My dowry consisted of a folding chair.
No, not that sort of folding chair. Despite its popularity in fine entertainment such as professional wrestling, Mum never owned such an article of furniture, nor would she have regarded it as a fit inheritance for her only child. Neither did she mean an elegant Italianate scissor chair, fitting though that would have been for my obsession with the Middle Ages and Renaissance. My dowry was somewhere in the middle, both in terms of style and utility, and was as much an exemple of the 1970s esthetic as the hideous lime green polyester double knit pantsuit I wore for special occasions when I was in high school. I'm not sure where exactly Mum found it - the Lillian Vernon catalogue, perhaps? - but found it she did, and it took pride of place in the TV room/study that had begun as my father's bedroom.
The dowry chair was a smallish cube-like object that folded out into what purported to be a bed for unexpected guests. The quilted cotton upholstery was an unappealing brown roughly the color of what we used to politely refer to as "dog dirt" in my family, with an odd creamy tan lining when was folded out to become a narrow and extremely uncomfortable sleeping space. It wasn't much fun to sit on, either, and the only persons in the house who seemed to like it was Mum's Cairn terrier, Skye, who fell in love with as a puppy and spent the rest of his life rubbing against it, trying to dig up the carpet underneath it, drooling on it, and shedding pale reddish-cream guard hairs all over the surface on a daily basis.
I'm not sure how or when Mum started to refer to the chair as my dowry, but it became an affectionate joke between us. I remember her shaking her head when I requested it for my first apartment and being told that it was far too rare and precious a thing for her to turn over until I had a house of my own and could display it properly. I'm not sure my boyfriend/future husband ever quite recovered from being told that the chair was all I was getting when Mum died, or from the filthy look the dog gave him when he tried to sit in it a few minutes later.
The dowry chair was far from the only private joke Mum and I developed after Dad died, nor was it even our favorite. That was Mum's repeated demand that I come home and bring her $1,000, even though I made about a quarter of her salary.
This peculiar request originated when Mum warped me for life introduced me to the great American humorist James Thurber when I was about twelve or so. I didn't get half the adult references, of course, but that didn't keep from laughing hysterically at "Fables for Our Time," The Years With Ross, The Thurber Carnival, and the deceptively simple, childish cartoons. My high school classmates thought I was weird to begin with, and quoting "The Night the Bed Fell" instead of the masterworks of Rod McKuen didn't help.
I loved pretty much everything Thurber wrote, but my favorite (and Mum's) was a little gem called "Bateman Comes Home." This told the story of Nate Birge, the gangrenous and not very intelligent owner of Hell Hole, a hardscrabble farm graced by a cow named Bless-Yo-Soul, a wife named Elviry, and nine daughters lying in the local cemetery, only two of them dedd. His own hope in life was that his son, Bateman, who had decamped for the city years ago, would come home and bring him a thousand dollars.
Of course Bateman, like Godot, never shows, but a relative on the lam from the Chicago police and her gangster boyfriend do, followed by an idiot neighbor boy with double pneumonia who occasionally utters profundities like "Deed-a-bye, deed-a-bye, deed-a-bye, die!" By the end poor old Nate was so addled (and gangrenous) that when the neighbor boy suddenly claims to be Bateman, Nate capers about the yard of Hell Fire, his tar paper shack, screaming "Glory gahd to Hallerlugie!" while Thurber ends the story with a simple:
"If you keep on long enough it turns into a novel."
I had no idea what that meant, but it sure made my mother laugh. Then again, Mum had grown up during the days when writers were churning out lots and lots and lots of books set in downtrodden rural areas of the South, featuring downtrodden rural people who spoke mainly in apostrophes, prayed when they weren't fornicating, and ended up either indomitably facing their trials, or dying of disease, misadventure, or pellagra. The Southern Gothic, as it later came to be called, ranges from the majestic heights of William Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom! to potboilers so ridiculously overloaded with incident, accident, disease, death, sex, apostrophes, shiftless whites, shiftless blacks, dark secrets, bad dialect,
angels in the architecture, deformity, and did I say death? And apostrophes? that it's no wonder Mum laughed so hard at Bateman's homecoming that she scared the dog.
The Southern Gothic rose around the time that the Southern Agrarians, led by Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, championed the virtues of rural life below the Mason-Dixon Line. Their view of the Old South emphasized the independent, hard working, pious, conservative yeoman farmer who had built the early Republic but was now being superseded by the Northern industrial worker, and called for the whole country to return to its agrarian roots. Real Southern problems, like racism, sharecropping, segregated schools, poverty, malnutrition, and political corruption, were either ignored or laid at the feet of modern industrial life as it worked its way south from Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New England.
