Laughing Stock

By Thomas S. Stribling, Randy K. Cross and Howard Bahr

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In the intense blossoming of American literary talent between the World Wars, T.S. Stribling took his place with Faulkner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and other members of his generation with the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his bestselling novel The Store. In Laughing Stock, Stribling’s autobiography, the gifted writer reflects with humor, irony, and passion on his trajectory from a remote southern town to the literary heights of Paris and New York.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817389253

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Index

AN INTRODUCTION

History, whether of nations or of men, is a sum for which there are two equations. The first is mere ciphering: dates, the antics of princes and kings, the chronicles of parliaments and antique wars. Through these the historian seeks to preserve the Race, in documents ordered and lifeless as a brick. Yet even the learned historians must know there is another reality, lost down the cataract of nights and days which time itself is made of, where ordinary men struggle for a while and are gone. Thus the second equation: the slow accumulation of life upon life where the princes and the kings are but ornaments, if they come to anything at all.

T. S. Stribling of Tennessee, author, traveler, and Pulitzer Prize winner, was not interested in the mathematics of history. For Stribling, history was a convenient stage upon which characters could move in all their diverse humanity, where an author could shift the flats according to his own design. In The Forge, for example, Stribling’s characters are palpable and real, though they inexplicably fight the Battle of Okolona before Shiloh, and encounter Federal troops in north Alabama at impossible times. Thus, so long as the characters ring true, dates and events take care of themselves.

In Laughing Stock, T. S. Stribling’s autobiography, the reader will search in vain for any history whatever. He will find the narrative anchored in a single date: March 4, 1881, the date of Stribling’s birth. Beyond that, history is on its own. World War One, the Jazz Age, the Depression, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor—these noisome artifacts must be supplied by the reader himself, as a kind of chronological Muzak behind the actors on the stage. Early in the book Stribling declares that an autobiography should tell precisely what one remembers about oneself and nothing more . . . I intend to follow this rule strictly. And so he does, strictly.

Though such a cavalier disregard for historical context might seem fatal in an autobiographical narrative, it becomes in Laughing Stock a decided advantage. For Stribling’s is an infinitely human book, uncluttered by portentous events, in which history’s second equation is evoked with charm and delight. Laughing Stock makes neither pretention nor apology. It is funny, irreverent, perceptive, at times lyrical, and is exactly what its author intended for it to be: the chronicle of a literary life.

Stribling began Laughing Stock in 1940, and though it remained unpublished during his lifetime he continued to revise and expand it over the years. In this present volume, the first published version of the autobiography, the editors have been careful to let Mr. Stribling speak for himself. Working closely with Mrs. Louella Stribling, they have been unfailingly honest in their work, so that the finished, publishable product speaks with Stribling’s voice alone. Annotation has been kept to a minimum; only those notes which were absolutely essential to the clarity of the narrative have been included.

The narrative follows Stribling’s career to 1938, a period of his life interesting enough without reference to larger events. Though the title suggests a personality at the mercy of a complex world, Stribling in fact remains very much at the helm, watching, recording, pursuing that which Faulkner saw as the objective of all writing: the conflict of the human heart. Stribling’s tone is ironic, and the voice throughout is that of an observer apart from the stream of life, bemused at the world and at himself. Yet the power of Stribling’s perception remains undiminished by his nonchalance, so that the most inconsequential event can reveal a depth of meaning. At one point in the narrative, Stribling recalls a night off St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, when he lay on the bow of a schooner in the harbor. Across the bay a dance was being held for American naval officers; at midnight the music ended and

. . . the dancers returned to their homes and their ships, the musicians to their drinks, and left a hollow place in the moonlight and the harbor. I lay a long time in this vaguely sweet deprivation. I don’t know whether I was asleep or still awake when the Negro crew came aboard and we spread our sails and crept with the land breeze, very, very slowly to sea, over the sinking moon and under the ghost of morning.

Such lyric passages, surfacing from time to time out of an ironic undertone, contain the essence of Stribling’s romantic, restless spirit, a spirit which ultimately prevails in Laughing Stock.

