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  “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.”

  Fred is enigmatic.

  He’s a mountain farm boy—“I sound like Gomer Pyle on a bad day,” he admits—with a fancy education. He started out writing science fiction as a teenager and still has a cult following in fantasy and Gothic circles for an early novel, Dagon. Most highly regarded for his poetry, he is the winner of the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the next best thing to a Pulitzer. He also claims a T. S. Eliot Award, a Rockefeller Grant, a World Fantasy Award, and a Best Foreign Novel Prize from the French Academy; like Jerry Lewis, he is said to be big in France. Noted Duke professor William Blackburn—who counted Reynolds Price, William Styron, and Anne Tyler among his students—was once cajoled into naming the best writer he’d ever taught. He didn’t hesitate: it was Fred Chappell. “Anybody who knows anything about Southern writing knows that Fred Chappell is our resident genius, our shining light, the one truly great writer we have among us,” novelist Lee Smith once said.

  But he is also a restless soul who got kicked out of Duke for a time and took seven years to complete his undergraduate degree. The offense was “Joe College stuff,” he says. “Got drunk and sassed a cop, got throwed in jail.” Following that, he admits, “I was a teenager until I was forty or forty-five.” Fred’s detractors will always regard him as a drunk no matter how high he rises.

  If his personality is complex, his body of work is downright inscrutable.

  Fred’s “Broken Blossoms” is as perfect a coming-of-age tale as I’ve ever read. In it, an eleven-year-old mountain farm boy—an easily recognizable Fred—clings to a dreamlike existence from which his father cannot shake him. His fame, the boy believes, will come as a stamp collector, or from his chemistry experiments, or from his epic science-fiction poem, “The Cycle of Varn.” It’s easy to envision the preadolescent Fred, like the boy, setting out from home to bring his father a jar of water where he works in the field, then arriving without the water and having no idea what happened to it, and his father taking him back home on the family wagon, its wheels cutting a straight, sensible line through the boy’s footprints meandering all over the road. I can’t keep a smile off my face every time I read “Broken Blossoms”; each page tops the last.

  I Am One of You Forever—the first of Fred’s Kirkman novels—is among my favorite books. His novel cycle was born of a poem he wrote way back in 1971. Called “The River Awakening in the Sea,” it summarized Fred’s feelings upon waking in bed on his thirty-fifth birthday, the same conceit that begins Dante’s journey in The Divine Comedy.

  Writing that piece got him thinking about a volume of poems sharing the theme of water. Halfway through that effort, he resolved to write companion volumes taking the other three classical elements—fire, air, and earth—as themes. Together, the volumes River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep comprise a tetralogy called Midquest, recognized as Fred’s major poetic work, for which he won the Bollingen. Each volume is dominated by a different part of the speaker’s mountain family—River by his grandparents, for example, and Bloodfire by his father. Each covers the same twenty-four hours of the speaker’s birthday at midlife, though some poems are reminiscences of the same hour in earlier years. The overall structure is complex. Each volume contains eleven poems. The first poem reflects the eleventh, the second reflects the tenth, the third reflects the ninth, and so on inward to the central sixth poem. And the forms are diverse. “Free verse and blank verse predominate,” by Fred’s reckoning, “but we also have terza rima, Yeatsian tetrameter, rhymed couplets, syllabics, classical hexameter variation, elegiacs, chant royal, and so forth.”

  Then he decided to match Midquest with a quartet of novels of like setting, characters, themes, and structure. The central figure is Jess Kirkman, a boy on a mountain farm through most of the cycle. The novels have their moments—like the fine piece “The Maker of One Coffin” in I Am One of You Forever—but I can’t help seeing Fred as a victim of his own subtlety. The novels are complex mainly for complexity’s sake. A storyteller of great gifts, Fred elects instead to play puzzle maker, and the narrative suffers at times. The whole thing seems overintellectualized; its intricate structure is perceptible only to those who’ve had it explained to them; indeed, most garden-variety readers don’t understand the Kirkman books as novels at all, but rather as story collections. Fred’s indifference to popularity is always tallied on the credit side of his ledger, but I’m not sure it should be.

  So it is with great admiration and a little doubt that I approach Fred at the culmination of his twenty-six years of work since “The River Awakening in the Sea,” as he writes the final installment of an integrated cycle of four poetry volumes and four novels that is likely unique in all of literature.