Whether the Southern Gothic, which exaggerates these problems to the point of Grand Guignol (often with a supernatural twist), arose in reaction to this misty-eyed sentiments is not clear, but what is clear is the enormous impact the Southern Gothic has had on American culture and perceptions of the rural South. Writers as varied as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, John Kennedy Toole, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Stephen King and Charlaine Harris have drawn on the Southern Gothic tradition in their works, influencing American and global perceptions of what life in the South was (and sometimes still is) like.
Of course not all Southern Gothics, or books about the rural South, achieve the lofty heights of The Optimist's Daughter or Absalom, Absalom!. Some aren't even as good as Four and Twenty Blackbirds. And others, of course, are So Bad They're Good.
Tonight I bring you both a novel and a series. The novel, which was almost certainly the inspiration for "Bateman Comes Home," was a sensation when it was published for its allegedly gritty, sympathetic look at Southern life during the Depression. The series, a string of long and increasingly ridiculous potboilers about an antebellum plantation, was the inspiration for one of the worst movies of the 1970s, as well as a short-lived subgenre of the historical novel:
Tobacco Road , by Erskine Caldwell - Tobacco Road is an unlikely candidate for a Book So Bad It's Good. Written by an earnest young writer who hoped to dramatize the sufferings of rural farmers in the South, it was edited by Maxwell Perkins, who made his name championing the early works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. The author, Erskine Caldwell, not only grew up in the Deep South but was later married to photographer Margaret Bourke-White, with whom he collaborated on three books detailing the degradation and poverty of rural life during the Depression.
Admirers included William Faulkner himself, along with literary critic Malcolm Cowley and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow (who thought its author should have won the Nobel Prize). A Broadway version was a smash hit, while the 1941 film version, directed by John Ford and starring the gorgeous Gene Tierney, was originally thought to have the same sort of critical and box office potential as The Grapes of Wrath.
So what is it doing here?
Perhaps it's the plot, which begins with Jeeter Lester, starving sharecropper who insists on working his ancestral lands even though he has so little money his wife is dying of pellagra, managing to steal a sack of turnips from his son-in-law, and spirals downward through a complicated series of events centered around a female preacher, Jeeter's less than intelligent son Dude, his voluptuous but disfigured daughter Ellie May, a car that eventually burns out its engine, an orgy at a hotel that dignifies the phrase "Cockroach Hilton," two fatal car accidents, and the death of Jeeter and his wife when the fire he sets to clear his overworked land for planting gets out of control and engulfs their house as they sleep. This neatly takes care of their respective phobias about being eaten by rats (Jeeter) and being buried in a tattered calico dress (Ada) but leaves the reader squinting in dismay and wondering what the hell the characters needed to do to catch a break from the author.
Or perhaps it's the characters themselves, who are either neurotic (Jeeter), malnourished (Ada), mentally challenged (Dude), or physically deformed (Ellie May has a hideously split hairlip at odds with her fabulous body, while Sister Bessie the preacher has no bone in her nose, making it resemble a pig's). Not only that, they have no problem with prostituting Sister Bessie at the aforesaid orgy, and don't notice that Grandma Lester has been run over by Bessie's car and is lying dead in the road during a long discussion between Jeeter and his on-in-law Lov (whose turnips he stole in the opening pages) about Lov's thirteen year old wife Pearl (who refuses to sleep with him, thank God and the angels) running off to the city in search something better than sharecropping, turnip eating, and pushing out the next generation of Jeeter relations.
Or maybe it's prose like this bit of dialogue, where Dude is describing his own sister:
"Ellie May's acting like your old hound used to do when he got the itch," Dude says to Lester. "Look at her scrape her bottom on the sand. That old hound used to make the same kind of sound Ellie May's making, too. It sounds just like a little pig squealing, don't it?"
or this description of Sister Bessie's nose:
"Look at them two big holes running down into her face—how does she keep it from raining down in there, you reckon?"
"I'll be damned if I know. Maybe she puts cork stoppers in them to keep the water out."
