“Attic” is Full of Treasures https://ift.tt/TtU3uJ1
Posthumous releases are a mixed blessing. For every great work, such as John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, readers are met with many disappointments, like Nabokov’s The Original of Laura. Dzanc Books and a host of the late William Gay’s admirers have sought to present a series of the Tennessee author’s unpublished works that fall into the former category. They achieved this with 2018’s The Lost Country. A road novel of sorts, it reinforced the reputation Gay earned during his lifetime. Now in paperback, the stories, memoirs, and fragments in Stories from the Attic, while not achieving the heights of The Lost Country, provide more evidence of Gay’s mastery.
Gay died in 2012, at the age of seventy. Readers might be surprised by the small size of his oeuvre at that point, but though he wrote his entire life, he didn’t publish until age fifty-nine. The Long Home, from 1999, is one of the great debut novels of the past thirty years. It shows a writer already nearing his peak and led to a subsequent bidding war for his second novel, Provinces of Night. Several more books followed, including the story collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down (which included his finest short story, “The Paperhanger”) and the Southern Gothic novel Twilight. Stories from the Attic displays many of the strengths present in Gay’s earlier works while also demonstrating the not-ready-for-primetime quality found in most posthumous publications.
The book opens with its strongest piece, the story “The Ascension of Pepper Yates.” In it, the title character uses a fake police uniform and vehicle to scam motorists into believing their cars need servicing at a nearby garage. He receives ten dollars from the garage owner for each one who falls for the trick, but his underhandedness has its roots in an oddly sincere desire to become a lawman: “He had put in unnumbered applications for city policeman. He had begged to be a deputy, traffic policeman, process server, anything.” Told that he will have to wait until someone retires, Yates targets an older officer, Henry Garrison. He pours sugar in the man’s gas tank, writes threatening notes urging him to quit, and (finally) shoots out his front window. Once this succeeds, Yates becomes “a man transformed,” one who “look[s] like a man for whom the dice had come around at last.” He is just as corrupt as a legitimate police officer as he was at the beginning of the story, however, which ends with him using his status to try to take advantage of a local woman.
“Nighttime Awakening,” the following story – and also the book’s longest – provides evidence of one of Gay’s prime influences: Flannery O’Connor. The opening focuses on widowed Mrs. Tippitt, a busybody landlady who, in her questionable piety, believes that “in another time she and Mr. Tippitt might have been slave owners, might have overseen some huge plantation.” Her current renter, Clay, is known far and wide for threatening his enemies with burning them out of their homes. When he does this to Mrs. Tippitt, she grabs her shotgun, only to have Clay disarm her and insist, “I bet you know things about yourself right now you never knowed before.” Here, Clay walks in the footsteps of O’Connor’s The Misfit, believing himself to be a truth seeker even in his viciousness.
“Nighttime Awakening” is also home to some of the collection’s finest writing, especially in its descriptions:
Spring weeds and grass already encroaching onto vacant lots. Past a house long burned, charred rubble rainwashed and sanctified. Broken brick and sundry debris scattered about, a still erect chimney rising bleakly in the May air like an ancient monolith left by some race dead and lost, its meaning forgotten eons ago.
Similarly, while Clay hitchhikes on the side of the road, “About him birds still sang, behind him the eastern sky streaked with pink and gray and the sun appeared suddenly atop the treeline and hung there, turned blood red by the mist and fog charting his progress malignantly like a malevolent and vengeful eye.” Ultimately, no matter how impressive the writing, this story suffers due to its length. For as long as it is, it feels more like a sketch of a novel rather than a self-contained narrative. Clay, Mrs. Tippitt, and a host of secondary characters are fascinating figures to follow throughout the story’s fifty-plus pages, but Clay’s arc needs more time to develop.
Several other stories feel like sketches or exercises, too, but even so, the memoirs that follow are worthy additions to Gay’s collected works. “Reading the South (Paperback Edition)” offers an unexpectedly relaxed enumeration of Gay’s reading history and influences, ranging from literary figures such as O’Connor and William Faulkner to genre writers Rex Stout and Zane Grey. Gay spends particular time on Thomas Wolfe, whose Look Homeward, Angel “Sharpened everything and brought it into focus and pointed it toward a purpose.” He concludes with, “But forget about writing the Great American Novel – Thomas Wolfe got there first.” Though Gay is most often connected to Cormac McCarthy, his interest in Wolfe could open new avenues for future study.
Stories from the Attic ends with a roundtable discussion of the author’s “Literary Legacy.” A variety of editors, writers, and friends offer different facets of Gay’s talent and personality. He comes across as a true dedicatee to the writing life, aware of his gifts and conscious of others’ assessments of them . In the end, these additional voices offer a new picture of the writer and reinforce his place among the finest southern writers of his generation.
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