Scribblers (7 page)

Fred is enigmatic.

He's a mountain farm boy—“I sound like Gomer Pyle on a bad day,” he admits—with a fancy education. He started out writing science fiction as a teenager and still has a cult following in fantasy and Gothic circles for an early novel,
Dagon.
Most highly regarded for his poetry, he is the winner of the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the next best thing to a Pulitzer. He also claims a T. S. Eliot Award, a Rockefeller Grant, a World Fantasy Award,
and a Best Foreign Novel Prize from the French Academy; like Jerry Lewis, he is said to be big in France. Noted Duke professor William Blackburn—who counted Reynolds Price, William Styron, and Anne Tyler among his students—was once cajoled into naming the best writer he'd ever taught. He didn't hesitate: it was Fred Chappell. “Anybody who knows anything about Southern writing knows that Fred Chappell is our resident genius, our shining light, the one truly great writer we have among us,” novelist Lee Smith once said.

But he is also a restless soul who got kicked out of Duke for a time and took seven years to complete his undergraduate degree. The offense was “Joe College stuff,” he says. “Got drunk and sassed a cop, got throwed in jail.” Following that, he admits, “I was a teenager until I was forty or forty-five.” Fred's detractors will always regard him as a drunk no matter how high he rises.

If his personality is complex, his body of work is downright inscrutable.

Fred's “Broken Blossoms” is as perfect a coming-of-age tale as I've ever read. In it, an eleven-year-old mountain farm boy—an easily recognizable Fred—clings to a dreamlike existence from which his father cannot shake him. His fame, the boy believes, will come as a stamp collector, or from his chemistry experiments, or from his epic science-fiction poem, “The Cycle of Varn.” It's easy to envision the preadolescent Fred, like the boy, setting out from home to bring his father a jar of water where he works in the field, then arriving without the water and having no idea what happened to it, and his father taking him back home on the family wagon, its wheels cutting a straight, sensible line
through the boy's footprints meandering all over the road. I can't keep a smile off my face every time I read “Broken Blossoms”; each page tops the last.

I Am One of You Forever
—the first of Fred's Kirkman novels—is among my favorite books. His novel cycle was born of a poem he wrote way back in 1971. Called “The River Awakening in the Sea,” it summarized Fred's feelings upon waking in bed on his thirty-fifth birthday, the same conceit that begins Dante's journey in
The Divine Comedy.

Writing that piece got him thinking about a volume of poems sharing the theme of water. Halfway through that effort, he resolved to write companion volumes taking the other three classical elements—fire, air, and earth—as themes. Together, the volumes
River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain,
and
Earthsleep
comprise a tetralogy called
Midquest,
recognized as Fred's major poetic work, for which he won the Bollingen. Each volume is dominated by a different part of the speaker's mountain family—
River
by his grandparents, for example, and
Bloodfire
by his father. Each covers the same twenty-four hours of the speaker's birthday at midlife, though some poems are reminiscences of the same hour in earlier years. The overall structure is complex. Each volume contains eleven poems. The first poem reflects the eleventh, the second reflects the tenth, the third reflects the ninth, and so on inward to the central sixth poem. And the forms are diverse. “Free verse and blank verse predominate,” by Fred's reckoning, “but we also have terza rima, Yeatsian tetrameter, rhymed couplets, syllabics, classical hexameter variation, elegiacs, chant royal, and so forth.”

Then he decided to match
Midquest
with a quartet of
novels of like setting, characters, themes, and structure. The central figure is Jess Kirkman, a boy on a mountain farm through most of the cycle. The novels have their moments—like the fine piece “The Maker of One Coffin” in
I Am One of You Forever
—but I can't help seeing Fred as a victim of his own subtlety. The novels are complex mainly for complexity's sake. A storyteller of great gifts, Fred elects instead to play puzzle maker, and the narrative suffers at times. The whole thing seems overintellectualized; its intricate structure is perceptible only to those who've had it explained to them; indeed, most garden-variety readers don't understand the Kirkman books as novels at all, but rather as story collections. Fred's indifference to popularity is always tallied on the credit side of his ledger, but I'm not sure it should be.

