This paper has published Hal Crowther’s essays and news features since 1989. In the days when he wrote weekly, Crowther was a virtual letters-to-the-editor machine, inspiring readers’ highest adulation as well as some of the most malicious letters we’ve ever received. He has since cut back his syndicated column to now-and-then status, but that doesn’t mean he’s backed down. If anything, he casts a colder eye than ever on the political shenanigans and crimes of the day; Crowther stories we’ve run in the past year on the Bush administration were the very definition of “tearing them a new one,” albeit in an erudite way — and, yes, those stories garnered fevered denunciations from dissenters.
The past few years have seen a change in Crowther’s writing, however, with his focus shifting more frequently to the arts, specifically music and painting, and the culture of the South, particularly in “Dealer’s Choice,” a regular column for Oxford American magazine.
Recently, Louisiana State University Press published the third collection of Crowther’s essays, Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millenial South, a mix of pieces previously published in Creative Loafing, Oxford American and other publications, as well as some new ones.
Crowther’s range of interests and knowledge is broader here than in past collections. A good example is “A Prophet from Savannah,” a long profile of Kirk Varnedoe, a former Crowther college buddy who also happened to be a renowned curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and had a big impact on the development of modern art itself. Crowther tells Varnedoe’s story while also meditating on memory and the expectations of youth and their denouement, weaving in and out of both “storylines” until they’re inseparable. The essay is a longer version of a cover story which ran in all CL papers, and is one of Crowther’s finest, most subtle works.
He was born in Nova Scotia to American parents and spent his first 12 years at various naval bases (his father was a naval officer). He graduated from Williams College and earned a masters in journalism from Columbia University. Crowther is a veteran of The Buffalo News, Time magazine, and Newsweek. He moved permanently to North Carolina in 1977 and jumped to the alternative press, helping found The Spectator in Raleigh, then moving to The Independent in Durham in 1989.
In 1992, Crowther became the first member of the alternative press to receive the H.L. Mencken Award from The Baltimore Sun, an honor imparted annually to the country’s finest columnist. In 1998, he shared the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ first place award for commentary with Nat Hentoff from the Village Voice. His second collection of essays, Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Commentary and the 1999-2001 Fellowship Prize for Non-Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern. He lives in Hillsborough with his wife, novelist Lee Smith. We spoke to Crowther last week.
Creative Loafing: Is there a reason this particular collection came out now?
Hal Crowther: Well, one of the things I wanted to get across is that this is a critical time in the South, a time to take stock, and what I was trying to do was to look at some of the things that are passing, things that should be noted with pride and due attention, and also things that have always been a problem that may or may not be improving fast enough.
You’ve become known as a chronicler of the South whether it’s the arts, politics, or what have you, but a lot of people think you’re just a transplanted Yankee. How long have you been in the South?
Most of my life, I guess. I was here till I was 11, then I came back in 1977 and have lived here ever since. My father’s family came from North Carolina. I’ve only gone for about 10 years, when I was in college or living with my parents, that I wasn’t living in the South, so I regard myself as pretty much full-fledged, even if my mother’s from Boston.
Why does the image of Southerners as dumb, backward hicks with Klan suits in their closets refuse to die out? I thought after eight years of Bill Clinton — no matter what you thought of his politics much less his sex life, there’s no denying the guy is bright as hell — that might have changed.
It just seems to be something that won’t go away no matter what. I thought the way Clinton was scrutinized early on was very interesting, as if they expected him to spit tobacco juice during his State of the Union speech (laughs). The Republicans hated him more than anything else because they feared him — he was so obviously an efficient politician with charisma and they tried to counter that with this image of the slick hick salesman who wanted to get into every woman’s shorts (laughs). It was kind of a stereotype just waiting for him to fall into and they utilized it to the max.
Let’s talk about Southern literature. Considering how closely the South now resembles the rest of the country, is there a future for Southern lit, does it even still exist?
I guess Southern literature will last as long as [the South’s] consciousness of being separate from the rest of the country continues. One wonders how long that will be. The whole idea of Southern literature, it’s generally agreed, was invented by the Nashville Agrarians and it was bolstered by their descendants. Their vision of Southern literature, I think, in people like Faulkner or Robert Penn Warren, was a looking back — not necessarily looking back to the glorious antebellum plantations or anything like that, but looking back to this agrarian model and people sort of living peacefully on the land and so forth. A lot of that was fanciful, of course, but at the same time, compared to the rest of the country, this was a rural region dominated by farmers and small businessmen and small towns. So that literature became known as Southern literature and it’s been very much focused on Southern life, but always with that agrarian model in the back of the author’s, or reader’s mind.
