Great Gift

Legal Studies Forum
Volume 26, Number 1, 2002
reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum

A GREAT GIFT:
READING JOHN WILLIAM CORRINGTON

JAMES R. ELKINS*

It is rare in life you get to say what you think where it will count. It becomes important to say the right things. So I will try.

– John William Corrington, letter to
Charles Bukowski, January 9, 1962¹

TAKEN BY SURPRISE

It was a day embedded in one of those summer weeks when idleness and industry have settled into a quiet truce. I am, or so I tell myself, writing a book on lawyers and stories, one of those elusive books that never seem to get written. On this particular morning, I’m waiting, with a patience easily confused for idleness, for that strong writing wind by

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which I will set sail with the book. I did indeed catch that strong wind; and no, the book on lawyers and stories didn’t get written.
A fine summer day it was, watching with detached bemusement as my writing flounders, when the postman arrives with another morning’s diversions. I edit a journal–the Legal Studies Forum²–and it provides a steady source of diversions, diversions all the more attractive when one’s own writing is stalled. On this particular morning, the diversion turns out to be an essay about a writer named John William Corrington, and his novella, “Decoration Day.” I’ve never heard of Corrington, but apparently “Decoration Day” is a story about a retired judge, and the author of the essay assures me the novella will be of substantial interest to a legal audience.
I read the essay with an editor’s hope soured with a history of disappointment.³ The opening paragraphs are not encouraging. The author wants to explore the novella to show how “Decoration Day” reflects Plato’s sense of order in the soul; my eyes glaze over at the thought of it.⁴ An editor, like a teacher, learns to battle cynicism, and the bad judgments that follow in its wake by seeking the best in what we read, and to do that it helps to remain curious. And so I find, tucked

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away in a footnote, a brief biographical sketch of John William Corrington.⁵Here is the footnote:

John William Corrington received a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in 1964 and taught English at Louisiana State and Loyola until 1973. He received his J.D. from Tulane in 1976. While practicing law in New Orleans, he remained active as a writer, working on film and television scripts, and continued to publish novels, poetry, and short stories. Among his most significant works are the novels The Bombardier (1970) and Shad Sentell (1984), the poetry volume, Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), and a volume of short stories, The Actes and Monuments (1978).⁶

If Corrington’s Platonic sense of justice was inducement for summer indolence, the biographical footnote on Corrington’s career roused me. First, I’m puzzled that I’ve never heard of Corrington. While there is now more scholarly writing in the field of law and literature, law and popular culture, narrative jurisprudence, and legal storytelling than most of us can possibly manage to read,⁷ I can’t recall ever having seen a single reference to Corrington.⁸ With the swarm of lawyer novelists and their growing prominence in popular culture, learning of still another would not start much of a fire.⁹ But there is something in the short biographical

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sketch about Corrington that suggests, a man cut from a different cloth: an English professor with a D. Phil., a published poet, a novelist, and Hollywood screenwriter. Then he becomes a lawyer. What I found in the footnote left me curious about Corrington, his work and his life, and his fiction.

READING CORRINGTON

Editing an essay on Corrington’s novella, “Decoration Day,” the novella seemed an obvious place to begin my reading.¹⁰ “Decoration Day,” was published with a second novella, “The Risi’s Wife,” under the title All My Trials,¹¹ and as I soon learned, the book is out-of-print. No copy to be found in my university library, I turn to the Web, where, wondrously, a curious man (with dollars in his pocket) can peruse the holdings of some 9,000 independent book dealers located around the country. A few

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minutes on abebooks.com¹² and their marvelous used-book search-engine and it’s possible to locate even the most obscure book and a bookseller who will see it to your door.¹³
July 1, 2000. I locate a paperback copy of All My Trials at Pinchpenny Books in Ashland, Kentucky (and how remarkable it is that All My Trials could have ended up in such a place; a story there I suspect, albeit one never to be told). $4.00 and $1.58 shipping. All My Trials is on its way.¹⁴ A few days later, I’ve read “Decoration Day” and decided that Corrington is the real thing. “Decoration Day” is a story of perfect pitch, luminous prose, and vividly complex characters. Corrington writes as if he has God looking over his shoulder and the Devil knocking at the door;¹⁵ this John William Corrington may be the man to know. It seemed so on that July summer day when I finished reading “Decoration Day,” and it seems so now.
Something in the gravity and reach of “Decoration Day” prompted the acquisition of another copy of All My Trials. Chuck Flotkoetter, a bookseller at Lombard, Illinois had one and he wanted a personal check for $21; no credit cards. A week later a pristine hard-back copy of All My

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Trials arrives and I read “The Risi’s Wife,” the second of Corrington’s two legal novellas. If “Decoration Day” is told with the steady-hand of a seasoned Southern master, “The Risi’s Wife” is a metaphysical love story written under the influence of Corrington’s reading of Indian philosophy.¹⁶ A reader walks away from this story staggering a bit (as do the two lawyers who share the story), reminded perhaps of Dorothy’s aside to Toto in the Wizard of Oz: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“Decoration Day” and “The Risi’s Wife” are both stunning works of fiction and my response in reading them, I begin to see, is a bit odd. I impulsively call the University of Arkansas Press to see if I can find someone who knows anything about Corrington¹⁷ and how the Press came

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to publish All My Trials.¹⁸ Nothing comes of the call and I don’t learn anything new about Corrington or the book.
Exactly what might have been driving this inordinate curiosity about Corrington, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain. I’m usually more than content to satisfy my curiosity about an author with what I find in a dust-jacket bio. Reading Richard Selzer, I know only that he is a surgeon turned literary man.¹⁹ And beyond the dust-jacket facts–professor of surgery at Yale, retired to write full-time, now a prolific writer–I know Selzer only by way of what I intuit from his writings. And this dust-jacket knowledge of Selzer seems quite enough. I’ve been reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with law students for years now with nothing remotely resembling a temptation to make the trip to Monroeville, Alabama, to visit the town and the courtroom so vividly, famously, fictionally portrayed in Lee’s novel.²⁰ I’ve read, admired and

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taught Walker Percy’s The Second Coming²¹ without digging beyond the surface facts I know about Percy–trained as a physician, tuberculosis during the last years of his medical training, took up the reading of existential philosophers, did not practice medicine, slowly got around to making himself a novelist. I have dutifully acquired the Percy biographies,²² a collection of letters exchanged between Percy and Shelby Foote,²³ and a collection of occasional writings published after Percy’s death,²⁴ but haven’t pursued these biographical sources in any kind of systematic way.²⁵ With Corrington it has turned out to be a different story.

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READING “DECORATION DAY”

“Decoration Day” is not in any sense difficult to describe (it’s not experimental, post-modern, or genre-defying), but a description of the story by way of a condensed re-telling renders a pale imitation of the story itself. Corrington once noted, “I have yet to see a reading of an important modern novel which is not clearly partial; which does not play blind man to the novel’s elephant.”²⁶ Like any literary work of lasting merit, efforts to describe it falter when placed against the work itself. Corrington, early in his career as an English professor, writing about the work of writers he admired, recognized the problem. “I have found out a peculiar thing about great art. The greater it is, the less I can find to say about it.”²⁷

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Corrington was, of course, an academic and a student of literature and he knew he must, as teacher and critic, find a way to talk about the literature he found exemplary. And so, whatever my limits as a critic,²⁸ I must now say something about “Decoration Day,”²⁹a story that left me, at the end, knowing I’d been places only this story could have taken me. But isn’t it just such a reading experience, having seen what could not be seen without the story, an experience difficult to recreate (or even explain), that makes one a reader, a real reader? And it is, I think, an experience that takes us, again and again, back to a particular author, an author who made that story and made that experience possible.³⁰

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As the story begins, we find Judge Albert Sidney Johnston Finch,³¹ recently retired from the bench–a Louisiana state court judgeship–having taken up the gentlemen’s life, reading ancient Roman historians, listening to classical music,³² musing about the possibility of writing a philosophical

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legal treatise.³³ He’s a fisherman³⁴ and he’s something of a loner. He’s most definitely a Southerner.
Corrington had a Southerner’s sensibility when it came to stories and how they work, and as a writer, once he had a story underway he knew how to keep it moving.³⁵ We’ve no more than been introduced to Judge Albert and his efforts at retirement when Albert Sidney’s peace and

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contentment are threatened by a visit from Loreen Wendell and the unwelcome news that she’s going to seek a divorce from Albert Sidney’s godson, Billy Wendell. Albert Sidney may be new in his retirement but he takes it seriously–too seriously one might think–and he doesn’t welcome the intrusion occasioned by Loreen Wendell’s problems.

I was surely and adamantly retired. No more car thieves and pigeon-droppers, chicken-geeks and soft-tissue injuries. I was done with them and they with me. Not another eviction or foreclosure. Never a motion in limine or one more garnishment. If what I had was not the peace that passeth understanding, it would have to do till I was subpoenaed by a Higher Jurisdiction.³⁶

Albert Sidney claims to have put his work as a man of the law behind him and while Loreen isn’t asking Judge Albert to represent her, only to recommend a good lawyer, even this simple request seems to threaten his new-found peace, a new life he’s taken up beyond the business and busy-ness of the law.
We are later to learn, that it has been the death of his wife, Victoria, more than anything else, that has brought about Judge Albert’s effort to settle down into the quiet contentment of retirement, and his withdrawal not just from the law, but from friends and neighbors as well. Judge Albert seeks solace now in his books,³⁷ music,³⁸ fishing, and a quarrelsome relationship with Rowena, a black woman who has worked for his family so long that neither she nor Albert quite know how to do anything but keep doing what they’ve always done. Rowena is an awfully powerful woman, recognized to be so by Albert Sidney, and she has in ways small

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but numerous become a central part of his life. “And so, you see, Rowena and I are stuck with one another, both fearing what our people would say were either of us to betray that unspoken compact of half a century’s standing.”³⁹ With Rowena looking after him, doing some cooking, keeping things straight at the house, Albert Sidney isn’t much interested in the world or anyone’s affairs, even of those he would call family.
After Loreen Wendell’s visit and the unpleasant news of the troubles in her marriage to Billy Wendell, Albert Sidney confirms that his retirement and withdrawal are intentional, and he expects to remain so retired until the end of his days:

That evening I was on the porch with my whiskey, a decent sunset, and looming out ahead, a fine empty evening to fill. It was my hope and intention in those days to go forward with the retirement thing until, one bright morning, Rowena would show up grumbling and cursing her aching bones, shut off my stereo, search the premises for me, and find me at last right there in my chair, on my porch, Homer or Ariosto in hand, smiling, and dead as a mackerel.⁴⁰

