of farmer-storytellers.” Most farmers of Nate Shaw’s generation belonged to the tradition of farmer-storytellers, and I am sure that a great many of them were good talkers indeed. Nor is he remarkable for what Mr. Rosengarten calls his “awesome intellectual life.” The adjective seems to me overwrought, as if Mr. Rosengarten were trying to make Nate Shaw admirable, which is not necessary. With us, the phrase “intellectual life” suggests a life exclusively intellectual, a life apart from action, and Nate Shaw was remarkable because the life of his body and the life of his mind were one life. He had, obviously, a superior intelligence, but he was not a modern intellectual. His thought was not speculative or experimental; it was not an overrefined maundering among “alternatives.” It was a meditation upon experience, always related to acts.
Review of Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
Shaw’s words have the energy of passionate knowledge; he speaks as a man who has seen. It is characteristic of him to say, “Well, I looked into all that and seed . . . ” He had no schooling; his book-learning is all described in one sentence: “I can put down on paper some little old figures but I can’t add em up.” But he says of the failure of his lawyer’s appeal, following his sentencing for the shooting: “That was my education right there—” In a sense, it must have been. That event—his stand against the deputies and his imprisonment—was not only the great event and the turning point of his life; it was also his life’s measure, its clarification or revelation. He speaks with the pressing awareness that “I understand a heap of things today more clear than I did in them days . . .” And sometimes his memories hasten and crowd him almost beyond coherence. He exclaims at one point: “O, these words brings up others and they won’t wait . . . ” His words are principled by his certainty that “there’s nothin honorable before God but the truth.”
I am troubled because Mr. Rosengarten’s name appears on the book as author rather than editor, which he was, and because the book is subtitled The Life of Nate Shaw rather than The Autobiography of Nate Shaw, which it is.
More troubling is the comparison of Shaw with Faulkner, initiated by Mr. Rosengarten in his preface and followed already by several reviewers. Mr. Rosengarten commits himself to this supposed likeness with a simple-mindedness hard to believe: “Faulkner writes about the white south; Shaw speaks about the black. Both focus on the impact of history on the family.” The first sentence falsifies Shaw and Faulkner both; if there is any single truth basic to southern history, it is that there never has been a “white south” or a “black south.” The second sentence is useless because, although it is at least partly true, it is probably just as true of most writers. The great difference between Shaw and Faulkner is passed over lightly indeed in the concession that one speaks and the other writes. That is a fundamental difference, and other important differences follow from that one.
The idea seems to be that until the blacks have their Faulkner they won’t be “equal”; Mr. Rosengarten’s sentences fairly sigh with relief. It is as if liberality requires us to pretend that the whites and the blacks are exactly alike in everything but color, like salt and pepper shakers. This could be agreed upon, maybe, and we could make an etiquette of ignoring our differences. But what if the differences do exist? And what if the two races are useful and necessary to each other because of their differences? And what if they have access to certain aspects of their experience and their common nationality only through each other? Shaw is valuable to us precisely because he is not like Faulkner. He is richly different.
II
Shaw’s vocabulary and usage will sometimes seem strange to readers not familiar with his region and way of life, but it will never seem empty or inert. When he speaks of “correspondin” a girl or says that his son “got stout enough to accomplish a place,” we have no trouble understanding what he means, and we are also aware that his words convey insight beyond the reach of conventional usage. He speaks always in reference to a real world, thoroughly experienced and understood. His words keep an almost physical hold on “what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me. . . ” Surely this is the power that we have periodically sensed in what is called (vulgarly) “the vulgar tongue.” It is a language under the discipline of experience, not of ideas or rules. Shaw’s words, always interposed between experience and intelligence, have the exactitude of conviction, whereas the words of an analyst or theorist can have only the exactitude of definition.
In a recent issue of Saturday Review/World, R. Buckminster Fuller has an article called “Cutting the Metabilical Cord,” which is based on a virtually unqualified assumption that humanity has begun a process of unlimited improvement by way of technological progress. “Humanity knew very little when I was young,” he says. And he recalls the “skilled craftsmen” he worked with on his first jobs; these people “had vocabularies of only about 100 words, many of which were blasphemous or obscene.” Thanks to radio and television, however, this lamentable ignorance has been corrected by a “historic information-education explosion and its spontaneous edifying of humans in general.” This “explosion” of edification “completely changed the speech pattern of world-around humanity from that of an illiterate ignoramus to that of a scholar.” These and many similar assertions culminate in a sort of Creed for Modern Times: “The great intellectual integrity of universe has cut the metabilical cord of tradition and parental authority—putting youth on its own thinking responsibility.” And then occurs the essay’s only note of caution, which is immediately buried beneath another avalanche of technological mysticism: the young people of 1974, “whose metabilical cord of tradition has been cut, now need a few years time to develop competence to take over the world affairs initiative, and that is exactly what universe is apparently about to do next.”
It may be that Mr. Fuller’s language can be put to some good use. I hope so. It could certainly be used to promote the sale of television sets. Should his jargon catch on with the public, it could also be useful to any politician whose designs required a fit of public optimism. This gobbledygook of “universe” is representative of a lot of the sub-tongues spoken now by people who lead “awesome intellectual lives.” It is speech so abstract, so far removed from anybody’s experience, that it is virtually out of control; anything can be said in it that the speaker has the foolishness or the audacity to say.
There is not a phrase in Nate Shaw’s story so abstract, naive, ignorant, insipid, or tasteless as this language of Buckminster Fuller. An “uneducated” man whose speech was formed long before radio, Shaw is nevertheless well able to say whatever he thinks, and he thinks whatever he needs to think as a man of exceptional competence, both practical and moral. In moments of joy or grief, he is capable of a sort of poetry. The burden—and so the discipline—of Shaw’s language is what he knows from experience. For that reason nothing he says, if correctly quoted, will ever be useful to a salesman or a political propagandist. There is not a single slogan in this book. He has no talk of “education explosions” or “metabilical cords.” He does not say “Freedom now” or “Black is beautiful” or “Power to the people.” He says: “My color, the colored race of people on earth, goin to shed theirselves of these slavery ways. But it takes many a trip to the river to get clean.” He says: “They goin to win! They goin to win! But it’s goin to take a great effort . . . . It won’t come easy. Somebody got to move and remove . . . . It’s goin to take thousands and millions of words, thousands and millions of steps . . . . And I hope to God that I won’t be one of the slackers that would set down and refuse to labor to that end.”
That is eminently responsible language. And it is deeply moving—especially when we realize that the man speaking almost in the same breath of faith, doubt, difficulty, and his own willingness to labor is eighty-six or-seven years old. The movement here is characteristic: the swiftly defined hope or vision or ambition, followed by the recognition of difficulty, the implication of labor. And these passages occur among stories that reveal the nature and
