WHAT IS
SOUTHERN, ANYWAY?
by
Judy Long, Editor in Chief
Hill Street Press
Athens, Georgia
Presentation scheduled
for delivery
at the 8th Annual Harriette Austin
Writers Conference
July 21, 2001, at the University of Georgia
Willie Morris once
asked, "Is the idea of 'The South' felt by anyone besides writers and other
people who spend too much time thinking about themselves? Is it nothing more
than personal nostalgia codified? Are Virginians and Mississippians connected by
anything other than the fact that their ancestors lost a war together? What is
innately Southern anymore?"
Let me ask, how many of
you grew up in the South?
How many in the rural
South?
When you think of the
South, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Do you think of barbecue and
the blues, moonlight and magnolias, Scarlett and Rhett, or do you think of place
and family--where you grew up and Sunday afternoons spent with relatives
(probably a few eccentric ones) during your youth?
The defining
characteristics of Southern fiction are a sense of place and home--home is a
potent word for a Southerner, a deep involvement with family and ritual, a
celebration of eccentricity, a strong narrative voice, themes of racial guilt
and human endurance, local tradition, a sense of impending loss, a pervasive
sense of humor in the face of the tragic, and an inability to leave the past
behind. As William Faulkner said, "The past is not dead, it isn't even
past."
I am on friendly turf
today, Athens, Georgia--a town that prides itself on being the home of the Civil
War's double barreled cannon and Budwine--so I am relieved that I do not have to
enter into the tired debate about whether or not there is a Southern identity or
whether or not it is important. Louis D. Rubin, the founder of Algonquin books,
stated, "...the Southern identity is important because it is.
Whether it ought or ought not to be is irrelevant. The facts are that
there existed in the past and there continues to exist today, an entity within
American society known as the South, and that for better or for worse the bait
of viewing one's experience in terms of one's relationship to that entity is
still a meaningful characteristic of both writers and readers who are or have
been part of it."
What I am here to talk
about is the image of the South as a cottage industry, sought after not only by
New York and Hollywood, but by foreign countries as well. A popular part of
European curricula is the study of the South. Southern writers show us how
history is being altered but also recovered--a theme with universal appeal.
Hollywood
How has Hollywood
translated the South?
As either an idyllic
pastoral South or a tragically flawed South. Since the beginning of American
film history, there has been a constant tension surrounding the portrayal of the
South.
Viewers can easily list
the facets of the Western, but the "Southern," never caught on as a
genre because depictions of the South are often contradictory.
"There have always
been two versions of the South, both wrong. On the one hand there is the GONE
WITH THE WIND South: bronze men in white linen suits, demure ladies with lace
parasols, white-columned mansions framed by magnolias, courtly black butlers
named Melvin, and gentlemen who make their own whiskey. On the other hand there
is the TOBACCO ROAD South: sawmill towns, potbellied sheriffs, hillbilly
singers, Jackleg radio preachers, tin-roofed chicken houses, and gentlemen who
make their own whiskey. So you can see that Margaret Mitchell and Erskine
Caldwell didn't totally disagree," Paul Hemphill observed.
Hollywood's first
attempts to portray the South were all films in the Plantation Film genre,
beginning with the 1903 silent film of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, which focused on
"the gallantry, charm, hospitality, and gentility of the antebellum
days," rather than on Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery message in the
novel. D. W. Griffith's classic BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), based on Thomas Dixon
Jr.'s novel THE CLANSMAN, portrayed what he called the attractive plantation
lifestyle of the South. Posters for SO RED THE ROSE (1935), based on Stark
Young's novel of the same name, begged moviegoers to "see the Old South
ride again."
But all of these
earlier films would be left in the dust when the quintessential Southern
Plantation Film, GONE WITH THE WIND, debuted in 1939. It has continuously
mesmerized audiences worldwide.
Why?
Margaret Mitchell
created a memorable literary landscape of place in GWTW. Tara and the land are
important characters. Whether a moviegoer is in the South or Japan, he can
connect with the sense of place and with Scarlett, who exemplifies the Southern
themes of human endurance and triumph over tragedy.
With the coming of
World War II, producers were discouraged by the U.S. government, which was
fighting a war for democracy, from continuing to portray the plantation
lifestyle, lifestyle built on slavery, as glamorous. In the 1947 film, THE FOXES
OF HARROW, a mother kills herself and her child rather than continue to live in
slavery. Change had come in Hollywood's representation of the South.
Producers then sought
to depict a realistic contemporary South in such films as ALL THE KING'S MEN
(1949), based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren, and INTRUDER IN THE DUST
(1949), based on the novel by William Faulkner.
The works of many
Southern writers, who were oftentimes labeled as Southern gothic, including
Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Tennessee Williams were translated onto the
big screen. Williams described Southern gothic as a style which captured
"an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience."
Williams' A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951), CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958 ), and
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959) helped create the Decadent South film genre.
Some examples of films
which left a little bit to be desired in the "it's Southern, so these
stereotypes must be overblown" department:
CRAZY IN ALABAMA,
DELIVERANCE, FORREST GUMP, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, SMOKEY AND
THE BANDIT and WALKING TALL.
Some examples of films
which didn't blow it in the stereotype department:
A CHRISTMAS MEMORY,
FRIED GREEN TOMATOES, THE GRASS HARP, MY DOG SKIP, THE GREAT SANTINI, TO DANCE
WITH THE WHITE DOG, THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL, and SLING BLADE
What film adaptations
from Southern novels do you think have been successful?
One of the finest film
adaptations from a novel that I have ever seen is TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Horton
Foote wrote the screenplay based on Harper Lee's novel. Perhaps because he is a
Southerner, he took such care to make the script authentic.
New York
Terry Kay said this
morning that New York sees Southern as being a dysfunctional family. He should
know for he is one of the contemporary South's most successful writers, so you
might want to consider putting a dysfunctional first cousin once removed in your
next book.
I feel that I need to
qualify what I am about to say, for there are always exceptions to every broad
generalization about any topic. I know many dedicated and caring editors and
publishers in New York, so what I am about to say cannot be held against me. I
am making comments about the New York publishing industry as a whole and there
are exceptions to every rule.
Publishing has changed
more in the last ten years than in the previous century. Gone are the days of
the "gentleman" publisher in New York. Post-World War II American
publishing has been transformed relentlessly by corporate take-overs. Five
behemoths now share 80% of the market and profit margin is the bottom line. They
are: AOL-owned Time Warner, which owns Little, Brown and Company, as well as the
Book-of-the-Month Club; Disney, which owns Hyperion; Viacom/CBS, which owns
Simon & Schuster; Bertelsmann; and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which
owns HarperCollins, which owns William Morrow and Avon.
One of the best books
on the collapsing standards of New York publishing is Andre Schiffrin's THE
BUSINESS OF BOOKS: HOW THE INTERNATIONAL CONGLOMERATES TOOK OVER PUBLISHING AND
CHANGED THE WAY WE READ. Schiffrin was Publisher at Pantheon Books for thirty
years. He is now director of The New Press, which he founded in 1993.
Schiffrin writes,
"Until quite recently, publishing houses were for the most part family
owned and small, content with the modest profits that came from a business that
still saw itself linked to intellectual and cultural life. In recent years,
publishers have been put on a procrustean bed and made to fit one of two
patterns: as purveyors of entertainment or of hard information. This has left
little room for books with new, controversial ideas or challenging literary
voices."
Nearly 2.5 billion
books were sold in the United States in 1998, earning close to 23 billion. The
large volume, however, does not insure diversity of content. More and more of
the books published today duplicate each other--play it safe regarding content.
In the bullring of today's marketplace, danger lies ahead for adventurous,
intelligent publishing.
Most of the American
public is well aware of the plight of the independent bookseller vs. the chain
bookstore. Like awareness needs to be developed for the plight of the
independent publisher vs. the conglomerate publisher. In the end, freedom in the
marketplace for both the author and the reader is reliant upon the independent
publisher; otherwise a very few mega- corporations dictate what is published and
what is available to the large-scale reading public.
When HarperCollins was
eaten by Rupert Murdoch's empire, the company released many mid-list writers
from their contracts. The term, mid-list writer, usually equates with literary
writer. These are not the blockbuster sellers, but they are the works that will
endure and prevail, the works that will become the classics of tomorrow. It is
becoming more and more the case, unless a book seems destined to be a
blockbuster, these media empires are not interested in publishing it because of
the high economic demands they are faced with daily.
Some independent
publishers still exist in New York, including Grove/ Atlantic and W. W. Norton
and they actively pursue the acquisition of good literature, of mid-list
writers. An example is the recent publication by Grove Atlantic of YONDER STANDS
YOUR ORPHAN by Barry Hannah, who is one of the South's finest writers, but has
never been a mega-seller. Grove's dedication to good writing when COLD MOUNTAIN,
which they expected moderate sales for, became a best-seller.
