June 2015 – Snopes

Goat Song and Horse Opera

R.T. Smith

The prospect of a Greek tragedy set in the nineteenth century American West appealed to me at first, even if the play in question were Sophokles’ unpopular Women of Trachis. I’m a fan of both westerns and what Flannery O’Connor (referring to her own work) called “large and startling figures,” which also populate the plays of Fifth Century B.C. Athens, and I could well imagine how the essential elements of the dramas (caveat lector: I’m a long way from an expert) might be preserved, even if the circumstances and means of expression were transformed, spun, subverted.

The translation in question is Keyne Cheshire’s Murder at Jagged Rock (The Word Works, 2015), a rendition of the story of Herakles’ demise at the hands of his jealous wife, who actually intends to resurrect his passion for her with a garment charmed by the blood of the centaur Nessus, who wishes to have revenge on Herakles and, knowing his hydra-tainted transfusion is toxic, lies to the young Deianira and claims he’s doing her a favor. But before the fatal poncho episode, the story of Herk’s destruction of the town of Selgun (the translation’s full of word play like this) to grab the lovely Violet Fatts (no kidding) has to come out, followed by speculation, windy messengers, hand-wringing worry, righteous indignation and choral odes that aren’t quite yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay must unfold.

Meanwhile back at the ranch. I was disappointed by MaJR for several reasons, and it all began with the translator’s and editor’s prefaces. The form of the original configuration is pretty much retained, and the translation is pretty much line-by-line. But there’s also an unsettling literalness of vision in Cheshire’s project which is consigned to the category of “experiment” from Deanna’s opening speech. The tragedies of Sophokles’ era depend for their emotional impact upon a belief in the ritual of the goat song, or tragedy, which may have received its genre name from sacrifice or from the dedication of the theatrical mode to Dionysus, who tends to keep company with Pan, satyrs, other bucolic wine aficionados. It’s all a religious ritual, with appropriate ceremonial atmosphere (spectacle of dance, music, costume, scene), and since that element won’t translate effectively to a western vehicle, I think the attempt to follow the form is a mistake. Better to let the original text cast a strong and guiding shadow over a carefully told and vaguely similar story, wrought with bold originality. But that wouldn’t have actually been a “translation,” so I think the original miscalculation really limits the enterprise, or my eccentric appetite limits my willingness to suspend belief.

But a translation that’s an exercise in superimposing one culture over another is not necessarily a mistake. I think the other source of my objection, however, is more serious. Both editor and translator claim this version takes place in “the Wild West.” Trouble is, there’s no such place. There’s the Sedalia Trail and Abilene, Santa Fe and Denver, the Missouri Breaks and the Badlands. There’s even Medicine Bow (“When you call me that, smile!”) And there’s the 1840’s, 1870’s, 1890’s, or more to the point: just east of Durango in the fall of 1877. And the people who live in these places and these times speak – according to their class, ethnicity, education, age, profession, gender and so on – in specific and identifiable ways. When fictional or historical versions of them appear on the page, the degree to which they echo that speech plays an important role in both authenticity and a unity Aristotle doesn’t give much ink to.

In her editor’s introduction, Barbara Greenberg says that the characters of Murder at Jagged Rock speak “stylized cowboy lingo,” but anyone who’s read newspapers and letters from the nineteenth century has to be a little puzzled by this term. What we get on the page is, in fact, closer to what the script writers for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show would have contrived for ticket-buying eastern and European dudes, a language which ignores the entire notion of dialect – vocabulary, metaphors, syntax, inflection, rhythm – and substitutes for it grammatical errors, phonetic spellings of hickish pronunciation, the whole arsenal of homogenized errors meant to establish authentic ignorance, or draw a guffaw. The result here is closer to SNL than Roughing It or even an episode of Rawhide from the Sixties.

