OLEAN -- Reader Alert: As sometimes occurs in this space, following is a book review posing as a column. Another caveat: The review is about a collection of essays by a close friend. However, the friendship doesn't change the fact that Hal Crowther is one of the very best writers in America today.
His most recent book, "Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South" (Louisiana State University Press, $26.95), is filled with saucy wisdom, erudite observations, plentiful gobbets of historical information, little shards of the author's soul, and sentences so trenchant and precise in style that you want to keep a notepad nearby to write some of them down.
Crowther estimates he's lived about three-quarters of his life in the South. Significant portions of the rest of it have been spent in Western New York.
He and I started work at the Buffalo Evening News on the same day 35 years ago, he as a media critic. I was a general assignment reporter. He had previously written and edited for "Time" and "Newsweek," and it soon became evident to me this was probably one of the most invigorating, iconoclastic, colorful and independent thinkers I was likely to meet in my life. This expectation proved true. If one hung out with Crowther, one had odd adventures.
One night, after an evening of shared roistering, I invited Crowther to sleep it off in the 19th-century farmhouse I owned on Pletcher Road in Lewiston. The warm old place (later a bed-and-breakfast inn) featured one of those angled stairwells with a spacious landing about halfway up. We tiptoed in without lights, so as not to alarm the family in such wee hours -- a futile endeavor, it turns out. I went on ahead to my bedroom, using a back staircase, and soon heard the loudest ruckus in the eight years I lived there.
Part of the noise was the roaring and barking of Hannibal, the usually affable Great Dane I owned at the time, but he was ensconced in the kitchen near the huge fireplace that graced that room. The clanking, bumping, scraping, huffing and swearing was coming from halfway up the main staircase.
The house occupants were roused, the lights turned on, and the source of the clamor made apparent -- Crowther had gone two rounds with the serpentine hoses, clunky canister and metal attachments of a Hoover vacuum improperly stowed on the landing, smack in his way. He thought it was the dog, he explained. Crowther seemed a bit more damaged than the Hoover, but insisted he had won on points. Hal apparently was quite a handful, even as a child.
In one of the new book's best essays, "Mencken and Me," he describes himself as "precocious"and "obnoxious" in Methodist Sunday school: "I asked the hardest questions of the dumbest teachers -- for instance, 'Why should I love my enemies if God sends his to hell?' -- and was widely identified as God's enemy before I was nine years old."
Crowther is no enemy of God, and the smart-alecky posture in matters of intellect was probably genetic. A few more sentences into the Mencken essay, Crowther tells of his father's four-martini boast that there were five men in the world, no more, "who clearly surpassed him in intellectual agility." This prompted Hal's younger brother -- "himself no slacker in the satirical arts" -- to start introducing the father to his and Hal's friends "as the Sixth Smartest Man in the World."
But I'm giving the wrong picture of my writer friend. He's actually quite modest and humble -- until it comes time to rip into the perpetrators of various unfair idiocies, modern moronic decisions and blatant wrongs so myriad in our present world.
Another reviewer of his work, Tommy Tomlinson of the Charlotte Observer, accurately wrote that "you get the feeling Crowther is happiest with a straight razor in his hand. Don't get him mad. The boy will cut you."
Comparisons with the late, great Bard of Baltimore, the slice-and-dice essayist H.L. Mencken -- whose name is on one of the prestigious writing awards Crowther has won -- are inevitable.
The Mencken book was presented to him by his grandfather. Crowther is often compared to Mencken by book reviewers. In his "Mencken and Me" essay, Crowther sees the parallel:
"God knows Mencken was belligerent, even warlike in his popular persona, but he and I were among those who know almost from infancy that our anger will be expressed with the pen, not the sword."
Crowther, like Mencken, is politically incorrect by instinct and design, railing routinely against the "elaborate, infuriating systems of rhetorical taboos" that so plague thought, learning and informed opinion today. Crowther notes in his essay that in Mencken's time "outrageous exchanges between clever people were considered good sport, not grounds for public demonstrations and emergency legislation."
Mencken is generally depicted (somewhat erroneously) as conservative in his political views, while Crowther deplores the current crop of bossy right-wingers.
But Crowther -- five years ago in an interview with the independent Southern magazine "The Wag" -- bowed to Mencken for his standard of writing: "What I got from Mencken is the theory that if it isn't entertaining, if it doesn't challenge and engage the reader, if it doesn't push him in the chest a little bit and make him sit up, then he's not going to finish it. An essay is short enough so that a reader should be engaged and excited all the way through." Exactly so.
Crowther, though a transplant, is very respected (and sometimes honored) in the South -- perhaps because he understands that region's exquisite sense of place, and its appreciation of, and reliance upon, storytelling. In the same "Wag" interview, he commented on this aspect of Southern culture:
"The narrative voice is something most Southerners grow up with. Maybe it's just the length of time they spent in the hot weather, not moving too much, long before television and air conditioning, trying to amuse themselves out there with their fans and so on. I'm not sure how it came about -- porches, I think."
Porches? Crowther explains: "You think of the porch as associated with the South. You can go through communities in other parts of the country sometimes for hours without seeing anyone sitting on a porch."
My experience in the South tells me Crowther is onto something with this assertion. I've lived about half my adult life in the states of the old Confederacy (Virginia, Florida, Arkansas), and the stories and conversations -- yes, sometimes rendered on a porch -- were usually much richer and substantive than those offered in my native New York.
Maybe it's the weather.
Native Southerners certainly have a more pronounced sense of place than homogeneous denizens of the Union states. I've actually had the experience -- more than once during the three years I lived and worked in Arkansas -- of being on the road for business, or newspaper conferences, or recruiting, or covering stories in some nearby state, and answering a knock on the motel room door.
A polite couple would typically be there. One of them would speak: "Oh, sir, pardon us for the interruption, but we saw the license plate on your car in front of this door, and we're from Arkansas, too. We were born in Conway. How about you?"
The reply -- "uh, North Little Rock" -- would inevitably lead to friendly questions of "Do you know the (Smiths, Joneses, McCords, etc.)?" and a genial discussion about food, weather, politicians, fishing, Wal-Mart, the Razorbacks, whatever. This never happened to me in other states.
Crowther, in his collection of essays, covers a long list of such charming idiosyncrasies and Southern behaviors. What I like best is his celebration of the lack of pretension in the South. What you see is what you get. I found people there -- at least the folks who were born there and grew up there -- universally straightforward and direct. It was most refreshing. And Crowther can blow up pretension in very few words.
In one essay, he asks, "What makes the South southern?"and relies upon English professor Jerry Leath Mills of the University of North Carolina for the answer. At one fancy literary symposium, Crowther reports, the good Professor Mills "dismissed a cartload of leaden theory with the results of his own extensive research."
The key observation, according to the professor: "There is indeed a single, simple, litmus-like test for the quality of Southerness in literature. ... The test is: Is there a dead mule in it?"
Indeed, in one of the celebrated Cormac McCarthy's novels ("Blood Meridian"), the professor found 59 mule fatalities, and from the works of several dozen Southern authors, Crowther reports, "Mills exhumed two hundred dead mules."
Northerners would probably get cheesed off at this revelation about their books and articles. The reaction in the South? Someone quickly after the symposium opened a successful saloon in Chapel Hill and named it the Dead Mule Club.
"Gather at the River" is full of such stuff. If you want to know more about the real South, read it. If you want to read Crowther monthly, subscribe to the excellent "Oxford American" magazine, which Mississippi novelist John Grisham helped establish, and which now is headquartered in Little Rock. Crowther's column on Southern letters and culture is called "Dealer's Choice."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Jan. 31 2006 |