Storytelling

 Stories were always being told when I was young. Told by my mother's mother born in 1898, by my father's aunt born in 1907, by my mother born in 1933, by my mother's sister born in 1923, by my father's brother born in 1932, and by my father born in 1934. It was how they remembered their lives. I suspect it was how they made sense of their lives. They certainly created a past for me.

As I got older, everyone had stories to tell.

None of these storytellers became writers.

Now I have never read Erskine Caldwell but have seen part of the film version of Tobacco Road. I was curious when I saw there was a Paris Review interview of Caldwell. When I saw this passage, I decided to write this post:

INTERVIEWERS

Mr. Caldwell, what first interested you in becoming a writer?

ERSKINE CALDWELL

Well, I was not a writer to begin with; I was a listener. In those early decades of the century, reading and writing were not common experiences. Oral storytelling was the basis of fiction. You learned by listening around the store, around the gin, the icehouse, the wood yard, or wherever people congregated and had nothing to do. You would listen for the extraordinary, the unusual; the people knew how to tell stories orally in such a way that they could make the smallest incident, the most far-fetched idea, into something extraordinarily interesting. It could be just a rooster crowing at a certain time of night or morning. It’s a mysterious thing. Many Southern writers must have learned the art of storytelling from listening to oral tales. I did. It gave me the knowledge that the simplest incident can make a story.

Seems to me this is true of Midwestern writers, too.  Maybe not the current generation, of which I know so little. If I switch to the past, I do think this applies to Kurt Vonnegut and Booth Tarkington and Ring Lardner and Ross Lockridge, Jr.

And in those stories told me there was strangeness of the singular. How my mother's mother stole the wedding gifts at my parents' second wedding because she did not want my mother to remarry my father. How my great-aunt had crossed the line at the Real Silk strike and had the thrill of being followed afterwards by potential strikers out to teach a scab a lesson. I ran across the following today in Meghan O'Gieblyn's essay on Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling:

...Her essays from the 1940s heap scorn on the regionalist fiction that was then popular, Sinclair Lewis knockoffs rendered in Dick-and-Jane prose that were well-loved by “commonsense literary critics,” as Young called them. “What is it that such anti-literary literary critics really want, when it comes right down to brass tacks?” she asked in one essay. “They want literature to be simple, plain, sensible, healthy, unassuming, underwritten, comfortable.” The problem was not merely with style, but with substance, the former being inseparable from the latter. It was this miserly literature that perpetuated the lie that the Midwest, often celebrated as the “true” America, was simple, dull, and average. “America has been, if anything, the land of crazy unreason, where all kinds of people have done, as a matter of course, the most impoanssible things,” she writes. “So why should American literature be falsely described as something less experimental than America is?”

Ms. Young was from Indianapolis. Our stories were not always comfortable or comforting. Indiana produced James Dean and Kin Hubbard, as well as Charles Manson and Belle Gunness; Eugene Victor Debs and James Bopp. Why shouldn't our fiction follow the stories told here and be as strange as life?

sch 8/28/22