Clyde Edgerton - laughing and crying together

One of the interesting aspects of American literature is the genre called "Southern Writers." Say the phrase and one immediately thinks of Faulkner, Williams, Wolfe, Welty, Morris, Styron and, increasingly Clyde Edgerton.

There is no similar classification of "Midwestern Writers," even though the midwest can claim Hemingway, Lewis, Bromfield, Hecht and Sandburg. No "Eastern Writers" at all, and no "Western Writers" unless we list those who wrote about cowboy themes.

So, what is it about the Southern writers that makes them so distinct a class? I have been thinking about that since finishing Raney, Clyde Edgerton's first novel about a young southern woman, Raney Bell, who married an Atlantan named Charles C. Shepherd. Except for their interest in country music, they could hardly be more diverse. Raney is a country girl from Bethel, North Carolina, daughter of the owner of a country store, a Free Will Baptist, and attended the local community college. Charles, on the other hand, is from a big southern city. College trained, son of a college professor and a public school teacher, a nominal Episcopalian. Raney likes to "visit." Charles likes to read. Raney loves it when friends drop in without warning, Charles hates it.

The differences extend to smaller things, too. Raney likes to fill up the sink and wash all the dishes in the same water. Charles refuses to wash his dishes in what he calls "dirty water," so he washes them under a running faucet, which, according to Raney, wastes water, a precious resource. Charles, as it turns out, likes to read Playboy and Penthouse; Raney is aghast that such publications exist at all, let alone hidden in her house. Charles's best friend is black, and Raney, answering Charles contention that "skin color doesn't make any difference," replies, "I thought of all the years the colored people around Bethel had lived in real low conditions and had never amounted to anything and I figured that if Charles thought skin color didn't make any difference, then he must be blind."

As you might expect, the couple is having some serious adjustment problems. Charles, in his heart, believes her family "inferior." Raney thinks his family is "stuck-up." They have problems about sex, too. Raney wanted her marriage consumed (sic) after the wedding, and announces, in an aside, that she went to her marital bed a virgin, "well, almost," whatever that means. (We are left to wonder.) Charles apparently asked for some unusual caresses on the wedding night, which Raney thought were disgusting and unnatural.

To deal with these and other issues, the couple decides to see a psychologist, who Raney refers to as a "psychiatric." So the novel appears to be as plain as one could imagine. Familiar situations which happen everyday, all over the world, and yet, Edgerton makes this a delightful excursion into the lives of these two apparently mis-matched people.

What makes it so interesting, fascinating would be a better word, is that we have here a conflict of world-views. Raney, while uneducated by Charles's standard, nonetheless has a finely developed view of the world and virtually everything in it. She has opinions, learned mostly from listening to her family talk and reading the Bible, and in the early stages of the novel, and the marriage, there is not one scintilla of ambiguity in her makeup. She understands the world, from her perspective, and rarely has to reflect before making a reply. With her, it is all common sense, and some of the things her husband says are simply incomprehensible. Upon being told that Charles likes his friends because "they think," Raney's instantaneous reply is, "Think? Who don't think? Everybody thinks."

Edgerton's ear for dialog is flawless. He catches every nuance, and one can almost hear the inflection in his written lines. His story development is perfectly handled, as the characters alter their world view enough to encompass the other. Raney, a teetotaler at the start of the book, even succumbs to "a warming sip of that Southern Comfort," and finds that Charles's view of sex is not so terrible after all.

So what makes a Southern Writer? I think it has to do with the Southerners' identification with the South. I have never heard people identify themselves as "Northerners," except in reaction to Southerners. Northerners define themselves as from Michigan or Ohio or New York or New England, and my guess is that the Southerners' identification has its roots in the defeat in what Southerners like to call "The War of Northern Aggression."

They lost the war, and defeat draws people together in ways that victory never can. The saying, "Success has a million parents, failure is an orphan," is akin to that. We celebrate our individual parts in the victories. We share a communal sadness in the defeats.

I recall a story told in a Bible class which illuminates the situation. It concerned a rich white southern woman who died. All of her friends mourned her passing, and someone, in talking with her old colored maid, who had been with her for thirty years, asked how she was coping.

"Jess fine," she said.

The woman pressed the question. "It must be terrible for you. The two of you were so close. I used to hear you laughing together every afternoon on the front porch. You were probably closer to her than anybody..."

To which the old black maid replied: "No ma'am. We wasn't close. You're not close to people you laugh with, only the people you cry with. And all we did was laugh together.."

I believe that Southerners, without ever thinking about it, have a keener sense of being in the same boat than Northerners or Westerners. They have cried together, and so they hold on to their heritage in a way outsiders rarely understand. They share, if not a distinctive language, at least a distinctive accent and idiom, and language always unites.

Beyond that, I think that climate has something to do with it. When summer settles in, there is no escaping the heat; at least that was true until this generation, and for more than a hundred years, people sat on the porch and talked. They told stories, some true, some fanciful, and generations of young people grew up hearing those stories, and writers were made, if not born. There is nothing quite like that in the North. Northerners, huddled to keep warm, turn inward. Southerners, to catch a cooling breeze, spread out.

They tell a story about Calvin Coolidge, 'Silent Cal' they called him, a New Englander through and through. When he returned from Church one Sunday, someone asked him what the sermon was about.

"Sin," he replied.

"What did the preacher say about it?" his questioner continued.

"He was agin' it..." Coolidge replied. Conversation closed. That is the result of several hundred years of long, cold winters. It could not happen in the South.

Clyde Edgerton is a wonderful Southern writer. But he is more than that, too. He is a profound observer of the human condition. I don't know why it has taken me so long to get to him - several of the readers I admire most have been raving about him for years - but I have found him now, and I will never let him get away. If you have not done so, I urge you to find him, too, and RANEY is the perfect place to begin.

Richard N. Hughes, the number one Blockhead at The Blockhead Journal

Mattie Rigsby stuck in the chair - Southern manners in a very difficult situation.