But we must surely know what Albert Sidney does not–this contentment cannot last. We know this because it’s so terribly hard to imagine a story that begins with a man’s contentment and simply follows its progress. Or perhaps we know from our own lives (well before we crawl or stumble into retirement) that contentment is elusive. Contentment arrives like a fickle, visiting relative, on the move again before we’ve gotten used to her peculiar ways. And fiction, with its dependence upon conflict and drama, is an unlikely source of anything resembling contentment. While I’ve never sought contentment, I have been blessed on occasion by its unexpected appearance, and as a man looking retirement in the face sooner rather than later, I’m curious about how Judge Albert’s strong-willed efforts to retire and stay retired might work out.
“Decoration Day” is, as you might suspect, not really a retirement story at all. Albert Sidney has a good deal more life in him than he wants to realize, too much to content himself rereading Greek and Italian classics, while he listens to fine music, and watches the swirl and snarl of the world beyond.⁴¹ Devoted now to retirement, Judge Albert is a man

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shaped by years of disciplined work and, being neither whimsical nor precipitous in action, it’s not clear what might get him off his front porch and into a more active life.
     With still another visit, this one from Billy Wendell, who has come not to talk with Judge Albert about the troublesome situation with his wife, Loreen, but to seek the Judge’s help in dealing with a matter involving the government, we suspect we’ll have a chance to see Judge Albert in action. Billy Wendell tells Albert Sidney that the government has decided it wants to give a medal, and not just any medal, but the Medal of Honor, to Gaspard Penniwell–known to Albert Sidney as Uncle Gee. Gee, for reasons known best to himself, wants no part of the government or the medal.⁴² Gee works some of Billy Wendell’s land, as well as his own farm (deeded to him by Billy’s father), and Billy is trying to lend him a hand and fend off the government as a favor to Gee. And there are two additional facts of some importance: Gee is black and he’s a man that Albert Sidney knows from the time he was a young boy and Gee just a young man.
     “Decoration Day” takes off, then, from these two pivotal points: Judge Albert’s retirement and his efforts to remain so and his legal efforts on behalf of Gee to force the federal government to leave him alone. It would be possible, if not a bit foolish, to continue in this vein and walk the reader through “Decoration Day.” No second-hand description can do justice to Corrington’s masterful, poignant story and I will, as they say in Kentucky, “stop while the gettin’s good.” I’ll say only this: There is more to be learned about Judge Albert as the story progresses, about his relationship with Gee when they were both young men, and why Gee doesn’t feel inclined to let the government bestow medals on him. In all of this, Judge Albert, in his legal efforts on Gee’s behalf, ends up learning something about himself. We readers learn, slowly and subtly, just how much Victoria, his wife (and the law), has meant to him, the role Gee played in his upbringing, how the work on behalf of Gee requires a kind of self-scrutiny that lies beyond Albert Sidney’s experience (but not his character). Judge Albert must now question and reexamine the assumptions he’s held about who he is and how he wants to live the rest of his life.
      “Decoration Day” has the compelling vibrancy and poetic prose which one finds in all of Corrington’s fiction. And there is a literary quality and depth of seriousness in “Decoration Day” (and Corrington’s other legal

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fiction) absent in the lawyer fiction the public now consumes like over-priced breakfast cereal⁴³ and rarely matched in the best contemporary legal fiction.⁴⁴
For those who teach and study legal fiction, to stumble upon Corrington’s “Decoration Day” is like finding gold.⁴⁵ It is a story charged with passion, plotted through the lives of characters we learn to care

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about (as we learn how they care for each other). There is, in finding something like “Decoration Day,” a sense of pleasure, and the hope that more of the same can be found with a return to Corrington’s other fiction. Reading “Decoration Day,” I knew one thing clearly–I had found a writer to read and a man to know, a writer who wrote with assurance that there is still something to be learned about the world, indeed, that this ordinary world in which we make our lives is part of some larger Tale.

FISHING DEEP WATERS

The driving force in Corrington’s life was an adamantine sense of himself as writer. Simply put, Corrington knew he could write, that he had stories to tell and that he knew how to tell them. Corrington was both disciplined and talented. He had trained himself carefully in the use of words, primarily as a poet;⁴⁶he knew he was good with words and felt it

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a duty to write and write well. He would, along the way, expend an enormous amount of time and energy engaged in writing that had little meaning to him, other than as a means to support his family, but it was always his stories and novels (and his philosophical writings) that he saw as his life’s purpose. And that purpose was to capture in fiction, by way of his talent, some “larger conception of things.”⁴⁷ This quest–to write big fiction–would never falter whatever other work he might undertake. And he would give up, along the way, the idea of being: a musician (but never cease listening to music), a poet (his fictional prose is often poetic),⁴⁸ a professor (even as he uses his fiction to “teach”), a literary scholar (continue as he did to write about philosophy and the “humanities”⁴⁹), an intellectual historian (although he did maintain his interest in the work of Eric Voegelin and, with colleagues, edit a book of Voegelin papers⁵⁰ and

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study Eastern philosophy). What Corrington did not give up was his sense of himself as a writer of serious fiction.⁵¹
It was, he says, in his days as a high school student that the decision to be a writer was put in place: “They had a short story contest at Jesuit High here in town [Shreveport, Louisiana], and I won it till they stopped having it!”⁵² As an undergraduate at Centenary College, the die was cast: “By my senior year, I’d reckoned on what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to write. I was in the process of moving my spiritual and intellectual baggage from Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller to William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe.”⁵³
And with the baggage moved, Corrington made writing an intellectu-al, philosophical, and spiritual quest that would continue for the rest of his life. He set about in his fiction, to fish the deepest waters. What he wants to do, he says, is “to test and assay and learn the meaning of the depths that exist beneath the flux of surface change upon which we skate like water-bugs until we are pulled down, back into that engendering depth from which we rose to the light.”⁵⁴ Corrington’s fiction, like a

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compass bearing, always has its alignment with that “engendering depth”; and then, coming up against that depth, glimpsing it, finding our-selves enmeshed in it, we are changed in some inexorable way.
Corrington did little trolling in the deep waters of his own inner life and had an aversion to the idea of fiction as a substituted form of politics.⁵⁵ Unlike writers he might admire, Corrington sought no place for himself in his fiction.⁵⁶ “I have always tried to avoid making fiction which in fact constituted nothing but fictionalized essays on my own opinions and moods.”⁵⁷
While Corrington was insistent that neither he nor his politics belonged in the fiction, an author’s life must inevitably bleed into a fictional work, and this was as true for Corrington as it is any writer.⁵⁸ But the Corrington we see in the fiction, significant and intriguing as it may be, never gets in the way of his penultimate desire–to tell a story, and to let the characters do the telling.⁵⁹ What Corrington sought as an ideal, and largely achieved, was to simply honor the story he was trying to tell. Joyce Corrington suggest that her husband’s “literary ideal” was an “art free of biographical incident–even free of the ego of the artist.” She points to the following passage in Bill’s journals where he addresses this aspect of his writing:

[I]sn’t art the purest and the best when it reflects a vanished artist, and a luminous object whose sheen, the glory surrounding, is the living projection of the subject artist immolated as an ego, existing only in the patina of love which lifts the object out of nature and into that small transcendence of artistic creation? (12 July 1981)⁶⁰

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Corrington knew where he stood as an author, and he knew what he wanted his fiction to be. He had taught fiction, lectured on “the twentieth century novel,” and developed a comprehensive “theory of literature.”⁶¹ Corrington knew the literature of his time and he knew he didn’t want his writing to become an extension of his personality⁶² or his politics.⁶³ And while he might have had strong “political feelings,” he had no desire to have his fiction serve as political tracts.

Strong as my political feelings might be, I’ve never consciously tried or wanted to convert them into stories or poems. There has to be a form of human expression which ignores the short-term passions and gets on with the real questions: the ones that have always existed, and which always will.⁶⁴

Corrington believed, with some justification, that his fiction was sufficient proof that he was “not given to autobiographical ravings. . . .”⁶⁵A lawyer in one of Corrington’s stories tells his colleague: “Folks here can abide a lot of peculiarity, but you ought not to flaunt it. You want to keep your appetites kind of to yourself.”⁶⁶ Corrington took that admonition to heart and tried to abide by it in his fiction.

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Corrington reached beyond himself for his stories and he wanted them to honor the long past, not as a glorification of history, but an acknowledgment of that past and order which has “always existed.”⁶⁷ As Corrington puts it: “To be happy, one has to have the sense of having accomplished something beyond oneself, beyond what the ego wants and craves–something that is somehow a tribute to God, and to the powers he grants us if we prepare and listen.”⁶⁸ To write fiction as Corrington sought to write it, meant he had to fish the deep waters and to do that he needed to be well out-fitted. “The more I read in history, philosophy, and religion,” he said, “the more determined I am to use everything I can, because what you want is the broadest possible human basis for your work . . . .”⁶⁹
Corrington’s fiction became an expression of his quest to make use of everything he could, and to let his characters do some of the heavy-lifting. In “The Actes and Monuments,” we find a man at the end of his tether, but he’s still trying to figure out how to live, to learn what he needs to know to survive:

After the coronary, I quit. I could have slowed down, let things go easier, taken some of the jobs where little more than appearance was required. But I didn’t do that. I like to believe that I cared too much for the law. No, I do believe that. Because if I had cared nothing for the law, I would have played at being an attorney–or else simply stopped being involved with law at all. But I did neither.
Rather, I let go my partnership and began looking for some way to use all I knew, all I was coming to know.⁷⁰

Corrington in “The Actes and Monuments,” is after “something big,” something of sufficient magnitude that it requires all he knows.⁷¹ And

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what he is after, the magnitude of it, and the knowledge of it, did not so much arise and grow over the years, as it did possess him from the beginning. While writing his first novel, And Wait for the Night, Corrington writes his friend and fellow poet, Charles Bukowski, and tries to explain what he hopes to do with the novel:

When you’ve done a lot of little things like scaling small hills and even big hills, you feel like you have got to take on something big or else what the hell did you buy the safety-rope and the alpine spikes for? So my novel. It is not about graduate school or about men who sell insurance and can’t get an erection because I never cared about grad school (drank whiskey then and slept during classes), and there is no insurance for suddenly finding you are dead (which is the only risk and only surety). . . . So it [the book] is about a strange monumental yesterday peopled with all the beloved ghosts of men who were only men until musket balls or cannon shells stripped them of flesh as swords did Hector and an arrow did Achilles. Now they are myths, and it is good to say of them, like in Ecclesiastics: LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN.⁷² And the infamous too. Because all sent their greatness and their sins down to us, and we triumph and suffer for them again.⁷³

