Sherry Chandler

A cat may stare at a [son of] King [MacLain]

In the foreground was a cat. In the deep grass she held a motionless and time-honored pose.

Her head was three-quarters turned toward them where they stood. It seemed to have womanly eyebrows. Her gaze came out of her face with the whole of animal comprehension; whether it was menace or alarm in the full-open eyes, her face made a burning-glass of looking. Her eyes seemed after so long a time to be holding her herself in their power. She crouched rigid with the devotion and intensity of her vision, and if she had caught fire there, still she could not, Eugene felt, have stirred out of the seizure. She would have been consumed twice over before she disregarded either what she was looking at or her own frenzy.

— Eudora Welty, from “Music from Spain”

According to James Shimkus in Aspects of King MacLain in Eurdora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a master’s thesis I found online, Eudora Welty had not originally considered “Music from Spain,” set in San Francisco, as part of The Golden Apples.

The story, whose protagonist was originally named Francis Dowdie, had several different titles, including “Dowdie’s Guilt,” “Guilt,” and “The Flower and the Rock,” the latter being the title under which Russell submitted the story to the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Town and Country, Atlantic, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Tomorrow, and Partisan (Polk 62). “The Flower and the Rock” was rejected from all of the aforementioned magazines, but Welty expressed her faith in the story in a letter to Russell dated September 17, 1947: “Nobody has yet bought the S.F. story [“Music from Spain”], have they? That really makes me think less of editors (said the author)—I do think that a good story”

In the end, the story was eventually published in a limited, monograph edition in June 1948 by the Levee Press of Greenville, Mississippi. It was while she was typing a clean copy for the Levee Press edition that Welty decided the story belonged with the others in The Golden Apples

She communicated her discovery to Russell in a letter dated February 18, 1948: “I’d already typed solidly all day getting Music from S. ready for Levee (wrote the whole damn thing just about over—but really I think this time I got it right—and the key is, you’d never guess, the little man in it is from [Morgana] and who he is is one of the MacLain twins—don’t faint. Cleared everything up.).”

I neglected to mention in my tarradiddle on this subject last week that one reason why these stories are full of “caricatures” is that they are also full of avatars of various Greek gods and mythological figures. The collection is to a large extent a re-telling of these myths. So Morgana is, in some ways, a land as enchanted as the Forest of Arden, complete with rude mechanicals in the form of the African American characters. Shimkus points out that the name of the town may refer to the Fata Morgana.

The title of the collection may refer to William Butler Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Aengus wanders in search of

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun

And as I did point out last week, all the characters seeking to escape this fated place, to find their own version of the golden apples, find themselves tethered still to Morgana, Eugene MacLain, who physically escapes to San Francisco, perhaps most of all.

The message in the end may be that escape is not the right tactic, that the quest is inward not outward.

Eugene MacLain encounters two cats in his day-long (Bloomesque?) meander around San Francisco. One in a store window, and this one in the grass by the shore.

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My thanks to everybody for good wishes. I am not usually so public about my ills but then I don’t remember when I’ve been this sick. I’m mending but I fear not very coherent.

Cat and Golden Apples

from “Music from Spain,”

A tortoise shell cat pillowed in apples gazed at him from a grocer’s window. She pulled her round eyes closed as on little drawstrings. Eugene recollected that one street back a plaster bull dog, cerise with blue rings around the eyes, which ordinarily sat in the ground floor window of a hotel between the drawn shade and the glass, had this morning been taken away. Eugene had missed it—been cheated of it. As the cat opened her eyes again, he had a moment of believing he would know anything that happened, anything that threatened the moral way, or transformed it, even, in the city of San Francisco that day: as if he and the city were watching each other—without accustomed faith. But with interest . . . boldness . . . recklessness, almost.
— Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1947)

One I know, admire, respect, remarked a while back that s/he had undertaken to include The Golden Apples in a literature course but would not do so again because Welty uses the N word way too much.

The remark aroused my curiosity, so I pulled our copy off the shelf. I don’t remember having read this collection of connected short stories before. It is true that it has frequent use of the N word and appearances of African-American characters that seem caricatured. I think it might be a very difficult book to take into the classroom today, especially in an area that doesn’t tend to be what you might call culturally enlightened.

On the other hand, all the characters in the book are sometimes treated like caricatures. It is not a strictly realistic work. The stories refer to folklore and mythology.

The whites in this complex collection of interconnected stories are not admirable. The stories seem to be about the way your culture catches you, drags at you, keeps you to their expectations of you. Morgana, Mississippi is a closed decaying culture that does not embrace difference. Or change. If you are poor white, you are to remain poor white. If you are “class” then you must act a certain way, even in the face of disaster. All the stories on some level are about those who attempt to escape and fail. In the story “Moon Lake,” three girls flee the confines of summer camp, find an old boat, and think they will use it to float out into the middle of the lake, outside the carefully marked off swimming area of the camp. But the boat turns out to be tethered and locked and they can’t get more than a chain’s length from the shore.

