Why Arkansas? The shortest answer is that my wife Diane was raised in Little Rock, and graduated from Hendrix College. A somewhat longer one would probably begin in Amherst, Mass., a few days before Christmas 1969. Well after midnight, Diane and I walked out together into what Faulkner called the “cold … iron New England dark.” Snow lay piled all around. We’d just emerged from our first full-scale academic Christmas party. After meeting and marrying in graduate school at the University of Virginia, we’d moved to New England that fall, where I’d begun a career as an English professor. 

“Oh my God,” I said. “I should have been a coach.”  

 “I should have married one,” she answered, exaggerating her Arkansas twang for effect. The stress, for students of dialect, falls on the last word, drawn out for emphasis. “Ah shoulda married wuuuuuuun …”  

It should be mentioned that Diane’s daddy, George Haynie, was a baseball, basketball and track coach.  

Things never got any better. Funny, we’d both seen “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” at the old Center Theater in downtown Little Rock during my first trip here to meet her parents. Now we were living it, albeit with a lot less booze and a lot more political posturing. While we’d been studying in Virginia, the infamous ’60s of legend and song had swept through New England academia like a cultural virus. The intellectual mood was highly politicized; its tone dictated by what I came to call the “anti-gravity left.” Smug revolutionaries predominated. “Liberal” was a term of contempt, signifying gutlessness and bad faith. All this coexisted with an aggressive form of local boosterism requiring one to affirm the superiority of life in the “Pioneer Valley” at frequent intervals. 

A guy like me, basically a Jersey smartass with a big vocabulary, was doomed from the start. I’d grown up almost in the shadow of the Pulaski Skyway. (Yeah, like the Arkansas county of the same name.) You know where Tony Soprano gets off the Jersey Turnpike on his way home to the suburbs? Right there. When I was in junior high, we moved out of the city too. There was a famous mobster who lived not far away. Eventually, the state cops found a crematorium in his basement. Seems he’d been fertilizing his roses with rivals he’d had whacked. So when the professors started talking revolution, I couldn’t keep a straight face. Whose ass did they think was going to get kicked once the ass-kicking started? 

People patronized Diane to her face. Being cute, Southern and pregnant made my wife a three-way loser: Clearly unserious, and probably a bigot. Was she supposed to explain that her pregnancy was a surprise, a triumph of nature over science? That she was ashamed her home state had given its electoral votes to seg candidate George Wallace in 1968, but proud it had re-elected anti-war Sen. J. William Fulbright and liberal Republican Gov. Win Rockefeller on the same day? Nobody asked. She once got scolded by a dinner guest for the “racist” crime of owning a Merle Haggard album. Know what? It was mine. 

Ordinary New Englanders, I should say, never acted that way. Only academics. Indeed, the opposite was true. Most had never met anybody from Arkansas. At the general store in the little town where we lived, people would ask Diane questions just to hear her talk. For that matter, many of my colleagues acted like normal human beings, just not enough of them to make large social gatherings enjoyable. 

In short, we needed to get out before I got fired. There was a job at UALR. I applied for it, and got it. Having a Little Rock connection probably helped, albeit not directly. An applicant who knew where Arkansas was and actually wanted to live here couldn’t have hurt. My thinking was that living in a city not inhabited exclusively by professors, students and real estate agents, and where my wife already had a lot of friends, would make academic life more bearable. I’d also noticed that Arkansans laugh a lot, a practice forbidden by law in some parts of New England. 

The job never really worked out, but that was my fault. I’d chosen a profession that, in the final analysis, didn’t suit my nature. A scholar is somebody who specializes in one or two specific areas, learning more and more about less and less. In graduate school, I’d become fascinated with Jonathan Swift. To me, “Gulliver’s Travels” is one of the great, magisterial works of world literature. Not long after we were married, Diane was astonished to see me get teary-eyed at Swift’s tomb in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He’d been dead, after all, since 1745. But teach “Gulliver” every year for 20 years? I’d go nuts. Journalism suited me better. 