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This notion that he had been left a great legacy would preoccupy Corrington throughout his life. But unlike Harold Bloom’s writer who suffers an “anxiety of influence” in coming to grips with the great writers who precede him,⁷⁴ Corrington welcomed the embrace of this legacy and the sense of duty that accompanied it. In “The Actes and Monuments,” Harry Cohen, one of Corrington’s fictional lawyers, having fled New York, beseiged with heart attacks, has gotten himself to Vicksburg, Mississippi where he must now try to keep himself alive. But in Vicksburg, Harry Cohen takes on a new burden–to understand the South. Cohen says:

I walked amid the grassy parkland of the old battlefields. I touched stone markers and tried to reach through the granite and marble to touch the flesh of that pain, to find what those thousands of deaths had said and meant. . . . [T]he Southerners, those aliens, outsiders, dying for slavery, owning no slaves; dying for the rights of states that had no great care for their rights. In the name of Death, which had engulfed them all, why?⁷⁵

Cohen’s effort to understand where he is, is part and parcel of knowing who he is, and only by knowing who and where he is will he know how to live. This idea–that one belongs to a place and that place and belonging to it becomes part of you–is integral to Corrington’s understanding of the South and his sense of himself as a writer. But more of this business about Corrington and the South in a moment. Corrington is not, in his fiction, attempting to represent or portray a faithful

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rendering of the South and its people so much as he is working out an “ontology” or “view of Being”⁷⁶ that underlies, shapes, and fuels his writing and his view of literature.

I came to see that our lives, as Proust said in . . . Swann’s Way, are so small, so fleeting, that they must be attached to some larger conception of things if they are not to be wasted. Consider that this room, in geologic terms, is a mirage, a fleck of time, and we ourselves ghost who appear upon the film of world-history for the least part of a second. The film goes on, leaving our passions and our acts behind, and only if our purposes have struck root in the largest and most essential patterns of our time can we aspire to be more than blips in the film. What can a man–or even a society–do to sustain its reality, to fix its “having-lived” upon that onrushing pattern? I believe that we must become giants, and the only way to do that is to live for one another, to enter that vast communion of the saints. If we do not, as single persons and as a culture, come from something and tend toward something, then we are nothing. We are less than the trilobites that one can find stuck absurdly in the sediments left over from Devonian time. Is all this abstract metaphysics? Yes, but it is also the precise theme of a piece of contemporary poetry:
We are but a moment’s sunlight,
fading in the grass . . .

That is so. We are ephemeral, but we are, if we choose to be, in Schopenhauer’s words, “Lords of eternity.” And it is from this beginning that all great work . . . springs.⁷⁷

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Corrington, from his earliest novels to his later legal fiction, and in his jurisprudential writing,⁷⁸ works toward this “larger conception of things.” The lawyers in Corrington’s fiction learn, painfully, to take responsibility for the knowledge that we “come from something and tend toward something.” If we do not know this, and live according to this knowledge, “then we are nothing.”⁷⁹ In his fiction and philosophical writing, Corrington found a way “to live for” history and to enter, by way of his writing, into a “vast communion of the saints.”⁸⁰ Harry Cohen, the lawyer in Corrington’s “The Actes and Monuments,” when offered help by another attorney, says: “Yes, I told him. Hell yes. Only small boys and large fools stand alone when they might have allies.”⁸¹ We become giants, in Corrington’s view, by honoring the saints and the demands they make on us.⁸²
Corrington may have been fishing deep waters, but there was often a playful, dark, farcical element in his fiction.⁸³ But the comic farce is

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always in service of his larger purpose, envisioning the lives of ordinary men and women caught up in the “onrushing pattern” of a reality⁸⁴ that extends beyond a single life (even of the most purposeful sort). In a letter to Charles Bukowski, Corrington says, “I am only playing the lines and watching the corks bobble until and if I get a strike.”⁸⁵
Corrington used his fiction to explore the myths and mysteries that envelope us: “[I]f a man is any kind of writer at all, that capacity to bequeath the mystery to another generation, to send the message onward, is the only thing that matters.”⁸⁶ Masterful as he was with language, Corrington had little interest in trying to dazzle the reader. What he did with a story was try to shock the reader into recognition of those deeper truths and mysteries that lie all about us. This requires, “[s]tories about the most serious and deepest feelings and thoughts. . . . Stories of the kind that Faulkner said were the only ones that mattered: stories of the human heart in conflict with itself.”⁸⁷

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Corrington’s commitment to serious fiction was put to the test in the decade he wrote TV daytime dramas, writing that meant absolutely nothing to him intellectually. While there is no way to measure or assess how much this work diverted his intellectual energies;⁸⁸ it certainly never softened his talents. But in making the choices he did, Corrington never deluded himself.

It had become obvious by the mid-fifties that there was an inverse proportion between the amount of money a man could make–and the quality of his writing. If you wanted to make a lot of money, you wrote crap. If you wrote quality fiction, you weren’t going to make any money. My junior year in college had given me an example. I was working at the Shreveport Times in those years, and when I wasn’t on the police beat or doing general reporting, I did book reviews. They gave me a big thick novel to review. It was one of the finest novels I’ve ever read. It was called The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. It cost $7.95 when the

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average novel cost $3.95 or $4.95, and of course it made no money at all for its publisher.
Years later, I talked to an editor who had worked at Harcourt, Brace in 1955. He remembered the meetings surrounding the publication of The Recognitions. “We knew there was no money in it,” he told me. “But everybody thought the book had to be published. In those days, there was still a thing called American literature, and we felt we had to publish a book as splendid as The Recognitions. We just had to.”
That was then. This is now. I think it safe to say that no American publisher would risk three dollars and ninety-five cents in the name of American literature. There is little reason to suppose that Raintree County would be published today. Less reason to think that any of Faulkner’s major work would find print. Can you really imagine a contemporary publisher reading As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury and, as they like to say, “committing corporate funds” to it. This is the age of Herman Wouk and John Updike, John Irving, Steven King, and inevitably, James Michener.⁸⁹

And there was never to be any illusion that he would ever be able to spend all his time writing fiction:

I suppose I had some intuition that things might go that way as far back as the late 1950’s. That’s why I went on to graduate school and entered college teaching. Not so much for love of teaching as for a little security while I got on with what it was I thought I should do in life.⁹⁰

Corrington was knowledgeable about the world of publishing and he was a realist:

Joyce Corrington and I have consistently been paid best for our worst work. Neither of us could make a decent living writing what we want to write, writing in the great literary tradition that T.S. Eliot told us extends from the work of Homer to the present. If we are willing to write garbage and not complain, we can make thousands of dollars a week. If we insist on doing the best work we can do, we’ll be lucky to make ten thousand a year.⁹¹

With the realization that he could not make a living as a fiction writer, Corrington simply divided his time, between the TV daytime dramas that could earn him a good living and the fiction where he would explore “the larger conception of things.” It was a world divided between writing fast and furious (and doing it efficiently and for money) and writing as slowly as it might take to make something meaningful (and

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doing it for posterity). Making a living, and writing to explore the “larger conception of things” are, in Corrington’s world, two different enterprises.

If anyone has anything serious to say, writing should under no circumstances be undertaken as a way to make a living. Be a carpenter or a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher. Do something you like to do which leaves you time for the writing. I always thought running a fishing-camp would be a great way to make a living. When Faulkner was asked what job would be best for a writer, he said he thought the ideal job would be to be the landlord of a bordello. You’d have all your time free, and everything you’d need close at hand.
Writing is no more a career than loving, marrying, raising one’s children is a career. It is a way of living that entails seeing into the flow of one’s own life and that of others–either close by, or immeasurably far away–and then to make use of one’s hard-gained skill to recreate that life in language. So that the life thus preserved intersects the ongoing life of generations, even nations–as yet unborn.⁹²

BECOMING A LAWYER

Writing poetry, Corrington knew he wanted to write fiction (and he did).⁹³Teaching, he knew he wanted to be a writer (and he was).

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Somewhere, somehow, he got the notion he would be a lawyer, or more accurately, that he needed to study law. How does a man, at age forty, who has already moved his intellectual baggage several times, secured a position as an English professor, who has taken up the writing of Hollywood film scripts, become a law student? What prompts such an undertaking? The pursuit of yet another career?
For some years now I’ve tried, by various means, to encourage my students to become more reflective about the work they will undertake as lawyers, the means they will adopt in that work, and the way their minds might be bent and shaped to accommodate this work. It’s not at all clear how this reflection and introspection are to be undertaken. And so, I simply ask my students: What brought you here? Corrington, in response to this question, says:

Well, I was sick of academia, so I got out of that in ’72 and started law school at Tulane. I think part of it was the fact that my dad had been a lawyer and had always wanted me to be one and I had always said, “No, I’m going my own way.” But then I had a little bit of spare time and we were financially OK and why not do that for him, even if it was posthumously? There was one other reason: when I told my father I had a job at LSU, he said, “Well, son, teaching at LSU for a while is OK, but

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when are you going to get a job?” He didn’t regard teaching school or writing novels–or doing movies, God knows–as serious work fit for a responsible and bright man. But when I became a lawyer, you see, I had a place in the social order just like everybody else.⁹⁴

When Corrington says his father, John Wesley Corrington, was a lawyer, he means he graduated from law school and was admitted to practice law, not that he actually practiced law.⁹⁵ When the family moved in 1942 to Shreveport, Corrington’s father, who had been working in the insurance business in Ohio, stayed in the business he knew best. Pat Wykes, Corrington’s sister, does not remember her father making all that much of the decision not to practice law, but he was clearly proud of having graduated from law school. It was part of the family lore that their father had “graduated first in his class and 2nd in the state.”⁹⁶ Corrington seems, in some way, to have been deeply affected by his father’s wistful remembrance of his law studies.
Bill Corrington was, as his law school friend, Art Dula says, a “thinking man” and he may well have gone to law school more to think about law than with any idea he would ever practice law for a living.⁹⁷ Indeed, William Domnarksi, says, “What he took up at the age of forty, when he turned to law, was a grand intellectual adventure.”⁹⁸

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It was an “intellectual adventure” set in motion by Corrington’s growing disenchantment with academic life and a spirited, bruising, well-publicized fight he had undertaken at Loyola (where he was Chair of the English Department) with the Jesuits who ran the school. According to Joyce Corrington, taking up the study of law was “a way out of an unpleasant situation” at Loyola:

When Bill was invited to move to Loyola from LSU and become chairman of the Department of English, he was told that Loyola was embarkingon a “campaign of excellence” and he was being hired to build a distinguished department. Bill brought with him from LSU, Miller Williams, a publishing poet, and Thomas Blouin, a man who read everything, delighted in teaching, and was well liked by students. Then the Jesuits decided to fire Blouin. While it was never said outright, it was clear that their only objection to him was that he was gay (though never accused of having involved himself sexually with any students). Bill felt responsible for Blouin and he rallied the Faculty Senate to his cause. Bill was a very good politician when he chose to be. There were student protests and an AAUP hearing which, as I recall, found for Blouin. Ultimately, the president, vice-president and dean of Loyola were ousted from office as a result of the Blouin affair. However, the Jesuits had depth and brought in new people to fill the vacated positions (ironically the new Loyola president was the same man who as principal of Jesuit High School in Shreveport had kicked Bill out of school for “having the wrong attitude”). Despite all Bill’s efforts they were eventually able to dismiss Blouin, the faculty grew tired of fighting, and Bill found himself required to teach more hours than he wanted to teach. It was during the Blouin fight that Bill observed that in the modern world one needed to be a lawyer to stand up for one’s rights.⁹⁹

Addressing a Shreveport writers conference in 1985, Corrington elaborated on his disenchantment with academic life.

