Sherry Chandler » The “Regional” South
The “Regional” South
David Payne, “Writing on Writing,” in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American, a column entitled “Carrying America’s Shadow:”
While it’s true that a half-century ago a galaxy of celebrated Southern writers—Capote, Welty, Faulkner, Williams, Harper Lee, and others—enjoyed cachet in the North; and though once a generation or so along comes a Gone With the Wind or a Cold Mountain, the fate of a writer like Lee Smith remains more typical. Author of the masterly Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith has a large, devoted audience in the Southeast, yet after a dozen novels, her reputation and readership continue to plummet north of Washington, D.C.
Smith’s latest book sets the pattern: Upon its publication in 2006, On Agate Hill, a novel situated in and around Hillsborough, North Carolina, shot to No. 1 on the Southern Independent Bookseller Alliance (SIBA) bestseller list and remained there for weeks. During that time, it never appeared on any of the seven other regional lists around the country. By contrast, Anna Quindlen’s concurrently published Rise and Shine, with a Bronx setting, appeared throughout its run in high positions on all eight lists, including SIBA. Both trajectories are typical for established writers from their respective regions: that is, Southern writers are “regional”; Norther writers are “national.” And what’s true of Smith and Quindlen today was also true of Faulkner and Hemingway in their primes.
Why?
Is human experience in the South a specialized and limited affair, relevant only to other Southerners, while life in the Bronx is “universal” and relevant to all, including Southerners? And, if not, what accounts for the confinement of Southern writers to the region?
There may be some conflict of interest in Mr. Payne’s picking Lee Smith as the exemplary novelist for his column. Smith’s husband, Hal Crowther, is also a contributing columnist to The Oxford American. However, I thoroughly agree that Smith is one of the best novelists writing in the United States today and if you haven’t read Fair and Tender Ladies then you’ve missed out.
It also may be true that Smith, along with Ron Rash (another neglected writer mentioned in this column), is operating under the double whammy of being not just Southern, but Southern Appalachian. We all know what exotic inbred creatures dwell in the southern mountains.
Possibly also, compared to a Southern novelist like Cormac McCarthy, Smith suffers from writing of women’s issues—the home and hearth. You’ll find no shoot-outs in Smith’s world.
Besides, as Payne points out, in order to achieve his popularity, McCarthy had to leave the South and begin writing Westerns. Maybe Texas is the one Southern state everybody in the country can identify with?
To return to the Southeast in The Road, McCarthy had to create an area so burnt-out as to make Sherman’s scorched-earth March to the Sea look like a weenie-roast.
Still, it’s an interesting question: why is the Bronx considered more normative for the United States than Hillsborough?
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11 Comments
1. Tommy replies at 31st December 2007, 9:32 am :
In my last American Literature class at Centre, in my senior spring term, we read Native Son, set in New York; Blood Meridian, one of McCarthy’s Westerns; The Emperor of Ice Cream, which defies explanation; and a book whose title and author I have forgotten, but it was a turn-of-the-century life-in-New-England story.
We also read Faulkner. Not good Faulkner, either, but Sanctuary: The book that has a brothel not because Faulkner wanted to have a brothel in it, but because brothels sold books.
This is not to say I didn’t read Southern authors at a liberal arts college in Kentucky, but the reading curriculum was rather sparse on Southerners.
2. Rebecca Clayton replies at 31st December 2007, 4:23 pm :
I’m beginning to think the cultural divide these days is not North vs. South but Suburban vs. Rural. I come from Willa Cather country, not the South, but I too am irritated by the narrow scope of the New York literary establishment, and offended by redneck references.
David Payne’s identification of South and North has some flaws. Jonathan Yardley is indeed an irritating (if interesting) reviewer, but he self-identifies as a Southerner. Although he was born in Pittsburgh (arguably part of Appalachia, and hometown of Stephen Foster), he attended college in North Carolina, and has spent most of his newspaper career in Southern cities. I’d say he has that suburban sensibility that views everything rural in a Gothic light–either quaint and colorful, or dark and disturbing.
