Southern Bookman

Faulkner's "The Hamlet" stands among his master works

August, a month so associated with William Faulkner, meanders along with waves of heat broken by rain and stormy winds. I'll mark this late summer, when global warming grows deeper, with the reading of Faulkner's "The Hamlet."

I'd known of Faulkner's Snopes family saga and read a good part of it, such as the fine short story "Barn Burning," which a lovely Louisiana lady explained to me at the Faulkner conference at Ole Miss. But I'd never read the novel trilogy, "The Hamlet," "The Town" and "The Mansion." Someplace I'd read a quote by  Gabriel García Márquez that "The Hamlet" is among the greatest Latin American novels, and that lit my desire to read the book, the first part of the trilogy.

As with other Faulkner books I've discovered over the years after my college reading of the standard "great novels" of "The Sound and the Fury," "Light in August" and "As I Lay Dying," I was thankful to have read it. My life would have been significantly lessened without this great book. "The Hamlet" joins "Absalom, Absalom" and "The Wild Palms" as Faulkner books I've read for the first time relatively late in life. 

"The Hamlet," published in 1940, is one of Faulkner's great works. In it, Faulkner displays a wonderful rough-edged humor, as rich and knowledgeable about frontier life as Clemens. The book can stand with "Huckleberry Finn" as a comic masterpiece. As with Clemens, "The Hamlet" shows the mastery of a variety of different dialects. It also shows an astonishing range of literary forms in one book: the tall tale, the joke, magical realism, the Victorian novel, 20th centry "stream of consciousness," the Western, the mystery, the potboiler, the Southern gothic.

After savoring the novel', I was taken even higher by the writing in the last section, "The Peasants." The novel details the life of "Frenchmen's Bend," the rough settlement near Faulkner's central location of Jefferson. The novel often shows the farmers and workers of Frenchmen's Bend sitting and talking on the front porch of the country store, the center of Flem Snopes' rise to power and the steady accumulation of other members of the clan. The dialogue in "The Peasants" shows a perfect ear for Southern speech and the rural rhythms of life in Mississippi after the Civil War. The funny, amaazing stories that unfold show an ineffable narrative gift. 

The qualities of the book continue. The variety of their characters, and the sure touch of their names, matches Dickens. In fact, although Faulkner is often celebrated, or derided, for his modernist narrative disjunctions of chronological time and point of view, I found the book at its best when he uses the standard narrative techniques of 19th century masters like Dostoyevsky and. Turgenev.

Among the many wonderful characters in the book, a couple stand out. V.K. Ratliff, the "sewing machine agent," is the book's moral center. He is prone to wheeling and dealing and the pursuit of money, at times with nearly shady acts, yet he also shows compassion toward others, humor and the responsibility of preserving the tribal heritage of the place. Ratliff, with his knowledge of every inch of the territory from his travels on his buckboard selling sewing machines, and his desire to be the chief storyteller, has a consciousness similar to Faulkner's. One weakness of the book is that at the end, he is deceived by Flem Snopes in the funny, amazing denoument of the novel. Although Faulkner tries to address this problem, I am not convinced that Ratliff would fall for Snopes' strategem; he is just too smart, too canny, too wise. This problem is not serious enough to ruin the book, but it is one of the few places where Faulkner missteps.

Another character whom received extra affection from Faulkner is the young boy with the amusing name "Wall Street Panic" Snopes. Again, the boy's wild energy, curiosity and ability to survive hair-raising adventures reminded me of Clemens' Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. I had the feeling that Wall Snopes is Faulkner's image of himself as a boy, running around Oxford Mississippi and environs.

Now, on to the other parts of the Snopes trilogy, "The Town," published in 1957, and "The Mansion," 1959. The last two books were published late in Faulkner's life, and I fear they will show a lessening of powers. Even if I find "The Town" and "The Mansion" don't reach the heights of "The Hamlet," I trust they will stand above most books.

Faulkner's imagination was taken by the Snopses throughout his career; he first conceived of the stories in the 1920s. He loves all of the families and characters he created, but he has a special, rough affection for the Snopeses. I look forward to completing the journey.

Wendell Berry's Short-sighted Nostalgia for the Local

Wendell Berry's essay "The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford" in the winter issue of the Sewanee Review left me feeling let down. Berry at the end swerves to a discussion of the loss of "authentic local speech." In his essay, he portrays Williams as a poet of local speech, who based his work on the community of Rutherford. Berry builds his case well, to a point, but doesn't reach a satisfying conclusion before tacking on his coda about the loss of local dialects, and "also of a perhaps indispensable knowledge, propriety and sensitivity." I had a feeling of disloctaion at Berry's sudden switching of tracks, as if the first part of the essay had just been an enticement to a totally different message.

