Southern Bookman

Frank Deford's sportwriting life

I listened with pleasure to Bob Edwards interviewing Frank Deford about Deford's recent memoir "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." Edwards and Deford, two old pros of the media game, blended perfectly.

That I had read the book added to my enjoyment of the interview on satellite radio. Deford, despite a surprising fondness for worn-out cliches, has the gift of readibility. His stories about his early days at Sports Illustrated and about the athletes he's met went down like fine champagne. Today's ESPN generation might not remember some of the players Deford writes about -- Elgin Baylor, even Bill Bradley -- and could learn that today's hyper sports environment didn't spring up from nowhere.

Referring back to those cliches, and interjectiions such as "Heavens to Betsy," the book does show signs of careless writing and today's lower editing standards. For example, Deford makes a big point of how his name is frequently misspelled DeFord, but then it's misspelled that way throughout the book. I read the memoir in e-book form on my Nook, which made me wonder if ebooks are taken from unedited versions. I've felt with other ebooks that the editing standards for them are even lower than those for printed books. Deford's sentences can have a breathless, run-on quality, as if dictated off the top of his head.

I also wondered about his assertion that he was the first national writer to do an article on Bill Bradley when Bradley was at Princeton, Deford's alma mater. John McPhee's book "A Sense of Where You Are" is my first memory of Bradley. Perhaps Deford wrote his Sports Illustrated profile of Bradley before McPhee wrote his book, excepted in the New Yorker, as I recall. Deford might be right that he was the first one to write about Bradley, but I'd be curious to know for sure.

Deford amusingly writes about his stint as editor of the National, the great failed experiment of a national sports daily. Several of my colleagues at the AJC left to follow the National dream, including the late Van McKenzie, whom Deford warmly remembers.

Listening to Deford and Edwards chat and laugh together like a veteran vaudeville team, I realized that Deford overcomes the drawbacks with his generous, magnanimous spirit. He's a throwback to the days when sports were not taken so seriously and possessed a mythic, magical quality. Today's sports-talk yakkers, stats junkies and overpaid, entitled athletes have taken away a lot of the fun. Deford sounds, and reads, like a man whos's had fun.

Jonathan Franzen's Instant Masterpiece

The fanfare accompanying the publication of Jonathan Franzen's novel "Freedom" is heartening to upholders of traditional literary culture. After years in which novels, especially large and serious ones, were pushed to the margins of American culture, Franzen's book is receiving cloudbursts of attention, including Franzen appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

With reading of novels and other books in decline, our attention spans short-circuited by the Internet, television, mobile phones and I-pads, and cultural standards falling, the Franzen boom is like a last reflexiive spasm of a dying age. Or perhaps it marks a revived attention to literature, fueled by the popularity of e-book readers like Kindle.

No matter what, I was dismayed by Sam Tannenhaus' fawning review of "Freedom" on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The first sentence set me off, "Jonathan Franzen's new novel 'Freedom," like his previous one, "The Corrections," is a materpiece of American fiction."

How unseemly for Mr. Tannenhaus, the editor of the book review and the noted biographer of Whittaker Chambers, to immediately make an inflated assessment of a novel not yet available to the reading public. Such simplistic and short-sighted declarations would be questionable for a college sophomore; they are disturbing from the editor of the most prevalent literary review in Americag.  To be declared a masterpiece, a book traditionally has stood the test of readership, received longterm critical evalation and gained acceptance by generations. Tannenaus' declaraton is premature at best. It only set the stage for a long, tedious and overwrought review.

I read "Corrections" when it appeared: I'd forgotten that it was publshed right before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Perhaps someone will compile an anthology of Sept. 11-eve literature; old '60s lib and reputed Barack Obama pal Bill Ayers published his self-serving memoir right before Sept. 11 as well. "Corrections" is an apt companion to Ayers' book; both are testaments to an age of self-indulgence and moral atrophy reputedly blown away with the dust of the Trade Center towers.

