February 10 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Mind of the South, WJ. Cash’s classic and, in the event, only book. Reading Cash was a formative experience for most members of the symposium-going class of Southerners, so there will be a number of gatherings to mark the occasion. As a matter of fact, there was one on February 10 at Wake Forest, Cash’s alma mater. Alas, I missed it: I’m in California this year, cut off from my roots and also from such delightful perks of my profession as hanging out with a bunch of my friends and talking about one of my favorite books while drinking somebody else’s Jack Daniels.

As far as I can tell, the anniversary passed unremarked here in what used to be called Baghdad by the Bay, although some of the local intelligentsia were preparing for a conference of their own the next weekend, something called the National Sexuality Symposium. I thought about asking Chronicles to stake me to the $245 registration fee so I could tell you all about it, but then I figured Tom Fleming doesn’t really want me discussing techniques for extended orgasm or erotic filmmaking in these pages, much less whatever was said at the workshop on S&M for beginners. I am sorry to have missed the “erotic costume ball” at the San Francisco Airport Hilton, though; I had this great idea for a costume.

But back to W.J. Cash.

You know, he really did write a strange book. One of the strangest things about it is that it’s still read and discussed fifty years after it was written. After all, historians who don’t agree about much of anything else (Eugene Genovese and C. Vann Woodward come to mind) do agree that as a historian Cash is—well, a good prose stylist. And even his prose isn’t to everyone’s taste these days. A saving remnant of my students share my fondness for great rolling periods punctuated by snappy colloquialisms, but more of them seem to wish that Cash would just get to the point; they don’t know what to highlight with their yellow markers.

Still, the book is widely read, even when it hasn’t been assigned. One day in a Buckinghamshire bookshop I spied a Confederate battle flag from across the room—on the cover of the British edition. And some of Cash’s great broad-brush generalizations about the South have become almost conventional wisdom among college-educated Southerners, whether they know where the wisdom came from or not. Again and again in his recent book, A Turn in the South, V.S. Naipaul unwittingly paraphrases Cash by quoting his informants’ “observations”—probably, in fact, repetitions of things that they read or heard as undergraduates.

It’s true that many of these ideas weren’t original with Cash, but he gave them popular currency. As Bruce Clayton shows in a new biography of its author. The Mind of the South has demanded and received attention ever since its publication. It didn’t sneak up on our notice like, say, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (published the same year but pretty much ignored until the 1960’s); it was widely and favorably reviewed in both the popular and the academic press, North and South alike, and if its actual sales were disappointing—well, tell me about it. As Alfred Knopf tried to explain to Cash, that’s what usually happens with serious works of nonfiction. (The book later sold very well indeed, in overseas and paperback editions, but by then Cash’s widow had unwisely sold the author’s rights to Knopf)

Even if the book didn’t make Cash much money, it made him an immediate literary celebrity. Many in 1941 saw it as an antidote for Gone With the Wind, published not long before. Cash had actually reviewed Margaret Mitchell’s book and had called it “sentimental” (than which there were few adjectives more damning in the mouth of someone who aspired to a tough, cynical, Menckenesque style), but when Miss Mitchell and her husband invited the Cashes to dinner at the Piedmont Driving Club, the two writers hit it off famously, swapping stories and compliments. Not surprising, really: both moved in the New South’s smart set and shared its tastes and assumptions. Besides, “sentimental” isn’t exactly the right word for Peggy Mitchell’s book, just as it’s not exactly the wrong word for Jack Cash’s: Cash’s “man at the center” looks an awful lot like Gerald O’Hara.

After his book came out. Cash also visited and schmoozed with Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, Ralph McCill, and (oddly) Kari Menninger. On the strength of his reviews, he got a Guggenheim fellowship, and he set off to Mexico to write a novel, stopping on the way to give the commencement address at the University of Texas. (After a couple of weeks in Mexico he hanged himself, but more about that in a minute.)

On the face of it. Cash was an unlikely literary giant. Cod knows he was a mess, as Clayton’s book shows. Just a few years earlier, thirty-six years old, unmarried, and unable to hold a job for long, he had moved back to little Boiling Springs, N.C., to live with his parents. “Sleepy” (as his friends called him) was supposed to be working on his book, but he seemed to spend most of his time riding his bicycle, chopping wood, and dozing in the sun in front of the courthouse. His recurrent attacks of “neurasthenia” and “melancholia” were notorious; he also suffered from goiter and (secretly) from fears of impotence. He stayed up nights talking with an unemployed Baptist preacher, drank too much, smoked too much, and probably didn’t eat his vegetables.

True, he had been a BMOC as a Wake Forest undergraduate, a campus character with his pipe and chewing tobacco, terrifying Meredith College girls with his fierce intellectuality, writing poems and short stories, reading H.L. Mencken, and imitating the master in crusading editorials for the school paper. But then he had dropped out of law school (“you have to lie too much”). He hadn’t lasted as a college English teacher, either (most students were “satisfied with football, rah-rah, and Commerce A”). He had written and burned several novels and collected rejection slips for his short stories. In a brief flurry of success in 1929-30, he had placed three iconoclastic essays on the South in Mencken’s American Mercury; one, “The Mind of the South,” won him a book contract with Knopf. Then it had been back to dithering.

He wrote now and again for Charlotte newspapers, turned down offers of better newspaper jobs in Cleveland and New York for vague reasons of health, and edited a small-town weekly before his health made him give that up, too. (Clayton concludes that Cash suffered recurrent depression, brought on by hyperthyroidism and endocrine imbalance, and aggravated by hard drinking.) Cash’s parents weren’t welloff, but when his doctor recommended rest and travel they staked him to a European tour. He loved the Parisian vie bohéme and burst into tears at Chartres, then returned to Boiling Springs, his parents, and his unfinished manuscript.

So everyone was surprised (not least, it seems, his publisher) when he finished The Mind of the South. Yet during his seemingly unproductive and aimless 20’s and 30’s, Cash had been observing and thinking about what he saw: the Gastonia strike, the Klan, political demagoguery, lynchings, the Dayton “monkey trial”—it all comes out in the book, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Those Southerners who wanted unstinting loyalty to the homeland weren’t pleased. Donald Davidson didn’t like the book at all, and said so in one of the few negative reviews the book received. (Characteristically gallant, Davidson regretted that the news of Cash’s suicide reached him too late for him to pull the review.) I hate to disagree with Mr. Davidson on this matter, but I do. Twenty-odd years ago, C. Vann Woodward wrote that “social scientists, especially sociologists,” seem to have “a special affinity” for The Mind of the South. Maybe that’s it.

Anyway, it’s true that Cash hated a lot about the South. Occasionally he was imagining things, sometimes he was just being fashionable, but often he was right. And it’s obvious that he loved the place, too, because what started out as a smart-aleck essay for Mencken’s magazine wound up as a book that any reader should recognize as a cry from the heart.

It’s easy to criticize Cash’s picture of the South. His almost completely unsympathetic treatment of Southern religion, for instance, strikes me as perversely obtuse. Even when he gets it pretty much right—as I think he does with Southern individualism—he tends to go overboard.

But that almost doesn’t matter now. Cash’s South may not correspond perfectly or even very well to the real one, but it’s certainly a fascinating place. Scholars differ and, I guess, always will about the accuracy of Cash’s descriptions and the validity of his explanations, but as a work of the imagination. The Mind of the South is a remarkable achievement—far better, as Clayton suggests, than any novel Cash was ever likely to write.

Vann Woodward observed once that Cash himself “was merely illustrating once more that ancient Southern trait that he summed up in the word ‘extravagant'”—and that’s exactly what some of us like about the book: the sound of its words, the sweep of its history, the boldness and the flamboyance and the very exaggeration of its characterizations. (“Softly; do you not hear behind that the gallop of Jeb Stuart’s cavalrymen?”)

And that suicide? Some said that Cash was driven to it by worry about the Southern reaction to his criticism, that he was thus a victim himself of what he called the “savage ideal” of conformity. Can we see his self-destruction as a last extravagant Q.E.D.?

No. As Clayton shows, nearly all Southern reviewers liked the book. The real story is less ironic, but even sadder. Shortly before his death he had been hearing nonexistent voices, and he thought the Nazis were out to get him. Clayton concludes that Cash probably killed himself during an episode of delirium tremens caused by involuntary alcohol withdrawal, the result of a severe case of Montezuma’s revenge.

For once in his life. Jack Cash wasn’t thinking about the South.