The Omnivorous Reader

Waiting for Gurganus

And savoring his short fiction

By D.G. Martin

Like two other important North Carolina authors’ debut novels, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in 1929 and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain in 1997, Allan Gurganus’ Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All in 1989 caught the nation’s attention and stayed at the top of the bestseller lists for months. It has sold over 4 million copies and become an American classic.

Set in the 1980s, the book is narrated by 99-year-old Lucy Marsden, who married 50-year-old Col. William Marsden when she was 15. She tells of her marriage to the Confederate veteran, his wartime experiences and the entertaining and poignant routine of her daily life in the fictional town of Falls, located somewhere near Rocky Mount.

Widow was followed in 1997 by Plays Well with Others. Sandwiched between the two novels are a couple of collections of short fiction, White People and The Practical Heart, the last published in 1993.

So, what had he been doing in the years afterward? “Writing, every day,” he says, “and getting up at 6 a.m. to do it.” Finally, in 2013 Gurganus published Local Souls, taking us back to Falls, where Widow and many of his short stories are set.

Local Souls is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories, but three separate novellas. All are set in Falls, but the characters and stories are independent and quite different. Susan, the main character in the first novella, “Fear Not,” is a 14-year-old all-American girl growing up in Falls when her father dies in a boating accident. Seduced and made pregnant by her godfather, she gives up her baby, pulls her life together, later marries, has two children, and leads a normal life until she is reunited with the child she gave up. Then her life is transformed in a surprising and puzzling way, one that only Gurganus could conjure up.

In the second novella, “Saints Have Mothers,” a divorced woman, smart and ambitious enough to have published a poem in The Atlantic magazine, has two sons and a 17-year-old daughter. The daughter is more committed to serving those in need than she is to her mother, whose life is wrapped up in hopes for her daughter’s future. When the daughter announces that she plans to go to Africa on a service project, the mother objects. But the daughter still goes. Communication with her daughter is spotty until a middle-of-the-night phone call brings word of the daughter’s death. As the mother and the Falls community prepare for a memorial service, Gurganus brings the story to a shocking and touching conclusion.

The third novella, “Decoy,” is the history of a relationship between two men. One is a beloved family doctor, part of an established Falls family. The other is a newcomer, who came from the poverty of struggling farm life, but has achieved modest financial success and near acceptance by Falls’ elite. When the doctor retires, their friendship is disturbed and then swept away by a “Fran-like” flood that destroys both men’s homes and much of Falls.

With its complex characters and plot, “Decoy” deserved to be a separate book. In 2015 that happened, and it sold well as a stand-alone.

In his latest book, The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus (January 2021), several stories take readers back to Falls.

In one story, “The Deluxe $19.95 Walking Tour of Historic Falls (NC),” a tour guide narrates and takes a hard look at the town. She begins: “Moving along nicely. No stragglers, please. Incorporated in 1824, almost immediately made the county seat, Falls still boasts five thousand local souls. We’re down from our peak seven thousand during the commercial boom of ’98, 18 — 98. See that arched bridge? Some say that yonder River Lithium accounts for both our citizens’ soothed temperaments and for how hard we find leaving home. Few local students, matriculating up north, last long there.”

Longtime fans of Gurganus will appreciate the inside look at his favorite town. Newcomers will find that the tour of Falls forms the basis for another engaging Gurganus tale.

The new book includes one of my favorites. In “A Fool for Christmas,” Vernon Ricketts, a pet store manager in a mall near Falls, is the lead character and narrator. He is the fool for Christmas who cannot resist a call to take care of a homeless teenager, keep her warm, and help her hide from the security officer, who is dedicated to getting such undesirables out of the mall. The teenager is pregnant, and Gurganus’ story draws on the Biblical account of Christ’s birth in a way that brings out the same sort of deep feelings.

Gurganus wrote this story for NPR’s All Things Considered in 2004 and read it on the program. He has rewritten it regularly. Last year it made its way into print in a limited edition that sold out quickly. The story’s inclusion assures that the new book will be a family treasure.

Perhaps the book’s most timely story is “The Wish for a Good Young Country Doctor,” which was published first in The New Yorker in April last year. It is set in a rural village in the Midwest during a cholera epidemic in 1850, where a young doctor does his best to save its citizens. But when many die, the doctor is blamed.

How did Gurganus manage to time his story to coincide with the current pandemic? He says he finished the story early in 2020, “on the day that coronavirus appeared for the first time in The New York Times. And the context was completely changed. I sent it to my agent, who sent it to The New Yorker, which bought it in a day, and it appeared two weeks later.”

These stories and six more in the new book will remind us of the talented North Carolinian’s ability to make us laugh painfully at ourselves and our neighbors while we wait for his long-promised, long-delayed opus, An Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.

When I pushed him to tell us when it would be finished, Gurganus smiled and said, “I’ve got a lot of material. Every time I think I’ve finished the book, somebody tells me another story about a corrupt preacher and the choir director. And I add another chapter. So I think it might be a trilogy instead of a single volume.”

I am waiting hopefully.

But I am not holding my breath.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

The Omnivorous Reader

We Got the Beat

The richness of North Carolina’s music

By Stephen E. Smith

In his latest book, Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Popular Music, from Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, music critic David Menconi lays it out in the prologue: “Music is North Carolina’s tuning fork — not tobacco, basketball, NASCAR, or even barbecue — because it’s not just in the air here, but also the soul.”

Barbecue gobbling, nicotine-addicted NASCAR/Carolina fans might take exception to Menconi’s premise, but for North Carolinians who have wandered through life with their ears pricked forward, there’s no denying that the state’s popular music scene has played a significant role in defining their identity. Charlie Poole, Blind Boy Fuller, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Nina Simone, James Taylor, the Red Clay Ramblers, Ben Folds, Mandolin Orange, and hundreds of other talented musicians, have, at one time or another, called the state home, and although a self-serving parochialism is at work here, there’s good reason to take pride in the music North Carolina has contributed to the world. We can’t claim a Nashville or an Austin or a New Orleans, but popular music would be a lot less interesting without us. And although the state’s boundaries are an arbitrary and artificial device for identifying musical movements and influences, there’s nothing new in employing “sense of place” as an organizing element. The Oxford American, for example, publishes an annual state music edition, with North Carolina featured in their winter 2018 issue.

If sex — oh, all right, true love — is the primary inspiration for most pop tunes, race has been a troubling subtext in much of the music North Carolina artists have created. What could be a more revealing example than the “beach music” craze of the 1950s and ’60s where crowds of privileged white guys, decked out in patch-madras britches and alligator wing-tipped tasseled Nettletons, shuffled to sexually implicit dance candy produced almost exclusively by Black artists who wouldn’t have been allowed admission to the venues where they were performing?

