Link: http://paulhemphill.net

Paul Hemphill’s last book was about cancer, the disease that took his life last week, and about the allure of all those Camels he smoked along the way. I’m not sure he finished it, but I’m eager to read his observations. Because Paul always had something piercing to say about his experience with life’s tough issues.

Hemphill’s work is a chronicle of many themes of Southern life in the late twentieth century: country music, race relations, automobile racing, baseball, troubles with booze. He reveled in the pleasures of his surroundings, but he never sugar-coated what he saw. “He told it like it is for people who are just scraping by,” said his former colleague at the Atlanta Journal Roy Blount, Jr. Those of us who moved away from the South rather than engage the difficulties that its social issues pose owe him a debt. Because Paul engaged them with tenacity.

Follow up:

Unlike a lot of Southern writers, he had no social pedigree to buffer him. His father, the topic of two books-- the novel King of the Road (1989), and a nonfiction work, Leaving Birmingham (1993)-- was a long-haul trucker, a smoker, a drinker, and Paul’s hero until his racism began to sicken his son. Unfortunately, he held on to his father’s other antisocial habits too long. Me and the Boy (1986), written when Paul was 47, chronicles his unsuccessful attempt to kick the bottle and hike the Appalachian Trail with his own son. Eventually, he stopped drinking. And smoking. But his body never forgot. The cancer started in his throat and moved to his lungs.

Unlike a lot of Southern intellectuals, Paul would not go vague on you when things got complicated; he stayed keenly attuned to the business at hand. He was a great and careful listener, a gentle storyteller. He cooked honest food—greens and peas and cornbread. He wouldn’t have gone to college (Auburn) if he hadn’t struck out as a rooky baseball player. But he did. He even went to Harvard (as a Nieman fellow), which he found a great place to be. But he went back to Atlanta, where he had written a popular newspaper column and never left. He worked steadily at home on Fama Drive with periodic forays to Manuel’s Tavern, the liberal/Democratic watering hole, long after he gave up the bottle.

Both fiction and nonfiction flowed from his typewriter, then his word processor. Friends like Pat Conroy and Anne Rivers Siddons became wealthy writing novels, but the reporter in Paul remained relentless. The South he knew could not be reduced to formula. One of my favorite of his books, The Ballad of Little River (2000), involves his investigation of an African-American church fire set by white teens in a backwater Alabama community. This was not a place accustomed to close scrutiny, but Paul holed up in a fishing cabin and stuck with it. Someone shot out his tires, but he got his story, every hard and troublesome fact, and he made meaning from what he learned.

Most likely I wouldn’t have known Paul if he hadn’t married one of my University of Georgia roommates, Susan Percy, more than thirty years ago. They had one daughter, Martha, and he had two more daughters and a son with his first wife. Susan tells me all four visited him at the hospice before he died and that the many accolades that have poured in have mitigated some of the pain they felt during their father’s drinking days.

At the funeral, there’ll be music from Hank Williams, the country music star who died from alcoholism and about whom Paul wrote the widely acclaimed Lovesick Blues (2005) , but Susan found a bagpiper for the graveside. He’ll be playing “Amazing Grace.”

You can find a complete bibliography of Paul’s work and several obituaries at http://paulhemphill.net