Southern Excursions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time (review)

George Garrett's presence turns dark rooms brighter than rainbows. He makes people smile, and for moments worry grinds slower and life seems more gift than burden. In George's company scoffers become appreciators. The weary shake the creeping palsy of cynicism and return to desk and library invigorated. "What a friend we have in George," a poet once said to me at Sewanee, paraphrasing the good old hymn. Too often people confuse selflessness and its consort generosity with insignificance. Decency is rarely achieved easily. Selflessness is not natural to man, no matter an individual's inclination toward the sunny. George's pages will illuminate the future. How fortunate we are to have both the books and the man.

Southern Excursions is a miscellany containing a selection of George's essays, reviews long and short, interviews, introductions, and tributes. Linking the pieces together are George's clean prose, critical generosity, and capacity to appreciate and understand. Because the generosity is raised on hard study, the pieces not only delight and intrigue, but they also invite readers to return to the library and reacquaint themselves with books that might have slipped the leash of memory. George introduces a banquet of southern writers, both the living and the dead, all of them quick with talent, however, including William Hoffman, Robert Morgan, Donald Davidson, William Price Fox, Stark Young, Fred Chappell, Lewis Nordan, Allan Gurganus, David Huddle, William Goyen, David Madden, Doris Betts, Mary Lee Settle, Madison Jones, Peter Taylor, and William Humphrey.

As hog is necessary to spiced round, so threads of quotations season reviews, tempering the roast of idea and summary, bringing guffaws to the palette. In discussing Jesse Hill Ford's The Conversion of Buster Drumwright, George quotes the character Ralph Swiggert. "See the scriptures, see the book, my friends," Swiggert says, "and just remember that, whether you want to think about it or not, all our kin started in that book with this Jewish fellow, Adam, and his wife, Mistress Eve. You know what she done in cahoots with a snake." In introducing Wendell Berry at Sewanee, he repeats a stanza of Berry's verse. "I wish I was easy in my / mind, but I ain't. / If it wasn't for anger, / lust and pride, I'd be / a saint."

Rumination seasons George's reviews. He observes that southerners are haunted by history, oftentimes imaginary history. As gas lights made ghosts extinct, so contemporary culture has made history endangered. Last November one of my students flew to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. "Oh, goodness, I'm so relieved to see you," I said the first day of class after the vacation. "I was so worried about you." "What?" the girl said, looking puzzled. "I read that Sherman burned Atlanta," I said. "Just thinking about you upset me so much that I could hardly eat a turkey leg, much less a spoonful of cranberries. I do hope your house escaped the flames." "What?" the girl said again. My student had not been born in Atlanta or the South, but she had lived in Georgia for six years. Moreover when I asked the rest of the class to explain my allusion, the class was silent. No one understood the reference to Sherman.

Unlike my remark in class George's statements about history actually provoke thought. On the one hand, history poisons, muddying the clear present with old enmities. On the other hand, perhaps Americans are so brutal because we don't know history. Instead of studying the consequences of past actions, thus foreseeing the consequences of plans, Americans avert their eyes from both past and present and, gazing far from shattered bone, envision future realities soft with uplift, buttressed by narrow, ignorant moral certitude. "We have," George writes, "been wrong about so many things and will surely be wrong again."

George annotates his reviews...