It's as if Caldwell, determined to portray his characters as sympathetically as possible, piled on so much pain, so much horror, and so much degradation that ultimately it's hard not to laugh as yet another awful thing happens. The playwright who adapted the book for Broadway, one Jack Kirkland, seemed to realize this and simplified the plot quite a bit, made Ada more sympathetic, and ended the play with Ada being run over instead of Grandma while she helps Pearl escape to the city.
Unfortunately, this didn't help with the reviewers; Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times hailed Tobacco Road with:
"The theatre has never sheltered a fouler or more degenerate parcel of folks than the hardscrabble family of Lester...It is the blunt truth of the characters he is describing, and it leaves a malevolent glow of poetry...Plays as clumsy and rudderless as 'Tobacco Road' seldom include so many scattered items that leave such a vivid impression."[7]
That didn't prevent the play from running for an astonishing seven and a half
years, or from touring for even longer. The Hollywood adaptation, which was deliberately played for laughs by Western specialist John Ford, was less successful, but among them the novel, play, and movie ensured that the phrase
Tobacco Road became a byword for Southern poverty even as
The Grapes of Wrath came to symbolize the tragedy of the Dust Bowl.
Alas, Caldwell never quite managed to join Steinbeck in the lofty ranks of American letters. Tobacco Road, which never went out of print, began to appear in less and less savory venues; once a bestseller with a WPA-style cover, it soon was appearing in the paperback racks at gas stations with cover art that made it look like a hot, sweaty, sexy romp, not an examination of the horrors of life during the Depression. The title became a by-word for inbred rural nastiness, and it didn't help either Tobacco Road or its author that his next novel, God's Little Acre, was so sexually explicit that the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice sued Caldwell and his publisher, Viking Press, for disseminating pornography.
Caldwell and Viking won, and God's Little Acre went to sell 10 million copies over the years, but Caldwell spent most of the next few years either writing mawkish photojournalism about the poor with Bourke-White or serving as a war correspondent. His later novels sold very well but never achieved the success of either Tobacco Road or God's Little Acre, and he's best known today as a Southern regionalist. The Modern Library did name Tobacco Road to its 100 Best Novels list, right next to Ironweed, but it's hard to know if this was because of its cultural importance or its quality.
Regardless, it's hard to disagree with the critic for Slate who called Tobacco Road a "greasy hairball of a novel" and describe it as the pulpiest Southern pulp ever pulped...
Unless one counts our next selection, which outpulps just about any and every novel by, about, or even mentioning Southerners, the South, or human beings in general.
Mandingo, by Kyle Onstott (sequels by Onstott, Lance Horner, and Ashley Carter) - Kyle Onstott was an unlikely candidate to write a bestseller. Originally from Illinois, he spent much of his early life in California on the dog show circuit, where he bred, showed, and judged champions. Beyond this Onstott, who lived with his mother and his adopted son Phillip, was perfectly happy to spend his days drinking gin, smoking cigarettes, and watching the dogs gambol in the sun. His first book, The New Art of Breeding Better Dogs, was the summation of all that he had learned through his experiences on the dog show circuit.
It also seems to have served as at least partial inspiration for his greatest literary achievement, Mandingo.
Just why Onstott chose to write about antebellum life is not clear; he wasn't a Southerner, unlike Erskine Caldwell, and his main interest in life had been doing as little work as possible to support his work with dogs. His son's interest in West African anthropology seems to have sparked something in him, however, and when he was in his 60s he started to write the first of what became known as the Falconhurst novels in longhand. Phillip then took his father's rough drafts, edited them, and started sending the resulting manuscript out to publishers.
None of the New York houses were interested, possibly because Mandingo's combination of hideous violence, interracial sex (much of it rape), and characters who spoke in atrocious dialect was more than they wanted to handle. Mandingo was finally published by a small Virginia house, Denlinger's, which specialized in books about (you guessed it) showing dogs, cats, and small birds. Why they decided to publish something so outside their usual field of interest is a mystery, unless it was because they owed Onstott a favor.
Mandingo came out in 1957 in all its brawling, sprawling, incredibly violent, incredibly sexist, incredibly racist glory. Set at a decayed plantation called Falconhurst, it goes into loving detail about Warren Maxell, the rheumatic master, who breeds prime slaves for field, bed, and medical uses; his son Hammond, who has been merrily impregnating the breeding stock to the point where he can't respond sexually to a white woman:
He would have to get used to the whiteness of female flesh. Its pallor seemed to him not quite healthy, somehow leprous, cold. He knew the beauty of blondeness, but failed to appreciate it. He knew, moreover, that if he was to have a wife he would have to tolerate that she was white.
