56
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
We Are All In It by Fred Chappell
on the occasion of receiving the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration
above right Fred Chappell and his wife, Susan Nicholls Chappell,
reading “A Last Glimpse of the Traveler” at the 10th Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming, Greenville, NC, 20 Sept. 2013 (Watch this reading from the event’s website.)
decide purposely to lag behind the pace of the greater mass, adhering to a stance so conservative it almost seems subversive. One of the grand virtues of Dr. Samuel Johnson was that he was not an innovator. His achievement was to create an elevation from which the prior achievements of literature could be viewed. Other writers break out in front. The greatest strengths of Laurence Sterne were his initially puzzling innovations. Of writers like Sterne – some of them greater than he – we often say that they are or were “ahead of their time.” When those authors appear, it becomes our task to try to catch up. To try to understand Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, Whitman, and certain other visionaries, their contemporary readers had to readjust their bifocals, scratch their wigs, and sneeze repeatedly. Many if not most of us probably do not see the challenge of such newfangled writers as a pressing one. Even if we are not content with the state of things as they are, we are reluctant to expend the time, energy, and eyesight upon untried vistas. This situation must be a lonely one for those particular writers – or artists, composers, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers. I attempted to portray this set of complications in a little allegorical poem called “A Last Glimpse of the Traveler.” The speaker is an inhabitant of a lonely village in an indeterminate time period. He voices the sentiments of the townspeople when he addresses the visionary traveler whose goal he cannot sight, whose mission he cannot comprehend, whose strength of determination he cannot measure. This journeyer pauses for a moment in this small hamlet and the speaker addresses her: photograph by donna kain
I am very proud indeed to have been given the Roberts Award for Literary Inspiration. I do not know the names of the members of the inevitable committee that came to this surprising decision, but I like to think they are all women and men of impeccable literary taste, Solomonic judgment, and inviolable character. Yet – how am I to square this thought with the fact that they lit upon my name as a recipient? Let us stipulate that I do not deserve the Roberts Award. There are two advantages in this proposal. First, it allows me to feel that I am getting away with something that doesn’t belong to me. That is a nifty perverse pleasure, and at my age pleasures almost have to be perverse to be enjoyable. Second, it allows me to accept the award not as a single person but as an informal, self-appointed representative of so many other teachers of literature and literary composition in our state. If I may be permitted the latitude not to regard this honor as proceeding to an individual person, but to a member of a large, unorganized – or disorganized – group that believes that the task of literature is to describe our ways of understanding and misunderstanding our universe, then I shall feel even more greatly honored. It has long been my belief that the composition of literature and its dispersal and interpretation are all communal efforts. Sink or swim, flip, flop, or fly – we are all in it together. But there are some situations in which the thought does not apply. Some individual writers
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