Fact and Fiction

Around Christmas, Diane Rehm broadcast (on her NPR program) her interview from a couple years before with Mary Chapin Carpenter to discuss MCC's just-released CD of Christmas songs. I have always liked MCC but wasn't familiar with the album so tracked it down, loved the sample cuts, and ordered it—and it's wonderful. Every song is mellow, thoughtful, and respectful of the true spirit and meaning of Christmas. Since she wrote most of the songs, she gives the impression that she really believes the Christmas story—speculation on my part.

In looking for information about the farm she and her husband live on in Virginia (I've been looking at Virginia farms for sale lately—more speculation on my part) I came across articles about a (rare these days) concert Carpenter played at in Jackson, Mississippi, that I would have given a LOT to have witnessed. I can find no record of it having been recorded or filmed for sale—it may only be a memory to be cherished by those fortunate enough to have attended.

The concert was held at Belhaven College on April 17, 2009, in honor of the Centennial anniversary of the birth of Southern novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001). Along with Mary Chapin Carpenter, three other daughters of the South, singer-songwriters all, performed: Kate Campbell, Caroline Herring, and Claire Holley. All four were invited to perform because of their appreciation for Welty's impact on their own understanding of the South as reflected




in their songs. The latter two, Herring and Holley, I am not overly familiar with, but I have all of the dozen or so CD's Kate Campbell has released. She writes and sings of the Old South the way Eudora Welty knew it, lived it, and loved it.

Eudora Welty spent her whole life in Jackson, Mississippi, and was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (among many other prizes). Consistent with my own shallow knowledge of Southern novelists (Faulkner, O'Connor, et al), I had never read anything by Eudora Welty. I knew that the email program I used for many years on the Mac was named Eudora in honor of her—actually, in honor of a short story she wrote, "Why I Live at the P.O." (P.O. -- email -- get it?) Never, that is, until I read her One Writer's Beginnings (pub. 1983).

In an article about the concert, Mary Chapin Carpenter related how she came to read the book:

The book is a bible, a talisman of sorts. I has meant so much to me. I was living in a scummy little apartment trying to be scrappy and eke out a living, when a very dear friend of mine quoted the very last line of the book. Our conversation was about struggle, and after I heard the quote I ran out and got it. I basically devoured it and found myself returning to it over and over again through the years. To this day I recommend it to any person I meet who is trying to establish a creative life within the requirements of making a living. It reaffirms what I am trying to accomplish for myself. Sometimes you are not sure of what you are trying to do; you are just trying to be happy.

In "the last line of the book" Eudora Welty wrote, "As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." So I bought the book and "basically devoured it" as MCC had done.

One Writer's Beginnings is a small book—the transcripts of three lectures given by Welty in 1983 to inaugurate a new lecture series at Harvard University. The three lectures—"Listening," "Learning to See," and "Finding a Voice"—trace how Welty found her Southern-novelist voice growing up in Jackson. Having grown up in the South, albeit a half-century later than Eudora Welty, I loved reading about a culture I had known slightly in my grandmother's deep-in-Dixie town of Marion, Alabama. It made me realize that, sadly, most of what we know today about the South in that era is negative—and rightly so, in some ways. But there was much to honor and enjoy as well. The book is not about the South, but it is about Eudora Welty growing up there and how she learned to write—and most of her novels and short stories betray her deeply Southern roots.

And it was easy to see why she was the first living writer to be included (1998) in the Library of America series of works by American literary giants. She told the story of her life in a voice that made me want to begin reading her fiction.

Her parents both had "mountain" roots, having moved to Jackson to begin their family with no prior connections there. As a child, Welty accompanied her family back to "the mountains of West Virginia" for visits. I loved this retelling of how her mountain heritage imbued her with the fierce independence that characterized her life as a writer: (As a child she had tumbled down a mountain ravine . . . )

It seems likely to me now that the very element in my character that took possession of me there on top of the mountain, the fierce independence that was suddenly mine, to remain inside me no matter how it scared me when I tumbled, was an inheritance. Indeed it was my chief inheritance from my mother, who was braver. Yet, while she knew that independent spirit so well, it was what she so agonizingly tried to protect me from, in effect to warn me against. It was what we shared, it made the strongest bond between us and the strongest tension. To grow up is to fight for it, to grow old is to lose it after having possessed it. For her too, it was most deeply connected to the mountains.