  “I can’t imagine needing more than a couple hours of your time altogether—probably less—arranged however is least bothersome to you,” I write. “Though it would suit me ideally if you are in fact busy on a final Kirkman book, another of your projects might prove just as interesting.”

  I despise my ass-kissing tone. I’m no better than the hundreds of others who will write Fred this year and ask him to get them a job or recommend them to a publisher, their own talent being insufficient for the task.

  “I think my idea is a pretty good one, and I hope you’ll see some merit in it.”

  If I were Fred, I’d tell me to go to hell, or at least neglect to answer my letter. But there’s a good reason he’s a beloved author and I’m not.

  “Your project is an interesting one, indeed,” he writes back. “And it just so happens that I have been thinking about Asheville in the very terms you broach.”

  Fred doesn’t like to be interviewed about works in progress, but he’ll be glad to talk to me about the new book once he’s finished it. What he proposes for the time being is that I write him every couple of weeks. He says he’ll do his best to respond with general updates on how he’s coming along.

  I can live with that.

  CHAPTER 4

  Toil

  It isn’t long before my writers’ group friends begin submitting to the company where I work. They approach me shyly, apologetically. “I’m putting something in the mail to you this week” is the way a couple of them introduce it. I’m pleased at the chance to see something of theirs on paper, and say so, but I also make it clear that we’re primarily a nonfiction publisher, and that most of our novel slots are filled by authors we’ve handled previously or who come to us with a basket of credentials.

  The first to arrive is a story about two damaged men—one alcoholic and the other schizophrenic—who meet in a halfway house. After they have a falling out, the latter is tricked into being bused out of state in a scheme to keep him from receiving local government funds. The alcoholic, understanding that his estranged friend is without his medication and headed for a breakdown, tracks him down halfway across the country and brings him home. From the cover letter, I learn this about the author, one of the writers’ group’s stalwarts: her first husband died of chronic alcoholism, and she has both a son and a stepson who are schizophrenic.

  Next is a mystery novel set in a fictional town near Asheville, in which a grizzled police chief and his pretty neophyte deputy have to solve a crime spree.

  Third comes an action-packed story about a church burning in rural Georgia. Among the principals are a wealthy landowner sympathetic to the local blacks, an ex-footballing, psychologically fragile black minister, a tribe of ornery Klansmen, and a soft-spoken, do-gooding former president Jimmy Carter himself.

  I write the author of the novel about the alcoholic and the schizophrenic that her approach is too didactic, that it seems she is more intent on driving home a point than spinning a good tale. And the machinations by which the schizophrenic is shipped out of state—a matter of some importance in the story—are murky.

  The second submission, t
he genre mystery, is simply not the kind of material we publish. But since I know the author and understand that criticism will be appreciated, I take him to task for overemphasizing the young deputy’s frailty and other minor matters.

  I fail to flag the church-burning novel on its way in, and it is rejected by someone else on the staff before I know it has arrived.

  Easily the best of the submissions is a story set mainly on a mountain farm near Asheville. A man accused of brutalizing and murdering a teenage girl is the beneficiary of a hung jury. Though it is widely agreed that he committed the crime, no witnesses were present, and there is negligible hard evidence against him. The novel then proceeds in eight alternating viewpoints as various characters—among them the older sister of the victim, her three brothers, and one of the brother’s friends—try to steel themselves to extract some mountain justice. The murderer finally turns up dead, in the same remote cabin where his victim was discovered. It is the work of Sharyn McCrumb’s friend Jack Pyle, who calls it “The Sound of Distant Thunder.”

  I’d characterize it as a literary murder novel governed by old-fashioned restraint and class. Jack does several things well. The eight narrators’ voices are distinct. The humiliation of the dead girl’s older sister is palpable when she has to provide details of her sex life during the courtroom scene; the devotion of her shy, long-ignored suitor could have been corny but is instead rather touching. The villain is characterized mainly by others’ feelings toward him; he is physically present only on a few occasions, and then briefly; altogether, he is wisely used.

  “The Sound of Distant Thunder” receives a wider circulation than my other friends’ submissions. Everyone agrees to its competence, but it is ultimately rejected on the feeling that we’ll likely receive several better novel manuscripts over the course of the year, an assessment I judge to be fair. I deliver the bad news by letter.