Category Archives: U.S.

by | 5 September 2004 · 11:12 am

Naipaul’s Nashville: Music

Naipaul interviews Nashville songwriter Bob McDill.

No amount of questioning, no amount of explaining, even from someone as willing to talk as Bob McDill was, could take one to the magic: the calling up and recognition of impulses that on the surface were simple, but which, put together with music, made rich with a chorus, seemed to catch undefined places in the heart and memory.

Mama said, don’t go near that river.

Don’t go hangin’ round ole Catfish John.

But come the mornin’ I’d always be there

Walkin’ in his footsteps in the sweet delta dawn.

Almost nothing at first. But then the images and the associations come: Mama, river, catfish, footsteps, delta, dawn.

Bob McDill said he had had to learn the subculture. But the Southern images and words of his best songs are far from the stylized motifs of a good deal of country music. And though he makes much of writing in an office in a matter-of-fact, day-to-day way–and perhaps because he talks in a matter-of-fact way, since the mystery cannot be described–it is probably true that, when moved, he writes with that most private part of the self with which Proust said serious writers write.

He says that his best song is “Good Ole Boys like Me.”

When I was a kid Uncle Remus he put me to bed,

With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head.

Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man

With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand.

And he talked about honor and things I should know.

Then he staggered a little as he went out the door….

I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be.

So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

Every detail there was considered. His aim, he said, was to get as much of the South as he could in a few lines. And the song has become very famous; many people I spoke to referred to it; the mood of the song spoke for them. A “good ole boy” … was a redneck; but it was also a more general word for an old Southerner, someone made by the old ways. The song might seem ironical, then celebratory. But below that it is an elegy for the South, old history and myth, old community, old faith.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 247-248.

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by | 3 September 2004 · 6:06 pm

The Mississippi Frontier

Naipaul’s chapter on Mississippi is entitled “The Frontier, The Heartland.” Until reading him, I had never considered Mississippi to be a frontier state. But it is, at least in part. And I should have remembered from reading Frederick Law Olmstead‘s The Cotton Kingdom many years ago.

“My mother and father used to tell me about when they would hang people in the courthouse square. Legal hangings, not lynchings. That was when my father and mother were children. And my daddy was born in 1897. And that was just abhorrent to me–and it was to them. These were stories that people would tell you as you were growing up. I think we’ve come a long way. It seems like people are becoming more civilized, I hope.”

The stories told to Ellen as she was growing up were frontier stories; that was how I regarded them. They had echoes of any number of Western films; and it was remarkable to hear them from someone who had just turned sixty. In one lifetime, then, it seemed that she had moved from frontier culture, or the relics of a frontier culture, to late twentieth-century Jackson and the United States. It gave a new cast to my thoughts, and a new cast to my conversation with people….

Ellen’s thoughts, just before we separated, were of her father, who had died when she was thirteen. “My father told me you never got ahead by stepping on somebody’s back. We all need to come up together.”

That had been the great discovery of my travels so far in the South. In no other part of the world had I found people so driven by the idea of good behavior and the good religious life. And that was true for black and white.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 164.

I must confess a family scandal. One of my great great uncles was hanged as a horse thief in Wyoming (via Texas) in 1878, a fact which so scandalized my maternal grandfather as to cause him to scratch his middle name (which he shared with that uncle) out of the family Bible.

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by | 3 September 2004 · 5:55 pm

Naipaul Asks Welty about Rednecks

And it was of the redneck, the unlikely descendent of the frontiersman, that I talked to Eudora Welty when I went to call on her. I had arrived early, and waited on the street below the dripping trees. She was ready early, and could clearly be seen through her uncurtained front window. But I was nervous of knocking too soon….

The frontier was so much in her stories: a fact I had only just begun to appreciate. And she was willing to talk of the frontiersman character.

“He’s not a villain. But there’s a whole side of him that’s cunning. Sometimes it goes over the line and he becomes an outright scoundrel. The blacks never lived in that part of the state. They came over to work on the plantations. Most of the rednecks grew up without black people, and yet they hate them. That’s where all the bad things originate–that’s the appeal they make. Rednecks worked in sawmills and things like that. And they had small farms. They are all fiercely proud. They dictate the politics of the state. They take their excitement–in those small towns–when the politicians and evangelists come. Scare everybody, outwit everybody, beat everybody, kill everybody–that’s the frontiersman’s mentality.”

I told her the story Ellen had heard as a child about the rednecks to the south of the town where she had spent her summers: the story of traveling salesmen who had been roughed up and hitched to a plow and made to plow a field. Ellen had said that this story had come down from the past; and I had thought of it as a romantic story of the wickedness of times past, an exaggerated story about people living without law. But Eudora Welty took the story seriously. She said, “I can believe the story about the salesmen. I’ve heard about punishing people by making them plow farms.”

We talked about Mississippi and its reputation. “At the time of the troubles many people passed through and called on me. They wanted me to confirm what they thought. And all of them thought I lived in a state of terror. ‘Aren’t you scared of them all the time?’ A young man came and said that he had been told that a Mr. So-and-So, who was a terrible racist, owned all of Jackson, all the banks and hotels, and that he was doing terrible things to black people. It was a fantasy. It wasn’t true. The violence here is not nearly as frightening as the Northern–urban–brand.”

A frontier state, limited culturally–had that been hard for her as a writer, and as a woman writer? The richness of a writer depends to some extent on the society he or she writes about.

She said: “There is a lot behind it, the life of the state. There is the great variety of the peoples who came and settled the different sections. There is a great awareness of that as you get older–you see what things have stemmed from. The great thing taught me here as a writer is a sense of continuity. In a. place that hasn’t changed much you get to know the generations. You can see the whole narrative of a town’s history or a family’s history.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 213-214.

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by | 2 September 2004 · 5:47 pm

Good Soldier Outlier: Coping with the Draft

I started college, without much enthusiasm, in the fall of 1967 at the University of Richmond, Virginia. I dropped out in the middle of my sophomore year, in delayed culture shock after having spent most of my childhood in Japan. My academic advisor had talked me into taking ROTC the first year, but I dropped it in order to take a journalism class during my sophomore year. Journalism and German were the only two classes I had any interest in that semester. My German professor called me to ask why I didn’t bother to show up for the exam. (The only exam I showed up for was a required religion class, “The Bible as History,” which I had prepared for half my life, not just half a year.)

Something similar happened to three out of four childhood friends of mine from the Southern Baptist missionary community in Japan. All of us who dropped out ended up in the military, one in the Navy and two in the Army. In Virginia, at least, conscientious objector status was only granted to those who belonged to established religions that espoused pacifism. You couldn’t personally pick and choose which–if any–wars you cared to fight in.

Family History

My father was raised a Quaker, but became a Baptist, and spent World War II on a ministerial deferment at the University of Richmond, graduating in 1945. Four of his five brothers–likewise Quaker-raised and Baptist-converted–served in the military, the youngest in the Navy during the Korean War. (He visited us in Japan.) None was an officer, none died, and none really talked about what he’d been through.

The same goes for my mother’s two brothers, raised Presbyterian in the Shenandoah Valley, who enlisted for World War II. One spent his time in B-17s out of Thule, Greenland, protecting convoys in the Atlantic. His plane went down near Bermuda in 1945, losing half the crew, but he managed to survive after several weeks in hospital. The other served in Co. A, 314th Infantry, 79th (Cross of Lorraine) Division through Normandy and the Vosges, then across the Rhine, and finally into Czechoslovakia. He was a very taciturn man, and never talked about the war, not even to his wife, until he attended a D-Day anniversary in Normandy in 1994, when he broke down and wept.

The tradition goes back even further. Two great grandfathers fought in the Civil War, on the wrong side. I’m very glad their side lost–and I’m even gladder that they both survived. In each case their last battles were against Gen. Custer. One, a private in the 45th Virginia Infantry, was taken prisoner after Custer’s flank attack at Waynesboro in February 1865, the last battle of Sheridan’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign. The one in the 11th Virginia Infantry was WIA in April 1865 at Five Forks, where Custer helped turn Lee’s flank and drive him out of Petersburg. I’d love to know how each of them reacted when they heard about Custer’s death at Little Big Horn in 1876.

