THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407220588
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LYNN DEAN HUNTER
LENGTH: Long : 108 lines
ONCE UPON A TIME, according to Baltimore's literary critic H.L. Mencken, the South was ``the Sahara of the beaux arts,'' that is, a cultural wasteland - particularly in regard to the writing arts.
``That was the way we used to think about Southern fiction,'' says North Carolina writer Doris Betts, whose latest novel, Souls Raised from the Dead, was just published by Alfred A. Knopf. ``But it's no longer the case.''
Indeed, since Mencken's era - he died in 1956 - Southern fiction has come alive. Today, authors such as George Garrett, Reynolds Price, Ellen Gilchrist, Kaye Gibbons, Dori Sanders, Larry Brown, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith and Robert Olen Butler are filling the stores with new fiction. Their styles are lucid; their subjects are fresh.
Critics have noted the ordinariness of the new Southern narrator, who might be a small-town beautician or a schoolteacher, in contrast to the larger-than-life figures in novels of William Faulkner's era. Betts, a short-story writer and novelist (The River to Pickle Beach, Heading West, The Beast of the Southern Wild), views this as a step in the ``democratization'' of fiction. Southern literature, she says, has been removed ``from the planter class, the aristocracy.''
``Now people are educated who, a hundred years ago, did not have the verbal skills to tell their stories. We hear jokes about `mall fiction' and `trailer court novels.' But, if you believe there are only a few universal stories, then they can be told by anybody. The emotions are the same whether you're wearing a big hoop skirt or going barefoot in the swamp. It's still love and death and worry; religion, pain, all those things.''
Many of the hot new Southern writers are Betts' personal friends; some, like Tim McLaurin (Woodrow's Trumpet, Keeper of the Moon), are her former creative-writing students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
It is no coincidence that the literary arts have blossomed in Betts' lifetime. A Distinguished Professor of English at UNC-CH, Betts, 62, is one of those people who, believing it could happen, has nurtured the renaissance in Southern fiction.
``It's an exciting time to be here,'' says Betts of Chapel Hill. ``First, there had to be people who believed this could happen, and who worked to make it happen. . . . Now there's a contagion (among younger writers) that just wasn't there when I was growing up. It's cumulative, like a snowball going downhill.''
Betts was born in Iredell County, N.C., and schooled in Statesville, Greensboro and Chapel Hill; she now lives on a horse farm outside Pittsboro, N.C. For more than 20 years, she has worked to bring writing to community schools and libraries. Her grass-roots literary efforts stem from a conviction that arts and culture should not be kept inside the universities.
``There is a hunger out there,'' she insists. ``Once you have more interaction in the communities, it just sparks; one thing sparks another. There need not be a division between writers and the audience. The ivory tower - those walls are down. That's the other thing that's very exciting. Writers are living in the world.''
Betts joined the UNC-CH faculty in 1966. She has been instrumental in designing and directing the creative-writing program and has received many distinguished teaching awards. Recently, Betts was named to the Esquire roster of those who have most influenced the development of young writers in America.
``I don't try to make my students over in a cookie-cutter mold,'' she says. ``They come to class and take away what they need. What I do is not so much `teaching writing' as showing students how to discover their own genuine subjects. . . . I've noticed that women writing teachers - it's such a cliche, I'm afraid to use it - are the most nurturing. Women give a great deal to their students.''
Married to Judge Lowry Betts and the mother of three children, Betts has carried some traditional domestic skills into the workplace.
``The first dissertation I directed was a young woman who had just had her first baby,'' Betts recalls. ``She was breast-feeding the baby, and meeting with me. She'd come, bring the baby, put a quilt down in my office; the kid would play, and she would nurse it. We would go on talking about literature. There was not a man in the department who could concentrate with a baby in the office. Women have had to.''
Betts believes women's traditional skills are not only altering the workplace, they are shaping new trends in Southern fiction.
``What I see among female writing students now is a great reliance on voice. Like Anne Tyler's writing, or Lee Smith - they do it so well. And the emphasis is on individual experience. A microcosmic view. And coping - endings in which people are coping somehow.
``Y'all know,'' Betts says, lengthening her Carolina vowels, ``women can't run off to the French Foreign Legion, or anything else. Sooner or later they stay home and deal with it.''
Betts' most recent book, Souls Raised from the Dead, has a ``coping'' conclusion, in which family members try to find ways to absorb their grief after a child's death.
``The questions that interest me are largely religious questions,'' she reflects. ``With a lower case `r.' I would say that underlies the way people who do cope learn to cope. But nobody's all that certain, either. That's what I wanted (in Souls Raised from the Dead) - I wanted to show somebody on a kind of lengthy pilgrimage, whose simple faith is collapsing. You know, religion is embarrassing to people.'' She laughs.
``We've flipped from the Victorian: Now we can talk about sex, but death and religion are embarrassing.'' MEMO: Lynn Dean Hunter is a writer who lives in Norfolk.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JERRY BAUER
Doris Betts, 62, an English professor at the University of North
Carolina, has influenced many young writers.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY WRITING by CNB