In recent years you’ve seen more criticism of Southern lit, in fact there was a famous essay that appeared in the Nashville Scene by Marc Stengel in which he basically asked, “Where is the literature for Southerners who shine their shoes and wear ties — why are we left out?”
I think as the South attracts more and more northerners and foreigners, and things are changing very fast, my guess is that what you’re talking about, the writing that’s been characterized as Southern Literature, will be quaint if not extinct in 25 years.
There are so many new groups of immigrants coming into the South now, our literature is bound to change and diversify. One of the reasons the whole idea of Southern lit worked was that for so long, we were relatively homogeneous. Not anymore. One of the things I tried to do in the book is to look at some writers like James Still, whose work, once “Southern lit” is past, should still be treated with great respect.
Some people think Southern fiction has been co-opted by what a friend calls “Granny rocking on the porch lit,” almost a caricature of Southern life.
I think it’s true that it’s been horribly abused. I’ve made savage fun, for instance, of T.R. Pearson, and so did Jake Mills in The Independent — he just took T.R. Pearson apart, he said reading him was like meeting someone at a covered dish supper that just wouldn’t let go and bored you till your knees gave out (laughs). I compared Pearson to peanut butter — if you take a little bit of it and spread it on a cracker it can be tasty, but if you take a great big gop of it, it’ll choke you to death (laughs). There’s been a lot of that kind of fiction and as someone whose wife has written a lot of books categorized as Southern fiction, I’m always sensitive that people see the difference, that they see what Lee’s doing, which is very legitimate regionalism, versus this formula stuff.
Where did this kind of caricature of Southern fiction start?
Well, I think you can point an ugly finger back at Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road, God’s Little Acre). Caldwell was a minister’s son and kind of an intellectual who found a vein of northern ignorance and worked it. He took the silliest kind of general store stereotypes of poor Southerners and expanded on them with sexual content and titillated Northerners into believing things about the South that many of them still believe. It’s shocking to me how intelligent people in the North, in New York specifically, misunderstand and denigrate the South. They haven’t changed, I mean, even some of the most intelligent people, they just have no clue what’s going on down here.
And then, sometimes people here seem to buy into some of those Southern stereotypes.
You’ll always be surprised. I was surprised to see that a lot of people, the night after I had read at this one bookstore, over 120 people showed up for an appearance by Jesse Helms for his new book. They were just there to see Jesse, he didn’t read or sign books, he just sat there and said, “God bless you, God bless you, God bless you” over and over, and kind of blinked like an old toad ’cause that’s all he’s capable of, but people poured in there and bought his book (laughs).
That’s not an inspiring scene to contemplate, especially now, 40 years after the Voting Rights Act.
Yeah, they’re still down here, you can’t start congratulating yourself, but I think the younger generations are going to be OK. I think they’re a lot less marinated in bad racial attitudes, at least I believe that to be true, although I wouldn’t look away and think that the problem’s been solved. I mean, prejudice is universal, prejudice and bigotry are human traits and it’s unfortunate that the South has been stereotyped as the only place where these attitudes have been prevalent. It’s not true, as anyone who’s done much traveling can tell you.
Let’s talk about New Orleans. After the disaster that’s hit the city, what do you think will happen, particularly in view of the nearly mythological place New Orleans has in Southern culture?
In fact I’m writing about that now. Walker Percy called New Orleans “the Paris of the South.” It was the place where you went to get away from all the small-town repression and expectations and just let your hair down in a place with a whole different set of assumptions. He said it was “in the South but not of the South, like Mont St-Michel at high tide.”
I think New Orleans has very little to do with the South in a lot of ways, but it’s a wonderful place to go for R&R. It was a great place to go for things that didn’t flourish elsewhere, like tolerance, the arts, diversity, great food. That was my special city, I lived there for a year and have been back many times and it’s a terrible personal loss for me, in addition to what a disaster the whole thing has been. If it’s lost, or is never the way it was again, it would be a terrible psychological loss for the country, never mind the economic loss.
How do you feel about the overall arc of your career? You’ve had so many varied positions, are you satisfied with how things turned out?
Well, I don’t wish I had done anything else. I’ve enjoyed doing what I wanted to do, I’ve been willing to take chances and it’s worked out well for me. But the problem I’m having now is that I wanted to give up indignation and fury at a certain point in my life. I wanted to retire from writing about politics and I wanted to write more about books and music and religion and art but I’ve started to feel now that there just aren’t enough clear voices. I’d love to just be traveling, seeing some of the great museums in Europe I’ve never seen, but I feel that the politicians these days are making me work beyond my retirement age (laughs) because there are so few hands to throw the sandbags on the levee. So as long as I’m still being published and people still want to read what I have to say, I feel I have this sense of responsibility as long as there’s any hope at all.
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
