Southern Comforts

“There are two great qualities that make fiction--one is the sense of mystery, and the other is the sense of manners,” Flannery O’Connor once remarked. “We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradictions, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.” The aptness of her observation is illustrated in A Modern Southern Reader, edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway (Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 494 Armour Circle, N.E., Atlanta, Ga. 30324: $14.95; also available in hardcover, $24.95), a magnificent anthology of fiction, drama, poetry, essays, interviews and reminiscences by more than 50 important writers from the American South.

The editors of “A Modern Southern Reader” concede that the most distinctive qualities of the South are fading along with the rest of our regional colors: “Television and the suburban shopping malls have pushed it into the back country, and the small-town rural world of the early decades of the century is now most fully alive in the fiction it helped to create,” Forkner and Samway explain. Indeed, much of the work collected here is drawn from what poet and “Southern theorist” Allen Tate called “the Southern renascence”--that is, the mid-20th-Century flowering of Southern letters that included William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty, all of whom are represented in “A Modern Southern Reader.”

But there is nothing facile or superficial about the monumental literary enterprise that is embodied in “A Modern Southern Reader.” Rather, the editors aspire to demonstrate the depth and sweep and variety of their subject, ranging from such seminal literary figures as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, leading lights of the Fugitives poetry movement, through the abbreviated but memorable work of James Agee and Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright and Randall Jarrell, to the contemporary Southern writers who themselves represent several generations: Walker Percy, William Styron, James Dickey, Willie Morris, Reynolds Price, Wendell Berry, Alice Walker. Along the way, we glimpse virtually every notable Southern writer of our century: Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams.

The selections are so diverse, in fact, that the book--and the body of literature which it explores--yields no neat literary formulae or glib generalizations. Indeed, “A Modern Southern Reader” is a study in the literature of a troubled people and a blighted past; the Southern writer, each by his own lights, confronts the problematic past, the difficult present, the uncertain future. As Ransom wrote in “Antique Harvesters: “We pluck the spindling ears and gather the corn./One spot has special yield? ‘On this spot stood/Heroes and drenched it with their blood.’/And talk meets talk, as echoes from the horn/Of the hunter--echoes are the old man’s arts,/Ample are the chambers of their hearts.”

A slightly different perspective on much of the same territory is available in Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, a massive two-volume anthology, edited by Dorothy Abbott for the Center for the Study of Southern Culture Series (University Press of Mississippi, 3825 Ridgewood Road, Jackson, Miss. 39211: $14.95, paperback; $35, hardback, per volume). Volume I is devoted to fiction, Volume II is nonfiction, and the set constitutes a stunning demonstration of the literary bounty of Mississippi as the source and subject of Southern writing. “Rich in writers, Mississippi is rich in resources for the writer,” Eudora Welty once explained. “Our primary resource is the place itself. . . . Place never stops informing us, for it is forever astir, changing, reflecting, like the mind of man itself.”

Many of the writers and works selected for “A Modern Southern Anthology” also appear here: Faulker--and, in particular, “Barn Burning”--as well as Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Willie Morris, Richard Wright. But the narrower geographical focus of “Mississippi Writers” permits its editor to present an even more diverse collection, including journalists (Hodding Carter, Turner Catledge), civil rights leaders (James Meredith, Charles and Medgar Evers), and contemporary fiction writers such as Ellen Gilchrist, whose work is only beginning to earn a broad readership.

Abbott’s task in creating “Mississippi Writers” was a blend of literary curatorship, critical scholarship, and old-fashioned detective work--she tracked down novelist and screenwriter William Attaway, presumed dead, by contacting Harry Belafonte, for whom he once wrote calypso music lyrics. “Mississippi writers are scattered from Natchez to Nepal,” she writes. “The astonishingly large amount of Mississippi literature I discovered made me at times concede to the notion that virtually everyone in Mississippi must have written at least one book. . . . One man couldn’t understand why his aunt wasn’t included in my collection when I would ‘take a heathen like William Faulkner.’ ”