Shadow Market

A fanciful dealer in dark wares

By D.G. Martin

When Fred Chappell writes, multitudes of fans stop and read. Now retired, he was for more than 40 years a beloved teacher of writers at UNCG, where he helped establish its much-admired Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. He served as North Carolina poet laureate from 1997 until 2002. He is revered by many for his fiction, especially his early works based on his years growing up in the mountains. But his 30 some-odd books show his determination not to be limited to any genre, geography or time.

His latest book, A Shadow All of Light, demonstrates the wide scope of his imagination and talent. It is a magical, speculative story set in an Italianate country hundreds of years ago. Chappell asks his readers to believe that shadows are something more than the images people cast by interrupting a light source. These shadows are an important, integral part of a person’s being. They can be stolen or given up. When lost, the person is never the same.

In Chappell’s tale, an ambitious young rural man, Falco, comes to a big port city (think Venice), where he attaches himself to a successful shadow merchant, Maestro Astolfo. Over time Falco learns the trade of acquiring and selling shadows detached from their original owners. The business is a “shady” one because the acquisition of human shadows often involves underhanded, even illegal methods, something like today’s markets in exotic animal parts or pilfered art.

But Maestro Astolfo and Falco, notwithstanding public attitudes, strive to conduct their business in a highly moral manner. Although losing one’s shadow could be devastating, the situation is mollified if a similar replacement can be secured from shadow dealers like Astolfo or Falco.

Chappell, in the voice of Falco, explains, “No one likes to lose his shadow. It is not a mortal blow, but it is a wearying trouble. If it is stolen or damaged, a man will seek out a dealer in umbrae supply and the difficulty is got around in the hobbledehoy fashion. The fellow is the same as before, so he fancies, with a new shadow that so closely resembles his true one, no one would take note.

“That is not the case. His new shadow never quite fits him so trimly, so comfortably, so sweetly as did his original. There is a certain discrepancy of contour, a minor raggedness not easy to mark but plainly evident to one versed in the materials. The wearer never completely grows to his new shadow and goes about with it rather as if wearing an older brother’s hand-me-down cloak.

“Another change occurs also, not in the fitting or wearing, but in the character of the person. To lose a shadow is to lose something of oneself. The loss is slight and generally unnoticeable, yet an alert observer might see some diminishing in the confidence of bearing, in the certitude of handclasp, in the authority of tread upon a stone stairway.”

After introducing his readers to the complexities of shadow theft, storage and trade, Chappell takes Falco, Astolfo and their colleague Mutano through a series of encounters with bandits, pirates and a host of other shady characters. Mutano loses his voice to a cat. Bandits challenge Falco’s efforts to collect rare plants that eat human shadows. Pirates led by a beautiful and evil woman battle the port city’s residents for control.

Similar to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Chappell’s A Shadow All of Light is fast-paced, mythic, and unbelievably entertaining.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

American Ulysses

Finding the uncommon in a common man

By Stephen E. Smith

We’ve grown infamous for what we should know but don’t. What’s more distressing is our proclivity for spouting “factoids,” assumptions that are repeated so often they become accepted as truth. Ask a reasonably well-educated person what he or she knows about Ulysses S. Grant and you’ll probably hear that Grant was a drunken Civil War general and a president whose administration was tainted by scandal. Beyond that, you’re not likely to get much in the way of revelatory information.

Certainly we’re suffering no dearth of sources. Curious readers have access to Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant — one of the finest memoirs written by an American — and recent biographies include Jean Edward Smith’s 2002 Grant and H.W. Brands’ 2013 The Man Who Saved the Union, lesser volumes which have done little to compensate for the general lack of knowledge regarding a man who rose in seven years from a clerk in a leather goods store to commander of all Union forces in the Civil War to a two-term president of the United States. As president, Grant may not be as obscure and maligned as James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson, but he has nonetheless slipped from memory, and most of what remains in our collective awareness are vague misconceptions and flawed characterizations.

