State of the Art: Tennessee
STATE OF THE ART: TENNESSEE
By Diann Blakely
Morgan Entrekin, head of Grove-Atlantic Press, made a fresh name for himself in a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece not long ago when he freely admitted to not reading all of the books he publishes. Yet the Nashville native continues to prove that he’s no chopped (chicken) liver with Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. Thomas’s novel, which received front-page coverage in the New York Times Book Review, disappeared from view, and then a more-than-deservedly renewed life via Ireland’s version of the Pulitzer for fiction, the IMPAC Award, the equivalent of our Pulitzer or National Book Award for Fiction, or England’s Man Booker Prize.
Man Gone Down may well be our generation’s Invisible Man, and one of the things that first endeared me to Thomas was his recent interview with the Times, in which he refuses to turn cartwheels over either the IMPAC or the recent election of Obama. “I wrote that novel in a kind of fit,” said the 41-year-old Mr. Thomas. “I had a bunch of jobs. I was teaching four classes a semester at NYC’s Hunter College and two or three in the summer, and working construction and coaching soccer and baseball and trying to build my house. I don’t think it is something I could replicate.” Addressing the subject of our new president, Thomas says, in so many words, that if a change is gonna come, to quote Mr. Cooke, it hasn’t come yet. (If you don’t believe him, dear Swamplanders, particularly in our region, where the sitting president carried only the state of North Carolina, hunt down--so to speak--a story in a recent issue of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger about a white vigilante rampage for an African-American accused of stealing a TV:
http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/index.php/site/comments/a_delta_manhunt_with_booze_and_guns_090209/)
The protagonist and narrator is a young man trying to support his blue-blooded Boston wife and their children, which means, among other things, trying to come up with the cost of his children’s private school tuition and an apartment in New York as she leaves the city for native grounds one summer. The novel focuses on four days--with the truncated time lending enormous tension to the book--in which the narrator struggles with the broken promises he finds around him as the past collapses into the present tense; his tenuous marriage; and the bond he feels with his three children, two boys and a girl, of various skin tones, and whose initials by which they are called in Man Gone Down match those of Thomas’s real-life progeny. Except the girl, who is always referred to as “my girl.”
To say much more would be to ruin the plot of the novel for anticipatory readers, of which I hope I’ve created a few. I’ll pursue the issue only this far: this is a book that must be read, by whites and African-Americans. A natural successor is Rebel Yell, by Nashville’s Alice Randall, whose first novel, The Wind Done Gone, a parody of the Margaret Mitchell classic, landed Randall in court and in the pages of People magazine. With Rebel Yell, Randall jolts us into more contemporary territory, beginnning with Birmingham’s 16th St. Baptist Church bombings, whose foment and repercussions were documented with furious yet restrained precision by Spike Lee in Four Little Girls. Randall’s own take on the event is purely female, in the highest sense of that word: at what point do politics take precedence over the lives of one’s children? Like Man Gone Down, Randall’s book will open a vein in the consciences--if consciences have bodily systems and parts, and I believe they do--of Southerners in particular. My earlier bossy-boots mandate that that book “must be read” is not intended, by any means, to detract from the joyous ease of Randall’s own multi-layered narrative.
Technically, Rebel Yell is so far beyond the diaristic structure of The Wind Done Gone that it will take away the breath of readers of that first novel. Randall has gone from being a songwriter to début novelist to a creator of fiction fully in control of the complexities of her craft. Such control is learned by the writers one most admires, and here’s what Randall has to say about her influences and her aims, which she fulfills and then some, in Rebel Yell:
It has been little realized that many black children growing up in the South in the sixties grew up in a time and place of terror. In some places in some times, the struggle for racial equality was less a civil rights movement and more a civil war. Rebel Yell is anchored in those places and those times. But it reaches into the present and across the world. It was a challenge to depict the Southerner abroad, in Rome, and Fort-de-France, and Manila, without the usual trappings and markers, but it was an illumination to discover how vividly the South travels. Hope and Abel making home in Manila, despite political tragedies, do reach for bits and pieces of "Dixieland". When I was writing Rebel Yell I remembered falling in love with The Honorary Consul and was emboldened to undertake some of the same kind of work Graham Greene does: look into warring territories of the soul and warring political entities all at once. Another novel I thought about often when writing Rebel Yell was Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands. Mothers and daughters in the novels of Jane Austen was the focus of my undergraduate thesis. I have long been fascinated with the marriage plot. In Rebel Yell I sought to explore what happens when the love unexpectedly persists after divorce, after disillusion, after greater love--to ponder the reality of a good woman’s polyandrous heart.
Would that more Southern writers, thinking back on their early days, wrote less about wisteria and iced tea and did more reading--the Graham Greene influence, albeit thoroughly assimilated, allows Randall to reach far beyond not only her native ground, but beyond the female body, though that body remains the holy ground from which the rest of the story springs.
