Category Archives: southern literature

Styron, Set This House on Fire

On Mark’s recommendation, I read this novel and agree completely with his sentiments. Briefly, the story is about some expatriates in Italy after WWII. The narrator, Peter, drives down to visit his old school friend, Mason, who is independently wealthy and partying it up with movie stars. There, Peter encounters another man in that circle, Cass. During Peter’s first night in town, everyone gets rip-roaring drunk, there are some spats, and the next day a woman has been raped and Mason is dead. The police wrap it up and say Mason raped her and committed suicide, case closed.

A few years later, Peter visits Cass in North Carolina to uncover the truth. The structure of how the narrative unfolds is interesting, because it’s almost entirely in a series of flashbacks. In the first half of the novel, Peter’s narrative develops the character of Mason and Mason’s side of that evening, and the second half of the novel is essentially Cass telling his story. And I think that structure, while interesting, is what ultimately makes the novel a magnificent failure, or whatever Faulkner’s phrase was.

Yes, there are some scenes that could edited, but even more troubling, the book could use a good line-editing page by page, because reading it I didn’t get a sense of an author. I felt like I was reading Norman Mailer, a big expansive overdone narrative that has these great moments but that left me not really knowing what to say about Styron the artist. I kept wishing Peter would just disappear the way Zuckerman disappears on Roth’s ’90s work. Peter does disappear, but he’s still there as a conscious listener, which is clunky.

Overall: I’m glad I read it, and will probably read more Styron, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it without Mark’s caveat that it could stand to be 150 pages shorter.

Faulkner, Sartoris (republished as Flags in the Dust)

How have I never read this novel? A shame, for sure. After finishing it, I believe it’s the keystone of southern literature in the 20th century. Many, many southern writers have written books in this vein —  William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, Larry Brown’s Father and Son, Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper, William Gay’s The Long Home and Provinces of Night, and many, many more (I’d include my MFA thesis novel, though it was an unwitting parallel; I really wish I’d read Sartoris circa 2005…).

So what’s the story? If you haven’t read it, the novel is about old Col. Bayard Sartoris and his grandson, Bayard, who has just returned home from WWI. Young Bayard is a wild one, and suffering from the post-war Lost Generation syndrome, so he spends his days driving around too fast, though for a time he settles down with Narcissa Benbow (whose brother, Horace, makes an appearance), and who is also being courted by one of the Snopes boys. And that’s the first thing that’s so interesting about the novel — it’s Faulkner’s first Yawknapatawpha book, so he introduces this wide cast of characters. And it’s neat to see how, for instance, years later, he took a couple of paragraphs from this novel and turned it into his Snopes trilogy.

The plot here is fairly loose and probably wouldn’t get published today. Indeed, editors 80-something years ago cut Flags in the Dust drastically, and the novel was eventually restored. I read a library copy of the original, so I can’t comment on the changes, though Sartoris read fine to me. What I really like here is that Faulkner hasn’t started in on his spiraling plots and crazy POV jumps and six-page sentences. Rather, this is a lyric, pastoral elegy to a collapsing family, rich in natural detail and foreshadowing some of the heavy-hitters to come. Maybe not Faulkner’s best, and maybe not one that earned him his place in the canon, but it’s still a great read.

On William Styron

[Cross-posted with So You Have an MFA]

Y’all might have seen that Sophie Styron, William’s daughter, has a new memoir about her father’s life. The only Styron I’ve read is Lie Down in Darkness, which he wrote at 26. That novel has its moments, but you have to slog through others to find those gems. Plus, it’s kind of hard to distinguish the prose from Faulkner. Anyone read Confessions of Nat Turner or Sophie’s Choice?

Reading the reviews of Sophie’s book, I’m reminded why I don’t care to know too much about an author’s life. On the one hand, there are these fascinating details from a NY Times review:

Bill Clinton and Gabriel García Márquez argued at the Styrons’ table while a Marine with the nuclear football ate fried chicken nearby. (Mr. García Márquez wanted to talk about Cuba; Mr. Clinton preferred to declaim Benjy’s monologue from “The Sound and the Fury.”)

Edward M. Kennedy was a regular guest; so were James Jones and Arthur Miller and Carly Simon and James Baldwin. There was always, Ms. Styron writes, “laughter, profanity, complex movements of thought.” The family’s Christmas party usually included Leonard Bernstein on piano.