With American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, Ronald C. White offers new insights into the life of the 18th president of the United States. Whereas Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer William McFeely stated emphatically in his 2002 biography of Grant: “I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic, or intellectual specialness,” White finds much to admire, basing his observation on Grant’s interior life, his intense love for his wife and children, his fondness for the theater and novels, and his loyalty to his friends, not a few of whom led him into the ill-conceived schemes that tarnished his second term as president. “I discovered that Grant’s life story has so many surprising twists and turns, highs and lows, as to read like a suspense novel,” White writes. “His nineteenth-century contemporaries knew his story well. They offered him not simply admiration but affection. In their eyes he stood with Washington and Lincoln.”

Indeed, Grant was held in high regard by his countrymen — and by ordinary people around the world. But McFeely’s critical judgment of Grant as an unexceptional man isn’t without justification. White’s account of Grant’s early life reveals no hint of exceptionalism, and his years as a young Army officer and his subsequent sojourn as a hardscrabble farmer offered no indication that he’d rise to general of the Army of the United States, the first non-brevet officer to hold the rank since Washington. Moreover, his terms as president were marked by the best of intentions regarding Reconstruction, civil rights and Native American assimilation. By contemporary standards, dismal though they may be, Grant’s presidential years were only vaguely tarnished by the misconduct of trusted associates.

Readers who believe themselves schooled in the facts of Grant’s life will encounter the occasional surprise. Grant, the general who would destroy the Southern economy and social construct, was, for a brief period, a slave owner. White points out the general’s views on “the peculiar institution” were pragmatic and demonstrate evolution of thought. In a letter to his abolitionist father, Grant wrote: “My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately.” A year later he would write to Elihu Washburne, a Republican congressman from Illinois and Lincoln supporter: “I was never an Abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly & honestly and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery.”

Other miscalculations would prove to be more damaging to Grant’s wartime reputation, such as his General Order No. 11: “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department . . . are hereby expelled . . . ” Although he claimed that a member of his staff had written the order, Grant was, according to White, solely responsible for an order that threatened to alienate the 7,000 Jews who served in the Union Army.

The most oft-repeated factoid regards Grant’s alcohol consumption. (There’s no hard evidence that Lincoln ever said that if he knew Grant’s favorite brand of whiskey he’d send barrels of it to his other commanders.) White attributes rumors of Grant’s intemperance to jealous fellow officers. “Few had ever met Grant — but no matter. Once the label ‘drunkard’ became affixed to a man in the army, it could seldom be completely erased.” He also rejects the notion that Julia Grant was the “balm” for her husband’s drinking, citing evidence to support the claim that Grant rarely over-imbibed.

Grant’s Civil War successes, from Fort Donelson to Appomattox, are adequately reprised in White’s narrative, and for hard-core Civil War enthusiasts there’s a plethora of histories that cover Grant’s military career in more exhaustive detail. Where White’s biography shines is in evaluating Grant’s post-war conduct, falling decidedly on the side of Grant’s defenders.

As president, Grant worked tirelessly for Native American assimilation and black civil rights. And he was temporarily successful in crushing the Ku Klux Klan, but was, in the long run, unsuccessful in changing attitudes that ruled the hearts and minds of Americans, especially Southerners. White also focuses on the Gold standard, the Annexation of Santo Domingo, the Virginius Affair, and the scandal surrounding the Gold Ring. Grant’s second term was dominated by economic upheaval, and White’s analysis of the Panic of 1873, precipitated by the failure of the brokerage house of Jay Cooke & Company to sell bonds issued by the Northern Pacific Railway, is thoroughly researched and placed in perspective.

Unfortunately, Grant’s grasp of economics, on a personal level and as head of the federal government, was a weakness that plagued him into his old age when he was bankrupted by a smooth-talking swindler. But Grant always rallied when he found himself in difficult circumstances, and his finest achievement occurred when, suffering from incurable throat cancer, he transformed himself into a man of letters and wrote his two-volume personal memoir, restoring his family’s fortune. After Grant’s death, Julia received royalties amounting to $450,000 ($12 million in today’s dollars).

