The Fred Chappell Reader

by Fred Chappell

Overview

An Anthology Showcasing the Brilliant Versatility of Acclaimed American Author Fred Chappell

The Fred Chappell Reader is an anthology that bears witness to the remarkable scope of Fred Chappell's career, featuring a rich body of narrative and lyrical fictions ranging over history, mythology, science, philosophy, and Chappell's own life. Recognized as a storyteller "to put on the shelf with Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty" by The Washington Post, Chappell is one of America's most brilliant and versatile authors, with many novels, short stories, and volumes of poetry to his credit.

This collection includes the complete novel Dagon, substantial portions of four other novels, several short stories (two of which are previously uncollected), and a selection of poems culled from his books. Chappell's poetic achievement earned him a share of the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1985, alongside John Ashbery.

The Fred Chappell Reader offers an important and thoroughly rewarding selection of work by a major American writer, showcasing his mastery of diverse genres and cementing his place in the pantheon of great American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466860490
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/17/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	490
File size:	618 KB

About the Author

Fred Chappell is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and fiction. His books include the novel Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave you (Picador USA) and Spring Garden: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press). He was a judge for the 1997 National Book Award for Poetry and his writing has received many major prizes, including the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University (shared with John Ashbery), the Ingersoll Foundation's T.S. Eliot Award, the Aiken/Taylor Award from the University of the South, and the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He teaches at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where he lives with his wife, Susan.

Fred Chappell is the award-winning author of more than twenty books of poetry and fiction, including I Am One of You Forever, Brighten the Corner Where You Are, and Look Back All the Green Valley. He has received many major prizes, including the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from Yale University and the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives with his wife, Susan in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

The Fred Chappell Reader

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By Fred Chappell

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1987 Fred Chappell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6049-0

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CHAPTER 1

FROM

It Is Time, Lord

CHAPTERS 1–

ONE

I was born May 23, 1931, in the house of my grandmother. No doctor could be found to attend, only a midwife from three miles away in the country. My birth was loud and troublesome; the midwife, who was but a young girl, fainted away and my father, who was assisting, had to force her again to consciousness. I lived in the room later for a long while with my grandmother. It was in this room that we took our meals and every night kept a watch until midnight, she reading the Bible, I myself reading a queer story of adventure. On the mantel above the iron stove there was a large clock, which was wound with a key stuck into two holes in its face. A brass pendulum swung inside the glass front, uttering a solidly satisfying click at each foot of its arc. My mother in the labor cried for the clicking to stop. My father opened the face and clutched the pendulum, but his hands so shook that he succeeded only in making the clicking faster. He was forced to take up a pair of scissors and a pencil and hold them on each side of the pendulum in order to halt its motion.

I was born in Gemini, which is the sign of the arms and denotes balance. We born in Gemini are fond of mathematics and science, or, perhaps, acting and oratory. We have a middling talent for commerce, are of a saving disposition, are moderate in all things. In short a fine sense of balance marks our undertakings. — Not so my sister, who is four years my junior. She was born in Leo, August 2, and they born in the sign of the heart have lofty minds and moral seriousness, dignity and firm will. Ptolemy of Pelusa hazards that one of the sign of the heart will achieve positions of honor and trust: thus, my sister has two children, and they are obedient. She never bends to them, and merely laughs at their egotistical whimsies. — She and I are temperamentally opposite. She is confident and graceful in her certainty that she always has the right in things, while I attribute my indecisiveness to my habit of weighing all particles of a problem. My two children obey me but tolerably, for I take their reasons seriously. The world my children see is very different from the world I see, but I discover in it a substance, and it is not less broad than my world. Leo, too, is a masculine sign, dry and barren, a fire sign; and so my sister has really the soul of a man, perhaps the soul of a prince. Gemini is also a masculine sign, but it is an air sign. An air sign has the disadvantage of inconstancy, as of the winds, but air is the temple of space, of infinity. Nothing so pours through me as the blueness of the sky in a cold, clear day; no eyes trouble me so much as the peculiarly flat blue eyes of babies or of ruthless blond women.

That room in which I was born had blue walls, too. They were plaster walls with tiny pimples everywhere, like a coat painted on. The ceiling was fairly high — it was rather an old house — and the single illumination was from a bulb suspended by a gilt chain from the center of the ceiling. When I was very young I liked to mount a chair and bat the bulb with a newspaper in order to watch the shadows of the furniture stagger on the floor, dart in and out beneath each object like animals frightened and bold by turns. The room always smelled of camphor, oil of wintergreen, and tonic: medicines my grandmother absorbed continually for her varied complaints.

