On the Fiction of Allan Gurganus 65 The Searing: On the Fiction of Allan Gurganus BY WILLIAM GIRALDI Most of our necessary fiction writers are one-trick magicians we applaud precisely because they perform that one trick better than anyone else: Carver’s obsolete American Dream; Updike’s suburban sexualis; Cheever’s middle-class malaise; Flannery O’Connor’s postlapsarian South; Poe’s danse macabre. Each can be easily cubicled as a certain kind of scribe, which is really how we prefer it. Isaiah Berlin’s division of writers into hedgehogs and foxes—via Archilochus’s pithy maxim “the fox knows many little things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing”—had no trouble with Dante and Ibsen (hedgehogs) or Shakespeare and Montaigne (foxes), but buckled for Berlin when confronted by Count Tolstoy. What do we do with a writer who challenges our pigeonholing tendencies? How do we think and feel about him? With Tolstoy, Berlin was forced to capitulate and have it both ways: Tolstoy appears at first to be neither hedgehog nor fox, but upon closer inspection of his theory of history, turns out to be both: a hedgehog in conception, a fox in execution (for Berlin, the fox is a pluralist, the hedgehog a monist). As a thinker, Tolstoy was a monist, but as a witness to human striving and frailty, he applied his doctrine dialogically, foxily. He explored feelings as fervently as he advanced ideas. Of major contemporary American writers, Allan Gurganus is perhaps most protean and thus most difficult to classify. His sublime novel 66 WILLIAM GIRALDI Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989)—the first-person life story of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden—has the heft and historical reach to slide onto the same shelf as War and Peace. His novel Plays Well With Others (1997) canvasses the lives of three artists in pre-AIDS Man- hattan. The novellas and stories in White People (1991) and The Practical Heart (2001) span the immense complexities of class, race, history, gender, sexuality, disease, and family, while proving Gurganus’s Updikean ability to hop fiction genres. A North Carolinian who still resides in the South, Gurganus is not a Southern writer the way Faulkner and Welty were: his storytelling sensibility draws its heat from a source wholly apart from theirs. The South is not his muse. Male and gay, he writes with a wisdom and refinement that owe allegiance to no gender or sexuality. He doesn’t carry flags. Watch him ventriloquize convincingly in the voice of a young, straight insurance salesman, an elderly woman who preserves historical homes, a middle-aged gay man scrutinizing his idyllic youth, or just about anyone else he pleases. As irreverently comical as Joe Orton, Gurganus is also a first-order tragedian who paints plagues: hilarity and heartscourge, often both on a single page. A storyteller of infectious charisma and wide cerebral sweep, he was once the star student of John Cheever. Blake Bailey, Cheever’s biographer, dubbed Gurganus “aristocratic,” but he writes of the uneducated and disenfranchised with an uncommon gift for feeling (as in “Saint Monster,” Gurganus’s sympathetic and unsentimental novella about a cuckold and his son). In his able hands almost no aspect of our humanity goes uninspected. He tells the severest tales because, as he quipped in a 2010 interview, “the big stories eat the little ones.” Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All achieved bestsellerdom and won the esteemed Sue Kauffman prize. The sheer capaciousness of the thing, the glorious oddities of its structure and inebriated style, the oozing charm and back-porch acumen of its narrator, the indelible scenes of warfare and its aftermath: there’s nothing else like it in American letters. Slap it down on the table the next time a cynic tells you that American novelists have acquiesced to solipsism and given up on the grand social/ historical epics of Balzac’s nineteenth century. Lucy Marsden, “the last living veteran of the last living veteran of that war,” sings her 700 plus pages from a rest home, a not-bad place in Falls, North Carolina, the fictional town that appears in all of Gurganus’s work. Lucy occupies the On the Fiction of Allan Gurganus 67 throne of Storyteller; she is the voice of history, of remembrance. She tells her willing interviewer with the tape recorder: “Lucy here is still something that many folks from History would dearly love to be. I am alive, honey.” She certainly is, and the story she sings belongs as much to her husband as it does to her: she married Captain