In a very short novel, Allen Mendenhall manages to combine a great deal of philosophical and quasi-theological reflection, Twain-like adolescent comedy, and Faulkner-like familial dysfunction, adding to the Southern literary tradition’s collection of tales filled with absurdity, hilarity, shattering revelation, and haunting desire, all mixed to disturb and delight.
A Glooming Peace This Morning by Allen Mendenhall (130 pages, Livingston Press, 2023)
Samuel Johnson said that he preferred to read according to inclination, for “what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” That is my desired modus lectandi as well, but my inclination is often put in second, third, and even fourth place by the duties and chaos of life. Allen Mendenhall’s A Glooming Peace This Morning, was a victim of such chaos. Having procured it last spring, I started it, laughed my way through two chapters, put it down to prepare some classes, wrote some other pieces I had promised other publications, finished spring grades, and promptly lost the book in my house.
Inclination had the last laugh this time, however. This fall, as I was very desperate to procrastinate on writing some articles I had promised to editors and preparing for classes I had agreed to teach, the book magically appeared in my bedroom. Hallelujah!
Readers of this publication who know Professor Mendenhall of Alabama’s Troy University for his articles and television appearances dealing with public matters may be a little surprised that he is a novelist. The author is, however, of a relatively rare but recognizable breed. A southern gentleman lawyer, he fulfills all the best stereotypes by being a scholar, gentleman, and man of letters equally at home talking about law, politics, the economy, higher education, and literature. In addition to books on law and the philosophy of liberty, he has published several collections of essays dealing with literature and culture. He also edited the Southern Literary Review for a decade.
A Glooming Peace This Morning marks a change from writing about literature to creating it himself. It is indeed a very Southern novel, but one that takes place in the 1970s, when the New South of big cities was recognizable but had yet to transform the smaller towns with their Old South charm, tradition, Christ-hauntedness, idiosyncrasy, and hypocrisy. That first chapter I found so captivating both last year and after my rediscovery begins with the narrator of middle-middle to late-middle age drawing in the audience in a cadence that has echoes of the Bible, the classics, and the front porch:
Let me tell you a story from my childhood, a tragedy worthy of ancient Attic theater, a sordid account of illicit love and unfortunate loss, of law and order, justice and mercy, life and death. Some forty years later I recall these sad events with the clarity and devotion with which Matthew, Mark, and Luke—faithful followers each—recounted their timeless message of hope, grace, and promise. Only my story is different, more ominous. Listen and hear my voice. Pay attention to what I have to say. Store up my words for wisdom and instruction.
From here, we get a description of Andalusia, set in the heart of Magnolia County in an unnamed Southern state. It is a smaller town where the concerns of the outside world of the turbulent ‘70s do not dominate, and the segregation by then forbidden by law “was accomplished instead through habits and practices which amounted to law in those days.” The “imperfect peace” between blacks and whites was considered preferable to “disruptive improvements.” Andalusia’s residents “favored ourselves over alien outsiders, especially Yankees.” And they still referred to the Civil War as the War Between the States. Despite the encroachments of mass media, Andalusia is a place unlike Gertrude Stein’s Oakland: there was still a very distinct “there” there. In the narrator’s memory, the town was a still point in a time of change.
With this mise en scene, the chapter’s final words bang like a gong. The narrator recalls the feeling of “time slipping through my fingers as would water” while nothing happened in Andalusia. He also recalls his reaction to the feeling: “I shaped the words, to no one in particular. Give me something new. And something new came.”
Rather than jump right into the new thing, however, Professor Mendenhall has the good sense to make his twelve-year-old narrator, nicknamed “Cephas” by his friend Lump, give a more intimate introduction to his own social circle and sense of reality. Lump himself is the circle’s “densely freckled, beaver-toothed leader, a Huckleberry Finn we admired and in whose forbidden society we delighted.” Michael is “named for an angel” but is a slightly devilish child who knows when he’s gone too far on the dark side. Michael’s twin sister, Sarah, is the one for whom Cephas pines. The last of the circle is Brett, “introverted and serious” with pimples that “networked along his cheeks and forehead and bulged on his bridgeless nose.” This fatherless boy bears the responsibility for keeping an eye on his older brother, Tommy, 17 and mentally handicapped.
Sarah and Tommy are the ones who will bring the new and ultimately tragic events for which Cephas had called. Sarah becomes gravely ill, with “the inexplicable kind” of sickness “that doctors enjoy and despise on account of its bringing money and defying remedy.” Wasting away, Sarah is avoided by all the kids, who want to avoid her tragedy, even by Cephas who is infatuated with her. The result is perhaps predictable. Tommy, simple of mind but also of heart, sticks by her side and becomes a love interest at a time when natural insecurity and budding sexuality would meet even in a healthy young girl.
The social circle, who are experimenting with alcoholic beverages (“hooch”) and very interested in the affairs of the flesh, spies what they believe to be a consummation of this odd but understandable relationship. When Sarah recovers and blooms into a young woman, the intensity of the interest in her on the part of the boys reaches a fever pitch. Lump and Cephas decide to tell a judge they have been told is safe and wise about what they believe to be the illicit relationship.
This decision sets a foreseeable series of events in motion. Tommy is charged and brought to trial, turning the small town upside-down. Cephas’s father, a lawyer, “would return from work and speak of nothing but Tommy’s case, which had incited disarray in the churches and mobilized officials into a community of purpose.” The trial mixes black comedy with high seriousness in a way that is riveting. Its conclusion and the aftermath have an apocalyptic feel to them, a shattering of the old with the new things seemingly summoned by the narrator, Cephas, while yet accounting for the fact that life in a small town—as everywhere—will go on in the wake of tragedies. That it is a tragic ending is not surprising to the reader who recognizes the title as a phrase from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Unlike the ending of that play, however, this short novel ends in the present with a much older Cephas ruefully reflecting on the events of a past that are every bit as alive to him as his own present. Those reflections are consistent with the kind of Southern melding of Christian language and faith together with classical and pagan agnosticism and despair that was signaled by earlier conversations in Lump’s and Cephas’s circle about the nature of biblical revelation. The reader is not quite certain whether the references to the provident and foreordaining deity are to a Calvinist God or an impersonal Fate. And Cephas’s hope of heaven seems less insistent than the desire for the past to be kept alive in memory. The novel, which is dedicated to “the novel, that pseudorealist modern art form that engages innumerable minds in private, pensive isolation,” ends with Cephas’s reflections on the fading and vanishing past, which survives only in the stories that we tell each other.
In a very short novel (130 pages), Professor Mendenhall manages to combine a great deal of this philosophical and quasi-theological reflection, Twain-like adolescent comedy, and Faulkner-like familial dysfunction. It is not flawless. The decision to give so many details of Cephas’s later life seems mistaken. A spare hinting at what he became and endured in later life would have been more powerful. So, too, the account of the effects of the events on Cephas’s family introduces some lore that might have been better placed earlier in the story to make those effects seem more integrated and less an add-on.
Yet, even with caveats about such decisions, the final verdict is that this book adds to the Southern literary tradition’s collection of tales filled with absurdity, hilarity, shattering revelation, and haunting desire, all mixed to disturb and delight. It may be Professor Mendenhall’s first novel. We may hope it is not his last.
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