by Paul Theroux
I said, “That’s the sort of situation you’ve written about in your short stories.”
“Yes, I have.”
“What does your family think of your writing?” I asked.
This question made her laugh so hard her laughter became a cough, and she covered her mouth with her bird-claw hand and became short-winded.
“As far as I know they don’t read it!” she said at last. “No one ever mentions it—that I write. I don’t think they care!”
And she laughed again, not the bitter laugh that I expected, but genuine amusement, as though she was commenting on utter silliness, and of course she was. And I thought of the ingratitude and philistinism of a family that studiously ignored the genius and witness of this woman’s work.
“I did my best,” she said. “I told the truth.”
“Amen,” Randall said.
On the way back to Hamburg, she told me a story relating to a family estrangement. She told it well, each phase of it, at first without emotion, but then in a tremulous voice. It was so dramatic and complete in her telling that I urged her to write it. She said she had not written a story in years. I said that this one would be perfect. After I dropped her at her remote house, the sun lowering into the fields, she waved from the porch, Ozella beside her. I dropped Randall in Greensboro and hit the road again.
The following week, Mary T sent me an email, remarking on something I’d written, saying I was a real writer—praise from her was like a garland. “You can tell one in a sentence or two, can’t you?” she wrote. “Thank you for the book. It was a privilege to have you in my house.” In response, I mentioned the factual account of the family estrangement from her own experience that she had told me, and said I thought it would be a corker of a short story.
“I do too,” she replied, “and it’s roiling around in my subconscious but as fiction. I’ve always wanted to write a short-short story, and this could be it. In its uniqueness and coldness it seems to need isolation, like a photograph. Or so it seems at the moment.”
I wrote again in the following days. I received a brief reply—“Not feeling well”—and then there was silence. Randall wrote to say that Mary T was ill and in the hospital. About a month after we met, she died. The cause was given as pancreatic cancer.
By then I was home, as though in another country, at the far end of the road that led to the South.
INTERLUDE
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The Fantastications of Southern Fiction
Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books. When I got home, I immersed myself in Southern fiction. The Faulkner I had read in my last interlude, and the places I had seen in the spring, made me curious to know how the novels and short stories located in the Deep South might give me better access to the reflective interior of those states, so passive, so mute. Many Southern writers are defiant in their belief in a nebulous concept of regionalism—that they are expressing in their work the heart and soul of the South. Faulkner’s conviction in this was so strong that his fiction seemed to define the South, its history and its people. Though the more I read him, the greater my realization that, for all his obsession with detail, he left unwritten, undefined, the simple fact that for his entire life he lived at the edge of a university campus that demeaned its black workers and excluded black students. Fascinated to the point of mania by the past, he seemed bored, annoyed, and uncomprehending of the enormous events of the present to which he’d been an eyewitness.
On my previous trip, on the banks of the Savannah River I had passed by Wrens, Georgia, childhood home of Erskine Caldwell, who, apparently inspired by the country folk he knew, wrote Tobacco Road (1932), one of his earliest and most successful novels. This is the saga of the sharecropper Jeeter Lester, his wife Ada, who has no teeth (“she dipped snuff since she was eight years old”), his son Dude, who marries a much older woman named Bessie (who has no nose), his daughter Ellie Mae (who is mute and has a harelip), and his daughter Pearl, whom he marries off to his friend Lov Bensey when she turns twelve. This twelve-year-old wife sleeps on the floor, refusing to share the marital bed with the much older Lov, who is aggrieved at his child wife’s disgust. What the hail is going on here?
In his works of fiction, once immensely popular for the very coarseness for which they are belittled now—they sold in the tens of millions in the 1930s and ’40s—Caldwell created a popular image of the South as a landscape peopled by grotesques. Most of his white characters seemed to come from Dogpatch, L’il Abner’s hometown, which first appeared in the Al Capp comic strip in 1934. Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre (1933), just as outlandish in its cast, along with Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), set the tone for the Southern novel of tenants and sharecroppers in which the freakish and the darkly comic predominated—bizarre characters, unspeakable crimes, unnatural acts, shocking sexual situations—almost as a form of literary indirection. Why does this seem like a trick? Because black life, the racial rejection, and the peasant misery only obliquely enter these narratives.
Though Caldwell’s novel Trouble in July (1940) and his long story “Kneel to the Rising Sun” (1934) concern the lynching and harrying of innocent black men, and Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) has a near-lynching that ends in the shooting and castration of Joe Christmas, these works are exceptional. Southern fiction and its grotesques, sometimes termed “Southern gothic,” seldom touched upon (and seemed to accept) the day-to-day injustices of the 1920s and ’30s. So we have a nightmarish literature of dwarfs, hunchbacks, albinos, night hags, and deviants (in Sanctuary, the impotent Popeye, who has “yellow clots for eyes,” rapes Temple Drake with a corncob), but little mention of forced labor, racial violence, extreme segregation, and the lynching of blacks. You see this Witches’ Sabbath of freaks throughout Flannery O’Conner and Carson McCullers and in the early Truman Capote.
