Heat and Southern Writers

 
 I don't know whether it's true or not, but I've read arguments that air conditioning killed off great Southern writing. Not literally, of course. No one actually died. What has disappeared is a stream of great, innovative novels by writers like William Faulkner.

I don't know whether I agree with this argument. In any given age, you have thousands of writers, only a few of whom survive for more than a year or two and even fewer, if any, who survive beyond their lifetime. Then, to take it one step further, when you look at the truly great authors, they generally had a great period. Wordsworth had written his greatest poetry by the time he turned 40. Fitzgerald died at 44, so it's hard to say, but he wrote a lot of mediocre short stories to make money, though some people think his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon lived up to his earlier promise.

My point is that, it's hard to explain how great artists emerge, whether through genius, which has to be part of it, or as a sign of the times they live in. Most wrote (or painted, etc.) in schools of some kind, out of which emerged movements that enabled both the movements and individual artists to become known by the public: the Harlem Renaissance, the Impressionists, the Transcendentalists, etc. The Renaissance of Shakespeare's day would certainly have been a great time to write and perform, so even though he didn't belong to a "school," he didn't write in a vacuum either.

Having excellent editors, whether they're professionals such as Charles Scribner or a fellow writer traveling in your circle for while can be the catalyst for producing great works as well. Look at Hemingway's manuscripts or consider Pound's effect on Yeats.

Still, on a day like this when the temperature is mid-nineties in mid-May, I find myself hoping and praying that refusing to turn on the air this early in the season proves to be the very thing that puts me into a hypnotic state and fuels my imagination so that I create worlds beyond this world, take readers to a place that makes them dream about the characters I birth and wake wanting more.

I would endure much for that. Who wouldn't?