Oh, Doug. Dammit. You weren’t here long enough to satisfy us. We shall miss you.

***

I recently struck up another email conversation with Doug Marlette. Ya’ll might know him in any one of half a dozen different ways — as the creator of comic strip Kudzu, as a novelist (The Bridge, Magic Time), as an Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist, …hell, the man’s even written a musical!

We discussed his book, Magic Time, (which comes out in paperback published by Picador this summer) as well as life in general, life in North Carolina, new life in Tulsa, OK — well, that’s enough of my introduction, read on…

Magic Time with Doug Marlette

Val: You restore houses, draw political cartoons and a daily comic strip, and you write novels. When you left Chapel Hill for Tulsa, did you look for a house to revive or a house you could move into, one that was work-ready?

Doug: Actually, it was Pick Cantrell in my novel The Bridge who renovates houses. Hard as it may be to believe, nobody has ever accused me of being handy. But because there is such an autobiographical component to The Bridge people confuse me with Pick. Unlike Pick I didn’t beat up my publisher and wasn’t fired from my job, but would have beat up my publisher if it had been legal. And The Bridge’s fictional setting of Eno, North Carolina, is based loosely on Hillsborough, a former mill village where my ancestors once worked in the cotton mill’s weave rooms and where I now live with my family. These days the town features an advanced white-wine-and-Brie-in-bulk community of writers and other bourgeois bohemians. Various members of the community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from the imagination. I thought by giving Pick qualities nobody would ever attribute to me it would inoculate me from criticism. I was wrong. Autobiographical fiction runs the risk of encouraging readers to identify certain characters. Kirkus asked me if the dust-up over the autobiographical content of The Bridge had any effect on the writing of my second novel, Magic Time. If it did, I told them, it was to motivate me to create a character like Carter Ransom, who has such elegance, gravitas, and noblesse oblige that he would never be mistaken for me. I like what Thomas Wolfe said about it: “The sculpture should not be mistaken for the clay from which it is formed.” We found a lovely loft in a beautiful historic art deco building smack dab in the middle of downtown Tulsa.

Val: Compare the literary community of Chapel Hill with that in Tulsa. Does Tulsa have a book store to compare with Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh?

Doug: For starters, I doubt the literary community in Tulsa would ever launch or tolerate or gloss over a book-banning. Oklahoma writers seem to have learned from the embarrassment caused by those in their state who banned John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath what North Carolina writers failed to learn from provincial Asheville’s dumping on Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. Amusing as it is to me that while The Bridge rocks merrily along six years after publication, still selling steadily and winning new readers nationwide, including a growing number of book clubs and Community Reads programs around the country, both the local Orange County head librarian and the chair of the neighboring Alamance County Community Reads program have mentioned to me that to their chagrin and embarrassment they still can’t buy The Bridge in our local independent bookstore, Brick Alley Books in Hillsborough, NC, the town that is the setting for the novel. Frustrated readers have complained to me about that for years and I had to explain that the store’s owner is doing the bidding of Allan Gurganus, Lee Smith and Hal Crowther, turning her bookstore into a sleeper cell of HillQueda (the local name for their fatwa of passive aggression against The Bridge). Of course, that kind of buzz and controversy sells books and I’ve thought of sending HillQueda a dozen roses, but I’m afraid their bush-league behavior has damaged irreparably their reputations, not to mention the bookseller’s, and turned the local so-called writers community into a literary laughingstock. If Kudzu’s Bypass is a town so backwards even the Episcopalians handle snakes, I guess that makes Hillsborough a town so backwards even the writers ban books. But the truth is, as far as I know, I’m the only writer with any actual roots in town. My family goes back generations in Hillsborough and Orange County. The book-burners are recent arrivistes and carpetbaggers and do not represent the real Hillsborough. For instance, a frame shop in town wants to host a book-signing for Magic Time next month but was warned that their business would suffer if they did. I told the owner she could back out if she wanted, that I didn’t think she had any obligation to lose business over this silliness. She said, “No, I’ve talked about it and prayed about it with my daughter, and we still want to host a signing for you because it’s the right thing to do.” Bless her heart and I rest my case. That’s the real Hillsborough.

Tulsa reminds me of Greensboro or Winston Salem now, or Charlotte ca. 1980, sort of like the best of North Carolina before Yankees and traffic, and literary pretense. One of the things I wanted to show in The Bridge was how Eno (standing in for Hillsborough in the shadow of Chapel Hill) with its bourgeois bohemians and Manolo Blahniks trodding on the gravestones of slaves and lintheads had morphed from a mill village into the worst of homogenized America, with the same kind of yuppie upward mobility, shallowness and superficiality we associate with homogenized suburbia or celebrity-addled Hollywood. So far as I can tell Oklahoma has not so far developed the self-infatuation and self-importance that plagues writers elsewhere. I’ve been catching up on reading Oklahoma writers like S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders, Rumblefish, Tex) and Billie Letts (Where The Heart Is) and met them recently and they are delightful. The only independent bookstore I know of in Tulsa is Steve’s Sundries. The Barnes&Noble at 41st and Yale hosted the Tulsa debut of Magic Time.

Val: Do you feel Oral Roberts will influence your life in any way — your writing or your cartoons?

Doug: I hope he heals my backswing. Again, those giant praying hands looming over Oral Roberts headquarters feel like something right out of Jim and Tammy Faye’s Heritage USA in Charlotte. Although Oral and Richard have more political sway in the Tulsa community than Jim and Tammy ever did. Which, of course, is good for the cartoonists.

Val: Have you seen Leon Russell yet?

Doug: No, but Cain’s ballroom is just a few blocks from where I live. And J.J. Cale, (After Midnight, Cocaine) godfather of the Tulsa Sound, used to be an elevator operator in the building where I live.

Val: Back to the serious side. A comic strip is to a political cartoon as a __________ is to a _________. And a novel is to a __________ as a __________is to a __________.

Doug: A comic strip is to a political cartoon as a pick and roll is to a slam dunk. And a novel is to a political cartoon as an entire basketball program is to a slam dunk.

Why?

Lots of differences. What I loved about the editorial cartoon was that it could express so much passion and perception so succinctly. It was all about the image. Simplicity, directness, distillation and as few words as possible. To cartoonists, words are a crutch. No words in a drawing is our hole-in-one. Yet, my own personal test for greatness in cartoonists is the same as it is for novelists. Can you remember their work? Do they change the way you see the world. Do they tattoo your brain? Singe your synapses? Get under your skin? It’s amazing how quickly and efficiently that little test separates the wheat from the chaff.

But when you draw daily political cartoons for as long as I have, you learn that the passing show of politics – who’s the flavor of the month, what’s the hot-button issue of the day — has the approximate shelf life in public memory of a J-Lo marriage. Today’s John Kerry or Donald Rumsfeld is tomorrow’s discarded Ben Affleck. Which is one reason I began drawing my comic strip, Kudzu, twenty-five years ago.

Producing a comic strip seven days a week (no rest on the Sabbath) allowed me to deal with the more enduring, universal themes, issues that, like the kudzu plant, never die. Domineering mothers and unrequited love are the same now as they were a hundred years ago and will feel the same a hundred years hence. The eternal human strivings for love, power, chocolate, hang-time, and the perfect barbecue sauce are forever.

The strip allowed me to deal also with the sheer whackiness of growing up on the fault line between the Old Confederacy and the New South, to explore the comic dimension of coming of age in the kinds of towns I grew up in – as Rev. Will B. Dunn says, “towns so backwards even the Episcopalians handle snakes.” But my comic strip town of Bypass is not just full of eccentrics and Elvis Sightings, the kind of place Nasal T. Lardbottom can win first place in the school Creation Science Fair by entering his brain pickled and preserved in a jar, where Reverend Will B. Dunn can buy the Ten Commandments monument on eBay or perform the first Same Self Marriage. It’s not all Eat, Drink, and See Mary. In the first week of the strip drawn twenty five years ago, Kudzu Dubose, who was based roughly on my awkward adolescence, announced he wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer, but my comic strip alter ego knew something I didn’t.

When asked why there are so many writers in the South Walker Percy said, “because we lost.” He should have added “our minds.” As we southerners all know, there is a low-grade schizophrenia, a free-floating bipolarity, that hangs over the lower right hand corner of the United States, a spiritual disorder, a regional dis-ease, that we all participate in, but don’t recognize until much later, if ever.

That insular Southern madness and dysfunction was embodied for me in my grandmother, my father’s mother, who dominated her family and terrorized me as a child and inspired my first novel, The Bridge. Mama Gracie, as we called her, dipped snuff, packed heat, carried a .38 in her purse, and had a black belt in passive aggression. She could weep at will and brandished that weapon like a truncheon. A museum of hysterical symptoms, she had dreams, visions, premonitions. She was a tour guide of the emotions who specialized in the guilt trip and made sure we were all frequent flyers.

