Nine Lives
The annual crescendo that culminates in Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books generates a warp-spasm of activity at the offices of the Tennessee Humanities Council. As the THC’s executive director, Robert Cheatham can be found at the center of the logistical and paperwork maelstrom that he and his staff have wrought. But to catch up with him—even after a hurried lunch of fast food over a file-strewn conference table—is to find him eerily calm.
Since the festival first precipitated out of the various statewide hoedowns known collectively as “Homecoming ’86,” Cheatham has prodded and stoked a little local book fair into a full-blown Book Happening of regional and national import. By now, it’s apparent from his unruffled demeanor that either he knows precisely what needs to be done and when...or he has simply stopped trying to find out.
“Fairs have been around forever,” he notes. “As soon as people started selling books, there must have been book fairs. Putting something together that’s both a fair and what we call a festival, which is really a conference—in other words, blending the commercial and academic—well, I suspect that’s fairly recent.
“This book festival does not pay for itself...yet. It should, but it doesn’t. Nevertheless, what we’re trying to do now is to make it self-sufficient and self-supporting so that if NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] goes under, this can be saved. After all, this is a very interesting marriage of commerce and education; and it’s a hard line to walk between being commercial enough to get an audience—to get the earned income you get from book sales and such—and becoming so commercial it loses its educational value.
“One of the things I have learned in all of this is that if we think the nonprofit world is ignorant about the profit-making world, that is nothing compared to the ignorance of the profit-making world about the nonprofits. There is this whole lack of understanding that every dollar we receive cannot enrich people. They’re tax-exempt dollars, and it is absolutely vital that we guard our tax-exempt status.
“It’s a very tricky area, because the IRS likes everything pure—and nothing’s pure any more. So we have to make the case that the commercialism that’s going on in Legislative Plaza is secondary to the educational programs going on everywhere else. To the extent that commerce exists, it is totally supportive of the rest of our event.”
As each successive year buffs the festival’s national reputation to an ever brighter sheen, the THC is increasingly challenged to satisfy local literary preferences on the one hand and, on the other, to expand public taste beyond safe regional stereotypes and the clichéd genres. In response, the festival may well appear to arc through an entire mood swing from one year to the next.
“Who knows about the audience?” Cheatham sighs. “In fact, it always amazes me that you could live in Nashville and be any kind of reader at all and not know that this event happens every year. But there are still people here who are devoted readers who don’t know.
“I felt last year that we went a little bit far on getting celebrities. For celebrities like Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, who wrote a very good book, I do not apologize. But there were other celebrities who I don’t think are serious writers. I mean, we’re getting into this ‘as-told-to’ crowd.
“I hope we don’t ever move so far in that direction again. And in a way, this year, we’re coming back to our roots. If anything, this year we have too much literary fiction. In putting on this seven- or eight-ring circus, we do everything we can not to force people to make impossible choices. They’re difficult choices, but they’re not impossible. Just the same, if you’re interested in literary fiction, you’re going to have some hard choices to make this year.”
A random sampler
For the most complete printed listing of this year’s Festival schedule, the insert accompanying the Sept. 28 Sunday Tennessean will have to suffice. Cheatham, however, prefers to refer all queries to the Council’s Web page at http://www.tn-humanities.org/, where rolling changes in each day’s activities are posted as they’re discovered. Kurt Vonnegut’s abrupt cancellation on Sept. 24, for example, was duly acknowledged at the THC site with the mere blip of a byte.
As for making recommendations among the schedule’s myriad possibilities, Cheatham will assent merely to scratch the surface:
The War Between the States “Yes, we have a Civil War panel every year; we have two or three, actually. Some of us would like to quit fighting the Civil War, but it’s gonna be fought, so what the hell. We’ll go along with it. Interestingly, Madison Jones is coming this year [2-3 p.m. Oct. 4]. He’s a Tennessean. He’s never hit the way Charles Frazier has hit with Cold Mountain [1-2 p.m. Oct. 4], but his book, Nashville 1864, is very good. He’s going to be on the program with another Civil War novelist, Howard Bahr, but we didn’t put them in the War Memorial Auditorium, that’s for sure. It just shows how interesting it is to consider what does hit a nerve out there in the marketplace.”
The South “We only have one big Southern panel this time, sort of our ‘Whither the South’ panel, although we don’t call it that. We call it something like ‘Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going’—which is just another way to say ‘Whither the South.’ Still, it’s going to be a very good panel.” (Featuring speakers John Egerton, John M. Barry, Peter Applebome, Edward L. Ayers, and Bradley C. Mittendorf, 9:30-11:30 a.m. Oct. 4.)
“There’s also a good panel that I’m going to attend if I get a chance, and it’s called “Redneck and Okie and the Sense of Human Worth: Southern Memories” [noon-1:30 p.m. Oct. 5]. That should be one of the real gems that people might not otherwise notice.”
Novels about chatty Cathy beauty operators “Well, I’m not going to touch that. Suffice it to say, we have them. They’re on the program. I’ll leave you to find them. It does get old, but they’re there. As a genre, it is alive and thriving.”
Children’s books “I’ve just got to put in a plug here for The Pasteboard Bandit. It’s a children’s book, but it was discovered in Langston Hughes’ manuscripts in the Yale library, where it lay dormant for years. Oxford University Press will actually be introducing this book at the festival [11:30 a.m.-1:00 p.m. Oct. 4].”
Cafe Stage “There’s interesting, interactive stuff on the Cafe Stage that we do for adults. Maybe people don’t pay much attention to it; but this year, Tim McLaurin has done a recent book on snakes, The Last Great Snake Show, and he may very well have snakes onstage. We just don’t know yet.” (To find out, visit the stage 2:30-3:30 p.m. Oct. 5.)
The Internet “A new element this year is a live Web chat on Saturday that Nashville CitySearch is organizing. Who knows what it’ll amount to....” (With writers Larry Brown, Frances Mayes, Lee Smith, and Steven Womack, 12:30-1:30 p.m. Oct. 4; visit http://nashville.citysearch.com/ .)
As the festival quickly approaches, Cheatham hopes only for the best—but his ambitions remain modest. “The interesting thing I learned last year is that you want the weather to be good, but you don’t want it to be too good. And then, the thing that we worry about as much as anything else is that the festival should get too big. I know that if it got so big that you couldn’t get a seat unless you arrived at a room an hour early—I know that would just ruin it.
“One of the nice things about these events, I think, is how they create among the people there a sense of community—a sense of everybody coming together. That’s kind of magical. Or it certainly can be.”
The dog-eared page
“Many of us have a fear of height—even more of us have a fear of depth.”—Tom C. Armstrong, from Gift Rap (1:30-2:30 p.m. Oct. 3)
“You...hailed me back through the wide air between us/(Tennessee, Carolina) with a Roman poise,/A courtly gravity becoming our best days/A dozen years back when we trusted each other/Through a dangerous night and walked out saved/In hot August dawn.”—Reynolds Price, from “The Dying Belt, Douglas Paschal Gone,” The Collected Poems (noon-1 p.m. Oct. 4)
“In 1910 one engineering journal proclaimed, ‘The Millennium will have been reached when humanity shall have learned to eliminate all useless waste.’ ”—John M. Barry, from Rising Tide (9:30-11:30 a.m. Oct. 4)
“Even today, there’s no tacky like Nashville tacky.”—Peter Applebome, from Dixie Rising (9:30-11:30 a.m. Oct. 4)
“The music industry has never really accepted the premise that there is such a thing as a conflict of interest.”—Don Cusic, from Eddy Arnold (1:30-3 p.m. Oct. 3)
“ ‘Well,’ said the other Elvis, ‘my theory is you don’t need plastic surgery if you know how to do your hair.’ ”—William McCranor Henderson, from Stark Raving Elvis (3-4 p.m. Oct. 4)
“Anna had heard the men talk of this, too—the uncanny demon cry of the Rebel army going into the attack—and now here it was for real, echoing across violence and death for the last time in a wild crescendo that seemed to peak and yet peak again: descanting blood, crying lost youth and the loss of all dreams.”—Howard Bahr, from The Black Flower (2-3 p.m. Oct. 4)
