The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  The Egyptian editor was wrong about that. We are not the most dangerous people on earth, not in a world that once included Hitler and is still clearly capable of genocide. But perhaps we do, as our writers point out, possess some terrible capacity for violence (often juxtaposed with bravery and sacrifice) that we see so clearly in other parts of the world. We are the only nation—at least so far—to actually make use of an atom bomb, and we did it twice, and as the vivid account of John Hersey makes clear, this is not a distinction to be proud of.

  6

  Just Telling a Story

  Featuring:

  All Creatures Great and Small—James Herriot

  Walking Across Egypt—Clyde Edgerton

  Clover—Dori Sanders

  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 cour
se, 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 bei
ng 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.