Fred Chappell: In Memoriam

News travels fast—until it hits LA traffic. Which would explain why I only just learned about the death of Fred Chappell last month. In all my years, I never met anyone who so fully epitomized the concept of the “Man of Letters.” I probably still have somewhere the letter of recommendation he wrote for me when I left UNC-G, touting my ineffable virtues—he was, after all, a master storyteller. Because to be honest, I was a bit of an ass back then. OK, that’s not entirely fair; I was a complete ass back then. So much so that I squandered my access to such a brilliant mind. Partly due to scheduling conflicts, mostly due to my sense of inadequacy, I held off until my final semester before enrolling in an independent study with him. And being hands-down the least prolific member of my class, I did not produce much work to discuss in our weekly meetings. I should’ve realized that discussing my own work would be the least instructive thing we could do—far better to discuss just about anything he cared to hold forth on. He was exceedingly generous. Following the publication of my first book, I finagled a reading at UNC-G. Naturally, he was there, even though he was on the cusp of retirement (“No more in ’04” was his boisterous motto).

In an eerie coincidence—the kind that makes you wonder if the universe is random after all—I recently grabbed I am One of You Forever from my local library, not knowing that Fred was gone. I hadn’t read it in—what, 30 years?—but loved every word, even though I seemed to remember every word. Perhaps that’s one of the hallmarks of epic writing: you know it by heart, and yet it always seems new. 

For those unfamiliar with the book, it’s not so much a novel as a collection of linked stories, all told from the perspective of a tween boy growing up in rural North Carolina, in a family visited by a succession of picaresque uncles. It merges magical realism with a Faulknerian connection to the Southern gothic tradition, along with some straight-up blarney. The result defies comparison.

Of course, I first knew Fred as a poet. If he is not generally listed among the ranks of New Formalist poets, it’s only because he predates them, being, as always, ahead of his time. There is a structure, if not an obvious form, to all of his poems, even those that appear to be written in free verse. Perhaps because he wrote stories and literary criticism, and his poetry often seeks to accomplish what can not be done in any other medium. There’s no better example than “Narcissus and Echo” from his book, Source. According to myth, Echo could not speak on her own, but could only give back what others have said. Miraculously, Fred composed a poem that demonstrates this impossible constraint. There’s simply no way to describe it without reproducing it here, in total:

Of course, we are all Narcissus—but Fred alone seems sufficiently aware of his narcissism to banish it. A poem like that results from two things: a stroke of brilliance to conceive of it, and the long diligent effort to make it work out (Fred believed that regularity was a writer’s bread and butter). Fred could be dauntingly erudite, bouncing from Norse mythology to Grimm’s fairytales without missing a beat; in fact, the title and epigraphs in his book First and Last Words allude to or name-drop Vergil, Livy, Kant, Goethe, Tolstoy, Vermeer, Rubens, Einstein, Beowulf, and of course, the Gospels, to name a few. Nonetheless, he could be funny. His sense of humor is evident in poems such as “Recovery of Sexual Desire After a Bad Cold,” which begins “Toward morning I dreamed of the Ace of Spades reversed,” or “Charge,” which looks upon a statue of a (Civil War?) general and muses that the “Black pyramid of cannonballs / by the pediment are turds / of the bronze horse.” About the Confessional poets, he wrote (and I’m going from memory here, because it appeared on community poetry bulletin board, not in any permanent publication), “If my peccadilloes were so small / I don’t think I’d want to show them off at all.” Fre understood that poetry should encompass all human conditions, including humor.

Further evidence of that sly humor can be found in the title of his collected poems, “Spring Garden.” The Amazon review describes it as “a story of the poet classifying and selecting among his work while his wife, Susan, botanizes in their private garden.” That may be true, but the real fact is, Spring Garden was the name of a bar near the UNC-G campus, quite popular with the MFA crowd (the beer was cheap). Fred would often join us for a drink at the end of the day. He always tried to be approachable, and down-to-earth. Perhaps it was his way of showing encouragement. He was well aware of the difficult challenges facing a young writer. He once remarked: “Because of the emotional wear and tear, and because of the uncertainty of success or of even making progress, many give it up and eventually take up something else.” I think that knowledge was a burden to him. In fact, I suspect he identified with Vergil—not just because of his pastoral lyrics, but because he led Dante through the depths of Hell and into the gates Paradise. Teaching a bunch of rag-tag would-be writers must stem from the same tradition.

I can’t begin to guess how many writers he mentored during the course of his lengthy tenure. Many have gone on to achieve renown in their own right—but I’m sure they would all acknowledge their debt to him. He once joked, in typical humility, “If I am going to be remembered, I guess I’d like to be remembered as someone who did less harm than he was capable of.” Sorry, Fred, you will be remembered as someone who did far more than that.

You are one of us forever.