So I finished 'The Book Thief' and have started Kathryn Stockett's 'The Help' a confection of my favorite kind: literature of the American South. This one started in early 1960's Jackson, Mississippi. (Or, Mi-ssippi, in the slow drawl of the characters.) I adore fiction about the South: the descriptions of weather, flora, and fauna; the written dialect; completely off-the-wall characters; funny turns of phrase. It's all so lush, rich, and languid. It even makes this life-long New Englander slow down just a touch. Truman Capote, Rebecca Wells, Carson McCullers, Kaye Gibbons, the goddess Eudora Welty...they are all masters of the genre.
Here's the really sad part: I've never been south of the Mason Dixon line!
It's my favorite genre of literature, and I have zero experience with the actual region. Even my precious DOG is technically from Alabama. She's been down South, y'all, but me...not so much.
Time to get cracking on some travel plans, mayhaps? Or would I be terribly disappointed by the reality of something that I enjoy so much on the page? (Putting aside the obvious negative issues around race and discrimination. That is NOT entertaining or romantic, and I don't mean to imply any endorsement of such!)
Perhaps I should ease into it, and start in the Carolinas rather than head straight to Tennessee...
What do you think, readers?
And do pick up a Southern writer if you haven't: it's a perfect antidote to the February malaise. Start with Capote's 'The Grass Harp'.
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By all means visit, but don't linger too long in the backwater towns. What sounds languid in novels can turn claustrophobic in real time. How about attending a writers' conference in a Southern university town? There you'll get all the drawling, grits, and quirky characters you're looking for, minus the suspicion and gossip by the small-town locals at That Yankee Woman. See if you can enroll your dog - or at least bring him along to audit.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you need a vacation down south. You've never been to Florida at least? Wow from a NE girl that's surprising, ya'all. (I hate that BTW)
ReplyDeleteYour description I like. Paula Nowick's comment above, though, reminds me that the reality of the South can indeed be very different from the literary experience through, say, Eudora Welty. Still, both the literary and actual experience of the South, paradoxically, are based on the same thing: the South. (Is there a sweeping generality to be inserted here? Something about the literary and the actual experience of something to human beings? But that way is down a tangent. Focus. Be brief; attention wanes...)
ReplyDeleteThe reality of the South can indeed be very different from the literary experience. I hate, for example, South Carolina ever since learning from a Citadel Cadet (think of West Point up North), during the Viet Nam war, that he hoped the war would still be there when he graduated so his military career could succeed. On the other hand one of my shipmates was a slow-talking, thoughtful man from Greenville, South Carolina.
But your entry above makes me feel nostalgic for one of my favorite writers: William Faulkner. These days I read very little (I'm old) but I think of Faulkner as a putter inner (whereas for me Hemingway was a taker outer). (Faulkner has one sentence that goes on for si
Jorge continues the above comment: six pages. I once got an A on a college exam on Faulkner even though I showed up still drunk from the night before and wrote my answers like a wise-ass mimic of William Faulkner.)
ReplyDeleteNone of the human beings I hold up for their writing style were exemplary human beings-- but I still feel good about that mythical Yauknapataupha county located somewhere in a Mississippi of long ago.