Long Time Leaving (22 page)

I wanted to include that song's full lyrics in my anthology but concluded that the lament of a disabled veteran who is driven to shoot his wife because she “takes her love to town” is just too full of real agony to be called humor. Then Chet Atkins (America's greatest guitarist, also funny) told me that “Ruby” was the result of Tillis's attempt to write the most godawful maudlin song he could. But the mawkishness and the rage are so convincingly vigorous and unashamedly empathetic that the risibility intensifies the shock. What I'm saying is, if Oliver Stone had Mel Tillis's sense of humor (or any sense of humor at all),
Natural Born Killers
might have worked.

Another thing about Southern humor is orality. Melissa Fay Greene writes in
Praying for Sheetrock:

Like the souths as opposed to the norths of other nations, the warmer part of the United States is disinclined to take much interest in sense unless it engages as many of the senses as possible. Southern writing abounds in phonetic relish. It may take Southern eye-ear coordination to appreciate some of Faulkner's dialogue (“I ghy tell um! Holting him up dar whilst whipper-snappin’ trash makin’ free wid Marsh Hoke Christian's sto. I ghy tell um!”) and Joel Chandler Harris's renderings of dialect (“He jump up, he did, en ‘gun ter grabble in de quog-mire des ez hard ez he kin”). But there is comparable, more accessible vernacular tastiness in Molly Ivins:

In Portis:

In Hurston:

In Clyde Edgerton:

Southern humor may be tall talk. Nikki Giovanni:

Mark Twain:

Or it may be very low-key. Gregory Jaynes:

It may even be lexicographical.
You All Spoken Here,
by Roy Wilder, Jr., is a guide to Southern locutions that is serious—too authoritative to appeal to the pecan-log trade, which is probably why it is genuinely funny and also out of print. Here's a sample:

Whatever else may be said of it, Southern humor almost always sounds like people talking on the page, slanchindicularly. How else are natural people, let alone animals, going to talk on something flat like that?

I
f you should attend a function at which I perform an “author reading”—especially if I have read for free in the fond hope that somehow my appearance will lead, however indirectly, to the sale of eight or ten scattered unused copies of my books, which will leave me, in the long run, no more than ten or twelve dollars in the hole for the evening if I have eaten carefully enough that I won't have to send my whole tux to the cleaners, and you are wearing an outfit whose cost exceeds my cut on the sale of,
who knows, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand copies …Please
don't come up afterward and ask me—nay, defy me—to reassure you that you would enjoy what I write if you had to read it yourself.

You don't have to buy a book. I'll get by somehow. Borrow a book. Steal it (actually, I might get a royalty on that). Read it in the store. Check it out of the damn library.

I'll go further. Read a
book somebody else
wrote.

Just don't lose sight of the fact that reading aloud to the wealthy, or—it goes without saying—to the needy, is not a writer's line of work.

I don't even know why people want to listen to a writer read to them, except that it's a relief to see that he or she is so unhealthy-looking, and it leaves their hands free for eating. But it's always for some good cause (literacy, say, ahem). And I enjoy throwing the floor open for questions. It's not often I get a chance to throw anything these days, since I am at that awkward stage in life when my son throws back too hard and my grandsons can't catch yet.

But when I do throw open the floor, here is what someone invariably comes back with, perhaps in a faintly prosecutorial tone: “Why does the South produce so many writers?”

The standard answer to this used to be “Because we lost the war.” But these days an African Southerner may well be on hand to raise an excellent question: “What do you mean
we,
kemo sabe?” An all-white Southern “we” is like a vegan Southern breakfast.

My own short answer has been: “Because it doesn't produce so many readers. You can write about your neighbors and there's a good chance they won't see it.” I'm tired of that one.

So. Alternative answers:

• Per capita, the South doesn't produce all that many writers, any more than kangaroos amount to a great percentage of prizefighters (or, for that matter, Australians). It's just that you can tell right away which ones are kangaroos.
  

• Conversely, there may be plenty of Northern writers, it's just that Northern writers are like Northern barbecue places: not all that good. A Northern writer might do, if you're hungry, but when you
  get
  hungry your first thought is not of a Northern writer.
  

• I read somewhere that El Greco had an astigmatism or something that caused him to paint people in strikingly elongated form. Either he thought his people looked like everybody else's, or he thought other painters’ people looked squat. In the latter case, seems like he would have asked some other painter about it. “Very effective technique, there, the way you squash the human figure down like that. I notice, uh, several of the other fellas also…” Maybe all he got in reply was a funny look. Anyway, maybe my mind's eye-ear coordination, being Southern, is distorted. But don't Northern fictional characters sound kind of flat?
  

