MISSISSIPPI CHURNING | PAGE 2 the problem, Shearer and others say, is that without ever really intending to, Grisham's fame has dragged Oxford, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. It's as if a klieg light has been switched on, trapping the town's writers in its blinding glare. Literary tourism is suddenly big business here. Grisham's private jet may no longer roar overhead, but a double-decker bus has taken to prowling Oxford's streets, its guides often pointing out the homes of well-known writers. (When novelist Mark Richard was a visiting writer at Ole Miss a few years ago, the bus idled outside his house until he finally stood up in his underwear and waved hello.) Pick up the town's yellow pages these days and you'll notice that Oxford bills itself on the cover as "The Land of Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying.'" And there are controversial plans to attract more tourism by erecting a Faulkner statue on the town square this fall. "Why stop with one statue?" asked a very funny recent editorial in the Oxford Eagle, a local newspaper. Why not just go ahead and open a theme park called "FaulknerLand," the writer continued, with rides that might include "Quentin Compson's Descent into Madness" and a "'The Sound and the Fury' elevated monorail?" Even worse than the tourism, many here say, is the recent influx of literary wannabes. "This town is suddenly overrun with poseurs," says Linda White, an Oxford native who is a former managing editor of the Oxford American. "Everyone you meet these days has a manuscript to show you. The place is turning into a kind of cute theme park for writers." In most American towns, a surfeit of literary activity wouldn't necessarily set off any fire alarms. But Oxford is a town that justifiably (and perhaps a bit neurotically) prides itself on being the South's literary mecca; books and writers have long been serious business here. As Square Books owner Richard Howarth puts it, "Literature is one of the few things Mississippi can really be proud of," and no one seems to know what to make of this new breed of tourists and hopefuls. One glance around Howarth's expertly stocked shop and you begin to suss out what he means about Mississippi's compelling literary heritage. Among the talented writers the state claims as its own, and whose works Howarth features prominently, are Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Willie Morris and Richard Ford, as well as newcomer Donna Tartt. And this list doesn't even include Oxford's two most prominent contemporary writers, Barry Hannah ("Bats Out of Hell," "High Lonesome") and Larry Brown ("Fathers and Sons," "Joe"). To his credit, Grisham doesn't compare his work to these writers'. In fact, he has admitted that he wrote his second book, "The Firm," by following the guidelines in a Writer's Digest article about how to write a suspense novel. But his success has warped some people's ideas here about what a novelist should aspire to be. "My students used to have the very romantic idea that they could actually make a living as a writer," says David Galef, an associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi and, natch, a published novelist. "Now they think they can make a killing at it." The funny thing is, his students may be onto something. Galef notes that at least one Oxford resident, a former candy company employee named David Compton, became inspired to start writing after spying Grisham in church one day. Last year Compton sold his first novel, "The Acolyte," to Simon & Schuster for an advance of close to $1 million. What Galef calls the battle between "dueling ghosts" -- Faulkner's and Grisham's -- is likely to rage for decades here. Or at least until that tour bus goes away for good. But Oxford likes nothing more than a good literary dust-up ("This may be the last town in America where people still get into fistfights over books," one writer here told me), and as it happens, Grisham's visit happened to fall right in the middle of several doozies. Call the first battle -- it's also the most tempestuous -- the Case of the Missing Magnolia Tree. When John Leslie, Oxford's laid-back mayor of 24 years, was casting about for a way to honor Faulkner this coming September on what would have been the writer's 100th birthday, he came up with what he thought was a perfect plan: He commissioned a $50,000 statue of Faulkner from the respected Mississippi artist Bill Beckwith. Mayor Leslie made two big mistakes, though. The first was chopping down one of the two lovely 40-foot magnolia trees in front of City Hall to make room for the sculpture. Tree-loving residents were infuriated -- particularly since Leslie inexplicably cut down the healthier of the two trees while leaving the sick one alone. "I planted that tree out there myself," Leslie tells me, pointing to the stump outside his window. "There were originally no trees in front of this building. So I figured I had a right to cut one of them down." Leslie's second mistake was even more egregious. He assumed that Faulkner's family -- and Oxford's literary community -- would embrace the idea of a statue of the reclusive writer on the town's central square. He couldn't have been more wrong. Faulkner's family has