Eudora Welty, Photographer (TPR #17)

If I had to name my favorite Southern Writer, I would probably end up landing on Eudora Welty. Astonishingly, however, my admiration - even veneration - of this woman does not connect to any story or novel that I admire most. Her work is remarkable - strong, beautiful, intelligent, and well-worthy of the accolades it has received over the years - but it is her voice, her being in the world that I mourned when she passed away in 2001. I wrote this short piece at the time, trying to make sense of my grief:

How do we mourn the passing of someone we’ve never seen?  Wandering the stacks of the local library, I allow my fingers to trail over the bindings of the DIY and self-help books with no success - nothing on the subject of grieving for strangers.  And yet, stranger is not the word to use.  Perhaps there is no word to define the relationship between reader and beloved author.  But when someone with as much presence as Eudora Welty dies, the void left demands definition.

I first read Welty when I was in college, but it has never been exactly or only the fiction that drew me to her.  I don’t recall particularly identifying with any one character in her stories, and I don’t include Welty’s novels in any of my “all-time favorites” lists.  But I love the way she wrote.  And why choose to identify with the fictional character when I could see myself in the real thing, in Ms. Welty herself?  Every time I read her slim memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, I want to call Ms. Welty and say, “Yes!  Me too!  That’s it exactly!”  I can only imagine that she has touched many others in similar ways.  She was the consummate real person, in all her eccentricities, and for that reality, she was beloved by all who knew her and many who did not.

So, with no instruction provided or further guidance to seek, I forge ahead in my grief.  I return to the library.  I locate the unauthorized biography on Eudora Welty and gingerly pull each of her works of fiction down from the shelves.  I hunt up archived magazine articles and interviews and circle them all around me on the floor, ignoring the stares.  I make myself comfortable there, amid her life’s work, and I once again begin One Writer’s Beginnings, allowing myself to feel her weighty presence in each page, in each precisely chosen word.  

I think I've read all her fiction over the years. I've read one biography and have another on my shelf. But what I had not yet examined was her book of photographs One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression. Welty worked as a WPA publicity agent during the depression. This job required her to travel all over Mississippi, observing and writing up regular happenings like county fairs and judge installation. Her photographs were not officially part of the job, but the job made her see so much, and the results are astounding. They are among the most inspiring things I have ever encountered. She sees her photography as something separate from her writing, just a thing she did after college, but she also sees the connectivity of it, as seen in this passage:

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves. You have to be ready, in yourself; you have to know the moment when you see it. The human face and the human body are eloquent in themselves, and stubborn and wayward, and a snapshot is a moment's glimpse (as a story may be a long look, a growing contemplation) into what never stops moving, never ceases to express for itself something of our common feeling. Every feeling waits upon its gesture. Then when it does come, how unpredictable it turns out to be. (foreword 7-8)

I am continually astounded by her words. And I only wish I could have met her during her life. As a founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has been many times in my hometown, but I never had the chance to encounter her there. Maybe one day, I'll make it to her hometown and try to "meet" her there. And maybe you can meet her - and the impressive subjects of her photographs - through One Time, One Place or the more expansive collection of her work published in 1989, or perhaps in the Paris Review interview from volume II.

I must say I was thoroughly unimpressed with her interviewer. In fact, it was quite a distraction for me because I was growing angry with her increasingly inane questions. For example, the published interview opens, "You wrote somewhere that we should still tolerate Jane Austen's kind of family novel. Is Austen a kindred spirit?" I do not have the original text of the essay being referred to here, but based on Ms. Welty's response, I'm thinking this question was terribly misguided. Here's the polite, but biting, return:

Tolerate? I should just think so! I love and admire all she does, and profoundly, but I don't read her or anyone else for "kindredness." 

And then a few questions later, when she asks, "Do you ever return to Virginia Woolf"? I actually wrote in the margin: "Is this interviewer an idiot?" That Ms. Welty does not resort to such name-calling or dripping sarcasm as I likely would have is a testimony to her grace. But enough complaining. This post has already gone on too long. Here's one passage from the interview that I am so glad to have. Welty is responding to a question about the oral tradition in the south:

I think it accounts for the pleasure people take in a story told. It's a treasure I helped myself to. I took it for my ways and means, and that's proper and justified: Our people talk that way. They learn and teach and think and enjoy that way. (124)

Yes, Ms. Welty! That's it exactly.