The overriding value of White’s biography is in deepening our knowledge of a controversial American leader and the machinations that shaped his presidency. Forget about the notion that history repeats itself. It doesn’t. But an accurate understanding of the past is necessary to place the present in context. We have an obligation to possess more than a muddled, haphazard knowledge of the events that have shaped the moment.

Given the tenor of the times, White probably won’t succeed in bringing “the enigmatic, inspiring, and complex story of American Ulysses . . . to the wider audience he deserves,” but if McFeely’s 2002 psychological appraisal of Grant leaves us with a decidedly negative impression — “. . . he (Grant) had forced himself out of the world of ordinary people by the most murderous acts of will and had doomed himself to spend the rest of his life looking for approval for having done so” — White instills in the reader a sense of pride in the political system that nurtured a leader possessed of uncommon tenacity and persistent moral courage.  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.

Legend of the Working Class

When M, a cross-species monster, moves from N.C. to Pennsylvania, the plot thickens

By D.G. Martin

In his insightful review of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in this magazine last month, Stephen Smith questioned whether that book explains the unexpected success of Donald Trump’s campaign for president.

Meanwhile, I have been thinking that another new book might give us insight into the white male blue-collar world where Trump’s appeal rang loud and clear. North Carolina native Steven Sherrill’s The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time tells how a fictional and Greek legendary half-bull, half-man called the Minotaur adapts to life in a modern white working-class community.

In case you do not remember the Minotaur, he was the offspring of a queen of Crete, who, subject to a curse from a vengeful god, fell madly in love with her husband’s prize bull. The resulting offspring grew up to be a feared monster that devoured children. In the Greek legend the Minotaur was killed to end his evil ways.

But, in Sherrill’s story, the Minotaur has survived and lived for thousands of years, roaming from place to place. He is immortal and destined to struggle forever to live as an outsider alongside fully human colleagues.

Back in 2000, in his novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Sherrill brought the fictional Minotaur to our state as a line cook in a seedy restaurant called Grub’s Rib just off the interstate near Charlotte. The Minotaur lived in a mobile home in a rundown trailer park. His co-workers called him M and got used to his bullhorns, funny-looking face, and tortured way of speaking. They had their own set of challenges, not unlike those described in Hillbilly Elegy.

Just as his co-workers adapted to M and accepted him as a fellow-worker, readers set aside disbelief, identify with the creature, and observe the world of a struggling working class through his eyes. Still, M is destined always to be something of an outsider, a condition that painfully troubles and enriches his story and his relationships with the blue-collar characters that surround him.

This September, 16 years after The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, its sequel, The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time, hit bookstore shelves. Sherrill, who now lives in Pennsylvania, teaches at Penn State-Altoona. M has moved up there, too. He is now a professional Civil War re-enactor in a tourist-centered “historic village.” Every day M puts on his Confederate uniform and goes out on the field to do his job. He dies. Over and over again.

In the rustbelt around the village and battlefield near Altoona in central Pennsylvania, M observes and interacts with the struggles of the working and out-of-work people he encounters. Almost all are at the edge. One broken car away from a financial crisis. One lost job away from disaster.

M’s struggles are special. Only half-human, he still has fully human desires and aspirations. He is lonely and longs for companionship. He is helpful and considerate. He adapts to disappointment. But, as Sherrill leads us to understand in this, his second Minotaur masterpiece, M is always going to be “other.” Always an outsider.

M lives at the Judy-Lou Motor Lodge, a shabby motel just off a busy highway and within walking distance of the historic village and battlefield. The motel owner, Rambabu Gupta, gives M a place to stay in return for M’s handyman repair work. M can fix almost anything, including automobiles.

When a dirty, filthy, broken down Honda Odyssey van careens into a parking lot near the motel, an attractive redheaded woman and her wild, brain-damaged brother get out, and a weird love story begins. M sets about to fix the car. He wanders through his favorite places, auto junkyards, to find the right parts. As he fixes her car, the appreciative redhead and M begin to develop feelings for each other.

