Long Time Leaving (21 page)

“ ‘Greg,’ my daddy advised, ‘don't sleep late or leave town or you won't have nuthin’ left.’ ”

Plain words meeting the plain truth. Anybody who hears
good
regional poetry and laughs
at
it is missing something.

T
his month I will address a college commencement. I won't tell you which college.
^*
If I did, people there might Google this up beforehand, and get the impression, as I make the speech, that I am plagiarizing myself. Because I may need some of this stuff—such stuff as I may dredge up here from the depths of my reservations about the speech.

Not that I mind public speaking. I am more relaxed at a podium holding forth at length to a crowd of strangers than when I am trying to get through one whole anecdote, among friends, in a restaurant. “Waiters abhor a raconteur. Invariably, just as I am reaching a crucial narrative juncture, a waiter—whose notice I could not have attracted with Roman candles one second before—will sprint across the room to inquire—in a leisurely, getting-to-know-us-better sort of way, though he must be aware that I am holding my breath in midsentence—whether there is anything at all he can do for anyone at the table. At a podium, I can feel secure that the worst…

Well, bad things can happen there, too. Once, years ago, before I had come to realize that there are venues in which you can't pay me to speak, I addressed a “motion upholstery” conference. I opened with several motion upholstery jokes, which I had prepared for the occasion. The jokes, I don't remember now—I believe one involved chasing a runaway chaise longue—but I do remember how they went over.

Flat. As I once heard Minnie Pearl say about her college career, “I got off to a grinding halt.” (Minnie Pearl, who went to Vanderbilt, my alma mater, was funnier than you'd know if you only saw her doing her Opry act. She told me that she asked Roy Acuff why he got Olivia Newton-John's name so garbled up when he introduced her at the Country Music Awards, and he replied, “Well, I didn't know the little lady. I wasn't acquainted with the little lady's work. The little lady as a performer was new, to me. And, then, I didn't give a shit.”)

It wouldn't have been so bad had the motion upholsterers turned beet red and shaken their fists at me—“Motion upholstery is my life! This mockery shall not stand!” I might have fed off that energy. But they did not react to my motion upholstery jokes at all. They saw nothing comical, intrinsically, about motion upholstery. I might as well have been telling H 2 O jokes to a roomful of fish.

So I could say take my word for this, Class of ’05:

Never make jokes about motion upholstery. When you are addressing a motion upholstery convention. Especially if you have only an outsider's grasp of what motion upholstery is. (In layman's terms, it is recliners, sofa beds—adjustable stuffed furniture, I would have called it, if the idea was to keep it from being in any way humorous, but what do I know?) Your best bet, probably, is to steer clear of motion upholstery jokes altogether.

But I may be behind the curve. These days, college students may take courses in Effectively Gearing Laughter-Oriented Marketing Techniques to Target Risibilities. At my alma mater, Vanderbilt (where forty years ago there opened up to me all the glories of the arts and the sciences), the most popular major today, by far, is human and organizational development, which prepares bright-eyed youngsters for employment in corporations. What are they thinking? Studying corporate relations in college is like getting married in high school. My only message to HOD people is what Robert E. Lee said after Pickett's charge:

“Too bad!
Too bad!
OH! TOO BAD!”

Which brings me to my reservations about the speech. It's a chance to point youth in the right direction. But even if it's not too late for that, I don't like the idea of sending a whole group of people off in the same direction. Even one on one, I am not good at advice. Advice tends to boil down to “If I were you, I'd listen to me”—when, in fact, I am not you, and if I were, why would I need to tell you anything?

Or else advice applies only to some ideal person. The other day I saw a newspaper photo of two men wearing what looked like slightly gussied-up blue jeans, and grinning as if they were doing something droll. “Wearing Their Pants,” said the caption. The men were clothing designers. They had shown up at a fashion show in
their own trousers.
Pants of their own creation. And this was news. Like fashionwear, advice so often fits only those special individuals on whom it hangs better than it does on its designers.

And why would a person of commencement age listen to someone who still reads newspapers? What I would really like to tell youth today
is: “Learn to read! The kind of stuff I write! Printed stuff, on paper! Stuff you might want to linger over, reading, as I have writing. Mark my words, it will stand you…”

It would stand me, that is, in good stead. Not that anybody knows what “in good stead” means anymore. “In the beginning was the Word,” says the Book of John. Because it's a book. The Blog of John would have said, “In the beginning was the Pixel.”

There's an old rhythm-and-blues lyric, “Keep on churning till the butter comes.” When aspiring writers ask for my advice, that is what I tell them. They look at me in childlike wonder—wondering what in the hell is a churn, and why go to such lengths to produce a substance that is fattening? By the time anybody accrues any wisdom anymore, it's in the wrong operating system.

In my speech I could quote what Meryl Streep told a Vassar graduating class: “You have been told that the real world is not like college, and you have been reliably informed. The real world is more like high school.” But that would just bring the graduates down. Except for those who reached their prime in high school, and they aren't the ones you want to encourage. Also, it might not apply to the HOD people.

This will be my third time as a college commencement speaker. The first time, I began by saying, “Look at the person on your left. And the person on your right. And yourself. Of those three people, ten years from now, not one will remember anything I am about to say.” That was true, but too reductive. Young people want their elders to give them advice, so they can snort at it.

The second time, I addressed graduates of the Tufts University Veterinary School. I attended college, I told them, on an unusual scholarship, awarded each year to a prospective sportswriter. Along with the scholarship—because it was funded by the Thoroughbred Racing Association—came summer internships connected to horse racing. One week, I went around to bluegrass breeding farms with a gruff Scottish veterinarian. The first day, he pulled a mare's tail to one side and said, “Hold this.” He inserted a speculum into the mare, peered inside, and told me to take a look.