Few names among Tennessee writers are as well-known as Franklin’s Madison Smartt Bell, who has spent recent years deflecting the Southern obsession with race--how can things be otherwise?--onto the island of Haiti. The life of Toussaint L’Ouerverture, the slave revolt he led there, and the bloody repercussions that exist to this day have resulted in a trilogy of historical novels and a biography. At the Southern Festival of Books, Bell, like Randall, appeared last October, he on behalf of his latest work, Devil’s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, and that of thirty-year-old Kevin Wilson, whose breakthrough piece, “Fear of Glass,” was a cover story for the Oxford American several years ago. (I’m proud to say that in writing a brief item about that piece, I became, so far as I know, his first reviewer.). Yet both Bell and Wilson are married to poets, who inevitably receive less attention, and thus it's to the work of two who write in this genre that I want to turn next, first to that of Bell's wife, Elizabeth Spires, author of six volumes of verse and six books for children, editor of the occasional prose and uncollected poems of the late, esteemed poet Josephine Jacobsen, and now the lyrical force behind a collection called I Heard God Talking To Me: William Edmonson and His Stone Carvings.
Without the assiduous work, born of deserved and loving attention, of photographers Edward Weston and Louise Dahl-Wolfe, William Edmondson would not be “the late, esteemed” sculptor but quite possibly forgotten. A mystic in overalls who worked as a janitor and at other odd jobs heard God command him at the age of fifty-seven to pick up a chisel and carve the statues that made him famous, the varmints and birds, girls and angels, jilted suitors and other figures who adorned his famous yard, with its sign “TOMB-STONES / FOR SALE. / GARDEN. ORNAMENTS. / STONE WORK” and “Wm Edmondson” in smaller letters below.
Why this kinship with a woman who is not a Tennesseean, although married to one, I wondered? And so I asked:
I became interested in Edmondson's stone carvings on many trips to Nashville (where my husband's father lives). I like the strong sense of presence and individuality that each of his figures have, as well as the whimsy and humor in some of the pieces. Edmondson seemed like the perfect artist to introduce to young readers (as well as to adults who weren't familiar with his work). His carvings really did speak to me in the sense that I felt each had a story to tell. Thus, I structured the book as monologues spoken by Edmondson and the figures themselves.
The monologue, it should be pointed out, was the perfect poetic subgenre to choose, for like Michelangelo’s slaves, there’s a sense of many of Edmondson’s subjects as having existed previously inside the blocks of limestone he carved, struggling to be set free. Indeed, some appear at least partially to remain with the stone’s confines, like one of his most famous works, a likeness of Eleanor Roosevelt wearing—or semi-attached to--a huge fur coat.
I next asked Spires how she obtained the photographs.
I spent about six months, if not more, tracking down the sculptures (some are in private collections and some are in museums) and finding high quality images. It became a kind of exercise in detective work, done on the internet, and by telephone and mail. I wrote collectors, curators, private art galleries, and museums. The [Weston] and [Dahl-Wolfe] photographs of Edmondson and his yard were already digitized and in an archive, but other images were sent to me as photographs, slides, and transparencies. I had no idea when I started how complicated and time-consuming it would be finding the images, but it all came together in the end.
Edmondson was lucky to have died before the white fetishization (forgive the wretched jargon here) of "outsider art" began. Spires’ poems reject this current trend and more. They offer due reverence, and though her book is being marketed as a Young Adult title by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, we should remember, as Wordsworth said, how much more clearly we see as children, or slightly older. The style that Spires adopts for her poems not only see Edmondson’s work, they behold it, as well as allow the “whimsy and humor” of which she spoke regarding several pieces, and this quality in particular will not be lost on either the children or the adults who pick up I Heard God Talking to Me, an admirable volume indeed.
Leigh Anne Couch recently published her first collection of poems, Houses Fly Away, via Zone 3, a magazine and small press that runs a biennial publication award--Couch’s book was chosen by the acclaimed poet Richard Jackson of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga--out of Austin Peay University in Clarksville. I predict that she will become much better known, and quickly, and the lyric quality of the prose in which she discusses Houses Fly Away and more should make the origins of my prediction clear:
I worked on a poem for twelve years. The words, lines, and images were always changing, but for twelve years I tried to write a good poem. I wasn't trying to write a book, but after so much time several forces goaded me into being bound, as it were: I had a “bookly” number of poems; I was nearing forty (no longer a younger poet according to Yale); and my writing and life were beginning to change in dramatic and irreversible (one hopes) ways so that before I knew it I was writing a second book before the first one was published. This is how Houses Fly Away came to be. One of those dramatic and irreversible changes was falling in love and marrying Kevin Wilson, a writer himself, of fiction (Tunneling to the Center of the Earth). I've always been a little scared of writing, scared to make too much of it, had always been told, “honey, don't get your hopes up.” Kevin has never been scared of the process as far as I can tell, and living with a writer like that has made me bold.