In the essay, Berry compares Williams to William Faulkner, saying that Faulkner, like Williams, was fated to write about the community in which he was born. They both were haunted by place, and crearted their special language to give witness to local history, culture and passions. Berry, though, doesn't consider how critical Faulkner was of his Mississippi home, its tragic prejudices and ignorance.He also contrasts Williams and Faulkner to a writer like Hemingway, who left home and wrote about the expatriate life in Europe. Of course, Berry is right about Hemingway, but I'll point out that some of Hemingway's most enduring work are his locally based Nick Adams stories, which I still love.

While Berry's nostalgia for local speech has validity, he romanticizes the local, embuing it with a presumed wisdom and care for the land. However, the insular and small-town South through the Depression was known for overplanting and ruining local land. Its communities were crippled by prejudice, violence and hostility for fresh ideas, as Faulkner shows. Disease and ignorance were widespread. Berry doesn't mention Flannery O'Connor, perhaps because her work, while vibrant in local dialect, shows the ruin of this stunted culture. Despite the emergence of local artists such as Faulkner and the Carter family, the local communties were more marked by inarticulateness than poetry, myth and music. Despite Berry's championing of local virtue, the achievement of the Carter family and Faulkner was the result of outside influences and education interacting with local customs and ways of living. Some of the best-known Carter songs were actually not local folk music, but Tin Pan alley works that had slowly come to the mountains. And Faulkner's work was enriched by his interaction with cosmopolitan influences.

Berry is right that value is lost when local language disappears under the influence of mass media and culture. Yet, the local communities of the past also imposed a loss of freedom and creativity on their inhabitants. And, local language was as impoverished as the land and economic opportunities. We should strive to recover what was valuable and enduring in local language and culture, but not over-romanticize the past.  

 

James Lee Burke's Louisiana

I was surprised to discover that James Lee Burke is in his 70s. I thought he was in his late 50s or early 60s. Like Philip Roth and other writers, Burke proves that F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong when he said there are no second acts in American life.

Burke is best known for his Dave Robicheaux novels. He started off writing literary fiction but had a tough time selling his work. With the Robicheaux books, he achieved wild success. I haven't read many of his books, not really that drawn to his line of grotesquely comic crime fiction. While at the library the other day, I decided to pick up his latest book, "The Glass Rainbow," which I've found highly entertaining.

Unlike Elmore Leonard, Burke doesn't shun describing the landscape, and his poetic evocations of southwest Louisiana, Acadian territory (Burke refuses to use the derogatory but popular term Cajun), rekindle my love for my native state. As with Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, Burke's New Iberia turns into a character, along with the rest of the towns along Bayou Teche, which he turns into a mythic, mystical force.

Burke can bog down in patches of surprisingly bad writing, and the plot often strains credibility. The dialogue veers from sharpness and originality to tone-deaf banality. The characters and male-female relationships lack depth. Yet, Burke overcomes these weaknesses with his strong, forceful, evocative voice.

What I'll remember is the vision of Acadiana as a ruined paradise, its creative, funny and industrious people tragically exploited first by the ante-bellum planter class and then the oil companies and other capitalist overlords. Burke has a strong sense of the region's history, culture and traditions. At times, his philosophical musings run away from him. At others, his thoughts on the ruination of the Acadian paradise are deeply moving. A flawed writer who succumbs to the shortcomings of the farcical grotesque crime genre, Burke more often than not reaches true transcendence. 

 

Memories of Howard Nemerov at Sewanee

Southern Bookman and its companion blog Chasing the Blues have been moribund in recent weeks as I've been cosumed with my news site Buckhead Patch. At last, on a cold, bright and windy Saturday, I find some time to return.

I'm inspired by the memory of Howard Nemerov at Sewanee. The other night, needing a garmet for sleep, I pulled out from the back of a drawer the tattered, torn T-shirt of the first Sewanee Writers Conference, with a quote from Howard, in a poem about walking a dog, "To show who's master, I write the poem."

Like Proust's madeleine, the T-shirt summoned my first memory of Howard. He stood in short purple shorts, a sweatshirt or jacket, and wore sandals with socks. With his gray hair, large beaked nose and craggy features, he looked like a member of some exotic bird species. His deep, voluminous voice was unforgettable; it still plays in my mind.

The poor man was already battling the cancer that would kill him. I struck up a friendship with him; he was warm and friendly, although his criticism of fledgling poets' work was cutting and brutal. I was thankful I hadn't submitted my poor earnest work to him for individual criticism, but rather to the kind Emily Grosholz.

The next year, he was too ill to appear at Sewanee. I'd sent him a letter or two, and he responded with postcards with his flowing signature. His place was taken by John Hollander, who rather deftly cut up my poems, with one sentence stll stinging "This line is egregious."

