“ ‘“I’m a
Campfire Girl. ... I have to pay a visit to some old lady,’ she told the nurse
at the desk.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, and
photographer Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “A Visit of Charity,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1983)
Roughly 30 years ago, while visiting Richmond, I toured Hollywood Cemetery, a kind of Valhalla for Virginia’s most illustrious. It’s not just two American Presidents who are buried here (James Monroe and John Tyler), but also many of the most prominent figures in the Confederate government and military: Davis, Pickett, Maury, Anderson, Mason, McGuire, and Fitzhugh Lee.
Nearby one of the most famous of these, General “Jeb” Stuart, is Ellen Glasgow—born eight years after the surrender at Appomattox, but, unlike so many of her generation, detached from and even skeptical of the Lost Cause mythology that distorted Southern life for a century.
While others wrote of moonlight and magnolias, she described an uneasy regional transition from an agrarian to industrial economy—and suffragettes’ refusal to accept a patriarchal society.
When adapted for the screen in 1942 by John Huston as a Bette Davis-Olivia de Havilland vehicle, In This Our Life was unusual at the time for its frank treatment of racism. The film, like the novel, showed how desperately clinging to anachronistic and even false codes of conduct could spiral into what James Baldwin called “the white descent from dignity.”
Though feminist literary scholars have somewhat revived interest in Glasgow, she has never fully recovered the popularity she experienced while alive.
But we should certainly
pay renewed attention to her warning about meanness. Events are proving all too
well that it can be carried in the DNA of a nation as much as in a family. The
only cures for this fever are charity and a Glasgow-like independence of
intellect and spirit.
Lie Down in Darkness
brought the 26-year-old Styron notice as a novelist of abundant narrative gifts
and deep moral seriousness, working in Faulkner’s tradition of Southern
storytelling. He did not realize until his first bout of mental illness in the
mid-1980s that even the heroine of this early effort suffered from this affliction.
As part of
a cohort of writers who served in World War II and briefly spent time abroad after
its conclusion, he—as well as friends James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer,
and Peter Matthiessen—took cues from the “Lost Generation.”
They were,
Styron’s youngest daughter Alexandra wrote in her memoir Reading My Father, “Big Male Writers…[who] perpetuated, without apology, the
cliché of the gifted, hard drinking, bellicose writer that gave so much of
twentieth-century literature a muscular, glamorous aura."
Even as
Styron played the bon vivant during summer parties at Martha’s Vineyard, his poet-activist
wife Rose and their four children endured his moodiness, angry outbursts, and
frequent frustration over his inability to bring his work to as quick and
successful conclusion.
In middle
age, that age of homage, masking their own attempts to obliterate the shock of
their war, proved increasingly unsuccessful and counterproductive. Though Styron’s
career lasted four decades, his output was not that extensive—four full-length
novels, a book of short stories, a memoir, a play, and an essay collection—finding,
at the age of 65, that the “senior partner” to his writing, his drinking, no
longer satisfied or spurred his writing.
A
childhood in Tidewater region of Virginia was overshadowed by his mother’s
decline and death from breast cancer, a struggle that only worsened his father’s
melancholy. W.C. Styron’s second marriage left his son with a stepmother he
found chilly and unsympathetic.
I briefly
described in this post from 14 years ago the controversy surrounding
Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the bloodiest slave uprising in
antebellum America, The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Many admirers
like myself of his forays into the darkest chapters of American life attributed
the long gaps between books to perfectionism, a tendency common among authors.
But with Darkness Visible, he described, in shattering detail, how his writer’s block was
bound up with a psychic condition that he likened to a storm in his brain.
This memoir
provided knowledge and help to others similarly afflicted. But, aside from the
trio of novellas collected in Tidewater Morning (1993), Styron was never
able to complete his World War II novel, The Way of the Warrior, after Sophie’s Choice in 1979, because his depression returned with a vengeance in the
spring of 2000, troubling him till his death six years later.
When the literary historian and critic Malcolm Cowley began to plan
the anthology, all 17 books by William Faulkner were out of print, so
the novelist paid the bills by writing screenplays in Hollywood.
Moreover, he was seen through a relatively narrow lens,
with many critics viewing Faulkner’s novels and short stories simply as examples
of the “Southern Gothic” tradition of violent plots and grotesque characters,
as well as discrete items rather than as a part of what Cowley called the “whole
interconnecting pattern” of the novelist’s works.
To counteract this misimpression, Cowley arranged
short stories and chapters of books into chronologically arranged sections in which
readers could see how Faulkner’s “mythical kingdom” of Yoknapatawpha County developed
over 2 1/2 centuries.