Menconi’s compendium is generally arranged chronologically, with scant attention paid to music as folklore (we’re talking “popular” music here), and Bascom Lamar Lunsford is as close as Menconi comes to crediting traditional influences. The rough and tumble antics of Charlie Poole and his North Carolina Ramblers is his starting point in “Linthead Pop.” Poole, who was born and raised in Randolph County and spent much of his life working in cotton mills, thrived musically in and around North Carolina in the 1920s and ’30s, and his influence on popular music has waxed and waned with changing tastes. Nevertheless, he remains an essential, almost mythical figure in the history of the state’s music.

Piedmont blues artists who worked the Bull City tobacco markets receive their due in chapter two: Blind Boy Fuller, the Rev. Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Elizabeth Cotton and Etta Baker are credited with influencing popular artists well into the 21st century.

“Through the Airwaves” is a much-deserved tribute to Charlotte-based Arthur Smith, whose superb musicianship and entrepreneurial savvy brought North Carolina music into the mid- to late-20th century. Menconi writes: “Smith didn’t just figure out syndication and diversification but vertical integration, controlling the means of production” by establishing a studio in Charlotte that catered to “the likes of Statler Brothers, Flatt & Scruggs, James Brown, and Johnny Cash.” Smith’s copyright infringement suit over “Dueling Banjos,” a 1972 hit from the movie Deliverance, is explicated in detail, correcting lingering misconceptions concerning the tune’s authorship and Smith’s strategic lawsuit against industry giant Warner Brothers.

Greensboro readers will appreciate Menconi’s focus on The 5 Royales, a Triad-based gospel-inspired group who enjoyed nationwide popularity in the ’50s and early ’60s. Best known for having written and recorded “Dedicated to the One I Love” — later covered by the Shirelles and the Mamas and the Papas — the Royales’ story is one of hard work and little pay. What should have amounted to considerable income from record royalties never materialized. After the Royales’ singer-songwriter Lowman Pauling’s death, his wife received a check for $6. “I hate to say it,” Pauling’s son observes, “but in the Jim Crow South, black people got the shaft.”

Doc Watson, the Appalachian flat picker who’s an institution for North Carolinians, is the subject of a thoroughly researched chapter that will enlighten even longtime Watson fans, and the benighted beach music craze is given more than adequate attention in a chapter ironically titled “Breaking the Color Lines at the Beach.” The hit-and-miss career of Eastern North Carolina’s Nantucket is detailed in “The Eight-Track Era of Rock and Roll,” and Chapel Hill is dubbed the “Next Seattle” in an essay that celebrates Ben Folds and the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Menconi examines the rise of North Carolina record labels, including Colonial, Sugar Hill and Merge records, and the popularity of Americana, Alternative, and Hip-Hop is explored through the music of the Avett Brothers, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Kruger Brothers, Mandolin Orange, the Backsliders, and 9th Wonder and Little Brother.

Of particular interest is Menconi’s appreciation of the great Nina Simone, a Tryon native whose immense talent was shaded by her railings against racial injustice. She and other Black artists fled the state. “That’s especially the case with jazz,” Menconi writes, “starting with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Max Roach. . . . And after Blind Boy Fuller died in 1941, his Durham blues peers Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Rev. Gary Davis all decamped to the North.”

Sprinkled throughout the text are sidebars that recognize artists of particular merit — the Steep Canyon Rangers, Chatham County Line, Shirley Caesar, Tift Merritt, the Embers, James Taylor, John D. Loudermilk, Link Wray, Rhiannon Giddens and many others. Still, it’s impossible to get it all in. There’s just too much good stuff to fit into 300 pages, and many fans will be mildly disappointed to find their favorite musician omitted.

Still, Menconi provides a valuable service to North Carolina music lovers, a well-researched and beautifully written primer that’s essential in understanding the state’s contribution to popular music. Moreover, he establishes a jumping-off point from which yet-to-be-written books might explore with more specificity the state’s musical diversity by region and genre.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He is the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

The Omnivorous Reader

Mountain Redux

The return of Ron Rash’s classic character

By D.G. Martin

What is it about Waynesville, the small mountain city west of Asheville?

Two of our state’s most admired novelists set their best books in the mountains near Waynesville: Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier, and Serena, by Ron Rash. Both books are gems with memorable characters and descriptive language that flows like poetry. Both deal with cruel and brutal destruction of life and land: Cold Mountain by war, Serena by the clear-cutting of ancient mountain forests.

Having written about Frazier recently, it is time to give attention to the work of Rash. His latest book, In the Valley, gives us nine new short stories and a novella that revives the main story in the classic Serena.

From its beginning, North Carolina has been the scene of environmental destruction that accompanied the creation of great wealth and employment opportunities. The importance of tars and pitch to our economy gave us our Tar Heel nickname and destroyed vast forests of longleaf pine.

In the early part of the last century, our mountain regions opened their treasured forests to massive clear-cut operations that destroyed some of the state’s most beautiful and important natural landscapes.

Serena was set in the time of the Great Depression in the immense forests near Waynesville. The leading characters were the owners of a Boston lumber company that was systematically cutting all the trees on the thousands of acres that it owned.

The background of systematic forest destruction was a perfect backdrop for Rash’s epic story of love, hate, ambition, ruthlessness and revenge. His novel opens at the railroad station in Waynesville. Pemberton, the leading partner in the lumber company, returns from Boston with his new bride, Serena. Her striking appearance and arrogance immediately awe Pemberton’s partners and most of the employees, who have come to meet the couple at the station.

Also at the station are a rumpled mountain man and his pregnant teenage daughter, Rachel, whose unborn child was fathered by Pemberton. The mountain man accosts Pemberton with a Bowie knife. In the ensuing fight, Pemberton sinks his own knife into the chest of the mountain man, who drops his Bowie knife and dies.

Serena, showing the dominating character that will carry the novel to its end, picks up the Bowie knife, hands it to the dead man’s daughter and says, “By all rights it belongs to my husband. It’s a fine knife, and you can get a good price for it if you demand one. And I would,” she added. “Sell it, I mean. That money will help when the child is born. It’s all you’ll ever get from my husband and me.”

Serena was ambitious and dramatically attractive, riding a white horse and displaying her well-trained eagle. She and her husband were determined to get rich by clear-cutting thousands of acres of North Carolina mountain forestlands, destroying a rich, stable and precious environment.

Rash made Serena a symbol of corporate greed and anti-environmentalism. Serena was also driven by personal passions. She was determined to eliminate her husband’s illegitimate son and the child’s mother, Rachel. This assignment went to Galloway, a one-armed employee utterly devoted to Serena. Galloway’s efforts, chronicled in the book’s dramatic last pages, were nevertheless a failure. The boy and mother were safe, and Serena was off to exploit the forests of Brazil.