I believe it was at that second Sewanee session that I learned that Howard was the brother of Diane Arbus. As a young man, I'd seen an exhibition of Arbus' work at the New Orleans art museum. Her black and white portraits of freaks, giants, and regular people in moments of anger or turmoil changed my aesthetic perceptions. I quickly hurried to read Howard's eulogy to his sister, who committed suicide.

It's hard to say how World War II era poets like Howard and John will fare in history. One or two of their poems show up in anthologies. I think Howard's poems about the war should be remembered. along with several of his others. The work of that era has a stern formalism, an academic dryness, the quality of being locked behind museum glass. Some of the subject matter, such as with the poem on walking the dog, can be incidental and inconsequential. Still, I value those poets, especially when they strive to break away toward more freedom of technique and subject.

After my second summer at Sewanee, I heard that Howard had passed away in St. Louis. Now, 20 years later, his memory is evoked by a T-shirt. I hope it survives one more washing. This time, I'll leave it in the drawer forever.

Tom Yuill: "I Want the Poem to Be Itself, to Be a Realized, Complete Work of Art"

      I met Tom Yuill for all of two minutes last summer in the Grolier Poetry Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. In our brief chat before he hurried off to catch a plane, I learned that he was a poet, so I quickly asked if he would participate in a Southern Bookman interview. He heartily agreed before rushing off into the bright morning. I repaired to nearby Harvard Square with Tom's collection "Medicine Show" (University of Chicago Press) and his e-mail address. I spent an hour or so seated on a bench as students and teachers ambled by, finding myself entranced and excited by Tom's poems, which combined formal elements with daring flights of expression. Elizabethan and modernist echoes blended with sounds of the blues, Texas honky tonks and cowboy songs. Themes of rebellion, family loyalty, allegiance to the past and tradition, and the desire for escape and freedom meshed in artistic counterpoint. Since then, we have developed a warm friendship via e-mail. Now in mid-autumn, here are Tom's responses to my questions. Tom teaches at Boston University, where he studied with one of the first subjects of the Southern Bookman interviews, Rosanna Warren. 

Your fine book “Medicine Show” contains a multitude of characters, moods, voices and settings. A key is the poem “Several Histories” (freely after Hikmet) in which you say “into being came three worlds/ Where I still live.” The collection explores these several histories, and perhaps more than three worlds. How do these histories and worlds correspond and interact?

I guess the whole thing together is a strange panegyric. The arc of the book, its plot, is one way the different “worlds” interact. The tongue in cheek swagger, artifice and naivete of, say, “Ode to the Wind” give this sass-laden paean to free will the right tenor for the first section, in which the poet is not yet cognizant of the depth of his confusion. The adaptations of Villon in particular but also of Corbiere and Catullus appear like consoling blues tunes, Hank Williams songs or — to me at least — hymns. They echo present pain and thereby give solace and bring needed empathetic companionship. By the time we get to “Several Histories” the poet character of the book is more attuned to his devastations and to his joys. Hikmet’s wonderful poem is often translated as “Two Loves,” so mine is really an occasion in a little lyric spell to receive the gift of Hikmet’s kind genius and to hear it as I do hear it, through the noise and sweetness of my own disordered memories — “worlds” you might call them — some fairly real, most of them largely imagined.

 I loved the references to the Rolling Stones. How does their music influence you as a poet?

The Rolling Stones are, for me, stunning artists. I was never the kind of person who wanted to rush down to their hotel after the show to try to hang out or the deluded sort who thought he should try heroin because Keith did it. I don’t care what they look like or who else likes their records, whether the new record gets good reviews. It would be my pleasure to meet them I suppose, particularly Charlie, but their music and performances have always been more than enough of a gift, a staggering gift of creative work for anyone who is interested. Keith, Mick and Charlie do something with rhythm that is transformative. Transformative of received influences, transformative to the central nervous systems of people listening, transformative in the highest traditions of art and on a basic physical level. Listen to Chuck Berry’s “Havana Moon,” then listen to “Beast of Burden,” for instance. I have no idea if the Stones were trying to do anything in particular there, but the relatively disciplined, infectious cadences of “Havana Moon” seem to me transformed into the peculiarly rollicking, infectious cadences of “Beast of Burden.” Dad taught me what iambic pentameter is so long ago I literally cannot remember learning it. I only remember, at a very young age, knowing what it is.

Where both deliberate the love is slight.

I just knew whenever some teacher asked me about it, what was in blank verse and what was not. So when I write something like, 

The air is hot, it whispers, it has lips.

It whispers like good news…the beer is cold…

I know, having internalized blank verse a long time ago, I have internalized something else as well. perhaps listening to the Stones for 15 years prior to that helped me find my own peculiarities within that pentameter. Not quite iambic, but, for me, for that poem, it’s on the money.   