  

National Poetry Month Blog Tour - Robert Penn Warren

Once again, I must start by thanking Serena at Savvy Verse & Wit for hosting the National Poetry Month blog tour. I'm glad to be taking part and to be sharing with you the poetry of one of the fathers of Southern Literature, Robert Penn Warren. Earlier this month, I shared a little from Jeff Daniel Marion and some from Brooks Haxton with a mention of Robert Penn Warren's Jefferson Lecture on poetry. Today, I take you right to the source.

In 1986, Robert Penn Warren was chosen to be the first US Poet Laureate, a position now held by fellow Southern writer Natasha Trethewey. Robert Penn Warren was a prolific writer, creating wonderful work even in the years leading up to his death in 1989. Some argue that these later works are among his very best, and though my Robert Penn Warren Reader has selections from the many stages of his career, I want to share one of these later poems with you. In "Old-Time Childhood in Kentucky," RPW begins with these memorable words: "When I was a boy I saw the world I was in. / I saw it for what it was." In the stanzas that follow, he shares vivid images of tobacco fields, General Jackson and one of his duels, and "in limestone skeletons of the fishy form of some creature" found at a cave, with the narrator's uncle and grandfather. And then, the poem turns:
                 
                                                                     "Grandpa,"
I said, "what do you do, things being like this?" "All you can,"
He said, looking off through treetops, skyward. "Love
Your wife, love your get, keep your word, and
If need arises, die for what men die for. There aren't
Many choices.
And remember that truth doesn't always live in the number of voices."

He hobbled away.  The woods seemed darker. I stood
In the encroachment of shadow. I shut
My eyes, head thrown back, eyelids black.
I stretched out the arm on each side, and, waterlike,
Wavered from knees and hips, feet yet firm-fixed, it seemed,
On shells, in mud, in sand, in stone, as though
In eons back I grew there in that submarine
Depth and lightlessness, waiting to discover
What I would be, might be, after ages - how many? - had rolled over.

Robert Penn Warren is a poet-storyteller, his poems often driven by narrative but marked by the remarkable attention to word and form that is unique to poetry. Though not in the Paris Review collection that makes up my long-neglected TPR Challenge, RPW was interviewed (by Ralph Ellison!) in 1957 for the publication, and his responses are amazing. When asked about works that influenced him, he responded that "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix" made quite an impression on him at age 9. He says:

I thought it was pretty nearly the height of human achievement. I didn't know whether I was impressed by riding a horse that fast or writing the poem. I couldn't distinguish between the two, but I knew there was something pretty fine going on .

Later, when asked about what he calls "The Fugitive Group" of poets in Nashville, he responds:

...in a very important way, that group was my education. I knew individual writers, poems, and books through them. I was exposed to the liveliness and range of the talk and the wrangle of argument. I heard the talk about techniques, but techniques regarded as means of expression. But most of all I got the feeling that poetry was a vital activity, that it related to ideas and to life.

And that is why, even this half a century later, we celebrate National Poetry Month. Because poetry is so vital to our ideas and to our lives. If you get the chance, read some more Robert Penn Warren. It will not disappoint.

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle (with link to signed copy giveaway!)

It seems a shame to me that Jill McCorkle's first novel in 17 years shares a title with Kate Atkinson's new book. It's like showing up to prom only to find the more popular girl at school is wearing the same dress as you. It doesn't mean you don't look gorgeous in your dress; it's just somehow deflating before you even get started. Similarly, I have a friend whose cousin had a baby just a few months after her son, William, was born. The cousin's baby's name: William. That's awkward, right?

Not awkward, however, is Jill McCorkle's writing, and her book, her Life After Life, is worthy of every song of praise. She is a gifted writer, who has written a wildly creative novel about life and end-of-life without being macabre or heavy-handed. She deftly draws us in, just as we all do to one another, by introducing us to the idiosyncrasies of an unforgettable cast of characters. Life After Life requires the same willingness to be vulnerable that real human (and animal) relationships do and makes us thankful for each time we consent.