“Moon Lake” is anthologized elsewhere and it is one story from the collection that I had read. Like everything in Welty, it is beautifully written, but it always puzzled me. In context of The Golden Apples, its themes are much more resonant.

I didn’t resolve my own questions about treatments of race. It is not a modern book, times have changed, and the racial attitudes in The Golden Apples seem shocking. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe we weren’t meant to take that stuff for granted. Maybe we were. The white people of Morgana, Mississippi did. Welty doesn’t treat her African-American characters as wise, the way Faulkner did. But they aren’t any sillier than the white people.

In search of the sublime

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden has been around long enough to be considered a classic in American Studies. In fact, I think it helped define the discipline.

Marx is an “increasingly militant” environmentalist, a choice of words I found in Jeffrey L. Meikle’s article, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden [Technology and Culture 44.1 (2003) 147-159]. It seems an odd choice to describe one who

appeal[s] to a broad spectrum of scholars and teachers of American studies, especially those of the author’s own generation who shared his anxiety about a postnuclear world dominated by the technological systems of what became known as the military-industrial complex

A casual Google search seems to indicate that Marx’s argument has become the one to refute. He is accused of skewing his argument toward the garden and also of basing it too much in high culture and literature. Meikle enumerates several of the counter arguments. I was particularly struck by this one:

Even more dismissive, John Lark Bryant faulted Marx for “tacitly assuming the essentially Arnoldian premise that a literature reflects its society.”*

I guess I myself always took that premise as a given. Seems to me that we were a nation born in literature. Names lilke Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson do pop up.

On the other hand, I suppose one must recognize that there are cultural forces that march on, for good or ill, in spite of theorists and politicians.

Meikle points toward another couple of post-Marx books that sort of take up where Marx left off: John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 and David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime .

. . . a wide-ranging study whose dramatic dust-jacket photograph exemplified the central paradox of the machine in the garden. The image foregrounds three men looking out from a precipice over a vast mountainous landscape, in the midst of which rises the massive concrete structure of the Hoover Dam, a gleaming artificial white slash across the rugged gorge of the Colorado River. . . .Surrounded by the desert landscape of the Southwest, the dam can hardly be termed a machine in a garden. Yet its reservoir, only beginning to fill at the time of the photograph, would create lush gardens, whose inhabitants would further benefit from the hydroelectric power it generated. Here was a case of the machine creating a garden—about as close a collaboration of nature and technology as one can imagine. When he took a long view, Nye observed that “Americans looked for sublimity in both realms” and concluded that “each was interpreted as a sign of national greatness.”

Nye’s book dates from 1994. Not everyone would now agree that creating a garden out of a desert is necessarily a good thing. But a cultural ideal does not necessarily consider right and wrong. Meikle concludes:

The Machine in the Garden remains the undisputed starting point for all attempts to understand the complex connections among developing technologies, their representations in text and image, and the multiple realities of American cultural experience. Marx might appreciate the irony that the text to which he has devoted a lifetime of thinking, shaping, commenting, and re-visioning has itself become a classic whose continuing influence cannot be ignored.

I don’t know why that’s an irony.

Maybe because a “classic” is no longer a living text?

Oh well.

I am not, at this point, even looking at Marx’s whole premise. I’m only about 125 pages into the book. I’m just sharing the parts that cause me to pay close attention. Sort of thinking out loud on the blog. Writing and thinking are often the same thing for me. It’s one of the functions this blog serves in my life.

Here is more of Marx on de Crèvecoeur’s Letters:

Without the sense of the landscape as a cardinal metaphor of value, the Letters could not have been written. Indeed, for the farmer it is the metaphoric even more than the physical properties of land which regenerate tired Europeans by filling them to overflowing with exuberancy. We are reminded of Robert Beverley’s exuberant style, not to mention Melville’s and Whitman’s — Whitman, whose hero will move from the contemplation of a single spear of grass to his barbaric yawp. It is not surprising that Crèvecoeur was one of the writers who convinced D. H. Lawrence that only the “spirit of place” really can account for the singular voice we hear in American books. In the Letters, as elsewhere in our literature, the voice we hear is that of a man who has discovered the possibility of changing his life. Landscape means regeneration to the farmer. In sociological terms, it means the chance for a simple man, who does actual work, to labor on his own property in his own behalf.[pp. 110-111]

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John Lark Bryant, “A Usable Pastoralism: Leo Marx’s Method in The Machine in the Garden,” American Studies 16 (1975): 63

Busy Day

Fun day!

No time for computers, which is probably a good thing.

If you’re looking for something sort of fun to read, The Guardian’s Book Blog has Ten Rules for Writing Fiction from the likes of Elmore Leonard, Roddy Doyle, Neil Gaiman, et al.

My favorite was Margaret Atwood (predictable, yes), who begins like this:

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

But while Atwood recommends that you consult a thesaurus, I tend more to agree with Roddy Doyle:

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.

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Another writer’s take on these lists at Phoenicia Publishing.

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On a more serious note, this is wrong.

Read here too.

Mr. Sinclair Lewis has a birthday

And here, in celebration on this February Sunday morning, are the opening paragraphs of Elmer Gantry (Harcourt, 1927), Lewis’s satire of populist evangelism:

Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk. He leaned against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Cato, Missouri, and requested the bartender to join him in “The Good Old Summer Time,” the waltz of the day.

Blowing on a glass, polishing it and glancing at Elmer through its flashing rotundity, the bartender remarked that he wasn’t much of a hand at this here singing business. But he smiled. No bartender could have done other than smile on Elmer, so inspired and full of gallantry and hell-raising was he, and so dominating was his beefy grin.

“All right, old socks,” agreed Elmer. “Me and my room-mate’ll show you some singing as is singing! Meet roommate. Jim Lefferts. Bes’ roommate in world. Wouldn’t live with him if wasn’t! Bes’ quarterback in Milwest. Meet roommate.”

The bartender again met Mr. Lefferts, with protestations of distinguished pleasure.

Elmer and Jim Lefferts retired to a table to nourish the long, rich, chocolate strains suitable to drunken melody. Actually, they sang very well. Jim had a resolute tenor, and as to Elmer Gantry, even more than his bulk, his thick black hair, his venturesome black eyes, you remembered that arousing barytone. He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously. He could make “Good morning” seem profound as Kant, welcoming as a brass band, and uplifting as a cathedral organ. It was a ‘cello, his voice, and in the enchantment of it you did not hear his slang, his boasting, his smut, and the dreadful violence which (at this period) he performed on singulars and plurals.

On matters of varying importance

I don’t know about the groundhogs but the raccoons around here are certainly seeing their shadows. Here are a couple of shots TR got of the daylight raid on the supplementary sunflower seed feeders. The birds are many at the feeders this year.

Some people call this Candlemas Day and Your Daily Poem has posted “A Song for Candlemas” by Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856 – 1935)

Issue 2 of Still is up and it includes literature by some of my favorite writers. I draw your attention especially to Matthew Haughton, Bobbi Buchanan, and Elaine Fowler Palencia. Let me tell you that Elaine is one of the masters of the short story. Her collection, Small Caucasian Woman, remains one of the best examples of Appalachian literature and of the American short story. Matthew is circulating a fine poetry manuscript. And Bobbi edits New Southerner.

I want also to share with you this video add for Darlene Campbell’s new fantasy novel, Dragon’s Heir. The artwork in this video is Darlene’s own and I am thoroughly charmed by the notion of using YouTube to do a form of cover blurb. Darlene is also a fine poet who posts at Raven’s Shadowl

And just as a follow up, the other day I did a search on Melverina Elverina Peppercorn and found, in addition to my own post, not much except this musing on names at Vast Public Indifference, where I find that there was more than one man in the 19^th century south named Alexander The Great.

Oh, and Fringe Magazine has an interesting interview with the founder of Bookslut, Jessa Crispin: The Accidental Tastemaker

Some kudos

In an e-mail, Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing mentioned that 2010 marks their 25^th year of publishing. In that 25 years, FootHills has brought some great chapbooks into the world, including mine and Helen Losse’s, which are #s 4 and 5 in their Poets on Peace series. I see that they have just released POP #14. FootHills chapbooks are fine handstitched examples of chapbook art.

Michael will also turn 60 in 2010. A banner year for Wheeler Hill.

I also need to announce the advent of a brand-new press here in Kentucky, Accents Publishing. Launched by owner/editor Katerina Stoykova-Klemer,

Our mission is to promote brilliant voices in an affordable publication format, and to foster an exchange of literature among different world cultures and languages.

And ambitious plan. I’ve talked to Katerina about her goal, which is to produce small attractive books that sell for about $5. It’s a sort of micro-marketing strategy of publishing and I wish them well.

We at Accents Publishing believe that readers should be able to afford the books we publish. That’s why we’re committed to providing books that offer great value at a reasonable price.

The Press will have a premiere event to launch its first book on February 4 at Common Grounds Coffee House, 343 East High Street, Lexington, from 7:00 – 10:00 pm.

Last but not least, I want to mention that one of my very favorite places in Central Kentucky, the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, received an honorable mention for the MetLife Innovative Artist Space Award for 2009. More than 30,000 people visited the Carnegie Center in 2009 to participate in their literacy programming. I was one of them.

The abstract of their MetLife application reads

In 1990, Lexington’s mayor created a committee to discover a reuse for the vacant Carnegie library building; from that group, the idea for a community learning and arts center was born. The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning helps people find joy in writing, reading, and learning new things. In addition to offering a gallery and performing arts events, the center’s emphasis on writing and promoting books by Kentucky authors has made it the literary hub of Kentucky. The building is also home to learning and arts organizations, an author, and writing/book discussion groups. It is also the site for other non-Carnegie events, including the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.