Southerners are not much on the modern fad of self-help, or as I have seen it recently labeled in a bookstore: self-discovery/improvement. I hadn't thought a great deal about it until after I was in line at a chain bookstore right before the Christmas rush three or four years back. The woman in front of me was buying a whole stack of how-to or why-to garbage that was certain to enrich your life: more money earning potential than you ever dreamed possible, weight loss, plastic surgery, body-building, New Age spirituality (which is about as new as the pseudo-philosophy of Jewish gnosticism that was afoot before Christ), healing the inner child of sexual fulfillment, and other such tripe.
I hope the woman was buying to feed her own rotted mind and not doing what I was: purchasing Christmas gifts. I long ago decided that people need no more junk, in fact, that junk buying is immoral. So I go to book and music stores and buy what people need. That most of them don't know they need it is not the issue; nor is it that many are as hostile to what they receive as a child who is given only clothes. The issue is that it is needed. Taste is not relevant here. No one, certainly not impressionable young people, needs any more BeeGees, Michael-Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, or rap cds. 
Everyone should own the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, the Bothy Band’s 1975: The First Album, and at least one cd by the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys, and while I’m at it, Hot Burritos! The Flying Burrito Bros. Anthology 1969-1972."
I am opposed to your being forced to listen to them, but it seems only decent to give you an easy opportunity to do so and perhaps improve more than just your tastes.
And if you think that giving people possessed of no musical discernment a Vivaldi or Mozart cd can cause a ruckus of amused glances concerning the out-of-touch innocent who bought so terribly inappropriately, then try giving today's militantly uncultured (or rather, MTV postmodernist-multicultured) a book worth reading.
Before this winding path straightens, I think you might like to know that this tendency of mine to buy gifts u2018good for you' is not original with me. Two of my grandfather's sisters could be counted on to dampen our childish holidays with what one cousin dubbed u2018endless church and Jesus junk.'
That's a great thing about Southern culture (and its Celtic forebear): you can blame whatever somebody doesn't like in your actions or attitudes on some ancestor, on some persistent gene, and virtually never need so much as stretch the truth. The bad is symbiotic to that: if you are honest, you can claim nothing good as completely originally yours.
The woman at the register smiled broadly as she unstacked the books I'd lugged up to her. "It surely is good to see a man who loves to read,' she said in an accent halfway between western Carolina hill and the Deep South u2018shuh-guh' one routinely abused by Hollywood. "That's a heap of books."
"Well," I said somewhat embarrassed, "they're mostly gifts. Only The Crossing is for me." I didn't tell her I planned to read Nashville 1864: The Dying of the Light before wrapping it. It's the kind of thing you learn to do while an old fashioned poor graduate student. "Anyway, that woman before me had more than I do."
The checker laughed as she swiped a book across the scanner. "I reckon so," she said leaning toward me, "but those things aint much good to read, now are they?"
"Folks sure buy them though."
"Around here," she said, "the only ones that do are Yankees and recent graduates of the college taught by Yankees and people who watch tv all day."
That was funny at the time, and only later did I ponder it and decide the woman had been correct in the main. Self-improvement books are not what Southerners write (though I have been told that a couple of big selling self-help writers are natives of the South who live elsewhere and have successfully replaced their accents), nor are they what Southerners purchase in any significant numbers. And if you observe Southerners in a library in the South reading one, you likely will see furtiveness from shame at being caught that is little different from that of the Southerner caught reading the latest sex-crazed New York Times #1 fiction bestseller. He knows he is experiencing trash and retains enough character to be ashamed of himself for succumbing to the temptation.
I know this is not universally true and that it is less true today than it was 20 years ago. In addition to the Government-backed successes of Yankee education, the power of American Mammon has seduced and made increasing numbers of natives of the South, especially younger ones, far more crass than their great-grandparents could have imagined possible, Being allowed to share the wealth of Empire always corrupts because man, though different culturally, remains weak, fallen man. But the distinction noted above regarding self-help and the South remains generally true.