Mama Gracie, was a comic figure in many ways but as much a tragedian as Medea or Lady Macbeth. As those of us who deal with comedy on a regular basis, understand, all humor is rooted in pain. Slipping on a banana peel is funny when it happens to someone else. My childhood felt like one long banana peel

of psychic pain and humiliation, one sustained whoopee cushion of mortification and shame. Humor is a natural defense against these things, and by nature, it skates on the surface of things, plays off the obvious, the superficial the ephemeral. Cartoons, and comic strips, deal with the surface of life. For me writing fiction allowed me to approach the tragic dimension, to get at the subtextual stratas, the sorrow and bitter-sweetness of life that humor seldom can.

Val: How much of your personal or family experience is reflected in Magic Time?

Doug: I had already begun writing Magic Time when I mentioned to my father a couple of years ago that I was going down to Mississippi to do some research on Freedom Summer, 1964. “Remember the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney?” I said, and explained that I was going to attend the fortieth anniversary observance of their deaths. To which my eighty-two-year-old father replied, “Yes, I remember. I was involved in the search for their bodies.” Hooo-kayyyy!

My father had been a Marine Corps lifer stationed in Laurel, Mississippi, at the time that the military and the National Guard were called up to troll the bogues of Neshoba County for the victims’ bodies, as memorialized in the film Mississippi Burning. He was typical of many southern whites, not sympathetic to the Movement, but no Kluxer either. He was a law-abiding citizen who was simply doing his duty when his government asked him to help the FBI find the missing civil rights workers

Similarly, I had no idea growing up that my grandmother had been bayoneted by a National Guardsman in the great textile strike known as the Uprising of ’34, and my discovery, at the age of forty, that the blue-haired, snuff-dipping dominatrix of my childhood was considered a working class hero in some circles led me to write my first novel, The Bridge. My family reminds me of Forrest Gump, who was always present at these significant moments, major historical events of the twentieth century, yet was unaware of their significance to the nation at the time. Maybe my impulse to write is some genetic drive to piece together the puzzle.

Although I grew up a military brat, with a sort of random sense of where I belonged, maybe creating someone as socially rooted as Carter was part of my own upwardly mobile impulse. I was too young–six years younger than Carter– to be involved in the civil rights movement. I was also too cowardly. It wasn’t even an option, not something anyone I knew would be involved in, although the evening news and dinner table conversations were full of the racial skirmishes swirling around us. But being a product of my time and place and parroting my parents’ views, I was far from enlightened. One of my first editorial cartoons– for the high school paper– was critical of Martin Luther King, making the segregationists’ point that violence followed in his wake. This, even though the town where I lived was the headquarters of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (who loom sinister in Magic Time).

I remember when two boys left my phys ed class one day with tears streaming down their cheeks. The teacher explained that the FBI had just arrested their fathers for the murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney.

Val: Can someone who’s never lived in the South successfully write a book about the Civil Rights Movement? I mean… must one experience the South in order to write about it? Do you think your personal geographic history helped when writing this book?

Doug: I don’t think you have to be from somewhere to write about it. Anymore than you have to be a certain gender or race or sexual orientation. It’s a matter of imagination. Still, there may be advantages to being a Southerner, since the Movement was a Southern phenomenon essentially, transpiring for the most part in the lower right hand corner of the country. We southerners recognize the American South as a distinct and peculiar region of this country — the only part of our nation to have experienced invasion, defeat and humiliation, as well as the sin of slavery. This, we believe, makes southerners different from other Americans. Why are there so many Southern writers? “Because we got beat.” explained novelist Walker Percy. It seems we Southerners may have more in common with the vanquished and defeated of the world, than with our own fellow citizens north of the Mason Dixon. Because our homes were burned down and our silverware was stolen we, like the citizens of most of the rest of the planet, may have inherited more of an instinctive feel for tragedy, and a taste for pessimism, a native understanding of Original Sin. As well as a sense of humor. We can laugh at ourselves. And because we were defeated we may have been innoculated and immunized to the naive optimism of America which on the world stage has made us as a nation so sunny and innocent and dangerous.