By 1972, though I’d become chair of an English department and offered a full professorship, I’d had enough of academia. You may remember that in the late sixties and early seventies, the academic world was hysterically attempting to respond to student thugs who, in their wisdom, claimed that serious subjects seriously taught were “irrelevant.” The Ivy League gutted its curriculum, deans and faculty engaged in “teach-ins,” spouting Marxist-Leninist slogans, and sat quietly watching while half-witted draft-dodgers and degenerates of various sorts held them captive in their offices. Oddly enough, even as this was going on, there was a concerted effort to crush the academic freedom of almost

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anyone whose opinions differed from that of the mob or their college-administrator accessories. It seemed a good time to get out and leave the classroom to idiots who couldn’t learn and didn’t know better, and imbeciles who couldn’t teach and should have known better.
I went to law school at Tulane. At least in Southern schools, the lawyers were having none of this educational anarchy. The work there is simply too demanding and too competitive to allow for pretensions of any kind. It was a good time for me, and it produced a series of short stories dealing with life from the point of view of lawyers and the law that hasn’t finished yet.¹⁰⁰

The suggestion that he left teaching because of the politics and turmoil of the times is probably overstated. Corrington had never found much satisfaction in classroom teaching, and although he was undoubtedly a strong, dynamic teacher¹⁰¹ and a serious literary scholar, his real commitment had always been to his writing (and in particular, his fiction and his philosophical writing), rather than to teaching.
Corrington’s scholarly writings (published and unpublished) are impressive. He had sharply defined opinions on the poets of his day, and on the literary greats–Faulkner, Hemingway, Wolfe, Camus. He published critical academic articles on poets as diverse as Charles Bukowski (with whom he had a close, if long-distance relationship, that lasted for much of the 1960s) and Wallace Stevens, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and James Dickey, and sharply critical writings on Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov (for whose poetry he had little but disdain). His essays appeared in literary journals and in scholarly books. His poetry was published in small poetry mags as well as established journals, basically wherever he could find a willing editor. Corrington’s written lectures on the “theory of the novel” and “the 20th century novel” were sufficiently well-developed that they could easily have been published. Corrington, as an intellectual historian, had a long-standing interest in the history of humanities and he wrote several scholarly papers on the subject.¹⁰² He was adamantly devoted to the proposition that the South was a place of great literature

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and wrote both popular¹⁰³ and scholarly works104 on the South and its place in literature.
     In addition, during the twelve years he taught, he managed to get a D. Phil. from the University of Sussex (1965), serve as a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (spring quarter, 1968), get into a rather fractious fight with the Jesuits at Loyola, and during all this he wrote like a man afire. These were the years in which he wrote his first novels, And Wait for the Night105and The Upper Hand,106 and his first collection of short stories, The Lonesome Traveler and Other Stories.¹⁰⁷
     Corrington seems to have put his mind to teaching and his scholarly pursuits in the same focused, intense way he wrote fiction. Yet, he seems, even early in his teaching career, to have had no great affection for classroom teaching. In an August, 1962 letter to his friend Tom Bell, some two years after he started teaching, he says, “Summer school is a drag. You might as well talk to cans of chicken-soup.”¹⁰⁸ Corrington describes that 1962 summer teaching stint, in a letter to Charles Bukowski, as a “cosmic agony of spirit, but necessary to make money.”¹⁰⁹ The summer before, Corrington had written Bukowski expressing similar sentiments:
     These kids this summer that I teach: they are as different from me as elephants from panthers. No insight, no reflexes, no passions–only the desire to get lost in some crowd and to make it to the plain of mediocrity and feast there forever.¹¹⁰
     We might be reminded here of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird¹¹¹ and the young Scout Finch’s observations about the teaching of literature to first grade students. Scout, off to school for her first day, has studied with Atticus Finch, her lawyer father, and she’s already smart enough to get in trouble with teachers who had just as soon she didn’t know quite so much. Her first grade teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, as new to Maycomb and teaching as Scout to formal schooling, wants to get things

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started well with her new students. So, she reads them a story about cats. “The cats had long conversations with one another, they wore cunning little clothes and lived in a warm house beneath a kitchen stove.”¹¹² Scout tells us that “[b]y the time Mrs. Cat called the drugstore for an order of chocolate malted mice the class was wriggling like a bucketful of catawba worms.” The children have grown restless and distracted, Scout explains, because Miss Caroline was “unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature.”¹¹³ Bill Corrington in his courses at LSU was simply dealing with students “immune to imaginative literature.”¹¹⁴
Corrington, in what is undoubtedly an exaggeration all decked-out to get the attention of his decidedly anti-academic friend, Charles Bukowski, says:

The way you teach an English class is the way, I expect, you fight a battle. Most of them are either dead or sure to be killed. Ok, this is the way it is. Shake [Shakespeare] says: “this must be.” You do not sob over the fact of gravity, and you face the reality of that bad Sunday at Appomattox. And you write with one hand and once in a while you salvage a little something out of the stew with your left.
But I could wash dishes and feel good when I got through a day without any breaking. It is bad to equate people, young or old, with crockery, but I am only recognizing: I didn’t make them stupid fucking self-satisfied potential corpses. And not being dr. frankenstein, I cannot bring them around. So I talk–the way you would to a man with a terrible gut-wound who might start crying (and neither your nor he want that) when he feels death shaking its rattle in his ear. And I keep thinking how chickens in a cage, in full sight of the execution-place, pay no heed until the hand closes on their own specific needs: o god what individualists.¹¹⁵

Teachers are commonly confronted with the problem of unengaged students, and Corrington, no less well prepared to deal with them than his colleagues, has simply got bigger fish to fry. In a still earlier letter to a friend, Tom Bell, Corrington says he finds LSU, where he was then teaching, “all right,” but adds that “anyplace is all right. They leave me

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alone and I sure leave them alone.”¹¹⁶ He is, even in this first teaching position, ready to flee not only LSU but teaching itself. As he tells Bell, he wants to “talk to cabdrivers and former suicide pilots and emasculated diplomats.”¹¹⁷ What we see here is a writer in need of experience, looking

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for a life that will make it possible for him to write. “I think you have to keep having things happen in order to really know them . . . .”¹¹⁸ Corrington could not content himself with teaching because he did not see it as a way for a writer to live. And while he may have set off to law school on an intellectual and philosophical quest,¹¹⁹what he ended up finding, in the practice of law, was a world rich enough to capture his imagination as a writer. Teaching and poetry were preludes to fiction, and his work as a lawyer would become the source of his best fiction.
Whether Bill Corrington’s departure from Loyola-New Orleans was a strategic retreat or a planned change of career,¹²⁰ Domnarski is right, it was the kind of intellectual venture one learns to expect of Corrington. That Corrington took up the study of law as an intellectual foray, is further supported by Joyce Corrington’s observations on the influence of Eric Voegelin and his philosophical study of history on her husband.¹²¹

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Corrington was first introduced to Voegelin’s work while teaching at LSU in the early 1960s. Voegelin, who had been teaching at LSU, had left by the time Corrington arrived. LSU Press was publishing Voegelin’s monumental four-volume Order and History and Corrington got introduced to the Voegelin work by Dick Wentworth at LSU Press.¹²² When asked about Voegelin’s influence on his thinking, Corrington noted that after reading Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation “the world looked different, less arbitrary and more intelligible. And it has stayed that way.”¹²³ In Voegelin’s work, Corrington found an intellectual historian whose work “pulled together all the things that interested me: theology, literary criticism, symbolic studies, even psychology–everything I knew a little bit about fed into and was made coherent by Voegelin’s work. And it’s still going on.”¹²⁴ Joyce Corrington notes that after this early reading of Voegelin in the 1960s, Bill followed up in the 1970s with reading in Hellenic and modern philosophers and that Voegelin had certainly figured in his decision to study law.¹²⁵

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     There would always be, for Corrington, recurring thoughts that he might someday take up teaching again, and he entertained thoughts of returning to Shreveport to teach at Centenary College.¹²⁶ But as often as he would mention going home, and a return to teaching, there was little effort to make it happen.¹²⁷ Indeed, he seems to have known, at some level, that the pull of Shreveport, Centenary College, and the idea of teaching, were the stirrings of myth, and not to be actualized. “Perhaps I should have behaved myself and stayed in academia–but I don’t think so. My boredom threshold gets lower as [my] age increases.”¹²⁸
     In 1980, two years after he left the practice of law, Corrington began a journal that he would continue until just weeks before his death. In some 1,200 journal pages, Corrington makes only brief reference to the three years he practiced¹²⁹ and the years he spent at Tulane Law School. It was only in interviews, asked directly about what took him to law school, and in a presentation to a Louisiana writers conference, that Corrington would talk about his decision, at age forty, to study law. But he had little to say about his experiences as a law student at Tulane and seems to have left no account of those years.
     Joyce Corrington, commenting on Bill’s decision to practice law, says:

He was offered a position on graduation by Steve Plotkin, whom he met during the Blouin fracas [a battle with the Jesuits at Loyola-New Orleans over Blouin’s tenure]. Steve guaranteed him a base salary of (as I remember) only $10,000 per year but generously gave him $500 to buy suits for court appearances and another $1000 to furnish his office. I

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recall helping him do both. Steve Plotkin’s practice was largely personal injury and Bill eventually told Steve he would go to court and try the cases but he’d be damned if he’d interview any more clients, clients who wanted to tell him their whole life history.
Bill felt great responsibility for his clients and took his trial work very seriously–so much so that he would come home during a trial and down a pitcher of martinis to deal with the stress.
I do not recall that he wrote much during this time since establishing himself in a field where he was a 40 year old with the knowledge of a 20 year old demanded a lot of his time. He was proudest of writing appellate briefs. In one case, Steve gave Bill a $10,000 or $15,000 bonus for that work.¹³⁰

Steve Plotkin, now a Louisiana judge, notes that Corrington was a good lawyer but was more intrigued by the moral and philosophical issues presented in the cases than the cases themselves.¹³¹Corrington set out to be a litigation lawyer but eventually decided, notwithstanding the compe-tence he developed in his early trial assignments, that he was better suited for appellate work,¹³² and more interested in writing briefs than trying cases.
Professions, law among them, involve disciplined work; new initiates are admitted to the profession only after they undergo the rigors, rituals, and rationalizations that prepare them (somewhat) for what lies ahead. New initiates adopt and adapt, or they opt-out. They take up assigned roles and look to various sources for the meaning to be derived from law work. For many, the practice of law requires not just knowledge and skill but an identity (an identity which connects the work to the person, a connection that provides a sense of the worthiness of the work). This business of identity, taking one on, dealing with one already in place, can be tricky. And for a man like Corrington, established and accomplished when he arrives as a student, this business of taking on a new identity

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would be rather different than for a student who shows up in law school only months after graduating from college.
I don’t know whether it’s possible to teach an old dog new tricks or not. Corrington, as a law student, was, an old dog. And more importantly, he took up the study of law with a rather impressive array of tricks at his disposal. He was an accomplished poet, novelist, teacher, reader of the classics, and a student of philosophy; he was a writer and an intellectual. We don’t get many Bill Corrington’s in legal education.
Whatever Corrington did during those law school years, law school didn’t seem to capture his imagination–he would have little to say about his student years at Tulane Law School.¹³³ That law school, with its pseudo-drama, the great earnestness and striving of the students, and the constant drumbeat of talk about learning to “think like a lawyer,” did not find a place in Corrington’s fiction is somewhat more surprising. While Corrington found no place in his fiction for law school, lawyer’s fared a great deal better. First, he had real fondness for lawyers¹³⁴and he found in their existential struggle, material he could build into his stories. In “The Southern Reporter,” one of his post-law-years short stories, Corrington comes as close as he would ever come to suggesting what his years as a lawyer had meant to him as a writer:

The essence of a courthouse is the play of stories that moves within it. In the clerk’s office, the civil sheriff’s office, between the judges’ clerks, between lawyers, between the women who clean up the courtrooms and the blind man who sells sandwiches and magazines in the lobby, there is a constant current of telling and hearing, of guessing and supposing as to the cases that are being acted out before the bench. The stories have no necessary connection with what will enter the records of each case. The rules of evidence do not constrain clerks and custodians, deliverymen and lawyers outside the purlieus of the court. What passes

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in the hallways of the courthouse may be strange, inaccurate, tainted with the passions of the storyteller. Still it may be nearer the truth than those pages that will be read by the court of appeal.¹³⁵

It was the law’s stories and the everyday work of lawyers pushing up against the ordinariness of tragedy, work in which a man might glimpse that larger “order of things” beyond law, that Corrington would explore in his lawyer stories. Corrington knew how to tell a titillating story, but he told them as a seer of things, of human beings and their struggles, their pains and tragedies, their conflicted hearts, and their resort to law to deal with fates from which law could not save them. Corrington knew that the law was an anchor but that it would not hold in the worst of storms. Law must always operate in the shadow of myth, the gods, and our sense of the Divine.
In “Every Act Whatever of Man,” Walter Journe, learning that he is to appear before a Supreme Court Judge named Harold Walker, says:

Harold Walker. Short, jovial, a Santa Claus of a man. From their district. A fine legal scholar, an activist who used the code like a canvas to sketch out his own ideas of the meaning of the law, and who always required that whatever formula you used, you got down to the rights and wrongs of a case. Mr. Journe’s heart sunk within him. Harold Walker was a pragmatist.
He remembered arguing a case before the Circuit Court of Appeal before Harold went to the high court. Mr. Journe had had a fine case. He had had the law, the code, even the precedents, for whatever they might matter. But Harold had interrupted his argument, and fixed him with that affectionate jovial smile of his, and asked, –Well, well, Mr. Journe, you’ve laid it all out for us, and I see what you’re saying. But is it right?
Lord God, is it right? What kind of a maniac judge asks that of a lawyer? The judge is supposed to answer that question, not the advocate. No, the lawyer, having taken a case, is supposed to have only one view, and to argue that view until a final decision cuts him short. No one has the right to ask the advocate to judge. He cannot. It is not his function.¹³⁶

Corrington had a practiced eye for observing lawyers. In “The Southern Reporter,” Dewey, a court reporter, observing a defense lawyer named Vallee, cross-examine the prosecutrix in a rape case, says:

At first Vallee was as quiet, as gentle as Caswell [the prosecutor] had been. He asked Miranda about her past down in the country, asked

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about her home life, about her religious education, asked if she had had boyfriends back then. Miranda answered openly, like one without guilt. But then the questioning closed in, became more personal. Vallee began stalking her like a wolf, moving question by question from counsel’s table toward the witness stand until he enclosed it, his arms almost around it as he pressed one question after another. Dewey didn’t like his method. It was almost as if he were embracing her, drawing her close, as if his questions were intimate rather than public. He wanted to know about her sexual experience as a young girl. He wanted to know about her lovers, and he was so close to her, it was as if he deemed himself her next friend rather than an attorney doing what was expected, demanded of him. Vallee wanted to know why she had chosen Jumbo’s as a place to work. Surely she had known that Jumbo’s was a swinging place, a place where the live crowd came. Hadn’t she picked Jumbo’s for that very reason? Hadn’t she come up from the parishes looking for action? Wanting excitement? Wasn’t that the way it was?¹³⁷

Lawyers may, in their willful entanglements of reality, seem to have in mind doing their own version of fiction. Dewey, the court reporter in “The Southern Reporter,” listens to the lawyers everyday, and concludes that lawyers “somehow alter reality to suit their cause. It was like listening to the serpent arguing with Eve. Only Eve hadn’t been to law school as the serpent surely had.”¹³⁸ Corrington, a student of law, and now a lawyer, knows how to listen to lawyers, and he had no plans to play Eve.
The lawyers in Corrington’s fiction address themselves, when they must, as lost souls.¹³⁹ The unnamed lawyer in “Pleadings,” who has begun to have doubts about his wife, and more troubling, fears that she now has doubts about him, says:

I tried very hard to reckon where I was and what I should do. I was in the twentieth century after Christ, and it felt all of that long since anything on earth had mattered. I was in a democratic empire called America, an officer of its courts, and surely a day in those courts is as a thousand years. I was an artisan in words, shaping destinies, allocating money and blame by my work. I was past the midpoint of my life and could not make out what it had meant so far.¹⁴⁰

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     And when you’ve practiced law long enough, and seen enough, you begin to wear down. Mr. Landry, an old-time New Orleans lawyer, in “Nothing Succeeds,” tells us how it is:
     One of the results of aging in the law is that you are not easily gotten to. By the time you have been at it thirty or forty years, you have done so many things no one should have to do that something has drained out of you, to be replaced with the law, like a creature trapped in mud which is hard pressed for a long, long time, leaching away the soft parts, making everything over. In stone.¹⁴¹
     The law didn’t trap Corrington in its mud; but then he didn’t put in his thirty years.

“I AM NOT A MODERN MAN”

Corrington disdained “the fads & lunacies of opinion & action that have cursed the age in which I have lived.”¹⁴² It was, he said, “an age in which any man can take pleasure running from reality.”¹⁴³ These con-cerns about the modern era are to be found throughout Corrington’s fiction and his philosophical writings. For example, in “Decoration Day,” the story begins with Judge Finch, recently retired, taking up the gentleman’s life, reading ancient Roman historians, listening to classical music, and with thoughts of writing a legal treatise. Of the treatise, Judge Albert says: “It would probe the archaic depths of the legal tradition–not as a bag of statutes and rules, but as a spiritual structure. I could be certain that no practicing lawyer worth his salt would read it. I liked that.”¹⁴⁴ The law expressed in its statutes and rules is a modern conception of law. Judge Albert, retired, no longer in the statutes and rules business, is thinking about the law’s “archaic depths.” What we have here is pure Corrington, looking beyond the law’s statutes and rules, seeking its “spiritual structure.”
Another Corrington story, “Pleadings,”¹⁴⁵ begins, dinner on the table, a lawyer receiving a telephone call from a sheriff’s deputy, who wants him to see a friend about a legal matter. It offers the lawyer an opportunity to say something about having his evening and his fantasies interrupted:

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As a rule, I put people off when they want to come to the house. They’ve got eight hours a day to find out how to incorporate, write a will, pull their taxes down or whatever. In the evening I like to sit quietly with Joan. We read and listen to Haydn or Boccherini and watch the light fade over uptown New Orleans. Sometimes, though I do not tell her, I like to imagine we are a late Roman couple sitting in our atrium in the countryside of England, not far from Londinium. It is always summer, and Septimius Severus has not yet begun to tax Britain out of existence. Still, it is twilight now, and there is nothing before us. We are young, but the world is old, and that is all right because the drive and the hysteria of destiny is past now, and we can sit and enjoy our garden, the twisted ivy, the huge calladiums, and, if it is April, the daffodils that plunder our weak sun and sparkle across the land. It is always cool in my fantasy, and Joan crochets something for the center of our table, and I refuse to think of the burdens of administration that I will have to lift again tomorrow. They will wait, and Rome will never even know. It is always a hushed single moment, ageless and serene, and I am with her, and only the hopeless are still ambitious. Everything we will do has been done, and for the moment there is peace. It is a silly fantasy, dreamed here in the heart of booming America, but it makes me happy . . . .¹⁴⁶

