Great Moments in Southern Literature

(The title is only partially facetious. Imagine it as a recurring segment on your completely inane 24-hour news network of choice. How completely out of character and unexpectedly worthwhile it would be in contrast. You could have passages of Ignatius J. Reilly (bronzed, right) railing against everything while he waits outside the D.H. Holmes in New Orleans interspersed with clips of Lady Gaga’s latest doings or superimposed close-ups of Glenn Beck’s oh so expressive eyes. It would be awesome.)

I’ve really been on a bit of a Southern literature kick lately: Faulkner (a difficult but ultimately worthwhile slog it turns out), a Flannery O’Connor bio, the occasional essay by Walker Percy (Signposts in a Strange Land, the posthumous collection of his essays by his Jesuit biographer Patrick Samway has some wonderful essays on Louisiana and the South in general that should interest most readers along with some of a more philosophical bent dealing with the nature of language, art and faith, among other things, for those, like myself, more nerdy in taste. Here’s a quote from his wonderful “New Orleans, Mon Amour” that I particularly liked, “Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.”), a Civil War novel by Shelby Foote (the guy you remember from Ken Burns’ PBS series if you saw it), and the two authors I will feature here: George W. Cable and Eudora Welty. (Unfortunately, it seems reading Faulkner has done nothing to help the brevity of my parenthetical remarks.) First off, the wonderful Eudora Welty, a sort of amalgam in my mind of every funny old Southern lady I’ve ever met, to the point where I feel constrained to always refer to her as Miss Eudora Welty, out of respect and familiarity.

Despite that, I actually had never read Miss Eudora before this spring when I read both her wonderful short novel The Optimist’s Daughter and a few of her short stories (and was a little miffed no one had forced me to read her growing up, what are English teachers for after all if not forcing us to read good things against our will, there are better and more enjoyable Southern short stories that could be anthologized than “Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily”, both of which still leave me a bit cold – no pun intended on the mortality, presumed or otherwise, of certain supporting characters in either story). I realize in painting her as the beloved Southern lady who sits in the back of the church and, after you chance to sit by them at a pot-luck meal, reveals herself as one of the nicest and simultaneously cuttingly funny people you’ve ever met - the kind that because they are old and because all they say is wrapped in good manners and propriety (prefacing even the meanest remarks with “bless his heart”) hold together these two opposing poles without so much as soiling their dainty white cotton gloves - I may turn some people off; positing her as a feminine, jokey, Mark Twain knock off trotting out that (formerly) highly prized Southern literary commodity: the amusing backwoods country bumpkin for laughs without much substance beyond that (because amusing and beloved as they are, most old church ladies probably shouldn’t be writing books- though I may be wrong on this point). But her humor in no way distracts or masks any potential deficiencies of her art. Think instead of a Jackson-bred Jane Austen, very funny but also a wonderful author. The following passage comes from Losing Battles, (though in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that The Optimist's Daughter is better) as one Miss Beulah describes to her new sister-in-law Aunt Cleo the one brother who is not present at the ongoing family reunion in comparison to the present brothers, Aunt Cleo’s husband included,

     “Handsome! Handsomer than Dolphus ever was, sunnier than Noah Webster, smarter than Percy, more home-loving than Curtis, more quiet-spoken than Nathan, and could let you have a tune quicker and truer than all the rest put together,” said Miss Beulah.
“He sounds like he’s dead,” said Aunt Cleo.

As it turns out, baby brother Sam Dale is dead. But that sums up nicely part of what is so wonderful about Miss Eudora, natural humor in the flow of the story. *Here’s a short story also by Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Turning to a likewise often neglected (though with better reason than with Welty) Southern author, I present New Orleans’ own George Washington Cable. Cable is an interesting figure; he was a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War who later became an ardent supporter of civil rights for former slaves (which led to his eventual exile from the South). He was also a good friend of Mark Twain who during their joint national book tour (which if you can believe was at the time a highly publicized and culturally significant event, a far cry from the sad and lonely looking authors sitting alone at tables in Barnes and Noble with a pile of unused and unneeded Sharpies and photos) was arguably the headliner and the bigger draw. Twain is still read of course (along with having that ultimate sign of late 90s cultural relevance a movie starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas based on not one, but two of his works, placing him, by extension, on roughly equal footing with Santa Claus in terms of popularity) while Cable is largely forgotten (I only found him available through a small Gretna based publishing house). Cable can be a little bit moralistic at times and has the annoying (to modern readers) habit of writing in dialect, to quote from one of his characters “Mais, fo’ w’y’?” (points for anyone who can figure out how an apostrophe better captures the nuances of a native French-speaker’s pronunciation of “why” than a silent “h”), but he still is of some interest I feel. Cable places the action of all his best works in the society of prewar New Orleans of the 1820s and 30s a time when gens de couleur libres (free men of color) of mixed French and African ancestry and the Freejacks set at liberty for their assistance in the Battle of New Orleans held some rights (even owning slaves in some cases), much more so than in the days of the post-Reconstruction backlash of oppression by the newly empowered Democrats that Cable wrote in. This distance allowed him room to comment on society; much in the way that Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch trials to talk about McCarthyism. With that and Cable’s ardent Christianity in mind, the word’s of his priest Père Jerome in the novella Madame Delphine should be considered, although they seem hardly less applicable today,
“’It is impossible for any finite mind to fix the degree of criminality if any human act or of any human life. The Infinite One alone can know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, and how much to our brothers or our fathers. We all participate in another’s sins. There is a community of responsibility attaching to every misdeed. No human since Adam – nay, nor Adam himself – ever sinned entirely to himself. And so I’m never am called upon to contemplate a crime or a criminal but I feel my conscience pointing at me as one of the accessories.”
Make no mistake, slavery was an American sin, not a peculiarly Southern one (Northern looms were just as hungry for cheaply produced Southern cotton as Southern planters were to produce it, and so jointly profited and sinned). In the same way, the globalized economy expands the circle of our neighbors and we can no longer (if we ever could) claim ignorance about why our Nikes are so cheap. Beyond this our mutual responsibility (an idea found interestingly enough in Dostoevsky’s writings of around the same time, though neither possibly read the other), affects the way I at least interpret the Bible, especially Genesis. But that’s for another post (or two)…
***Before I got around to posting this, I came across this in Terry Teachout’s decent biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops, and this seems as good a place as any to stick it. Here Armstrong discusses his proposal to his future wife Lucille after originally being rebuffed by concerns on the part of Lucille, (the idiosyncratic capitalization is Armstrong’s),
“That’s when I stopped her from Talking by slowly reaching for her Cute little Beautifully Manicured hand And said to her, ‘Can you Cook Red Beans and Rice?’ Which Amused her very much. Then it dawned on her that I was very serious. She – being a Northern girl and Me a Southern Boy from N.O. She could see why I asked her that question. So She said: “I’ve never cooked that kind of food before. But – Just give me a little time and I think that I can fix it for you.” That’s All that I wanted to hear, and right away I said “How about Inviting me to your house for dinner tomorrow night.”
A few nights later Louis went and ate red beans at Lucille’s parents house which he reported to be, “Very much delicious and I Ate Just like a dog,” and repeated his proposal, which was accepted the second time asking.