When I heard that all unsold stock of Brad Vice’s debut story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, had been pulped just weeks after publication, I was immediately reminded of Bohumil Hrabal’s melancholy meditation on literature, Too Loud a Solitude, which begins: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books….”
The narrator of Hrabal’s haunting novella is Hant’a, a seemingly simple man whose job requires him to feed books day by day into the hydraulic press, which compacts them into manageable, unreadable bales. It’s a horrific way to earn a living for a man who loves to “pop a beautiful sentence into [his] mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.” Hant’a’s secret and his existential salvation is that, every day, he rescues a few books from destruction.
If only Hant’a were actual rather than fictional. If only he could have somehow leapt out of Hrabal’s 1976 novella and into Georgia, circa 2005. If only he had crossed paths with a manuscript called The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was subsequently published by the University of Georgia Press, a noble beginning for a book that would, in physical terms at least, meet such an ignoble end. Perhaps, given this impossible intersection of fact and fantasy, a worthy book would have been saved from its highly unusual fate.
The problem for The Bear Bryant Funeral Train begins with a text published in 1934 by Farrar and Rinehart, Stars Fell on Alabama—which contains, among other ephemera, a list of fiddler tunes, descriptions of African-American rituals, and the legend of a two-ton alligator that devours a twelve-year-old boy. The author was a New Yorker named Carl Carmer who came South to teach at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He spent several years exploring remote corners of the state, and later distilled his experiences into a 294-page book that is part fiction and part journalism, a pastiche of observations with titles like “Footwashing,” “Flaming Cross,” “The Prophetess of Eutaw,” and “Twilight of the Races.”
In his time, Carmer was a best-selling author, and some consider Stars Fell on Alabama to be a classic text about what may be the most oft-snubbed state of the Union. In a 1936 letter to William Stanley Hoole, Zora Neale Hurston referenced Carmer’s book as an example of the South “taking a new high place in American literature.” The University of Alabama Press reissued Stars Fell on Alabama in 2000, along with an introduction by then-New York Times editor Howell Raines, a Birmingham native whose admiration of Carmer’s book was unmeasured: “Whenever I read the dazzling initial image of the book—when I see through Carl Carmer’s words a blood-colored moon and pine trees standing darkly against the sky—it is possible to understand the power of that old, dark magic.”
Perhaps some sense of “that old, dark magic” was just what Vice was hoping to evoke when he inserted sentences from a section of Carmer’s book entitled “Tuscaloosa Nights” into his collection’s opening story, “Tuscaloosa Knights.” Both stories involve a Ku Klux Klan rally. Both are told from the point of view of a Northerner who views the ceremony with horror. Both are set in the mid-1930s—one major clue to the time period in Vice’s story being the mention of a newspaper article about a tight end from Arkansas named Bear Bryant who, despite playing with a fractured fibula, led the Crimson Tide to a big victory over Tennessee.
But if Vice was counting on his readers’ familiarity with Carmer’s work, he misjudged the audience. After Tuscaloosa public librarian Margaret Butler pointed out the similarities between the two texts, the University of Georgia Press quickly revoked the award and recalled all unsold stock of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Within days of the recall, the entire stock had been pulped.
Vice’s staunchest defenders consider his unattributed use of several of Carmer’s sentences to be a clear act of literary allusion, while his harshest critics call it outright plagiarism. Vice himself has said that his story was a play on the original, pointing out his longstanding and sometimes public appreciation of Carmer’s work, characterizing his failure to directly acknowledge Carmer in The Bear Bryant Funeral Train as “a terrible mistake.”
Six months before The Bear Bryant Funeral Train was released, Jake York, editor of Thicket, an online journal of Alabama writing, published Vice’s “Tuscaloosa Knights” side by side with an excerpt from Carmer’s book—an excerpt containing the very lines Vice used in his own story—on the Thicket website on March 1, 2005. In his passionate defense of Vice in “Fell in Alabama: Brad Vice’s Tuscaloosa Night,” which appeared on the storySouth website in November of that year, York describes reading “Tuscaloosa Knights” for the first time: “I heard the echoes of Carmer right away, and I thought Vice had done a smart thing. He had written his story right on top of Carmer’s, set his own characters in the very Tuscaloosa Carmer described among the very Klan that disgusted Carmer….”
York goes on to describe what he sees as a kind of literary highwire act, in which “Vice’s story argues for the essentiality of Carmer’s work by making Carmer’s work central to his own, and in doing so makes Alabama a larger place.”
This might be a difficult statement to swallow for anyone who hasn’t read The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, in particular the title story. But the title story is just such a highwire act, set at some undisclosed point in the future, in which an engineer who is responsible for designing the cars that will one day double as our homes uses his spare time to create a Super-8 film—or, rather, a re-creation of a Super-8 film—entitled The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, “not a real document,” but a “computer-generated film made to look like a document.” Vice’s narrator here is a secret archivist in the tradition of Hrabal’s Hant’a. Every weekday, Sonny descends alone into the computer-aided design lab at his company’s offices in Tuscaloosa, “where there is hidden an otherwise secret and forbidden library. There I sift through much forgotten lore and arcana in hopes of recovering something useful or important to the collective spiritual imagination of my people—Alabamians, Southerners, Americans, in that order or reverse—good consumers, one and all.”
