A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile

James Alan McPherson (2000, Touchstone)

       The essays of James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) that are collected here were written near the end of his distinguished career as a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher. They offer glimpses of his life as a student, a father, and an observer of American culture and history. His range is impressive, not to say intimidating: he's also capable of reckoning with what ancient Rome, Shakespeare, and modern Japan might have to say to us.

      The exile of the subtitle refers to the fact that, beginning in 1981, he made his home in Iowa City, where he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; that's a long way from his childhood: "I lived in a lower-class black community in Savannah, Georgia, attended segregated public schools, and knew no white people socially. I can't remember thinking of this last fact as a disadvantage, but I do know that early on I was being conditioned to believe that I was not supposed to know any white people on social terms." As fate would have it, he became a reader, and then a student at Morris Brown College in Atlanta. At Harvard Law School, he studied fiction writing on the side, and followed up with an MFA from the Iowa workshop, having already been published by the Atlantic Monthly.

      Iowa may be one of the whitest places there is; what McPherson liked about it was that it was self-consciously a place with customs and rituals, a sense of the Done Thing. He went so far as to pose as a sports fan, in concert with the prevailing ethos. "...I was sure to find all the butchers watching a game on television. They had already assumed that I was an athlete because all the black males they noticed were athletes. I did not disappoint them." But of course, there's much more going on with him than that. It's just that you can't get close enough to people to figure out their real stories without making some gesture of community.

       McPherson's own community included Ralph Ellison, whom he appreciates here both as a hero and as a friend, in an essay responding to the publication of Ellison's Juneteenth. Ellison, McPherson says, brought to the modernist project a blues sensibility, capable of mingling the inescapable strife of daily life with a streak of humor, and of personal style. After all, among the ancient Greeks, "life was tragic, full of agon. But to them it was also comic. And the two dramatic categories were linked."

       They're linked in Huckleberry Finn, certainly. In an essay occasioned by the restoration of some passages of the book that had been cut, McPherson observes that Mark Twain "was writing about the possibility of friendships across racial lines, at a time when such emotional connections were considered radical. He was writing about the struggles of the human heart confined to the structure of white supremacy...yet Twain, like Stephen Crane after him, still wrestled with the possibilities of heroic action within the confines of a corrupt uncaring culture."

       Such matters are in McPherson's purview as well, particularly when he reads Othello in the shadow of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, which were recent history at the time. The outlines of our life today were clear to him already: "Prosperity has been polarized, with great wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The institution of the nation-state is rapidly being replaced by global corporate ties under invisible managements. The middle class is frightened. The poor no longer exist as human beings. Europe is becoming one federated nation, while the demographics of the United States are changing relentlessly. Information is everywhere, but there is less and less of it with any substance."

      That's the world we still live in, and we can't say nobody saw it coming.

 

Emailed as  Any Good Books, March 1, 2021

Still in Love

 

Still in Love: a novel

Michael Downing (Counterpoint, 2019)

      Mark Sternum has it made, teaching creative writing at Hellman College. He has tenure, and teaches only two classes per semester. He's conscientious, though, going so far as to complete the assignment for each class, submitting it to be marked up by the Professor, his teaching partner. The Professor is a hard case, and a bit of a pedant. "When would the Professor want to discuss ideas for stories? Never. When would it be useful to disclose the autobiographical basis of a story? Never. How much time will we spend brainstorming and writing in class? None. 'I will never be interested in anything except every word you write.'"

      Mark, on the other hand, is there to mother the students. It's his mailbox that is full of submitted work on Monday mornings, and whose office hours are a parade of students who need to discuss syntactical confusion, ideas for stories, and the feedback they've received from the Professor. He devises the assignments, does all the copying, and keeps track of the lucky twelve who are admitted to the class. On the whole, this arrangement satisfies Mark. He knows it isn't fashionable to admit how much he loves teaching, but he's exceedingly lucky to be at Hellman, where he can still enjoy it wholeheartedly.

