1974 1st Edition Jericho The South Beheld by Hubert Shuptrine and James Dickey

Description: Offered for sale is a 1974 1st Edition Jericho The South Beheld by Hubert Shuptrine and James Dickey. Large "Coffee Table" style book. 13" x 16" book with many illustrations. Also included is a Hubert Shuptrine Print of his "Late Afternoon". Print is 11" x 15" Thank you kindly for your interest in my listing. Jericho By ELI EVANS JERICHO By James Dickey and Hubert Shuptrine. Hubert Shuptrine, a painter, and James Dickey, the Georgia-born poet, traveled through the South together and the result is an unusual book combining the talents of both artists with over one hundred water colors and drawings by Shuptrine and an accompanying text by Dickey. It was a good idea, harking back to Dickey's hero, James Agee, who traveled with photographer Walker Evans in the thirties to produce the classic "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." ("James Agee," Dickey once said, "for me, word by word and sentence by sentence, is the writer I care most for than anybody else I've ever read in any language.") But whereas the Agee/Walker book was published quietly (less than six hundred copies sold) and was an underground classic until rediscovered more than twenty years later, "Jericho" came out with all the yahoos of a rebel yell as the gift book of the past Christmas season in the suburbs from Baton Rouge to Richmond. The sheer bulk of the book has made it an easy target for reviewers to ridicule: 12 1/2 x 16", weighing seven pounds, it could be used as a coffee table itself. The first printing of 150 thousand numbered copies (mine was number 76,362) showed that the good old boys who conceived the book down at Oxmoor House in Birmingham learned well from publishing the successful Southern Living magazine how to manipulate the southern need for status. (Dickey, the former ad man, knew no New York publisher had that kind of whole hog faith in the south as a market.) The press release accompanying the book sets a new standard for Southern Chic, pointing out to sensitive art lovers that the book required "twenty-eight carloads (one million pounds) of paper and thirty-one miles of cloth." It's as if the poet decided to give himself over to the Alabama Chamber of Commerce for a few months. But statistics and salesmanship are not the issue. The book succeeds in capturing that haunting character of the white southern spirit which echoes with the hollow sound of defeat and battered pride. It is astonishing, however, that a book about the south could be written in the seventies that does not mention the black struggle for freedom, that does not even make reference in word or painting to the civil rights movement. The tapestry also fails to acknowledge the emerging south that has registered more than two and a half million black voters since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and has elected more than 1,300 blacks to office including mayors, city councilmen, school board members, sheriffs, and 94 state legislators (there were none in any of the eleven states ten years ago). The story passes over the new south governors of the last decade and the strong image of racial reconciliation that major white political leaders must protect to win the election (even George Wallace has appointed a black to his cabinet). Instead of a young black lawyer arguing his case before an integrated jury more than 375 law students are now in major southern state university law schools), the paintings show the sad faces of a black woman fishing or a group of black folks in the field chopping cotton. It's as if the book were written in 1953, or before that even, before any of the southern present caught up with its tormented past. In some ways, however, no book has caught better the South that white southerners think they live in. If the book has value, it rests in its creation of a nostalgic mood that confirms the white Southerner's view of himself as the citizen of Jericho, the destroyed but resurrected city. Dickey took his title from the book of Joshua: " And the captain of the Lord's host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe off thy foot; for the place whereon thou standest is holy." Says Dickey: "Hubert and I are Southerners. This is one of the reasons we have chosen the title 'Jericho.' That the South has been traditionally, a Bible-oriented culture is only part of the reason. We wished to behold our land, each in his own way, with something as near to Biblical intensity as we personally, could get." "Jericho" is an ironic choice of title in ways that the authors might not have suspected: "Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho" was one of the anthems of the civil rights marches and "the walls came-a-tumbling down" was an allegory for the barriers to freedom and opportunity that the white folks inside the city erected to keep the blacks out. As a Southerner myself, I know that Southern history shrouds the psyche, smothering the present in gauzelike memories as thick as the mist hanging over the Georgia marshes. That's the South that Shuptrine paints Wyethlike - of coonskins and old men whittling, of hound dogs and Confederate gravestones, of broken-down barns and buggies and rocking chairs and moonshine. Dickey seems blinded by the sights and tastes of the South, intoxicated with the smell of baking corn bread and the sounds of fried okra sizzling (recipes included in the book). This aspect of the Southern character thrives not only on the abandoned plantations, but in the hearts of the common men that Dickey recalls - the wild hoop-and-a-holler possum eaters, skinning rabbits and marrying kin until their genes were as played out as the land. Dickey, as far as I know, has not directly addressed the civil rights issue since 1961, when he wrote a short essay before he left the advertising business called "Notes on the Decline of Outrage." Dickey knew the score then, for he described the unfolding drama of the Negro struggle as "pointing up, as nothing else in this country has ever done before, the fearful consequences of systematic and heedless oppression for both the oppressed and the oppressor, who cannot continue to bear such a burden without becoming himself diminished, and in the end debased, by such secret and cruel ways.... It is not too much to say that in the 'Negro problem' lies the problem of the South itself." Then how to explain the void in Jericho? For "Self Interviews" in 1968, Dickey talked into a tape recorder for several weeks. He had been criticized for his silence on Vietnam and on racial issues; while Robert Kennedy's funeral was being broadcast on a television set in the next room, Dickey laced the official poets who wrote for the political mood and the critics who "call you 'out of it' if you don't write about the Watts and Washington riots and the march on Selma.... But the universe exists as well. Why should we slight that? One must not be coerced..." While writing "Deliverance" (which also steered away from racial themes), Dickey elaborated on this defense of his creative choice by saying, "It excites me more to write about a river than to write about violence in the streets. And if that's what excites me, by God, that's what I'm going to write about." Dickey, the poet and novelist was on defensible ground, I think, because a writer of his sensibilities must write from the emotional edge, calling on the fragments of experience that move him. But "Jericho" is an interpretive history which announces its theme as "The South Beheld." An omission as immense as egregious as the changes the civil rights movement brought about in black and whit attitudes - not to mention the longing and anger that punctuates all of Southern black history, so tellingly revealed to us in history, so tellingly revealed to us in "All Gods Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw" (in fact they should be read together) - raises a fundamental political and psychological question about the intentions of the authors. Perhaps the question is the sales strategy of their sponsors. With "Jericho," Dickey cannot any longer retreat onto the platform of poetry or the prerogative of creative preference by professing a lack of interest in the Southern racial struggles. No Southern writer can write about Southern history without addressing this tiger directly. "Jericho," then, shouts with Dickey's silence. Had Dickey begun to explore Jericho's impact on blacks, he might have come upon fascinating possibilities. Despite the efforts of the white planters to immerse the slaves in Christian fundamentalism, the blacks turned to the Old Testament for solace and inspiration. They were attracted to the Israelites and their great journey out of the land of slavery into the land of freedom. "Go down, Moses...Let my people go" was a Negro spiritual, not a Baptist hymn; and the river Jordan with its chariots, Daniel's den of lions an Joshua's walls were all real places to the newly freed slaves. Negroes didn't just read the stories in the Old Testament; to the masses of black people, Bull Connor was a modern Pharaoh, Martin Luther King was their Moses, and the marchers were the children of Israel headed for the promised land. Dickey and Shuptrine might have done great things with the Bible theme had they tried to see the South through the eyes of the millions of black Southerners who live there - a history of burned-out churches and the fear of night riders, of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery where King preached in the shadow of the state capitol a block away; of the sit ins at Woolworth's in Greensboro, of the successfully integrated schools of the seventies, of the black mayors in Atlanta and dozens of other cities whom whites helped vote into office. There's another omission, serious because it was conscious and the authors had to work so hard to achieve it. Southern writers like Pat Watters ("The South and the Nation") and John Egerton ("The Americanization of Dixie") have pointed to the crumbling values of Southern life as every little town begin to look alike, every little town begins to look alike, every main street an identical patchwork of chain stores and fast-food diners. Listen to how Dickey coped with the intrusions as he traveled and wrote: "He sent his pictures. I put them on the floor, on the walls, on the ceilings of innumerable cinder-block Southern motel rooms, where, cramped between a Home of the Whopper and a tire-iron-wangling Shell station, I went to sleep looking at a Negro sliding placidly across the ceiling... in the blue of Hubert's water-color sky... the quality of a Southern motel will never be quite the same for me again, because I carry my Shuptrines with me and by the magic of scotch tape can cover my living spaces with the images of my land, with the fixed and limitless mysteries of place." And so it is that this book papers over the real South, shielding its blemishes and changes from the reader; it is successful because its subliminal message tells the book-buying South what it wants to hear- that the last 20 years didn't happen, that they are still living in a white paradise without any recognition of the paradise lost. For Dickey, one of the most publicized American poets since Frost and Sandburg, the gap is profoundly disappointing. He sells his South short. In so many ways, the South is now the most optimistic section of America embarked on its long process of healing while Northern cities are exploding with white violence. Perhaps the South is Jericho, destroyed by war, tempered by protest, and now rebuilt to new strength and vigor on the shoulders of a committed leadership of both races that see black and white cooperation as a key to regional vitality and national reconciliation. That's the Jericho that could have unfolded in this volume; that's the political and emotional reality of the South in the seventies that Shuptrine and Dickey could have captured for the next generation. The tragedy is that the opportunity to do it in such a dramatic format will probably not come again. Eli Evans is the author of "The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South."

Price: 40 USD

Location: El Paso, Texas

End Time: 2024-08-21T16:30:19.000Z

Shipping Cost: 9.13 USD