In Tribute to Madison Jones

I don't know exactly when or exactly how I first became aware of the novels of Madison Jones, but it must have been sometime in the late 1980s when I was in graduate school at Wichita State University. Perhaps I came across his name in some article about contemporary southern writers, saw he lived and taught in my home state of Alabama, and was intrigued by the description of his work and the high praise it received, particularly his novel A Cry of Absence, which Allen Tate and Andrew Lytle called a masterpiece. William Hoffman described him as a southern Thomas Hardy, which underscored for me a seriousness of intent and made me want to explore the work of this writer whose name I'd never heard.

So I began with A Cry of Absence (1971) set in small-town Tennessee during the Civil-Rights movement; and, while Tate and Lytle could have better articulated why the novel is a masterpiece, I simply understood as a young graduate student trying to learn to write fiction that it was. Although its obvious concern is the Civil-Rights movement, Jones moves far beyond racial issues and ultimately examines the very depth and complexity of man's capacity for evil. When I read his earlier novels—The Innocent, Forest of the Night, A Buried Land, and An Exile—in fairly close succession, I saw that such an exploration of evil was not merely Jones's subject of choice, it was his preoccupation—but it did not make his work narrow in any fashion. As Jones himself might have asked, What theme is more all-encompassing than good and evil?

In the mid-1990s, while teaching at Clemson University, I learned that Jones was scheduled to give a reading at the public library in Scottsboro, Alabama, as part of the Alabama Voices series. It was a weeknight, and though it would mean a great deal of driving in a short period of time, I could not pass up the opportunity. So a friend and I made the five-hour trip and listened to Jones read and respond to questions about his work. He spoke slowly, carefully, thoughtfully; and there was something in his speech that felt familiar to me even though I had never met the man. Sitting there, I realized finally that he spoke as he wrote, and as anyone who has read Jones's work knows, his language and sentence structure have a poetic exactness to them that, if one is paying attention, offers irrefutable logic and keen insight.

I remember one person asking about the filmed version of An Exile; the movie was called I Walk the Line, starred Gregory Peck and Tuesday Weld, and featured on the soundtrack the Johnny Cash song of the same name. Jones was not exactly complimentary. When I saw the movie some years afterward, I thought it was very much in keeping with the novel, which shows the corruption and eventual downfall of a once-decent rural sheriff. (Later, after I'd gotten to know Madison—who was certainly capable of admiring a beautiful woman—I was surprised that the presence of Tuesday Weld, who played what has to be called a temptress, didn't earn the movie any measure of goodwill from him.) Because I had read John Gardner's writing about the art of fiction, I wanted to ask Jones that night in the library if he felt, to quote Gardner, that "the ultimate value of fiction is its morality"? If it "helps us to understand what we believe"?, which seemed pertinent questions for Jones's work. But I was too intimidated and kept quiet.

In the fall of 1997, after I had returned to Alabama and settled in Montgomery, I wrote Jones and praised his recently published novel, Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light. In the meantime I had read Passage through Gehenna and Season of the Strangler, whose very titles rightly suggest a further exploration of good and evil. Then there were the novels Last Things and To the Winds that showed Jones was capable of writing laugh...