of film, I wanted to see what Proulx had written. Her story by then had become a brief book, fifty-five pages about a pair of cowboys in the Rocky Mountain West. As the story begins, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are both in their teens, hired hands on a Wyoming sheep ranch. Sometime near the end of that first lonesome summer, just the two of them above the tree line, Jack and Ennis made love in their tent. It was not something either of them had planned.
“I’m not no queer,” said Ennis.
“Me neither,” said Jack.
They left the high country at the end of that summer, and both got married and began raising families. Four years passed but as soon as they saw each other again, they understood it was not a one-time thing—not some isolated moment on Brokeback Mountain. Theirs, they knew, was a bond to be ended only by death.
As the story unfolded in Annie Proulx’s graceful prose, I was impressed anew by her remarkable act of literary courage. This was, after all, 2005, a time when homophobia was steeply on the rise. President George W. Bush had used it in his run for reelection, and a noisy minority of American Christians were railing against a sin their savior never mentioned. But Proulx’s novella was more than a story of homosexuality. She was writing more broadly about longing and loss, an emptiness most of us try to keep at bay.
. . . he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream. The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.
Writers have to write about these things, this dark underside of the human heart, for how else could it ever be transformed? But sometimes they write about other things, too, searching for redemption, even bits of heroism here or there. And so it was in 2011 that my friend Tom Peacock introduced me to yet another book. Peacock is one of my literary heroes, an author still writing beautifully at the age of ninety-two—a gift that is rooted in part, I think, in his voracious appetite as a reader. He told me he had just finished reading Unbroken, the latest best seller by Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit. I had read Seabiscuit, liking it less than I thought I would, perhaps because of soaring expectations. (I may well have been a minority of one.) But for me Unbroken was a whole different matter; Peacock called it “perfectly marvelous,” and I thought he was understating the case.
Hillenbrand spent seven years on the project, poring through old diaries and letters and conducting seventy-five interviews with her unlikely subject, Louie Zamperini, an Olympic track star turned war hero. She begins his story with a scene from the Pacific in World War II:
. . . Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had withered down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.
This is a book that captures the terrors of war, graphic, unsentimental, sketching the fury of America’s enemy, the Japanese, an army motivated at least in part by the assumptions of racial superiority that Hitler was preaching half a world away. Through Hillenbrand, we feel the camaraderie of the American forces, the bravery of men like Louie Zamperini, and the impossible suffering they endured. More powerfully even than Tom Brokaw, Hillenbrand, with her meticulous research and storyteller’s eye, shines new light on the greatness of the Greatest Generation.
A critic for New York magazine complained in mock frustration that Unbroken “seems designed to wrench from self-respecting critics all the blurby adjectives we normally try to avoid: It is amazing, unforgettable, gripping, harrowing, chilling, and inspiring.” And Rebecca Skloot, herself a superb popular historian, called Hillenbrand simply “one of our best writers.”
And so it is clear that for those of us who love a good book, the end of great writing is not in sight. We may, of course, have our different definitions of greatness, and those that I have confessed in these pages are deeply personal and purely my own. Not everyone is drawn to a book about war, not everyone will share my love of Southern writers or American journalists such as David Halberstam. And where are the authors from other lands? Where are Homer, Chaucer, Hemingway, or Proust? These are questions for which I have no answer. Only this: whatever the books that have touched our hearts—whether through joy, discomfort, inspiration or escape—those are the encounters that are worth celebrating, and preferences none of us need to defend.