      Mark's romantic partner, Paul, is away in Italy for the spring semester of 2017. We met Paul previously in the delightful Perfect Agreement; they are still in the same awkward–or perfect–arrangement by which Mark keeps a too-small house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and Paul keeps a too-small apartment overlooking the Cambridge Common. Hellman lies conveniently between the two, so Mark can retreat back and forth; his Saab mechanic is in Ipswich, but the Chinese food is better in Cambridge.

      Still in Love hits the notes of traditional academic comedy, such as the tension between the tenured faculty, who get offices, and the contingent, who barely get desks. Will they vote to form a union? There's department politics: "[The department chair] had a damnably good memory and a thick file on everyone in the department to back her up when necessary. She had reluctantly agreed to be chair when she was first asked to take the five-year appointment. That was ten years ago." The other English faculty appear in quick sketches: "He was built like a broomstick, and he had long cultivated an image in the department as a misanthrope, which was his attempt to take credit for being disliked." Or sometimes little mysteries: "It's always hard to tell if he's sneaky or senile. Take your pick."

      What I liked best about the book, though, is the course itself. We are in the position of the auditing students, who seat themselves on the deep window ledges around the classroom, while the enrolled students sit around the table. Some of the students need to go back to first principles, like what conjunctions are, and how to tell phrases from clauses. As for how to combine them, regard this little beauty: "When the dependent clause comes first, you need a comma. You need no comma when the independent clause comes first."

      I know my way around prose, but writing fiction is an art so far beyond my knowledge as to appear magical. Downing is simultaneously describing effects and practicing them, especially in the assignments Mark completes. Seemingly impossible technical requirements - words of one syllable, a 125-word sentence - make the writers think hard about every word, and what it contributes to the reader's understanding. They may even, like Mark, come to love limitations, which give form and structure to the work. The Professor's dogmatism is as lovable as it is prickly: "Don't withhold facts to create mystery. That's manipulation, and readers will sense it. The real mysteries of life are not withheld facts. The real mysteries are simple and persistent questions. Why doesn't she love me? How could he say that?"

     Just so, Downing has strewn the novel with mysteries to leave us with. Do Mark and Paul ever get to live together, and should they? Whither Hellman, the adjuncts' union, writing, teaching itself? Why read fiction? I'm a little closer to grasping that one.

 

Any Good Books,

February, 2021

Emailed 2/1/21

 

The Best Cook in the World

 

The Best Cook in the World: Tales from my Momma's Southern Table

Rick Bragg (Vintage, 2018)

Cookbooks, I'm told, vary along a spectrum from the dry, scientific, just-the-facts style to the ridiculously discursive, which lay an elaborate scene for each dish, including its provenance and what the weather was like when the writer first ate it. In The Best Cook in the World, Rick Bragg is surely setting the farthest boundary of the discursive style. Since I'm not really looking for a cookbook to cook out of, that suits me just fine.

In the first place, Bragg is not at all a cook, himself. He took a mind to interview his mother when she was in her late seventies about how she did what she did in the kitchen, in hopes of preserving some knowledge that might be going the way of the old growth forest. "She does not own a mixer or a blender. There is a forty-year-old lopsided sifter for her flour, and a hand-cranked can opener. She mixes with a bent fork and a big spoon, smelted, I believe during the Spanish-American War." The recipes in the books come in teaspoons and cups and such, for our convenience, but "[s]he cooks in dabs, and smidgens, and tads, and a measurement she mysteriously refers to as 'you know, hon, just some.'" And how long does it need to cook? Well, I'm sorry, but Margaret Bundrum Bragg doesn't know you, and she doesn't know how hot your oven runs. You'll know when it's done, if you're paying attention like you should.

In the second place, this is real country food. In the northeastern corner of Alabama, where Bragg's people come from, nobody needed to be told to eat locally, or 'farm-to-table'–that's just what food was. "The country people, the working people, subsisted mostly on beans, greens, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pork, and sometimes chicken, when one could be spared or perhaps stolen." And all this with plenty of butter; if not butter, bacon grease; and if not bacon grease, lard. You can only eat food this rich in fat if you have also chopped the wood for the stove to cook it on, or been out hauling logs or digging wells all day.

