Do you want a portrait of the New Southerner? He is Billy Graham on Sunday and Richard Nixon the rest of the week." --Walker Percy
"Walker thought women should have hips," Ellen Gilchrist said when I mentioned his name.
One night, she said, she wore a long, expansive, hippy kind of skirt, and Walker said something to the effect of "Well, Ellen, you look great." He spoke with appreciation. And respect. I'm certain of that.
Ellen was accustomed to dealing with gentlemen.
Maybe that's why she went back to Mississippi after the Governor's School business.
. . .
I would love to know who invited Ellen to speak at Governor's School in 1985.
"My father, a man who disinherited a child during the civil rights movement ... this is a man who meant to pay me a compliment by sending me a flag once given to him by President Nixon during the Vietnam war ... [One] of my children made a pair of pants out of it."
Her son cut up a flag. From Nixon.
Ellen was a Girl Scout. She never desecrated an American flag. But she could look upon the act. She could think about it. Ellen could love a child who did that kind of thing. And she could write about it. Well.
In 1985, Ellen Gilchrist was 50 years old. She had just won a National Book Award for "Victory over Japan."
Her words to the young people at Governor's School do not match her written work for quality:
"It's time to start ignoring your parents. Be really nice to them, and forget them. At the age you are now, it's time to start using your stuff, your real stuff."
The students at Governor's School objected. In person. Bible-believing Christian kids and other kids with a degree of filial piety stood up and challenged the big-deal writer lady down from Fayetteville.
That's the whole idea.
Also, a reporter from the Log Cabin Democrat was there.
. . .
Now guess which politician said what.
. . .
"I think it is always wrong to deface the American flag, and while I think young people should be encouraged to think for themselves, I don't think children should be encouraged to disregard their parents' opinions."
. . .
"We can have an outstanding educational experience up there without a left-wing radical or a right-wing radical. We don't need either one."
. . .
"Now if no one minds, I will go back to work on my books," Ellen told the reporter who followed up. (One imagines her alone in her house on Mount Sequoyah, picking up the telephone. No caller ID. Is it one of her children? It's someone from the Arkansas Gazette.)
. . .
"Do you practice your culture?" asks my least favorite work at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. I love the title, I'm just creeped out by all the eyes on the sculpture.
It's to my back when I stand and look at another work by the improbably named Kay WalkingStick. It's charcoal on paper, it's a woman, and I'm pretty sure it's art.
It's like looking at an Ellen Gilchrist novel.
. . .
Ellen returned to Jackson, Miss., in 1985. One of her characters is afraid of the virus and goes home to live with her parents.
. . .
Then she went back to Fayetteville. I thought that Ellen was never polite, but her essay on her Fay Jones house is impossibly polite. She dances around the cold, the leaks, and the dangerous wiring as if she were from Mississippi, which she was.
She loved the idea. And she loved the light.
. . .
I went to the front page of the Pryor Center looking for another interview, and there was Ellen's. Featured. With the improbable "passed away on Jan. 30."
Good God. Ellen? Pass away?
I will never believe it. She might have died. Her latest, most hilarious stunt. But I will never believe that Ellen passed away.
. . .
She did get fired, though. I heard this from an old friend. My editor tells me it's OK to put this in print.
Ellen got fired from teaching at the University of Arkansas because she assigned a work by William Faulkner.
They gave her two years' pay. She laughed all the way to the bank.