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Passing by the Dragon
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10626 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1993 |
2,367 Words |
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Robert Gingher
Robert Gingher teaches American and English literature at
Guilford College and the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro, where he has also directed and continues to teach
in the master of arts in liberal studies program. Under an
NEH summer seminar grant he will be working this summer in
Dorf Tyrol, Italy, in the Ezra Pound archives. His Rough Road
Home: Stories by North Carolina Writers (University of North
Carolina Press) appeared last year.
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THE HARD TO CATCH MERCY
William Baldwin
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993
457 pp., $19.95
The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.
--Saint Cyril of Jerusalem
In the early 1980s at around three in the morning a voice would wake the author of The Hard to Catch Mercy and command him to resume writing. "I knew there was a story to tell," remembers William Baldwin, "and I was uniquely suited to tell it--so I kept going until I had it right." Over an interrupted decade, that early morning whisper took on fictional flesh and became Maum Anna, the former slave and family cook of Baldwin's distinguished first novel. Set in a Carolina fishing village caught between the heritage of the Civil War and the current First World War, The Hard to Catch Mercy probes what Faulkner called "the human heart in conflict with itself," without which art labors in vain. It is that rarest of books--an imaginative feast riveted in the wonder of the ordinary; a spirited and mature first novel.
The time is 1927, and Willie T., Baldwin's near-namesake narrator, looks back to 1916 when he was fourteen and growing up in his shut-in Low Country hometown. A lifelong resident of McClellanville, South Carolina, Baldwin mines his own "postage stamp of soil" in The Hard to Catch Mercy as carefully as Faulkner prospected Oxford, Mississippi, in his Yoknapatawpha saga. Baldwin has noted that he, too, is possessed by Faulkner's subjects of "land, family, race."
The estate of Col. William Thomas Allson (Willie T.'s Grandpa), like Thomas Sutpen's hundred acres in Absalom, Absalom!, is "land primed for fatality and already cursed with it." Slavery and miscegenation haunt Baldwin's family novel. Like Sutpen, Allson has a murderous will and uses questionable means unto his ends: "Mrs. McGill would state in public that Grandpa had stolen the Allson Place from her family by marrying Mary Matthews. It was the Matthews Place back then and Grandpa had been the overseer. So in her mind the Allsons weren't nearly good enough--but then her mind wasn't exactly a fine-tuned instrument."
Mrs. McGill is not the only character here
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