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Visions of a Southern Master
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11355 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1986 |
5,563 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
If, as Scott Fitzgerald once suggested, there are no second acts in American literature, the first one can be such a smash that the audience forgives the author's failure to stage acts two and three and a satisfactory denouement. A man who skyrockets to fame at the age of twenty - four, as did Fitzgerald when he published This Side of Paradise in 1920, hardly warrants condolences; besides, several impressive acts followed this one. At twenty - five, Norman Mailer bedazzled the critics and rang the cash registers with The Naked and the Dead, and three years later William Styron, a tender twenty - six, duplicated Mailer's success by winning 1951's Who - Will - Succeed - Faulkner Sweepstakes with Lie Down in Darkness. Once considered freakish, early fame today routinely descends upon young novelists whose first books sport dust covers dripping with the sort of encomia that could come honestly only from the novelist's mother. Who cares about second acts when you can gobble enough cake in the first one to last a lifetime?
There is another, less remarked type of success in American letters, one that starts off with little hoopla, builds slowly over decades with a gradually increasing audience, and then finally, in the writer's later years, brings recognition and acclaim. The recently deceased Bernard Malamud springs to mind, a novelist who failed to reel in the big one, but whose artistry and craftsmanship, devotedly cultivated for three decades, eared him an enduring spot among the leading novelists of mid - twentieth - century America. One thinks, too, of Eudora Welty, author of a string of sparkling books, who had to wait until her sixties to reap the sort of accolades that Mailer and Styron luxuriated in when they were half her age.
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