After producing nine works of fiction, University of Florida professor emeritus Padgett Powell has now released Indigo, his first book of nonfiction. Pete Dexter extols the idiosyncratic aspects of Powell’s essays — the lilt, the humor — in his introduction:
“The stories in Indigo are stories, as much as his fiction. They move like stories, carry the same expectations, they end like stories. They do not remind you of newspaper columns.”
Case in point is Powell’s piece on southern writer Peter Taylor. Powell met Taylor in Houston after his professor, Donald Barthelme, asked him introduce Taylor at a University of Houston reading. Before the event, the men of letters sat for supper where Powell secured the inspiration for this comical passage:
“[Taylor] was aged and Southern-courtly, just as he was supposed to be. I became distracted by a powerfully bad odor. Refined Peter Taylor clearly was not a man who would not bathe, but the gothic lurks in the aged Southern-courtly. The smell was outrageous, pathological if it was issuing from a living being. I was waving to and fro like a bird dog or Ray Charles.”
The odor turned out to be a blond kaaba of cheese. Powell then pivots to illuminate Taylor’s talents before describing Taylor at the reading:
“Mr. Taylor, who thank God does not smell like that cheese, is wrapping up non-demonstratively, non-remonstratively, unpreciously, just reading … and you are crying. Because you are an ad hoc VIP and sitting in the front row. You have been in the presence of a Biggee.”
In his essay on short story writer and activist Grace Paley, another Biggee, Powell’s distinct voice and lively perceptions resonate:
“By no reckoning of a real clock or of real life did I know Grace Paley well. Yet I felt, and I suspect this phenomenon is not unknown to many who knew her a little, that we were intimate. She came on to you with the gum chewing and the smile and the electric eyes and the wild hair and the offer, without extending her hand one inch, to hold hands with you.”
The honest “sexy grandmother” held hands with many men and voiced her opinions without caring about consequences. When Powell teased her that Norman Mailer was going to get her, she said: “No, he’s too old and sick.” When asked to comment on Donald Barthelme’s early death, she blamed his smoking and drinking; “men will be boys,” she said. Powell ensures that the reader understands that Grace Paley, at five-feet-tall, can square off against anyone.
Powell’s 2018 essay about Irish writer William Trevor radiates with praise. However, the piece did not start out as a feature. Initially, Powell was commissioned to review Trevor’s last book of stories, but he did not believe a review would sufficiently express his response to the work. Instead, Powell wrote a profile for Book Post replete with his signature quips: “Mr. Trevor knew he was dynamite-money-qualified and ninety, and he saw Dylan invited but not going to Stockholm, and he said, Ah, that’s it then, and died.” This passage refers to Trevor being passed over for the 2016 Nobel Prize for Fiction by Bob Dylan and his death shortly thereafter. Powell goes on to show his respect for Trevor: “[His] Collected Stories is pound for pound the most literary bang for the buck in the English world.”
In his profile of Bill Wegman in 2012 for Hello Nature, Powell recalls the first time he met the famous dog photographer: “I was on a porch over a lake in Maine … He was wearing a funny-looking kepi with flies pinned to it and was sitting in the rear of the canoe.” Wegman owned a cabin where he photographed two Weimaraners, “Ray and Mrs. Lupner in Bed.” Powell explains the uniqueness of Wegman’s creation: “These dogs in this bed made you want to be in the bed.” He also discloses the fact that Wegman once ran with John Belushi who said “Wegman! What you gonna do when the dog dies?” and when the dog perished “Wegman began breeding” Weimaraners.
Powell then writes about the people who expanded his literary palate: His aunt Lena who introduced him to Norman Mailer, and his favorite English professor, Nan Morrison, who considered it heresy that Powell never read Faulkner. With her prodding, Powell boarded the Dixie Limited, the nickname Flannery O’Connor gave Faulkner. In “Cleve Dean,” Powell takes the reader to Pavo, Georgia to meet his 500-pound subject, a pulp wooder, farmer, and world champion arm wrestler. When they meet, Dean offers Powell his “catcher’s-mitt-size hand on the long end of a long arm that is one inch shy of being two feet around, and it looks, this arm, like the leg of an ordinary person.”
These 18 essays that span 30-plus years highlight Powell’s unique voice and trademark quips. When his first novel Edisto was published in 1984, several critics didn’t hesitate to call him a literary genius. The novel, narrated by a white adolescent prodigy, is notable for its spiky voice. That heady verbal thrust is just as alive in these essays — and its assertive persistence makes for entertaining reading.
[Published by Catapult on November 9, 2021, 272 pages, $16.95 paperback]