Could a cross-species friendship work into something more? Sherrill uses his great storyteller gifts to make his readers wonder, and maybe hope. But the poignant climax is dark and sad.

Back to the recent election, M seems to have no interest in politics, but his desperate, disillusioned, and angry co-workers and neighbors in Pennsylvania’s rustbelt could understandably have found hope in Donald Trump’s message. If they had made it to the polls on November 8, their votes would almost certainly have helped Trump steal Pennsylvania from the Democrats and Hillary Clinton.  PS

D.G. Martin hosts North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at noon and Thursdays at 5 p.m. on UNC-TV.

Hillbilly Blues

Poor, white and not quite forgotten

By Stephen E. Smith

The presidential election is either over or is about to be, and, barring an unforeseen catastrophe, we ought to be breathing a collective sigh of relief. But in our hearts we know the truth: It ain’t over yet. The media, including the publishing industry, aren’t about to let us rest. We’ll no doubt be obliged to examine in excruciating detail the cause-and-effect relationships that inflicted this grievous wound on our national psyche.

Publishers, of course, get us coming and going. White Trash; The Making of Donald Trump; Hillary’s America; The Year of Voting Dangerously, etc. — Amazon lists at least 17 books that address the pre-election mêlée, enough reading to keep us bleary-eyed and brain-bruised until the next election cycle, and well beyond.

Of these many offerings, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance, has been the chief beneficiary of our need to grasp the incomprehensible. Published in late June, this Horatio Alger memoir shot to the top of The New York Times and Amazon.com best-sellers lists and stayed there. This was due in large part to promotion by the author and Amazon that fostered the belief that Hillbilly Elegy offers a profound insight into the rise of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.

A quick read of Amazon’s “Editorial Reviews” is explanation enough: “What explains the appeal of Donald Trump? . . . J.D. Vance nails it” (Globe and Mail); “You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance . . . .” (The American Conservative), and so forth. Only The New York Times acknowledged a mild albeit flawed apprehension of fact: “Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election . . . ,” “inadvertently” being the operative word.

In February, Vance wrote an op-ed for USA Today headlined: “Trump Speaks for Those Bush Betrayed”: “. . . .what unites Trump’s voters,” Vance wrote, “is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful.” In a print interview with Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative, Vance stated, “The simple answer is that these people — my people — are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.” Vance’s appearances on ABC, CNN and NPR only reinforced this perception, and by the time he arrived on the set of “Morning Joe,” Vance’s criticism was even more focused, asserting that Donald Trump is “just another opioid” to many Americans struggling with loss of jobs, broken families and drug addiction.

All of which begs the question: Does Hillbilly Elegy explain the rise of Donald Trump?

It doesn’t. No amount of tortured exegesis can conclude with a calculated degree of certainty that the anecdotal examples offered in Hillbilly Elegy lead to a statistical generalization regarding the wide-ranging support garnered by the Trump candidacy. Despite the claims of critics and the author, the book does not present, directly or indirectly, a viable explanation for the recent national unpleasantness — and the hype surrounding the publication of Hillbilly Elegy amounts to little more than a subtle form of literary bait and switch.

Misrepresentations aside, it’s safe to say that Vance has written an insightful and readable memoir that details the estrangement of a segment of America’s displaced white underclass. His personal story, which comprises most of the text, is straightforward: Poor boy from a broken, drug-befuddled family wants to make good and does. The sociological narrative is also immediately explicable: As “hillbillies” migrated from Kentucky and other Southern mountain states, they clustered in desultory communities around the factories that offered them work. But this relocation came at a price. The traditional culture that once rendered support and stability from birth to death was sacrificed to economic prosperity. When the high-paying jobs disappeared, neighborhoods of poor people were left behind, lacking the social networks that sustained them in their mountain communities.

To his credit, Vance’s message is one of personal responsibility. He has no patience with convenient excuses or the tendency to shift blame to the media, politicians, or the middle and upper classes. Succinctly stated, his advice is to pull up your pants, turn your hat around and make something of your life.