“Dilated cervix,” he said. “You'll need a mind's-eye view of that.”

Had I been training to be a vet, as he assumed, that advice would have been more directly useful. But a dilated cervix is receptive. When real life saps my confidence, I summon up that vision. Somewhere out there, I tell myself, there's a reader like that cervix.

For me, a reader. For you maybe a customer, an investor, a CEO…

But come on. There's nothing like a reader.

I
t wasn't a cat book or a Southern humor book or a co-dependent book.” So spoke James Finn Garner, according to an item in
The New York Times,
in explaining why he had fretted—needlessly, as it turned out—about the best-selling potential of his own book:
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

I don't know what sort of reading can have led Garner (a Chicagoan) to regard Southern humor as a commodity more reliable than the spoofing of political correctness. He may have seen too many of those booklets with titles like
How to Tawk Hillbilly
next to the cash registers of highway oases that also sell foot-long pecan rolls. Or he may have had in mind the late Lewis Grizzard's best-sellers, which are to Southern humor as foot-long pecan rolls are to Southern cuisine.

My idea of Southern humor is broader and deeper than Garner's. Of course, it would be, since I am myself Southern and, among other things, a humorist. In fact I have been referred to as “the thinking man's Lewis Grizzard”—a description that neatly eliminates every possible market.

That is my ethnic row to hoe. But I'm damned if I'll sit still for my métier's being lumped in with codependent cats. Nor will I remain good-humored if I am asked one more time the question that two different New Yorkers asked me after I told them I had just finished editing an anthology of Southern humor. Here is what each of those New Yorkers asked me:

“Is it thin?”

If they had asked me is it in English, or, indeed, is it fat, I would have responded in a spirit of hearty ethnic badinage. But …thin?

To anyone similarly shackled by Northerncentricity, I would pose this challenge: Pick, from your perspective, the greatest American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and musical genius. Let's say you name Nathaniel Hawthorne, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Ives. Okay, here is my question:

Did any of them write anything that would make a book of Northern humor thicker?

I know O'Neill composed a comedy, Hemingway bits of sardonic verse, Hawthorne a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce (a funnier concept now than then, probably), and Ives no doubt witty sequences of
notes. My question is, did any of them write anything that's still funny to read?

Now, take Southerners. Out of regional graciousness, I will stipulate the word
arguably
in each case when I adduce the following: America's greatest novelist, William Faulkner; America's greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams; America's greatest short-story writer, Flannery O'Connor; America's greatest musical genius, Louis Armstrong. Each of these has left us with good solid still-enjoyable chunks of exemplary Southern humor.

So have America's greatest stand-up comedian, Richard Pryor (from Peoria, but his Mudbone character is from Tupelo, Mississippi); the greatest American blues singer, Bessie Smith; the inventor of jazz (to hear him tell it), Jelly Roll Morton; the quintessential
New Yorker
writer, Joseph Mitchell; the inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe; and the greatest figure in country music, Hank Williams. Not to mention Charles Portis, Julian Bond, Jimmie Rodgers, B. B. King, Eudora Welty, Nikki Giovanni, Donald Barthelme, Alice Walker, Russell Baker, Cor-mac McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Nelson, Ishmael Reed, Lyle Lovett, Little Richard, and Richard Wright. I might also direct your attention to noteworthy humorous appreciations (fond, blistering, or mixed) of the South by A. J. Liebling, Garrison Keillor, and H. L. Mencken. As Dr. Johnson said of Oliver Goldsmith, the South has been both a source of wit and the cause of wit in others.

Furthermore, Dave Barry lives in Miami, which is south of the South, but in a letter to me Barry has written: “I think I qualify as at least possibly Southern. I have dogs, and dogs tend to Southernize a person. I do not mean this in any condescending sense. I mean it in the sense of, you can't be putting on elitist Northern airs if your house has dog snot smeared on the windows from the dogs trying to get at the UPS man.”

Loath as I am to put on elitist Southern airs, it would be remiss of me not to mention that all of modern American literature, according to Hemingway, comes out of
Huckleberry Finn,
which is about as Southern-humorous as you can get. And I will say this: Southern humor has got down and wrestled more familiarly than Northern humor has with the blues, slavery, the civil rights movement, Elvis, Lyndon Johnson, rock and roll, oysters, alligators, the Civil War, and, incidentally, Hemingway (see Katherine Anne Porter's droll account of having been thrust physically together with Papa, on a level of parity, to his consternation, by Sylvia Beach).

To be sure none of the people I have mentioned, aside from Grizzard
and me, are regarded as Southern humorists. Nor, primarily, are James Wilcox, Lee Smith, Hunter Thompson, Harry Crews, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Barry Hannah, or John Shelton Reed. But they are all Southerners, and they have written very funny stuff.

Southern humor tends to be mixed in with violence, heartbreak, preachment, politics, libidinousness, gustation, anger, nostalgia, racial conflict, and adventure. In the South, humor (like argumentativeness in New York) is not so much a specialization as a requisite element in discourse; and Southern humor tends to work best when it isn't trying to be any funnier than life and death. Faulkner is a case in point. He can be rousingly comical when telling how horses ran through a house or Uncle Willy got killed trying to escape the mundane by giving himself flying lessons. But when Faulkner wrote a parody of his own style, it did not succeed in being funny. Nobody should try to write like Faulkner, including Faulkner.

Stick to strictly waggish Southern song and story, and you will soon find you have a surfeit of collapsing outhouses on the one hand and “the ladies, God bless 'em” condescension on the other. But there's nothing funnier, or more chilling, in American literature than O'Connor's story of affectless serial murder, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Blues lyrics are no less dark when jocular. The most humorous lines in country music are to be found in songs that are also genuinely painful, such as Mel Tillis's “Ruby” (“It's hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralyzed”).