Mountain Grills and hoggish minds: W. O. Gant's allusive invective.
Unlike most admirers of Thomas Wolfe's fiction, I did not read any of it, except for an anthology piece about the circus at dawn, at what seems to be the agreed-upon time of life for full appreciation of its emotional pull. I was in fact twenty-five years old and a graduate student preparing to write a dissertation on Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic, The Faerie Queene, when I first opened Look Homeward, Angel.This violation of customary sequence had several consequences. One was that, having already worked my way through some 36,000 lines of stanzaic verse that constitute the existing fragment of Spenser's overall plan, I was not put off by long books. A second was that I was so taken by Wolfe's writings that I circumambulated my intended work schedule for many months while I read most of them, along with what were then the standard biographies and critical works. A third consequence is one I address in this note: coming upon certain passages of W. O. Gant's inspired invective, I already knew what a "Grill" was, and I was gratified to note that somebody else had been reading The Faerie Queene.
By "somebody else" I mean Wolfe, not the W. O. that he created. Wolfe could hardly have avoided Spenser at the University of North Carolina, where Edwin Greenlaw, one of the two chief mentors of his undergraduate experience, was then on the way to becoming one of the country's foremost scholars of Renaissance literature. Later, his Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (1932) would prove an extremely important work, and he would go on at Johns Hopkins to begin work on the magisterial Variorum edition of Spenser's complete works. In The Web and the Rock, where he appears as Professor Randolph Ware, Wolfe has him declaim:
Do I know more about Spenser than Kittredge, Manley, and Saintsbury put together? Yes. Do I know more about Spenser than God and Spenser put together? Yes. Could I have written The Faery Queen? No-o. Could I write a doctoral thesis about The Faery Queen? Yes. (216)
But for W. O. Gant, though adequately armed with popular lines and tags from Shakespeare, to borrow from a book that almost nobody (then as now) outside the precincts of academia would have known much or anything about, seems hard to reconcile with the decorum of character that Wolfe keeps up so well in his portrayal. "'Mountain Grills!' he roared. 'Mountain Grills! The lowest of the low! The vilest of the vile!'" (LHA 29) And again: "'Twas a bitter day for me, when I came into this accursed country: little did I know what it would lead to. Mountain Grills! Mountain Grills!" (LHA 49). These passages occur also in O Lost (58, 74), and an editor's endnote correctly directs the reader to The Faerie Queene (674). The adjective mountain does not occur with grill in Spenser, as we will see; so I assumed by all this that the phrase had some folklore behind it, that it had somehow worked its way into the colorful parlance of the land. I then began a casual and sporadic inquiry, over approximately the next forty years, to locate a colloquial basis.
I did this in the obvious way, simply by asking people I knew to have grown up in western North Carolina if they knew what a mountain grill was. Some offered culinary guesses, probably facetiously--maybe a little place that has good hamburgers, or something that burns charcoal--but everybody else admitted to never having heard or seen the term except in a novel by Thomas Wolfe.
I knew at last for sure that I was on a wild goose chase when my friend Perry Deane Young, a writer whose ancestral connections with the Asheville area are both wide and deep, told me the same thing and sent me a paper he'd read to the Thomas Wolfe Society at a meeting I'd missed in Asheville in September of 2000. "What does it mean?" Young writes. "And I have to tell them I don't know. I think 'ol W.O. just made it up" (1). Young goes on, with customary wit and humor, to convert the phrase from W. O.'s pejorative uses to a title of honor. "Thanks to Thomas Wolfe," he writes, "we grills are now on the shelves of every library in the world--under Literature" (6).
I conclude, then, that readers are to assume that W. O. Gant read The Faerie Queene, or at least the twelfth and final canto of its second book, "The Legend of Temperance." In that episode, adapted partially from the Circe story in Homer's Odyssey (book 10), Sir Guyon as the Knight of Temperance enters the realm of the temptress Acrasia, a representative of intemperance in every form. Having sternly rejected her blandishments and torn her palace and gardens into ruins, Guyon discovers as he leaves that the various animals lolling around are actually men whom Acrasia, in the manner of Homer's Circe, has turned into beasts through her magic, operating in conjunction with their own intemperate natures. Guyon, through his religious companion, a holy palmer, restores their humanity. One character, however, enjoys being the hog that Acrasia has made him. I quote from the edition of Spenser's complete works edited by R. E. Neil Dodge (1908), the standard college text for Spenser at the time Wolfe studied with Greenlaw. Many modern editions normalize the name in question to Grill:
But one above the rest in speciall. That had an hog beene late, hight Grylle by name, Repyned greatly, and did him [Guyon] miscall, That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall. Saide Guyon: "See the mind of beastly man, That hath so soone forgot the excellence Of his creation, when he life began, That now he chooseth, with vile difference, To be a beast, and lack intelligence." To whom the palmer thus: "The dunghill kinde Delightes in filth and fowle incontinence; Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish minde. But let us hence depart, whilst wether serves and winde." (FQ II.ix. stanzas 86-87)
W. O. obviously finds relief in the application of the Gryll image to Eliza's people, especially the Pentlands, whom he elsewhere depicts in porcine imagery:
"But they can eat!" he shouted, plunging suddenly at the kitchen door. "They can eat--when someone else will feed them. I shall never forget the Old Hog [Eliza's father] as long as I live. Cr-unch, Cr-unch, Cr-unch...." (LHA 64)
In Homer's tale of Circe, Gryll does not appear by name, though hogs are the animals Odysseus's men become. He takes a starring role, however, in another Greek source that Spenser may well have known, a dialogue by the prolific and widely popular essayist, biographer, and philosophical writer Plutarch (c. AD 45-125). One of Plutarch's dialogues, Gryllus, or Do Animals Possess Reason, presents an argument between Odysseus and one of Circe's pigs who attacks the common notion that animals lack ratiocinative power. Gryllus's rhetorical abilities are adequate to convince Odysseus that animals are in many ways morally superior to human beings.
