Art and Craft

Thirty Years on the Literary Beat

Bill Thompson

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611174434
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

A compendium of profiles, interviews, and reviews published by the South Carolina book review editor

Art and Craft presents the hand-picked fruit of Bill Thompson's three decades covering writers and writing as book review editor of Charleston, South Carolina's Post and Courier. Beginning with a foreword by Charleston novelist Josephine Humphreys, this collection is a compendium of interviews featuring some of the most distinguished novelists and nonfiction writers in America and abroad, including Tom Wolfe, Pat Conroy, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Bragg, and Anthony Bourdain, as well as many South Carolinians. With ten thematic chapters ranging from the Southern Renaissance, literature, biography, and travel writing to crime fiction and Civil War history, Art and Craft also includes a sampling of Thompson's reviews.

A foreword is written by South Carolina novelist Josephine Humphreys, who is author of Dreams of Sleep (winner of the 1985 Ernest Hemingway Award for First Fiction), Rich in Love (made into a major motion picture), The Fireman's Fair, and Nowhere Else on Earth.

Featuring: Jack Bass, Rick Bragg, Roy Blount, Jr., Robin Cook, Pat Conroy, Patricia Cornwell, Dorothea Benton Frank, Herb Frazier, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen, Sue Monk Kidd, Brian Lamb, Bret Lott, Jill McCorkle, James McPherson, Mary Alice Monroe, Joyce Carol Oates, Carl Reiner, Dori Sanders, Charles Seabrook, Anne Rivers Siddons, Lee Smith, Mickey Spillane, Paul Theroux, Tom Wolfe

Leading Lights, or the Test of Renown

“A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”

Joseph Conrad, The Children of the Sea (1897)

Fame can be a cruel mistress, but it beats obscurity. Usually.

Some authors hope for the equivalent of being a working character actor, steadily employed and recognized by filmgoers, even if the audience can’t always apply a name to the face. They are welcome company. For others, nothing less than mega-stardom will do. Unlike matinee idols, however, most “big name” writers don’t have to relinquish their privacy at the altar of renown. Just a portion of it.

That’s the bargain, of course. The unfortunate thing about fame is that once achieved, sustaining it can become the dominant impulse, not the work. Some find that they’ve made a devil’s pact, writing to suit the fashion of the moment, delivering content that pleases and avoiding what less discerning readers may not like.

The authors profiled in this section made no such compromise. They take chances. They are not satisfied with the commonplace, or with fleeting fancies.

They are allied with the ancients, who believed that fame was the crown of achievement, not with the aspirants of Andy Warhol’s 15-minute world, whose conviction is that fame is the only thing that’s worthwhile, an end in itself.

I learned early on that interviewing famous writers is no different from speaking to less exalted ones, once their radiance loses a bit of its wattage. This usually happens in five minutes or less, when one realizes they are driven by the same aims, needs and insecurities as lesser lights. But acclaim does not always equate with talent, much less execution. Some of modest gifts and desires have simply found a profitable niche and are content with that. Others are more ambitious, either financially or artistically or both. And many writers garner fame for a reason, apart from the luck of the draw and fortuitous timing. They’re just that good.

Twain said fame is a vapor, a wisp. But I suspect the regard in which these writers are held will linger.

Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full

Could it be true? Could Tom Wolfe, maverick New Journalist of the ’60s whose use of fictional techniques left editors aghast, really be nearing his 70s?

Yes. Not that there’s any less vigor to his writing, as Wolfe’s much-heralded second novel A Man in Full (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) amply demonstrates. Set in boomtown Atlanta, the 742-page broadside received a National Book Award nomination well before landing in bookstores this week.

In it, Wolfe nails our corrosive worship of conspicuous consumption and a peculiarly American brand of hubris with sufficient depth and flair to bury all that rot about him being a “one-novel wonder.”

Wolfe insists, jocularly, that one of the most distinguishing features of the novel is its literal, not literary weight. A hefty three pounds, the book may have been 11 years in the making, but was written in a little more than a year.

“I once made the statement that all books are written in six months. The rest is dancing around the project,” says Wolfe. “Much time was consumed in outlining the novel. As I tell my children, outlines are as much a part of the craft of writing as the writing of sentences.”

Wolfe was founding father and chief practitioner of the so-called New Journalism in articles and in such books as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970). He also championed the notion—anathema to some literateurs—that the more creative approaches to modern journalism surpassed fiction as a window to the heart, soul and rhythm of the land.

The Richmond, Va., native, who graduated from Yale with a degree in American studies, underscored the claim in 1979 with The Right Stuff, but by the latter part of the ’80s realized he could undertake the novel without compromising his convictions. Thus was born The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), his hugely successful Reagan-era satire.

“I do believe the novel can bring you the news, and there’s never been a bigger need for it in this century.”

It’s reassuring to know that Wolfe, ever the sartorial dandy, hasn’t shed his taste for the unconventional, for surprise.

“A lot of what’s in the book just sort of hopped into my head,” says Wolfe, deflecting mention of his reputation for intellection and hard work. “The intimidating thing about fiction is that you have all this freedom. In nonfiction, you’re handed this character and this plot, and the challenge is to bring them alive.”

The protagonist of A Man in Full is embattled Atlanta real estate developer Charlie Croker, an aging former football hero with an ambitious young wife and a wagonload of woe. His business ventures going sour, Croker is facing the loss of his 20,000-acre plantation. Despite a ton of debt and humiliating austerity measures imposed from without, he clings to a driving desire to see the name “Croker” emblazoned 50 stories on high.

“The edifice complex,” Wolfe quips.

