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Mountain Lit

Knox Lit 101

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  Knox Lit 101

Some essential reading for the Knoxville literateur

by Jack Neely

The Big Three

1. Sut Lovingood's Yarns by George Washington Harris. The first time I saw this book, I was embarrassed to find it on the shelves of my public library. It's written in a dopey hillbilly dialect. There's a racial slur on the first page and on several pages thereafter. Throughout the book are unfootnoted allegations against females, freemasons, lawmen, and Baptists. I considered making a complaint to the librarian.

I didn't know until later that the book is a classic which has been in print for over 130 years and is still studied by scholars. I also didn't know that the author had lived just around the corner. George Washington Harris (1814-1869) was, in fact, one of the pillars of antebellum Knoxville's business and political community, as well as an elder in the conservative First Presbyterian Church. He obviously had a wild streak.

Sut Lovingood's Yarns, which traces the adventures of a prank-loving country boy always trying to get the better of women, preachers, and the law, is the dirty little secret of American literature. Mark Twain was fond of the book, and some scholars believe it was a strong influence on his career. Both William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor praised it as an influence on their own writing.

Harris was reckless with his humor, but not hateful. Critic Edmund Wilson called it "by far the most repellent work of any real literary merit in American literature." Most of the Sut stories are set way out in the country; only a couple are set in Knoxville proper—"A Razor Grinder In a Thunderstorm" and "Eavesdropping a Lodge Of Freemasons"—but they're doozies.

Harris died in a Knoxville hotel in 1869 after a strange seizure that he himself apparently attributed to "poison." His sudden death at 55, and the whereabouts of his last manuscript, are two of the mysteries of American literature. A contemporary of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, Harris died never guessing he'd one day be considered one of the founders of a distinctly American literature.

2. A Death In the Family, by James Agee. Much Knoxville literature is too gamey for general audiences, but Agee's masterpiece is an exception; it should be required reading for all Knoxvillians, young and old.

It's called a novel, apparently, only because most of the characters' names are fictional. Otherwise, it's a literal memoir of his father's death in a freak car wreck on Clinton Pike when Agee himself was only six and a half, and his Highland Avenue home before and after that accident. In the novel, Agee somehow embraces both harsh reality and tender affection, dealing with death without ever seeming either sentimental or irreverent. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1957, and was just this month named by novelist (and recent Pulitzer laureate) Michael Cunningham as one of the 10 best Pulitzer-winning novels of all time. A public-television drama based on the book is currently in production.

Agee never finished A Death In the Family to his own satisfaction; editors hammered it together after his own death at the age of 45, and chose toopen it with a well-known piece he'd written years earlier, "Knoxville: Summer 1915." Whether Agee would have included it in the novel or not, it's a handy place to find a lovely piece of prose.

3. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy. Thanks to his border trilogy, (the first installment of which, All the Pretty Horses, is a soon-to-be-released motion picture starring Matt Damon), author Cormac McCarthy is much more famous now than he was when he wrote Suttree. But some aficionados, even outside of Tennessee, consider his Knoxville-based novel to be his masterpiece. Recommended for anyone with a strong stomach, it's arguably Knoxville's Dubliners. It's one of those novels that makes you want to get out and see the places he's describing; some of them are still intact. Originally published in 1979, it's actually set in the early 1950s and describes in thick detail downtown Knoxville and the environs as McCarthy knew them as a young man.

Cornelius Suttree is himself a young man, a refugee from family and West Knoxville respectability who lives on a boat downtown and fishes for a living. Suttree's downtown of weedy riverside shacks, illegal tavernboats, jail cells, seedy hotels, undersides of various bridges, and an encyclopedic array of dens of iniquity, is populated by prostitutes, homeless drunks, and a voodoo queen, many of whom are based on real people, some of whom appear in the novel under their real names; Suttree's Knoxville underworld is a place of horror, revulsion, and a great deal of affectionate humor.

Out Of Print

Bijou, by David Madden. This novel of a pubescent boy whose world orbits around the Bijou Theatre is the author's most Knoxville-centered work. Walker Percy (who wrote The Moviegoer, his own movie-centric novel of coming of age in the South) raved about Madden's entry into the genre as "a triumphant, funny, brutal story of growing up." Madden is the most uneven and hardest to place of Knoxville writers. His books have been called "troublesome, demanding, and sometimes a bore. But at its height it is indeed a work of art." Bijou contains Madden at his most poetic and his most tedious. He has a knack for cornball dialogue that some go for more than others, and to catch all of Madden's allusions to scores of B-movies in this long book, you'd have to have an impressive library of '40s videos—or be at least 60 years old, with a few hundred Saturday matinees under your belt.

It's interesting that both Knoxville-based novels about childhood include significant scenes in Gay Street movie theaters; in their professional careers, both Agee and Madden wrote significantly about movies.

It's also remarkable that two of the three best-known Knoxville-based books are set in the same period—roughly the half-dozen years after World War II—and are each thick with detail about downtown as they follow the misadventures of footloose young males (as it happens, McCarthy and Madden are almost exactly the same age, but any resemblance ends there).

Though the novel is essentially nostalgic, and as a whole is not quite as dark as Suttree, parts of Bijou are more disturbing, simply because the protagonist is much younger than Suttree, a 13-year-old boy.

Alone among his Knoxville peers, Madden changed his fictional Knoxville significantly, renaming it Cherokee, giving new names to most of the streets, and making a few alterations to the topography. But the Bijou is the Bijou, and the Spanish-American War statue out in front of the courthouse is still a place kids daydream about climbing. His 1979 sequel, The Pleasure-Dome, has a few Knoxville (Cherokee) scenes, and his 1998 Civil War novel, Sharpshooter, takes place during Longstreet's siege of Knoxville.

Nonfiction

More Lives Than One, by Joseph Wood Krutch. Read the things Krutch wrote about Knoxville throughout his career and it sounds like several different cities and towns. Krutch (pronounced Krootch; he was the brother of the guy who established the downtown park) was terminally ambivalent about his home town. He left after graduation from UT in 1915 to enjoy an unusually wide-ranging career as biographer, drama critic, philosopher, and naturalist, achieving national distinction in each pursuit.

Krutch's best-known biographer believed the author was disingenuous in trying to distance himself from his hometown, but this elegant and sometimes pointed memoir of his life, which includes some charming memories of his eccentric German family in turn-of-the-century Knoxville, is worth a read.

Racism 101, by Nikki Giovanni. This lively and interesting collection of essays has more in it than the title suggests. Read her essay "Coffee Signs," which is ostensibly about the flashing JFG sign downtown. Among other Knoxville-related Giovanni works is her autobiographical volume Gemini; chapter one of which is about her youth in '40s and '50s East Knoxville, and a heartbreaking return years later; called "400 Mulvaney Street," the essay has been collected in other anthologies. And "Knoxville, Tennessee," a very short, nostalgic poem in free verse, has been transcribed into an illustrated children's book.
 

July 13, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 28
© 2000 Metro Pulse