Looking back on "Corrections," I don't consider it "a masterpiece." I remember a swirl of impressions, a few striking characters and scenes, and the book's claustrophobic atmosphere. It had stretches of good writing, but could have benefitted from cutting and editing. I didn't think it that much different from other novels about American families; it was hardly the original, revolutionary break with the past that Tannehaus imagines.

The importance given to Time's endorsement of Franzen is also outdated, since the cultural power of the weekly newsmagazine has seriously eroded.  A few decades ago, the newsmagazines played a major role in settting the cultural/political and social agenda, but now they hardly matter, especially to the younger generation.

That Franzen is receiving such heightened attention is ironic, since he claimed to disdain such acclaim when Oprah chose "Corrections" for her book club and he rejected her imprimatur. The burst of publicity has also brought protests from women novelists who see themselves as slighted in comparison.

The publication of "Freedom," at 562 pages, marks the latest revival of the big, messy novel. That there's no shortage of such books shows that literary publishing might not be in such bad shape after all. Still, "Freedom," even if it achieves best-seller status, will still be purchased and read by a small percentage of the American public. "American Idol" and football will consume most people.

  

My Southern Heritage, Universal Outlook

I've sometimes wondered why I called this venture Southern Bookman, since that implies the regionalism and provincialism I deplore. In my literary interests, I consider myself a member of the Republic of Letters, the historical and enduring fellowship explored by Princeton historian Anthony Grafton in his recent book "Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West."

While I have an international, open-minded outlook, I instinctively and without much thought decided to use the title "Southern Bookman." I am a Southerner, irrevocably stamped by my upbringing in Southern Louisiana, in many ways different from the rest of the South because of its French and Catholic heritage. While I lack much patience for neo-Confederate Romanticism, or the Southern boosterism espoused by the Oxford American, I am in profound ways a provincial Southerner.

As an LSU graduate, I am deeply proud of the university's literary heritage, fostered by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the original incarnation of the Southern Review, and nurtured today with the continued excellence of the literary journal, and the LSU Press. I love the South's literary tradition, rooted in William Faulkner, but contributed to by so many others: Eudora Welty, Kate Chopin, Flannery O'Connor, Roy Blount, Barry Hannah, Tom Franklin, Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon and on and on. Among my favorite writers, the quintessential Yankee, Robert Lowell, was strongly stamped by his association with Southerners and his time in the Deep South.

I consider myself as adding to the tradtion of Southern liberalism/progressism, with various branches reaching to Huey and Earl Long, William Faulkner, Ralph McGill, Eugene Patterson,  Walker and William Percy, Hodding Carter (a bitter Long foe in his Louisiana Days), Wendell Berrry and so many others. Like Berry, I respect the Agrarians, rejecting their racism, but seeing much of value in their espousal of  tradition and criticism of modern, monolithic capitalism.

While I revere Lincoln and the Union cause, I have a deeply engrained emotional bond with the soldiers of the South and military leaders like Lee and Jackson. I am an irrational and emotional partisan of LSU football and other sports, although for many years I tried to deny that tribal attachment.

For better or worse, I am a Southerner, a Louisianian, and I suppose, a Georgian, although I've resisted the latter attachement despite living in Georgia for now more than 30 years. I've had allegiances to Sewanee, Emory and the University of Florida. Along with other intellectual Southerners, I deplore the South's poverty, religious fundamentalism, suspicion of outsiders and fresh ideas, violence, self-destructive eating and drinking, and defensiveness, traces of all of which I possess like minerals in my bloodstream. I love the South's colorful language, storytelling, loyalty, sense of honor, love of nature and beauty, romanticism, family consciousness and love of eating, drinking, celebration and ceremony. As these conflicting statements indicate, the best and worst of the South are sides of the same cracked mirror, through which a clear image can be difficult to discern.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to write this type of essay now, so many months into Southern Bookman. For some reason, I felt the need to orient myself to the site's mission, and give some insight into its purpose and outlook.

I've enjoyed doing the site's interviews with a variety of writers, and look forward to continuing this in 2010. I also look ahead to renewing my efforts to cover American and global writing and thinking. As a new year arrives, I am grateful for the many readers and supporters of this effort and happily anticipate the journey continuing.