Southern Bookman

A Vivid Look at Shiloh

On a recent trip to Nashville, I saw an I-75 sign in Tennessee for the Pittsburg exit, which stirred my memory of the Civil War Battle of Shiloh, which began at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River when a ragged Rebel force on a lovely Sunday morning in early April disturbed the breakfast and languor of Sherman's troops. Leaving the Cumberland River and crossing the Tennessee River on our return to Atlanta also brought back my recollections of the federal-Confederate conflict in the West.

The trip to Nashville had raised my awareness of the old river city's Civil War legacy. Along with historical markers and Garrison Keillor's amusing reference in his Ryman Auditorium show to the 1864 Battle of Nashville, we visited Belle Meade Plantation, with its exhibits on the plantation's role in the battle and the experience of slaves who lived there. With remnants of old Nashville juxtaposed with its soaring office towers, hotels and gleaming convention centers, I felt an underlying presence of the Civil War.

I'd read quite a bit about Shiloh, yet realized I didn't deeply know details about the battle. I'd encountered Shiloh in general histories but never read a book devoted to the battle, the war's first with a shockingly high number of deaths and casualties. I'd read such specialized histories of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and Antietam, all written by the excellent Stephen W. Sears.

In my state of Shiloh curiosity, I came upon Winston Groom's "Shiloh 1862" at the library as if it had been placed there for me. Groom, best known as the author of the novel "Forrest Gump," is also a noted military historian who before his Shiloh account published a similar book about Vicksburg. I excitedly checked out "Shiloh 1862," and it has captivated me from the start, a fitting book as Memorial Day approaches.

"Shiloh 1862" with novelistic power looks at giant personalities such as U.S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman and Albert Sidney Johnston as well as lesser players. While Groom falls short of Sears' encyclopedic range, "Shiloh 1862" gives a vivid, detailed look at the battle that made the North realize that the war would be long and bloody and strengthened the South's resolve.

1962 Prize for "The Moviegoer" Holds Up

A recent Slate article looked back at how Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer" unexpectedly won the 1962 National Book Award over more well-known works like Joseph Heller's "Catch 22" and J.D. Salinger's "Franny and Zooey." The piece claimed the literary surprise was a scandalous fix engineered by A.J. Liebling and his wife, Jean Stafford, a member of the awards committee.

According to the article, Liebling discovered Percy's first book on trips to Percy's native Louisiana. Liebling went to Louisiana to report on Gov. Earl Long for the New Yorker, articles collected in the wonderful book "The Earl of Louisiana." One correction to the Slate piece: The writer calls Long a conservative, when he was one of the most liberal Southern politicians, as Liebling recounts. Anyway, the Slate writer claims that Liebling wanted Percy's book to win the award to show up publisher Alfred Knopf, who had feuded with Liebling. Knopf had not pushed "The Moviegoer," which Knoph published, so its winning the award would somehow show up Knopf, the writer says with convoluted logic.

The writer might be right about Liebling, but I have my doubts. First, Long died in 1960, and Liebling likely would have been done with his Louisiana forays long before "The Moviegoer" was published.

Stafford likely had another connection to Percy. Before marrying Liebling, she was married to Robert Lowell, a close friend of poet/critic Allen Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon. Gordon, who remained a close friend of Stafford, was an early mentor of Percy, who turned to writing after his medical career was halted by tuberculosis. Gordon is a more likely champion of Percy's book to Stafford than Liebling.

It might not be relevant to the 1962 book award, but Stafford had her own Louisiana connection. Early in her marriage to Lowell, she moved to Baton Rouge in 1940 when Lowell went to study at LSU with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. The deeply talented Stafford was pressed into service as a secretary for Warren and Brooks' Southern Review. Lowell's friend Peter Taylor was also at LSU at the time. Taylor himself might have been the one who passed Percy's book to Stafford.

The Slate article assumes the truth of a literary conspiracy, only slightly raising the possibility that "The Moviegoer" won on its merits. After 50 years, the award holds up. "Catch 22" continues to be read, but a lot of it looks dated. "Franny and Zoey" is seen as quirky and its reputation has fallen along with Salinger's. "The Moviegoer" is the most enduring of the three books. "Catch 22 and "Franny and Zoey" are '60s artifacts. With its philosophical depth and timeless insights into human nature, "The Moviegoer" holds greater claim as a classic.