The house was brick and there were fourteen other rooms. It was set on a hill in the center of the farm. Three barns stood together two hundred yards east of the house; behind them pasture stretched over a hundred acres of hills, below them lay the grain and tobacco fields, and a crooked creek, gradually chewing away the edges, the course being twisted and spring floods coming annually. The stream was well populated with muskrats, too, and their burrows ran sometimes into the middle of fields. The bottom fields were the best evidence of the present fortune of the farm: my grandparents could neither afford to have the creek straightened nor to leave it crooked. The buildings were all in good condition and the land well cared for, but the fence rows were grown with ragweed and locust and sassafras bushes, a sign that tenantry was unwillingly employed.

The fourteen other rooms of the house I remember as being always cold and dark. My grandmother was unwilling to give a room heat or light except when it was absolutely necessary. When I was older I lived in an upstairs room with two gable windows facing west. The room was paneled with notched pine slatting, and in the stream of the grain I would find rivers with islands, flames, tongues, heads of dogs, men, and bears. A long ridge fenced away the town from the farm and when I darkened my room for the night the gray aureole of the town lights lay along the top.

But I did not live in this room until I was fifteen, when I had already felt the first vague desires of sexual life: to sleep all night in a muddy ditch, to hang dead by the toes like Mussolini, to eat hashish — I fancied that one ate it from a bowl with a spoon, that it was of the consistency of jelly and black and bitter. And too — unfortunately — these upstairs bedrooms were furnished with dressing tables with large mirrors. For the vulgar saying that one cannot live on love is true only of romantic love, and certain persons there are who can live fatly on self-love, can devour themselves to the last gut and toenail, Narcissuses who play with themselves the game of Zeus and Selene.

And this is not on my part self-castigation for adolescent guilt. The chances are good that the remembrance is false. Pray God that it is. For the rich money of dream is generally debased by the counterfeiting of memory, and in the same manner certain reminiscences gain especial value by the significance of subsequent events. To illustrate, if a stranger approached you with a handful of diamonds, you would not attempt to judge his character by admiring his jewels. We can form no idea of the history or mind of a past century by reading its best poems, nor can we discover ourselves by the single remembrances that fasten to us.

I choose a single memory which has gathered such patina of usage that it seems much further distant than it is. My sister was three years old and she was following me to the barn. It was very cold. When the wind blew it hurt, but there was not very much wind. It hurt too when I walked fast, the cold air cutting my lungs as I breathed more deeply, and so I walked slowly.

Step for step behind, my sister whimpered. She wore only a little dress with puffy sleeves smothered in a thin blue sweater. She had long blond curls and I thought they were brittle because it was so cold and that they might splinter on her shoulders like golden icicles. It was late dusk and the moon was yellow, bulgy and low over the hills of the pasture, a soft handful of butter.

There were men in the barn I had never seen. They sat on sacks of crushed corn and cottonseed meal in the dimness. They looked mute and solid. Someone said, "That's a little girl behind him."

One of the men rose and approached slowly. He was tall and his gray eyes came toward me in the dusk. His hair was blond, but not as yellow as my sister's. "Where you from, boy?" he asked.

"Home."

"Is that your sister?"

"Yes. She's Julia. My name is James."

"Don't she have something more than that to wear?"

"I told her not to come out with me."

"You better strike out," he said. "She'll freeze to death out here."

"Strike out?"

"You better light out for home." He rubbed his big wrists. "Hurry up and go on before she freezes to death."

"Come on," I told her. She was still whimpering. Her hands were scarlet, smaller and fatter than mine. I touched her hand with my finger and it felt like paper. There were small tears in her eyes, but her face was scared, not crying.

I started back. The rocks in the road were cold. Once I didn't hear her whimpering and I looked and she was sitting in the road. I went to her and took her elbows and made her stand up. "Come on," I said reproachfully, "you'll freeze to death."

We went on, but then she saw a great log beside the road, and went to it and sat. She had stopped whimpering, but her eyes had become larger. They seemed as large as eggs. "Please, come on," I said. "You'll freeze to death out here."

