Chapel Hill Herald, December 13, 2001, pg . 3

Marlette's first novel ruffles Hillsborough literati feathers

by Lois Carol Wheatley

HILLSBOROUGH—Except for portions identified as historical in an epilogue to “The Bridge,” Doug Marlette says his first novel is a work of fiction.

Some in Hillsborough disagree.

Hillsborough’s literary community of nationally known authors took umbrage with the novel—populated by flawed characters with certain sexual inclinations and a solid streak of mean-spiritedness—believing the town’s denizens to be fashioned after some of its own. Fire was returned in the form of letters and phone calls as advance copies were circulated. Marlette, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist best known for his nationally-syndicated comic strip Kudzu, refused to change a word, and the feud escalated into a full-blown brawl.

Stops on Marlette’s book tour mysteriously were cancelled or postponed. Scathing reviews were posted on Amazon.com. The publisher received requests to have names removed from the book’s acknowledgements, and a poem was sent to Marlette’s home that could readily be interpreted as a death threat.

“May maggots munch your bellybone,” it read in part, “and rats chew on your ears.”

The epilogue states that some of the book is factual. “Although a work of fiction, many of the events in ‘The Bridge’ are based on true stories,” Marlette writes, and then specifically lists them: the massacre of mill strikers in 1934 (20 people wounded and six killed); the fact that Marlette’s own grandmother was bayoneted by a National Guardsman during the mill strike; and a couple of subsequent, related events, including a local case of “collective amnesia concerning the Great Uprising of ’34.”

The mill strike, the protagonist’s discovery of it and his family’s involvement in it are the main thrusts of the novel. All else was incidental until the minor, peripheral characters were shoved to center stage by the literati in Hillsborough who thought they recognized them as real people.

The character Ruffin Strudwick, a gay author who has written a Civil War epic, appears on fewer than 30 pages of the 380-page novel. He is widely viewed as a thinly-veiled depiction of Allan Gurganus, one of Marlette’s neighbors (and author of “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All”).

But Marlette’s best friend Pat Conroy (author of “Prince of Tides”) also believes Marlette is writing about him. “Pat’s sister Cathy wrote me a letter saying she just loved the book,” Marlette said, “and she especially loved how I made Pat gay.” Conroy wrote a book about his father called “The Great Santini,” which his father loathed.

In Marlette’s novel, the character Strudwick writes about his father, evoking a similar reaction—which is why Conroy believes the fictitious character is him. Nevertheless, where Gurganus is deeply offended, Conroy is amused by the character’s personality quirks and appalled at Hillsborough’s negative reaction.

“I have watched this from afar,” Conroy said when reached at his home in South Carolina, “and I would rather live in Calcutta than in Hillsborough, North Carolina.”

Gurganus offered his own comment, arrived at, he said, after careful deliberation on the matter. “My decision is just to say the following: that I believe in the First Amendment, and that it’s Doug’s privilege to describe the village where we live as he sees it,” Gurganus said. And he added, after a moment’s pause, “The less said about it, the better.”

Rumor has it that he was behind a concerted effort to have less said about it. A close friend of Gurganus tried to squelch the book—Erica Elsdorfer, manager of the Bull’s Head Bookshop at UNC. She cancelled Marlette’s reading at the book store, asserting that the novel was homophobic trash. Marlette wound up giving his reading at UNC’s journalism school, where he teaches.

News of the Bull’s Head allegations and of the cancellation—coming from a book store that sells T-shirts that say “I read banned books”—somehow reached Malaprops in Asheville, where Marlette’s reading was postponed until people had a chance to read the book. After the novel was read and the allegations dismissed, Marlette’s reading was rescheduled.

Amazon.com now has deleted the scathing, anonymous reviews and has said that it will trace their source. Marlette said he has no plans to act on the information. The whole thing, which he characterizes as “a tempest in a teapot,” now seems to be subsiding, much to his relief.

A comparison has been drawn between Marlette’s current situation in Hillsborough and the legendary strife between Thomas Wolfe and the citizens of Asheville following the publication of “Look Homeward, Angel.” According to one account, an outraged citizen asked Wolfe’s mother how she had endured being contorted into the character of Eugene Gant’s mother Julia. Without missing a beat, Wolfe’s mother reportedly responded: “That wasn’t me.”

Similarly, Marlette said his characters aren’t Hillsborough citizens either. The novel seeks to bridge generations between the mill owners and strikers of the ‘30s and the town’s inhabitants of the ‘90s. The character Ruffin Strudwick is descended from the mill owners, and his prickly demeanor is essential to the parallels drawn between past and present.

“He is a writer and not, say, a painter or an organ-grinder, for a reason,” Marlette said. “Writers articulate and convey and illuminate the values of an age.”

Marlette has been in plenty of trouble before, with Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell and Hillary Clinton, in the course of his career as a political cartoonist, and he doesn’t mind ruffling a few feathers. But he insists Strudwick is not a portrait of anyone.

“I like this character very much,” he said. “I’m very proud of this character. And he is a composite of at least 12 people I can name, including myself.”

Marlette wonders why he hasn’t received any complaints about the novel’s hero, Pick Cantrell, a New York political cartoonist fired from his job after assaulting his publisher. The novel is written from a first-person perspective and Cantrell shares many of the author’s characteristics and biographical details, even up to and including a physical description that closely matches Marlette’s.

But the similarity ends there. Cantrell goes to jail for assaulting his publisher and his long-suffering wife has to return to work during his ensuing bout with unemployment. Thereafter he lives in professional exile, moving from one ugly confrontation to the next.

“I think if anyone should be ticked off about my book, it should be me,” Marlette said, “because here is this cartoonist depicted that people think is me, and he loses his job, he has no control over his temper, his family’s dysfunctional, his mother’s a suicide, and he even loses his son at Halloween. It’s slanderous. Anyone who knows me knows that’s not me.

“So I’m really ticked off at Marlette the writer for showing me, Marlette the cartoonist, in this unflattering light. How dare he? The author of ‘The Bridge’ doesn’t show the proper respect and deference to my noble career and my delightful personality and boundless charm,” he said. “How dare he hurt my feelings like that, be so irreverent toward my sacrosanct image and persona?”

And well he may laugh, with his first novel cracking the best seller lists, going into a second printing, and being snatched up by Paramount for the movie rights. Marlette’s also having a bit of a chuckle at the prospect of using this whole pitched battle as fodder for a second, even more incendiary novel.

“How about ‘Burning Bridges,’ the sequel?”