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Those Who Survived Junior
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10414 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,800 Words |
| Author
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Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan, a novelist and literary critic, is professor
of English and director of the program in creative writing at
Vanderbilt University. His most recent novel is The War the
Women Lived: Voices From the Confederate South (1996). |
IN MEMORY OF JUNIOR
Clyde Edgerton
Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1992
224 pp., $16.95
It is an October Sunday in Nashville. The Southern Book Festival is about to end, and in the ballroom of the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, awards are being made: plaques for lifetime achievement in the service of literature, for the best novel of the past year, for the best book of nonfiction, for all the usual accomplishments in all the usual categories. Finally, there will be fifteen, perhaps twenty minutes for the featured writer to read from his work. Clyde Edgerton, holding an apple he will use later as part of his performance, begins with an anecdote:
Recently, when Edgerton was in California, a cabdriver, hearing his accent, asked if he was from the South.
Edgerton admitted that he was. "Then I guess you know a lot about the Civil War," the driver said. "A little," replied Edgerton.
"How many people were killed in that war?" the driver asked.
"Over a million," Edgerton replied "North and South."
There was a silence. "Well," the driver said finally. "I think that's a great tribute to the patriotism of the American people."
There are, I suspect, several morals to this story: For example, unlike some wines, southern humor is transportable. It exists wherever a southern storyteller can find it, and good southern storytellers always have an ear cocked for it; listening is one of the things they do best. But Edgerton deals in humor, not morals. He tells another joke courtesy of the same cab driver, then goes to work, reading first a passage about a dog, near death from hanging, being revived by a kind of canine CPR: "I once brought a bird dog back to life with mouth-to-mouth. Actually, it's mouth-to-nose in the case of a dog…."
Then with large bites of apple held in his cheek, chewed on, swallowed, he replicates the dialogue of a quail hunter, complaining over lunch about animal rights activist: "You can't hardly have a circus now with all these cruelty-to-animals people all over the place. You use a whip and a chair in that tiger's
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