Life After Life is a multi-vocal novel which focuses on the residents and visitors to the Pine Haven Retirement Center. One of those voices, Joanna, is a hospice volunteer who witnesses death after death and tries to honor and preserve the memory of each one. Another is Abby, a young girl who considers the residents of Pine Haven her dearest friends. There is humor and sadness in equal measure, just as there is youth and age, death and life. Here McCorkle writes about what it was like to develop this novel. I love this essay. Maybe it's because I'm losing a grandmother to Cancer and a grandfather to dementia and my parents to the care of them both. Maybe it's because of the vivid imagery she calls to mind (especially that dogwood named after Aunt Lottie). Or maybe it's just because Jill McCorkle is good. She is real, real good.


Just like each of us, the book is imperfect, but it is lovely.  The part I take issue with is the end, and though I won't reveal any of what actually takes place, I will say it moves too quickly over important and dramatic material and denies the characters the depth they deserve at the last. That, too, could be part of the beauty of the book, though, for how often do we find ourselves at the end of a loved one's life wishing we had more time, had asked more questions, knew more of what he or she was really thinking, feeling? Though the ending was a disappointment for me, it was still an important book and one I highly recommend. If for no other reason, you should read this book to meet the incomparable Sadie, an 85-year-old former schoolteacher, who shares wisdom at every opportunity, such as, "Learning and facing language teaches children to learn and face other things as well" (30).

Ever since I heard McCorkle tell us all about "Cuss Time" at the Celebration of Southern Literature, I have been more than a fan. You can read her essay by the same name at The American Scholar. In it, she combines humor, truth, and a healthy heaping of intelligent, persuasive rhetoric. McCorkle is fabulous and unfortunately not widely read outside of the Southern Literature circle, but y'all, that is a mistake. Life After Life is the next book you should pick up. To help you along, Algonquin is giving away a signed copy of Life After Life - go enter here before the end of the month. And when you love it, I hope you will help spread the word about this Life After Life. It may have fewer friends in high places, but it is no less worthy of attention.

A Conversation with Lee Smith

I believe it was Lee Smith who first made me fall in love with Southern Literature. I'm not sure, but I think so. I think it was Lee Smith who swung open the door to a golden room where I met and talked and ate and drank with Eudora Welty and Bobbie Ann Mason and Jill McCorkle and Ernest Gaines and Allan Gurganus and Natasha Tretheway and Silas House and ever so many more. I believe it was Lee Smith who made me love the conversations of her people, her characters, her place so much that I find myself here, this many years later, still listening for those voices, still going to those places whenever I get the chance.  I suppose it helped that her place was also my place at the time of this in-love-falling. I was born and raised in Tennessee, I live now in Georgia, but it is Southwest Virginia that made me who I am. I can say that without irony, for isn't it often our college years that reveal to us ourselves? As a graduate of one of the best places on earth - Emory & Henry College - I can say with great pride that it is Emory, VA that grew me right up and threw me out into the world as I am.

Emory is about an hour and a half from Lee Smith's homeplace of Grundy, VA. Grundy is a tiny, little town with an amazing story that Smith captures in one of my favorite things she's ever done: Sitting on the Courthouse Bench: An Oral History of Grundy, Virginia. This book is really a project completed by a group of Grundy County High School students, lead by their teacher, Debbie Raines, but Smith brought the idea to Raines and worked with the group to bring the book to life. It is a most-beautiful collection of stories and photos, voices and faces, and I treasure my copy. When I bought it at the conference many years ago, I got my mama a copy, too. I got hers signed but didn't get mine. I'm not sure why. Shyness, maybe? The good news is I will get another chance at that signature next week when Lee Smith comes to town for the Celebration of Southern Literature. In fact, I'll be taking Ms. Smith to a nearby school event, so I'll get the chance to spend the whole morning with her, and I am so looking forward to that.

In advance of our meeting, Ms. Smith graciously agreed to answer some questions for the blog. I hope to get a review of her last novel On Agate Hill up later this month, but for now, allow me to introduce you to Lee Smith!

WE: You have a new book coming out later this year - Guests On Earth. What most excites you about this novel? What can you tell us about it?

LS:  Guests on Earth is set at Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, N.C., during the years 1936-1948, the year of the terrible fire in which Zelda Fitzgerald perished along with eight other women patients in a locked ward on the top floor. Her body was identified only by her charred ballet slipper---for the brilliant Zelda was still a talented dancer and choreographer as well as a writer and a visual artist.  In this novel  I offer a solution for the unsolved mystery of that fire,  along with a group of characters both imagined and real,  and  a series of events leading up to the tragedy.  My narrator is a younger patient named Evalina Toussaint, daughter of a New Orleans exotic dancer. Evalina is a talented pianist who connects to Zelda on many levels as she plays accompaniment for the many concerts, theatricals, and dances constantly being held at Highland Hospital. As Evalina tells us at the beginning of this novel, “I bring a certain insight and new information to that horrific event which changed all our lives forever, those of us living there upon that mountain at that time.  This is not my story, then, in the sense that Mr. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was not Nick Carraway’s story, either---yet Nick Carraway  is the narrator, is he not? And is any story not always the narrator’s story, in the end?”