Valdosta Nights: Football Life in a Southern Town

Drew Jubera's "Must Win: A Season of Survival for a Town and Its Team" goes beyond its hyperbolic title with a rich, in-depth look at a small Southern city and its passion for high school football.

More than just a sports book, "Must Win" uses the 2010 Valdosta Wildcats season to examine education, race, religion, teen life, religion, hip hop, poverty, and urban problems. Along with that, sports fans will find a wealth of high school football lore.

Jubera, a longtime colleague of mine at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, spent a year in Valdosta to chronicle the Wildcats' 2010 season under new coach Rance Gillespie, hired to restore the Wildcats' declining football dynasty.

Once nationally known as the country's top high school football power under legendary coaches Wright Bazemore and Nick Hyder, Valdosta had declined in the 1990s after Hyder's unexpected death, of a heart attack in the school's cafeteria at lunchtime. With white flight and a falling population, the old inner-city school had watched nearby Lowndes County High rise in wealth and football power.

Jubera presents an engaging history of the town's football rise and fall, giving fascinating details of the city's and region's past and present along the way. Valdosta, on the eastern edge of U.S. 84 football crescent that swings through south Georgia, is the last stop on i-75 before tourists reach Florida. That geographical distinction has allowed the city to build a tourism industry based on interstate hotels and restaurants. Jubera delves into the area's agricultural past of turpentine production, when black workers were brutally exploited. He shows how that past echoes into the present day, when many black members of the Valdosta team are beset by poverty and violence.

The book is populated by an interesting group of characters, from longtime Valdosta boosters desperate to restore the glory days to football-addicted coaches and stressed teachers and parents. The most memorable characters are the handful of players whom Jubera highlights in heartbreaking, funny and endearing ways.

At times, Jubera's attempts at hip-hop flavored effects fall short, but those are rare blemishes. "Must Win's" intensely regional focus, as with Faulkner, gives it universal appeal. The book deserves national attention and readership.

Gay Talese Enters the Bunker, and The New Yorker

Gay Talese, who's rarely if ever published in The New Yorker during his illustruous career, broke into the august magazine a couple of weeks ago with a profile of New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi. In tandem with the piece, The New Yorker web site ran a video of Talese giving a tour of his "bunker," his writing office located in the basement below the New York townhome he shares with his wife, Nan, the noted book publisher.

To enter his retreat, Talese must walk down the stairs of his townhome, traverse a few steps on the sidewalk, then go down a few more stairs to a room that once served as a wine cellar. The video shows Talese making this short jaunt. Once in his hideaway, Talese displayed a glee in his work, and clothing.

The dapper, elegantly graying man, saying his haberdashery derives from his Italian heritage, sported a beige suit, blue striped shirt, yellow tie and staw fedora. His soundproof office, which lacks a phone, is crammed with files of Talese's work for five decades. He gave a demonstration of his reporting methods, how he interviews his subjects without taking notes, then immediately writes down the conversation on pieces of cardboard specifically cut to fit his jacket pockets. Connecting to  his sylish clothes, the cardboard looked like the kind cleaners place into startched shirts. I was somewhat surprised to see Talese working on a desktop computer; I half-expected him to be of the old school that still works on a typewriter, or even writes longhand. That Talese in his 70s remains so vital and attractive is inspiring.

Much of Talese's classic work was done for Esquire magazine. It's good that the New Yorker is now accepting Talese's pieces; editor David Remnick has opened the magazine to a wider variety of writers.

The piece on Girardi displays the controlled qualities of masters like Talese, who uses simple declarative sentences and well-chosen facts such as hitting statistics to build an interesting, understated narrative. His profile reminded me of the work of another master long associated with The New Yorker, John McPhee.

Talese, McPhee and Robert Caro are among a generation of writers who gave heightened literary quality to nonfiction writing. Tom Wolfe is another illustrous member of that generation, who, however, has turned to novel writing late in his career.

With eulogies of print continuing, a new generation of writers such as Katherine Boo and Michael Lewis have continued producing vital nonfiction works, continuing in the path of Talese, McPhee, Caro and others.

