Anne Tyler: Earthly Possessions (1977)

Elements of the Southern Gothic are plentiful in Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions. Charlotte says of her grotesquely obese mother: 'In some way, she'd grown separate from the rest of the town – had no friends whatsoever.' Added to that, her father 'Hung about as if he didn't own his own body [...] he looked like an empty suit of clothes'. And her mother said she didn't believe Charlotte was her real daughter, thought there'd been a 'mix-up' at the hospital. As a child, Charlotte's two principal fears were that she'd be rejected because she was not the real daughter, or that if she was the real daughter she wouldn't ever be able to escape.

Once again with Tyler, in this novel there's a statement that normalizes the abnormal, or abnormalizes the normal: 'Maybe all families, even the most normal-looking, were as queer as ours once you got up close to them.' What do you expect: this is Anne Tyler, who specializes in dysfunctional families and the weirdness of everyday life, who paints a world where the bizarre is an ordinary part of living. Several of Tyler's novels begin where a person walks out of a relationship, but in Earthly Possessions Charlotte Emory not only walks away from Saul to draw out money out of a bank for her escape, but at the same time walks into the clutches of bankrobber (and bad driver) Jake, whose almost consenting hostage she becomes, which begins an absurd road trip into Florida involving a mismatched couple, turning into a mismatched trio.

All this is told in two alternating first person narratives in the past tense by Charlotte, which are in fifteen sections – from the bank robbery through to the end of the road trip, and from Charlotte's early life up to the end of the road trip where the narratives converge – with a sixteenth section as a presentday coda. But Charlotte is still stuck in her past life, and things still happen to her without her being able to make anything happen for herself.

A criminal driving to Florida, a cat in a car? Isn't there just a teensie sniff of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' here? Tylerized, of course.The links below are to Anne Tyler novels I've written posts on:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Anne Tyler: If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
Anne Tyler: The Tin Can Tree (1965)
Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder (1972)
Anne Tyler: Celestial Navigation (1974)
Anne Tyler: Morgan's Passing (1980)
Anne Tyler: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Anne Tyler: Breathing Lessons (1988)
Anne Tyler: Ladder of Years (1995)
Anne Tyler: A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Anne Tyler: Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
Anne Tyler: The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Anne Tyler: Digging to America (2006)
Anne Tyler: Noah's Compass (2009)
Anne Tyler: The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
Anne Tyler: A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)

Frances Newman (1883-1928) - Southern Writer of Brilliance

Frances Newman (1883-1928) was born in Atlanta, GA, and is hardly remembered now, although she wrote two amazing novels: The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), and Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928).

The Hard-Boiled Virgin is divided into 50 or 60 sections with only one paragraph in each, and the very long, circuitous sentences and frequent double negatives make this no easy read, I'm delighted to say. This is a by no means atypical sentence:

'She was not born a mystic, but merely human reason could hardly have been responsible for her conviction that her troublesome soul - like other people's - was the shape of a canteloupe seed and nearly the same colour, and that it was about ten inches long, and that it was made of a translucent cartilaginous substance with a small oval bone in the center.'

And how about this for an oblique description of orgasm via masturbation:

'a fountain rose and fell and dropped its electric spray through her thin brown body'.

I seem to remember Flannery O'Connor saying something about avoiding things that 'look funny on the page', but it seems to be ungooglable. O'Connor calls The Hard-Boiled Virgin 'undramatic' and hates the fact that there is no direct speech in it at all. In The Habit of Being, she writes Betty Hester (known as 'A' in the book): '[Newman] must have been a very intelligent miserable woman - but no fiction writer.'

I strongly disagree with the last part of this, although I can understand the reaction. Her second novel, Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers, is perhaps a little more accessible, but only a little: there are paragraphs in this, the sentences tend to be shorter, and there are even a few instances of direct speech, although never as separate paragraphs!

But it's still very oblique, as if resisting saying anything concrete. People don't just says things, their mouths say things, or they hear their mouths saying things, or they hear the voices of the thing they call themselves saying things, etc: layer upon layer of writing evades saying anything directly. And yet both books contain strong social criticisms, and the first sentence of Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers is like a feminist attack on convention, deliberately stating that the protagonist's name (and by implication identity) has been subsumed into that of her new husband:

'On the fifteenth morning after the bishop of Virginia and the rector of St Paul's Church had given her a legal right to open her eyes and see her very light brown hair lying against Charlton Cunningham's very dark brown hair, Charlton Cunningham's wife opened her eyes on his warm violet silk sleeve.'

Even with their oblique references to birth control, menstruation, and sex, her books shocked many: the New Woman was attacking the stronghold that the Southern lady had defended for so long.

At times though, I confess that I wonder if I'm reading the mind of a schizophrenic, such is the dislocation. But far more often, I feel this is the work of a brilliant writer, someone deliberately writing against the artificiality of representations of reality that we find in so many other writers. Newman is struggling to express how her characters feel to be living, how they actually think. The comparisons with Virginia Woolf are inevitable, but although she's in the same ballpark, the game Newman plays is unique.

This link contains brief information on Frances Newman.

But for much more in-depth criticism, this is a fascinating piece on her from The Southern Belle in the American Novel, by Kathryn Lee Seidel.

Madison Jones, A Buried Land (1963)

In 1963, in The Habit of Being, which is a collection of letters written by Flannery O'Connor and edited by Sally Fitzgerald, O'Connor writes to Betty Hester: 'Right now I'm trying to get Madison Jones' [A Buried Land] read.* It is a shame about his books. They are excellent and fall like lead clear out of sight the minute they are published.'

This time I agree with O'Connor: A Buried Land is indeed excellent. Its genesis is a melding of two things: Jones's deep concern about the flooding of huge areas of Tennessee and northern Alabama by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and a story Jones heard about a young woman dying after an abortion.

The novel, once more, is about a good man corrupted by evil. Gradually unfolding events inevitably lead to Percy's undoing, and the novel almost reads like a thriller, or a kind of detective story, even a Greek tragedy. The cerebral young Percy has an alter ego, his physically-oriented friend Jesse, who tempts him to have sex with Cora, a simple girl originally from the mountains. She dies shortly after a botched abortion in Nashville, and Percy and Jesse bury her in a graveyard now evacuated before the TVA floods the area and buries the past. Unlike the rest of his family, who think the TVA are virtual robbers, Percy supports newness. However, despite his job as a lawyer several years later and his potential rosy prospects, his past actions will come back to torment and haunt him in the shape of Fowler, Cora's brutal and relentlessly vengeful brother, and the impoverished Jesse, who clings to a past Percy hopelessly wishes were forgotten.

The final paragraph on the front flap reads:

'Madison Jones turns the screws of suspense very tight in this powerful book. Youngblood is a modern Raskolnikov, whose struggle against himself is no less desperate than his conflict with his unnerving pursuer.'

A remarkable book.

*Betty Hester is known as 'A' in The Habit of Being, and was a Georgian who corresponded with O'Connor between 1955 and 1964. Their letters total almost 300.

Madison Jones, The Innocent (1957)

Madison Jones was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1925. He worked on his father's farm and studied at Vanderbilt University and the University of Florida, coming under the influence of Fugitive agrarians Donald Davidson (to whom he dedicates his third novel, A Buried Land (1963)), and Andrew Lytle (to whom he dedicates his second novel, Forest of the Night (1960)). Both of these men were among a number of co-authors of the highly important collection of essays published as I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930).*

On the half-title of The Innocent, Jones's first novel, it reads: 'This novel is set in the American South of today, where the old loyalties are dying and the new laws know nothing of the customs and habits of the past. When young Duncan Welsh returns from a broken marriage and broken job in the North, he finds himself surrounded by decay and violence - the violence of women and men and of horses. Desperate to still the angering hum of change he himself is driven to outrage, and the book moves to its bloody close with the implacable fury of a hill-country feud.'

Having just read - and with great pain, I have to add - Madison Jones's The Innocent (1957), I was eager to find out what fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor made of the novel in Sally Fitzgerald's edited letters of O'Connor, The Habit of Being (1979). On 23 March 1957 O'Connor says 'The Commonweal had a lousy review of The Innocent by Madison Jones. It's a very fine novel.' However, O'Connor, a few months later, on 7 September 1957, says 'I didn't read it to take all that in myself. I suffer from generalized admiration or generalized dislike... '. Er... Of Jones's first two novels, Paul Binding, in Separate Country: A Literary Journey through the American South (1979) says: 'Interesting though they are, these novels seem to me so shot with ambiguities and authorial tensions as to be bewildering both in detail and overall vision. Where they are alive is where they are most confused.'

*The full twelve writers were: Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Donald Wade, Robert Penn Warren, Stark Young.

Milledgeville, Georgia: Flannery O'Connor: Literary Landmarks of the Southern United States, #26:

Three interpretation panels give background details of the farm. One, entitled 'The Farm', states: 'Between 1931 and 1939, Bernard McHugh Cline, M.D. (Flannery O'Connor's uncle) purchased this farm, which had once been the core of a 19th century plantation. With the help of employees and family members like Dr. Cline's brother-in-law, Frank Florencourt, Andalusia became a fully functional farm with electricity and other amenities. As the farm operation eventually expanded other improvements were made, such as the distribution of well water around the complex in underground copper pipes. When Dr. Cline died in 1947, the property went to Flannery's mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, and another uncle, Louis Cline.'

The front porch.

Photos of Flannery O'Connor's father, Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr, and her uncle, Dr Bernard McHugh Cline.

