Some Personal Papers - Hardcover

Bradham, JoAllen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1881515044 ISBN 13: 9781881515043

Publisher: Texas Review Press, 1994

Synopsis

Bradham, Georgia Writer of the Year, weaves an eerie tale of a social worker's dark psyche.

About this title

From the Author

Some Personal Papers: ONE BOOK--TWO SHOCKS

Words take revenge. Mine chirp up like open-mouthed baby birds from the nest of memory. One rises from the high school conversation in which I specified I wanted to write. The other is my adamant reiteration in the tenth grade that picture shows were not real art. I've recovered from my cinematic stupidity, but did my adolescent delusion pronounce a curse?

This question would never have come up except that with Some Personal Papers, I put myself in peril. As soon as the novel won the 1994 Texas Breakthrough Award in Southern and Southwestern Fiction, the local papers ran a couple of features. Members of the community who certainly never keep up with literary doings suddenly knew about me and the book. I was delighted with their good wishes, until I realized they thought only in terms of movies or television. "Who will play Miss Genie in the movie?" became a constant. From that repeated question I realized that a piece of literary fiction was meaningless to a screen-glued world. I, who promulgated during high school that motion pictures were marginally declasse, confronted the truth that if my book did not quickly metamorphose into film, neither it nor I had any class at all.

Closer in time is my denunciation of TV. For twenty years I've lived in a TV-free home. Once, mid-way, I faltered and purchased. On a Sunday evening, when the sky was overcast but not stormy and the set had been here three weeks, I turned it on. BLAM! Lightning! A direct hit! What could I conclude? After ten years, I had succumbed and sat myself, worshipper style, before the Golden Calf of a TV, dallied in its lures, albeit briefly, and then witnessed its fall. The hand that smote the gaudy box with its orange faces into a tan plastic husk was, literally, as fast as lightning, was, in fact, lightning. It seemed perfectly clear that God was intoning from the skies above Georgia: "No. Thou shalt not have an idiot box. BAD. Go and TV no more."

With Some Personal Papers out, folks around the community started with "When will this be on TV?" or "This is a perfect made-for-TV movie." When, over a year later, the novel had the good fortune to win the 1996 Townsend Prize, the responses intensified:

--I know they'll make a movie now!
--Will they shoot it here in Georgia?
--Since it's a short book, we can see it on TV in one evening!

So it goes. Without a film, nothing.

The idea that a book is at best a halfway house on the way to Tinseltown accounted for one shock, but ways of reading delivered the real zinger. Back in high school, when I was promising to write and playing the intellectual snob, I did have enough sense to know I had to make a living and determined to become a college English professor. This was the compromise position, a compromise that snapped as trap. In graduate school, the New Criticism was still hanging on, at least where I was, and I absorbed all the injunctions of close reading. I knew that plot was the least thing, that allusions, images and setting, structure and mythopoeic patterns, archetypes and other such erudite matters constituted literary art.

Because Id taught so many college students and also had a pretty reliable idea of the number of students whod gone through college English courses with instructors similarly trained, I lived under the blissful assumption that everyone read critically. Wrong. As I conducted book clubs, fielded questions, and led discussions on and off college campuses, folks would say, "Tell us about yourself," or "What is the moral message here?" or "How does this help with my life?" All those years in the classroom I thought I'd said last rites over this kind of reading. I expected to converse with those who knew writing from the inside. Not so. In meeting after meeting, heres what I found:

--Was your father a minister? How else could you know the Bible?
--What message are you sending?
--Is this book a political statement?
--This is depressing! I HATE to read depressing things.
--You use "I." I thought the "I" meant the writer.

Such responses staggered me. I thought everyone, right off, would see the construction of Eden I'd wrought. Picking up the name symbolism should be a piece of cake. Didn't I always expect to find name symbolism? Hadn't I taught name symbolism to thousands? Hadn't my contemporaries taught name symbolism to millions? Foolishly, I assumed that my readers would know why one character is conspicuous for tactile imagery and immediately read the book aright. Silly me.

Thus the second shock zapped me. All those years I'd spent teaching had been wasted. Furthermore, since my friends and colleagues all over the country had been following the same procedures, we'd all failed. Almost everyone, it seemed, dropped critical reading before the ink dried on the final exam and reverted to plot or pithy passages for better living.

And now--shockproof--what am I doing? Two things: Bracing up for TV- and film-directed questions now that Black Belt Press has published this new edition of Some Personal Papers and working on other books. Art is long; funny questions, short. Hope springs eternal.

From the Back Cover

". . . spare, taut, and powerfully alive. JoAllen Bradham has created a shocking and credible story told in an unforgettable voice, offering a savage vision of the mundane hell of America's underclass. A remarkable achievement." --George Garrett

Though eleven, Herez Alexander is the mental and physical equivalent of a five-year-old, with little potential for further development. When the director of Children's Services, Eugenia Diane Putman ("Miss Genie" to the many children who adore her), visits she finds him tied to a crib in his mother's apartment, staring blankly, with the scars of cigarette and iron burns left by his mother's boyfriend on his hands and arms. In an epiphany of sorts, she remembers the words of her father at the funeral of her deformed, eleven-year-old brother - "the Lord took him; freed him from his troubles; freed him from his prison" - and realizes that love and compassion dictate but one, radical, course of action in helping Herez and others like him. One of the most powerful and shocking novels you'll read this or any other year, Some Personal Papers is the heartrending story of a woman "guilty by reason of charity."

About this edition

• Publisher: Texas Review Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1881515044
• ISBN 13: 9781881515043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 148
• Illustrator: Swindell Barbara J