Allan Gurganus and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of Rocky Mount, situated on the Tar River in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer.
After high school, Gurganus studied painting at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but he dropped out, and, with the Vietnam War on, became eligible for the draft. He ended up an enlisted man, assigned to the U.S.S. Yorktown. After three years of service, he went to Sarah Lawrence, and studied with Grace Paley, and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where his teachers included Stanley Elkin and John Cheever. Cheever sent one of Gurganus’s stories, “Minor Heroism,” to The New Yorker, which published it, in 1974, when Gurganus was twenty-six. It has been described as the magazine’s first work of fiction to feature a gay character.
Gurganus moved to Manhattan in 1979. “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” which is narrated by a ninety-nine-year-old woman who married a veteran of the Civil War when she was fourteen, was published ten years later. It sold more than four million copies and remained on the Times’ best-seller list for eight months. Gurganus’s work is socially incisive, tender, and erotic; race, sexuality, Southern masculinity, and the Church continually engage him. Le Monde called him “a Mark Twain for our age, hilariously clear-eyed, blessed with perfect pitch.”
He spent fifteen years in New York. During the AIDS epidemic, he lost friends and lovers, many of whom he remembers in his second novel, “Plays Well with Others.” He has also published a novella and three collections of stories. About thirty years ago, he returned to North Carolina, moving into a home in the historic district of Hillsborough. When my first book came out, he sat in the front row at a reading in Chapel Hill, and invited me and my two children to visit his house. Recently, I went to see him there again. It is a convention of treasures: William Morris wallpaper, ancestral oil paintings, stained-glass windows sourced from a demolished Gothic church, and a portrait that once hung in the actress Cécile Sorel’s Paris apartment. We spent two days together, and later I called him on the phone and we talked some more. Our conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
Your house is extraordinary. The aesthetic feels entirely your own.
People either get it or they run. I love beautiful things, I love ugly things, and what mixes the two is what I love best. As a child, I always imagined myself having a house like this—a house made of playrooms. No one can tell me not to paint in the kitchen. Now I have a live-in helper, and I see him and his cats experiencing the space as a new form of freedom.
What brought you to Hillsborough?
I guess Hillsborough did. I left New York City after a funeral. My last lover-slash-friend, who’d been suffering from AIDS, died at thirty-two. At his burial, I looked back at the city in the distance. I thought, Now I don’t have anything to do this afternoon. This is the end of the line. Everyone I’d been taking care of had died. I saw my opportunity to get out. It was a relief to feel that it was over.
North Carolina was the only place I could think of—it was an automatic setting. I knew what bloomed and what I could and couldn’t expect from nature. It was almost as if I was being assisted by some of the forces I had lost to the pandemic.
Chapel Hill was too expensive. I needed a fixer-upper, another patient but one that could be resuscitated. On a village side street, I saw a manse that hadn’t been painted in thirty years, and a woman sweeping the sidewalk with a broom. It had three-inch bristles. She had no teeth but maintained a façade of respectability via the broom. I said to my friends—whoever gets that house will be the luckiest person on earth. Six weeks later, I owned it.
I settled in, expecting to be Henry David Thoreau in his worst mood. I had come to hide. Someday, I might regroup, regather myself. But people bring you casseroles and cakes and ask after your politics; before you know it, this little town has pulled you back into the enormous world again.
Was it difficult being one of the high-profile, liberal characters in a Southern village?
Living with people has a way of taking the edge off the extremes of belief. There was never anyone who threw rocks at my window. I was a native, after all. They just considered me eccentric—but I tried not to scare the horses.
You titled your first story collection “White People.” How did readers respond to that title?
I’d always been told to write about what I know. And, if I know anything about anything, it’s a scrap or two about white people. How we are obsessed by rules but attracted to leaders who break them best. How we take pride in all our ancestors accomplished but accept no blame for everything they got wrong. As you remember, Rocky Mount was and is sixty-per-cent African American, so our childhoods accepted that as a universal. Don’t all workers come by bus from one side of town to clean and cook for the other? The employed made life seem possible and dignified for the employers. This was as acknowledged if ignored as oxygen is acknowledged and ignored.
The book’s original cover, brilliantly designed by Chip Kidd, understood this. It was ninety-per-cent black with delicate white lettering, formal as a wedding invitation. It made an ironic statement, hinting that this comic fiction was a kind of deranged “how-to” handbook on maintaining Caucasian standards! It seemed funny at the time.
You appear to like old things.
My house is not a museum. It’s less about ownership, more a form of foster care. Being seventy-five myself now, I’ve become a snob for excellent usage, noble wear and tear.
Speaking of hard usage, I’m thinking about our birthplace. Like many small towns, it has struggled to thrive in recent decades.
Rocky Mount once had such richness. I still come into town expecting to see 1959—everybody’s farm truck, double-parked. Now you find a hundred empty storefronts. Now it’s like an Edward Hopper painting, stuffed with solitude.
We attended the same high school, Rocky Mount Senior High.
My class was a starter experiment at integration. They sent the most gifted kids from Booker T. Washington. The first day, one student’s locker was smeared with dog shit. I’ve always thought those pioneers were the bravest people I knew—one of five or ten, looking after each other, bearing the pressure of being exemplary.
How Allan Gurganus Became a Writer
Source: News Flash Trending
0 Comments