Little Rock and Arkansas, however, suited Diane and me right down to our toes. For one thing, nobody here confused her with Daisy Mae Yokum. Her intelligence, integrity (and graceful ankles) were what people noticed, not some fantasy about her imagined prejudices. Back home, where she’d never really thought of living, she had a million friends. Her career flourished. Me, for family reasons I won’t go into, I’d been looking for a home all along. Some years back, Esquire magazine asked me to write an entry in a series called “Why I Live Where I Live.” At the expense of plagiarizing myself, here’s some of what I said: 

“The capital, business and financial center, rail and highway pivot and only real city, Little Rock sits on the Arkansas River almost exactly in the middle of the state, just where, as if it had been arranged by committee, the hills meet the flatlands … Little Rock remains as strongly flavored and provincial as it is possible for a contemporary American city to be, fancying itself the center of nothing more than the state of Arkansas … In fact, living here is something like living in the capital of a remote and insignificant country. Arkansans are proud and touchy, bitterly resentful of condescending outsiders, yet bitterly self-critical. Just a little bit, in fact, like Irish Catholics.” 

And that was written before the Clinton presidency infested the state with that plague of locusts known as the national political press. On the ethnic angle, I’ve always thought the key to getting along with Arkansas country boys is understanding “redneck” pride. Allowing for differences in accent and demeanor, it’s not all different from my father’s Jersey Irish brand. The Old Man must have announced his credo to me a thousand times. “You’re no better than anybody else,” he’d growl “AND NOBODY’S BETTER THAN YOU!” That could easily serve as the Arkansas state motto. 

“In Arkansas,” I continued, “anonymity is not one of your big problems. Not everybody knows everybody else, but it sometimes seems that way … We are not surprised to pick up [the newspaper] and read a story by someone we know about somebody else we know. For one who grew up around New York, the effect is like inhabiting an endless Victorian novel. You can feel like a bit of an insider without having to work at it. The city has roughly 300,000 citizens and the state about 2 million, so it isn’t exactly village life, but a reasonably gregarious person who has been here a few years rarely meets someone with whom he hasn’t a few acquaintances in common. The gossip is fantastic.” 

Here’s something else about Arkansas that appeals to a Jersey guy: They’ll never get the whole sumbitch paved over and covered with eight-lane freeways and discount malls during my lifetime. Believe it or not, parts of the Garden State used to resemble the Ozarks. Explaining the Perry County farm we recently bought to my brother, I said it looked very much like Hunterdon County, N.J. did 50 years ago, when we were boys and the Old Man would take us for Sunday drives in the country. Before World War II, my crazy/brave father used to play polo on Sunday afternoons on New Jersey National Guard artillery horses. He’d get a big charge if he could see me now riding across the fields on my own middle-aged gelding. 

“I love Little Rock,” I wrote, “because I can put a flatboat into the Arkansas River inside the city limits and enjoy freshwater fishing that is the equal of any in the United States, or into any of a dozen beautiful, forest-ringed lakes within an hour’s drive. I can load up four beagles and go rabbit hunting with an old friend in soybean and rice fields in the Delta flatlands little more than a half hour away, or leave town to the west and be so far gone into the hills that what few settlements one comes across seem frozen in time somewhere in the 1940s. I even like the climate — tornadoes, floods, and maddening heat waves notwithstanding. I’m not sure I could have survived here before air-conditioning any more than I’d have been able to stand the social climate back in the bad old days before segregation was laid to rest, but I do like living in a place where the urban-rural balance is tilted toward the country.” 

Yeah, well, rabbit hunting’s no fun anymore, on account of how every Arkansas thicket big enough to house rabbits is now infested by white-tail deer, so that instead of pursuing the wily hare, you end up chasing scent-intoxicated beagles over two or three counties trying to catch the little beggars before they run under 18-wheelers. But you get the idea. 

Diane thinks I’ve “gone native,” as used to be said of English colonial administrators who did things like learn Sanskrit or take up playing the sitar. Oh yeah? Then how come I managed to come this far without mentioning the Razorbacks?