Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 21, 1991 TAG: 9104210294
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ANN MORRIS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Each wore a heavy gold medal around the neck, a symbol of his or her place in this pantheon.
But when the lights came up and the writers rose to leave, it was hard not to notice the stooped shoulders, frail limbs and hobbling gaits. Of the 26 fellowship members, only a handful are under 60; three are octogenarians.
Organized in 1987 to promote Southern writing and commemorate literary achievement, the fellowship believes in the distinctiveness and value of Welty Southern literature. That's understandable: Its members hail from the generation that brought Southern writing out of obscurity and won it respectability and recognition.
"When I took American literature in the '30s," Shelby Foote recalled, "it was all New Englanders in the textbooks. Now the South is very well represented."
But as this generation of giants passes - Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy are its most recent losses - the future of Southern literature becomes fraught with questions.
Can the themes favored by such writers as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty sustain Southern writers into the 21st century? As the South becomes more like the rest of the country, will the traditional Southern subjects of family, history, race and nature still be relevant?
And is the Southern literary tradition, now six decades strong, a wellspring that nourishes young writers or has it become a stifling influence, limiting creativity and experimentation?
Asking these questions earlier this month in Chattanooga, where the fellowship met in conjunction with the city's sixth biennial conference on Southern literature, felt akin to heresy. But conversations with a dozen novelists, poets and scholars suggest that Southern literature is facing something of an identity crisis - and a challenging period ahead.
This concern was best expressed by Madison Smartt Bell, a prolific 33-year-old novelist and short-story writer who grew up on a Tennessee farm but now lives in Baltimore. Bell describes himself as a "Southern writer who writes about non-Southern subjects." His most recent novel, for example, "Dr. Sleep," is a dark tale of urban alienation set in London.
He also bridges the stylistic gap between South and non-South, at times writing in the expansive storytelling mode favored by Southern writers, at other times in an oblique experimental style fashionable among young cutting-edge writers from other regions.
Bell said he worries that Southern literature runs the risk of overdoing it with southernness.
"Regional writing is a good thing and a terrible thing, but you don't want it to become merely quaint," he said. "I think [that] in a generation or two it really might become that. There have been so many reprises of the same thing, although outside circumstances have changed a lot."
The real subject for Southern writers today is how the region is being assimilated into the national culture and what that means for the Southern soul, Bell said. The late Walker Percy is the only writer who has truly tackled that subject, he said.
"Percy arrived at the dead center of where our subject really is," Bell said. "I'm not sure there's anyone in my generation who has done that, and the subject is changing out from under us."
The question of homogenization also worries Walter Sullivan, a 67-year-old Nashville novelist, teacher and literary critic known for his studies of Southern fiction. Sullivan said he fears that the South has lost the one thing that gave its literature a special power: a sense of the sacred.
"It used to be that Southerners had a sense of piety, a sense of the mystery of nature that came from their agrarian heritage," he said. "As we become more and more secularized, we become less and less good as writers."
Southerners haven't lost their fondness for gossip and storytelling, though, and that stands our literature well, Sullivan said.
"When you're gossiping, you're talking about people. And what is the very essence of fiction writing? Characterization. People. Malicious gossip may get you in trouble, but it's good for literature."
Southern writers have another distinct advantage, according to Fred Chappell, the Greensboro poet, novelist and creative writing professor. Living far from the nation's trend capitals, they can avoid the latest literary fashions and write more authentically.
But what is authentic subject matter for a young Southern writer? In North Carolina, a state on the fast track to urbanization, many writers still set their stories in rural areas and small towns, and often in the past.
In the past year, for example, Reynolds Price wrote a novel in which a man reflects on a summer he spent at a camp in the Smoky Mountains; Clyde Edgerton brought out a novel set in a small town with a Baptist college; and Kaye Gibbons published a novel set in rural North Carolina in the Depression.
The question of subject matter is particularly challenging for black writers, whose literary tradition is primarily one of protest.
In the decades known as the "Southern Renascence," the 1920s to 1940s, most of the South's finest black authors moved north to escape Jim Crow laws. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston were among those who migrated north, and although their most powerful work focused on their Southern experience, they were bitter exiles, for good reason.
In recent years the pattern has continued, with Southern-born writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison choosing to write about the South but live elsewhere.
For black writers who stay, it's an exciting if uncertain time.
"I am as Southern as Eudora Welty," said Tina McElroy Ansa, a young Georgia writer whose first novel, "Baby of the Family," was published last year. "I'm nourished by the South. I love family and small-town life. I don't ever want to live anywhere else."
For her novel, Ansa researched black folklore by interviewing old black women of the Georgia Sea Islands, and wove their respect for the supernatural into her story.
"One thing I wanted to do was reclaim that reverence," she said. "Talking about ghosts and spirits is not something to be embarrassed about. It's my heritage, it's my tradition, it's my people."
Although her novel was well received and she was invited to speak at the Chattanooga conference, Ansa said she wonders whether she will ever truly be included in the Southern literary mainstream. She notes that the fellowship, which inducts new members biennially based on a private vote, has no black women members, although it does have four black male members.
Watching the aging fellowship members on the stage of the Tivoli theater, Ansa said she wondered: "Who will join these people?"
It's a good question.
by CNB