The recent death of legendary New York Times publisher Punch Sulzberger made me want to go back to Talese's classic book "The Power and the Glory," about how Sulzberger revitalized the Times. Seeing the video of Talese in his work space increased my desire to revisit that book, along with Talese's other work, such as his Esquire pieces on Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra. Talese is such an epitome of New York style and culture, that it's striking to remember that he is a proud graduate of the University of Alabama.

Robert Caro's Portrait of LBJ, and Country, in Crisis

Thanks to the Atlanta-Fulton County Library System, on whose public computer I'm writing this blog, I'm reading the latest volume of Robert Caro's massive biography of Lyndon Johnson. The recently released "The Passage of Power" looks at how Johnson was chosen as John F. Kennedy's vice president, how Johnson's role in the Kennedy administration was severely stunted, how events unfolded during the shocking days of Kennedy's assassination, and how Johnson gave heroic duty to the traumatized country with his masterful handling of the transfer of power.

Many characters appear in Caro's thrilling pages, but the heart of the book is Johnson's bitter rivalry with Robert F. Kennedy. Neither man comes off well in their hatred of each other, although Johnson appears as the most wronged. Kennedy, like Johnson, was a complex man, with conflicting impulses of generosity and inferiority. Caro emphasizes that RFK desperately wanted to please his domineering father, Joe Kennedy, and I wondered if somehow he saw in Johnson a distorted mirror image of old Joe.

Caro's themes are many, with in-depth retellings of the era's political and social history.  The author does a good job of dramatizing and making interesting events such as the maneuverings at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, at which Johnson was chosen as JFK's running mate despite the bitter opposition of RFK, and Johnson's experience of Nov. 22, 1963, and afterward, a viewpoint never before given such detailed exposition, as far as I know. At times, Caro drifts into complex inside-baseball bogs, but these are rare. The Shakespearian figure of Lyndon Johnson lives and breathes on the page, as does the cast of vivid, colorful characters surrounding him.

Now, I want to go back and read the volume of Caro's opus I missed, "The Master of the Senate." And, I can't wait for the next volume, in which Caro analyzes how Johnson passed the "Great Society" legislation, only to see his presidency wrecked by Vietnam. Caro apparently still has the health and energy to complete his herculean task, and we hope he does so, recalling however that William Manchester, the man who gave the first accounts of Kennedy's assassination, was unable to finish his massive biography of Winston Churchill.

Thinking of Churchill's importance as a world leader raises one question I had while reading "The Passage of Power": Is Lyndon Johnson really worth such a massive biography? He was one of the most successful presidents in regard to social programs, and a failed one because of the economic and social havoc engendered by his conduct of the Vietnam War. Johnson led the country at a pivotal time of social and economic change, and was a focal point for all that is good and bad in American society. Caro's devotion to his story, and his ability to bring alive the events surrounding him, makes his subject seem worth the major treatment. Page by page, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, Caro makes his case for Johnson as a major, epochal figure. He mostly succeeds in proving that LBJ, if not among the greatest presidents, is certainly one of the most vital and complex. Richard Nixon is the only other president who presents such a mixture of good and evil, genius and self-destructiveness. It's a reflection of their chaotic times that their administrations followed upon each other, both showing incredible achievements and appalling failures, both consumed by Vietnam and a neurotic need for secrecy and distorted power. Perhaps a writer is waiting to give the Caro treatment to Nixon, although it's unlikely anyone will again write such a massive and detailed history of any historical figure.   

James Lee Burke Shows Jarring Contradictions, Literary Skill in Latest Work, "Creole Belle"

James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux books represent the most extended excursion I've made into the macho crime-novel genre. I've read one or two of books by Elmore Leonard and a couple by Carl Hiassen, and probably five by Burke, whose descriptions of western and southern Louisiana enflame my nostalgia for my native state.

I've just finished Burke's latest, "Creole Belle," finding it a mixed bag, as usual with his books. As with Hiassen and Leonard, the villains possess cartoonish evil natures. Burke enjoys violating crime fiction rules, memorably laid down by Leonard a few years ago. At times I wish Burke would hew more closely to Leonard's standards; Burke's frequent philosophical digressions make me long to get back to the plot. Unlike Leonard counsels, Burke is big on the weather, in Burke's books, it seems the rain is falling in every scene, or clearing up. HIs effects grow repetitive, a number of scenes begin with nearly the same wording.