 
 
You had three different poems titled “Medicine Show.” The way you paced them through the book gave the impression of a wagon traveling to different places. Do you see them as a sequence, perhaps as one poem?

I don’t see them as a sequence exactly, but I certainly see them as connected. I like the impression you got, Louis — thank you. The poem just needed three versions, and the book needed each of them at different points. Should one see the book as a quest upward, or downward perhaps, up Parnassus or down Mount Jackass, the three versions might simply reflect the poet’s gradual internal and external progress. After all it’s easy enough to feel discouraged not being able to improve society, even one’s own corner of it, and most concerned Americans might feel hopeless enough by now about a war one knows about mainly from seeing it on television, a hideously remote reality for something that serious. It’s not that hard to know burying one’s self in a pile of middle class burdens will be, for some, a realistic way to raise children, for others a form of self-burial. The last of the three, of course, is a healing lyric. Your parents are not perfect, and they love you. How much trading pain for pain might be avoided with such revelations? But the other versions have to be there, too.

 I loved the evocations of your Texas childhood and family, particularly the son’s relationship with the father, with elements of rebellion and conflict as well as love. How did you give these personal narratives such universal power?

Such personal narratives had universal power a long time before I came along. Which is not to say I do not deeply appreciate your observation — such poems are, after all, great opportunities for falling on your face as a poet. Texas will always be profound to me. The places we live when we are little often stay uniquely meaningful. I always think Dad, his Dad whom we all knew as Kewpie, and Mom’s Dad, Granddaddy Bell, are the three greatest guys I’ll ever know. By the late '90s it became the norm to treat your father as ridiculous, like Homer Simpson, but rebellion used to be quite normal — beyond whatever Freud articulated. The best popular music of the 1960s is so incredibly good that a lot of cultural moments which were only really valid then became shadow versions of themselves for kids in the 70s, the 80s, even the 90s. Everyone was supposed to try to have their version of what they thought the 60s were. Kids my age wanted electric guitars for Christmas so they could play Van Halen covers. I always preferred the Stones and the Beatles, and I was captain of the swim team in high school and recruited to swim on a Division 1 team in college, so I was immune to some of that influence, but not all of it. For a while I suppose I thought you were supposed to be mad at your father. He was very patient with it for the most part, and eventually I decided rebelling doesn’t have much to do with originality. We returned to the norm then, which for us meant we were very close.   

Your freely rendered translations of poets like Villon, Hikmet and Corbiere reminded me of similar work by Robert Lowell. Is Lowell a strong influence for you?

Robert Lowell’s “Imitations” is very important to me. After my first day in graduate school at BU I took Derek Walcott’s advice and went to the Grolier to buy it. Also at Derek’s suggestion I started rewriting Rimbaud and Baudelaire poems in free verse. Then I had the profound good luck to work with Rosanna Warren, both in the graduate poetry seminar and in her translation seminar. There I studied Dryden’s essay in earnest, along with the usual classic texts from Benjamin, etc. I still find Mark Strand’s Grade A poem “Translation” perhaps the easiest to sympathize with on this vast subject. I am not an expert in foreign languages but a poet who feels uncommonly indebted to older poets, many of whom wrote in languages other than English. My adaptations and imitations should not be understood too differently from, say, the Rolling Stones’ electric cover version of Robert Johnson’s acoustic “Stop Breaking Down Blues.”

The poem “Dallas Skinheads” stood out, combining the diverse elements that make the entire book so captivating. How did you see such disreputable characters as sympathetic, almost heroic?

The poem’s rhyme scheme is an abbc sort of pattern so it has a sonic fabric holding its various elements together. And it is in couplets, so they perhaps whisper the idea of heroics. And of course there is the organization of the poem, which for me is like the organization of images on a rose medallion vase or the weaving together of elements in one of Robert Pinsky’s poems. I never set out to try to write poems like Robert’s, but BU was the only graduate program to which I applied specifically because I knew I had to work with him. He proved to be every bit the mentor I needed as a younger poet, and more. Some influence is bound to show, I suppose. AS I say in the notes, I owe Robert a special debt of gratitude.

I should point out the young skinhead is not a neo-nazi but a social misfit trying to find a way to affirm himself. There is something at least poignant, if not necessarily heroic, in the struggle to affirm one’s self in the midst of confusion. The older lyric from “Streets of Laredo” is often thought of as a light little cowboy song. The Smothers Brothers did a pastiche of it. But it’s about a young man who’s gotten himself fatally wounded for no particularly good reason, and is trying to ask before he dies for some modest funeral. The Mom character in the poem experiences the sudden death of her own mother and begins to slowly destroy herself. The Americans in the Midwest, whose children may be rebelling for reasons unclear to them, may themselves be voting for a president who wants to make possible a winnable nuclear war. Unconscious, destructive impulses are not the private property of the young, even if the young may be the most obvious sufferers of such impulses. And of course, it is a poem about influences. We have free will, perhaps. The question is, do we use it? 