Hillbilly Elegy possesses the same appeal that propelled Rick Bragg’s 1999 All Over but the Shoutin’ onto the best-sellers list — it’s thoughtful, compelling in its grim detail, and ultimately faith-affirming. No red-blooded American can abandon the belief that any lucky, talented, hardworking schmo can become a success, but the wise reader will understand that Vance’s story is not an allegory for life; it’s merely the recounting of a series of random events arranged in such a way as to suggest meaning.

Readers should also bear in mind that better sociological studies have come and gone without notice. One is reminded of Linda Flowers’ 1990 Throwed Away, which detailed the economic exploitation of eastern North Carolina sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

As for articulating the emotional toll taken on those Kentucky mountain people who migrated north, poet Jim Wayne Miller summed up their sense of loss in five lines from his 1980 collection The Mountains Have Come Closer. The final stanza of the poem “Abandoned” reads:

Or else his life became the house

seen once in a coalcamp in Tennessee:

the second story blown off in a storm

so stairs led up into the air

and stopped.  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.

On the Lookout

A fascinating first novel, a talk of ecological disaster

By Gwenyfar Rohler

Upstairs in the UNC Wilmington Creative Writing Department is the publishing laboratory, where the literary magazine Ecotone matured, and a small press, Lookout Books, refines their books into existence like an oyster begetting a pearl. Until recently, Lookout’s carefully curated and award-winning catalog included two collections of short fiction, a memoir and even a book of poetry, but no novel. But now, Lookout and writer Matthew Neill Null have both dipped their proverbial toes in the water of novel-writing by debuting their first novel, Honey From The Lion, last year.

In the book, set in and around a logging camp in West Virginia at the turn of the 20th century, Null brings us characters that many people would cross the street to avoid. He slowly pulls back the curtains and, with a flickering gaslight, breathes life into these unwashed, violent and desperate people who then become the source of great empathy.

Honey From The Lion is not a hymn to strong men who control other people’s destinies, though the first chapter and the title (an allusion to Sampson from the Bible) might hint at that. For Null, the real story is the struggle of the hundreds of working men to realize their own destinies within their private lives and a system with the singular purpose of exploitation of resources — natural and human. He takes a microscope to look as closely as possible at individuals who, in most circumstances, would never be anything more than statistics: ledger columns, payroll, accident reports. These moments, teasing out the backstories of each character, no matter how minor, are reminiscent of David Foster Wallace.

Echoes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove reverberate as well. The introduction and development of the uber macho world are built around a strict code and the appearance of outsiders unprepared to understand the code. But where McMurtry’s men have developed their own code and live outside the dictates of a world they reject, Null’s are trapped inside the code as the least powerful players in their ecosystem.

The care and adoration lavished on a Lookout book is obvious. The physical product is a beauty to behold in an age where book design and production are sidelined for bargain prices and expedient content delivery. Not at Lookout. French flaps, beautiful graphic design and tailored page layouts are the hallmarks of a book that someone cares about. (On the rare occasions that you see a book this carefully created from a big publisher, you know it was the pet project of someone in the office who went the extra mile.) At Lookout, each book radiates that level of care. Perhaps that is the best argument for smaller presses: Because each book takes so much time and effort, they put out few in a year (Lookout produces only one or two annually), and each book is almost a sacred experience. Any author would swoon to have his or her work treated with such reverence, especially for one’s debut novel.

Curious about the selection process for Lookout’s first novel, I reached out to Emily Smith, publisher and co-founder of Lookout. Smith writes, “Null evokes the virgin forest as a fully realized character we grieve deeply by the end of the novel. He implores us to care about the ecological tragedy in West Virginia through story . . . it presented a rare opportunity for our publishing entities to better align our missions and to showcase a book in which place and the natural world feature prominently.”