Why does this matter to me, given the Jamesian rule of the “given”? The story of Deianira’s apprehension and suffering and Herakles’s folly and destruction is serious, though not without room for some mischief. Any story unfolding through Cheshire’s vaudevillian “stylized cowboy lingo” is going to elicit less empathy (and catharsis) than amusement and irritation. The translation has been performed, and the translator writes “the crowd was soon swept up in the story.” I won’t question his word, but I suspect that the dramatic trappings of live theater, a home crowd and a string band made crucial contributions. And to give him credit, Cheshire admits that “the Wild West has its hokey side,” but Jagged Rock has far more hoke than grit, spit, sweat, dust, hash and real slang.

But I’ve gotten to this point on thin ice, without citing examples of the troubling passages, which abound. In fact, the problem is compounded when a single speech by one character features language which has the force and dignity we associate with Sophokles, accompanied by the stylized palaver. In one choral ode the Girls of Jagged Rock say, with poignancy and antique gravity, “Broken, she sees only hell,” but on the next page offer, “We’s a-telling you,/ that ain’t the thing to do.”

It’s not impossible to swallow a slave or stranger saying, “You ain’t heard the truth of none of what you ought to./Now I – I’s got full knowledge of it all, I does!” However, when the wife (based on a queen in the original) of the hero says, “I won’t be pilin’ no more/ trouble top the pain she’s got already. Reckon/ she’s had enough,” it does stick in my craw.
The play contains some attempts at period diction, as when the chorus chants that “Aphrodite played the empire,” but even that seems off key to me.

If my objections seem unduly harsh, the source is my love for the music and poetry of the many strands of vernacular available for writers to explore. I also appreciate a writer’s willingness to do research in linguistic matters and to employ with some consistency and craft the levels of diction and range of trope he chooses. Not that I want Sut Lovingood’s speech, which is twisted as sweetgum grain and attempts to duplicate non-standard pronunciation, turns of phrase and butchered grammar until the reader stops laughing and cries for mercy. What I miss in MaJR is, rather, what Twain recommends, that the writer employ enough of the tongue of actual people to render on the page the impression of the dialect. A version of Women of Trachis that capitalized on an opportunity to convey ancient Greek sentiments in the argot of some genuine time and place in the West may have found in me an enthusiastic advocate. Jagged Rock, for all its admirable intentions, did not.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

A Shot Across the Bow: WE WERE BROTHERS is a memoir worth reading.

R.T. Smith

Anyone unfamiliar with Barry Moser’s art ought to summon him up on Google before reading this and just gawk at his wonderful prints and drawings of Dickinson, Poe, Quixote, Hawthorne, Faulkner, scenes Biblical and mythic, Alice, animals, birds. It’s an impressive body of work, would be even without his illustrations for great books by Dante, Melville, Carroll, which are formidable. He works in a mode reminiscent of Leonard Baskin but is alternately fierce and calm, elegant and grotesque in his own way. His balance of gravity and grace will long outlive both today’s commercial fine art of the NYC scene and the sly graphic play practiced by so many with the tools for perceiving and rendering, but not the heart and spirit for bringing light. No matter how closely he works with texts, “illustration” is too modest a word for his craft and the resulting work.

But We Were Brothers is not primarily about art, though the story of any artist’s life is bound to feature reminiscences of learning the craft and seeking graphic expression without video games or pyrotechnic movies in mind. This memoir, forthcoming from Algonquin in the fall, is one of the two satisfying volumes I’ve read this month from a genre that usually leaves me cold. Reluctant to indulge in the sentimental or the standard moonlight and magnolias of its place and time, We Were Brothers still warms me with a flame born of friction and fed on candor.

We Were Brothers does not attempt to explore Moser’s laudable career as a professional artist or to catalogue either an artsy tendency toward glamorous misbehavior or a hive of secrets about transgression and rescue. It’s not quite 200 pages long and tells just enough of the story of the boyhoods of the author and his bother Tommy, two nearly incompatible peas from the same pod. Southern (Chattanooga), not affluent, temperamental, these two misfits scrapped and snarled at each other for years, though the younger Barry usually wound up on the short end.