Some critics compare the tale to Shakespeare’s Macbeth — the ambition of Serena and Pemberton to dominate, own, and exploit, leading to the same sort of triumphs and ultimate “bloody handed” tragedy. Maybe it’s a stretch to compare Rash with Shakespeare, but his vivid writing takes the reader by the hand and makes him a participant in the action, not just an observer. I found myself jumping aside to escape a falling tree that killed a lumberman. I panicked with a character who lost her way in the pitch dark of a mountain night. I died with one of the book’s characters as rattlesnake poison crept up our legs.

Serena established Rash as one of America’s leading authors. New York Times book reviewer Janet Maslin named Serena one of her “10 Favorite Books” of 2008.

A novella that is part of Rash’s new book, In the Valley, brings Serena back from Brazil to North Carolina to take charge of a logging project. Galloway also returns to take on Serena’s murderous assignments, including the search for Rachel and her son.

Readers will again be impressed and horrified at Serena’s determined and brutal efforts that destroy more of the environment and decimate the logging crews.

Rash’s writing is firmly connected to his concerns about threats to the preservation of the environment. In an interview with Mountain Times Publication’s executive editor Tom Mayer, Rash explained, “I’m seeing now this peril for the national parks. There’s a lot of push to change what is considered wilderness that can be mined or timbered. My hope is that this (story) would remind us how hard won these national parks were and what they were fighting against.”

The new book is a bonus for fans of Rash’s short fiction. There are nine finely tuned short stories. All deal with mountain people like those he knows from growing up in or near the mountains, or from his long years teaching at Western Carolina University. These are folks that Rash clearly cares for and worries about. But the time settings vary, giving readers a look at mountain life over hundreds of years.

The opening story, “Neighbors,” is set during the Civil War in the mountain community of Shelton Laurel. A Confederate foraging and raiding party targets the farm of a young widow and her two children. The Confederates assume she is a Union sympathizer and prepare to burn her house and barn. Rash captures the meanness and ugliness of war and punctuates his point with an ending that surprises the reader and darkens the tale.

“When All the Stars Fall” deals with a poignant breakup of a father and son’s construction business because their value systems are different and incompatible.

In “Sad Man in the Sky,” a helicopter pilot who sells 30-minute rides takes on a troubled but inspiring passenger.

In “L’Homme Blesse,” a mountain college art professor explores the connection between the artwork of a Normandy invasion veteran and the images on the walls of ancient caves in France.

“The Baptism” is the story of a country minister responding to a worthless wife abuser who wants to be baptized. The story has an unexpected and satisfying ending.

A young female probationary park ranger in “Flight” encounters a bully who blatantly fishes without a license and breaks all the park’s rules. Her daring retort is illegal but satisfying.

A struggling late-night storekeeper in “Last Bridge Burned” helps a troubled woman who stumbles into his store. Years later he reaps an interesting reward when he connects with the same woman, who has been transformed.

In “Ransom,” a wealthy college student survives a lengthy kidnapping only to face more challenges resulting from the warm relationship she developed with her kidnapper.

Set 60 years after the Battle of Chickamauga, “The Belt” tells how a belt and its buckle that saved a Confederate soldier’s life during that battle has now saved the life of his great-grandson.

Rash’s fans will appreciate this short volume of some of his best writing. For those unfamiliar with his work, In the Valley would be a great beginning place.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

The Omnivorous Reader

Siberian Odyssey

Exploring the exotic and the desolate

By Stephen E. Smith

“Loss of Travel Causing Americans to Feel Stress and Anxiety” a recent MSN headline blared. If that’s the case, here’s a possible pandemic-proof cure: The Lost Pianos of Siberia, by Sophy Roberts, a beautifully written travelogue/social history that will likely transport the reader to heretofore unknown locales.

You can’t travel much farther afield than Siberia, the wasteland to which tsarist political prisoners were exiled and in which purged Soviet dissidents disappeared into gulags surrounded by ice, swamps, mosquitoes and intellectual sterility. Much of what the average American knows about Siberia — if he or she knows anything at all — is based on the movie Doctor Zhivago, which wasn’t set in Siberia, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was, and that’s unfortunate, since Siberia contains an 11th of the world’s land mass, the largest continuous forest, the longest railroad, the biggest lake, the coldest city, and an exotic ethnic mix that’s bewildering even by American standards.

So why would a British journalist travel to Siberia to find lost pianos? Roberts isn’t an authority on the evolution of the instrument or a connoisseur of the finer points of piano construction or restoration. She isn’t even an accomplished pianist. Although she never overtly states her motivation, the reader is left with the impression that the book, in addition to being immensely entertaining and informative, is a testament to the power of music in the most adverse circumstances man can conjure. Simply stated, Roberts went looking for lost pianos in the most desolate place on the planet and wrote a book about what she found.

The narrative is organized around physical locations, social histories and characters. “The pull of private histories is always present in Siberia,” she writes. “Every face informs the enigmatic texture of a place where legacy of exile lingers, like the smell of incense, or the feeble gleam of traffic lights, with the complexity of Russia’s identity, and the mix of Europe and Asia, evident not just in the jumble of architecture of the Siberian baroque church I stood on top of in a snow-breeze in winter, but in the routes reaching out from every side.”

Typical of Roberts’ happier discoveries is the story of Maria Volkonskaya. When Maria was forced into exile in the 1850s with her Decembrist husband, she took a clavichord, dragging it on a sledge. Once settled in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Siberia, she opened a hospital and concert hall, where recitals became a social force in the region. Roberts visits Maria’s home, now a museum, and discovers a pyramid piano shaped like a concert piano turned up against the wall (the original clavichord had long since disappeared into history) and a Lichtenthal owned by Maria.

When played the Lichtenthal “behaved awkwardly,” but the muffled notes lift Roberts into lyricism: “The keys were sticky, like an old typewriter gluey with ink. He struck the keys until the softened notes — muted by layers of dust, perhaps, or felt that had swollen in the damp — started to appear. At first the sound was reed-thin, no louder than the flick of a fingernail on a bell. Inside the piano, the amber wood still gleamed, the strings’ fragile tensions held in place by tiny twists around the heads of golden, round-headed tuning pins.”

Chapter 8, “The Last Tsar’s Piano: The Urals,” is a predictable rehashing of the Russian Revolution and the transport of the Romanovs to Ekaterinburg. The Tsarina played the piano, an ebony instrument, perhaps a Russian made Schröder, which disappeared along with the Romanovs and the Ipatiev House in which they were executed. Ironically, the body of Rasputin, the Tsarina’s personal mystic, was disinterred, stuffed into an old piano and burned.

