"Night Watch" by Jayne Anne Phillips--Notes On Reading A Pulitzer Prize Winner

 

I have for many years made a practice of reading prize winning books in fiction, nonfiction, and juvenile fiction.  I don't read every prize winner every year or even most of them in some years.  I chose to read this one because someone I know on social media recommended it, and it is a 2024 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  The brief description of the novel on the official website of the Pulitzers says this about the book: 

From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War—and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds.  (Pulitzer Prizes website 2024) 

The novel is set primarily in West Virginia's Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum which was one of the earliest such mental institutions in America beginning shortly after the states of Maine and Kentucky built the first two such institutions.  The novel is set in the times shortly before, during, and after the Civil War, and is centered on three women in the mountains of West Virginia, and the Civil War sharpshooter who is the son, husband, and father of the three women respectively.  The sharpshooter has been seriously injured during the war and has no memory of who he is, his name, or personal history.  But he has become skilled in caring for the mentally ill while in a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, and has been referred to the asylum as a night watchman and general aide to the doctor.  The man's mother is a root woman, an herb doctor, or healer. The man's wife and daughter, along with the older woman, are living high in the mountains of West Virginia while he is away in the war and are the victims of marauders from both sides of the conflict at times.  The antagonist in the novel is a Rebel sympathizer who is wandering the countryside alone preying on whomever he can find who is too weak to defend themselves against him.  He moves in with or on the young woman's mother, victimizes the two of them in every way possible and finally drops off the girl and her mother, who has become nonverbal as a result of his rape and abuse of her, at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum and disappears before returning as an inmate of the institution.  The girl has been ordered to tell the asylum staff that the mother is not related to her, and she is simply a teenage orphan who has been caring for the woman.  The ruse works and the mother is admitted as a patient while her daughter is taken in as an unpaid aide for her mother.  

Eventually, the mother begins to talk and continues the lie their attacker has forced them to tell.  But she also becomes enamored of the doctor in charge of the institution and the feelings are mutual. Her daughter is eventually made a full time nurse, a position which did not require formal educational training or a degree in the 19th century.  When their attacker is brought to the asylum, he is in a violent rage and placed in a locked ward from which he eventually escapes.  The novel comes to a violent climax with the building on fire, the attacker returned to try to murder the women, and, in the meantime the night watchman's wife has recognized him and they have come to tell the doctor they are married and intend to leave to go back to the mountains.  The attacker climbs through the window of the doctor's office as that conversation has begun and attacks the group.  The sharpshooter is shot and killed just as he manages to throw the attacker out a third story window to his death.  All the loose ends are quickly tied up and the girl's mother marries the doctor, the grandmother takes the girl back to the mountains, and all is well that ends well.  

This is a good novel but not a great novel.  It does contain the bones of what could have been a great novel.  But after years of reading many winners of the Nobel, Pulitzer, and other literary prizes, for me the novel is a disappointment.  It is poorly organized, leaves far too many issues hanging at times, and could have been a far better book with a serious rewrite.  I realize when I say such things about a book which others rave about, I have set myself up for anything from a mild sneer of derision to outright claims of ignorance on my part.  The author has a fine resume both as a writer and a trainer of writers.  This is her sixth novel and twelfth book.  It is also the first of her books I have ever read and it is possible that I am not giving her enough credit.  But I really do believe that she, her agent, her editor, and the Pulitzer committee all accepted less than what could have become her best work and a worthy prize winner.  I'd love to have seen this book in a better form after another month or two of work from the author and her editor.  But you might also read it and rave. Don't take my distaste for the book as a total red flag.  If you like the sound of the plot, read it, and form your own opinion. 

