Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope

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Introduction

BARBARA A. BAKER

Most of us never forget the first Lewis Nordan book we read or how we happened to read it. My own introduction had everything to do with Auburn since I was assigned to read Music of the Swamp during my graduate studies there. I read it and fell in love with Buddy Nordan; I fell in love with Sugar Mecklin and his whole strange family and with the gorgeously musical language in which Buddy rendered their bizarre predicament. One book led to another, until I had read everything Nordan had published.

I had the feeling that I knew Buddy, and it turns out that we do share some coincidental history: we both took PhDs in literature from Auburn University and both spent a good bit of our lives in the Pittsburgh area. We also share a love of Elvis and the blues, an affinity for Loachapoka, Alabama, and an appreciation for the work of the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts and Humanities.

I met Buddy in 1999 when he visited Auburn as a guest of the center. We had dinner together about a block from Pebble Hill (which houses the center), and I was more enchanted by him personally than I had been before, reading his wonderfully comic and tragic blues-flavored stories.

Years later I called him to ask if he would participate in Lewis Nordan and the Heartbreaking Laughter of Transcendence and Hope: A Symposium, which was sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center in January 2009. He was delightful—humble and humorous—and he immediately agreed to travel to Auburn and spend more than a week with us. He taught classes and gave readings, and he also delivered the keynote lecture of the symposium transcribed here as Don't Cry for Me, Itta Bena, the title he had originally given to his fictional memoir Boy with Loaded Gun (but later abandoned since most people don't know how to pronounce the name of Buddy's hometown, which apparently rhymes with Argentina). By the end of his stay with us, it felt like Buddy was an old friend.

If you are lucky enough to know Buddy Nordan, you are probably friends with him for life, as evidenced by the number of people who attended the symposium and his lecture. Friends and admirers came from everywhere—from Spain and the Czech Republic, from Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Georgia—for the opportunity to spend some time with Buddy, and none missed the keynote event and the chance to hear the latest story by Lewis Nordan, Dog on the Roof. He didn't disappoint. A bit more fragile than he had been in 1999, he spoke from his chair and kept us rapt with the details of the history of Buddy Nordan as a writer, as he put it.

We laughed until we cried as he described how Mississippi townsfolk had responded when as a child he announced that freelance writer might be a worthy occupation, and how he had made up a full-blown character sketch about Mr. Wasson, the minister, and his odd sister, Julia, that turned out to be the truth. He imitated James Dickey and told an embarrassing story on himself regarding a talk he had given in graduate school about Wallace Stevens's private parts. We delighted to learn that he felt he became a writer during the days he lived in Loachapoka and studied at Auburn. There he began to observe the strangeness of ordinary people, such as his neighbors whose house was repeatedly struck by lightning because it was grounded through the plumbing.

Nordan has an uncanny ability to make the strangest folks feel comfortable at the same time that he makes his readers feel safe with the freaks and the midgets and the swamp elves that populate his imagination. The comfort one finds in the landscape of Nordan's work drew a variety of writers, scholars, actors, artists, and students to Auburn that January to share in the strange yet sweet, comic yet tragic, joyful yet often painful place that Nordan's fiction creates. The essays that follow in this volume, adaptations of the talks we delivered at the Nordan symposium in Auburn, reflect our shared admiration of the paradox of Lewis Nordan's world.

As writer Lee Martin notes in the first essay, "The Strangely Familiar World of Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair," the familiar and the strange are never very far apart in Nordan's work. Martin claims that meeting Buddy in Fayetteville, Arkansas, opened his own writing to the possibility of the gifts of the spirit that allow him to treat characters with respect and, in so doing, to bring the actual world and the fantastic world face-to-face.

Martin is only one of the many great writers who admire Buddy's work. Clyde Edgerton, for instance, claims that he'd rather read a story by Lewis Nordan than win money. Edgerton responded quickly in the affirmative when asked to come to Auburn to help us celebrate the life and works of Nordan, promising to sing his version of Sugar amongst the Chickens as a sort of opening act for Buddy's talk. Unfortunately, Clyde fell ill the night before the event; so he sent along a recording of his song (lyrics printed here) and joked that Buddy would blame him if he caught his flu. The song lyrics capture the whimsical folly of Sugar Mecklin's backyard chicken-fishing escapade as well as his very human desire to please his mama, while Edgerton's illustration Redbird brings to life the fury of the chicken.