Flannery O'Connor's bedrooom, with the familiar crutches.

The dining room.

The kitchen.

The interpretation panel entitled 'The Property' states: 'On the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, Andalusia is a 544-acre farm composed of gently rolling hills divided into a farm complex, hayfields, pasture and man-made and natural ponds, and forests. Tobler Creek intersects the property, entering near the west corner and meandering down to exit at the southeast boundary. The farm complex comprises roughly twenty-one acres of the property and also includes a livestock pond at the bottom of the hill south of the Main House. During her productive years as a writer, Flannery O'Connor lived at Andalusia with her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, from 1951 until her death in 1964.'

The barn.

The third panel is entitled 'A Literary Landscape' and reads: 'The argicultural setting of Andalusia, with its laborers, buildings, equipment, and animals, figures prominently in Flannery O'Connor's work. Southern literature places great emphasis on a sense of place, where the landscape becomes a major force in the shaping of the action. Andalusia provided for O'Connor not only a place to live and write, but also a functional landscape in which to set her fiction. While living here, O'Connor completed to novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two short story collections, A Good Man Is hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965).'

Flannery O'Connor's grave in Milledgeville cemetery.

Savannah, Georgia: Flannery O'Connor: Literary Landmarks of the Southern United States, #22:

Flannery O'Connor's Certificate of Baptism, dated 12 April 1925.

The cathedral across from O'Connor's childhood house, where she was baptised and which she attended.

The street marker reads: 'FLANNERY O'CONNOR CHILDHOOD HOME. Mary Flannery O'Connor, novelist and short story writer, and born in Savannah, March 25, 1925. She grew up in this house and in later years she referred to it simply as "the house I was raised in." She lived here until 1938, attending church at the Cathedral across Lafayette Square and school at St. Vincent's Grammar School, then facing the square between Harris and Macon streets. Flannery O'Connor thrice won the O. Henry award for best short story of the year. Her collected stories won the National Book Award in 1972. She died [of lupus] in 1964 at age 39.'



The house is open for tours between 13:00 and 16:00 except Thursdays.

The front room.

Paducah, Kentucky, and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country

When Joel Conarroe reviewed Bobbie Ann Mason's first novel In Country (1985) for The New York Times, he described it as 'Shopping Mall Realism', which somehow doesn't quite hit the right button (1). But he was more exact when he said the book is 'light-years away from the young professionals sipping margaritas on Columbus Avenue', because Mason writes about a very different America from the glamorous San Francisco city centre.

Less than two years ago, I'd never heard of Bobbie Ann Mason when I drove through southern Illinois's Shaunee National Forest and over the Ohio River into Paducah, western Kentucky. We visited the quilt museum (2), but in a town with a population of only 26,000 there appeared to be not a tremendous amount more to see. And yet in In Country, in the ironically named small town of Hopewell - perhaps a pseudonym for Mayfield, where Mason was born - a visit to Paducah, its mall and its restaurants, is the highpoint of the week.

Sam Hughes is a late teenager and Conarroe finds her similar to characters in the fiction of Carson McCullers and Harper Lee, although the language is very different:

'The restroom is pink and filthy, with sticky floors. In her stall, Sam reads several phone numbers written in lipstick. A message says, "The mass of the ass plus the angle of the dangle equals the scream of the cream." She wishes she had known that one when she took algebra. She would have written it on an assignment.'

In a world where adolescent sexual witticisms are foregrounded to schooling, Sam's mental outlook seems both limited and limiting: there is an abundance of references to tradenames, TV programmes and commercials, and such singers as Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Boy George. As the book progresses, though, Sam's horizons widen, and this is symbolized by her buying a car, which is important to her self-discovery.

In Country is in part a quest novel, and Sam mentally sets out to find her father, who died in Vietnam, and who never saw his daughter. She does this by asking questions of people who knew him, and by reading his semi-literate letters and diary. This is also a protest novel, quietly raging against the horrors of the Vietnam war, and against the callous treatment ex-veterans receive. Sam lives with her Uncle Emmett, who appears to be suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. Soon tiring of her childish boyfriend, she tries to form a relationship with the older veteran Tom, but he is impotent: he is yet another of the walking wounded who carry the ghosts of Vietnam around with them.

The main part of the novel is a long flashback which is sandwiched between a road trip made by Emmett, Sam, and Sam's grandmother - who perhaps bears some resemblance to the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' - in Sam's car, to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

This is a very powerful and moving coming-of-age story detailing the effects of war, a story of the difficulty people have relating to each other. Oh and, er, let's not forget the frequent references to ham and mother-fuckers (3).

(1) The title refers to a GI expression for Vietnam.

(2) The Museum of the American Quilter's Society.

(3) 'Mother-fuckers' is another GI expression, this time used for the loathed lima beans the soldiers were given to eat.