BONUS NUMBER 22: FLORENCE KING, FAILED SOUTHERN LADY AND WORLD'S WITTIEST BISEXUAL REPUBLICAN
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
I ran out of space in Bonus Number 21 before I could expand my introduction of Florence King. She was one of the few conservatives I ever found simpatica. That’s because much of her right-wing bluster was an act. That I’m convinced of. Also part of her rebellion was to hide anything in her person that might be looked on as attractively feminine. She reminded me of the character actress Marjorie Main.
Florence’s bottom line was: “I hate stupidity, left, right, or center.” I suspect that the allure, for her, of writing for William F. Buckley’s magazine, National Review, was Buckley’s vaunted erudition and his style of smooth surliness. In reality, he was a religious bigot who, had he lived a few centuries earlier, might have functioned as CEO of the Inquisition.
But Florence would not have joined his tortures. She would have busied herself instead with translating manuscripts from Greek and Latin.
After the Publishers Weekly interview we stayed in touch by letter and phone, and she contributed a generous jacket blurb to my first book and to my second. No reason to include them here, so I’ll just say that she read the entire book, not the dust jacket — unlike the cheapjacks you met in Bonus 21.
When southerners get together outside the South, they sometimes try to outdo each other with grotesqueries in the form of downhome stories. I once asked Florence why she thought people in the South loved to describe horrible diseases and maiming accidents. She knew exactly what I meant. The gothic misfortunes recounted in these tales were not funny until much later, after they had been transformed into literature, more or less. Call it the oral tradition.
Our competition went something like this: “The doctor cut him open, took one look, and sewed him right back up,” she said.
“He felt a pain in his chest and the next thing you know his heart exploded like a jar of ketchup,” I rejoined.
“She had never been sick a day in her life, and then wham! She never knew what hit her.” Florence dramatized it with rolling eyes and flailing arms.
“That man run over the grandma and a little chile with his pickup truck, and his front wheel just kept spinning on their heads,” was my next contribution. I heard it once at a Christmas party.
She paused to think of another one and I preempted her. “My turn again! They thought it was appendicitis, so they cut him open to take it out. The sun hit it, and that’s when they found a cancer the size of a grapefruit.”
By this time we must have seemed like two drunks — guffawing, wiping tears from our eyes, unable to stand up straight. When finally we calmed down, I said, “Well, why do they tell horrible things with such relish?”
“It’s because in the church-going South, with its manners and traditions, it’s improper to talk about sex in a social context. So they get off on disease and tragedies instead.”