Indeed, restlessness and romance lay at the very center of Stribling’s life. Born into the post-Reconstruction South, his mother of Alabama plantation stock and his father a veteran of the Union army, Stribling was early marked for a dreamer. His father, a practical man, frowned on writing—especially the writing of fiction—as a profession. But Tom, from the time he began to write at a spoolcase desk in his father’s store, knew that for him there could be no other life.

Yet, in that time and in that place, a young man who was educated at all was expected to direct that education toward one of three natural alternatives: business, the church, or the law. Tom Stribling reluctantly followed the law, and in 1905 graduated from the University of Alabama law school into a future that was, as Stribling recalled, about as cheerful and hopefully defined as the whirling clouds of an approaching storm. His career as a lawyer in Florence, Alabama, lasted little more than a year, and was sublimely undistinguished. But it marked for Stribling that point in the ordinary, workaday world beyond which he would never go again. For when he left the law he embarked once and forever on the course he had set long before under his father’s disapproving eye. He would be a writer.

In the years that followed, Tom Stribling pursued his craft through a remarkable apprenticeship. For a time he worked on the congenial staff of Trotwood’s Magazine in Nashville. Always restless, he contracted to sell subscriptions for Trotwood’s and set out on a period of wandering that would take him to New Orleans, Cuba, South America and Europe. All the while he wrote and wrote, augmenting his income with the sale of hundreds of prefabricated Sunday-school and adventure stories. Finally, in 1917, a Chicago house published The Cruise of the Dry Dock, and Stribling’s career as a novelist was begun. It was a career which eventually would see him the best-selling and most popular novelist writing between the wars.

In 1931 Stribling published The Forge, the first volume in his great Southern trilogy. The Forge and subsequent volumes (The Store, 1932, and Unfinished Cathedral, 1934) followed the fortunes of Miltiades Vaiden and a score of other characters from an antebellum, agrarian South to the triumph of the mercantile New South in the 1920’s. The trilogy marked the climax of Stribling’s career, as attested by the fact that in 1933 The Store was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and a Boston newspaper of the period heralded Stribling as The Novelist of the South. Most telling, perhaps, are Theodore Dreiser’s remarks in a letter to Stribling dated October 23, 1934:

Your book The Forge . . . is the only novel of all those attempting to cover either the Southern or the Northern point of view, that I think is worth a straw. By that of course I do not imply that yours is in anywhere near the straw category. As a matter of fact, it is as fine an American realistic novel as I know of. There is something so truly human and real about every line of it. More than that, it is fair to life and to the individual in the South who found himself placed as he was at that time. Really, it is a beautiful book—dramatic, amusing, sorrowful, true.

Thus Dreiser, whose name is inseparable from American Realism, touches the heart of Stribling’s success: his realistic treatment of the human condition, in all its lights and shadows.

For all his popularity, however, Stribling’s career as a publishing novelist was ended by 1938. In that year These Bars of Flesh appeared, and though afterwards public expectation was high, no new novels were forthcoming. Stribling would publish essays and occasional short stories until his death in 1965, but never again would his name appear on a published novel. Stribling apparently had come full circle. After These Bars of Flesh he began to look on the novel form exactly as his father had years before; that is, that fiction was useless, and the only writing worthy of accomplishment was in the realm of philosophy, history, or biography. Thus Stribling turned to these forms, culminating his efforts in a 1500-page philosophical treatise entitled The Philosophy of Yes and No, which encompassed religion, sociology, history, ethics, logic and a host of other ideas, some of which he had touched upon in his novels.

Yet this period, 1938-1965, saw the greatest paradox of Stribling’s writing life. For, though he denied the validity of the novel, Stribling continued to write in that genre, completing seven additional novels which he never intended to publish. Such unheralded labor bespeaks a compulsion, a terrific desire to observe the landscape of human experience and record it, get it down on paper, if for no other reason than to deny the arithmetic of histories and biographies. At his home in Clifton, Tennessee, remote from the world, T. S. Stribling sought for the balance of his days to come to terms with humanity. Early in life he had yearned to follow the tenets of Souvestre’s An Attic Philosopher in Paris, and in his romantic soul longed to live in an attic and look down on life aloofly and philosophically from above and think thoughts about it. In Clifton, in the last twenty-five years of his life, he realized this desire in its highest sense.

