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: My People's Waltz

Author: Dale Ray Phillips

Publication Date: 1996

How I Heard About It: Oxford American article

            I read all of My People’s Waltz out loud to myself. Yep, that’s right. All 190 pages. It was, I guess you could say, a long and lonely November, and sometimes I needed a human voice in my apartment other than the talk show hosts of public radio. But there were other reasons.

             From the very first sentence—“My grandfather kept his floozy in a silver Airstream above the bend in the river where the dead crossed over”—I knew these were sentences that demanded to be read aloud. Indeed, I will stick my neck out and holler that there is not one sentence in this book, not one, that isn’t a gemstone of a sentence. To prove my point, let me open the book at random, slam my finger on the page, and quote: “A few customers on the end of the route were eating at their picnic tables to escape the kitchen’s heat, and I fought the crazy urge to introduce myself as someone who had decided to join their family.”

            Yes. Yes, indeed.

            If I never read another book out loud again from cover to cover, I’m okay with that, for this was the book to do so.

            I’m sure by now you can tell that I am a hyperbolic man, and I also know that nothing could be more cliché and critically unsound than to say, “This is the best book I have ever read in my life.” But what do you do when you feel this statement to be so true—that this book speaks to you, and almost you alone—and there are no other words that come to you except, “This is the best book I have ever read in my life”?

            This is not to say, by the way, that this is the best book you will ever read in your life. And it’s entirely possible that I feel this way in the same way I feel about Shakespeare’s plays. (That is, whenever anyone asks me which Shakespeare play I like best, I reply: “The one I just read.”)

            My People’s Waltz is, perhaps for lack of a better term, a novel-in-stories, with a single protagonist-narrator named Richard, and each story chronicles a liminal moment in his life—the death of his grandfather, his loss of virginity, his break-up with his high school girlfriend, his marriage, his divorce, the raising of his son. Indeed, it occurred to me that the genre itself—a novel-in-stories (and particularly this novel-in-stories)—makes the greatest use of Aristotle’s notion about the difference between epic and dramatic time.[1]

            But to reduce these stories to bullet-like points is to strip them of their multidimensionality. In the first story, “Why I’m Talking,” the grandfather’s sudden heart attack is only one event in a maelstrom of intoxicating plot points, which include a young boy (Richard) refusing to talk, his mother off in the mental ward, his father out on the road as a half-ass salesman, and his grandfather’s biracial paramour letting the young boy cop a feel. And even the grandfather’s death is not the climax (not even when, in a strangely moving moment, young Richard kisses his dead grandfather’s tongue). The climax, I would argue, occurs at the end, when his mother is frantically asking Richard about what happened, and he speaks for the first time:

            I understood that although this periodic leave-taking had already become a part of  our lives, we had somehow become a family, caught in the awkwardness of shaping our first reunion together. Some chimeras would have to be constructed to keep this   good feeling alive, and so I answered her with this voice, which love had taught to deceive.

            You’ll notice that he doesn’t really speak—the dialogue is indirect and summarized—but the voice is the same one that goes on to tell us all of the tragicomic stories that follow. It is a voice with a hypnotic rhythm—most of these sentences are around thirty syllables—and that expresses a childlike wonder, a simplicity that captures beautiful awe.

            Let me provide some examples.

            Upon seeing the birth of his child: “If there is a lesson to be learned from witnessing birth, then it is that all things are urged ungently into being.”

            Upon recognizing the relationship with his high school girlfriend will not last: “I marveled at the newly discovered place in myself which could make love on a widow’s walk to someone I loved but would leave because a greedy part of myself wanted more.”

            Or when he takes a break to hustle people in a savings-and-loan scandal in Florida: “The Gulf Coast was like that—full of people whose luck had tricked them into risking anything in order to rediscover what they had lost.”

            These aren’t pretentious declarations. They are the straightforward declarations of the heart, and I only quote the smallest fraction of them, though I could go on all day.  

            But there are writers who write great sentence without the sentences amounting to anything like a story. This book, though, is at its very essence a love story. Certainly not a romanticized love story, but a true one—about love’s anxieties and troubles.

            For just as in Shakespeare, marriages are things of trouble[2]. Richard’s parents have a tragic marriage—the mother takes up boyfriends from time to time, the father remains desperately in love—and the tragedy extends through Richard’s own marriage to Lisa. (That’s part of the tragedy, I think—the stories seem to suggest that we can never, no matter how much we want to, escape from our parents.) Dale Ray Phillips captures marital tension in wonderfully subtle dialogue—the kind of dialogue they’re always trying to teach you about in creative writing classes.

            The title of the book comes, of course, from the Roethke poem that everyone always debates: Is the father abusive in the poem, or is he lovably drunk? Or both?

            The ambiguity is essential to the poem, as it is to this book. Everywhere in this book there are people dancing—usually sad drunks twirling and spinning and somehow both utterly alone and part of community of sad drunks twirling and spinning and trying desperately to make sense of their hard lives.  There is such sadness in these stories, but it is a deep sadness that the beauty heightens, confirming Shelley: “Our saddest songs tell our sweetest thoughts.”

            Dale Ray Phillips, for all I know, is something like the Harper Lee of his generation. He hasn’t published another book in the fifteen years since My People’s Waltz, and it’s not hard for me to understand. This book must have taken nearly everything he had to write—pain and love and hard work—and it remains to me the essence of the anxiety of influence. After reading the book, that is, my writing seemed much more frivolous and inconsequential thereby.

            Fifteen years ago, however, it was not obscure; in fact, the book was nominated for the Pulitzer. But fifteen years is a long time in today’s world, and not many of my friends or colleagues have heard about it.

            This book, sadly, needs more than whatever simple, humble resuscitation this blog post can offer. This book needs to be remembered as it is—a classic of Southern literature. Or, even better, the truest love story I have ever read, in silence or aloud.  

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[1] I explain this difference to my students like this: Say you’re watching a blockbuster action film like The Fast and the Furious. Epic time is all of the time the main character, played by Vin Diesel, presumably must go through—sleeping, brushing his teeth, going to the bathroom, etc. etc. But how boring would an action film be if the director showed us this? (Andy Warhol once made an 8 hour film of his lover sleeping—blah.) Instead, we see dramatic time—the events that matter to the story—the hijacking and car chases, etc. etc.

[2] Weird exceptions: the Macbeths, Gertrude and Claudius