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Child to the Waters: A review

by Jimmy Cantrell

James Kibler, author of the non-fiction work Our Fathers’ Fields, is a scholar of Southern literature. Most specifically, Kibler is the foremost authority on the poetry of William Gilmore Simms, the most prolific and important antebellum Southern author (Simms’ fiction compares both for good and ill to that of his older northern contemporary James Fenimore Cooper: several Simms novels would translate into exciting movies). Like many first rate scholars of worthwhile poets, Kibler is himself a poet. He now is also a writer of fiction.

Published by Pelican, Child to the Waters (the title is an intriguing play on lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Stolen Child,” which concerns the relations between this world and the Celtic Otherworld and art) is Kibler’s volume of short fiction, and it obviously is the work of a man steeped in lyric sensibility. In fact, it may be best to refer to the volume as a series of prose poems. What sets it apart from most similar works by academic or academically praised poets of recent times is that Kibler’s book is neither casually PC nor self-indulgent and self-referential (which, I must admit, is perhaps the only way to avoid being hounded by the PC Gestapo for not making PC your theology). His lyrics in prose are grounded not in himself but on the solid rock of Southern, specifically Carolina Upcountry, culture.

My view is that Southern literature, when it is worthwhile, is a folklore, folk-culture based literature. It is built from, is rooted in, old tales and talking: family and community histories told in both verse and prose, mostly informal and unpolished. In addition to a keen awareness of the centrality of land and place, and Southern identity and emphases that are bound to land and place (without which you will have ‘southern’ geographic writing but not Southern literature), belletristic Southern literature requires Southern folksong and oral history and discussion of politics and preaching, not necessarily in the works but behind them as trusses. Child to the Waters is a fictional presentation of that truth, one that calls for a new generation to take up the mantle that the vast majority of contemporary Creative Writing and Southern Literature professors and editors at publishing companies and literary journals have declared deservedly dead. And being rather like Flannery O’Connor’s ‘modern’ characters, they believe only that what’s dead stays that way.

The opening paragraph in the “Prelude” is, in both language and philosophy, something that Yeats could have penned: it calls for readers to reject as false “the rules that govern the modern mind, so rigidly shaped by reductive science…. ” The volume’s subject is art, which (if it is art grounded in the eternal verities and family, land, history) is a necessary antidote to the Modern religion of empirical materialism. Art is not religion, nor can it replace religion, as was proven by the failed cultural legacy of what I call High Modernists. But art - which does entertain, though not cheaply and superficially - is necessary to a healthy, vigorous culture - certainly to one that is not focused on Mammon.

“Stories for Christmas, or Willows Like Wands” shows us that art is necessary to ‘travelers,’ those who make no permanent home, but it warns that art not connected to place (which is the vast majority of art that today is promoted and praised) ultimately will use up the world. “Fair Grace By the Eddying Pool” presents the power of folksong. “A Perfect Day for Tyger Fish” provides examples of both art deriving from the natural world and the necessity of art and its meanings being passed down in the family. “The Wee One’s Alphabet Blocks” declares that the poet is necessary to dream the story fully, to see the truth and its significance. “A Knight of the Sheep,” with its title that suggests especially Medieval Christian culture, concerns daydreaming, art, and eternity, linking them ultimately with Irish culture. The absence of art, which has been replaced by consumerism in our Modern become Postmodern world, is revealed humorously in “Transistorized Resurrection” to produce inanity at best.

“Quar” is the tale of furniture maker Mazen Prysock, whose craft is an art that requires of him such focus that he is seen by the community as “quar:” queer, meaning odd, not like the normal ordinary man who works only to make a living and acquire stuff. Kibler furthers the theme by having Prysock and his physically ugly wife produce a beautiful daughter, who sings beautifully to her father’s fiddle, which he made. The community, in its limited way, comes to take a type of pride in these “quar” folk. Indeed, Kibler says by contrast, any community that does not welcome and honor such “quar” folk will culturally and spiritually desiccate itself.

As the book’s title suggests, Kibler sees the possible reinvigoration of Southern culture as best explained by, and perhaps inextricably linked to, Irish cultural and national survival and renewal. “Singin’ Billy, the Song Catcher” is a piece about William Walker, who in 1835 published the widely influential Southern Harmony, which is very much the genesis of Southern folk and church music - that of the whites in the Piedmont and Appalachian areas - being collected and distributed, and then determining most of America’s popular music forms. Kibler’s fiction has young Billy hearing music in all aspects of Southern life: nature - animal and plant and weather and geography - livestock, work, his mother’s hum. The storyteller says of Billy’s mother’s songs, which stirred in him the desire to write and collect the music of his South,

They began in the wet, bright greens of moss-covered mounds on Meath’s broad brow and Armagh’s hills. They carried the magic of pipes and harps, of jigging reels, and the sidhe - the language of blue crags and Tara’s misty far dells (51).