Hal Crowther also responded enthusiastically to our invitation, and his talk was a highlight of the Buddyfest, as we called it. Would I have made the trip for any other writer? . . . probably not, was his honest response. But Lewis Nordan is special to Crowther, who claims he has never met a reader [Nordan] had failed to move or edify or to crack up entirely. In Lewis Nordan and One Critic: The Archer or the Arrow Catcher? Crowther explains, [T]here's no literary precedent for Buddy's marriage of strange and sweet. It's as if he sets himself a challenge to create characters as bizarre as he can make them and still compel us to feel their pain and their humanity.

At the same time, in his work Nordan lays bare his own pain and humanity by offering a great gift of honesty that forces a personal recognition of ourselves within his stories. In Transcendence and Hope in the Blues Life and Life Writing of Lewis Nordan, I suggest that he shares with the great blues artists a sense of urgency in rendering personal grief artistically for the sake of the transcendence that art can provide. In his Sugar Mecklin stories, as well as the Sugaresque stories in Boy with Loaded Gun, Nordan transforms personal catastrophe into universal art that speaks to what Nordan has called the history of all human beings, which includes isolation, death, heartbreak, betrayal, lost love, and lost hope (Growing 9). However, the starkest parts of his memoir honestly acknowledge that there are certain instances of pain and loss in his own life that he will not transform for the sake of amusement or even art. To some of the most brutally honest autobiographical moments in his memoir, Nordan does not apply a fictive invention that circumvents pain. He heads straight into it with honest prose written from love.

Marcel Arbeit, in Life as a Set of Games and Invented Stories in Lewis Nordan's Fictional Memoir, also notes that Nordan's Boy with Loaded Gun has more than one voice and illustrates different narrative strategies. Arbeit claims that in his memoir Nordan splits into several narrative personas and writes a story based equally on fact and fiction. Compelled by his storytelling instinct, Arbeit argues, Nordan makes himself into a full-fledged literary character who uses selected situations from his life to give telling examples of the benefits and perils of imagination and storytelling as universal distancing strategies. According to Arbeit, all the games that Buddy's character plays throughout the memoir are really versions of a single life game in which he transforms himself into his fictional counterpart and lives out his life as if from a distance. Arbeit concludes his interesting reading of Nordan's memoir by examining its ending, which is educational and even happy if we take the family idyll in the epilogue at its face value.

This same epilogue is the subject of Edward J. Dupuy's Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Guns and Love in Lewis Nordan's Work. Dupuy reminds us that, at this moment, the epilogue stands at the end of Nordan's corpus. Published first as a short story called An American Dream, the epilogue picks up on themes that haunt Nordan's other works: according to Dupuy, writing it may have helped Nordan come to terms with the violence of the Mississippi Delta of his youth at the same time as it explores the violence of America—the connection of guns and love that makes his quasi-fictional couple representative of a nation. These characters, too, are not so far from other Nordan characters who have their share of moral shortcomings: the pathetic Runt Conroy . . . , the murderous Solon Gregg, or even the alcoholic and largely silent Gilbert Mecklin.

In "The ‘Idea of Order’ in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi: Scapegoating and Redemption in The Sharpshooter Blues," Roberta S. Maguire follows this thread by examining some of the questionable decisions of just about all of the characters in the novel, who show themselves at some point to be experiencing feelings of guilt brought on by the failure to heed the ethics inherent in acts of language. Maguire argues that The Sharpshooter Blues might be seen as an elaborate metaphor for how language works—how it makes and unmakes and can remake a world. In that way, [the novel] offers a prescription—an order, if you will—regarding the care we must take with language. The novel, according to Maguire, reveals at once the abstract power of language to create a new reality and the concrete human capacity to misuse that power to disastrous effect.

In "Faulkner's Ghost in Lewis Nordan's The Sharpshooter Blues," Terrell L. Tebbetts also looks at the power of language in Nordan's work. Tebbetts argues that in The Sharpshooter Blues the narrators repeatedly call their own narratives into question, acknowledging that they may not have ‘really’ experienced what they report but may have merely imagined their accounts, and this quality, among others, illustrates that Nordan's novel is in dialog with William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Among the many similarities enumerated by Tebbetts is that both writers see the world as fraught with jeopardy; however, Nordan grants his characters agency that helps them create enduring connections so that they can face the inevitable tragedies of life.

Often these enduring connections are creations of the mind, since Nordan endows his characters with the imaginative capacity to dream and to live in realities of their own making. As Manuel Broncano argues in Lewis Nordan's Southern Magic, Nordan's characters often resemble the author himself, engaged in the task . . . of finding new spaces in our surrounding reality. Pointing up the similarity between Nordan's journey into a territory that defies the logic of narrow-minded rationalism and the pan-American tradition of the marvelous real, Broncano illustrates that Nordan is far more than a regional writer, and his work appeals broadly beyond the United States (as Broncano's and Marcel Arbeit's attendance at the Nordan symposium in Auburn attests). In his essay, Broncano shows that Nordan's fiction creates a self-contained reality made of language, and his characters, like all humans, dwell in a world built with words, a linguistic construct that can exist by itself without the need of any referent whatsoever.

The poet Jo McDougall, too, admires the special world that Nordan creates with language, especially in his most critically acclaimed novel, Wolf Whistle. Here, McDougall claims, Nordan beautifully blurs poetry and prose: [H]e is on every page a poet, shaping prose with transformative power and imagery, creating a world both real and surreal, imbuing an alchemy of dark magic. But his greatest gift, according to McDougall, is the gift of freedom, which grants permission to celebrate the ignorant, tragic, messy, elegant paradox that is the South.

While McDougall sees a similarity between Nordan's dialogs and Flannery O'Connor's simultaneously real and surreal riffs and counter riffs, Robert Rudnicki points out Nordan's kinship with Eudora Welty, especially in the lyricism, evocative descriptions, and magical quality of Welty's A Still Moment. In his piece, Eulogizing Space: Eudora Welty's ‘Still Moments’ and Gaston Bachelard's ‘Dream Geometry’ in Lewis Nordan's Fiction, Rudnicki argues that the landscapes of Welty's Natchez Trace and Nordan's Mississippi Delta are depicted according to a similar poetics of natural space. Drawing on Bachelard's study, Rudnicki claims that Nordan's and Welty's fiction share language that stabilizes the geometry of space through simple engravings that function as an invitation to readers to start imagining life anew.

One young reader who applied just such an imaginative creative process to Nordan's story Music of the Swamp is Kate Beard. We had fashioned the Buddyfest as an opportunity for students to find entry into Nordan's work, and that is precisely what happened for an Auburn University Drawing I class in which Beard was a student. The class read the story the semester before Nordan visited Auburn and then illustrated what the uninitiated reader might garner from it. All of the drawings were displayed during the symposium, and Beard's drawing, included here, was selected to represent the class in this volume. While he was with us, Buddy found a new following among our students, some of whom awakened to the interdisciplinary possibilities presented by the art of the story—especially as rendered by Buddy Nordan. The students who met him took a lasting impression that they are still talking about.

He seems to have had the same effect on students all through his career. John Dufresne, a former student of Nordan, joined us and spoke with fondness of lessons learned under Nordan's direction as a young instructor. Perhaps it was from Nordan that Dufresne learned that the fiction writer's job is to look at the world one street, one little farmhouse, one double-wide at a time, because it's through the particular that we come to know the general, through the concrete that we come to know the abstract, through the peculiar that we come to know the normal, through the home place that we come to understand the world. In Wonderful Geographies, Dufresne claims that the writer inhabits two landscapes: the one that we lived in, and the one that lives in us. As he notes, When the two landscapes are in synch, as they are with Buddy, we get a sense of emotional attachment and spiritual significance, his and eventually our own. Dufresne expresses what many of us feel—once you know Nordan, whether through his writing, personally, or both, you know yourself better.

