Category: Art

“It’s going to be a good spring,” so says writer and native Memphian Hampton Sides, and for good reason. Make that two good reasons.

One: Next month his anthology Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison: And Other Urgent Inquiries Into the Odd Nature of Nature (Outside Books), based on a popular question-and-answer column he wrote or edited for Outside magazine, will hit bookstores. Two: This month a project perhaps nearer his heart and called Ghost Soldiers (Doubleday) lands in stores, lands its author on the Today show (May 25th), and lands the book a full-page ad (with kind words from the likes of David Halberstam and Jon Krakauer) in the May 18th New York Times.

These aren’t Sides’ first forays into publishing. His first job was at Memphis magazine as a college intern from Yale and his first book, Stomping Grounds: A Pilgrim’s Progress Through Eight American Subcultures, he admits “didn’t go anywhere” (except out of print). But with this spring’s two titles Sides may be about to make it big-time and with built-in audiences.

That’s especially true in the case of Ghost Soldiers, which tracks the lives of the men who, having survived the infamous Bataan Death March in the Philippines in 1942, went on to become POWs of the Japanese inside the largest continuously-running prisoner of war camp in Asia. That camp, outside the city of Cabanatuan, was also the largest American POW camp ever established on foreign soil, with an estimated 12,000 U.S. soldiers passing through its gates and a full quarter of them buried beyond its barbed wire. The daring rescue of the roughly 500 sick and starving men still inside the camp in January 1945 — a surprise rescue engineered by the U.S. Army Sixth Ranger Battalion under the leadership of Colonel Henry A. Mucci, with equal help from a band of Filipino guerrillas — makes it, as the book’s subtitle declares, “The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission.”

Dramatic? Without question, according to Sides’ expert rendering of the challenges facing the rescuers at every stage of the operation. Forgotten? No, if we mean the men who survived Cabanatuan’s horrendous conditions; yes, if we mean generations since the war who know the phrase “Bataan Death March” and not much more. Sides knows this because, before launching into this three-year project, he was among the latter.

“I knew that Bataan was somewhere over in Asia, and it was something horrible,” Sides, 39, explained in an interview from his home in Santa Fe. “But I honestly didn’t know if it involved Americans or Brits or Australians or what.”

Having made the decision to write about Bataan, however, he quickly realized that the Death March alone would not make a whole book. “Where were the men marched to?” the author had to ask himself. “A lot of people have the idea, well, it was over, not realizing that the march was really just the beginning,” Sides said. “The men had to get through three years of the camp, and the deaths just kept coming. If anything, the deaths got worse. But I couldn’t figure out how to end the thing. How did these men get out? I couldn’t just leave them in this dire situation. Then someone said, ‘Well, there’s the raid on Cabanatuan.’ And I said, ‘The what?’ I could not believe this wasn’t a famous piece of American history, like Teddy Roosevelt and Cuba, or the Alamo.”

Sides doesn’t describe himself as a war buff “at all,” and in Ghost Soldiers he doesn’t pretend to be one. A “general-interest person” is more his line but a person with a specific interest in the question of survival.

“Here I was at Outside magazine writing and editing stories about all sorts of bizarre adventures and esoteric human-endurance stories — what I call ‘synthetic suffering’: people concocting bizarre ways to put themselves through trials and tribulations. Crossing deserts and oceans. Pogo-sticking up Mt. Everest without oxygen. But Ghost Soldiers is a human-endurance story that’s authentic. Men thrown into a situation with a huge scope, on a huge scale. I came into this story interested in who survives, who doesn’t, and why, more than I did with any great interest in military history.” (Military histories being by and large, in Sides’ words, “a genre full of hacks, bad storytellers, or really technical writing.”)

But how to explain the disappearance of the Cabanatuan camp and the rescue of its prisoners from the minds of most Americans?

“When this raid happened, it got a lot of press for about two weeks,” Sides said. “And then Iwo Jima happened, and then Okinawa, and then Hiroshima. It just got overshadowed by larger events in World War II.”

Overshadowed at the time too by the very real fear that American forces imprisoned elsewhere in Asia could become targets of further mistreatment by the Japanese. Or is it more a matter of generations?

“People didn’t like to talk about horrible things they went through in war situations. The men themselves didn’t like to talk about it much,” Sides said. “Not because it was horrible but because of a generational tendency toward reticence. I kept running into this with all these guys I interviewed. You go through the most amazing stories with them, and they say, ‘You don’t want to know about that.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I do! I really do!’ Whereas maybe the Vietnam generation talked too much.”

Hampton Sides, for his part, intends to talk, just as he listened to Cabanatuan survivors, their rescuers, and the Japanese themselves.

Among those rescuers was a Memphian, Robert Anderson (“an amazing guy,” according to Sides), whose war record and remembrances form the cover story in this month’s Memphis magazine. And among the Filipino rescuers there was critical help from guerrilla captains Juan Pajota and Edwardo Joson. I asked the author if he talked to them too.

“No, they’re both dead,” Sides said. “Pajota particularly bore the brunt of the fighting and was really kind of the unsung hero of this raid. There was a lot of publicity immediately after it — in The New York Times and through the AP, The Times of London, and Time, Life, Newsweek. I went back and dug up all that stuff. The guerrillas aren’t even mentioned. It was like rah-rah America, we kicked ass, but we couldn’t have done it, on any level, without the help of the guerrillas, the civilians they mustered, and the water buffalo carts they were able to get and pieces of intelligence they provided. I don’t know if you’d call it racist, but it was a sign of the times: The people who probably helped the most weren’t even mentioned.”

