And once more, I am amazed and delighted by the verbal pyrotechnics of T. R. Pearson. This evening I had occasion to dig out his second novel, Off for the Sweet Hereafter, and was again captivated by its opening sentence, a sentence that runs for 407 words across a page and a half, a sentence with more bends and kinks and meanders in it than the Ocoee River. It is a pitiful thing that he’s never gotten the recognition he deserves, because he writes like a young Faulkner, but a young Faulkner who’s also hysterically funny.
This is how the novel begins:
That was the summer we lost the bald Jeeter who was not even mostly Jeeter anymore but was probably mostly Throckmorton or anyway was probably considered mostly Throckmorton which was an appreciable step up from being considered mostly Jeeter since Jeeters hadn’t ever been anything much while Throckmortons had in fact been something once previously before the money got gone and the prestige fell away leaving merely the bluster and the taint and the general Throckmorton aroma all of which taken together hardly made for a legacy worth getting stirred up over but any one of which taken singly still outstripped the entire bulk of advancements ever attempted and realized by Jeeters who had scratched around in the dirt but were not much accomplished at farming and who had speculated in herds of cattle but were not much accomplished at speculating either and who at last had turned their energies to the construction of a henhouse which commenced ramshackle and got worse but became nonetheless the chief Jeeter advancement along with the hens and the little speckled brown eggs and the localized ammonia cloud which was itself most probably the primary Jeeter success though no particular Jeeter or group of Jeeters together actually contributed to it or could prevent it either and so when the bald Jeeter, with the fat Jeeter as her maid of honor, exchanged vows with Braxton Porter Throckmorton III in the sanctuary of the Methodist church on Saturday June the twelfth, 1942, and afterwards set up house in Neely proper she got away from the hens and the henhouse and out from under the ammonia cloud which was most likely beginning to expand in June of 1942 since it set in to expanding most every June and swelled straight through August and on into September, especially this past August and especially this past September when it was bearing down on the town limits and posing some threat to the icehouse which was regular and ordinary for the season, particularly in August and particularly in September, so we were having what had come to be our usual summer straight up to the moment Mr. Derwood Bridger laid his ladder against the Throckmorton clapboard and climbed to the upper story where he pressed his nose to the bedroom windowscreen and shaded his eyes and called and hollered and shrieked at the bald Jeeter until he was satisfied that she was gone from us for good.
To get the full meaning and flavor of it, you may have to read it aloud. Pearson’s writing needs to be read aloud, read aloud by someone who has spent dozens of Saturday and Sunday afternoons on the front porch listening to all the relatives talk and gossip and tell stories that start noplace in particular and wander everywhere until they get to the end that probably isn’t anyplace in particular either. It’s intensely Southern writing, and it’s intensely and exactly right, exactly the way Southerners of a certain age talked but don’t much talk any more because everybody’s too busy to sit down on the porch glider and the rockers and talk and talk and talk and talk, and drink ice tea and eat FFV cookies that came in those pretty tins you could wash out afterwards and use to keep notions or pins or paperclips, or whatever you had that was scattered around and needed a tin to keep it in.
