'I Belonged to the Compton-Burnett Cult Myself'

“Southern men did not create their gun culture for reasons of machismo. If you had asked my father or grandfather why they hunted they would have given the same answer. ‘To eat quail, you fool. Why else?’”

A refreshing gust of realism brought to an “issue” customarily chewed on by gasbags of all stripes. Turner Cassity can be counted on to be simultaneously contrary and illuminating. Except for his time in the U.S. Army, during but not in the police action in Korea, Cassity most likely never discharged a firearm in his life. Neither hunter nor survivalist, he was a poet and librarian, not notably gun-crazy occupations. He was also an independent thinker, a subspecies threatened with extinction. Cassity was immune to clichés and conventional sentiment. He must have been as entertaining in conversation as he was in poetry and prose, an unlikely hybrid of Dr. Johnson and Oscar Wilde. He continues:

“They would also have been the first to say that handgun control will not accomplish much. The cemeteries are full of people who were blown away with shotguns, but the motive was more often greed than masculinity. Machismo is a notion they would have hooted at. Something for Hispanics to become exercised over, like guitar music, or the face of Jesus on a tortilla. If there were no other way to obtain quail I should myself be out in the forest blasting away, as frightening as, with my myopia, that thought is.”

More evidence of unbenighted wit from the manuscript I wrote about in Thursday’s post. Cassity is more interested in truth than in pleasingly lockstep conformity of opinion. This is the poet who writes in “An Attempt to Explain Anorexia Nervosa to Lillian Russell” (Between the Chains, 1991):

“There is no remedy. It first reveals

Itself in an insatiable desire to

Purchase women's magazines. It strikes

High-fashion models, who at least die rich.”

Here is Cassity, once a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford, on the books of childhood:

“It is traditional in literary autobiography to enumerate one’s childhood reading. I am surprised that writers are so willing to tip their hands, but as I have already tipped mine I might as well come out and say that I chose books for their illustrations. I read the first two books of Paradise Lost, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, exactly as one would read any other science fiction. You will guess who the artist was [Gustave Doré]. Even he could not get me through The Divine Comedy, though he managed to make London poverty more interesting than ever Dickens did. At this moment I would not read David Copperfield if you went macho and held a shotgun to my head.”

Cassity, displaying good taste, has good things to say, usually in passing, about Kipling, E.A. Robinson, H. Rider Haggard, Nostromo, From Here to Eternity (the novel) and silent movies. His mother and grandmother accompanied silent films on piano in Mississippi theaters. Cassity is an enthusiastic ad hoc critic of architecture, especially theaters. Here he is on being stationed in Puerto Rico:

“Culture at Tortuguero had been ongoing. In the seclusion of the net I read Buddenbrooks, Resurrection, War and Peace, The Possessed, and all of Proust. My reading list will convey to you the amount of time we had on our hands. I gave up on Ulysses. Dublin is just not as interesting as Lübeck. Dublin is not as interesting as Arecibo.”

And here he describes his success as a librarian working in South Africa:

“Ladies left the tennis courts and swimming pools to storm our doors. I can report that both Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch were popular, and that Ivy Compton-Burnett was a positive cult. I belonged to the Compton-Burnett cult myself, and still do. The Mandelbaum Gate suggests that Miss Spark could deal lethally with Johannesburg, but to do it full justice would require Dame Ivy.”

Without citing the source, Cassity then quotes an interview with Compton-Burnett: “I believe it would go ill with many of us, if we were faced by a strong temptation, and I suspect that with some of us it does go ill. . . Isolation and leisure put nothing into people. But they give what is there, full play. They allow it to grow according to itself, and this may be strongly in certain directions.”