I’m guessing it has to do with “hookworm” being mentioned in one of the posts.
faulkner wrote some of his best stuff while he was employed in Hollywood. Other "Southern’ writers were also inluenced by living outside the reagion-like kyle Onstott. But i do agree that the South 9up to about 1965) was a very different region, culturally and socially. I think the long period after the Civil war caused a LOT of Southern minds to fester-I can’t see why the Confederacy is so revered down there. Face it, the Civil war (and the causes it was fought for) are deader than a coffin nail-and let is GO!
Absolutely - he’s specifically who I was referring to as America’s greatest writer (and Huck Finn its greatest novel).
People do think of Missouri as midwest now, but I swear when I go down there I feel like I’m really in the South.
Well, not quite born post-MLK, but too young to really remember a segregated South - Padgett Powell and Mark Richard stand out. I think they still effuse southernism in their writing.
I think Jombi’s editor nailed it in one. The “quaint” factor probably drives this meme like it stole it.
It’s even worse when it comes to music. While it’s true at least that much of popular music here somehow has it’s roots in the south, I’ll bet there’s plenty of musicians from elsewhere in the US that helped form the core of what is considered American Music that are/were miffed at not being considered “quaint” enough, i.e. not southern or something.
Now if you want a great example of both of the OPs stereotypes rolled into one, we must consult that great southern philosophy tome, The Andy Griffith Show, and ponder The Darlings. The “boys” in that family were nearly catatonically stupid, but but when it was time to play music, they were a bunch of Paganinis, albeit playing bluegrass music.
I have experienced it, to a degree (though in this postmodern age, everything is a blah wash, so don’t take the subsequent whine too seriously). I’m a Southerner living where it’s mostly non-Southerners, and I’ve seen the knowing smiles when I start to talk. Yep, I’m one of those dumbass racist inbred subhumans. As a musician, I’ve encountered a few folks who thought that since I’m a Southerner, I can just “set on my bucket and play Turkey in the Straw lickety split”. Of course, that’s when I crank it up and play some Clash or something… 
Wow, bup, I honsestly got the impression that you were talking about Faulkner (you were shy and didn’t name names in the OP).
You know, I agree with this–Huck Finn in particular (because of the slavery theme)–Tom Swayer is more rural midwest farm boy. Twain was an all-American (in several senses*, including Hawaii) pundit, with an all-around good ear for regional mimicry and foibles–there was that Connecticut Yankee thing too.
And, to continue the anecdotes about Twain, he is also all-American in being the antithesis of that prim writer of mannered English, Miss Jane Austen*: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.” Now, is that a comment designed to stir up raucous American frontier consent, or what?
**An “all-English” writer, “England’s Jane,” per Kipling. Twain was wrong.
Care to elaborate? I’ve heard these men called many things by many people, but “distinctly ignorant” isn’t one of them. I ask because I knew one of the Agrarians when I was in college and found him to be one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.
I was referring to the content of their thought. The Agrarians stood for everything that held back the South and made it a Northern economic colony and a global embarrassment from Reconstruction through the 1960s.
One of the Twain scholars in the Ken Burns documentary (may have been Hal Holbrook, who really is a Twain scholar in addition to playing him so many thousand times) mentioned that Twain was the first travel writer to write from Europe and the Holy Land with a uniquely American voice and sentiment. Prior to him most American travel writers wrote with something of an inferiority complex and like prodigal children returned to the land of t heir ancestry, while Twain seemed to accept from scratch that America was just as much a souvereign nation and had just as much culture and a lot more to offer than the Old World. Ditto with Huck’s narration: many critics were aghast that a semi-literate boy with no formal education and who wasn’t just an adorable waif who’s ultimately saved by an aristocrat’s charity would narrate a novel first person and in the vernacular.
It’s a sad irony to me that the book is so often reviled and banned because of it’s use of the N word. It implies the people have never read it, because it’s one of the most powerful arguments AGAINST racism American literature ever knew as Huck goes from seeing Jim as a silly superstitious buffoon to a man whose ignorance is due to society and who values freedom and loves his wife and children so much he risks death and torture to redeem them (that great scene where Huck destroys the letter he writes to Widder Douglas- wonderful).
Also such irony that schools ban the books of a man who paid the college tuitions of several former slaves/children of former slaves, including that of the first African American ever to graduate from Harvard Law School, or who wrote Aunt Rachel’s Story (the real Aunt Rachel was Mary Ann Cord), a dialect piece you’d never see at a minstrel show.
Again, please elaborate. What specifically about their writings leads you to paint with such a broad brush?
Some aspects of Agrarian thought - - particularly that on race relations - - were off the mark. Most of the Agrarians recognized this in the 1960s and 1970s and some recanted what they put forward in “I’ll Take My Stand”. In other areas they were remarkably prescient, especially those related to industrial society and its impact on human dignity, the economy, and on urban and suburban development and sprawl.
So they are a mixed bag, in my opinion, but I’ll going to leave it up to you to prove that they “…stood for everything that held back the South and made it a Northern economic colony and a global embarrassment from Reconstruction through the 1960s.”
Were people really so aghast that a novel was told first person in vernacular? I ask because it’s one of those things that sounds more like a good story than actually the truth. I mean, it’s one of those things my English teachers told me too, but never said who it was that were so put out.
Further, on the side of skepticism we have the fact that it was so groundbreaking. Although Twain was innovative and great, it’s not like he invented it. Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard, and other characters, were just as blunt, poorly educated, but winkingly wise as Huck. Even Melville’s Ishmael gets away with more homespun judgmentalism than Melville himself would’ve, on account of Ishmael was just a simple sailor man.
“was not so groundbreaking…” :smack:
I kind of doubt this: after all, you’d expect that if this were the source of their manners, they’d be polite first and foremost to the slaves who were polite to them. Alternately, you’d expect that they’d be spoiled brats: the slave nannies and butlers would be deferential to the children of elites who held the slaves’ lives in their hands.
I’m taking a class on NC history now, and my professor offered an alternate theory: Souther manners derived from a world in which treating someone with contempt was analogous to calling them an inferior, and calling someone an inferior was equating them with a slave, and so on a deep emotional level, accepting rudeness from someone was a threat to your own freedom. Small slights therefore got exaggerated into deadly fights, because accepting slights was so risky; white people therefore learned a code of manners that would prevent small slights.
On the South’s reputation for laziness, hookworm is part of it; another part of it is poor nutrition. Prewar Southerners tended to live on subsistence farms who earned money for taxes by producing whiskey and by producing hogs (on the open range). With the advent of railroads, the range closed, which meant you couldn’t drive your hogs to market, which meant you had to pay the railroad to take them in, which meant that you’d get less money for them; the closed range also meant you couldn’t produce as many hogs, and that you had to pay for fencing for them and food. And after the war, the feds sent down an army of marshalls to enforce the new high taxes on whiskey distilling, which meant that it was no longer a profitable enterprise for farmers. In order to raise money to pay taxes, farmers turned from swine and whiskey and subsistence agriculture to cash crops–tobacco and cotton, for example. This meant that they weren’t growing their own food, which meant that their nutritional levels plummeted.
C. Van Woodward described this south as “Juleps for the few and pellagra for the crew.” Malnutrition, with concommitant mental disorders, skyrocketed during this period.
Daniel
I’ve heard excerpts of the criticism at the time but can’t quickly google much. When I have time I’ll look on databases, but I did find these:
The Concord Library called it “trash and suitable only for the slums” and refused to shelve it. This is a contemporary to the novel (1885) Atlanta Constitution defense of the books to critics who dismissed it as “coarse, vulgar and inartistic”. Will check for more when time permits.
Contemporary Reviews- actually, several are favorable (raves, even), though the Boston papers hate it and the San Francisco papers are mixed. The most amazing thing is how little literary critics have changed in 121 years- the “I’ve got a thesaurus! I’ve got a thesaurus!” style was already entrenched even then.
Huh? I’ve lived in the southern US for 25 years, and I’ve never known anyone to have hookworms or any worms, for that matter. Your wiki article makes no mention of a 35% infestation rate. This page from the CDC states, “Hookworm infections, although not common in the United States, are also associated with gastrointestinal blood loss and iron depletion.” Were you referring to the early 1900’s?
Sampiro certainly gives a good background history to the complexity of the Southern US. I’d add that there is a strong oral story-telling tradition in the South, both in white and black culture. There’s a great appreciation of being able to deliver a long, drawn out oratory, whether it’s in a local gossip mode, tall tale, or ribald humorous story, with extra points for witty turns of phrase, and skill of timing. I suppose you could even consider political and religious oratory in that manner.
I wasn’t born in the South, and grew up as a young child in California, New England, and New York before coming down here as a teen in the 70’s. Big culture shock, the South is definitely different. One thing I still notice, though, contrasting even now when I visit other parts of the country: Southerners tend to listen better, rather than yack a lot, at first. That is a broad brush stroke, of course, and sometimes visitors will often think that Southerners are suspicious and taciturn, even “slow”, but my experience is that there’s just a period of sizing up. Once you know people, it’s very warm hearted, a quality I often don’t find elsewhere.
I lived in Oxford, Mississippi, for 13 years, a town that now has the owner of the local bookstore as Mayor, on his second term . Ol’ Billy the Faulk is part of the reason for that, he put the town on the map as a writer, and it’s now the home of a yearly Faulkner Conference, as well as The Conference for the Book, both drawing writers from all over the globe. Said Mayor grew up around the corner from Faulkner, and the bookstore has thrived because of it’s support of Southern writers. The Oxford American started there as well, on the heels of the town’s renaissance as a writer friendly place, with enough amenities that one wasn’t just dropped down in the oddities of MSPI. At the time, too ,John Grisham lived there and was getting popular, and poured some cash back into Oxford’s literary endeavors.
Bit of a digression there. When Faulkner wrote his masterpieces, it was a sleepy town with a University, undergoing all the changes that Mississippi went through. He wasn’t really thought of as a favored citizen until later in life, but he did come from a known/appreciated family, so his eccentricity was tolerated, and then, after his Nobel award, celebrated. Too, I’ve had people say they can’t read Faulkner, it’s too many words coming at them. If you read Faulkner in the slower Southern story-telling mode, though, it’s entirely approachable and savored.
I agree with Sampiro that the confluence of forces in the South; isolation, racial cultural and political clash, etc, make for a stout brew of weirdness. I’m in NC now, but miss Mississippi and Alabama for the sheer oddity you could find driving out into the world there. There’s something about poverty and abandonment of social structural supports that makes people get wonderfully creative. In my time there, I was documenting blues musicians, and met so many incredible people who had made it through some very hard times. Blues musicians, like many Southern writers, are the ones whose creativity shined through all the crap the society presented at the time. I came to feel that it was not because of, but in spite of the prevailing culture. When one is an intelligent, thinking, creative person, and the situation you live in has many obstacles and messed up thought dictating the society, the mind gets busy in order to soar above it.
Something I’ve wondered so kooky that I’m almost loathe to mention it (though I’m sure it not only has been mentioned before but has a name and scientists somewhere who research it) has to do with nutrition and region. We all literally are, of course, what we eat: every molecule in our body is made of nutrients and proteins taken from our food. For centuries, people were the land they lived in. A farmer living in rural postbellum Alabama would have eaten mostly corn, tomatoes, squash, etc., grown from his own garden or those near around because few foods could even be transported long distances without spoiling before the railroads covered more space. His meat would have been game from the woods of rural Alabama (who had been eaten exclusively from rural Alabama foliage) and butchered domesticated livestock, poultry and fish that would have eaten primarily of Alabama foliage and feed grown either on the same farm or nearby.
Now I eat food on a daily basis that comes from all over the world. Most of the produce in the grocery store for large parts of the year comes from Mexico/South America, various sauces and spices are imported from every continent, chicken comes from farms in the Midwest and beef from all over the world, etc… What has this done to our bodies or to our relationship to our surroundings? Have their been documented physiological or personality changes or more allergies or immunity damages, etc., as a consequence of this? (I’m not even referring to the changes caused by growth hormones given to cattle or pesticides in plants, etc., but just the region.) Anybody have a clue?
I think that JohnT must have meant in the early twentieth century. In the 1910s, John D. Rockefeller funded a massive education and eradication campaign against hookworm in the South. When I was in grad school, one of my classmates was doing some fascinating work comparing the campaign against hookworm to the early fight against AIDS. Both required people to talk about taboo subjects ( privies and feces in the case of hookworms, sex in the case of AIDS); both were viewed with suspicion by some community members; etc. Thanks in large part to the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, hookworm was mostly eradicated from the South by 1927.
Two other non-sequitur asides about southern culture:
- Everybody knows what a big deal the Civil War is in pop-culture and identity down here (especially in the “us v. them” mentality that is real), but less well known and almost as major is The Depression. While I don’t remember anybody who lived through the Civil War (though I knew the people who did know them and knew them well in fact), practically all of the old people I knew had horror stories from the Depression. My family lines were lucky in that while they weren’t rich they owned their own land and raised enough of their own food (even the ones who lived in tiny towns had gardens and chickens) that they didn’t go hungry, but they ALL had major distrust of banks, corporations, etc., as a direct result. People died of malnutrition down here during the Depression, and while we (rural and tiny-town southerners) were unaffected by the initial stock market crash (nobody in my family owned stock) the ripple effects hit HARD in a place that was already just scraping by. My grandfather was laid off the railroad and ended up sharing an abandoned cattle car with several male relatives in Charleston where they bribed their way into jobs in the shipyards that paid 4 per day (and they were deliriously glad to get it- they gave .50 per day back to the man who hired them), while my other grandfather lost the $800 he had in the bank and yet still had to pay off the $500 mortgage on his farm- he never had another bank account as long as he lived, keeping thousands of dollars in a box buried under his chicken house when he died) and the site of migrants going by, many of whom had worked for the family picking cotton or corn in better times, was something they never forgot. It ultimately gave birth to the Civil Rights movement as well, but that’s another story.
2- NONE of this thread should in the least inspire the notion that Southerners are at all monolithic. Before the Civil War there were southerners who were staunch abolitionists either vocally or secretly (always remember there were many white people- some of them slaveholders- who were agents on the underground railroad, and while Harriet Tubman is rightfully lauded as a brave and valiant woman she only worked in the border states- here in the Deep South, being caught with fugitive slaves was at best a long prison sentence if you were white and more likely death). During the Civil War Alabama was one of several states to field a Union regiment (Winston County seceded from Alabama when Alabama seceded from the Union, while former Alabama resident Andrew Johnson, governor of TN, served as VP under Lincoln) and some of the biggest, bravest names in the Civil Rights movement (Virginia Durr, for example, or her brother-in-law SCOTUS justice Hugo Black) were white Southerners (Black was a former member of the KKK before he became the most liberal justice in the nation). There were free blacks who owned slaves, got rich from business or trade, served as overseers or worked in the slave trade, etc., there were Jews and Catholics and even the occasional Chinese or Italian or Pole down here, etc., and even in the same tiny community you’d have widely different sorts (free thinkers, snake handlers, ardent segregationists and equally ardent integrationists, etc.). While it’s definitely fair to say the south is and has always been socially conservative as a rule, on the individual level all bets are off, and the “dissidents” are a sizable minority. (Example: 37% of Alabama voters voted for Kerry, a liberal MA Yankee, and at the height of segregation there were significant numbers for Kennedy [how many in AL is a matter of argument due to the oddity of the electoral process here at the time]). But, I’ve known many Alabamians who were flaming liberals and many who were hardshell conservatives and most are between- there is much middleground.
In addition to Mark Twain, I would definitely put Sinclair Lewis at the top of quintessential American writer who happened not to be southern. I don’t think any writer has quite captured the spirit of intelligent men caught in a mundane unintelligent world quite as perfectly as Lewis.