Title: Billy Watson's Croker Sack

Author: Franklin Burroughs

Publication Date: 1991

How I Heard About It: LIterary Osmosis

“I very much fear,” Franklin Burroughs writes at the end of his last (and title) essay in Billy Watson’s Croker Sack, “that writing about such a place will come out sounding like ‘local color.’ …[But] I’m sure my writing won’t consistently escape these evasions of the complexities of the particular place, or of the self that looks at it. But the croker sack has quite unexpectedly turned out to be an emblem of what I would hope to find and how I would hope to find it.”

What we find in these six essays, as if opening a croker sack[1], epitomizes the very best of (pardon the term) nature writing—the insightful and complex intersections between human and natural history, the precision of language and image. The places that Burroughs writes about in Billy Watson’s Croker Sack are either the Maine of his adult life or the South Carolina low country of his youth, more often the connection between the two.

So if it’s local color, I like local color, and damn those who don’t. In fact, it’s no secret that I’ve always admired and envied Burroughs, if not felt a kind of kinship with him. We both were born in South Carolina, both graduated as English majors from Sewanee. During my Maymester kayaking and writing course, I taught his book The River Home, which chronicles his canoe trip down the Waccamaw River in the wake of a writer named Nathaniel Holmes Bishop, who made a remarkable 2500 miles journey in a paper canoe from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico from 1874-1875, and who wrote about it in a book (an obscure one!) called The Voyage of the Paper Canoe.

And, indeed, Burroughs’ prose has an ease to it that can only be described in the metaphorical terms of a river—an ability to flow effortlessly between the personal, the political , the scientific, the historical, the journalistic, the ethical, the philosophical, the etymological, and so forth.[2]

Take, for instance, the first essay in the collection, “A Snapping Turtle in June,” in which Burroughs finds a snapping turtle digging a hole on a road in Maine. The discovery leads him, as writer, into marvelous description:

The shell and skin are a muddy gray; the eye, too, is of a murky mud color. The pupil is black and shaped like a star or a spoked wheel. Within the eye there is a strange yellowish glint, as though you were looking down into turbid water and seeing, in the depths of the water, like light from a smoldering fire. It is one of Nature’s more nightmarish eyes…The snapper’s eye is dull, like a pig’s, but inside it there is this savage malevolence, something suggesting not only an evil intention towards the worlds, but the torment of an inner affliction.

I did not intend, when copying that just now, to quote that much of the text. But each sentence, as you will note, surged with a new intensity.[3]

The literary father here, of course, is Thoreau. One cannot think of a New England nature essayist, even a South Carolina transplant, without thinking of Thoreau, who, more than Emerson, wrote essays that moved so easily between narrative and meditation.

But back to snapping turtles.

It’s not just description that carries this essay—it’s also the fact that Burroughs is a meticulous researcher. And he can relate his research to the non-scientific reader: “The fish they catch by luring them into range with their vermiform tongues, which may have something to do with the role of trickster that they assume in the mythology of North American Indians.”

And then Burroughs will step back and narrate the story of showing the turtle to his young daughters and of carrying the hissing turtle from road to ditch. And then, as though reaching farther down into the croker sack, he’ll pull out the real story—a flashback to his boyhood in Conway, a summer in which he works for a timber company with his two cousins[4].

It’s in this memory that something terrible and strange happens when a drunk—sitting in a country store where the timber crew is having lunch, and mumbling incoherencies about a man named McNair—suddenly explodes and takes out his rage on a snapping turtle that is something like the store’s houseguest:

The turtle seemed weary, deflated, too long out of water. The man nudged its head with his boot, and the turtle hissed and struck feebly toward him. The man glared down at it, letting his rage recover and build back in him. He looked like a diver, gathering to plunge. The turtle’s mouth hung open, when it hissed again the man’s arm suddenly jerked down with the pistol and he shot it, shattering the turtle’s head. ‘That’s what I’d do to that goddamned McNair.’

Burroughs doesn’t end the essay there. He returns, of course, to his daughters, who are made more innocent in contrast with the violent memory. But the episode haunts the reader in a way that it must haunt Burroughs himself, and one sees the very fluid connection between Nature and Human.  

I won’t spoil the rest of the essays as I might have here. But it’s fair to say that Burroughs treats the rest of his subjects—moose, fishing, dogs, duck hunting, the croker sack itself—with the same range of complexity and beauty as he does the snapping turtle.

            There is, perhaps, a limited readership for a book like this, but I am in it. My interest is partly local, partly personal, but mostly because of the gorgeous writing, both on the sentence and thematic level, that just flows.