So it is with great admiration and a little doubt that I approach Fred at the culmination of his twenty-six years of work since “The River Awakening in the Sea,” as he writes the final installment of an integrated cycle of four poetry volumes and four novels that is likely unique in all of literature.

“I can't imagine needing more than a couple hours of your time altogether—probably less—arranged however is least bothersome to you,” I write. “Though it would suit me ideally if you are in fact busy on a final Kirkman book, another of your projects might prove just as interesting.”

I despise my ass-kissing tone. I'm no better than the hundreds of others who will write Fred this year and ask him to get them a job or recommend them to a publisher, their own talent being insufficient for the task.

“I think my idea is a pretty good one, and I hope you'll see some merit in it.”

If I were Fred, I'd tell me to go to hell, or at least neglect to answer my letter. But there's a good reason he's a beloved author and I'm not.

“Your project is an interesting one, indeed,” he writes back. “And it just so happens that I have been thinking about Asheville in the very terms you broach.”

Fred doesn't like to be interviewed about works in progress, but he'll be glad to talk to me about the new book once he's finished it. What he proposes for the time being is that I write him every couple of weeks. He says he'll do his best to respond with general updates on how he's coming along.

I can live with that.

C
HAPTER
4

Toil

It isn't long before my writers' group friends begin submitting to the company where I work. They approach me shyly, apologetically. “I'm putting something in the mail to you this week” is the way a couple of them introduce it. I'm pleased at the chance to see something of theirs on paper, and say so, but I also make it clear that we're primarily a nonfiction publisher, and that most of our novel slots are filled by authors we've handled previously or who come to us with a basket of credentials.

The first to arrive is a story about two damaged men—one alcoholic and the other schizophrenic—who meet in a halfway house. After they have a falling out, the latter is tricked into being bused out of state in a scheme to keep him from receiving local government funds. The alcoholic, understanding that his estranged friend is without his medication and headed for a breakdown, tracks him down halfway across the
country and brings him home. From the cover letter, I learn this about the author, one of the writers' group's stalwarts: her first husband died of chronic alcoholism, and she has both a son and a stepson who are schizophrenic.

Next is a mystery novel set in a fictional town near Asheville, in which a grizzled police chief and his pretty neophyte deputy have to solve a crime spree.

Third comes an action-packed story about a church burning in rural Georgia. Among the principals are a wealthy landowner sympathetic to the local blacks, an ex-footballing, psychologically fragile black minister, a tribe of ornery Klansmen, and a soft-spoken, do-gooding former president Jimmy Carter himself.

I write the author of the novel about the alcoholic and the schizophrenic that her approach is too didactic, that it seems she is more intent on driving home a point than spinning a good tale. And the machinations by which the schizophrenic is shipped out of state—a matter of some importance in the story—are murky.

The second submission, the genre mystery, is simply not the kind of material we publish. But since I know the author and understand that criticism will be appreciated, I take him to task for overemphasizing the young deputy's frailty and other minor matters.

I fail to flag the church-burning novel on its way in, and it is rejected by someone else on the staff before I know it has arrived.

Easily the best of the submissions is a story set mainly on a mountain farm near Asheville. A man accused of brutalizing and murdering a teenage girl is the beneficiary
of a hung jury. Though it is widely agreed that he committed the crime, no witnesses were present, and there is negligible hard evidence against him. The novel then proceeds in eight alternating viewpoints as various characters—among them the older sister of the victim, her three brothers, and one of the brother's friends—try to steel themselves to extract some mountain justice. The murderer finally turns up dead, in the same remote cabin where his victim was discovered. It is the work of Sharyn McCrumb's friend Jack Pyle, who calls it “The Sound of Distant Thunder.”

