This volume, a finalist last year for the National Book Award for critical writing, is a collection of essays previously published in several publications. All are concerned with Southern culture in one way or another, and although a reader may not agree with all of Crowther's positions, he is always a writer to be taken seriously.
By Don Noble
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Hal Crowther's biographical tagline for the last twenty-four years has included the sentence, "Crowther is married to the novelist Lee Smith." As wonderful a writer as Lee Smith, formerly a reporter for the Tuscaloosa News, is, Hal is her equal in nonfiction.
This volume, a finalist last year for the National Book Award for critical writing, is a collection of essays, first published mainly in The Oxford American but also in the New York Times, Southern Exposure, and several other periodicals. All are concerned with Southern culture in one way or another, and although a reader may not agree with all of Crowther's positions, he is always a writer to be taken seriously.
Hal Crowther is an expert on the South, but not a polemicist. In one essay he will excoriate politicians such as Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott. Of Helms he writes, "He represented segregation, regression, repression, homophobia, McCarthyism, mill bosses, and big tobacco. . . His office was the North American consulate for the fascist dictators and death squads of Latin America."
But when Senator Lott got carried away with his praise for Strom Thurmond on the occasion of Thurmond's retirement, Crowther agrees that the skies turned "black with the circling buzzards of the necrophagic press"-vultures, that is, eaters of dead meat, which is what Sen. Lott was after his own Republican party turned on him.
Crowther can be tough on the South, but entirely understands that this region is still woefully misunderstood by Yankees, who are all too willing to believe the South is composed of "incestuous hillbillies, church-burners, mule-beaters, and randy evangelists." Crowther does in fact understand the more praiseworthy sentiments behind wanting to fly the stars and bars. I do not agree, however, that the citizens of North Carolina reelected Jesse Helms out of spite, to throw "the Eastern media into apoplexy."
Crowther is fully aware of the complexity of Southern culture and is pretty clear about outsiders analyzing it. "Never tell the South you understand it better than it understands itself. Like Brer Rabbit, it may outlast and outfox you."
While solidly anti-Republican, anti-Iraq War, anti-midless plutocrats, anti-greedy developers and gated communities, Crowther's book also contains a number of profiles of Southern artists and writers of different kinds, some familiar, some not. Crowther reveres the work of Wendell Berry and Elizabeth Spencer, admires the wily Dolly Parton immensely, and is delighted that the novelist Denise Giardiana is running for governor of West Virginia.
Crowther praises the music of banjo man Tommy Thompson, writes of how he loves the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, especially its soundtrack, and delivers a strong eulogy for the Appalachian writer James Still. Still, like Faulkner, is a writer rooted in place, and Crowther disagrees strongly with John Barth's assertion that the writer's imagination is his vital asset, not the earth beneath his feet.
There are other eulogies: a moving piece about his old friend Kirk Varnadoe of Savannah, who rose to be curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, perhaps the most influential position in the art world, and one for Marshall Frady, Southern biographer, whose subjects included George Wallace, whom Frady described as "the greatest of the American demagogues," but personally "curiously vague and weightless," with "a childlike naivete."
There may come a day when one should stop castigating the racist dragons Helms and Wallace, but that day is not yet here. And Crowther takes a moment to push the stake a little farther into the heart of literary critical theory. Crowther tells of Professor Franco Moretti, who has gone beyond text-free scholarship--that is, students will not read books, only about them--to a new, even loonier position: the project of the future should be to count and catalogue all the books since Gutenberg. My, that sounds lively and enriching.
Don Noble's book reviews can be heard each Monday on Alabama Public Radio at 7:35 a.m. and 4:44 p.m. Recently retired as English professor at The University of Alabama, Don's specialties are Southern and American literature. Don also hosts Bookmark on Alabama Public Television.
