The titles of all four novels are taken from Appalachian songs. The first,
I Am One of You Forever,
introduces mountain farm boy Jess Kirkman and his close-knit family during the World War II years. The second,
Brighten the Corner Where You Are,
follows a strange day in the life of Jess's father, Joe Robert Kirkman, who must answer for his handling of evolutionary theory in the classroom. In the third,
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You,
Jess's mother attends his grandmother on her deathbed while Jess and Joe Robert wait in the next room, where they kill time by remembering the strong women of the family.
Fred is on record as saying that one of his goals is “to
produce a daring and even experimental novel which would not look or feel experimental.”
Indeed, the reviewers of his Kirkman books have fallen for their surface simplicity and missed their organizational intricacies, their classical overtones, and their interrelatedness to the
Midquest
poems. Even as late as the third novel, the major reviewers were befuddled. The
New York Times Book Review
called
Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You
“not quite a novel, but more than a collection of linked short stories.”
Booklist
failed to clarify matters in saying it was “actually a set of short stories stitched together into a gallery of idiosyncratic characters.”
Library Journal's
parenthetical approach was weakest of all: “Chappell begins this novel (and although it could appear to be a short story collection, it is a novel, held together by themes, songs, and stories from the past that a young man tries to interpret into the present) with a brilliant death bed set piece.”
But they're hardly to blame for missing the finer points of a masterwork twenty-eight years in the making. I certainly didn't understand the overall conception until it was explained to me. Even Fred has been known to blanch at his undertaking. “Better to fail as the clown who wrote the whole thing than as the chicken who didn't,” he says.
By the time
Look Back All the Green Valley
is released, news has traveled that it marks the completion of Fred's eight-book opus, and now it seems that readers have known all along that such a work was in the making, and followed it from the start. Lest anyone miss the point, the publisher offers this as the first sentence of its jacket copy: “With
Look Back All the Green Valley,
Fred Chappell brings
to a close one of the most rewarding cycles of novels in recent memory.”
Fred, too, is quick to reveal his artifice. In the novel's first chapter, Jess Kirkman comes back to the mountains after a twenty-one-year absence. To call his identity transparent is to understate the case. Jess teaches at a university; his mother chides him for his “excessive drinking” and for “writing poetry nobody can understand”; two of his poetry volumes are
River
and
Earthsleep
âthe first and last volumes of the
Midquest
cycleâand they were written under the pseudonym Fred Chappell; Jess's wife is Susan, as is Fred's real-life wife, who appears in
Midquest,
Jess is struggling to translate a classic work, in this case
The Divine Comedy.
Jess's father, Joe Robert, has been dead ten years, and his mother, Cora, is succumbing to congestive heart failure. Jess's return home is occasioned by a mix-up at the cemetery. Having oversold its plots, it has no room for Cora, so Jess and his sister must find a new burial place for their parents. In the process of carrying out his mother's deathbed wishes, Jess uncovers hints of possible marital infidelity on Joe Robert's part, and his effort to solve this new family mystery is the thrust of the novel.
Reviews of the book are positive and readers' reactions appreciative, though the kind of grumblings that have accompanied all the Kirkman books are occasionally heard againânamely, that
Look Back All the Green Valley
is a collection of short stories and not really a novel at all.
In one sense a feat of literary daring, in another an elaborate puzzle, in still another a colossal inside joke, the eight-book cycle is less a commercial success than a rich
field for private study for many years to comeâwhich is no doubt the way Fred prefers it.
The biggest success of the year is without question Robert Morgan.
Morgan was raised on a farm near the Green River in Henderson County, south of Asheville. Though his parents had little schooling, they kept a dictionary, a Bible, and a small selection of novels, history books, religious tracts, and
National Geographies
around the house. In the mornings, he and his mother read Dick and Jane books. In the evenings, Morgan would sit on one of his father's knees and his sister on the other and listen to him read stories.
When in 1958 the Henderson County Bookmobile began stopping at Green River Baptist Church, it was a revelation to Morgan. The bookmobile was nothing grander than an old utility truck fitted with shelves, but it contained the greatest quantity of books the fourteen-year-old had ever seen. He started with Jack London's Klondike tales and James Oliver Curwood's stories of the Royal Canadian Mounties and graduated to
Oliver Twist
and
David Copperfield.
Having seen
War and Peace
advertised in the Sears & Roebuck catalog as “the greatest novel ever written,” he was delighted to find it in the rolling library's collection.
Like most mountain farm families, Morgan's was cash-poor. They didn't have money for a car, truck, or tractor and had to borrow a horse when they needed one.
In Morgan's sixth-grade year, his class took a trip to Biltmore House, but he didn't have the three-dollar fee and so had to stay at school. Knowing his liking for Jack London,
his teacher suggested he spend the day writing about a man lost in the Canadian Rockies. That was Morgan's first experience writing fiction, and he was surprised how quickly it passed the day. But he didn't really catch fire until he was at North Carolina State studying to be an engineer. When he couldn't get into a math course he wanted, he enrolled in a fiction-writing class. He subsequently transferred to the University of North Carolina for his bachelor's, got an MFA, and landed a position teaching writing at Cornell while still a young man, quite a rise from his modest roots.
His publication record was steady, if unspectacularânine volumes of poetry, a pair of short-story collections, and two novels. His first poetry collection was published by Russell Banks, a friend and classmate at Chapel Hill. Morgan's second novel,
The Truest Pleasure,
was selected a
Publishers Weekly
Best Book of the Year and a
New York Times
Notable Book.
Ask anyone who's met him and they'll tell you Morgan is one of the nicest guys in the business. He always finds time to give readings and to autograph. He's gracious and humble. He respects serious writing, good or bad. He never complains to his publisher about marketing, publicity, accommodations, or meals.
