The South/books: Yoknapatawpha Blues

Long after the rest of the country was losing them, the South still possessed those things that are often thought essential to great literary art: a hot sense of pride and guilt, a feel for land and family, a known way of doing things and, above all, a feeling of shared pain and history. Through the slow days and long nights, Southerners told stories —their own and the one everybody knew by heart: the brave defeat in defense of an ignoble cause.

But if great art was possible—even likely—from such material, not much in fact resulted, at least until the 1920s when William Faulkner began cultivating Yoknapatawpha County, the patch of “rich deep black alluvial soil” that was alike his invention and his home. Suddenly, a whole generation of Southerners saw the ground beneath their feet for what it could be: a foothold on the universe. Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, early Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor—for close to 40 years, the line of inspired Southern writers seemed inexhaustible. Critics sometimes refer to this outpouring as the Southern literary renaissance. It is a misnomer, for nothing like that flow of writing had occurred in the region before. For American readers, it transformed the South, the literary South at least, into some sort of national possession, a province of the imagination like Camelot or Shakespearean England.

Fading Manners. Southern writers did not form a school. The works they produced were far less of a piece than is usually imagined. Welly’s gentle, loving Mississippians live at a vast remove from Faulkner’s tormented, often tormenting souls. Many Southern writers, in fact, have chafed at being pigeonholed as such. Flannery O’Connor, a Catholic whose brilliant short stories lacerated characters to get at their souls, once said flatly, “I’m interested in the old Adam. He just talks Southern because I do.” But when her native land was ridiculed, she snapped, “When I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it’s because we are still able to recognize one.” Most Southern writers shared her stated literary purpose: “To observe our fierce and fading manners in the light of an ultimate concern.”

O’Connor died in 1964. In retrospect, that date looks like the end of a literary era. If so, was it because the modern Snopesian world of rootless mechanical men and heartless financiers had finally, as Faulkner was always predicting, done in the South? Or was it that creation flagged once deprived of one powerful, catalytic genius? Whatever the reason, Southern writing today, at the moment of what may be that region’s first national triumph in over 100 years, seems stalled between the glorious past and an uncertain future. The past, in fact, has become a burden to its inheritors. On their triumphant march, the older authors left much of the terrain scorched earth. Writers who now elect to deal in moldering mansions and history-whipped alcoholics risk unfavorable comparisons with Faulkner. Indeed, no one who writes on the South can escape Faulkner’s shadow. Says Novelist Walker Percy: “The problem is how to get out from under him.”

Red Schoolhouse. One solution, as Percy has demonstrated in The Moviegoer, is to turn away from the Faulknerian South and look at the place now. But the view strikes some as aesthetically disappointing. Says Percy: “A subdivision or shopping center in the South is much the same as in White Plains.”

Southerners naturally prefer progress to poverty and ignorance; but something in every artist has to mourn the loss of oddness and individuality. Almost ruefully, Ernest J. Gaines (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman), who now lives in California, describes the changes in the rural Louisiana of his childhood: “My heroes were the proud black men and women who took a helluva beating from the land and got up next day and tried again. But you can’t write about that. It is over and gone and done with. You can’t write about the red schoolhouse that I went to because it’s gone too. You can’t write about mules. Maybe now you can write about tractors … but that’s not as romantic.”

Southern writers who still want to exploit the romantic or the bizarre must push further and further back into chills and shadows. Two recent novels suggest that the quest may not be worth the effort. Paul Allen’s Apeland (Viking; $7.95) deals with a pack of bloodthirsty yokels who pursue an escaped female gorilla through a Florida swamp. Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes (TIME, Sept. 13) recounts the butchery, human and otherwise, that accompanies an annual rattlesnake hunt in a backwater of Georgia. Both books are technically competent, but neither author endows his characters with anything but barbarous mania. They write, as Faulkner put it, “not of the heart but of the glands.”

Despite such disappointments, it would be foolish to say the South is now a closed book. The long civil rights nightmare of the ’60s is waiting for a talented dreamer. Blacks in increasing number are examining their American experience, and for most that story takes shape in the South. Alex Haley’s forthcoming Roots (Doubleday; $12.50) is a vast autobiographical novel about a search for black ancestors—in Africa and later on the plantations. In a soon-to-be-published novel, Flight to Canada (Random House; $6.95), Ishmael Reed, born in Chattanooga, Tenn., but raised in Buffalo, goes back to the Old South for a disc-jockey retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At one point, an outwardly servile slave diddles his late master’s will and inherits the estate. “Yeah,” he says about his fellow slaves, “they get down on me and [Uncle] Tom. But who’s the fool? Nat Turner or us?” The target of Reed’s broad, sometimes raging satire is American racism. But the South is also, in its readymade exaggerations, the best friend his fiction has.

If black writers are looking backward, some white writers are thinking about looking out. Says William Styron, a regional writer who lives in Connecticut: “Southern writers must now leave the swaddling clothes of the swamp and local color and address themselves to conditions elsewhere.” Percy, whose three novels have moved steadily away from older Southern atmospheres, agrees: “We have the challenge to bring the peculiar Southern quality to bear on whatever we write.” That approach has a history of some notable failures. Faulkner’s one novel set entirely outside the South—A Fable—is wooden allegory. (Truman Capote abandoned skillful Southern fantasy for the nonfiction novel and café society gossip.) As the South becomes more like the rest of the country, though, the outside world will become correspondingly familiar.

Personal Touch. For something has not changed in the South, and it is more crucial to a writer than any number of mules and mansions: a love of storytelling, the inborn conviction that life can be possessed by a beginning, a middle and an end. Says Lisa Alther, the Tennessee-born author of the recent bestseller Kinflicks: “In the South, it’s important that everyone agrees. So instead of arguing about abstractions, they sit around telling stories. This training comes in very handy if you’re interested in writing fiction.” And always has. Says Eudora Welty: “We Southerners understand things through narrative, the personal touch. I don’t think you can ever erase that.”

If it is erased, what Faulkner called the “problems of the human heart in conflict with itself will be left to the dissection of psychiatrists and chemists. The odds favor the writers. What they must do now is what writers have always done before: change people and place into a region of art—and of the heart.