Hammond's eventual wife, a spoiled brat named Blanche whom Scarlett O'Hara would have bitch slapped into the next county, Ellen, the near-white "bed wench" Hammond falls in love with, and Mede (short for Ganymede), the black Mandingo "stud" who is purchased to knock up as many of the breeding stock as possible, including Big Pearl, his sister (not that either of them know that).
The plot, such as it is, includes such delights as incest, pedophilia, bad grammar on the part of both the characters and the author, interminable trips between plantations and brothels, lovingly described beatings, stereotyped evil gay men, stereotyped simpering gay boys, stereotyped "good slaves" who are thrilled to death at being chosen as "bed wenches," rampant alcoholism by both Maxwell and Blanche, boxing matches between slaves, a mammy/housekeeper named Lucretia Borgia who escapes a relatively cushy position with her second master to return to the delights of Falconhurst, Blanche (seven months pregnant by her brother) beating Ellen (seven months pregnant by Hammond) until Ellen miscarries, Blanche then getting her ya-yas off with Mede and a couple of very, very, very effeminate slaves named Alpha and Omega (wince), Hammond poisoning Blanche when her second child turns out to be the living spit of Mede, and -
hang on, and kindly remember that I am not making this up -
- Hammond boiling Mede alive for having sex with Ellen, then insisting that Mede's mother and sister keep his corpse simmering until it's basically soup stock. He then dumps the Mede stock into the grave of Blanche and her baby, which was murdered by Blanche's mother the instant it was born. Being a mensch, though, he lets Mede's grieving relatives keep his boiled bones.
Needless to say, the critics were not impressed; not only was the book a witless, badly edited mess that seemed to be the bastard offspring of Gone With The Wind and cheap BDSM porn as midwifed by a dog show judge, the Civil Rights movement was underway, so why was anyone writing or publishing something so lip-smackingly salacious about slavery or slaves? Especially a 70 year old from California? Of course, the public, eager to see what all fuss was about, snapped up every copy Denlinger's could print, and more. Eventually the book came out in paperback from Fawcett, and eventually some 5 million copies of were sold, some of which may still be lurking to this day in the knotty pine rumpus rooms of finer suburban tract houses.
So far Mandingo could be any one-off Book So Bad It's Good. What secured its place in American fiction was the appearance of an eccentric Boston writer named Lance Horner.
Horner, who specialized in cheesy historical fiction, read Mandingo and liked it. Soon he and Onstott were collaborating on a sequel, Drum, a second sequel, Master of Falconhurst, and a third sequel, Falconhurst Fancy. These were every bit as violent, salacious, and absurd as Mandingo, but noticeably better written thanks to Horner, who actually knew how to structure and pace a novel.
So popular were the Falconhurst books that Kyle Onstott's death in 1966 only meant that Horner, who had a remarkable ability to ape Onstott's style, continued writing Falconhurst books until his death a few years later. By then the Falconhurst novels had spawned a subgenre of the historical romance called "slavesploitation," which is every bit as awful as the title implies, and the series continued to limp along in the hands of Kathryn and Ashley Carter (both pen names of professional hack Harry Whittington) until 1988. Among the more interesting of the later titles were spin-offs The Golden Stud and Sword of the Golden Stud, which chronicled the adventures of sexually insatiable "mustee" (near-white) slave Jeff Carson/Bricktop as he rogered his way across the Deep South in a never-ending quest for freedom.
Best of all, this Book So Bad It's Good spawned a Movie So Bad It's Good, the legendary 1975 plantation Gothic sleazefest that starred James Mason, Perry King, Brenda Sykes, Susan George, and Ken Norton Sr. Quentin Tarantino claims that this, along with the cosmic horror that is Showgirls, is a rare example of a big-budget, prestige studio making an exploitation movie, and fives minutes of screen time will prove that Tarantino is, as usual, correct.
There has been very little critical or scholarly attention paid to Kyle Onstott, Lance Horner, the Falconhurst novels, or plantation Gothics in general. Whether this is because of the genre's inherent racism, or the simple fact that Kyle Onstott was a terrible, terrible author, remains for future generations to decide.
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And so, my friends - do you have a Golden Stud book lurking in your attic? An elderly tape of Mandingo, the movie? Did your mother keep a Lance Horner or two tucked in her nightstand? Don't be shy, we're all friends here.....
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