A Listener's Comments

By Melvin Maddocks

FAREWELL TO THE SOUTH

by ROBERT COLES 408 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $7.95.

"Anything that comes out of the South," the late Flannery O'Connor once observed, "is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." Digging behind all the grotesque, realistic "Gone-with-the-Tobacco-Road" cliches, slowly and painstakingly detailing the ambiguous Southern actuality--this has been Robert Coles' work in progress for more than a decade. In the three volumes of his Children of Crisis series, completed earlier this year, he has documented, mostly in their own words, the destinies of families mainly from the rural Southeast.

Now Coles has moved on to the Southwest, lending his ear and--because he is an artist as well as a psychiatrist--his imagination and his heart to the words of the Chicanes and Indians. Farewell to the South, largely a collection of Coles' magazine articles, forms a kind of passing commentary upon his major work so far.

Here are on-the-spot sketches of civil rights workers of a long decade ago, brought up to date. Coles does not mind the inevitable inconsistencies, for distrust of certainty is his passion. The certainty of fellow psychiatrists, for instance, who "misuse their own professional language" to smuggle value judgments under the guise of science. The certainty of the social scientist "who has a name or a label for everything and wants at all costs to be 'concerned' and 'involved.' " The certainty of the Northern liberal who adds "ignorance, recklessness, and self-righteousness" to his original vice of remoteness.

Coles' essays on James Baldwin and Lester Maddox as victims of their own rhetoric are also statements on his own methodology, his need to be specific. "I can't stand all the abstracting," he has said. "The Marxist-Freudian blueprints.

That sort of thing. I like intellectuals who've lived in the world -- George Orwell, James Agee, Simone Weil."

Whether studying undernourished children in South Carolina or inspecting the epic rich-poor contrasts of Texas cities, Coles sticks to the tangible. He confronts Southern paradoxes -- sad ness and willfulness, resignation and re sourcefulness -- and stubbornly refuses to resolve them.

"I wonder," he writes, "where else in this country past history and present social conflict conspire to bring forth so much of the evil in people, so much of the dignity possible in people, so much of the 'pity and terror' in the hu man condition." Farewell to the South honors these contradictions and bears witness to a slightly grotesque but most realistic hope.

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