Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 13, 1994 TAG: 9412130024
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ WE have our own writers," wrote Richmond author James Branch Cabell in 1947. "And that they are not perfect, we may admit, tentatively, inasmuch as we never went so far as to read their books."
That quote, from the book "Let Me Lie," sums up Virginia's feelings for its writers - who date back to 1608, when Capt. John Smith published his booklet, "A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony."
Mother of states, mother of presidents. Virginia has also mothered a good portion of award-winning authors this century - it just hasn't done much to honor them until recently, they say.
"While Virginia has not even a trace of an inferiority complex about anything, it actually seems to have a literary inferiority complex," said Hollins College professor and writer Richard Dillard.
Dillard was the featured speaker last week at The Library of Virginia's celebration of "Terrain of Truth and Dreams: 20th Century Virginia Authors," an exhibit that maps out Virginia's writers - what they wrote, what part of Virginia they came from and what awards they won along the way.
The list is impressive and various: six Pulitzer Prize winners, 31 mainstream fiction writers, 17 poets, nine historians/biographers, three fantasy/sci-fi writers, three mystery writers. As Dillard says, "It goes from John Fox Jr., who wrote romantic novels about the Cumberland, to William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk."
The biggies are showcased, including Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove, Sherwood Anderson (``Winesburg, Ohio''), William Styron (``The Confessions of Nat Turner''), Peter Taylor (``A Summons to Memphis'') and Tom Wolfe (``The Right Stuff'').
Some of the lesser-knowns are honored, too, as a way to raise awareness about their lives and writings.
Did you know, for instance, that Mary Johnston's Civil War novels, "The Long Roll" and "Cease Firing," contain some of the best writing about men in combat produced to date? Or that Johnston, a mystic, was born in Buchanan and lived in Warm Springs?
"Here's this quite independent-minded Virginia lady who went trudging around on the battlefields ... and wrote astonishingly, and she's been flat-out forgotten," said Dillard.
Display of the map, which coincides with a national traveling exhibit that also features writers from the other 49 states, will be exhibited at The Library of Virginia in Richmond through March 3 (although the national map moves on after Jan. 28). Its purpose, according to state library spokesman Jan Hathcock, "is to reinforce the appreciation of books and reading, and the literary heritage of Virginia."
Which, compared to other states, fares quite well. "Poor Wyoming has to claim writers who only went there on hunting trips!" Dillard said, such as Ernest Hemingway. Vladimir Nabokov "is only on there because Humbert Humbert and Lolita passed through there in the novel."
Southwest Virginia - traditionally overlooked as literary territory in favor of Richmond or Charlottesville - is or was home to 17 writers on the 58-person list, including the late Paxton Davis and the late Carleton Drewry, as well as Lee Smith, Dillard, Sharyn McCrumb and Cathryn Hankla.
Drewry, who lived in Roanoke and was the state's poet laureate until his death in 1991, "always felt that writers who lived in New York City had a better chance of being noticed than those who lived in the far reaches of the United States," said his widow, Elizabeth Drewry.
Added Ivanhoe-born and Hollins-educated writer David Huddle: "I feel really honored to be representing Ivanhoe. ... I grew up in Southwest Virginia; I'd never seen the ocean till I was 25 years old."
Now a writing professor at the University of Vermont and a novelist, Huddle says Western Virginia has been fertile ground for his work. "I sometimes speculate about what kind of writer I would've been had I stayed home; maybe I'd have felt no pressure at all to write about it. It would have been all around me."
Setting his work in a small Virginia factory town, as he did in his short-story collection "Only the Little Bone" and a collection of poems called "Paper Boy," has been Huddle's way of dealing with homesickness, he said - "a way of going home every morning" when he sits down to write.
Hankla, a Richlands native and the youngest writer on the map, says Southwest Virginia infiltrates her poetry more than fiction. "You're so attentive to descriptions of things close to hand when you write poems," said Hankla, 36, who also teaches at Hollins.
"There's this feeling in Roanoke and beyond [it west] that you really need to represent yourself," she added. "Appalachia is still considered a Third World country - in our own state. That hasn't gone away."
The map is a good public-education tool, said Lexington's Katie Letcher Lyle, who has published 11 books, including five adolescent novels.
"I don't think the public really knows that much about creative writers," said Lyle. "They think, one, you're rich; two, you're intimidating; and three, you're real smart. And they're so wrong, I can't stand it."
Nelson S. Bond, a fantasy and screenplay writer who is considered the "dean of Roanoke's writers," is also on the map, which lists among his works the short story collection, "Mr. Mergenthwirker's Lobblies and Other Fantastic Tales," and his two-act play adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
"They asked Somerset Maugham how he got to be the dean of English letters, and he said, 'longevity,' '' quipped Bond, 86. "I think that would have to be my answer, too."
When Bond first began writing, "I would type a story, and my wife would make a clean copy, then I'd revise ... then we'd do it again and again about five times before the story got done," Bond explained. "Now it's all done on computers in one draft, which is probably why writers today are so sloppy.
"Good stories are not written, they're rewritten."
In his talk last week, Dillard urged the Library of Virginia Foundation to carry the celebration a step further by working with the University Press of Virginia to bring Mary Johnston's two Civil War novels back into print, as well as Ellen Glasgow's 1929 "They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals" and James Branch Cabell's 1927 "Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig-Leaves."
"Books don't stay in print in this modern world of multinational-corporation publishing," he said. "And we don't want these wonderful Virginia writers to be forgotten - simply because no one can get their books."
Copies of the 20th-century Virginia Authors Map can be purchased for $15.68 (includes tax and shipping) from the Virginia Center for the Book, 11th Street at Capitol Square, Richmond, Va. 23219-3491; (804) 371-6493 (checks payable to the Virginia Center for the Book).
The Virginia map exhibit runs through March 3 at the Virginia Center for the Book, located at 11th Street at Capitol Square in downtown Richmond. (804) 786-7133 or (804) 371-6493 for more information.
by CNB