Ecotone, the sister imprint, place-centric magazine, published Null’s story “The Island in the Gorge of the Great River” in the spring 2014 issue. Null, the then-emerging writer, had not published a book, which appealed to Lookout, whose mission states “seeks out emerging and historically underrepresented voices, as well as overlooked gems by established writers.” In manuscript form, Smith was attracted to this novel’s “nuanced and lyrical descriptions of the natural world, its expansive and cinematic pace.”

Lookout has enjoyed success with previous publications, like their first one, Edith Pearlman’s story collection Binocular Vision, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2011. The following year, Lookout published Steve Almond’s story collection God Bless America: Stories, which won the Paterson Fiction Prize. They know how to pick a winner and how to present one.

I can only imagine the stunned grin that must have spread across Null’s face the moment he received his first novel in Lookout-form. But, from reading Honey From The Lion, I am certain he would recreate the moment in stunning, captivating, undulating prose, drawing the experience out for paragraphs if not pages, intensifying the moment to something epic in contrast to the momentary sensation of pages in hands.

A part of the Creative Writing program at UNC Wilmington, Lookout ensures that the art of bookmaking continues to live hand-in-hand with the art of writing. It may be one of the most valuable lessons to impart on to the next generation of writers. Because, as in Lookout’s new novel, each page holds moments experienced in-depth that draw and enlighten the darkened corners of each character’s soul. Value the written word (and the well-designed book) as something sacred, for it will outlive all of us.  PS

Gwenyfar Rohler spends her days managing her family’s bookstore on Front Street.

Updike Redux

A collection of 186 stories and a new biography are a chance to reexamine a remarkable literary life

By Stephen E. Smith

In his biography Updike, Adam Begley quotes from a letter John Updike wrote to his mother while he was a student at Harvard: “We need a writer who desires both to be great and to be popular, an author who can see America as clearly as Sinclair Lewis, but, unlike Lewis, is willing to take it to his bosom.”

Updike was describing the writer he’d become. For more than 50 years his novels, essays, poems and short stories filled America’s bookshelves, and the upper middle class, the culturati from which he drew his characters and themes, received each new volume with enthusiasm.

When Updike died of lung cancer in 2009 (addiction trumped intellect), we were left with 30 novels, 15 short story collections and umpteen books of poetry and assorted prose to appreciate anew. With the publication of Library of America’s quality two-volume edition (a boxed set) and Begley’s biography, Updike, readers have an opportunity to read or reread 186 stories (the Bech and Maples stories are published in separate volumes) arranged in order of publication. Astute readers can correlate the stories with Begley’s exposition of Updike’s richly complex life as an observer and participant in the subculture about which he wrote with extravagance and often shocking excess. Best remembered for his “Rabbit” novels, it’s Updike’s short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker, that most closely parallel the life he lived.

Begley is quick to point out that few American fiction writers were more autobiographical than Updike — so obsessively so as to raise questions about Updike’s capacity for rational detachment. Readers unfamiliar with his short fiction are forewarned that his dominant theme is betrayal and its resultant complexities. His characters are white, usually Protestant members of the American upper middle class living in southeastern Pennsylvania or New England. His subject is adultery. The operative emotion is guilt, as explained in his 1977 story “Guilt-Gems”: “A guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression. Those souls around us, living our lives with us, are gaseous clouds of being awaiting a condensation and preservation — faces, lights that glimmer out, somehow not seized, saved in the gesture and remorse.”

Updike is the master of The New Yorker short story, carefully wrought prose narratives with lengthy passages of description and meticulously rendered characters who find themselves unhappy in a world of affluence that encourages the guilty pleasures of adultery. So pervasive is this mindset that in “The Women Who Got Away” the narrator is touched with exquisite regret for potential affairs he failed to consummate: “There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, in retrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps because the contacts, in the slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.”    

For all of his literary sophistication, Updike is the most parochial of writers. With a few possible exceptions — most especially his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” (a real clunker) — he wisely sticks to what he knows. Southern readers won’t discover tobacco worms, hogs and banjo-picking rednecks in his fiction (although there’s an occasional working-class hero), and his characters are, after the similitude of their re-embodiment in story after story, possessed of a mildly annoying self-indulgence and an irritating dissatisfaction with bourgeois abundance.