complained bitterly in the weeks since the plan was announced. "Will was an intensely private man, and he simply wouldn't have wanted to be used as what the mayor calls a 'tourist attraction,'" says Jimmy Faulkner, the writer's nephew. "He would have hated this." The family is so troubled by the idea of the statue, Jimmy Faulkner adds, that the writer's only living child, Jill Faulkner Summers, is considering breaking all ties with Oxford if the plan goes through. This would mean, among other things, that the family would yank all of Faulkner's papers from Rowan Oak and from the university's archives. It's too early to tell how the great statue debate of 1997 will play out. One possible solution to the stalemate, says Cynthia Shearer, would be to have the statue placed at Rowan Oak instead of the town square. Either way, she takes a slightly more wry view of the situation. "I wish Faulkner had been here to see this," she says, chuckling. "He would have sided with the tree." Over at Square Books, owner Richard Howarth is upset about the proposed statue, too. "They're really trying to exploit Faulkner," he says. "It's obscene, when all is said and done." But as it happens, Howarth is at the center of another of the town's current literary imbroglios -- the recent cancellation of the popular Oxford Conference for the Book, an annual series of lectures, discussions, parties and signings that Howarth helped found in 1992, and which has attracted such luminaries as Richard Ford and William Styron. Howarth, who seems to be close friends with nearly every Southern writer alive, including Grisham, has run the conference along with the University of Mississippi. This year he pulled out for a simple reason: The university has given the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain permission to build a large store on its campus. Howarth claims he isn't worried about the competition, although he admits that "I've seen a lot of my friends go out of business." He's simply concerned that the chain store will be yet another sign that the real world -- Grisham's world, in effect -- is crashing in on this small-town paradise. "It's the Wal-Marting of America," he says. "People just don't recognize uniqueness anymore." Perhaps nothing embodies Oxford's current identity crisis more vividly than the Oxford American, a rambunctious and often brilliant literary magazine founded here in 1991 by a young, self-educated California transplant named Marc Smirnoff. Smirnoff's magazine has been ambitious from its first issue, which attracted work by such writers as Ford and John Updike. In the years since, the Oxford American has published work by nearly every major living Southern writer of any repute -- as well as a few dead ones. In a coup two years ago, Smirnoff sought out and printed a previously unpublished short story by Faulkner. The Oxford American didn't really become controversial until 1994, when Grisham rescued it from the brink of bankruptcy and stepped in as the magazine's publisher. Almost immediately, many here say, you could sense a change in the magazine. It was printed on slicker paper. It adopted Grisham's famous distaste for sexual content and "offensive" language. (Barry Hannah was asked to tone down the language in a short story that the magazine had already accepted. "He later told me the story was better without it," Smirnoff says.) At the same time, the magazine printed a cheesecake cover that featured a fair amount of gratuitous cleavage. The magazine also provided a platform for Grisham's social conservatism, publishing a special crime issue that featured a now-infamous editorial in which Grisham threatened to sue director Oliver Stone. Grisham maintained that the violence in Stone's film "Natural Born Killers" had "caused" the murder of a friend whose killer had seen Stone's movie shortly before the crime. Smirnoff, a lanky loner who slightly resembles a young Sam Shepard, denies that Grisham has had much influence on the magazine's more commercial drift. "We've put our heart and soul into this thing, and we simply want people to read it," he says. Referring to the magazine's ban on salty language, he cites former New Yorker editor William Shawn's strictures against profanity in his magazine, and calls it "a moral issue -- not a First Amendment issue." Smirnoff, who now edits Grisham's novels, wins high marks from Oxford's literary community for his magazine. "He's really very talented, and unlike most editors, he really reads work by new writers," Cynthia Shearer says. But while people here praise his magazine and compete to be published in it, Smirnoff is seen as a distant and aloof figure in Oxford -- he's someone who's alienated many of the writers he's worked with. "Marc's a brilliant guy who just doesn't have much in the way of tact or social skills," says one local writer. "He tells it like he sees it, and he pisses people off."
Smirnoff's somewhat Faulknerian brusqueness has, perversely enough,
endeared him to literary Oxford. In a town that's busily debating the
merits of tour buses and statues and encroaching Barnes & Nobleses,
Smirnoff and his magazine give this town's gossipy and contentious
writers one more thing to argue about. They wouldn't want it any
other way.
|