Like Lowell, you have a gift for memorable, striking individual lines that click into the mind like gold coins. Do you work and rework these lines, or are they products of sudden inspiration?

Well, thank you for a great compliment. I compose all the time, always have a pen and scrap of paper in my pocket or by the bed, so sudden inspiration must certainly be part of what I’m doing. But I work on the lines, the stanzas, the poems, all of it, over and over. I have spent years listening to a poem over and over, trying to make sure the rhythms I have on the page are right for the poem itself. I take great swaths of lines, pull three of seven out and fuse them with one or twelve more I wrote at another time. No rules, really, except that I want to the poem to be itself, to be a realized, complete work of art. And, sure, for me part of that is giving it the right lines, not the flashiest lines, not the strangest lines, not the most formally strict lines, none of that. If the lines are memorable I give credit to the poem, that is to say, I said it aloud so many times it must have wrung from itself whatever wasn’t ringing true. As Shakespeare, Lowell, Sidney, Villon, Fulke Greville and Frost teach us, what rings true artistically IS often memorable. Thank you for the kind compliment to those poems.

 What direction is your work taking these days?

My next book of poetry is called “American Bull Terrier.” It has begun as a book about force, Being as Force I guess, in the Heideggerian sense. But it will certainly go from there to become more complex. Dad is one of the heroes of "Medicine Show" — Mom and Dad. Mom is an ethereal presence reappearing throughout, and Dad rests in a big poem right before the last section. So far Kewpie (my father’s father) appears to be one hero of the new one. And my wife, of course, remains a Muse and a beacon. I never worry about formal strategy or such things. I learn about the form of the book as I write, revise and organize the poems.  

 

 

 

New York Times Glows for Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Wiener recently complained that The New York Times' literary coverage is biased toward white male authors of "literary fiction." Sniffed Picoult in a Tweet, that venue of well-considered literary thought, "Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." Picoult and Wiener whimpered over the massive attention the Times gave to Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Freedom," although the Times wasn't alone; Time magazine put Franzen on its cover.

If such a bias exists, it apparently doesn't extend to "creative nonfiction," a phrase that makes me uneasy. Recently, the Times has twice reviewed black woman writer Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," and this week profiled Wilkerson. Wilkerson accomplished the literary trifecta of having her book reviewed by Times literary top gun Michiko Kakutani and receiving a front-page rave on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The profile of Wilkerson was done by longtime literary journalist Charles McGrath. Wilkerson is basking in the warmth of the New York Times' many suns.

Her book is a massive look at the "great migration," during which a huge number of blacks fled the Jim Crowe South for Northern and Western cities.  The Times reviews, along with a recent strong review in The New Yorker, call the book a major work. In an inspiring show of perseverance, Wilkerson took 15 years to finish the book, interviewing 1,500 blacks who'd left the South. However, she focuses on the stories of just three people, which raises the question whether she decided to aim for commercial attractiveness rather than in-depth scholarly writing of more appeal to an academic audience.

Wilkerson's title comes from the great black writer Richard Wright, who said that the black migration to the North was in search of the "warmth of other suns." Her book draws attention to the horrid South where black men were frequent lynching victims and segregation was deeply enforced. Wilkerson uncovers strange evidence of how deep the system ran; blacks and whites were forbidden to play checkers in Birmingham parks. That thankfully vanished world today seems unbelievable even to those who lived through it, and writers like Wilkerson are to be commended for showing the brutal reality of those days.

McGrath's profile of Wilkerson is readable, yet superficial. He points out that Wilkerson lives in Atlanta, although she "commutes to Boston, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Boston University." While not elaborating further on that commute, the piece says Wilkerson moved to Atlanta in 2001 "for reasons unconnected to the book." Those reasons are never detailed. However, Wilkerson says that she discovered that "she needed to be here, only I didn't know it." She continues, "I needed to look through the exile's heart and feel that distant, rejecting, hurtful feeling," adding "I needed to come here to see what they left."

Undboutedly, discrimnation and racism remain in the South, yet the piece doesn't delve into how Wilkerson "saw what they left." McGrath, nor Wilkerson, ever reflect upon Atlanta's status as a mecca for Southern business and culture, even in the mean old days of Jim Crow. Atlanta's reputation for tolerance has been overstated --a destructive race riot occurred here in the early 20th century -- yet it still offered blacks prospects for commerce, education and artistic expression sorely lacking in the rest of the South. I would have been interested in Wilkerson's views on Atlanta's history and present status as a center of black achievement. But McGrath apparently didn't follow up on this.