She looked up at me. I pulled at her. Her wrists felt glassy under my fingers. "What are you doing?" I cried. "Why won't you come on? You'll freeze to death." I couldn't move her. It terrified me because I thought she had frozen to the log.

It had got much darker and the moon was larger.

I jerked her again and again, but she didn't get up. Nothing moved in her face. Two small tears were yet at the corner of each eye. She looked queer, stonelike, under the moonlight, and I thought something terrible had happened to her.

"What are you doing to her? Why don't you leave her alone?"

My father suddenly appeared behind me, huge and black in the moonlight. He too had a small tear in each eye. He was breathing heavily in a big jacket. White plumes of breath bannered in the air.

"What makes you hurt her? What gets into you?"

She raised her arms, and he gathered her to his jacket, holding her in both his arms as in a nest. She knotted herself against his chest, curling spontaneously.

He turned his back toward the moon and strode. Sometimes I had to trot to keep up, and I continued in the limplike pace until we got home.

"Open the door," my father said hoarsely. He knocked the door with his foot.

My mother stood waiting inside and looked through my head at my sister, red in my father's arms. "What happened?" she asked. Her mouth thinned.

I went to the brown stove and put my hand flat against its side, and it seemed a long time before its heat burned me. My face began to tickle.

"What were they doing?"

I walked to the window and looked at the moon huge and yellow behind the skinny maple branches. A dim spot emerged from the window pane as I breathed, and as I stood there it got larger and larger, like a gray flower unfolding, until it obscured the total moon.

This was winter, specifically January; spring is another matter entirely. April is even now chartreuse for me, a color which retains the dizziness and inspiring sickness of the liqueur. The new grass of April is chartreuse, and the new leaves on the long withes of weeping willows. It seems my father kept an ape, a tall, ginger-colored beast which wore a red collar about its neck, but was otherwise entirely free. The name-plate on the collar read: Modred. He had given me a long reap hook and told me to cut the lawn. The pale new grass was very short and limp. The hook would not cut it; the grass blades bent under it, and seemed to squirm away from it. Finally I threw the tool down in exasperation. My father came out upon the porch with the ape — he was quite as horrid as Poe's ape of the Rue Morgue — and said to it, "You'd better get him before he gets any worse." The ape felt the back of its neck under the collar and put some lice in its mouth. Then it came down into the yard for me. I ran to a willow tree and climbed to the shuddering top before stopping, but when I looked down I looked into the face of the ape directly beneath me. It seized me by the ankles and pulled me down against its chest. I could hardly breathe. It clutched my left arm and bit away my hand. I could see the bare silver bones of my wrist. The ape looked down, and my father, who was standing at the foot of the tree, tossed it a salt shaker. It began to sprinkle salt upon my wrist.

So this is probably a dream, though perhaps it is injured by things which have since occurred or by dreams I have since received. But it is more tangible than many things encountered in the flesh. For instance, among our linens now is a washcloth with the print of a rose; nothing is more unreal than to see it floating alone, half-submerged, in the white bathwater. Or I would play chess or Chinese checkers with my grandfather and suddenly there would appear upon the squares of the board the hump and tail of Ursa Minor or the long spine of Draco. What is less real than this? We played on a marble chessboard which my grandfather had himself set in a heavy oak table he had made. To see these constellations emerge from the aggregate of pawns and knights was like seeing Atlantis raise its head out of the cold ocean, or, perhaps, like seeing in the marigold faces of human men the sudden roses of divinity: Dionysus before Acetes; Christ:

Lo, how a rose e'er blooming

From tender stem hath sprung!

My grandfather and I would befuddle the eternal summer afternoons with games: chess, checkers, poker. He sat in a leather rocking chair on the open porch. By him a small table held a pitcher of water, a glass, a pint of whiskey. He drank slowly and thoughtfully. Flies strutted on his knuckles. He had a very bald head, deep green eyes, the face of Sibelius with the identical veins distent on the temples. It was a face such as the Emperor Augustus must have had: and this was how he sat, the melancholy emperor of the afternoon. He was a builder of houses and a good carpenter, but now for nearly forty years he had been able to walk only with the support of a crutch and a cane. Sometime in his twenties his legs had been completely shattered in a sawmill accident, and, because medicine in that time and place had been so very bad, he had never recovered. In the afternoons he did not like to walk. Besides games his other amusement was swatting flies. He wore out any number of fly swatters before he fashioned himself a leather one from the tongue of an old shoe. Like my sister, he was born in Leo.

