OMNIVOROUS READER

By Stephen E. Smith

Writers have twitches and tics of style and substance that identify them as distinctly as their DNA — and writers of exceptional talent are possessed by obsession, a focus on subject matter that elevates their work to a purity that establishes a commonality with their audience. North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe was such a writer. So is Bland Simpson.

Simpson has earned a reputation as the chronicler of the North Carolina coast and sound country. His books include North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky, The Great Dismal, and Into Sound Country, books that demonstrate his love of the state and the region where he was raised. He has appeared in numerous PBS (WUNC) documentaries, and his familiar voice graces the soundtrack to travelogues exploring the coastal region. In short, he’s the go-to guy when it comes to the history and evolution of coastal North Carolina. For many years, he’s been the Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In his latest book, Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir, Simpson remains in familiar territory — he’s writing about the state — but he’s moved his focus west to an area outside Chapel Hill where he’s lived for the last 50 years.

Where is Clover Garden?

Head west out of Carrboro until you hit N.C. 54. Drive northwest into gentle farmland until you pass the old White Oak School. If there’s a sign for Swepsonville, you’ve gone too far. You can try that, but you won’t happen upon the place name that serves as the title of Simpson’s memoir. According to Simpson, Clover Garden is closer to Carrboro than Graham. He describes it as “a small, four-square-mile country community to the old Porter Tract of the low Old Fields, lying beside the Haw River just a few miles west of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. . . .” But in truth,readers will suspect that Clover Garden is anywhere in North Carolina’s vast rolling Piedmont, any plot of land inhabited by neighbors who live harmoniously in tight-knit communities.

“Memoir” in the title is used in the loosest sense. There’s maybe a thread of chronology at work, but Simpson takes an impressionistic approach to his writing, à la Manet (not Monet). Readers who remember their art history will be reminded of the details in Music in the Tuileries and The Café-Concert, images in which all the specifics matter to the whole.

Clover Garden is divided into 45 segments — short narratives, random observations, anecdotes, even gossip — that, when taken together, comprise the “memoir” and give the readers a sense of a particular time and place. These independent segments are skillfully illustrated and enhanced with photographs by Ann Cary Simpson, whose keen eye for specific and illuminating images has enhanced Clover Garden and her husband’s previous books.

If the impressionistic comparison seems a trifle pretentious, the narratives Simpson shares are not. He writes of pool halls, pig pickings, snowstorms, country stores, great horned owls, folklore, boatwrighting, cafes and bars, stars, and riderless horses, all the bits and pieces, practical and impractical, that comprise our daily lives. And if you’ve lived in the Piedmont, there’s a good chance you’ll know a few characters who contribute color to the storytelling. If you don’t recognize any of the characters, you know them well enough at the conclusion of the memoir, or you’ll recognize their counterpart in your circle of friends and acquaintances.

Simpson’s descriptions embody an easy blending of history with a touch of nostalgia as in this sepia-tinged recollection of old friends and poolhalls (one of which was frequented by this reviewer): “In time, Jake Mills showed me his two favorite pool halls, Happy’s on Cotanche Street in Greenville and Wilbur’s on Webb Avenue in Burlington. After school in the 1950s, he and Steve Coley used to play quarter games with the textile mill hands coming off first shift and drifting into Wilbur’s straight from work. The cigarette haze hung low below the green shades, and the cry of ‘Rack!’ was in the air, and the balls clicked and clacked, and, like many a youth before them, Jake and Steve picked up pin money in this Alamance County eight-ball haven.” Even Neville’s, a long established Moore County watering hole, receives a passing mention in Simpson’s narrative explorations.

Above all else, Simpson is a master prose stylist, a poet at heart. His sentences are graceful and well-tuned — thoroughly worked on to get that “worked on” feeling out — and laced with continual surprises to save them from predictability. Simpson is always a pleasure to read, and he can transport the reader to familiar ground as if it’s being seen anew. “. . . alongside dairy cows, beeves and horses in pastures meeting deep forests of white oaks and red oaks and pines, copses of them around country churches, and straight up tulip poplars and high-crown hickories, American beech and always sweet gum, muscadine vines everywhere, willows close to the waterlines of ponds where big blue heron stalk and hunt, ponds full of bass and bream, shellcrackers and pumpkinseed and catfish prowling the bottom . . . .”

Thomas Wolfe would approve.