Thanks to our hero—who himself had the honor, decades before, of riding in Bryant’s funeral cavalcade—this arcana does not lie fallow. He splices it into the actual footage of Bear Bryant’s funeral train, which stretched for sixty miles circa 1983, “in the old petrol age—anno Domini, as we used to say in school.” Over time, the film has become layered and complex, ultimately presenting itself not merely as a record of the funeral but as a commentary upon iconography, upon demagogues, upon a moment in Southern culture when a football coach could be fashioned as “a superlative invention of the South,” commanding as much respect among his people as a Gandhi, and drawing more disciples in his postmortem march than Elvis or Martin Luther King, Jr. Among the mourners in Sonny’s film are Yuri Andropov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Idi Amin, and Ho Chi Minh’s eldest son, along with “parliamentarians from the Hague, senators from the Kinesen” and “a caravan of oil sheiks from Yemen.” A few faces from the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, including John Lennon and Johnny Weissmuller, are included for good measure. The film’s climactic scene, in which the great ears of Walt Disney’s rodent mascot are toppled in bloody disgrace, shows Aleister Crowley tumbling onto the Vargas girl.
In other words, the engineer-cum-filmmaker takes liberties, as artists are wont to do. He uses the tools available to him—in this case, sophisticated imaging technology—to marry the past to the present, to supplement the facts of an important moment in history with his own version of that moment. From the raw material of the past, he creates a riveting fiction. The narrator, upon sharing the film with a coworker named Uva who arrives offering him a deal with the Devil, aka Disney World, describes it thus: “Just after the stock footage, there is a cut in the film. The film reopens. The lens focuses on a mighty team of mules….” The mules are pulling a green cotton wagon loaded down with old ladies silently mouthing the words to “Amazing Grace.”
Uva wants to know whether the film works “on an allegorical level.”
“Allegorical, anagogical, literal,” Sonny replies. “Like an epic poem, they all collapse into one point at the end.”
In the writing courses I teach, we sometimes find ourselves discussing the key to a story, that bit of metaphorical iron, notched and narrowed just so, which unlocks the work in some way, opening a door onto its mysteries. One might read Sonny’s words as such a key to the title story; or, to take it further, one might read the title story as a key to the entire collection. Maybe it’s a stretch to say that Carmer’s chilling descriptions of the Klan rally are the “stock footage” after which Vice’s own work of art “reopens” onto a bigger, allegorical story of our modern-day South; maybe not. But I do believe a good argument can be made that Vice, as author and archivist, has recovered “something useful or important to the collective spiritual imagination,” has continued a conversation about Alabama’s difficult past that should not, in good conscience, be relegated to some dusty basement of the mind.
Even if a reader were to perform the intellectual acrobatics necessary to accept Vice on these terms, though, they’d first require access to the stories, which would need to be hunted down in the various literary journals and anthologies in which they appeared. This makes the University of Georgia Press’ hasty response all the more distressing. By performing a radical act of erasure upon Vice’s book, the Press curtailed an important conversation before it could even begin. What emerged instead was a cacophony of galvanized voices battling it out in the blogosphere and, to a lesser extent, the print media, debating not the merits of the collection, which few had actually had read, but instead circling around the subjects of plagiarism, allusion, postmodernism, and legal issues of copyright—a worthy discussion, but one which, by the omission of the book in question, was inherently incomplete.
A discussion of the book itself might have taken into consideration that The Bear Bryant Funeral Train is a work of art that cannot be dismissed even in light of the author’s own mistakes. In “Stalin,” a retired history teacher is haunted by the cruelty of parents toward their children and by his own inability to save the students who passed through his school over the years. Months after reading the story, I, too, am haunted—by the image of a little girl who has no teeth: “She was a sad creature, an animal that wanted to be a little girl. Pale skin, freckles, waxy yellow hair. She was too skinny.” This girl reminds the narrator of another child, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, whose father once “grabbed her by the hair, dragged her to the dance floor, and shook her by the scalp until her legs began to move about.”
In “Mojo Farmer,” a widowed farmer plants a garden of murdered cats and whispers secrets to a scarecrow whom he has lovingly dressed in his dead wife’s clothing. In “Artifacts,” a cookbook writer creates a delicate dish of chocolate duck while remembering her young son’s death by drowning; as the story ends, the grieving husband and wife are playing tug-of-war with a swan that the husband killed on a golf course. In “Tuscaloosa Knights,” escapees from an insane asylum move unknowingly toward a gathering of hooded men.
Amid the danger and gothic darkness, there is also humor: “When I was very young, my parents did their parental duty and took me to Orlando to visit Disney World, which for them was kind of like making a pilgrimage to Mecca,” says the aforementioned Sonny, narrator of the title story. “In those days, Orlando was the holy city of the middle class.”
While The Bear Bryant Funeral Train is deeply informed by the South in which it is set, this is fiction that looks beyond clear regional boundaries—beyond the legendary football coach of the book’s title and the Klan rally of its most controversial story—to a larger world of Khrushchev, the Black Plague, the Great Depression, and espionage. And this, in large part, is why I find the book so moving. Far from forming an insular perspective of the South, it is a picture of a region as part of a broader history.
This is where I confess that I left my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, for bigger cities a long time ago and rarely looked back. Like the narrator of “What Happens in the ’Burg, Stays in the ’Burg,” who, during a very successful fish fry on his lawn in Russellville, Arkansas, wishes he were at a martini party with his cold but graceful ex-wife, I occasionally have the feeling, while sipping a martini at some swank hotel bar, surrounded by slick beauties in fishnets and men in elegant pants, that I’d much rather be elsewhere: drinking cold beer at a fish fry. And like The Moviegoer—Walker Percy’s unforgettable tale of soul-searching, polite society, and secretarial lust in New Orleans, which I have carried with me to places as far-flung as Reykjavík and Beijing just to have a taste of home in my backpack—The Bear Bryant Funeral Train serves as a kind of uneasy reminder of the landscape and culture I left behind. Uneasy because it holds no tidy answers to racism or poverty or, in fact, the demagoguery of its title story, nor does it offer up quaint suggestions of mint-julep-infused yarn-spinning on wraparound porches. And yet, reading these stories, I cannot help wondering what it would be like to hear them on just such a porch, holding just such a drink in my hand, tasting the mint and the cool, slippery ice. In this happy fantasy I am barefoot and wearing one of those summer dresses Irwin Shaw was so fond of. One does not often go barefoot or wear summer dresses in my adopted hometown of San Francisco.
Which is to say that there are so many different lives we can choose, and no matter how well-suited we are to the one we end up with, there’s no banishing the longing for the one we turned away from. There are places a person can leave without feeling some regret, but I’m not sure you can ever leave your childhood home without, one day, feeling the sting of it. On the phone recently, Vice told me that he will be moving to Pilsen in the Czech Republic in the summer of 2007 to help expand the University of West Bohemia’s foreign language summer school. It had been a long road with The Bear Bryant Funeral Train—the excitement of winning the prize, the thrill of publication, the terrible sadness and confusion of seeing the book destroyed after so long and careful a gestation, plus the difficulties he faced at Mississippi State University, where he was an Assistant Professor of English when the controversy began. After Vice’s book was recalled by his publishers, Mississippi State formed an ethics comittee to investigate his case. The committee found him guilty of “misconduct in ethics in research and other scholarly activities” and recommended that he be reprimanded. While it did not specify what form the reprimand should take, aside from the suggestion that The Bear Bryant Funeral Train be discounted from any academic evaluation of Vice, the committee specifically advised against a termination of his contract with the school. Vice President of Research Colin Scanes, however, disagreed with the recommendation, and instead moved to dismiss Vice, one year before he was to go up for tenure.
I like to think of Vice there in the land of Kafka and Hrabal, Havel and Vaculík and Klíma, traversing the complicated streets of Prague or wandering Pilsen’s ancient underground cellars while working out, in his mind, a new story. Already, in his fiction, one senses the echoes of larger spaces; it is the sign of a well-read writer that the voices of Eastern Europe can vibrate beneath the sentences in a book of stories almost entirely set south of the Mason-Dixon line.
The books mentioned within The Bear Bryant Funeral Train are varied: Khrush-chev’s memoirs; The Deipnosophists, Athenaeus’s hefty text on literature, politics, and food, among other matters; and The Moviegoer, in which Vice found the perfect epigraph: “Lordy lord, the crazy talks we have. If people could hear us, they would carry us straight to Tuscaloosa.” Vice, who was born in Tuscaloosa and completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama, has described the book as a “love letter” to his hometown. Ultimately, however, it was Carmer’s unacknowledged text that left the most indelible impression.
The good news is that it looks as though The Bear Bryant Funeral Train will have a second life. As this article was going to press, I learned from editor Jim Gilbert that River City Publishing has plans to issue a new edition of the book in the spring of 2007. The revised version will more closely mirror Vice’s 2001 dissertation from the University of Cincinnati, which contained many of the stories that ended up being published as The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Unlike the UGA Press edition, it will be divided into two sections, the latter of which is set entirely in Tuscaloosa. In his dissertation, Vice described the Tuscaloosa stories as an “attempt to reconcile the seemingly incompatible movements of Southern regionalism and international postmodernism.” In that vein, it contained epigraphs by Albert Camus, Basho, Guy Davenport, Bear Bryant, and, more importantly, Carmer, all of which will reappear in the River City edition. One new story will be added, along with an introduction by Vice and a compendium of essays by John Dufresne, Jake York, Erin McGraw, Don Noble, and myself, among others.
Like the film The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, the new version of Vice’s book proves that no matter how “finished” a work of art may seem, it remains, in many ways, a work in progress.
“If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh,” Hant’a declares in Too Loud a Solitude, “because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.”