(WE: I am so looking forward to this book. It sounds like somewhat of departure while maintaining some important threads, some continuities that matter.)

WE: Most of your work has womanhood as its center. Would you consider yourself a feminist? Do you think writers have a responsibility to make political or social statements with their work?

LS: Of course I am a feminist----how can any woman not be a feminist? But I do not feel that a writer has a responsibility to make a political or social statement in her work. In fact, fiction written with this aim in mind is apt to be bad writing---too strident, too one-note, often with cardboard, emblematic characters rather than real people. A big exception is Barbara Kingsolver, whose work I admire enormously. She manages to tell a good story AND present very strong themes, as in her recent novel "Flight Behavior" with its strong ecological message. What I have found over the years is that I do best by simply writing a story as well as I can---a story that really means something to me personally----and if has any true merit,  then clear theme and meaning will emerge. In much of my own writing, I have tried to give a voice to those who don't have one---to speak up for children, for instance, who are so often powerless in their own lives (Molly Petree in my novel "On Agate Hill").  I have written a lot about mental illness. I have tried to preserve pockets of history, folklore, and ways of life in such novels as "The Devil's Dream," "Oral History," and "Fair and Tender Ladies." I have especially tried to illumine and honor women's lives--in particular, the older women I knew as a child, women who spent their lives "doing for others" or working in jobs that are  ignored or looked down upon. Often they had too many children and too little education. These are the women who just "keep on keeping on," to quote my mother--and I have always considered their unsung lives heroic. My own favorite character I ever came up with is probably Ivy Rowe in "Fair and Tender Ladies." 

WE: In 2010, you published a collection of new and selected works, Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. Was it hard to choose the stories to include? Or do those selections stand out as landmarks for you?

LS: Yes, it was awfully hard to choose which stories to include in "Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger"......actually, it was a very emotional experience for me. These stories cover 42 years. And when you look over the work of a lifetime, it is almost like reading a memoir---each story brings back the place and time in which it was written, the phase and stage of my life which produced it. The stories of youth are different from the stories of age, just as I am different from that scribbling girl who started writing so long ago. One of the biggest changes is that now, I am more interested in the "long haul" than the transcendent moment, that epiphany which is the province of the lyric poet and the young writer. My husband and I will be celebrating our 30th anniversary soon. So my new stories such as "House Tour" and "Stevie and Mama" (my favorite!) are really about long marriages, how they change over time, the relationship of past to present, the accommodations we all make in the name of love...I could never have written those stories earlier.

 In picking out the older ones, it was a  great pleasure to choose a few of my favorites that had appeared in early collections not widely sold or read ...such as "Bob, A Dog" or "Between the Lines"----it was sort of like asking one of your shy students who had never gotten to speak up in class to come forward now, and read her work aloud.

(WE: I recently read "Bob, A Dog" for the first time and it was thoughtful and difficult and good. I love this image of stories as reluctant but talented students.)

WE: You have identified James Still's River of Earth as a defining moment in your life - reading it, you recognized your Southern Appalachian home as a literary place, a place you could write about. Do you think that recognition and appreciation still occurs for young people, or has the genre broken down that barrier?

LS: Just because I grew up in the mountains didn't mean I understood or appreciated that heritage at the time. No, I thought I had to write about anything BUT Grundy in order to be a "real writer," a person I envisioned in a Parisian garret smoking Gauloises and  writing all night long. When I found "River of Earth" all by myself in the Hollins College library, it galvanized me--here were my own relatives, talking just like themselves, in one of the best novels ever written...and at the very end of the book, when the crops have failed and Daddy has lost his job, the family picks up and  moves yet again--to Grundy, my own home town, of all places! Suddenly I saw how the people and events in my own experience might be the stuff of real literature. Years later, I was amazed when the wonderful West Virginia novelist Denise Giardina told me how much it had meant to her to read MY work, in a novel named "Black Mountain Breakdown," just as Mr. Still's novel had meant so much to me.  Our professors always tell us "write what you know".....but often we don't know what we know until we come upon someone else who is using our material, the stuff of our own lives. It is a great gift to find the writer you need to read. Books themselves are often our best teachers.

