The Books That Mattered

by Frye Gaillard

  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.

  7

  Poetry, Prose, and a Sense of Place

  featuring:

  All the King’s Men—Robert Penn Warren

  At Play in the Fields of the Lord—Peter Matthiessen

  Snow Falling on Cedars—David Guterson

  Also, T. Harry Williams, Will Campbell

  I

  I don’t know when I first read All the King’s Men. I must have been through it a dozen times by now; it is quite simply my favorite book, and there are passages that I can almost quote:

  But all at once the laughter was gone. It was as though someone had pulled a shade down in front of her face. I felt as you do when you pass down a dark street and look up to see a lighted window and in the bright room people talking and singing and laughing with the firelight splashing and undulating over them and the sound of the music drifts out to the street while you watch; and then a hand, you will never know whose hand, pulls down the shade. And there you are outside.

  And there I was, outside.

  Every encounter with the poetry of that prose has left me marveling at Robert Penn Warren’s ability to produce it—his subtle alliterations and internal rhymes, the waltz-like cadence of the paragraphs; not the jazz riffs of Mark Twain or Albert Murray, but something much easier and sweeter than that, like a stream tumbling gently over the rocks. There are many writers I’ve admired through the years, but only a handful that have left me in awe. Heresy though it may be, even William Faulkner is not one of those. But Warren is, and perhaps because I am not a poet I come at his writings through the mysteries of verse—which was, after all, his own point of entry to the written word.

  In 1921, at age sixteen, he entered Vanderbilt University and while he was there he studied with some of the finest poets of his time, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle. From 1922 to 1925 a group that included professors and students gathered regularly to talk about poetry. They called themselves the Fugitives, and after a time they began to publish a journal by that name. It never had more than two hundred subscribers, but this dogged little group produced some important poetry for a while and attracted the attention of some of the most prominent poets in the world, including T. S. Eliot. As an undergraduate, Robert Penn Warren was one of the prodigies, and in later years he would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, not once, but twice, for his books of poems.

  There was, however, a painful detour along the way. In 1930, Warren wrote a chapter in I’ll Take My Stand, a book of twelve controversial essays conceived primarily by four of the fugitives—Ransom, Tate, Warren, and a flinty Southern writer named Donald Davidson. The other contributors to this iconic volume, which achieved a renown far out of proportion to its actual sales, would include a novelist, a journalist, a couple of historians, a psychiatrist, and an English professor. The book took its title from a line in “Dixie,” which suggested its basic purpose as well. These men (and they were all white men) set out earnestly to defend the South. The region, they felt, had been under attack, particularly from the pen of H. L. Mencken, the muckraking journalist from Baltimore, who criticized, among other things, the cultural aridity of their place.

  These writers didn’t care for Mencken’s tone, but they had other, deeper concerns. They saw in other parts of the nation a drift—really more of a torrential rush—toward a spirit-killing materialism, which was rooted, they thought, in the industrialization that had swept across the country. The satisfaction of a hard day’s work had been ripped from the nurture of God’s green earth with massive damage to the human psyche and soul. But the agrarian writers of I’ll Take My Stand saw an antidote to the problem, and it lay in the pastoral example of the South, a place where people still lived on the land with its built-in rhythms of leisure and work.

  In point of fact, it should be noted, their idyllic vision of the South probably bore a greater resemblance to the Vanderbilt campus, where many of them worked, than it did to the hardscrabble farms all over the region, where white and black families were struggling to survive. This was, after all, the beginning of the Great Depression, a time of ruin in the Southern landscape. But the agrarians were poets, men of letters first of all, who thought in metaphors and dreamed of better days.

  They knew in their hearts that the country was losing a piece of its soul, and even today, in these early years of the twenty-first century—a time of obsession with gadgets and things, and the runaway greed of modern corporations—the core of the agrarians’ message rings true. The problem, I think, was their jumble of intent. They set out to issue a warning to the country, delivered through a passionate defense of the South, including, unfortunately, its most dubious institution of all: racial segregation.

  It fell to Robert Penn Warren to offer that defense, and at the age of twenty-five he did his best. In an essay entitled “The Briar Patch,” he called for racial equality in the eyes of the law, for greater educational opportunity for Negroes (he spelled it, sadly, with a lowercase “n”), and for black and white farmers to embrace their common interests. But in 1930, he believed these goals, all worthy, could be accomplished within the framework of segregation.

  By the 1950s, Warren had repudiated that view; had raised his passionate voice, in fact, in support of civil
rights. But that is getting ahead of the story. In between, there was All the King’s Men.

  Warren began work on the novel, easily the best-known of his books, after taking a teaching job at Louisiana State University. He came to that handsome, oak-shaded campus in 1933, just after Huey P. Long had taken his seat as a U.S. senator. Long, who would inspire the character Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, was one of the most remarkable politicians of his age—really, of any age in American history. You don’t hear much about him today. There’s the vague impression of a Southern demagogue, and there have been so many of those through the years that Long most often simply disappears into the dismal haze of Southern history.

  The truth, however, which Robert Penn Warren understood very well, was that Huey Long was in a class by himself. He was that rarest of political figures, a left-wing radical from the South, who, if he had not been assassinated, might have been president of the United States. It would have been an uphill climb, but Long was a brilliant, charismatic politician, who offered in the depths of the Great Depression a vision of economic justice the likes of which the country had never seen. Nor has it since.

  He was born in 1893 in the farming country of northern Louisiana, not quite as poor as he would try to make it sound later on. But the realities of poverty were all around. The land was hard and the timber companies had cut down the trees, and red clay gullies slashed through the hills. The people, mostly white in that particular corner of the state, scratched out a living as best they could, virtually all of them poor, though many of them were as tough as the land. In Winn Parish, where Long’s family settled, they opposed secession in 1860, and some of them even fought for the Union. At the turn of the twentieth century, when Huey came along, the contrarian streak was still in full force.

  He came of age with a fierce ambition to make things better; the cause of the people would be his cause—especially the poor who had suffered too long at the hands of the rich—and as he made himself their defender and champion, he would climb the ladder of Louisiana politics. From there the presidency loomed just ahead. Long had it all mapped out in his mind.