I write about the South and draw about it because it is what I know and because I believe it is where America reveals itself to itself. This nation, historically, seems to have been destined to forge its soul on southern terrain, to come into itself as a nation on the red clay and piney woods of our region. The South is where it has always played out its problems most vividly, fought and bled and suffered over its most basic principles, and where it has discovered its deepest convictions. Our national spirit of rebellion, revolution and independence has always found some of its most passionate, eloquent voices in southerners from Patrick Henry, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King, Jr. We, as a nation and a people, came into ourselves during the crucible of the Civil War, the struggle for union fought mostly on southern soil, when we went from thinking of ourselves as a loose collective of disparate, individual states to thinking of ourselves for the first time as the United States of America. The civil rights movement of the Sixties, the struggle to extend and fulfill the promise of the Constitution to all of our citizens was fought and also played out on Dixie’s terrain. And now the economic energy of the nation has shifted South, as has political power, with Southerners in control of the White House and Congress, the view from the bridge to the 21st century in a global economy seems to be one of a distinctly Southern perspective.

Val: It seems silly to quote you to you, but… I will. When interviewed by Marjorie McNamara:

It’s harder thinking on multiple layers. I cannot hold all the things in my head at one time. For drawing, for journalism, it’s like instant gratification. I can start a cartoon in the morning, finish it in the afternoon and see it in the paper the next day. With a novel, you never know. The long term thing uses a different muscle.

Doug: It’s harder thinking on multiple layers. I cannot hold all the things in my head at one time. For drawing, for journalism, it’s like instant gratification. I can start a cartoon in the morning, finish it in the afternoon and see it in the paper the next day. With a novel, you never know. The long term thing uses a different muscle.

Here’s what happens. When you’re writing (a novel), you’re open to the world. Things slip in. You’re always aware. There’s something about it that causes you to be alert to things that are pertinent to what you’re doing. I remember being at a dinner party, hearing the story…

Val: When writing a novel, how do you turn off the influences, the input, of what you hear/see on a daily basis? Does drawing a political cartoon and Kudzu sort of “clear the way”? Do you write the novel first, cartoons second or do whichever needs to be first on that particular day?

That said, how important is a sort of forced social hermiticism for a novelist? (nice word, eh? I just made it up, — obviously — hermiticism as opposed to you engaging in hermeticism and avoiding persecution through secrecy!) I mean, Carl Sandburg’s wife made it easy for him to write, pampered him, took on all domestic/financial activity. She loved them goats. How much, if any, does Melinda screen your daily input — I mean, domestically? Do you get all pissy when interrupted or are you able to return to whatever activity you were engaged in without a creative hiccup? Are you creatively ambidextrous — can you draw a political cartoon, write a few pages in a novel, then work on Kudzu with just a few minutes gap between each or is there some specific process for switching gears?

Doug: I seem to thrive on the input. And multiple deadlines. Remember, the kudzu plant grows a foot a night because it absorbs all the nutrients and proteins in the soil around it. I seem to function like a sponge that way. Also journalism teaches you to focus in the midst of chaos. Also with multiple projects if you run out of steam on one thing, or find yourself at a dead end, you can turn to something else. I find that the different projects stimulate me, and feed each other.

Val: Next questions will discuss men v. women as critics. There’s no masculine equivilent of “bitch” — is it easier for men, more socially acceptable, to be cynics, critics, or pundits? Dorothy Parker v. HL Mencken sort of idea… Is that why there is a distinctive gap in the #s of men/women who draw political cartoons? (or am I being southern here and transposing southern-women to all-women?)

Doug: I think humor is an expression of aggression. As is criticism, punditry. The superego, as Freud explained in Civilization and Its Discontents, is the id’s aggression turned back on itself for the sake of the survival of the species. Hence, we have the restriction and restraint of law, The Ten Commandments. Our aggression turned back in on us. It’s how we get civilization. And its probably how we get migraines too. Women have gotten the green light for their aggression more in recent decades hence more women comics and political cartoonists.

One last question:
When Clyde Edgerton read from Lunch at the Picadilly in Greenville, NC a couple years ago, I overheard an audience member say, “He’s as funny as Reynold’s Price isn’t.”

Give me an audience quote from one of your readings, since I won’t be able to travel the 1,300+ mile drive from the NC coast to Tulsa, OK any time soon. (this question is optional, totally optional — come to think of it, any of these questions are optional but you already know that)

Doug: People used to say to Kurt Vonnegut “you write short.” When they met him he was taller than they expected. I used to get something like that with my cartoons. I apparently draw like a short dark, bearded guy. But am actually tallish, and alarmingly have this somewhat affable, open- faced quality, like some Sunbelt Rotarian. It confuses people. They’re surprised when my inner pit bull shows itself.