Eric Miles Williamson

Literary Columnist, American Literature Specialist, Transfuge Magazine

Associate Editor, American Book Review
Board of Directors, National Book Critics Circle
Associate Editor, Boulevard
Fiction Editor, The Texas Review
Professor of Contemporary and Postmodern Literature
University of Texas, Pan American

 

 

Paul Ruffin: a Great American Writer, and He’s Armed to the Teeth

 

           The poverty of American “people of color” is no secret: if you read a book by an African-American or Mexican-American author, you have a near 100% chance the author is going to be writing about poor people. And the poverty of white people in America has been well dramatized by authors such as John Steinbeck and Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Sinclair Lewis. But the poverty of America’s poor white people has rarely been written about by the poor whites themselves, because poor white people don’t write books. They’re too busy being poor.

           I grew up poor, but at least I grew up in a city, Oakland, California, the greater urban area populated by nearly ten million people. There were museums, universities, bookstores, symphonies, opera houses and theaters. Compared to a child growing up in rural America, I had it good. I was the cultured elite.

           What’s miraculous in America is that on occasion one of our hillbillies escapes the redneck wasteland between the Hudson River and the Sierra Nevada mountain range and goes to college. What’s even more incredible is for that hillbilly to decide against going into law, business, or medicine and choose instead to become an artist. And even rarer still is for that aspiring hillbilly artist to become a great artist.

           Paul Ruffin, author six collections of poetry, two novels, three short story collections, and two books of essays, is arguably America’s greatest little-known author. Why little-known? Because he grew up poor and white, and in America, that still constitutes being “advantaged.” Another white male writes a book: big deal.

           Rich white writers get jobs at good universities, their Ivy League degrees assuring them success even if they suck. Minority writers who have never even published books get jobs at universities over white people who have published half a dozen books because American culture feels such guilt about historical inequities. Poor white writers, though, they’re screwed—they teach in high schools, like Ruffin did. They quit writing and become carpenters. They’re mowing lawns and hiding out in the backwoods like literary Unabombers.

           Had Paul Ruffin been a minority who’d grown up abysmally poor, who, like Ruffin, had to join the military to escape the rural Assembly of God hell that was his birthright, whose abusive father had only a third-grade education and worked for years on the production line of a toilet-seat factory, whose staple food as a child was “mayonnaise sandwiches,” who didn’t even have indoor plumbing until he was in junior high school, he’d be the toast of the country, published on big New York presses, internationally acclaimed like inferior “writers of color”—Percival Everett and Sandra Cisneros come to mind here. He’d have won a major award or two, like Toni Morrison. He’d be teaching at Yale University, like Elizabeth Alexander, the fraudulent “poet” who read at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

           That Paul Ruffin is not famous is all to the better: He hasn’t been coerced into paying attention to critics who might have conned him (as they have so very many weak-willed American authors-turned-hacks) into toning things down and pussifying them, editing his little-read masterpieces into works of watered-down, politically correct, and perfumed and slickly packaged commercial sewage.

           In the form of the short story his only living American rivals are Richard Burgin and Barry Hannah. For my money, Ruffin is better than either of them. His collections, The Man Who Would Be God, Jesus in the Mist, and Islands, Women, and God, just might be genius.

Ruffin’s stories are about common people, folks from Texas and Mississippi who live quiet and humble lives—factory workers, farmers, fishermen, husbands and wives and youngsters and oldsters. But although Ruffin’s characters are common, his books are not. In his stories, every sentence is honed and tight and true, the stories brutal and honest and harrowing.

Ruffin writes of the world of men, centering around the conflicts inherent in the stifled world of masculinity. “Manhunt,” for instance, the opening story of Islands, Women, and God, is about a county’s scramble to apprehend an escaped convict, a black man. The hunters of the convict are local men who normally spend their days selling cars and working for insurance companies. These otherwise calm men regress into the blood-thirsty bigots and would-be killers they deep down (like most men) actually are, the manhunt a legal excuse to do what they’ve always wanted to do: hunt down and kill a nigger. Very old laws govern Ruffin’s fictional world, and he puts them dazzlingly on display.

           American men are encouraged to be feminine, discouraged from hunting, fishing, and reveling, are told that if they get pleasure from a good, old fashioned barfight, they’re disgusting, juvenile brutes. When they pop (and yes, they’re all armed to the teeth), when they explode and their repressed natures surface, it gets pretty ugly in them thar hills. The poor country folk who experience this life generally don’t escape to write about it.

           Ruffin did, and he has. His work makes that of Flannery O’Connor and Chris Offutt seem tame by comparison.

           I can see him living on a farm in West Texas, killing his own animals and eating them, blood on his face and veins between his teeth. I asked him once if he owned guns. “Hell, are you kidding?” he said. “I’m as ready as I can be for whatever might be coming.”

           Reading his fiction, I believe him. I’m glad he uses his firepower on the page. In America, there’s no sharpshooting short story writer better.