So my Delta schoolmate Walker Percy wrote me, when he was working on The Last Gentleman, I on The Half Gods (having described his attempt as firing a precision rifle with telescopic sight): "We come from the same town, but we ain't plowing the same field. To foul the metaphor: yours is a very big gun with a massive charge of powder and I hope you can deliver on target without laying waste the surrounding countryside."

My thirty-year scrimmage with the Infernal Revenue of the United Snakes of America affords a comic example. One summer stay at Yaddo (retreat for musicians, artists, writers) I was prompted to explore the old reservoirs where fish swim through fanwort and milfoil. I bought the required gear, accomplished the mission, produced and sold a poem, "Rainsong of Fish and Birds" (see the Five Chambered Heart).

Next spring--with other expenses of teaching, travel, entertainment and study-groups, books, art books, scientific journals, music in score and phonograph records, photographing slides, recording tapes and keeping up equipment--I of course deducted the mask and snorkel. It seems to have been the straw that broke the auditor's back. I was summoned to a fat chestnut worm in Baltimore who had no notion how to be a thinker, teacher, universal writer, multimedia lecturer, yet believed he could disqualify for me all costs clouded by his ignorance. At the climax of a hot session, he hit on the diving mask: "Well, Mr. Bell, what is your profession? You're surely not a diver?"

I knew it was ill-advised, but I let him have it: "My profession is being Charles G. Bell, and there is almost nothing I do that does not contribute immediately and essentially to the carrying out of this important calling." His jaw as I spoke dropped lower and lower; and for twenty years thereafter I was continually investigated, to accumulate whole notebook files of no less ridiculous and ironic episodes.

What is the history of my fond attempt (Ulysses' "folle volo"--"mad flight") to bring all realms of knowledge into creative cognizance?

My Kentucky grandmother's great-great-uncle was Daniel Boone, from whom I have a powder gourd. My present task is to lead, as deftly as I can, over the Cumberland Gap of a life-road.

If I go back two generations, I find myself spanning the poles of Mississippi. My mother's family draws me to the washed-out Faulkner hills. My father's to my own cotton-rich and supposedly enlightened alluvial Delta.

No doubt I owe as much to my mother as to the Bells--her Norman Olivers and Archers come through Virginia to the slash-pine slopes in the northeast part of the state. Her father, Captain Archer, who fought in the Civil War (for States' Rights, he told her, his slaves freed), was at least represented in our library by his sword. But both he and the mother had died when Nona Omega, "ninth and last," was young; so she had scant memories of them. Thus of all her kin she only enters here, as by miracle--a spring from the clay of those gullied fields, backward towns, hard-hit relatives. In the polarity of my birth, her elements are air and water, cloud reflections on a mysterious pool.

But the activity, characters, tales, the tragicomic energies, swirl around the Greenville house where my father and Aunt Bessie were reared by my musing grandfather (who died before I was born) and his driving Kentucky firebrand of a wife. He had been a photographer before the Civil War in the Ohio basin, with an earlier family. When that broke up, he worked, after the war, with a portable studio, up and down the Mississippi, until, in a Kentucky river town, he won that child beauty, come for her portrait (as Fra Lippo Lippi finished his novitiate model with the picture), and took her down river to Greenville to set up house and studio.

Figures 1 and 2. Grandfather Charles G. Bell and Grandmother Hallie Owens Bell

In The Married Land, reversing the roles of male and female, he becomes the yielding mystery of air and water, she the drive and hardness of rock and fire. Let a picture pair (figures 1 and 2) revive the story of the old photographer, often harried to collect rents on her squalid properties--until once water took his part, time of the spring rise; when she came home raging against river, flood, destinies, above all that husband: "the most useless hulk of a man God ever sent to cumber the earth. While you sit here rocking and dreaming, our houses have gone in the river, that whole Poplar street row of houses. And the miserable sheriff, who was there watching, had the effrontery to tell me there was nothing he could do. Will you get up and go down there and act like a man, and make him do something? Do you understand me? The houses have caved off, gone in the river."

But the old man sat smiling and rocking, intoning to himself (though she heard and was brought to explosion): "Thank the merciful Lord; thank the blessed, merciful Lord."