Scribblers (6 page)

Maybe Sharyn's informality puts me too much at ease. Maybe I'm too comfortable in having read seven or eight of her novels. Or maybe I just have no idea what goes into organizing an interview. Whatever the reason, I possess an unwarranted confidence the day I drive north to Virginia.

The first sign that I'm out of my depth comes during the program. If Sharyn is disorganized, it's only in matters nonessential. Here, today, she's well coiffed, meticulously prepared, and much at ease before a gathering of fifty or sixty, most of whom seem to know her personally. Sharing the billing with her is Appalachian folk musician Betty Smith. They alternate. Sharyn reads excerpts from her Ballad novels, after which Betty performs the songs that inspired the prose. Betty has won a history-book award for a biography she's written; she has also garnered numerous music awards and has done some recordings for the Smithsonian. I've never heard of her, of course. She performs on guitar and dulcimer, which I recognize, autoharp, which sounds vaguely familiar, and something called psaltery. Music, Sharyn explains, is of such importance to her that she compiles a special soundtrack for each new novel, which she plays as she writes. I've noticed the song snippets in her books but mostly skipped over them. I resolve to purchase a Betty Smith tape after the program and to get on the ball. If I've missed the importance of music in Sharyn's books, what business do I have troubling her for
an interview? They're called “the Ballad novels,” for God's sake! I sulk through the rest of the program.

Afterward, Sharyn invites me to lunch with several of her friends from the audience. Then we go alone to the public library in nearby Stuart, Virginia, to talk. We find a quiet table in the back, where I set up my tape recorder between us.

“Where are you from in the mountains, exactly?” I ask.

She's not from the mountains at all, though her father was.

How could I not know that?

I grow flustered, as is reflected in my subsequent questions. They're so convoluted that they're barely recognizable as questions at all. I ramble on and on, venting literary opinions, drawing parallels where none exist, speaking on Appalachian topics with the false authority that only a native New Yorker can muster. All the while, a private voice nags me:
She's the one who's supposed to do the talking.
The tape I am making will be painful to hear. I know that much already.

Sharyn, God bless her, waits patiently until I'm finished, seeming not to judge. Her books have been translated into many languages. She's been interviewed far and wide. She's run into all manner of idiots. Her technique is to take the mess I've dumped in her lap, locate within it the germ of a pertinent question, restate that question clearly, and then answer it. I'm more thankful than I can say.

“The first time I ever lived in the mountains was in 1980. I mean, my ancestors got to Mitchell County in 1790, but between them and me came World War II. So when my father was drafted and taken out of the mountains, he ended up marrying a girl from the coast, and he never got back.”

Like Sharyn's life itself, her books are neatly divided between the two distinct cultures of the lowland South and the highland South.

The heroine of her early books is forensic anthropologist and amateur sleuth Elizabeth MacPherson.

“That's my mother's side of the family,” she says. “That's the flatland South. Those books are Jane Austen with an attitude. They're cultural satires.”

Elizabeth MacPherson is not closely in touch with her Scottish roots. On the occasions when mountain culture does come into play—as in
Highland Laddie Gone,
which is set during a Scottish festival in the Appalachians—it is lampooned for its excesses.

Those early novels and a couple of science-fiction satires—one of them the Edgar-winning
Bimbos of the Death Sun
—were produced under trying circumstances.

“The first seven or so books were written by someone who had infant children, a day job, and was going to graduate school. Now, how much could you get done with those three things on your plate?”

“About what I'm getting done now,” I admit.

“I mean literally in diapers. I mean they were infants. With
Bimbos,
for example, I was working eight to five at the Virginia Tech film library, taking two classes per semester, and I was pregnant, at the throwing-up stage, and I had a book contract that said I had to get this book written in eleven weeks. And so I would finish this job at five o'clock, get something to eat, go sit at the typewriter, and write until eleven, and then go to sleep. And cry—sometimes just cry—because I was so tired. And then get up at seven o'clock
in the morning and do it again. And so I have no sympathy for people—especially twittery old ladies—who say, ‘Someday, when I have the time, I'm going to write a book.' ”

Those early books were successful—perhaps too much so.

“I grew up very much in this whole tradition of ‘I want to be a writer,' without having any models. Nobody sits down and really talks to you about how the world works in a literary sense. So, for example, there are three ways to be known as a literary writer. You can go live in New York and work in publishing. You can get an MFA, preferably from Hollins or Iowa, or an undergraduate degree from Bennington. Or you can be a college professor, in English, at some accredited four-year school. And if you don't do one of those three things, hello genre fiction. You write
Moby Dick,
they call it ‘The Hunt for White October.'

“So all of a sudden, I found myself getting typecast for writing genre fiction and getting readers with their brains in neutral, when what I wanted to do was to be taken seriously as a writer. And New York wasn't going to help me, because they were happy. As long as they can sell, you know, twenty thousand books, fifty thousand books, a hundred thousand books, they don't care if they're read by chimps. I was making money for them. ‘Don't mess with anything.' But I said, ‘This isn't what I want to be.'

“So what I had to do was invent my audience. About four years ago, I stopped accepting any invitations where it was, like, a mystery conference or a mystery anything. Or anybody that called me a mystery writer in publishing circles—just, no. ‘You want me to come, here's what you call me, and here's what I'll talk about.' ”

What you call her is an author of plot-driven literary novels, and what she likes to talk about best is her Ballad books, born of her highland heritage.

“My mother's side of the family would have been all for what Southerners consider literary writing, which is what I call ‘tenure fiction,' mostly. My father's side of the family were the ones who were very strong on plot-oriented narrative. I mean, look at country songs. They're short stories. That whole Celtic tradition of using story to impart values.”

