Part of my job in the world is the reading of manuscripts, chiefly by new authors. I go through hundreds every week. Boston produces better writing than the far West. Los Angeles leads the whole country in quantity; Kansas and Oklahoma are producing capital poets; they tremble on the verge of literature. Chicago leads them all in ideas, originality, and vigor; it is the great hatching place of American letters. But the South? The South is an almost complete blank. I don’t see one printable manuscript from down there a week. And in my more than three years of steady reading the two Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Tennessee have not offered six taken together.
— H.L. Mencken “The Sahara of the Bozart” New York Evening Mail November 13, 1917
H.L. Mencken was almost a Southerner too. The Maryland native wrote this scathing opinion piece about the South and its “postbellum nothingness.” His theory was that the South had become devoid of artistic integrity or output. Read as an acidic Jonathan Swift-ian satire or not, it was an honest opinion from his perspective. Now a hundred years later, while we are not certain what poets Kansas produced (In deference to the state and not to be Mencken-esque, we will guess and recommend Eugene Fitch Ware a/k/a Ironquil, Willard Wattles (“Sunflowers” 1914), and Edgar Lee Masters (“Spoon River Anthology” 1915)), Mississippi and the South quickly propelled their product to the head of the class.
As we mentioned last week, Vanderbilt's “Fugitive Poets” laid the groundwork for a Southern Renaissance. Despite their retreat into the old, tired, backward ways later on as “Agrarians,” they laid a foundation that poets from the South were actually schooled in the works of antiquity and still highly capable of providing the perspective on both what was right and wrong with the so-called New South.
A key facet of pushing the importance of Southern writers in the 1920s was actually the Harlem Renaissance (as discussed here in February) as former Southerners like Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston were finally able to let their voices be heard in the cultural revolution surrounding the first great migration North. One of the first true African-American works to widen the lens on life in the American South was former schoolteacher Jean Toomer's meditative 1923 work “Cane.” Toomer's realism and a mixture of styles and voices would provide literature in general with a new experimental structure for the novel.
In Oxford, William Faulkner returned from WWI to become a poet. Dubbed “Count von No Count” by friends and neighbors, the early years in pursuance of this goal were arduous. After having a pair of poems published, Faulkner shifted to writing prose. On his fourth novel and facing still more rejection, 1929 was the year that finally brought his talent to light with “The Sound And The Fury.” Its time shifts and varying points of view were completely new to Literature. Its success fueled Faulkner to write his next classic “As I Lay Dying.”
In neighboring Alabama, a pair of tumultuous childhoods received the emotional earthquakes that would lead to future success and further advancement of the genre. In 1929, 13-year-old Walker Percy's father committed suicide, the second of three in his immediate family. By the next year, Percy would live in Greenville, where he and his new friend Shelby Foote would begin to follow their shared interest in writing. In Monroeville, AL, after years of surviving his parents' divorce and its toll, Truman Capote would finally find a home with his beloved Aunt Sook - a continuing influence in his most autobiographical writings.
Women began to make great strides in Southern Lit in 1929. Virginian Ellen Glasgow, best known for her “escapist” novels, would be among the first to chart a course for female independence in print with her novel “The Sheltered Life.” Born in Kentucky and married to Fugitive Poet Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon moved to Tennessee, where she began writing her first novel and a separate career of welcoming the greatest writers to the South (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and even T.S.Eliot) and nurturing new talents like Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. Also in 1929, Eudora Welty left her home in Jackson to study to be a secretary in New York City. Her master plan: secretary by day, short-story writer at night.
Finally, the breakthrough work of 1929 was the first novel by North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe. Published just eleven days before the Black Monday stock market crash, “Look Homeward, Angel” combined autobiography with fiction. Wolfe retold all of the stories of his childhood through the family, friends, and boarders at the Dixieland boarding house in Altamont. After a try at playwriting, Wolfe began working in earnest on this novel in 1926. Taking it to the publisher Scribner, it originally clocked it at a mammoth 1,100 pages. Unlike a lot of the other works in its time, Wolfe honestly discussed alcoholism, racism, familial rifts, mental health, and even loneliness. A huge success, the accuracy of “Look Homeward, Angel” was questioned by his hometown of Asheville. Despite most of the forty chapters being about Wolfe's father and mother, he still stayed away from his boyhood home until the late Thirties. Wolfe's work was championed by none other than William Faulkner, who called him “one of the ablest writers of the generation.”
The young Fugitive Poets openly challenged Mencken. Those who followed in their wake did their best to disprove his theory. Ironically, by the early 1930s, Mencken cared no more for the South. As Southerners do, the South simply tipped its hat and cared no more for him as well.
“Culture is the study of perfection, and the constant effort to achieve it.”
— Allen Tate
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
New This Week
TYLER CHILDERS - Can I Take My Hounds To Heaven? [3LP/3CD](Hickman Holler/RCA)
In his most ambitious statement yet, Tyler Childers and his band The Food Stamps have recorded their first Gospel album which is split into three albums each containing different versions of the same songs. "Angel Band" in its Jubilee version sounds like an outtake from "The Last Waltz" with everyone reaching as high as they can and Childers' submitting a new verse. The Hallelujah version is Childers and The Food Stamps recorded live to tape with no real additions. Still to come, is one more version of the "Joyful Noise" incarnation.
FREDDIE GIBBS - $oul $old $eparately [CD](Warner)
Pushing twenty years in Hip-Hop, Gibbs shows no wear and tear on his latest where he fires verses at an almost rapid-fire clip. A Grammy nominee and longtime rhymer with no real commercial respect (his 2014 collaboration with Madlib on "Pinata" remains one of the best Hip-Hop albums of the 21st Century,) Gibbs rolls deep with Big Sean, Hit-Boy, Schoolboy Q and a single with Moneybagg Yo that samples DeBarge's "All This Love" over synth bounces and rhymes that put all that mumble rap to shame. Limited copies of "$oul $old $eparately" come with an autographed CD sleeve.
SLIPKNOT - The End, So Far [LP/CD](Roadrunner/Elektra)
Self-described as a heavier version of 2004's "Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses," Slipknot mourns the loss of original drummer Joey Jordison ("The Dying Song (Time To Sing)") and tracks that sound similar to "We Are Not Your Kind." "Yen" has the kind of chorus that makes Active Rock station salivate thanks to its guitar slink and turntable scratching. However, it still feels very out of place next to the vulgar, hazy blast of their past that is the brutal "The Chapeltown Rag." Come Friday, we will see how the whole image comes together. After all the best Slipknot albums (namely "Iowa") are all about maintaining that momentum as the band descends into the abyss.
OFF! - FREE LSD [LP/CD](Fat Possum/The Orchard)
When music critics look back on this iteration of the blistering Punk movement, its true antecedent is the throat-clearing blasts of this all-star band. Like their 2010 classic "First Four EPs," Messrs Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks,) Coats (Burning Brides,) new bassist Autry Fulbright II (And You Will Know Us By Trail of Dead), and the phenomenal new drummer Justin Brown (Thundercat, Flying Lotus, and Herbie Hancock) with help from Bad Religion's Hetson actually chart untouched territory on this fearsome, fast, battering ram of anger and frustration. "War Above Los Angeles" slingshots through its changes with thunderous guitar descents, 150mph drum fills, and an apocalyptic finish. "Kill To Be Heard" is even more dramatic with a mixture of barreling riffs and driving old-school LA Punk played at light speed. Faster yet more precise with elements of Free Jazz and Science Fiction interspersed, OFF! is definitely ON.
YEAH YEAH YEAHS - Cool It Down [LP/CD](Dress Up/Secretly/AMPED)
Back with their first album in almost a decade, Yeah Yeah Yeahs spring their now-glossy NYC Art Pop on a generation that embraced their "Maps" as a standard. In its place, Karen O. duets with Perfume Genius on the mysterious but enlightened synth-pulsed power ballad "Spitting Off The Edge of The World." While 'Burning" insures that the one art-damage almost skronky group has evolved into a band that can incorporate dance beats, strings, and raw emotion into an album that is futuristic and commercial.