County Meath, in which sits Tara, the seat of the High Kings of ancient Ireland, is, as I have explained concerning the significance of Margaret Mitchell’s use of the name for the O’Hara plantation that means everything to Scarlett, seen as the symbolic cultural and historical center of Ireland. Because of the life and work of St. Patrick, County Armagh (located in today’s Northern Ireland statelet) has been seen as the spiritual center of Ireland since the early Middle Ages. All that understood, the meaning of this passage in Kibler’s tale should be obvious: the Southern folk and religious music that continues to reach the world and has been instrumental to much belletristic Southern literature derives straight from the cultural, historical, and spiritual heart of Ireland. If that is the case, then any revival of Southern culture must reconnect with those Celtic roots fully. Deny - from ignorance (cultural, familial, or theological) or greed or fear or lust for Empire: the reason matters not - those Celtic roots, and you participate in the murder of Southern culture as surely as the man who chops the roots or denies life-regenerating water kills the mighty oak.

“The Golden Cup and Bowl” is as important in this regard as “Singin’ Billy, the Song Catcher.” In it, Kibler presents a stinging picture of the contemporary South while holding out hope. Odell (note the Celtic name) visits the Cullen place (more Irish in the South) and tells a dream. I encourage everyone to read Yeats’ play Cathleen ni Houlihan before reading this story, for it takes off from Yeats’ work: the single most influential work of literature to inspire early 20th century Irishmen to rise for their culture’s survival and for national independence.

Odell’s dream, which is narrated to Hamp Cullen, is about a poor old woman who comes to his door. He knows her generally but has never talked to her. Odell listens to the old woman, but he does not understand, not even when she tells him that what she requires is passion. When Odell has finished with recalling his dream, Hamp asks his friend what that story means, and Odell honestly replies that he has no idea. Worse, he is ready for a nap. Because the old woman is the personification of the South seeking for any men worthy of serving her, just as Cathleen ni Houlihan is the personification of Ireland raped and impoverished by English conquering and rule (which included laws aimed at cultural genocide), the apathy shown by both Odell and Hamp is damning. It represents the average Southerner of the past 40-50 years, including those of significant Irish ancestry. Their ignorance is not their fault, not entirely, for they are products of a government school system that has at its heart great animus against Southern culture. But their apathy is their own doing. Once the moment of grace has come, he who rejects demonstrates his worthlessness, and this pair, typical modern era Southerners focused on daily routine and modern conveniences, are too lazy to try to understand. To them, a tale is mere diversion: pleasant, ephemeral, signifying nothing.

The hope is that Rob-Emmet Cullen overhears Odell’s tale, and his response is the only way Southern culture will be spared from extermination:

He pondered on it long and well and riddled and reriddled night and day, year passing into year. With memory’s clearer eye, no strange old woman then did he see, but young lady fresh in bloom and walk of queen. And when he grew a man, turned from his father’s fields by alien culture’s ways, he sought and found this same lost lady’s cup, and filled to brim with all his soul and passion up (171).

The significance is not restricted to one child’s acceptance of the old woman’s calling. His name is that of Robert Emmet, an Irish nationalist who was executed by British officials in 1803. In the dock, Robert Emmet declared that no man should write his epitaph until “my country takes its place among the nation’s of the earth.” In “The Golden Cup and Bowl,” Kibler calls not merely for Southern cultural revival based on its Celtic sources, but also for Southerners to hear the pleas of our Cathleen ni Houlihan.

The most fun story in Child to the Waters is “The Revenge of the Great House.” Contemporary academia and publishing are revealed in all their anti-cultural, cliché-ridden barbarity. Kibler presents a pure urban Editor (“books were his game” - and games are for children and light passing of time) who loves Thoreau and Harriet Beecher Stowe and seems to cringe from any contact with life lived on the land (those who know the real Thoreau, who is discussed briefly in the tale, will understand that the Editor has chosen well). Bob, Kibler’s author and farmhouse-restorer character, sees not merely the Editor and his historian sidekick but the whole culture war as spawned by Puritans “in their Mather-created Cities-on-Hills.” Anglo-Saxon Puritans Bob sees as men who “had always despised their own nature as men and hated all others for not hating themselves” (94). As befits a tale in such a book, “The Revenge of the Great House” ends with focus brought back to Ireland and to Yeats. In thus doing, Kibler says that we, Southerners and other Americans, have but two basic cultural models, only one of which we may choose. Either we will take the path of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism (and that does not require Calvinist belief or practice: Unitarian become Oversoul-Universalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and atheist John Dewey were both quintessential Anglo-Saxon Puritans), which has led inexorably to Multiculturalist PC and all its Leviathan State cultural barbarity, or we will take the path of Celtic culture.

Belletristic literature does not sell well because we have become very much a nation of spoiled, lazy, materialistic adolescents demanding quick, cheap entertainment. Because, as Yeats knew, any meaningful political or economic reform first requires healthy and vibrant culture based on history and family, one resonating with spiritual focus and strength, it is a waste of time to diddle with politics or to preach free market economics, or even call for return to conservative theology, unless you also promote the renewal of traditional conservative culture and its arts. If we fail to purchase belletristic literature that points readers toward the kind of cultural revolution that Yeats promoted, we will see no more of it in book form, and thus we, whatever we have intended, will have aided the contemporary Puritan barbarians. A good starting point is to purchase Child to the Waters and then to inform the publisher that you are interested in additional challenging literary fiction.