ÿþ<html> <head> <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=unicode"> <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12 (filtered)"> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; color:blue; text-decoration:underline;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {color:purple; text-decoration:underline;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:.7in 1.0in .7in 1.0in;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> </head> <body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple> <div class=Section1> <p class=MsoNormal>Eric Miles Williamson</p> <p class=MsoNormal>Literary Columnist, American Literature Specialist,<i> Transfuge Magazine</i></p> <p class=MsoNormal>Associate Editor, American Book Review<br> Board of Directors, National Book Critics Circle<br> Associate Editor, Boulevard<br> Fiction Editor, The Texas Review<br> Professor of Contemporary and Postmodern Literature<br> University of Texas, Pan American</p> <p class=MsoNormal>&nbsp;</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>&nbsp;</p> <p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center;line-height:200%'>Paul Ruffin: a Great American Writer, and He s Armed to the Teeth</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>&nbsp;</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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 <i>great</i> artist.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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, <i>The Man Who Would Be God, Jesus in the Mist, </i>and <i>Islands, Women, and God</i>, just might be genius.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%'>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.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='text-indent:.5in;line-height:200%'>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 <i>Islands</i><i>, Women, and God</i>, 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 <i>wanted</i> to do: hunt down and kill a nigger. Very old laws govern Ruffin s fictional world, and he puts them dazzlingly on display.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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. </p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           Ruffin did, and he has. His work makes that of Flannery O Connor and Chris Offutt seem tame by comparison.</p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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. </p> <p class=MsoNormal style='line-height:200%'>           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.</p> </div> </body> </html>