between the magnolias

Marion Montgomery on despair.

"We have to bear human foolishness, human absurdity, without resorting to making despair a virtue. Momentary despair- we can't escape that. It's as likely as indigestion when a new absurdity is being absorbed. I think I mean that the existentialists' absurd- which has frightened too many writers out of wit and humor- is a prospect of the world we come to again and again. We can't escape coming to it. But it can't be enough to just come to it: one has to go through.

The ticket to it is the tragic eye, which I suspect is innate. The passport that allows us to come back from it we have to be given or earn- the humorous eye. Humor is a necessary complement to the tragic, if one is to preserve what our age insists on calling "sanity". (I call it soul.) There are advantages of place and community and family to one's earning or being given that eye, I think. That is one of the gifts to the Southern writer that we haven't quite outgrown with our new arrogance.

Marion Montgomery in an interview with James Colvert conducted at the University of Georgia in September, 1970

No one coming from the Protestant tradition could pay such reverent homage to absurdity. Marion Montgomery must have been Catholic or Orthodox or agnostic- something with a heightened skepticism of power and an ability to laugh at the adventures of worldly authority.

Montgomery currently lives in Crawford, Georgia, where he has devoted much of his life to teaching, writing, and ponderizing.

• William Walsh interviews Marion Montgomery more recently for the Istanbul Literary Review. St. John of the Cross enters the discussion.
• Montgomery's bio on the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Flannery eccentrics vs. Welty eccentrics.

I like to classify Southern eccentrics into two groups: Eudora Welty eccentric or Flannery O’Connor eccentric. If you are a Welty eccentric, your sister is called something like Cattie Paw because her name is Katherine and she walks quietly. If you are O’Connor eccentric, your sister is called Trampasaurus Oceanus because she gets around during Fleet Week. Welty eccentrics may leave a family dinner to go sit in the woods and sketch lichen. O’Connor eccentrics leave a family dinner after announcing they’ve ended the affair with the Methodists’ choir director to move to Hilton Head with the Piggly Wiggly produce manager and his spiritual guru.

In case y’all missed it, over in Union City, Tennessee a man assaulted his momma with a ham. Yeah, he shanked her. Now, the alleged ham chucker said he indeed did throw that ham, but was not expecting his momma to be walking down the hall and get smacked by his lofting of the pork. I’m sorry, but you don’t go willy nilly throwing ham around without hitting something unless it’s a spiral sliced ham. Then obviously it’s going to cut to the right and miss momma altogether. I know that assault with smoked meats can happen anywhere, but there’s just something so Southern Gothic about knocking momma out with dinner. And let’s face it, in the South, that’s the only way you’re gonna knock your momma out with dinner because your sweet potato pie will never be as good as hers. I don’t know what kind of eccentric that makes our ham-handed assailant. I’m leaning more towards O’Connor eccentric because the government-owned buildings Miss Eudora’s characters inhabit tend to be more of the post office persuasion than the jail persuasion.

Susan Wilson, "Embracing My Inner Flannery"

Laughing Stock: The Autobiography of T.S. Stribling.

T. S. Stribling (1881-1965) was a restless man. It takes a certain thick restlessness to make like a bum and travel across the country hopping from train to train relying on the spruce of the moment to send the manna from the heaven you hardly believe. And it takes a certain stubborness to write about the South while maintaining your political and economic distance from it. 

Though he followed the path deemed proper by earning a law degree at the University of Alabama in 1905, he might as well have worked at Wendy's. His autobiography, Laughing Stock, recounts the pleasure of a life as lived by a man who intended nothing greater than to experience and write. In his own words:

My idea of an autobiography is that it should tell precisely what one remembers about oneself and nothing more. Hearsay evidence, logically, should be ruled out of autobiographies just as it is ruled out of murder trials, because if you have to inquire about yourself, that phase of your life forms no part of your conscious existence and should be omitted. I intend to follow this rule strictly. 

And then, he cleverly continues:

For example, I cannot remember my birth so I do not feel at liberty to put down the amazing and completely justified portents that accompanied my entrance into a waiting world. I will not tell how, when I was born in Clifton, Tennessee, a neighbor girl asked my mother what object she should first place in my hand. That was important, because the first thing a baby touches, it will work with all the rest of its life. My mother didn't know what to put in my hand, but she said the Bible. The neighbor girl, however, in glancing around the bedroom, could not find the Bible but saw a pen. So she put the pen into my hand, and that fact has always colored my output of fiction. Then, as a kind of great seal assuring the fulfillment of the prophecy, this neighbor girl, later in life, went crazy.