The family stories Bragg tells go back a hundred years, to when his great-grandfather James J. Bundrum went off to Georgia after (probably) killing another man in a drunken fight. He was a mean, violent old cuss, but he could cook like an angel, so in 1924 his son, Charlie, went and found him in the Georgia hills, and brought him back to teach Charlie's new wife how to cook. The sixteen-year-old bride, Ava, was just as hard-headed as the old man, and "it would be a fat lie to claim that her tutelage began with anything remotely akin to enthusiasm on her part." As iron sharpens iron, though, these two stubborn people eventually came to an understanding. He taught her biscuits and cornbread, and planting and foraging, and how to select the chicken whose day it is to die. "Spare the young when you can, and let them grow into fat hens or good roosters. It might be as tough as a two-by-twelve, but would be good for broth, or dumplings, or stew. And if you have to eat a chicken your kids have named, wait till they are visiting relatives, and blame the foxes."

That last is a level of sneakiness, not to say larceny, that runs in the family, because people have to eat. Where did that stoat come from, or those two pigs feet? (They come in fours.) And why was that cow trying to cross a railway trestle when it came to grief? These are mysterious matters, but in time they became the stuff of stories as delicious as the food they describe. Even the worst year, 1934, when Charlie was serving time for bootlegging, led to wonderful suppers consisting entirely of sweet potato pie or cobbler - cobbled together, indeed, by the best cook in the world. Bragg's own mother wasn't yet born in those days, but she would later work her magic keeping three sons alive on government commodities, and on what Bragg called in another book, "the table scraps of nothing."

Should you ever wish to wax elegiac about hillbillies, I'd suggest this or Bragg's earlier memoirs as a good place to begin. He treats these prideful, stubborn people both honestly and lovingly. Sometimes they drink, sometimes they cuss, sometimes they sing Hank Williams tunes over the stove, and you'll wish you were there to hear them, and to sit down over simple food, cooked well.

 

Any Good Books, by email

January 1, 2021

 

Whose Story Is This?

 Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters

Rebecca Solnit (2019, Haymarket Books)

     In these essays, once again, Rebecca Solnit has things to say that will be obvious only after she has said them. She's making a historical record of the changes we're living through now, because we won't remember. "Forgetting is a problem; words matter, partly as a means to help us remember. When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, made, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions." Indeed, people are still arguing and shifting our assumptions: we're nowhere near the end of history. Nor are we near the beginning of history: the Me Too movement would not have happened without other events and movements going back decades.

     One of the sea changes we are now experiencing is a dramatic widening of whose story we are telling, or hearing. The history of America has so often, for so long, included only white people, nearly all of them men. Even outside the corridors of power, there's often an elision of non-white Americans in the eyes of the media. "In the aftermath of the 2016 election, we were told that we needed to be nicer to the white working class, which reaffirmed the message that whiteness and the working class were the same thing and made the vast nonwhite working class invisible or inconsequential. We were told that Trump voters were the salt of the earth and the authentic sufferers, even though poorer people tended to vote for the other candidate." We know we're not going to change people by yelling at them that they are racists, but that doesn't necessarily make it healthy to pretend that they aren't.

    One way to stay safe when you're powerless is to pretend not to know what you know. House-cleaners and secretaries keep all kinds of secrets, as a condition of their jobs. This skill may amount to a gift for invisibility: how much did Pullman porters overhear when the white passengers assumed nobody was listening? Meanwhile, "the powerful swathe themselves in obliviousness in order to avoid the pain of others and their own relationship to that pain. It is they from whom much is hidden, and they who are removed from the arenas of the poor and powerless." If they don't know that their students or employees are being sexually harassed, they don't have to do anything about it.

      Other people tell lies on purpose, abusing their power to be believed. "What's clear now is that...a minority of us think they can enforce a version of reality divorced from factuality, and that they always have. It corrupts everything around them, and the corruption begins with them." The current presidency is one example, of course. Black Lives Matter exists to shine a light on other examples, cases when the police believe that their version of events is the only one that will be heard, even when there is videotape that contradicts it.