Organizing those best-of poems from the last twelve years into a book was an act both humbling and revelatory. I really had to listen to the poems again to hear how they corresponded with one another; as it turned out, they strained toward a coherence I had been ignoring for years. I don't mean to be coy. I had never written a book, so I didn't know what that poetic intention felt like. This second book is already different because of the hindsight gained from the first. It is a strange thing after your book has been published--and a few intelligent reviewers have convincingly argued otherwise--to say what you think it is about, much less what it means. I can describe what I thought I was doing at the time and I can describe the a-ha moment when I felt the poems fit into a book, but that's about as far as I can go.
In some way or another I'm always writing about the spaces full and empty in our lives--the body as space taken up on this earth, the body that preserves space for the spirit, the space the heart takes up, the space of a lifetime--and then how we use those spaces to make a self. In eighth-grade reading comprehension in the early eighties we were taught to read stories for conflict: man v. nature, man v. society, man v. self. I think there's one more versus: it probably should have been man v. woman or man v. God, but I was in Catholic school, so I doubt it. Anyway, Houses Fly Away is rife with such match-ups, but it's always the self against the body, the past, memory itself, and family; and the poems strive for reconciliation or at least détente. The book is full of failure. In the second book I want the speaker to be less afraid of being misunderstood. In the way my dream life lags behind my waking life by about five years, this second book looks like it will be about early marriage, even though our child might be in first grade by the time it sees the light of day.
Though Robert Palmer may have originally hailed from Little Rock and spent only four years in Memphis, the latter city is where the Mississippi Delta is said to begin--in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, to be exact--and the music that sprang from its soil is the subject of his best-known work, Deep Blues. Not coincidentally, the volume shares the title of an excellent documentary written by Palmer and directed by the justly famed Robert Mugge. The film begins on Beale Street then journeys to the Hill Country, where many of the artists who came to be associated with Fat Possum, including the late Junior Kimbrough and R. L. Burnside, who began to attain recognition in the mid-nineties, when Palmer himself--who produced albums by both--passed away. Greenville and Clarksdale, those hubs of the Delta, their blues alleys now crack-ridden and blood-soaked, perhaps fittingly provide the finale.
A new collection of Palmer’s occasional work--he became the first pop music critic for The New York Times and was the author of a plethora of reviews for publications such as Rolling Stone, and edited with a fetchingly candid introduction by Anthony DeCurtis as well as liner notes, during his brief life--was authorized by the Palmer estate and given an introduction by DeCurtis. Called Blues and Chaos and published in November by Scribner’s, the book is simultaneously uneven and invaluable. Blues and Chaos lacks the urgency and centripetal energy of Deep Blues, but it makes available some classic material about Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, Charles Ives, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Lou Reed, John Cage, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Philip Glass, and world and punk music—an article largely devoted to Kentucky native Richard Hell, one of the latter genre’s resurgent lights with the newly released Destiny Street Revisited, as well as a Rimbaud scholar and poet who is now at work on a autobiography, is trenchant indeed.
If these are figures who incited Palmer’s admiration, Madonna and the Ramones, those deliberately (?) dumb Jerseyites who wanted to be sedated, among other things, were not his jar of moonshine, as DeCurtis reminds us in the introduction. Indeed, it’s difficult to picture the slightly chubby Arkansan shuffling down Beale in Mugge’s documentary being drawn into the feminist, sexually aggressive, but somehow over-controlled and -choreographed, indeed manufactured, aura of a woman who remains more of an icon than a singer; or, for that matter, listening to CBGB sing-alongs with those who, like Joey and Deedee, craved Versed. What would Palmer have thought about the best of the RiotGrrls, who came into being as he went to the other side, I found myself wondering? Sleater-Kinney’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” whose growls mean business but are leavened with humor and nip at the ankles of the ostensible subject but also, more allusively--and elusively--at Pop (the Ramones covered his classic “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), in addition to its more explicit hommage to Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, I should admit here, is one of my favorite songs.
Finally, though the novel just came out today, it’s well worth making a note on your calendar to look for Amy Greene’s Bloodroot, her début novel. It began, as she says,
...as an exploration of characters I dreamed up and wanted to know more about. I based their voices on those of family, friends and neighbors I’ve been listening to my whole life, hoping to bring them to the page in a way that rings true. I focused first on telling their stories and in the process found myself painting a portrait of the East Tennessee landscape, sharing my own vision and perspective of where I come from; a mystical place with haints and witches and fortunetellers, where people still practice folk magic brought across the ocean centuries ago by Scottish and Irish settlers. But along with the magic and beauty of the land, there is also a sense of isolation that comes with living here. The passage of time and the changing world outside the mountains in many ways has little impact on life in Appalachia.. The pull is strong here to follow tradition and live the same as generations of our families have before us, so it’s hard to forge our own identities. With Bloodroot, I wanted to ask if where we’re born and how we’re brought up dictates who we become. As hard as it might be to overcome inherited traits and circumstances, I hope to have shown through Johnny and Laura that it’s possible. They refused to let their fates be determined by who their parents are or where they came from.
How many of us, with Tennessee roots or not, share that same refusal? And those same ties, which make the refusal one of pulling up our roots only to find them colored with blood?
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