If you care to know why, read Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The standard self-help book being a quintessentially secularized Anglo-Saxon Puritan craft (think first of early to bed and countless other ways to get rich and look like a winner) and Percy being uniquely Southern Christian, Lost in the Cosmos is the very antithesis of the type, for its concern is with the essential intangibles.
I am not going to analyze the work in its entirety; a few references are all I can manage. Those who find Carl Sagan an unintentionally humorous High Modernist prototype of the errors of recent education will enjoy Percy's admission that his pleasure in reading Cosmos "was not diminished (perhaps was even increased) by Sagan's unmalicious, even innocent, scientism, the likes of which I have not encountered since the standard bull sessions of high school and college – up to but not past the sophomore year" (201). Do not miss Percy's point, especially if you are laughing while repeating Sagan's salacious phrasing of u2018billions': the sincere foolishness of bright, empirically inclined undergraduates at Chapel Hill (who presumably largely grew out of it) before the second World War became the defining dogma of the Ivy League by the 1960s and from there helped ruin whatever it touched.
Those who wish to bash or laud Percy for outrageousness will want to take note of his concluding scenario on The Envious Self. He describes a pair of native Southern writers: "For years, even though you both live in Massachusetts you have both attacked the crass, materialistic, money-grubbing society of the North and defended the traditional, agrarian, Christian values of the South, with its strong sense of place, family, and roots" (68).
None of that is outrageous: those distinctions have been true from at least the settling of Boston by men who found proof of election as clearly in earthly favor as in anything else. The general description of expatriate Southerners, if Massachusetts is altered to a generic north, could fit a few prominent writers, including those who were numbered among the Agrarians. And it is foolish to make more of that than the obvious: some writers find it easier to write away from home, particularly if they are using the home as setting while fashioning creative literature to highlight, comprehend, and teach the eternal verities. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Conner could stay at home while so writing, but William Styron could not (I'm not certain if it is significant that Styron is the weakest of that quartet).
The outrageousness lies in what Percy says next: one of those Southern writers with decidedly anti-Modernistic and pro-conservative values wins the Nobel Prize.
Now that is utterly outrageous. Such a writer today would find it a difficult task to be hired and tenured by a Southern Baptist institution located in the South; a Nobel, even a Pulitzer, is beyond question.
Cleanth Brooks best expressed it when I first met him briefly at the 50th anniversary symposium on the publication of I'll Take My Stand. Being young and therefore stupid as well as impatient, I took the opportunity to squeeze myself into a group discussion following a panel. When a lull occurred, I asked Mr. Brooks why he thought Robert Penn Warren, who was standing in another and larger circle, had not won the Nobel and if he – Mr. Brooks – believed that he – Mr. Warren – would be so honored.
He hasn't won the Nobel and won't win it, replied Mr. Brooks, because of his Agrarian writings.
How so, I asked. In case anyone is wondering, I was naïve well beyond that date.
Mr. Brooks gave me a quick lesson that I needed to learn in order to apply to the Leftists then finalizing their taking over English departments. I doubt that the knowledge would have helped much, but at least I wouldn't have been blindsided so easily.
Mr. Brooks said the Swedish academy was decidedly socialist, decidedly pro-urban, and as long as it remained such could not allow a Nobel to go to a Southerner, certainly to one who had been Agrarian and whose life's work presented the values of the conservative South without parody, without hatred. Someone (and I think it was M.E. Bradford but can't be certain because my attention was focused on Mr. Brooks and Andrew Lytle) added that he agreed and that was the reason Miss Welty would never win the Nobel and strongly Christian writers would no longer win and before long we would see winners more undeserving than Pearl Buck (Toni Morrison may be the PC apex there, though William Golding being awarded ahead of Graham Greene – it seems the committee had decided it had to give the Nobel to an Englishman whose surname begins with the lucky seventh letter of the alphabet and could not stomach the thought of a Nobel laureate in these advanced times who writes from the vantage of morally conservative Christianity – is equally ludicrous).