"A Place To Come To" by Robert Penn Warren--Book Review

 

When this novel was first released a reviewer in "The Harvard Crimson" had this to say about it: 

"In his latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives."  (Julia Klein, "Harvard Crimson", April 23, 1977)

In the end, Ms. Klein did not write a positive review of Robert Penn Warren's novel and I firmly believe she erred by doing so.  While this novel is not another "All The King's Men", Warren's best novel, it is a markedly good novel by a great writer and deserves to be read and appreciated just as much as anything else Warren ever wrote.  But, I suppose when you have won three Pulitzer Prizes, one for "All The King's Men" and two for a pair of his books of poetry, you are expected to write stupendously great literature even if your intent was only to produce a grocery list.   It seems to me that simply because Robert Penn Warren was never invited to join the group of American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature some critics and general readers think he can be forgotten, left by the wayside of mass marketed literature, and ignored.  The list of American Nobel winners which includes Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and now even Bob Dylan, is a prodigious list and I do not mean to belittle or question the credentials of Bob Dylan by adding him to list as the last person.  But I do believe that Robert Penn Warren was just as deserving of a Nobel Prize as any American writer who was ever awarded one and a bit more than a few on that list. When I make a list of the greatest American writers, the names I put on that list are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Buck, Warren, and Flannery O'Connor who also never lived long enough to accumulate a body of literature sufficient to earn the Nobel.  I also find it interesting that three of those writers are southern writers, Warren, Faulkner, and O'Connor.  

And that last statement brings me to one of the most important misconceptions about Robert Penn Warren.  He is sometimes thought of as an Appalachian writer and he definitely was not.  He was indisputably a Southern writer.  He was a self-avowed member of The Fugitives at Vanderbilt and lived much of his life, especially his academic life, at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University neither of which is Appalachian.  And his retirement was spent in New England.  Yes, Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky, Western Kentucky, which is not in Appalachia, not even in the ever expanding political definition of Appalachia used by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the congress which is a purely political definition based totally in pork barrel politics and not remotely culturally based.  Warren was born and raised in Todd County Kentucky on the Tennessee border in Western Kentucky far outside both the political and cultural boundaries of Appalachia.  He never referred to himself as Appalachian and rightly so.  He never wrote Appalachian Literature.  He wrote Southern Literature and wrote it just as well as Faulkner and O'Connor, even better at times.  

Now that I  have made one more diligent attempt to murder the myth of Robert Penn Warren as an Appalachian writer, let's talk about this book which is a damn fine novel about a southern college professor, raised in Alabama,  living in Nashville and teaching at a college which we can assume is based loosely on Vanderbilt. The writer and professor moves to Chicago to pursue a doctorate, has an affair with a young Jewish woman there, then marries a young woman from the Dakotas who eventualy dies of cancer.  He returns her to her homeland to be buried near her relatives and after her death returns to Tennessee to teach.  The novel is filled with very unique, very human, very well written characters who move in and out of the protagonists life which is often centered around a group of friends which his wealthy lover and her husband have collected on their southern farm.  The protagonist is drifting loosely along in life, attempting to abandon and deny his youth in the deep south and at times filled with ennui.  The death of his wife and her burial in the Dakotas where she grew up is part of the source of that rootlessness but the character is much deeper than one source of ennui.  He is drifting through a group of friends and acquaintances who ride fancy horses, attend fancy parties with their fancy friends, and also seem to drift from moment to moment without aim or purpose.  

But this is a fine novel filled with excellent character development, precise plotting, and tension which must always seek resolution.  It is, admittedly, not "All The King's Men" and it was never intended to be. Warren intended this novel to be "A Place To Come To" and it is.  He intended this protagonist to be Jed Tewksbury whose father died drunk falling from a wagon box while attempting to urinate on the hindquarters of a mule only to be found graveyard dead on a dirt road in Alabama with his penis out of his pants.  That graphic image haunts Jed Tewksbury throughout the novel and a great deal of his ennui can be said to be rooted both in his childhood poverty and his father's ignominious death and drunken lifestyle along with his mother's eventual love for and marriage to a stepfather whom Jed Tewksbury does not really  like and, yet, Jed finds in the end that his little hometown in Alabama is "A Place To Come To".  The novel is filled with the characteristic, powerful writing of Robert Penn Warren.  He moves through the novel like a world champion boxer scattering a combination of literary left hooks, body blows, and precise three and four words jabs into the mind of the astute reader.   If you love good to great literature, southern literature, you need to read this book, and remember as you read it that it was never intended to be "All The King's Men". 