Also crying ouf for further elaboration is the statement "... the book, influenced by Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' and the films of Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh, rotates in a novelistic way among three main characters whose stories are interspered with broader, more gneral inter-chapters." Steinbeck, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh? Creative nonfiction, begone.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" sounds like an deep examination of a major historical subject, although male historians, whether white or black, would wish for similar attention. Also, as McGrath quickly points out, Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times as a features writer for the newspaper. Cynics will likely wonder whether her connection with the paper played a role in the attention giver her book.

The controversy about whether the Times plays literary favorites could only arise in regard to that newspaper, the only one that runs separate reviews in its regular Arts section and in an independent  Sunday book review. Most newspapers around the country are cutting back or eliminating their book reviews. However, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has recently had a resurgence in running reviews and writing about authors, generally connected with the recent Decatur Book Festival. The AJC in a surprising sign of local knowledge, even had its own superficial profile of Wilkerson.

The disturbing trend of reduced book coverage is countered by an announcement I saw somewhere in Internet land that the Wall Street Journal will soon run a separate book review. While this is welcome, I hope the WSJ continues running as well its outstanding daily book reviews, along with its book coverage in the Friday and Saturday "weekend" sections. I'm suspicious that the arrival of a separate book review will lead to the elimination of book coverage elsewhere.

While alarms keep ringing (sorry, Mr. Orwell) about declines in reading, these literary stirrings show an abiding interest in books and publishing, and not only in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Books on a broad number of subjects keep coming out. And the proliferation of events like the Decatur Book Festival reflect a deep and committed love of reading and books.

Yet disturbing signs are everywhere; I discovered this week that the long-established Louisiana Book Festival has bene canceled, because of state budget cuts. This left me with the chilling recollection that a state austerity movement after Huey Long's downfall led to the demise of LSU's Southern Review, later revived. The distinguished LSU Press and Southern Review were threatened by a first wave of budget cuts last year. With further drastic budget cuts looming, and an aversion to increasing taxes, the LSU Press and Southern Revew are again threatened. This year, they are celebrating 75 years of literary excellence. 

 

Evoking Mark Twain and Willie Morris

Last night, I happened to catch the last half of Ken Burns' PBS portrait of Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. For some reason, I'd never heard of it before, although the show had apparently been done some time ago, since it included comments by the late William Styron.

The show gave a touching portrait of Clemens and his family life. It also presented an in-depth account of Clemens' writing of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." I particularly found meaningful and insightful the exploration of "Huckleberry Finn," including appreciations by Dick Gregory, Russell Banks and Styron, among others.

The Clemens production showed Burns at his best. I thought his "Ciivl War" series was strong, but he succumbed to self-indulgence in the overblown "Baseball" and "Jazz" series.

Although he was not included, the Twain/Clemens broadcast summoned to me the ghost of Willie Morris. I woke up during the night, aware of Willie's presence. I suppose the show's portrayal of Clemens' recollections of his boyhood in the writing of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" reminded me of Morris' excellent memoir "North Toward Home," based on his boyhood in Yazoo City, Miss.

When I was at the recent Faulkner Conference in Oxford, Miss., I also thought about Morris a few times. After a tumultuous career in New York, where he was the groundbreaking editor of Harper's, Morris returned to Mississippi as the writer in residence at Ole Miss. Before his death, he sparked a literary flowering in Oxford.

Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain and Willie Morris. Such essential American voices endure and speak to us, no matter the momentary chattering and noise that at times overwhelm us.

Andrew Hudgins' "American Rendering" Revisits Southern Landscape

This is harvest time in American poetry: a slew of poets are marking long, productive careers with the publication of "new and selected poems" collections. Following Ed Hirsch in this benediction is Andrew Hudgins with "American Rendering" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which offers 24 new poems along with offerings from collections stretching back to 1985. The title "American Rendering" evokes the South's deep patriotism, along with the ironic sense of the "rendering" of the Civil War.

The book's introduction claims that Hudgins has "developed a distinctively descriptive form of the Southern Gothic imagination,"  which for some might raise more groans than cheers. The "Southern Gothic" is undoubtedly the most shopworn genre of American literature. With his tales of grotesque Southern Baptist religion, racially-tinged violence, male rage and lust and misplaced honor, Hudgins holds down the poetry wing of the new school of Southern redneck writing, established in fiction by Barry Hannah, Harry Crews and others.  While Hudgins can fall victim to some of the worst vices of the "Southern Gothic," he also finds fresh springs of energy in the South's propsensity for violence, fundamentalism, confused family loyalties, passion for automobiles and music, and love of war and honor. While his work is pulled toward the well-worn and cliched, he does find new fields to plow in the Southern landscape.

Hudgins' poems read like short stories, with strong narratives and clear language. He can go too far with his senationalistic Southernisms, and his use of allusions from ancient history feel contrived and gratuitous. He can write some pretty bad poems. At his best, he achieves a strongly imagined vision, laced with grim, grotesque humor, the rhythms of old hymns and the deep mythical pull of the Southern land and memory.

Some of the best poems come from his earlier collections, particularly "After the Lost War," in which he evokes the American Civil War, including a finely imagined monologue of the 19th century Georgia poet Sidney Lanier.

Readers of short stories and novels usually turned off by poetry will find much to enjoy in Hudgins' work. In his least successful poems, his attempts at the lurid and grotesque feel excessive. At his best, his voice is authentic and memorable, like the best Southern storytellers, or a Sunday morning choir in an old country church.

 

  

Noel Polk: William Faulkner "Continues to Amaze"

   The pre-eminent Faulkner scholar Dr. Noel Polk is likely more familiar with the great Mississippi writer's work than anyone. He has edited corrected versions of all of Faulkner's books.

   

   As explained below, Noel consulted Faulkner's original typescripts to correct editorial changes made when the books were first published. Because of Noel's painstaking work, readers now have Faulkner's masterful novels close to how he originally wrote them.

 

     I briefly met Noel at the recent Faulkner & Film Conference at Ole Miss, where he and other Faulkner scholars swapped stories about the great man while enjoying drinks and the sultry evening  at a bar overlooking the square that Faulkner made famous. As they matched the square's landmarks with Faulkner's writing, the last pages of "The Sound and the Fury" came alive in my mind's eye. A genial and gregarious storyteller, Noel fascinated me with his knowledge of Faulker's life and work.

 

     The editor of Mississippi Quarterly, Noel lives in Starkville, the home of Mississippi State. In the following Southern Bookman interview, he talks about his lifelong calling of restoring Faulkner's work as he intended it to be read.

 

 

 

 

1. You’ve edited the corrected texts of Faulkner’s work for the Library of America and Modern Library. Could you briefly describe the necessity of these corrections and the editing process?

 

  Most of the “corrections” I made were simply to restore what Faulkner wrote as against what editors changed that to. For most of the novels what they changed was minor --- punctuation, some Southernisms, some typing errors — nothing that is going to drastically change the way we read the novels.

 

 The editors of Absalom, Absalom!, however, made massive alterations, deleting dozens of passages of sometimes 10 lines or more, altered punctuation to shorten some of his long sentences, and, for example, clarified deliberately ambiguous relative pronoun antecedents because, as they note in the margins, they couldn’t figure out what kinds of challenges Faulkner was presenting in the new novel. Since he preserved the typescript that the editors worked from, it was pretty easy to restore those cuts and make an Absalom more nearly what Faulkner wrote.

 

 Those same editors denied Faulkner his title If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem in favor of The Wild Palms because, they told him, Absalom had been such a bust in the bookstores and they didn’t want to risk another novel with a biblical title; Faulkner was furious (one of the very few times he actually objected to an editorial decision), but had no choice but to accede.

 

 More difficult was the task of reconstructing Flags in the Dust from the probably preliminary typescript (not the setting copy that he submitted to his publishers), which Douglas Day used in the early 1970s to produce a text of Flags; but that Flags did not factor in the portions of Sartoris that clearly Faulkner had written, revisions of the extant preliminary typescript. Most of his novels were published in astonishingly clean and accurate texts, so that the editorial “corrections” I did in all 19 novels involved simply cleaning up some of the problems they and sometimes typesetters caused. Random House, except in this instance, was very professional and responsible in getting his works into print: They printed the complicated part 4 of “The Bear” in Go Down, Moses immaculately.

The Library of America undertook, with Random House’s cooperation, to make Faulkner the first in-copyright author to appear in the series, and after consulting with me on a problem in the text of As I Lay Dying, asked me to co-edit the Faulkner series with Joseph Blotner; I prepared the texts and he did the chronology and the annotations. The Library seems to have already made the decision to base the new Faulkner texts in the typescripts that he had preserved, perhaps partly because I had already produced new texts of Absalom and The Sound and the Fury for Random House. Though I had worked with his typescripts for years, when we began the “corrected texts” (Random House’s term for those first two texts), I really had no idea what kinds of “corrections” would be necessary in the other texts, so the whole project was a kind of adventure, that kept me off the streets, that kept me from drinking too much beer in the afternoons with colleagues; but overall I am happy to say that now the entire oeuvre of his novels are in print in texts that are as close to what Faulkner wrote—warts, perhaps, and all—as it’s possible to have.

 

2.   The corrected texts recall publication of corrected versions of Joyce’s “Ulyssses,” but problems with “Ulysses” seem more understandable, since he was working with French printers. Is Faulkner unusual among American writers published by U.S. publishing houses in requiring such extensive corrections? Is it because of the perceived difficulty of his work?

