Marshall Frady

When the Oxford American arrived a few weeks back, I forced myself to read it gradually, combing through its plethora, preserving without any conscious allusion to tantric mechanics. One of the articles which has since struck me is on Mr. Frady, of whom I was unaware much like Douglas Southall Freeman and dozens of other notable Southern literary figures. A journalist and biographer, Frady appears to be similar to Liebling in that he was wordsmith, a duststorm of metaphors which he could unleash at will. He died last year and will be known, apparently, for his biographies of such disparate figures as George Wallace, Billy Graham and Jesse Jackson - the latter gave the eulogy at his funeral. He appears to have been eternally grateful to have been present during the Civil Rights Struggle, perhaps one of the last crackles of honest emotion in our variegated history.

Frady published a bio of Marin Luther King Jr. in 2002 as part of the Penguin Lives series. I checked the tome out of the library this afternoon and was flabbergasted on the first page:

At the same time, the South seemed a region that belonged to some older, more primal and gutteral script about the human situation, tribal stark, fatal, that was whollyoutside the general American sensibility of rationality and optimism.

All schedules aside, this turning of phrases is remarkable, this adjustment of refration and antiquity speaks to stir for those so disposed. Included in the Oxford article is a 255 word sentence from an essay included in his text Southerners.

But the interstates have razed their way on out into the last aboriginal outbacks of the South, and in all the Fox's Dens and Bali-Hai Lounges of the motels that have accumulated along their length, townsmen from the peanut gins and feed mills of nearby scruffy little communities - great-grandsons of Jackson's fance skirmishers and Jubal Early's mounted raiders, who were accustomed until recently only to the beercan-pop-ping hoot and stomp of local pine-planked honky-tonks - gather on a Saturday night to roost, in khakis and clay-clotted brogans, in a windowless grottolike clandestine gloom lascivious with dim glows and quilted leather and a sweet whisky-tinged must of the urbanely illicit, finguring damp paper napkins imprinted with raffish cartoons as they brood over their bourbon-and-ginger-ales at the waitresses bobbling back and forth in Bo Peep thigh ruffles and net stockings, all the while mulling the savoryintimations of secret abandoned sheet-thrashings in the rooms along the rear parking lot, until inevitably one of them, after a waitress' leggy passage by him, jumps atop a table with a loud obscene yap of supplication, and then, as he is being herded toward the door by the manager, snatches up a chair and sends it skidding calamitously down the length of the bar with a parting bawl of outrage and longing -this, a hundred years later, about all that is left of those legendary heedless charges with gleeful yodels up the slopes of Cemetary Ridge and Malvern Hill.

Such feats, so little notice or acclaim but what a wonder; I recall a New Historian theorizing that Proust is indicative of the Surplus Labor of a Late Bourgeois society: who can complain, my friends?