Maxim Gorky, who knew something about suffering, wrote of the “genuine horrors” of everyday life in his native Russia, and certainly there are examples aplenty in Roberts’ telling. While visiting Kiakhta, a city located on the Russian-Mongolian border, she describes gruesome deaths by bayonet during the tsarist and Soviet eras. Prisoners were poisoned and shoved alive into bakers’ ovens. Many exiles were sprayed with water and frozen to death so as not to waste bullets.

Near Tomsk, one of the oldest cities in Siberia, she hears stories of a family of “Old Believers,” examples of Slavic civilization before the introduction of Westernizing reforms in the 18th century, who had retreated so far into the snowy taiga of the western Sayan Mountains that they lived in complete isolation until discovered in the late 1970s. They knew nothing of Stalin and the moon landings, which they didn’t believe anyway, and thought cellophane was crumpled glass.

In describing Sakhalin Island near Aleksandrovsk in the North Pacific Ocean, she quotes Chekhov: “A dreadful, hideous place, wretched in every respect, in which only saints or profoundly perverse people could live of their own free will.” Vlas Doroshevick, one of Russia’s most popular and widely read journalists of the 20th century, described Sakhalin as “perhaps the most foul hole as exists on earth.”

On the Yamal Peninsula, Roberts observed abandoned “skeletons of iron, diggers, lorries, and drilling machines stuck in hollows of land from Yamal’s vast natural gas fields” — a desolate place that “felt close to the start of time.” The forsaken landscape of Kolyma “felt like the saddest place on the planet.”

And so it goes: the Altai Mountains, Harbin, Novosibirsk, Akademgorodok, Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, etc. — place names so foreign they’re almost unpronounceable.

Roberts spent two years wandering the inhospitable wilderness of Siberia, and her powers of description bring those locales and their histories to life. There may have been pianos yet undiscovered, but Russian authorities eventually became suspicious of her “lost pianos” rationale, and she was ordered out of the country. Riding to the airport, she studied the texture of the skull of a man sitting in front of her. It was “like a brain exposed. The image stayed with me, along with the sight of a handgun in our driver’s glove compartment, the swelling in the land from mass graves, and the statues of Lenin in Kadykchan with half his face shot away.” 

There are disturbing, indelible images in The Lost Pianos of Siberia, visions of what Gorky called the “grotesquely terrible.” But there are also touches of humor and occasional moments of beauty. If Roberts’ descriptions of Siberia don’t magically cure the stress and anxiety of living in pandemic America, thoughtful readers might well find they sleep a little more soundly.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards

The Omnivorous Reader

A McCorkle Couplet

Connecting tissue of two novels

By D.G. Martin

In 1984, a young North Carolina writer, Jill McCorkle, shocked the literary world by making her debut with two simultaneously released novels, The Cheer Leader and July 7th. The New York Times called her a born novelist. She went on to write three more novels, Tending to Virginia (1987), Ferris Beach (1990), and Carolina Moon (1996).

Then she paused to concentrate on short stories that won high praise. But in 2013 she was back with another novel, Life After Life, and then again in July 2020 with Hieroglyphics. Both books deal with the complications in older people as they face life’s end.

Life After Life focuses on residents of a retirement home and the people who work for and with them. Hieroglyphics deals with one couple’s efforts to adjust to retirement and aging. Into these settings McCorkle injects rich and disturbing stories that hold her readers’ attention throughout.

Life After Life is set in the fictional town of Fulton, North Carolina, a place not unlike Lumberton, where McCorkle grew up. In the Pine Haven Retirement Center, her characters come together as residents, staff, visitors and family.

One important character, Joanna, provides hospice-like counseling and comfort to dying residents and their loved ones. Her activities give the novel a gentle storyline and provide a persistent reminder that illness and death are an inescapable part of the experience at Pine Haven.

A mentor tells Joanna, “Make their exits as gentle and loving as possible. Tell them how good it will be, even if you don’t believe it yourself. You’re Southern, you know how to do that.”

McCorkle describes how family members embrace Joanna “like she is one of them. Lung. Brain. Breast. Uterus. Pancreas. Bone. The families discuss and explain their loved one’s symptoms and diagnoses for her as if they have never been heard of before, have never happened to anyone else, and she listens.”

Each of McCorkle’s characters has a different set of challenges, but the onset of fatal illness and death is a constant.

For instance, there is Stanley, a lawyer and widower. After Stanley’s wife died, his son moved into the family home, would not leave Stanley alone, slept beside him in his dead wife’s place in their bed, and began driving the grieving father crazy.

To get away from his son, Stanley decided to act as if he really was crazy and therefore needed to be in a retirement center. He constructed a new image for himself, a kind of senility combined with a loss of judgment that led to inappropriate remarks to women.  His crude descriptions of his desires and how he wants to fulfill them prove that his mental condition requires institutionalization. Stanley’s crazy conduct is an act to get him away from his son and into the retirement center. It worked.

Stanley is only one of the several characters whose situations evoke sympathy, pain and laughter.

Dealing with the presence of death is part of life’s experience. Reading Life After Life deepens a reader’s realization of its oncoming approach. It makes one wonder again why we are here, why we are still here, and whether there really is some life after life.

At the end of Life After Life, one of Pine Haven’s most popular service people, C. J. (for Carolina Jasmine), is found dead in her apartment. It looks like suicide, but there are hints that something is amiss. A single parent with a young son, C.J. had been secretly seeing a surgeon who had a wife and other love interests. The surgeon is an obvious suspect, but there is no closure to his fate.

Near the book’s ending another character remembers “a train wreck in this very county in 1943 where over 70 people died, most of them soldiers trying to get home for Christmas.” McCorkle says she recalls her dad talking about visiting the crash site near Lumberton and seeing all the scattered debris.

C. J.’s death and the train wreck provide connective links from Life After Life to Hieroglyphics. The father of a central character in Hieroglyphics died in the train wreck.

McCorkle also lived in Boston for a number of years, where she heard about a 1942 nightclub fire that took more than 492 lives, including the mother of another key character in Hieroglyphics.

When Lil, whose mother died in the fire, and Frank, whose father died in the train wreck, first met, they discovered their common bond, one that held them through 60 years of marriage.

The story begins with Frank and Lil, now in their 80s, retiring to Southern Pines. They live within driving distance of the train wreck’s site, which is near the modest home where Frank lived for several years after his dad’s death.

Frank and Lil have driven to the old house, now occupied by Shelley, a single mother, and her young son, Harvey. Shelley has seen Frank driving by before and is nervous. “It doesn’t help that that old man rides by so often now, his green Toyota slowing in front of the house and then circling the block.”

When Shelley meets Frank at the door, he explains, “I grew up here. I would love to see inside if convenient. My wife, too.”

Shelley resists, but at the end of the book Frank is in the backyard of the old house finding some closure.

