THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505100666
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines
THE SOUTH
B.C. HALL AND C.T. WOOD
Scribner. 395 pp. $27.50
THERE IS nothing quite like being hectored by a half-informed common scold to take all the joy out of life for a short while, and that is just what this silly book accomplishes. Only here we have a duo of common scolds working in tandem. In The South, B.C. Hall and C.T. Wood attempt to provide a state-by-state portrait of Southern history and culture, as it was and as it is. The result is far different from what the reader might expect, for the fruit of the authors' labors reads like a book commissioned by Mother Jones magazine to portray the South, for the most part, as ridiculous, contemptible and pathetic.
It has been said that anyone who wants to understand the South must grapple with two Gordian themes: the War between the States (along with the South's defeat) and race relations. These themes necessarily loom large in The South, but Hall and Wood, who live in Arkansas and previously co-wrote Big Muddy: Life on the Mississippi Revisited, do not grapple with them; they dismiss them as easily understood and worth considering only for their value in lambasting ``the South's habitual violence'' and its ``crazed arrogance.''
If the authors have read a serious book on the Civil War since their childhoods, it certainly isn't evident. There was no fighting around Atlanta, we are instructed, and therefore that famous rail station scene of the Confederate wounded in the film ``Gone With the Wind'' is a sentimental fraud. The truth is those men were supposed to represent the wounded shipped home from Gettysburg! Furthermore, Jefferson Davis wasn't captured near Irwinsville, Ga., by Union cavalry, as every other history book tells us; he was really captured in Lynchburg ``on the last train from Richmond.'' We are assured that Gen. Joe Johnston surrendered his Confederate troops to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's bluecoats near Durham, N.C., thus countermanding Davis' direct orders to fight on. In reality, Davis earlier had reluctantly given Johnston permission to seek terms with Sherman. (Perhaps Civil War historians Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote simply made up some of the things they wrote.)
The name of Nat Turner's master is given as John Travis, not Joseph Travis; the true name of the pirate Blackbeard, Edward Teach, is given as John Teach; the Nashville Agrarians centered around Sidney Mttron Hirsch, not Donald Davidson; the list goes on. These small historical inaccuracies seem trivial, but they add up over the course of a thick book, and together they cast the work's overall reliability in doubt. When the authors attempt to characterize white Southerners into three predominantly negative categories - redneck aristocrats, good old boys and mean sumbitches - unrecognizable outside a television movie-of-the-week, the book's veracity looks particularly flyblown.
Traducing reputations seems to be one of the authors' specialties. Robert E. Lee, long considered an admirable man and a brilliant general, was in fact an overpraised ``traitor'' who won a number of ``so-called victories'' before he ``unaccountably decided to fight a winner-take-all last battle at Gettysburg.'' Was Stonewall Jackson the architect of the Valley Campaign of 1862, a masterpiece of military strategy studied to this day at colleges of war? No, he was the man who ordered a 15-year-old recruit shot by a firing squad for sleeping on duty.
In laying bare the ragged follies of the South's traditional heroes, the authors are curiously inconsistent. Martin Luther King Jr. is hailed as a martyr of the civil rights movement, not as an adulterer who also plagiarized his doctoral thesis. Erskine Caldwell is presented as a literary giant for giving the rural South a hot stick in the eye with his novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, not as a cad who betrayed everyone who was ever decent to him.
Nor should these figures be portrayed in negative terms; the point being that, though promoted as free-swinging iconoclasts in the tradition of H.L. Mencken, the authors are predictably partisan in their demolitions. In this work, nearly every figure who stands culturally to the right of, say, Jimmy Carter is a bigot or a rube - with Jesse Helms, predictably, portrayed as the Prince of Darkness - while everyone standing on the other side of the fence is spoken of in terms of breathless wonderment usually reserved for the lives of the saints. Socialist Mary Harris Jones (``Mother Jones'') is so treated, while the authors go positively ga-ga writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, gushing, ``William James, George Santayana, and Josiah Royce could only look down from the stars and feel good about their former pupil at Harvard.'' Oh, pul-leeze.
There is a method behind this prejudice, for the authors refer time and again to Dixie-blistering Mind of the South, a classic work by the long-dead W.J. Cash (whom the authors cozily call ``Jack'' throughout). It was Cash who coined a term pertinent to the authors' viewpoint: ``the Savage Ideal,'' meaning a belief system in which change is fiercely resisted. Further, Hall and Wood seem to have determined that a good phrase should be used recurrently, and if ``the Savage Ideal'' is used once it is used a few dozen times, as is ``the Janus-faced nature of the South.''
The Savage Ideal is doomed in a world increasingly without any principle but expedience, and the authors couldn't be happier, for to them the Savage Ideal inevitably denotes white racism. If white Southerners and black Southerners have ever exchanged a civil word, you won't learn it from this book; the races are portrayed as getting along about as well as two scorpions in a bottle. But the civil rights struggle and the accomplishments of Southern blacks in all areas of cultural endeavor are described in fair and heartfelt detail, with all the key pioneers and bit players having a moment in the spotlight - all except James Meredith, whose legacy has gone down the memory hole in this book, doubtless because he stands on the incorrect side of the cultural divide.
``No pleasure but meanness,'' declared the Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's most famous short story, ``A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'' a statement that seems to cover the authors' perceptions of race relations in the South. As for O'Connor herself, the authors predictably misinterpret her achievement, completely overlooking the latent Christian vision of her stories and novels to focus upon her depictions of Southerners as grotesques.
Certain other Southern writers are dismissed with only brief comment, with the Vanderbilt ``Fugitives'' - John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, among others - consigned to oblivion as the creators of ``idealistic whimsies.'' Reynolds Price, Peter Taylor and Dave Smith are completely ignored. Culturally the authors seem far more in their element when writing in breezy tones of modern Atlanta nightlife, where off-work male executives ``count coup with the stewardesses, kindergarten teachers, and working girls. They're all looking for performance, for glory, for the f--of the century.'' Indeed.
A certain degree of sympathy for their subject and more attention to what W.J. Cash called ``that innocent love of personal detail native to Southerners'' would have served the authors well. As things stand, Hall and Wood attempt to present their portrait in a cool, worldly-wise tone reminiscent of Alistair Cooke's America; but, alas, there are so many errors of omission and commission, sweeping generalization and inconsistency that the superior tone is for naught. To tell its story, the land of Homer and Jethro needs a Homer - and all it got in The South is a two-headed Jethro.
- MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who lives in Michigan, is the
editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' by CNB