MR. UNIVERSE by Jim Grimsley

Author:Jim Grimsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Kaye Gibbons, on The Borderland

Hardscrabble southerners, as remarkably portrayed in The Borderland, do not suffer interlopers from the city gladly. People such as Grimsley’s Rollins couple critique and pass judgment on strangers who wonder how such people manage to back some semblance of life out of the tangled, violently composed wrecks of their existence. The Rollinses, in their favor, were born of the land and know their way through fields in the dark, and when we consider that southerners have forever loved land, we see that by owning a piece of the earth they are actually better southern citizens than the play’s chief irritant, Gordon Hammond.

Grimsley writes of what happens when two diametrically opposed married couples breach the borderland, both physical and spiritual, that separates their lives. This tale of life roiling in a crucible has been acted out before, by Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and every writer who has looked for the extraordinary collision of cultures and values. Grimsley, however, transcends the bulk of modern fiction by blurring the dividing line a bit by his methods of characterization. He shows, always; he tells us only what we need to know and is then quiet. He is never a preacher, never didactic. But somehow at the play’s end, we see in retrospect how he manages his shades of gray, how subtly his characters convey the heart of the story. We never feel that Grimsley has any animosity, any scores to settle. It is plain that he respects his art form, his language, too much to turn a fine story into a social diatribe. He certainly had the chance and was wise enough not to take it. He is interested in words, symbols, metaphor, and character. In all of Grimsley’s work, there are those powerful characters, straining to break free from the page.

The Hammonds and the Rollinses live by different rules, treasure different ideals, if one can say that the wife-beating, violent-natured Jake has any ideals other than the solely utilitarian—eat, drink, procreate until the wife is spent. His counterpoint, Gordon Hammond, is skittish, possibly impotent, and, in contrast to Jake, can wield neither his pistol nor his penis satisfactorily. The menace each one provokes—Jake physically and verbally, Gordon emotionally—is played out in the dark. Here, Grimsley’s work with darkness recalls the famous last lines of The Glass Menagerie. If one of Borderland’s men had a bit of what the other had, they might make decent husbands. But they have been molded by circumstance, not nature, and this acculturation makes each, in his own way, a son of a bitch seldom so artfully drawn in literature.

The wives, Helen Hammond and Eleanor Rollins, have in common the singular ability to feel pain. We readily see what strife the common lot of male humanity has put them through, the emotional if not physical hurts, the trauma of a furious fist, the refusal to create a family. Helen has come to the country to find a life that southern city people, latent boomers, increasingly wish to imagine their grandparents had.

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