The Raindrop Waltz, by Gary Carden.
Trillium Books, 2001.
$20 - 158 pages.

Critics, like historians, ought to make their personal prejudices known if those prejudices might influence their written opinions of a certain author or artist. Let me state right up front, then, that I have enjoyed Gary Carden over the years I have known him: his storytelling, his books, his company. Now he has just come out with a collection of his plays, The Raindrop Waltz, giving me still another reason for enjoyment.

The Raindrop Waltz contains a short prologue by Carden as well as eight plays. Three of the plays stand alone; three more — “Coy,” “Dude” and “Jesse Racer” — make up the Land’s End Trilogy; the final two plays of the book — “The Uktena” and “The Nennehi” — are Carden’s attempts to blend the ideas of the French surrealist Antonin Artaud with some legends of the Cherokee.

What is most lovely and lovable about this book is the way that Carden’s voice comes through on each page. Having heard him several times telling stories to different groups and having heard him both on tape and on video, I could hear his voice as I read the plays, a voice that translates well to print, a voice that could belong only to Gary Carden.

In “The Raindrop Waltz,” for example, the play for which the book is named, Agnes, the grandmother of Jody Lee, has told Jody Lee all his life that he has “bad blood” from his mother’s family, the Extines. Agnes says:

“... I happened to look up from what I was doing, and I seen you! You was standing out there in the yard staring at the Balsam Mountains.” (Agnes halts dramatically.) “Oh, God, Jody Lee! It chilled my blood. You was standing like an Extine!” (Jody Lee smiles wryly at the audience). “Had that same quare look on your face like Frankie Jean used to have ... like you wasn’t really seeing anything. Now, Arthur was settin’ out there sharpening his mowing blade, and I said to him, ‘Arthur, look at Jody Lee.’ Well, no sooner did he look than I knowed he seen it too! He said, ‘Agnes, he is standing like Enoch Extine, the one that used to live naked like a heathen in the woods ‘til they caught him and took him to Morganton.’” (Approaching Jody Lee, she speaks with feverish intensity.) “You’ve got to fight it, Jody Lee. Fight it! (She shudders, dramatically.) All that Extine blood coursing through your veins! (Hopefully.) Maybe, just maybe you’ve got enough Teester in you to overcome it.”

(Jody Lee walks to s.c. and speaks to the audience.)

Jody Lee — “When I went to college, I took a course in world philosophy. Studied all of those grim and bleak philosophies: existentialism, naturalism, nihilism.” (Pause.) “None of them was as bad as ... bad blood.”

For anyone familiar with the idea of family ties and the influence of “blood” — I grew up in Boonville in Piedmont North Carolina and used to hear several of our neighbors expounding at length on the effects of “blood” in certain individuals — this passage will be both familiar and hysterically funny.

One of Carden’s great talents as a storyteller is his ability to blend humor with poignancy, a blend that allows him to bring to the reader the great themes of human existence — love, death, bravery, fear, desire, success, failure — without having to beat the reader over the head with these themes. He carries this talent into his plays. In “Philoctetes,” Carden gives us some humorous insights into the Trojan War, and particularly into the character of Ulysses, while at the same time he covers in a few pages several major themes — the animosity between patricians and plebeians, the gulf that exists between perception and reality, and a satiric look at Homer’s heroes. Even in a play like “Jimmy Du,” Carden’s story of a man paralyzed by a car accident, Jimmy Du’s humor allows him to speak to the audience without completely wallowing either in self-pity or in bitterness.

Carden also strives throughout his plays and his other work to present a picture of the mountains and the people who live here in an authentic way. In the production notes to The Raindrop Waltz, Carden writes “... as a mountain person there is nothing I find more offensive than the way Appalachian speech is depicted in much of the popular media.” In “Nance Dude,” for example, Carden has Nance Dude tell her story of her life and of the murder of her granddaughter in a monologue filled with the mountain speech of the earlier part of this century, but without the bogus quality found in so many plays, movies and books about the mountains and the South. Here is Nance Dude at the end of her long life remembering when she met Dude Hanna:

“I do wonder why I’ve lived so long. Sometimes in the evening, I set outside to watch the darkness come, ’n I try to remember all the things thet happened. So much misery. I try to remember if I wuz ever happy. Somewhere in all thet sadness, wuz there a day or an hour thet lifted my heart. All I can remember is Dude Hanna’s devil laugh and them nights when we stood in thet dark pool. I can see Dude’s old grin as he lifts me up and my feet come off the bottom. ‘Nance,’ he says, ‘You almost make me feel thet life is worth the trouble.’”

Gary Carden once wrote in this paper of another writer that he had “done us proud.” That same accolade — is there any better? — goes for him as well. Gary, you done us proud, and we thank you for it.

(The Raindrop Waltz would make an ideal Christmas gift for those who enjoy Appalachian literature or good drama. The book may be ordered from your local bookstore or from: Trillium Books 213 Highlands Rd., Suite 67 Franklin, N.C., 28734. 828.524.5274.)

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville).

 

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