Leo is summer, a lion with a hide of shaggy gold. Its haunches are sunlight, its flesh the logos of God.

Strong is the lion: like a coal

His eyeball, a bastion's mole

His chest against the foe.

My grandfather and my sister are searched into by this majesty, kneaded in the glory of it. But are we merely masks of the stars and seasons? Apple trees are of summer, too, but they remain in winter, and not entirely asleep. For my grandfather lived through many winters and died in a summer. Once, I remember, he and I walked together in a December morning. We walked through the orchard in the first heavy frost of the season — or at least it now seems that it was the first heavy frost. Suddenly he said, "Look out, boy. Reach me that apple." Above my head hung a great yellow apple, which somehow had escaped apple picking and autumn. I leaped as high as I could and felt it thud heavily in my hand. I gave it to him, and he, resting lopsided on his crutch, inserted both thumbs in the blossom end and tore the fruit into irregular halves. The meat was white as linen. The sunlight glittered on the moist flesh as on dew. Two black seeds glared from its heart. It was so cold it hurt my teeth.

Leo endures. There is summer in winter. My grandfather spent most of the winter before the cast-iron stove in the warm blue room. The stove was wood-burning; the top slipped sidewise on a socket hinge and chunks of wood were thrust in. Ashes and coals fell into a long, narrow trough beneath the grates. I used to lie on my belly on the floor and gaze through a small window into this trough. Everything grew small and the dropped cinders were great boulders and mountains. The scene was illuminated by the red-orange glare of the fire above. It was as arid as sand, and live coals dropped through the grates, splashing the walls with sparks. This is the best notion of hell. When I would dream or daydream of going to hell I always wound up in the bottom of that stove.

"Don't look into the fire so long, boy," he said.

"Why not?"

"It's bad for your eyes."

"How come?"

"You'll go blind if you keep that up long enough."

"Is it bad to be blind?"

"You can't see nothin when you're blind. Man that's blind is in bad shape. I used to know a feller in Fletcher Forks that was blind. He was sworped across the eyes with a sharp chestnut limb when they felled the tree."

"What did he do?"

"Well, he used to log a little. Had a good matched team, used to bring hardwood about halfway down Turkey Knob and J-hook it off the mountain."

"What's J-hook?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Fred Chappell Reader by Fred Chappell. Copyright © 1987 Fred Chappell. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

"What's Artichokes?": An Introduction to the Work of Fred Chappell by Dabney Stuart

I. NOVELS
From It Is Time, Lord, Chapters 1-3
From The Inkling, Chapters 1-3
Dagon
From The Gaudy Place, Chapter 1: Arkie
From I Am One of You Forever

II. SHORT STORIES
From Moments of Light
"Mrs. Franklin Ascends"; "Thatch Retaliates"; "Moments of Light"; "The Thousand Ways"; "Children of Strikers"; "Blue Dive"

Uncollected Stories
"Linnaeus Forgets"; "Notes Toward a Theory of Flight"

III. POETRY
From The World Between the Eyes
"February"; "Tiros II"; "Death of W.H. Auden"; "Seated Figure"

From Midquest
"The River Awakening in the Sea"; "My Grandmother Washes Her Feet"; "Cleaning the Well"; "Dead Soldiers"; "Rimbaud Fire Letter to Jim Applewhite"; "My Grandfather's Church Goes Up"; "Burning the Frankenstein Monster: Elegiac Letter to Richard Dillard"; "Second Wind"; "My Father's Hurricane"; "Three Sheets in the Wind: Virgil Campbell Confesses"; "Remembering Wind Mountain at Sunset"; "My Mother's Hard Row to Hoe"; "My Father Washes His Hands"; "Susan's Morning Dream of Her Garden"; "My Grandmother's Dream of Plowing"; "Earthsleep"

From Castle Tzingal
"The Homunculus"; "The Admiral"; "Song for Disembodied Voice"; "The Queen"; "Epilogue: Song for Disembodied Voice"

From Source
"Child in the Fog"; "Humility"; "Awakening to Music"; "Narcissus and Echo"; "Recovery of Sexual Desire after a Bad Cold"; "Rib"; "The Virtues"; "Message"; "Forever Mountain"

Afterword: "A Pact with Faustus"
Bibliography