            At the end of “Of Moose and Moose Hunter,” Burroughs has a kind of flash forward to a moment that hasn’t happened yet, but will, when he sees a moose while fly-fishing, and how he describes it might be exactly how one feels about reading this book:

            And I would look up from the water, almost dizzy with staring for so long at nothing but the tiny fly drifting in the current, and there they would be—maybe a cow and a calf—standing on the other bank, watching me watch them, trying to fathom it.


[1] Burroughs: “In South Carolina the word referred to any biggish cloth sack—for example, the hundred-pound sacks that livestock feed came in.”

[2] Burroughs also has an amazing vocabulary that he employs with ease. In one paragraph alone he uses the following words casually and in a way that doesn't suggest, in my opinion, pretense: frowsy, parataxis, importunity, and furtive.

[3] “The image is Zen,” the poet Charles Wright writes. “The metaphor is Christian.” If so (and I do believe so), in the quoted passage above you’ll notice the Zen-like attention to detail but also the subtle ways in which Burroughs converts images to wonderful metaphors. And that, I think, may be a valid way to describe Burroughs as a writer—he never makes any outright statements of faith, but his writing is imbedded with an intellectual Christianity (a.k.a. Episcopalianism).

[4] Burroughs is also, I might add here, a master of character description: “He was lanky, with comically large feet and big, bony, lightly freckled hands and wrists, and you would have expected him to have no strength and stamina at all. But he could use any of the tools we used—bushaxe or machete or grubbing hoe—with no sign of strain or fatigue, all day long, holding the tool gingerly, a pace that the rest of us could not sustain.”

Title: Let Not Your Hart

Author: James Seay

Publication Date: 1970

How I Heard About It: Bookstore Browsing

  All writers have, or will tell you they have, a conversion narrative like this: a small independent bookstore, an afternoon of mindless browsing, the welcome discovery of a great book. Mine is no different really, and perhaps even a bit more cliché. The bookstore was Square Books in Oxford, the book was a yellowed paperback lightly imprinted with a bottle ring, and its author was the kind of Southern poet too many male poets born in the South want, at least at some point, to be. Including me.

            Let Not Your Hart by James Seay looked just like a book from the 60’s should look, with its sepia-colored cover and Warhol-like illustration of a (VW?) bus. And hell, the book even smelled like an old poem should. But that wasn’t why I bought it. Three other reasons: it was dedicated to Lee, which is my wife’s name; it was a first book; and, most importantly, I liked the first stanza of the first poem, which was about fishing, a subject I was trying to write about in my own scribblings. 

            I admit that I am a sucker for fishing poems, with their natural, if obvious, metaphorical resonance. But here was a fishing poem, “Grabbling in Yokna Bottom” about a different kind of fishing—catfish noodling—which was enjoying, in the cult documentary Okie Noodling and in the television series Hillbilly Handfishin’ and Mudcat, a popular resurgence in American culture forty years after the publication of this book.

            The subject matter was all well and good, but it was language and form that made the poem distinctive.

            The hungry come in a dry time
            To muddy the water of this swamp river
            And take in nets what fish or eel
            Break surface to suck at this world’s air.

The spondee that opens the fourth line enacts perfectly what the poem is saying, what it describes—that is, the words themselves break the surface of the line, the same way the spondaic “Rough winds” blow into the fourth line of Shakespeare’s famous 18th sonnet.

            I only get this technical because conscientious spondaic line-openings are a hallmark of Seay’s style, in the way they are for many great poets—Sidney, Shelley, Hopkins, et al. This was a poet, I realized, who was paying attention to form and therefore couldn’t be idly charged with only being a “Southern poet.” (This charge always has imbedded in it condescension: the belief that Southern poets favor, or rely on, subject matter more than form).

            I read through the book, and I loved its intensity of language and content. Here are poems that aren’t shying away from the world and the materials of what some might call “the masculine South”—hunting and fishing and manual labor and football and moonshine (not to mention characters with names like Speedo, Punk Kincaid, Champ, Sam Boy, etc.)—but they confront these subjects without nostalgia or sentimentality.

Take, for instance, the fifth poem in the collection, “Turtles from the Sea.” It is a poem, no doubt, that will make many readers cringe—especially readers who have already cringed at a term like the “masculine South”—but you can’t deny its honest depiction of illegal turtle hunting and the strange, beautiful way the guilt takes hold in the last two stanzas. And I think it took me a second reading before I heard it for what it was: a ballad.

            Cast-off vital parts grew black, then green,
            And simmered in the Florida heat.
            Buzzards circled, swooped, and took what parts
            The dogs or wildcats would not eat.

            Fang and beak devoured my flesh each night
            Until the Cuban workers came,
            Turned the spoil of rent and rotted heart
            Onto the newly planted sugar cane.

           
In the bookstore I asked my Mississippi poet-friend, who was playing the part of Virgilian guide in his native state: Who is this guy?

            Or was, as it turned out to be. James Seay shot himself sometime in the 70’s or 80’s, my friend told me. I bought the book immediately, half-anticipating this essay—here was a gem of a poet needing to be resuscitated. Someone who was too good to lie unnoticed in the vaults of time.

Or is, as it turns out to be. James Seay didn’t shoot himself. He’s been teaching for forty years at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I am guilty of being a dilettante for not knowing his work. And where did my friend get that rumor? And the ability to say it so casually?

 But I have only been able to unearth two essays about him, and only two interviews. An online bibliography brings up a picture of the man—shaggy-haired and one-eyed. Yep, a poet with an eye-patch.

And so the emphasis in his poems on vision. In the poem “Options,” a doctor offers the speaker a choice of replacement glass eyes. The poem is one of anger, the hardest tone to control:

            Not for all the purple velvet
            That could be cut to lay them on
            Was there an option
            Able to resplit my sight

            …

            He tried, eye after eye;
            They lay like bogus coins
            In my forehead

This is good, especially in the way the rhythm works against the anger, but I like the subtle anger even better in another poem, “Were You Wise, Awake?”

            Your conch beside the fire
            Sings it desire, yet sings no such fury
            As the quickened one
            In the moon’s half-light or in the torn eye of the sun
            Beneath the turning sea.

Here the anger gets transferred onto the natural imagery, which is lovely. And though I hate to speculate on such matters, I wonder: would his poetry have been as good without the missing eye? That is, I think his vision of the world is made stranger thereby. As when he notices that an old governor (the machine, not the political figure) “lies like a broken animal, / the needles of its red eyes / fixed steady on the sea-shell road.” Or, in “The Starlings,” that the tile birds “peck / at crumbs, hard and stale as cinder rocks, / on the snow beneath the Kotex box.”

            Let Not Your Hart contains some bad poems too, as expected of any collection and especially a first. Sometimes his staccato rhythm and inverted syntax sound stilted. But the book also contains many great poems—poems that linger in the mind well after their reading—such as my favorite fishing poem in the book, “Others of Rainbow Colors”:

            The taloned hooks were mullet-baited
                        And dropped into the glacial
            Brilliance where old night awaited
                        New day in waters crystal-
            Green beneath out whiteflashing bow.
                        Spiraling up it came in troll
            Toward our knifenosed prow,
                        Had taken the mullet whole
            And came as a gift, however dumb
                                    Or knowing,
                        From the seawomb.
                                    But following
                        Its invisible helix came others
                                    Of rainbow colors,
            Free, yet caught in all the prisms of the sea.

Title: Stoner

Author: John Williams

Publication Date: 1965

How I Heard About It: Recommended by a friend

            Ah, the English Professor, that perennial subject of the biopic, stumbling cliché of alcoholism and existential emptiness, too self-conscious for his (rarely her) own good. You have probably seen them: Wonder Boys, The Squid and the Whale, A Single Man, Smart People, etc. etc.

            It’s not that these portrayals are necessarily false. It’s that most of them (but not all) are lousy films.

            John Williams’ 1965 novel, Stoner, is about an English professor who is not an alcoholic. Nor is he, as one might believe the title to imply, a pot-smoker. His name is William Stoner, and this quietly beautiful novel chronicles his career at the University of Missouri in the first half of the twentieth century.

            We learn on the first page, in a remarkably bleak sentence, the tragic fate of our title character:

            Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

            The nod here, I think, is to another chilling portrait of human isolation—Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which contains this more blatantly ironic passage on its first page:

            So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilych's  death the first thought of each of the gentlemen in that private  room was of the changes and promotions it might occasion among  themselves or their acquaintances.

            This kind of announcement relieves us of surprise. It’s not if our character dies. Only when. And thus what emerges between the casual mention of Stoner’s death at the beginning of the novel, and the haunting and intricate details of his death at the end, is the embodiment of what Arthur Miller called “Tragedy and the Common Man.”

            For William Stoner’s life is nothing if not a series of disappointments. Remarkably, though, he does not emerge as a pathetic character in the way that, say, Willy Loman does.

            Partly this has to do with the calmness and clarity of Williams’ prose—what you might say is its iciness, and thereby its incisiveness—and the way that his prose mirrors Stoner’s demeanor. Stoner is not hyperactive or manic like Willy Loman. His problems are serious, to be sure, but he confronts them with a clear control of emotion. And thus Williams charges the atmosphere with awkwardness and tension.

            Take, for instance, Stoner’s decision, against the wishes of his humbly rural parents, to study literature rather than agriculture. But he does not tell them until they make the long trek to Columbia for his graduation:

            They were alone in the kitchen…But neither then nor after his parents had finished breakfast could he bring himself to tell them of his change of plans, of his decision not to return to the farm. Once or twice he started to speak; then he looked at the brown faces that rose nakedly out of their new clothing, and thought of the long journey they had made and of the years they had awaited his return. He sat stiffly with them until they finished and came into the kitchen. Then he told them that he had to go early to the University and that he would see them there later in the day, at his exercises.

He cannot here, as elsewhere, bring himself to speak his mind. Indeed, this is often a novel of long silences. Not until halfway through, during the first of Stoner’s academic scandals, do we get any detailed discussion of literature.

            Instead, the novel traces Stoner’s increasing detachment from the big things in life: his marriage, his family, his career, his search for meaning.

            Williams reserves the novel’s most stinging portrait for Stoner’s wife, Edith, who must surely be among the coldest bitches in all of literature. Though her bitchiness, at times, seems a bit one-dimensional (there really isn’t any gray area with her), at least you can say this about it: it is absolutely relentless.

            Even on their honeymoon you can predict their unhappy destiny:

          When he returned, Edith was in bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her face turned upward, her eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. Silently, as if she were asleep, Stoner undressed and got into bed beside her. For several moments he lay with his desire, which had become an impersonal thing, belonging to himself alone. He spoke to Edith, as if to find a haven for what he felt; she did not answer. He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence.

The silences here are Edith’s, not Stoner’s, and they contrast with her nearly manic, though honest, remark at his deathbed. She says to one of Stoner’s dean, his only friend Gordon Finch (and not to Stoner; no, never directly to Stoner): “‘He looks awful. Poor Willy. He won’t be with us much longer.’”

            Small wonder Stoner never turned to alcohol after all. What he turns to instead is his work, and John Williams has been quoted as saying, “The important thing to me is Stoner’s sense of a job.” As Edith takes an extended vacation in St. Louis after her father’s suicide, Stoner realizes his marriage is a failure but that his

            love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.

            But disillusionment, as it tends to do, grows. Edith plays mind games with their daughter, Grace, and turns her quietly against him. An annoying and incompetent graduate student receives an F in one of Stoner’s classes, sides with the incoming department chair, and hinders Stoner’s career.

            And like all serious writers and scholars, Stoner begins to doubt his vocation. And the doubt, by turns, hardens and softens him. Picture him with the Buddha’s half-smile in the following lines, which characterize despair quite beautifully:

            He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run of all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and ta last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

            But then, like a false spring, Stoner falls for a younger instructor named Katherine Driscoll, and we never doubt for a moment that they are in pure, true love. They read together, make love often, even vacation in a cabin during one chilly winter break. And here, too, Stoner has an epiphany about love that becomes itself a kind of love poem, and that needs to be quoted in its entirety:

            In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence of the heart.

Needless to say, this is beautiful prose. But by now—on page 195 of a 278-page novel—we know the outcome. Stoner’s rival colleague, Hollis Lomax (another one-dimensional character, and a categorically imperative asshole) sees to it that their love affair ends.

            Stoner grows even more disillusioned and then, years later but seemingly as a result of Katherine’s absence, fatally ill. And if you think I have spoiled the ending, then this novel is not for you. One comes to this novel not for its plot but for its beautiful prose and its quiet passages of stoic solitude.  And nowhere is Williams better than in describing Stoner’s last moments on earth, in its illuminated details—“The sky outside, the deep blue-black space, and the thin glow of moonlight through a cloud,” “the distant sound of laughter,” “the sweet odors of grass and lead and flower”—and in which Stoner picks up one of his old books:

            It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth  at any time seemed almost trivial. He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in the fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.

            One can’t help but wonder, especially if one is in the profession, whether or not Stoner’s story is the story of all English professors or writers. But it is not. No more than any of the lousy movies about English professors are. This is a story, in the end, about all of us.