I’ve only read one Lee Smith book, Devil’s Dream, and disliked it enough to read no more. The thing I found most unattractive about it was her portrayal of the Carter Family (which she renamed but didn’t fictionalize very much) as over-emotional and inbred. I’d group her with the suburban sensibility, identifying the mountain folks as the Shadow.
Annie Proulx, undeniably a Yankee, writes exclusively about rural people and places, and identifies the visiting suburbanites as Other, out of place, clueless, and potentially dangerous.
It’s a very interesting article on a subject I can’t seem to steer clear of.
3. sherry replies at 31st December 2007, 5:27 pm :
You read the Post, don’t you Rebecca, and so you know Yardley’s work? The man’s name meant nothing to me and everything Payne quoted was drawn out of context so I really didn’t pay much attention to that part of Payne’s article. Nor was I sure that I could follow him all the way to the South’s being the salvation of mankind — more or less.
You can only carry arguments like Payne’s so far and he (and I with him) may have pushed his past its limit. Still, I do like Lee Smith in her early work. Haven’t read much of her later stuff. Haven’t read Devil’s Dream. I don’t read fiction much any more. As for Proulx, I read one short story that my son stuck in front of my nose but otherwise only know her through the movies. Shipping News was great; Brokeback Mountain I wouldn’t go see because I’m contrary and it was so popular.
Your statement of Proulx’s themes reminds me of our conversation about Deliverance. When I moved to Chicago in 1970, my father told me I’d be all right as long as I didn’t go where I didn’t belong. But I discovered the problem to be that, being a country mouse in the city and/or not being a native, I didn’t always know where I didn’t belong.
4. sherry replies at 31st December 2007, 5:34 pm :
Faulkner hit me like a tidal wave, Tommy, when I was in college. The first book I read was As I Lay Dying and it struck me as so wonderfully unlike anything I’d ever read before that I devoured everything the man read, including Sanctuary, which I’d agree isn’t the very best example.
I had a similar college experience with Melville.
I discovered Lee Smith later on after she came to the Women Writer’s Conference some time in the 80s. Again, I devoured everything I could find. In Smith I found people I knew, could understand, felt an allegiance to, which is more than I can say of most contemporary novelists.
I wish I could recover that love for fiction. Lately the only novels I read with much joy are detective fiction and selected fantasy novels. Maybe I just like fairy tales.
5. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 31st December 2007, 8:39 pm :
I feel obliged to defend Lee Smith’s authenticity. From idiom to humor to sense of history and sense of place, she seems to me to be “of” the people she writes about as much or more than any writer I’ve read. I hear no condescension nor condemnation in her voice, but an understanding of her characters, an empathy, even a oneness with them. Like Payne, I do not understand why she is not more popular on the national scene - as she is indeed a “masterly” writer - unless there is a NE/New York literary establishment bias against southern settings/characters/storylines. I think I would also disagree with the clear-cut rural versus urban division in literature mentioned by an earlier commenter, at least as applied to southern writers. The rural south of contemporary America is suburbanized whether that meshes with romantic notions of the “pure rural” or not. Satellite dishes dot the most remote hollers of Appalachia, bringing America’s homogenized culture into most every living room, and most rural folks live within easy driving distance of the ubigitous Wal-Mart. Lee Smith captures this shifting American scene. I ‘ve read most everything she’s written (haven’t read Agate Gate yet, however, for some reason) and think she should be counted among the country’s finest contempory novelists.
6. sherry replies at 1st January 2008, 12:16 pm :
I’ll agree with you about Lee Smith, Georgia. One thing that made me want to devour everything Lee Smith wrote, at least there for a while, was that I felt she was writing about people I knew and could understand. I also enjoyed a certain joyousness in her work. I sometimes did find a certain satiric element in her work, did think she was laughing affectionately at her society’s quirks, but I didn’t read it as condescension.