He has a way with words, this man. And a way with life that makes you wish you could see how he eats a freshly-roasted pig (so much can be known about someone by how they eat pork). 

• Bio from UNA page.
• The Store, published in 1932, won a Pulitzer Prize. 
• You can read Birthright and The Cruise of the Dry Dock for free online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
• Memories and tributes to Stribling from his hometown of Florence, Alabama.
• The TS Stribling Museum in Tennessee was restored by the Tennessee Historical Foundation, through a grant from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). A 1924 Craftsman Bungalow style house built by T.L. Kloss, a local business man, and later the retirement home of 1933 Pulitzer Prize winner and author, T.S.Stribling, a Clifton native. Stribling married Lou Ella Kloss, the builder's daughter. The restored house is now the T.S. Stribling Museum and houses the Clifton Public Library. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is located in the historic district of Clifton, TN. The site is open Tuesday-Friday, 11:30-6:30pm. Guided tours can be arranged by contacting: Wanda Johnston Email: [email protected] Tel: (931) 676-3188
• "T. S. Stribling", a handy printable bio with images from Maria Pietuszka. 
• Drive the Tennessee River Trail Scenic Byway and visit Stribling's house along the way.
• Explore Wayne Country driving map is a great, easy printable go-to.
• Books by and about Senor Stribling.

Walking away from Percy as fact.

Walker Percy Online is an excellent resource for fans of Percy's fiction and nonfiction writing. Spending time browsing its resources led me back to trying to discover Walker Percy as an author and a "modern man", or a man modern enough to know that the self-concept precedes the existenz. So who was Walker Percy? Not the facts-- I crave the fiction. I'm seeking a sense of Percy in the age of identity politics.

The Southern writer who refuses the title or experience of Southern writer-dom understands his milieu better than the writer whose claim to fame requires a self-motivated Southern identity. While Percy kept his distance from attempts to characterize him as a Southern writer, one must wonder why. How did Walker Percy understand his career as a writer? Did he identify a particular trajectory or journey with a specific end or goal? Or did his existentialism make such a story impossible?

Could it be that Percy did not wish to be associated with what has become the megachurch moment of Christianity? Micah Mattix hints at something along these lines:

Percy brooded over the labels “Catholic” and “Southern,” aware of the fact that both, particularly the former, could be used to dismiss his work as another manifestation of what he pejoratively called the “triumphant Christendom of the Sunbelt.” Terrence Rafferty did write a somewhat overheated, though not entirely wrong-headed, review of The Thanatos Syndrome, which he tagged “[e]schatology made simple,” but this rarely happened. While his Roman Catholicism is perhaps more essential to his work than it is to O’Connor’s, it seems unlikely that interest in Percy is less than interest in O’Connor because of this.

Overall, Percy’s Southernness was also an advantage to him—as he himself recognized. The northern writer, Percy once observed, no longer has anything to write about. Having dismissed Christianity and sharing no common culture with his readership, he finds himself writing “dirty,” “not by design, but by default.” The Southern writer, by contrast, still has the remnant of a tradition (or, at least, he did during Percy’s time). He details “the crumbling porticos, the gentry gone to seed, like Faulkner’s Compsons” or is nourished by “the extravagant backwoods Protestant fundamentalism of Georgia.” 

So Percy considered himself too "dirty" for the self-help culture of Southern evangelicalism. This makes sense- his characters spent more time resigning themselves to life rather than fixing or improving it.

Percy, like Bruce Springsteen and Flannery O'Connor, liked to play with "that hole inside everybody", the little dark space where the light can't reach. Percy was not afraid of the dark. He sought God in twilight and left the light of day for the rest. Now that darkness is almost instinct (thanks to social media, reality TV and the iPhone), I wonder what remains of significance itself? I'll confess that I would have enjoyed nothing more than discussing the rise of reality television with Mr. Percy. Is reality tv existentialism at its cultural peak or the death of individual action? I need a revelation not a self-realization.