We Are Educated, We Are Calm

Regionalism's Finest

Today’s letters lack regional flavor. We live in an era of creative writing exercise. The vast majority of which turns out new works driven by conceit rather than experience. Think of a movie-script situation: a tongue-in-cheek apocalypse, a generation of  men birthed through a prolonged deconstruction of a unit. Apply this situation to a couple dozen flash-fictions, and then do your damnedest to hold true to the supposition that the language of  a story trumps the story of a story. Our advice: Make sure the only telling dialect is that of the well learned. Kill many words. Kill all links to your people. Be heavy-handed in your editing. Don’t love. Don’t fuck. Don’t ever let the world grow excited. Don’t enjoy a thing, you genius.

Stop.

This is growing boring. We’re thirsty. And it’s time for blood.

Last week we picked up a copy of Larry Brown’s Big Bad Love. It is not his best book. Hell, it might not even be his best story collection, but what’s refreshing about these 10 stories is the regional language held throughout.

Language is growing conspicuously unidentifiable in American letters. Perhaps it’s a reaction to Horace Engdahl’s anti-American rant, but most of the books we’ve recently scraped our eyes across seem to sound like translated texts. Apparently many American writers work aggressively to make sure their language sounds like filtered American drivel. And while we’re not patriotic by any stretch, nor giant proponents of realism in literature, we find it staggering that writers from various American regions are sounding more and more like a ubiquitous academy.

A Well-Twisted Tongue

So, Larry Brown. He blew our hair back. We needed to see some crud in the creativity. We needed some bear-footed behemoth to bring us back to the cradle of American tongue-trash.

Brown’s short story “Old Soldiers” — simultaneously patriotic, condemning, drenched in liquor, hill-billy, and mud — did the trick just fine.

Let me tell you something else Mr. Aaron did one time. He had this old dog named Bobo, whose whole body was crooked from being run over so many times. Mr. Aaron fed him potato chips. He’d go out once a day and dump a bag of pigskins or something on the ground  and then go back in. As children we’d all sit around in front of the store, on upended Coke cases and such, and wait for dogfight to occur.

In “Old Soldiers” Brown tells the story of Mr. Aaron (a WWII vet) and Squirrel (a Korean War vet) as seen through the eyes of Leo, the son of a soldier who fought alongside Mr. Aaron in the war. The story is set in Mississippi. In true Southern fashion each scene takes place either in a bar, car, or convenience store.

The story is a lamentation on grief caused by the stresses of warfare, and the loneliness experienced by war veterans when surrounded by those who have not experienced war.

He had a Mitsubishi TV we were watching with the sound turned off. My boots were thawing on the floor. Mr. Aaron brought a mop and swabbed and never said a word about the mess. He kept his beer in the candy case, hot. If kids came in giving him any shit he ran their asses off. I was almost swooning with delight. I knew he was ready with a war story.

“By god, I miss your daddy,” he said.

What shapes up is a clear respect for Mr. Aaron. What comes later is a clear disrespect for Squirrel.

I finished my beer and got another one, and Squirrel bummed a cigarette off me. I lit it for him, and he started telling me how he’d lost all his money. I wasn’t listening that close, but it was something about them driving down to Batesville and unloading some two-by-fours and him asking the man he was working for to loan him a hundred dollars.

After Squirrel secures the money the party goes on a drinking spree and Squirrel is left penniless and drunk with no way to get home. That’s when he stumbles upon Leo and begs him for a ride home. Leo begrudgingly obliges him, but on the way Squirrel gets chatty.

“I was on the front lines at Korea,” he said. I looked sideways at him.
“I  didn’t know that,” I said.
“Hell yes.”
I listened then, because moments like that are rare, when you get to hear about these things that have shattered men’s lives.

After time spent divulging secrets to Leo, Squirrel decides he needs a more experienced ear. Rather than have Leo take him home, Squirrel is dropped at Mr. Aaron’s store, where he knows he’ll have a peer in past-combat’s misery.

They went on inside, already talking, already forgetting about me, and I watched them for a moment before I ducked out of the rain and back into my car. I thought about things while I drove home alone. I thought about being old, and alone, and drunk and needing help. I knew I might be like that one day. I thought about having to turn to somebody for help. I hoped it would be there.

Now, we understand that this type of story, and this kind of language might currently be out of fashion. But damn, it’s nice to hear something that sounds real — and regional — from time to time. Don’t you think? — Brian Allen Carr

Video: Larry Brown