When she was old, widowed, ill, and losing her sight, my mother one day announced to me she would be very glad to have the piano back in our house. It was the Steinway upright she had bought for me when I was nine, so far beyond her means, and had paid for herself out of the housekeeping money, which she added to by buying a Jersey cow, milking her, and selling part of the milk to the neighbors on our street, in quart bottles which I delivered on my bicycle. While I sat on the piano stool practicing my scales, I imagined my mother sitting on her stool in the cowshed, her fingers just as rhythmically pulling the teats of Daisy.

Two of her children had played this piano, I practicing my lessons and my brother Edward all along playing better by ear. When her grand-daughters came along, the piano was sent to their house to practice their lessons on. Now, all those years later, Mother wanted it under her roof again. Right now! It was brought and, the same day, tuned. She asked me to go directly to it and play for her "The West Virginia Hills."

I sat down and remembered how it went, and as I played I heard her singing it—singing it to herself, just as she used to while washing the dishes after supper:

O the West Virginia hills!

How my heart with rapture thrills . . .

O the hills! Beautiful hills! . . .

This one moment seemed to satisfy her. Once from her wheelchair, afterwards, she tried to pick it out herself, laying her finger slowly down on keys she couldn't really see. "A mountaineer," she announced to me proudly, as though she had never told me this before and now I had better remember it, "always will be free." (pp. 60-61)

It's easy to see Welty's mother reaching out, through the familiar refrain of a cherished song, for the past she had known; the freedom she had known in the mountains of West Virginia. We can't turn back the clock, though we try—nowhere more so than in the deep South. And no one sings with more understanding and pathos about that passing era than Kate Campbell, herself the daughter of a Mississippi preacher, Southern-born and bred.

I wish you could hear Kate's voice and melody in your head as you read the words to her song "Petrified House"—the sad picture of a Southern woman locked in the past, refusing to admit that her way of life was passing away:

She sees the world through yellowing lace

The world hasn't seen her since seventy-eight

Except for the nephew who used to look in

To bring her her chocolate and tonic and gin.

She lives in one room of a mansion downtown

With nothing but strip bars and strip malls around

It used to be three miles to those big stone gates

'Til property taxes just whittled it away.

She believes somehow that nothing has changed

Even though Sherman left Georgia in flames

Cotton's still king and the south didn't fall

As long as wisteria climbs up the wall.

She won't read the paper and won't watch the news

She thinks it's all lies made up by New York Jews

Her daddy said no matter what the laws say

Down here we've always done thing our own way.

Some day that petrified house will fall down

Like everything it will return to the ground

Whatever it stood for will all be condensed

To one paragraph on a plaque by the fence.

(copyright 2001 Large River Music)

But from what I read, it was Kate's song "Look Away" that brought the Jacksonians to tears when she played and sang it at the Centennial concert. Kate later talked about what inspired "Look Away:"

I remember seeing Eudora on public television one night and there was a photograph of the mansion in Windsor, Mississippi, behind her. I remember her talking about the New South and the Old South and along the way she said, "You know, not everything was bad and it doesn't really matter where you are from, there is good and there is bad." She was talking about the Old South and she said 'it really wasn't all about hate.' I, too, cannot believe that the history of the south is all about hate.

I can imagine a deeply Southern audience weeping at what has been lost and what was never known about the region they love as they listened to the plaintive lyrics of "Look Away:"

I can still recall the night

Lightning burned the mansion down

We all stood in our pajamas

On that hallowed wouthern ground

When the flames had turned to ashes

Only blackened bricks remained

And sixteen stately Doric columns

There beneath a veil of gray.