• Maybe Northern people bring up the abundance of Southern writers so that I will feel better about being from the South. They expect me to blush and dig into the carpet with my toe and say, “Aw, y'all are just being sweet. I reckon we ain't any more writer-productive than y'all are, really. Not all that much more anyhow.” But I think they expect me to swell up and say, “Well, hell, we have a sense of place and loss and family and dirt and blood and sweat and pigmeat and alligators and dogs and woods and pelvis movement and the King James Version of the Bible and smash-mouth football, as I will prove, if any of y'all want to go out drinking or eating or wrestling or praying or reminiscing about our respective mamas after my talk.” Which will give them grounds to roll their eyes in a way that feels good to them. Which is why I say that deprecatory thing about Southern readers. Of course maybe that makes them feel good, too, but, hey, Northern people have to feel good sometime, which is why they “winter” in warm places.
  

• Writing is a way of getting in out of the hot sun. Once back in the late seventies I visited the Plains, Georgia, worm farm of Hugh Carter, which had found a place in the public eye because Hugh's cousin Jimmy had been elected president. This farm appeared to have one active employee, who was busy shoveling worm manure
  from where the worms left it into a pile for bagging as fertilizer. At the time, people were selling worm-farm starter kits like mad as a solution to world hunger, which was a Ponzi scheme if I ever heard of one, and yet to my surprise I couldn't get a national magazine excited about my writing an article about the phenomenon.
  

Anyway, I watched this employee work for a while, because the fine points of vermiculture proved interesting and I have a strong watching-people-work ethic, and then he stopped shoveling, said “Whew,” and asked me what I did for a living.

“Write,” I said.

He wiped his brow. “I reckon you can do that in the shade,” he said.

• Writing is a sublimation of the oral instinct, and certain Southerners like to eat and drink and talk and spit and whoop and smooch so much that we would just die if we ate and drank and talked and spat and whooped and smooched as much as we naturally want to. In fact, we do die, eventually, and that's why, but in the meantime writing is restful to the mouth.
  

• You have to be crazy to be a writer, and Southerners like being crazy. As a road lizard, as a June bug, as a hog that has got into the mash, as an outhouse rat. Ever hear Willie Nelson or Patsy Cline sing “Crazy”? That's a rhetorical question. I'll tell you one thing, you don't ever hear anybody say, “Don't mess with him. He's
  sane.
  ”
  

• Southerners have the names for it. Take a non-Southern name: Lorrie Moore. Wonderful writer. Imagine how much more wonderful if her name were Flannery, Eudora, or Zora Neale.
  

• Southerners don't take words for granted. I will be listening to a non-Southerner explain something to me for a while, and wondering what is wrong, and then it will dawn on me: he thinks words are like personnel, and he is their manager, whose role is to organize them into meeting the goals of his department. Southerners think words are like people.
  Peculiar
  people. Mix a bunch of them together and you can't tell what might happen. I am going to waltz over to the dictionary now and stab my forefinger at various pages and pick three words at random:
  pillar, innerspring,
  and
  slippery.
  See what I mean?
  

I peeked, picking those words. You have to. I didn't
think
about what I was picking, but for one thing all those short
i
's, peppery
p
's and ripply
r
's …There may have been another principle of selection
there, too, now that I think about it; but my point is, you have to have some kind of subverbal sense about what goes together—for instance I don't care how many people tell me that pineapple is good on pizza, I am not going to have it. It might be good. I know a lot of people swear by it. It just don't seem right to me. My father got on with just about everybody, but I remember the pleasure in his voice (and my ears) once when he rendered judgment—his accent getting stronger for effect—on some man who stuck in his craw:

“I don't know that there's anything wrong with him, p'tickly. I jist …don't …lak …him.”

I guess that kind of judgment implies predisposition, which, Lord knows, that be a bad thing not only in Southern society but also in Southern writing (I never said I was talking exclusively about
good
Southern writing), but there is something to be said, at least literarily, for the fact that a Southerner's tastes reside deeper than explication.

• You notice I used the expression “Lord knows,” above. And yet I am not a person who worships. And unless you worship, in some kind of distinct adherent way, I don't see where you get off saying that you are religious. People go around talking loosely about being “spiritual.” They may just be moved by various coincidences of weather, water, mood, and natural light. In order to hang on to the page for very long, writing needs to be material, as in evidence. Church is evidence. Expressions like “Lord knows” are evidence-not that the person using the expression is religious but that he or she has been religious and knows what it's like.
  

• Southerners don't need a lot of evidence. As long as it's specific and relates to the mouth. For instance, here's something I learned from judging a barbecue contest in Cleveland, Mississippi (being untrained, I just helped judge the beginners’ competition): Barbecue judges trim their fingernails very close. Because, well, when you think about it, you can imagine how much sauce, and not only that but a lot of different conflicting sauces, would build up under them otherwise.
  ^*
  

• Southerners like to generalize,
  hard.
  That is the only way in this world that you are ever going to get down to universal truth.
  

F
rom Joseph Blotner's biography of William Faulkner we learn that in 1936, while in Hollywood rustling up film work, Faulkner attended a party at which he played tennis with Zasu Pitts. A witness to the game, Blotner tells us, “remembered that pairing vividly, Faulkner playing as well as he could after some serious drinking and his willowy oppponent fluttering about, waving her arms, and dejectedly murmuring Oh, my,’ whenever she missed a shot.”