Willie Marsden when he was fifty and she merely fifteen. Willie and his best friend, Ned Smythe, had marched off to fight for the Confederacy when they were boys not yet ready for a razor, and the loss of Ned creates a wound that gapes throughout Willie’s life. If Lucy’s tale is about childhood, hers and Willie’s and her many children’s, then it is also necessarily about loss: she is the lone and lonesome survivor of her large family. James Wilcox, writing for The New York Times Book Review, hit the mark when he claimed that childhood “is at the heart of this novel’s tragedy,” but only because childhood is a tragedy for each of us: a tragedy because it will not stay, because it delivers us to the doorstep of disillusionment, of estrangement, and worse. The novel’s true subject is neither war nor love nor childhood, but, as Wilcox noted, language—storytelling itself. As Lucy’s family saga and the history of a region meander forth, the novel becomes a kind of Southern-style Arabian Nights—Lucy telling tales not only to bear witness or pay homage to the departed, but to fend off the Reaper Grim, to keep herself essential, entertained: “The best storytellers on earth, child, they’ve all stayed semi-furious defending something, expecting something—ex- pecting something better.” What can a ninety-nine-year-old woman in a rest home expect, exactly? Revision, compassion, respect. And what does she defend? Her version of events, her history. “Storytelling is one kind of revenge,” she asserts. “Maybe losers get better at it than the winning side. Honey, us losers have to be.” She means the South, yes, but she means the rest of us too: we are all losers in that we are all mortal. And so she talks and talks, exuberant, definite. Oh, child, I could blow the whistle on the world if I ever took a mind to. Forgive my speaking so strutting and bold, but remem- ber, talk’s about the single pleasure left me. My mouth is still a cakewalk, my mouth’s both a deep gutter and a full-out waltz. And see, I liked saying even that. 68 WILLIAM GIRALDI Hers is a language aflame, with cadences straight out of the South’s oral storytelling tradition. Lucy’s voice shares bite with the repartee of manifold love-bandits in Barry Hannah; when telling of young Ned’s death, she describes Willie’s crooning to his corpse: “It sounded bad as expected—half-caw, much ache in it.” That line pulls its power from the surprise of “caw” attached to “half” and the substitution of a comma for “with”: as short and punchy as the boy’s last breaths, it drips with Lucy’s brogue. This is about the volunteer candy-striper, fifteen with a rebel’s bent, who visits Lucy at the home: She sat here droning Dickens at me not two days back, hair up like a skunk taxidermied in butch wax. I said to her, “Zondro” (her real name is Sandra but she changed it just to have her way and feel in charge — something I understand). I go, “Zondro, is this new hairstyle a way of showing you feel . sad about the Indians?” If you’re not laughing at “taxidermied,” the ellipsed pause between “feel” and “sad,” and then the unexpected choice of “Indians,” you need a jump- start. Every page has such delights of comedy and linguistic bravado; like Shaw and Wilde, Gurganus is, everywhere in his work, eminently, endlessly quotable: “During hurricanes and house fires, minutes after hatchet murders, the ladies of Falls had and have one ready answer for survivors: a nice hot casserole.” Once, as a child, Lucy witnessed Falls’ only Asian behind his tailor’s shop: “Mr. Chow sat on his back step eating noodles from a bowl, sat stitching these into his mouth via two sticks.” Yeats spoke about the intellectually startling word that is also the accurate word in context, and he would applaud Gurganus’s ingenious use of “stitching,” a word choice as flawlessly executed as Yeats’s choice of “slouches” in the closing lines of his famous poem “The Second Coming”: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Similar to Yeats, Gurganus reimagines familiar scenes, imbues them with his vision and vernacular and thus alters ever after how we shall see them. What else can a writer offer but a new way of seeing? On the Fiction of Allan Gurganus 69 One would suspect that at the conclusion of her 700-page dirge, Lucy the ancient crooner would, like an octopus that has just deposited her eggs, sink and expire: she has given voice to the silenced, set down the record for all to ponder. But the end of her story brings no hint of failing; rather, it brings a further show of Lucy’s defiance and fortitude, her vitality: “Nobody could stop me.