The Mortgaged Heart (34 page)

I read it as much to comfort myself as to comfort her, and the beauty of the language brought peace and loveliness to both of us on that Christmas Eve in that hospital ward.

She was a girl of magnificent courage, accepting the infirmities of her life with grace and equanimity. Still, I knew that she was troubled about the party, because she repeated, "Tonight of all nights, when I was going to walk in and show my friends."

The doctors also were troubled, and suddenly, like a rising wind, there was a small commotion in the corridor. News was being passed around that Carol's leg was going to be fixed in time and she could go to her party, after all. There was general rejoicing in the nine-bed ward, and Carol wept again, with excitement.

When it was time for the party to begin, Carol was dressed immaculately and wearing her finest clothes. Her legs were brought to her, and she used the skills for walking that she had been taught so very recently. A doctor looked in the doorway to see how she was getting on, and the therapist said, "Good girl, Carol."

She checked the straps on her prosthetic legs, and then she struggled to get into a standing position, and with her head held high, she walked proudly down the corridor of the ward to where her friends were waiting for her.

I knew that the long months of suffering, heroism, hard work and courage had paid off and that Carol would really be all right.

The last time I heard from her, she was attending college, joining in all the student activities, and was planning to teach physiotherapy after graduation.

[
McCall's,
December 1967, published posthumously]

I
N OUR OLD
G
EORGIA HOME
we used to have two sitting-rooms—a back one and a front one—with folding doors between. These were the family living-rooms and the theatre of my shows. The front sitting-room was the auditorium, the back sitting-room the stage. The sliding doors the curtain. In wintertime the firelight flickered dark and glowing on the walnut doors, and in the last strained moments before the curtain you noticed the ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece, the old tall clock with the glass front of painted swans. In summertime the rooms were stifling until the time for curtain, and the clock was silenced by sounds of yard-boy whistling and distant radios. In winter, frost flowers bloomed on the windowpanes (the winters in Georgia are very cold), and the rooms were drafty, quiet. The open summer lifted the curtains with each breeze, and there were the smells of sun-hot flowers and, toward twilight, watered grass. In winter we had cocoa after the show and in summer orange crush or lemonade. Winter and summer the cakes were always the same. They were made by Lucille, the cook we had in those days, and I have never tasted cakes as good as those cakes we used to have. The secret of their goodness lay, I believe, in the fact that they were always cakes that failed. They were chocolate raisin cupcakes that did not rise, so that there was no proper cupcake cap—the cakes were dank, flat and dense with raisins. The charm of those cakes was alogether accidental.

As the eldest child in our family I was the custodian, the counter of the cakes, the boss of all our shows. The repertory was eclectic, running from hashed-over movies to Shakespeare and shows I made up and sometimes wrote down in my nickel Big Chief notebooks. The cast was everlastingly the same—my younger brother, Baby Sister and myself. The cast was the most serious handicap. Baby Sister was in those days a stomachy ten-year old who was terrible in death scenes, fainting spells and such-like necessary parts. When Baby Sister swooned to a sudden death she would prudently look around beforehand and fall very carefully on sofa or chair. (Once, I remember, such a death fall broke both legs of one of Mama's favorite chairs.)

As director of the shows I could put up with terrible acting, but there was one thing I simply could not stand. Sometimes, after coaching and drilling half the afternoon, the actors would decide to abandon the whole project just before curtain time and wander out into the yard to play. "I struggle and work on a show all afternoon, and now you run out on me," I would yell, past endurance at these times. "You're nothing but children! Children! I've got a good mind to shoot you dead." But they only gulped the drinks and ran out with the cakes.

The props were impromptu, limited only by Mama's modest interdictions. The top drawer of the linen closet was out of bounds and we had to make do with second-best towels and tablecloths and sheets in the plays that called for nurses, nuns and ghosts.

The sitting-room shows ended when first I discovered Eugene O'Neill. It was the summer when I found his books down in the library and put his picture on the mantlepiece in the back sitting-room. By autumn I was writing a three-acter about revenge and incest—the curtain rose on a graveyard and, after scenes of assorted misery, fell on a catafalque. The cast consisted of a blind man, several idiots and a mean old woman of one hundred years. The play was impractical for performance under the old conditions in the sitting rooms. I gave what I called a "reading" to my patient parents and a visiting aunt.

Next, I believe, it was Nietzsche and a play called
The Fire of Life.
The play had two characters—Jesus Christ and Friedrich Nietzsche—and the point I prized about the play was that it was written in verses that rhymed. I gave a reading of this play, too, and afterward the children came in from the yard, and we drank cocoa and ate the fallen, lovely raisin cakes in the back sitting-room by the fire. "Jesus?" my aunt asked when she was told. "Well, religion is a nice subject anyway."

***

By that winter the family rooms, the whole town, seemed to pinch and cramp my adolescent heart. I longed for wanderings. I longed especially for New York. The firelight on the walnut folding doors would sadden me, and the tedious sound of the old swan clock. I dreamed of the distant city of skyscrapers and snow, and New York was the happy mise en scene of that first novel I wrote when I was fifteen years old. The details of the book were queer: ticket collectors on the subway, New York front yards—but by that time it did not matter, for already I had begun another journey. That was the year of Dostoevski, Chekhov and Tolstoy—and there were the intimations of an unsuspected region equidistant from New York. Old Russia and our Georgia rooms, the marvelous solitary region of simple stories and the inward mind.