“If the ruling metaphor of contemporary life is a bad loan that’s suddenly come due,” writes one reviewer, “Wolfe has again noticed it first, then pushed ahead of other creditors.”

He’s also pushed ahead in other ways. To a large extent, Wolfe is utilizing Atlanta to deal metaphorically with such issues as evolving cultural identity. And he is just as puzzled as any why Atlanta, the very emblem of the New South, so seldom has lured the serious novelist.

“You’d think it would be an absolute natural. It’s such a colorful and exciting place and in many ways such a young, new place, that you’d think there would have been 30 or 40 novels set there by now. This whole business of passing up this incredibly rich and bizarre panorama just baffles me. Not just Atlanta. What about Dallas? What do writers want?”

Some might counter that a sprawling, unfocused Atlanta is too hard to pin down. It may be a complex social structure, but otherwise recalls Gertrude Stein’s “there is no there, there” comment about Oakland.

“People make that argument. They say that American society is so fragmented that if you try to do a slice of life as the novel does you just get a slice of chaos. All that really means is that it’s just a little more difficult to portray the life of a city than it was in, say, Dickens’s time. You just have to work a little harder. It’s by no means impossible. There should be great novels about Charleston, too. The same is true of my hometown.”

Like Bonfire of the Vanities, which was set in motion by a racial incident, A Man in Full cranks up when a local black football star is accused of raping the daughter of a prominent white businessman.

“One of my convictions is that if you want to write about urban America today, you can’t duck race. It’s a huge part of our national life. So far in fiction, it’s being dealt with in a delicate, mincing fashion that is kind of pathetic. It’s time to write about the subject head on. I can’t believe how the majority of fiction writers today are avoiding incomparable material and essentially just sitting there sucking their thumbs.

“This idea began around the 1870s in France, where tremendous emphasis was put on the so-called psychological novel or the exquisite novel—something understood by only we precious few. And that’s the state our literature is in now. Many writers are taught in college graduate writing programs that journalism today reports all the facts and so it’s no use to compete with it, that in no way can the novel be used to bring the news. In a way, the opposite is true. Less is being covered in 1998 than in 1908.”

It is partly for this reason that Wolfe says “A Man in Full” is his best book.

“On the other hand, if you don’t think that you’re in deep trouble. I did pretty much what I set out to do. Along the way came an unexpected pleasure—the treatment of Stoicism and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus—and it added something to the book that surprised me. I’ve written nonfiction most of my career. There won’t be many surprises there apart from the discovery of material that is new and hasn’t been discovered before.”

Fiction or nonfiction, Wolfe still surprises us.

November 15, 1998

Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale

Lee Harvey Oswald hungered for renown, the sort of global fame attendant to great achievements. He was dyslexic, but a voracious reader who aspired to write and move millions. He defected to the Soviet Union at age 19, certain it held the answer to his dreams.

It is not news that superior ability breeds superior ambition. But it was Oswald’s tragedy that his abilities were mediocre.

He ventured to Russia and into the arms of the KGB, only to be consigned to the gloom of Minsk and a job in a nondescript factory. He was not interviewed. He was not debriefed. For two years, Oswald and his Russian wife were constantly observed by those who didn’t quite know what to make of him: CIA plant or deranged romantic?

Had Oswald found what he so desperately sought, might he have become a different person than the man accused of the Kennedy assassination?

Norman Mailer thinks so. Thanks to unprecedented access to KGB documents, Mailer, aided by investigative reporter Lawrence Schiller, has deconstructed the Oswald we thought we knew and reconstructed the character of the man he calls “the American Ghost.”

In Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (Random House), Mailer’s first book-length work of nonfiction in 16 years, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the nature of a man accused of murdering not just a president, but an era. He does not ask, “Who killed Kennedy?” but “Who was Oswald?” He finds an individual far different from the ineffectual loner of popular myth.

“One of my fundamental literary beliefs is that whether people are good or evil, they have humanity, and that we can learn as much from evil people as from good people. And Oswald saw himself as a potentially great man, a leader who one day would change the world.”

Mailer insists that the most misguided way to regard Oswald is as a dangerous recluse, because it is too simplistic. Oswald, he says, was not passive, but active, even audacious. Yet over the years American popular culture has painted him as a much-diminished character.

“I noticed that in most of the reviews of my book, even the positive ones, the reviewer said ‘Yes, but Mailer’s making too much of this fellow.’ And I’m at a loss. Because I find him not only fascinating but adventurous. I’m not trying to celebrate him. He was a terrible liar and deceitful and killed a man I have huge regard for. Or I believe he did.

“But the fact of the matter is that he was a very enterprising kid. At the age of 19, he’s a Marine who goes over to the Soviet Union and dares to defect. That in itself is bold and kind of extraordinary, especially for a young man who also exhibited great timidity. A weak man doesn’t step out into the unknown. He dared to believe, for instance, that the USSR is not as bad as we painted it.”

When Oswald determined to leave the USSR, he succeeded in working through the bureaucracies of the U.S. State Department, which he had earlier defied, and the KGB. He left with his wife, Marina, a Russian girl whom he had chanced to marry.

“(These are) brave acts which reveal a lot of fortitude,” says Mailer. “He had instincts about dealing with bureaucracies. I was amazed to see how smart and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Leading Lights, or the Test of Renown
• Biography, Real and Imagined
• The Traveler’s Muse
• The Late Unpleasantness, in Fact and Fiction
• The Southern Renaissance
• Crime and Punishment
• Pressing Issues
• Watering the Wasteland
• Palmetto’s Progress (The Locals)
• The Reviews