In search of the Southern word

Will the South as a culture survive? More specifically, will readers a hundred years from now still identify certain contemporary writers as “Southern?”

The first question is too large to ponder here. It is safe to say, however, that in the last 60 years the American South has undergone a massive transformation. Segregation is a fading memory. Cities continue to grow. Mass media has leveled some of the differences between the South and the rest of the country. The fried chicken and mashed potatoes of the Eisenhower era have made room for Pad Thai and guacamole. 

Yet differences remain. The “grits” line between North and South still exists. There are still plenty of good old boys who hunt and fish and listen to country music. There are churches where one can find dinner on the grounds. And anyone with a car can still experience that wonderful feeling of flying along a country road in the summer at night with the windows open and the music blaring and the scent of honeysuckle and dew filling the air like the sweetest perfume on earth. 

We can only see dimly into time, and prognostication is often a losing game, but it is safe to say that if the South does retain some of its identity as a region, then there will be Southern writers.

Certainly the literature that the South has already given to the world will act as a bulwark preserving both the South and Southern literature. Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Maya Angelou, Margaret Mitchell: these and many other writers continue to influence our own contemporaries, authors like Pat Conroy, Fred Chappell, Charles Frazier, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker.

In “A Visitor’s Guide to the Literary South,” Trish Foxwell takes her readers on a wonderful tour of the homes and towns inhabited by some of our region’s finest authors. She has arranged her book alphabetically by state and city, and then proceeds to give thumbnail sketches of the authors who lived in these places and descriptions of their homes and any memorials raised to them by their fellow citizens. She also includes other nearby places of interest and even recommends various historical lodgings and restaurants.

One feature that marks this book as special are the enthusiastic tidbits of information Foxwell shares regarding both the authors she has selected and their homes. Many who live in Western North Carolina, for example, have read Thomas Wolfe’s novels and visited his home and his grave in Riverside Cemetery. Foxwell provides an unfamiliar snippet of a letter Wolfe wrote to his sister Mabel about their brother’s death: “I think the Asheville I knew died for me when Ben died.” 

Though Foxwell focuses on the region’s indigenous writers, she doesn’t neglect those who settled or visited there. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who stayed in the Asheville area off and on for long periods of time while his wife Zelda sought treatment for her mental illness at Highlands Hospital, selected rooms 441-443 at the Grove Park Inn because the nearby stairs allowed him to avoid the public and because he could watch guests arriving and departing from his window. Foxwell takes us to Hemingway’s home in Key West, with its limestone exterior and swimming pool around which there still live descendants of Papa’s six-toed cats and to the Casa Marina, the grand old hotel Henry Flagler built where Hemingway often showed up in sandals and shorts for lunch.

“A Visitor’s Guide to the Literary South” also reintroduces authors who may be less known to contemporary readers. Robert Ruark from Southport, N.C., was a best-selling novelist in the 1950s, but the books that secured his reputation were the two reminiscences he wrote about his boyhood. Like Hemingway, Ruark loved the outdoors and traveled the globe, but it was his descriptions of his own backyard that proved his most lasting work. Foxwell cites Ruark’s “The Old Man and the Boy:”

“If you are a very small boy, being close to the water makes the summer a marvelous thing. There is something of the kiss of the sun on dancing little waves, fresh salt breeze in your face and sun on your head, the taste of salt fresh on your lips. It was like that this day when the Old Man taught me to use the cast net and all the fish were hungry for the little gray shrimp we had caught on the edges of steaming marshes.”

In these words, Ruark captured the South—or at least a small part of it. Foxwell’s wonderfully written and well-organized book should be appreciated by all readers who love literature, traveling, and the South. She has, as some people say here, “done us proud.”