I'd characterize it as a literary murder novel governed by old-fashioned restraint and class. Jack does several things well. The eight narrators' voices are distinct. The humiliation of the dead girl's older sister is palpable when she has to provide details of her sex life during the courtroom scene; the devotion of her shy, long-ignored suitor could have been corny but is instead rather touching. The villain is characterized mainly by others' feelings toward him; he is physically present only on a few occasions, and then briefly; altogether, he is wisely used.

“The Sound of Distant Thunder” receives a wider circulation than my other friends' submissions. Everyone agrees to its competence, but it is ultimately rejected on the feeling that we'll likely receive several better novel manuscripts over the course of the year, an assessment I judge to be fair. I deliver the bad news by letter.

The chance of an unsolicited novel manuscript finding its way into print through a commercial publisher is remote. Where I work, the success rate is perhaps one in a thousand.
Prospects may be better at houses more noted for their fiction, but I doubt it; most of them probably don't even look at unagented material. Since the competition is so fierce, one might expect published fiction to be of consistently high quality. But in seeing the mediocre stuff on bookstore shelves, would-be novelists are understandably bewildered. They're also encouraged, believing their manuscripts are as good as most of what's out there.

When these writers submit material, they're often treated shabbily. Manuscripts are discarded unopened. Or they're opened and put directly into their return envelopes. Or they sit in a pile unexamined for six months, after which they receive a form-letter rejection. Or they find a use as scrap paper or worse. I have a good friend who once got a rejection typed on the back of
page 142
of someone else's manuscript; at least it was a personal reply, he figured. In the publisher's view, material is so plentiful and available slots are so few that it doesn't make business sense to pay someone to read more than a page or two into most manuscripts, when they're read at all. Writers are so debased by the process that they're grateful for any human contact at all, even when it's a barely polite kiss-off.

Just as I expect, I receive a thank-you note from each of the three friends whose novels I turn down.

The slush pile was once a responsibility of mine. Manuscripts came in plain envelopes, in brown paper tied with string, in boxes weighing six or eight pounds, in boxes within boxes within boxes. They came registered mail, or postage due, or marked “Urgent: Unsolicited Material.” Some came shoddily packed and split open, others so securely
shrink-wrapped, stapled, and double duct-taped that getting into them practically required power tools. Some were already copyrighted, others elegantly laid out, still others handwritten. Some were pristine, even perfumed. Others were dog-eared or stank of cigar smoke or had what appeared to be dried snot on the pages.

They were sent by grandmothers, doctors, grade-schoolers, bereaved parents, pilots, professors, war veterans, philosophers, librarians, Libertarians, perverts, and time travelers. A surprising number came from convicts; these were written longhand and never had any return postage. The ones from foreign writers were accompanied by something called an International Postal Coupon, bearing seals peculiar to the country of origin. Since neither I nor our local post office ever figured out how these were to be redeemed in American currency, I returned foreign parcels at company expense, or didn't return them at all.

Some writers insisted on making appointments and delivering their manuscripts in person, over my protests that there wasn't a thing in the world I'd be able to tell them until I had a chance to review their material. That argument carried no weight; they showed up anyway. A few, having traveled a good distance, expected me to read their manuscripts while they sat across the desk. I once spent a surreal hour with a man who claimed to be a Gypsy and his toddler son clad in nothing but a pink diaper. Freely admitting he could neither read nor write, the man wanted me—
expected
me—to scribe his Gypsy story for him.

They sent memoirs, novels, folk tales, kids' books (though all the writers' guides clearly state that we don't
publish children's material), religious tracts (though we don't handle these either), poetry (likewise), three-hundred-thousand-word whoppers, collections of newspaper columns, single short stories (though we publish only books), and antigovernment diatribes. They submitted samples beginning with
page 215
. They sent synopses that ran twenty-five single-spaced pages. They compared their work with
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye,
and
The Bridges of Madison County.
They judged their writing of a kind with, and even superior to, that of Jane Austen, Cormac McCarthy, and John Grisham. They hung their hats on having studied for a semester with Anne Tyler or Annie Dillard or Gordon Lish. They said how well their work would translate to the big screen, and sometimes even cast the lead roles. They claimed all their friends had read their manuscript and recommended they get it published.