In the 300 pages between its opening and closing at the old house, McCorkle takes us deep into the lives of the characters we meet on the first pages: Frank, Lil, Shelley and Harvey.

Frank carries the consequences of the train wreck throughout his life. Both his father and mother were on the train, coming from Florida to their home in Massachusetts, where Frank and his grandmother waited for them. Frank’s seriously injured mother remained in North Carolina to recuperate. She was sure she heard Frank’s father calling, “Don’t leave me.” So she stayed and ultimately married a local man.

Frank joined her and they lived in her new husband’s house. Ultimately, Frank went to college and graduate school, married Lil, and became a college professor specializing in ancient history and archeological relics. Along the railroad tracks he collected relics from the wreck, including a toy decoder that he imagined his parents were bringing him for Christmas.

Lil cannot get over the loss of her mother, a ballroom dance instructor, who had not told her husband or Lil that she was going to the nightclub. The questions of who her mother was with and why still haunt Lil. She is also a collector. McCorkle uses Lil’s collected newspaper clippings and copious notes to help tell a story that include her agonizing experience of Frank’s misadventures with a younger academic.

Shelley’s son, Harvey, collects horror stories about the Beast of Bladenboro, the Glencoe Munchkins, and other scary tales that keep him awake at night and that he uses to frighten his schoolmates and add complication to his mother’s life.

Shelley is a court reporter in a Robeson County courtroom during a high profile trial of the doctor accused of murdering one of his many girlfriends. The doctor’s victim was C.J., a major character in Life After Life.

Shelley’s troubles with Harvey and Frank intersect with her life’s other challenges to put her court reporter’s job at risk.

McCorkle brings these different characters together into a complex, layered and gripping novel, making Hieroglyphics, along with Life After Life, more proof of her storytelling genius.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

The Omnivorous Reader

The Write Stuff

What makes memorable writing work?

By Stephen E. Smith

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” “The world will little note nor long remember . . .” “A date which will live in infamy . . .” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

The right words arranged in the best order have always served to rally us in moments of crisis, and although we have, of late, been inundated with words beyond number, no one has assembled the vocabulary that sums up our deep sense of frustration. Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020 revised edition) is the third volume in a series that focuses on words, metaphor, rhetoric and style in English usage, and although the author doesn’t address the present failure of language, he goes far in explaining what makes specific semantic patterns enduring.

Farnsworth’s approach is straightforward. He parses great writing by great writers: Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and many others whose eloquence survives even in our present circumstances — writers who understood the enduring principles of style but who were willing to violate those principles in the service of meaning and resonance.

Whereas most books on style offer formulas or impose a system for aspiring writers to follow, Farnsworth illustrates by use of example, citing short, familiar quotes to explain how memorable passages work. It is up to the reader to translate the lessons implicit in the writings of Lincoln or Churchill or in the King James Bible into a form that is acceptable in our times. Therein lies the benefit — and for the less disciplined reader, the rub. If you aren’t enthralled with language and its possibilities, the book is little more than a cure for insomnia. If, on the other hand, you’re a lover of words, Farnsworth’s latest offering might be just what the doctor ordered in the heart of a pandemic — a self-reflective occupation with the written word.

The opening chapters focus on word derivation with attention to the effects of Saxon and Latinate words, and how they shape meaning when used in opposition. “There are two ways to say almost anything in English: with little words or big ones,” Farnsworth writes. “More precisely, you can say most things with older, shorter words that have Germanic (or ‘Saxon’) roots, or with longer words that came into the language more recently — perhaps six or seven hundred years ago — from French, and before that from Latin.” Examples: ask/inquire; break/damage; luck/fortune; come/arrive, etc. Saxon words are short, direct, often one syllable, while Latinate words take prefixes and suffixes and are less likely to create an image in the reader’s mind — the visible vs. the conceptional.

Admittedly, there’s little new in this observation, and Farnsworth quotes English historian Thomas Macaulay, who detected, more than 100 years ago, the Latinate fault in the work of Samuel Johnson: “All his (Johnson’s) books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks . . . ” Thus he cleverly employs Macaulay’s critique as both explanation and example.

Beyond this obvious observation, the reader is introduced to the more obscure nuances of word usage, demonstrating that the best writing — the most powerful writing — is a mix of Saxon and Latinate words, and he supplies and analyzes numerous passages from the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Lincoln: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s . . . .” “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hands?” “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff,” etc.

Many of the most recognizable passages begin with Latinate words and end with a strong series of Saxon words, as with Patrick Henry’s “I conceive it my duty, if this government is adopted before it is amended, to go home” — emphasizing the power created by word arrangements that stand in opposition to one another while keeping the demands on the reader (what Farnsworth calls “the cognitive load”) at a minimum.

The book’s central chapters explicate active and passive voice, sentence variations, and esoterica such as metonymy, anacoluthon, right- and left-branching, and direct and indirect approaches to the audience and situation, all of which are, despite the pedantic terminology, easily accessible.

The book’s final chapters, “Cadence: Classic Patterns” and “Cadence: Combinations & Contrasts,” which deal with prosody, the study of the stress and intonation in language, can be a trifle deadly — reminiscence of junior high English classes where you were tortured with scansions of Poe’s bouncy “The Raven” or Christopher Marlowe’s “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships. . . .” During a raging pandemic, who gives a rip about spondees and pentameters?

Still, Classical English Style is immensely entertaining, an indulgence for anyone wishing to escape the moment, and it’s worth a careful read, if for no other reason than it collects memorable quotes, a sort of Greatest Hits of clear and beautiful communication.

So where are the words we need to hear? Where is the unifying sentence or paragraph so necessary at this time in our shared distress?

It may have been uttered by George Floyd as he lay on the asphalt with a knee on his neck. Whether accidental metaphor or straightforward reality, “I can’t breathe” — a simple Saxon sentence that Farnsworth would find perfectly acceptable — may well sum up our collective state of mind, although it does nothing to lift us out of the funk in which we find ourselves.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.

The Omnivorous Reader

Portrait of “Little Thunder”

Sue Monk Kidd imagines the wife of Jesus

By D.G. Martin

“It could have happened.”

My friend was talking about The Book of Longings, the latest novel from Sue Monk Kidd, the bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees that sold over 8 million copies and appeared on The New York Times bestseller list for 2 1/2 years.

The central character and narrator of Kidd’s new book is Ana, who opens the story with the following, “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder.”

It could have happened, just as my friend asserted, but it is a stretch to believe Jesus was married. No, it would be many stretches, and Kidd, the expert storyteller, uses each one to build a rich, complex, and almost believable tale of a woman who became Jesus’ wife.