But Percy's use of an impossible scenario in today's world is also not my subject. The most important section in a self-help book, and perhaps the most important in any work of Southern non-fiction, is my subject.
u2018The Last Donahue Show' concludes Percy on The Promiscuous Self. As he had begun to make absolutely clear in his third novel Love in the Ruins and had stressed in his fourth novel Lancelot, and would sum up beautifully in his sixth and final novel The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy was certain that modern sexual liberation-libertinism is a sign of a culture wishing its own demise and that the horrors it inevitably spawns provide a masterful excuse for government centralizers to expand their tyrannical powers – to do good, to provide services to the needy, to save.
As is appropriate, the last Donahue show is about sex. The guests are a promiscuous San Francisco homosexual, the kind whose indiscriminate, random couplings spread AIDS like wildfire; a married businessman described as "a connoisseur of the lunch-hour liaison;" and a pregnant 14 year old. What likens them is their utter selfishness; they have no concern that their actions can and do harm others; each believes that good is defined by personal pleasure and desire. Also onboard is Dr. Joyce Friday, "well-known talk-show sex therapist" (45-46). Her best line is: "Studies have shown that open marriages can be growth experiences for both partners" (48).
Some readers may be saying: I thought he called this Percy thing u2018Southern non-fiction,' and that shrink is surely a fictional treatment of Joyce Brothers and her imitators. The confusion is understandable but easily explained. Southerners, like the ancient Greeks and the Irish, are incessant talkers, not talkers of statistics or Donahue-Oprah feelings, but of stories. The empirically addicted will tend to see that as frivolous at best, but the Southerner kens that stories are the best way to get at the truth in its fullest, its richest. Do we learn more about adultery from the 7th commandment or from the story of David and Bathsheba? Sometimes the Southerner can tell a u2018true story' and make his point (even if he must delete names to avoid lawsuits in this Sophist brave new world); at other times he must create a little fiction based closely on what everyone knows to be actual truth.
Percy's capturing of a typical Donahue sex show is perfect. Those who recall the forefather of Jerry Springer may well wonder if Percy could have been sued for stealing a transcript of a Donahue show. Except that this is the last Donahue show. The tolerance promoting, educational event is interrupted by a trio of visitors who appear mysteriously at the back of the studio. One visitor is dressed and sounds like John Calvin. Another "looks for all the world like Colonel John Pelham, Jeb Stuart's legendary artillerist" (50). The third visitor is dressed like someone mixing mid-20th century fashions; the genial host sees him as like Harry Truman.
I do not intend to spoil the section for those of you who have not yet read it by relating its ending. I will provide Calvin's best lines: "What I have heard is licentious talk about deeds which are an abomination before God, meriting eternal damnation unless they repent and throw themselves on God's mercy. Which they are predestined to do or nor do, so why bother to discuss it?" (52).
More important than Calvin's assessments of modern American decadence are Pelham's. "That's not the way people should talk or act," the honorable Confederate says (53).
Pelham asserts that gentlemen do not so act because they know their duty and discharge it. "But after all," he adds, "you won the war, so if that's the way you want to act, that's your affair. At least, we can be sure of one thing."
Ever ready to learn and relate, and as curious as the National Enquirer readers who made up so large a portion of his devoted audience, Donahue asks.
I confess to having thought about such in church.
"We're not sorry we fought," the Confederate answers.
In this article I am not focused on Percy's views of Calvin's theological inadequacies and errors; nor am I focused on Percy's views of the even more inadequate errors of Pelham's essentially a Christian and Stoic warrior philosophical stance. I am focused on the Confederate's response. He has now seen the full cultural fruits of the Unionist victory achieved in no small part by war against civilians and their family histories, which means war against their traditional values. And being a man of honor both to right causes and to the code of hospitality in which a guest avoids insulting his host, he can do no more than say, "We're not sorry we fought."
Questions: Are you sorry the Confederates fought? Are you happy they lost? Are you so blinded culturally that you cannot see what Percy saw: that Donahue and worse morally and ever tightening government centralization are inevitable fruits of the Unionist victory allowed to percolate?
You can bet that not merely Leftist Statists but also their unwitting allies, the socialist-penned Pledge of Allegiance sacramentalizing neoconservatives, answer Yes to the second question and We certainly hope so to the third
June 18, 2001