Ultimately, Cowley hoped to change perceptions of
Faulkner. But when he began the project in 1944, first, he needed simply to reach
this novelist who could every bit as elusive as he was eccentric.
“I sent him a letter saying I wanted to write a long
piece about his work,” Cowley remembered in a 1978 interview with The New
York Times. “I hoped to meet him. After four or five months, he
answered from Hollywood, explaining that when he got letters from strangers he
first opened them to see whether there was return postage. If there was, he
took out the stamps and dropped the letter in a drawer. Then, he said, every
six months or so, he'd open the drawer and start reading the letters. Mine had
been luckier: It only waited three or four months.”
A further obstacle awaited Cowley: Faulkner’s disdain
for biographical intrusiveness: “He wrote me that the idea of finishing his
career, having attracted no more attention than he had, was painful and, yes,
he would be grateful to have a long essay written about him, but he didn't want
to have any personal details included. He wanted to live perfectly anonymously.
He said in one letter that he wanted his tombstone inscribed ‘He wrote the
books and he died.’”
Under Cowley’s gentle but persistent prodding,
Faulkner gradually released information about himself. He even contributed a
map of Yoknapatawpha County ("William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor”) and
a “Compson Appendix” to the volume, revealing an imagination that
spilled well past the temporal confines of one work: The Sound and the Fury.
Although the novel only covered from 1910 to 1928, the
appendix starts with the battle of Culloden in 1745, and ends in 1945, when “Sister
Caddy” Compson has last been heard of as the mistress of a German general. In this
reconsideration, Faulkner revealed a restless imagination that spilled well
past the temporal confines of individual works.
“Faulkner at his best — even sometimes at his worst —
has a power, a richness of life, an intensity to be found in no other American
novelist of our time,” Cowley wrote.
Critical opinion soon swung decisively in this direction. By 1950, Faulkner had won the Nobel, his backlist was back in print, and his newer titles were greeted with due respect.
The only subsequent critical rescue
projects even remotely that successful involved William Kennedy (through Saul
Bellow’s suggestion that three of his novels be marketed as “The Albany Trilogy”)
and Dawn Powell (through Gore Vidal’s 1987 New York Review of Books
essay and Tim Page’s subsequent biography and editing of her novels for the “Library
of America” series)
Three-quarters of a century after Cowley called for a Faulkner
reappraisal, the collected works of this once-neglected novelist are considered
essential in understanding both the bone-deep ties of Southerners to their
region and the original sin that overshadows the land to this day: the replacement
of its dense forests with baronial plantations, achieved at the cost of the
subjugation of Native-Americans and African slaves and the ignorance and greed
of many of its history-haunted whites.
“ ‘Why can’t we?’ she asked.
“ ‘Yer leg,’ he said reverently.
“The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting
both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently
awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down
at him and said, ‘Well, come on if you’re coming,’ and he began to climb the
ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.
“ ‘We won’t need the Bible,’ she observed.
“ ‘You never can tell,’ he said, panting. After he had
got into the loft, he was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down
in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles,
slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking
out the front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the
loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods.
The sky was cloudless and cold blue.”—American short-story writer and novelist Flannery
O’Connor (1925-1964), “Good Country People,” originally published in Harper’s
Bazaar, June 1955, republished in her short-story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)
As last week’s PBS documentary Flannery
made clear, stories such as “Good Country People” were inspired in part by
O’Connor’s life on her family’s 550-acre dairy farm in Milledgeville, GA, where
she also raised peacocks and chickens.
I have not had the chance to visit that farm, but on
the two occasions when I was in Savannah, I made it a point to see her
birthplace on Lafayette Square. This childhood home was just across from the Cathedral
of St. John the Baptist. That building was not just a weekly but daily presence
in her life, as the young girl could view its steeple and hear the tolling of its
bells from her room. Anyone trying to understand the strong feelings about God
expressed with oblique but unusual force in her fiction and more conventionally
if pungently in her letters would do well to go to this neighborhood.
For any writer, O’Connor’s life is an
inspiration, proof of the power of forsaking self-pity, even in the face of
overwhelming obstacles (in her case, the lupus that hobbled and eventually killed
her at age 39), through iron commitment to work.
With Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, published
75 years ago this month, William Faulkner tested his publisher’s promotional department and readers alike.
Like much of the rest of his fiction, the book was set in the fictional county
of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, with an unorthodox style and plotting that
sometimes made extraordinary demands. 
