The Books of the States: Kentucky (8 electoral votes; Guest: John Jeremiah Sullivan)

I'm already on record in this cross-country wander as being once narrowly diverted from a career of horseplaying and a subscriber to Harper's, so it's perhaps no surprise that I recall vividly "Horseman, Pass By," John Jeremiah Sullivan's lengthy 2002 piece from that magazine on his father, a sportswriter, and Kentucky horse racing. The article won a National Magazine Award and later grew into Blood Horses, a book about fathers and horses that one review called "As unconventionally lovely a book as you are likely to read for some time."

His State by State essay is also lovely and unconventional: steering clear of the travelogue or personal reminiscence for a profile of Constantine Rafinesque, an eccentric polymath genius (hmm, sounds like Guy Davenport--see below), born in the Ottoman Empire who became a botany professor at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., in the early 19th century before, according to legend cited by Wikipedia (and it doesn't get more authoritative than that!), leaving the university with a curse upon its halls, which were soon destroyed by fire. Here is a representative passage from that piece, concerning Native American earthen mounds:

There are a few places left in Kentucky, mostly on family farms, where you can see them as Rafinesque did, geometric land sculptures covered with grass, half in the field and half in the forest. Rafinesque declares it "high time that these monuments should all be accurately surveyed" and undertakes the work himself. But the book he produces, The American Nations, is worthless, an interminable pseudo-scholarly unfolding of his theories on the origin of New World societies, which he contends sprang from a voyage of Mediterranean
ür-colonizers, the Atalantes. On and on, lineages of chiefs, names, dates, for thousands of years, information that would change everything, had Rafinesque actually possessed it, had he not somehow himself been able to sit there and endure the sheer tedium of inventing it. And then, not content with fraud, he descends to forgery, cooking up an entire migration saga for the Lenape Indian tribe, one that corroborates to a striking extent his ideas about prehistory.

Sullivan, who was an editor at Harper's and now contributes to GQ, was born, like Hunter S. Thompson, in Louisville, and is even more qualified to make this selection than I'd thought, as he was the lucky one to do the Paris Review interview (not online, unfortunately) with Davenport, the singular man he calls below "the magician of Lexington," a South Carolina native who accepted an appointment at the University of Kentucky in 1963 and became a reason all by himself to read Kentucky. But not the only reason: pound for pound, I'm not sure any other state will be able to match the eight books he's chosen below for interest, locality, and strange variety:

• Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer: Packer: Okay, born in Chicago, but grew up in Louisville and was graduated high school there. Has been described as "Louisville's" in the Courier-Journal--we can claim her. I remember when "Brownies" came out in Harper's in 1999, the atmosphere of newly arrived talent. Her novel about buffalo soldiers leaving the south and going west is one of the things to look forward to in American fiction.
• The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton: When things shake out, Merton's may be one of the minds we'll have to try to understand if we want to say what happened to the West in the twentieth century. Born in France, he was a theologian who spoke from inside of doubt. Also a singular writer. This, his greatest book, is a retelling of the Purgatorio, in the form of his own memoirs, taking for its Paradise a Trappist monastery in the bourbon country of Central Kentucky, where Merton spent most of the last thirty years of his life. (John Haskell must be aware of this parallel, in his own American Purgatorio, when he has the narrator drift down to Lexington; if not it's another mystery of that amazing novel.) Merton's journals of the Gethsemani years are good reading, too. Some time ago when they were published I took a magazine assignment to spend a week there, at the abbey, in silence, doing nothing but read them, and then review them. It was a foolhardy thing to do. The level of concentration made possible by that existence I found almost unbearable. Also the journals themselves are very lonely. He writes of his strange and obscure affair, a monk's affair, with a nurse in Lexington, who took care of him after a surgery. They were exposed--the abbot was reading her letters. Merton turned from this to an even deeper solitude.
• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick: By far the saddest Lexington in literature is the one drowsily conjured in the early pages of this book. Hardwick died last year. She was a true stylist. Sleepless Nights is her purest exercise in style, told with the hypnotized-seeming confessionalism of the insomniac. It's impossible to forget this melancholy book.
• Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices by Robert Penn Warren: Robert "Red" Warren. Born Guthrie, Kentucky, in 1905. Fugitive Poet, Southern Agrarian, New Critic, famous novelist, famously tormented about race, finally something beyond that. I admire most his formal innovations. The stuff in the middle of All the King's Men, for instance, the Cass Mastern section: Warren inserted a small, perfect, extremely complex historical novella into the middle of what's otherwise a fully functioning political thriller. It's like you're crossing the river, and the water in one little place in the channel flows the other way. But Brother to Dragons is the obvious pick here. It may be the most authentically Kentucky book since Filson's Discovery and Present Settlement. Essentially a story about what happened to America's ember of the Enlightenment when we tried to carry it west. (Very violent things.) It's a play, a novel, a poem, also a work of scholarship. One of those weird unplaceable American hybrid books, like something Paul Metcalf might have written, if Metcalf had been a romantically wounded Southerner and not Melville's great-grandson.
• Lost Mountain by Erik Reece: A book about a controversial mining practice in use throughout the Appalachian coal country, known as mountain-topping. Instead of digging into the mountain, you blow off the top of it with explosives, then scoop out the coal, showering toxic debris into the rivers and streams. You turn the flattened peak into a golf course, or a "nature preserve" full of introduced plants. Reece sets out to answer a simple question: What would it be like to see a mountain older than the Himalayas die? He actually got the name of one, Lost Mountain, which had been targeted for this radical practice, and spent a year returning to the place, taking along one kind of expert or another--a botanist, a geologist--so that he would *know* this mountain when they detonated it. And then he does watch that happen. A powerful book. It gets into the complexities. Lots of Kentuckians in the counties where this takes place argue that the companies make jobs, and less dangerous ones, but Reece is persuasive in maintaining that no industry poisonous to its own workers' ecological communities can ever really be good for the local economy.
• The Death of Picasso by Guy Davenport: Prof. Davenport, the magician of Lexington (also Erik Reece's teacher at the University of Kentucky, it seems perverse not to add). His death a few years ago left a void. He was one of the last flickerings of that American modernist luminescence, the generations of writers who felt you had to hold the tradition in your head as a unified thing before you could even begin to speak about it. The effort warped many of them. It helped Guy that he was a certified genius polymath. He came to be at ease in whatever floating chamber he shared with Basho and Wittgenstein and Hugo Grotius and a couple of Greeks. In there he somehow devised a private postmodernism. You were welcome to sit and prompt him at the house in Bell Court, if you wanted. I remember one strange thing: he always burned his trash in the fireplace. That's not done anymore so close to the center of town. I nominate The Death of Picasso from among his astounding collections of essays because it contains this Kentucky scene, in a piece about Lèvi-Strauss called "The Anthropology of Table Manners":