On the other hand, Sophie apparently takes her father to task for his drinking and for generally being a less-than-perfect father, which Winston Groom (author of Forrest Gump and friend of William’s) has a problem with. From his WSJ review:

What to make of Ms. Styron’s bewildering disquisition? “Reading My Father” is excellently written and highly entertaining, but in the end it is simply troubling. The problem is that the allegations of Styron’s relentless, frightening, mean-spirited and tyrannical assaults on his family don’t square up with the evidence presented. Perhaps there were episodes too horrid or embarrassing for the author to include, but that isn’t fair to the reader. If you are going to prosecute a case, prosecute it or let it be, because that is basically what this book is—a trial of the author’s father.

There is no mention of any physical abuse, or of violence, and the evidence of severe mental abuse is unconvincing. It’s an undisputed fact, however, that the Styron children—Ms. Styron has two sisters and a brother—grew up in luxurious homes, traveled well, attended good schools and Ivy League colleges. They were surrounded all their lives by creative, smart people and basked in their father’s celebrity. At present they are all living productive lives.

I guess I’m glad to see people aren’t just letting Styron’s legacy go gently into the night, but what of the work? Did that generation miss out on the canon? Or will we one day be looking at Styron, Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, Malamud and others the way we look at Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner today?

Walker Percy and despair

I’ve been doing some reading Walker Percy. Last night I read Linda Whitney Hobson’s Understanding Walker Percy, a great place to gain some basic biographical details and an introduction to Percy’s philosophical framework. I’ve been meaning to read up on Kierkegaard for a few months now, and may have to after this book. From Hobson’s book, Kierkegaard had this idea for three spheres of being — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In the aesthetic sphere, we’re in despair because of the meaninglessness of everything, but we might not realize we’re in despair. In the ethical sphere, we understand the meaninglessness but strive to live an ethical life anyway, stoically accepting it. In the religious sphere, we’re knights of faith striving to overcome the despair. (I’m not totally clear, but I think that’s the gist of Hobson’s synopsis.)

In terms of Percy, Binx Bolling is living in the aesthetic sphere. He’s a consumerist, and he moves from one secretary to the next, and he drives an MG, all in an effort to stave of the “malaise” of the “everyday.” These moves are a series of “rotations,” to use Kierkegaard’s term, an effort to avoid confronting the despair. But he is jolted out of his complacency and renews his efforts at “the search,” in which he becomes the knight of faith. He knows he’s been participating in rotations and now is willing to confront the truth.

The reason Percy speaks to us today is that our world has many more rotations to keep us from confronting the everydayness, the malaise, the despair: Facebook, blogs, cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle, video games, political histrionics, email surveys, retail VIP memberships, iPads, etc. So much stuff! And all of it keeps us distracted from any kind of spiritual questioning. Is it any wonder religion is an endangered species, carried on primarily by fringe lunatics with financial or political stakes? The real danger is that if we’re buried in the aesthetic sphere, what happens when the rug gets pulled out from under us? When the stocks crash or the housing bubble bursts? Then we see the facade for what it is, we get a glimpse of how fragile our worlds are and how we’ve been living in despair, and to deal with it we go crazy. That’s how the tea party forms. That’s why people blow up abortion clinics or have affairs or embezzle money from their employers. We perform risky behavior to serve some end, some manufactured meaning (to restore our nation’s finances or to restore morality or to get rich and pay off bills). Manufacturing some end, some meaning, is another rotation.

In many ways, the worldview of Percy shows up in DeLillo. Speaking about White Noise, DeLillo said he was trying to capture a “radiance in dailiness,” which seems very similar to this idea of rotations. The characters in DeLillo are distracted by the radiating media to the point where they become spiritual vacuums. It takes a disaster — an end-of-the-world-type scenario — for them to lift out of the malaise and rediscover life.

New Stories from the South: 2005

In continuing to catch up on the stories in this anthology series, I read through the 2005 issue this week. I’ll probably slow down and try to start working my way backward with the Best American series, or maybe I’ll go back to novels, but in the mean time, here are a few highlights from 2005:

  • Dennis Lehane, “Until Gwen” — a dude’s father picks him up from prison, and the two revisit a West Virginia fairgrounds where some stolen jewels might be hidden. The two men and dude’s girlfriend had been involved with a robbery gone south. Everyone’s a villain.
  • Judy Budnitz, “The Kindest Cut” — the narrator reads Civil War letters about her ancestor amputating limbs and cracking up.
  • Moira Crone, “Mr. Sender” — a girl pities this man who lives next door to her, because the man’s daughter ran off, but the man probably been abusing the daughter and took up with the girl next door. Very spooky tale.
  • Rebecca Soppe, “The Pantyhose Man” — an entertaining story about a woman who works at a hotel switchboard and develops a relationship with a pervert who keeps calling to ask her about her pantyhose.
  • Kevin Wilson, “The Choir Director’s Affair (The Baby’s Teeth)” — Wilson hasn’t missed yet that I’ve read; this story is about a guy whose friend is stepping out on his wife and using the guy as an excuse. One day the protagonist gets saddled with his friend’s baby.