Burke shows signs of wanting to be the serious literary writer he once was, which is one reason he goes against Leonard. I realize that Burke's descriptions of nature and Louisiana towns are a major reason I like his work. Burke overwrites, his words drifting deep into the purple, but when he's under control, he achieves a masterful, poetic depth.

In his latest work, Burke gives even more emphasis to Robicheaux's sidekick, Clete Purcell. He also introduces a couple of other characters, who are more outrageous cartoons than real characters. As with Burke's previous book, a prequel to "Creole Belle," he shows an end of life, elegiac wistfulness.

Burke strives to paint Robicheaux, Purcell and their families as more virtuous characters than the evil-doers. But, part amusingly and part dismaying, Purchell and Robicheaux reveal themselves as more sadistic and brutal than the evil guys they end up slaughtering. Much of this violence comes off as gratuitous, as if Burke enjoys showing how far he can go.

In "Creole Belle," Burke takes on the oil companies and the gulf oil spill, although he never mentions the perpetrator, BP, by name. While he blasts the oil companies for ruining the traditional Cajun lifestyle, he shows his characters driving from say New Iberia to New Orleans without forethought, a freedom that would be impossible without the oil companies. Thus, while painting big oil as evil, he presents a society irrevocably addicted to oil.

Burke again goes too far with his descriptions of violence; and his depictions of women are plagued by an combination of leering sexism and old fashioned paternalism. His dialogue can be clumsy and heavy-handed, along with his historical/philosophical musings. The best parts of the book are when he shows his talent as a literary artist, such as the finely imagined final scene of Clete Purcell and some Vietnamese children he befriends at a Key West beach.

Despite his contradictions, displays of careless writing and lack of consideration for the reader, Burke in the end transcends his weaknesses, presenting a tragic and artistically moving portrait of Louisiana culture under siege by environmental degradation and societal change.

A Trip to San Francisco

I've just returned from that exquisitely literary city, San Francisco, where I quickly made my pilgrammage to the Beat cathedral, City Lights Books, in a racy North Beach area. My son accompanied me, and I proudly showed him Jack Kerouac Alley next to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's book-jammed spot. Seeing Saint Jack's sign and standing in the soft West Coast light, I felt a momentary wash of emotion, a mourning for the lost days of freedom and hope that Kerouac captured.

Inside, my son was amused by the sections devoted to radical politics and writing. I found a book on Jimmy Rodgers, the old Mississippi singing brakeman, surprised that my interest in old roots music would be met by City Lights, which I place in another literary/intellectual/artistic realm than country and western. Goes to show the universality of the City Lights collection, quite an anachronism these days, but quite common at independent bookstores back 30 years ago.

City Lights is also an excellent press; and I purchased a nice City Lights poetry anthology. After making my purchases, I saw a new book by the great guitarist Ry Cooder, a short story collection called "Los Angeles Stories," published by City Lights, but didn't buy it right then. Later, at another bookstore, this one located on Second Street downtown, I did buy it to take home with me.

With all of its tomes on anarchism, socialism and the like, City Lights is a capitalist place. I pointed out to my son a book on type and fonts that I had read, checking it out of the library, and he, a type wonk, decided to buy it, then complained over and over about its $30 cost. 

My son wasn't impressed when we returned outside and I pointed out to him the nearby Hungry I, once the center of the cutting edge standup comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. I was happy to see the old spot, assuming that it still gives a forum for comedians, poets and musicians. A few days later, we happened on a cool spot called Melt, where we listed to jazz for several hours from two different bands, the first a trio and the second a packed tightly together group with piano, bass, sax, guitar, two drummers, and a guy playing trumpet and French horn. Each group had a musician playing standup bass, a wonderful instrument.

The spirit of Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade floated in the cool bay breeze when I sat at a sidewalk spot drinking coffee and saw a sign above a storefront advising that here was the office of a private eye. Our companion, a resident of the neighborhood, said the P.I. had left a few years ago, but in my mind I was already forming the detective novel about the place. San Francisco is one of those magical places that inspires writing. 