[
Mademoiselle,
September 1948]

I
N THE
S
OUTH
during the past fifteen years a genre of writing has come about that is sufficiently homogeneous to have led critics to label it "the Gothic School." This tag, however, is unfortunate. The effect of a Gothic tale may be similar to that of a Faulkner story in its evocation of horror, beauty, and emotional ambivalence—but this effect evolves from opposite sources; in the former the means used are romantic or supernatural, in the latter a peculiar and intense realism. Modern Southern writing seems rather to be most indebted to Russian literature, to be the progeny of the Russian realists. And this influence is not accidental. The circumstances under which Southern literature has been produced are strikingly like those under which the Russians functioned. In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Russian novelists, particularly Dostoievsky, were criticized harshly for their so called "cruelty." This same objection is now being raised against the new Southern writers. On first thought the accusation seems puzzling. Art, from the time of the Gteek tragedians on, has unhesitatingly portrayed violence, madness, murder, and destruction. No single instance of "cruelty" in Russian or Southern writing could not be matched or outdone by the Greeks, the Elizabethans, or, for that matter, the creators of the Old Testament. Therefore it is not the specific "cruelty" itself that is shocking, but the manner in which it is presented. And it is in this approach to life and suffering that the Southerners are so indebted to the Russians. The technique briefly is this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humorous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of a man with a materialistic detail.

To the reader accustomed to the classical traditions this method has a repellent quality. If, for instance, a child dies and the life and death of this child is ptesented in a single sentence, and if the author passes over this without comment or apparent pity but goes on with no shift in tone to some trivial detail—this method of presentation seems cynical. The reader is used to having the relative values of an emotional experience categorized by the author. And when the author disclaims this responsibility the reader is confused and offended.

Marmeladov's funeral supper in
Crime and Punishment
and
As I Lay Dying,
by William Faulkner, are good examples of this type of realism. The two works have much in common. Both deal with the subject of death. In both there is a fusion of anguish and farce that acts on the reader with an almost physical force. Marveladov's violent death, Katerina Ivanovna's agitation about the supper, the details of the food served, the clerk "who had not a word to say for himself and smelt abominably"—on the surface the whole situation would seem to be a hopeless emotional rag-bag. In the face of agony and starvation the reader suddenly finds himself laughing at the absurdities between Katerina Ivanovna and the landlady, or smiling at the antics of the little Pole. And unconsciously after the laughter the reader feels guilty; he senses that the author has duped him in some way.

Farce and tragedy have always been used as foils for each other. But it is rare, except in the works of the Russians and the Southerners, that they are superimposed one upon the other so that their effects are experienced simultaneously. It is this emotional composite that has brought about the accusations of "cruelty." D. S. Mirsky, in commenting on a passage from Dostoievsky, says: "Though the element of humor is unmistakably present, it is a kind of humor that requires a rather peculiar constitution to amuse."

In Faulkner's
As I Lay Dying,
this fusion is complete. The story deals with the funeral journey made by Anse Bundren to bury his wife. He is taking the body to his wife's family graveyard some forty-miles away; the journey takes him and his children several days and in the course of it the body decomposes in the heat and they meet with a mad plethora of disasters. They lose their mules while fording a stream, one son breaks his leg and it becomes gangrenous, another son goes mad, the daughter is seduced—a more unholy cortege could hardly be imagined. But the immensities of these disasters are given no more accent than the most inconsequential happenings. Anse throughout the story has his mind on the false teeth he is going to buy when he reaches the town. The girl is concerned with some cake she has brought with her to sell. The boy with the gangrenous leg keeps saying of the pain, "It don't bother me none," and his main worry is that his box of carpenter's tools will be lost on the way. The author reports this confusion of values but takes on himself no spiritual responsibility.

To understand this attitude one has to know the South. The South and old Russia have much in common sociologically. The South has always been a section apart from the rest of the United States, having interests and a personality distinctly its own. Economically and in other ways it has been used as a sort of colony to the rest of the nation. The poverty is unlike anything known in other parts of this country. In social structure there is a division of classes similar to that in old Russia. The South is the only part of the nation having a definite peasant class. But in spite of social divisions the people of the South are homogeneous. The Southerner and the Russian are both "types" in that they have certain recognizable and national psychological traits. Hedonistic, imaginative, lazy, and emotional—there is surely a cousinly resemblance.

In both the South and old Russia the cheapness of life is realized at every turn. The thing itself, the material detail, has an exaggerated value. Life is plentiful; children are born and they die, or if they do not die they live and struggle. And in the fight to maintain existence the whole life and suffering of a human being can be bound up in ten acres of washed out land, in a mule, in a bale of cotton. In Chekhov's, "The Peasants," the loss of the samovar in the hut is as sad, if not sadder, than the death of Nikolai or the cruelty of the old grandmother. And in
Tobacco Road,
Jeeter Lester's bargain, the swapping of his daughter for seven dollars and a throw-in, is symbolical. Life, death, the experiences of the spirit, these come and go and we do not know for what reason; but the
thing
is there, it remains to plague or comfort, and its value is immutable.

Gogol is credited to be the first of the realists. In "The Overcoat" the little clerk identifies his whole life with his new winter cloak, and loses heart and dies when it is stolen. From the time of Gogol, or from about 1850 until 1900, imaginative writing in Russia can be regarded as one artistic growth. Chekhov differs certainly from Aksakov and from Turgenev, but taken all in all the approach to their material and the general technique is the same. Morally the attitude is this: human beings are neither good nor evil, they are only unhappy and more or less adjusted to their unhappiness. People are born into a world of confusion, a society in which the system of values is so uncertain that who can say if a man is worth more than a load of hay, or if life itself is precious enough to justify the struggle to obtain the material objects necessary for its maintenance. This attitude was perhaps characteristic of all Russians during those times, and the writers only reported exactly what was true in their time and place. It is the unconscious moral approach, the fundamental spiritual basis of their work. But this by no means precludes a higher conscious level. And it is in the great philosophical novels that the culmination of Russian realism has been reached.