This is the gift of great writing, and it is not unlike the gift that Shakespeare may have bestowed on Nordan, according to Constance C. Relihan, who claims in The Nordan Shakespeare that his dissertation topic chose Nordan as much as he chose it. Nordan has claimed time and again that his doctoral work on Shakespeare barely influenced him. Relihan agrees, stating that the relationship between the dissertating Nordan and the fiction-writing Nordan is not one of forward influence: the subject of the dissertation did not create the emphases and imperatives of the fiction; rather . . . the worldview of the writer, having chosen Shakespeare as a focus, would have been prompted by his own creative impetus to choose Shakespeare's romances (not the high tragedies or the comedies) as his subject. At the very least, Nordan may have known himself better after having read Shakespeare.

It is our hope that the readers of this volume will come to know both the humanity and the paradox of Lewis Nordan, and so we give Buddy the last words by concluding with three interviews that were conducted over the course of roughly ten years. The first was recorded as part of Don Noble's Bookmark series in 1998. In it, Buddy says that he favored among his books Music of the Swamp because the painstaking process of writing it revealed to him a certain truth about his relationships to his father and stepfather. He also discusses how he came to terms with fictionalizing the Emmett Till tragedy in Wolf Whistle and the friendship that developed between Nordan and Till's mother, who had both lost sons to a violent death.

In Manuel Broncano's ‘The Day When the Swamp Elves Ran out of the Canebrake’: A Conversation with Lewis Nordan, recorded in 2006, Nordan further reveals the significance of the loss of his son to his work as he discusses his love for his characters, particularly Hydro Raney and his father. For example, the agonizingly beautiful scenes he creates around Hydro's suicide in The Sharpshooter Blues were written from memory. Those were images inspired by the death of my own son, says Nordan.

At the end of the day, it was our recognition of the importance of father/ son relationships to his writing that Nordan appreciated most about the pieces in this book. When I interviewed Buddy while he was with us in Auburn in 2009 (included here as Buddy on the Plains), he said that he was impressed by how carefully we had read his work and that we showed him things about his writing that he had not fully understood before. There were mentions of ways of looking at love and ways of looking at father/son relationships that had been inside me all along. I can recognize them as mine, but I really hadn't put them together as a coherent way of looking at life that I now see.

Our intention is that the readers of this volume, too, will see the whole of a writer who has the strength to write honestly from love—for it is a profound love that compels the creation of all his characters. We hope, too, that the publication of Lewis Nordan: Humor, Heartbreak, and Hope is the beginning of a long conversation about an outstanding writer who has changed us all by letting us know him.

1

Don't Cry for Me, Itta Bena

LEWIS NORDAN

I'm so glad to be back here in Auburn. I'm going to just talk for a while off the cuff about myself as a writer. I'm going to forgo any of this heavy bull that I usually talk in interviews about the reason I'm a writer is death, pure and simple, blah, blah, blah, and really just tell you about the accidental way I sidewaysed myself into being a writer and then I'm going to read a recent story. I often wonder why it was I got to be a writer when so many people who knew early on that they wanted to be a writer didn't get to be one.

I came from a little town in Mississippi called Itta Bena. I wanted to call my memoir Don't Cry for Me, Itta Bena, but nobody could pronounce Itta Bena. So the joke was lost.

The school I went to was a good little school in a good little town, but not one that emphasized creative writing by any means. There were no writers in my family, no familial models to draw upon.

But once in the eighth grade, maybe the only time in all of my twelve years of schooling, I was asked to write a character sketch about somebody in my family. So I chose my grandmother and wrote a few pages in my eighth-grade handwriting on a ruled sheet of paper and got a good grade on it. Not only that, the teacher said it was the best thing in class and asked me would I read it to the class. And so, hell, yes, I read it to the class. Next thing I knew, a preacher didn't come to the weekly chapel, and they said, "Why don't you read your story about your grandmother to the whole