A Visit to Nashville's Parnassus

On a recent trip to Nashville, I had to make a pilgrimage to Parnassus Books, author Ann Patchett's independent bookstore experiment. Belying my imagined enraputure with an old-fashioned, overstuffed bookish haven in a vintage storefront near Vanderbilt or downtown, we found the store in a contemporary space in a mall in Green Hills, the city's upscale area.

While the bookstore met the measure of a clean, well-lighted place, the area's sterility was disappointing. Inside, a good crowd of book lovers chatted about authors and readings and looked through the shelves. The presence of such folks was encouraging, but didn't quite overcome the arid commercial feeling of the business.

The store did have a strong variety of books, better than seen these days at Barnes & Noble. The poetry section contained several books with which I was unfamiliar, or could never find in Atlanta, and I also found a long-sought work, Edith Pearlman's short story collection, "Binocular Vision," with an introduction by Patchett herself. I also found the American Poetry Review, for years common on newsstands, but which has disappeared in the last half decade or so. Parnassus' bulletin board gave evidence that it is making a good effort to foster the city's literary culture, with announcements of readings, workshops, book signings and writer's appearances.

Later, we heard about a similar experience to ours in regard to Parnassus. Our daughter's roommate said her mother, like me, had read about the bookstore in The New York Times and had to make a visit to the described literary oasis. Similar to me, the Mom had been disappointed by the sterile mall location.

Well, that's not the important thing. The books, and the nurturing of literary culture, are what matter. I salute Patchett for her effort in keeping independent bookstores alive. 

The Sunday Times Gives Nod to Faulkner

The Sunday New York Times magazine last week published John Jeremiah Sullivan's introduction to a new Modern Library edition of William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom." With Oprah Winfrey's push a few years ago, Faulkner is again a hot writer, and Sullivan with his collection "Pulpwood" is among the young writers celebrated in New York literary circles. So, undoubtedly surprising the Sunday reader expecting the usual tale of young urban angst, the Times magazine turned its attention to Faulkner and a dense, convoluted novel first published in 1936.  

The piece began with the observation that "Absalom, Absalom" in an Oxford American poll a few years ago was voted the best Southern novel ever. Sullivan, who has ties with the self-consciously Southern OA, might have even written the poll article himself. If nothing else, the reference shows the silliness of such polls, with Faulkner himself having several books worthy of being considered the best Southern novel. Many readers find "Absalom, Absalom," perhaps the most Southern Gothic of Faulkner's books, heavy going. I myself had a hard time warming to the book, at last seeing its greatness. It is to be wondered how many people who voted for "Absalom, Absalom" as the greatest Southern novel actually read it.

Sullivan in his Times magazine piece warms over the usual boilerplate about the South and race, miscegenation, the burden of history, blah, blah, blah. He also makes some dubious claims about Faulkner's book, predominantly that it is the only novel he knows of that examines how history manifests intself in individual lives. Huh? What about "War and Peace," or even "Huckleberry Finn?" The piece damns Faulkner with extravagant praise.

Well, I suppose the usual blather about the South and race and so forth will pleasure the conventional midsets of Times readers. What Faulkner actually says about race and its primal place in Southern history is not actually explored by Sullivan in his Cliff Notes musings.

What I loved about "Absalom, Absalom" is the portrait of Quentin Compson, the doomed Southern gentleman of "The Sound and the Fury," in my opinion Faulkner's greatest achievement. The book is narrated by Quentin, who tells the story of "Absalom, Absalom" to his Harvard roommate, Shreve, one of Faulkner's most  interesting minor characters.  Quentin is one of Faulkner's archetypal Southern characters, and "Absalom, Absalom" shows him as a full personality, not totally consumed by the obsessions that mark his tragedy in "The Sound and the Fury."

Perhaps Sullivan's piece in the Sunday Times will inspire a few readers to pick up the new edition of "Absalom, Absalom," even bring them to start the national "dialogue" on race that Sullivan like others says the country desperately needs. In my observation, racism is dying out generation by generation, but it continues its stranglehold on our society. "Absalom, Absalom' examines race, of course, but that is not the primary reason to read it, as Sullivan claims. As with other great works, its value is in the author's artistic vision, the fully imagined fictional world that Faulkner creates.

 

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.