That said, it's doubtful his characters would find him such a fine fellow.
In his 1999 novel,
Gap Creek,
he creates for his narrator, Julie Harmon, a string of misfortunes that would make Job quail. Gail Godwin's
Evensong
is set at the cusp of the millennium; some of her characters, afraid of the apocalypse, are apprehensive about crossing the threshold.
Gap Creek
is set a hundred years earlier, at the doorstep of the twentieth century, and it seems the modern age can't come quickly enough for the mountain people.
The novel opens with Julie's younger brother burning with fever from a mysterious illness. She and her father bring him down the mountain, taking turns carrying him in their arms, to the doctor in Flat Rock. On the return slog, Julie is toting him when he coughs up a bellyful of white worms and strangles to death. Her father isn't long for this world either, dying of consumption in the second chapter and leaving Julie to do the backbreaking work for what is now a houseful of women.
Rescue comes in the person of dark-haired, stoutly built Hank Richards, who marries Julie and takes her across the South Carolina border to live in a rented home in Gap Creek. Julie's duty is to care for the home's owner, a crusty widower named Pendergast. One day, while rendering fat on the stove, she sets the house on fire. Pendergast is badly burned while trying to save his pension money and dies a short time later.
The house is only slightly damaged, and the young couple's fortunes seem to be on the rise, as Julie is newly pregnant and she and Hank now have free run of the place and a jar of found money. But a fast-talking stranger bilks Julie out of the money, and Hank loses his job at the cotton mill. Gap Creek floods, carries away the chicken coop, and drowns their only cow. Julie delivers her baby all alone and nearly dies afterward; her premature daughter, in fact, does.
At the close of the novel, Pendergast's heirs announce their intention to claim the house. Hank and Julie, pregnant
again, must return on foot to North Carolina, their only possessions what they can carry over the mountains in their arms.
All this, and Julie is only seventeen.
Gap Creek
is released in September 1999, and the publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, is pleased to sell through the ten-thousand-copy print run over the holidays.
Morgan receives a phone call in early January. “It was a woman,” he tells me later. “She said, âI picked up your book and couldn't put it down. It says on the back of the novel that
Gap Creek
is the work of a master' ”âFred Chappell's jacket blurbâ“ âand that's really true.' ”
“She didn't tell you who she was?” I ask.
“No. She said, âI have a little book club, and I'd like you to come and speak to us.' I thought it was a lady I had met from South Carolina. I told her I'd be glad to speak to her group, though I really didn't know when I'd be able to get down there. And then later in the conversation, she said she was in Chicago, and it began to dawn on me.”
Oprah Winfrey likes to call authors personally, dust off her Southern accent, and have a little fun with them.
Gap Creek
is the twenty-ninth selection of her book club, she finally gets around to telling Morgan.
Algonquin also receives a call. “I can remember every moment of all of it,” Morgan's editor, Duncan Murrell, tells me later. “I remember sitting at my desk, and I forget who took the phone call, but we were informed by Oprah's people that
Gap Creek
would be selected. This process all started happening on a Monday evening. They called late. And one of the stipulations was that we weren't to call Robert right
away, because Oprah was in the middle of trying to find him.”
One problem is that the show's producer would like five copies immediately for staff use. A modest second printing is in the works, but for the time being, the well is dry; Algonquin has only three copies in house. And then Oprah wants five hundred copies to distribute to her audience the following week, when she will publicly declare the selection of
Gap Creek.
“It would be announced the following Tuesday, I think, and this was a Monday, which was an extraordinarily short period of time,” Murrell says. “That wasn't the typical amount of time that she gave. I'm not sure why. In any case, we were all very, very excited about it. But there wasn't a lot of time to be excited, and to jump up and down and celebrate and pop champagne, because there was only a week to get it done. And getting it done meant there were hundreds of thousands of books we had to print to get out there initially. And it meant going to the printers and convincing them to shuck off everything else they were working on and crank these things out.”
“Was all of this a matter of contract with the
Oprah
show?” I ask.
“There was a contract signed with Oprah. There were a lot of rules that she had.”
“Regarding secrecy before she announced the book?”
“Everything from secrecy to how the
Oprah
logo was to be displayed. We were presented with an array of logos that you could use on the cover of the book. What size and all that was all dictated by her. This was all work very happily
done, by the way. I'm not complaining. But you had to very quickly produce a reader's guide that could be put on the website, and an author biography.”
One of Algonquin's responsibilities is making travel arrangements for Morgan.
“They brought me down and filmed me walking along Gap Creek,” Morgan tells me. “They also filmed me at my grandmother's grave site.” Julie Harmon is loosely based on his maternal grandmother, Julia Capps Levi.
The staff manages to scrounge the five copies for the producer but has to prevail upon a major book distributor to gather the five hundred audience copies without leaking the news, and then to overnight them to Chicago.
Meanwhile, Algonquin orders a printing of 350,000 copies, which, impossibly, must be in stores by the time Oprah makes her announcement a week hence. When orders for the book reach 600,000, Algonquin orders a third printing before the second is done. Of course, since secrecy must be maintained while the announcement is pending, bookstores don't even know what they're ordering. They're not buying Robert Morgan's
Gap Creek,
but rather Oprah's new selection, sight unseen.
“It took a herculean effort to get it done,” Murrell says. “The other thing was that there was a holiday. The Martin Luther King holiday intervened between the Monday that she told us and the Tuesday that it was to be announced, and when those books were supposed to be in the stores. Nobody worked on Monday, so everything had to be done by Sunday, and shipping by Tuesday, so we did a lot of funny things, interesting things, like shipping books in waves as
they were coming off the press. One chain sent their own trucks to the press just so they could take them straight off the press to the bookstores. It was a very exciting time, that's for sure.