Later, in the Renaissance, Plutarch's dialogue stirred up a good deal of controversy for an age that had begun to make the Circe story, quite apart from any intent on Homer's part (Odysseus, on the advice of the god Hermes, spends a year in a sexual relationship with Circe, eventually gaining her aid to continue his voyage home), the principal vehicle for a moral theme of reason's necessary domination of passion and the affective faculties of the mind and soul, lest the individual regress to a bestial state such as those enchanted by Circe exhibit. Anyone interested in this issue is well advised to consult Merritt Y. Hughes's impressively comprehensive essay, "Spenser's Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance." As Hughes points out, some rebellious minds in the Renaissance such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Laurentius Valla found truth and a cynical wisdom in Gryllus's arguments, but the vast majority of humanists during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were appalled at the notion that beasts shared a capacity generally (and religiously) regarded as peculiar to humankind. Spenser clearly belonged to the latter party, and drew for the Acrasia episode upon numerous literary depictions of the Circe myth as moral allegory. These, according to Hughes, included "Ariosto's Alcina, Trissino's Acratia, Tasso's Armida, as well as ... the not-entirely wicked enchantress of Giordano Bruno's Cantus Circaeus." (388). The allegory permeated emblem books of the time, which combined woodcut representations with moralizing commentary, and found a place in the pseudoscience of physiognomy, which related animal features to human faces in parallel drawings purporting to locate character traits in physical appearance (Hughes 393-94). One might guess that Gryllus provided a particularly useful model in such "scientific" endeavors, since of the Seven Deadly Sins--Pride, Avarice, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger, and Sloth--the hog may be reasonably indicted with all but Pride.
Going forward in time from Hughes's survey of Renaissance examples of hoggishness as a demonstrable human characteristic, we can cite one further literary resurfacing of Gryll, this time in a nineteenth-century volume that, again, Wolfe may have known, though its emphasis is at odds with W. O.'s pejorative application. This is a book by Thomas Love Peacock--friend of Shelley and other Romantics and good-natured critic of what he saw as his friends' excesses of Romantic feeling--a novel titled Gryll Grange (1861). In it, a protagonist named Gregory Gryll, Esq., declares himself Epicuri de grege porcus ("A pig from Epicurus's herd") "and held, though he found it difficult to trace the pedigree, that he was lineally descended from the ancient and illustrious Gryllus, who maintained against Ulysses the superior happiness of the life of other animals to that of the life of man" (14). In Peacock's novel, the hoggishness of the traditional Gryll is transformed into a metaphor for the good life, withdrawn from politics and frustrating human conflicts: "He liked to dine well, and withal to dine quietly, and to have quiet friends at his table, with whom he could discuss questions which might afford ample room for pleasant conversation and none for acrimonious dispute" (15).
It goes without saying that there would be no room at Squire Gryll's table for the contentious likes of W. O. Gant.
Wolfe's appropriation of the word from Spenser (and perhaps others) is a manifestation of the genius he displays on every hand in the creation of a figure who is arguably the most vividly realized character in all his books.
Works Cited
Hughes, Merritt Y. "Spenser's Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance." Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 381-99.
Peacock, Thomas Love. Gryll Grange. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861.
Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser. Ed. R. E. Neil Dodge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908.
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life. New York: Scribner's, 1929.
--. O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life. Ed. Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
--. The Web and the Rock. New York: Harper, 1939.
Young, Perry Deane. "What about Us Grills? Growing Up in Thomas Wolfe's Backyard." Typescript of presentation. Thomas Wolfe Society Meeting. Pack Memorial Public Library. Asheville, NC. 29 Sept. 2000.
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| Title Annotation: | BELLES LETTRES |
|---|---|
| Author: | Mills, Jerry Leath |
| Publication: | Thomas Wolfe Review |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2006 |
| Words: | 1875 |
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