Who was Mother’s favorite? Who was Dad’s? Stepdad’s? Where did the money come from and go? Why a military school for two so unsuited for regimentation? And twisting through the entire introspective story is the question of black and white, how two of the same blood developed such radically opposed attitudes toward African-American strangers, a black playmate or, more importantly, their mother’s elegant and steely black friend and neighbor, Vernetta Gholston.

Black and white. Ink and paper. These became the primary colors of Moser’s palette, and his nearly-photographic drawings of family, places and planes punctuate the narrative, along with vivid sketches in words, which imprint on a reader’s memory and imagination. Just two examples. As a child in Will Haggard’s grocery, Vernetta weeps when she’s told that she can’t accompany her white playmates to the picture show. Then she runs to the flour barrel and thrusts her face in, emerging dusty white but unsuccessfully disguised. “Now can I go? Now can I go?” she pleads. That scene will stay with most readers, as will the unembellished account of a burning B-25 Mitchell streaking across the American sky, it’s crew bailing out as it lost altitude. The pilot’s chute failed to open, and he plummeted to the schoolyard, as the engine smashed through a house “bounced ten feet into the air, and then rolled smoking into the street.” The prose is spare, and Moser doesn’t spend much time explaining the impression this knowledge and sight of the swath left by the craft left on the boys and the community. But the reader gets it right at the core.

Roosters and TV, segregation and white Jesus, dogs and scuffles, plus ridicule (of Barry for his awkwardness and chubbiness, of Tommy for his eye problems and recklessness) permeate this chronicle of boyhood, but Moser makes certain readers understand that he was raised to be a racist and took some time to realize that his inherited view was unwise, unhealthy and unkind. The sibling rivalry is not unusual for two boys in a household, but the rift about race that amplified their estrangement gives the narrative a torque, underscores and taints many accounts of play, work, family misfortune and petty disputes.

How did the author begin to see the light? What were the benchmarks in this clash of world views as the pair grew older? Like a stone skipping across a still lake, the narrative touches still water, then rises again. Moser’s approach is a chronological sampling, gathering momentum rather than spending it, but headed for a surprising exchange of letters that brings two voices to life, cuts to the quick and, painfully, recalls what brotherhood is all about and how painful is the road to understanding.

What most attracted my empathy and seized my imagination in We Were Brothers is the way Moser achieves admissions of his own shortcomings without falling into a standard confessional mode. He sees himself as neither hero nor victim and recounts even horrifying lapses of humanity with more than a tincture of forgiveness. It’s a good story, as simple and complicated as most people’s lives, and Moser inspires confidence and teaches the lessons that he has learned without assuming the podium or the stage. He can do this partly because of his devotion to the atmosphere and the personalities of those around him, and there are times when you can feel the crackling heat and the mist off the river, see the “blizzard of blue and white feathers” that is a shotgunned jay. Overall, Moser has rendered a compassionate view of a passing world, mysterious and complicated as the South we know from the fiction of Welty or the photographs and constructions of William Christenberry.

Facsimile: The Flannery O’Connor Stamp

R.T. Smith

I was disappointed when the U.S. Postal Service recently unveiled its new Flannery O’Connor stamp, which slightly resembles one extant photo of Ms. O’Connor as a co-ed but would not be recognizable to many people who are familiar with the most prevalent, and representative, photographs of her as an adult artist. Lawrence Downes in The New York Times has likened the stamp image to Betty Crocker, and Joyce Carol Oates Tweeted that the artist who painted the portrait which was digitalized for the stamp not only could never have seen a photo of Ms. O’Connor, but must, also, have never read a word the Georgia author wrote. I’m not sure I’m convinced of that, but this is certainly a missed opportunity to “put a face on” many of the most piercing and sadly humorous American short stories, certainly a dozen of my favorite pieces, genre aside, in world literature. Below are the stamp itself, the closest FOC image to the stamp and a photo from the series by Joe McTyre, one of many in which he saw her spirit:

The picture which artist Sam Weber may have been working from was taken while O’Connor was a student at Georgia State College for Women, though the pearls may have been imported from one of the 1962 photographs taken at Andalusia by Atlanta Journal-Constitution photographer Joe McTyre. My favorite shot (McTyre’s favorite showed her sitting under a self-portrait with a partridge) displays her on that day (during the warm half of the year, if I read the vegetation correctly) seated in the parlor, smiling, somewhat scholarly in those signature cat-eye glasses, not looking frail at all, her crutches out of sight and an open book on her lap. I’m a little conflicted on the matter of the crutches, as they’re not necessary for a photo of a seated person, nor should this occasion be an opportunity to make a point about physical disabilities. Or should it? I’m of two minds. O’Connor was stricken by disease, smitten by the love of her God and beloved of the muse and whatever other dieties confer a capacity for sweat and vision. However tempting it is to focus on her process, her domestic circumstances, her struggle and personal steel, the real point is the work, which I think would be more effectively celebrated by an image of the writer during the time she was crafting it. Crafting it almost every morning, I might add, from just after mass till lunch at the Sanford House Tea Room (often shrimp and peppermint pie).

Once lupus struck the young Flannery’s immune system, it damaged her body, her features, her stamina. The marvel is that it did not decrease her sense of mischief, theological seriousness, cultural understanding, caustic wit, originality of metaphor, allegorical logic, fierce discipline, compassion and instinct for the right words to “draw in large and startling figures for the blind.”

What I see in the portrait on the stamp is a more ordinary face, an unworldly young woman of the early fifties, somewhat blithe, the remarkableness of the heart and imagination not yet much in evidence in the eyes as she sits for a school picture (though the stamp artist has added some years, I think). I don’t really see the early signs of her vulnerability or her strength, which together with action and humor constitute character. Her Communion Day photo of 1932 reveals more grit and mischief in those windows to the soul than the co-ed shot.

But this is a tempest in a teapot, and I don’t think the trickster, cartoonist and satirist Mary Flannery O’Connor would have been very interested in either the postal image or my disappointment. We have the stamp (sadly, not the first class one I’d hoped for), which is a long-overdue tribute, and many who see it will say either “Who?” or “So that’s what she looked like.” Others will be reminded of Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, “Revelation,” “Greenleaf,” “Good Country People,” while a few smile and suspect that “a good likeness is not hard to find.” Maybe someone will be moved to go out to the fields and read “A Circle in the Fire” aloud, “as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.” That would suit me.

[R. T. Smith has been editor of Shenandoah for20 years, over70 issues, including the 60th anniversary Flannery O’Connor issue. He is the author of several books, including The Red Wolf: A Dream of Flannery O’Connor. Smith’s article “Much Mischief Is Divinest Sense: My Flannery Visitation” will appear in the fall issue of The Flannery O’Connor Review.]

Art, Just for the Holy Hell of It, 1 of 2

R.T. Smith

1. Memento Mori

Memorial Day: I had just come in from trimming and sweeping the deck wisteria’s ambitious scouts, which will, left to their own devices, extend and explore , insinuate among the lounge chairs, twine the arms and legs to claim the faux natural materials and (beckoning toward the treeline) whisper, “Brother, come with us, come home.” My wife was in the garden performing more arduous weeding chores, but I couldn’t get out of my mind what she’d told me an hour earlier. Mary Baldwin College’s Facebook hostesses had been scolded by a follower for posting a “Happy Memorial Day” message sporting the image of a squirrel (MBC’s mascot) armed with an American flag. The mild admonition was directed at the inappropriate whimsy and that “happy,” given what we’re officially supposed to be remembering beyond race cars, water sports and grilled meat.

I was feeling immune to that criticism, as I neither celebrate nor much register that holiday. Many have given the full measure, no few of them due to foolish miscalculation and misplaced enthusiasm from our generals and princes, but at my house we don’t seize the occasion to engage in family scrum, feasts, flag-waving or pyrotechnics, and I’m likely to spend the afternoon in my office or my reading chair. Sarah and I were planning to sup on fresh bread and a long-simmered soup of beans and sausage. I was reading a couple of books I enjoyed and planning to watch part of a TV miniseries, Texas Rising, on Sam Houston as Texas savior that night, and so to bed, as the chroniclers say. Not much thought dedicated to American victories and losses beyond my pilot light of disgust at our various administrations and their foreign adventures, which, mind you, doesn’t equal my anger at the current international felons and their jackal depravity, but I feel hamstrung and impotent in those matters. In short: the usual discontent and dismay, but thirst for distraction which would encourage me to focus on some “larger picture,” or smaller ones.

When I went into my study to change shoes after my Nemo-like battle with the squid-wisteria, I stopped longer than usual in front of a smaller picture, a painting sent to me by friend Billy Dunlap and hanging on the blue wall. I’ve seen it, as they say, a thousand, and Billy knows my mind enough to have guessed I’d be fixated by it. The title scrawled in white on the verso of the black canvas is “Sgt. Williams in the Moonlight,” and it’s dated 2007, accompanied by what’s called an appropriate sentiment about our mutual something-illegible, so I suppose I’ve had it 7-8 years. Now, here it is, on our livingroom table like a body ready to be cleaned:

12” X 24” polymer paint on canvas
The image is a familiar one, the original photograph widely reprinted in the late 19th century, then in history books, as perhaps a cautionary emblem for those traveling west, or a reminder of the cost. I have seen it on practicallyhistorical.net and grouped with images of Custer, though we have no photographs of the fatalities after that battle, so I’ll resist that interpretive path. The cavalryman whose family came west (I’m projecting based on his name) from Wales, then further, was probably left behind by his enemies as a NO TRESPASSING sign. I’ve heard the larger field of the photograph shows a lonesome horse grazing in the background, but my artist friend has, I believe, selected and composed (though maybe the source of that horse is one of Dunlap’s own constructions; trickster that he is), turning grim pastoral to both memento mori and an object of stern beauty.

Once Billy cast his artist’s eye beyond the Mississippi, where the bison and hawks different from Virginia and Mississippi denizens could be found, his archival instincts found this whole new trove of images, and he lit on this Sergeant Williams or was lit up by the sergeant and placed him, with or without his mount and the glowering Yahweh sky, on various panels and dedicated canvases for years (“Landscape and Variable: Indian Paint Brush” 1987; “Meditations on the Origins of Agriculture in America” same year; “Object Lesson Series: Willing Spirit/ Weak Flesh” 1991). Sometimes the panels or canvases have an actual arrow embedded in the images, usually not. The body – a soldier, a casualty, a guardian – of the non-com can appear in different lights and stages of decay; in one rendering his body appears to be mossed over, glowing verdigris, in others the wounds are fresher, more delineated, the ribs or facial features more prominent. The disposition and proportions of the body always approximate the “pose” in the original photograph.

At first, I couldn’t decide if he reminded me more of St. Sebastian or a misshapen porcupine. St. Porcupine? Clearly, I wanted to joke the impact into submission, to peer to the side, see the Dunlap Williams as subsidiary or peripheral. It is a disturbing image, though not really grisly, compared to, say, the grue-fetish zombie crap comics, popular TV and movies assail us with, hoping to scare-titillate us. There ought to be a word – scittilate – for that unimaginative enterprise. But Williams is ghostly in that deeply spiritual, but not religious, way which often leaves us blinking, if not transformed.

And he reminded me of the scene in Dances with Wolves when Costner/Dunbar and his muleskinner discover a Caucasian body long dwelling in the tall prairie grass, occasioning the wagonneer to quip, “Somewhere back home somebody’s wondering, ‘Why don’t he write?’” [This is approximate; I’m not ready to watch that film again to get the line exact.] While Sgt. Williams is not without identity, he’s still pretty much one of our unknown soldiers, but here he is also big A Art – emotional, highly wrought, mysterious, both sustaining and able to trigger serious hungers.

And the painting has outlasted my earlier associations and driven me deeper into meditations I never volunteered for. Billy is many things: painter with perfect visual pitch, sculptor, teacher, curator, wit, writer, raconteur, bon vivant, and so on. But at his core, he’s a trickster, and I find myself wishing I could decipher that word after “mutual” in the inscription.

Sergeant Will is moonwashed white, his flesh become bone, his face eluding recognition, but just expressive enough to occupy the threshold between mime and demon, and yet still human. He might be floating upon calm black waters, but the brushstrokes in muted colors complicating the backdrop suggest something more solid. His feet are pitiable, and you want to start covering him there and move the blanket up for privacy, yet in the whitening moonlight he has a profound dignity, the five arrows almost symbolic: one planted in the groin, a second in the belly, one in the heart, another just above the sternum, a final one in the left deltoid. They come from different angles and carry a hint of red on their fletching. The body also shows red wisps and splotches, enough blood on the right elbow to suggest blunt trauma.

Intriguing as the amateur forensics might be, the whole is so much more than . . . . Sergeant Williams is in repose. He has come face to face with death and become, for me, the face of death, even more than my maternal grandfather John P. Thaxton, whom I was always said to favor physically until I grew old and grayed old and took on my father’s features. (Temperamentally, I excite few comparisons to either man.) I remember seeing granddaddy the day he died in that back (west) room on the iron-framed feather bed I had so often slept in. Patchwork quilt of many blues, pillows thick as shoats. I was six. He’d been suffering from lung cancer long enough to have grown even more sparse and sinewy than labor had made him. Grizzled of cheek, chin and mien. I’m now developing his hairline, but I never had his sinewy grit or lanky good nature. That’s wisdom, to my mind: grit and humor together, a strong dose of generosity doesn’t hurt. Wisdom is humanitarian instincts spoken and then acted, I believe. I’m just a poor facsimile. But I knew him as a child knows a local hero, not even aware until I was sixty that his “unexplained” disappearances and extended absences were binges the Baptist church wouldn’t much excuse in a farming carpenter. But at least they didn’t express their disapproval with archery.

I wonder if Sergeant Williams achieved wisdom? I think of the last line of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” but twisting it, with death-in-flight replacing the assailant Zeus-goose. “Did [he] put on his knowledge. . . ?” Hard to believe a soldier of the sergeant’s era didn’t tipple a bit, which is a useful clarifying lens just before it becomes an occluding one. I’m guessing he was a scout, but as soon as I begin to speculate on his identity and function, I want to know who took the original damn picture. And what was left out. The records don’t show. Old Anonymous at it again. I wonder if it was someone whose curiosity about the human condition and respect for the final stages mirrored Sally Mann’s as she photographed her dying father and the corpses at the “Body Farm” where forensic scientists use to learn how the forces of nature reclaim various examples of our flesh and bones. Maybe it was just an artless journalist, but I’m skeptical about makers of images shooting from the hip with neither design nor agenda, intent being a natural instinct for our species.

A few years ago, my wife didn’t object when I asked if I could move the sarge to our bedroom, where I could study him from my own prone position. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t admit to arranging my body to mimic his position. I also thought of my grandfather’s position as he prepared for death and mine when I was laid up with the poisons of chemotherapy and radiation in the same room a decade ago. “Fallen man” is my phrase for the general posture, and I have stretched out on my deck in winter to seek his outline in the stars, though that constellation eludes me so far. I have found both terror and comfort in my morbid exercises, just as I find that pair in most activities. O felix culpa?

Neither did Sarah object when I decided to move the painting back to the wall of my study, where there’s a scarlet, trumpet-blowing angel silhouette cut from sheet metal to greet him, to “Taps” and “Reveille” him. What I’m hoping in the long run is that I’ll be able to follow this meditative path when my time to cross the river comes along: wisteria, the sergeant resting in peace, the red angel blowing maybe a kind of jazz anthem of welcome. I read this anecdote somewhere. When Allen Ginsberg was dying, he was asked how he felt, and his answer was that, where he’d expected to be terrified, he was instead exhilarated. Smell of fresh grass and a lathered horse, twang of a bowstring, moonlight on the face . . . and just hope that first arrow is well-chosen and flies true. “All fall down.”
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The Mighty Billy D