This past April’s Millennial Gathering of Writers of the New South left undiscussed one important aspect of past and present Southern literature: the Gothic. Perhaps this omission isn’t surprising. Odd characters, macabre events, and moss-haunted landscapes remain so much a part of our region that discussing them seems as beside the point as discussing the influence of humidity—or Wal-Marts—on the Southern character. ”Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks,“ Flannery O’Connor once wrote, ”I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.“

O’Connor, the Georgia master of the Gothic subgenre, would have turned 75 this year, and Hill Street Press has issued a collection of tributes titled Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius ($16.95) to mark the occasion. O’Connor died before she reached her 40th birthday, having fought a valiant battle with lupus, the neurophysical ”wolf“ that ravages the joints, nerves, and bloodstream in undeniably gruesome—even Gothic—ways.

Editor Sarah Gordon includes in the tribute volume a particularly suitable work from Mark Jarman’s new book, Unholy Sonnets. The Vandy professor’s poem opens by conjuring the serial killer in one of O’Connor’s best-known stories, ”A Good Man Is Hard to Find,“ as he decides to make his move. ”The Lord God,“ Jarman tells us, watches ”with His seven compound eyes“ as the murderer’s rifle is loaded and aimed: ”[God] sees the horror dreamed and brought to being, / And still maintains His vigil and His power, / Which you and I would squander with a scream.“

Jarman’s poem draws a bead on O’Connor’s manipulation of point of view, which is largely responsible for her signature use of the Gothic. Her fiction’s introductory pages are invariably hilarious, their humor usually at the expense of petty, platitudinous bores we’re meant to recognize as far less intelligent and evolved than ourselves. We’re drawn, in other words, into collusion with the sardonic narrator—who has been colluding with God from the get-go and has decided to bring us along for the ride. Paradoxically, as O’Connor’s works arc toward closure, the point of view alters just enough for us to realize something else: Very bad things are getting ready to happen to her characters; they no longer look quite so unlike us; and the narrator, as her grip on the action loosens, suddenly becomes merely the action’s observer, thus a stand-in for the reader. No longer empowered by her collusion with God and the godlike power any narrator has to dictate events, O’Connor damns herself along with the rest of us, all salvageable only by the harsh intervention of Christian grace.

Other contributions to Flannery O’Connor: In Celebration of Genius are less macabre but still Gothic, if only by their recounting of O’Connor’s various eccentricities—which one suspects were in particular force when company came to call. Miller Williams, more famous locally as Lucinda’s father than as the much-honored poet who founded the University of Arkansas Press, remembers when he brought his 4-year-old daughter to visit O’Connor at her Milledgeville farm, Andalusia. The writer’s famous peacocks fascinated the young Lucinda, who ”laughed and fell and laughed and fell again“ as she chased the birds. ”When I scolded her for it,“ Williams tells us, ”Flannery told me to let her go. ‘She won’t catch them unless they want her to.’ “

Another tribute contains a story about Katherine Anne Porter’s visit to Milledgeville. The several-times-married Texas beauty, whose literary legacy is no less considerable than O’Connor’s, asked her hostess if she ever feared attacks on her peafowl by marauding dogs. ”Not anymore,“ O’Connor allegedly said while lifting a shotgun or rifle from behind a curtain. Apparently Porter was silent as she was driven away from Andalusia, finally turning to her friend at the wheel with a sigh: ”That woman,“ she said of O’Connor, ”scares me to death.“

Strange but false

One of the most sensational and best-known examples of the Southern Gothic occurs in James Dickey’s Deliverance, his novel of suburban Atlanta businessmen confronting the wilderness—in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the word—via a weekend river trip. Later adapted for the screen, Deliverance contains graphic scenes of male homosexual rape and a revenge killing, and the tale concludes with a bone-chilling dream sequence. When the film came out in 1972, Yankee reviewers expressed dismay; many Southern ones were embarrassed to death—hadn’t the civil rights era already disgraced the region sufficiently?

Yet Dickey never wrote any fiction as wildly inventive as the lie-enhanced version of his life he told and retold to party guests, reviewers, professors, critics, students, and the multitudinous women he attempted to seduce, often successfully. His first marriage, written about by his son Christopher in the dignified yet unsparing Summer of Deliverance, ended with the melodramatic spectacle of the author’s ill-treated wife, Maxine, drinking herself to death while Dickey swashbuckled his way across the American poetry scene. Soon after Maxine’s demise, Dickey married one of his students, Deborah, whose liking for drugs matched his taste for booze. Dickey’s first definitive biographer, Henry Hart, bluntly terms the match ”a nightmare“—the physically imposing poet was hospitalized at least twice after Deborah attacked him.

It’s not surprising to learn from Hart’s exhaustive James Dickey: The World as a Lie (St. Martins, $35) that the poet, a Vanderbilt graduate, didn’t cotton to biographers: He doubtless feared they’d expose his falsehoods. But Hart believes he feared even more that the scandalous details of his life—in its ”real“ as well as fabricated versions—would allow biographers to ”do nothing but wallow in his savagery and cruelty.“

Though Hart proclaims himself a proud ”Connecticut Yankee,“ certain lines of New England’s literary heritage prepare him well for the Southern Gothic territory: Hawthorne’s uncle was one of the hanging judges at the Salem witch trials, hence The House of Seven Gables; and Melville, recently discovered to have been a wife-beater, stinted on few of life’s inescapable savageries and cruelties. Yet Hart brings neither the former’s Yankee terseness nor the latter’s Northern wit to his subject, and one closes his book—not quite at the end, I confess—wondering if Dickey’s life and work wouldn’t have been better served with a little less detail. Anyone’s best and worst moments, if chronicled with monotonous arrays of minutiae, quickly become almost indistinguishable, if not downright dull.

Frozen moment

Recent Vanderbilt graduate Kevin Wilson, whose essay ”Fear of Glass“ became an Oxford American cover story last fall, appears in the current issue of The Vanderbilt Review (Volume XVI, 2000, $5). ”What Cold Can Do,“ a (very) short story, mixes Southern Gothic with magic realism, adding dashes of Shirley Jackson (author of ”The Lottery“ and The Haunting of Hill House) and Stephen King. Wilson tells the story of Coalfield, a town once caught in a seemingly endless winter.

The writer’s spare language trusts content and subtle soundplay to work their spell on the reader as cabin fever and death begin to take their toll on the town’s citizens. ”One by one,“ he writes near the conclusion, ”every pet in Coalfield was tossed over the edge of the ravine until a small hill had formed, a hill that would stay for the entire winter, a hill of frozen paws and whiskers and claws and tails. The townspeople of Coalfield spent the rest of the winter listening to the silence outdoors and staring at thermometers, both wishing for warmth and dreading the thaw, when Dead Pet Ridge would melt. In the pitch black of night, people would awaken to the sound of scratching on the front door. They would kick off the covers and run to the window, press their faces against the stinging cold glass and stare out at the calm expanse of ice, of cold, of a winter that would not go away.“

Wilson’s story abuts a generous selection of work—some of it quite cheery—from participants in Vandy’s Millennial Gathering: keynote speakers Yusef Koumunyakaa and Lee Smith, along with Betty Adcock, James Applewhite, Roy Blount Jr., Andrew Hudgins, Miller Williams, and University of Tennessee professor Allen Wier.