It is fitting, then, that Laughing Stock should be the product of this final phase of Stribling’s career. It is a work of observation, of wry comment, of delight in all the various shapes of humankind. It is consummately Stribling the humanist, the watcher, and the very words on the page are the stuff of Stribling’s life. When he was a newborn infant, Stribling relates, a neighbor girl put a pen in his hand so that it might guide his life. On the morning of his death Stribling asked again for a pen; it was the last writing he would ever do, and it went into the manuscript of Laughing Stock.

In the end, Stribling’s purpose is suggested by the title he originally had in mind for the work, Patterns of my Life. Although the narrative follows a rough chronology—that is, the principal character grows progressively older—it is shaped by a succession of images and episodes rather than the strict demands of time. Stribling observed: It certainly is a strange thing how incidents, trifles in themselves, penetrate one’s life and grow and grow and change its whole pattern, while other matters of apparent great import fade into nothing. For Stribling these trifles—a certain moon over St. Thomas, a hanged man in Havana, a Tennessee river wrapped in the mists of winter—led ultimately to the sum of experience. This is the lesson of Laughing Stock, and for those of us who will never be princes or kings it is a comforting lesson indeed.

Howard L. Bahr

Oxford, Mississippi

March 25, 1982

CHAPTER I

In which the author claims kin with the reader

We Southerners rake up kin. We graft our family trees to that of almost any stranger we meet, and we lasso with our ancestral lines the illustrious dead. Old Commodore Cornelius Stribling of the Union Navy was one of these illustrious dead. I have to be very careful along here because there was also a Captain Stribling in the Confederate Navy, and I wouldn’t want, at this late date, to get the two navies mixed up again.

The Commodore seems to be the only Stribling who lifted himself to such eminence as to be visible to all the other members of our clan. No person outside of the family ever heard of our Commodore. His deeds do not appear in any history that I ever read. Very probably he was a cautious old sea dog and reached his comparatively high rank by keeping out of the enemy’s fire, and so arrived at his eminence by seniority. But no matter how he did it, he rose higher in life than any other member of our gens and has done more to weld the Striblings of America into one proud, happy, backward-pointing family than any other Stribling who ever lived. I place the Commodore first not only because of his rank, but through certain private designs on the reader whom I mean presently to induct into our charmed circle, and maybe, who knows, sell him this history as a true account of at least one twig of our family tree.

However, I must be honest. All of us Striblings are not commodores. I mentioned Cornelius for window dressing—to put our family’s best foot forward. It has other feet. Only a week ago here in Marianna, Florida, where I am writing this autobiography,¹ I was talking to a member of the CCC camp. He had a Stribling grandmother and he told me his life’s story. He had worked as a salmon guard up in Washington State to keep hijackers from stealing salmon out of the company’s runways. He said that he received good wages from the company itself and from thirty to forty dollars a day from the hijackers. He justified this dual wage by saying that if he didn’t sell out the salmon owners to the thieves, the next man would, and that if he resisted, the robbers would shoot him and get the salmon anyway. In that case, he said, not a single honest man would benefit by the deal. The set-up struck me as a peculiarly Stribling attitude. It held the high moral philosophic tone of our family strain, and yet it was practical too, very practical. I invited my distant cousin to have lunch with me, but he declined; he said that the Marianna restaurants were not up to CCC fare.

My idea of an autobiography is that it should tell precisely what one remembers about oneself and nothing more. Hearsay evidence, logically, should be ruled out of autobiographies just as it is ruled out of murder trials, because if you have to inquire about yourself, that phase of your life forms no part of your conscious existence and should be omitted. I intend to follow this rule strictly. For example, I cannot remember my birth, so I do not feel at liberty to put down the amazing and completely justified portents that accompanied my entrance into a waiting world. I will not tell how, when I was born in Clifton, Tennessee, a neighbor girl asked my mother what object she should first place into my hand. That was important, because the first thing a baby touches, it will work with all the rest of its life. My mother didn’t know what to put in my hand, but she said the Bible. The neighbor girl, however, in glancing around the bedroom, could not find the Bible but saw a pen. So she put the pen into my hand, and that fact has always colored my output of fiction. Then, as a kind of great seal assuring the fulfillment of the prophecy, this neighbor girl, later in life, went crazy.

