The Books That Mattered Read online

  The Books That Mattered

  A Reader’s Memoir

  Frye Gaillard

  NewSouth Books

  Montgomery

  Also by Frye Gaillard

  Non-Fiction

  Watermelon Wine (1978)

  Race, Rock & Religion (1982)

  The Catawba River (1983)

  The Dream Long Deferred (1988)

  Southern Voices: Profiles and Other Stories (1991)

  Kyle at 200 M.P.H. (1993)

  Lessons from the Big House (1994)

  The Way We See It (with Rachel Gaillard, 1995)

  If I Were a Carpenter (1996)

  The Heart of Dixie: Southern Rebels, Renegades and Heroes (1996)

  Voices from the Attic (1997)

  Mobile and the Eastern Shore (with Nancy and Tracy Gaillard, 1997)

  As Long As the Waters Flow (with photos by Carolyn DeMeritt, 1998)

  The 521 All-Stars (with photos by Byron Baldwin, 1999)

  The Greensboro Four: Civil Rights Pioneers (2001)

  Cradle of Freedom (2004)

  Prophet from Plains: Jimmy Carter and His Legacy (2007)

  In the Path of the Storms (with Sheila Hagler and Peggy Denniston, 2008)

  With Music and Justice for All (2008)

  Alabama’s Civil Rights Trail (2010)

  Fiction

  The Secret Diary of Mikhail Gorbachev (1990)

  Children’s

  Spacechimp: NASA’s Ape in Space (with Melinda Farbman, 2000)

  NewSouth Books

  105 S. Court Street

  Montgomery, AL 36104

  Copyright 2012 by Frye Gaillard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-287-0

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-197-1

  LCCN: 2012012229

  Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.

  To Julie Suk, the poet in the family

  And to Nancy

  “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

  — William Faulkner

  “Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved. It is the balm of the primitive, the way to exorcise a terrifying life.”

  — Anais Nin

  “I think you must remember that a writer is a simple-minded person to begin with . . . He’s not a great mind, he’s not a great thinker, he’s not a great philosopher, he’s a storyteller.”

  — Erskine Caldwell

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 - Once Upon a Time

  2 - Southern Voices

  3 - Across the Divide

  4 - The Power of the Truth

  5 - Darkness

  6 - Just Telling a Story

  7 - Poetry, Prose, and a Sense of Place

  8 - Forgotten Histories

  9 - Family Values

  10 - The Classics and the Glory of the Stars

  Epilogue—The Beat Goes On

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  Literary Index

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Last year I was re-reading some favorite books, including Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, always, for me, one of the most durable of the classics. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . Such a fine setup for a novel of upheaval and social injustice, a warning by Dickens against the flaws in European society. Somehow, maybe because I once read them in consecutive weeks, it is a book associated in my mind with Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins, in which the protagonist, Dr. Thomas More, a psychiatrist and mental patient in the same institution, is contemplating the possibility of anarchy.

  Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

  Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

  Once again, not a bad beginning for a book.

  I was subsequently talking about these things—favorite books and why they move us—with my friend, Jay Lamar, director of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University. Jay is, and has been for years, one of the most important figures in the Alabama literary scene, a writer and editor who also plays a catalytic role. For some years now, through her programming at the center, she has brought writers and readers together in college classrooms, community centers, libraries, and other venues to talk about the things that matter to us all.

  In one of my conversations with Jay, I mentioned that I had always wanted to write a book about books, those that had brought me the greatest delight through the years. I wanted to offer a reader’s tribute, but more than that, a kind of reader’s memoir, a recounting of exactly why and when these volumes had mattered. I think I may have mentioned The Plague by Albert Camus, a book that I found to be curiously inspiring, given the dismal subject matter. For the narrator and central character, Dr. Bernard Rieux, there is meaning on the other side of suffering, and when I read the book as a college freshman I remember clinging to that glimmer of hope.

  I’m sure that I also mentioned William Faulkner, not a writer that I always enjoyed, but one who provided the very definition of art—the human heart in conflict with itself—and a reason to consider why reading mattered. Jay encouraged me to go ahead with the book, while she and other members of her staff developed programming to go along with it. In the pages that follow are eleven essays featuring thirty-odd books, both fiction and non, that have had a major impact on my life. This list (it was supposed to be a Top 25, but it grew) is not my estimate of the thirty best books ever written, but simply those that have mattered most to me.

  Some conspicuous names are missing. There is no Shakespeare, no Dostoevsky, no Hemingway or Thomas Mann, or for that matter, no Barbara Kingsolver. It is also true that some of these selections are personal indeed. I doubt if most such lists would include Larry L. King’s The Old Man and Lesser Mortals, or Jacobo Timerman’s The Longest War, or Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, as beautifully written as these books are. And most fans of David Halberstam would be more likely to choose The Best and the Brightest over The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy. But there are some books that I suspect would make a lot of lists: To Kill a Mockingbird, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, perhaps The Grapes of Wrath or All the King’s Men—none of these are especially original selections, but they come from the heart.

  My hope is that those who read this book, or participate in the programming that is scheduled to follow (either regional or national, under the auspices of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities) will be moved not to adopt these selections but rather to create an equally personal list. I have to say that in more than forty years as a writer, I’ve never been involved in a more satisfying project, or one more fun, and I’m happy now to let it go forth, hoping, expecting, that those of you who thumb through the pages will be moved to contagious ruminations of your own.

  1

  Once Upon a Time

  Featuring:

  Johnny Tremain—Esther Forbes

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Mark Twain

&nb
sp; Also, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Roy Blount Jr., Ron Powers

  I

  My first encounters with books were disappointing.

  I remember when I was a very little boy thumbing through the pages of fairy tales, which were, as far as I could tell, stories of cannibalism and mayhem in which giants and witches, tigers and wolves did their best to eat small children. Then came school and the announcement that I must learn to read, and the books they gave us to accomplish this task were as dull and dreary as the fairy tales had been terrifying. This is Spot. See Spot run. I wondered what these people were thinking. Whatever happened to the idea of a story? This was something I knew all about, for I had a favorite aunt—her name was Mary, but I called her Mamie—who had a gift for telling fine tales, which had the advantage that they were mostly true.

  Mamie lived in the house next door to ours, and it seemed to be filled with the whisper of old ghosts. Not the scary kind, but the benevolent presence of a rich family past that wound its way back into hazy and unfamiliar places that we could only see in our minds. The house itself was a source of endless fascination for me, and for my cousin, who came to visit most often in the summer. We loved the nooks and crannies of the attic, where we sometimes sifted through the moth-eaten relics, old coats and dresses that my cousin loved, and a Confederate jacket that had once been worn by a member of the family.

  Everything about the place was antebellum, but not in the Gone-With-the-Wind, Greek revival tradition with the great white columns and curving staircases; this was, instead, an unpretentious two-story house built to catch the summer breeze—a Gulf Coast cottage, constructed by slaves in 1836. It was surrounded by magnolias and oak trees draped with Spanish moss and azaleas blooming pink at the first hint of spring. Mamie roamed those grounds with great satisfaction, and welcomed an extended family of children into this curious world of memory. I remember sitting with her on the front porch swing when I was maybe five or six, my cousin Julie on one side, me on the other, while she told us stories of the Revolutionary War.

  Her favorite subject was General Francis Marion, “the Swamp Fox” as he was then known, a Low Country-patriot from South Carolina with whom Peter Gaillard, one of our own ancestors, had ridden. “A plague on that wily Swamp Fox!” she would cry, imitating Cornwallis or some other British general driven to distraction by Marion’s bold guerilla raids. For me as a child, listening to her stories was pure joy, and at least for the first ten years of my life it simply never occurred to me that anything this good could happen in a book.

  But then I discovered Johnny Tremain. I must have been in the fourth grade, and there it was on a library shelf, imposing in its mass at more than two hundred pages. Later, I would learn about its author, how Esther Forbes, a remarkably prolific writer from Boston, had won acclaim for her novels and a Pulitzer Prize in the 1940s for a biography she had written of Paul Revere. For Johnny Tremain, a story for young readers about the Revolutionary War, she had won the Newbery Medal in 1944, and even now her book is remembered as one of the finest children’s novels ever written.

  For me, it was magic. It was the tale of a boy in Revolutionary Boston, a silversmith’s apprentice initially unaware, at the age of fourteen, of the turbulent history taking shape around him. He lived in the attic of his master’s house, sharing cramped quarters with two other boys, both far less gifted than he. I think I was drawn to this flawed hero, Johnny Tremain, precisely because the author had not made him perfect. He seemed so real in his flashes of arrogance and disdain, so completely believable to a reader like me, just a few years younger and thus drawn easily into his world. And what a world it was!

  There was only one window in the attic. Johnny always stood before it as he dressed. He liked this view down the length of Hancock’s Wharf. Counting houses, shops, stores, sail lofts, and one great ship after another, home again after their voyaging, content as cows waiting to be milked. He watched the gulls, so fierce and beautiful, fighting and screaming among the ships. Beyond the wharf was the sea and the rocky islands where the gulls nested.

  As Esther Forbes’s story unfolds, so does a vivid portrait of a time in which the people of Boston are much like the gulls—scrapping to feed their families and themselves. Yet they also know there are opportunities in America that the Mother Country could never offer. For their working-class counterparts across the Atlantic, there was far less hope of anything better, far less chance of upward mobility, no matter their ambition or grit.

  In Boston, seething with life and a ferocious sense of greater possibility, a resourceful boy like Johnny Tremain could indenture his services to a master craftsman, knowing that one day he would have his own shop. For a time that was all Johnny thought about, encouraged in his dreams by the great Paul Revere, one of the finest silversmiths in the city. But then without warning, his expectations ended in calamity. As Johnny was rushing one morning to fill an order, a crucible containing molten silver cracked from the strain of too much heat, and the liquid metal quickly coated his hand, burning his delicate flesh so severely that his thumb became welded to the edge of his palm. Even after he recovered from the pain, and the fever and delirium that went along with it, he knew that his days as a silversmith were over. For a time he wandered the piers of Boston, trying to imagine another way of life but finding nothing to compare with what had abruptly been taken from him.

  He rarely bothered to look at the signs over the door which indicated what work was done inside. A pair of scissors for a tailor, a gold lamb for a wool weaver, a basin for a barber, a painted wooden book for a bookbinder, a large swinging compass for an instrument-maker . . . A butcher (his sign was a gilded ox skull) would have employed him, but the idea of slaughtering animals sickened him. He was a fine craftsman to the tips of his fingers—even to the tips of his maimed hand.

  Finally, Johnny came upon a newspaper office, where he was offered a job delivering papers. He might have considered such work beneath him, except for the fact that it came with a horse—a spirited gelding with pale blue eyes, his coat nearly white but flecked with brown, and a mane and tale that were almost black. Johnny was impressed by the animal’s beauty, and even more by his speed; but also by a timid, vulnerable spirit that required a gentle hand from the rider. Within a few days, horse and boy had developed a bond as they galloped through the rolling hills of Massachusetts, handing out papers from Boston all the way to Lexington and Concord.

  The year was 1773, and Boston was the epicenter of rebellion—a fact that Johnny understood well. British troops now occupied the city, and flashes of violence seemed to happen every day. As he began to read the papers he delivered, studying the incendiary editorials, he developed a passion for the Patriot cause. He soon discovered that the attic just above the newspaper office was a place where the rebel leaders—John Hancock and Samuel Adams, Paul Revere and Joseph Warren—came and mapped their strategies of insurrection.

  And so it was that Esther Forbes began to weave her tale of adventure through a history that had won her a Pulitzer Prize. The complexity of her achievement was beyond the understanding of a reader barely ten. Even so, I knew there was something in the way she told the story that went far beyond what I learned in school. Paul Revere, previously nothing more than a stick-figure legend, suddenly came alive in her pages—the robust son of an immigrant father, stocky in his build, swarthy in his look, a man who anchored a network of spies.

  John Hancock, known to me only for his signature, emerged as a complicated character—one of the richest men in Massachusetts, with all of the vanity such wealth might imply, but a leader who was willing to risk everything for a cause in which he deeply believed. Along with Samuel Adams, an ally who could scarcely have been more different, Hancock was generally regarded by the British occupiers as one of the most dangerous men in the colonies. Adams, meanwhile, appeared in the pages of Johnny Tremain as a man who was never very good at anything, except politics.

  Unl
ike John Adams, his more famous cousin, Sam was a patient, disheveled man in his early forties, prematurely gray, and content, it seemed, to let other men take center stage. His hands and voice often shook when he spoke, even as he planned the Boston Tea Party, but there was never any doubt—certainly not in the minds of the British—that his organizing genius lay at the heart of the Patriot cause.

  But perhaps the most intriguing figure of all, and to me the least known, was Dr. Joseph Warren, a thirty-something physician who had achieved renown in the medical world through his belief in inoculations for small pox. The disease had ravaged Boston more than once, and in the great epidemic of 1764, Warren was able to demonstrate the value of his largely untested and controversial practice. One of those he inoculated was John Adams. As Boston drifted toward revolution, this gentle physician—“a fine-looking man,” in the words of Esther Forbes, “with fresh skin and thick blond hair and very bright eyes”—emerged as a leader both fiery and fearless.

  It was Warren who, on April 18, 1775, sent Paul Revere on his ride to Lexington and Concord—first to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were then in Lexington, that the British army was on its way to arrest them. The other mission of the British that night was to seize the Patriot munitions in Concord, and it was there that the minutemen gathered in force.

  Faced with a withering fire as they marched toward the village, the British regulars broke and ran—a possibility that had scarcely occurred to them, given the ragtag army they were facing. It was, of course, one of those inspiring moments of history that mutates easily into mythology, and I remember as a boy being stirred. But there was something in the quality of Esther Forbes’s telling that suggested that this was a more subtle story, tinged, perhaps, with irony and pathos. Not that I formed such thoughts at the time. I was far too inspired by a newfound passion for history and books.