Moreover, the focus on the purely carnal is likely to wear thin when the stories are read without interruption. Even the most voyeuristic of readers are likely to experience a vague unease. Certainly sex has much to do with our lives, but at what point is the committed imagination overwhelmed by irrational obsession? Guilt experienced vicariously may have a temporary exhilarating effect on the reader, but it’s accompanied by a sense of sorrow at having benefited emotionally at the expense of others. This becomes especially apparent when Begley reveals Updike’s serial adultery, a philandering so obsessive that Updike was immensely proud of having made love to three women in one day, all the while living a life in which he remained a civic luminary and held responsible stations in various Protestant churches.

In the final analysis, however, Updike is more than a horndog with a thesaurus. In conveying memorable life moments, true and full of empathy, and producing examples of sense experience used to good effect, he is unsurpassed. The poignant, knifing nuances of life permeate his fiction, as with this typical passage from a pedantically sexual visit to a dental hygienist in “Tristan and Iseult”: “Sometimes his roving eyes flicked into her own, then leaped away, overwhelmed by their glory, their — as the deconstructionists say — presence. His glance didn’t dare linger even long enough to register the color of these eyes; he gathered only the spiritual, starlike afterimage of their living gel, simultaneously crystalline and watery, behind the double barrier of her glasses and safety goggles, above the shield-shaped paper mask hiding her mouth, her chin, her nostrils. So much of her was enwrapped, protected. Only her essentials were allowed to emerge, like a barnacle’s feathery appendages, her touch and her steadfast, humorless gaze.” Updike is tirelessly observant, and any careful reader of his fiction is bound to wonder if there’s an emotion, gesture or technical detail that’s gone unexplored.

Updike’s early stories are a study in the evolution of the great writer he would become, and the later stories are often burdened with excess detail and Jamesian syntactical constructs that leave the reader yearning for a misplaced comma or a dangling modifier. The less ambitious middle stories — most notably those included in the collections “Museums and Women” and “Trust Me” — are varied in subject matter  and more experimental in structure and execution. “The Orphaned Swimming Pool,” “Invention of the Horse Collar,” “Poker Night,” “Under the Microscope,” “Museums and Women,” “During the Jurassic,” “The Baluchitherium,” “The Slump” and “Still of Some Use” are departures from Updike’s formulaic adultery fiction. They’re overlooked gems that avoid the quirky, distracting The New Yorker ending and are more immediately appreciated.

Updike became the writer he described in that long ago letter to his mother. A large segment of the American public took him to their bosom, convinced that his vision of America was correct — or at least sufficiently believable. Whether his literary reputation will eclipse that of Sinclair Lewis’, well, that remains to be seen.  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.

Rediscovering a North Carolina Treasure

The works of John Ehle

By Gwenyfar Rohler

“We’re bringing John Ehle’s books back into print,” explained Kevin Morgan Watson, gesturing to Press 53’s display at the North Carolina Writer’s Conference. I nodded knowingly and inwardly hoped that my confusion didn’t show on my face. I was too embarrassed to admit that I wasn’t familiar with John Ehle or his work. To remedy my chagrin, I sought out Ehle’s The Land Breakers, and I was stunned that it had taken me until the age of 36 to discover his work.

The Land Breakers begins Ehle’s seven-book series exploring the settlement and development of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. It opens in 1779 and primarily traces the journey of Mooney Wright, a Scots-Irish orphan who has recently completed his indentured servitude in the New World. Wright buys a piece of land, 640 acres of good, “bottom land.” When he and his young wife finally arrive after a perilous journey to this promised, much-dreamed-of prize, Ehle captures their rapturous disbelief and elation with honest realism. Reading it doesn’t so much remind one of being young, in love and filled with dreams and wonder, but actually takes one back to inhabiting that space in a way few writers can.

