North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
REDEMPTION, INSPIRED AND QUESTIONED a review by Lisa Proctor Joseph Bathanti. Half of What I Say Is Meaningless: Essays. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2014. Earl Swift. Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.
LISA PROCTOR teaches writing at ECU where she has served on the editorial board and as an assistant editor of NCLR. JOSEPH BATHANTI earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. The Pennsylvania native moved to North Carolina in 1976 to work in the VISTA program and has remained in North Carolina ever since. He is currently a Professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. His novel Coventry (Novello Festival Press, 2006) was reviewed in NCLR 2008. Read more about Bathanti with the review of his recent prize-winning poetry collection, also in this issue. Virginia writer EARL SWIFT is the author of four previous books of nonfiction: Journey on the James (University of Virginia Press, 2002), Where They Lay (Houghlin Mifflin, 2003), The Tangierman’s Lament (University of Virginia Press, 2007), and The Book Roads (Houghlin Mifflin, 2011). This fifth brings the journalist to Eastern North Carolina, Moyock, NC, specifically, where his subject, a 1957 Chevy, winds up.
Half of What I Say Is Meaningless and Auto Biography, the latest offerings from Joseph Bathanti and Earl Swift, respectively, each reflect on the interplay between our individual and collective histories and how our connections to each other – and to the world – can serve as a path to redemption. Each author’s approach is compelling, but their use of the checkered pasts of key characters (including, in Bathanti’s case, himself) to explore these themes is quite different – and ultimately reveals what I would posit is a fundamental weakness in Auto Biography. Former North Carolina Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti begins his collection of essays, Half of What I Say Is Meaningless, by wrestling with how, for creative nonfiction writers, there is an “involuntary – and even wholly innocent – reflex to fabricate when memory falters” (1–2). The genre, he writes, is “nitroglycerine . . . rocking precariously in a rickety wagon driven by drunken mule skinners, pulled by drunken mules, along a mudscarred, rocky, potholed road” in the way it must balance truth with invention (4). Bathanti tells us that in his own efforts to “figure out what happened,” even he can’t be sure of what’s real (5). I say, no matter. The beauty and depth of Bathanti’s storytelling is seductive. We would readily forgive the fabrications; we don’t want to question its authenticity. For the reader, the rawness of emotion in Half of What I Say Is Meaningless is too real not to be real. Bathanti treats every environment, every relationship, every experience as unique – and meaningful because of its uniqueness. In “Blind Angels,” a poetry reading in Bathanti’s hometown, Pittsburgh,
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becomes a catalyst for the author to ruminate on his ambivalence toward Catholicism and his ardent desire for forgiveness and redemption. His early experiences at confession are almost harrowing – “a dizzying collision within my seven year old cranial vault between metaphysics and mathematics.” He is plagued by guilt that he cannot remember exactly how many times he has committed a given sin. The urgency in his prose here is striking: “I was not only distraught gauging precisely the quantity, the sheer freight, of my mortifying transgressions; but, more than anything, catatonic at the thought of admitting to my Confessor, [within] an inch of my face, in a totally blackened box the size of a phone booth, that staggering sum” (107). By the time he reaches puberty, he has had enough. It’s no longer about the minor infractions of childhood. Now his sins are “capital crimes” that he is “too ashamed, too scared” to confess (108). The burden of committing the sins is bad enough, but the additional weight of lying about them is just too much. His absolution is to walk away from confession forever. But, as is true with most things in life, it’s not that simple. An encounter with an inebriated homeless man outside the gallery where he gave a reading reminds him how much forgiveness does matter to him. The urgency, panic even, that fueled Bathanti’s childhood guilt gives way to gratitude, and yes, forgiveness. He realizes that this “dispossessed, heartsick, homeless derelict” is his “savior,” who “suffers in [Bathanti’s] place.” When the man asks for a hug, Bathanti obliges. When the man asks for money, this time Bathanti ignores childhood admonitions