     Another way that lies affect our public lives is the promulgation of anti-abortion laws that contain willful misrepresentations of pregnancy and childbirth. "Sometimes the mostly white, mostly male legislators pushing these lies seem like amoral strategists. Sometimes they just seem like idiots." Ohio Republicans introduced a law instructing doctors to treat life-threatening ectopic pregnancies by re-implanting the embryo in the womb, a purely imaginary procedure. "So this is a bill to force a procedure that doesn't exist to save an embryo or fetus who's doomed while risking the life of the mother, who can be saved. It isn't pro-life, it is pro-lie."

In the long arc that bends toward justice, lies and secrets don't get the last word. Anita Hill spoke up, and so did Christine Blasey Ford, even in the face of threats of violence, and the near-certainty that the Senate would write their stories off. A study from 2003 showed that three out of four women who reported workplace harassment faced professional or personal repercussions. Solnit wonders, "What would women's lives be like, what would our roles and accomplishments be, what would our world be, without this terrible punishment that looms over our daily lives? It would surely rearrange who holds power, and how we think of power, which is to say that everyone's life might be different. We would be a different society." 

 

If we keep fighting, it could still happen.

 

 

Any Good Books, December 2020

 

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

 This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, 2013)

      This is my perfect Ann Patchett book. Though I like her writing, I found Bel Canto, the novel she is best known for, so stressful that I've never read another one. In her essay about fiction writing, she makes the reason clear: she read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in high school. "That novel's basic plot–a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society in confinement–became the story line for just about everything I've ever written."

     Lucky for me, this collection of essays represents writing Patchett did to pay the bills, on the way to making a living from her novels. (She had the credentials to teach literature and writing, but that didn't leave nearly enough mental energy for creativity; and when she waited tables, she was simply too tired.) She cut her teeth in Seventeen, and graduated to Vogue, Elle, and GQ as her teenage days receded farther into the past. She cultivated a reputation as a reliable free-lancer, able to deliver copy on time and at the required length. In addition to the discipline of writing professionally, she developed a thick skin about the editorial process. "Somewhere along the line I learned to experience only the smallest, most private stabbing sensation when I watched my best sentences cut from an article because they did not advance the story. Ultimately this skill came to benefit my fiction as well." Not that editors cut her fiction, but she could see for herself what kept the story moving and what didn't.

     Essays from the latter part of that career, when she had more say over her topics, amount to a catalog of her life and loves: her grandmother, her dog, an elderly nun who was her first-grade teacher. To all of these she brings a quality of love, care, and attention that turn out to be what life is made of. When the Washington Post Magazine sends her to write about trying to join the Los Angeles Police Department, she brings an ear for story, and a delightful brio about climbing over six-foot walls. She's a lover of books, going so far as to invest in an independent bookstore in Nashville, which is still going strong.

      Even though novels aren't ordinarily my cup of tea, Patchett's essay about writing them is full of interest, and applicable to many other kinds of artistic work. On avoiding the distractions of novelty: "I made a pledge that I wouldn't start the sexy new novel I imagined until I had finished the tired old warhorse I was dragging myself through at present." On writing the books she wants to read: "If you wind up boring yourself, you can pretty much bank on the fact you're going to bore your reader." On challenging herself: "Make it hard. Set your sights on something that you aren't quite capable of doing, whether artistically, emotionally, or intellectually. You can also go for broke and take on all three." On sticking to it: "The lesson is this: The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page."

 

       The title essay is actually, and wonderfully, a story about divorce; not just her own disastrous first marriage, but her parents' and her grandmother's. "We weren't the products of our parents' happy marriages; we were the flotsam of their divorces. In the house of my mother and stepfather, my sister and I were the spoils of war." The titular happy marriage came after an eleven year courtship, during which Patchett steadily declared that she was not interested in getting married. Was she wasting time, all that time, or did everything turn out as it was meant to? Does it matter? "We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold on to."

 

Published by email, November 1, 2020