I do think, however, satellite dishes and Wal-Mart to the contrary, that there’s a divide between suburban and rural. But that may just be because I’m old.
7. Rebecca Clayton replies at 1st January 2008, 12:39 pm :
Well, since Sherry and Georgia think so highly of Lee Smith, I guess I’ll give her another try–maybe Devil’s Dream was an anomaly. (It sure did strike me as snide, though.)
Georgia, the “suburbs” I was thinking of are the affluent suburbs around the really big Eastern cities (although I think they have their counterparts in other areas, I’ve only lived around DC and NYC). Wal-Mart isn’t interested in urban real estate, and places like Montgomery Co, MD and Fairfax Co. VA (affluent D.C. suburbs) don’t allow Wal-Mart in. People who live in these toney suburbs never see anyone outside their socio-economic level. The people who clean their houses, fix their cars, and stock their organic market shelves ride two hours each way from modest rural or distant-blue-collar ‘burbs. Whether the rest of us are exotic aliens or native-born trash, we’re invisible, and our stories are quaint and colorful or nasty and brutish. (In DC, these are the neighborhoods where the movers and shakers of our government make their homes, and that’s one reason we’re in trouble…)
Rosalie calls it as a class divide, and that’s part of it, but well-to-do people in small communities still see the poor people, at Wal-Mart, on Main Street, in the public schools…In the country, the unfortunate are right under your nose, neither exotic nor quaint. I think what Payne identifies as “Northern” is th narrow, blinkered world view of the affluent ‘burbs, whether they’re located in Boston. or Los Angeles, or Atlanta.
8. sherry replies at 2nd January 2008, 1:53 pm :
Good enough, Rebecca. And I shall essay some Annie Proulx. What titles would you recommend?
9. Rebecca Clayton replies at 3rd January 2008, 5:42 pm :
Whatever you do, stay away from “Accordion Crimes!” I like her short story collections best–”Heart Songs” is a collection of her Vermont stories, and “Close Range” stories are set in Wyoming. I like “The Shipping News” best of her novels, but “Postcards” and “That Old Ace In the Hole” are good too. (The critics didn’t like “Ace in the Hole,” but I loved the way the pessimistic 20-year-old hero keeps meeting old people who tell him to have hope, there’s lots to look forward to. Also, I love a prairie, and so, it seems, does Annie Proulx.)
Is Fair and Tender Ladies the best place to start?
Say, Sherry, I Paypal-ed a copy of “Dance the Black-Eyed Girl,” and Paypal informs me you haven’t collected your cash yet. Did the email get lost in the holiday spam flood?
10. sherry replies at 4th January 2008, 7:23 am :
Fair and Tender Ladies is an excellent novel, Rebecca, and it’s more of a period piece so maybe you won’t find so much attitude in it. Also, if you like short stories, you might try Me and My Baby View the Eclipse. I’ll ask Georgia to chime in here with recommendations.
Our local library has The Shipping News and I loved the movie, so maybe I’ll start there. They’ve got That Old Ace in the Hole in audio but I’ll only listen to those if they’re unabridged.
Thank you for ordering Dance the Black-Eyed Girl. I apologize about the PayPal account. Turns out there’s a problem with my buttons. I’ve reconstructed them and I hope they work okay now. The help-desk guy with the accent said you should cancel that order.
I sent you an e-mail. If you don’t get it, send me one.
11. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 5th January 2008, 9:11 am :
Well, I was once in a book club with a woman who declared to the whole group that she never liked any book I recommended. So I probably have odd taste. I howled with laughter when I read Family Linen many years ago, but have not re-read it in a long time. I like Smith’s humor, her sense of the absurdity that hovers in all our ordinary lives. Black Mountain Breakdown isn’t funny, however, but the main character still haunts me - I think about her at least once a month, and its been 20 years since I read the novel. Critics like F & Tender. Oral History was also one of her critical successes.
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