Although the book is set in the Middle East of 2,000 years ago, the coming together of Jesus and Ana was framed in North Carolina, where Kidd wrote her book. That came as a complete surprise to me. I knew Kidd had deep roots in Sylvester, the town in Georgia where she grew up. Until I learned about her new book, I did not know that she and her husband moved to Chapel Hill a couple of years ago, a place they chose, never having seen, after reading articles about best places to live in America.

Her move to our state solidifies North Carolina’s claim to be a home and refuge for the nation’s best writers.

The book’s story begins in the year 16 A.D. Ana is the teenage daughter of the head scribe of Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, and, subject to the Roman overlords, the ruler of Galilee. We know this Herod Antipas as the King Herod from the Bible’s account of his ordering the execution of John the Baptist. 

Ana and her mother, father, aunt and servants live near Antipas’ palace in Sepphoris, a thriving city. Ana’s cousin and adopted brother, Judas, has left home to join with Zealots fighting against the Roman occupation. Near Sepphoris is the poor village of Nazareth, where Jesus lives in a less-than-modest hovel with his widowed mother, Mary, and his siblings. 

Unlike most other young women of the times, Ana is well-educated and writes stories of women heroes of the Bible. Although she cherishes her unmarried status, her parents arrange for her betrothal to an elderly, unattractive but wealthy man. She is distraught. When he dies before the wedding, she is relieved. Then her parents push her to become Antipas’ concubine, a position that would provide security for her and her parents.

Meanwhile, she has encountered the young Jesus, who walks each day from Nazareth to Sepphoris to work on a massive construction project for Antipas. The spark is immediate. She appreciates his deep connection to God, or as Jesus calls him when he prays, Abba or Father. He appreciates her education and aspirations to write and promote the place of women.

Their marriage transforms her privileged life into hand-to-mouth poverty in the crowded house in Nazareth, where Ana does not get the warmest of welcomes from Jesus’ brothers and their spouses.

Kidd describes the smells and the constant chores of cooking, milking, feeding, sewing, petty jealousies and resentments that fill the lives of the struggling poor family. Jesus is often gone for long periods to work on projects in other parts of Galilee, sometimes even going as far as the Sea of Galilee to work with fishermen.

Jesus’ search for God leads him to the preaching of John the Baptist. He becomes a follower, and when John is arrested by Antipas, Jesus becomes a leader, leaving Ana alone with his family in Nazareth.

When Ana offends Antipas, she becomes another of his targets. For safety, Ana’s aunt takes her to the great library city of Alexandria in Egypt, where she encounters another set of conflicts and challenges. 

Ana waits and waits for a message from Jesus telling her to return. The message finally comes in the form of a letter from Judas, who urges her to hurry. She arrives in Bethany near Jerusalem just in time for a Passover dinner with Mary, Martha, Lazarus and Jesus, but Jesus is not there. He is on trial in Jerusalem. The next day Ana hurries to Jerusalem just in time to watch as Jesus carries the cross toward the execution site. He collapses. Ana rushes to comfort him and say goodbye.

Kidd reconstructs the crucifixion experience in a way more horrible and poignant than any of the four Gospels.

She also offers a surprising explanation of why Judas betrayed Jesus. Many deeply faithful religious people have never understood Judas’ motivation. Was it simply for the 30 pieces of silver? In Kidd’s version, it is not for the coins, but rather his belief that Jesus’ death at the hands of the Romans would ignite a rebellion against those occupiers, a goal Judas and his fellow Zealots shared, but Jesus rejected, working instead to prepare for the coming Kingdom of God.

“One of the biggest questions in the Christian crucifixion story is why Judas betrayed Jesus,” Kidd says. “I wanted to give him a motivation for his betrayal, to humanize him, too, and cause our thoughts about him to be less black-and-white and more complex. In my imagined version, Judas is Ana’s adopted brother who was orphaned when his father was crucified and his mother sold into slavery after a failed Jewish revolt against the Romans, a historically real insurrection by the Jews of Sepphoris in 4 BCE. I portray Judas as a child consumed with hatred for Rome, as a radical Zealot, and as an ardent disciple who believes Jesus is the Messiah destined to deliver them from Rome. His betrayal of Jesus is a piece of intricate and earnest political theater. It speaks, I think, to the danger of hyper-idealism, how a person overly possessed by a principle can begin to justify almost anything for his cause.”

That Ana’s story continues after Jesus’ death emphasizes Kidd’s and Ana’s belief that excluding and minimizing the role of women in the days of Jesus and today has been a tragic mistake.

For many years, Kidd has been interested in feminist theology and has written “about silenced and marginalized women and the missing feminine within religion. I can only speculate that the premise for the novel bloomed out of that exploration.”

Whether Kidd’s readers are true believers or skeptical inquirers, whether they are strong supporters of an expanded role for women in religious organizations or resisters of change, The Book of Longings will be an enriching and challenging read.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

The Omnivorous Reader

Going Viral

Shedding light on dark days

By Stephen E. Smith

In the mid-’s, Richard Preston’s nonfiction The Hot Zone was a bestseller. Based on a 1989 outbreak of an Ebola-like strain of virus in Reston, Virginia, the horrors depicted in Preston’s book kept this reviewer awake at night. Even though the sickness was confined to monkeys imported for research purposes, it took an Army medical team clad in spacesuits to exterminate the infected primates.

With ample time to contemplate the predicament in which we now find ourselves, I did what reviewers do: I read, albeit belatedly, other books about pandemics. I downloaded Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History, Sara Shah’s Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, and David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (there are umpteen other equally enlightening volumes I haven’t had time to pursue), and I discovered in each book a blueprint for the COVID-19 pandemic — disturbingly precise roadmaps for events over which we might have managed a modicum of control on a worldwide, national and personal level had we taken to heart what history and science has to teach us.

If you’re interested in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic, Quammen’s 2016 Spillover is by far the most informative — and the scariest — study. He focuses on zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, rabies, influenza and West Nile, infections that sicken animals and jump to humans. COVID-19, although not identified when Spillover was written, is a zoonotic that has escalated into a pandemic via human-to-human transmission, and Quammen makes it possible for the layman to comprehend the viral dynamic at work. He explains in straightforward terms how global travel and exploding world populations make it possible for a virus such as COVID-19 to spread rapidly. We tend to view the spread of such a virus as an independent misfortune that happened to us (how else would a nonscientist see it?), but “That’s a passive, almost stoical way of viewing them,” he writes. “It’s also the wrong way,” making us susceptible to anecdotal testimony and false cures that might be harmful.

Quammen says that emerging diseases are the result of two forms of crisis on the planet — ecological and medical. “Human-caused ecological pressures and disruption are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading pathogens ever more widely,” Quammen writes. Logging, road building, slash-and-burn agriculture, the consumption of wild animals, mineral extraction, urban settlement, chemical pollution, nutrient runoff into oceans — most of what we call “civilizing” incursions upon the natural world — destroy the ecosystem. This destruction releases viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists and other parasites embedded in natural relationships that limit their geographical range. “When the trees fall and the native animals are slaughtered, the native germs fly like dust from a demolished warehouse.”

