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  • The Complex Fate of Being a Southerner
  • Merritt Moseley (bio)
Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South by Roy Blount Jr. (Knopf, 2007. xii + 384 pages. $25)

Roy Blount, Jr., though he grew up in Georgia, is a sophisticated, well-read man. Speaking in an uncorrected southern accent, he nevertheless sounds intelligent. The author of a biography of Robert E. Lee, he gives every evidence of opposing chattel slavery.

False paradoxes such as these (mine) irritate Blount. He gets tired of being called “the world’s most sophisticated redneck” by people who think he will be pleased, or of being suspected of Klan sympathies if he doesn’t like the movie Mississippi Burning. Some of the fruits of his ressentiment (a word that he knows, though he went to college in Tennessee), delivered humorously if occasionally repetitiously, appear in his new collection, Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South.

Blount is the author of nineteen other books, including earlier collections of essays mostly humorous, a memoir, a book about the Pittsburgh Steelers, and It Grows On You, a history of human hair, and as usual his style is the essential element in his Dispatches. He makes blues and country music almost sing on the page. His many columns celebrating food can cause a reader to salivate. One of the best essays here is on songs about food: “I have the greatest collection of food songs anywhere in private hands, including Andie Mac-Dowell singing a little number that I wrote the words to: ‘Pie,’” he declares. He writes with gusto about bird-dog trials and rattlesnake rodeos, Atlanta’s Varsity drive-in and southern football (with a nicely pointed contrast with the Harvard-Yale game), as well as Faulkner, film, Truman Capote, Bill Clinton (a bit too much of this), and Mark Twain, on whom he is brilliant.

His best writing is devoted to the complex fate of the southerner in America. For instance, though he is scathing on Albert Goldman’s biography of Elvis, he doesn’t let Elvis off easily either: “I have been thinking of starting a Dixie Hall of Dumb, featuring otherwise distinguished Southerners who played into stereotypes by getting off into various kinds of bad dumbness—D. W. Griffiths (scapegoat-seeking dumbness), [End Page xxxi] Shoeless Joe Jackson (mooncalf dumbness), Lewis Grizzard (mean-spirited dumbness), Newt Gingrich (smarty-pants dumbness), Bill Clinton (gotta-have-it dumbness), and, yes, Elvis. Southerners have an honorable affinity for certain kinds of dumbness—quixotic, salt-of-the-earth, hardheaded, crazy-ass, open-handed, over-the-top (or under-the-bottom) dumb.” He adds: “But then there’s weak, lame, unnecessary dumb. Elvis had the world by the tail, and when they gave him songs to sing about his bare toes right out in front of everybody, he sang ’em. So now I have an ethnic burden.”

Blount is as tempting to quote as he is to ponder. Structurally his essays seem artfully artless. In one of the best pieces here, “You Hate Me Because I’m Southern,” he analyzes the representation (or the “social construction”) of southern womanhood in the Elizabeth Taylor film Raintree County and moves to a call for the rehabilitation of ham in place of soybeans and a demonstration of how some classic poems could be improved by replacing the word stone with watermelon.

The best part of this exemplary essay appears in the beginning (always one of Blount’s strengths): “In his power-building years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson figured that ‘he himself would likely never reach the presidency,’ writes Marshall Frady, ‘owing to the Southern odor on him.’ The political sensorium has changed since then, of course, but—I don’t know about you—I still stink a little. I like to roll in it, some.”

Though anyone wanting to learn more about the actual as opposed to the imaginary South will profit from this book, it is likely to appeal most strongly to southerners who like to roll in it some. [End Page xxxii]

Merritt Moseley

Merritt Moseley, who professes English at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, has reported on the Booker Prize competitions for this quarterly since 1993.

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