And now, if Anthony Hatcher has a say
in it, Jim Ross is in line for one more last hurrah. Hatcher has completed a 27-page biographical essay of Ross with the working title “It Didn’t Sell Much: The Publishing Struggles of Novelist Turned Newspaperman.” The North Carolina Literary Review, an annual publication put out by East Carolina University in Greenville, plans to publish the essay next summer. Hatcher then hopes to use the essay as an introduction to a new volume of Ross’ complete short fiction — the eight stories he published in his lifetime, plus the best of the unpublished ones Hatcher exhumed from the boxes of Ross’ papers. Meanwhile, Hatcher has filled a 6-foot-tall bookcase in his home office with volumes by writers with Greensboro ties who were part of Ross’ world — Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Donald Justice, Randall Jarrell, Fred Chappell and Bob Watson — as well as Ross’ siblings and literary relatives, including his niece Heather Ross Miller, a novelist and poet. As he continues to gather string and immerse himself in this world, Hatcher has begun writing Jim Ross’ life story. He wants to have a solid draft of a biography in hand before approaching publishers, hopefully within a couple of years. Then, if all goes well, he’ll make another push to get In the Red polished and published, and try to persuade a publisher to reissue that underappreciated classic, They Don’t Dance Much. What finally convinced Hatcher to push ahead with this daunting job of reviving a long-dormant literary reputation? “I feel Jim Ross has a fascinating story,” Hatcher says. “He is a fascinating story. Here was a guy who had such promise — he met Flannery O’Connor, he was endorsed by Hemingway, he traveled in the circles of fame — and yet he didn’t break out himself. It’s such a human-interest story. It’s not that he’s a Harper Lee, but he wrote a quality book that was admired by Raymond Chandler, by Flannery O’Connor, by top literary agents. He met with Maxwell Perkins. He’s a guy who will be of interest to writers, to people who
are aspiring writers. This is a familiar story — the guy who just didn’t make it. He tried. He had talent. But he didn’t get there.” So it’s a sad story? “When I finished the first draft of the biographical essay, I showed it to Marnie and she said, ‘You’ve done a nice job, everything is accurate, but this is so sad the way you’ve written it. Jim wasn’t a sad man.’ She said he was frustrated by the rejection, but it didn’t ruin his life.” Hatcher reworked the essay to soften the tone, reasoning that Marnie Ross should know such things. After all, she married the man because he made her laugh, and they were happy together for twenty-five years. And those who knew Jim in the last years of his life, even as he grew stooped from painful osteoarthritis and the weight of accumulated rejection, will tell you that right up to the end he had a fine head of sugar-white hair, eyes that danced with mischief, and a crackling sense of humor that nothing in the known world could extinguish. Jim Ross was the opposite of a sad man. He was a man who was elated — and endlessly amused — by life. “In some ways it’s a sad story, but I get the impression he still had a good life,” Hatcher says. “He was an excellent reporter. He wanted to be a writer, and he became a writer — not the kind of writer he thought he would be, which was a novelist, but he wrote for more than thirty years. And I think his story is worth telling. Here’s a guy who produced quality work, who made people happy. I have heard no one speak harshly of him. Everybody loved the guy. Everybody. He touched a lot of lives.” OH Bill Morris is the author of the novels Motor City and All Souls’ Day. He worked as a reporter for the Greensboro Record in the late 1970s, when he met Jim and Marnie Ross and first read They Don’t Dance Much. He returned to Greensboro as a columnist and feature writer for the News & Record from 19891996. He now lives in New York City, where he is a staff writer for the online literary magazine The Millions. He is at work on a novel about Detroit.
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The Art & Soul of Greensboro
September 2012
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