So what is Southern
today to these conglomerates is as diverse as the South itself is, but to
generalize, what is Southern to New York is reliant upon the same stereotypes
Hollywood employs. Would the work of the great writers of the Southern Literary
Renaissance, Faulkner, O' Connor, and Welty (if they were newcomers) be
published today by these New York houses? Welty said of her own writing,
probably not.
Publishing
in the South
There are many
publishers in the South today, ranging from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill,
which is owned by Workman in New York to independent publishers to university
presses.
Acclaimed Southern
literary critic Louis D. Rubin Jr. founded Algonquin as an independent press in
1982 and the quality of the fiction on his list got New York's attention. Rubin
paved the way for Southern publishers that receive critical acclaim for their
authors on a national scale.
Independent publishers
in the South, such as Longstreet and Peachtree in Atlanta, Hill Street in
Athens, Cumberland House in Nashville, Crane Hill in Birmingham, and John F.
Blair in Winston-Salem, continue to grow. Many authors find them a welcome
alternative to New York.
Although these
companies are not going to compete with New York for advances, they do compete
with the quality of the working relationship they can offer an author. Southern
independents who do publish fiction usually have room for only one or two
fiction works on their list each year. Many university presses in the South
publish one or two fiction titles a year also.
Study these publishers
web sites and catalogues to see how they define Southern.
What is Southern,
Anyway?
Even though the South
has changed dramatically in the last half century, its character remains
distinct. "Southern still invokes considerably more than merely a
geographical grouping. History as a mode for viewing one's experience and one's
identity remains a striking characteristic of the Southern literary imagination,
black and white," wrote Louis Rubin.
The most noteworthy of
today's Southern writers marry the best of Southern tradition with the demands
of contemporary life in the South. The important theme of sense of place remains
constant even though a more diverse Southern community is explored in its
literature.
Perhaps "The
South" as an entity is a work-in-progress and not a completed manuscript;
it is a culture constantly in pursuit of redefining itself in the present, while
holding onto the tenants which gave the region its character.
Quotes by Southern
Writers (They say it better than me)
"My mother,
Southern to the bone, once told me, 'All Southern literature can be summed up in
these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what
Daddy did to Sister."'
--Pat Conroy
"Why has the South
produced so many great writers? Because we got beat."
--Walker Percy
"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."
--Flannery O'Connor
"All talk is
dying. No more porch talk because no more porches. Air conditioning and
television have taken us inside to be passive voyeurs of a fake world made in
Hollywood and New York.
--John Egerton
"Many Southerners
of a certain age . . . have moved beyond the old defensiveness on the one hand,
the old guilt on the other. They don't object to portraying the South warts and
all--as long as it's made clear that Southern warts are more interesting than
anyone else's.
--John Shelton Reed
"One of the first
things I can remember in my life was hearing about the New South. I was three
years old, in Alabama. Not a year has passed since that I haven't heard about a
new South. I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again. In
fact, my definition of a New South would be a South in which it never occurred
to anybody to mention the New South.
--Walker Percy
"The North isn't a
place. It's just a direction out of the South."
--Roy Blount Jr.
"Storytelling and
copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're
inexpensive and easy to procure."
--Robert Penn Warren
"The Southerner is
a local person--to a degree unknown in other sections of the United States. The
Southerner always thinks of himself as being from somewhere, as belonging to some
spot of earth.
"In a way, I think
Southerners care about each other, about human beings in a more accessible way
than some other people.
--Eudora Welty
Southern Winners of
the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction:
Julia M. Peterkin, Scarlet
Sister Mary (1929)
Caroline Miller, Lamb
in His Bosom (1934)
Margaret Mitchell, Gone
with the Wind (l936)
Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings, The Yearling (1939)
Ellen Glasgow, In
This Our Life (1942)
Robert Penn Warren, All
the King's Men (1947)
William Faulkner, A
Fable (1955)
James Agee's A Death
in the Family (1958)
Harper Lee, To Kill
a Mockingbird (1961)
William Faulkner, The
Reivers (1963)
Shirley Ann Grau, The
Keeper of the House (1965)
Katherine Anne Porter, Collected
Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
William Styron, The
Confessions of Nat Turner (1968)
Eudora Welty, The
Optimist's Daughter (1973)
James Alan McPherson, Elbow
Room (short stories, 1978)
John Kennedy Toole, A
Confederacy of Dunces (1981)
Alice Walker, The
Color Purple (1983)
Peter Taylor, A
Summons to Memphis (1987)
Anne Tyler, Breathing
Lessons (1989)
Richard Ford, Independence
Day (1996)