 

 Well, see above. The editors had difficulties with Absalom, as indeed do we all, but he was not alone among American authors who had to deal with editors — Max Perkins famously reduced Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel to manageable publishable proportions, for example, and the more recent notorious revelations of how his editor rewrote Raymond Carver’s stories; and Robert Penn Warren’s editors at Harcourt simply mutilated the text of All the King’s Men.

 

 To be absolutely fair, I should point out that editors and publishing houses have to think of books as marketable artifacts: They have to make a profit in order for us to have books at all. If they sometimes made bad decisions in what we now consider high art, we have to remember that they at least at some level have to think about how to pay their own —and their authors’ — bills.

 

3.   At the recent “Faulkner & Film” conference, I was excited and encouraged to find  how vital Faulkner’s work is for young scholars and readers. Why does he have such an enduring appeal?

 

 People say, with reason, that all of the 19^th century is in Moby-Dick. I think that all of the 20^th century is in Faulkner: his work is a kaleidoscope: look through it toward the light and the many-colored pieces of glass form a beautiful pattern; turn it half a degree one direction or another and that same colored glass forms itself into yet another beautiful perfectly organized pattern. So whether you approach Faulkner from the point of view of race, gender, psychology, history, the books present a brilliantly organized pattern of observation and commentary. After 45 years of intensive study of his work, I’m still discovering new stuff to talk and think about and to thrill over. Besides all that, they are damned good stories.

 

4.   After the conference, I read for the first time “If I Forget Thee Jerusalem” (“The Wild Palms”). The book is quite a departure from his Yoknapatawpha-based novels and stories and successfully uses elements of pulp fiction and even Westerns. The scenes in Chicago, New Orleans and the Utah mining camp are convincing, along with the depictions of the Mississippi River flood. The book reaffirms my amazement at Faulkner’s versatility. With his movie work and openness to different genres, do you consider him unusually adaptable for a major writer?

 

 Yes, he continues to amaze.

 

5.   At the conference, “Absalom, Absalom” appeared to receive the most critical comment, especially because of its links with Faulkner’s Hollywood experience. Is “Absalom, Absalom” now considered his greatest work?

 

Yes, although my favorite novel is always the one I happen to be reading at the time; to me, they are all infinitely fascinating. I’m confident that A Fable is a greater book than the Faulkner field is willing to grant and that eventually we will understand it for what it is. Faulkner said it would take us 50 years to understand it; perhaps he meant 150!

 

6.   Faulkner seems comparable to Shakespeare and Dickens. Like them, Faulkner doesn’t shy away from sensationalism to appeal to a common audience, while achieving artistic grandeur. Along with them, he created an astonishing cast of major and minor characters, and found universality in the particular. Is Faulkner the American writer most like Shakespeare and Dickens?

 

 For me, that’s an inarguable proposition, and for the reasons you give — the number and variety of unforgettable characters and situations.

 

7.   What projects are you working on now, whether involving Faulkner or other writers such as Eudora Welty?

 

 Though I’ve been retired from teaching for nearly two years now, I’m staying busy, still editing The Mississippi Quarterly and still entertaining invitations to lecture and teach. Also reading a shipload of murder mysteries!

Audiotapes Capture Faulkner at Virginia

William Faulkner's voice and personality live again in a remarkable collection of audiotapes preserved on a University of Virginia Web site.

Organized by professor Stephen Railton, who recently played a selection of the tapes at the Faulkner Conference at Ole Miss, the tapes capture Faulkner talking to classes and at public meetings when he was the writer in residence at Virginia late in his life. They were recorded in the late 1950s, just after the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation and before the civil rights movement gained force.

Faulkner talks with wisdom about these and other social issues. For those who love his books, though, the most fascinating part of the tapes is to hear him discuss writing and listen to him reading from his works.

Courteous, funny, courtly, equanimous and learned, Faulkner displays his best character traits in the tapes. Recorded on old-fashioned reel-to-reel equipment  by Frederick l. Gwynn and Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner, the tapes have a few hisses and static, but Faulkner's voice is clear and distinct. Some of the material was used in Gwynn and Blotner's book "Faulkner in the University," but the Web site offers and much more extensive collection.

One interesting trait mentioned by Railton is how comfortable Faulkner is with silence. He waits as long as two or three mintues for a person in his audience to ask a question. Actually, such an ability to remain silent for long periods was a characteristic of Southern men of Faulkner's era. I remember conversations in which an older man would not speak for long periods, comfortable with long silences.

Railton in his talk at Ole Miss asked listeners to the audiotapes to comment on any technical difficulties. The link is http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/. Railton's Web site also includes audi archives on Mark Twain, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom."