Long Time Leaving (32 page)

My wife, Joan, who is from various places in the North, says she knows why. Because Italians gave the world pasta and the opera. Okay, grits don't come in as many forms as pasta—which to me is a plus. You ever try to find regular spaghetti on a menu anymore? Who needs flat spaghetti? Who needs bow-tie spaghetti? Who needs spaghetti in the form of little spirals? And you know what baked ziti is, that they make such a big deal about on
The Sopranos?
We cooked some the other night, to see. It's macaroni and cheese. A friend of mine from Georgia who raised her daughter in Virginia took the daughter, at age seventeen, to dinner at some neighbors’ house, and the neighbors served macaroni and cheese. The daughter took a bite and said, “Mm. This is some interesting pasta.” My friend couldn't believe it. You think you've grounded your children in basic values, and then, boom, you realize you somehow neglected to acquaint them with macaroni and cheese. You know what the Sopranos call tomato sauce, by the way? Gravy. Okay, I once got spaghetti sauce in a Georgia restaurant that was essentially catsup. But that is because tomato sauce is not
our
gravy. Our gravy will make a puppy pull a freight train.

And, okay, I will stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Hank Williams wasn't Puccini. So the Met will charge $200 a ticket for a lavish production of
Madame Butterfly,
but with a ten-foot pole it won't touch “Your Cheating Heart,” which is the same story boiled down and less expensive.

Maybe that's the problem. The Mafia has done a lot better financially. The Klan, because it is so desperate to find somebody to look down on, doesn't know which way upscale is. But there's more to it than that.

People in this country do not think evil Southerners are cool. Our bad guys are not cable ready. Okay,
kleagle
is sillier
than godfather,
but—

See, I have to live with this. If our evil people are not as cool as evil people in New Jersey, it follows that whatever I am writing about is suspect. At dinner the other night, a New York man got out of me that I was writing a book about Robert E. Lee. He gave me a narrow look and asked, “Is the South going to like it?”

This is the flip side of what I came up here to get away from. Now instead of Southern people looking at me and asking is the South going to like it, I've got Northern people looking at me and asking the same thing, only demanding the opposite answer. Ideally, I told this New York man, nobody is going to like it. That confused him, which was the most I could hope for.

The truth is, just about the only thing Robert E. Lee and I have in common, besides the South, is that the Lees and the Blounts are both of Norman extraction. We come from people who came to England by way of Normandy from Scandinavia. The Norse, or, ironically enough, Northmen. The name
Blount
derives from Guillaume le Blond, who came in with the Norman Conquest. Normans have been the effete bad guys all the way back to
Ivanhoe
and
The Adventures of Robin Hood
and, I think,
Henry IV,
both parts, though I have other things to worry about than keeping all those Henrys straight. In Mississippi, you've had the Percys; they've been good guys, for Normans. The Percys fought the Klan, in a condescending Norman sort of way. In my case, Norman blood is mixed up with Scotch-Irish and Welsh and Dutch, so I don't have that aristocratic, cavalier thing going—but my point is, even mongrel-Norman guys and Klan guys are two different crowds.

So if you think I am raising the question of why the Klan has no pop-entertainment cachet (hasn't had any, really, since
Birth of a Nation)
in hopes that it can regain some and I can get in on it—no. I spent some time with Klansfolk back in the early eighties, to write a magazine article, and the only time any of them touched my heart was when I was riding in an elevator with some of them to the top floor of a four-story building in Nashville (to visit their lawyer), and one of the women looked giddy and said, “This is the highest I've ever been.” I contribute to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has just about run the Klan, as such, out of business. I don't even want there to be a hit TV series about an appealing family that, say, makes speeches at Bob Jones University. I don't even want to
vote
for anybody in such a family.

I just don't want to have to pick up
The New York Times
and read, as I did the other day, this from Maureen Dowd:

Okay. I am not denying that there were Southern law students in the 1930s who were prejudiced against Catholics (who have a mark on their foreheads only once a year). I am not denying that there are such Southerners now. If I accidentally see Bill O'Reilly or Mel Gibson on TV one more time, I might even—never mind.

Nor do I want to talk bad about Maureen Dowd's mama. I am just saying, maybe Maureen Dowd's mama's interpretation of some Southerners’ remarks was a tad more
literal
(and I
like
literalism, in its place) than the remarks themselves were. My goal in life is to make some tiny headway toward lifting from Southerners some tiny bit of the burden of having
to prove
that we are being tongue in cheek. For Southerners, the price of irony is eternal vigilance. Okay. I accept that. I just want to shift a reasonable amount of that burden northward.

Here is a novel that I highly recommend:
For the Love of Robert E. Lee,
by M. A. Harper. Harper, according to the dust jacket, “is the daughter of a South Carolina farmer. After 19 years in New Orleans, she recently returned to her family seat in Columbia.” The narrator of this novel, which was published in 1992 by the Soho Press of New York, is a spunky South Carolina high school girl named Garnet Laney, who falls in love, in 1963, with an early portrait of Lee, back when he looked a lot like Cary Grant. This narrator's school has recently been integrated. There are racial incidents, in which some of her white classmates behave badly. In these matters, she is a two-fisted liberal—at one point, she bloodies the nose of a bad white boy. Meanwhile, she is drifting back into the past to imagine—on plausible historical grounds—a love life for poor, unhappily married, incredibly foxy Marse Robert.

The only teacher who comes close to understanding Garnet is her debate-team coach, Mr. Damadian, an Armenian American Peace Corps veteran from Queens, New York. “I really like you people,” Damadian tells her. “Frankly I expected
Tobacco Road.
Weekly lynchings, I don't know. But you guys aren't as vicious as you're cracked up to be.”

Damadian means well. He and Garnet genuinely like each other. And here he is being sort of tongue in cheek, of course. But he is also presuming to express a measure of surprise that white Southerners lack a visible mark of Cain. Here is Garnet's reaction:

Yes. Can I get an “A-men,” There was, in fact, a TV series about Southerners of that period,
I'll Fly Away,
which I'm told was pretty good, but for some reason I never watched it. Not enough people got whacked in it, I guess. If
For the Love of Robert E. Lee
were turned into a series, by the right people, that I would watch.

But you know how that phrase, “the right people,” sounds to the wrong people, North and South. So let me be clear: by “the right people,” I mean those who will like my book about Robert E. Lee.

I
never met a Southerner who didn't hate the movie, and it's hard to understand…. There is a kind of reaction, as if the movie is meant to be critical of them,” my late friend and hero Pauline Kael is quoted as saying in
The Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece.
I would be one of the Southerners who have given her that impression. And if there's anything I hate, it's the notion of hating something that's good, or being regarded as hating something that's good, because of where I'm from.

I have, in fact, met a number of Southerners who loved
Nashville.
I've argued with them till I was blue in the face. “What if it were a movie called
Harlem?”
I have exclaimed. “Could it have gotten away with casting Ronee Blakley as a character loosely based on Billie Holiday? Singing the songs of Ronee Blakley?”

Then, of course, I have to add, “Not that there is anything wrong with
the songs of Ronee Blakley. She has a pretty voice, and that's an interesting song she sings in the movie, about growing up in Idaho. It is just not a country song. It's too damn lilting. And you know, and I know, that the character she plays, an ethereal hysteric said to be based on Loretta Lynn, conveniently lacks what is most essential about Loretta Lynn: her grit and humor. Loretta Lynn is about as ethereal as …as…”

But now, I believe, I am finally able to speak of this movie calmly. In part because I am mature and tired, and in part because I now have another movie to love, which many other Southerners hate.

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of
Nashville.
It is also the year that
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
has appeared. Both films are set in the South, were shot on location in the South, and have much to do with Southern music. Both were directed by non-Southerners—in the first case, Robert Altman of Kansas City, in the second, the Coen brothers of Minnesota. I always go to an Altman movie rooting for it to be good, and
Nashville
is widely regarded as Altman's best (actually,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
is). I always go to a Coen brothers movie expecting that at least something about it—something sour, arch, and chilly blooded—will put my teeth on edge, and when I saw a preview of
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
I thought to myself, “Oh, right, wiseacres meet
Green Acres.”

I couldn't wait to see
O Brother
so I could denounce it as a crude, heartless caricature of persons representing my ethnic background. I sat there scowling at it for fifteen minutes. And then…

It's a funny movie. And it's got feeling. You may think that John Tur-turro is the last person in the world that you would want to see playing Southern, and I would have been the first to agree with you, until I saw him with a fake beard and this hard, intense look on his face,
yodeling,
to “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” Lip-synching, of course, but there is something distinctively skanky about Turturro's looks that seems right natural in an escaped convict of my ethnic background. And Charles Durning does just enough of a little dance to retain his title as the best-dancing fat man there ever has been. I would sit through a musical tribute to Newt Gingrich by Billy Ray Cyrus if I thought that at some point Charles Durning would get up and dance. And I like George Clooney in movies. Did you see him in that movie where he's locked into a car trunk with Jennifer Lopez? If I didn't begrudge him that, I'm not going to begrudge him anything.

Maybe you think I have forsaken all vigilance. Well, maybe I just have bad taste. Let me confess that I have found much to enjoy over the years
in Hee-Haw
and also in
Amos 'n Andy.
Then, too, maybe I like a little

Northern smart-ass mixed in with my country pleasures. Purely Southern funnin -of-ourselves sometimes gets too cozy. Sharp as Mrs. “Minnie Pearl” Cannon was as a person, check out some of her old Grinder's Switch monologues if you want to hear Southern people being portrayed as
embarrassingly
dumb. “Mr. Turturro's performance,” writes A. O. Scott in an otherwise enthusiastic
New York Times
review, “is obnoxiously broad, as though he had prepared for the role by studying tapes of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, a recurring minor character on ‘The Simpsons.’ ” Well, are you offended by Cletus? No, because Cletus is
pointedly
heavy-handed. Like Andy Kaufman calling Memphis wrestling fans stupid to their face, Turturro takes the slack-jaw thing straight-facedly over the top, with no “I'm-on-yall's-side” wink to taut-jawed Southern folks. That's what would have been offensive, that wink. He's not an interesting enough actor to pull off that wink. Let's face it, there have been quite a few echt-Southern comedians who have not done tongue-in-cheek slack jaw all that well.

But the main virtue of
O Brother
is how lovingly and respectfully it involves real, weird, ecstatic, piercing, rootsy Southern music—from “You Are My Sunshine” and “I'll Fly Away” to the wonderfully spooky-erotic (and new to me) folk lullaby, “Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby.” You might well say that any movie with any sense set in the South
would
take advantage of the good music. But that is what
Nashville,
the music-filled movie, does not do.

Of course, neither does Nashville, the music industry. If only Altman had been grounded enough in the music to give that disjunction the business, so to speak. But
Nashville
is like a movie set in English pubs that takes for granted beer should be cold. As soon as
Nashville
came out, I rushed to see it. The other day I watched the DVD of it, to make sure I hadn't just been in a bad mood when I saw it in 1975. That movie still puts my nose out of joint.

It has some great stuff in it, to be sure. Lily Tomlin's Nashville housewife has what the Lorettaesque character lacks: character. Her scenes with Ned Beatty playing her husband and with Keith Carradine as the young musician who seduces her (it is she, however, who comes out on top), and Beatty's scenes with Gwen Welles as the aspiring, untalented singer who has to strip for a political smoker, all flow together the way only a semi-improvised, actor-friendly Altman syncopation can, when it's got some fiber to it. And, hey, it's not as though I expect a movie called, say,
Dodge City to
be a scrupulous travelogue. But you can't flambé fried chicken. The concept
Nashville
has too much literal and metaphorical
specific gravity, good and bad, to be served up just any old whichaway à la Altman.