In 2012 Quammen asked this straightforward question, “Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of the rain forest or a market in China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people?”

If we can’t predict the next pandemic, says Quammen, we can remain vigilant, we can monitor worldwide transmission, and take precautions. Argue as we may about how and why we got here, the fact remains we find ourselves in a frightening moment whose ramifications must be faced head on. Spillover allows the reader to do just that.

As thorough and graphic as the above-mentioned volumes are, they don’t truly immerse the reader in the personal misery visited upon the Spanish flu generation or on those of us suffering the most extreme ravages of COVID-19. But there are books of fiction — doses of focused reality — that do just that, books I’d read 50 years ago.

The first is Katherine Anne Porter’s 1939 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a collection of three “short novels.” Told in the third person, the title story lulls the reader into the complacency of daily life — until the influenza sweeps up and almost kills the youthful protagonist. Porter’s description is worth reading in full, but here’s a sample:

“Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand.”

Porter suffered bouts of influenza at least three times in her life, so she writes from an acuity borne of experience, and she’s careful to impress upon the reader that we are all cursed with the conviction that nothing terrible can happen to us . . . until it happens.

If Porter captures the suffering endured by a victim of the pandemic, North Carolina’s Thomas Wolfe wrenches the reader’s soul when conveying the agony of watching a loved one die from the Spanish flu in Look Homeward, Angel. With Wolfe, the reader is always in danger of being consumed by his excessive wordiness, but it’s that verbosity that’s effective in conveying a terrible reality. Again, the writer’s words are worth reading in full, but here’s an excerpt:

“The rattling in the wasted body, which seemed for hours to have given over to death all of life that is worth saving, had now ceased. The body appeared to grow rigid before them. . . But suddenly, marvelously, as if his resurrection and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened. . . casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornfully and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.”

Books about death and disease don’t make for cheerful reading, but understanding the pandemic is better than succumbing to its ravages or losing a loved one to COVID-19. Wear a mask, wash your hands, social distance — and read wisely. PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

The Omnivorous Reader

An Honest Day’s Storytelling

Finding truth in Lee Smith’s fiction and nonfiction

By D.G. Martin

Some North Carolina writers say that it is easier for them to tell the truth in fiction than it is in nonfiction. In nonfiction, the facts can bind up authors so tight that it is hard for them to deliver the truth.

The two most recent books by North Carolina’s beloved novelist Lee Smith give us a chance to compare her “truth-telling” strengths in her fiction versus her nonfiction writing. Her most recent book, Blue Marlin, which came out in April, is fiction, while her memoir, Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, was published in 2016.

The main character and narrator of Smith’s Blue Marlin is a young teenage girl dealing with growing up, religion, boys and the troubled mental health and marital problems of her parents. Much of Dimestore, Smith’s only nonfiction book, deals with the same topics in the context of the real life experiences of Smith and her parents. 

Blue Marlin is short, about 120 pages, each filled with Smith’s warm and sympathetic storytelling gifts and characters who reach out and remind us of people we knew growing up. 

In the book, the Lee Smith-like character, Jenny, age 13, discovered her beloved small-town lawyer dad was having an affair. Soon everybody in town knew. Her dad moved out of their home. Her depressed mom sought treatment at a hospital in Asheville. After a time, her parents decided to try to put their marriage back together on a trip to Key West, Florida, with Jenny.

Riding to Key West in the back seat of her dad’s new Cadillac, Jenny began a list of good deeds she would do on each day of their trip, “which ought to be enough,” she thought, “to bring even Mama and Daddy back together.” But, will the time in Key West do the job?

Their motel, the Blue Marlin, was a positive, not just because of its swimming pool and waterslide. The motel was occupied by a movie crew, including actor Tony Curtis. Jenny and her mom were big movie fans and read the fan magazines together. They “squealed together” over Curtis. Things were off to a good start.

Jenny settled into Key West. She walked the streets, visited the sites, made friends with the locals, and did her good deeds every day. But she’s not sure her good deeds are working. “My parents were endlessly cordial to each other now, but so far they had never slept in the same bed. I knew this for a fact. I checked their room every morning.”

To find out whether Tony Curtis’ help and Jenny’s good deeds could bring about real marital reconciliation, you will have to read the book, but Smith leaves clues in the afterword.

Following a real family trip to Key West to help her real parents’ troubled marriage, Smith writes that the Key West cure worked. “Mama and Daddy would go home refreshed, and stay married for the rest of their lives.” She writes that of all the stories she has ever written, “this one is dearest to me, capturing the essence of my own childhood — the kind of unruly, spoiled only child I was; the sweetness of my troubled parents, and the magic essence of Key West, ever since January 1959, when these events actually occurred.” Smith cautions her readers that not all the events in her book happened, describing it as “autobiographical fiction, with the emphasis on fiction.” 

She explains, “I can tell the truth better in fiction than nonfiction.”

A few years ago when I read Dimestore, I thought her memoir’s real stories were, in some respects, even better than the wonderful ones she had told in her novels and short stories. 

Her descriptions of the real characters in her life were, like her fictional characters, compelling. Dimestore opened the door for her many fans to know her as well or better than her good friends do. 

It gave clues about how growing up in a small Appalachian coal mining town and spending most of her life working, writing and raising a family here in North Carolina have influenced her writing.

We learned that her seemingly idyllic childhood, with devoted parents, surrounded by loving members of an extended family, was also full of challenges.

In a chapter titled “Kindly Nervous,” Smith described the “immense anguish” her beloved father felt during his bouts of bipolar mania. 

But for Smith there was a bright side to her father’s condition, which he described as “kindly nervous.” When her father could not sleep, he would work all night at the dimestore he owned in downtown Grundy, Virginia. Smith often accompanied him to the store and slept on a pallet under his desk. In the morning, he took her to breakfast. “How I loved those breakfasts! I got to have my scrambled eggs and my own big white china cup of sweet, milky coffee alongside early-morning truckers and the miners who’d just worked the graveyard shift, their eyes rimmed with coal dust like raccoons.”

Her mother suffered, too, and was frequently hospitalized for depression and anxiety.

But, again, Smith emphasizes the bright side. “This is my story, then,” she writes, “but it is not a sob story. Whenever either of my parents was gone, everybody — our relatives, neighbors, and friends — pitched in to help take care of me, bringing food over, driving me to Girl Scouts or school clubs or whatever else came up.”