Ehle’s family history on his mother’s side can be traced to one of the first three families to settle Appalachian North Carolina, the frontier that The Land Breakers and its six companion novels chronicle. Throughout his adult life, he continued to live in the western part of the state (when not in New York or London for his wife, Rosemary Harris’, acting career), with homes near both Penland and Winston-Salem. From his author’s bio: “His interest in the folkways of the past . . . is an interest in the present, in where we are all going, what we are leaving, and what we will need to find replacements for.” Perhaps that is part of what makes The Land Breakers so compelling. On the surface, it appears to be a book about man versus nature and the insurmountable opportunities around him, but it is so much more.

In The Land Breakers, as each new family moves into the valley Mooney Wright has settled, Ehle introduces their strengths and weaknesses and the impact they will each have on the collective survival of the settlement. None of the characters are merely two-dimensional parodies of an idea; rather, they are all flawed yet desirable human beings struggling with their own mortality against a wilderness far more powerful than they are. The journey the characters make toward understanding what is essential for their survival and success is so captivating I could not put the book down. Ehle explores both life’s beauty and horror. Spoiler alert! The scene involving the snake attacks at night might be the most frightening three pages I have read in years. Forget the bogeyman and the phantoms of Stephen King — these snakes left me white-knuckled and twitching.

In 1967, John Ehle married Tony Award–winning English actress Rosemary Harris. With a film résumé that includes Beau Brummell, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, George Sand in Notorious Woman, Desdemona in Othello, Tom & Viv, and even Spider-Man, Harris has a career of legend built on a solid foundation of craft. Perhaps inspired partly by witnessing Harris’ film experiences, in 1974 Ehle released The Changing of the Guard, a book that chronicles the production of a big-budget biopic of Louis XVI. Were it not for the intensity of the writing and skillful use of metaphor that slowly overtakes the action of the book, it would be hard to believe the same man wrote both novels.

The Changing of the Guard is a prismatic display of storytelling. On the surface it tells the story of an aging British actor who sees himself as a contemporary of Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier, making his last big picture: a beautiful, sweeping costume drama of the last days of Louis XVI during the French Revolution. His real-life wife is cast to play his mistress, and her best friend is to be Marie Antoinette. From the outset the power struggle appears to be between the actor and the brash young director that the studio insisted upon. But slowly, the book evolves into Ehle’s retelling of the private life of Louis during the revolution, serving as both a metaphor for the war waged on set and the changes in the actor’s private life. The line between art and reality is crossed so frequently and subtly — almost a form of magical realism — that, in the hands of a lesser writer, the story line and conceit would be hokey and hard to follow. But from Ehle’s pen, it is completely believable. The part that makes the book painful to stomach is the needless human cruelty we are capable of inflicting upon each other — which Ehle demonstrates in broad strokes through the French Revolution and very pointedly with exquisite, tearing saber thrusts in the personal interactions between the actors and director.

Where The Land Breakers is about man versus nature and forces greater than man could comprehend, The Changing of the Guard takes on the inevitable autumn of life that comes to all of us and the painful battle with a world that no longer needs us. At their core both books explore the experience of giving yourself wholly to something bigger, greater than yourself. Be it art or the development of a farm, both are about legacies and leaving some sign that you passed through this world.

Similarly, Kevin Morgan Watson has dedicated himself to the enterprise of publishing and creating an outlet for work he believes in (and I am forever grateful to him for bringing Ehle’s books back into print). Ehle manages to look at very specific stories: the settlement and growth of the Appalachians, the transition in the film world from beautiful, bright costume dramas with stylized performances to dark, realistic depictions of life before electricity, a world of people who talk to each other like real people instead of caricatures. Ehle finds the universal struggle that speaks to readers, even if you have never built a log cabin or operated a guillotine.

Many people are preoccupied with their legacy; few people understand that legacy is something we begin creating every morning when we wake up, before we understand our own mortality. Perhaps Mooney Wright put it best: “A person becomes part of what he does . . . grows into what grows around him, and if he works the land, he comes to be the land, an owner of and slave to it.”  PS

Gwenyfar Rohler spends her days managing her family’s bookstore on Front Street.