Moreover, the date of my birth was portentous, March 4th, 1881, the day James A. Garfield was inaugurated. My mother, at the time, said that she thought this was very fortunate because it would help future students of history to remember the exact day President Garfield took his office. But as I say, I do not remember these incidents of my own self, and that is why I omit them from these pages.

The first thing I distinctly remember is crossing a plank walkway between the log kitchen and the log house on my grandfather James Waits’ place in North Alabama. A cousin of mine, Leslie Hewitt, a big boy, wearing a grotesque mask, leaped from under the walkway crying, Boo! In all my subsequent life I have never received so horrible a fright. It seemed to strike me all over in one shattering blow. The fact that my cousin immediately took off his false face and assured me that it was only he and no bugaboo made no difference at all in my hysterical fear. There was something about it profound, fundamental, a horror welling up from the uttermost depths of life. My cousin and his gargoyle mask were mere detonators to touch off my psychic explosion. I sit here now, sixty-odd years distant from that dreadful moment and wonder about it. Why was I so frightened? I knew nothing of monsters or ambuscades or sudden sorties fraught with death; that is, during my brief life in my small body I knew nothing of these things. But before the mystery of my birth, I had existed disparately among men and women for some odd-millions of years, and before them I had existed in extreme diffusion among mammals, among vertebrates and invertebrates. What my cousin really did was to arouse in me prenatal memories of ancient assaults and flights where some strain in me had fled in mortal fear from mortal foes. His jest had lit a lamp within my childish brain that reillumined for an awful instant memories mercifully obscured by endless lives and deaths.

Now, why do I expand this simple incident of a false face and a childish fright? Nothing depends on it save this: I am endeavoring to insinuate myself as undoubtedly his kinsman from an antiquity which even the most credulous D.A.R. would hardly expect to find recorded in the genealogical libraries in Washington. True enough, I am not admitting the reader into the arcanum of the actual Stribling family, but into the pre-Striblings, out of which that remarkable lineage sprang. That is the most I can do under the circumstances and, in common charity, also the very least.

CHAPTER II

In which the writer hestitates between Tennessee and Alabama and finally dumps the reader on the boundry line

During my earliest youth, I summered in Alabama and wintered in Tennessee. I hardly know in which of these states to make a start. Tennessee was gregarious, practical, hard-bitten; Alabama lonely, dreamy, and poetic. In the winter, I lived in Clifton, Tennessee, one of five children. Or to speak more exactly, I was in sequence, one of two, then one of three, and finally one of five children,¹ playing, fighting, cajoling for favors, avoiding chores, leading a busy, harassed, skirmishing sort of life. In Alabama, I lived with my aunt Martha Waits on my grandfather’s isolated farm. We had two servants, Mat, a grown Negro girl, and George, her half-brother.

These two were not precisely servants. They were children of my grandfather’s slaves and thus were the Negro side of our family. Their surname was Waits. They did both the servants’ work and the farm work, too. They received no money as wages, but my aunt Martha, whom we children called Aunt Mon, set aside some land for George and Mat to raise a cotton crop. Whatever this little patch raised belonged to them. I recall, once in early autumn, helping George and Mat pick their cotton. I had a small cotton sack which I dragged between the rows. If I worked more than one morning, I don’t remember it. But when George and Mat sold their cotton, they had an extra nickel which they could not divide between them, so they gave it to me for my labor. That was the second money I ever made. My first was a dime, which my father gave me for reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade before the Masons in the upper story of the old Clifton Masonic Academy.

But to return to George and Mat. George had his great toe cut off of his right foot, and so, to that extent, he was a cripple. He lost it by placing his foot on a chopping block at the woodpile and dursting Mat to chop it off with the axe, and Mat had chopped it off.

Mat would durst anything. She was a large, gloomy, brownish-black girl, part Indian. In all my summer visits to my aunt’s, I never do remember her playing with me except one time, and that was a very treacherous play. The fence around our double log house was a rail fence, ten rails high. I was small enough for Mat to place me on the top rail, then entertain me by upsetting me backwards and catching me as I fell. She did this several times, and it was a very exciting and pleasant game. Finally, she pulled me backwards and let me fall to the ground onto my head and shoulders. That was what she had been nerving herself to do all the time. The fall could easily have broken my neck. I raised a great outcry and rushed to my aunt. When my aunt learned what had happened she threatened Mat with punishment, but there was really nothing she could do. Mat was a big, strong girl, and my aunt was a thin, old woman. The reason that Mat had wanted to hurt me was that she did not like any of the Waits family. She was always gloomy and morose, on account, we thought, of her Indian blood. Her grandfather, an Indian in the North Alabama woods, had gotten to one of my grandfather’s slave women working in the fields. The red man’s resentment and hatred for the whites had resulted in Mat’s flinging me headlong from the rail fence. So I look upon myself as the very last causalty of General Jackson’s Seminole Indian War.

I have not as yet taken the reader inside my grandfather’s house. It was a poor, two-room log house chinked with clay and whitewashed inside and out, with tiny windows like portholes cut high in the walls. It had an attic above the two lower rooms, and this attic had in it a single small square window like a porthole. In fact, that is what the windows were, portholes, a heritage from Indian days. Naturally, I did not know these things when I lived in the house. It was then simply my grandfather’s home set in a yard quite bare save for two or three gaunt blackjack trees, and beyond lay the poor rolling clay fields thrusting up scrawny black cotton stalks. I am sure that I must have seen the fields green in the summertime, but my memory always shows me a fading autumn picture, brown and black and dead.

My grandfather’s house did not face the public road that ran past the place. It turned its side to the road as if, notwithstanding its poverty, it were haughty and indifferent to all comers and goers. This was because my grandfather James Waits came from South Carolina, and in Charleston all the houses do so stand, facing each other’s backs with gables lifted in disdain for the passerby. And so James Waits built his.

My thoughts keep moving thus around and about the outside of the old log building because to enter it renews a childish solemnity, if not gloom. The living room on the left of the boxlike hall that separates it from the company room is, as I have intimated, dark and bare with a great stone fireplace at its end. In my memory, in front of this dark, cavernous fireplace is drawn up a bed, an old corded bed, on which, under a sheet, a motionless figure lies. The figure is always there, night and day, without sound or movement, save, when awake, the batting of its eyes. It is my grandfather James Waits, paralyzed even to his finger tips, unable to utter a sound to let his wants be known.

My aunt Martha was his constant attendant summer and winter, because she was the unmarried woman among his children and so came to this lonely unending vigil with a gloomy black girl as her help. But I wonder what my grandfather himself thought, a bleached old man looking fixedly at one point in the low smoky ceiling just above his head.

In his days of movement, my grandfather was a man of consequence for his neighbors, if not for himself. He was a neighborhood politician, a writer of deeds, mortgages, and wills for his less-literate neighbors, all done free of charge, out of pioneering neighborliness.

He was a boisterous, storming, disputatious man with secession arguments on his tongue’s end and almost the whole of the Bible committed to memory, not for practice certainly, but for religious debate. He rode all over the countryside arguing religion and politics, canvassing for his candidate, whomsoever he might be, and never ran for any office himself. He had a queer habit of never allowing a meal to catch him at home. When mealtime came, he arose, went to the big front gate where his mare, Old Mag, stood always hitched and ready, and rode away. In vain did my grandmother, my aunt Martha, my mother, or any of my uncles and aunts (there were twelve of them in all) rush out of the house yelling Pap! Pap! Come back, dinner is ready! or Supper is ready! He rode persistently away through some deep anti-prandial instinct, and hours later, when the meal was all over, he would return home and eat. And odd to say, my brother to this very day is touched somewhat by this meal-avoiding instinct. And my sister-in-law, his wife, will look at me across the table in Tennessee and say, Why won’t he come to his meals? And I answer, "His grandfather never