Personal History

Among the three of us baby-boomer agemates from Japan who enlisted, only one ever saw combat–the one who joined the Navy, oddly enough. Enlisting in the Navy was one way to minimize direct exposure to hostile fire, although it required four years on active duty, rather than the two-year minimum required by the draft. Unfortunately, the Navy man ended up guarding ammo depots in Cambodia in 1969-70, where he suffered lifelong disabilities after leaping out of a guard tower during a firefight and shattering his ribs and spine. Vietnam has defined the rest of his life.

The two of us who ended up in the Army enlisted specifically for a noncombat military occupational specialty (MOS). The other friend became a radio technician and spent most of his enlistment at Ft. McPherson, Georgia, where he helped record the Calley trial. He went on to become an award-winning TV producer and pioneer in High Definition TV.

After taking a battery of aptitude tests, I enlisted in April 1969 with a contract for language school because there weren’t any openings in journalism. (Army reporter Al Gore enlisted in August 1969.) Of the 8 languages on my list, the Army in its wisdom picked number 7, Romanian. Kurdish was number 8, but that probably required Special Forces or CIA status. I chose languages that would keep me in school for 9-12 months of my 3-year enlistment. I started with Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Russian–but avoided Vietnamese and Southeast Asian languages.

Language school helped turn me toward linguistics and away from journalism. Thanks to the GI Bill, work study, grad assistantships, and a variety of part-time and full-time jobs, I was able to finish a doctorate with only $2,000 in student loans, which I paid off early. On balance, I’d have to say the Army did more for me than I did for it.

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by | 2 September 2004 · 6:37 am

Good Soldier Outlier: Introduction

So many people these days seem to be fighting the Vietnam War all over again, and so few politicians, journalists, and pundits–and fewer and fewer academics–have any military experience at all. So I thought I’d seize the opportunity to share a few of my own impressions about what it was like to be in the Vietnam Era military. There are far more Vietnam Era Vets than there are Vietnam Vets. I’m one of the former. I never got close to combat. Never even left the States. True war heroes may be reluctant to talk about their experiences, but a bookish clerical soldier like me should be able to prattle on and on.

If you get nothing else out of it, I hope at least you come away with a feeling that people in the military are just people, in all their diversity, and not some strange subspecies of robotic sociopaths, as so many antiwar protestors seem to assume.

The thing that most disturbs me about so many of my politically active colleagues in academia is their visceral revulsion at all things military, and their tendency to demonize anyone connected with the military. It’s even worse than the casual bigotry one finds on American campuses toward anyone with a marked Southern accent, or anyone who openly professes Christianity.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive. I was raised among expatriate Southerners in Japan, but consciously worked to erase any traces of a Southern accent, while teasing friends who kept theirs. Now my daughter teases me for the traces her finely tuned ear picks up, while I get defensive about the South. I was also raised among Christian missionaries, although I abandoned the faith during adolescence. By now I’ve also abandoned my old resentment toward the church.

My lofty rationale for indulging a story-telling whim, then, is to help counter one kind of antimilitary bigotry that seems so widespread among those inclined toward pacifism. Perhaps I might also help counter a bit of the promilitary mythologizing that seems so widespread among hawks.

The first installment will follow this evening.

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by | 30 August 2004 · 5:39 pm

Naipaul on W.E.B. and Booker T.

In two chapters of A Turn in the South entitled “The Truce with Irrationality” (I and II) Naipaul interviews mostly black Southerners in Tallahassee, Florida, and Tuskegee, Alabama. The title comes from Naipaul’s gloss on a literary quote.

“The most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality.” The words by James Baldwin (among the most elegant handlers of the language) had stayed with me since I had read them, nearly thirty years before…. But now, in the South, in the middle of my own journey, I began to wonder whether the truce that every black man looked for hadn’t in fact been with the irrationality of the world around him. And the achievement of certain people began to appear grander.

Besides interviewing living people, Naipaul rereads famous works by two famous men, and examines their literary and educational legacies.

Tuskegee was still a going concern. It had a devoted community; and it still had heart. Its financial predicament was the predicament of black schools generally; and it was better off than some. Its physical condition was very far from that of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where in parts the campus looked ruined. There was a melancholy bronze statue there too, at Fisk, meant to set the seal on glory, but now seeming to watch over the ruins. The statue was of W.E.B. Du Bois, the rival and critic of Washington….

The quarrel or debate between the two men, Du Bois and Washington, both mulattoes, is famous. Du Bois might seem closer to contemporary feeling. But his best-known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of essays and articles, is a little mysterious….

If Booker T. Washington can make a darky joke, Du Bois can speak of “the joyous abandon and playfulness which we are wont to associate with the plantation Negro”; can say, “Even today the mass of the Negro laborers need stricter guardianship than Northern laborers”; and he can ask, “What did slavery mean to the African savage?”

But we can read through both the Du Bois way of writing and the Booker T. Washington manliness to the facts of Negro life of the time, and see the difficulty both men would have had in defining themselves, and establishing their own dignity, against such an abject background. As if in resolution of that difficulty, Du Bois’s book seems lyrical for the sake of the lyricism. It can appear to use blacks and ruined plantations as poetic properties. It deals in tears and rage; it offers no program.

In this beginning of Du Bois there was also his end. He lived very long, and towards the end of his life–facing irrationality with irrationality–he left the United States and went to live in West Africa, in Ghana, a former British colony that had in independence very quickly become an African despotism, and was soon to revert to bush and poverty, exporting labor to its neighbors.

At the very beginning of the century, in Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington, in his late-Victorian man-of-the-world style, had cautioned against just that kind of sentimentality about Africa. “In the House of Commons, which we visited several times, we met Sir Henry M. Stanley. I talked with him about Africa and its relation to the American Negro, and after my interview with him became more convinced than ever that there was no hope of the American Negro’s improving his condition by emigrating to Africa.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 120, 151-153.

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by | 30 August 2004 · 5:25 pm

Up from Slavery: "A painful coded work"

On this journey I read [Booker T. Washington’s] Up from Slavery twice. On the second reading, after I had been nearly four months in the South, I found that the book had changed for me. It became more than the fabulous story of a disadvantaged man’s rise. I began to see it as a painful coded work, making separate signals even in a single paragraph to Northerners, Southerners, and blacks.

I also began to see the book as the work of a man constantly concerned to raise funds for his school. That should have been obvious to me always, but it hadn’t been; that had been swept away by the power of the fable. Below that primary appeal, however, there were others: the man of the world appealing knowledgeably to the very rich on behalf of the wretched, representing himself as honorable and worthy and manly and educated; yet at the same time taking care to do the contrary thing, and making it clear that as a black man he knew his place.

Hence his confident, socially knowing talk, like any solid late-nineteenth-century citizen, of the “best people” and the “vices” of “the lower class of people.” But he is mortified when, on a train journey from Augusta to Atlanta in Georgia, in a Pullman car “full of Southern white men,” two ladies from Boston, “ignorant, it seems, of the customs of the South,” insist on inviting him to supper. The meal seems very long. As soon as he can, he breaks away from the ladies to go to the smoking room, where the men now are, “to see how the land lay.” It is all right; the men know who he is and are anxious to introduce themselves to him.

In England he develops a high regard for the aristocracy and the time and money they devote to philanthropic works. He is impressed by the deference of servants, who are content to be servants all their working life and, unlike American servants, use the words “master” and “mistress” without any constraint. In that ambiguous observation there are consoling messages both for blacks and Southern whites. He becomes friendly, he says, with the Duchess of Sutherland. She is a famous beauty. But as a black man he will be out of place to say so directly. He writes, “I may add that I believe the Duchess of Sutherland is said to be the most beautiful woman in England.”

So many snares; so many people to please; so many contradictions to resolve; so many possibilities of destruction. The achievement was great. But at what cost. He died at the age of fifty-nine.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 153-154.

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by | 28 August 2004 · 8:42 pm

Identity as Religion, Religion as Identity

Naipaul interviews theology students in northern Georgia.

Identity as religion, religion as identity: it was the very theme of another theology student, a young man from a background quite different, a mountain community in northern Georgia.

He said, “When I think of growing up, the two things are very much the same thing–family and church. The church was a small church, with about forty-five members, all related. Seven or eight generations ago the first member of our family moved into that area and bought four hundred acres, and we still live on that. It isn’t a plantation. There might have been slaves early on, but that disappeared pretty soon. We were a family of small farmers. My grandfather had fifteen or sixteen brothers, and their descendants all live within three miles of one another. It is very rare that anybody moves away. When you go up there you know people, and you know them as relatives.

“At the same time it is very easy for your own identity to get lost. But I have since grown to appreciate how wonderful that is: a warm, loving, open kind of family, not just father and mother and brothers and sisters, but cousins, aunts, and uncles.

“The church is very much the same thing. Family members. The Holiness Church is a very emotional religion, and what struck me early on was how very different people were in church from what I knew of them at home. The emotion they expressed in church was different. There would be a lot of shouting. The preacher would try to work them up to the sinfulness of human nature. There would be moments during the service when people would get up and speak in tongues, and people would try to interpret what was being said. And there were times when people would get saved.”

“This religion was not a reaching out to the world?”

“This religion was a calling away from the world, an excluding of the world. I still struggle to find how I relate to all that now. The first year in college I spent alone in my room. I was scared to go out. Then I became angry with some aspects of the faith that had such a rigid view of the world.”

But now (like the Mississippi plantation, and for the same, economic reason) the mountain world was changing. “A lot of the people have to go away to get work.” They came back, it was true; they never lost touch. But: “The twentieth century is pouring over the mountain.”

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 48-49.

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by | 26 August 2004 · 7:48 pm

Confederates and Shias

Naipaul interviews the scion of a former plantation owner in South Carolina.

The North was now very concerned with all its minorities. It might have been thought that they would have considered the South a minority area. But they didn’t. The official Northern view could be put like this: “The white Southerner is not a minority. He is a backward fellow American who oppresses a minority, the Negro.”

Had he looked at his father’s book about the plantations recently? No, not recently. But he knew the book well, and he had some of the feeling for the old plantation life.

I said, “But you can’t feel nostalgia for what you don’t know?”

“Although I didn’t grow up with any knowledge of the working life of the plantation, still, life on the plantations–when we went to visit them when I was a child–it was more like the old Southern countryside, even though we didn’t have slavery. It was the old easygoing rural life, and relations between the races were much more what they had been. So I can feel nostalgia for a past.”

He was as concerned, even obsessed, as his father had been by the superficial destruction of the South–the highways, the fast-food chains–and pained by the alienation of some of the plantations to people and firms from outside.

The past as a dream of purity, the past as cause for grief, the past as religion: it is the very prompting of the Shias of Islam to nobility and sacrifice, the dream of the good time of the Prophet and the first four caliphs, before greed and ambition destroyed the newly saved world. It was the very prompting of the Confederate Memorial in Columbia. And that very special Southern past, and cause, could be made pure only if it was removed from the squalor of the race issue.

When–again as in a stage set–we got up from our chairs and went inside, for a salad provided by our hostess, I said I felt he was dealing in emotion without a program. He agreed; but then he said the program was being created….

He told me because of the developments of the 1950s his father had ended as a Southern separatist; and that was where he himself was now. The defeat of the South, the surrender of Lee, was for him an unappeasable sorrow, I felt.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 106-107.

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by | 26 August 2004 · 7:45 pm

Stepin Fetchit in Trinidad

“Does the name Stepin Fetchit mean anything to you?”

It certainly did. Stepin Fetchit was adored in my childhood by the blacks of Trinidad. He was adored not only because he was funny and did wonderful things with his seemingly disjointed body and had a wonderful walk and a wonderful voice, and was given extravagant words to speak; he was adored by Trinidad black people because he appeared in films, at a time when Hollywood stood for an almost impossible glamour; and he was also adored–most importantly–because, at a time when the various races of Trinidad were socially separate and the world seemed fixed forever that way, with segregation to the north in the United States, with Africa ruled by Europe, with South Africa the way it was (and not at all a subject of local black concern), and Australia and New Zealand the way they were–at that time in Trinidad, Stepin Fetchit was seen on the screen in the company of white people. And to Trinidad blacks–who looked down at that time on Africans, and laughed and shouted and hooted in the cinema whenever Africans were shown dancing or with spears–the sight of Stepin Fetchit with white people was like a dream of a happier world.

It wasn’t of this adored figure that Jack Leland was speaking, though. He had another, matter-of-fact, local attitude. He said, “The ambitious people went north, and we were left with the Stepin Fetchits.” Now there was a movement back; not big, but noticeable.

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), p. 109.

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