“Did you have a storyteller in the family?” I ask.

“I guess my father was. I got bedtime stories. One I remember when I was three started, ‘Once there was a prince named Paris whose father, Priam, was the king of Troy.' And so I got
The Iliad
in installments, but on a storytelling level, the way you might get Little Red Riding Hood.”

Sharyn traces her American roots to Malcolm McCourry, a Scot who was kidnapped in 1750 and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. After becoming an attorney in New Jersey and serving in the Revolutionary War, he arrived in the North Carolina mountains in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Sharyn likes to describe the Appalachians as a “vertical culture.” She tells how there is a vein of green-colored mineral called serpentine that runs from northern Georgia through Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Virginia and all the way up the eastern mountains to Nova Scotia, then resumes across the Atlantic in western Ireland, from which point it travels through Wales and Scotland and onward all the way to the Arctic Circle.

So it was that Malcolm McCourry and thousands of his
countrymen, vaguely dissatisfied with lowland America, gravitated to the Appalachians. They didn't know it, but the mountains were the same ones they'd lived in back home.

Sharyn says, “The most famous Appalachian writer published a book in which this sentence appears: ‘There are three things we say when we want to praise our neighbors. We say, one, “I never had to shoot one of their dogs.” Number two, “They keep themselves to themselves.” And number three, “They don't take charity.”' Now, who was that writer?”

“Got me,” I say.

“Stephen King,
Bag of Bones.
See, western Maine is the mountains, and that sentence sounds like I was describing the culture in Tennessee, Kentucky, western North Carolina. In some ways, we have more in common with the people of Maine than we do with the people of eastern North Carolina.

“I used to have a sign that said, ‘Stephen King works harder than you do.' He's another one who's trying really hard to get taken seriously.

“So many people talk about literature, and they use the phrase
got through.
‘I got through X book.' As if it were a low-carbohydrate diet. As if it were the thirty-mile triathlon. Something that you endured and gritted your teeth. And people think that literature has to be like medicine. It has to be brown and taste bad. That if something is not tedious and boring, you haven't read anything of significance.

“So I thought, ‘Okay, you have to be interesting, you have to have something to say. But why can't you combine it? Frost combined it. Dickens combined it. It's been done. Just because it's not fashionable doesn't mean it's not
feasible.' So I just completely ignored everything after 1940 and looked back to the old novels.

“I thought, ‘Why can't I be Dickens?' I wanted to be a nineteenth-century writer. I sort of realized that I missed it chronologically. But those writers—Dickens and Twain and George Eliot—were not college professors who wrote the odd book and had to edit the quarterly review. With
Oliver Twist,
Charles Dickens changed the child-labor laws. All these people had written nonfiction pamphlets and sermons, and people didn't listen because it was so depressing. And he wrote a novel and changed the child-labor laws.

“I think that somebody needs to be an advocate for the culture. I think there's been so much garbage written and especially filmed about Appalachia. And when I wrote
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter,
there must have been a roomful of books and EPA studies on the Pigeon River. And I wrote
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter,
in which that old man was dying of cancer because of the river, and I got letters from all over the country from people wanting to know what they should say to their congressmen. They were going to clean up that river because of an old man who didn't exist.”

“Dear Fred,” my letter opens, “I am writing to ask if I may interview you for a book I hope to begin soon.”

For me, Fred Chappell sets the standard for long-suffering writers.

Duke University, his alma mater, is the repository of Fred's collected papers, which to date occupy eighty-four linear feet of shelf space. And that's only the part that's been
cataloged. The finder's aid that describes what's in the various boxes runs sixty single-spaced pages. The collection includes drafts of his manuscripts, proofs of his books, and published material sent to him by his former students. But a large part of it—twenty boxes—is correspondence from authors famous and obscure and from an assortment of wannabes, favor curriers, and yahoos who would have Fred comment on their stories, speak to their groups, help them trace their ancestry, compose a poem for their benefit event, lend his name to their masthead, donate his time, or write them a recommendation. Fred answers every piece of mail—many thousands over the years. And they aren't perfunctory responses. If you look at Fred's notebooks—included among the papers at Duke—you'll see handwritten drafts of multipage letters to writers no one has ever heard of. And as his fame grows and word spreads that he's a soft touch, the burden only grows heavier.

I took a couple of fiction-writing workshops from Fred in graduate school. He would read all student work aloud himself in his country monotone, leaving us to guess at its authorship. After each story, he'd ask the students one by one for their comments, the odd result being that you'd have to anonymously pass judgment on your own work in front of your peers. It was either that or reveal yourself as the writer, which no one ever did.

I was never the kind of student to brown-nose or get close to my professors, Fred included. Though I was completely out of contact after graduation, he somehow knew when I took work as an editor. A couple of times a year, a manuscript would arrive from someone who'd learned about
me through Fred. His memory of me was vague. I could easily recognize the parcels that came via his recommendation because they were always addressed to Steve Neal, who was the United States congressman from Fred's district at that time. But at least he remembered me—sort of.

When my first book came out, I sent a copy to him. Not then knowing his habit of answering all his mail, I had no expectation my gift would even be acknowledged. But like many others before me, I received a prompt, two-page letter complimenting the book's good points and going gently on the bad. He even quoted a couple of passages back to me. He'd read the whole thing, and closely. It remains the most gracious letter of its kind I've ever gotten.

So when I'm laying plans for my present project, it is Fred's misfortune to have been raised in the town of Canton, just west of Asheville. I will prevail on him again.

“If I understand correctly,” I write, “you're planning or working on a fourth Kirkman novel. I'd like to touch base with you a few times as the book develops to find out how you're progressing. I won't ask to quote from your work or do anything other than describe it in broad terms.”