One time, both parents were hospitalized, her mother in Charlottesville. Her mother’s doctor invited the 13-year-old Lee to have lunch with him. “Our luncheon,” she writes, “remains one of the most memorable occasions of my youth.”

After a long formal lunch with lots of conversation about Smith’s love of literature, the doctor asked her if, because both parents were ill, she was worried about getting sick herself.

Smith replied, “You mean, if I am going to go crazy, too.”

When the doctor said, “yes,” Smith thought, “How did he know? Because that was exactly what I thought about, of course, all the time.”

The kindhearted doctor assured her that he was a good doctor and she seemed to be “a very nice, normal girl, and I am here to tell you that you can stop worrying about this right now. You will be fine.”

She was fine, and explains how such events can be blessings for an author.

“This is an enviable life, to live in the terrain of one’s heart,” she writes. “Most writers don’t — can’t — do this. Most of us are always searching, through our work and in our lives: for meaning, for love, for home. Writing is about these things. And as writers, we cannot choose our truest material. But sometimes we are lucky enough to find it.”

Is Smith’s “truest material” in her fiction or her memoir? I am not sure I know the answer. But one thing is certain, whenever she puts pencil to paper, the result is going to be moving, and honest.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch Sunday at 3:30 p.m. and Tuesday at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV. The program also airs on the North Carolina Channel Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. and other times. To view prior programs: http://video.unctv.org/show/nc-bookwatch/episodes.

The Omnivorous Reader

The Delta Blues Legend Nobody Knew

A new biography of Robert Johnson comes alive with anecdotal details

By Stephen E. Smith

Biographers, musicologists and blues aficionados who’ve attempted to research the life and times of bluesman Robert Johnson have faced a daunting challenge: Not much is known about the elusive Johnson, who was born out of wedlock in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, in 1911, and whose lifeless body was found 27 years later in a ditch outside Greenwood.

All that remains of Johnson are a couple of photographs — and they don’t tell us much about his life — and a death certificate that lists only the date of his demise (Aug. 16, 1938) and the location of the body when it was found. And, of course, there are the 29 classic recordings, including 12 outtakes, of Johnson’s playing and singing what would eventually transform the man in a pinstripe suit holding a Gibson L-1 guitar into the definitive bluesman whose Delta style influenced a generation of guitar heroes.

Those are the available facts. The heart of the Robert Johnson legend, the details of how he lived and the appalling circumstances surrounding his death, are based on speculation, hearsay, rumor and outright invention, and despite a plethora of books, a feature film and a documentary or two, there’s been little primary source material available until the publication of Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson, by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.

Annye Anderson is Johnson’s stepsister. She considers Robert “family,” although they weren’t blood relatives and were linked only by a convoluted mixing of broken relationships and communal living arrangements. Still, she managed to spend time with the great bluesman through her preteens, and she willingly supplies anecdotal details and insights into his life and personal habits. She also retells stories that were passed down to her from her extended family.

Given the dearth of information surrounding Johnson’s life, Anderson’s testimony is a welcome addition to the historical record, but the serious reader must be willing to take Anderson’s recollections at face value. Although there’s a chance of falling victim to a hoax, there’s no reason to believe that Anderson isn’t who she says she is. She supplies a summary of family relationships that link her to Johnson, and her intimate knowledge of the time and place in which Johnson lived is convincing enough. It’s reasonable to assume, or at least to hope, that Anderson’s collaborator, Preston Lauterbach, the author of three previous blues-related volumes, and the publisher, Hachette Books, have done their homework.

Anderson’s stated purpose is to “set the record straight.” Readers learn about Johnson’s daily routine in Memphis and details of his hoboing, his love life, his favorite foods, his preferred tobacco, and the divergent sources of his music.

Given the time and social circumstances in which he lived, Johnson was aesthetically middlebrow. “I know his (Brother Robert’s) repertoire pretty well,” Anderson writes. “He was blues, he was folk, he was country. Jimmie Rodgers was his favorite, and he became my favorite. Brother Robert could yodel just like he did. We did ‘Waiting for a Train,’ together. . . . And you name it. All the Irish songs he did, because in the South they used to sing lots of those songs: ‘Annie Laurie,’ ‘My Bonnie,’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” Like many bluesmen of the period, Johnson played at juke joints, in parks, at rent parties and dances, and on street corners and front porches, but never achieved national recognition during his lifetime.

Typical of Anderson’s recollections is Johnson’s last visit at a family gathering on the evening of the Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight. Johnson, guitar in hand, was decked out in a white sharkskin suit, Panama hat and patent leather shoes. “He was razor sharp when he dressed,” Anderson recalls. “He (Johnson) did ‘Terraplane (Blues),’ ‘Sweet Home Chicago,’ ‘Kind Hearted Woman,’ he and Son (Johnson’s half-brother) did ‘44 Blues’. . . . That night of the big fight was the last time I saw him.”

Johnson died not long after the Louis-Schmeling bout. “Everyone was in shock,” she writes. “He was dead two weeks before we knew. . . . We weren’t going to sing Jimmie Rogers together ever again, or sing ‘John Henry’ together anymore.”

The second half of Anderson’s memoir is a predictable tale of music-biz skulduggery. Johnson’s recordings went unappreciated until Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1961. In the early ’60s, Steve LaVere, a researcher and promoter of blues artists, began to focus on the Johnson legend, making himself wealthy in the process. Anderson sums up seemingly endless controversy in one paragraph: “People say Steve LaVere made Robert Johnson a legend. No. Steve LaVere didn’t tell Eric Clapton about Robert Johnson. He didn’t tell Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. Musicians already knew Brother Robert’s work before LeVere got into the picture. That’s the whole reason LeVere got involved. Those big artists had covered Brother Robert’s songs that nobody had copyrighted. Brother Robert was already a goldmine fifteen years before he won a Grammy. Steve LaVere caught on before anyone else, and we never caught up to him.”

As for the oft-repeated myth that Johnson sold his soul to the devil and the melodramatic stories surrounding his death by poisoning or from the ravages of congenital syphilis, Anderson dismisses it all, noting that people will say “anything for a dollar.”

Despite endless legal wrangling, Anderson and her half-sister Carrie Spencer never profited from Johnson’s belated success, and a sense of bitterness shades her memoir. In addition to setting the record straight, money is surely one of the motivations behind Brother Robert. Claud Johnson, who was ruled by the Mississippi Supreme Court to be Robert Johnson’s son, received over a million dollars in royalties in 1998. “My family lost all we worked for during the past twenty-five years,” Anderson writes. “You know, I was born at night, but not last night.”

Anderson supplies blues enthusiasts with a few mundane but revealing recollections that help flesh out the character of Robert Johnson, but we still lack a fully dimensional portrait. The man remains a mystery, a mostly fictive figure whose 29 recordings have had a profound influence on an essential American art form.  PS

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press awards.