But mention Cabanatuan in today’s Japan and what do you get? Sides, who won a fellowship to Japan in the course of his research, found the Japanese willing to talk but still somewhat perplexed by his emphasis on America’s experience in the war.

“I’d been talking to a lot of American veterans, and they were almost uniformly skeptical of my trip: ‘They won’t even talk to you. No way! They don’t even know [Cabanatuan] happened.’ But, no, the Japanese talk about the war all the time. It’s a little bit like the Civil War in the South.

“This is a war that took over 2 million Japanese lives. It rearranged the floor plans, the architecture of every major city. The war affected every Japanese person in a way the Second World War didn’t come close to affecting us. So of course they talk about it. It just takes them a while to get started. It’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it’s lurking just underneath.”

And the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war? “When the Japanese talk about war crimes they tend to focus most of their energy on China because even before we got into the war they’d been fighting in China for 10 years,” Sides explained. “The scale and the enormity of the atrocities that were perpetrated in China dwarf anything that happened to Americans or Brits. So when you come as an American and talk to the Japanese about war crimes, they’re a little bit confused. They almost forget Bataan, the prisoner-of-war camps. China doesn’t let them forget. But for an American to say, Well, you know, there was this thing called the Death March in Bataan and what about the way you treated American POWs, it’s just sort of barely on their radar screens. It’s almost blind-siding them.”

Ghost Soldiers could remedy that, even if, as its own author admits, his pages on life inside Cabanatuan can be “grotesque.”

“But there’s no other way to tell it,” said Sides. “Some of what these people were going through is so bleak.” Which led the author to alternate his chapters on camp conditions with hour-by-hour, then minute-by-minute preparations for the release of its prisoners, an action tale “to ventilate” the grim depiction of prison life. Otherwise, according to Sides, “it would be hard for readers to get through it. It would be hard for me to get through it if I were reading it cold.”

“This isn’t a chipper book by any means,” he added, “but something I’m going to talk about on my book tour is something every one of these POWs told me: that what they think got them through is a sense of humor. Little pranks. Ways of striking back in amusing ways. Even as difficult as this book is to get through, the humor that these people were able to find, some of it gallows humor … it was important. Maybe in some cases the most important factor in their survival.”

Sides may have felt he was “steering a 747” during the composition of Ghost Soldiers, the first of his books with a true narrative, a beginning, middle, and end, but it’s one he found “ungainly,” “complicated,” “a little hard on the spirit.”

That was then, however. This is now, meaning his upcoming book tour, but as Sides said, “This is going to be an easy book for me to promote, because I believe everybody should know what these guys went through and how they got out of it. It’s an aspect of the war that was given short shrift.

“We Americans like to think of ourselves as invincible. We don’t lose wars, we don’t even lose battles. We don’t give up. We don’t surrender. Here’s a case where we did surrender, and we went through horrors. … When people think of World War II they tend to think of a few battles in Asia, but certainly the limelight has been trained on Europe. And for whatever reasons, this is a part of the story of the war that kind of got swept aside. It’s the story within the story of the Philippines that got buried over the years. … I say it’s their, the men’s story. I just threaded it together.”

Something also says that Sides’ former teacher and late mentor at Yale, John Hersey, author of the World War II classic Hiroshima and author of a book (Men On Bataan) unknown even to Sides when he embarked on Ghost Soldiers, the same Hersey who was in the Philippines right up to America’s evacuation, would understand.

Hampton Sides

Signing copies of Ghost Soldiers

Burke’s Book Store

Monday, May 21st, 5-6:30 p.m.

Life’s Only Promise

By Sid Kara

PublishAmerica, 269 pp., $19.95 (paper)

sid Kara’s debut novel, Life’s Only Promise, is clearly a labor of love; a passionate cry against injustice by a young and idealistic writer.

Set in the Mississippi of the early 1900s, Kara’s book details the hollow promises of Emancipation and how they have already turned sour a few decades after the Civil War. Just as novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved depicted the harrowing, brutal world of slavery, Kara’s novel takes us into the harsh, subterranean world of chain gangs and forced labor.

Weaving historical fact with fiction, Life’s Only Promise tells the story of a black sharecropper named Fulton Chapman who leaves his home in 1905 in the hopes of finding a better life for himself and his young daughter, whom he leaves behind while he goes to find work on the railroad. A series of mishaps results in Fulton being wrongly convicted and leased to Parchman Farm, where he and the other “gunmen” are to pick cotton for the state.

Brutalized by the guards, tormented by the merciless Mississippi summers, weakened by the wretched living conditions and scarcity of food, Fulton endures the surrealness of his new surroundings. For a long time, only the memory of his old home and his waiting daughter sustain him. But as year piles upon year, the memories and hopes of reuniting with his family dim.

An aborted escape kills the last iota of hope in Fulton. The prisoners are tracked down by militiamen. Fulton jinxes his own escape by coming to the rescue of his beloved old friend, Moondog. Many of the recaptured prisoners die of their wounds and many others are lynched. Watching Moondog’s lynching freezes something inside Fulton’s heart and he spends the next several years in total silence. The squalor, violence, and brutality of Parchman have taken the energetic, hopeful young man that Fulton was when he entered the plantation and turned him into a dull, deadened, middle-aged zombie.

Kara, a native of Memphis, is particularly effective in describing the attitudes of a racist South in the first half of the 20th century. The sheer worthlessness of black life is made amply clear, as is the racial superiority and economic avarice that allowed places like Parchman to exist.

His portrayal of J.K. Vardaman, the racist governor of Mississippi, is particularly effective. Kara captures the combination of prejudice, malice, connivance, and populist bluster that elected Vardaman to the state’s highest office. And he shows how racism requires the collusion between politics and business interests in order to survive.

But Life’s Only Promise does not treat its black characters as one- dimensional victims. Over and over again, we see Fulton’s friends, such as Moondog and Corliss, display a fighting spirit. Much as their slave ancestors did during the slave rebellions, the gunmen refuse to go gently into the night and indeed go to their deaths with dignity and defiance. We also see that the yearning for freedom is as intrinsic as hunger or thirst and that this yearning propels Fulton and the others through their darkest hours.

Some of the passages in the novel that describe the treatment of the gunmen are so graphic and blood-splattered that they make the reader flinch. Occasionally, the violence borders on gratuitous but then one remembers that violence was the story of black men’s lives. Still, in the hands of a more mature writer, these passages could have been handled with more sophistication and sensitivity.

Kara’s youth comes through in the writing. For every passage that is smooth and direct, there is another where the writing is wordy, bombastic, and over-the-top. The phrase “unfulfilled dreams” pops up at least three times. Flowery sentences like “He felt the schism between his selves begin to buckle under the force of his memories, and he felt that he was losing control over the architecture of his being” are distressingly common and take away from the trajectory and emotional heft of the novel. Kara could have clearly benefited from a strict editor.

On the other hand, Kara has a good ear for dialogue. The rural Southern dialect and colloquialisms are realistic and never strained. They go a long way toward giving the novel its depth.

Kara, who graduated from MUS and Duke University (in 1996), apparently gave up a career as an investment banker in order to finish this novel. He is already working on a second book that deals with the international trafficking in women. These are serious subjects for a young author to be tackling, and it is heartening to see that Sid Kara has avoided the pitfalls that besiege many a young writer: He has avoided the temptation of his first novel being a coming-of-age, thinly veiled autobiography.

Most European countries have long, rich film traditions. But while nations such as France, Germany, and even Denmark have made formidable contributions to world cinema, the Low Countries’ role has been more sketchy. According to Robert Sklar’s Film: An International History of the Medium, however, one of the most important proto-cinematic innovations has roots in the Netherlands, this year’s Memphis in May honored country. In the mid-17th century, Dutch inventors devised a way to project painted images through a lens using light (either the sun or candlelight). This development led to the first self-contained projectors — Magic Lanterns — which included a light source, image, and lens all in one apparatus.

But since that crucial contribution to cinema’s prehistory, discussion of Dutch film is usually limited to two names — Joris Ivens and Paul Verhoeven. Ivens was an early political documentarian with roots in the Soviet style who, despite his own roots, made films all over the world, including the U.S. and China. Likewise, Verhoeven left the Netherlands for work elsewhere. Most Americans are familiar with his extreme (if often misunderstood) blockbusters RoboCop and Starship Troopers, but Verhoeven made many well-regarded films in his native Netherlands during the ‘70s and early ‘80s, including Soldier of Orange and The Fourth Man.

But the Netherlands’ film scene also gained a bit of international exposure a few years ago when director Mike van Diem’s severe but emotional Karakter (Character in the U.S.) won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Karakter will be shown this week at Malco’s Bartlett Cinema Ten as part of Memphis in May.

Visually, Karakter is a harsh but striking blend of black, brown, and white — black suits, brown offices, and white snow. Set in Rotterdam during the early 1900s, the film opens with an aging court bailiff, Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), found dead and a young lawyer held under suspicion of murder. The film is told in flashbacks as Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huet), the lawyer, defends his innocence and describes to the police his relationship with Dreverhaven.

Dreverhaven, it turns out, is a vicious, heartless official who takes joy in ruthlessly evicting poor families. Katadreuffe, who we learn is Dreverhaven’s illegitimate son, describes him as “law without compassion, the curse of the poor.” Katadreuffe is conceived when Dreverhaven forces himself on his servant Joba (Betty Schuurman). Joba decides to flee rather than accept Dreverhaven’s marriage proposal and raises Katadreuffe in poverty. Katadreuffe grows up taunted by schoolmates as a bastard and, after learning the identity of his father, develops a hardened hatred for him.

But Dreverhaven watches his son’s growth from afar, inflicting what may be cruelty and what may be tough love. “Why don’t you leave our boy in peace,” Joba asks Dreverhaven during one of their rare meetings. “I’ll strangle him for nine-tenths, and the last tenth will make him strong,” the old man responds.

Karakter is based on a 1938 novel by Ferdinand Bordwijk that was a major bestseller in the Netherlands, and the film has a Dickensian feel. It is essentially a dark, spite-driven Horatio Alger tale: Poor Katadreuffe learns English (and much more) from an incomplete set of encyclopedias he finds abandoned in a new apartment his mother rents and works his way through bankruptcy to become a lawyer. But his largely unspoken family feud is never far from the surface of his life, culminating in the dramatic confrontation that bookends the film.

Karakter is a fine film, but viewers shouldn’t read too much into that Oscar win. The Best Foreign Language Film Oscar rarely rewards the most exciting international cinema. And it’s hard to say how much the period piece has to say about life in the Netherlands today. But quibbles aside, Karakter is still an accomplished film that’s worthy of this week’s big-screen showcase.

Monstruary

by Julian Rios

Knopf, 225 pp., $25

Imagine for a moment that through some strange rift in reality you have been physically transported to the absurd, unnatural, and harrowing world of a Hieronymous Bosch painting, but you’re blindfolded. What you hear is disquieting. What you smell is nauseating. Since you can’t see, providing narration for every terrible and nonsensical sight encountered is your disturbingly alliterative and alarmingly articulate guide Julian Rios, author of Monstruary.

Rios’ most recent book, masterfully translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, is nigh Joycean in its labyrinthine linguistic complexity, though you most likely can decipher its prose — unlike some of Joyce’s — albeit a bit dense and breathless.

Monstruary is the tale of Emil, our writer/artist/narrator, and his exceptionally gifted cadre of friends and acquaintances, who are all caught up in a world of high-octane art and bad-luck love. The title of the book comes from Emil’s friend Mons’ painting-series-in-progress, a number of works with many different recurring themes but one thing in common: chilling imagery, which Emil is all too happy to relate to his audience in horrific detail.

It seems Mons must first have a drunken nightmarish vision a la Bosch before his brush touches canvas:

The trampling angel with the body of curling clouds who plunges

ahead on petrified pillar legs that shoot fire like muskets and

make the earth tremble to the rhythm of a pile driver.

Ill-assorted multitudes of human figures with the heads of animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, and all kinds of beasts and insects

with the heads of men and women and mutants, semihuman masses

that swarm like ant colonies, surge like cresting waves, spill

like avalanches into chasms of darkness. …

A giant starling straddled by a naked Lilliputian. …

A tightrope walker with the head of a goldfinch.

A carp with the head of a duck.

A beetle with the gaunt, dissipated face of a young man.

Fish with human arms, men and women with fishtails …

Admittedly, this is a very odd book. While we learn the details of the characters’ lives and loves, we’re intermittently taken on descriptive roller-coaster rides regarding paintings and sculptures, the life of the mind of several artists, mysterious journals full of automatic writing penned by unaware mediums of dead wives (each almost indecipherable phrase rife with possible meanings), et cetera. And this roller coaster starts on page one.

Somewhat pretentious is the narrator’s ubiquitous plays on words, obscure puns, and alliterative phrases — that poor exhausted translator! — of which there have to be at least 20 on every single page. (Every character is a latent linguist.) No phrase is left unskewed by double entendre, no pun is left unpunned, and rarely is a sentence left in which every word does not echo another with the same sound or series of letters. Chew on this: “That delirious architecture seemed to spring from the opium visions of De Quincey and Coleridge, semisymmetries in a chaotic kaleidoscope where dromedary domes rose beneath the cupola of night, mad truncated caracole staircases against unsalvageable walls, lofty basalt rising over the abyss, pilasters soaring to the stars and splintered plinths and prostrate rostrate columns, the sharp beaked peaks of their rostrums earthbound, and alligators astride astragals in the black sun of melancholy.”

For many readers this will be too much to deal with. They’ll lose interest immediately, or, if intrigued, will simply be worn out by the sentence strata they have to constantly dig through to get at meaning. But there are plenty of masochist members of the intelligentsia who relish a very challenging book like this, obstinately difficult in its narrative bent. You just have to be a word junkie. You have to enjoy it like others enjoy puzzles. The meaning’s there, but you’ve got to know what to look for to get it.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Monstruary, especially if you love art and literature. But don’t eat too many pronto pups and cotton candy before you get on the ride, and for God’s sake keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Too Much Loneliness?

Isolation is all well and good. But as questioned earlier, can a writer live alone? The answer is: most likely, but it is more fun to have a community. Michelle Buckalew agrees. “We must remember that a lot of great things can come out of talking with authors and people who write,” she says. “There are wonderful relationships that can help our community. [Right now,] It’s so fragmented.”

“A few years ago,” Corey Mesler recalls, “for National Poetry Month, which is in April, Otherlands coffee shop had [roughly] 20 poets read for 3-5 minutes each. It was an entire evening of poetry and the wildest spectrum of poets you could imagine. It was great. And nothing has been done since like that. I wish there more things like that.”

“This is a very feudal city and I don’t just mean academically. Memphis operates in cells,” says Randall Kenan. According to Buckalew, so does most of the writing community. “A lot of writers aren’t aware of other writers. There is no network outside of particular institutions. There aren’t a lot of venues to meet, they don’t foster relationships.”

Shara McCallum, local poet, assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis, and current head of the River City Writing Series has something of a different viewpoint. While she agrees that there can always be more options for those inclined toward word-smithing, she would like to see a larger audience in Memphis.

“There are a number of writers in this town,” McCallum says. “So that if someone wished to look, there’s something there to take advantage of. I think that writer’s find communities, find each other. I’m interested in a readership of good literature by people who are not necessarily writers. I think that needs to come back to the U.S. There is a support of the visual artists [by patrons] who are not themselves visual artists. I think that writers are already so insular in terms of our community, in particular in academia and how much that has become a centralized place for writers to exist now. I feel what is important is for educated readers to read literary stuff. I think it [Memphis] is still lagging behind where I would love for it to be.”

Mesler expresses some frustration along the same vein. Though Burkes Bookstore hosts multiple book-signing parties for local, nationally, and internationally known authors, sometimes the response from the citizenry is less than extraordinary. “I’m often disappointed in the turn-out,” Mesler says. “If I could figure it out, I would be smarter than I am. I’ve been doing this for 26 years and I haven’t figured it out.”

He doesn’t think that lack of recognition stops with name writers. “I think what you always miss — and this is unfortunate — is that there are writers who are working very seriously and with great commitment to their craft who haven’t had the success. I am sure there are poets and short-story writers who have placed things in magazines and they just haven’t had a breakthrough and they may never. That’s the sad state of publishing today.”

Buckalew adds, “I think it is so important for the writers to know that they are appreciated and to somehow salute them, acknowledge them in some way because this area is not known so much as other areas.”

A Growing Community.

Admist all this negative talk of the lack of a writing community, there are pockets of Athenian cultures among the prevalent Visigoth society. For example, Royal Stewart, Marketing Manager of the Deliberate Literate sees a mentorship growing in the recesses of his coffee shop. “There’s a gal named Melissa Crouch.” he says. “She’s kind of become a student of Craig’s. She’s in the process of writing a movie and getting all kinds of help.” Crouch, a poet, is now producing her first short films with Brewer’s advice.

These sorts of relationships were unheard of as recently as a decade ago, according to Mesler. “I think the Memphis literary scene used to be non-existent,” he says. “It was a bunch of back-biting curs with egos who wouldn’t talk to each other, wouldn’t give anybody credit. If you were associated with Memphis State [now the University of Memphis], you wouldn’t associate with the Rhodes writing group. That was about ten years ago. I think there’s been a lot of positive change. Tina Barr coming to Rhodes, Shara McCallum coming to the University of Memphis. Those two women bring a lot of energy and a lot of creativity. They care.”

Says McCallum, “I’ve seen some progress. I really have seen some good things happen. So I have hope. I’m not at all seeing it as a dismal thing.”

Kenan, however, is not so optimistic. “I don’t see Memphis becoming Santa Fe or Dallas anytime soon,” he says, referring to those cities vibrant literary communities. “The people’s priorities are not such to cause that to happen. It’s [Memphis is] a blue-collar town. People don’t have a lot of time for it. Which isn’t to say that it dictates destiny because there are working classes very interested in the arts. But it’s not in a lot of people’s priorities.”

All that said, there is a consensus that the writing community in Memphis could stand some improvement without exceeding the city’s critical mass of interest. One such improvement can come from the media.

“I think that — as someone who is looking at the overall spectrum of arts — if the media doesn’t do something, we’re sunk in general. I think there will be a small [writing] community always,” says McCallum. “ I don’t think it will ever be huge. But I think that small community can be better reached and better served if the main sources of information — which is what the media is supposed to be — gets behind us.”

Hancock shares McCallum’s frustration with the press. “We deserve some sort of kudos,” he says. “We seem to get press from all sides except from Memphis. The media just ignores us. It pushes us to the side.”

However, writers in Memphis are at least receiving more interest from the arts community at large. Mesler sees the inclusion of a poetry booth in this year’s Arts in the Park festival as a big sign that the literary arts are moving onto the main stage in Memphis’ arts scenes. “I saw that as a really positive thing,” he says. “When you talk about arts in Memphis, you used to be talking about dance, painting, theater, and music. And nobody gave a thought about writers and the writers didn’t feel a part of the arts.”

In all the cases, there are small steps toward a more general recognition in the city. Such a distinction, according to Brewer is something the city deserves to give itself. “I think Memphians are beginning to reward themselves more. I haven’t lived here my whole life [his family moved to California from Memphis and Brewer moved back ten years later], but I think it’s fair to for me to say that Memphians dog themselves and dog the location.” According to Brewer, Memphis’ growing literary scene is an indication of its acceptance of itself as more than that city between St. Louis and New Orleans.

There’s more. There’s always more. There are writers not mentioned and writing programs not here in this article and ideas not shared. Still, it is a start. The literary word is not dead here in Memphis and is even growing a little day by day. The next time you find out about an author signing or a poetry reading, why not check it out? The wind blows and the rain rains and writers write. Now all that needs to happen is for writers — and readers — to talk about it.

The wind blows, the rain rains, and writers write. It is hard to escape such simple truisms. But a more murky question is this: Where do writers write? Certainly not Memphis? The city known for the Blues and barbeque, independent theater and minor-league sports could not possibly have a writing scene. Right?

Let’s see (in no particular order): Shelby Foote, Steve Stern, Arthur Flowers, Marilou Awiakta, Randall Kenan, Ralph Wiley, Tina Barr, Shara McCallum, Craig Brewer, Marshall Boswell, Margaret Skinner, John Fergus Ryan, Tom Graves, Joan Williams, Corey Mesler, Alan Lightman, Jim Gray, Charles Turner, Cary Holladay, John Bensko . . . okay, the list goes on and on. And these are just the Memphians who are established workers at their crafts, with publications and awards galore. This speaks nothing about the various poetry slams around the city coffee-houses, the occasional reading, and all the writers yet to be known for their work.

Oh yeah, and there is John Grisham.

There are also writing venues. Owner Sarah Hull of the The Deliberate Literate on Union hosts multiple series for area readers and writers to get together and convene with programs like poetry readings, the Yarn-Spinners club, a story-telling center, and the Word from the Basement series. There is the River City Writers Series at the University of Memphis as well as a similar writing series at Rhodes College, both featuring Pulitzer winning writers. The University of Memphis houses an MFA program, and Rhodes sponsors a well-known summer writer’s camp for high schoolers. Both programs publish literary journals, the University of Memphis on a national basis and the Rhodes on a smaller scale, but to much acclaim in academe.

Memphis magazine offers a $1,000 prize each year to the winner of its annual fiction contest. According to Marilyn Sadler who oversees the contest, there are few contests that offers that much. The winning story is published in the magazine.

On the air, Michelle Buckalew hosts The Book Gallery on AM 600 WREC’s station on Beale Street every week, interviewing writers from around the world. On the FM dial, 89.3, The Book Show broadcasts weekly with host Douglas Glover. On TV, the Library Channel (cable channel 18), supports three book shows: Talks with Authors, Library NewsLinc, with a library representative discussing new books available in the Memphis library system, and the “Channel 18 Spotlight,” a monthly interview with various area writers, as well as other artists. On the web at http://www.memphislibrary.lib.tn.us/, you can read book reviews for what is in the libraries or write your own.

Memphis also has a surprising and growing live literary presence in the form of the Poetry Slam, an event likened to “the Olympics” by Slam-Master John Hancock who runs the Memphis chapter of the nation-wide group with co-Slam-Master Benjamin “IQ” Sander. Once a month, there is an “official” Poetry Slam (usually at the Map Room) where 10-13 readers have three minutes and ten seconds to read their work. The five judges then judge the performances (half on the poem and half on the performance). According to the Poetry Slam’s website at www.memphispoetry.com/slam, “Any audience member who isn’t related or sleeping with a poet may judge.”

Last year, the Memphis Poetry Slam team went to a National Poetry Slam competition in Providence Rhode Island, and also a regional Slam in Birmingham, Alabama, where they placed third. Hancock and Sanders are also creating a non-profit organization tentatively called Word Play Ink which will support the Poetry Slam group. They also hope to work toward bringing poetry to the community on a wider basis with such events as Youth Poetry Slams.

Finally, there is the The Mid South Writers’ Association, started by Paul Flowers, an author, journalist, and columnist for the defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar. The group has grown from meetings in Flowers’ home to bimonthly gatherings at St. John’s Episcopal Church, located at Central and Greer. The group publishes Writers on the River, a bi-annual journal featuring the nonfiction, fiction, and poetry of Memphis writers.

So there are Memphis writers and locales and discussions. Big deal. Every city has its own writers. Language, as ubiquitous as it is, extends its grippy fingers to every walk of life and few communes escape. However, to say that a city has writers is not the same as saying that there is a writing community. And while common-sense accepts that writers are by their very nature loners, history accepts the best work of writers coming in groups. Think of Modernist salons or surrealist get-togethers. For those esoteric, think about the Dadaists.

But in the same way that literary writers and thinkers see the world as a big fragmented mess, Memphis writers do not get together too often for coffee. However, such a step would require a unique vibe running through the heart and work of the writers present. Do Memphis writers have a genre all their own?

The Memphis Voice

“When I read a Grisham,” says Rhodes writer-in-residence Marshall Boswell, “I look for landmarks. There’s a southern suburbia to Memphis; all those lawyers and judges. All those spots and landmarks like Silky O’Sullivans. It’s more about a region. It’s restaurants and barbeque. It’s Elvis.” Memphis writers also seem concerned with the city. Says U of M assistant professor, North Carolina native, and Rome de Prix winner Randall Kenan, “That’s a truism about Southern writers. We’re obsessed with place.”

“I’d say that Memphis writers are very steeped in the history of the city,” says Corey Mesler, owner of 125-year-old Burkes Bookstore, who just signed a book deal on his first novel. “In a way, they [Memphis writers] are very pro-Memphis.”

Going away from the printed page to the projected screen, Memphis screenwriter and filmmaker Craig Brewer says, “Storytelling is very important in the South in general. I think it was Peter Taylor who said, ÔWell, the South lost. That’s why there are good writers there.’”

Brewer says other Southern influences are in the writing as well. “Family history is very important, at least it is to my family,” he says. “You can’t help but when you’re in this city and in this location to know that people have a need and are connected to a history.”

But a sense of history and place does not add up to a sort of collective unconscious needed for unity. There has been no defining great Memphis novel. “I haven’t seen that captured,” says Boswell. “It’s under-appreciated and it’s not real flashy, so I think it’s going to take some carefully nuanced observation to get at it.”

Says Buckalew, “I would say that most of the local writers are just looking. They’re looking, I think, for a voice.”

“I don’t think that Memphis [writing] has a specific feel. I don’t think the Blues influences it or anything like that,” says Hancock. “What I do feel is that there are a lot of people in Memphis who think outside of the box more than people expect. They think a lot bigger than anyone else in the country would realize. All the artistic history that is here in the city breeds people to be artistic in one way or the other. A lot of that comes out in their writing.”

That voice can lead to untapped reserves of writing potential in the area’s students. Says Kenan about his students, “They have a lot of material. I think the sad thing is that they don’t realize how good it is. I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that their mundane, unexamined circumstance is just their niche. I can’t believe more people haven’t written more.”

“I think Memphis is fertile ground,” says Boswell, a native Memphian. “Tom Wolfe did his Atlanta book and figured the mainstream of the country is being generated from this part of the country. I think the South is the center of designing the culture right now.”

Try preaching that to Hollywood, who is currently at odds with Brewer over the location of his next movie. “That’s kind of the deal breaker right now,” Brewer says. “I go to these meetings at New Line Cinema and Universal and they’re like, ÔDoes it have to take place in Memphis?’ Well, yeah. It’s such a unique place.” Brewer’s recent success seems to prove his point. “You know what’s funny about Poor &Hungry,” Brewer wonders aloud, “I was so expecting that once I got past the Mississippi [River], no one would be interested because it was regional. It was quite the reverse. I think the South is one of the last mythological places in America. Too much has fertilized this soil.”

If the South is such “fertile” ground, not all writer’s feel enough people realize that. Says Hancock, on his experiences at national Poetry Slam tournaments, “On a National level, there’s a Northern stigma against the South in general. It’s difficult to convince people that we’re not just a bunch of illiterate hillbillies. So many people don’t appreciate their Southern literary heritage. They don’t realize how many great writers come from our area. It’s sad to see that when you go out and perform a piece that has nation-wide or world-wide appeal and it confounds an audience that doesn’t know what to expect from a city like Memphis.”

A Writer’s City?

Fine, so there are writers and at least some common vibes about which to write here in Memphis. But does that make Memphis a good city in which a writer can live? What makes it interesting for writers to work here? One major benefit is that Memphis is away from the center of the literary world such as the giant literary agencies and presses and even the smaller, independent scenes.

It is that separation that can be good for a writer’s life. “I’ve lived in literary towns and non-literary towns and this is one of the least literary towns I have been in,” Kenan says. “Which, for a writer, is wonderful because you aren’t sub-conscious about it. People aren’t rhapsodizing about the place from a literary standpoint.”

Barr thinks Memphis is a good place for her and her muse. “It’s been very good for my writing,” she says. “It’s allowed me to focus. It’s different if you are in New York and you are going to miss the Metropolitan Opera. It’s quiet [in Memphis], and that’s good for my work.”

Says Hancock, “I think it’s [Memphis Writing] more ‘salt of the Earth.’ With a lot of the writers in the city, I don’t feel synthetic words from these poets.”

Brewer says that the cacophony of peers can be deafening. “When I went out to L.A.,” he says, “I was there for a week. I realized on about Thursday of that week that my ideas began to get stupider. When you get so close to the industry, in my case the film industry, your thoughts begin to sound like everything else around you.”

However, Brewer, who does a good amount of his writing at the Deliberate Literate, also finds inspiration in Memphis’ peculiarities. “I remember coming back home and it was Dead Elvis Week,” he recalls. “I was glad I was back and I was that I live here.”

Part 2 of this article will appear in tomorrow’s On the Fly.

As it is in Larry Brown’s fiction, so be it in Larry Brown’s nonfiction: straight up. Language: straightforward; method: straight-shooting. He’s made that way his way in short stories and novels, in one work of nonfiction (On Fire), and again in nonfiction, now, in Billy Ray’s Farm (Algonquin), a new selection of previously published magazine articles, plus a closing essay titled super-economically “Shack.”

That “shack,” like the author’s writing, is simply put: a set of walls and roof Brown built with his own hands on his own land in Tula, Mississippi, where, if he wishes, he can watch the rain come down, maybe step outside and fish, maybe strum a guitar. Maybe write? Sometime, perhaps, when the tiny building is finally finished and when, as he describes elsewhere in these pages, he is: not on a book tour, not at the Enid Spillway “fish grab,” not at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, not aiming at coyotes, not rescuing goats, not wrestling with a “calfpuller” and mother heifer and unborn calf, and not remembering the kindnesses shown to him by personal hero Harry Crews and an unsung hero praised nonetheless by Flannery O’Connor, Madison Jones.

Brown met Jones in 1989. The occasion: Brown’s first literary conference. And it’s an occasion in Billy Ray’s Farm for Brown to state explicitly what Jones succeeded in doing and what Brown, implicitly, hopes himself to achieve in fiction: “a relentless forward drive of narrative”; “the ordinary things of life [witnessed] with great clarity, [the] weather and seasons and the land that lies around the characters”; “people … caught up in the events around them and swept forward … to the point where drastic actions can result.” In short, fiction populated by “people breathing and moving and acting on their own, as if this story was simply found somewhere, fully formed.” Better put, shorter still: to make something that “makes you forget that you’re reading.”

Needing, however, more than a cow’s prolapsed uterus in the way of “drastic action”? Conflict both internal and external, on a grand scale? People caught up in events and swept forward, even unto certain death? Something nowhere near the “ordinary” but “things,” the weather, the seasons, the land around people so caught, witnessed with great clarity? Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So (in paperback from Penguin) may be a story the author found fully formed when he first set foot in Sarajevo in 1993, but you’ll in no way forget you’re reading. You may in fact feel the urge to stop reading and throw up once inside this eyewitness reporter’s heroin-fed brain and inside his depiction of contemporary warfare, Balkans-style and centuries in the making.

That this author is still alive isn’t a matter of luck, it’s a matter of miracle. When he isn’t shooting up on return trips to London, he’s shooting (as cameraman) any number of atrocities and being shot at (as sitting duck) by any number of sides responsible for those atrocities in war-torn Bosnia.

Loyd’s employer was The Times of London, but Loyd’s outlook isn’t a seasoned newspaperman’s cool detachment. He knowingly, repeatedly, recklessly, suicidally (?) plants himself where the going gets tough and the tough (including innocents) get … what? In the way. Of bullets and bayonets and worse. Those bullets and bayonets, backed by bloodthirsty commanders backed by competing, insane nationalisms, this book does something to explain but in no way explains away. Better, as in the case of a kitten making off with a man’s spilled brains or as in the sight of a disoriented crone wielding a man’s severed leg, you, like Loyd, cast your feelings in the bin marked “horrible” and wait “until the night’s darkness paroles them into your dreams.” That a self-professed fuck-up as major as Anthony Loyd could pull himself together and graduate to writing this good must say something about A) the educational might of England or B) the survivor instinct inbred in Loyd from a host of military forefathers. The result either way: a dispatch from the nightmare also known as front-page news.

An altogether different, private, bloodless nightmare presents itself the second you so much as read a word of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods (Knopf), the private portion being the realization, despite education and reading, you don’t know squat. The least but immediate of the book’s virtues? It’s short. Meaning: a complete reread isn’t an option, it’s a given. The topic: nothing less than the foundation of Literature itself, with a capital L; man’s perception of the gods as real entities, interceding, wrecking, inspiring earthly affairs and stretching back to archaic Greece and antique Rome; the much earlier source of that interplay, the early Vedic verses and ritual practices of India; and the revolutionary reworking of individual consciousness that took place in 19th-century Germany and France, according to avant-garde theories of artistic creation, the very well-spring of modernism. Course requirements: a working knowledge (preferably in the original but translations, for wimps, provided) of Baudelaire, Heine, Helderlin, Lautreamont, Mallarme, Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Novalis, and never will you feel stupider than you will reading this book. Dig out from college your thinking cap and forget about forgetting you’re reading.

Taps

By Willie Morris

Houghton Mifflin, 338 pp., $26

Willie Morris died in 1999, which makes his novel Taps posthumous but not unfinished. His widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris, who oversaw every aspect of the manuscript’s preparation, who honored every change Morris indicated, has seen to that.

Taps took the author decades to write. Morris began toying with the idea of a fictional work based on his own experiences growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, as far back as the late 1960s, the same period (1967-71) he served as editor of Harper’s. When he returned to Mississippi in 1980 he returned in earnest to Taps, a labor of love obviously, a work to join My Dog Skip in popularity possibly.

The story is a year in the life of Swayze Barksdale (age 16), the season opener is early summer 1951 (with the Korean War at its height), the place is Fisk’s Landing (Yazoo City stand-in, pop. 10,184, staple of conversation: hearsay), and life there goes this way: divided — between hill country and flatland; between planters and plain folk; between blacks and whites; between the living and the dead; and between what these citizens, good or bad, show of themselves and what they don’t or can’t, which, in the book’s violent climax, makes for a matter of life and death. Heavy-duty? Sometimes yes, more times no. Heavy-handed? In spots.

“I began to see that everyone in the town seemed troubled,” young Swayze observes after perhaps observing more than most 16-year-olds in a town he goes on to describe as “a warehouse of tormented souls.” His object by the time he reaches college at Sewanee? To “remember with surging clarity how passionately I was trying to give a little sense and design to the things I had felt and learned and experienced.” It’s a tall order, but consider:

1) A fatherless boy on the brink of adulthood who “worries about everything,” who is “miserable in the very tributaries of [his] soul,” which prompts in or on him “a sturdy trace of paranoia — warts and rash and angst … dread of the open grave and the mother … perverse predilection for the Ricks Funeral Home … and along with all this a proclivity for the desolate, the insufferable, the troubling.”

2) A widowed, indomitable mother, a teacher of tap dance but with “aristocratic” forebears, who is “fraught with an inordinate propensity for intrusion,” a woman “obscurely troubled” and driven to search and research her son’s every move.

3) A girlfriend, Georgia: “spoiled, irreverent, unpredictable,” “stubbornly self-reliant and free,” source of Swayze’s joy, then sorrow.

4) The half father, half big brother to Swayze, Luke Cartwright: a man of “truncated queries and unembarrassed silences,” “half redneck and half coat-and-tie,” “iconoclastic,” “ironic,” a man who sensed “the essential malevolence of things and aberrant behavior and other people’s limitations.”

5) Rich boy Durley Godbold, whose limitation is being born the monster son of a “feudal grandee” of a father, his limit crossed when he learns of Cartwright’s affair with Godbold’s wife Amanda, “daughter of a failed yeoman turned small time entrepreneur” yet blessed with “an essence of honor” to go with her iron sense of self.

And 6) Potter Ricks, owner of the local funeral home, “a central figure in those days, the talisman and necromancer and conjurer of the tale, the sad, the gruesome, the funny,” “custodian of our past.” It is Ricks, along with Cartwright, who enlists trumpeters Swayze and his misanthropic friend Arch to play “Taps” for the town’s multiple war dead over the course of these 12 months.

If the prospect from Fisk’s Landing looks gloomy, Morris’ story, for the most part, is not. And yet, early on we learn this from Swayze: “The ornately polite and elaborate society of that old small town rewarded the child for keen observation and encouraged him to listen — a society of extremes with secrets not easily honored” and with some secrets apparently more honored than others.

Swayze’s mother Ella, for one, is a case of barely contained hysterics. Swayze observes her but cannot justify, much less comprehend, her bizarre actions. And Swayze’s father, “a tall man … of gentle countenance” who died when the boy was 10, figures even less prominently in Swayze’s recollections. Unless by the tap of Ella’s feet we’re to hear of a husband and father (the author’s own?) being secretly, repeatedly mourned.

JoAnne Prichard Morris will be reading from and signing copies of Taps at Burke’s Book Store tonight, Thursday, April 19th, from 5 to 7 p.m. For more info, call Burke’s at 278-7484.