New Stories from the South: 2010

They got Amy Hempel to edit the collection this year, and she picked quite a few shorter stories than you normally see in this anthology. For instance, Padgett Powell’s “Cry for Help from France,” is a two-page plotless rumination on courage, an interesting read but a kind of bizarre story. I didn’t love everything in here — in fact, I was having trouble stomaching some of the more blatant “southern” pieces, and wondered if I was losing interest/faith in southern literature. Fortunately, Elizabeth Spencer came in near the end and restored my sensibilities. Some highlights:

  • Ann Pancake, “Arsonists” — Pancake is a relatively new Appalachian writer, and this story, about a man cracking up in West Virginia strip mine country, takes on an important political topic through its characters, who have their own private drama within the larger system. A very good read.
  • “Aaron Gwyn, “Drive” — This story is about a guy who, after a fight with his girlfriend on the road, speeds up and cruises into the left lane, nearly killing them in a wreck. The action cures their relationship, temporarily, and they embark on a series of reckless “drives.”
  • Kenneth Calhoun, “Nightblooming” — A 20-year-old drummer joins a jazz band with a group of partying septogenarians. Need I say more?
  • Tim Gautreaux, “Idols” — A few years ago, some editor asked a bunch of favorite southern writers to write an O’Connor-inspired story, which has led to several fun stories. Gautreaux takes a couple of O’Connor like characters — Julian and Parker — and puts them to work on a decaying mansion in Mississippi.
  • Brad Watson, “Visitation” — Watson has two stories in this anthology, but this one was my favorite. It’s a simple story about a divorced guy visiting California and staying in a motel with his kid, but the psychology of the story is spot-on, including the guy waking up at 3 a.m. from the whiskey he drank to put himself to sleep.
  • Elizabeth Spencer, “Return Trip” — This is the second of Spencer’s stories that I’ve been really, really impressed with. This story is about a husband and wife living in a borrowed cabin near Asheville, and they have two surprise visits — their son from college, and the wife’s third cousin, with whom she has had quite an ambiguous past. The only other writer I can think of to compare Spencer to is William Trevor, in that both authors take fairly simple stories and knock you out with the results. I don’t say this lightly: Spencer is an effortless writer. In just a few paragraphs, you know these characters and care about them. And it all starts with such an innocuous sentence: “It was during a summer season Patricia and Boyd were spending together in the North Carolina mountains that Edward reappeared.” You know Edward spells trouble, and boy does he.

Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman

I’m finding that I love Walker Percy, but maybe only in small doses. I got bogged down with The Last Gentleman, his second novel, much in the same way I got bogged down in some of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy. (I bring up Ford because he seems very influenced by Percy, both stylistically and philosophically.) Overall, The Last Gentleman has moments of sheer brilliance, such as oft-referenced Chapter 4, but maybe not a good one of Percy’s to start with.

The book is about a young man, Will Barrett, a southerner living in New York City and suffering from spells of amnesia and deja vu. He’s grappling with the meaning of life, drifting around aimlessly, when he meets up with the Vaughts, also southern expatriates. Barrett gets roped into accompanying the dying teenager, Jamie, balancing the wishes of boy’s father, his brother’s ex-wife, and his sister the nun. Meanwhile, Barrett falls sort-of in love with Jamie’s other sister, the somewhat empty-headed Kitty.

Barrett and the Vaughts hit the road, traveling through Richmond, Charleston, Georgia, and eventually ending up in New Mexico. As such, the novel is something of a picaresque, the form heightened by Percy’s satiric tone (Barrett is almost always referred to as “the engineer”). I enjoyed the panorama of the South, but I didn’t really connect with the characters, maybe because of the satire. Perhaps it’s not Percy I can only want to read in small doses, but rather satire. Much longer than a short story, and I tend to find satires tedious.