Sheer Talent

Fred Chappell 1936-2024

I met Fred Chappell at a retirement dinner for William Blackburn, the revered creative writing teacher at Duke University.  I wasn’t there as a writer (in what turned out to be Blackburn’s last year as a professor, I had the choice of taking his creative writing class or his class in Elizabethan and 17^th Century Literature; I chose the literature class, and have always been glad I did), but as the boyfriend of a woman in the dorm that was sponsoring the dinner.  We had name tags at the table, and when Fred Chappell sat across from me, I suddenly felt tongue-tied.  I hadn’t met many published writers.  But he reached across to look at my name tag—looking at me and saying, “May I?”—and introduced himself.  I had met one of the famous Duke writers.[1]

I hadn’t read his work, and didn’t until years later, sometime in the early eighties when, after I’d made many attempts to get a book review assignment at the New York Times, a woman I’d met in New York had suddenly and unexpectedly gotten a job at the Times called me up with an assignment, Chappell’s novel I Am One of You Forever.  I admitted to her that I’d met Chappell,  and she immediately wanted to rescind the assignment, saying they didn’t assign books to somebody who knew the author.  “I only met him once,” I said, “I don’t really know him, and I wouldn’t hesitate to give him a bad review.”  That was the truth.  I wanted that assignment.  She let me review the book.

As it turned out, I loved the book.  I had a natural suspicion of Southern writers and the fans who loved them, but Chappell had a verbal gift that was startling.  He’d spent much of his writing life as a poet, and won the Bollingen Prize the year the novel came out.  Later that year I was helping organize a series of readings at the Durham Public Library, and Fred came to read.  He was as gracious as the first time we met, thanking me for the review, and gave a wonderful reading, even though I detected a natural shyness about him.  He was also by that time a well-known professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and had produced a number of published writers from his creative writing class.

My next encounter with Chappell came in the early nineties, by which time I’d published four novels and had reviewed books for a number of papers.  The new book editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, David Perkins, wanted to edit the book page but shied away from writing a weekly column, so he was looking for help with that.  I was working on yet another novel, not sure I wanted to interrupt that every week with a book review, much less all the pressure that would be involved in maintaining such a pace, but Perkins eventually decided he would split the column among several writers, and one of the people he picked was Fred Chappell.  It turned out that, in addition to being a first-rate poet, short story writer, novelist, Chappell was also a well-read and extremely interesting critic.  I was proud to be writing the column with him.  I never had a job that I enjoyed more.

Perkins had various ideas as an editor.  One was to get local novelists to write a novel together, one person doing the first chapter, another the second, and so forth.  I had plenty of trepidation about such a project, but I probably needed the money (the novel I was writing took a long time, then didn’t sell), so I agreed.  It turned out to be much more fun than I had thought.

I can’t remember who got the idea for setting it at a writer’s conference, but Lee Smith, writing the second chapter, ended with the protagonist sitting down to a workshop with Fred Chappell, who happened to be writing the third chapter.  He brilliantly satirized himself, saying he was drunk (as usual) and gave such a boring talk (muttering words like “syllabic achronicity, Cthulhu, Homeric simile”) that the whole audience eventually walked out, including his wife.  But he had the next workshop feature North Carolina writer Tim McLaurin, who was known for his love of snakes and apparently for taking a few of them to his readings.  In any case, McLaurin got tangled up in some wires and upset the box of snakes, which were slithering all over the Carolina Inn, where the workshop was taking place.  I was the next writer.

I loved the assignment.  Tim McLaurin himself followed me, so I left him following one of his snakes into the women’s restroom.

Even better than that was another book idea Perkins had, getting writers to write about the book that changed their lives.  There were a number of books that you might have expected, Tolstoy’s Confessions, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I wrote about a cheap trashy biography of Hemingway that made me want to be a writer), but Chappell, in what was certainly the most original of all the essays, wrote about Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking, and how it changed his family’s life, greatly broadening their food horizons from the fried food of the South (he mentioned what he thought of as the most typical Southern recipe ever, Coca-Cola cake).  The essay is hilarious, and the very idea of doing it was original.

Back in the day, I had some conventional ideas about who the best Duke writers were.  Reynolds Price’s beautifully crafted sentences impressed me, as had William Styron’s somewhat tortured prose (I greatly admired it when I was young and wanted to write that way.  Thank God I realized at some point that, if I did have a talent, it was for simplicity).  Anne Tyler was the best seller among us, extraordinarily talented and prolific.  But the books of my great mentor aren’t much read these days that I know of, and the same goes for Styron, I would say (I think both those men will be remembered more for their memoirs, Price’s A Brand New Life, about his battle with cancer, and Styron’s Darkness Visible, about depression).  Anne Tyler has written so many books that it’s hard to keep up.  But I have sometimes thought in recent years that the most natively talented, in the greatest variety of genres, and maybe the hardest working—all the while teaching at the university level—was Fred Chappell.  Poetry, stories, novels, reviews.  He even, at the age of 80, published a fantasy novel with Tor Books.  The man left behind a massive life’s work.  It’s well worth exploring.

[1] Another of them, and a friend of Fred’s, was Reynolds Price, who had taught me at Duke in creative writing.  Soon after I published my first novel, Reynolds asked me to be on a panel with him and Anne Tyler (and Eudora Welty!), so I met Anne.  Years later, at an alumni panel about Blackburn that Reynolds asked me to be on, I met William Styron and James Applewhite, whom I think I had met at the Anne Tyler event.  At some point I corresponded a while with Josephine Humphreys, and had lunch with her when she visited Durham.  So I pretty much covered my generation, except for Charlie Smith.  I never met Guy Davenport, but corresponded with him for a while.  I eventually decided he was the most original of them all.