INTRODUCTION:
BEYOND
REGIONALISM
by Hugh Ruppersburg
The
stories
in Other Arms Reach Out to Me take place in the American South, most of them in Georgia. An exception is “Andalusian Triptych, 1962,” about a Georgia-born man living in Spain. Ironically, their author, Michael Bishop, hasn’t made his name as a regional writer. He’s widely known as an award-winning writer of science fiction and fantasy, with two Nebula awards and other accolades to his credit. Yet several of his SF novels have Southern settings. His 1983 novel Ancient of Days explores what happens when a prehistoric human is discovered living in West Central Georgia. Brittle Innings, his wonderful 1994 baseball novel, takes place in a fictional South Georgia town whose farm club has a first baseman straight out of a famous tale by Mary Shelley. Bishop’s deep familiarity with baseball as well as with the habits and ways of small-town Southern life during World War II—heat, eccentric characters, racism, humor, sex—enables him to provide a rich array of carefully observed details that evoke a rich sense of Southern place.
The same is true of Other Arms Reach Out to Me. These stories are steeped in the Southern landscape, culture, and character. They are grounded in a geographical place, a cultural milieu, that helps bring alive his characters and their situations. Their Southern ambience feels neither forced nor artificial. But I am hesitant to describe them as “regional,” a word that might seem limiting. What most stands out for me in these stories is their emphasis on human individuals and dilemmas: children chafing against parents, parents distraught over lost children, teenage love, desire, marriage, old men in nursing homes, grief and depression, death. These are the topics and themes of the world’s great literature. As richly evoked as the Southern setting may be, I could imagine most of these stories set in other parts of the world. The people and situations they describe are fundamental to human life.
Even so, it’s important to consider the role of the American South in this collection. The literature of the South has offered since its early days a rich assortment of eccentric and unusual human characters. We saw them in the early writings of the southwestern humorists—for example, A. B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes (1835) and George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool (1867). Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was their successor.
A Southern writer of the twentieth century who continued to develop this tradition, and who made comic and grotesque characters a distinctive mark of her work, was Flannery O’Connor. Her most memorable characters are a strange fusion of the humorous and the malevolent. Mr. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and Manley Pointer in “Good Country People” come immediately to mind. O’Connor’s manner of characterization, her penchant for portraying grotesque characters and situations, are clear influences in many of the stories in Other Arms Reach Out to Me.
O’Connor’s influence is especially evident in the first story: “The Road Leads Back,” where a famous writer named Flora Marie Craft (based on O’Connor), at the urging of her friend Hettie Bestwick (an avatar of O’Connor’s real-life friend Betty Hester) seeks a miraculous healing of her lupus in an Alabama monastery. A tale that might have ended in a stirring moment of spiritual healing or of disappointment instead goes awry in a fantastic and comical way. The story’s whimsical humor, along with Bishop’s compassionate portrayal of the ailing writer, makes it one of the best in the collection. It works as both homage and parody.
Other Arms Reach Out to Me offers many of its own eccentric and comical characters: in the bear-hunting father of “Unfit for Eden,” the unprincipled detective-narrator of “Unlikely Friends,” the institutionalized lovers in “Crazy about Each Other,” the cerebral young man who proposes to a celebrity by mail in “Doggedly Wooing Madonna,” and so on. The behavior and speech of Bishop’s characters are often hilarious, but he portrays them with sensitivity. Rarely does he ridicule them. Usually, with a few notable exceptions, he displays more compassion toward his suffering characters than does either Twain or O’Connor. Distinctively drawn characters are a major element of the Southern atmosphere of Bishop’s stories, and a means by which he speaks to the larger concerns of human experience.
One of the most traditional “Southern” stories here is “Unfit for Eden,” told by a boy who grows up near the Okefenokee Swamp. After his father, a self-reliant bear hunter, dies in prison, neither the boy nor his mother can escape his legacy. The stepfather who replaces him is a truck-driving, wife-beating religious fanatic. The boy’s entire background will seem strange to anyone who did not grow up in the swamps, for the tale’s atmosphere grows out of its peculiar details: bear skulls, hidden copies of Leaves of Grass, sex in a cemetery. Everyone will recognize the conflict at its heart (a boy rebelling against a stepfather who denies his every interest and inclination), but the distinctiveness of this story stems from its deeply Southern milieu.
More often, Bishop takes an unusual, unexpected approach to traditional situations. Two of the stories are set in nursing homes. The title story “Other Arms Reach Out to Me” pits a cantankerous old man against a violinist who plays for residents of the home. He takes advantage of her need as a single mother for money, and in general there’s not much likeable about him. A pathetically lonely figure, he describes himself as a “dying old fart who’s buried four wives and gone ornery to boot.” The story’s ending is perhaps the grimmest in the volume, leaving us uncertain as to who the real villain is. In a second nursing home story, “No Picnic,” a black attendant cares for an old man who harbors a personal resentment against him. He finally discovers a disturbing explanation for this attitude. Even if it does not lead to reconciliation, it at least allows a measure of understanding of the role that each man plays in the other’s life. Both stories are notable for their ambiguous resolutions, as if Bishop intentionally leaves to the reader the burden of deciphering the moral and ethical questions they raise. These questions both unsettle and move the reader.
Bishop’s stories are impressively diverse in style, voice, and content. Often humorous and/or satirical, they are never shallow, and comedy never overshadows the darker realities of men and women struggling with their lives, with what one of Bishop’s characters calls “a series of ever more outlandish shocks.” In “Baby Love,” a man deals with grief and loneliness over his wife’s death by devoting himself so obsessively to his infant daughter that he denies himself connections with others. In the poignantly humorous “Change of Life,” a woman struggles with her love for a younger man obsessed with frogs. In “How Beautiful with Banners,” an aging man who has lost his wife tries to prove his worth by “laundry bannering,” competing with his neighbors in creatively hanging out clothes, old linens, dish rags, and assorted other items.
The most wickedly satirical story, “Rattlesnakes and Men,” takes aim at the American mania with guns and the Second Amendment: instead of guns, however, the citizens of a small Georgia town must, by law, own rattlesnakes. The story, which Bishop himself has described as a “Georgia-based story set in the near future of an alternate timeline,” has a grounding in fact: in Georgia, in 1982, the city of Kennesaw became the first of a number of towns to require citizens to own guns. Also, the small North Georgia town of Nelson recently passed its own mandatory ownership ordinance. In this day of alternative facts, “Rattlesnakes and Men” hardly over-stretches truth. Like George Saunders in Tenth of December or CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, the author portrays a recognizable world just askew from the one we know.
Michael Bishop works in the tradition of Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Janisse Ray, and other writers of the modern American South. The wealth of details in his descriptions of Georgia locations invests his stories with an authentic, palpable sense of place. But it is his skill in portraying distinctively individual characters that most strongly marks this collection. Because they reflect his deep empathy for the general human condition, the stories in Other Arms Reach Out to Me transcend regional limitations.
In the end, they are redemptive and life-affirming.
Hugh Ruppersburg is University Professor Emeritus of English and retired Senior Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia. He has written books on William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren and edited five anthologies of work by and about Georgia writers, including After O’Connor: Stories from Contemporary Georgia, as well as a collection of essays about the writer Don DeLillo. He has received the Governor’s Award in the Humanities in Georgia, Georgia Author of the Year award, and the Albert Christ Janer Creative Research Award at the University of Georgia.