"The Kentucky Cycle", Pulitzer Prize Winning Drama by Robert Schenkkan

 

"The Kentucky Cycle" by Robert Schenkkan is a Pulitzer Prize winning dramatic script which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.  It is comprised of nine short one act plays which are intended to be produced by the same company of actors in one or two days and has been produced onstage in only a small number of cities.  Yet, it won the Pulitzer over four other finalists including "Two Trains Running" by August Wilson, the great African American playwright whose plays had won two Pulitzer prizes in the previous five years, and whose crafting of drama was so consistently above average that in his lifetime he had five plays nominated for the prize including two which were winners.  In fact, Wilson's "Fences" is generally considered one of the greatest plays ever written.  I am not certain that the Pulitzer committee got it right in 1992.  

"The Kentucky Cycle" is described as a "...sweeping epic of three families in Eastern Kentucky (which) spans 200 years of American history from 1775 to 1975."  The world premier of "The Kentucky Cycle" was held in Seattle and the production opened on Broadway on November 14, 1993, almost 11 months after the Pulitzer Prizes were awarded.  The Broadway production closed on December 12, 1993, less than a month after the opening with a total of only 33 performances which says the play was less than a success in New York.  It averaged less than 57% of capacity during the Broadway run.  

I do not claim to be an expert on drama as literature or on dramatic production but I have acted in numerous one act Christmas plays during my grade school years, played leads in a few college plays, and read drama on a regular basis.  In my estimation, this play or plays, if you prefer, since it is composed of nine one act plays which were intended to be performed in either one day with a lunch break or over two days with five of the plays on one day and four on the other, is of less quality than the average winner of a Pulitzer Prize.  The script is filled with gratuitous violence including a double murder in the opening minutes; one case of patricide; one case of filicide because the child was born a girl; contains numerous negative stereotypes of Appalachian people; frequent use of the cultural and ethnic epithet "hillbilly"; and appears to have been written primarily as an experiment in minimal staging and unique production elements.  I tend to believe that the Pulitzer was awarded for two reasons: 1) the unique staging with minimal sets and little changes during the switches from one play to another made it a unique creature in American drama; 2) August Wilson had just won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays in the previous five years and the committee had no intentions of being accused of considering him a favored playwright again.  

The script is a unique creature as I have stated above and it does have some redeeming qualities but those qualities and the Pulitzer win were not enough to keep it in frequent staging around the country at outdoor theaters, college and university drama departments, or other venues.  It obviously had to be premiered in Seattle instead of Broadway and had to garner the Pulitzer before a Broadway producer and theater would take a chance on it.  Its use of the cultural and ethnic epithet "hillbilly" is just as reprehensible as the use of any other such epithet about any other such minority group.  Its demands on the stamina and time commitment of an audience make it a production that is more likely to be endured rather than simply enjoyed.  Its use of dialect writing which is often less than perfect also makes it unlikely to be admired by the general American audience and more likely to be perceived by such an audience as another depiction of "those poor, ignorant hillbillies".  I can say that I am glad I read it since it is alleged to depict the history of Eastern Kentucky albeit that depiction is less than perfect.  It is a piece of the greater puzzle of the literature of Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky and it is not the first piece of literature to be well received by some small, perhaps previously prejudiced, portion of the general public and less well by Appalachian audiences.  I would not bet ten cents that it will ever be produced again anywhere in America.  Don't waste your time reading it unless you are a theater buff who loves to read all scripts or an Appalachian scholar who loves to read and study the entire body of Appalachian Literature.  

I would also like to thank Millie Perdue who located this script and gifted it to me because of my expressed interest in reading it.  Thanks, Millie!