In “The Actes and Monuments,” New York lawyer Harry Cohen, fleeing the North and a number of life-threatening heart attacks, takes up residence in Vicksburg, Mississippi where he meets up with another lawyer, W.C. Grierson. When he visits Grierson’s office he is taken beyond the public rooms of the office to a warden of rooms filled, floor to ceiling, with books. “Thousands upon thousands of books. Books in leather and buckram, old, new, burnished bindings and drab old cloth.”¹⁴⁷ Many of the books are ancient classics and Cohen learns that Grierson, who will end up working with him on a brutal rape/murder case, has a rather odd preoccupation–what Grierson calls a “hobby.” “I take on old cases sometimes.”¹⁴⁸But these “old cases” are not just old, they are ancient and they’re odd. It turns out that Grierson writes legal briefs on behalf of the long-dead, more specifically, those who have been falsely accused. Grierson, at the time of Cohen’s visit, is working “on the defense of Anne Albright, a young girl burned during the Marian persecutions at

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Smithfield in 1556. It was to be a class action, aimed at overturning the convictions of all those Protestants burned under Mary Tudor.”¹⁴⁹
While Grierson may seem to be engaged in a rather bizarre form of legal work, Corrington cautions against such a judgment:

When reading fiction, don’t get put off by the distance in time or in place or in manners and attitudes between you and Proust or Hawthorne or Goethe or Shakespeare. Remember that human nature is constant in the very diversity of its presentation in life. What human beings want and fear and love and trust may change, may shift in emphasis from the 16th century to now or from France to here. But human beings will always want and fear, love and trust.¹⁵⁰

Grierson is doing, in his own, odd, and seemingly futile way, what we must all do, what Corrington does in writing fiction: “It’s the business of us all to drive the past into the future so that our children will know and understand the questionable meaning of the present.”¹⁵¹ The past matters; a man’s past comes back around, to be taken up again, when he retires, becomes ill, is beaten down, and gets ready to die. Corrington’s lawyers know this past, and, by way of their acts of memory, we readers come to know it.¹⁵²
Corrington’s fiction is an evocation of memory, an effort to recapture and re-present a past that then becomes not only a critique of modern times, but instructive for a future worth pursuing.¹⁵³

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As I told a friend once, people in America, even in the South today, throw their pasts away. Graveyards and City Directories and old dance cards and flowers pressed in [B]ibles no one remembers to enter births and deaths in any more–all of them are filled with thousands of pasts that are ignored, forgotten, thrown away. Nobody wants them, nobody sees any use in them. [Then turning to his own Shreveport]: Who knows or cares who developed Broadmoor? Does anyone remember Dehan’s Restaurant or Le Chat Noir or the Peerless Cleaners? Who remembers Worm’s Hilltop House or The Chef, or the Rex Theatre or Mrs. Pat’s Food Market? They belong to me now, and they have appeared–or will appear–in my work as it goes forward.¹⁵⁴

The present, however we may attribute to it the solidness of substance, is ephemeral and cannot be made to last. In a letter to Charles Bukowski commenting on his father’s death, Corrington was reminded of “Pete Kelly’s Blues”:

“The blues ay, things were good once and they’ll be good again. The only trouble is it’s NOW.” We can remember and we can look ahead, but NOW is always slipping out of our hands like sand–or blood. We can never hold it and get the texture of it. Everything becomes history, chas: what is means nothing, and sooner or later it is reduced to a few photos, maybe a rusty bayonet and some slowly melting ditches in Virginia. Given time, all of it is either lost or embalmed in the pages of history. Think that even literature may finally lose its meaning and become simply more documents to tell tomorrow about today.¹⁵⁵

What we have now, is what the lawyer in “Pleadings” sees, as he drives back to his office after he and his client’s wife have been to a state mental hospital to see the client’s son:

Then I was driving toward Metairie amid the dust and squalor of Airline Highway. Filling stations, hamburger joints, cut?rate liquor, tacos, wholesale carpeting, rent-a-car, people driving a little above the speed limit sealed in air?conditioned cars, others standing at bus stops staring vacantly, some gesticulating in repetitive patterns, trying to be understood. No sign of life anywhere.¹⁵⁶

Corrington’s turn to history becomes a way to deal with the present, to find solace from the “criminal idiocy of the late 20th century,” and “an

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age of spiritual rot and rootlessness.”¹⁵⁷ Finding his own era wanting, “[t]he confusions and complexities of life in the 20th century make one’s spirit yearn to transcend it . . . .”¹⁵⁸
Corrington addressed these theme in his writings, but he gave them even more direct expression in his journals and unpublished work:

I only wish I had vision enough to see what this age will evolve into. Most of my visions are unpleasant ones. Each generation of lunatics seems more clearly homicidal than its predecessor. (Journal, September 4, 1980).

* * * *

Perhaps I should set down the reasons I [despise] this age so much. I suppose I owe myself that much, lest the future see me as simply someone who was incapable of taking pleasure in this “Golden Age.”
I hate this age because it is decadent, vicious, corrupt. I could have lived in the 19th century because it was barbarous, and I love guns and would have done battle with pleasure; I could have managed nicely in the 18th, because there were possibilities of civilization. But in this age, the great world of the 18th–especially in music–is over, and the barbarism of the 19th is past. (Journal, September 13, 1980).

* * * *

The past two hundred years have become a fever rather than a progress. (Journal, February 1, 1982).

* * * *

We seem to have reached a point in our national development where we are prepared to do anything rather than think, anything except examine our collapsing culture and try to determine what it is telling us–anything but face the reality that we have turned away from the heights and depths of life itself and settled into a kind of spiritual and intellectual fog from which no [judgments] worthy of the name can issue, and into which every new insight seems to vanish without a trace.

* * *

To know who you are and what you are about seems to be a rare thing today. But it is at the very center of serious writing. And if you have that sense, it is possible to shrug off the fads and the tackiness, the poor workmanship and stupidity of contemporary writing–even if, from time to time, you are forced to engage in it. Perhaps it is a little like the meditation practice of Zen Buddhism. You possess the capacity

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to withdraw into a real world of real people doing intelligible–even if terrible–things. You look at the world around you as an especially perverted illusion, and turn inward to a truth that expresses itself through the symbols of language, a truth that does not depend on a moment or a popular attitude or the deformed consciousness that supposes the end of language is to make money.¹⁵⁹

William Mills, a friend and colleague of Corrington, observes that in Corrington’s “critique of modernity,” his work “reflects influences of some of the best poets of the age . . . .” Corrington himself sums up his stance in his rather startling claim: “I am not a modern man.” It is a claim not only about himself, but one that goes to the heart of his writing.

I am not a modern man–and that may be my own personal salvation. What I love comes to me from the past, the gift of Mozart and Albinoni, Dickens and Shakespeare, Plato and the prophets, Lee and Jackson, St. Thomas and Augustine.¹⁶⁰

SOUTHERN ROOTS

John William Corrington landed in Shreveport at age ten,¹⁶¹ attended Centenary College in Shreveport,¹⁶² and throughout his life, proudly and

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defiantly, identified himself as a Southerner.¹⁶³ He was, in contrast to some Southern writers,¹⁶⁴ quite willing for the world to know him as a writer whose work was steeped in the South, composed in honor of its heroes.¹⁶⁵ Corrington was as firmly rooted in Louisiana, as Faulkner in Mississippi, Louis Auchincloss in New York City, Lowell Komie in Chicago.¹⁶⁶ It is quite impossible to imagine one of Louis Auchincloss’s

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fictional lawyers practicing anywhere but New York City. And so it is with Corrington.

I’ve been gone from Shreveport for almost thirty years [at the time of the writing], but, as you can see, Shreveport has never left me. It remains the subject and matrix of my work, and it always will. Not because my recollections of it are without pain, or because I lived a golden untroubled childhood here. It wasn’t that way. But the experiences I had here, the places I remember, the people I loved–and even the ones I despised–have been as useful to me, as evocative, as Paris of the 1880’s and 90’s was to Marcel Proust. Not in a direct sense, certainly. I have never written an roman a clef about Shreveport, using real people with fake names. Yet at the same time all my characters live here. They fitted smoothly and anonymously into the interstices of time and space in the period between 1863 and 1960. * * * * Even today, with thirty years . . . between me and Shreveport, when someone asks where I’m from, I invariably answer without thinking, “Shreveport.” When I start to put together a new story, I think of its setting here, or in New Orleans, or somewhere in between. Even when I write of New York or London or Los Angeles, the people are from Louisiana–simply because those are the people I know in the same way I know myself.¹⁶⁷

Corrington was pleased to have his fiction identified with the South. In an interview with William Parrill, Corrington makes his feeling for the South clear:

WP: You strike me as the most unreconstructed of all the Southern novelists I know anything about.
JWC: I consider that just about the greatest compliment anyone could give. I can think of no reason to be reconstructed. My country is the South–especially North Louisiana and East Texas. The antique values and ways of thinking are good enough for me.¹⁶⁸

Judge Finch, in “Decoration Day,” describes a friend, a Federal District judge, as “thoroughly reconstructed,” a condition which Judge Albert finds rather pitiful–“a sorry attitude for a Southerner, but one common among those who have a short memory, poor concentration, and deep pockets.”¹⁶⁹

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The South, fitful and flawed as it was, had a deep resonance in Corrington’s psyche and in his work. Still early in his writing career, at a time when he was publishing poetry and writing academic papers, his first novel underway, he remarks in a letter to Charles Bukowski:

What you try not to do is fool yourself. Win or lose in the cosmic stakes, I can take it. Never having really thought I was much, or likely to be much, I am thankful for good lines, even for good thoughts, and if other people want to print what happens, okay. It makes no difference one way or the other. I am not so far impressed with what I have done, and this is forever good–because I am not depressed, either. All is well. This is what the South has done for me. I belong to something: a land, a family, a way of life. And thus I don’t have to get my ego all laced up with the poetry. . . . I feel real bad for people whose writing (or editing) becomes an extension of their personalities.¹⁷⁰

Corrington finds in the South, not the subject for his fiction, but a way to locate himself as a writer, a way to know who he is and what he’s writing for. He says, “it is written of men that they do well when they are proud of what they are–and what they come from.”¹⁷¹
In still another letter to Bukowski, Corrington identifies the South as an enigma, but also a place which had left him a legacy of giants:

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[T]he South was an enigma (I would probably feel that even if I was from Luxembourg): a race of giants, individualists, deists, brainy and gutsy: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson (Andy), Davis, Calhoun, Lee, and on and on. And yet the stain of human slavery on them.¹⁷²

And it was among these giants, and those who had a code that guided their lives, that Corrington sought a place for himself.

