Shades of gray - tribute to born-and-raised southern men - Column

National Review, Oct 18, 1993 by Florence King

ASKED if he would like to live somewhere else besides New York, George M. Cohan replied, "Where else is there?"

I feel the same about Southern men: "What other kind is there?" I've been involved with other kinds, but I always felt oddly off-base, as if matters were somehow incomplete and destined to remain so. I suppose I sensed nothing crazy was going to happen, and that's a bad way to feel in romantic situations.

What I like best about the Southern man is his matchless gift for self-parody. He secretly enjoys being the American other Americans are always trying to understand.

In his new book, New York Days, Willie Morris tells of being at Gettysburg College for a speech, when all of a sudden he took a notion to see the battlefield by moonlight. He was stopped by a longsuffering security guard who said, "It happens all the time. And it's always Southerners. Why always you Southerners?"

Such questions are music to the Southern man's ears, which is why he's glad the latest New South has become part of corporate America. Millions of Yankees are moving down here now, and they're all trying to understand him.

Knowing that his reputation precedes him, he likes to move in on a Yankee woman and match her preconceived notions of gallant Southern gentlemen. If his wife gets mad he will reply innocently, "I was just being polite," or "She's our guest." These are unanswerable and he knows it; hospitality being sacred, his Southern woman must keep her mouth shut while his Yankee woman sits there with hers hanging open, so mesmerized by his megachivalry that she looks pole-axed.

He can, in the words of Georgia writer Rosemary Daniell, "make a woman feel as if she is being bathed in melted butter." He can also make her feel shut out as no other man can. He does it whenever he feels his masculinity is threatened.

As much as he enjoys playing the Southern gentleman, he is painfully aware that the image smacks of the drawing room and the dancing master, requiring behavior that makes him feel foppish. One part of him wants to squire the ladies, but another part wants to escape from them entirely, and so he periodically rebels.

His worst episode is the hunting trip that allows him to go a record number of days without a bath. The idea is to smell bad, so if he can't get away he will go out on the porch and sleep with the dogs.

Another is his frat-rat number, when he hangs out with his friends and everybody gets down-and-dirty in the manner of novels blurbed "All the Fine Young Men."

Then there is gun cleaning. Considering the number of guns Southern men own, this can go on for days. It's hard to miss the symbolic rejection in his Smith & Wesson petting parties; the rubbing and caressing he puts into polishing the stocks are bad enough, but wait till he cleans the barrels.

Next he inspects his various collections. He still has the old cigar box containing his boyhood treasures. These include standard little-boy items such as baseball cards, marbles, and penknives; but scattered among the ordinary mementos are things that only a little Southern boy would save: a frog's skull, a cameo watch fob with half the face sliced off, and the skin of the snake that bit him.

Finally, he opens the trunk containing buttons stamped CSA, faded flags full of bullet holes, torn epaulets, and crumbling scraps of blood-stained gray cloth. As he sifts through these talismans, his mood of bittersweet sadness is impenetrable.

All men occasionally shut women out, but Southern men are more unmistakable about it. A man who holes up with paperwork from the office might actually be doing something that must be done right away, but when a man ignores you to polish his great-granddaddy's sword, you know you're de trop.

His psychosexual conflicts can be extreme, but they defy psychiatric sophistry. Far from being a "latent" homosexual, he has an unusually strong identity, for he is the South personified: simultaneously a female oasis of gentility and grace, and a male wasteland of taverns and guns, both vying for the accolade of the "real South."

SOUTHERN MEN and psychiatrists are creatures from different planets. They don't even speak the same language. In Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, Bertram Wyatt writes, "Honor, not conscience; shame, not guilt; were the psychological and social underpinnings of Southern culture."

This is why the Southern man feels he has given a thorough accounting of himself when he "explains" a fist fight or a sudden job resignation with: "I had to." Some corner of his heart will always be consecrated to Edmund Ruffin, the South Carolinian who fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter--and who, when he received word of Lee's surrender, wrapped himself in a Confederate flag and shot himself.

Why? He had to.

Present Presidents excepted, the Southern man navigates by fixed stars. There's no telling what he might do if he gets riled, but he says grace and he says ma'am and he loves his countries--both of them.