Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
I’m in the summer doldrums, trapped between turkey and doves, reliant on my clumsy attempts at fly casting for episodic relief, often bringing more laughter than fish. My Labrador Jed and I run angles and pattern blinds and marking drills against the notion of a cold morning that seems impossibly distant when we must rise to train before the temperature reaches 80 degrees on the way to 96, Jed’s oil black fur soaking up the heat like asphalt. With kids out of school, routines disrupted, and the heat here in the Cape Fear, Summer is a challenge. It’s something I thought about this past Father’s Day as I struggled through the black water and thigh-deep muck of the pond fronting my house, intent on doing “dad stuff,” trimming dead trees with a bow saw and two torn rotator cuffs while wearing what I now know are leaky waders purchased twenty pounds ago.
I’ve told you before, I neither require nor desire much for the day I perceive as little more than a marketing tool for the necktie and golf ball industries, neither of which I patronize. But, encased in neoprene and humidity under the North Carolina sun, I did wonder if my attitude might be too severe. Perhaps I do deserve a day all about me! It's not like I need much. The people who make me a dad. The dogs. A good book.
That last got me thinking. When it’s almost too hot to move, one can still turn a page or visit one. Writing as much as I do, and often reading things people ask me to, can consume my ability to read things purely for the want of reading them. So lately, I’ve been focused on alternating my “must reads” with my “want to reads.” Sometimes they’re the same. Sometimes one must hunt for the book one needs. Sometimes it finds you. So it is with the work of Vereen Bell.
When I was twelve years old, my mother gave me a copy of Bell’s Swamp Water, the story of a south Georgia boy who follows his dog into the Okeefenokee Swamp to ensuing drama. I never read it. I was focused on war books, as I knew what my profession would be and saw little reason to read outside those lines. But I carried that book through moves and deployments, and when I recently read a mention of Bell in Upland Almanac, I decided it was time to read the book I’ve carried around for forty years. Per usual, my mother knew best.
I’ve gone down a Vereen Bell rabbit hole of late, consumed by our commonalities of which I only recently became aware. Bell was born in Cairo, Georgia (pronounced “Kay-ro” for the uninitiated) in 1911. I was raised in Athens, Georgia, well northeast of Cairo, but Georgia is a state of mind. Bell’s family, like mine, was part of the turn-of-the-century Georgia legal firmament (my great-great-grandfather and Bell’s father, R.C. Bell, sat upon the Georgia Supreme Court together, and both served as Chief Justice; Bell was so appointed by my Great-Great Uncle when he was Governor). But Vereen Bell was far more enraptured with dogs and quail and writing about both than the law. He became a freelance writer and eventually an editor in Detroit, Michigan. But of another choice that I wholly understand, he said, “I liked the work, but hunting season in Michigan is open only ten days, so, after two years, I came back to Georgia, where hunting season is open three and a half months.”
Bell ultimately settled in Thomasville, Georgia. My grandmother grew up on a quail plantation her father managed in Tallahassee, Florida, not far from Cairo or Thomasville. I went to law school there, at FSU, and I understand the inexorable pull those longleaf pines exerted upon Vereen Bell.
Bell was far more successful as a writer than I. Swamp Water sold to Hollywood for the modern equivalent of $370,000. His bird dog stories, serialized in the leading magazines of the day and collected in Brag Dog and Other Stories, made him nationally popular. He published a novel, Two of a Kind, a love story more about its dog training protagonist Duff, his hard-to-break pointer, Judas, and the pre-World War Two culture of dog field trials, the results of which then made the pages of the New York Times back then, than romance. All of that would have been enough to entice me. But like my Grandfather, Bell volunteered for service in World War II. Like me, sixty years later, he was a Georgian gone to war.
Marine Private First Class Robert Lee Russell, Jr. was shot at the battle of Sugarloaf Hill on Okinawa and came home to join another generation of Georgia judges. Lieutenant Vereen Bell served as a Navy aviation intelligence officer and died of his wounds at the Battle of Leyte Gulf the day after his ship, the USS Gambier Bay, was sunk on October 25, 1944. Bell was buried at sea off Samar Island in the Philippines. His last story was published in Colliers Magazine the next month. For me, a man who contemplated my own death overseas and means to have my ashes spread in the water off Georgia’s 100-mile coast, it’s a difficult end to contemplate. Particularly for Bell, who, at thirty-three, had so many words left to write.
I won’t pretend that Bell’s writing is sublime. It’s not hard to understand why his stories found purchase in popular magazines of the time rather than establishing him as a great name in literature. His dialogue can be wooden, his characters’ emotions sometimes stunted. His casual use of language representing the racial and cultural reality of 1930’s Georgia makes me uncomfortable, though some scenes reveal Bell as a man of privilege wrestling with the manifest injustice of the times, perhaps indicative of the role his son Vereen Bell, Jr., a professor emeritus of literature and a bird dog man himself, would eventually take at Vanderbilt University.
The flaws in Bell’s work are not to be ignored, but for those of us who love dogs and birds and the smell of shotgun smoke drifting in cool air, perhaps they are to be considered as part of the historic whole, as lessons for good and ill. And when the best parts of the days Bell wrote about seem most remote, days when the tail of a good dog is a better gauge of the nature of a day than a thermometer struggling with the truth, perhaps they are a place to go to find both questions and answers.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal