Maurice Manning in The Southeast Review

Asked about his summer reading by Southeast Review editor Michael Garriga, Maurice Manning explains why he finds Melville and Hardy relevant to this modern world of today:

In the summers I try to read fiction since I have longer stretches of time. This summer I’ve read Jude the Obscure and a fair amount of Melville’s short fiction. Both Hardy and Melville fit nicely into some of my recent thoughts about our contemporary society, how it’s changed and what we seem to have lost, and reading them helps me to refine my own thinking. These forays always manage to offer some serendipitous results. A few days ago, I was in my local public library waiting to talk to a teenage book club and I was thumbing through some county historical documents, which included a record of deeds from the late 1790s. There I found entries for the sale of slaves, as well as entries for the return of slaves, apparently to keep the biological family intact–for the “purpose of nurture and solace.” I also found entries where parents had enlisted their young children for apprenticeships with local tradesmen. In one such entry, a 3-year old girl was apprenticed to a man to learn “spinning;” in another, a 6-year old boy was apprenticed to a man to be a “hatter.” Lots of things intrigue me here, aside from simply imagining the lives of these real people. First of all, the sad and wrenching history of slavery preoccupied Melville, and, as immodest as it might sound, I enjoy feeling a kind of fellowship with him. The rural and village trades were important to Hardy, especially how the loss of such trades was one of the significant costs of industrialization.

I generally find more meaning and potency in the past. Here in Kentucky (just outside Danville) that past has always felt close and I’ve always felt connected to it, sprung from it, like it or not. Down the road from my house is an old family graveyard. One of the graves there is for a woman whose first name was America. Even though I live in the middle of nowhere, sometimes it feels like I live in the center of it all.

Read the rest of this interview.