(WE: Denise Giardina is wonderful. Just sayin'.)

WE: Speaking of genre, do you ever regret your identification as a "Southern" writer? Do you feel Southern and Appalachian literature is considered somehow less than literary fiction? If so, why? As a particular example, how do you feel about the timing of Jill McCorkle's Life After Life being released at the same time as Kate Atkinson's book of the same name?

LS: I have always thanked my lucky stars that I grew up where and when I did-- in the small, remote coal town of Grundy, Virginia---hearing the picturesque, lovely and specific Appalachian speech of the older generation---and the best stories in the world. I still haven't used them all up! 

But you are quite right in that these two excellent yet very different "Life After Life" books coming out simultaneously does illustrate the divide between "literary fiction" and "Southern fiction" in many people's minds. Except to Southerners, "Southern" still means rural, unsophisticated, dumber, "lesser than"----and all this is even more true with Appalachian fiction. Sociologist John Shelton Reed has aptly called Appalachia "the South's South"----despite  breakthrough  successes like  Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain", Ron Rash's "Serena," and Adriana Trigiana's Big Stone Gap books, the Hee-Haw stereotype is still entrenched in the average American reader's mind. 

It is my belief that after the initial flurry of publication (which is all about money, anyway, and clearly Atkinson's publisher has more money than Jill's----just as Atkinson already has an international following)  Jill's book will find its own way. People LOVE it. The themes in Jill's book are universal-----exactly what we are all dealing with in our own real lives---with a redeeming dash of humor thrown in, and writing that literally sings.

(WE: Look for my review of Life After Life later this week. I will finish it tonight, and it is making me tremble it's so good.)

WE: What emerging Southern authors are you most admiring of and why?

LS: There are so many exciting new Southern voices to admire that it's awfully hard to choose---but right now I am in the middle of reading Holly Goddard Jones's new novel "The Next Time You See Me" and it's just knocking me out. I don't know how she knows what she knows, at her age---the depth of all these characterizations is astonishing, along with her rich, gorgeous prose style. As somebody said on the jacket, this novel is a "a whole jukebox full of country songs." Holly will be in Chattanooga too, accepting an award for her fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers as well as reading her own work---I wold advise everybody to go hear her, and buy a book! I plan to get mine signed, and hang onto it.

I couldn't have asked for a better response because I will also be hanging out with Holly Goddard Jones next week. I have her book, it is next in line to be read and reviewed, and if you're lucky, you might just get an interview from her as well. Take Lee Smith's advice. And then, take mine: read Lee Smith. She just may be that writer you need to read. I know she was for me.

Brooks Haxton, Robert Penn Warren, and Poetry

Robert Penn Warren's book Democracy and Poetry was born out of his preparation for his 1974 Jefferson Lecture of the same name. It is an academic, intellectual work, and the foreword alone offers much to consider, such as "We cannot discuss democracy or poetry as existing outside of history, as a matter of timeless, unconditioned options. They, like all things that we esteem or abhor, represent developments in time" (xiv). In tracking the progress of democratic equality, Warren associates the growing acceptance of different selves with the growing accessibility of poetry:

...the concept of self, with the associated values and issues, was central to poetry, and that the concept, in the turn of time, though in an imperfect, stumbling, and ragged way, was to become more and more widely available to men. In the turn of time, every man might become a king, or at least a hero. (xv)

I will be reading these essays this week and thinking more on this issue of poetry and democracy, self and accessibility throughout the month, but I wanted to share this starting point today.

I also wanted to share the first taste of Southern Poetry from Brooks Haxton, who will be honored with the Hanes Award for Poetry in a few weeks. I introduced myself to Haxton's work through Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh's collection Hammer and Blaze. Haxton's contribution to this anthology are a series of poems rooted in the Psalms, though not overtly religious in content or theme. At turnrow, you can find eight of the poems in this series, some of which are also anthologized in Hammer and Blaze. My favorites of the ones I read were "Sackcloth" (you can read it at the turnrow link) and "God's World, 1927," which takes as its subject the Great Flood of the Mississippi River in April 1927. It is a powerful piece, and I love the interplay of the history, the words, and the language of the psalmist. The other that spoke to me is called "Scrolls," a brief poem I will share here:

Scrolls

So will I compass thine altar, O Lord:
that I may publish with the voice of
thanksgiving. - Psalm 26

Thine altar is to me this bathtub
where my four-year-old twin
girls tip back their heads.
They close their eyes.
I read their faces from above,
in trust and fear, in holiness,
heads tipped until the waterline
has touched their hairlines, cautious.
Look: their hair flows underwater
like the scrolls unfurled in heaven.