The best display of manners on the part of a restaurant I have witnessed was at the Imperial Ramada Inn in Lexington, Kentucky, into the Middle Lawrence Welk Baroque dining room of which I once went with the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (disguised as a businessman), the Trappist Thomas Merton (in mufti, dressed as a tobacco farmer with a tonsure), and an editor of Fortune who had wrecked his Hertz car coming from the airport and was covered in spattered blood from head to toe. Hollywood is used to such things (Linda Darnell having a milk shake with Frankenstein's monster between takes), and Rome and New York, but not Lexington, Kentucky. Our meal was served with no comment whatever from the waitresses, despite Merton's downing six martinis and the Fortune editor stanching his wounds with all the napkins.

• That Distant Land: Collected Stories by Wendell Berry: Any list of Kentucky writers that didn't include Berry would be from space. He is Kentucky writers. Also a culture hero to many for his back-to-the-land politics. He's one of the only people who's tried to go into that old 1930s Agrarian ethos and strip out the junk, the racial ideology and the medieval nostalgia, etc., and see if there's still something workable there. I like him best for the quiet forward pressure and almost funereal polish of his prose. That's very northern Kentucky somehow. They don't interrupt each other there. This collection includes a story of his that I love, "The Solemn Boy," sort of a mood piece. The name of one of its characters, Tol Proudfoot, reminds me of a curious thing you learn in Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, in his essay about J.R.R. Tolkien, which is that Tolkien, who taught languages at Oxford, had a former student of his land at a small college in Kentucky, and Tolkien used to amuse and puzzle this person by asking him to send his old professor last year's phonebook, when the new ones came out, because he liked the old Anglo-Saxon names, Barefoot and Baggins and whatnot, and needed them for something he was writing.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories by Hunter S. Thompson: This is number eight, so also the moment when the obscenity of all I'm leaving out becomes hardest to ignore (everything that Chris Offutt has written, for starters, but especially No Heroes, his strange mountain memoir, a Kentucky homecoming story both experienced and told through the gauze of someone else's holocaust memories; and there's Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands; also John Robert Shaw, the eighteenth-century well-digger whose Narrative of Thirty Years is largely a recounting of the several times he accidentally exploded himself with dynamite at the bottom of a well and almost died--that book ends like no other I know, with two obituaries for its author, the first false, coming after a spectacular blast when the editors thought it impossible for Shaw to survive and went to press prematurely, the second real, when he finally did perish, in yet another explosion!). But the delegate from Kentucky must be Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P. 2005. Funny that he and Guy Davenport died so close together in time. I don't know if they were ever in a room together, at some Kentucky Writers thing or whatever. It would have been uncomfortable. But they knew a lot of the same gods, as Guy would have said. This edition of Fear and Loathing includes Thompson's "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," in which he took the gonzo torch from Terry Southern. Whatever you think of where Thompson's writing went, that piece remains pure pleasure.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey