Last fall Howell Raines griped amusingly in The New York Times Book Review about “the Southern Living disease,” an affliction that leads Southerners to depict their region “as one endless festival of barbecue, boiled shrimp, football Saturdays, and good old Nashville music.” The three million of us who subscribe to that “relentlessly cheerful” house-and-garden magazine (Raines’s words, and he’s right about that) will recognize, however, that the man doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Southern Living does indeed offer recipes for tailgate parties, but its shrimp are usually tarted up with some fancy sauce, Nashville music seems to be infra dig, and as for barbecue—well, let me tell a story.

If you ask me, one of the best pieces Southern Living ever ran was an article by Gary Ford on barbecue. When I said as much to a Southern Living staffer, though, he grinned. “You know, Emory [Cunningham, the founding publisher] really didn’t like that piece,” he said. “He almost killed it.”

I asked why on earth he’d want to do that.

“Too down-home. Too low-rent.”

The point is that although Raines claims that “always with the South, things circle back around to race and class,” he is strangely tone-deaf when it comes to the social pitch of Southern Living. This is one genteel magazine.

But take Raines’s description of the Southern Living disease, give the blues equal billing with country music, add a dash of cultural anthropology and a touch of political reportage, remove the contemptuous tone, and I’d buy it as a description of a magazine called, simply, Southern. Southern first appeared, out of Little Rock, some three years ago. It, too, was written and edited for a Southern middle-class audience, but for one that was interested in more than portraits of itself.

While it lasted, in fact. Southern epitomized a novel idea of what the South is all about, one that since the 1970’s has been struggling for the region’s soul with the traditional, “Old South” view that I wrote about last month. In the crucial matter of race, for instance, Southern worked conscientiously to portray and to celebrate a biracial society—definitely not a colorblind one, rather one that both blacks and whites have built and must share. It sought black writers (successfully) and subscribers (I don’t know), and it was. surprisingly candid about the South’s remaining and emerging problems of race relations.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who found Southern‘s approach interesting. By last year the magazine had attracted over 200,000 paying customers for its version of “the South, the whole South, and nothing but the South.” But like the man in the country song. Southern lived fast and died young, leaving only beautiful memories.

In the winter of 1988-89 I heard rumors out of Birmingham that the publishers of Southern Living were preparing to start a general-interest magazine of their own, to go head to head with Southern. They coveted Southern‘s audience. Compared to Southern Living it drew proportionately more young readers and more men, and some advertisers like that. Moreover, Southern‘s circulation was growing rapidly; Southern Living had pretty well saturated its market: three million households are, after all, a substantial fraction of the Southern middle class.

I was happy to hear these rumors—the more regional magazines the better—and unhappy to learn in March 1989 that they were wrong. Southern Living didn’t start a competing magazine; it just bought out the 70 percent interest in Southern held by a Little Rock investment banking firm. The new owners of Southern promptly sacked its publisher, editor, and staff, and moved its editorial offices to Atlanta. Last summer they announced that Southern was being killed, to be replaced by something called Southpoint (“The Metropolitan Monthly”).

Well, the move to Atlanta should have been a warning. Any magazine edited from there would have to be very different from the old Southern magazine. As an executive of Atlanta magazine told the Cox News Service: “The South that is Atlanta, the South that is Florida, bears little resemblance to the South that is Little Rock.” This statement—meant as a criticism of Little Rock—is the kind of thing that makes Atlanta despised elsewhere in the South (except maybe in Florida). It is true, though, if only because there’s some question of how many white folks in Atlanta are Southerners to start with. This same yuppie argued that Southern “had this real outdated romanticism about the South”—well. Southpoint‘s promotional literature made it clear there’d be no romance about this new magazine. It wasn’t going to struggle for the South’s soul: it was looking to sell it.

Speaking of souls, have you heard the one about Satan’s offer of wealth, power, and fame in exchange for a lawyer’s? “What’s the catch?” the man asks.

Just the sort of subscriber Southpoint seemed to be seeking. (A sample cover advertised an article on the ten best lawyers in the South. No kidding.) This magazine, its promotional mailing threatened, would be one that “demands your attention.” It would offer “a probing, candid look at the region’s big changes, new players, shifting currents.” It would have “more about the hot issues directly affecting your career,” as well as “revealing close-ups of the coolest players and fastest comers who shape today’s South, the big winners (and losers).” I found myself wondering what the lukewarm outcome might be when a cool player meets a hot issue.

Anyway, the flyer said that someone like me, “who works, lives and plays (to win!) in today’s South,” has “the greatest need for a magazine like Southpoint, written for and about the ‘thought’ leaders who drive our fastmoving, quick-changing region.” Now, it seems to me that if parts of the South have become “fast-moving” and “quick-changing” the least we can do is preserve a decent silence about it. And who wants to live in a “driven” region, much less one driven by “‘thought’ leaders”?

In short, this new magazine was not promising. One contrast sums it up nicely: where Southern had articles on barbecue and biscuits, Southpoint‘s brochure promised a story on good airport food.

This is just embarrassing. Yankees do this stuff so much better, I say let them do it all.

To be fair, when Southpoint actually appeared, in September, it was better than this mailing had led me to fear. An enlightening cover story put the financial affairs of Southern college football coaches under the lens. There was a pleasant article about Olive Ann Burns, author of Cold Sassy Tree, and a promising column on urban planning. All of the material I liked could have appeared in the old Southern, though, and the rest of Southpoint is either boring or silly. There are real sundowners of articles about banks and business and “cool players,” as promised. The sort of flagrant advertising tie-in that has made Southern Living so much money is represented by an article on a bunch of expensive hotels (the “five best” are in New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and—Washington, DC!) There’s a poorly researched list of bookstores in a number of Southern cities, and a similar list of Oriental restaurants that I can’t judge. And there is absolutely no whimsy about this new magazine.

What we have here is a combination of Fortune and New York magazine in a Southern setting, a magazine for people who work, live, and play (to win!) in Southern cities—not at all the same thing as a magazine for Southerners, If Southpoint survives for a year or two in its present format, I’ll be curious to see how many of its readers are migrants to the South and how many are natives. I’m not sure what to predict, though: will many migrants care about a Southern magazine? Will many natives care about this one?

Frankly, I believe that the Southern Living folks have made a big mistake with Southpoint, and that it reflects a generation gap of some consequence. I’ll finish this discussion next month.

 

[Read Part I here.]