I love the gentle intimacy here, the repetition, the overlap. In fact, these few small tastes of Haxton's work have convinced me both of the correctness of the award and of my desire to read more. Won't you look up Brooks Haxton and revel in a few stanzas this April? I think Robert Penn Warren would approve.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Something like 17 years ago, I took a class called "Modern Southern Writers." It was amazing. And it started something that just may never end. My fascination with Southern Literature carried me through graduate school (my Master's Thesis subject) and extends to this day. Besides my fascination, I carry something else with me from that class: a list of books my professor and mentor recommended to me as further reading once the class concluded. Walker Percy's The Moviegoer is on the list. Ever the conscientious student, I picked it up last week.

Pretty much the whole time I was reading this book, I was muttering under my breath,"this book is just crazy. It's crazy, I tell you." When I wasn't muttering however, I was highlighting beautiful passages. So, how to review it?

Over at Tin House, Danny Nowell was singing its praises this past week. Or singing the praises of it when he was in college but now he's just confused by it? It is, if nothing else, a difficult to define book.

Perhaps this unpindownable quality is what won it the National Book Award in 1962 (quite the scandal - beating out Catch-22 and Revolutionary Road) or why Modern Library ranked it #60 in its 100 Best English-Language Novels list. I had a list of those ML100s going somewhere, didn't I? (rummages in purse like old lady looking for dusty mints. emerges with used kleenex and hot wheels car). Oh well. Truthfully, its uncertain nature, while enigmatic, is actually part of the appeal, and it is something else, more than just difficult to define.

The story (what story there is) follows Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker and veteran of the Korean War. He alludes to the war, occasionally directs his narrative to old friends, presumably fellow soldiers, perhaps lost in battle, and clearly was affected by the wound he sustained there. But it's not about the war. He describes women, using vague but lustful descriptions that manage to objectify them and somehow make his obsession feel less real. But it's not about women or sex. He talks about making money, about The Search, about his family (who died), and his Aunt (who raised him), and about his cousin Kate (a bit unstable), who he ends up marrying. But it's not about any of these things either. It was influenced by Kierkegaard and existentialism, but it is not mere theory. It's also, interestingly enough, about the South I know and identify with the least. It is a South Apart, and Binx Bolling is a man apart.

So, again, I ask: how to bring you to this puzzle of a book? The best I can do is with some tastes of my reading experience. Perhaps it will intrigue you to pick it up.

The first note I made was actually an insignificant passage where Binx is describing the day and mentions "the first thunderstorm of the year" (18). I kept reading, and then I had to come back because I kept thinking about the level of attention required for someone to note the first thunderstorm of a year. It strikes me as a brilliant stroke of writing and also a window into Binx's character.

Another passage that manages to do so much is this from Aunt Emily:

It's an interesting age you will live in - though I can't say I'm sorry to miss it. But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the evening land. That's us all right. And I can tell you, my young friend, it is evening. It is very late. (54)

And this long, conversational stretch:

There comes to me on the porch the voices of the morning, the quarreling late eleven o'clock sound of the redwings and the talk of the women, easy in its silences, come together, not in their likenesses (for how different they are: Sharon's studied upcountry exclamations - "I surely didn't know people ate crawfish!" - by which she means that in Eufala only Negroes eat crawfish; and my mother's steady catarrhal hum - "If Roy wants bisque this year, he'd better buy it - do you know how long it takes to make bisque?") but come together rather in their womanness and under the easy dispensation of the kitchen. (161)

And though there are many more, I'll close with this clear and quiet condemnation, also from Emily:

Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but for its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no blood running in the street, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we're sentimental people and we horrify easily. (223)

It is a strange little novel, but it is one I'm afraid I'm going to keep thinking about. And that's not a bad thing. Also on the list is Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, and I am intrigued by its description. Maybe next spring.