Maybe this is why I love Poppa [Ernest Hemingway]. Because all my dusty fathers sing out of the soil, “There is a code. There are things one does, and things one never does. There are deaths and deaths, loves and loves. Choose. Be wise. Be strong. Be honest and humble; die rather than be reduced. There is a code.”¹⁷³

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It was this “code” that Corrington, student of the South and its literature, would try to explain in intellectual and philosophical terms. Corrington, writing with Miller Williams, in their introduction to a collection of Southern fiction, provides a detailed prospectus on the nature of the Southerner:¹⁷⁴

[First, there is something called “Southern” writing] a thing of the mind, a matter of character and a point of view [and it can be identified and described.]¹⁷⁵

* * *

The landscape of the South that is most haunted is within the Southern man. And there, too, the ghosts have names. They have been named before, and the names are not ours, but they are good and honest names. They are Religion and History, Place and Responsibility.¹⁷⁶

* * *

[T]he myth of unlimited progress, of man’s perfectibility, never has had much currency in the South. Man’s will weakened, his intellect darkened by original sin, is not the foundation for Utopia.

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The history of man, as seen by the Southerner, is a history of “the human heart,” in Faulkner’s phrase, “in conflict with itself.”¹⁷⁷

* * *

We are told that the Southerner lives in the past. He does not. The past lives in him, and there is a difference. He knows where he came from, and who his fathers were. He knows still that he came from the soil, and that the soil and its people once had a name. He knows that is true, and he knows it is a myth. He knows the soil belonged to the black hands that turned it as well as it ever could belong to any hand and that the Confederacy did not.¹⁷⁸

* * *

Everyone in the United States had a history; the Southerner has one.¹⁷⁹ (Until recently, history–at least a portion of it–was almost a second religion to the Southerner.)¹⁸⁰

* * *

He [the Southerner] knows that in the history of the South are less happy myths that are also not fiction, stories as dark as Medea and as real as blood, stories many outside the South would know and understand . . . facts and myths which, to some degree, darken the heritage of any people.¹⁸¹

We might, finally, let this matter of the South rest, with Corrington’s affirmation:

I am a man of place; connected emotionally to Northwest Louisiana, in spirit at least. I may never come home to stay until I’m buried here, but that won’t change anything. I still function best with that myth and my

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interest is in functioning, not in creating documentaries to some grubby truth.¹⁸²

Corrington was a man of liberal spirit,¹⁸³ but his identification with the South brought with it a distinctive Southern swagger in his jabs at liberals, Yankees, and Northerners. Corrington had the Southerner’s notion of enemies: “You are held together in one piece and one place by the forces blowing against you from outside. Your enemies and their determination to do you in are what keep you together.”¹⁸⁴ He took devilish pride in poking hot intellectual irons at those he thought ignorant of the South (and its literature), and especially liberals:

The measure of a society by liberal standards is the individual; I think that is no measure at all. The true measure is the ultimate contribution the society makes to the ongoingness of humanity.¹⁸⁵

* * *

[T]he Southerner remains a rebel. He resists, and will likely continue to resist, the relentless process of conformity which some recent Northern liberal was pleased to call, with characteristic obtusity, “The Americanization” of the South. For “American” in such context, one must read “Yankee,” and in large measure the Southerner, in chorus with most Latin Americans, and fully half the world’s people, tends to exclaim, “Yankee, go home.”¹⁸⁶

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Corrington carried on a good bit about liberals and Yankees, and while he meant to hit hard, he was mostly trying to keep the South alive and mythic for his writing:

Sure, part of the formula is cursing Yankees. I can, for limited periods, believe that Yankees and their kind made this stinking cesspool of a world, and that my people had no part in it. Sad, but I know too much to think that. It only serves for long enough to write a thing. But it never shows in the thing, does it?¹⁸⁷

With his love of the South, his extensive knowledge of Southern literature (both fiction and poetry), and his disdain for the North, it is hardly surprising to find Corrington writing a Southern-flavored brand of lawyer fiction. Corrington was as firmly rooted in the South as an old live oak tree; a tree of great magnitude requires an enormous root structure and it was Corrington’s sense of myth and his search for the first order of thing that was his root structure.

MYTH

A writer invites (himself and the reader) to do difficult things–to discover what is denied, old, implacable; to find and give a name to that which drives us to misery, to hope. We look back, Corrington seems to say, not in nostalgia, but in search of reality, the larger reality within which we must all live, the reality reflected in and obscured by the spin and whirl of an individual life. Corrington’s fiction addresses the grand illusion that we can live in the moment and disregard the past, that we can live for ourselves and pay no mind to our ancestors, that we can literally strip from existence the gods of the old order, and live free of myth and the Fates.¹⁸⁸ In Corrington’s fiction, the illusion gives way as

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his characters glimpse (if dimly) that “larger conception of things”¹⁸⁹ that hovers over a man’s story and the place in which he has lived that story. For Corrington, the past (and the way we honor it),¹⁹⁰ the present (and the illusions of the day), and the future (anticipating the as yet unseen) are as shaped by myth as by individual effort/design/will.¹⁹¹
Religion has always addressed this “larger conception of things” and takes on the role of myth in doing so, but then religion attempts to dif-ferentiate itself from myth.¹⁹² Corrington accepted established religion¹⁹³

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but he sought out, in his understanding of God, a Divine presence which transcends the Sunday practice of religion,¹⁹⁴ a presence that Rudolph Otto called the mysterium tremendum.¹⁹⁵ When an interviewer reminded Corrington that he had been called a Catholic writer, it’s little wonder that he did not warm to the label. He pointed to a novel he had recently published, Shad Sentell, as not having a “syllable of Catholicism” in it.¹⁹⁶ And while another novel, The Upper Hand, involves an ex-priest, and one of his lawyer short stories, “Every Act Whatever of Man,”¹⁹⁷ deals with religious matters, Corrington is not a religious writer in the same way he is not a political writer.
It is the Divine (rather than religion), theology and myth, and an awareness of the “larger conception of things” that infuses Corrington’s fiction. Corrington, who would have so little to say about his law school years, did speculate that law school (and its “world of rationality”) had posed a threat to his “hold on a mythical world.”¹⁹⁸ But Corrington knew this “world of rationality” quite well from his years of study and graduate work, conforming these studies to his own purposes as he may have done. So it seems unlikely that the rationality he confronted in law school could

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have seriously threatened his “mythological mind” and the uses for which he found for it in his fiction.¹⁹⁹
We see Corrington’s “mythological mind” at work, most visibly, in his fictionalized Shreveport (and New Orleans) which became characters in his stories.²⁰⁰

Shreveport is a mythological construct of my mind. For my own purposes, I make it warmer, more upright, more linked to the antique virtues than it ever was; wilder, more insane, more desperate at its fringes than it ever was. Everyone does one or both in relation to his past as age comes on. It is simply that the artist knows better how to do it and make it stick.²⁰¹

Corrington, conscious as he was about his mythologizing of Shreveport, was simply trying to use Shreveport to mine the mythic substratum, and get closer to what he sometimes called the Tale. Corrington says: “[E]ach of us bears a Tale, and the expression of it in some way is the ‘meaning’ of our lives.”²⁰² Fiction provides an opening to, if not a revelation of, the Tale. Corrington was no minimalist sketch-artist, and he had no desire to find a place for suburbanites and bleached-out, empty modernists in his fiction. He wanted his fiction to loom large, pulling us up close to those who, often against their will, must come to grips with the larger myths within which lives are embedded. Corrington attributes to pride, the belief that “we weave the fabric of life along our pattern instead of God’s. We make the cloth, but not the pattern.”²⁰³ It is in honoring these concerns that Corrington dedicates all his fiction, A.M.D.G. Asked by an interviewer what it meant, Corrington replied: “It’s something that I was taught when I was just learning to write, taught by the Jesuits to put at the head of all my papers, and it’s the only thing that I carried away that I have any use for–that and the discipline they gave me. It stands for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the greater glory

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of God.”²⁰⁴ In his journal he would note that the AMDG dedication of his fiction meant that the stories were “for the Lord’s perusal, part of the lila, the play–more properly, the Tale in which we are all involved whether we would be or not.”²⁰⁵ To work with and in myth, Corrington has his characters, his lawyers, brush up against the big stuff,²⁰⁶ to fish the same deep waters Corrington fishes. “We are all driven,” Corrington says, “by different demons: fame, love, hate, fear, rage, sympathy.”²⁰⁷ These are the big fishes; we swim among them with our little lives, Corrington with his fiction. “It is the writer’s task to tell stories that reveal . . . wanting and fearing, loving and trusting as if it is in the secret hearts of his characters.”²⁰⁸
In fiction and life, we engage, resist, fall prey to, and struggle to understand the Tale. The struggle, sometimes a comedy, sometimes tragedy, sometimes both, evolves from the sense that the Tale is real, and yet we are forever unknowing as to its true source, or even its place in the day-to-day affairs of life. (And yes, there are those who claim to know the Tale, its source, and how it must be lived.) Bill Corrington told of a dream his wife, Joyce, had reported to him:

In that dream, it was clear to her that each one of us, every person alive, is a story told about God. She could tell me no more than that, but that was surely enough, for she had told me the tale she was told in dream. Some of us are destined to be triumphant stories, some tragic. Some of us may be epics, some lyrics. All that remains is the translation of what it means to be human into human language.²⁰⁹

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It was triumphant and tragic stories that Corrington wanted to tell. And to do it, he knew it required a language carried from the heart. We find just such a language in Corrington’s legal fiction, in the ways of his retired judge, Albert Finch and Old Gee (Gaspar Penniwell) in “Decoration Day,” and we find it again in Walter Journe, the lawyer in “Every Act Whatever of Man”:

It was his habit to come to the courthouse early when he had business there. He would nod to the janitor as the large ancient doors opened, and then, the rising sun behind him, he would walk up and down the silent shadowed corridor, a dog run with offices, chambers, and courtrooms off to either side.
     When he had a trial, he would do the last?minute acts of mental construction at this time, search out the questions to be asked that he had not discovered yet. On those days, he would pace rapidly through the shadows, hardly noticing the dark obscure portraits of long?dead judges that adorned the walls along the corridor or even noticing later the growing number of lawyers and functionaries as they came in to begin their day. Not until his opponent, or the clerk of the court where he was to try, came up to him would he cease his pacing and look up, distracted, to see that the sun was high and it was time to work.
     Other times, when there was no trial, he would go to five o’clock mass in the tiny Church of the Holy Redeemer, and then, Christ upon him, would pace the courthouse corridor, rosary in hand, his thoughts not religious in the common sense, but pieced together out of almost seventy?five years of life, fifty at the law. His study was Christendom, that long wave of meaning which had reached from Jerusalem to Byzantium, from Aachen to St. Stephanie, Louisiana. He would remember his father, a sorrowful mystery, blurred by forty years gone. He would remember the town when vegetable carts and a butcher shop had done his family and friends for a supermarket. There had been a time when young people stayed in St. Stephanie, or, leaving, spent a year or two or three in New Orleans, came back to marry and begin a family, telling no one anything of that Carthage to the east where, in the Quarter, souls were lost and sin lapped at the steps of St. Louis Cathedral, like water from the Mississippi, against levees which often did not hold.
     He would consider what it meant to serve the law, to bring a poor man’s suit, and walk away afterward, some small piece of justice done. He would think of what he had seen on the late news: terror, assassination, acts of vengeance, things so foul that their like had never been seen in this courthouse and, God willing, never would be.
     It was as if he were forging a new rosary, one other than that handed to St. Dominic. One no less mysterious or laden with grace, but one in which the great hierophantic events in the life of the Savior were replaced with the happenings of the day. He would consider the little girl

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raped, killed, her body dismembered and thrown into the river there at New Orleans. And as he considered, he would recite a decade of the rosary for the repose of that small soul, but even more for her family and loved ones who even then must be suffering an agony which the child in her innocence was far beyond.
     Or he would reflect on the priests who deserted their calls–a decade to bring them faith and return of grace again. Or he would remember his very special intention: those children destroyed by abortion, whose half?formed bodies and slumbering souls had been, by the millions, given over to a holocaust as violent, vicious–and legal–as that of the Nazis against God’s Chosen Ones.
     Sometimes a groan would escape him as he paced.
     –Sir, the janitor might say. –Mr. Journe, is something wrong?
     He would come to himself then, smile, shake his head, slip his rosary into his pocket, still keeping hold of the bead he was telling, and go on pacing as the sun rose on another day in the courts.
     That morning, as he paced, a young clerk came up to him quietly.
     –Mr. Journe, Judge Soniat would like to see you . . .
     He looked up. Michael Soniat here at this hour? He glanced at his watch. It was barely seven-thirty, two and a half hours before court. He walked behind the young clerk, whose name he did not know–there were so many nowadays, they came and went so quickly. It was just before he reached the oaken door of the judge’s chamber that he lost count of his beads.²¹⁰

A DEATH THAT SADDENS STILL

John William Corrington died, days short of a month after his 56th birthday, from a heart attack on a November’s Thanksgiving Day, 1988. He was still in so many ways a young man, his ideas and writing still vital, various intellectual projects underway, still restless to explore the “deeper mystery.”²¹¹And yes, his death, in Malibu, California was in an ironic, if not cruel way, his passage home, to the place in the world he loved whole-heartedly, to finally rest after a journey that carried him far.
In his final minutes, being rushed to the hospital, he turned to his wife Joyce–collaborator in life and in writing–the woman who described her time with Bill as a 30-year seminar, and said: “It’s all right.” It was the last words he would speak.²¹²

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“The only man who really dreads dying is the poor bastard who has never lived. By all measures, I have lived well. What I could do, I have pretty much done. I have cried only rarely and only small tears for what I couldn’t do. I have loved the grass and even given hours over to the sky and the clouds. I have considered my father’s courage and my mother’s endurance and have wished them well. I have given thanks where it was due, and tried failingly and with maybe some success not to want what I wanted, but what was right and honorable to want. The failures have been legion, but the success have held the fabric together and kept the juices flowing. Now I am nearly thirty and still not tired enough to lay off–and am almost old enough to trust myself with things of importance: like a family, like writing, like friends. . . .
So much is luck. So much is the grace of God. But the part that shows and can be seen belongs to us, and neither lady luck nor god almighty is stingy enough to steal the by-line. They like to see us make it, because they know we have to die–and the making is not too much overpayment for the dying that comes after.”²¹³
+ + +
“We all fail, as Faulkner says, but if we are brave and insist on forgetting as little as possible, we may manage to scrawl a shorthand note to tomorrow on the wall of this great pay-toilet of a world . . . if the janitor doesn’t blow up the whole damn lavatory.”²¹⁴

+ + +

“I got one thing to carry into deadland with me: the certainty that I could see. . . .”²¹⁵

+ + +

“I write like men paint or carve: to erect my own tombstone in advance.”²¹⁶ “With me it is the desire to create a piece of stone so enduring that when the earth gives way, it will survive as a meteor. Something that could stand as a tribute and an epitaph to the dignity, the glory, and the unvanquishable soul of mankind.”²¹⁷

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ENDNOTES

* Editor, Legal Studies Forum. When I set out to learn more about John William Corrington from those who knew him, taught him, practiced law with him, lived with him, and loved him, no one could have been more responsive and helpful than Joyce H. Corrington, Bill Corrington’s wife and collaborator. Joyce Corrington quietly encouraged my endeavors, responded to my persistent questions about her husband and his work, reviewed her husband’s unpublished papers, and most importantly, graciously authorized my unfettered access to her husband’s papers. My thanks, again, to Joyce Corrington for her help and her friendship.
John William Corrrington’s papers are archived at Centenary College, Shreveport, Louisiana. My work with the Corrington Papers was made all the more enjoyable by the able assistance of Margery Wright, who catalogued Corrington’s papers at Centenary College, and by Roger Becker, Director of the Magale Library at Centenary College, who were the most collegial of hosts during my stay at Centenary College.

1. Corrington letter to Charles Bukowski, sent from Baton Rogue. Corrington Papers, Centenary College. [All Corrington letters cited hereinafter are located in the Corrington Papers, Centenary College, Shreveport, Louisiana]. Corrington writes Bukowski about an introduction to his poetry that he plans to write for Jon Webb’s collection of Bukowski poetry that will be published by Webb’s Loujon Press. Corrington corresponded with Charles Bukowski throughout the 1960s. The relationship ended on a sour note, instigated by Bukowski (a man never known for loyalty to his friends), and the two men went their different ways.
Jon Webb and his wife, “Gypsy Lou,” published the Outsider, a New Orleans magazine of poetry, and founded the Loujon Press, which they eventually moved to Tucson, Arizona. Both Corrington and Bukowski contributed poetry to the Outsider, and both men held Jon Webb in high esteem. Loujon Press published a now highly collectable book of Bukowski’s poetry under the title It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (New Orleans, 1963) (777 copies printed, all signed by Bukowski). Corrington wrote the introduction to the book and, in doing so, made the case for Bukowski as a major poet. See generally Lloyd Halliburton, Corrington, Bukowski, and the Loujon Press, 13 (1) Louisiana Literature 103 (1996).

2. Some of you know the journal; and to those who do not, I will say only this–it’s a big little journal with a proud history. As editor, I’m the man on the tail-end of that history, a fate Corrington would understand better than most. A history carries with it duties, so it falls to me to live this history and to pursue, as relentlessly as energy and time and resources permit, the varied intellectual diversions which will ultimately find a place in the journal.

3. An editor reads a manuscript expectantly, with hope it will be a startling discovery, a pleasure to all those who read it, an honor to publish. But this hope is tempered with the knowledge that most essays do not live up to such expectations.

4. Those who teach know the situation: You read the first page of a student’s paper and the only thing to prompt you to read what follows is a strong sense of duty, and the understanding that this student (as indeed, most writers) is struggling, still learning. At the worst of times, it may help for a teacher to remind himself that reading shoddy, ill-formed ideas (and writing that seems never good enough) is work we get paid to do. It may also help to realize that we ourselves, we teachers, are capable of shoddy writing. But an editor, like a teacher, has a duty to this author/stranger, a duty to read well and find value, if possible, in what was written.
I try, not always successfully, to forestall negative judgment and look for something of value in the essays I review for publication. I must read a manuscript well if I am to provide a considered judgment about its features and qualities, and then describe to the author my decision not to publish the work. My best efforts at diplomacy in this critical decision sometimes fail. I have found no guaranteed way to assure authors that their work has been read carefully. Editors make enemies. If it be so, as it is, let my failed efforts at diplomacy be testimony that I have undertaken with care my duties to a journal which has claimed so much of me.

5. Different readers react differently to footnotes. They seem far more acceptable in legal scholarly circles than beyond. I once tried to write without them; I have now given up that effort.

6. Douglas Mitchell, John William Corrington’s Decoration Day, 25 Legal Stud. F. 687, 686, n.1 (2000). Corrington attended Tulane Law School from 1972 until 1975, and received his degree in 1975, rather than 1976. Corrington’s degree from the University of Sussex was a D. Phil., not a Ph.D.

7. A bibliography on narrative jurisprudence and legal storytelling now in-progress lists over 400 articles and books; more appear every week.

8. I did find, as my work on Corrington proceeded, one scholar, William Domnarski, who had written about Corrington for the legal community. See William Domnarski, A Novelist’s Knowing Look at the Law: Short Stories by John William Corrington, 69 ABAJ 1706 (November, 1983) [26 Legal Stud. F. 839 (2002)]. Domnarski, a decade later, would write still another essay on Corrington. See William Domnarksi, “Corrington’s Lawyer as Moralist,” in JOHN WILLIAM CORRINGTON: SOUTHERN MAN OF LETTERS 144-155 (Conway, Arkansas: UCA Press, 1994) [26 Legal Stud. F. 847 (2002)] [hereinafter Southern Man of Letters]. The only other mention of Corrington in the legal literature that I have been able to locate is Judith L. Maute’s review of two Corrington collections of stories. See Judith L. Maute, Book Review, 37 Okla. L. Rev. 636 (1984) (reviewing the lawyer stories in The Actes and Monuments and The Southern Reporter).

9. While there has been a great outpouring of legal fiction in the last twenty years (most of it eminently forgettable), I still find the idea of the lawyer novelist interesting. And since I teach a course on lawyers and fiction, I’m in constant search of stories (and new authors). Of course, most of the fiction I read (in which lawyers play a significant part) is not something I ever want to read again, and therefore, cannot imagine wanting to teach it. But the course and my thinking about it does influence my reading.
While the lawyer turned novelist is now a common phenomenon, there is, I think, a reason to be curious about lawyers who write novels. We live in the age of the billable hour (and increments of an hour), an era in which, for the lawyer, time equals money. Law is a demanding profe

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The University of Texas School of Law

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Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library