That American skaz

 

In the Europe of the interwar period, there was a whole lotta interest in the telling of the tale – the system of the tongue and (as Walter Benjamin, in a brilliant illumination, realized) – the hand as an instrument of tactile pressure. This system, incidentally, is opposed to the system of the eye and the hand as an instrument of writing – the pen, the typewriter. Variations on the old oral/writing binary – but molecularly interesting variations, and not reducible to the binary mothership.

In the U.S., we already had the most brilliant of skaz texts – Huckleberry Finn. During this time, a long line of writers – W.C. Williams, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hurston, etc. – were trying to tap into the American skaz.

And then there is Eudora Welty.

Since, this summer, I am enduring and enjoying the total sun and occasional breezes of the South of France, around a pool no less, I am in a sort of American mood. Funny how these things work by contraries. I’m a little more hopeful about the Motherland – although aware that, on the edges, America is financing and providing the weaponry for the mass murder in Gaza. Any hoo, I have a little paperback stack that includes Eudora Welty’s Collected Stories. I’ve never settled my accounts with Welty. And why not do it now?

I did have in mind, before I started, the Welty that is too cute by half, the Welty of the inevitably dragged out “Why I live at the P.O.” Gertrude Stein said that there are stories that are accrochable and stories that are inaccrochable – taking her metaphor from the painters, who select for their shows the painting that can hang – that is, sell, or at least represent them – as opposed to those they paint that they can’t hang, that they just have to do, somehow. “Why I live at the P.O.” is hyperaccochable.  It is among the stories that wear out their spirit with being overhung.

So there’s that. Reading around, the lit I came upon Lorrie Moore’s essay on Welty, which is rather stinting. Moore is worried that Welty is a racist. And no doubt she is. As was the U.S. during the slave, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid eras. I think – although, in fairness to Moore, I haven’t checked this out – that if she were writing about, say, Edith Wharton, she would not be hung up about Wharton’s racism. But she was. And, I should say, I am – I, too, am a product of the white American middle class. I pre-existed before I existed, with my people, my grandparents and great grandparents, enjoying the bounties of Apartheid America and making it up through the middle class in a racist game that no retroactive sprinkling of “diversity” is going to make up for or hide.

So there is that.

Anyway, I plunged randomly in the stories and came upon one that bowled me over: The Hitchhikers. It was published in A curtain of green and other stories, where the P.O. story was also collected. The Hitchhikers is a fierce little story about a salesman, Tom Harris, some hitchhikers he picks up, one surly, one playing a guitar; and the small town he stops in with them, and the fight between the hitchhikers in which one gets killed, and the prohibition era drinking and fucking of this little Missipp town near Memphis.

The Skaz needs a traveler: a pilgrim, a knight, a bum. Or a salesman. Since Balzac virtually discovered the type with Gaudissart, the traveling salesman has done a lot of business in lit, especially Am. Lit. It began, in America, as the Yankee salesman, but in the “new South” the salesman is a bit different, a bit more ambiguous. Flannery O’Connor, who is a very different kinda writer than Welty, likes her salesmen to come with their Yankee rationality or cynicism to visit the internal exiles of Dixie (who are her knockdown characters). Welty, whose father was a salesman, has a much more level view of the kind. Tom Harris is not proving any point about secularism or nihilism. Instead, he is a man around whom excitement happens – but who is increasingly alienated by that excitement, or numb to it. It is a numbness that bothers him some.  It is not a bit folksy, the way Welty sometimes embroidered a bit with her tellers and their tales. This is, rather, the pure products of America finding their excitements growing, each year, a little colder.

I recognized that South.

The ending bits of the story are perfect:

“Harris, fresh from the barbershop, was standing in the filling station where his car was being polished.

A right of little boys in bright shirt-tails surrounded him and the car, with some colored boys waiting behind them.

“Could they git all the blood off the seat and steerin’ wheel, Mr. Harris?”

He nodded. They ran away.

“Mr. Harris,” said a little colored boy who stayed. “Does you want the box?”

“The what?”

He pointed, to where it lay in the back seat with the sample cases. “The po’ kilt man’s gittar. Even the policemans didn’t want it.”

“No,” said Harris, and handed it over.”

I love the economy of this ending, with its true American skaz way with symbols – symbols are embarrassing. That is really one of the keys to American sentimentality, the edginess with symbols, the embarrassment one feels when they are too heavily present, one’s sense that symbols lead to no good thing.