And it's a long and slow surrender

Retreating from the past

It's important to remember

To fly the flag at half-mast

And look away.

I was taught by elders wiser

Love your neighbor, love your God

Never saw a cross on fire

Never saw an angry mob

I saw sweet magnolia blossoms

I chased lightning bugs at night

Never dreaming others saw our way of life

In black and white.

Part of me hears voices crying

Part of me can feel their weight

Part of me believes that mansion

Stood for something more than hate.

(copyright 1995 Fame Publishing Company)

I don't pine for the Old South; like Eudora Welty said, there was good and bad. I wish my own mother, who grew up in the deep-heart of Dixie, hadn't confused me by telling me as a child not to refer to black women as "lady." It's what the Old South taught her. But I would give a lot today to ride again from my grandmother's house into downtown Marion, Alabama, on the junk wagon of the beloved Negro "Doc," pulled by his faithful mule. A kinder and humbler man, from what I knew of him, I've never known. From his wagon we'd jump down and go into the drug store to sit at the counter and sip dime limeades in crushed ice through a straw—all by our child-selves, no adults scanning for predators or abductors. And I would give a lot to climb mountain-sized magnolia trees, see the stars, and chase the lightning bugs Kate sang about—the parts of the South that weren't about hate. I haven't seen a star or a lightning bug in years—and don't know why.

One Writer's Beginnings helped me understand something else about myself—why I have never been a reader of fiction. Eudora Welty's father was not either. He was a successful businessman; it was from her mother than Eudora got her love of books and the stimulus for her imagination. Indeed, Eudora's father was leery (but supportive) of her desire to become a writer, what she knew she wanted to be from an early age:

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. (Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.) (p. 82)

I don't say that I agree with Mr. Welty, only that I identify with his shortcoming. Indeed, the value of fiction was brought home to me more powerfully than ever recently when I watched the video of a delightful interview with Eugene Peterson, author of more than 30 books and translator of the popular Bible paraphrase called The Message. A former pastor and professor, and a staunch defender of fiction as a window into the human dilemma, he made this amazing statement in the interview (paraphrase): "I believe the first two-years of every seminary degree should be spent with students reading nothing but the classic works of fiction. Only then will they begin to grasp the realities of life they will soon encounter in the faces of the people to whom they preach on Sundays."

Gulp.

I have never pridefully avoided fiction—Eudora Welty's or any other. I just always, when faced with the choice of "fact vs. fiction" in a life of limited time (à la Mr. Welty), chose fact. But if reading One Writer's Beginnings was a gentle temptation to read more fiction, Peterson's words were a severe rebuke.

One of the most enjoyable—and powerful—pieces of fiction I've read lately was by (no surprise) Wendell Berry—his short story "Fidelity" in a collection of five stories by the same name (Fidelity, 1992, recommended by my son, Daniel—later the subject of discussion with son David over the question of Berry's touching the theme of anarchism). Wendell Berry ties into Eudora Welty because he writes, not just in his more philosophical essays but in his fiction, of a time past—a time when life was agrarian, self-sufficient, community-based, and content; a time when people took responsibility for themselves and their neighbors and had no expectation of entitlements; a time when it was clearly understood that there was no health apart from the health of the land.

Award-winning Wendell Berry has spent his life living, farming, and writing in rural Kentucky. That's not the deep South, but it's another region with its own identity and culture—some negative, mostly positive—that most moderns know little of. In that sense, Berry is of the same cloth as Welty, Campbell, and others.

So—this chain of thoughts comes full circle—Carpenter, Welty, Campbell, Peterson, Berry—and me hanging on for dear life as I process yet another round of trying to grow up before I grow old. At the very least, I have been reminded that poets, minstrels, and novelists do as credible a job at recording the passage of time as do historians—probably better. I don't recall facts causing my eyes to brim with tears as they do when Kate Campbell sings or Eudora Welty writes.