290
JONATHAN YARDLEY
It
would be no less difficult to find today a place in the South
where a scene such as that could occur. There are still a few isolated
pockets of the "old" South, a few places where community life remains
self-contained, but television and the interstates are rapidly eliminating
them. More and more, the South is assuming the rest of the country's
rootlessness and facelessness. Not long ago the South was a state of mind,
and its literature uniquely reflected that. Now it is becoming a clutter
of McDonaldburgers and Holiday Inns
and
Radio S1hacks and A&P
WF;O's and Easy Exit-Easy Return gas stations and French Provincial,
Ye Olde Williamsburg apartment sprawls - and what does the Southern
writer say about
that?
The problem for the younger Southern
wr~ters
is that they feel
themselves heirs to the regional tradition, yet the South in which they
have come of age bears little resemblance to the South in which the
tradition was e!>tablished. All too many of them are stuck on the track
with their mU'les and wagons while Faulkner's Dixie Limited roars down
on them: entranced by their literary forebears, they are writing what
Miss O'Connor called "phony-Southern," parodies as unconscious as
Willingham's was conscious. The creative writing schools (which are
flourishing in the South as never before) are filled with earnest young
Faulkners and O'Connors, churning out dense sentences and grotesque
tales that draw not a whit on personal experience but reek of "the
South."
The serious writers recognize this pitfall and are trying to figure
out how to avoid it - how to write about the South, that is, but about
their
South. Among them (the list could be longer) are Reynolds Price,
Harry Crews, Doris Betts, Madison Jones, Cormac McCarthy, James
Whitehead, Charles Gaill1es, and Walker Percy.
As
a group they defy
generalization, save that they are looking at the new South with a sensi–
tive awareness of the old, and attempting to find what threads of con–
tinuity may exist.
Price and Crews could not be more different, but they share a
common experience: they have had their fling with the old forms, they
have abandoned them, and they are struggling to find their own voices.
Price made a great success with his first novel,
A Long and Happy
Life,
which is Southern, rural, charming, funny - and imitative. Since
then he has been moving progressively inward, making his interior life
the chief preoccupation of his fiction.
Permanent Errors,
his latest col–
lection of stories and reflections, is a thoughtful and in certain respects
courageous piece of work, for it is a candid exercise
in
public self–
scrutiny. But ultimately its self-preoccupation is narcissistic and its prose
