A Question of Precision

The speaker is an old hand in a Texas English department, addressing a graduate student who wants to write about the novelist Ruby Nash Burks. His warning: do not trust Potter. Potter has the biggest name in the field and a good early book on J. Frank Dobie to his credit, but his monograph on Burks gets her birthplace wrong in its first sentence and goes downhill from there, misreading her friendship with the formidable Faulkner scholar Vida Lou Spruce and inventing a feud where there was something closer to sisterhood.

The journal filed the piece as a critical essay, and it wears the clothes of one: a judicious survey of Potter's career, a ranking of his books, a corrected biography. But Burks, Spruce and Potter are Parotti's inventions, and the piece reads as a dry comic monologue about how literary reputations are made, how biographers get things wrong, and why precision matters. It closes with practical advice on how to write the book that will finally set the record straight.

Readers who come to it as scholarship should know that the Texas figures Potter is credited with writing about (Dobie, Katherine Anne Porter, Walter Prescott Webb, Sam Houston, O. Henry) are real; the central author is not.

Philip Parotti is a novelist and retired professor of English at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. His books include The Greek Generals Talk, The Trojan Generals Talk and Fires in the Sky, as well as a series of naval novels.