“The Artificial Nigger,” Flannery O’Connor’s much-praised story in the collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), shows black life as a grotesque netherworld. In another tale in this collection, “Good Country People,” a bogus Bible salesman runs off with the prosthetic leg of a woman he has failed to seduce. Good fun, you think, but O’Connor’s intention is often spiritual redemption and high-mindedness, as in her brilliant short story “Revelation,” from Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), describing the enlightenment of Mrs. Ruby Turpin, which buds in a doctor’s waiting room and blooms in a pigpen. The story is about class, race, and God’s grace. Here, in a paragraph of Southern paranoia, Mrs. Turpin tortures herself with a farcical dilemma:
Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus, please,” she would have said, “just let me wait until there’s another place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.
Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding (1946) is the story of a twelve-year-old Southern girl, Frankie Addams, and her assorted friends and family. By chance, she meets a soldier on furlough, who persuades her to visit his hotel room, where he attempts to rape her. Her black cook, Berenice Sadie Brown, blind in one eye, wears a blue glass eye: “It stared out fixed and wild from her quiet colored face.” A transvestite, Lily Mae Jenkins, puts in an appearance. An important experience for Frankie is her visit to the House of Freaks at the Chattahoochee Exposition, where she sees the Giant, the Midget, the Fat Lady, the Alligator Boy, and the Wild Nigger, though “some said he was not a genuine Wild N
igger, but a crazy colored man from Selma—he ate live rats.” Later, Frankie wonders whether she will grow into a freak, and, she reflects, the near-rape by the soldier was “like a minute in the fair Crazy House.”
Hardly fifty pages into Capote’s debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), we have met a witch-like woman (“long ape-like arms . . . a wart on her chin . . . dirty-nailed fingers”), a black dwarf (“a little pygmy”), a one-hundred-year-old man named Jesus Fever, and a long-necked woman, a cook, who “was almost a freak, a human giraffe.” Colorful, perhaps, but you have no notion that this narrative is taking place in a bleak segregated town; the horrors of the everyday are an accepted fact, not worth mentioning.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) seems on the surface to be a worthy evaluation of small-town Southern values, even if it is tediously plotty, overwritten, and predictable: the black laborer on trial for manhandling, throttling, and raping the white woman has a withered arm and could not possibly have done the deed, but he is found guilty and ends up shot to death. The critic Jeffrey Meyers has referred to the novel as “a sentimental, simple-minded rip-off of [Faulkner’s] Intruder in the Dust.” And my brother Alexander has called attention to its “ecological fascism,” asserting that while the novel insists “it is wrong for anyone to kill a mockingbird which so sweetly sings its heart out for us, it is nevertheless all right to shoot blue jays—this, when the headline theme of this so-called heartfelt, liberal novel unapologetically attacks the extremes of racism, bigotry, and ethnic selection.” With a cast of stereotypes confirming every conventional prejudice against the Deep South, the book has sold in the millions.
Look closer and you see that Mockingbird, which most readers took to be a tale of the intolerant 1950s South, is set (decorous courtroom talk) “in this year of grace 1935,” and it, too, has a lineup of freaks, including Misses Tutti and Frutti and the hideous racist Mrs. Dubose: “Her face was the color of a pillowcase, and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet, which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin.” Turns out Mrs. Dubose is a morphine addict. Boo Radley, taken to be a weirdo, turns out to be a hero. The news that Harper Lee was releasing another novel, Go Set a Watchman, written before Mockingbird and apparently rejected by her publisher, filled me with gloom.
The tall-tale tradition of Southern life as a malignancy—“gothic” is an elevating misnomer meant to ornament or dignify it—has persisted. The work of the late Barry Hannah, a Mississippian (born 1942), is an example. His fiction, too, has been described as “darkly comic” and “set in a phantasmagoric South.” His stories, especially those in Airships (1978), have an unusual garrulity and undeniable power, a tipsy love of language, and broad humor; they are memorable for the utter absurdity of their situations. The same can be said for Charles Portis, whose name is solely attached to the comical Western True Grit. Portis was born and still lives in Arkansas, and his work is inspired by life in Arkansas even when the work is not set there. The Dog of the South, a brilliant road book—a manic drive from Little Rock to the Honduran jungle—is a good and hilarious example of this, and so is Norwood, which features an ex–circus midget, Edward Ratner, “the world’s smallest perfect fat man.” Most of the gringos in Gringos, which is set in Mexico, are misfits and fantasists.
The best of these outlandish writers is Portis, because of the consistency of his humor, his fluency, his ear for the nuances and inflections of Southern speech, and his comic purity—his wish (nearly always achieved) to produce laughter. His characters, such as the con man Dr. Reo Symes, enlarge themselves with their talk, which is usually paranoia or bluff. “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later” is one of the compact observations in The Dog of the South. “They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.”
Hannah and Portis broadened and deepened the same furrow that was plowed in the Southern soil by Caldwell and Faulkner, and the fantastications of their extravagant prose seem like a diversionary tactic. In the work of these writers, something odd and evasive is also taking place. It is as if an alternate reality, verging on a crude surrealism (“phantasmagoric”), in the form of mutilated and misshapen whites and freakish blacks, a sideshow of distraction, was invented to deflect from the bald facts of Southern life, the boredom and poverty and fatigue, the pedestrian cruelties and common abuses, the sorrows, the fatal misunderstandings.
This was why I felt so strongly about the writing of Mary Ward Brown, modest in scope but unsparing in its scrutiny. And the interconnected stories in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples (1949) were a masterly evocation of a Delta town in Mississippi. I was not a fan of Harper Lee’s solitary (and I think overpraised) book, preferring her fellow Alabamian William March (1893–1954), best known for his last novel, The Bad Seed, and the obscure author of earlier ones, Come In at the Door, and The Looking-Glass, and many great short stories, as well as a superb war novel with multiple narrators, Company K. His story “Runagate Niggers,” in Some Like Them Short (1939), is an ironic account of racial injustice and debt slavery. His work is without fantastication and is to my taste; to the land and people it depicted, it is devastatingly truthful.
All of these writers are white Southerners. The South’s black writers, by contrast, have no need to resort to fantastication: the truth behind their fiction is so bizarre that the grotesque comes firsthand, ready-made. From the South’s earliest black novelist, William Wells Brown—who partly based his 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, on Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings—through Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, the works of black writers are more factual, contain more obvious self-portraiture, are often polemical in their sentimental rage, and are emphatically racial in their indignation. And with the exception of Gaines, none of these writers remained in the South. For example, Brown, an escaped slave, died in Boston in 1884.
PART FOUR
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Summer: The Odor of Sun-Heated Roads
Don’t never drive a stranger from your door, He may be your best friend, you don’t know . . .
—SAM CHATMON, Delta bluesman, “Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor”
Chasing Summer
Under the impartial dazzle of the sun, late-summer exhaustion on Cape Cod had begun to set in with a visible sigh, a last gasp of heat fading the shrubbery with a distinct desiccation, a general wrinkling and shrinkage, the deep green of the oak leaves going pale, an uneven yellowing of the slumping tussocks of salt hay in the sea marsh, a blackish red blush surfacing in the leaves on the horizontal outflung branches of the pepperidge tree at the end of my road, and a nose-tickling fragrance from the upright brushes of tall, gone-to-seed timothy grass.
And still, with summer slipping away, the heat like a hammer.
The withering was obvious everywhere—in the burst milkweed pods that looked like small brittle taco shells spilling out silken-haired parachuting seeds, the droop of the leggy wildflowers, the sag of the morning glory vines, and the slant of headless daylily stems with the rotted petals beneath them: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
The tomato plants in the vegetable garden were mildewed, blotchy, blighted-looking, even as their fruit was at its plumpest and most pickable, the fist-sized Brandywines yanking the weakened plants sideways and fracturing the skinny stems with their weight. The tawny patches of parched grass in the lawn were widening by the week, and the hydrangea blooms, discolored and stiff, were a frizz of brown, the leaves—and the leaves of most shrubs—dirtied by risen dust, the woody annuals with dead blossoms looking stricken and strangled.
I loved this heat. But the warmth of the day was temporary, like a gust of expelled and humid breath, the dog days of mid-August giving way to cooler nights and unpredictable shifts—an occasional storm or a day of chill—like a reminder of what was to come, the clammy hand of fall and the loss of summer’s freshness. In the last gasp of vegetation, there was n
o point in watering or fertilizing or planting anything, since it was a season on the wane, an annual diminishment, the shortening days like an intimation of theft, leaving the impression that you’re being cheated of light.
The best time to lock the house and head south, where the heat would linger for months more; to hit the road, to live again for lingering blossoms and green grass and dusty lanes; to recapture good weather and revisit familiar routes and friends, maybe find some new places, chasing summer, with the heightened alertness you feel when you’re in a place you don’t belong.
Tunneling South
Driving from the high Northeast, through the cruel ugliness of places like Bridgeport and the Bronx under a low grainy sky, was like a rarefied form of tunneling—with bridges and ramps, a route of snakes and ladders—enduring the dense traffic and the stifling and stinking and overheated air of foul particles to find open space, holding my nose to bore through it and find better air in the South.
This image of a tunnel is not fanciful. The potholed chute of I-95 is hectic, unpredictable, dangerous and bleak, cavern-like and confining, at times like shuttling through a sooty culvert. All the way from my home to Washington there are actual tunnels, lengthy ones dug under railway tracks and rivers and harbors, and I sluiced through them in ghastly orange glare as idiot cars raced past. The drive is something to endure: five hundred miles devoid of any loveliness, not even trees (though perhaps New York City will have some symmetry and beauty when, at some distant date, construction ceases and it is finally finished), a journey like a trip through a mine shaft where the air is so thickened by the murk of pollution that even the open road is like a tunnel.
