Mystery Outside the Frame: An Analysis of William Gay's Literary Landscapes by Dawn Major

Mystery Outside the Frame: An Analysis of William Gay's Literary Landscapes by Dawn Major

When I started writing about William Gay as a world building author and knowing he was also an autobiographical author, I became intrigued by his paintings. I had an “aha” moment with one painting I named, “De Vries’s Cabstand and Poolhall”—although Gay never titled his artwork. This piece caused me to view his paintings as extensions of his settings. I began searching for prose that “matched” up with his artwork. It is incredibly satisfying reading an exquisite passage of prose that fits perfectly with an image he painted. It adds another level of richness to his art…as though the reader may enter the painting, or the scene described by Gay. For me, it felt like I was traveling back in time to the 1930s and 1940s, walking down the wooden-planked sidewalks of his fictional town, Ackerman’s Field, climbing the steps to a shotgun shanty, opening the door, and wholly immersing oneself in Gay’s narratives.

You can almost hear his character’s voices, see the grim expressions on their faces. Most of Gay’s paintings he gifted to friends and family, and according to the lead archivist, Michael White, Gay loved Christmas, so with several paintings one will find the holiday, “Christmas,” along with the year, and his signature at the bottom corner, e.g., “Leigh, Christmas 2005, William Gay.” Other times, this information was written on the back of the canvas, or he just signed the bottom corner. And other times he neglected to sign the painting at all.

Although he never titled his paintings, because he noted the occasion and year, the team has been able to date at least part of the collection. Because Gay did not title his paintings, members from Team Gay—a group of scholars, professors, poets, authors, and philosophers, who worked together to edit and publish Gay’s posthumous works, as well as advocate and promote Gay’s work—sometimes create names for his paintings, like “De Vries’s Cabstand “or “The Bell Witch House.”

Personally, I have started associating many of Gay’s pieces with specific passages. I often find myself invoking a name for a painting using the title of a short story. For instance, I started calling a grove of beech trees “The Lightpainter,” because in the story the main character paints this image. Or, I have “named” a painting using a line of prose. In “Wittgenstein’s Lolita,” the characters come across an enclosure of pine trees: “They had come to a clearing, a barren circle surrounded by lofty pines with trunks like the bones of a ruined cathedral” (22). I associate the simile— “like the bones of a ruined cathedral”— with another image of trees, and therefore, have named the piece after this line. It is a way to instantly relate to and identity Gay’s untitled pieces.

In 2019, my husband and I traveled to Brush Creek, Tennessee. First, I wanted to visit with Michael White and Susan McDonald—who formed the original team of archivists, along with Lamont Ingalls, Paul Nitsche, and Sheila Kennedy. They did most of the foundational work of locating, organizing, and transcribing Gay’s works. Over the years, Michael and Susan have collected Gay’s paintings.

I needed to see the paintings in person and take photos of them, so I could continue to write and advocate for Gay. Many of his paintings may be viewed on the William Gay Archive website, but it does not compare to seeing them in person. So, my first stop was Brush Creek. My next visit was Gay’s hometown of Hohenwald, Tennessee —a one stoplight town where most everything shuts down on Sunday. My goal was to locate settings in Gay’s novels and short stories that he may have painted. Michael took me on the grand tour of Hohenwald, pointing out locations that were also settings, and I got to meet some of Gay’s family members. I asked Chris Gay, William’s youngest son, if he recalled a cabstand in Hohenwald. I thought it unusual that such a small town would require taxi services. Fortunately, he did remember their car breaking down one day and taking a taxi home. It stuck with him because he was a child, and it was unusual to be driven in a taxi. I asked him if he knew where it was once located in Hohenwald, and he told me to try South Maple Street.

Off we went (with my poor husband in tow) driving all over Hohenwald looking for fictional settings that were possibly real. Keep in mind that throughout the years, and certainly after the fictional time period Gay was writing about, buildings were demolished, converted into other businesses, or destroyed by fires, so finding this location in 2021 was a bit of a pipe dream, but I had this gut feeling. I cannot explain it. I just knew we were going to find the cabstand. And we did.

The original cabstand/poolhall location is behind The Strand Theatre—another setting Gay wrote about—and the indentations of the original windows and doors were still visible, although bricked over. I took multiple photos to compare to the painting of De Vries’s. This was a huge find. We could now match up a fictional setting with a painting. It inspired me to look for more places.

I also verified with the local librarian, historian, and archivist of the Lewis County Library, Crystal Nash, that Hohenwald had a cabstand, and she provided its fascinating, if somewhat disreputable, history. Nash was a saint for providing me with this research. Nash scoured phonebooks from the 1950s to the 1980s, identifying all the cabstands in town. There were numerous cabstands and they moved around from street to street, but the one I was interested in was indeed on South Maple Street. Nash stated that: “Mayfield’s Cab Service operated at 25 South Maple and was listed in the 1967 through 1982 phone books. Mayfield Cab service had a reputation for making alcohol deliveries for residents, and there must be some truth to this story as the business was raided in 1969 with two and a half cases of whiskey being confiscated.” With this single image the history, the setting, the prose, and the painting came to full life. However, none of the cabstand businesses Nash provided were named “Wolf de Vries Poolhall, Taxi and Cold Beer.” I was less concerned about this aspect because Gay had a habit of merging characters and settings. Plus, it is a fictional setting. Gay probably adjusted the name. His settings were an amalgamation of a couple of towns and his characters were also a mix of various people he knew. We already established Wolf De Vries’s cabstand and poolhall was a fictional setting that Gay also painted. What is significant here, was positively identifying the real location with the fictional setting as well.

Matching real places Gay wrote about with his artwork has proved to be an epic scavenger hunt. In addition to visiting Hohenwald, seeking the assistance of Lewis County historians, archivists, and librarians who knew Gay and were familiar with the places he wrote about, I also started scouring maps of Lewis County during the time period of Gay’s novels and short stories. Most of his work is set between the 1930s to 1950s with some works set in the 1970s and later. Mapping Gay’s real world and fictional world is another bunny boiler project that Team Gay have agreed to assist me with. The technique of mapping one’s fictional world and merging real landscapes with their specific histories, ecologies, and geographies is a common practice of world-building authors. I believe Gay used this methodology, as well as painting his fictional world, to construct his Southern legendarium—a realistic world with horrific and dark fantastical elements.

Gay was an incredibly talented author, but most people were not aware that he also painted and certainly no one was making these connections between his writing and his artwork. With this article, I hope to illuminate the relationship between Gay’s paintings and prose by focusing on a specific painting—that DeVries’s Cabstand/ Poolhall painting that led me to further study Gay’s folk art. I will show how that painting may be used to elucidate the character of De Vries more thoroughly but also provide a fully, immersive, reading experience. Using Gay’s short memoir, “Calves Howling at the Moon-To accept art you have to accept mystery” for reference, I will discuss Gay’s influences as well as his thoughts about painting the South. Finally, I will explore Gay’s subject matter—his landscapes, forest, old barns, shanties, farmhouses, roads, windows—the images he painted and repainted that also served as his literary working symbols.

Early Paintings and Influences/ Honing His Craft

For Christmas one year when Gay was a teenager, he was given a paint-by-numbers kit with an image of a clown printed on a small canvas. Gay was never a follower of rules, and so he turned it over and painted a train on a trestle. The train trestle image is Gay’s earliest known

painting, and he gave this painting to his mother who hung it on her mantel until she passed away.

He mostly painted landscapes, rural settings, roads, or windows, but there are a couple of still-life images and one image of wolves. Like his writing, he had a proclivity to paint with dark or neutral tones—brown, gray, black. You will never find a painting where he used bight vivid colors. That said, he would use lavender, orange, red, yellow when he painted horizons, sunsets, twilight, or fading light in windowpanes.

A young William Gay, date unknown, believed to be a school picture

A Young William Gay, date unknown, take in the Summer Gay's family went to Westen Tennessee to chop cotton.

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