We Came Along with a Hammer

(….a common refrain, I know, but we’re trying to post a little more regularly round these parts, so we’re chatting weekly, as we go. We were about 6 chapters into The Store by T.S. Stribling when we had this chat.

Since we haven’t finished the book yet, I can’t direct you to the summary, but for context’s sake, The Store is set in 1880s Alabama in the small town of Florence, with a large cast of characters, the most central of which, thus far, is the ex-Confederate Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, a former Klan leader now living off the income from his much diminished family estates, getting by in a broke-down rental house where he endures a childless and loveless marriage with a wife, Ponny, who physically repulses him and whom he feels to be his inferior.)
Dreadful Penny: I think my stomach flu was caused by the first 100 pages of The Store.

Diablevert: I’m on p 72 of The Store, so I think you must be a little ahead of me. I’m kind of warming up to it a little.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, I got going on The Store and thought I’d round up to an even hundred.

Diablevert: No bigs.

Dreadful Penny: Getting past the first 20 pages of this book has to have been the greatest challenge of this project, to date. Once I realized we’re gonna spend this book on the losing side of the Civil War, that is.

And I don’t think you even get to the dialect at that point.

Diablevert: I am totally there with you. Call it shallow of me, but I too was not particularly enticed by the prospect of spending 300+ page in immediate post-reconstruction Alabama. ‘Scuse me, 511 pages, in my edition.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I hope Stribling manifests a Tarkington-esque contempt for his (ex-plantation overseer/Klan leader) main character.

Diablevert: Stribling is a lot more reserved than Tarkington; a lot less willing to tip his hand and reveal whose side he’s on. I’d say he’s the better writer for it.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know… I think it’s too early for me to judge his relative merits as a writer. I do like his adeptness with interweaving storylines and characters’ motivations. He seems very capable of juggling a large cast (all one-note characters, but still, there are a lot of them.)

Diablevert: yes. I suppose that’s why I’m more willing to cut him a break, at the mo — he’s still doing setup, and I’m unsure where he’s going with this, but i am curious to know.

Dreadful Penny: I’m curious, I guess, but I’m finding it really hard to suspend dislike… we’ve already mentioned the racism and then there’s his constant references to his “fat wife Ponny.” Ugh.

Diablevert: See, I dunno. I do find Miltiades hard to like at those points. But I think they’re in there deliberately to cut against the reading of him as a noble, tragic figure; his slights against his wife make him seem petty. Makes him more of a sad sack than an Ashley Wilkes figure. Also it shows him failing to live up to his purported code of the gentleman.

As for the racism…..yeah, when he first introduced the group of black people watching the political meeting, I cringed, like, “oh, god, here we go again with the dialect.” But I would say his treatment of the black characters as characters has been about as in depth as his treatment of any of the others. I feel like the thoroughgoing racism of this society is something he’s portraying more than participating in, at this point.

Dreadful Penny: Well, I’m going to reserve judgment on the race issue until we’re farther in… but I’m not optimistic.

And I don’t think constantly denigrating his wife is Miltie’s sole flaw, at all… in fact, he seems to have almost no virtues at this point in the book. He’s thrown his lot in with the wrong side, he’s superior, condescending, snide, manipulative, and self-deluding. And he’s racist, and he’s nasty to his wife.

Diablevert: I don’t know if I’d go that far. We’re not really given an action scene of him in the past, at least so far as I can see, but from what the characters think/say about him, he does seem to have been a respected and superior figure in the pre-war world, and a good soldier and leader of men in the post war-world, and he acts to get Charlie Hot Hands, the shop keeper’s son, to lay off his girlfriend. So far it seems like, in the pre-war South Milt fit in and could have been successful; in the post-war world he’s lost an adrift.

Leaving aside our own contemporary values on whether it was in fact admirable to be a success in the antebellum system — and subbing in for them the values of 1930 or 1880 — I think Milt could have been read as a sympathetic figure, but the petty faults Stribling gives him are there to deliberately cut against that

Dreadful Penny: That’s fair, I guess, but he over-identifies with a social class he wasn’t a part of. He was an overseer, but sees himself as a gentleman… I don’t think he was ever part of the world of Southern gentility that he thought he was.

Diablevert: Possibly. Seems like he was on the line; both him and Drusilla seem to think that at one point it would have been both possible and desirable for them to marry, and she seems to have been at the upper end of this town’s society. Even now, before taking the clerk job, he’s been living on his income, the very definition of a gentleman.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I wonder where that income is from? Did Confederate officers get war pensions? If so, what government paid them? That’s probably a good research question for the week.

Diablevert: Ooh, if you want to find that out that would be interesting…

Dreadful Penny: I’ll see what I can do.

Diablevert: It said somewhere that he married his wife for her money; possibly she has an inheritance of some sort. And it’s not clear to me whether he lost the family land or if it was diminished or if it just doesn’t pay that well in the 1880s economy as it did in the pre-war.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, that’s right. I remember that now.

Diablevert: I feel like I’m defending the book more strongly than my enjoyment of it thus far warrants.

Dreadful Penny: Ha! I knew it! You devil’s advocate, you! I mean, I’m willing to argue that it probably has some merits, but I would never ever ever read this “for fun.”

Diablevert: I dunno; in this case I seem to be experience the lawyerly tendency to have my argument turn my mind. I do feel as we go on that we’re in better hands with Stribling than with some of the other authors.